Stativeness and Directionality in System and Text

Abstract

The article aims at exploring the essence of the distinction between the two fundamental forms of language which the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev designated as system and text. After discussing and rejecting Hjelmslev's own characterizations of this distinction as that between either- or- and both-and-relations as well as several distinctions used by Roman Jakobson to characterize that distinction, the article proposes to consider the possibility to regard as the defining characteristic of the system stativeness and as that of the text directionality. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that these characteristics are only the dominant ones of the two forms of language, the system also displaying phenomena of directionality and the text phenomena of stativeness. These, however, play, within the respective forms of language, only a subordinate role. Subordinate directionality in the system is to be seen in the internal structure of all complex system-units, such as words as parts of the lexicon, and even between some of these units, namely numerals, themselves. Subordinate stativeness in the text, on the other hand, is displayed by enumerative coordinations, the concept of coordination comprising not only the coordinations of traditional grammar, but also a certain higher-level type of coordination, a type which I call macro-coordination.