- Email: [email protected]
The boundaries of nature in the discipline of linguistics
Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci
The boundaries of nature in the discipline of linguistics Douglas A. Kibbee Department of French, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2090 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Accepted 8 February 2003 Joseph, John E. 2000. Limiting the Arbitrary. Linguistic Naturalism and its Opposites in PlatoÕs Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Abstract John JosephÕs most recent book presents us with an opportunity to understand our discipline, and through this understanding to reshape it in important new directions. From this book spring so many ideas, so many new ways of viewing both our discipline and the object of its attention, that I have here eschewed the normal evaluation of a standard book review, in favor of an exploration of where we might go from here. It should be clear from this format that I heartily concur with both the content and the approach that Professor Joseph offers. 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction What is the purpose of linguistics? This question, when asked by university administrators, makes us linguists nervous. For this reason, it is most often answered by a definition rather than a true statement of purpose: linguistics is the study of language. 1 When we do not duck the question, the response will most often require
E-mail address: [email protected] (D.A. Kibbee). For instance, the homepage of the Linguistic Society of America provides the following definition of linguistics: ‘‘Linguistics, the study of language, concerns itself with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so’’. At the very end of this introduction to the branches of linguistics is a short section on ‘‘applications of linguistics’’, but this concern is purely optional: ‘‘Linguistics can have applications wherever language itself becomes a matter of practical concern’’ (emphasis added) (http://www.lsadc.org/web2/fldfr.htm). 1
0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2003.02.002
302
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
us to confront the nature vs. x divide that John Joseph has described in his fascinating book. Is the purpose of linguistics to analyze real examples of language, or is observable language merely an illusion, under which the linguist will tease out underlying similarities to arrive at a greater truth? Whichever response we opt for requires further questions of purpose: why describe a particular language, why look for underlying similarities? The answers to such questions have been based on the notion of the ‘‘natural’’ in language, with some portion of language deemed natural, while other parts of language are conventional, cultural, or arbitrary. The interpretation of what is natural, and the decision that the study of language should concern itself primarily or only with what is natural, are both cultural constructs which, like it or not, place the study of language squarely back in the realm of the humanities, right where it started out. This is perhaps a controversial position to take in a journal entitled Language Sciences, and it certainly will not sit well in the generativist camp 2 among many others. It is, however, the central conclusion of JosephÕs book: ‘‘the ÔhistoryÕ and ÔdoingÕ of linguistics are, or ought to be, indistinguishable from one another’’ (p. 201). For Plato the resolution of the question is simple: whether language is natural or conventional does not really matter because the study of language is not a path to truth. Those who study language, whether etymologists or rhetoricians, are wasting time that would better be spent on the study of the real world, that is, the invisible ideal world, about which our knowledge is indirect. What is real, then, is hidden, and it is the role of the specialist to find the hidden dimensions and connections that the everyday observer would fail to perceive. This is the role Socrates takes on in PlatoÕs Cratylus. The view that reality lies in the world of the ideal is not the dominant view; most since Plato have had a greater respect for physical reality. However, linguists since Plato have spent their time finding out what language really is, how language really works, revealing hidden dimensions and connections, towards a variety of goals, from the explication of literary or ordinary language to the study of logic (and many points in between), marveling at the diversity of language and trying to determine the unity of language. The determination of whether the connections or the dimensions are more ‘‘natural’’ depends on what the linguist wishes to prove about human nature, and language being one of the primary differences between humans and other species, the linguist would seem to have special knowledge to contribute about human nature. Human nature not being directly observable, the search for this kind of knowledge is framed by philosophical, a priori, statements. For Aristotle, ‘‘all men by nature desire knowledge’’ (Metaphysics, I, i); for Chomsky, the ‘‘essential features of human nature involve a kind of creative urge, a need to control oneÕs own
2 Chomsky, protesting that some question his credentials to speak about intellectual history, clearly does not want to be a labeled a humanist: ‘‘In the humanities . . . a substantial number of practitioners are people with tiny minds and limited understanding’’. Even with these limited intellectual faculties humanists have been able to debunk Professor ChomskyÕs ventures into intellectual history, particularly Cartesian Linguistics (1966). See for example Aarsleff (1970).
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
303
productive, creative labor, to be free from authoritarian intrusions, a kind of instinct for liberty and creativity’’ (Chomsky, cited in Otero, 1988, p. 594). The purpose of linguistics in the first case might be to help determine how language relates to the acquisition of knowledge; in the second case to determine how language can be creative; both will claim to reveal human nature, but the foundation of the science rests on an unverifiable claim of what is real. As Joseph points out again and again, ‘‘the problem now, as it was in PlatoÕs time, is knowing what that reality is independently of language’’ (p. 200).
2. Nature and its opposites in the study of language Before returning to the question posed at the beginning of this article, let us now follow JosephÕs argumentation. The first half of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of PlatoÕs Cratylus, the oldest extant exploration of a language issue. This sets the stage for the discussion of the limits of nature and of convention in explaining the facts of language, in this case the ‘‘correctness of words’’. If the purpose of words is to teach and to discriminate between like objects, then the purpose of the study of language would be to learn about reality. Hermogenes takes the side of convention (nomos). If an individual decides to call a man ‘‘horse’’, then that is up to the individual. The arbitrariness of words is interpreted to allow maximum freedom. If names are conventional then they offer no insights into reality, and the study of language is of no interest. At the other end of spectrum stands Cratylus, for whom there is a natural link between a word and the reality it represents. This is true in the world of the ideals, Socrates explains, but not in the world of human language. Even if the original giver of names had approximated the ideal name for a thing, subsequent human history has distorted the term, largely through convention. There is a political dimension to this: convention gives too much power to the masses, whose understanding of reality is therefore more distant from nature than is that of the philosopher. Not only does convention distort reality, it is also contrary to the good of society, claims Socrates. If individuals can choose their own words, they can choose their own laws, and ultimately the fabric of society is torn apart. Embracing the arbitrary is ultimately a retreat to manÕs primitive state. Having established PlatoÕs dismissal of the study of language, and the first discussion of nature in language, in three chapters on the Cratylus, Joseph turns his attention to the legacy of the ‘‘natural’’ in language, and the subsequent discussion of the ultimate purpose of the study of language. Chapter 4, ‘‘Natural grammar and conventional words from Aristotle to Pinker’’, describes the dividing line between nature and convention in the two and a half millennia since Plato. Chapter 5, ‘‘Natural dialect and artificial language from Varro to Chomsky’’, discusses issues of linguistic variation, of linguistic norms, and the relationship of linguistic description to linguistic reality. Chapter 6, ‘‘Invisible hierarchies from Jakobson to optimality theory’’, traces how the notion of invisible, underlying realities of language has progressed during the twentieth century.
304
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
For Plato, the natural is located at the realm of the ideal, and removed from the experience of people; in that respect nothing about language was natural or allowed us to perceive the true nature of things. It was a way of reconciling the diversity of languages to what he believed was a unique reality. For his successors, nature was closer at hand, and observable through human perception. Epicurus provides us with a historical account of the development of linguistic diversity, as the different peoples (ethne) of the earth had different feelings and perceptions of nature, influenced by their group history, and sought to express them by different languages. The creation of language happened in two stages: a natural, but rough and ambiguous language, followed by a refined, rational and conventional language as the group consciously sought to improve the effectiveness of their communication. The natural language would deal with concrete items, and the rational language would add abstract terms. In this way Epicureans avoided the historical problem of explaining how, without language, people could agree on conventional terms. Varro had another take on the natural and the unnatural in language. He considered natural those parts of language over which the speaker had no choice, i.e., grammar, while across the divide stand those elements that are subject to individual volition, the entire arbitrary enterprise of connecting word and meaning, i.e., the lexicon: In modern terms, this means that the lexical meanings of words exist on a higher plane of consciousness than do the rules of morphology and syntax. As a result, the former are more subject to the historical and political processes we call convention, while the latter, being unconscious, are more natural in their origin and operation. (p. 103) The Varronian divide would essentially be continued in the Renaissance and beyond, with the division between innate ideas and conventional vocabulary. The PortRoyal grammarians considered innate that which was part of a universal human logic, while the other elements of language, those that distinguished one language from another, were arbitrary. They had the political notion then that each language should be made to conform as closely as possible to the logical form. A long tradition, stretching from Plato to Pinker, considers oneÕs native language as natural and innate, and other peoplesÕ languages as unnatural and deformed. Therefore it is not surprising that logical form for these Frenchmen looked a lot like French. Even those who did not subscribe to the strong analogist position of Port-Royal could believe in a different kind of natural force, the ‘‘genius’’ of each language. Thus the choices within an individual language were not totally arbitrary, but were (or should be) guided by a specific national character, itself determined naturally by ‘‘climate’’ or ‘‘race’’, much as in the Epicurean model. Throughout the 18th century much of the attention will focus on the nature of free will, and the social contract. In RousseauÕs model words would be natural, especially nouns; the anomalous is closest to nature, and the development of larger social groups would bring about analogy, that is grammar, a conventional agreement about usage.
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
305
The development of comparative linguistics in the first half of the 19th century further shaped the notions of natural and unnatural. Once again the ‘‘Varronian line’’, as Joseph terms it, is drawn, separating the unnatural lexicon from natural grammar. The comparison of languages on morphological bases led to typological classifications which brought linguists to conclude that some languages were stuck in a more primitive phase than others, in the natural progression from one type of grammatical organization to another (isolating, agglutinating, inflectional). The popularity of this approach was certainly not unrelated to the imperialistic designs of the countries of Western Europe, where the theories originated. Even Saussure finds himself creating two classes of language, the lexicological and the grammatical, the former exemplifying arbitrariness to the extreme, the latter motivating paradigmatic relations. Once again this risks making value judgments of the quality of languages, or of the mental capacities of those who speak them. For Saussure, the bond of meaning to sign is totally arbitrary, but the free will of the individual has little role: the systematic aspects of language, both lexical and functional, are social facts, and are part of the unconscious. The social/unconscious then takes over the position that ‘‘nature’’ held in previous theories. The langue, the language system, is a powerful external restraint on the individual or even on the speech community. Joseph notes that this is too powerful a system, and clearly the individual can effect change on language, for example the way Saussure changed the way we use the terms langue and parole. To accommodate this problem, Saussure softens his view of the arbitrary to admit relative degrees of arbitrariness. In subsequent structuralisms, European and American, the lexicon is left aside, to determine the systems, first phonological, then morphological, and finally, in the generativist model, syntactical. This was largely a progression from the directly observable, to that which can be observed only more and more indirectly, more and more abstractly. That abstraction has, as in the case of Plato, become the ‘‘real’’, the universal principles that are hard-wired into the brain in the Chomskyan program. Everything else is essentially lexical. Pinker establishes his boundary between natural and unnatural by claiming that regular (natural) forms are kept in one part of the brain, and irregular forms in another part of the brain. Irregular forms are part of the lexicon, while regular forms are handled by a syntactic process. PinkerÕs claim that speakers of languages have two separate language organs for processing the two different types leads him inevitably to claim that speakers whose language has only one type or the other have one ‘‘developed’’, and one ‘‘underdeveloped’’, part of the brain. Joseph points out the political dangers of such a position, stating that ‘‘it is reasonable to say that the ground is laid for linguists who look at language death and survival from a Darwinian perspective to connect the world-wide spread of English to its ÔnaturalnessÕ relative to the innate language faculty of the brain’’ (p. 139). Thus we see that discussing what is ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘conventional’’ in language, as first explored by Plato, is not irrelevant to modern linguistic thought, but in fact continues to play an important if often unacknowledged role. To make real progress in linguistics we need to be upfront about these issues, asking, in JosephÕs words:
306
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
• Can any version of naturalness itself be ÔnaturalÕ, or must it be known to us always and only as a historical product? • For any particular conception of the natural, is it based on criteria that are directly observable? If not, how can it be verified, or falsified? • If some part of language is to be reckoned as somehow less natural than another, how can it have come into being except through processes that themselves ultimately depend upon natural faculties? (p. 140). Furthermore, just as Plato had a political goal in discussing the limits of nature and convention, every position taken on the delimitation of nature and convention by everyone writing on language since Plato has at the very least political implications, even if they are not openly confronted. This political element is brought out clearly in JosephÕs next chapter, ‘‘Natural dialect and artificial language from Varro to Chomsky’’. From the very first treatises on language, it was recognized that literary language was different from ordinary language, and that it was in some sense less natural. For Plato, the language of the people was contrasted with the ideal language, as a deformation of that ideal bond of language and nature. More commonly, the language of the people was contrasted with that of poets and rhetoricians, and the language of the people was held to be more natural, and have less freedom of choice. The language of the people could also be studied as the languages of the peoples, as in DanteÕs search for the volgare illustre, the vernacular dialect among the immense variety on the Italian peninsula that could be a vehicle for the highest artistry. The first battle was to establish the equality, even superiority, of the vernacular with respect to the learned language (Latin). Dante did this on the basis of the naturalness of the vernacular, as opposed to the artificiality of the learned language, but from that natural vernacular he wanted to extract the best elements, rationally. Thus the volgare illustre would be the best taken from each of the dialects, against which all the dialects could be measured. Not surprisingly, the volgare illustre ended up looking a lot like DanteÕs native Tuscan, but the point here is the use of the natural to ‘‘restore’’, in fact to create, a national unity. Ironically, Italy would be one of the last states in Western Europe to become either politically or linguistically united. The other Western European examples that Joseph evokes, Spain and France, combined political and linguistic unification more effectively. In Spain, Nebrija (1492) offered to bring to the Spanish language the same artificial (unnatural) stability that the creation of grammar had brought to Latin. The role of the grammarian is to establish a language that will not be deformed, like the vernacular. For Du Bellay, the French language is natural, like a cultivated plant; languages are made cultivated by writers and grammarians. Their attentions to the language, which can include borrowings from other languages and neologisms, are nonetheless constrained by the ‘‘genius’’ of the language, a language-specific ‘‘nature’’. The association of language with the power of the state quickly led to the institutionalization of a standard language. Joseph rightly points out the similarities between ‘‘law’’ and ‘‘standard language’’, each regulating what is right and wrong,
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
307
and he points out the disparity between popular and professional conceptions of these institutions. These standards can only touch on what is arbitrary, for they regulate only that which is variable, but the regulation is often performed in accordance with what is perceived of as natural, either in the sense of conforming to the genius of the language, as in Du Bellay, 3 or in conforming to ‘‘natural logic’’, as in the reforms proposed by grammarians of the Port-Royal school. In our discussion of the politics of language below we will fill in some of the more than three hundred year gap between Du Bellay and Saussure, but for now we follow Joseph in skipping ahead to the early twentieth century. Saussure too viewed literary language, and more generally ‘‘cultivated language’’, as less natural. Such a language arises ‘‘whenever a people reaches a certain level of civilisation’’ through ‘‘a kind of tacit convention’’ (cited in Joseph at p. 153), to enable people of a multidialectal or multilingual nation to communicate. Although it seems to occur ‘‘naturally’’ (i.e. inevitably) it is unworthy of linguistic analysis because the natural systems of a language are deformed by it, just as they are by lexical borrowing. The standard language was equally scorned by George Orwell, who found that it was removed from nature by its reliance on dead metaphors. Only those who are still connected to the natural world, the working classes in his view, are able to create new lively metaphors. Fresh thought can occur naturally only through the senses, and the expression of those sensory perceptions through language. Fresh thought is politically important because it permits people to see through propaganda. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, peopleÕs language can only be liberated by social engineering. For Chomsky, the problem of linguistic variation is that it is impossible scientifically to distinguish a language from a dialect, a fact that has led linguists to search for technical ways of making the distinction. His solution is to consider language not as what is understood within a speech community, but rather as what is present in an individualÕs brain. Only this language is ‘‘real’’, in the sense that it has a physical existence. However, Chomsky slips easily from talking about an individualÕs I [ ¼ internal] language to the I-language shared by speakers of the same language (abstracted from the I-language of several speakers). A language is now an idealization, and his I-language is really no different from the E [ ¼ external] language he scorns as unscientific. Chomsky is driven in this by his own political concerns, both in the disciplinary politics of post-World War II American universities, and more broadly in the radical scepticism of his general politics, including his perspectives on democracy (about which more below). Joseph argues that all languages are social constructs, I-languages as well as E-languages. All that we can know about them we abstract from actual instances of linguistic production. The claim that some languages are more natural, more
3 A better example here might be Louis Meigret. Du Bellay never wrote a grammar, so his work is not so easily comparable to NebrijaÕa, although a perfectly suitable comparison for Dante. MeigretÕs work is more original than Du BellayÕs, and the connection to legal practice is more explicit.
308
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
observable as natural objects, than others is dangerous, and blinds us to consideration of all aspects of language use. Pretending variation does not or should not exist, or cannot be taken account of by scientific linguistics, would ultimately make linguistics irrelevant. In a final chapter Joseph considers a much narrower chronological period, the twentieth century, focusing on the linguistÕs use of invisible, underlying structures, from JakobsonÕs work on the archiphoneme, in which he rejected the notion that all relationships within the linguistic system are of the same nature. This led Jakobson to work on the notion of markedness, in which the unmarked elements are somehow more natural than the marked items. This point will be picked up in Chomskyan linguistics in the form of core and periphery grammar, with the core containing regular linguistic forms and the periphery the irregular. Ultimately this leads Chomsky back to the position that grammar is natural, the lexicon is not, which has a two-thousand-year pedigree. Greenbergian universals offer another peek at natural constraints on human language, and because they are implicational rather than absolute they do not require innate structures in the brain that are specific to language. Instead the structures of language would be constrained by the mental structures that receive and organize perceptual data. Rosch and Marr offered a different view of how perception takes place, one in which the essential feature is normative. Normativity, then, would be natural and internal, not conventional and external. Iconicity studies in the 1970s and 1980s often carried the name of ‘‘natural’’ (Natural Morphology, Natural Phonology, Natural Syntax), with the claim that ‘‘grammar [. . .] not only can but does reproduce the structure of the real world, and that anytime it fails to do so, this is the result of an arbitrary human choice that will in the course of time ÔnaturallyÕ give way’’ (p. 198). This is the far end of the spectrum, towards the ‘‘nature’’ pole. Most recently, Optimality Theory sees Universal Grammar as a set of constraints, in which one member can overrule another, and all languages can rank order the rules according to their own system. The arbitrary here reaches beyond the lexicon to the very grammar. How can the arbitrary be limited in such a system? Joseph concludes by reminding us to be aware of the nature vs. x divide, in all its forms. Through this understanding of how our knowledge to this point has been shaped by that divide, we can hope to ‘‘move beyond it’’. What might thinking and knowing be without this divide, indeed without binary dichotomies altogether?
3. Nature and the purpose of linguistics In JosephÕs thorough review of the many permutations of the nature vs. x divide, we are drawn repeatedly to the political implications of the conceptions of nature exemplified in these theories. This is perhaps ironic as one of the goals of linguistics as a discipline in the second half of the twentieth century in America has been to divorce the ‘‘scientific’’ study of language, henceforth allied with the ‘‘hard’’ sciences,
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
309
from all that cannot be studied scientifically, i.e., the humanities and social sciences. 4 It is my hope and belief that consideration of that social dimension can help us out of the impasse blocked by previous divisions, and give a broader purpose to the study of linguistics. Frequently during JosephÕs presentation he notes the parallels between language and the law. PlatoÕs nomothetes is the lawgiver and in the examination of links between words and nature one of the first words/ideals Socrates critiques is dikaion, ÔjusticeÕ. Varro states that ordinary people should follow common usage just as they follow common laws. The idea that there are ‘‘natural laws’’ as well as ‘‘conventional laws’’, as well as natural (objective) rights and conventional (subjective) rights, permeates Western legal thought. I ask the reader now to bear with me as I present in barest outline the history of the notion of natural law, for ultimately I think this will point to a way to escape the trap of ‘‘the natural’’ in linguistic theory. Natural law theory is generally traced to Augustine, through Thomas Aquinas, and it holds that any law to be valid must be in accordance with moral law, and moral law is derived from essential human nature. Augustine states that ‘‘that which is not just seems to be no law at all’’ (cited in Aquinas) and Aquinas elaborates ‘‘if in any point it [any human law] deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law’’ (Summa theologiae I-II, Q. 95, A. II, cited in Tierney, 1997, p. 25, n. 46). That nature is human reason. Through the late Middle Ages the notion of natural rights grew from this concept of natural law. Natural rights began with the concept of freedom, not in the sense of the liberation of serfs, but rather in theological terms, the liberty of the soul, which was in part a Franciscan reaction to the papal schism of the 14th century (see Tierney, 1997, p. 170–203 on William of Ockham). Individual liberties, which no authority, pope or monarch, could deny, were a concept that slowly took hold in Western Europe. The centralisation of power led to concerns about limiting the power of the monarch. With the disintegration of religious unity in the West, freedom to worship as one pleased was an early example of such a notion. The transition from the medieval to the modern concept of natural law and natural rights was also a transition from Catholic to Protestant political theorists. The Dutch scholar Grotius (Hugo de Groot, 1583–1645), a Protestant who spent much of his career in Catholic France, is often considered the founder of the modern theory of natural law and natural rights, which he elaborated in his work on the law of nations, De jure belli et pacis (Paris, 1625). Grotius argued against the skepticsÕ belief that human beingsÕ primary motivation is self-interest, and against the medieval presentation of natural law as based on
4 In his political writings Chomsky has consistently and vehemently denied that he has a ‘‘political theory’’, primarily because he claims that such a thing is impossible, given his definition of theory. One of the points of Edgley (2000) is to demonstrate that he definitely has what political scientists would call a political theory, even if Chomsky himself would not attach such a label. ChomskyÕs definitions of science and of scientific theory are very narrow, but they have opened to American linguists the coffers of the National Scientific Foundation, which are considerably fuller than those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
310
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
self-preservation. Instead, he claimed, a social instinct drove humans to seek the company of other humans in a peaceful society. The instinct of sociability is the foundation upon which natural law is based. 5 If sociability is a natural instinct, then language is the means by which this natural instinct is developed and sustained. If then this is the role of language, not the communication of logical propositions, but the facilitation of contact between humans in order to fulfill a natural human need, then the exclusion of the conventional and the cultural from the natural in a linguistic theory leads the study of language down the wrong path. Suppose then that ChomskyÕs ‘‘natural instinct for creativity’’ is matched by a ‘‘natural instinct for sociability’’, each of which is nurtured by basic mental functions (perception, comparison, classification) to produce language. Under such an umbrella, sociolinguistics is just as ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘scientific’’ as cognitive science, and particular languages are just as interesting for their particularity as they are for exemplifying linguistic universals. Furthermore if sociability is a natural instinct, then normativity is a scientific concept, not an unnatural imposition of society. The development of linguistic norms is no less natural than the development of speech itself, and one might consider the work of the ‘‘language mavens’’ that Pinker derides as simply one end of the spectrum of behaviors that derive from the sociability instinct (Pinker, 1994, p. 370– 403). Viewing linguistic norms as a natural process, instead of as an authoritarian, wrong-headed limitation on our natural creativity would free linguistics from blinders that have distorted our conception of language for some time. Suppose we wondered not so much at the rapid acquisition of language in children, as we did at the developmental relationships between language and social interaction. We could shed certain problems that dog theoretical linguistics: (1) the very limited content of universal grammar as compared with the vast diversity of human language, (2) the need to posit a language faculty that is distinct from other mental processes, (3) the monolingual bias of this version of child language acquisition, even when most humans grow up in multilingual or at least multidialectal contexts, (4) the ever-present danger of promoting the linguistic structures of oneÕs own language as universal. This is a view of nature that does not force us to exclude convention. But, the skeptical linguist might object, the fact that Grotius speaks of a human instinct for sociability does not make it so, or link it to language. To this I would respond that the instinct for sociability has a foundation in observable human behavior that is every bit as strong as that for an ‘‘instinct for creativity’’ or an ‘‘instinct for language’’. That may or may not be enough, but at least it offers the hope of escaping the impasse where early 21st century linguistics finds itself. And the
5
‘‘Inter haec autem quae homini sunt propria est appetitus societatis, id est communitatis, non qualiscunque, se tranquillae et pro sui intellectus modo ordinatae . . . . Haec vero . . . societatis custodia, humane intellectu conveniens, fons est ejus juris . . . quo pertinet alieni abstinentia, et si quid alieni habeamus . . . restitutio’’ (cited in Tierney, 1997, p. 317, n. 5 and 6).
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
311
link to language is at least hinted at in the study of linguistic abilities of children who have somehow been deprived of human contact (so-called ‘‘wild children’’, at the extreme end of this spectrum). We asked at the beginning of this article that the purpose of linguistics is. It is not fair to ask a question without suggesting a response, so here is mine: linguistics provides one way for us to understand essential human nature, by studying how language provides a basic capacity (the expression of creative thoughts) to fulfill a basic need (the establishment social relations). At the applied level, then, linguistics can legitimately contribute to our understanding, and, optimistically, to our resolution of social issues of inequality, of the manipulation of thought (ChomskyÕs manufacture of consent as well as Whorfian concepts), and to the evaluation of claims of linguistic rights.
4. Conclusions JosephÕs magisterial account of the history of linguistics leads us to explore the very reasons for our discipline. Plato, while dismissing the value of the study of language, has provided us with a fundamental vision of what the options are. Joseph obviously does not share PlatoÕs attitude towards language or the study of language––nor do I––but he recognizes and makes us recognize the importance of the frame Plato created, a frame that opposes nature to a variety of other things, and ascribes naturalness to some aspects of language, while denying the naturalness of others. Tracing the alterations to that frame through the millennia, Joseph leads us to contemplate the various divisions that the concept of ‘‘nature’’ has imposed on linguistic thought, and on how these divisions limit the scope of linguistic thought. By incorporating the social within the natural, we may still be ‘‘limiting the arbitrary’’, but at least we have pulled a broader range of phenomena within the scope of Ôscientific linguisticsÕ and opened the door for a more complete understanding of this most human of traits, language.
References Aarsleff, H., 1970. The history of linguistics and Professor Chomsky. Language 46, 570–585. Edgley, A., 2000. The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky. Routledge, London/New York. Otero, C.P. (Ed.), 1988. Noam Chomsky: Language and Politics. Black Rose Books, Montreal. Pinker, S., 1994. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, New York. Tierney, B., 1997. The Idea of Natural Rights ( ¼ Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 5). Scholars Press, Atlanta.
The boundaries of nature in the discipline of linguistics Douglas A. Kibbee Department of French, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2090 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Accepted 8 February 2003 Joseph, John E. 2000. Limiting the Arbitrary. Linguistic Naturalism and its Opposites in PlatoÕs Cratylus and Modern Theories of Language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Abstract John JosephÕs most recent book presents us with an opportunity to understand our discipline, and through this understanding to reshape it in important new directions. From this book spring so many ideas, so many new ways of viewing both our discipline and the object of its attention, that I have here eschewed the normal evaluation of a standard book review, in favor of an exploration of where we might go from here. It should be clear from this format that I heartily concur with both the content and the approach that Professor Joseph offers. 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
1. Introduction What is the purpose of linguistics? This question, when asked by university administrators, makes us linguists nervous. For this reason, it is most often answered by a definition rather than a true statement of purpose: linguistics is the study of language. 1 When we do not duck the question, the response will most often require
E-mail address: [email protected] (D.A. Kibbee). For instance, the homepage of the Linguistic Society of America provides the following definition of linguistics: ‘‘Linguistics, the study of language, concerns itself with all aspects of how people use language and what they must know in order to do so’’. At the very end of this introduction to the branches of linguistics is a short section on ‘‘applications of linguistics’’, but this concern is purely optional: ‘‘Linguistics can have applications wherever language itself becomes a matter of practical concern’’ (emphasis added) (http://www.lsadc.org/web2/fldfr.htm). 1
0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2003.02.002
302
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
us to confront the nature vs. x divide that John Joseph has described in his fascinating book. Is the purpose of linguistics to analyze real examples of language, or is observable language merely an illusion, under which the linguist will tease out underlying similarities to arrive at a greater truth? Whichever response we opt for requires further questions of purpose: why describe a particular language, why look for underlying similarities? The answers to such questions have been based on the notion of the ‘‘natural’’ in language, with some portion of language deemed natural, while other parts of language are conventional, cultural, or arbitrary. The interpretation of what is natural, and the decision that the study of language should concern itself primarily or only with what is natural, are both cultural constructs which, like it or not, place the study of language squarely back in the realm of the humanities, right where it started out. This is perhaps a controversial position to take in a journal entitled Language Sciences, and it certainly will not sit well in the generativist camp 2 among many others. It is, however, the central conclusion of JosephÕs book: ‘‘the ÔhistoryÕ and ÔdoingÕ of linguistics are, or ought to be, indistinguishable from one another’’ (p. 201). For Plato the resolution of the question is simple: whether language is natural or conventional does not really matter because the study of language is not a path to truth. Those who study language, whether etymologists or rhetoricians, are wasting time that would better be spent on the study of the real world, that is, the invisible ideal world, about which our knowledge is indirect. What is real, then, is hidden, and it is the role of the specialist to find the hidden dimensions and connections that the everyday observer would fail to perceive. This is the role Socrates takes on in PlatoÕs Cratylus. The view that reality lies in the world of the ideal is not the dominant view; most since Plato have had a greater respect for physical reality. However, linguists since Plato have spent their time finding out what language really is, how language really works, revealing hidden dimensions and connections, towards a variety of goals, from the explication of literary or ordinary language to the study of logic (and many points in between), marveling at the diversity of language and trying to determine the unity of language. The determination of whether the connections or the dimensions are more ‘‘natural’’ depends on what the linguist wishes to prove about human nature, and language being one of the primary differences between humans and other species, the linguist would seem to have special knowledge to contribute about human nature. Human nature not being directly observable, the search for this kind of knowledge is framed by philosophical, a priori, statements. For Aristotle, ‘‘all men by nature desire knowledge’’ (Metaphysics, I, i); for Chomsky, the ‘‘essential features of human nature involve a kind of creative urge, a need to control oneÕs own
2 Chomsky, protesting that some question his credentials to speak about intellectual history, clearly does not want to be a labeled a humanist: ‘‘In the humanities . . . a substantial number of practitioners are people with tiny minds and limited understanding’’. Even with these limited intellectual faculties humanists have been able to debunk Professor ChomskyÕs ventures into intellectual history, particularly Cartesian Linguistics (1966). See for example Aarsleff (1970).
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
303
productive, creative labor, to be free from authoritarian intrusions, a kind of instinct for liberty and creativity’’ (Chomsky, cited in Otero, 1988, p. 594). The purpose of linguistics in the first case might be to help determine how language relates to the acquisition of knowledge; in the second case to determine how language can be creative; both will claim to reveal human nature, but the foundation of the science rests on an unverifiable claim of what is real. As Joseph points out again and again, ‘‘the problem now, as it was in PlatoÕs time, is knowing what that reality is independently of language’’ (p. 200).
2. Nature and its opposites in the study of language Before returning to the question posed at the beginning of this article, let us now follow JosephÕs argumentation. The first half of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of PlatoÕs Cratylus, the oldest extant exploration of a language issue. This sets the stage for the discussion of the limits of nature and of convention in explaining the facts of language, in this case the ‘‘correctness of words’’. If the purpose of words is to teach and to discriminate between like objects, then the purpose of the study of language would be to learn about reality. Hermogenes takes the side of convention (nomos). If an individual decides to call a man ‘‘horse’’, then that is up to the individual. The arbitrariness of words is interpreted to allow maximum freedom. If names are conventional then they offer no insights into reality, and the study of language is of no interest. At the other end of spectrum stands Cratylus, for whom there is a natural link between a word and the reality it represents. This is true in the world of the ideals, Socrates explains, but not in the world of human language. Even if the original giver of names had approximated the ideal name for a thing, subsequent human history has distorted the term, largely through convention. There is a political dimension to this: convention gives too much power to the masses, whose understanding of reality is therefore more distant from nature than is that of the philosopher. Not only does convention distort reality, it is also contrary to the good of society, claims Socrates. If individuals can choose their own words, they can choose their own laws, and ultimately the fabric of society is torn apart. Embracing the arbitrary is ultimately a retreat to manÕs primitive state. Having established PlatoÕs dismissal of the study of language, and the first discussion of nature in language, in three chapters on the Cratylus, Joseph turns his attention to the legacy of the ‘‘natural’’ in language, and the subsequent discussion of the ultimate purpose of the study of language. Chapter 4, ‘‘Natural grammar and conventional words from Aristotle to Pinker’’, describes the dividing line between nature and convention in the two and a half millennia since Plato. Chapter 5, ‘‘Natural dialect and artificial language from Varro to Chomsky’’, discusses issues of linguistic variation, of linguistic norms, and the relationship of linguistic description to linguistic reality. Chapter 6, ‘‘Invisible hierarchies from Jakobson to optimality theory’’, traces how the notion of invisible, underlying realities of language has progressed during the twentieth century.
304
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
For Plato, the natural is located at the realm of the ideal, and removed from the experience of people; in that respect nothing about language was natural or allowed us to perceive the true nature of things. It was a way of reconciling the diversity of languages to what he believed was a unique reality. For his successors, nature was closer at hand, and observable through human perception. Epicurus provides us with a historical account of the development of linguistic diversity, as the different peoples (ethne) of the earth had different feelings and perceptions of nature, influenced by their group history, and sought to express them by different languages. The creation of language happened in two stages: a natural, but rough and ambiguous language, followed by a refined, rational and conventional language as the group consciously sought to improve the effectiveness of their communication. The natural language would deal with concrete items, and the rational language would add abstract terms. In this way Epicureans avoided the historical problem of explaining how, without language, people could agree on conventional terms. Varro had another take on the natural and the unnatural in language. He considered natural those parts of language over which the speaker had no choice, i.e., grammar, while across the divide stand those elements that are subject to individual volition, the entire arbitrary enterprise of connecting word and meaning, i.e., the lexicon: In modern terms, this means that the lexical meanings of words exist on a higher plane of consciousness than do the rules of morphology and syntax. As a result, the former are more subject to the historical and political processes we call convention, while the latter, being unconscious, are more natural in their origin and operation. (p. 103) The Varronian divide would essentially be continued in the Renaissance and beyond, with the division between innate ideas and conventional vocabulary. The PortRoyal grammarians considered innate that which was part of a universal human logic, while the other elements of language, those that distinguished one language from another, were arbitrary. They had the political notion then that each language should be made to conform as closely as possible to the logical form. A long tradition, stretching from Plato to Pinker, considers oneÕs native language as natural and innate, and other peoplesÕ languages as unnatural and deformed. Therefore it is not surprising that logical form for these Frenchmen looked a lot like French. Even those who did not subscribe to the strong analogist position of Port-Royal could believe in a different kind of natural force, the ‘‘genius’’ of each language. Thus the choices within an individual language were not totally arbitrary, but were (or should be) guided by a specific national character, itself determined naturally by ‘‘climate’’ or ‘‘race’’, much as in the Epicurean model. Throughout the 18th century much of the attention will focus on the nature of free will, and the social contract. In RousseauÕs model words would be natural, especially nouns; the anomalous is closest to nature, and the development of larger social groups would bring about analogy, that is grammar, a conventional agreement about usage.
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
305
The development of comparative linguistics in the first half of the 19th century further shaped the notions of natural and unnatural. Once again the ‘‘Varronian line’’, as Joseph terms it, is drawn, separating the unnatural lexicon from natural grammar. The comparison of languages on morphological bases led to typological classifications which brought linguists to conclude that some languages were stuck in a more primitive phase than others, in the natural progression from one type of grammatical organization to another (isolating, agglutinating, inflectional). The popularity of this approach was certainly not unrelated to the imperialistic designs of the countries of Western Europe, where the theories originated. Even Saussure finds himself creating two classes of language, the lexicological and the grammatical, the former exemplifying arbitrariness to the extreme, the latter motivating paradigmatic relations. Once again this risks making value judgments of the quality of languages, or of the mental capacities of those who speak them. For Saussure, the bond of meaning to sign is totally arbitrary, but the free will of the individual has little role: the systematic aspects of language, both lexical and functional, are social facts, and are part of the unconscious. The social/unconscious then takes over the position that ‘‘nature’’ held in previous theories. The langue, the language system, is a powerful external restraint on the individual or even on the speech community. Joseph notes that this is too powerful a system, and clearly the individual can effect change on language, for example the way Saussure changed the way we use the terms langue and parole. To accommodate this problem, Saussure softens his view of the arbitrary to admit relative degrees of arbitrariness. In subsequent structuralisms, European and American, the lexicon is left aside, to determine the systems, first phonological, then morphological, and finally, in the generativist model, syntactical. This was largely a progression from the directly observable, to that which can be observed only more and more indirectly, more and more abstractly. That abstraction has, as in the case of Plato, become the ‘‘real’’, the universal principles that are hard-wired into the brain in the Chomskyan program. Everything else is essentially lexical. Pinker establishes his boundary between natural and unnatural by claiming that regular (natural) forms are kept in one part of the brain, and irregular forms in another part of the brain. Irregular forms are part of the lexicon, while regular forms are handled by a syntactic process. PinkerÕs claim that speakers of languages have two separate language organs for processing the two different types leads him inevitably to claim that speakers whose language has only one type or the other have one ‘‘developed’’, and one ‘‘underdeveloped’’, part of the brain. Joseph points out the political dangers of such a position, stating that ‘‘it is reasonable to say that the ground is laid for linguists who look at language death and survival from a Darwinian perspective to connect the world-wide spread of English to its ÔnaturalnessÕ relative to the innate language faculty of the brain’’ (p. 139). Thus we see that discussing what is ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘conventional’’ in language, as first explored by Plato, is not irrelevant to modern linguistic thought, but in fact continues to play an important if often unacknowledged role. To make real progress in linguistics we need to be upfront about these issues, asking, in JosephÕs words:
306
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
• Can any version of naturalness itself be ÔnaturalÕ, or must it be known to us always and only as a historical product? • For any particular conception of the natural, is it based on criteria that are directly observable? If not, how can it be verified, or falsified? • If some part of language is to be reckoned as somehow less natural than another, how can it have come into being except through processes that themselves ultimately depend upon natural faculties? (p. 140). Furthermore, just as Plato had a political goal in discussing the limits of nature and convention, every position taken on the delimitation of nature and convention by everyone writing on language since Plato has at the very least political implications, even if they are not openly confronted. This political element is brought out clearly in JosephÕs next chapter, ‘‘Natural dialect and artificial language from Varro to Chomsky’’. From the very first treatises on language, it was recognized that literary language was different from ordinary language, and that it was in some sense less natural. For Plato, the language of the people was contrasted with the ideal language, as a deformation of that ideal bond of language and nature. More commonly, the language of the people was contrasted with that of poets and rhetoricians, and the language of the people was held to be more natural, and have less freedom of choice. The language of the people could also be studied as the languages of the peoples, as in DanteÕs search for the volgare illustre, the vernacular dialect among the immense variety on the Italian peninsula that could be a vehicle for the highest artistry. The first battle was to establish the equality, even superiority, of the vernacular with respect to the learned language (Latin). Dante did this on the basis of the naturalness of the vernacular, as opposed to the artificiality of the learned language, but from that natural vernacular he wanted to extract the best elements, rationally. Thus the volgare illustre would be the best taken from each of the dialects, against which all the dialects could be measured. Not surprisingly, the volgare illustre ended up looking a lot like DanteÕs native Tuscan, but the point here is the use of the natural to ‘‘restore’’, in fact to create, a national unity. Ironically, Italy would be one of the last states in Western Europe to become either politically or linguistically united. The other Western European examples that Joseph evokes, Spain and France, combined political and linguistic unification more effectively. In Spain, Nebrija (1492) offered to bring to the Spanish language the same artificial (unnatural) stability that the creation of grammar had brought to Latin. The role of the grammarian is to establish a language that will not be deformed, like the vernacular. For Du Bellay, the French language is natural, like a cultivated plant; languages are made cultivated by writers and grammarians. Their attentions to the language, which can include borrowings from other languages and neologisms, are nonetheless constrained by the ‘‘genius’’ of the language, a language-specific ‘‘nature’’. The association of language with the power of the state quickly led to the institutionalization of a standard language. Joseph rightly points out the similarities between ‘‘law’’ and ‘‘standard language’’, each regulating what is right and wrong,
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
307
and he points out the disparity between popular and professional conceptions of these institutions. These standards can only touch on what is arbitrary, for they regulate only that which is variable, but the regulation is often performed in accordance with what is perceived of as natural, either in the sense of conforming to the genius of the language, as in Du Bellay, 3 or in conforming to ‘‘natural logic’’, as in the reforms proposed by grammarians of the Port-Royal school. In our discussion of the politics of language below we will fill in some of the more than three hundred year gap between Du Bellay and Saussure, but for now we follow Joseph in skipping ahead to the early twentieth century. Saussure too viewed literary language, and more generally ‘‘cultivated language’’, as less natural. Such a language arises ‘‘whenever a people reaches a certain level of civilisation’’ through ‘‘a kind of tacit convention’’ (cited in Joseph at p. 153), to enable people of a multidialectal or multilingual nation to communicate. Although it seems to occur ‘‘naturally’’ (i.e. inevitably) it is unworthy of linguistic analysis because the natural systems of a language are deformed by it, just as they are by lexical borrowing. The standard language was equally scorned by George Orwell, who found that it was removed from nature by its reliance on dead metaphors. Only those who are still connected to the natural world, the working classes in his view, are able to create new lively metaphors. Fresh thought can occur naturally only through the senses, and the expression of those sensory perceptions through language. Fresh thought is politically important because it permits people to see through propaganda. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, peopleÕs language can only be liberated by social engineering. For Chomsky, the problem of linguistic variation is that it is impossible scientifically to distinguish a language from a dialect, a fact that has led linguists to search for technical ways of making the distinction. His solution is to consider language not as what is understood within a speech community, but rather as what is present in an individualÕs brain. Only this language is ‘‘real’’, in the sense that it has a physical existence. However, Chomsky slips easily from talking about an individualÕs I [ ¼ internal] language to the I-language shared by speakers of the same language (abstracted from the I-language of several speakers). A language is now an idealization, and his I-language is really no different from the E [ ¼ external] language he scorns as unscientific. Chomsky is driven in this by his own political concerns, both in the disciplinary politics of post-World War II American universities, and more broadly in the radical scepticism of his general politics, including his perspectives on democracy (about which more below). Joseph argues that all languages are social constructs, I-languages as well as E-languages. All that we can know about them we abstract from actual instances of linguistic production. The claim that some languages are more natural, more
3 A better example here might be Louis Meigret. Du Bellay never wrote a grammar, so his work is not so easily comparable to NebrijaÕa, although a perfectly suitable comparison for Dante. MeigretÕs work is more original than Du BellayÕs, and the connection to legal practice is more explicit.
308
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
observable as natural objects, than others is dangerous, and blinds us to consideration of all aspects of language use. Pretending variation does not or should not exist, or cannot be taken account of by scientific linguistics, would ultimately make linguistics irrelevant. In a final chapter Joseph considers a much narrower chronological period, the twentieth century, focusing on the linguistÕs use of invisible, underlying structures, from JakobsonÕs work on the archiphoneme, in which he rejected the notion that all relationships within the linguistic system are of the same nature. This led Jakobson to work on the notion of markedness, in which the unmarked elements are somehow more natural than the marked items. This point will be picked up in Chomskyan linguistics in the form of core and periphery grammar, with the core containing regular linguistic forms and the periphery the irregular. Ultimately this leads Chomsky back to the position that grammar is natural, the lexicon is not, which has a two-thousand-year pedigree. Greenbergian universals offer another peek at natural constraints on human language, and because they are implicational rather than absolute they do not require innate structures in the brain that are specific to language. Instead the structures of language would be constrained by the mental structures that receive and organize perceptual data. Rosch and Marr offered a different view of how perception takes place, one in which the essential feature is normative. Normativity, then, would be natural and internal, not conventional and external. Iconicity studies in the 1970s and 1980s often carried the name of ‘‘natural’’ (Natural Morphology, Natural Phonology, Natural Syntax), with the claim that ‘‘grammar [. . .] not only can but does reproduce the structure of the real world, and that anytime it fails to do so, this is the result of an arbitrary human choice that will in the course of time ÔnaturallyÕ give way’’ (p. 198). This is the far end of the spectrum, towards the ‘‘nature’’ pole. Most recently, Optimality Theory sees Universal Grammar as a set of constraints, in which one member can overrule another, and all languages can rank order the rules according to their own system. The arbitrary here reaches beyond the lexicon to the very grammar. How can the arbitrary be limited in such a system? Joseph concludes by reminding us to be aware of the nature vs. x divide, in all its forms. Through this understanding of how our knowledge to this point has been shaped by that divide, we can hope to ‘‘move beyond it’’. What might thinking and knowing be without this divide, indeed without binary dichotomies altogether?
3. Nature and the purpose of linguistics In JosephÕs thorough review of the many permutations of the nature vs. x divide, we are drawn repeatedly to the political implications of the conceptions of nature exemplified in these theories. This is perhaps ironic as one of the goals of linguistics as a discipline in the second half of the twentieth century in America has been to divorce the ‘‘scientific’’ study of language, henceforth allied with the ‘‘hard’’ sciences,
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
309
from all that cannot be studied scientifically, i.e., the humanities and social sciences. 4 It is my hope and belief that consideration of that social dimension can help us out of the impasse blocked by previous divisions, and give a broader purpose to the study of linguistics. Frequently during JosephÕs presentation he notes the parallels between language and the law. PlatoÕs nomothetes is the lawgiver and in the examination of links between words and nature one of the first words/ideals Socrates critiques is dikaion, ÔjusticeÕ. Varro states that ordinary people should follow common usage just as they follow common laws. The idea that there are ‘‘natural laws’’ as well as ‘‘conventional laws’’, as well as natural (objective) rights and conventional (subjective) rights, permeates Western legal thought. I ask the reader now to bear with me as I present in barest outline the history of the notion of natural law, for ultimately I think this will point to a way to escape the trap of ‘‘the natural’’ in linguistic theory. Natural law theory is generally traced to Augustine, through Thomas Aquinas, and it holds that any law to be valid must be in accordance with moral law, and moral law is derived from essential human nature. Augustine states that ‘‘that which is not just seems to be no law at all’’ (cited in Aquinas) and Aquinas elaborates ‘‘if in any point it [any human law] deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of law’’ (Summa theologiae I-II, Q. 95, A. II, cited in Tierney, 1997, p. 25, n. 46). That nature is human reason. Through the late Middle Ages the notion of natural rights grew from this concept of natural law. Natural rights began with the concept of freedom, not in the sense of the liberation of serfs, but rather in theological terms, the liberty of the soul, which was in part a Franciscan reaction to the papal schism of the 14th century (see Tierney, 1997, p. 170–203 on William of Ockham). Individual liberties, which no authority, pope or monarch, could deny, were a concept that slowly took hold in Western Europe. The centralisation of power led to concerns about limiting the power of the monarch. With the disintegration of religious unity in the West, freedom to worship as one pleased was an early example of such a notion. The transition from the medieval to the modern concept of natural law and natural rights was also a transition from Catholic to Protestant political theorists. The Dutch scholar Grotius (Hugo de Groot, 1583–1645), a Protestant who spent much of his career in Catholic France, is often considered the founder of the modern theory of natural law and natural rights, which he elaborated in his work on the law of nations, De jure belli et pacis (Paris, 1625). Grotius argued against the skepticsÕ belief that human beingsÕ primary motivation is self-interest, and against the medieval presentation of natural law as based on
4 In his political writings Chomsky has consistently and vehemently denied that he has a ‘‘political theory’’, primarily because he claims that such a thing is impossible, given his definition of theory. One of the points of Edgley (2000) is to demonstrate that he definitely has what political scientists would call a political theory, even if Chomsky himself would not attach such a label. ChomskyÕs definitions of science and of scientific theory are very narrow, but they have opened to American linguists the coffers of the National Scientific Foundation, which are considerably fuller than those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
310
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
self-preservation. Instead, he claimed, a social instinct drove humans to seek the company of other humans in a peaceful society. The instinct of sociability is the foundation upon which natural law is based. 5 If sociability is a natural instinct, then language is the means by which this natural instinct is developed and sustained. If then this is the role of language, not the communication of logical propositions, but the facilitation of contact between humans in order to fulfill a natural human need, then the exclusion of the conventional and the cultural from the natural in a linguistic theory leads the study of language down the wrong path. Suppose then that ChomskyÕs ‘‘natural instinct for creativity’’ is matched by a ‘‘natural instinct for sociability’’, each of which is nurtured by basic mental functions (perception, comparison, classification) to produce language. Under such an umbrella, sociolinguistics is just as ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘scientific’’ as cognitive science, and particular languages are just as interesting for their particularity as they are for exemplifying linguistic universals. Furthermore if sociability is a natural instinct, then normativity is a scientific concept, not an unnatural imposition of society. The development of linguistic norms is no less natural than the development of speech itself, and one might consider the work of the ‘‘language mavens’’ that Pinker derides as simply one end of the spectrum of behaviors that derive from the sociability instinct (Pinker, 1994, p. 370– 403). Viewing linguistic norms as a natural process, instead of as an authoritarian, wrong-headed limitation on our natural creativity would free linguistics from blinders that have distorted our conception of language for some time. Suppose we wondered not so much at the rapid acquisition of language in children, as we did at the developmental relationships between language and social interaction. We could shed certain problems that dog theoretical linguistics: (1) the very limited content of universal grammar as compared with the vast diversity of human language, (2) the need to posit a language faculty that is distinct from other mental processes, (3) the monolingual bias of this version of child language acquisition, even when most humans grow up in multilingual or at least multidialectal contexts, (4) the ever-present danger of promoting the linguistic structures of oneÕs own language as universal. This is a view of nature that does not force us to exclude convention. But, the skeptical linguist might object, the fact that Grotius speaks of a human instinct for sociability does not make it so, or link it to language. To this I would respond that the instinct for sociability has a foundation in observable human behavior that is every bit as strong as that for an ‘‘instinct for creativity’’ or an ‘‘instinct for language’’. That may or may not be enough, but at least it offers the hope of escaping the impasse where early 21st century linguistics finds itself. And the
5
‘‘Inter haec autem quae homini sunt propria est appetitus societatis, id est communitatis, non qualiscunque, se tranquillae et pro sui intellectus modo ordinatae . . . . Haec vero . . . societatis custodia, humane intellectu conveniens, fons est ejus juris . . . quo pertinet alieni abstinentia, et si quid alieni habeamus . . . restitutio’’ (cited in Tierney, 1997, p. 317, n. 5 and 6).
D.A. Kibbee / Language Sciences 26 (2004) 301–311
311
link to language is at least hinted at in the study of linguistic abilities of children who have somehow been deprived of human contact (so-called ‘‘wild children’’, at the extreme end of this spectrum). We asked at the beginning of this article that the purpose of linguistics is. It is not fair to ask a question without suggesting a response, so here is mine: linguistics provides one way for us to understand essential human nature, by studying how language provides a basic capacity (the expression of creative thoughts) to fulfill a basic need (the establishment social relations). At the applied level, then, linguistics can legitimately contribute to our understanding, and, optimistically, to our resolution of social issues of inequality, of the manipulation of thought (ChomskyÕs manufacture of consent as well as Whorfian concepts), and to the evaluation of claims of linguistic rights.
4. Conclusions JosephÕs magisterial account of the history of linguistics leads us to explore the very reasons for our discipline. Plato, while dismissing the value of the study of language, has provided us with a fundamental vision of what the options are. Joseph obviously does not share PlatoÕs attitude towards language or the study of language––nor do I––but he recognizes and makes us recognize the importance of the frame Plato created, a frame that opposes nature to a variety of other things, and ascribes naturalness to some aspects of language, while denying the naturalness of others. Tracing the alterations to that frame through the millennia, Joseph leads us to contemplate the various divisions that the concept of ‘‘nature’’ has imposed on linguistic thought, and on how these divisions limit the scope of linguistic thought. By incorporating the social within the natural, we may still be ‘‘limiting the arbitrary’’, but at least we have pulled a broader range of phenomena within the scope of Ôscientific linguisticsÕ and opened the door for a more complete understanding of this most human of traits, language.
References Aarsleff, H., 1970. The history of linguistics and Professor Chomsky. Language 46, 570–585. Edgley, A., 2000. The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky. Routledge, London/New York. Otero, C.P. (Ed.), 1988. Noam Chomsky: Language and Politics. Black Rose Books, Montreal. Pinker, S., 1994. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, New York. Tierney, B., 1997. The Idea of Natural Rights ( ¼ Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 5). Scholars Press, Atlanta.