To continue one sub-genre among these posts, whose motto might be, “Linguista sum: linguistici nihil a me alienum puto” (echoing the late but unlamented Roman Jakobson’s paraphrase of Terence; vide Y-H-B’s article, “Roman Jakobson in Retrospect: Unvarnished Remembrances of a Stiff-Necked Student,” Chinese Semiotic Studies, 14 [2018], 41-56), my waiter at one of my Stammlokale (a young man in his twenties, and irrefragably a native speaker of American English) uttered the words “awesome,” when first taking my order, and “fantastic,” when I ordered a double espresso at the end. The communicative function of these two words was clearly and exclusively PHATIC,i. e., linguistic tokens meant purely as acknowledgments of my utterances in continuance of the act of communication––and, nota bene, utterly divorced from the meaning of their stems, viz. “awe” and “fantasy.” Needless to say, young speakers nowadays use these phatic words constantly and habitually without any intention of alluding to their literal meaning.

This account of one limited aspect of a miscellaneous prandial exchange is worth rehearsing in the service of asserting (yet again) that the locus of linguistic reality is the ACT, the CREATIVE MOMENT OF SPEECH––a moment made possible by the existing structure of language with its general rules but which transforms that structure, so that linguistic structure is itself always in flux, always being modified by acts of speech.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO