서술과 구성

이향천(Lee Hyangcheon) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2012 언어학 Vol.0 No.62

This is a critical treatise on predication: What is predication? What constitutes it? What form does it show? What is its function? What is it used for? Where can we locate its phenomena? Predication is a primitive relation. It cannot be defined in other terms. The relation has the form: A predicates B. Henceforth, A is defined as ‘the predicater’(praedicans), and B is defined as ‘the predicated’(praedicatum). Predication is a relation holding among the items of the world(the meanings of the representing words), and these items constitute the material of the structure. There may be various conditions and restrictions on the material. Where a predication is set, there arises a state of affairs. It constitutes the state of affairs by shaping it as it looks. Before predication, the state of affairs cannot arise (out of the flux), it would be formless, it wouldn’t be anything we could name or discern. Only through predication the states of affairs show themselves, they come to exist before our eyes. And the predication is represented in language in the form: A predicates B. Through language we can establish the phenomenon of predication. Thus, predication constructs the states of affairs. Likewise, the modification constructs the things, and conjunction constructs the complex structures: the complex of things, the complex of states of affairs and so on. These three(modification, predication, conjunction) are the principles of world construction. The view that the world can exist independent of the knower(observer), the so-called objectionism, is criticized. And we cannot say that there can exist a thing or what cannot be said. Finally Donald Davidson(2005)’s view of predicantion is criticized. He set the question in the wrong form, so his proposed solution is not a genuine solution. Predication makes a unity of a sentence by the very relation, predication. The unity of a sentence cannot be achieved or assured by any property, or any function of its parts. There is a relation set on the items and the items constitute unity by the very relation. I propose to take the various ways of researching language. The language can be viewed not only as a system of forms, but as a process, as an action, as a force, as a socio-historically developing system. And it can be studied with the help of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, sociology, history and science. Predication can be viewed as a force of constructing the world, the state of affairs. The way of studying language is envisaged that treats the linguistic phenomena critically, the fundamental facts, the forms and the materials, and the limits and possibilities, and the functions or forces, which may be called “critical linguistcs”. The critical linguistics must comprise the scientific findings or principles of the age.

신범주론의 구축을 위한 예비적 논의

이향천(Hyangcheon Lee) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2020 언어학 Vol.0 No.87

This is a preliminary discussion before constructing a new category theory. First, Aristotle’s ontological categories, Kant’s epistemological categories, Old Grammarian’s linguistic categories are reviewed and criticized. They do not observe the classifying norms, mix the criteria, they do not discriminate the levels of analysis, they do not distinguish between what a thing is and what it is used for. They view the world as the sum of events or states of affairs. And the categories they have presented are all the constituents of the events: the things, the qualities, the actions, etc. But there are many other things that belong to the upper levels. For example, the modalities are what predicate on the events, causals are the patterns of the combination of the events. It is my thesis that we do many different things with a sentence. Not only do we represent an event with a sentence, but we construct a story on that event, express the modalities on that event, and finally we do an act through uttering that sentence. All these (which do not belong to the event) are expressed in a sentence and they have been treated as constituting an event. The world, or the reality is the one in which we live, but according to the traditional perspective, they are the objects of the observations only. And they do not know that the reality is dependent not only on the observation, but also on the perspectives, the contexts, and the actions. I am going to build categories based not on the observation, but on the action. These categories are not the components or elements of events, but the organizing departments of action: the actor, the action’s goal, the action’s context, the available resources, the instruments or methods, the procedure, etc. The world is constructed based on the actions or around the actions. The actions can change or modify the world and the changed and ever changing world will also change the actors. Thus the world view has changed and all the actions, even category making must change thereupon. We live in a changing world and we adapt ourselves to it. The changing world should be categorized not in terms of static components or members, but in terms of action organizers.

참이나 거짓을 양상으로 볼 수 있는가?

이향천(Hyangcheon Lee) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2018 언어학 Vol.0 No.81

Truth or falsity, unlike possibility or necessity, has never been treated as one of modes in modal logic, category theories, or in any other grammatical theory. The reason, I think, resides in people’s deep-rooted way of thinking that the fact, namely, the true state of affairs is the basic or the primitive of all states of affairs. This paper is a criticism on this view. First, for the sake of clarification or elucidation of the concept ‘mode,’ my definition of mode proposed in my article H. C. Lee (2010) is reintroduced. There the definition was sought most broadly, and across the levels. Ontologically, the mode is how the world is formed; epistemologically, it is how it appears to the observers; and linguistically, it is the way of representing the ontological, and epistemological modes. Linguistically, the mode expressions can function as predicates on the individual state of affairs that the sentence represents, or they can function as modifiers on the variable state of affairs. The modal expressions cannot modify the specific or individual events. This is one way of differentiating modification from predication. The distinction between ‘mood’ and ‘modality’ which can be found among many scholars is spurious. The difference is just that of the ways of expressing modes: morphological, as verbal inflections or other ways. The morphological, inflectional way of expressing the mode has traditionally been called ‘Mood,’ but there is no need to isolate it from the other ways of expressing modes. People are used to treating declarative sentences as the basic of all the types of sentences. I call this attitude “truth fundamentalism.” They insist that the other types can be derived from this declarative sentences. Davidson, who based his semantic theory of natural language on the truth-conditional theory is one of the proponents of this view. I criticize his semantics, the truth-conditional semantics, and I find no reason or evidence to posit the truth as the basic of all the other modes. Linguistically, the predicate “true,” parallel to the others, is one of the modal: It is true that..., it is possible that..., it is necessary that..., it is fortunate that.... Why do people ignore (deliberately or unconsciously) this parallelism? I think this is the effect of the truth-fundamentalism. Next, truth-fundamentalism is criticized in other areas. First, in the area of perception, according to Hoffman et alii (2015), human perception has evolved not by developing seeing what is true or not, but by adapting to the environments. The veridical perception, that is the way of seeing things as they are, extincts and the fitness avails. What we see is not the reality itself, but is an interface between us and the reality. Second, Heylighen (2005) proposes anticipation-control theory of mind, which says that the most fundamental fact of how the mind or the brain works is not that of information processing, but that of anticipating and controlling. That is, we do not see the things as they just appear at the moment, but in the anticipation and feedback when the anticipation fails. That is people see the world not in terms of how it looks now but in the frame of anticipation and control. In conclusion, our definition of mode is revised: mode is the way the world is formed or the way the world appears to us. In addition, it is the way it appears in the way that is most suitable for our survival and reproduction, and the way it appears in the frame of anticipation and control.

무엇을 명사라고 하는가?

이향천(Hyangcheon Lee) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2008 언어학 Vol.0 No.50

관계에 관하여

이향천(Hyangcheon Lee) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2011 언어학 Vol.0 No.61

Relation, as one of Aristotelian categories, is different from substance. "Father" is not an expression referring to a thing(a substance), but it is a relational term, derived from a state-of-affairs "A begets B (or, A gives birth to B)", from which we call A B"s father. It takes two to have a relation, and the relation is defined or stipulated on the two. In this respect, relation is different from the other Aristotelian categories in that it takes 2 substances or two properties or others to form a relation. For the sake of conceptual clarity, we need a terminological refinement, or redefinition. For example: A is the modifier(modificans) of B and B is the modified(modificatum) of A when A modifies(modificare) B. A is the predicator(praedicans) of B, and B is the predicated(praedicatum) of A when A predicates(praedicare) B. A is the sign(significans) of B and B is the meaning(significatum) of A when A means (signifies, significare) B. The ‘subject-predicate’ opposition is to be rendered as ‘praedicatum-praedicans’ opposition, which will make it clear what matters with respect to the relation and where the terms came from. In relation to linguistic signs there are various relations involved: 1) the sign-meaning relation; 2) the sign-sign relation; 3) the meaning-meaning relation; 4) the sign-(meaning-meaning) relation; 5) the (sign-sign)-(meaning-meaning) relation. The syntactic relations as spoken by Chomskians are usually intended to be that of 2), the sign-sign relation, but we can see many times they involve 3), the meaning-meaning relation. There are three meaning-meaning relations: modification(A modifies B), predication(A predicates B), and conjunction(A and B are conjoined with each other). These are the core relations which describe the structure of the meanings of language. And if we can say language constructs the world as it is, the 3 are the central ways of how it constructs the world. By predication a state of affairs comes to have its shape; by modification a thing comes to have its shape. Without such languaging the state of affairs has no structure, no shape, so it cannot exist as such. The languaging(modifying, predicating, conjoining) is the principle of structuring the world. It takes two to tango. It takes two to relate. The study of relation is the study of two-ness.

양상의 언어 철학적 고찰

이향천(Hyangcheon Lee) 사단법인 한국언어학회 2010 언어학 Vol.0 No.56

The term ‘mode’ is redefined. The world consists of cases(following Wittgenstein"s “Die Welt is alles was der Fall ist”). Each case(as a whole) looks this way or other (ontological mode), and the knower captures the case as it looks (epistemic mode) and the speaker expresses it as a predicate of the case (linguistic mode). In this way we can avoid the vagueness of the so-called definition of the mode ‘the speaker"s attitude toward a proposition’. When we investigate the modal phenomena we need to look into the acts involved in uttering a sentence. There are linguistic acts like stating, informing, demanding, threatening and so on. And there are epistemic acts like seeing, hearing and knowing. Furthermore we need to understand about action, acts in general. For example, we need to understand that every act has its belief and desire involved. In Korean, the sentence final clitics like ‘-ta, -ne, -ni’ are the markers which indicate the acts of a speaker. They indicate a stating, an informing, and an affirming of a fact respectively. They do not have the modal meaning like ‘speaker knowing, hearer unknowing’ themselves. These modal meanings are presupposed or implied by the acts or by the desires and beliefs involved in the acts. The Korean sentence final clitic ‘-gess’ has no meaning ‘intention or desire’, and . ‘-ci’ is not a sentence final expression at all. To get a proper view on the modal phenomena we need a proper theory of meaning, the theory of action, the epistemology, and we need a unificational view on the various manifestations of the mode, about the situations of the linguistic acts and the interactions between the speaker and hearer and so on.