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Syntax: Autonomous or Meaning Motivated?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Walter H. Hirtle
Walter H. Hirtle*
Affiliation:
Fonds Gustave Guillaume, Université Laval
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Extract

… on ne peut rien savoir de scientifiquement valable concernant les actes d’expression si l’on n’a fait préalablement l’étude des actes de représentation dont ils émanent. (Gustave Guillaume 1954:28)

Perhaps the most remarkable trait of human language is the way it adapts spontaneously to the particular experience the speaker wants to express. Thanks to our mother tongue, the linguistic means are available to render more or less faithfully whatever we intend to communicate regardless of the particular nature or quality of the message. This is remarkable first of all because, in itself, raw experience is strictly private and incommunicable, a fact Northrop Frye (1971:124) depicts quite vividly in the following passage:

… it is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1994

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