Oliver Cresswell

In this concluding chapter, originally his farewell lecture to the faculty of Meisei University, Caldwell explains how his encounter with Japanese speakers of English provided supporting evidence for his theory of Molecular Sememics. Beginning with a discussion of the misuse of the determiners “a” and “the” by Japanese speakers of English, Caldwell finds that instead of systematic or syntactic rules being violated, it is a misunderstanding of the patterns of salience ordering in English. In contrast to Japanese, English uses determiners, pronouns, and several other devices, to marshal lesser or greater degrees of determinacy and focus to indicate the salience structure of a sentence. As seen in Chapter Four, these are the underlying structures of discourse which help order the speaker’s communicative intention, and satisfy the focus of the listener. Importantly, however, these structures are not rules, nor is language a categorical system; for Caldwell, unlike many in the Western tradition of linguistics and philosophy, is not interested in habitual and extreme generalizations, or strict categorization. Neither is he interested in unending particularization, such that everything is different beyond reconciliation. As such, Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics is an account of language that sees it simply as a tool for communication, and seeks to understand the different strategies that help us do just that.

Caldwell’s analysis of Richard Ford’s “Issues” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” displays how Molecular Sememics can be used as an aid for literary criticism. In commenting on the two authors’ styles, Caldwell notes that while Hemingway attempts to reify his words since he knows they will be distrusted as mere symbols, and Ford distrusts the words and categories he’s inherited as an author, both take up what Caldwell deems the creative obligation of writers: to make new meanings – new molecules – out of the terms we use every day. Hemingway also leaves it an open question to be resolved by the reader as to whether a character or the narrator is speaking, while Ford instead moves his authorial spotlight everywhere, leaving nothing to the imagination. With the former, this highlights how the meaning of the story lies just as much in what is unsaid as in what is said. For the latter, all molecules have every item exhaustively listed, and so there is nothing for the reader to learn beyond what is given. Operating subtly in this chapter, Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics sheds light on authorial intention, as well as the effects of that intention, conscious or unconscious.

Caldwell sets out an alternate view to the prevailing orthodoxy that syntax is the fundamental structuring force of language. Focussing his discussion around discourse, he distinguishes between two kinds: discourse in the large sense – a set of semantic relationships that become conventionalised through continuous use in the same way; and discourse in the small sense – a particular act of speech, writing, or conversation that takes place ‘within’ a discourse in the large sense. Caldwell argues that discourse naturally structures itself in three different ways: through the discontinuity of its terms and forms; by the mutual presupposition of the terms ‘inhabiting’ the discourse; and the directionality, purpose and aim of a discourse (in the small sense). These three forms of the coercive structure of discourse provide a discipline to it that differs from the syntax of standard theory, and highlight how the meaning of our words comes not from the terms themselves, but from the discourse within which they are situated.

Caldwell’s aim here is to provide the context within which his own theory is meant to be understood. He gives a brief history of the Structuralist approach to linguistics to shed light on both its failings and its insights. According to Caldwell its key failure to provide a semantically consistent analysis of the system of ordinary language was due to the scope of this analysis. The principle of the differential of meaning could not provide the answers sought when applied to language as a whole. However, states Caldwell, when ordinary language is not viewed as a one large system, and the differential is applied to particular speech acts – small, local discourses – such analysis yields semantic consistency. This “molecule” is the arena wherein a word comes to have meaning in contrast to its immediate “others”; and as such, Caldwell’s own theory of Molecular Sememics is perhaps best understood as something of a moderate or micro-structuralism.

The theory of Molecular Sememics was born of Caldwell’s frustrations with standard theory’s inability to adequately speak to literary criticism. The molecular sememe, understood as a new paradigm for linguistic study, can shed a great deal of light on such an heretofore neglected branch of linguistics. Caldwell shows that understanding meaning to belong to the molecule as marked by the word chosen in context allows for a deep and nuanced engagement with any text. A reader’s understanding of an author’s intentions can be greatly enhanced by reconstructing highly marked molecules, using both historical context and clues found within the text itself, to find the missing terms – the words not chosen – of the molecules. Deconstructionism in literature turns on the same argument, requiring a critic to rewrite the text by choosing the originally unmarked terms of a molecule; but it takes this conclusion to an unhappy extreme, often losing the author’s message in the process. Recognizing that language is not a single system or structure, but rather a set of conventionalized micro-structures, Molecular Sememics offers a view of language that allows for the creativity witnessed not just in poetry and grand works of prose, but in everyday, ordinary speech.

Beginning with one of his favourite examples of a ‘highly marked’ molecule at play – a university Registrar’s use of the word “undoubtedly” – Caldwell shows how in ordinary language it is this brief moment of choice, this “molecule”, that is in fact the sememe, the fundamental unit of meaning. This molecule is created in momentary discourse, existing before conventionalization ‘fixes’ its terms, and failing to notice this gives the false impression that it is the words we use to name a molecule that are the bearers of meaning. Situating himself against this orthodox understanding of linguistic meaning, Caldwell firmly sets the premise of Molecular Sememics to be that meaning originates in an individual utterance, and is then conventionalized through continued use in that same manner.

While the previous chapter provides a wide gloss of varying applications of Molecular Sememics for literary criticism, this chapter focusses specifically on the ontological connections between language and perception unearthed in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. By implicitly utilizing his theory of Molecular Sememics, Caldwell aims to show that Stevens’ concern with poems that truly capture the phenomenology of experience offers a perfect example of the way our linguistic world can shape our understanding of our perceptual world. For Stevens’ use of various rhetorical devices helps to create a poem that feels as real as the experience it is itself about, highlighting an underlying tenet of Molecular Sememics: we have the power to name our experiences, and by so doing, create the sense and meaning these experiences have for us.

The sections of this chapter were each intended to be their own chapters in a much larger volume focussed on Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics, and he begins by presenting his motivation for the theory. It has the potential for explaining many facts about language, which, when taken together, are difficult to explain consistently within the current orthodoxies of linguistic study. Caldwell stresses that such an explanation can be found by focussing on parole and not langue, for language is more like a biological process, and not like a computational system as standard theory suggests.The second section provides the context for understanding Caldwell’s own theory, as a sort of continuation of the Structuralist program of the twentieth century. However, Caldwell does not take Saussure’s idea of ‘langue’ to be anything other than a heuristic, and deems the failures of Structuralism (and current standard theory) to be a result of mistaking the formal model of language that arose out of this program for an explanation of language itself.Following from this in section three, Caldwell endeavours to begin where Saussure finished. Approaching language from a non-formalist perspective he seeks to arrive at an explanatory theory that is primarily concerned with speech, and only concerned secondarily with language in the abstract or formal sense. On such a view, speech is not a transmission system for encoding and decoding messages, but a semiotic medium where meaning is created within a temporary and emergent structure – the molecular sememe – arising out of the perceptual structures of the human mind.In the final sections of this chapter, Caldwell details some of the structural characteristics of the molecular sememe. It is a macro-structure, a complex unit, which is given focus by the teleological structures of the discourse it exists within. These teleological structures are expressions of intention by speakers in a discourse, which organise themselves to focus on a particular molecular sememe, and give meaning to the sentences of the speaker.

The standard theory of the mind and language, as Caldwell understands it, is that human thinking doesn’t occur in language at all, but takes place in ‘mentalese’, a purely formal manipulation of logical concepts that then correlate to words. Contrary to the linguistic relativist hypothesis, all languages are fundamentally equal in this, and though the words may differ the thinking is the same. Here though, Caldwell proposes a different view, drawing attention to the fact that the human brain is the kind of thing that creates synthetic organisations out of the sense data it receives from the world. These synthetic organisations are molecular sememes, the arenas where linguistic meaning is created; for our minds bring our experiences of the world into focus, and into discourse. Once in focus these molecules can be given a name, and they may have different names at different times, in different discourses, and sometimes have no name at all. Thus, on Caldwell’s view it is not just different languages and cultures that may be incommensurate – even different discourses in the same language may be so with one another. Molecular Sememics therefore stands in opposition to both standard theory and linguistic relativism, being more akin to linguistic pluralism, where any language and any speaker, can express the meanings of the world in many different ways.