II. Theory and practice in studies of language

1. If language is the theory and discourse is the practice (I.B), then, barring physical or mental disabilities, a whole society could be included in cognitive and linguistic terms, though of course not with equal stores of knowledge. But in social terms, this potential is overlaid by complex attitudes about included persons knowing and speaking the language ‘better’; their discourse is received with attention and respect, whereas excluded persons suffer the opposite treatment. So the prospects for social inclusion may be enhanced by language study, broadly defined here as organised activities for engaging with samples or features of language in order to actualise your own understanding and control of the language.

2. In theory, language study would apply systematic strategies of exploration and explanation; but in practice, the respective approaches have fluctuated widely in methods and goals, as we shall see. Moreover, the whole enterprise has often addressed the nature and organisation of language without a realistic theory of how language skills develop, and how they can be described, targeted, or promoted. Instead, many studies have been unsystematic, impressionistic, or unfocussed, focusing on issues of marginal relevance for language skills, such as ‘deviant’ or ‘ungrammatical sentences’ no one is likely to say anyway (II.78).

3. This chapter will portray some major approaches to language study from the standpoint of ecologism by exploring their relations between theory and practice. Although the approaches may not be cleanly separated, and may have appeared in combinations or oscillations, they do appear distinctive in their intentions, ideologies, and histories, and in their implicit or explicit definitions of ‘language’. They cover much of the potential spectrum of language study and may therefore help us judge our own prospects for future studies from a retrospect on past studies.

II.A. Prescriptive studies of language

4. Prescriptivism¹ can designate an approach for ‘prescribing’ how a language or variety should be used. A ‘language’ is implicitly defined as a system that expresses degrees of status, cultivation, and education within a community of speakers or (more importantly) writers. Ideologically, prescriptivism resonates with idealism, which holds that the ideal and abstract are more valid or true than the real and concrete (I.81). Historically, it originated as a pre-modernist project attuned to exclusive theories of birth, rank, and class, whereby the language variety of included ‘elites’ could help to justify their privileged status above the ‘masses’. Insofar as the variety was an idealisation, it was rarely anyone’s native language or home variety, and had to be mastered through zealous study. It was mainly deployed in prestigious texts and discourses for occasions of power, such as ceremonies for kings, priests, or honoured guests.

5. In principle, then, prescriptivism leads toward constructing and maintaining a more theoretical (ideal) variety for use in ‘high culture’ and distinct from the more practical (real) variety or varieties in everyday use. The distinguishing criteria have been partly theoretical, such as elegance, balance, and logic; and partly practical, such as observation of prestigious usage. Theory has understandably run well ahead of practice, and in some issues and approaches away from practice.

6. Once the prestigious texts had been duly recorded, specialists were assigned to study and determine their precise form and meaning and to deter changes or errors, or influences from less prestigious varieties or languages. The sacred texts of Hinduism and Islam, such as the Vedas and the Qur’an respectively, underwent meticulous studies of Sanskrit since the 5th century BC,² and of Arabic since the 8th century AD.³ Especially for language sounds, crucial in texts to be recited, those descriptions attained a degree of precision not achieved in Europe until the science of language was reinvented as ‘modern linguistics’.

7. Still, Europe had a venerable tradition of studying prestigious texts from the periods of ‘high culture’ in two ‘classical languages’: Greek mainly in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., and Latin mainly from the 1st century B.C. up to the 2nd century A.D.⁴ These texts were more secular than sacred, ranging across poetry and drama, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, natural science, history, and govern-ment. Several projects of study emerged. The formal organisation of words and word-patterns, but also sometimes of language sounds, was studied in grammar, which we can call traditional grammar to distinguish it from ostensibly ‘modern’ notions of ‘grammar’. The functional organisation of discourse, especially of persuasive types, was studied in rhetoric. And the creative and ornamental organisation of discourse was studied in poetics. In theory, these three projects might be usefully integrated, as writers like Aristotle indicated (VI.4); but in practice, they have coexisted rather uneasily. Grammar sustains social divisions most arbitrarily, and has predominated: its forms are harder to control, yet easier to distinguish between ‘correct’ versus ‘incorrect’ (cf. II.10, 13, 189).

8. The theoretical drift of prescriptivism was intensified when ‘classical’ Greek and Latin were no longer based on a real population of native speakers yet persisted as idealised languages of power. Of the two, Latin was favoured for historical, geographical, and political reasons, such as being the direct ancestor of the ‘Romance’ languages in Europe and the idiom of Rome and its church as an enduring power centre. Latin was accordingly long retained for use by the church, state, and law, and by academic studies in fields antedating the ‘humanities’ and the ‘sciences’ of our own times. By the account back in I.41, the practices of social inequality matched a theory of linguistic inequality asserting the superiority of classical languages, and of the high cultures they represented, over local languages and popular cultures. Ordinary people with no Latin were excluded from power, unable to sustain public discussion and negotiation or to advocate social inclusion and equality. Similarly, they were excluded from access to knowledge by a mode of education where Latin was the medium of instruction and scholarship. Primacy was given to Latin grammar as a subject matter, which bequeathed us the tradition of Britain’s ‘grammar schools’ right up into recent times (my emphasis):

[12] In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,  ‘grammar’ meant Latin grammar. For Bishop William Wykeham, in the foundation charter of his College at Winchester, it was ‘the foundation, gate, and source of all the other liberal arts.’ (James Ball)⁵

[13] Grammar schools were most proud of helping boys to win awards at Oxford or Cambridge, urging ever-growing numbers of them successfully through public exami-nations, encouraging that sense of discipline and order. (Harry Judge)⁶

The notion that gifted intellectuals are identified or even fostered by studying ‘grammar’ seems embedded in British folk-wisdom.

9. Ironically perhaps, the shift into ‘modern’ culture was animated by the ostensible ‘renaissance’ (rebirth) of ‘ancient’ culture. From the 15th and 16^th centuries onward, though in some regions much later, administration, trade, colonisation, and technology gathered momentum and stimulated the moderni-sation and diversification of European societies and of their methods of production and distribution. These trends favoured wider social inclusion and the displacement the ‘classical languages’ by the ‘modern languages’. To be sure, usage was still uncertain and perplexed some newly included groups, such as recently created aristocrats, the rising bourgeoisie, and successful immigrants. A contingent of ‘experts’ arose to dispense advice on usage, initiating an obdurate prescriptive tradition that has survived until this very day.

10. Even more ironically, then, these ‘modern languages’ were deemed to need ‘cultivation’ by analogy to the classical languages, especially if, like French, they descended from Latin. So theoretical varieties of the modern languages were duly reconstructed from the top down on extrinsic criteria of authentic or supposed resemblances to ancient languages that had themselves become partially theoretical, as I remarked in II.5-8. And due to its apparent formality, traditional grammar proved more amenable here than did rhetoric and poetics (cf. II.7).

11. By a further analogy, the theory of ‘cultivated language’ ran distinctly ahead of the practice in the modern languages too. The practices closest to the theory were achieved by highly ‘educated’ writers whose works were solemnly admitted to a ‘canon’ of the (aptly named) ‘classics’. Some consciously modelled their style on works in the ‘classical languages’, e,g., French dramas of the 17^th century, or epic poems influenced by the Aeneid (VI.10.8.2). The new ‘classics’ in turn set standards for those who aspired to ‘high culture’ as a means or symbol of power.

12. Still, these approaches to the study of language have oscillated between prescriptive (how the language should be used) and descriptive (how the language was used by powerful or educated people). These two approaches combine uneasily if the prescribing implies the language is often not used as it ought to be; and so theory again runs ahead of practice, except perhaps for people who self-consciously aspire to power or, like governesses, must communicate with powerful people.

13. The term language guardians can cover whoever holds the theory that language needs to be purified and protected from usages variously derided as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘ignorant’, ‘vulgar’, and so on. Their central practices are to promulgate rules of two complementary types: to prescribe ‘good’ usage (like the ‘prescrip-tion’ from a doctor) and to proscribe ‘bad usage’ (like the ‘proscription’ of a heresy). And here again, grammar has proven the most effective implement, being the most complex and least controllable factor in language (cf. II.7, 10).

14. The sustaining ideology might be called purism, advocating a crusade to ‘purify’ language. Historically, its most influential institution in the world has been the redoubtable Académie Française, whose founding statutes of 1634 declared its own theory: to ‘give explicit rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences’.⁷ The Académie’s proposals for reference works are an allegory of how far in historical time theory can run ahead of practice. Its ‘dictionary’ was published after 60 years (in 1694);⁸ its ‘grammar’ after 298 years (in 1932); and its ‘rhetoric’ so far not at all. In 1998, a website⁹ was opened which gives advice on the French language and extols its membership of ‘immortals’, who ‘offer a faithful image of the talent, intelligence, culture, and literary and scientific imagination upon which the genius of France is founded’. ‘Their moral authority in matters of language is rooted in usages, traditions, pomp’[and ceremony?][₌ ‘faste’] (my translation).

15. The moralising overtones of purism are at times egregious. A panel of authors and editors,¹⁰ when asked to judge the use of the Adverb ‘hopefully’ to mean ‘it would hoped that…’, gave these responses:

[14] It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.

[15] I have sworn eternal war on the bastard adverb.

[16] This is one that makes me physically ill.

[17] an abomination, and its adherents should be lynched.

Grammatically, this ‘hopefully’ shares the form and function of fully accepted Adverbs like ‘fortunately’ or ‘happily’ — expressing the speaker’s attitude about the future — and so cannot be an ‘error’. I find it attested both in casual speech[18] and in formal writing[19]:

[18] ‘That’s really all you could ever ask for, isn’t it, a long and healthy life? — And hopefully, a happy one too.’ (Denise Bulger in the Liverpool Daily Post)

[19] Hopefully, if the management information system in an organization is one that reflects control and accountability,[…] then the accounting information thereby generated should demonstrate the attainment of value for money from public services.¹¹

Those self-righteous authors who ‘swore eternal war’ and called for ‘lynchings’ had better stockpile weapons and rope for a long campaign.

16. Ferocious responses like[14-17] are so far beyond all proportion and reason as to signal acute social stress being displaced onto spurious conflicts among language varieties. Right-wing ‘economic policies’ like Thatcherism and Reaganism, have left behind an underemployed or unemployed class of citizens whose de facto exclusion can be tied to their language varieties and to their exclusion from language study, even portending social problems like ‘hooliganism’:

[20] Norman Tebbit, later Chairman of the Conservative Party, claimed that the decline in the teaching of grammar had led directly to the rise in football hooliganism. Correct grammar was seen by him as part of the structures of authority, such as respect for elders, for standards of cleanliness, for discipline in schools… (Brian Cox)¹²

Ominously, this Tory tall-tale would cast us English teachers as conspirators abetting public violence. Still, I love to imagine what football hooligans would do with Lord Tebbit if he sternly confronted them to administer grammar lessons.

17. Historically, the prescriptivism and purism of language guardians originated as a pre-modern project, which must grow more irrational and reactionary with the passage of time. Language guardians unleash the confrontational right-wing discourse I shall call ‘flakspeak’ (VI.26f), with smears like ‘illiterate’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘bastard’. Yet strong motives sustain their campaign. It exploits the aspiration or at least subservience to power, which, as I said, can require studious conformity with prescriptive and proscriptive rules (II.13). On a deeper level of awareness, the campaign resonates among groups who feel anxious or threatened by modernisation at large. They justly view language and usage as sensitive barometers of variation and change, and unjustly attack certain usages to release resentment against groups who are in tune with new trends, mainly the youth, or against groups who are to be targeted for exclusion, mainly minorities and immigrants.

18. And most importantly, dispensing advice about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ usage remains a gigantic and lucrative business; and nowhere better than for English, with its immense and diverse population of speakers, its voracious borrowing from other languages, and its key value as the main medium of ‘global modernisation’. Since the 16^th century, but with real intensity since the latter 18^th century, English speakers aspiring to social status, refinement, and ‘correct’ usage have been regaled with edifying reference works, some bearing quaint, picturesque titles, such as:

[21] A Dictionary Interpreting all such Hard Words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Teutonick, Belgic[Dutch?], British[Celtic?], or Saxon as are now used in our refined English Tongue (1656)

[22] The young lady’s accidence; or, A short and easy introduction to English grammar designed, principally, for the use of the fair sex (1799)

Even today, our societies are riddled with language guardians — authors, clerics, grammarians, academics, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and schoolteachers, along with ordinary citizens who upbraid their children, sneer at their neighbours, or write indignant Letters to the Editor of the Times. They sport no formal qualifications, but only the conviction that their own variety of the language is the best model for everybody (cf. II.32, 87). They prey on the social insecurities of the public to sell handbooks on ‘errors’ with alarmist titles, the peak so far in sheer quantity and effrontery being 1001 Pitfalls in English Grammar.¹³ Their right-wing crusade is a discordant counterpoint to the untrammelled tonalities of contemporary conversation, like a turgid gush of tenacious and embarrassing anachronisms.

19. To drum up public demand, language guardians expediently prescribe what most people do not say (like ‘if I were he’) and proscribe what most people do say (like ‘hopefully’). Since the rules need not represent actual usage, anyone can freely invent them, and apparently no one can entirely get rid of them. Some advice is so wrong-headed you have to wonder why anyone ever believed it, such as ‘never begin a sentence with “And” or “But”‘, which survives in the ‘grammar checker’ of Microsoft Word 2000, as does (need I say?) the ban on ‘hopefully’. For the record, my own British and American Writers Corpus (hereafter BAWC), now at some 65 million words, shows 29,973 Sentences beginning with ‘And’, e.g.[23]; and 49,917 with ‘But’, e.g.[24]; the figures I find in the BNC at 100 million words are 80,101 for ‘And’ and 102,454 for ‘But’. ‘But’ is more frequent because its function of introducing contrary content encourages a division between Sentences.

[23] Little of beauty has America given the world[…]; the human spirit[…] has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song — the rhythmic cry of the slave — stands to-day as the sole American music. (Souls)^bawc

[24] Analogy would lead me to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. (Origin)^bawc

Mercifully, the rule is not much in favour nowadays among the Internet sites warring against ‘errors’ in English; purist language guardians mistrust the Internet anyway (see[170] in II.183). We still find some moderate claims about the usages being ‘less formal’[25].

[25] Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there is no reason not to begin a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and’; in fact, these words often make a sentence more forceful and graceful.[Yet doing so] does make your writing less formal (Jack Lynch, ‘Grammar and Style Notes’)^www

But authentic data banks disagree. Among the resolutely formal texts where these usages abound 

I find Milton’s Areopagitica, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Bertrand Russell’s 

Proposed Roads to Freedom.

20. Just because the ‘rules’ don’t need to represent actual usage, they manifest disturbing inconsistency and variation among the language guardians. Ironically, avowed defenders of the ‘standards’ of the language may patently disagree about what those ‘standards’ might be. School pupils are hardly edified by facing fresh batches of ‘rules’ from English teachers, whose collective inclination to mark ‘errors’ for obscure reasons can reach daunting intensities.¹⁴ This unsettling situation acutely endangers the credibility not just of the guardians but of English teachers in general. The most enduring effect is to convince ordinary speakers that, for reasons they don’t understand, their own usage is ‘not good English’ — this too in fine collusion with the hidden curriculum (cf. I.56).

21. The genuine motors of contested usages are the variation or change that are natural, indeed inevitable, processes in the life of a language, which is always in the process of being confirmed and constituted by discourse (I.36). Alternate usages co-exist; one displaces another; an innovation gains popularity; new ideas must be expressed; and in-groups display their solidarity:

[26] When certain groups want to create an identity, they create their own language.[…] Research carried out by Dr Tony McEnery — in conjunction with the website Student World — found that UK campuses have a language of their own,[offering] words for getting drunk,[such as] ‘trollied, klangered, bazeracked, wombled’;[…] and for sex, like ‘lancing, jousting, getting jiggy with it, parking your bus, having a boff’. (Student slang leaves parents dazed, BBC World News)

The evolution of such a system cannot be controlled, let alone purified, by the language guardians even if they were granted all the power of the state and its institutions — an authority no society seems eager to confer.

22. So the purist crusade cannot succeed, as the history of English has abundantly proven. But the guardians probably don’t expect to win. Their deeper agenda is rather to empower themselves and disempower others whose social or educational status, as reflected in their usage, offers a pretext for denying them equal rights and opportunities, especially to youth, minorities, and immigrants (II.17). This right-wing agenda favours not accurate, workable rules you can easily follow, but artificial, troublesome rules you must struggle to follow.

23. If the pre-modern agenda of prescriptivism seems outmoded in modern societies shaped by democracy, it must seem far more so in post-modern societies shaped by multilingualism and multiculturalism. Once again ironically, the more the inclusive theory of democracy gets put into practice to accommodate rising diversity, the more likely it becomes that social exclusion will be practiced on the pretext of languages or language varieties as surrogates for gender, race, religion, or tribe (I.42) — whilst producing ominously similar outcomes.

24. These outcomes markedly distinguish the exclusive projects of prescriptivism and purism from the inclusive projects of ecologism. The problems ecologists see in language and discourse are not in isolated usages being ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘ignorant’, or ‘vulgar’ (cf. II.13, 15), but in selections and combinations of usages not being genuinely efficient, effective, or appropriate, though mostly correct or grammatical by conventional norms (cf. II.130). Our own advice is not prescriptive in the mode of traditional grammar (‘you must say it this way and not that way’), but more consultative in the mode of traditional rhetoric (‘if you want that effect or emphasis, you can try saying it this way’) (II.134, 206). Our agenda faces the supplementary challenge of deflecting the counter-productive impact of prescriptivism that has undermined so many people’s confidence in own abilities to use their language competently and creatively — another waste of human potential (I.56, 62).

II.B. Descriptive studies of language: philology

25. Descriptivism can designate an approach for ‘describing’ how a language or variety is actually used. A ‘language’ is defined here as the system shared within a community of native speakers and (less importantly) writers. Ideologically, descriptivism resonates with realism, which holds that the real and concrete is more valid or true than the ideal and abstract, and is thus the diametrical antithesis of prescriptivism resonating with idealism (cf. II.4). Historically, it originated as a modernist project for describing languages in terms of their long-range evolution. As such, the project can relate to partly prescriptive studies of a predominantly historical character, such as the ancient Sanskrit and Arabic studies of sacred texts (II.6); in fact, Sanskrit led philology to uncover the family relationship between the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Germanic’ languages (II.27).¹⁵ Yet far too little data survives of the general usage contemporary with those early studies to judge how far they were also descriptive. Plausibly, sacred texts could encourage an idealisation of the language, although the description of language sounds had to be thoroughly realist.

26. Seen from a European standpoint, the most substantial roots of descriptivism in language studies were in philology,¹⁶ consolidated as an academic field in the 19th century and still established today as a general heading for language studies in some European universities. Its focus was mainly historical, working with old languages whose documentation is spotty at best. A crucial parallel to practice versus theory was made between the ‘attestation’ of forms and patterns as direct evidence like manuscripts or place-names, versus the ‘reconstruction’ from indirect evidence, like earlier forms conjectured from later forms. These two resources sustained the study of language ancestry,¹⁷ concerned with Old English (or ‘Anglo-Saxon’), Old French, Old High German, Old Norse, Old Irish, Old Church Slavonic, and so on  (cf. II.33). Some studies reflected a rising interest in their modern counterparts, and a quest for ethnic, regional, and national identity among language groups long submerged in moribund ‘empires’, e.g., the Czech national revival of the 19^th century.¹⁸

27. Language ancestry prompted the comparative study of language families.¹⁹ Some had long been informally recognised: the ‘Romance’ languages like Italian, Spanish, and French; the ‘Slavic’ or ‘Slavonic’ languages like Polish, Czech, and Russian; or the ‘Germanic’ languages like German, Dutch, and English. Now, philology launched systematic projects for uncovering the detailed organisations and relations within and among these families as far back as could be traced. These families were shown to belong to a far older and larger family stemming from the entirely reconstructed language called ‘Indo-Germanic’ (later ‘Indo-European’) to signify the relatedness between Indic and Germanic languages (II.25). Some scholars have even suggested that all the world’s languages evolved from a single ancestor²⁰ — the most inclusive possible theory of language, though hardly a practical one to verify when so much early evidence is missing.

28. These studies in language ancestry might seem to imply ironic similarities with the study of the ‘classical’ languages described in II.7, but the implications were in fact quite different. Unlike Greek and Latin, these ancestral languages were not judged superior to the modern ones; nor subjected to idealisation; nor seriously advocated for use as official languages of power; nor proposed as models for purifying their modern descendants, as had been done, say, with Latin for French (II.10). Prescriptive notions of ‘cultivation’ and ‘correctness’ would be baldly irrelevant anyway for extinct language communities.

29. Moreover, philology must be meticulously descriptive for languages where the native speakers have all disappeared, and where the preserved attestations are limited or uncertain. Philologists face vast labours just to establish the evidence and sort out the bewildering variations and inconsistencies among scribes, chanceries, or regions. If their studies centre on prestigious texts of ‘high culture’, then because these have been most carefully and plentifully preserved. But in principle, philol-ogists welcome all attestations of a language in authentic data — poems, songs, incantations, homilies, riddles, edicts, histories, letters — whatever survived the ravages of time and the vandalisms of church, state, and countless wars.

30. The descriptive and realist dependence of philology upon attestation was strongest in dialectology,²¹ the study of contemporary regional varieties generally referred to as ‘dialects’. As far as I know, here was the first academic field instating the principle that a ‘language’ in the ordinary sense is more precisely a family of varieties. Most studies have briskly equated the whole ‘language’ with a presumed ‘standard’ variety spoken in a dominant court or city and deployed for prestigious texts and for discourses of power. Other dialects had remained in the shadows, so that even for Classical Greek and Latin, despite their plentiful attestation, we have inadequate notions of how the languages were used for everyday conversation in different regions. Besides, dialects hold no interest for the language guardians in a prescriptive approach, who mistake variation and change for forces of ‘error’ and ‘corruption’ (cf. II.21f); dialects would be studied in order to ‘standardise’ and ‘purify’ them, which would probably destroy them instead.

31. On the side of practice, a living dialect is a real variety to be described from authentic data, using methods for ‘elicitation’ from informants, i.e., native speakers animated to supply examples (cf. II.42, 58). For philology, each dialect is a valid and self-sufficient system determined by its geography and history — an early theory of linguistic equality (I.40). And if old languages and language families are studied in written samples, current dialects are studied in spoken samples, some of which have rarely been written and are not easily captured by standard orthography.

32. On the side of theory, philology proposed that the evolution of language obeys regular ‘laws’, perhaps by analogy to the evolution of species in biology. In a famous demonstration, the ‘Germanic’ branch manifested two massive and regular ‘sound shifts’ affecting specific consonants and accounting for hosts of correspon-dences between languages with a common ancestry, e.g., between German and English. Clues of this ancestry may be traced in these two samples of heroic lays composed by unknown poets at roughly the same time,²² one from Old English[27] about the combat between famous warrior Beowulf and the ‘hoard-warding worm’ or dragon, and one from Old High German[28] (‘high’ because spoken in the higher regions of the south) about the combat between the old warrior Hildebrand and his deluded son Hadubrand. I provide first piece-by-piece translations, using cognate Words and Word-pieces even if they don’t fit modern usage, and then idiomatic translations. To suggest some links between the languages, I have supplied cognate words from the respective other language in square brackets.²³

‘Hatred was aroused, the warder of the [treasure]  hoard recognised the man’s speech. Nor was their time to conclude peace. First came forth the breath of the monster out of the stone cave and hot sweat of battle; the earth resounded.’  

‘Then they let the [lances of] ash wood clash in sharp combat, so that they remained fixed in the shield; then they rode together[i.e. against each other], split their shields and struck devastatingly[ upon]  their white shields until their[shields of] linden wood were shattered, embattled with weapons.’

The most striking resemblance may be in the rhyme and metre, since both poems were recited or sung rather than read. Quite unlike the modern notion of rhyme, sounds recur at the start of words rather than the end, the effect being stronger than for modern alliteration. The metre (‘Stabreim’ in German) divides every line into halves, each with two stressed syllables where the repetition of sounds is clustered. All these features suggest a close affinity at the time, not merely of languages but of cultures — perhaps a topic for ‘comparative stylistics’ (cf. VI.10.2, 82).

33. For our agenda, a key point about philology was the reconciliation between theory — reconstructing a language through law-like correspondences — and practice — deducing the language from preserved attestations. When possible, the theory was directly data-driven by actual evidence, e.g., when reconstructing ‘Indo-European’ by comparing a comprehensive range of attestations in its many descendants.²⁰ The sudden discovery of a very early language that confirms a theory is a momentous event, e.g., when Hittite, spoken in an empire in Cappadocia from the 18^th to the 13th centuries B.C., confirmed the theory of laryngeal sounds.²⁴ Had the data refuted the theory, philologists would have promptly revised it — a step against which some recent ‘linguistic theories’ are effectively immune (II.85). 

II.C. Descriptive studies of language: linguistics 

34. As if it were itself subject to the evolution it describes, philology evolved into a resolutely descriptivist and modernist ‘science of language’ under the term linguistics, which our discussion can term descriptive linguistics.²⁵ It arose in some isolated approaches in the latter 19th century and was widely consolidated in the 20th, probably aided by several trends: the solid advances in phonetics for describing the sounds of diverse languages and varieties at high degrees of precision; and the rising interest in ‘strategic languages for administering colonial empires or conducting global warfare with more efficient means (cf. I.41, 106).

35. Moreover, linguistics profited from the advance of ‘science’ at large and the establishment of new sciences in institutions and universities. Considerable influence emanated from the ideology of unified science,²⁶ an optimistic project to ‘unify’ all the sciences plus philosophy by merging two strikingly contrasting ideologies: radical realism upon the model of physics, and radical idealism upon the model of formal logic (I.81). The contrast may have remained inconspicuous because both fields display formal equations, although in physics they refer to the essential forces of nature and the behaviour of matter and energy, whereas in logic they refer to abstractions like ‘possible worlds’ (cf. II.94). So whenever you switch from physics over to logic, your objects of inquiry switch from real to ideal, or from actual to virtual, and the observation of properties becomes irrelevant.

36. Under such influences, the young science of ‘descriptive linguistics’ might undergo contrary pressures toward either realism or idealism, as manifested in the lasting contest between the ideologies of physicalism²⁷ versus mentalism.²⁸ Unhappily, the contest was less dialectical than confrontational; each ideology firmly claimed sole authority and denounced the other, like negative campaigning in dirty politics. The concept of ‘language’ in turn suffered two converse reductions: to a concrete array of physical objects or events, or else to an abstract array of meanings or ideas. For realism, which favours practice, ‘language’ is manifested as what we hear and read; for idealism, which favours theory, ‘language’ is an underlying system that is not manifested at all. So the dialectic between language as theory and discourse as practice (section I.B) has been largely obscured.

37. Notably in the early stages, the new science remained allied with philology, where some eminent linguists had been professionally trained anyhow. This alliance might have encouraged reconciling theory with practice, as philology had done (II.33); and a similar success was achieved in fieldwork linguistics (II.58). But unified science would hardly address historical issues, which do not fit into the physics of particles, forces, and interactions on either infinitesimal or astronomical time scales; or into the logic of ‘propositions’ and ‘sentences’ that are always and everywhere either true or false (cf. II.70).

38. At all events, descriptive linguistics founded its own academic identity by making two programmatic turns. It soundly repudiated prescriptivism and tradition-al grammar as unscientific;²⁹ and it stoutly avowed the linguistic equality whereby all the world’s languages or varieties have equal potential for expressing or communicating whatever might be required, and none is inherently superior or inferior (cf. I.40; II.31).³⁰ The avowed goal was to describe languages as they are actually used, and not as some guardians assert they ought to be used. Descriptive methods were to be kept clearly distinct from evaluative (cf. VI.10.10.1).

39. But, all too precipitately, linguistics also turned against descriptive philology by radically sidelining the historical emphasis. Language would henceforth be described as a static ‘synchronic system’ in its current state and in a programmatic dichotomy with the ‘diachronic sequence’ in its historical evolution.³¹ This shift recast the question of what type of system a language might constitute, and two distinct theories (or groups of theories) proposed their answers, some resonating with realism or physicalism, and others with idealism or mentalism.  

40. Even more influential was the programmatic dichotomy, under various pairs of labels like French ‘langue’ versus ‘parole’,³² between language representing the static system, versus discourse representing its dynamic manifestations. The ‘true and unique object of linguistics’ was roundly declared to be ‘language studied in and for itself’.³² By contrast, ‘speech cannot be studied’, ‘for we cannot discover its unity’; it is but a ‘heterogeneous mass’ of ‘accessory and accidental facts’³² — a linguist’s hopeless utopia (cf. I.6). In my terms, this dichotomy flatly disconnects the dialectic between theory and practice, and the outcome has had to be divisive and counter-productive. In particular, the practices of linguists are left in the vacuum of ‘studying language’ but not ‘speech’, i.e., producing theory-driven, top-down input without recourse to data-driven, bottom-up input — ultimately, science explaining only its own abstractions (cf. II.85). We seem to pursue the truly arcane question of what language is like when nobody’s using it.

41. Because these two dichotomies idealise ‘language’, they resonated with idealism and mentalism. Neither the ‘synchronic system’ nor ‘language by itself’ exists in the world of real experience; they are entities which linguistics postulated rather than discovered. They were further split between mentalism and physicalism when ‘the source material of language’ was ‘pictured’ in another dichotomy: as ‘two parallel chains, one of concepts’, i.e., the ‘signifieds’; and ‘the other of sound-images’, i.e., the ‘signifiers’; and ‘the bond between the signifier and the signified’ was declared ‘arbitrary’.³³ Having exiled discourse (‘speech’) elided the fact that the processes of associating meanings with sounds during the use of language are by no means arbitrary, but precisely controlled. ‘Arbitrariness’ expediently trun-cated the challenge to explain how these processes of association operate even in simple discourse, not to mention language learning, poetry, or translation.

42. However, some major approaches in descriptive linguists effectively disregarded these prim dichotomies and applied a resolutely realist theory. There, a ‘language’ is defined as the concrete system of speech activities shared within a community of native speakers, which I consider the most essential and general theory within descriptivism (II.25). The practice of linguists would concentrate on observing and recording a corpus of utterances from informants in authentic situations, rather like dialectology (II.31). This theory need not compel a choice between physicalism and mentalism (II.36), but can underwrite an informal compromise. Physicalist outlooks have dominated phonetics, the study of the articulation and audition of speech sounds, whilst mentalist outlooks have dominated grammar, the study of the forms and patterns of phrases and sentences.

43. Still, some descriptive linguists declared their official allegiance to unified science (cf. II.35). Applying physicalism to language favoured the ideology of behaviourism, where speech figured as ‘verbal behaviour’,³⁴ and utterances as pairs of a ‘stimulus’ by the speaker and a ‘response’ by the hearer. ‘Speech’ was thus breezily alleged to constitute ‘cause-and-effect sequences exactly like those we may observe in the study of physics’.³⁵

44. A descriptivist and realist theory might rationally procure data by identifying the units in a language system, and the ‘distinctive features’ determining their various positions in the system. A radical implication is that the system is constituted only by the distinctiveness among the units, with each unit defined precisely by how it differs from all others (cf. II.170).³⁶ The units also occupy distinctive positions within ‘structures’, defined in turn as ‘systemic’ (system-based) relations between units. This approach has duly been dubbed ‘structuralism’,³⁷ and has been adopted and adapted as a general method of description not just in linguistics but in neighbouring fields like anthropology and literary studies, where the originally literal model became prominently metaphoric. Its linguistic origins fostered a latent formalism despite some functionalist practices, and a resulting over-emphasis on static units rather than social and historical processes, and on general or universal ‘oppositions’ rather than individual or social experiences.

45. To procure data on the most basic level, descriptive (or structural) linguistics proposed to isolate systems of ‘minimal units’ that cannot be analysed any further. Each system was consigned to a ‘level of description’ for study by a corresponding subfield within linguistics. Phonology³⁸ was the subfield accredited for the study of minimal distinctive sound-units called Phonemes, these being theoretical units corresponding to Speech Sounds as practical units. By drawing on Phonetics,³⁹ the most realist domain of language study (II.34, 42), the Phonemes can be concisely defined by ‘distinctive features’ specified as locations and events of articulation. Modelling the terms upon Latin, a Phoneme can be ‘labial’ for the lips, ‘nasal’ for the nose, ‘dental’ for the teeth, ‘palatal’ for the palate, and so on. A ‘stop’ occurs if the air stream is blocked; a ‘fricative’ if it passes with friction; an ‘affricate’ if it is briefly blocked and then passes with friction; ‘resonant’ if it passes with humming; and so on. If the vocal chords vibrate, the Phoneme is ‘voiced’; if not it is ‘voiceless’. Such a system is relatively straightforward to observe and define by correlating with the human vocal anatomy. Each language has its distinct system, wherein the repertory of Phonemes is relatively compact.

46. The practices for the notation and segmentation of Phonemes have enjoyed material assistance from Graphology, the unofficial ‘level’ of written language corresponding to the Phonology of spoken language (V.29). Its theoretical units are the Graphemes that represent Phonemes, whilst its practical units are, in most languages, the Letters. The relation between theoretical and practical is solid in some languages like Czech, Hungarian, or Spanish, but badly skewed in others like English and French. So the international phonetic alphabet offers a single system for accurately transcribing the sounds of virtually any language. Not surprisingly, the vowels need more phonetic letters than do the consonants, especially for a language like English with about 20 distinct vowel sounds.

47. The practices further identify Phonemes as those minimal units which are capable of distinguishing between words with different meanings. The routine test is the ‘minimal pair’, two words that differ in a single prospective Phoneme. Thus, ‘pin – bin’, ‘pin – pun’, and ‘pin – pit’ suffice to show the presence of distinct Phonemes in three positions, conventionally written with the letters of the phonetic alphabet between square brackets, thus:

(The inverted ‘e’ is widely called by the borrowed Hebrew term ‘schwa’, and roughly indicates the sound of 'uh' as in 'huh?' It’s so common in English, we really ought to have our own letter for it.)

48. However, such methods can encourage a confusion of theoretical units with practical units. When speech has been transcribed with the phonetic alphabet, the Phonemes seem to be right there for us to inspect. Yet despite their realistic basis in articulation, the Phonemes are not in the stream of speech, nor actually uttered or heard; they are mental and physical targets to which the actual Sounds get fitted during the acts of uttering or hearing. Besides, those acts produce more features than those defining the Phonemes, such as those relating to the ‘prosody’ or ‘intonation’ (Ch. IV). And of course adjustments are needed for the individual speaker’s voice, whose qualities make it recognisable even without seeing who it is.

49. Morphology⁴⁰ was in turn the subfield accredited for the study of minimal meaningful form-units called Morphemes, these being theoretical units corres-ponding to Words and Word-Parts as practical units. The Word-Parts can be handily identified by four respective positions. The Stem is the core or central part of a Word and best indicates its meaning. The Prefix is ‘previously fixed’ before the Stem; the Infix is ‘internally fixed’ inside the Stem; and the Suffix is ‘subsequently fixed’ after the Stem. Some descriptions also use the term Ending as a separate element tacked on at the end as required by the Grammar, e.g., to make a Singular Noun into a Plural. Morphemes are conventionally written between slash-marks, as in these typical illustrations:  

Here, the ordinary alphabet can serve, showing that the shapes of isolated Morphemes as theoretical units can differ from their shapes as practical units in combinations (e.g. /ity/ + /s/ => ‘ities’). Moreover, the conventional orthography of English preserves more information about Morphemes than would a phonetic transcription, e.g., the consistent Word Stem ‘gnos’ (know) in ‘gnosis’and ‘gnostic’ .

50. Like for Phonemes, the methods for identifying the Morphemes work well enough by segmenting language samples. You subdivide an utterance into the smallest units that have meanings until no more divisions can be made. Perhaps influenced by their own transcriptions, some thrifty linguists even conceived of Morphology being built directly on top of Phonology, and the Phonemes being the constituents of the Morphemes. But the two units are too disparate. Sounds are not the building-blocks of meanings nor do they total up into meanings. Rather, Sounds are the means whilst meaningful forms are the ends; and the forms of language are in turn the means whilst the meanings of language are the ends (II.94).⁴¹

51. Besides, worse problems impend in identifying Morphemes than Phonemes. The most obvious problem is the vast quantity of Morphemes for all the Word-Stems in the vocabulary. The preferred solution has been to give a reasonably complete description of the repertories of Prefixes, Infixes, and Suffixes (and, where appropriate, Endings), but of only a modest selection of Stems. The problem of quantity is just postponed, and turns up even worse in Lexicology (II.61).

52. A closely related problem is the apparent absence, in languages like English, of a theoretical system of distinctive features for Morphemes to apply to practical units as nicely as the system of Phonemes applies to Sounds. Instead of balanced pairs like[p] and[b] or[pIn] and[bIn], we find hosts of unbalanced single items without the formally logical counterpart — ‘youthful’ without ‘*ageful’, ‘dislike’ without ‘*dislove’, ‘overkill’ without ‘*underkill’, ‘beforehand’ without ‘*after-hand’, and countless others.

53. A less obvious problem is that the knowledge of various speakers is far less uniform for Morphemes than for Phonemes. The Morphology of English is decidedly unsystematic; the recognition of Morphemes may depend on extra knowledge of French, Latin, or Greek, or of some specialised field like biology or medicine. Many speakers might not detect the Negative Prefix (borrowed from Latin) ‘in‑’ across its changing forms, e.g., ‘in‑capacity, im‑munity, ir‑relevance’, or its coincidental resemblance to the Directional Prefix ‘in‑’ meaning ‘into’, e.g., ‘in‑vade’, ‘im‑pact’, ‘ir-rupt’. Where the linguists’ description finds multiple Word-Parts, ordinary speakers might find only the whole Word.

54. A still less obvious problem resides in the definition of Morphemes as ‘minimal meaningful units of form’. We can identify a unit as meaningful without being confident in defining its meaning. What meaning should we offer for ‘of’ to cover examples like ‘fond of society’, ‘think too well of herself’, ‘the want of Miss Taylor’, ‘his horror of late hours’ (all in Emma)? Or of the Suffix ‘‑ity’ across ‘quality, ability, reality, personality, jollity, eternity’ (all in Lord Jim)?

55. Explaining the meaning of Morphemes might well lead beyond the official limits of descriptive linguistics. Considering the etymology and history of expressions oversteps the limits upon ‘synchronic’ description (II.39). Tracing Morphemes to the languages from which they were borrowed, such as the many Prefixes from Latin into English, oversteps the structuralist concept of each language constituting a system on its own terms.

56. Moreover, Morphemes often do not just have meanings in themselves, but also delimit or derive meanings in context. This point is obvious for an item so common and flexible as ‘of’, but applies to many items that are much less so, as corpus linguistics can testify (section II.F.3). The ‘minimal’ status of Morphemes renders them cumbersome and roundabout units for description and analysis, and suggests they may not play a dominant role in active communication. Even a morphologist must continually start from whole Stretches of Text.

57. As for Phonemes and Sounds (II.48), Morphemes are easily confused with the Words and Word-Parts in a transcribed Utterance, whereby the function (e.g., the English Noun-Plural Morpheme) gets confused with the form (e.g., the written Letter ‘‑s’). In fact, a function in English need not demand a form, e.g. in Plurals like ‘deer’ and ‘sheep’, which has sometimes been called a ‘Zero Morpheme’.⁴² Comparing English to highly ‘inflected’ languages, we might say that the function of Singular for Nouns, and of Person for Verbs everywhere but the Third Person Singular of the Present carry ‘Zero Endings’. Formless too are Number and Gender for Articles and Adjectives. So the Morphemes as such are also not in the data.

58. Despite these various problems, Phonology and Morphology have undeniably provided a realistic practical basis for descriptive research in fieldwork linguistics,⁴³ which discovers and describes a language through direct observation of its uses for communication among native speakers. In effect, the ‘theory’ of the language is painstakingly extracted from the evidence of practices. This research continues the tradition of dialectology in philology by relying on ‘attestations’ of language, and on data elicited from ‘informants’ (cf. II.31).⁴⁴ But rather than the well-known languages of Europe (as in dialectology,) fieldwork turned to the lesser-known languages of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific. These are vastly more challenging, since their organisation may not be known in advance and may differ radically from European languages. In such a situation, identifying units of sound and form in recorded utterances constitutes a solid contribution.

59. Fieldwork brings to light interesting linguistic resources to express cultural patterns, such as Morphemes adapted for telling stories. Sample[30] comes from a story in Juba Arabic, a creole spoken in the southern Sudan, telling what befell a rogue elephant who had destroyed a bird’s nest and offspring, ignoring its protests and lamentations (parp: functions like a Present Participle).⁴⁵

[30] Fil          gum  zalaan ma  huwo wa  sibu huwo gi      kore. Uma    ta  ter     ruwa le

       elephant arose angry  with her    and  left  her    parp cry    mother of birds went to

reyiis ta gurubaat u     gum  worii le huwo gisa. Gurubaat ruwa le  fil           u     bada    

chief  of hawks    and arose told   to him   story hawks      went  to elephant and began 

dugu dugu fil.          Fil           ainu ze   de   u    bada   kore u    gum  jere gi      arfau

peck peck elephant. Elephant saw like this and began cry  and arose ran parp  raise     

adaan to  kebiir gi     durbu  kueen to  fi   wataa

ears    his big     parp  pound feet      his on earth.

‘The elephant got angry with her and left her crying. Then the mother bird went to the chief of the hawks and told him the story. The hawks went to elephant and began pecking and pecking him. The elephant saw that and began to cry out and ran off, raising his big ears and pounding the earth with his feet.’

Here we have Morphemes for marking the functional Aspect I call Trajectory (cf. III.93): the Inchoative ‘bada’ for an Action just starting, and the Durative ‘gi‑‘ for an Action continuing over time. The marker ‘gum’ highlights main actions in the story line, apart from its lexical meaning ‘arise’.

60. Such success led fieldwork to consider describing a whole language by ‘structural’ methods dealing in units and distinctive features. But fieldworkers observe many practical factors not organised in structures of Phonemes or Morphemes, and hence sidelined by structuralist linguistics, such as the communal activities and household affairs of daily life. Exploiting these factors frees descriptive linguistics from its official boundaries determined by secure correspon-dences between the theoretical and practical units defined to be minimal and hence most basic. Only the practical units can be observed; their theoretical functions and relations, and the motives for their selection and combination, must be inferred.

61. If descriptive linguistics simply moved from smaller toward larger units, the next level might be for the subfield of Lexicology,⁴⁶ the study of Lexemes as theoretical units corresponding to Words and Expressions as practical units. Yet linguistics has hesitated to make this move, and for compelling reasons. On the side of theory, the Vocabulary of a language hardly appears to correspond to any system of productive Lexemes with distinctive features comparable to the system of Phonemes. Moreover, the sheer quantity of items, evaded in morphology (cf. II.51), cannot be so easily set aside again. The status of the Lexeme itself has remained fairly shadowy; perhaps it could be an outline for a group of words made from the same Stem, e.g., ‘rest, restful, restive, restless, restlessness’ (all in Babbitt). Yet many Vocabulary items are isolated from any such group, such as ‘boffin’ for a scientist (unrelated to ‘boff’ for a joke) or ‘hooch’ for liquor (unrelated to ‘hooch’ for a thatched hut). And the relevant groupings in the use of lexical resources are the sets of choices likely to be considered together, like ‘claim, argue, assert, maintain, vow’, which are not usually related by form or formation.

62. On the side of practice, in contrast, the vocabulary is wondrously useful for an unlimited range of goals and functions, far exceeding the practices of any one speaker or writer. And the introduction and evolution of vocabulary are practice-driven too; few expressions are confirmed on theoretical grounds alone. Some pedant seems to have devised ‘exsert’ (jut out) and ‘inhume’ (bury) as logical antonyms of ‘insert’ and ‘exhume’, and I find almost no authentic uses.

63. Still, to conjecture that vocabulary is where practice most vigorously runs ahead of theory would be premature. Vocabulary is the practical side of the overarching theory that expressions do correspond to reasonably consistent meanings shared among a community. The theory cannot be proven because meanings cannot be directly observed, only their effects. Meanings are like mini-theories about how the world is organised and what people do. Yet how we grasp each other’s meanings despite all the differences in our knowledge and experience is a question that official theories about language have yet to settle.

64. The field of Lexicography,⁴⁷ concerned with compiling dictionaries, certainly began as practice running ahead of theory. Early dictionaries were mainly collections of words that attracted the compiler’s notice. The methods for deciding which words to include and how to define them were largely improvised. Emphasis fell upon erudite and antiquated items, presumably on the theory that people would not know them, but without considering whether people would want to know them, like ‘psychrophilic’ (thriving at low temperatures), ‘monopsony’ (one buyer and many sellers), or ‘borborygmus’ (intestinal rumbling caused by gas) in Webster’s dictionaries. In addition, a special dictionary jargon was cobbled together for defining them, as in these examples (again from Webster’s):

[31] Versicular: of or relating to versicles

[32] Tricotyledonous: having three cotyledons

These suggest a user erudite enough to know the meaning of ‘versicles’ (phrases sung in public worship) and ‘cotyledons’ (first leaves on a seed plant embryo), yet ignorant enough to miss Adjectival Suffixes like ‘-al’ and ‘-ous’ or the Prefix ‘tri-’.

65. At all events, descriptive linguistics did not achieve a correspondence of theory and practice in Lexicology, and research preferred to focus upon the subfield of Syntax,⁴⁸ defined as the arrangement of Words and Word-Parts in Phrases and Sentences. If we draw a close parallel to ‘Phoneme’ and ‘Morpheme’, the central unit would be the Syntagmeme, but defining that unit is far more difficult. It cannot be minimal, and it lacks a reliable set of distinctive features. I find the term rarely used in published English research, though I do find the partly analogous term Tagmeme, defined as the relation between a syntactic slot and the class of items that can occupy it (II.136).⁴⁸

66. The problems facing Syntax are rather the reverse of Lexicology or Lexicography: theory has tended to run far ahead of practice and at times entirely away from practice. In the early stages, some thrifty linguists thought of building Syntax directly on top of Morphology,⁴⁹ the Morphemes being the constituents of Words, which in turn are the constituents of Phrases (cf. II.49). But here too, the units are too disparate, even though the numerous Words that cannot be subdivided also correspond to Morphemes. In theory, the Word differs from the Morpheme as a unified target which is more likely to be uttered alone, e.g. ‘Run!’ (Tom Sawyer) and which typically appears in Collocations with other Words, e.g. ‘the moon was waxing’ (Jane Eyre), not ‘inflating’ or ‘mushrooming’ (cf. II.153). In practice, the Word is (somewhat narrowly) considered the decisive unit for learning a language, organising and producing utterances, compiling dictionaries, and so on; and its meaning is usually more tractable to define than that of the Morpheme (cf. II.54).

67. Perhaps too, the move to Syntax naturally entails a move away from the practical units of Phonology and Morphology, and toward more theoretical concepts of language (II.77). Certainly, such a trend flourished in generative linguistics, which I shall shortly review. There, Syntax became so theoretical as to push Phonology to the margins and dispense with Morphology (II.81).

68. To balance theory with practice, descriptive Syntax would presumably require some correspondence between theoretical and practical units, as had been achieved in Phonology and Morphology (II.45ff). Instead, the units of the Phrase and the Sentence, and far less often the Clause, were casually treated as both kinds of units, apparently without registering the latent dualism and its problems. For the standard (or ‘canonical’) theoretical Sentence in English, the ‘syntactic structure’ of ‘Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase’ (or ‘NP + VP’ for short) is constituted quite differ-ently than our practical Sentence ‘the moon was waxing’. No matter how much detail we add to the structure — e.g. to specify Verbs like ‘wax’ that regularly occur in the Progressive Aspect, not in the Simple Tense (my data do not show  ‘the moon waxed’) — we do not yet explain the construction of the Sentence, e.g., that ‘moon’ and ‘wax’ are highly likely to occur together, and here were chosen to anticipate why Jane could ‘plainly see’ Mr Rochester ‘at so late an hour’.

69. And so Syntax steadily drifted away from observing practical structures toward accounting for theoretical structures in terms of each other. For some linguists, the account should be given entirely upon formal principles without recourse to the meaning of language (cf. II.79).⁵⁰ We might compare the relations among sentence structures within a single text or discourse (e.g. ‘satisfied customers’ <==> ‘you will be satisfied’).⁵⁰ But the method was soon expanded for all sentence structures in a ‘language’ or ‘grammar’, and the stage was set for ‘generative linguistics’ (section II.D).

70. When descriptive studies turned to the subfield of Semantics,⁵¹ the study of meaning, theory ran away from practice altogether. A hopeless utopia was invoked to impose a highly literal and sceptical ‘science of semantics’:

[33] The total communicative content of an utterance[…] is too complex to be accounted for[by] systematic theory.[…] We must rather[...] isolate what is strictly said before we can explain circumstances, conventions, and whatever else.[So] the boundary between what does and what does not bear logically on the truth of what is strictly said must be the boundary between the science of semantics and the science of the further effects obtaining in a speech-exchange. (David Wiggins)⁵²

This might be the semantic version of the old dichotomy between language and discourse, but with a special twist. Here, meaning by itself (determined by ‘truth’) for ‘the science of semantics’ gets separated from meaning in context (determined by ‘circumstance’ and ‘conventions’) for the (clumsily phrased) ‘science-of-the-further-effects-obtaining-in-a-speech-exchange’. But if meaning is a theory or a set of ‘mini-theories’ (II.63), these must be tested by practices in ‘speech-exchanges’ in order to determine what anything or anybody ‘means’. Even ‘truth’ depends on context and circumstance, with fuzzy borders to ‘falsehood’ and ‘tale’[34-35].

[34] Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach[…]

By indirections find directions out.[…]

If circumstances lead me, I will find

Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed. (Hamlet)

[35] By this marriage all little jealousies, which now seem great[…]

Would then be nothing. Truths would be tales,

Where now half-tales be truths. (Antony and Cleopatra)

Moreover, semantic analysis of ‘what is strictly said’ symptomatically turns out rather offhand in practice, as in this foray into the meaning of ‘bachelor’:

[36] Intuitively, does the following pair mean the same: (a) ‘bachelors prefer redheads’; (b) ‘girls with red hair are preferred by unmarried men’? Yes. (You may not have agreed, but it’s not too important.) (Semantics: A Coursebook)⁵³

To a more disciplined inspection, these don’t ‘mean the same’: ‘redheads’ are not just ‘girls’, but also ‘women’; and that is important, thank you.

71. In parallel to ‘Phoneme’ and ‘Morpheme’, theoretical units were proposed like Seme, Sememe, or Semanteme,⁵⁴ plus the semantic features they would have. But these theoretical units are ostensibly ‘universal’ and thus peculiar to no language, and so would hardly correspond to specific practical units, which they must in order to communicate. The proposed ‘features’ like ‘Human’ for the meaning of ‘bachelor’ in the evergreen example (cf. II.94) are just Words with meanings that depend on their contexts of use. In authentic data, both a bachelor and a husband can be only ‘half human’, the ‘feline’ Mr Carker resembling a ‘cat’[37], and a ‘revolting husband’ from Sylhet in Bangladesh resembling a ‘tree’[38].

[37] feline from sole to crown was Mr. Carker,[…] sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot,[as he] looked down at Mr. Dombey, half human and half brute (Dombey)

[38] The man is often horribly old with a crooked face while his wife is a young girl of astonishing beauty.[…] He may be like a banana tree or a coconut tree, half human in appearance, revolting in every way, but caring for him is still a woman’s duty if he’s her husband. (Asian Women in Britain)

A ‘bachelor’ is a social, not just ‘semantic’ category, and in a setting like Victorian England, might be regarded not as a prime case for semantics but as an anomaly:

[39] A bachelor is a man who shirks responsibilities and duties (Socialist)

[40] What’s a bachelor? A mere nothing — he’s a chrysalis. He can’t be said to live — he exists. (Gondoliers)

The ‘complexity’ of the ‘total communicative content of an utterance’ is exactly what makes meaning ‘systematic’. And a Semantics that ‘isolates’ away from it loses not merely its human relevance but its principal resource.

72. Theory and practice have also been perplexed in the subfield of Pragmatics,⁵⁵ defined as the study of the uses of language — perhaps a paradox in a discipline which has, since its inception, set up dichotomies (like ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, II.40 ) to separate language from use. If Pragmatics were to be yet another descriptive ‘level’ of units, Pragmemes might be theoretical units corresponding to Speech Acts as practical units. The ‘Pragmeme’ would in turn be determined by its pragmatic features, which might encode distinctions concerning conditions of use, such as intentions and goals, or traits and states of the participants, such as beliefs and emotions. However, I hardly find these terms documented anywhere. Besides, goals or emotions are not features of theoretical units, but of practical units like the text or discourse (e.g., insincere promise); and they are not ‘distinctive’ in determining the places of units in an orderly system like the Phonemes.

73. But after all, Pragmatics emerged from the philosophy of ‘ordinary language’⁵⁶ rather than from linguistics proper. It was embraced by linguistics to resolve intractable problems fomented by a Semantics that, as we saw, wanted to ‘isolate truth from circumstances’ and ‘conventions’[48]. Similarly, the Speech Acts most studied have seemed fairly abstract and well-defined. A favourite is the Performative, a speech act that is constituted by uttering it (III.91), such as ‘promising’ to perform an action⁵⁷ by using the ‘Performative Verb’ ‘promise’[41]. However, authentic data suggest that Performatives are a rather special case, and even ‘promising’ is more variable in context than ‘speech act theory’ would indicate. Speakers can ‘promise’ Actions which they could scarcely perform[42], or which are not in their own power[43]. Besides, ‘I promise you’ can just be giving assurance[44], or even making a threat — a quite different speech act[45].

[41] I promise that I’ll be there at two o’clock. (invented example)

[42] I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors (Religious Experience)

[43] I promise you that if you persevere with aerobic walking, the psychological benefits alone will make you want to get out every day. (Walking Diet)

[44] I haven't done anything wrong — I promise you. I'm just homeless, that's all. (Furniture) 

[45] if you kill my husband, or anyone else, then I promise you that your brothers will die, on the tarmac in front of that plane. (Skyjack)

Like other linguistic units, a ‘speech act’ is best defined in the context of situation.

74. In retrospect, descriptive linguistics has achieved its greatest successes where it balanced theory with practice, most effectively in fieldwork by analysing corresponding systems of minimal units. In my view, this work is the most impressive and enduring success in modern linguistics, documenting over a thousand previously undescribed languages (cf. II.58). Sadly, many are nearing extinction, as children abandon the idioms of their parents, and families are displaced from their communities. In February 2000, UNESCO estimated that a language disappears every two days and nearly half of the roughly 6500 languages spoken today are endangered. Ecologism harmonises with UNESCO’s view: ‘each language reflects a unique vision of the world and shows how the community resolves its problems with the environment’; ‘at the disappearance of a language an irreplaceable part of our knowledge of the thought and of the vision of world is lost’.⁵⁸

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