1. Functionalism
This first school of thought focuses on how language is actually used in everyday life. Those who abide by functionalism look at language as just another tool for humans to use, and thus tend to focus on the function language and its different parts have in our lives. The theories of functionalism focus on phonological, semantic, syntactic, as well as the pragmatic functions of language. Functionalism emphasizes the importance of social context, usage, and the communicative function of the grammar, phonology, orthography, and more, of a language.
2. Structuralism
Based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure of Switzerland, structuralism is an approach to linguistics that focuses on the idea that languages are fixed systems made up of many different units that connect with each other. This school of thought marked a shift from historical linguistic analysis to non-historical analysis. Later on, other linguists would come to see structuralism as rather out-of-date. It worked for phonology and morphology, but the theories it proposes don’t make as much sense as the ones proposed by new schools of thought. Saussure was aware of the fact that, in his time, he would not be able to get a good understanding of the human brain, and so left that to future linguists.
3. Generativism
The work of Noam Chomsky became the basis for the generativism approach to linguistics. It was originally a way to explain how humans acquire language in the first place, but soon it came to be used to explain the different phenomena that occur in all natural languages. The generative theory of language suggests that, in its most basic form, language is made up of certain rules that apply to all humans and all languages. This led to the theory of “universal grammar”, that all humans are capable of learning grammar. All of this was developed in the second half of the 20th century, with Noam Chomsky taking into account the work of Zellig Harris as well.
4. Cognitivism
The last linguistic school of thought on our list emerged in the 1950s as a reaction to generativism. In basic terms, cognitivism says that language emerges from human cognitive processes. It challenges “universal grammar” by suggesting that grammar is not something that all humans can inherently understand, but rather it is learned by using language. In this sense, it is a bit similar to functionalism. However, the main focus of cognitivism is how language is based on meaning that the mind creates.
Linguistic Theories
Ferdinand de Saussure is the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism, specifically in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or talk), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiotics. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word).
This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world they designated. By focusing on the internal constitution of signs rather than focusing on their relationship to objects in the world, Saussure made the anatomy and structure of language something that could be analyzed and studied.
Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Scandinavia. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted research that would be greatly influential.
The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the words 'pat' and 'bat' are different because the /p/ and /b/ sounds contrast. The difference between them is that the vocal chords vibrate while saying a /b/ while they do not when saying a /p/. Thus in English there is a contrast between voiced and non-voiced consonants. Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance, that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is due to the fact that these two sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.
Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Background Summary and Analysis
1.1. The Kantian Background - Review
1. What defines the form of human experience?
a. Space and Time (a priori forms of
Intuition).
b. Categories (concepts of the Understanding).
2. For Kant, these concepts are fixed and universal, i.e. ahistorical.
3. Problems: Kant's categories seem arbitrary and their universality is merely assumed by Kant, not proven.
4. In a post-Darwinian world, it seems more likely that such concepts and categories of human experience are historical, i.e. subject to change - contingent.
5. In response to this shift in emphasis, Husserlian phenomenology demands that we look and see what the status of such categories are independent of our theoretical presuppositions.
6. Social scientists, who approach this issue empirically through observation and prediction, suggest that there may be significant variations in conceptual frameworks culturally and historically. But the evidence is not entirely conclusive. So, from a scientific standpoint, the issue remains open.
1.2. Summary of Saussure's Structural Linguistics
The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure studied language from a formal and theoretical point of view, i.e. as a system of signs which could be described synchronically (as a static set of relationships independent of any changes that take place over time) rather than diachronically (as a dynamic system which changes over time).
According to Saussure, the basic unit of language is a sign. A sign is composed of signifier (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent) and a signified (the concept or meaning). So, for example, a word composed of the letters p-e-a-r functions as a signifier by producing in the mind of English-speakers the concept (signified) of a certain kind of rosaceous fruit that grows on trees, viz., a pear.
According to Saussure, the relation between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary in at least two ways. First, there is no absolute reason why these particular graphic marks (p-e-a-r) should signify the concept pear. There is no natural connection or resemblance between the signifier and the signified (as there would be in what Saussure calls a symbol, i.e. an iconic representation such as a descriptive drawing of a pear). After all, it's not as if the word "pear" looks or sounds anything like a pear! In fact, a moment's reflection makes it clear that the connection between the signifier and the signified is due to a contingent historical convention. It didn't have to happen the way it did. In principle, the word "pare", "wint", or even "apple" would have worked just as well in associating a word with the concept pear! But given that the word "pear" has come to signify the concept pear in English, no one has the power to simply change it at will. In other words, the relationship between a word and a concept is arbitrary in one sense (in terms of its origin) but not in another sense (in terms of its use).
Saussure makes a second point about the arbitrariness of the sign. He points out that the relation between the sign itself (signifier/signified pair) and what it refers to (what is called the referent, i.e. the actual piece of fruit-the physical object) is also arbitrary. This claim is less plausible than the former. For example, one might object that the concept in the mind of the speaker is formed, either directly or indirectly, by actual pears. Ideally then we would expect it to be the case that the properties of actual pears would be causally related to our concept of a pear-that the characteristics of pears produce in one's mind the concept of a pear either directly through experience with pears, or indirectly through pictures of pears, descriptions, or some such thing. Thus, the concept pear might be thought of as some basic information and set of beliefs about actual pears, e.g. what they look like, how they feel and taste, what they're good for, etc.
Saussure's way around this obvious objection is to say that his interest is in the structure of language, not the use of language. As a scientist, Saussure limited his investigation to the formal structure of language (langue), setting aside or bracketing the way that language is employed in actual speech (parole). Hence, the term structuralism. Saussure bracketed out of his investigation any concern with the real, material objects (referents) to which signs are presumably related. This bracketing of the referent is a move that enabled him to study the way a thing (language and meaning) is experienced in the mind. In this sense, his motivation was similar to Husserl's. And in the end, Saussure never offered a method for investigating how language as a system hooks up to the world of objects that lie outside language. As we shall see, this was to have far-reaching effects.
Thus, according to Saussure's structural linguistics, each sign in the system of signs which makes up a language gets its meaning only because of its difference from every other sign. The word "pear" has no meaning in itself or in the intention of the speaker, but only due to the fact that it differs from other possible graphic images such as p-e-e-r, p-e-a-k, f-e-a-r, b-e-a-r, etc. In other words, it doesn't matter how the form of the signifier varies, as long as it is different from all the other signifiers in the system (langue). To the structuralist, meaning arises from the functional differences between the elements (signs) within the system (langue).
An economic analogy helps to illustrate Saussure's theory of meaning. The signs of a linguistic system are like the coins of a monetary system or currency. Thus, a system of signs (words of a language) is analogous to a system of values.
A quarter has a certain monetary value determined by its exchange value. Quarters can be exchanged for other things because they have a designated (but flexible) value. Quarters can be used to buy goods or commodities. But they also have a fixed value in relation to other coins. So, for example, a quarter is equal to two dimes and a nickel; it is more than a penny; it is less than a dollar, etc., etc.
Linguistic signs also have values in relation to other signs. For example, the word "bachelor" can be "exchanged" for the term "unmarried man". This is, in many ways, an equal exchange. That's what it means for words to be synonymous - they have the same meaning or linguistic value. They can be substituted or exchanged for one another just as the quarter can be exchanged for two dimes and a nickel.
1.3.The Significance of Structuralist Theory
The first thing to notice is that, according to structuralist theory, meaning is not a private experience, as Husserl thought, but the product of a shared system of signification. A text is to be understood as a construct to be analyzed and explained scientifically in terms of the deep-structure of the system itself. For many structuralists, this "deep-structure" is universal and innate.
If we consider the application of structuralism to art and extend the monetary analogy, we can think of paintings as comprised of many languages or sets of conventions that play a role in the exchange of signs. For example, the language of western academic painting can be contrasted with the language of African sculpture or Japanese brush painting. Just as one word in the English language is paired with a concept, so a visual image, icon, or symbol is paired with a concept or idea that it is said to "express". Such a study of signs in the most general sense, whether visual or verbal, is called semiotics. In the West, art schools are the institutions that have the function of passing on these visual conventions. [2]
Second we should note that in structuralism, the individual is more a product of the system than a producer of it. Language precedes us. It is the medium of thought and human expression. Thus, it provides us with the structure that we use to conceptualize our own experience.
And third, since language is arbitrary, there is no natural bond between words and things, there can be no privileged connection between language and reality. In this sense, reality is also produced by language. Thus, structuralism can be understood as a form of idealism.
It should be clear from what we've just said that structuralism undermines the claim of empiricism that what is real is what we experience. It can also be seen as an affront to common sense, esp. to the notion that a text has a meaning that is, for all intents and purposes, straightforward. This conflict with common sense, however, can be favorably compared with other historical conflicts (e.g. Copernicus' heliocentric system). In other words, things are not always what they seem. Thus, the idealist claim of structuralism can be understood in the following way: Reality and our conception of it are "discontinuous". [3] This view has important implications, as we shall see below.
According to structuralist theory, a text or utterance has a "meaning", but it's meaning is determined not by the psychological state or "intention" of the speaker, but by the deep-structure of the language system in which it occurs. In this way, the subject (individual or "author") is effectively killed off and replaced by language itself as an autonomous system of rules. Thus, structuralism has been characterized as antihumanistic in it's claim that meaning is not identical with the inner psychological experience of the speaker. It removes the human subject from its central position in the production of meaning much as Copernicus removed (de-centered) the Earth from its position at the center of the solar system. And since language pre-exists us, it is not we who speak, as Heidegger was to say, but "language speaks us".
1.4.From Pre-Structuralism to Structuralism to Post-Structuralism
The shift from a pre-structuralist to a structuralist theory of language and the implications drawn from it by poststructuralists is represented in the following diagrams:
A. Pre-structuralist theory assumes that there is an intimate connection between material objects in the world and the languages that we use to talk about those objects and their interrelations.
B. As we saw above, Saussure puts this connection between the material object and the word in brackets, i.e. he sets it aside in order to study the very structure of language. Thus,
According to Saussure's structuralist theory of language, the meaning of a term (a word or expression) does not begin and end with the speaker's experience or intention (as it does in Husserl's theory). The act of speaking and intending presupposes a language already in place and upon which the speaker must rely in order to say anything at all. Concepts or meanings are picked out (signified) because of the differences in the network of words (sound- or graphic-images) that make up the language (langue). Thus each word-each structural element of the language-finds its own relative position or node within the network of differences.
In other words, the meaning of a particular term in a language is due to its relative difference from all other terms in the language. A signified, i.e. a concept or idea, is properly understood in terms of its position relative to the differences among a range of other signifiers (words with different positions in the network (langue) and, hence, different meanings).
C. Poststructuralist theory denies the distinction between signifier and signified. According to the poststructuralist, concepts are nothing more than words. Thus, signifiers are words that refer to other words and never reach out to material objects and their interrelations. To indicate this shift in theory, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida introduces the word "différance" to indicate the relation between signifiers as one of difference and deferral.
If a word's meaning is solely the result of its difference from other words, then the meaning (the concept or signified) is not an additional thing "present" in the sign itself. On the contrary, "meaning" (if it can be called that at all) is the ever-moving play of difference from signifier to signifier; a slipping from word to word in which each word retains relations to ("traces" of) the words that differ from it.
Thus, according to poststructuralists such as Derrida, the specification of meaning is an infinite and endless process! Meaning, to some extent, always escapes one's grasp-it is always just out of reach, ungrounded, with no origin in the intention of the speaker, contrary to what Husserl thought. In other words, when a speaker uses certain words ("This is a pear"), then according to the theory she does not have a nonlinguistic object or concept in mind-there is no additional thing or "object" outside of the language (i.e. no "meaning") that could be transmitted or made "present" to her listener or reader. There is nothing there in her speech but language, i.e. a network of signification.
Thus, "meaning" is the result of a play of difference-a movement which brings about both difference and deferral. (It may help here to bring in the traditional distinction between the denotation and the connotation of a term. The connotation may be thought of as the aura of suggestion, the echo or trace of other words to which it is related by such things as association, common usage, similarity, etc. The denotation, the relation (reference) between the word and the actual thing denoted by the word, from structuralism on, is bracketed and never brought back. Its absence, however, leaves its own "traces" in the form of problems for a poststructuralist theory of language. (See below.)
So the poststructuralist draws the following consequences from the study of language:
1. Meaning is never fully present in any one
signifier, but is infinitely deferred or suspended.
2. Meaning is contextual, i.e. affected by related words.
3. There is always an excess of meaning.
But there is another, more radical, consequence that can be drawn from our analysis. If the meaning associated with an expression is not present in the expression itself, and if the speaker must make his own presence felt by communication through words, then it follows that the speaker is never fully present in the act of using language. And if, as a human being, I can only think and experience a world through language, then "I" and "my presence" are as much deferred as the meanings I attempt to grasp when I try to understand and explain myself. In other words, I am never present even to myself. Rather, it is language that speaks, not a unified and autonomous ego or self. (How is this related to Kant's theory of knowledge?)
One final note. On p.60 of Literary Theory, Eagleton makes use of the following argument:
1. All experience depends on language.
2. Since, to have a language is to be part of a whole form of social life,
there is no possibility of a private language.
3. Therefore, all experience is social experience, i.e. there are no private
experiences.
This argument presupposes the notion in Saussure (and Hjelmslev in Prolegomena to a Theory of Language) that language is constitutive of experience.
Notice the central role played by the premise that experience itself "depends on" or is structured by language. Without this assumption, the slide into the de-centered self is not so easily motivated. (Cf. Heidegger's notion of the de-centered self. Derrida himself says that consciousness is an effect of language.) This poststructuralist view of language undermines the theories of Descartes, Husserl and most of western metaphysical thinking about the primacy or centrality of the subject and reinforces the notion of the "decentered self" as characteristic of the human condition.
What alternatives can we imagine as a challenge to the poststructuralist position? One strategy would be to start by agreeing with Kant that we must have categories or concepts of some kind to organize human experience. But we might also disagree with Kant over the nature and a priori character of those concepts. In doing this, we could borrow from Heidegger the view that the categories of human experience are historical in nature and potentially in flux-not fixed and universal. But then we might question Heidegger's emphasis on the linguistic nature of these concepts by drawing on Gestalt psychology to argue for the existence of certain "structural" and hard wired components of human perception and thought of a prelinguistic nature. This is just one tentative direction one might take in challenging the view presented by the form of poststructuralism that we've been considering.
Other problems are raised if we consider language not simply as an object but as a practice. Suppose I say to you, "Open the window" in a situation where there is no window in the room. You might ask, "What do you mean?" This would be to question my "intentions" - what am I trying to accomplish by saying what I've said? Perhaps I am making a point about the fact that there is no window in the room. My paradoxical statement - inexplicable in Saussure's structuralist terms - might be meaningful to you in another practical sense. This is because understanding is recognizing what effects one might seek to bring about through the use of certain words. My obscure command might be a request that we move to a room that has a window.
In other words, speech is not just an object, it is a form of behavior, and as such it can only be understood contextually, i.e. in a situation. This realization of the pragmatics of language signals a shift from language to discourse, and a concomitant change in emphasis away from a text's meaning to its function.
In the end, we may want to say not so much that reality is linguistic but that language is real, and not necessarily all there is to human reality and experience.
Notes
1. See also: Saussure, "The Linguistic
Sign" in Innis, Semiotics; Barthes, "From Work to Text", Art in
Theory, 940-46. [return]
2. For more on the application of structuralism to painting, see Francis
Frascina, "Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and
Cubism", in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century,
Harrison, Frascina and Perry, New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1993, 87-183. [return]
3. Eagleton, Literary Theory, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983, 108.
[return]
4. See Innis, Semiotics, 26. [return]
2. Sytemic-Functional Linguistics
Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centred around the notion of language function. While SFL accounts for the syntactic structure of language, it places the function of language as central (what language does, and how it does it), in preference to more structural approaches, which place the elements of language and their combinations as central. SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context.
A central notion is 'stratification', such that language is analysed in terms of four strata: Context, Semantics, Lexico-Grammar and Phonology-Graphology.
Context concerns the Field (what is going on), Tenor (the social roles and relationships between the participants), and the Mode (aspects of the channel of communication, e.g., monologic/dialogic, spoken/written, +/- visual-contact, etc.).
Systemic semantics includes what is usually called 'pragmatics'. Semantics is divided into three components:
* Ideational Semantics (the propositional content);
* Interpersonal Semantics (concerned with speech-function, exchange structure, expression of attitude, etc.);
* Textual Semantics (how the text is structured as a message, e.g., theme-structure, given/new, rhetorical structure etc.
The Lexico-Grammar concerns the syntactic organisation of words into utterances. Even here, a functional approach is taken, involving analysis of the utterance in terms of roles such as Actor, Agent/Medium, Theme, Mood, etc. (See Halliday 1994 for full description).
References
· Halliday, M.A.K. 1961. Categories of the theory of grammar. Word 17. Reprinted in Bertil Malmberg (ed), .... . Abridged version in Halliday (1976).
· Halliday, M.A.K. 1994 Introduction to Functional Grammar, Second Edition, London: Edward Arnold.
· Martin, James R. 1992 English Text: system and structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
3. Generative Linguistics
Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.
Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate all those and only those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who invented the term [1] , and by most dictionaries of linguistics. It is important to note that generate is being used as a technical term with a particular sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.[2]
The term generative grammar is also used to label the approach to linguistics
taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the
use of transformational grammar – a theory that has changed greatly since it
was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures – and by
the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that
some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the
same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the
earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated
with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface
structure" of sentences.
GRAMMAR THEORIES
Generative grammar: algorithmic (phrase structure grammars)
Transformational grammar (1960s)
Generalised phrase structure grammar (late 1970s)
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (1985)
Principles and parameters (1980s)
Lexical functional grammar
Categorial grammar (lambda calculus)
Montague grammar
Dependency grammar (Lucien Tesnière 1959)
Link grammar
Cognitive grammar / Cognitive linguistics
Construction grammar
Fluid Construction Grammar
Word grammar
Stochastic grammar: probabilistic
Operator Grammar
Functional grammar: usage-oriented (behaviorist)
Danish Functionalism
Systemic functional grammar
Role and reference grammar
Philosophy of
Linguistics
1. Three Approaches to Linguistic Theorizing: Externalism,
Emergentism, and Essentialism
The issues we discuss have been debated with vigor and sometimes venom. Some of the people involved have had famous exchanges in the linguistics journals, in the popular press, and in public forums. To understand the sharp disagreements between advocates of the approaches it may be useful to have a sketch of the dramatis personae before us, even if it is undeniably an oversimplification.
We see three tendencies or foci, divided by what they take to be the subject matter, the approach they advocate for studying it, and what they count as an explanation. We characterize them roughly in Table 1.
|
externalists |
emergentists |
essentialists |
|
|
Primary phenomena |
Actual utterances as produced by language users |
Facts of social cognition, interaction, and communication |
Intuitions of grammaticality and literal meaning |
|
Primary subject matter |
Language use; structural properties of expressions and languages |
Linguistic communication, cognition, variation, and change |
Abstract universal principles that explain the properties of specific languages |
|
Aim |
To describe attested expression structure and interrelations, and predicting properties of unattested expressions |
To explain structural properties of languages in terms of general cognitive mechanisms and communicative functions |
To articulate universal principles and provide explanations for deep and cross-linguistically constant linguistic properties |
|
Linguistic structure |
A system of patterns, inferrable from generally accessible, objective features of language use |
A system of constructions that range from fixed idiomatic phrases to highly abstract productive types |
A system of abstract conditions that may not be evident from the experience of typical language users |
|
Values |
Accurate modeling of linguistic form that accords with empirical data and permits prediction concerning unconsidered cases |
Cognitive, cultural, historical, and evolutionary explanations of phenomena found in linguistic communication systems |
Highly abstract, covering-law explanations for properties of language as inferred from linguistic intuitions |
|
Children’s language |
A nascent form of language, very different from adult linguistic competence |
A series of stages in an ontogenetic process of developing adult communicative competence |
Very similar to adult linguistic competence though obscured by cognitive, articulatory, and lexical limits |
|
What is acquired |
A grasp of the distributional properties of the constituents of expressions of a language |
A mainly conventional and culturally transmitted system for linguistic communication |
An internalized generative device that characterizes an infinite set of expressions |
Table 1. Three Approaches to the Study of Language
A broad and varied range of distinct research projects can be pursued within any of these approaches; one advocate may be more motivated by some parts of the overall project than others are. So the tendencies should not be taken as sharply honed, well-developed research programs or theories. Rather, they provide background biases for the development of specific research programs—biases which sometimes develop into ideological stances or polemical programs or lead to the branching off of new specialisms with separate journals. In the judgment of Phillips (2010), “Dialog between adherents of different approaches is alarmingly rare.”
The names we have given these approaches are just mnemonic tags, not descriptions. The Externalists, for example, might well have been called ‘structural descriptivists’ instead, since they tend to be especially concerned to develop models that can be used to predict the structure of natural language expressions. The Externalists have long been referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’ (and sometimes Externalists apply that term to themselves), though this is misleading (see Scholz and Pullum 2006: 60–63): the ‘empiricist’ tag comes with an accusation of denying the role of learning biases in language acquisition (see Matthews 1984, Laurence and Margolis 2001), but that is no part of the Externalists’ creed (see e.g. Elman 1993, Lappin and Shieber 2007).
Emergentists are also sometimes referred to by Essentialists as ‘empiricists’, but they either use the Emergentist label for themselves (Bates et al. 1998, O’Grady 2008, MacWhinney 2005) or call themselves ‘usage-based’ linguists (Barlow and Kemmer 2002, Tomasello 2003) or ‘construction grammarians’ (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001). Newmeyer (1991), like Tomasello, refers to the Essentialists as ‘formalists’, because of their tendency to employ abstractions, and to use tools from mathematics and logic.
Despite these terminological inconsistencies, we can look at what typical members of each approach would say about their vision of linguistic science, and what they say about the alternatives. Many of the central differences between these approaches depend on what proponents consider to be the main project of linguistic theorizing, and what they count as a satisfying explanation.
Many researchers—perhaps most—mix elements from each of the three approaches. For example, if Emergentists are to explain the syntactic structure of expressions by appeal to facts about the nature of the use of symbols in human communication, then they will presuppose a great deal of Externalist work in describing linguistic patterns, and those Externalists who work on computational parsing systems frequently use (at least as a starting point) rule systems and ‘structural’ patterns worked out by Essentialists. Certainly, there are no logical impediments for a researcher with one tendency from simultaneously pursuing another; these approaches are only general centers of emphasis.
1.1 The Externalists
If one assumes, with the Externalists, that the main goal of a linguistic theory is to develop accurate models of the structural properties of the speech sounds, words, phrases, and other linguistic items, then the clearly privileged information will include corpora (written and oral)—bodies of attested and recorded language use (suitably idealized). The goal is to describe how this public record exhibits certain (perhaps non-phenomenal) patterns that are projectable.
American structural linguistics of the 1920s to 1950s championed the development of techniques for using corpora as a basis for developing structural descriptions of natural languages, although such work was really not practically possible until the wide-spread availability of cheap, powerful, and fast computers. AndrĂ© Martinet (1960: 1) notes that one of the basic assumptions of structuralist approaches to linguistics is that “nothing may be called ‘linguistic’ that is not manifest or manifested one way or another between the mouth of the speaker and the ears of the listener”. He is, however, quick to point out that “this assumption does not entail that linguists should restrict their field of research to the audible part of the communication process—speech can only be interpreted as such, and not as so much noise, because it stands for something else that is not speech.”
American structuralists—Leonard Bloomfield in particular—were attacked, sometimes legitimately and sometimes illegitimately, by certain factions in the Essentialist tradition. For example, it was perhaps justifiable to criticize Bloomfield for adopting a nominalist ontology as popularized by the logical empiricists. But he was later attacked by Essentialists for holding anti-mentalist views about linguistics, when it is arguable that his actual view was that the science of linguistics should not commit itself to any particular psychological theory. (He had earlier been an enthusiast for the mentalist and introspectionist psychology of Wilhelm Wundt; see Bloomfield 1914.)
Externalism continues to thrive within computational linguistics, where the American structuralist vison of studying language through automatic analysis of corpora has enjoyed a recrudescence, and very large, computationally searchable corpora are being used to test hypotheses about the structure of languages (see Sampson 2001, chapter 1, for discussion).
1.2 The Emergentists
Emergentists aim to explain the capacity for language in terms of non-linguistic human capacities: thinking, communicating, and interacting. Edward Sapir expressed a characteristic Emergentist theme when he wrote:
Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such… It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. (Sapir 1929: 214)
The “pretty patterns” derided here are characteristic of structuralist analyses. Sociolinguistics, which is much closer in spirit to Sapir’s project, studies the influence of social and linguistic structure on each other. One particularly influential study, Labov (1966), examines the influence of social class on language variation. Other sociolinguists examine the relation between status within a group on linguistic innovation (Eckert 1989). This interest in variation within languages is characteristic of Emergentist approaches to the study of language.
Another kind of Emergentist, like Tomasello (2003), will stress the role of theory of mind and the capacity to use symbols to change conspecifics’ mental states as uniquely human preadaptations for language acquisition, use, and invention. MacWhinney (2005) aims to explain linguistic phenomena (such as phrase structure and constraints on long distance dependencies) in terms of the way conversation facilitates accurate information-tracking and perspective-switching.
Functionalist research programs generally fall within the broad tendency to approach the study of language as an Emergentist. According to one proponent:
The functionalist view of language [is] as a system of communicative social interaction… Syntax is not radically arbitrary, in this view, but rather is relatively motivated by semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive concerns. (Van Valin 1991, quoted in Newmeyer 1991: 4; emphasis in original)
And according to Russ Tomlin, a linguist who takes a functionalist approach:
Syntax is not autonomous from semantics or pragmatics…the rejection of autonomy derives from the observation that the use of particular grammatical forms is strongly linked, even deterministically linked, to the presence of particular semantic or pragmatic functions in discourse. (Tomlin 1990, quoted by Newmeyer (1991): 4)
The idea that linguistic form is autonomous, and more specifically that syntactic form (rather than, say, phonological form) is autonomous, is a characteristic theme of the Essentialists. And the claims of Van Valin and Tomlin to the effect that syntax is not independent of semantics and pragmatics might tempt some to think that Emergentism and Essentialism are logically incompatible. But this would be a mistake, since there are a large number of nonequivalent autonomy of form theses.
Even in the context of trying to explain what the autonomy thesis is, Newmeyer (1991: 3) talks about five formulations of the thesis, each of which can be found in some Essentialists’ writings, without (apparently) realizing that they are non-equivalent. One is the relatively strong claim that the central properties of linguistic form must not be defined with essential reference to “concepts outside the system”, which suggests that no primitives in linguistics could be defined in psychological or biological terms. Another takes autonomy of form to be a normative claim: that linguistic concepts ought not to be defined or characterized in terms of non-linguistic concepts. The third and fourth versions are ontological: one denies that central linguistic concepts should be ontologically reduced to non-linguistic ones, and the other denies that they can be. And in the fifth version the autonomy of syntax is taken to deny that syntactic patterning can be explained in terms of meaning or discourse functions.
For each of these versions of autonomy, there are Essentialists who agree with it. Probably the paradigmatic Essentialist agrees with them all. But Emergentists need not disagree with them all. Paradigmatic functionalists like Tomlin, Van Valin and MacWhinney could in principle hold that the explanation of syntactic form, for example, will ultimately be in terms of discourse functions and semantics, but still accept that syntactic categories cannot be reduced to non-linguistic ones.
1.3 The Essentialists
If Leonard Bloomfield is the intellectual ancestor of Externalism, and Sapir the father of Emergentism, then Noam Chomsky is the intellectual ancestor of Essentialism. The researcher with predominantly Essentialist inclinations aims to identify the intrinsic properties of language that make it what it is. For a huge majority of practitioners of this approach—researchers in the tradition of generative grammar associated with Chomsky—this means postulating universals of human linguistic structure, unlearned but tacitly known, that permit and assist children to acquire human languages. This generative Essentialism has a preference for finding surprising characteristics of languages that cannot be inferred from the data of usage, and are not predictable from human cognition or the requirements of communication.
Rather than being impressed with language variation, as are Emergentists and many Externalists, the generative Essentialists are extremely impressed with the idea that very young children of almost any intelligence level, and just about any social upbringing, acquire language to the same high degree of mastery. From this it is inferred that there must be unlearned features shared by all languages that somehow assist in language acquisition.
A large number of contemporary Essentialists who follow Chomsky’s teaching on this matter claim that semantics and pragmatics are not a central part of the study of language. In Chomsky’s view, “it is possible that natural language has only syntax and pragmatics” (Chomsky 1995: 26); that is, only “internalist computations and performance systems that access them”; semantic theories are merely “part of an interface level” or “a form of syntax” (Chomsky 1992: 223).
Thus, while Bloomfield understood it to be a sensible practical decision to assign semantics to some field other than linguistics because of the underdeveloped state of semantic research, Chomsky appears to think that semantics as standardly understood is not part of the essence of the language faculty at all. (In broad outline, this exclusion of semantics from linguistics comports with Sapir’s view that form is linguistic but content is cultural.)
Although Chomsky is an Essentialist in his approach to the study of language, excluding semantics as a central part of linguistic theory clearly does not follow from linguistic Essentialism (Katz 1980 provides a detailed discussion of Chomsky’s views on semantics). Today there are many Essentialists who do hold that semantics is a component of a full linguistic theory.
For example, many linguists today are interested in the syntax-semantics interface—the relationship between the surface syntactic structure of sentences and their semantic interpretation. This area of interest is generally quite alien to philosophers who are primarily concerned with semantics only, and it falls outside of Chomsky’s syntactocentric purview as well. Linguists who work in the kind of semantics initiated by Montague (1974) certainly focus on the essential features of language (most of their findings appear to be of universal import rather than limited to the semantic rules of specific languages). Useful works to consult to get a sense of the modern style of investigation of the syntax-semantics interface would include Partee (1975), Jacobson (1996), Szabolcsi (1997), Chierchia (1998), Steedman (2000).
Theoretical Linguistics
Linguistic theory aims to explain the nature of human language in terms of basic underlying principles. Linguists study the structure of natural languages in order to gain a better understanding of those principles. UWM linguists conduct research in core areas of linguistic theory:
- Phonetics and phonology: the study of sound systems, sound patterns, and sound structures
- Syntax and semantics: the study of sentence structure and how it constrains meaning and interpretation
- Morphology: the study of word structure and its connections with sound and sentence structure
- Language acquisition (first and second language)
- Historical linguistics and language change
UWM Linguistics faculty are internationally recognized for their scholarly contributions, and our students conduct cutting-edge research in all areas of theoretical linguistics.
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