Symbolic Linguistics

by Hugh M. Lewis

The word is a verbal or linguistic symbol. It is technically defined as a morpheme, or the minimal unit of language that carries meaning. The kind of meaning carried by a word is symbolic, and this is defined as the ability for the word to represent something else, or, usually, a number of different things other than itself.

All known languages are constituted by words as symbols. Word symbolisms may be elaborated phraseologically or summarized holophrastically by a single word sentence, depending upon our need and intentions for communication. Word symbolisms therefore have an inherent malleability about their structure and their use in language that permit them to be deployed in a wide variety of ways.

Disambiguation of meaning is usually the primary communicative function of language, though not always, and deliberate ambiguity is sometimes the goal. But symbolic ambiguity in language will be induced and increased when and if a word is found representing more than one set of meanings at the same time in a single phrasal context, or alternatively when the representational meanings of a word are not apparent, vague or clearly specified at all. Words bereft of context, or decontextualized, either internally or externally, are usually received as inherently ambiguous and therefore meaningless.

In the theory of symbolic meaning, ambiguity is like noise in an informational system. Noise is indeterminancy of pattern that results in interference of communication. Loss of meaning is found to occur when symbolic systems break down or no longer have adaptive relevance in the environment in which they are articulated. This can result in psychological distress and disorientation, as well as in a breakdown of social order and integration.

In this process of the disambiguation of meaning we find clearly the gestalt pattern recognition of words as figures against a background of context--the symbolic meanings represented by a word in context constitute the relationships between the figure of the word and the background of the context in which the word is embedded. Native speaker intuition therefore can be described as the "aha" experience of sudden gestalt pattern recognition in a set of words in which the figure/ground relationship suddenly becomes disambiguated and its significance immediately apprehended to the listener.

The pattern recognition processes tied to word recognition and in turn to feed-forward word production are complex and are related to the hard-wiring and software programming of the brain and the primary sensory and speech production apparatus. For spoken words, it begins with auditory recognition and I believe somewhat spontaneous memory association that allows meanings of a spoken word in context of the speech event to be "unpacked" and searched for relevance. Task associations reveal that, for new language learners, the ability to hear the word correctly and clearly rests upon the ability to make the phonemic-phonetic distinctions of the sound modulation pattern of the word, and this becomes reflected in the spontaneous spellings of words by second language learners. It seems highly correlated with the phonetic-phonemic pattern of speech recognition that is common to the learner in the learner's own mother-tongue or primary language. Once a word is learned, this recognition of the sound pattern unique to a word and to a speaker becomes almost automatic or what I would call cerebrally reflexive in the mind. Reinforcement of the word, by chronic usage and learning, sets the program in the mind in a definite manner.

Memory associations, as well as behavioral associations, appear to reinforce pattern recognition processes even at the base perceptual level of auditory pattern discrimination and speech articulation. Representations of symbolic meanings are undoubtedly tied and consonant with such memory and behavioral associations, and it is suspected the basis of symbolic meaning is a relational system based upon words and the pattern associations connected to words. The human mind can be thought to be programmed around and for the purpose of processing and using human language for the purposes of thought and behavior. 

This argument is not to confuse a strong case for linguistic determinism with a modified form of linguistic relativity of experience--those who are deaf or otherwise without language will still think and see the world in terms of perceptual experience the same as those who use language, but it is thought that the range of this experience and the capacity for articulation and manipulation of experience will be drastically effected as a consequence of the lack or loss of language. I suspect that language has a great deal to do with the organization of the mind, being the basis for the "software" programming of the brain. Two speakers of different and mutually unintelligible languages see and experience the world in similar ways, but think about the world in terms of different programs. It is like trying to cross a Microsoft word processing program with a Aldous word processing program--the two sets of code are incompatible to one another. The two programs are probably more or less equally efficient in being able to digitally process words, and are capable of producing more or less the same documents, but the structures and topography of meaning that is found in each program will not be identical at all.

For deaf people who are fluent in a sign language in a community of deaf signers, it is apparent that sign language occurs in similar regions of the human mind as that for normal verbal speech, and therefore the consequences of a sign language would be very similar for those with a verbal language as a primary pattern. For those lacking any language or means of communication though, it is likely that the capacity to organize and comprehend experience must be severely restricted and limited.

It is important to understand that symbolic meaning of the software program of the mind, encoded in human language and reinforced through memory and behavioral associations, and deposited in a distributed manner in the brain in intricate, complex and malleable neuronal networks, as a web of interconnections with numerous nodes, may occur at several places and at several stratified layers simultaneously, and it is this layering and the simultaneous and consequential co-occurrence or activation of these stimulated webs in different parts of the brain that produces symbolic meaning and links this meaning to words.

It is a mistake to believe that linguistic relativity is based on the notion that a word determines one's experience at some level--such as the word red allowing us to see or facilitate our ability to see red. The word as a symbol is arbitrary by design, and thus meaning associated with a particular word is non-obligatory--the facilitation of  the experience of the color red through the word "red" is an evocation or elicitation of the memory and behavioral associations that are tied to the word. Any word would be a suitable substitute for red. Of course, having a clearly distinguishable word for a particular association or set of association does facilitate the capacity to think about that set of associations, even in a reflexive or automatic manner, but it is possible to think about or imagine for instance the color red even without having a name for the color, though without a direct name for the experience, I suspect that such a thought pattern is very emphemeral or transient, and somewhat inherently ambiguous, just as the background of experience is ambiguous without a figure to contrast it to.

In this sense, words as symbols have a clear indexical function in the filing system and organization of information in the brain. It must be so, or otherwise the flood of experience in the mind would be overwhelmingly chaotic. This indexical function of the filing system is efficient in the sense that it saves the brain from devoting an otherwise disproportionate amount of energy to think about all the things it would need to think about to make sense of the world. The use of a word allows the mind almost immediate, reflexive access to a given profile of experience across a spectrum of meaning, or association complex, even to the point that in normal speech processes the word itself may replace and stand for the experience and association complex it represents in a nominative fashion, implicitly suggesting or invoking the meanings without having actually to activate the full range of experience subsumed by the name. I believe words are normally deployed and articulated in just such a manner in the course of normal speech, with the option always being there of begin able to zero in on the elaboration of key words and their meaning associations.

Words in phrasal and sentential context create a new level of meaning containing its own context and having its own synergism, and thus words in phrasal or sentential strings are part of a system of language that is built upon the linking together of individual word-symbols in larger constructions. Symbolic meaning that emerges as the result of such linguistic constructions is different and more explicit than the kind of rudimentary and largely unconscious meanings that are associated with word symbols in isolation. Constructive meaning is largely conscious and to some extent explicit. There occurs therefore multiple overlapping layers of symbolic meaning attached to any single speech event or set of speech events, the ground being the memory and behavioral associations that are unconsciously and somewhat reflexively attached to single symbol words, and the figure of speech being the linked, mutually constraining meanings that arise from the phrasal or sentential construction of a string in context, mostly conscious and deliberate and therefore requiring greater focus of attention and effort. I think in the neural pathways of the brain, the associations between words become the shared networks occurring between and branching out from multiple successive sources of the brain, creating a kind of animation effect of the mind, like a set of movie frames being run past one's eyes and made to look as if an active image occurs. I think the brain works fairly much in this way, and is capable of removing the sense of the gap and break between words to foster the illusion of the phenomenological continuity of experience.

Sometimes words are merged in the course of speech to an almost continuous set of sounds and normal speech in many languages often flows with but brief or even absent pauses between words. For a non-native speaker to listen to a foreign language, with the inability to recognize the sound or meaning pattern of the language, the language tends to be perceived holophrastically as a single continuous, punctuated string of sounds. In the vast number of instances, the connection between the word, its sound and form, and the things it represents is ultimately arbitrary and largely a matter of convention. Only in a few instances may we infer an onomatopoeic function to a word, or trace a word to an onomatopoeic root. Words can have a sonorous quality, and it is the sonorous quality of similar or complementary words that is the basis of meter, song and poetry. The challenge of course in these artistic forms are to match sound pattern with meaning in a consonant and provocative manner.

The basic symbolic function of a word is to name something, or the nominative function. The most basic word takes the form of a "name" and even other syntactic categories of words may ultimately be understood in their basic form as "names" or intrinsic nouns. Naming is the most basic form of symbolic representation we have, and it goes almost without saying that the same name may refer to multiple things, and multiple names may refer to the same thing. Names are the most prototypical word forms, and the most basic function of word symbols.

Derivative from names are two basic types of word form, and these are the class of nouns that name a person, place, thing or a quality, serving as a main subject and an object and a second class of verbs generally naming a relation, an action, a state or condition, used to link a specific noun or "noun-topic" to a larger context of relations. 

In English, derivative of nouns are a special class of modifiers referred to as adjectives, and derivative of verbs are a special class of modifiers referred to as adverbs. The class of adverbs and adjectives overlap due to the fact that bound morphemes like the suffix "-ly" added to an adjective generally allows it to be used as an adverb. Derivative of or at least proximally related to adjectives are another special class called determining articles. 

Words are organized into multiple overlapping sets that accomplish communication of information about the world, primarily by establishing a relationship between a word and its symbolism. These sets are aspectual in designation.  Though words are often used singly, if this is not done in context of its specific reference and intention, then the significance of the word may be ambiguous and lost to the audience or receiver. Words set in strings serve to create their own context, and the string construction of such context is necessary to the disambiguation of symbolic reference in words, as well as to the designation of relationship between word symbolisms. Sentential strings carry their own intra-sentential context that allows the meaning of the string as a whole to achieve displacement from the actual speech setting itself. It creates flexibility and the possibility for precision and generalization in the use of words.

We may identify in the constructive articulation of any language two general phenomena--the processes of elaboration and summation of meaning. This refers on the one hand to the phrasal structure of word strings primarily involved in the process of elaboration, and the nominative or holophrastic structure of names primarily involved in the process of summation of meaning. The articulation of any string in any language involves the expansion or reduction of the length of the string, and an alteration of the communicative value of the string accordingly. There is a trade-off between communicative efficiency and communicative efficacy that is achieved through the dual processes of elaboration and summation. Since summation is the most basic structure, we assume that communicative condensation for the achievement of efficiency tends to be the basic modality of speech--elaborative code aiming at achieving communicative efficacy tends to be the derivative modality of speech.

I would tentatively distinguish language stratified at the following levels:

1. word symbol--holophrastic meaning

2. phrase structure--phraseological elaboration

3. sentential structure--inter-phraseological constructions

4. inter-sentential constructions

Linguistic development and acquisition may occurs in this way, in this set of stages, and  for any language there may be a set of implicit and explicit rules, or operating instructions, which govern the pattern of articulation of speech at each of these four main levels of the stratification of speech and language.

We may speak of the phraseological structure of language, and the ready interchangeability of words with alternative phrases. A phrase may be defined as a natural unit of language that is rooted in oral communication, and that involves a string of words that stand in substitute to or modify a single word. Expressive elaboration in any language is always achieved through the modification of sentences through phraseological modification. Phraseology is an effective manner of embedding and elaborating meaning in a sentence frame. In general a phrase is an incomplete sentence, or a sentence that does not stand on its own, but may be embedded within another sentence.

The acquisition of language by children generally replicates this process, as young infants quickly move from a holophrastic stage of one word sentences that merely designate or indicate a thing in the environment, a mood, a relationship, a need, to the formulation of simple phraseological strings with drastically reduced grammar and inappropriate use of symbolic reference, to increasingly well organized and correctly structured sentential strings that largely replicate the speech of adults. This is achieved by about 5 years of age in the child, and is the precursor to the child's first efforts at learning to read, spell and write.

Rules of order emerge in the organization of a language as a system of expressive communication that constrains or sets limits on how we may use words and phrases in relation to other words in the construction of strings. These rules of order are known as the phrase structure syntax or grammar. They allow us to effectively use words in terms of a larger system of symbolic meaning and communication that has predictable structure and pattern in its organization.

A universal "deep structure" of the brain, referred to generally as the language acquisition device, is held to be based upon an inherent transformational grammar of human language. This inference of an LAD may miss the essential point that phrase structure constraint is necessary to any language as a communication system that is based upon the designation and elucidation of symbolisms through words. Such a system resides primarily in a community of speakers who share the same words with similar meanings, more or less, and do not arise as the result of biological processes but as a function of mutual agreement and achievement of convention in the course of development of a speech community. We are referring to rules that are part of cultural linguistics, or what we may call a language culture.

Such syntax or rules of order generally arrange words into types or categories of meaning, depending upon their function and position in the construction of sentences. Rules are arrived at by implicit agreement that is achieved through common usage. I believe that we cannot really investigate the origin of this system, as it has been a process of continuous development from the period of earliest proto-language, and I suspect that we may find a single tree of human language with a trunk that derives from the remotest periods of the past to the present, and within which all contemporaneous languages are represented by one branch or another. The form of the languages that human beings have spoken has changed dramatically in every possible way, and there are in fact an infinite number of different language systems possible in human terms.

Rules of language structure render the linguistic system orderly and predictable. It makes possible native listener intuition, especially in situ of the conversational or communicational setting. Rules of language are so well worked out in fact that they are capable of fairly precise discrimination and designation of terms and their meanings. This function of specification and clarification is necessary if a language system is to achieve the degree of coherence and consistency it needs to be effective in its essential function of coordination of human behavior.

In terms of symbolic linguistics therefore, we cannot ultimately separate semantic from syntactic or pragmatic functions in the expression of language--all these functions remain bound up in the language system as a whole. We analytically separate them in terms of designation of aspect of a word--in English the word "run" generally is used as a verb to designate the fast motion of an animal sprinting, but it can also be used as a noun to designate either an area over which one runs, or a period of time during which a run occurs. These functions are aspectual features of the word "run" as symbolon in the linguistic culture of English.

It is the system as a whole that changes through a process of continuous point by point modification. These modifications may occur at many different places throughout a language system and because such systems are multi-level in their articulatory patterning, changes may occur simultaneously upon several levels. We may in fact see the typical syntactic categories of a language as basically semantic aspects or features that are applied to words. 

We must in terms of systematic language change inquire about the possibilities of certain selective factors operating upon language dynamics. It seems for instance that some aspectual features of a language are preferably selected over others and that certain directions of change in a particular language achieve a kind of momentum that seems largely irreversible if not quite inevitable.  Because languages are relatively undetermined in their structure, as with many functional communication systems, the same thing may be said in more than a single way, and the same words may carry multiple meanings. At each point in the articulation of a sentence, for instance, an alternate set of words or word constructions are possible, and the outcome of the sentence will depend upon the terms selected. Such alternation enhances the flexibility of the structure of language as a general purpose system of communication, and is keeping with the idea that it is the structure of the sentence as a whole, and by extension, the language as a whole, that is important. 

The basis of most language change is the addition of new words or the modification of old words by the accretion or loss of meanings. We should not discount the loss of old words by their disuse or replacement by new words. Linguistic displacement, or replacement of old words or expressions by new words, or the replacement of old meanings by new meanings, entails that a language remain functionally streamlined and unencumbered by too much basic choice.

For any active language system, we can probably designate a core vocabulary of less than a thousand words that will be used more than 90 percent of the time in most ordinary circumstances in a language, and we would be surprised to find that the majority of these words point to the same basic symbolic referents in most languages. There is probably a range of 3 to 5 thousand other words that are necessary to permit flexible communication in a language system to be deployed under most circumstances and in most behavioral settings of the language context. Most of these words will be used far less frequently and their use will vary widely depending on context--we expect less agreement of these terms by their symbolic referents between different languages than with the core vocabulary. Together, these auxiliary and core vocabularies can be said to constitute the practical or working lexicon of a language.

Languages typically function by the use of bound morphemes that carry no intrinsic meaning but modify the words to which they are attached. The function of such bound morphemes is largely to designate or mark the syntactic part of speech that the composite morpheme takes on as an aspect of its meaning--determining what kinds of words it may come before or after within a sentence.

To understand and be capable of using a distinct linguistic system is to have fully incorporated that language system into the hard-wiring of the human brain and nervous system and the software programs of the human mind. Because speech is generated on the fly, feed-forward, there is little time for the brain to anticipate or prepare the ordering and selection of words, and as much as possible, this entire process of speech production is back-grounded as something that occurs in a more or less automatic and even "reflexive" manner. We do not generally need to think about every next word we choose--if we did our conversations would be slow and very boring. We have a way of by-passing the need to make conscious decisions regarding word selection in sentence construction by the fact that we base our construction on received templates of various kinds, and we select alternative templates in also a semi-automatic manner entailing minimal choice or fore-thought. The templates themselves can then be evoked and modified as needed in a fairly plastic manner to achieve the correct or desired form of expression. This entire process seems to be ultimately guided by higher order mental structures of the human mind, and the entire speech apparatus appears ultimately in control of either one's own higher order brain structures, or in indirect control by the brain structures of other speakers.

General Systems Essays, Vol. I