Competing Discourses

Perspective and Ideology in Language

David Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315505312
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

This book discusses and explores the relationship between language and world view. David Lee presents recent research in linguistics, drawing together strands from a number of different areas of the subject: the nature of linguistic and conceptual categories, the role of metaphor in the everyday use of language, gender differentiation and social variation in speech. In this study, David Lee considers a broad range of issues in the light of two contrasting views on language. For much of its history, linguistics has been dominated by a tradition which sees individual languages as uniform, homogenous systems. However, there has always been an opposite view emphasising the complex tensions and cross-currents inherent in linguistic usage. This alternative perspective is explored in the analysis of a wide range of literary and non-literary texts: casual conversations, interviews, newspaper reports, official memoranda, television commercials and extracts from novels. The author describes how both spoken and written texts can be seen as the sites where tensions between "competing discourses", stemming from different social positions and perspectives, are illustrated.

1 Classification and Selection

Classification

The main aim of this first chapter is to identify some of the most important properties of human language that enable it to function as a mediator of world-view. We will focus in particular on the role of classification and selection in linguistic encoding and decoding. The imposition of structure on our raw experiences through these processes is closely bound up with questions of perspective. The thesis that coding creates reality rather than simply reporting it will be illustrated in discussion of two short texts, one literary, one non-literary, which provide an illustration of the operation of ideological factors in interpretation.

One of the main reasons why language is so closely bound up with world-view has to do with the classificatory function of language. Language can be seen as a tool for the classification of our experience of the world in many different ways and at many different levels. At a very basic level, individual words are clearly classificatory devices. In order to be able to use appropriately the English word dog, for example, the child acquiring English has to identify a very disparate range of phenomena, including poodles, Dalmatians, Alsatians, as all belonging in some sense to a single category. The task is far from straightforward, since in some ways the linguistic categories appear rather arbitrary. In many respects, an Alsatian resembles a wolf much more closely than it resembles a poodle, for example. Some insight into the problematic nature of the task of discovering the precise nature of the fit between language and the world is provided by the process of 'overextension' in child language development. This term refers to the process whereby young children use words such as dog, apple, ball, moon, fish, cow, ketchup and so on to refer to a much wider range of phenomena than do adults. For example, one child used the word cow not only for a picture of a cow but also for a horse, a reindeer, a zebra, a camel, a buffalo, an elephant, a polar bear, a kangaroo, a gorilla and some ants! Another used apple not only for an apple but also for a banana, a lemon, a strawberry, a cherry, an orange, a pear, a tomato, an onion, a red ball, an artichoke, a round biscuit, a ball lamp, a ball of soap, a solid oval and a teapot (Thomson and Chapman 1977: 364–5).¹

Nouns are not the only words that classify the phenomena of experience. Consider, for example, a verb like climb, which is used to denote a wide variety of situations. When you climb a ladder, you perform quite different actions from those involved in climbing a rope and there is very little in common between these situations and those of a plane climbing into the sky or a spider climbing across a web. Climb can also be used to refer to downward movement {She climbed down the rock face). It might even denote a situation in which there is no movement at all, as when I use a sentence such as See how the ivy climbs up to that window to describe what is in effect a static situation.

Many adjectives illustrate the same point. The meaning of strong varies considerably across expressions such as a strong horse, a strong cup of tea and a strong possibility. There is nothing about the notion of physical strength that necessarily links it to the notion of 'degree of concentration' as this applies to a cup of tea or to the meaning 'highly probable' as expressed by the phrase a strong possibility. This is not to say that the meanings in question are unrelated (a question to which we will return in Chapter 4, where we discuss the role of metaphor in ordinary language). But the fact that a single word can be used to cover this particular range of meanings would seem odd to speakers of many other languages.

The point that language imposes a classificatory scheme on the observed phenomena of experience is illustrated not only by lexical entities but also by grammatical elements. Consider, for example, the difference in English between the present perfect construction and the simple past tense. When we wish to refer to an event that occurred in some period of past time, the grammar of English forces us to choose between a present perfect form such as John has found the money and a simple past such as John found the money. We tend to use the former if the event in question relates to the present situation in some way (hence the tendency to use it for very recent events), whereas the latter is used if the event is thought of as being unconnected with the present. Since (with minor exceptions) one of these forms has to be used for events in past time, we can say that the grammar of English forces speakers to divide events in past time into two categories – those that impinge on the present and those that do not. Not all languages do this, even those that have a similar formal contrast. German, for example, has both a perfect tense and a simple past tense, but they are not used in the same way – hence the considerable difficulties experienced by German learners in the appropriate use of these forms in English. It is not that native speakers of German find difficulty in distinguishing between the two kinds of event in past time. It is simply that their acquired habits of language usage have not accustomed them to encode this distinction linguistically.

The notion of language as a classificatory instrument also applies at a more general level than that of individual lexemes and grammatical elements. For example, there is a sense in which the grammatical systems of all human languages are constructed around two very basic types of conceptual unit – physical objects and actions. It seems not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that these two general categories constitute the basic building blocks of our world-view. It should be emphasised, however, that this claim is not based on the simplistic idea that the grammatical categories of 'noun' and 'verb' can be equated in a straightforward way with the semantic categories of 'physical object' and 'action'.

The nature of the relationship between the level of meaning and the level of grammar is one that is crucial for our general argument and we will return to it on a number of occasions. At this point it is useful to establish an important methodological principle. When we consider the nature of the relationship between grammatical and semantic categories, we need to make an initial distinction between two levels of grammatical analysis – the language-particular level and the language-general level (Huddleston 1984: 74–6). At the language-particular level, the category of nouns includes not only those words denoting physical objects such as stone, table, house, tree but also many words denoting actions and events (arrival, destruction, disappearance, collision) as well as others denoting more abstract concepts (joy, charm, weakness, truth). The characteristics that identify all of these words as nouns in English concern their grammatical properties rather than their meaning. For example, the fact that they all inflect for plurality, the fact that they take determinatives (such as the, a, this, each) and adjectives as dependents and the fact that the type of phrase which they head fills a particular set of clause functions such as Subject and Object (for full discussion see Huddleston 1984: ch. 6).²

The language-general level is concerned with the naming of grammatical classes, once these have been established for each language on the basis of language-particular criteria. It is at this level that the semantic categories of 'physical object' and 'action' make an important contribution to the definition of metatheoretical terms such as 'noun' and 'verb'. The important point here is that the grammatical systems of human languages are organised in such a way that the vast majority of words denoting physical objects in any language are typically to be found in one class (defined by a distinctive set of language-particular grammatical properties) and the vast majority of words denoting actions are to be found in another (defined by a different set). It is in this sense that we can say that grammatical systems are organised around the semantic categories of physical object and action.

Even at the language-particular level there is a sense in which the nouns that denote physical objects, such as chair and table in English, are more central members of the noun category than nouns which denote other types of concept such as arrival (an event) or willingness (an attribute). In the first place chair and table each consist of a single morpheme. Arrival and willingness, on the other hand, are morphologically complex, both of them being 'derived' by the morphological process of suffixation from the simple stems arrive and willing.³ The second point is that all English words that denote concrete objects belong in this particular word-class, whereas this is not true of those that denote actions or events (most are verbs), nor of those that denote attributes (mostly adjectives). A third point concerning willingness is that it does not inflect for plurality and this applies to many other nouns denoting abstract concepts (aggressiveness, determination, readiness, likelihood). In other words, membership of the noun category is not an all-or-nothing matter but a gradient phenomenon. Chair and table are central or prototypical members of the category; arrival is slightly less prototypical because of its morphological character and its semantic properties; willingness is a peripheral member of the category. Whereas all these words are nouns, some are more 'nouny' than others. The claim that category membership is a gradient phenomenon is important, in that it applies not only to grammatical categories but also to semantic ones. We will develop this point as the book proceeds.

The fact that certain members of the noun category in English denote entities and concepts that are not physical objects raises a question relating to world-view. Consider concepts such as storm, wave, lightning, wind. In many languages the words denoting these concepts behave like verbs (Whorf 1971d: 215). Thus, in these languages there are structures such as It is storming in the West, The sea is waving violently today, It is winding strongly outside. These structures are impossible in English because the grammar of English treats the corresponding words as nouns. We therefore express the corresponding meanings by constructing sentences around Noun Phrases – There's a storm in the West, The waves are rough today, There is a strong wind outside. The obvious question is whether the fact that the grammar treats these words as nouns causes speakers of English to think of the corresponding concepts as objects. A small piece of evidence suggesting that this is so is the fact that many beginning linguistics students fail to see any problem in these examples for the traditional definition of nouns as words that refer to 'people, places or things'.

One point about words such as storm, wave, wind and so on is that the corresponding concepts do resemble physical objects in certain ways. Waves, for example, have certain characteristics of shape, size and weight that relate them to physical objects, so that their inclusion in the noun class in English does have some semantic motivation. In other respects, however, they are much more like events. One would suspect that speakers of those languages in which these concepts are treated as verbs are much more sensitive to their event-like characteristics than to their object-like characteristics. It is also worth noting in this connection that, whereas grammatical categories tend to be relatively clear-cut, semantic categories are often much more problematic. There is no doubt that the word lightning, for example, is a noun in English but it is much less clear that the phenomenon in question is a 'thing'. This discrepancy between the status of grammatical and semantic categories is fundamental to the argument of this book, since one of our main themes has to do with the nature of the fit between language and the world.

A related question arises in English with respect to a grammatical process known as 'nominalisation'. We noted above a distinction between 'basic' nouns such as chair, stone, table on the one hand and arrival, destruction, disappearance on the other, such that the latter are seen as being in some sense 'derived' from words that are basically verbs. There is an analogue to this situation in the domain of syntax. Thus, consider a sentence such as Max commented on the dessert, which clearly denotes an event. The grammar of English makes available an alternative grammatical structure for referring to this event: Max's comment on the dessert, a structure that is generally referred to as a 'nominalised' form of the sentence (or clause) Max commented on the dessert. The nominalised form is generally used when speakers wish to express complex propositions containing embedded propositions. Thus, if I wish to refer to the event 'Max commented on the dessert' and say of this event that it surprised me, one way of expressing this complex proposition is to use the nominalised form (Max's comment on the dessert surprised me).

Again, the general question is whether a nominalised form leads us to conceptualise the event in question as a kind of thing-i.e. whether the grammatical process of nominalisation is associated with the semantic process of 'reification'⁴ This view is far from implausible. In the case of the example cited, when somebody makes 'a comment' by uttering certain words, it is very easy to conceptualise the proposition in question as a kind of object which they have produced. There are all kinds of ways in English of talking about speech acts that support this view: your announcement, my remark, John's speech, their suggestion, his advice and so on. In other words, English speakers have a general conceptual framework relating to speech acts, such that they are naturally conceptualised as a kind of object.

The situation is in fact even more general than this, since the process of reification can apply not only to speech acts but to most actions. Thus if John kicks a goal, it is possible to refer to this event as John's goal, as if it too were a kind of object. We can also apply the same kind of attributes to many actions that we apply to objects – a long kick, a high catch, a heavy fall, a light punch, a narrow escape.

One important area of meaning that is encoded in the grammars of all languages is the notion of agentivity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Classification and selection
• 2 Grammar, categories and world-view
• 3 Language and world-view: Golding and Faulkner
• 4 Metaphor
• 5 Language, perspective, ideology
• 6 Language and gender
• 7 Discursive interactions
• 8 Variety, discourse, ideology
• 9 Conclusion and overview
• References
• Index