A priori in Language and Linguistics: Word and Its Basic Unit

Abstract

Language displays, first and foremost, the core ability of human consciousness to develop svyaznost’ (coherence and linkage). To approach language as a sign system means to concentrate on its insignificant and third-rate characteristics that are not essential for it (like featherlessness for humans). Using language we can develop svyaznost’ at the levels of text, phrase, word, and a unit less than a word. This article discusses the last level, since the other levels had been or will be investigated in other works. When developing svyaznost’, human con­sciousness is subject to a priori laws of sense positing. They differ in European and Arab-Muslim big cultures based (accordingly) on substance and process log­ics. The Arabic literary language (fuṣḥā) is analyzed in theoretical perspective of traditional Arabic linguistics (naḥw wa ṣarf), while the European languages are discussed from the standpoint of contemporary Western linguistic thought. As a result, differing a priori regularities were discovered in what regards the minimum (atomic and irreducible) unit of speech and possibility of its ar­ticulation, as well as a correlation between this basic unit and a whole word. The human language is an utterly important vehicle for developing svyaznost’ in the overall cognitive architecture, therefore any universal language science should necessarily give account of, firstly, the fact of language a priori regulari­ties, and, secondly, of their variance in languages based on different logics of sense positing. The discovered a priori laws that define our ability to single out and to pronounce the basic (atomic) unit of speech in European languages and in Arabic literary language confirm the universality of the laws of sense positing that set up a priori laws for not only theoretical thinking but for sense perception as well.