Linguistic Society of America

Iconic and Economic MotivationAuthor(s): John HaimanSource: Language, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 781-819Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413373Accessed: 07/12/2010 02:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/413373?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa

ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION ICONIC AND ECONOMIC MOTIVATION

JOHN HAIMAN

University of Manitoba The distance between linguistic expressions may be an iconically motivated index of

the conceptual distance between the terms or events which they denote. But the length of an utterance may also correspond to the extent to which it conveys new or unfamiliar information. Reduced form may thus be an economically motivated index of familiarity. Much of the arbitrariness of grammatical structure arises where equally plausible mo- tivations such as iconicity and economy are, in effect, competing for expression on the same linguistic dimension.*

From Aristotle to Chomsky, the majority view among philosophers of lan- guage has been that human language, in sharp contradistinction to various kinds of animal communication, is essentially symbolic, and that this distinction con- stitutes perhaps the crucial and unbridgeable gap between them. According to Chomsky (1972:69),

'Animal language ... makes use of a fixed finite number of linguistic dimensions, each of which is associated with a particular non-linguistic dimension in such a way that selection of a point along the linguistic dimension determines and signals a certain point along the non-linguistic dimension ... The mechanism and principle, however, are entirely different from those em- ployed by human language ...

I hope to show here that one linguistic (or formal) dimension does correspond directly to a non-linguistic (or conceptual) dimension in exactly the way that Chomsky described, in a number of human languages. The linguistic dimension is that of distance between linguistic expressions-which corresponds directly to, and in this sense is motivated by, a variety of conceptual dimensions.

Linguistic distance is easy to define. In fact, if an utterance were nothing more than a string of sounds, the linguistic distance between two expressions could be defined simply as the number of syllables (or even the number of seconds) between them.' But since language is hierarchically structured, the linguistic distance between two expressions depends on the nature and the

* For their constructive criticism of earlier drafts of this paper, I wish to thank Henning Andersen, Dwight Bolinger, Paul Friedrich, Talmy Givon, Joseph Greenberg, Edith Moravcsik, Johanna Ni- chols, Sandra Thompson, Anna Wierzbicka, H. C. Wolfart, and Karl Zimmer. I also wish to acknowledge with thanks the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which made possible much of the research reported here.

'That this last possibility is by no means absurd is demonstrated in an elegant experiment by Bolinger & Gerstman 1957, whose conclusions anticipated the findings of my ?1. They found that the contrast between expressions like lighthouse keeper and light housekeeper was not one of relative stress, as was then believed, but of the ratio of disjuncture-or linguistic distance, measured in time units-between the morphemes light, house, and keeper. Their 'common sense conclusion' (255) was that,

'since in lighthouse keeper the semantic bond between light and house is closer than that between house and keeper (immediate constituents are lightholuse / keeper), and since the disjunctures transparently [i.e. iconically] supply a physical separation whose width correlates inversely with the semantic bond, it follows that the disjunctures function directly to carry the information.'

781

JOHN HAIMAN

University of Manitoba The distance between linguistic expressions may be an iconically motivated index of

the conceptual distance between the terms or events which they denote. But the length of an utterance may also correspond to the extent to which it conveys new or unfamiliar information. Reduced form may thus be an economically motivated index of familiarity. Much of the arbitrariness of grammatical structure arises where equally plausible mo- tivations such as iconicity and economy are, in effect, competing for expression on the same linguistic dimension.*

From Aristotle to Chomsky, the majority view among philosophers of lan- guage has been that human language, in sharp contradistinction to various kinds of animal communication, is essentially symbolic, and that this distinction con- stitutes perhaps the crucial and unbridgeable gap between them. According to Chomsky (1972:69),

'Animal language ... makes use of a fixed finite number of linguistic dimensions, each of which is associated with a particular non-linguistic dimension in such a way that selection of a point along the linguistic dimension determines and signals a certain point along the non-linguistic dimension ... The mechanism and principle, however, are entirely different from those em- ployed by human language ...

I hope to show here that one linguistic (or formal) dimension does correspond directly to a non-linguistic (or conceptual) dimension in exactly the way that Chomsky described, in a number of human languages. The linguistic dimension is that of distance between linguistic expressions-which corresponds directly to, and in this sense is motivated by, a variety of conceptual dimensions.

Linguistic distance is easy to define. In fact, if an utterance were nothing more than a string of sounds, the linguistic distance between two expressions could be defined simply as the number of syllables (or even the number of seconds) between them.' But since language is hierarchically structured, the linguistic distance between two expressions depends on the nature and the

* For their constructive criticism of earlier drafts of this paper, I wish to thank Henning Andersen, Dwight Bolinger, Paul Friedrich, Talmy Givon, Joseph Greenberg, Edith Moravcsik, Johanna Ni- chols, Sandra Thompson, Anna Wierzbicka, H. C. Wolfart, and Karl Zimmer. I also wish to acknowledge with thanks the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which made possible much of the research reported here.

'That this last possibility is by no means absurd is demonstrated in an elegant experiment by Bolinger & Gerstman 1957, whose conclusions anticipated the findings of my ?1. They found that the contrast between expressions like lighthouse keeper and light housekeeper was not one of relative stress, as was then believed, but of the ratio of disjuncture-or linguistic distance, measured in time units-between the morphemes light, house, and keeper. Their 'common sense conclusion' (255) was that,

'since in lighthouse keeper the semantic bond between light and house is closer than that between house and keeper (immediate constituents are lightholuse / keeper), and since the disjunctures transparently [i.e. iconically] supply a physical separation whose width correlates inversely with the semantic bond, it follows that the disjunctures function directly to carry the informati