Double articulation

Fundamental principle of linguistics

Not to be confused with Coarticulation or Doubly articulated consonant.

In linguistics, double articulation, duality of patterning, or duality[1] is the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements (sounds, that is, phonemes) to produce a large number of meaningful elements (words, actually morphemes).[1] Its name refers to this two-level structure inherent to sign systems, many of which are composed of these two kinds of elements: 1) distinctive but meaningless and 2) significant or meaningful.

It is one of Hockett's design features.

## Theory

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Double articulation[2] refers to the twofold structure of the stream of speech, which can be primarily divided into meaningful signs (like words or morphemes), and then secondarily into distinctive elements (like sounds or phonemes). For example, the meaningful English word "cat" is composed of the sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/, which are meaningless as separate individual sounds (and which can also be combined to form the separate words "tack" and "act", with distinct meanings). These sounds, called phonemes, represent the secondary and lowest level of articulation in the hierarchy of the organization of speech. Higher, primary, levels of organization (including morphology, syntax, and semantics) govern the combination of these individually meaningless phonemes into meaningful elements.

## History

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The French concept of double articulation was first introduced by André Martinet in 1949, and elaborated in his Éléments de linguistique générale (1960).[3] The English translation[4] double articulation is a French calque for double articulation (spelled exactly the same in French). It may also be termed duality of patterning.

"Duality of patterning" was proposed by American linguist Charles F. Hockett in a 1958 textbook A course in modern linguistics.[5] The two terms are similar but different, and Hockett and Martinet proposed their concepts independently. Both of them were probably inspired by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev's theory of "two planes" of human language. Hjelmslev proposed that human languages have two kinds of planes: planes of plereme ("fullness" in Greek) and planes of ceneme ("emptiness" in Greek). The planes of plereme contain meaningful units, and the planes of ceneme contain meaningless units that make up the meaningful units. For example, the cenemes of spoken language are phonemes, while the pleremes are morphemes or words; the cenemes of alphabetic writing are the letters and the pleremes are the words.[6]

Sign languages may have less double articulation because more gestures are possible than sound and able to convey more meaning without double articulation.[7]

## See also

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* Origin of language
* Origin of speech

## References

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1. ^ a b Trask, R.L. (1999). Language: the basics. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-20089-X.
2. ^ Occasionally also "double segmentation".
3. ^ Martinet, André (1960). Éléments de linguistique générale (1st ed.). Colin.
Revised edition: Martinet, André (2008). Éléments de linguistique générale (5th ed.). Colin. ISBN 9782200354473. OCLC 942996561.
4. ^ Martinet, André (1964). Elements of General Linguistics. Translated by Elisabeth Palmer. Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571090792. `{{cite book}}`: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
5. ^ Hockett, Charles Francis 1916-2000 (1970). A course in modern linguistics. Macmillan. OCLC 1072556808.`{{cite book}}`: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
6. ^ Ladd, D. Robert (December 2012). "What is duality of patterning, anyway?". Language and Cognition. 4 (4): 261–273\. doi:10.1515/langcog-2012-0015. ISSN 1866-9808. S2CID 147433105.
7. ^ Sedivy, Julie (22 September 2014). "The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn't Exist". Nautilus. Retrieved 23 September 2014.

## External links

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* Wendy Sandler et alii, "The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language", 2009.