Language as social interaction: Integrationalism versus segregationalism

Language as Social Interaction" In tegra tionalism Versus Segregationalism

R o y Har r i s

Worcester College Oxford University

ABSTRACT

Two contrasting paradigms have emerged in twentieth-century linguistics. One treats language and languages as objects of study existing in their own right, independently of other varieties of communication (the segregational paradigm). The other sees language as manifested in a network of human abilities and activities complexly integrated in social interaction (the integrational paradigm). This paper examines some of the differences between these two approaches to linguistic communication, and argues that the full theoretical implications of the integrational paradigm have yet to be explored.

"F rom the fact that language is a social insti tution, it follows that linguistics

is a social science, and the only variable to which we can turn to account for

linguistic change is social change, of which linguistic variations are only con-

sequences." These are the words of a great pioneer of French sociolinguistics,

Antoine Meillet (1921: 16-7), cited half a century later by one of the leading

methodologists of contemporary American sociolinguistics, William Labov (1972:

263). Unfortunately, it can hardly escape the at tention even of a first-year student

that this imposing pronouncement contains not just one glaring non sequitur but

two; and it is arguable that these twin non sequiturs have continued to flaw

sociolinguistic theorizing ever since MeiUet first lent his authori ty to them. From

the fact that language is a social institution, it no more follows that linguistics is a

social science or that linguistic changes are only consequences of social changes,

than it follows from the fact that only in human communities are crops cultivated

that agriculture is a social science or that changes in cultivation are consequences

of changes in society. Whatever the status of linguistics vis ~ vis the social sciences

may be, it is not a status somehow guaranteed in advance by the premiss that

language is a social insti tution (whatever that rather controversial phrase is taken

132 Language Sciences, Volume 9, Number 2 (1987)

to mean). It is not open to dispute that when a speaker A addresses an utterance to a

hearer B, and B, having heard and understood the words A uttered, addresses a reply, to A, which A in turn hears and understands, then what we are dealing with is an

episode of social interaction. Nor is it open to dispute that we are dealing also with an episode of linguistic interaction between A and B. From the very beginning of

modern linguistics, such examples have been taken as illustrating what Saussure was

the first to call le circuit de la parole, the "speech circuit." On the basis o f such

examples, at least two fairly uncontroversial but rather modest conclusions may be

drawn concerning the role of language in social interaction. One is that no theory

of social interaction can afford to ignore language. The other is that no theory of

language can afford to ignore the social matrix of which the speech circuit is only

one part. Or, to put the point more sharply, while we might imagine ~/a Rousseau

pre-linguistic communities in which social interaction was somehow carried on by

means other than language, the hypothesis of communities either here, or on Mars, or in some other possible world, in which linguistic interaction was the sole form of

social interaction is simply incoherent. Language is an activity which would be

meaningless unless the language-users also engaged in other forms of social interaction.

This, it might be thought, is a very obvious fact. Precisely for that reason, it

is somewhat curious to find that it should be felt obligatory to argue the case, as

Silverstein did in an article published as recently as 1977, that certain 'cultural prerequisites', as he called them, need to be taken into account for purposes of

grammatical analysis. In other words, if the linguist is to give a full and satisfactory

account of native speakers' mastery of their language, that account cannot ignore

the speakers' awareness of certain context-dependent social practices which must

be presupposed if certain types of linguistic expression are to make any kind of

sense at all. It will not be relevant here to discuss in detail the particular case which

is Silverstein's main concern, that o f indexical expressions. Nor is it necessary to

accept Silverstein's analysis of indexicals in order to agree with his more general

point that in order to elucidate their linguistic function we cannot appeal to prior-

established social roles of speaker, hearer, etc., since the relevant social roles are

created by linguistic interaction itself. Thus, for example, it will be irremediably

circular to define the meaning of the pronoun / by reference to the role o f speaker,

if what we understand by the role o f speaker involves, inter alia, knowing how and

when to use a first person pronoun. In short, there seem to be clear cases where the

explication o f certain aspects of social interaction is not merely intertwined with

but actually co-terminous with and exhausted by the explication o f certain linguistic

practices. What is interesting is why it should be necessary to have to argue this

as a point of linguistic theory. For an answer we must look to that part of social

Language as Social Interaction 133

history which comprises the emergence and development of modern linguistics as an academic discipline.

General linguistic theory, in the course of the twentieth century, has seen the emergence of two contrasting approaches. The mainstream approach has been, and remains, a segregational approach. Founded by Saussure, continued in the U.S.A. by Bloomfield and today by his generativist successors, segregational analysis treats language and languages as objects of study existing in their own right, independently of other varieties of communication and amenable to description in terms which are quite separate from those used in any other discipline. The alternative approach, the integrational 1 approach, sees language as manifested in a complex of human abilities and activities which are all integrated in social interaction, often intricately

so and in such a manner that it makes little sense to segregate the linguistic from the

non-linguistic components. Therefore, according to one view linguistic intercourse

is a form of human behaviour which is sui generis; whereas according to the other view that is precisely what it never is and never could be.

A more detailed description of the two views would make the point that the segregationalist approach to language typically abstracts from the linguistic community and from the communication situation, and proceeds by setting up

decontextualised systems of linguistic units and linguistic relations. The integrationalist, on the other hand, insists that language cannot be studied without distortion except in its normal functional context. Consequently, for the integrationalist the proposition that language is a mode of social interaction is a simple truism. Whereas for the segregationalist it is not strictly true at all. For the segregationalist, to speak of language as social interaction is at best a kind of ellipsis, rather like describing alcohol as a social problem. Strictly speaking, the argument goes, alcohol is not a social problem: the social problem is a problem which arises out of the

availability of alcohol and what people do with it. Analogously, it may be urged, language itself is not social interaction, even though certain kinds of social interaction arise on the basis of the availability of language and what people do

with it. One reason why the opposition between these two approaches has not hitherto

played a more prominent part in twentieth-century linguistics is that early on a compromise was struck. The nature of that compromise is enshrined terminologically in the puzzling and ungainly word sociolinguistics. It is a term which gives titular acknowledgment to the social framework of language, but at the expense of suggesting that what sociolinguists study is only one aspect or subdivision rather than the totality of language. This compromise left segregationalists free to insist

that the study of language structure rather than the study of linguistic communities

constituted the disciplinary heart of linguistics and linguistic theory. But why was

such a compromise necessary at all?


Two complementary answers may be suggested. One was the anxiety of linguists to establish the credentials of linguistics as a subject which could stand academically on its own two feet. This was a question of institutional politics, of the independence

and expansion of university departments, of competition for posts and funding, and similar issues which mark the development of Western higher education in the twentieth century. Linguistics as a subject would on that level have been distinctly less credible if its practitioners had been seen to be :,.-a fundamental disagreement with one another about aims, boundaries, and methods. The other answer was the failure of any linguistic theorist to produce a more plausible solution to the

problem of linguistic heterogeneity posed by Saussure. That problem is most clearly formulated in a much quoted passage of the Cours de linguistiquegdndrale:

Language in its entirety has many different and disparate aspects. It lies astride the boundaries separating various domains. It is at the same time physical, physiological and psychological. It belongs both to the individual and to society. No classification of human phenomena provides any single place for it, because language as such has no discern~le unity (Saussure 1922: 25).

Saussure's solution to the problem of heterogeneity is well known. It is the famous distinction between langue and parole - on the basis of which Saussure

argued that the study of la langue as a synchronic system must take priority over all other aspects of linguistic study. The effect of the Saussurean solution, as pointed

out very clearly by Giglioli (1972: 7), was to divorce linguistics from the study of social interaction. For if every competent speaker possessed/a langue as a complete internalized synchronic system, then the testimony of a single individual sufficed in principle to provide the descriptive linguist with all the evidence needed. Furthermore, the testimony of a single informant seemed the best guarantee of the homogeneity of that evidence. Studying many speakers actually engaged in la parole became at best superfluous and at worst confusing. For all that was necessary for the analysis of the underlying linguistic system was a point by point comparison of linguistic expressions, considered independently of the circumstances of utterance and the disparities between different speakers.

This theoretical and practical divorce between the study of /a langue as a

system and the study of /a parole in use had profound consequences. One of these was that the integrationalist position never developed into a fully worked out alternative to the segregationalist approach of the post-Saussurean period, but

remained in a state of subordinate dependence. A certain amount of lip-service was paid to the existence of an interactional matrix in which language functioned,

but then it was to all intents and purposes ignored. Bioomfield's famous behaviourist parable of Jack, Jill and the apple, for instance, recognizes that the meaning of the utterance apple includes the totality of the interaction between Jack and Jill


preceding and following that utterance. But then Bloomfield promptly dismisses

the study of meanings as impracticable in our present state of knowledge and

proposes to concentrate just on the linguistic structure of utterances. This is a

typically segregationalist move. The question of whether it even makes sense to

propose the linguistic study of utterances in isolation from their interactional

context is not allowed to arise (Bloomfield 1935: 22ff., 139ff.).

If it had been, presumably much of the work that was done on American Indian languages in the first half of the present century would never have been attempted

at all. Charles Hockett recalls that it never occurred to him during his work with

the Potawatomi that it was relevant in order to describe and analyse their language

to have any degree of practical mastery of it himself. He writes of this period in American linguistics, "Boas and Sapir sent their graduate students for a year (or even a summer or so) of 'fieldwork' with a hitherto undescribed language and

allowed them to write up their data as a doctoral dissertation" (Hockett 1968: 30);

and he recalls the anecdote about Boas who, with a perfectly straight face, asked a student returning from his fieldwork, "Well, did you get the whole language?"

The significant point here is that these were anthropologically oriented linguists

who should have been the first to grasp the complex integration of Indian languages

with Indian culture. They were not, like Saussure's students, working in libraries

with texts from the past rather than with human beings in the present. Yet

the notion that a few months' fieldwork with informants suffices to sift the

'linguistic facts' from their cultural embedding bears eloquent witness to the

extremes to which the segregationalist approach could be taken.

An interesting case is that of Sapir, who acknowledges that the normal function

of language is to articulate many and varied patterns of social behaviour. Sapir's

example is borrowing money. "If one says to me 'Lend me a dollar,' I may hand

over the money without a word or I may give it with an accompanying 'Here it is'

or I may say 'I haven't got it' or Tll give it to you tomorrow.' Each of these

responses," says Sapir, "is structurally equivalent, if one thinks of the larger behavior

pattern" (Sapir 1933: 12). Yet although Sapir realized this, he does not seem

to have realized its theoretical significance, or at least not bothered to analyse the

theoretical implications. The integrationalist insight is glimpsed, but then not

followed through. Sapir apparently fails to see that this kind of structural

equivalence is not something outside language, but something without which what

is said would be outside language - that is to say, would be meaningless.

It is not surprising that the clearest expression of an integrational perspective

on language should have come from one of the leading figures in social anthropology

of the interwar period, Malinowski. But Malinowski's most famous dictum, that

language is "a mode of action, rather than a countersign of thought," when watered

down into such statements as "the context of situation is indispensable for the


understanding of the words" (Malinowski 1923: 307), or "the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation" (Malinowski, loc. cit.) appears to reduce readily to truisms with which nobody would disagree. As interpreted by J. R. Firth, Malinowski's claim emerges in the sadly emasculated guise of recognizing an 'outer' layer of contextualization statements which the descriptive linguist is obligated to undertake in order to 'complete' the description of a language. It is like giving a final road-test to the already assembled car. Thus viewed, what Malinowski says is drained of its most radical theoretical content.

In America, the attempt to integrate linguistics into the general study of communicative behaviour was pursued most systematically by Kenneth Pike, while

in England a similar emphasis emerged in the work of Firth, for whom "the central concept of the whole of s eman t i c s . . , is the context of situation. In that context are the human participant or participants, what they say, and what is going on"

(Firth 1957: 27). In both Pike and Firth, however, one sees a further consequence of the compromise between the segregationalist and integrationalist positions. Although Firth uses the term integration, for him the analysis of that wider integration begins "when phonetician, grammarian and lexicographer have finished." In other words, Firth works from utterances 'outwards,' and not from the total context 'inwards.' Like Pike, he seems to have conceived of the nonverbal part of communicative behaviour essentially as language carried on by other means. This is evident even terminologically in the case of Pike, who introduced such units as the "behavioreme" (a term clearly modelled on phoneme and morpheme). Thus, in both cases, the approach eventually adopted envisaged an extension of the analysis of language systems to embrace a certain range of related social facts, rather than any rethinking of the basic assumptions underlying the postulation of language systems in the first place.

These cases are instructive because they enable us to pinpoint a deeper reason why segregationalism has dominated modern linguistics for so long. It is simply this: that even those linguists most sympathetic to an integrationalist approach to language on the theoretical level were in teaching methodologically committed to segregationalist practices. There was a failure, in short, to come to terms with

the fact that a thorough-going integrationalism requires us to recognize a principle which may be called the 'non-compartmentalization principle' (Harris 1981: 165). Whatever name we choose to give it, this is the principle that as human beings, whose humanity depends on social interaction, we do not inhabit a communicational space which Nature has already divided for us between language and the non- linguistic. Or, to put it another way, language is not an autonomous mode of

communication and languages are not autonomous systems of signs. Integration,

in short, is not to be construed on the model of a jigsaw puzzle or construction kit, where we start with separate pieces, some linguistic, others non-linguistic and then


fit them together. On the contrary, the jigsaw puzzle is a typical ly segregationalist

model of how a language works.

When the integrationalist thesis is stated in its simplest form, it may appear to

leave itself open to an obvious objection. The objection runs as follows.

But surely plain common sense demands that in the analysis of social interaction a clear distinction be drawn between the use of language and the use of non-linguistic forms of communication. For if I wish to get my neighbour at the dining table to pass the salt, there is all the difference in the world between trying to achieve this by means of pointing or gestural pantomime and trying to achieve it by means of uttering the words "Pass the salt, please." The fact that I may decide both to point and to utter the words as well does not somehow invalidate an absolute difference between verbal and nonverbal interaction.

Does an object ion such as "this point to the conclusion that in the end the

segregationalist approach has common sense on its side after all?

On the contrary, when carefully examined, our common sense grasp of such

examples falls a long way short of providing support for the segregationalist position.

It is important to see how and why. According to the segregationalist, the English

sentence Pass the salt, please has an invariant form and meaning which is quite

independent of episodes of meal-time behaviour and the interactional exchanges

therein. This invariant form and meaning are determined independently by the

phonological, grammatical and semantic rules o f the English language. Thus, the

contr ibut ion of the linguist towards explaining such an episode o f social interaction

will be to explain how these linguistic rules of English make the utterance

recognizable as a request to pass the salt. The explanation takes roughly the

following form.

Because both speaker and hearer have ' internalized' the same set of phonological

rules, both of them can identify the utterance as an utterance of a particular string

of English phonemes, which means that they are able to distinguish it from

utterances of all the infinite number of other strings of English phonemes, whether

or not they have ever encountered that particular string before. Second, because

both speaker and hearer have ' internalized' the same set of grammatical rules, both

of them analyse that identified string of phonemes as representing the same sentence

with the same grammatical structure. Specifically, they are able to identify Pass the

salt, please as an imperative construction in which the salt is the direct object of the

transitive verb pass, the salt being a noun phrase comprising the definite article

plus the mass noun salt. Thirdly, because there are rules governing the meaning

of each grammatical element and relation, and also of each lexical item slotted into

the sentence structure, and because the participants know all of these, they are

able to compute a total meaning for the sentence. This total meaning turns out

to be something which might be paraphrased roughly as "Kindly cause the


contextually particularized sodium chloride to move in the contextually particular-

ized direction." The trouble with this, needless to say, is that if that is a correct

characterization of Smith's message to Jones at the dining table, it is a complete

mystery how the salt ever gets passed at all. In other words, we have now created

for ourselves the formidable problem of explaining how Jones manages to understand

what it is that this obscurely oblique message is asking him to do. Solving this

problem has now become a major industry in the branch of linguistics currently

called pragmatics; and much effort has been expended on propounding solutions. But why create the problem in the first place?

The point here is not to mount a reductio ad absurdum argument against linguists' analyses of the meaning of sentences. The point is that such an analysis,

taken as seriously as you wish, shows rather that the linguist's meaning of the English

sentence Pass the salt, please is not the analysandum we were looking for in order

to explain the episode of social interaction. Afortiori no amount of ingenuity in pragmatics will bridge the explanatory gap. Or, to put the matter in Wittgensteinian

terms, the language-game we play at the dining table with Pass the salt, please is

not a game of skill in combining dictionary meanings into grammatically structured totalities nor, conversely, of resolving such totalities into their constituent parts.

The game of formal linguistic analysis is itself a language-game; but not the game

we play or even have to know about in order to get the salt. Neither game 'explains'

the other; nor does skill in playing one entail skill in playing the other.

Once we realize this we realize that when it comes to construing language as

social interaction the segregationalist approach puts the cart before the horse. For

the integrationalist, on the other hand, priorities are reversed. There is no question

of starting from the analysis of a decontextualized verbal abstraction and proceeding

thence to explain how a piece of meal-time social interaction works. On the

contrary, for the integrationalist it is that piece o f social interaction which is one

of the established language-games underwriting the abstraction we call the English

sentence.

From an integrationalist point of view, it would be fruitless to attempt to

define the meaning of the words Pass the salt, please without reference to the

'cultural pr~'equisites,' as Silverstein calls them. How complex these are, even in such a trivial case, emerges from the fact that we can imagine various cultures other

than our own in which, for example, any one of the following language-games

might regularly occur. 1. When Smith said Pass the salt, please, Jones first removed

the salt from the salt-cellar, poured it on to a napkin, folded the napkin and then

handed the folded napkin to Smith. 2. When Smith said Pass the salt, please, Jones

took the salt and sprinkled it on the food on Smith's plate. 3. When Smith said Pass the salt, please, Jones took the salt, and sprinkled it over Smith's head, shouting

"Abracadabra." There is no need to multiply the hypothetical possibilities further.


In these three imaginary cultures, the meaning of Pass the salt, please would be

different; and in all three cultures it would be different from the meaning we

understand Pass the salt, please to have in ours. From an integrationalist point

of view, the meaning is inseparable from the language-game and it is this view of

meaning we have to adopt if we want to understand language as social interaction. Unfortunately, even those who see the radical difference between segregation-

alist and integrationalist approaches are sometimes seized by a misguided impulse

to try to reconcile them, treating them as complementary rather than opposed.

What that shows is that in spite of grasping the difference they have not fully grasped

its theoretical implications. Trying to combine segregationalist and integrationalist

perspectives is, for theoretical incoherence, on a par with trying to combine

synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It leads straight to chicken-and.egg

conundrums. The language-game of passing the salt is deemed to be explicable on

the basis of the meaning of the English sentence Pass the salt, please, which in turn

is explained by appeal to the existence of such language-games as passing the salt,

which in turn are explained by invoking the meanings of sentences like Pass the salt, please, and so on ad infinitum. The social practices and the language which

supports them are referred back and forth to one another, in a never-ending circularity o f explanation. This is what results when an attempt is made to 'complement ' the integrationalist view by superimposing a segregationalist perspec-

tive upon it.

It is easy enough to spot the circularity here, but far less easy to spot the

perpetual-motion mechanism which sets the explanatory wheel revolving and keeps

it going. That mechanism is nothing other than our talk of "the English sentence Pass the salt, please." For once we pose the explanatory problem in terms of second-

order constructs of this nature, we have already given the wheel a spin which will

keep it turning in perpetuity. But it is not immediately obvious how. For, again,

common sense seems at first sight to support the segregationalist. Surely the

integrationalist can hardly expect us to believe that there is no such thing as "the

English sentence Pass the salt, please." Can we not, from a lay point of view,

recognize that sentence, repeat it, quote it, spell it, translate it into French, and so

on? How would all that be possible if English sentences were simply fictions of

linguistic theory? Once again, however, the deliverances of common sense turn out under scrutiny

to support the integrationalist. The integrationalist does not deny that reference

to sentences features in everyday talk about language; nor maintain that it is

somehow wrong or misleading to describe typical episodes of social interaction in

some such terms as the following:

Smith said to Jones "Pass the salt, please" whereupon Jones passed the salt.

140 language Sciences, Volume 9, Number 2 (1987)

o r even~

Smith said to Jones "Pass the salt, please," whereupon Jones did so.

That is not what is at issue. What is at issue is whether this validates the theoretical

assumption that sentences are context-free linguistic invariants which have to be

postulated in order to explain why Smith says what he does and how Jones can

possibly understand it. What the integrationalist will point out is that by identifying the social

interaction between Smith and Jones in these terms we are already choosing to

describe what we presume to be one aspect of the participants' contextualized

interpretation of that interaction. In so describing it we do not make tacit appeal to some linguistic theory of sentential invariants but overt appeal to how Smith

intended and Jones understood the utterance to be communicationally integrated

into a particular continuum of activity. We assume no more, in other words, than

that if Smith were asked "What did you say to Jones?" he might truthfully reply

"I said: Pass the salt, please," and if Jones were asked why he passed the salt he

might truthfully reply "Because Smith said: Pass the salt, please." Nothing else

is required to validate descriptions of social interaction by reference to sentences.

But that validation affords no foothold for a segregational linguistics. On the

contrary, it renders the linguist's account of the decontextualized sentences not

merely superfluous but irrelevant to an analysis of language as social interaction.

The segregationalist typically makes several mistakes here. The first mistake

is to assume that when we identify metalinguistically what Smith said to Jones

as the sentence Pass the salt, please we are implicitly referring to some determinate

subset of the events which took place in that particular episode of social interaction.

And upon this first mistake a second mistake is then built, which is to assume that

the correct analysis of the episode is one which compartmentalizes it neatly in

two: on the one hand, the subset of events constituting the component Pass the salt, please and, on the other hand, the non-linguistic events surrounding it. A third

mistake is then added to complete the superstructure of errors, which is to suppose

that by apl~ying a set o f analytic procedures valid ex hypothesi for the sentence irrespective of the context we can recover what the participants thought was meant

and thus explain the whole episode. In short, there is a total confusion of sentences with utterances, and of the language-games in which we make reference to sentences

with the language-games thereby described.

A thoroughgoing integrationalism would mean taking seriously the consequences

of Sapir's observation that communication is based on structural correspondences

between certain forms of behaviour in a situational context. It would mean

recognizing that passing the salt when asked to do so is no less a linguistic act than


uttering the words Pass the salt, please in order to get it. Both are complementary manifestations of linguistic knowledge, of proficiency in a language-game, and we

unhesitatingly treat them so in the communication situations of everyday life.

Only a blind acceptance of the theoretical dogma which equates language with

spoken language and thus induces the mistake of identifying vocalization as the

mark of the linguistic act par excellence will prevent us from recognizing that truth.

To make that mistake is on a par with believing that you are not running except

during the seconds when your feet touch the ground and only playing tennis at the

moments when your racquet hits the ball. If the task of explicating language as social interaction is to be taken as a serious

goal, it cannot be tackled either on a basis that equates the use of English with the

vocal utterance of English words or on the basis that somehow the English language and other languages, or varieties ~ereof, are 'given' in advance, and all the investiga-

tor has to do is to go out and investigate how they are being used. That positivistic

misconception is the inherent flaw in much of what is nowadays called sociolinguistics. It proceeds by trying to correlate a few selected features of speech

(very often items of vocabulary or details of pronunciation) directly with social

classifications of the speakers (by such parameters as age, sex, income, occupation,

education, etc.). Perhaps it could be argued that this is virtually all that is left for

sociolinguists to do, once the segregationalist thesis has been accepted that the analysis of linguistic structure is a quite separate enterprise from the description of

language use. Whatever the reason, the result is that the tables, graphs, maps and

statistics which are the characteristic tools of the sociolinguist's trade tell us no

more about language than they would about fashions in clothes or hairstyles. This

is because the patterns they reveal are based on external correlations, the relevance

of which to the communicational function of language is itself problematic. To

proceed thus is, in effect, to divorce language from communication in a way which

either ignores or trivializes the main theoretical problems concerning both language

and communication. Language as social interaction involves not just vocal behaviour but many kinds

of behaviour. And to engage in face-to-face linguistic communication is, in the

simplest type of case, to co-monitor with one other person a behavioural continuum

along which a succession of integrated events can be expected to occur. To have

grasped and be able to exploit these integrational connexions is what makes us

communicationally proficient members of a community. That proficiency is not

to be explained on the basis of 'knowing the language.' On the contrary, it is only

on the basis of that communicational proficiency that one can begin to make sense

of the concept of 'knowing the language.'

This takes us back to what Malinowski was already calling in the 1930's "the

dilemma of contemporary linguistics." Malinowski summed up that dilemma by


asking "Can we treat language as an independent subject of study? Is there a legitimate science of words alone, of phonetics, grammar and lexicography?" Malinowski's answer was "no." We may not agree entirely with his reasons; but nothing that has happened in the field of language studies since Malinowski's day suggests that in the end he got the answer wrong. 2

NOTES

1. The term integrational is here used as proposed in Harris (1981: 165-7). It is a term which has also been used in other ways by a number of linguists,

including Guillaume, Katz and Postal, Bailey and, more recently, Lieb; but these other uses have little, if anything, in common with the present one. In particular, it should perhaps be stressed that for present purposes there is

no question of 'integrating' the various components of a language description. Language description of the traditional kind would not feature at all as a concern of the integrational linguistics here envisaged, precisely because 'languages' can only be constituted as describienda by a segregational approach.

2. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the I.C.U. Conference on

Sociolinguistics, Tokyo, 19 July 1986.

REFERENCES

Bloomfield, Leonard 1935 Language, London.

Firth, J.R. 1957 Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951, London.

Giglioli, P.P. (ed.) 1972 Lan$uage and Social Context, Harmondsworth.

Harris, Roy 1981 The Language Myth, London.

Hockett, C.F. 1968 eTheState oftheArt, The Hague: Mouton.

Labov, William 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns, Philadelphia.

Malinowski, B. 1923 "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages."

Meillet, A.

1921

Supplement to

C.K. Ogden and I,A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, London.

Linguistique historique et linguistique gdndrale, Paris.


Sapir, E.

1933 "Language," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York. Reprinted in 1949, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, D.G. Mandel- baum (ed.), Berkeley/London. Page references and to the reprint.

Saussure, F. de 1922 Cours de linguistique g~ndrale, 2nd ed., Paris 1922.

London, 1983. Silverstein, M.

1977 "Cultural Prerequisites to Grammatical Analysis," Anthropology, pp. 139-51, M. Georgetown University Press.

Tr. R. Harris,

Linguistics and Saville-Troike (ed.), Georgetown:

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