* Nor are language couplings the only kind of couplings which occur. There are other kinds of symbols and other kinds of sentences, e.g., the coupling of a map with the territory, the coupling of van Gogh’s painting The Cypresses with what is symbolized (which is not merely the cypresses but forms of feeling as well). But here we are concerned primarily with language sentences.
† In Chapter 9 I describe symbolusing behavior as characterized by a tetradic structure. Thus, if one were to observe an utterance of a symbol — or, as I would say here, of a sentence — one would notice that there is not only an utterer and a coupling of sentence elements, but also a listener or receiver of the sentence. “The second person is required as an element not merely in the genetic event of learning language but as the indispensable and enduring condition of all symbolic behavior. The very act of symbolic formulation, whether it be language, logic, art, or even thinking, is of its very nature a formulation for a someone else. Even Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal after twenty years on the island, is nevertheless performing a through-and-through social and intersubjective act.”
Today, ten years later, I would broaden the notion of coupling “symbol” and “object” to the utterance of sentences in general, whether symbol and object, naming sentences, or traditional declarative sentences with subject and predicate.
This “tetradic behavior,” involving an utterer, a receiver, symbol and object, is contrasted with the “semiotic triangle” of Ogden and Richards, involving a sign which affects an interpreter which in turn responds with behavior relevant to an object or referent.
I find it convenient here, however, to observe Peirce’s distinction between dyadic relations and triadic relations. It will be seen that no substantial change has been made. What matters is the difference in “valence” between the semiotic relations encountered in symbol use and those in signal use, whether the difference is between triads and tetrads or dyads and triads.
Thus, the “semiotic triangle of Ogden and Richards with its “causal” relations between sign and interpreter and between interpreter and referent is clearly, in Peirce’s scheme of things, a pair of dyads.
The tetrad I proposed can, if one wishes to deal with atomic rather than molecular events, be split apart along its interface between utterer and receiver of a sentence, yielding a coupling of sentence elements by utterer and a subsequent coupling by receiver. The tetradic model, I see now, is appropriate only in successful communication, i.e., those transactions in which the same elements are coupled by both utterer and receiver and in the same mode of coupling. Unfortunately this is not always the case.
In short, in Chapter 9 I deal with the “molecular” structure of the communication process, whereas I am here dealing with the “atomic” structure.
* It is this transformation of symbols and their subsequent confusion with things that Count Korzybski used to rage against. “Whatever you choose to say about this object,” he would say, holding a pencil aloft, “don’t say ‘this is a pencil.’ “ “Whatever you say the object ‘is,’ well it is not” (p. 35).
In point of fact, I have never seen anyone mistake a word for a thing or try to write with the word pencil, though the magic use of words undoubtedly occurs in primitive societies and perhaps an analogous misuse in modern technological societies.
Korzybski tended to treat the peculiar features of symbol use as misbehavior to be gotten rid of by a therapeutic semantics which was almost an ethical science.
In a triadic theory of meaning it is to be hoped that symbolic transformations and sentence couplings with the verb is will not be put down as instances of bad behavior or human stupidity but rather will be regarded as a fundamental property of sentence utterance.
What needs to be explored is not human perversity as such but rather a parameter variable of symbol use. All sentences entail couplings. The mode of coupling is a normative dimension in which couplings may be used truly or falsely in propositions, well or badly in poetry, as a transparent vehicle of meaning or as an opaque simulacrum which distorts meaning.
† Werner and Kaplan note that the word chair is not merely a sign or label for chairs: “…the material, phonemically unique sequence, ch-ai-r, is articulated into a production whose expressive features parallel those ingredients in the percept ‘chair.’…Only when the vocable has become imbedded in an organismic matrix, regulated and directed by an activity of schematizing or form-building, does it enter into a semantic correspondence with the object (referent) and does it become transformed from the status of a sign to that of symbolic vehicle.”
* Cf. Braine: He and others have noted that an early stage of language acquisition in children features two-word utterances comprising a “pivot” word and an “open” word. Thus a child using the “pivot” word there might combine it with any number of “open” words and say there ball, there man, there doggie, etc. Then in a few months a second stage is reached in which the child combines two “open” words. Thus instead of saying there car or there man, the child might say man car, meaning “A man is in the car.”
Braine noted a pause or juncture between the two “open” words. Thus baby chair or baby book, uttered without a juncture, is presumably a pivot-open construction meaning “(There is) a little chair” or “(There is) a little book.” Whereas the utterance baby#chair, uttered in a certain context, is reliably understood by the mother to mean “The baby is in his chair.” The symbol # represents a juncture or pause.
This open-open construction is a very large class and represents, to my way of thinking, nothing less than the child’s graduation from the naming sentence (there ball) to the syntactical, “subject-predicate” sentence.
Let us agree with Chomsky that a child’s linguistic behavior cannot possibly be accounted for by traditional learning theory with its notions of “stimulus control,” “conditioning,” “generalization and analogy,” “patterns,” “habit structures,” or “dispositions to respond.”
The question, however, is whether the sole alternative to learning theory is Chomsky’s “innate ideas and innate principles,” specifically in this case a “language acquisition device,” a kind of magic black box interposed between input and output which contains not only the principles of universal grammar but the capacity of generating the grammar of one’s own language.
I wonder whether Chomsky’s LAD (language acquisition device) is nothing more nor less than the unique human ability to couple sentence elements, to couple symbols with things, symbols with symbols, which couplings may be understood to mean whatever context allows them to mean.
Indeed, may not grammar itself be defined as the primitive coupling plus whatever inflection, particles, and patterns may be required to supplant the diminishing context and the intuitive grasp by the mother of the child’s couplings? Thus the child’s sentence baby#chair may be understood infallibly by the mother to mean The baby is now in his chair. But as the intimate mother-child relationship declines and as it becomes necessary for people to talk to strangers over telephones about