Abstract
Articulating simplicity and complexity is fundamental for any knowledge endeavor. This chapter carries a critical examination of several possible options in linguistics. Starting with the ancient debate between analogist and anomalist grammar schools, we address the following issues: the nomothetic approach as a reduction to simplicity, and research of determinant laws; complexity, replayed in the models of Complex Systems; the notion of emergence, between determinant and reflective judgment; the assessment of Complex Systems as an apparent middle path to Semiolinguistics; a discussion of linguistic theories directly concerned with the issues of meaning and complexity.
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Notes
- 1.
Separation redistributed by Kant through the relation between intuition and understanding.
- 2.
But «Varro excellently reminds that it was by borrowing from mathematicians their proportional relationship (analogon, in Greek) that the Alexandrian grammarians were the first to be able to clearly establish, in the form of tables, the complex paradigms of Greek flexional morphology» [translation], op. cit. p. 8.
- 3.
Regarding this too hastily reconstituted debate, one could think that it is a matter of a bipolarity of the regular/monstrous or regular/pathological type, but in truth, it is an indefinite variety of forms exceeding any typology which should be put forth here—and, in parallel, the idea of regularity should be made compatible with that of indetermination—but this is a much more contemporary reformulation.
- 4.
Let us emphasize in passing that the mathematical or logical/computer-scientific schemes in question were not themselves bearers of the epistemologies or of the ideologies that they may have contributed in founding. Even if, initially, the logico-mathematical schemes could appear as univocal epistemological emblems, nothing would prevent them from ulteriorly being requalified and put in the service of a plurality of epistemologies. Hence, the existence of computers and of programming languages by no means requires a logical and computational conception of the mind and of language. We may just as well consider this as an avatar of writing, having a form of hybridization with the idea of mechanism. Thus, a contrario, computer science has given rise to an unprecedented proliferation of diagrams and images which have contributed to the development of topological, dynamic and genetic conceptions, initially undervalued to the benefit of a purely computational vision.
- 5.
The irony of this being that in order to establish its own autonomy, each component of the global architecture (each subdiscipline) recommends its own criteria and a very specific level of objectivity. But then, the encounter between the different levels believed to be separable becomes problematic. The strategy of enunciative linguistics, for example, was to refuse such a separation: without renouncing the idea of a core of meaning, nor that of tiered layers, they are conceived differently, within an apparatus which anticipates beforehand the linguistic value of the enunciative and pragmatic activity.
- 6.
All being ingredients proposed at times by favoring relationships over elements, at other times by conferring these a first form of individuation which then supports relational connections specifying their identity.
- 7.
And this even if, for us, in the contemporary context, it would be suitable for such linguistics to invoke yet a different type of knowledge, left uncovered by the system of the three Critiques, and consisting in the exposition of a reasoned distribution of competing interpretive points of view regarding a same value-form.
- 8.
This temporal parameter t is in fact far from referring to a clearly identifiable time. It is better conceived as a parameter controlling the system’s variations in state, the progressive interaction of the organization factors retained in the modelization. It is also in correspondence with the time (endowed with an elementary increment value) of the algorithmic process which accomplishes it.
- 9.
By decomposition and synthesis, it is a biophysical framework; by diffusion, transformation, institution, it is a socio-symbolical framework.
- 10.
We can thus evoke the proximity, once observed, between Californian cognitive linguistics and connectionist modelization. In a way, connectionist modelizations in the tradition of PDP (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986) will have reproduced the ambiguities and limits of the cognitive linguistics from which they drew inspiration. Giving preeminence to perceptual-type mechanisms, they conceived of them according to a mentalist and representationalist mode, and since it is a matter of language, they will not have succeeded in dissociating themselves from the traditional schemas of a sentence-based grammar.
- 11.
The notion of value is understood here in the broad sense encompassing all issues at stake in the interactions, be they internal or external, which constitute and are created by the life of systems.
- 12.
As evoked by the title of the pioneering work by H. Atlan Between crystal and smoke [Entre le cristal et la fumée, 1979].
- 13.
It is these schemas of understanding and figuration (in torrents, populations, forms, metamorphoses) which then occupy the center of the reconstructions, instead of the ideas of writing and of rewriting which represent another vision of temporality, in thought and in history (theme noted by the philosopher C. Malabou).
- 14.
Cf. a contrario the propositions developed in (Cadiot and Visetti 2001, Visetti and Cadiot 2006) where it was a question, through a discussion with various linguistic theories including Interpretive Semantics, of rethinking the semiolinguistic field in dynamicist terms, as a deployment of forms participating in several regimes or phases of meaning, each referring to a certain mode of linguistic genericity. We then call “motifs” the semantic formations which carry a genericity, said to be figural, that is characteristic of instable phases, and possibly present under various textual formants (e.g. morphemes, lexemes, idiomatic expressions, isotopies, etc.).
- 15.
Thus, the term “seme” does not appear in the preface to the 3rd edition of the theory’s founding work.
- 16.
Thus, the first of these epistemological orientations seems to allow for the designations or glosses of semes to have only a conventional status (albeit motivated since it deals with lexicalization), whereas the semes are conceived as “method invariants”, which their name may indicate but does not constitute. In the second orientation, on the other hand, it is not so directly a question of “method”, and we would expect the more opportunistic nature of the seme, which is then to be understood as an event within a trajectory (an “interpretive moment”), to result in a particular concern for its designation. But such is not the case. And when it does appear to be so, it is simply that the analytical notion of semic relation has been substituted with the more simply empirical notion of co-occurrence.
- 17.
Including a distancing from CT, which however remains a foundational moment, for each one of us, in our progressions steered towards different horizons.
- 18.
Also, cf. the works of the two authors cited in the bibliography.
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Piotrowski, D., Visetti, YM. (2017). The Game of Complexity and Linguistic Theorization. In: La Mantia, F., Licata, I., Perconti, P. (eds) Language in Complexity. Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29483-4_1
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