Part of
Chomskyan (R)evolutionsEdited by Douglas A. Kibbee
[Not in series 154] 2010
► pp. 43–72
Chomsky’s paradigm
What it includes and what it excludes
“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech […]” George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion In the structuralist tradition, the semiotic nature of the linguistic sign was seen as grounded in the psychological association between sound and meaning. On the one hand, this association is arbitrary, since sound and meaning are dissimilar in nature; on the other hand, the language system as a whole is partially motivated through various associations by similarity, which group paradigmatic relations and are a factor in semantic change. The system relies on the social fact of language use as the guarantor of the stability of conventionalized form-meaning associations, but also as the agent of change, which is a slow disruption and restructuring of the stability of the system. The article discusses evidence for the semiotic nature of language from the domain of poetic iconicity, which heightens and highlights the possibility of non-arbitrary association between meaning and form. The importance of the dimension of language use is also discussed with reference to Mufwene’s (2001, 2005, 2007) ‘uniformitarian’ theory of language contact, according to which idiolectal contact is the linguistic locus of social interaction and language change. It is argued that, in discounting language use, i.e., ‘linguistic performance’ and ‘E-language’, the Chomskyan theoretical framework is incomplete as an account of the nature of language.
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