GEORGES MOUNIN

A semantic field:
The names of the domestic animals in French *

&dquo;k’~’;;1
1: I!:

All attempts to describe the vocabulary of a language in structural terms

derive ultimately from Saussure’s insight that the word is not an isolated unit.
They rest on the postulate that the vocabulary is organized in sets (or fields,
as they are known since the work of Trier), each consisting of a number of
lexical items interconnected by a network (or structure) of relationships.
The problem is to find the field within which the interconnections between a
given group of words will show up best; and this in turn entails a prior decision,
or assumption, concerning the kind of domain or dimension in which fields are
best sought. So far, linguists have taken it that the object of investigation
is a conceptual field (Trier’s term). Thus Saussure takes from psychology
the concept that enables him to consider craindre &dquo;to fear&dquo;, avoir peur &dquo;to
be afraid&dquo;, and redouter &dquo;to dread&dquo; as members of the same field 1. Trier’s
own example, the &dquo;semantic sphere (or circle: Bezirk) of Knowing&dquo;, is de-
fined by a concept taken from philosophy 2. Haugen takes from geography
the concept that justifies his treatment of the names of the cardinal points as
a field 3. Mator6 draws on his own sociological views to delimit the &dquo;notion-
al field&dquo; centred on the word art in 1765 4, and so on.
To emphasize that semantic fields have not been defined by specifically lin-
guistic procedures is not necessarily to condemn them, as if it were a priori
never legitimate for linguists to classify by meaning. It may be that we have
no choice but to define semantic fields conceptually. But, if so, we must be
clear what we are about, never losing sight of the fact that our starting-point

*
Translated by Dr. Peter Wexler (School of Comparative Studies, University of Essex)
from &dquo;Un champ s~mantique: La denomination des animaux domestiques&dquo;, La linguistique
1, 1965, pp. 31-54.
1. F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 5th ed., Paris, Payot, 1960, p. 160.
2. J. Trier, Der deutsche Wortschatze im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, Heidelberg, 1931.
3. E. Haugen, "The semantics of Icelandic direction", Word 7, 1951, pp. 1-14.
4. G. Matoré, La méthode en lexicologie, Paris, Didier, 1953.
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173-190.
174

is extra-linguistic, and recognizing that in bringing together the words horse,

gelding, stallion, mare, colt in a single semantic field we are relying entirely
on extra-linguistic experience of the biological relationships between the ani-
mals they name5.
But since structural linguistics bases its analyses on the search for formal
criteria, attempts have been made to set up (or to verify) certain fields by such
procedures. An example6 its Saussure’s &dquo;associative relations&dquo; like those
between enseigner &dquo;teach&dquo;, enseignant &dquo;teacher&dquo;, enseignement &dquo;teaching&dquo;,
which constitute what Dubois ’calls an &dquo;etymological series&dquo;. A fuller
illustration is given in Table 1. This lists all the nomenclature of domestic
animals (in universally accepted senses of the adjective) recorded in run-of-
the-mill contemporary dictionaries, which is taken to represent the relevant
vocabulary, active and passive, of a Frenchman of average education.
A field of this kind, which groups lexical items related both in form and
meaning, might be called morpho-semantic, if Guiraud had not pre-empted
the term in a different sense, or morpho-lexical, or etymological; but perhaps
the best term would be derivational.
A tabulation of this kind tells us something about the structure of the
vocabulary, but only what we know from Saussure’s category of &dquo;motivated
words&dquo;. But those who have tried to describe portions of the vocabulary in
structural terms have always set their sights higher than this, and have sought
to detect the semantic relationships between &dquo;non-motivated&dquo; words. A
derivational series can only be a preliminary indication of the existence of a
field, or a confirmation of one established on other grounds.
*

An adequate linguistic structuration of the field of domestic animals might

or might not fill the vacant squares in Table 1, but would certainly extend its
range with terms obtained by other, purely linguistic procedures. But before
we attempt reconstitute the internal structure of this semantic field, a pre-
to
liminary difficulty must be faced: we have now established a derivational
field, indicating in a general way the existence of a semantic field; it has been
assumed that more truly linguistic criteria for defining this semantic field can,
in some as yet unspecified way, be found. But what are the grounds for this
assumption? Even Dubois, who of all writers on the subject has been most
careful to avoid recourse to non-linguistic criteria in describing the internal
structure of his fields, falls back on another science to establish the frontiers

5. Only L.J. Prieto, in his Principes de noologie, The Hague, Mouton, 1964, has proposed
an overall theory for the structural analysis of meanings.
6. Saussure, op. cit., p. 173.
7. J. Dubois, Le vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 à 1872, Paris, Larousse,
1963, p. 41.
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 175

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176

and to define the overall content of the political and social vocabulary he
treats. This field, he says, &dquo;is defined by the specific [semantic] function it
fulfills in the system of communication constituted by language&dquo;. It is &dquo;that
field which gives immediate expression to the economic, social and political
relations between the various classes of society [...]] The homogeneity of a
field is a reflection of the specificity of its [semantic] function ; and where
could one find a more clearly-defined lexicon than that which describes the
overall structure of society ?&dquo;8 But how is one to decide, by a formal pro-
cedure, whether a given term qualifies for membership of the lexicon of imme-
diate social relationships, or of domestic animals?1
Choosing a corpus, as Trier and Dubois do, may seem to be a linguistic
operation. But the fact that a word is found in the corpus and can be shown
to have the required meaning cannot of itself constitute formal grounds for
including it in the field unless the corpus has been chosen at random, which
is not the case either for Trier or Dubois. Each chose his corpus by concep-
tual criteria -
a collection of texts considered a priori to be of a theological
or political nature. Moreover a second purely conceptual operation excludes
from consideration terms attested in the selective corpus but subjectively
judged not to form part of the field being investigated.
If we relied on a random corpus to provide the material for the semantic
field labelled &dquo;Domestic Animal&dquo;, it would have to be of immense size and
even so would almost certainly be incomplete: the corpus consisting of all
the writer’s conversations and ordinary reading over a two-month period
provided occurrences only of exotic animals and the names for mule, dog,
chicken, goat, fowl, sheep, pig, swarm, stallion, bullock and bull.
A statistically and linguistically arbitrary (but conceptually justifiable)
decision was therefore taken to confine the corpus to six volumes of the &dquo;Que
sais-je?&dquo; paperbacks. These are generally popular treatments of high qual-
ity, and as such may be taken to represent a vocabulary neither too technical
nor too non-technical. The titles chosen were: Thevenin’s Animaux domes-
tiques, Amiot’s Le cheval, Mathis’ Le peuple des abeilles, Chauchard’s Sociitis
animales, socijtjs humaines, Gibassier and Guyot’s Les noms des plantes, and
Guyot’s Origine des plantes cultivies.
In this corpus of about 200 000 words, the frequency of terms for the name
of the field (domestique, domestiqué, domestication, domestiquer, domestica-
teur, domesticable, domesticabilité, domesticité) varies from 196 occurrences
in Thevenin to 5 in Chauchard, 4 in Mathis, 3 in Amiot, 2 in Guyot, and none
in Gibassier. This confirms Gougenheim’s illuminating remark9 that &dquo;a
concrete word has no frequency&dquo; meaning that certain very common words
-

may not occur at all, even in an enormous corpus, unless steps have been taken

8. Dubois, op. cit., p. 1.

9. G. Gougenheim, "Les enseignements de la statistique du vocabulaire", Études de lin-
guistique appliquée 2, Paris, Didier, 1963, p. 41.
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 177

to place speakers in situations where these words might be needed. It

the
follows that corpus intended for a specific lexical investigation can never
a
be chosen at random, but must always be based on a conceptual, non-linguistic
decision to bring the conversation round to certain themes if the corpus is
-

an oral one, and for a written corpus to select texts by conceptually-defined

criteria.
*

In order to introduce greater formal rigour (of a linguistic kind) into the des-
cription of the internal structure of a lexicon, Dubois has advocated, in addi-
tion to the choice of corpus, two further procedures: the exploitation of lexical
equations and lexical oppositions within the sentence relationships which -

seem to be purely formal and distributional, but from which lexical or seman-
tic relationships can nevertheless be derived.
For example, if, in a sufficient number of contexts, the lexicalized syntagm
domestic animals is contrasted (in the logical, not the linguistic sense) with
the syntagm wild animals, we can be sure that their &dquo;values&dquo; (as Saussure
puts it) are semantically interdependent, and in fact mutually exclusive. But
are these relationships expressed often enough for our purposes? Of the 196
contexts in Th6venin in which the word domestic (or one of its seven deriva-
tives) occurs, 57 express a contrast between domestic and wild; in 25 of these
the contrast is within the same sentence, in the remainder within a slightly
longer context. Two of Chauchard’s 5 examples express the same contrast,
one of Mathis’ 4, two of Amiot’s 3, and one of Guyot’s two. The opposition
domestic/wild is therefore well attested; but it has still not been established
on formal linguistic grounds. Neither commutation nor distributional anal-
ysis can handle contexts like &dquo;On October 31 the workers’ battalions and
those of the bourgeoisie clashed on the Place de Gr6ve&dquo;, or &dquo;Indications of
domestication in ancient times may be revealed by the state of the skeleton,
particularly by features not present in the wild animal&dquo;. The contrast is
there, but it is a logical one. It may be expressed linguistically by coordin-
ation, or negation, or by an adversative, or by a term implying antonymy (&dquo;do-
mestic [...] reverting to wildness&dquo;). The only real formal element is the
use of authentic contexts: it is this which gives the procedure such linguistic
validity as it possesses.
In any case the procedure throws up a whole series of other oppositions
-

domestic/tame, wild/tame, domestic/game, wild/hybrid, domestic/acclimatized,

domestic/semi-domestic, domestic/semi-wild, domestic/semi-captive. It also
reveals identities or quasi-identities like domestic captive, slave, obedient,
=

favourite, servant, companion, docile, and so on - all of them of some inter-

est in that they show how the procedure brings out relationships between
the Saussurean values of these terms while remaining incapable of revealing
their full meaning. Saussure points out the difficulty himself: &dquo;The value
[of a term in context], conceptually considered, is presumably one element
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12
178

of the term’s meaning; but it is difficult to determine how meaning can be

dependent on value and at the same time distinct from it &dquo; 1°. (The passage
continues with a discussion of the notion of value, not that of meaning.) The
comparison of contexts may show that domestic, tame, wild, acclimatized are
in complementary distribution as qualifiers of the nouns animal or species,
and so form a lexical system. But in the first place other contexts from the
same corpus will have given other qualifiers of the same nouns - words like

related, different, predatory which are however excluded from consideration

-

on grounds that cannot be called linguistic. And in any case the contexts
cannot be made to reveal, by formal linguistic procedures, either the struc-
ture of the &dquo;semantic system&dquo; or the precise differences between the elements
of the system. What contexts provide is usages, by a scientific extension of
the empirical method by which dictionaries use quotations to fill out the mean-
ing of a: term. Contexts cannot provide formal analysis with the &dquo;semantic
distinctive features&dquo; (if such exist) on which alone a structural semantics might
be built.
*

These features manifest themselves only in contexts of a highly specialized

and artificial kind, namely in &dquo;definitions&dquo;. But these in turn derive from
logical, not linguistic procedures. &dquo;To know a thing, says Leibniz, we
must consider all its requisites, the features which suffice to distinguish it from
all other things. We call this its Definition.&dquo; lI This is definition as under-
stood by logicians: a statement of the distinctive character or features of the
concept. The amount of linguistics technique consciously applied by lexi-
cographers has varied; but it has always been at least equalled, and usually
unwittingly, by the amount of logical technique.
What semantically distinctive features do the dictionaries provide for the
word corresponding to domestic? &dquo;Of animals, the opposite of wild&dquo;, says
Littr6. The distinctive feature here is /non-wild/. Larousse (in both the
1924 and the 1962 editions) proposes another feature: &dquo;Applied to tame ani-
mals&dquo;. The 1957 edition of Quillet has yet another: &dquo;[Of animals] living with
man&dquo;. Robert combines two of the above, features (/living with man/ and
/tame/) and adds two new ones (/for work or pleasure/ and /long tamed/):
&dquo;Said of animals which live with man for his work or pleasure, and of a spe-
cies long tamed&dquo;.
If we adopt Littr6’s criterion, every non-wild animal will be considered
domestic (assuming a prior definition of the feature /wild/: Littr6 offers &dquo;Living
in woods jor deserts&dquo;). Farm, house, circus, zoo ’animals will all be domes-
tic. Larousse’s definition will also include many circus animals and some

10. Saussure, op. cit., p. 158. E. Buyssens has attempted a solution of this problem in "Le
structuralisme et l’arbitraire du signe", Studii si cercetâri linguistice 9, 1960, pp. 403-416.
11. L. Couturat, La logique de Leibniz, Paris, Alcan, 1901, p. 181.
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 179

zoo.animals, as well as many animals which may have the run of a house (par-
rot, magpie, lion-cub, monkey, etc.) but which one would normally hesitate
to call domestic; and to exclude other obviously domestic animals which could
hardly be called tame (the rabbit, for example). The definitional feature
/tame/ turns out to cover a wide range of cases, both in non-linguistic reality
and in linguistic usage, from animals which merely tolerate the presence of
man to those which allow themselves to be touched, fed, etc. ; from those which
can obey a wide range of commands to those which obey none
(many song-
birds, rabbits, etc.); from those which may be allowed to run completely
free (chickens, pigeons, dogs, etc.), to those which can be trained to form a
wide variety of activities but which can be kept only in captivity (from the
lion to the canary). Quillet’s criterion, derived from the word’s etymology,
raises problems no less numerous: the definition fits pets (white mice, tor-
toises, guinea-pigs, hamsters, etc.) as much as farm-animals. Robert’s four-
feature definition avoids some of these problems, but raises others of the same
order. We are bound to conclude that linguistics and logic are at logger-
heads in lexicological practice: logical definition and linguistic usage do not
always, or even usually, coincide. The fact has been observed by specialists
in the terminology of science and technology, a domain where (in theory)
higher standards of rigour are set. As Holmstrom points out 12 : &dquo;It is impor-
tant to remember also that the mere existence of a standard glossary does not
compel writers to .~use, translators to translate, and readers to understand
terms in the senses which are therein defined. The most it can do indirectly
and after a time-lag, is to influence them in the direction. It is this influence,
however long delayed, which alone justifies the effort of standardization&dquo;.

The specialized scientific definitions do sooner or later percolate down to the

dictionaries, often in somewhat distorted form; in their original wording, can
we expect them to provide a more rigorous treatment of the distinctive fea-
tures of the Domestic Animal and clearer demarcation of the semantic field?
a
From the 1856 definition of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire the following features
emerge:
1. Presence in or near the house (the etymological feature slightly expanded);
2. The fact that the animal is fed by man;
3. The fact that, under these circumstances, the animal reproduces itself;
4. The fact that the relationship between the animal and man is a habitual
one. Cornevin’s definition (1891) repeats the first and third of these, and
adds:
5. The fact that the animal provides man with products or services.

12. J.E. Holmstrom, "The multilingual terminology project", Bulletin of the Provisional
International Computation Center 8, 1960, pp. 1-16.
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180

The logic here is indeed more rigorous, but even these features do not en-
able us to demarcate the field of Domestic Animals in an entirely unambiguous
manner. Some of them (/in or near the house/, /fed by man/) are consequences
of another (/reproduction controlled by man/); but is this always the case?
The feature /fed by man/ would nowadays include the fruit-fly and microbe
cultures, as would the feature /products and services/. But the feature /con-
trolled reproduction/ (omitted by Robert) would exclude the domestic ele-
phant. Many wild animals game and fur-bearing
-

provide -

&dquo;products or services&dquo;. And what services can pets be said to provide?

Even if these criteria were always clear-cut, there would remain the problem
of deciding whether all five criteria have to be satisfied, as the definitions imply,
or whether there are degrees of domestication, as the fluctuations of linguis-
tic usage would suggest.
This digression into the domain of zoology may have served to illustrate
a fact of rather wider implications: the relationships we observe in the world
of non-linguistic experience are very far from being lexicalized in their en-
tirety. In the first place, they change faster than the language does: the old
name, derived from the /domus/ - /silva/ opposition, still survives, but cannot
cover the wealth of new relationships between man and animal which have
arisen since classical times the development of zoos for scientific purposes,
-

the extension of large-scale breeding (even of mink or ostriches), new possi-

bilities of reproduction in captivity through artificial insemination (e.g., the
tigron in Vincennes zoo). The very notion of captivity has evolved, from
tiny cages to the artificial sites of modern zoos and even to nature reserves.
In the second place the use of a single term may conceal a wide range of facts;
it is familiarity with the situation which maintains the distinction between
uses of domestic applied [as in French] to the fly and the elephant, between

pet sparrow and pet donkey, between tame squirrel and tame lamb, etc.
In short, the concept &dquo;Domestic Animals&dquo; turns out to be a kind of empir-
ical concept, a complex logical structure with a long history; in linguistic
usage it coincides exactly neither with the set of animals defined by all five
of the above criteria taken together, nor with the set defined by any of them
taken sperately.
*

We have so far failed to demarcate the field labelled &dquo;Domestic Animals&dquo;

either by formal procedures derived from linguistics or by the logical proce-
dure of comprehensive conceptual definition. There remains the alternative
logical procedure of ostensive definition: this involves going through our
corpus and listing exhaustively all animals described as domestic ass, horse, -

bullock, etc. But even this procedure cannot give a clear-cut solution, since
usage varies from one author to the next, according to their definitional cri-
teria. For Thevenin not only goats, sheep and pigs but also gazelle, ante-
lope, jackal, ferret, otter, civet-cat, guinea-pig, mink, skunk, pheasant, swan,

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 181

cormorant, ostrich, carp, trout, silkworm, bee, drosophila, oyster and mussel
are or have been domesticated; but he includes none of the animals which do
not reproduce in captivity, such as the elephant, cheetah or hunting falcon.
Mathis refuses to count bees as domestic animals, on the grounds that they
&dquo;have undergone no degeneration of their ability to survive in nature&dquo; (thus
introducing yet another classificatory feature the inability to return to the
-

wild state -
which is indeed implicit in several authors); man merely shel-
ters, protects and exploits them. For Chauchard the essence of the matter
is &dquo;a substantial influence on an animal species, in contact with mankind&dquo; ;
animals which show this influence he calls &dquo;humanized&dquo; ; and &dquo;the relation-
ship with animals like bees is a minimal one; we modify their environment
but have no relationship with them that could be called social&dquo;.
(The case of apiculture &dquo;bee-keeping&dquo;, aviculture &dquo;bird-rearing&dquo;, piscicul-
ture, ostriiculture and mytiliculture &dquo;fish-, oyster- and mussel-farming&dquo;
shows a formally-marked transition to uses of domestic(ated) applied to the
vegetable kingdom - uses which could not therefore be excluded from the
semantic field by formal linguistic criteria: Guyot uses the opposition &dquo;domes-
tication of flora/wild flora&dquo; and the equation &dquo;cultivated/domesticated plants&dquo;.
The standard opposition in Floras is &dquo;cultivated/wild&dquo;, but (in French) the
adjective domestique is occasionally found, for example with sorbier &dquo;sorb-
apple&dquo; and prunier &dquo;plum-tree&dquo;.)
Ostensive definition can therefore demarcate our semantic field only if we
confine our corpus to an idiolect, i.e., to the works of a no-longer-productive
author. Hence the possible value of applying this procedure to the lexis of
an author who is dead. Essentially we are driven to the conclusion that the
notion of a semantic field is not a linguistic one, however much it may appeal
to the imagination; it is by origin and nature an empirical conceptual category.
The concept &dquo;Domestic Animals&dquo; was not deliberately chosen to demons-
trate the impossibility of accepting Trier’s theory that the entire vocabulary
of a language must be describable as an overall structure of contiguous fields,
each made up of a mosaic of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive
expressions. (It was in fact chosen because of certain examples suggested
by Hjelmslev and Cantineau in their analyses of semantic structures.) But
our case-study does illustrate some of the unsatisfactory aspects of Trier’s
ideas. The same piece may form part of more than one mosaic: the same
lexical items would be patterned differently in the two conceptual fields &dquo;use-
ful/harmful animals&dquo; and &dquo;mammals&dquo;. In the second place, there may be
some areas of the conceptual field not covered by the available names: many
animals (partridge, pheasant, hare, trout, etc.) must still be called wild even
though they are nowadays manipulated by man, protected, reared, caught,

transplanted and often directly or indirectly fed, using techniques not adequa-
tely covered by any of the words domestication, rearing or acclimatization.
And even if acclimatization were an acceptable designation for this whole
group of operations, would the opposition acclimatized/native form a part
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182

of the domestic-wild field, or would it form a field in its own right ? It is evi-
dent that the variety of attitudes to the world of non-linguistic experience
(which is to say, in the last analysis, the ever-changing complexity of human
praxis) suggests that semantic fields are not contiguous but often overlap in
conceptual hierarchies whose structure is not always so easy to define as the
biological ones. We have here what seems to be an excellent example of the
way our view of the world is conditioned by our terminology: Trier chose to
designate the phenoma he was investigating phenoma whose existence in
-

some sense is undeniable by the term field, which carries inevitable meta-
-

phorical implications; if he had chosen instead to call it a system, he might

not have been induced to maintain the principle of exhaustive non-overlap-
ping on the (equally metaphorical) surface of his conceptual sphere.
If nevertheless the notion of the semantic field has attracted linguists and
led to some useful work, this may be attributable to the fact that it covers part
of the linguistic notions of lexical system and semantic system (which are
probably not the same thing); it is these that should have provided the start-
ing-point and guide-lines of the enterprise; we would then be in a position
to say whether the phonemic, morphological and semantic structure of a lan-
guage are all discoverable by the same kind of rules of procedure.

*
1 : ,.~ .’ ¡ ¡..~
,,

It therefore seems impossible to find a priori an adequate formal definition

of a semantic field; but we may be able to get the results first and define the
field afterwards. The procedure will involve constructing systems (in the
rigorously linguistic sense of the term) and testing the hypothesis that the
semantic field might be definable a posteriori as an interconnected set of such
systems.
We may take as our example the ostensive definition of an uncontroversial
portion of the semantic field of the Domestic Animals, namely the farm-animals
whose designations formed the basis of Table 1. One system might be the
paradigm of all nouns which commute with ass in the following definitional
statement: &dquo;The ass is a domestic animal because its reproduction in captiv-
ity is both normal and long-established&dquo;. It will be noted that the proce-
dure is a hybrid one: logic provides the definition, linguistics the notion of
commutation.
Half-a-dozen similar systems may be constructed, for all the terms which
can be substituted in the following definitions, each of which introduces a
new distinctive feature (or &dquo;requisite&dquo; in Leibniz’ term).
The requisites here considered are exclusively biological ones:
1. A(m) is the male of the species A;
2. A(e) is the fernale of A;
3. A(j) is the young of A(e) and A;
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 183

- - -

4. A(n)- is the litter of A(e);

5. A(p) is the verb for parturition by A(e);
6. A(c) is the specific cry of A ; ,

7. A(1) is A’s shelter.

From this information we obtain Table 2 (p. 184).

The pattern exhibits structure in the proper sense of the term, in that the
paradigms are in each case a system, and that the systems can all be correla-
ted, in the sense in which that term is used in phonology (the relationship
between two series differentiated only by the addition of a single distinctive
feature). For example: --
,
-
,

j - . 1
horse, bull, cockerel, etc. ;
ram, ,
.-.
,
-
.,_
-;
_

°’
,&dquo; &dquo;
_.
’
’
colt, calf, lamb, pullet, etc.
This correlation may also be expressed as a ratio between the terms of each
series (exactly as /p/ is said to be to /b/ as /f/ is to /v/ or as /t/ is to /d/):

~- /p/ : /b/ :: /f/ : /v/

j ’,
ânesse &dquo;she-ass&dquo; : âne &dquo;jackass&dquo; :: mare : horse ,.
&dquo;,-
calf : cow :: pup : bitch ~ :?&dquo; -

to kitten : kitten :: to calve : calf ...

-
~.
quack : duck :: crow : cockerel . j’
~ ~- ,
.

This preliminary structurization fills a number of gaps in the table of deri-

vational structure and adds to it substantially. But the table is still incom-
plete. Some of the remaining gaps are explicable on biological grounds,
that is by reference to the structure of non-linguistic experience: there are
many blanks in the series for the mule because it is sterile; there is no spe-
cific term for a litter when only one young is normally born; cOllvée &dquo;brood&dquo;
is used as a common term for all birds. More intriguing is the absence of a
verb for the parturition of the ass. Some species have one term for the male
and another for the individual in general (horse/stallion, pig/boar, sheep/ram);
others have the same name for the individual and the male (dog), or for the
individual and the female (goose). (We must leave it to diachronic linguis-
tics to explain how these taxonomic anomalies may reveal traces of much
older formal or semantic systems.) These facts suggest that even empirical
biology is not the only principle of lexical structuring.
There is in fact a further set of distinctive features, cutting across those
already described, which derives from another dimension of non-linguistic
experience and that may be called the zootechnical. The names of some
features reflect a need, now or in the past, to make distinctions along that
dimension. It is only when the morphological distinctions between male,
female and young are relevant to human practice that we find different names
for them, and this holds equally for game and familiar animals, even harmful
ones. On the other hand we do not distinguish between male and female
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swallows or sparrows, perhaps because we neither breed them nor use them

(for some species, when a useful distinction was needed for a bird young enough
to capture and old enough to survive capture, the term oiseau niais
&dquo;fledgling&dquo;
was created). Similarly for the verbs of parturition: pouliner &dquo;to drop a
foal&dquo;, veler &dquo;to calve&dquo;, or the names of the worker responsible for the ani-
mal : bouvier &dquo;drover&dquo;, muletier &dquo;muleteer&dquo;, berger &dquo;shepherd&dquo;. The name
of the animals’ shelter is also included, initially because of the frequency of
derivational correlations (bergerie &dquo;sheepfold&dquo;, porcherie &dquo;pigsty&dquo;, poulailler
&dquo;hen roost&dquo;, colombier &dquo;dovecote&dquo;, lapinie3re &dquo;rabbit-hutch, etc.) and also
because of equally well-established correlations other than derivational:

Zootechnical rather than biological facts also determine the distinctive

semantic features derived from the special names for castrated male (gelding,
bullock, capon, etc.), or new-born (chick:A chicken, larnbkir: ~lamb) or sexually
differentiated but immature male and female (steer, heifer=l=-calf; pullet, cocke-
rel =l=-chicken).
Sometimes the distinctive features derive from yet other conceptual fields,
for example from the commercialization of animal-breeding. It is because
the specifications vache at?iouillante &dquo;cow in calf&dquo;, jument pleine &dquo;mare in
foal&dquo;, poussin d’un jour &dquo;day-old chick&dquo; are highly relevant to buyer and seller
that they have become distinct semantic realities, and even stable lexicalized
syntagms.
A similar phenomenon is visible in a fourth conceptual field, the designa-
tions of kinds of meat. Here usage is determined by the non-linguistic real-
ities of the butcher’s trade: du chevreau &dquo;kid&dquo; because only the meat of the
young animal is eaten; but also terms for the meat of sucking-pig, -lamb
and-calf -
in addition to words for mutton, pork and veal because they
-

are different commodities. Indeed in many regions a meat intermediate be-

tween lamb and mutton can be specified: de I’agneaugris, literally &dquo;grey lamb&dquo;,
or du broutard, literally &dquo;browser&dquo;, for weaned lambs more than a month
but less than a year old, with two strictly synonymous names, one referring to
the colour of the meat, neither white nor red, the other to the first pasturing.
Also reflected in the terminology is one last conceptual field, that of cooking,
which sometimes makes further discriminations among the kinds of meat;
poulet &dquo;chicken&dquo;, the generic term, covering birds of any age, alongside pou-
lette &dquo;pullet&dquo;, poularde &dquo;fat pullet&dquo;, poule (in the collocation poule au riz
&dquo;chicken and rice&dquo;), and coq (in the collocation coq au vin).

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18
Selec

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Similar conclusions are suggested by the terminology of the major subsets of

Domestic Animals. Traditional techniques distinguish between le cheptel
&dquo;cattle&dquo; and la basse-cour &dquo;farmyard animals&dquo;. The former originally
expressed a legal concept; though of great antiquity it is still as much part of
legal and economic terminology as of the common language. Le cheptel is
in turn divided into le gros b~tail (oxen, etc.) and le menu betail (sheep, goats,
etc.); la basse-cour comprises poultry and rabbits. The generic term for a
concrete group of animals of the same species is universally troupeau (to-
gether with the more restricted troupe), with the single exception of the more
technical term meute &dquo;pack of hounds&dquo; (see Table 3).

Despite the apparently insuperable difficulties discussed above, the attempt

to discover the structure of a vocabulary is by no means a pointless under-
taking. The attempt to prove that linguistics is a unified science, and that
the structural laws which hold for phonology, morphology and syntax can
be applied to vocabulary (or semantics) is a procedure that would be open to
criticism only if we asserted on principle that these laws must apply a priori;
particularly if, in order to reach this conclusion, we distorted the linguistic
facts to make the semantic structure comply with pre-established dogma. If
however it should one day be demonstrated that between formal linguistics
and semantics there lies an unbridgeable gulf, such that linguistics must forgo
any claim to being a unified science, then this will represent a gain, not a loss,
for the science of linguistics as a whole.
The attempt to discover the structure of the lexicon and of the significata
of a language is therefore a reasonable undertaking, if only because there is
every reason (from children’s acquisition of vocabulary to Saussure’s analysis
of values) to suppose that words are not isolated units. But one may legit-
imately ask if the structuralists’ attempts have so far achieved results as solid
as those in other areas of linguistics; and one must then reply that lexical
structure and (still less) semantic structure have not yet yielded up their secret.
The hypothesis tested in this paper has been that the lexis of a language
possesses a structure detectable to the extent that it is modelled on a structure
of another order -

the order imposed by human praxis in its experience of

the non-linguistic world. The lexis would then be structurable not by virtue
of its strictly linguistic properties nor for specifically linguistic reasons (except
in the usually incomplete derivational series), but only because it reflects, to
whatever degree of approximation, one or many other (non-linguistic) struc-
tures.
The hypothesis hasseemed an attractive one-it is after all equivalent
long
to Leibniz’ Alphabet of ideas and there is no denying that it does show
-

how semantic classifications may be organized, at least in certain (possibly

extensive) areas of the vocabulary. But all these classifications rest on non-
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 189

linguistic criteria and on distinctive semantic features (also called simple ele-
ments or simple truths by Leibniz) provided by the extra-linguistic analysis
of experience. J.-C. Gardin’s considerable experience with this type of clas-
sification-by-concept has led him to the conclusion that &dquo;there are essential
differences in the general mode of research, and consequently in the way obser-
vations are categorized, as between, say, chemistry, cookery, and philosophy.
No doubt the intellectual processes involved are similar, but the way the expe-
rimental field is organized by the vocabulary varies so widely that it seems
unreasonable to attempt to reduce them all to a single pattern&dquo; 13. It follows
that every semantic system will require separate empirical research: the dis-
tinctive semantic features will in each case express different non-linguistic
relationships.
The point has been discussed incidentally by Rulon S. Wells; but the ulti-
mate obstacle to the procedure suggested above may not be the one he indi-
cates 14. He under-estimates the possibility of establishing the semantic
content of Latin tabul by distinctive-feature (or componential) analysis, and
doubts whether all semantic contents are or may be reducible to systems of
paradigms like those set up above for hongre &dquo;gelding&dquo;, jument &dquo;mare&dquo;,
poulain &dquo;colt&dquo;, pouliner &dquo;to foal&dquo;, hennir &dquo;to neigh&dquo;, etc. (or like those by
which B. Pottier constructs the semantic field of siège &dquo;seat&dquo;, including chaise
&dquo;chair&dquo;, fauteuil &dquo;armchair&dquo;, tabouret &dquo;stool&dquo;, caflapé &dquo;couch&dquo;, pouf, etc.,
on the basis of six definitional features 15). Improvements in dictionary-
making, a subject now attracting much thought and effort, suggest that we
may reasonably look forward to an enormous improvement over the archaic
instruments we now call by that name, and provide an admittedly empirical
but relatively optimistic reply to Wells 16.
A more truly linguistic obstacle to any complete structuring of the voca-
bulary may lie in the arbitrary nature of the sign, or more appropriately the
arbitrary nature of lexicalization. The hypothesis of a reasonably rigorous
parallelism between the structure of experience and the structure of the voca-
bulary rests on the intuition that every relatively stable and relatively frequent
aspect of reality must eventually be lexicalized as is on the whole confir--

med by investigations of the relationship between frequency and cost, on the

economy principle 17. But how in that case can we explain the fact that Ita-
lian has the single verb figliare (preferring paradigmatic economy) correspond-

13. M. Allard, M. Elzière, J.-C. Gardin, and F. Hours, Analyse conceptuelle du Coran.
II: Commentaire, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1963, p. 18.
14. Proceedings of the VIIth International Congress of Linguists, Oslo, Oslo University
Press, 1958, p. 616.
15. B. Pottier, Recherches sur l’analyse sémantique en linguistique et en traduction méca-
nique, series A, II, Publications de la Faculté de Lettres de Nancy, 1963, pp. 11-18.
16. See the report on the November 1961 conference on lexicography in the IJAL volume
On Lexicography.
17. A. Martinet, Eléments de linguistique générale, Paris, A. Colin, 1960, pp. 190-199.
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190

ing to French pouliner &dquo;to foal&dquo;, veler &dquo;to calf&dquo;, cochonner &dquo;to farrow&dquo;,
agneler &dquo;to lamb&dquo;, chatonner &dquo;to kitten&dquo;, etc. (preferring the converse solu-
tion) -

unless indeed we assert that in its zootechnological aspects Italian

civilization is totally different from French because their terminologies are
different? (There is a reciprocal problem, though perhaps from a more lite-
rary register, in French troupeau &dquo;flock&dquo; corresponding to Italian gregge,
nrandra, arniento, branco, etc.) Of course diachronic studies will explain
these discrepancies by the facts of internal or external linguistics. But the
explanation does not abolish the discrepancy, which underlines the fact that
no parallelism need exist between the structure of non-linguistic experience
and its lexicalization. =

So that in spite of appearances in spite, that is, of numerous recent at-

-

tempts -
little theoretical progress has been made since Meillet, for whom
&dquo;Words [unlike the units of phonology or grammar] do not constitute a sys-
tem, at most a collection of little groups &dquo; &dquo;. It is true that a great deal of
valuable research has been devoted to the description of these &dquo;little groups&dquo;;
but the techniques used have been so varied using lexical structuralism,
-

logic, statistics, distribution theory, information theory that no overall -

unity is yet apparent.

18. A. Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, vol. I, Paris, Champion

p. 84.

A linguist, Georges Mounin teaches at the Faculté des Lettres of Aix en Provence, and has
already published : Teoria e gloria della traduzione (1965), Histoire de la linguistique des
origines au xxe siècle (1965), Saussure, (1968), Clefs pour la linguistique (1969),
La communication poétique (1969).
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