Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Sapir Theory

Like Saussure's Cours, Sapir's Language, first published in 1921, seeks to stake out the overall field of language study. The ‘main purpose is to show what’ Sapir ‘conceives language to be, what is its variability in place and time, and what are its relations to other fundamental human interests -- the problem of thought, the nature of the historical process, race, culture, art’ (SL v).2 He stresses that the ‘content of language is intimately related to culture’, the latter defined as ‘the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives’ (SL 219, 207). ‘The history of culture and the history of language move along parallel lines’ (SL 219).3 Indeed, ‘the superficial connections’ between ‘speech’ and ‘other historical processes are so close that it needs to be shaken free of them if we are to see it in its own right’ (cf. 4.2; 6.6; 12.9; 13.1). ‘Language’ is thus an ‘acquired ‘cultural’ function’ rather than ‘an inherent biological function’ with an ‘instinctive basis’ (SL 3f) (cf. 3.15; 4.2; 8.26, 42, 44, 91; 9.1f, 6ff, 18, 22f, 107; 13.62).4 ‘Eliminate society’, and ‘the individual’ ‘will never learn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society’. ‘Language’ has an even greater ‘universality’ than ‘religion’ or ‘art’: ‘we know of no people that is not possessed of a fully developed language’ (SL 22). Indeed, ‘language’ may have ‘antedated even the lowliest developments of material culture’, which were ‘not strictly possible until language’ ‘had taken shape’ (SL 23) (cf. 4.10; 8.28; 9.7).

3.2 Such theses project a vast scope for the study of language, in pointed contrast to the narrower pursuits of the time (cf. 13.3). Sapir hopes to provide ‘a stimulus for the more fundamental study of a neglected field’ (SL vi). His book could ‘be useful’ ‘both to linguistic students and to the outside public that is half inclined to dismiss linguistic notions as the private pedantries of essentially idle minds’ (SL v; cf. 2.88). ‘Knowledge of the wider relations of their science is essential to professional students of language if they are to be saved from a sterile and purely technical attitude’. We should avoid ‘making too much of terminology’, taking too much ‘account of technical externals’, or parading ‘the technical terms’ and ‘technical symbols of the linguistic academy’ (SL 140, 138, vi). We should also resist such tendencies as the inclination to ‘worship our schemes’ as ‘fetishes’; ‘the strong craving for a simple formula’ ‘with two poles’ that ‘has been the undoing of linguists’; and ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ carried over from 19th-century ‘social sciences’ that has been ‘the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’ (SL 122f) (cf. 3.49; 2.6; 13.14).

3.3 Sapir's characteristic stance is a striking mix of sobriety and exuberance. His portrayals of language, for example, range from staid abstractions of a Saussurian cast over to extravagant panegyrics. At the sober end, Sapir describes ‘language’ as a ‘conventional’, ‘arbitrary system of symbolisms’ (SL 4, 11). Or, less abstractly, it is ‘a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols’ (SL 8). At the exuberant end, ‘language’ is declared ‘the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved’; ‘the most self-contained’ and ‘massively resistant of all social phenomena’; the ‘finished form or expression for all communicable experience’; and ‘the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations’ (SL 220, 206, 231) (cf. 6.2; 13.22). Moreover, ‘language’ ‘is the most fluid of mediums’ and ‘a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions’; ‘the possibilities of individual experience are infinite’ (SL 221, 231) (cf. 3.13, 70; 4.31; 5.25, 28; 8.42). Hence, ‘languages are more to us than systems of thought transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expressions’ (SL 221).

3.4 In Sapir's view, quite unlike Saussure's, ‘language exists only in so far as it is actually used -- spoken and heard, written and read’ (SL 154f) (cf. 13.36). But this claim is addressed mainly to the ‘pedagogue’ who ‘struggles against’ ‘“incorrect”‘ usage and insists on ‘maintaining caste’ and ‘conserving literary tradition’ (SL 156f) (cf. 2.5, 24, 29; 4.40, 87; 8.26).5 The ‘logical or historical argument’ of such pedagogues is often ‘hollow’ or ‘psychologically shaky’, lacks ‘vitality’, or promotes ‘false’ ‘correctness’ (SL 156ff). Instead, we must ‘look to’ ‘the uncontrolled speech of the folk’ and examine ‘the general linguistic movement’ and ‘the actual drift of the English language’ (SL 156, 167). ‘The folk makes no apology’ and feels ‘no twinge of conscience’ about usage, yet ‘has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students’ do (SL 156, 161). So we should explore how a ‘system proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk’ (SL 230).

3.5 However, caution is needed because ‘the man in the street does not stop to analyse his position in the general scheme of humanity’ and may confuse ‘racial, linguistic, and cultural’ ‘classifications’ or see ‘external history’ as ‘inherent necessity’ (SL 208). Even linguists may be ‘so accustomed to our own well-worn grooves of expression that they have come to be felt as inevitable’ (SL 89) (cf. 3.50; 4.4, 72; 5.11; 8.14). Hence, ‘a destructive analysis of the familiar is the only method of approach to an understanding of fundamentally different modes of expression’.

3.6 In Sapir's exuberant outlook, ‘the fundamental groundwork of language’ ‘meets us perfected and systematized in every language known to us’ (SL 22). Yet he is equally impressed by the ‘incredible diversity’ of ‘speech’. Indeed, ‘the total number of possible sounds is greatly in excess of those in use’ (SL 44). From among ‘the indefinitely large number of articulated sounds available’, each ‘language makes use of an explicit, rigidly economical selection’ (SL 46). In ‘grammatical notions’ too, ‘the theoretical possibilities’ ‘are indefinitely numerous’; ‘it depends entirely on the genius of the particular language what function is inherently involved in a given sequence of words’ (SL 63).

3.7 Exuberance and sobriety are again mixed in Sapir's characterization of language as a system. An exuberant conception (just cited) is ‘the genius of language’: the ‘type’ or ‘basic plan’, ‘much more fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature’ or any ‘fact’ of ‘grammar’ (SL 120) (cf. 3.32, 46, 51, 63, 68). This ‘genius’ is variously claimed to affect the ‘possibilities of combining phonetic elements’; the interdependence of ‘syllables’; the amount of ‘conceptual material’ ‘taken in’ by the individual ‘word’ (3.32); the ‘outward markings’ of ‘syntactic equivalents’ with ‘functionally equivalent affixes’; the ‘functions’ of ‘sequences of words’; the selection of ‘conventional interjections’; and even the ‘effects’ a ‘literary artist’ can draw from ‘the colour and texture’ of the language's ‘matrix’ (SL 54, 35, 32, 115, 63, 5, 222). Only in regard to ‘race’ does Sapir dismiss the notion of ‘genius’ as a ‘mystic slogan’ or a ‘sentimental creed’ (SL 208f, 212).

3.8 A sober conception, on the other hand, is the ‘economy’ of a language. This conception is applied to the ‘selection’ of ‘articulated sounds’; the ‘alternations between long and short syllables’; the availability of ‘rhyme’; and the relative importance of ‘word order’ versus ‘case suffixes’ (SL 46 229f, 64). The ‘economy’ also ‘irons out’ the ‘less frequently occurring associations’ between ‘radical elements, grammatical elements, words’, or ‘sentences’ on one side, and ‘concepts or groups of concepts’ on the other (SL 37f). This process limits the ‘randomness of association’ and thereby makes ‘grammar’ possible (cf. 2.29). Even the single sentence is said to have a ‘local economy’ of ‘its terms’ (SL 85).

3.9 If we ‘accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's psychic or “spiritual” constitution’, then ‘we cannot define it as an entity in psycho-physical terms alone’ (SL 10f). We should ‘discuss the intention, the form, and the history of speech’ ‘as an institutional or cultural entity’ and ‘take for granted’ ‘the organic and psychological mechanisms back of it’. Sapir is thus ‘not concerned with those aspects of physiology and physiological psychology that underlie speech’ (cf. 2.31). He alludes only in passing to ‘the vast network of associated localizations in the brain and lower nervous tracts’ (cf. 4.10, 14, 18f; 8.21, 23). ‘Language’ ‘cannot be definitely ‘localized’ in the brain’, ‘for it consists of a peculiar symbolic relation -- physiologically an arbitrary one -- between all possible elements of consciousness on the one hand, and certain selected elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and nervous tracts on the other’ (cf. 2.16, 31, 66; 7.31, 93, 743; 816).

3.10 Although Sapir vows he has ‘little to say about the ultimate psychological basis of speech’, he believes that ‘linguistic forms’ ‘have the greatest possible diagnostic value’ for ‘understanding’ ‘problems in the psychology of thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit’ (SL vf) (cf. 5.69; 6.2, 6; 7.10; 8.24; 12.17ff, 22, 62; 13.10).6 ‘Language and our thought grooves are inextricably interrelated, are in a sense, one and the same’ (SL 217f). ‘Linguistic morphology is nothing more or less than a collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment’ (SL 218). Moreover, ‘all voluntary communication of ideas, aside from normal speech, is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from the typical symbolism of language as spoken and heard, or, at the least, involves the intermediary of truly linguistic symbolism’ (SL 21). ‘Even those who’ ‘think without the slightest use of sound imagery are at last analysis, dependent upon it’, ‘the auditory-motor associations’ being ‘unconsciously brought into play’ (SL 20). As proof, Sapir cites ‘the frequent experience of fatigue in the speech organs’ after ‘unusually’ ‘intensive thinking’ (SL 19).7 ‘Gesture languages’ too owe their ‘intelligibility’ to ‘their automatic and silent translation into the terms of a fuller flow of speech’ (SL 21).

3.11 Consequently, ‘the feeling entertained by so many that they can think, or even reason, without language is an illusion’ (SL 15). ‘Thought may be no more conceivable, in its genesis and daily practice, without speech than is mathematical reasoning practicable’ without a ‘mathematical symbolism’. An evolutionary connection is propounded: ‘that language is an instrument originally put to uses lower than the conceptual plane and that thought arises as a refined interpretation of its content’ (cf. 4.34; 8.6). ‘The product grows’ ‘with the instrument’, and ‘the growth of speech’ is ‘dependent on the development of thought’ (SL 15, 17). In view of ‘the unconscious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure’, ‘the most rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious linguistic symbolism’ (SL vi, 16). The idea that ‘people’ ‘are in the main unconscious’ of the ‘forms’ they ‘handle’, ‘regardless of their material advancement or backwardness of the people’ (SL 124) (cf. 3.61), is favoured by other theorists as well (cf. 13.49). Sapir also surmises that the ‘analysis’ of forms is ‘unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker’, implying that ‘students of language cannot be entirely normal in their attitude toward their own speech’ (SL 161, n) (cf. 13.1, 49).

3.12 However, ‘language and thought are not strictly coterminous’, and ‘the flow of language itself is not always indicative of thought’ (SL 14f). ‘At best language can but be the outward facet of thought on the highest, most generalized, level of symbolic expression’, rather than ‘the final label put upon the finished thought’ (cf. 7.25). Conversely, ‘from the point of view of language, thought may be defined as the highest latent or potential content of speech’, its ‘fullest conceptual value’. Or, ‘language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mould of thought’ (SL 22). Still, ‘the feeling of a free, non-linguistic stream of thought’ may be ‘justified’ in ‘cases’ wherein ‘the symbolic expression of thought’ ‘runs along outside the fringe of the conscious mind’. This view concurs with ‘modern psychology’, whose ‘recent’ literature’ ‘has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind’ (SL 16, 126n). Perhaps ‘a more general psychology than Freud's will eventually prove’ ‘the mechanisms of “repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic symbolization’ ‘to be as applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts’ (SL 157n).8

3.13 A ‘speech sound’ attains ‘linguistic significance’ by being ‘associated with some element or group of elements of experience’; ‘this “element”‘ ‘is the content or meaning of the linguistic unit’ (SL 10). Hence, ‘the elements of language’ are ‘symbols that ticket off experience’ (SL 12). For that purpose, ‘the world of our experiences must be enormously simplified and generalized’ into ‘a symbolic inventory’. ‘The concreteness of experience is infinite, the resources of the richest language are strictly limited’ (SL 84). Besides, ‘the single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable’ (SL 12). So ‘we must arbitrarily throw whole masses of experience together as similar enough to warrant being looked upon -- mistakenly but conveniently -- as identical’, ‘in spite of great and obvious differences’ (SL 13). ‘It is almost as though at some period in the past the unconscious mind of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience’ and ‘saddled the inheritors of its language’ with a ‘premature classification that allowed of no revision’ (SL 100). ‘Linguistic categories make up a system of surviving dogma -- dogma of the unconscious’.

3.14 Sapir thus concludes that ‘the latent content of all languages’ is ‘the intuitive science of experience’ (SL 218) (cf. 3.23; 12.12f; 13.24). ‘The essence of language consists in assigning conventional, voluntarily articulated sounds’ ‘to diverse elements of experience’ (SL 11). The ‘“concept”‘ serves as ‘a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of experiences’ (SL 13). ‘The single impression’ enters one's ‘generalized memory’, which is in turn ‘merged with the notions of all other individuals’. ‘The particular experience’ gets ‘widened so as to embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings may form or have formed’.

3.15 Despite his reverence for Freudian ideas and his emphasis on experience, Sapir shows scant concern for ‘volition and emotion’, albeit ‘they are, strictly speaking, never absent from normal speech’ (SL 39). ‘Ideation reigns supreme in language’; ‘volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors’ (SL 38) (cf. 9.15). ‘Their expression is not of a truly linguistic nature’. To support this outlook, Sapir judges the ‘expression’ of ‘impulse and feeling’ to be ‘but modified forms of the instinctive utterance that man shares with the lower animals’ rather than ‘part of the essential cultural conception of language’ (cf. 3.1). Though ‘most words’ ‘have an associated feeling-tone’ derived from ‘pleasure or pain’, this tone is not ‘an inherent value in the word itself’, but ‘a sentimental growth on the word's true body, on its conceptual kernel’ (SL 39f). ‘Speech demands conceptual selection’ and the ‘inhibition of the randomness of instinctive behaviour’ (SL 46n) (cf. 3.9). Besides, ‘the feeling-tone’ ‘varies from individual to individual’ and ‘from time to time’ (SL 40). So ‘desire, purpose, emotion are the personal colour of the objective world’, and constitute ‘non-linguistic facts’ (SL 39, 46n).

3.16 Even in its more rarefied domains, Sapir finds language far from ideal. He notes a ‘powerful tendency for a formal elaboration that does not correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences’ (SL 98) (cf. 2.49).9 Instead, we run up against ‘form for form's sake’, and a ‘curious lack of accord between function and form’ (SL 98, 100, 89) (cf. 3.22, 24, 33; 4.47, 49; 7.63; 8.58; 9.19; 12.25, 27; 13.54). ‘Irrational form’ ‘is as natural to the life of language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning they once had’ (SL 98). ‘Phonetic processes’ favour ‘non-significant differences in form’; and ‘grammatical concepts’ tend to ‘degenerate into purely formal counters’ (SL 100; cf. SL 61).

3.17 Again like Saussure (cf. 2.68ff), Sapir declares that ‘the mere phonetic framework of speech does not constitute the inner fact of language, and that the single sound of articulated speech is not’ ‘a linguistic element at all’ (SL 42; cf. 2.68; 4.29; 6.7). ‘The mere sounds of speech are not the essential fact of language’ (SL 22). ‘Language is not identical with its auditory symbolism’, though it is a ‘primarily auditory system of symbols’ (SL 16f). ‘Communication’ ‘is successful only when the hearer's auditory perceptions are translated into the appropriate and intended flow of imagery or thought’ (SL 18).

3.18 Nevertheless, ‘the cycle of speech’ as ‘a purely external instrument begins and ends in sounds’ (SL 18) (cf. 2.17, 67; 13.27). ‘Speech is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their articulation that we can hardly avoid’ ‘the subject of phonetics’ (SL 42) (cf. 2.70f; 3.14, 21; 4.29; 5.42; 8.70; 13.26). ‘Neither the purely formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully understood without reference’ to its ‘sounds’. At one point, Sapir asserts that ‘auditory’ and ‘motor imagery’ are ‘the historic fountain-head of all speech and of all thinking’ (SL 21) (cf. 3.10, 37; 8.6).

3.19 In regard to sound systems, ‘the feeling’ of ‘the average speaker’ is not reliable, but ‘largely illusory’, namely that a ‘language’ ‘is built up’ ‘of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter’ (SL 42f) (cf. 2.22f; 4.38; 6.50; 7.46, 66; 8.11, 53, 75f; 13.26). ‘Phonetic analysis convinces one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of sounds that are habitually employed by speakers of a language is far greater than they themselves realize’ (cf. 4.29).

3.20 We should rather assume that ‘every language’ ‘is characterized’ ‘by its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern’ (SL 56).10 ‘The actual rumble of speech’ must therefore be traced to an ‘ideal flow of phonetic elements’ (cf. 2.68; 4.30; 5.42f; 13.26). ‘Back of the purely objective system of sounds’, each language has ‘a more restricted “inner” or “ideal” system’ that can ‘be brought to consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism’ (SL 55).11 ‘The inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be with the mechanical or the irrelevant, is a real and immensely important principle in the life of a language’. ‘Unless their phonetic “values” are determined’, ‘the objective comparison of sounds’ has ‘no psychological or historical significance'

3.21 For ‘the organic classification of speech sounds’, Sapir offers four criteria: ‘the position of the glottal chords’; the passage of ‘breath’ through the ‘mouth’ or ‘nose’; ‘free’ or ‘impeded’ passage; and ‘the precise points of articulation’ (SL 52f). This scheme should be ‘sufficient to account for all, or practically all, the sounds of language’.12 For example, ‘each language selects a limited number of clearly defined positions as characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transitional or extreme positions’. Or, the language picks out its ‘voiced sounds’, which, being ‘the most clearly audible elements of speech’, ‘are carriers of practically all significant differences in stress, pitch, and syllabication’ (SL 49) (cf. 4.34). ‘The voiceless sounds’ serve to ‘break up the stream of voice with fleeting moments of silence’.

3.22 Besides the ‘system of sounds’, ‘a definite grammatical structure’ ‘characterizes’ ‘every language’ (SL 56). ‘“Grammatical” processes’ are ‘the formal methods employed by a language’ (SL 57) (cf. 13.54). ‘Grammar’ indicates that ‘all languages have an inherent economy of expression’, wherein ‘analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms’ (SL 38) (cf. 3.8). ‘Were language ever completely “grammatical”, it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak’ (cf. 13.59). Hence, we should expect to find a ‘relative independence’, or a ‘lack of accord’, ‘between function and form’ (SL 58f, 89; cf. SL 64, 69ff; 3.16).

3.23 For Sapir, ‘our conventional classification of words into “parts of speech is only a vague wavering approximation of a consistently worked-out inventory of experience’, ‘far from corresponding’ to a ‘simple’ ‘analysis of reality’ (SL 117) (cf. 2.30, 65; 3.13; 4.55; 5.72f; 9.27; 13.7, 24). ‘The “parts of speech”‘ ‘grade into each other’ or are ‘actually convertible into each other’ (SL 118) (cf. 13.54). Hence, they ‘reflect not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns’. ‘For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech -- their number, nature, and necessary confines -- is of the slightest interest to the linguist’ (SL 119) (13.7, 17).

3.24 Taken by itself, ‘every language’ does have ‘a definite feeling for patterning on the level of grammatical formation’ (SL 61). ‘All languages evince a curious instinct for the development of one or more grammatical processes at the expense of others, tending always to lose sight of any explicit functional value that the process may have had’ and ‘delighting, it would seem, in the sheer play of its means of expression’ (SL 60) (cf. 3.16). The ‘feeling for form as such, freely expanding along predetermined lines, and greatly inhibited in certain directions by the lack of controlling patterns, should be more clearly understood than it seems to be’ (SL 61). Meanwhile, a strong later trend in American linguistics was foreshadowed by Sapir's recommendation that ‘linguistic form may and should be studied as types of patterning, apart from the associated functions’ (SL 60) (cf. 4.49; 7.63; 13.54). This counsel is ominous if ‘a linguistic phenomenon cannot be looked upon as illustrating a definite “process” unless it has an inherent functional value’ (SL 62).

3.25 ‘The various grammatical processes that linguistic research has established’ ‘may be grouped into six main types: word order, composition, affixation’, ‘internal modification’, ‘reduplication, and accentual differences’ (SL 61).13 Of these, word order is ‘the most economical method of conveying some sort of grammatical notion’ -- ‘juxtaposing two or more words in a definite sequence’ (SL 62). ‘It is psychologically impossible to see or hear two words juxtaposed without straining to give them some measure of coherent significance’. When ‘two simple’ words, or even mere ‘radicals’ (roots), ‘are put before the human mind in immediate sequence it strives to bind them together with connecting values’.

3.26 ‘Composition’ is ‘the uniting into a single word of two or more radical elements’ (SL 64) (compare Saussure's ‘agglutination’, 2.64). ‘Psychologically, this process is closely allied to word order in so far as the relation between the elements is implied, not explicitly stated’. But ‘it differs’ ‘in that the compounded elements are felt as constituting but parts of a single word-organism’. ‘However, then, in its ultimate origins the process of composition may go back to typical sequences of words in the sentence, it is now, for the most part, a specialized method of expressing relations’ (SL 65) (cf. 13.54).

3.27 ‘Affixation is incomparably the most frequently employed’ ‘of all grammatical processes’ (SL 67) (cf. 2.62). A well-developed system of affixes may allow a language to be somewhat ‘indifferent’ about ‘word order’ by compensating with ‘differences’ that are ‘rhetorical or stylistic’ rather than ‘strictly grammatical’ (SL 63) (cf. 7.55). ‘Of the three types of affixing -- the use of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes -- suffixing is much the commonest’ and may indeed ‘do more of the formative work of language than all other methods combined’. In some languages (e.g. Nootka of Vancouver Island), ‘suffixed elements’ ‘may have as concrete a significance as the radical element itself’ (SL 66; cf. SL 71n). In others (e.g. Latin and Russian), ‘the suffixes alone relate the word to the rest of the sentence’ by demarcating ‘the less concrete, more strictly formal, notions of time,14 person, plurality, and passivity’, while ‘the prefixes’ are ‘confined to the expression of such ideas as delimit the concrete significance of the radical element’ (SL 68). Still, ‘in probably the majority of languages that use both types of affixes, each group has both delimiting and formal or relational functions’ (SL 69).

3.28 ‘Internal modification’ entails ‘vocalic or consonantal change’, and is ‘a subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammatical process’ (SL 61, 73). ‘In some languages, as in English’, it ‘indicates fundamental changes of grammatical function’. ‘Consonantal change’ ‘is probably far less common than vocalic’, but ‘not exactly rare’, appearing prominently in ‘Celtic languages’ for instance (SL 74f).

3.29 ‘Reduplication’ is a ‘natural’ operation, namely ‘the repetition of all or part of the radical element’ (SL 76). ‘This process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance’. ‘The most characteristic examples’ ‘repeat only part of radical element’, mainly to signal ‘repetition or continuance’ of an action (SL 77f).

3.30 ‘Variations in accent, whether of stress or of pitch’, are ‘the subtlest of all grammatical processes’ (SL 78f). ‘Accent as a functional process’ is hard to ‘isolate’, being ‘often combined with ‘alternations in vocalic quantity or quality or complicated by the presence of affixed elements’. Even so, ‘pitch accent’ in particular ‘is far less infrequently employed as a grammatical process than our own habits of speech would prepare us to believe’ (SL 81).

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