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A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTATION
MICHAEL TOOLAN
What does saccadic mean; and, if you can't say, how will you go about finding out? How, when you come across the word in the following passage, do you make sense of it?
[ Our modern, "information" society ] is a society which looks into the screened eyes of its newscasters and need look no further than those saccadic responses to understand that one can no longer believe what the President of the United States says about international terrorism.
Perhaps your first reaction is to the general tenor of these remarks: very literate, alienated, and left, in its focus on the way television has come to facilitate an almost reflex fabrication of facts and values--a tendency we might dub 'tele-mendacity', or even 'telemendacion', if you get the idea. As you read the sentence, you recognise that familiar feeling of being harrassed by, say, one of those radical intellectuals who write in The Nation; it might be Noam Chomsky writing, you decide (in which case, you have indeed been harrassed). But back to saccadic: do you reach for your Webster 's, your ageing OED? And find saccade (and no adjectival form) defined as 'a jerk or jerky movement in various specific applications' (OED), with cited instances from horse-dressage, violin double-stopping and involuntary swallowing, none of which is particularly helpful in the present case. ~ Now what? Communication breakdown, system failure, a message flashed across your brain: 'This sentence cannot be processed at the present time'? Or intelligent situated sense-making, a hazarding that the speaker is referring to the 'packaged speaking', an automated- and mechanical-seeming performance, abrupt, robotic, which we recognize as the hallmark of yet-undropped news anchors and currently popular politicians? The latter, probably. Not 'the latter, of course' , because if you don' t care enough about the larger purposes of the quoted passage, then you always have the option of turning away uncomprehendingly.
Now the entire movement of this scenario is bizarre according to one approach to the nature of language: all this fudging and uncertainty about whether saccadic is a word (perhaps only the noun saccade is, and that an archaic French one--not English at all), and if so about what it means, shouldn't be issues at all. If saccadic is a proper member of the English lexicon, in good standing, it should have a clear meaning and a determinate pronunciation (we should know with certainty whether the second vowel is long or short), and these should be uniformly known (as in simple words like table) or potentially uniformly known. Otherwise however can we explain mutual understanding?
If Locke had lived long enough to read the final paragraph of Roy Harris 's The Language Machine (1987), from which the quoted sentence above is taken, he would no doubt have flagged that word saccadic as liable to cause misunderstanding an, if used in scientific discourse,
Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Professor Michael Toolan, School of English, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K.
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in need of what Taylor (1992, p. 43) has termed--using a word which itself may cause mis- understanding--communicational prophylactics. Among Locke's prescriptions for reliably communicative language may be found the following: don't parrot; follow the best usage; know what the words you use mean; and don't vary word meanings. In sum, Locke implicitly declares, let us have one definitive dictionary for the language, and let us always observe its prescriptions.
But why, some may ask; what is at stake here? Locke's answer is that what is at stake is nothing less than communication and the understanding this advances, that is, communicational understanding. But do we really require the kind of uniformity that Locke's prophylactic prescriptions are evidently designed to shore up, in order to secure and advance communicational understanding? Yes we do, if we have the kind of picture of communication that Locke had; and Locke pictures communication as telementation. 'Excuse me?'. Yes, telementation (it's right there, in the Supplement, a little ways down from saccadic): 'that is, the conveyance of thoughts from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer' (Taylor, 1992, p. 30).
The word telementation is even more of a novelty than saccadic, having been coined by Roy Harris and tossed into the economy of metalinguistic vocabulary in his book The Language Myth (1981). That book was devoted to analyzing and exorcising the myth which, in Harris's view, has long held Western linguistics captive: the myth that language is telementational in function, and operates via a determinate code of form-meaning pairings. The telementation model regards linguistic communication, in essence, as the faxing of thoughts from A to B, with speech (and hearing) fulfilling an equivalent role to that of properly 'handshaking' fax machines. Major poets in the evolution of the telementational myth include Aristotle, Locke, and Saussure. Aristotle, for example, assumes that two of the three crucial domains postulated in a triangulated view of linguistic communication--ideas, and objects in the world--are human universals and invariant: they are 'the same for the whole of mankind' (Aristotle, On Interpretation, 1938, p. 1, quoted in Harris, 1981, p. 9). Only the third partner in the enter- prise--words--demonstrably varies, in Aristotle's view, as witnessed by the different languages that different communities use. Fortunately, within any given language, there is the possi- bi l i ty-and indeed the necessity, according to telementational thinking--of all speakers con- forming to a single accepted system which pairs particular words with particular ideas. That fixed and uniform pairing is not merely possible but necessary within telementational thinking since, where lapses from this standard occur--again, if communication is indeed the faxing of thoughts--they must cause misunderstanding, vagueness, nonsense, and 'chat'. Certainly, fixed pairing must be secured and maintained if linguistic communication is to fulfil its roles of knowledge-dissemination, information-transfer, and the description and analysis of phenomena. It 's bad enough that members of one dialect of English speakers understand and react to the directive 'Get off the pavement!' in a sharply contrasting way to that of members from another dialect; but at least we can and must expect and require uniformity and recurrence of form- meaning pairings within any given community.
The acme of telementational mythography are the famous pages (27ff.) of Saussure's Cours de linguistique g~n~rale outlining the ~speech circuit', complete with schematic depiction of the heads of two women blowing arrows at each other (the figures are undoubtedly women, although why Bally and Sechehaye gave them such avant-gardedly short hair is a minor enigma). Those talking heads give us pause. They are older than the paragraphs among which they sit, or float disembodiedly rather, removed from any discernible context but the context of Saussure's theory, not a single worry-line or gesture or other sign of purpose or goal to be seen, faxing those arrows at each other (more precisely, to their ears, where the arrows take
A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTATION 81
a dog-leg to the brain, to be traded in for ideas), but saying nothing (Harris, 1987, p. 164) and doing nothing. The sketch is emphatically phonocentric: one wonders what a Sign-using deaf person makes of it when they come upon it in the Cours, or of the commentary that follows, where, in the course of promoting attention to the mental phases of the speech circuit and disvaluing the physical phases, it is asserted that 'it would be impossible to photograph acts of speech in all their details'. If signing is a deaf community's counterpart of a speaking community's speech, the claim does not obviously apply to all kinds of langue.
..... s B
By the standards of modern coursebook reprographics, the sketch is awfully quaint, if not downright hokey; a photograph it is not. And not by accident perhaps: it's hard to imagine those involved in publishing more recent editions and translations of the Cours urging 'We really must supplement that awful sketch with a genuine photograph of two people talking, overlaid by the speech-circuit lines as necessary'. For a genuine photograph, they would quickly remind each other, would be prone to all the interpretive impertinences of readers' imaginations: the readers may start wondering whether the people in the photograph are in fact speaking the same language; or some cynic will suggest that what B is actually saying to A is 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about'. And we'd have to be so careful to find suitable interactants: better not have a woman and man speaking, or the 'genderlect' lobby will have us on toast; and of course it can't be a mother-infant pair (what a disaster that would be). No, no, we're really much better off keeping the thing quite schematic, with cameo performances from our ideally situated limbless ladies.
Furthermore, it occurs to them, it's as well that this ideal pair don't look much like a Professor and Student, and certainly not the kind of Professor and Student for whom one might invent names like Ferdinand and oh, Albert, say. You know how full of misunderstandings students' notes on lectures are: professor-student communication would be a very shaky example of problem-free telementation. Borsley and Newmeyer (1996) make this same point in a footnote to their recent critique of Harris's work. They are anxious that Harris interprets the Saussure of the Cours holding to a 'stronger form' of the language myth than the F.M.L. might have actually acknowledged; they are only two among thousands of linguists who endure sleepless nights worrying over whether the Saussure of the Cours is the 'real ' Saussure, and whether that book represents his 'best work'. Borsley and Newmeyer then warn that the Cours is 'a posthumous compilation from [Saussure's] undergraduates' lecture notes--an important point which the author of Reading Saussure and of an award-winning English translation of the Cours has evidently entirely overlooked. Posthumous compilations really are of limited reliability, and I understand that in the light of their own reasoning Borsley and Newmeyer are now grappling with a parallel problem they have noticed with regard to the New Testament. Concerning the unreliable transmission of the Cours they add:
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We would hate to have our ideas judged from our undergraduate students' hastily scribbled interpretations of the already oversimplified material in our lectures to them?
A disturbing prospect, indeed. Nevertheless, their disapproval and the possible disapproval of Saussure-- 'who perhaps might not have authorized the publication of this text', as Bally and Sechehaye acknowledged in their Preface to the first edition, in 1915--are irrelevant. Whether we professors like it or not, undergraduates are always likely to draw on their 'scribbled interpretations' when judging their instructors' ideas. And if Borsley and Newmeyer would really hate to have their ideas judged in this way one is inclined to urge them to make a point of never lecturing to undergraduates, since on their own assessment this is always likely to entail the dissemination of misinformation. But of course that doesn't matter, according to Borsley and Newmeyer 's implicit reasoning, because undergraduates are not their idea of 'fit judges ' : it's not that they never want their ideas to be judged, it's just that they want their ideas (and, by extension, Saussure 's) judged by the right kind of judges, i.e. one 's peers, that is, people who are 'really' speaking the same language as oneself. But Borsley and Newmeyer have not indicated any ways in which Bally and Sechehaye were not Saussure's peers in this sense (if it is allowed that the Father of Modern Linguistics had any peers).
What is more telling here is Borsley and Newmeyer 's quite explicit acknowledgement of the possibilities of miscommunication and misunderstanding, even in what are arguably the relatively conducive conditions of the lecture hall, where notes may be scribbled down. Would Borsley and Newmeyer prefer to have their ideas judged from students' interpretations formed without benefit of writing, one wonders; that is, in a purely oral-aural setting such as that of the communicators in Saussure's speech circuit? One suspects not. In short, whether contem- plating writing or speech at the practical or much-maligned empirical level, Borsley and Newmeyer have no blind faith in telementation. Empirically speaking (and even allowing that we may be contemplating an era when certain precocious twenty-one-year-olds could write dissertations on the original vowel system of Indo-European languages, demonstrating a sophistication of linguistic analysis unparalleled until, in 1957 . . . ) , let us not be so naive as to imagine that Ferdinand's thoughts are encoded into a linguistic form which is decoded into identical thoughts in Albert 's head. Even such synchronic communication is problematic, to say nothing of the difficulties that arise in the diachronic transmission down to today's students. No question, Borsley and Newmeyer acknowledge: empirically speaking, telementation is pure myth. 2
But do they acknowledge this in theory, too? Of course, they say. Not that we generativists need to, they add, for telementationism is a defect of a code model of communication, and we generativists reject the code model. But we reject it tacitly, because it relates to something quite outside our area of inquiry: it relates to communication, a ghastly banner to parade under, and one liable to cause you to end up teaching courses on doctor-patient discourse, or children's narratives, or the language of the lawcourts: cultural or political studies carried on by other means, a woefully far cry from hypothetico-deductive science. The latter is what we value, and the latter we pursue, in our studies of acceptable and unacceptable grammatical structure:
For generative linguists, the central question is not ~How do speakers use language to communicate?', but rather 'How do speakers come to have the grammatical knowledge that they do?'. Generative grammar is concerned, for example, with the fact that an English speaker knows that 'Which men does she expect to like each other?' is acceptable, although 'Does she expect to like each other?' is not... (Borsley and Newmeyer, 1996).
If I may be forgiven for putting words into Borsley's and Newmeyer 's mouths, I would suggest that generativists' central question is not only 'How do speakers come to have the grammatical knowledge that they do? ' , but also 'What is the grammatical knowledge that speakers come
A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTATION 83
to have?' . More important though is the need to correct the first question in the quotation above, the one said not to concern generativists but, by implication, one associatable with Harris and what Borsley and Newmeyer might call his language myth myth. For 'How do speakers use language to communicate?' is not in fact the kind of question Harris asks; rather, among his 'central questions' might be said to be
and
and
'What role does language play in communication?'
'What are speakers doing when they speak to each other?'
'What is language?'
It is in our answers to these questions that the fallacy of telementation needs to be highlighted, when it emerges. Borsley and Newmeyer are content to reply to these questions in the following vein:
"We generativists can't answer and won't answer hopelessly large questions of that kind. But we can tell you about the grammatical structures within the language whose role in communication we couldn't possibly comment on: for example, we have a neat grammatical explanation for why reciprocal pronouns like each other require overt specification of their antecedent when they appear in complement clauses. But don't expect us to explain what the sounds represented in standard orthography by 'Which men does she expect to like each other?' do. or cause, when uttered in some actual situation by A and addressed to and heard by B.'
It is hard not to see this as a minimalist or 'residual' (Harris, 1987, p. 89) approach to semantics and meaningful language. By their own insistence, generativists devote scant analytical attention to a phenomenon so External as linguistic communication; their claim then is that their projects are untouched by commentaries directed against the telementational and fixed-code fallacies. But this amounts to an extraordinarily literal-minded defense, to the effect that if certain assumptions are not declared--or if, for that matter, they are explicitly denied--then the paradigm cannot be implicated in such thinking, as if anyone who pleads not guilty must be innocent. In fact this has been the standard response by mainstream linguists--when they have offered a response at all--to Harris' telementation charge. The response is essentially this: fixed-code telementation is so naive and simplistic a picture that no-one would seriously espouse it today. What I shall suggest in reply to this--echoing Harris, I believe--is that the avoidance of open espousal of telementation goes hand in hand, still, with a much deeper- rooted assumption, sufficiently foundational that it is spared scrutiny or even reiteration by researching linguists, that fixed-code telementation encapsulates the essential characteristics of linguistic communication.
But before proceeding we should attempt to clarify just who or what it is that the Harrisian critique, in terms of the telementational and fixed-code fallacies, is directed at. P a c e Borsley and Newmeyer 's suggestion that Harris has gone to inordinate lengths 'attacking (what are taken to be) the historical and theoretical foundations of generative grammar ' , it is simply untrue to suggest Harris 's critique is specifically directed at generativism, or that he is out to show 'that Chomsky has got it all wrong' . In Harris 's pantheon of the great pilots of this century who have steered Western linguistics onto the rocks, Chomsky probably ranks third, behind Saussure and Bloomfield, on both of whom Harris has written far more extensively. Of course Chomsky is very much alive and intellectually active, which may make the attention feel different to Borsley and Newmeyer. But Harris 's critique of theories--is this surprising?--
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has little to do with the individual authors of those theories (so that whether the author of the Cours is more Charles Bally than Ferdinand de Saussure is of no consequence) but with what he sees at the enduring myth underlying all these theories. For Harris, the breeding ground of this myth is no single scholar but, as he often emphasizes, 'the Western tradition'. Locke and Saussure and Bloomfield and Chomsky are the great midwives of dazzling offspring of the myth. The myth's reach is far more extensive than that of generativism; if generativism as a term of art dies away (as transformationalism has done), and is replaced by, for example, cognitivism, the myth may survive untouched.
Borsley and Newmeyer would have us believe that mainstream linguistics has no truck with telementation, and they defy those who suggest it does to demonstrate any cases, since the seminal papers on the generative-linguistic treatment of semantics by Katz and Fodor in the 1960's, where idea-transfer has been assumed to be the function of language. 'We have found no more recent example of a generative linguist endorsing telementation', they declare (Borsley and Newmeyer, 1996). Perhaps this is simply because the endorsement is ubiquitous. In the interests of brevity, I shall cite evidence of telementational and fixed-code assumptions from just one source--but, arguably, the most crucial contemporary one, since this book has been praised on all sides as a compelling articulation of the real, cognitive interests of contemporary linguistics. I refer to Steven Pinker's acclaimed bestseller, The Language Instinct:
The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means 'dog' just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning. For the price of this standardized memorization, the members of a language community receive an enormous benefit: the ability to convey a concept from mind to mind virtually instantaneously (Pinker, 1994, p. 83-84).
The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar) (Pinker, 1994, p. 85).
Ungrammaticality is simply a consequence of our having a fixed code for interpreting sentences (Pinker, 1994, p. 88).
A second look at the generativist exemplum supplied by Borsley and Newmeyer is now in order:
Generative grammar is concerned, for example, with the fact that an English speaker knows that 'Which men does she expect to like each other?' is acceptable, although 'Does she expect to like each other?' is not . . .
What's going on here?, the outsider asks. Who is this 'English speaker' that Borsley and Newmeyer refer to? Why the emphasis on her being a speaker: wouldn't she have to be able to read English in order to judge the acceptability of the written sentence 'Does she expect to like each other?' Or is the idea that someone will 'present' her with a spoken utterance which we can take to correspond to the written one specified here, and that it is her reaction when she hears this spoken utterance that Borsley and Newmeyer are talking about? But then wouldn't it be better to call her an English hearer than a speaker? This is nitpicking, Borsley and Newmeyer complain: it doesn't matter whether the string is written or spoken, whether she's called the speaker or the hearer. And don't start cooking up some 'real-world context', a rushed telephone conversation, for example, where, sure, you might be able to get away with saying something which might be transcribable as 'Does she e x p e c t _ _ to like each other?', with the missing parties situationally-retrievable. We're not interested in contextualized examples, or particular individuals processing particular linguistic material; that's our point! We're interested in grammaticality and acceptability as these apply when, frankly, you cut away all the distractions and complications of language integrated into diverse activities. The language we're interested in is autonomous, use-free, the thing in itself. And the only criterion
A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTATION 85
we want to match this world-detached language against is that of acceptability of the most general kind.
At this point, the integrational linguist is surely justified in asking what possible 'accept- ability' yardstick the autonomous linguist has it in mind for us to consult, given that they have just emphasized that we need to treat their probe sentences as ideally removed from real or imagined situations, contexts, and human beings. I think it is clear that the acceptability they have in mind relates to pure ideation. That is, we are supposed to inspect the sentence 'Which men does she expect to like each other?' as if it were in vacuo; we are expected to see that it articulates a coherent thought or complex of thoughts, and stamp it acceptable--purely on the grounds that it conveys one or several clear ideas. And on the other hand we are to scan 'Does she expect to like each other?' as if this, similarly, came at us as a pure, context-free stream of ideation, and stamp it unacceptable solely on the grounds that, as a vehicle for ideas- transmission, it palpably fails. No other communicational grounds, besides ideas-transfer, are relevant to this mainstream linguistic notion of acceptability. Thus if one were to suggest that, inter alia, saying 'Does she expect to like each other' might, in relevant circumstances, be a 'very acceptable' means by which haste, anxiety or over-eagerness could be communicated, the suggestion would be ruled out as entirely eccentric by the telementationally-minded mainstream.
Much the same could be said for sentences like the following classic, which generativist psycholinguists for many years cited as especially revealing, although they now tend to regard it as embarrassingly unnatural:
The horse raced past the barn fell.
What is a 'barn fell ' , the reader of this sentence is thought to wonder; should that be hyphenated; is it at all related to a 'barn yard ' , or a 'bean field'? The reader has 'no idea' what a 'barn fell' is, and in view of this--so the argument goes--retraces their mental steps along the garden path and belatedly finds the hidden relative clause. As before, all very cerebral and ideational; in fact, nothing but telementational. The sentence belongs to psycholinguists-- certainly not to equestrians or farmers--and it is a little ungracious of them to disown it at this late date. Such a sentence is difficult to imagine being uttered in normal purposeful spoken discourse; and if it were uttered, no normal delivery of it would be prosodically silent, in the way the written form is, about the phrasal boundary between barn and fell. But to talk like this is to move down a garden path of no interest to generative psycholinguists--as if the sentence referred to a real horse and a real fall, that is, a real situation of language use in which many other things besides ideas-transfer might be of interest. In sum, what unites 'Does she expect to like each other?' and 'The horse raced past the barn fell ', as they join such other prize mutants of the linguistics laboratory as 'The farmer kills the duckling' and 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' is their almost pure inutility for any purposes other than the underwriting of telementation. And notwithstanding professed rejections of code-fixity and telementation to the contrary, the generativist methodology depends crucially on 'intuitive acceptability (and un- acceptability)' as a heuristic lever, and this intuitive acceptability criterion treats utterances as essentially telementations, either successful ( 'grammatical ' ) or defective ( 'ungrammatical ' ) .
What does telementation embrace, and what does it discard or ignore? Telementation is, quite bluntly, 'thought transfer': all that it requires and expects is that B 'gets ' A 's thought. It is therefore not so far removed, in essence, from telepathy, although the latter's roots suggest it involves feeling at a remove, whereas telementation involves thinking another 's thoughts,
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thanks to that other 'sending' them to you. If quite how this is managed is a little hard to visualize, all the better for you: you are not entirely in thrall to the telementational fallacy. If one does try to imagine the 'pure ' transfer of thoughts, one usually conjures up images of heads, connected by wires or electrodes, and A furiously intent on 'sending' the thought 'Mary had a little lamb' 'down the wire' to B. The picture is, clearly, not unlike Saussure's one of the limbless ladies. But wait--and this is why language is telementational--A doesn't have to rely on fierce concentration, auras and atmospheres, to send his thoughts to B: he can use the single fixed-code language that he holds in common with B. And now, ta da, A simply has to say 'Mary had a little lamb' or 'Where 's the rest of me?' or 'In cognitive psychology the claim that there is a fixed structure of human nature traditionally takes the form of an insistence on the heterogeneity of cognitive mechanisms and the rigidity of the cognitive architecture that effects their encapsulation' and B will almost instantaneously 'get ' those ideas.
Crucial to telementation, or 'ideas-transfer" is the assumption--which is either false, unprovable or irrelevant, and perhaps all three--that when A speaks to B the same idea that A used and encoded into speech is picked out, highlighted, or re-created in B's head. A has an idea and, via the 'conduit ' of language, B receives a copy. In telementation, language enables ideas to be faxed or, in a generous interpretation, re-assembled or re-created; what telementation signally excludes, and what a genuinely anti-telementational approach such as Harris 's integrational linguistics includes, is the notion that in situated interactions between A's and B's, all parties draw on language to construct or create ideas. It 's all the difference between duplication and invention. Telementation excludes almost everything to do with 'the whole bodily behaviour' of humankind (as Firth termed it: Firth, 1964, p. 19), except our mind/ brains, and is concerned with the latter only insofar as they can be thought of as machines for processing propositions and not, for example, as theatres teeming with emotions. It excludes difference, action, disagreement, emotion, embodiedness and embeddedness. It interconnects with assumptions and confusions in relation to the term 'language', by contrast with the term 'a language'. The former is routinely regarded as too vague, general, and protean to be amenable to systematic understanding; only the latter, whose structure can be foregrounded under the rubric of ' langue' or 'competence' , is conducive to scientific study; and, in a recent further turn of the screw, only the deep internal workings of a language, studied at a remove from all the 'noise' which contaminates the implementation of linguistic structure in something as 'external' as, say, the English used between people on my busride home tonight, is of linguistic interest. In practice, however, the banished term language reappears at every turn, not least in any and every appeal to empirical evidence. ~ Thus there is a systematic ambivalence in the way mainstream linguists use such terms as linguistic knowledge, knowledge of language, and language acquisition.
At the heart of all linguistic communication--not just in the use of creative metaphors--lies risk: the risk involved in attempting to get one's interlocutor to see the same picture of some aspect of reality that you, the speaker, believe you see. This element of risk is of course troubling, especially to the telementationally minded, who would wish that language at its most precise and unambiguous might shuttle ideas from mind to mind in a flawless, friction-free manner. On the other hand, and from outside the telementational mindset, the risk involved is part and parcel of genuine linguistic creativity: language can only genuinely go wrong when one is genuinely re-making language as one goes along. A proper respect for the indeterminacies of language should help us to see the importance of interactional risk.
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In the integrational alternative, no assumption of assured, fixed-code reproduction of signification is made. Indeed the non-iterative nature of language behaviour is made one of its hallmarks and essential characteristics. The reverse of iterability is assumed: namely that we can never be sure that signification remains constant, from one use of an expression to the next use of the " same" expression. In general, from an integrational linguistic perspective, signi- fication is not assumed to be constant across 'repeated' expressions from a single speaker; equally importantly, it is not assumed to hold constant between a speaker and an addressee.
There are some standard manoeuvres used for deflecting Harris's 'telementation' criticism. Essentially, the problem is redefined, and then rejection of the redefined phenomenon is documented. Thus, it is claimed that what Harris is railing against is 'the code theory of communication'; and then various emphatic critiques of that code theory are cited, to show that generativists have no sympathy with such a model. The relevance-theoretical work of Sperber and Wilson is often cited at this point, as evidence of a positive rejection of code theory, in favor of a model of communication as ostensive-inferential. But such defenses overlook a countercurrent in relevance-theory argumentation, which emerges from the fact that while relevance theory rejects a code theory of communication, it actually accepts a model of language as a code (albeit one that requires bolstering by various interpretive procedures, including the invoking of a principle of relevance, in order for speakers to communicate). In relevance theory, linguistic communication succeeds because a relevance-shaped process of inferencing can and must operate upon the fixed-code 'thoughts' supplied by the language. Harris's 'language myth' objects to the fixed-code theory of language; but quite independently he objects to the ideas-transfer theory of communication. In conflating these principles and then concurring only with Harris's critique of the former, commentators reveal just how powerful is the general expectation that nothing but ideas is 'transferred' in language communication, and ideas which are utterly identical in speaker and hearer, at that.
One of the most illuminating and crucial distinctions drawn in The Language Myth, that between hearability and mere audibility, is germane to the discussion (a parallel contrast holds between legibility and mere visibility). As Harris notes, orthodox linguistics has attended far too much to audibility, a property conducive to treatment with a mechanistic descriptive apparatus of determinate units, rules, and criteria, and that attention has been to the neglect of hearability. However,
When A speaks to B, the prime communicational concern which both share in common is not just the audibility but the hearability of what is said; as when A writes a letter to B the prime communicational concern is not just the visibility but the legibility of what is written (Harris, 1981, p. 178).
Harris pursues the discussion of hearability and legibility via interesting examples of the in- determinacy of form in each domain. He considers the bases of interpretation of a sound trans- cribable as [zaaaa] produced with a falling intonation, uttered by a bowler in situationally- appropriate circumstances in a game of cricket; and the parallel interpretation of a scrawled figure, in a letter, which might possibly be the word 'and'. In the latter case, he writes:
We say, for example, of some dubiously legible word in John's letter, qt looks like and'--as if we were engaged in an actual process of comparison between the scrawl on the paper and some imagined copperplate prototype, whereas what we are in fact trying to do is to determine how the scrawl is most plausibly interpretable in its context, in such a way as to make sense of John's communication (Harris, 1981, p. 178-179).
If we emphasize legibility rather than mere visibility then, as an essential element in interpretation, we must also remember that legibility is to be understood as a matter not of what a written form 'is permitted to be read as', but of what it 'can be, and is, read as'. Harris
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proceeds to demonstrate the unhelpfulness of any assumed reliance on a prototypical 'and ' , and shows that prototypicality cannot give an 'and' in the reading task:
In some respects the scrawl will be similar to the prototype, and in other respects it will be dissimilar. What we need to know is which similarities matter. But the prototype itself cannot tell us this. It does not incorporate in its own visual contours the cri teria relevant for matching it with every other writ ten shape. All we have done is to substitute one problem for another . Fur thermore , the substitution leads us nowhere . For we now have to decide in which respect the scrawl would need to be like the prototype in order to determine whether the scrawl is indeed +like and ' . The answer will be that the relevant respects are precisely those in which the scrawl is legible as "and + . If we can determine that for the scrawl, then we do not need the prototype at all. If not, no amount o f visual inspection o f the prototype will help (Harr is , 1981, p. 179).
Harris 's chief target here is the fixed-code assumption that there is a prototype form of 'and ' in the written language (or of +How's that' in the spoken language), which would somehow 'tell ' the language-user whether a particular encountered form was an instantiation of that prototype, that is, whether the encountered item was an imperfect token of the authoritative and pre-existing type. On the contrary, Harris argues, there is no warrant for assuming such prototypes exist, and even if they did, they would not be able to resolve the question of whether a particular encountered form was a token of the posited type. That crucial question can only be resolved (provisionally) in the perceived circumstances of an experienced communication situation. At the same time it is clear that perception of similarity plays an important role in the local determination of whether some scrawl is an 'and ' , that is, in deciding what a particular shape or sound 'counts as'. Readers' and listeners' procedures of comparison, and judging similarity are a crucial part of language-comprehension and interpretation. Even to supply the metalinguistic commentary 'It looks like and' is to identify the speaker as an inducted member of a language community, with memories of previous uses of the word 'and' . As Harris remarks:
No one supposes that two individuals can somehow achieve instant communica t ion on the basis o f words neither has used or heard before. The question is whether it is correct , or useful, or even plausible to represent their past linguistic experience as s tanding in relation to their present communica t ion situation as the rules of a game to a par t icular episode of play (Harr is , 1981, p. 186).
An interactant's encountering of a spoken or written expression does not lead, directly and immediately, to an attempt to match it with a single, one-entry-for-all-purposes, lemma in a mental lexicon, which supplies one or several possible meanings for the heard form. That is the essence of mistaken bi-planarity. We do not live in language that way. And when we behave as if we did, we should be discouraged from such fundamentalism, for it is clear that to assume the existence of prototype forms and prototype meanings and to pretend to interpret linguistic communication accordingly amounts to unqualified embrace of fixed-code telementational principles. Such an ill-advised prototype-matching would seem to bedevil generativist linguists" reception of a third word in Harris 's lexicon, to which I now turn.
The word in question is fascist. Not a nice word, granted, nor a new one. It occurs in a short commentary (on translation) which he published in the Times Literary Supplement of London in 1983. There he called the idea of an ideal speech community which is totally homogeneous (the wording echoes Chomsky's famous formulation) 'a fascist concept of languages if ever there was one' (1983, p. 1119). Lord, the outcry! That f-word is a fighting word ' if ever there was one' . I don' t entirely agree that it was appropriate in the context: surely totalitarian is the more accurate description? But Harris, exercising the freedom of speech that he and Chomsky have championed, chose to use the f-word. And it's hard to fault his strategy. Because--in my reading of this minor current of linguistic historiography--by means of that one naughty word in one ephemeral review, Harris got the attention of generativists in a way that none of his
A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTATION 89
earlier booklength critiques had. Inter alia it led to a brief caustic rejoinder in Chomsky (1986, p. 47), while in the paper discussed here, Borsley and Newmeyer (1996), the word provokes Borsley and Newmeyer to unwitting self-parody when they call it a 'theory' and devote an entire section to what they apparently think is knock-down refutation of what they see as Harris's implicit claim. Their section begins:
Harris'~ theory makes a clear prediction about the countries in which structural linguistics (of any variety) should have been the most flourishing and enjoyed the highest degree of 'official' sanction. They are Germany and Italy.
The 'historical evidence' that Borsley and Newmeyer thereafter parade to show that 'Harris's predictions are completely wrong' is perhaps best not dwelt upon; mindful that Borsley and Newmeyer have fallen into the trap of answering one naughty word with many preposterous ones+ I shall risk censure in the other direction by offering no reply to their rebuttal of the fascism 'prediction'. But it would seem that the beginnings of Borsley and Newmeyer's misrepresentation of Harris's remarks lie in their uptake of the word fascist telementationally; that is, as if it, necessarily, meant and conveyed to every reader just one fixed idea. The larger point of Harris's commentary in which the f-word appears is that the post-Saussurean 'idealization' of the homogeneous speech community has knocked cross-cultural language study right off the agenda, at least as far as Linguistics is concerned: bilingualism and translation are taken to be of little and no interest, respectively, to the linguist (the former is of interest only insofar as it furnishes evidence for one account or other of Universal Grammar, the culture-free study of linguistic structures).
Let us move beyond these moments of acrimony to a scene of love and communicative harmony, one that occurs towards the close of a play by Brian Friel, The Communication Cord. In this play Tim, a graduate student writing a thesis on language and communication, finds that the empirical specifics of his developing interaction with Claire, in all its warmth and sub- stantiality, contradicts much of what his dissertation has postulated, in theory, about language:
CLAIRE: It's been a long time, Tim. TIM: Seven and a half years. The very week I began working on the thesis. CLAIRE: Tim the Thesis. JACK: Pompous bloody idiot. CLAIRE: It's on conversation, isn't it? TIM: Language as a ritualized act between two people. CLAIRE: Yes. TIM: The exchange of units of communication through an agreed code. CLAIRE: Yes. TIM: Fundamental to any meaningful exchange between individuals. CLAIRE: Is it? TIM: That's the theory. JACK: (Tentatively) Tim . . . ? CLAIRE: Chat, really. TIM: Yes. CLAIRE: What we're doing now. TIM: But I think that after this I may have to rewrite a lot of it. CLAIRE: Why? TIM: All that stuff about units of communication. Maybe the units don't matter all that much. CLAIRE: I think that's true.
90 MICHAEL TOOLAN
JACK: Can you come here for a minute, Tim? TIM: We ' re conversing now but we ' re not exchanging units, are we? CLAIRE: I don' t think so, are we? TIM: I don ' t think we can be because I 'm not too sure what I 'm saying. CLAIRE: I don' t know what you ' re saying either but I think I know what 's implicit in it. JACK: Tim, I think I 'm in a bit of trouble. TIM: Even if what I 'm saying is rubbish? CLAIRE: Yes. TIM: Like 'this is our first cathedral ' [an apothegm continually used, during the play, to
describe the traditional Irish cot tage--MJT] ? CLAIRE: Like that. TIM: Like 'this is the true centre '? CLAIRE: I think I know what 's implicit in that. TIM: Maybe the message doesn' t matter at all then. JACK: Tim! CLAIRE: It 's the occasion that matters. TIM: And the reverberations that the occasion generates . . . . CLAIRE: I feel the reverberations. TIM: I feel the reverberations. CLAIRE: And the desire to sustain the occasion. TIM: And saying anything, anything at all, that keeps the occasion going. JACK: Tim! CLAIRE: Maybe even saying nothing.
(Brian Friel. 1983).
Just who Brian Friel had been reading when he wrote The Communication Cord is open to speculation (the influence of George Steiner 's writings on his play Translations is well- documented: in the present case are there shades of Goffman too, perhaps?). But it is certainly possible to see this closing love scene as another version of the scenario of ' l inguistic communication without exchange of units' which Friel previously achieved in one of his most memorable scenes, in Translations, where the Gaelic-using Maire and the English-using Yolland speak love to each other, via and despite their mutual monolingual incomprehension. In Translations the love scene leads ultimately to tragedy; here a similar situation is re-told as farce. And. to be fair to what Friel suggests here, it should be noted that even as Tim and Claire are demonstrating the irrelevance of "the exchange of units' to one kind of entirely successful communication, Jack is comically failing to communicate to Tim at a more basic, mathetic level concerning the shaky structure of the building they are occupying. The consequence of this communicational breakdown is that, as the final curtain falls, so does the cottage: Tim, leaning too hard on a critical post. literally brings the house down. It makes little difference whether or not we label Tim's successful communication in this scene the interactional, and that which he overlooks transactional, or vice versa for that matter: Fr ie l ' s key point would seem to be that communication comprises a range of interest and attention, and not mere telementation. Lockean telementation simply has nothing to say to the likes of Tim and Claire, and Maire and Yolland: to put this another way, telementation is a picture of communication that sets no store whatsoever by the fact that individuals at least sometimes love each other, so that saying anything or saying nothing may function equally well communicatively, since the essence of that communication is no particular content, but the occasion and the desire to sustain the
A FEW WORDS ON TELEMENTAT1ON 91
occasion. This latter description, jointly formulated by Tim and Claire, is as direct a gloss of Malinowski's phatic communication as one is likely to find in the theatre, which in turn reminds us of just how fundamentally different are the phatic and telementational conceptions of communication.
A thought just 'came' to me which I would like to send to you: do you have the same idea of saccadic now as you did before you began reading this essay? And of telementation? I have suggested in this paper that where mainstream linguistics has even bothered to respond to Harris's fixed-code telementation charge, it has, at best, taken the form of agreeing that linguistic communication certainly cannot be fixed-code telementation and then resuming its theoretical enquiries as if in fact it were (invoking that all-purpose defense, as the need arises, of qdealization'). What have been striking in their relative absence are responses of the fol- lowing kind: given that linguistic communication cannot possibly be founded upon fixed-code telementation, what are the ways in which language is not a fixed-code, and what are the ways in which linguistic communication is not telementational? Arguably, these questions are less than paradigm-shifting, and assume that the questioner is setting out from a place still within the labyrinth created by language-myth segregationalism. But if this is the place in which we still find ourselves, then it may be idle to hope to advance our exorcism of the language myth from any other place of leverage.
NOTES
~lf you consult a recent Webster's, or the second edition of the OLD, you will find new definitions of saccadic which link it specifically with rapid and jerky eye movement, and indeed it seems that in the twentieth century this usage in relation to eye-movements has come to eclipse the earlier range of uses. In the OLD 2nd edition you find that one of the illustrations comes from the writings of Harris's sometime colleague, Jerome Bruner.
-'At the same time. where does Borsley and Newmeyer's distrust of reliable communication from Saussure to Bally, and from Ball,, to today's reader, lead? It leads to a generalized scepticism and anxiety about communication which is as unjustified as the absolute and idealized assumption encapsulated in the telementation fallacy from which it depends: it is because, like Locke, Borsley and Newmeyer tacitly adhere to the telementational standard that they are so ready to speculate that, on particular occasions, that standard has not been met.
~Empiri~ism which in North American theoretical circles seems to have become inseparably bound, collocationally. with the dismissive epithet naive--is, in Borsley and Newmeyer's view, the only principle (and for them a by definition inadequate one) to which Harris's integrational approach is explicitly committed.
REFERENCES
BORSLEY, R. and NEWMEYER F. 1996 The language muddle: Roy Harris and generative grammar. To appear in LOVE, N. and WOLF, G. (Eds), A Blastsehrifi fi)r Roy Hurris.
CHOMSKY. N. 1986 Knowledge ~f lxlnguage. Its Nature, Origin and Use. Praeger, New York.
FIRTH. J. R. 1964 The Tongues (~[Men. Watt, London.
FRILL. B. 1983 The Commumcation Cord. Faber, London.
HARRIS. R. 1981 The l~mguage Myth. Duckworth. London.
HARRIS, R. 1983 Theoretical ideas. Times Litera(v Supplement. 14. October, p. 1113.
HARRIS, R. 1987 The I_z~nguage Machine. Duckworth, London.
PINKER, S. 1994 The Lcmguage Instinct. HarperPerennial, New York.
TAYLOR, T. 1992 Mutual MisuHderstanding. Duke University Press. Durham, NC.
