ABSTRACT
Scholars of contemporary linguistics can be divided into two groups. There are those who consider language as a social experience and examine the morphological, syntactic and lexical characteristics of the languages in current use, including sub-systems and connotational speech in their inquiry. A hundred years ago words and sentences in a social context were based on reliable referentials that were linked together, being cohesive if not logically coherent, without however constituting a single system formulated as such. Static and mobile, like light and dark and like outlines, lost their status of independent, juxtaposed absolutes and became relative. The absence of referentials has consequences that are all the more serious since speech merges with image to create an illusion of structure, the image appearing as referential, although it has not any such function. Large ‘unofficial’ groups based on speech and linguistic relations have taken over the role of the discarded groups almost entirely.
