From a 'critique' of Chomsky's linguistics here:
"By ‘language’, Chomsky doesn’t mean what you or I might mean by that term. He doesn’t mean French or Swahili and he certainly doesn’t mean people conversing or exchanging ideas."
Well, I'm not familiar with Chomsky's linguistics in anything but a second-hand and general way, but by 'language' I don't mean French or Swahili or people conversing or exchanging ideas, and neither, I suspect, do you. When we say, for eg, 'language is what differentiates us from animals' or 'X has a facility with language' or 'no thinking without language' or 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language', we use the word in the more abstract and non-specifc sense, a sense perhaps not that far removed from Chomsky's. And it's interesting, to me, that - even if we're monolingual and not at all theoretical - we can make this distinction, that we recognise, beyond our mother tongue and beyond particular conversations and speech acts, this deeper universal.
3 comments:
Don't forget de Saussure and 'langue' and 'parole'. He made the distinction between the stuff that you or I say and use ie 'parole' which roughly translates as 'speech' and 'langue' which is the abstract notion of the language available to you to speak (though the word is synonymous with 'tongue'.)
Voloshinov argued with this saying that the whole thing was too abstract because language is always the stuff that is 'uttered' by a real material 'utterer' with an intended audience ie there is always an intended or real receiver. By his definition, there is no such thing as abstract 'language' or even 'the English language'. There are only users, a living mix of utterers and receivers. We have the ability to fossilize language in the form of books, manuscripts, gravestones and the like but in these cases we can tease out the matrix of utterers and receivers in terms of the original ones, later ones, contemporary ones and so on.
V. also argued that the social and economic states and roles of utterers and receivers were embedded in each and every utterance and that de Saussure had ignored this in his attempt to create his abstract system. In other words no linguistic act is purely linguistic. Of course, many linguists ignore such nostrums and carry on quite happily charting the decline of this or that phoneme from RP, or the changing use of 'do' in Elizabethan England, without ever linking anything back to any community of people alive or dead. I once met a bloke who was really getting his Ph.D. by counting bees' knees. Of course he called them 'patellae'. I hear of plenty of linguists who I dub in my mind as of the bees' knees variety. It sounds quite complimentary, doesn't it?
Only a few fairly vaguecomments. I never managed really to get interested in Saussure, but my understanding is that he didn’t think of ‘langue’ as some existing system, over and above actual speech acts (like some sort of Platonic Idea), but as a conceptual abstraction. ’Langue’ is presupposed but also (potentially) transformed by individual ‘paroles’. But in any case, I don’t think that the distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ is synonymous – even roughly – with the distinction I was suggesting in the post. Say when Celan speaks of language as a kind of shelter or Eliot talks about language ‘straining under the pressure’, I don’t think the idea is that of ‘langue’ in the Saussurian sense. It’s at once difficult to define, conceptually, what they do mean, but also intuitively obvious.
The argument about language always being embedded and particular seems to me in one sense self-evident, but also not very useful. It’s like saying there’s no violence in the abstract which we might discuss, only particular contextualised acts of violence. Or there’s no ‘culture’ that might form the object of analysis & discussion but only particular cultures. Just because in reality no linguistic act is purely linguistic doesn't stop us producing conceptual abstractions for the purpose of analysis?
But yes, to see a language as a kind of independent system with its own autonomous history of growth & decay is definitely something I’d regard as erroneous.
It may be self-evident and not very useful, Mark, but I think you'll find that in most discussions about 'language', people lapse almost immediately into various forms of reificatory bunkum. The most common is when people say 'language does this...' or 'the thing about English, you can't say that...' From there, people will get into quite heated arguments about 'language' or 'English' does or not does to, or what 'it' 'allows' you to do and so on. This can take place at the everyday chat level, or it can take place as part of academic interchanges.
The problem with Saussure is whether the 'langue' that someone's 'parole' is supposed to borrow from, really exists. Listen to most London kids and they're hopping about between languages, dialects all the time and for very important social reasons. If you want to say anything useful or explanatory about this, then the parole langue model won't do much for you.
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