Functions
of Language 1/2, 1994, 163-200.
Function
and Form in Language Theory and Research:
The
Tide is Turning
Robert de
Beaugrande
Actor sent to jail for not finishing sentence
— Knoxville, TN New
Sentinel, 1/21/89
ABSTRACT
It is argued that many of the major notions in
‘mainstream’ linguistic theory and method over the years have been
influenced by a ‘classical formalist’ ambience that suited conventional
ideas about how science ought to proceed but fostered an idealized ‘frozen’
conception of the language system in isolation form reality and society. Today,
the tide is turning toward functionalist accounts of language; but the
accompanying shift in our scientific programme calls for careful reflection.
Some deep-lying motives for the shift are explored with a view to potential
consequences.
A.
The quest for ‘language by itself’
2.
Given such an appeal, it is hardly surprising if the majority of study so far,
ranging from ‘traditional grammar’ up through philology and modern
linguistics, has been devoted to ‘language by itself’. When Saussure’s
influential Course in General Linguistics emphatically concluded with ‘the
fundamental idea’ that ‘the true and unique object of linguistics is
language studied in and for itself’ (1969 [1916]: 232), he (or his students)
presumably intended to shield linguistics from absorption by neighboring
sciences. Saussure complained that ‘heretofore language has almost always been
studied in connection with something else’ (1969: 16). Though surrounded by
‘other sciences that sometimes borrow from its data, sometimes supply it with
data’ — ‘political history’, ‘psychology’, ‘anthropology’,
‘sociology’, ‘ethnography’, ‘prehistory’, and ‘palaeontology’
— ‘linguistics must be carefully distinguished’ from such sciences, which
can contribute only to ‘external linguistics’, concerning ‘everything that
is outside’ the ‘system’ of ‘language’; in return, ‘we can draw no
accurate conclusions outside the domain of linguistics proper’ (1969: 102f,
147, 6, 9, 224, 20f, 228) (but see § 43).
3.
In effect, the prospects for any science of language were made contingent on the
precept that ‘language by itself’ can indeed be located and studied, given
the proper methods. This precept was in turn reflected in several tenets
propounded in influential books setting down the ‘classical’ programme of
‘mainstream’ linguistics:1
(1)
A language should be considered a uniform,
stable, and abstract system in a single
stage of its evolution.
(2)
This system is to be defined by internal,
language-based criteria.
(3)
Language is a phenomenon distinct from
other domains of human knowledge or activity.
(4)
A language should be described apart from
variations due to time, place, or identity of speakers.
(5)
The description of a language should be couched in statements at a high
degree of generality, if possible about the language as a whole or even
about all languages.
Within
that programme, the tenets interlock in projecting a free-standing and
self-sufficient conception of language that stands firm while we are describing
it (cf. § 26, 65).
4.
Most of the theoretical and practical problems throughout modern linguistics
have arisen from the tendency to consider tenets (1-5) as fundamental postulates which any science of language must accept
rather than as empirical hypotheses
to be tested by a range of methods. Linguistics was rendered highly
self-conscious about the hypothetical but henceforth essential borderline
between ‘linguistic’ versus ‘extra-linguistic’ or ‘non-linguistic’
data, issues, explanations, and so on (cf. § 30, 63). Since ‘language by
itself’ is not a ‘fact’ or ‘object’ directly presented to observation,
linguistics sought to construct it by
sheer theoretical bootstrapping. The most fateful consequence has been the idea
that language can be removed from all
contexts for purposes of rigorous analysis; in fact, such analysis merely creates
a different and special context, one that may exert powerful but largely
unacknowledged controls on the language data (cf. § 40, 54).
5.
Let us focus here on hypothesis (1) stating that language should be considered a
uniform, stable, and abstract system, which can be called for short the u-s-a
hypothesis (though it was by no means limited to or universally accepted in
the real USA). The strongest test for this hypothesis would be whether
linguistic research does indeed discover such a ‘u-s-a system’ for a given
‘natural language’ like English. The discovery process has proceeded by
means of conventional data-handling strategies,
such as:
(1)
collating: a large set of data
samples are compared and contrasted to distill out what they have in common,
e.g. which word types frequently occur with other types;
(2)
generalizing: certain aspects of the
observed 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 language as a whole;
(3)
rarefying: the ‘rich’ data are
rendered more ‘sparse’ by disregarding certain aspects or details, e.g.
variations in the actual pronunciation of language sounds;
(4)
decontextualizing: the data are taken
out of the observed context and treated as if they had occurred in isolation or
could occur in a wide range of contexts, e.g. irrespective of the social status
of groups or speakers;
(5)
introspecting: the linguists make
estimations based on their own intuitions about the language, e.g. which
sentences do or do not violate the ‘rules’;
(6)
consulting informants: native
speakers are and asked to judge or rate data samples of their language, e.g. to
decide whether two utterances ‘mean the same’.
Since
the data by themselves do not tell us exactly how these strategies should be
applied, the validity of the strategies ought to be a further hypothesis, or
rather a set of hypotheses, to be tested by our results.
6.
But how can the results provide a test for the validity of the very strategies
expressly deployed to produce those results? To escape circularity, the key
tests would surely be the convergence
among data discovered and described, and the consensus
among linguists about how the data should be treated and interpreted. In
retrospect, these two tests have been met with full success only in the
description of language sounds in ‘phonology’. Here, linguistics indeed
found a ‘u-s-a system’ of ‘phonemes’ whose quantity and nature can be
precisely described by two sets of criteria. Physically, each ‘phoneme’ can
be uniquely described by its features, e.g., a ‘voiced stop’ such as [d]
produced when the vocal cords vibrate and the air flow is fully blocked; the
visual correspondence between phonemes and written letters of the Roman alphabet
was also supportive, though it was not an official base because the description
was strictly addressed to spoken language. Mentally, each ‘phoneme’ must be
capable of differentiating between units that also differ in meaning, e.g. [d]
versus [t] in ‘hid’ versus ‘hit’. This full success made the study of
language sound systems in ‘phonemics’ or ‘phonology’ into the ‘model paradigm’ in modern linguistics, e.g. when Firth (1957a
[1951]: 222; 1968 [1957b]: 191) recommended that ‘phonemic description should
serve primarily as a basis for the statement of grammatical and lexical
facts’, and that ‘linguistic analysis’ should have ‘the same rigorous
control of formal categories’ as ‘in all phonological analysis’. A lasting
heritage of this view has been the proliferation of ‘-eme’ terms (e.g.
‘morpheme’, ‘lexeme’, ‘tagmeme’, ‘syntagmeme’, ‘sememe’)
modeled after the ‘phoneme’.
7.
Henceforth, ‘mainstream’ theories confidently projected language to be an
array of ‘u-s-a subsystems’ (usually called ‘levels’), each consisting
of a repertory of minimal combinable
elements comparable to ‘phonemes’. A complete
description of a language would be the sum of the descriptions for each
subsystem, supplied by linguists working in the several areas within a neat
‘division of labour’. For a time, some
linguists (especially in America) insisted that ‘rigid, water-tight
compartments or levels are aesthetically satisfying and provide the only valid
scientific conclusions’, and that
‘level mixing’ was a ‘sin’, e.g. ‘the Pike heresy’ of
‘persistently using non-phonetic criteria in phonemics’ (quoted by Pike
1967: 59, 443, 66, 362; cf. Hockett 1942, 1955; Moulton 1947; Voegelin 1949:78;
W. Smith 1950: 8; Trager & H. Smith 1951).
8.
Yet matters have proven less manageable as research has moved beyond the
subsystem of sounds. The subsystem of minimal meaningful forms, called
‘morphemes’, is already less tidy. Convergence and consensus are fairly high
for identifying and isolating
the morphemes in our data, where the chief physical criterion, the linear
arrangement of the data written down, is visually clear though less well-defined
than the articulatory criteria of phonology. But convergence and consensus are
rather lower for classifying
morphemes into categories, since observed linear positions by themselves do not
afford explicit, clean-cut indications of category; at most, we can set up some
categories whose names indicate where items appear, e.g. ‘prefixes’ in
front, ‘suffixes’ behind, and ‘infixes’ in the middle. Some languages do
present specific morphemic sectors, such as the inflections of Nouns and Verbs,
which can be precisely and exhaustively described; yet even there, complexities
can arise, e.g., the category of ‘English Noun plural morphemes’ written
‘‑s’ or ‘‑es’ but pronounced /s/, /z/, /∂s/, or
/∂z/2 , plus the ‘zero morpheme’ not written at all (like
‘sheep’). Otherwise, the majority of ‘morphemes’ fall into very large
and fuzzy sets, e.g., all Nouns or all Verbs. The standard solution to this
problem has been to put all indivisible words over into the class of
‘lexemes’ and reserve the term ‘morphemes’ for the tidier sectors.
9.
The subsystem of ‘syntax’, which concerns the arrangement of phrases and
clauses, is still more problematic, chiefly because we are dealing with a
repertory consisting not of minimal
units but of complex units (sometimes
called ‘syntagmemes’ after the terms ‘phonemes’ and ‘morphemes’)
ranging from just one morpheme (e.g. ‘help!’) up to an extensive phrase,
clause, or sentence. Nor does it seem feasible to give an exhaustive, precise
listing of phrases or clauses; even the traditional division into ‘Subject’
and ‘Predicate’ can leave tricky residues, e.g., signals of the speaker’s
viewpoint like ‘frankly’. And syntax inherits the problems of morphology
about classifying items in sets. Again, the physical appearance of data written
down for visual inspection does a deal of handiwork insofar as the divisions
between words and between at least some phrases seem evident. But the reasons
why an observed pattern of words and phrases has that shape must be
inferred.
10.
Evidently, the methods of identifying and classifying units into repertories had
supported consensus among linguists quite well for phonology and fairly well for
morphology, but later much less well for syntax. So amid a flood of animated
controversy, phonology plus morphology were moved toward the sidelines and
syntax assumed the role of ‘model paradigm’ in linguistics. True, the
‘u-s-a hypothesis’ remained firmly in place; but the ‘u-s-a system’ was
now conceived to be a repertory of ‘rules’
for arranging units into phrases and sentences. Yet since — unlike the
units — these ‘rules’ plainly do not appear ‘in’ the data, this new
paradigm placed increasing demands on the ingenuity of linguists in devising
‘rules’. The data-handling strategy (5) of ‘introspecting’ now assumed a
key dual role not just in relating the rules to discovered data but in
generating invented data that would reflect the linguists’ knowledge of the
rules as native speakers — their ‘competence’ (cf. § 46). In this dual
and somewhat circular role, introspecting threatened to overshadow the other
data-handling strategies, especially the strategies of ‘collating samples’
and ‘consulting informants’.
11.
The state of affairs was most diffuse in semantics, the investigation of the
meanings of language. While phonology was the model paradigm, semantics had
sought to set up a repertory of abstract minimal units called ‘semes’ or
‘sememes’ like the ‘phonemes’, e.g. ‘± Animate’ or ‘± Human’,
but the criteria for identifying them lacked any straightforward basis such as
the phonemes had (cf. § 6, 19ff). When syntax became the model paradigm,
semantics was handed the job of supplying ‘rules’ to ‘interpret’
syntactic ‘strings’. The wherewithal of this ‘interpretation’ was
‘semantic features’, which strongly resembled the ‘sememes’.
12.
What gradually ensued was an uneasy imbalance between the language data and a
descriptive apparatus which was still to be defined solely by internal,
language-based criteria separated from variations due to time, place, or
identity of speakers. Predictably, convergence and consensus receded
dramatically. Groups of linguists proposing different types of rules
proliferated; and even linguists who agreed about rule types attained
conflicting descriptions when they moved beyond the more straightforward and
well-behaved examples. Decades of further work on rule-systems has not managed
either to supply a complete, definitive description of any language or even to
attain consensus about how we should seek one.
13. So if the tests for the ‘u-s-a hypothesis’ are convergence
and consensus (§ 6),
then it stands refuted, and we need
to reconsider the ‘mainstream’ research programme based upon it. My sense is
that such a reconsideration is now well under way, but has not been guided by a
sufficiently consolidated and well-argued rationale. The danger persists that
recent trends may be seen as retreating from scientific standards, whereas we are in fact redefining
those standards (cf. section C).
B.
The enduring problem of ‘constraints’
15.
in morphology, the constraints are
already less tractable. Are we to assume, for instance, that the speaker of
English is aware of Romance-language-based morphemes like /in-/ and /im-/
signifying negation and their sensitivity to phonemic position before dentals
(‘intangible’) versus labials (‘impossible’); or of the criteria for
using them versus /un-/, /non-/, or /a-/; or of their distinctness from the same
set of phonemes and graphemes signifying direction in ‘inject’ or
‘impale’? Or are these constraints merely a historical sediment of English
that has become ‘arbitrary’, whereas the constraints on, say, singular
versus plural are still active and productive?
16.
It was in syntax that the problems of constraints was destined to become truly
virulent. As we saw in section A, the notion of a system being a repertory of
minimal combinable elements proved explosively unmanageable for syntax and was
replaced by the notion of a system of ‘rules’ for arranging units into
phrases and sentences (§ 10). Losing the constraints supplied by
‘minimalness’ and by the straightforward procedures for isolating minimal
units turned out to be quite costly. A extensive new set of constraints was
required which would distinguish all the allowed or ‘grammatical’ sequences,
of whatever length and complexity, from all the disallowed or
‘ungrammatical’ ones. Since the ‘classical’ programme of
‘mainstream’ linguistics’ required this job to be done by internal,
language-based criteria alone (§ 3, 12), the ‘natural’ constraints of
situation and context that always apply to real data in human interaction were
not deemed admissible unless they had been formally reconstructed as purely
linguistic ‘rules’.
17.
The ‘rules’ were accordingly envisioned to be explicit, formal statements of
constraints applying directly to sequences or ‘strings’ composed not of
words as such but of syntactic categories such as ‘NP’ (noun phrase) or
‘VP’ (verb phrase). The set of the allowable (or ‘grammatical’)
category-sequences of a language like English is indefinitely
large but not, as was claimed, infinitely
large, at least not in the genuine mathematical sense of ‘infinity’. A
truly infinite system will eventually produce all
possible combinations, even unimaginably
improbable ones, just as in infinite time a roomful of chimpanzees pressing
the keys of typewriters will eventually write the works of Shakespeare. Such
statements tell us nothing about language or about Shakespeare, but are mere
tautologies of the concept of infinity. What might actually be infinite is the
set of possible realizations of such sequences
as utterances, plus the specific details of time, place, tone of voice,
etc., which were not addressed by mainstream descriptions anyway, witness tenet
(4) in § 3.
18.
Still, it is troubling to imagine that an indefinitely (let alone infinitely)
large set of category sequences might call for an indefinitely (let alone
infinitely) large set of rules. So the ‘transformational’ approach was
eagerly greeted as a means for constraining the set of proposed rules by
postulating rules that convert some sequences into other sequences and thereby
provide them all with their respective ‘structural descriptions’. This
attractive idea not merely slammed the door shut again on infinity (which, I
have suggested, was not really necessary) but allowed
some sequences to act as constraints on other sequences, with the rules
acting as channels for relaying the constraints. Within this conception, three
scenarios were possible:
(a)
There exists precisely one such rule set for a given language like English;
(b)
There exist several, perhaps many such sets.
(c)
There exists no such set.
Only
if (a) holds can we predict a steady trend toward convergence and consensus.
19.
The confidence that (a) does hold was buoyed up for a time by the expanded
freedom to devise rules that are not ‘in’ the data but merely held to
‘underlie’ it. The freedom was much enhanced when the domain of rules was
expanded from syntax to include
semantics (§ 11). But the freedom worked against convergence and consensus as
long as it remained unclear how these semantic constraints could be derived and
stated. Syntactic ‘rules’ had been conceived as constraints on linear orders
and needed merely to state where items should go. ‘Semantic rules’ had to
operate between the domain of meaning, which is hardly linear in any
straightforward sense, and the domain of syntax, which presumably is. The
‘sememes’ like ‘± Animate’ or ‘± Human’ were merely binary; if
they were internally ordered, then chiefly by hierarchy, e.g. ‘Human’ being
a subclass of ‘Animate’, rather than by linearity. For the rules to operate
upon sequences, a feature like ‘+ Human’ assigned to a Noun category would
be a constraint on what categories can precede (e.g. of Adjectives) or
follow (e.g. of Verbs).
20.
So the ‘transformational generative’ solution to the spiraling problem of
constraints and rule-sets undercut convergence and consensus still further.
Symptomatic here was the virulent and unresolvable dispute over how much of the
formal arranging of sentences should be done by the syntax or by the semantics.
The ‘standard’ model held the line in favour of the ‘syntactic
component’ as the sole motor of arranging the sequence which was then
‘interpreted’ by the ‘semantic component’; but this scheme made it
difficult for the semantic constraints to actively assist the arranging. In the
converse model (‘generative semantics’), the ‘logical form’ of the
sentence was first set up by the semantics and then ‘interpreted’ by the
syntax to yield the actual sentence pattern; but how can ‘logicality’,
focusing on issues like ‘quantification’ (e.g. ‘all’, ‘some’
‘every’, etc.), be interfaced with linearity?
21.
The ensuing controversies and of the rapid withdrawal of support for
‘generative semantics’ suggest that semantic constraints are vastly more
subtle and complicated than any other constraints linguistics has been seeking.
A syntactic sequence is at least a clear arrangement, with some items definitely
placed before (or on the ‘left’) of other and some some items definitely
placed after (or on the ‘right’). But semantics keeps hitting on ambiguities,
i.e., on cases where the ‘same’ linguistic material may have several
meanings; and so we need a large additional set of constraints to determine
which of those meanings is the chosen one, e.g. for written examples received in
the absence of the writer:
[1]
Blind woman forced by cop to clean up after her guard dog accepts settlement (Evening
Times-Globe [Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada]) 8/17/88
[2]
State Recycling Skyrockets in 1988 (Tulsa World
8/18/88)
[3] Police chase winds through three towns (Saint Croix Courier [New Brunswick, Canada.] 12/14/88)
[4]
Actor sent to jail for not finishing sentence (Knoxville, TN New Sentinel, 1/21/89)
We
could resolve [1] by stipulating that ‘accepting a settlement’ belongs to
the class of actions requiring a ‘Human’ Agent, such as ‘woman’ but not
‘dog’; and that ‘clean up after’ belongs to the
class of standing ‘Prepositional Verbs’ having their own meanings. We
could resolve [2] and [3] three by alternative syntactic descriptions, with
‘Recycling’ being Noun, not Verb, and ‘winds’ being Verb, not Noun; but
do we want semantic rules to stipulate that a ‘state’ cannot ‘recycle
skyrockets’ if it so decides (and can get them back), or that ‘police’
cannot ‘chase the wind’ in hopes of apprehending it, say, on charges of
vandalism and property damage? For [4], we can’t get help from syntax, since
both meanings of “sentence’ (uttered sequence and court punishment) apply to
a simple Noun. Conceivably, an ‘actor’ could end up in ‘jail’ for
willfully violating a contract by breaking off his or her performance in
mid-sentence. Or, less conceivably, some authority could be so convinced of the
inviolate status of formal grammatical rules as to make incomplete sentences a
punishable offense. (Lord knows, sillier laws have been passed, such as that
statute in force on a Norwegian coastal island making it a crime to be in a bad
mood in public.)
22.
Often, we can only resolve such ambiguities by reasoning about what the writer
probably intended to say, based on our knowledge about the world. To assists
semantics in these fresh and thorny tasks of ‘disambiguation’, linguistics
finally turned to ‘pragmatics’, which, being the study of ‘the relation
between linguistic expressions and their uses’ (Webster’s Seventh
Collegiate Dictionary, p. 667), might seem at odds with the ‘classical’
programme of ‘mainstream’ linguistics to study ‘language by itself’ (cf.
§ 3). However, the programme was upheld by conceiving the speaker in a uniform,
stable, and abstract (‘u-s-a’) fashion as a faceless supplier of intentions
to perform ‘speech acts’ that constrain the meaning of sentences. The hearer
was a similarly faceless recoverer of those intentions. So language remained
firmly at the theoretical centre, and the sentence merely acquired the further
role of a basis for reasoning backwards to the speaker’s intention(s) and
forward to the hearer’s recovery of the intention(s). Again, the constraints
were to be stated as formal ‘rules’ at the highest degree of generality.
23.
In this section, I have argued that the historical development of linguistics
was driven by the search for the one set of constraints that apply all across
the language — scenario (a) in §
18. But the long-range failure to attain or merely to approach convergence and
consensus could well be taken (and has been, e.g. Bierwisch 1965) to support to
scenario (b) allowing for several such sets, perhaps a great many. Recent
developments indicate, however, that the lack of convergence and consensus are
instead evidence for scenario (c), stating that no
such set can be ever be discovered. If so, important progress must wait
until the ‘classical’ programme has been fundamentally revised (§ 57-69).
24.
Basically, language can be described as a mediating system interposed like a
layer between a layer of
‘reality’, i.e. the world we live in (however we conceive it to be) and a
layer of ‘society’, which talks in and about that world. Society can of
course go directly to reality by acting upon it, e.g. plowing fields or building
houses. But having language typically makes most such actions more worthwhile
and effective, and makes many other actions possible quite apart from acting
upon reality.
25.
The ‘classical’ programme of ‘mainstream’ linguistics indicates that we
can and should detach language from this configuration and roll the other layers
aside. The validity of this move hinges on the deeper (‘u-s-a’) hypothesis
that once detached, the language system will stand firm: complete and fully
organized by its own internal constraints (cf. § 3). The lines of argument I
have developed in Sections A and B lead to the opposite conclusion: that once
detached, the system tends to skid out of control, and can only be described if
we restore the constraints of reality and society. Much theoretical and
reconstructive work in linguistics has in effect been such a restoration but has
stopped short of drawing the conclusion itself. More often, certain constraints
of reality and society have been disguised as ‘formal rules’ operating upon
isolated sentences, each sentence being a valid instantiation of ‘language by
itself’. When we move beyond straightforward, simple examples hand-picked to
fit the rules (like ‘John is easy to please’), the other missing constraints
take their vengeance upon us by stubbornly blocking convergence and consensus.
And no amount of redoubled ingenuity in designing rules, or ‘extending’ and
‘revising’ the ‘mainstream’ theories, can ever resolve this impasse.
26.
If language were a uniform, and stable, and abstract (‘u-s-a’) system, we
could indeed detach it from reality and society. But such is at most the
putative local status of phonology, with every ‘phoneme’ held uniquely
and precisely in place by physical and mental criteria (§ 6). But in its global
status, language is an evolving
system that is not uniform over time,
and fluctuates between abstract and
concrete. We must take account of how links are temporarily established to
relate items within the current version
of the system (cf. § 48). If we took away the constraints from reality and
society that help to build these transitory networks, the language system would
not stand firm but would skid out of control, whence the principled
impossibility of describing it in that state.
27.
However, this global status supports local
frozen islands, to borrow a key term from complexity theory (e.g. Kauffman
1990a, b). In language, these islands include exactly those formal domains or
factors that have been successfully described by ‘mainstream’ morphology and
syntax. But many other domains or factors remain in flux until they become
relevant for the current version of the language needed to support the ongoing
discourse. The main reason why linguistics did not attain convergence and
consensus was the inappropriate and untested notion that the global status of
the system is frozen, or can be frozen for purposes of description. Doing this
job even partially demands a heroic ‘freezing’ action on the linguist’s
part; and the divergence of the outcome from the outcome of other such actions
is not surprising, but inevitable. We might even predict the degree of
divergence by reference to the relative state of flux that is to be frozen:
lower in morphology, higher in syntax, and highest of all in semantics.
28.
When language is put to use in discourse, brief local ‘freezings’
continually congeal and then disperse, rather like a liquid at a ‘subcritical
stage’ which readily attain ‘critical mass’ and then ‘critical
dispersion’ with modest inputs of energy (cf. Beaugrande, in preparation).
Some of the constraints used here come from the standing frozen islands, while
others are made to order for the occasion. The demonstration sentences picked
for most formal linguistic analysis attempt to take a footing on the standing
frozen islands but they slip off to the degree that this terrain is insufficient
and often slippery as well, whence the disputes among linguists.
C.
Formalism versus functionalism
29. Going back to the two ‘basic facts’ cited at the outset (§ 1),
we can now contrast two fundamental outlooks on language. The ‘fact’ that
language has a high degree of organization is essential for formalism, a term that can subsume all methods construing form
to be the basis and framework of language — how
entities are
shaped or
arranged. The ‘fact’ that people use language to do things is
essential for functionalism, a term
that can subsume all methods construing function to be the basis
and framework of language — what means are used toward which ends. In the
past, constructive interaction between the two stances has been regrettably
hindered by the predisposition of each to regard itself as the outermost
framework of language science and its counterpoint as a limited subdomain, as
suggested graphically in Fig. 2.
30.
The ‘classical’ programme for describing ‘language by itself’ has naturally favoured formalism, since the forms seem to be the
most uniform, stable, and abstract (‘u-s-a’) aspects of language, whereas
functional aspects tend to be associated with use. So it has become conventional
in linguistics to presuppose the
legitimacy of formalism, whereas the legitimacy of functionalism must be
expressly justified. Formalism was
widely held to confer high ‘scientific’ status, whereas functionalism was
either ignored or else patronized as ‘unscientific’, ‘pre-theoretical’,
or merely ‘applied’. So functional research
has been severely held back by inappropriate or premature demands for
rigor, abstractness, generality, and so on, stated as absolute, a priori
criteria of science.2 One concrete symptom has been the routine
efforts of functionalist methods to justify and defend themselves by constantly
reasserting what ought to be obvious, e.g.:
there
is more to using language, and communicating successfully with other
people, than being able to produce correct sentences. Not all sentences
are interesting, relevant, or suitable; one cannot put any sentence after
another and hope that it will mean something. (Cook 1989: 3)
Such
an argument would be pointless had not formalism attached vast importance to
‘grammaticality’ (here, ‘correctness’) of the isolated sentence (§
16f), making it the cornerstone of ‘linguistic competence’ and declining to
inquire whether a sentence might be are interesting, relevant, or suitable in
actual communication, questions which would inevitably reach beyond the
boundaries of ‘language by itself’ (cf. § 4).
31.
Symptomatic too are the many hesitant compromises in which modest amounts of
functional data are cautiously admitted without revising the formalist
framework, e.g. in situating ‘functional sentence perspective’ upon
‘generative semantics’; or in which formalist methods are glibly renamed
‘functional’ ones, as in ‘structural-functional’ grammar. Ironically,
these compromises are sometimes faulted for going too far, whereas their
weakness lies rather in not going far enough!
32.
In the long run, though, pure formalism runs aground on its own austere
principles and is trapped in irresolvable dilemmas because, I have argued, it is
based on hypotheses that stand refuted by the collective result of linguistic
research over at least the past thirty years. The promise for a complete,
precise formal description of any natural ‘language by itself’ remains
unfulfilled not because linguists have not yet worked out the ‘correct’
theory or model, but because no theory can ever freeze the design of ‘language
by itself’ (§ 27).
33.
I would surmise here that the significant advances of functionalism in recent
decades have reached a turning point — a ‘subcritical stage’ close to
‘critical mass’ (in the sense of § 28). Instead of merely patching up or
abetting formalism with sporadic functional constraints, we are now seeking a
convergence and consensus for theories and models which are genuinely and
unabashedly functional from start to finish and which will determine the role
and valence of formality on that basis. We will bring to fulfillment the
long-standing advocacy of the ‘Prague School’ scholars led by Vilém
Mathesius who proposed that instead of ‘proceeding’ ‘from form to
function’, as ‘older linguistics’ had done, we ‘proceed from function to
form’ (1926: 198; cf. Mathesius 1975 [1961]; and see now Nekvapil 1991).
Leading in to his contrast between Czech and English sentences, Mathesius (1975
[1961]: 84f) suggested that functional factors (e.g. ‘theme’) originally
preceded formal ones (e.g. ‘Subject’) and thus coincided with them for a
time, but not for a ‘long duration’.
34.
Let us reconsider in this light the organization of language into ‘levels’
(cf. § 7). The characteristic descriptive formalist scheme had its levels
defined by the units of a set of ‘u-s-a’ systems, one each for phonemes,
morphemes, words or ‘lexemes’, and phrases or ‘syntagmemes’, each being
the subject matter of one established field in linguistics, as suggested in
Table 1.
In
some sense, these units appear ‘in’ the data of language samples, at least
when they have been transcribed into a consistent visual orthography (cf. § 6,
8f). Perhaps encouraged by this visual medium, the relationship among the levels
was assumed, at least implicitly, to be based on a building-block conception of size
and constituency, the
phonemes being the components of morphemes, the morphemes the components of
words, and the words the components of phrases (cf. Bloomfield 1933: 162).
Hence, the whole scheme was held together by a ratio of parts to wholes, even
though the criteria for defining the respective types of units were not
consistent, e.g. features of articulation (like ‘voiced’) applying only to
the phonemes. The meaning of a sentence or utterance should accordingly be the
straightforward sum of the meanings of the parts — a precept expressly stated
by Saussure (1966 [1916]: 121) and Chomsky (1965: 144, 162f), among others. The
validity of the precept could not be seriously tested until linguistics
proceeded from stipulating that phonemes (can) differentiate meanings and that
morphemes have meanings over to stating what those meanings are (cf. § 6ff,
14).
35. A characteristic functionalist scheme, in contrast, might have levels such as ‘intonation’ or ‘prosody’, ‘lexicogrammar’, and ‘discourse’, which are the subject-matter of more recent or less established field in linguistics (Table 2).
Intonation
or prosody is both the sequence of uttered sounds corresponding to the abstract
units (the phonemes) and the overall curve or ‘melody’ of pitch, tone, and
volume of the sounds. The ‘lexicogrammar’ includes not just the morphemes
and the phrase structures, but their cognitive grounding in the community’s
system of world-knowledge about how processes and their participants are
organized, e.g. whether an Action (e.g. ‘accept a settlement’) has a Human
Agent (cf. § 19, 67) (cf. Longacre 1976; Halliday 1985). And ‘discourse’ is
the total communicative event, including gestures, facial expressions, emotional
displays, and so on. These levels are interrelated not through size and
constituency, but through mutually
determining functions, witness
the intonation
curves that are typical for
certain discourse domains (e.g. political speeches). We can turn here to the
influential idea of Frantisek Danes (1964)
that one level be regarded as the means
which serve the ends of the other
levels.
36.
This idea can be insightfully applied also to the more familiar scheme of
descriptive ‘levels’ in order to characterize their relations to each other
and to meaning. As shown in Table 3 (up to down axis on the left side),
37.
This formulation seems well-suited to the precepts of pioneering functionalists.
We can recall here Firth’s pronouncement that ‘descriptive’ or
‘structural linguistics’ should ‘deal with meaning throughout the whole
range of the discipline’ and ‘at all levels of analysis’ (1968: 50, 160).
We can also recall Pike’s warning that ‘the sharp-cut segmentation of
meanings’ is ‘in principle impossible’: ‘meaning has its locus not in
the individual bits and pieces’, but ‘within the language structure’ in an
‘identified context’ (1967: 609, 134). There, ‘the meaning of one unit in
part constitutes’ and ‘is constituted of the meaning of a neighbouring
unit’ (1967: 609). So ‘meaning’ is a ‘contrastive component of the
entire complex’ and ‘occurs only as a function of a total behavioural event
in a total social matrix’ (1967: 148f, 609). Pike’s view might help resolve
such ‘difficulties’ as arise when ‘morphemes’ seem ‘lexically
meaningless’ or ‘lack’ an ‘unchanging core of meaning’ (1967: 184,
186, 598f; cf. Bazell 1949; Bolinger 1950; Hockett 1947; Nida 1948, 1951). And
we can treat ‘semantic variants’ in terms of how they are ‘conditioned by
the universe of discourse’ (1967: 599).
38.
In the functionalist scheme, relations or ratios of size and constituency are
not decisive, because a means relates to its end first and foremost in terms of
its function, purpose, or motivation and only secondarily and at times
arbitrarily through its form, shape, or dimensions. The co-presence of several
‘levels’ follows simply from the requirement that so complex a system as
language must avail itself of several types of items, each type specialized for
some functions more than for others. Each type helps to render it probable
(albeit not totally certain) that the active version of the language system will
support the stretches of discourse that participants actually process, whose
length and complexity are decided on line by ‘packaging and scheduling
strategies’ (see § 44 below) rather than defined a priori by the units of
formal linguistic analysis. For the wherewithal of spoken sounds to be
sufficiently distinctive to be reliably produced and received, the phonemes
supply targets around which the variations of actual uttered and heard speech
are clustered while current contextual constraints ensure that mistakes or
miscues happen fairly seldom and endanger communication even more seldom. To
enable distinctions among the differing functions of the same word-base (e.g.
the stem of a Verb), a language is highly likely (though not forced) to work
with means whose formal signals consist of modifications or expansions of the
base; so the morphemes get organized into modest ‘frozen islands’ whose
borders are stable enough that many cases can be handled with compact resources,
e.g. the Arabic ‘broken’ or ‘internal’ plural that modifies the form
versus the ‘sound’ or ‘external’ plural that adds an ending (like
‘-iin’ to the masculine and ‘-aat’ to the feminine in Spoken Iraqi
Arabic); even special cases are then readily handled, e.g. for assigning plurals
to English words that get borrowed into Arabic, some with the internal plural
like ‘film - aflaam’ (film/s) and some with the suffixed plural like
‘tilifizyoon - tilifizyoonat’ (television/s), depending on whether the word
happens to resemble native words; even nonce-borrowings follow, as observed in
Arab code-switching, e.g. ‘daktoor - dakaatra’ (doctor/s) versus ‘muudeel
- muudeelaat’ (model/s) (Sallo 1994). Finally, the language needs standing
word-base units to carry the brunt of distinct combinable meanings; hence the
lexemes for a large open category whose sub-categories (the ‘parts of
speech’) may be indicated by morphemic systems or by linear position or by
both, whence the dual imperative for syntax. The meaning of the utterance is not
registered separately on any of the levels but is the operational result of the
strategies which draw upon these resources as suits the current context. So such
questions as how much of the formal arranging of sentences is done by the syntax
or by the semantics (§ 20) are unanswerable in principle, because meaning is
never absent from any ‘level’ or ‘component’.
39.
The notions of ‘frozen’ and ‘flux’ can help capture the central
functionalist notions of ‘unmarked’
versus ‘marked’, which has often
been interpreted merely in terms of higher versus lower frequencies. The
standing frozen islands tend to coordinate the most unmarked options, e g. the
Active versus Passive Clause formats of English. The more marked the options,
the more they would tend to involve express momentary ‘freezing’. The effort
of producing and receiving them would depend on this factor rather than on
frequencies of occurrence, which are unduly abstract and computationally
unrewarding or in many cases totally unworkable. In a Shakespeare passage like
this:
[5]
But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander [...]
Fights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite
from their fixure! (Troilus and Cressida
I, iii, 94-101)
the
combinations are strikingly marked, e.g. the ‘married calm of states’; yet
we can comprehend the meaning (i.e. that ‘disorder’ follows when ‘the
speciality of rule hath been neglected’, as Ulysses says) and appreciate the
imagistic effects by performing a similar freezing in our own current versions
of the English language, which may require some literary training.
40.
Viewed this way, degrees of ‘markedness’ become the functional successor to
formal ‘degrees of grammaticalness’. When an utterance is consensually
deemed by native speakers to instantiate a ‘grammatical sentence’ of the
language, it is the output channeled predominantly, though (aside from standing
clichés like ‘no man is an island’) not exclusively, from frozen islands
and their immediate vicinity (§ 46). So we do not have a clean contrast between
yes-or-no or between ‘grammatical’ versus ‘ungrammatical’ unless we set
about to create deliberate ‘non-sentences’, an act which necessarily drives
a wedge between our analysis and the empirical realities of language wherein
‘non-data’ are seldom produced on purpose (§ 4).
41.
The functionalist project advocated above does not reject formalism at large but
rather its claims to be the exclusive source and statement of categories,
criteria, and constraints. Our leading criteria cannot be formality and rigour
as ends in themselves, but empirically and computationally supportable
descriptions of how a language as a complex system can be designed to operate
and evolve as rapidly effectively as it evidently does. Formality and rigour
will not be rejected but shifted to a new position. The results of formalism
would be ‘bracketed’ and situated in a deeper and wider perspective, such
that the patterns and regularities uncovered so far are viewed not
parts of a final description or explanation of language but as data which
still require a functional description or explanation.
42. A promising pathway for research might be to seek formal and rigorous accounts of the ‘requirements for evolvability in complex systems’, such as ‘self-organization’ and ‘selection’ (e.g. Kauffmann 1990a, b). Such accounts are now available across a range of sciences, including mathematics, physics (especially condensed matter physics), astronomy, chemistry, biology, immunology, psychology, economics, computer science, engineering, and robotics (e.g. Anderson et al. [eds.] 1988; Langton [ed.] 1988; Perelson [ed.] 1988; Jen [ed.] 1989; Stein [ed.] 1989; Langton et al. [eds.] 1992; Zurek [ed.] 1990) and suggest significant principles for the new foundations of a science of text and discourse as well (Beaugrande, in preparation). We might thereby explicitly resituate linguistics among the other sciences after a long tradition of either fending off presumed encroachments (as in Saussure’s claims cited in § 2) or making sporadic or sketchy borrowings, e.g. comparing a ‘grammar’ that ‘generates all grammatically “possible” utterances’ with a ‘chemical theory’ that ‘generates all physically possible compounds’ (Chomsky 1957: 48)
43.
As an evolving complex system, language would operate not directly with standing
‘rules’ but with powerful packaging
and scheduling strategies that select some ‘rules’ from a standing
repertory (e.g. that the English Article precedes the Noun) and generate other
‘rules’ on the spot (e.g. that ‘recycling’ is done to commonplace
plentiful objects like paper and cans rather than to uncommon objects like
‘skyrockets’), and apply the rules in some workable order, sometimes in
sequence and sometimes in parallel. These strategies can freely derive
constraints from reality (e.g. that winds are unprofitable to chase) and from
society (e.g. that uttering grammatically incomplete sentences can hardly be a
prison offense) (examples from § 21).
44.
The most powerful constraints would therefore apply not
directly to the sentence as a sequence of syntactic categories, as formalist
linguists have consistently assumed, but rather to the design
processes which are tuning the
‘current version’ of the language and generating those constraints needed
for the ongoing communicative context. Formalist linguists have, as it were,
been looking too far ‘downstream’ for ‘shallow’ constraints on the
sentence itself; but these cannot reveal the working of the system until we
uncover the ‘deeper’ constraints ‘upstream’ that are charged with
specifying constraints at varying degrees of ‘shallowness’, including those
addressed by formalism as well as those above or below them.
45.
It would follow that the language system, or a native speakers ‘competence’
of it, cannot consist of a complete set of standing formal ‘rules’ that
apply to the sentence (cf. § 10, 30). Instead, it consists of a complex of
constraints shading outward from a modest ‘inner set’ of general standing
rules (more or less ‘frozen islands’) likely to apply in most of the
currently active versions of the language, toward ‘outer zones’ (‘in
flux’) wherein more specific and transitory ‘rules’ are set up to sustain
the one currently active version by means of operations for search, activation,
and regulation of linkages among items in patterns. The ‘rules’ about which
linguists do attain consensus would come from that inner set, while the
‘rules’ which remain in dispute would come from the outer zones (cf. § 40).
So what we might take to be an abstract or formal linguistic ‘rule’
describing a formal ‘sentence structure’ would actually be a commonplace
selection or output of operations that fluctuate to suit the motivations and
organizational demands of the context. The notion that such motivations can be
parcelled off to ‘components’ like ‘syntax’, ‘semantics’ and
‘pragmatics’ clouds our understanding of the empirical fact that the
motivations are products of continual interactions. Placed in abstraction and
isolation, those ‘components’
have no organization amenable to complete or definitive empirical discovery and
description, much less to a definitive formalization. Only a fully developed
functional framework can tell us which sections of language can be formalized
and to what degrees.
46.
The precept that actual communication runs on the currently activated system
offers an opportunity to reformulate the whole issue of meaning in terms of
which meanings might be activated at a given moment. One empirical strategy has
been developed in recent research on ‘priming’
(e.g. Kintsch 1988, 1989). A probe item is held to be primed — its level of activation is raised above the inactive
state — if people consistently recognize and respond to it more rapidly than
otherwise, e.g., by pressing a key to signal that it either is or is not an
English word (Kintsch 1989: 197). During text reception such as reading, the
initial association among a word and its possible meanings was surprisingly
found to be not merely non-determinate but
non-selective! So when people are
reading a given word in a text, both its relevant and its non-relevant meanings
are initially ‘primed’ and activated; but after a short time, the
non-relevant ones are deactivated while the relevant ones raise their activation
and ‘spread’ it to farther associates. Suppose you are a speaker of English
reading a text, on a moving computer display, containing the passage:
[6]
The townspeople were amazed to find that all the buildings had collapsed except
the mint
The
text suddenly halts at ‘mint’, and the display gives you a target item to
decide if it’s a real word. For a brief interval up to roughly half a second,
your response will probably show priming for both the relevant target
‘money’ and the non-relevant ‘candy’, but not for the inferrable
‘earthquake’ (what caused ‘the buildings’ to ‘collapse’).
Thereafter, the non-relevant item loses its priming while the relevant and the
inferential items gain. Evidently, the constraints of context exert their
control during this interval and regulate the strength whereby any one word or
meaning is associated with the current ‘control centres’ of the topic.
47.
The importance of this finding can hardly be overestimated. The resulting
‘construction-integration model’ is distinguished case of a major
theoretical revision driven directly by empirical data — a rare event in the
study of language by linguistics and language philosophy. We find concrete
evidence that the meaning of a discourse is not just constructed on the spot,
but with extremely cheap ‘rules’ — in fact, ‘rules’ may not be the
proper term at all. The processing of the discourse at the receptive end first
activates the ‘nodes’ within the knowledge network that are stored for the
each word (or word-part) being recognized. This activation automatically spreads
to the meaning-nodes in the same network. The now active network (suggested by
right-hand graphic of figure 2 in § 26) runs through several cycles whereby the
strengths of the connections are adjusted, some being raised and others lowered;
and which adjustments occur is evidently determined by the constraints of the
context. Here, linguistics and semantics would frame the leading question: what
sort of rules could possibly be skilled and rapid enough to do the job? And how
could they be called up and applied if, at (or near) the split second when they
are needed, the processor has not resolved ambiguous word senses?
48.
The answers may lie in a striking parallel that has come to the fore in
‘complexity theory’, relating again to the ‘requirements for evolvability
in complex systems’ cited in § 42, namely the concepts of
‘self-organization’ and ‘increasing returns’ under the folksy motto:
‘them that has, gets’ (Waldrop 1992: 17; see Beaugrande, in preparation, for
details and sources). The most rudimentary requirements for ‘self-organizing
processes’ have been studied in research on the ‘cellular
automaton’, a self-operating mechanism embodying a ‘programmable
universe’ wherein time is ‘ticked off’ by a ‘cosmic clock’ and space
is filled with an arrangement of discrete ‘cells’, each of which can be in
only one of a fixed repertory of states, say, either living or dead (compare
Burks 1970). With each tick of the clock, this automaton makes a transition
to a new state determined by its own current state and the current state of its
neighbors. The ‘laws’ of such a universe can be encoded in a ‘transition
table’ stating the ‘rules’ for changing from any current state to a
possible consequent state. A cellular
automaton can be simulates with current computer technology , e.g. as a program
for generating patterns of dots on a screen according to rules specified by the
programmer (see Wolfram 1984; Wolfram [ed.] (1986). The simulations uncovered a
surprising regularity conforming to only four classes of ‘rules’ (Table 4),
whose names I have reformulated somewhat (compare Waldrop 1990: 225ff).
Class
1 are ‘doomsday rules’: no matter
what random pattern of living or dead cells you start with, they all get rapid
death within a few time-steps, and the grid on the computer screen goes
completely uniform. Stated within the theory of dynamical systems, these rules
have a single ‘point attractor’, like a marble rolling around in a basin:
wherever it started it would soon roll down and stop in the centre. Class 2 are
‘stagnation rules’ whereby the initial pattern soon congeals into
stable blobs that sit there in a lethargy of faint, regular oscillations. In
dynamical systems, these rules have a set of ‘periodic attractors’, like a
pattern of hollows in a bumpy bowl, in each of which the marble could keep
rolling gently but indefinitely. Class 3 are ‘chaotic rules’ that produce an excess of activity, and the grid on
the screen appears to be boiling with a ‘chaos’ (in an ordinary sense) of
structures so unpredictable and unstable that they break up almost as soon as
they form. In dynamical systems, these rules have a set of ‘strange
attractors’, like a marble rolling around in a bowl so fast and furiously that
it can never settle down. Finally, Class 4 are ‘self-organizing rules’
that produce an ‘order’ of structures which multiply, grow, split, and
recombine in coherent patterns but don’t ever fully settle down. These rules,
which have no correlated ‘attractor’ in the theory of dynamical systems,
seem the most similar to the basic principles that could construct life-systems
and their processes and in fact generate patterns quite reminiscent, say, of the
growth of ferns.
49.
Programmers kept putting in ‘rules’ and sorting them into one of these four
‘classes’ just by watching the results, hoping that the classes can be
reliably distinguished by some definable property. And, surprisingly, one such
property was found in the straightforward ‘survival
probability’, i.e. the likelihood that any given cell would be alive in
the next ‘generation’ ticked off the ‘clock’ (shown in Table 1). A
probability near 0 goes with ‘doomsday rules’, and everything dies off
almost at once. A somewhat higher probability goes with ‘stagnation rules’,
and things survive but in stasis. A 50-50 probability goes with ‘chaotic
rules’, and each cell switches constantly from life to death and back, so that
nothing can stay organized. A ‘critical threshold’ around 27.3% turns out to
go with ‘self-organizing rules’, where life-like structures arise
spontaneously.
50.
The findings in priming during the reception of discourse strongly suggest that
there too, some mode of ‘self-organization’ must be at work, and that its
key feature is again the regulation of critical values, as has in fact been
simulated on computers by Kintsch’s group. The nodes whose mutual linkage is
near these values will become ‘attractors’ for their surrounding sectors in
the knowledge network and thence the ‘control centres’ for building up the
array of knowledge that corresponds to the ‘meaning’ of the discourse as the
construct of the receiver (here the reader), and not as the output of ‘shallow
rules’ called up to map out specific ‘phrase structures’, ‘transform’
them into others, and to ‘interpret’ the result by pasting together the
meanings of the constituent formal pieces. The simulations by the Kintsch group
in Colorado and the group around David Rumelhart and James McClelland in
California indicate that an associative network can support a coherent array of
text meaning (Kintsch’s ‘textbase’) by adjusting strengths of linkage in a
‘connectionist’ manner (cf. Rumelhart & McClelland 1986). Here,
‘concepts are defined in a knowledge net by meaning constructed from their
position in the net; immediate associates and semantic neighbors of a node
constitute its core meaning’, whereas ‘its complete and full meaning’
could be obtained only by ‘exploring its relations to all the other nodes in
the net’ (Kintsch 1988: 164). If so, the attempts of classical semantics to
expound the exact meanings of words necessarily branches out indefinitely,
whence the conspicuous lack of convergence and consensus noted in § 11f.
51.
I would see a confirmation here for my own long-standing conjecture (e.g.
Beaugrande 1987, written in 1985) that language processing entails a significant
margin of ‘non-determinacy’ that has not been adequately reflected in
linguistic theory but is vital for managing language complexity and fluctuation,
especially within the subsystem of ‘semantics’. Against the deterministic
research ‘tradition’ of ‘modelling knowledge use in comprehension by
designing powerful rules to ensure that the right elements are generated in the
right context’, Kintsch and his group have shown us how much can be accounted
for by a ‘weaker production system’ whose ‘rules’ are ‘just powerful
enough that the right element is likely to be among those generated’ along
with ‘irrelevant or inappropriate’ ones (Kintsch 1988: 163f).
Such a system ‘can operate in many contexts’, as befits discourse
‘environments characterized by almost infinite variability’ (ibid.). So ‘a
computational model of text comprehension’ as ‘the construction of a mental
representation of a text with simple, though rough and crude rules’ being
‘used promiscuously’, followed by ‘a wholistic integration phase’ that produces ‘a coherent picture’, would seem
to be ‘psychologically more plausible and computationally more flexible’
than the ‘precise rules’ that classical semantics has envisioned
(Kintsch 1992: 263).
52.
Computers have also made a significant advance in a different direction but
again indicating that relatively few constraints (universal ‘frozen
islands’) apply all across the language as an abstract system. The majority
apply rather to discourse domains or contexts, some sparser, some richer. These
contexts, which have largely remained implicit in ostensibly formal analysis (§
4), can now be systematically described through huge computerized corpuses of
real language data, such as the ‘Bank of English’ at the Birmingham
University, which, as of January 1994, contains ‘several hundred millions of
words of running text’, with an operational sample corpus of 167 million words
of text from 797 British and American books; newspapers (Times,
Independent, Guardian, Today, Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Economist);
magazines; radio broadcasts (BBC and NPR); and recordings of conversations4
(cf. Baker at al. [eds.] 1993). Such data banks can reveal regularities that
simply aren’t evident either from modest samples or from introspection of
native speakers (Sinclair 1992a, b). The question of how general a given
regularity might be is no longer a matter of intuition subtly biased by a vested
interest in situating things on the highest plane (§ 5, 17, 33). Instead, it is
a matter to be verified by looking at sets of contexts in which key words appear
more often or less often, and at the phrasings which frequently link certain
word-types.
53.
An interesting case in point is the Verb ‘build up’. If used in the Active
as a Productive Process with a Human Agent as Subject and with a Target, the
corpus collocations show an ameliorative attitude (e.g. when ‘you build up an
organisation’); used in the Medial with a non-human Subject as Developmental
Process and no Target, the collocations show a pejorative attitude (e.g. when
‘cholesterol builds up in the body)’ (Louw 1993: 171).4 In
formalist linguistics, such a factor would probably be set aside as
‘subjective’, ‘vague’, or simply ‘extralinguistic’.
54.
Admittedly, the display of data by no means eliminates the need for careful
interpretation by the investigator nor transfers it over onto the computer. The
assignment of attitudes just mentioned is still a subjective decision based on
our world knowledge about whether things involved with ‘building up’ are
good or bad. But such a display of data is the surest basis I can see for
regaining convergence and consensus about the nature and the extent of potential
regularities of a language, including ones that might go unnoticed or might turn
out to be quite different than we would conclude by relying only on our
intuitions and introspections (cf. § 10). Thus, the advent of reliable
large-corpus data should be a fine opportunity for reconsidering how to build
functional theories and methods closely attuned to realistic data.
D.
Conclusion and outlook
56.
The recent research and findings sketched in the foregoing section at least
justify some optimism that within the framework of discourse and discourse
processing we can find theories and models of language that attain impressive
degrees of rigour and formality without remaining bound to the ‘classical’
programme of ‘mainstream’ linguistics summarized in § 3 and especially to
the now refuted ‘u-s-a hypothesis’ (cf. § 5f, 10, 13f, 22, 25f). In their
stead, we could seek to formulate a ‘post-classical’ programme with new set
of hypotheses like these:
(1a)
A language should be considered a fluctuating
and evolving system moving from one activated
version to another.
(2a)
Language constitutes a communicative
system defined by internal
and external criteria.
(3a)
Language is a phenomenon integrated with
many other domains of human
knowledge or activity.
(4a)
The language should be described in
respect to variations due to time, place, or identity of speakers.
(5a)
The description of a language should be couched in statements at varying degrees of generality between the entire language and the
specific discourse context.
Despite
first appearances, such a programme does not promise to undermine consensus by
admitting a wealth of complications and alternatives that had previously been
filtered out. Instead, it shifts the search for consensus to a higher plane,
where we agree to use all available investigative means to determine the
validity of such hypotheses instead of merely placing them as eternal first
principles ahead of and above our day-to-day inquiries.
57.
The ‘new generation’ of functional theories and methods will
undoubtedly look rather different in several ways from the
varieties that have long held centre stage in formalist linguistics. I
shall wind up by citing twelve prospects we can foresee. First, we will need a
flexible outlook for sorting out an onrush of functional
data, including much that has not been given prominent roles in conventional
linguistics. For instance, pejorative and ameliorative speaker attitudes cited
in § 54 will need to be admitted as a valid constraint.
58.
Second, we can expect a critical
reappraisal of seemingly secure principles of linguistics. A prominent instance here is the venerable
distinction between the grammar as a
set of patterns and phrasing versus the lexicon
as the set of words and idioms in the ‘vocabulary’ of the language (cf.
Francis 1993). The usual arrangement has been that the grammar gets the
regularities and the lexicon gets the irregularities (e.g. Sweet 1913 [1875-76]:
31; Chomsky 1965: 86f, 142, 214ff). The data from the ‘Bank of English’
reveal that a considerable number of lexical items have distinctive grammatical
proclivities; and conversely, that certain grammatical phrasings are highly
likely to take certain types of lexemes, e.g. ones indicating the attitude of
the speaker, as we just saw.
59.
Third, we can anticipate new pressure to reconsider
our familiar divisions that parcel out language into ‘levels’ (or
‘components’’). Whereas the characteristic formalist scheme had levels
defined by the units of ‘langue’ and related in terms of size and
constituency displays, the functionalist scheme sees the levels related to each
other and to the types of meaning in terms of means and ends (cf. § 35-38). The
‘mapping’ between means and ends is only secondarily executed in terms of
forms and patterns and is substantially more adaptive and non-deterministic than
the mapping between parts and wholes.
60.
Fourth, we will need to officially
discard the ‘langue/parole’ dichotomy descended from Saussure — a move
already prefigured by functionalists (Trnka 1964; Pike 1967; Halliday 1973;
Stubbs 1993), since we have exhausted the issues that can be treated under its
auspices and have been unduly confined from there on. The most interesting new
statements we can make about language will be those showing how an English text
or discourse is a dialectic
that reconciles the two Saussurian poles: some aspects are more general
for the language at large and some are specific to the single situation. To tell
which is which, we need no longer rely on intuitions or follow our vested
interest toward the general, but can display and collate the contexts within a
large corpus, and see which aspects are in fact the more typical ones.
61.
Fifth, unified functional categories may
subsume diverse formal categories. In a ‘cognitive functional’ grammar,
the categories of world-knowledge about how Processes (Events and Actions) are
organized (§ 35) can productively group categories according to whether and how
they indicate what brings the process about. This suggest beside the familiar
distinction between Active and Passive, where the Agent is more likely to be
explicit for the first than the second, a large class of Medials wherein the
Agent in the ‘medium’ of the process, e.g. when a person ‘behaves’ or
‘grows taller’ but also when a person ‘is tired’ or ‘feels ill’.
This class cuts across the formally defined classes traditionally called
‘Intransitive Copulative’ and Intransitive Complete’.
62.
Sixth, we might explore why some
functional categories are more typically expressed in some formal patterns
rather than others. The English Imperative is among the clearest indicators
of Process types, apparently because it has remained relatively unaffected by
the diversification of social roles following the rise of the middle and working
classes, during which more indirect and adaptable means of command and request
were derived instead from Modal Verb constructions, Interrogatives, and so on.
Here, we might inquire into the real and social constraints on commanding an
Action, e.g that the Action have a genuine intentional Agent capable of
performing it and controlling it. More specifically, the prototypical Emotives
in English do not make the Agent the controlling Medium but a Medium in a
vaguely controlled State expressed as a Modifier with a Verb like ‘be’ and
‘feel’, e.g. ‘be happy’ and ‘feel sad’.6 For social
motives, the unmarked Imperatives are Positive with the Ameliorative Aspect,
e.g. ‘be happy!’, but Negative with the Pejorative Aspect, e.g. ‘don’t
feel sad!’ (Beaugrande, in prep.). Conversely, these Imperatives tell us about
how a society rates Emotions and sets the ‘display rules’ for these.
63.
Seventh, functional accounts need not be
strictly ‘linguistic’ in sense
of the classical mainstream programme that (in terms of the ‘layer-cake’
parable, § 24f) sought to detach language from its role of a mediating system
interposed between ‘reality’ and ‘society’ on the deeper (‘u-s-a’)
hypothesis that once detached, the language system will stand (compare § 3,
26). In contrast, the hypothesis just cited about English Imperatives could lead
to social and cultural research on the typical strategies for giving commands.
In a ‘pre-modern’ culture with firm beliefs in the power of ritual magic to
affect the weather, a command like ‘sun, ripen our crops!’ might be unmarked
in a ritual context, whereas in a ‘modern Western society it might seem
childish or facetious. In such respects, large-corpus data will often suggest
hypotheses that lead the statement of function constraints toward cultural contexts.
64.
Eighth, the foregoing prospects might open
new horizons for cross-cultural studies, provided that similar empirical
tests and large corpuses could be carried out for other languages besides
English. In mainstream linguistics, the common demand that ‘grammatical
description’ should ‘recognize only those linguistic distinctions which are
formally expressed’ (stipulated even by Firth 1957a [1951]: 222) has been
offset somewhat by the accumulation of languages in which these distinctions are
quite diverse, witness Bloomfield’s (1933: 176) ‘surprise sentence’ and
‘disappointment sentence’ accredited because they are formally signalled in
Menomini though not in English. The accumulation has made linguists sensitive to
a wide range of functional categories, even if demands like Firth’s have made
them wary about going beyond the formal classes of the individual language. It
is surely no coincidence that the pioneers in British ‘functional’ research,
such as Firth and Halliday, were Orientalists who urgently needed functional
categories to describe languages like Chinese or Hindustani. We can not turn
again to languages like English with a sharpened sense for functions that are
not formally signalled but are no less vital, e.g the intonation contours that
reliably convey surprise and disappointment.
65.
Ninth, new approaches will require a
theoretical superstructure in keeping with a stated cognitive interest,
simply because we cannot master such a volume and variety of data and aspects
without setting clear priorities (Beaugrande, in preparation). A theory tailored
to teaching English for special purposes (‘ESP’), e.g. the discourse of
computer science, may look quite different from a theory tailored to teaching
English as a foreign language (‘EFL’). In the former case, the overall
tendencies shown by a large corpus will be less decisive than those shown by a
subcorpus for the discourse domain in question;5 in the latter case,
the sampling from which teachable instances are to be drawn will need to be
adjusted to the culture of the prospective learners and to the discourse
strategies of the native language. In both areas, most theories and methods put
forward so far have not been based on adequate representative data, and have
been organized more by formal than by functional criteria.
66. Tenth, whereas formal analysis is usually considered finished when it
has attained an exhaustive segmentation of the data or rewritten them all into
formal notation and state rules that ‘assign a structural description’, a
functional analysis would elect to stop when it has attained ‘ecological validity’ by providing some relevant and
non-trivial insight into discursive practices, e.g. how some discourse
strategies make knowledge more widely accessible than others (Beaugrande, 1991b,
1991c, in prep.) and how strategies might support equality among participants
and bring practices of inequality to heightened awareness (cf. Atkinson
and Heritage [eds.] 1984; Chilton [ed.] 1985; van Dijk 1988, [ed.] 1990;
Fairclough 1989; Wodak [ed.] 1989; Drew and Heritage [eds.] 1992). This work
would motivate the analysis to lead into constructive and collaborative social
interventions, e.g,. to design writing programs for training people to use the
strategies that make knowledge more widely accessible (cf. Halliday and Martin
1993). Striving for such ‘ecological validity’ requires us to weigh
potential applications in advance of our research, whereas applications of
formalism are typically made after the fact or not at all, since the top goal is
to subserve some abstract and timeless ideals of ‘science’ and ‘rigour’.
For example, the typical formalist conflation of spoken with written language
must yield to a careful differentiation if we want to apply our research to such
issues as improved reading and writing programs (cf. Bereiter and Scardamalia
1987; Čmerjková and Šticha [eds.] 1994).
67.
Eleventh, we stand to gain if we do not assume that an analysis is valid only
when it converts natural language data into a formal representation, e.g.,
English sentences into the formulas of predicate calculus, upon which rules can
easily act because they are written in much the same notation. According to my
line of argument, this act means freezing the data, on the untested assumption
that they are reliably maintained within the system in a frozen state. Insofar
as the freezing also sheds contextual constraints, it defeats rather than
advances the search for a complete, definitive analysis and undermines
convergence and consensus. It seems more productive to retain
the text or discourse as its own representation in some orthography whose
use favours convergence and consensus, and apply clearly stated strategies of
description, analysis, and explanation, such as a ‘cognitive functional
grammar’ situated close to semantic and pragmatic concerns (cf. Halliday 1985:
xvif) (§ 35, 61). These strategies place the method in a ‘user-friendly’
proximity to the data yet ensure that it does not converge with them.
68.
Twelfth, functional approaches can offer the new labours they bring by offering
some decided advantages. They will be eminently
suited to treat real data that has not been ‘cleaned up’ or idealized at
all except insofar as is necessary for transcription into the corpus. Also such
approaches will be much more
user-friendly, since no special training would be demanded for rewriting the
data into elaborate formal representations. For many purposes,regularities such
as that noted for build up can be
presented in sensible everyday discourse to wider circles, such as language
teachers or authors of style manuals.
Notes
2 According to a
convention not yet fixed in early linguistics,
phonemes, as abstract sound units get placed in slanting lines but as
‚phonetic‘ descriptions get placed in square brackets (e.g. Moulton 1962:
4); if morphemes are sequences of phonemes
(§ 34), the former notation
should apply. Conceptually, however, the difference is much less clear than the
visual appearance, and does not acknowledge how much of the work is really being
done by the letters of the alphabet. Already, conventions of notation were
enlisted in constraining the analysis without sufficient awareness of the
implications (cf. § 15).
3 An egregious case
was Dressler’s (1970) attack on
the Prague School, taking it as given that functionalist methods must identify
all relevant formal units, along with their boundaries and mutual position,
before progress can be made.
4 Data kindly provided by Ramesh Krishnamurthy, then Development Manager at
Cobuild (now at Aston University), in a letter to me of April 13, 1994.
5 Mr. Krishnamurthy informs me that Cobuild has a ‘consolidated suite of
in-house programs that allow us to select any combination of subcorpora and
provide us with concordances’ and with ‘information’ on ‘frequency’,
‘collocation’, and ‘word-class’ (compare Note 4).
6 Though limitations of space preclude
an explicit presentation here, I use here the terms for Processes and Aspects
from the ‘cognitive functional grammar’ set forth in Beaugrande (1997),
which draws on and modifies such functional grammars as Halliday (1985); compare
Chafe’s (1970) ‘semantic structure’ and Longacre’s (1976) ‘notional
structure’.
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