One of the most distinctive features of the integrational theory of language is its adherence to ontological explicitness and constructiveness: the ontological status of every linguistic entity postulated by the theory is clearly determined (explicitness), and every entity is a logical or set-theoretical construct ultimately related to a small number of sets of basic entities that include, in particular, objects and events in space-time (constructiveness).
The Integrational Theory of Linguistic Variability thus aims at providing a theoretical framework for variation research (including studies in sociolinguistics, dialectology, and historical linguistics) and a basis for a realistic theory of language systems.
[4][5] Ontologically, an idiolect is construed as a (possibly infinite) set of abstract sentences: form-meaning pairs consisting, in the case of a spoken rather than a written or signed idiolect, of a structured phonetic sound sequence and a meaning of this sequence.
Every idiolect system consists of (technically: is an n-tuple whose components are) a phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexico-semantic, and sentence-semantic part; and each part determines a different type of properties that the form-meaning pairs must have in order to belong to the idiolect.
(There may be other components in addition to the ones listed above; the precise structure of idiolect systems is a matter of ongoing research.)
The latter is concerned mainly with (i) making general assumptions on the properties of idiolect systems in arbitrary languages and (ii) developing a conceptual framework, and corresponding terminology, for their description.
Most importantly, a distinction is made between the definition of a term and the identification of corresponding linguistic entities in given idiolect systems.
are construed not as categorial terms (denoting sets of linguistic entities) but as names of two-place relations ('is-a-phoneme-of,' 'is-a-suffix-of,' etc.)
Given this distinction, a term like 'verb' may be defined by means of word- or sentence-semantic criteria; the syntactic nature of the corresponding categories in individual idiolect systems is still guaranteed by the fact that the categories can be identified by resort to the syntactic means of the idiolect systems (morphological marking, word order, intonation) and, possibly, properties of lexical meanings.
Consider, for example, the set of all adjective forms of a given English idiolect system whose sound sequences start with /bl/.
Integrational Linguistics appears to be the only modern approach to explicitly adopt the fourfold distinction between definition, identification, characterization and justification, implicit in Western linguistic tradition with its insistence on the semantic definition of many general terms used in identifying syntactic entities as described in individual grammars.
[17] The conception of (morphological and syntactic) paradigms, fundamental in IL, has recently been further elaborated in Lieb (2005).
Phonetic and phonological sounds are both conceived as sets of auditory properties of speech-sound events, hence, as abstract real-world entities.
('Sequence' is understood in the Integrational Theory of Language in a specific, set-theoretical sense that allows for the limiting cases of empty and one-member or 'unit sequences.')
The sound categories (simultaneously belonging to the phonetic and the phonological level) are uniformly construed as sets not of individual sounds but of sound sequences of the idiolect system, allowing a treatment of affricates and long consonants (elements of Consonantal-in-S), diphthongs and long vowels (elements of Vocalic-in-S) and the like alongside simple vowels and consonants.
The intonation structure assigns sets of 'auditory values' (pitches, degrees of loudness, phonation modes etc.)
Prosodic phenomena in both accent languages and tone languages are then treated in a unified way: differences of tone or stress are represented through sets of auditory values directly within a specific component of a phonological word, namely, the phonological intonation structure, which is properly linked to the (syntactic) intonation structures of syntactic units in which the phonological word occurs; and tone languages differ from accent languages mainly in the way phonological intonation structures are 'processed' in syntactic intonation structures.
The constituents of a structured sound sequence are connected through phonological relations (p-nucleus, p-complement, p-modifier).
In particular, Integrational Syntax is Word-and-Paradigm, an orientation that has recently been gaining followers also elsewhere in linguistics.
Integrational Syntax is a surface syntax: no 'deep structures' and no empty syntactic units or categories are allowed; true, an 'empty phonological word,' properly defined, is assumed for the treatment of phenomena such as ellipsis, and the empty sequence is used to deal with so-called optional complements.
A given syntactic word form may combine with several categorizations within a single paradigm (syncretism); and a single paradigm may have a number of different meanings (polysemy), which leads to the same number of different lexical words (identical in their form components).
The formal conception of constituent structures developed in IL allows for easy surface treatment of discontinuous constituents (whose proper treatment was a key motivation, in early Generative Grammar, for deep structures) and avoids any restriction to binary branching with its well-known empirical problems.
The values of such grammatical functions are two-(or more)-place relations among constituents of the syntactic unit.
Incorporating features of Valency Grammar, Integrational Syntax construes subject and object functions as derived from more basic complement functions that simultaneously cover all complements of a single verbal nucleus; it generalizes the notion of valency to arbitrary lexical words, excluding purely auxiliary words.
In particular, government categories, given through classifications in the Lexical Word Ordering and contained in the marking structure, are crucial to identifying the values of the complement functions relative to the syntactic quadruple.
Type 1 categories, contained in the marking structure, may also play a role in the identification of syntactic function values.
A morphological unit that is the first component in an analysis of a syntactic base form is a 'morphological word.'
They include the top-level lexeme categories Stem and Affix (comparable to the parts of speech in syntax) and their subcategories.
In the case of a 1-place concept, the attributes in the intension are properties, and the extension is a set of individual real-world objects.
Such 'relational concepts' typically occur as lexical meanings of verbs and adpositions (prepositions, etc.)