The linguistics of William Diver and the Columbia school

Abstract

Abstract. The school of linguistics established by William Diver, known as the Columbia school, is arguably the most radical on today's linguistic scene. Many of the insights that appear as important or interesting ideas in today's functionalist thinking were incorporated by Diver in a coherent, comprehensive theoretical framework even before functionalism emerged as a distinct line of thought. Diver eschewed a-prioristic and purely deductive categorizations and grounded his work on an empirically-motivated distinction between the language-specific and the universal. He offered a penetrating critique of the categories of syntax which showed them to be a flawed basis for analysis of language, and thereby demonstrated a foundational fault in generative grammar. By focusing on naturally occurring discourse data, the Columbia school has been led to a view of grammatical structure as driven by the communicative function of language and by the effect of human behavioral traits such as inference and minimization of effort. This view reveals that a great deal of what had been regarded as "core syntax" or polysemic is in fact monosemic signal-meaning pairing. Columbia-school analyses demonstrate such hypotheses with innovative contextualized and quantitative validation techniques. The same orienting principles yield an explanatory phonology, one that is thoroughly "natural" and grounded in phonetic substance without being merely descriptive. The Columbia-school framework offers an original view of what constitutes explanation in linguistics.

6. Degeneracy: The maintenance of constructional networks

“…2 Indeed, if schematic that is lexically underspecifiedconstructions like the ditransitive for instance have their own idiosyncratic meaning that cannot be reduced to its parts (see Goldberg 1995), they do not differ really from individual words, as they realise an irreducible form-function correspondence. 3 This is not a new idea, but goes back to at least Bloomfield, and it is one of the foundational principles of the Columbia School of Linguistics, as set out by Diver (Huffman 2001). 3 The various types of constructions can be classified according to the dimension atomiccomplex and the dimension schematic-specific, which are orthogonal to each other.…”

Common Semantic Denominators of the Internal Vowel Alternation System in English

“…It will be further illustrated in section III.2 that the different IVA phonological classes and subclasses also reflect semantic differences, and the closer the specific IVA classes are phonologically the closer they are semantically. Our approach to the so-called irregular forms follows the tenets of the Columbia School (CS) sign-oriented framework, "where meaning is defined as a value relationship between grammatical signals sharing a common semantic domain" (Crupi 2006: 263, who also refers to Diver 1995Reid 1991;Huffman 2001), which is able "to explain the distribution of linguistic forms" (Reid 2002: ix) or, following Diver (1995: 49), allows "discovering the motivation for the particular form". Thus, our analysis differs from other functionalist approaches because it ventures beyond the traditional linguistic categories usually associated with the sentence, because "sign-based theories take the distribution of linguistic forms as the phenomenon to be explained" (Davis 2006: 2), or as Reid (2002: ix) states: the "Columbia School [...] makes linguistic meaning the explanans in linguistic theory rather than the explanandum".…”

El Orden Del Adjetivo en La Lengua De Señas Argentina: Un Estudio Preliminar

“…Desde este punto de vista, es la posición del adjetivo en relación con su núcleo en un contexto nominal la que posee un significado invariante: la diferenciación (Bolinger, 1954;Klein-Andreu, 1983). Este significado invariable posee dos categorías: diferente de otros/ diferente de sí mismo (Diver, 1995;Huffman, 2001), diferente sin contraste/ diferente con contraste (Klein-Andreu, 1983), o diferencia absoluta/ diferencia relativa (Martínez, 2006). Entonces, la anteposición del adjetivo a su núcleo [Adj N] se relaciona con la ausencia de contraste mientras la posposición con la presencia de contraste.…”