Article and Noun in English

141 Pages·1972·11.08 MB·English

by  John Hewson

JANUA LINGUARUM
STUDIA MEMORIAE
NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA
edenda curai
C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD
Indiana University
Series Practica, 104

ARTICLE AND NOUN
IN ENGLISH
by
JOHN HEWSON
Memorial University of Newfoundland
1972
MOUTON
THE HAGUE • PARIS
© Copyright 1972 in The Netherlands
Mouton & Co. N. V., Publishers, The Hague.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 70—173386
Printed in Hungary
FOREWORD
The seemingly impenetrable mysteries of human language have afforded an
object of curiosity and study for centuries. Every age has had its own point of
view, its own philosophy, its own attitudes to language. These attitudes vary
from those that hold all language to be based on a universal grammar to
those that regard language as nothing more than a capricious accumulation of
sounds. The Greeks were the first Europeans to attempt linguistic analysis;
successive generations have followed in their footsteps: Latin grammar was
based on the Greek model and it in turn formed the basis of the grammars
of the modern vernaculars.
Grammar then became normative or prescriptive, insisting on the Latin
model; atrocities are perpetrated even today upon the grammar of English
because the traditional model has been the Latin one: we are taught that 0
table! is the vocative case; that It is I is correct, even if in French, a direct
descendant of Latin, one says C'est moi.
In the nineteenth century, because of comparative Indo-European studies,
men became aware of the historical evolution of languages, and the study of
phonetics, especially historical phonetics, grew apace. In our own century
phoneticians have analysed the sounds of human language and the means of
producing them sufficiently well to be able to construct machines capable of
synthesizing such sounds. At the same time, interest developed in the subject
of phonology (phonemics) or the systemic categorization that lies behind the
phonetic fact.
There has also been a continuing evolution in grammatical studies, even if
these latter have had but little effect on the schools. Sweet had many interesting
insights on the grammatical structure of English, and Jespersen's comments
and analyses frequently achieve profundity. They represent a tradition that is
in danger of being overlooked; modern linguistic scholarship, where it treads
new paths, must not forget, in its enthusiasm for the new, the relevant scholar-
ship of the past. Linguistics, as a discipline, is not new; it has a long history,
and the neglect of great scholars of the past may result in the neglect of a
valuable chain of enquiry or in puzzlement over problems that had, in fact, long
been settled.
6 FOREWORD
In recent years, linguistic research has devoted a great deal of energy to
what has come to be known as transformational grammar. Growing out of the
ideas of symbolic logic, mathematics and cybernetics, transformational gram-
mars view language implicitly, if not always explicitly, as a dynamism: they
are concerned with stating the grammatical fact in dynamic terms, a principle
which is a major step forward.
Transformational grammars, however, have certain limits: they aim to state
and to describe, not to explain. The goal of the present study is to go beyond
the statement of competence and to investigate, in one small area, the mental
mechanism, the system, that lies behind the syntactic fact.
As a point of departure, this study utilizes the linguistic theories of Gustave
Guillaume, and may be considered as a justification and elaboration of his
ideas. At his death in 1960 Guillaume left a small body of published materials,
not at all easy to follow or understand (for which reason it has been very
largely ignored or completely misunderstood), a vast amount of unpublished
material, and an oral tradition among his immediate disciples. I have been in
the fortunate position of being able to draw upon all three sources.
In Chapter I the relevant historical facts concerning the use of the article
are presented and examined: some may wonder at the introduction of the
historical element, but the reason for this state of affairs is quite simple. The
functioning of a particular system must be explained in synchronic terms, but
the development of the system itself is a matter of history; to understand a
system fully, one must look at it from both perspectives. There are in fact two
different processes, both interrelated and interconnected; the generative oper-
ations that produce parole and result in a phrase or a sentence (synchronic)
and the generative development of langue that produces what Saussure called
an état de langue (diachronic).
Chapter II presents Guillaume's view of language with a discussion of
method. This sketch is necessarily brief, and is intended as an introduction to
the theoretical chapters, not as an exhaustive survey of Guillaume's ideas and
their place in modern linguistic thought. Chapter III is an attempt to delineate
a theory of the substantive, using the psychomechanics of Guillaume as a
point of departure, and Chapter IV presents the English article system as seen
from the point of view of Guillaume's theory. The remaining three chapters
investigate the relevance of the theoretical proposals to the three types of
article usage: indefinite, definite, and zero.
The psychomechanics of Guillaume is based on an Einsteinian Weltan-
schauung and is therefore difficult to grasp on first encounter: it is necessary
to gain a broad insight into the whole before all the parts can be seen to fit
thoroughly into place. It is, however, for explanatory purposes, an extra-
ordinarily powerful theory: without it, this work would have been little more
than a compilation of puzzling facts. If puzzles remain they must be attri-
FOREWOBD 7
buted to the inadequacies of the author, to the novelty of the exercise, and the
abstruseness of the matter; the work is therefore offered as an essay in the
purest sense of the term.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Human-
ities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada
Council. I would like to express my gratitude to both these bodies, and also
to the many people who helped me in various ways, especially Roch Valin,
Walter Hirtle and Andre Joly.
St. John's, Newfoundland
August 1969 John Hewson

TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD 5
I. INTRODUCTION: THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OP THE ARTICLE 11
A. Indo-European 11
B. Germanic 15
C. Old and Middle English 16
D. Development of Article System 18
E. Fluctuating Usage 22
II. THE METHOD 26
A. Scientific Method: Empirical and Theoretical 26
B. Evidence and Proof 27
C. Guillaume's Psychomechanics 28
D. The Nature of Language: The Guillaumian View 35
E. The Intuitional Mechanism, Fundamental Principle of the
Linguistic Binary Unit 38
F. Dematerialization and Evolution 40
G. Mentalism and Mechanism 41
H. Operative Time 42
I. Models 43
J. Discovery Procedures 44
III. THE THEORY OF THE NOUN 46
A. The Nature of the Noun 46
B. Relationship of Adjective and Noun 50
C. Singular + Plural 61
D. Notional Ideation and Structural Ideation 63
E. Dematerialization in the Formal System of the Noun 65
IV. THE THEORY OF THE ARTICLE SYSTEM 69
Definite and Indefinite 69
B. The Zero Article 76
V. THE INDEFINITE ARTICLE 85
A. Extensivity of the Indefinite Article 85
B. Use with Proper Nouns 88
C. Indefinite as opposed to Zero Usage 90
D. Article with Attributes 91