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Comments Welcome
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
28 May 1993
Linguistics, synchronic as well as diachronic, has consistently assumed that human language is divided up (without remainder) into individual units that we call "languages". But where are these languages to be found; where are they located? Nowadays, at least, there is widespread agreement that each individual language is located, not in any one place, but scattered among the separate minds/brains of many individual humans. It is supposed to take the form of "knowledge", although mainly not conscious knowledge. The humans in question are those who are said to "speak", or simply to "know", the particular language.
Thus, we assume that a language exists as knowledge in the minds/brains of individuals, each of whom has acquired this knowledge by processing his/her own personal linguistic experiences. However, since the experiences of different individuals can't have been identical, it seems inevitable that each language will exist in many different forms--each built up from the experiences of a particular individual. Still, linguistics has always assumed that the language in the mind/brain of one individual is in some significant sense the same language as that in the minds/brains of all of the other individuals whom linguists would count as speakers of that language. But what might be the sense in which this could be true? In what sense and to what extent can a language that is found scattered, and in non-identical forms, among the minds/brains of many different individuals be a uniform system?
There is also another question to be asked: To what extent must it be uniform in order to be able to perform its functions? The answers to these questions seem to depend in large part on the form taken by the speakers' knowledge.
Therefore, we must ask: What form does this knowledge take? What I will do here is propose and discuss three hypothetical solutions which, I hope, can serve as reference points for future discussion.
First, in Grace 1992 (pp. 3-6) I spoke of the conception of languages as what I called "governing systems", that is, systems that govern the construction of a particular set (infinitely large, of course) of sentences, each with its own meaning. That is, the governing system is supposed to authorize the sentences and warrant the meaning(s) of each sentence so authorized. The governing system is traditionally supposed to consist of a syntactic system and lexicon, which constitute the means by which it is supposed to be able to accomplish this function. The governing-system conception of the way languages work, then, presupposes the traditional view discussed in Grace 1993 of the knowledge possessed by its speakers: that is, the view that their knowledge consists of a syntax and a lexicon. Let us consider that as one hypothesis of the nature of linguistic knowledge (and therefore of the individual language). Thus:
HYPOTHESIS 1 . Individuals' knowledge of a language takes the form of a syntactic system and a lexicon.
DISCUSSION: I tried in Grace 1993 to show that that conception of speakers' linguistic knowledge was untenable. The syntax-lexicon model has been developed by linguists for the structural analysis of artifacts of speech. Or more exactly, the analysis is of selected aspects of the artifacts. What are usually analyzed are written texts or what has been spoken and preserved as an artifact by transcribing or audio recording. An analysis (language description) produced by applying this model effectively defines and characterizes the language for the linguistic profession.
For convenience, I will refer to structural-analysis-of-artifacts-of-speech
descriptions (1) as SAAS
descriptions and descriptions of the knowledge-of-language
in the minds/brains of individual humans as
In Grace 1993 I argued that the ability to use language requires the individual to call up--as wholes--utterances or utterance partials, contemplating each as a unitary phenomenon so as to evaluate the likely effect of each on the contemplated audience. KOL hypotheses should, I think, be required to satisfy the conditions that emerge from that fact (as I believe it to be).
HYPOTHESIS 2 . Individuals' knowledge of a language takes the form of a repertoire of discourse components and their uses.
DISCUSSION: What I have in mind in speaking of "discourse components" includes such things as have been called "speech formulas" (as described, for example, in Pawley 1985, 1992 ), "grammatical constructions" (as described in Lakoff 1987), "schemata" (as described in Tyler 1987), "semantic formulas" (Pawley 1992), "catch phrases", "idioms", "cliches", "proverbs", etc.
I assume that there are some discourse components that are sufficient alone to constitute an utterance (more accurately, to serve as the vehicle of an utterance). Others have to enter into combinations in order to constitute a suitable vehicle for utterance. It appears that in these combinations the components may be simultaneous, or one can precede the other, or various kinds of overlapping and embedding can occur.
In asserting that the individual's knowledge-of-language takes the form of a repertoire of discourse components, Hypothesis 2 implies that KOL descriptions are possible and that they would consist of nothing more than (a list of?) appropriately characterized discourse components.
Hypothesis 2 suggests that the individual constructs a repertoire of discourse components by analyzing the utterances that s/he hears and extracting recurrent parts. Possibly there are clues of some sort as to what parts to extract, clues that would lead all speakers of the language to extract largely the same parts and therefore to have very comparable repertoires. Again possibly there are not, and possibly different speakers have very different discourse components in their repertoires.
Although it's impossible now to say much about what possible different forms the individual discourse components might take (that would be a problem for future research), I will offer a few comments.
First, some discourse components seemingly can have other discourse components as parts (i.e., some discourse components can have variable (non-lexified) sub-components).
Second, knowing a discourse component presumably includes knowing what it can combine with.
Third, it seems likely that everything that would count as a lexical item in the Hypothesis-1 approach would be eligible for inclusion as a discourse component under Hypothesis 2.
Fourth, an interesting question is whether the repertoire of discourse components could include grammatical constructions with no lexification at all (e.g., "noun + intransitive verb"). I don't know for sure. If so, could it even go so far as to incorporate--in some form or other--everything postulated by Hypothesis 1 (since I've suggested already that it could include all of the lexical items)? I don't know. Would it include abstract schemata such as the three-part (beginning-middle-end) structure of narrative and many written forms (and even conversations, I think) in our culture? Again, I don't know.
Finally, have some KOLs in some periods in history had significantly larger numbers of more abstract discourse components than others? I have suspected that discourse components may have tended to become more abstract in the history of our own culture as people have been called upon more frequently to talk to people they haven't previously known and about an increasingly wide range of subjects. Today, we often have to talk about subjects in which we aren't expert (i.e., which involve us in discourses--e.g., medical discourse while consulting a physician--for which our repertoires of discourse components are not well developed). What I'm suggesting is that language use in our culture has become exceptionally ad hoc and that that has probably required our repertoires of possible utterances to provide much more flexibility (to move somewhat more in the direction of Hypothesis-1 type knowledge?).
The third hypothesis is:
HYPOTHESIS 3 : Individuals' knowledge of language is nothing more than a large memory store of experiences--with the emphasis on experiences in which language was used. For linguistic purposes, we may think of this as essentially a store of utterances. We interpret what's said by recalling other cases where the same thing or something similar was said. We decide what to say by recalling similar situations and what was said in them (and what the consequences were).
DISCUSSION: Clearly individuals don't remember all of the details of any utterance they have heard, nor do they remember every utterance individually. The point of the hypothesis is that our KOL at the given point in time doesn't (as Hypothesis 2 would have it) consist of a fixed inventory of precisely-specified components which require only to be assembled according to the applicable instructions in order to produce (the linguistic expressions that serve as vehicles of) utterances. Rather, Hypothesis 3 maintains, what we have is more like a store of utterance examples .
If we don't remember all details of every utterance we have heard, what--if this hypothesis is valid--do we have in our memory stores? Again, anything approaching a full answer to that question would have to be a matter for future research. However, as far as I can judge it seems likely that other things being equal, we remember particular utterances (or parts of utterances) better in proportion to: (1) how often we've heard them; (2) how recently we've heard them; and (3) the amount of emotional impact hearing them had on us. By "remember better" I mean either that the details are preserved more accurately, or that the entire utterance (or utterance part) is more accessible to ready recall, or (probably most often) both.
It does seem clear that we can often remember some parts of an utterance quite clearly, but not remember other parts.
Even though I've suggested that the memory store contains partial as well as complete utterances, which may make Hypothesis 3 seem hard to distinguish from Hypothesis 2, there is a fundamental difference between the two. According to Hypothesis 2 what we know are discourse components , which are potential utterance parts which we have only to assemble in the right ways to produce utterances. According to Hypothesis 3, what we know are examples , and our task is to use these examples as a basis for designing our own utterances. I don't know very much about how this is (to the extent that the hypothesis is valid) accomplished, but I would suppose that the principal basis is analogy. For a simple example of what I have in mind, given utterances A, B, C in the memory store, we decide that we want to produce an utterance that will be similar to A, but differ from it in just the way that B differs from C.
EVALUATION: I believe that I have made it clear that I don't find Hypothesis 1 at all plausible, and why. What about 2 and 3? My feeling is that neither is entirely right. Hypothesis 2 presents all discourse components as being defined with the same preciseness and all as equally accessible. I don't think that this can be right. Actually, I think that some discourse components are much more familiar than others, and that we are much more certain of the actual composition of some than of others. Furthermore, I think that we clearly don't just pull ready-made components out of storage and put them together, but that we sometimes have to do some adapting of the sort which is emphasized in Hypothesis 3.
On the other hand, Hypothesis 3 leaves too many questions unanswered for one to feel very satisfied with it. Just how are the utterances that we remember, and remember better, selected? Where our memory has selected out parts of utterances, how are these parts selected? Just how does the process by which we use our available examples to design new utterances work? Of course, it would be unreasonable to ask for precise answers now since no work has been done on this, but the kind of suggestions that I've been able to give here aren't precise enough for us to feel very sure just what the hypothesis is.
If I were to give my best judgement at this time, it would be that the KOL is some kind of compromise between what is proposed in the latter two hypotheses--that it has aspects of both.
IMPLICATIONS: What are the implications of these hypotheses for the question with which we began? We have been talking about the knowledge-of-language (KOL) of the individual, but it has been assumed that the "language" of which the individual has knowledge is something which extends far beyond any individual. What are these supra-individual entities that we know as "English", "Japanese", etc.? What kind of answer would each of the hypotheses suggest for that question?
First of all, I think that Hypothesis 1 most strongly requires the internal unity of such languages. The "governing system" role that each is called upon (by that hypothesis) to play seems to presuppose a tightly-structured system. It would seem that the possibility for variation within such a system would be strictly limited--that adding more varieties to a governing system would soon loosen it up to the point that it would lose the ability to govern anything (more and more rules becoming optional). The presupposition that a language must be a governing system implies that all of language is divided up into quite distinct languages, and that therefore, it must be possible to sort each individual speaker into one or another pigeon hole (or perhaps two or more in the case of multilinguals, but with each multilingual's KOL neatly partitioned among the pigeon holes). (3)
Hypothesis-1 literature assumes that what the language learner will have to learn is specifiable beforehand in a fairly precise way, because s/he has to learn a particular language whose syntax and lexicon (which are what s/he will have to learn) are already established and non-negotiable.
Hypothesis 2 doesn't require such tightly structured systems or so much internal unity. What one must learn--what the KOL consists of--is not highly structured. It is a repertoire, much more like a dictionary than a grammar. In such a case we can imagine different individuals who have grown up in fairly close proximity having substantially different repertoires of discourse components, according to the accidents of their experience. But we can imagine them communicating with each other fairly successfully by relying on the discourse components that they do share (presumably still a large number). Hypothesis 2 doesn't seem to require that all KOLs in the world must belong to one of a fixed number (usually estimated as between five and ten thousand) of entities of the kind we've been talking about: i.e., "languages". (I imagine that advocates of Hypothesis 2--if there were any--would say that KOLs will be found to cluster into different languages just to the extent that the speakers whom they represent belong to distinguishable socially -based clusters).
Hypothesis 3 doesn't seem to require any external system at all. Presumably, the ability of some people to (more or less) understand one another results from the fact that some people have heard the same utterances or (much more often) have heard similar ones.
CONCLUDING REMARKS: These hypotheses are intended as ideal types--each taking a single principle and building on it--rather than as truth claims. I don't believe that any one of them is entirely correct. However, I think there is some approximation to the truth in all three. I think that, as is implied by Hypotheses 1 and 2, there is more structure in our KOL than Hypothesis 3 admits. However, as implied by Hypothesis 3, there is not a sharp line between linguistically relevant and linguistically irrelevant knowledge as Hypotheses 1 and 2 imply. I think that, as 3 suggests, we have a great variety of information--much seeming quite unrelated to language--that we can, and at times do, draw upon in speaking and listening.
I would say that the KOL in reality appears to combine characteristics of Hypotheses 2 and 3. However, it was pointed out above that the definition of 2 is loose enough to permit most or all of 1 to be accommodated within it. And it appears to me that individuals who show greater virtuosity in their use of language tend to have a more analytic knowledge of the language. That is, I suspect that their KOLs may include discourse components with more of the characteristics proposed by Hypothesis 1 than does the KOL of the average speaker--and/or may include greater numbers of such components. In fact, I think that what is regarded in our culture as "good" command of a language is likely to be closely related to the presence of Hypothesis-1 characteristics. However, I don't believe that the Hypothesis-1 characteristics predominate in any KOL.
Although none of the hypotheses is presumably accurate in itself, I hope that the three of them do succeed in bracketing the truth--that the truth lies somewhere in between. In particular, I hope that it may be useful to examine separately what each of them implies about the processes of linguistic change and differentiation. Since the Hypothesis-1 picture of language has dominated discourse up until now, I think examining the implications of all three may be all the more interesting if, as I believe, both Hypotheses 2 and 3 are closer to the truth than is Hypothesis 1.
AFTERWORD
I shouldn't end without emphasizing that admitting that SAAS descriptions aren't accurate descriptions of the kind of knowledge that speakers have of their languages won't deprive them of all value. Such descriptive accounts came about in the first place because they are useful. In particular, they're an important practical help for anyone attempting to use (or to learn) a strange language. In the early stages particularly, understanding what we hear or read is a matter of word-by-word decoding (i.e., translation). And to speak, except for the simplest utterances, we have no option in the earliest stages but to conceive our utterances first in our own language and then translate essentially word-for-word. Dictionaries and grammars are in principle the best kinds of aid I can imagine for translation tasks of this particular kind. (In fact as I've often mentioned, I think that it is precisely from the experience of using dictionaries and grammars in such language-learning-via-translation tasks that the idea developed that all language use is a kind of translation, and that we have internalized grammars and dictionaries that we use for that purpose).
But SAAS descriptions have uses beyond such practical applications. They provide the best way we have of talking about language differences. They are our way of talking about the range of differences among languages of the world, specifying characteristics that are universal and, for those that are variable, specifying just what variants exist in the world. They also permit us to talk about the differences between related languages--both between contemporaneous ones and between ancestor and descendant--and thus provide our means of talking about linguistic change. We would be left in a most awkward situation if we were no longer permitted to use SAAS descriptive statements.
But I do wish we knew better what lies behind them. I continue to think the KOLs must be the ultimate objective, and although I suppose the SAAS descriptions are somehow resultants of the structure and content of the KOLs, the relation seems to be far from direct and straightforward.
1. I should point out that most SAAS descriptions intend to include potential artifacts of speech as well as those that happen to occur in their corpora. Back up
2. There is some temptation to suggest an analogy between this contrast between SAAS and KOL descriptions and Noam Chomsky's (1986) distinction between externalized language (E-language) and internalized language (I -language). However, Chomsky's assumptions about the nature of KOL are very different from those made here.
Moreover, although SAAS descriptions are usually made from the utterances of a number of speakers and purport to represent a (supra-individual) language, it would be possible to make an SAAS description of the speech of a single person. I'm not sure that the output of an individual could count as an E-language for Chomsky. Back up
Again, suppose we've made a decision to assign the dialect to language A, but after some years, conditions have changed so that it seems clear that it's now closer to the other dialects of B. If we reassign the dialect from A to B, both languages are automatically changed (since each language is the sum of the KOLs which make it up). Therefore, their descriptions should be revised. (Or, if one thinks of the descriptions as existing prior to the intervention of the linguist, the revision occurs automatically. In fact, if instead of "descriptions" we refer to their "grammars", everyone would presumably agree that the revision was automatic). This seems awkward for Hypothesis 1. For example, the languages will have changed, but the individual speakers' KOLs won't have. Nobody speaks any differently, and yet the governing systems of both must be assumed to have changed. Back up
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Convergence: A series founded, planned, and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York, etc.: Praeger. Back up
Grace, George W. 1992. Another attempt to explain why I have misgivings about what we tell people about language. Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 43. Printout. 21 pp. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).
Grace, George W. 1993. What is the language faculty? Ethnolinguistic Notes, Series 3, Number 44. Printout. 8 pp. Back up. Also internet World Wide Web page (Click Here).
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Back up
Pawley, Andrew. 1985. On speech formulas and linguistic competence. Lenguas Modernas 12: 84-104. Back up
Pawley, Andrew. 1992. Formulaic speech. In William Bright (Editor in Chief), International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Vol. 2, pp. 22-25. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Back up
Tyler, Stephen A. 1987. The unspeakable: Discourse, dialogue, and rhetoric in the postmodern world. Madison WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Back up
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