On the Notions 'dual Articulation' and 'structural Analogy'

This talk is devoted to a rather ‘conceptual’ discussion of some notions that bear directly on the relationship between phonology and morphosyntax. First I will discuss some of the original formulations of the principle of Dual Articulation (Dual Patterning) as found in the work of Martinet, Meillet and Hockett, and then we’ll see how dual articulation is now often understood. Initially, there existed a ‘sequential’ understanding of this notion. In the first articulation, words (or morphemes) consist of (meaningless) segments, while in the second articulation, words/morphemes are grouped into larger meaningful constructions. Thus morpho-syntactic structure is built on top of (word) phonological structure. In the first articulation constructions of meaningless units (phonological forms) are (largely arbitrarily) linked to meanings, while in the second articulation meaning is linked to specific (hierarchical) structures, the morphosyntactic form. Thus, phonology and morpho-syntax together constitute the form of language and ‘grammar’ is the system of basic units and combination rules that we use to describe that form. At the level of phonology, the basic units are ‘features’, while the morpho-syntactic basic units are the category labels Noun, Verb, etc. The kinds of combination rules in both domains are largely the same which brings me to the second notion, Structural Analogy. Structural Analogy refers to the structural resemblance between the phonological structure and the morpho-syntactic structure; both are based on identical principles (such as binarity and headedness), and their differences are due to the fact that phonology exclusively interprets phonetic matter, while morpho-syntax interprets both phonetic and semantic matter. Semantics is irrelevant at the level of phonological form in that phonological form is not semantically motivated (iconic). In the view developed thus far, the phonology–morphosyntax interface is defined by linking phonological constructs to category labels, and one hierarchy is built on top of the other. However, this conception does not reckon with the claim that, as the morphosyntactic hierarchy unfolds, a non-isomorphic phonological hierarchy unfolds in parallel. The idea is that syntax groups the phonological material that is linked to the category labels in a way that is not necessarily consistent with the structuring of that material which is determined by ‘phonological’ rules. These ‘phonological’ rules, crucially, are not the rules that govern the phonological shape of words, and indeed they appear to be different in nature. It would appear, then, that we have two types of duality: (classical) serial duality (first phonology then morphosyntax) and (modern) parallel duality. (A third use of the term dual patterning simply refers to the fact that signs, simplex or complex have a form and a meaning.) It is parallel duality which invites us to say that complex (i.e. polymorphemic) words and sentences have two hierarchical organizations, one morphosyntax, the other phonological (1). I will argue that the view in (1) is incorrect and should be replaced by (2)