Description levels
Linguistic utterances can be analyzed on different levels of description ("niveaux d'analysis" according to Émile Benveniste ). The prerequisite for this is the "double structure", which is characteristic of natural human languages, i.e. the fact that elementary linguistic units (sounds) are used to create higher-level linguistic forms (words), the arrangements of which in turn result in units of higher order (sentences) .
The double structure makes it possible to get by with a minimal inventory of elementary units and, based on this, to produce a potentially unlimited variety of expressions containing meaning. This distinguishes natural languages from any other natural communication system ( animal languages ).
Separation of levels
Approaches to the order of the levels of description come from traditional grammar and linguistics of the 19th century , whose grammars typically begin with the sound , then deal with the theory of forms of nouns and verbs and finally word formation. The following hierarchical order has been established since linguistic structuralism :
- phonetic level : breakdown into the smallest units of distinction ( phonemes )
- Word level : breakdown into smallest meaningful units ( morphemes )
- Sentence level : Analysis of the syntactic structure (sentences)
- Meaning level : Analysis of the semantic form
In structuralism, the first two or the first three levels in particular were examined, with efforts being made to use standardized analytical methods, some of which were purely formal and which should do without taking the meaning into account (American structuralism: Leonard Bloomfield , Zellig S. Harris ), and others were guided by functional and thus semantic criteria (French and Copenhagen structuralism: André Martinet , Louis Hjelmslev ).
The means of predicate logic are also used for the semantic level (following Richard Montague ). In addition, in the 1960s in particular, word semantics were developed that were strictly based on phonological analyzes ( Jerry Fodor ); this form of feature semantics is now considered to have failed completely.
hierarchy
The sequence of the description levels is hierarchical because a higher level presupposes the lower. Further assumptions said that the levels were related to each other in a relationship of isomorphism (according to Jerzy Kuryłowicz , who adopted the term from mathematics), that is, that similar formal relationships and analog analysis methods can and must be used for all levels, with binary ones Schemes were preferred ( Roman Jakobson ).
However, this assumption has not proven itself, especially not in the case of syntax and semantics, the relationship between them and one another in any case remained unclear. In his theory, Benveniste therefore made a distinction between the areas of the language system (to which the elements of all levels below the sentence belong) and discourse (to which the sentences - "énonciations" in Benveniste's later theory - belong), whereby the methods of analysis for both are fundamentally different.
The hierarchy of levels description has in modified form in the generative grammar of Chomsky condition where it recurs Semantic shape and Phonetic form in another arrangement as a result of syntactic form logical form.
literature
- Essays
- Émile Benveniste : Les niveaux de l'analyse linguistique . In: Ders .: Problems of general linguistics (“Problèmes de linguistique générale”). Syndika Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1977, ISBN 3-8108-0031-7 , pp. 119-131.
- Louis Hjelmslev : Prolegomena to a language theory ("Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse"). Hueber Verlag, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-19-006709-0 .
- Jerzy Kuryłowicz : La notion de l'isomorphisme . In: Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague 4 . Reitzel, Copenhagen 1949, pp. 48-60.
- Books
- Leonard Bloomfield : The language ("Language"). Edition Praesens, Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-7069-1001-2 .
- Zellig S. Harris : Methods in Structural Linguistics . Chicago University Press, Chicago 1951.
- André Martinet : Basics of general linguistics ("Éléments de linguistique générale"). Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 1971.
