Coming to Chomsky's model as presented in Aspects of Syntactic Theory or Language and Mind, may see syntax as dominating semantics, as does John Searle in a review of Chomsky's work for the NY Times. Chomsky pays most attention to relations at the level of phrases and sentences as opposed to semantic oppositions or distinctions as described in structuralist and poststructuralist works, or speech-act contextualization as described by Austin or narratologists like Gerard Genette. However, Chomsky himself seems to at least partly conflate notions of the significance of individual words and of syntax.
Now, one might find this warranted because of course, arrangement of words determines their meaning. But one might also find it warranted because the characteristics of individual words determine certain aspects of what's called syntax.
Searle further considers that Chomsky simply ignores various conditions imposed by speech-act theory: "". However, some overlap in POV may come from the complex nature of word. While Chomsky's visual models treat words as discrete entities, his discussions of them do not.
I suspect we all find the assignment of a meaning to a word to be a complex task. We may use a word easily, but we strain to define it. In making dictionary entries, lexicographers, I submit, do not "say what a word means" or even fairly describe it; rather, they make an attempt to reduce it to something Austin might conceive of as constative. In different ways, Derrida's notions of play and différance and Chomsky's positing of "[Chomsky on what constitutes a word]".
Searle's description of followers of Chomsky who insist on "semantics effects syntax" makes an amusing parallel to the divisions of American poetry from the mid-20th Century on, between objectivist or postmodern poets who, very roughly, approach language as material structures; and beat, confessional, and late-Romantic poets, who tend to conceive of the true poem as an essence or meaning at some remove from the physical text. In both cases, a resolution might involve aspects of each.
Subjectively, a word involves something far more and far different than a lexical entry. If, for ease of speaking, we borrow Saussure's vocabulary, the morphology of what constitutes a signifiier has to be taken as complex. We have a sound, but only certain aspects of that sound are taken to be semantically significant. That is, table means table whether loud or soft, high or low pitched, guttural or bell-tone. In English, a change in stress within a word may change the meaning in such a way that we call it a "different word." In Spanish, such changes in stress often define tense, in the preterit, for instance. Likewise, a change in volume carried over an entire word may change the meaning of the word in its context:
SHALL I compare thee to a summer's day?
Shall I compare THEE to a summer's day?
Shall I compare thee to a SUMMER's day?
We expect the relative stress between the syllables of summer to remain constant when the word is stressed. We see it as "the same word" even though music has altered its meaning in the sentence. If the reader will read Shakespeare's line above without changing the stress, but raising the pitch tor the sections in capitals, one will find the meaning changed similarly. Chomsky notes that there is some change in sound or "surface structure" at every phrase boundary that corresponds to what he calls "deep structure," which seems strongly related to sense.
At the same time, the signified seems spooky. Words seem more properly haunted by a host of associations that walk the earth unsettled at every reference. My table, then, contains the red and gold, metal-legged formica contraption I damaged when I spilled my chemistry set in 1964, whereas your table probably does not, or didn't up until now. At the same time, these associations may be called more or less strongly into play. The association seems to involve all the fuzziness typical to analog systems. I'm reminded of the way my mind treats the visual field before me. I take in information from close to a 180-degree field all around, but signal towards the center of binocular focus receives more attention and more cerebral processing. I can answer questions about what is in front of me with little trouble, but if asked about someting at the edge of my vision, I will turn or glance my eyes towards it to answer. Similarly, aspects or associations of each word seem to be foregrounded or backgrounded in mind, and the mind pays attention to various aspects depending on relevant context.
Given this range of action and attention, the meanings of words shimmer and change much like the visions called by music. Context changes the meanings of words; phrase boundaries change context; the materiality of individual words and morphemes changes phrase boundaries.
We tend to treat phrase boundaries as a question of pauses, but this really treats very little of articulation because said phrases are nested within each other. Indeed, they do not nest cleanly. To give just a simple example, we teach students that a period, which the English even call a full stop, ceases syntactic activity. Yet our relation of nouns and pronouns easily jumps the boundary of sentences. If I say, "John studied. He passed the test," no one questions that He is John. Even such outwardly simple acts display the some recursive parsing that Chomsky talks about. To a large extent, we do so by clues internal to the process.
Those cues that are used to determine words cannot be used to determine phrase boundaries. Otherwise, the system would suffer from unworkable ambiguities. Changes that cannot be reproduced by the great majority of the population cannot be used as traditional or common phrase markers, either: if one had to hit a very high C to end a sentence, those who could not reach the note could not speak clearly. A man whose voice is deep and grainy shows little by that, whereas a smooth-voiced woman who duplicated the sound would find that listeners interpreted her words differently, as might someone who pronounced a single roughly grained word in a smooth sentence. So pitch, volume, and the duration in which a note or syllable is held seem to serve for most changes.
How does this relate to written language? Presumably, visual aspects that do not articulate words may be used to inflect and to determine phrase boundaries. We can observe this in poetry, where line-breaks and spacing have long been used to make logical divisions that need not relate specifically or directly to sound. For instance, Elizabethan verse is not always end-stopped. Why, then, need there be an end-stop at all? Clearly, because phrase boundaries are signaled. When Dickinson refers to "inflections of the pen," she makes a distinction.
A few tangentially related observations should hold. We measure music against itself, reflexively and recursively, almost as Chomsky describes syntax. Thus a melody can be the same melody even if it is in a different key. A 3/4 rhythm may be played faster or slower and be none the less recognizable. But the relative relation of pitch and measure and stress must remain, or the melody becomes unrecognizable. Similarly, when we read Pope, we find ourselves quickly judging as significant minor deviations from the iambic that might be less noticeable in, say, Robert Lowell. We reset standards for such things quickly, on the fly, without much thought. If a poem starts as a sonnet, we expect it to end as a sonnet, but that does not necessarily mean that the poem on the next page cannot be something else. From this we also get "composition by the page" as in Pound's Cantos. That is, the visual layout of the page impacts the articulation of the verse.
This would seem to become a guiding principle for the design of web sites and online literature. Freed from the necessity of uniform linearity demanded until recently by linotype and typeset books, visual layout of Websites and blogs reflects the multiple possibilities. And the diction of the language must reflect that as well.
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