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flumeli Caddesi 80 , Roseoglu Ap. 3, Osman be y, Istanbul 30/9/50
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^esr Dr. Pi sober-Jorgensen, ri n
£ Your letter reached me only now, since I was on travel* lease forgive the hasty reply. n . ,, _ _ riQ+-1-0v,rn relation and determination Firstly your jug«.t!on Mt W«»r with suhord- is a syntagmatic relation ,i.e.d term @ g 0ne can say that A determines ination or cohesion. ^J^^^Srmid? whereas it would make nonsense to say "A is nhnrrt^at/to b” outside the context of a sentence. Only by determination, qua patte?å relation. I meant the satisfaction, within the phrase, of determination qua syntagma tic r@lation« , But it must be confes sed that this does not bring determination quite down to the level of the other pattern-relations, before it can be made to behave like one. that any element is determinant if it has a place in the chain normally held by a determinant in the stricter sense. Another is the rule that it only holds wittnn immediate constituents. Such rules are superfluous for subordination and cohesion © In. fact one might say that determination i s peipheral in the domain of pattern- relations, whereas the others are nuclear. It does not answer to the definition, but it behaves similarly to those relations which do. •k'rom your remark on a plural implying a singular I take it you must agree with Ja.kobson that nasality implies orality, voice breath, tensity laxness etc. For me orality, breath, laxness etc. are all the same, namely plain zero, though this zero may(*so to speak) take on. a different colour according to the direction from which we look at it. (Of course in circumstances the plural or nasality might be unmarked, but then they in turn would be best regarded as zero. ). It is true /that we may express the fact that we ///////////// have substituted zero for nasal- 'ity (/ n>-t) by saying that we have substituted orality for nasality, but it is surely rather odd; isn’t it really the whole point of neutralisation that a feature is replaced by zero, rather than by another feature (which would represent no eeon- omy)? (Which incidentally is one reason why I have to agree that I have overworked the notion of neutralisation to cover cases in which zero is not concerned. Wheth- er "defective distribution" id the best term I do not know; it rather suggests that one would expect to find, the phoneme at this noint, and 1 previously used it to des- oribe cases where one would,e.g. "cases vides", and the non-occurrence of sr- in Danish can hardly be so described. Incidentally it was not the absence of sr- vis-a yis si - that I cal 1 ed neutralisation, but rather the absence of _ls- vis-a-vis sJL- in a language where they can both occur medially. I should also perhaps have made It clearer that the examples at the beginning of the article have nothing to do with neutralisation, but merely with irrelevance. In fact the title was rather annpnny, since it was only at the end of the article that I remembered again that ) ad set out to talk about neutralisations and not about syntactic relations in , general. J
Various further operations are necessary Of these the most important is the rule
y
And I am afraid, as you say, that the remarks on ^order were rather obcure.By phonemic order I meant simply the opposition before/after. The order of phonemes * SVen n0t mfnt^oned> since this is a morphological fact like the wn-cri P °rerne .y,.tV’e word* And if the fact that a phoneme occurs in a in th?I jTat we havf tMs phoneme, in praesentia, in the word, then the relations often LI°rd^re^1S04.i? But if "in praesentia" implies a text, as it fi-ed befcLt A then this is since the order of phonemes in the word is &r? - ' '■” • A lot of confusion can caused by such remarks as Hjelmslev’s,
occur-
2Vi/
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that elementa in praesentia are those we have together, so to speak, before our eyes since we may have either a linguistic form or a.n utterance (a "text") before our eyes, and the meaning of "before our eyes" is totally different in the two cases. I suspect that in the use of in absentia resp. praesentia we have a lamentable 5,conflation of several different contrasts, that between system and text, that betweei r/jthe simultaneous and the successive, and that between the substitutable and the com- | binable • ^ confess that I am the only linguist who cannot understand what is meant ^ by "in praesentia",and that I ought never/to have used the term. It is very interesting to hear that you also insisted to rt.ielmsiev that the Syncretisms of cases are not syncretisms of content. I think this point was the or- igin of my article for A.L. , since his invitation to contribute arrived .just after a letter of mine on this point. It is rather a primitive point perhaps, and one in Tffhich Jegpersen would have agreed with us. But it is a characteristic of leaders of schools , which iijelmslev himself has noted in his "post-mortem5 on Jespersen for A.L. , that they are not liable to accept other views even when these represent a continuation of their own.
o far as the^principle of continuing analysis into simultaneous units id cerned, I agree entirely with you and Jakobson. Simultaneity is merely the zero- o^nosition of succession. But the /analysis must be continued In the same way. I ,y to prove, in a ess hasty letter, that his analysis of the simultaneous units is not strictly parallel. Meanwhile Yours sincerely
con-
I stop only to catch the last acceptance of air-mail, at greater length, and -*■ hope more lucidly, in about a week's time.
I will write
3J> c l was »lad to have your Reneral agreement with the views In Archivum. As or vagueness of the "definition" of morpheme (if it Is fair to call it one), this was in* tentional. Shere 1s I think room for two sorts of definition, very vague ones whic . serve before the system of a given language has been discovered, and very precise ones to describe the structure finally arrived at. It is rather dangerous for a linguist to be quite certain what he is looking for at the beginning of analysis: he is too liable to find it even when it is not there. And it is doubtful if an# very precise definition ever would be satisfied in a language for which it had not been devised
ad hoc .
the definition in A.L. (would"union" be any better than association?) would lead to absurdities if appliedTa F"rule of thumb from the beginning; and if it were made more precise it would lead to still more absurdities. Definitions should be rather like the rules of a select club, in which the conditions of admission are not made very clear, but nevertheless great care is taken in examining the credentials of each separate candidate for membership; each is considered on his ow»l merits. xhe good grammarian is like a man who may even have forgotten the rules of the ci.ub, but yet can state, when asked, the precise reasons which led him to vote for the ad- mittance of a disputed member. And lust for this reason I quite agree, of course, with the use of morphological criteria in phonemic analysis (as exemplified by Danish u/v you cite). We do not need to remember whether our definition of the phoneme made any provision permitting or prohibiting their use. Having found out that phonetic and morphological identity- go normally together, we are quite entitled to make use of the fact (while remaining prepared to find a language in which it would not be true). Some American scholars object to this on the grounds that we shall then never know whether two units corres- pond, having taken the one already to help us with the other; but the answer is sure- ly that nothing prevents us from asking afterwards whether the result could have been ! reached without the aid of such secondary criteria, and if it could not have been then : the correspondence, in fact, is the result of a generalisation (but none the for this, providing the fact is not denied). I*t true that the more reductions made the less functions differentiated? If /a!?1? P wdAwe functionally identical, labial^y- and postpalatality ( nut I may not have followed you here. J of rm-frir* * 7°U °onslder asymmetry of the two planes not to be a matter f Pr ncipie (in other words one could construct a language 1n which the same sort cf «>oth). this 1 agree. But by the way, wh^wo S« UB/aSLI k?) 8 3y* °f three Pl8neS A B °' W0Uld *&• «*• three
worse
are not.
4Peøtscriptum: I have just received Kurylowicz' nLe probieme du classement des cas (Krakow Bul tn 3949) whish reminds me of s point omitted i n the discussion of i, correlation etc.) are therefore a priori impossibl e* the cases may make up frag Aments of systems, but not a system. And here the conclusion, though in practice true, entirely fails to follow from the premisses* This is shown by the phonological parallel. The oppositions of prominence (stress and accent generally) can also not be established by commutation. We can— } not substitute strong for weak stress within the word, but merely strong-weak by weak-strong etc. Now this role which is played by the syllable in phonology is played among the cases by the nominal bases* Latin nom,~us and acc.-urn are not commutable* the opposition is not between -us/-um but between X-us,Y-um/ Y-us Xum where X and Y are any nominal bases; of course, with all the reservations as to the propriety of speaking of an opposition when we have only one relation,e*g. "before", "more prominent than" capable of two orientations* But it would, I think3 be fair to talk of a permutational opposition as contrasted with a computational# "Syntagmatic ' will hardly do, since it applies to the relations of the terms in praesentia ( sit venia termino!) rather than to the orientational opposition that their reversibility illustrates. The permutational opposition is like the commut- .^tional a minimal opposition, and it is this fact (rather than any nonsense about fhe same place in the chain",which begs the whole question since sequence is also p permutational opposition) which should be the criterion of a. paradigm* I believe that the analogy holds much more closely than may at first sight appear. It must be remembered that we have only a given construction (subject- object) under consideration, not nom, and acc. as a whole, since the latter are trical to the plane of content and may in other constructions contain ' -.6 rent. fi.gurae of content (how little use -“jelmslev makes of figurae in the ^n ^et almost only in the lexical domain, where they will not workl) T^e opposition of subject and object (which is mere"shorthand" for the orientat- ions onnosD tion implied) is i tself an opposition of Prominence, in the content. , e opposition may he neutralised, as with the nassive verb (where only the Prom- i Perrnithed- just as in the expression only the stressed syllable Jas« e<Vn ~*wMch is .Just to say that an isolated member in each case is prominent in relation to zero). Ml,H ’J bring in the distinction of commutative end pernretstive Eampoii^nt-asyretri0 Pt>ivative asymmetric Equip.-symm. Priv.-symm. Commutation -----lYlif ( (u) 7-’.<V prominence x iuncture prominence
Permutation
secuenee