Ethnolinguistic Notes
New Series, Number 6
INTELLECTUALIZED LANGUAGE
2. WRITING
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
October 21, 1978
“For Chomsky the meaning, or semantics, of a sentence is also specified in the base grammatical structure. Each unambiguous or well-formed sentence has one and only one base structure, and this base structure specifies the meaning or semantic structure of that sentence. Hence the meaning of a sentence relies on no private referential or contextual knowledge; nothing is added by the listener. One is justified, therefore, in concluding that, for Chomsky, the meaning is in the sentence per se." David R. Olson (1977: 259)
"My central claim is that the evolution both culturally and developmentally is from utterance to text. While utterance is universal, text appears to have originated with Greek literacy and to have reached a most visible form with the British essayists." (ibid. 262).
"An uninitiated reader who opens a scientific treatise on law, economy, medicine, or history published between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries is struck most forcibly by the complete absence of logical order. The materials are treated successively without any connection, progression of thought, development, or show of proof." Jacques Ellul (1964: 39).
"Individual writers throughout the 16th century varied tone sentence by sentence, even phrase by phrase, with all the oral freedom and flexibility of pre-print days. Not until the later 17th century did it become apparent that print called for a stylistic revolution.” (Marshall McLuhan (1966: 129).
I have long found puzzling the paradox posed by the juxtaposition of the following (presumably true) propositions: (1) All native speakers of a language (excepting rare abnormal individuals) have an authoritative knowledge of the language and are in principle to be regarded as possessing equal competence [rather as if the language were an object which is implanted in the mind of each native speaker], (2) A language is basically an oral phenomenon; written language not being a language at all but simply the oral language with only the final actualization of the utterances being in a different medium, (3) The proficiency of native speakers in writing their language varies widely from great skill to great ineptitude. I have wondered how these presumed facts can be reconciled. Unfortunately, in the great division of scientific labor, this question seems not to have fallen into any of the sectors into which the frontiers of knowledge have been partitioned.
In puzzling about the problem of writing, I finally decided that the great, strange, new thing about writing--that for which the orally-oriented were totally unprepared--was the necessity to sit still and deliberately “formulate definitive statements" (the expression between quotation marks being the formulation that I made for myself). In writing, one is asked to word the statement in such a way that his meaning will be correctly and completely understood by anyone at all at any time at all and in any circumstances at all. By contrast, most oral speech is directed at someone whom one knows well (or at least who is of a familiar background) in particular circumstances which are evident to both speaker and addressee. Furthermore, it does not really matter much whether the speaker's utterance adequately expresses his meaning since there is ordinarily ample opportunity to tidy up misunderstandings and supply missing details in further discussion. David R. Olson has now provided handy terms for the two kinds of linguistic products (e.g., Olson 1977). The product of oral language is the "utterance". An utterance does not contain the meaning; the meaning resides in the speaker. The product of writing is the "text". The text is regarded as an autonomous object. The meaning is supposed to be embodied in the text; it is supposed to be fully discoverable by means of careful analysis of the text itself.
Olson claims that current linguistic theory depicts languages as text-producing objects. That seems a fair appraisal. However, I would like to claim in turn that no language that produces autonomous texts in the true sense of the term is even theoretically possible (within the realm of any non-absurd metaphysics). All communication by language necessarily presupposes a contribution by the audience. The special problem of writing, aside from the finality imposed by the impossibility of follow-up discussion, is that one has to think up some sort of image of one’s intangible audience and hold it in one's mind as one writes.
Let me make two quick points in passing. First, text-like varieties of language are not restricted to writing. Any oral presentation to a large audience, where ensuing discussion is impossible or possible only within severe limitations calls for text-like language. Moreover, individuals who have acquired some skill in producing text often tend to produce text even in face-to-face oral communication. Second, there is surely much to be said about the impact of writing on our own linguistic heritage as far back as classical Greece. That fact is brought out forcefully in Eric A. Havelock's (1963) Preface to Plato.
What I want to bring up here is another step in our linguistic heritage--at least as regards our writing. Something happened in the 17th century. To the quotations from Ellul and McLuhan which appear at the head of this Note may be added the following (Foucault 1970: 39): “Later, Buffon [sc. 18th century GWG] was to express astonishment at finding in the work of a naturalist like Aldrovandi [sc. early 17th century] such an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, reported quotations, fables without commentary, remarks dealing indifferently with an animal's anatomy, its use in heraldry, its habitat, its mythological values, or the uses to which it could be put in medicine or magic.
Once again, then, our attention is called to the 17th century.(1) Olson, in the quotation appearing above, specifies the "British essayists”. What, then, happened to English writing in the 17th century?
I am certainly entirely without competence to offer any answer of my own knowledge. However, even a cursory inspection of the critical literature bearing on the period reveals certain areas of agreement. One point is the existence of (in the words of Stanley E. Fish, 1972: 374) “a very old question: what is it that polarizes seventeenth-century style, and why is it that by the end of the century the opposition of styles has become so much less pronounced?"
Fish’s own answer is that it results from an "opposition of epistemologies” (ibid. 378). "On the one hand there is the assumption that the mind, either in its present state or in some future state of repair, is adequate to the task of comprehending and communicating the nature and shape of reality; and on the other, the assumption that the mind is a prisoner of its inherent limitations, and that the apprehension, in rational or discursive terms, of ultimate truth, is beyond it." (ibid. 377). Subsequently, (ibid. 381) “.. . in the Restoration a pressure for consistency, that is for isomorphism, is exerted by a naive and optimistic epistemology, and the plain style is no longer optional, but mandatory, and mandatory not as a literary choice, but as a manifestation of a faith in rational discourse."
I will mention only one further consideration concerning the "plain" style--some authorities have seen it as very much involved with the evolution of the "new science", i.e., what 1 have been calling "modern science". There can be no doubt, at least, that plain style was an important part of the program of the Royal Society (cf. Sprat on "Their manner of discourse" in Spingarn 1908), conspicuously enough so to have been satirized by Swift in Gulliver's Travels.
What is to be learned from all this? 1 do not pretend to have the answer. 1 believe that it has something to do with language. I believe that it has something to do with the personal equations of those of us who undertake to discover the nature of language. Finally, I believe that it may provide some hint of the measure of that which remains to be done.
NOTE
1. I cannot resist reproducing here the quotation from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World which appears, preceding page l in Chomsky 1966:
.
"A brief, and sufficiently accurate, description of the intellectual life of the European races during the succeeding two centuries and a quarter up to our own times is that they have been living upon the accumulated capital of ideas provided for them by the genius of the seventeenth century.”
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. New York: Harper & Row.
Ellul, Jacques. 1964. The technological society. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Fish, Stanley E. 1972. Self-consuming artifacts: The experience of seventeenth-century literature. Berkeley: California.
Foucault, Michel: 1970. The order of things. New York: Random House (Vintage Books).
Havelock, Eric A. 1963. Preface to Plato. Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1966. The effect of the printed book on language in the 16th century, in Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan (eds.), Explorations in communication: An anthology. Boston: Beacon, pp. 125-35.
Olson, David, R. 1977. From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review 47: 257-81.
Spingarn, J. E. (ed). 1908. Critical essays of the seventeenth century, Vol. II, 1650-1685. Oxford: Clarendon. [The excerpt from Thomas Sprat's, The history of the Royal-Society of London (original1y published in 1667) is on pp. 116-119].
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