In Vladimir
Patras, (ed.), Socio-lingvisticke a
Psycholingvisticke Aspekty Jazykovej Komunikacie. Banska Bystrýca:
Univerzita Mateja Bela Fakulta Humanitnych Vied, 1996, vol. 1, 15-26.
Robert de Beaugrande
Florida reporter completes sentence
— Editor and Publisher, 4/24 1993
1. Linguistics, psychology, and sociology
1.1. The long-term relationship of linguistics to
psychology and sociology has been complex and unstable. In the early years, the
relationship was essentially programmatic, based on somewhat ambivalent
statements by the various founders of linguistics (survey in Beaugrande 1991),
that language is definitely a psychological and sociological phenomenon, but
that linguistics must not be regarded as a branch of psychology or sociology.
1.2. Instead, linguistics resolved to found its claim
to be an independent science on the conception that language is a uniform,
stable, and abstract system to be studied apart from its use in communication.
This conception created a backlog of neglected issues that would only much
later be taken up by psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
1.3. To the extent that the relationship between
psychology and sociology was rather strained for several decades, the prospects
of them uniting to absorb linguistics were remote in any case. Psychologists
insisted on heavily controlled laboratory
experiments and quantifiable results.
Sociology welcomed naturalistic settings
and qualitative results. The chief
reason for this difference was that many crucial human activities were not directly observable from a psychological
standpoint but were from a social standpoint. Psychologists thus felt impelled
to set up tight environments wherein behavioural clues of unobservable
"mental" processes might be credibly assembled. The more constricted
the experimental apparatus, the more it reassured the psychologists. The
sociologists, in contrast, could refer to a predominantly observable
behavioural substrate with reasonable distinctness and reliability.
1.4. Had the two sciences felt somewhat more secure
during their early years, they might have been more inclined to merge their
explorations into some consolidated "psycho-social superscience". But
they both felt highly self-consciousness in a scientific ambience dominated by
"physicalism", "positivism", "unified science",
and so on, which regarded all the "human sciences" as disturbingly
"soft" in comparison to the "natural sciences", especially
physics. So each "human science" had to mind its borders carefully
and postpone any inclination to open them to a neighbouring discipline with quite
different ideas about how science ought to be conducted.
1.5. Where might linguistics have tried to fit into
this scientific ambience? Should it incline toward the laboratory experiments
in strictly controlled designs, or toward the rich interactional situations of
ordinary communication? As we know, "mainstream" linguistics as a
whole did neither. The use of the laboratory was confined mainly to phonetics,
while interactional situations were confined to being the data substrate for
linguistic fieldwork on previously unrecorded languages. In neither of these
modest appropriations did linguistics seek to borrow very consistently or
extensively upon the theories and methods of psychology or sociology.
1.6. In
addition, some influential linguists believed that reliance upon one of the two
neighbours logically precluded reliance upon the other. British
"functionalists" like Firth and Halliday roundly asserted the primacy
of sociology over psychology as an orientation for linguistics, whereas American
"mentalists" like Sapir and Chomsky just as roundly asserted the
opposite. This split was closely related to the split between functionalism versus formalism. A functionalist account
exploits rich interactional constraints upon the patterns of language being described,
and shares the sociologists' interest in symbolic behaviour. A formalist
account tends to consider those details "performance data", rather
like "scatter" or "noise" that ought to be stripped away by
formalising the "purely linguistic" data, and tends to project a
psychological domain of "underlying structures" which compensates for
the discounted interactional constraints.
1.7. So the long stand-off between functionalism
versus formalism in linguistics further impeded a consensus about interaction
with sociology and psychology. Only recently have the prospects brightened for
a unified view of function and form in language, thanks to major new
developments in such areas as discourse processing and large corpus
linguistics, as will be sketched later on.
2. The emergence of psycholinguistics
2.1. Eventually, sociolinguistics and
psycholinguistics had to emerge, but under the provision that both of them
would remain clearly delimited by the theoretical and methodological framework
of linguistics proper. The psycholinguists would chiefly test the
"psychological reality" of the constructs postulated in linguistics
(survey in Clark & Clark 1977). On a simple plane, the handiest project
would be to show how people perceive and comprehend sentences through
procedures that resemble or run parallel to the analysis of sentences practised
in mainstream linguistics: in the "descriptive structuralist"
approach through "immediate constituent analysis", and in the
"generativist" approach through "transformational derivation".
Not surprisingly, the main emphasis fell upon syntax, just as it did in
linguistics, for instance, in experiments showing that perception and recall
are better when a series of words forms a cohesive syntactic pattern than when
it does not.
2.2. The difficulties for such a discipline could be
readily predicted from the factor that the majority of linguistic theories had
not been intended as descriptions of the operations performed by speakers and
hearers. The structuralists simply didn’t entertain such a prospect. The
generativists seemed more proximate, but, due to their characteristic
disinterest in empirical demonstrations, they occasionally repudiated this
interpretation as a "misunderstanding" of their work (Chomsky 1965).
Still, the misunderstanding was frankly encouraged by the heavily
"mentalising" terminology of the descriptions, such as the famous
"deep structure".
2.3. The severest limitation upon early
psycholinguistics arose because both descriptive and generative linguistics
historically took the sentence to be the largest "purely linguistic"
structural unit. Going "beyond the sentence" would have implicated
presumably "extralinguistic" factors and thus unsettled the tidy
demarcation of linguistics from the neighbouring sciences, which was for so
many years part of its claim to be a "science". Significantly, the
linguistic schools that were least strongly committed to the sentence, namely
linguistic fieldwork in America and "functional" linguistics in
Britain, were also the ones with a stronger leaning towards sociology than
towards psychology, and were not intensely involved with psycholinguistics.
2.4. The centrality of the sentence in linguistics
obliged researchers in psycholinguistics to conduct experiments on the doubtful
assumption that speakers and hearers process exactly one sentence at a time.
Experiments dealing with two or three sentences were infrequent and were still
conceived in terms comparable to the single sentence, e.g. for probing the
connection between pronouns and their referents. Presenting single sentences
encouraged an unnaturally strong focus on syntax, which neatly suited the
commitments of formal linguistics. But differently conceived experiments soon
provided counter-demonstrations that meaning is more important, especially in
respect to the organisation of a topic (e.g. Bransford et al. 1973; Bransford
& Johnson 1973). By implication, this finding undermined the centrality of
the sentence, though the sentence continued to be the usual unit in psycholinguistic
research for some years.
3. The emergence of sociolinguistics
3.1. The staunch reliance upon linguistic theory had
a no less pronounced impact on sociolinguistics. The top task, not surprisingly,
was to discover which social or regional variations applied to the descriptive
schemes that linguistics had already formulated, especially when phonology and
phonetics were deployed to study pronunciation (survey in Dittmar 1976). Yet
even from the start, sociolinguistics was rather more iconoclastic than
psycholinguistics because, in direct contrast to psycholinguistics, it was very
hard to proceed without disrupting the central conception of linguistics that
language is a uniform and stable system. Several prominent sociolinguists (e.g.
Dell Hymes) explicitly interpreted their findings as a repudiation of this
conception though, in the United States at least, they usually still formulated
their discussions within the terms and concepts of mainstream linguistic
theory.
3.2. In Britain, sociolinguistics had a more
prominently social and "extra-linguistic" orientation centring on the
thesis that social variation in language corresponds to distributions of wealth
and privilege, which would have sounded rather outlandish in psycholinguistics.
Also, the British school had a powerful interest in applications: not merely to
describe social variations but to suggest how their more negative consequences
for human inequality might be attenuated.
3.3. Intriguingly, one of central grounds upon which
this campaign was first argued was psychological — although this seems to have
had no visible impact upon psycholinguistics of the same period — namely that
variations of language reflecting social status were also symptomatic for
psychological or cognitive capacities and limitations. The most famous case was
the unfortunately named "deficit hypothesis" of the London group
around Basil Bernstein, whose linguistic groundings were descriptive and functionalist.
3.4. Further strains could be anticipated as
"generative" formalist linguistics underwent progressive abstraction
and drifted steadily further from any potential for socially relevant
applications. The sociolinguists had to push all the more energetically in the
reverse direction, even at the cost of seeming less and less
"linguistic".
3.5. We can see similar pressures upon the field of applied linguistics, which for a long
time remained so firmly committed to linguistics that it neglected rich
opportunities to interact with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics at a time
when all three fields were grappling with similar problems about how to
reinterpret linguistic descriptions so as to accommodate modalities and
purposes that had not been intended. These shared problematics could suggest a
reconciliation: might not the integration of psychological and social aspects
into the spectrum of linguistic concerns also be the most auspicious basis for
designing applications? Conversely, might not the impetus toward applications
provide rich and significant constraints upon the inquiries of
psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics? Although this reconciliation does not
seem unduly abstruse, it has not attracted any large following in any of the
three fields until recently. What appears to have happened instead has been a
gradual and largely unguided evolution driven primarily by the need to adapt
and interpret the theoretical and methodological instrumentarium inherited from
linguistics without discarding the basic thesis that language is a uniform,
stable, and abstract system. The thesis has mainly just been qualified for
particular sets of situations or groups of speakers, each of whose version of
the language was still assumed to be stable and uniform, e.g., the "restricted
code" and the "elaborated code" envisioned by Basil Bernstein
(1964).
3.6. A
predictable consequence has been an unproductive disinterest in many of the
contextual constraints that are reflected in cognitive models of reality and in
social models of interaction. It is this disinterest that eventually stymied
formalist theoretical linguistics.
4. Future prospects
4.1. Since the late 1970s, the tidy borders between
the various disciplines cited in sections 1-3 have shown encouraging signs of
melting away. The driving motive, I would suggest, has everywhere been the
sense of stagnation and crisis setting in as each discipline reached the limits
of the issues and problems it could address by itself. In mainstream
linguistics, the project of describing language as a uniform, stable, and
abstract system has been discredited by the obvious long-term inability of
linguistics to attain either a convergence
in the descriptions of data or a consensus
about their theories and methods. It has become all too clear that the attempts
to separate language from its psychological and social settings effectively
prevents us from describing language beyond a few well-behaved domains, such as
phonology and morphology. Important progress cannot be achieved by continuing to
"formalise" the data and to reconstruct abstract and purely
linguistic constraints, but only by resituating language in its ordinary
settings and determining the relevant constraints via a sound empirical and
interdisciplinary basis.
4.2. In retrospect, we can aptly regard
psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics as moves to incorporate selected aspects
of world-knowledge and social knowledge into the framework of linguistics
proper. Progress was eventually slowed by the decorum of incorporating just
enough sociology and psychology without endangering the central control of
linguistics over the directions of research in these adjunct areas. The fact
that this restriction proved less tense in psycholinguistics suggests that many
categories of linguistic theorising had a rather psychological cast to them
anyway, whereas their social grounding had been more shaky. We might conclude
that different speakers of a language resemble one another more in the types of
psychological operations they perform than in the types of social activities
wherein they deploy language; yet this conclusion seems a bit too simple in
view of the impressive degrees of consensus we see in the social organisation
of conversation. Or, we might conclude that the psychological domain simply offers
more leeway to reconcile small-scale activities in the perception and
comprehension of isolated sentences with the fairly non-committal
specifications of conventional linguistic theorising. Or again, we might
conclude that to recognise the social differentiations and variations carried
by language tends to awaken intuitive resistance among academics, particularly
those who share similar dialects and idiolects; this conclusion is supported by
the unmerited furore which greeted the sociolinguistics of Basil Bernstein.
4.3. What future scenarios are on the horizon in
1994? In one scenario, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics will simply persist alongside conventional
linguistics, much as they always have, taking their cues from its trends. But
this scenario seems unlikely, given the spiralling sense of stagnation and
crisis with each of the three disciplines, due, I have suggested, to the rather
isolated and fragmented views of language itself.
4.4. In a second scenario, the leading figures in the
three disciplines will meet to renegotiate their interactions with more
flexibility and equality, assigning a considerably amplified role to
psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics for restating the issues and problems in
primarily psychological and social terms. In return, linguistics would
officially renounce its project to describe language apart from world-knowledge
and social knowledge and could regain its grounding in real data by turning to
large corpuses of authentic texts stored and displayed in computerised banks
(Sinclair 1992a, 1992b). These moves would create more freedom to
"theorise" by relaxing the uneasiness over whether certain issues are
properly "linguistic".
4.5. Cognitive linguistics on the psychological side,
and systemic functional linguistics and critical linguistics on the
sociological side are intermediaries that could add further support to projects
to account for language in more directly psychological and social terms. For
example, "grammar" would not be described as a relatively autonomous
set of formal rules, but as a modality for organising typical processes,
actions, and events in everyday life (cf. Halliday 1985; Givón 1989).
4.6. A fourth and most "radical" scenario
would be a multi-disciplinary science of text and discourse with a sufficiently
broad theoretical and methodological framework to accommodate all the relevant
disciplines (Beaugrande 1980, 1984, in preparation). Here, the boundaries of
disciplines conventionally found in academies, universities, and so on, would
be bracketed as products of historical and political trends that are no longer
conducive even to the officially recognised programs, let alone to programs
which fall somewhere in between. This scenario, which has been the focus of my
own work for the past fifteen years, has led me to conclude that we can make
the most significant new progress by diversifying
and integrating, that is, by applying multiple methods to a given issue
while explicitly working to draw together what they might have in common.
4.7. Would such a "multi-disciplinary science of
text and discourse" still have recognisably independent fields of
psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, or would it integrate them and their
concerns into a broader and more nuanced perspective? The answer still hangs in
the balance, and it might be instructive to conclude here by citing some
central theses that such a "multi-science" might develop (cf.
Beaugrande 1994, in preparation).
4.7.1. The text is not merely a linguistic unit, but an event of human action, interaction,
communication, and cognition.
4.7.2. The main source of data should be naturally occurring texts and discourses.
4.7.3. Text analysis is rich and
expansive rather than formalised and
reductive.
4.7.4. Text research obliges the investigator to engage and
re-engage with the texts rather than
to strive for the idealised separation of subject from object, or scientist
from data.
4.7.5. Text science should continually
reflect upon its own procedures by
declaring and justifying its motives in terms of epistemological interests bearing on the relations between texts and society.
4.7.6. Text linguistics should
not be a "normal science"
as a battleground for warring "paradigms" but a science for cooperation and integration among alternative paradigms.
4.7.7. Text linguistics should
adopt an encompassing interdisciplinary
perspective.
4.7.8. "Critical" text research should support vital social goals such as establishing freedom of access to knowledge or revealing and redistributing communicative
power structures.
4.7.9. Text research should interact with institutions and groups both
inside and outside the academy, such as
teachers of native or foreign languages, language pathologists, language
planning agencies, and so on.
4.7.10. To
manage our agenda of tasks, a coherent
research plan should be adopted.
4.8. The need for such an agenda to explore
psychological and sociological issues should be immediately evident. To the
degree that psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics have depended on conventional
linguistics, these theses may sound unusual and unduly demanding, perhaps even
a bit utopian. However, for the reasons I have outlined in sections 1-3, we all
seem to be at a turning point in our respective fields, and some important
decisions will have to be made soon.
4.9. A science of text and discourse could repay its
debts to psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics by modelling the transactions
whereby these two disciplines gather their data. Psycholinguistics has
typically followed along by designing experiments with sparse language
materials such as individual sentences with trivial meanings, rather than, say,
an interesting story, in the belief that the mental operations to be monitored
would be simpler. But in a rich system, sparse materials would be processed in
non-typical ways, so that the experimental results could not claim as much
generality as is usually implied. In particular, removing test persons from
their ordinary social settings into a laboratory brings them into a novel transaction
in at least three modes. In the social
transaction, one group (experimenters) is empowered to select and shape the
task for the other group (test subjects), discounting their social status. In
the cognitive transaction,
specialised methods are deployed to "read" the interaction between
material (e.g. pressing a key) and data (e.g. recognising a sentence). In the discursive transaction, experimenters
give instructions, collect verbal responses, interpret and publish findings,
and so on.
4.10. Unlike the natural sciences such as physics or
chemistry psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics have directed their
observations and investigations toward humans, who are themselves fully capable
of all three transaction modes; and these capabilities need to be explicitly
accounted for. If we remove natural constraints, as psycholinguistics usually
does, then either the people under study will invent artificial constraints, or
the results will be underconstrained and therefore potentially inconsistent
(Kintsch 1977). If we try to leave people in natural settings, as
sociolinguistics usually does, we face the problem of how we conduct our
investigations without depriving the situations of the "natural"
qualities (Baugh 1983).
4.11. Psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics could
thus make important contributions here by jointly exploring the implications of
adjusting constraints on people and their uses of language. We could thereby
not merely indicate where our past methods can be situated in a broad
multi-science but could also suggest a wider and more nuanced range of
alternative methods for the future. In this spirit, the issues of
psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics will always be worth our interest
wherever they arise all across the human sciences.
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