The Neo-Firthian Tradition and Its Contribution to General Linguistics (Linguistische Arbeiten) 3484103396, 9783484103399
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Table of contents :
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Subject and Aims
1.2. Method of Approach
1.3. The Historical Perspective
1.3.1. The European Background
1.3.2. Linguistics in America
2. THE BACKGROUND TO THE NEO-FIRTHIAN TRADITION
2.1. Sane Remarks on Terminology
2.2. The Context of Firth's Work
2.3. The Work of Malinowski
2.3.1. Malinowski’s Research Background
2.3.2. Language in Context
2.3.3. Phatic Communion
2.4. The Linguistic Theories of J.R. Firth
2.4.1. Firth’s Publications and his Influence
2.4.2. Firth’s Theories
2.5. Prosodic Analysis
3. THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEO-FIRTHIAN LINGUISTICS
3.1. The Background: Structuralism and General Linguistics
3.1.1. Meaning and Discovery Procedures
3.1.2. Linguistics and the Use of a Text Corpus
3.1.3. Intuition, Theory and the Ideal Speaker
3.2. Levels of Language
3.3. Substance
3.4. Linguistic Form
3.4.1. Formal Meaning
3.4.2. Grammar
3.4.3. Lexis
3.5. Context
3.5.1. Context in Linguistic Analysis
3.5.2. Formal Choice in Context
4. LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS AND LINGUISTIC SYSTEMS
4.1. Development
4.1.1. Linguistics and Pragmatics
4.1.2. Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
4.2. Application
4.2.1. Language Acquisition and Society
4.2.2. Language and Social Universals
4.3. Models of Language Functions
4.3.1. The Child’s Model
4.3.2. The Adult Model
4.4. The Macro-Functions
4.4.1. The Ideational Carponent
4.4.2. The Interpersonal Carponent
4.4.3. The Textual Component
4.5. The Macro-functions and their Realizations
5. THE IDEATIONAL COMPONENT
5.1. General Introduction
5.2. The Logical and Experiential Sub-components
5.2.1. Experience and Expression
5.2.2. The Problem of Word-Fomation
5.3. Transitivity
5.3.1. Clause Organisation and Ergativity
5.3.2. Types of Process
5.3.3. Participant Types
5.3.4. Circumstantials
5.4. Modulation
5.5. Conclusion
6. THE ORGANISATION OF DISCOURSE
6.1. The Textual Component
6.2. Texture within the Clause
6.2.1. Unmarked Theme
6.2.2. Alternative Thematic Options
6.2.3. Marked Theme Dislocation
6.2.4. Identification
6.2.5. Predication, Substitution and Reference
6.3. Information
6.3.1. Tonality (Information Distribution)
6.3.2. Tonicity (Focus)
6.4. Texture above the Clause
6.4.1. Text and Cohesion
6.4.2. Text and Replacement Semantics
6.5. Conclusion
7. THE INTERPERSONAL COMPONENT
7.1. Introduction
7.2. The Speech Situation and Language
7.2.1. Mood
7.2.2. Modality
7.2.3. Key
7.3. Sociological Semantics
7.3.1. The Structure of a Speech Situation
7.3.2. Systemic Choice in the Communication Situation
7.3.3. The Meanings of the Language Option in Context
7.4. Conclusions
8. CONCLUSIONS
8.1. The Neo-Firthian Tradition
8.1.1. The Legacy of J.R. Firth
8.1.2. The Structure of Neo-Firthian Linguistics
8.2. Language as Social Semiotic
8.2.1. The Contexts of Language
8.2.2. The Semantics of the Text
8.3. The Image of Neo-Firthian Linguistics
8.4. Contribution
9. GLOSSARY
10. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Citation preview
Linguistische Arbeiten
73
Herausgegeben von Herbert E. Brekle, Hans Jürgen Heringer, Christian Rohrer, Heinz Vater und Otmar Werner
James Monaghan
The Neo-Firthian Tradition and its Contribution to General Linguistics
Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1979
CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme der Deutschen Bibliothek Monaghan, James: The neo-Firthian tradition and its contribution to general linguistics / James Monaghan.Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1979. (Linguistische Arbeiten ; 73) ISBN 3-484-10339-6
ISBN 3-484-10339-6 ISSN 0344-6727
D 30
© Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1979 Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Ohne ausdrückliche Genehmigung des Verlages ist es auch nicht gestattet, dieses Buch oder Teile daraus auf photomechanischem Wege zu vervielfältigen. Printed in Germany. Druck: fotokop wilhelm weihert KG, Darmstadt
To my Father and Mother
VI PREFACE
This is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Frankfurt in May 1978. It originated as an attempt on ity part to relate the type of linguistics I cut ny teeth on under Jim Muir in the early sixties at Glasgow University to General Linguistics as understood and practiced a decade later in West Germany. This vague idea was nurtured by ny doctoral supervisor, Leonhard Lipka, who convinced me I could write this book when I didn't think I could, and who shewed me, in same detail, what was still lacking in the first version. Without his encouragement and thorough criticism this book would never have been written.
I also want to thank Eugene Winter for a lengthy correspondence on matters textual and linguistic and especially for his contents on Chapter 6, and all those others who so generously helped me keep up with recent developments in the Neo-Firthian tradition. The inadequacies that have survived such detailed and kindly help have to be blamed on ity own invincible ignorance.
Finally, ny thanks are due to Mrs. Ingrid Broter, whose talent for deciphering little bits of paper glued to larger bits and for turning the result into a thing of beauty is evident in the book before you, and to my family for putting up with me especially during the final phases of composition and proof-reading.
James ftonaghan
Munich 1979
VII Table of Contents 1.
niTRODUCTION
1
1.1.
Subject and Aims
1
1.2.
Method of Approach
3
1.3.
The Historical Perspective
7
1.3.1.
The European Background
8
1.3.2.
Linguistics in America
11
2.
THE BACKGROUND TO THE NEO-FIKTHIAN TRADITION
15
2.1.
Sane Remarks on Terminology
15
2.2.
The Context of Firth's Work
18
2.3.
The Work of Malinowski
21
2.3.1.
Malinowski's Research Background
21
2.3.2.
Language in Context
22
2.3.3.
Phatic Ccnmunion
25
2.4.
The Linguistic Theories of J.R. Firth
28
2.4.1.
Firth's Publications and his Influence
28
2.4.2.
Firth's Theories
29
2.4.2.1.
The Spectrum of Meaning
31
2.4.2.2.
Metalanguage
34
2.4.2.3.
Renewal of Connection
36
2.4.2.4.
Firth and the Ideas of de Saussure
40
2.5.
Prosodic Analysis
41
3.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF NEO-FIKTHIAN LINGUISTICS
45
3.1.
The Background: Structuralism and General Linguistics
45
3.1.1.
Meaning and Discovery Procedures
47
3.1.2.
Linguistics and the Use of a Text Corpus
49
3.1.3.
Intuition, Theory and the Ideal Speaker
53
3.2.
Levels of Language
55
3.3.
Substance
57
3.4.
Linguistic Form
60
3.4.1.
Formal Meaning
61
3.4.2.
Grammar
62
3.4.2.1.
The Rank Scale and its Units
62
VIII 3.4.2.2.
Structures and Classes
63
3.4.2.3.
System
3.4.2.4.
Delicacy
65
3.4.3.
Lexis
67
3.5.
Context
72
3.5.1.
Context in Linguistic Analysis
73
3.5.2.
Formal Choice in Context
77
4".
LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS AND LINGUISTIC SYSTEMS
82
and Exponence
65
4.1.
Development
82
4.1.1.
Linguistics and Pragmatics
84
4.1.2.
Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
85
4.2.
Application
86
4.2.1.
Language Acquisition and Society
86
4.2.2.
Language and Social Universals
88
4.3.
Models of Language Functions
89
4.3.1.
The Child's Model
89
4.3.2.
The Adult Model
90
4.4.
The Macro-Functions
93
4.4.1.
The Ideational Component
94
4.4.2.
The Interpersonal Component
94
4.4.3.
The Textual Component
95
4.5.
The Macro-functions and their Realizations
95
5.
THE IDEATIONAL COMPONENT
99
5.1.
General Introduction
99
5.2.
The Logical and Experiential Sub-ccrrponents
5.2.1.
Experience and Expression
102
5.2.2.
The Problem of Word-Formation
103
5.3.
Transitivity
107
5.3.1.
Clause Organisation and Ergativity
107
5.3.2.
Types of Process
113
100
5.3.3.
Participant Types
115
5.3.3.1.
Action (Material Process) Clauses
115
5.3.3.2.
Mental Process Clauses
116
5.3.3.3.
Relational Clauses
117
ÏX
5.3.3.3.1. Attributive Clauses
118
5.3.3.3.2. Equative Clauses
120
5.3.4.
Circumstantials
121
5.3.4.1.
Beneficiary
122
5.3.4.2.
Fange
123
5.3.4.3.
Attributive
125
5.3.4.4.
Condition
125
5.4.
Modulation
126
5.5.
Conclusion
127
6.
THE ORGANISATION OF DISCOURSE
129
6.1.
The Textual Carponent
129
6.2.
Texture within the Clause
131
6.2.1.
Unmarked Theme
131
6.2.2.
Alternative Thematic Options
133
6.2.3.
Marked Theme Dislocation
134
6.2.4.
Identification
135
6.2.5.
Predication, Substitution and Reference
137
6.2.5.1.
'Structural' Reference
137
6.2.5.2.
'Structural' Substitution
138
6.2.5.3.
Predication
138
6.3.
Information
139
6.3.1.
Tonality (Information Distribution)
140
6.3.2.
Tonicity (Focus)
140
6.4.
Texture above the Clause
142
6.4.1.
Text and Cohesion
143
6.4.1.1.
Cohesive Reference
144
6.4.1.2.
Cohesive Substitution and Ellipsis
145
6.4.1.3.
Cohesive Conjunction
149
6.4.1.4.
Lexical Cohesion
150
6.4.2.
Text and Replacement Semantics
150
6.4.2.1.
Systematic Repetition and Mutual Expectancy
152
6.4.2.2.
The Structure of Texts
157
6.4.2.3.
Vocabulary 3 Words
160
6.5.
Conclusion
163
X
7.
THE INTERPERSONAL COMPONENT
164
7.1.
Introduction
164
7.2.
The Speech Situation and Language
164
7.2.1.
Mood
167
7.2.2.
Modality
171
7.2.3.
Key
173
7.3.
Sociological Semantics
175
7.3.1.
The Structure of a Speech Situation
175
7.3.2.
Systemic Choice in the Carnnunication Situation
178
7.3.3.
The Meanings of the Language Option in Context
180
7.4.
Conclusions
181
8.
CONCLUSIONS
184
8.1.
The Neo-Firthian Tradition
184
8.1.1.
The Legacy of J.R. Firth
184
8.1.2.
The Structure of Neo-Firthian Linguistics
187
8.2.
Language as Social Semiotic
188
8.2.1.
The Contexts of Language
188
8.2.2.
The Semantics of the Text
189
8.3.
The Image of Neo-Firthian Linguistics
191
8.4.
Contribution
193
9.
GLOSSARY
195
10.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
213
1 1.
INTRODUCTION
1.1.
Subject and Aims
My subject is that tradition in linguistics which has developed in Britain in the last half century and whose main theoretical lines can be traced back to the work of J.R. Firth. I wish to concentrate, however, on the last twenty years, and, within this period, on questions currently in the forefront of discussion in the linguistic ccmnunity at large, as well as on those areas which seem to offer the most promising basis for future developments. Under the former heading will come, for exanple, work on the semantics of the sentence and under the latter heading, of areas which are only being opened up in any detail, are the problems of hew the speaker relates his language to the rest of the utterance, and how language fits into the situation of its use. My aims are to present the first comprehensive attempt to look at what I will call the Neo-Firthian^ tradition as a whole and to make it more widely available to linguists and those interested in language in society. I hope to shew that linguistics should in principle account for language in its social situation, rather than as merely a collection of structural units to be analysed individually. I am not of course denying the validity of studying the inner life of sentences but I will argue that this is only a part of the linguist's task and only a part of the description of language.
1
This expression is purely a convenient shorthand for the approach to the study of language which I am describing. I do not suggest that all the scholars that I include under this cover-term believe all the same things, far less that they all subscribe to anything like a party line. Nor do I want to suggest that the ideas in question are not found elsewhere. For further discussion of this question,cf. 2.1., the Glossary under'NeoFirthian'and Halliday (1966c:110).
2 I believe that an account of this tradition within linguistics is particu2 larly appropriate at the moment because 'mainstream' linguistics has burst the bounds of the structuralist tradition frcm which it has sprung and is looking for a way to account for aspects of language which structuralism was not designed to describe. Scne of its problems, in fact, derive frcm the difficulties inherent in the theoretical presuppositions most linguists accept as axictns, while others are based on difficulties apparently inherent in the material. In either case, a look at the problem from another angle ought to open the way for a new synthesis. I am not proposing a 'new' theory of language or linguistics but am only trying to make more widely available a part of modern lincuistics which has received less attention than it deserves outside of Britain and the Conmonwealth. Ihe concept of linguistic 'schools' is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, notion and is meant to indicate groups of scholars who share comnon areas of interest, corttnon terminology and certain cannon ways of looking at the problems of language. The fact that such groups have often been geographical is siirply a matter of educational origin and ease of comnunication. The rise of English as the international language of theoretical linguistics and the editorial policies of the various learned journals make it difficult today to preserve a 'pure' approach to language, even if anybody wanted to. Few do, of course, and attitudes to what is permissible as an approach to language are more open than ever before.
2
This refers to the line from Bloomfield through the development of American Structuralism and including the Chomskyan reaction and the major trends within transformational grammar. It is called 'mainstream' or 'orthodox' linguistics because everybody has been exposed to it and knows its main features. It is also the tradition in which most linguists work. The term does not imply, of course, that other traditions like Tagmemics or Stratificational Grammar in the US or European schools like those associated with the Prague or the Geneva or the Copenhagen groups are backwaters. My whole thesis is based on the presumption of the essential unity of General Linguistics and the fruitfulness of mutual influence between different approaches (cf. 1.3.1.).
3 1.2. Method of Approach There are naturally certain disadvantages in using such soft-sell tactics to introduce a theory. We tend to prefer global claims concerning the pcwer of a theory to explain everything about language (cf. Marshall & Wales:1966). Certainly when one has to go through the mental gymnastics of breaking into an unfamiliar theory it is comforting if the proponents of that theory can claim to have rendered all other theories obsolete. The idea that this will be the last time that one will have to get used to new terminology, new theoretical assumptions and new attitudes to the role of the linguist in the description of language is certainly pleasant. It would be nice to be able to believe that one kncws all that is really important. Unfortunately, such views can only be described as a triumph of hope over experience. Gleason's content on Firth and his colleagues is a fair one. "Not only is their view of language basically different; their terminology contrasts sharply with that used by most other linguists. As a result, Americans find great difficulty in reading their papers, and so fail to profit by their insights." (Gleason 1955; 1961:213)
The alternative to ascribing difficulties one has with a new theory to differences in approach and methods is to accuse its proponents of muddled thinking or excessively obscure expression. Both such accusations have been rrade about various Neo-Firthian works. Vfe will look at exanples later (cf. 3.1.3.) but a few general points are in order here. First of all, it would certainly be nice if all seminal works on theoretical linguistics were notably lucid and suitable for unsupervised undergraduate reading. In reality, however, breaking new ground requires a lot of wrestling with the language to make it say just what you want it to say and not what the generally accepted opinion says. You can manufacture weird and wonderful terms and terrify anyone who just dips into your book or you can use the old vocabulary and hope that the reader can remember that you are using an old term in a new way. Further, there are certainly examples of muddled thinking and sloppy use of terms throughout the literature, and in spite of my best efforts I will probably
4 perpetrate scire infelicities in the following pages. In spite of this, I hope to show that the myth of Neo-Firthian obscurity is largely a matter of the difficulty of expressing new ideas in a vocabulary loaded with years of old meanings. I have provided a glossary of key terms in an attempt to solve the problem. (I will also look at seme real difficulties in the Glossary.) Another possibility for me would have been to make a systematic comparison of the main differences between Neo-Firthian and Transformational-Generative (TG) linguistics but I soon gave up the idea. Not only is such a project beyond the scope of the present work but there are also several other problems. Firstly, the various schools of thought which all make use of the concept of transformation are by no means the same. In fact, within their terms of reference most of the work done under the heading of Case Granmar and Generative Semantics is perfectly compatible with the general work on sentence semantics in the Neo-Firthian tradition. There are, however, inportant differences between these TG schools and the so-called Standard Model and the differences include, moreover, sane of the very points which are most critical for the present discussion. More recent developments seem to indicate that even this Item and Process approach (cf. Hocket 1954) is being called into question and trans formations are being abandoned. Secondly, starting from a Neo-Firthian base and looking for a TG parallel makes the discussion look polemical and one-sided. On the one hand, certain areas are not included in present TG discussions and on the other, those that are hardly gain from an attempt to translate them into the terminology of another theory. This naturally works both ways as in the rather inconclusive discussion of prosodic analysis in terms of generative phonology in Langendoen (1968). Certain questions about the nature of language and the task of the linciuist, which are central to a Neo-Firthian approach to language, have not been asked in the theories under discussion. A detailed comparison, therefore, would be both extremely time-consuming and relatively unproductive. Furthermore, the audience for which this book is written will be in a position to make their own comparisons. I hope to illustrate some more detailed differences in a more introductory work (Monachan: forthcoming), where I try to look at English from a Neo-Firthian point of view.
5 I have taken the TG tradition as the main object of comparison since it is the most generally familiar, especially the Standard Theory. Furthermore, such oanparison is particularly useful at the present time in view of the internal reexamination within TG theory of fundamental assumptions in the light of a wider conception of what is relevant to linguistic discussion. This discussion has made clear that many of the strengths and weaknesses of TG theory derive frcm its roots in Neo-Bloomfieldian Structuralism whose stress on the rigorous application of a finite number of basic principles to language was also basic to early TG grammar. Furthermore, both Structuralism and early TG theories got into difficulties over the question of meaning. (I will look at parallels in detail in 1.3.2. belcw.) For our present purpose it will be enough to note that features which were set aside in the weaker theories of earlier stages have often been the basis of later advances. Simplifying complex problems so that details can be attended to one at a time is a respectable scientific method. However, it has its problems. Scholars tend to get attached to particular modes of action or reaction . So it is important to look at schools of thought in their ooAtext and as a whole. Thus, in spite of the polemics of the early sixties against what was called Taxoncmic Structuralism, many of the basic assumptions of contemporary TG theory were taken over frcm Structuralism and were not represented in the non-Bloomfieldian linguistic tradition. This was itself neither a good nor a bad thing but while avoiding turning descriptive terms into slogans it is important to face the facts. Not all of the ideas put forward by the Structuralists were wrong and they produced seme descriptive work of lasting value. Their theories must be judged on their merits rather than their orthodoxy. That Syntactic Structures is deeply influenced by Structuralism both in theory and practice can hardly be doubted but the fact that many scholars close to the TG tradition failed to realise this led to blinkered view of both their own work and the work of those who disagreed with them. Perhaps the ability to see the progress of linguistic theory as it is, is among the most useful results of a conparison of the works of different scholars. A discussion of seme of the major questions of the last twenty years from a non-Structuralist/TG point of view will provide at least a new slant on the background to current discussions. It may even be able to contribute to the
6
new synthesis called for by the tensions due to the theoretical successes of other models (cf. Chafe 1968). The fact that many of the perceived anomalies of the Chomskyan paradigm derive from the various attempts to account for the meaning of language in corrrminication seems to suggest that the Neo-Firthian tradition, which has always stressed the centrality of meaning in linguistic analysis, has a real contribution to make. This chapter and the next one will be devoted to background. First, I will describe from a Neo-Firthian angle the main aspects of the American and the major European traditions which are relevant to our subject. Since the facts are kncwn I make no attempt at completeness. A full treatment of the history of linguistics from a similar point of view is to be found in Robins (1964). In Chapter 2, on the other hand, I will concentrate on linguistics in Britain before 1957, with special emphasis on J.R. Firth and Bronislaw Malinowski. The rest of the book will then concentrate cn the tradition as it now exists.
Chapter 3 will describe the beginnings of Neo-Firthian linguistics and X have structured it round M.A.K. Halliday's (1961) systematization of what came to be called Scale and Category Granmar. I have done this because it is a crucial publication for the development of the tradition but also because of its difficulty. It can only be fully understood in the light of the work which constituted Neo-Firthian linguistics in the early sixties, to be found in In Memory of J.R.F-ivth , Halliday, Mcintosh and Strevens (1964) and Mcintosh and Halliday (1966), to name only the most convenient collections. Halliday (1961) provides the best sketch of the framework but the reality of the tradition is documented by the ease with which independent work can be fitted into his description of the theory. Halliday's essay attracted most attention at the 3 tine because it was seen as a 'grammar1. What I want to suggest, however,
3
The change in the meaning of words here is interesting. Grammar used to be a part of linguistics, like phonology and lexicology. It was also the most detailed and rule-governed part of linguistics. As linguistics advanced, more and more strict regularity was discovered and so grammar expanded to include the other areas. This is, of course, unexceptionable. I believe, however, that we are not yet in a position to explain even most of areas like lexis, semantics or language in situations by yes/no rules. X do not believe that anyone who describes language in non-grammatical terms has to be excluded from linguistics. I will use the word 'grammar', therefore, to refer specifically to linguistic activity at its most exact (cf. 3.4.).
7 both here and later on is that there is a lot more to the Neo-Firthian approach to language than the study of the formal aspects of linguistic organisation.
Chapter 4 to 7 are a detailed look at Neo-Firthian linguistics since 1968. Again I have put Halliday in the centre, this time with his theory of Systemic Granmar. My reasons are similar to the above and I still wish to stress that within the framework that is thus provided there are contributions by scholars who are not 'Systemicists' but still have a place in the tradition. Halliday's vrork, as well as being fruitful in detail is also characterized by a wide vision that sees language as a part of a larger whole, as part of the social semiotic (cf. Halliday: 1975b). In Chapter 4, then I will sketch the main types of meaning organised in language. In Chapter 5 I look at the Ideational Component, which is also the area where Halliday's own work cones into the closest contact with other 'grartrBrs'. Chapter 6 looks ait a development of Halliday's Textual Component, Chapter 7 develops suggestions towards an Interpersonal Component, which sets out to put meaning into its social context, Chapter 8 is a survey of my major conclusions, with remarks on possible future developments.
1.3.
The Historical Perspective
It is interesting that the watershed between Neo-Firthian linguistics and its historical background is 1957. As well as being the year of Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957), 1957 also saw the publication of Studies in Linguistic Analysis (Firth 1957a). This volume contains, as well as Firth's "Synopsis of Linguistic Theory, 1930-1955", the first collection of work by his pupils. The "Synopsis", furthermore, draws together the main themes of Firth's own work and provides a progranmatic groundplan for what was to follow. It is particularly interesting to note that in the article Firth only quotes one American linguist (Harris:1951) and ccmments:
"The main criticism to be offered of American structuralist linguistics based on phonemic procedures is that, having attempted just that, it has not furnished any valid grammatical analysis of any language by means of which renewal of connection in experience can be made with systematic certainty." (Firth 1957b:22-3)
8
Otherwise the linguistics is his own, although he also refers to Wegener, Wittgenstein and Ryle as well as his own pupils. It would be fair to say that, as well as embodying a pragmatism which distrusts mere abstract theorizing, Firth was influenced by philosophical approaches to language. The pragmatism is interestingly parallelled in the British school of phonetics in Sweet's criticism of German analytic methods in phonology (cf. Henderson 1971:44) and in Jones' phoneme concept, as compared with that of, say, Trubetskoy.
The tradition against which Blocnifield reacted was a different one. Language study in the USA had been prescriptive and normative as far as it applied to the neither tongue. The experience of tackling the aboriginal languages of the country showed the limitations of any attempts to apply the categories of traditional grammar to exotic languages, and the habit of observation was soon turned onto English in place of attempts to correct usage.
1.3.1.
The European Background
European linguistics, like its American counterpart, derives from the same Western philosophical-granmatical tradition dating back ultimately to the Greeks. In both continents, scholars like Whitney, Humboldt, and Wegener had speculated about language. In Europe, however, the major form of linguistics in the nineteenth century was comparative philology, which at that time largely subsumed dialectology and phonetics. Both of these, with their increasing stress on the observation of living language, came to be more and nore central to the development of modem linguistics. At the same time as anthropologists in America like Boas and Sapir were presenting their insights into language, in Europe the most important theoretical work was being done by the philologist Ferdinand de Saussure.
De Saussure's posthurrous Cour de linguistique générale (1916), and the work of his students of the so-called Geneva school, has contributed some of the most central concepts to modern linguistics. The distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the concepts of syntaamatic and paradigmatic relations in language, of the distinction between langue and parole and the dichotomy of signifiant-signifié in the discussion of the linguistic
9 sign, are all to be traced back to Saussure. As we will see certain aspects of his influence have not been wholly benign and some of his distinctions can be criticized (cf. 2.4.2.4 belcw) but this does not detract frcm his general significance. The second most influential European school is that associated with the Prague Circle. This type of linguistics, also called Factionalism, has been described in several places by one of its menibers, Josef Vachek (cf. especially Vachek 1966). It too has contributed to Neo-Firthian ideas but is perhaps more generally known for such concepts as 'markedness' and 'distinctive feature1. The major contribution of the Prague school to linguistic theory in general has been in phonology (and through Jakobson on Generative Phonology) and in functional sentence perspective deriving from the work of Vilem Mathesius. This area has been especially fruitful in Halliday's work, and we will return to it below in Chapter 6.
A further important European school was centred in Copenhagen. The Copenhagen school, like the Firthian, set out to develop a theory which included other types of meaning as well as linguistic meaning in its model. The name Glossematics is indicative of the intention of placing the study of language in the context of a theory of symbolic systems in general. It is represented in English rrainly by the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Hjelmslev 1943; 1961). It uses rather abstract terminology and pays less attention to natural language than other theories. It has hcwever, had an influence on the work of Halliday and Lanib.
Strangely, the only major European school of linguistics which has had no book devoted to it by one of its merrtoers is the British School. Firth published no major work sunming up his ideas and the only account at full length of Firth's work (Langendoen 1968) is not completely satisfactory (cf. 2.4.1.). Mast of the sources for the development of the new theory are in essay form and although those of Firth have new been collected (Firth 1957c, Palmer 1968)
10 most of the work is still only to be found in journals.
4
This is not an insur-
mountable problem but it has on the other hand apparently discouraged seme scholars frcm following up references and it has also to some extent masked the continuity within the tradition so that even scholars working frcm a Neo-Firthian base fail to see their work in the proper context. I hope that the present work will go sane way to filling this gap.
As I will show in my survey of Firth and the Neo-Firthian tradition, the European tradition was, and is, particularly relevant to the development of British theories.^ While Firth reacted against several of de Saussure's major ideas (cf. 2.4.2.4.), the influence of Prague is central to the work being done on discourse today. In fact, the period since the mid-sixties has been one of a much wider awareness of what is going on elsewhere. This is true
of both British and American linguists and the recent emphasis on seman-
tics and pragmatics has given linguists on both sides of the Atlantic much ccrrmon ground.
4
5
I will thereforequote Firth's articles which originally appeared in journals by date but refer to them by the page numbers of the collected editions. I must at this point apologize for omitting the development of phonology in Britain from my account. This tradition deriving from Bell and Ellis, through Sweet and Jones up to the present day is of no lesser importance than Firth's tradition. There is, however, a good reason for its exclusion here, which goes beyond the British tradition of distinguishing phonetics and linguistics, and the narrower point of view of my book. Jones, like Sweet before him, was very much within a non-fragmented tradition in phonetics. For all their theoretical differences, the development of the phoneme concept and work on the description of vowels and consonants was done worldwide. Sweet and Baudouin de Courtenay, as well as Jones, Troubetzkoy and Twaddel are central to any account of the development of phonology (cf. Kramsky 1974). Firth's own phonology was based on other principles than Jones' (cf. 2.5.).
11 1.3.2. Linguistics in America As in Europe»linguistics in America was set on a new course after the First World War. This was the first of several challenges to orthodoxy in the USA and one of the great strengths and weaknesses of the Structuralist tradition has been the violent reactions against orthodox methods. The first of these was the Structuralist attacks on traditional gramnar and this was followed by the attacks on Structuralism by Chomsky and his followers, who appealed to traditional philosophical grammar. The fact that neither 'revolution' was quite as thoroughgoing as its proponents believed does not detract frcm the value of rethinking the basic premises of language study. The developments of Structuralism up to the late fifties with its stress on the description of actual language use, on accountability, and rigorous segmentation and classification led to many significant advances in our knowledge of language. This stage of linguistics could be called 'corpus-centred' and produced such inportant works as the analyses of spoken and written English by Fries, which were based on field methods originally developed for describing foreign languages (Fries: 1940 and 1952; 1957). Errphasis throughout this period was on the smaller units of language especially on phonology and morphology. In comparison, the sixties must be seen as a theory-centred decade. Frcm early attempts to stretch a Structuralist machinery to analyse more complex units at levels above the word, the TG theories really began to break new ground when they tried to achieve an analysis of meaning in the sentence. At first the claim that TG grammar was the only acceptable type of linguistic description led to much detailed discussion of what this theory would need,to account for all the features of natural language. Discussion included the question of the Cycle, naturalness conditions, the permitted types of transformation etc. The relative ease with which the model could now handle larger stretches of language allowed a concentration on syntax rather than morphology, and the generation of sentences led inevitably to attempts to handle problems of sentence meaning which had seemed to be not amenable to rigorous discussion in the days of Irmnediate Constituent Analysis. With the shift of the main focus onto the problems of meaning a new trend had set in.
12
Looking back on the early days of TG theory one can certainly see sane work which is as sterile as the exaggeratedly behaviouristic agnosticism occasionally shewn by Structuralists but, like its predecessor, early TG theory had its positive effects and partly for the same reason. Structuralists like Fries, Harris and Wells had insisted on step-by-step accountability and in doing so had advanced our knowledge of language and exposed the limits of their own models by discovering problems beyond their power to solve. The same principle is stated in Syntactic Structures:
"Precisely constructed models for linguistic structure can play an important role... in the process of discovery itself. By pushing a precise but inadequate formulation to an unacceptable conclusion, we can often expose the exact source of this inadequacy and, consequently, gain a deeper understanding of the linguistic data." (Chomsky 1957:5)
The truth of this has been well illustrated by Chomsky's own proposals. The failure of the Standard Theory to account for rreaning has led to a search for alternative models better designed to take account of meaning and language use. Inspiration has been drawn frcm traditional graimar, language philosophy and sociology. There has also developed a refreshingly non-doctrinaire approach to language study in comparison to the earlier sectarianism. Reports of theoretical work are more tentative and people are more ready to learn frcm each other than was the case earlier. This development works both ways. A good example is the cotparison between Halliday and scholars like Fillmore and Lanb (cf. 5). The realization of the inadequacies of earlier ideas and the mistrust of patent solutions to difficulties in language should not be the signal for retreat into a higgledypiggledy approach to the study of language nor should it be regarded as a sign of despair in the face of complexities. Rather it is the willingness to accept suggestions frcm various points of view which can contribute to the ccttircn search for a solution. The aranmatical and semantic theory which I propose to describe is not to be seen as a candidate for the position of the ideal description of language. At the very least, however, it should provide a challenge to those brought up in other linguistic traditions to reexamine sate of their basic beliefs. In addition there are certain aspects of the description of natural languages which can apparently be handled better by
13 methods within the Neo-Firthian tradition than by any other theory. In seme places it is complementary to other theories, in others it is apparently incompatible and the problem will have to be reexamined before a solution can be found which fits the facts. I am convinced of the value of the theory in its basic features and only further application of this and other theories to the study of natural languages will allow us to assess its ultimate contribution to General Linguistics. While suggesting that the Neo-Firthian tradition is perhaps most useful in its avoidance of same of the pitfalls of structuralism, I do not want to give the impression that the structuralist tradition was a mere aberration. Structuralism's stress in rigour and accountability and on description rather than prescription is still useful. The Chonskyan revolution has bequeathed to us not only sore convincing analyses of features of natural language but also the "challenge of generativeness, the ideal, that is, of fully explicit and literally applicable description" (Weinreich 1966;1972:14). This is still an ideal and while, as has been pointed out with reference to prescriptivism (Householder 1973), one mast be constantly on one's guard in case the old vices creep back in under another name, permanent advances have been made. Even departures frcm the ideal of explicitness can have their uses. It is instructive to notice the subjects which are set aside frcm the discussion, clearly marked by trees with a rich crcp of triangles. With our attention thus drawn to areas like tense and adverbials as special problems we can go on to see if these difficulties arise from the nature of the grarmiar itself or if the discussion of certain things has just gone out of fashion. One area which seems to be an example of the latter situation is word-formation, but linguistics is new mature enough to make a realistic assessment of what present grammars can achieve. Problems are sought out rather than avoided and while this does not lead to such neat results as generating selected (or even fabricated) sentences it is certainly more valuable for the understanding of natural languages.
The increase in the amount of attention paid to meaning in linguistic analysis has gone beyond the question of cognitive 'content' which had always been a feature of traditional logico-granmar. As well as sctte interesting work into the prepositional component of linguistic meaning there have been several
14
attenpts to widen the areas of discussion even if some of these areas seem at the moment of such nature as to defy exact analysis. Obvious exanples include George Lakoff's work on fuzzy grairmar (G. Lakoff 1972,1973). Haas, in an important article, demonstrates hew different theories at present available account for different aspects of the meaning of the same sentence and concludes:
"In view of the multiplicity of semantic functions which can be performed by one and the same syntactic construction, it is not surprising that we can describe its meaning in terms of a number of different features. It is in fact desirable that we should do so". (Haas 1973:94-5)
Such awareness of the inadequacy of individual theories is salutary and it is even possible that there are areas of meaning which are beyond the reach of linguistic analysis. However, at the moment we should try to account for as much as possible rather than sweep the difficulties under the rug in the interest of theoretical neatness.
Finally, while offering a critical survey of a tradition in linguistics which has always seen language as iteaningful activity in situations, I do not want to suggest that only the NF tradition kept this approach to language or that elsewhere it was totally blotted out in hunting for minimal pairs and filling slots. As Robin lakoff puts it, the idea of taking account of context "has been anticipated by a veritable Who's Who of linguistics and anthropology: Jespersen, Sapir, Malinowski, Firth, Nida, Pike, Hymes, Friedrich, Tyler and many others" (R. Lakoff 1972:926). It is a matter of small importance to establish who had a particular good idea first. What is important is making sure that such an insight is not only widely known but also that it fits within a theoretical framework which allows it to be used in explaining language.
15 2. THE BACKGROUND TO THE NEO-FIKTHIAN TRADITION
2.1. Some Remarks on Terminology Before looking at Firth and his intellectual background, it is worth pausing to define sate terms and make clear my position oh terminology in general. I have already mentioned, in 1.2., the problems posed by terminology for both the reader and writer. For the reader, there is the difficulty of seeing linguistics frcm outside the comfortable frame of reference he has built up. Seen frcm another angle,this is, however, an advantage. Unfamiliar terms protect the reader frcm the siren voices of familiar terminology lulling his critical senses to sleep. It is easier to maintain a healthy scepticism when approaching scmeone else's theory. There are several examples which have struck me in the TG tradition of the cavalier way in which questionable concepts are put forward as if they were laws of nature. Chomsky, to take an eminent example, carries over undiscussed the pervasive principle of binariness frcm Structuralism. The few voices in the wilderness raised against the ready assumption of, for example, the basic NP/VP cut seem to have fallen on deaf ears (cf. Grady 1967, Hope 1973). Another example of the tendency to get things into pairs is the very questionable division of competence and performance. This has been related to what Bickerton (1973:643) has called the "eternal dichotomizing" of de Saussure, which was criticized by Firth as early as 1935 and has never been a feature of Neo-Firthian work (cf. 2.4.2.4.). I hope to shew that these assumptions are creations of the theory and therefore have to justify themselves as being more effective than other ways of analysis (cf. 2.4.2.2.). Other unspoken assumptions, like the notion that spoken language can be accounted for solely as a set of sentences, seem to me to be descriptively inadequate and I will present alternatives (cf. 6.3. below and Monaghan 1979).
For the writer the problem is the difficulty of being both clear and original. I will try to solve this problem by relating terms with a specific meaning in the Neo-Firthian tradition to their historical context and by defining them
16 in a glossary. Some of these terms, like 'context' are of very wide currency outside the Structuralist-TG tradition but it is still worth getting a definition in black and white. Others, like 'linguistic form' are used in a specific sense and tied closely to the stage of the theory they are presented in. I will resist the temptation of translating terms into those of other theories, except when complete identity exists. This is, however, very rare since you invent new terminology only when you want to draw attention to a conception of language different frcm the usual one. A term of the theory can be used to replace one which has acquired too many meanings. This is why Lamb preferred 'stratum' to 'level' (Parrett 1974:184). Part of the difficulty with 'carpetence' is that the everyday meaning tends to overwhelm the meaning as defined (cf. 3.1. 3.). Other problems arise when terms have pejorative connotations in everyday speech, like 'redundancy' or have acquired them in the literature, like 'Taxoncmic Structuralism' or 'discovery procedures' (cf. 3.1.1.).
A related problem to that of terms of the theory is the use of names. I will be looking in seme detail at characteristics associated with the Structuralist-TG tradition (cf. 3.1.) so I will just mention the matter here. Although I will argue that Syntactic Structures, as its name suggests counts as part of American Structuralism, I will confine the term 'Structuralism' to the tradition frcm Bloamfield up to Bloch, Fries, Harris, Trager and Wells. I occasionally refer to Chomsky's earliest work as 'Neo-Structuralist' when I wish to stress the continuity of approach. Since I do not use 'Structuralism', or any other term, as anything other than a convenient descriptive label I hope I will not seem to be doing anyone an injustice. I have had a similar problem of hew to name my subject. I have settled on the term 'Neo-Firthian' linguistics as a cover term for the theories I propose to discuss. It is so far justified in that all the writers I will be talking about have certain theoretical positions which separate them fran other schools of linguistics and these ideas can be seen to derive ultimately frcm the work of J. R. Firth. I have preferred it therefore to geographical terms like 'London school' or 'British school1 since these terms could be equally
1
I will not have occasion to talk about European Structuralism which has in any case important differences.
17 well used for the work of those influenced by Daniel Jones in phonetics, or Basil Bernstein in sociology. I will use the term 'Neo-Firthian' to refer to post-Firthian work by writers like Halliday and Sinclair and will keep the term 'British tradition1 to refer to all of the main attitudes to language current in Britain especially the fruitful re-integration of the MalincwskiBernstein tradition and the Firth-Halliday tradition in the writings of Hasan, Doughty and Thornton. I do not propose to enter into the controversy about the difference between 'Firthians' and 'Neo-Firthians' as proposed by, say, Mitchell (1971). Palmer (1968:9) writes: "Halliday 1 s essentially monosystemic categorization seems to me to have little in common with Firth's approach which, as Firth so constantly stressed, was essentially polysystemic and in which the levels were no more than 'a hierarchy of techniques for the statement of meanings'".
I think that Halliday's work since 1968 will be seen to be not nonosystemic at all, but in the last analysis it does not really matter what status one scholar is assigned in relation to another. Halliday is the most distinguished of Firth's immediate students and his influence on future generations will probably be at least as great as Firth's on British linguists in the fifties and sixties. Certainly Halliday's work differs frcm Firth's, otherwise there would be no advance. He is working in a different linguistic atmosphere, so to speak, and he has fruitfully combined advances in linguistics with Firth's principles to create a new synthesis. Further, imitation, or 'loyalty' to a dogma can scarcely be seen as a tribute to any scholar. Development of a theory which is continually shewn to contain more than at first sight apparent, is surely preferable to following a party line. Halliday himself points out in a reply to Matthews (1966) that 'schools of thought' are only convenient terms to refer to scholars with features in oormon, and should not imply unanimity of the scholars themselves. "I find the concept of 'a Neo-Firthian', especially one 'committed' to certain 'statements', rather extraordinary. Must we all be labelled in this way? There is an important principle at stake here: that a scholar is responsible for what he says and writes/not for what others say and write". (Halliday 1966c:110)
18 This is one reason why I only speak of the Neo-Firthian or TG traditions and try to avoid using such labels of people. As I have said, the labels are merely descriptive, to indicate canton features of approach in scholarly work and do not claim that the individuals publishing in a tradition have a canton policy, or even that they write with a sense of group identity. Halliday's work is one logical development arising from basic principles set out by Firth. These principles are also to be seen in the work of Mitchell and Palmer who share irany features of their approach with Halliday without being 'NeoHallidayans' (to create a nonce-word which we will not need again). 'The NeoFirthian tradition' is the term I use to account for these comon features. 2.2.
The Context of Firth's Work
As we have seen, Firth was not greatly influenced by contenporary American work. What, then, was his intellectual background? In 2.3. I wish to look at the. work of Malinowski, the greatest single influence on Firth's work in semantics and pragmatics (to use modern terminology). In 2.4., where I describe Firth's work in detail, I will look at the European background to his work on semantics. Before doing this, however, it is necessary to look at the English background to Firth's earliest work. This is particularly important since Firth himself was very conscious of the tradition of language study in Britain, especially that part of it represented by the Philological Society, whose president he was later to become. The Philological Society's major achievement was, of course, the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles and this grew out of a long tradition of lexicography which "is a branch of linguistics in which the English are very much at home" (Firth 1946). I will return to this in 2.4.
The other major branch of the study of living languages was phonetics. This tradition can be traced back to the Elizabethans as a serious scholarly pursuit and was always closely connected to orthoepy. In "The English School of Phonetics" Firth writes:
"If synchronic phonology can be summarily described as the grammar of sounds and letters, our term 'phonetics' covers it, and we have practised the discipline in some form or other for centuries". (Firth 1946:92)
19 He then goes on to discuss the contributions of British scholars like, among others, Sir William Jones, H.E. Palmer, Pitman, J. Wright, Sweet, Ellis and the Bell family, to the tradition which he traces back through Alexander Hume, Sir Thomas Smith, William Bullokar and John Hart to iELfric. I cannot here go into the history of the English tradition of phonetics in detail (for more information on the tradition before the nineteenth century see Dobson (1957)) but the few names I have mentioned speak volumes about the kind of work done in the nineteenth century. The dominant figure in the distinguished line was Sweet, wham Firth often quotes with approval. In his Preface to A Handbook of Phonetics (1877) Sweet wrote:
"The importance of phonetics as the indispensable foundation of all study of language - whether that study be purely theoretical, or practical as well - is now generally admitted" (quoted in Henderson 1971:vii).
Sweet also worked on phonetic alphabets (along with Alexander Melville Bell among others). The catibination of the fundamental study of phonetics and dissatisfaction with 'latin Letters' for representing sounds is also a characteristic of prosodic analysis, the phonological system developed by Firth and since applied most often by scholars connected with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SQAS). As well as the Bells, "that well kncwn Scots family of elocutionists" (Firth 1946:96), Pitman, with his invention of the most widespread modern shorthand method, must be accorded equal status. Joseph Wright and Ellis worked on dialectology, the former's practical use of narrow transcription being particularly important. Finally, H.E. Palmer's work on English as a foreign language is still useful today. Firth himself undertook several projects in the field of alphabets and phonology (Firth 1936,1938), a subject which has had a recent revival with regard to English (Haas 1969, 1970), but his most lasting contribution is in the field of prosodic analysis (cf. 2.5.).
British work on phonetics, since the Elizabethans, has been influenced by the demand for teaching English to foreigners. A second use for accurate characterization of sounds was the study of the language of the peoples of the Qnpire. This was partly true also of American linguistics and Firth mentions scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries like Franklin, Webster, Whitney and Haldeman (Firth 1946:114).
20 The main difference between the British and American situations in the twentieth century, however, was that in the United States the very presence of the society represented by the linguists was destroying Amerindian society and with it the languages to be studied. This problem was aggravated by the fact that the oldest available form of the language was that of the oldest speaker and that an ad hoc method of first discovering and then recording the sounds of the language was needed. Hie major languages of study in the Orient and Africa were different in that they were spoken by the majority of the people in the area and that the societies were relatively stable. Many languages had a long tradition of writing and gramnatical study, soretimes superior to the western tradition (Firth 1946:110). As a result there was less pressure on linguistics not concerned with Amerindian languages to concentrate on developing discovery procedures and techniques of reducing languages to writing. The languages were stable enough to be examined frcm the point of view of theory-building. Description of the languages had often been done already and what was required was better principles on vrtiich to work. The problem of methods could, then, be subordinated to the more basic problems of theory. This may help to explain Firth's irritation at "scientistic technicians" with their "passion for the accumulation of so-called 'facts', the piling up of trivialities to be treated statistically, perhaps with
defective theoretical principles" (Firth 1957b:1). He
believed in the Importance of getting a firm theoretical grounding and still mistrusting the significance of the data. His motto to the Synopsis was Goethe's "Das Hochste ware zu begreifen, das alles Faktische schon Theorie ist" (Firth 1957b:1). It is interesting to note that the two periods of the flourishing of Structuralism in America coincided with outside events. The earlier anthropological period coincided with the rounding up of the last of the Red Indians. The second flowering came with World War II and the need to learn foreign languages quickly. The upsurge in interest in South East Asian languages in the last few years seems not unrelated to government funding of the universities. One wanders if the relatively smooth development of British linguistics is to be related to the independence of university departments frcm government grants.
21 2.3. 2.3.1.
The Work of Malincwski Malincwski1s Research Background
Bronislaw Malincwski was probably the greatest single influence on Firth's linguistic theories. He was an ethnographer who had worked during the First World War among the Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands. He published several works, the most iirporant for our purposes being "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages", an appendix to Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning (1923). In this remarkable essay he sets out his iirpression of the role of language in society, which was later to influence Firth who attended seminars with him in the early thirties. Malincwski's ethnographical approach was based on his ability to pick up foreign languages very quickly and he aimed at a mastery of a culture's language as the main way to insight into its workings. This approach to society through language led him to appreciate the shortcomings of contemporary approaches to languages, especially the inadequacy of traditional descriptive categories for describing exotic languages. In this he concurred with oontenporary American anthropologists, who, hcwever, since part of their aim was to record dying languages, moved on to develop descriptive techniques for classifying the formal data independent of the rules of traditional grammar. In a situation where languages were represented by a handful of speakers the social ccnponent was of little importance in conparison with the structural. Malincwski, on the other hand, was mainly interested in the native society. He noticed first of all the connections between this culture and its language and the subsequent difficulty of accounting for either in a European language. He noted that certain uses of language could only be explained by setting them in the culture where they were found. A knowledge of dictionary meanings of words was inadequate for a full appreciation of hew these words were used. Since he wanted to use the native language as a tool to gain an understanding of native society he was forced to develop a theory of language use, and in Order to cannunicate this he had to relate not only language to society but 'savage society' to 'civilized society'.
22
His ideas about the correspondence between 'native1 languages and European languages are similar to contemporary thought on the matter. Basically the formal features of a language were seen as related to the social background and the type of society. As late as 1938 Jespersen was to discuss the "childlike and effeminate" impression given by the "language of Hawaii" and concludes that "You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking such a language" (Jespersen 1938;1962:3). While not going quite as far, Malinowski does relate the structure of "primitive languages" to "questions of savage psychology". For instance he cites the distinction made between root and affix in the "highly developed IndoEuropean languages" compared with his view that in
"native languages ... the function of grammar and radical meaning respectively are often confused in a remarkable manner". (Malinowski 1923:302)
This relation is seen as an evolutionary one. European languages like the society in which they are set are more specialized than primitive ones. On the other hand, evolution irtplies continuity and Malinowski goes on to show that given the dependence of language on social facts, the uses of language are comparable in different societies. Let us look at some of Malincwski1s views in detail. 2.3.2.
Language in Context
His first insight was that even with "an ideal interpreter at hand, who, as far as possible, can convey the meaning of each utterance, word for word, so that the listener is in possession of all the linguistic data available" he would still be unable to understand "even a single utterance" (Malincwski 1923:300). From the examples he gives of a "statement in native" we see that the 'translation' is in fact a series of lexical correspondences between English and Trobriand. Malinowski's concept of linguistic meaning is obviously confined to word meaning. However, and this is the point, even if we expand the lexical correspondences which he suggests into real English sentences we do not get the full meaning of the text. One needs to know the place of the events des-
23
cribed in the whole of Trobriand culture. The fact that the utterance is a boast and what significance boasting has both depend ultimately on the value system in the Trobriand culture. Labelling an action a boast oily works if we translate not only words but also value systems. Self-praise has a different 2 status in different societies. The conclusion drawn by Malinowski frcm his Trobriand example is that meaning is not contained in words. This is particularly true, he believes, of primitive languages but is also true of written languages. Verbal utterance "becomes only intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation, ... an expression which indicates on the one hand that the conception of context has to be broadened and on the other that the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression".(Malinowski 1923:306)
With our tradition of dictionary-making we tend to assume uncritically that words 'possess' or 'have' meanings. We forget that even in a dictionary a word is only a part of an equation of the form "X means Y". Words do not mean on their cwn because we do not encounter them on their cwn. They are only uttered as part of events. Our knowledge of a language allcws us to predict with fair accuracy where a word will mesh with the perceived world and this prediction is what we usually call the word's meaning. The relationship between a word and its meaning in use is emphatically not a simple one and does not constrain the speaker as much as we might believe. That this needs repeating even for linguists is seen in the Presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America in 1972 where we read: "Language is a jungle of associations..., where a malevolent guide can lose any simple-minded wayfarer... Truth is not a highway. It is a trail hacked through snake-infested undergrowth" .(Bolinger 1973:547)
I have occasion to look at this question of words and meanings in several places (cf. 2.1., 2.4.2.2.).
2
A similar attempt at contextualization has been made for Old English (Daunt 1966:70-71).
24 Note that Malinowski is not saying that you can make nothing of words in isolation. What he does say is that the context of utterance cannot be ignored. When we don't have a context for a piece of language which might qualify as a text we invent one from our experience (for an extended discussion of this 3
cf. 3.5.2.).
He is stressing the situation because linguistics in his day,
(and very often in fact to the present day) concerned itself primarily with written language (cf. Katz & Fodor 1963). This is language "set down with the purpose of being self-contained and self-explanatory" while a "statement, spoken in real life, is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered. ... Exactly as in the reality of spoken or written languages, a word without linguistic context is a mere figment and stands for nothing by itself, so in the reality of a spoken living tongue, the utterance has no meaning except in the context of situation". (Malinowski 1923:306-7)
He distinguishes sharply between the point of view of the ethnographer and the philologist and concludes that the perspective of the former, who studies language in a living society is "the one relevant and real for the formation of fundairental linguistic conceptions" (Malincwski 1923:307).
The concept of the importance of situation in language study was Malincwski's most significant contribution to Firth's theory. The message of an utterance is not to be seen merely as the sum of the lexical meaning of its constituent words but to take in both the irrmediate context and the culture in which the interaction has taken place. This is why Neo-Firthian linguistics has avoided so far the pitfalls of sentence linguistics where imaginary airbiguities of fictitious sentences have caused such unnecessary trouble (cf.also 8.2.).
3
By extending the notion of context from the mere linguistic to the interactional situation, Malinowski somewhat overloads the term. This is later compounded by Firth when he subdivides context (cf. 2.4.2.1.) and by Halliday where he expands context to include the context of culture (see Glossary). A useful distinction was made by Mcintosh (1966:303) where he introduces the term co-text and defines it as "the textual environment of the constructions under actual scrutiny". In a footnote he attributes the origin of the term to J.C. Catford. It has since become common in the literature. I will try to make clear at any given point how the term is used by the scholar under discussion. In my own person, I will distinguish 'context' and 'co-text' and in general, when necessary use 'context of situation'. (cf. Glossary: context).
25
Langendoen, in his book on Firth and Malincwski, claims that in 1923 Malinowski defined context of situation as "the context of human activity concurrent with, iimiediately preceding, and following the speech act" and that not until 1935 did he mean "the whole cultural setting in which the speech act was embedded" (Langendoen 1968:35). Cn the basis of this trivialized view of contextual meaning, he then builds his criticism. He further attributes this 'change' to the arguments of Firth but adduces no evidence beycnd suppositions: "it is reasonable to suppose that Firth, always effective in arguing his position, had a considerable influence on Malinowski" (Langendoen 1968:2). The claim that Malinowski in 1923 only meant by context the iumediate situation does not stand closer scrutiny. Both the canoe race described at length in "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages" and the following quotation refute it. "The study of any language, spoken by a people who live under conditions different from our own and possess a different culture, must be carried out in conjunction with a study of their culture and of their environment".(Malinowski 1923:306)
Malinowski stressed both the narrower and the wider concepts of context, and as we will see in the case of phatic communion the wider social system as well as the exigencies of the interaction ccme into play. This can also be seen in the work of those influenced by Malincwski frcm the sociological side, such as Bernstein, who take into account both inroediate context and wider cultural background (cf. 7.3.). The single most famous corollary of this view of language as primarily "a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection" (Malinowski 1923:312) is the notion of phatic oatmunian. I want to look at this concept here rather than in Chapter 7 because it illustrates how Malincwski extends his findings beyond the environment on which he based them. 2.3.3.
Phatic Cctmiunian
"Phatic Oamnunion" is defined as a "type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words" (Malinowski 1923:315). He sees this as a
26
paradigm example of the fact that the meaning of an utterance is not to be derived solely from the words which make it up.
"A mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawingroom, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant". (Malinowski 1923:313)
That the words are "conpletely irrelevant" is not wholly true. What is the case, however, is that the transfer of the information usually associated with the individual words used is not what the utterance 'means'. The functions which phatic corrrnunion does fulfil are described in an important article by Laver (1975).
Laver points out that phatic communion is to be seen as one aspect of a battery of behaviour types necessary for the smooth functioning of face-to-face interaction. He extends Malincwski's concept by seeing it as fulfilling two main functions. The first use is in furthering the interaction itself by taking up a signalling function. Thus various stages of the interaction such as the opening, the selection of the topic, the discussion of the topic and the decisions rrade, and the breaking off of the encounter are all characteristically marked by verbal (and non-verbal) signalling. Some of these signals are interaction-centred and others person-centred. The former might include examples like I've got a problem..., Listen, did you get any shoes, May I introduce Mr. Clancy..., That's interesting..., Go on..., Well, that seems to be that..., Right, that's settled then, Well, I won't stand round all day gossiping etc. In fact, purely interaction-centred phatic connunion is not as common as person-centred, or partly person-centred phrases. This is particularly true of the beginning and end of the interaction where there are tensions generated by the instigator of the action in the passive member. At the beginning of the interaction, he has to invade the privacy of the addressed person and this 'threat situation' is often met by expressions like Excuse me, ..., Sorry to interrrupt, but... , Pardon the intrusion, but... etc.. In fact, conversational openings like Get me a cup of tea, Tell me Grimm's law, etc. are fairly restricted in occurrence and the situations where they would be appropriate could probably be exhaustively listed. Similarly, at the end of an encounter, phrases like Well, I won't take up any more of your time..., Is it that time already? I must get back..., Well, I enjoyed talking to you...,
27
etc. are the norm. Failure to go through the correct interaction-furthering ritual is also significant. Comments like When I said that, she left without a word, and She just walked straight in and asked for a job, illustrate that failure to follcw the rules is also significant. Lastly, we might note, that much of this phatic catimunion is highly predictable and idiomatic. In English and German phrases like, I'm sorry to butt in..., Do you come here often?, Ioh glaube wir mussen langsam gehen..., Tja3 das ware es dann eigentlioh..., would illustrate this.4 (cf. Schlegloff (1968) and Schlegloff and Sacks (1973) for further examples of the structuring use of stereotyped phrases).
The second function which Iaver mentions is the signalling of psychological relationships between the interactants. Obviously this has a lot in camion with what we have been talking about. Nevertheless, it has an additional aspect. As Laver points out, much of the opening phase of interaction consists of placing the speakers in relation to each other. It follows that interaction without introductory phatic ccmnunion is marked as having clear relationships between the participants, as in buying a railway ticket. Even in cases with clear roles relations there does, however, tend to be a certain amount of phatic communion, like Good morning etc. It is interesting to note that requests for information at ticket offices are much more propitiatory than requests for tickets. There is here a potential conflict situation. The addressee may reject the role he is being offered and so the speaker will usually be more tentative unless his status is such that he assumes that he has a right to demand that the listener take up the role. In general, the opening phase signals both the position of the speaker and the hearer as well as delimiting their mutual relationships in the interaction. Departure signalling is also distinctive of different relationships. In German, the customary valedictory Auf Wiedersehen on leaving shops etc. has a distinctive intrafia-
4
It is interesting to note that in small group interaction specialization takes place so that in a group of, say, six, one member develops into a person mainly responsible for maintaining the cohesion threatened by the pressure which has to be exerted by the group leader to keep the problemsolving process going. He is what has been called the 'emotional leader' of the group. Thus one member would in most of his utterances be involved in person-oriented phatic communion while the leader would employ most of the interaction-oriented phatic communion. This is borne out by the fact that the other members like the emotional leader better than the interactional leader (cf. Sprott 1958).
28 tion curve as against more personal use, and there are other lexical choices like Tschtiss and Servus, whose appropriateness is context-bound. While different societies will have different realizations of these functions of phatic catinanion it seems reasonable that, since psychological pressures seem to be universal human characteristics, they will be institutionalized in patterns of ritual behaviour to naximize the profit each interactant gains frcm the process of camnunication.
2.4.
The Linguistic Theories of J.R. Firth
2.4.1.
Firth's Publications and his Influence
The corpus of Firth's writings is surprisingly small. With the exception of two short bocks published in the thirties (Firth 1930 and 1937) his total output is in the form of essays collected as Firth (1957c) and Palmer (1968). He wrote no full-length work setting out and applying his own theory, and the essays, presented as they are en bloc are rather daunting to the seeker after Firth's theory. They are by their nature occasional and cure usually on specific aspects of
his theories and contain new ideas and repetitions of
old ones in sometimes bewildering confusion. Robins describes them as
"all readable and stimulating but programmatic rather than definitive, often allusive rather than explicit, and sometimes infuriatingly obscure on points obviously vital to the theory he was expounding".(Robins 1961:198)
This repetition may be partially explained by the fact that Firth was a relatively isolated figure in the field of linguistics at the time. Although he was the dominant figure in the British tradition in linguistics, his contacts with his major contemporaries in America and on the Continent were marked by irrportant theoretical differences of approach. Consequently, a lot of his work has a ring of stubborn reassertion rather than continual development. It is also fair to mention that his life was not spent in the cloistered calm
of his study but that two aspects of his career made continuous publi-
cation difficult. One was his war work, what he called "operational linguistics", which came right in the middle of his career and at least partly explains the gap between his early and late periods. Secondly, during his career he created what Langendoen calls 'The London School of Linguistics'
29 single-handed, as well as being instrumental in increasing the number of chairs of linguistics in British Universities.
The amount of committee work this involved can be imagined. His contribution to British linguistics was not, however, merely administrative. From the testimony of his friends and pupils, and even more from the way they developed his ideas, he was obviously able to stimulate those with whan he cane into personal contact. A study of his influence cannot, therefore, be confined to what he actually published but must include the scholarly heritage developed by his pupils. My brief sketch of Firth's views will be carried out with this in mind.
Langendoen, who is the only person to publish a full length treatment of Firth's work, has demonstrated the results of ignoring this heritage. His final conclusion is seen in his review of Palmer (1968).
"It would appear that all Firth was capable of doing in syntax was to discuss isolated examples ad hoc, and to make pronouncements ex cathedra... Probably the same uncharitable conclusion should be drawn regarding his published work in semantics and phonology, although in the latter he was clearly able to stimulate others to original and creative work. Perhaps his widely acclaimed genius lay in having clear and insightful intuitions about what linguistic analysis is all about." (Langendoen 1971:180-1)
Since I am primarily interested in the 'others' I will not attempt to examine this conclusion in detail although I think the evidence I will present will cast some doubt on it. Moreover, the idea that 'Hie London School' originated at the University of London (Langendoen 1968:1), is misleading. We have already seen that a large part of Firth's (and Neo-Firthian) theory was already established by the 1930's and this was in no small measure due to the influence of Bronislaw Malinewski as well as to the tradition of linguistics in Britain before him (cf. 2.2. and 2.3.). I now propose to discuss Firth's most fruitful ideas in terms of their developments up to the present day.
2.4.2.
Firth's Theories
Although Firth's flew of publications was interrupted by the war, this did not cause a radical break in his ideas. Apart from a few terminological re-
30 adjustments, there is little in his early publications which is not still valid twenty years later. He put his pre-war work in perspective when he wrote that his
"own 'philosophical point of departure' was clearly stated in Speech, published in 1930 in Benn's Library. It was restated in The Tongues of Men in 1937. A preliminary sketch of the 'spectrum' method of analysis at different levels was submitted to the Philological Society of Great Britain in February 1935 and published in the Transactions of that year" . (Firth 1949:171)
The "preliminary sketch" referred to is, of course, "Techniques of Semantics" but the main bulk of his articles in the thirties are on phonology and alphabets, especially in connection with exotic languages. This culminates in "Sounds and Prosodies" (1948a) where he takes up publication again after almost a decade of silence. In this article we get a fairly detailed outline of Firth's ideas on Prosodic Analysis (cf. 2.5.). In the same year he also published "The Semantics of Linguistic Science" (Firth 1948b), and the following years saw what might be called the second major phase, frcm the point of view of the development of his theoretical position. Whereas before we see him setting about the creation of a theory under the influence of his predecessors, after the war we see more and more references to the 'London Group' who developed and applied his ideas and who are the main subject of ny vrork. Palmer describes it as a "period of consolidation rather than discovery. The exciting new ideas, context of situation, the spectrum of meaning, prosodic analysis, collocation, had cane before" (Palmer 1968:1). This conclusion is perhaps best illustrated in Studies in Linguistic Analysis which had articles by W.S. Allen, Halliday, Haas, Mitchell and Palmer as well as Firth's "A Synapsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955". This work sums up well his main ideas in the twenty-five years of his lingustic career. I will, therefore, rely heavily on it for my comments in the next few pages. I will moreover not try to present a study of Firth's career as such but only as it has inspired more recent work. For this reason, I have paid less attention to Firth's work on phonology than it deserves. Instead I propose to concentrate on Firth's stress on language in society, which has been developed most tellingly in Halliday's conception of "social semiotic" (cf. Halliday:1975b).
31 Firth insisted on seeing language as primarily a means used by people to function in society. In doing this the linguist has to abstract what is relevant from all that is happening at the time the language is produced. This abstraction and its description has to be justified in terms of the reality CO
which it is dependent. The language of linguistics is itself a case of
language in context and must be critically treated as such (cf. Lipka(1979) for a good example of the benefits accruing frcm looking closely at terminology) . I will look at these points in order. First, I wish to sketch Firth's spectrum method of handling meaning (2.4.2.1.) then his views on the language of linguistics (2.4.2.2.) his stress on not allowing theory to lose contact with reality (2.4.2.3.) and finally, his theory compared with contemporary structuralist ideas (2.4.2.4.). 2.4.2.1.
The Spectrum of Meaning
Firth's approach to language stresses language as part of a coimunication situation. Its function in the situation is that it is meaningful. This has as its corollary that all aspects of linguistics study meaning in context. As Firth puts it "A statement of ... meaning ... cannot be achieved at one fell swoop by one analysis at one level. Having made the first abstraction by suitable isolating a piece of 'text' or part of the social process of speaking for a listener or writing for a reader, the suggested procedure for dealing with meaning is its dispersion into modes, rather like the dispersion of light of mixed wave-lengths into a spectrum". (Firth 1951:192)
This extended concept of meaning follows logically from insisting that language as language, and not as mere noise, (which is studied by physicists etc.) is meaningful. Meaning is dispersed for the purpose of linguistic study into a series of ccmpcnent functions. "Each function will be defined as the use of some language form or element in relation to seme context. Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, granmar, lexicography and semantics each handles its cwn component of the carplex in its appropriate context". (Firth 1957b:6) Thus situational meaning is the function of language in the social context. Lexical meaning is the function of one lexical item in the context of other
32 lexical items and grammatical and phonetic meanings are functions of the relevant units in their own contexts.
Firth describes the context of situation as a
"group of related categories at a different level from grammatical categories but rather of the same abstract nature. A context of situation for linguistic work brings into relation the following categories: A. The relevant features of participants: persons, personalities. (i) The verbal action of the participants. (ii) The non-verbal actions of the participants. B. The relevant objects. C. The effect of the verbal action". (Firth 1950:182)
This mode of meaning, then, "is the functional relation of the sentence as a whole to the processes of a context of situation in the context of culture" (Firth 1951:195). The language is thus seen as functioning within a behavioural framework. The next mode of meaning is the lexical, where the relationship is the collocation.
"Collocations of a given word are statements of the habitual or customary places of-that word in collocational order but not in any other contextual order and emphatically not in any grammatical order. The collocation of a word or a 'piece' is not to be regarded as mere juxta-position, it is an order of mutual expectancy". (Firth 1957b:12)
Hie collocation is then a syntagmatic relation of lexical items to each other in terms of their likelihood of cooccurrence. Firth illustrates this by shewing that in the phrases young ass and old fool the adjective and the noun are so related by mutual expectancy that replacement of one by another is unlikely although both ass and fool can be applied with the same meaning to an old or young person. This is not a relation between signifiant and signifie but between words themselves. We will return to collocation in 3.4.3.
The granmatical mode (what he calls 'morphological1 in his earliest work) has to do with grammatical "substitution counters' like 'verb' or 'noun' and their mutual relations. We will discuss this in 3.4.2.
Firth resisted for a long time the use of the term 'phonological'. This was
33
based on the British usage going back throuc^i Sweet, that used 'phonetics' for the study of the sounds of language. Hie study of sounds as noise etc. was not regarded as linguistics at all but as physics. The phonetic level, like all the other levels in Firth, presupposed the handling of meaning. But in his later writing, such as (1951:192ff), he distinguishes phonetic from phonological (including prosodic). In the phonological node or level Firth stressed the meaningfulness of speech sounds and their relations to each other. Here he fulfilled Sweet's hope that the linguistics of the future should concentrate en sounds in sequence, not in isolation. His analysis runs contrary to contemporary phonemic analysis which Firth dismisses as "phonetic hypostatization of roman letters" (Firth 1948a:126). These alphabetic assumptions have, for instance, slanted the International Phonetic Alphabet in favour of European languages. Prosodic Analysis is, like the rest of Firth's linguistics, a general theory which is applied differently to specific languages. It is interesting from our point of view insofar as it illustrates some of Firth's basic assumptions about the relation between a theory and the language it describes. We will return to it briefly in 2.5. Before leaving Firth's work on the sounds of language we must look at two other points. One is that even "the general feature of voice quality is part of the phonetic mode of meaning of an English boy, a French man or a lady frau New York. Surely it is part of the meaning of an American to sound like one" (Firth 1951:192). Not only is a sound meaningful in terms of the other significant sounds of a language, it is also meaningful in the whole system of culture containing the language. Another aspect of sound meaning is the "phonaesthetic mode". The term 1 phonaesthetic' is used fear that fact that certain sounds in a language or even a group of languages tend to be related to a certain type of meaning. This has been called "iconism". It seems to have gene cut of fashion although it is an interesting borderline feature of language which puts the absolute claim of arbitrariness for the linguistic sign in doubt. One interesting application of it has been an attempt to explain that handful of puzzling exceptions to the English Great Vowel Shift (Samuels 1965). Thus a statement of the meaning of a piece of language has to be made at the contextual, lexical, grammatical and phonological levels. This extension of the use of the word 'meaning' to apply to the result of choice at these
34
different levels has met with opposition. Lyons was particularly disturbed by the syntagmatic nature of Firth's approach to language and he wrote that 'context' and particularly 'context of situation' "cannot be made to bear all the weight that Firth places on it" (Lyons 1966:288). He rightly points to the lack of attention Firth pays to reference and paradigmatic semantic relations. Given the fact that Firth produced no complete survey of his theories it is hard to decide where paradigmatic semantic relations would have been accounted for. While the problem of reference is part of Firth's context of situation, it is true that he stressed syntagmatic relations between events and objects rather than a paradigmatic listing of options available. This part of the theory was to be developed a decade after Firth's death in the vrork of M.A.K. Halliday. A good example of the 'spectrum' approach to the analysis of meaning is Hudson (1972), which shows hew Firth's ideas have been developed. 2.4.2.2.
Metalanguage
Firth laid great stress on avoiding overgeneralization. His belief in the usefulness of studying 'restricted languages', as he called them, is an important balance against the modern tendency to hunt 'universals' semetimes on the basis of scanty evidence. Firth talks of the special collocational characteristics of the language of Lear's limericks and of Swinburne's verse. For our purpose we can exemplify this idea of culturally and contextually special language types by looking at one special restricted language, language about language, or metalanguage. Firth repeatedly stressed that statements about language are only relative. Categories were to be set up and maintained only as long as they were regarded as useful and oily insofar as they could be justified by appeal to the language under description. This process Firth referred to as "renewal of connection". Since his criterion for a term in the theory was its usefulness it followed that he made no claims about the reality of linguistic categories. Firth's position was that "existence as asserted of material objects and spatio-temporal events was not properly predicable of the carponent parts of an analytical system" (Robins 1963:22).
35 Firth himself is perfectly explicit in avoiding making claim for the 'God's truth' of his constructs.
"Our schematic constructs must be judged with reference to their combined tool power in our dealings with linguistic events in the social process. Such constructs have no ontological status and we do not project them as having being or existence. They are neither immanent nor transcendent, but just language turned back on itself".(Firth 1950:101)
Not only is he careful not to make excessive claims for the reality of categories of description, he draws attention to the metalanguage of his theory. He emphasizes particularly the dependence of the technical vocabulary of linguistics en the theory of which they are a part. This was one of the clear exanples of language varieties giving particular meanings to elements within them, and of the unreality of setting up ideal languages without reference to the context of their use (Firth 1948b. cf. also Lipka 1979 for a study of the restricted language of lexical fields).
His suspicion of unified abstract language systems with claims to universality led him on to a condemnation of "bogus philosophising" which merely consisted of the "'personification' of categories as universal entities". This 'personification' - which is perhaps better referred to as 'hypostatization' (cf. Lipka 1975:212 and Leisi 1952;1971:25-27) - has not been lacking in recent work but it can only be avoided when one continually measures one's constructs against their exponents in real language or in terms of their value as theoretical tools. What Firth (and later Halliday) proposes is "a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description". (Firth 1957b: 21) This was essentially part of the same distrust of terms, like 'adjective' etc., which tend to be carried over froti language to language without adequate consideration of the individual prcblans of each language. In spite of the change in fashion, the growth of confidence which has led more and more people to claim universal validity for their constructs, Firth's caution is wise. Questions of the form "Hew many transformations are there?", make the unjustified assumption that there are transformations. 'How many transforma-
36
tions are needed to describe/generate all known languages?' is an adequate forrnulaticn for vrtiat any scholar can hope to achieve. It also makes it much sinpler to changeyaur mind. As long as you recognize that metatheoretical constructs are inventions with a purpose, they can be improved and extended. If you take too much for granted as to what
exists, then, to cite a parallel
case, you see tiny hcrtiunculi under the miscroscope or Pivot Grammars, where there are none. Postulating universals should core after it is clear that all languages are thus best described.
2.4.2.3.
Renewal of Connection
At a tine when a large amount of writing concerned itself with procedures and methods of analysis Firth repeatedly insisted on the necessity of basing practical collection of information on a specific theory. "It is the view of the writer that linguistics must not be allowed to becate more deeply engaged in methodology, but that a special effort is needed to keep it to theoretical order". (Firth 1957b:l) Failure to see that 'facts' are not data but are derived from theoretical principles has vitiated much Structuralist and post-Structuralist work. Harris, whose dropping of the first two words in the title of his book (Methods in) Structural Linguistics in later editions is significant, set out to present
"methods of research used in descriptive, or, more exactly, structural, linguistics. It is thus a discussion of the operations which the linguist may carry out in the course of his investigations, rather than a theory of the structural analyses which result from these investigations" (Harris 1951:1).
This idea that first you apply your methods of analysis and then construct a theory was widely criticized and led to the Chomskyan reaction. However, Harris rightly contrasts methodological rigour with uncontrolled inventiveness, when he points out that his methods
"should not have the undesirable effect of forcing all languages to fit a single Procrustean bed, and of hiding their differences by imposing on all of them alike a single set of logical categories. If such categories
37 were applied, especially to the meanings of forms in various languages, it would be easy to extract parallel results from no matter how divergent forms of speech". (Harris 1951:2)
TMs is, of course, true. If you use meaning as your basis, structural differences fade into relative insignificance. Harris therefore decided to disregard meaning. Chcmsky, who assisted Harris with the manuscript of this book, continued this attitude to meaning until the sixties. The limiting nature of this restriction had, however, the justification that it was intended to prevent impressionistic and arbitrary selection of 'facts' without due attention to the data. Firth, as we have seen, was also against mere piling up of details. He insisted that 'facts' must be abstracted from the "general mush of goings-on" and this can only be done if you have a theoretical place for them. Further, the 'fact' will be given its value only by its place in the theory (just as the theory is judged only in its ability to account for the real data of language in situations). An example of the status of a 'fact' is the case of 'hesitation phenomena' which occur in the data of spoken language. 'Hesitation phenomena' are 'facts', but if you are interested" in the "ideal-speaker hearer" and if you then (tacitly) decide that he never hesitates then these are (theoretically) uninportant. Even though actors and politicians train themselves to introduce hesitation phenomena into prepared lines to give an inpression of candour and naturalness, they can be discarded alcng with the effects of drunkenness, aphasia and repeated blows to the head. Another exairple is what Lipka (1969) describes as assimilation in English weak verb preterites ending in voiceless consonants. This can be alternatively regarded as a prosody of voicelessnes extending over both segments (cf. 2.5.). Which is the 'fact'? The answer depends on the theory behind the description. In both cases, the description is relatable to observations about English. This is also important of a theory, since every "theory derives its usefulness and validity from the aggregate of experience to which it must continually refer in renewal of connection" (Firth 1957b:1). As well as connecting with experience, however, a theory must allow for the relative validity of its own axicms.
"For me, a fact must be technically stated and find a place in a system of related statements, all of them arising from a theory and found applicable in renewal of connection in experience". (Firth 1955:43)
38
This is a theme running through Firth's work. Nowadays, it seems less remarkable than at the time. However, there are two aspects of it which are important to remember. Firstly, while a lot of lip-service is paid to the idea of describing real language the real situation was described by Lyons when he wrote of TG orthodoxy in the sixties that
"linguistic theory, at the present time at least, is not, and cannot, be concerned with the production and understanding of utterances in their actual situation of use ... but with the structure of sentences considered in abstraction from the situations in which actual utterances occur". (Lyons 1968:98)
Chcmsky sometimes writes as if the distinction between his theory and the Structuralists is that they are too interested in the mechanics of linguistics and not enough in the results. Halliday, Mcintosh & Strevens (1964:301-2) conpare the two, saying:
"Whereas the earlier model had been procedural - that is, had specified the steps to be taken to arrive at the description of a language, transformation theory ... Eis] theoretical, - that is,it specifies the form the description must take, regardless of how it is arrived at".
We would all agree that how a theory is arrived at is of secondary importance to the results; but if the results clash with new data it is useful to have contact with real language to shew that the theory or the facts it proposes are more than the linguist's whim. We also have the not unirrportant terminological point that the expression 'discovery procedure' seems to presuppose the prior existence of something to discover, while 'renewal of connection' is more neutral. The postulate is matched against the language events from which it has been abstracted to see if it explains more than it was made out of. Firth, then, is to be seen as a linguist who insists that linguistics should be based on firm theoretical foundations but should be tested repeatedly against real language. This has been reflected in the Neo-Firthian tradition ever since. The practical difference is seen by comparing the book on English syntax by Stockwell, Schachter and Hall Partee (1973) with, say, Huddlestcn, Hudson, Winter and Henrici's volume (1968). The former was completed as a research paper in 1968 and is an interesting and useful attempt at a synthesis
39 of current linguistic theories with reference to a description of English. The latter, known as the OSTI Report, is a similar attempt at a description of English but with several important theoretical differences. First it is based on a corpus, although not exclusively. If a grammar is to be descriptively adequate it has to be able to handle all the sentences of the language it claims to deal with. There has developed in recent years, however, a tendency to shy away fron the practice of testing one's theories against anything but a set of constructed exanples. Huddleston, in a book based on his contribution to the OSTI project discusses several inportant features of the grairmar of the clause (Huddleston 1971). He proceeds by giving a theoretical account of each sub-topic from a TG point of view and then classifies all the relevant sentences in the corpus in terms of this theory. Thus the section on inperatives concludes with a breakdown of the imperatives in the corpus in terms of the theoretical categories set up. Secondly, while going beyond the corpus, the study recognizes the polymorphous nature of language. This is seen for instance in Huddleston's distinction between "written scientific English" and "' carman-core' English" (Huddleston 1971:1). This is in keeping with Firth's theory of restricted languages making up a major language but having certain characteristics of their own. Various parameters are possible but one of those which is most often ignored and with the most serious consequences is the distinction between spoken and written language. Generally, TG theory claims to handle spoken language but all too often contents itself with citations of sentences which sesn usually of the sort you would get in written English. An example of this could be Dougherty's interesting essay on coordination which claims grarrmaticality, without specifying the conditions, for sentences like John was hunting lions and was frightened by snakes, Growling lions and flying planes are dangerous and is fun respectively, and Mary and Sue were certain to win and expected to lose respectively
(Dougherty 1970). Firth would have
rejected these sentences as nonsense, but if they do represent English sentences they are of a restricted type and the restrictions on their use are surely an important part of any linguistic statement about them. We will see later when we cctne to look at Neo-Firthian descriptions of aspects of spoken English that seme of the sentences are most unlike what passes for spoken English in many theory-centred models. Many features in fact are treated in
40 the grartmar which would probably be relegated to performance in other models. 2.4.2.4.
Firth and the Ideas of de Saussure
Like Malincwski, Firth firmly rejected the philological preoccupation with written language and the concept of a unified language used by all its speakers in the same way. The failure to examine the assumption that language has a unitary nature has been the besetting sin of all post-Saussurean linguistic theory in the U.S. whether Structuralist or Transformationalist. The expedient of claiming to be only describing the linguist's cwn idiolect, while recognizing the difficulty, effectively side-stepped the real problem with a consequent loss in value of the resulting analysis. The difficulties behind this unspoken selection of what the linguist wants to treat as language has been discussed in several places (cf. Householder 1973). Bickerton, quoting Labov, points out that
"orthodox linguistic theory dealt exclusively in terms of static models of discrete languages and dialects, and data which could not readily be incorporated in such models were consigned to the "wastebasket of performance'". (Bickerton 1973:641)
This realisation, which is reflected in current sociolinguistic work, that 'ideal language1 is a concept of doubtful value in the long term has ocme to the fore because, while artificiality may make sane parts of the analysis easier, it also limits its usefulness.
As well as insisting on treating language at levels related to its real functioning in everyday use. Firth weis in general suspicious of many of the doctrinaire theoretical distinctions which have too often been taken over wholesale from de Saussure without due consideration. On the one hand he rejected the idea of a unified 'tongue' as the object of study. Firth quoted with approval one of his pupils, Fritz Güttinger, who described the most permanent impression left on him by Firth's work as "die Einsicht, daß die Spielregeln der Sprache und des Sprechens im Grunde etwas viel Ftoheres sind, als man zu glauben gewohnt ist" (Firth 1935:31).
Firth adds in the same place a warning which might still be applied today: "It follows also, of course, that loose linguistic sociology without formal
41 accuracy is of litte value". Several of the insights of current sociolinguistics are prefigured in the work of Firth. Quoting frcm Bickerton again we read: "our metatheory breaks down the Saussurean dichotomy between synchronic and diachronic studies. Language then is seen as a dynamic process evolving through space and time". (Bickerton 1973:642-3)
This tension between the realities of language and the methodological pressures of a rigorous approach has been pointed out by several scholars. Von Wartburg describes this problem as the "unlösbare Verflechtung von Diachronie und Synchronic, das Hineinfliessen und Herausströmen und wiederum Hineinerstarren" (quoted in Lipka 1966:4). It is worth repeating at this point, however, that what Firth is proposing is not what we would nowadays recognize as sociolinguistics. This is rather linguistics based on language and how it is used to mean in social settings. This meaning occurs at every level. A particular accent or intonation is meaningful. A grammatical structure has a meaning in terms of what else could replace it in a situation. The concept of linguistics as the core of the social semiotic is the basis for Firth's insistence both that language cannot be reduced to a clear-cut analysis of words and sentences one at a time and devoid of any context, and that a meta-language must be created which can handle and order this many-faceted creation with its various modes of meaning. We will return to these questions in the next chapter. 2.5.
Prosodic Analysis
Prosodic Analysis fulfils Sweet's derrand for a synthetic approach to phonological description. In keeping with Firth's spectrum approach to language analysis (cf. 2.4.2.1.), it is also polysystemic, setting up different systems for different environments. Although some of the ideas are to be found in Firth's earliest works, the classic statement of prosodic analysis is Firth (1948a). Although it is not developed within the part of the tradition on which I am going to concentrate, prosodic analysis has been applied to exotic languages especially by scholars associated with the School of Oriental and African Studies. What has been carried over into the central area of the Neo-Firthian
42
tradition is the awareness of phonological units like the syllable and tone group as carriers of grairmatical distinctions (cf. 3.2.,6.3. and 7.2.3.). In prosodic analysis, the stream of speech is analysed into phonematic units and prosodies. Phonematic units are segmental, like phonemes, and are sequentially arranged. Because of the importance of the prosodies however they play a much less important role in description. They are more abstract than phonemes and less tied to the roman alphabet. Prosodies are suprasegmental but they are not confined to the classical trio of pitch, stress and juncture, nor are they an addition to a fixed number of segments (like the suprasegmental phonemes). Prosodic analysis is contextual or syntagmatic where phoneme theory is paradigmatic. The unit of analysis is the syllable (and above) and the interest is on how "the syllable(s) and its (their) parts are integrated in acting as exponents (realisations) of words or larger structures, as opposed to presenting these exponents in terms of a simple string of segments which make up syllables" (Albrow 1975:6). Prosodies are not placed in serial order but are assigned to certain positions. Thus there is a prosody of voicelessness associated with final stops in the German word. 'Assimilation1 is handled by assigning a relevant prosody to the assimilating unit. Thus the alveolar stop endings of English verb preterites and past participles ccme under the domain of the voice or voicelessness prosody frcm the final consonant of the root syllable. These examples illustrate the second important aspects of prosodic analysis. Not cnly does it account for syntagmatic relations it is also polysystamic. This means that within any restricted language different environments are described as having different phonological rules. This is obviously true of
5
Even the distinctive feature analysis of generative phonology is in comparison with prosodic analysis merely another way of expressing (articulatory or acoustically based) phonemes. The sum of the one-column feature matrices are the familiar phonemes.
6
Different levels of formality have different amounts of assimilation. The junction prosodies [?] and [ fi] only appear in certain English speech styles.
43 7
initial medial and final position in the syllable , and grammatical environments like the preterites and past participles mentioned above. Firth illustrates his theory by looking at what is traditionally treated as the phoneme /a/ "in connexion with other prosodies such as the so-called 'intrusive' r, the glottal stop, aitch, and even w and y. Examples are vanilla ice, law and order, ore'ation, behind, pa and ma, to earn, to ooze, secretary, behave, without money" (Firth 1948a:132). These operate as junction prosodies and this explains why [fi] is always syllable initial and [?] syllable initial or final. The y and w prosodies are also features of irregular noun plurals. This mouse can be represented as ^masw and mice as ^ m a s Y , the difference being a change in prosody. Similar analyses can be applied to buy/bought and get/got (Albrow 1975:15).
Firth demonstrates prosodic analysis by applying prosodies to a generalised consonant (c) and vcwel (v) syllable structure (Firth 1948a:138).
Prosodies cy
vc3
VC3 cizjnvtfjbvcs
vy
cvcc
fry AÖ31 ofs W3Z mAtJ beta ay öirjk Phonematic structure
3—a9—of—w-z mAtJ bet—a—Oigk
I.
Prosodies cvy
hvz^fvy
wajy hxz fly Phonematic structure
7
I wa
sez Ji
sccvccic
cvc
cvc
akseptid öis WA.n ksept d öis WAn
It is interesting to note that Arabic script reflects this fact by having different letter forms in these positions. Even in English, the regular verb and regular noun endings have a single spelling -d and -s in spite of varying voice prosodies. The phonematic units are the alveolar stops and sibilants. The rest is environmental prosodies.
44
Prosodie analysis emphasises the phonetics and phonology of synthesis, and has thus been confirmed by recent studies of speech perception and production, which emphasize the interpénétration of so-called segments and such prosodies as voice, nasalization, aspiration, iotacization and labialization. In the context of the present vrork I have not the space to discuss prosodie analysis in more detail. As we will see, the work I will be discussing makes little use of prosodies in the way they are applied in the essays collected in Palmer (1970). Nevertheless, the emphasis on phonological environments above the syllable is to be found in later work (cf. 6.3.).
45 3.
TEE FOUNDATIONS OF NEO-FIRTHIAN LINGUISTICS
3.1.
The Background: Structuralism and General Linguistics
Before turning to the development of Neo-Firthian linguistics after 1957 I want to look briefly at the contenporary development of transformational grammar and particularly the relationship between the Neo-Firthian tradition, the TG tradition and Structuralism frcm a Neo-Firthian point of view. This relationship has been obscured by the often polemically slanted picture of structuralism presented in the sixties. Early TG linguists generally saw themselves as superseding 'taxoncmic structuralism' and thus being the only acceptable linguistic method. Typical is Postal's surrming up of major structuralist theories (in which he included Halliday's) as "essentially... unformalized and unclear versions of the theory of PSG" (Postal 1964:79). Since Phrase Structure Grammars had been shewn to be inadequate without transformations, this meant that no non-transformational granmars could successfully describe language and this in turn limited the possibilities of fruitful cooperation from outside transformational orthodoxy. In fact, only the corollary of Postal's statement is true. The Phrase Structure Grammar at the heart of what would soon be called the 'Standard Theory' was essentially formalized and clear structuralism. Meaning, as discussed by Firth, was ignored and only massive criticism of this fact led to the half-hearted attempt by Katz & Fodor (1963) to graft some discussion of sentence meaning onto the theory. In 1965 Chomsky could still treat meaning as one of the 'Residual Problems'. The new developments which tried to account for meaning, such as Case Grammar and Generative Semantics abandoned the structuralist Phrase Structure base and sought inspiration in traditional grammar and logic. Only these semantic theories have had any significant influence on Neo-Firthian work.
46
Both the exclusivism and the essentially structuralist base of early TG theory tended to isolate it. This was carpounded by an apparent refusal of many transformationalists to read non-transformationalist work. The tendency was to lump together under 'taxoncmic structuralism' not cnly Fries, Bloch, Wells, Trager and Hill but also writers like Kenneth Pike, who had always shewn important differences frcm his contemporaries such as his refusal to accept a separation of levels (Pike 1954 etc.). Bibliographies in the early sixties often gave the impression that nothing significant had happened between the Port Royal Granmar and Syntactic Structures, with the exception of a few works like Jakobson, Fant & Halle (1951). From an outside point of view Chomsky's quasi-mathematical attempts to codify intuitions by mechanical procedures did not seem so different frcm the tradition represented in Bloomfield (1926), Fries (1954) and Harris (1951). Generative phonology was also derived frcm structuralist assumptions (cf. 2.5.). Even the methodological differences were largely on the surface (Gleason 1976), and Chcmsky's shift of attention frcm morphology to syntax had been foreshadowed by Harris (1946,1951) and Wells (1947). In short, TG apologists tended to overstress the newness of their theory and to underplay both the tradition in which it was embedded and alternative traditions. There were important differences frcm other theories but the attempt to see them as criteria for acceptability of all theory effectively insulated TG work from constructive criticism. Recent work, like Haas (1973), has underlined the fact that linguistic theory is primarily a consensus of various schools of thought in which different approaches can lead to complementary results. This position is a characteristic of the British approach. Halliday, for instance, distinguishes between the complementary 'textual1, 'generative' and 'exemplificatory' approaches to description and continues
"Description is however not theory. All description,whether generative or not, is related to General Linguistic Theory; specifically to that part of General Linguistic Theory which accounts for how language works. The different types of description are bodies of method which derive from, and are answerable to, that theory. Each has its place in linguistics (Halliday 1961:241).
..."
I propose to take Halliday's work as the basis for my discussion because he was the most important theoretical writer in the sixties and his influence
47
has been widespread. He also gives form to the work of various writers who share his intellectual origins1, without being divorced from "the mainstream of linguistics from Sweet and de Saussure to Mukarovsky, Vachek, Hjelmslev, Firth and Pike, in attempting to make linguistic statements which take account of both form and meaning".(Quirk 1960:57)
Unfortunately several aspects of this 'mainstream' linguistics were turned into shiboleths in the sixties. These include the role of so-called 'discovery procedures1, the role of the corpus in linguistics and the role of idealisation. It will be necessary to deal with these points briefly before going on to deal with Neo-Firthian work in general. 3.1.1.
Meaning and 'Discovery Procedures'
Most linguistic theory has paid at least lip service to the centrality of meaning in linguistic studies. Fries, after citing similar remarks in Bloomfield (1933;1935:27), states that he does not deny that "the chief business of language is to caimunicate meanings of various kinds" (Fries 1952; 1957:8 fn.6). Two years later he devoted a whole article to the question, when he answered criticisms frcm linguists like Firth and Carrol (Fries 1954). Gleason, speaking frcm an essentially structuralist point of view states: "... we rule meaning out of our analysis precisely because it is meaning in which we are ultimately interested" (Gleason 1955;1961:94). Even Chcmsky claims, not without seme justification, to "have always insisted explicitly that a theory of use and understanding must be incorporated in any comprehensive theory of language" (Parret 1974:30). Nevertheless, in comparison with the work of Firth and his successors, meaning was relegated to second place in practice. The concentration was on the formal organisation of language, i.e. structures at the morphological and syntactic levels. Instead of studying how language means, Chomsky proposes, as the "fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L", to 1
By using Halliday's schematization to make connections between different writers I only want to illustrate the unity of the tradition, not personal or ideological dependence (cf. 2.1.).
48 separate gramriatical from ungrammatical sequences of the language "and to study the structure of the grammatical sequences" (Chcmsky 1957:12). Katz & Fodor's (1963) attempt to graft sate semantics into the theory (while avoiding accounting for 'settings') was scarcely an advance on collocations, which had been proposed lcng before. Not only were collocations ignored but even older ideas like word-field analysis were not taken into account.
This neglect of meaning was combined with the belief that it was a characteristic of 'Structuralist ' i.e. non-Transformationalism to ignore meaning in favour of 'discovery procedures'. Postal, in a discussion of Halliday, depicts this bogey.
"To be honest the only data or examples that can be presented are recordings of physical signals and descriptions (technicolor movies) of the physical contexts of these. I am not permitted, if I really follow this preposterous methodology, to say French tête means English head... I can only say 'a large creature uttered the noise tête, it was cloudy, ... etc.'". (Postal 1969:412)
This methodology is certainly preposterous but it bears no resemblance to Neo-Firthian theory or practice. It is even unfair to 'Structuralists' with whan Postal really ought to have been more familiar. The very term 'discovery procedure' seems to have been invented by Chcmsky as a stick to beat structuralists with (cf. Gleason 1976/4 fn.l). In a perceptive article on the subject Miller says of Chcmsky,
"... he attacks either the weak points of the best structuralists or the arguments of the lesser ones, a form of argument which quickly leads people to believe that before 1957 all was darkness". (Miller 1973:137)
It is true that even the best structuralists go to seme lengths to avoid appealing to intuition. Their reason for doing this was a distrust of the unchecked use of intuition to justify analysis. A glance at classics like Fries (1940 and 1952;1957) shows that intuition is not purposely left out but rather that it is continually measured against language examples. Methods like those of Harris (1946) and Wells (1947) are rather abstract but it is important to realize that in fieldwork, for instance, discovery procedures of the type described in, say, Gleason (1955;1961:286-311) are a real help. Secondly,
49 no one would want to deny the value of granmatical tests to justify analyses. These are found in Chomsky (1965:22) where he used transformations to illustrate deep structure differences and in Jacobs and Rosenbaum (1968:192) where they write: "One of the basic reasons for assuming the existence of such entities as noun phrase complements is the fact that such embedded sentences seem, very often, to act like noun phrases under such tests as the passive test, the cleft test, and others".
We may find writers like Fries, who uses operational analyses of a corpus to distinguish between questions and statements, rather overdoing their reliance on a fixed methodology but at least we are clear where their intuitions are based. Recent work has tended to lack justification for important decisions of fact on the status of linguistic elements. Citation of text examples and the use of tests occur unsystematically and apologetically. We find ourselves stymied by the author's failure to check what seems to be a very idiosyncratic use of language by listening to what goes on around him (cf. Managhan 1978). At least the structuralists were trying to base their intuitions on real language use, and trying to find examples to support claims about language is a salutary check against overenthusiastic invention of sentences to prove points. 'Discovery procedures' meaning mechanical methods of linguistic analysis without recourse to meaning (cf. Lipka 1975:212ff) have been seldom used other than with languages where there is no native speaker doing the analysing. In the American literature, they had a temporary vogue, but they were never a feature of the British tradition. 3.1.2.
Linguistics and the Use of a Text Corpus
What about texts? Here we have a similar situation to 'discovery procedures'. Structuralists were caricatured as only describing what had been recorded with no interest in what was possible. As an antidote to what was seen as a myopic preoccupation with what had been collected, the sole arbiter of language was to be the native speaker's intuition. Since the easiest choice of native speaker is usually the author this means you both ask the questions and give the answers (cf. Leech 1968:87). Further, as Chafe points out
50 (Parret 1974:17) people vary greatly in their sensitivity to linguistic differences. This, once said, seems obvious enough and several authors have attenpted to put their opinion on a surer footing (cf. Cruse 1973, and references there). Works like Huddleston (1971) shew that the scholarly examination of stretches of real language need not be relegated to 'applied linguistics1. The fact that Huddleston's TG model is adequate to handle sentences of written English frees it from the criticism of much contesmporary work, that it is anecdotal and atomistic, inventing sentences to illustrate theories.
In spite of Postal's caricature above of the linguist who describes texts, there is justification for reexamining the reasons for applying linguistic techniques to a particular text. The first is the very multifariousness of real language. Without some sort of selection it is impossible to make statements which are both meaningful and applicable. There is a permanent tension between the desire to explain all the secrets of the universe and the limitations, both practical and theoretical, of our experience. There are several methods of isolating what you want to count as language frcm what Firth calls the 'general mush of goings-cn'. One method is to imagine an ideal speaker in a perfectly homogeneous speech caimunity. This is rather like the school mathematics exercises of the form: 'If 10 men dig 4 ditahes 6 feet long by 2 feet wide in 2 hours, how long will 5 men take to dig 3 ditahes 10 feet long by 3 feet wide?' This certainly allows us some idea of the factors involved in estimating workrates, but ignores factors like the skill and strength of the men, the quality of the ground and how many men can actually be dewn any one hole at any cue time. Since it predicts results in ideal conditions it allows later concentration on the variables. The main problem of this type of approach in linguistics is that there are neither ideal native speakers nor homogeneous speech ccmnunities. You have limited the concept 'language', as you have to do, but you have limited it in an undefined way. What is right seems in the last analysis what the linguist thinks is right. There is no court of appeal.
The other method of reducing language to manageable proportions for the purpose of description is the cue used by Panini and the latin graitmarians of the Renaissance, the use of a corpus. There is no doubt that this produces significant grammars, which are complete in the sense of accounting for all language within a circumscribed area. The size of this area varies. Halliday
51 describes the choice as follows:
"One may wish to make an exhaustive descriptive grammar of the language of a circumscribed text, such that the statements made are intended to account for all linguistic 1 features of the text but are not offered as either exhaustive or necessarily valid for any linguistic material outside that text. It is sometimes desirable however, to attempt a descriptive statement that is to be valid for some non-circumscribed body of linguistic phenomena: for a language, for example, whose texts cannot all be considered and may include what has not yet been spoken or written". (Halliday 1956:177)
Obviously, the relationship between the two types of description is of the nature of a cline. The larger your text the more valid will your assumptions be for language outside its bounds. Ultimately, any speaker's intuitions depend on the amount of language he has experienced. The spurious distinction between 'native speakers' and others fails to give full emphasis to this fact. Competence is not an accident of birth. There are native speakers who certainly do not possess the ability to generate all English sentences. The claim that they can generate their own idiolect is trivial. A beginner who has learned half a dozen rules and makes characteristic interference errors in a particular language has his own idiolect. Competent non-natives tend not to be not • -Iced. On the one hand, for exanple, the 'competence' to judge the acceptability of sentences like He was ever so happy, or You oould do yourself a nasty •injury with that thing or I'll see you the length of the bus stop will depend on experience of geographically scattered varieties of English. Few native speakers would be likely to find the structures behind all three of these sentences in their active granmar although they are standard in their own areas, fly competence is dependent en the sum of all the English I have ever heard or read. It is only when you have acted as informant on usage and acceptability that you realise the shakiness of the concepts of 'ideal native speaker' and une langue une. Even when talking about your cwn language, then, competence in production and understanding is not enough if you want to avoid idiolectal solipsism. When it comes to field linguistics with previously unrecorded languages the analysis of a corpus is inescapable (cf. Gleason 1955;1961:277-311). It is necessarily inferior to describing a language you know well, but any gramnar of any language must be able to account for random texts. Since U.S. linguistics up to
52 the late fifties was characterised by an emphasis on the practical analysis of languages there have been several interesting publications of descriptions of corpora, although most of than go on to draw wider conclusions frcm the particular evidence examined. Among these perhaps the most famous are by Fries (1940,1952;1957). The former is a study of varieties of written epistolary English based on "seme two thousand complete letters and excerpts frcm about one thousand more" addressed to the US government and "largely made up of intimate descriptions of heme conditions... all offered as reasons for appeals of one kind or another" (Fries 1940:28). The latter concentrates on formal characteristics of sentence construction ostensibly based on "same fifty hours of mechanically recorded conversations en a great variety of topics - conversations in which the speakers were entirely unaware that their speech was being recorded" (Fries 1952; 1957:3). In this book Fries is, however, rather selective in his examples and fails to bring out the distinctions between spoken and written English at all times. An example of the analysis of a single text is Halliday's The Language of the Chinese "Secret History of the Mongols" (1959). In caimon with most descriptions restricted to one text this is the analysis of a unique record of a restricted register of a dead language (Halliday 1959:5). Chomsky, quoting Harris, writes about such text analyses: "A grammatical description that gives nothing more than 'a compact one-one representation of the stock of utterances in the corpus' can be challenged only to the extent that the observations it summarizes or rearranges are defective. It claims little, and its interest is correspondingly limited". (1961:220)
Few linguists would disagree with him. As Chomsky himself, however, recognizes even Harris does not put this forward as the ultimate aim of linguistics. Later in the same book Harris writes: "The work of analysis leads right up to the statements which enable anyone to synthesize or predict utterances in the language" (Harris 1951:372). In fact, the only examples of a study of a text for its cwn sake seem to be historical analyses of dead languages. Stylistic descriptions of particular writers or works are either primarily concerned with
53 the use of language by the author or with general stylistic characteristics of particular registers. Firth (1951), for instance, discusses the restricted languages of Swinburne and of eighteenth and nineteenth century epistolary prose. Halliday (1969b) examines the literary effects derived from unusual uses of the transitivity systems in Golding's The Inheritors, and Crystal and Davy (1969) examine the linguistic correlates of certain situationally conditioned uses of language.
Seen in this light a text or corpus of real language, spoken or written for a ccrmtunicative purpose and not produced by the linguist to support his theories is not inferior to unsupported intuition as a basis for language study. This is especially true when the corpus is more than 200 texts of 5000 words each frcm
"unscripted speech; novels; plays; poetry; criticism and other nonfictional prose; psychology and social sciences; philosophy; physics and other physical sciences; biological sciences; law; politics; religion; useful arts (such as cookery); newspapers; etc.". (Quirk 1960:53)
3.1.3.
Intuition, Theory and the Ideal Speaker
The attacks on 'taxoncmic structuralism', untempered by reading the best structuralists, led to the idea that the only use that could be made of a corpus was mindless labelling and listing according to fixed 'discovery procedures'. As a result, TG linguistics had the difficulty of finding a way of restricting what could be classified as a language for the purposes of analysis. Not only was linguistic theory to limit itself to sentences, these sentences were frcm a particular source.
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance". (Chomsky 1965:3)
The vagueness of the criteria here is particularly troublesome. The randan or characteristic errors can be made to include hesitations and restructurings
54
which are essential features of real spoken texts. The reader of an analysis on such a basis is at the rrercy of the writer's idiolect, and the examples are also produced by scmeone preoccupied with the point he is trying to make. This is bad because "violations of many grammatical rules become more acceptable as they are repeated" (Labov 1972:817). Furthermore, anyone who has been put in the position as 'native speaker' of English of making decisions on the grammaticality of sentences will agree that the process of composing illustrative examples of, say, complementizer constructions is a very different thing frcm ccmnunication or any other normal function of language.
Even at its best the linguist's idiolect is only a randan sub-set of all potentially producible sentences of a language. The grantnar of this idiolect stands in an undefined relation to the granmar of 'the language as a whole' (whatever that means). A text is a sub-set of acceptable utterances of a language (and partially defines the language). It has the advantage of being clearly defined, available to all and extendible in any direction if corroboration of a feature is required. It is not a substitute for theory but a useful tool, just as the linguist's intuitive grasp of a language is a great help in analysis when employed with the proper safeguards. In retreating frcm real language nany linguists came to prefer more or less interesting philosophical or quasi-mathematical speculations about sentences and a theory of language study which leads its practitioners away frcm language as it is used by people in situations. To talk of a speaker (even an ideal one) producing sentences (undefined) and then to proceed to generate sentences like: Tell me what seemed to whom to be idiotic (Karttunen 1977:36) leaves one open to all sorts of criticism. This seems just possible as a piece of written English but bears little resemblance to the sort of spoken English reproduced by scholars working from recordings (cf. Fries 1952;1957:50-51; Crystal and Davy 1969:passim).
As we saw in Firth's work, the object of linguistic analysis is the language event in context. As Halliday puts it
"The linguist operates with language and text, the latter referring to all linguistic material, spoken or written, which we observe in order to study language. The linguist's object of study is the language and his object of observation is the text: he describes language, and relates it to situations in which it is operating". (Halliday 1960:18)
55 This does not of course mean that "linguistics mast be restricted to the data of observable texts and contexts in which texts are produced" (Postal 1969: 410). In his first publication, Halliday wrote
"the language under description will be not that of a circumscribed text but one of which many texts exist and will exist: a restricted language which may be called New Chinese... The description has, however, a textual basis in a small corpus of spoken material recorded by myself in Peking and elsewhere, from which all except the constructed examples are drawn. This is the experimental core of the material, while the field of observation is the totality of my own experience of this restricted language as I have been able to codify it". (Halliday 1956:177-8)
The relationship between the categories of description and the observed language event is not automatic but is the product of the linguist's knowledge. Introspective data is also classified according to the linguist's knowledge of the language but it is unfortunately more amenable to organisation than externally produced texts that the linguist may find awkward. 3.2.
Levels of Language
Turning frcm the differences in approach between the tradition which Halliday developed in the early sixties and .American ideas, we can now look at the NeoFirthian tradition as a whole. All post-Saussurean theories have assumed a basically tristratal model of language. Even American Structuralism is best seen as a truncated version of this with meaning left to be considered later. On the one hand is the primary data, the signifiant, the expression, usually conceived at least in principle as phonic and on the other, the meaning, the signifie, the content. The link between sound and meaning is the sign which is to be seen as the meshing-point of this double articulation and is the centre of interest whether it be word or sentence. Although the model presented by Halliday (1961) is also tristratal there are important differences. The linguistic sign is not the object of study but 2 rather language in context. Following Firth's definition of linguistics 2
Firth never read "Categories of the Theory of Grammar" but the main ideas are also to be found in Halliday's earlier work (cf. Halliday 1956 and 1959). "Categories" is the first formalized statement of the theory behind most Neo-Firthian work in the sixties.
56 as "a sort of hierarchy of techniques by means of which the meaning of linguistic events may be dispersed in a spectrum of specialized statements" (Firth 1950:183)/ Halliday distinguishes as "primary levels... 'form', 'substance' and 'context"' (Halliday 1961:243).
Substance is sound or visible marks. "The form is the organisation of the substance into meaningful events" and is thus the centre—piece of the grammar. The definition of context shows the continuity of the theory with Firth's work.
"The context is the relation of the form to non-linguistic features of the situations in which language operates, and to linguistic features other than those of the item under attention: these being together 1 extratextual' features". (Halliday 1961:243-4)
Halliday diagrams the model thus:
Phonetics Linguistics SUBSTANCE
phonic — — - phonology substance
FOBM ^ >» ( granrnarf' /lexis i