Optimization of natural communication systems 9783110872149, 9789027931467

Table of contents :
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. THE SEMIOTICS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION
II. THE LOGIC OF NATURAL LANGUAGES AND THE "NATURALNESS" OF LOGICAL LANGUAGES
III. APPROACHES TO THE OPTIMAL REDUCTION OF THE SPEECH SIGNAL
IV. ON THE USE OF COMPUTERS IN LINGUISTIC RESEARCH*
REFERENCES
INDEX OF NAMES
INDEX OF TERMS

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JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA MEMORIAE N I C O L A I VAN WIJK

DEDICATA

edenda curai C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Minor,

92

OPTIMIZATION OF NATURAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS by

Olga Akhmanova

1977 MOUTON THE HAGUE - PARIS

© Copyright 1977 Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

ISBN 9 0 2 7 9 3 1 4 6 1

Printed in the Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction I.

II.

The Semiotics of Human Communication 1. The Object of Semiotics. The Sign-producing Reduction of Messages 2. The Signatum, the Signans, and the Semiotic Problems of Natural Human Languages 3. Sign and Meta-sign. Sign in Language and Sign in Speech 4. Semiology and Interdisciplinary Research . . . 5. The Semiotic Systems which are not based on Graphic or Phonic Substance and the Problem of the "Silent Language"

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6 7 13 17 24

The Logic of Natural Languages and the "Naturalness" of Logical Languages 1. Concerning the "Pragmatics of Descriptor Languages" 33 2. The Syntax of Natural Languages and the Syntactics of the Information-logical Languages 44 3. The "Law of the Sign" and Rational Semantics . 50

III. Approaches to the Optimal Reduction of the Speech Signal 1. The Typology of Abbreviations 2. Compression of the Speech Signal in Stenography 3. The Compression of Speech in Technical Communication Channels and the Linguistic Means of Reducing the Speech Signal IV. On the Use of Computers in Linguistic Research 1. The Problem of Processing Linguistic Material for the Machine 2. Computational Statistics 3. Computer Processing in Terms of

67 75 81

87 93

VI

Classification and Grouping 4. Modelling and Simulation 5. Organisation of Work

96 97 99

References

105

Index of Names

108

Index of Terms

110

INTRODUCTION

Today an auxiliary "mediator language" is mostly thought of as a system of correspondences, as a metalanguage for computerized storage of information. Its units are not tied down to any natural substance on the expression plane; they function on all levels merely as "correspondents", as arbitrarily established equivalents of morphemes, words and constructions. Although the creation of a generally acceptable mediator language still r e mains a problem, an abstract theory of optimal semiologically relevant relationships may well be set up to serve as a general mathematical backdrop for the more concrete and specific tasks presented by this or that particular science. What has just been said raises the following question. May we apply the term "linguistics" to describe this abstract mathematical pursuit ? It has been suggested that the branch of semiotics which concerns itself with secondary auxiliary "languages" ("secondary" in the sense that in the final analysis they are all reducible to the basic and most important means of human communication - the natural language) should bear the general name of "interlinguistics". Linguistics as the science of natural human languages is part of philology, for languages cannot be understood apart from the social-historical phenomena they serve to perpetuate. The question a linguist is bound to ask from the very outset is "who says what when", for only in this way can proper and complete knowledge of a language be reached. Artificial auxiliary languages call for a diametrically opposed approach. Interlinguistics begins with the deductively constructed abstract general principles on which to erect the particular man-made system of rational scientific communication. Before we leave the subject of interlinguistics in its relation to linguistics (jazykoznanije) we must make sure there is no misunderstanding. It is most important to distinguish between the two because they have too often been confused. But while doing so we must also bear in mind the affinities. In the case of a natural human language we begin with the relevant philological-historical facts: where is the language used and by whom? does it have a writing system and what graphic tradition is it based on? what

2 a r e its genetic and areal relations ?, etc. Sooner or later a stage is reached when we a r e able to deduce f r o m our factual empirical m a t e r i a l s certain general regularities, certain abstract p r o p e r t i e s . But, of c o u r s e , we must never lose sight of the r e a l i t i e s of actual communication to keep the abstractions well in hand, and prevent them f r o m degenerating into the "emasculated idealistic o n e j " ("toscije idealisticeskije"). Thus, for example, L . V . Scerba explained the idea of an abstract syntactic pattern by c r e ating his famous "sentence": "glokaja kuzdra Sifepo budlanula bokrenka", while A.I. Smirnitsky used x, y, z for lexical m o r phemes: if X Y-ed Z then, presumably, Z was Y-ed by X. Both scholars w e r e nevertheless convinced that, as f a r as natural h u man languages a r e concerned, abstractions a r e arrived at on the basis of a background knowledge, sound and analytical, of a s u f ficient number of natural human languages in all their exclusive originality. With the secondary artificial semiotic systems - the subject of interlinguistics - the order is r e v e r s e d . We begin with the system of abstract relationships, f o r how else could we construct a rational logical means of passing on information? But artificial s y s t e m s , too, can acquire philological and sociolinguistic significance - as is the c a s e , for instance, with Esperanto. Or they may remain part of pure semiotics if they stay confined to rigorously r e s t r i c t e d u s e s - a limited number of highly specialised intellective m e s s a g e s . Hjelmslev's idea of an immanent linguistic "algebra" even today, i. e. thirty y e a r s a f t e r the publication of his "Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundlaeggelse", r e m a i n s one of the most comprehensive. Whatever we actually h e a r or read, the realisations or manifestations of the linguistic system a r e so unstable and v a c i l lating, that a truly scientific linguistic theory can only be constructed on the basis of reduction and generalisation. All s e m i o logical systems must a p r i o r i be based on the assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between expression and content. Hence the method of "commutation" (Kommutationspr^ve) which e n ables the r e s e a r c h e r to reduce the endless variety of " m a n i f e s tations", or variants, to a limited number of constant o r invariant units. This otherwise sound reasoning, however, had very little to do with linguistics, f o r Hjelmslev insisted on confining his study to the purely formal relations, the form of expression and content over against their substance. But it was hailed by interlinguists who appear to have found inspiration in the general idea of the purely abstract deductive approach. The pivotal concept was b o r rowed f r o m the metalanguage of mathematics where it is directly

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connected with that of "isomorphism", which enables the m a t h ematician to extrapolate the properties of isomorphous systems from one to another. What the linguistic acceptation of the t e r m could be was not clarified, and the t e r m was not in the index which contained all the significant elements of Hjelmslev's m e t a language (funktion, inddeling, indgaa, induktion, relation, e t c . ) . The way it was used by linguists since shows that it could be d e fined as a theory which postulates an absence of qualitative d i f ference between the various levels of language and requires that the same methods and principles be used f o r their analysis and description. This is, probably, the way purely deductive axiomatics should be constructed a priori. But it was too involved and far-fetched to be of use to the student of actual human languages. This appears to be the common fate of all deductive hypothetical systems. Thus, for instance, S.K. Saumjan and P. A. Soboleva's "Applicational Generative Model" which neatly divides the overt relations in speech - the phenotype level - from the covert inherent relations in language - the genotype level - is widely recognized as a model of creative thinking. But there is nothing it can really do to explain the facts of a well-developed natural language with all its variety of styles, r e g i s t e r s , territorial and social dialects, etc. Failure to distinguish between linguistics and interlinguistics is downright harmful because it has often resulted in a decline of philological culture, in people simply giving up languages as they a r e , in favor of the still non-extant hypothetical ones. Why bother to learn to use English or Russian properly with all their illogical intricacies when one's time and effort can be so much more profitably spent inventing models and formalisations, "constructing formal models of linguistic competence", for example? Hjelmslev was a great linguist and an original thinker, a man of culture and erudition. (Nowadays one can r i s e to fame without any of these qualifications.) I do not intend to dwell here on the vicissitudes of the so-called "generative g r a m m a r " because, in my opinion, its unjustified claims have now been amply exposed. I would only like to caution my colleagues against the growing tendency to seek refuge within the pale of "analytic philosophy" (and further back, via the Viennese Circle, to Frege's "Voraussetzung" now dubbed "presupposition"). I am not thinking at the moment of the utter rejection of a world view which substitutes for the phenomena and processes of objective reality, and their reverberations in human consciousness, sets of operations with sentences as found in "ordinary language", nor of the members of this philosophical school's inability to use precise linguistic c r i t e r i a to distinguish meaning and reference, etc. All I am t r y -

4 ing to say is that something should be done quickly before another generation is lost to our science, for isn't it infinitely easier and much more rewarding to discourse upon "perlocutions" and "felicity conditions" than to learn even the rudiments of comparative philology ? Addiction to aprioristic-deductive theories and concentration on formalised artificial constructs distracts people from the study of natural systems of communication; a logical "language" is by definition a closed system with practically no exchange of elements with the environment. It is man-made and rational. Its parts are entirely conventional while their interdependence rests on the notion of pure relations. Natural systems are open. Like all systems they also consist of interdependent parts. But they are in close relationship with all the various factors of the environment with which they exchange elements and energy. In contrast with artificially constructed logical "codes", natural communication systems cannot be regarded as a network of functions and relationships, for here it is the interdependent objects or elements and the way they r e act to the extra-systemic realities of the external world that come first. Ontologically, there are at least three distinct interpretations of "system": 1. A system is an objectively existing entity. The concept of an entity of this kind is a scientific abstraction. 2. A system is both a conceptual and a physical entity. 3. A system is a fiction of the brain, a "conceptual construct" which is conceived a priori to ensure elegance and consistency of description. It goes without saying that to the Soviet linguist the correct interpretation is the first. According to the Marxist-Leninist principles of systemic analysis we begin with the objects and the specific character, and the peculiarities of their interdependence. We cannot understand a system (it cannot be reflected correctly as a concept) unless we bring to light the actual complex relations among its elements. But this can be done only by using special techniques - the specific and peculiar structures of knowledge capable of reflecting adequately the actual functioning of the systems . It should be added that the subordination of the elements to the whole can be fully comprehended only in the framework of the historical approach to systemic analysis, that is, understanding a given condition as one which has developed (and is still developing) from an earlier stage to a subsequent one. A natural communication system is an historical category and is therefore in a state of flux, of continuous and uninterrupted

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change. It is also a complex system of systems - the phonological, the grammatical and the lexical. The special methods used for the different levels are based on the distinction between "wholeness" and "additivity". In the former case (phonology) a change in each separate part brings about changes in all the other parts. In the latter (the lexis) the subsystem is "additive" in the sense that a partial change - the borrowing of a new word, or the coining of a new derivative - does not simultaneously change the whole lexical system. The internal structures of artificial (rational, secondary etc.) "languages" or semiotic systems and natural languages, although basically different, can, nevertheless, be shown to share certain essential properties. In the composition of the former the structural properties of the latter have always played an important role. It remains to be seen whether the semiotic approach to the natural systems will help to optimize them and formulate rules and recommendations which, if widely accepted and included in the curricula of linguistic schools, will be sure to greatly increase the number of fluent users of languages. In what follows, the double nature of our subject, the necessity of always bearing in mind both aspects will figure as the main methodological premise.

I THE SEMIOTICS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION

1. The Object of Semiotics. The Sign-producing Reduction of Messages. So much has currently been written on the subject of semiotics and so breath-taking is the infinite variety of means of transmitting the infinitude of messages, that the main point now, if anything like a contribution to optimisation of human communication is to be attempted, is to limit oneself strictly from the outset. In what follows I shall, therefore, concentrate on the communication of verbal messages, touching upon their immediate analogs and concomitants more or less in passing. I shall also take for granted the primacy of verbal messages and the "verbalizability" of all other forms of human communication. But what are its (the natural human language's) semiotic devices ? Is its efficiency guaranteed by its original physical nature (the phusei of the Ancient Greeks) or does it depend on the linguistic activities of its u s e r s , who are forever improving their methods and setting up standards and models to be adhered to by whoever tries or seeks to raise his or her linguistic status ? Can the verbal message be separated from the concomitant nonverbal ones and how is the complex (if the answer to the above is negative) taught both to the "native" infant and the "alien" adult? Like all other semiotic systems, in the final analysis, language consists of a set of units and a set of rules which order their c o m bination. But are all linguistic units merely "signs" - ultimate entities unequivocally based on a one-to-one correspondence of "expression" and "content" ("signans" and "signatum") ? Or is the "sign-function" really and properly realized only on the f e a ture level of language - tentatively spreading out to include some of the more overtly patterned subdivisions of Grammar ? Otherwise stated, does Grammar provide a worthwhile number of instances of a sufficiently consistent one-to-one correspondence between the "sign-vehicle" and the "designatum" to be placed on the borderline between phonology and graphology, on the one hand, and lexicology and style, on the other? Whatever the exact place of grammar in the hierarchy of levels, the semiological relevance

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of "otherness" has been established mainly for units of the feature level. The semantic and especially the "metasemiotic" or stylistic units have so far eluded straightforward semiotic analysis, for structural lexicology and stylistics are still in the offing. It could be added that the relationship itself between structural linguistics and what might be described as "the semiotician's approach" has not yet been consistently brought to light. The headline of the present chapter speaks of "the sign-producing Reduction of Messages". I have no doubt that this is the most obvious approach of "linguistic semiotics". It is common knowledge, for instance, that when writing systems were devised by Cyril and Methodius or Wulfila they could do so only because they had thought of ways and means of reducing the infinite variety of sounds actually emitted by the u s e r s of the respective languages to a limited number of semiologically relevant "markers" or "signals" which distinguish the "sound cauls" of words and morphemes. An even more surprising semiotic achievement is shorthand. Ages ago the semiotician was not content with reducing human language to mere writing and went many steps further. It is therefore s u r prising that so little attention was given to stenography as a theoretically and practically inestimable branch of semiotic analysis. The subject will be discussed at greater length below (pp. 65 ff.) together with other "restricted" languages. New views were opened to linguistic semiotics by modern information theory. Thus, for example, modern phonology has greatly widened the scope of meaningful oppositions: we know now that in actual communication up to 50 per cent of the allophones may be left out without seriously impairing intelligibility, some of the oppositions being so reliable as to be able to carry the message in spite of different kinds of "noise", including the psycho-physical and psychopathological ones. There is also now a much deeper study of pauses and diarhemes, of different compensatory phenomena of sound, etc. All these and a host of others are the proper subject-matter of linguistic semiotics with the ultimate aim of devising a carefully planned, rational reduction of the speech signal, both phonetic and graphic, by leaving out the r e dundant parts (i.e. those which can easily be reconstructed on the basis of different kinds of context - grammatical, phraseological , situational, etc. ). The scientific study of all these facets of communication must pave the way to the solution of practical problems of "optimization" of natural systems of communication. These have acquired e s pecial significance in the era of scientific technical revolution.

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2. The Signatum, the Signans and the Semiotic Problems of Natural Human Languages. It has justly been claimed above that a "living semiotic system" the natural human language - cannot be substantially improved without due attention to the functioning of the "expression plane", the graphic and phonetic signals used by the speakers and writers. But very little can be done here without an equally serious and profound investigation of the plane of content. The reason why the expression plane has been investigated so much more fully is because it is incomparably simpler. The content of a linguistic unit is not, merely, the capacity /ability of sound and/or graphic complexes (or "types") to refer to something in extralinguistic reality or to "denote" it. It may appear, at first sight, that linguistic semiotics can content itself with the concepts of "type" (the virtual sign, the invariant) and of "token" (the actualised sign, the variant, the extension, etc.) without concerning itself with the ontology of the "reference" or "denotation". But this is not the case. In all languages there are a considerable number of "signs" which are not referable to actually existing objects or things. Thus, for instance, "unicorn" is an English word with an invariant signification of its own, or, putting it more plainly, with a distinct lexical meaning. Nevertheless it cannot be used to denote factual referents or "objects" actually appearing in speech-situations, for the simple reason that no such object exists or has ever existed. There will, therefore, be a world of difference between the "extensions" of "unicorn" and of, for example, "horse". The nature of the sign function will be incomparably simpler in the latter case. Although instances of this kind are usually borrowed from mythology, or concepts representing bygone stages in the development of human cognizance and knowledge, such as, phlogiston, perpetuum mobile, etc. , the peculiar relationship between a linguistic "sign" and its denotatum can just as well be demonstrated by means of ordinary everyday words. Thus, for example, the word "water" may be used simply to denote the chemical compound in question, i . e . , H20, both in the technical and the everyday language. It could also be used, by mistake, to point to some alcohol, for example. Next comes the whole gamut of transferred or figurative meanings and uses, as when Russian "voda" means 1. (disparagingly) soup, milk, etc. , which is too thin or poor in quality; 2. rapid talk, "gas", a needlessly drawn out flow of words, etc. In this way semiosis glides imperceptibly into meta-semiosis and further on into different kinds of "distorted communication", or even wilful "perversion of communication" - perverted reference or deliberate misuse of terms. Epistemologically, the starting point is the concrete corpuses

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or "texts". Considering the "texts", the designate (or "signatum"), together with its "sign-vehicle", may be conceived as a class of "denotates" or "referents", appearing in its "extension" and cognizable by listing all the members of the class. It then becomes an "intension" if conceived as a definition (a condensation) of the properties shared by all the members of the class and them alone. The ability of the human mind to work out intensional meanings is very great and is stimulated by the existence of ready-made, monolexemic units in the native languages. With respect to these, the concept becomes a designatum. It is most important to distinguish between the two (the designatum and the denotatum) because one and the same object can serve as a denotatum for different signata. For instance the same object may be called a carriage or a vehicle, a rat or a nuisance, etc. Investigating the sign function must also include the pragmatic side: 1) the recipient of the message, that is the party, to whom the given unity of expression and content is a sign, and 2) the way the recipient "transposes" the message into its physical equivalents. It goes without saying that this is where the invariant neurological correlates of variant messages come in, for comprehension could well be viewed as a translation of linguistic signs into a neurological code. But this still appears to remain a hypothesis . There are also interesting approaches which concentrate on the emotional states produced in the recipients by different categories of signs. Not infrequently, things are further complicated by the bias of behaviorist psychology with its distrust of "mentalistic" constructs. This sometimes leads to the rejection of the designatum (the "significative" function of signs) and the reduction of the sign function to mere reference. The extreme complexity of the signans-denotatum relation is also manifested in the multitude of metalinguistic expressions already coined to refer to the different varieties of "signs" - " s y m b o l " , "signal", "index", "icon", "symptom", etc., the choice depending on the nature of the relationship or, more specifically, on the degree of similarity between the signans and the denotatum. Thus we speak of a "symbol" when the choice of the signans is not wholly arbitrary or conventional, without, however, being similar to, or resembling, the denotatum in the ordinary sense of the word, or being based on direct metonymic relations. For example, the Hammer and Sickle serve as symbols of labour and unity of workers and peasants, and hands clasped in a handshake as a more general symbol of unity and cooperation. "Indexes" are part of the simpler (more elementary) semiotic systems, as, for instance, in the case of traffic signs, a typical index is an arrow which indicates direction. In natural human languages the deictic nature of articles and some classes of pro-

10 nouns may also s e r v e as an example of this kind of sign function. Although, as has been explained above, the general problem of the "linguistic sign" is by no means c l e a r , certain c l a s s e s of words may well be used to exemplify this o r that particular v a r iety of sign. Thus, f o r example, proper names may be regarded as a type of "symptom". The fact that they a r e different f r o m the common run of appelatives has been amply proved by the e n o r mous l i t e r a t u r e and age-long controversies on the subject o f t h e i r nature. We cannot enter into discussion of the question whether they p o s s e s s meanings or not (the fact that Maria or Sophia also means "female", while John or Thomas a r e m e n ' s names has been made abundantly clear). What is much l e s s widely discussed is the symptomatic value of f i r s t names as well as, though l e s s obviously, of s u r n a m e s . In those societies where antagonistic class distinctions have not been abolished, names c a r r y i n f o r mation about the social standing of a person, the social class to which he belongs. In the USSR it often s e r v e s as a symptom of its b e a r e r ' s belonging to a certain age-group, f o r the fashion in names changes ostensibly. It was very widely believed in the twenties that ordinary pre-revolutionary names should be d i s carded in favor of new coinages - Vladilena, Kim, Marxina, e t c . , but l a t e r there was a r e t u r n to the m o r e usual kind, with a marked predilection, however, f o r the grander ones, often associated with folklore, the better known works of fiction, etc. , as, for instance, Svetlana, Marina, Nikita, Sv'atoslav, etc. So f a r we have spoken of "monolexemic" units, assuming that the global and indivisible content is naturally contained in a "caul" o r "envelope" no less global and "whole" (cel'nooformlennaja). But the theory of signs includes, besides semantics and p r a g m a t i c s , also syntactics, the relation of the separate units to one another in the flow of speech. When syntactics is considered f r o m the viewpoint of information theory, then at one extreme we are confronted with the u t t e r i m possibility of predicting what the next element in the chain or flow of elements can be, while at the other extreme its predictability is complete. In elementary semiotic s y s t e m s , taking t r a f f i c lights f o r example, there is a 100 per cent probability of red following yellow. In order that the probability principle may be applied to natural-language sequences, a detailed study of complex g r a m matical, phraseological and other f a c t o r s must be carefully c a r r i e d out. At one extreme, then, "dormitate" all kinds of furious green ideas, f r a g i l e whales, laughing triangles, and orange-green h o r s e s ; there information theory as an aid to semiotics is baffled outright. At the other extreme, very much "awake", a r e those

11 isolated, idiomatic formations, which, although made up of two or more distinct units on the expression plane, are semantically global in the sense that they are referred to their denotata globally, i . e . in a way indistinguishable from their monolexemic equivalents. This point must be emphasised because this is where the categories of semiotics are especially significant. It is well known that it is extremely difficult to distinguish phraseological units from the rest of word-combinations on the basis of greater or less "idiomaticity", for the number and variety of subtle gradations makes certainty practically unattainable. But the semiotic criterion serves the purpose almost without fail. It is reasonably easy to decide whether the signans was gradually built up from its component parts in the process of speaking or writing, or whether it was used for naming ready-made, as a prefabricated complex unit. When speaking about phraseological units, it is natural to begin with their globality, for this is what distinguishes them from the common run of word-combinations. Nevertheless, it is very important to remember that their component parts are words, not morphemes. Thus, for instance, in "the last straw" meaning "an addition to the task, burden, etc., which makes it intolerable", or "at the drop of a hat" meaning "as soon as a signal is given; at once, willingly" the designates of each of the component words remain unchanged in the sense that the words are easily recognisable; they do not lose their identity either on the expressionor on the content-planes. Otherwise stated, they can be apprehended as such even when functioning within a phraseological unit, which is proved by the frequently used metasemiotic device of "deformation of phraseological units", as when, for instance, somebody is praised for his wonderful ability "to reduce mountains to mole-hills". This "paradox" of the phraseological unit not only increases its semantic and metasemiotic capacity, but also gives a very good example of one more variety of "sign" the "icon". The fact is easily proved by comparing some of the particularly capacious phraseological units with their definitions in paremiological dictionaries, which often appear not only as unwieldy and pedantic, but also as strikingly inadequate and/or even comic. Thus, for instance, the Russian "Bog n'e bez milosti, kazak n'e bez s"8astja" (God is not without mercy and the kazak is not without his share of luck) can illustrate both deficiencies, for it was "explained" as "there is no need to be prematurely alarmed, for a favorable course of events is not excluded". The semiotic functioning of linguistic units is inseparable from a consideration of the general categorial meanings which accompany the concrete lexical meanings of words and their complex equivalents. These categorial meanings are overtly ex-

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pressed by the systems of morphological grammatical categories which divide words into the large classes called "parts of speech" and are regularly manifested in the different syntactic functions which are naturally assumed to mark off the different syntactic kinds of words. In different languages the general lexical, the morphological, and the syntactic criteria are sometimes distributed in widely diverging ways. Word-combination is an important part of linguistic semiotics in many ways, including the proper understanding of the "sign functioning" of the words themselves. Thus, for instance, the English word (adjective) "white" as a fact of English philology can be traced back to the origins of the Germanic linguistic and philological tradition, and is systematically described in all the different phonetic forms it has assumed, and all the semantic changes it has undergone in the course of time. But in spite of the large volume of factual knowledge, the niceties of the functional aspect still give rise to controversy. What is the "designate" (or the "invariant lexical meaning") of "white"? Dictionaries usually begin by defining it as "of the colour of fresh snow or common table salt or milk or chalk". But, obviously, it would be futile to look for corroborating evidence in texts - who would actually want to speak of "white common salt" or of "white milk" or even of "white fresh snow"? In cases (or combinations) of this kind "white" could only be used as an epithet - a special kind of tropeic attribute, a poetic metasemiotic device. As a word, on the semantic level, "white" will normally occur in an altogether different kind of combination - with nouns whose colour is not the colour of milk or the common table salt, words like skin, wine, bread and, further on, like lie, scrounge, magic, etc. Perhaps what "white" primarily means should be defined as "light in contrast with a dark counterpart", "antonymic description of the light variety to distinguish it from the darker one" etc. But this, as will be seen from a more detailed discussion of polysemy, homonymy, etc., below (pp. 50 ff.) is a rhetorical question, for not only linguistic semiotics, but linguistics itself would not be possible if we did not understand the difference between syntagmatics and paradigmatics. When we speak of paradigmatics and paradigms in linguistics we usually mean grammatical morphology or the system of grammatical inflexions. It is also, at present, part of generally accepted Russian metalinguistic tradition to speak of syntactic paradigms, meaning the morphological modifications within a syntactic pattern. In a paradigm the elements or units of a semiotic system are arranged in such a way as to bring out their mutual relations, presenting them with so much consistency and regu-

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larity that their "optimisation" is practically secured from the start. A paradigm, therefore, enables the linguist to describe, logically and economically, the distinctive features of expression and content, of sound and meaning, on which is based the semiologically relevant opposition of units and their combinations. As far as phonology and grammar are concerned, most of these have already been discovered and described for a considerable number of languages with clarity and precision. Not so with lexicology. As far as the lexis, or the vocabulary (the word stock) of languages is concerned - although attempts at a systemic (and, therefore, "optimal") description go back to at least the beginning of the present century - very little progress has been made. There are many reasons for this. First of all, a lexical system is an additive one, if at all. Second, the number of elements or units is so great that extrapolating the neat and orderly arrangements of grammatical paradigms to optimize the infinitude and diversity of lexical relationships remains problematic to this day. This does not mean to say that there is a slackening of effort. There is already a great and growing number of books and dissertations devoted to this task. We still notice attempts at an improved "componential analysis", especially in its deductive variety, that is, based not on analyses of the word stocks of natural human languages, but on the abstract categories of mathematical (symbolic) logic with an ever larger admixture of some of the would-be lexical subdivisions current in "analytic philosophy". But whatever the methodology, what we usually see is a more or less arbitrary choice of a limited number of "semantic fields" - terms of relationship, colour terms; verbs of motion, of mental processes, of speaking, often just two or three words, with all their connotations and in relation to their immediate paradigmatic "neighbours". Some of these papers are very interesting and useful indeed. But they are all affected by a general inability to see both the place of their particular effort within the tens of thousands of words (the would-be "lexical system" of which the particular study is an infinitesimal part) and the way to a general solution of the problem of a complete lexical paradigmatics. (1*) 3. Sign and Meta-sign. Sign in Language and Sign in Speech. The subject-matter of semiology is further complicated by the fact that semiological systems are often superimposed upon one another: there is all the difference in the world between a signsystem which refers to denotata which are not themselves signs,

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and a sign-system specially constructed for descriptions and discussions of other semiotic systems, the latter appearing not as instruments or tools but as objects of study. The importance of this difference was emphasized as far back as the Middle Ages: the more usual or natural sign-situation, when the referents are not viewed as possessing semiological relevance, and the specific one, when they are parts or components of a semiotic system, were carefully distinguished. To provide, terminologically, for this peculiar semiotic situation, the term "metalinguistic" was coined to be used when the "object" system is the natural human language. I use the term "metasemiotic" to denote the highest level of linguistic study: feature, semantic, metasemiotic. But, of course, if a wider view of semiotics is taken, that is if, as in the present book, it is not confined to linguistic semiotics, then the term "metasemiotic" can, perhaps, be used with different acceptations. As far as linguistics (the science of natural human languages) is concerned, the language we use when "talking about talking" is a metalanguage, while the system of signs we are talking about is the object language. The last quarter of a century has seen a tremendous increase not only in the number and variety of different linguistic schools, but also of metalinguistic concepts and terms. Unfortunately not all of the numerous works on the subject distinguish clearly enough between the following three aspects of metalinguistics: 1) the system of terms, consisting of words which are either not used in the object language, or, when borrowed from the latter, acquire in the metalanguage a special meaning; 2) specific combinations of words (and their equivalents) which reflect the peculiarities of metalinguistic usage, and on which depends the formation of complex or "explicative" terms which are gradually included, together with the monolexemic ones, into the inventory of linguistic terminology, and 3) the sociolinguistic aspect: the particular form of "meta-speech", the way the metalanguage of linguistics is used, can always be shown to reflect the attitudes of a school, a trend, or an epoch, etc. By introducing the concept of "meta-speech" we commit ourselves to the obvious sequel and must keep our eyes open for "meta dialects" and even "metaidiolects". Let us give an example. For a long time - ever since de Saussure's "Course" was first translated into Russian, "jazyk" ("language") and "rec" ("speech") were the generally accepted (actually the only) ways of naming this all-important dyad. Little by little, however, under the influence of different branches of mathematics, a host of other expressions, referring to the same linguistic denotatum, but presenting it at different angles, came into use, such as "invariant"-"variant", "code"-"message",

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"intension"-"extension", "primary parameters"-"secondary parameters", "set-theoretical approach"-"probabilistic approach", etc. (2*) The choice of this or that appellation is now a question of "meta-stylistics", for the connotations and h i e r archies are fraught with distinct sociolinguistic overtones. It has already been mentioned that an accumulation of metalinguistic units around the same linguistic denotatum should make us wary of the importance of aspects, which may involve important distinctions. A case in point is the indiscriminate use of the word "code" to denote semiotic systems in general - including natural human language. This simplistic approach is incompatible with the Marxist-Leninist principles of systemic analysis which proves that systems are objectively existing entities . The specific character of natural human languages is that they exist only in and through speech, which functions in a v a r iety of ways, including the "poetic" or "metasemiotic" ways. The concept of "language" ("langue") is an abstraction, a generalisation, the "obsieje" which exists in the particular "v otdel' nom i cerez otdel'noje". The "general" (language) and the " p a r ticular" (speech) are interdependent; they are a dialectic unity and their interaction is mutual. In the case of the code-message relationship the "dependence" is one-sided. To compose a message with the help of a code all one needs is a knowledge of the code, and the ability of the d e s tinee to re-establish the original one-to-one correspondence b e tween the units of the code and the elements of the received m e s sage, that is to decode it. The message in this simple or p r i mary sense is not supposed to carry anything that is not unequivocally contained in the code, for the latter is primary and enjoys an independent existence, is ontologically f r e e , not affected by the way it is used to transmit messages. The classical example of the Morse code not only serves the purpose of exemplification, but also of proving the stability of this kind of semiotic system, for obviously nothing has happened to it; it has remained basically the same in spite of the innumerable messages constantly being transmitted by means of it over the years. When Baudouin de Courtenay and de Saussure explained to their diachronically oriented audiences the necessity of the synchronicsemiotic approach, it was an important contribution to our science and a distinct step ahead. Without their seminal ideas it would have been much more difficult to approach a number of tasks establishing linguistic standards, optimisation of orthographies, improving international communication, etc. But the idea that natural human language is merely one of the semiotic systems, simply part of general semiology, was a dangerous simplification. The ontology of the primary specific semiotic system, which is

16 the most important means of human communication and the general basis of all other systems, its extreme complexity and the fact that it cannot be understood unless viewed in its indissoluble connection with thinking as well as the social life of its users, requires the application of a complex system of methods and approaches. The difference between a code and a natural human language is probably most clearly explained by introducing the concept of "dimensions", (3*) the code being a mono-dimensional system, and the natural human language a poly-dimensional one. This means that in the case of the latter very much depends on whether its phonetic substance has been transposed into the graphic dimension (failure to take this dimension into account can lead to futile argument of a general-semiotic character, with one of the discussants thinking of an unwritten language and the other - of a highly organised literary one). There is also the dimension of "generality" - is the use of the language compulsorily shared by all the members of a community or is it only a partial system, confined to only some form of communication; and, above all, how far have its users gone on the way of controlling it, of normalizing its use and mapping out the direction of its development? The state of affairs in modern society is much more complex than it was when the dimension of "globality" appeared as due only to natural causes - like, for example, social stratification or dia- (or poly-) topical (territorial) variation. At present mankind is more and more concerned with the problem of "mediator" languages because of the urgent necessity of creating efficient means of transmitting information across national boundaries. Optimization of the most important natural means of human communication cannot begin unless the different speech communities become fully conscious of the power over their own languages. This requirement has now been fulfilled in a great number of cases. Very many languages have been committed to writing, and compliance with the established orthographic rules has been demanded from all. Comprehensive lists of grammatical paradigms have been worked out and are taught in schools as laws not to be transgressed. The learning of at least one foreign language has been made compulsory in schools - a process which cannot fail to make people language-conscious, and engage them in linguistic analyses and the intricacies of different bases of a r ticulation, for without these no global linguistic message can be transposed from one semiotic system into another. There is also the widespread preoccupation with contrastive linguistics, the ever-growing number of contrastive studies of languages belonging to widely differing systems. We could not end this chapter without mentioning one more a s -

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pect of human communication. Writing has made it possible for people to communicate not only over space but also time. Synchronically language serves as a means of inter- and intracultural communication. However difficult it may be for members of different cultures to learn to understand one another, there is always a way of fathoming the discrepancies, of obtaining reliable knowledge on this or that subject and finding a solution, of bridging the gap. But diachronic communication, transmitting and receiving information over time cannot, because of its very nature, be exact or complete. Thus, for example, translation of old books is of necessity approximate, for we do not know what the attitudes of the original writers and readers really were, what their reaction to this or that situation was, etc. Otherwise stated, the noises inherent in the "time channel" are unremovable. Although what has just been said ought not, theoretically speaking, apply to intellective communication and be mainly a problem of translating ancient works of fiction, this is not the case. The earlier work in the field of creating abstract conceptual systems was probably even less "context free" than it is now. First of all there has always been - and still is - the difficulty of dividing the strictly intellective message from the emotive one. And then there is the enormous task of finding, or discovering, media for the different sciences - as we know the "language" of mathematics, for example, which seems to suit physics or theoretical mechanics to .everybody's satisfaction, has not, so far, been of much use to the philologist. It is therefore one of the outstanding general scientific tasks to see what can be done to work out information retrieving logical systems (informacionno-logiceskije systemy) which would be sufficiently unified - and at the same time diversified - to satisfy the ideal requirements, whose nature has been made sufficiently clear because of the progress of general semiotics. 4. Semiology and Interdisciplinary Research. The different attitudes and orientations of representatives of adjacent disciplines have given rise to a number of different approaches to the semiotics of natural human languages. Thus, for example, the psychologist seeks to distinguish between the "code", the semiotic system upon which a particular act of communication is based, and the intention of the speaker or "sender of the m e s sage", more generally. But this distinction alone cannot account for the speaker's "behavior", for the sociolinguistic aspect must always be reckoned with. It is common knowledge that no natural

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human language is ever simple or uniform, or the only semiotic system in use even in the smaller speech-communities. Every time a speaker opens his mouth he instinctively chooses the variant of his own language, or some foreign one, to suit the particular situation and aims of communication. Not all the variants and modifications of speech-behavior depend on the speaker's free will. Often the choice of this or that form of discourse is determined by the orator's psycho-physiological peculiarities. Thus an experienced public speaker will naturally produce well-formed sentences with a properly balanced prosody and loudness of voice; he will not cough or intersperse his speech with hesitative phenomena. The reverse will be the case if the speaker is a novice. His voice will trail off, his sentences will become entangled, pauses (both silent and voiced, but always parasitic) as well as other kinds of "fillers" will become excessively frequent, etc. I may add that all these are usually enhanced by the speaker's consciousness of recording apparatus: comparatively few people are born so confident as to be able to behave naturally, from the start, before a television camera or even an ordinary tape recorder. Optimization requires, therefore, that "rhetorical phonetics" be established as a compulsory subject at schools and universities. (4*) This aspect of verbal communication also requires a detailed investigation of the speaker-listener interaction. What the speaker says and how he says it depends on who he is addressing and why. It follows that the psychophysiological states of the speaker are inseparable from those of the listener. In most typical speechsituations it is not merely a question of "decoding" the message; it is also the general effect, the overall impact, the psychological and emotional states induced in the listener. The simplest instance is the difference between interest and boredom. If the speaker wants to make sure that his message is not lost on the audience he must watch for listlessness. In contrast with codes, language does not restrict the freedom of the user, who is free to use whatever Words he likes to suit the particular requirements of naming. Neither does syntax impose strict rules. It allows considerable latitude in length of sentence, construction, functional sentence perspective, etc. But the effect will depend, of course, on the optimal decision. This is where the concept of "paralinguistics" comes in. The term was introduced because there appeared to be a need for a word to denote the various phenomena of sound (very imperfectly conveyed in writing), which have so far not been registered among the regular oppositions and "othernesses" of the feature level. The metalinguistic problem could not be solved by merely speaking of "extralinguistic phenomena" or "linguistic behavior"

19 whenever it was something not normally included in the more orthodox structural analyses and descriptions. Hence "paralinguistics" as the science of those aspects and peculiarities of phonation which are typical of speakers of a given language, but which do not belong to the distinctive features usually contained in inventories of phonological oppositions, for example: degree of loudness, hesitation phenomena, diapason (range) of modulation, etc. We can form an idea of the progress of paralinguistics by comparing the listings of categories in G. L. Trager ("Paralanguage: first approximation". "Studies in Linguistics" 1958), David Crystal and Randolph Quirk ("Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English", The Hague, 1964) and M. Rensky (The Systematics of Paralanguages. "Travaux linguistiques de Prague", 2, 1966). The term appears to have been proposed by A. A. Hill, but it does not appear to have been noticed widely enough before the publication of Trager's paper. The importance of Hill's contribution lies in the inventory of what he described as "vocalizations" not only to be distinguished from "voice qualities", but also to be recognized as part of the total speech event. The former - pitch range, resonance, tempo, etc. - together with their respective "controls" had long been recognized, described, and termed as "intonation". But the highly heterogeneous subclasses of "vocalizations" had either received very little attention, or not been considered at all as part of the linguistics of speech - la Unguis tique de la parole. TTiey should therefore have been presented in inverse order: 1. "vocal segregates" ("uh" and variants, silent pauses (beyond junctures), intruding sounds, "hm", trills, "tsk", clicks, etc. 2. Vocal qualifiers: intensity, pitch height, range (drawl, jabber) and 3. "vocal characterizes": laughing, crying, sighing, yawning - also yelling, moaning, and even belching! Linguists are writing increasingly on 1. There is nothing that a linguist would regard as irrelevant in 2. But 3. is so obviously beyond what the linguist is naturally concerned with, that is, "signs with a fixed coded value" (Stankiewicz), that he would find it hard to include it in his categorisations. This is clearly borne out by the categories of classification proposed by Crystal and Quirk. They begin by drawing a line between what is 1) conventional, patterned and 2) personal, nonpatterned. The former is "prosody" and includes pause, tension, rhythmicality, pitch range, prominence, tempo, and tone. The latter is "paralanguage" consisting of a) "voice qualities" (whisper, sigh, huskiness, creak, falsetto,resonance), b) "voice qualifications" (laugh, giggle, tremulousness, sob, cry) and c) "vocalizations" (clicks, grunts, etc.). Rensky is even more ex-

20 plicit. He drops the smaller divisions and lists under "language proper" intonation, grammar, interjections, lexis; under "paralanguage" - paraprosody and paralexis (vocalisations). Even a brief and superficial comparison of the three "models" shows what the difficulty is when the speech event is visualized in its natural complexity, i . e . , when it is viewed as it really is. When a given speech act is considered by the psychologist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, etc. , language is regarded as only a part of the total communication phenomenon - a part, one of the parts. Thus from the psychologist's point of view it is the states of the speaker's organism, his emotions, the nature of the particular motivation, his intentions, etc., that are most important or primary. To the linguist it is the constant and interpersonal, and not the peculiar and specific "variables" of the individual speech-act that really matters. Although the linguist sees no reason why the term "paralanguage" should not be used to label a number of peripheral phenomena of sound, he can find it hard to see how properly linguistic phonological methods can be applied here. True, the idea that the study of various expressive components of speech must be based on "grading", and not "opposition", which requires the units under investigation to be "discrete", does suggest ways of including the seemingly overcontext-bound, or those which do not lend themselves to separation from the particular states of a particular speaker in a particular speech situation as parts of "linguistics proper". But even so he will refuse point-blank to regard "vocal characterizers" as having anything to do with his subject. Even those phenomena of sound which are usually grouped under the general name of "intonation" are to a considerable extent supplementary or even redundant. This is easily proved by listening to the endless variety of "Englishes" everybody can hear over the radio every day. Even within England there is a lot of difference between the way the same language is "intoned" in the different parts of the country. Or, take the two main variants of the language, British and American ? It can easily be imagined what a prosodic babel would be discovered if the intonations used in the different parts of the Commonwealth were systematically contrasted ! I am not speaking of the United Nations, the Common Market or that type of "speech community" where everybody uses English freely and fluently and where understanding is obviously not impaired by the representatives of the different nations flagrantly (not to say shamelessly) speaking English, decked out in their own native prosodies. Every single case of verbal communication is called a "speech event" or "act of speech"; a prolonged one is a "text" or " c o r pus". Verbal communication would not be possible if there did

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not exist a set of ways or means of "structuring speech", hence syntax as the ordering of units in the spoken chain and the science which investigates the principles on which it is based (sintaksis kak ucfenije o postrojenii reci). It has been conclusively shown by leading Russian linguists that prosody (or "intonation") is the basic syntactic category, because it is practically independent of "construction" in its ability to convert any word or word-combination, or even a morpheme into a complete predicative utterance. What we call "syntactic prosody" is the prosodic expression of the basic grammatical relations of an utterance. Thus, for instance, any ultimate syntactic element pronounced with a fall (signalled in writing by a full stop) converts it to a simple statement. Pronounced with a high rise the same element (or its complex equivalent, see above pp. 19 ff.) with a question mark in writing, will function as a question, while a low rise will bring it out as an unfinished part of an utterance, or signal "expectation". But the functioning of prosodic means is not confined to syntactic prosody, where it is comparatively speaking simple and uniform. The full scale of prosodic variation is realised as "suprasyntactic prosody", which is divided into "logical" and "timbre" suprasyntactics. Although the prosodic means used to realise "logical stress" or "accent d'insistance" differ widely enough with speakers of different languages, the principle of a r bitrarily bringing out any element of a syntactic sequence for the sake of emphasis may well be regarded as a "prosodic universal". It also serves some of the fundamental requirements for the foreground (aktual'noje clenenije predloZenija). Thus, for example, as Sir Alan Gardiner has pointed out, a sentence like "Henry a r rived" can easily be made to express two different kinds of message. By placing the logical stress on "Henry" we convert it into the psychological predicate without depriving it of its function of grammatical subject: the purport of the sentence can in this case be rendered or paraphrased as "It is Henry who arrived". If however "arrived" is brought into prominence, then this slovoform combines both functions - that of the grammatical and the psychological predicate, and the general purport of the sentence becomes roughly equivalent to "Henxy did arrive". Logical suprasyntactics requires no additional prosodic means, its purpose being adequately served by combinations of the basic prosodic features - tone, loudness, range, tempo, and pausation. With "timbre suprasyntactics" - the realisation of various emotional, expressive, and evaluative overtones - the list of features must be greatly extended. Basically timbre suprasyntactics is no more than a realization of "timbre 2", defined as "the specific suprasegmental colouring of speech which endows it with

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certain expressive-emotional overtones" as when we speak of somebody sounding gloomy or gay. But of course, the progress of paralinguistics has widened the horizon of the student of timbre suprasyntactics. Of the "voice qualities" and "voice qualifications" practically every one can be shown to play a significant role on the highest plane of syntactic analysis and expression. (5*) It is time we turn to the main line of our discussion and explain what the "optimization" aspect of all these features is. One can also question: is there a way to teach rhetorical phonetics outside special histrionic establishments, where prospective actors - on all levels, from the theatre to the more humble roles of radio announcers, disc-jockeys and other masters of eloquence - learn their trade mainly by instinct and imitation ? The answer to this question is emphatically in the affirmative. Every lecturer and teacher, every public worker, scientist, or commentator, i . e . every single person who is expected, with any degree of regularity, to address audiences, must be given a course, explaining to him what the phonetic tools of his trade are, what the general principles of prosodically structuring one's speech are, and how the particular requirements of this or that situation can best be met. Some people are born speakers, even orators. Others are so poor that they never know how to reach their audiences, how to establish the proper speaker-listener contact. They fail to pass on the information which, in itself, could be infinitely more valuable and important than the one so brilliantly expounded by the trained rhetorician. In our lectures on rhetorical phonetics at the philological faculty of the MGU (Moscow state University; see pp. 19-53 of the "Outline"), after a detailed description of the categories of prosodic analysis and their metalinguistic symbolization (including the vast domain of rhythm, frazirovka, etc.) we analyse, in greatest detail, three different ways of "presenting" a piece of scientific text, a part of a lecture on a scientific subject at university level. How does one attract the attention of one's audience and keep it focussed on what is being expounded, or establish the "contact" one hears so much about, in a fully premeditated way? It could have appeared at first sight that, the text being neutral and cognitive, all we required was adherence to the rules of English intonation, as laid down in one of the well-established manuals. Thus, pauses are made to draw in breath at the junctures indicating syntactic relations; stressed words appear in a descending-scale sequence; non-final breath-groups nuclei are low-rising or mid-falling, while final ones are low-falling; tempo, volume, range are normal. In actual fact, however,

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this rendering was not found acceptable. It was too monotonous and uninteresting. At the other extreme was the variant enunciation which, in its attempt to impress the audience and hold its attention was clearly overreaching to the point of being comical. In the variant designed to serve as a model there was judicious use of variations and contrasts of tempo; high falls and fall-rises were used for logical emphasis to bring out the more important portions of the text; kinetic tones followed each other in rapid succession to express conviction; prominence was given to the more important words by diminished volume, by high-falling tones preceded by pauses, etc. The methods of structural functional linguistics, the meansend model of "East European" linguistics, has long been regarded as the general scientific model for all humanities - psychology, literature, ethnography. But the realization of this idea has often fallen short of the ideal. Thus the psychological approach to the semiotics of natural human communication concentrates on the behavior of the particular individual, the latter being viewed as a separate Gestalt. In contrast with the psychologist, the linguist is mainly interested in the social aspect of communication. In the case of sociolinguistics he concerns himself with models of extralinguistic behavior and their communicative function, p r i marily in so far as they are culturally conditioned and institutionalized. Otherwise stated, the linguist's methodology, which has enabled him to discover and describe fully and scientifically the semiological nature of sounds and grammar forms, inspires him with confidence and encourages him to go on with attempts to apply the same methods to "encoding extralinguistic information", the "encoding" of emotions, attitudes, etc. As long as he has not succeeded in working out as neat a system of contrasts for the extralinguistic parameters of the act of communication, he cannot decide in their favour and will continue to regard them as i r r e l evant. The assumption that the leading role is assigned to linguistics is further corroborated by the fact that the more widely known interdisciplinary domains are called psycho-, neuro-, ethno-, etc. linguistics, and not linguo-psychology, etc. Nevertheless the precision of classical phonology is not likely ever to be attained in any of these interdisciplinary fields of research. Incidentally, the now enormous amount of literature on acquisition of language by children says very little about how the proper r e actions to extralinguistic factors or elements of the speech event are taken care of, and how children are helped to control them in accordance with a given cultural background. We know that knowledge of this kind is inevitably based on a large number of

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different factors - motivational, adaptive, characterological, etc. But how do they combine ? when are they introduced to the best advantage ? how are they used to teach children to avoid this or that predicament? - to these questions we rarely find an immediate and satisfactory answer. When the object under investigation is so infinitely complex the question of "modelling" it is bound to arise. A very interesting example of a mechanical device whose responses to situations are comparable to human responses is Ceccato's "tortoise". Although since the publication of the original Russian version of this book considerable progress has been made in all branches of semiotics and mechanical communication, Ceccato's contribution to the monumental "The Use of Computers inAnthropology" is well worth mentioning. (6*) From the point of view of interdisciplinary research in the field of human communication, in which anthropology (ethnography) is taking part to an ever greater extent, it is most important to translate natural verbal reactions into certain well-regulated forms of activity. The ethnographer, as well as the psychologist, is less interested in the inherent properties of linguistic systems and structures with their inner organization than in the way they manifest themselves in actual human intercourse, as part of the great complex of different semiologically relevant factors. To create a "talkingAutomaton" and to teach it to simulate even the simplest forms of human - and linguistically based - activity is a great step forward. 5. The Semiotic Systems which are not based on Graphic or Phonic Substance and the Problem of the "Silent Language". Since natural human language is the most widely used means of human communication, the phonic (and graphic) substances figure prominently as the basic "realisations" on the expressionplane . But they are by no means the only ones. In the course of the last two decades the results of extensive research on a great variety of ways information is naturally passed on in human society have been made generally available. (7*) But can all these different facts be brought into a system? Or, rather, can it be shown that there are distinct "silent languages" (or particular semiotic systems) at all comparable with the verbal language ? These questions are best considered with respect to "kinesics" - the "language" of body-motions, for the notion of "gesture languages" is a well-established one. There is braille, for instance, and there are the trapist monks. There are the conventional gestures of greeting, agreeing, disagreeing, departing,

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and expressing gratitude. The "institutionalized" ones are well known and widely used. To draw up a list of these simple "purports" and indicate how they are expressed in at least the 'greater' languages - that is by the users of the better known and influential languages of the world - would be an important step towards the optimization of natural communicative systems. When one reads in Weston la Barre's extremely interesting article ("Approaches to Semiotics", p. 218) of conventional American "gestures of friendliness" giving offence through ignorance of even the rudiments of kinesiology, or of the handsover-the-head self-handshake being interpreted as an arrogant gesture of triumph, one can only hope that this intolerable state of affairs will soon be drastically changed and "kinesiological" education will find a place in our educational system. What has just been said about the simplest and most obvious cases does not mean to say that the more complex ones - what could be described as "parakinesics" in the sense that it is best avoided altogether in neutral communication and reserved for various expressive-emotional evaluative intentions - should not be subjected to as rigorous and detailed an analysis. But like paralinguistics, parakinesics presupposes the underlying neutral system, and is therefore doomed to wait until an effective methodology has been elaborated. The general principle, however, ought to be the same for all natural semiotic systems: the dialectic unity of expression and content requires that the two sets of units be taken up as the two "functives" of one and the same signfunction; interest, surprise, disbelief, approval, disapproval, admiration, contempt, etc., and the body-motions used to express them in different cultures, with, of course, special attention to the "zero" equivalents. As everybody knows, one can always stay on the safe side and reduce one's communicative body-motions to an absolute minimum. The general rule that a foreigner should be sparing in his use of highly idiomatic phraseological units and in all situations stint himself of the more colourful or daring paralinguistic devices, is equally valid here. There is no reason whatsoever why one should indulge in sticking out one's tongue, kissing, slapping backs, etc. with representatives of different cultures. For instance it is much "safer" not to shake hands at all, than to shock the foreigner by the repeated and effusive handshakings of one's own culture. Besides there is always the verbal sign, which when used carefully, is not likely to cause offence. I could add that foreigners in general should be as pedantic as possible in the way they use other people's languages. L. V. §3erba was quite right when he said that there i s no harm in the foreign learner's language being "stilted" (pust'govorit sukonnym jazykom). Much better that than an unjustified and in-

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accurate excess of self-expression. It goes without saying that all along a very clear distinction should be made between instinctive motions and actions, and the "kinesic codes", which are institutionalized within a given cultural tradition and acquired, learned by imitation, together with the primary and most important natural semiotic system of all the language of words. Part II of the present book deals with the logic of human communication and suggests certain ways of optim(al)ising not only communication in general, but also cross-cultural communication in particular. By closely observing the communication of scientists, politicians and diplomats at international conferences, etc. , we will gradually arrive at an optimal minimum of nonverbal signs and make the first step in the direction of establishing an auxiliary international silent language. The temptation to apply the methodology of structural linguistics to all nautral human semiotic systems has been and still is very hard to resist. But doubts and difficulties remain. Thus, when we discussed paralinguistics in the preceding chapter, we had no doubt whatsoever of the existence of an underlying linguistics. But when we turn to kinesics, are we sure that it is not a kind of 'para' that we are talking about ? As long as we have left out of consideration the highly specialised transpositions of natural human language into braille, etc. , kinesics as commonly understood (Birdwhistell) does not seek to supplant verbal communication, but only to supplement it. It follows that whatever term may be decided upon in the final analysis, the pararnonpara opposition does not appear to be applicable here. In other words, what is usually called "kinesics" appears to correspond not to linguistics, but to paralinguistics in the above acceptation of the t e r m . The arguments in favor of this solution may be summed up as follows. We assume that linguistics is distinguished from p a r a linguistics by the former concerning itself primarily with intellective communication, and the latter exclusively with tlie a c companying expressive-emotional evaluative overtones, i . e . , all the supplementary phenomena of sound which are superimposed on the units of language and the syntactic rules, according to which they are brought together in speech. Kinesics, then, would have to appear as a semiologically relevant opposition of elements of body-motions, serving as conventional bearers of intellective information. But the content of a kineme has been conclusively shown to be always situation-bound; and if, m o r e over, it has been established that it does not correspond to the minimal discrete units of verbal languages, being apprehended only globally, mainly as independent predicative units, then e s -

27

tablishing an analogy, or drawing a parallel, between the verbal language and the system of kinemes, would be hardly feasible. Like sentences, kinemes always include in their semantic structure the quantifier of existence; they always express predication. In contrast with the verbal language, whose functioning is not confined to the speech event in the narrow sense, but can and does freely include also the narrated event, allokins are always oriented only towards the two immediate participants of the speech event and cannot by their very nature be made to allude to, or indicate, beyond anything.Briefly stated, like all other secondary semiotic systems, the "language of bodily gestures" is confined to only a specific aspect of the total field of human communication, which is covered by the most important means - the natural verbal language. The fact that such a great number of semiological systems share the property of being secondary, by no means implies that they are all basically alike. The difference between them can be very great indeed. Thus, for instance, if we compare whistling, drum-beating, etc. , with (para)kinesics, we shall find that the former reduce the number of semiologically meaningful oppositions to an absolute minimum, while the latter serves to introduce additional, or surplus, contrasts and thus elaborates and develops communication by means of the verbal language still further by more subtle particularization and nuancing of what e s sentially is already there. The additional information supplied by body motions cannot be included in the orthography because it would take generations to teach ordinary language users not only to decode, but even to be able to observe it, to become fully aware of its existence. The following two illustrations will help to bring out the point. 1. In the much quoted "Approaches to Semiotics" (p. 179) Professor Birdwhistell exemplifies kinesic analysis by merely taking up a simple interrogative "What?" as produced by one of the discussants. " . . . One of the first things that we get is a kinesic double bar which he located in his eyebrows. Now he could also have located it in his hands. It just happens that when you turn to the British, you find that they do not ask questions that way. When Englishmen make a positive assertion, their eyebrows go up and they are held in an up position. . . . In this case, what we had was a kinemorph.. . In American English the brows have two significant degrees of variation in their lift, lowered and raised. The bound morph, which is a kineme, may be either unilateral or bilateral, with different transfixes and infixes. Now the duration of eyebrow lift was varied in this case by a reduction in pectoral tension, reducing the pectoral display, which is quite American and related to a particular status level;

28

Dr. Parker is the Chairman of this session, after all, and if he omitted the pectoral weakening it would be inappropriate and would involve a translation into a different meaning system with different dialectal variations." 2. Chapter Three of "The Silent language" by Edward T. Hall begins with the following excellent illustration. "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's success with his creation, Sherlock Holmes, is largely attributable to the fact that Holmes knew how to make the most of non-verbal communication and extracted the maximum from what he observed. The following extract from "A Case of Identity" aptly illustrates this point. He had risen from his chair and was standing between the parted blinds, gazing down into the dull neutral -tinted London street. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that on the pavement opposite there stood a large woman with a heavy fur boa round her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad brimmed hat which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her ear. From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at our windows, while her body oscillated backward and forward, and her fingers fidgeted with her glove buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who leaves the bank, she hurried across the road and we heard the sharp clang of the bell. "I have seen those symptoms before", said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. "Oscillations upon the pavement" always means an affaire de coeur. She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate. When awoman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and the usual symptom is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a love matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or grieved. But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts. " Sir Arthur made explicit a highly complex process which many of us go through without knowing that we are involved. Those of us who keep our eyes open can read volumes into what we see going on around us. " But who are "those of us who keep our eyes open" ? From what has been quoted above it would appear that they are 1) the trained kinesiological scientist, and 2) the miraculously gifted individual. As far as all the rest of humanity is concerned - is anything wrong? Is something inherently the matter with the rest of us ? As an answer to this question I shall permit myself to adduce one more quotation: Margaret Mead taking part in the discussion-

29 session on language teaching ( " A p p r o a c h e s . . p . 177). According to Dr. Mead the reason why kinesics remains a problem is the incompatibility of . . people who have given their lives to linguistics" and "those who have devoted a large amount of their time to seeing" or "those who listen and those who look". As an extreme case Dr. Mead mentioned a renowned American linguist " . . . who couldn't see anything at all (not because of failing eyesight! O. A.) while his hearing was so acute that he could hear the slightest sound. Somebody might be standing in front of him with tears rolling down their faces, and, until they spoke, he did not even know they were unhappy!" There is here an implicit disapproval of the linguist's attitude. But 1) how do we know that the above-mentioned tears were "semiologically relevant" in this particular way ? How do we know that it was not merely the result of wind, or smoke or whatever ? And does not the example show clearly the advantage of "verbalizing" one's emotions and leaving to the visual signs their proper function of enhancing the verbal message, making its impact so much more powerful ? Now 2): it is common knowledge that verbal communication has the great advantage over the visual one of being transferable over great distances, in the dark, overtime, etc. Personally I listen to the radio much more frequently than I watch television, not only because at the present stage of its development radio information is available in much greater variety than the televised one; mostly because I am not at all interested in the kinesic achievements of the presenters working for the host of radio transmission, in what is broadly described as English, operating all over the world. Watching the infinite variety of "body-motions", which are institutionalized in different cultures, accompanying in all kinds of bizarre ways the message, which is perfectly comprehensible to all normal users of English as a means of international communication, would be invaluable for contrastive kinesics. But it would needlessly detract the attention of one who wants to learn certain facts about a certain subject with as little waste of time as possible. Otherwise stated, I would like to insist that the chiselling off of intellective (or cognitive) information from the extremely complex globality of an act of human communication is the core and essence of the semiotics of human intercourse. It is deplorable that it is still so often taken for granted, even disregarded as something that is so trivial and uninteresting as not to deserve multidimensional analysis. Thus, for example, a very large number of outstanding Romance philologists - people like Vossler, Spitzer, Bally and others, gave priority to the physiognomic and psychological modes of the speech act, and set great store by the individual

30 idiosyncrasies and innovations, etc., which could lead to the e r roneous idea of pre-eminence of emotions over the intellective factor. Throughout this book our aim is to concentrate on the intellective function of speech and see what progress has been made towards optimizing it, making it more effective as a means of cognitive communication, also with the assistance of the ideas and categories, which came into being mainly because of the special requirements of interlinguistics - the continuing attempts at creating logical informational languages (informacionnologiifeskije jazyki), "mediator" languages for "machine translation", as well as the considerable achievements in establishing "typological etalons", and the even higher level of scientific generalisation ("modelling" of linguistic systems (Denisov)). But we shall consider them all primarily from the point of view of their "naturalness" and see how they can help the transmission of intellective information by means of natural human languages to become more effective. Notes (1*) Although very many new publications have appeared since 1969, the year of publication of our collective contribution (O. S. Akhmanova et. a l . , ed. E.M. Mednikova, Osnovy komponentnogo analiza "Principles of componential analysis", Moskva, MGU) the State of the Art has not undergone substantial or drastic changes. (2*) With this "embarrassment of riches" there was no reason for any terminological innovations. Thus it is very difficult to see the point of speaking of "competence" and "performance", without explaining the need. (3*) Cf. Margaret Mead, "Vicissitudes of the Study of the Total Communication Process" in Approaches to Semiotics, Sebeok et al. Eds. (4*) "Rhetorical phonetics" is very closely connected with what Dr. Mead calls "establishing a stance that represents a state of mind" (op. cit., p. 189). "All I do", says Dr. Mead, "is act as if it was natural for me to be there". She made this very important point in connection with the "Pedagogical perspectives" of paralinguistics and kinesics, which, in spite of the rather broad title, was mainly understood as important for foreign language teaching. As far as this particular aim is concerned, all the ordinary learner requires is treating the subject of conversation seriously, respecting his audience - behaving in a way that should be natural if rapport is to be established. As far as

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the ordinary learner (the non-linguist, not the philologist or language teacher) is concerned, " . . . we don't need to teach him to speak like a native, but make the other people believe he can, so he can talk to them, and then he learns". But, of course, rhetorical phonetics is a special subject. A discussion of its content will be pursued below when the more widely used term "paralinguistics" has been reviewed. I am convinced that verbal semiotics should always begin with a description and analysis of the expression plane - what we actually hear or see. But this first step leads nowhere if the study of the expression is not immediately followed, or accompanied, by "content analysis". (5*) For examples of timbre-suprasyntactic analysis and description the reader is referred to "An outline of English Phonetics", pp. 67-83. To the already listed features we were compelled to add the feature of "spread voice" or "phonetic smile" and formulate the problem of those qualities which 1) enable people to identify each other's voices, that is tell the voice of somebody you know from that of a stranger, etc., and 2) qualify a voice as beautiful, dull, rough, etc. (for the latter W.D. Voiers used "psychometric scales", but so far we have not been able to include this aspect in our research programme). Timbre-suprasyntactic analysis is truly rewarding for those registers of speech which aim at emotional impact rather than intellective (or cognitive) information. As far as rhetorical phonetics is concerned the more "exaggerated" uses of timbre 2 features are studied only receptively by the undergraduates of our Faculty. (6*) Silvio Ceccato, "Suggestions for Anthropology: The Machine which observes and describes". There are two or three minor points in his very interesting paper which should be amended. First of all, would the expression "traditional linguistics", which was originally applied to comparative philology and more generally to the neogrammarians as distinguished from "structural linguistics", now be shifted to describe traditional structuralism as against "formalism" ? or as the ideas of the "generative semanticists" in opposition to the "traditional" completely non-semantic theory of grammar of the mid-nineteen fifties ? or perhaps the "newest" of the "new" analyses of speech - the curious blend of BUhler's "Funktionen" and Austin's "-locution." triad? (7*) The two sources on which the discussion of the different kinds of "silent languages" was originally based are the often cited "Approaches to Semiotics" and Edward T. Hall's "The Silent Language", the latter being of especial interest in the context of the present discussion because it does not stop at description. It warns the reader of the predicaments we can find our-

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selves in because of unawareness of the "silent" messages the different nations of the world use daily in their own "silentspeech" communities. We learn our own "silent language" together with the verbal one naturally and subconsciously, and in this respect there is complete similarity between the two semiotic systems. Later, however, we are taught to read and write - to analyze the naturally produced sounds. We understand even more deeply the nature of our verbal activity when we begin to learn a foreign language. But all the infinite variety of silent systems of communication have so far been allowed to take care of themselves. All we know about them even today is that they are numerous and exciting.

II THE LOGIC OF NATURAL LANGUAGES AND THE "NATURALNESS" OF LOGICAL LANGUAGES

1. Concerning the "Pragmatics of Descriptor Languages". Optimization of natural communicative systems is urgently required, first and foremost, because of the "information explosion", the inability of mankind to retrieve available scientific information by ordinary means. Otherwise stated, what is now needed in all branches of science is reliable and efficient "Knowledge Availability Systems". (1*) The greater part of the preceding subdivision of this book aimed to draw as clear a line as possible between the "intellective" or "cognitive" functioning of natural communicative systems, and the "expressive emotional-evaluative" functioning. Unless that was done, there was no hope at all of successfully tackling the problems of optimization. The idea of a "machine" follows a very similar line of reasoning. Although the "mechanical" aspects of our problem will be discussed at length in Part 4, it is essential that the place of "machine linguistics" should be correctly understood from the start. We begin with the meta-linguistic aspect; the acceptation of terms and the way they are used. In spite of the fact that a complete change in the meaning of the term "machine translation" was to a considerable extent a case of face-saving ("we never really meant "translation" from just one language to another, within just a couple of languages, but a much wider theoretical study of universal mediator languages, etc."), what has been achieved may be of use to those who hope to rationalize the retrieval of scientific information. The essential difference between translation and information retrieval is obvious. "Translation" presupposes rendering in the target language the whole of the information contained in the source. It is not supposed to overhaul the original text, expunging all the information that the translator (or the one who set up the algorithm) will deem r e dundant. A translator of prose is proverbially a slave, a mere amanuensis. The task of the "information-retriever" is quite different and

34 his qualifications are superior to those of a "translator of technical literature" (this reservation is required to show that we are in no way concerned here with the translation of fiction or belles lettres in general - let alone poetry where the translator is "a rival"). Information retrieval implies not only the right, but also the obligation to discard all irrelevant information contained in the original text. It goes without saying that this involves a great deal of decisiontaking and in general cannot be done by somebody who is unable to think clearly or grasp the main purport of the text with reasonable speed. But there is also the "technical" aspect, the linguistic "tools" he must possess. Otherwise stated, he must be helped in such a way as to be taught to select from the arsenal of the almost infinite variety of words and expressions contained in a natural human language, those which express a given meaning most clearly and unambiguously. Although these are still selected on an empirical basis, their choice can be rationalised and, as far as the words are concerned, a minimal list for the particular sciences, as well as a general list of words scientists should normally speak with (that is not only terms, but also words and expressions we call "general scientific") can be and are being compiled, though, of course, with varying success. These lists are inventories of units, forming the so-called "descriptor languages". They must help the compiler of different kinds of summaries, annotations, reviews, etc. , render precisely and economically the content of texts by showing him how to reduce the variety of means actually used by the original authors to a strictly rationed and limited number of "descriptors". At this point the question may well be asked: why speak of the "pragmatics" of descriptor languages ? Cannot this problem be regarded as a logical one, and is it not both simpler and more effective to base the research in this field not on what occurs when scientists actually communicate, but on a set of aprioristically constructed units and their logically deduced rules for combination? Or, should the scientific semiotic approach ignore the pragmatic side ? The answer to this question is an emphatic "No". The difference between deciding in favor of the abstract semiotic or the pragmatic approach in our case is the following: although, ideally, there appears to be absolutely no reason why scientists should not change their speaking and writing habits - if not overnight, at least within a reasonably short period of time - there is no possibility of this actually happening, as has been amply proved by the failure of machine translation and the still unsatisfactory results of the various costly attempts at ensuring mechanical retrieval of information. To devise an artificial mediator

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language (a rational and logical international language of science) following the principles, on the elaboration of which so much time, money and effort has been spent over the centuries (and especially during the last 25 years or so), would be an excellent solution to the problems raised by the "explosion of information". Unfortunately, it has been proved over and over again - even great minds like Leibnitz or Peano, Jespersen and Baudouin de Courtenay never tired of investigating the matter - that there does not exist, and is not likely ever to be set up, an international body, competent to prescribe and dictate the choice of semiotic systems to be used by who would want to communicate scientific information to the rest of the world. There is nobody to proscribe the use of people's natural national languages where and how they want. I would like to add that, at present, the tendency to use a great variety of national languages is growing, if anything. The developing nations of the world, as they become independent sovereign states, are only too happy to stimulate the development of their national languages in all imaginable ways. It follows from what has been said in the preceding paragraph that information is never handed down to those who require it on a salver. They must "retrieve" it! And the original writer is hardly ever made to think of making it easier for others to find out, without actually perusing every word of his text, what it was he really had in mind. Even a simple requirement - "the informative content" or "informativity" of headlines, the minimal condition of facilitating at least the primary librarian's classification, is too often and too flagrantly neglected. What, for instance, can one make of the following: "Caught in the Act", "Tracking the Generic Toad", "The Same Side Filter", "I F o r got What I was Going to Say", "Passive Resistance", "Foleyology", etc. ? I am fully aware of the great temptation to be witty and original, and cater to one's immediate associates. But how on earth is the unhumorous librarian ever to guess that all the above must be grouped under "Linguistics", to say nothing of placing them correctly under sub-divisions and subcategories. Incidentally, it has been most instructive to my generation of Soviet linguists to be told of what happened, bibliographic ally, to Scierba's famous dissertation, because long before there was any hint of "explosions" of any kind he, a famous linguist, had not thought of the then homonymy of the Russian substantivised adjective "Glasnyje" and called his work "Russkije Glasnyje v kacfest vennom i kolicfestvennom otnosenii". Had he made the title explicit and "informative" enough and taken proper antiambivalence measures (glasnyje zvuki, for example, or . . ."and the Phonetics of Russian", or whatever) his work would never have been, even temporarily, classified as research in the field of the

36 activities of the pre-revolutionary Russian "Zemstvo" and the way representatives of the district communities were supposed to influence them. At the risk, then, of proliferating undue pessimism we conclude that there is little hope of a general acceptance of a rational ("optimal") semiotic system for a uniform and logically faultless encoding of scientific information in the immediately foreseeable future. We must, therefore, concentrate on the actual state of affairs and see in what way the linguist can help devise better ways of retrieving information concealed by the unrational and non-optimal systems of languages, dialects and, particularly, idiolects! Pragmatically, information retrieval begins with indexing. Unless the flood of incoming books and other publications is sorted out, they will be useless because they cannot be simply located, and therefore will be "dead". In spite of the shortcomings of the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) it still appears to be the most widely used one. (2*) To what extent the "sorting out" can be mechanized or made automatic is another matter. This will probably depend, to a considerable extent, on the "begetter" of the original text. If, at long last, he can be persuaded to adhere to some simple rules, if he tries hard and conscientiously to ensure the "informativity" or "information value" of his headlines by following a consistent and well-regulated system of presentation, if all publications are preceded with an annotation and followed with a summary - the three appearing as a gradually expanding "text" to be further written up in the complete book or article, enormous progress would be made and information retrieval, though never simple or effortless, would cease to be one of the nightmares of modern society. The "direction" or, to suggest a new application for a recently coined term, "directionality" of the process of communicating the results of one's brainwork is a case in point. What has been suggested in the preceding paragraph would, of course, be the right "direction". It would be incomparably easier to "retrieve" if the original writer had from the very start a distinct idea of what it was all going to be about, if he could formulate it in the three degrees of gradually expanding brevity and only then proceed to expound it with as many ornaments of style, humour, and brilliance, and with as much force of conviction, as he could possibly muster. What actually happens, however, is just the r e verse. We begin by writing a lot - often in a not so logical - not to say rambling way. Our papers are usually needlessly longwinded. Our books are very often composed in such a way, that the information they contain is downright irretrievable (by ' r e -

37

trievable' we mean a concise presentation of what the publication is about; too often it appears as a more or less haphazard compiling of articles on vaguely allied subjects written at different times and lacking congruity, instead of seriously trying to r e trieve the essential information, we more often than not, merely try to telescope the text as best we can without even an attempt at a practical application of the science of handling information, without even a complete awareness of the existence of a science - the library and information one ! When the tables have been turned a host of questions are bound to arise. How much of the information contained in a given paper (or more generally, publication) can be squeezed into the headline, however long and carefully planned? Who is to read the article itself for the purpose of realizing the ensuing two stages or "levels" of process - the "annotation" and the "précis" or "summary" (which, as will be shown later, does not stop at saying what it is about, but also informs the reader of the different modalities and attitudes, of what is said about it)? (3) How does one set about explaining, rationally and succinctly, what the author has to say about the "objects" already classified, what he has done to them, what new ideas have been formed in the process of investigation, what makes him accept this or that view and reject another, why hé approves of the one and disapproves of the other, etc. ? In order that a text may be properly "indexed" on all levels it is necessary to begin by working out a system of "descriptors". A descriptor is a word or word-combination, chosen from a number of different ways of pointing out an "object" (in inverted commas, because the word is used in a very broad sense, including concepts, etc. ) because it can most adequately be used as its standing denotation. The different other ways, i . e . the different words and expressions, out of which we select the descriptor, are sometimes erroneously described as "synonyms". This is why a digression on the subject of "meaning equivalence" is called for. First we will discuss the subject of difference between "synonyms" and "descriptors". "Synonyms" includes the quantifier of plurality, for synonymy is a specific lexical relationship which presupposes the existence of two or more immediately comparable designata for the same denotatum. "Synonyms" are "those members of a thematic group which a) belong to the same part of speech and b) are so close to one another in meaning that to be able to use them correctly in speech we require exact knowledge of the shades of meaning and stylistic connotations which distinguish them from one another". In a highly developed metalanguage, based on the words and rules of word-combination bor-

38

rowed from one of the natural languages, we have to study both "thematic groups" and their less clearly distinguishable members very similar to the way we use for all other registers of natural human languages. But whatever the register or the particular purpose of our study, it is not the semantic equivalence that comes first. Highest on the list of priorities in this case is the difference, the more subtle distinctions we can make by comparing the different members of a given thematic group and choosing the one that best suits our purpose. Thinking of a set of descriptors for this or that branch of science is one of the most important tasks of semiotics. On the content plane it has nothing to do with the "finer distinctions" alluded to above and so important in most of the registers of natural human languages. The definition which describes it as "a word or word-combination" must now be made more general, for, on the expression plane, it is most conveniently represented by a symbol of mathematical logic, or another short denotation, for all that is required from it is complete meaning-equivalence with all rival denotations (which are not its "synonyms", which in the process of information retrieval must be ignored so as not to mislead the recipient or addressee, but doublets, triplets, quadruplets, etc.). It should be added that like all other semiotic contrivances, descriptors are chosen arbitrarily and are only of functional significance. Thus, for instance, when compiling a terminological dictionary it may be found convenient to bring together under one head-word, a number of diverse designata, and then, in their proper alphabetic places, to simply refer them to the one chosen to represent them all as their common "descriptor" (in spite of the fact that, on closer examination, there may be some more subtle stylistic or diachronic distinctions between them). The system of descriptors for a given science, if adequately worked out, enables the information scientist to reduce the vocabulary of the text under investigation, for "descriptor-presentation" cannot by definition, consist of the same number of units as were contained in the original material. In terms of library science, a descriptor may be defined simply as an answer to an inquiry, couched, in accordance with the form of the inquiry and its purpose, in any of the elements of the expression plane. Its essential quality is that it should possess sufficient "descriptive force" to be referable to its semantic equivalents in the other r e alizations of the document. A large part of the dictionary of descriptors for a given science is based on its terminology, for terms are the most informative part of the text. But even here there is usually no one-to-one correspondence, owing to the much discussed imperfections of ter-

39

minological systems, which are (1) often overburdened with synonyms , (with inadequate understanding of the difference between the latter and descriptors, i.e. the natural features derived from linguistic bases, and the rational relations established with the help of semiotics and its categories); (2) their infrequent incapacity to provide answers to inquiries seeking bibliographical information. It should also be observed that at present neither linguistics nor semiotics appear to be in possession of exact methods by which to determine the descriptor-capacity of textual units. Briefly stated, the problem could be assumed to consist in setting up equivalence classes, with the descriptor figuring as "genus proximum" and the units to be reduced as "differencia specifica". It has also been hoped that componential analysis would result in a well established set of generalized minimal semes and rules for combining them; but the extensive literature on the subject has failed so far to be of use in the solution of our problems. (4*) Descriptors are usually characterized as "nomenclature", i . e . those used to retrieve "appelative" information. But when a summary is required, what we have called "nomenclature descriptors" is clearly not enough. We have suggested, therefore, that the concept of "modal" descriptors should be introduced (Akhmanova and Nikitina, 1965). Later an attempt was made to group different modal expressions, like, for example, it is important, necessary, desirable, etc., and then see if this would result in workable generalization (as part of the candidate dissertation of Vera Lapsina). But useful generalization of these preliminary lists has proved impossible. It has become obvious that the problem of modal descriptors can only be approached via the achievements of information-logical research, which is developing on the basis of the concepts and symbols of mathematical logic. As far as direct or "indicative" modality is concerned, the necessary quantifier of existence is already in general use, as well as the extremely effective means of indicating negation, negating what is expressed by this or that symbol positively, and thus employing a very convenient way of expressing, most unambiguously and economically, double the number of concepts and relationships. The quantifier of oblique modality can easily be set up, with appropriate modifications for the more important differenciae specificae. Negative modality will then be taken care of in the usual way. I shall now adduce some examples to clarify the above points. I shall begin with the difference between an "annotation" (annotacija) and "information retrieval by means of descriptors" (deskriptornoje opisanije), as proposed in Sevbo, 1969. Title: The Etymological Dictionary of the Russian language.

40 Annotation: Perspectives in developing etymological studies and creating etymological dictionaries, aims of research and purpose of etymological dictionaries, elaboration of principles of etymological lexicography. Rendering the content by using descriptors ("deskriptornoje opisanije"): I. Etymological Dictionary. Etymological studies (methods and purposes). Lexicography. Principles of lexicographic presentation. The difference, then, between an "annotation" and a condensed rendering of essential information by means of descriptors consists in the latter being "prefabricated", as it were. Thus one is considerably less free in one's choice of expression in the latter than in the former, for one is supposed to adhere as closely as possible to the list of already inventorised descriptor units. But whatever the difference, the similarity is greater, and in the present context more important: in both cases information retrieval is confined to nomenclatures, and, accordingly, to nomenclature descriptors. But, as has already been pointed out above, the "condensed" presentation of texts does not stop at this, for there is always the large amount of "modal" or "predicating" information to be retrieved and included in the report. To give a broader idea of the wider approach let us assume that we have been commissioned to "put in a nutshell" the proceedings of the conference on "Homonymy" ("Leksikograficeskij Sbornik", No. 4). On close examination of the lengthy corpus of the "Proceedings" the "nomenclature" units were found to be the following: heterogeneous (etymological, historical) homonyms; homogeneous (semantic, synchronous) homonyms; the morphologic expression of homonymous relations (or relations between homonyms) also morphologically expressed homonymy; formally rendered homonymy; lexical-phraseological expression of homonymy; orthographically expressed homonymy (the last three are easily brought together under a single descriptor as "overt" homonymy in contrast with "covert" homonymy). But, obviously, a mere listing of the "things they talked about" could satisfy only the limited needs of "indexing". The aims and results of the symposium, the controversial points and the approaches to their resolution was what retrieval of scientific information mainly required. The listing of the "things" was of scientific interest mainly metalinguistically, because prior to the conference the accumulation of doublets, triplets, etc. , this branch of linguistics was encumbered with was hardly realized. As far as the existence of the objects themselves (not the various names used to denote them) was concerned, it was common knowledge. It follows that they could easily be disposed of,

41 together with the accompanying indicative modality or the "modality of being", by means of a very short and simple table: 1. 3 only heterog. homon. 2 . 3 only homogen. homon. a) if overtly expressed morphologically b) if overtly expressed in the orthography c) overt morphol. expr. , also as a subsidiary criterion

3 discussant(s) 15 " 4

"

1

"

10

"

In other words, 3 of the discussants refused to recognize the existence of homogeneous homonymy. 15 did so, but with the following reservations: 4 insisted that it should be morphologically expressed; one required orthographic expression, while 10 discussants believed that overt morphological expression could be regarded as a subsidiary criterion (presumably priority being given to semantic incompatibility). The information retrieved so far from an enormous and rambling corpus (both size and vagueness is notoriously typical of comptes rendus) does not include "oblique modality", tells us nothing of what the discussants thought was lacking, that should be there, what the so far unfulfilled requirements as well as "the first priorities" of this line of linguistic research were. With the appropriate symbolism for oblique modalities still in the offing, it had to be written up in a very uninteresting and oldfashioned way (incidentally, the way in which most précis writing is still done all over the world). Thus: 1. All existing methods of semantic analysis and description of words must be totally reconsidered to work out new principles on the basis of historical investigation of the corresponding lexical systems. 2. The different meanings of the same word must be carefully distinguished both from the homophonous units - their homonyms, and the different uses of one and the same word. 3. The different degrees and nuances of semantic relationships must be kept distinct, both factually and metalinguistically (always bearing in mind that language is in a state of constant flux). 4. Lexicological theory and lexicographic practice, although there is a close relationship between them, are different linguistic subjects. The scientific discoveries made by the former cannot be mechanically applied to the latter, etc. As far as these four items, which were arbitrarily selected

42

for the sake of exemplification, are concerned, it should be added that the verb "must" was chosen for the first three items, and "can" for the fourth simply because it struck me as sounding more natural or idiomatic. Concerning the purport of the original speeches it could be interpreted as "it is necessary", "it ought to be done", "it is required", "it is essential", etc. (Russian nuzno, sledujet, trebuetsa, neobkhodimo etc.). Otherwise stated, the infinite variety of different means of expressing oblique modality - especially if the subtle modifications of the negative forms are taken into account, shows how important it is to work out consistent principles and suggest unambiguous symbols to facilitate (or optimize) the retrieval of this kind of information from scientific texts. The fact that it is the modal or predicative or "pragmatic" descriptors that require optimization most urgently can easily be proved. As an example I shall use below two English summaries which, as is now very often the case, are appended to papers published in scientific journals. It goes without saying that they are indispensable when the article itself is written in some other language, but at the same time the English of summaries (or, perhaps, précis) prepared by non-native users of the language frequently complicates matters still further, emphasizing the importance not only of the strictest economy, but also of conventional descriptors. 1. Title of article: "Toward Formal Treatment of Document Retrieval Languages". Summary. "The notion of document retrieval language is introduced and defined in terms of the semantics of questions. The formal definition of a document retrieval language includes the formal definition of . . . (a list of all the "objects", requiring a formal definition) . . . Formal definition of the so called basic type of document retrieval language is given, the basic type being very close to what is usually called coordinate indexing s y s tem. Some methodological problems of document retrieval languages are discussed and the typology of such languages is outlined. " I have underscored the predicates because the text gives a very clear idea of the wastefulness of putting in so many verbal predicates: introduce, include, give, discuss, outline. The only necessary one is, probably, "define". The composite term of the headline could easily be abbreviated to DRL. It is also impossible to see why "formal definition" should be repeated four times running. Even without reading the article, the following could be suggested as a step towards optimization. "DRL, including its basic type (the "coordinate indexing system") as well as . . . (list of "Objects") . . . their formal definition, and one in terms of the

43 semantics of questions. The methodology and typology of DRL. " The underlying modal descriptor is the "quantifier of being", which does not have to be overtly expressed because substantive representation includes "indicative predication" in a text of this kind. (The problem of "compression" will be discussed in a more general way in part 3 below.) 2. Title of article: "Term as a Member of Lexical System". Summary; "The question of whether vocabulary can be described as a system is still open to discussion. This is why it is designated under the question mark in the "Dictionnaire linguistique de l'Ecole de Prague" by J . Vachek. The author of this article challenges the idea of "self sustenance" of the word and advocates the systematicality of the word and its meaning which are conditioned by the concept of the lexical field. The status of term in the vocabulary is considered as dual: on the one hand, systematicality is manifested to its utmost in a term, on the other hand, a term enters a system of notions of a given sphere of terminology, which does not necessarily coincide with the system of the vocabulary of a given language. Therefore term is a "servant of two masters" and cannot be a perfect example of a word regarded as a member of the lexical system." Again, I am not discussing the English of the text. One of the burning problems of international communication is "What is the English We U s e ? " ! And shouldn't we finally do something about i t ? ! I shall merely venture to suggest a more reasonable variant, avoiding irrelevant information. "The controversial question of "lexical system" is answered in the affirmative: there is no such thing as "independence of the word" (samostojatel'nost'slova). It exists only as a member of a lexical field and depends for its meaning upon the systemic relations within the latter. In the case of a term the dual systemic relationship 1) within the system of the general vocabulary, and 2) within the system of scientific concepts, complicates matters still further." I must immediately repeat that the suggested variants are not the result of a systematic scientific investigation of the subject and are not scientifically "watertight". Nevertheless they are based on an extensive analysis of "summaries as they are" and, though open to criticism, may help to draw attention to a problem the importance of which cannot be overestimated. Linguistic r e search always moves simultaneously in two directions: from the "etic" to the "emic" and vice versa. So far we have spoken of equivalence classes and basic logical purports as the most r e liable taxonomy to which to reduce the factual variety of texts. A general theory of descriptor languages will require, in future, not only an increasingly profound investigation of the nomenclature descriptors for the different sciences, but also an increas-

44 ingly deeper involvement in the optimization of syntactic relations, and the ensuing methods of singling out the basic ones, providing them with unambiguous and compact units of expression. 2. The Syntax of Natural Languages and the Syntactics of the Information-logical Languages. "Descriptors" then, in the narrow sense, are a kind of lexical units. They are the "unique beginners", the "termes d'identification", even when thought of as headlines for equivalence classes. The classification of concepts and terms, the attempts to single them out and arrange them in their elementary and easily combinable forms will certainly continue to take a prominent place in linguistic modelling and optimization. As far as the simpler cases - chemical formulas, crystal structures, etc. - are concerned, very much can be done mechanically even now. There can be no doubt that this line of research has done much, at least in the less complicated cases, to solve the stupendous problems set before the information and library scientists by the unmanageable scope of information in the modern world. The problem of "modal" or "pragmatic" descriptors (quantifiers, operators, etc.) is infinitely more complex, for it has to deal with the language-speech dichotomy. As far as natural human languages are concerned it is useless to believe that imaginary (or "hypothetical deductive") structures, non-existing "genotypes", can actually be used as a rational means to retrieve syntactic information. For those employed in the writing of summaries and indexing scientific publications there is nothing in it but " . . . bewilderment over the tautologous propositions of logic" (Jakobson, 1970, p. 423). For representatives of "formal" linguistics, who still believe that what actually happens when man communicates by means of natural verbal languages (and what "traditional" means-end structuralism mistakenly assumed to be the object of linguistics), "genotype" is the only truly scientific approach to "linguistic theory". Unfortunately, their idealistic "pudding" cannot be proved by eating for the simple reason that it is totally inedible. Does this mean to say that there is, in general, no use whatsoever for the great number of publications which, under the name of "linguistics" generate volumes of sentences only to subject them to all kinds and varieties of logical operations? As has already been stated above, this kind of intellectual pastime may help the development of interlinguistics. The "logic" of human communication has occupied scholars for centuries, including followers of Leibnitz, Newton, or Descartes. There are many

45

scholars in the world today who do not abandon the hope of creating a "mathematical-logical" linguistics as a basis for the creation of informational logical languages for, ultimately, all the different sciences. It goes without saying that there would be very little hope for the "information-logical" without logic. But it remains to be seen what the connection is, if any, between the natural and the information-logical languages in so far as syntax is concerned. The very interesting thing about the syntax of natural languages, if they are cultural with a well-established philological tradition, is that it falls into two parts - the endless variety of "utterances" on the one hand (including scraps of telephone conversations, dialogues stealthily tape-recorded in street cars, conversation in a communal kitchen) and the properly formatted units of the written language, i . e . , the logically formatted sentences of the higher forms of intellective discourse, on the other. These are acceptable only if they are constructed in accordance with wellestablished rules and models of literary syntax. They are never used by illiterates, for it takes years of learning and pages of rigidly controlled practice to learn to produce them in an acceptable form. The extreme case, which fully justifies speaking of the "logic of natural languages", is compound, complex and complex-compound sentences. With respect to these "logic" is just ordinary general logic, "logic" in its proper sense, and not the specific "Spr^gets logik", discoverable by contrastive analysis in terms of "linguistic relativity". The content plane of the "patterns" (or the established models) according to which this kind of sentences is produced consists of the more abstract "constructional meanings", such as conjunction, disjunction, implication, negation, equivalence, generality, etc. Needless to say these are the very kinds of syntactic content required by logical reasoning: the propositions of logic are not only ideally formatted; for them logically impeccable formatting is the whole point, the alpha and omega of the "science of reasoning". The methods of formal logic, including familiarity with all the different kinds of syllogisms, have always been included in the curricula of higher education. Nevertheless the "bewilderment" increasingly caused by the inability of so many would-be linguists to distinguish between a) logic, b) interlinguistics, andc) linguistics urgently requires the most painstaking exhortation. Let us begin with sentences, the formatting of which is perfectly acceptable from the viewpoint of the syntax of both natural and logical languages. The logical transformations, based on the interchangeability of the different kinds of logical-syntactic bonds are easily demonstrated, as long, of course, as there is no contradiction between the logical operations and the (pragmatic) pur-

46

port of the resulting sentences (as we shall see later, failure to make sure the condition is fulfilled can easily transfer the "text" to an altogether different field of study, namely linguostylistics). The sentences with their faultless logical analysis (Paduceva 1965) are: 1. If the sides of a triangle are equal, any two of its angles a r e equal - any two (pair of) angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. In this case the attributive bond was substituted for the implicative and conjunctive ones. It goes without saying that exactly the same kind of syntactic-logical operation could be p e r formed with all kinds of scientific text. Its usefulness would never be questioned because one expects logic from scientific discourse. One can also understand why the ability to perform logical operations may turn out to be helpful. As everybody knows, t r a n s lation of scientific texts is greatly hampered by the limitations of "idiomatic usage". If one is familiar with the techniques of "explicit paraphrase", the task is made much easier, for one readily and naturally falls back on "another way of saying it". Sentence 1. can serve as an example. In Russian the first part of the sentence ran as follows: "jesli treugol'nik ravnostoronnij . . . " But is it idiomatically correct to say in English "if the t r i angle is i s o s c e l e s . . . " ? 2. There exist isosceles triangles which are rectangular some of the isosceles triangles are rectangular - 3 rectangular isosceles triangles. The next step is the use of quantifiers. In a case of this kind the introduction of the quantifier of existence, 3 , greatly simplifies matters, helping to avoid contamination of logic with the whimsicalities of natural human languages. Why did I t r a n s l a t e s here as "there exist" and not as "there are", (in Russian - "imejutsa" or "sugciestvujut") or another "existential" link verb ? 3. It is not true (it is false) that all triangles have equal sides (are isosceles ones) - not all triangles are isosceles - J all t r i angles are isosceles. The quantifier of negation J is again very convenient, especially if we take into consideration the different idiomatic ways of negation in natural languages. Summaries should abound in quantifiers - without doubt the optimal way of expressing, clearly and unambiguously, notions, which in different natural languages are so hard to isolate and present in a rational and unambiguous form. I have mentioned already the importance of keeping clear of linguostylistic effects, of not producing them inadvertently. What I mean could, perhaps, be better explained by first considering an example. In textbooks the "Barbara" syllogism is (or has been for a long time) usually illustrated by "Man is mortal", or more explicitly, "All men are mortal", "Socrates is a man", "Socrates

47

is mortal"; in Russian: "Vse ludi smertny, Sokrat Selovek, Sokrat smerten". In the "Advanced learner's dictionary of current English" the illustration reads as follows: "All men must die; I am a man; therefore I must die". Now both idiomatically and linguostylistically there is a world of difference between "I'udi smertni" and "I'udi dol2ny umeret' ". The former implies qualification, an attribute of the human race, and expresses it, by means of the short orpredicative form of the adjective, in a way which is both literary and pedantic. The latter expresses duty or obligation, without the particular stylistic connotation. It is also highly appropriate to connect this truism with Socrates, because the reader or listener understands then that this is by no means an informative statement, not something the speaker meant to communicate in good earnest, but a traditional example of the most trite and elementary form of syllogism. To transpose it into the Ich-Deixis is still worse. "Ja dolzen umeret" reminds one of the man being shot at dawn by a firing squad. The difference is not, perhaps, so pronounced in English. Nevertheless, it is much safer to sin on the side of overpedanticism, than to try to present abstract scientific statements in everyday language, the casual register. It is regrettable that the stylistic difference of saying "the same thing" is not noticed by "generators of sentences". Particularly deplorable is the fact that more often this happens not because they intentionally neglect it, but because they have not taken the trouble to really master the language they use mechanically and without consideration for its idiomatic peculiarities. I will now try to restate briefly the main points of the preceding part of this chapter. Natural human language is the subject of linguistics - both as part of philology and as part of the study of linguistic structures, that is traditional structural-functional linguistics. In its "descriptive" variety it is based on segmentation of texts in terms of "same or different". As far as syntax is concerned, the main problem consists in singling out immediate constituents or "configurations", i . e . , segments or parts of utterances whose syntactic function remains constant. It can be replaced by shorter or longer syntactic "synonyms", re-written in different ways. When endocentric, it can be represented by its head-word without in any way impairing its structural properties as part of the propositional or logically formatted sentence. Reduction is the more inportant of the two processes because it brings out most conspicuously the constituent properties of the configuration. It is believed that this can be achieved not only for overt grammatical oppositions, but for the covert ones as well, and thus resolve grammatical homonymy. The classical structural-functional or

48

means-end approach could not have been so successful if it was not based on a careful distinction between opposition and contrast, the emic and the etic, etc. Logic is a science which is connected with linguistics to a very limited extent, by only those parts which are concerned with the "man-made" or conventional rules of "logical syntax". Logic was, therefore, of service to the investigators of information retrieval when there was no doubt as to the limited possibilities of its application. Thus it was very easy to find in scientific texts many complex sentences in which the logical types of syntactic bond stood out very clearly, and were mutually transformable without loss of stylistic, sociolinguistic or pragmatic information. As time went on, however, "modern scientific" linguists were no longer content with their more modest "logistic" achievements. They refused to go on confining their activities to discovering those features of natural human languages which may usefully be "re-written" for the special purposes of the logical informationretrieval features. Instead it is often assumed that logical formalization or transposition of certain pre-conceived structures into specific semiotic systems, is linguistics in the proper and scientific sense of the word. It is now often claimed that this is what the "modern" and truly scientific linguist must confine his investigations to, and that this "new" linguistics must oust the "traditional" one. Although there is no harm in people studying mathematical logic - on the contrary, together with mathematics, it must be one of the outstanding formal disciplines - in the present context it turned out to be downright harmful, because even a superficial acquaintance with its symbols (the particular semiotic systems used) and its categories was too time-consuming for people (especially young people) studying languages and linguistics. Their concentration on how to re-write and formalize left them no time to think of what it was they were re-writing and formalizing. As far as "traditional" linguistics was concerned it was dismissed in toto, like so much pre-scientific trash ( e . g . , the philosophic stone, or phlogiston, or geocentric theory - in chemistry, physics and cosmogony, respectively). The misadventures of "traditional" machine translation must have convinced even the most obdurate that due to the very nature of things it is impossible to transpose natural human language into a logical and rational semiotic system. The multitude of spheres, genres, dialectal and social variants, etc., makes it impossible to foresee what may happen in different speech and extralinguistic situations, with the twists and turns in the different kinds and combinations of contexts. There is also "the play of language" - the unexpected metasemiotic effects, different kinds of allusion or deliberate desire to bewilder and mislead.

49

Besides being unattainable, overall logistics would be useless. It could serve a useful purpose only for one sphere (or register) of human communication: the passing on (or "getting across", or transmission) of intellective information in general, and scientific information in particular. It is therefore essential that all concerned should finally realize that the urgent social need at present is the optimization of scientific information. Our main task therefore, as participants of the scientific-technical revolution, consists in standardizing, ordering and, in general, bringing under control the main intellective forms of natural human languages. This does not mean to say that the creation of artificial auxiliary systems should be discontinued. Interlinguistics has always been and remains a very important branch or division of semiotics. The study of the already existing auxiliary semiotic systems, and the search for ways of creating better ones, would not stop even if there were a law against it. But shall we ever arrive at a reliable transposition of the information stored by the mathematical logical system into the natural one ? And is it really worth the trouble ? Would it not be more sensible to reconcile oneself to the fact that for some specific purposes the exchange of the specific technical information would stop, and would not be verbalizable or verbalized in the ordinary sense of the word? Let us now try to look at the relationship between natural human and information logical languages from one more point of view. Let us assume that all the operations connected with transferring the information from a natural to the information logical language have been successfully performed and that we are now faced with the task of "translating" it into another language, also natural and human. We have strained our imagination and assume that an algorithm has been worked out which will make it possible 1) to re-code the information stored in the information logical language by using the natural elements of the target language presumably on the basis of a one-to-one correspondence and 2) that we are in possession of "transformation rules", by whose application the result of 1) can be reduced to the simplest possible form. In other words, the sum total of the information in question would thus be available in its simplest, clearest and most economical transsubstantiation. Well and good. But what one completely fails to understand is why it should then be expanded all over again to appear in the garb of the "unwieldy, long-winded, ambivalent natural language"? Why then not leave natural language alone to follow its tortuous paths in dialectical unity with thinking and the social life of the community which is its creator and without which it would not be

50 granted human status ? At this point I am bound to digress and remind the reader of the complexities involved in intersemiotic translation. It is common knowledge that there is no question, so far, of direct translation from the information logical calculus into natural human language. This can be attempted only with an ordered sequence of artificial logical languages each of which takes care of one type (class) of translations. Special equivalence rules coordinate the formulas of the languages in the set or sequence, which divides the original calculus from the final product. To be valid, each of the series of transformations must be proved to leave unchanged the semantic characteristics of the sequence of formulas. This being the case, the process may be described as so many stages of "translation". It is also required that the sequence of operations be proved reversible and shown to have suffered no loss of information. When finally the symbols or signs of the natural human language have been substituted for those of the symbols or sets of symbols of the informational-logical ones, we arrive at the weakest link of the whole chain. How do we know that what we have arrived at, i.e., the outcome of the slow and painstaking process above, is a set or complex of "grammatical" sentences ? For the adherent of "generative grammar" there are no objective ways of answering this question. There is only the much criticized idea of the reactions of a non-existent supernatural human being who is endowed by the divine blessing of unerring intuition, etc. It should be added that the bete noire of all translation is e s pecially "black" in cases of this kind. There is always the problem of preventing the source language from exerting an unwelcome influence on what comes out in the target. When the source is "information-logical" (a construct) how do we guard against "low-level grammar" or its most dangerous variety - hypergrammaticality? (5*) 3. The "Law of the Sign" and Rational Semantics. Modern semantics is based on the assumption that for a sign function to be normally realized there must be regular one-to-one correspondence between a given expression and a given content. In natural human languages the expression is primarily based on sounds or semiologically relevant phonations. At a certain stage of a language's development a way is discovered of reducing it to writing. Originally the graphic substance figures as a subservient or secondary expression. In a fully developed literary language it tends to become a rival, a parallel means of expression in no

51 way inferior to the "natural" one. Given the choice of at least two media, there should be no reason why "the law of the sign" (zakon znaka) should not be observed in natural human language, why there should not be stable one-to-one correspondence between the content of linguistic units and their expression. But as has repeatedly been stated above, nothing is simple in the "most important means of human communication" . Thus the simple and general principle of semiotics is that the "functives" of the sign function persistently refuse to behave in a simple and orderly way. The non-observance of the law of the sign is so widespread and occurs so often that it may be viewed as one of the most persistent inconsistencies of a system which refuses to lend itself to analysis in terms of structures and transformations. In all languages, again and again, we find the same expression catering to different and incompatible "meanings". Or, conversely, the same content (or meanings) appears in forms (or expressions) so varied that a great deal of specialized research is required, including knowledge of historical provenance, to understand how this phenomena could have come about. A general idea of the complex relationship between expression and content in natural human languages can best be formed by imagining the following diagram: Word Semantic variation Homonymy

Formal variation Synonymy

When stated in so many words, the above "picture" will be read as follows. A word (the basic and most important linguistic unit on which all the rest of linguistic units depend for their existence) appears in speech in a variety of formal and semantic modifications without loss of identity, i.e. , without ceasing to remain the same word. But there is a limit: 1) when the same phonetic envelope (or caul) refuses to be stretched any further and a new word emerges, a homonym with respect to the original one; or 2) when, although the meanings of the two (or more) units are hardly distinguishable, their forms are so different that there can no longer be a question of "variation of the same unit". In chapter 1 above synonymy was discussed in detail, particularly in its relation to descriptor-based substitution - absolutely the most important aspect of this question in so far as optimization of intellective information is concerned. The very difficult problems connected with ways of discovering the boundary-line

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between semantic variation of the same word and the emergence of the homonym have now been given a working solution in my "Dictionary of Russian Homonyms", the original approaches to the task having been expounded as far back as 1957, when I published my "Offerki po obsfiej i Russkoj leksikologii". What still remains controversial is the problem of phonetic and morphological variation of the same word in contrast to two different words as synonyms. True the more obvious cases of phonetic variation are hardly ever described as "synonyms" simply because it is a matter of common-sense cases like, for instance, [often] and [dfan], [ai5a] and [i: