Subject: Re: heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu:Towards an AITist General Theory of Language. 
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 18:30:12 +0100


Towards an AITist General Theory of Language.

Part One.

The Historical Background.

Language is differentiated into two clearly unopposed mutually dependent
differentiated areas - the naming of the things that exist and the
description of the way in which those things exist. Philosophy too can be
classified into two opposed endeavours and is likewise divided into two
primary areas - how things exist and why they exist. Whilst there is an
essential, reciprocal correspondence betwixt the two great dichotomies of
language - there is no compatibility and even an antagonism between the two
great definitional philosophical pursuits of mankind, science and religion,
each of which seek to provide a concise explanation for the simple or
factive existence of which language describes the modalities.

Analytical Indicant Theory is the first linguistically based philosophy to
confront the problem of simple existence and come to grips with the question
of   the modalities of existentiality head on. The challenge of existence or
'being' has haunted philosophy and religion down the ages from the
pre-Socratic Greeks down to the present day.  Most major philosophers and
churchmen have tussled with the enigma and given up - others have only
brushed against the difficulty tangentially and have moved on without
engaging with it adequately.
This short article seeks to provide a brief overview of the development of
linguistic study to modern times and then offers an abbreviated introduction
to an AITist general theory of the philosophy of language.

Human language is composed of two major elements and two elements only. On
the one hand - the existents - the architectural elements of presence that
are in existence and are named. On the other hand there are the
descriptives - the elements of language that indicate and describe the modes
of the existence of those existents.  Inaugurally language proclaims or
introduces the things that exist and gives them names - the names of
persons, places or things and those signifiers are known as 'nouns, ' and
then it describes the referential modes of existence of those nouns - with
adjectives, verbs and adverbs, of which all can be said to be descriptive of
modes of existence.

The most challenging component of any language is commonly the part that
addresses the verb. Learning a language is to a very large degree learning
how to manipulate the verbal forms of that language.  The patterns and
structure of the verb in each language seem to differ very considerably from
those in every other language except in the case of those that are
associated historically.  Native speakers of a language are as a result
somewhat confident that their own language has a moderately unambiguous way
of addressing verbs and are often deterred when confronted with something
altogether dissimilar in a new linguistic system.


CUT.  I have snipped the history of linguists text, which you no doubt
already know.



Continues:
The later twentieth century saw the emergence of the major figure in the
world of linguistics - Noam Chomsky who criticized the Bloomfieldian attempt
to articulate a set of "discovery procedures" - that were thought being
capable to be employed automatically to texts and could be warranted to
generate an suitable phonological and grammatical characterisation of the
language of the texts.  Chomsky launched transformational-generative
grammar, a masterful and extremely cogent system of linguistic analysis. He
unbolted the working parts of the descriptive language - laid them out on
semantic workbenches and diagrammatically identified the role of each
component and how it relates to the other parts of speech. Chomsky contended
that human beings have a congenital proficiency for apprehending the
schematic rationales implicit in the grammatical structures of language. It
is this innate capacity that accounts for how young children, after hearing
the speech of their elders, are able to deduce the grammatical conventions
underlying common wordstrings and then apply those rules to engender
innumerable types and assortment of sentences that they had never heard
earlier. He explicated how we are all born with an ability to comprehend the
grammatical structure of the language to which we are exposed.

In all this great progress and analytical movement forward however one vital
discernment of the nature of language has been overlooked - a missing link
which has led to unnecessary complication and a certain amount of
obscurantism and needless over complexity, and that is the recognition that
there is only one word for existence and that is existence. The way that
humans think about the world and the way we describe the world is marred and
complicated by the lack of realisation that the verb 'to be' and its
constellate of forms is not a verb proclaiming the pure existence - the
simple presence of an entity - a person, place or thing in the cosmos, but a
mechanism - just like all the other modal descriptors in human language -
which helps to describe the way or manner in which that material or
immaterial entity subsists for the human conciousness.  What then can be
identified as the main contribution of AITism to an understanding of
language, and how does the AITist project differ from the historical
tradition and even the twentieth century analysis of Chomskyan linguistics,
which it enhances and augments?  It is the realisation of the true role of
the copula that invests AITian linguistics with the freshness and
individuality of its approach to the philosophy of language.  Traditional
linguistics and even those genres which could be described as being at the
cutting edge of linguistics have continued to treat the 'to be' cluster as a
verb. To be more precise, they have treated the copuletic mechanism as a
verb of simple existence, and with the exception of the so-called modal
verbs, they have not recognised that the incorrectly named 'copula' is not a
'linking' word' or glorified conjunction at all, but a vital element in the
way in which our cognitive systems conceptualise and describe the manner of
existential states and activity of the material entities and mentally
constructed representations that surround us.  Linguists sometimes talk
about the mood and modality of certain verbs, but they talk about the
subject in an entirely different way to AITist linguists.  They realise that
it is conceivable to acknowledge a grammatical category of modality, which
is analogous to gender, tense, number, etc and that this taxonomic group can
be identified, described and compared across a number of different and
unrelated languages, not only amongst the phylum of the great Indo-European
language family, but in all the languages of the world.  The achievements of
linguists who specialize in this field of modal verbs are outstanding, but
all of them are more concerned with the sentiment or manner of mental
attitudes of the speaker in what s/he describes, or the way in which s/he
interprets the utterances or writings of others, rather than with the
existential mode of existence of the subject of a statement or written
sentence.  Verbal modality, for traditional linguistics as will be seen,
does not refer to existential modality, but principally to the meaning to
the verb alone, and accompanying that too - to other elements - to the whole
string of words and the subtleties of import.

There are languages in which modality is marked elsewhere than with a verb
or inside a verbal composite, and these cross-linguistic equivalences can be
identified and classified.

A major difference between traditional considerations of modal
characterisation between conventional linguistics and the modern AITist
approach, is that the former is an interpretive, subjective approach, which
attempts to analyse and define nuances of meaning within words such as 'may,
ought, will, can' etc - whilst the AITist discipline is concerned foremost
with an active acknowledgement of existential modality - of the way that
things exist, or have existed in the past, or perhaps will exist in the
future, with the modularity and  rendering of precise meaning seen as a
secondary though no less interesting and important aspect of how we describe
the way we  live, or the way that material and non-material concepts are
ideated.  For the AITist no verb of simple existence is necessary in an
utterance. Existence is automatically imbued without syntactical volition or
conscious participation by the very enunciation of the name-word or noun.
Any so-called "is" word which appears in a sentence, whether as a visible
and stand-alone, exposed, emphatic copula - as happens in the case of the
'to be' cluster - or sometimes as a hidden contractile copula enshelled in
the carapace of the verb is there to exhibit and to indicate the modal
informancy of the predicate as it describes the existential modality of the
subject or 'extantal imbuant' as it is called in AITist terminology. The
present simple tense of English or the verbal prolixity of Latin with its
hundred-plus verb forms all contain a variant of the copula or 'modal
indicant. Verbal formulas in languages differ, first of all in the way in
which the linguistic fabric is coordinated, and secondly in the type of
information comported.  The foremost pre-eminence is between those languages
whose verbal lineaments are evinced virtually exclusively by inflexion and
those which lack inflexional features entirely, those which, in traditional
terms, used to be described as 'inflexional' and as 'isolate' languages.
Extreme representatives of such systems are Arabic or Latin from one point
of view and Chinese and English on the opposite side.  English is a good
deal nearer to Chinese than it is to Latin - as long as we are concerned
with words. If we enquire how many dissimilar forms of the verb there are in
Arabic and Latin, the reply will be more than a hundred. On the other hand
in English there are solely five accomplishable forms.  In the verb 'to
break' ' we have only break, breaks, breaking, broke and broken. It is a
rather trivial comparison of the appositive aspect or dissimilitude of
things between English and Latin or Chinese and Arabic, since it is
altogether restricted to the terms of the word.

Coming soon in Part Two:
Contractile and Emphatically Exposed - Copuletic Guises.





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