All languages share certain categories of expression which seem to correspond to a constant model. The forms which these categories assume are listed and classified in linguistic description, but their functions become clear only when they are studied in action—in the practice of language and the fabrication of discourse. These categories are fundamental, independent of all cultural determination. They reveal the subjective experience of speakers who establish and situate themselves in and by language. Our effort here will be to clarify two basic and necessarily associated categories of discourse, that of person and that of time.

Contemporary study of language has turned to questions of linguistic structure and cognitive psychology of a sort that aroused little interest in the immediately preceding period. The extent to which this is a return to long neglected topics rather than an innovation is not widely appreciated, however, and I would like to comment briefly on this matter here.

A central topic of much current research is what we may call the “creative” aspect of language use, that is, its unboundedness and freedom from stimulus control. The speaker-hearer whose normal use of language is “creative,” in this sense, must have internalized a system of rules that determines the semantic interpretations of an unbounded set of sentences; he must, in other words, be in control of what is now often called a generative grammar of his language. A generative grammar must determine the structural description of each possible sentence, where the structural description of a sentence is a formal object of some sort that contains what information the rules of the language provide concerning the semantic content and phonetic form of this sentence.

Since “in human speech, different sounds have different meaning,” Leonard Bloomfield's influential manual of 1933 concluded that “to study this coordination of certain sounds with certain meanings is to study language.” And one century earlier Wilhelm von Humboldt taught that “there is an apparent connection between sound and meaning which, however, only seldom lends itself to an exact elucidation, is often only glimpsed, and most usually remains obscure.” This connection and coordination have been an eternal crucial problem in the age-old science of language. How it was nonetheless temporarily forgotten by the linguists of the recent past may be illustrated by the repeated praises for the amazing novelty of Ferdinand de Saussure's interpretation of the sign, in particular the verbal sign, as an indissoluble unity of two constituents—signifiant and signifié— although this conception jointly with its terminology was taken over entirely from the twelve-hunded-year-old Stoic theory. This doctrine considered the sign (sêmeion) as an entity constituted by the relation of the signifier (sêmainon) and the signified (sêmainomenon). The former was defined as “perceptible” (aisthêton) and the latter as “intelligible” (noêton) or, to use a more linguistic designation, “translatable.”

Not long ago, when general linguistics tended to be identified with the philosophy of language, a linguist entitling a short article “The Word” would have been rightfully accused of unbearable presumptuousness. Any discussion of the word involved, in fact dealing with the relationship between thought and language, that is, penetrating into an area which the linguist neither dared nor desired to exclude from his researches but in which he felt ill-equipped to accomplish anything worthwhile alone. In the second place, it involved all the questions raised by the nature of the sign, in other words, semiology in its entirety. Finally it led to reconsidering the relationships between the “word” and the sentence on the one hand, the word and the “lower” elements of the sequence, syllables and “phonemes” on the other. The question, however, that the linguist could not ask was whether criteria existed that permitted, for all languages and all cases, the identification and delimitation of a segment of the sequence as a determined word. For this it would have been necessary for a linguist to feel that it was his duty to define precisely the terms he used. He would also have needed enough courage to foresee that the term “word” itself might have to be put aside if his researches showed that this term could not be given a universally applicable definition.

If from the etymological point of view the term category denotes a class of objects sharing a common feature, under linguistic category we generally understand a class of linguistic units (chiefly words) sharing a common meaning or syntactical function, expressed by a common external (phonetic) form. Thus the words room-s, table-s, pencil-s, match-es, glass-es… are representative of the category of the plural number; (be) describe-d, contrive-d, share-d, found-ed, assert-ed… represent the category of the past tense. Forms like men, children, etc., on the one hand, (he) rode, went, etc., on the other, are also members of the category of the plural or past, respectively, in spite of the lack of the characteristic feature -(e)s or -(e)d, since functionally (i.e. as regards meaning) they lean upon the pattern of the productive -s and -d forms, thus:

the semantic difference between man and men (child and children) is the same as that between e.g. room and room-s, rendered by the sign -s versus zero;

the semantic difference between rides and rode (goes and went) is the same as that between describe-s and describe-d, rendered by the sign -d as against -s.

An attempt is made here to consider poetry as one of the aspects of language. It is not the first attempt and certainly not the last.

At first glance we are startled by the multiplicity of additional formal laws restricting the poet's free choice of expressions: intricate rhyming schemes, equal number of syllables in a line, regular distribution of short and long, stressed and unstressed syllables, alliteration, prevailing in both ancient Germanic and modern American poetry:

(E. E. Cummings, All in green)

In 1957 American linguistics seemed to have reached a plateau of achievement and acceptance on which its practitioners could pause in retrospective pride. That year saw the publication, under the aegis of the American Council of Learned Societies, of a sampling of papers, edited by Martin Joos (Readings in Linguistics) and documenting, according to its subtitle, “The development of descriptive linguistics in America since 1925.” In a period of about five years around that date H. A. Gleason, Jr., Charles F. Hockett and Archibald A. Hill published textbooks which summarized and extended current views on linguistics, while another leading linguist, Kenneth L. Pike, summed up his considerable experience in a preliminary version of a major work on Language. In the same year there appeared a slim volume which was to have a startling impact on linguistics. Its author, Noam Chomsky, was a student of Zellig S. Harris who himself had codified the methods of structural linguistics in 1951 and was one of the leading proponents of the assumptions and goals of American linguistics attacked so sharply by its new critic. Truly a paradigm of the Hegelian myth of history.

The well-known German mathematician D. Hilbert wrote : “A nation in isolation cannot progress unless neighboring nations are also progressing, the interests of the different states require not only that order should reign within each of them but also that the relationship between these states should be correctly maintained; the same is true in the case of the different sciences.”

These words of D. Hilbert, written many years ago and in which he stresses the prime importance of the interdependence of the sciences, take on a special significance at the present time when cybernetics, which is developing at an increasingly fast rate, makes it possible to discover profound analogies with far-reaching implications, between spheres of knowledge which a priori are unrelated.

Speech—both audible and inaudible—is always speech about something. The subject matter may be natural reality, social reality, or psychic reality (the manifestations of a person's spiritual life exist for us objectively, i. е., outside us and independently of us, and thus form part of reality which we investigate). The epistemological controversy up to this day has been over which element is primitive : language, which creates our image of reality, or reality, which is mirrored, reflected, mapped by language. Two solutions are possible: either the linguistic process is an act of creating an image of reality, or it is an act of mirroring, reflecting, etc.

We speak because we live in society: this might seem a truism, the statement of which scarcely needs any lengthy justification; all those involved in the study of social groups, under whatever aspect, know that the knowledge of language is one of the conditions at the basis of their research and one of the essential means at their disposal for successfully carrying out their task, delving more deeply into the facts, and verifying their results. It would seem that those linguists who do not conceive of language as an interpretation, but rather as the pure subject material of their science, also have to express their agreement with regard to the evidence of the proposition; in fact, if the sociological character of the linguistic fact has never been denied, the attention which has been devoted to it has varied considerably.

Antoine Meillet demonstrated in 1906 that language corresponds exactly to the definition of a social fact. “Language is… eminently a social fact.” In effect, this is explicitly implied in the definition proposed by Durkheim. A language exists independently of the individuals who speak it, and although it has no reality outside the sum of these individuals, it is nevertheless, due to its general character, exterior to each of them, thus proving that it does not depend on any single person to modify it and that every individual deviation from common usage provokes a reaction.” Meillet shows moreover that the causes for semantic changes are social in character and can be classified into three main types. They are explained by changes in the thing meant, by the transfer of words from one social group to another, and, thirdly, by intrinsic linguistic conditions. In fact the causes are outside the linguistic system itself—the causes for changes of the third type are not the linguistic conditions themselves but lie in whatever has induced these conditions—and this is true of every linguistic system (by system of a language I mean also the relationships between the words and their sense). The division of a society into classes or castes produces differences in vocabulary, grammar, phonetics and phonemics, in style, etc. The adoption of a new language by a people can lead to profound changes through the agency of the substratum. The material and spiritual evolution of a society is followed by the appearance of a great number of new words and new meanings which have repercussions on other parts of the linguistic system, a characteristic aspect of the linguistic development of Europe and of the languages of every society of our time which has become industrialized and has adopted modern Western civilization.

Although language is at least as old as mankind, its mysteries have as yet hardly been scratched and whatever we may hold as its ultimate nature, origin and destiny would remain at present highly speculative. Indeed, a bylaw of the Linguistic Society of Paris is mentioned to rule out of order any formal paper on the origin of language. What is more, socially accepted perspectives on language have altered in the course of ages and while it is true that a “scientific” study of linguistic phenomena has been confined to ancient India and recent times, it may very well be that the fundamental and really controlling level of these phenomena, as distinguished from the level of their habitual use and description, lies in that spontaneous power latent in the psychic reality whereby it is able to attain self-expression in lower media through inducing in them rhythm and pattern. Behind the pattern of the audible sound waves of speech lie the patterns of articulation and neural activity. Despite the operation of chance in the choice of convention in language and in its actual use, there are discernible in it patterns of a statistical and logical nature.