A Descriptive Technique for the Treatment of Meaning
Paul L. Garvin · Language · 1958
The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the oft-repeated proposition that we can not handle meaning linguistically, by attempting to evolve an empirical procedure for the processing of semantic field data, which can then be evaluated in terms of the criteria of consistency, exhaustiveness, and simplicity. This procedure will be applied to a minimum semantic contrast in grammar—the difference in grammatical meaning correlated with the presence or the absence of a single paradigmatic morpheme. I shall call this correlation a GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, and the contrasting morphemic units the GRAMMATICAL FORMS of this category.