Links to pages: 77, 81, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94
George W. Grace
University of Hawaii
April 14, 1982
Dell Hymes has been pointing out the importance of different ways of talking since at least 1961 (Hymes l961). One of his recent papers (Hymes 1974b) is, in fact, entitled, "Ways of speaking". The point of that term, he states, "..is the heuristic, or regulative, idea, that communicative conduct within a community comprises determinate patterns of speech activity, such that the communicative competence of persons comprises knowledge with regard to such patterns" (1974a: 45). The present note may be seen as reflecting a belated recognition of the significance of that insight of Hymes's. However, my approach will be somewhat different--somewhat less general than his--because I want to focus upon ways of talking as ways of dealing with particular subject matter.
To make clearer the problem on which I want to focus, consider the remark by Thomas S. Kuhn (1970: 205) that "the proponents of different theories are like the members of different language- culture communities". In fact, it is common to say when individuals or groups of individuals have difficulty in understanding each other that they "are not speaking the same language". Of course, we understand that we are using the expression "the same language" in a metaphoric way--if they are all speaking (say) English, then literally they are speaking the same language. At least that is the way we are accustomed to talking about these matters. However, they are not employing the same way of talking about their subject matter.
As Kuhn in particular has emphasized, there can be ways of talking in a particular language that are not comprehensible to some speakers of that language, and there can even be different ways of talking about what is essentially the same thing such that those who know only one of those ways cannot adequately understand anything said in the other way. It is the existence of these ways of talking which can be mutually unintelligible even though in the same language-- these differences of ways of talking that are sometimes metaphorically spoken of as differences of language--that I want to examine here.
My purpose here, then, is to call attention to the existence and the importance of ways of talking about things and to make some suggestions for a way of talking about their nature. I want to propose that human language can be thought of (and talked of) as made up of different ways of talking. While a way of talking about something consists most obviously of vocabulary, there is much more to it than that as I will try to show below.
It should be pointed out at the outset that not all ways of talking are equally well seen as ways of talking about things, i.e., not all ways of talking may be characterized with equal aptness in terms of their subject matter. In fact, Dell Hymes, in his writings about ways of talking, does not ordinarily approach them in terms of their subject matter. But here, as I pointed out above, I am especially interested in looking at ways of talking specifically as ways of dealing with particular subject matter.
I appreciate the value of Hymes' approach; I see that which I am putting forward here as complementary to it. I believe that linguistics should be interested in how it is possible for different people to talk about the same thing in different ways--in ways that are different in such manner and degree that the different people are in a significant measure unable to understand each other. In fact, I believe that linguistics should be interested in how it is possible to talk about something at all. Linguistics has generally been content to leave that problem to philosophers; in fact, some linguists seem to regard taking one's distance from the problem as a mark of virtue--of faithful adherence to standards commanded by, or in the name of, science. However, the problem is a central one for the foundations of science.
On this point it is appropriate to point out that one of the first monographs in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science was Leonard Bloomfield's (1939) Linguistic aspects of science. Just as the problem is of critical importance for science as a whole, so it is for particular sciences such as linguistics. For linguistics, which claims language as its subject matter, to remain permanently aloof from all interest in precisely that aspect of language on which its own enterprise depends would surely seem peculiar.
But would not such a new way of talking about language--such a new point of view on language--conflict with our present approaches? Would it not tend to debilitate our present efforts, and even to reduce the field to a kind of schizophrenia? My answer is that it would not; I think that the prospect is quite the contrary. However, I should point out to begin with that this way of talking about language is not intended to supersede that in which language is seen as consisting of individual languages. On the contrary, the two are supposed to complement each other. Part of the motivation for this approach is my belief that our understanding of a phenomenon such as language is best advanced if we develop different perspectives on it-- different ways of talking about it--rather than adhere rigidly to a single one. That is not to say that it is not also useful to attempt to bring these different perspectives together into a unified theory--to establish translatability among the different ways of talking about what seems to be the same thing. What I suggest is not useful is to give one way of talking about a thing a special status which tends to preclude the development of others.(1)
But the objective would be to acquire the ability to look at a thing from different perspectives. In the words of Magoroh Maruyama (1977: 135), "Americans, who believe in the existence of one truth, will inevitably ask: if you have different views, which one is right? But consider the following: in the binocular vision it is irrelevant to raise the question as to which eye is correct and which is wrong. Binocular vision works, not because two eyes see different sides of the same object, but because the differential between the two images enables the brain to compute the invisible dimension." Cf. also Wittgenstein's statement, "Every time I say that this or that representation could be replaced with another, we take a further step toward the goal of grasping the essence of what is represented" (quoted in Harries 1978: 168), and Gregory Bateson's (1979: 73) assertion that, "In many cases, an increment of insight is provided by a second language of description without the addition of any extra so-called objective information." It is in the same conviction that I am attempting to develop a new way of talking about language.
Another way to put it would be this: Although there is a sense in which it is true that these two ways of talking are both about language, and therefore about the same thing, it is also true that any new way of talking is inevitably about something at least slightly different. That is, a new way of looking at what is ostensibly the same thing will inevitably lead us to see new things in the process; not exactly the same things will be perceptible with any change of perspective. And not exactly the same things will be talked about after any change in the way of talking. Therefore, the availability of a new way of talking--even when it is supposedly about the same thing--will also increase the range of things we are able to talk about.
I should also explain that I think the word "understanding" characterizes what should be our ultimate objective with respect to language better than "knowledge". "Knowledge" suggests something reducible to statements of fact. Knowledge in that sense may be a reasonable objective where our interest in a certain phenomenon is clearly defined and can be adequately formulated in a few specific questions. Our interest in human language, I would maintain, is of a quite different sort. Language is so fundamental to the nature of humankind and so extensively ramified through all of our institutions that much thought and investigation will still be required before we can be at all specific about what all of the questions are which we would have to get answered.
Furthermore, I would maintain that the aspect of the quest for understanding which is most in need of special stimulation is the developing of new ways of talking about things. It needs special stimulation for two reasons: first, because more ways of talking about things-- more perspectives on things--are particularly needed, and second, because developing good ways of talking about things requires extraordinary effort.
A final point needs to be made about the kind of thing I am attempting here, viz., providing a way of talking about something. The point is that what I am attempting is a quite different thing from providing a survey of research results or of the current state of our knowledge on a particular subject. Since what I am doing does represent the subject (ways of talking about things) in a particular way--as conforming to the particular model which emerges from the concepts which I introduce--I hope that it is, in fact, in reasonable accord with what is known. However, I do not intend specifically to claim that any particular point in the scheme is "true" of an external reality. In being thus "incorrigible", it is analogous to a work of art or to a mathematical system.
However, the way of talking which I will propose differs from a mathematical system in the important respect that its relations are not formally exact, and it also differs in that it was designed with a quite specific interpretation in mind. It is subject to rejection if it should turn out to be insufficiently useful, or to modification of any sort to increase its usefulness, but it is not, strictly speaking, corrigible, since it makes no empirical claim. Such a way of talking could, of course, develop into a mathematically exact scientific theory just if a group of people adopted it and developed it and their understanding of it to the point of unanimous consensus within the group as to how agreement on the correctness of statements made within the way of talking could validly be reached.
I hope that adopting the way of talking that I am proposing will provide a better basis for investigating a number of problems such as how different paradigms (in Kuhn's sense) can seem to use different languages, how ways of talking express the assumptions of particular cultures or of particular political philosophies, how political bias is expressed in the reporting of events, how a way of talking can be used in advertising to mislead, etc. It should also lead to fairly specific hypotheses about the following problems:
1. Why attempts to describe the structure of the lexicon of a language (such as was the goal of the "ethnoscience" and the "Neo- Humboldtian ethnolinguistics" movements) have met with only limited success. It is often the case that words of similar enough meaning that they seem a priori necessarily to fall within the same "domain", do not show any recognizable systematic relations among their meanings. A good example is Weinreich's (1962: 27) set: saturnine, sullen, crabby, glum, sulky, surly, gloomy, morose. The hypothesis here would be that only vocabulary items that belong to the same way of talking show systematic structural relations.
2. The nature of idiomaticity. The hypothesis would be that idiomaticity is nothing more than conformity to established ways of talking about things. More precisely, to talk about something in a language (say, English) where there is a conventional way of talking about that thing, but to employ an unconventional way of talking about it, is to fail to speak idiomatically (say, to fail to achieve idiomatic English).
3. The various natures of translation. An important point to note is that a way of talking about something is not necessarily just in one particular language. The vocabulary itself--if by vocabulary we mean only what I have been calling "lexifications"-- is divided up according to different languages. However, translation will predictably be easy whenever the entire discourse to be translated falls within a way of talking that is common to both languages. Ways of talking that are shared by at least two languages are so common as to defy enumeration. Ways of talking about something that far transcend any individual languages are exemplified by sciences, religions such as Christianity or Islam, or political philosophies such as Marxism.
The proposed point of view provides a basis for distinguishing several different kinds of cases: e.g., (1) translation between different languages where the entire discourse to be translated falls within a way of talking that is common to both languages, (2) "translation" between different ways of talking about the same thing in the same language (e. g., between two competing scientific paradigms), (3) translation into a language which does not have a way of talking about the particular thing (the subject matter), as for example, attempting to translate Einstein's special relativity theory into the Eskimo language (as someone once suggested).
4. The nature of linguistic convergence. In this view it will be seen as the development of compatibility among ways of talking, leading ultimately to ways of talking that differ only in lexification.
A particular way of talking about something of course implies a particular way of looking at it--of perceiving it. I will assume here that our ways of talking about things accurately represent our ways of perceiving them. That is, I will talk about ways of perceiving and ways of talking as if they were equivalent.
The "things" that can be talked about are defined by the ways of talking. It has been said that each science creates its own object. In a more general way, we may say that anything that people talk about is designed by the way of talking about it.(2) However, many of the things which we talk about are assumed to have counterparts in an external world. That is, the things that are created by our ways of talking are supposed to correspond to real things in a real external world. In fact, we commonly think of ourselves as talking directly about the real things themselves just as we commonly assume that we perceive them directly, etc.
The following points may help the reader to get an idea of how various phenomena would be perceived from the proposed point of view.
1. From this perspective the whole of human language is seen as composed of ways of talking about things. From the same point of view each individual language might be seen as the precipitate from a long accumulation of ways of talking about things, some so ancient that it is no longer clear what things they were originally intended to talk about.(3) To belong to the same language, all of the disparate ways would necessarily have become assimilated into a somewhat self-compatible whole.
2. Ways of talking about things, like individual languages, are not clearly set off from one another. On the contrary, one can define them more narrowly or more broadly, distinguishing more or fewer different ways of talking. Thus, linguistics as a whole might be thought of as corresponding to a single way of talking about language or as, alternatively, as many different ways of talking as there are different schools of linguistics. Certainly when one begins to read a linguistic work, it is often easy to determine what school of linguistics it represents, and often members of different schools have had difficulty in understanding each other's writings. In fact, to quote Thomas S. Kuhn again, one of the characteristics of scientific revolutions is that adherents of different paradigms within the same discipline "inevitably talk through each other" (Kuhn 1970: 109). However, there remains much in the perception of, and the talking about, the nature of language which is characteristic of linguistics as a whole.
3. Any science, in this perspective, is also seen as a way of talking about something. Scientific discourse is a way of talking which has achieved a high level of "consensibility"--i.e., it embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement (cf. Ziman 1978: 6, Rorty 1979: 11). (However, this characteristic of science is only a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, from other ways of talking about things; cf. Wittgenstein 1958: 88, "If a language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also [queer as this may sound] in judgments."). The ultimate case of such agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement is represented by a mathematical deductive system providing mathematical proofs.
4. Ways of talking about things often have implications of much deeper sort (which may not be fully recognized by those acquiring a particular way of talking). For example, a way of talking about political issues may reflect assumptions about human nature and about natural and perhaps supernatural forces. As a corollary, the way of talking chosen for reporting a specific incident (as in news reporting) may reflect assumptions about the larger context--the political and economic forces at play, for example. And cf. Michael J. Reddy (1969: 297-98) on the implications of our way of talking about the way language works, "I do not claim that we cannot think momentarily in terms of another model of the communication process. I argue, rather, that that thinking will remain brief, isolated, and fragmentary in the face of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions...".
5. Devising ways of talking about things is one aspect of the process of acquiring understanding of the universe.
Developing ways of talking about things is particularly characteristic of our culture. Ronald and Suzanne Scollon describe an Athabaskan who learned to operate a road grader simply by observing the grader in operation until he had mastered the techniques required. He emphasized that "he could not say how he did it" (Scollon and Scollon 1979: 186). Per contra, in our culture it is characteristic to attempt to analyze skills in such a way as to permit us to talk about them. In fact, our proclivity for analysis, our ever increasing encroachment upon the domain of the ineffable, is one of the characteristics of our culture which is most often cited as objectionable by members of other cultures.
And yet the invention of ways of talking about things is central to the way we function. For example, I have heard it suggested that psychoanalytic theories (e.g., that of Freud) are of value precisely as ways of talking about things--ways of talking taught to the patient by the therapist. Furthermore, we provide formal instruction not only in subjects which are intrinsically intellectual in content, but also in matters of skill such as singing (cf. Pike 1943: 17ff.), playing tennis (on this, contrast the novelty of the approach of Gallwey 1974, where the skills are not analyzed verbally), or speaking a language. Our instructional practices are such as to require putting the skills into words; in fact, these verbal analyses are regularly compiled into textbooks which are then used by both teacher and learner in the formal instructional process. In other words, the skills to be learned are analyzed in such a way that they can be talked about as if they consisted of factual knowledge.
6. What we might call "public understanding" of the universe might be measured as a sum of our ways of talking about things. A few paragraphs earlier I contrasted understanding with knowledge. The measure of our public knowledge of the universe would consist of a sum of what John Ziman (19786) calls "consensual statements"- -that is, statements which are universally agreed to at any given moment (i.e., are universally accepted as expressing demonstrated truths). Likewise, the extent of our understanding of a particular "thing" is equal to a kind of sum of our ways of talking about that thing. In the appropriate summation the weight given to a particular way of talking should be some kind of function of its degree of consensibility and of the size of the vocabulary which it employs.
7. The supposed virtues of increasing the size of the vocabulary of an individual are really virtues of expanding one's repertoire of ways of talking about things, that is to say, the virtues of a richer world. A vocabulary test is a crude sampling of one's knowledge of ways of talking about things.
A way of talking about something might be thought of as a limited, verbally-created, reality. Or, more exactly, that which it is a way of talking about is such a reality. It is a reality made up of its own elements--objects, states, processes, acts, and so on--some peculiar to the particular reality and some shared with other realities. What is distinctive about it, above all, is its vocabulary--the vocabulary by which its elements are expressed-- but there is much more to be said about it than that. The vocabulary of a particular way of talking is, in fact, almost completely derived--more or less directly--from that of other ways of talking.
As I mentioned above, the boundaries between different ways of talking are often not clear. Probably the easiest way to isolate a way of talking is to catch it at the moment of its origin. Actual examples of the invention of ways of talking are not usually very readily accessible, but I do have some instances of my own attempts to design ways of talking about something to refer to, and I will make use of them where necessary.
Let us consider the invention of vocabulary. I have tried to show (cf. Grace 1981b: 57ff.) that new lexical items ("conventional signs") are almost always "motivated" signs. That is, the sign provides a "characterization" of the element which it represents. The characterization suggests what the element "is like".
I will illustrate with an example from my own work. In Grace 1981a I attempted to devise a way of talking about the meaning of sentences (or more exactly, what I called "sentence-level signs") as a basis for discussing the problem of translation. I wanted this way of talking to meet certain conditions. First, I wanted meaning to be represented as capable of existing independently of, and prior to, any linguistic expression. Therefore, terms such as "content", which implies the existence of a "container" (cf. Reddy 1979) seemed inappropriate from the start. Second, I wanted to assume that both the claim that anything can be said in any language and the claim that translation always distorts are true. That would require that there be some kind of meaning which can be expressed in any language and another kind of meaning which is expressible only in some particular language.
The vocabulary which I settled upon included the following terms: The meaning of a sentence-level sign is called an "idea" (which, of course, provides a kind of characterization of such a meaning). The meaning which is (by definition) capable of translation into any language is called the "basic idea". However, the basic idea preserves only what might be called the "gist" (although I did not use that term) of the meaning of the actual linguistic sign. The exact meaning of the actual sign (sentence or the like) is the "fully-formed idea". Again it can be seen that this term contains a characterization; it suggests (as I intended it to) that this "idea" has been given a specific form, and that to preserve this particular meaning in translation would require that the specific form in which it is expressed should be accurately reproduced. The idea in the precise form in which it first occurred to the speaker-to-be is called the "thought". The thought is presumably never a basic idea, but it is most often also not a fully-formed idea. A thought which is not a fully-formed idea must be "construed" (that is, it must be interpreted into a fully- formed idea) before it can be given any linguistic expression.
I should emphasize that in choosing this particular example to illustrate ways of talking, I do not intend any suggestion that it is a particularly well- designed one. I simply intend it as an illustration of the kinds of considerations which may enter in to the design of a way of talking or, at least, of its basic elements.
I must now attempt to provide the basic elements of a way of talking about ways of talking. Most of the vocabulary presented here was introduced in Grace 1981b. There a language was described as providing an inventory of emic elements (mostly kinds of individuals, objects, acts, processes, states, and the like) in the senses of the conventional signs of the language. The same description can be applied to a way of talking; a way of talking can also be seen as having such an inventory of emic elements. Many of the conventional signs are motivated signs. That is, the relation between form (lexification) and meaning (sense) is not completely arbitrary. Motivated signs either involve metaphorically extended meanings of other signs (as "foot" of a bed) or a construction composed of two or more other signs (as in multimorphemic words or idioms). Motivated conventional signs characterize the emic elements which they represent.
The signification of a motivated conventional sign therefore consists of both a sense and a characterization. The signification of an unmotivated conventional sign consists only of a sense. Signs which are not conventional signs (e.g., most phrases and sentences) are called ad hoc signs. Since an ad hoc sign has no conventional sense, its signification consists only of a characterization.
New conventional signs are nearly always motivated. That is, they not only name the new element, but they also suggest what it is like. All such characterization is at bottom metaphoric, including that of ad hoc signs. For talking about ad hoc signs I will borrow some ideas and concepts from Michael J. Reddy's paper (Reddy 1979), "The conduit metaphor--a case of frame conflict in our language about language" and from the book, Metaphors we live by, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
Consider first the concept of basic metaphor. A basic metaphor represents one structured domain of experience (usually a more abstract one) as like another (usually a more concrete one). An example from Lakoff and Johnson is : "An argument is a building" (1980: 98). Such a basic metaphor gives rise to a whole series of particular metaphors: e.g., we can talk about the "framework", "solidity", or "shakiness" of an argument; we can "construct" it, "support" it, or "buttress" it; it can "collapse" or "fall apart", etc. That is, we conceive of arguments as analogous to buildings, and talk about them in the same terms.
Richard Rorty in his book Philosophy and the mirror of nature (Rorty 1979) introduces the concept "normal discourse". This concept is described as a "generalization of Kuhn's notion of 'normal science'" (1979: 11), and defined as "...that [discourse] which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it" (1979: 320). Abnormal discourse, by contrast, "is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside" (1979: 320).
Roughly speaking, then, it seems that, in the terms which I have been using here, Rorty's "normal discourse" might be interpreted as talking within an established "way of talking". But there remains abnormal discourse. Rorty says little about the nature of abnormal discourse, but it seems that any discourse which does not conform to some established way of talking in the particular language must constitute abnormal discourse. Such a definition would seem to include any talking about things about which there is no established way of talking in the language (even though there may be in another language) or talking about things about which there is an established way of talking if one is not talking in the established way. It seems that every language must provide means for such discourse; otherwise the possibility for the expression of novel ideas (or lunacy) or the translation of exotic material would be severely limited. It would be interesting to have more information as to how abnormal discourse works. I would assume that it depends heavily on metaphor.
I have proposed here that human language can be thought of (and talked of) as made up of different ways of talking. I have been especially concerned with ways of talking as ways of dealing with particular subject matter--i.e., with ways of talking about things. This view of language is not intended to supersede other views but rather to provide an additional perspective.
I hope that this perspective will throw light on various problems, among them the difficulty of finding structure in some lexical relations, the nature of idiomaticity, the nature of the various operations which we call translation, the nature of linguistic convergence.
From this perspective each individual language is seen as the precipitate from a long accumulation of ways of talking. Sciences are seen as ways of talking about their subject matter. Devising ways of talking is singled out as an important aspect of the process of acquiring understanding of external reality.
A way of talking may be thought of as a limited, verbally- created, reality. The "things" which we talk about belong to such realities. A way of talking may be thought of as consisting basically of a vocabulary, but to say only that gives a misleadingly simple picture of the actuality. The following glossary provides the basic elements conceived of in my proposed way of talking about ways of talking about things.
Abnormal discourse. (Rorty 1979) Discourse which does not conform to any pattern of normal discourse.
Ad hoc (linguistic) sign. A nonce sign. One put together just for a particular instance of language use. Sentences (except for a relative few conventionalized ones such as proverbs, formulae, and various quotations) are ad hoc signs, as are any freely generated phrases, etc. The meaning (signification) of an ad hoc sign consists only of a characterization.
Basic metaphor. A general metaphoric relation between two structured domains of experience such that one domain (usually the more abstract one) is represented as being like the other (usually more concrete one). A basic metaphor provides the basis for the creation of particular metaphors.(4)
Characterization. That aspect of the meaning of a linguistic sign which is not established by convention, the aspect which corresponds to the motivation of the sign (unmotivated signs provide no characterization). Thus, in the case of a completely motivated sign such as most sentences, the characterization is simply the meaning of the sign. In the case of partly motivated signs, the characterization adds to the sense a suggestion as to "what it is like".
Conventional (linguistic) sign. A linguistic sign which has become conventionalized, i.e., belongs to a permanent inventory of signs which are learned as such. Contrast ad hoc sign.
Domain of experience. Any structured aspect of experience which is conventionally experienced as a gestalt. Domains of experience constitute the components of the basic metaphoric relation (e.g., "an argument is a building").
Emic element. That which is represented by the sense of a conventional sign. One of the inventory of individuals, etc., or kinds of individuals, objects, states, processes, actions, acts, etc. constituting the reality of the particular way of talking.
Motivated (linguistic) sign. A linguistic sign in which the relationship between the lexification and the signification is in some degree non- arbitrary. A motivated sign is either derived from another, unmotivated, sign by metaphoric extension (as 'foot' of a bed) or is composed of several elements. All ad hoc signs and most conventional signs are motivated.
Normal discourse. Discourse "which is conducted within an agreed- upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it" (Rorty 1979: 320). A well-established way of talking.
Particular metaphor. Any specific application of a basic metaphor. A particular metaphor is specified by a fixed sequence of words, e.g., "to put a concept into words". A particular metaphor may be either conventionalized or ad hoc.
Sense. The conventional meaning of a conventional sign. The signification of an unmotivated conventional sign consists just of a sense; that of a motivated conventional sign consists of meanings of two kinds: a sense and a characterization.
Signification. That which in association with a lexification constitutes a linguistic sign. A signification may consist of a sense alone (in the case of an unmotivated sign), of a characterization alone (in the case of an ad hoc sign or a completely motivated conventional sign), or of both a sense and a characterization (in the case of a partly motivated sign).
1. Consider the following comment by Richard Rorty (1979: 377-78), "For the edifying philosopher the very idea of being presented with 'all of the truth' is absurd, because the Platonic notion of Truth itself is absurd. It is absurd either as the notion of truth about reality which is not about reality-under-a-certain-description, or as the notion of truth about reality under some privileged description which makes all other descriptions unnecessary because it is commensurable with each of them." Back up
2. The discussion by Ernst Cassirer (1969: 60 [orig. 1933]) is worth quoting: "Il nous reste encore un dernier facteur à envisager pour nous représenter pleinement la signification du langage pour la construction de la conscience. Il ne coopère pas seulement à la construction du monde des objets, du monde de la perception et de l'intuition objective, mais il est indispensable pour la construction du monde de la pure imagination. Les deux oeuvres sont d'égale importance; car tous les stades primitifs de la conscience sont justement caractérisés par le fait que la coupure franche entre "fantaisie" et "réalité", entre "image" et "chose", entre le "représenté" et le "réel" n'est pas encore faite. Ces stades sont encore, en face de ces oppositions, dans un état d'indifférence; la séparation et la distinction de ces idées ne sont pas encore accomplies,..." Back up
3. Cf. similar points made by Wittgenstein (1958: 8) ("Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.") and by Murat Roberts (1944: 300)("Idiom belongs primarily to discourse, grammar to language. But since idiom has created language, which is its subconscious deposit, idiom has created grammar. Grammar, in [the author's] view, is fossil idiom.") Back up
4. My concept "basic metaphor" is very similar to Donald A. Schön's concept "generative metaphor" (Schön 1979). However, I thought it best to use a separate term until I can be more certain to what extent my use conforms to his. Back up
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Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor--a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In Andrew Ortony (ed.). Metaphor and thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 284-324.Back up
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