Introduction Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca Contents Ph.D. Qualifying Examination for Linguistics—Saudade Gezellig

On the Meta-Abstractness of the Abstract Abstract

Métha Maxwell
(no relation)

Abstract: Little note has been taken of the linguistically universal logical and empirical implications and consequences that bear crucially on linguistic methodology and meta-processes that arise from E. Maxwell’s 1979 paper, On the Abstractness of Abstractness. Though no complete copy of this important paper is known to have survived to the present day, the abstract is sufficient for one to conclude, as E. Maxwell does, that any further investigation of the problem outlined in the abstract, must of necessity, for the reasons given in the abstract, incorporate that paper’s working hypothesis and theoretically substantiated methodological framework. Some may argue that a meta-revolution in the field needs a less abstract basis than the abstract notions of a paper abstract on the abstractness of abstractness, but such putative arguments are completely without empirical motivation and void of content, and are therefore theoretically insignificant and empirically inconsequential. In this paper we will show that any analysis which purports to demonstrate a principled and empirically crucial interaction of various rules and components, or to exclude on principled grounds any set of logically possible sequences from occurring in anyor everynatural language, must be underlyingly impinged on by E. Maxwell’s meta-notions of meta-abstractness. We are confident that no counterexamples can or will be found in the investigation of all known human languages, thus implying an optimally configured abstract linguistic meta-universal. —M. Maxwell

Introduction
Ph.D. Qualifying Examination for Linguistics—Saudade Gezellig
Collateral Descendant of Lingua Pranca Contents