Distributional Structure

1.1 Possibilities of structure for the distributional facts

1. What misconception of the “man in the street” does Harris correct?
   That he freely puts together whatever elements have the meanings he intends. In fact he does so only by choosing members of classes that regularly occur together, in the order in which those classes occur.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 146
2. Can the distribution of linguistic elements be stated exactly, despite the vagueness of natural language?
   Classes can: all elements group into classes whose relative occurrence can be stated exactly. But the occurrence of a particular member of one class relative to a particular member of another must be stated in terms of probability, based on frequency in a sample.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 146
3. Do distributional statements need support from normative rules, a standard dialect or history?
   No: every dialect studied, including colloquial and “substandard” speech, has regular occurrences, and the relative occurrence of elements can always be stated descriptively, without reference to history.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, pp. 146–147
4. Why does Harris prefer successive groupings into sets to enumerating each element’s total restrictions directly?
   Direct enumeration (as some engineers proposed, e.g. departures from equiprobability per sound) gives no simple description and doesn’t order the restrictions. Grouping elements into sets at successive levels gives fewer, simpler statements, ordered so the larger restrictions come first and the list can be stopped at any point as an approximation.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 147
5. What does it mean that the investigation of a language is partly a “mathematical search”?
   Besides discovering the irreducible elements and their relative occurrence empirically, the linguist searches for a simple set of ordered statements expressing those facts.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 148
6. Is the distributional analysis of a language unique?
   No: several systems can be equally adequate (e.g. several phonemic solutions), and different ones may be simpler for different purposes. This non-uniqueness is harmless, since each system can be mapped onto the others.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 148
7. Contrast the item style and the process style of structural statement.
   Item (combinatorial) style: form A includes elements e + f, form B includes e + g, so all forms are combinations of elements; more algebraic and parsimonious. Process style: A is derived from B by changing f into g; more like historical statements, useful in morphophonemics. Both rest on relative occurrence, so both are distributional.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §1.1, p. 149