Knowledge & Discourse

Towards an Ecology of Language

Colin Barron, Nigel Bruce, David Nunan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317881261
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Knowledge and Discourse presents an ecological approach to the study of discourse in social, academic and professional practices. It brings together distinguished scholars from diverse cultures - India, China, Australia, Canada among others - and disciplines - linguistics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy. The chapters collectively illustrate the ecological approach by exploring how language makes connections between subjective experiences as people construct meaning and action.

This book offers the reader a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the study of language as discourse, questioning traditional views of disciplinary knowledge and the role of discourse in the pursuit, construction and compartmentalisation of such knowledge. Through the variety of disciplines, experiences and approaches, the contributors show how the world and word are contingent on each other. The notions of connectivity, contingency and change are themes that run through the book, and in the interweaving of these themes readers will find persuasive illustrations of an ecological approach to applied linguistics.

1

Prologue: Language and linguistics/Discourse and disciplinarity

Alastair Pennycook

Introduction: caught in the crossfire

In his popular book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker (1994) argues against a view that language might play too large a role in how we think or behave. Rather than viewing language as a system of meanings that influence, construct or determine the way we think, he argues that language, while interesting as a structured, biologically-based system, is ultimately only a medium into which we translate the all-important ‘language of thought … mentalese’ (1994: 81). Acknowledging a certain smugness derived from his scientific knowledge of how language really works, however, he is prepared to forgive people for considering language to be more important than it really is: ‘People can be forgiven for overrating language’ (1994: 67). By contrast, Chris Weedon — someone whom I presume Pinker is going to have to forgive for her misguided over-evaluation of the importance of language — argues in her slightly less popular book, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, that ‘the common factor in the analysis of social organization, social meanings, power and individual consciousness is language. Language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. Yet it is also the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed’ (1987: 21).

This paper sets out to explore some of the implications of this divide between the so-called linguistic turn in the social sciences — a shift that allows for statements such as Weedon’s, and which may be seen generally as poststructuralist — and the concept of language in the so-called linguistic sciences — which allows for such warnings as Pinker’s. Of course, it might be argued that these are simply looking at different aspects of language: linguistics is concerned with the analysis of language as a system, while poststructuralism, coming from a tradition of literary criticism, has to do with interpretation, and therefore takes representations in language as primary. And yet, I want to suggest that there is far more going on here than simply two different approaches to language, in part because of the very large claims each makes about the importance of its own position. This discussion, then, concerns issues to do with language, discourse, science, power, and disciplinary knowledge, issues that go to the heart of the concerns of this book.

There are also for me more immediate concerns to do with my work as an applied linguist, since we now seem to find ourselves sandwiched between these two positions on language. To our right stands the threatening presence of linguistics. As applied linguists we are continually encouraged to see ourselves as simply applying the ‘scientific knowledge of language’ to particular contexts. As our own (University of Melbourne) Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Department handbook recently put it, ‘Linguistics is the scientific study of language in all its aspects [sic!]. Applied linguistics is the application of linguistic knowledge to real-world issues having to do with language …’ In this role we are but the appliers of scientific knowledge about language to ‘real world’ contexts. Looming up on the left, however, is the vibrant domain of poststructuralist work, with questions of language and representation pervading everything. Seductive though such work may be, it also presents us with a dilemma, for surely in this view everyone is an applied linguist, everyone is dealing with language in real-world contexts.

There are, therefore, a number of very serious issues here. As an applied linguist concerned with understanding the political contexts of language education, I am confronted on the one side by a seductive but all-embracing version of poststructuralism that threatens to engulf applied linguistics, and on the other side by an intimidating body of ‘scientific knowledge’ that I am supposed to be able to apply. These issues here, then, are far more than abstract speculations about language, discourse and knowledge: they have major implications for how we think about language, literacy or language teaching. Are these simply different paradigms, or can they perhaps learn from each other? In the rest of this paper I shall explore, first, the construction of linguistics as a science of language; second, the evolution and implications of poststructuralist thinking; and, third, possible ways forward via ‘postlinguistics’.

Linguistics and language: full of sound and science, signifying nothing

We may, fairly uncontroversially, turn to Saussure to see the origins of the particular view of language that holds sway in modern linguistics.¹ Of course, there have been lots of ‘advances,’ even the so-called Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, but looked at from the outside it generally appears more consistent than disjunctive. The important thing to understand here is the very particular move made by Saussure in order to establish linguistics as a discipline. ‘In the whole history of science,’ according to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, ‘there is perhaps no more fascinating chapter than the rise of the new science of linguistics. In its importance it may very well be compared to the new science of Galileo which in the seventeenth century changed our whole concept of the physical world’ (cited in Culler 1976: 114).

The intellectual climate of the nineteenth century made claims to scientific knowledge almost obligatory, and indeed, as Crowley (1996) points out, Saussure’s move to define linguistics as a science was made in an attempt to overcome the claims already being made to scientific status by historical–comparative linguistics. With Saussure came a dramatic narrowing of the scope. Saussure’s definition of language ‘assumes that we disregard everything which does not belong to its structure as a system; in short everything that is designated by the term “external linguistics”’ (1983:21). Among these exclusions were the relations between the history of a language and the parallel history of a cultural or national group; relations between languages and political history (which include ‘colonization’, the internal politics of a country, and the development of specialised vocabularies within modern nations); relationships between languages and social institutions such as church, school, etc., and the relationship between these and the development of a literary language; and finally relationships between language and geographical spread and variation (Saussure 1983: 20–21). This is a pretty interesting list of things to cast aside.²

Saussure also made a number of other crucial moves. As can already be seen, the development of structuralist linguistics involved a major inward turn, a move to define language and linguistics in a very particular way. One of the most significant aspects of this was to develop a view of meaning that suggested that meaning was not to be sought in any relationship between language and the world but rather was a product of the relationships between signs within the system of language. This was a crucial and radical step. Instead of the earlier ‘God-given’ views of meaning (still prevalent in Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other fundamentalisms), or the ‘humanist’ version of meaning brought about by the so-called Enlightenment (in which ‘man’ became the guarantor of meaning), this new view was what Taylor (1990) calls an ‘institutional’ view of meaning, whereby language comes to reside in a fixed, institutionalised system.

According to Crowley (1990), the significance of Saussure’s move to show that words do not stand for objects or ideas, that they were part of a system of signs whose meaning was constructed by their relationship to each other, was that he was then able to argue that rather than words being a pale reflection of reality, a second cousin to the real world, they were in fact part of reality, that is, language was an objective fact and thus could be studied according to the same scientific principles as other objective domains of the real world: ‘Once liberated from its status as but a pale shadow of the world of things into its proper place standing alongside those things, then language could join those other items of reality in the privileged status of scientific object’ (Crowley 1996: 18). Thus, as Taylor (1990) suggests, access to an understanding of the meaning of words was only to be had through the institutional construction of language as described by experts. Meanings in this view are facts that can be understood by the linguist but are not accessible to the rest of us; they cannot even be influenced by the rest of us.

Thus, by defining the structuralist notion of the sign as part of the linguistic system itself, as part of langue, Saussure and subsequent linguists have been able to argue that the only scientific (the only true) way to understand language is through versions of the ‘scientific study of language’ as defined from within the discipline of linguistics. Indeed, the langue / parole distinction of linguistics has come to suggest not only a division between system and use but also between on the one hand methods of analysis and objects of study (langue/linguistics) and, on the other, all the trivial, non-scientific interests in language (parole/everyone else). With a few quick moves, therefore, Saussure managed to construct a linguistics that relied on a massive set of exclusions. It was able to claim scientific status and thereby to deny that other approaches to language had anything useful to say. As Harris (1981) explains, ‘The version of the language myth propounded by modern linguistics has it that there is only one descriptive standpoint which allows us to proceed to a systematic analysis of linguistic phenomena’ (1981: 35). He goes on to explain that ‘A study of the development of modern linguistics makes it clear that the entrenchment of the language myth as a basic theoretical assumption arose from the need to establish for linguistic studies respectable academic status as a “science”’ (1981: 37). It is indeed interesting to note that, as Derrida (1974) points out, of all the human sciences, ‘linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity’ (1974: 28).

With the coming of the so-called Chomskyan revolution, the scientific status of linguistics was even further emphasised. ‘Academic prestige is dependent on various factors, but one of them is scientific status: a prestigious discipline will tend to possess qualities associated with science (however erroneously) such as theoretical and methodological rigour, “objectivity”, abstraction and so on. One achievement of the so-called Chomskyan revolution has been to appropriate this sort of status for linguistics more successfully than previous or alternative paradigms’ (Cameron 1990: 83–4). Whereas, as I suggested above, the construction of the sign-as-fact enabled Saussurean linguistics to constitute its study of language as a study of linguistic facts, the Chomskyan move to construct language as a biological fact in the brain allowed for even greater claims to scientificity, moving through the mechanistic and computer modelling world of cognitive science into biological reality. Robinson (1975) suggests that this Chomskyan move will in time be recognised as ‘only another episode in the history of the long and desperate effort to reduce thought about language to an exact science’ (1975: 124).

There are several upshots of this claim to scientific status. First, it has given this particular approach to language immense power relative to others. This has been even further increased by the influence of structuralist linguistics on other areas in the social sciences. For a time linguistics was able to look at itself as some sort of central founding discipline in the social sciences, the scientific basis of knowledge about language from which all other possibilities flowed. This has clearly had a rather sad, inhibiting effect on the possibility for change in linguistics. Second, it has meant that linguistics has as another of its founding dogmas the belief that it is engaged in a descriptive rather than a prescriptive enterprise. As Pinker (1994) explains, ‘The rules people learn … in school are called prescriptive rules, prescribing how one “ought” to talk. Scientists studying language propose descriptive rules, describing how people do talk’ (1994: 371). Such claims to being engaged in objective description with no normative effects are clearly naïve.

As Taylor (1990) argues, linguistics is a fundamentally normative discipline in that while purporting to describe facts about language, it is laying out normative principles: ‘If purportedly descriptive discourse on language is best reconceived as a (covertly authoritarian mode of) normative discourse, then the assertion of the political irrelevance and ideological neutrality of linguistic science can no longer be maintained. Descriptive linguistics is just another way of doing normative linguistics, and an ideologically deceptive one at that’ (Taylor 1990: 25). Similarly, Parakrama (1995) points out that so-called descriptive work always focuses on certain forms of language at the expense of others. ‘This unequal emphasis,’ he goes on, ‘is not so much the fault of individual descriptivists as a problematic of description itself, which can never be a neutral activity. In other words, description is always a weak form of prescription’ (1995: 3). As Harris (1981) puts it, ‘the linguistics introduced by Saussure placed theoretical constraints upon the freedom of the individual speaker no less rigid than the authoritarian recommendations of the old-fashioned grammarian–pedagogue. But instead of the rules being imposed by educational pedants, they were envisaged as being imposed from within the language itself’ (1981: 46).

The third effect of linguistics creating itself as a science has been a constant tendency to seek so-called universal aspects of language. This is of course a fundamental aspect of Chomskyan transformational grammar, since the whole project presupposes and simultaneously claims to be searching for aspects of a Universal Grammar. But this is also an aspect of other forms of linguistics; like science, it claims that what it finds are culture-free, universal laws of nature. One of the effects of trying to make this claim is that culture, as the local, the different, the incommensurable, inevitably becomes detached from language: culture is difference, language is similarity. Finally, the linguistic claim to scientific status means it must also be answerable to the question posed by Foucault: ‘What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand “Is it a science?”’ (1980: 85). Of course, as we have already seen, the lists of types of knowledge that linguistics sought to exclude were long. But perhaps even more significant were the types of knowledge it sought to disqualify: all those non-scientific, interpretive, exploratory, open-ended questions about language and life.

The disciplinary boundaries, the lists of exclusions, the claims to scientificity made by linguistics, therefore, lead to the dismissal of many other possible interests in language. As Poynton (1993) observes, even an interest in fairly uncontroversial aspects of ‘external linguistics’ is often ‘characterised as not sufficiently linguistic, providing the perfect excuse for “real” linguists not to engage seriously with it. There is a particular arrogance about most linguists concerning what it is necessary to know about language, so that only those who “really know” are regarded as having proper authority’ (1993: 4). And meanwhile, the great misfortune for applied linguistics is that in order to attain academic credibility it has desperately sought to be as scientific as linguistics and has celebrated its increasing scientificity.

For applied linguists, questions of language learning, education and literacy came to be seen as centrally cognitive issues to do with the acquisition of a system — how people master the morphemes, syntax and phonology of a language; how a reader decodes words — rather than with how language learning is almost inevitably a process of socialisation into a culture, or how literacy is embedded in cultural politics, in who has access to whose knowledge. Recent acrimonious debates around the hardcore ‘scientific’ study of second language acquisition (see Block 1996; Firth and Wagner 1997; Gregg et al. 1997) have shown how steadfastly the conservative disciplinarians will battle to hold their ground. The problem for many of us who work in areas such as applied linguistics, then, is that in trying to develop more critical, more political analyses of language as it is used, learned, and taught, we find ourselves caught between a linguistic model of language that offers little hope for developing such an analysis and a poststructuralist view that sits at odds with the disciplinary pulls of our work.

The model of language developed in linguistics and adopted by applied linguistics offers little prospect for an understanding of the non-autonomy of language. As Bourdieu puts it, ‘As soon as one treats language as an autonomous object, accepting the radical separation which Saussure made between internal and external linguistics, between the science of language and the science of the social uses of language, one is condemned to looking within words for the power of words, that is, looking for it where it is not to be found’ (1991: 107). For a more critical approach to language, we are confronted by two main options: a plunge into poststructuralism with the possible dangers that we then just disappear amid a sea of poststructuralists; or some sort of marriage between linguistics, politics and poststructuralism. Before I explore these possibilities, I shall look in greater depth at the linguistic turn of poststructuralism.

The linguistic turn

While the linguistic version of language has been continuing on its way, isolated from outside changes by the solidity of its disciplinary knowledge (and it is interesting to note here the extent to which its disciplinary boundaries appear to have isolated linguistics from the poststructuralist challenge while other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology have been far more permeable), developments in the understanding of language elsewhere have taken a different track. At some levels, there is an interesting irony here in that it was exactly the radical potential of Saussure’s linguistic sign that gave the impetus to poststructuralist thought. Nevertheless, a great deal of the work in language that clusters around the term poststructuralism is more directly opposed to the very forms of structuralism that originated from Saussure’s linguistics and spread to other domains of the social sciences. As Poynton (1993) explains,

From the poststructuralist side, linguistics as a profoundly structuralist enterprise has been trenchantly critiqued or marginalised as of no conceivable interest. In significant respects, linguistics as the founding structuralist enterprise has come to signify what post-structuralism is ‘post’ in its radical critique of the structuralist project. Conversely, linguistics itself … has been so seduced by its standing as senior technicist discipline within structuralist conceptions of the humanities and social sciences as to fail to register that the linguistic turn’ of the last twenty or so years within these areas was not only asking different kinds of questions about language as a social phenomenon but was calling into question the premises of established ways of ‘knowing about language’ within disciplinary linguistics itself.

(1993:3–4)

Parakrama (1995) makes a similar point when he suggests that ‘much of the most exciting work in poststructuralism has gone unnoticed’ in linguistics because of ‘the conceptual framework of linguistics as a science which still remains in place even with the sub-disciplines of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics; and the historical complicities between linguistics and colonialism (both “internal” and “external”) which still pervade its “neutral” systems of classification and nomenclature’ (1995: 3). In many ways, then, the view of language that underlies the linguistic turn is vehemently opposed to the view of language constructed by linguistics. It is important, therefore, to observe not only some of the common origins here but also the fundamentally different questions being asked.

This more radical view that allows us to think of language as constructing reality comes via the poststructuralist turn. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Knowledge and discourse: towards an ecology of language
• 1 Prologue: Language and linguistics/Discourse and disciplinarity
• Part I Reflexive Practices
• Part II Social Practices
• Part III Professional and Academic Practices
• Coda
• References
• Index (word and phrase)
• Index (writer names)