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A Postulate for Linguistics in the Sixties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
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The approach to language study represented by postulates and corollaries was once the basis of Bloomfieldian linguistics, yet it is now somewhat out of fashion. Sets of postulates have a tendency to grow in number and unwieldiness, and transformational investigators favor a more operational analysis and statement. Yet transformational study itself rests upon a postulate which is at present implicit. Stated without setting it into the Euclidian language and style favored by Bloomfield, it is that the relations between utterances are capable of being stated in the form of manipulations. Such an approach to utterances forces us to assume that all utterances contain items in combination, and that all items can appear in other utterances, which are then new combinations.
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- Copyright © 1962 Linguistic Society of America
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1 It is not my intention to discuss how far the transformational rules of a generative grammar constitute a model of how utterances are produced. The question is vexed, and obviously in need of discussion and solution, yet in this paper it makes no difference if we speak of manipulable items and combinations on an ‘as if’ or on an actual basis. In both cases, the approach adopted and the language used force the same consequences and the same restrictions. I shall consequently speak freely of manipulations and manipulable items, without committing myself thereby either to the view that transformational rules are models of speech, or the converse, that they are merely marks on paper.
2 Paul Ziff, Semantic analysis 179–80 (Ithaca, 1960). In saying that the two instances of division are instances of the same word with different meaning, while bear noun and verb are different words, Ziff is relying on the principle of ‘isolation of meaning’, since the two bears do not overlap, whereas the two divisions do. In this he is close to nineteenth-century semantic analysis.
3 Robert B. Lees, The grammar of English nominalizations 12, 25–6 (IJAL 26:3, 1960). Lees uses the terms inherent and accidental, and rather curiously does not decide that such a sentence as He is tall in Japan could easily be handled by supposing that there are differing morphemes both spelled tall.
4 George P. Faust, ‘Hill's Introduction to linguistic structures: Comment and discussion’, SIL 14.52–3 (1959).
5 An example of such an absurdity would be the assertion that all English nouns are grammatically classified into the categories of greenness and nongreenness. A noun which is nongreen shows that fact by lacking any ending. A noun which is green shows its greenness by the green ending, which is always zero.
6 Charles F. Hockett, ‘Linguistic elements and their relation’, Lg. 37.29–53 (1961).
7 Morris Halle, ‘Speech sounds and sequences’, Fourth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Helsinki, 1961). The paper will presumably be available in the forthcoming volume of proceedings; meanwhile I have consulted it in manuscript through the author's kindness.
8 The statement that morphemes must have some body or substance should not be read as a denial of the possibility of abstraction or symbolic representation. But in all instances of abstraction or symbolic representation the starting point is physical events, and the symbolism is in one-to-one correspondence with these events. When there is no such correspondence, the symbolism is unsatisfactory.
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