In linguistics, double articulation, duality of patterning, or duality
is the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements (sounds, that is,
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s) to produce a large number of meaningful elements (words, actually
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...
s).
Its name refers to this two-level structure inherent to
sign system
A sign system is a key concept in semiotics and is used to refer to any system of signs and relations between signs. The term ''language'' is frequently used as a synonym for a sign-system. However, the term ''sign-system'' is considered preferab ...
s, many of which are composed of these two kinds of elements: 1) distinctive but meaningless and 2) significant or meaningful.
Theory
''Double articulation'' refers to the twofold structure of the stream of speech, which can be primarily divided into ''meaningful'' signs (like words or
morphemes
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone a ...
), and then secondarily into ''distinctive'' elements (like sounds or
phonemes
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
). For example, the meaningful English word "cat" is composed of the sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/, which are meaningless as separate individual sounds (and which can also be combined to form the separate words "tack" and "act", with distinct meanings). These sounds, called
phonemes
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
, represent the secondary and lowest level of articulation in the hierarchy of the organization of speech. Higher, primary, levels of organization (including
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
* Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
* Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
,
syntax, and
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...
) govern the combination of these individually meaningless phonemes into meaningful elements.
History
The French concept of ''double articulation'' was first introduced by
André Martinet in 1949, and elaborated in his Eléments de linguistique générale (1960). The English translation ''double articulation'' is a French
calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language w ...
for ''double articulation'' (spelled exactly the same in French). It may also be termed ''duality of patterning''.
"Duality of patterning" was proposed by American linguist
Charles F. Hockett
Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics, structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Leonard Bloomfi ...
in a 1958 textbook ''A course in modern linguistics''. The two terms are similar but different, and Hockett and Martinet proposed their concepts independently. Both of them were probably inspired by Danish linguist
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studie ...
's theory of "two planes" of human language. Hjelmslev proposed that human languages have two kinds of planes: planes of ''plereme'' ("fullness" in Greek) and planes of ''ceneme'' ("emptiness" in Greek). The planes of ''plereme'' contain meaningful units, and the planes of ''ceneme'' contain meaningless units that make up the meaningful units. For example, the ''cenemes'' of spoken language are phonemes, while the ''pleremes'' are morphemes or words; the ''cenemes'' of alphabetic writing are the letters and the ''pleremes'' are the words.
According to Hockett and other linguists, this duality is an important property of human languages, since it allows for the expression of a potentially infinite number of meaningful language sequences. Strictly speaking, however, such expressiveness follows from
generativity
The term generativity was coined by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson in 1950 to denote "a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation." He first used the term while defining the Care stage in his theory of the stages of psychosocial ...
or
productivity
Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
(a finite number of components combining via rules to produce a potentially infinite arrangement of novel utterances), not of duality per se (one could have a system with 2 levels of the kind referred to as duality, and yet have only finite productivity). For further discussion, see
figurae
Linguists often use the terms phonemes and morphemes to refer, respectively, to the figurae and the signifiers of human languages.
The division of the stream of speech into meaningful morphemes plus their further subdivision into meaningless eleme ...
, as well as
Hockett's design features Hockett's Design Features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of langua ...
, which treats productivity and duality as distinct essential properties of language.
Sign language
Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...
s may have less double articulation because more gestures are possible than sound and able to convey more meaning without double articulation.
See also
*
Origin of language
*
Origin of speech
References
External links
*Wendy Sandler et alii
"The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language" 2009.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Double Articulation
Linguistics
Philosophy of language
Semiotics
Theories of language