Toward a Science of Text and Disourse

8/3/2019 Toward a Science of Text and Disourse

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II. Toward a Science of Text and Discourse

II.A. Paradigms for the study of language

1. If we define a text as a communicative event (I.34), a discourse would be a set of

interconnected texts, the primary instance being the conversation. It would follow that text

and discourse are the main channels for people to encounter language. If so, all work for

cultivating or studying language would have been at least implicitly or indirectly concerned

with texts, even though only a few were explicitly or directly so. Before moving ahead, we

can look back on past disciplines in this perspective.

2. Each discipline is circumscribed by a schema or scenario of shared concepts and

methods regarding what questions to ask and where to seek the answers. The currently

fashionable term is the paradigm, which the philosophy of scienceattributes to each

normal scienceperforming its routine work of solving problems (puzzles). Periodically, a

paradigm shift occurs, most radically in the scientific revolution. To cover its broad range

of concerns, a science of text and discourse must shift to a transdisciplinary paradigm

that does not just displace some older paradigm with a new one, e.g., sentence linguistics

with text linguistics. Instead, ours should be a meta-paradigm that integrates multiple

paradigmsin order to situate their concepts and findings in wider contexts where disciplines

can interact in full solidarity to develop a detailed ecologist program for sustainable social

progress (I.60; II.132). To encompass the range of rich,interconnectedissues we face today,

we must transcend the philosophers popular but outmoded scenario of competing

paradigms locked into a Darwinian struggle for survival (cf. III.24, 181; VII.199). In that spirit,

it is essential to build upon our precursors and to appreciate the problems they faced and the

solutions they attempted.

II.B. Textuality in grammar, rhetoric, and logic

3. The oldest and richest tradition belongs to the maintenance and interpretation of

prestigious texts, typically official, legal, ritual, sacred, or poetic. Evidently, the text,

particularly the written inscription, was widely esteemed a potent social instrument for

expressing and transmitting the important knowledge of the culture. This esteem is most

evident when prestigious texts are cited in legitimizing discourse about what is right or

binding, witness these two examples from the 15th and 20th centuries [8-9] (i.a.).


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[8] I am talking of the statutes that have the force of canons and of decretals that are universally

binding on the church [] since it is useful to introduce any reform on the basis of precedent, I would

submit an imperial letterwhich is credited to Constantine (Nicholas of Cusa, On the supremacy of

general councils in church and empire, 1433)

[9] [Prime Minister ] Begin reviewed the text in detail, and finally concluded, This document is not a

proper basis for negotiations [] He focused on words and theirmeaning [] In all, the American

team prepared 23 versions of the Framework for Peace. I wrote the original Sinai agreement

personally, and there were eight different texts before we finished (Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith,

1982)

Evidently, many people believe having written text settles things for good.

4. Yet the elite rank and specialized training of many experts on prestigious texts say,

for the Vedic priests or the Kabbalists of the Torah, or for todays attorneys of corporate law

suggests that the text can be a highly problematic social instrument. Paradoxically, the

experts apply specialized skills and procedures to constructa meaningthat has an adaptive

valuefor them while purporting to have only registeredandpresentedthe onecorrectortrue

meaning. The authorityof the text is all too readily co-opted forauthoritarian moves of power

(cf. II.129; III.10; V.14). The reifying formalist myth of the self-sufficient text with a stable

and determinate meaning, which inflates the individual over the social (cf. I.39; II.110;

III.107), serves the dual agenda of enhancing the prestige of texts and securing the rights of

interpretation for elite groups (V.80; VII.199).

5. So in most historical settings, textual skills decide whether access to

knowledgepromotes either power and inequality or else solidarity and equality. Discoursal

power moves are easy to mystify as literal and true statements about reality because

few people properly appreciate the potential of discourse to construct and negotiate reality

(cf. VIII.75, 131). Conversely, discourses of power are hard to demystify because doing so

requires us to raise our critical consciousness and suspend our easy routines of

understanding talk in order to draw wider and subtler connections (cf. I.59). We need to

critique such familiar expressions as nature and reason, e.g. in [10], and recognize such

discourse to be a direct precursor of todays myth of intelligence and aptitude being pre-

determined by nature (VII.64).

[10] Every constitution is founded on natural law [that] exists by nature in reason. [the] wiser

and more excellent are chosen as rulers in order that, endowed with a naturally clear reason,

[] they may choose just laws and by these govern others and hear cases. [] thus those

who are strong in reason are by nature masters and rulers of others (Nicholas of Cusa)


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The mystification of discourses of power has been abetted by the disinterest among

language-related disciplines in explaining the relevant strategies and providing an explicit

theory for such a long-standing and important practice. Evidently, powerful people are not

eager to have it made public how they use discourse in ways that are quite adaptive for them

and quite maladaptive for the disempowered.

6. Three main disciplines have traditionally been concerned with language. The discipline

of grammar has sought to expound the organization of a language in terms of forms,

patterns, and rules. Typically, prestigious texts were chosen as sources, which enhanced

the prestige of grammar and encouraged qualified scholars to study and cultivate it. Using

such sources placed traditional grammarians fairly close to text linguists and kept them from

anticipating the 20th-century rift between language study versus text study (cf. II.24). Their

own specialized education and high literacy legitimized the early grammarians claim to

know the language and encouraged many of them to act as language guardians by

adopting conservative, elitist standards and by making prescriptionsfor correct usageand

proscriptions against incorrect usage. This strategy was highly adaptive in creating a

lucrative and self-perpetuating market for expertise about grammar. In practice, the

standards were largely constructed along social lines to accentuate the dual distinctions

between writing versus speech and between a prestigious variety or dialectversus one or

more non-prestigious ones (cf. VII. 251-55). The reliability and generality of such grammars

for representing actual usage remained uncertain, insofar as the things people were not

supposed to saywere precisely ones which many people did say.

7. The conservative quality of grammars was reinforced by the strategy of recycling

earlier grammars, even ones from other languages, e.g., when the English abbot lfric

Grammaticus (ca. 955-1020) relied in [11] on the Latin grammarians Priscian of Caesarea

(5th century A.D.) and Aelius Donatus (4th


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century). Like many later grammarians, lfric assumed that English grammar should be

legitimized by borrowing upon Latin grammar and using the same descriptive terms.Fortunately, the models they admired, such as Priscians Institutio de arte grammatica and

Donatus Grammatica urbis Romae, took a very broad view of grammar, witness Donatus

sections on the voice, letter, syllable, feet, tones, schemes, and tropes (de voce, de littera,

de syllaba, de pedibus, de tonis, de schematibus, de tropis). Hence, lfrics notion of

grammatica (Anglo-Saxon stfcrft, skill in letters [of the alphabet], but also learning,

study) covered the sounds of speech and the construction of meaning as well, in each case

foregrounding written language. In modern terms, the grammar extended into phonology,

intonation, and semantics (cf. II.29f, 48ff, 63).

8. Rhetoric was a more directly textual discipline whose social function was to teach

active and public skills, especially for oratory, rather than to cultivate the passive and private

skills gleaned from the grammatical study of prestigious texts. The rhetoricians saw in

language less a catalogue of correct forms and patterns than an armory of discourse

strategies for practical goals. This scope was not necessarily narrower than grammar,

because the rhetoricians, while not trying to cover all the points a grammar might address,

emphasized richer factors of context, e.g., how to persuade particular audiences. Rhetorical

effectiveness may not coincide with grammatical correctness; some audiences might see

an inappropriate power move in the use of a cultivated style preferred by grammarians.

Rhetoric (with the Greek root erein meaning speak) has therefore been more political and

populist and centered on oral discourse, whereas grammar (with the Greek root gramma

meaning letter) has been more academic and elitist and centered on written discourse.

Privileging grammar over rhetoric in education right up into modern times reflects the policy


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of granting preferential knowledge access to reward high literacy and standard dialect

rather than the skills of popular communication (VII.162f, 169f, 212f).

9. Recognizing the public demand for training in rhetoric and the profits of the schools

already offering it (e.g. the school of Isocrates), Aristotle expounded his famous Art of

Rhetoricin search of a systematic philosophical and psychological foundation. His method of

classifying into subtypes has proven vastly influential ever since, even among modern

linguists (II.34; V.45). For example, he distinguished between the deliberative rhetoric for

reaching decisions in assemblies, the forensic (or litigious) for arguing cases in court, and

the epideictic for displaying elegant or ornate language. His advice about the proper style or

usage of language was ambivalent, due his admiration for poetry and stage drama (e.g. by

the sonorous Euripides). He recommended appropriate language and the normal idiom but

also exotic and distant language that is artificial but seems natural. For writing, his

ominous suggestion that content ranks below style has stirred considerable annoyance (cf.

V.39).

[12] the virtue of style is to be clear, and to be neither low nor endlessly sublime, but appropriate. []

the discourse must be made to sound exotic, for men are admirers of what is distant, and what is

admired is pleasant. [] one must do this without being noticed and give the impression of speaking

not artificially but naturally. [] the technique is well concealed by drawing words from the normal

idiom, [] we should make little use of exotic, compound, and artificial ones; [] they involve toogreat a change from what is appropriate. [] written speeches have more effect through their style

than through their intellectual content.

Despite a brief plea for correct grammar (agreement of Gender and Number), he differed

prominently from the grammarians (and even more from the logicians) by describing how to

build rational or logical arguments and proofs upon uncertain or subjective premises, and

how to gain power by exploiting the audiences emotions (anger, contempt, gentleness,

friendship, love, pity, envy, jealousy). He classified people into character types by age and

by social rank, noting that the rich are arrogant and overbearing and mindlessly happy, for

their wealth is the highest measure of all things, and they believe themselves privileged to

rule; just what the wealthy backers of todays New Right coalition devoutly and

mindlessly believe (cf. VII.32).

10. Logic was a discipline aspiring to complete the search for a universal system of

knowing in the discipline of philosophy (from Greek roots, love of knowledge). Whereas

some philosophers invoked an absolute first principle such as Nature or God, others

turned to language as the privileged mode for knowing, meaning, defining, asserting, and so


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positional relations (cf. III.158). These sparse conditions do not hold either for a natural

language like English or for human knowledge of the world and society. A disquieting trade-

off impends: the more rigorous and precise the logic becomes, the sparser the meaning and

the lower the cognitive and social relevance of its statements (cf. II.50, 57; III.168).

13. Still, over the centuries, the project for using logic to definitively capture truth and

meaning has enthroned logic as the prime model for all human thought and reasoning (II.96;

III.167), both in idealism and in some radical versions of its archrival realism, such as

logical positivism holding that certain (positive) knowledge is based on observable physical

phenomena, and verificationism holding that knowing the meaning of statements equals

knowing how to verify them by observing the reality they describe. Similarly, the science of

language has at times used formal language as the leading model for natural language (cf.

II.58, 99; III.167-73). So philosophy, language science, and psychology have projected their

own procedures for designing formal models and representations over onto human

processes of thought and language at large. I hold this projection to be a category mistake

whereby a theory is short-circuited onto the domain of practices it purports to describe or

explain (cf. II.96; III.169, 180; V.124; VII.63; VIII.17). How far human thought or language

might be formal or logical is a question to be empirically discovered and not just quietly

pre-empted or taken on faith (II.79;III.173; IV.30).

4. Fig. II.1 sums up how grammar, rhetoric, and logic might be assessed as three

approaches to

texts. Typically, a grammar has been derived from passive skills honed on a body of

prestigious texts, mainly written; a rhetoric by practicing more active skills on oratory texts,

mainly oral though sometimes transcribed and embellished; and a logic by formal skills with

using notations and determining the validity and truth values of mainly artificial texts.

15. Despite their disparate perspectives on texts, grammar, rhetoric, and logic co-existed

over the centuries in a trivium, a trinity of eminent scholastic domains (called liberal arts).

Some early authorities saw no tension among them, e.g., when Aristotle sought to merge

rhetoric with logic and treated grammar as well (II.9). Our modern age has seen them split


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up; grammar has survived best, heavily represented in schooling at all levels (VII.K.2),

whereas marginal areas are left to rhetoric in departments of speech or journalism and to

logic in philosophy. The heritage of the trivium has been a studious respect for high

standards of style, cogency, and clarity that education has appreciated without being

properly equipped to impart the requisite skills in equality (Ch. VII). Perhaps a science of

text and discourse can contribute to a productive reassessment of criteria for grammatical

standards, rhetorical effectiveness, or logical validity.

II.C. Textuality in philology

16. The notions of language science or modern linguistics owe much to the field of

philology, which was established in the nineteenth and century, and whose chief concerns

were: (a) historical connections among successive stages of a language; (b) comparative

connections among languages from related groups or families; and (c) geographical

connections among various dialects of a language. All three investigations have gathered

their main evidence from written text-artifacts and devoted scrupulous attention to problems

and inconsistencies in transmission and transcription. Historical studies, particularly by the

Neo-Grammarians, sought to formulate laws of language change, but also to produce

reliable textual editions (e.g. the Hildebrandslied, 1812), and to cultivate the language skills

for studying and using these whence such academic domains as Old English and ltere

Germanistik. Comparative studies, particularly those of the Indo-European group, inquired

which languages were related, and whether the relations were due to common ancestry or to

other factors like migration and borrowing. Geographical studies, often labelled dialectology,

focused on forms or pronunciations that varied from region to region in regular ways. This

work pioneered thorough methods to describe dialects apart from the usual pejorative social

attitudes (cf. II.6; VII.49, 171; VIII.96, 150).

17. One eminent success in philology was to describe the great sound shift that split off

from the other Indo-European languages the Germanic branch that would later produce

Anglo-Saxon and later still English. For example, the unvoiced stops (where the air

passage is stopped but the vocal cords are inactive, II.29) written as p, t, and k, got

shifted to fricatives (where the air passes with friction) written as f, th, and h, whence

Latin pater, tres, and centum versus English father, three, and hundred. A shift could

be strikingly regular, affecting virtually all relevant words and even progressing to a precise

geographical line; unaffected items are probably later borrowings or frozen proper names,


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ritual terms, and so on. So the sound shift shed light on all three branches of philology:

describing the history of languages and their common ancestry as well as the evolution of

dialects. The discovery nicely fit the 19th-century concept of natural laws reaching all

across the sciences.Here already, the study of sound systems fostered an impressively tidytheory of language, and detached the language from the discourse practices of social agents

(II.29; III.137).

18. Philologists also pioneered the technique of working with authentic data from a

corpus of language samples; and they carefully described what they found people saying

instead of prescribing what people should say in the manner of traditional grammar. The

key question was which forms were attested, i.e., textualized in preserved inscriptions or

transcriptions for reliable identification and collation. Here, the textualizing of forms provided

the means not merely to determine their function and meaning as for all language (I.41)

but to decide which forms merited scrutiny at all. Although Indo-European is commonly

held to be a scholarly reconstruction and an abstract system of forms rather than an actual

language, some unrecorded language(s) resembling it must once have been textualized in

order to develop and stabilize the formal regularities we can trace in its descendants. And

the recovery of genuine texts in any early offshoot of Indo-European is a sensational event,

witness the stir in our own century over the discovery of Hittite going back 3,000 years.

19. Recent research has raised again the prospect that, contrary to the standard view

among philologists, that Indo-European may not be unrelated to other language families

after all. Supportive evidence includes the -m- in First Person forms and the -t- in Second

Person forms consistently appearing across the whole group called Eurasiatic by Joseph

Greenberg, including also Uralic, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukchi-

Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut. Some linguists, such as Morris Swadesh, have even

revived the prospect, once discounted by philologists, of a monogenesiswhereby all the

worlds languages descended from a single one. How they might have evolved into separategroups is being actively discussed in the wake of startling findings that populations with

different language families also differ in their genetics. These findings converge with

burgeoning explorations of the relationship between language and genetics.

20. Fig. II.2 shows how the branches of philology might be seen as three more

approaches to texts.


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The historical branch compiled and edited documents and inscriptions to trace the historical

stages in a language. The comparative branch mapped the relations among languages or

language families indicated by patterns of attested forms complemented with painstakingly

reconstructed forms. The geographical branch used surveys and questionnaires to elicit

the dictation or transcription of regional varieties. In each of the three, the concept of

language varied to focus on evolution, comparison, and variation, respectively.21. Philology grappled valiantly with the problems of analyzing authentic data and of

weighing textual evidence against conflicting or missing evidence, especially when

postulating non-attested forms. With living languages, in contrast, informants can be

consulted, and the obstacle may be not too little evidence but too much too many diverse

opinions and too little consensus about the vocabulary, grammar, or sound systems in

various dialects or geographical areas. Most techniques of taking dictation rarefy the factors

not easily represented through the conventions of writing (III.195). And if schoolmasters are

the informants, as for the monumental Deutscher Sprachatlas research, their usage may be

more self-conscious than the usage of ordinary speakers.

22. Despite such problems, philology inaugurated major advances in the directions later

pursued by modern linguistics. The main concern was no longer grammatical, rhetorical, or

logical standards, but the systematic properties of all the data that could be assembled in a

corpus. Philologists appreciated the prestigious texts of literary and poetic discourse and

scrupulously collected and edited them. But they also worked to uncover and preserve any

surviving samples of non-literary discourse, such as statutes, proclamations, proverbs,

prayers, incantations, personal letters, and so on. This concern prefigured the more resolute

move of linguistics to affirm the centrality of spoken ordinary language over written elite

language (cf. II.24ff). Still, many modern linguists have not properly acknowledged their debt

to philology. They may have been motivated by rivalry or by competition within academic

language programs treating ancient and medieval languages from a mainly literary

viewpoint. Yet these programs did pave the way for modern language programs in the

schools and universities. Perhaps a science of text and discoursecan requite our own debt


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to philologists by providing further perspectives for the study of the early texts they have so

diligently preserved.

II.D. Textuality in modern linguistics

23. The term modern linguistics designates a field of research and method that

emerged in the 19th century and was consolidated in the 20th. It resolved to be modern by

making a fundamentally new departure from the earlier approaches to language outlined so

far in this chapter. It would be scientific by framing explicit theories of language and

implementing disciplined practices. It would describe what people do say rather than

prescribing or proscribing what people ought or ought not to say. It would provide

comprehensive coverage of the whole language rather than selective coverage of

grammatical, rhetorical, or logical issues. And it would defend the primacy of spoken

language, e.g. by developing elaborate methods for representing sounds more accurately

than with conventional orthographies (especially for English, VI.56); although written

language samples were often used and their visual clarity did some cheap explanatory work

in identifying units and their boundaries (cf. II.29, 34, 38; III.195, 202; IV.1)

24. However, the ratio between theory and practice in modern linguistics has remained

profoundly problematic (cf. IV.21) The human practices connected to language are

dauntingly vast and diverse, and certainly do not, by themselves, stipulate the form or the

content a theory of language ought to have. So, many linguists though by no means all,

as we shall see have attempted to stipulate a theory from the top down, i.e., in purely

theoretical terms, which would stipulate the methods for connecting it to the practices of

linguists and of speakers. A famous project of this kind was inaugurated by Ferdinand de

Saussures course in general linguistics (published in French in 1916), which declared the

true and unique object of linguistics to be language studied in and for itself,termed langue

in French, and placed it in a stringent dichotomy against language use, termed parole.

Henceforth, the classical program for mainstream linguistics as we find it reflected in

influential works and in the agendas of university departments, professional journals and

conferences, and so on has typically constructed its theories of language according to

tenets like these:

(a) Language is aphenomenon distinct from other domains of human knowledge or activity.

(b) Language should be described apart from the conditions under which speakers use it.

(c) Language should be described by internal, language-based criteria.


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(d) Language should be considered a uniform, stable, and abstract system in a single stage

of its evolution, i.e., in a synchronic perspective at the present time rather than in an

evolutionary or diachronic one across historical time.

(e) The description should be stated at a high degree of generality what applies to the

entire language or even universally to all languages.

In the early stages, these tenets strategically suited the academic politics of establishing a

monodisciplinary normal science in a sparse and self-conscious scientific climate.

Disconnecting language by itself from issues in neighboring fields, such as literature,

history, folklore, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, was expected to make the

description more compact, unified, and rigorous by imposing strict limits on which data get

accredited, i.e., accepted as worthy of investigation and placed into the established

categories.

25. But a theory of this type raises a serious problem for practice: language is not

encountered by itself but only in use. Undaunted, linguists undertook to constructa language

as a theoretical system presumed to underlie all of its practical uses, though the preferred

term was discover to uphold classical realism by implying that this system is a reality

waiting to be found. The chief practices of discovery have been data-handling moveslike

these:

(1) collating: the data samples in a corpus are compared and contrasted to see what they

have in common, e.g., which word types frequently co-occur;

(2) consulting informants: native speakers are asked to judge or rate data samples of their

language, e.g., which among several versions of an utterance they would be more or less

likely to say;

(3) generalizing: certain aspects of the data are construed to be general ones, e.g., that the

Subject-Verb-Object order of a sample set of English Sentences is a typical pattern for the

whole language;(4) rarefying: the rich data as we find them in real discourse are rendered sparse by

disregarding certain aspects or details, e.g., variations in the actual pronunciation of the

same language sound;

(5) decontextualizing: the data are removed from the observed context and treated as if they

could occur in isolation or in a wide range of contexts, e.g., irrespective of the social status of

groups or speakers;

(6) introspecting: the linguists base estimations on their own intuitions about the language,e.g., which sentences conform to grammatical rules.


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These practices were performed as cognitive moves while organizing materials and

constructing theories and models, and as discoursal and social moves while stating the

results and informing colleagues through reports, conferences, journals, books, and so on.

Because our own language strongly affects how we classify and label things, the discoursal

aspects of doing linguistics are far more influential and significant than has been widely

recognized.

26. The practices for these data-handling moves differed between two broad approaches

to language. Fieldwork linguists (as the term says) go work in the field of cultural and

social activities and carefully record a corpus ofauthentic data:what native speakers of a

previously undescribed language or dialect are actually observed to say. In contrast,

homework linguists (to coin a new matching term) work at home (or in the office) with

data that have been supplied from an outside source. The data may be authentic, as in a

computerized corpus of real discourse (II.64). But they may also be invented databy the

linguists, who are fluent speakers and claim to represent the whole community of native

speakers. This tactic is highly problematic, and we need to consider why (II.36; IV.21).

27. In practice, fieldworkers never encounter language by itself, even if the official theory

purports to describe it; you confront language in rich connections with language use and

exploit modes of data that are not just linguistic, such as the procedures of buying and

selling goods (II.33). Your work is always strongly data-driven, and practice-driven,

especially when you join in the social practices of interaction and conversation. The practices

supply continual tests: if your theory or your conclusions are wrong, youll get corrected,

misunderstood, teased, or ignored. In contrast, homework can disconnect theory from

practice by relying on your own introspection and intuition to formulate and describe what

native speakers are presumed to know about the language by itself. The work becomes

strongly theory-driven, especially when you pursue a construction that, by definition, does

not directly manifest itself in data or in practice, and when you try to disconnect inventeddata from cognitive and social constraints. Nor are your theory and conclusions tested by

being put into practice. Instead, theories and descriptions get evaluated mainly by standards

of design, such as formality, rigor, elegance, or compactness (cf. II.43, 92). In exchange,

authentic data such as everyday conversations may look messy or deviant, hardly worthy of

attention (II.41; VII.133). So the quest to discover the language-system as an underlying

reality can paradoxically lead radical homework linguists to replace the language with a

technical constructionwhich exists only in their own theorizing and can be connected tolanguage data only when these have been removed from practice and translated into some


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sparse notation. Along the way, real speakers as informants get marginalized and

silenced, and a written standard variety parades as the language itself (VII.165; VIII.18)

the linguists version of the fundamental contradiction between inclusive theory (e.g. for

covering an infinite set of sentences) versus exclusive practice (e.g. for disregarding

ordinary conversations) (cf. I.6; II.41). And cultural memory gets erased to avoid questions

about how concrete discoursal practices might evolve and for whose benefit (III.113).

28. After 70 or 80 years of research, the status of language by itself is still uncertain.

Since it is not a manifestation but a theoretical construction, it cannot be verified by

conventional observation of the practices of language use. So we can move to a higher

plane and observe the progress of linguistics as a science . There, our testable hypothesis

might be: if language is indeed a uniform, stable, and abstract system we can describe by

purely linguistic criteria, then we should observe steady long-range increases on three test

scales: (a) coverage, i.e., how much language data have been described; (b)

convergence, i.e., how far various descriptions get corresponding results; and (c)

consensus, i.e., how far linguists agree about how the description should be stated and

assessed. What we actually observe, however, is not a steady overall increase but an

uneven pattern of increases in some domains, and stagnation or short-range decreases in

other domains. How far linguistics might count as a normal science (in the sense of II.2) is

still not decided; its normalcy fluctuates periodically and substantially (II.41).

29. We observe the stablest increases in the description of language sounds, which

had already anchored the philologists concept of language being governed by natural laws

(II.17). In the domain of phonology (or phonemics), linguistics discovered a uniform,

stable, and abstract system of phonemes: theoretical minimal units which correspond to

the practical units of language sounds, and whose quantity and nature can be precisely

described in practice for any language by the physical and mental criteria that differentiate

them (cf. II.45, 48). Physically, each phoneme is connected to articulatory events and

locations, e.g., a voiced dental stop such as /d/ produced when the vocal cords vibrate and

the air flow is blocked by the teeth (cf. II.17); the concrete physiological processes are

investigated in the kindred domain ofphonetics. Mentally, each phoneme must be capable

of differentiating between elements (words or word-parts) that also differ in meaning, e.g., /d/

versus /t/ in hid versus hit (III.92). These two sets of criteria nicely converge in practice to

give tidy results: complete coverage and a high consensus among phonologists. The

description also reaps some cheap explanatory work from the visual match between thenotation of many phonemes and written letters, or technically, the graphemes, of the


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popular Roman alphabet even though spoken language was the official domain to be

described (II.23).

30. This huge success on our three test scales made the study of sound systems in

phonology into the model paradigm for early modern linguistics, whence the series of -eme

terms (e.g., morpheme, lexeme, syntagmeme, sememe) modelled on phoneme.

Henceforth, mainstream theories confidently projected language to be an array of uniform,

stable, and abstract subsystems, usually called levels, each consisting of a repertory of

theoretical minimal units which correspond to the practical units in the language data and

which constitute asystem of differences (cf. II.39, 45, 114, 123). A complete description of a

language would be the sum of the descriptions for each subsystem, supplied by linguists

investigating the several areas within a neat division of labor. Research of any scope or in

any area could contribute on its own terms, e.g., by doing pure phonology or only syntax.

In this fashion, linguistics would be mono-disciplinary and would also contain a set of

smaller monodisciplines.

31. Impressive success was also attained in the domain of morphology (or

morphemics). Here, the theoretical minimal units are the meaningful forms called

morphemes, which correspond to the practical units of word-parts, such as word-stem,

prefix, or suffix, and of non-segmentable words. This domain offered vital support for

fieldwork in Peripheral regions on previously undescribed languages of lesser diffusion

that often defamiliarize the Western fieldworker by presenting much more elaborated

systems of meaningful forms than do the familiar Western languages of Center regions

(e.g. English and French) (cf. II. 37, 86; VIII.9). The polysynthetic languages spoken, say,

by Native Americans join morphemes into long word-like constructions that would be

expressed by complex phrases in other languages, e.g., [14] from Paiute of south-western

Utah (reported by Edward Sapir), or even by whole utterances, e.g., [15] from Aymara of

Peru and Bolivia (reported by Martha J. Hardman) (cf. II.62).[14] wii - to - kuchum-punku-rgani-yugwi - va - nt - m()

knife-black-buffalo - pet - cut up-sit (plural)-future-participle-animate plural

they who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black cow (or bull)

[15] aru-si - kipa - si - p - xa - a - naka -sa - ki - puni - rak- spa - wa

speak-REFL-bridge-PROG-PLUv-COMP-NOM-PLUn- we -just-always-also- VRB-3rdP+DES-AFF

I know it is desirable and necessary that all of us, including you also, keep communicating

The piece-by-piece or interlinear translations customarily provided in fieldwork linguistics(cf. VI.73) combine ordinary language with specialized functional labels (like animate plural)


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to suggest what the various morphemes contribute. In the Aymara data [15], the morphemes

convey not just the content such as speak, but a rich palette of grammatical functions and

aspects, such as reflexive (REFL) (i.e. speak to each other), progressive (PROG), plural of

numerousness for the verb (PLUv) and for the noun (PLUn), completive (COMP) indicating

sententious certainty, a marker for the third person of the desiderative aspect (3rdP+DES), a

transition from the opening verb to a nominal (NOM) and then back to a verbal (VRB), plus a

final affirmation marker (AFF) that turns the whole cluster into a sentence type. The idiomatic

or free translation shows English using clausal framing to convey aspects such as

sententious certainty and desiderative (I know, it is desirable and necessary).

32. How has morphology fared on our three test scales proposed in II.28? Coverage faces

the tough practical problem that the stock of minimal forms of a language could include the

entire vocabulary of indivisible words plus word-parts. The preferred solution has been a

theoretical division between the grammatical morphemes in stable, compact classes, e.g.,

the set of all verb inflections for present, past, and so on, versus the lexical morphemes in

unstable, open classes, e.g., the set of all verbs or verb stems. Morphology would seek to

provide full coverage of the grammatical ones as the proper morphemes, whereas the

lexical ones would be lexemes and would be consigned to lexicology, a domain often left at

the borders of linguistics (cf. II.38, 64). The ensuing division between grammar versus

lexicon became an accredited dichotomy in formal linguistics (II.49), whereas systemic

functional linguistics has projected the fundamental unity of the lexicogrammar

apportioning the work of expression to grammatical or lexical resources in a characteristic

way for each language or language type (II.63).

33. Morphology attained its best convergence through the fieldwork described in II.31,

where theory and practice are always connected, and where all available clues must be

exploited to discover the meaningful parts in transcriptions of actually observed utterances.

This job requires acute skills in listening and transcribing, but also in relating utterances orutterance-parts to cognitive and social constraints, whether or not these might be

described in linguistic terms (II.27). Moreover, you must meet the practical challenge of

moving from being a total outsider for the community of speakers over to being an insider

who can speak the language well enough to interact in communicative practices (cf. VIII.9).

Along the way, you continually test and refine your description, and adjust your theory

accordingly.

34. Consensus is supported by the emphasis on identifyingand isolatingthe morphemesin the data, which can extract some cheap explanatory work from the linear distributions


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being visually displayed by a transcription into a reliable phonetic alphabet (cf. II.23, 29, 38).

One straightforward method is to repeatedly segment the data until no further meaningful

subdivisions appear feasible, and then to classify the segments and the patterns these

constitute. This immediate constituent analysis, if applied in all observation of word-

structure, was expected to eliminate any inconsistency of procedure. You can, for instance,

readily distinguish the boundmorphemes that can occur only as a part of a longer unit from

the free morphemesthat can occur by themselves.

35. But even so, morphology is less congenial than phonology for the classical program

of mainstream linguistics because the data are not nearly so tidy and compact. For

example, Modern English has fairly few indisputable bound morphemes, such as the endings

for plurals of nouns and for tenses and persons of verbs, or the endings such as -able and -

ish for deriving words; in return, much of the grammatical work is now done with the so-

called Function Words (e.g., Articles, Prepositions, and Conjunctions) which, like bound

morphemes in other languages, belong to small or closed sets and have key phrase

positions but sparse or indeterminate meanings. The lexical work is mainly done with the

so-called Content Words (e.g., Nouns, Verbs, and Modifiers) which belong to large or open

sets and have flexible phrase positions but richer and more determinate meanings. A

Content Word is more self-sufficient and more likely to be uttered alone (e.g., fire!, run!,

terrible!) than is a Function Word (e.g., ?the!, ?at!, ?unless!), except maybe to

emphasize a contrast. Also, the Content Words are more likely to take on the remaining

bound morphemes (the inflections), e.g., to signal a declension of nouns with singular

versus plural or a conjugation of verbs with present versus past (IV.20, 47, 62, 82).

36. English also illustrates the problems for describing a language that has assiduously

borrowed word-stems, prefixes, and so on, e.g., from French, Latin, or Greek, which are no

longer recognized as meaningful units by many contemporary monolingual speakers. Should

a morphological description include not just the more obvious units like the prefixes in- andim- for negation alongside un-, non-, or a- but also the erudite units like -pter (wing) in

helicopter, where speakers would more likely identify the final -er as an agentive suffix

(compared, say, to propeller) on the verb helicopt, which has in fact appeared in a recent

English dictionary with the irritable label back formation by false analysis? Such

etymological data would bring in language history and thus undercut the mainstream

program to describe language in a single stage of its evolution (II.24(d)).

37. Still, these problems for theory have not kept morphology from making huge practicalcontributions by describing hundreds of previously undocumented languages through active


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fieldwork, such as that sponsored by the Summer Institute of Linguistics and carried out by

Kenneth, Evelyn, and Eunice Pike, Robert Longacre, Joseph Grimes, and their many diligent

colleagues and students (cf. IV.41; VI.73). This work is undoubtedly the most memorable

and enduring achievement of modern linguistics. We have gained not merely a deepened

and defamiliarized sense of the striking morphological diversity of languages, but also

refined methods of investigation we can reapply to the more familiar, worked-over languages

(cf. II.86, 108). We can also rework the classifications of languages begun by philologists like

Rasmus Rask and continued by linguists like Edward Sapir, Joseph Greenberg, and Morris

Swadesh (cf. II.19).

38. Looking to reapply the successful methods of morphology, the next domain in terms of

unit size would logically be lexicology, whose theoretical units, the lexemes, correspond to

the practical units of words; but this domain did not at all fit the linguists beloved conception

of a uniform, stable, and abstract system. So the next domain taken up was actually the

subsystem ofsyntax, which concerns the organization of phrases and clauses in structures

or constituents. Here, fresh problems cropped up. Consensus was hard to achieve about

what the theoretical units, prospectively called syntagmemes (after the terms phonemes

and morphemes) or phrase structures, might be, and how they might correspond to the

practical units ranging from just one word (e.g. help!) to a phrase and on up to an extended

clause or sentence. Since the repertory obviously would not consist ofminimalunits, some

new mode of theory would need to deal with complexunits, Nor does it seem feasible to give

an exhaustive, precise coverage of phrases and clauses; even the traditional division into

Subject and Predicate can leave tricky residues, e.g., signals of the speakers viewpoint

like frankly (cf. IV.28, 206). Once again, the visual appearance of data written down does

some cheap explanatory work in indicating some divisions between words and between

phrases (cf. II.23, 29, 34). But the linear sequence is not rich enough: we can inspect the

positions of items but not the relations among them we can see where things are but notwhythey are there orwhere else they could be.

39. Evidently, the methods for segmenting data into formal units and classifying these into

repertories supported convergence and consensus much better for phonology and

morphology than for syntax. Linguists began to cast about for other theories and methods,

particularly ones that would still treat language as a uniform, stable, and abstract system.

So the system was redefined to consist not of a repertory of theoretical minimal units (II.30)

but of a repertory of theoreticalrules for arranging simple units into complex units. Here, thecorrespondence between theoretical units and practical units dramatically receded, insofar


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as these rules would not produce (or describe) the phrases and sentences themselves, but

rather the underlying structure of phrases and sentences. This new paradigm therefore

felt authorized to reject the data-driven and practice-driven methods of descriptive

fieldwork for classifying and organizing data and extracting patterns from a corpus of

observed speech, in favor oftheory-driven methods for designing a generativehomework

model of language by itself. The model would be a generative grammar: a highly technical

construction whose rules would generate all the grammatical sentences of the language by

assigning them structural descriptions, and no ungrammatical sentences (cf. II.105). The

grammar does not specify how people actuallyproduce real sentences or why they say what

they do (although discussions kept using terms like producing sentences); it only specifies

the abstract structure of possible sentences. The homeworkers craftily declared it

unreasonable to demand of linguistic theory that it stipulate a discovery procedure for

actually constructing the grammar, given a corpus of utterances (cf. VII.132, 326); how one

might have arrived at the grammar was not relevant to the program of research one

may arrive at a grammar by intuition, guess-work, all sorts of partial methodological hints,

reliance on past experience, etc. Of course, practical discovery procedures were just what

fieldworkers had always demanded of linguistic theory, and they were shocked to be called

unreasonable by people using hints and guess-work.

40. The ratio between theory and practice in modern linguistics became more elusive than

ever (cf. II.24). The dichotomy in the classical program of mainstream linguistics between

language by itself (langue) versus language use (parole) (II.24) was redrawn between

competence, i.e., what speakers of the language know, versus performance, i.e., what

speakers actually do or say. Competence belonged to an ideal speaker-hearer in a

completely homogeneous speech-community who knows its language perfectly, and

determines only what is grammatical, i.e., described by the grammar; performance would

determine what is acceptable, i.e., approved by realnative speakers. This line of reasoninginstalled the idealized grammar as the formal model for competence (cf. VII.K.2). It was easy

to invent plainly grammatical or well-formed examples like [16] and plainly ungrammatical

or ill-formed ones like [16a], while still others seemed grammatical and yet disturbingly odd

like [16b] (cf. IV.129).

[16] Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently.

[16a] New appear revolutionary infrequently ideas.

[16b] Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.


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Introspection and intuition were expected to underwrite an explicit formal statement of the

status of all such samples. But from that day to this, no such statement has been produced

for any language. In hindsight, it seems evident that introspection and intuition cannot

achieve in practice the task set down for it by the theory (cf. II.27, 65). No strong evidence

suggests that the native speakers intuitive knowledge of the language is substantially more

precise and uniform than his or her actual utterances and can be disconnected to make

purely grammatical judgements about invented sentences. Introspection is opportunistic,

coming into practice when data are presented and evolving to adapt to viewpoint and focus,

rather than subsisting as a stable theoretical system when its not being used.

41. At this stage in mainstream linguistics with syntax as the model paradigm (cf. II.30,

49), its status of a normal science fluctuated uneasily (II.28). The increase along the three

test scales proposed in II.28 stagnated and gradually turned into a decrease. In theory, full

coverage of language data was built right into definition of the grammar: assigning a

structural description to all the grammatical sentences (II.39). But in practice, only modest

sets of sentences could be so devised that their grammaticality was indisputable; the rest

were sensitive to varying contexts and interpretations, which are presumably affected by

performance factors. The homework linguists had once proclaimed that descriptivist

data-driven practices only precluded the development of a theory (a theory being of

course a formalist grammar); the lesson now emerged, with high poetic justice, that

generativist theory-driven procedures preclude the description of adequate data in

practice. The same grammar purporting in theory to provide total coverage ofall the well-

formed sentences of English might in practice provide almost no coverage of a corpus of

observed speech in everyday conversations, which would often look ill-formed and which

was always produced by real speakers who are neither ideal nor homogeneous and

certainly dont know the language perfectly (cf. II.27, 54, 57, 66, 95). A paradoxical scenario

arose: reality being claimed for a technical construction while rejecting the reality of humandiscourse inclusive theory with exclusive practice (cf. I.6; II.27). And instead of becoming

a genuine normal science, generativist linguistics could only be a normalizing quasi-science

that cannot describe authentic data but only the data it has expressly normalized, thereby

rendering them empirically undecidable (cf. III.172).

42. Convergence among the descriptions of data was impeded by the burgeoning

theoretical apparatus of formal rules and notations and innovative terms. True to the

grammars name, each fresh rule-set transformed the datas appearance, sometimescloser to the surface structure of sentences as we find them written down in ordinary


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orthography and sometimes venturing at varying distances into the deep structure that was

held to underlie sentences and to generate them through procedures of transformation,

e.g., to convert Active into Passive. The prerogative to transform the surface data often led

to divergent results, especially if, as was freely conceded, surface structure is unrevealing

as to underlying deep structure, and if the grammar does not, in itself, provide any sensible

procedure for finding a deep structure of a given sentence.

43. Consensus was concentrated in the early phase when generative grammar still had a

standard model. Soon, the leeway for inventing theoretical rule-sets spurred proposals for

competing models. The fuzzy connection between theory and practice in such models

prevented using a corpus of authentic data to establish a consensus about the best model;

instead, models were hotly debated on theoretical grounds (cf. VIII.22). Over thirty technical

constructions still contend within the field, bearing trademark names like case grammar,

Montague grammar, lexical-functional grammar, X-bar theory, or government and

binding, and advocated on technical and formal criteria of design (II.27), which again do not

favor consensus.

44. Perhaps the evolution of modern linguistics outlined in this section could be retold as the

search for constraints, with constraint being broadly defined as any factor making some

items or patterns of a language more or less likely than others. The Saussurian conception

of a system wherein everything holds everything else in place (un systme o tout se tient

rigoureusement) suggests that a language by itself (langue) consists of a complete set of

standing constraints. The generative conception further assumes that the range of those

standing constraints is formally circumscribed within the borders of the grammar. An

alternative conception, sponsored by systemic functional linguistics and related methods,

sees language as a system (or multi-system) of evolving interactions between standing

versus emergent constraints, and among linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints.

Language is interposed like a layer inside a cake (Fig. II.3): society uses language tounderstand and

appropriate theworld , while the world passes via language into a socially shared world-

model. The classical program of mainstream linguistics would disconnectlanguage from


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this configuration, as if rolling the layers apart (Fig. II.3, right side). Language by itself can

be described in purely linguistic terms only if it can hold firm and continue to subsist

and operate upon its own internal, standing constraints (cf. II.54).

45. But can language by itself hold firm? It apparently can in some sparse sectors

whose constraints are generaland uniform and whose organization seems fairly frozen. In

phonology, every phoneme is held precisely and uniquely in place by the physical

constraints of articulation and by the mental constraints of being able to differentiate between

elements that also differ in meaning (II.29). The physical constraints are the clearest, but the

mental ones can be easily met by finding at least one contrastive data pair like hid and hit,

whose members do not mean the same thing; we neednt state whatthey mean orhowtheir

meanings differ, we only need a ready consensus that the meanings do differ (cf. II.48).

46. Internal standing constraints also suffice for some fairly sparse and frozen sectors of

morphology. For example, the inflections of nouns and verbs can be

covered and classified without having to state their often complex relations to cognitive

constraints (e.g., what might be the Agent of an Action) and social constraints (e.g., how Pro-

Nouns can signal power or solidarity). Also, the distributions of morphemes can be firmly

grasped by observing them in a corpus of authentic data, where the speakers themselves

were respecting cognitive and social constraints (cf. II.33, 58, 75).

47. In syntax, however, where the constraints are more specific and diverse, the search

was less successful. Descriptive syntax could not progress very far beyond morphology,

e.g., in phrase structure grammars, and identified the linear positions of segments much

better than the constraints that would put them there. Syntacticians kept looking deeper,

whence the shift from fieldwork over to homework methods (II.39ff). Linguists apparently

assumed thatpurely syntactic constraints corresponding to ruleswould emerge most clearly

from invented data out of context, since authentic data in rich contexts obviously obey non-

syntactic constraints too. Stating which sequences (or sentences) can or cannot occur intheory should prove easier than stating which ones actually did in practice. Predictably, the

ambition to make syntax stand on its own constraints highlighted the frozen islands of

language, i.e., the stabilized formal patterns of sparse standing constraints such as article

+ noun in English. Yet even in languages which, like English, have a fair quantity, these

frozen islands by no means suffice for continuing increases in coverage, convergence, and

consensus. Without realizing it, generative syntax had taken on the unworkable task of

freezing the whole system, and each attempt necessarily got partial and divergent results(IV.3). Even simple invented data (e.g., John is eager to please, II.66) may refuse to freeze


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over: the more you fixate and analyze them, the likelier you are to notice other aspects or

interpretations.

48. This predicament encouraged widening the search for constraints to encompass

semantics, the investigation of the meanings of language. Early theorizing had implicitly

disconnected semantics from the rest of linguistics by insisting that the relation between form

and meaning is arbitrary, i.e., not motivated by any natural bond. Intriguingly, this move

deviated from the mainstream program by appealing to the history and evolution of

language: how the meanings came to correspond to the sound patterns we now observe.

But the relation between form and meaning is not all arbitrary within the system and the

consensus among speakers (II.62); it eludes linguistics because it is always evolving in

multiple dimensions on several levels. In phonology, the phonemes need merely differentiate

meanings (II.29, 45). In morphology, the morphemes grammaticalize meanings, but the

meaning may not be decided until a morpheme gets used, e.g., the English Possessive -s

that might indicate many relations beside possession, e.g., part (the cars engine),

temporality (tonights feature film), locality (Hollywoods fashion industry), and so on. In

lexicology, the lexemes lexicalize meanings that are typically stable though often adaptive,

e.g. freedom (VII.10, 18, 31). In syntax, the syntagmemes linearize meanings that are also

grammaticalized and lexicalized. This scheme, which will be enriched later on (II.62; III.92,

203, 232ff), does not foresee a level or domain for meanings by themselves, fully separated

from these other levels: such a level might indeed look quite arbitrary.

49. At all events, semantics long led a shadowy life within linguistics, and was often left to

the philosophers. Some linguists even vowed that meaning should not be a part of their

science at all. Others undertook to develop a semantics closely modeled upon the better-

known levels. When phonology was the model paradigm (II.30), structural semantics

postulated a repertory of sparse-looking theoretical minimal units called sememes (or

semes or semantemes), such as Animate or Human. When syntax became themodel paradigm (II.41), this scheme was taken over into semantic features (or markers)

specified by formal rules and situated in the lexicon rather than in the grammar these

two being considered separate levels or components, as they already had been in

morphology (cf. II.32, 75; IV.14). Neither approach fared well on the test scales of coverage,

convergence, and consensus. Research centered on programmatic demonstrations with

meagre examples, and even simple analyses (e.g. kill = cause + die) raised thorny

disputes. In retrospect, this outcome could have been predicted. Of all the aspects oflanguage, meaning is the hardest to freeze and suffers the most through disconnecting


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language from peoples knowledge of world and society (II.74). We are left with no way to

tell what practical units these theoretical units might correspond to: ideas, human actions,

real objects and events, cultural artefacts, and so on. A sememe or feature like +Human

cannot be a stable, determinate unit: how complex or simple and how abstract or concrete it

is depends on the context, e.g., on whether it occurs in the discourse of biology,

anthropology, philosophy, religion, politics, law, or medicine (cf. III.93). Trying to analyze

meanings out of contextor else for all contexts are two equally impossible jobs the one

having too few constraints and the other too many and linguists get vague or conflicting

results (cf. II.53f; III.32). Meanings can converge and linguists can reach a secure consensus

only by assembling a representative set of discourse contexts, where the constraints have

been applied by real speakers (II.65, 75).

50. Nor has it been easy to reach a consensus about how semantics should interact with

syntax. After withdrawing his early claim that grammar is autonomous and independent of

meaning, Chomskys standard model gave the semantic component the job of supplying

formal rules for interpreting and disambiguating syntactic sequences that had already

been generated (structurally described, II.39) by the syntax. Because this arrangement

blocked the semantic constraints from helping to construct the sequence, a counter-proposal

was soon made to give the generative role to the semantics, and to postulate the logical

form for the deep structure of the sentence before the syntax kicks in. But consensus also

broke down about how to represent a logical form: logic pursues sparse issues like truth

and validity rather than the rich ordinary meanings of words or utterances (cf. II.10ff). The

logical forms shown in sample analyses glibly retained undefined ordinary words, e.g., in

this semantic representation for a sentence from James McCawley:

The formula states that it is true for all members (xs) " being a universal quantifier

that each x lovesxs wife. The formal treatment covers only the assignments into sets, an

issue logic can handle (II.11). The rich meaning of the crucial love is not semantically or

logically analyzed into units, and attempts to do so would hardly converge.

51. Further constraints were plainly needed, and the stage was set to welcome

pragmatics, which had been defined by linguistics and semiotics as the study of the uses of

language in a three-part scheme alongside syntax and semantics. Fended off by the staid

division between language by itself versus language use, pragmatics had made its


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academic home mainly in philosophy. Linguistics now admitted pragmatics on the condition

that, like semantics, it would respect the formality prescribed for syntax. So pragmatics was

to supply further sparse constraints in the guise of rules for interpreting and

disambiguating sentences by specifying what a sentence implies, entails, or

presupposes, and how its meaning (sometimes!) depends on the speakers intention and

the hearers acceptance. What appears to be a simple statement about reality, e.g.,

Rodolfos c freddo fuori (its cold outside) in Puccinis La Bohme, can be intended and

accepted to be a proposal to stay inside; Mimis answer ti star vicina (Ill be near you)

reacts by implying that shell keep him from feeling the cold outside.

52. A catchy motto for pragmatic inquiries was how to do things with words (John

Austin), and not just how words are formed and arranged or what words mean. The notion of

speech act was adopted from ordinary languagephilosophy, a term contrasting with the

more technical or formal language philosophy of logical and mathematical systems (cf.

III.167). Here, research sought to specify the conditions under which an utterance actor a

locutionary act corresponds to a propositional act of stating a content or message, an

illocutionary act of performing a discourse action (e.g. promising, threatening), and a

perlocutionary actof eliciting an effect on the hearer (e.g. getting compliance). Whereas the

propositional act foregrounds the constative function of making statements about the world,

the illocutionary act is most prominent in the performative function where saying and doing

fully converge (e.g. pronouncing this meeting adjourned).

53. Although the constraints supplied by pragmatics were well received in linguistics, the

mainstream program of disconnecting language by itself from language in use was not

widely repudiated. Analyses still used invented data; the speech acts were analyzed from the

standpoint of an ideal speaker or hearer (II.40f, 50, 128; V.4); and linguists resisted

admitting a wide range of cognitive and social constraints in general (cf. II.49; III.32) three

trends that, as we saw, hinder convergence and consensus. Also, the sentence was stillthe chief formal unit, now held to be the vehicle of the theoretical unit of the speech act (cf.

II.83). The meaning of the utterance was only modestly constrained by presuppositions

(what must be valid if the proposition is true) and implicatures (what follows logically from

what you say), both of these usually being propositions formatted as single sentences too.

Such conceptions continued to encourage idealization and to obscure the ratio between

theory versus practice, especially by impeding the analysis of authentic data from observed

conversations (II.41).


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54. On the whole, the search for constraints throughout mainstream linguistics has

followed an ambivalent, zigzagged course: integrating steadily more domains or levels of

language without explicitly renouncing the heavily theoretical conception of language by

itself being a uniform, stable, and abstract system. Richer constraints were admitted

uneasily or through disguised forms and obscure terminologies about rules or features.

Today, we can roundly reject the mainstream conception for having definitively failed the

three test scales of coverage, convergence, and consensus. The failure demonstrates that

language does not hold firm upon its own internal standing constraints (cf. II.44f). If we

disconnect cognitive and social constraints, language merely skids out of control and

eludes our most resolute attempts to describe it. In sum, the classical mainstream program

summarized in II.24 cannot be achieved either in theory or in practice and cannot provide a

sound basis for a normal science. We now recognize that such technical constructionsas

Saussures abstract langue and Chomskys purely grammatical competence (II.24, 40f)

cannot be fully described by any method. Whereas descriptive fieldwork linguistics at least

makes such concepts less constructional, generative homework linguistics only makes them

more technical; and the two sides keep on drifting apart.

55. Its high time, I submit, to reconnect theory with practice by consolidating a post-

classical linguistics and reformulating the tenets stated in II.24:

(a) Language is aphenomenon integrated with society and with its knowledge of the world.

(b) Language should be described along with the conditions under which speakers use it.

(c) Language should be described in terms ofinteractions betweenstanding versus emergent

constraints, and among linguistic, cognitive, and social constraints.

(d) A language constitutes a dynamiccommunicative system undergoingcontinual evolution.

(e) The description of a language should be stated at fluctuating degrees of generality

between the entire language and the specific discourse context.

Such a program will demand hard work to accredit a much richer range of data and to rethinkour familiar categories from a monodisciplinary perspective over into a transdisciplinary

one (cf. I.5, 39). But in return, we can finally make genuine headway toward coverage,

convergence, and consensus and situate theory and practice within a dialectic where each

defines the other (II.80, 112).

56. Within this post-classical program, the concepts and methods of linguistics would be

resituated in differently conceived projects and deployed as tools toward further ends rather

than as ends in themselves (cf. II.79). They would be placed in a theoretical frameworkexpressly asserting that the design of language is organized for the uses people make of it in


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practice, and that our data should be described expressly in those terms (I.38; II.112).

Conversely, the uses of language are richly constrained by the organization of language but

also by the organization of society and its knowledge of the world. So the uses of language

must be intensely scrutinized as the crucial arena in which language, society, and world

mutually organize and negotiate themselves. The job is immense, but we have reached a

turning point where easy little projects are no longer relevant (III.201).

57. Our program should also transcend the long-standing contest between formalism,

which inquires how the elements and patterns of language are shaped or arranged, versus

functionalism, which inquires how those elements and patterns are put to use. Formalism

has profited from the project to describe language by itself, since the forms seem

reassuringly uniform, stable, and abstract, whereas functional data point toward the side of

language use and keep connecting language with world and society. Moreover, formalism

makes formality into a free-standing goal that must be maintained at all costs, as if a formal

theory could only be challenged by a still more formal one and not by issues of practice

(III.170; VII.188). Despite its long-range stagnation over the years, formalism has maintained

its orthodoxy of pure theory and exclusive claims to scientific status, and its self-confident

optimism that a fully formal description is just on the horizon. Ironically, the much-advertised

rigor and objectivity of the methods, with their imposing notations derived from formal logic,

set theory, predicate calculus, algebra and the like, was combined with a subjective leap of

faith into a project that had to be shielded from contact with authentic data and real speakers

(II.41). Meanwhile, a semblance of progress was upheld by assuming that some factor or

manifestation of language can be explained by sticking a formal label upon it or by rewriting

it into a formal notation (II.27; III.167ff, 184). Functional factors had to be either excluded (as

parole, performance, surface structure, and so on) or else admitted in formal disguises

(e.g., by defining the topic of a sentence as the leftmost noun phrase dominated by [i.e.,

being a major constituent of] the sentence).58. The formalist project is stymied as long as it obliges linguists to formalize data and

disconnect them from their functions but cannot control how you do it. A major trade-off

ensues: coverage of language, convergence among data, and consensus among linguists

all decrease when natural language data get rewritten into formal notation, and increase

when data get treated in natural formats (Fig.iI.4) (cf. II.12, 41; 65; III.167ff; V.1). The

trade-off is to be expected, because people,


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includinglinguists, are real speakers rather than ideal ones and agree less when they

formalize natural language data than when they speak, listen, read, and write them.

Conversely, the more the data are examined in the contexts and practices where they

actually occur, the easier it is to agree about what they mean (II.65, 74f).

59. Formalism has also been favored by the project of dividing up the organization of

language into subsystems called levels, each one to be described by its own internal criteriaand not to be mixed with the others. The levels would be formally linked within a structural

hierarchy based on the size of units and the constituency between parts and wholes, as

proposed by the influential American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. The phonemes as sounds

shown toward the top (Fig. II.5).would be the

constituentsof morphemes as forms, the morphemes the constituents of lexemes as words,

and the lexemes the constituents of syntagmemes as phrases. We could thus envision a

scheme of multiple levels piled upon each other, with the shallower levels nearer the

surface of an utterance The breakdown into their respective building-blocks would give us

a scheme like Fig. II.6 for the utterance they sounded unspeakably horrible (Collins

COBUILD Dictionary, p. 1602). As we move from phonemes to morphemes to lexemes, weusually get fewer units, though not just from adding up the sum of the parts. In Fig. II.6, the

units matching the phonemes are written in phonetic script, and the units matching the


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morphemes in the usual orthography but in their base forms, e.g., able + ly = ably, or

horror + able = horrible, although for many speakers an item like horrible might be a single

unanalyzable unit. The scheme looks visually transparent and data-friendly in registering the

practical units we can readily discover in the data. It also has a clear criterion for

completeness, namely when all units have been isolated and labeled. And it raises the

attractive prospect that asparser subsystem can be the model for a richer one, e.g.

phonology for morphology, so that linguistic theory can manage with one parsimonious set of

concepts and methods, e.g., by segmenting data into minimal units (cf. II.30ff, 87). But

several stubborn problems persist. A discontinuous constituentwould be awkward, e.g., the

verb live it up with an obligatory Pro-Noun in the middle, or the Possessive King + -s in the

King of Englands hat. So would a multi-level unit, such as the Latin imperative ! (go!),

which could be analyzed as a phoneme, a morpheme, a lexeme, and various syntagmemes

(verb phrase, clause, complete utterance) all at once and would thus have itself as its own

constituent several times over. Also, the scheme makes no reference to semantics or

meaning, leaving us to naively assume that the meaning of the whole is simply the sum of

the meanings of all of its parts. And finally, the practical use of language would look like

shuffling blocks, the speaker fetching the pieces and putting them in a row, while the hearer

takes the row and pulls it back into the pieces. All these problems highlight how the formalist

scheme implies disconnectedness and masks the unityand continuityof human utterances,

and obscures the interaction between local micro-units and global macro-units (cf. III.224).

The function of formalism is to authorize an academically accredited failure to connect,

faithfully reflecting the endemic malady of modern society (I.4; II.61, 86; VII.22; VIII.16).

60. In a functionalist scheme, in contrast, the levels would be richly connected, not just

through the size of units and the constituency between parts and wholes, but through

mutually determining functions between means and ends, as proposed by the eminent

Czech linguist Frantiek DaneFormal units are recognized in terms of what they contribute how they function both within their respective sub-system and within the current

discourse. As shown in Fig. II.7, the means-end connections would go across on three

parameters.


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First, the levels whose formal units are typically but not obligatorily smaller are the means

for the ends of the levels whose units are typically larger (up to down axis on the left side).

Second, the forms on each level are the means for the ends of their meanings on that same

level (left to right axis). And thirdly, the meanings on the levels whose units are typically but

not obligatorily smaller are the means for the ends of the meanings on the levels whose

units are typically larger (up to down axis on the right side).61. This formulation sounds a bit more complicated than the formalist one, and the

scheme is not visually transparent because we see only the forms, i.e., the more manifest

means, and have to infer or reconstruct the ends and meanings (cf. IV.4). This problem

might resemble the problem, aired above, that the rules of syntax do not appear in

sentences (II.39), but for us the lesson is not to move away from the data but to move

resolutely toward them, namely the data indicating how people connect means with ends,

and forms with meanings, when they use language in discourse. If formalism fails to makeconnections, functionalism insists on making connections. Authentic data supply rich

constraints, whereas invented data serve the untypical ends of linguistic analysis and

rarefy or disconnect important constraints (cf. II.53, 59; IV.5). So a functionalist account is

better positioned for convergence and consensus by acknowledging the constraints from

knowledge of world and society. And our own descriptions of discourse can be made

accessible by exploiting the potential of discourse for constructing and sharing models of the

world and society (II.131; VII.71).62. Formally, the relation between form and meaning looks arbitrary in the dismissive

sense of mainstream linguistics, since few objects and events in the world suggest what

sounds should be used to express them (II.48, 90). But functionally, the relation is always

motivated to achieve the task of organizing the meanings with the formal resources the

language provides. The distinct levels of language are required because this task is actually

a cluster of subtasks: meanings need to be differentiated by phonemes (in sounds),

grammaticalized by morphemes (in word-parts), lexicalized by lexemes (in words), linearized

by syntagmemes (in phrases), and, finally, integrated by texts (cf. II.48; III.92, 203, 232ff).


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Each language farms out these subtasks in its own way (I.38; II.32) along several

parameters of design, which we shall explore in Ch. III. Forcomplexity, analytic languages

have simpler words and make the phrase be the primary unit of formal organization, as in

Modern Mandarin Chinese (Ptnghu) or, to a lesser degree, English (cf. IV.195); synthetic

languages have complex words with readily distinguishable word-parts such as stems and

affixes, e.g., the nouns with 15 cases in Finnish (cf. III.117; IV.134); polysynthetic

languages have very complex word-forms, e.g. Aymara (cf. II.31). For stability, isolating

languages keep the basic or root form unaltered, e.g. Vietnamese; agglutinative languages

glue together compounds out of units each of which has its own meaning, e.g. Bantu; and

inflective languages make formal changes that are meaningful only in combination with a

root form, e.g. ancient Greek. Or again, some languages organize form-systems through

prefixes, e.g. Khmer, while others do so through suffixes, e.g. Nootka. All this formal diversity

is offset by the functional compatibility of languages for being interfaced with the constraints

of world and society.

63. An expressly functional scheme of levels might look like Fig. 8. Prosody is the

intonation of

the overall sequence of uttered sounds and words, having a melody of pitch, stress,

volume, and tempo in spoken discourse and being partially represented by punctuation in

written discourse (cf. IV.E). The lexicogrammarunites the resources forlexicalizing and for

grammaticalizing along a parameter of delicacy: more delicate patterns have finer-

grained criteria for accepting specific lexical items or small sets of these, whereas lessdelicate patterns have coarser-grained criteria for accepting large sets of items (cf. IV.B).

Each language goes its own way in apportioning lexical and grammatical work(II.32) and in

correlating the work with cognitive and social constraints. Finally, discourse is the level of

the total communicative event, including discoursal moves, gestures, facial expressions,

emotional displays, and so on, in contexts of situation (cf. I.33; II.89; IV.F).

64. Functionalism has recently gained a vital new resource for accessing authentic data in

contexts. Large computerized corpuses of authentic texts enable us to assemble and

analyze items and patterns on a scale and scope that simply werent feasible before. As of


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mid-1996, the largest is the Bank of English developed at Birmingham University under the

supervision of John McHardy Sinclair, with some 323 million words of running text from

contemporary spoken and written sources, including: British and American books;

newspapers (e.g., Times, Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist,

Economist); magazines (e.g., Esquire, Good Housekeeping); ephemera such as letter-box

mailings (e.g., YMCA appeal for homeless people, Friends of Earth Tropical Rainforest

Campaign); radio broadcasts (British Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio);

and recordings of conversations. This is the widest coverage we have ever had of a

language, though it is far from complete (cf. II.78).

65. As a corpus gets larger, it does not simply show us the same data multiplied out, e.g.,

each item being ten times as frequent in a corpus ten times as large. Instead, the larger

corpus both turns up fresh data that did not appear at all in the smaller ones and displays the

previous data in steadily finer delicacy for the range and frequency of the combinations.

Hosts of regularities emerge that escaped notice in smaller data sets, and would elude

unguided intuition and introspection. We still have to interpret the data, but our results are

much more favorable to convergence and consensus than results from linguistic methods

without a large corpus (cf. II.74ff). We are now on the favorable side of the trade-offcited in

II.12 and shown as Fig. II.4 in II.58. Instead of coverage, convergence, and consensus

decreasingwhen natural language data get rewritten into a formal notation, they are now

increasingwhen data get treated in their naturally occurring formats.

66. Conversely, the corpus highlights the improbable and unnatural quality of invented

data like John is eager to please (II.47). Typical contexts of real discourse call for less

simple-minded and peremptory utterances. For example, all three instances for eager to

please in the Bank of English have a Direct Object Target, and a more interesting Subject

Agent than the legendary John, e.g., the government keen to please powerful forces such

as wealth and the Church [18-19].[18] < a government official who is eager to please the wealth goddess >

[19] < the Sandinistas. The government is eager to please the Church

[20] < show a sociable child who is eager to please or charm those around him >

Linguists who attempt to judge the grammaticality of invented sentences may strain their

intuitions, e.g., on a sample like John is eager to sneeze; and the strain gets worse for

naive informants who consider what would be sensible, not what would be well-formed (cf.

II.40f). The corpus solves this dilemma by displaying data that real speakers have already


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approved (II.46, 76). We need to account for the communicative competence these

speakers dont justpossess in theorybut also manifest in practice (cf. I.59f, II.76).

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Toward a Science of Text and Disourse

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