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Linguists and their speakers
Language Sciences 32 (2010) 536–544
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Linguists and their speakers Edda Weigand University of Munster, Institute of General Linguistics, Department of Dialogue Research and Comparative Lexicology, FB9 Aegidiistr. 5, 48143 Munster, Germany
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 19 March 2010 Accepted 29 March 2010
Keywords: Integration Mother tongue Native speaker Mixed Game Model New Science
a b s t r a c t At first glance, the object of linguistics ‘language’ seems to be a clear, separate object. In the history of linguistics however different concepts of language have been proposed which are dependent on the model concerned. Together with the concept of language, the concept of the speaker has changed from the ideal speaker to the individual speaker. The paper aims to describe some steps in this process of grasping language and the speaker in the history of modern linguistics. The present state of the art is characterized by the challenges posed by so-called ‘New Science’, i.e. post-Cartesian science. Integration instead of division and separation has become a core concept which inevitably has consequences for the conceptualization of language and the speaker. Reductive models need to give way to holistic approaches. The Mixed Game Model is sketched out as a holistic model which is capable of tackling the concept of ‘the integrational speaker’. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction ‘Language’ seems to be a clear, separate object. In the history of linguistics however we are confronted with a series of concepts of language dependent on the model concerned. The same is true of the concept of ‘the speaker’ which changes in accordance with the concept of language put forward. This change in the basic concepts of the discipline ‘linguistics’ is connected with a general change in science which has shaken our belief in certainty, and it is also connected with a fundamental change in our society. As citizens of a globalized society, we are always on the move. We need to come to grips with ‘living with uncertainty’ (Toulmin, 2001). Fixed traditions and definitions have been replaced by negotiating arguments. Concepts which seemed to be simple and clear in the past, such as our ‘mother tongue’ or the ‘native speaker’, have become problematized. We can be born in a country which is not the country of our forefathers and acquire the citizenship of that country. We learn the language of that country from birth and – so it seems – become native speakers of that country. We can, for example, encounter a Chinese waiter in a Tuscan restaurant in Italy who speaks the Tuscan dialect perfectly and has an impressive knowledge of the Tuscan cuisine. We might wonder whether he considers himself a Tuscan or still ‘feels at home’ in the culture of his forefathers. Initially, rising doubts about the native speaker’s intuition were suppressed. As linguists, we felt justified in declaring that we were linguistically trained native speakers and knew the rules of our mother tongue. We thus gave ourselves the legitimacy to decide what counts as right or wrong, as a well-formed or a problematic utterance. We took it for granted that meanings can be defined and understanding can be presupposed among speakers of the same mother tongue. We were thus still on the rule-governed track of competence even if we had moved to communicative competence. Looking beyond the sentence and trying to grasp performance we might be surprised by situations in which native speakers of the same mother
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tongue cannot understand each other. Yule (1996, p. 4), for instance, meditates about this fact in his introduction to ‘Pragmatics’. Passing by he listens to a conversation between other native speakers of English (1)
Her: So – did you? Him: Hey – who wouldn’t? and comments: I heard the speakers, I knew what they said, but I had no idea what was communicated. [. . .] Thus, pragmatics is appealing because it’s about how people make sense of each other linguistically, but it can be a frustrating area of study because it requires us to make sense of people and what they have in mind. What Yule considers to be a ‘problematic case’ is however not at all strange but quite normal in performance. Native competence cannot be restricted to the level of verbal means. We never only exchange verbal means in communication but play the game of dialogue as an integrational game, using our abilities of speaking, thinking and perceiving simultaneously. We need to be insiders in the game and make sense of what is in our minds. It is the challenge of New Science to tackle the issue of how body, mind and language are interconnected and dialogically put to action. The paper aims to describe the attempts made in the history of modern linguistics to grasp the object language and its speaker. We can no longer consider language to be an abstract, separate system. Language in the end means the ability of speaking which is intrinsically connected with other human abilities. Integration has become a crucial concept in recent decades, and consequently the question can no longer be avoided of how ‘the intergrational speaker’ can be conceptualized. 2. Concepts of language and their speakers Language seems to be a concrete object. The acoustic shape however is only part of the object language which as such remains an elusive concept. We are confronted with individual languages; language as such represents a hypostatised mental concept. Modern linguistics tried to grasp it along two different lines: the line of competence, i.e. of abstraction to rules, and the line of performance, i.e. of allowing any rule to be broken. De Saussure (1916) started the line of abstraction with his concept of language as a sign system. The sign system represents a static system which operates without a speaker, i.e. the rules of the system replace the speaker. Meaning is defined and expressed by signs and their mutual relationships. Modern linguistics thus started out on the path of reductionism by completely abstracting from language use and searching for hidden rules at an underlying level. De Saussure paved the way for Chomsky’s concept of the ‘ideal speaker’ (e.g., 1965), which is defined by reference to a set of abilities. These abilities are conceived of as operations which computers allegedly can handle when generating correct sentences. As a consequence, the generative concept of language is an artificial concept designed to account for the rulegoverned process of constructing sentences. In the wake of the pragmatic turn we began to look beyond the limit of the sentence and to address language use. However, we still continued on the path of abstraction by changing language competence to communicative competence and correct sentences to well-formed dialogues. The native speaker took the place of the ideal speaker and became the final authority whose intuition decided what counted as a well-formed dialogue. Rules of language competence changed to conventions of communicative competence. Dialogue grammar (Hundsnurscher, 1980) and Searle’s speech act theory (1969) are conventional theories of communicative competence. Whereas the concept of the ideal speaker belongs to a general concept of language, the concept of the native speaker is aligned to an individual language, namely the mother tongue. The native speakers’ competence is competence in their mother tongue. Dell Hymes’ sociolinguistic term of communicative competence (1972) was thus reduced to the level of rules and conventions. Although the pragmatic turn drew our attention to ‘real’ language, it was not immediately clear what ‘real’ language or ‘language use’ should mean. Even if some progress has been achieved by proceeding from language as a sign system via the ideal speaker to the native speaker, the concept of language nonetheless remained a myth (Harris, 1981). Generative principles survived in the concept of well-formed dialogues and did not allow us to address ever-changing performance. Performance was the declared starting point for empiricist models. The question of what should be the starting point for theorizing, reflection or observation, seems to be an ever-returning question in science. Fundamental arguments against the behavioural method have been put forth by Chomsky (1959) in his famous attack on Skinner. They seem to have been forgotten in current trends set by proponents of spoken language. I will not take up the debate once again (Weigand, 2004a). In principle, there is no empirical evidence as such. Genuine science or ‘‘the pleasure of finding things out” (Feynman, 1999) starts with goal-directed observation which combines, from the very outset, reflection and observation, mind and body. Observation needs a point of orientation, a question to open up the complex whole. In empiricist models the pivot shifted from the native speaker’s intuition to the empirically measurable authentic text. Concerning the issue of what can count as convention in a language, the intuition of the native speaker has been problematized. Different native speakers may respond differently. What counts as convention is no longer decided by the native speaker but by the statistical concept of frequency in a corpus. At its core, the concept of the native speaker who is legitimized to decide about rules and conventions of a language was lost and the individual native speaker put at centre stage.
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‘language’
abstraction rules
‘la langue’: a system without speakers
language competence of the ideal speaker
communicative competence of the native speaker
observation empirical ‘data’
ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, spoken language
performance of the individual speaker
frequency in the corpus: the individual native speaker
Fig. 1. Concepts of language and the speaker.
Up to this point, the history of modern linguistics can be outlined as in Fig. 1. The different concepts of language and the speaker developed in modern linguistics result from methodological exigencies. On the one hand, we have the postulate of searching for hidden rules and, on the other hand, the opposite postulate of exclusively observing measurable surface elements (cf. Searle, 1972). Both paths are inevitably insufficient to enable us to grasp language as a whole. Every attempt to bridge the gap between competence and performance is destined to fail as long as it aims to combine two incompatible methodologies. The enterprise best poised to bridge the gap has to change the starting point and to address the object not ‘damaged’ by methodology (Martinet, 1975). The gap is bridged by human beings who combine regularities and individual techniques in their minds. Performance models as well as competence models are restricted to a reductionist concept of language which does not exist as an autonomous object. Underlying rules as well as spoken language are only parts of the object which as a whole does not arise from addition but from integration in a hierarchy of components. Human beings are able to come to grips with this complex whole as they adapt themselves to ever-changing conditions and use their abilities in integration (cf. also Harris, 1998). Proponents of the empiricist route are also confronted with another problem. How are they to map spoken language in all its arbitrariness with a concept of grammar which needs some common ground? They get out of the paradox by declaring that it is individual speakers who construct the grammar of a language in the process of speaking. Grammar is no longer presupposed as an internalized mental concept in the mind of the native speaker but is created by the speakers in every individual case. Grammar ‘emerges’ or is ‘constructed’ in the process of speaking (e.g., Hopper, 1987; Ono and Thompson, 1995). There is no longer a core of rules and conventions which constitute the standard language or specific varieties of a language. On the contrary, the authentic text reigns. Whether its elements are meaningful can however not be decided by observation alone because there is no empirical evidence as such. Phonetics is not yet linguistics proper. Linguists need the criterion of relevance which transfers phonetics into the phonology of a language. Language is inherently connected with meaning, but it is not verbal signs which carry defined meanings. It is speakers who give meaning to utterances and negotiate understanding. Even if performance models stress the point that they aim to describe ‘reality’, what they describe is the ‘reality’ of speech which – like phonetics – waits to be sorted out regarding its relevance for action. 3. What makes our mother tongue so unique If we accept that the concept of the native speaker is no longer fixed but differentiated towards individual native speakers, we have to address the principal question of what makes up native speakers’ competence. A Chinese living from birth in Italy may become a native speaker of Italian in spite of having to face the issue of different cultures drifting apart, the culture of his home land and the Italian culture. The problem of the speaker’s identity thus arises in our ever-mobile societies. The concept of identity seems to start from the identity of a person with his/her mother tongue or with being a native speaker (Love, 2009, p. 31) and becomes problematized if we no longer live exclusively in the country of our mother tongue. Even if native speakers differ, they seem to have something in common. The question therefore cannot be avoided as to what makes our native competence so unique. Why can we not acquire another mother tongue as adults? We certainly can have two or even more ‘mother tongues’ if learned from birth or in a very early period of our childhood. If we have to learn another language as adults we will never achieve the same proficiency. The language we learn will remain a foreign language, always requiring an effort when we speak it, whereas our mother tongue consists of internalized routines we use unconsciously. By learning a language from birth, in a period which is epigenetically programmed for it, we acquire an ability which is different from learning a language in later years. Even if we can no longer hypostatise a general native competence, native speakers – however different they are – have something in common: they use their language unconsciously and – if asked – can to a certain degree decide by intuition what is a candidate for conventional language use. They easily cope with the issue of how language and cognition supplement each other. For them, speaking and thinking interact smoothly whereas we as foreigners have trouble disambiguating certain polysemous forms.
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Being a native speaker is not an absolute quality. Native speakers differ considerably in their mother tongue competence as becomes obvious in examinations at school or with translations. It does not suffice to request that a text be translated by a native speaker in order to get a good translation. The native speaker must have proficient native competence. Proficiency in language use is a condition for professional success in most areas. It is all the more difficult for immigrants to gain a foothold in a country which is not the country of their mother tongue. Our modern times are characterized by mobility: we are born in a country and later live in another country, we learn foreign languages, become acquainted with foreign cultures and may even decide to acquire another national identity. We can however not change our racial identity. Our Tuscan Chinese remains Chinese even if born in Italy, having acquired Italian citizenship and learned Tuscan from birth. Human beings are a product of epigenetic rules (Wilson, 1999, p. 210); their biological identity cannot be intentionally changed within one generation. 4. The challenge of New Science: how to conceptualize the integrational speaker Let us come back to Yule’s problematic case (example 1) that there are situations in which even native speakers cannot understand each other. That is the case when the focus is only on speech, on what is said. In language use we mean more than we say because we do not only use our ability to speak but integrationally use other abilities as well, mainly to think and to perceive. The challenges a new science of language is confronted with are twofold: – How to integrate the different communicative abilities human beings use in dialogic interaction, i.e. how to conceptualize the ‘integrational speaker’? – How to bridge the gap between rule-governed theorizing and ever-changing reality? Human beings are not the victims of the complex but are capable of coming to grips with it in their minds. The bridge we are searching for is built by human beings in their minds. How can New Science deal with this complex network of components? New Science is post-Cartesian science which goes beyond the simple and dares to take on the adventure of the complex. We no longer need to make hypotheses about the black box of our brain, we can see how it works although the brain still remains a mystery. There is no simple at the beginning, no matter separated from energy or function. Mirror neurons already demonstrate a complex interplay between perception and intention which characterizes human beings from the very outset as dialogic beings (Weigand, 2002b). New Science is integrational science based on consilience. Whereas natural sciences fully accept the inner connectedness or the unity of knowledge, social sciences and linguistics hesitate to join consilient research which ‘cuts down through the levels of organization from society to mind and brain’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 205). In linguistics, an integrational approach based on the tenet of consilience allows us to conceptualize an integrational speaker who is able to use different communicative abilities and different techniques simultaneously as illustrated in Fig. 2. The integrational approach as a holistic approach has first to clarify the complex object and then to derive an appropriate methodology from it (cf. also Martinet, 1975). Goal-directed observation, i.e. observation guided by a specific question, tells us that language belongs to human beings. It has taken some time to acknowledge this obvious fact and to recognize that there is no independent object language (Weigand, 2010). Language as a natural phenomenon is comprehensible as the ability to speak, and this cannot be described independently of other communicative abilities. The nature of language depends on the nature of human beings. To my mind, human beings are social individuals. The speaker is in any case an individual speaker who is socially or dialogically oriented towards his/her fellow beings. It is this double nature which is mirrored in language: on the one hand, it is individually applied, on the other hand, it has to comply to regularities in order to attain social ends. Language moreover is an intrinsically cultural phenomenon. Learning a language means learning how to use it in a specific culture. Human beings are not only biological beings born with the innate capacity to learn a language. They are also cultural beings as a result of the coevolution of genes, mind and culture (Lumsden and Wilson, 2005; Weigand, 2007). The so-called ‘language instinct debate’ is a game played at the extremes of orthodox theory, not a game which belongs to New Science. What are the methodological consequences which a theory has to derive from such a complex object of ‘language as dialogue’ (Weigand, 2009a)? If the theory is intended to help us understand what is really going on in dialogue, we have to begin from zero, by facing complexity and struggling to find a way through. The way through cannot be the addition of competence and performance or of sign system and language use. Instead, we have to find the key we unconsciously follow when opening up complexity in everyday and institutional dialogic action games. The key lies in our nature as purposive beings and in our extraordinary ability of competence-in-performance. We are not the victims of chaos nor are we shackled by rules. We are able to adapt to ever-changing conditions of performance by applying rules as far as they go and by going beyond rules where necessary. the integrational speaker body & mind & language
rules & particularities
Fig. 2. Communicative abilities and techniques of the integrational speaker.
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The integrational speaker is an individual speaker who communicates with other individuals. There has to be some common ground for them to come to an understanding. They are, to some degree, bound to keep to regularities, rules and conventions, which can be the regularities of standard languages or of language varieties, e.g., dialects. The concept of a standard language does not mean that language is totally determined by a set of normative rules; the speaker is in any case free to obey to or to abandon the norms, even though as a native speaker he/she knows the rules and conventions of standard language which are used in the community. The methodology in an integrational theory is thus not restricted to an independent set of pre-existing rules but is based on principles of probability applied by the speakers. The integrational speaker first tries to structure the complex according to standard conditions. If understanding is not yet achieved by reference to rules and conventions of standard cases, the speaker includes particular conditions and proceeds from standard cases to individual cases. New Science meets the challenge of complexity by developing a holistic theory which from the very outset starts from the complex object (Simon, 1962). As there is no language without a speaker, the starting point needs to be human abilities and how they are applied in a world of uncertainty. An integrational theory of language will inevitably cross narrow disciplinary limits not only between the disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences but also between the social sciences and the natural sciences. According to the basic principle of consilience, ‘the social sciences are intrinsically compatible with the natural sciences’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 205). The ‘Mixed Game Model’ which I developed in recent years represents a step in this direction (e.g., Weigand, 2006, 2008, 2009a). As a holistic theory it starts from human beings and their abilities and describes how human beings try to resolve their social needs and purposes in dialogic action games on the basis of principles of probability. Human beings orient themselves as ‘complex adaptive systems’ (Gell-Mann, 1994) within ever-changing surroundings by principles of probability of various kinds, constitutive, regulative and executive ones. Constitutive principles are the principles of action and dialogue and the principle of coherence, which is of special interest from an integrational point of view. The Action Principle gives an answer to the question as to what makes up an action in general. Having intentions does not yet necessarily mean carrying out an action. Actions of any type, communicative, mental and practical actions, are based on the correlation of purposes and specific means by which the purposes are attained. Depending on the type of action, the specific means are communicative, mental, or practical means. For instance, to carry out a practical action means having a practical purpose, such as felling a tree, and using practical means, such as a saw. Carrying out a communicative action means having a communicative-dialogic purpose such as a request and using communicative means such as speech and gestures. The purpose of a speech act can be defined by specific pragmatic claims which allow us to derive a dialogic speech act taxonomy (Weigand, 2003). Dialogic actions are often double-layered actions, i.e., behind openly expressed purposes they pursue different hidden interests. Consequently Searle’s formula F(p) has to be extended by including interests I as a dominant predicate as indicated in Fig. 3. To give an example: in the commercial area of our capitalistic society the interest behind business actions can be grasped as win (Weigand 2009b). It mostly remains hidden as, for instance, in case of the publicity spot (2)
Toyota does not break down.
which has the purpose of a simple statement. Communication does not proceed by means of a concatenation of single autonomous speech acts but by means of sequences of internally related initiative and reactive speech acts. The features ‘initiative’ versus ‘reactive’ are not only formal features dependent on the position in the sequence but primarily qualify the speech acts as functionally different speech acts: initiative speech acts make a claim, reactive speech acts fulfil this very claim. The dialogic nature of every single speech act and the resulting basic structure of communication is represented by the Dialogic Principle proper as illustrated in Fig. 4. Example: (3)
Our economy is at risk.
– $
ASSERTION
You are right./I don’t see it that way. ±ACCEPTANCE
The claim to truth of the initiative speech act is fulfilled, in a positive or negative way, by the reactive action. In this way dialogue is constituted at the level of interaction by action and reaction. Only by action and reaction can the interactional purpose of the dialogue ‘coming to an understanding’ be attained.
I
[F
(p
)]
Interest [purpose (reference + predication)] ↔ communicative means Fig. 3. Action principle.
Dialogue
Action
Reaction
Fig. 4. Dialogic principle proper.
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Interest [purpose (reference + predication)] ↔ communicative means speech, perception, cognition Fig. 5. Coherence principle.
The correlation of action and reaction goes beyond the correlation of meaning and understanding at the level of the shared mind or intersubjectivity. An utterance is meant by the speaker and more or less understood by the interlocutor. Understanding or sharing our minds is never total, always gradual. Understanding is a mental action by the hearer and related to the utterance of the speaker. However, due to the intrinsic integration of our abilities we are normally unable to stop at understanding and cannot help taking a position, at least in our minds. We react, in general with a positive or negative reply, i.e. basically by evaluating the speaker’s position. The third constitutive principle, the Principle of Coherence, is an integrational principle proper as it relates to the integration of communicative means by which dialogic action is performed (examples are given below in chapter 5). Communicative means rely on abilities of language, mind, and body which complement each other. Coherence of dialogue comes about by understanding how the communicative means interact in carrying out an action as illustrated in Fig. 5. Coherence was initially thought to be established by verbal means within the text. In the meantime the level of the text has lost its autonomous status: coherence of the text changed to coherence in the mind (Weigand, 2000; Givón, 1993). The basic tenet of speech act theory of ‘doing things with words’ (Austin, 1962) can be considered a general catch phrase. We do not act by speaking alone, we act using utterances which represent a combination of different communicative means. By making an utterance we speak and at the same time we see what is going on in the speech situation and we make assumptions about particularities of the game. Our communicative abilities interact when we produce the utterance as the carrier of the action. Constitutive Principles are combined with Regulative and Executive Principles. Regulative Principles mediate between different and even contradictory abilities and interests. They are, for instance, responsible for how we match our self-interest with respect for the other human being or for how we deal with emotions. Regulative principles are highly dependent on cultural conventions and only in part intentionally controlled. Principles of politeness which mediate between self-interest and respect as well as principles of emotion which mediate between emotion and reason are thus differently shaped in different cultures (Weigand, 2004b, 2007). Executive Principles finally refer to cognitive processes and strategies which we apply in order to successfully pursue our interests and purposes. Executive principles as well as regulative principles are part of a rhetoric of dialogue which evaluates communicative means with respect to their effective use in dialogic action games (Weigand, 2008). 5. Sample analyses of how the integrational principle proper works Having introduced the nuts and bolts of the Mixed Game Model, let me now illustrate with a few authentic examples how the Principle of Coherence or the Integrational Principle proper works. Integrational linguistics requires us to explicate how we can come to an understanding in dialogue by the integrational use of different communicative means. Meaning is not defined, understanding cannot be presupposed. Meaning and understanding are negotiated in the mixed game. Negotiation includes dealing with problems of understanding and misunderstanding. Consequently understanding remains, in principle, gradual understanding. Our first example illustrates the interaction between speaking and thinking or between language and cognition. The wellknown example from Brown and Yule (1983, p. 196) can do this best (cf. Weigand, 2002a): (4)
There’s the doorbell. – I’m in the bath.
These two utterances show no sign of textual coherence, nonetheless they are connected. We understand their internal relationship even without any description of the situation. Obviously we mean more than we say. We do not need to resign, like Brown and Yule, nor do we need to assume a zero connector, like Stati (1990). Coherence comes about by the Dialogical Principle proper and by the interaction of verbal means with cognitive means. Our actions are dialogically oriented: the speaker’s initiative utterance in our example of an indirectly directive game makes a dialogic claim to truth, and indirectly to volition, and expects the interlocutor to react by addressing this very claim. The initiative and reactive utterance are thus connected at the cognitive level by making and fulfilling the same claim. That is precisely what is represented by the Dialogic Principle proper which is not in need of any empirical sign because it is based on human beings’ nature as intersubjective, i.e. dialogical individuals. Cognition comes into play in this example in another respect, too. The claim to volition of the initiative utterance is not explicitly expressed by verbal means but left to inferences. It is a characteristic of indirect speech acts that the real claim remains uncertain, in the balance of probabilities and is thus to be negotiated: someone has to open the door, if possible the interlocutor. The same is true of the reactive utterance which also indirectly conveys a claim to volition (also Weigand, 2002a). Speech not only relies on sharing our minds; it is also intrinsically connected with shared perception as we can see with the following authentic example (Weigand, 2002a):
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(5)
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A B
One for her. Eve, too.
Without a description of the speech situation we will not really understand what is going on in this action game. We might be baffled and ask: Where have all the ‘sentences’ gone? We do not find sentences, we find utterances, i.e. communicative means, not just verbal ones. Normativity or conventionality of a language system obviously do not count. Verbal means are integrated with perceptual means in a way that demolishes language rules or norms. It is necessary to perceive what is going on in order to understand. In our case we can observe that B, the father, is cutting willow branches for the son, and A, the mother, asks him to cut a branch for the daughter: one for her, which is accepted by the father: Eve, too. Integration in the sense of interacting dialogic means – verbal, perceptual, and cognitive – is a constitutive feature of human competence-in-performance. Perception cannot be separated from speech. This is in part the reason why oral and written language cannot be directly compared. Perception in the speech situation and perception in the written medium are completely different and consequently result in different utterance constructions (Weigand, 1993). There is also another issue which finds its proper explanation in the integration of speaking, thinking and perceiving: the issue of human beings’ ability to produce ever-new utterances that have never been produced before. It can no longer be considered an astonishing event but the natural consequence of the fact that meaning is created through the eyes of individuals and is not only expressed by the use of verbal means. The complexity of meaning and understanding is, in principle, without limits. Neither Chomsky’s recursive rules (1965) nor the infinite possibilities of variation in spoken language touch upon the real issue. The following authentic example illuminates once more very clearly the integrated network of communicative means which we use without any effort in everyday communication (see also Weigand, 2004c). I will first present this example without any description of the speech situation, i.e. ‘trusting the text’ (Sinclair, 1994) or a concept of language as autonomous object: (6)
H E H F E
Lassen Sie sich nicht anstecken! Sind Sie krank? Haben Sie nicht das Wasser gesehen? Jeder hat sein Hobby. Das würde ich nie machen, wo wir soviel bezahlen allein fürs Putzen. Ah, jetzt verstehe ich. Sie haben recht. Nein, da lasse ich mich nicht anstecken!
H E H F E
(in English translation) Don’t let yourself get infected! Are you ill? Didn’t you see the water? Everyone’s got a hobby. I’d never do that when we pay so much just for the cleaning. Ah, now I understand. You’re right. No, I won’t let myself get infected!
I am quite sure that you will not understand what is going on in this action game. You may try to find some thread running through the text and arrive at an approximate partial understanding by guessing. But are we guessing in language action? On the contrary, we do not need to guess because as human beings we not only use our ability to speak but inevitably bring in other integrated abilities, namely perceiving and thinking. In order to understand what is going on in language use, we have to participate in the action game and to analyse it from inside, addressing the complex directly and not reducing it to the empirical level of the text. Consequently, language action is not action by speaking but by integrated dialogic means including verbal means. It thus becomes evident that we have to go beyond the empirical level of the text and have to add a description of the cognitive and perceptual background from which the interlocutors derive their cognitive and perceptual means of communication. Clearly, they do not trust the verbal text alone but trust cognitive means, associations and allusions which an observer cannot understand. Thus in our example H refers to a person not present in the action game without explicitly expressing it, a person who, some days ago, had spilled water on the ground when cleaning the roof of the house entrance: Didn’t you see the water? The action game takes place near the entrance of the house. It is therefore enough for H to raise his head and to look and move his body in the direction of the entrance hall thus alluding by perceptual means to what had happened a few days ago, and ironically commenting on it Everyone’s got a hobby. He deliberately only uses the anonymous term everyone and takes it for granted that the interlocutor will understand. His wife F, too, uses an anonymous phrase: I’d never do that trusting that E will understand because they are supposed to share knowledge as a result of the fact that all three live in the same house. She adds a critical comment on the price they have to pay for the cleaning of the hallway. All these means together, verbal, perceptual and cognitive ones, are necessary for E to come to an understanding and to arrive via negotiation at the right meaning of to be infected, namely ‘to be infected by a mania for cleaning’. There is no explicit disambiguation by the verbal environment. Language-in-use can accept the risk of misunderstandings because they are normally immediately repaired. I think the conclusions to be drawn from this example of everyday small talk are evident. Linguistics as a science of language alone is not capable of addressing language action. Yule (1996, p. 4f.) is right when he states that as observers we can only understand examples which are exclusively based on empirical means. Trusting the text in a corpus does not lead to an
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understanding if it requires the interaction of different types of communicative means. Corpus linguists who consider the corpus as a record of our behaviour, like Stubbs (1996, p. 233), are wrong because only part of our behaviour is recorded in the corpus. Example (6) also shows how body movement is deployed as perceptual communicative means. Perception is directed at the body, at gestures and any other body movements. Whereas gestures have already been dealt with at length in the literature as an important dialogic means (e.g., Nash, 2007), body movement still needs to be analysed in more detail. Not every body movement can be conceived of as communicative means, only movements which are intentionally carried out, as in our example where moving forward indicated the place of the event. 6. Conclusions The conclusions to be drawn from these examples are clear: human beings are integrational beings best equipped to come to grips with complexity. A theory of language has to do justice to the complex hierarchy of interacting subsystems including verbal means as an integrated component. Integration in the sense of interaction not only happens at one level, for instance, as interaction of different communicative means, but also crosses the levels of the hierarchy, bottom–up and top–down, from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities and vice versa. The complex whole is an integrated whole unified on the basis of consilience. New Science is called upon to dare go on the adventure of a genuinely holistic approach which also includes an ethical component. Evaluating and taking a position is an inborn feature of human beings (Wilson, 1978/2004, p. 153). Every individual is therefore responsible for how Mankind is shaped. No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manner of thine own Or of thine friend’s were. Each man’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee. John Donne References Austin, J.L., 1962. How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford University Press, London. Brown, G., Yule, G., 1983. Discourse Analysis. University Press, Cambridge. Chomsky, N., 1959. Review: ‘B.F. Skinner: verbal behavior’. Language 35, 26–58. Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. The MIT, Cambridge/Mass. Feynman, R.P., 1999. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Perseus Books Group, Reading/Mass. Gell-Mann, M., 1994. The Quark and the Jaguar. Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. Abacus, London. Givón, T., 1993. Coherence in text and in mind. Pragmatics & Cognition 1, 171–227. Harris, R., 1981. The Language Myth. Duckworth, London. Harris, R., 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford. Hopper, P., 1987. Emergent grammar. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 13, 139–157. Hundsnurscher, F., 1980. Konversationsanalyse versus Dialoggrammatik. In: Rupp, H., Roloff, H.-G. (Eds.), Akten des VI. Internationalen GermanistenKongresses. Basel 1980, vol. 2. Lang, Frankfurt/Main, pp. 89–95. Hymes, D., 1972. On communicative competence. In: Pride, J.B., Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics. Selected Readings. Penguin, Harmondsworth, pp. 269– 293. Love, N., 2009. Science, language and linguistic culture. Language & Communication 29, 26–46. Lumsden, C.J., Wilson, E.O., 2005. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process, 25th Anniversary ed. World Scientific, New Jersey. Martinet, A., 1975. Functional Linguistics. La linguistique fonctionnelle. In: Martinet, A. (Ed.), Studies in Functional Syntax. Études de syntaxe fonctionnelle. Fink, München, pp. 9–81. Nash, C.E., 2007. Gestural regulators in French, Japanese and American English dialogues. In: Grein, M., Weigand, E. (Eds.), Dialogue and Culture. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 115–140. Ono, T., Thompson, S.A., 1995. What can conversations tell us about syntax. In: Davis, Ph.W. (Ed.), Alternative Linguistics. Descriptive and Theoretical Modes. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 213–272. Saussure, F. de, 1916. In: Bally, Ch., Sechehaye, Albert (Eds.), Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne, Paris (Transl. Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. De Gruyter, Berlin, 1967). Searle, J.R., 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. University Press, Cambridge. Searle, J. R. (1972). Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics. The New York Review of Books XVII, 16–24. Simon, H.A., 1962. The architecture of complexity: hierarchic systems. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106, 467–482. Sinclair, J., 1994. Trust the text. In: Coulthard, M. (Ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis. Routledge, London, pp. 12–25. Stati, S., 1990. Le transphrastique. PUF, Paris. Stubbs, M., 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis. Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Blackwell, Oxford.
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Toulmin, St., 2001. Return to Reason. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass. Weigand, E., 1993. Mündlich und schriftlich – ein Verwirrspiel. In: Löffler, H. (Ed.), Dialoganalyse IV. Referate der 4. Arbeitstagung, Basel 1992. Part 1. Niemeyer, Tübingen, pp. 137–150. Weigand, E., 2000. Coherence in discourse – a never-ending problem. In: Beckmann, S., König, P.-P., Wolf, G. (Eds.), Sprachspiel und Bedeutung. Festschrift für Franz Hundsnurscher zum 65. Geburtstag. Niemeyer, Tübingen, pp. 267–274. Weigand, E., 2002a. The language myth and linguistics humanised. In: Harris, R. (Ed.), The Language Myth in Western Culture, Curzon, Richmond/Surrey, pp. 55–83. Weigand, E., 2002b. Constitutive features of human dialogic interaction: mirror neurons and what they tell us about human abilities. In: Stamenov, M.I., Gallese, V. (Eds.), Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 229–248. Weigand, E., 2003. Sprache als Dialog. Sprechakttaxonomie und kommunikative Grammatik, 2nd rev ed. Niemeyer, Tübingen. Weigand, E., 2004a. Empirical data and theoretical models. Review article on: Eerdmans, S.L., Prevignano, C., Thibault, P.J. (Eds.), Language and Interaction. Discussions with John J. Gumperz. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2003. Pragmatics & Cognition 12.2, 375–388. Weigand, E., 2004b. Emotions: the simple and the complex. In: Weigand, E. (Ed.), Emotion in Dialogic Interaction. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 3–22. Weigand, E., 2004c. Possibilities and limitations of corpus linguistics. In: Aijmer, K. (Ed.), Dialogue Analysis XIII: Understanding and Misunderstanding in Dialogue. Niemeyer, Tübingen, pp. 301–316. Weigand, E., 2006. Argumentation: the mixed game. Argumentation 20 (1), 59–87. Weigand, E., 2007. The sociobiology of language. In: Grein, M., Weigand, E. (Eds.), Dialogue and Culture. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 27–50. Weigand, E., 2008. Rhetoric in the mixed game. In: Weigand, E. (Ed.), Dialogue and Rhetoric. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 3–22. Weigand, E., 2009a. Language as Dialogue. Benjamins, Amsterdam. Weigand, E., 2009b. Principles of Dialogue: With a Special Focus on Business Dialogues. In: Weigand, E. (Ed.), Language as Dialogue. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 323–340. Weigand, E., 2010. Sprache und Sprechen. In: Braun, O., Lüdtke, U. (Eds.), Enzyklopädisches Handbuch der Behindertenpädagogik, vol. 8. Sprache und Kommunikation, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart. Wilson, E.O., 1978/2004. On Human Nature. With A New Preface. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass. Wilson, E.O., 1999. Consilience. The Unity of Knowledge. Vintage Books, New York. Yule, G., 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
Linguists and their speakers Edda Weigand University of Munster, Institute of General Linguistics, Department of Dialogue Research and Comparative Lexicology, FB9 Aegidiistr. 5, 48143 Munster, Germany
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 19 March 2010 Accepted 29 March 2010
Keywords: Integration Mother tongue Native speaker Mixed Game Model New Science
a b s t r a c t At first glance, the object of linguistics ‘language’ seems to be a clear, separate object. In the history of linguistics however different concepts of language have been proposed which are dependent on the model concerned. Together with the concept of language, the concept of the speaker has changed from the ideal speaker to the individual speaker. The paper aims to describe some steps in this process of grasping language and the speaker in the history of modern linguistics. The present state of the art is characterized by the challenges posed by so-called ‘New Science’, i.e. post-Cartesian science. Integration instead of division and separation has become a core concept which inevitably has consequences for the conceptualization of language and the speaker. Reductive models need to give way to holistic approaches. The Mixed Game Model is sketched out as a holistic model which is capable of tackling the concept of ‘the integrational speaker’. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction ‘Language’ seems to be a clear, separate object. In the history of linguistics however we are confronted with a series of concepts of language dependent on the model concerned. The same is true of the concept of ‘the speaker’ which changes in accordance with the concept of language put forward. This change in the basic concepts of the discipline ‘linguistics’ is connected with a general change in science which has shaken our belief in certainty, and it is also connected with a fundamental change in our society. As citizens of a globalized society, we are always on the move. We need to come to grips with ‘living with uncertainty’ (Toulmin, 2001). Fixed traditions and definitions have been replaced by negotiating arguments. Concepts which seemed to be simple and clear in the past, such as our ‘mother tongue’ or the ‘native speaker’, have become problematized. We can be born in a country which is not the country of our forefathers and acquire the citizenship of that country. We learn the language of that country from birth and – so it seems – become native speakers of that country. We can, for example, encounter a Chinese waiter in a Tuscan restaurant in Italy who speaks the Tuscan dialect perfectly and has an impressive knowledge of the Tuscan cuisine. We might wonder whether he considers himself a Tuscan or still ‘feels at home’ in the culture of his forefathers. Initially, rising doubts about the native speaker’s intuition were suppressed. As linguists, we felt justified in declaring that we were linguistically trained native speakers and knew the rules of our mother tongue. We thus gave ourselves the legitimacy to decide what counts as right or wrong, as a well-formed or a problematic utterance. We took it for granted that meanings can be defined and understanding can be presupposed among speakers of the same mother tongue. We were thus still on the rule-governed track of competence even if we had moved to communicative competence. Looking beyond the sentence and trying to grasp performance we might be surprised by situations in which native speakers of the same mother
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tongue cannot understand each other. Yule (1996, p. 4), for instance, meditates about this fact in his introduction to ‘Pragmatics’. Passing by he listens to a conversation between other native speakers of English (1)
Her: So – did you? Him: Hey – who wouldn’t? and comments: I heard the speakers, I knew what they said, but I had no idea what was communicated. [. . .] Thus, pragmatics is appealing because it’s about how people make sense of each other linguistically, but it can be a frustrating area of study because it requires us to make sense of people and what they have in mind. What Yule considers to be a ‘problematic case’ is however not at all strange but quite normal in performance. Native competence cannot be restricted to the level of verbal means. We never only exchange verbal means in communication but play the game of dialogue as an integrational game, using our abilities of speaking, thinking and perceiving simultaneously. We need to be insiders in the game and make sense of what is in our minds. It is the challenge of New Science to tackle the issue of how body, mind and language are interconnected and dialogically put to action. The paper aims to describe the attempts made in the history of modern linguistics to grasp the object language and its speaker. We can no longer consider language to be an abstract, separate system. Language in the end means the ability of speaking which is intrinsically connected with other human abilities. Integration has become a crucial concept in recent decades, and consequently the question can no longer be avoided of how ‘the intergrational speaker’ can be conceptualized. 2. Concepts of language and their speakers Language seems to be a concrete object. The acoustic shape however is only part of the object language which as such remains an elusive concept. We are confronted with individual languages; language as such represents a hypostatised mental concept. Modern linguistics tried to grasp it along two different lines: the line of competence, i.e. of abstraction to rules, and the line of performance, i.e. of allowing any rule to be broken. De Saussure (1916) started the line of abstraction with his concept of language as a sign system. The sign system represents a static system which operates without a speaker, i.e. the rules of the system replace the speaker. Meaning is defined and expressed by signs and their mutual relationships. Modern linguistics thus started out on the path of reductionism by completely abstracting from language use and searching for hidden rules at an underlying level. De Saussure paved the way for Chomsky’s concept of the ‘ideal speaker’ (e.g., 1965), which is defined by reference to a set of abilities. These abilities are conceived of as operations which computers allegedly can handle when generating correct sentences. As a consequence, the generative concept of language is an artificial concept designed to account for the rulegoverned process of constructing sentences. In the wake of the pragmatic turn we began to look beyond the limit of the sentence and to address language use. However, we still continued on the path of abstraction by changing language competence to communicative competence and correct sentences to well-formed dialogues. The native speaker took the place of the ideal speaker and became the final authority whose intuition decided what counted as a well-formed dialogue. Rules of language competence changed to conventions of communicative competence. Dialogue grammar (Hundsnurscher, 1980) and Searle’s speech act theory (1969) are conventional theories of communicative competence. Whereas the concept of the ideal speaker belongs to a general concept of language, the concept of the native speaker is aligned to an individual language, namely the mother tongue. The native speakers’ competence is competence in their mother tongue. Dell Hymes’ sociolinguistic term of communicative competence (1972) was thus reduced to the level of rules and conventions. Although the pragmatic turn drew our attention to ‘real’ language, it was not immediately clear what ‘real’ language or ‘language use’ should mean. Even if some progress has been achieved by proceeding from language as a sign system via the ideal speaker to the native speaker, the concept of language nonetheless remained a myth (Harris, 1981). Generative principles survived in the concept of well-formed dialogues and did not allow us to address ever-changing performance. Performance was the declared starting point for empiricist models. The question of what should be the starting point for theorizing, reflection or observation, seems to be an ever-returning question in science. Fundamental arguments against the behavioural method have been put forth by Chomsky (1959) in his famous attack on Skinner. They seem to have been forgotten in current trends set by proponents of spoken language. I will not take up the debate once again (Weigand, 2004a). In principle, there is no empirical evidence as such. Genuine science or ‘‘the pleasure of finding things out” (Feynman, 1999) starts with goal-directed observation which combines, from the very outset, reflection and observation, mind and body. Observation needs a point of orientation, a question to open up the complex whole. In empiricist models the pivot shifted from the native speaker’s intuition to the empirically measurable authentic text. Concerning the issue of what can count as convention in a language, the intuition of the native speaker has been problematized. Different native speakers may respond differently. What counts as convention is no longer decided by the native speaker but by the statistical concept of frequency in a corpus. At its core, the concept of the native speaker who is legitimized to decide about rules and conventions of a language was lost and the individual native speaker put at centre stage.
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‘language’
abstraction rules
‘la langue’: a system without speakers
language competence of the ideal speaker
communicative competence of the native speaker
observation empirical ‘data’
ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, spoken language
performance of the individual speaker
frequency in the corpus: the individual native speaker
Fig. 1. Concepts of language and the speaker.
Up to this point, the history of modern linguistics can be outlined as in Fig. 1. The different concepts of language and the speaker developed in modern linguistics result from methodological exigencies. On the one hand, we have the postulate of searching for hidden rules and, on the other hand, the opposite postulate of exclusively observing measurable surface elements (cf. Searle, 1972). Both paths are inevitably insufficient to enable us to grasp language as a whole. Every attempt to bridge the gap between competence and performance is destined to fail as long as it aims to combine two incompatible methodologies. The enterprise best poised to bridge the gap has to change the starting point and to address the object not ‘damaged’ by methodology (Martinet, 1975). The gap is bridged by human beings who combine regularities and individual techniques in their minds. Performance models as well as competence models are restricted to a reductionist concept of language which does not exist as an autonomous object. Underlying rules as well as spoken language are only parts of the object which as a whole does not arise from addition but from integration in a hierarchy of components. Human beings are able to come to grips with this complex whole as they adapt themselves to ever-changing conditions and use their abilities in integration (cf. also Harris, 1998). Proponents of the empiricist route are also confronted with another problem. How are they to map spoken language in all its arbitrariness with a concept of grammar which needs some common ground? They get out of the paradox by declaring that it is individual speakers who construct the grammar of a language in the process of speaking. Grammar is no longer presupposed as an internalized mental concept in the mind of the native speaker but is created by the speakers in every individual case. Grammar ‘emerges’ or is ‘constructed’ in the process of speaking (e.g., Hopper, 1987; Ono and Thompson, 1995). There is no longer a core of rules and conventions which constitute the standard language or specific varieties of a language. On the contrary, the authentic text reigns. Whether its elements are meaningful can however not be decided by observation alone because there is no empirical evidence as such. Phonetics is not yet linguistics proper. Linguists need the criterion of relevance which transfers phonetics into the phonology of a language. Language is inherently connected with meaning, but it is not verbal signs which carry defined meanings. It is speakers who give meaning to utterances and negotiate understanding. Even if performance models stress the point that they aim to describe ‘reality’, what they describe is the ‘reality’ of speech which – like phonetics – waits to be sorted out regarding its relevance for action. 3. What makes our mother tongue so unique If we accept that the concept of the native speaker is no longer fixed but differentiated towards individual native speakers, we have to address the principal question of what makes up native speakers’ competence. A Chinese living from birth in Italy may become a native speaker of Italian in spite of having to face the issue of different cultures drifting apart, the culture of his home land and the Italian culture. The problem of the speaker’s identity thus arises in our ever-mobile societies. The concept of identity seems to start from the identity of a person with his/her mother tongue or with being a native speaker (Love, 2009, p. 31) and becomes problematized if we no longer live exclusively in the country of our mother tongue. Even if native speakers differ, they seem to have something in common. The question therefore cannot be avoided as to what makes our native competence so unique. Why can we not acquire another mother tongue as adults? We certainly can have two or even more ‘mother tongues’ if learned from birth or in a very early period of our childhood. If we have to learn another language as adults we will never achieve the same proficiency. The language we learn will remain a foreign language, always requiring an effort when we speak it, whereas our mother tongue consists of internalized routines we use unconsciously. By learning a language from birth, in a period which is epigenetically programmed for it, we acquire an ability which is different from learning a language in later years. Even if we can no longer hypostatise a general native competence, native speakers – however different they are – have something in common: they use their language unconsciously and – if asked – can to a certain degree decide by intuition what is a candidate for conventional language use. They easily cope with the issue of how language and cognition supplement each other. For them, speaking and thinking interact smoothly whereas we as foreigners have trouble disambiguating certain polysemous forms.
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Being a native speaker is not an absolute quality. Native speakers differ considerably in their mother tongue competence as becomes obvious in examinations at school or with translations. It does not suffice to request that a text be translated by a native speaker in order to get a good translation. The native speaker must have proficient native competence. Proficiency in language use is a condition for professional success in most areas. It is all the more difficult for immigrants to gain a foothold in a country which is not the country of their mother tongue. Our modern times are characterized by mobility: we are born in a country and later live in another country, we learn foreign languages, become acquainted with foreign cultures and may even decide to acquire another national identity. We can however not change our racial identity. Our Tuscan Chinese remains Chinese even if born in Italy, having acquired Italian citizenship and learned Tuscan from birth. Human beings are a product of epigenetic rules (Wilson, 1999, p. 210); their biological identity cannot be intentionally changed within one generation. 4. The challenge of New Science: how to conceptualize the integrational speaker Let us come back to Yule’s problematic case (example 1) that there are situations in which even native speakers cannot understand each other. That is the case when the focus is only on speech, on what is said. In language use we mean more than we say because we do not only use our ability to speak but integrationally use other abilities as well, mainly to think and to perceive. The challenges a new science of language is confronted with are twofold: – How to integrate the different communicative abilities human beings use in dialogic interaction, i.e. how to conceptualize the ‘integrational speaker’? – How to bridge the gap between rule-governed theorizing and ever-changing reality? Human beings are not the victims of the complex but are capable of coming to grips with it in their minds. The bridge we are searching for is built by human beings in their minds. How can New Science deal with this complex network of components? New Science is post-Cartesian science which goes beyond the simple and dares to take on the adventure of the complex. We no longer need to make hypotheses about the black box of our brain, we can see how it works although the brain still remains a mystery. There is no simple at the beginning, no matter separated from energy or function. Mirror neurons already demonstrate a complex interplay between perception and intention which characterizes human beings from the very outset as dialogic beings (Weigand, 2002b). New Science is integrational science based on consilience. Whereas natural sciences fully accept the inner connectedness or the unity of knowledge, social sciences and linguistics hesitate to join consilient research which ‘cuts down through the levels of organization from society to mind and brain’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 205). In linguistics, an integrational approach based on the tenet of consilience allows us to conceptualize an integrational speaker who is able to use different communicative abilities and different techniques simultaneously as illustrated in Fig. 2. The integrational approach as a holistic approach has first to clarify the complex object and then to derive an appropriate methodology from it (cf. also Martinet, 1975). Goal-directed observation, i.e. observation guided by a specific question, tells us that language belongs to human beings. It has taken some time to acknowledge this obvious fact and to recognize that there is no independent object language (Weigand, 2010). Language as a natural phenomenon is comprehensible as the ability to speak, and this cannot be described independently of other communicative abilities. The nature of language depends on the nature of human beings. To my mind, human beings are social individuals. The speaker is in any case an individual speaker who is socially or dialogically oriented towards his/her fellow beings. It is this double nature which is mirrored in language: on the one hand, it is individually applied, on the other hand, it has to comply to regularities in order to attain social ends. Language moreover is an intrinsically cultural phenomenon. Learning a language means learning how to use it in a specific culture. Human beings are not only biological beings born with the innate capacity to learn a language. They are also cultural beings as a result of the coevolution of genes, mind and culture (Lumsden and Wilson, 2005; Weigand, 2007). The so-called ‘language instinct debate’ is a game played at the extremes of orthodox theory, not a game which belongs to New Science. What are the methodological consequences which a theory has to derive from such a complex object of ‘language as dialogue’ (Weigand, 2009a)? If the theory is intended to help us understand what is really going on in dialogue, we have to begin from zero, by facing complexity and struggling to find a way through. The way through cannot be the addition of competence and performance or of sign system and language use. Instead, we have to find the key we unconsciously follow when opening up complexity in everyday and institutional dialogic action games. The key lies in our nature as purposive beings and in our extraordinary ability of competence-in-performance. We are not the victims of chaos nor are we shackled by rules. We are able to adapt to ever-changing conditions of performance by applying rules as far as they go and by going beyond rules where necessary. the integrational speaker body & mind & language
rules & particularities
Fig. 2. Communicative abilities and techniques of the integrational speaker.
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The integrational speaker is an individual speaker who communicates with other individuals. There has to be some common ground for them to come to an understanding. They are, to some degree, bound to keep to regularities, rules and conventions, which can be the regularities of standard languages or of language varieties, e.g., dialects. The concept of a standard language does not mean that language is totally determined by a set of normative rules; the speaker is in any case free to obey to or to abandon the norms, even though as a native speaker he/she knows the rules and conventions of standard language which are used in the community. The methodology in an integrational theory is thus not restricted to an independent set of pre-existing rules but is based on principles of probability applied by the speakers. The integrational speaker first tries to structure the complex according to standard conditions. If understanding is not yet achieved by reference to rules and conventions of standard cases, the speaker includes particular conditions and proceeds from standard cases to individual cases. New Science meets the challenge of complexity by developing a holistic theory which from the very outset starts from the complex object (Simon, 1962). As there is no language without a speaker, the starting point needs to be human abilities and how they are applied in a world of uncertainty. An integrational theory of language will inevitably cross narrow disciplinary limits not only between the disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences but also between the social sciences and the natural sciences. According to the basic principle of consilience, ‘the social sciences are intrinsically compatible with the natural sciences’ (Wilson, 1999, p. 205). The ‘Mixed Game Model’ which I developed in recent years represents a step in this direction (e.g., Weigand, 2006, 2008, 2009a). As a holistic theory it starts from human beings and their abilities and describes how human beings try to resolve their social needs and purposes in dialogic action games on the basis of principles of probability. Human beings orient themselves as ‘complex adaptive systems’ (Gell-Mann, 1994) within ever-changing surroundings by principles of probability of various kinds, constitutive, regulative and executive ones. Constitutive principles are the principles of action and dialogue and the principle of coherence, which is of special interest from an integrational point of view. The Action Principle gives an answer to the question as to what makes up an action in general. Having intentions does not yet necessarily mean carrying out an action. Actions of any type, communicative, mental and practical actions, are based on the correlation of purposes and specific means by which the purposes are attained. Depending on the type of action, the specific means are communicative, mental, or practical means. For instance, to carry out a practical action means having a practical purpose, such as felling a tree, and using practical means, such as a saw. Carrying out a communicative action means having a communicative-dialogic purpose such as a request and using communicative means such as speech and gestures. The purpose of a speech act can be defined by specific pragmatic claims which allow us to derive a dialogic speech act taxonomy (Weigand, 2003). Dialogic actions are often double-layered actions, i.e., behind openly expressed purposes they pursue different hidden interests. Consequently Searle’s formula F(p) has to be extended by including interests I as a dominant predicate as indicated in Fig. 3. To give an example: in the commercial area of our capitalistic society the interest behind business actions can be grasped as win (Weigand 2009b). It mostly remains hidden as, for instance, in case of the publicity spot (2)
Toyota does not break down.
which has the purpose of a simple statement. Communication does not proceed by means of a concatenation of single autonomous speech acts but by means of sequences of internally related initiative and reactive speech acts. The features ‘initiative’ versus ‘reactive’ are not only formal features dependent on the position in the sequence but primarily qualify the speech acts as functionally different speech acts: initiative speech acts make a claim, reactive speech acts fulfil this very claim. The dialogic nature of every single speech act and the resulting basic structure of communication is represented by the Dialogic Principle proper as illustrated in Fig. 4. Example: (3)
Our economy is at risk.
– $
ASSERTION
You are right./I don’t see it that way. ±ACCEPTANCE
The claim to truth of the initiative speech act is fulfilled, in a positive or negative way, by the reactive action. In this way dialogue is constituted at the level of interaction by action and reaction. Only by action and reaction can the interactional purpose of the dialogue ‘coming to an understanding’ be attained.
I
[F
(p
)]
Interest [purpose (reference + predication)] ↔ communicative means Fig. 3. Action principle.
Dialogue
Action
Reaction
Fig. 4. Dialogic principle proper.
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Interest [purpose (reference + predication)] ↔ communicative means speech, perception, cognition Fig. 5. Coherence principle.
The correlation of action and reaction goes beyond the correlation of meaning and understanding at the level of the shared mind or intersubjectivity. An utterance is meant by the speaker and more or less understood by the interlocutor. Understanding or sharing our minds is never total, always gradual. Understanding is a mental action by the hearer and related to the utterance of the speaker. However, due to the intrinsic integration of our abilities we are normally unable to stop at understanding and cannot help taking a position, at least in our minds. We react, in general with a positive or negative reply, i.e. basically by evaluating the speaker’s position. The third constitutive principle, the Principle of Coherence, is an integrational principle proper as it relates to the integration of communicative means by which dialogic action is performed (examples are given below in chapter 5). Communicative means rely on abilities of language, mind, and body which complement each other. Coherence of dialogue comes about by understanding how the communicative means interact in carrying out an action as illustrated in Fig. 5. Coherence was initially thought to be established by verbal means within the text. In the meantime the level of the text has lost its autonomous status: coherence of the text changed to coherence in the mind (Weigand, 2000; Givón, 1993). The basic tenet of speech act theory of ‘doing things with words’ (Austin, 1962) can be considered a general catch phrase. We do not act by speaking alone, we act using utterances which represent a combination of different communicative means. By making an utterance we speak and at the same time we see what is going on in the speech situation and we make assumptions about particularities of the game. Our communicative abilities interact when we produce the utterance as the carrier of the action. Constitutive Principles are combined with Regulative and Executive Principles. Regulative Principles mediate between different and even contradictory abilities and interests. They are, for instance, responsible for how we match our self-interest with respect for the other human being or for how we deal with emotions. Regulative principles are highly dependent on cultural conventions and only in part intentionally controlled. Principles of politeness which mediate between self-interest and respect as well as principles of emotion which mediate between emotion and reason are thus differently shaped in different cultures (Weigand, 2004b, 2007). Executive Principles finally refer to cognitive processes and strategies which we apply in order to successfully pursue our interests and purposes. Executive principles as well as regulative principles are part of a rhetoric of dialogue which evaluates communicative means with respect to their effective use in dialogic action games (Weigand, 2008). 5. Sample analyses of how the integrational principle proper works Having introduced the nuts and bolts of the Mixed Game Model, let me now illustrate with a few authentic examples how the Principle of Coherence or the Integrational Principle proper works. Integrational linguistics requires us to explicate how we can come to an understanding in dialogue by the integrational use of different communicative means. Meaning is not defined, understanding cannot be presupposed. Meaning and understanding are negotiated in the mixed game. Negotiation includes dealing with problems of understanding and misunderstanding. Consequently understanding remains, in principle, gradual understanding. Our first example illustrates the interaction between speaking and thinking or between language and cognition. The wellknown example from Brown and Yule (1983, p. 196) can do this best (cf. Weigand, 2002a): (4)
There’s the doorbell. – I’m in the bath.
These two utterances show no sign of textual coherence, nonetheless they are connected. We understand their internal relationship even without any description of the situation. Obviously we mean more than we say. We do not need to resign, like Brown and Yule, nor do we need to assume a zero connector, like Stati (1990). Coherence comes about by the Dialogical Principle proper and by the interaction of verbal means with cognitive means. Our actions are dialogically oriented: the speaker’s initiative utterance in our example of an indirectly directive game makes a dialogic claim to truth, and indirectly to volition, and expects the interlocutor to react by addressing this very claim. The initiative and reactive utterance are thus connected at the cognitive level by making and fulfilling the same claim. That is precisely what is represented by the Dialogic Principle proper which is not in need of any empirical sign because it is based on human beings’ nature as intersubjective, i.e. dialogical individuals. Cognition comes into play in this example in another respect, too. The claim to volition of the initiative utterance is not explicitly expressed by verbal means but left to inferences. It is a characteristic of indirect speech acts that the real claim remains uncertain, in the balance of probabilities and is thus to be negotiated: someone has to open the door, if possible the interlocutor. The same is true of the reactive utterance which also indirectly conveys a claim to volition (also Weigand, 2002a). Speech not only relies on sharing our minds; it is also intrinsically connected with shared perception as we can see with the following authentic example (Weigand, 2002a):
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A B
One for her. Eve, too.
Without a description of the speech situation we will not really understand what is going on in this action game. We might be baffled and ask: Where have all the ‘sentences’ gone? We do not find sentences, we find utterances, i.e. communicative means, not just verbal ones. Normativity or conventionality of a language system obviously do not count. Verbal means are integrated with perceptual means in a way that demolishes language rules or norms. It is necessary to perceive what is going on in order to understand. In our case we can observe that B, the father, is cutting willow branches for the son, and A, the mother, asks him to cut a branch for the daughter: one for her, which is accepted by the father: Eve, too. Integration in the sense of interacting dialogic means – verbal, perceptual, and cognitive – is a constitutive feature of human competence-in-performance. Perception cannot be separated from speech. This is in part the reason why oral and written language cannot be directly compared. Perception in the speech situation and perception in the written medium are completely different and consequently result in different utterance constructions (Weigand, 1993). There is also another issue which finds its proper explanation in the integration of speaking, thinking and perceiving: the issue of human beings’ ability to produce ever-new utterances that have never been produced before. It can no longer be considered an astonishing event but the natural consequence of the fact that meaning is created through the eyes of individuals and is not only expressed by the use of verbal means. The complexity of meaning and understanding is, in principle, without limits. Neither Chomsky’s recursive rules (1965) nor the infinite possibilities of variation in spoken language touch upon the real issue. The following authentic example illuminates once more very clearly the integrated network of communicative means which we use without any effort in everyday communication (see also Weigand, 2004c). I will first present this example without any description of the speech situation, i.e. ‘trusting the text’ (Sinclair, 1994) or a concept of language as autonomous object: (6)
H E H F E
Lassen Sie sich nicht anstecken! Sind Sie krank? Haben Sie nicht das Wasser gesehen? Jeder hat sein Hobby. Das würde ich nie machen, wo wir soviel bezahlen allein fürs Putzen. Ah, jetzt verstehe ich. Sie haben recht. Nein, da lasse ich mich nicht anstecken!
H E H F E
(in English translation) Don’t let yourself get infected! Are you ill? Didn’t you see the water? Everyone’s got a hobby. I’d never do that when we pay so much just for the cleaning. Ah, now I understand. You’re right. No, I won’t let myself get infected!
I am quite sure that you will not understand what is going on in this action game. You may try to find some thread running through the text and arrive at an approximate partial understanding by guessing. But are we guessing in language action? On the contrary, we do not need to guess because as human beings we not only use our ability to speak but inevitably bring in other integrated abilities, namely perceiving and thinking. In order to understand what is going on in language use, we have to participate in the action game and to analyse it from inside, addressing the complex directly and not reducing it to the empirical level of the text. Consequently, language action is not action by speaking but by integrated dialogic means including verbal means. It thus becomes evident that we have to go beyond the empirical level of the text and have to add a description of the cognitive and perceptual background from which the interlocutors derive their cognitive and perceptual means of communication. Clearly, they do not trust the verbal text alone but trust cognitive means, associations and allusions which an observer cannot understand. Thus in our example H refers to a person not present in the action game without explicitly expressing it, a person who, some days ago, had spilled water on the ground when cleaning the roof of the house entrance: Didn’t you see the water? The action game takes place near the entrance of the house. It is therefore enough for H to raise his head and to look and move his body in the direction of the entrance hall thus alluding by perceptual means to what had happened a few days ago, and ironically commenting on it Everyone’s got a hobby. He deliberately only uses the anonymous term everyone and takes it for granted that the interlocutor will understand. His wife F, too, uses an anonymous phrase: I’d never do that trusting that E will understand because they are supposed to share knowledge as a result of the fact that all three live in the same house. She adds a critical comment on the price they have to pay for the cleaning of the hallway. All these means together, verbal, perceptual and cognitive ones, are necessary for E to come to an understanding and to arrive via negotiation at the right meaning of to be infected, namely ‘to be infected by a mania for cleaning’. There is no explicit disambiguation by the verbal environment. Language-in-use can accept the risk of misunderstandings because they are normally immediately repaired. I think the conclusions to be drawn from this example of everyday small talk are evident. Linguistics as a science of language alone is not capable of addressing language action. Yule (1996, p. 4f.) is right when he states that as observers we can only understand examples which are exclusively based on empirical means. Trusting the text in a corpus does not lead to an
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understanding if it requires the interaction of different types of communicative means. Corpus linguists who consider the corpus as a record of our behaviour, like Stubbs (1996, p. 233), are wrong because only part of our behaviour is recorded in the corpus. Example (6) also shows how body movement is deployed as perceptual communicative means. Perception is directed at the body, at gestures and any other body movements. Whereas gestures have already been dealt with at length in the literature as an important dialogic means (e.g., Nash, 2007), body movement still needs to be analysed in more detail. Not every body movement can be conceived of as communicative means, only movements which are intentionally carried out, as in our example where moving forward indicated the place of the event. 6. Conclusions The conclusions to be drawn from these examples are clear: human beings are integrational beings best equipped to come to grips with complexity. A theory of language has to do justice to the complex hierarchy of interacting subsystems including verbal means as an integrated component. Integration in the sense of interaction not only happens at one level, for instance, as interaction of different communicative means, but also crosses the levels of the hierarchy, bottom–up and top–down, from the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities and vice versa. The complex whole is an integrated whole unified on the basis of consilience. New Science is called upon to dare go on the adventure of a genuinely holistic approach which also includes an ethical component. Evaluating and taking a position is an inborn feature of human beings (Wilson, 1978/2004, p. 153). Every individual is therefore responsible for how Mankind is shaped. No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. 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