the written language bias in linguistics: its nature, origins and transformations

The Written Language Bias in Linguistics

There is a ‘written language bias’ in the language sciences, particularly inlinguistics. Within the discipline of linguistics, models and theories of languagehave been developed that are strongly dependent on long-time traditions ofdealing with writing and written language. This legacy is still alive in modern,mainstream theoretical linguistics. As a consequence a paradox arises: there is analmost unanimous agreement on the absolute primacy of spoken language, yetlanguage is explored from theoretical and methodological points of departurethat are ultimately derived from concerns with cultivating, standardising andteaching forms of written language.

The author substantiates claims about the ‘written language bias’ usingarguments and points from the theory and philosophy of language, phonology,grammar, lexicology, semantics, pragmatics, theory of text and discourse. Specialattention is given to the notion of the single, unitary language, the distinctionbetween language and speech, the view on language as a set of abstract objectsand rules, the sentence as the fundamental unit of language, among other themes.Although the book focuses on mainstream linguistics, it also sketches analternative theory of language which describes language use and talk-in-interaction in dialogical terms and as embodied, social action distributed in time.

Per Linell is a sociolinguist and professor in the interdisciplinary graduateschool of communication studies at University. He has publishedwidely within the field of discourse studies, particularly on institutionaldiscourse.

Routledge advances in communication and linguistictheory

Series Editor: Roy HarrisThis Series presents an integrationist approach to problems of language andcommunication. Integrationism has emerged in recent years as a radicallyinnovative theoretical position. It challenges the most basic assumptionsunderlying orthodox twentieth-century linguistics, including those taken forgranted by leading structuralists, post-structuralists and generativists. Accordingto integrationists, human communication is an essentially creative enterprise: itrelies very little on the ‘codes’, ‘systems’, ‘habits’ and ‘rules’ postulated byorthodox theorists. Instead, integrationists see the communicative life of eachindividual as part of a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the pastand the future. The success of this attempt depends crucially on the ability tocontextualise ongoing events rather than on any mastery of establishedconventions.

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1 Words—an Integrational ApproachHayley G.Davis

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3 Rethinking LinguisticsEdited by Hayley G.Davis and Talbot J.Taylor

4 Language and History: Integrationist PerspectivesEdited by Nigel Love

5 The Written Language Bias in LinguisticsIts nature, origins and transformationsPer Linell

The Written Language Biasin Linguistics

Its nature, origins and transformations

Per Linell

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Contents

Preface ix

PART I Preliminaries 1

1 Introduction 2

1.1 Two ways of looking at language 2

1.2 An overview of this book 4

1.3 What I won’t do in this book 5

2 From aspects of communicative action to sets of abstractforms

7

2.1 Objectification: splitting the phenomena and inverting thepriorities

7

2.2 Why a set of forms? 9

2.3 The cultural stereotype: talk is not ‘real language’ 10

2.4 From practical activities to theorising language 12

3 Speech and writing, spoken and written language 17

3.1 Speech and spoken language: a first approximation 17

3.2 Writing and written language: a first approximation 20

3.3 Blurring the distinctions 23

3.4 Priorities in modem linguistics 27

3.5 Summary: towards the main thesis 28

4 The written language bias in linguistics and languagesciences

29

4.1 Introduction: a paradox in modern linguistics 29

4.2 The ‘myth theory’ 30

4.3 Written language as medium and model for spoken language 31

4.4 The written language bias: defining the notion 33

4.5 Is the bias a characteristic of linguistics? 35

PART II The phenomenon and its extension 36

5 The written language bias in 101 points 37

5.1 Introduction 37

5.2 Language, discourse and the world 38

5.3 The notion of ‘a language’ 45

5.4 Phonetics and phonology 56

5.5 Grammar 63

5.6 Lexicology, semantics and pragmatics 78

5.7 Communication, discourse and texts 94

5.8 The psychology and biology of language 107

5.9 Semiotics of language, speaking and writing 111

5.10 Extensions of language and text metaphors 118

5 11 Conclusion: WLB in linguistics as a partly homogeneous andpartly heterogeneous set of assumptions

121

PART III Discussion 124

6 The transf ormations of some written-language-basedthemes

125

6.1 Introduction: recontextualising themes in linguistics 125

6.2 The Cartesian distinction between language and the world 129

6.3 Communication as transfer by means of a code 131

6.4 Language and speech 135

6.5 The notion of a language 138

6.6 Language as objects 151

6.7 The norms of language and the normativity of linguistics 157

6.8 Sentences: the fundamental units of linguistic expression (andcontent)

169

6.9 Structuralism 174

vi

6.10 The world as text 176

6.11 Recontextualisations summed up 177

7 Critique of ‘the written language bias’ argument 182

7.1 Introduction: reactions and non-reactions 182

7.2 What is the alternative? 182

7.3 The incommensurability of written language and spokeninteraction

183

7.4 A misrepresentation of written language, writing and literacy? 184

7.5 Media vs. communicative genres 186

7.6 The idealised language made by linguists 187

7.7 A language bias instead of a written language bias? 187

7.8 A caricature of linguistics? 188

8 People’s languages and linguists’ grammars 193

8.1 Where is language?: three major positions in linguistic meta-theory

193

8.2 Harris: ‘myths’ and ‘made-up’ theories 195

8.3 Chomsky: the theory that people’s languages are ‘linguisticallyirrelevant’

199

8.4 Radical social interactionism: there is only situated interactionand situated knowledge

204

8.5 Ethnomethodology: the reflexivity of sense-making 206

8.6 Conversation Analysis the ‘embodied action’ theory of language 208

8.7 A dialogistic stance: theories of ‘languaging’ 210

8.8 Conclusion 216

9 The written language bias—past, present, future 218

9.1 The long past of linguistics 218

9.2 Stability and change: structure and discourse 219

9.3 Capturing dynamics: three basic difficulties 219

9.4 A return to linguistic activities 220

Appendix: The Written Language Bias in 101 points 222

vii

References 226

Index 246

viii

Preface

In 1982, I released an in-house publication entitled The Written Language Bias inLinguistics (Linell, 1982),1 in which I argued that the language sciences, and inparticular linguistics, have developed models and theories of language that arestrongly dependent on long-time traditions of dealing with writing and writtenlanguage. This, I argued, is true of present-day linguistics too, and also whenspoken language is thematised. Therefore, modern linguistics is partlycharacterised by a paradox: there is an almost unanimous agreement on theabsolute primacy of spoken language, yet language is explored from theoreticaland methodological points of departure that are ultimately derived from concernswith cultivating, standardising and teaching forms of written language.

Other authors have pointed out the same ‘written language bias’,2 and I havemyself returned to the topic on a number of occasions (Linell, 1988, 1998a,2001a). What I have tried to do in these texts, as well as in the present book, is toprovide a particular perspective on the genealogy of language-related conceptsand on the disciplinary history of linguistics, to explain how linguistics becamewhat it is, or, at the very least, has been.

Since the publication of Linell (1982), I have had ample opportunities toreflect upon disciplinary linguistics from a position within an interdisciplinaryresearch programme in communication studies. I have also developed mythinking in more interactional and ‘dialogical’ terms. The present work is anentirely new attempt to deal with the ‘written language bias’; only a few, veryminor passages have been taken over from earlier formulations. In somerespects, this version is, I hope, more nuanced than previous versions. At the sametime, it is more radicalised on other points. Many more points of the writtenlanguage bias have been taken up, and I have tried to weave various threadstogether in a more coherent and goaldirected way, particularly in Chapter 6.

Another difference is that Linell (1982) was largely a negative critique; therewas, at the time, no fully articulated alternative theory of language which couldportray language use and talk-in-interaction as embodied, social actiondistributed in time. In the 1982 version, I looked upon speech not so much asdialogical interaction but, rather, exclusively as the individual speaker’sutterance production and comprehension. The same, I think, was true of mostother attempts of that period of time.3 We are now in a better position toformulate a ‘dialogical’ alternative, and I have myself tried to spell out some ofits aspects in Linell (1998a).

The ideas contained in this book have matured over a time period ofconsiderable length. Much was sparked off in conversations with RagnarRommetveit from 1979 and onwards. Some ideas go back to the 1970s when Iwas inspired by Sven Öhman in Uppsala. Later I was influenced by the writingsof Roy Harris, Paul Hopper and Talbot Taylor. I have had the great privilege ofdiscussing dialogism particularly with Thomas Luckmann, Ivana Marková andRagnar Rommetveit. I also thank Jan Anward, Ivana Marková and RagnarRommetveit for valuable comments on various parts of the typescript. At variouspoints, I have been helped by ideas put forward by Karin Aronsson, SaaraHaapamäki, Ulrika Nettelbladt and Kerstin Norén, as well as by colleagues in theDepartment of Communication Studies, Linköping University. Paul Hopper,Sandra Thompson and Talbot Taylor have been instrumental in promoting thisbook to print. In particular, I thank Professor Roy Harris for including it in thisseries of which he is the general editor. For bibliographical help I thank ChristinaBrage. Work on the book was facilitated by a research grant from the Bank ofSweden Tercentenary Foundation (no. J2001–0054). I was able to finish parts ofthe text when I was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Paris,sponsored by Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Columbia University, ReidHall. I thank them all.

Finally, I gratefully acknowledge permission by Palgrave Macmillan to usematerial (cf. Chapter 6, especially 6.5) from Linell (2004a), earlier published inBostad et al., Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture: Meaning inLanguage, Art and New Media.

Per LinellLinköping, November 2004

1 This has also been available as an electronic publication from Carnegie-MellonUniversity

2 One may mention, in particular, the work of Roy Harris (e g 1981) and Talbot Taylor(1997) Other early attempts are Pawley (n d) and Syder (1983)

3 For example, Clark and Clark (1977), Pawley (n d)

x

Part I

Preliminaries

1Introduction

1.1Two ways of looking at language

People encounter language and linguistic phenomena in all the differentcognitive and communicative activities of social life. We are immersed incontinuities of practices, in which we use language, in combination with othersemiotic resources, in trying to understand and make known phenomena in theworld. In doing so, we do not normally focus on language itself. Instead,language comes out as an abstract phenomenon, often transparent and invisiblein the sense that it is the medium through which we perceive other things,understand and communicate about them, and it is these things—the topics oftalk and text and the interpersonal relations—that we attend to in theoverwhelming majority of communicative events. How, then, can such atransparent and dynamic phenomenon as language be construed and madevisible?

It is a reasonable claim that linguistic phenomena could be, and have been,seen in basically two different ways, as actions and as structured sets of abstractforms. According to the first perspective, to speak and to listen and respond totalk, that is to indulge in talk-in-interaction, and to write and read, and to uselanguage in modern hybrid media, imply involvement in action, in acting in andthrough language. Such a perspective will highlight dynamic processes; asseveral authors have claimed quite emphatically, discourse is a process. Thus,for example, Potter et al. (1990) contend that ‘discourse is a verb’.

Yet, as far as our ways of conceptualising language is concerned, this has notbeen the dominant tradition. Instead, we have become used to saying that alanguage is an inventory of forms, and rules for generating forms. These formsinclude morphemes, words, phrases and sentences, which are expressionsassociated with linguistic meanings, and used for representing the world. Thistradition starts in antiquity, with Aristotle, Dionysios Thrax, Donatus, Priscianand others, and goes all the way to the twentieth century, with names likeSaussure, Bloomfield and Chomsky.

Accordingly, we have at least two major ways of construing or representinglanguage:1

Languages as structured sets offorms, used to represent things inthe world

Language as meaningful actionsand cultural practices, interventionsin the world

It is possible to characterise these perspectives as Cartesian and monologistic vs.Hegelian and dialogistic, respectively (Marková, 1982).2 The former viewusually portrays (the understanding of) the world as prior to language; a languageis then simply a means for expressing understandings. At the same time,language is seen as primary relative to the situated meanings in communicativeevents, the latter being entirely secondary and epiphenomenal. The secondperspective, the ‘action’ view, argues for the interdependence of, on the onehand, language (as co-constitutive of understandings) and, on the other, theworld as it is understood. On this view, we intervene directly in social life andcontribute to constructing the world, when we indulge in actual spoken or textualpractices.

The formal-structural approach to language was brought to an extreme in certainforms of structuralism and, in a particularly sharpened and peculiar form, in(early) Chomskyan grammar (less so, in some ways, in neo-Chomskyanlinguistics). The action approach, on the other hand, has received a radicalexponent in Conversation Analysis (CA), about which Hutchby and Wooffitt(1998:14) say: ‘[CA] is only marginally interested in language as such; […] theproduction of utterances […] is seen not in terms of the structure of language,but first and foremost as a practical social accomplishment’ One may note thateven these authors, who emphatically endorse an action approach, seem topresuppose that ‘language’ as such should be conceived of primarily in terms of‘structure’. I would propose a more integrated, and in some ways eclectic,approach, in which structure and action are seen as two interpenetratingperspectives (Linell, 1998a). However, for the purpose of the following account,it will at times be illuminating to contrast and compare the approaches tolanguage and discourse, on the one hand, in traditional, structural and generativelinguistics, all heavily subject to what I will call a ‘written language bias’(WLB), and, on the other hand, in dialogical accounts which deal more or only withtalk-in-interaction and which are less, perhaps only marginally, subject to a WLB.

1 A third sense of ‘language’ is obviously ‘language faculty’, which can be understood asthe ability to indulge in verbal communication and cognition, that is in talk-in-interaction,reading, writing and thinking

2 Other labellings might be drawn from the product vs process/practice distinction andfrom Humboldt’s (1969) concepts of language as ergon vs energeia

INTRODUCTION 3

1.2An overview of this book

The WLB comprises a great many assumptions about language and linguisticpractices, most of which are typical of the discipline of linguistics and build uponthe idea of a language as a structured set of abstract forms. However, partlysimilar conceptions are commonplace in everyday ‘common-sense’ views onlanguage. In addition, there are also other ideas about language and the world thatare dependent on literacy but appear in language sciences other than linguistics.In particular, I will analyse some aspects of a minor collateral branch of the WLBcomplex that looks upon language as texts and is typical primarily of someapproaches to literary theory.

The organisation of the book is roughly the following. In the next chapter Iintroduce a discussion of why linguistics has developed a WLB. Theoriesoriginated in diverse practical activities having to do with the teaching andcultivation of written standards, the study of foreign languages, translationbetween languages, and so on. A main theme in later chapters will be to followthe transformations of concepts and ways of thinking from their practical originsvia chains of recontextualisations into the theoretical contexts of present-daylinguistics.

Chapters 3 and 4 could be regarded as preparatory for the main parts of mytreatise. Chapter 3 contains a brief sketch of differences between speech andwriting, including some considerations of the dangers to simplify the dichotomy.Chapter 4 offers a more precise account of what more exactly I mean by the‘written language bias’.

Chapter 5 is by far the longest chapter. Here I argue for and substantiate aclear WLB in mainstream linguistics and language sciences. I have chosen topresent these data and claims in terms of 101 separate points, organised intosections dealing with different parts of linguistics. For each point, I indicate apossible explanation in terms of traditional, and often practical, activities oflinguists and others. I also formulate, for each point, an alternative account inmore interactional and ‘dialogical’ terms.

Many of the 101 points are intertwined in complex themes, which haveundergone more or less radical transformations, mutations of sense, as they havemoved over time across many contexts. In Chapter 6, 1 account for thegenealogies of a number of themes of central importance in linguistics, how theyhave become successively recontextualised across contexts in developments thatdisplay both continuities and discontinuities. Examples are the notions of ‘alanguage’, ‘linguistic rule’ and ‘sentence’ in grammars.

Ideas about a WLB in linguistics have been proposed, by myself (Linell,1982) and others (e.g. Taylor, 1997). They have been challenged at severalpoints. In Chapter 7, I address some criticisms, including those (partly opposite)ones that I draw a caricature of linguistics, and that my own account is itselfsubject to a ‘language bias’.

4 THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE BIAS IN LINGUISTICS

Basically, many issues ultimately come down to the fundamental question:Where is spoken interactional language (that is, ‘language’ rather than thediscourse or the interaction themselves), and what is it in essence? I discussbasically three quite different, twentieth-century solutions in Chapter 8. They areRoy Harris’s ‘myth theory’, the abstract essentialism of generative linguistics,and several mutually related interactionist and ethnomethodological proposals.Finally, I summarise some features of a‘dialogical’ account, which I regard as aviable alternative. Chapter 9 is a final wrapping-up of some of the problemsraised in the book, particularly the problem of capturing dynamics in languageand interaction.

1.3What I won’t do in this book

Having given a brief overview of what I try to do in this book, I would also pointout a few things that I will not try to do. Thus, this treatise is not an attempt todescribe the differences between spoken and written language (even if manydifferences can be gleaned, particularly from Chapter 5). Even less is this anaccount of writing or written language per se.3 My objective is more specific and,as I have already pointed out, more of a meta-perspective; what I want tothematise is that our views on language in general and, in particular, on spokenlanguage, within linguistics and at large in our Western cultures, are historicallydependent on literate activities, i.e. concerns having to do with written language,and that they are in general more suitable for the description of writing andwritten language. Many of the claims and hypotheses that have been made aboutthe nature of spoken language and language in general are not based on evidencefrom spoken language, but on properties and conventions of alphabetic writingsystems and on attitudes to literate practices.

Furthermore, this treatise is not a history of linguistics.4 Nor would Icharacterise it as belonging to the history of ideas. It is more of a genealogy of (aselection of) concepts in linguistics. This presupposes, however, a belief on mypart that present-day linguistics cannot be properly understood without agenealogical (or historical) perspective. It is within such a context that I lookupon the language sciences from a particular point-of-view: they are thoroughlydependent on a heritage of a written language bias.

One might conjecture that the WLB would apply mostly to those (traditional)linguistic approaches that focus on specific languages and their written forms andliterate cultures, often with normative ambitions. Contrary to this, I will arguethat many variants of a rationalist or universalist theory of language, includinggenerative linguistics of the second half of the twentieth century, are heavily

3 There is, of course, an extensive literature dealing with this topic See, e g, Coulmas(1989, 2003) and Harris (1995, 2000)

INTRODUCTION 5

influenced by the WLB heritage of linguistics. This becomes more evident if (asI try to do particularly in Chapter 6) we analyse, and deconstruct the effects of,the many theoretical recontextualisations that these theories have gone throughduring their journey from traditional theories.

Nonetheless, there are admittedly other trends than the WLB in the history oflinguistics and language sciences. I shall allude to them in several places in theensuing chapters.5 But I shall claim that the WLB has been dominant, and it isthis WLB which is my overall topic in this book.

4 There are many historiographies of linguistics, including Arens (1969), Aarsleff (1982),Robins (1998), Malmberg (1983, 1991) and Parret (1976)

5 See in particular Chapter 7 fn 10


2From aspects of communicative action to

sets of abstract forms

2.1Objectification: splitting the phenomena and inverting the

priorities

The view on language as inventories of abstract forms, rather than as aspects ofmeaningful action, interaction and practices in the world, is quite pervasive. Thisdominant view is widespread in the language sciences and in mundane culture,but it is above all characteristic of the discipline of linguistics.1 As a matter offact, the construction of a language as a set of forms and the constitution of(traditional and modern) linguistics as a particular academic discipline areintricately intertwined processes. In this respect, the case of linguistics is hardlyunique, nor even very remarkable. As Atkinson (1995:21) observes:

All academic disciplines actively create and construct their subject matter.The world—be it the natural or the social world—does not present itself toour academic gaze already packaged into the subject matter of research andtheorizing. Indeed, the very processes, intellectual and practical, wherebywe undertake our research serve to demarcate the proper subject matter forinquiry. Disciplines define themselves in relation to the objects ofresearch. In so doing, they simultaneously define those objects themselves.Disciplines and their objects each co-exist, mutually defining one another.

Disciplines and their perspectives on subject matters mutually define themselves.Yet, it is at least conceivable that reflection about language could have started outfrom a ‘naive oral’ view rooted in our everyday experiences of ‘languaging’,which could have resulted in the adoption of an ‘action’ view, or a

1 This is not to deny that there are some linguists who argue for the action approach Forexample, Benveniste (1966 131) claims ‘c’est dans le discours, actualisé en phrases, quela langue se forme et se conforme Là commence le langage On pourrait dire, calquant uneformule classique nihil est in lingua quod non prius fuerit in oratione’ However, linguistswho draw the full consequences of such a view are a definite minority

communicative perspective, on language. The term ‘languaging’ (Liberg, 1990)is used here to suggest that activities are primary; by contrast, the more commonterm ‘language use’ seems already to presuppose a view according to which anautonomous and reified language is put to use in discourse. Within such aframework, properties of linguistic structure, if they are attended to at all, areseen primarily as aspects of utterances, these utterances always being integratedwithin contexted communicative activities. Seen against such a potentialalternative, the switch to a ‘structure’ view of language involves a hugeconceptual change, comprising both splitting and inversion;2 first, thephenomena at hand must be split into structure and process (practice), andlanguage structure has to be abstracted out and construed as an autonomousobject, then the priority relations are to be reversed, so that the communicativeactivities now become recontextualised as merely involving the application oruse of an underlying language so construed. If, in addition, we see languaging insocial settings in terms of dialogue and interaction, the splitting-plus-inversionprocess will stand out as a transformation of dialogical practices into languageuse by individuals. Communication then becomes something that occurs (mainlyor exclusively) on the speaker’s or sender’s premisses. Instead of looking atlanguage as a profoundly social-interactional phenomenon (Linell, 1998a:‘dialogism’; Halliday, 1978: ‘language between individuals’), it comes out asabstract systems or as competences of individuals, or possibly also as actions byindividuals (Linell, 1998a: ‘monologism’; Halliday, 1978: ‘language withinindividuals’).

Taken together, the two processes of splitting and inversion amount to anobjectification of language. Words, and other linguistic resources, arerecontextualised and transformed from pragmata, ‘tools’ (ready-to-hand(zuhanden)) in Heideggerian jargon; Steiner, 1978) to be used in the mediationand accomplishment of cognition and communication, to abstract objects(‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden)) to be observed and theorised. Humboldt (1969:419), who proposed an activity (energeia) approach to spoken language, saidabout this: ‘Das Zerschlagen in Wörter und Regeln ist nur ein todtes Machwerkwissenschaftlicher Zergliederung.’3

2 Splitting and inversion are, according to Latour and Woolgar (1986), common featuresof scientific activities, aspects of the phenomena observed are abstracted (by splitting anintegrated phenomenon) and reinterpreted (and often reified) in terms of (‘theoretical’)entities or principles underlying the observable data, i e the priority relations get invertedOne should note that Latour and Woolgar use these concepts with regard to naturalscience, their focus is on work in science labs In the social sciences, processes of splitting-and-inversion occur as theories of macro-structures are constructed from micro-interactional data

3 Thanks to Saara Haapamaki for drawing my attention to Humboldt’s formulations Seealso Chapter 7 fn 11


It is a fact worth dwelling upon that this objectification involves a veryconsiderable conceptual step, which, logically, would not necessarily have to betaken. After all, we start out from talk-in-interaction, i.e. dynamic behaviour thatis in constant motion. In other words, we are dealing with complex bodilyconduct, behaviours which exhibit some recurrent structural properties. If wewant to abstract out these structural properties, do we have to hypostatise themas a coherent body of knowledge, posit them as abstract structures, existing inand of themselves, as if they were prior to talk-in-interaction? If Latour andWoolgar (1986) observe recurrent processes of splitting and inversion in thescientific analysis of events in nature, it does not necessarily follow that the sameanalytic procedure must be pursued in the analysis of human behaviour, actionand interaction too. For example, if we were to describe patterns in other kindsof dynamic behaviours, say the ways people walk or run, it would be bizarre toaccount for the different gaits in terms of manifestations of combinations ofunderlying object-like invariants. Now, the reader may rightly object that talk-in-interaction and spoken language are much more richly structured than walking-in-the-world, and in addition, it is a semiotic phenomenon, that is words aresystematically linked to semantic functions. No doubt this does make a bigdifference. However, is this, in itself, enough to explain and motivate themetamorphosis in our understanding of language, from the dynamics of‘languaging’ to stable and abstract objects? I would argue that the answer is no.

2.2Why a set of forms?

We remain faced with the following social facts. There is an assumption made inlinguistics, as well as in the language sciences more broadly, that ‘language’ is asystem of abstract forms. Words are described and understood as mental things,signs or forms (signifying something), rather than as aspects of dynamic andsituated actions. Similar views are predominant in popular, common-sensetheories of language. Why?

One answer to this question is obviously, as we have seen, the generaltendency in systematic reflection to reify the analytic products, the concepts usedfor systematic description and explanation. But in the case of the languagesciences, there is another major reason in that our views of language stem fromour collective, cultural acquaintance with writing and written language, and fromattitudes fostered in connection with this in a literate culture. It is reasonable toassume that language could not be seen as a structured set of objects, untilcultural communities had got used to writing and literacy. Written languageconsists of cultural artefacts, which are at the same time physical and symbolic(‘cognitive artefacts’; Norman, 1991). Artefacts mediate our understanding ofand interaction with the world, but they are also objects for us to reflect upon.Therefore, language and its constituents undergo a process of reification andobjectivation, when we, as language users, become acquainted with permanent

FROM ASPECTS OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION TO SETS 9

and visible signs on paper (or, before this, other materials such as clay or stone).In short, for a very long time, inscriptions, in the concrete sense of static markson paper, have been the dominant technology of language. At the same time, it isin the development of literacy, in the schooling needed for learning to read andwrite, that theories of language structure have become necessary. With writing,language becomes an object of reflection, and, simultaneously, its interactionalnature will be more easily forgotten.

2.3The cultural stereotype: talk is not ‘real language’

In almost all societies we know of, written language has had—and still has —avery high status. It is often regarded by the common man with respect,admiration and reverence. From the outset, it was the language of religiousdocuments, the laws (both religious and secular) and the great authors (auctoresas authorities).

Of course, the traditional admiration for writing and literacy was basically anadmiration for those, originally the very few, who could use written languageproperly. Most societies did not have—and many still don’t have—anywidespread literacy. Instead, we have had oligoliteracy, that is a state in whichliteracy is limited to a small minority of educated people. No wonder writing isregarded as something special! Among the Sumerians and Accadians, ‘writingwas the pursuit of scribes and preserved as a “mystery”, a “secret treasure”’(Goody and Watt, 1972:323), and this is probably still true of certain societies,for example in the Middle East.

Thus, the supremacy and mystery of the written language were established insocieties with a low level of literacy. The association with the church and itsinstitutions added to its status. For a long time, priests and monks were a veryimportant group among those who were able to read and write, and they alsoacted as school teachers and private tutors, and this gave them ampleopportunities to enhance the specific status of the written language. And indeed,literacy enabled people to perform many important cognitive and social actions,which would have been impossible without writing (Olson, 1994).

If we make an enormous leap from the traditional societies just hinted at andaddress the situation in our post-industrial modern societies, we still find thatwriting and written language have, by and large, a much higher status than talkand spoken language. (Recall that we are still concerned with stereotypes in theWestern cultures at large; the attitudes of linguists are a special and morecomplicated case, to which I will turn a little later, for example in Chapter 3.4and onwards.) The popular, common-sense theory of language (e.g.Mugglestone, 1995) includes a conception implying that talk and spokenlanguages are not real language; they are incoherent and incomplete, oftenfaulty, impoverished, unclear, impure and illogical, sometimes even improper,foul or uncivilised, whereas writing and written language are (or can be) really


fully fledged language; they are (or should be) proper, correct, clear, logical andcoherent. Often, ideas of written standards integrate notions of purity and fixity(cf. Aitchison, 2001:612). It is obvious that some such ideas often recur also inmodern linguists’ understanding of what a language is. Written language is,according to this view on language, the norm or standard, against which spokenlanguage is, or should be, assessed.4 Such assessments also serve as tools forsorting people, that is the language users; those who know the proper and correctlanguage are distinguished from those who simply speak the uneducated andvulgar vernacular. Here, language issues stand ‘proxy’ for wider social issues(Rickford, 1999:272).

Cultures have needed grammars for written language, books of norms whichshow how to compose correct sentences. As I will discuss in the subsequentsection, linguistics has its roots in practical activities dealing more or lessexclusively with literacy and written language. By contrast, no need has been feltfor explicit grammars of spoken language. At times, this attitude has beentransformed into a related one which says that spoken language does not have agrammar, in the sense of implicit standards of correctness; there are nolinguistically interesting regularities to be discovered in conversational language.5

In fact, attitudes that are somewhat similar to such stances prevail inlinguistics. For example, one may turn to the theories of Saussure or Chomsky.There is no structure or orderliness and nothing social in their understandings ofla parole and ‘performance’. Saussure declared: ‘Il n’y a donc rien de collectifdans la parole; les manifestations en sont individuelles et momentanées. Ici il n’ya rien de plus que la somme des cas particuliers […]’ (1964:38). Saussure’s laparole has been interpreted as a mere ‘rag-bag’ of random and accidentalfeatures (Holdcroft, 1991:52).6 Chomsky speaks of the spoken languagesurrounding a child as having a ‘degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent’(1965:58). The lack of interest in interactional language goes hand in hand withignorance. As Milroy (2001:621) points out, ‘it took them [i.e. linguists] a verylong time to realize that variation [i.e. in language use] could be structured’.Milroy goes on to say:

4 One may note, however, that these evaluations of speech and writing are not universal SeeChapter 3 3 2

5 This opinion is still common among enlightened laymen I recently told a colleague froma neighbouring discipline that I was involved in a research project on the grammar ofconversational language He replied that he could hardly understand that there was a needfor such a thing

6 Thibault (1997) and other recent interpreters suggest a more nuanced interpretation ofSaussure It is possible that the ‘received’ view of Saussure has been affected by beingfiltered through the renditions of other structuralists who have been more extreme thanwas the ‘real’ Saussure Cf Chapter 5 fn 20 (I am indebted to Saara Haapamaki forpointing this out to me)


In Irvine and Gal’s terms (2000:38–39) variation in language was subjectto erasure; it was not recognized as existing—it was not ‘seen’. (I haveelsewhere (Milroy 2000:20–23) discussed how much of the variation ofearly English was explained away by medieval scholars as not really beingthere at all.)

2.4From practical activities to theorising language

There are some close similarities between scholarly theories and popular views(everyday ‘social representations’) of language. The explanation is of course thatthese have evolved under mutual influencing (see Figure 2.1). Common-senseideas of language have been communicated through the church, the school andother institutions. Furthermore, Aitchison (2001:611) points out that

[a]t times when public literacy was fairly low, and understanding oflanguage virtually non-existent, a few ‘opinion makers’ had a surprisinglypowerful influence. Strong views were put forward by those in authority,and these ideas have achieved the status of a ‘folk tradition’.

Linguists (or, rather, their predecessors) have often been engaged in ‘practical’projects and activities that were subject to political and educational goals andambitions. Some of these activities have been fairly technical in nature, forexample the tasks of ensuring practicable spelling and efficient rules fororganising written texts. We may choose the origin of the concept of ‘grammar’as an example. It goes back to the notion of techné grammatiké, meaning

Figure 2 1 The circulation and recontextualisations of concepts of ‘language’ (source:Linell, 2001a: 10).


basically the skill of coping with writing and written texts. And indeed, severalof the basic grammatical notions were discovered, and also to some degreeinvented, in order to develop and improve techniques of writing and reading.Grammatical theory developed primarily out of the conscious reflection overpractices of writing, rather than over the nature of linguistic units and rulesconsidered as abstract theoretical entities. The exact definition of units likewords is not a given, self-evident fact of spoken language. The Romans used away of writing, termed scriptura continua, in which there were no signs ofpunctuation, no spaces between words and no distinction between upper-case andlower-case letters (Saenger, 1997). However, reading practices, especiallyperhaps in silent reading, arguably became easier when such conventions werelater introduced. But this made a theory, albeit a ‘practical theory’, necessary.The basic concepts of grammar had to be defined and refined; what, for example,is a word (or a word form), and what is a sentence (or a clause)? The theory of theart of writing was a normative or prescriptive theory, not a description ofsomething existing independently, in spoken language or talk-in-interaction.Moreover, as research from the last decades have shown (see Chapter 3.3),written language did not originate as an attempt at representing spoken languagedirectly; historically, it had other kinds of origin (Pettersson, 1996), andsomething similar holds for (especially the early stages of) children’s(spontaneous) appropriation of the written medium (Liberg, 1990).

Systematic reflection on language was for a long time motivated by and co-existent with the need for developing practically useful notions needed forliterate practices, writing and reading. As such practices were modified, newnotions may have become necessary. For example, silent reading may havedemanded more of structurally motivated layout in texts than did reading aloud.But we can generalise the point; theories of language and linguistic structurewere originally embedded in practical and political tasks, taken on by experts(the predecessors of linguists) and often ultimately related to far-reachingprojects of nation-making and state-building. These tasks, often mutually related,included:

• preserving the holy language and highly literate varieties (the writtenlanguage of the auctores, that is, the exemplary classical writers);

• finding ways of writing one’s own language, i.e. establishing scribalpractices, often under the influence of Latin grammar;

• standardising norms, i.e. national standards to be used in writing (and writing-based speech);

• developing and establishing, elaborating and enriching national languages,which were often new languages constructed above and beyond what existedbeforehand, i.e. the divergent, spoken vernaculars;7

• describing language so that people could be taught to read and write properly;


• describing differences between (national) languages so that people could betaught to translate texts between languages, and to read and write (and, lessoften, speak) them as foreign languages;

• inventing writing systems for new languages (often the transposition andmodification of alphabetic writing systems already designed for otherlanguages).

All this laid the foundation for a scholarly tradition, very much based on writingand certain genres of written language. The ‘practical’ activities connected invarious ways to literacy, writing and written language fostered increasinglyworked-out ‘theories’ of language, and attenuated versions of these were alsotaught in schools and, more broadly, throughout the literate cultures. Thestandardisation of uniform scripts constantly implied, with a few (partial)exceptions, a devaluation of the characteristics of spoken language. Schoolingactivities have always been geared towards teaching how to write correctly, inthe right way. All this in turn had an impact on how later generations of more‘descriptively’ oriented linguists understood their task of defining language.Partly the same concepts, attitudes, arguments and knowledge systems have been‘recontextualised’ (Linell, 1998b) across many domains of knowledge, andsimilar conceptions and ideologies of language have been reproduced (Bernstein,1990). One must note, however, that such recontextualisations always, and bydefinition, involve fitting material into new contexts with other backgroundpremisses, and therefore concepts, arguments and claims will acquire partly newmeanings and have new, and perhaps unexpected, consequences. I will discuss anumber of such recontextualising processes in this book, particularly inChapter 6.

Three of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century, Saussure,Bloomfield and Chomsky (in his early work), all contributed in various ways toconsolidating the view of language as a set of forms. Saussure set himself the

7 The creation of common standard languages to be used in writing goes back to antiquity,compare especially the case of classical Greek koiné (Eco, 1995 11) Basically, thedevelopment of written standard languages can take either of two forms (Burke, 1993 83f)One way is to create a new language system on the basis of features and fragments ofdifferent dialectal origins, thus building something of an artificial language This is more orless what Ivar Aasen did in Norway, in creating New Norwegian The other solution is toadopt one dialect and then build a national identity around this dialect, ‘sterilizing itsassociations’ (ibid 84) with its original dialectal community of speakers This is more orless the case of modern Italian, which is built upon Tuscan There are many similar caseselsewhere Consider, for example, the case of literary Russian, which is built on the urbanMoscow variety elevated to a ‘powerful all-national state language’ (Smith, 1998 3) forthe ethnically and socially so varied Russian Empire in late imperial times and,especially, under the Soviet regime of the USSR The Russian literary standard wasdescribed by linguists and supported and promoted by strong, partly even brutal, politicalaction by the centralist government For a comprehensive account, see Smith (1998)


dual task of establishing both language as a system— an autonomous system ofla langue—and linguistics as a discipline. The latter should be an autonomousdiscipline distinct from other scholarly approaches to language, such asphilology, psychology and sociology of language. Two well-known quotes fromSaussure read as follows:

La linguistique a pour unique et veritable objet la langue envisagée en elle-même et pour elle-même.

(1972:317)8

La tache de la linguistique sera: [a)…, b)…] c) de se délimiter et de sedéfinir elle-même.

(1964:20)

The analytic effort to define language as la langue came to have the sideeffect,surely an intended one, of the ambition to create an academic territory reservedfor linguists. Wolf and Love (1997b:314) make the following observation:

[…] treating signs as autonomous offers the important pragmaticadvantage of providing orthodox linguistics with a definite object of study.This, ultimately, is the basis for the attractiveness of the orthodoxy: that itpoints the way to a specific programme of activity for linguists.

Bloomfield, emphasising language as form, also championed the autonomy oflinguistics, and wrote: ‘In the division of scientific labor, the linguist deals onlywith the speech signal […]; he is not competent to deal with problems ofphysiology or psychology’ (1933:32). In Chomskyan linguistics, the idea oflanguage as a separate structure was further developed, now as a separate mentalorgan, or an autonomous module in the mind, housing the ability to organise thesystem of forms. These scholarly developments have endorsed and radicalisedthe splitting-and-inversion process referred to above, and especially Chomskyhas exerted a revolutionary influence in recontextualising what was for Saussurea system of social signs as some kind of mental machinery for mapping abstractrepresentations into ‘surface forms’ (see Chapter 6.7.2 on this metamorphosis).

Many theoreticians in modern linguistics seem unwilling to admit theirdependence on a legacy of older traditions, or they are quite simply ignorant ofthe history of their own discipline. But we can safely claim that there is a longpast of constant interplay between common-sense, everyday popular ideas aboutlinguistic matters, and dominant scholarly views, models and theories. There are

8 However, this formulation has not been found in Saussure’s own notes, and has laterbeen attributed to the editing efforts of Bally and Sechehaye (Harris, 1987 191,Haapamaki, 2002 263f)


connections between the cultural domains of everyday lay discourse andacademic discourse among experts on language.


3Speech and writing, spoken and written

language

In this chapter, I will review some commonly made observations of and/orassumptions about putative differences between, on the one hand, speech andspoken language, and, on the other, writing and written language. (Incidentally,while in Linell (1982) I consistently used the term ‘speech’, I would now prefer‘talk-in-interaction’ in many contexts. ‘Speech’ has a certain ring of monologism.Nevertheless, I have kept ‘speech’ in a good many cases, since it is theestablished antonym to ‘writing’.)

This chapter is intended merely as a necessary background for the followingparts of this book; what the exact relationships between speech and writing are isnot in the focus of this book. However, I will use the opportunity to mention somerespects in which spoken and written language are not that different.

3.1Speech and spoken language: a first approximation

The conventional description of that which takes place in a normal talk-exchangesituation is that a speaker tries to exert an influence on a listener, or a group oflisteners, by making him, her or them perceive, understand, feel or do somethingparticular. After that, participants may switch roles. However, a more accuratedescription would be that parties to the interaction reciprocally influence theirdoings, understandings and interpersonal relationships. In a conversation,interlocutors partly, or even largely, co-construct interpretations, and the roles ofspeaker and listener are typically not sharply demarcated from each other.Barring this, we can still say that, as participants take turns, different speakersguide listeners into doings and understandings moment-by-moment by exposinglinguistically structured speech behaviours (utterances) that operate together withnon-verbal signals, various kinds of background knowledge that participantshave, listeners’ responses and other features of the physical and social context inwhich the communicative activities are embedded. The various behavioural andinformation-processing operations involved in the production as well ascomprehension of speech are transient events which partially overlap and occurat very high rates and usually with high degrees of precision in the timing ofdifferent contributions. There is often a frequent exchange of speaking turns

between the communicating parties. All in all, this brings about a very intricateand rapidly evolving social interaction between the parties.

We can briefly state some of the most important features of speech and talk-in-interaction in the following points:

3.1.1

Speech is dynamic behaviour distributed in real time. It has many features ofcontinuous movements (rather than a chain of successive articulatory states orpostures), and its inherent dynamics, the changes at various levels, must besubject to on-line monitoring and analysis by both communicating parties; as onegoes on, one can no longer observe that which was produced a few momentsearlier. The products of the speaker’s activities, that is the behaviouralmovements and the resulting sound waves, are ephemeral; they fade awayrapidly over a few moments, and the same applies to the listener’s activities. (Idisregard here the fact that some types of ‘products’ remain in short-termmemory for certain limited periods of time.) As a consequence, actors are forcedto focus on the dynamic behaviour as such, rather than on some persistentproducts, like in writing. (And yet, when researchers, as opposed to actors insitu, have analysed speech, they end up looking at transcripts, i.e. writtenproducts. See Chapter 4.3.)

3.1.2

Talk-in-interaction involves bodily gestures; participants use their voices, faces,bodily orientations and movements to signal messages. In brief, spoken languageand interaction are embodied.

3.1.3

The whole interaction between speaker and listener is dependent on (or, better,interdependent with) the situation, and other contexts, in many important ways.For example, participants point to objects and events in the situation (Bergmann,1990: ‘local sensitivity’), and they can combine speech with the use of artefactsin their situated interaction. The situation as perceived by participants willchange, as the interaction moves ahead.

The speaker’s speech behaviour is continuously accompanied andsupplemented, and occasionally contradicted, by various non-verbal signals,which means that the verbal message is often in itself much less explicit than inwriting. Referents may be pointed to, and interpretations may be made moreprecise and complex through gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, etc.,and thus some references need not be brought into language. Social situationdefinitions and communicative activity types (‘framings’) often supportcommunication. For example, by allowing various kinds of conversational


implicatures (Levinson, 1979, 1983, 2000), activity types relieve speakers of therequirement of making some things explicit. The physical environment too,which is usually a built environment, can invite certain expectations on andinterpretations of the communicative activities. Parties to a conversation oftenhave a considerable amount of background knowledge about each other, thethings talked about, and so on.

Accordingly, the use of an utterance in a situation involving face-to-faceinteraction is not at all an isolated speech act; it is part of an integratedcommunicative act which comprises talk and a range of other semiotic resources,including prosody (which should be regarded as part of talk and spokenlanguage) and non-verbal means, such as gaze, facial expressions, pointing andother gestures and manual sign(ing)s, bodily postures and movements, spatialorientations, etc. as well as aspects of the material surround. There is a complexcontextual configuration (Goodwin, 2000) at play. The message is conveyed, orshown, in several parallel channels working simultaneously. Furthermore, therole played by spoken language cannot be properly understood without takinginto consideration the whole communicative act, and its embeddedness within amore comprehensive activity, involving several nested communicative projects(Linell, 1998a:207ff.).

In a face-to-face interaction, both speaker and listener(s) are physicallypresent at the same time and place. Participants interact and take turns. Thespeaker must produce his utterances quickly and readily, and the listener mustrespond just as rapidly, under the pressure of the emotive and social atmosphereof the face-to-face interaction. This is a strong form of mutual presence. Theconversational text becomes a joint product, more than a sequence ofindividuals’ utterances. Even if a party may be allowed long, ‘monological’turns, the addressee responds, under normal circumstances, all the time (verballyand, perhaps most importantly, by non-verbal means), and this feedbackcontinuously influences the speaker’s behaviour.

3.1.4

Communication through talk is a resource available for all normally equippedhuman beings across different social groups and cultures. Spoken language isacquired under conditions that are quite different from those pertaining to writingand written language. Its ontogenesis is part of the normal individual’s primarysocialisation, which starts in very early infancy and develops through childhoodand further on as an integrated element of habitual activities in everyday culture(Tomasello, 1995). It then remains the dominant channel of communication of theprivate sphere of people’s lives; knowledge of one’s spoken language isan inalienable element of one’s knowledge of everyday culture. But interactionallanguage is of almost ubiquitous importance also in professional and institutionalsettings.

SPEECH AND WRITING, SPOKEN 19

3.1.5Summary: communicative interaction versus spoken

language

Interactional, spoken language is designed to cope with meaning-making inspecific situations, and in real time and space. It has its home base in talk-in-interaction, which is a complex social interplay between actors. Communicativeinteraction is quite comprehensive in terms of contextual interdependencies andsemiotic resources. Yet, the traditional and unreflected conception of languagehas remained narrow. Indeed, it is possible to claim that, by and large, spokenlanguage, as well as language in general, has been taken to include only thosefeatures of speech which have regular counterparts in conventional writing! Inaddition, the embodiment and the embeddedness within on-line activities of talk-in-interaction make the term ‘speaking language’ more apt than ‘spokenlanguage’, the latter term being product-oriented rather than process-oriented.Before, I made a similar argument for the term ‘languaging’. All of this is at theheart of what I will call ‘the written language bias’.

3.2Writing and written language: a first approximation

Unlike speech and talk-in-interaction, written texts are typically not perceivedand interpreted at the same times and places as they are produced. The analysis ofwritten language both by linguists and mundane users (readers) necessarily focuson the products or traces of the writer’s activities, i.e. on the written texts,whereas the production process itself is inaccessible and unimportant for thenormal reader. The written, textual products may be carefully planned, editedand re-edited. This applies most typically to printed texts, as opposed to somesituation-bound texts written by longhand. While a speaker in a conversationmay exert a considerable social-psychological pressure on the listener and maydirect the latter’s thoughts and feelings on-line through his own verbal (and non-verbal) signals, a writer has not at all the same immediate power over the reader(s).

However, while the processes involved in the production of written texts areusually not directly communicatively significant, the fact that the productspersist over time makes various types of intermediary communicative actsavailable. The written texts can be used in different ways, edited and re-edited,re-employed, duplicated, distributed to particular persons or groups in newsituations, and these activities can be regarded as proper communicative acts intheir own right (or as parts of such acts). These acts are often instigated andperformed by other people than the writer, the original sender, himself.Similarly, however, what speakers say in a particular conversation mayoccasionally become important for subsequent communicative interactions,


involving the same or other actors. In talk-in-interaction, too, there may besecondary or remote audiences (Linell, 1998a:109).

3.2.1

A written text and its component parts (letters, words, sentences, paragraphs,etc.) have the character of objects. They are persistent and static, and arespatially rather than temporally organised. Considerable sections may be scanned(almost) simultaneously, and this can be done repetitively, in principle as manytimes as required. (I disregard here the fact that the activities involved in readingare also dynamic and distributed in time, something which must haveconsequences for the resulting comprehension.) Rapid, urgent responses areusually not necessary. Texts can be carefully read and reflected upon.

3.2.2

A written text, and especially a printed one, is made up of discrete symbols, i.e.letters and (graphic) words, and these are organised in certain regular spatialpatterns, according to syntactic rules as well as various conventions of spacing,punctuation and paragraph division. These symbols are only very approximatecounterparts of some of the structural (i.e. segmental-phonological, grammatical,lexical) features of spoken language; the prosodic features and the non-verbalsignals of the communicative acts of talk-in-interaction have almost nocorrespondence in writing.

The written text consists of traces of writing activities. It exists as a symbolicartefact, which is not embodied by its users, the communicating people. Writtenlanguage is disembodied with respect to the human agent. At the same time, itmust of course be inscribed on some material foundation, such as a piece of paperor a computer screen.

3.2.3

A reader must, in order to properly understand a written text, put it into a widercontext, using various kinds of background knowledge, for example knowledgeabout the text genre and about the topics of the text, or assumptions regarding thewriter’s intentions. Nonetheless, a written text is, as a rule and in comparisonwith spoken utterances, relatively explicit. The absence of an immediate contextmust be compensated for, i.e. referents must be explicitly referred to andsometimes more fully described, and arguments must be represented moreextensively. By the same token, referents are, or are made, displaced, that isspatially-temporally remote, from the text and its context of production. Unlikespoken utterances, a written text typically lacks an immediate situationalcontext. Many aspects of the concrete situations in which the text is producedand/or read, are not, and can not all be, textually represented. Indeed, a written


text is relatively autonomous in the sense that it is not dependent on thesurrounding situation, especially not the physical one. This applies to theproduction situation as well as the consumption situation. The text stands on itsown feet to a much greater extent than spoken utterances in a dialogue, for whichthe sender’s and the receiver’s expectations, intentions, responses, non-verbalaccompaniments, etc., are normally immediately relevant for the interpretation.An interlocutor’s contribution to a dialogue is open for direct responses,modifications, repair, completion by the other. In principle, a written text can bedecoded at any place, albeit often in partly different ways, and the decoding canoften be performed by a great number of different people.

Furthermore, the medium of writing is adapted for monological use.Normally, the sender, the writing individual, works alone, and the same appliesto the receiver. The interaction between parties is limited (or even absent), or atleast held in abeyance. Reading is repeatable through rescanning. That is, writtentexts too may receive overt responses, but these responses are typically off-line(as opposed to on-line), displaced and deferred. In terms of the dialogicalproperty of interactivity, the written text is ‘suspended dialogue’ (Peters, 1999).

3.2.4

Learning how to read and write is quite different from acquiring the abilities toindulge in talk-in-interaction, to speak and to understand speech. Normally, aconsiderable amount of explicit instruction is needed, and the more skilled anderudite writers have usually gone through many years of rather intense and goal-directed study. Thus, the acquisition of written language belongs to the so-calledsecondary socialisation, in which schools and other cultural institutions play avery important instrumental part. Schooling and education are unevenlydistributed in most, probably all, societies. Thus, while spoken language is in animportant sense every man’s property, written language, especially as regardsskilful writing, is the belonging of only parts of the entire population. Thiscircumstance forms the basis of the function of written language in socialstratification. In addition, written language is often used in the non-private lifesphere, and, again unlike spoken language, it is not integrated with everydayknowledge and culture but is often associated with various kinds of abstractknowledge separate from the world of direct experience.

When writing is taught, a number of more or less explicit norms are referred to,and these norms will therefore be partly conscious to the language users. Writtenlanguage appears to be more constrained by rules and conventions than spokenlanguage, especially as regards its form. There is therefore less variation, i.e. lessdialectal and idiolectal variation, and more invariance in written language. Ofcourse, there are exceptions too, especially in advanced literacy uses: modernpoetry and post-modern literature.

It has also been noted (Chapter 2) that the conditions under which writtenlanguage is generally taught have promoted the quite common belief that the


written language (of some genres) represents the ‘grammatical’ or correctlanguage, whereas many variants of spoken language are construed as incorrect,defective, incoherent, or even rude or foul.

3.3Blurring the distinctions

The differences between spoken and written language are not always andeverywhere as clear-cut as the preceding account suggests. In fact, the briefoverview just given is deliberately simplified on several points. I shall mention afew of these points here.

3.3.1Genres of writing and reading

So far, I have considered speech and writing as different media, only discussingsome prototypical differences between them. Now, an important issue is whethertext or discourse genres and communicative activity types are more importantthan the media in themselves. There are spoken genres, in which language isused very much as in certain written styles, and, conversely, writing can sometimesbe deliberately used for mirroring conversational styles. When a society hasbecome fully literate, some of its spoken language varieties can hardly remainunaffected by written language and literacies. In addition, new technologies haveblurred the boundaries quite considerably (Chapter 3.3.4).

Focusing on written communication, it is necessary to point to the importanceof medial differences between texts written by long hand, as opposed to printedand computer-mediated texts. These are often used for quite divergent sorts ofwritten communication. It should be obvious that some of the prototypicalfeatures assigned to writing in Chapter 3.2 only hold for printed texts (or textsdesigned or intended to be printed), and only for certain genres among printedtexts at that. Indeed, the text type presupposed is quite often that of expositoryprose. Correspondingly, the genre of spoken language and communicationimplicitly taken to be primary in the accounts of Chapter 3.1 is that of informal,mundane conversation. Moreover, there is not one single genre of ‘ordinaryconversation’ either (e.g. Linell, 1998a:241), but that need not concern us here,where, after all, we have to argue at a fairly high level of abstraction.

Cultures display a large variation in literacy practices of writing and reading.Such practices are highly contextualised and subject to activity-specific goals.Thus, Street (1984) warns us of adopting ‘autonomous literacy’ theories thatassume that reading processes are universal and homogeneous.


3.3.2Attitudes to writing

Returning to the values ascribed to speech and writing in Chapter 2 (writtenlanguage as ‘language proper’), it should be made clear that these attitudes are byno means necessary and universal. For example, in classical Greece and Rome,the attitudes to reading and writing were often quite negative. Svenbro (1993)documents both explicit claims and implicit hints made in various parts of theclassical literature that depict written texts as lifeless and as something whichcould be adulterated by irresponsible readers and interpreters. Reading out loudother people’s texts was a task for slaves. Creative ideas should instead bedeveloped in authentic speech, that is in real-life rhetoric or in spoken,interactive argumentation between free men. Such thoughts about language haveappeared in other cultural contexts too (Street, 1988). That written texts cannotbe trusted was, for example, a commonplace opinion in medieval England(Clanchy, 1979). In some ways, the view of writing and written language as deadlanguage has also lived on. In the scholarly study of language, it has often beentaken up by those who want to promote the study of dialogue and of language asaction; W.von Humboldt, Voloshinov and Bakhtin are but a few names in thistradition.

One may conclude that the attitudes to written language—as opposed tospoken vernaculars—that underlie the ‘written language bias’ in linguistics andcommon-sense culture are often at odds with attitudes to speech and writing inphilosophy and literary theory, where speech has sometimes been associated withauthenticity and individual creativity. Writing, on the other hand, has sometimesbeen linked to collectivity and suppression. At the same time, however, it hasbeen suggested that writing promotes individuality (Olson, 1994), and Derrida(1967) has emphasised dynamics and motion in written texts, challenging ideasof the necessary primacy of speech.

3.3.3On the origin of writing

Historically, speech and writing have very different origins, and it is not true, ashas sometimes been thought, that written language was originally used anddeveloped simply for representing spoken discourse. Still we have to assume thatthere must have existed some transitory forms; how else could we explain theinvention and development of written languages in cultures that were originallyentirely oral in nature?

The account above (Chapter 3.2.4) suggested that writing is in general morebound by norms and conventions. But there are big differences also withinorality and within literacy, not only between the two. For example, we findnormativity and ritualisation in spoken language too. Most cultures supportcertain bound forms of speech, which are relatively conventionally constrained in


form and content, as compared with ordinary spoken discourse and, in particular,informal conversational interaction. Such varieties have often been used for therecital of orally downtraded sacred ‘texts’, myths, laws, proverbs, epic poems,etc., and they seem to occur also in cultures that lack writing totally, for examplecertain Polynesian cultures. At the same time, the language varieties involved areamong those which seem to be liable to be written down at an early stage inthose cultures in which writing systems are indeed developed. The occurrencesof such phenomena seem to presuppose some precursors of linguistic analysis,before the advent of writing. Indeed, fairly advanced linguistic analyses weremade in ancient India, in an oral cultural context (Staal, 1974).

Thus, we can say that certain features that we usually ascribe to writtenlanguage have some natural counterparts in certain spoken genres, and thesegenres often occur also in such oral cultures or sections of culture that have hadno or little contact with literacy. But this is not to deny that writing as such hashad a profound influence on our thinking, since it always transforms the structureof language and gives prominence to certain features (Olson, 1994). This thencreates a special type of premiss for the development of linguistic theory; atheory of written language cannot, and should not, be entirely identical with acorresponding theory of spoken, interactional language.

At this point, it is worth recalling that writing and written language had originsand original functions other than that of representing spoken discourse. And thedifferences are still there; speech and writing have a considerable amount ofautonomy and mutual independence. This applies to sociogenesis (Pettersson,1996) as well as the ontogenesis in children (Liberg, 1990). Writing started outand developed as, and is still constituted as, kinds of symbol systems on artefactsthat are structurally independent of speech in many respects. In addition, writingis used for quite different purposes than speech. Making inventories of things(and people), in the form of lists and the like, is but one such function.

Writing was not originally, and is certainly not universally, geared towardbeing ‘phonographic’, i.e. designed to represent speech as accurately as possible(Pettersson, 1996). So, while it is obvious that written language develops later incultural history and in language ontogenesis, it is not true that written language issimply secondary to spoken language.1 Yet, there has often been, in Westerncivilisation, a belief and an ideology that writing should approximate speech asclosely as possible at an optimal level of representation. As far as phonology isconcerned, this level should be, according to some linguists, the phonemic level;thus, seen in this light, phonology is really about finding the optimal orthographyfor each language. There has often been an attempt to make written language intoa medium that can veridically represent aspects of spoken language. Arguably,this becomes more important as literacy becomes very widespread in thepopulation.

1 For some recent discussion, see in particular Pettersson (1996) and Harris (1995)


The cultural histories of various national, written languages usually suggesttheir partial independence of spoken-language realities. For example, we maylook at the developing scribal practices in different countries. Johnson (2003)studied manuscripts of several kinds from medieval (fourteenth-century) Sweden,and thus documented sets of developing conventions (in her case: as regards therendition of inflectional endings). She argues that they reflect systematisingefforts on the part of scribes, rather than simply mirror patterns of spokenlanguage. That is, these conventions followed a logic of consistency that waspartly specific to the literate practices themselves. In addition, they wereevidently developed under the influence of Latin grammar.

3.3.4New developments: computer-mediated communication

New technologies from the twentieth century, and especially from its last threedecades, have fundamentally moved and blurred the boundaries between speechand writing. These technologies include radio and television (especiallyinteractive genres), audio- and video-recorders, computers with text-processingfacilities and most recently, the integration of the technology for the recordingand transmission of audio- and video-data with the possibilities for analysis,manipulation and synthesis of verbal and non-verbal data in and by computersoftware. Speech and interaction can nowadays be recorded on various storagemedia, such as audio- and videotapes and computer discs, which has rendered akind of permanence to the recorded speech, while a great deal of its dynamics isstill preserved. Computer facilities allow for editing, and cutting-and-pasting, ofspoken messages much like what was before only possible for written texts.Conversely, written messages in computer-based media have become much moreinteractive and dynamic.

These innovations will probably change our attitudes to speech and writing,perhaps in fundamental ways. On the other hand, there still remain long-livedattitudes and understandings that have developed over centuries and becomesedimented in our everyday language. What I call ‘the written language bias’ hasbeen established over very long periods. While it is subject to importanttransformations, many of its basic features have proved to be quite persistent tochange.


3.4Priorities in modern linguistics

3.4.1The primacy of speech over writing

It is mandatory to emphasise the relative autonomy of written language in thecontext of this book, since many linguists have, despite their own writtenlanguage bias, claimed that written language is entirely secondary to spokenlanguage and therefore possibly linguistically uninteresting: ‘It is one of thecardinal principles of modern linguistics that spoken language is more basic thanwritten language’ (Lyons, 1981:11). At the same time, this idea does not justmark off ‘modern linguistics’, for it has a long past in Western theorising aboutlanguage. Thus, for example, Aristotle is known to have argued that writingsimply provides signs for other signs, namely spoken ones, which in turn aresigns for imprints by nature on the soul. (This idea is critically discussed byHarris, 2000.)

Many linguists of the twentieth century have propounded the idea that writingand written language are nothing but a secondary sign system which onlyindirectly, that is via spoken language, gives expression to the apperceptions ofthe world. Some put it in particularly stark terms: ‘Writing is not language, butmerely a way of recording language by means of visible marks’ (Bloomfield,1933:21), and ‘[l]anguage excludes writing’ (Hockett, 1958:11). Andfurthermore:

Language et écriture sont deux systèmes de signes distincts; l’uniqueraison d‘être du second est de représenter le premier [which implies thatlanguage is basically spoken language].

(Saussure, 1964:45)

For the linguist, writing is, except for certain matters of detail, merely anexternal device, like the use of the phonograph, which happens to preservefor our observation some features of the speech of past times.

(Bloomfield, 1933:282)

We have now known for a long time that there are many grounds for rejectingsuch claims. One of the pioneers in modern linguistics to pay attention to theparticularities of written language was Vachek: ‘Writing cannot be flatlydismissed as an imperfect, conservative quasi-transcription, as has often beendone up to the present day’ (1949:93).


3.4.2The primacy of language over both speech and writing

Speech and writing involve language use in communication and cognition. Theyare therefore not, one might argue, about language as such. I have suggested, andwill continue to argue in this book, that language in spoken interaction isdynamic and dialogical, embodied, subject to temporal and spatial constraints,embedded in communicative activities and interdependent with other contextualconditions. A linguist-critic might object that this concerns talk-in-interaction,not language. Language, he or she might insist, is systemic and based onabstract, formally defined symbols (and combination of symbols); it is form, notsubstance, context-independent rather than situated, abstract and mental (orspiritual) rather than bodily. Such an abstract language, it could be argued,underlies both speech and writing.

I cannot accept this objection as it stands, since it is based on a conception oflanguage (merely) as abstract objects, not as action, and on a variant of thelanguage-speech dichotomy that I will not endorse. I would concede, however,that language also involves abstract aspects of linguistic activities that haveemerged from and therefore transcend situated activities. Under thesecircumstances, it remains an issue of great complexity how language should beunderstood. I shall return to this issue at several places in the chapters to come,especially in Chapter 8.

3.5Summary: towards the main thesis

I have tried to do two things in this chapter. First, I have sketched, using ratherbig brush-strokes, some prototypical differences between speech and writing. Ihave also briefly suggested how this overview could be criticised and amended. Iwill tie up with these points in Chapter 7, when I deal with some criticisms of theWLB claims.

Second, I brought up, in Chapter 3.4, two assumptions or judgements commonlymade in linguistics, namely (a) that speech is the primary manifestation oflanguage, and writing is secondary to speech, and (b) that language as such, as a‘system’, is primary to ‘language in use’, to both speech and writing. Judgingfrom the ways linguistics has in fact been practised, the second assumptionseems to have taken precedence over the first; language is the central notion, andlanguage has been conceived in ways that are strongly influenced byconsiderations of written—as opposed to spoken, interactional—language.However, this points to a deep-seated contradiction, or a paradox, in modernlinguistics, which will be further explored in subsequent chapters.


4The written language bias in linguistics and

language sciences

4.1Introduction: a paradox in modern linguistics

In Linell (1982) and later, I have argued that there is a ‘written language bias’(WLB) which has governed thinking within linguistics from its inception almostup to the present day. This bias, which is nearly omnipresent in linguistics, hasbeen discussed by Taylor (1997) under the label of ‘scriptism’, i.e. ‘the influenceof writing on the conceptualization of speech’ (p. 52) within language theory.1

The WLB heritage is still pervasive, despite the facts that linguists, with fewexceptions, claim the primacy of speech and spoken language over writing andwritten language, and that, in more recent times, they have indeed been explicitlyconcerned with spoken language too. Therefore, we can talk about a paradox inmodern linguistics: one claims the absolute primacy of spoken language, yet onegoes on building theories and methods on ideas and experiences of a regimented,partly made-up language designed for literate purposes and overlaid with normsproposed by language cultivators, standardisers and pedagogues. All thisamounts to a deeply ingrained contradiction based on a veritable reversal ofpriorities.

It is also a fact that written languages have been subjected to systematicstudies by linguists and other scholars to a much larger extent than spokenlanguage, again with the possible exception of the last decades. Traditionally,this focus on written language has been prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Butmodern linguistics is to a remarkable degree based on studies of inventedlanguage specimens which reflect intuitions based on written standards. (Thereare of course many studies of actual, written texts too.) This, in itself, could becharacterised as a huge WLB in the language sciences. As a result, we have atruly fragmentary and largely inadequate picture of what spoken interactionallanguage is like. This is true even for those languages of the world that have beensubjected to the most comprehensive and systematic study by linguists.2

1 Taylor (1997) occasionally adopts the term ‘written language bias’ (e g pp 59–60)

Arguably, the remedy to this state of the art lies in a decisively empiricalapproach to the study of languages, spoken as well as written. Such an approachshould of course not be hostile to theory;3 on the contrary, it ought to seekexplanations of linguistic structures and processes where such explanations couldbe found, that is as regards spoken language as well as language in general, firstand foremost in the social and behavioural conditions of communicative andcognitive activities, especially talk-in-interaction.

In spite of this, I will not use the term ‘the written language bias’ primarily torefer to the relative neglect of spoken language per se. Instead, I am thinking of adifferent but related fact, namely that the models and methods used for studyingspoken language, and language in general, are largely those inherited from timeswhen the goals were those of standardising and exploring written language.

4.2The ‘myth theory’

My assessment of the state of the art in the language sciences shows a certainaffinity with theories put forward and claims made by Roy Harris in a series ofpublications (e.g. 1980, 1981, 1996). Harris proposes that language andlanguages do not exist in an objective reality, at least not in the form described inmainstream linguistics; instead, linguists have ‘made’ language(s) (Harris,1980). It is, according to Harris (1981) and supporters (Davis, 2002), a ‘myth’that language(s) are given, independently of linguists’ activities, out there inreality, as objects for research. We may call this ‘the myth theory’ of linguists.

However, it is hardly the case that ‘myth theorists’ deny entirely that there arelanguage phenomena ‘out there’. Rather, they reject most of what mainstreamlinguists have proposed in the way of describing and explaining thesephenomena. That is, language(s) exist(s), but not in the form ascribed to it/themby the ‘language makers’ in linguistics and elsewhere. Linguists’ construction oflanguage is strongly dependent on literate and scholarly cultures, a pointproposed by ‘myth theorists’ and in this book alike. However, this does notamount to arguing that written language lacks socio-cultural reality or isunimportant as a linguistic phenomenon. Indeed, Harris (1995) is a detailed studyof writing (taken in a wide sense), arguing for its importance.

To some extent, it seems fairly easy to ridicule ‘the myth theory’, at least theradical interpretations of it. Despite some commonalities in spirit, I shall not

2 Arguments that this is so have been articulated by many, as regards English, see Pawley(nd) and Syder (1983)

3 But there are good reasons to dismiss those kinds of excessively theory-driven researchin linguistics, in which data play only a minor role, as evidence for or against veryspecific, theoretical models This kind of (Chomskyan) linguistics is based on a falseanalogy with the methodology of natural sciences (e g Chapter 6 7 2)


myself argue directly in its terms. I believe, however, that ‘myth theorists’ haveraised many important points, and I will deal with some of them in terms of theWLB. For the time being, I will leave aside the formulations about ‘myths’ andreturn to some of them only in Chapter 8.2, and focus on my own assumptions,which include the following points (among others):

• there is language ‘out there’, and this includes both spoken and writtenlanguage (and other modalities);

• spoken and written language exhibit some degree of autonomy and mutualindependence, despite the obvious and numerous mutual dependences;

• these dependences are not unidirectional from spoken to written language; ourways of speaking are not untouched by literacy, writing and written (and otherartefact-borne varieties of) language, nor by attempts (by human users:linguists, politicians, and others) at constructing, regulating and reforminglanguage, usually in and through writing;

• despite this, talk-in-interaction, spoken language and spoken discourse mustbe (largely) described on their own, rather than in written-language-biased,terms.

The last-mentioned point is all the more important, since language in general andspoken interactional language in particular have indeed been described under acomprehensive WLB. What I mean, and do not mean, by this WLB will be givenmore substance in the sections and chapters to follow.

4.3Written language as medium and model for spoken

language

As I have already suggested, there are several interrelated sources of the writtenlanguage bias in linguistics. On the one hand, there are the cultural sources,basically of two interrelated kinds, the linguists’ activities, and the attitudes tolanguage mediated by schooling, science, popular science and the whole literatesociety (see Chapter 2 above).

On the other hand, there are two major instrumental origins. First, writtenlanguage has been used as the model for language in general; implicit andexplicit conceptualisations and theories developed in the study of writtenlanguage have been generalised to spoken interactional language, and tolanguage in general (that is, when differences between speech and writing aretreated as immaterial).

Second, written language is still the medium for analysing and representingauthentic spoken language and discourse, in and throughtranscription. Furthermore, when invented sentences are contemplated andanalysed within ‘theoretical linguistics’ (and arguments are supposed to be validfor language in general), these sentences are given in writing.

THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE BIAS IN LINGUISTICS 31

In Chapter 5, I am going to present a large number of WLB points whichillustrate different ways in which written language has been used as model andmedium for the study of spoken language. Here I will just give two examples ofhow the written medium, as a theoretical or technical means, seems to haveinfluenced our conception of language. The examples I have selected are, first,language considered as a language of propositions, and second, the use of(phonetic and other kinds of) transcription.4 In both cases, the structure of the meta-language, the language of describing object language, seems to impose astructure on this object language.

Most written genres have normatively preferred the expression of content interms of full sentences. While sentences vary in complexity, each of them can beconsidered as expressing one or several semantic propositions. A proposition canbe defined in various ways (e.g. Johnson, 1987:3f.), for example as arepresentation of a state of affairs in the world that uses a predicate symbol and anumber of argument symbols, allegedly representing relations between entities inthe world. Propositions can be used to describe conceptual structures, but pre-intentional and pre-conceptual phenomena too can become conceptualised andconsciously entertained in a propositional form. But as Johnson (1987:4)observes, it does not follow from the fact that human experiences can bedescribed in propositional terms that these experiences are exclusivelypropositional in nature. Indeed, Johnson argues that many events of experienceare imageschematic, metaphorical and/or based in bodily emotions, and non-propositional in nature. Yet, it has often been claimed that the semantics oflanguage is entirely propositional. It may be argued that this is actually aconsequence of the written medium being sentence- and proposition-based.

As a second case, let us turn to the use of written transcripts in the study ofspoken interaction. It is generally agreed that transcription is a necessary step inour work with spoken data; analysis would be impracticable without it. But thisonly makes it crucially important to ask what the process of transcription reallyinvolves. The transcript will hardly be a simple reflection of the stream of talk-in-interaction. A written text lacks much that is present in speech. (Ironicallyenough, the WLB in linguistics has now and then taught us that, instead, it isspeech which has a ‘defective’ or ‘impoverished’ structure.)

A considerable data reduction takes place, and the selection of data will reflecttheoretical goals and implicit assumptions on the part of the linguist (Ochs,1979). But surely there is more to transcription than simply selection andreduction. After all, we are faced with a projection of a dynamic, temporallydistributed stream of behaviours and interactions onto a spatially organised,static object, fixed and given in its form. Transcription will assign a discrete,segmental structure to the talk. In speech, there are no neat counterparts of the

4 These are treated in Chapter 5 primarily as (but not exclusively in) # 52 and # 24,respectively


letters and graphic words of a typed or printed text (though it can hardly bedenied that there is some basis in the structure of speech for a segmentalanalysis). In addition, when transcribed, speech is usually deprived of most of itsmusical dimensions: stress patterns, tones and tunes, rhythm, tempo, etc. Anutterance is arguably, partly like a song, an emergent totality involving bothverbal language and music. Merleau-Ponty refers to speech in terms of ways of‘singing the world’ (1962:187). Yet, we tend to disregard this, due to ourhabitual use of transcription and conventional writing, which systematicallyignores prosody and the non-verbal accompaniment of speech. (This point ofcourse serves to stress the importance of using the taped data, alongside thetranscripts, at most stages of analysing any piece of talk-in-interaction.)

Once a conversation has been transformed into a written text, it is given thereon paper, as it were in its totality. This invites the application of an outsideobserver’s retrospective, static, structural approach and implies difficulties to re-create the dynamic, on-line process in the conversational interplay as it isaccomplished and experienced by the actors. Faced with just the final product,the whole discourse transformed into text, it may be hard for the analyst tocapture the ambiguities and indeterminacies, which were there to be negotiatedand temporarily resolved in the actual communicative activity. The discourse-as-text perspective sometimes adopted by linguists encourages us to search forsomething different, for example slot-and-filler structures (integrated constituentstructures) of the same kinds that we are used to identify in the syntax of writtentexts.

The general point is that the technologies available have profoundlyinfluenced our theoretical conceptions of language. The impact of printed textsare, of course, the prime example. Writing encouraged us to think that prosodicand ‘paralinguistic’ features are not really part of language proper. Telephonesmay have supported a view of spoken language that vocal, but not visual, aspectsare part of talk as such.

These are but a few introductory examples of how the WLB of dominantapproaches in linguistics imposes structures of specific and quite constrainingkinds onto spoken language and interaction. Once again, my purpose in writingthis book has been to look at many more written-language-based assumptions asthey are applied to spoken language and talk-in-interaction, and to language ingeneral, rather than to written language.

4.4The written language bias: defining the notion

For something to be a point (or a candidate point) on the WLB list (Chapter 5), Ihave adopted basically the following two requirements:

1 It must be more reasonable for written than for spoken language; it iswritten-language-oriented, but need not be exclusively so.


2 Theory development and empirical studies should have shown, over time,that another theory of talk-in-interaction and of language-in-talk-in-interaction is more fruitful, or at least possible, on the point in question(these understandings are given as ALTERNATIVES in Chapter 5);otherwise, the point would not involve any undue or inappropriate bias withregard to the analysis of spoken interactional language.

Before proceeding to the actual points, a few additional caveats and reservationsare needed. First, my position is in no way meant to imply a denigration of thestudy of written language and of literacies. On the contrary, I think thatsystematic empirical studies are needed to determine their properties, and toascertain more exactly the structural and functional similarities and differenceswith respect to spoken language.

Second, I will not claim that the WLB ASSUMPTIONS about language arenecessarily wrong, nor that they are entirely pointless for the understanding ofspoken language and interaction. They might, at least in some cases, be fairlywell motivated (see Chapter 5.11), but the point is that they constitute a specificand limited view on language and discourse. It is a historical fact that thesevarious assumptions have been adopted within mainstream and traditionallinguistics, and that they are systematically related to, or have their origins in, aprimary concern with written language. They certainly do not give the wholetruth about language. Language and discourse need to be studied from othervantage points too, and there are other alternatives, that is dialogical,interactional ones, available for dealing with language in talk-in-interaction (andfor written language and language in general too, for that matter).

Indeed, having said the above, I would like to make the third point that thetraditional assumptions about language are not necessarily appropriate for theanalysis of written language and writing-based communication either. In fact,linguists have not been very keen on empirical studies of the language of actualwritten texts either. (This claim is valid for linguistics, at least up to quiterecently. Philology, of course, is a partly different story.) Rather, linguists havedevised a kind of idealised, decontextualised language, which may at bestrepresent their intuitive view of how written sentences are (or should be) built(cf. Kress, 1994:18). More of a dialogical approach will be necessary in theempirical study of written language too. Both speech and writing involve sociallyconstituted practices, and written communication too is a form of interaction ordialogue (Nystrand, 1992). For example, as we write, we become influenced bywhat we have written so far. Written texts are examples of discursive and socialaction (Fairclough, 1992). But I propose to put aside, at least for the time being,the issue whether some (which?) of the WLB items are in some way or anotherfruitful approaches to language (spoken, written or in general). My purpose issimply to argue that there is, in the language sciences, a fairly coherent body ofWLB points. In Chapter 5, I will go into the details. Before that, however, we


need one more specification: does the WLB pertain to the whole of linguistics,and only to linguistics?

4.5Is the bias a characteristic of linguistics?

Linguistics is a particular discipline with a long history and an even longer pre-scientific past. The practitioners of this discipline have mostly been concernedwith developing and legitimating written standard languages. Today’s theoreticallinguistics is still in various ways dependent on this cultural heritage. This is amajor claim in this book. But is the whole of linguistics really subject to theWLB? And if there is a WLB, isn’t it much more widespread, applying tolanguage sciences other than linguistics as well?

I would claim that the WLB applies to traditional grammar, structuralistlinguistics (of the Saussurean, Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfieldian kinds), andto Chomskyan generative linguistics, in particular its earlier variants, whichcould be regarded as extreme versions of formalist structuralism. There are manyother schools of linguistics that are similarly subject to a WLB. But it must beconceded that the WLB is less typical of, for example, Prague linguistics andsemiotics, British functionalism of the Firth-Halliday tradition, and manyempirical approaches of the last 20 or 30 years.5

At the same time, a WLB pertains to traditions in other language sciences too,for example in philosophy, psychology, sociology and communication studies.Moreover, a WLB is clearly part of common sense conceptions of language,thriving in Western cultures at large. This will be amply exemplified inChapter 5. As I stated in Chapter 2, it is rather obvious that these assumptionsabout language have been entertained in grammar schools, in general educationalsystems as well as scholastic studies, and they have spread from there. Thesesystems have been quite closely associated with written language studies. Iwould therefore claim, as far as the WLB is concerned, that linguistics hasplayed a key role, but other language sciences are also part of it. At the sametime, it seems that alternative conceptions of language, notably dialogical ones,have with few exceptions originated outside of core linguistics (Linell, 1998a).

I shall return to the questions raised in this section in Chapter 7, where I willalso address the accusation that I am drawing a caricature of linguistics.

5 See, for more details, Chapter 7 fn 9


Part II

The phenomenon and its extension

5The written language bias in 101 points

5.1Introduction

The list that will make up the lion’s share of this chapter is the result of anattempt on my part to assemble some significant assumptions and perspectives inlinguistics and, more widely, in the language sciences that seem to reflect a‘bias’ towards literacy, writing and written language. Even if the explanationsbehind the various points of this bias are regularly to be found in the past, andmost of the points have become recontextualised and transformed over time,traces of them can still quite often be sensed in the language sciences of thetwentieth century.

The 101 points to follow will each be stated in terms of three consecutivesections. First, there is a concise formulation of a particular WLBASSUMPTION, a point that is claimed to be part of the overall WLB perspectivein (mainstream forms of) linguistics and other language sciences. The followingBACKGROUND section suggests a social explanation for the WLBASSUMPTION in question. Science has its ultimate sources in common sense,1

and the background for many WLB ASSUMPTIONS is often, I suggest, basedon pre-theoretical, everyday reasonings about language. Theoreticalunderstandings of language were not invented out of nowhere, nor did they resultfrom ‘pure thinking’. Instead, they are often related to practical dealings withtext and language that dominated earlier periods in the history of linguistics(Chapters 2 and 8.3.). Thus, the specific claim raised in THE BACKGROUNDsections is that the various WLB ASSUMPTIONS are related to literatepractices, usually in the past. Finally, there is, under each point, a sectionlabelled THE ALTERNATIVE, which represents a less WLB-oriented stancethat could have been, and is indeed today often, adopted by those workingsystematically with spoken language and interaction more on their own terms. Invery general terms, THE ALTERNATIVES form together what might be calleda dialogical alternative, which looks at language as action and interaction. The

WLB perspective, by contrast, is essentially one of seeing a language as a set ofabstract forms.

I have tried to give the points rather succinct formulations, and I mustapologise for the fact that this may at times give a partly fragmented impression.Yet, I have chosen this format to facilitate referencing. As a compensation, I aimat a more extensive, discursive and synthesising account in the subsequentchapter (Chapter 6).

My account will start with a number of points that concern language ingeneral and its relations to discourse and the world (## 1–6). The notion of theunitary, separate language has been part and parcel of linguistics, and I treatvarious WLB ASSUMPTIONS connected with this in ## 7–20. Thereafter, Ideal with aspects of language and languages, more or less in accordance with thetraditional partitioning of linguistics: phonetics and phonology (## 21–28),grammar (mainly syntax) (## 29–45), semantics (including lexicology) andpragmatics (## 46–63), and wider aspects of communication, discourse and text(## 64–80). Then follow some points (## 81–85) pertaining to the psychologyand biology of language. The final points (## 86–101) tend to transgress theboundaries of language (as conventionally conceived) and therefore of linguisticsin different respects; some relate to general semiotics and different kinds of signsystems. However, issues of language cannot be readily compartmentalised as Ihave done here; boundaries are fuzzy, and the particular placement of somepoints can certainly be disputed. Also, I regard the points particularly of the lastgroup merely as examples. The list to follow is not exhaustive. There is no suchthing as the final interpretation.

5.2Language, discourse and the world

# 1Language and the world are distinct, and languages represent

the world

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The basic assumption that language and the worldare distinct occurs in two variants. Objectivism, which is historically the mostpopular and common variant in Western thinking, claims that the world—anobjective world—exists ‘out there’ prior to and independently of languages anddiscourses. The latter are only used to describe this world; in doing so, theymirror, reflect or represent the world. Linguistic items, words and sentences,stand for things and states-of-affairs in the world.

1 Common sense is not necessarily mistaken (though it could be) (cf Marková, 2003 139)Moreover, the ‘dialogical alternative’ too is of course in some ways ultimately dependenton common sense


The other variant, subjectivism (sometimes called ‘mentalism’), assumes thatthe world appears to the individual human being as structured by the senses andthe cognitive capacities and habits of man. Thus, the world—the world asapprehended—is a subjective, ‘inner’ world. The role of language and discourseis again to reflect and represent the world, in this case the subjective one.

Both objectivism and subjectivism assume, in effect, that language andcommunicative processes do not affect understanding; they simply reflect theworld or understandings of the world, and do not have a constructive orconstitutive function in cognising the world2 (as the dialogical alternative wouldassume). Words are just pointers to things in the world or to ideas in individualminds.

The idea that a language is an inventory of labels for objects in the world orfor mental objects is known as ‘nomenclaturism’.3

THE BACKGROUND: The existence of permanent textual records endorse theidea of language and discourse as distinct from the world. Texts refer (orpotentially refer) to, describe and represent parts of the physical-social world,that is, the ‘referential’ (largely external) world that we experience through oursenses. Many expository texts are used to relate, describe, account for, etc.something which putatively exists, or happened, out there in the world, prior tothe human activities of linguistic description (provided of course that the textsare factual rather than fictional). In general, drawings, maps, diagrams, tablesand written texts are ‘representational artifacts’ (Wartofsky, 1979; Latour andWoolgar, 1986), which are full of ‘inscriptions’ that ‘draw things together’(Latour, 1988); they represent the results of many observations (and thoughts)and make them visible and surveyable.

Texts are remote and displaced in time and space, and therefore in someimportant senses, e.g. causally, independent of the referential worlds theydescribe. Briefly stated, texts establish textual worlds detached from the external,referential world.

If we choose the subjectivist alternative instead, a similar argument holds.Once written, texts exist as entities with their inscribed meanings, detached fromtheir authors’ subjective worlds. They contain the traces of prior cognitive actions.

The referents (of texts) in the referential world, if they do exist (some texts areabout fictive referents), exist independently of whether they are referred to intexts or not. Texts and referents (and subjective thoughts) may cease to existindependently of each other.

2 This kind of similarity between objectivism and subjectivism has been pointed out bymany For example, Merleau-Ponty (1962), who, in this regard, talks about ‘mechanism’and ‘intellectualism’, points out that neither paradigm ascribes significance to language orspeech itself for them, ‘the word has no significance’ (p 176), and ‘authentic’ speech doesnot contribute to meaning-making ‘In the first [i e mechanism] there is nobody to speak,in the second [i e intellectualism], there is certainly a subject, but a thinking one, not aspeaking one’ (p 177)

THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE BIAS IN 101 POINTS 39

Nomenclaturism, i.e. the theory that words are labels for things, can beassumed to have been reinforced by writing. Written words on paper, object-likein themselves and displaced from their referents (the things they ‘label’), providea model for how words in general relate to what they mean. They are not seen asparts of situated, integrated and embodied actions, accompanied by othersemiotic means and performed in front of other people and in the presence of(some of) their referents.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Languages and discourses constitute and construct (atleast parts and aspects of) our apprehension of the world. Therefore, discursiveconstructions cannot be construed as independent of the world as it appears tous. Language and the world are not entirely distinct phenomena, but they arereflexively or dialogically related. (Note, however, that this theory is not identicalto the WLB point of # 3 below.)

This intertwinement of discourse and aspects of the world is not physical orcausal, but semantic-pragmatic and conceptual. The basic units of languaging areactions, inter-actions and communicative projects. All these communicativeactions are responsive to aspects of contexts and situations. Communicative actsperform something in the world; they are active interventions. Many of them canbe regarded as instructive acts; the speaker tries to show and highlight features ofsituations (whether these situations are present and real, or remote, imagined orvirtual), trying to make the addressee (and himself as an actor) pay attention tothese features (making them more visible) (Goodwin, 1994). Language is used tointervene in (people’s apperceptions of) the world.

Language and meaning belong neither to an objective, outer reality nor to asubjective, ‘inner’ world. Rather, language and meaning, as well as humandesires, feelings, projects, intentions, expectations, etc. belong to an ‘inter-world’4 between the individual, who is culturally embedded, and others, who aresimilarly culturally embedded. Language is a means of relating to andinteracting with others, of being (or becoming) in the world.

# 2The objectification of language: languages as inventories of

objects

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Languages exist as objects in their own right; theyare distinct from the world ‘out there’ (which they refer to and describe; cf. # 1).

3 Harris (1980, 2002a) uses the term ‘surrogationalism’ for the theory that the linguisticrepresentation is a ‘surrogate’ for a more direct, such as perceptual, representation ofthings in the world Words are ‘surrogates’ for the things they stand for Surrogationalismoccurs in a ‘reocentric’ variant (objectivism words stand for things in the world) and a‘psychocentric’ variant (subjectivism words stand for apperceptions of the world) (Harris,1980 44)


They are also objects independent of and prior to discursive practices. Language,given beforehand, is put to use in discourse (# 5).

A language can be conceptualised in terms of sets or inventories of abstractobjects, as a structured stock of words (and, perhaps, more complex expressions;# 30) and rules (# 13). Words are stable form-meaning couplings, and a languageis a code consisting of such items (# 46).

THE BACKGROUND: ‘When words and sentences are written down, theycan be readily looked upon as objects’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980:204).Coherent written texts can also be conceptualised as independent of discursiveaction.

Grammars, dictionaries, etc., have been designed in order to focus onlanguages and linguistic forms only. They document objective forms withoutimmediate consideration of their actual situated use.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language and discourse are necessarily intertwined.Linguistic resources are aspects of—methods for—meaning-making activitiesand practices. While the traces of linguistic activities (‘words’, etc.) have awritten mode of existence, the linguistic entities per se are not (abstract) objects.

If a language is to be construed as a system of objects at all, this system and itsassociated theories must in large part be seen as cultural artefacts; they exist asthe products of those decontextualising activities by linguists and other languagecultivators which serve to separate out certain structural properties from thecontinuities of discursive activities. Such artefacts are useful for variouspurposes in a literate society using written texts and computers.

# 3The world as linguistically constructed

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The world, as we know and understand it, iscommunicatively constructed. This applies, according to a radical variant ofsocial constructionism, throughout; any linguistic description, whether it belongsto the everyday life world or in a scientific model, is a construction achieved inand through communicative activities involving language. Since the world canbe understood only in and through language and communication, this means thatthe world itself is in a sense a linguistic or communicative construction.Moreover, if each language is an autonomous system (# 9), it will constructreality in its own way.5 These different perspectives are constructed, in thinkingand communication, in and through the use of different languages, or of (partly)the same language in different ways (in different texts and contexts). Thus, theworld, and any particular part of it, can be understood in many—perhaps in

4 Merleau-Ponty (1955 293) ‘intermonde’ Others have formulated similar ideas Forexample, Rommetveit (1998a, 1998b) talks about language and meaning as existing in the‘interface’ between the individual and the world See also Bakhtin (1984 287ff)


infinitely many—ways, at least as many ways as there are different languagesand sublanguages. There are many possible worlds.

This point is typically not part of mainstream linguistics. Instead, the previoustheses of objectivism (and subjectivism) (# 1) are the more popular stances.Radical variants of objectivism (the main variant under # 1) and constructionism(this point) can be seen as opposite positions, and may be used as examples ofthe fact that seemingly contradictory conclusions can be drawn from the sameunderlying assumption (# 1), namely that language/discourse and the world aredistinct; the difference lies in which of these phenomena is construed as mostbasic.6

THE BACKGROUND: Texts are distinct from the world that they describe(# 1), and are always produced by people. A radical (post-modern) version ofconstructionism holds that issues of truth can never be resolved; it is notmeaningful to argue that some theories are more (or less) true of reality thanothers. Texts are ‘made’, and their form and content are only accessible in andthrough the linguistic artefacts. In fiction and literary theory, there is no essentialdistinction between texts that have (some kind of) real background and texts thatare the product of the writer’s imagination. The question what is true in relationto some factual or external reality independent of the text is immaterial and doesnot make sense. This attitude to fiction may be generalised to all linguisticdiscourse. Texts are thought to constitute their own worlds.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Linguistic descriptions are, by definition, mediatedthrough language and communicative activities. The world is partlyindeterminate, and there are multiple perspectives on it that can be constructed insocial interaction and cognition. But communicative construction is not acontext-free activity; it does not take place in vacuo. It is interdependent with(our perceptions of) the material world and our bodily based constraints andpossibilities of processing information in real time. Furthermore, it is subject tohuman purposes, in which the communicative activities are embedded, andoccurs in a real world which affords the human subject with physical andperceptual stimuli. Language too is embodied (# 16). In other words, language ischaracterised by both embeddedness (in sociocultural practices occurring in theworld) and embodiedness.7

Though dependent on sociocultural resources, human agents are not entirely‘imprisoned’ within language. Actors can criticise language for not conformingto how they cognise aspects of the world. Communicative constructs vary intheir nature; some are more constrained by efforts to remain as objective aspossible in veridical descriptions of empirical obser vations, others deal with

5 This sentence expresses a particular variant of the theory, i e the strong version of theSapir-Whorf theory of linguistic determinism For some recent discussions of linguisticrelativity, see Lucy (1992) and Gumperz and Levinson (1997)

6 This is further argued in Chapter 6 2


fiction or speculation. Some interpretations and theories of the world are betterthan others; for example, science is in general constrained in ways that do notapply to myths. Thus, a radical social constructionism should be replaced by amore contextual variant.8

# 4The autonomy of linguistics

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Languages exist as objects ‘out there’ in the world(# 2). Therefore, the discipline of linguistics has a data domain of its own. It is anautonomous discipline.9

A language is a self-contained system (# 9). It is studied in linguistics,whereas the study of its various boundary conditions has to be relegated to‘applied linguistics’ (# 6), or to ‘hyphenated’ brands of linguistics, for examplepsycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and neurolinguistics, or to other disciplines,such as psychology, sociology and anthropology.

THE BACKGROUND: Linguists have presented languages as separableobjects, documented and filed in dictionaries, grammar books, etc.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language is an integrated part of communicativeactivities, behavioural and cognitive processes, and social practices. It should bestudied within interdisciplinary language studies.10 It amounts to a far-reachinganalytic operation if we claim that linguistics has a data domain that is entirelyseparate from that of, for example, psychology11 or discourse studies.

# 5Discourse as the use of language, and the product-orientation

of discourse theory

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is a structured set of forms (abstractobjects, # 2, # 12), which are put to use in discourse (= language use). Linguisticpractices in discourse are therefore secondary to the language system. In actualdiscourse, the abstract linguistic objects (and rules) are re-used and instantiated(# 14). In analysing discourse, linguists must therefore conceive of utterances asproducts (# 68), that is structured strings of words that reproduce entities(‘building-blocks’) pre-existing in language.

The distinction between language and discourse can sometimes be describedas a distinction between language and speech (# 21).

7 The common English word for ‘embodiedness’ is ‘embodiment’ On embodiment ofmeaning, see Merleau-Ponty (1962) and especially Johnson (1987) On embodiment andcultural embeddedness, see Zlatev (1997), Rommetveit (1998b) and Johnson (1987 190)

8 Cf Hacking (1999), Linell (1996) For some discussion, see Chapter 8 4

9 See quotations from Saussure in Chapter 2, p 16


THE BACKGROUND: A written text is the result of communicative actiontoo, but it has a permanent character and can be consumed in situations that arecompletely different from the situations where it was produced. This highlightsaspects of texts as persistent and situation-transcending things and products,rather than as actions and processes. A written text consists of static forms whichare distributed in space and can be analysed as objects with a parts-and-wholestructure; they can be composed and decomposed, cut and pasted, permuted andreassembled in different constellations.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Speech is process-oriented rather than only product-oriented. Participants in discourse and communication are embedded in physicalenvironments and social situations, involving people immersed in socialactivities and engaged in communicative action. Language is meaningful action,interventions in the world, cultural practices, linguistic praxis or ‘languaging’(Liberg, 1990).

Linguistic practices are primary, and the language system is a product ofabstraction from such practices. To understand these processes and practices,analysts must adopt a perspective that is compatible (though not identical) withthat of the participants in the interaction. Instead of working primarily with adistinction between language use and language system, analysts need adistinction between situated interaction and situation-transcending, socioculturalpractices (including linguistic practices with their (partly) systematic aspects).Both situated interactions and situation-transcending practices are dynamic innature (Chapter 8.7.2).

# 6Linguistics and applied linguistics

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: It is the essence of language which should be theobject of theories within linguistics proper, especially in general theoreticallinguistics. By contrast, the study of how language is used— in activities ofspeaking, writing, understanding speech or writing, translating betweenlanguages, etc.—is the object of applied linguistics. Theories from linguisticsproper are to be secondarily applied in the latter field.

THE BACKGROUND: Linguistics has been established in academia andhigher education as the scientific study of language, and the study of discourse,psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, etc. were added much later as applied fields.For example, in American universities, psycholinguistics was developed asparasitic on theoretical (generative) linguistics, and in the beginning it was neverseriously put into question if this was a viable avenue for research (Chapter 6.5).

10 Cf also Harris’s (1996, 1997) notion of ‘integrational linguistics’, which he contrastswith ‘segregational’, i e autonomous and monodisciplinary, linguistics

11 For discussion, see Derwing (1979)


On the other hand, theories of text interpretation were long before developedquite independently of linguistics, e.g. within philology, theology and literarystudies.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The study of language systems (systems abstractedfrom linguistic practices; # 5) vs. discourses may require different theoriessubjected to different perspectives, but these theories must be made compatible.An explanatory theory of linguistic practices cannot build exclusively on theapplication of theories of linguistic structure. In fact, theories of socioculturalpractices are the most basic ones (cf. # 5).

5.3The notion of ‘a language’

# 7The unity and homogeneity of each language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: What constitutes one individual language is, inpractice, very often a national language, or some linguistic variety which couldbe made into such a language. Each such language, for example English, Frenchor Swedish, is one unitary, i.e. homogeneous and integrated, system (or a set ofinteracting unitary systems or modules); variation is not a property of thelanguage system per se. If there was no fixed common code, successfulcommunication would be impossible (cf. # 46, # 66).

The idea of unitary languages has had repercussions in historical linguistics. Allgenetically related languages are assumed to be the descendants of one dialect-free (unitary) parent language (Ursprache). In addition, the assumption of unityis related to the idea (and ideal) of purity of languages and cultures (# 99).

An individual language is defined primarily by its grammar and lexicon(# 13). However, since there are extensive lexical variations between everydaylanguage and ‘languages for specific purposes’ (e.g. professional languagevarieties), the former is more constitutive of the language. Vocabularies areculture-dependent, basic grammar is not.

THE BACKGROUND: Standardising a unitary national language is part ofthe project of uniting a nation. The written standard language is, or has been‘made’ (cf. Harris, 1980), homogeneous in terms of phonology, grammar andlexicon. Linguists have taken an active part in these unitising endeavours.12

THE ALTERNATIVE: To begin with, there is no single system of spokenlanguage corresponding to the idea of a national language; instead, there areoverlapping, regional and social varieties, as well as partially specific languagestied to communicative activities and genres. The notion of a unitary nationallanguage is an artificial social reality attempted at as a result of political actions,including linguists’ standardising efforts. For example, what Saussure regarded as


la langue of French was arguably the language of the French educated, culturaland political élite (e.g. Bourdieu, 1982:26ff.).

We often encounter linguistic resources which are selectively used in particularcommunities about particular parts of the world,13 perspectivised in specificways, and cannot be considered part of a general, abstract language defined at anational level. In addition to crosssituationally valid ‘national’ languages, oneneeds to recognise ‘social languages’ (Wertsch, 1991) or ‘activity languages’(Allwood, 2000) used in different communities (professional and institutionallanguages, jargons, etc.) and in different kinds of communicative activity types(‘language games’). In addition, the linguistic repertoires of particular speakersvary too.

With regard to historical linguistics, even if historically related languages havedescended from common origins, there need not have been a variation-freeUrsprache; no known languages are devoid of sociolectal, dialectal or idiolectalvariation.14

# 8Dialects are not languages

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: In addition to ‘languages’, there are ‘dialects’.Spoken vernaculars are ‘dialects’, not ‘languages’.15 Rather, they are varieties oflanguages.

THE BACKGROUND: Only national standard languages are generallyallowed in writing.16 ‘Dialects’ have often been levelled out—to a great extent inwriting, much less so in speech—as a consequence of imposing national standardlanguages on linguistic communities.

THE ALTERNATIVE: From linguistic-structural and (inter)actional points-of-view, all linguistic varieties are comparable, but they are tied to differentcommunicative genres, and therefore differ widely in the sizes of vocabulariesand in their degrees of specialisation and general applicability.

12 See e g Chapters 2, 6 5 and 8 2

13 As a case in point, consider so-called membership categorisation devices (MCDs)discussed by Sacks and many discourse analysts They are often ignored in linguistics, and,interestingly, also in Conversation Analysis (CA) (Silverman, 1998)

14 Cf also ideas of the perfect language # 56 and Chapter 6 5 1

15 Almost universally, only national standard languages have traditionally beenconsidered real ‘languages’ For example, Hull (1993) demonstrates how for centuriesMaltese was regarded, by the dominant, ‘cultural-imperalist’ classes, merely as a corruptdialect of Arabic Only very gradually, in the twentieth century, was Maltese establishedas a ‘language’ It is now one of the official languages of the Republic of Malta

16 On the notion of ‘national language’, see Chapters 6 4 and 8 2–3


# 9The self-sufficiency and autonomy of the language faculty

and of the individual language system

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is autonomous and unique both at thelevel of the human language faculty (which underlies all languages) and at thelevel of the individual language (langue). The universal language faculty isseparate from other cognitive abilities; it is a specific ‘module’17 of the mind. Aspecific language is an autonomous system (cf. # 2, # 4) that underlies bothspeech and writing (# 90).

Aspects of linguistic structure, such as the linguistic structure of a sentence,must be explained by reference only to other parts of language structure. This isa structuralist assumption; structure is self-sufficient,18 immanent in language(Hjelmslev, 1961), or internal to a language system (‘competence’, ‘I-language’)underlying surface language (Chomsky, e.g. 1965).

THE BACKGROUND: ‘The word’, i.e. language, was given by God only toman (# 81). A fixed set of linguistic norms, defining what is considered one‘pure’ language, has been supposed to increase the sense of linguistic identity(and therefore also social and national identity) of speakers. According tocommonly accepted rules, multilingual speakers should stick to one language at atime; languages should be kept separate in minds, texts and societies (# 99).Linguistics has traditionally had a monolingual bias (Romaine, 1989).19

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language, and different languages, must be explainedlargely in terms of extra-systemic factors, such as the physiologically orpsychologically based processing constraints of language users, social demandson and contingencies of cognition and communication, culture-specific standardsof behaviour, different ‘framings’ of communicative activity types, various kindsof background knowledge about the world and non-linguistic or pre-linguisticexperiences.

Individual languages are not always kept apart in practice, as examples oftransfer, code-mixing and code-switching indicate.

# 10A language as a system of maximally general rules

Each language is integrated and coherent, and forms a single, unitary system ofinternally defined relations (‘où tout se tient’20). Alternatively, we can conceiveof a language as a small set of mutually coupled such systems (modules) (e.g.

17 Fodor (1983) For some discussion, see Smith (1999)

18 Cf Derwing (1979 180)

19 Cf Cromdal (2000) who argues that research on bilingualism has presupposed the ‘onelanguage at a time’ principle, thus guarding the purity of languages, much along the linesof literate culture


phonology, syntax, lexicon) (# 9). In such a system, rules receive maximallygeneral forms.21

THE BACKGROUND: Grammar books build upon the idea of a coherentsystem of categories and rules contained in the grammar (book). Modernlinguists strive to formulate maximally simple, economical and elegant systemsof rules, ‘a parsimonious description of the language product’ (Derwing, 1979:182). This holds true of generative linguistics more than traditional grammar.Parsimonious models are the result of linguists’ activities and their totalisingambitions rather than something inherent in language ‘out there’ (Chapter 6.5).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Languages are dynamic, display variation acrosscontexts and are subject to historical change. Categories and regularities havefuzzy boundaries. Regularities are locally structured, and different systems areonly partially convergent. Languages do not form entirely coherent systems.Instead, there are points at which different systems compete. ‘All grammarsleak’, as Sapir (1921:38) formulated it.

# 11The form vs. meaning dichotomy

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: In language, there is a clear distinction betweenform and content, expression and meaning. Language gives expression tothought (# 48). When one uses language, one must think before one can speak(or write) (# 76). But language itself is primarily a matter of expression or form(# 12).

THE BACKGROUND: Writing enhances the expression side; it consists ofpermanent marks on paper. At the same time, readers in different situations canassign divergent meanings to a text. See also # 12.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In discourse and interaction, expression and meaningare mutually constitutive, and neither can be considered independent of or priorto the other. Thoughts and messages are accomplished in and through beingbrought into language.

20 This expression is due to Antoine Meillet (Malmberg, 1983 20), although Saussureanin spirit and often erroneously attributed to Saussure Meillet and other structuralists seemto have imposed a rather Durkheimian reading on Saussure Recent commentators (e gThibault, 1997) have argued that Saussure was less inclined to see language in terms offully integrated systems than the received view of him has claimed

21 Cf ‘the principle of maximum regularity’ as discussed by Derwing (1973 132ff, 1979180, n 31)


# 12The priority of form

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Different languages can encode the same meanings;hence, what makes particular languages distinct is their form (vocabulary,morphosyntax; cf. # 13). Linguistics, the study of different natural languages,must therefore give priority to expression (form) over meaning (content).22

THE BACKGROUND: The physical side of signs and symbols are objects,marks on stone, wood, paper, etc.; meanings and references are not physicallypresent. Focus on texts directs attention to formal aspects. While we can usuallyagree on what is there as physical symbols, we may sometimes disagree on whatthe appropriate interpretations of the texts are.

THE ALTERNATIVE: See # 11.

# 13Language as words and grammar, and the sharp distinction

between lexis and grammar

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: A language consists, basically, of lexis andgrammar (morpho-syntax, plus phonology). (See also # 12 on the priority of form.)According to an older version of this conception, phonology is not unequivocallytreated as part of language (# 21). Other parts, such as semantics, text grammarand pragmatics, were only later recognised as central parts of language.

Lexicon and grammar are fundamentally different modules of language. Alexicon, or dictionary, consists of words (which are typically simplex items, butoften polysemic, and possibly organised in semantic fields and hierarchicalsystems), and a grammar contains general rules for combining words intogrammatical phrases and sentences (# 30). The grammar takes care ofregularities, the lexicon of irregularities and idiosyncracies. Basically, thedistinction between grammar and lexicon builds upon the differences betweengeneral ‘rules’ and ‘lists’ of idiosyncratic units. According to ‘mentalist’

22 The concentration on form in grammar has been particularly strong in Americandescriptivism (Bloomfield, Z Harris, etc) and generativism (Chomsky) (see discussion inHockett, 1968 19ff) In Europe, the interdependence of form and meaning in grammar hasin general been acknowledged more often Hjelmslev (1953 [1943]) treated, at least intheory, expression and content on a par Some, e g Firth and Halliday (cf Butt, 2001), havedeclared that linguistics is basically the study of meaning (as linguistically encoded)Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that most forms of functionalism in linguistics tend to berather formalistic, after all

Using a formal paradigm, Montague (1974) in a sense put syntax and semantics on anequal footing in assigning to strings of the language both a syntactic and a semanticstructure that are homomorphically related Later formal accounts, e g Kempson et al(2001), have reinstated the asymmetry between syntax (form) and semantics in claimingthat natural language expressions are semantically underspecified


linguistics, these are claims meant to be valid for the ‘mental’ grammar andlexicon.

The lexicon contains the semantic substance (concepts) that connects languagewith the world. A basic semiotic assumption is that words, as linguistic primes,mirror reality (which, in turn, might be described in terms of Aristoteliancategories of things, processes, etc.) (# 1). Grammar, and especially syntax, onthe other hand, is algorithmic and algebraic, consisting of logic-like rulesoperating on variables and constants (# 89). People can be educated on theproperties of words, but syntax, which is largely automatised, is more difficult todescribe and teach.

THE BACKGROUND: Learning and teaching how to write, and how totranslate texts into foreign languages etc., have traditionally concentrated onlexis and grammar. Language pedagogy has therefore influenced generallanguage theory profoundly. Dictionaries are lists of particular items and theiridiosyncracies, grammars consist of general rules (with examples). In traditionalgrammars, words and their morphologies dominate, at the expense of syntax.Orthographic rules for dividing texts into simple words, which are listed separatelyin dictionaries, draw attention from the fact that talk often builds upon standingcollocations.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Lexis and (especially) grammar are the most abstract(decontextualised) aspects of language. Other, more context-bound aspectsinclude semantics, pragmatics, text and discourse structure and interactionalfunctions. These are just as basic to a description of a language. Moreover,languages (words, grammar, prosodies) are not the only means to createmeanings in cognition and communication; there are other semiotic resources,including ‘body language’ and the manipulation of objects.

The boundary between lexical items and grammatical constructions is notalways as sharp as linguists have traditionally argued (e.g. Fillmore, 1988; Kayand Fillmore, 1999). The absolute distinction between ‘lists’ and ‘rules’ is afallacy (Langacker, 1987:42). For example, lexicalised phrases (and compounds)are boundary cases; they have regular ‘syntactic’ properties, but some of theirsemantic features are not predictable by rule. At the same time, grammaticalconstructions do not just have a syntax, i.e. purely formal rules for combiningelementary signs; particular constructions have their own semantic implications,i.e. functional (meaning) potentials.23 Some lexical items have primary functionsas discourse-structuring devices. The productive use of language builds partlyupon larger chunks, word collocations, rather than just simple words (# 29).

23 Ono and Thompson (1995), Linell (2003, 2004b) and Wide (2002)


# 14The type-token distinction

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Tokens of words and sentences in text and discoursecan be classified as occurrences of particular types belonging to the languagesystem.24

THE BACKGROUND: In printed texts, all tokens of the ‘same’ word orsentence look identical. Dictionaries are organised in terms of entriescorresponding to word types, rather than word occurrences, and grammars definesentence types, rather than token utterances. However, the type-token distinctionis not applicable to entire situated texts and discourses. This might be developedinto an argument that text and discourse do not belong to language.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The type-token distinction is somewhat moreproblematic with regard to spoken discourse, and its words and syntacticconstellations; for example, (some) prosodic enactments and situated meaningsare token-specific. Situated utterances are never simply tokens of pre-definedtypes; each utterance is interdependent with its own contexts.

# 15The abstractness and disembodiedness of language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language as such consists of abstract signs andrules (# 87); it is immaterial ‘form’ rather than material ‘substance’ (in the termsof Saussure, Hjelmslev and others). This can be further explicated in terms ofthree related assumptions: language is

a acorporeal or disembodied, that is spiritual rather than carnal or embodied(incarnated);25

b atemporal, rather than distributed in time (# 16); andc asocial, a property of individual minds or supraindividual, collective

systems, rather than something shared or accomplished by interlocutors inactual situated interaction and dialogue (# 19).

Since priority is (usually) assigned to forms (expressions), i.e. ‘sign-vehicles’,rather than to the meanings of signs (# 12), this approach to language is one of‘abstract objectivism’.26

24 This point of the WLB is discussed at length by Taylor (1997)

25 Cf what Peters (1999 63ff) calls ‘the spiritualist tradition’ in theories ofcommunication However, for some spiritualists, what was spiritual was ideas, i e therealities thought and talked about (# 1), rather than words and communication ForAugustine, for example, words and languages, by contrast, were tied to the bodies offallen men


THE BACKGROUND: Written language is not bodily behaviour; it consists ofsigns on concrete artefacts. These signs are just traces of acts of writing (# 86).The written signs are conventional (‘arbitrary’; Saussure, 1964) symbols, ratherthan motivated (iconic) signs. Writing gives prominence to ‘sign-vehicles’,which are distributed in space rather than in time. Counterparts of musical andnon-vocal dimensions of speech are largely lacking.

The idea of language as pure, disembodied form has a long past in anidiosyncracy embraced by many philosophers and linguists: the complete denialof the body. In exercises of logic and grammar, linguistic form is of primary, andexclusive, importance (# 57).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Spoken language is embodied. It is a significant factthat we are dealing with complex motor behaviour, executed by bodily meansand distributed in time. Language is therefore not entirely immaterial ordisembodied (e.g. Bourdieu, 2000). Languages are neither individual (private)nor entirely collective; they are (partially) shared by real people, that is socialhuman beings, who engage in public (observable) communication with oneanother.

The body gives expression to the phonetic side of language, which isintegrated with musical and gestural dimensions, cf. # 24. See also # 67. On thecontent side, words have an anchoring in what the material world offers in termsof perceptions. This applies to concrete words, but also to abstract words, whichare often metaphorically based on spatial relations (Reddy, 1979; Lakoff andJohnson, 1980).

# 16The atemporality of linguistic items

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Linguistic items have no temporal dimension.Rather, they are, although abstract as types, spatially organised. Time andsequence pertain to utterances, order and place to linguistic units, for example,sentences (# 30). See also the distinction between phonetics and phonology(# 22).

Sentences have a linear and hierarchical structure, and they are syntacticallyand semantically integrated as demarcated wholes. In order for such units to beproperly planned and understood in use, their structures must be available forinspection in their entirety at one and the same time (# 76).

THE BACKGROUND: See # 5.THE ALTERNATIVE: Spoken utterances are transient phenomena,

distributed in real time, and produced and received over time in an incrementalfashion. Verbalised content is communicated in a temporal sequence (Wold,

26 This is the abstract objectivism that was so forcefully criticised by Voloshinov (1973)


1978). The timing and pacing of different aspects of talk are important in socialinteraction. Cf. also # 76.

# 17Contexts as linguistic environments

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The relevant context of a linguistic unit in focusconsists of the other linguistic objects surrounding it, that is those units that co-occur with it and thus belong to its phonological or syntactic environment. Othercontexts do not belong to language, or are not pertinent to the language system.For example, such contexts may be extra-linguistic situations, or ‘encyclopedic’world knowledge (# 51).

THE BACKGROUND: Contexts other than co-text are important in theproduction and use of written texts too. However, there are some written texttypes, whose interpretation is normatively constrained to what is linguisticallyrepresented, for example logical calculus using a notation. Another similar genreis that of decontextualised linguistic examples in grammar books or languagelessons.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In spoken interaction, many context types arerelevant. A broad taxonomy (Linell, 1998a) includes the prior (and in somemeasure, projected following) discourse (co-text), the surrounding situation, andvarious abstract background assumptions, such as situation definition (‘frame/framing’), knowledge of language, genres and activity types, assumptions abouttopics and partners, societal institutions, etc.27 Such contextual resources arecrucial for the production and interpretation of utterances; taken by itself,language is allusive and incomplete (# 48).

# 18The absence of situated order

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Situated utterances are individual and accidentalevents, disorderly from a linguistic point-of-view.28 Variation in speech isunsystematic and, therefore, linguistically uninteresting (# 20, # 22; cf. alsoChapter 2).

THE BACKGROUND: Written language is regimented and regularised; itsnorms disprefer many kinds of variation. In comparison with carefully plannedand edited texts, spoken utterances are occasioned by all sorts of accidentalcircumstances, including the other party’s unpredictable interventions.

27 Cf also Givón’s (1989 73ff) division of contexts into textual, deictic and generic ones,and the various contributions to Duranti and Goodwin (1992)

28 Cf Saussure, Chomsky, as quoted in Chapter 2 (p 12)


THE ALTERNATIVE: Situated interaction and the utterances embeddedwithin it are thoroughly social in nature, and ‘order[ly] at all points’ (Sacks,1984:22). However, this kind of order is only in part predefined by rule; instead,it is accomplished in and through the interaction itself.

Variation in spoken language (styles, registers, genres) is systematic bothsystem-internally and in relation to contextual factors.

# 19The internal(ised) grammar of the individual

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is a property of individual minds (cf.# 15c). The native speaker has developed a complete and coherent mentalgrammar which enables him to speak and understand his language. The linguist’stheoretical grammar is a model of this internal grammar.

THE BACKGROUND: The idea of the fully coherent grammar has beendeveloped in and through linguists’ attempts to write grammars (grammar books)(# 10). The idea has later been metaphorically transferred to the language user’sallegedly ‘psychologically real’ (mental) models of his language. See alsodiscussion in Chapters 6.7.2 and 8.3 below.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language cannot be understood as a property only ofasocial individuals’ minds. Language is essentially social and public. It exists inthe interface between culture and the individuals embedded within the culture(# 1).

Moreover, even those with a full native-like command of a language do notneed, nor do they possess, an entirely coherent, monolithic grammar of theirlanguage. Rather, different parts of their linguistic knowledge are systematised todifferent degrees. Language as a whole is socially distributed, that is differentindividuals and groups are familiar with it and possess it to different extents. Weare only ‘shareholders’, holding varying amounts of ‘shares’, in a commonlanguage (Rommetveit, 2003).

Language users’ knowledge, being partly decontextualised (i.e.crosssituationally applicable), emerges from the experiences of using the samelinguistic constructions in different situated activities.

# 20Errors and inadequacies in language use

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Characteristics of spoken language that deviate fromwritten norms and standard language grammar and pronunciation are basically‘(performance) errors’. These comprise phenomena like dialectal features ofpronunciation conversation-specific aspects of grammar and language, restarts,reformulations and hesitations in talk (and other features of ‘(self-initiated self-)repair’ cf. Levelt, 1989), as well as features which belong to exceptional


language behaviours, including those due to linguistic disabilities (e.g. specificlanguage impairment, aphasia) and psychiatric disturbances.29

Even though errors, i.e. deviations from the norm, can occur in writtenperformance too, the general point is that it is spoken language that deviates fromwritten language, the latter being the implicit (or explicit) norm, rather than theother way around. As regards misunderstandings, and other failures ofcommunication, these imperfections are due to mistakes and incompetencesresiding in the communicating individuals, since language in itself is, bydefinition, ‘correct’ (# 33).

THE BACKGROUND: What the features mentioned above have in commonis that they deviate from the written forms and norms, including the ‘received’pronunciation, of the standard language. The teaching and learning of writtenlanguage have traditionally focused on eradicating errors, on aiming for correctlanguage. Written texts should, it has been taught, be seen as efficienttransmitters of meaning unencumbered by unnecessary words and unaffected bydisturbing errors. All this would be called ‘noise’ in the communication theoryof Shannon and Weaver (1949).

Thus, in this monological theory, it is the authoritative system of the writtenstandard language only which decides what is right. (Was this system created byGod? At least, this view was for a long time part of a European and Jewish-Christian cultural legacy (Eco, 1995), and has sometimes been taught in traditionalschools, along with God’s holy words.) What else individual human beings canaccomplish on their own is to err, to make mistakes.

The conception of communicative failures as due to individual incapacities isrelated to individualism, which is a commonplace in Western philosophy andhuman sciences. While individualism is hardly derivable from a WLB per se, ithas sometimes (e.g. Olson, 1994) been argued that literacy, at least in some culturalenvironments, made the individual human being emerge as the sole source ofcompetence and responsibility.

29 Such ideas were earlier often pronounced by linguists, and they still are in manypeople’s common-sense conceptions of language Few linguists of today would treat thephenomena mentioned here within one and the same category Yet, Chomsky’s (1965)attitude to ‘performance’ was one of disinterestedness, resulting in the lumping togetherof quite different phenomena It underlies his often-cited definition of the ‘ideal speaker-listener’

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in acompletely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its languageperfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions asmemory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors(random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of language in actualperformance

(Chomsky, 1965 3)


THE ALTERNATIVE: The various ‘performance’ phenomena are vastlydifferent in nature. Many are quite appropriate for spoken, interactional languageand contribute to communication efficacy (cf. # 31, # 35, # 41, # 76, # 79).

A dialogical view on performance under difficult conditions, for example,aphasia or non-native communication, would attend to competences andopportunities, rather than only or mainly on deficits. The static viewconcentrating on errors is often linked to a rather exclusive focus on language ina narrow sense; actual communication involves many other semiotic meanswhich might in part make up for limited capacities in language (Goodwin, 2003),or in the specific language concerned.

In contrast to the ‘speech as deviation’ view, one could just as well argue thatwritten language deviates from spoken language, or that the two are simplydifferent on many points (cf. # 38, # 41). ‘Repair’ phenomena (Schegloff, 1979)are integral to natural impromptu talk.

Miscommunication cannot be reduced to incapacities of the individualsubjects. Even if some problems and shortcomings in communication are relatedto individual disabilities, patterns of communication depend on allcommunicating parties, their degrees of acquaintance with the social situations,etc. Rather than being individual and subjective in nature, language anddiscourse in communication are intersubjective and interactional phenomena.Communication involves attempts at achieving mutual understandings, whichcan never depend solely on an autonomous individual human being.Misunderstandings are instead dependent on the interaction betweeninterlocutors, or between, for example, an individual and a text (an other’sproduct) (Linell, 1995).

As regards unexpected or bizarre uses of language, for example in psychiatricdiscourse or in certain artistic genres, these should not be immediately dismissedas deviations from the norms (and hence as linguistically uninteresting). Since,after all, people do indeed often make some sense of unusual language use, thismust be due to the exploitation and expression of some aspects of thepotentialities of the system, in combination with various contextual factors.30

5.4Phonetics and phonology

# 21Language and speech, and the notion of pronunciation

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There is a fundamental distinction betweenlanguage and speech. The former deals primarily with grammar (morphosyntax)

30 See Salazar Orvig (1999) for extensive argumentation


and lexicon (# 13). The study of speech includes phonetics and phonology,which are, by definition, concerned with the study of the ‘pronunciation’ ofwords and other expressions.

One might say that language is mental, something which belongs to the brain/mind, whereas speech is produced by the articulatory organs. According to thisview, the phonology of a language, the mental organisation of sound structure, isseparated from its phonetics (cf. ## 22–25).

The distinction between language and speech is partly paralleled by that ofChomsky’s (1965) ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, even though the positing ofthis parallel would involve a fairly radical recontextualisation.31

THE BACKGROUND: Concepts of language and languages havetraditionally been closely linked to writing and literacy, rather than to talk-in-interaction. The concept of ‘pronunciation’ presupposes the existence of alinguistic norm sustained by writing; the ‘pronunciation’ of a word is the correctway of reading it out aloud, that is representing in speech what is (sometimes, asin language teaching) first encountered in writing.

The sharp distinction between language and speech derives from the history oflanguage studies. The distinction was in part institutionalised in Americanacademia, where languages were studied and taught in departments of Englishand foreign languages, and speech in departments of speech and rhetoric (todayoften called departments of communication). The study of foreign languagesfocused on their written form, and the phonology/phonetics of these languageswas sidestepped.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Different languages involve different types ofphonetic acts. Thus, phonetics also pertains to specific languages, and speechconsists of complex motor behaviours, which are expressive of and integratedwithin the specific spoken language involved. These phonetic acts are not based,or parasitic, on written-language-dependent mental representations. Phonetics isnot concerned with the ‘pronunciation’ of words and phrases that are firstrepresented in writing (but cf. # 26!); there are languages without scripts! Talk-in-interaction is an embodied activity in its own right.

# 22Phonology as separate from phonetics: stability and

dynamics

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There are two modes of existence for the sounds ofspeech, that is the phonological strings of discrete, invariant (context-free)segments and the continuous, dynamic movements at the phonetic level. Thus,

31 Such recontextualisations will be discussed in Chapter 6 Note that ‘language andspeech’ are fairly common translations of Saussure’s notions of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’(Chapter 6 4)


the phonology of a language is separate from its phonetics, the latter dealing withthe physiology, acoustics and psychology of speech. Phonology, by contrast,deals with the linguistic structure, the systems, at the level of sounds. Phonology,but not phonetics, lacks a temporal dimension (# 16). The distinction betweenphonological segments and phonetic movements mirrors those of invariance vs.variation and stability vs. dynamic change, as regards the sounds of language.Phonological structures should be treated as disconnected from phoneticsubstance.32 Yet, many theories argue for some kind of connection (see # 23).

The distinction of phonology vs. phonetics is another, more modern way ofdrawing the boundary between language and speech (cf. # 21). It is related to thedistinction between la langue and la parole (Saussure, 1964), and the notions ofemic and etic approaches (Pike, 1947). Stability vs. dynamics of language pertainto these levels, respectively.

THE BACKGROUND: Standard written language is subjected to stablenorms. Invariance of spelling and in the physical shape of letter characters arestrongly preferred and technically supported by print. Thus, the invention ofalphabetic scripts has influenced the idea of a phonological level of invariantsegments (# 23).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Phonology is concerned with language-specificaspects of the phonetic processes of languages. Language is not disembodied,and phonology cannot be disconnected from phonetic substance. Language as asystem, including its phonology, is also subject to change (# 10). Conversely, thereare structural regularities in discourse and linguistic behaviour too (# 18).

# 23Phonemes as segments

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: ‘[E]ach natural language has a finite number ofphonemes (or letters in its alphabet), and each sentence is representable as afinite sequence of these phonemes (or letters) […]’ (Chomsky, 1957: 13).Accordingly, the phonology of a language is first and foremost a system ofphonemes, which are abstract segment types.33 Thus, a phonological string has alinear structure, consisting of discrete segments (cf. # 16). A few (prosodic,# 24) phenomena, however, must be analysed as ‘suprasegmentals’, at astructural tier above and across segments.

Phonological segments can be understood in articulatory terms as certaintargeted ‘postures’ of the speech organs.34 The phonetic processes of speech

32 The issue how to bridge the gap between phonology and phonetics has been hotly debatedby modern phonologists and phoneticians See, e g, Fischer-Jørgensen (1975)

33 In some theories (notably Chomsky and Halle, 1968), underlying segments areconsiderably more abstract than in structuralist phonology or phonemics (Pike, 1947,Trubetzkoy, 1958)


production are essentially coarticulatory; strings of discrete segments (at a‘mental’ level) are coarticulated in such a way that a dynamically varyingcontinuum arises. This process has been characterised as ‘the assignment ofphonetic effects to phonological causes’ (Hammarberg, 1976:356) or as a‘conversion’ or ‘translation’ of phonological features to ‘articulatory transitions’(Kent and Minifie, 1977:131). In a generative phonology, similarly, the output ofthe phonological component is a ‘phonetic form’, which can be understood asinstructions to an articulatory performance system, or as articulatory intentions.35

Phonology is abstract, and phonological rules are formulated as mappings ofabstract representations onto other representations.

THE BACKGROUND: Phonemes are the closest counterparts to graphemes(letters) in writing. Indeed, phonology was originally motivated by the need for atheoretical basis for alphabetic writing, a ‘technique for reducing languages [orspeech] to writing’ (cf. the subtitle of Pike, 1947). To that extent, phonology isthe theory of spelling principles, that is orthography. Alphabetic symbols areused also in so-called ‘narrow phonetic’ transcription.

The principles of discreteness, linearity and ‘posturality’ are all related toalphabetic writing. As regards ‘posturality’, one may point to traditions in manycultures of having learners of the alphabet assign ‘sound values’ to the letters.These values are taught by reference to pedagogically chosen phonatory-articulatory postures.36

Phonological rules are written in analogy with instructions for respellings andtransliterations. Once speech has been ‘reduced to writing’, phonology getstransformed into abstract graphic representations and their manipulations. Whenphonological rules are accounted for, in the style of generative phonology(Chomsky and Halle, 1968), it is done in terms of substitutions of symbols informally defined environments. Phonology is (allegedly) about speech, but it iscarried out in writing.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Phonology deals with constraints on phoneticbehaviour (processes, actions) and these constraints are, by definition, language-specific (# 21). From an action-theoretical point-of-view, phonology can beconstrued in terms of gestures, which must be seen (a) as components ofpurposive actions, and (b) as dynamic and carefully timed movements rather than

34 However, this claim would hardly be accepted by those who advocate an absolutedistinction between phonology and phonetics (# 2, # 27)

35 Bromberger and Halle (1989) and Chomsky (1995) Carr (1997) discusses this as a‘transmutation [] across quite distinct ontological categories’ (p 88), arguing that on theone hand, it is part of a variant of a ‘telementation’ theory of communication (# 66), and,on the other hand, that it is inconsistent with the Chomskyan view of language ascognitive and ‘internal’

36 The term ‘posturality’ is due to Ohman (1979 142f), who discusses the phonologicalperspective on speech in terms of the principles of discreteness, linearity and posturality


abstract ‘postures’ or mental objects (cf. Fowler, 1980). Furthermore, theextensions of such gestures cannot be exhaustively described in terms of phoneme-sized segments.

A phonologically structured piece of phonetic behaviour has manysimultaneous, ‘suprasegmental’ dimensions; syllables and syllabic components,as well as larger units, some perhaps corresponding to words, are phonologicalunits too. Some of the phonetic counterparts of abstract phonemes cannot beentirely reduced to discrete segments; they are not fully segmentalised in actualbehaviour.37

Units such as syllables and segments emerge from the interaction of theproperties of gestural coordination (Bybee, 2001:34, 85). At the same time, theability to segmentalise words phonologically is partly an ‘epiphenomenon’, aneffect of explicit instruction in how to analyse words for reading and spellingpurposes (Faber, 1992).

# 24The neglect of prosodies, musical dimensions and

paralanguage

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Prosodies comprise, among other things, tones,tunes, stresses, variations in articulation (hypo- vs. hyper-articulation), tempo,rhythm and pausing in speech. Prosody is not an essential part of language.Rather, it is akin to paralanguage and, first and foremost, a property of therealisation of language in speech (# 21). Paralanguage, for example gender-, age-or dialect-related voice qualities and pitch registers, does not belong to language.

In general, linguistic signs lack a musical dimension. If, however, parts ofprosodies—with a less exclusive definition of phonology—are to be included inthe grammatical model of the language, they belong to phonology rather thansyntax. Moreover, only those aspects of prosodies which are linguisticallyrelevant, i.e. discriminate between descriptive and referential meanings of wordsand sentences, are to be included (# 27). Expressions of emotion, for example,are not part of phonology (# 67).

THE BACKGROUND: It is only in exceptional cases that prosodic features,such as stress patterns or intonational contours, are marked in writing.Historically, the term ‘prosody’ referred to those extra diacritics (over the letters)added to texts as instructions for how (written) texts should be sung.

Voice qualities and pitch registers are never represented in conventionalwriting (nor indeed in phonetic transcription), although they may occasionally

37 Even some formal phonological theories of today, e g Autosegmental Phonology(Goldsmith, 1990), would concede this point This also holds for Firthian ProsodicAnalysis See Ogden and Local (1994) for a comparison between this and AutosegmentalPhonology


be subject to metadiscursive comments on reported dialogue in novels, and thelike. In most types of written texts, prosodic variations and distinctions are byand large levelled out.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Prosodies are significant parts of language, and pertainto both phonology and syntax.

Language is embodied (cf. # 15, # 87), and speech has a musical dimension;tones, tunes, stresses, melody, variations in tempo, volume and rhythm, and inlength and weight of syllables (cf. musical notes). Preciseness of segmentalarticulation (hypo- vs. hyper-articulation) is a related dimension.

Paralinguistic dimensions, such as voice quality (creaky voice, falsetto, etc.)and baseline pitch registers (e.g. high vs. low baseline pitches) used by men orwomen, are sometimes characteristic of linguistic communities. Languages anddialects may also have typical ‘bases of articulation’ (e.g. tense vs. relaxed, frontvs. retracted).38

With regard to syntax, prosody is a major resource used by speakers inorganising turn-constructional units (Local et al., 1986; Local, 1992; cf. # 38).

# 25The exclusion of non-vocal aspects from speech

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Irrespective of whether it is conceived ofexclusively in segmental terms or as covering aspects of prosodies too, thephonology of a language includes only vocal aspects. It does not comprise bodilypostures, gestures, facial expressions or gaze (# 93). Nor does it include theparalinguistic dimensions of vocality that are not integrated with lexical andsyntactic structure (# 24).

THE BACKGROUND: Conventional writing does not encode non-vocalbehaviours, although interestingly, in e-mail, SMS and similar computer-basedinteractional systems, there are attempts at including counterparts of some non-vocal signs (‘smileys’).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Speaking is integrated within communicative practicesthat are based on several channels of somatic behaviour, including gaze, facialbehaviour, gestures and postures. It is not just a matter of producing vocalutterances.

38 Heffner (1950 98f) The notion of ‘basis of articulation’, which is a globalcharacterisation of the pronunciation habits of a whole language or dialect, was admittedin early phonetics (e g by Sievers or Jespersen), but was later largely relegated fromlanguage-specific phonetics as the field of phonology was developed


# 26Monological speech as the object of study in phonetics

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The study of phonetics is (or should be) based on‘laboratory speech’, that is monological speech by one speaker, produced underoptimal acoustic conditions. The reason is partly that linguistic structure needs tobe clearly discernible, and not be confounded with other irrelevant factors (cf.# 20).

THE BACKGROUND: For various theoretical and practical reasons, such asthe wish to impede irrelevant ‘noise’ resulting from contaminating factors,phonetic research is based on decontextualised words, phrases and sentencesread aloud.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Authentic speech is part of communicative practices inreal-life situations, integrated with paralanguage and subject to interactionaldependencies. Laboratory speech, by contrast, is special; it is read speech. Theprosody of read speech is parasitic on the written script. Prosodies in real livinginteraction are very different from this, and in some ways less clear in structure.

# 27Distinctive features and binary oppositions

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: When distinctive features were introduced intophonological theory (Jakobson et al., 1967), as entities or properties at a level‘below’ letter-sized phonemic segments, they were soon (re)interpreted asrelational features distinguishing abstract signs, that is, as marking distinctionsbetween phonological segments (in the tradition of Chomsky and Halle, 1968).These distinctive features, and the phonological distinctions building upon them,are binary in nature, i.e. they have an either-or (digital, rather than analogical)character.

THE BACKGROUND: Written texts consist of abstract signs, also at the levelof graphemes. These are the counterparts of, and models for, phonemes inphonology (# 23).

Digital principles are salient in writing. A given sign token is either aninstance of one type or another; either a particular sign is present or not (+ or −).There are few more-or-less cases. Digital principles are radicalised to theabsolute in the machine languages of computers.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Distinctive features could be understood as phoneticdimensions discriminatory of linguistically relevant sounds and sound gestalts(phonetic gestures). Many phonological features exhibit more degrees than justtwo (either-or).39 The assumption of analogous, rather than digital, processing

39 This was argued e g by Ladefoged (1971), and since then by several other phonologistsand phoneticians


seems probable in many cases of prosody and paralanguage, e.g. in theexpressions of emotions (Fonágy, 1977).

# 28Phonological development as independent of non-verbal

vocalisations

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There is a principled dividing-line betweenphonetics and phonology (# 22). Phonemes, not physical sounds, make up thewords of languages. Accordingly, there is a sharp boundary between pre-linguistic vocalisations and the gradual appearance of phonemic distinctions inthe child’s phonetic and phonological development (# 82).40

THE BACKGROUND: Only when small children begin to producerecognisable words can we start to identify the early versions of the counterpartsof alphabetic letters.

THE ALTERNATIVE: There is a systematic organisation in babbling too.Much (though not all) babbling displays typical syllabic structures with language-like vowels and consonants (Oller, 1986). However, it is disputable, perhapsunlikely (e.g. Engstrand et al., 2003), that babbling also reflects sounds that arecharacteristic of the particular language occurring in the infants’ linguisticenvironment. On the other hand, there is some research (Kuhl et al., 1992) thathas shown that infants may be more perceptually sensitive to phonologicaldistinctions of their linguistic environment than to other phonetic features (cf.# 82).

5.5Grammar

# 29Texts as linearly ordered words

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Discourse consists of words. The term ‘(spoken) word(s)’ originally referred to (a portion of) ‘overt discourse’ (of any linguisticcomposition). In mundane common-sense it still sometimes does so, but inlinguistics it now refers to (simplex) lexical items and their counterpart tokens indiscourse, that is textual words or ‘running words’. Sentences, utterances andtexts can be exhaustively analysed in terms of such well-defined and linearlyordered words.

THE BACKGROUND: Printed texts consist of words ordered from left toright, with spaces between consecutive items. The lay-out is subject to clearlydefined conventions. Transcripts of talk-in-interaction would hardly be legible,if they were not by and large based on the conventional separation (and spelling)of words.


THE ALTERNATIVE: It is too simplistic to describe sentences and utterancesin terms of linearly ordered words. There is some hierarchical structure as well;syntactic configurations build upon phrases, defined in terms of, among otherthings, syntactic dependencies. In talk, phrases are made manifest also throughprosodic exposure and integration (# 24). The analysis of utterances into well-defined words is conventional and transposed from printed text. There arefrequent cases in which the analysis into words is uncertain or incomplete. Forexample, the category of clitics is a boundary case. Counterparts of written wordforms are often not demarcated prosodically or by interstitial pauses. In mostspeech styles, we have larger ‘phonological words’ or ‘intonation units’ (e.g.Chafe, 1994) instead.

Words in the conventional sense (cf. entries in dictionaries) are not the onlybuilding-blocks used by speakers. There are many ‘prefabricated’ multi-wordsequences (Erman and Warren, 1999).

# 30Sentences as the only basic units of grammar

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Sentences are the basic units of grammar. Theconcept of ‘sentence’, however, is in part used rather equivocally. Somecharacterisations use a fairly loose, ‘functional’ or semantic-pragmaticdefinition; a sentence corresponds to a (minimal) communicative action (‘speechact’; # 59) or a ‘(minimal) pragmatically interpretable utterance’, that is alinguistic unit (‘enunciation’) which is sufficiently complete to admit of areasonable interpretation as conveying a message or a piece of information. Arelated idea is the sentence as the expression of what minimally constitutes a‘complete thought’ (# 79). However, most traditional and theoretical grammarsprovide more formal or technical definitions of the ‘sentence’. We will focus onthese more formal properties.

Sentences are at the same time the most comprehensive and (the only) basicunits of grammar (cf. the symbol S). This assumption is made in most moderntheories of grammar. An earlier, more traditional and conservative view is that agrammar is based on words and their abilities to enter into various combinations.Modern grammar has also assigned an important position to (non-clause-formed)phrases. Some grammatical theories regard the clause (simplex sentence), ratherthan the sentence, as the basic unit; this view is tantamount to saying thatalthough there are complex sentences in connected discourse, there are no suchcomplex units in the abstract language system.41

40 This aspect of Roman Jakobson’s (1968) theory is no longer widely accepted by moststudents of child language


In most of modern theoretical linguistics, sentences are not exemplary tokens ofsentence-formed utterances, but rather abstract types (cf. # 14) belonging to thelanguage system.42

There are basically two kinds of formal requirements on sentences. One set ofrequirements concerns the internal structure. In a simplex sentence (or clause),there is a (finite) verb phrase, structured around a verb (as the head) and itscomplements, and this is predicated of an argument, usually realised as agrammatical subject (subject-predicate construction; cf. # 52 on predication,proposition; # 79 on ‘complete thoughts’; also # 41 on ellipsis). Note that thisdefinitional criterion makes ‘(simplex) sentence’ virtually equivalent to ‘clause’.But there is another condition on sentential structure that does make a‘(complex) sentence’ different from a ‘clause’; there is a clear distinctionbetween, on the one hand, a sequence of two or more independent sentences and,on the other, a ‘complex sentence’. The latter is a multi-clause construction with(at least) two clauses (in English, the term ‘sentence’ (=S) is often used), theseclauses being syntactically embedded (conjoined or subordinate) constituentswithin the whole (complex or matrix) sentence. This idea of complex sentencepresupposes that sentence boundaries are clearly defined, and different fromother boundaries between clauses.

Another kind of idea relating to the concept of ‘sentence’ is also formal inorientation but retains some kind of functional flavour: sentences arecharacterised by the absence of external (linguistic-structural) relations. Asentence is therefore an autonomous unit with no essential relations to anylinguistic environment (preceding or following units of text) (# 32). Takentogether, the above-mentioned formal conditions imply that sentences have an‘inner syntax’ but no ‘outer syntax’ (# 36).

THE BACKGROUND: Written expository prose consists of full sentences,appropriately punctuated. (‘Full sentence’ here means that there must be at leastone complete clause.) This is clearly the norm for written language as taught inschools. Accordingly, many written genres disprefer free-standing phrases. Moreimportantly perhaps, written texts have no counterparts of the complex TRPs(‘transition relevance places’, ‘possible completion points’; see below) of

41 Some grammarians assign to ‘clause’ a purely formal definition, and to ‘sentence’ amore functional one This applies to, for example, Noreen (1904), which is one of theearliest modern treatments of a single national language (Swedish) Noreen (1904 57) thoughtthat ‘sentences’ belong to what he called ‘semantics’ (Sw betydelselara), ‘clauses’ but to‘morphology’ (Sw formlara) However, the relevant terms in Swedish grammar, sats(‘clause’) and mening (‘sentence’), may not carry exactly the same connotations as‘clause’ and ‘sentence’ in modern English (Yet, German and French are more differentfrom Swedish with their (Haupt)satz and phrase, respectively, both corresponding to‘sentence’) Etymologically, Sw mening is related to mena ‘to mean’ and thus indirectly tomeanings like ‘meaning’, ‘judgement’, etc


spoken interaction, in which syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic criteria may pointin different directions. This is partly due to the fact that semantic and syntacticcriteria are made to coincide in the case of text sentences in expository prose.These text units are also bounded by punctuation, which is the only (partial)counterpart of prosody there is.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The flow of utterances in spoken interaction isorganised in terms of turn-constructional units (TCUs) (Sacks et al., 1974).These do not correspond in a direct manner to syntactic units. Only some TCUsexhibit phrase- or clause-like forms. Sometimes pragmatic, syntactic andprosodic criteria coincide to define boundaries (transition relevance places,TRPs), but in many cases, more complex TRPs occur (Ford and Thompson,1996; Selting, 1998a).

Structures of spoken language include many other forms, including free-standing or only partially integrated words, phrases and other forms which donot correspond to full and coherent sentences.43 In addition, there are manystructures that extend beyond sentential boundaries. One may conjecture that thesyntactic templates oriented to by speakers in reallife discourse are not (just)clauses (i.e. simplex sentences), but ‘grammatical constructions’ of variousforms (Ono and Thompson, 1995: ‘constructional schemas’). Many suchconstructions have an ‘outer syntax’, in addition to the ‘inner syntax’, which hasbeen the only structural domain acknowledged in traditional grammar (# 36).

Full sentence structure is a cultural artefact designed to regulate writtenlanguage. The sentence is basically an orthographic unit (Halliday, 1994). Yet,sentences occur marginally in spoken language, but this is largely due to theinfluence of written language.44 Apart from this, the apparent evidence forsentences is actually evidence for clauses.

# 31A language as a well-defined set of sentences

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Not only do languages have sentences as their basicunits (# 30), but each individual language can be formally defined precisely as awell-defined (infinite but enumerable) set of sentences. The corollary of this isthat the sentences belonging to this set are defined as ‘correct’ or ‘grammatical’(# 33). These notions are implicit in much of traditional grammar, but was madeexplicit in the mathematical definition of a language proposed by Z. Harris andin some early work by Chomsky.45

42 Cf, e g, the notion of ‘system-sentence’ in Lyons (1977) System-sentences are not partof actual texts, rather, ‘the notion of a system-sentence is a theoretical construct whoseprincipal function in the language-system is to define grammatically [ ]’ (632)


THE BACKGROUND: The idea of a language as containing or allowing onlycertain types of sentences is implicit in traditional grammar books. The examplesgiven there as items of ‘correct’ language are typically sentences, and it issuggested that there are underlying rules defining these grammatical sentences.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In authentic discourse, sentences or clauses are not theonly grammatical constructions characterising utterances (# 30). There is no wayof defining a language exclusively in terms of derivations from a well-definedsystem of rules. Languages have fuzzy boundaries (# 10).

# 32The decontextualisation of sentences, and the demarcation of

grammar from information structure

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Prototypical sentences are autonomous anddecontextualised. They correspond to speech acts by ‘independent’ (context-independent, monological) authors; examples are assertions, questions, requests,exhortations, apologies, etc. (cf. # 61).

Grammar is exclusively concerned with the internal structure of sentences(# 36). By contrast, information dynamics, which belongs to pragmatics ordiscourse theory rather than grammar per se, requires a text-linguistic analysisgoing beyond sentence boundaries. Information dynamics is analysed in terms ofconcepts and distinctions like theme-rheme, given-new information and focus-

43 While clause-like structures are often recruited to some positions in turn-constructionalunits (TCUs), sentences (defined as above, i e as distinct from clauses) can hardly betaken to be basic units of impromptu speech, for at least the following reasons

1 many communicative acts are not performed by single prototype sentences(cf # 31),

2 contexts often provide for sentence fragments as entirely normal and naturalTCUs or turns (cf # 41),

3 ‘syntactically incoherent’ constructions occur rather frequently, and cannotalways be dismissed simply as ungrammatical (cf # 43 structure shifts),

4 boundaries between sentences, on the one hand, and between clause-likesentence constituents, on the other, are not sharp,

5 the competition between pragmatics, prosody and syntax in defining TRPs isblurring the boundaries between units

For arguments against the sentence as a unit in spoken interaction, see e g Ochset al (1996), Leech (2000)44 Kress (1994 71) notes that ‘the sentence is not a unit of the spoken language althoughit does intrude into speech from the syntax of writing at a later stage in the languagedevelopment of children As a consequence, the early writing of children is characterisedby the absence of the sentence’


background, and is expressed by means like prosody, word order, use ofreferential expressions (e.g. full noun phrases vs. pronouns) and choice ofgrammatical constructions (passive vs. active constructions, cleft vs. non-cleftconstructions, extrapositions, etc.).

THE BACKGROUND: Grammar books have been based on the analysis ofexamples that correspond to autonomous, single sentences.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Utterances in spoken interaction have responsive(backwards-pointing) and projective (forward-pointing) aspects, i.e. inherentrelations to other utterances (prior and projected next ones).46 The responsiveaspects of many utterance types are formally marked (# 36). (Yet, these types areoften conspicuously absent from grammar books!)

# 33Correct language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The notion of ‘correct language’ is basic in definingwhat a given national language, such as English, comprises, or indeed, what anynatural language is. Thus, a language can be defined as a set of correct, or‘grammatical’, sentences (# 31, # 34).

THE BACKGROUND: Authorities in many nations have taken measures toregulate written language, and to preserve and cultivate correct language andgood usage. ‘Correct language’ is (at least partly) defined by a set of man-madestandards for language in writing, especially expository prose.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Edited language in print may need standards of‘correctness’ to enhance clarity, consistency, esthetic qualities, etc. This isdifferent from impromptu interactional language, which cannot be subjected tothe same requirements. Such a language is functional, understandable, expressiveand aesthetic on its own terms. It must be capable of accommo dating toinfinitely variable communicative situations.

The fact that written-language-based standards of correctness have been takento be valid for all varieties of language and as inherent in language in general,irrespective of genres, situations and media, shows that certain genres of writtenlanguage are tacitly assumed, by lay people as well as expert linguists, torepresent language proper and language in general. This assumption stilloccupies the linguist’s mind, in spite of the transition from normative to

45 Cf Z Harris (1954 260) ‘[A grammar is] a set of instructions which generates thesentences of a language’, Chomsky (1957 13) ‘From now on I will consider a language tobe a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finiteset of elements’, and Bloomfield (1926 155, quoted by Derwing, 1979 167) The totalityof utterances that can be made in a speech-community is the language of that speech-community ‘When Chomsky and his followers later turned their interest away from‘External languages’, the emphasis on sentences was abandoned, in favour of moreabstract constructions See Chapter 6 8


descriptive linguistics. In fact, modern linguistics is still implicitly normative(Chapter 6.7.1.)

# 34Grammaticality as the basic property of language and

linguistic units

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Grammaticality, i.e. grammatical correctness (# 33),is the basic property assigned to units belonging to a language. Indeed,correctness is a defining property of sentences (# 30, # 31).

THE BACKGROUND: In school, students are taught to write correctlanguage (see # 35).

THE ALTERNATIVE: In actual communication, situation-appropriateness ofutterances is more relevant than grammaticality. As Clark and Haviland (1974:116) put it:

We do not speak in order to be grammatical; we speak in order to conveymeaning. We do not attempt to comprehend speech in order to detectviolations of grammaticality; we comprehend in order to detect meaning.

# 35The degenerate and repetitive quality of conversational

language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Conversational language is in many waysimpoverished, and full of violations of linguistic rules (cf. # 20). Talk does notdirectly reflect proper and correct language. It often exhibits structure violations(# 43).

Speakers often repeat their own and their interlocutors’ words, without addingnew information, which points to the low level of the representational capacityof conversational language.

THE BACKGROUND: Written language is (or should be) coherent, edited,standardised and oriented to linguistic norms, and it is taught to be like that. In‘cultivated’ styles, e.g. in essays, repetition is a stigmatised phenomenon,something which ought to be minimised.

The view on spoken, interactional language—widespread in commonsenseconceptions, but also in, for example, some of Chomsky’s47 writings —asdegenerate echoes attitudes to contemporary language varieties held by manylinguists in the early nineteenth century; according to them, modern languageshad been subject to degeneration after ‘classical’ epoques or since antiquity. The

46 See, e g , Schegloff (1996) and Linell (2003, 2004b)


ancient language varieties were of course only accessible in the form of certainwritten genres.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The language of talk-in-interaction has manystructures of its own, which are motivated by and well suited to the situationaland interactional demands and purposes relevant in different kinds ofcommunicative activities. Violation of written language norms does not implydegeneration.

The re-use of others’ and one’s own words is a natural phenomenon in aconversation; by borrowing meaning and form from one another, participantsachieve coherence, express agreement or affiliation, and accomplish alignment indialogue. Alternatively, we re-use others’ words in other ways, reaccentuatingthem in order to oppose the situated meanings proposed by the other. All in all,‘repetitions’ are not plain copyings; new utterances convey new meanings(confirmation, agreement, disagreement), and ‘repetitions’ regularly involve newprosodic orchestrations.

47 Compare passages like the following, in which Chomsky argues that the faculty forlanguage must be innate, since it is, according to him, inconceivable that a grammar canemerge from the ‘degenerate, fragmentary, narrowly limited, scattered, inadequate’ dataprovided by the spoken language surrounding the child

Thus, it is clear that the language each person acquires is a rich andcomplex construction hopelessly underdetermined by the fragmentaryevidence available

(1975a 10, italics added)

Knowledge arises on the basis of very restricted and inadequate data and[] there are uniformities in what is learned that are in no way uniquelydetermined by the data itself

(1966 65, italics added)

A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, thedegenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, thestriking uniformity of the resulting grammars, and their independence ofintelligence, motivation, and emotional state, over wide ranges ofvariation, leave little hope that much of the structures of the language canbe learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character

(1965 58, italics added)


# 36Syntax as a matter of the internal structure of sentences

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Since sentences are the most comprehensivegrammatical units (# 30), grammatical structure (syntax) deals exclusively withthe internal constitution of such units (# 32).

THE BACKGROUND: See # 32.THE ALTERNATIVE: Grammar deals with conventionalised relations

between words, and with syntactic constructions within other such constructions.In addition to the inner syntax of grammatical constructions, i.e. the internalstructure of utterances (e.g. clause- or phrase-like constructions), there are manyconstructions that have a conventionalised outer syntax. The outer syntaxspecifies relations between the construction and what may precede and/or followit in the sequence of talk or text. That is, constructions often require, presupposeor invite certain properties in their prior utterances and possible next utterancesin the local sequences in which they occur.48 The boundary between thegrammar and the ‘information structure’ of texts is partly fuzzy (# 32).

# 37The hierarchical structure of syntactic units

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Sentences (# 30) have a hierarchical constituentstructure that can be formalised as a tree structure. Such structures are connexand unambiguous; branches are linked to only one node at a time, and the treehas only one root.

Texts exhibit some hierarchical structure above the sentence level.THE BACKGROUND: Texts are often laid out as if they consist of

hierarchical, slot-and-filler structures: paragraphs, sentences, clauses, phrases,words.49

THE ALTERNATIVE: The syntactic structures of utterances (turns andTCUs) in spoken, interactional language are not fully integrated. Theorganisation of turns is more locally managed, and there are some more looselyconnected front- and end-field elements (Auer, 1992, 1996). On the other hand,although utterances are built in an incremental fashion, there are dependenciesbetween units in the structures of talk-in-interaction too. Some of thesehierarchical structures are signalled through prosody. That interlocutors orient toprojections from syntactic, hierarchical relations is shown in the practices ofpredicting upcoming turn-transition relevance places (Ford and Thompson,1996), completing other’s utterances (Lerner, 1989) and repairing one’s own andother’s units in syntactically coherent ways.

48 The notions of inner vs outer syntax have been used in ‘construction grammar’ (Fillmore,1988), and would be of fundamental importance in a ‘dialogical grammar’ (Linell, 2004b)


# 38Grammatical ambiguities

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Grammatical ambiguities are inherent in language,but some of them can be disambiguated by prosody in speech (cf. # 24).50

Examples of ambiguous sentences are Visiting aunts can be a nuisance., Theyare flying planes., and The police were ordered to stop drinking after midnight.

Other differences that exist only in speech, often due to different prosodicpatterns, do not belong to language per se, but to its use in communicativecontexts.

THE BACKGROUND: Correct spoken language can be seen as the product ofpronouncing, i.e. reading out aloud, the corresponding texts correctly. The veryprocess of pronunciation may be seen as involving disambiguation by assigningdifferent prosodic patterns to undifferentiated text sentences.

The discussion of sentences in grammar books and grammatical treatises hasneglected many differences between prosodic variants. Thus, there is in Englishonly one sentence The farmer killed the duckling. (Sapir’s, 1921, standardexample), despite differences in situational appropriateness and communicativedynamism of differently stressed and intonated variants (e.g. with stress on eitherof farmer, killed, or duckling).

THE ALTERNATIVE: If we take spoken language to be primary, theprosodically distinct utterances in speech are basic, and their written counterpartscan be seen as the products of ambiguation. In general, many of the ambiguitiesdo not arise in talk-in-interaction, because the different variants (‘readings’; notethe term!) are prosodically distinct,51 and/ or they occur in entirely different

Interrogative constructions always have obligatory projective properties Some examples ofconstructions with inherent relations of both responsive (backward-pointing) andprojective (forward-pointing) kinds are the ‘incredulity response construction’ (IRC)(What, me worry? Him wear a tuxedo? Der und einen Smoking anziehen, Lambrecht,1990, Jespersen (1924 129f) called this ‘nexus of deprecation’), ‘echo questions’ ([A Areyou tired?] B Am I tired?), and the ‘X-and-X construction’ in Swedish and otherlanguages (‘contrastive reduplications’, Lindstrom, 1999 230ff, Linell, 2003, example inliteral translation A [Am I forced to tell you that?] B Forced and forced, I cannot forceyou to do either or or, but)

49 Borsley and Newmeyer (1997 57) argues, in a paper criticising Roy Harris’sarguments for the impact of writing on linguistic theory (i e, in my terms, of a WLB), thathierarchy is a point of overall importance in syntactic theory which is not dependent onwriting They are clearly wrong (unless, as they seem to do, one takes the written languagebias as something pertaining only to the alphabetic-phonemic level) On the other hand, Iconsider the present point (# 37) as a fairly peripheral WLB point, especially since thereare hierarchical structures in spoken language too


situations or activity contexts. The primary units are situated utterances (andutterance types), not abstract sentences.

# 39Movement transformations

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Some sentences include elements that have beenmoved to their manifest positions from other positions within a more straight orbasic sentence structure. The latter positions therefore appear as empty.Examples of such phenomena are elements that have been moved forward(‘fronted’) to a structure-initial position, by transformations like ‘topicalisation’and ‘left dislocation’.

THE BACKGROUND: Movement of linguistic material is a common optionfor writers who edit their texts after having produced a first version.

THE ALTERNATIVE: ‘Movements’, in the generative sense, have nocounterparts in natural language processing. Utterance-initial elements areproduced first, and then there are different options for the speaker to continue hisutterance, by increments; one option is to retroconstruct the initial elements as(pre-)front field constituents (Auer, 1996) (cf. # 76).

# 40Multiple embeddings

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Languages include complex sentences (‘macro-syntagms’) with multiple embeddings of phrases and clauses (sentences) withinother such units. In principle, there is no limit to the recursivity of language atthis level (Chomsky).

50 A similar case concerns so-called garden-path sentences At first sight, such a sentencemay appear incomprehensible, because the structural interpretation most easily (andtherefore first) assigned to it does not give the whole sentence a semantically coherentinterpretation, the reader must therefore go back, as it were, ‘along the garden-path’, andreanalyse the whole sentence, i e choose another path of parsing and interpretation Smith(1999 35, 112) uses examples like I convinced her mother hated me and The cottonclothing is made of grows in Mississippi, in which her mother and cotton clothing mustnot be treated as constituents However, in speech, they would hardly be prosodicallyorchestrated as constituents True garden-path sentences are more frequent in writtenlanguage (barring the obvious fact that they have often been invented by linguists for thepurpose of illustrating putative grammatical principles)

51 Moreover, discussions in early generative grammar of many of the exemplar sentencesused as illustrations of grammatical ambiguity ignore not only differences in prosody butalso differences in semantics and syntactic constituent structure For example, the tworeadings of They are flying planes differ in that in one of them, are is a copula, while inthe other, are flying is one constituent, the present progressive plural of the verb fly


THE BACKGROUND: Written prose is often built with long, convoluted andyet syntactically coherent sentences.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In spoken interaction, long utterances with multipleembeddings are the emergent results of local decisions of moving from one turn-constructional unit (TCU), such as a clause, into another one. Such localdecisions, going from one clause into, for example, a subordinate clause initiatedby, say, that or which, can be repeated several times. But the resulting ‘sentences’(‘macro-syntagms’) of varying depth of subordination are not different structuresin the grammar per se; the grammar does not contain such complex sentencesbut a core syntax plus methods from moving from one relatively simple structure(TCU) to another. The notion of subordination of higher orders does not fitimpromptu spoken language.

# 41Non-sentence-formed utterances as elliptical sentences

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Many sentence fragments—structures which do notdisplay full clause or sentence structure—should be interpreted as ellipticalsentences, i.e. units that are derived by ‘ellipsis’, or ‘truncation’,from syntactically complete sentences, which in turn express full propositionsexplicitly (# 52).

THE BACKGROUND: In school, students are taught to write full sentences.Similarly, the teaching of foreign languages often prioritises full sentences.

THE ALTERNATIVE: ‘Elliptical’ utterances are evoked by, and parasitic on,the structure of preceding utterances (or supported by situational specificitiesand/or gestural accompaniments). Participants regularly exploit properties ofeach other’s utterances (Bakhtin); this applies to ‘elliptical’ utterances as well asto many other utterances. As a result, ‘elliptical’ sentences are fully functionaland sufficient for their communicative purposes, given the relevant sequentialpositions and activity contexts in which they occur. Language is basically ameans for action, and each utterance need not be a formally explicit and logicallycomplete representation of a proposition. For example, the normal, unmarkedresponse to a question is often an ‘elliptic’ phrase, while responses in the form offull clauses would often trigger special interpretations, ascribing to the responderattitudes of, say, irony, impertinence or pedantry (Lerner, 1995).

# 42Grammaticalised response constructions

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Many utterance types (‘responsive constructions’)that appear only as responses to other utterances in dialogue or to specificsituational events do not represent grammatical sentence types.52 They should beanalysed in terms of information structure, rather than grammar proper (# 32).


THE BACKGROUND: Written prose is seldom written in ways that mirrorcolloquial and conversational styles of informal talk-in-interaction. Responsiveconstructions are underrepresented in many written genres. Moreover, responsiveconstructions cannot be assessed as grammatical autonomous units (sentences),since they require, by definition, an extra-sentential co(n)text (# 32). They aretherefore typically absent from traditional grammar books.

THE ALTERNATTVE: In talk-in-interaction, there are numerous utteranceswhose forms show that they are responses to prior utterances. Ellipticalutterances (# 41) are a case in point. Others involve specialised constructionsthat ‘quote’ prior utterances and integrate the quoted elements in newgrammatical constructions and prosodic environments (# 35, # 36). Suchresponsive constructions have specialised grammatical functions that are naturalingredients in talk-in-interaction.

# 43Syntactic contaminations and structure violations

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Constructions such as restarts (anacolutha) andsyntactic blends (pivot constructions; apo-koinou)53 that do not cohere sentence-grammatically in their entirety are ungrammatical, or at least they involve non-coherent structure shifts (Enkvist and Björklund, 1986). Restarts, repetitions,interruptions and pivot constructions are structure-violations, and can beanalysed as syntactically contaminated. They belong to performance, rather thanlinguistic structure (# 20). Many of them can be regarded as hesitationphenomena.

THE BACKGROUND: The constructions discussed here are not accepted innormal prose. The notion of ‘structure’ presupposed in ‘structure-violation’ isone that fits mainly certain genres of written language, and builds upon the ideaof complete, coherent sentences (# 31, # 41).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Restarts, repetitions and interruptions fulfilcommunicative functions, apart from sometimes being indicative of hesitation.Apokoinou (pivot) constructions are quite natural in spoken utterances, whichare incrementally produced (# 76), and at least some of them should be regardedas semi-grammaticalised. When we talk of ‘structure shifts’ or ‘change ofconstructions’, we are unduly dependent on written-language-grammaticalnotions of ‘construction’.

52 See fn 48 for some examples


# 44Pronouns and demonstratives

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Deictic terms are among the few units of language,whose interpretations are not determined by their lexical content (# 57). Theyindex referents without characterising them. Pronouns (and other pro-forms)have either fixed, text-internal (anaphoric or cataphoric) antecedents (orsubsequents), with which they are coreferential, or they have situational, text-external (deictic) and objective, referential relations to speaker, addressee, thirdpersons, etc., whose identities are uniquely determined for each communicativesituation in space and time. In the latter case, we are dealing with a language-independent surround that serves as an anchorage for referring expressions (# 1,# 53).

THE BACKGROUND: A written text abstracts from situationaldependencies. Grammatical and logical theories of pronouns and deixis haveused isolated sentences and texts fragments to determine either the intertextualco-references of pronouns with prior (or subsequent) noun phrases (pronouns assubstitutes for underlying noun phrases and/or as pointers to antecedent nounphrases), or their deictic references to ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’ persons, whoseidentities are (putatively) situationally fixed. However, pronouns cannot be fullytreated within the limits of single sentences; they operate within larger textchunks (or episodes in talk).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Pronouns do not only refer, are not simply substitutesfor nouns and noun phrases, and do not simply index fixed, text-external roles(speaker, addressee, third person). They are resources for speakers in creatingconstellations, alliances and partitionings, affiliations and disaffiliations betweenthose present in the situation and in relation to non-present people, and theirprevious statements, opinions and attitudes. For example, demonstratives (e.g.this vs. that) are not just straightforward descriptions of the distances of referentswith respect to the speaker; they are creative displays of how the speakerorganises her local, current sphere of interest (Laury, 1997; Eriksson, 2000).

Pronouns and demonstratives are important means for constructing footings(Goffman, 1981) to one’s own and the other’s utterances, and for establishingpositionings in discourse.54 For example, reference to oneself as speaker(animator, author, principal or figure in Goffman’s terminology) is not doneexclusively with I (‘1.p.sg.’), but can also involve (at least) we, you, one, and

53 Apo-koinou (‘syntactic blends’, ‘syntactic amalgams’, ‘double bind constructions’,‘pivot constructions’) (Franck, 1985, Lambrecht, 1988, Schegloff, 1979, Selting, 1998b)are constructions that include a ‘pivot’ segment in between an initial segment and a finalsegment which do not go together syntactically (according to written-language norms)Examples There was a farmer had a dog (Lambrecht, 1988), That’s what I’d like to haveis a fresh one, I had a little operation on my toe this week I had to have a toenail taken off(Walker, 2002) in which ‘a farmer’, ‘what I’d like to have’ and ‘this week’ are therespective ‘pivots’


impersonal constructions, such as passives. Conversely, formally identicalpronouns can display quite different positionings; consider, e.g., the varyinginclusiveness of ‘we’, the generic vs. personal ‘you’, ironic ‘we’, the use of ‘one’and impersonal constructions. The description of pronominal use presupposes atheory of the complexities involved in acting as a speaking subject, positioningoneself in a complex matrix of social contexts.

# 45Particles, pleonasms and interjections

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Parts of a sentence that have no referential ordescriptive meaning, or encode basically the same content as other parts of thesentence involved are ‘unnecessary’ or ‘pleonastic’. Particles, which are usuallyshort and uninflectable words, do not encode any referential meaning. Many ofthese words, so-called pleonasms and interjections, occur predominantly inspoken interaction and can be omitted from exemplary language. Expletive(dummy) words are only motivated if they function as place-holders (e.g. the‘formal subject’ it) and help build complete sentences.

Interjections (brr, oops, phew, shit, etc.) are not real words; they reflectemotions rather than express thought. Response particles (yes, yeah, no, mm, oh,well, etc.) can also be regarded as linguistically trivial ‘interjections’. They do notcontribute to describing or explaining matters of substantial content. The sameholds, a fortiori, for elements that reflect the monitoring and planning of one’sown speech (uh, um, I mean, etc.).

THE BACKGROUND: Writers of coherent prose are taught to avoidunnecessary words which do not add to cognitive content. Writers should besuccinct and ‘to the point’. Pragmatic particles, for example y’know, right?, andlike, are seldom taught in foreign-language instruction. In grammars, they aretypically ignored.

Response particles (as well as other types of particles) are infrequent in writtenprose. If they are used at all in writing, they are thrown in (‘interjected’) into thetext merely to make it appear slightly more dialogic. Listeners’ support items,especially when occurring in the course of (another) speaker’s turn, are generallyomitted from written (drama or novel) dialogues.

THE ALTERNATIVE: No utterance parts are entirely superfluous; thepresence or absence of words always carries some meaning. ‘Response cries’(Goffman, 1981) fulfil social functions, such as demonstrating that the emitterhas control over the situation (or tries to regain it). Pragmatic particles haveimportant functions in indicating the speaker’s attitudes and knowledge status(evidential markers, hedges, speech act adverbials), invoking agreements and

54 See, e g, Watson (1987) Mühlhausler and Harré (1990) and Salazar Orvig (1999)


affiliations vs. expressing objections, calling for and giving feedback ininteraction, etc.

Response particles, though asyndetic and non-sentential in form, and oftenfree-standing, have many communicative functions (Sorjonen, 2001). They oftenfunction as listeners’ support items. They are not simply interstitial and parasiticactions that could be eliminated without loss of interactional meaning. Otherparticles reflect various aspects of the regulation of interaction and of thespeaker’s planning and monitoring of speech (Allwood et al., 1990), whichcontributes to interactional meaning and helps the listener to follow the speaker’smeaning-making.

5.6Lexicology, semantics and pragmatics

# 46Fixed meanings: language as a code

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: A language is a code in the sense that each word, i.e.each entry in the mental lexicon, is a combination of a stable, phonological orgraphemic form and a fixed meaning. In addition, it has fixed morphosyntacticproperties.55

Each word has a fixed, invariant and well-defined (‘literal’) meaning. Suchlexical, literal meanings are more or less the same for all (competent) languageusers. They are always valid in actual use, except when words are deployed inclearly ‘indirect’ or ‘metaphorical’ senses. Word types with invariant meaningsare recurrently instantiated as tokens in communication (# 14), and this explainswhy successful communication is possible, how meaning can be transferred fromone person to another (# 66).56

In a linguistic description, word meanings can be defined as (structured)bundles of semantic features or meaning components. These are defined system-internally, in terms of their distinctive relations to other words, or in terms oftheir representational relations to the objective world (# 1). However, manywords are polysemous at the structural level too; their lexical entries thereforeconsist of several distinct feature bundles.

That word meanings, or the concepts constituting the lexical contents ofwords, are definite, discrete and fixed is part of an objectivist account of meaning(# 47).

THE BACKGROUND: Theories of word meaning are historically related tolexicographic activities. Lexicographers try to define dictionary meanings thatallow readers to decode words (often in printed texts) that they do not understand.As long as dictionary entries are explained entirely in verbal terms (i.e. eachentry is explained in terms of other words), they must be given Aristoteliandefinitions, typically in terms of a fixed set of necessary and sufficient semantic


features. The authority of dictionaries, which is often widely acknowledged,supports the view that words have fixed forms and fixed meanings. The strive forfixed and discrete word meanings is also characteristic of taxonomy andterminology in natural sciences and technology.

THE ALTERNATIVE: A system of fixed meanings would not work in actualcommunication, since the situational landscape of communicative contingenciesand requirements is always new and never fully stereotyped across uniquecommunicative situations. Dynamic meaning-making is part and parcel ofcommunicative actions and discursive movements. A semantics of languagemust be based on a semantics of understanding and sense-making in discourse.

Our conceptualisation and understanding of the world is based on humanexperiences and thus ultimately dependent on embodiment (perceptualinteractions and bodily movements within our environment) and the culturalembeddedness of the mind (Johnson, 1987; # 3, # 15).

Lexical items are not rigid designators, nor are they inert classificatorydevices. Lexical meanings are open-ended and include ‘encyclopedic’knowledge (cf. Langacker, 1987:489). The use of language, including the use ofwords, is dynamic. Dynamics may, in this context, be taken to imply at least twoaspects:

a it refers to the activities in which we construct, negotiate or confirm therelative stability of reference and signification; and

b polysemy is a systematic phenomenon (Nerlich et al., 2003); meanings areflexible and malleable, i.e. they can take on many different instantiations invarying contexts (Johnson, 1987:29–30).

Rather than being fixed bundles of semantic features, lexical items haverelatively open meaning potentials that are activated, negotiated and enriched,when words are used in situated communicative practices; different parts of thepotentials are foregrounded and backgrounded (and sometimes cancelled) indifferent contexts. Communication is achieved through the exploitation of the

55 For some linguists, not only words but also compound signs, such as sentences, arestable form-meaning couplings (cf ‘system-sentences’, # 30) However, for other linguists,as well as for most lay people, words are the core of the code

56 For example, in a rather behavioural interpretation of this theory, Pinker (1994 151–152) explains that a

word is not merely a person’s characteristic behavior in affecting thebehavior of others, but a shared bidirectional symbol, available to convertmeaning to sound by any person when the person speaks, and sound tomeaning by any person when the person listens, according to the samecode


meaning potentials of words (and other linguistic resources) in combination witha host of contextual resources. The lexical meanings are of course not entirelyopen from the beginning, but the meanings of words in use gets dialogicallyestablished and determined, enriched and perhaps even fixated, in situateddeployments.

The polysemy of words is a consequence of the dynamic interactions betweenlexical meanings (i.e. meaning potentials) and contexts. The theory of meaningpotentials may include the assumption that some semantic-pragmatic aspectsbelong to the ‘core’ of the lexical content, in the sense that these are featureswhich—relatively speaking—are less easily downgraded in importance orcancelled in specific contexts. Barring this, (parts of) some meaning potentialscan be better described in terms of prototypes or family resemblances. Asupplementary idea is that words also have a ‘frame semantics’57 based on whatlinguistic and social contexts they occur in.

Accordingly, the theory of meaning potentials58 is based on the assumption ofthe obligatory interaction between lexical properties (of the potential) andcontexts. Therefore, if situated sense-making is always, in some respects,context-interdependent, there are no ‘literal meanings’59 that can pass unchangedas situated meanings (# 62).

Yet, lexical meanings are sometimes subject to attempts at fixation, forparticular communicative purposes or in specific activity types, such as in thevery writing of dictionaries. This, however, has generated the belief in a fixedcode as an immanent property of language. But ‘[m]eanings that seemperspicuous and literal are rendered so by forceful interpretive acts and not byproperties of language’ (Fish, 1989:9). Dictionaries and grammar books arepractical and pedagogical aids (to be used when learning how to write, translate,speak foreign languages, etc.), rather than explanatory theories of language.

# 47Objectivist theory of meaning: meaning as properties of

linguistic entities

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Linguistic entities, words (# 46) and sentences(# 48), have meanings in themselves; these meanings are deployed by languageusers in communication and cognition. Meaning is an objective phenomenon,not a subjective one: ‘Words are arbitrary symbols which, though meaningless inthemselves, get their meaning by virtue of their capacity to correspond directly tothings in the world’ (Johnson, 1987: x). That is, ‘Meaning is an abstract relationbetween symbolic representations (either words or mental representations) andobjective (mind-independent) reality. These symbols get their meaning solely byvirtue of their capacity to correspond to things, properties, and relations existing

57 Fillmore (1985) Cf also Tomasello (1995)


objectively “in the world”’ (ibid.: xxii). This objective meaning of the word isrepresented by the semantic features of its literal meaning (# 46).

Meaning is what is made explicit in words and sentences (# 48). A morespecific theory involves the claim that meanings equal truth conditions (# 54).(See also # 1.)

THE BACKGROUND: The quest for objectivity is part and parcel of manyscientific approaches. It is dependent on attempts to bracket backgroundphenomena of a ‘subjective’ nature (human bodily experiences and culture-specific influences, cf. embodiment and cultural embeddedness of language;# 15), for particular theoretical and practical purposes. It has long traditions inlogic (cf. # 54) and linguistics,60 as well as in natural sciences and natural-science-inspired human sciences. It is entirely embedded within literacy.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Meaning is something that exists as processes andproducts of human sense-making activities in discourse. A theory of what wordsmean is derivative from a theory of how people mean, make sense in and of theworld, using language (words, sentences) as well as other resources andexperiences.

58 For an account of ‘meaning potentials’ in relation to traditional theories of lexicalmeaning (variants of Grundbedeutung and Gesamtbedeutung theories), see Allwood(2003) Ultimately, the notion of potentiality goes back at least to Aristotle ‘Semanticpotential(itie)s’ and ‘meaning potentials’ have also been discussed by dialogicallyoriented scholars in recent years Marková (1992) attributes the notion back to Humboldt(1969) (We recall Humboldt’s notion of language as energeia, a concept related to‘potential’) Rommetveit has exploited the notion of meaning potentials in several textsdealing with dialogue in situated interaction (e g 1974, 1988) Meaning potentials play asignificant role in the Firth-Halliday tradition too (cf Halliday, 1973, 1994, Hasan, 1996),and have also made their way into recent cognitive semantics (Fauconnier and Turner,2003) and lexical pragmatics, which endorses notions like ‘semantically underspecifiedlexical representations’ and ‘pragmatic enrichment’ (Pustejovsky and Boguraev, 1996,Carston, 2002) On meaning potentials, see also Linell (1998a 118ff) and Lahteenmaki(2004)

59 Note that the term ‘literal meaning’ is used here about the allegedly ‘fixed, invariantsemantic content’ of a word A ‘literal meaning’ is exhaustively defined in terms of a fixedand context-independent set of semantic features (components) (cf Toolan, 1998‘componentialism’) One could talk about the counterparts of ‘literal meanings’ also at thesentence level, such sentence meanings are derived (by a ‘compositionality’ principle]from the literal meanings of the words appearing as constituents in the sentence, and theways in which constituents are combined within the syntactic configuration (# 48)

The ‘literal word meaning’ in the strict sense referred to here should be distinguished from‘core meaning’ (cf above), which is dynamic, incomplete and defeasible

The assumption of fixed literal word meaning is discussed at length by Rommetveit (1988)as the ‘myth of literal meaning’ For discussion and critique of the ‘language as a fixedcode’ assumption (Harris, 1981 ‘fixed code fallacy’), see, e g, Taylor (1992), Harris(1996) and Toolan (1998)


Meaning is dependent on a background of preconceptual and preintentionalstructures of bodily experiences and image schemata, and their metaphorical andmetonymic extensions. This ‘pre-linguistic’ background permeates and shadesinto the network of linguistic concepts, and must be considered part of meaning(Johnson, 1987:188).

Meaning is not objective in the sense of objectivist theories, but it isintersubjective in nature; it is public (in principle), dynamic and (at leastpartially) shared. It is situated, concerned and immersed in human projects andsocial commitments (Rommetveit, 1998c: 222).

# 48Meaning as explicit, and the principle of expressibility

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The meaning of complex expressions can be derivedfrom the (‘literal’) meanings of constituent expressions (cf. # 46 on words) andthe way in which they are combined, i.e. meaning can be derived from semanticproperties tied to the expressions themselves (the so-called principle ofcompositionality, sometimes called the Fregean principle). One could think ofthese linguistic meanings as the ‘literal’ and context-independent interpretationsof sentences (# 30) and other syntactic combinations.

Linguistic meaning is, in other words, what is objectively (# 47) madeexplicit, ‘literally’ or explicitly expressed (‘coded’), by words and sentences.This is also the basis for ‘the principle of expressibility’ (Searle, 1969:19–20);whatever a speaker means to say can be made fully explicit in talk (or text) andthus get understood. This thesis can be derived from the ideal of verbal languageas the fully fledged medium of representation (# 55), and is related to the idea ofa perfect language (# 56).

THE BACKGROUND: Written texts are usually verbally more explicit thanspoken discourse needs to be. Some written genres are designed to make amaximum of relevant meaning explicit, i.e. to provide strict and exact guidelinesfor interpretation.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language in discourse is essentially incomplete andallusive,61 or, in Garfinkel’s (1967; Heritage, 1984) terms, indexical, and cantherefore be understood only in context. Whatever we may choose to say, i.e.express explicitly, can always be assumed to fall short of what we might mean orhow we can get understood. This, then, is the opposite of Searle’s principle ofexpressibility.

60 The objectivist theory of meaning was developed primarily by Frege in the latenineteenth century (work republished in Frege, 1966) and has been the cornerstone ofmany modern, and more elaborate, theories, such as model-theoretic semantics (Lewis,1972), situation semantics (Barwise and Perry, 1983), Davidson’s (1975) theory ofsemantics as a theory of truth and Montague grammar (Montague, 1974) For a shortoverview, see Johnson (1987 xxixff)


Meaning in actual language use is partly implicit; ‘explicit’ words are onlyused as a means, together with other means, for making sense in actual practice,for guiding sense-makers to situated interpretations. Situated interpretations are‘prompted’ (Nerlich and Clarke, 2003:7), rather than represented, by linguisticexpressions. Language and other semiotic resources (e.g. gestures; # 93)combine, and elaborate on each other, in making meaning in situ (Goodwin,2000). At the same time, however, these resources are used in a world whichalready has a meaningful structure; as social human beings, we have been‘thrown’ into a meaningful world, as Heidegger would say (Steiner, 1978). Whenwe encounter new situations, we are already familiar with many aspects of theactivity types and the language used there.

# 49The acquisition of word meaning

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Word learning consists basically in learning wordsas labels of objects, processes, properties of objects and processes, etc. in theworld (# 1). This will then enable speakers to use these signs with their fixedmeanings (# 46) appropriately.

THE BACKGROUND: The kinds of word learning that are detached fromconcrete situations of application are characteristic primarily of individualstudies in the library. This practice of word learning contributes to strengtheningthe idea of words as labels for objects (processes, etc.) in the world. Forexample, when we look up an unknown word of a foreign language in adictionary, and we get a translation into words of our own language, we tend toimplicitly assume that the foreign word and the word(s) of our own languagemean precisely the same, i.e. are fully equivalent labels for—or means ofreferring to—the same things in the world.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Most of the time, children do not learn words inisolation from other activities. Word learning is merely a by-product, and partand parcel, of the child’s efforts at understanding utterances in acts of jointattention. Word learning depends on interpreting others as intentional agentswithin joint attentional interactions (Tomasello, 1995). This scaffolding ismandatory in early development, less so at later stages of development. Words(and grammatical patterns) are products of extraction or abstraction fromutterances.

61 This idea was clearly formulated by Merleau-Ponty (1962, Spurling, 1977) Moreformal theories of natural language, e g by Kempson et al (2001) and Carston (2002), talkabout the ‘semantic underspecification’ of expressions, or the obligatory ‘pragmaticinferencing’ in language use


# 50The dictionary vs. encyclopedia distinction

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Each word has an abstract and concise lexicalmeaning; it stands for a particular concept (or, in the case of polysemy, a numberof different but related concepts) (# 46). Our knowledge of these lexicalmeanings, or lexicalised concepts, is distinct from the encyclopedic knowledgeof the comprehensive phenomena about which the words are being used.

THE BACKGROUND: Dictionaries and encyclopedias are different kinds ofaids. Linguists try to delimit knowledge of language, as described in dictionariesand grammar books, from various kinds of comprehensive knowledge of theworld. This makes possible a distinction between what it means to understand asentence ‘linguistically’, i.e. as a linguistic item without a context (or in a defaultcontext), on the one hand, and to understand a situated utterance event in whichthat sentence is ‘used’, on the other. The latter is what is involved in actualcommunication, but the former reminds us of what could be required when weread a text in a foreign language without any other important communicativecontext than that of learning something of that foreign language. We then first tryto understand what the words and sentences of the text mean at a ‘linguisticlevel’ (Ottosson, 1996:431). In terms of sense-making, this is a rather specialactivity, quite aloof from what is going on in the overwhelming majority of talk-in-interaction situations.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Word meanings, and verbally represented concepts,are usually more extensive than conventional dictionary definitions; words thatare well known to their users have rich associative potentials. There is noabsolute boundary between entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias. It is due topractical considerations that definitions in dictionaries must be kept succinct.

# 51The semantics vs. pragmatics distinction

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There is a distinction between, on the one hand,pragmatics which deals with language use, and, on the other hand, semanticswhich deals with meanings as abstracted from conditions of communicationsituations, as constituted by static semantic components (# 46) and as determinedby the semantic relations to other units in the language. From a linguistic pointof view, primacy must be assigned to semantics. Moreover, the extension oflinguistic pragmatics is limited; for example, perlocutionary effects are not partof linguistic meaning.

THE BACKGROUND: In sentence semantics, logic, etc., which are dealt within exercises based on autonomous sentences and formulas, we deal with formalproperties of language, not with situated communicative relevance.62 Theseexercises are given in writing.


THE ALTERNATIVE: Language, grammar and semantics should be seen asproducts of abstraction from the communicative practices, which are primary.They are not given ‘out there’ in the form linguists ascribe to them (Chapter 8.1–2), but are instead the products of specific, goal-directed ‘situateddecontextualising practices’ (Linell, 1992), of which doing practical linguistics(finding lexical definitions, writing grammar books, etc.) is an example.

An absolute distinction between semantics and pragmatics is problematicsince meaning cannot be accounted for in isolation from language use(Wittgenstein, 1958). Illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions are conflatedin actual language use. Conversational implicatures (cf. Levinson, 2000) arepartly different in different social situation types. Meaning potentials (# 46)operate in the interface between semantics and pragmatics.

# 52Mental representations, propositions and predications

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is a medium for cognition (# 65) and isused primarily for representing the world (# 1, # 53). The semantic or logicalstructure of the basic linguistic unit (# 30) is that of a predication or proposition.63

A proposition is a mental representation of a state of affairs in the world thatuses finitary predicate symbols (functions) and a number of argument symbols.64

Alternatively, and in a slightly different but related perspective, we can say thatin a proposition, something is predicated of something else. The formalcounterpart of this is the clause or simplex sentence (# 30). Psychologically, aproposition can be loosely understood as a ‘complete thought’ (# 78).

The thesis that sentence meaning is propositional in nature combines with thethesis that word meanings are fixed and discrete (‘literal’) (# 46) to form anobjectivist theory of meaning, which claims that semantics should deal withrelations between, on the one hand, words and sentences and, on the other hand,an objective reality (# 47).

THE BACKGROUND: The idea of language as a representational system(# 1) is also influenced by the idea of writing as an externalised (secondary)representation (# 90). The propositionalisation of the world (see below) is verystrong in certain written genres, e.g. expository prose and predicate logic (cf.# 57).

Spoken interaction involves movements and positionings by interlocutors.Many written texts can also be seen as ‘discourse’ and interpreted in terms ofdiscursive movements. However, some very much writing-dependent texts, such

62 Even proponents for a comprehensive pragmatics, such as Levinson (2000) who dealswith ‘generalised conversational implicature’, works largely with concocted sentences(called ‘utterance types’) in default contexts


as lists, dictionaries and statistical tables, invite the view of staticrepresentations.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language must be conceptualised as public practices,not only as inner mental processes. The fundamental unit of language is that ofthe communicative action (and related notions such as interaction,communicative activity and communicative project; cf. Linell, 1998a).Communicative acts can carry many functions, apart from describing orrepresenting the world, or externalising ‘complete thoughts’ (Schegloff, 1996:111ff.). For example, they support practical actions in the world. There are manyutterances which are not propositional or sentence-formed (or easily derivablefrom such a form by ‘ellipsis’): calling somebody’s attention, orders andrequests, many assessments and evaluations, expressions of emotions (such as‘exclamations’), cheering, booing and cursing. Language use is not just a matterof laying out expository or argumentative prose, i.e. prototypically proposition-based text types. One important dimension of discourse and interaction is that ofinterpersonal power and domination (e.g. Bourdieu, 2000).

The conceptualisation of the world and the understanding of discourse bothinvolve non-propositional structures, such as bodily emotions and feelings,image-schematic structures and their metaphorical and metonymic extensions.65

These remain non-propositional, even though they can be propositionallyelaborated in verbal discourse (a process which might involve considerablerecontextualisations, i.e. resemanticisations). It is in and through the use oflanguage that we propositionalise the world.

# 53Representational meaning: reference and description

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is basically a medium for cognising(# 65) and representing the world (# 1). Interpersonal communication issecondary.66 Words and sentences (constellations of words) have basicallyreferential (denotative) and descriptive (cognitive, conceptual, intellectual)meanings. Other (expressive, evocative, emotive, conative, interpersonal)meanings are secondary.

THE BACKGROUND: Written texts, particularly expository prose andvarious kinds of formal(ised) language, enhance the function of representing theworld. Some text genres have been developed in order for interpersonalfunctions to be backgrounded or completely bracketed.

63 This is what Lyons (1995 336) calls ‘the intellectualist—and objectivist—prejudicethat language is essentially an instrument for the expression of propositional thought’

64 Cf Johnson (1987 3), who also accounts for a number of different, though related,definitions of the concept of ‘proposition’


THE ALTERNATIVE: Representational meaning is not uniquely important;there are also practical, instrumental, emotive, interpersonal, etc. uses oflanguage (# 52). In some genres of text or talk, it is the expressive, evocative (e.g.persuasive) or emotive meanings that dominate.67 Indeed, action, andcommunication and interaction between people, are more basic to language thanrepresentation (# 65). Moreover, it is not words that refer to and describe objects;people use words to refer and describe (see # 64).

# 54Truth and truth-conditional semantics

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The purpose of language use is to represent theworld truthfully (# 1), i.e. to communicate truth. Truth is a relation of agreementor adequation between human perception, cognition, claims-making andlinguistic descriptions, on the one hand, and objects and states of affairs inreality, on the other.

Sentence meaning is a matter of truth conditions; if we knew what it would befor a given sentence to be found true—to be truthfully used— then we wouldknow what its meaning is. (This logical-positivist formulation (Carnap) squareswell with objectivist semantics; # 47.) At the same time, actual truth values inparticular situations are irrelevant at the level of linguistic meanings tied to thelinguistic ‘system-sentences’. At the abstract and idealised level of the languagesystem, a sentence may be said to make the same claim no matter who uses it andwhen.68

THE BACKGROUND: The development of a truth-conditional semantics isthe result of particular scholarly activities in logic, formal semantics, etc., and itis useful for such particular purposes. It is not a general theory of linguisticmeaning. In scientific discourse, however, validity, veridicality and truth arecrucially important; such discourse is strongly dependent on written prose and,for more advanced purposes, on formalisation (which is always done in writing).

In grammar or logic exercises, free-standing and autonomous sentenceswithout communicative contexts are used, which implies a backgrounding oreven complete bracketing of semantic content other than asserted propositions,such as presuppositions and implications. Sentences are given in terms of well-

65 On (especially) image schemas, see Johnson (1987) For arguments concerning theneurological basis of cognition, and with theoretical assumptions of a similar kind, seeDamasio (1994)

66 This point is of course contested by many functional linguists Indeed, the history oflinguistics can be partly characterised as a struggle between those who think that languageis primarily used for cognition (expression of thought) and those who argue forinterpersonal communication as its primary function

67 As regards referential, evocative and expressive meanings, compare Karl Buhler’s(1934) functions of symbol, signal and symptom


defined formulas. Frege, who is the father of truth-conditional semantics, was amathematician, who was not at all concerned with natural language in humancommunication (see also # 52, # 89).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Truth is not such a straightforward and exclusivelyimportant thing as classical logic might suggest. On the one hand, thephilosophical analysis of the logic of ‘possible worlds’, not just the ‘actual’world, calls for new kinds of concepts (Lewis, 1986).

On the other hand, truth in real life is, or may be, situated and dialogicallyconstituted.69 The study of cognition and communication needs a semantics ofunderstanding, not just a semantics of truth (Fillmore, 1985). Utterances are partof communicative projects (# 61), by which speakers mean much more than justinforming about objective state of affairs. ‘Literal’ interpretations of utterances(and texts) are not exclusively relevant in many contexts; conversationalimplicatures often lead to other interpretations. Truth, i.e. correspondence withthe world, is not the only relevant aspect in communication; others areinteractional meaning, the creation of social alliances and divergences,considerations of politeness and tact, the ‘why of communication’ (Ducrot,1972). Listeners and parties to a dialogue always have to ask themselves ‘whythat to me now?’ (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973:299). Different communicativeactivity types and genres call for different relevance principles. Politenessconsiderations often impede speakers from going ‘on record’.70

Both signification and significance are relevant in communication. Utterancesare parts of situated communicative acts. In addition to asserted meanings,utterances have presupposed, implicative and projective meanings, which can beinferred only in context. They too are cocommunicated in actual communicationsituations.

68 Rommetveit (1998c 221) comments on such ‘eternal’ sentences

Frege was thus not at all concerned with natural language in contexts of humancommunication, but with idealized or ‘eternal’ sentences These are sentences which aresupposed to make the same claim about the world no matter who utters them or when andhence to be fully understood even in Virgin Mary type of situations

Rommetveit’s reference to ‘Virgin Mary’ is an allusion to the idea that anyone will fullyunderstand the linguistic meaning of a sentence—any sentence, such as It’s raining oreven Was it Gorbachev who invented the perestroika?—and yet remain untouched byhuman initiatives and mundane realities One must understand, of course, what linguisticitems such as rain, invent and perestroika mean without any specific context, furthermorethat Gorbachev must be a proper name, that there are semantic differences between thepresent and past tenses, between declarative and interrogative sentences, and a few thingsmore But the point is that it is sufficient to know the language, as it were, to havereceived the words (from God?), one should not be seduced, or confused, by the ‘dirty’realities of specific, situated, human concerns that affect the interpretations in real life


# 55The completeness of language as a semiotic system

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Although no natural language is perfect, at least notfrom a logical point of view (but cf. # 56), verbal language must be seen as aprivileged system for communication and cognition. Indeed, it is a (or the) fullyfledged medium of representing knowledge (# 48), or, at least, it can bedeveloped into such a medium (# 56).

THE BACKGROUND: Printed texts have been largely or exclusively basedon verbal language, often treating pictures as illustrations that merely repeatwhat is (should be) there independently in the verbal text. Furthermore, acommon argument is that pictures represent things in a less systematic way.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The linguistic make-up of an utterance or text cannever determine the situated meaning of that utterance or text (# 58). In thissense, language does not represent anything completely. Contexts of varioustypes are always co-determining situated interpretations (Goodwin, 2000); takenby itself, language is merely allusive and incomplete (# 48).

Language is specialised to represent and express some aspects of the world,while images and pictures (static or moving), music, multimedia, etc. are betterfor other purposes (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996).

# 56The idea of a perfect language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Natural languages are not perfect. But the idea of aperfect language is alive:71 this is a language which is maximally precise,logically consistent, exhaustive, and free from irrelevant features of deception,ambiguity, emotion, etc., that is such confounding factors that may distractattention from the concentration on logic and truth (# 54). A rule-based formalcalculus might work in many contexts (# 57).

THE BACKGROUND: See # 54.THE ALTERNATIVE: Explicitness and logical consistency are not, and can

not be, the only requirements on a language. In many contexts, other means andfunctions, sometimes seemingly opposite to these values, are essential in the

69 Rommetveit (1998c 227) For example, Rommetveit refers to the case of a man (MrSmith) who is mowing his lawn His wife truthfully uses contradictory claims (‘He isworking this morning’, ‘He is not working this morning’) about this same situation (MrSmith mowing his lawn), depending on which interpretations have been made relevant bydifferent dialogical contexts (in this case different conversations that Mrs Smith had onthe phone, while Mr Smith was still mowing) These different dialogical contexts exploitdifferent parts of the meaning potential of ‘work’ (i e ‘indulging in physical exercise’ vs‘being at work’)

70 This is the point of Sacks’s (1975) incisive and somewhat exaggerated formulation‘everyone has to lie’


real, social world: vagueness, incompleteness, indirectness, versatility, flexibility,negotiability, ambiguities, equivocation and even contradictions. Also, languageis necessarily allusive (indexical) and incomplete (# 48); we cannot accomplishsituated meaning in and through language in isolation, entirely outside of relevantcontexts.

# 57Logic and reasoning as a formal rule-based calculus

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Logic and formal semantics work with a context-free calculus of formulas, representations of propositions, etc. Linguistic actionscan be explained in terms of rule-following, i.e. conforming to linguistic andpragmatic rules, which can be idealised and formalised.

THE BACKGROUND: Advanced logic has always been carried out inwriting; it needs a written language designed to represent concepts unequivocally(a ‘Begriffsschrift’; Frege)72 and to highlight the algebraic aspects of syntax(# 89). For example, a syllogism is portrayed as a short text, isolated, fixed andboxed off.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In human communication, rationality is integratedwith morality, emotionality, sociality, etc., and argumentation is in manycontexts non-demonstrative, rather than logically conclusive. Moreover, manyrationalities are typically local, i.e. they are not of universal validity. Logicalconsistency is not the only goal (# 56).

Linguistic communication can only marginally be explained in terms of rule-following. Many patterns result from habits, embodied and partly automatised.73

We orient ourselves or are guided by habits and norms.

# 58Utterance meaning as determinate

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Texts and utterances have determinateinterpretations. These can be inferred from linguistic meanings and pragmaticprinciples.74

In finding out and explaining what texts and utterances (and the underlyingwords and sentences) mean, we must rely on experts—linguists, philologists,literary scholars—and their intuitions, experiences and theories.

THE BACKGROUND: Long literate traditions of academic and scholarlypractices have privileged the distanced, systematic interpretation ofdecontextualised texts, at the expense of the interpretations that these texts anddiscourses receive in their embeddings in social life. It has sometimes beenassumed that texts and utterances must have one single, authoritative meaning.

71 For further discussion of the idea of a perfect language, see Chapter 6 5 1


They must be semantically and pragmatically determinate, rather than partlyopen. There are only a few exceptional, genuinely ambiguous occurrences.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Utterances and texts are made sense of by participantsin the communicative activities, in which they are produced, used, negotiated andinterpreted. When a given utterance has been issued, it often does not have onesingle, determinate interpretation inferable from linguistic structure, contextualinformation and pragmatic principles. Rather, it is still partly open and multiplydeterminable, and it is a task for participants together to develop sense-makingand (if necessary) make more precise interpretations in the course of the ensuingdialogue. Actors’ (participants’) meanings, which are partly shown as responsesin dialogue, are necessary, at least as a starting point, for the informed analyst’spossibilities to account for what texts and discourses mean in actualcommunication.

# 59Semantic problems

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The kinds of semantic problems which need to beexplained in linguistic semantics are exemplified by homonymy, grammaticalambiguity (cf. # 38), paradoxical internal contradictions (self-reference; the liar’sparadox), and other literal and condensed (‘gedichtet’) polysemies, etc.

THE BACKGROUND: Grammatical ambiguity, the liar’s paradox, etc. aretypically discovered by studious contemplation of decontextualised written texts.Compare the conventional opening ‘Consider this sentence…’

THE ALTERNATIVE: In situated communication, problems of mutualunderstanding are related to or caused by vagueness of reference, meaning andillocutionary force; different types of implicitness and implicature; discrepanciesin frames, perspectives and background knowledge; differences in depth ofintention and standards of comparison, etc., rather than structural ambiguities,etc. In other words, traditional linguistic semantics fails to analyse the mostsignificant problems.

# 60Deixis as exceptional

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Only a few categories of expressions in a languageare deictic or indexical in that they require a contextual specification in order to

72 On Frege, see Stenlund (1980) See also fn 84

73 Cf on this point Bourdieu’s (e g 2000) notion of ‘habitus’ See also Chapter 6 7 2

74 For different theories of pragmatic principles, see Grice (1975) (maxims), Levinson(2000) (generalised conversational implicatures) and Sperber and Wilson (1986)(relevance principle)


be interpreted; these deictic expressions demand references to the world for theirmeanings. All other aspects of meaning are inherent in lexical entries or can becomputed by rules of language. (On pronouns, see # 44.)

THE BACKGROUND: In grammar exercises, and in the reading of fictionaltexts, reference to the world is usually immaterial. Written texts are built more onanaphoric (text-internal) than deictic (text-external) references.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Utterances are always contextualised and indexical.The linguistic side of the utterance is incomplete and allusive (# 48); utterancesdo not ‘contain’ their meanings (‘content’). Most expressions require situationalspecification; many noun phrases have referential aspects, and predications toopoint indirectly to aspects of extra-linguistic situations.

# 61Speech acts as basic units of language use

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Individual speech acts are the basic units ofcommunication and language use, and they are prototypically expressed assentences (# 30, # 52). Basic speech act types are assertions, questions, requestsand classical ‘performatives’ (declarations, namings, promises, apologies, etc.).According to speech act theory (Searle, 1969, 1975a, 1975b), communicativeacts are performed by independent speakers, rather than in collaboration withlisteners or other participants. Speakers take initiatives and actively intervene inthe world following their own intentions (# 74, # 75).

THE BACKGROUND: Just as texts have fully responsible authors, speechacts are assumed to have autonomous individual authors with their ownresponsibilities and intentions. Texts stand on their own feet; they need not beseen as responses, subordinated to other authors’ texts.75

THE ALTERNATIVE: Contributions to dialogue are not independent ofcontexts and adjacent actions in the communicative projects co-accomplished byparties. They are dialogically constituted ‘inter-acts’,76 rather than monologicalspeech acts, even if each utterance may, in some cases, be physically producedby one speaker only.

Many communicative acts are expressed in multi-unit turns (rather than singlesentences) or in local dialogical sequences (Linell et al., 2003). Even suchclassical speech act types as to assert something, to ask a question, to issue anorder, to thank, to promise, to accuse, etc. are part of more comprehensivecommunicative projects (Linell, 1998a: Chapter 11). Communicative acts are notdecontextualised and autonomous assertions, questions, etc., but acts made forsome purpose (as parts of communicative projects), e.g. assertions in the serviceof making the recipient aware of some relevant information or arguing for apoint, or questions in the service of getting to know or understand something orchecking somebody’s knowledge.

In addition, there are countless acts that are even more clearly responsive:77

e.g. to respond, to initiate a repair, to confirm (what others have said), to make an


assessment (or second assessment), to make a counterargument. Many of theseactions are essentially interactional, whether collaborative or competitive. Yetother examples of ‘inter-acts’ are to joke, to tease, to insult and to respond tosuch attempts.

Most contributions to discourse have both responsive and initiatory properties,that is the individual utterance is designed to respond to prior contributions (orsomething in the situation at large) and to anticipate possible next contributions.Some of these properties are even grammaticalised (cf. # 36). (See also # 74 on‘recipient design’.)

Nothing of all this is given due attention in Searle’s theory. The theory doestreat perlocutionary effects, but this is a fairly marginal part of it. This makesspeech act theory a particularly interesting case of the WLB, since it is relativelynew (cf. Searle, 1969) and represents an attempt to describe how people ‘dothings with words’ (Austin, 1962) in spoken interaction.

# 62Direct and indirect speech acts

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There is a clear distinction between literal and non-literal meaning (# 46), and related to this, between direct and indirect speech acts.78 The latter distinction falls back on the differences between semantics andpragmatics, and between linguistic meaning and pragmatic inference (# 51, # 58).‘Direct’ speech acts are those in which the speaker’s intended meaning is equalto the ‘literal’ (or ‘coded’) meaning of the sentence (# 48). The meaning of‘indirect’ speech acts, by contrast, must be derived by the use of pragmaticprinciples and contextual knowledge.

THE BACKGROUND: Literal meaning is defined by the text (‘by the letter’),which is objectively there on record (on paper, etc.). Some traditions of textinterpretation based on this notion would claim that what can be assigned to thetext in itself is, on a principled basis, different from what various readers mayread into it, due to their specific personal or cultural circumstances. (Accordingto a related theory, inherent text meanings are what expert readers have agreed toassign to the texts as such; see # 58.)

THE ALTERNATIVE: All utterances are assigned situated interpretationsthat go beyond what is defined by language; contexts are always relevant, also in the case of ‘direct’ speech acts. For example, one must have contextualknowledge in order to assess how ‘literally’ an utterance is intended. Often,

75 By contrast, the dialogistic standpoint (e g Bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986) is, of course,that utterances and texts are always (to some extent) responsive in nature

76 ‘Inter-act’ as a term is a back-formation from ‘interaction’, and is intended to allude tothe dialogical constitution, the dependence on interaction, of the communicative act CfHalliday (1994 68) and Linell and Marková (1993)


‘indirect’ meanings (in Searlian terminology) are the conventionalised ‘default’interpretations; Can you pass the salt? is conventionalised as a polite request,and is interpreted as an inquiry about ability only under unusual circumstances.At the same time, the conventionalised utterance interpretations too are context-[inter]dependent (Toolan, 1998).

# 63Quotes: renditions of others’ discourse

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: One can repeat others’ utterances as ‘direct’ or‘indirect’ discourse (another meaning of (in)directness than in # 62); the formerinvolves the copying, by direct quotation, of the other’s speech.

THE BACKGROUND: In writing, one may reproduce, or copy, a sequence ofwords ‘verbatim’. Indeed, one can cut it out and paste it into another text. Incertain genres, there is a norm that quotations must be exactly verbatim.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In natural conversation, the boundary between ‘direct’and ‘indirect’ discourse is often somewhat blurred. Moreover, so-called direct(i.e. quoted) speech too occurs, by definition, in a new context. This means that,as a communicative act, the ‘quote’ (copy) is not identical to the ‘original’.Moreover, quoting often involves reconstruction of both form and content; thatis, quoting is an active construction rather than a simple repetition (Tannen,1989). In addition, one can quote not only others’ verbal utterances, but alsotheir non-verbal vocalisations, voice qualities, facial expressions and gestures.Quoting in dialogue is ‘demonstration’ rather than representation (Clark andGerrig, 1990).

5.7Communication, discourse and texts

# 64The cognition vs. communication distinction

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There is a clear distinction between cognition(thinking) and communication. The former is information processing within theindividual mind or brain, whereas the latter is the transfer of messages betweenindividual minds (cf. # 65).

77 See Linell (1998a) Attempts to add responses to Searlian taxonomies usually regardsuch responsive moves as ‘secondary’ or ‘supplementary’ move types, which are entirelysubordinated to ‘proper’ speech acts (cf Linell and Marková, 1993)

78 Cf also ‘proper’ vs ‘supplementary’ acts according to fn 77


THE BACKGROUND: When people compose texts, it is believed that theyfirst think up what to write, then they write it down. That is, thinking andcommunication are two different activities (see # 76).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Cognition and communication are intertwinedprocesses. Both can be described as dialogical. Cognition too is situated, i.e.occurs in the world, and is often distributed across individuals, or betweenindividuals and artefacts (Engeström and Middleton, 1996). An ordinaryconversation can be construed as an example of distributed cognition (Linell,1998a: 224; Linell et al., 2001).

# 65Language as a medium for cognition, not for action and

communication

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: For a specific language to exist, it must beinternalised into each competent individual’s mind. This accounts for thespeaker’s linguistic competence. Therefore, language is a medium for cognition(thinking), and cognition is carried out by individual minds. Cognition consistsof intraindividual information processing, by means of natural language orperhaps a more abstract, ‘internal’ language (# 84). Communication is asecondary phenomenon; it consists of the interpersonal transfer of signalsrelaying thoughts that originate and reappear in the speaker’s and listener’s,respectively, individual minds (# 64).

Language is a means for interpretation and contemplation rather than aninstrument of action and power.79

THE BACKGROUND: Writing and reading involve cognitive activities,which are typically carried out by individuals in partial and temporary isolation.They are, in this sense, monological activities in which communication is notimmediately highlighted (cf. # 76).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language originates and lives in and throughcommunication, particularly in talk-in-interaction. Communication is theenvironment for individual as well as collective (‘distributed’; # 64) cognition.Using language consists in acting in and on the world. The act of representing anaspect of the world is an action too, an active intervention, in the world.Propositions and proposals are not all that different from each other (Holmberg,2002). In Halliday’s (1985) terms, the ideational and interpersonal aspects oflanguage and language use are intertwined. Intrapersonal cognition too must beexplained in dialogical terms.80

# 66Communication as transfer of meanings

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Cognition precedes communication; before one cansay anything, one must have thought it out. Language is first and foremost a tool


for cognition (# 65). Communication consists in a transmission of meanings andmessages between individuals, from the speaker (or sender) to the listener(recipient). More precisely, what happens in communication is that the speakersends a fixed meaning to a listener via linguistic expressions associated with thatmeaning; meanings ‘travel’.81 Together with a fixed code (# 46), ultimatelybased on the principle that language mirrors reality (# 1), the transfer of correctlycoded messages can secure complete and mutual understanding (# 78).

THE BACKGROUND: Written communication involves the transportation ofdocuments carrying symbols from source and sender to destination and recipient.The transfer model of communication has received further support frominformation theory (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) and later models, designed forthe explanation of the capacities for information storage, processing andtransmission within technical systems, i.e. computers and telecommunicationsnetworks. These models have been metaphorically extended to humancommunication (e.g. Denes and Pinson, 1963)82 (cf. # 83).

The idea that communication involves the transfer of complete thoughts fitsthe production, revision and editing of certain text types better than improvisedspeech. There are of course kinds of spoken discourse too which are not whatMerleau-Ponty (1962:179, n. 1) calls ‘firsthand speech’, but rather ‘constitutedlanguage’, i.e. performances preceded by rehearsals (ibid.: 188).83 What Merleau-Ponty fails to note, however, is the role of writing in developing ‘constitutedlanguage’.

THE ALTERNATIVE: ‘[S]peech does not translate ready-made thought, butaccomplishes it’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962:178). This is not to deny that the speaker(and the listener) use material that has been either routinised or partially thoughtout in advance; ‘accomplish’ does not mean ‘create ab novo’ in all respects, butrather ‘pursue’ and ‘complete (for current purposes)’.

Sense-making is accomplished in and through the interaction itself;communication is an interaction both among participants and betweenparticipants and their contexts. The recipient (listener, addressee, reader) mustalways do active work to arrive at meanings and interpretations. Meanings donot ‘travel’; ‘nothing travels from the speaker to the hearer except the sound wave’(Langacker, 1987:162).

# 67The cognition vs. emotion distinction

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Thoughts and feelings are very different things.Cognitive activities and processes must be clearly kept distinct from emotive and

79 Cf Bourdieu (2000 53), who ascribes this position to ‘the intellectualism of thestructural semiologists’, and more generally to a long ‘scholastic’ tradition

80 Cf Vygotsky (1986) For some discussion, see Linell (1998a 267f)


conative ones. They are even handled by different parts of the brain, that is, by

81 The transfer model of communication has also been dubbed, for example, ‘the conduitmetaphor’ (Reddy, 1979) and the ‘bucket theory’ Osgood says about the bucket theory.‘Words, like little buckets, are assumed to pick up their loads of meaning in one person’smind, carry them across the intervening space, and dump them into the mind of another’(Osgood, 1979:213) Yet another term is ‘the telementational model’ (Harris, 1997,2002b) Taylor, following Harris, talks about the two interrelated ‘fallacies’ of‘telementation’ and ‘fixed code’ as an ‘illusory’ foundation for ‘orthodox language theory’(1997 3, 6, see also Harris, 2002b) Harris (1981) discusses John Locke’s theory ofcommunication as a prime example of ‘telementation’ Harris (1997 243ff) has collectedsome quotes from well-known linguists, as different as Hermann Paul and Steven Pinker,showing their adoption of some variant of the ‘telementation’ metaphor Harris alsodiscusses Saussure’s commitments. (See Joseph, 1997, for arguments that Harris hasoverstated the case.) Carr (1997) argues that the model occurs in a recontextualisedmanner in generative linguistics For some more formulations of the transfer model ofcommunication, see Chapter 6 3 Here, following Roy Harris, I will cite a few more tellingauthorities

Communication involves the transfer and modification of individual-psychological states,according to Paul Grice (1981 227)

[ ] a certain psychological state psi1 [ ] is followed by a certain utterance U[ ] which in turn [ ] is followed by a particular instance of a furtherpsychological state psi2, a state not now in the communicating creature butin the creature who is communicated to And it might be a matter ofdesirability for psi1 and psi2 to be states of one and the same, rather thandifferent sorts, so that when these sequences psi1, U, psi2 occur, theyinvolve utterances and psychological states between which thesepsycholinguistic correspondences obtain

In a less technical fashion (cf discussion in Davis, 2002 45), the generativistJackendoff (1993 3) formulates it as follows

Something in Harry’s brain that we might as well call a ‘thought’ results inmovements of his vocal tract (lungs, vocal cords, tongue, jaw and lips),which in turn create a sound wave that is transmitted through the air Thissound wave, striking Sam’s ear, results in Sam’s having the same ‘thought’(or a similar one) in his brain

The communication of a message is described by Lyons (1977 724) as atransportation or a ’journey’

[ ] the process of communicating propositional information is readilydescribable [ ] in terms of the localistic notion of a journey If Xcommunicates p to Y, this implies that p travels, in some sense, from X toY [ ] It may be suggested that ‘p is at X’ (where X is a person) is theunderlying locative structure that is common to ‘X knows p’ ‘X believesp’, ‘X has p in mind’, etc


and large, cortical and subcortical structures, respectively. Language is, first andforemost, a means for cognition, not for emotion and volition. The latter are thedomain of ‘body language’.

We must also distinguish between facts, on the one hand, and subjectiveopinions and emotive attitudes, on the other. That is, the logical aspects ofthought must, at least for some purposes, be analytically separated from theactual psychological phenomena (representations, Vorstellungen).84 Science asopposed to art and fiction are human projects of entirely different kinds.

THE BACKGROUND: The dichotomies of reason vs. passion (cognition vs.emotion) and mind vs. body have a long history in Western philosophy,epitomised in the theories of Descartes (cf. # 20). Language as a means forrepresenting and elaborating thought, rather than feeling, is taught in schoolingpractices. In logic and mathematics, it is mandatory to distinguish between whatis the true nature of the objective system, and what is due to subjective mentalphenomena and human errors.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In a painting or drawing, there is no way of separatingcognitive and emotive components or aspects, and the same is true of speech. Inutterances, cognition and emotion are interpenetrating. Many communicativeacts cannot be regarded only as expressing thoughts.85

In general, feelings are cognitively penetrated, and conversely, cognitions, e.g.argumentation and decision-making, are partly dependent on and driven byvolitions and emotions, which in turn involve the apperception of bodily states.Cognition and emotion are handled by many interacting systems of the brain, andare also dependent on interaction with the rest of the body.86 The mind is notdisembodied, nor is the brain disconnected from the body. ‘Language has aheart’ (Ochs and Schieffelin, 1989).

82 But human communication has rather little in common with technical informationtransmission Computers are stuck with their fixation on formal properties of messages,they have excessively good memory capacities, but no ability for intuitive and globalassessments and moral judgements See discussion in, e g, Dreyfus (1979)

83 Cf also Merleau-Ponty (1962 183) What misleads us in this connection, and causes usto believe in a thought which exists for itself prior to expression, is thought alreadyconstituted and expressed, which we can silently recall to ourselves, and through whichwe acquire the illusion of an inner life

84 This was the position taken by Frege, in his (1879) ‘Begriffsschrift’ or ‘Formelsprachedes reinen Denkens’, and he has had many followers in philosophy and logic Cf also thefollowing quote from Frege (1971 59–60)

Ursprunglich ist beim Menschen das Denken mit dem Vorstellung und Fuhlen vermischtDie Logik hat die Aufgabe, das Logische rein herauszusondern, zwar nicht so, dass wirdenken sollen ohne vorzustellen, was wohl unmoglich ist, sondern zu, dass wir dasLogische bewusst unterscheiden von dem, was sich an Vorstellungen und Gefuhlen daranhangt


# 68Utterances as texts and as products of linguistic activities

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Discourse must be analysed as (linguistic) products(# 5), on the basis of the utterances produced and transcribed.87 Linguistic analysisof text and talk deals with ‘the said’ rather than ‘the acts of saying’ (in French(Ducrot, 1984): le dit rather than le dire). More precisely, a piece of discourse isa text, i.e. a coherent and structured linguistic object, which could be analysed interms of its constituent structure.88 Such a text can be analysed at face value, as astatic, complex object.

THE BACKGROUND: Texts, especially printed ones, backgroundcommunicative activities in systematic and effective ways. A written text is notan online registration of communicative activities, but the products of suchactivities. They are linearised structures of object-like traces.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Discourse must be seen as social action in contexts. Itis a process, a sequence of interactional events in time, which must beunderstood in dynamic terms. As Halliday (1985:xxiii) put it, ‘writing existswhereas speech happens’. This is of course particularly pertinent in the case of talk-in-interaction.

Transcription of talk-in-interaction cannot be dispensed with. However, it doesinvolve the transformation of a dynamic interaction into a static text(Chapter 4.3). Even if the analysis of talk as products (‘the said’, le dit) isimportant and necessary, the processes and practices (‘acts of saying’, le dire)must remain in the mind of the analyst.

# 69Utterances as behaviour

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Utterances are linguistically structured speechbehaviour, words combined according to linguistic rules. Such behaviour is theexternal surface product (# 67) realising abstract non-behavioural (‘mental’)structures.

85 Alan Gardiner (1951 17), one of the linguistic dissenters who was clearly interested inthe communicative life of (spoken) language, wrote about the idea that utterances expressthoughts

As applied to many samples of speech, the description is [] grotesque Consider a motheranxiously asking for news of her son, or a tradesman driving a hard bargain Or again,imagine an angry traveller hurling words of abuse at an uncomprehending porter, or ajudge pronouncing sentence of death upon a murderer? Shall we say that these persons areexpressing thoughts?

86 Damasio (1994) argues for numerous interactions between mind, brain and body In histerms, the brain is ‘body-minded’ Cf also Johnson (1987) Other relevant backgroundreading is obviously Merleau-Ponty (1962)


THE BACKGROUND: Written texts consist ‘objectively’ of words,observable as marks on paper, and utterances are their spoken counterparts,observable as overt behaviour.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Utterances are meaningful actions rather than plain‘behaviour’. They are acts (communicative acts, contributions to dialogue) byspeakers in interaction with partners and contexts. In other words, they belong tojoint communicative projects (Linell, 1998a: 212ff.) The linguistic meansdeployed are turn-constructional units reflecting speakers’ orientations to variouslinguistic structures (such as words and ‘grammatical constructions’, cf.Chapter 8.7.5). Linguistic structures are conventionally determined andabstracted aspects of, or conditions on, actions embodied in behaviour.

# 70The text vs. context dichotomy

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: There are absolute boundaries between texts (ordiscourses), which are couched in language, and their (extralinguistic) contexts.Contexts are stable, external environments.

A text and its context are related like a painting and its frame; the text is madeup exclusively of what is inside the frame. Another analogy suggests that thecontext is the extralinguistic surrounding, the objective reality outside of thecommunicating individual and his or her linguistic behaviour—which serves asthe referential anchorage for that which is said (# 1).

THE BACKGROUND: A printed verbal text is surrounded by various kindsof concomitant contexts, co-texts and para-texts (e.g. Genette, 1991).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Some contextual resources are of course given aheadof an interaction, but if they are to become relevant, they must be oriented to bythe interlocutors, in the activity as actually staged and at some level ofawareness. Discourse and relevant contexts are therefore mutually constitutive,and both emerge in and through the interaction and verbalisation (Linell, 1998a:Chapter 8). ‘Frames’ (cf. Goffman, 1974) should be substituted by a more dynamicconcept: framings (MacLachlan and Reid, 1994). Contexts form contextualconfigurations, and talk is constituted by an array of semiotic resources, whichare made to interact with different parts of such configurations (Goodwin, 2000).

87 Cf Derwing (1979 182) On the ‘product approach’ to discourse, see Clark (1996 29)and Linell (1998a 4)

88 There are rather few text-linguistic approaches to spoken discourse and conversationthat attempt to analyse it in terms of constituent structure (in analogy with intrasententialsyntax) Cf, however, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975)


# 71Texts as repeatable, structured objects of verbal signs

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Texts are closed units with an internal structure. Inwritten, especially printed, texts, the words are there on record; what is meant isinscribed in the text, and is publicly available in the text (‘meaning in the text’).For any given text, there is a singular and stable, textual (‘literal’) meaning.

Texts can be repeated, that is re-read or re-told, in exactly the same form andwith the same content. What counts in a text or a piece of discourse, is that whichgets said (and possibly documented, i.e. written or transcribed), not the act ofsaying it (# 68). For example, in the case of narratives, the story itself, rather thanevents of story-telling, is the relevant object of study. Tales tend to exhibitrecurrent patterns (Propp, 1968).

THE BACKGROUND: Texts (stories, etc.), musical scores, etc. as written orprinted constitute the stable identities of the verbal or musical pieces in a literateculture.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Even though texts, for example stories or pieces ofmusic, can sometimes be repeated in approximately the same shape many times,especially if read or played out from a script or score, the basic phenomenon isthe telling of the story or the performance of the piece of music, or moregenerally the activity of saying, playing or doing something. The meaning of atext is always contextually determined, especially in less formal and regimentedsettings, and usually does not stay the same across recontextualisations. Textshave a potential for meanings and messages (Rommetveit, 1974; Nystrand et al.,1993:298), which is exploited in different ways under divergent circumstances.Story-telling takes place in an interactive field. The ‘same’ story may be told fordifferent purposes on different occasions, and will then be assigned differentmeanings.89 What makes communicative sense involves situational factors, suchas different actors, places, times, purposes and moral points.

# 72Coherence

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Coherence is a primary characteristic of a text, apiece of discourse or a conversation, and is defined in terms of intra-textualconnectedness (cf. # 71). Coherence inheres in the text itself, as a boundedobject.

THE BACKGROUND: Written texts, for example essays in compositioncourses, are evaluated in terms of their internal coherence.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Coherence is not a property of the text or talk as alinguistic object (product), but of the emergent, continually changingcommunication situations and the accompanying trains of thought. As a result ofcoherence-making efforts, a conversation will often be organised andapprehended in terms of episodes and phases (compare paragraphs and sections


in texts). New episodes in the interaction are not necessarily tied to prior co-text,but are nevertheless perceived as situationally relevant and coherent, becausecoherence is not a purely text-internal property but a relation between discourseand its various contexts, including the communicative situation and parties’background knowledge (Sanford and Moxey, 1995; Korolija, 1998).

# 73Sequentiality

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: A conversation (or a text) is characterised bysequentiality. Its utterances are ordered in a linear series, and get part of theirmeanings from the positions in the situated sequences in which they occur.

THE BACKGROUND: Dialogues in written drama texts consist of sequencesof lines. Theatre-plays are also, in some relevant senses, detached from thesurrounding life.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Utterances and discourses get parts of their meaningsfrom contextual resources other than the local sequences. Among these areassumptions about the communicative activity type and knowledge aboutlanguage. Utterances may partially overlap; they do not necessarily follow eachother, but they are subtly timed in relation to each other. The timing of linguisticutterances with respect to paralinguistic acts is another important aspect (# 77).

The temporality of speech and spoken language (# 16) does not only concernsequentiality (or timing) within the single encounter, let alone the localsequence.90 Temporality also applies at the sociohistorical level of practices; itresults from the continuities (and discontinuities) in the forms of life (privatelife, work life, institutions, etc.) from which habits, routines and ‘systems’ oflinguistic organisation emerge.

# 74Speaker and listener roles

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Speakers and listeners have very different roles andtasks in communication; the speaker is the active party—the author—and thelistener is a recipient of the speaker’s message. Communication is based on whatsenders (sometimes called ‘communicators’) do; recipients’ tasks are to decodeutterances and reconstruct what the speakers mean. Similarly, readers are, orshould be, subjected to writers and their texts.

THE BACKGROUND: Authors and readers of written texts have verydifferent roles, and act out of different situations, usually separate in time andspace. Authors of texts work more independently and autonomously fromrecipients than do speakers in talk-in-interaction. Unlike being the addressee in a

89 See Eriksson (1997), and references there


conversational interaction, reading a text does not involve any direct interactionwith the sender.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Both parties (speaker, listener) are active in sense-making (# 66). In designing utterances (and texts), speakers (and writers) have totake into consideration the particular recipient’s perspective (‘recipient design’;Sacks et al., 1974). Listening to somebody talking, especially if you are the directaddressee, involves an active and responsive understanding; the addressee is afeedback giver and very likely the next speaker. The process of meaning-makingin situ is one of common co-authoring in dialogue (Rommetveit, 2003). AsGoffman (1981) has shown, there are many kinds of speaker identities(‘principal, author, animator’) and listener identities (‘direct and indirectaddressees, other ratified participants, overhearers, eavesdroppers’; cf. alsoLevinson, 1988).

Readers actively interpret texts, e.g. by relating them to their own backgroundknowledge and current concerns. However, the degree of relative freedom ofreaders vary between different reading practices.

# 75The individual speaker as the sole communicator and

producer of the basic constituents of meanings and messages

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Sentences are the expressions of complete thoughts,i.e. the minimal messages that can be communicated (# 79), and utterancemeaning is attributable to the individual speaker and his/her actual intentions.The source of utterance meaning lies entirely in speaker intentions. In givingexpression to his or her intentions, the speaker builds on the meanings inherent inthe language used (# 61); he or she is the one who chooses the words, but thewords with their lexical (‘literal’) meanings are given by the language. Authors(and speakers) are the only authorities when it comes to determining what thespecific texts mean.

THE BACKGROUND: The form and content of a written text is the product ofits author, often a single person (even if he or she has incorporated the words andideas by other people) (cf. # 61).

THE ALTERNATIVE: In dialogue and conversation, utterances areincrementally produced, on a moment-to-moment basis. Even utterances thatform syntactically coherent units are sometimes, indeed rather frequently, co-produced (‘collaborative completion’; Lerner, 1989). Meaning is a collaborativeaccomplishment, in which speakers interact with interlocutors in a world whichis already meaningfully organised.

90 This is the level at which CA (Conversation Analysis) studies sequentiality SeeFleming (1997) for some critical comments


Not all meaning aspects are consciously intended by the speaker, and there areunintended consequences of most interactions. Both parties to a dialogue carrysome responsibility for the outcome and each other’s contributions.

# 76Rhetoric, and the planning and execution of utterances

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Thought and meaning precede linguistic form.Speakers begin at the very least with what Wundt (1900) called aGesamtvorstellung (Blumenthal, 1970:16ff.). That is, first we think and organisemeaning, only thereafter we speak and transfer the message (# 66).

Utterances are consciously planned, and the production of utterances consistsof at least two phases, planning and execution (Clark and Clark, 1977). Otherpsycholinguistic models of utterance production, such as that of Levelt (1989),talks about three mental agents: conceptualiser, formulator and articulator.91 Thismirrors central ideas in rhetoric, which is the classical study of successfulperformance in speech. According to rhetorical theory, a speech is a piece ofthoroughly planned and coherent discourse, which goes through five (at leastpartly consecutive) stages, from inventio via dispositio, elocutio, and memoria topronuntiatio.

THE BACKGROUND: Written texts are often first planned, then written, andafter that edited and rewritten, in a process in which conscious considerations ofpossible interpretations may be carefully monitored. Although rhetorical theoryis geared at the delivery of spoken messages, and sometimes even morespecifically, at speaking without the support of a written script, it relies heavilyon literate attitudes. Rhetorical study focuses on texts or speeches that have beenplanned, and often written down as texts, before being memorised.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Verbalisation is a process in which sense-making andutterance production go hand in hand. There is no complete meaning in the mindof the speaker before the utterance has been compiled and its linguistic formdetermined (unless of course the speech has been rehearsed). Moreover, speakerssometimes discover what they themselves have meant (or at least are heard tohave meant), only after they have spoken and heard how their interlocutors takeup and respond to their utterances.

The planning, rehearsal and execution model is not applicable to typicalimpromptu talk, let alone to talk-in-interaction (conversation). Utterances are theproducts of collaborative verbalisation and sense-making processes, in whichexpressions and their meanings are interactionally occasioned and locallyproduced on a moment-to-moment basis, in an incremental fashion.92 In theprocess of turn construction, there are several points of structural import, where

91 This is mirrored in the very different social theory by Goffman (1981) of the speaker’sself as three-dimensional principal, author, animator


the current speaker and the addressee characteristically do specific actions ininteraction (Schegloff, 1996).

# 77The ideal delivery of speech

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: An ‘ideal delivery’ of an utterance or text is freefrom (unplanned) pauses (filled or unfilled), pleonasms (# 45) restarts, structureshifts (# 43), and other errors (# 20).93 When disfluency problems occur inspeech, they are not pertinent to language per se (# 21).

THE BACKGROUND: Portraying utterance production in terms of ‘idealdelivery’ is an account parasitic on ideas of how a skilful performer should reciteor read sentences or texts aloud.

THE ALTERNATIVE: ‘Discontinuities’ in speech and spoken interactionhave important functions as indicators of the pace in which speakers are able (orprepared) to make verbalisations accessible to the partner and himself or herself.That is, languages have developed special devices and markers to handle thespeaker’s monitoring of his or her own speech (Allwood et al., 1990). Degrees offluency in speech may reflect planning problems, but can also be partlyintentional on the part of the speaker. Repair phenomena are important forestablishing intersubjectivity in interactions.

# 78Intersubjectivity and understanding

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The understanding of an utterance involves findingthe correct interpretation. This is either one which is expressed by the wordsactually used (# 48), or one which matches the speaker’s intention (# 75) (or, ofcourse, one which fits both these conditions).

THE BACKGROUND: Texts have a character of permanent objects, whichinvites the idea of an inherent meaning. This idea has a long past. The author’s

92 Schegloff (1982 89) argues that

if stable forms appear to emerge or recur in talk, they should be understoodas an orderliness wrested by the participants from interactionalcontingency, rather than as automatic products of standardized plans Form,one might say, is also the distillate of action and/in interaction, not only itsblueprint If that is so, then the description of forms of behavior, forms ofdiscourse (such as stories) included, has to include interaction among theirconstitutive domains, and not just as the stage on which scripts written inthe mind are played out


intentions are uniquely important in the interpretation of holy texts, according tomany religious doctrines (God’s truth!).

The particular activities in which the sender’s intentions and his or her specificwordings are crucial are often strongly dependent on writing and written texts.

THE ALTERNATIVE: What has been said or done cannot be made unsaid orundone, but it can be meaningfully interpreted and reinterpreted in retrospect indifferent ways. Utterances can be understood in many ways and at many levels;what counts in the situated interaction is not the correct interpretation, but anunderstanding that is sufficient for current practical purposes (Garfinkel, 1967),for purposes that are relevant to the parties in situ. At the same time, we usuallyapproach each other in dialogue with the assumption that we will achieveintersubjectivity94 and that we will, and do, understand each other.

Problems in communication must be explained in intersubjective terms.Mismatches between dialogue partners as regards their respective understandingsof a piece of discourse may induce repair activities and thus stimulate furthermeaning negotiation. ‘Misunderstandings’ may actually promote understanding(Linell, 1995).

There are indeed situations in which the specific wordings are crucial forwhich readings are permitted; for example, this holds for the interpretation ofmany legal documents, administrative regulations or diplomatic notes. Similarly,texts building on formal notation (e.g. in mathematics) are intended formaximally form-based interpretations (# 57). Also, there are situations of spokeninteraction in which an agent’s intentions are crucial, e.g. in specific moments ofa lawsuit investigating an alleged offence. But conditions on such specificactivities (‘situated decontextualising practices’; Linell, 1998a: 280) cannot bemade into axioms of general theories of understanding of linguistic messages.

# 79The expression of complete thoughts

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Communication consists, by definition (# 64), in theexchange of thoughts. Discourse consists of sentences (# 30) (or fragments thatcan be derived from sentences (# 41)) which are the expressions of completethoughts (propositions, etc.; # 52). Each sentence should be interpretable as anautonomous proposition in its own right.

93 The notion of ideal delivery (and the previous point about planning and execution) iscentral to the account by Clark and Clark (1977) It is discussed at length by Taylor (1997)

94 Thus, to some extent, intersubjectivity must be taken for granted in order to be attained(Rommetveit, 1974 86) ‘We must, naively and unreflectively, take the possibility ofperfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve partial intersubjectivity in real lifediscourse with our fellow men’ (Rommetveit, 1979b 161, italics in original)


THE BACKGROUND: Writers edit verbalised content sentence-by-sentence,i.e. proposition-by-proposition. Some written—literary or scholarly—sentencesare made to be quotable in isolation, as free-standing units without a documented,dialogical context.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In dialogue and communication, ‘thoughts’ are neverentirely completed, let alone by single speakers. Interlocutors ‘think together’ indialogue (# 64). Utterances are both past- and future-oriented; they exhibit inter-unit relations, which are both responsive and projective in character. They extendbeyond the single utterance (turn, turn-constructional unit) itself (# 36).

Utterances are allusive (# 48), rather than containers for completed andterminated ideas. Utterances are used in meaning-making processes, not inisolation but in combination with many kinds of contextual resources.Contributions to dialogue are subjected to reinterpretation, negotiation anddevelopment most of the time. Dialogue is, in Bakhtin’s terms, in principle‘unfinalisable’; in practice, however, we must of course put an end to situatedtexts and talk exchanges.

# 80Interpreting as translation

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Interpreting into another language in and throughspoken interaction, for example, by means of a dialogue interpreter, is a matterof correct translation.

THE BACKGROUND: Translation of written texts involves findingequivalent texts in another language; it does not directly involve interactionbetween people.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Dialogue interpreting involves both renditions ofmessages in a language different from the source language and taking part in aninteraction in a peculiar triadic situation. The dialogue interpreter, who istypically the only one who understands both languages involved, has to take on amediating or regulating role; he or she acts to some extent as a go-between. Thesituation cannot be understood only in terms of ‘translation’ 1998).

5.8The psychology and biology of language

# 81Language as an innate and uniquely human property

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is a uniquely human possession, andtherefore part of our innate predispositions. Language is primary with regard todialogue and discourse (language use; cf. # 5). Therefore, if anything isbiologically determined, it must be this basic phenomenon, i.e. language itself


(Chomsky). In addition, the complexity of natural language is such that it cannotbe acquired simply through empirical experience, especially since the verbalinput that a child receives is limited and of bad quality.95 The capacity forlanguage must be partly, or largely, innate.

THE BACKGROUND: The idea of language as a gift only to human beingshas a long past. The word was given only to man, according to dominant text-based, monotheistic religions. Religious messages have been expressed in text,e.g. the holy scriptures.

Written texts do not, except very rarely, include things that do not belong tolanguage proper, i.e. counterparts of non-verbal features.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language and dialogue interpenetrate and areinterdependent. An infant has a biologically endowed capacity for dialogue(Bråten, 1992; Trevarthen, 1992), and the predisposition for spoken language usemust be seen in this context (# 82). Moreover, people’s experiences with actuallanguage use is not limited; children spend hours every day doing things thatinvolve opportunities to explore and learn language. The quality ofconversational language is not bad, unless one judges by narrow written-language based standards (Hacker, 1990). Indeed, the linguistic and extra-linguistic environment surrounding the child is, under normal conditions,extremely rich in information (Elman et al., 1997; # 49).

There are some ‘non-verbal’ aspects of bodily communication which havecounterparts in animal communication. Such communication accompaniesspeech (# 82).

# 82The discontinuity theory of language evolution

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Language is fundamentally different from all othercommunication systems, in humans and animals. There is no continuousevolution or development, neither in phylogenesis nor in ontogenesis, from proto-or pre-verbal communication to language and verbal communication.96

95 This point is of course not shared by all linguists In the twentieth century, its mostconsistent spokesman has been Chomsky (e g 1965, 1988) As regards conversationallanguage, Chomsky argues that it is grammatically incoherent and of ‘degenerate quality’(cf # 35) (which of course amounts to a thoroughly unsubstantiated claim) Chomsky alsoargues that lexico-semantic systems are partly innate For example, he insists that

the speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternativeto the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available beforeexperience with language and is basically learning labels for concepts thatare already part of his or her conceptual apparatus

(1988 27f)


THE BACKGROUND: This point is a secular version of the theory thatlanguage was given only to man (# 81).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Many so-called non-verbal behaviours, for examplegaze, posture, facial expression, gestures and laughter, are integrated with speech(cf. # 93, # 94). Spoken language develops as a continuation of preverbal (vocaland non-vocal) behaviours (cf. # 28). Even the new-born infant indulges indialogue with others. Dialogue comes before language.97

# 83The brain as a computer

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The brain must be assumed to be a system forprocessing representations formulated in natural language or some more abstractlanguage-like form (# 84). The mind/brain has a computational character, eventhough it is probably different from those artefacts, computers in the ordinarysense, which have so far been invented and manufactured (Smith, 1999:139).

THE BACKGROUND: This point is based on analogies with computers, atechnology that may be interpreted as a complex device designed for theprocessing of written symbols. It is therefore also dependent on earlier artefactsof writing; these artefacts (written sentences, texts, images) have served asmodels and metaphors for so-called internal or mental representations (# 90).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Neural networks are densely structured, working withparallel, distributed processing, and need not be representational, according toconnectionist theories (Zlatev, 1997). Structures and functions relevant for andcontributing to communication, cognition, emotion and volition are not limited tothe brain and the neural systems; other parts of the body are also involved(Damasio, 1994).

If computers need certain kinds of representations of the world (cf. # 84), itdoes not follow that humans need the same kinds of representations of the world.Computers function differently from human beings (Dreyfus, 1979). The latterhave more dynamic, holistic and (inter)active ways of relating to and coping withthe world.

# 84The mind as processing information and representations

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: ‘The mind’ is an abstract and comprehensive termfor referring to the psychological (‘mental’) capacities and processes of thebrain.98 Cognition, according to mainstream cognitive psychology, consists in

96 A locus classicus for the discussion of continuity and discontinuity theories oflanguage is Lenneberg (1967)

97 Cf Halliday (1975), Bruner (1990), Trevarthen (1992), Bråten (1992)


processing representations formulated in a natural language or in a more abstractlanguage-like system (e.g. Fodor’s, 1976, ‘mentalese’). Cognition involvesmental computations operating on symbolic representations (cf. # 57 on logic asa formal calculus, and # 89 on syntax as algebra). Reasoning consists in rule-governed manipulation of symbols and combinations of symbols.” This implies a‘representational theory of mind’ (Fodor, 1980:63).100

THE BACKGROUND: Reading and writing texts involves specific situationsin which one thinks and works with language without directly intervening inother situations of the world. That is, they are ‘situated decontextualisingpractices’ (# 51).

Pure information processing, in the sense of manipulating (pragmaticallyuninterpreted) symbols, is what computers do. This amounts to decontextualisingto an extreme degree. The theory of cognition as information processing has beenreinforced by the use of computer analogies (# 83).

THE ALTERNATIVE: The mind cannot be understood solely or evenprimarily in terms of processes of the individual brain. Rather, the term standsfor an abstract and comprehensive way of talking about the abilities of the(‘mindful’) person to interact with the world, for example in perceiving and (re)cognising things in the world, in acting non-randomly and often purposefully inthe world, in making other people respond in certain ways, and in using languageadequately with regard to particular situations. Cognition in real life involvesrelating to and acting in the world (cf. notions like ‘situated cognition’ and‘cognition in action’).101 The human mind works with domain-specific andpragmatically permeated meaning, rather than uninterpreted informationformulated in a universal language.102

The information-processing in the brain concerns the mind’s necessaryneurophysiological substrate, rather than the mind itself. However, even if we

98 Cf, e g, Chomsky (1988 7, et passim) Chomsky often uses the expression ‘mind/brain’,since in his view, the two terms just refer to different aspects of the same physical organFor a critical discussion, see Hacker (1990), and below, Chapter 6 7 2

99 This point, that thinking consists in mental computations in a universal ‘language’, hasa long history, featuring, among others, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume and LaMettrie (‘man isa machine’) (e g Andler, 1988) It is part of an objectivist theory of rationality andmeaning (Johnson, 1987)

100 For some discussion, see Rommetveit (1998c)

101 Other related notions are ‘everyday cognition’ (Rogoff and Lave, 1984), ‘cognition inpractice’ (Lave, 1988), ‘socially shared cognition’ (Resnick, 1991) and ‘distributedcognition’ (Hutchins, 1991)

102 Pylyshyn (1980) makes a distinction between subcognition (unconscious mentalprocesses), working on ‘information’, and cognition, dealing with ‘meaning’, in anattempt to reconcile the natural-science-oriented theories of mental or cognitive‘processes’ and the social phenomenology of cognition as experienced by people insituated activities


consider cognition at this level of brain functions, it need not operate in terms ofalgorithms and representations. Theories of connectionism may providealternatives (# 83).

# 85Learning as internalisation and remembering as retention of

information

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Learning and remembering consist in theinternalisation and retention of data and facts. The contents of thinking andremembering are itemised thoughts and memories.

THE BACKGROUND: Once thoughts and memories have becomedocumented in text, they come out as determined and fixed. In school, rotelearning, verbatim memorising, and retention and reproduction of the content oftexts have been traditional ingredients.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Learning consists in becoming acquainted withaspects of the world, and is demonstrated in the creative participation in practicesappropriated. The processes of thinking and remembering are dynamic andreconstructive streams of consciousness. They are not dependent on fixed itemsof content. In addition, they involve aspects of subconscious, uncontrollableprocesses.

Remembering is a social, constructive and reconstructive activity (Middletonand Edwards, 1990). Verbatim recall occurs only under exceptionalcircumstances, including some traditional school contexts, and certain tasks inexperimental psychology.

5.9Semiotics of language, speaking and writing

# 86Languages, signs and traces

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Languages are codes, i.e. systems of signs (cf.# 46). These signs are abstract entities (# 87, # 88). At the same time, however,the abstract concept of sign is metaphorically derived from the phenomenon ofconcrete signs, that is traces of previous events and actions. Indeed, discourseand text, or, in other words, language in use, are the traces of the previous,transient human activities of talking and writing. In the case of writing, thesetraces are permanently persistent, but utterances too are products (# 68). The useof language amounts to fabricating concrete signs that guide (or sometimesmisguide) other people’s understanding of the world.

THE BACKGROUND: Concrete signs are left behind as traces of a person’sinscribing (sign-producing) activities, in particular writing a text.


THE ALTERNATIVE: Rather than being a system of signs (types rather thantokens), language can be regarded as a system of dispositions (potentialities,energeia) to carry out communicative actions of different sorts. These activitiesdo indeed sometimes (especially in writing) leave traces behind.

# 87Abstract signs

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Signs are form-meaning combinations (cf. # 46).Signs are abstract (# 15); they are removed from the things they stand for or‘represent’ (# 1).

THE BACKGROUND: In a dictionary, each entry correlates just twocomponents, a lemma and its interpretation (cf. Harris, 1980:155).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Language is not completely abstract; rather, it isabstracted from embodied behaviour. The embodiment and distribution in time(# 15) must not be forgotten, as far as spoken, interactional language isconcerned.

Words can be likened to gestures.103 Signs do not only represent, they alsopresent and construct things, and they must be considered in relation to theirusers in context. Signs are cues to or hints at interpretations; they do not‘contain’, are not inalienably coupled with, their senses. The study of abstractsigns must be supplemented with a study of the situated signifying practices.

# 88Signs as arbitrary symbols

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The ways in which form and meaning are coupledwithin abstract signs (cf. # 87) is entirely conventional, that is, not motivated bycausality or similarity relations, for example.

Despite the fact that sign tokens are concrete traces of previous behaviours(# 86), linguistic signs (words) are symbols, not indices or icons (in Peirce’sterminology). Meanings are related to forms by arbitrary conventions.104

THE BACKGROUND: When words occur in written texts, the referents arenot co-present, and therefore, the relations of similarity and contiguity are notattended to. Expository texts, in particular, are typically displaced from theirreferents, and there are no indexical and iconic relations to things talked about.

103 ‘[ ] I possess [the] articulatory and acoustic style [of a word] as one of themodulations, one of the possible uses of my body’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 180, italicsadded)

104 Though this point is most often associated with Saussure (1964), it is commonplace inlinguistics


Written language is sometimes based on explicit agreements to use certainconventions.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In the acts of using words in context, use is notarbitrary; words are used about referents and situations in ways that build onsimilarity (iconicity) and contiguity (indexicality) with referents and situationsencountered before. Some parts of vocabularies, for example metaphoricalaspects, are also non-arbitrary. In spoken interaction, many utterances are iconicor metonymic; prosodic and somatic (gestural, postural) dimensions reflectaspects of content, or exhibit part-whole relationships with regard to emotions. Inface-to-face interaction, indexical functions, that is pointing to referents, areperformed by gestures, but also by aspects of the verbal form.105 Also writingoften involves indices and icons; cf. sign-posts, maps, graphs, and various othersupplements to verbal texts (Harris, 1995).

# 89Syntax as algebra

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The fundamental property of complex signs, that isprimarily sentences, is their syntax. Their syntactic properties imply that they canbe likened to algebraic expressions (cf. # 57). Such expressions are situationallyand pragmatically uninterpreted; it is immaterial to the understanding of them asstructured linguistic expressions that they may be used with specific referencesand meanings in particular communication situations.106

For some, the essence of language lies in these abstract linguistic resources,detached from culture and communicative practices. In Chomsky’s laterwritings, these resources are ultimately brain functions (Chapter 6.7.2.) This viewis parallel to, for instance, the neurophysiological perspective on ‘memory’ as afaculty consisting of certain brain functions. In this theory, ‘subjectivememories’ of persons, events, etc. in the world are regarded as secondary (epi)phenomena.

THE BACKGROUND: Writing promotes the analysis of the internal structureof algebraic expressions, represented by inert marks on paper. Language,detached from communicative practices, is externalised in writing. Memories,rather than processes of remembering, are externalised in texts. The algebraicaspects of syntax are purified in special languages, such as mathematical logic,which Frege characterised as Begriffsschrift (# 57).

THE ALTERNATIVE: In discourse, in particular in talk-in-interaction,utterances are not semantically and situationally uninterpreted constellations of

105 Cf Clark (1996 159ff) who notes that while language use involves indicating (cfindices), demonstrating (cf icons) as well as describing-as (cf symbols), the latter hascompletely dominated the study of language

106 Cf fn 68 (this chapter)


abstract signs. Instead, semantics and pragmatics take precedence over syntax.Language cannot be detached from culture, which is inextricably intertwinedwith meaning, understanding, intention, intersubjectivity, emotion and morality.Similarly, remembering is a situated activity, in which ‘memories’ of events,persons, etc. in the world are basic (# 85).

The essence of language is not that of a private (‘mental’) symbolic calculus;it consists of resources that people have in common with other human beings andthat they use in combination with other semiotic resources in a publicmeaningful world.

Socioculturally speaking, ‘pure thinking’ as exemplified in algebraiccalculation is a marginal activity, something which cannot be taken as the basisfor general theories of language and reasoning. Most kinds of thinking involvesperceptual and bodily experiences and activities.

# 90Writing as a secondary representation

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Written texts are the secondary representations ofspeech, which is the primary type or medium of linguistic representation(Chapter 3.4.1). A linguistic, spoken sentence (or sequence of sentences) is, inturn, the outer form of a mental representation of something in the world (# 1,# 47).

Written and spoken language are basically manifestations of the samelanguage system (cf. # 9). Yet, spoken performance is often fraught with mistakesand errors (# 20, # 43).

All written texts are designed to be read, and reading involves recoding the textinto speech (although reading is nowadays most often a silent, individual activity)(# 91). Writing should be made to reflect (spoken) language (except of course forperformance errors and their phenomena). The development of efficient writingsystems (alphabets) for languages does indeed show that they have becomeincreasingly approximate to the structures of speech.

THE BACKGROUND: Written sentences and texts, pictures and graphs, etc.on paper or computer screens have been understood as externalisedrepresentations of thoughts and ideas. Mental representations (propositions;# 52) and mental images have been considered primary. But this does not followfrom the fact that writing is produced in situations in which people think. Rather,it is the other way around; the external artefacts (texts, images) have been usedas tools in thinking, and as models and metaphors for structures and processes ofthe brain or the mind. Human brains have been thought of as employingrepositories of information and representations, in analogy with written records,for example notebooks and computer disks.

THE ALTERNATTVE: Linguistic formulations do not simply reflect orrepresent other realities, but they construct or present realities in partly new andspecific forms. Written signs are not just the decodable traces of (secondary acts


of writing following) prior thinking. Nor is it probable that cognition residesexclusively in processing internal representations (# 84). Writing is not simply arepresentation of speech. Instead, various forms of writing have been developedfor special purposes and fulfil functions that cannot be mastered in speech. Anatural language is not monolithic across genres and media (speech, writing)(Chapter 3.3.1).

Writing is partly autonomous with regard to speech (Chapter 3.3.3). Manysystems of writing have been invented, and are still used, independently ofspeech. Even if many scripts allow for texts to be read, that is integrated withinactivities in which counterparts to written signs in the form of spoken utterancesare produced either aloud or silently (Harris, 1996; Pettersson, 1996), this doesnot mean that the texts themselves have to mirror the structure of speech (# 84).It is enough that there are conventions or rules for how to correlate written signswith spoken utterances.

# 91Reading as verbatim reading ‘from the book’

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Careful reading is the same as reading verbatim‘from the book’, that is all the words, in their proper syntactic constellations, arerendered as speech, either aloud or silent (as in silent reading). Reading involvesnoticing what is there ‘in the text’; if the reader uses the text for drawingconclusions not warranted by the text itself, that is not part of the reading per se.

THE BACKGROUND: Reading texts is a common activity in our Westernculture. Reading has traditionally been taught in schools as reading from the text.For a long time, it involved reading aloud, and still does in some situations,including many religious ceremonies and some educational contexts. The objectsof reading in school are coherent texts, not mere lists. But many signs of writing(Harris, 1995) were not originally designed to be systematically or exhaustivelyread as coherent texts.

Taken as WLB points, # 90 and # 91 may seem paradoxical, since, on the faceof it, they assign a kind of primacy to speech. However, they reflect a WLB-attitude by assuming that a language is a neutral reflection, or representation, ofthe things represented (cf. # 1, # 47). In addition, they misinterpret some of thesimilarities between speech and writing; many of the influences have actuallygone from written to spoken language, rather than in the other direction. TheirWLB nature is also due to the fact that we tend to take for granted that writingand reading necessarily go together.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Reading in actual life is varied, and involves more,and sometimes less, than Verbatim reading’, that is reading the text as such. Onthe one hand, reading involves interpretation and sense-making that comprise alot of inferencing, that is much more than simply decoding the written text. Atthe same time, many texts are read more extensively, without paying attention totheir full written, linguistic structure. In many activities, written notes and texts are


used as supports for acting, remembering and thinking. For example, a list ofitems to be purchased is used differently from a piece of coherent prose. A list ofpoints may be used by a lecturer merely as points of departure for considerableelaboration and commenting.

# 92Transcription as a veridical record of speech

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: An adequate and detailed transcription of a spokenutterance, or a sequence of such utterances, contains the same empirical data asthe spoken original.

THE BACKGROUND: In actual practice, analyses of spoken data are largelybased on the transcribed data, which are then simply taken as the data.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Transcriptions are necessarily selective. They promotedifferent attitudes to the discourse than do the original spoken utterances in situ(Chapter 4.3). In analysing spoken interaction, audio and videotapes should beused together with transcripts (Ochs, 1979; Nettelbladt, 1994).

# 93Gestures as non-linguistic signs

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Verbal communication in and through speech,which, by definition, is communication in and through linguistic means, isdifferent from bodily communication (# 15). Gestures, by contrast, are bodily,and non-verbal, communication. Languages are organised as specificautonomous systems (# 9), but gestures are not associated with particular naturallanguages. Instead, gestures, whether accompanying speech or not, are separatesigns of other kinds (often indexical or iconic in nature).

THE BACKGROUND: Gestures are not represented in writing (cf. # 94).THE ALTERNATIVE: Gesticulation is partly integrated with verbal conduct,

and performs interactional functions. The same applies to bodily postures, facialexpressions and gaze behaviour. Linguistic features and gestures are oftenenvironmentally coupled, that is they exploit features of the built environment(Goodwin, 2000). Speaking involves all of this. Indeed, talk-in-interaction itselfcan be conceptualised in terms of gestures (# 87). Phonetic behaviour can bethought of as complex articulatory gestures (# 23).

‘Non-verbal’ communication shares features with verbal signs (McNeill,1985). Even emblems (Ekman and Friesen, 1969) must be understood in relationto talk, since they are often used in the absence of talk, as substitutes. Languageshave indexical and iconic features too.


# 94Laughter and smiling

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Laughter and smiling are non-verbal, extra-linguistic behaviours, independent of particular languages. They are oftenproduced independently of, or in lieu of, talk. Laughter and smiling have nolanguage-specific structure (although there are cultural constraints on theiroccurrences).

THE BACKGROUND: Laughter is not marked in writing, except in a fewgenres in which some features of the spoken interaction are occasionallydescribed.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Laughter and smiling are often integrated features ofutterances in dialogue. They can elicit verbal or non-verbal reactions in dialogue,and they can function as responses to utterances 1989; Haakana,1999).

Laughter and smiling co-occur with, and sometimes substitute for, verbalexpressions, for example stance-expressing adverbials. Messages expressed bylexical means are often modified by laughter, which can mark them as non-serious, mitigating face-threatening aspects, or expressing embarrassment.

# 95Sign language and spoken language

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Sign language is based on the gestural production ofsymbolic configurations (Stokoe, 1972). Each sign can be portrayed as a‘postural’ configuration of the body parts involved in the production of the sign.Spoken language is also based on underlying ‘postural’ segments (# 23).

THE BACKGROUND: When sign language is thought to be modelled onverbal language and if targeted shapes in signing are documented by staticdrawings and photographs in dictionaries, the theory of sign language takes overassociations from the notion of written, verbal language.

THE ALTERNATIVE: In ‘sign language’, we are faced with a signing systemin which signing is like talk-in-interaction, more characterised by motion andmovements than by postures and positions. ‘Signing language’ is therefore abetter term than ‘sign language’. Similarly, ‘spoken language’, a product-oriented term too (cf. # 12, # 68), is actually a misnomer. Since action is basic tospeech, ‘speaking language’ would be a more appropriate term.

# 96The visual mode and the monological stance

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: The visual mode is the most important for cognitionand communication, since texts and pictures are permanent and can be inspected


repeatedly and systematically. Perceptions leading to linguistic descriptions areprimarily based on visual inspection of the surrounding world.

THE BACKGROUND: Vision is the dominant modality in reading and ininvestigations in the psychological and natural sciences. Vision enhances anobserver’s monological perspective. In science, we look at, rather than listen to,the phenomena. Sounds too can be recorded and then displayed as ‘visual speech’.

THE ALTERNATIVE: The spoken-auditory mode enhances a dialogicalactor’s perspective; a speaker can hear his or her own talk, and thus the speakerand the other are put on a more equal footing. Within the visual, there is animportant difference between gaze and mutual gaze; it is only the latter thatmakes us self-conscious (Farr, 1990:35, 38, et passim).

5.10Extensions of language and text metaphors

# 97Collective representations of the world as stable stocks of

knowledge

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Communication is made possible because culturesand languages support collective representations of the world. Suchrepresentations may be thought of as social, and fairly stable, stocks ofknowledge that people share (albeit to varying extents) and use as backgroundknowledge in communication and cognition.

THE BACKGROUND: The notion of ‘representation’ (of the world) (cf. # 1)is dependent on such static ‘representations’ as pictures, diagrams, etc. (# 90). Inaddition, the conventional picture of ‘social representation’ of particular topics,say X and Y, seems to have been influenced by the phenomenon of (long)encyclopedia articles, under the entries X and Y. Social representations aretherefore thought of in analogy with texts and pictures.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Knowledge of the world, what we may call ‘socialrepresentations’, is based on social practices. Such representations consist ofideas, systems of ideas, knowledge, beliefs, ways of acting, thinking and talkingthat people (in a given culture) entertain with respect to particular domains of theworld; thus, representations are mostly domain-specific107 and sociallydistributed, rather than general and collective. Though relatively stable acrossparticular communicative events, they are not static, but on the contrary dynamic,communicatively constructed, circulated in real social life, only partially sharedand only in part systematic.108 Social representations are both cognitive andbiographically and socio-historically based. Many are characterised by tensions,ambiguities and contradictions, and their content may be differentially exploited,and occasionally fixated, in particular contexts. Hence, we can compare them, insome relevant respects, with the meaning potentials of words (# 46).


# 98Moral systems as objective

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Systems of moral norms can be conceived of asspecial cases of social representations (# 97). However, moral norms should beunderstood in terms of stable, well-defined and autonomous moral rules. Suchrules have some properties in common with linguistic rules, which are objective,social facts too. Moral systems can be explored by experts in objective terms.

THE BACKGROUND: Moral and legal rules have usually been given inwriting, from biblical times onwards.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Morality is partly a situated accomplishment, andbased on social practices. (A similar argument could be made with regard toGrice’s 1975 maxims of conversation, which are partly of a moral character.)Moral norms are ultimately based on habits (mores) and their evaluations(ethos), which are negotiated, confirmed and exhibited in and through people’sverbal (and non-verbal) interaction and social intercourse.109 It is related to trust,which is a thoroughly interpersonal and interactional phenomenon.

Moral systems, as developed by expert philosophers, and often in putativelyobjective terms, are the results of particular fixating activities, done for specificpurposes (cf. # 57).

# 99The homogeneity of cultures

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Cultures, whether local, regional or national, are,just like languages, unified and homogeneous bodies of values, norms andknowledge. People who belong to a community share the same culture. A culturemay be seen as a system of values, which are determined by system-internalrelations.

THE BACKGROUND: Political action has often tried to unify nationallanguages. This also involves attempts at unifying cultures. The assumption of

107 Some scattered examples of such domains, for which social (‘common-sense’)representations have been explored by social-representation theorists, are nature,biotechnology and genetically modified organisms, cancer, AIDS, the Swiss bankingsystem, the global climate change, or the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001

108 A particular theory of ‘social representations’ is associated with the work of SergeMoscovici See Farr (1987) and Moscovici (2000) There are many interpretations of thetheory, only some of which assume that representations are relatively fixed and static(Wagner, 1996) A more dialogical and constructionist account of socio-cultural knowledgeis clearly possible (Marková, 1996, 2003, Linell, 2001c) It is therefore different from aDurkheimian theory of collective representations A more Durkheimian version of socialconstructionism, involving ‘social stocks of knowledge’, is propounded by Berger andLuckmann (1966)

109 Cf Bergmann (1998), Luckmann (1998) and Linell and Rommetveit (1998)


homogeneous culture is often implicit in language studies, except sometimes insociolinguistics. One can interpret this assumption as an extension of theassumption of homogeneity of language (# 9, # 10), language being the moststructured and easily studied expression of culture.

The common insistence on the purity and unity of languages and culturesseems to reflect a widespread fear of impurity in many cultures (Douglas, 1966).Quasi-scientific theories of races, nations and cultures, flourishing particularly inthe nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, also interpreted mixedcultures in terms of degeneration, contamination and corruption, as signs ofcultural maladies (e.g. Young, 1995). Similarly, hybrid languages have beenregarded as degenerate, as emergent from their circulation in zones of dubiousstandards.

THE ALTERNATTVE: Cultures, like languages, are not monolithic systems,but are characterised by diversity, tensions and variations, as well as bycommonalities. People are not simply members of singular cultures. There areplenty of ‘crossings’ of languages and cultures (Gumperz et al., 1979; Rampton,1995, 2001). Multiculturality is often a sign of cultural richness, rather thandegeneration.

# 100Pictures as texts

THE WLB ASSUMPTION: Images and pictures are semiotic entities that can beanalysed in theoretical terms derived from the structural analysis of verballanguage (written text).

THE BACKGROUND: This point is not typical of linguistics at large;linguists have seldom paid attention to anything but (written) language.110 Butthe point of # 100 was developed particularly in post-Saussurean semiology,especially by Barthes (1993), who applied notions like syntagm and paradigm topictures.

THE ALTERNATIVE: Images and pictures are not based on linearity. Iconityin (‘non-abstract’) pictures is very different from verbal language.

# 101Understanding nature

Understanding things that may seem radically different than language anddiscourse, for example understanding nature itself, is in fact analogous to readinga text, that is finding the meanings of what are in effect signs. Such signs aretraces of (causally) prior processes and activities (# 86). Meanings are inherent in

110 Today there are of course important exceptions, e g Harris (1995, 1996) and Kressand van Leeuwen (1996)


the text (# 47); there is a ‘true’ reading to be provided by experts (# 58). (Notethat this theory of text meaning is opposite to the one presupposed in # 3.)

THE BACKGROUND: In earlier times, natural science was conceived of interms of ‘reading the book of nature’ (cf. Olson, 1994). Often, the meaning thatwas supposed to be waiting to be discovered was thought of as God’s meaning(see Chapter 6.10).

THE ALTERNATIVE: Exploring nature and doing natural science is largely amatter of finding causal explanations. This is different from interpreting texts, ashas been known for a very long time, for example in hermeneutic and dialogicaltraditions (von Wright, 1971).

5.11Conclusion: WLB in linguistics as a partly homogeneous

and partly heterogeneous set of assumptions

The 101 WLB points are rather different in nature. Some might appear to befairly trivial, others are more deep-seated and have taken me more time andimagination to identify. Some of the points are quite close to one another, a fewalmost on the verge of being mutual paraphrases. In other cases, I have pulledtogether what in a different analysis might be stated as different points. Toaccount for some of these connections, I will therefore, in Chapter 6, discuss someof the clusters formed by families of WLB points. There I will also discuss someof the transformations that points and themes have undergone as they havemoved across theoretical environments.

It follows from this that the precise number of points is completely arbitrary.Naturally, I would not claim that there are exactly 101 points in linguistic theorywhere the reflections of a WLB can be spotted. Rather, the choice of the oddnumber of 101 is supposed to suggest that further points could have been added.

When the points are considered together, it appears that they do not form anentirely coherent position on the nature of language. Indeed, some points appearto be almost contradictory, such as the theses that language is simply a means ofrepresenting a world existing independently of language (# 1), and that the worlditself is by and large constituted in and through language (# 3). However, this isnot as paradoxical as it may seem; in this particular case, a common underlyingclaim is that language and the world are distinct, and that only one of them isprimary. (This assumption is hardly necessary; see # 1.) Where the positionsdiffer concerns the problem of which of them, language or the outside world, istaken as primary (see also Chapter 6.2).

A related case of a blatant contradiction between points is that betweenassumptions of objectivist meaning (# 46, # 47, # 48) and radical relativism(# 3), which are related to considerations of language as an abstract system(derived from or suited for theorising written language) and of language use asparticular texts (i.e. written or writing-like texts), respectively.111 The latter isprimarily a (post-)modern position and comes from literary theory rather than


linguistics. As we have seen, it is the perspective on languages as abstract systemsthat has dominated linguistics proper.

A general point, then, is that sometimes, very different conclusions can bedrawn from basically the same general assumptions. At least, this is possible aslong as the whole system has not been made explicit and checked for logicalconsistency. Such is of course the case with many of the pretheoreticalassumptions associated with the WLB. There is no reason why they should haveformed an entirely consistent theory. Therefore, the very activity by myself andother such-minded people of assembling all the points and constructing them as awhole (‘the WLB of linguistics’) cannot help having an effect on ourunderstanding of the subject matters. In the terminology of Chapter 6, this is, inits own right, a rather grand-scale recontextualisation of the attempts by linguistsand others at trying to understand language and communication in sometimesrather different ways.

Bearing these remarks in mind, it should also be natural to realise and accept,as I have already pointed out, that not every one of the 101 points is endorsed byeach and every traditional, structural or generative linguist. In general, somepoints seem to have a weaker form in traditional grammar, as compared tostructuralist or Chomskyan linguistics: for example, the idea of a unitarylanguage (# 7) is radicalised by the structuralist assumption of self-sufficiency(# 9) and by the Chomskyan assumption of maximal generalisations (# 10).Some of the points may not exactly correspond to what some linguists say ‘intheory’, but they may still be characteristic of the attitudes that have beenadopted in actual practice. All in all, it is no exaggeration to claim that theoverwhelming majority of points have been constitutive of mainstreamlinguistics.

I would also like to reiterate that most of the distinctions and concepts listed asWLB ASSUMPTIONS are, in my view, not entirely pointless for spokenlanguage, or for language in general, at least not in less extreme formulations. Forexample, languages have a systematic character, with an internal organisationand some kind of autonomy; however, this cannot warrant statements thatlanguages are absolutely closed and maximally integrated and coherent (# 9,# 10). In addition, just to take a few additional examples at random, there is somekind of segmental structure to speech (# 23), the type-token distinction in someform is necessary (# 14), many utterances have some hierarchical structures(# 37), and parts of them exhibit a sentence or clause structure (# 30), parts ofverbal language are typically articulated in terms of propositions (# 52),utterances derive an important part of their meaning from their sequentialpositions (# 73), and languages and linguistic formulations can support differentperspectives on the world (# 3). However, typically, the points are not applicableto an absolute or full extent, especially as far as spoken interactional language is

111 I take up this contradiction again in Chapter 8 3–4


concerned. This is what I have tried to indicate in the ALTERNATIVES underthe various points.

To summarise, one may think of the WLB account as a backdrop againstwhich, or as a conceptual framework within which, more specific theories ofvarious properties of language can be, and have been, articulated. No branch orschool of linguistics may espouse the whole of the WLB. Nor does the WLBaccount retell the whole story about language as told by mainstream linguistics.But it does account for significant parts of a general theoretical framework,which has been dominant for centuries and which, in isolation, is partlymisguided, at least as far as spoken language is concerned. It is a frameworkwhich tends to compartmentalise and fragment aspects of language, dealing withthem in abstraction from the contexts in which they need to be considered. Theyform what Harris (1996) would call a ‘segregational’ approach, as opposed to the‘integrational linguistics’ he proposes himself. Hopefully, the counter-proposalsof the ALTERNATIVES above form a sufficiently coherent alternative, that is adialogical and integrational approach (Linell, 1998a).

Having said all this, I think it is safe to conclude that spoken interactionallanguage has not only been studied much less than it deserves (especially whenconsidered against the fact that linguists have constantly asserted its primacy),but it has also been studied with models that are not particularly apt for capturingits basic features of dynamics, embodiment, distribution in time and integrationwithin situated communicative practices. Many existing grammars of spokeninteractional languages are still lacking on accounts of observational, descriptiveand explanatory adequacy (to adopt the terminology of Chomsky, 1964:29).

It is possible to characterise the WLB perspective as largely monologistic(Linell, 1998a); it favours a universal, fixed perspective on language. It assignsinfluence only to two monological authorities, the supraindividual languagesystem and the individual speaker. Historically, Bourdieu (2000) would locatesuch an approach firmly within a scholastic tradition, which commits the fallacyof universalising particular cases and of forgetting the social conditions thatmade the evolution of the approach possible.112 The mainstream approach tolanguage has sprung from activity-specific, practical and normative concerns (cf.the BACKGROUND sections above). The movements from normative goals andpractical activities related to literacy practices to descriptive ambitions andclaims of generalised theory (putatively valid for language in general, includingspoken language) are significant aspects of the history of language theorising. Ishall return to this theme later (Chapter 8.3). First, in the next chapter, I will dealmore systematically with some of the more specific historicalrecontextualisations.

112 Bourdieu (2000) does not use the term ‘monologism’, but talks aboutmonoperspectivism and ‘epistemocentrism’


Part III

Discussion

6The transformations of some written-

language-based themes

6.1Introduction: recontextualising themes in linguistics

What I intend to do in this chapter1 is to analyse some themes in the history oflinguistics and in the genealogy of linguistic concepts. Using an analogy withdialogue or conversation, I will argue that such thematic developments can beseen as embedded within a conversation between traditions, schools, trends and‘movements’.2

Dialogues and conversations have many characteristic properties.3 One is thecollective development or co-authorship (co-construction) of meaning; topicsand ideas cannot be developed by single individuals or, in our case, by individualscholars or single schools. Ideas crucially presuppose, and are often responses to,other ideas, and they give themselves rise to partly new ideas, which otherpeople attend to and respond to. In a certain sense, ideas ‘cor-respond’ with oneanother. Contributions to a dialogue have a Janus-like nature; they are bothresponses to prior contributions, and involve initiatives that define the localcontext for possible next contributions.

Another point concerns the partial unpredictability of a conversation; topicscan change in so many ways, due to the involvement of many actors, and to thecombination of numerous internal and external forces and contexts. Newcontributors to dialogue can bring in perspectives that would so far haveappeared to be strange or alien to the discourse on the matters in focus.Dialogues exhibit both continuities and discontinuities; material which has, insome way or another, been part of prior discourse, may be recontextualised intonovel contexts and made part of new communicative or cognitive projects,subject to other commitments than before, and the incorporation of ideas from

1 I thank Ragnar Rommetveit for numerous detailed comments on an earlier draft of thischapter

other contexts may lead to the marginalisation of aspects which were earlier infocus.

Of course, the ‘conversation of traditions’ within the sociocultural context ofthe history of a discipline, such as linguistics, is not quite like the situatedinteraction in an ordinary conversation. In general, the development spans a verylong time period, and participants, the individual authors, often do not directlyinteract with one another in real time. New commentators often enter thedialogue from a partly distanced position. Nevertheless, this is, in some respects,similar to a multi-party conversation, in which participants come and go, or atleast are active only in periods, and in which new episodes are often initiated byparticular participants’ recontextualising material from the prior dialogue,providing fresh perspectives on the subject matter and locating it in a newargumentative surrounding.

The 101 points of Chapter 5 are far from being mutually unrelated. On thecontrary, many of them cluster around certain common or similar themes. Suchthemes appear in varying disguises in different contexts, and they have been usedfor divergent purposes in different times and socio-cultural and scientificenvironments. Well-known phenomena and old understandings are sometimesrecategorised, reclassified or reformulated using other words and new concepts,and, conversely, old words are appropriated by scholars for use in new contexts.Yet, partly the same themes—concepts, attitudes, arguments and knowledgesystems—have been recontextualised across many domains of knowledge, andsimilar conceptions and ideologies of language have been reproduced.

A central notion in the dialogistic vocabulary is that of recontextualisation(Linell, 1998a, 1998b). It may be defined as the dynamic transfer-and-transformation of something from one discourse/text-in-context to another, orfrom one tradition (or ‘order’4) of discourse to another. Recontextualisationinvolves the extrication of some part or aspect from a text or discourse, or from agenre (tradition, order) of texts or discourses, and the fitting of this part or aspectinto another context, that is into another text/discourse or text/discourse genre,and its use and environment. In Goffman’s (1974) terms, recontextualisationtherefore usually amounts to reframing. Among the aspects of discourse whichcan be recontextualised are: linguistic expressions, concepts and propositions,‘facts’, arguments and lines of argumentation, assessments, values andideologies, knowledge and theoretical constructs, stories, ways of seeing thingsand ways of acting towards them, ways of thinking and ways of saying things.

2 Such an analysis of a discipline is thus opposed to a ‘narrowly preconceived model ofscientific development’, describing the evolution of the discipline as ‘a continuouslyprogressive path to the present’, usually using an ‘uncritical chronicling’ of thecontributions by great scientists (cf Ash, 1983 143)

3 See Linell (1998a) for a comprehensive survey


Recontextualisations occur as words and concepts circulate, and arecirculated, across domains of practice and knowledge; they wander from mouthto mouth, and across minds, texts and discourses. A recontextuali sation is nevera pure transfer of a fixed meaning. It involves transformations of meanings andmutations of meaning potentials in ways that are usually quite complex and sofar not very well understood. It is therefore important to considerrecontextualisations themselves as sense-making practices; selected parts ofdiscourses and their meanings in the prior, ‘quoted’ (source) discourse-in-context are used as resources in creating new meaning in the ‘quoting’ (target)text and its communicative contexts. For example, changes in meaning ofteninvolve reversals of figure-ground relations; what is central in one context maybecome peripheral in the other, and vice versa.

While ‘recontextualisation’ is originally a text-based notion (as it is implied inthe work of, for example, Bakhtin and Kristeva), it is of fundamental importanceto all cognition and communication, including in particular talk-in-interaction (acontention which is, by the way, in the spirit of Bakhtin). Bernstein (1990:59–61) used the term ‘recontextualisation’ in the discussion of the reproduction ofeducational discourse, and it has also been used in ethnography (e.g. Bauman andBriggs, 1990). Linell (1998a, 1998b) argues that it can be assigned a wideapplicability and a fundamental position in the theory of communication.Recontextualisations can occur at all levels of discourse: intratextual cases(within the same text, conversation or focused encounter), intertextualphenomena (relating different specific texts, discourses and conversations, eachof them anchored in its specific contexts), and ‘interdiscursive’ phenomena,occurring at more abstract and global levels and concerning relations betweendiscourse types (communicative activity types, genres, orders of discourse)rather than between specific text tokens. In proposing the term ‘interdiscursive’,Fairclough (1992) seems to prefer the Foucaultian notions of ‘discourse’ and‘order of discourse’. A ‘discourse’ is then, roughly, all that has been (or couldbe) said about some (widely defined) topic and, in (at least partly) particular,culture-specific ways, for example within a specific genre (‘order of discourse’),tradition, profession, time period, or the like. In this chapter, I shall analyse somelarge-scale, ‘inter-discursive’ recontextualisations across schools of thought in thehistory of the language sciences.5

Recontextualisations involve both a continuity aspect and a discontinuityaspect. Let us begin with the discontinuity aspect. It pertains to the fact thatrecontextualisations always, and by definition, involve fitting material into newcontexts with other background premisses, and therefore concepts, argumentsand claims will acquire partly new meanings and have new, and perhapsunexpected, consequences. Terms, concepts and arguments, and bundles and

4 On the concept of ‘order of discourse’, borrowed from the work of Michel Foucault, seeFairclough (1992)

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF SOME WRITTEN-LANGUAGE-BASED 127

systems of concepts and arguments, move across contexts of use; as regardslanguage and discourse, we are concerned with knowledge that is derived frompractical domains: learning to read and write, teaching and learning foreignlanguages, translating, standardising languages, dealing with language ineveryday activities. This knowledge gets converted, in many steps, into scientifictheorising within scholarly genres and activities. In addition, we havemovements between divergent scientific paradigms and research interests, andsome of these will be highlighted here. These recontextualising movementsinvolve transformations, as words and concepts gain new meaning; we could talkalso about reconceptualisations or resemioticisations, mutations of sense andvalue.

But at the same time, there is also a continuity aspect in recontextualisationsacross contexts; concepts, theories, arguments and understandings carry part oftheir history with them. Continuities range from cases in which later writers orepoques say virtually the same thing as their predecessors (this would be‘ventriloquation’ of others’ voices in Bakhtinian terminology) to cases in whichlater contributions are really ‘counterutterances’ to earlier stances and claims. Thatis, in the latter case, a prior theory may be virtually contradicted by subsequenttheories, it is met with a’counter-word’. Yet, the new theories get their identitiesprecisely from countering the earlier ones. Such theories cannot be properlyunderstood if we do not see what views they are opposed to. Therefore, the priortheories have, in a sense, contributed to the evolution and formulation of latertheories. Bakhtin may have wanted to speak of ‘co-authorship’ between differentvoices, subjects, stances or traditions. While the cases of ‘counter-theories’involve a lot of discontinuities, it often turns out in such cases that theories andtheir counter-theories share some common assumptions; if there was no‘common ground’ (Clark, 1996), there would be no communication across theboundaries. The following sections will provide several examples of thisphenomenon.

In the upcoming chapter, I will select a few recurrent themes in the languagesciences for consideration in the terms suggested here. There are continuities inthese themes, yet they have become recontextualised and reconceptualised acrossdifferent theoretical environments, and have been subject to varioustransformations. Before proceeding to the various themes that I want to bring up,some limitations of my analysis must be stated. I must be content withestablishing some similarities between ideas and their variants in differentcontexts. These variants are often clearly distributed in time, some remaining moreor less constant over long periods (such as many attitudes typical of everyday lifeor traditional educational systems), others being distinctly typical of particular

5 For analyses of intra- and intertextual recontextualisations, especially as applied toprofessional and organisational discourse, and for discussion of the concept ofrecontextualisation, see Linell (1998b) and Sarangi (1998)


schools and traditions of specialised linguistic thought, and therefore oftenlimited also in time and space. I suggest relations between such provinces ofmeaning, proposing that they can be thought of in terms of recontextualisations.Using the dialogistic framework, including the above-mentioned analogy withconversations, I construe the history of ideas and concepts as a background for laterdevelopments; a given epoque is interpreted in the light of how it was taken upand reinterpreted by later epoques. But I will provide no truly historical accounthere, no detailed description of empirically attested influences between scholarsand traditions. While such a history of ideas would naturally be highly relevant,it would necessitate much more space than this chapter can provide.6 I cantherefore only give some sketches of possible and plausible connections betweenpoints belonging to a written-language-biased epistemology for language,cognition and communication. These sketches will include a time dimension, sowe could perhaps talk about a genealogical account; I am concerned with howideas and concepts have emerged over time and ended up where we are now. Inmy account, however, the idea of a genealogy, associated with the work ofNietzsche and Foucault, will be recontextualised within a Bakhtinian framework.7

6.2The Cartesian distinction between language and the world

In mainstream thinking about language, mind and society, one finds numerousCartesian dichotomies such as those between structure and praxis (use), societyand individual, content and expression, discourse and context, cognition andcommunication, self and other. It is characteristic of a Cartesian ontology that theconcepts, the two poles opposed to each other in each dichotomy, are assumed tobe conceptually independent of each other; one can think of one withoutnecessarily dragging in the other. The phenomena covered by the two conceptsare even taken to be empirically distinct (one can find them in different places),and one of the dichotomy’s poles is assumed to be logically, ontologically oreven causally prior to the other. Monological theories of the mind assign primacyto language structure over linguistic praxis, to cognition over communication, tocontent over expression, to self over other, etc. A dialogical framework wouldstress the conceptual intertwinement of the concepts involved in each pair;neither member can be thought of independently of the other, and neither can beassigned primacy over the other (e.g. Linell, 1998a: 36; Marková, 2003).

One very general distinction is that between language and ‘the world’, thelatter being that which language and discourse ‘are about’, in terms of reference,

6 Indeed, it would be possible to scrutinise the history of each recontextualising chain andthen write a treatise only on that My goal, however, has been to provide a comprehensivetreatment of the whole WLB in linguistics


description and explanation. Here, we find two extreme positions in the historyof linguistic ideas. According to one of them, which has undoubtedly been thedominant view, the world is unequivocally primary, and language has arepresentational function. This ‘surrogationalism’ (Roy Harris; language is a‘surrogate’) in turn has two very different variants, objectivism or empiricism(the dominant position), and subjectivism or intellectualism (the minorityposition) (Chapter 5: # 1). The other extreme view, linguistic determinism,would reason in the opposite direction; it is language that is primary, and theworld, as it appears to us, is linguistically constituted (# 3).

What interests us in this context is that the positions above, linguisticrepresentationalism and linguistic determinism, which appear to be mutuallycontradictory, share the same, fundamental assumption, namely that languageand the world are distinct phenomena (# 1). They differ with regard to the otherCartesian principle, namely that primacy and causality relations are necessarilydirected from one entity to the other. If we conceive of one position as derivedfrom the other by recontextualisation, we see that such an operation wouldinvolve a radical reversal of priorities and perspectives. While the two views arerelated by discontinuity, one being a ‘counter-word’ to the other, there is acontinuity aspect in that they share the common ground. At the same time, thesedifferent visions have a dialogical alternative, which advises us to leave thestraitjacket of Cartesian assumptions and to accept the mutual dependency oflanguage and apperceptions of the world.

Having used this general point as a vignette for this chapter, I will now discussa number of recurrent, and somewhat more specific, themes in the scientificinquiries into language and discourse, and examine how these topics gettransformed in the dialogue, or sometimes perhaps lack of dialogue, betweenscholarly approaches. The themes I take up do not, of course, exhaust the availablematerial; there are other topics that could have been used.8 I have chosen thefollowing six themes: communication as a transfer process, the distinctionbetween language and speech, the notion of a language, linguistic items asobjects, norms and rules in languages and linguistics, and sentences as theprimary units of language. Finally, I will add a couple of points about thesemiotic extension of linguistic theories to other phenomena than language.

7 Foucault (1977) discusses Nietzsche’s use of terms like genealogy, origin (Ursprung),descent (Herkunft), and the like I am not so much interested in historical origins, in thesense of objective events untouched by their subsequent development in the history ofknowledge, rather, I attempt a kind of genealogical account of how ideas and conceptshave come to be what they (appear to) be here and now (or at the point in time, fromwhich their descent is being explored) This, I assume, concerns Herkunft or Entstehung,rather than Ursprung or Geburt in Nietzschean terms (cf Foucault, 1977 140ff) If this isaccurate, I should perhaps have used ‘genealogy’ rather than ‘origin’ in the title of thebook


6.3Communication as transfer by means of a code

In nuce:9 There are various theories of communication (Peters, 1999), including

‘dialogical’ ones (Linell, 1998a). But the dominant ones, throughout most of thehistory of linguistics and philosophy, have been variants of a transfer theory,usually combined with some sort of a code theory of language. I shall deal withthis mainstream theory here.

First, an etymological excursion: the term ‘communication’ goes back to Latincommunicare, which means ‘to share, make common’, and originally, the termwas evidently used about sharing messages, or perhaps more concrete gifts(Peters, 1999:7). When words like communication and communicate wereintroduced as loan-words into European languages like English, French orSwedish, they were used about the exchange of messages. However, they soonalso acquired meanings related to military road systems, the physicaltransportation of fluids in connected vessels as well as to messages in artefact-supported signalling systems, and, in some languages, the transportation of

8 For example, Nystrand et al (1993) perform a somewhat similar analysis of aconceptual complex including the notions of ‘writing’, ‘text’ and ‘meaning’ (in text anddiscourse)


people and goods, etc. Metaphors usually work from concrete to abstract things,and disregarding parts of the ancient history of the words for ‘communication’,something similar seems to have had a considerable influence on how the concepthas been understood over the more recent centuries. Communicative processesinvolving the exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings by means of speech,writing and other symbolic systems have often been explicated in terms ofvarious conduit metaphors. ‘Conduit’ means a pipe or channel for carrying afluid, or a rigid tube or duct for carrying and protecting electrical wires or cables.The explication of the communication of meanings and messages makesfrequent use of words like channel, duct transmitting signals, source anddestination, transportation; Reddy (1979) provides many examples of how suchconduit metaphors have invaded everyday language. Communication has beenthought of as a process of transfer or transportation.

Accordingly, the transfer model of verbal communication seems to have beenaffected by other mundane uses of the word ‘communication’. However, let usnow go back to the beginnings and to the nutshell formulation above. It starts outfrom the assumption that language is used to represent, categorise and describethe world; words represent our experience of the world—they code it (# 1). Thesenses provide representations that mirror the structure of the outside world; onthis view, the senses too are in fact thought of as transference (or communication)channels. Words are used as names, or labels, of the concepts so produced. Thisis commonly known as ‘nomenclaturism’. Variants of this theory wereformulated by Aristotle (‘imprint theory’),10 Locke (notion of ‘simple ideas’),and many others throughout history. Augustine, according to Peters (1999:67ff.)‘in many ways a fountainhead of the concept of communication’, saw linguisticsigns as passive vessels, and as media of transport and communication. Wordsand languages did not contribute to meaning; meanings were already there, ‘outthere’ in the world and as interiorities of the human mind (or heart) (cf. the modernontologies of objectivism and subjectivism; Chapter 6.2). ‘The thingsthemselves’, God’s creation, were ‘all but infinitely superior to words’ (Peters,1999:68), the words being tied to the bodies of fallen man.

Ideas, which are thought to be internal to individual souls, are primary in along Western ‘spiritualist tradition’ (Peters, 1999:63ff.) Connected to this viewis the theory that language codes our sensory and cognitive ideas; this has beenformulated by many thinkers, as different as Augustine, the medieval modistsand the young Wittgenstein (1922), although connecting these formulationswould involve several recontextualisations. In less sophisticated versions, this

9 In most of the following sections, I will start by a summary of the putative evolution, ina nutshell, before I flesh out the argument In these nutshell formulations, I use bold toindicate variants of the concept(s) in focus, and italics to refer to (fragments of) (new)relevant contexts, i e historical circumstances and conditions, partly consisting of activityenvironments and sociopolitical realities, partly of conceptual contexts or ideationalenvironments These contexts have been boxed off and grey-shadowed to the right


theory of the relation between language and ‘reality’ has also been lived, and isstill lived, by many lay people. Moreover, the ideal of language as a code is stillhonoured in many activities where exact terminologies must be designed (cf.Chapter 6.5.1 on ideas of the perfect language).

The transfer model of communication is, as we have seen, closely related tothe thesis that cognition precedes communication; ideas (‘thoughts’) aredeveloped and housed by individuals, and are then brought into language andtransmitted in communication. (The same applies a fortiori, according to thistheory, to individual emotions and volitions.) Even if interpersonalcommunication has—by some—been regarded as the primary function oflanguage, cognition is still (for these scholars) the prime mover. As an interestingcase in point, one could consider (2002) study of more than 40traditional grammar books dealing with the Swedish language from the lateseventeenth to the late twentieth century, in which she notices that theoverwhelming majority of authors regard language as a medium for representingthought. However, when the minority (mainly some late nineteenth-century andtwentieth-century linguists) did appoint interpersonal communication as theprimary function of language, they would characteristically take it for grantedthat language in communication simply serves to express ideas and thoughts,that is, in modern terms, products of cognition. Thus, we have a transfer modelof communication, in which cognition is indeed the only fundamentalphenomenon, and language is a code ancillary to this, and, more particularly, tothe interpersonal communication of individuals’ thoughts. Therefore, thetraditional conception shows no recognition of the dialogical idea that meaningis, at least in part, communicatively constructed (rather than simply cognitivelyconstructed prior to communicative processes); according to this view, languagecontributes to sense-making, to assigning meaning to what is said in and throughthe situated interaction. (At the same time, dialogism would of course hardlydeny that we communicate ideas and thoughts.)

The theory of language as a code (# 46) and the theory of communication as atransfer or transportation of coded messages (# 66) is a popular combination.

10 Roy Harris (2002b 612) notes that Plato, in the Theaetetus, put forward a competitor toAristotle’s theory of sense perception

According to this, the sensible qualities perceived—for example, thewhiteness of snow—reside neither in the original object nor in theperceiving sense-organ Whiteness somehow arises as the joint product ofan interaction between eye and object In other words, it is not a case ofpattern transference at all

Here, we find germs of a dialogical account of the relation between the mind andthe affordances of the world


Indeed, it has been thought that communication, or anything approaching perfectcommunication, would be impossible unless we share exactly the same languageand unless correctly coded messages can be transmitted without disturbances(‘noise’). This is what explains mutual understanding, one argues. Harris (1981,1997), who calls this the ‘telementational theory’, shows that it has beenpropounded by many philosophers and linguists, such as John Locke, HermannPaul and Ferdinand de Saussure. Locke expounds it in An Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding (1975).11 Saussure (1964:27ff.) took it up in his ‘circuitof parole’ (although Thibault, 1997, shows that other features of Saussure’s workshow that he was far from a ‘transfer theorist’).

However, the assumption that communication involves perfect mutualunderstanding is contradicted by mundane experience. As many scholars haveargued, what matters is understanding which is sufficient for situated, currentpurposes (Garfinkel, 1967). In most situations, there is no such thing as thesingle, complete and correct understanding; what we often do in communicationis instead—by and large—to trust other’s communicative acts, to trade on eachother’s meanings and to act on the basis of provisional understandings. There isno other way out. The fixed code assumption is therefore unnecessary (Taylor,1992). It is based on a loose concept of mutual understanding, which has beenconverted into a scientific dogma.

After this dialogical interlude, let us return to the transfer theory ofcommunication. It received new support from at least two powerful sources orcontexts in the twentieth century. Peters (1999:22ff.) talks about them as the‘technical and therapeutic discourses’, especially after World War II. Thus, onthe one hand, there are theories of mass communication. These are theories ofhow the same text gets multiplied and distributed in many copies to recipients,who then, in one reasonable sense, receive the same message. (Of course, fewtheories would assume that all readers understand the text in the same way.)Such a theory is just a radicalisation of already existing theories of writtencommunication, for example of letter exchange. Models of information exchangein organisations also reinforce such transfer models, although in new contexts;documents are either distributed or not distributed along the lines (channels,conduits) of communication in the organisation. Another important discourse,according to Peters, is that of (popularising) therapeutic communication and theethos of self-realisation, expressing a dream of establishing true contact betweenindividuals who usually fail to communicate. Popular psychology fosters the ideathat ‘straight’ communication, an unimpeded transfer of thoughts and feelings, isa possibility.

The most influential transfer model in modernity is probably that of Shannonand Weaver (1949), who were concerned with information transmission intechnical systems. This information theory acquired status and respect because itallowed for various mathematical calculations of information capacity, amongother things. It was taken over, recontextualised, in many textbooks of speech


communication (e.g. Denes and Pinson, 1963). At the same time, this ties backto much older, purely ‘theoretical’ explications such as that of Locke.

Few linguists, philosophers or psychologists of today would hold that alanguage is a code in a strict sense, or that sense-making in discourse would belimited to ‘decoding’ what has been ‘linguistically encoded’ into spoken orwritten texts. Many would prefer to talk about the ‘underspecification’ oflinguistic meaning, and the pragmatic enrichment of meaning (e.g. Kempson et al.,2001; Carston, 2002). But the old ideas, albeit considerably modified, that isrecontextualised, still persist, for instance in familiar distinctions between directand indirect speech acts (Searle, 1975b), or direct and inferred meaning. Oneexample concerns how meanings are inferred by means of conventional orconversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). Another theory building upon asimilar distinction is that of Clark and Clark (1977), who claim that theunderstanding of utterances can be (at least analytically) divided into, first,decoding and comprehending the linguistic content and, second, utilising theresult of this for whatever purposes are relevant in the communicative situation.Another idea related to the monological theories of language and communicationis that of the ideal language, ideal at least for scientific and classificatorypurposes, as an exact terminological, taxonomic system. This ties up with whatwill be talked about as ideas of the perfect language (Chapter 6.5.1).

6.4Language and speech

Among the many recontextualisations that various linguistic notions haveundergone throughout Western cultural and scholarly history, those whichconcern the notion of ‘a language’ are among the most intriguing. I will dealwith them in the next section. But first I want to focus here on how language hasbeen distinguished from speech, and what has happened to this distinction.Reflection over linguistic phenomena has been strongly connected with readingand writing, and learning how to indulge in these activities. I referred to theselinks between language, literacy and language studies in Chapter 2. In thiscontext, it must be recalled that those language varieties that were read, writtenand taught were, for most students, nearly always more or less foreignlanguages. This is true in those circumstances too when the written language wasa variety of the ‘same’ (or a similar) language as the spoken vernacular(s) that

11 The 17th century John Locke claimed in his influential ‘Essay concerning humanunderstanding’ (1690) that language was primarily for the transfer of information,asserting that ‘language is the great conduit, whereby men convey their discoveries,reasonings, and knowledge from one to another’ This conduit metaphor was probablybased on Locke’s admiration for London’s recently installed water supply (Aitchison, 2001 612)


the students knew in advance. But in many cases, the language of scholarlystudies was literally foreign, notably Latin, a language which, furthermore, wasseldom spoken by the students. Many factors contributed to a great cultural dividebetween literacy and oral culture, and the systematic study and reflection overlanguage was tied to the former. Thus, there evolved a world of literacy andlinguistic study, in which a theoretical, or at least pre-theoretical, understandingof language was cultivated, and which was distanced from the world of speech.

The distinction between ‘language’ and ‘speech’ has a background inimportant practical and academic-institutional divisions. (With slightly differenttheoretical accentuations, the distinction could also be presented as ‘language vs.discourse’ or ‘language vs. language use’ (# 6).) When speech was studied andtaught, this was often done within another discipline than the study of writtenlanguages. Such a division of labour was institutionalised in the academicorganisation of universities. Thus, for a long a time, and particularly in the USA,where, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speech and rhetoric werestudied and taught more intensively than in many European countries, languageswere, and still are, studied in departments of specific (English or foreign)languages, whereas there were, and still are, entirely different departments ofspeech, rhetoric and communication (names differ between universities). Thestudy of ‘language’ as a general phenomenon was later transferred to, andimmensely expanded within, departments of linguistics.

Departments of speech and rhetoric in the USA often also house specialitiessuch as speech disorders, which, accordingly, were thought of as pertaining to‘speech’ rather than ‘language’. Thus, the study of speech, in this traditionalorganisation, was devoted to both the use of language (rhetoric) and (problemsof) speech delivery (such as stuttering and stammering). (In some contexts,dialectal speech was treated on a par with speech errors; cf. # 20.)12 Linguistic


disabilities, which—especially as regards different kinds of aphasia—arenowadays regarded as, or known to be, language related, were regarded asspeech disturbances. For example, Bloomfield (1933:35) talks about aphasia as‘disturbances in the manner of making speech responses and in responding tospeech’. Specific linguistic impairments (SLI) (to Use a modern term) in childrenwas likewise, and perhaps even more unequivo cally, treated as pertaining tospeech, rather than language (Malmberg, 1969; Nettelbladt, 2001). It is fair tosay that speech was regarded as behaviour in the late nineteenth century (# 69), aperspective entirely alien to the conception of language (words, grammar) of thetime. On some accounts, this conception of speech was also quite remote fromclassical rhetoric, which, was (and is), though dealing with spoken performance,largely concerned with the planning of its content and structure. Likewise, the‘speech-as-behaviour’ approach had (or has) a shortage of considerations ofaction and communicative activities, which, by contrast, have become crucial inrecent pragmatics and communication studies.13

The concept of ‘pronunciation’ (# 21) has for a long time straddled theboundary between language and speech. Surely, it had a weak position in somedivisions of language studies, notably in Latin studies. The discipline ofphonetics, which started to grow in the late nineteenth century and blossomed inthe twentieth century, became largely concerned with the articulation, acousticsand perception of speech. By contrast, phonology, as the linguistic study ofsound structure, later developed largely as an independent speciality, which waspart of linguistics rather than phonetics. Accordingly, many phonological schoolshave stressed the (purportedly) non-phonetic nature of phonology (# 22, # 23).For some, phonology was about immaterial structures, that is ‘form’ rather than‘substance’. In other words, language is something ‘spiritual’ residing in themind or brain, but speech is embodied in and produced by the articulatoryorgans.

As we have seen, the distinction between language and speech has a longacademic and scholarly history. When Saussure developed his linguistics andestablished the distinction between langue and parole, he could build on thisdeeply entrenched distinction. Indeed, the French terms originally meantapproximately ‘language’ and ‘speech’ (or ‘spoken discourse’) respectively. Inmodern linguistics, the terms have become recontextualised from their historicalorigins, and are now understood more as ‘language system’ and ‘language use’,irrespective of the medium. It is significant, however, that the langue-paroledistinction to some extent conflated two modern distinctions, namely system vs.language use and written language vs. spoken language. That is, in effect thelanguage system became quite close to language in writing. Only speech was sufficiently different from the ideal language to merit a term of its own, i.e.

12 For example, this was true of some Swedish encyclopedias from the early twentiethcentury


speech/parole (# 21); there was no corresponding need for a distinct term forlanguage use or discourse in writing, i.e. ‘written performance’. At the sametime, though, an additional reason for not granting writing a theoretical notion ofits own, that is for not elevating écriture to a status similar to that of parole, mayhave been the opinion that writing is merely a secondary representation of speech(Chapter 3.4.1).

In late twentieth-century linguistics, the most famous recontextualisation ofthe basic dichotomy discussed in this section is undoubtedly Chomsky’s (1965)distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’. At first glance, thisappears to be a rather different conceptual pair than language and speech. Inparticular, Chomsky’s background context is that of individual (cognitive)psychology, rather than Saussure’s sociology. Yet, it is ironic to note howChomsky uses dialectal variation and speech errors as examples of features thatdo not pertain to (the necessarily idealised) concept of ‘competence’; insteadthey belong to ‘performance’. (See the famous quotation from Chomsky (1965)about the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ quoted in # 20, fn. 29.)

6.5The notion of a language

The meandering flow of ideas, or the chain of recontextualisations summarisedin this nutshell formulation, involves many transitions, which would all deserve alengthy account. However, there are three aspects of these extremely complexdevelopments that are particularly noteworthy: (1) the transition from a pre-theoretical notion of language, entirely subordinated to practical activities, to atheoretical notion of a system of abstract units, conceived in an academiccontext; (2) the movement from partly systematised subsystems of a language toa well-defined, integrated system of an external (surface) language; and (3) thechange of focus from particular, external (national) languages to abstractuniversal principles. I will now comment on parts of this whole complex in amore discursive fashion.

The word ‘system’ runs through many of the stages of the recontextualisingchain. This term means ‘group or combination of interrelated, interdependent orinteracting elements forming a collective entity’ (Collins English Dictionary,1991:1565) and can be derived from Greek sustema meaning ‘combination orassemblage’.14 It is reasonable to argue that members of a speech community—

13 There is an interesting recontextualisation branch in the development from rhetoric tothe individual—psychological theory of utterance production of Levelt (1989) and to thesocial—interactional theory of the speaker’s self in Goffman (1981) I refrain fromanalysing this here, but cf Chapter 5 # 77


particularly when they have been confronted with other people’s divergentspeech habits—realise that there is some ‘system’ in their own ways of speaking,a system with elements which are somehow interrelated and interacting. In otherwords, there is something one could call ‘language’ (or ‘tongue’, ‘idiom’ or thelike). However, if there are partial—i.e. not entirely consistent—systems in eachspoken variety of languages, clearly such systems have later become much‘improved’ by literate people, by linguists, language planners, administrators andother people with political ambitions, who assembled more interrelations withinlanguage varieties and created more of integrated systems. Such man-made,standardised systems were then imposed back on, and later also ascribed to,naturally occurring spoken languages and their speakers.

Specific, individual languages, such as English, Russian or Thai, do not havethe self-evident and independent existence and unitary nature that we have beenenticed into believing from the ways they are talked about in everyday life andtraditional schooling. It is an illusion that there is such a thing as one single,unitary language, exactly as described by linguists, out there. Certainly, this‘object’ of linguistic description was not there from the beginning; at the outset,there were simply the various spoken vernaculars. Creating a national languagehas always and everywhere been a political project. The national state needs onelanguage, just as it has often required one church, one army and one monetarysystem. There is a popular saying, used when one wants to point out the political(as opposed to the intrinsic, linguistic) character of the notion of ‘a language’,

14 From syn- ‘with, co-’ and the verb histanai ‘put, cause to stand’


that what distinguishes a ‘language’ from a ‘dialect’ is that only the former hasan army. In the context of this book, it would be more appropriate to say that a‘language’ (as opposed to a ‘dialect’) must have a script, and a set of societalinstitutions connected with writing and literacy.

Within many nations, the standard language has been popularly conceived asthe language that all citizens have in common. By contrast, the local or regionalways of speaking were merely ‘dialects’, and professional varieties used ‘forspecific purposes’ were just ‘registers’ or ‘jargons’. National languages have ofcourse most often been based on spoken vernaculars, sometimes mainly on oneprestige variety (Chapter 2.4). When dialects were related and perhaps mutually


intelligible, there was a basis for developing an abstract standard to be used inwriting, for purposes like legislation, education and administration.Nevertheless, the notion of the national language is largely a cultural andsociopolitical artefact, not something descriptive of empirically pre-existinglinguistic activities in (spoken) social life. A national standard language is notrelated in any simple way to a natural speech community comprising all thosewho are considered citizens or subjects of the nation; they usually do not speakin the same ways. On the other hand, once written standards have been created,legitimised and taught, often for many generations, standard languages tended tobecome social realities, materialised in writing and to some extent also inspeech.

Among the practical and political activities in which linguists have often, or atleast in the last two or three centuries, been involved are those of planning,standardising and describing national written languages. Accordingly, one ofRoy Harris’s (1980) main points is that linguists are ‘language-makers’;language itself, as described by linguists, and, in particular, as unitary individuallanguages are things constructed, ‘made’, partly even fabricated, rather thansomething given, existing, out there.15 As a result in part of this, the grammaticalmodels of mainstream theoretical linguistics have not been based, and are still notbased, on sufficient empirical data from people’s language use, especially asregards talk-in-interaction.

National standards needed linguistic descriptions. Creating descriptiveaccounts involved normative attempts to constrain variation and to make pointsof language structure more precise than they appear to be in the bewilderingworld of language use (what Saussure came to call la parole). The project ofstandardising languages included a strong tendency to freeze, or fixate, thesystems. There was a need for a unitary written standard, to be used as a‘standard of correctness’. As such, this language and its grammar were clearlyman-made.16 Yet, it was often thought, from antiquity through the millennia, thatGod had given mankind the original language (cf. Eco, 1995). By way of an

15 This point will be further discussed in Chapter 8 2


example, for Dante, who wrote a treatise on language (De vulgari eloquentia, c.1305), a ‘grammar’ was a rule-governed, written language, and he used the termabout the rule-governed language of Latin, a literate language as opposed to thespoken vernacular (Eco, 1995:34ff.). Only a language taught by formaleducation, a locutio secundaria, had a grammar; a ‘natural’ language, which wasacquired ‘naturally’ in childhood, did not.

Therefore, it amounts to a very considerable conceptual step, a crucial one,though it was of course taken only gradually, when later, the implicit assumptionwas made that a language as a system was somehow fixed in itself, out there, alsoin the vernacular, spoken language, rather than merely fixated by human usersfor particular purposes. Thus, for example, words came to be thought of ashaving fixed meanings, which only had to be documented in dictionaries. Or toput it otherwise, words do not have open, variable and flexible meanings that getfixated in and through the activities of making the dictionaries.

The most basic notion in traditional (pre-theoretical) thinking about languagewas clearly that of the ‘word’. (I would guess that most of the world’s languageshave included a lexical item for ‘word’ much earlier than they got one for‘language’.) The term ‘word’ gradually acquired the meaning of ‘lexical item’,rather than ‘(part of) connected discourse’. At the same time, a language wasdescribed in terms of its words and their properties; how words are pronounced(phonology, the study of sounds), how they were inflected, derived from otherwords, and used in combinations (morphology, and grammar, which includedonly—what would nowadays be thought of as—a rudimentary portion ofsyntax), and what they meant (lexicology, as made manifest in dictionaries).Words with their pronunciations, morphological properties and lexical meaningscould be more easily described and taught than syntax (# 13). Once again, wemust recall the historical provenance of ideas about language: they originated inpractical activities that were much closer to language pedagogy than to linguistictheorising of a modern kind.

The traditional language descriptions that I just alluded to fall short of beingcomplete or integrated models in a modern sense, and it is probably fair to saythat most traditional grammarians, while obviously being aware of some of thesystematicity of linguistic phenomena, did not think of a natural language as anintegrated system which could be exhaustively defined in a way that completelyexcluded contradictions and incoherences. The norms described in the grammar,that is to say in the grammar books, are arguably only part of the entire languagesystem.17 Dictionaries and handbooks in grammar are practical and pedagogicalaids, supporting people’s efforts to write, learn foreign languages, translatebetween languages, etc.; they are not explanatory or fully descriptive models oflanguages. In other words, the assumption of the fixed code (# 46) was arguablynot fully heeded in traditional grammar.

16 See Chapter 6 7 2, including references to Wittgenstein and Rommetveit


Saussure (1964) has usually given credit for having developed the idea of acomplete, integrated system underlying and defining each individual language(or dialect) (la langue) (# 9). It amounts to a rather radical recontextualisationwhen the traditional ideas of a language were combined with the idea of a fullydeveloped structuralism. But the idea of an integrated system had been envisagedalso in several nineteenth-century conceptions. Following upon the neo-grammarian discovery of sound laws came the idea of languages as organismsthat grow and change, partly in analogy with biological species. This was part ofthe intellectual background for the Saussurean idea of a language system, alangue, as an integrated structure. However, the Saussurean idea appears in thecontext of a structural conception of social systems, including language as aprimary case; Saussure’s linguistics has traditionally been connected withDurkheim’s sociology.18 Not only should the linguistic description be made(constructed as) more comprehensive and systematic than before, but the wholeenterprise was based on the theoretical idea of a language in itself being acomplete, integrated system out there (# 10). This linguistic system wassupposed to be ‘context-free’ in the sense that it is valid across genres andsituated activities of language use. But it is interesting to note that Saussure didnot include sentence syntax, let alone text-linguistic regularities above thesentence level, within la langue. Thus, while a language was essentially anintegrated relational system (‘form’ rather than ‘substance’), its primary units werestill words, rather than sentences. Many other linguists argued along the samelines; for example, Gardiner (1951) accounted for ‘words’ as part of ‘language’,‘sentences’, however, as part of ‘speech’. Later twentieth-century linguists,notably Chomsky (1957, 1965, etc.), were to change this view, as part ofsubsequent recontextualisations.

The view that a language consists of a set of fixed, thing-like products is arecurrent theme in the linguistic literature. One of the best-known definitions isthe following: ‘From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite)of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements’(Chomsky 1957:13). In this conception of the early Chomsky, it is sentences,rather than words, that make up a language. I shall return to this point inChapter 6.8. Furthermore, we note that the grammar of sentences is both context-free and clearly demarcated. It is context-free19 in the sense that thedetermination of grammaticality, criteria for inclusion in the language system,never relies on considerations of textual environments and communicative

17 See, for example, Coseriu (1952), who expanded the Saussurean distinction of languevs parole into a three-place one—sistema (‘system’), norma (‘norm’) and habla (‘speech’)— and proposed that norma is more restricted than sistema as a whole, it is a kind ofreduced system

18 Some commentators (e g Thibault, 1997 48) argues that this is an extreme reading ofSaussure (cf Chapter 5 fn 20)


contexts. It is also completely demarcated in that a sharp boundary can be drawnbetween what is grammatical, that which is part of the language, the set ofgrammatically correct sentences, and what is not (## 31–33). If prior linguisticshad ascribed a more limited stability or rigidity to the language system, Chomskynow proposed the stronger notion of well-definedness as a substitute.20 We notethat we are still talking about (what later came to be called) ‘external’ languages.

What is the source of the view underlying this development? Apart from thehistory of linguistics that I have just sketched, the inspiration came, inChomsky’s case, at least partly from mathematics, where a language is preciselya set of strings of symbols which are defined by a set of specific and explicitrules (cf. also # 89). Note, incidentally, that mathematical symbol languages area highly specialised kind of written languages. A mathematical theory is usuallydesigned to be elegant, concise and exhaustive. Exhaustiveness refers of courseto its ability to cover the phenomena that it is intended to cover, and this can bedetermined by the researcher. For example, Chomsky (1965) outdefined manyaspects of language as ‘performance’.

But there are deeper roots of the conception of a language as a set of thing-likeproducts. Derwing (1979:165) argues that some of the characteristics ofAmerican linguistics, notably the emphasis on products, rather than processesand underlying capacities (cf. # 68), and the view of language as somethingautonomous (cf. # 9), can be derived from Bloomfield’s methodologicalrecommendations. Bloomfield argued that linguists must concentrate on thestructure of overt behaviour, since we cannot speculate on the underlyingprocesses out of lack of the necessary knowledge of physiology and psychology.This heritage had an impact on later American linguistics, including Chomskyangenerative linguistics; there are more similarities between Chomsky’s and Katz’s(1964) psycholinguistics, on the one hand, and variants of multi-stagebehaviourism, on the other, than is usually thought.21 But the view on language asa structured set of products goes much further back in history. For one thing,there is the universal tendency to reify products of theoretical analysis (Latourand Woolgar, 1986, as quoted in Chapter 2). More specific for our case,however, is the fact that linguistics has always been biased towards analysingproducts, namely written sentences and texts (# 68). Similar trends recur in newfields; Terry Winograd, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence research,fairly early expressed his fear of ‘the error of reification of cognitiverepresentations’ in cognitive science (1980: 226–227).22

One of the remarkable things in Chomsky’s early definition (as quoted above)is precisely that a language is still regarded as the set of all the linguistic

19 The term ‘context-free’ has often been given other meanings in grammar theory I amusing it in the specific sense defined here

20 This move was strongly criticised by several contemporary commentators, notablyHockett (1968)


products that can be constructed once we have a system of rules. An alternative,and (one might think) intuitively more satisfactory, view would be that alanguage consists of all the units and rules which make up the system underlyingthe products.23 From the vantage point of the language user one could propose amore psychologically based definition; the language of a speaker/listener is hisknowledge of the underlying language system (la langue) or, alternatively, hisability to produce and comprehend an infinite set of utterances, discourses andtexts, which fit the underlying system of rules (# 19). In fact, this soon becamethe position of Chomsky (e.g. 1965, 1966:75, etc.). Superficially, this also ties upwith a tradition exemplified by Humboldt’s proposals that language be regardedas an activity (and an ability to act linguistically) (energeia), rather than as a setof products (ergon),24 and particularly that a language is determined by its ‘innerform’.

Saussure’s abstract system of la langue consisted of the linguisticallysignificant properties of a language. The notion was the outcome of an attempt tocleanse language from all those linguistically irrelevant (psychological,contextual) factors that supposedly confound the view if we look at situateddiscourse (parole). Chomsky (1965) adopts very much the same attitude indistinguishing ‘competence’ from ‘performance’. For Saussure, a language(langue) was a superindividual, collective, socioculturally constituted system.But languages are also mastered and used by individuals. Rommetveit (1998a:179) points out that there has been a ‘pervasive duality’ in scientific studies oflanguage between the notions of ‘a system existing in a collectivity’ and‘individual linguistic competence and language processing’. With this in mind,we can take a look at the next steps in our nutshell formulation ofrecontextualisations, especially the chain ‘la langue > generative model oflanguage > internalisation within the ideal speaker-listener (competence)’. Inother words, an abstract model of language was first defined, ‘an analysis [which]proceeds by first “bracketing off” content, social relations, and historical forcesand then isolating a transcendent, hierarchical, and autonomous system’(Nystrand et al., 1993:292). Then, this system was put back by Chomsky and his

21 See Chapter 6 6 and 6 7 2 on Katz’s paramechanism

22 See discussion in Rommetveit (1998c 221)

23 Smith (1999) claims that this was Chomsky’s position from the very beginning and thathe never really espoused the view of a language as a set of surface sentences, asformulated in Chomsky (1957) Smith (ibid 32) is of the opinion that interpreters havemisleadingly assigned too much importance to Chomsky (1957), ‘which, despite itsseminal role, was basically a set of notes for an undergraduate course at MIT []’ If this isso, it does of course not invalidate my analysis of the origin of this view and the fact thatit was, after all, explicitly communicated in Chomsky (1957)

24 Chomsky (1965 4, 8, 198, 1966 23ff) pays tribute to Humboldt (e g on the point of‘inner form’), in spite of the fact that his own theorising is quite different fromHumboldt’s on so many accounts Cf Aarsleff (1970)


psycholinguistic followers into the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ and declared‘psychologically real’. Thus, one outcome of the developments in the USA waspsycholinguistics, an offspring25 of a formalistic generative model of language inlinguistics and a mentalistic psychology, largely defined in opposition tobehaviourism. It is obvious that this development involves very complexrecontextualisations in which ideas from the past are combined with newdemands in a rather different context. For example, we have already pointed tothe behaviourist heritage still entertained in some interpretations of mentalism(Katz), and I will later (Chapter 6.7.2) deal with ambiguities involved in the useof terms like ‘rule’ and ‘process’. At several points, this generated a good deal ofconfusion.

When Chomsky (1965) chose to start out from the individual speaker-listener,he was surely influenced by the individualism which has been a trademark ofAmerican variants of social and human sciences (e.g. Farr, 1996; Rommetveit,1998a). However, Chomsky’s notion was a strange mixture, as is easily seen inthe following often-quoted definition:

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, ina completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its languageperfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions asmemory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors(random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language inactual performance.

(1965:3; italics added)

Here, we are faced with a completely decontextualised, detemporalised anddisembodied concept of language (cf. # 15, # 16). It is also a prototypicallymonological theory, with its notion of a monolithic system, and the absoluteauthority assigned to, on the one hand, this system and, on the other, thecognising individual (although the latter is not thematised here) (Linell, 1998a:32–33). The pivot of the theory is the ‘ideal’ individual, defined exclusively interms of his membership within a ‘completely homogeneous’ community inwhich a language (cf. la langue) is used. In other words, this may be taken as arecontextualisation of Saussure’s notion in terms that sound quite individualistic.Indeed, Chomsky (1965, and especially 1968, and later) declared that linguisticswas to be understood as part of cognitive psychology. Cognition has, inmainstream (particularly American) psychology, been concerned with mental

25 Rommetveit (1979a 17), in an apt formulation, saw psycholinguistics as a child (‘thelove child’, Rommetveit, 1998c 216) resulting from ‘a hectic love affair’ between‘structural linguistics and individual (as contrasted to social) cognitive psychology’(italics in original)


processes within the individual; as Sarason (1981:827) put it, mainstreamAmerican psychology has been ‘from its inception […] quintessentially apsychology of the individual organism’.26 At the same time, a generativegrammar, based on abstract formal rules of syntax, was assumed to be theadequate model of the language. Such a strongly transformed version of lalangue, now termed ‘competence’, was assumed to be internalised by thelanguage user, and to be (in some sense) ‘psychologically real’.

We have seen that Chomsky took over a legacy from many of hispredecessors, including Saussure. But he had also some more radical points onhis agenda. George Lakoff27 mentions, in an interview on early Chomskyanlinguistics (Huck and Goldsmith, 1995:109ff.), four ‘commitments’ which wereof central importance for the generativists of the 1960s:28

1 The Chomskyan commitment’: language (itself, the thing in the world) is aformal symbol system (cf. # 15). That is, Chomsky inaugurated a formalisticlinguistics in a particularly strong form; ‘for Chomsky, generalization meantgeneralization over form alone, not over meaning’ (Lakoff in Huck andGoldsmith, 1995:111). Syntax was to be autonomous and free fromdependencies on semantics; this stance sounds a bit ironic, given thatChomsky (1959a) has been given so much credit for having killedbehaviourism, which was a tradition also shunning considerations ofmeaning and subjectivity.

2 ‘The Fregean commitment’: language, including semantics, should beformalised (using formal logic, model theory, and so on) (# 57, # 89).

3 ‘The generalization/full range commitment’: an adequate grammar mustseek maximal generalisations (# 10).

4 ‘The cognitive commitment’: one must take empirical results about thenature of the mind seriously and make the theory of language fit thoseresults.

26 The discipline of psychology is quite commonly defined as the science ofindividuals’ behaviours and mental life, but the individualism is in general moreaccentuated in America than in Europe The two main twentieth-century trends in USacademic psychology, behaviourism and cognitivism, focusing on individuals’behaviours and information processing, respectively, are strongly individualisticAmerican social psychology too is decisively individuo-centred (Graumann, 1988,Farr, 1996)

27 Lakoff was one of Chomsky’s most famous students in the 1960s, who laterbecame a renegade and a strong critic of Chomsky

28 Derwing (1979 178ff) identified similar ‘principles’ the autonomy principle(corresponding to Lakoff’s Chomskyan commitment), the generative principle (cfFregean commitment), the self-sufficiency principle and the principle of maximumregularity (Lakoff s generalisation commitment)


The first three commitments pertain to (the early) Chomsky’s preference formodelling a language in mathematical-language terms; one should strive not onlyfor explicitness but also for compactness, conciseness, elegance andexhaustiveness. Many linguists of the time (e.g. Hockett, 1968) objected to this,arguing that natural languages are partly ill-defined.

Let us now return to the fourth of the commitments, the ‘cognitive’ one. Thiswas a point to which Chomsky remained very ambivalent. In taking this stanceof ambivalence, he conformed to a dominant trend within linguistics. He was,after all, not prepared to take mental-processing models seriously; ‘competence’could not be understood in any performance-oriented terms, not even in terms ofan ‘idealised’ performance model. Thus, Chomsky stayed mainly with the threefirst-mentioned commitments, those which were most clearly based on notionsderived from written-language-based linguistics. (Lakoff argues that he (Lakoff),by contrast, ranked the cognitive requirement highest.)

The last steps in the recontextualising chain formulated in nuce above alsoinvolves far-reaching transformations. Chomsky and his close followers havenow turned away from the task of describing ‘surface’ languages (‘E(xternal)languages’), that is languages (langues) such as English, Russian or Thai. Innotions like ‘grammaticality’ (a) ‘language is a derivative and perhaps not veryinteresting concept’, Chomsky (1980:10) declared.29 (Incidentally, this impliesmuch less emphasis on ‘grammaticality’, a notion to be discussed later, inChapter 6.7.2.) Chomsky’s interests are now instead, or more decisively thanbefore, first (e.g. 1981) on core grammars and on ‘principles’ of universalgrammar (‘I(nternal) language’), and more recently (1995) on ‘minimalist’assumptions of structure associated with the underlying language capacity.Surface sentences are no longer the basic units of a language; rather, we aredealing with more abstract principles of grammatical construction, which areassumed to be innate, i.e. inherent in the human biological constitution. Theendeavours of theoretical linguists are assumed to be directed at finding basicfunctions of the mind, and ‘when we speak of the mind, we are speaking at somelevel of abstraction of yet unknown physical mechanisms of the brain’(Chomsky, 1988:7). ‘“Internal” [in the term I-language] means that the domainthat the linguist is studying is internal to the mind/brain of particular speakersand hearers, rather than expressing a relation between the mind and the outsideworld’ (Smith, 1999:138). Thus, Smith (ibid.: 38) claims that I-language, as ‘atechnical term’, ‘indicates a state of the mind/brain’.

When dialogists say that the notion of ‘a language’ is derivative, they meanthat it is derived by abstraction and (re)construction from situated, practical andembodied activities. Chomsky, on the other hand, has something completelydifferent in mind, when he says that the notion of ‘a language’ is ‘derivative’

29 Even more radically ‘The notion E-language is empty of content and correspondinglyunnecessary’ (Smith, 1999 38)


(and ‘perhaps not very interesting’); languages have been derived bysociohistorically constituted cultures from that which is ‘interesting’, namely theuniversal language faculty.

The analogy with the natural sciences, and the view that the I-languagepertains only to individuals,30 will be attended to presently (Chapter 6.7.2). Butlet me summarise my review of theories of what language, and a language, iswith the conclusion that there is a long chain of transformations with links thatprovide a continuity backwards; adjacent links interlock as do often sequences ina dialogue or conversation. And yet, just like in a conversation, the topics canchange radically over time. The changes from the pre-theoretical notion of a(national) language to Chomsky’s notion of ‘internal language’ seem to involvean almost complete change of topic. It involves the cleansing of language fromculture; we move from a notion of a language embedded in talk, writing,communicative practices and partly national and regional cultures to anothernotion of language liberated from culture and remote from communicativepractices.

Also if we adopt only the limited time perspective of (mainly) Chomskyanlinguistics of the second half of the twentieth century, there are continuities aswell as radical changes. Chomsky (1957) was largely concerned with ‘external’languages, or rather: one such language, namely English, while Chomsky (1995)is not. For the early Chomsky, the grammar was context-free (in the sense usedhere) and the (external) language was completely demarcated, whereas today theinternal grammar of the language faculty is still context-free, but there is nogrammar that completely defines, or demarcates, the external language. In thebeginning, there was the notion of one language in the sense of one externallanguage. Now, unity and uniqueness is defined at an entirely different level, thatof a universal language; there is one innate, language faculty.

The stance of neo-Chomskyan linguistics implies a very peculiar version ofthe paradox of modern linguistics (Chapter 4.1); while the primacy of spokenlanguage is acknowledged, one uses data that are largely constituted by thelinguist’s ‘intuitions’ for what is grammatical language. These intuitions arebased on a literate heritage, i.e. culture-specific norms developed overgenerations and centuries by language cultivators, standardisers and pedagogues,and they often ignore or reject structures which are perfectly normal andfunctional in situated, interactional, spoken language. Yet, while neglectingauthentic spoken language data (# 20, # 35), some modern theoretical linguistsargue that their methods lead them to reveal principles of universal grammar.

30 Smith (1999 138) treats the ‘I’ in ‘I-language’ as ‘a mnemonic for Internal, Individualand Intensional’


6.5.1The idea of the perfect language

The idea of specific languages as unitary systems, which I have just commentedupon, has an interesting sideline, which deserves mentioning as a separate point:the idea of the perfect language (# 56). That is, once we have the notion of thesingle-language system, we may imagine the singular, perfect language system.This idea comes as a logical consequence of practices committed to constructing,reforming and improving (written) languages. It has, in the history of linguisticideas at least since the Middle Ages, often been conflated with ideas of alanguage regarded as original (‘Adamic’).31 As Eco (1995:1) says: ‘[t]he story ofthe confusion of tongues, and of the attempt to redeem its loss through therediscovery or invention of a language common to all humanity, can be found inevery culture […].’

There seem to be three variants of the idea of the perfect language.32 Theseideas may seem rather different, yet they can be regarded as differentrecontextualisations of the same root idea; mortal human beings may have animperfect language or linguistic competence, but there is, or has to be, a perfectlanguage somewhere. Thus, this case too illustrates the continuity vs.discontinuity aspects of recontextualisations, as well as the fact that quitedivergent ideas may share some single, basic assumption (Chapter 6.1).

One variant of the perfect-language dream is clearly the thought that aparticular language, for example, a classical language or the speaker’s ownlanguage, is the only natural and fully equipped language there is. Such ideas,which were popular among writers on language at least up to the early nineteenthcentury, were often combined with the idea of degeneration, i.e. thatcontemporary language varieties had deteriorated, or at least were running therisk of doing so.33 The idea that one’s own national language was the optimallanguage has been cherished by several nations, and has often been part of moremilitant forms of nationalism. Sometimes but less frequently, this idea has beencombined with the conviction that this language, i.e. the author’s own languageor the sacred language of his religion, is also something of the original languageof mankind. Eco (1995:95), in his review of such nationalistic hypotheses raisedby different authors, often in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shows how

31 Thus, a topic for another section on recontextualisations of linguistic ideas could havebeen the monogenetic hypothesis, the utopian dream of one Adamic language, that is theidea that there was one original human language to begin with This chain ofrecontextualisations starts out from theories, based on traditional religious ideas andbolstered by highly speculative etymologies, and ends up with the comparative method inhistorical linguistics See Eco (1995)

32 For a historical account of ideas of the ‘perfect language’, see Eco (1995) My ownaccount here was influenced by a lecture by Michael Holquist (Djuro, Sweden, June2001)


this idea has been propounded as regards Etruscan, Celtic, Dutch, German,Swedish and other languages.

A second idea concerns verbal language in general. This involves the claimthat verbal language can express any content, i.e. there is the potential to developmeans for expressing any imaginable content (# 48, # 55). According to this view,no other systems of communication, such as body language, sign language orvisual codes (pictures and pictorial representations), can match this capacity.This verbal language is defined in terms of principles for a universal language.Proponents include scholars as different as Dante (whose forma locutionisdescribed the gift that God conferred unto Adam) (Eco, 1995:42f.) and Chomsky(his ‘universal grammar’; cf. below Chapter 6.7.2).

A third idea assumes that no so-called natural language is or can be perfect.Every language is full of ambiguities, polysemies, metaphors, illogical semanticsystems, grammatical irregularities, redundancies, or whatever other propertiespeople have regarded as defects. The flaws of natural languages are due, on theone hand, to historical accidents; languages are the results of incidentalcombinations of features with different origins, which has led to incoherentsystems (‘confusion of tongues’). On the other hand, the illogical features ofeveryday language are also due to irrelevant influences that affect languages andlinguistic performance, especially in speaking (# 20). Ordinary, writtenlanguages have often been developed to eliminate some of these problems, butthey too suffer from the lack of logic endemic to natural languages. Therefore,many philosophers, who were by profession severe critics of natural languages,have invented fanciful systems designed to be consistent and reliabledescriptions of reality; Eco (1995) accounts for several of them, including thoseof Wilkins and Leibniz. (Such ‘a priori philosophical languages’ (Eco) often hadlittle to do with natural languages, but were of course still dependent on eruditetraditions.) From the nineteenth century onwards, ideas of the perfect languageappear in formal logic and mathematics (# 57 and Chapter 6.8 on Frege); these,then, are languages designed for special purposes, rather than comprehensivesystems for the perfect description of all true, human knowledge. Other cases areclassificatory systems in the natural sciences, or terminology for materials usedin modern technology, etc. Such languages ‘for specific purposes’ remain ofcourse written languages of a special kind (## 53–55).

6.6Language as objects

The notion of the individual language as a more or less unitary system has beencentral in linguistics. But linguists also have another particular, and clearlyrelated, view on what languages in general are. This view, dominant in

33 Cf Chapter 5 # 99 on the idea of purity of languages and cultures


linguistics and more widely in literate cultures and their educational systems,amounts to portraying languages in terms of sets of abstract objects, for examplesounds and words, rather than in terms of meaningful actions and culturalpractices (Chapters 1 and 2). Linguistic data are products of activities(Humboldt’s ergon), rather than instances of communicative work (energeia) orpraxis, that is activities of talk, text and discourse. This ‘product’ view is verypervasive, and clearly part of the WLB (cf. esp. # 2, # 31, # 47, # 68, # 71). It hasa long history and, in certain ways, it includes the establishing of the notion of alanguage, which I have just discussed.

The views that linguistic data are objects rather than actions, and that thesingle language is a set of abstract objects seem to involve the followingrecontextualisations:


The habitualised use within a speech community of the same or similar linguisticresources involves a basic objectification. Berger and Luckmann (1967) describeit in terms of an externalisation: products of human activity, in particularlinguistic activities, are made external in social communication, and can beobserved as recurrent products, objects that reappear again and again. Theseexternalised products are also internalised by individuals learning to masterlanguage (ibid.: 78). The need to talk about and analyse this language entailsfurther reification (as do all sorts of classification). Objectification in this secondsense is endorsed by writing, which involves a focus on formal objects (sounds,graphs, words, combinations of words). We can hardly avoid noticing thatalready here, at this very general level, we have witnessed severalrecontextualisations. But the story goes on, in many additional steps.

From the point-of-departure just adumbrated, there are several trajectories inmodern linguistics. In one variant, the strive towards objectivism andphysicalism, particularly in the psychology of language, has, when applied tospeech, led to behaviourism. Another development has led linguists to view thesignificant objects in language as increasingly abstract (# 15). We move fromsentences as tokens of sentence-formed utterances to ‘system-sentences’ (seeChapter 6.8). An earlier position in European as well as American structuralismwas to focus on linguistic phonological, syntactic, etc.—properties of (what haslater been termed) ‘surface phenomena’. Later theories of linguistic structurework with more abstract objects, theoretically postulated but unobservable at thesurface. This development, for example in generative linguistics, was inspired byanalogies with theorising in the natural sciences (Chapter 6.7.2).

Let us look at this development in somewhat greater detail. From the point ofview of the communicative activities carried out in and through talk-in-interaction, speech appears to consist of transient, dynamic behaviour distributedand evanescent in time. The transience of the products of the activities ofutterance production and comprehension make a process-oriented approach seemnatural. In other words, we should focus on the behavioural activitiesthemselves. Actors’ interpretation of linguistic behaviour in situ is heavilydependent on an on-line interaction with background knowledge, non-verbalsignals and various other features of the situational context. The sheer andrepeated attention to linguistic regularities, the recognition of the ‘same’ words,may entail a certain amount of objectification and reification. But this willbecome much stronger, if it is mediated by writing. And, indeed, there was notechnology apt for recording and analysing the dynamics of spoken interaction,except the notation in static, written texts. Written texts consist of permanentobject-like products which tend to be relatively autonomous, explicit and subjectto less variation than speech. As Voloshinov (1973:78) put it: ‘Formalism andsystematicity are the typical distinguishing marks of any kind of thinking focusedon a ready-made and, so to speak, arrested object’

One ingredient in the formalist approach is that linguistic structures aretypically viewed as hierarchically organised systems of objects. Lakoff and


Johnson (1980:204) summarise ‘the premise of objectivist linguistics from itsorigins in antiquity to the present’ as follows:

Linguistic expressions are objects that have properties in and of themselvesand stand in fixed relationships to one another, independently of anyperson who speaks them or understands them. As objects, they have partsthat are made up of building blocks: words are made up of roots, prefixes,suffixes, infixes; sentences are made up of words and phrases; discoursesare made up of sentences.

The model which is most often applied to linguistic products, especially by(American) structuralists, is that of hierarchical constituent structure. The rootmetaphor is partly that of a building with floors and rooms, etc. But there is alsoan analogy with theories of the physical, material world, in which things arethought of as decomposable in successively smaller things, components orparticles. The typical approach in structural linguistics amounts to dividinglinguistic products into successively smaller segments; the whole discourse (ortext) is broken down into sentences, these in their turn into constituent sentences(main and subordinate clauses) and phrases, and phrases are thought to consist ofwords, words of morphs, morphs of syllables and/or phonological segments(vowels and consonants), and the latter are finally dissected into the ‘ultimateconstituents’, i.e. phonological features.

The method of segmentation and classification has been applied mainly tointrasentential relations, but it has occasionally been adapted to texts anddiscourses as well. A coherent text is thus pictured as a timeless web of part-wholes(proper constituencies) and other structural relations (dependencies of varioustypes). Such methods were sometimes extended to the analysis of certain kindsof spoken discourse (e.g. Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975). As regards the analysisof face-to-face interaction, these methods have been termed ‘structural studies’(Duncan, 1979) and considered to be typical of the ‘linguistic’ discipline.Duncan describes this approach to face-to-face interaction in the following way:

It has been a characteristic of these studies to date that, while sequences ofactions are the essence of the analysis, considerations of time per se are notincluded in the hypothesized structural elements. (Time may, however, beused in the task of transcribing the interaction, in order to locate interactionevents.) The omission of time for the hypothesized interaction structure isnot a principled aspect of these studies, but rather it reflects a generalpractice of current investigators. The practice may, and perhaps should,change as research continues.

(1979:384)

This comment on early studies of spoken discourse by an outside observer thusstresses the atemporality of the structures posited within linguistics as


particularly salient (# 16). The point still has a lot of relevance, although thesituation is changing with new approaches, particularly within ConversationAnalysis and the related field of interactional linguistics (Chapter 8.7.5).

The ‘objectivist’ view does not apply only to the linguistic products as such,that is what may be seen as the ‘linguistic data’ (‘surface data’: words, sentences,texts, etc.); it is usually also expanded to cover ‘the underlying structures’underneath and beyond the ‘surface data’, as well as to the linguistic code itself,i.e. the more or less permanent language system(s) consisting of items and rulesand normally conceived of as ‘the grammar of the language’.

In other words, if linguists analyse the observable patterns of linguistic data interms of hierarchical constituent structures, this holds just as much for the‘underlying structures’. Deep structures, semantic representations andmorphophonemic forms have been portrayed, particularly in early generativegrammar and generative phonology (Chomsky, 1965; Chomsky and Halle,1968), as hierarchical structures of thing-like, static and discrete segments ofdifferent sizes. Furthermore, in Chomskyan mentalism, these entities wereassumed to be ‘psychologically real’, and some of Chomsky’s adherents, mostclearly perhaps Katz (1964), have accordingly postulated a machinery of mentalthings that causally impinge on each other in the course of the ‘speechcommunication chain’. Katz argues that the linguist

invents a theory about the structure of this mechanism, [i.e. the mechanismunderlying linguistic communication] and the causal chain connecting themechanism to observable events, to explain how these internal causesproduce linguistic communication as their effect … The events to whichthe mentalist’s constructions refer can stand as links in the causal chainthat contains vocalizations and sound waves as other links.

(Ibid.: 129–130)

Thus, Katz clearly viewed speakers as more or less mechanical input-outputsystems; his ‘mentalism’ is a para-mechanism with a certain affinity to multi-stage S-R behaviourism (cf. Linell, 1979b; Wilks, 1989).34

However, it must be admitted that Katz’s paramechanism represents a radicalview which was probably espoused only by very few linguists, generativistsincluded. It encompasses a variant of the transfer model of communication(Harris’s ‘telementation’; # 66). Yet, traces of this can be found in neo-Chomskyan theory too; Carr (1997) discusses modern generative phonology(Bromberger and Halle, 1989; Chomsky, 1995), focusing on the notion of‘phonetic form (PF)’, which is one of the two components (the other one is‘logical form (LF)’) that specifies the items to enter into a sort of performancesystem. PF can be conceived of as ‘instructions to an articulatory performancesystem’ or as ‘articulatory intentions’ (Carr, 1997:66). Carr argues that thisimplies a ‘transmutation […] across quite different ontological categories’ (ibid.:68). The case is typical of generative linguistics and its equivocations concerning


the connectedness or disconnectedness of ‘internal’ language in relation tolinguistic behaviour, ‘psychological reality’ to performance processes (see below,Chapter 6.7.2), ‘generation’ to ‘production’, etc.

Leaving Katz’s paramechanism, and related aspects of generative linguistics,and returning to more common ground in linguistics, we may say that the viewthat linguistic structures are hierarchically organised object-like entities exists inits purest forms in structuralism (# 2, # 12). Saussure regarded language (lalangue) as a closed integrated system of units (i.e. abstract objects or ‘things’)with stable internal relations (‘un système où tout se tient’ in Meillet’s words).35

The portrayal of language as an entirely rigid system, a structure within whichitems are arranged in fixed ways, was brought to an extreme in post-Bloomfieldian American structuralism (Hockett, 1968).36 Later, generativelinguists developed this radical structuralism along partly rather different lines.On the one hand, they preferred descriptions terms of ‘items-and-processes’,instead of merely ‘items-and-arrangements’,37 thereby doing justice to therecursiveness of the linguistic rule system. (Note that, in this usage, ‘processes’have to do with organising the linguistic description, not with processes oflanguage use.) On the other hand, generativists expanded the universe ofputatively existing linguistic objects; in addition to ‘surface units’, i.e. actualword forms, phrases, sentences, etc., they introduced ‘deep-structural’ units intoboth syntax and phonology. Thus, abstract relationships such as morphemeidentities between actual forms were thought to presuppose the existence ofabstract morpheme-invariant phonological forms. For example, in addition toword forms like English sane /sein/ and sanity /saeniti/, Chomsky and Halle(1968) posit a morpheme-invariant abstract form /sæn/, which does not directlycorrespond to any of the phonetic forms. According to the interpretation withinthe then mainstream, classical generative phonology, such a morpheme-invariantis an abstract, object-like form (morphophonological representation), not merelya way of formulating relationships between ‘surface forms’.38 In syntax, surfacestructures and deep structures were thought of in partly analogous fashions. Thus,

34 As regards the point about the affinity between behaviourism and Chomskyanmentalism, cf also the relation between objectivism and subjectivism (intellectualism)according to Chapter 5 # 1 I will return to the issue of rules and processes inChapter 6 7 2

35 Thibault (1997), in his ‘re-reading’ of Saussure, argues that Saussure (1964) is moreinterested in the processes of meaning making in the social life of language than has beentraditionally thought Thibault argues that the view of langue as autonomous abstractobjects has been selectively filtered out by generations of Saussure interpreters, especiallystructuralists Langue, in Thibault’s interpretation of Saussure, is not a reality existingindependently of parole The langue-parole distinction is methodological, not ontological

36 By post-Bloomfieldian structuralists, I mean linguists such as those enumerated as‘descriptivists’ by Hockett (1968 17) ‘Bloch, Haas, Harris, Hockett, McQuown, Nida,Pike, Swadesh, Trager, Voegelin, Wells ‘Hockett is himself critical of some of thestructuralist excesses of such a linguistics


despite several obvious and important differences, it would be justified toconceive of Chomskyan linguistics as firmly anchored within the Americanstructuralist tradition.39

The theory that a language should be seen as nothing but a closed integratedsystem (# 10) is a difficult stance to sustain, since it denies the significance ofsome of the most fundamental properties of language. Thus, adaptivity to newsituations lies at the heart of language. Linguistic variation is typical of linguisticcommunities, and this in turn is connected with the fact that all natural languageschange over time. It is well known that extreme structuralism has greatdifficulties in accommodating such facts. According to these theories, ‘eachhistorical change would have to be conceived of as a willful distortion of theinherited pattern, which is absurd’ (Andersen 1969:828). Instead we must admitthat languages, as well as speakers’ competences in them, are open systems intowhich new elements can be introduced without becoming fully integrated.Therefore, a certain instability and certain conflicts may characterise them. Sapir(1921:38) once formulated this in his often-cited dictum: ‘[N]o language istyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.’ Hockett (1968), similarly, in anattack on early Chomskyan linguistics, argued that languages are partly ‘ill-defined’, that is, not as well-defined as Chomsky (1957) proposed (cf. quotationin Chapter 6.5).

6.7The norms of language and the normativity of linguistics

Presently, I will turn to another major type of recontextualisation in linguistics:the chain of transformations in conceptualising language first as social norms andrules and later as processes and principles. But before that, a few remarks onnormativity in linguistics.

6.7.1The hidden normativity of modern linguistics

The history of normativity in linguistics involves, just like many of the otherpoints, a reversal of priorities and perspectives and a shift in background-focusrelations. In the beginning, normativity was foregrounded in linguists’ activities,and descriptive adequacy with respect to actually attested linguistic varieties wasclearly secondary. Later, description becomes central, and normativity recedesinto a hidden position. When scholars dealing with language were engaged moreor less directly and even exclusively with teaching people how to write their

37 These terms were introduced by Hockett (1954)

38 For discussion of this ‘orthodox’ generative phonology, see Linell (1979a)

39 Cf also Hockett (1968 e g pp 31, 37, et passim)


language correctly and occasionally how to speak it, that is to use a rhetoricallyefficient language, or with developing new written standards of so farinsufficiently standardised national languages, etc., their discipline was of courserather explicitly prescriptive; it prescribed norms to be followed in the use oflanguage. A normative focus is also natural for a linguistics serving the interestsof promoting literacy and developing language for use in administration,education and cultivation of a national heritage. Learning to write makes a greatdeal of explicit study necessary, and this consists in no small measure in thelearning of norms to be consciously attended to. On the other hand, a person’sspoken vernacular is acquired without any explicit instruction, and it may beargued that it is in fact constrained by fewer, or at least partly different kinds of,grammatical rules than written language (Chapter 6.5). Yet, as we will see, thenorms of written language enter the analysis of spoken discourse too.

The analyses of present-day linguistics are carried out for more ‘theoretical’reasons. It is generally held that the aims of linguists are nowadays purelydescriptive and, possibly, explanatory; rather than prescribe how people shouldact, linguists and other social scientists are assumed to describe how people do infact behave and act. Nevertheless, practices in linguistics are still replete withnormative aspects, although this is rather seldom admitted. Thus, conventionalintroductions to modern linguistics typically contain a short introductory chapteron the history of linguistics, in which it is simply asserted that linguistics used tobe prescriptive whereas modern linguistics is descriptive. Yet, such textbooks areheavily prescriptive in that they tell beginners how they should understandlanguage and how linguistics should be done (according to the particular author’stheoretical preferences). Let us look at some aspects of this ‘hidden normativityof descriptive linguistics’.

Traditional practices of linguists were located in structures of power andideology, and so are the practices of modern linguists, although in different andoften more subtle ways. For example, whereas ‘correct language’ wastraditionally defined in openly prescriptive terms, a language has later often beenconstrued as a well-defined system of forms (an infinite but enumerable set;Chomsky’s (1957) early ‘Syntactic Structures’ view), and correctness(‘grammaticality’) is seen as the definitional property, determining whether aproposed string ‘belongs to’ the language (# 31). Grammaticality of expression isstill more important than appropriateness of linguistic actions to tasks-in-contexts (# 34).

Generativists construe grammaticality as an inherent formal property of thelanguage system. When issues of grammaticality are raised, generativiststypically rely on the ‘linguistic intuition’ of competent language users.Sometimes, it is suggested that their intuitions are ultimately based on theallegedly innate language faculty. Thus, grammaticality is thus no longer‘reflected upon in terms of man-made standards of correctness’ (Rommetveit,1988:37). In actual fact, however, the intuition is of course strongly influencedby a body of ‘man-made standards’ that informants have tacitly (and sometimes


consciously) adopted during a long socialisation, when attitudes to languagewere internalised as part of the acquisition of literacy and written language:

After some time the idealized speaker-hearer of generative grammar [cf.Chomsky, 1965, as quoted on p. 150] was recognized as a well-known butrather special kind of citizen: the academic professional, writing (andthinking) in a highly standardized monological prestige language.

(Teleman, 1980:335)

The hidden normativity of linguistics shows up at different levels. For example,anyone who really pays attention to the full variability that actually characterisesspoken language, may well be amazed by the fact that many of the actuallyoccurring structures have not been described in the usual grammars, not even inmodern grammars compiled by ‘descriptive’ linguists. The simple fact that manystructures seem to have escaped the attention of linguists and therefore have beeneffectively excluded from grammars implies a certain amount of normativity,although there may be little awareness of this. A stronger kind of normativity isat hand when some structures that are known to occur in speech, are neverthelessnot accepted in the linguist’s grammar (cf. Milroy, 2001). Such structures areinstead regarded as ungrammatical or deficient, or to be explained in terms of‘performance factors’ (cf. # 20, # 35, # 43). Such utterance types in spokenlanguage, are, for example, types that involve changes of constructions, e.g.initial segments followed by (what appears as) a new beginning (anacoluthon) ora transition into another construction via a central, pivot phrase (so-called apo-koinou, e.g. I had a little operation on my toe this week I had to have a toenail takenoff.; # 43). These violate the structural rules of written standards. Accordingly,they are usually rejected as ungrammatical, that is as not belonging to thelanguage involved (language defined as a set of grammatical sentences),although they are perfectly natural and function well in their own medium.Indeed, structures like apo-koinou have sometimes been accepted in more literatecontexts; for example, they occurred in some Middle High German texts, buthave later been expelled from the written language of Modern Standard German(Sandig, 1973).

Linguists set up—explicitly or implicitly—meta-norms for which linguisticvariations, structures and rules should be allowed into the grammar. These meta-norms are deployed in projects of demarcating a language, and they are oftensimilar to those which were consciously adopted by normative grammarians ofthe past in their regimentation of written standards. There is always a temptationto regard as ungrammatical such stretches of spoken discourse that cannot besubsumed under the generalisations following from the rules or norms alreadyformulated and accepted. At the same time, once some previouslyunacknowledged structure of spoken, interactional language is attended to anddescribed by some linguist as part of the language in question, it is therebyassigned another status; it becomes recognised as part of the language in


question, at least the (spoken) varieties in which it occurs, and, accordingly, italso becomes, as it were, legitimised. This phenomenon, quite frequent inmodern linguistics, clearly shows the normative function of the descriptivistpractice itself.

Therefore, normativity appears in new disguises in modern linguistics. Borsleyand Newmeyer (1997:59), who defend generative linguistics against accusationsof normativity, argue that generative grammarians are not prescriptive, on thegrounds that they do no longer exclusively deal with grammars of nationalstandard languages but analyse various non-standard dialects. However,normativity is today a lot more subtle than this. Perhaps, the most perspicuousside of it consists in the above-mentioned lack of observational and descriptiveadequacy as regards spoken, interactional language; a lot of regularities havesimply not been discovered. But modern linguistic analysis obeys norms at thelevel of metalanguage too. This is to say that analyses are dependent on the veryspecial language games that are performed by the linguist as he applies hismethods to the data. The metatheory to which a given linguist adheres allowsonly certain kinds of ‘linguistic representations’, say certain types of syntacticconstituency trees or dependency structures, or certain kinds of underlyingphonological representations. The apo-koinou construction just mentioned is acase in point, since it does not fit permissible tree structures (Lambrecht, 1988).Thus, such metatheoretical norms will partly determine the linguist’sidentification of invariant properties behind the variation in linguistic data.

By way of summary, linguistics is still normative in nature. There is perhapsnothing surprising in this; all sciences are to some extent dependent on norms,and in the social sciences the situation is particularly complex, with normspermeating both data and (meta)theory. Yet, the level of self-awareness on thispoint seems to be rather low among theoretical linguists.

6.7.2Routines, norms, rules and processes

The most radical transformation involved in this series concerns the shift fromsocial, man-made standards of correctness of linguistic behaviour to mental,unconscious processes. Social norms pertain to how people think they (and otherpeople) should behave, i.e. they are normative rules. People are not always fullyconscious of such norms; at the very least, they are not necessarily capable ofgiving them explicit formulations. On the other hand, they sometimes reactnegatively to breaches, which shows that they do orient to norms. Note,however, that social norms or rules, whether explicit or not, pertain to observableconduct, not to some underlying, structural relations or to brain processes.Accordingly, behaviour can be evaluated in terms of rule-following, or at least rule-conforming.


Some social rules are, however, given explicit, though often unsystematic,formulations in books of etiquette. As far as language is concerned, rules haveprimarily concerned written language. It belongs to the downtraded commonsense that writers should follow rules of correctness, whereas speakers oftenbehave in incorrect and whimsical ways, due to a lot of situational, andlinguistically uninteresting, factors (# 20). This WLB view has been carried overinto modern linguistics, as in Chomsky’s proposals that spoken conversationallanguage is often impoverished and defective (# 35).

In talk, syntactic dependencies between constituents make upcoming items inutterances projectable, and thus they facilitate cognitive processing. In a


descriptive linguistic approach to language, grammaticalised regularities areformulated in terms of rules, some of which are quite general (cross-contextual,decontextualised), and others are more clearly activity-specific. Such descriptive‘rules’, however, are ex-post-facto descriptions of regularities of observedlinguistic behaviour. They are expert-observers’ constructs and are notequivalent to the social rules which language users sometimes follow, when, forexample, they consciously avoid certain expressions or topics in their discourse.

A speaker who indulges in communicative work in social interaction has tocope with problems of organising topics in real time, and at the same time (mostoften) secure the turn at talk, that is compete for communicative space with otherparties to the interaction. Talk-in-interaction is a dynamic accomplishment andcannot be described in terms of obeying explicit rules (Heritage, 1984;Schegloff, 1996). Yet, speakers fall back on some kinds of social norms torender their actions accountable. Actors are helped by, and base their actualconduct on, habits of organis ing utterances that they have gradually acquired aspart of their appropriation of language and of their general acculturation. Butthese ‘rules’ are still closely related to routines, habits, practices and skills.

Within descriptive linguistics, attention is given (in principle) to all kinds ofconventionalised and ‘grammaticalised’ regularities, provided they areacceptable (Chapter 6.7.1); here, we are not limiting ourselves just to selectedpoints of importance for good writing practices. The descriptive turn inlinguistics has to some extent coincided with an increasing interest in spokenlanguage, although this was then approached with a WLB of the kinddocumented in this book. Gradually, attention was also given to different dialectsof spoken language, and to other non-standard varieties, such as child language.Now, the number of ‘rules’ descriptive of actual regularities in spoken languageuse (and, indeed, in actual written language use as well) exceeds by far thenumber of social norms of language, to which speakers (and writers) may orientconsciously (conscious orientation or monitoring is rare but it does occur undercertain circumstances). In the practical writing-oriented activities in, for example,education (and in traditional linguistics), the rules were social, man-made normsor standards. As long as people use their own native language, or, more perhaps,a regional variety of a standard language related to their own spoken vernacular,they seem to need explicit norms and rules only at some points. Otherregularities are, as it were, automatically brought about and regulated, and are notraised to consciousness. Thus, just as explicit traffic rules or books of social


etiquette only account for parts of people’s actual traffic behaviour and socialintercourse, respectively, rules of traditional grammar account, and weredesigned to account, only for parts of people’s linguistic practices. The aim offormulating rules describing all linguistically significant regularities thereforeinvolves a fairly different requirement. And yet, the restriction to ‘linguisticallysignificant’ regularities (not all ‘performance’ phenomena are linguisticallyinteresting) shows the link to traditional normativity (cf. Chapter 6.7.1).

In linguistics, the strive towards descriptive statements of regularities inlinguistic behaviour was undoubtedly promoted by work with unknown andunscripted languages, as in the studies of American Indian languages byAmerican linguists. But note that the spoken vernaculars of languages likeEnglish or Swedish too were partly ‘unknown and unscripted’ languages;Allwood et al. (1990) describe this as the ‘non-written life of speech’ of suchlanguages. The same applies, a fortion, to child language, learner languages,aphasic varieties, languages of dementia and many other phenomena that haveattracted the interest of linguists in recent decades. When, accordingly, linguistsproceeded to formulate descriptively adequate rules of actual spoken and writtenlanguage use, the connection with normativity and explicit rule-following wasrelaxed. Sometimes, the new context preferred an interpretation of ‘linguisticrule’ in phonology or syntax simply as a generalisation which adequatelycaptures a regularity in linguistic behaviour. For example, if regularities inchildren’s talk deviate from rules of competent adults’ language, such children’slanguage has been described as having its own ‘rules’. Children’s languageshould be explained in ‘its own terms’. These ‘rules’ were sometimes evenreferred to as ‘incompetence rules’ (Smith, 1973). Note, incidentally, that thismade it possible to talk about idiosyncratic rules, possibly valid only for somesingle individuals and perhaps also restricted to some stage in their linguisticdevelopment. This development, therefore, is on its way towards underminingthe social nature of norms and rules, and it blurs distinctions between rule-following, rule-conforming and ‘mere’ regularities.40 The trend towardsaccepting ‘unconscious rules’ was thus well under way.

There are two ingredients in the recontextualised, new conception of linguisticrule that are especially noteworthy. They are mutually related, and both wereforeshadowed in early generative grammar and later formulated with moreexplicitness and consistency. One is unconsciousness or unawareness; in earlierscholarly (and mundane) contexts, the notion of an unconscious rule wassomething of a contradictio in adiecto; how could something be a norm forpeople if they are entirely unaware of it? The other salient feature was a gradualincrease in talk about linguistic processes. I will deal with both of these, startingwith unconsciousness.

The belief in unconscious rules became increasingly supported and enhanced,as linguists began to formulate abstract rules which did not directly correspond toregularities of ‘surface language’. At the same time, such systems of underlying,abstract rules of a grammar were, particularly in early generative linguistics,


primarily seen in the context of the logic of a mathematical meta-language andits related notation. The idea of formalised systems of generative rules invokedand exploited the idea of mathematical languages defined in terms of theirgenerative power (Chomsky 1957, 1975b). For Chomsky and some of his closecolleagues at the early stage (around 1960), there was a great interest in thegenerative capacities of different kinds of formal rule systems (‘formalgrammars’).41 Here, the connection with social norms of behaviour was at bestvery remote. Instead, the normativity reappeared at a very different level;extensive discussions were dedicated to issues of what kinds of formalism thelinguist could or should deploy as parts of the meta-language that he used in his(meta)linguistic activity of describing the object languages. Accordingly, onemight explain this recontextualisation as one of moving from regularities inspeakers’ behaviours (nota bene: those which were ‘linguistically significant’ orwhich defined ‘grammatical’ strings) to rules in linguists’ grammars, i.e. intheoretical models in which structural relations were formulated in terms of asystem of underlying representations and rules (phrase-structure rules,transformations, phonological rules). But the grammar was seen as the linguists’construction of something given out there, namely the language user’s linguisticknowledge. Accordingly, generative grammarians claimed that these formalrepresentations and rules in phonology and syntax were ‘psychologically real’(e.g. Chomsky, 1965; Chomsky and Halle, 1968); they were part of speakers’linguistic competence, but obviously, they were not consciously known to them.42

Let us now turn to the discourse about linguistic processes. If one looks at agenerative grammar, it appears to be formulated in terms of ‘processes’, ratherthan in terms of ‘items-and-arrangements’ (Hockett, 1954). Generative rules areproductive in that they allow for the generation of infinitely many grammaticalstrings (some of which were new; cf. the Chomskyan notion of creativity); forexample: ‘I am assuming grammatical competence to be a system of rules thatgenerate and relate certain mental representations, in particular representations ofform and meaning […]’ (Chomsky, 1980:10). Arguably, the units and rules of a(generative) grammar are nothing but abstractions, i.e. ways of stating structuralrelations between substantial linguistic phenomena (‘substance’ being what came

40 Ganz (1971), Linell (1979a 23) and Lahteenmaki (2003a)

41 The term ‘Chomsky hierarchy’ was used about a hierarchy of formal grammars rankedin terms of their capacity to generate sets of strings An ‘unrestricted grammar’ (Chomsky,1959b), the most ‘powerful’ (but therefore also the least interesting) type, can generateany language that can be generated at all Peters and Ritchie (1973) demonstrated that theStandard Theory of Transformational Grammar of the Chomsky (1965) type was in factequivalent to an unrestricted grammar This result may have encouraged generativists toreduce the role of transformations (cf neo-Chomskyan theory), but probably also reducedthe interest in the strictly formal properties of grammars


to be talked about as ‘surface phenomena’). But once explicitly formulated, suchabstractions easily become reified, i.e. looked upon as abstract ‘things’.43

Since, in the 1960s, the models of generative linguistics were developed in anintellectual context of ‘mentalism’, in which the grammar was claimed to be‘psychologically real’ and linguistics part of the cognitive sciences (Chomsky,1968), it was tempting to think of grammatical rules in terms of mentalprocesses, ‘generat[ing] and relat[ing] certain mental representations’ (Chomsky,1980; see above). Such processes are the products of linguistic modelling, andthe whole theoretical enterprise was assumed to be analogous to model buildingin the natural sciences. On this view, the mental processes, or ‘rules’, are real,causally efficacious entities.44 They are inaccessible to direct observation as wellas to introspection, and they are of course radically different from social normsof language and linguistic behaviour. These processes also have nothing to dowith communicative strategies (which can be entertained with varying degrees ofconsciousness).45 Instead, ‘“rules of grammar” in the psycholinguists’ sense, andtheir organization into components, are inherent to the computational systemsfound in humans […]’ (Pinker, 1994:479).

I have already referred to Chomsky’s own ambivalence with respect to claimsof ‘psychological reality’ (cf. the ‘cognitive commitment’ as discussed inChapter 6.5). And there is indeed a major conceptual step from entities in anabstract, formal system to processes in psychologically real events. The formerare de-temporalised formal objects, similar to logical and mathematical systems,whereas psychological processes presumably take place in real time and arecrucially supported by bodily processes. One may talk about this attempt to linkabstract rules with psychological processes as a serious confusion, blurring adistinction that has been honoured for long in philosophy, logic and mathematics(with names like Kant, Bolzano and Frege), namely that between, on the onehand, formal objects of knowledge and, on the other, whatever psychological,subjective processes are needed in attempts of understanding and coping withthem in the real world of mortal human beings (cf. # 67). However, what maymake this counter-argument less intriguing is of course that natural languagephenomena cannot be equated with mathematical or logical languages; incontrast to idealised logic, they occur in the real, empirical world, where they areembodied by individuals in actual cognitive activities and social interaction. ButChomsky, and many other linguists, have turned their attention away from suchaspects of situated action. Therefore, the accusation of confusion does have aconsiderable bearing on (some interpretations of) his position.

42 The move from language users’ object language to linguists’ meta-language will befurther discussed in Chapter 8 On the claims of psychological reality in (generative)phonology, cf Linell (1979a)

43 See also Chapter 6 5, including the reference to Winograd (1980)

44 See above, Chapter 6 6, particularly on Katz’s paramechanism


Yet, even if we choose to bracket for the time being these seriousinconsistencies in the Chomskyan approach, it should by now be clear that therecontextualisation from social norms to mental rules in the Chomskyan senseinvolves several far-reaching transformations. Grammaticality judgments builtupon native speakers’ intuitions are no longer regarded as derived from social,man-made norms but as resulting from the functioning of unconscious, partlyinnate, processes in the mind or brain of the speaker. These rules are part ofindividuals’ minds or brains (rather than social communities of speakers); thenotion of I-language (see above, p. 152) is a technical notion referring toproperties of the individual mind (Smith, 1999:10, 138). Intuitions aboutlanguage are produced by individual minds, and there is no explicit recognition,on the part of Chom skyans, that these intuitions may have a social origin.46

Indeed, we seem to be faced with a theory which regards language as a propertyof individuals, rather than of social communities or of the interfaces betweenindividuals and sociocultural environments. Several commentators havediscussed this in terms of Wittgenstein’s refutation of the notion of a privatelanguage.47

As an aside we may note here how the generative concept of rule wasrecontextualised in the late 1960s by Labov (1972) in his sociolinguisticallycontexted notion of Variable rule’. What Labov did was to index rules, mostlyphonological and morphological rules, for their probabilities of applying indifferent linguistic and social contexts, the social variables being social class, ageand sex of speakers, formality of speech situation, and such like. While thisinnovation of Labov’s turned out, at the end of the day, to have little impact onlater sociolinguistics, it is interesting as a case of a recontextualisation of anotion, that of generative rule, that looks minor (the assignment of an index ofprobability to an otherwise formal, generative-phonological or syntactic-transformational rule) but involves considerable changes. Instead of conceivingof rules as part of the ‘competence’ of an idealised speaker within a ‘completelyhomogeneous speech community’ (Chomsky, 1965, as cited above), Labov wastrying to reinstate and describe the sociolinguistically variable language use inactually attested speech communities.48

The last part of the recontextualising chain sketched in the nutshellformulation above involves the transition from a traditional interpretation of(social) rules (of language) and from mathematical formalism to neurolinguisticinterpretations. Chomsky, who had emphasised the biological foundations oflanguage for a long time, increasingly (from the 1980s onwards) referred toanalogies with biology, physics and other hard sciences, as opposed to the social

45 Cf Chomsky’s (1965) distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’Communica-tive strategies belong to ‘performance’, along with various phenomena suchas memory limitations and insufficient knowledge of language (on the part of particularindividuals)


norms imbued with morality studied in the social sciences. A new context was setup, in which language and mind were talked about in terms of neurologicalstructures ‘wired in’ in the biological constitution. Chomsky (1988:7) explained:‘[…] when we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction ofyet unknown physical mechanisms of the brain.’ Accordingly, he often uses thecompound term ‘mind/brain’, implying that ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ are just referringto different aspects of the same physical organ (# 83).

Many commentators have argued that the notion of unconscious rules amountsto serious confusion.49 Wittgenstein (1958) emphasised the social nature of rulesas part of his defence of language as a public phenomenon. Rules are, accordingto his kind of understanding, standards of correctness in social practices inparticular linguistic communities (Rommetveit, 1988; 2003a:57). By contrast, ‘[t]o think that rules [in speakers’ “competence”] awaitdiscovery by linguistic theorists is to confuse the appropriate form of explanationof normative phenomena with forms of explanation appropriate only to thephysical sciences’ (Baker and Hacker, 1984:334). Chomskyan standpoints areoften defended by using analogies with the natural sciences.50 Such analogiesignore the embeddedness of language in sociocultural circumstances, and, ingeneral, the differences between the objects of inquiry of natural sciences and thehumanities (e.g. von Wright, 1971).51 We are encouraged to deal with languagein terms that abstract away from history, society, behaviour and variation, anddismiss the notions of meaning, understanding, intention, intersubjectivity,communication, emotion and morality. What we are left with are brain structuresand an unquestioned notion of intuition. Critics of the Chomskyan stance wouldargue that the term ‘mind’ should not be used about abstract properties of thebrain, but about people’s ‘mindful’ ways of interacting with the physical and

46 Ragnar Rommetveit (personal communication, italics his) argues that Chomsky’srecourse to ‘the intuition’ of the ‘native speaker-listener’ and to what is in effect his(Chomsky’s) own ‘intuition’, amounts to a kind of ‘mysticism’ ‘What sophisticatedphilosophers (such as Wittgenstein and Ricoeur) have explored in terms of constraints onand possibilities of a scientifically disciplined study of language and mind is bracketed,and the epistemological problems are “solved” by faith in (intuition as a) mysteriousrevelation’ And yet, this ‘magic avenue from own mastery of language’ leads to (whatChomsky himself wishes to think of as) ‘“hard science”’

47 Smith (1999 159) refutes this Wittgensteinian argument by reference to the fact thatindividuals may have idiosyncratic regularities in their language behaviours However,Wittgenstein’s point is not about peripheral idiosyncrasies, it is of course that the core of alanguage cannot be private Chomsky has discussed the private-language argument, e g1986. 232ff

48 One might compare this recontextualisation to another famous one, accomplished byanother leading sociolinguist, Dell Hymes, who took the notion of ‘competence’ andtransformed it into ‘communicative competence’ (1971) Hymes criticised Chomsky onseveral principled grounds Yet, by selecting the term ‘competence’, he clearly sought anassociation with the leading generative linguistics of the time


social world, for example, ‘human beings’ decisions, intentions, hesitations andtemptations’ (Hacker, 1990:136), which are situated, dialogical and (inter)relational phenomena.

For Chomsky (1988, 1995), however, the analogies with the natural sciencesare neither misguided nor far-fetched. Ultimately, in his view, the aim oflinguistics is to find neural and biochemical configurations and mechanismscorresponding ‘at some level of abstraction’ to structures posited in the theory ofuniversal grammar.52

In order to do justice to more recent theorising in neo-Chomskyan linguistics,it should be conceded that the notion of ‘rule’ seems to have largely given way tonotions like ‘constraint’, relations of ‘control’, ‘government’, ‘binding’, etc. Thisdevelopment is parallel to the dethroning of the ‘sentence’ in favour of the‘grammatical construction’ to be mentioned towards the end of the next section.

To summarise this section, again we can witness long-term as well as moreshort-term continuities and radical changes in linguists’ conceptions, this timewith regard to the notion of ‘rule’. We started out by noting that talk-in-interaction is not a matter of obeying rules, but instead, it involves dynamic anddialogical accomplishments in which actors orient to linguistic and interactionalhabits and routines. From this, some social norms emerge, and particular socialactions can be made ‘normatively accountable’ (Heritage, 1984:117 et passim).Standards of correctness are made more explicit, as literacy and writtenlanguages are developed. Within (especially generative) linguistics, two quitedifferent notions of ‘linguistic rule’ have been chiselled out, those of symbolic(formalised, proposition-like) rule (or rule expression) and mental process. Oneof the more recent changes within Chomskyan linguistics involves the move fromthe interest in formal explicitness and the generative capacity of formalgrammars to theorising about abstract, neural systems with modules whosemutual relations are not made fully explicit in formal terms.

The two generative-linguistic notions of linguistic rule have been attackedfrom quite different directions, notably from Wittgensteinian philosophy,ethnomethodology and connectionism. These trends in contemporary thinkinghave been discussed by Lähteenmaki (2003a), who concludes that we shouldstick, or return, to Wittgenstein’s somewhat looser notion of knowing rules asmeaning approximately ‘mastering a situation’, a notion of ‘rule as praxis’ closerto ‘habit’, ‘institution’ and ‘skill’ (p. 533).

49 Eg Baker and Hacker (1984), Hacker (1990), Zlatev (1997 32) and Lahteenmaki (2003a)

50 See, e g, Chomsky (1988 7), Smith (1999 12, 27, 33–34, 64, 83, 94, 95) Indeed, Smithsummarises,’ [as] in physics, so in linguistics’ (ibid 95)

51 Yet another argument is that some of these analogies build upon false notions of hownatural scientists of the past, e g Newton, actually understood their own theories Theyseemed to have been influenced by notions recontextualised from (pre-scientific)understandings of social relations between humans Newton talked about gravitation inanalogy with social attraction between people (Leary, 1990 9f)


6.8Sentences: the fundamental units of linguistic expression

(and content)

It has been pointed out (# 29, # 30) that traditional grammar tends to workwith words, rather than sentences, as the fundamental units of language. Bycontrast, the insistence on sentences as primary entities is typical of modernlinguistics, and again the innovation is largely associated with the name ofChomsky (in this case: 1957). However, the ground had already been paved:notions of sentence had a long past, and there were several reasons for a WLBlinguistics to be sentence-oriented.

Before I go into the genealogy of the sentence concept(s), we must remindourselves of the fact that the term ‘sentence’ is regularly used in several ways,sometimes fairly vaguely or ambiguously. As I noted in Chapter 5 (# 30), thereare two interrelated strands in the attempts at defining the notion(s). One issemantic-pragmatic in orientation; sentences are somehow expressive of the(minimal) actions (speech acts) or the (minimal but in some sense complete)units of thought that are brought into language. The other strand is the more formaltype of definition, building on the combination of subject and predicate, whichmakes the notion of (simplex) sentence virtually equivalent with that of ‘clause’(cf. German Satz). These two strands meet one another again and again, insomewhat different ways, throughout the history of ideas. On the whole,however, modern linguistics has increasingly preferred formal definitions.

But let us now go back to some of the starting-points. There were several ideasin traditional concerns with language that pointed forward to appointing

52 For some commentators, Chomsky’s goal of anchoring linguistic models in claimsabout the human brain shows his fundamental empiricism, in spite of all the ways inwhich he professes to rationalism Hence, Ohman says about the ‘principles, conditionsand rules’, which Chomsky (e g 1975a) proclaims are part of ‘the essence of humanlanguage’, i e of ‘universal grammar’ (UG)

The notion that these principles might simply be an expression of the waya competent grammarian thinks in linguistic matters is unacceptable toChomsky Just as Linnaeus in Systema Naturalis sought to uncover God’sown plan for Nature, Chomsky wants to see in UG not the grammarian’simplicit understanding of the principles of grammar, but rather Nature’sown plan for Language He considers that such a plan exists ‘independentlyof us’ and that it is grammatical theory’s (UG’s) task to reveal it usingempirical methods

(Ohman, 1988 259f)


sentences as basic units. These ideas were clearly mutually related, and at least acouple of them were rooted in the practical activities, associated with learning towrite.

The efforts to standardise writing involved the need for rules and advice forhow to express oneself in written texts, especially expository, coherent prose.Written texts must be punctuated; commas and periods are used for demarcatingstrings of words that fit the structural properties of (what was later theoreticallydefined as) clauses and sentences. Explicit talk about the composition of textsshifted the emphasis, one could argue, from words to syntactic units of texts, thatis to combinations of words and, in particular, sentences.


The notion of the complex, multi-clause sentence with its hierarchicalstructure, and its distinction between main clauses and subordinate clauses, isclearly derived from genres of expository prose; the structure of conversationalturns (in most genres of spoken dialogue) does not build upon sentences. Atleast, this is true if we make a distinction between ‘(complex) sentence’ and‘clause’;53 it is primarily the structural properties of clauses that we find reflectedin turn-constructional units of talk-in-interaction.

Another time-honoured idea supporting sentences and especially clauses is theassumption that cognition, communication and discourse must ultimately buildupon units corresponding to ‘complete thoughts’. In a communicative orcognitive act, something is said about, i.e. predicated of, something else (cf.distinctions like subject-predicate, theme-rheme); we talk and think, it is argued,in ‘propositions’ (# 52), and the basic subject-predicate nexus of a propositionfinds its outer form in the simple sentence (clause). This theory actually goesback to Ancient Greek linguistic philosophy, especially the Stoics. Thereafter, itwas always present in some way or another in linguistic philosophy. In modernlogic, especially in the work of Gottlob Frege and many semanticists of thetwentieth century,54 such ideas got a strict formulation (# 54); a sentenceexpresses a proposition and is a well-formed formula. This is an idea withobvious repercussions in formal grammar, notably in early generative grammar(Chapter 6.5).

For Frege, the ‘formal language of pure thought’ was a logical, rather than apsychological, matter. Being a mathematician, he was not at all concerned withnatural language in contexts of human communication, but with idealisedsentences dealing with meanings in a stipulated Platonic domain. Such ‘eternal’sentences are ‘supposed to make the same claims about the world no matter whoutters them and when’ (Rommetveit, 1998c:221). In some (generative)recontextualisations from the latter half of the twentieth century, ‘the language ofthought’ (Fodor, 1976) was seen not as conventional predicate logic but rather asan abstract universal mental code underlying all natural languages.

In another recontextualisation, however, the idea of the sentence as theexpression of the ‘complete thought’ became central to nineteenth-centurypsychology of language. It was part of Wilhelm Wundt’s ‘psychology of thesentence’ (Blumenthal, 1970), and one of the pioneers of early aphasiology,Hughlings Jackson, declared that ‘the unit of speech is the proposition—to speakis to propositionalize’ (1958). A proposition can be construed either as a state ofaffairs in the world, or as the ‘propositionalised’ linguistic description, in theform of a complete sentence, of such a state of affairs. A common idea inpsychological models of language use, however, has been that the speaker (orwriter) develops an overall idea (Wundt’s Gesamtvorstellung) by verbalisationinto a linear sentence-structured sequence of words. Here again, the

53 See Chapter 5 # 30, including fn 43


psychological and philosophical theories of ‘the sentence’ (German: Satz)actually concerned the clause (simplex sentence), more than complex sentencetypes. But when such notions have been used in the teaching of how to write(and, sometimes, talk), they were treated as relevant for complex sentences aswell. Accordingly, the theories serve to provide a firm position for the sentencein a written-language-biased linguistics. At the same time, as I already noted(# 30), however, complex sentences, formally defined, do not receive muchsupport from empirical studies of impromptu speech.

Sentences and clauses are important units in traditional grammar. However,they were normally thought of as derived notions; the speaker or writer useswords as his linguistic primes and combines them into sentences. Such unitswere thus units of text or discourse, rather than units of language or grammar. Thisapplies, for example, to Saussure’s (1964) theory. In other words, sentences are,in this kind of theory, sentence-formed text or utterance units, that is tokens insituated discourse rather than abstract units of language. In the psychology oflanguage, this idea of sentences as results of discursive production, rather than asunits of language, was championed by, among others, Hermann Paul (1886),who, accordingly, was opposed to Wundt (see above) on this point (Blumenthal,1970). The same line of thought, that syntactically complex utterances areincrementally produced, has had important recontextualisations in behaviouristaccounts, as well as in recent Conversation Analysis and interactional linguistics(Schegloff, 1996).

One of the innovations in American structuralism and early generativism wasto recontextualise sentences as structured strings belonging to the languagesystem. Thus, they were not secondary or derived, as many traditionalists, plusSaussure, Paul and others, had argued. Chomsky made sentences into the onlyprimary units of the language system, and contributed his famous definition of alanguage (cf. Chapter 6.5), which I repeat here: ‘From now on I will consider alanguage to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length andconstructed out of a finite set of elements’ (1957:13). We see that here, sentencesare the (only) fundamental units in language; the grammar is defined as thesystem of rules defining the set of grammatical sentences (# 31). The same ideaappeared in the work of Chomsky’s teacher and intellectual predecessor, ZelligHarris (1954:260): ‘[A grammar is] a set of instructions which generates thesentences of a language.’ In somewhat later texts by Chomsky we find similarformulations:55 ‘A fully adequate grammar must assign to each of an infiniterange of sentences a structural description indicating how this sentence isunderstood by the ideal speaker-hearer’ (1965:4–5). Sentences have now become

54 Among representatives of ‘objectivist theories of meaning’, Johnson (1987 xxxi ff)mentions model-theoretic semantics (e g Lewis, 1972), situation semantics (Barwise andPerry, 1983) and theories of meaning as equalling theories of truth conditions (Davidson,1975)


‘system-sentences’, which are ‘theoretical constructs’ in the language systemposited by the linguist (Lyons, 1977:632). Sentences are not, or are no longer,observable events (as are utterances) (cf. Carr, 1997:77). In this way, thegenerative grammar, with its system of rules generating sentences, contained, atan early stage, the seed for further developments in the recontextualising chain.Chomsky (1957) introduced a distinction between underlying structures andsurface sentences, which was later (1965) more fully developed in the deep vs.surface structure distinction. Sentences could now be represented at a deep-structural level. Psychological interpretations of this followed up Wundt’s ideaof the sentence, ‘which he define[d] psychologically as the transformation of asimultaneous mental representation (the Gesamtvorstellung) into sequentiallyordered speech segments that are logically related to each other according to therules of language’ (Blumenthal, 1970:19). Clark and Clark, in theircomprehensive introduction to Psychology and Language (1977), similarlyproposed that, in sentence production, an ‘underlying representation’ is firstformed, i.e. planned and put together, and then this is transformed into a linearstring and ‘executed’ as such in speech (# 76).

However, Chomsky and many other formal grammarians were, after all, as wehave seen (Chapter 6.5 and 6.7.2), reluctant to push the claims for psychologicalreality very far in concrete terms, for example as regards how sentenceproduction and comprehension are actually carried out. Rather, deep structureswere hypothetical constructs, even though some kind of reality was definitivelyattributed to them. At the same time, these structures could be thought of asabstract sentences. But a more adequate characterisation would be asgrammatical constructions of an abstract kind. This foreshadows furtherdevelopments; sentences (as they appear in ‘external languages’) lose theirposition as units of grammar, and instead we find more abstract grammaticalconstructions (and ultimately, principles and parameters; cf. Chomsky, 1995).

Also much more surface-oriented theories, such as ‘construction grammar’(Kay and Fillmore, 1999) which is sometimes combined with conversation-analytic (CA) approaches to actual spoken discourse within ‘interactionallinguistics’, work with notions like ‘grammatical constructions’ (Chapter 8.7.5).However, construction grammar and interactional linguistics, as opposed to neo-Chomskyan approaches, have different reasons for suggesting that the sentencebe dethroned. Construction grammar builds its theory on the insight that thesentence has no privileged status in the surface grammar of spoken, interactionallanguage.56 Interactional linguistics is concerned with actual talk-in-interaction,and its related grammar. It aims at a process- rather than product-orientedapproach. Grammatical constructions (which can take many forms in manifestutterances: clauses, phrases, etc.) are not equivalent to the concrete utterances

55 Similar formulations are legion in work by other early generativists, e g Postal (19643)


(products) as such, but are rather ‘methods’ (Linell, 2003, 2004b) or‘constructional schemas’ (Ono and Thompson, 1997) for building concreteutterances. For Chomsky (1995), by contrast, the reason for partially abandoningsentences is rather the overall disinterest in surface (‘external’) language and theconcentration on abstract construction principles defining the putativelyuniversal, ‘internal’ language.

6.9Structuralism

I shall conclude the sample of recontextualisations given in this chapter bybringing up two more far-reaching effects of WLB. They concern the impact ofstructuralism on sciences outside of linguistics, that is, semiotic extensions ofnotions of language and text that have originated in linguistics and literary study,respectively. They derive from two different lines of thought, abstractobjectivism from the ‘language as an abstract system’ view (the one whichdominates mainstream linguistics) and radical social interactionism (sometimescalled constructionism) from a ‘language as text’ approach, characteristic ofcertain trends in literary studies. Diametrically opposed as they appear to be,these are two positions that both seem to be descendants of WLB influences. Inorder to see the connections, it might be instructive to start from classicalstructuralism.

Structuralism of a Saussurean kind, which is clearly part of the WLBideational heritage, teaches us that each entity, in particular every linguistic item,is defined in terms of its relations to other entities. The interrelational structureof items form an integrated, stable, synchronic system; a language is the primeexample of such a system (# 9). It is pure ‘form’ (as proposed by Saussure and,more consistently, by Hjelmslev; # 15); there are no (concrete) objects orsubstances. Various criticisms have been raised against this view, one of thembeing that such a synchronic view of stable systems cannot accommodatedynamics and change, and another one being that one has to assign a place tosubstances, along with abstract objects. I will argue that the two extremepositions discussed in this section dealt with these problems in partlydiametrically opposed ways.57

One of them, abstract objectivism, kept the stability aspects, but incorporatedmore of an essentialism, acknowledging the existence of abstract objects (such asdeep structures and underlying representations), later (sometimes) interpreted asneurological realities (Chapter 6.7.2). This is a development of the structuralistapproach in that some properties in the system are taken to be fundamental,whereas other (more ‘superficial’) properties can be derived from theseunderlying (deep-structural) properties. (This assumption was criticised by the

56 Fillmore (1988), Lambrecht (1990) and Kay and Fillmore (1999)


constructionists and their predecessor Nietzsche.58) Abstract objectivism reifiedstructural relations in terms of deep structures, which were often assumed to beuniversal in nature. Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Chomsky in linguistics aregood examples.59 Saussurean structuralism60 and its linguistic concepts were, inthe guise of semiotics, extended, i.e. applied by recontextualisation, to othercommunicative and societal phenomena. This movement had its heyday in the1960s, particularly in France, with names like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Lacan,who were engaged in analysing, for example, the ‘languages’ of myths, picturesin fashion magazines and the unconscious. Other examples of semiotic extensionsinclude the analysis of body language (Birdwhistell, 1952) and of sign language(# 95) in terms that resemble those of verbal language, spoken or (ultimately)written. Some of these applications clearly also depended on a ‘language as text’perspective, to which I will turn in a moment.

The other position, a constructionist fundamentalism, can be exemplified bypositions taken by Friedrich Nietzsche. As Nehamas (1985:90) argues in hisexploration of Nietzschean themes, Nietzsche analysed phenomena in human lifein analogy with literature: ‘some of Nietzsche’s most startling ideas becomeintuitively plausible when transposed to literature’. Literary texts are constructedby humans, and conceptions of the world are also so constructed, by humans whowant to understand and master the world (as an expression of their ‘will topower’). A character in a literary work does not exist except through what hasbeen said in the text about him or her; similarly, a person in the real world is thetotality of what (s)he has said or done, and what (s)he and others have said orthought about her or him. Thus, Nietzschean ideas represent the textual type ofthe WLB, which have thrived more in literary theories than in linguistics(Chapter 5: # 3).61 Nietzsche also argued for the structuralist idea that a thing ismerely the sum of its effects on other things (Nehamas, 1985: Chapter 3); everyquality or effect is part of a relational whole. In this anti-essentialist view, stablesubstances and attributes were challenged (ibid.: 96); instead, humans couldapply different perspectives on any part of the world and construct theinterrelational forms in divergent ways, under varying conditions. Form is ‘fluid’(ibid.: 103), constituted by the history of forms and practices. On this point, wecome closer to a dialogical understanding of the world.

57 It should be obvious that I will not claim that the individual scholars to which Iattribute the ‘extreme positions’ in the following text were directly influenced bySaussurean structuralism In fact, one of them, Nietzsche, published long before Saussure,and another, Chomsky, has relatively few references to Saussure (mainly in Chomsky,1965) I am dealing here with basic relations between scientific and ideological stances,rather than with historical influences between individual scholars

58 Nehamas (1985 88 et passim)

59 One might venture to mention other, rather different, trends in other fields, such aspsycho-dynamic theory (Freud, Jung) and folklore (the analyses of folk-tales by, e g,Lotman)


6.10The world as text

If the linguistic system has been used as metaphor and analogy, so has the text.Attempts to read human life and human cultures as ‘texts’ have been proposed byseveral scholars in the twentieth century, some of them following the example ofNietzsche (Nehamas, 1985). The example of Michel Foucault springs to mind inthis connection. More recently, it has become popular to suggest that variousnatural phenomena too, including the human body, are, or could at least be readas, ‘texts’; this is especially obvious in writings about the genetic code (e.g.Haraway, 1991). Similarly, the notion of ‘discourse’ has occasionally (e.g.Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) been extended to cover virtually all kinds of meaning-making, whether related to language or not.62

The use of texts has of course been part and parcel of all sciences, andsometimes the impact of language and texts on our ways of understandingparticular phenomena ‘out there in the world’ has been considerable. Mondadaand Racine (1999) account for the case of geography. There are many ways ofdoing geography in and through texts, that is of ‘writing geographies’, rangingfrom discursive travelogues to cartography based on topological principles andzenithal perspectives. Maps are a kind of artefacts with inscriptions, and theyembody a totalising vision, a particular way of ‘domesticating’ the earth bygeographic description. The iconicity, isomorphism and transparency of (modern)cartography seem to guarantee a truthful representation. Mondada and Racine(1999:275) explain that ‘recourse to spatialisation techniques permits theconstruction of an intelligibility which seems to stem from the thingsthemselves, thus assuring an effect of factuality and objectivity which is specificto descriptions of space’. Although discursive language could never attain suchan isomorphy, it has often been part of the ideal of an exact language. However,the main point of Mondada and Racine is, as I understand it, that geographicaldescription is text, often consisting of discursive texts and always embedded, asin the case of modern maps, in language use. Maps are used for reading thephysical environment.

In summary, one might suggest a semiotic extension of a great generality andwith a much longer history than references to Durkheim, Saussure and Foucaultwould suggest; a movement from thinking about language to thinking aboutother things. For example, the idea that God has spoken to mankind through natureitself is a long-standing idea. St Augustine talked about a language made out of

60 I am ignoring here the arguments (e g Thibault, 1997) that Saussure himself was, afterall, not such an extreme structuralist as the received view has claimed

61 I must refrain from any comprehensive attempt at surveying other examples of text-and literature-based generalisations For example, the work of Jacques Derrida(‘grammatology’, ‘logocentrism’) will be left out in this context My focus remains on theWLB points, especially as far as they are more apt for written rather than spoken language


things themselves; ‘[h]e viewed the world, as it was later put, as a vast bookwritten with God’s own finger’ (Eco: 1995:15). In the natural sciences, text-reading was for a long time used as a metaphor and model for ‘reading the Bookof Nature’ (cf. # 101); this was the conception of many natural scientists such asBacon, Galilei, Boyle and Newton (Olson, 1994: Chapter 8). The idea of laws ofnature is parasitic on legislation, i.e. on laws of societies (Harris, 2002b: 19). It isalso rather obvious that certain properties ascribed to languages, such as unityand homogeneity (# 9), have often been extended to cultures (# 99) withoutmuch problematisation. By way of analogy, one could perhaps argue that themodel of language also provided a metaphor for sociologists’ reading ‘the Bookof Society’. If there is any truth in this suggestion, that would amount to another,even more far-reaching effect of the WLB.

The WLB has led to a focus on structures that linguists expect to find also inspoken language and discourse. It therefore has an impact on sociolinguistics, atleast those traditions which are not decisively ‘interactional’ or ‘dialogical’ incharacter.63 But I argue that the written language bias has also influenced socialtheory in general. It is commonplace to claim (despite the absence of explicitreferences) that Saussure had his structuralist ideas from Durkheim, that islinguistic theory borrowed ideas from social theory. But perhaps it is (just asmuch) the other way around?

6.11Recontextualisations summed up

By way of summary, I have analysed aspects of the history of language studiesby using the analogy with a multi-party conversation. What I tried to do was toreinterpret events in the evolving intellectual history as ‘conversational’contributions in a past dialogue. I have dealt with mainstream, largely non-Bakhtinian traditions in linguistics, with some emphasis on the development ofChomskyan linguistics from the second half of the twentieth century.64 Myargument is that a dialogical (Bakhtinian) analysis of the conceptual evolution ishighly relevant also for a discipline, such as mainstream linguistics, which manypeople regard simply as a cumulative and rational science.

The picture that emerges from this bird’s-eye view of the history of linguisticsis that of a dialogue between traditions, schools and ideas involving countlessrecontextualisations. It demonstrates that a theoretical contribution cannot beunderstood in isolation from the ideas, voices and sociocultural conditions thatpreceded it, nor is our understanding of it unaffected by the manyreinterpretations that have arisen as responses to it. As Nystrand et al. (1993)

62 In my opinion, this amounts to adopting a sense of ‘discourse’ that is much too looseand inclusive


point out in a somewhat similar analysis, when ideas are scrutinised, their‘formative’ and ‘receptive’ contexts must be examined too.

In focusing on the dialogue between ideas and concepts, I have, in part,diminished the importance of single individuals, emphasising instead theirdependence on the sociohistorical and semiotic web in which their work isinterwoven.65 In focusing on the ideas as such, I have also largely neglected thesociocultural contexts in which the historical developments have taken place.From a dialogistic point-of-view, this is an obvious limitation, which can bedefended chiefly by reference to space restrictions. Nevertheless, the analysis isbased on the sociohistorical order of events, rather than just being an account ofthe logical order of ideas.66

My analysis belongs more to meta-linguistics than to the history of linguisticsor the history of ideas (as these disciplines are commonly practised). It is alsomore of a history of concepts than of ideas, and more of a ‘genealogy’ than aproper history. The analyses of this chapter can be regarded as exploring theprovenance, ‘genealogies’, of concepts. Different but related concepts exhibitfamily resemblances. Nehamas (1985: 102–104), in his account of Nietzsche,uses analogies with ‘families’, related concepts from different eras showingbelongingness to the same family, or having a common family history: ‘[L]aterforms and purposes’ of concepts are seen ‘as subsequent stages, as descendants,of earlier ones’ (ibid.: 103; italics in original).

However, my main metaphor remains that of the ‘conversation of ideas’. Inthe sociohistorical dialogue, ideas from one tradition may be grafted onto othertraditions. It is a history which involves reversals, impositions andappropriations. The resulting reinterpretations and transformations of ideas aresometimes fairly radical, as I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter. As Inoted at the outset, recontextualisations are bound to involve transmutations ofmeaning and import. Often enough, we can witness reversals of perspectives andof core-periphery relations, that is reversing relations between what is in focus ofattention and what is marginalised, what is foregrounded vs. backgrounded. Suchreversals will almost necessarily be at hand when practical utility, which isprivileged in practical and political activities, gets backgrounded in favour of thequest for scientific truth in projects within theoretical linguistics. However,despite the vicissitudes of interest and reversals of perspective, the ultimatesubject matter—language, discourse, communicative activities—will remainpartly the same, and as we can see, words and concepts used to describe andexplain the phenomena often remain partly the same, thereby causing a good

63 The latter category would include, first and foremost, the ‘interactionalsociolinguistics’ of John Gumperz (e g 1982)

64 My account is, in this case, that of an informed outsider There are many insider accountsof Chomsky’s linguistics For such an example, see Smith (1999), which, in my view,borders on hagiography


deal of confusion. Indeed, the case of language studies is particularly complex,for we must use our common and culturally inherited everyday language as asource for our scholarly metalanguage about language itself.

Recontextualisations involve, as I noted in the introduction (Chapter 6.1), bothcontinuities and discontinuities. An analysis of the various chains ofrecontextualisations involved in the history of linguistics produces a picture ofboth local coherence between historically adjacent contributions and radicaldiscontinuities between non-adjacent segments, much like what one would findin an ordinary conversation. There is local coherence between adjacent links inthe chains, but the accumulated effect of many local shifts may often befundamental changes of perspectives and understandings. For example, thedistance from the conception of a language in traditional grammar to Chomsky’sminimalist theories is great.

I claimed in the introduction that modern linguistic theory cannot liberateitself completely from ‘folk models’ of language, and that it is still dependent onproducts of traditions of scholarly activities that were largely prescriptive innature. Dispositions to think and use language in specific ways, in our case aboutlanguage itself, appear to change more slowly than the sociocultural conditionsthat have given rise to them. The same seems to be quite typical of many othergrand-scale recontextualisations (cf. Linell, 1998b). In our case of the WLB bodyof assumptions, the most comprehensive grand-scale recontextualisation residesin the comprehensive move from various practical activities to the purelyscientific contexts. The practical activities are situated, subject to specificconditions, and related to writing and reading, and to language pedagogy (cf. theBACKGROUND sections of Chapter 5). It may be reasonable to use words andconcepts about language in conventional ways as long as we are still concernedwith talking in and about those practical activities in which they had their origin.This, however, is no warrant for their motivated status as assumptions in thegeneral theories of language, discourse and communication (Segerdahl, 1998b;Bourdieu, 2000).67 Bourdieu (2000) describes what he calls the ‘scholasticfallacy’ in philosophy and social sciences; particular cases have beenuniversalised, and the sociohistorical and semiotic environments in which ideasoriginally were made possible have largely been forgotten. The overalldevelopment in linguistics, which Bourdieu could have used as a major case inpoint, is from activity-specificity (activities being related to specialised, or insome cases, generalised variants of written language and literate culture) touniversalising claims about language in general, including spoken language as

65 In Nystrand’s (1999) terms, it is a study of ‘the semiotics of influence’

66 Thus, the analysis is, I think, exempt from Bourdieu’s (2000 43–48) harsh critique of‘ahistorical philosophizing histor[ies] of ideas’, usually involving an idea of culturalevolution consisting quite simply of successively more advanced stages of knowledge


the primary form, and from practical and normative concerns to descriptive andexplanatory ambitions.

An analysis of the sociohistorical ‘conversation’ is important, I argue, forprecisely this reason: people actively engaged and engrossed in using theconcepts, in our case linguists and other actors, are not necessarily aware of thefact that they are involved in recontextualising actions, in which words, conceptsand arguments are, as it were, ‘quoted’ from original contexts and used in new(‘quoting’, derived) contexts. The words of the other, of generations of quitedifferent linguists, have been appropriated in new contexts, occupied andpopulated without a full awareness of their origins. And the scientific texts arenevertheless almost monological, with the dependence on others’ voices more orless concealed; in Bakhtin’s terms, it is a case of passive or weak double-voicedness (Morson and Emerson, 1990:147ff.).

I would therefore argue that the history of linguistics (or of any other scientificor non-scientific activity) includes many examples of the following two cases.Both are lacking in self-reflection and both fail to do the necessary historicalanalyses, but they err in contrary ways. On the one hand, there are those caseswhere actors erroneously believe that they are dealing with the same conceptsbecause they use the same words about what is ultimately largely the samesubject matter. They know that the present activity contexts and theoreticalframes are very different from the older ones, and yet they ignore, forget aboutor remain blind to the effects of the new contexts. But these contexts may in factentail radical differences in the semantic jobs that the words do. Partly the samewords are still used, but the concepts formed in new contexts may be slightly orsometimes even radically different from those used in the prior context, andarguments are often only seemingly similar to what was used in the original frames.We have witnessed this in the transition from practical activities to theoreticalcontexts.

On the other hand, there are also cases when actors do more or less theopposite to this. It is often in the interest of proponents of new theories to masktheir historical heritage. Therefore, Nietzsche engages in ‘genealogy’, trying toreveal ‘the very particular, very interested origins from which actually emergethe views that we have forgotten are [just perspectivised] views and take insteadas facts’ (Nehamas, 1985:32). Those who propose new theories often cut off thelinks with their own history and believe that they can use the words in newcontexts, dealing with ‘facts’ of language without bothering about the historicalloadings that words and concepts carry with them. Rather, the new generationsof scholars and scientists tend to declare, often quite arrogantly, that aspects ofold-timers’ systems that do not fit the new moulds are irrelevant. Modern

67 One should note, however, that the scientific activities, in which one looks for generaltheories, are also situated and subject to their specific conditions They are ‘situateddecontextualising practices’ (Linell, 1998a Chapter 14)


linguistics is characterised by the deliberate forgetting or denial of history. Inparticular, this has often been true of modern American linguistics, where theknowledge of history has typically been quite rudimentary;68 to my knowledge,neither the American descriptivists nor Chomsky and his followers eversuggested, let alone acknowledged, the importance of the heritage of the WLB inlinguistics. Yet, this heritage lives on in the background and contexts of moderntheorising.

It is not so easy to cleanse word meanings of surviving connotations. Wordsand concepts are never innocent; they have been touched by others. Conceptsremain charged with presumptions and overtones of earlier formulations, andwords record traces of the contexts through which they have passed (Lachmann,2004). There may be traces, perhaps detectable through an ‘archaeological’analysis of knowledge (cf. Foucault, 1970), of historically older layers ofrelations and connections that still exert an influence on scholarly thinking andon the evolution of scientific knowledge. Genealogy operates, Foucault says in ametaphorical turn, ‘on a field of entangled and confused parchments, ondocuments that have been scratched over and recopied many times’ (1977:139).

When we explore the boundaries of word meaning, we will, as Rommetveit(1999:18) puts it, find ‘a fringe of conceptual vagueness […] andindeterminacy’. Hilary Putnam noted that:

Using any word—whether the word be ‘good’, or ‘conscious’, or ‘red’, or‘magnetic’—involves one in a history, a tradition of observation,generalization, practice or theory. It also involves one in the activity ofinterpreting that tradition and adopting it to new contexts, extending andcriticizing it.

(1981:203)

In the context of this chapter, which has made ample use of Bakhtinian notions,it seems appropriate to finish by quoting his famous dictum that words carrytheir history with them:

The life of a word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another,from one context to another, from one generation to another. In thisprocess the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely freeitself from these concrete contexts into which it has entered.

(1984:202)

68 The same is true of other disciplines, e g psychology (cf Ash, 1983)


7Critique of ‘the written language bias’

argument

7.1Introduction: reactions and non-reactions

One can identify basically three different types of responses to the stancesadopted in Linell (1982), that is the previous and quite preliminary version of mywork on the WLB in linguistics, and to other works with similar points (such asseveral of Roy Harris’s books). Mainstream linguists ignore the critique, or ask uswhy they should bother about this kind of gobbledygook, which seems to begeared towards making linguists and others halt for some time and think aboutwhat they are doing; practising linguists should instead, it is argued, contribute tolinguistics by doing proper linguistic analysis. In this vein, Harris (2002b)reports on reactions to his proposals concerning the ‘language myth’ (seeChapter 8.2) that ‘instead of trying to meet the challenge head-on and defendthose assumptions (i.e. of mainstream linguistic theories), what they (i.e.mainstream linguists) typically did was simply deny that that they believed in themyth […] and then carry on exactly as before’ (p. 3). Another type of reaction,though this time from people working empirically on spoken language, is to referto the critique, usually mentioning it with approval and without counter-arguments. So these two are basically non-reactions. However, there are alsosome criticisms, more or less serious, which have been raised, in print or inpersonal communication, by various people who are both theoretically orientedand often fairly close to my position. These are obviously the ones for whom thedifferences matter, since criticising something usually amounts to giving somedignity to it. Some of these critics argue that I have not been radical enough. Inthis chapter, I shall summarise some of this critique in seven points.

7.2What is the alternative?

Some people have argued that even if I stated many points of interest in Linell(1982), I failed to formulate an alternative.1 What would a conception of spokenlanguage and interaction more on its own terms be like? By now, some twenty

years later, there is a wealth of empirical work and corresponding theory on talk-in-interaction and conversational language. Accordingly, I have made an attempt(Linell, 1998a) at formulating a ‘dialogical approach’ to language and discourse,in particular to talk-in-interaction. In the concise formulations of the 101 pointsin Chapter 5, I have hinted at such an approach in the ALTERNATIVES. I will alsotake up a few points in Chapter 8.7.

7.3The incommensurability of written language and spoken

interaction

Liberg (1990) suggests that Linell (1982) tried to compare two incommensurablephenomena: written language, i.e. an abstract linguistic system, and talk-in-interaction, i.e. spoken language use. Thus, Liberg (1990:173)2 sets up two listsof predicates, assembled from Linell (1982: 5–12; see also above, Chapter 3.1–2): written language, written texts and writing are characterised in terms of being‘persistent, static, discrete, decontextualised, more explicit, etc.’, while spokenlanguage, spoken discourse and speech are ‘ephemeral, dynamic, continuous,context-bound, less explicit, etc.’. Liberg rightly points out that written texts arenot ‘decontextualised’ in any absolute sense, merely liberated, in the prototypicalcases, from constraints of the immediate physical environment. Moreimportantly, however, she claims that the first list of adjectives pertains towritten language and texts, and not to acts of writing, while the secondenumeration is allegedly about spoken language use, the behaviours or actionsinvolved in speaking. This is an unfair or skewed comparison, Liberg argues.3

My rejoinder must be that the comparison is not quite as lop-sided as Libergseems to claim. If we compare the products of the activities of writing andspeaking, that is the written texts and the spoken utterances, respectively, theydo seem to have the properties assigned to them in the listings of above. Inaddition, there is a natural tendency to see writing and written language preciselyin product terms, and speech and spoken language more in process terms. Inother words, given the nature of speaking and spoken interaction, it would benatural to adopt a process (or action) approach. Yet, and this is one of the central

1 It is a common strategy among linguists, and other scholars, that they flatly dismissfundamental criticisms, if they can argue that the opponent cannot present a coherentalternative (Of course, they usually grant themselves the right to define the criteria bywhich such alternatives should be assessed) For example, proponents of generativism andrepresentationalism have argued that there are no alternative paradigms, grammars mustbe generative, and cognition must be based on representations, because one cannotconceive of any alternative On these points, Elman et al (1997) and Zlatev (1997) areamong those who have demonstrated the viability of an alternative

2 And similarly, Liberg (1993 124–125)

3 The same argument appears in Pettersson (1996 101–102)

CRITIQUE OF ‘THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE 183

WLB points which must not be missed, in spite of all this, language, includingspoken language, has usually been seen as a set of forms (expressions), i.e. inobject or product terms (cf. especially # 2, # 68). As I noted in Chapter 3.1.5,while scholars have sometimes seen spoken interaction as dynamic andprocessual, they have often persisted in treating spoken language as static andobject-like.

Indeed, we seem to be faced with a chain of ideas of the following sort (cf.Chapter 6.6):

Assuming that this sketch provides a basically correct picture of theunderlying historical process, one may notice a series of non-trivialreformulations and recontextualisations; from ‘text’ to ‘language’, from ‘seeingsomething as’ to ‘the essence of something (being of a certain nature)’, from‘written language’ via ‘language in general’ to ‘spoken language and interaction’.The end result is that spoken language and interaction are conceptualised with a‘written language bias’.

7.4A misrepresentation of written language, writing and

literacy?

Some of the points from the previous section can be carried further. It may beargued that the WLB analysis of linguistics presupposes an inaccurate view ofwritten language, writing and literacy. For example, Street (1984, 1988) andothers have pointed out, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the radicaltheories of the psychological and social consequences of literacy as propoundedby, among others, Goody (1977), Ong (1982) and Olson (1977 and, somewhatless radically, 1994) are based on an ethnocentric conception of literacy. Streetdemonstrates that literacies in different cultures work out in different ways.


However, our WLB theory does not depend on a theory of universalinfluences of writing and literacy on cultures and societies. Rather, we assumethat the explanations for the WLB reside in culture-specific factors, i.e. inWestern educational systems, the role of Latin studies, promotion of nationalstandard languages, etc. (see Chapter 2).

Other criticisms tie up closely with what was discussed in Chapter 7.3.Properties like staticness, discreteness, etc., one may argue, are not attributes ofwritten language, nor of acts of writing (Pettersson 1996:102). For example, awritten text includes suprasegmental and continuous features. This is perhapsmost obvious in ordinary longhand writing, but features like bold-face, italicsand underlining in printed texts perform functions partly similar to prosodies inspeech. Acts of writing and reading are transient, bound to points in time, spaceand contexts, just like acts of speaking and listening. Moreover, granted thatfeatures like staticness and discreteness are properties of written texts (even ifthey are not without exception), that does not permit us to ascribe them to writtenlanguage, which is the system underlying texts. Therefore, Pettersson (ibid.)concludes that ‘the written language bias’ is a misnomer and should besubstituted with ‘the writing bias’ (p. 101).

These arguments are all in several respects well taken. But in adopting the term‘written language bias’, I use the term ‘language’ in the comprehensive,ambiguous way, including both the underlying systems and specimens of texts inthe language. This squares well with mundane and traditional usage. ‘Language’is also the term used by linguists when they define their object of study; the studyof ‘language’ does not exclude the use of language in texts and discourse. Butmore importantly, my point remains (cf. Chapter 7.3) that writing, and thepractices associated with the WLB, encourages a product or object approach tolanguage, rather than a process or action approach. A language is taken to be a setof abstract objects. It should be added that many of the attitudes to writing havebeen reinforced by printing; printed texts (and their use) have more of thefeatures conventionally associated with writing, than do texts written bylonghand.

Finally, I agree of course that a dialogical theory of writing and reading isnecessary. This will take into account the situated features of the activitiesinvolved. Such processes have not been very much studied, until recently. Thenecessary technology4 was not available, and the traditional text-orientation mayalso have hampered such studies. (In this respect, the situation is similar to thatof the study of speech and spoken interaction.) It is therefore possible, andindeed plausible, that the WLB theories are partly based on misrepresentations ofwriting, written language and literacy. But this does not affect my WLB claims. Itry to analyse assumptions, claims, theories and prejudices produced and

4 Here, I am thinking in particular of methods like computer-based, online logging of text-writing performance (Holmqvist et al, 2002)


reproduced in actual, empirically attested activities of thinking and talking aboutlinguistic matters, in everyday culture, in traditional educational systems andespecially in scholarly genres and scientific disciplines, that is particularly inlinguistics. As long as I account for these metalinguistic practices in a veridicaland adequate way, it is irrelevant to my argument if they involvemisrepresentations of language, writing and written language; the historicallyattested and culturally situated kind of WLB accounted for here is still there. Ifits theories misrepresent the ‘real phenomena’ (language ‘out there’) (and I arguethat they only partly do so), this is important to find out. But this is another stepin our analysis.

7.5Media vs. communicative genres

Another related problem is this: is the medium (speech vs. writing) really soimportant? Wouldn’t it be motivated to start out from communicative activities orgenres instead? Perhaps the WLB theory is based on an absolute dichotomy ofwritten text vs. spoken interaction that is in actual fact unwarranted? In responseto this, it must be emphasised5 that there are considerable overlaps in types oflanguage and linguistic activities across the boundaries between speech andwriting (Chapter 3.3). But again, the general assumptions about language andcommunication made in traditional linguistics as well as in many brands ofcontemporary theoretical linguistics do not seem to appreciate genre differences.We are faced with quite general theories of speech and writing, which appear towork (implicitly or explicitly) with prototypical genres and polar types; tacitly,we seem to assume that writing and speech have the properties of expositoryprose in printed text and impromptu (informal, colloquial) conversation,respectively. As Nystrand et al. (1993:306) point out, Olson’s (1977) seminalpaper was based on a simplified contrast between speech and writing that ‘did notinclude lectures, sermons, or seminar discussion, on the one hand, or letters, notes,or lists, on the other’. A similar simplification was made in Linell (1982).

In empirical reality, there are of course countless genre variants, and it appearsthat genre distinctions may often override differences between media. In addition,there are many hybrid genres (Bhatia, 1990; Roberts and Sarangi, 1999). Havingsaid this, however, it should be emphasised that the above-mentioned polartypes are not deprived of empirical support; they do indeed stand out asprototypes in large-scale empirical studies of many text and talk types (Biber,1988).

5 As was indeed pointed out in Linell (1982, 1988)


7.6The idealised language made by linguists

It has been pointed out, particularly by Roy Harris but also by others, that thelanguage that appears in linguists’ models and theories is not real writtenlanguage, as practised in ordinary written practices, but something moreartificial, an idealised language, a construction by linguists. The data thatlinguists, particularly grammarians, generally use as examples are often thoughtup (invented), rather than actually attested. The data constitute a special kind oflanguage and language use, with autonomous (context-free) sentences, which arediscussed from a specifically grammatical, and therefore rather peculiar (# 32),point-of-view. Harris (1980, 1981) claims that language, as conceived bylinguists, is a fiction, a ‘myth’. When Harris (1996) points out that linguistscodify language, he seems to imply that there is no code ‘out there’ or at leastthat linguists’ activities result in a new and special kind of code. While there is alot of evidence for Harris’s point, which will be taken up in Chapter 8.2, 1cannot see that it shatters my arguments for a WLB in linguistics, since the‘artificial’, ‘idealised’ or ‘fictive’ language described by linguists in (primarily)normative books on different languages is strongly oriented to the needs of goodpractices in the use of written language.

7.7A language bias instead of a written language bias?

Another point sometimes raised is that the WLB thesis, as laid out in Linell(1982) (and in this book), is not radical enough; it has been claimed that it is infact based on a bias that is very similar to the one it criticises. According toPettersson (1996:103), I made a distinction between language and paralanguage,‘which seems to revive the very bias under analysis’.6 The upshot of anargument by Kress (1994) is that, as regards communication, semiotics, etc., weare faced not merely with a written language bias, but with a general languagebias, a ‘logocentric’ stance.

The point of criticism under scrutiny squares with a possible reading of RoyHarris (e.g. 1996); every attempt to posit an abstract language amounts to‘segregationalism’, isolating verbal language from other phenomena with whichit may turn out to have essential links. Therefore, in Harris’s terms, we wouldneed ‘integrationalism’ instead of ‘segregationalism’. Basically the same critiqueof logocentrism has been raised by several others, for example, by JacquesDerrida in his deconstruction of philosophy and the role of language. In Harris’scase, it is not always clear to me how far he is prepared to go: does he mean that

6 At some points, however, such readings were warded off in Linell (1982), when it wasemphasised that ‘comprehensive communicative means’ involves ‘both verbal means(speech) and non-verbal means (gesticulation, etc)’ (p 6)


we should do away with the notion of language, language systems underlyingsituated interaction, altogether?

The attribution of a more deep-seated language bias to my analysis isinteresting. It implies that I am still too much of a linguist, who, after all, cannotsee through his own prejudices and do away with them.7 Indeed, I am ‘enough ofa linguist’ to insist that there is something like a ‘language’ over and beyond thesituated interactions in which talk-in-interaction occurs and in which ‘language’is made manifest. I also think that to some extent, ‘language’ can and should beseparated out from other aspects of communication. This need not imply that theboundaries are always easy to identify. These are assumptions made not only bylinguists but also, although most often in a partly different fashion, by ordinarypeople. Here, I am not thinking about their pre-theoretical meta-discourse onlanguage, which is predominantly ‘written-language-biased’ (Chapter 2).Instead, I would point to the fact that actors, in their actual interactional conduct,often do orient to features of (what we would call) ‘language’ (Chapter 8.7.2).However, this is of course no warrant that ‘segregationalism’, even of a moderatesort, is scientifically motivated. It must be emphasised (again) that language andlanguages are in many ways intrinsically intertwined with social practices andstructures, bodily behaviours, and (other) forms of communication andcognition. How to conceive of the relations between language and its contexts isfar from clear, but I will argue that a dialogistic framework will be helpful (cf.below, Chapter 8.7).

7.8A caricature of linguistics?

I have pointed out that not every point on my list (Chapter 5) is characteristic oftraditional, structuralist, generative (Chomskyan or neo-Chomskyan8) theories inlinguistics. One may add to this that there are many kinds of linguistics,especially in those circles who call themselves functionalists or interactionallinguists, that are hardly subjected to a WLB, at least not to any major extent. Alot of research has been done on talk-in-interaction in the last twenty or thirtyyears, within different disciplines and in ways that can be called ‘dialogistic’(Linell, 1998a). Isn’t all this part of present-day linguistics? Therefore, isn’t mycharacterisation of the whole discipline of linguistics as WL-biased ratherunjustified? Doesn’t it amount to drawing a caricature?

7 For such a critique of Linell (1998a), see Kelly (2002)

8 I use the label ‘generative (Chomskyan) linguistics’ for various versions of classical(Chomskyan) generative grammar up to, approximately, the launching of the first variantsof Extended Standard Theory (EST), e g Chomsky (1957, 1964, 1965, 1970) The label‘neo Chomskyan’ linguistics refers to works based on the theory of Principles-and-Parameters (Chomsky, 1986) or the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995)


My answer is (by and large) no. Many of the dialogistic approaches tolanguage and discourse stem from outside linguistics, or at least from outsidemainstream linguistics. Many outstanding analyses of language have beenprovided by philosophers, sociologists, social psychologists, culturalpsychologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, etc. Just to mention a few namesthat spring to mind, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Cassirer, Peirce, Mead,Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Malinowski, Ricoeur, Sacks, Goffman, Garfinkel andBourdieu have never defined themselves, nor have they been understood byothers, as linguists. One may argue for a very broad field of language sciences,where all these, and many more, are to be included. But it remains a historicalfact that linguistics is a specific discipline among the language sciences, with itsown history and present-day trends, and there is no doubt that the WLB has beencharacteristic of its mainstream proponents.

Some of the 101 WLB points of Chapter 5 have enjoyed a long time ofhegemonic dominance; this applies, for example, to the notion of a unitarylanguage (Chapter 6.5), the role of rules and sentences in grammar and logic, etc.Variants of the transfer theory of communication, the code theory of (a)language, the theory of cognition as information processing, etc. have been quitewidely accepted and adopted in the twentieth century. More precisely, they oftenoccur as taken-for-granted background assumptions, which linguists, and others,tend to ‘think from’ rather than ‘about’. At the same time, this means that whenlinguists are pressed to spell out their general assumptions in a more nuanced andexplicit way, they often produce a number of riders. However, what critics likeRoy Harris (and likewise, to some extent, myself) have done has been toreinterpret and recontextualise these propositions from backgrounded, partlyunrecognised assumptions into explicitised, focused claims, and then to assessthem in a critical context. Some opponents argue that this invokes a parody oflinguistics. For example, Joseph (1997) argues that the ‘telementational’ theoryof communication (cf. # 66: transfer theory) and the theory of language as a fixedcode (# 46) are among ‘the biggest, reddest herrings’ Harris could come up with(Harris, 1997:311).9

However, I find it hard to deny that many linguists (and lay people) haveendorsed at least milder versions of such theories as those of a fixed code, theautonomy of language, and communication as a transfer process. Many of theseperspectives are characteristic also of modern, theoretical linguistics at least upto the era of Chomskyan linguistics. But it is true that such basic assumptions areoften expressed only in rather vague and backgrounded forms. They reflectstances that are deeply entrenched and therefore taken for granted, rather thanargued.

In summary, I stick to the claim that the WLB points are, more or less, true ofmainstream linguistics, and, to some extent, more broadly other languagesciences. But the WLB is certainly not monolithic, and it goes without saying thatnot everything in linguistics derives solely from a WLB. The corpus of WLBpoints is deliberately limited to some core traditions of the discipline, and does


not do justice to some currents within linguistics at large, as it now looks somefour or five decades after Chomsky entered the academic arena and came todominate it.10

The WLB theory amounts to a particular perspective on the disciplinary natureof linguistics and its origins. Is it really true then? Well, if it is a particularperspective, this implies that there are other perspectives and otherinterpretations of its subject matter. Therefore, if we continue to insist on theperspectivity aspect, we could say that the WLB theory is not entirelyconstrained by a requirement to give the whole truth and nothing but the truth.On the other hand, perspectivity does not imply radical relativism; someperspectives are more fruitful and insightful than others. My claim is that WLBtheory is in fact a highly plausible account; there is plenty of evidence for it,evidence which, many people would argue, is close to being hard facts.

Any scientific theory abstracts from some aspects of data in order to make itspoints. The WLB meta-theory of linguistic theorising is no different in thisregard. Admittedly, it has a certain polemical touch too, and some interpretersmay therefore argue that there are features of a caricature in its picture oflinguistics. The compact form in which I sketched the background of somepoints in Chapter 5 (the brief BACKGROUND accounts after each point) mayindeed involve a few argumentative short-cuts. So there may be a grain of truthin such a characterisation. But as Bakhtin has pointed out, parody is an efficientmeans of giving overt expression to features of reality which are otherwise easilyconcealed, suppressed and denied.11

9 Joseph (1997) argues that detailed examinations of Harris’s characterisations (oraccusations) of various philosophers or linguists for being, for example,‘surrogationalists’ (cf # 1) or ‘telementationalists’ (# 66) show that these characterisationsdo not stand up to scrutiny Therefore, they are ‘red herrings’ For Joseph, Harris’s ‘myththeory’ is itself a ‘myth’


10 In a more detailed account, many of the 101 points would not apply to linguisticsindiscriminately With respect to present-day trends, including neo-Chomskyanlinguistics, at least two remarks are in place

First, as regards Chomsky himself (and his close followers), he has turned away from thetask of describing ‘surface’ languages (‘E(xternal) languages’), i e languages such asEnglish, French or Hebrew Indeed, such political and academic constructs are of littlelinguistic interest, according to neo-Chomskyan theory (see Chapter 8 3) This impliesmuch less emphasis than before on notions like ‘grammaticality’ Chomsky’s (1995)interest is now, it seems, more decisively on ‘minimalist’ assumptions of structure(‘principles’ of universal grammar, ‘I(nternal) language’) associated with the underlyinglanguage capacity Surface sentences are no longer the basic units of a language, rather, weare dealing with more abstract grammatical constructions (cf a similar attitude in‘construction grammar’, e g Kay and Fillmore, 1999)

Second, there has been a broadening of interests both inside (certain) neo-Chomskyanapproaches and, more characteristically, outside these New foci of interest include

• empirical studies of typological variation often working with large corpusesof real language data (‘corpus linguistics’, ‘usage-based linguistics’),

• studies of non-standard varieties, such as child language, pidgins and creoles,and languages for ‘specific purposes’ (e g professional varieties),

• extensive research on spoken language (including the burgeoning field ofinteractional linguistics, cf Chapter 8 fn 24),

• cognitive linguistics (e g Langacker, 1987; for a broad overview, see Croftand Cruse, 2004) with ambitions to move beyond language into cognition (butnot so much into interaction), Some variants are compatible with connectionisttheories (Elman et al, 1997, Zlatev, 1997

In addition, there are of course older traditions, e g in the functional-systemictradition of Firth and Halliday which have always paid attention to the socialrealities of language (Butt, 2001) Another dissenter, almost forgotten today, wasGardiner (1951) They share features with dialogical traditions (cf Chapter 8 7,and Linell, 1998a) If we look outside Anglophone linguistics, there is aFrancophone tradition in twentieth-century linguistics which is explicitly action-based and takes into account the speaking subject This tradition goes back toBréal (1897) In more recent years, the ‘linguistique de l’énonciation’ comprisesworks like Benveniste (1966, 1974), Culioli (1990–99), Ducrot (1984),Maingueneau (1994) and Salazar Orvig (1999)All this not withstanding, it is obvious that dialogical, interactionist conceptions are stillrare Indeed, some fairly recent contributions to discourse theory and pragmatics haveproved to be clearly monological in nature Searle’s (1969, etc) ‘speech act theory’,perhaps the best-known action approach to spoken discourse, is a prime example (cf # 57)Several branches of the functional-systemic linguistics pedigree have retained WL-basedfeatures, e g the Birmingham school of discourse analysis (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975)New versions of formalist conceptions of language are now often supported by computer-based metaphors and can be found in cognitive science, neurolinguistics andcomputational linguistics, where a formal language, with no substantial semantics,provides the basis for computations and calculi


11 Bakhtin and Voloshinov, and their commentators, used quite a few parodying orsarcastic expressions about the activities of linguists The habit of linguists examiningspecimens of language was compared to that of collecting and classifying dried andpressed specimens of plants in herbariums The language studied had been fixated inwriting—it was dead, indeed in some cases these were specimens from languages withoutany spoken counterparts any longer, ‘cadavers’ of language (Voloshinov, 1973 71) Firth(1968 47) called the rigour of formalist or super-structuralist linguistics a ‘rigor mortis’ Ifone ignores the life of discourse, Bakhtin (1981 292) argues, ‘all we have left is the nakedcorpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or thefate of a given word in life’ Voloshinov and Bakhtin took over the cadaver metaphorsfrom others, notably Humboldt, who said ‘Die Sprache hegt nur in der verbundenen Rede,Grammatik und Wörterbuch sind kaum ihrem todten Gerippe vergleichbar’ (Humboldt,1969 186) (There are similar statements in other works by Humboldt I am indebted to SaaraHaapamaki, Turku, for pointing this out to me) Sometimes, the metaphors involvingkilling and death were extended to linguists’ activities Thus, Bakhtin (1986 147) arguesthat contexts and discourse can never be finalised However, a language seen as a code‘must be finalized’—‘A code is a deliberately established, killed context’


8People’s languages and linguists’ grammars

8.1Where is language?: three major positions in linguistic

meta-theory

One might argue that a major task would be for me to formulate a coherentalternative to a WLB linguistics. Unfortunately, this is hardly feasible within thebounds of this book, the primary aim of which has been to argue that there isindeed, in the first place, a WLB in most of the language sciences of past andpresent times. Yet, I hope that the ALTERNATIVES under the respective pointsof Chapter 5 can be taken as fragments of a realistic theory of language, with aspecial emphasis on spoken, interactional language. Towards the end of thischapter, I will also quite briefly summarise some aspects of a dialogicalalternative. The main bulk of this chapter, however, will consist of a discussionof some attempts in the language sciences to theorise the relations betweenlanguage ‘out there’ and the linguists’ own activities and models.

Where is language? How do we get to know anything about it? These arefundamental questions in linguistic meta-theory which have been lurking behindmany arguments in this treatise and elsewhere. Here, I shall attempt to discusssome aspects of the issues by outlining three major positions in the ontology andepistemology of language that one can identify in the meta-linguistic debate ofthe three last decades of the twentieth century.

The first position may be dubbed the ‘made-up theory’ position. This has beenmost radically articulated by Roy Harris (1980, and later), who claims thatlinguists are ‘language-makers’. (In addition, ordinary people are of course, atanother level, language-makers too, rather than just language-users.) Harris’sview is that language is made largely in and through theorising; it does not existout there, at least not in the forms in which it appears in linguists’ theories, modelsand representations. Such models may be useful in various practical activitiesassociated with writing and literacy, but it is a ‘myth’ (Harris, 1981) that theyrepresent independent realities of language.

The other two positions are both objectivistic; they argue that researchers’models deal, or should deal, with linguistic realities existing ‘out there’.

According to them, the activity of the linguist’s theorising does not contributeanything essential to language per se. But they differ fundamentally as regardsthe nature of the objects of research out there. One position is the interactionist,social-constructionist approach associated with Conversation Analysis (CA) andinteractional linguistics. Emanuel Schegloff could be taken to be a figurehead ofthis position, which holds that language exists only in the very forms andfunctions that can be observed in the situated linguistic practices in the world, inconcrete activities and utterances, and, similarly, of course, in written texts, etc.Assuming, however, that priority is given to spoken, interactional language, wecould call it an ‘embodied action’ position. Before later going into the CAposition, I shall also mention two related, though partly different, interactionistpositions, those of (radical) post-modernist interactionism and ethnomethodology(Chapter 8.4–5).

The third major position maintains that language can not be directly observedin speech and writing. These are communicative and cognitive products thatdepend not only on language but on a complex interaction between language andmany other conditions which are ‘linguistically irrelevant’: individual,psychological, social, cultural, geopolitical factors. The true essence of languageis instead ‘inner’ (or ‘internal’) language, which is abstract and remote fromsurface regularities and somehow located in the mind/brain. What linguists do isto formulate in theoretical terms, as accurately as possible, what is already ‘outthere’, or in this case, rather ‘in there’, in speakers’ competences and in theinnate language faculty that every human being is endowed with. This position,the ‘inner language’ approach, is inalienably connected with the work of NoamChomsky.1

There are surely some grains of truth in all these three positions; that languageexists in linguists’ theories, in actors’ situated actions and practices, and inlanguage users’ minds/brains. At the same time, all three have some seriousproblems. I shall discuss them here, beginning by juxtaposing the ‘made-uptheory’ (‘myth’) position with the Chomskyan position, the latter being the onewhich, I believe, is most clearly a descendant of the WLB tradition. Thereafter, Ishall discuss some aspects of a radical social interactionism, perhaps espoused bysome adherents of Conversation Analysis. This stance tends to deny any realityin any abstract theory of language, whether made by linguists (Harris) orassumed to be acquired by ordinary human beings and based on their languagefaculty (Chomsky); there are only the situated interactions, and analysts should

1 Chomsky (1965 25) points out that he uses the terms ‘grammar’ and ‘theory oflanguage’ with a ‘systematic ambiguity’ ‘Grammar’, he says, could ‘refer, first, to thenative speaker’s internally represented “theory of his language” and, second, to thelinguist’s account of this ‘Similarly, ‘theory of language’ can also ‘refer both to thechild’s innate predisposition to learn a language of a certain type and to the linguist’saccount of this’ Thus, Chomsky in effect seems to deny the point in a distinction betweenobject of research (e g object language) and theory (e g scientific meta-language)


just reconstruct these. I will argue that this position too is overstated. At the sametime, there may be some affinity between the CA approach and the‘integrationalism’ that Harris recommends (Fleming, 1997). Towards the end, Iwill instead suggest a dialogical approach to ‘real’ language.

8.2Harris: ‘myths’ and ‘made-up’ theories

One of Roy Harris’s (1980, 1981, 1996, 1997) main points is that linguists arelanguage-makers. Linguistic theories and descriptions are made by linguists, andthey are more of products of the linguists’ own activities than an adequatedescription of an objectively given reality (‘language out there’); this implies,according to Harris, that language itself, as described by linguists, is something‘made’, constructed and shaped, perhaps even partly manufactured or fabricated,rather than something given and existing out there. It is an illusion that there issuch a thing as language, as described by linguists, in the world.

Harris’s point about language-making applies perhaps most unambiguously tothe notion of a national standard language. This is largely a cultural andsociopolitical artefact (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996:9), not somethingdescriptive of empirically existing (spoken) linguistic activities. It is the result ofthe activities by linguists, administrators, politicians and others to domesticatelinguistic phenomena and to create a common language to replace the complex,heterogeneous but related (often mutually intelligible) varieties that are, or were,to be found in oral communication. The national standard language does notdirectly correspond to a natural speech community comprising all those who areconsidered members of the nation. The idea of the unitary language is thereforelinked to efforts to create unitary standards of writing within the nation state.2

That the idea of unitary and standardised languages involves considerableidealisations is a point often made in (socio)linguistic metatheory (Bex andWatts, 1999; Coupland, 2000). The sociolinguist S. Romaine characterises a(national) language—as opposed to dialects—as a ‘relatively non-technical term’(1989:27). A long time ago, J.R. Firth too ‘found the idea of a language (English,Japanese, Chinese, Hindi) quite unhelpful for linguistic purposes’ (Butt, 2001:1813). As we will note below, this is, interestingly, an opinion put forward alsoin Chomsky’s more recent work, although he has other reasons for hisdisinterestedness in ‘external languages’. The idea of the common unitarylanguage was also forcefully put into question by Bakhtin, who instead argued forthe presence of heteroglossia that results from various ‘centripetal and

2 Another important application of the idea of unitary languages is the assumption of onecoherent, entirely integrated and dialect-free Ursprache, e g for all Indo-Europeanlanguages, which has often been made in historical linguistics, e g by ‘neogrammarians’(Junggrammatiker) I abstain, however, from substantiating this point here

PEOPLE ‘S LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTS’ GRAMMARS 195

centrifugal forces which makes it [i.e. language] a dynamic and emergentphenomenon’ (Lähteenmäki, 1998:60). Unity and invariance are not inherent inlanguage; rather, they can sometimes result from unifying policies, i.e. officiallanguage policies governed by ideology (ibid.). Bakhtin (1981) does himself usethe notion of the common unitary language, but this can, in Lähteenmäki’s(2003b: 33) interpretation, be characterised as ‘the product of centralising forcesand decontextualising practices found in all linguistic communities’.3

I would hasten to add a few remarks as an aside here. If standard languages aremyths, as Harris suggests, they are myths that have attained a level of socialreality and social importance. Rommetveit (1988:15) has remarked, with regardto the myth of ‘literal’ meanings of words (Chapter 5: # 46), that ‘the myth ofliteral meaning […] is in our highly literate societies a reality lived byenlightened laymen under subtle influence from stories told by prominentscholars of semantics’ (italics in original). The same could be said about nationallanguages; they are realities lived by most citizens under the influence of storiestold by experts (for example, linguists of the past) and political authorities,although the stories told by the latter have not always been very subtle. Therealities lived are also massively sustained by institutions and literate culture atlarge, not in the least in and through all the texts written according to the normsof the standard language. Thus, literate societies support written (standard)languages with a wide range of physical artefacts (books, computer files, etc.).National standards are therefore, at least in part, concrete, written realities.4

But Harris’s claims about the language myth are more far-reaching than theclaims about national standards might suggest. Exactly how farreaching they areis, however, somewhat difficult to determine. If we pursue Harris’s (e.g. 1980,1996) argument that linguists are ‘language makers’, we may ask: does languageactually exist in any form at all, or is it nothing but a ‘myth’, as Harris (1981,2002a, 2002b) has put it? If, on the other hand, language is more than a myth,where does it exist, and in what form? Is it ‘out there’, in the real life of people,as something which is then subjected to linguists’ (and other researchers’)interpretations and recontextualisations? If the linguists’ model is a theoretical

3 Bakhtin (1975), cited by Lahteenmaki (1998 60), argues that a unified language is nevergiven (Ru dan), but always posited (Ru zadan) However, Lahteenmaki (2003b) alsoargues that Bakhtin’s stance was somewhat ambiguous, the notion of a common unitarylanguage was not totally alien to him

4 Acknowledging the (lived) reality of something (such as a specific language) which inanother sense lacks an objective reality (here as spoken language and interaction) maysound like a dangerous argument Does something, say the immaculate conception,become real just because people believe in it? Well, in one specific sense it does, sincebeliefs may lead to real consequences in the world (Thomas, 1928) But the case oflanguage is more tricky than that It is a concrete artefact used as the medium forexpressing beliefs about the world, and the reality of the artefact does not depend on theobjective grounding of the beliefs expressed by it Cf also below, Chapter 8 3, on thereflexivity of language and meta-language


artefact, what are the language-in-actual-use realities like? If ‘linguists codifylanguage’, what is there in the first place, before it becomes ‘codified’? And whatkind of status can be assigned to the products of codification?

Despite Harris’s many provocative and extensive arguments, it is not clear tome exactly what his position is with regard to the above-mentioned questions.5

How far should the notion of ‘language myth’ (Harris, 1981) be taken? In arecent collection of papers (Harris, 2002a), which examine the consequences ofthe ‘language myth’ in various sectors of Western societies and cultures, Harris(2002b:1) characterises a myth as ‘a cultural fossil, a sedimented form ofthinking that has gone unchallenged for so long that it has hardened into a kindof intellectual concrete’. In addition, it seems clear that he thinks that a ‘myth’ isscientifically unfounded. According to the text on the jacket of Harris (2002a),Western thinking about language and communication has relied on

two very dubious assumptions. […] One of these is that each nationallanguage is a unique code that specifies determinate forms, meanings andcommunications of these utilized in everyday discourse. […] The other isthat linguistic communication consists in the utilization of such codes totransfer messages from the mind of one individual to the mind of the other.

In other words, these basic ‘myths’ concern ‘language as a fixed code’ and‘communication as a transfer process’ (Harris’s ‘telementation’), both of whichare by now well known and, in my opinion, subject to very serious doubt.6

In the context of this book, it must be added that one of the biggest myths inlinguistics is that the true nature of language—whether taken in general orspecifically as concerning spoken interactional language, i.e. language in itsoriginal habitat of talk-in-interaction—is adequately described in writtenlanguage-based linguistics. Oral language, as used in talk-in-interaction, isontologenetically, phylogenetically and sociohistorically primary. Yet, it is notthis language that is mirrored or described in dictionaries, grammar-books, etc.,even if these are useful aids in normatively regulating language use, especially incertain written genres. Nor is spoken interactional language adequately describedor explained in most theoretical accounts of language in general (taken asindependent of the medium). Our ‘native’ language gets transformedsubstantially, both when it is practised in writing (in actual language use), andwhen it is theoretically constructed in systematic ways by linguists (which is alsodone in writing). Here, following the spirit of Roy Harris, we can say that linguists

5 Cf Fleming (1997), who—despite his positive attitude to the ‘integrationalist’programme —thinks that Harris lacks a ‘“positive” methodology’ (p 205)

6 That these theories are still alive can be documented in the writings of many leadingscholars (see Chapter 5 # 46, # 66), despite this, critics have called them ‘Harris’s biggest,reddest herrings’ (see Chapter 7 7)


have in general failed to recognise the impact of their own use of language andmeta-language.

Linguists contribute to creating their object of study, i.e. language (in general)and specific languages.7 Linguistic theories are therefore not reflecting anindependent reality ‘out there’ in anything like a simple and straightforwardway. Nor is the longevity of a paradigm simply due to its alleged degree of fitwith facts. The survival of theories (and I might here think of, say, generativismor, more generally, of WLB theories at large) may also be due to relations ofpower within academia and interests in maintaining academic stability (Foucault,1972).

Constructing one’s object of study is of course not something that is uniquefor linguistics or the study of linguistic activities. Doing science on somethingcontributes to constituting the phenomena themselves, perhaps particularly so inthe human and social sciences. Generally, scholars and scientists construct theirobjects as more coherent and unitary than they are from the beginning; at least,there are usually alternative constructions possible, but these are often beingexcluded, ignored or even not thought of. Language, mind or psyche, society,state and national history have all been, if not constructed, then at leastthoroughly reconstructed in and through the activities of members of academicdisciplines, i.e. linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science and history,respectively. In these endeavours, scientists and scholars have often intentionallyor unintentionally—collaborated in subtle ways with political authorities.Languages are not just social constructions, they are in part academic andpolitical constructions.

However, all this cannot justify an unqualified dismissal of language ‘outthere’ as a ‘myth’. As I hinted at in Chapter 4.2, the ‘myth theory’ runs the riskof throwing out the baby with the bath water. There can hardly be any doubt thatthere is ‘language’ (as well as different ‘languages’) ‘out there’ in the social andindividual lives of people, behind and beyond situated talk-in-interaction, in theform of tacit knowledge and linguistic routines that transcend singlecommunicative situations. The nature of this ‘language’ in the context of talk-in-interaction must be understood in ‘dialogical’ terms, and I shall return to thistopic in Chapter 8.7.

7 For example, in her study of scribal practices in fourteenth-century Sweden, Johnson(2003) concludes that the neat, canonical inflectional paradigms usually set up in accountsof Old Swedish do not correspond to the written realities of the time Paradigms excludedattested variants if they did not fit the systematicity, and perhaps also included formswhich had not been actually attested in real language use Cf Chapter 5 # 7, on the idea ofunitary and variation-free languages


8.3Chomsky: the theory that people’s languages are

‘linguistically irrelevant’

The history of linguistics offers many examples of how concepts have becomerecontextualised from their original embeddings within projects of supportingpractical activities; they have been grafted onto various theoretical contexts, inwhich concepts are understood as theoretical terms in a scientific theory thataims at describing the nature of language as a Ding an sich, irrespective of whatpeople use it for in particular activities. These recontextualisation processes, inwhich concepts are moved from practical to theoretical contexts, have beengoing on for a very long time. If grammar in classical times, the tradition fromDionysios Thrax and onwards, was primarily aimed at improving language use,grammar for the medieval modists was already a matter for science andphilosophy. It cannot be disputed that concepts change as they travel acrosscontexts. On the other hand, we must not understand them as deprived of theirintellectual history; concepts remember, as it were, parts of their origins(Chapter 6). In addition, practical activities related to language are of course stillgoing on, and need their theoretical underpinnings, and practical activitiescontinue to influence theory in more or less subtle ways.

The principle of ‘from practice to theory’ was exemplified in Chapter 2 bysome notions of grammar. For example, the Roman way of writing in thescriptura continua style had no empty spaces between words, no punctuationsigns, and no distinction between upper-case and lower-case letters. Arguably, thelater introduction of these devices were motivated by practical concerns, but italso presupposed some theoretical notions, such as the concepts of ‘word’ and‘sentence’, traditionally the corner-stones of grammatical theory. Similarly, whenpeople (later) felt a need to be able to divide up long words on two successivelines, there evolved a concomitant need for ‘theories’ of the morphologicalconstituent (‘morpheme’) structure (and perhaps syllabic build-up) of words.Likewise, some notion of ‘phrase’ is presupposed when we lay out headlines ondifferent lines in, for example, books and newspapers, or in poetry (and this istrue also if the specific form of poetry builds upon the violation of phrasestructure). All in all, some reflection on language structure is a precondition fordeveloping routines for writing; we must be able to define and separate outwords, clauses and sentences, perhaps also morphemes and phrases, from theflow of utterances. Once rules for writing and written texts have been partlyestablished, concepts implied by the rules can be reified, refined and graduallydecontextualised from their original contexts of origin, and the linguistic entitiesthey define get reinterpreted as properties immanent in language and languagesin general, irrespective of particular written practices.

Accordingly, one aspect of the ‘from practice to theory’ movement is thatnotions which were originally tied to activity-specific contexts, for examplewriting in particular ways, become part of universalising theories; linguistic


concepts are claimed to be universally true of language, or at least generally trueof a particular language, rather than being conceptual tools for particularactivities involving (that) language.8 For example, phonemes (or ‘speechsounds’) were needed for alphabetical writing systems, but then claimed torepresent the true phonological structure of (spoken) words. (There is someempirical evidence for this phonological assumption, but it is not the whole truthand nothing but the truth; cf. # 23.) The definition of lexical meaning wasnecessary for compiling dictionaries (and these, in turn, were needed foreducating people in languages for specific purposes and in foreign languages),but then lexical meanings in terms of verbal (Aristotelian) definitions wereclaimed to represent the true semantic nature of words. (Of course, again there isa grain of truth in such a claim, but it cannot be a full theory of word meaning;cf. # 46.) The notion of the linguistic meaning of sentences (considered astypes), as opposed to the situated interpretations of utterances in which sentencesare deployed, was needed in grammar lessons and for teaching foreign languages,but it cannot be a full and universally valid theory of meaning (cf. # 48).Theories of formal semantic representations and operations (‘rules’) are neededto build computer software, but this kind of theory cannot be generalised to a fullaccount of how humans use and deal with language (cf. # 83).

Examples of this kind can be multiplied. Of course, I do not claim thatconcepts defined and operating within modern theoretical linguistics can be fullyreduced to, or equated with, their counterparts in those practical contexts, inwhich they originated or are still currently applied. That much should be clearfrom the account in terms of the recontextualisations laid out in Chapter 6. Butthe connections are there. And yet, theoretical linguists tend to be upset byinsinuations that their concepts could have a practical (and therefore, presumablyin their view, a ‘simple’, down-to-earth, rather than theoretical and elevated) originand import.

Returning to the point that grammars are ‘made’ by linguists, we note that thisis true in a trivial and obvious sense; it is linguists, not ordinary language users,who write grammars. But many theoretical linguists argue that they, in andthrough their grammar-making, also make claims about the language of reallanguage users. If we compare the activities of people experiencing linguisticphenomena in various ‘life’ situations with those of linguists analysing linguisticdata, we can set up the following contrast:

Linguists isolate (Harris, 1996: ‘segregate’) language, decontextualising itfrom all social, psychological and environmental factors, while people encounterand live their language as embedded or ‘integrated’ (Harris) withincommunicative practices. The data that theoretical linguists use for their analyses(B1) are usually not empirical data from people’s situated language use. Rather,linguists tend to analyse, manipulate and compare invented sentences, linguistic

8 I am indebted to the teaching of Sven Ohman as regards the arguments to follow


structures which are cleaned up and have had their ‘linguistically irrelevant’aspects of ‘performance’ wiped off. Linguists sometimes seem to subscribe to adualistic ontology, according to which ‘there are rules an sich which exist in aseparate realm independently of actual behaviour’ 2003a: 57). Inspite of all this, some linguists have argued that their grammars (B2) are modelsof speakers’ competences (cf. A2), even though Chomsky and others havecombined this claim with all sorts of riders.9 Considering the differences betweenthe activities and contexts of people who are immersed in their ‘languaging’(A1) and those of linguists in their distanced (and distancing) scholarly activities(B1), such an assumption seems highly unlikely (e.g. Hacker, 1990; Zlatev, 1997).

The scholarly activities within extensive divisions of the language sciencesbelong to academic traditions derived from scholasticism, in which scholarspursue their studies literally closed off from the world in which language islived. The history of linguistics, like that of many other humanistic disciplines,philosophy being the supreme case, has many features of a ‘scholastic vision’, asanalysed by Bourdieu (2000). Linguists have developed a detached view onlanguage, despite the fact that their predecessors’ approach to language wasrooted in practically and normatively oriented concerns characteristic ofparticular activities (standardising written language, compiling dictionaries,developing tools for translation of texts, etc.). According to Bourdieu, thiswould be a case of the ‘scholastic fallacy’ of ‘the universalizing of a particularcase and the forgetting of the social conditions which make it possible’.10

Scholastic studies are seldom directly related to the practical activitiesthemselves, but are immersed in the activities of a highly literate and intellectualenvironment, such as monasteries, grammar schools and universities. Bourdieu(ibid.: 51), referring to Dewey, goes on to say about the theorising scholar:

9 For some discussion of Chomsky’s and his followers’ attitudes to ‘psychologicalreality’ in phonology, see Linell (1979a)


Projecting his theoretical thinking into the heads of acting agents, theresearcher presents the world as he thinks it (that is, as an object ofcontemplation, a representation, a spectacle) as if it were the world as itpresents itself to those who do not have the leisure11 (or the desire) towithdraw from it in order to think it.

We see a case of

crediting agents with the reasoning reason of the scientist reasoning abouttheir practices (and not the practices of the scientist acting in everydaylife); or, more precisely, by proceeding as if the constructs (theories,models or rules) that one has to produce in order to make practices or worksintelligible to an observer who can only grasp them from outside after theevent […] were the effective and efficient principle of those practices.

(Ibid.: 60)

Linguists produce their universalist theories of language as part of their academicscholarly studies. People, on the other hand, learn to master their language, thismastery involving the ability to use utterances in patterned ways as parts ofcommunicative practices in different activity types. Why should these languageusers need a very complex grammar of the kind developed by linguists (B2), agrammar which is in fact often more of a systematic syntactic calculus ofsemantically-pragmatically uninterpreted abstract strings? The generativisttheories of language, which are indifferent to contexts and communicative ends,are exceedingly difficult to match with a theory of communication. There is agulf between theoretical linguistics and a theory of linguistic practice (or praxis).

Derwing talks about Chomsky’s (e.g. 1968) ‘totally unpardonable sleight-of-hand’:

he [Chomsky] assumes that [the] make-believe ‘ideal speaker-hearer’shares fundamental characteristics in common with real speakers and hearers, thus making grammatical theory an inherent part of ‘cognitive’ or‘psychological’ theory.

(1979:173; italics in original)

There is no validated empirical evidence, e.g. in the psychology of language, thatpeople’s linguistic knowledge is organised in analogy with a generativegrammar. Linguists, at least this kind of linguist, and language users do not sharethe same language (in several senses of that expression), and the analogy drawn

10 Ibid, back of jacket

11 The etymology of ‘school’, ‘scholarly’, ‘scholastic’, etc is the Greek wordschole originally meaning ‘leisure’


between linguistics and the natural sciences as both modelling (in some ways)similar kinds of phenomena in the world, and by similar methods, is, as was arguedin Chapter 6.7.2, largely misleading.

Indeed, recent developments of neo-Chomskyan theory have, a bit ironically,contributed to sustaining the difference between linguists’ grammars andpeople’s languages. Chomsky nowadays denies the linguistic interest of ‘E-languages’, i.e. ‘external’ languages such as English, Swedish or Thai; instead,neo-Chomskyan theory is concerned with ‘internal language’ (‘I-language’), aset of universal principles remote from surface patterns (but allegedlycontributing to explaining these patterns and people’s intuitions about them). Thenotion of a common public language is unnecessary and ‘completely foreign tothe empirical study of language’ (Chomsky, 1993:18–19, quoted in Smith, 1999:159). A ‘public’ language like English is, according to Chomsky’s followerSmith (1999; 156), ‘irremediably vague and ill-defined, and hence not a properarea for theory construction at all’. In fact, ‘external’ languages simply do notexist as objects of linguistic study (ibid.: 151).

Thus, Chomsky and some of his followers have now adopted the stance thatthe notion of a language (Chapter 6.5) in the sense of a national standardlanguage is a geo-political construct (cf. Chapter 8.2). Indeed, they endorse aparticularly strong form of this thesis, since they ignore the kinds of concreteimplementations that such ‘languages’ have received in national literate cultures.Therefore, these recent trends in theoretical linguistics too can be taken tounderscore the argument that there is a great divide between (A) and (B) in thedisplay on page 205. Chomsky has made a technical redefinition (orrecontextualisation) of the notion of language; it now stands for ‘internallanguage’, a notion which effectively ignores the social life of language and‘languaging’ in the world. This redefinition allows Chomsky to make his claimthat language has no particular relation to communication,12 a position which issurely absurd for most people interested in language.

Writing supports standard languages, and people’s belief in them gives them acertain kind of social reality. But many linguists, including, in particular,Chomsky, ignore that their predecessors have played a considerable role incontributing to constructing these ‘external languages’. Of course, they denyeven more strongly that present-day theoretical linguistics might be dependent ona traditional linguistics based on practical concerns. As Roy Harris has pointedout, linguists do not realise, or take account of, their own (and the languagephilosophers’) insight of the reflexivity of language, which implies that language

12 ‘There is no reason to believe—to repeat myself once again—that language“essentially” serves communicative ends, or that the “essential purpose” of language is“communication”, as is often said, at least if we mean by “communication” somethinglike transmitting information or inducing belief (Chomsky, 1979 87) The organisation ofgrammar makes it ‘ill-designed’ for communication (Chomsky, 1991 49) Cf Borsley andNewmeyer (1997 46f)


can be used in discourse about itself, and that this meta-discourse will have animpact on the object language itself and on our apprehension of it. When wethink and talk about our object, language, this object will get transformed in andthrough these activities of thinking and talking about it. But many linguists thinkthey are simply describing something objectively existing out there. Therefore,Harris argues, they simply do not understand what they are doing.

Accordingly, what we can see in the meta-theory of many linguists is aninsufficient appreciation of the relation between ‘theories’ and the humancompetences, behaviours and activities that these theories are allegedly about.Chomsky’s classical generative grammar (with its maximally general rules, etc.;cf. Chapter 6.5) was launched as a theory of the native speaker’s intuitiveknowledge of his language. Of course, the native speaker could not formulatesuch a theory himself or herself. That is the job of the linguist-theoretician,whose task, according to received metatheory, is basically that of formalising whatspeakers already know or, more precisely, what they know when they know theirlanguage perfectly. However, from our point of view, formalising is a (re)constructive activity; providing another form, namely, a formalisation, in anothercontext—the scientific one—will have some more or less far-reaching effects onthe content. In the case of Chomsky’s grammar, this was not a theory oflinguistic praxis but one of abstract competence far removed from living language.Nor does a theory of practice(s) (cf. Bourdieu, 1977, 2000), when formulated bythe scientist, simply mirror something out there in a simple manner. The scientistcannot help constructing his or her object theoretically. Therefore, just as we cansafely assume that there is language ‘out there’, as intersubjective realities, wecan also, as argued in Chapter 8.1, be sure that the phenomena involved getchanged in and through the linguists’ recontextualising activities, i.e. theactivities through which language and linguistic resources ‘out there’ are beingdescribed, conceptualised, formulated and, indeed, ‘codified’. The purpose of anempirical theory of linguistic praxis is to constrain and discipline these theorisingactivities, by the systematic use of authentic data. Accordingly, I am notadvocating any kind of post-modernist relativism.

8.4Radical social interactionism: there is only situated

interaction and situated knowledge

The position that construes language as something abstract and remote fromlanguage use is brought to an extreme in some forms of structuralism andgenerativism, as in Chomsky’s various approaches (Chapter 8.3). It represents anabstract objectivism and an idealist rationalism at the same time. Quite a differentkind of objectivism can be found in Conversation Analysis, to which I will turnin Chapter 8.6. However, first I need to introduce the notion of radical socialinteractionism, which seems to be what Goffman (1983:4) referred to as ‘rampantsituationalism’. It involves the claim that language and social phenomena do


exist but only as processes and products of the individual communicative actionsand activities occasioned in specific situations. At the same time, this is a formof post-modernist relativism, which is both akin to and rather different from CA.It is certainly a minority position in the language sciences, and virtually absentfrom mainstream linguistics.

There are many kinds and interpretations of social interactionism andconstructionism (or constructivism) (e.g. Holstein and Miller, 1993; Hacking,1999). One is (what one may call) radical (or ‘strict’, Best, 1993)constructionism, which approaches extreme relativism and ‘rampantsituationalism’. According to this position, there are countless, contextdependentperspectives on and versions of the world, and none can be said to be better ormore true than another. Different versions are constructed and used underdifferent sociocultural and situational conditions. Truth is the product of creationrather than an object of discovery (Nehamas, 1985:174). (With a poignantformulation, the theory holds that all kinds of claims-making are relativistic,social constructs, except as regards the theory of social constructionism itself,which is true (Linell, 1996).) Thus, the distinction between fact and fiction isobliterated, perhaps that between ‘discourse’ and ‘extra-discursive’ phenomenatoo. The idea that perspectivity implies radical relativism has been popularamong post-modern theorists, including some analysts of discourse. While it maybe hard to find scholars who articulate this kind of theory to the very extreme,Shotter (1993), Gergen (1994) and Potter (1996), among other discourse analysts,sometimes come fairly close to this position.

As I noted in Chapter 6.10, such radical constructionist theories are ultimatelyderived from literary theory, which is concerned with texts, rather than withnature and the material world. I would argue that understanding the empiricalrealities of language and languaging necessitates another kind of socialconstructionism which we may call contextual constructionism (Linell, 1996).This assumes that social construction is to some extent dependent on theaffordances of the material world and that it is subject to established socioculturaltraditions. (The latter point implies that it cannot be understood as entirelyconstructed ab novo in each specific situation.) It also makes the anti-relativistassumption that in most contexts, particularly in science, some theories are betterthan others.13 There is a world ‘out there’, even if it is by necessity dialogicallyappropriated. This view is more compatible with the CA type of interactionism,and also with the ‘dialogical’ position to be outlined in Chapter 8.6.

Radical constructionism is opposed to objectivism and realism. In discussingreality assumptions, we may take our point of departure in Devitt (1991), whodistinguishes between several forms of realism: weak realism, common (naive)realism, and scientific realism with two forms (degrees): entity realism (belief in‘theoretical’ entities which are not observable by the unaided senses andsometimes not even by the senses as extended by technology) and truth realism(all theoretical statements have direct counterparts in the world).


Not all forms of social constructionism are incompatible with realism. Indeed,even social constructionists are, I assume, at least weak realists, i.e. they assumethat there is something out there. Some constructionists even adopt what in factamounts to a rather strong social realism; ways of thinking are fairly solidifiedaccording to Foucault’s (1972) theory of discursive formations (Fairclough,1992:40).

Devitt uses his concepts in an analysis of the status of concepts in naturalsciences. Many things will be different, when we begin to deal with phenomenalike human cognition, action and communication and their relations to the world.It seems reasonable, though, that, in opposing radical interactionism, we couldassume more than a minimally weak realism of language. There seems to be agreat deal of order and organisation to discourse, some of which could beattributed to cross-situational knowledge of language accumulated by languageusers over time. We will therefore take a brief look at CA, and contrast CA withits diametrically opposite approach to language and discourse in neo-Chomskyanlinguistics. However, I shall first also touch upon ethnomethodology.

8.5Ethnomethodology: the reflexivity of sense-making

A dialogical outlook on language will find inspiration in ethnomethodology (e.g.Linell, 1998a:50). But it cannot build on a wholesale acceptance of its programme.Obviously, ethnomethodology (e.g. Garfinkel, 1967, 2002; Mehan and Wood,1975; Heritage, 1984) is not an approach that can be explored in a page or two.But there are two points that should be brought up here.

First, ethnomethodology aims at capturing ‘members’ meanings’, the sense-making accomplished in situ by participants in local and embodied talk-in-interaction (or in other kinds of situated accomplishments). Accordingly,researchers who deal with the realities of interactional language must begin bytrying to reconstruct these meanings. But here we must emphatically point out,as a counter-word to ethnomethodology, that researchers can never do just this.For one thing, analysts are not parties to the primary interaction, and do not havefull access to participants’ predicaments. Second, they are external observers ofparticipants’ interactions and theorists with an interest in accumulatinggeneralised knowledge of language and linguistic practices. Unlike theconversationalists themselves, they want to understand interaction on aprincipled and theorised level. This should and must be this way.

Second, ethnomethodology insists on the reflexivity between the sensemakingpractices and that which is made sense of. This applies to ‘members” primary(‘first-order’) interactions. But analysts are also involved in sense-making,

13 Nietzsche, who was a virtual figurehead for the theory of multiple realities(perspectives), also supported this stance (Nehamas, 1985 84, 103, 198)


namely making (‘second order’) sense of participants’ first-order sense-making.We are therefore faced here with two different levels and kinds of meaning-making. On different orders of sense-making, see Schutz (1970). Now, radicalethnomethodologists insist on the exclusive importance of members’ categoriesand meanings as well as on reflexivity. In contrast to Schutz’s and our position,Garfinkel (2002) holds that the analyst can avoid adding meaning; according tohim, ethnomethodology ‘is not an interpretive enterprise’ (p. 97). This in factmakes ethnomethodology incoherent and self-contradictory. On the one hand,there is reflexivity in all kinds of sense-making, and therefore researchers—whoare located in situations distinct and different from members’ primary,communicative contexts—cannot simply reproduce members’ meanings. Surely,they can reconstruct them, but reconstruction is an active recontextualisationprocess. On the other hand, there should be an exclusive emphasis on ‘members”accomplishments. Therefore, ethnomethodology is, if taken literally as describedby its radical proponents, not a practicable research programme.14 It isfundamentally different from and incompatible—on principled grounds—withgeneralising, cumulative sciences.

However, if we disregard the uncompromising stance of true believers, wefind many important insights in ethnomethodology. These insights are in factoften inherited from phenomenology, and shared with dialogism (section 8.7).Here belong points such as: a) language is action and interaction; b) sense-making is a situated accomplishment; c) the products of human cognition areinformative not only about the observed subject matter but also about theperspective of the observer; and d) the dialogical nature of an interaction cannotbe captured by a ‘formal analysis’ (Garfinkel, 2002) of aggregates ofdecontextualised items of observed facts, etc. Conservation Analysis (CA)(section 8.6), which derives from ethnomethodology (Heritage, 1984), hascompromised some basic tenets of it. CA has developed into a systematic andcumulative enterprise, and this has in fact been severely criticised by someethnomethodologists.15 CA often claims—in theory and in principle—to dealonly with ‘members’ categories’; in actual practice it too is of course aconstructed and contingent enterprise, dependent on researchers’ interests andreinterpretations. At the same time, to the extent that CA theorists argue thatmembers’ ‘meanings’ are contained in talk itself, for example in interlocutors’manifest uptake of conversational contributions, it amounts to a denunciation ofthe ethnomethodological and phenomenological insight that language isindexical, allusive and incomplete (Chapter 5: # 48).

14 This is admitted also by some of its more intelligent adherents, such as Mehan andWood (1975 162ff et passim)


8.6Conversation Analysis: the ‘embodied action’ theory of

language

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a form of constructionism and ethnomethodologywhich is closer to the dialogical stance that I propose (Chapter 8.7). Yet, it seemsto approach the more radical theories at some points. CA insists that utterancesand sequences of utterances are situated social constructions and occasionedaccomplishments. Thus, this ethnomethodological type of approach to talk-in-interaction is interested in the common-sense reasoning and ‘practical’ theorisingthat actors do and exhibit in their everyday communicative activities, in their‘languaging’. There is a great deal of order and orderliness in spoken discourseand interaction. The assumption of an ‘interaction order’ is shared with, and wasin part taken over from, Erving Goffman (e.g. 1983). Harvey Sacks formulated itin his dictum that ‘there is order at all points’ (Sacks, 1984:22).16

What about language itself, then? Well, linguistic structures can beacknowledged, but only if they are made manifest in actual behaviour, or ifactors can be shown to orient to them observably, in their utterances and turn-constructing procedures. Beyond this, CA practitioners are strongly suspicious ofclaims about other kinds of putative linguistic realities, or at least they prefer toremain agnostic about them. According to this view, language can not beassumed to exist in a specific form, simply because experts (linguists using theirtheoretical meta-language: ‘linguistese’) talk about it in particular ways, howeverelegant or systematic these reasonings appear to be.

I am convinced that CA has an important contribution to make to the study ofnot only interaction but also language. This applies also to method, theempirical attitude to attend to data from situated encounters systematically and tosearch for manifest structures there. This forms the empirical basis. But theanalyst must also make generalisations and theorisations. The lesson to be learntfrom CA is to try not to leave the data for theorisation too early, i.e. to resist thetemptation to speculate prematurely (Linell and Luckmann, 1991:17–18). (Ofcourse, we do not believe that data analysis can ever be totally theory-independent but, nonetheless, there are differences between stages or aspects ofan empirical project with theoretical ambitions.)

Ethnomethodology is a programme for researching locally occasionedaccomplishments, rather than for exploring sociocultural traditions. Accordingly,CA tends to concentrate on situated construction, and to ignore (or assume verylittle about) the situation-transcending practices, the languages and linguisticresources which language users tacitly orient to in their routinised situated

15 E g Lynch and Bogen (1994) For some discussion, see Silverman (1998)

16 Some basic CA references are Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Heritage (1984), Sacks(1992), Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) and Silverman (1998)


interactions and which have emerged in sociocultural history as sedimentations ofcommunicative and cognitive, constructive activities that have been going onbefore the here and now, in what Giddens (1984) calls the ‘continuity ofpractices’. Yet, situated interaction cannot be understood without a simultaneousreference to situation-transcending practices (even if these references oftenremain only implicit in conversationalists’ as well as analysts’ understandings).When parties to a conversation deploy lexical items and grammaticalconstructions, they orient to meaning potentials and social knowledge that they—and the cultures of which they are members—have become (more or less)familiar with in and through biographical and sociocultural experiences prior tothe situation there-and-then. However, they are not absolutely constrained bythese routines, habits and norms; they are (to some extent) free to violate them,but these transgressions will often be assigned specific meanings preciselybecause of their non-conventional nature.

The inductive, empirical stance of CA is of course utterly opposed to theextremely theory-driven position of Chomskyan linguists, for whom utterancesare largely defined by linguistic rules, i.e. they are made possible because of thepre-existing system. (In addition, many WL-oriented linguists within generativelinguistics, and elsewhere, believe spoken utterances to be rather chaotic andwithout a neat linguistic organisation; # 35.) Mainstream linguistic theoryendorses a ‘scientific realism’ in Devitt’s terms (Chapter 8.4); it assumes that thetheory is descriptively and explanatorily adequate, and that the abstract, scientificconcepts developed (or constructed) by linguists are taken to be ‘real’. ‘Surface’phenomena, that is utterances and turn-constructing procedures are, according tothis generativist outlook, not primarily significant; they are explananda ratherthan explanans phenomena.

Neither Chomskyan linguistics nor radical interactionism and CA explicitlyacknowledge the reflexive impact of theorists (‘language-makers’; Chapter 8.2)on language. They both adopt an empiricist attitude;17 language is simply outthere independently of the activities of linguists, language planners andstandardisers, and their theories of underlying structures and their dreams of a pureor better language (Chapter 6.5.1). CA researchers tend to propose that data, thatis actors’ talk in situated interaction, ‘speak for themselves’. In reality, however,researchers must always theorise their data; in doing so, they are positioned in ascholarly context, and their theories of course contribute to constructing theirobject theoretically.18 Both Chomskyan essentialism and radical interactionismare untenable positions from an epistemological point of view.


8.7A dialogistic stance: theories of ‘languaging’

8.7.1Dialogism

Dialogism is a general epistemology for conceptualising human action,communication, cognition and language. It is primarily relevant for the culturalsciences, rather than the natural sciences, and it exists in many variants (Linell,1998a; Marková, 2003). It is geared towards meaning more than matter. As such,it does not participate in the quest for abstract objectivism (cf. Johnson, 1987; cf.# 47); neither language nor cognition can be liberated from the body, emotionsand preconceptual structures.

But dialogism is not subjectivism either; it stresses the embeddedness andembodiment of language. Language is embodied, and embedded in culture at thesame time. Social activities and social concerns are crucial. Language exists inan intersubjective ‘inter-world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1955) between subjects and theworld, in the interface between culture and the individuals embedded within theculture.19 Cultural practices are not independent of the affordances provided bytraditions and by the material world. As Johnson (1987:212) says: ‘Objectivity[in the intersubjective sense] does not require taking up God’s perspective,which is impossible; rather, it requires taking up appropriately shared humanperspectives that are tied to reality through our embodied imaginativeunderstanding.’ Thus, we stress intersubjectivism instead of objectivism andsubjectivism, and relationism rather than relativism (Chapter 8.4).

17 On Chomsky’s empiricism, see Ohman (1988)

18 As regards CA, this point has been argued by many, including Fleming (1997), Billig(1999) and Segerdahl (1998a) The CA researcher systematises, if not formalises, whatlanguage users ‘orient to’ Among CA practitioners (at least as they state it in print), thereis a considerable lack of insight and interest in the constructive character of this processThere is a certain naiveté in the assumption that it is possible for the researcher simply toadopt and describe ‘actors” or ‘members” categories and understandings Moreover, evenif it had been fully possible, it would not be desirable Researchers try to build theories,people immersed in their own mundane communicative practices do not The researcher’spredicaments, commitments and purposes are different from those of the communicatingindividuals (Segerdahl, 1998a)

19 Cf Rommetveit (1998a, 1998b, 1999) An earlier formulation is that of Voloshinov(1973 26) ‘By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localizedsomewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline separatingthese two spheres of reality’ (italics in original) See also Chapter 5 fn 4 on Merleau-Ponty’s‘interworld’


8.7.2A theory of praxis

There can hardly be any doubt that there is ‘language’ (as well as different‘languages’) ‘out there’ in the socially embedded lives of individuals andcommunities, behind and beyond situated talk-in-interaction, in the form of tacitknowledge and linguistic routines that transcend single communicativesituations. This knowledge is what allows parties to interact in new situations,and speakers and listeners to construct and to comprehend novel utterances inanalogy with old patterns. Participants in communication frequently orient tofeatures of form and meaning, in a reflective way that presupposes knowledge oflanguage. For example, they do so in repairs20 and negotiations of meaning, andin co-constructions of syntactic units (Ono and Thompson, 1995), which are allfrequent in authentic interaction.

There are a number of present-day empirical approaches to authentic discourseand talk-in-interaction, which have a lot to offer in the study of languaging in realsocial life. They are interested in

the practical accomplishment of members of society. Members can and mustmake their actions available and reasonable to each other and, in so doing,the everyday organization of experiences produces and reproduces thepatterned and patterning qualities we have come to call social structure.The organization of talk displays the essential reflexivity of action andstructure and, in so doing, makes available what we are calling structure-in-action.

(Zimmerman and Boden, 1991:19; italics in original)

I have given an overview of these approaches in Linell (1998a: 49ff.), where Iconsider them as ‘dialogistic’ (or ‘dialogical’) in various respects. One of theseapproaches is Conversation Analysis (CA). However, some scholars interested inlanguage, particularly perhaps functionally or interactionally minded linguists,have pointed out that CA has shown little interest in language, if by ‘language’ wemean some structured knowledge assumed to exist over and beyond the situatedinteractions. Similarly, CA says rather little about the ‘reproducing’ and‘patterned’ aspects of ‘social structure’ (to cite some terms from the quoteabove). This is due to the fact that CA scholars sometimes adopt a kind of anti-structure position (Chapter 8.6).

Instead, I propose a more distinctly dialogistic position, which involves anassumption of a ‘double dialogicality’ (Linell, 1998a: 54) of discourse, actionand cognition; utterances are creatively and dialogically accomplished in situ(situational dialogicality), but situated interactions also belong to

20 Taylor (1997 61), however, suggests that the notion of repair, as used in CA, might beanother case of ‘scriptism’ (i e WLB)


sociohistorically constituted continuities of practice in which experiences andknowledge have been dialogically appropriated over time (socioculturaldialogicality). Such a theory of language is therefore a theory of linguisticpraxis, in which ‘praxis’ exhibits double dialogicality of the kind just mentioned:situated interaction (talk-in-interaction or situated text production and reception)and situation-transcending (sociocultural) practices (traditions). Some of thesepractices are activity-specific, others are more generalised. Both dialogicaldimensions are dynamic, focusing on the micro-genesis of talk and thesociohistorical genesis of activity types, discourse genres and languages,respectively. Given such a perspective, the language system, as described by thelinguist, is largely a theoretical construct, made by abstraction from the situation-transcending traditions of languaging.

We just noted that the sociocultural, situation-transcending practices, not justthe situated interactions, must be understood in dynamic and action-orientedterms. Most theories of language have disregarded this, or have been incapableof capturing it. One important reason for this failure seems to be dichotomies likestructure—action, system—use, langue— parole, competence—performance,macro-system—micro-genesis, which have as a rule found no place for praxis.Saussure, for example, never developed a linguistics of la parole, and his theoryof la langue is too static. Thus, the dynamics of praxis did not get a propertreatment. Chomsky, of course, never assigned any role at all to praxis in hislinguistic theories. CA, by contrast, focuses on situated interaction and misses outon the sociocultural aspects of praxis. But a dialogical theory, as outlined here,starts out from languaging in both situated interaction and sociocultural praxis,the latter of course only being manifest in continuities of precisely situatedinteractions.

8.7.3Language and language games

One might propose to think of the knowledge of language in terms ofgeneralisations over a large and fuzzy set of language games (in Wittgenstein’s,1958, sense).21 It is a matter of dispute in what ways and to what extent theselinguistic resources form integrated and close-knit systems, within and acrossactivity types, but there is every reason to assume that they do not formmaximally integrated systems, as many linguists (# 10) would have it. Utterancesare locally produced (# 76), and grammatical knowledge is also to some extentorganised in terms of local regularities. Arguably, the generalised linguisticcategories are fuzzy, and their meaning potentials are differentially exploited indifferent frames and situations. Language ‘out there’ is multi-faceted, partly

21 Cf. also ‘activity types’ (Levinson, 1979), ‘communicative genres’ (Luckmann, 1992)and ‘activity languages’ (Allwood, 2000) See also Linell (1998a Chapter 12)


indeterminate, negotiable and subject to change. At the same time, all this servesto make ‘language’ extremely difficult to capture theoretically. Firth argued,somewhat pessimistically, that language is ‘ineffable’ (Butt, 2001).

8.7.4An ‘emergentist’ position

So we must look at ‘languaging’ at both levels of situated interaction andsituation-transcending social practices. Utterance construction is supported bythe knowledge, beliefs and action dispositions that have emerged over time andbeen abstracted, accumulated and sedimented in the living socioculturaltraditions of the language(s) and its/their continuities of communicative practicesand in the biographical experiences of the actors, i.e. the language users involved.Hopper (1988) proposes that language exists in terms of ‘emergent grammars’;experiences of languaging (language use) shape our knowledge of language atdifferent levels.22

An ‘emergentist’ conception (Lähteenmäki, 2004) assumes at least twocontexts of emergence. On the one hand, speakers’ linguistic knowledge,including the meaning potentials of words and the functional potentials ofgrammatical constructions, are emergent from accumulated experiences of pastpractices. Such sedimentation (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1967) of linguisticknowledge builds on entrenchment (repeated exposure) (Langacker, 1987:39)and analogy (transfer based on perceived similarities).

On the other hand, actual situated meanings in particular cognitive andcommunicative events and projects emerge from the interplay of this linguisticknowledge and a host of contextual factors, such as intentions and expectations ofthe participants involved, aspects of the concrete environment and theaccompanying bodily behaviours, institutional and cultural conditions, themeeting of people’s frames of understanding which are only partially shared andderived from different biographical and cultural backgrounds, and many otherthings.23 Accordingly, a fundamental feature is the potential(itie)s (‘energeia’)characterising lexical items and grammatical constructions; structural potentialsare assumed to give rise to specific situated meanings in combination withcontextual factors.

22 Usage-based, emergentist accounts have been formulated by several linguists in recentyears. As for phonology, see Bybee (2001)

23 See Linell (1998a Chapter 8) for a comprehensive discussion of ‘contexts’ of discourse


8.7.5Dialogical entities in language

The dialogical stance calls for an empirical study of how languages work and arestructured in actual talk-in-interaction (and, of course, in written discourse, etc.).We must study the structure of utterances and the nature of turn-constructionalprocesses. This also involves the study of recurrent and activity-transcendentlinguistic structures, which are usually not in focus in CA studies proper, butperhaps in CA-inspired ‘interactional linguistics’,24 as well as in various formsof usage-based functional linguistics.

What kinds of concepts or entities would be part of a dialogical grammar?Obviously, this question can hardly be answered here, since it would require abook-length monograph of its own. Nonetheless, I would venture to mention afew theoretical entities and related perspectives, as regards lexicon, grammar,phonology, text, situation types and world knowledge (see also Chapter 5):

1 Phonology: The basic action components at the phonetic-phonological levelare complex phonological gestures. These are prosodic and partlysegmentalised gestalts. Gestures are to be understood in action terms.

2 Lexicology: Words (lexical items) do not have fixed meanings, but dynamicmeaning potentials, which contribute to situated meanings in and throughtheir obligatory interaction with contextual factors. Meaning potentials arerelatively stable, yet partly open, multiply determinable in context, anddynamically modifiable over time (sociohistorically). Meanings aresusceptible to contextual modifications, expansions and enrichments, inpartly different ways in different dialogical situations and communicativegenres.

3 Grammar. The basic entities are grammatical constructions, which areabstractions from utterances or utterance types. In this sense, they are‘surface structures’. However, they can also be seen as abstract structuresunderlying concrete, particular utterances and turns at talk, which are builton turn-constructional units (TCUs). Turns and TCUs are part of largercommunicative projects. In themselves, they exhibit field structures (cf., forexample, the pre-front field according to Auer, 1996).

Grammatical constructions can also be thought of as methods ofconstructing surface structures and utterance types according to certainpatterns or ‘constructional schemas’.25 Constructions often have an ‘outersyntax’ in terms of responsive and/or projective properties; they are havebeen made (over time, sociohistorically) to fit into (kinds of) sequential co-texts, in which they respond to (certain kinds of) prior units, and project

24 Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson (1996), Ford and Wagner (1996), Couper-Kuhlenand Selting (1996), Steensig (2001), Selting and Couper-Kuhlen (2001), Ford et al(2002)


(certain kinds of) possible, upcoming units (Linell, 2003, 2004b), and theirmeanings or functions may be accounted for in terms of functionalpotentials, in analogy with the meaning potentials of words (Wide, 2002).

4 Boundary phenomena: Although there are many phenomena that have anobvious home basis in either of the lexicon, the grammar or textanddiscourse-structure (or pragmatics), there are also many phenomena thatbelong to boundary zones between two or more of these fields. For example,grammaticalisation studies (Hopper and Traugott, 2003) have shown howlexical items with originally divergent uses may specialise in particulardiscourse-marking functions and thus become conventionalised as parts ofgrammar.

5 Pragmatics of meaning. The meaning of an utterance (or text) is often partlyopen and multiply determinable in the moment of production (and/orreception). In general, utterance meaning cannot immediately be fullydetermined, neither language-internally (say, by a principle ofcompositionality; Chapter 5: # 48) nor by pragmatic inference (linguisticstructure plus pragmatic principles, such as maxims, conversationalimplicatures, or a general principle of relevance; Chapter 5: # 58). Therelevant situated interpretation(s) must instead be dialogically determinedand accomplished through the interaction, including in particular the uptakeof the utterance, by the parties to the communicative activity (or cognitiveactivity, as for example in text reading) (Linell, 1998a: 112ff.). Situatedinterpretations involve the invocation of both lexical meanings—in the formof meaning potentials (cf. 2, p. 218)—and contextual factors, e.g. local co-texts and (knowledge of) communicative activity types (cf. 7 below)Deppermann, 2005). Meaning determination is usually only done up to apoint or to a degree that is sufficient for current communicative pur6 poses(cf. Garfinkel, 1967).

6 Text structures: In talk-in-interaction and texts, there are (more or less)coherent, sequentialised interactional structures, such as sequence types,(topical) episodes and activity phases which result from the accomplishmentof communicative projects of varying extensions (Luckmann, 1995).Communicative projects are typically collectively accomplished but with anasymmetric division of communicative labour, and are nested within other(communicative or non-communicative) projects, etc. (Linell, 1998a:11).

7 Communicative genres: Discourses instantiate recurrent communicativeactivity types and communicative genres (Luckmann, 2002). Individuals andcommunities of individuals differ in their communicative repertoires, i.e. the

25 Cf Construction Grammar (Fillmore et al, 1988), ‘grammatical constructions’ inLangacker (1987), ‘constructional schemas’ in Ono and Thompson (1995) However,Construction Grammar has so far not heeded the interactional aspects sufficiently


sets of different activities, genres and language games with which they arefamiliar.

8 ‘Encyclopedic’ knowledge about the world: We also need some notion of‘social representations’ (Moscovici, 2000)26 (or ‘discourses’ or ‘orders ofdiscourse’ in a Foucaultian sense’, Fairclough, 1992), which are bodies ofpartly systematised domain-specific knowledge and assumptions (especiallyof a common-sense type), belief systems, attitudes and dispositions to act,ideas and ideologies, ways of thinking and talking about specific issues(such as opera, biotechnology, air pollution, AIDS and HIV). It wassuggested earlier that the meaning potentials of linguistic expressions areused together with contextual resources, thus helping actors to make sense insituated discourse. Similarly, social representations are potentialities to evokeparticular types of discourses, actions, attitudes, etc.

These linguistic phenomena point to the fact that languages and linguisticpractices serve functions within larger projects of action, communication andcognition, designed to cope with and intervene in the world. They appear to bepsychologically, behaviourally and/or socioculturally valid.27 Of course, these‘real’ linguistic and communicative entities too get transformed as they arerecontextualised into the theory, as we as linguists codify language (Harris,1996). But even so, they are different from many of those abstract theoreticalstatements about language that have been formulated by structuralist linguists,particularly by generativists.28

8.8Conclusion

Language must be captured through sensitive explorations of the interfacebetween (observations of) people’s ‘languaging’ (communicative and cognitivepractices) and linguists’ (and other scholars’) theory-building attempts.Language and languages do exist in the world, but they surely come outdifferently in the three different realms we have been concerned with, that is, (1)in people’s lived experiences, in their communicative activities in talk-in-interaction, (2) on paper in writing and written texts (note that this writtenlanguage must be lived too), and (3) as linguists’ products, in their meta-discourse on language (also largely spelled out in writing), that is, as theidealised (normative or theoretical) notions that are at least partly ‘made’ bylinguists. People using language in real social life have only pretheoretical

26 I assume that a dialogical and constructionist interpretation can be made of ‘socialrepresentations’ (Chapter 5 # 97)

27 In Devitt’s (1991) terms, which were discussed in Chapter 8 4, we would here go forsome sort of common realism, but not a scientific realism


knowledge of, for example, meaning potentials and grammatical constructions.Scholars construct language systematically on the basis of essential features of thispretheoretical knowledge. These constructs are therefore to be found at severalremoves from language as it is lived by people; in order to reach the linguists’descriptions, the phenomena have been recontextualised several times, and hencetransformed as they have been moved between contexts.

The issues that we have been concerned with—what is language? where can wefind it?—are extremely complex. Some aspects have been discussed in thischapter, but obviously, the issues cannot be resolved here.29

28 Thus, one must have serious doubts (Linell, 1979a) in a ‘scientific realism’ (Devitt,1991) that would amount to assuming a psychological validity to such scientific entitiesand principles as, for example, morphophonological representations, abstract syntacticstructures, grammatical derivations and derivational constraints Even some theorists ofgenerative grammar would hesitate to claim that these are anything but the grammarian’sdevices for formulating a grammatical system Fodor et al (1974), some of the best-knownChomskyan psycholinguists of their time, admitted that ‘understanding and producing asentence is not a matter of running through grammatical derivations’ and ‘grammaticaloperations are not, in this sense, psychologically real’ (p 511)

29 There is a growing literature, however, within interactional linguistics, various types offunctional linguistics and systemic (Hallidayan) linguistics, ‘emergent grammar’ (Hopper,1988), etc, which raise these issues systematically As for my own work, I have touchedupon some of the topics elsewhere phonetic phonology in Linell (1979a), wordmeaningpotentials in Linell (1998a Chapter 6), grammatical constructions in Linell (2003, 2004b),interactional structures, activity types and communicative genres in Linell (1998a Chapter9), and social representations in Linell (2001b)


9The written language bias— past, present,

future

9.1The long past of linguistics

Even though modern linguistics is sometimes thought of as having a fairly shorthistory, it surely has a long past. And that past still matters. It is alive in everydaylife and in traditional education. I have argued that it is largely a story about howwritten language has been established and honoured, understood andmisunderstood. There are many points where a written language bias can beobserved, and many themes with a long history, a story of many variations andtransformations but also with many assumptions that have proved resistant tochange.

Some features of our understandings of language, discourse andcommunication naturally go beyond the impact of the written language bias.Many, it seems to me, are part of a Cartesian heritage in Western thinking(Marková, 1982, 2003). Cartesian philosophy looks upon conceptualdichotomies, such as that between language as a system and the language-usingsubject, as pairs of mutually independent concepts, one of which is consideredconceptually or causally prior to the other. Some theories assign primacy toautonomous language (Saussure, Chomsky), others to the autonomous speakerwith his intentions (Searle). Both are clearly part of ‘monologistic’ theories(Linell, 1998a). The history of the psychology of language shows how theoristshave struggled to argue for one or the other ‘solution’, either an objectivist oneor a subjectivist one (cf. Rommetveit, 2003). A more dialogical view stresses theinterdependencies and intersubjectivities; it would assume that speakers dependon their language, and language depends on its speakers. It is in and throughpeople’s communicative and cognitive activities that languages persist. Thesociety-individual (language-speaker, structure-actor) is only one of manyCartesian dichotomies that must be modified in a dialogical theory of languageand discourse; others are rationalism vs. empiricism, subjectivism vs. objectivism,theory vs. praxis, micro vs. macro, structure vs. process, self vs. other, discoursevs. context, content vs. expression, and cognition vs. communication. Suchdistinctions are of course analytically useful but must be thought of in terms of

conceptual intertwinement rather than as pairs of autonomous entities (Marková,2003). The question that comes to mind is: aren’t all these dichotomies typical ofcultures dominated precisely by a written language bias?

9.2Stability and change: structure and discourse

Social, psychological, discursive, linguistic and physical realities are obviouslycharacterised by both stability and change. Language can be seen as stablestructure or as dynamic discourse; in sociology we deal with both social structureand social action, in cultural studies with both culture and cultural practices. Butthe world-view that dawns upon us when we consider how language has beenlooked upon is one in which stability is in focus, and dynamics is marginalised.It is a picture of a stable and shared world with some residuals of undeterminedaspects to be contextually negotiated and fixated in specific situated interactions.This structure-infocus view posits a plethora of underlying structures beneathwhat on the surface appears to be more vague, ambiguous, changing and onlypartially shared.

When we deal with social and cultural phenomena, and with language anddiscourse, we should reverse the focus-background relationships from thestructure-in-focus view to a dynamics-in-focus view. That would involve anepistemology of dialogism (e.g. Marková and Foppa, 1990; Rommetveit, 1992;Linell, 1998a; Marková, 2003). We assume, for example, that we live in a dynamic,only partially shared and fragmentarily known, dialogically constituted world, inwhich relatively stable features (such as those of language and socialrepresentations) are emergent across series of communicative events. Recurrentlinguistic routines are of course developed by ordinary members of the languagecommunities, and then lived by them. Language and social representations areembedded within more comprehensive sociocultural practices, and constituterelatively stable phenomena, i.e. relatively stable as compared to singularsituated discourses.

Structures of language have been articulated, transformed, enhanced andendorsed by institutions and also supported by artefacts. Science is clearly onesuch powerful institution, and (mainstream) linguistics is a particular kind of adisciplined, socially situated tradition of decontextualising practices. Fish (1989:9) formulated such an idea in his incisive wording: ‘Meanings that seemperspicuous and literal are rendered so by forceful interpretive acts and not byproperties of language.’

9.3Capturing dynamics: three basic difficulties

To return to my initial question, why are dynamics, change, vagueness andopenness so difficult to account for and make visible? The reasons have

THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE BIAS— PAST, 219

undoubtedly to do with the fact that structures of language are the product ofparticular (scholarly and other) activities of description and analysis, whichinvolve definition and fixation. I have suggested that these reasons are of threekinds: a) deep-seated, conceptual ones; b) historical, traditional ones pertainingto the specific legacy of linguistics; and c) practical, technical ones.

First, at the most general level, scientific generalising analyses inevitablyinvolve reduction and categorisation of data into recurrent abstract patterns. Inthis endeavour, there is often an explicit and conscious strive to identifyreasonably stable and objective structures, and also to search for grand theories.

Second, there is, in the history of the language sciences, a more specifictradition which has seen written language as the norm in both real life and inscholarly attention. This has generated models of language, which cannot treatinteractional, spoken language and discourse properly. Language is not portrayedas being in motion, but as arrested and even inert.

Third, the mediums we have at our disposal for expressing analytic products istexts, transcripts, diagrams, tables, formulas, etc., which are bound to freeze orparalyse phenomena in motion. It is quite plausible that a real change on thispoint necessitates an extended use, also in the publications of research results, ofexcerpts from audio- and video-recordings (rather than just transcripts) togetherwith written descriptions and depictions, e.g. on CD-ROM. Another intriguingidea is that the remedy might involve the adoption of new representational media,such as computer-supported visualisation of dynamic movements.

9.4A return to linguistic activities

In this book, I have taken a fairly critical stance towards the intellectual heritageof mainstream linguistics. This does not amount to a recommendation of awholesale abandonment of theories and methods in linguistics. But it means thatif we take spoken language and talk-in-interaction seriously, and take them as aprimary manifestation of human symbolic capacities, we should try to resist alarge number of written-language-based assumptions. (Of course, this is animpossible task, if we understand it literally as implying a completely fresh startin the language sciences. That would be absurd, since we can never entirelyliberate ourselves from the perspectives which are sedimented in ourmetalanguage.) The study of language, and especially spoken interactionallanguage, would have to be grounded in very different data than has beentraditionally used in linguistics; instead of written data, made-up sentences andlinguistic intuitions, we need to work with situated talk, that is talk with whichpeople do things in all the diversified situations of real life.

In the course of history, the systematic study of language has made anintellectual journey from a pre-theoretical conception of language in terms ofactivities to a written-language-based theory of languages as systems of abstractforms. We are now perhaps approaching the completion of a spiralling movement


which would take us from these abstract forms back to the activities, tolanguaging and linguistic praxis, but now with a more theoretical understandingof how linguistic practices are structured and carried out in communication andcognition. We would then also get explanations of why languages have becomeorganised the way they are, why they are so open at some points and socomparatively determinate on others.

THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE BIAS— PAST, 221

Appendix: The written language bias in 101points

(Page numbers refer to Chapter 5)Language, discourse and the world

# 1 Language and the world are distinct, and languages represent the world(40)

# 2 The objectivation of language: languages as inventories of objects (42)# 3 The world as linguistically constructed (43)# 4 The autonomy of linguistics (45)# 5 Discourse as the use of language, and the product-orientation of

discourse theory (45)# 6 Linguistics and applied linguistics (46)

The notion of ‘a language’

# 7 The unity and homogeneity of each language (47)# 8 Dialects are not languages (48)# 9 The self-suffiency and autonomy of the language faculty and of the

individual language system (49)# 10 A language as a system of maximally general rules (50)# 11 The form vs. meaning dichotomy (50)# 12 The priority of form (51)# 13 Language as words and grammar, and the sharp distinction between

lexis and grammar (51)# 14 The type-token distinction (53)# 15 The abstractness and disembodiedness of language (53)# 16 The atemporality of linguistic items (54)# 17 Contexts as linguistic environments (55)# 18 The absence of situated order v55)# 19 The internal(ised) grammar of the individual (56)# 20 Errors and inadequacies in language use (56)

Phonetics and phonology

# 21 Language and speech, and the notion of pronunciation (58)# 22 Phonology as separate from phonetics: stability and dynamics (59)

# 23 Phonemes as segments (60)# 24 The neglect of prosodies, musical dimensions and paralanguage (62)# 25 The exclusion of non-vocal aspects from speech (63)# 26 Monological speech as the object of study in phonetics (64)# 27 Distinctive features and binary oppositions (64)# 28 Phonological development as independent of non-verbal vocalisations

(65)

Grammar

# 29 Texts as linearly ordered words (65)# 30 Sentences as the only basic units of grammar (66)# 31 A language as a well-defined set of sentences (69)# 32 The decontextualisation of sentences, and the demarcation of grammar

from information structure (69)# 33 Correct language (70)# 34 Grammaticality as the basic property of language and linguistic units

(70)# 35 The degenerate and repetitive quality of conversational language (71)# 36 Syntax as a matter of the internal structure of sentences (72)# 37 The hierarchical structure of syntactic units (73)# 38 Grammatical ambiguities (74)# 39 Movement transformations (75)# 40 Multiple embeddings (75)# 41 Non-sentence-formed utterances as elliptical sentences (75)# 42 Grammaticalised response constructions (76)# 43 Syntactic contaminations and structure violations (77)# 44 Pronouns and demonstratives (77)# 45 Particles, pleonasms and interjections (78)

Meaning: lexicology, semantics and pragmatics

# 46 Fixed meanings: language as a code (79)# 47 Objectivist theory of meaning: meaning as properties of linguistic

entities (82)# 48 Meaning as explicit, and the principle of expressibility (84)# 49 The acquisition of word meaning (85)# 50 The dictionary vs. encyclopedia distinction (85)# 51 The semantics vs. pragmatics distinction (86)# 52 Mental representations, propositions and predications (87)

APPENDIX 223

# 53 Representational meaning: reference and description (88)# 54 Truth and truth-conditional semantics (89)# 55 The completeness of language as a semiotic system (91)# 56 The idea of a perfect language (91)

# 57 Logic and reasoning as a formal rule-based calculus (92)# 58 Utterance meaning as determinate (92)# 59 Semantic problems (93)# 60 Deixis as exceptional (93)# 61 Speech acts as basic units of language use (94)# 62 Direct and indirect speech acts (95)# 63 Quotes: renditions of others’ discourse (96)

Communication, discourse and texts

# 64 The cognition vs. communication distinction (96)# 65 Language as a medium for cognition, not for action and communication

(97)# 66 Communication as transfer of meanings (97)# 67 The cognition vs. emotion distinction (99)# 68 Utterances as texts and as products of linguistic activities (101)# 69 Utterances as behaviour (101)# 70 The text vs. context dichotomy (102)# 71 Texts as repeatable, structured objects of verbal signs (102)# 72 Coherence (103)# 73 Sequentiality (104)# 74 Speaker and listener roles (104)# 75 The individual speaker as the sole communicator and of the basic

constituents of meaning and messages (105)# 76 Rhetoric, and the planning and execution of utterances (106)# 77 The ideal delivery of speech (107)# 78 Intersubjectivity and understanding (107)# 79 The expression of complete thoughts (108)# 80 Interpreting as translation (109)

The psychology and biology of language

# 81 Language as an innate and uniquely human property (109)# 82 The discontinuity theory of language evolution (110)# 83 The brain as a computer (111)# 84 The mind as processing information and representations (111)# 85 Learning as internalisation and remembering as retention of information

(113)

224 APPENDIX

Semiotics of language and other signs

# 86 Languages, signs and traces (113)# 87 Abstract signs (114)# 88 Signs as arbitrary symbols (114)# 89 Syntax as algebra (115)

# 90 Writing as a secondary representation (116)# 91 Reading as verbatim reading ‘from the book’ (117)# 92 Transcription as a veridical record of speech (118)# 93 Gestures as non-linguistic signs (118)# 94 Laughter and smiling (119)# 95 Sign language and spoken language (119)# 96 The visual mode and the monological stance (120)

Extensions of language and text metaphors

# 97 Collective representations of the world as stable stocks of knowledge(120)

# 98 Moral systems as objective (121)# 99 The homogeneity of cultures (122)# 100 Pictures as texts (122)# 101 Understanding nature (123)

APPENDIX 225

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Index

abstraction 46abstractness of language 53abstract objectivism 43, 54, 179, 209academic construction 202academic discipline 8accountability 166activity language 48actors’ meanings 93affordance 214algebra 115allusiveness 84, 91, 109alphabetic script 61analogy 217apo-koinou 77, 163applied linguistics 46arbitrariness 54, 114Aristotelian definition 80 80articulatory gesture 62, 118articulatory posture 61atemporality of language 53;

of linguistic items 54, 159authenticity 25author as authority 11, 105, 222autonomy of language 49, 125, 222;

of linguistics 16, 45;of texts 23

babbling 65background knowledge 20basis of articulation 63n38Begriffsschrift (Frege) 92, 100n84, 115Behaviourism 149, 150, 157being in the world 42binary opposition 64biological basis of dialogue 110;

of language 109, 153, 171body language 52, 180brain as computer 111

caricature of linguistics 193f.Cartesian dichotomies 133Cartesian perspective 4, 222child language 167Chomskyan linguistics 193n8, 195n10circuit of parole 137clause 66, 175cleansing of language from culture 153co-authoring 105, 132code model 43, 79, 135, 201codifying language 201, 208cognition as dialogical 109;

in the individual mind 97, 151;as intraindividual informationprocessing 97;in real life 112

cognition vs. communication distinction 96cognition vs. emotion distinction 99cognitive artefact 10cognitive linguistics 195n10cognitive representation 149coherence 103collaborative verbalisation 105f.collective representation 120communication:

concept of 135;as expression of thoughts 137;as secondary 97;as situated interaction 137,from source to destination 98;as transfer of meanings 97, 135ff., 201

246

communicative act 20, 87, 90, 94communicative activity type 20, 24, 48,

104, 191, 219communicative competence (Hymes)

171n48communicative construction 43communicative genre 191, 219communicative interaction 21communicative project 20, 42, 90, 94, 102,

219competence (Chomsky) 59, 141, 150, 169,

205completeness of language 91complete thought 66, 87, 105, 108, 175complex sentence 67compositionality 82n59, 84computer mediation 27computers 111conceptual intertwinement 133, 222conduit metaphor 98n81, 136connectionism 111, 113, 195n10constituent structure 158constraint 173constructional schema 68, 178, 218Construction Grammar 72n48, 178, 195n10constructionism 44, 180context 55, 102contextual interdependencies 21continuity of practices 213, 216conversational implicature 86, 90, 139, 219conversational language, degenerate

quality of 71, 110n95Conversation Analysis (CA) 4, 198,

214n18, 215conversation of ideas (metaphor) 183conversation of traditions 130, 182correct interpretation 107correct language 12, 23, 57, 69, 70, 163co-text 55counter-word 132crossing 122culture:

as diversified 122;homogeneity of 122, 182

dead language 196n11deep structure 159, 177

degeneration 71, 155deictic 77deixis 93demarcation 54, 69, 148, 153, 164demonstrative 77depth of intention 93dialect 48, 145dialogical alternative 39, 188dialogically constituted world 223dialogism 4, 9, 125, 214ff.dialogue 129dialogue interpreting 109dictionary 80, 82, 85dictionary vs. encyclopedia distinction 85direct speech act 95disambiguation 74discontinuities in speech 107discontinuity theory of language evolution

110discourse as language use 45;

as social action 101;as text 34

discreteness 22, 34, 60discursive construction 42disembodiedness of language 53, 151distinctive feature 64distributed cognition 97, 122n100division of communicative labour 219domination through discourse 88double dialogicality 216dynamic movements in phonetic behaviour

59dynamics-in-focus view 223dynamics of behaviour and interaction 19dynamics of sense-making 81

ellipsis 75embeddedness in socio-cultural practices

44, 214embodied action approach 198embodiment 19, 44, 54, 81, 214emergence 217emic 60emotion 65, 88empty position 75encyclopedic knowledge 81, 219end-field 73

INDEX 247

energeia 9, 82n58, 114, 149, 156, 217entrenchment 217episode 219ergon 149, 156errors 56, 116eternal sentence 89ethnomethodology 210ff.etic 60explicitness of texts 22expository prose 24, 88, 114, 191expressibility, principle of 84expression vs. meaning dichotomy 50externalisation 157external language (Chomsky) 148, 152f.,

207

family resemblance 81feelings as cognitively penetrated 100first-order sense-making 211fixation of meaning 82, 122fixed code assumption 82n59, 98, 146,

194, 201footing 78form 179;

priority of 51form vs. content dichotomy 50form vs. substance 53, 147, 179‘formal analysis’ (Garfinkel) 211formalisation 152, 158, 208formal language 151, 168formal semantics 92frame 55, 102frame discrepancy 93frame semantics 81framing 55, 102Fregean principle 84front-field 73functional potential 219functional-systemic linguistics 195n10

garden-path sentence 74n50genealogy 133, 183, 186generative phonology 61, 161generative rule 169genre 24, 191Gesamtvorstellung (Wundt) 106, 176Gesture 62, 118, 119

God-given language 110, 146grammar as internalised 150;

as techné grammatiké 14;as theory of language (Chomsky)198n1

grammatical ambiguity 38, 93grammatical construction 68, 178, 218grammaticalisation 219grammaticality 69ff., 148, 152, 163

Hegelian perspective 4Heteroglossia 200hidden normativity 162f.hierarchical structure 73, 125, 158historical change 161homogeneity of speech communities 122,

151

iconicity 115ideal delivery of speech 107idealised language (in linguistics) 35, 192ideal speaker-listener (Chomsky) 57n29,

150, 206image schema 83, 88immanence 49imprint theory 136impromptu conversation 191incompetence rule 168incompleteness 84, 91incremental production 75, 107, 177indeterminacy 217indexicality 84, 91, 94, 115, 212indices 115indirect discourse 96indirect speech act 95individualism 57, 150individual speaker as sole communicator

105information structure 69, 72, 76innateness 109inner form (Humboldt) 149n24inner syntax 72inscription 41integrational linguistics 45n10, 178, 192intellectualism 41n2, 87n63inter-act 42, 94interactional linguistics 125, 198, 218

248 INDEX

interaction order 212interdiscursivity 131interjection 78intermediary communicative act 21internal grammar 56internal language (Chomsky) 152f., 198,

207internalisation of grammar 56, 150, 151interpreting 109intersubjective understanding 107intersubjectivism 215intertextuality 131inter-world 42, 214intuition 154, 163, 171n46, 172invariant meaning 80inventory of forms 3, 8, 42items-and-arrangements 161, 169items-and-processes 160

joint attention 85

laboratory speech 64language:

notion of ‘a language’ 47, 142ff., 207language and the world 40, 44, 124, 133f.language as action 3, 9;

as allusive 211,as atemporal 151;between vs. within individuals 9,as context-free 147, 148, 153;as demarcated 153, 164;as incomplete 147, 211;as indeterminate 217;as innate 153;as medium for cognition 87f., 97, 137;as an organism 147;as property of the individual mind 53,56;as self-contained system 45, 147;as set of sentences 69, 177;as structured sets of abstract forms 3,10, 40, 148, 156, 189,as text 179

language bias 192language faculty 49, 154language game 216language makers 31, 145, 197

language myth 31language of thought 176language use 9, 45, 56, 86, 140language vs. speech distinction 58, 139ff.languaging 8, 46, 205, 217langue (Saussure) 16, 49, 60, 140, 149, 151,

160n35, 216laughter 119learning 113left dislocation 75lexicalised phrase 52lexical meaning 80, 105, 204lexicography 80lexicology 79lexicon 51lexis vs. grammar dichotomy 51linear structure 54, 60, 65linguistic determinism 43n5, 134linguistic praxis 46, 206, 216linguistic regularity 166f.linguistic disability 140linguistic environment 55linguistics as a discipline 36, 130, 151linguistics as part of cognitive psychology

151, 152linguists’ activities 205listener identities 105listener role 104literacy 190literal meaning 80, 82n59, 95, 102, 105literary theory 124, 180literate practices 14local production 217logic 92, 156logocentrism 192

macro-syntagm 75man-made standards (of correctness) 144,

146, 163, 166f., 170maps 181mass communication 138mastery of language 206mathematical language 148maximal generality of language system 50,

152meaning as coded 84, 85;

as collaborative accomplishment 105;

INDEX 249

as explicit 84;as fixed 79, 146,as flexible 81;as inferred 139;as inherent in the text 102,as objective 82f;as public 83;as situationally accomplished 137, 211

meaning component 80meaning determination 219meaning potential 81f., 218mechanism 41n2media, differences between 191members’ meanings 210memory 115mentalese 112mentalism 150, 159f, 169mental process 166, 169mental representation 87, 116, 169metatheoretical norms 164method of constructing utterances 218method of meaning-making 43metonymy 88mind as information processor 111mind/brain 172mind vs. body distinction 100minimalism 195n10miscommunication 58misunderstanding 58, 108monogenetic hypothesis 154n31monolingual bias 49monologism 4, 9, 125, 133, 151, 222moral system 121morpheme 161, 203morphophonology 161movement transformation 75multiculturality 122multiple determinability 93, 219multiple embedding 75multiple perspectives 44music 34, 62mutation of meaning potential 131mutation of sense 132myth of literal meaning 82n59, 200myth theory 31, 199ff.

national language 47, 122, 199

natural sciences 172nature, understanding of 123, 181neurophysiological basis of language 113,

171noise 57nomenclaturism 41f., 136non-linguistic sign 118non-verbal communication 110, 118f.non-vocal aspects of speech 63normative linguistics 70, 162ff.norms 162ffnorms of written language 23

objectification 9, 22, 42, 149, 157objectivism 40, 134objectivist theory of meaning 80, 82,

83n60, 87, 89observer’s monological perspective 120occasioning of contributions to dialogue

106, 212order of discourse 219ordinary conversation 24origin 133orthography 61outer syntax 67f., 72, 218

paradox of modern linguistics 30paralanguage 62paramechanism 160parole (Saussure) 12, 60, 140, 150, 216partial intersubjectivity 108n94particle 78perfect language 84, 91, 154performance (Chomsky) 12, 57, 59, 77,

141, 150, 205performative 94perspectivity 209phenomenology 211phoneme 60, 204phonetic behaviour 118phonetics 58, 141phonographic writing 26phonological development 65phonological gesture 218phonological word 66phonology 58phrase 66, 203

250 INDEX

pictures as texts 122pivot construction 77pleonasm 78politeness 90polysemy 81positioning 78possible world 90postmodernism 209posturality 61, 119potentiality 82n58, 114, 217practical accomplishment 212, 215practical linguistics 13, 15, 39, 126, 146,

183pragmatic enrichment 82n58, 139pragmatic inferencing 95, 219pragmatic particle 79pragmatics 86, 195n10preconceptual meaning 83predication 87pre-linguistic vocalisation 65prescription 162pre-theoretical linguistics 39, 144pre-verbal communication 110primary socialisation 20primacy of speech 28process 3, 165, 169process-orientation 46, 157, 189product-orientation 45, 113, 148, 149, 156,

189, 190pro-form 77projection 73projective aspect 70pronoun 77pronunciation 58, 74, 141proper language 12, 25proposition 33, 87, 108, 116, 125, 176propositionalisation 88, 176propositional language 33prosody 62, 73psycholinguistics 149, 150psychological reality 150, 159, 169, 178punctuation 67, 175purity of language 47, 49, 122

quotation 76, 96, 131

rampant situationalism 337f.

rationalism 209reading 105, 112, 117reading as sense-making 118read speech 64realism 210real-time processes 19recipient design 105recontextualisation 15, 126, 130, 182, 211,

of concepts 130, 203;continuity aspects 132;discontinuity aspects 131;from practical activities touniversalising theories 126, 184, 203

reference 88referent 41reflexivity of language 208reflexivity of sense-making 211regularity of linguistic behaviour 166f.reification 149, 157, 169, 179relativism 209relevant context 102remembering 113remote audience 22repair 57f.repetition 71representation 100, 120representational artefact 41representational meaning 88representational theory of mind 112response cry 79response particle 79responsive aspect 70, 95responsive construction 76responsive understanding 105reversal of perspective 183rhetoric 106, 140rule-based calculus 92rule-following 92, 166rules and processes 150, 165ff.rule vs. list distinction 52

Sapir-Whorf theory 43n5scholasticism 126, 184, 205schooling 13, 23, 36scriptism 30scriptura continua 14, 203secondary signs 28

INDEX 251

secondary socialisation 23second-order sense-making 211sedimentation 217segmental structure 34, 59, 60, 125segmentation 158segregational linguistics 45n10, 125, 192,

205semantic feature 80semantic potentiality 82n58semantic problem 93semantics 80semantics of understanding 80, 90semantics vs. pragmatics distinction 86semantic underspecification 84n61semiotic resource 84, 102sense-making in interaction 99sentence fragment 75sentences 33, 66ff., 72, 94, 125, 148,

174ff., 203, 204sequentiality 104, 125sharedness of language 54signing language 119sign language 119, 180signs as abstract 113, 114;

as arbitrary symbols 114;as gestures 114;as traces 113;

sign-vehicle 54situated cognition 112situated decontextualising practice 86, 108,

112, 223situated interaction 46, 216situated interpretation 84, 219situated order 55situation 46, 55situation-appropriateness 71situation definition 20, 55situation-dependence 19situation semantics 83n60situation-transcending practice 48, 213,

216smiling 119social constructionism 198;

contextual 45, 209;radical 45, 209

social distribution of language 56social interactionism 209social language 48

social norms and rules 172social representation 120n108, 219social routine 165social sharedness 54sociocultural tradition 213sociohistorical genesis 216spatial organisation 22, 54speaker identities 105speaker intention 105, 107speaker-orientation of communication

theory 164ff.speaker role 104speaker’s monitoring of own speech 79,

107speaking language 21speech 18, 188;

as accomplishing thought 99;as behaviour 141;as deviation 58

speech act 66, 69, 94, 139, 195n10spiritualism 53n25, 136splitting and inversion 9, 16stability vs. change 223standardisation 14, 47, 146story-telling 103structuralism 4, 147, 160, 179structure-in-action 215structure-in-focus view 9, 223structure shift 77structure violation 77subcognition 112n102subjectivism 40, 134substance 147sufficient understanding for current

purposes 108, 138suprasegmentals 60, 62surface structure 177surrogationalism 41n3, 134suspended dialogue 23symbolic representation 112syntactic contamination 77syntax as algebra 115system 144, 179system-sentence 67n42, 89, 157, 177

talk as incoherent 12

252 INDEX

talk-in-interaction as accomplishment 166,173

technical communication 99, 138technology of language 11telementational model 98n81, 137, 160,

194temporality of speech 104terminology 156texts as objects 102text vs. context dichotomy 102theorising language 11theory of linguistic praxis 215therapeutic communication 138thrownness 84traces 54, 101, 113transcription 32, 33, 65, 118transfer model of communication 98n81,

160, 194transformation of meaning 131transition relevance place (TRP) 67f.translation 109trust 121truth 44, 89truth condition 83, 89turn-constructional unit (TCU) 68type-token distinction 53, 125

unconscious rule 168underlying structure 149, 159, 177, 179unfinalisability of dialogue 109unitary language 47, 50, 124, 145, 199unitisation of language 47universal grammar 152, 155universalising theories 204, 206unpredictability 129Ursprache 47, 48, 199n2usage-based linguistics 195n10utterance execution 106utterance meaning as contextual 93f;

as determinate 92;as indeterminate 219;as multiply determinable 93

utterance planning 106utterance production 106utterances as behaviour 101;

as externalisation of thoughts 101, 137;as meaningful actions 102;

as products 101;as situated communicative acts 94;as texts 101

vagueness 91variable rule 171verbatim memorising 113verbatim reading 117vision 120

well-definedness 148why of communication 90WLB=written language bias 4f., 30ff.,

35f., 123f., 187ff.;as limited to linguistics 193f.

word meaning, acquisition of 85;as dynamic 81,as flexible 81

words 203;as basic units of language 65, 146, 174;as mental things 10

world as apprehended 40;as text 181f.

writing 5, 21;as a secondary representation 28, 116

writing bias 190writing, dialogical theory of 190,

origin of 25f.written communication as interaction 35written language 5, 21, 188;

as dead 25, 196n11as medium and model 32, 191

INDEX 253

the written language bias in linguistics: its nature, origins and transformations

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