Relational network theory

The origins of Relational Network Theory date to 1957, when Sydney Lamb completed his PhD dissertation on the Uto-Aztecan language Mono. Contrary to prevailing structuralist methods at the time, which stipulated discovery procedures assuming two levels of structure (morphology and phonology), Lamb's dissertation argued that Mono was better described with four strata: the morphemic, allomorphic, morphophonemic, and phonemic. The relationships between the strata were postulated to be realizational, so that morphemes were realized by allomorphs, allomorphs realized by morphophonemes, and morphophonemes by phonemes. He later extended this argument to English in 1958 in a presentation to the Berkeley Linguistics Group. At this stage, Lamb regarded the main innovative insight of his new framework to be the multi-stratified structure of language, hence why "Stratificational Grammar" was initially chosen as the framework's name. The strata concept continued to be developed by Lamb under the influence of Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics, namely as an extension of Hjelmslev's notion of the linguistic sign as having an "expression plane" and a "content plane". In fall 1964, inspired by a passage from Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Lamb developed the insight that realizational relationships between units of different strata constituted a network, and that the units themselves were nothing but points in the network defined solely by realizational relations with other points. The first public presentation of the relational network notation was given a year later in 1965, in a lecture delivered by Lamb at the Linguistic Institute of the University of Michigan. Other linguists in attendance at that lecture included Ronald Langacker, Ruth Brend, and Lamb's students David G. Lockwood and Peter A. Reich. though Halliday states that Lamb was already aware of the possibility of relating linguistic theory to actual neural processes as early as 1963. == Overview ==

RNT suggests that the linguistic system may be analyzed according to separate 'strata', or levels. The strata are ordered hierarchically and, whilst there are no clear-cut boundaries between strata, the elements of each stratum share similar characteristics. For example, a lexical item in the lexicogrammatical stratum is typically a specific sequence of phonemes which connects one or more lexical meanings in the semantic stratum. Several strata are involved in the production of a sound from an initial idea. In linguistic production, each stratum provides actualization or realization for the next lower stratum. Thus, speaking a word would involve a realizational pathway from the semantic stratum to the lexicogrammar, then the phonology, and then the phonetics. The reverse direction is true for linguistic perception and comprehension. Some commonly posited stratificational units and their strata include: • The phoneme as the unit on the phonemic stratum. • The lexeme as the unit on the lexical or lexicogrammatical stratum. • The morpheme as the unit on the morphemic stratum. • The sememe as the unit on the semantic stratum. In contrast to generativist approaches to linguistics, Stratificational Linguistics does not support the notion of an autonomous stratum for syntax. Instead, the term 'lexicogrammar', borrowed from Systemic Functional Linguistics, is preferred because Stratificational Linguistics suggests that syntactic categories are merely labels for classifying different types of lexemes but do not actually play any role in the realization of the lexemes. ==See also==