“I propose that the real distinction is between two modes of knowing rather than between two types of object known. The two modes of knowing are (1) the ANALYTIC MODE (the way of knowing structural principles, generalizations), and (2) the HOLISTIC MODE (the way of knowing a linguistic form immediately and as a unit). The first mode of knowing is undoubtedly especially prominent in the speakers’ knowledge of those aspects of a language that are generally described in grammars, and conversely the second mode especially of those described in the lexicon. However, the important point is that the two are not mutually exclusive.”In the years since I wrote that there has been an increasing recognition of the extent to which competence in a language requires holistic knowledge. I, myself, have found the contributions of Andrew Pawley and Alison Wray to be of particular interest although many others could also be cited. I intend this page as a casual outlet for thoughts and reflections on the ways in which speakers make use of holistic knowledge of analyzable sequences in their languages. I imagine it as mainly a place to discuss observations that I find puzzling and to present leads that seem potentially promising.
A recent article in Language (Bock et al 2006) has recalled another article (Roberts 1944) that made an impression on me some years ago. For a long time I’ve found it frustrating that I couldn’t see how to establish just when and where holistic knowledge is required for speaking a given language fluently and idiomatically (that is, so you come across as a native speaker). By “holistic” knowledge I mean anything beyond the kind of knowledge of grammatical rules and of words and their meanings that we might call “compositional” knowledge.
The literature on holistic knowledge most frequently focuses on the constructions that require it, and a lot of different terms have been used to refer to different kinds of constructions. Probably most common is formula or some derivation or phrase including it. Anyway, I’ve several times had the experience of seeing lists of what were put forward as formulas and feeling uncertain about some of them. How could one prove that they were indeed formulas? It was hard to be sure. A lot of formulas make analytic sense. I mean they are (more or less) readily interpretable in context. Or (if this isn’t saying the same thing) one can fairly easily figure out why the particular construction could be used to mean what it is being used to mean. But if we’re to get at the full extent of holistic knowledge, what we ultimately need to look for--as I understand it--is any construction of more than one word that couldn’t be predicted compositionally (i.e. not only justified, but actually predicted, on the basis of compositionality). This is where the Roberts paper comes in. He proposed there that “The best field of study for the idiomatologist lies in the subtle frontiers between almost identical languages and cultures” (Roberts 1944: 306). The kind of evidence that almost identical languages (and, we should add, “dialects”) make more readily available to us is that of equivalence in difference. And on the importance of such evidence I can’t resist appealing to the authority of Roman Jakobson who said (1959: 233): "Equivalence in difference is the cardinal problem of language and the pivotal concern of linguistics." I should probably digress to point out that one subject on which I’ve written a good deal is my own approach to precisely that problem--equivalence in difference. It has seemed to me that one of the best ways to get to the bottom of how people do things with language would be to compare how they do the same things with different languages (or dialects). And the most obvious area of study seemed to be translation. I have, over the years, probably expended a number of trees on questions such as: What is translation? How is it possible to say something in language B that is “equivalent” to something said in language A? What counts as equivalent? How does one know what a speaker of B would say in the “same” situation as a particular A utterance (where “same” again can only mean “equivalent”, because the same situation can never exist twice, and that’s all the more true when the A situation existed in one cultural context and the B situation has to be in another)? One thing that emerged very clearly from all this was that the more similar two languages and cultures are, the more confident we can feel in identifying equivalences between them. Moreover, the equivalences will generally be both more numerous and more precise. Consequently, when equivalent expressions are different, it’s generally easier to pinpoint the source of the difference as word meaning, grammatical rule, or formulaic knowledge. Let me give a couple of examples of what I’m talking about. In reading, say, a novel by a British writer, I’m often struck with little things that are a bit strange to me although I usually have no trouble in figuring out what they mean. It’s just that “we” wouldn’t say it that way, or “if we said that, people would think we meant xyz”. Of course, I’m usually in no position to specify exactly who (beyond the author in question) would say it that way or who (besides me) constitutes the “we” that would not, but that really doesn’t matter; each such case is an example of some kind of holistic learning on the part of author or reader or both. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried to collect examples systematically, but here are a couple that have occurred to me recently. 1. “to go missing”. I’ve particularly noticed this because it’s just come into common use by Americans recently (or so it seems to me). I think it’s older in some other varieties of English (I’ve thought of it as “British”), and has probably come into use by American journalists as a result of the reports, especially from Iraq and Afghanistan, by British journalists. This is formulaic; I don’t find a comparable formula that I can identify with the same confidence in American English--“turn up missing”? “be found/discovered to be missing”? or just “be missing”? I feel less confident about labeling any of these (maybe the first?) as necessarily known holistically. 2. “in hospital” vs. “in the hospital”. Someone (I take it to be the Brits and probably others) use the former which is unidiomatic to me (and, I imagine, to Americans in general). My best interpretation so far is that the American usage involves a more specific formulaicity. I think that in other contexts we generally say “in X” without the article when it involves institutionalization (if that’s the right word); e.g. in school, in jail, in prison. In those cases, it seems to me that “in the school/jail/prison” would most idiomatically be used to indicate location in the appropriate building, but not as inmate (or whatever other word is appropriate). Thus, it would seem to be more consistent to use “in hospital” for one who is hospitalized). But this more general rule for in vs. in the that I was trying to define also seems itself to require holistic knowledge on its own level. Of course, I don’t intend any claim that my analyses of these two cases are definitive; what I do want to show is that such dialect differences seem to offer a rich source of data.| Home Page | The Ethnolinguistic Notes | The Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 1 and 2 | Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3 | The Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 4 | Reflections: Language Evolution |
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Put on the Web 16 October 2006
Modified 17 March 2007
