In looking at what seems like an incidental issue, the discussion arrives at a critical point.  The question is:  What decides the issue of style?  Taking a given language as the object of discussion, what factors enter into and determine the choice of a style for its presentation, that is, a particular way of arranging and selecting the materials involved in a description, a grammar, or a theory of the language?  To what degree is the determination accidental, empirical, pragmatic, rhetorical, or stylistic, and to what extent is the choice essential, logical, and necessary?  For that matter, what determines the order of signs in a word, a sentence, a text, or a discussion?  All the corresponding parallel questions about the character of the choice can be posed with regard to the constituent part as well as with regard to the main constitution of the formal language.

Answering the question of choice, at any level of articulation, requires an inquiry into the type of distinction it invokes, between arrangements and orders which are essential, logical, and necessary and orders and arrangements which are accidental, rhetorical, and stylistic.

A logical order, if it resides in a subject at all, can be approached by considering all the ways of saying the same things, in all the languages capable of saying roughly the same things about the subject in question.  Naturally, the all appearing in that rule of thumb has to be interpreted as a fittingly qualified universal.  For all practical purposes, it simply means all the ways a person can think of and all the languages a person can conceive of, with all things being relative to the person and the particular moment of investigation.  For all those reasons, the rule must stand as little more than a rough idea of how to approach its object.

If it is demonstrated that a given formal language can be presented in any one of several styles of formal grammar then the choice is accidental, optional, and stylistic to the very extent it is free.  But if it can be shown that a particular language cannot be successfully presented in a particular style of grammar then the issue of style is no longer free and rhetorical but becomes to that very degree essential, necessary, and obligatory, in other words, a question of the objective logical order which can be found to reside in the object language.

Resources

• Cactus Language • Stylistics
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs
• Survey of Theme One Program

cc: Academia.edu • BlueSky • Laws of Form • Ma^thstodon • Research Gate
cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science