Linguistic Theory

The Discourse of Fundamental Works

Robert-Alain De Beaugrande

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317900641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Linguistic Theory, Robert de Beaugrande analyses linguistic theories not as abstract ideas or theses, but as the process and product of theoretical discourse. He argues that the best documentation of this discourse can be found in the 'fundamental' works of major linguists from Ferdinand de Saussure to Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch. He therefore employs the highly unusual strategy of a close reading of these works as discourse performances and strives to uncover their main points and characteristic moves in the linguist's own words.Through this approach, the reader is able to appreciate and understand the variety and controversy among linguistic theories as they have emerged and developed in interaction with each other. Special scrutiny is allocated to the issue of how far the active practice of the linguists followed their own theories and proposals, and why. The author concludes by assessing the prospects for linguistics to be drawn from the retrospect in the previous chapters.

Chapter 1

Linguistic theory as discourse

 

 

 

1.1 ‘Surveys’ of ‘linguistic theory’ have become so numerous that a new one calls for some justification. It seems to me that even though linguistics is about language, the major works in linguistic theory have seldom been analysed and synthesized as language, specifically: as a mode of discourse seeking to circumscribe language by means of language. Perhaps this lack is due in part to the limitations imposed by theorists who did not address discourse as a linguistic phenomenon, or only marginally so. Perhaps too, it was tacitly assumed that theories do not critically depend on the language in which they happen to be expounded. Today, however, discourse has become a major area of concern, and the dependence of concepts and arguments on the discourse that constitutes them is widely acknowledged.

1.2 Therefore, to examine linguistic theories as discourse constructions is by no means to discount their conceptual importance, but to insist on attending very carefully to the emergence of those conceptions within the original discourse before proceeding on to the more usual stages of abstraction and paraphrase. This insistence can be particularly instrumental in tracing the development of terminology, and the continuity, evolution, or change in the major lines of argument not merely between theorists, but within the work of an individual theorist.

1.3 On the whole, the history of the ‘science of language’ has not been unmanageably diffuse. Major theoretical works and frameworks have not been overly numerous. And on the whole, the discipline has been fairly parsimonious in its theorizing, indeed resolutely so in the face of the complexity of language. Yet we can certainly not claim that the problems addressed by our predecessors have by now vanished or been completely resolved. Instead, we frequently sense a need to return to those problems and re-examine the principles set forth decades ago to approach them.

1.4 In that situation, surveys of linguistic theory should be cautious about imposing an artificial, retrospective sense of order and direction on the discipline by distilling out a few main ‘ideas’, ‘schools’, ‘trends’, or ‘paradigms’. That method can abbreviate or conceal the complexity and diversity of scientific interaction and discourse. A counterbalance could be attained by surveying linguistics as a ‘model science’ perpetually in the process of situating itself in respect to language.

1.5 Such a survey is a problematic and arduous project, but I hold it to be urgent for several reasons. First, many of the issues in linguistics that preoccupy linguistic theorists today were recognized and deliberated by our predecessors. We cannot get a full sense of our domain by reducing the works of the founders to a handful of precepts and slogans, without due regard for the overall argument and context, including important qualifications and reservations. That strategy tends to convert complicated, energizing research programmes too eagerly into inhibiting new orthodoxies. And in hindsight, we may get the utterly mistaken impression that linguistics did not properly appreciate the depth and difficulty of the issues.

1.6 Second, linguistic theory is essentially a domain of work in progress, a discipline always in search of itself. Leading theorists often voiced their dissatisfaction with the state of linguistics as they saw it (cf. 12.3). But if we construe their discontent as a pretext for writing off the past, we incur the risk of repeating the same shortcomings they perceived and strove to alleviate.

1.7 Third, certain signs indicate that linguistic theory has for some years been moving into a phase of stagnation and diminishing returns. Despite decades of effort, the relations between theory and practice, between model and domain, or between method and evidence have not been definitively established, and seem to be shifted once again by every new school or trend. In consequence, the history of the discipline may appear discontinuous and non-cumulative, with research projects typically clustered around sporadic bursts of theorizing. The status of theoretical entities, even such central ones as ‘word’ and ‘sentence’, remains in dispute. No consensus obtains about the future trends and modifications that linguistics should undergo. In such a state of affairs, we cannot merely wait to see what develops in day-to-day research and discussion. We need to draw up the theoretical balance sheets of past investigations. Surveying the major issues and problems of the discipline through their treatment in the discourse foundational works can be an inaugural step in planning for future research on a truly comprehensive and organized scale.

1.8 All linguists share at least one special predicament: they can get evidence only from their own encounters with language, with and within some mode of discourse (cf. 12.1, 48). The system never steps forward to be ‘observed’ in some concrete selfhood; and data are not data until they have been understood as language. In consequence, linguists deal with data in whose constitution and interpretation they are always to some degree involved, at least behind the scenes. Since language is so extraordinarily sensitive to how it is used, it may assume different appearances depending on how it is grasped. We therefore need to expand our scope from ‘looking at language’ to ‘looking at linguists looking at language’ and in particular talking or writing about it. We cannot eliminate the linguist's perspective, but we can scrutinize it by asking how human beings, whether linguists or ordinary speakers, abstract systematic knowledge from language experience and at the same time apply systematic knowledge in order to relate experience to language (cf. 12.44).

1.9 That you must ‘know language’ to ‘understand language’ and vice versa is a truism, but by no means an insignificant one. We seem to confront a peculiarly vicious circularity enshrouding the question of how we might approach language from the ‘outside’: how children or linguists or anybody else can reach the ‘critical mass’, the stage of ‘knowing’ the system behind or beyond the individual uses of language (cf. 12.38). Much of that knowledge is concealed from conscious awareness during everyday discourse, and the prospects for making it conscious and explicit are by nature precarious (cf. 12.49). To observe yourself observing language, to watch or hear yourself thinking, to grasp your own understanding – all these acts are easily beset by paradox or infinite regress. We can, however, subject the discourse of those engaged in such acts to steadily more circumspect and integrative scrutiny, thereby adding fresh emphasis to our perennial insistence on the centrality of language (cf. 12.22).

1.10 My survey accordingly proceeds by arranging and presenting the discourse, the statements and arguments, of representative theorists in linguistics of this century, sticking as close as is feasible to their actual wordings, especially where major points are expressed. By this expedient, I hoped to restrict my own role in increasing or complicating the mediation between linguistics and language, as I would have had to do had I paraphrased and summarized the sources in my own words. Though admittedly laborious, this method may help to reanimate the complex flow of the discourse in the gradually emerging discipline, to focus on characteristic moves, and to retrace the key terms as they gain or lose currency. Proceeding by author rather than by ‘school’ may help to accentuate individual views, voices, and personalities, and thus to reexperience some of the momentum and perplexity of repeated confrontations with the recalcitrant problems that the study of language necessarily raises.

1.11 Due to this gallery of problems, a general book on linguistics tends to have the character of a performance, raising and responding to typical questions, such as:

Where does linguistics stand among the other disciplines?

Which aspects of language deserve to be put in focus, and which ones are of lesser interest?

What means or methods are recommended or rejected?

How do linguists gather data, and how can they check their own estimation of it against other sources?

How are examples brought to bear on theoretical issues and abstractions?

What are the fundamental units and structures of language?

What is the theoretical status of traditional concepts such as ‘word’, ‘phrase’, and ‘sentence’?

We shall be seeing quite a spectrum of potential answers, some explicit, others merely implicit. Few of the answers will seem definitive, since they depend on the goals and aspirations of the particular theorist, and these are by no means uniform (cf. 12.58, 60ff). Still, considering such a spectrum assembled in one volume may shed light on the nature of the questions, whatever the eventual answers we may yet select.

1.12 It was rather agonizing to decide which ‘fundamental works’ should be used, given the unmanageably large number worthy of inquiry. My selection was guided by two major criteria. First, these works were influential in the general development of theories or models, as attested for instance by frequent citation. Second, these works propound such a wide range of positions and issues that we can profit by bringing them into explicit interaction with each other. I do not mean to suggest that the works I selected are the only ones or even the best ones produced by each linguist, but only that they are important and rewarding examples of the discourse of linguistic theory.

1.13 My treatment is only roughly in chronological order, because the works and their spans of influence sometimes overlapped in time, and because some influences emerge more clearly through direct follow-ups, e.g. Bloomfield to Pike, Hjelmslev to Chomsky, and Firth to Halliday. However, similar arguments and conceptions also appear where we cannot trace such influences, or at least none that the authors acknowledge. Conversely, demonstrable influences do not necessarily promote agreement, and successors may differ from their predecessors or teachers on major issues.

1.14 Obviously, my selection could have been different or larger. But the approach proved to require such detailed attention to each work and theorist that I lacked the space to include more of them. For motives of size, I regretfully deleted a chapter on Terry Winograd, a major thinker both in linguistics and in artificial intelligence. I also deeply regretted not being able to deal with such undeniably influential linguists as Emile Benveniste, Dwight Bolinger, Wallace Chafe, Simon Dik, Charles Fillmore, Charles Carpenter Fries, Hans Glinz, Joseph Grimes, Z.S. Harris, Roman Jakobson, Daniel Jones, William Labov, George Lakoff, Robert E. Longacre, Aleksei Leontev, Nikolai Marr, André Martinet, Vilém Mathesius, Ivan Meshchaninov, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, or Leo Weisgerber. Also, I would have liked to include such precursors and pioneers as Franz Bopp, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Samuel Haldeman, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, Hermann Paul, Rasmus Rask, Henry Sweet, Dwight Whitney, etc. And major figures from neighbouring disciplines also deserve such attention: semioticians such as Julia Kristeva, Jurij Lotman, Charles Morris, Charles Peirce, Thomas Sebeok, etc.; language philosophers such as John Austin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul Grice, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Korzybski, Jacques Lacan, John Searle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc.; logicians such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Cresswell, Richard Montague, János Petöfi, Alfred Tarski, Lotfi Zadeh, etc.; psychologists and psycholinguists like Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Alexander Luria, William Levelt, William Marslen-Wilson, George Miller, Charles Osgood, etc.; sociologists like Basil Bernstein, Erving Goffman, Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, etc.; anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, etc.; or analysts of narrative and literary or poetic discourse such as Roland Barthes, Algirdas Greimas, Tzvetan Todorov, etc. Though I had to exclude all these figures, I glean some comfort from the fact that I have made use of their work in my previous writings, and from the hope that I may give them more attention in the future.

Chapter 2

Ferdinand de Saussure¹

2.1 Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) is a peculiar book, not merely published but in part composed after the author's death. Since he ‘destroyed the rough drafts of the outlines used for his lectures’, the editors, Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, used ‘the notes collected by students’ in order to ‘attempt a reconstruction, a synthesis’, and to ‘recreate F. de Saussure's thought’ (CG xviiif). To ‘draw together an organic whole’, the editors tried to ‘weed out variations and irregularities characteristic of oral delivery’, and to ‘omit nothing that might contribute to the overall impression’ (CG xix). Thus, the ‘Saussure’ of the Cours is a composite voice, speaking from a lecture platform between 1897 and 1911 and passing through the notebooks of followers who confess that ‘the master’ ‘probably would not have authorized the publication of these pages’ (CG xvii, 38, xviiif). Many problems with its formulation and interpretation may reflect the difficulties of its composition.

2.2 Saussure – or ‘Saussure’, as I should write perhaps – seems fully conscious of his role as founder of a ‘science’. He constantly searches for generalities, high-level abstractions, and fundamental definitions. Over and over, he states what is ‘always’ or ‘never’ the case, what applies in ‘each’ or ‘every’ instance, what are the ‘only’ relevant aspects, and so on. At times, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Longman Linguistics Library
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Graphic conventions
• List of abbreviations
• Mottos
• 1 Linguistic theory as discourse
• 2 Ferdinand de Saussure
• 3 Edward Sapir
• 4 Leonard Bloomfield
• 5 Kenneth Pike
• 6 Louis Hjelmslev
• 7 Noam Chomsky
• 8 J.R. Firth
• 9 M.A.K. Halliday
• 10 Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch
• 11 Peter Hartmann
• 12 Linguistics versus language
• References
• Index of names
• Index of terms