By Moreno Mitrovic

The endowment with language capacity is an insidious human property that even Linguistic training usually fails to objectify. It is that very objectification of language that is desperately called for, in order to produce and envisage a dualistic, and somewhat complementary, image of The Self.

Language has become—progressively—more apparent. Modern(ist) literary arts testify to that. Iris Murdoch noted “the sickness of language.” At that point, language failed in bodily performance of the authentic; it was the second stage that united the form of the problem: language became—has become!—an enemy. With this transparency of the medium, the notion of the self has become more clearly dualistic. The same problem (problem?) lingers in western science & thought, where the dualistic concept of subject-object disables the entitative.

I wish to raise an assumption: language can only exist in object-language form. Language is all we have and is thus metaphysical (Davidson 1996: 309); Language is the core basis for any conceptualisation.

If Ego and World are “of this world,” how can language be “out of it?” Only the third Cartesian interface could, though irrationally, explain the case.

Unaware of that collage of insinuations, the linguistic science has also failed to provide a reasonable, unitarian & holistic embracing and defining of language. Cartesian (and Humboldtian) description of language is axiomatic: language is an infinite use of finite means. Linguistics was—is!—only able to fathom the concept of language in dualistic form, nowadays regarded as the axiom of categoricity. The axiom persevered throughout modern linguistic inquiry: from Saussure who was able to see the language as (i) parole, being the social uses, and (ii) langue, a system of grammar, sole object of “proper linguistics.”

Similarly, Humboldtian domain encompassed—again dichotomously—,what he noted as, (i) ergon, means of communication, and (ii) energeia, that reconstitutes human experience ideally. Ultimately, the modern linguist Chomsky, who amazingly reformed the linguistic perspective, also similarly (with failure, variationists dispute!) parted the language into (i) competence, speaker-hearer knowledge, and (ii) performance, the actual use of language in concrete situations. As Chambers (2003: 10) also notes, the study of “language-energeia-competence” had to be abstracted from real-world context, the axiom being somewhat a basis for such abstraction. It is this abstraction that allows the traditional theory to (metaphysically) see the language as being “out of this world”. In the last few decades, however, an effort has been invested into postulating a unitarian image of language-research. Formalist variationists—many of them residing and working at our University—try to integrate real-world connotations and variations to formal language investigation.

De-formalising linguistics into practical language-observations, we are able to see another (a third!) image of the language dualism. Diachronic linguistics traditionally presupposes (ambitiously, but still!) that all Indo-European languages originate in a Proto-language-form. Throughout history, the Proto-form was partitioned and further split into a modern (i.e. synchronic) image of—let us say, Indo-European—languages.

The fourth piece of my pondering collage is sentence-internal dualism, known as binary. Modern syntax postulates that all languages have a binary sentential structure. This means that everything thought of, spoken or written can be arranged into pairs, dualistically, and function- merge-accordingly be computed into discourse. With that in mind, adopting the X-bar theory of sentential structures, an entertaining (though shockingly plausible!) Cartesian structure of existence would follow as:

This (chivalric) model helps me raise some vital questions, such as, whether the language is the(intermediate) projection of the world (res extensa) or the self (res cogitans). This, again,refracts us to object-subject dilemma, where we cannot know whether we are the objects of theworld or whether the world is the object of ourselves. We can only be certain in its median. Language is all we have. And that is paradoxical. There is nothing beyond language. Andlanguage itself is a closed system: all we can conceive is within a language. Wittgenstein said very similarly:

[3.032] It is impossible to represent in language anything that “contradicts logic”as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradictsthe laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist. (L Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

Abstracting, slightly, I dare ask: what is there beyond language?

Anything beyond language is, thereof, unconceivable and unfathomable. Hence arrogantly-
non-existent? I may pretentiously even stipulate that language blur is evidently (as Chomsky said in his 60s BBC interview,) the “volume” of human science-forming capacity. Integrating the closedness of language and its hermenautically-sealed form with the formalisation of syntactic structures, the paradox is easily represented as:

The final piece of my pondering deals with the self through the reflection and analogy of linguistic properties of a lexical root. As Dr Acquaviva noted in his presentation3 (of “Roots and Lexicality in Distributed Morphology), that “roots have no meaning by themselves.” That is a bold but enlightening statement. Core, in language, has no meaning when it comes to words. Similar semantic aspect applies in abstraction. Ego, hence going back to Descartes, is not meaningful without the language endowment (as Aristotle4 noted and Chomsky reinforced). Concluding, only root with chunk is meaning(ful).

We could adopt mathematical expressions for this theory, which would result language meaning in binary value. Language meaning can be expressed as a function s(l), denoting semantics of language with 1 value for meaningful and 0 for not meaningful5. Inflectional “chunks” are denoted as C6, similar to indefinite integral constant.

It is, then, clear that language—or its lexical sub-particle—can only assume a meaningful stance when both a lexical root (√x(l)) and inflection(al chunk) are fused. Concerning fusion, con-fusion & conclusion, few bits of my pondering have shown that language-internal and -external design is dualistic. There is uniformity only in arrogance in dismissing the medium. The persisting dualism lies in partition into structure and meaning— form and substance, (Cartesian) Ego and language (-lens). Similarly as shown in (7), the form and substance together denote a meaningful value. It is when objectifying language and labeling it as a slightly entitative bit of The Self that we encounter paradoxes that were otherwise unfathomable.

__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography

ACQUAVICA, PAOLO: (presentation of) “Roots and Lexicality in Distributed Morphology,” to appear in York Papers in Linguistics. Issue 18. York: The University of York, 2008.

ALLEN, DAVE: “Pluralism, Pragmatism and Metaphysics,” from Dialectic: A Philosophical Online Magazine. (http://dialecticonline.wordpress.com/)York: The University of York, 2008.

DAVIDSON, DONALD: “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth,” from Truth. (eds S Blackburn, K  Simmons) New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. [1996]

WITTGENSTEN, LUDWIG: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (transl. D F Pears, B F McGuinness.)  London: Routledge, 2004.