Construction of a linguistic theory from first principles and confrontation with crucial data

This paper develops a ‘signum ontology’, i.e. a model for coherently linking the signum (cf. sign) as an abstract entity ultimately to speech phenomena. It begins by analysing basic aspects of language: physical, meaningful and ‘word’ (i.e. in terms of word-identity), abstract and concrete (sections 2-5, 7), within a semiotic framework (Section 6). The resulting relationships between phonological, grammatical and abstract semantic entities (Section 8) allow for the incorporation of allomorph and alloseme into the model (Section 9). Having established core features of the model, I go back to the periphery, showing how maximally primitive notions (unascribed phonetic image correlate, and unascribed semantic image correlate / referent) provide a basis for coherently linking language reality (speech phenomena) to the abstractions of the model (Section 10), via a small number of serially applied basic principles, crucial among which is a set-forming criterion (Section 11). I show how the extra-linguistic models of general semantics and general phonetics (sections 12 and 13) link to the linguistic models of phonology and delology, and ultimately to the signum (sections 14-17), and the instantiational correlate of the signum, the lexonete (utterance) (Section 19). I provide a complete model of the signum ontology (sections 20-21), showing that its overall structure requires two notions, the allomorphon and allosemon, which have no obvious correlate in standard linguistic theorising, but demonstrating also that they are essential for coherent analysis of two phenomena which are widely recognised in linguistics: incomplete neutralization and imperfect synonymy (sections 22-23). I demonstrate the integration of the signum ontology with the other component of the overall theory (extended axiomatic functionalism), the system ontology (Section 24). Finally, I attempt to show that the small number of basic principles used for establishing the signum ontology model in this paper can, in fact, be further reduced (Section 25).