Connecting Social Semiotics, Grammaticality, and Meaningfulness

This monograph explores what linguistic categories can do to bring together syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology and information structure in a single analytic space. It assumes that an irreducible part of the semantics is shaped by reference in social semiotics to the extent of affecting grammaticality. It takes grammaticality as the central concept of grammar, and, through categories alone, provides an account of the meaningfulness of an expression that is consequent to the grammaticality of the expression. The role of the verb is crucial in relating the category choice to truth and decision in coming up with an account of the consequent meaningfulness.
These aspects make linguistic categories two-sided abstract objects, one side dealing with syntactic configurationality that is persistent from childhood to adult grammar, the other side dealing with pervasive referentiality in a developing grammar, both sides affecting grammaticality. The persistent properties that are studied in detail are case, agreement and grammatical relations. They are studied across a wide range of linguistic constructions intra-linguistically and cross-linguistically to carve out a landscape of possible human language categories. It is suggested that the proposed category landscape is sufficient for categorial typology, and necessary, if we conceive the main task of the language acquirer as coping with change and controlling the environment.