Classification according to meanings

It can, in my opinion, hardly be doubted that the word-groups of a given language can be classified according to their meanings no less satisfactorily than according to any other kind of feature. There are, of course, as everywhere in a language, borderline cases. I have already remarked that the degree-character of omissibility creates many borderline cases in the application of criteria of distribution. There are equally borderline cases between parts of speech, between syntactically free and fixed order, and so on.

For establishing meanings as features of types of groups, we have to start from the fundamental distinction between attitudinal and referential meanings. […]

The distinction is fundamental, among other things, because it pervades the whole structure of a language sys­tem on allits main levels. An attitudinal meaningis defined as the expression of an attitude of the speaker to something, e. g. alas. A referential meaningis defined as merely denoting, or referring to, something, either by nam­ing it (John, boy, red, arrive, with, if), or by pointing it out (he, this, so).

The attitude expressed is either ‘intellectual’, i. e. a belief in the existence or non-existence of something (Vivit. He lives.), or ‘non-intellectual’, e. g. an emotion (alas), a wish to draw somebody’s attention (the vocative, Brute), a wish that the hearer do something (the impera­tive, veni), et cetera.

The same distinction largely parallels the difference between the two constituents or ‘levels’ of the sentence, i. e. words and intonation (or, better, sentence-form), in that intonation is never referential, but always attitudinal, and words are referential and / or attitudinal. Merely referential are John, boy, red, etc. Merely attitudinal are yes and no (intellectual, expressing a belief in truth or falsity of a statement), and alas (expressing an emotional attitude). Both referential and attitudinal are vocatives (Brute), im­peratives (veni), and, in languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, the finite verb, venio, venit (expressing a belief; venit, I believe that he is coming).

On the level of the parts of speech, the distinction parallels the difference between interjections on the one hand, and, with a few exceptions, all other parts of speech on the other.

On the level of morphology, it distinguishes, in the system of the cases of the noun in Latin, the vocative from all other cases; in the morphological system of the verb, the imperative and the finite verb from the infini­tive and participles.

Even on the level of the vocabulary it plays a certain role, e. g. in the difference between children and brats, and between poor in the sense of ‘without money’, a poor man, and for the expression of an attitude of the speaker, poor man!

The distinction is of no less importance with regard to features of word-groups. It may well be that all languages have an opposition between predicative, i. e. attitudinal, and non-predicative groups. The group dogs bark is clearly attitudinal, predicative, and the group barking dogs is clearly referential. It may be added that a similar distinction must be made between different uses of the same type, of group, for instance between referential use of me miseram in vocat me miseram, and attitudinal use of the same group in Me miseram! (accusative of exclamation). [...]

On the basis of this fundamental distinction, we may distinguish different kinds of attitudinal and different kinds of referential meanings as features of groups. I need merely recall the ‘enumeration’, presented by coordinative groups, ‘description’ by the group modified-modifier, ‘re­lation to something’ by connective groups, and so on.

I shall give one example of a type of group that has features on several levels, as distinguished above, in order to illustrate my points, first, that in a complete descrip­tion of a language all these features should be described, and, second, that, in a given language, the group can satisfactorily be defined in terms of one, or a limited num­ber of different features.

My example is the coordinative group in English.

A typical auditory feature of the group, which it has in common with only very few other groups, is the seg­mentation by means of breaks, in English script indicated by commas. It may be noticed that the break is less marked, or optional, before a coordinative conjunction, e. g. before and in men, women and children (cried), but this is of secondary importance. The group has a unique auditory feature in what may be described as ‘even stress’ on all members.

The members of the group are not separable (unless by ‘insertion’, defined as a separate attitudinal expression: Men, I think, women and children, cried).

It is typical of the group that the order of its members is syntactically irrelevant: children, women, men cried.

It is a unique feature of the group that it may have more than two members.

It is typical of the group also that, with very few exceptions which can easily be formulated (Mother and I went away), the part of speech of the members is the same. Even some morphological categories are the same, e. g. the case of the personal pronoun (I saw him and her), the case of the noun (John’s and Mary’s books), and the general category of the verb (singing and swinging). There are very few groups in English of which both mem­bers may be the same part of speech: (a) bird’s nest, (I) shall see (him), very happily, but in all of them there is some difference, so that I believe that, in English, the coordinative group can satisfactorily and completely be defined in terms of the part of speech and the morpho­logical category of the members.

Distribution is a unique feature of the group also in that each member is omissible. A difficulty, however, arises here by the fact that ‘omissibility’ or, in Bloomfield’s terminology, ‘the same’ or ‘not the same distribution as that of the whole group’ is a matter of degree This is one of the weak points in the use of the criterion of dis­tribution, which I shall not discuss in detail. To give one example: in milk and scones were on the table, strictly speaking neither milk nor and scones nor even scones is omissible, and neither milk nor and scenes has exactly the same distribution as the group milk and scones.

Last, but not least, meaning is a unique feature of the group, which may be formulated by saying that it pre­sents an enumeration of similar things. However we wish to formulate this feature of meaning, there can hardly be any doubt about the fact that it is typical of this type of group, and of no other.