Text linguistics at the millennium 2
E. ‘If I were you...’
60.
For a programmatic illustration, I shall survey some corpus data kindly provided
to me by Stephen Bullon, Publishing Manager at COBUILD (Collins Birmingham
University International Language Database) in late 1998 and early 1999 from the
‘Bank of English’ at Birmingham University, the world’s largest
computerised data corpus, then containing over 329 million words of running text
(cf. § 2)
61.
I wanted to explore the Conditional colligations ‘if I were’ and ‘if I
was’, because they have been items of dispute among teachers of English
grammar. My sampling consisted some 800 occurrences out of the total of over
4000 — a partial sample of course, but a week of hard work to sort out all the
same. In respect to colligability, I found a strong attraction for the Second
Person Pronoun6 ‘you’, and the data indicated why. The coherence
of the data was centred on delivering advice (9), a warning (10), or a threat
(11), whilst the cohesion was centred on the two exophoric Actors ‘I’ and
‘you’:
(9) I’d
get some sleep if I were you. You’ll need to be up at six to catch the early
morning flight from Heathrow.
(10) The
builder looked at it and said, ‘I hope you’re not thinking of filling that
thing with water. I wouldn’t if I were you — it’ll go through the
floor.’
(11) The blood of the mob is up! If I were you, I’d clear
out of town now with as much as you can carry
The
speaker’s intentionality was to imply: ‘I’m not telling you what to do,
I’m just telling you what I would do from my own standpoint if I happened to
be in your place’. Some leeway is reserved for the acceptability of the hearer
who can decline without either side losing face. The informativity is low when
the situationality alerts the hearer about what might or should be done. But in
some contexts, the advice was clearly improbable and informative, e.g.:
(12)
a girl asked what she could do to stop her boyfriend ejaculating
prematurely. ‘If I were you, I would drop him straight away’, came the
answer
(13) ‘I’m thinking of sending my paper to the Journal. Is there room in the next issue?’ Benedict turned to him.
‘If I were you’, he said carefully, but with thickened accent, ‘I would
shred it’. Huntley bridled. ‘I beg your pardon?’
When
estimating the probabilities of data, we apply our own knowledge of
intertextuality being actualised on demand. Someone leaving from harrowing
Heathrow Airport had better get plenty of ‘sleep’ (9) in order to survive
the ordeal; and someone who has stirred the ‘blood of the mob’ had better
‘clear out of town’ (11). But some ‘girl’ who seeks advice from an agony
aunt about her ‘boyfriend’ does not expect to be ordered to ‘drop him
straight away’ (12); and someone who has written a ‘paper’ would
‘bridle’ at being told to ‘shred it’ (13).
62.
Other pronouns allowed by the cohesion of English were found to be disfavoured
by colligability. Whereas ‘if I were you’ appeared in 282 data samples and
‘if I was you’ in 37, others colligations were at best marginal, some
hovering between 10 and 20 and some close to or equal to zero. The totals were:
if I was he
0
if I was she
2
if I was they
0
if I was him
17
if I was her 5
if I was them 11
if I were he
3
if I were she
0
if I were they
1
if I were him
18
if I were her 6
if I were them
10
These
data indicate which of the virtual colligations of English cohesion are or are
not probable in their colligability for actualisation (§ 53). Interestingly,
the probabilities were about even for whether the Verb was in the Indicative
‘was’ or in the (presumably) Subjunctive ‘were’, even though both
colligated with the Object Pronoun much more readily than with the Subject
Pronoun. Yet when the Pronoun was ‘you’, which does not differentiate
between Object and Subject, the old Subjunctive still proved by far the more
probable choice. Perhaps this choice is felt to signal a Contrafactual Modality
and thus to be more tentative and polite for purposes of face-saving; or perhaps
the whole colligation is simply chosen and produced as one frozen unit (compare
‘theory and practice’ in § 98).
63.
Several constraints on colligability and collocability appeared when the
Conjunction ‘if’ had a meaning like ‘whether’. This meaning colligated
with the Indicative ‘was’ — possibly to leave open the question of whether
something is Contrafactual — and resisted colligating to the right with a
Pronoun. A common collocation to the left was a Verb expressing uncertainty,
like ‘ask’, ‘wonder’, or ‘not know’, as in (14-16).
(14) One day Mrs Luppin remarked that I was looking a little
off-colour and asked if I was feeling
all right. I told her about my sickness.
(15)
then I got pregnant and I started wondering
if I was going to be able to do things right
(16) I didn’t know
if I was going to do this assignment […] But late last night, I decided
to.
In
such contexts, the Verb ‘see’ never meant ‘perceive with the eye’, nor
did ‘tell’ ever mean ‘inform’, although these are the definitions listed
as the most probable by conventional dictionaries. Instead, the meaning was
‘find out’ or ‘determine’ as in:
(17)
I wrote seven poems to enter, very much borrowed from the Philip Larkin
style. I borrowed his sense of depression, too, so all my friends were phoning
to see if I was having a nervous breakdown.
(18)
No one with a gun had shown himself above the roofline but how
could I tell if I was being watched?
Such
data show how the ‘attractions’ among meanings can influence not just the
actualisation of one potential option, but also the actualisation of one
potential meaning for the superficially ‘same’ option (cf. § 58). The
colligation ‘as if’ colligates in turn with Nouns or Modifiers to the right,
and collocates with specified Verbs to the left.
F. Intertextual actualisations of ‘theory’ and
‘practice’
64.
I shall now attempt a less usual demonstration with corpus data, examining how
the pair of terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are actualised in contemporary
English texts, and what the implications might be for situating these pairs
within a genuine dialectic. My data were again kindly provided from the ‘Bank
of English’ by Stephen Bullon at COBUILD, this time in January 1999.
65.
First, we can look at text samples wherein both ‘theory’ and ‘practice’
appeared. The data indicated a cline between the pole of easy connection and the
pole of uneasy disconnection.
One
data source for easy connection were book titles on a motley variety of topics,
such as: Warfare in the Twentieth Century:
Theory and Practice; Life Insurance:
Theory and Practice; Islam in Theory
and Practice; and The Family
Interpreted: Feminist Theory in Clinical Practice. Intriguingly, the idea of
‘warfare’ or ‘life insurance’ having their own ‘theory’ intuitively
seems informative enough to suggest that the author intended to upgrade and
dignify a heavily practical activity (cf. § 93). In return, we might
intuitively grant the status of a religion like ‘Islam’ or a philosophy like
‘feminism’ being a ‘theory’, and see the informativity focused upon how
they get carried over into ‘practice’ against the contrary trends toward a
secular or patriarchal global society.
66.
The other main data source for easy connection was found among services offering
both ‘theory and practice’ in a package deal. Some were merely trendy, like
‘herbal medicine’ (19), while most were concerned with education, sometimes
in specialised fields like ‘accounting’ (20), but often in general education
(21-23), which we shall be seeing again (§ 68, 95).
(19)
a course designed to give students instruction in the theory and practice
of the use of herbs for medicinal purposes and herbal preparations to maintain
healthy skin and hair.
(20)
Financial Reporting explores accounting theory and practice, including
such topics as the development and objectives of financial reporting
(21)
The practicum is concerned with relating theory and practice, helping
prospective teachers to understand and practise a wide range of teaching skills
(22)
the adult education course contained five nights of theory and practice,
for three hours each night
(23)
The course of study ensures that theory and practice are closely related,
providing an opportunity for students to continue with work
These
trends can be easily by verified by surfing the Internet. On 14 February 1999,
the Alta Vista search engine returned 105,469 home pages for the verbatim
collocation ‘theory and practice’. Alongside such frankly pedestrian topics
as ‘Good Cooking’, ‘Horse Racing’, ‘Belly Dancing’, and ‘Late
Victorian Wallpaper’, I found courses or surveys in ‘Health Activism’,
Grading for the Fashion Industry’, ‘Radiometric Calibration’, ‘Rubber
Injection Moulding’ ‘Common Object Request Broker Architecture’, and far
more others than I have room to list here. This rampant proliferation indicates
how empty the terms have become, conveying a vague promise of being
comprehensive and thorough (§ 75). At times, the promise sounded distinctly
breezy:
(24) it also helps the student to make the vital connection
between esoteric theory and mundane practice, between the future of the planet
and the recycled Pepsi can
67.
In still other data, the disconnection between of theory and practice was openly
acknowledged, though still in confident hopes of a reconnection. One topic was
the economic organisation of a society:
(25)
As business starts to bloom in Central and Eastern Europe, theory will
increasingly turn into practice.
(26) The Marxist argument against the separation of theory and
practice is well known
Marx
himself would have vehemently denied that the ‘separation of theory and
practice’ which he strove to overcome could disappear when free-market
‘business starts to bloom’ in formerly ‘socialist’ countries. But then
he would have undoubtedly affirmed that the collapse of the polity in those same
countries resulted from authoritarian refusals to put the theory of socialism
into real practice (Beaugrande, 1997a: 397) (cf. § 80).
68.
Toward the middle of the cline shown in Fig. 2 we could put the data indicating
that the connection between theory and practice is ‘not clear’ (27) or is
open to ‘disagreement’ (28):
(27)
each group allowed to exercise its rights to freedom and
self-determination, but it is not clear what this policy will mean in terms of
practical politics
(28) Sometimes members of the community disagree over the
practical definitions given to values everybody professes in the abstract, such
as liberty or equality
Further
along toward the pole of uneasy disconnection was the prospect of ‘fundamental
cracks in society’ that are actually ‘widening’:
(29) the fundamental cracks in both society and theory which
were laid bare in the 1960s continue to widen; theory becomes increasingly
separated from practice and, thus, incapable of addressing those cracks
Predictably,
the social domain suffering the most conspicuously was education, which I often
noticed urgently searching for a reconnection, as in:
(30)
addressing the challenge of how we can make comprehensive education work
for those for whom theory and practice have remained far apart. That is a debate
to relish
(31)
Perhaps the primary benefit of this block was its attempt to link theory
with practice. Most teacher preparation programs have a separation
(32)
a cross section of teachers from
within school who can apply their learning in situ, bridging the gap between
theory and practice by generating theory from practice and practice from theory
(33) the actors within the school’s unique culture, provided
‘theory for action’ fostering a very different attitude towards theory than
the usual presentation of disembodied theory which many teachers experience on
external in-service courses
69.
A ‘cracked’ society might offer hidden motivations for ‘supporting’
democratic institutions ‘trade unions’ ‘in theory’ whilst
‘destroying’ them ‘in practice’ (34); or for ‘manipulating the
theory’ of an institution like the law in order to ‘justify’ one’s
‘perversions’ in ‘practice’ (35).
(34)
In theory, he is a great supporter of trade unions, because, in theory,
he’s a socialist, but in practice, he has been the most successful destroyer
of trade union power in the British print
(35) The problem, Mr Olson thinks, is not legal theory but
legal practice although lawyers clearly manipulate the former to justify their
perversions of the latter.
70.
Against my own intuition to approve of connection between theory and practice,
some data indicated disapproval:
(36)
The scope of coercive violence was extended: ‘Pornography is the
theory, rape is the practice’. ‘Pornography is violence against women’.
These made pithy slogans
(37)
Up until that point the proud theory
— and the practice of the majority — was that you lived with your family
until you met the man you would marry
(38)
It was a symbolic and deferential democracy, but the symbols
were rooted in substance: myth became the mortar binding theory and practice
The
connection was designedly tendentious for ‘pornography’ and ‘rape’ (36),
but merely patriarchal for ‘marriage’ (37) and ‘mythical’ for
‘democracy’ (38). Still, to assert that a ‘myth’ brings ‘substance’
to ‘symbols’ does seem audaciously informative, as does the metaphoric
‘mortar’ suggesting a solidity and strength that are only imaginary.
71.
My personal attention was attracted by the topic of ‘war’ or ‘warfare’,
whose ‘theory and practice’ we saw being invoked in a book title (§ 65).
Some data implied that ‘war’ is essentially a set of ‘practices’ that
can be pursued without much interest in ‘theory’ (39); or that the
‘theory’ can be invented after the fact (40).
(39)
he was an independent, practical soldier with a distaste for theory; a
fighter who believed that war provided the only lessons of real value to a
soldier.
(40) He did not ‘convert theory into practice’ but
exemplified instinctive practice and later derived theory from it. Few soldiers
have so impressively
But
most of the data concerned an official ‘theory’ expressly devised to justify
the practices of warfare such that they will not be recognised to grossly
contradict all the humane ideals of the society. Ironically, the author of the
most celebrated result, the ‘just war theory’ was a godly philosopher whose
sources were eminently theoretical, such as Plantonism (41). Incorporating the
‘Christian position’ on an ‘intellectual’ basis can harmonise this
theory with the theory of a ‘holy war’, ‘God’ being squarely on your
side (42-43). By emphasising ‘intention’ over
reality, a ‘just war’ can be glibly ‘translated’ into a ‘just
peace’, (44); and can project a resounding triumph of ‘good’ over
‘harm’ (45). Yet if the ‘theory’ really requires that ‘every
less-violent means be exhausted’ (46) and that ‘provisions be made for
innocent civilians’ (47), then no war I can think of has fit its practices to
the theory — certainly none in this century.
(41)
Augustine expressed a new attitude toward conflict by formulating the
just war theory. He adapted rules of warfare developed by classical thinkers
such as Plato and Cicero to the Christian position.
(42)
They forgot how intellectually respectable the Christian theory of holy
war once was
(43)
there’s something called a just war theory which is justified an awful
lot of wars in the world’s history, where both sides feel they call on God
(44)
one of the seven points of the just war theory is ‘right intention’,
and that is sometimes translated as the intention to have a just peace
(45)
the just-war theory clearly requires that the good to be achieved
outweighs the harm that is to be done
(46)
Essentially, the just-war theory requires, above all, that every
less-violent means be exhausted before war can be justified
(47) Likewise, the just-war theory requires that there be
provisions made for innocent civilians
The
real but unofficial theory of modern warfare has been described by Tony Wilden
(1987: 27), following Brownmiller (1975), in terms where ‘the power of God’
is equated with limitless violence:
The object is to destroy the will
to resist; the target is the entire population; the strategy is terror; the
means is torture; the usual end is death; most of the victims are women and
children: the worst instrument is rape. To do this you simply let your men loose
[with] the power of God over anyone and everyone without a weapon or the
strength to fight back.
72.
This contrast between theories indicates that the official position of
governments conducting a war or preparing to do so — of course as a means to
‘keep the peace’ (M. Thatcher) — will embrace the ‘just war theory’
whilst conceding that it is not, or not always, put into ‘practice’ (48-50),
due to unforeseen ‘problems’ (50). Improvements in technology are cheerfully
expected to establish the connection, e.g., to improve the practices of bombs
landing two-thirds of a mile off their targets (51).
(48)
One theme runs throughout, however — the dichotomy between the theory
of war and its practice
(49)
As this chapter will endeavour to
show, the gap between theory and practice in strategic bombing is wide.
(50)
after only 30 months of war, the original theory of strategic bombing had
been stood on its head because of practical problems in carrying out missions
(51) Warden believed, however, that modem munitions offered a
precision that would marry theory and practice. A B-17 bomber in World War II
had a ‘circular error probable’
of 3300 feet, meaning that half of the bombs dropped far from their targets
73.
Governments have invoked supportive theories to explain why warfare could not be
avoided. My data turned up the ‘domino theory’ (war must be fought here lest
neighbouring countries ‘fall’ to the enemy) (52-53), and the ‘deterrence
theory’ (54) (continual threat of war is needed to deter your enemies from
war). Both theories were heavily exploited during the Cold War, especially in
Southeast Asia (53), yet the armaments for war were illogically retained after
Cold War had ended (54).
(52)
‘We were faced with the Cold War and the domino theory," the
60-year-old former national serviceman said
(53)
He [Nixon] mined harbors, talked about ‘decisive military action to end
the war’, and used the domino theory to justify the need to stop communism in
Vietnam.
(54) Ordinary people, including those who subscribed to the
deterrence theory during the cold war, are angry that politicians have not taken
the opportunity to move towards a nuclear-free world
The
all-time prize for public mystification was surely earned by the ‘limited war
theory’ (55-58) concocted to justify the lavish preparations for war after
nuclear weapons had foreclosed the chances of surviving, let alone winning. This
theory was obliged either to ignore ‘the enemy’s response’ (57) or to
naively imagine the sort of enemy whose thinking is entirely guided by game
theory (58).
(55)
How can conflict be waged between nuclear-armed adversaries without
leading to mutual destruction? Limited war theory attempts to provide a
framework
(56)
We had to invent a theory that would allow us to fight on the edges
without nuclear technology. This theory is called ‘limited war’. Its premise
is that we and the Soviets can wage little wars, and that each side will refrain
from going nuclear
(57)
And in the event of a conventional attack the scenario was for the first
use of battlefield weapons to keep the nuclear war limited and contained. That
was the theory. But there was no account taken of the enemy’s response
(58) Limited war theory had been built on the assumption that
the opponent was cautious and value-maximizing, not fanatically determined
The
basic premise of this theory — which I have never once heard anyone seriously
defend — is vastly more remote
from real practices than anything imagined by Plato or St. Augustine: a
‘superpower’ with an staggering stockpile of nuclear armaments would refrain
from using these even in times of utmost desperation, and tamely accept defeat,
humiliation, and dispossession by the rival ‘superpower’ who, the propaganda
machines have insisted, is the very incarnation of evil. If the ‘Soviets
rejected’ such an absurd theory (59), then they were ‘motivated’ as much
by common sense as by ‘escalation theory’.
(59) bringing in escalation theory from political context is
the fundamental motivation behind Soviet rejection of many aspects of limited
war theory. This is crucial, because if a war is to be limited in scope through
deliberate restraint
A
far more accurate label would have been ‘substituted
war theory’, where the ‘little wars’ (56) between two or more clients of
the ‘superpowers’ allow the latter to stereotype short of the logical
end-game of ‘mutual destruction’ (55). Vietnam was supposed to be one such
substituted war, but it didn’t go according to the ‘theory’ of the
superpowers for ‘limited war’ (60), precisely because the ‘enemy’s
response’ was ‘fanatically determined’.
(60) Vietnam saw the application of many of these ideas.
Whether or not the Americans were consciously applying limited war theory, many
of the concepts underlying and shaping their policy were the same as those
shaping limited war theory
74.
I have focused on the topic of ‘warfare’ as a conspicuous demonstration of
how an official ‘theory’ can get ‘theorised’ not to account for the real
practices, but to provide a camouflage for the real theory. I suspect many far
less conspicuous parallels could be found wherever the real theory that would
actually account for the real practices would be inadmissible in a modern
democratic society. If so, the apparent global trends toward ‘democracy’
from the 1960s onward might be grasped as a ‘re-theorising’ of post-war
societies that transformed official theories whilst leaving the real practices
largely unchanged (see Beaugrande, 1997a for extensive discussion and
references).
G. Intertextual actualisations of ‘theoretical’
and ‘practical’
75.
The corpus data for samples wherein both ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’
appeared did not reflect the same trends as those with ‘theory and practice’
in any straightforward way, but parallels could be detected. The collocation
‘theoretical and practical’ was often enlisted to enhance the commercial or
professional value of some essentially practical activity or training by
implying that it is comprehensive or thorough (cf. § 66):
(61)
The program will incorporate theoretical and practical training within
the school’s own commercially-operated hotel, just outside Canberra.
(62)
the weekend is designed to give
Queensland’s food and wine professionals and serious amateurs access to the
latest information, practical and theoretical.
(63)
Media Studies, National Certificate. This course gives a basic
introduction, both theoretical and practical, in media studies as a starting
point for a career in this area
(64) The course is both theoretical and practical with the
emphasis once again on gaining real experience under the guidance of a senior
BBC Radio Trainer.
The
collocation was also enlisted to suggest the serious nature of one’s
deliberations:
(65)
This chapter is concerned with the practical and theoretical implications
of seeing ‘child abuse’ as a matter of men’s violence to babies, children,
and young people
(66)
More recently there has been a renewed interest in fundamental social problems
such as poverty, and a search, both on the practical and on the theoretical
level, for explanations of the persistence of problems despite the rise of
institutional welfare.
Criminology
presented an interesting exception: either remaining ‘reticent’ about
awkward matters that were both ‘theoretical and practical’ (67)
or else shunting them off into ‘ethical’ matters in order to profess
‘neutrality’ in both ‘theory and practice’ (68).
(67)
has often been ignored or avoided by critical criminologists. Carlen has
observed that there is a ‘radical reticence about theoretical and practical
questions concerning the desirability, recognition, denial and concomitant
control of the power to punish’.
(68) Most criminologists are engaged in theoretical and
practical projects without considering their ethical implications. They believe
that they can be ethically neutral
This
aspiration is quite natural in view of the questionable ethics of
‘punishment’ (not to mention the endemic beatings, rape, and torture in our
prisons) in a society whose official theory is to ‘rehabilitate criminals’.
76.
Where the data indicated some uneasy disconnection, the ‘theoretical’ was
typically disapproved and the ‘practical’ was approved:
(69)
Those experiences were of crucial importance to me, for they removed my
evolving approach from a purely theoretical context and re-rooted it in a
practical theatrical foundation
(70)
These are not theoretical niceties, they are fundamental practical moves forward
in market-led strategic change
(71)
Perhaps most distressing is the continued emphasis on theoretical
academic work, not practical or technical skills needed for the marketplace.
(72) most of the courses echo a ‘cut-the-crap’
utilitarianism. Background details, historical origins and theoretical models
give way to practical understanding-and-doing-skills.
Compare
this glowing vision of a ‘practical man’ being nearly superhuman:
(73)
He was a talented, capable, practical man, articulate, imaginative and
resourceful, the sort of person who could be relied upon to cope with any
situation
Some
of the data were less obvious, but a bias toward the practical might still be
inferred:
(74)
But it is fair to say that today, in general, the environment’s own
standing has become more of a matter of theoretical and spiritual interest than
a real practical constraint on the bringing of environmental litigation
(75)
he also spoke of freedom in terms which party critics like Roy Hattersley
might endorse as being dependent not just on theoretical choice ‘but on the
practical ability to exercise it, the freedom to work and develop talent’
(76) These medical schools, often controlled by a church
hostile to any birth control, enrolled almost no women, and stressed theoretical
expertise rather than the practical knowledge embodied in folk medicine.
‘Theoretical
interest’ by itself won’t accomplish much to save the ‘environment’
(74), ensure ‘freedom’ (75), or improve the ‘control’ of 'women’ over
their own lives (76).
77.
Occasional data recommended a clear decision for the one side or the other:
(77)
there was nothing for it but to distinguish sharply between the
theoretical man, who seeks understanding, and the practical man, who feels
compelled to take political action
(78) In an age of specialists, the organizational aspects of
mathematics function more tidily if people specialize either in the theoretical
areas of the subject or its practical ones. Because most people feel happier
working in one or the other of these two styles
In
still other data, connecting theoretical to the practical was advocated, though
the prospects might seem dubious:
(79)
if the lesson of history is that strong links between theoretical
research and practical applications are a key factor in scientific progress, the
effort to bring the two together is crucial
(80)
though not led directly by Marxist theory, they partially demonstrated
the correctness of that theory, showed that socialism was a practical
possibility and not just the theoretical result of idle speculation by
intellectuals who had no firm grasp of the realities
(81)
the method of ‘sociological intervention’ aims to open social movement
participants’ eyes to the wider theoretical significance of their practical
activity and thereby to catalyse the movements’ potential for creating a new
type of society
So
far, we are left to assume, science has failed to ‘bring together research and
applications’ (79); ‘socialism’ has been mainly ‘speculation’ divorced
from ‘realities’ (80); and ‘sociological intervention’ has brought us no
nearer to ‘a new type of society’ (81). If, as I would surmise, such
failures are related to the endemic disconnections of modern democratic society
(§ 74), expecting a total change seems, well, impractical.
78.
When either ‘theoretical’ or ‘practical’ occurred without the other
term, some differences in collocability could be readily noticed. The term
‘theoretical’ collocated in titles or descriptions with distinctly academic
topics, such as ‘mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology genetics,
physiology, anatomy, physiology, economics, psychotherapy’. In contrast,
‘practical’ collocated with distinctly non-academic topics such as
‘photography, seamanship, suturing, cooking, dining, woodworking, gardening,
summer pruning of tree fruit’. Equally remote from academic concerns were
books offering ‘practical’ advice like these:
(82)
this extremely practical book which mixes common-sense advice with many
trade secrets gleaned from extensive experience
(83) Courtship: Wisdom
For Wooers And The Wooed offers practical guidance on condom etiquette,
cheating, children, and, toughest of all, how to introduce your other half
If,
like me, you are puzzled about why ‘introducing your other half’ should be
‘tougher’ than rearing ‘children’, you’ll have to buy the book to find
out.
79.
The uses of ‘theoretical’ for academic topics were most pronounced when
collocated with ostentatious technical terms, e.g.:
(84)
In technical-theoretical parlance, countries are required to have factor
endowments in the same cone of diversification
(85) Bio-inorganic chemistry: experimental and theoretical
studies of speciation involved in trace element bio-availability, and
pharmaceutical trace metal interaction
The
link between ‘theoretical’ and authority was intensely emblematic when
opposed to ‘rampant empiricism’ (86) or when traced back to the ‘features
of language’ suitable for ‘sounding expert’ (87).
(86)
Rampant empiricism without a firm grounding in theoretical structures
will result in multiple research
projects with fragmented yield and low efficiency
(87) how they are perceived on some ‘authority scale’
might influence how the audience receives their experimental report or
theoretical argument. They know they have to sound ‘expert’. However, they
haven’t really figured out which features of language
The
term ‘theoretical’ itself was evidently thought to be one such ‘feature of
language’, witness its actualisations to lend some intellectual respectability
to dubious topics:
(88)
‘Psychoenergetics in Theoretical and Practical Aspects’, in Proceedings
of the Third International Congress on Psychotronic Research.
(89)
‘Reincarnation Field Studies and Theoretical Issues’, in B. Wolman, ed., Handbook
of Parapsychology
(90) To escape from this state Machen put his theoretical
knowledge of occultism to practical use, and after using a ‘process’ that
seems to have been some sort of magic
The
term was also actualised to make unpleasant realities seem more abstract, such
as tolerance of immigrants (91), profiteering by means of non-existent
‘capital’ (92), and ‘death’ by ‘cancer’ (93). Warfare popped up
again for a ‘theoretical’ intervention in Africa (94), where the
‘relief’ did not include food, water, or medical supplies, but manpower and
technology, presumably to ‘relieve’ the endangered power-holders who
safeguard European interests.
(91)
However, until immigrants began arriving in the mid-1980s, this tolerance
was a largely theoretical exercise.
(92)
the stockmarket boom inflated their
theoretical capital to phenomenal levels
(93)
However, the same assumptions that underpin calculations of ‘theoretical
deaths’ also predict an increased risk of fatal cancer in direct proportion to
the increase in body weight.
(94)
A theoretical taskforce of soldiers, warships, and military
aircraft was sent to carry out a relief mission in an imaginary African country
80.
The corpus data prominently represented two ‘theoretical’ fields. Astronomy
was a favoured topic because so much of it remains hypothetical, due to the vast
distances, masses, energies, and time lapses involved in stars or galaxies:
(95)
Crawford admits that these ideas are theoretical and highly speculative.
‘I haven’t a clue how faster-than-light travel or communication might be
achieved’.
(96) This provides a picture of the ‘Multi-verse’, as some
call this theoretical froth of universes. Because conditions in the black holes
are so extreme, even the laws of physics might change
On
the other hand, socialism was a ‘theoretical’ topic because humans can put
it into practice only if the society equitably redistributed its resources, and
the holders of power are grimly determined to achieve just the opposite. The
data showed people preferring to view ‘socialism’ as a ‘very distant
objective’ (97), far ‘withdrawn from the common-sense world’ (98). In
response, the advocates of socialism were found mistrusting the purely
‘theoretical’ and striving to gain a firm foundation upon the ‘social
experiences of the community’ (99) and to reconcile the ‘theoretical work of
intellectuals’ with the ‘manual labour of proletarians’ by sharing a
‘practical’ stance (100). The irony seems consummate if the ‘working
class’ attained a ‘theoretical position’ that ‘disconcerted’ the
academic ‘labour theorists’ (101).
(97)
Despite Ramsay MacDonald’s commitment to a Labour Party whose
theoretical aim was to transform capitalism into socialism, as leader of the
party he saw this as some very distant objective
(98)
Her [Hannah Arendt’s] thought is a
kind of reflection that deals with essences, with what is most abstract,
general, and theoretical — and it involves ‘withdrawal from the common-sense
world of appearances.’
(99)
political wisdom is not to be found in the theoretical speculations of
isolated thinkers but in the historically accumulated social experiences of the
community
(100)
By the same token, the theoretical work of intellectuals was thought to be no
less practical than the manual labour of proletarians
(101)
labour theorists of the period were aware of and disconcerted by the fact that
the working class was developing its own theoretical position on the nature of
society — a position that was antagonistic to the interests of established
society
81.
As with so many terms, my two here have been appropriated for consumerism,
witness the breezily offered ‘theory and practice’ of ‘wine’ and
‘hotels’ (61-62). Collocated directly with a commodity, ‘theoretical’
appeared just once and in a weird context (102), the intended meaning being
‘intellectual’, I would assume. But ‘practical’ collocated with all
sorts of commodities, including ‘shoes’, ‘cameras’, and ‘tableware’
along with some whose ‘practicality’ might well be doubted (103-04).
(102)
these theoretical disco records blended morbid introspection and exotic
rhythms
(103)
from our brochures showing a wide range of colourful and practical items,
the upholstery with practical zip-on covers for the flame-retardant foam
cushions
(104) Another tip is to look through the peculiar catalogues
that drop through the letter box and out of magazines. Practical ideas abound. A
portable plastic bidet, for example. Once they are the proud possessors of this
ingenious receptacle
I
would rather not picture the ‘practices’ of the ‘proud possessors’ in
(104)!
H.
Into the millennium
82.
The corpus data adduced above of course do not cover the entire range of ways in
which two pairs of terms ‘theory and practice’ and ‘theoretical and
practical’ are being actualised in contemporary English texts, but do suggest
some significant tendencies worthy of further research. Such data undeniably let
us observe what
language looks like when it is being used (cf. § 1), and to exploit texts by letting them represent themselves (§
42). We confront neither Saussure’s ‘mass’ of merely ‘accessory and
accidental facts’ plus Chomsky’s ‘fragments and deviant expressions’,
nor again the latter’s ‘completely homogeneous speech-community’ (§ 3f).
The data reflect an ongoing dialectic between the ‘heterogeneity’ within the
‘speech-community’ and the ‘homogeneity’ encouraged by shared
participation in text-events.
83.
This dialectic embraces us text linguists as well, since we belong, in our
private lives, to the community of English speakers being enticed with ‘foam
cushions’ and ‘plastic bidets’ (103-04) along with books of advice on how
to ‘cheat’ on our spouses (using a ‘portable bidet’ to purge the
evidence?) and how to give ‘introductions’ (81) so that likely candidates to
‘cheat’ with might think we’re single. In our professional lives, we can productively
invest our own status as participants in analysing or interpreting textual data
produced for the community (§ 48). Doing so should help to keep our own texts
free of the complacent or obscure abstractions that imply having some privileged
access to the ‘perfect
knowledge’ of the ‘ideal speaker’ (§ 4, 29, 34,
38), or purporting to miraculously restore the pristine, ideal order
which ‘actual speech’ had converted into disorder (§ 22).
84.
Yet our efforts to achieve the viewpoint of Firth’s ‘typical participants in
some generalised context of situation’ (§ 9) must remain continual work in
progress. Exploring corpus data is the most effective means I have found for
checking and enhancing the ‘typicality’ of my own English, though I shall
never get finished. I have repeatedly noticed areas where my own usage was at
best incomplete and at worst plain wrong, but most often just too vague. This
finding is quite natural even for a ‘Professor of English’, because, like
everyone else, I have had only a limited range of real-life
occasions for saying things (cf. § 31). I can discuss the ‘theory and
practice of education’ and frequently have, but I would be hopelessly lost in
discussing the ‘theory and practice’ of ‘belly dancing’ or ‘rubber
injection moulding’ (§ 66).
85.
Throughout my career, I have suspected that most disagreements among linguists
stemmed not from their official disputes about theory-building, e.g., whether
the ‘semantics’ should be ‘interpretive’ or ‘generative’, but from
their uneven capacities or dispositions for interpreting language data. The
unevenness might reflect the conscious or unconscious striving of some linguists
to isolate a Saussurian ‘langue’ or a Chomskyan ‘competence’ whilst
seeming to disappear behind data deliberately invented to be so trivial — like
‘the man hit the ball’ — that they seem to interpret themselves. Such
linguists look like they’re struggling to forget or cancel the fact that they
themselves are speakers and listeners who continually navigate between ‘langue
and parole’, or between ‘competence and performance’ and who are therefore
not positioned to isolate the one side from the other. Moreover, since ordinary
language experience is not mainly the interpretation of trivial isolated
sentences, their results are hardly likely to be representative of anyone’s
‘competence’, let alone the whole community’s.
86.
My professional situation has been decisively coloured by my own academic
history. My work in linguistics began with the translation of poetry
(Beaugrande, 1971, 1978), which has trained me to squeeze a great deal of
interpretation out of the data put before me, because as a translator I must
base my concrete practices upon my own interpretation of the original text. So I
was never deeply impressed with the kinds of ‘theoretical linguistics’ that
shied away from practices and retreated either into invented sentences or arid
formalisms, though I only gradually came to appreciate why the whole enterprise
is fundamentally misconceived, as I have explained here.
87.
My later work has been concentrated in language education in a broad sense. I
have thus become extremely sensitive to variations and uncertainties in and
about the usage of English, which I can see creating serious obstacles for
prospective learners or teachers of English. Indeed, the inequalities in access
to English world-wide are currently a major engine of those social and economic
inequalities that our ‘modern democracies’ officially claim to have overcome
(Beaugrande, 1997a, 1999b). So my own interest in corpus data is firmly situated
in a larger search for new directions and initiatives in a millennium which will
undoubtedly decide who may or may not speak or be heard.
88.
Again, I have good reason to mistrust a ‘linguistics’ proclaiming that
speech cannot be studied’ (§ 3). If, as Saussure acknowledged, ‘the
viewpoint creates the object’, then we have no use for the Chomskyan ‘ideal speaker’, who has no viewpoint
at
all. What text linguists must do is search our data for signs of
convergence of viewpoints among the community instead of glibly making
our own personal viewpoint supply all the norms and standards. Hjelmslev was
misled: ‘the linguistic investigator is not
given’ ‘the as yet unanalysed text (§ 7) but the actualised
text; and until I re-actualise it, I am given nothing at all. And if (as he vowed)
‘linguistic theory must also cover texts as yet unrealised’ (§ 7), then the
theory must equip us for engaging with the texts that are realised.
89.
So my enterprise hinges vitally upon gathering extensive data about the was in
which different people’s actualisations may converge or diverge.
We thus return to the critical dependence of text upon intertext which, I have
argued, turns our attention in the opposite direction from seeing the text
as a set or sequence of sentences (cf. § 14, 35, 59). By examining sets of
related choices across large numbers of texts, we can finally rescue
‘intertextuality’ from the theoretical and practical limbo where the arcane
adumbrations of post-structuralism had located it, and can make tractable
estimates of what is more or less probable about specified combinations.
Similarly, we can finally grasp the text as a genuine intersystemic event
— internally systemic in the mutual ‘attractions’ among options, and
also externally systemic in the tuning of those probabilities through other
texts within the intertext (§ 21). These options form the ‘networks’ that
are more open than any one actual text yet more closed than any virtual system
of a language (§ 27).
90.
How far an intertext might extend is, at this stage, totally unclear in theory.
In practice, you come to a trade-off between increasing the delicacy of your
survey by increasing the quantity of data versus keeping the presentation of
your findings from becoming too bulky to be manageable or indeed publishable
(cf. Sinclair, 1998: 82). I tend to level out with around one hundred samples
culled out of larger data set; for the data cited the present study, I
scrutinised some 1600 samples. But we need to form very large teams to examine
correspondingly large samplings whose size and range can be decided by practical
goals, such as providing a browsers’ corpus for self-paced learners of
English as a Foreign Language (Beaugrande, 1997b, 1998c),
91.
A comparable trade-off between delicacy and quantity applies to the length of
your individual samples. The default length in the Bank of English search
programme when I used it in July 1994 was 80 characters, with the key word or
words roughly in the centre, but I rapidly found this inadequate. The context
rarely settles down in any informative delicacy at less than twice that many,
and my samplings for this study, provided by the patient Mr Bullon, were roughly
200 characters, rounded up to begin and end with complete words. Even that much
is far from ideal, and my selection of data to present was partly steered by the
reliable delicacy of contexts at the specified length. This too is a merely
practical and somewhat adventitious artefact, to be overcome when our resources
allow.
92.
All these factors set the context for composing the present text about ‘theory
and practice’: in society, in education, in science, in linguistics, and
finally in a modest sampling of contemporary texts. I have sought to build a
case to support my assertion that human practices, including ones with texts,
are necessarily ‘theoretical’, but the underlying theories are largely
implicit and unrecognised. In return, official theories are constantly being
constructed and promulgated to satisfy the aspirations of a society of social
group to regard itself as human, fair, equitable, rational, and so on. Evidence
to the contrary can be expediently ‘theorised out’, especially by
classifying it all as individual accidents or mishaps which are (of course)
deplorable but which do not discredit an official theory.
93.
I have proposed to describe the textual data along a cline ranging from easy
connection to uneasy disconnection between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ (§
65). Some data confirmed my intuition of disconnections whose purport would be: ‘in theory it
should be like this but in practice it’s not’. Yet some other data implied
either that a connection can be taken for granted (‘just buy this book and
you’ll see’), or else that it has not yet been achieved but can be and
should be (‘just enrol in our all-new training course’). Often, ‘theory
and practice’ or ‘theoretical and practical’ seemed to convey little more
than a vague and mystified promise to be comprehensive or thorough in dealing
with matters as diverse as ‘Horse Racing’, ‘Late Victorian Wallpaper’,
‘Health Activism’, or ‘Grading for the Fashion Industry’ (§ 66). The
mystification could be more easily noticed if ‘practice’ were taken out,
e.g., if you proposed to enlighten the world on the ‘theory of belly
dancing’ or on ‘theoretical wine’.
94.
In general, ‘theory’ or ‘theoretical’ collocated with the lexical items
for academic topics, whereas ‘practice’ or ‘practical’ collocated with
those for non-academic topics, especially commodities (§ 78f). In respect to
attitudes, ‘theoretical’ was approved for academic contexts of ‘sounding
expert’ and authoritative (§ 79), but disapproved in contexts of being
abstruse or unrealistic (§ 76). In contrast, ‘practical’ was nearly always
was approved, e.g. for a ‘man’ who was ‘talented, capable’, and
‘resourceful’ (73).
95.
The most consistent preoccupations — and those with which, for the reasons
given here, I felt the greatest resonance — were found for the topic of
education (§ 66, 68). There, a ‘separation’ (31) or a ‘gap’ (32) was
admitted along with cheerful projects to reconnect: to banish ‘disembodied
theory’ (33) and (more bluntly) to ‘cut the crap’ (72). The sheer
convergence among these data indicate that the prospects are dim: if centuries
of efforts have not failed to connect up the theory and practice of education,
what can you hope to achieve, say, in ‘five nights’ (22)? The failures of
education cannot even be understood as long as they ‘theorised out’ as individual
mishaps of pupils being ‘lazy’, ‘undisciplined’, ‘disobedient’, and
so on.
96.
The real (but unofficial) theory of ‘modern education’ derives from the
persistent assumptions that the main objective must be the passive absorption of
theoretical knowledge about topics like ‘algebra’; and that the proportions
of ‘right and wrong answers’ in ‘test’ situations are the most valid
measures of individual ‘achievement’. Such assumptions could explain why
conventional education, both in its theories and in its practices, has remained
so insulated from the theories and practices of social and professional life in
rapidly changing societies. This insulation is usually accepted as a
self-explanatory precondition for education even though it instils pervasive
doubts about relevance which severely alienate many teachers and learners. No
significant improvements can occur whilst education is enlisted in the crucial
disconnection of ‘modern democracy’ to sustain equality in theory and
inequality in practice (Apple, 1984; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1986; Beaugrande,
1997a). We will need a full-scale ‘curriculum transformation’ for a
‘better linking of theory and practice to improve everyone’s learning, by
combining study with work, by a more democratic restructuring of schools, and
closer links with their communities’ (van Rensburg, 1994: 130).
97.
The double-tracking of our societies and their institutions has been faithfully
reflected in a ‘modern linguistics’ that ‘theorises out’ of
‘language’ the practical realities of human interaction. The resulting
idealisations, misleadingly still called ‘language’, are not just
empirically vacuous and scientifically invalid, but also socially irresponsible
insofar as they have denied to society the insights needed to promote equality
and democracy in and through language. Here too, a sweeping transformation is
urgently needed to bring real language back into the centre; and, for the
reasons I have sought to expound, we can reliably do so only by surveying very
large corpora of actualised texts.
98.
The analytic or descriptive tools of linguistics can be productively enlisted as
theoretical guidelines for practical goals. I can only pick out some salient
points to illustrate here. The word-order ‘theory and practice’ is quite
frozen. The reversed order ‘practice and theory’ appeared on a mere 8
home-pages of the Internet (compared to the 105,469 noted in § 66),
and all but one of these came from a single source, namely the ‘1st
International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling’
in Edinburgh in 1995. Either the normal word-order is simply treated as one
invariable unit; or the first item is also the one ranked higher than the second
(compare Cooper and Ross, 1975, on ‘world order’). The second explanation
does not fit the attitudes I have noted above. Nor is it plausible in view of
the far more comparable home-page proportions of 28,743 for ‘theoretical and
practical’ and 8361 for ‘practical and theoretical’. Either way, these two
sets of home-pages were almost all academic or educational, often on austere
topics, such as ‘optimal input filter design’ or ‘uncertainty and
complexity in automated knowledge acquisition’. Nothing so mundane as ‘horse racing’ or ‘belly dancing’.
99.
The probabilities of local colligations and collocations were better defined in
the corpus data, which are propagated under different conditions from Internet
home-pages. At
one end, the probability proved high for the fixed collocation ‘theory and
practice’ to collocate with lexical options from the topic of education, such
as ‘course’ (21-22, 33, 63-64, 71), ‘teacher’ (21, 31-33), and
‘student’ (19, 23-24). At the other end were the extremely improbable
combinations like ‘theoretical disco records’ (102) and ‘theoretical froth of
universes’ (96), or ‘practical guidance on condom etiquette’ (83) and
‘practical portable plastic bidet’ (104). Still, neither end of the
probability scale could be captured in term of ‘rules’ for the
‘grammaticalness’ or ‘well-formedness’ of ‘sentences’, all of which
would be at inappropriate degrees of abstraction (cf. § 18, 41); yet our
competence is not overly taxed by interpreting the data in context, thanks to
the ‘systemic’ nature of texts (§21). Here too, I would conclude that
intuition operates most smoothly after the fact (§ 31).
100.
John Sinclair (1991: 495), a grand pioneer of corpus linguistics, has remarked
that ‘the variations are much more interesting than the regularities’. My
own interest has been most piqued by the active dialectic between variation and
regularity, or in Saussurian terms, between ‘collective usage’ and
‘individual freedom’ (§ 11). The influence of collocability and
colligability often applies not to some specific choice (such as ‘course’)
but to some category of choices, such as the set of commodities that are
advertised to be ‘practical’ because, like ‘shoes’ or ‘cameras’ (§
81), the practicality of some brands might be doubted. Even ostentatiously
arcane combinations like ‘trace element bio-availability’ would fall under
the terms of ‘bio-inorganic chemistry’ (85), and the intentionality may well
may be to convey more scientific authority
than, say, ‘how new species are formed when trace elements are
available’. The acceptability of readers is compelled, though they might well
prefer, say, to read not (86) but
(86a):
(86)
Rampant empiricism without a firm grounding in theoretical structures will
result in multiple research projects with fragmented yield and low efficiency
(86a)
Empiricism lacking a theoretical basis will lead to fragmented and inefficient
research projects
The
high degrees of informativity in science texts are often merely apparent and
masked behind obscure modes of expression (cf. Bazerman, 1988).
101.
Word-order might be iconic for the packaging of commodities like the
‘flame-retardant foam cushions’ (103) which do burn but not so fast as
others and are displayed here like rubbery fire-wardens; or like
‘Reincarnation Field Studies’ (89) which slyly packages imagination with
observation. Or, parallelism in word-order can mark a contrast, e.g., ‘between
the theoretical man, who seeks understanding, and the practical man, who feels
compelled to take political action’ (77); or a contrast that one aspires to
resolve, e.g., between ‘the theoretical work of intellectuals’ versus ‘the
manual labour of proletarians’ (100). Or again, word order can regulate
informativity by guiding focus, e.g., toward ‘a
key factor
in scientific progress’ for which
our ‘effort’ is ‘crucial’
(79); or by evading the problems of Agency through a Passive when ‘political
wisdom’ is ‘found’ (by whom?) ‘in the historically accumulated social
experiences of the community’ (99). Such data show some of the many ways
whereby grammar can as the ‘front end’ for textual and intertextual motives
in choosing and arranging words and word-classes (§ 18).
102.
Such then are some prospects I see for text linguistics as we head into for the
next millennium, ready or not. Now that we have access to very large corpora of
authentic texts, the ‘linguistic’ issues I have aired and numerous related
ones can be reassessed from the bottom-up. Some major problems, though far from
solved, are finally being recognised and placed on the agenda, pending the
solutions that will require extensive explorations of data. Moreover, the
textual aspects of social and cultural issues can be expansively explored, such
as education and science. The delicate links between ‘language’ and
‘text’ — many of them still ‘missing’ from our established theory and
models — are also the most precise regulators of nearly all significant human
theories and practices. And, because language partially
constitutes what it postulates (§ 45), and because the actualisation of a text participates in constructing a ‘world’ (§
25), the linkage will do much to decide the future evolution of societies
already caught up in swift and epochal transformations.
Notes
1.
This problem of
‘complexity’ was also aired in Dascal and Margalit’s (1974: 85)
‘critical view of text grammars’, but their solution was simply to stay with
‘sentence grammar’.
2. Hartmann’s
(1963: 91) own term for the virtual was ‘potential’. In another volume,
Hartmann (1964: 51, my translation) expressed concern lest the pair of terms
render the ‘main term “system”’ unduly ‘vague’, and he proposed
instead the pair ‘system’ for the ‘potential’ and ‘complex’ for the
‘actual’. But for us the term ‘complex’ must seem too overloaded with
other associations, especially due to the recent prominence of ‘complexity
theory’.
3. Harweg’s
proposal (following K.L. Pike’s ‘unified theory’) to recognise the ‘emic
text’ alongside the ‘etic text’ points in a similar direction, except that
‘emic’ was defined to be ‘language-internal’ and ‘etic’ to be
‘language-external’ (1968: 152, my translation). I doubt whether this
distinction can be sustained in a comprehensive description of authentic texts.
4. In
this early passage, the wording was ‘finite or infinite’ but in Chomsky’s
subsequent formulations we consistently find ‘infinite’.
5. I recall
Hartmann
using the term in our discussions, though I could not find it in his landmark
volume Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft
(1963).
6.
Grammatical terms are
written in upper case throughout for easy recognition.
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