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diagram is empty of meaning. A diagram is
meant to give a graphic representation of essential aspects of a process;
in this case both text and diagram pretend to do so, but in fact give
no indication of what is really happening. The same dialogue could have
taken place between casual acquaintances, or shy lovers, or it could
record the picking up of a prostitute. The pseudoscientific balderdash:
'When He emits the operant, "What time is it?", the muscular activity
produces a sound which also serves as a stimulus,' and so on, is totally
irrelevant to the episode it pretends to describe and explain. And this
applies generally to any attempt to describe the language of man in
terms of S-R theory.
     
* See Appendix Two.
     
     
The Tree
     
     
The strategic advantage gained from labouring the obvious absurdity of
a theory is that it makes the proposed alternative appear as almost
self-evident. The alternative, set out in the pages that follow,
proposes to replace the concept of the linear S-R chain by the concept of
multi-levelled, hierarchically ordered systems, which can be conveniently
represented in the form of an inverted tree, branching downward:
     
     

 
     
We find such tree diagrams of hierarchic organisation applied to the
most varied fields: genealogical tables; the classification of animals
and plants; the evolutionist's 'tree of life'; charts indicating the
branching structures of government departments or industrial enterprises;
physiological charts of the nervous system, and of the circulation
of the blood. The word 'hierarchy' is of ecclesiastical origin and is
often wrongly used to refer merely to order of rank -- the rungs on a
ladder, so to speak. I shall use it to refer not to a ladder but to the
tree-like structure of a system, branching into subsystems, and so on,
as indicated in the diagram. The concept of hierarchic order plays a
central part in this book; and the most convenient way to introduce it
is by means of the hierarchic organisation of language.
     
     
The young science of psycholinguistics has shown that the analysis of
speech presents problems of which the speaker is blissfully unaware.
One of the main problems arises from the deceptively simple fact that
we write from left to right, producing a single string of letters, and
that we speak by uttering one sound after the other, also in a single
string, along the axis of time. This is what lends the Behaviourist's
concept of a linear chain its superficial plausibility. The eye takes
in a whole three-dimensional picture, embracing many shapes and colours
simultaneously; but the ear only receives linear pulses one at a time,
serially, and this fact may lead one to the fallacious conclusion that
we also respond to each speech-sound, bit by bit, one at a time.
This is the bait which the S-R theorist has swallowed, and on which he
has been dangling ever since.
     
     
The elementary speech souncls are called phonemes; they correspond roughly
to the written alphabet; in English there are forty-flve of them. If
listening to speech consisted in the chaining of separately perceived
phonemes by the listener, he would literally not understand a word of
what is said to him. Let me explain this paradox. If we were to translate
the process of listening to speech from acoustical into optical terms,
this would mean flashing onto a screen before the subject's eye printed
letters one by one, at the rate of twenty letters per second. The result
would be something like a nervous breakdown. The ear of the listener
has to take in about twenty phonemes per second. If he tried to analyse
each phoneme as a separate 'bit' -- or atom, or segment of language --
all he would perceive would be a steady buzz. I owe this illustration to
Alvin Liberman of the Haskins Laboratories -- a pioneer in the field of
speech-perception, and a participant in the Think-Tank seminar mentioned
in the preface. He also commented wryly that if we go on labouring the
point with the methods of