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This paper critiques Roy Harris's Integrationist linguistics by identifying gaps in its explanatory framework and proposes Elan Barenholtz's autogenerative theory as a means to address these deficiencies. The autogenerative theory enhances Integrationism by providing a structural mechanism for prospective openness in communication, establishing continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activities, and detailing the nature of the accumulated archive of past integrations. The synthesis maintains the core principles of Integrationism while offering a clearer understanding of the statistical structures leveraged by large language models (LLMs) and their inherent limitations.
Barenholtz's autogenerative theory reveals how language's structural mechanisms can enhance our understanding of LLMs and their limitations in capturing semiotic continuity.
Roy Harris's Integrationist linguistics offers a compelling critique of the referentialist tradition embedded deep at the heart of computational approaches to language, arguing that language is not a code that maps onto a pre-given world but a situated, bipartite activity oriented toward prospective joint action. Yet Integrationism leaves certain explanatory gaps: it does not fully account for the structural mechanism by which signs sustain prospective openness, it undertheorises the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activity, and it offers no detailed account of the structural properties of the accumulated archive of past integrations. This paper argues that Elan Barenholtz's autogenerative theory of language, developed in response to the behaviour of Large Language Models (LLMs), can fill precisely these gaps, enriching Integrationism without undermining any of its core commitments. Specifically, the autogenerative account provides: a structural mechanism for the prospective openness that Harris identifies as central to bipartite communication; a computational correlate for Harris's thesis of semiotic continuity between language and other sign-making activity; and a theory of the archive: what the accumulated residue of past integrations looks like and how new participants draw upon it. The synthesis preserves Harris's ontological primacy of the situated integrative act while adding explanatory content that Integrationism itself does not supply. For practitioners and researchers in natural language processing and large language model design, the argument offers a principled account of what the statistical structure that LLMs so effectively exploit actually is, and of what it cannot, by its nature, provide.
