Content Analysis

Abstract

A preliminary analysis of the content level of a short text was given by way of illustration in Chap. IV. The content is built up from discrete elements which, in exactly the same way as phonemes and prosodemes, have to be classified into paradigms of invariants. The procedure for establishing invariants is commutation. There is opposition between content invariants in the paradigm, and there is contrast between content units in the chain. Both the number of units and their relations are conventional and arbitrary. There are no a priori valid categories of content, though the particular functioning of the human mind may be supposed to restrict the possibilities to some extent, just as the acoustic and articulatory alternatives and variables do so on the expression level. Nor are there any sub-levels of analysis of the kind found in traditional grammar (no division into morphology, syntax, word-formation, semantics, etc.). The validity of such concepts has to be proved a posteriori for any language separately. Nothing makes their existence a necessity. All grouping of content units into functional classes or semantic fields consequently has to be looked upon as the result of an analysis of a given language system and must not a priori be supposed to exist in the same or a similar form in a language which has not yet been structurally described. It should be stressed that, as a consequence, terms like word, ending, prefix, suffix, parataxis, hypotaxis, substantive, verb, conjunction, tense, case, voice — all familiar to us from traditional grammar — have no raison d’être in the description unless they have proved to be appropriate denominations for structurally defined linguistic categories in the language in question. A very large number of older descriptions of exotic languages — often made by missionaries without any linguistic training — are useless scientifically because they are made on the model of classical (Greek, Latin) or traditional European grammar (English, Spanish). No grammatical structure is universal. Nor has any semantic categorisation general validity. Universal is only the basic structural principle, which remains identically the same whatever the particular linguistic structures¹.