My point here is that contemporary linguistic theory has become culture-centric to a disturbing degree. It has come to view human language as a whole mainly from the perspective of a particular category of speaker--those who are most adept in composing and analyzing autonomous text. And this, of course, is a category of which most linguists are representative members.
This us-centeredness didn’t begin with the work of Noam Chomsky, but that work has certainly given it a boost. The prominence accorded to syntax in the Post-Chomskyan paradigm has no doubt been a significant factor. It doesn’t really matter whether this new focus on syntax received its initial stimulus from outside linguistics (although the attention given to syntax by logicians[1] concerned with the problem of designing a language for a unified science is certainly suggestive); it did mark a major shift of direction within linguistics.
Anyway, Chomsky was convinced that all human languages had syntactic systems that conformed to the same set of principles, and that these principles were built into the human brain.(2) Since these principles were universal, he argued, it wasn't necessary to survey many languages--most of the principles of this inborn syntactic capacity could be learned from sufficiently intensive analysis of a single language. English was the most convenient language, and provided a large share of the initial evidence. In fact, it still provides a large share today.
Not only was it assumed that (as potential sources of evidence) any one language was equivalent to any other, the same assumption was made about the individual speakers of a language: one speaker was equivalent to any other. Why? Because the “acquisition” of the language occurred instinctively. Human infants spontaneously acquired the language to which they were exposed. Furthermore--it was assumed--any differences that might exist in the conditions under which different individuals acquire their first languages are irrelevant to the outcome.
This last assumption has important corollaries. For one thing, it would follow that language acquisition by children raised in a small, homogeneous, and isolated community in the state of “primary orality”(3) wouldn’t differ in any significant way from those raised in any other circumstances, for example:
1. In a society so permeated by writing that the child is constantly surrounded by written messages, where written language is regularly assumed to have greater validity that oral (to the extent even that pronunciation has again and again accommodated to spelling), where literacy is taken for granted to such an extent that an illiterate person is subjected to repeated obstacles (and oftentimes outright humiliation).
2. In a contemporary society by caregivers with years of formal schooling who are keenly aware of the importance of their child’s learning to read at an early age, and to speak “good English” (or its equivalent), and who are thoroughly indoctrinated in the standard (grammar-dictionary) model of what it needs to learn (an indoctrination that may be expressed in such ways as isolating individual words for the child).
3. By caregivers who are skilled in using an intellectualized standard language, who are skilled in composing and parsing the carefully formulated language that has been developed for scientific and legal documents, who--in other words--are particularly skilled in the use of Bernstein’s “elaborated code”.
Speakers with a dozen or more years of formal schooling (or, in the case of acquisition research, the offspring of such speakers) have often been the most easily accessible informants, and have provided a large share of the evidence that gets cited. Thus, it's happened that individuals who have been formally educated in modern Standard English or one of its equivalents seem tacitly to be recognized as typical of speakers of natural language. In such circumstances, the presumed typical "speaker" might actually be as much a reader and writer of "autonomous text" as a speaker.
Moreover, in descriptive statements referring simply to "English", “English” is generally (again tacitly) understood to mean what the prescriptivists would want it to mean--the kind of "Standard English" taught in the schools. In Grace 1996 I give examples of some constructions that don't conform to the rules of Standard English, but are nevertheless in common use by people who must be counted as speakers of English (if not of English, certainly not of any other recognized language). However, such prescriptively incorrect constructions are usually not accounted for in descriptive statements about English.
(Considering the important role that the English language has played in the construction of our understanding of how languages are constructed and how they work, there seems to be reason to worry about how much culture-centrism in linguists’ approach to English has distorted this understanding. Suppose for a moment that all descriptive statements made about “English” were suddenly required to account for all of the common usages of people anywhere who are ordinarily counted as speakers of English. Under such conditions, how much less homogeneous and logically coherent might the syntactic system of this paradigm language appear?)
Anyway, the theory of language developed by linguists working in the Post-Chomskyan paradigm has relied disproportionately on evidence drawn from this quasi-élite kind of speaker using this prescribed variety of language. Skillful writing and interpretation of autonomous text requires especially strong analytical skills, and these educated speakers should probably be expected to have significantly more such skills than the average speaker. This is probably one of several factors that have led to language descriptions that emphasize generalizations, ascribing as much of language processing as possible to computation in preference to holistic knowledge.
Is it also the principal factor that satisfies many linguists that the special attention given to syntax by the Post-Chomskyan paradigm is justified?
However as the theory has developed, questions for further research--especially questions concerning universality--have arisen. Some linguists have made efforts to find answers for these questions and generally to test the theory in a wide range of languages. However, convenience again has led in a large proportion of the cases to the choice of highly literate speakers of other "modernized" languages--what in Grace 2002b were referred to as "Modern Standard Languages".
It’s true that linguists have looked at some non-modernized languages as well--including some that aren't formally written. However, there’s something less than fully satisfying about this work. Although there can be no doubt of the value of developing a universal theory that's valid for all languages, there's also a danger in approaching languages with a ready-made theory that specifies what it's important to look for. In such circumstances, how significant should we consider it if the investigators find what they were looking for? And at the same time, how certain can we feel that there was nothing of significance that was overlooked simply because it had no apparent counterpart in the modernized languages the theory was developed on?
For example, Marianne Mithun (1984) writes about the difficulties involved in trying to figure out what is and what isn’t subordination in some Amerindian and Australian languages. When confronted with evidence such as Mithun’s, linguists have sometimes taken comfort in the fact that it has so far been possible to identify something answering to the concept of subordination in every language brought forward. But that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who remembers what Thomas Kuhn said regarding the research of “normal science”, viz., “we shall want finally to describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education” (Kuhn 1970: 5).
Shouldn’t we wonder instead whether deciding what is and what isn’t to be counted as subordination is really a problem that linguists working on those languages should feel obliged to solve? As Frederick Newmeyer (2002: 369) has pointed out, “…if grammar is tailored to the needs and properties of language users (to whatever degree), and language users now are not what they used to be, then it follows that grammar is probably not what it used to be.” By the same token, it follows that if the users of some contemporary languages, such as those Mithun cites, differ from the educated users of Modern Standard Languages, the grammar of the one may not reasonably be assumed to be the same as that of the other.
At one time there were linguists who argued that every language should be described in its own terms. Is it not possible that if some of the languages Mithun discusses were described in their own terms, concepts like “subordinate clause” might be reduced to a very peripheral role (or even fail to be included at all) in their description?
But if we accept that as a
possibility, the next question might be: What if the authors of the reigning
paradigm of linguistic theory had been speakers, not of Standard English but of,
say, one of the polysynthetic languages of
What if we were to conclude that they might not be--that starting from radically different languages would quite possibly have led to a significantly different set of hypothetical universals to be tested? For example, what if it seemed that subordinate clauses could perhaps have had only an insignificant place or no place at all in the new scheme?
Should we then interpret that as proof that we’d just been very lucky that linguistic theory had Modern Standard Languages as its launching point? That such languages provided the most productive basis that could have been found for the study of universal grammar? Would we then conclude that it’s only the efforts to design an instrument for autonomous text that have revealed the most interesting aspects of our inborn language faculty?
Such a conclusion would mean that there are many things about our inborn language faculty that we’d never have been able to discover if we had not had access to languages spoken in communities that had reached a certain stage of cultural evolution. Thus, some linguistic abilities would necessarily have been lying dormant for eons, waiting for the invention of writing and the notion of autonomous text before they could reveal themselves in all their complexity.(4)
But that must make us wonder if even our present standard languages represent the ultimate state or if there are more revelations in the wings awaiting their cues--make us wonder whether we have finally reached the state of language envisaged by our innate UG, or are only at the beginning of the disclosures.
On the other hand, we might refuse to believe that the evolutionary forces that produced the human language faculty were able to foresee thousands of years of cultural evolution and design a suitable instrument for the linguistic needs of that future world. And we might conclude that the Post-Chomskyan paradigm has arrived at a very culture-centric distortion of what is “natural” in human languages and innate in their speakers.
It may be inevitable that serious research on any subject will result in the construction of Kuhnian "conceptual boxes" and "strenuous and devoted attempts to force nature into" them. Indeed, a certain element of culture-centrism may itself be inescapable. The point here is that the Post-Chomskyan paradigm, in apparent unawareness of the extent of its culture-centrism, has allowed it to go virtually unchecked and thus to become a principal source of collateral damage.
1. Such as Rudolf Carnap. Cf. his title, “The logical syntax of language” (Carnap 1951). (Back up)
2. See the references cited in Grace 2002a. (Back up)
3. “Primary orality” is Walter Ong’s term. He (Ong 1982:11) defines it as “the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print” (Back up)
4. I should mention one alternative that has been suggested, namely that the evolution of the language faculty might have continued while the cultural evolution was going on. If such evolution could be assumed, it would not be necessary to suppose that the original language faculties, or even those of any speakers before the invention of writing, provided for the grammatical intricacies that have been developed in Modern Standard Languages. These could have evolved alongside other developments since the invention of writing.
What seems immediately to condemn any such suggestion is its necessary corollary that the language faculties of peoples without writing, in cultures that haven’t experienced evolutionary changes associated with the introduction of writing and the Modern Standard Language, would not have undergone the proposed evolution. Thus, it would follow that a person from any contemporary pre-literate community--or whose ancestors up until the last few generations were pre-literate--would be biologically incapable of learning to compose or interpret highly technical expository prose. Since the obstacle would be biological, it would mean that even if a child were taken as a new-born infant and raised in the most favorable environment, the limitations would still impose themselves.
As far as I know all available indications are that there would be no such result--that our species includes no subspecies with significantly different linguistic potential from any other. (Back up)
Carnap Rudolf. 1951. The logical
syntax of language.
Mithun, Marianne. 1984. How to avoid subordination. Proceedings of the tenth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 493-523. (Back up)
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