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Emergence in Language

(Extract from theory chapter of forthcoming dissertation)

Fergal Treanor, Universiteit Antwerpen, 26.11.2013

Contact fergal_treanor@hotmail.com for queries or feedback.

Abstract

This paper proposes emergence as a useful theoretical framework for the study of

language and discourse. It examines the shortcomings of compositional semantic

models, discusses existing social theories of language, and argues for the primacy

of an emergent social ontology. The Vygotskyan social mind and other theories of

extended cognition underlie the central premise: language is an emergent,

irreducible part of the lifeworld. Other factors behind language emergence –

phylogenetic and ontogenetic development, as well as linguistic relativity – are

discussed briefly.

Introduction

Language, like the lifeworld of which it is part, is an emergent. Emergents are complex

phenomena with properties not predictable or explainable from a knowledge of their parts (Kim,

1999: 6). One H2O molecule tells us nothing about water as a fluid; cellular biology does not

explain the behaviour of organisms; German lexis and grammar cannot be used to predict the

works of Humboldt. Complex interactions between lower-level phenomena emerge as new

entities with irreducible properties and causal powers of their own: Water currents influence the

paths of individual molecules, conscious intentions influence neural activity (Sperry, 1969: 534)

and Humboldt’s idealism influenced the shape of his texts and their constituent sentences. These

two key assumptions of emergentism, irreducibility and downward causation, are controversial,

and are discussed below.

Both claims are disputed by ontological minimalists (Humphreys, 1997: 2). Churchland (1994)

and Kim (1999) see the seemingly autonomous ontology of emergent phenomena simply as a

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gap in our knowledge, and prefer the more straightforward relation of supervenience.1 One

phenomenon supervenes on another if it can be explained by reduction to lower-level factors and

the relationships between them. Common examples are that heat is molecular motion, or that

disease is transmitted by bacterial infection. In principle, Kim argues, bridge laws could be

found, which would enable scientists to describe and explain all mechanisms of supervenience.

On this view, there is nothing about a drop of water which is not more sensibly understood in

terms of the aggregation of its molecules. Kim uses this position to argue for a conservative

reductionism: He allows that higher level phenomena can exist, but denies their ontological

autonomy. If the goal is “a simpler, leaner ontology” (1999: 15), then we must always prefer

explanations from the lower level.

In linguistics, relations of supervenience have long been the standard assumption. In Frege’s

model of compositionality, sentence meanings reduce to word meanings plus syntactic structures

(Busse, 2009: 112). In denotational semantics, meaning results from a kind of hierarchical

ontological stacking, with each new level being neatly reducible to its parts: Word meanings

reduce to “molecular” lexemes and “atomic” semantic features (Lyons, 1977: 317). Busse

rejects this view, as do most theories of pragmatics. To examine linguistic meaning at all is to

invite fuzziness and indeterminacy to take centre stage. This is why ideology research has to

incorporate perspectives and methods from the humanities: Where formal, objectivizing

semantic models have failed, interpretation based on theories of pragmatics and discourse

enables us to produce empirically grounded, intersubjectively viable interpretations. Emergence

as a broad theoretical framework allows for this.

Supervenience in Generativism

The generativist paradigm has supervenience at its core; Chomskyan linguistics is a quest for the

El Dorado of “competence” (Chomsky, 1968: 4) or “i-language” (Chomsky, 1986: 21-24), a

hypothetical mental organ which underlies all “performance” or language use. One generativist

author takes the chemistry metaphor to its limits, arguing that parametric theory can reveal the

1 Emergence and supervenience are sometimes used interchangeably. I will always use emergence to talk about

entities such as language, with new levels of complexity, and causal and explanatory potential of their own;

supervenience will only describe relations which can be explained by reduction – or to some authors’ belief that they

can be.

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“atoms of language”, and proposes a “periodic table” of linguistic elements (Baker, 2001). It is

important to note that the i-language hypothesis only works as long as the

competence/performance dichotomy is maintained: language is seen as a purified water droplet

in a vacuum. All factors outside the i-language that contribute to language use are seen as

external to linguistics ‘proper’. Real world linguistic data is “degenerate” (Chomsky, 1968: 24),

and aspects of meaning not isomorphic with the linguistic code are relegated to the “pragmatic

wastebasket” (Bar-Hillel, 1971).

The origin of this ‘mentalist’ view can be found in the 17th

century philosophy of mind;

competence is a quasi-scientific expression of Cartesian rationalism, a debt Chomsky has

frequently acknowledged (1968; 1986; 2003). The mental “language organ” is isomorphic with

its neural correlates, though the bridge laws remain unknown (2003). Rockwell (2005: 338-341)

dubs this position “Cartesian materialism”, as it stipulates a neat mind/brain supervenience

relation. Although Chomsky’s mind/brain awards cognition a material base, it is still a Platonic

idealization. It is just that now, instead of Descartes’ “ghost in the machine” we are asked to

believe in the “machine in the machine” (Rockwell, 2005: 338). One must ask whether this

hypothesis really constitutes an inference to the best explanation for a multifaceted phenomenon

such as language. There is no good reason why interaction, inference-making, sociocultural

constraints, genre conventions, etc. should be relegated to “degenerate” status to suit the terms

of an alluring philosophical idea.

More recently, Chomsky (2003) has allowed that linguistic competence may not be limited to

language, that there may be no denotational semantics, but only pragmatics and syntax. Syntax’s

“universal” properties may be limited to recursion (Hauser et al., 2002). This view is still

modular, as it maintains that language ‘proper’ supervenes on an essential mental core.

Silverstein (2006: 276-277) has characterised the Chomskyan ontology – like those of Saussure,

Bloomfield and Carnap before him – as ideological, in the sense that primarily, they reflect

Western academic and political culture, dreaming of idealised universal realms of perfection,

rather than serving as a useful epistemological starting point. The now extremely relativized

i-language hypothesis is “misguidedly lodged in the individual alone” (Silverstein, 2006: 276). It

has become vacuous, and lost heuristic relevance. Chomsky repeatedly claims that the

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explanation for linguistic structure “must” be sought in genetically fixed brain structures. But

there is nothing in science that would compel us to draw any such inference. Linguistics urgently

requires a paradigm shift. In this I agree with Silverstein, as well as Evans and Levinson (2009);

(2010) and Enfield (2010).

The supervenience relation, of which I argue Generativism is an instance, does no justice to the

diversity and complexity of emergent categories. It is descriptively inadequate, and lacking in

explanatory power. Emergence is an epistemologically elegant theory, because in embracing

complexity, it produces simple explanations. It starts from a position of avowed ignorance, rather

than seeking to universalize a single, narrow assumption. The central idea is easily stated:

Language comes from many sources. Explanations can come from many subdisciplines, since

emergence also provides a unifying theoretical framework for divergent subfields and

methodologies.

It is legitimate for science to simplify complex processes: Abstraction to explanatory

unobservables are crucial to any heuristic. As mentioned above, however, elegance should not

become an end in itself. Abstractions need to be useful, not beautiful. They are constructs to help

us think clearly, not ideals to be yearned for. The generativist claim to parsimony depends on the

exaltation of ‘competence’, but this can in fact produce cumbersome and irrelevant explanations

. Consider the following example:

(1) Ja, in England sind die alle mit dreiundzwanzig schon fertig, oder in Irland.

Yeah, in England they’re all already finished at twenty-three, or in Ireland.

[Yeah, in England are they all with threeandtwenty already finished, or in Ireland]

(1) is from a conversation about higher education in Europe. The speaker is comparing Germany

with the UK, the addressee comes from Ireland. These are salient factors which bear on any

understanding of the sentence. However, Generativism deliberately ignores pragmatics and

context, so the choices behind the topicalisation realised by the first adjunct, or the final

adjunct’s conversational repair function are seen as irrelevant. A generative grammar models

how the adjuncts got where they are, but disregards the why. This must be contrasted with

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conversation analysis (e.g. Sacks et al., 1974) or Arundale’s emergentist “conjoint co-

constituting” model of interactional organisation (Arundale, 2010), which seek to explain what

lies behind the choices in (1).

A derivation of (1) based on Principles and Parameters theory entails the replication of the entire

sentence, i.e. “ … oder in Irland sind die alle … etc.”, which is then deleted in the phonological

realisation2. This approach looks less like an attempt to model the actual mechanisms of an

unobservable but inferable entity, and more like the imposition of arbitrarily stipulative

technology on what are in fact extragrammatical matters. An emergentist approach allows for

different methods to suit different types of data, and is thus able to produce simpler answers than

a theory which always looks at data in only one way. There is no need to “force a clearly

pragmatic matter into a syntactico-semantic straitjacket” (Bar-Hillel, 1971: 401).

No one of the many factors contributing to language emergence should be seen as more intrinsic

than others. We might allow that to some degree, the substance contained in the sea can be

understood as ‘adulterated’ water – and water in the form of pure H2O, while practically

nonexistent in the lifeworld, is something that can be made artificially in a laboratory. But this

water is no longer seawater, just one of the factors contributing to it. We would not claim to be

studying the “i-sea” or the “deep sea”. With language, such artificial purification is neither

possible nor desirable. Some usage-based grammars incorporate the multifaceted nature of

language in their descriptions, and in this project, where grammatical description is required,

construction- and lexicogrammar-based models will be used (Fillmore et al., 1988; Kay and

Fillmore, 1999; Aitchinson, 2003; Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004).

Strangely, in the Chomskyan view, language use must be considered emergent, as ‘performance’,

is assumed to be indeterminate. While syntax is said to reduce to a finite set of principles,

Chomsky’s “creativity” means that the way in which a person uses language, even while

constrained by these principles, cannot be predicted (1968: 6). In other words, the theory claims

no explanatory power for any aspect of language outside sentence-internal grammar, though

even here, straightforward pragmatic readings can provide more illuminating explanations.

2 Thanks are due to Daniela Maas for guiding me through the technical details of Principles and Parameters.

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Eliminativist Materialism

In theories of consciousness, reductionists posit a supervenience relation between mind and

brain; mental processes are seen simply as isomorphic representations of neural ones. Chomsky

(1995) rejects such reductions, but in his later work tends to refer to the “mind/brain”, rather

than the “mind”. A stronger challenge to Chomsky’s mentalism comes from eliminative

materialism. In a series of influential papers (e.g. Churchland, 1981; Churchland, 1994), Paul

and Patricia Churchland have argued that reduction not only explains, but also entirely eliminates

“folk” categories. Focusing on the reduction from mental to neural description, they predict that

qualia, i.e. emotions and states of mind, will disappear from scientific vocabulary, becoming as

obsolete as the entities of antiquated pseudoscience, such as the humours, phlogiston, or the

luminiferous ether. This would also apply to theoretical mental entities, such as Chomsky’s “i-

language”.

When the right examples are used, eliminativist materialism seems to make sense.

Methodological examination of micro-level processes has caused science to progress. We now

know that worms do not spontaneously come into being in rotten apples, and that disease is not

transmitted by sorcery. But these examples are anecdotal; in much of science, the inherent

features of macro-level phenomena are not predictable from the micro-level. In fluid mechanics,

the universally accepted continuum hypothesis identifies a group of several thousand H2O

molecules as the smallest useful unit of analysis; anything smaller cannot be regarded as water

(Batchelor, 1967: 4-5). This minimum unit is in turn subject to the dynamics of the body of water

of which it is a part. Of course, a droplet of water, purified and suspended in a vacuum, has its

own properties, and they are no doubt fascinating, but we live on a planet where water always

occurs together with minerals, forms part of an ecosystem, and interacts with rapids, banks,

coastlines and the force of gravity as part of a river or sea. Bodies of water, their behaviour in the

lifeworld, and their ongoing interaction with their environment, present more interesting and

more pressing scientific questions. Language, like the sea, astounds us with its complexity and

variation. Reductive explanation might help us understand some limited aspects, but not all, and

certainly not downward causation.

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A further clear objection to eliminative materialism is the question: ‘Why stop there?’. Chomsky

wants to reduce language to mental processes; the Churchlands want to reduce mental processes

to neural processes; why not reduce these to questions of cellular biology, then to molecular

bonding, atomic structure, subatomic particles, and so on? Eventually we would have to

conclude that all matter, including our bodies, is just a manifestation of cosmic energy, and that

any other perspective can only be expressed in a sort of obsolete folksy vernacular. From a

spiritual perspective, there should be no objection to this view, but to researchers it is useless.

Emergentist authors (Sperry, 1986: 269; Rockwell, 2005: 258; Elder-Vass, 2010: 55) have all

used similar criticisms to debunk eliminativist materialism.

Explanation does not simply move from micro- to macro-levels, as assumed by Churchland’s

concept of “reductive contact” (1994: 29). Different orders and types of phenomena interact in

complex ways. There is no ‘true north’, even in materialist science. All units of analysis are

necessarily stipulative and contestable. When defining empirical categories, therefore,

researchers must make a clear case for their heuristic value in relation to specific questions. The

present dissertation aims to establish explanatory contact between related phenomena, but

remains open-minded as to what might explain what. A linguistic continuum hypothesis assumes

irreducibility of meaning, and treats texts, sentences or lexical choices as autonomous but

interrelated units of analysis. In Vygotskyan terms, language is a semiotic medium in the

mutually constitutive relation of mind and society, and any account of the factors behind its use

is necessarily interpretive. This approach lacks the ‘clarity’ of Churchland’s vertical model of

ontological levels (1994: 24), but it is closer to the facts of the lifeworld. Theory is necessary to

lift science out of the “empirical sand-heap world” (Welton, 1973), but theory must reflect

reality: where conflicts arise, verisimilitude is more important than elegance. Emergence heeds

this principle; supervenience does not.

Irreducibility and Downward Causation

More detail is needed here on the emergentist view: the central claim alone – that language is

influenced by many different factors – is as vacuous as the claim that something about our brain

enables us to use language. To begin, I will apply to language the two substantial claims made in

emergentist theory: Irreducibility and Downward causation. Emergentist research must seek to

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falsify these claims, and this project is no exception. The existing arguments for both, however,

are theoretically and empirically robust.

Irreducibility: In the case of water, the emergent ontological level or continuum is composed of

smaller units of the same substance. However, new levels of complexity are reached where new

properties emerge from differing sources, as with the H2O molecule compared to O2 or H2, the

sea as compared to a grain of salt, or language compared to any one of the many heterogeneous

factors giving rise to it. This argument rests on the principle of multiple instantiability, which

identifies a “mismatch” between emergents and “unitary concepts in a lower realm”

(Humphreys, 1997). Language exemplifies this, since any instance of its production, which

Halliday (2010) calls “logogenesis”, is the combined product of so many different forces that

they have never yet been definitively listed, let alone their interactions described. Language

emergence is heterarchical, not hierarchical. Sawyer (2004: 261) calls this kind of emergence

“wildly disjunctive”.

The reality with which linguists – especially pragmaticians – are confronted, is one of fuzziness

and indeterminacy. We have to make do with the weird ontology mentioned by Gumperz and

Levinson (1991). Different constitutive phenomena can result in identical linguistic data. If a

bureaucrat produces a document advocating a given policy position, it may be that they

themselves agree, or it may be that they are simply doing their job. Knowledge of genre

constraints and extralinguistic context helps narrow down the range of interpretive choices, but

linguists cannot hope to discover an objective, underlying truth. “Reductive contact” has no role

to play. Intersubjectively valid explanations, consistent with the facts of language use, are the

best we can hope for. This echoes the pragmatic principle of non-bi-uniqueness: There is no

stable relationship between form and meaning, between linguistic and social categories (see e.g.

Levinson, 1983: 15-18; Verschueren, 1999: 2-11; van Leeuwen, 2008: 23-25).

Extreme complexity alone, however, does not prove irreducibility; as Churchland points out,

current ignorance does not imply indefinite future ignorance (1994: 31). But there is another

reason why language data should be considered irreducible: As shown above, reduction only

seems useful as long as we assume that it is always an explanatory move. This is not the case for

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language, the analysis of which depends very much on what it is one wants to find out, and

which often involves an ‘upward’ move, e.g. explaining the structure of a sentence by reference

to the interaction or text of which it is part, or a text by reference to its sociocultural situatedness.

Any reduction, e.g. to factors determining phonological or propositional structure alone, always

singles out one aspect of language at the expense of all others. It is not a matter of doctrine that

language data could never, in principle, be reduced, so much as that for most research questions,

they need not or should not be.

Downward causation: emergent entities have causative powers at macro level. To believe that

our consciousness is an entity in its own right, and not simply an epiphenomenon of neural

activity, i.e. to believe humans have any amount of free will, is to accept downward causation. If

consciousness is not needed for decision-making, i.e. not an adaptive evolutionary phenomenon,

then why does it exist? Similarly, emergent social and cultural entities, or “social facts” in the

Durkeimian sense, influence conscious behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. A detailed

account of discourse as a causative force is given in Elder-Vass (2011: 151-153). Such facts, e.g.

institutional norms and genre conventions, have been described as “sedimented cognition”

(Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Levinson, 2006). Computational abilities (themselves an

indeterminate mix of phylogenetic and ontogenetic factors) also influence language use, as do

stylistic idiosyncrasies and many other factors. As the facts of language provide the only reliable

primary data, how are we to tease apart the contributing factors with any certainty? And how are

we to even categorize such heterogeneous factors according to which ‘level’ they belong to? It

also cannot be assumed that the factors (incompletely) listed above operate within clearly

bounded domains, that their interactions take place simultaneously, or that directions of causality

are in any way consistent. MacWhinney (2005a) identifies no less than seven different

timeframes for processes influencing language use, and the short-term discursive diachronicity

examined in this project is not one of them. Downward causation does not displace ‘upward’

causation, but rather brings additional complexity and indeterminacy to the mix. Ultimately,

emergentist accounts of causation require close analysis of data, and will tend to sacrifice

generalizability in favour of truthlikeness and close description on a case-by-case basis.

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Emergence as a unifying theoretical framework

Emergence not only replaces the narrow focus of Generativism, but also addresses Bourdieu’s

“occasionalist fallacy” (Duranti, 2005): Too many social theories of language, in rejecting

excessive abstraction, take on the character of lists of Things-You-Can-Do-With-Language. This

problem is visible in Hymes’ “On Communicative Competence” (1972), and Halliday, while

accepting the need for “general concepts needed for describing” (1978: 33), runs into the same

difficulty: His initially useful threefold division of ideational, interpersonal and textual functions

expands into an unwieldy mass of obscure terms. His programmatic call to “impose as low a

degree of idealization on the facts as is compatible with a systematic enquiry” (1978: 52) runs

aground in shallow waters. To state, without due regard to other factors, that linguistic systems

reflect social systems, is a misleading simplification. Language is not reducible to mental

structure or social relations – even in investigations with a relatively narrow focus, overarching

complexity must be assumed. Emergentism allows us to ask whether a given instance of

language use is primarily a reflection of social structure, or whether it is more usefully

understood in other ways. This is essential for any investigation which values a critical

assessment of its own claims. MacWhinney explicitly calls for such intradisciplinary openness:

“The goal of emergentism is to replace accounts based on stipulations with accounts in which

structures emerge from the interaction of known processes” (2005b: 4).

The overarching goal of an emergentist linguistics is to chart the mechanisms of interaction

between phylogenetic, historical, cultural, ontogenetic and online processes, and their role in

producing language. The phylogenetic emergence (MacWhinney, 2005a: 193-194) of what

generativists see as innate abilities is now being researched by evolutionary syntacticians such as

Hurford (2011). Such abilities seem more readily detectable by linguists whose subject area

involves the analysis of “microscopic” processes, i.e. syntacticians, morphologists, and

especially phonologists. Certain basic morphosyntactic and phonological regularities may be

carried genetically, though these need not be universal within our species, depending on one’s

view of the nature and speed of evolution (Dunn et al., 2011). Coevolution – the interaction over

different timescales between genetics and culture, is also constitutive of language emergence

(MacWhinney, 2005a; Evans and Levinson, 2010). MacWhinney argues that this renders

irrelevant the prevailing ‘nature/nurture’ debate in linguistics: “When we discuss some ability in

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the infant, we often ask ourselves, “Is this ability innate or learned?” There is nothing wrong

with this question, as long as we realize that it really a question about the timeframe involved in

the delineation of the relevant emergent processes” (2005b: 5). MacWhinney cites evidence for

a certain amount of brain plasticity: young children with brain lesions in known learning centres

are able use other parts of the brain to learn language. This suggests that ceteris paribus,

language does tend to be produced in the same parts of the brain, but that ontogenetic processes

are plastic enough to make changes where necessary.

Evans and Levinson (2009: 429) characterise observable regularities as “stable engineering

solutions satisfying multiple design constraints”. If our brains are assumed to provide a highly

flexible range of possibilities for ontogenetic development and language use, constrained by

interaction with environmental factors, it is plausible that linguistic structures would converge on

a relatively narrow range of outcomes. These will tend to display family resemblances

(Wittgenstein, 2004), or Vygotskian diffuse complexes (Taylor, 2003: 111-112), but will not

necessarily be derived from a common root. This implies that not only ‘performance’, but

grammar too results from speaker-external factors. This view complements the emergentist

perspective, as it brings even the most ‘innate’ aspects of grammar into an emergentist model,

and reopens the Boasian question of linguistic relativity.

Linguistic Relativity

Speakers’ native languages influence their cognition and hence their world view. This hypothesis

is controversial, but cannot be dismissed. Language is our primary form of access to complex

concepts, the medium of conscious thought through which world views are formed. If we accept

that social and cultural norms are factors in language emergence, even at the level of grammar,

the conclusion is clear. Language is

“not only a tool for social action and for the maintenance of social relations, but is also

fundamentally designed for, and by, these functions… a public system, above and beyond any

individual’s embodiment of it” (Enfield, 2010: 7).

In 1920, Franz Boas wrote:

“the categories of language compel us to see the world arranged in certain definite conceptual

groups which, on account of our lack of knowledge of linguistic processes, are taken as objective

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categories, and which, therefore, impose themselves upon the form of our thoughts.” (Deutscher,

2011: 266).

Boas’ student, Edward Sapir coined the term “linguistic relativity”. This perspective was shared

by Benjamin Lee Whorf, and became known as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, though Hill and

Mannheim regard it as “not a hypothesis in the traditional sense, but an axiom, a part of the

initial epistemology and methodology of the linguistic anthropologist” (1992: 383). They too

criticise the ideology behind theories of grammatical innateness, which “may be a product of an

essentializing ontology, deriving from practices of referential objectification in European

languages”. The only universal cognitive abilities posited in linguistic relativism are assumed to

be prelinguistic. (Hill and Mannheim, 1992: 383-385).

This aligns with the idea, articulated e.g. by Everett (2005; 2012), that the language faculty

reflects general learning abilities, rather than the invariant rules of ‘i-language’. Even some

recent research within the generativist paradigm has sought to de-emphasize the idea of

genetically fixed syntactic structures: Culicover and Jackendoff3 (2006: 415) point out that

analyses based on generativist assumptions are not supported by psycholinguistic evidence, and

argue that much of our grammatical ability can be explained as “domain-general”. Culicover

and Jackendoff are far from being neo-Whorfians, but their work removes some of the prejudices

against language development as a flexible process of constant interaction with our social and

cultural environment. Such a view puts variability at the centre of all linguistic analysis. It is

highly plausible that:

“… grammatical categories, to the extent that they are obligatory and habitual, and relatively

inaccessible to the average speaker’s consciousness, will form a privileged location for

transmitting and reproducing cultural and social categories” (Hill and Mannheim, 1992: 387).

Linguistic relativity can be observed in information structure: Spanish tends to topicalise events

while English topicalises agency. Stanford researchers have reported observable effects in

cognition, i.e. that hispanophones are less likely to assign blame for unwanted events, while

anglophones will tend to be more concerned with culpability (Boroditsky, 2011; Fausey and

Boroditsky, 2011).

3 See also Culicover PW and Jackendoff R. (2005) Simpler syntax: Oxford University Press Oxford. Also Culicover

PW and Jackendoff R. (2012) Same-except: A domain-general cognitive relation and how language expresses it.

Language 88: 305-340.

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It is also found the lexicon, where colour schemas are represented differently, or in markedness

reversals, which lead to a shift in the naming of things. In the Tenejapa Tzeltel language of

Mexico, the word cih originally referenced a kind of deer. When sheep were introduced by the

Spanish, they were first referenced using a marked form meaning “cotton deer”. But as sheep

came to dominate, cih on its own was used to refer to them, while deer became marked and

known as “wild sheep” (Battistella, 1990: 58). The change in the meanings of cih happened over

time in a group of language users; this supports a cultural ontology of language as a medium of

intersubjectively distributed meaning conventions.

Similarly, the German Beschäftigungsfähigkeit was coined to translate employability, a buzzword

of the Bologna Process. Struggles to express the concept in German are visible in a succession of

government documents. This supports the view of language as a bridge between culture and

cognition, but also implies that cultural constraints on cognition and lexical meaning can be

overcome when the need arises. There is plenty of flexibility in what Halliday (1978; 2004) calls

“meaning potential”. We must accept that linguistic relativity is non-deterministic: Whorf

famously erred in thinking that the Hopi had no time expressions; they simply use spatial

metaphors to express time (Duranti, 1997: 58). This makes it difficult to accept the more

controversial claims of Everett (2005), that adult monoglot speakers of Pirahã have no access in

their cognition to the idea of a cousin, or to any integer higher than two.

When addressing linguistic relativity, researchers should be careful to apply suitable categories

of analysis. Why should research be limited to a single variable? Native speaker status is only

one small factor in the complex social processes reflected in language use. How does Spanish

vary by speakers’ age, gender, regional identity and social class? What is the role of Genre, and

of the “sedimented cognition” (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Levinson, 2006) of institutional

structures? Are these factors to be considered ‘degenerate’, a blemish on an idealized world

‘community’ of Hispanophones? Quantitative methods do have the potential to inform the

selection of case studies for in-depth research. But statistical research alone impoverishes our

understanding of language use. Without undue arbitrary stipulation, language does not lend itself

to measurement. What is missing in Boroditsky’s method is a self-consciously interpretive

analysis, paying due regard to the “thousand sources of culture” (Barthes, 1967) – surprising in

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an area of inquiry so intimately bound up with questions of meaning. This deficit exemplifies the

“two cultures” problem (Snow, 1959). It is uncommon for researchers to bring together

principles from the humanities and natural sciences, but the analysis of ideological meaning calls

for just this. The “public system” mentioned by Enfield goes beyond mere correlations between

large-scale lexicogrammatical convention and world view; language use is a dynamic process,

where social and cultural forces of many kinds converge. As Bakhtin has put it:

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the

speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. (1981: 294).

Nevertheless, I agree fully with the core assumption of linguistic relativity: language both

enables and shapes conscious thought. It is a social and cultural fact, with causal powers of its

own. The emergentist perspective holds that language is neither constituted exclusively by, nor

reducible to brain activity. It also consists in the social relations between speakers. Our

relationship with the lifeworld and our ability to achieve intersubjectivity are all utterly bound up

with language. Language is the medium which maintains the link between cognition and the

world.

This project pays due regard to the fact that all primary materials, and many secondary ones, are

in German. How important (or not) this is will be reflected in the analysis. I do not intend to

chase after Humboldt’s “Weltansicht der Sprachen” (Bußmann, 2002: 577). Nor do I believe,

like William Harvey, that the German case system “is part of the explanation for German

philosophy’s orientation toward system construction” (Deutscher, 2011: 2504). Everett (2005;

2012) argues that languages adapt to cultural needs; German, a major world language, is unlikely

to lack concepts widely disseminated in Europe and the western world. I do, however, expect the

specific culture and social structure of the German public sector to be reflected in genre

conventions, and the cultural clash in education policy – also peculiar to Germany – to be

mediated through these genres.

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The Sociocentric Mind

It appears plausible that if a genetically inscribed linguistic universal does exist, it is the general

ability of ontogenetic processes to interact optimally with context in the very broadest sense, i.e.

all factors influencing linguistic and cognitive development, such as history, geography, culture,

society, intimacy, anatomy, etc. These factors are managed by humans’ varied and highly

adaptable cognitive abilities (Verschueren, 1999: 89-90; Enfield, 2010: 5) This idea is reflected

in Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation, (Hasan, 2002; Wertsch, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978;

1986), which identifies language as the bridge between cognition and the world.

Vygotsky reversed Piaget’s assumption that individual subjects are the basis for interaction and

the construction of social relations. His most important insight was that language in the mind is

constituted by language in the world (Duranti, 1997: 282-283). The “inner speech” of children

and adults alike is a reflection of social and cultural relations (Vygotsky, 1986: 27-30, 94-95).

The ontological implication is that language, while supported by cognition, is primarily a part of

human culture, history and society, and that our minds are essentially oriented to the lifeworld.

This is consistent with the strange constitutive circularity mentioned by Gumperz and Levinson

(1991). The Vygotskian view has been highly influential in the literature on Education and

Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Mercer, 2002; Barton and Tusting, 2005; de

Almeida Mattos, 2000), and the “sociocentric component of mind” (Silverstein, 2006: 277)

forms a basic assumption in linguistic anthropology (Duranti, 1997: 281-284; Everett, 2012:

227). As Duranti puts it, language “comes to us with a lot of decisions already made” (1997:

32).

The interactions between thought and the world remain indeterminate in Vygotsky’s theory. The

methodological upshot is that units of analysis in linguistic study should be meaning-carrying

fragments which reflect the whole, rather than “elements” as would result from a purely

phonetic or lexical reduction (1986: 211-212). This view is also reflected in the Sprachtheorie of

Karl Bühler, Vygotsky’s contemporary. His “Organon-Modell” proposed a three-sided sign,

whose functional aspects are irreducible to their phonetic or grammatical components (Bühler,

1934). Bühler, who worked in Vienna alongside Carnap and Neurath, rejected the atomizing

epistemological goals of logical syntax. He insisted that the subjective and affective situation of

16

speaker and addressee must be incorporated into any model of communication. This led to the

first detailed study of deixis and indexicality. Echoes of Bühler’s work can be heard in later

social conceptions of language, such as Halliday’s position that social roles are constructed

through language use (1978: 14) , or Verschueren’s “medium of adaptation” (1995: 19).

The Vygotskyan view also finds expression in recent theories from cognitive science and

philosophy, e.g. Clark and Chalmers’ “extended mind” (1998), and Rockwell’s “brain-body-

world-nexus” (2005). In these theories, the mind does not simply supervene on the brain, but is

externalised to objects and interlocutors in the lifeworld. The use of a scrap of paper to write a

shopping list or to search for a rhyme is a physical extension of thought. Our knowledge is also

strongly integrated with that of others; I am at best vaguely aware of the difference between a

baboon and a mandrill, but I know I can look it up on Wikipedia during a period of

procrastination. This line of thinking invites us to take a step further and see language and

meaning as fully distributed phenomena, existing in a shared semiotic space:

“Language seems to be one of the central means by which cognitive processes are extended into

the world… consider a reliable feature of the human environment, such as the sea of words. This

linguistic surround envelopes us from birth. Under such conditions, the plastic human brain will

surely come to treat such structures as a reliable resource to be factored into the shaping of on-

board cognitive routines. … Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive

vortices which help constitute human thought.” (Clark and Chalmers, 1998: 7)

Human minds are junctions in a socially distributed system of meaning. This leads us to a

paradoxical conclusion about the ontology of language: Cognitive research is of great value, but

its results always point us in the same direction: outward. The intensional quality of language –

to borrow a philosophical term – is the fact that language is being used at any time and in any

way. This is not necessarily an abstraction away from the facts; it is, rather, a shorthand for an

immense volume of facts, which we can conceive of only in principle. As researchers, we can

only observe extensional instances of language use as the basis for empirical enquiry. These

extensions can include the ‘language’ of totalitarian ideologies, the language of Schiller, the

language of international aviation, the language of football interviews and lovers’ disputes, or the

language of HE policy documents produced by German federal and regional authorities between

17

1999 and 2010. A ‘language’ in the lay sense, such as Spanish or Pirahã, is a special kind of

extension, as it usually encompasses highly diverse social and semiotic processes.

The “intentions of others” are ever present in our own minds. The more group-oriented the

activity type is, the more the potential for idiosyncrasy diminishes. Flight attendants and

language teachers may bring their own personal style into their work – even to great effect – but

they are also massively constrained to use language in specific ways in order to perform the tasks

they are obliged to perform. In the case of German HE policy documents, 1999-2010, we must

assume that texts are produced in such a way that individual authorship is irrelevant. In such

cases, texts primarily reflect the social, cultural and political forces which they embody. It is

these forces which will inform the ontological assumptions of this dissertation. Naturally, less

salient explanations must always be borne in mind for any instance of language use, but the

focus of enquiry will remain on the relationships between language use and social factors.

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