Foundation of an 'integral' grammar

Abstract

Within the framework of an integral grammar, syntax, morphology and lexicology represent three types of consideration of the same reality, which is the linguistic construction of meaning. The distinction between these three linguistic disciplines may be useful in some cases, but in other cases, it may hinder the explanation of linguistic phenomena. Integral linguistics is capable of unifying the disciplines by integrating them. It can, however, use modular methods where appropriate. It could, therefore be seen as a kind of construction grammar with the option of modularising its descriptions and explanations. This is not to say that this approach advocates methodical indifference; on the contrary, it presupposes a particularly rigorous deduction of its concepts and descriptive methods. The foundations for such a grammar have already been laid in Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, which —with striking foresight— anticipates the ideas of nowadays' construction grammars and provides them with a hitherto unprecedented theoretical foundation.

This is the starting point for the present article, which defines the functional levels of the sentence on the ground of the dimensions of utterance meaning. It deduces the notions of syntactic function and syntactic constituency from the synthetic and analytical mechanisms of the syntagmatic dimension of language and those of form and category from the abstraction principles of the paradigmatic dimension of language. Finally, it will be shown how the basic ideas of construction grammars, in particular that of the syntax-lexicon continuum, can be convincingly and exhaustively explained by the universal principles of grammar postulated by Saussure: the syntagmatic and paradigmatic structuration of language.