manifest by the semantic role of the particle, the ontological result is always the same—the creation of a linguistic object with a sense of linguistic being. This ontological unit that
results from the nominalization process establishes a grounded basis or a stage for further expansion of sentential or discourse units.
4.2.3 Philosophical—Creation of Ontological Objects
4.2.3.1 Language as Representation
The very act of language is observational. Language represents the deed. It is always in the “about” position, talking about something, rather than the direct relationship of with or to.
The difference between the experiencer stance and that of the observer is similar to the difference between knowing someone and knowing about them, knowing a sense or
experience versus knowing a fact. The difference is a degree of immediacy, of contact, of intimacy, of experience. The about relationship is one of distance, removal, separateness.
The about stance is that of the observer of the phenomena; it is the point of view of the narrator, the describer. It is external to the object or process it seeks to represent and thus is
able to perceive it.
Language is the act of the observer. It is separate from the phenomena. Language is not the thing itself but an attempt to represent it. By imitation mimesis language is a system
that functions observationally in relation to something else. That something else can be one’s own thoughts, as when one writes his own thoughts. The words are not the thoughts, but
represent them. The words on the page are a more distant representation of the words used to represent those thoughts. Thus an intricate system of self-same representation operates, both
in the oral and literate processes of languaging. The thing that language represents or replicates may also be an external to the speaker process, or a physical object, or even the
objects of the languaging process itself, which we call words, or utterances, or sentences.
Language is an external representation; it is not the item or the process it represents. It is a model of thought which can be represented by action.
4.2.3.2 Role of the Observer
The person using language is in the role of the observer. As a speaker he uses a model of his thoughts and perceptions, which may include his physical, emotional, mental, and social state
of being. The report that he issues about something is always his perception and formulation, even if conventionalized by social norms. His perceptions are about something.
It is this about relationship that is here called “observational” and is at the core of what language does ontologically. Language both represents and imitates something else. As
I place words on the page, I believe my thoughts to be the same as, or almost so, the lexical and syntactic frame I employ. The reader, presumably believes and who should speak for
him or her here but the author who controls the discourse—postmodernism aside that these words represent the thought of the author, and that even the lexical selection, the syntactic
turn and innuendo represent most accurately his or her perceptions. What other means of communication have we, if our words do not reflect our thoughts? Indeed, that dilemma is at
the forefront of all international political negotiation, as well as interpersonal and domestic relations.
Language and its about relationship is normally presumed to be representational. What it represents is the problem dealt with by spouses, by negotiators, by courts of law, by
theologians. That it represents something else is not in question. It is already presumed by those who ask the question “what does it mean?” It is that other aspect of being that is
commonplace in human languages, if not all languages. That otherness aspect is ontologically present in consciousness yet usually out of sight—that is, out of conscious
attention. For this reason, humans normally are not alert to the representational system that language is.
4.2.3.3 Nominalization as Observational Act
The grammaticalization of language as an observational act is nominalization. When a speaker formulates his thought into one sentence or even one word, he is grammaticalizing
them. Thoughts, perceptions, concepts take on a representation in language which entails a grammatical category normally.
1
The act of observing is signaled linguistically by epistemic devices, such as verbs or adverbs that comment on the act. In English, these are recognizable as the matrix clause with
psychological or sensory perception verbs such as think, said, seems, hope, dream. 80 a. He seems distracted.
b. I
thought he was coming today. The function of the matrix clause in 80a is to inform or make explicit the fact that
the observerspeaker is present in the linguistic scene. Other pragmatic functions may relate to the degree of certainty on behalf of the speaker about the assertion and therefore the
degree of responsibility he bears for the utterance. The attitude of the speaker to the assertion may also be implicit.
Modern theories of propositions have suffered the Platonic fate of a mind- independent status without the benefit of a perceiver. Traditional theories of propositions
presuppose a functional relation between sentences of natural language and propositions. The Russellian tradition takes propositions to be “structured entities whose constituents are
individuals and relations, plus perhaps some logical operations” Asher 1993:9. The Fregean tradition, found in many modern linguistic theories of semantics, views propositions as “sets
of possible worlds” for which Montague 1963 is chiefly responsible Thomason 1974; Asher 1993:9. The problem with the latter view is that natural language has been excluded.
4.2.3.4 Philosophical Approach to Objects
Asher 1993 explores natural language abstract objects in discourse and their anaphora. He attempts to establish a firm ontological basis, a metaphysics that is “real.” Following upon
1
Expressives and sounds of various types that are clearly communicative and representational are often excluded from linguistic description, unfortunately.
the natural language studies of Vendler 1967, Davidson, and others, Asher built a semantic model called Discourse Representational Theory of abstract nominals. This theory is
representational and conceptualist together with a “natural language metaphysics,” that he credits to Emmon Bach 1981. It should be noted that natural language distinguishes many
types of abstract objects, whose ontology is presupposed. These abstract objects include propositions, properties, states of affairs and facts, and all belong to the broad class of
semantic expressions called nominals.
Figure 30. Spectrum of abstractness Asher 1993:57
Like Vendler 1967, Asher 1993 distinguishes two types of sentential nominals but contributes his philosophical observations that there are 1 world immanent objects—events
and states—with causal, temporal, and spatial properties, and 2 purely abstract objects like propositions and thoughts which lack temporal, spatial, and causal properties. These
correspond respectively to event and result nominals. Though Vendler did distinguish fact nominals, an inclusive model was not developed between those two basic types and the fact
nominals. Asher proposed a much broader spectrum of nominals with fact nominals in between the two basic classes of event and result, because they can have causal efficacy like
events but do not take spatial or temporal properties like results. He proposes a schema of world immanence to capture the similarities and differences between these three types of
nominal abstract objects. He labels events as “eventualities” and results as “propositions.” Subcategorizing each type into component forms, he proposes a spectrum of more concrete
entities on the left to more abstract on the right.
4.2.4 Continuum of Noun and Verb Categoriality
