Text
linguistics at the millennium:
Corpus
data and missing links
robert
de beaugrande
Abstract
Text
linguistics seems to have originated chiefly in order to expand the search for
constraints, which was being noticeably impeded by the self-imposed
restrictions in a ‘linguistics’ centred on isolated, invented sentences
and abstract formalisms. Yet early attempts to bring the ‘text’ into the
scope of such a linguistics now seem inverted: for us the actual text, not the
invented sentence, must be the essential linguistic unit, and is sustained by
internal systemic organisation and by its external systemic organisation
within one or more ‘intertexts’. In the coming millennium, this prospect
can now finally be documented and clarified by working with very large corpora
of authentic texts, whereby we can hope to uncover some of the vital and
delicate missing links between ‘language’ and ‘text’.
Keywords:
virtual and actual system; theory and practice; theoretical and
practical; intuition; collocability and colligability; delicacy; large corpus
data; intertext; intersystemic event
A. ‘Language’ and ‘text’ in ‘modern
linguistics’
1.
Modern ‘general linguistics’ has been a singular enterprise, at times most
sharply distinguished from other approaches to ‘language’ by its
self-imposed restrictions. Since its outset, it has been influenced by Saussure’s
(1966 [1916]: 232) aspiration that ‘the true and unique object of
linguistics’ should be ‘language studied in and for itself’. In effect,
this vision of ‘linguistic’ science has been pursuing the question: what
would ‘language’ look like when it’s off by itself and not being used
(cf. § 14, 82) ?
2. An unwelcome answer would
be that it no longer looks like a real
language. If so, the term ‘language’ used by this linguistics loses
its ordinary meaning, namely: a mode of communication used among the members of a
human community. Some common uses in this meaning can be seen in these
authentic data supplied in July 1994 from the ‘Bank of English’ at
Birmingham University, the world’s largest computerised text-data corpus,
then containing over 200 million words (cf. § 60, 64, 89) :
(1) you should be pleased that the French
language has been spared
(2) he has no qualifications in teaching
English as a Foreign Language
(3) it’s old-fashioned, and it’s in a
foreign language. People are frightened of it
(4) I was told afterward that my language was
most entertaining
(5) fatally damaged? I don’t want to use
language of that sort
(6) there is a lot of bad language and
gratuitously oafish behaviour
(7) General
Kryuchkov used the language of the Cold War when he accused the US
(8)
He violently opposes the new language law, which makes major
concessions to ethnic minorities
Sample
(1) concerns the ‘French language’ spoken as a native language by a
whole nation, whereas sample (2) concerns the ‘English language’ as
a subject-matter to be ‘taught’ to, and learned by, people who speak a
different native language. Sample (3) implies that ‘a foreign
language’ may contribute to ‘frightening people’. Samples (4) , (5) ,
and (6) indicate how particular uses of ‘language’ get evaluated. In
sample (7) , ‘language’ covers both the style and the content of what a
Russian General said — belligerent in tune with the ‘Cold War’. And
sample (8) mentions a government regulation concerning which language or
languages should be used and when, for instance as an ‘official language’
in a multilingual country. So all these uses relate to real people who either
might use a ‘language’ for communication, or else might be hindered in
doing so because they had ‘no qualifications’ (2) , or because the
‘language’ was ‘foreign’ (3) or was restricted by a ‘language
law’ (8) , and so on. None of the uses matches ‘language in and for
itself’ in the austere theoretical meaning of Saussurian linguistics.
3.
This mismatch might explain why Saussure (1966
[1916]: 9, 11) asserted that ‘speech cannot be studied’, ‘for we
cannot discover its unity’; it is only a ‘heterogeneous mass’ of
‘accessory and accidental facts’ (§ 10, 21f, 39, 82) . Later, Chomsky
(1965: 4, 201) asserted in similar vein that the ‘observed use of
language’ ‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics, if
this is to be a serious discipline’; ‘much of the actual speech observed
consists of fragments and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts’. As if
in parallel, these same linguists asserted that ‘the concrete entities of language are not directly
accessible’ (Saussure, 1966 [1916]: 110) ; and that
‘knowledge of the language, like most facts of interest and importance, is
neither presented for direct observation nor extractable from data by
inductive procedures of any known sort’ (Chomsky, 1965: 18) .
4.
The mismatch is thus a signal that ‘language’, being the true
‘subject-matter of linguistics’ as a ‘serious discipline’, is not what
real people hear or see in ‘actual speech’. Another well-known claim then
falls into place: ‘linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal
speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its
language perfectly’ (Chomsky, 1965: 3) . Neither this ‘speaker’ nor this
‘community’ ‘exist in the real world’, as Chomsky (1977: 172)
has calmly conceded. So the true nature of ‘language’ is known only to
academics whose degrees in ‘theoretical linguistics’ somehow equip them
with privileged access to ‘perfect knowledge’ (cf. § 29, 34, 83) .
5.
One of Saussure’s (1966: 8) most candid acknowledgements also falls
into place: whereas ‘other sciences work with objects that are given in
advance’, in ‘linguistics’ ‘it is the viewpoint that creates the
object’. What he did not acknowledge but has been extensively displayed in
the subsequent history of modern linguistics is that multiple ‘viewpoints’
create multiple ‘objects’, whereby the meaning of the term ‘language’
has grown steadily more unstable and obscure. Linguistics has been fragmented
into disputatious factions, each assigning to ‘language’ its own idealised
meaning. And much time and print has been expended upon disputing over whose
idealisation is better without turning for adjudication to the evidence of
real language in ‘actual speech’ (Beaugrande, 1997a, 1998a, 1998b) .
6. What then about the status and meaning of the term text?
In the field proposed by linguists from Saussure up through Chomsky, the
‘text’ would seem to merit no home at all. As Halliday (1994: xxii)
has remarked, Saussure’s ‘understanding of the relationship between the
system of language and its instantiation in acts of speaking’ implied that
‘the text’ ‘can be dispensed with’; and ‘linguistics, for much of
the twentieth century’, has accordingly been ‘obsessed with the system at
the expense of text’
7. A few linguists did proffer a home for the ‘text’ in
their theories, but failed to secure it in their own practices of
investigation. For Hjelmslev (1969 [1943]: 12) , ‘the linguistic
investigator is given’ ‘the as yet unanalysed text in its undivided and
absolute integrity’ (but cf. § 88) . So ‘linguistic theory starts from
the text as its datum and attempts to show the way to a self-consistent and
exhaustive description of it through an analysis’ (1969: 21) . The
‘theory’ must also ‘indicate how any other text of the same premised
nature can be understood in the same way’ by ‘furnishing us with tools
that can be used on any text’ (1969: 16) . ‘Obviously, it would be humanly
impossible to work through all existing texts’, and ‘futile’ as well, if
‘the theory must also cover texts as yet unrealised’ (1969: 17) (cf.
§ 88) . Even so, Hjelmslev counselled that ‘linguistic theory’ should
seek to ‘describe and predict’ ‘any conceivable or theoretically
possible texts’ ‘in any language whatsoever’ (1969: 16f) . He even
stipulated that ‘linguistic theory’ should ‘foresee’ ‘a language
without a text constructed in that language’ (1969: 39f) (cf. § 37) .
8. Hjelmslev’s line of argument implied a programmatic move
to situate the ‘text’ inside the same abstract theoretical sphere as
‘language’ (or ‘langue’) defined by Saussure, whose programme
Hjelmslev is known to have heartily approved. We might sense a remarkable
expansiveness in the aspiration for ‘linguistic theory’ to provide one
single method of ‘description’ and ‘analysis’: first for the one
‘unanalysed given text’, then for ‘all theoretically possible texts’,
and finally even for the non-existent texts of ‘a language without a
text’. How this aspiration could be put into practice is obscure: in the
four published volumes of Hjelmslev’s writings, I could not find even one
demonstration. His only directive was that ‘the text is regarded as a class
analysed into components, then these components as classes analysed into
components, and so on until the analysis is exhausted’ (1969: 12f) . So the
text would be like a big chunk of language waiting to be taken to pieces which
would then be taken into smaller pieces, over and over, until we arrive at the
opposite end from its ‘undivided integrity’ (§ 7, 57) .
9. We might contrast Hjelmslev’s programme with that of J.R.
Firth, who declared that ‘the text is the main concern of the linguist’
(1968 [1952-59]: 24, 90, 173) . ‘All texts’ ‘in modern spoken
languages’ are considered to ‘carry the implication of utterance’ and
are ‘referred to typical participants in some generalised context of
situation’ (1957 [1951]: 220, 226) . So the ‘attested language text’
should be ‘duly recorded’ and ‘abstracted from the matrix of
experience’ (1968: 199f, 99) . Since it may not be ‘possible or desirable
to present the whole of the materials collected during the observation
period’, some ‘corpus’ is ‘essential’ (1968: 32) (cf. sections
E, F, and G) .
10. Still, Firth did not intend to countermand Hjelmslev’s
programme by situating the text on the side of ‘speech’ in opposition to
Saussure’s ‘language’, because Firth (1968: 28, 41, 127, 139f)
roundly rejected the whole dichotomy between ‘langue and parole’. By
‘referring’ the text to ‘typical participants’ and ‘generalised
contexts’ and by ‘abstracting it from the matrix of experience’, the
linguist would lift the text up from the merely ‘heterogeneous,
accessory, and accidental’ plane where we saw Saussure
situating ‘speech’ (§ 4) . Unfortunately, Firth’s own four published
volumes give only a few sketchy demonstrations, far short in practice of what
his writings on theory projected.
11. At all events, the ‘text’ was likely to remain on the
margins of linguistics as long as it was eclipsed by the sentence. Curiously, the ‘sentence’ did not start out as the
prototype of ‘language’ in the meaning of Saussure. He had argued that although
‘the sentence is the ideal type of syntagm’, ‘it belongs to speaking
[parole], not to language [langue]’ (1966 [1916]:
124) . However, his reservations distinctly placed the sentence on both sides: ‘in the
syntagm there is no clear-cut boundary between the language fact, which is a
sign of collective usage, and the fact that belongs to speaking and depends on
individual freedom; in a great number of instances it is hard to classify a
combination of units because both forces have combined in producing it, and
they have combined in indeterminate proportions’ (1966: 124f; see Beaugrande,
1999a for discussion) .
12.
These early reservations did not prevent the sentence from later occupying the
centre of modern linguistics, most famously when the ‘generative’ approach
defined a ‘language’ to be an ‘infinite of set sentences’ (Chomsky,
1957: 13) (cf. § 32) . Officially, the ‘sentence’ was a unit purely
restricted to ‘syntax’ or ‘grammar’, two terms now used as if they
were interchangeable, although they cannot be, as we shall see (§ 17f) . Yet
this restriction could not be sustained during attempts to actually formulate
a ‘generative grammar’, even for small samplings of invented English
sentences. The term ‘sentence’ was also being unofficially used (among
other things) for a semantic unit that should be called a
‘proposition’ and for a pragmatic unit that should be called a ‘speech
act’, as if to paper over the ‘indeterminate proportions’ in
Saussure’s reservation (Beaugrande, 1997a) . So just when ‘generative’
linguists were volubly announcing that the ‘study of competence abstracts
away from the whole question of performance’ and ‘why speakers say what
they say, how language is used in various social groups, how it is used in
communication, etc.’ (Dresher and Hornstein, 1976: 328) , the concept of the
‘sentence’ was being quietly stretched and bent in the direction of
‘performance’ (cf. § 50) .
13.
As long as the ‘sentence’ was getting stretched, the need to recognise the
‘text’ might not have seemed urgent. But the restrictions of the single
sentence eventually had to become onerous for linguistic investigations even
in the narrowed area of ‘syntax’ or ‘grammar’. And some linguists
would eventually respond by looking ‘beyond the sentence’ and at the
‘text’. Not surprisingly, much early work in ‘text linguistics’
emblematically aspired to build upon what now came to be called, for purposes
of contrast, ‘sentence linguistics’ — a term that would have seemed
oddly redundant to the ‘generative’ approach. By exploiting the
‘indeterminate proportions’ implicit in the sentence (§ 11) , such work
need not settle the question of whether the ‘text’ might be a unit of the
‘actual speech’ rejected by the linguists who had followed Saussure and
Chomsky (cf. § 3, 10, 23) .
14.
The most straightforward strategy for getting the text inside a linguistics
designed for the sentence would be to define the ‘text’ as a sequence
of sentences. As such, the ‘text’ could smoothly inherit the
established properties of the sentence, such as being ‘grammatical’,
‘well-formed’, and ‘rule-governed’. Yet disputes arose in the early
1970s over the question of whether those properties were sufficient, so that
established ‘sentence linguistics’ could account for whatever might be
found (Dascal and Margalit, 1974) ; or whether new properties would be found
that belong or apply only to texts (van Dijk, 1972) .
15. Text linguists naturally favoured the second option, which justified
their work as an accredited field. But in retrospect, I find the question
inverted. Following such leads as Hartmann (1968, 1971) and Schmidt
(1973) , we can accept the text as the essential linguistic unit and then
explore the status of the sentence as one of the potential segments within a
text, and thus one that could explicitly benefit from the previously implicit
bending in the direction of performance (§ 12, Beaugrande, 1999a) . Moreover,
the sentence could richly inherit the properties that have since been
established for the text, such as being ‘cohesive’, ‘coherent’,
‘intentional’, ‘acceptable’, ‘informative’, and ‘situational’
(Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981) (cf. § 59) .
16.
In the process, we might reach the unsettling conclusion that syntax
doesn’t exist in natural language insofar as the term means a system of
‘formal rules’ for arranging words together in sentences (cf. § 14)
(compare García, 1979; Givón. 1979; Beaugrande 2000) . As already implied by
Saussure’s reservation about the ‘sentence’ (§ 11) , speakers and
writers certainly select and combine words in response to important
‘non-syntactic’ factors, such as lexical preferences, communicative
situations, and personal motivations (§ 98-101) . To assert that these
factors are all ‘beyond the sentence’ or ‘outside the sentence’ is to
ignore their potent effects inside
the sentence and to block off significant resources for description and
analysis.
17.
The restrictions of syntax become most obtrusive when it gets directly equated
with ‘grammar’ (§ 12) . Despite the once fashionable notion of a ‘deep
structure underlying surface structure’ (e.g. Chomsky, 1965) , a
‘grammar’ which looks only at the order of words inside isolated sentences
and not at ‘why speakers say what they say, how language is used in various
social groups, how it is used in communication’ (§ 12) must remain a
shallow and superficial enterprise. In English — unlike many other languages
— word-order is sufficiently ‘frozen’ in some areas to sustain carefully
selected Aspects of the Theory of Syntax;
and these have indeed been the concerns of ‘generative linguistics’ until
it withdrew into ‘universals’ and ‘mental representations’, where the
‘sentence’ is no longer crucial (see Beaugrande, 1998a for discussion) .
18.
A realistic and empirically justified ‘grammar’ would rather be the front
end for all the relevant motivations that speakers or writers typically
apply or reflect when they put classes of words (e.g. Nouns) or of
word-parts (e.g. Suffixes) in one order rather than another (cf. § 101)
. This lesson might also be drawn from the recalcitrant obstacles encountered
by the early projects of text
linguistics to construct a text grammar
from the top down in the narrow and abstract ‘generative’ sense. The
‘text grammar’ for a fairly short text by Bertolt Brecht (‘Herrn K.s
Lieblingstier’) , which even shows a simple vocabulary and some parallelisms
in its phrasing, got tangled in an explosive complexity of ‘rules’1
(cf. van Dijk, Ihwe, Rieser, and Petöfi, 1972) , and the project was
eventually abandoned with no official conclusion (cf. § 38) . The same fate
can be predicted for any project to describe ‘texts’ on comparable levels
of abstraction and formality: what gets ‘abstracted away’ during the
‘formalisation’ would be vitally needed in order to account just for the order
of words, and far more for the choices
of words (cf. § 40) .
19. The converse approach for a ‘text linguistics’, and
the one that has gradually won out, is to work from the bottom up. We need to
examine a comprehensive range and variety of authentic texts and explore what
sorts of properties deserve to be accounted for, including, but not restricted
to, those of ‘grammar’ in the broad sense of § 18. We can apply whichever
categories and concepts of previous ‘linguistics’ seem productive, but we
can also apply ones from adjacent fields, such as literary studies, cognitive
science, artificial intelligence, ethnography, economics, and political
science (cf.
Beaugrande, 1980, 1997a, in preparation) —
whatever bases we can enlist in exploring how speakers do select and combine words inside
phrases, clauses, sentences, or any other relevant units, such as paragraphs,
essays, or science textbooks.
20.
This approach has a distinctly Firthian flavour, although we can exploit
fields, methods, and resources that were not available to Firth and his
pupils. Today, we are far better positioned to ‘observe’
and ‘collect’ a ‘corpus’ of ‘attested language texts’ and
to determine what is ‘typical’ and ‘generalisable’ (§ 9f) .
Admittedly, the sheer size of the task remains daunting enough to indicate why
Saussurian linguistics was so eager to rule out the ‘study of speech’ (§
3) . Yet the task deserves to be at the top of our agenda for the next
millennium.
B. Virtual system and actual system
21.
As a provisional strategy, some ‘text linguists’ (myself included)
have for a number of years been proposing to view the relation between a
language and a text as one between a virtual
system and an actual system. One pioneer
for this view was the eminent linguist and language philosopher Peter
Hartmann,2 who, together with his pupils (e.g. Siegfried J.
Schmidt, Roland Harweg, Walter A. Koch, Götz Wienold) , were the most
thoughtful originators of text linguistics. Against
any linguistics that might view texts being like Saussure’s ‘speech’,
i.e., ‘heterogeneous’, ‘accidental’, and devoid of ‘unity’ (§ 3)
, we maintain that the text is internally
systemic on its own terms and is externally
systemic in respect to other texts (§ 47, 99) . The text is thus an intersystemic
event during which multiple systems interact and converge (§ 89) .
22.
This viewpoint does not mean that ‘the interplay of langue and parole
somehow vanishes on the level of texts’ — a consequence inferred from my
work by Lindemann (1981: 126) . Much in the spirit of Firth (§ 10) , text
linguistics firmly rejects the dichotomy of ‘langue and parole’ for having
been deeply misconceived all along. The major flaw, not widely recognised, has
lain in attributing to ‘language’ an ideal
order, and to ‘speech’ an accidental
disorder (Beaugrande, 1998a, 1998b, 1999a) . The bizarre implication would
be that using a ‘language’ in ‘speech’ triggers an abrupt catastrophic
transition from stable and integrative order over to unstable and
disintegrative disorder. Conversely, the linguist whose ‘study abstracts
away from how language is used in communication’ (§ 12) miraculously
restores the pristine, ideal order. The practices of linguistic investigation
would consist chiefly of ‘idealising language’; yet we should be wary of
projecting an ideal that is fully disconnected from real language (Beaugrande,
1998a, 1998b) (§ 97) .
23.
Nor again does this same viewpoint mean that ‘texts seem to be exclusively
created by an actualisation of lower-level virtualities’, and that ‘texts
do not dispose of any virtual systemic aspects of their own’ — further
consequences inferred by Lindemann (1981: 126) . Of course texts hinge
crucially upon the ‘virtual systemic aspects’; our problem is that
‘virtuality’ is not readily isolated from ‘actuality’ when we work
with real texts. Lindemann himself proposed that ‘actually occurring texts
may be virtualised by exploring’ their ‘systemic aspects’, yet this
is precisely what text linguists do in practice though without describing our
practices by that term. However, we cannot be just putting ‘virtuality’
back into a space where it has been ‘actualised out’, because texts always retain some aspects of their virtuality as long as the
language is still known and used.3
So the ‘text’ is not just a unit of ‘actual speech’ (‘parole,
langage, performance’ etc.) in the senses of Saussure and Chomsky (cf.
§ 3, 10, 13) , but is rather a unit
which actually links language to speech.
24.
Some powerful evidence for the ‘virtuality’ would be that a single text
can be received and interpreted (‘actualised’) in more than one way
by different participants in a text-event or even by the same participant at
different times. Such is indeed a constitutive principle of literature; the literary text might, as Wellek and Warren (1956: 152)
have done, be compared to ‘langue’, and each ‘individual realisation’
to ‘parole’. Yet far from navigating between the order of ‘langue and
the disorder of ‘parole’ (§ 22) , the audience recreates a novel order for the ‘textual world’. Your motivation and reward
for reading or listening to a literary text is are thus to be a privileged
participant each time in constructing its ‘world’, whose order is in part
your own creative achievement (Beaugrande, 1988) . The same process would
apply, on a far less conscious plane of creative awareness, for the
actualisation and re-actualisation of any
text; literature merely accentuates and thematises the process to deepen and
broaden our understanding of the human situation.
25.
The implication would be that the ‘same’ text need not have the ‘same
order’ for everybody. At least in its fine details, each actualisation is
unique and unrepeatable. Moreover, each participant has a partially
individualised knowledge of the virtual system, with greater variation in the
lexicon and lesser variation in the grammar (§ 83ff) . So we must resolutely
address the questions of how and how far the respective actualisations of any
text can agree or coincide well enough for a text receiver to feel confident
of ‘understanding’ what the producer ‘meant’; or for several
participants to receive a text in what is thought to be the ‘same way’
Evidently, the degree of convergence among participants in a text-event is achieved on line
through the interaction of multiple systems whose design both anticipates and
adjusts to these achievements.
26.
The production and reception of a text would be complementary transitions between a more open mode and a more closed
mode of systemic order;
and these two modes would determine each other in a continual
dialectic. Contrary to the
assumptions of linguistics cited above, we would conclude that these two modes
of order must be quite proximate: the order of language is more closed and the
order of texts more open than has been widely acknowledged before (§ 56) .
27.
Text linguistics accordingly needs to develop models of how the one mode of
order sustains and tunes
the other. We might postulate a cycle whereby the language ‘actualises’ to
sustain and tune the texts, whilst the texts ‘virtualise’ to sustain and
tune the language. My intransitive usages of the two verbs may sound esoteric,
since the agents of these reciprocal activities are of course the participants
in the text-event; but the activities are normally just by-products of
communicative interaction and do not match what the participants are
consciously doing or intending to do (Hartmann, 1963) . The exceptions would
of course be the poets, whose enterprise consists of seeking and testing new
ways of organising language (Beaugrande, 1978, 1988) .
28.
Our own enterprise as text linguists consists of consciously
‘virtualising’ texts whenever we ‘actualise’ them for the purpose of
drawing inferences about the order of the virtual language system (§ 23) . A
key question, still to be adequately explored, is our own version of the
well-known problem of ‘participants’ versus ‘observers’ (cf. Harweg,
1968) . How can far our conscious
and attentional ‘actualising-for-virtualising’ correspond to, or
accurately describe, the unconscious
and automatic actualising and
virtualising of ordinary text producers and receivers; and what might occur
during our processes of making conscious and focusing attention? Quite
plausibly, the potential of the texts being investigated gets considerably
more elaborated precisely insofar as we prolong and intensify the cycle
postulated in § 27 (see also § 83ff) .
29.
In addition, the principle of each participant having a partially
individualised knowledge of the virtual system (§ 25) must apply to us
too. What might be our status as individuals and within the wider community?
Even if we could set aside our academic training and consider ourselves
reasonably typical, we could not yet
consider ourselves representative,
due to several constraints. The most obvious constraint is that the language
experience of any individual, even
one who has read or written extensively, is only a small part of the
experience of the community. Instead of conveniently taking the community to
be ‘homogeneous’ and purporting to have privileged access to the
‘perfect knowledge of the language’ (§ 4) , we need to lay open the
degrees of real uniformity and diversity among language users and among their
texts to large-scale adjudication with substantive evidence.
30.
A less obvious constraint on being representative could be inferred from the virtuality
I have suggested that texts always retain (§ 23) . This cannot be directly
measured by their manifested uniformity, because ‘virtuality’ is by definition open and
dynamic, and what is manifested is the actuality
that partly confirms it and partly specifies or modifies it to suit the
context. Instead of vowing that ‘knowledge of the
language’ is ‘never presented for direct observation nor extractable from
data’ (§ 3) , we can assume that ‘knowledge of the (virtual)
language’ never totally converges
with any set
of actualities, but does move steadily
closer toward convergence as the set gets larger and more diversified. In
that sense, we all — text linguists or not — remain ‘language
learners’ throughout our lives as we accumulate experience with texts. Text
linguists are just exceptionally self-conscious ‘learners’, ‘observing’ and ‘extracting’
whatever we can in the knowledge that there is always far more beyond it all.
31.
Still another constraint on being representative is the unresolved uncertainty
about intuition providing the source
for a ‘grammar’ to ‘describe the intrinsic competence of the idealised
native speaker’ (Chomsky, 1965: 24) . Contrary to such well-known claims,
unaided intuition is not broader and deeper than language experience but
narrower and shallower. It is best secured for the more stable and general
‘frozen’ areas of the virtual system whose virtuality seems static and
hence independent of ‘actual speech’, whence the preference for
restricting linguistics to a few Aspects
of the Theory of Syntax (cf. § 17) . But intuition is not well secured
for the dynamic cycles of actualising and virtualising precisely because of
the continual tuning. The interacting systems settle down in delicate detail
only at the respective stages of the interaction itself. So the native
speakers’ intuition may well not be reliable for telling you what they would
say until there arises a real-life occasion when they do say it. Intuition operates most smoothly after the fact in making
sense of what has already been said (§ 99) .
32.
This overall line of argument also indicates that the language system never
settles down in a ‘synchronic’ dimension; consequently, all attempts since
Saussure to construct a ‘synchronic description’ are doomed to be partial,
restricted, and provisional. However, these limits should not disband the
‘synchronic’ linguists so much as rather resituate their enterprise. Like
total convergence (§ 30) , ‘synchronicity’ is a factor we can move closer
to yet never attain. It is not set apart in some ideal ‘language’
disconnected from ‘speech’ but represents the totality of simultaneous
actualisings of the virtual system (cf. Harweg, 1968: 142) . So we cannot
remotely achieve any ‘synchronic description’, however partial, by ‘dispensing with texts’
(cf. § 6) ; we need bigger and better means for examining what large sets of
texts have in common.
33.
We thus return to a deep question: if language and text, or virtual and
actual, are closely interconnected yet never converge, how then are their
connections sustained? On a highly general plane, we might stipulate: the language is a set of texts; each text is one member of the set.
We might interpret this stipulation by viewing a ‘language’
as one vast ‘continuous text’, as ‘the totality of what has been written
and spoken (or perhaps even thought) in a language’ (Harweg, 1968:
142, my translation) .
34. We might feel reminded here of the definition
(already
cited in § 12) of a language being ‘an infinite of set sentences’ (Chomsky, 1957:
13) .4 The term ‘infinite’ merits closer examination, as I have
shown elsewhere (Beaugrande, 1998a) . The ‘infinity’ was hypothesised on
the simplistic mechanical basis of ‘recursive devices’ (Chomsky,
1957: 23f) whereby any sentence could, in theory, be made longer or more
complex. In practice, the set of infinitely long or complex sentences is an empty
set and thus an intractable object for constructing a ‘grammar’.
Nor can it plausibly be attributed even to the
‘perfect knowledge’ of ‘ideal speakers’, who also form an empty set of
humans (or superhumans) (cf. § 4) .
35. Still, for the sake of argument, we could infer that if
a text is defined to be a ‘sequence of sentences’ (§ 14) , then
‘generative’ theory would allow for an infinitely
long text.
That text would be theoretically equivalent to one superlong sentence with
‘sentence boundaries as sentential connectives’ (Fodor and Katz, 1964: 491)
. Yet such a text would also inescapably belong to an empty set. At most, our
theorising could plausibly postulate the concept of an infinitely long intertext,
whose practical correlate could be a conversation in which the ‘last word’
can never be said. Such a notion has a ‘post-modern’ or
‘post-structuralist’ flavour, though we are arguably still dealing with an
empty set. What is given is a real set of intertexts such as conversations,
each of which is at any one moment finite, though quite possibly still open,
such as the discourse of history, which could be definitively terminated only
if history came to an end.
36. Halliday (1997: 6) has for some time ‘preferred
to reverse the principle and characterise a language as an infinite system
generating a finite body of text’; but following a recent discussion where I
pointed out that, in terms of mathematical theory, the ‘infinite’ must
include combinations with infinitesimal probabilities, he now favours
‘replacing “infinite” with “indefinitely large”’. The finiteness
of the set of texts in existence at any given moment in time is hardly
disputable, but is a weak constraint for a living language, especially one
spoken as widely as English. Another weak constraint comes from the
‘indefinite largeness’ of the set of potential texts in English. The key
question, as pointed out elsewhere by Halliday (1993) , remains: how does the
set of existing texts constrain the set of potential texts such that, at any
given moment, some ways of adding to the existing set are substantially
more probable than others?
37. Problems with sets also arose when, influenced by the
high-level aspirations of ‘generative linguistics’, some text linguistics
essayed to formulate the constraints for distinguishing the set
of texts from the set of non-texts
(see Dressler, 1972 for discussion) . At the time, these constraints seemed
intuitively plausible in theory, but we can now see why they proved
intractable in practice. The attempt to create a non-text is always just one
step within an ongoing textual event, and thus still a sub-text, however
unconventional. Its ‘textuality’ is locally disrupted but globally
sustained. So in both theory and practice, the ‘set of non-texts’ is one
more empty set and therefore obeys no
constraints. Nor can it be
identified with the set of non-existent texts for which Hjelmslev would have
us postulate a ‘language’ (§ 7f) , since those would still be
‘texts’, although virtual — texts of a ‘language’ whose ‘textual
process’, i.e., its actualisation, is itself purely ‘virtual’ (cf.
Hjelmslev, 1969 [1943]: 40) .
38.
I shall cite just one more constraint on our being representative: the
practices of text linguistics who analyse and describe texts inevitably add to
the set of texts. We thus incur the additional challenge of probing the
relations between the set of texts we are analysing and the set of texts we
are producing as we go along (cf. § 83ff) . This challenge corresponds to
Firth’s (1968) distinction between ‘language under description’
and ‘language of description’, and to his epigram about linguistics being
‘language turned back on itself’. Evidently because science in general has
preferred to regard its own texts ‘as a purer code, eschewing rhetoric and simply
reporting natural fact’ (Bazerman, 1988: 6, 14) , this challenge is still
far from fulfilled. My own studies have consistently found that the relation
between scientific texts and their domain they purport to account for is
complex and unstable, especially when that domain is language itself, as in
modern linguistics. Far too little attention has been devoted to the
practical strategies of a linguist producing and receiving a text about
‘language’, even though they have significant effects upon the operations
and results of ‘theorising’ (Beaugrande, 1984, 1991) .
39.
For the present discussion, one effect I would highlight has been the
widespread textual strategy among linguists of inventing sets of artificial
pseudo-texts, usually isolated
sentences which are either trivial in their ‘grammaticalness’ (like ‘the
man hit the ball’) or else wildly bizarre in their
‘ungrammaticalness’ (like ‘*ball the hit ball man the’) . These are
intended to capture some constraints, optimistically called ‘rules’, of
the ideal system being called ‘language’; and their artificial status may
even be deemed to purge them from the
‘heterogeneous’
and ‘accidental’ qualities of ‘speech’ (cf. § 3) . But in the account
I have proposed here, the production of pseudo-data would ‘tune’ the
language system out of its natural ‘frequencies’, and thus lead to the
postulating of a pseudo-system which
does not deserve to be called a ‘language’.
40.
A second effect I would highlight has been the widespread textual strategy
among linguists of formalising texts,
apparently to render them more amenable to a scientific account (as in Koch,
1971; Ballmer, 1975) . The actual result is to create a set
of semi-texts that are artificial in a different way from pseudo-texts,
namely in having some features or aspects of texts whilst many other features
have been ‘abstracted away’ (§ 12, 18) . These semi-texts are not
trivial; in practice, they may be almost incomprehensible to everyone but
their creators. The production of semi-data would thus also tune the language
system out of its natural frequencies, and lead to the postulating of a semi-system which deserves to be called a ‘language’ no more
than does a pseudo-system. The practices of the linguists during this
production remain quite arbitrary and ad-hoc until we have a full and
creditable account of which features or aspects should or should be
‘abstracted away’ and how the remainder should be ‘formalised’.
41.
The practices of ‘formalising’ texts might correspond to a theory of the
‘text’ itself being a theoretical unit underlying a practical unit called
‘discourse’ (cf. van Dijk, 1972) . Here, we might recall Hjelmslev’s
aspiration to
get the ‘text’ inside the same abstract theoretical sphere as Saussure’s
‘language’, which Hjelmslev himself never attempted to demonstrate in
practice (§ 8) . And, as I have remarked (§ 18) , the demonstrations for
‘text grammars’ displayed an explosive complexity of rules and features,
precisely insofar as a text is not solely a theoretical or virtual unit
but also a practical and actual unit. If we disregard or ‘abstract away
from’ its ‘practicality’ and ‘actuality’, we lose a host of
significant constraints; trying to replace or reconstruct them all with rules
and features is a gratuitous, self-defeating exercise.
42.
Instead of complicating the relation between language and text with sets of
pseudo-data and semi-data, the preferable alternative strategy would be to let
the texts
represent themselves (§ 82) . The texts would retain the same
representation as recorded speech or writing within the experience of the
community of participants in text-events. Special annotations such as
representing the intonation of speech in a written format should be clearly
authorised by the purposes of the investigation and should not impede unduly
comprehension or access to the data.
43.
The practices of text linguists would then not entail transforming texts into
some other representation but rather transforming our own modes of accessing
and exploiting texts as data sources. We need to base our own authority not
upon holding higher academic degrees in ‘theoretical linguistics’ (cf.
§§ 4, 29) but upon examining large sets of authentic textual data
(section H) .
C. Theory and practice
44. These deliberations about the theories and practices of
text linguists counsel us to move onto a higher plane (doing what Peter
Hartmann used to call ‘Überhöhung’) .5 There, we
could define a ‘language’ to be
a general theory of human knowledge and experience evolving in a
dialectical relation to texts as a
set of practices for working out the theory (cf. Hartmann, 1963; Halliday,
1987) . By that definition, all the members of a language community are
implicated in the ‘theory and practice’ of language and text (cf.
Beaugrande, 1997b, 1998c) . More precisely, they sustain and share a dynamic
theory which evolves through a criss-crossing
interaction of many implicit and partial theories about how the practices
of everyday life and ordinary talk are organised. Whilst the diverse contexts
come and go, different partial sub-theories (rather than the whole theory)
are applied and specified in and through the practices.
45. To be sure, a language is a highly unique type of theory.
It cannot be effectively tested and verified or falsified in the familiar
manner of a ‘scientific theory’, because it partially constitutes
what it postulates. We cannot get outside
language in order to talk about it without implicating ourselves in it (cf. §
38) . Such would seem to be the aspiration of projects to ‘formalise’
language, but they merely end up replacing it a ‘semi-system’ whose
relation to real language presents even more knotty problems (§ 40) .
46. Nor again can we say that any one language is a ‘more
correct theory’ or a ‘more valid theory’ than any other. The potential
of any language for expressing human experience is infinite in theory, though
always finite at any one moment of practice. Some languages have, for
historical of political motives, had their potential more fully actualised in
specific domains, such as science and technology. Such is true of English but
by no means ‘validates’ the language to be the ‘superior’ one so often
extolled in the discourse of ‘International English’ (discussion in
Pennycook, 1994; Beaugrande, 1999b) .
47. Now, by the definitions proposed above, what has been
officially called a ‘theory of language’ or a ‘linguistic theory’ so
far would be a ‘meta-theory’, whereas the texts we produce to formulate and expound the
theory would display our ‘meta-practices’.
According to my line of argument here, these ‘meta-domains’ would be
fundamentally different depending on what their object of investigation is
declared to be. In the meanings of Saussurian and Chomskyan linguistics,
‘language studied in and for itself’ is a theory about itself, about pure
‘theoreticalness’
disconnected from the practices of ‘actual speech’. In consequence, their ‘linguistic
theory’ would be a ‘meta-meta-theory’,
as shown most programmatically in the English title of Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena
to a Theory of Language. This theory is doubly remote from practice, and
the practices of ‘doing linguistics’ in general and ‘building linguistic
theories’ in particular are radically under-constrained. Not surprisingly,
many books on ‘theoretical linguistics’ have been sharply critical of the
prior state of the field and have proposed to make a fresh start (Beaugrande,
1991: 334ff) . Over time, ‘linguistic theory appears to offer a stunning variety and
disparity of clashing doctrines’, and ‘striking divergences in terms,
slogans, and technical contrivances’ (Jakobson, 1970: 12) .
48.
But if our object is declared to be authentic texts, then
a ‘text-linguistic
theory’ stays proximate to the practices of real language-users, and our own
meta-practices would not be radically under-constrained. Indeed, we can
productively invest our own status as participants in analysing or
interpreting data produced for a community to which we rightly belong, such as
the readers of the Times, so that
our ‘text-linguistic practices’ are reconciled with the practices in our
object domain, though of course not simply converging with them. Against the
tendency of
‘scientific discourse’ ‘to hide itself’, as if it were somehow ‘not
writing at all’ (Bazerman, 1988: 14) (§ 38) , a ‘science of
texts’ would gain by displaying and even analysing its own discourse and the
latter’s implication in the constitutive and constructive practices of
text-events (see section H) .
49. Working back toward ourselves from the opposite side, we
should also devote far more attention to the ‘theoreticalness’ of
producing and receiving texts in and about everyday life. Most producers and
receivers would probably consider themselves ordinary practitioners or
practical users of a language, who have no interest or authority concerning
‘theoretical’ matters. They might be irritated or perplexed to be told
that knowing a language endows them with one among the most extensive and
powerful theories a human can achieve, far beyond the revered but restricted
‘theories’ of ‘science’. But until they can acknowledge this vast
endowment they will not be adequately empowered to use this resource for
gaining access to knowledge and society (cf. Beaugrande, 1997a, 1998c) .
50. In sum, a chief reciprocal task for a science of texts
would be to cultivate an active sense of the ‘practicalness’ of scientific
texts (ours in particular) and the ‘theoreticalness’ of ordinary
texts, within a programme for reconciling the two sides within a dialectical
interaction. Doing so would require reconstructing the ‘missing links’
between theory and practice, and between a language and the texts in that
language. I shall now consider some prospects as we look ahead to the new
millennium.
D.
Missing links
51. Perhaps the term ‘missing links’ sounds overly
dramatic. After all, the linkage between a language and a text — between
theory and practice — is achieved whenever human beings communicate,
although they don’t recognise their achievement in those terms. But in terms
of scientific investigation, our theories and models of this achievement
undeniably manifest some ‘missing links’. I have been suggesting here that
the toughest problems have stemmed from the assumption that a ‘language’
has a quite different mode of organisation than does ‘actual speech’ (or
texts) , and from the corresponding aspiration to describe language
independently of actual speech. So the urgent move now would be to develop a
more ‘text-like’ view of a language and a more ‘language-like’ view of
a text (§ 55) .
52. One promising approach would be the ‘systemic
functional linguistics’ prominently developed by Michael Halliday, who was
once a pupil of J.R. Firth. Halliday was among the first to realise that the
order of a language must be ‘systemic’ in modes that anticipate, reflect,
and support the ‘systemic’ uses of the language in texts (cf. § 21) .
Firth’s (1968: 192) vision of a text as a ‘longer piece’ to be
‘described as a relational network of structures and systems at clearly
distinguished but congruent levels, converging again in renewal of connection
with experience’ accorded with Halliday’s (1994: xiv) vision of ‘a
language’ ‘as networks of interlocking options’. Quite plausibly, the
networks constitute or contribute one type of ‘missing links’ whose
precise nature is now beginning to be explained.
53.
As Halliday (1997: 6) has recently acknowledged, his approach must
contend with the vast exponential size of the networks needed to represent
‘systemic potential’ as ‘alternative combinations of features’. The
network needs to ‘present’ not just ‘those sets of options that are
currently being instantiated’ but also the ‘open-ended’ ‘further
expansion of that potential’ (1997: 7) . Moreover, any such network
representation should reflect the cline between options which are highly
probable and options which are highly improbable (§ 36) (Halliday, 1993)
. Some options might be fully possible but rarely or never get used (§ 62) .
54.
So the networks for a language would be both too unwieldy and too
under-determined to serve directly as networks for a text. In exchange, the
networks for texts, such those I introduced for the pedestrian ‘rocket’
text (Beaugrande, 1980) , are too compact and specific to represent the
networks of the English language. Once more, we seem to detect some ‘missing
links’, this time between two types of systemic networks.
55.
The strategic place to look for ‘missing links’ would now be in a very
large corpus of authentic texts. Such a corpus can offer our best means for
promoting both a text-like view of language, and a language-like view of texts
(§ 51) . It can also display the competence of the language community bent
very far toward performance, as well as the community’s performance bent
very far toward its competence (cf. § 12) . We might undertake to complement
the systemic functional approach by exploring appropriately sorted corpus data
which may ‘provide evidence for our system networks, allowing them to extend
much further in delicacy while continuing to model language as potential’
(cf. Halliday, 1997: 24) .
56.
Corpus data are so eminently suited to informing us about ‘networks’
because they offer concrete displays of the constraints upon how sets of
choices can interact. In the ‘lexicon’ part of the ‘lexicogrammar’ of
English, these constraints constitute the collocability
in the virtual system, and the textual actualisations are the lexical
collocations. In the ‘grammar’ part of the ‘lexicogrammar’,
these constraints constitute the colligability
in the virtual system, and the textual actualisations are the grammatical
colligations. Following Halliday (1961) and Hasan (1986) , we
can say that the lexical choices are more
delicate, and the grammatical choices are less delicate; ultimately, the lexicon would be the ‘most delicate
grammar’, whilst the grammar would be the ‘least delicate lexicon’.
These paired terms can be situated within an array of multiple dialectic, as
suggested in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The
dialectics among language and text
The
arrows in Fig. 1 indicate that every point can access every other. Thus, what
is ‘collocable’ can constrain not just the collocations but the
colligations; what is ‘colligable’ can constrain not just the colligations
but the collocations; and so on (cf. § 63) . Such constraints ensure that the
order of language is reasonably closed, whilst the order of texts is
reasonably open (§ 26) .
57.
These prospects counsel us to adopt a synthetic
approach of exploring how choices converge in texts, rather than the analytic
approach of subdividing the text into steadily smaller pieces,
as counselled by Hjelmslev (who never showed us how) (§ 8) . We would
then highlight the systemic continuity of the text event: not just the mere
‘co-presence’ of smallest meaningful units (e.g. ‘morphemes’) , but
the interaction of meanings within a coherence that is not just the sum of the
meanings of the parts (Beaugrande, 1984) .
58.
Perhaps an analogy from particle physics might be helpful. There, the four
‘forces’ have recently been reinterpreted not as brute pushes
and pulls, but as information exchanges of ‘messenger
particles’: photons for the electromagnetic force, ‘gluons’ for the
strong force holding the nucleus of the atom together, ‘bosons’ for the
weak force regulating radioactive decay, and — presumed on grounds of
consistency but not yet observed — ‘gravitons’ for gravity. By analogy,
we could envision semantons as
sub-symbolic messenger particles of meaning being interchanged among the
virtual meanings of morphemes or whole words (cf. Smolensky, 1989; Beaugrande, 1997a) .
Through these ‘information interchanges’, some word-choices appear to
‘attract’ each other at varying degrees of strength, in analogy to
magnetism or gravity, and thus to determine which areas of virtual meaning are
being actualised to constitute the context (cf. § 63) .
59.
The interactive constraints and ‘attractions’ indicated in Fig. 1 would
continually supply and sustain the links — ‘missing links’ insofar as
they have eluded our investigations to date — between the language and the
text. Part of the actualised output would be the cohesion
and coherence of the text as
‘standards of textuality’, but also the other ‘standards’ identified
in text linguistics: intentionality,
acceptability, informativity, and situationality
(Beaugrande and Dressler, 1981) (§ 15) . The ‘most missing links’
of all begin to emerge, perhaps like the ‘cold dark matter’ astronomers
believe to be holding galaxies together, namely the links of intertextuality. For the first time ever, we can assemble and
compare the evidence for detailed and delicate intertextual constraints shared
among hundreds or even thousands of related collocations or colligations.
Instead of seeing the text as a set or sequence of
sentences, we can finally see it as a contribution to intertext
(§ 35, 87) .
E. ‘If I were you...’
60.
For a programmatic illustration, I shall survey some corpus data kindly
provided to me by Stephen Bullon, Publishing Manager at COBUILD (Collins
Birmingham University International Language Database) in late 1998 and
early 1999 from the ‘Bank of English’ at Birmingham University, the
world’s largest computerised data corpus, then containing over 329 million
words of running text (cf. § 2)
61.
I wanted to explore the Conditional colligations ‘if I were’ and ‘if I
was’ for a highly practical reason, because they have been items of dispute
among teachers of English grammar. My sampling consisted OF some 800
occurrences out of the total of over 4000 — a partial sample of course, but
a week of hard work to sort out all the same. In respect to colligability, I
found a strong attraction for the Second Person Pronoun6 ‘you’,
and the data indicated why. The coherence of the data was centred on
delivering advice (9) , a warning (10) , or a threat (11) , whilst the
cohesion was centred on the two exophoric Actors ‘I’ and ‘you’:
(9) I’d
get some sleep if I were you. You’ll need to be up at six to catch the early
morning flight from Heathrow.
(10) The builder looked at it and said, ‘I hope
you’re not thinking of filling that thing with water. I wouldn’t if I were
you — it’ll go through the floor.’
(11)
The blood of the mob is up! If I were you, I’d clear out of town now with as
much as you can carry
The
speaker’s intentionality was to imply: ‘I’m not telling you what to do,
I’m just telling you what I would do from my own standpoint if I happened to
be in your place’. Some leeway is reserved for the acceptability of the
hearer who can decline without either side losing face. The informativity is
low when the situationality alerts the hearer about what might or should be
done. But in some contexts, the advice was clearly improbable and informative,
e.g.:
(12) a
girl asked what she could do to stop her boyfriend ejaculating prematurely.
‘If I were you, I would drop him straight away’, came the answer
(13)
‘I’m thinking of sending my paper to the Journal.
Is there room in the next issue?’ Benedict turned to him. ‘If I were
you’, he said carefully, but with thickened accent, ‘I would shred it’.
Huntley bridled. ‘I beg your pardon?’
When
estimating the probabilities of data, we apply our own knowledge of
intertextuality being actualised on demand. Someone leaving from harrowing
Heathrow Airport had better get plenty of ‘sleep’ (9) in order to
survive the ordeal; and someone who has stirred the ‘blood of the mob’ had
better ‘clear out of town’ (11) . But some ‘girl’ who seeks advice
from an agony aunt about her ‘boyfriend’ does not expect to be ordered to
‘drop him straight away’ (12) ; and someone who has written a ‘paper’
would ‘bridle’ at being told to ‘shred it’ (13) .
62.
Other pronouns allowed by the cohesion of English were found to be disfavoured
by colligability. Whereas ‘if I were you’ appeared in 282 data samples and
‘if I was you’ in 37, others colligations were at best marginal, some
hovering between 10 and 20 and some close to or equal to zero. The totals
were:
if I was he 0 if I was she 2 if I was they 0
if
I was him 17 if I was her 5
if I was them 11
if I were he 3
if I were she 0
if I were they 1
if I were him 18
if I were her 6
if I were them 10
These
data indicate which of the virtual colligations of English cohesion are or are
not probable in their colligability for actualisation (§ 53) . Interestingly,
the probabilities were about even for whether the Verb was in the Indicative
‘was’ or in the (presumably) Subjunctive ‘were’, even though
both colligated with the Object Pronoun much more readily than with the
Subject Pronoun. Yet when the Pronoun was ‘you’, which does not
differentiate between Object and Subject, the old Subjunctive still proved by
far the more probable choice. Perhaps this choice is felt to signal a
Contrafactual Modality and thus to be more tentative and polite for purposes
of face-saving; or perhaps the whole colligation is simply chosen and produced
as one frozen unit (compare ‘theory and practice’ in § 98) .
63.
Several constraints on colligability and collocability appeared when the
Conjunction ‘if’ had a meaning like ‘whether’. This meaning colligated
with the Indicative ‘was’ — possibly to leave open the question of
whether something is Contrafactual — and resisted colligating to the right
with a Pronoun. A common collocation to the left was a Verb expressing
uncertainty, like ‘ask’, ‘wonder’, or ‘not know’, as in (14-16) .
(14)
One day Mrs Luppin remarked that I was looking a little off-colour and asked
if I was feeling all right. I told her about my sickness.
(15) then I got pregnant and I started wondering
if I was going to be able to do things right
(16)
I didn’t know if I was going to do
this assignment […] But late last night, I decided to.
In
such contexts, the Verb ‘see’ never meant ‘perceive with the eye’, nor
did ‘tell’ ever mean ‘inform’, although these are the definitions
listed as the most probable by conventional dictionaries. Instead, the meaning
was ‘find out’ or ‘determine’ as in:
(17) I wrote seven poems to enter, very much borrowed
from the Philip Larkin style. I borrowed his sense of depression, too, so all
my friends were phoning to see if I was having a nervous breakdown.
(18)
No one with a gun had shown himself above the roofline but how could I tell if
I was being watched?
Such
data show how the ‘attractions’ among meanings can influence not just the
actualisation of one potential option, but also the actualisation of one
potential meaning for the superficially ‘same’ option (cf. § 58) .
F. Intertextual actualisations of ‘theory’ and
‘practice’
64.
I shall now attempt a less usual demonstration with corpus data, examining how
the pair of terms ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are actualised in
contemporary English texts, and what the implications might be for situating
these pairs within a genuine dialectic. My data were again kindly provided
from the ‘Bank of English’ by Stephen Bullon at COBUILD, this time in
January 1999.
65.
First, we can look at text samples wherein both ‘theory’ and
‘practice’ appeared. The data indicated a cline between the pole of easy
connection and the pole of uneasy disconnection (Fig. 2) .
Figure 2. Connection
or disconnection between theory and practice
One
data source for easy connection were book titles on a motley variety of
topics, such as: Warfare in the
Twentieth Century: Theory and Practice; Life
Insurance: Theory and Practice;
Islam in Theory and Practice; and The
Family Interpreted: Feminist Theory in Clinical Practice. Intriguingly,
the idea of ‘warfare’ or ‘life insurance’ having their own
‘theory’ intuitively seems informative enough to suggest that the author
intended to upgrade and dignify a heavily practical activity (cf. § 93) . In
return, we might intuitively grant the status of a religion like ‘Islam’
or a philosophy like ‘feminism’ being a ‘theory’, and see the
informativity focused upon how they get carried over into ‘practice’
against the contrary trends toward a secular or patriarchal global society.
66.
The other main data source for easy connection was found among services
offering both ‘theory and practice’ in a package deal. Some were merely
trendy, like ‘herbal medicine’ (19) , while most were concerned with
education, sometimes in specialised fields like ‘accounting’ (20) , but
often in general education (21-23) , which we shall be seeing again (§ 68, 95)
.
(19) a course designed to give students instruction
in the theory and practice of the use of herbs for medicinal purposes and
herbal preparations to maintain healthy skin and hair.
(20) Financial Reporting explores accounting theory
and practice, including such topics as the development and objectives of
financial reporting
(21) The practicum is concerned with relating
theory and practice, helping prospective teachers to understand and practise a
wide range of teaching skills
(22) the adult education course contained five nights
of theory and practice, for three hours each night
(23)
The course of study ensures that theory and practice are closely related,
providing an opportunity for students to continue with work
These
trends can be easily by verified by surfing the Internet. On 14 February 1999,
the Alta Vista search engine returned 105,469 home pages for the verbatim
collocation ‘theory and practice’. Alongside such frankly pedestrian
topics as ‘Good Cooking’, ‘Horse Racing’, ‘Belly Dancing’, and
‘Late Victorian Wallpaper’, I found courses or surveys in ‘Health
Activism’, Grading for the Fashion Industry’, ‘Radiometric
Calibration’, ‘Rubber Injection Moulding’ ‘Common Object Request
Broker Architecture’, and far more others than I have room to list here.
This rampant proliferation indicates how empty the terms have become,
conveying a vague promise of being comprehensive and thorough (§ 75) . At
times, the promise sounded distinctly breezy:
(24)
it also helps the student to make the vital connection between esoteric theory
and mundane practice, between the future of the planet and the recycled Pepsi
can
67.
In still other data, the disconnection between of theory and practice was
openly acknowledged, though still in confident hopes of a reconnection. One
topic was the economic organisation of a society:
(25) As business starts to bloom in Central and
Eastern Europe, theory will increasingly turn into practice.
(26)
The Marxist argument against the separation of theory and practice is well
known
Marx
himself would have vehemently denied that the ‘separation of theory and
practice’ which he strove to overcome could disappear when free-market
‘business starts to bloom’ in formerly ‘socialist’ countries. But then
he would have undoubtedly affirmed that the collapse of the polity in those
same countries resulted from authoritarian refusals to put the theory of
socialism into real practice (Beaugrande, 1997a: 397) (cf. § 80) .
68. Toward the middle of the cline shown in Fig. 2 we could put the data
indicating that the connection between theory and practice is ‘not clear’
(27) or is open to ‘disagreement’ (28) :
(27) each group allowed to exercise its rights to
freedom and self-determination, but it is not clear what this policy will mean
in terms of practical politics
(28)
Sometimes members of the community disagree over the practical definitions
given to values everybody professes in the abstract, such as liberty or
equality
Further
along toward the pole of uneasy disconnection was the prospect of
‘fundamental cracks in society’ that are actually ‘widening’:
(29)
the fundamental cracks in both society and theory which were laid bare in the
1960s continue to widen; theory becomes increasingly separated from practice
and, thus, incapable of addressing those cracks
Predictably,
the social domain suffering the most conspicuously was education, which I
often noticed urgently searching for a reconnection, as in:
(30) addressing the challenge of how we can make
comprehensive education work for those for whom theory and practice have
remained far apart. That is a debate to relish
(31) Perhaps the primary benefit of this block was
its attempt to link theory with practice. Most teacher preparation programs
have a separation
(32) a cross section of teachers from within school
who can apply their learning in situ, bridging the gap between theory and
practice by generating theory from practice and practice from theory
(33)
the actors within the school’s unique culture, provided ‘theory for
action’ fostering a very different attitude towards theory than the usual
presentation of disembodied theory which many teachers experience on external
in-service courses
69. A ‘cracked’ society might offer hidden motivations for
‘supporting’ democratic institutions like ‘trade unions’ ‘in
theory’ whilst ‘destroying’ them ‘in practice’ (34) ; or for
‘manipulating the theory’ of an institution like the law in order to
‘justify’ one’s ‘perversions’ in ‘practice’ (35) .
(34) In theory, he is a great supporter of trade
unions, because, in theory, he’s a socialist, but in practice, he has been
the most successful destroyer of trade union power in the British print
(35)
The problem, Mr Olson thinks, is not legal theory but legal practice although
lawyers clearly manipulate the former to justify their perversions of the
latter.
70.
Against my own intuition to approve of connections between theory and
practice, some data indicated disapproval:
(36) The scope of coercive violence was extended:
‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’. ‘Pornography is
violence against women’. These made pithy slogans
(37) Up until that point the proud theory — and the
practice of the majority — was that you lived with your family until you met
the man you would marry
(38)
It was a symbolic and deferential democracy, but the symbols were rooted in
substance: myth became the mortar binding theory and practice
The
connection was designedly tendentious for ‘pornography’ and ‘rape’ (36)
, but merely patriarchal for ‘marriage’ (37) and ‘mythical’ for
‘democracy’ (38) . Still, to assert that a ‘myth’ brings
‘substance’ to ‘symbols’ does seem audaciously informative, as does
the metaphoric ‘mortar’ suggesting a solidity and strength that are only
imaginary.
71.
My personal attention was attracted by the topic of ‘war’ or
‘warfare’, whose ‘theory and practice’ we saw being invoked in a book
title (§ 65) . Some data implied that ‘war’ is essentially a set of
‘practices’ that can be pursued without much interest in ‘theory’ (39)
; or that the ‘theory’ can be invented after the fact (40) .
(39) he was an independent, practical soldier with a
distaste for theory; a fighter who believed that war provided the only lessons
of real value to a soldier.
(40)
He did not ‘convert theory into practice’ but exemplified instinctive
practice and later derived theory from it. Few soldiers have so impressively
But
most of the data concerned an official ‘theory’ expressly devised to
justify the practices of warfare such that they will not be recognised to
grossly contradict all the humane ideals of the society. Ironically, the
author of the most celebrated result, the ‘just war theory’ was a godly
philosopher whose sources were eminently theoretical, such as Plantonism (41)
. Incorporating the ‘Christian position’ on an ‘intellectual’ basis
can harmonise this theory with the theory of a ‘holy war’, ‘God’ being
squarely on your side (42-43) . By emphasising ‘intention’ over reality, a
‘just war’ can be glibly ‘translated’ into a ‘just peace’, (44) ;
and can project a resounding triumph of ‘good’ over ‘harm’ (45) . Yet
if the ‘theory’ really requires that ‘every less-violent means be
exhausted’ (46) and that ‘provisions be made for innocent
civilians’ (47) , then no war I can think of has fit its practices to the
theory — certainly none in this century.
(41) Augustine expressed a new attitude toward
conflict by formulating the just war theory. He adapted rules of warfare
developed by classical thinkers such as Plato and Cicero to the Christian
position.
(42) They forgot how intellectually respectable the
Christian theory of holy war once was
(43) there’s something called a just war theory
which has justified an awful lot of wars in the world’s history, where both
sides feel they call on God
(44) one of the seven points of the just war theory
is ‘right intention’, and that is sometimes translated as the intention to
have a just peace
(45) the just-war theory clearly requires that the
good to be achieved outweighs the harm that is to be done
(46) Essentially, the just-war theory requires, above
all, that every less-violent means be exhausted before war can be justified
(47)
Likewise, the just-war theory requires that there be provisions made for
innocent civilians
The
real but unofficial theory of modern warfare has been described by Tony Wilden
(1987: 27) , following Brownmiller (1975) , in terms where ‘the power of
God’ is equated with limitless violence:
The object is to destroy the will to resist;
the target is the entire population; the strategy is terror; the means is
torture; the usual end is death; most of the victims are women and children:
the worst instrument is rape. To do this you simply let your men loose [with]
the power of God over anyone and everyone without a weapon or the strength to
fight back.
According
to the ‘just war theory’, in contrast, the object would be to ‘secure a
just peace and the sovereignty and honour of the nation’; the targets are
exclusively ‘military installations’; the strategy is ‘tactical
manoeuvring’; the means is ‘manly valour’; and the end is the ‘victory
of the good side’ (ours) . Obviously, the ‘just war theory’ can do
wonders for upholding morale and for deflecting world-wide outrage over real
atrocities, which can be officially deplored as unfortunate lapses during an
otherwise ‘just’ enterprise.
72.
This contrast between theories indicates that the official position of
governments conducting a war or preparing to do so — of course as a means to
‘keep the peace’ (M. Thatcher) — will embrace the ‘just war
theory’ whilst conceding that it is not, or not always, put into
‘practice’ (48-50) , due to unforeseen ‘problems’ (50) . Improvements
in technology are cheerfully expected to establish the connection, e.g., to
improve the practices of bombs landing two-thirds of a mile off their targets
(51) .
(48) One theme runs throughout, however — the
dichotomy between the theory of war and its practice
(49) As this chapter will endeavour to show, the gap
between theory and practice in strategic bombing is wide.
(50) after only 30 months of war, the original theory
of strategic bombing had been stood on its head because of practical problems
in carrying out missions
(51)
Warden believed, however, that modem munitions offered a precision that would
marry theory and practice. A B-17 bomber in World War II had a ‘circular
error probable’ of 3300 feet, meaning that half of the bombs dropped far
from their targets
73. Governments have invoked supportive theories to explain why warfare
could not be avoided. My data turned up the ‘domino theory’ (war must be
fought here lest neighbouring countries ‘fall’ to the enemy) (52-53)
, and the ‘deterrence theory’ (54) (continual threat of war is
needed to deter your enemies from war) . Both theories were heavily exploited
during the Cold War, especially in Southeast Asia (53) , yet the armaments for
war were illogically retained after Cold War had ended (54) .
(52) ‘We were faced with the Cold War and the
domino theory," the 60-year-old former national serviceman said
(53) He [Nixon] mined harbors, talked about
‘decisive military action to end the war’, and used the domino theory to
justify the need to stop communism in Vietnam.
(54)
Ordinary people, including those who subscribed to the deterrence theory
during the cold war, are angry that politicians have not taken the opportunity
to move towards a nuclear-free world
The
all-time prize for public mystification was surely earned by the ‘limited
war theory’ (55-58) concocted to justify the lavish preparations for
war after nuclear weapons had foreclosed the chances of surviving, let alone
winning. This theory was obliged either to ignore ‘the enemy’s response’
(57) or to naively imagine the sort of enemy whose thinking is entirely
guided by game theory (58) .
(55) How can conflict be waged between nuclear-armed
adversaries without leading to mutual destruction? Limited war theory attempts
to provide a framework
(56) We had to invent a theory that would allow us to
fight on the edges without nuclear technology. This theory is called
‘limited war’. Its premise is that we and the Soviets can wage little
wars, and that each side will refrain from going nuclear