Distributional Structure

2 Distribution and meaning

1. Why does Harris deny a one-to-one relation between linguistic structure and meaning?
   Language structure doesn’t match the structure of the physical world or of human response; a person’s meanings grow while their language stays constant; there are ideas one cannot readily express; and words lack a single or even coherent range of meanings because of sound change, homonymy, borrowing, forgotten metaphors.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2, p. 151
2. Where does Harris find the correlation between language and meaning strongest?
   In connected discourse, especially stylized scientific reports and, above all, formal proofs in mathematics and logic. Even so, form and meaning are two planes whose structures are similar in various respects but not identical.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2, p. 152
3. Why can’t morphemes be decided by meaning, as in persist vs person?
   Meaning makes it hard to decide whether either has one morpheme or two. Distribution decides: consist, resist, pertain, contain, retain pattern with per- and -sist, but nothing parallels person, so persist is two morphemes and person one.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2, p. 152
4. How did Harris analyse Cherokee verb prefixes without relying on meaning?
   There are scores of person prefixes with no obvious segment meaning “I”. Grouping words whose stems differ but whose sentence environments are the same, he assumed a shared morpheme and worked out its alternants morphophonemically, step by step obtaining morphemes like {z} ‘I’, {h} ‘you (sg.)’, {o} ‘persons excluding you’, {n} ‘another person’, whose combinations need not match any person/number categories we have in mind.
   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2, pp. 153–154
5. Describe Harris’s procedure for finding morpheme boundaries without meaning.
   For a test utterance, look at many utterances sharing its first \(n\) phonemes and count how many different phonemes follow. Where this count peaks (greater after \(n\) than after \(n-1\) or \(n+1\)), put a tentative morpheme boundary, then check and correct with patterned relative occurrence. (Later called successor variety.)

   • Harris, 1954, Distributional Structure (Word), §2, p. 155