A clue about the mind: “Is-A” sentences

I'm bumping this post from 2011 to the top of the queue. Why? Because it is about the relationship between word order in sentences and order in the process of parsing sentences. That makes it relevant to my ongoing research into the nature of processes in LLMs.

Somewhere in his Problems in General Linguistics, my copy of which is, alas, in storage, Emile Benveniste has a chapter on sentences hanging on the auxiliary “to be.” As Benveniste was a linguist of the Old School, when being a linguistic meant familiarity with many languages, including—and this is important for this particular topic—classical Greek, it had examples from many languages, making it tough sledding for a monoglot like me.

While the content of this post certainly arises out of my thinking about that chapter, in the absence of actually having the text in front of me, I hesitate to assert a stronger relationship than that. I note only that, for Benveniste, the auxiliary “to be” was fraught with metaphysical significance. For the concept of being derives from “to be.” Where would philosophy be without Being? Thus, when Benveniste pondered such sentences, he wasn’t merely commenting on language. He was doing philosophy, or, if not quite that, camping out on philosophy’s door step.

I’m interested in such sentences because I believe they are a DEEP CLUE about how the mind works. I just don’t know what to make of the clue.

Is-A Sentences

So, I'm interested in word order in assertions such as the following:

(1) Fido is a beagle.
(2) Beagles are dogs.
(3) Dogs are beasts.

They all move from an element in a class (whether an individual, Fido, or another class, beagles) to a class containing it. None of them move in the opposite direction. Consider what happens when you try to go the opposite way. In the following sentence the class is mentioned first, then the subclass:

(4) Beagle is the kind of animal of which Fido is an instance.

In particular, note that (4) has a metalingual character that (1) does not. That is, (4) explicitly asserts that we are dealing with classification. One can do that metalingual job in various ways, but, as far as I can tell, one can't avoid it. That is, one cannot construct a proper English sentence relating a genus and species in which the genus is mentioned first, one can’t do that without ‘looping through’ some kind of metalingual construction on the way from genus to species.

Why?

What does this assymetry tell us about the underlying mechanisms? Why don't have sentences such as:

(5) Beagle za di Fido.

In this case "za di" is the inverse of "is a". English has no such sentences & no such inverse.

So, how widespread is this asymmetry and is there any explanation of this directionality?

But, consider . . .

I sent a query on that matter to a listserve, I forget which one, and got two replies that add some complexity to the matter. Rich Rhodes, Linguistics at UCal Berkeley, tells me that in Ojibwa the word order is reversed, the class comes before the individual, but the asymmetry remains. He then comments, which he qualifies as a quick guess:

My guess is that there is no compelling discourse function (like information flow) which makes it desirable to invert classificational equatives. Hence we only get the "unmarked" order. Subject-predicate in theme-rheme languages (like English) and predicate-subject in rheme-theme languages (like Ojibwe).

So, what's the nature of the mechanism that determines the "unmarked" order? That's what I want to know.

Lee Pearcy, Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., offered these examples:

(6) The beagle is Fido.
(7) The dogs are beagles.
(8) The beasts are dogs.

As stand-alone sentences, they seem a bit awkward to me. But they fare better in answers to questions, e.g.:

What’s that dog?
Which dog? The beagle is Fido and the terrier is Max.

What’re those animals?
The dogs are beagles, the cats are Persians.

In those contexts, the matter of class or classification is raised by the question, thus making it present in the discourse and so available as a point of attachment in the answer.

Further clues, anyone?