Scope misapprehension

As we have explained, there is an assumption that the semantic theory of the logical portion of language is now nearly complete and will form the foundation upon which some larger semantical structure will be built. However, having taken no account of linguistic change, philosophers of language have ordered their building materials the wrong way round.^2.4

Connectives are not at all suitable for a lasting foundation. Historically, the connective vocabulary has shown itself to be extremely fragile, while under similar conversational pressures, lexical vocabulary has proved itself comparatively resilient. Although compositionality - the syntactic composition of sentences - is widely claimed as a key condition, both of our capacity for novel speech production and of our capacity for speech comprehension, this condition represents only a synchronic point of view. Language as a phenomenon must also be viewed diachronically. When we look at language in its temporal dimension, we see matters differently. First, for all our compositional potential, we actually compose very few sentences each day, either in production or apprehension of speech. This actual composition of speech is the main vehicle of language change. But the compositional forces that can bring about compositionally significant changes of uses in functionalized vocabulary have less dramatic effects upon lexical vocabulary. This particular dynamic is well illustrated in Jane Austen [2].

Have you had any letter from Bath? [Henry Tilney to Catherine]

No, and I am very much surprised. Isabella promised so faithfully to write directly.

Promised so faithfully!­A faithful promise! That puzzles me. I have heard of a faithful performance. But a faithful promise - the fidelity of promising! It is a power little worth knowing however, since it can pain and deceive you. -Jane Austen, [1] p.209-10-

The construction arises from a misconstrual of scope: in the word sequence, promise faithfully to $\alpha$, the adverb faithfully, in the ancestral uses, modifies the infinitive. The promise, on the ancestral construal, is the promise faithfully to write. The other construal - reserved by Austen for the likes of the naive Catherine and the feckless Lydia -, which takes faithfully to modify the main verb, permits these intransitive constructions, and must therefore give to the element faithfully either a new meaning, or no meaning at all. Of course the language finds an idiomatic use for the construction as a whole, a use which is suggestive of earnest, hand-on-heart asseverations and undertakings, but it is not one that relies upon composition of autonomous meanings. The word faithfully has never migrated with any such meaning to other environments.

Negation-raising verbs such as believe, think and so on present a similar phenomenon. The common construal of I don¹t believe that $\alpha$ used instead of I believe that not-$\alpha$ has not spawned a new meaning of the verb believe; in biological terms, idiomatic uses do not generally propagate except artificially. A non-English speaker who says I don¹t hope you slip on the ice ^2.5 by analogy with the negation-raising idiom, is more likely to be quoted than to be imitated. We mention, in passing, that the verb doubt may be an exception to this general claim. There is good reason to suppose that the present use of the verb is a mutation of an earlier weaker use, one that is exemplified frequently, for example, in Pepys¹ Diary [61]

There I found as I doubted Mr. Pembleton with my wife - 1663 05 06

occurrence in KJV. It may well be this earlier weaker use that persists in such constructions as

I do not doubt but that the Viet Cong will be defeated. - Richard Nixon

Functional vocabulary is less impervious to the effects of such scope misconstruals. Of the many instances we now know about, we will mention only two here. The first involves the word unless, which is a reduced form of a longer construction; on [a condition] less (than that). In its earliest inter-clausal uses, such a construction would be conjunctive in character. $\alpha$ on a condition less than that $\beta$ would be representable roughly as $\alpha$ $\land$ $\lnot$ $\beta$. But now suppose (as seems to have been the case) that the construction is never used outside the scope of some prefixed negating item. Schematically, we can represent this as Not $\alpha$ unless $\beta$ (the underlining representing the original and...not reading. On that reading of unless the sentence as a whole will have its present-day reading if the scope of the Not is taken to be as in Not ($\alpha$ unless $\beta$). Suppose that an emerging portion of the linguistic population agrees, with its complementary portion, agrees on the occasions of use of all such sentences, but takes the scope arrangements as (Not $\alpha$) unless $\beta$. That emerging portion must give to the unless element of such sentences a new construal, as it would do in the case of or, for purposes of new compositions. Since the two portions of the population are unaware of the ancestor of unless unaccompanied by the preceding negation, the difference in their syntactic construals will never become apparent, and therefore the new construal never corrected. But under such conditions, a natural bias in favour of short-scope construals of negatives or simpler syntax more generally will eventually tip the balance of construals in favour of the innovation and, if unless migrates to other un-negated environments demanding an or construal, a sufficient portion of the population of language-users will have already accepted the or construal of unless ensuring its survival. Since the or reading will do for all instances, both the original (on the the new syntactic construal) and the new un-negated one, the and...not construal, is eventually extinguished. We have expressed this in the language of construals, but the phenomenon clearly has a neural substrate involving some form of imperfect replication of structure.

One element of the apprehension of speech (or written text) involves the neural rehearsal of the motor sequencing involved in its production [53]. We assume that the rehearsal of a spoken sequence under the auspices of one syntactic scheme is different from the rehearsal of the same spoken sequence under the auspices of another.

In the case of functionalized vocabulary, the principle governing changes seems to be occasions of identical instances, accompanied by novel syntax that give rise to entirely novel uses. For lexical vocabulary, such novel construals produce idiomatic constructions, but seldom new independent uses. We take as a requirement that an independent use is stable through some range of distinct environments. We may speak of a meaning restricted to a single environment type, but within the theoretical framework we are presenting, this would just be a redescription of what we ordinarily call an idiomatic use.