Background

Slavic languages exhibit a variety of prosodic systems, though they may be generally divided into stress and pitch accent languages. In some, prominence is expressed by free stress, as in Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Russian, Northern Kashubian (Slovincian); in others, stress is fixed, as in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Southern Kashubian, Upper Sorbian, Macedonian; and stress in Polabian may be predictable. Lower Sorbian has initial stress and a strong secondary stress on the penultimate syllable. The Slavic languages with pitch accent have only one main pitch accent per phonological word (unlike contour tone languages). Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene are of this type and the pitch accent is often subject to certain quantitative or positional restrictions. Transitional dialects tend to show transitional prosodic features, e.g., some southwestern Ukrainian dialects have fixed stress; eastern and parts of central Macedonia have different types of non-fixed stress patterns.

In this chapter I demonstrate that although there was one accent per phonological word in Common Slavic (CS), Late Common Slavic (LCS) had a bisyllabic norm for the expression of prosody. First I show that a major change in Slavic was the shift from a bimoraic to a bisyllabic prosodic grouping (2.2). This bisyllabic norm was more than a phonetic requirement for the expression of pitch accent; it was a phonologically significant metrical grouping. Many phonological changes in LCS, including the distribution of quantity, were circumscribed by it (2.3).

Slavic Prosody: Language Change and Phonological Theory was written at a very active time in the field of linguistics. New ways of analyzing language were being formalized, new studies of Slavic languages were being published, and discussions between Slavists and general linguists were raising some provocative questions. It is my hope that this work will be a contribution to the ongoing discussions in phonology. In this sense, the present study is only a beginning. By reconsidering some long-standing problems of Slavic linguistics from a new theoretical perspective, I have tried to suggest alternative interpretations and solutions to several persistent puzzles of Slavic historical phonology, while exploring some implications of the theoretical assumptions inherent in this approach.

The interpretation of Slavic historical phonology presented here evolved over a period of several years and will probably continue to evolve beyond the writing of this book. An earlier version of the analysis of liquid diphthongs may be found in Bethin 1992a and 1994b. Some sections of chapter 2 (2.2 and 2.4.1) first appeared in a slightly different form as Bethin 1993a, and the discussion of the Neoštokavian accent retraction in 2.5.1 is based on material published as Bethin 1994a. An analysis of gemination in Ukrainian first appeared as Bethin 1992c.

One way of approaching linguistic meaning is to think about translation claims between languages – interlinguistic semantic claims. Another approach focuses more directly on meaning claims concerning words or sentences within a language, on intralinguistic semantic claims. It is when focusing on intralinguistic issues that analyticity intuitions find their clearest voice; indeed, one cannot get very far at all in thinking about intralinguistic meaning claims without confronting difficult issues about analyticity. In this chapter we present our own account of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Though we accept much of Quine's negative appraisal, the analytic/synthetic distinction does have a useful place, we argue, in socio-linguistic practice; what needs to be resisted is certain philosophical – more specifically, epistemological – uses of that distinction.

Quine's polemic against synonymy and the analytic/synthetic distinction has many facets.

REALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

We have argued that a certain sort of metaphysical project – that of discovering what naturalistically constitutes truths about meaning – is almost certainly doomed to fail. Relatedly, we have urged in Part I of this book that both the conjecturalist and the descriptivist picture of meaning discourse are misleading. Our emphasis in the rejection of these pictures is rather different from that of our predecessors, however. While the most famous critics of this historical tradition – Quine in his critique of the myth of the museum, Sellars on the myth of the given, and Rorty on the mirror of nature – emphasize the notion of description as it functions primarily in the context of broad philosophical theory, we focus our critique on more workaday, more immanent notions. That is, while we certainly agree that language should not be understood in general in terms of some special relation to reality articulated by some correspondence-like term of philosophical art, we do not deny that there is some less haughty sense in which, say, description is a genuine linguistic phenomenon worthy of study.

INTRODUCTION

There are a variety of issues associated with the metaphysics of meaning. At least, many of the following questions will strike readers as familiar: Are there facts about meaning? Are there such entities as meanings? If so, what sort of entities are they? What sorts of facts, if any, do facts about meaning supervene upon? How are claims about meaning to be analyzed? By virtue of what do words and sentences have the particular meanings that they do? What is the relationship between semantic facts and non-semantic facts?

In the remainder of this book we fulfill our promise to explore metaphysical issues about meaning. As we move from the project of describing the function of meaning discourse to that of engaging directly with metaphysical issues, we are hopeful that our discussion thus far will shed some light on those issues, yet we should not expect too tight a connection between the metaphysics and socio-linguistic practice. In that regard we question in this chapter a pervasive assumption relating to our list of metaphysical questions.

INTRODUCTION: ROBUST AND MODEST MEANING THEORIES

Michael Dummett has distinguished “modest” from “robust” meaning theories. The proponent of a modest meaning theory, as Dummett uses the term, does not “hope to give an account of the concepts expressible by the primitive vocabulary of the object-language: it can seek only to explain to someone who already has those concepts, what it is that a speaker must know if he is to know the meanings of words and expressions of the language, and hence to attach those concepts to the words which, in that language express them.”

An example of a theory that tries to do the job of a modest meaning theory would be the Gricean one. That sort of theory takes for granted a grasp of various propositions and merely explains how utterances can be used to express those propositions whose understanding by the speaker is presupposed. Another example would be a truth-conditional theory of meaning that takes the form of a set of axioms that recursively generate statements of truth-conditions as in: “La neige est blanche” is true iff snow is white. A set of axioms of this sort would not, in themselves, suffice to tell one what it takes to have the concept is true, or the thought snow is white.

PHILOSOPHICAL ACCOUNTS OF MEANING

Daniel Dennett once invited us to consider super-Martians who were highly advanced scientifically yet lacked all intentional concepts. They spoke the language of austere physics and were capable of perceiving and describing the world at the micro-level. If such beings could accurately report happenings in their environment, make predictions, and generally live out their lives wholly within the scientific image, what would they be missing, Dennett wondered, by virtue of lacking intentional concepts? Dennett's answer was that they would miss out on various higher-level patterns, describable by way of mentalistic and semantic vocabulary. Such patterns are available to us by virtue of our understanding of such vocabulary, and we rely inescapably on it.

Such an answer, in outline, is fairly standard today. That is, it is fair to say that the general consensus in modern philosophy is that semantic talk – to focus on the species of concern to us – is descriptive of some sort of high-level pattern. There is, to be sure, a fair range of disagreement as to what sort of pattern it is. For some (Field, Devitt) it is a pattern of causal relations between humans, their language, and macroscopic objects; for others (Putnam at one point, Lycan) it is purely the functional organization of individual thought, while various philosophers extend this individualism to include either relations to external objects (Putnam at another point), or relations among the people in one's society (Burge, perhaps Sellars, and Putnam at yet a third point).

NATURALISM AND MEANING DISCOURSE

Ontological naturalism, epistemological naturalism

Our topic in this chapter is reductive naturalism about meaning discourse, i.e. the project of providing interesting analyses of meaning discourse using the language of natural science. While having no general hostility to modal theorizing, we believe that the prospects for generating interesting and explanatory modal generalizations that link meaning to the language of natural science is quite limited. As a consequence, the prospects for rich and explanatory analyses of meaning of the sort that contemporary philosophers hope for is quite limited.

Of course, the term “naturalist” need not be, and has not always been, associated with this strong reductive project. That project is but one manifestation of the desire to see human beings as part of the natural world. As a preliminary clarification, we might usefully distinguish here between naturalism in epistemology and naturalism in ontology. Naturalism in ontology is the project of considering each putative phenomenon and then rendering its nature intelligible in terms of the language of natural science or else dismissing it as a fiction.

INTRODUCTION AND OUTLINE

One of Quine's most important methodological contributions to the philosophy of language has been to focus the theory of meaning on the activity of the translator, on a consideration of the data she has to go on and the criteria for a correct translation. While it is not our purpose to endorse this as the central theoretical context within a mature semantic theory – that is, we do not, in the end, endorse radical translation in the Quinean sense as the fundamental model for all semantic understanding – we do recognize that Quine's stark posing of the epistemic condition of the radical translator is a crucial step along the way to an understanding of what is, or what could be, going on in semantic interpretation.

Central to Quine's discussion of the situation of the translator is his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, according to which the totality of actual and potential speech behavior of a linguistic community – which he takes to be the only ontological ground that exists for claims of meaning – does not suffice to determine a single correct translation manual from one language to another.

To say that a certain person desired to do A, thought it his duty to do B but was forced to do C, is not to describe him as one might describe a scientific specimen. One does, indeed, describe him, but one does something more. And it is this something more which is the irreducible core of the framework of persons.

In what does this something more consist? First, a relatively superficial point which will guide the way. To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties. From this point of view, the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the “ought” to the “is”. But even more basic than this (though ultimately, as we shall see, the two points coincide), is the fact that to think of a featherless biped as a person is to construe its behavior in terms of actual or potential membership in an embracing group each member of which thinks of itself as a member of the group …

Thus, the conceptual framework of persons is the framework in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provide the ambiance of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives …