Roy
Harris
Online
On ‘primitive’ languages in linguistic theory
Modern linguistic theory is haunted by a ghost. It is the ghost of a primitive language. It is interesting to compare three influential apparitions of this ghost: presented respectively by Saussure, Wittgenstein and Chomsky. The language in question is primitive not in the sense of being the language of some ‘primitive’ community actually existing, but in the sense of being a primitive model designed to capture in all their simplicity the essential features of any verbal system which deserves to be called ‘a language’.
Saussure’s version of the ghost is implicit in his account of the typical ‘speech circuit’ (circuit de la parole; Cours: 27-8). Wittgenstein’s makes its appearance in §2 of his Philosophical Investigations. (Wittgenstein 2001). (For detailed discussion see Harris 2009: 125-33; or Harris 2010.) Chomsky’s haunts his account of the ideal speaker-hearer (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: 3). In all three cases, the ghost is invoked in order to fill a gap which the theory in question lacks. All three cases thus stand in contrast to a linguistic approach such as integrationism, which neither offers nor needs such a phantom.
* * *
Saussure’s primitive language is evidently based on his notion of what an individual linguistic sign is, i.e. a bi-planar unit, the two planes being those of ‘form’ and ‘meaning’. For Saussure, the simplest linguistic sign consists in the union of a form plus a meaning, the form being a ‘sound pattern’ and its meaning a ‘concept’.
It is particularly important to note that the sound patterns of the words are not to be confused with actual sounds. The word patterns are psychological, just as the concepts associated with them are (Cours: 29).
Again:
A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern. The sound pattern is not actually a sound; for a sound is something physical. A sound pattern (image acoustique) is the hearer’s psychological impression of a sound, as given to him by the evidence of his senses (Cours: 98).
Saussure here rejects an older and even cruder but less ghostly bi-planar concept (nomenclaturism), in which the meaning of a linguistic sign is the object for which it stands, while the form is the name of the object (thus London is the name of London, Socrates the name of Socrates, etc.).
Although Saussure’s linguistics is explicitly phonocentric, there is no semiological reason why a biplanar format cannot be applied to visual signs as well. Here a linguistic form would be construed as a visual pattern, as opposed to a visible mark, while its meaning could still be treated as an associated concept. Traditionally, this is the way a monolingual dictionary is commonly interpreted. One column of entries specifies the visual ‘form’ of the words listed, while the accompanying column attempts to specify their ‘meaning’. This is done by citing supposedly equivalent words in the same language (unforgettable: not posssible to forget).
It is worth noting at this point that once the linguistic sign is treated in this way as a combination of form and meaning, it is a simple step to see communication as requiring no more than familiarity with the same signs as one’s interlocutor(s). In other words, for Saussure linguistic communication is ‘internal’ to the speech circuit itself. There is no need for any appeal to factors lying outside. That is why Saussure embarks on no discussion of the circumstances in which speech takes place, offers no theory of reference to support his theory of meaning, and treats the hearer’s task as a simple reversal of the speaker’s.
In Saussure’s conception, a single sign cannot function as a primitive language (langue). He offers no explicit argument for this, but assumes that a primitive (i.e. theoretically simplest) language is a set of sound patterns plus their meanings, these pairs being sufficient to enable A and B to communicate via speech. Communication itself is envisaged as a process of telementation (i.e. thought transference), and this – he assumes – offers no difficulty if A and B are familiar with the same inventory of linguistic signs. The existence of a sign makes it possible in principle for A to transmit a thought to B.
This is an assumption familiar from the traditional Western ‘language myth’ (Harris 1981). Although there is no intrinsic connexion between (i) the concept of a language as a fixed code of signs known to all members of a given community, and (ii) the concept of transmitting thoughts by means of signs from one mind to another, it is obvious that (i) and (ii) are mutually supportive. Postulating a fixed code is held to explain how telementation is possible, while telementation explains the purpose of having a fixed code.
* * *
Wittgenstein’s ghost has a vocabulary of just four words (block, pillar, slab, beam). But we are encouraged to treat this as a ‘complete’ primitive language. Exactly what that involves is by no means clear. But Wittgenstein’s primitive language is even more primitive than Saussure’s. It allows no role for an interlocutor. The assistant’s participation in communication and in the building operation is restricted to fetching any particular item that the builder orders.
In their essay on Wittgenstein’s language-games, Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker emphasize, quite rightly, that ‘the important feature of these primitive languages is that they are complete in themselves’ (Baker and Hacker 1980b: 53). They also point out that this notion is not a late addition to Wittgenstein’s thinking, but goes back at least as far as the Brown Book. That text in fact opens with a discussion of ‘completeness’.
Suppose a man described a game of chess, without mentioning the existence and operations of the pawns. His description of the game as a natural phenomenon will be incomplete. On the other hand we may say that he has completely described a simpler game. In this sense we may say that Augustine’s description of learning the language was correct for a simpler language than ours. (Wittgenstein 1969: 77)
This in turn takes up a remark in the Blue Book a year earlier.
A treatise on pomology may be called incomplete if there exist kinds of apples which it doesn’t mention. Here we have a standard of completeness in nature. Supposing on the other hand there was a game resembling that of chess but simpler, no pawns being used in it. Should we call this game incomplete? Or should we call a game more complete than chess if it in some way contained chess but added new elements? (Wittgenstein 1969: 19)
There are two points to note here. Wittgenstein speaks of ‘a standard of completeness in nature’. It holds, we are told, in the case of describing apples. Does anything similar hold in the case of describing languages? Or are languages not natural objects? We are not told explicitly, although chess, it appears, is a ‘natural phenomenon’, or at least can be treated as a natural phenomenon for purposes of description. Unfortunately none of this tells us what ‘completeness’ consists in where languages are concerned. It seems that we are being asked to accept that any linguistic description, however limited, could nevertheless be a complete description of some language or other (as in the case of chess without pawns). But does this make sense?
Saussure, one feels, would have wanted to point out to Wittgenstein that a clockmaker who describes in minute detail the inner workings of a clock, but fails to say anything about the movement of hands on the dial, has not described a simpler form of clock. He has failed to describe a clock at all.
Linguists will recognize that Wittgenstein’s unconvincing remarks about ‘completeness’ in §18 owe a great deal to a model adopted in historical linguistics, sometimes called the ‘organic’ model, where languages are conceptualized as constantly developing accumulations of verbal materials from the past. According to this model, no current language is ever complete. What are called ‘languages’ in common parlance are simply transitional phases in an ongoing process of linguistic evolution, following its own laws. Accordingly, no dictionary can ever be complete, no grammar book final, until a language is ‘dead’.
But when Wittgenstein published the Philosophical Investigations that organic model had been out of date for at least two generations. It is surprising to find him resurrecting it. The comparison between a language and an ancient city sounds more like J.A.H. Murray at his least inspired, rather than the voice of Europe’s premier analytic philosopher. In other words, the primitive language of Philosophical Investigations is indeed a ghost from the past.
* * *
Chomsky’s primitive language is that famous idealized system which enables speakers in a ‘completely homogeneous speech-community’ to communicate, without interference due to ‘memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors’ (Chomsky 1965: 3). In short, the ghost operates in what appears to be a communicational vacuum.
The only point in entertaining this fictitious ‘primitive’ language, as far as one can see, is that at one stroke it eliminates most of the practical difficulties that a linguist might encounter in identifying and describing linguistic signs. It is rather like beginning the academic study of any human activity by assuming that in theory all human beings are equally good at it; e.g. the study of swimming by postulating that all human beings can keep afloat and propel themselves with equal facility under suitable conditions (calm surface, similar water density, etc.)
Behind Chomsky’s ghostly idealization, however, there lies a sloppy conceptual conflation between language and languages. Languages, for a generativist, are supposed to be governed by rules. But on p. 8 of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax we are told that ‘any interesting generative grammar will be dealing, for the most part, with mental processes that are far beyond the level of actual or even potential consciousness’ (Chomsky 1965: 8). So it is difficult to see how one could know whether any grammarian’s characterization of a linguistic rule was accurate. Chomsky, nevertheless, apparently has no difficulty in selecting examples of information contained in ‘traditional grammar’ that is ‘without question, substantially correct’ (Chomsky 1965: 64). How he could know this ‘without question’ is a linguistic mystery. In his book Knowledge of Language (1986), Chomsky assures us that
in the case of language we can proceed rather far towards characterizing the system of knowledge attained – knowledge of English, of Japanese, etc., – and determining the evidence that was available to the child who gained this knowledge (Chomsky 1986: xxvi).
Here, evidently, the child’s knowledge of Japanese counts eo ipso as ‘knowledge of language’, as well as being knowledge of one particular language. But knowing Japanese is not ‘knowing language’, any more than knowing chess is ‘knowing game’. ‘Knowing game’ is not a human capacity which somehow comprehends all possible games. Behind this muddle lies Chomsky’s metaphysical faith in the existence of a ‘universal grammar’ common to Japanese, English, and all other languages.
Instead of facing the question of whether it makes sense for linguists to speak of ‘knowing X’, where X is not any particular language, but the language faculty itself, Chomsky discards the verb know and substitutes cognize. This is a verb of his own invention, which he is free to define as he sees fit. He then further complicates matters by drawing distinctions of his own for the term language (E-language, I-language, even C-language). Deliberate terminological obfuscations of this order give Chomsky ample room to dodge such questions as whether linguistic knowledge (of the kind we rely on in everyday communication) is or is not part of our mental equipment (irrespective of how the brain stores or deals with it).
It is not surprising that the conflation between language and languages is quite overt in the work of Chomsky’s followers, e.g. Roman Jakobson. ‘Language’, Jakobson assures us, ‘is a system of systems, an overall code which includes various subcodes’ (Jakobson 1985: 30). This is just linguistic gobbledegook. When I speak English, there is no sense in which I am using an overall code of which Japanese, or some part of Japanese, is a subcode; any more than when I play cricket I am playing a universal game, of which baseball is also a subgame.
As noted above, where grammar is concerned, most of it in any case lurks for Chomsky and his followers below the level of consciousness. Perhaps the distinction between language and languages lurks in the same obscure corner of the brain. In any case, the apposite integrationist rejoinder is that most linguistic processes that matter in everyday communication are well above the level of neuronal activities. They need to be. If you ask me what day of the week it is, there is no way I could understand the question any better by having a comprehensive physiological map of what was actually going on in your brain when you asked it, or in my brain as I tried to understand your question.
* * *
As Peter Matthews aptly points out in his entry on integrational linguistics, for integrationists the term integrational implies that ‘languages are not conceived as systems independent of their use in communication’ (Matthews 2007: 197). This highlights what the primitive languages postulated by Saussure, Wittgenstein and Chomsky have in common. They are attempts to set up languages as systems, in advance of describing any such system in working order. This move is typical of orthodox linguistics: systems come first, applications later. Every new application to linguistic material can then be hailed as a ‘breakthrough’. This inevitably starts linguistic inquiry off on the wrong foot. In fact, it is quite inappropriate as a foundation for any empirical study, from linguistics to landscape gardening. We should not be surprised if we end up with descriptions which recognize just those features which were tacitly taken to be present in the system to start with.
REFERENCES
Baker, G.P. and Hacker P.M.S. (1980b), Essays on the Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 1, Oxford, Blackwell.
Chomsky, A.N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
Chomsky, A.N. (1986), Knowledge of Language, New York, Praeger.
Harris, R. (1981), The Language Myth, London, Duckworth.
Harris, R. (2009), Rationality and the Literate Mind, New York, Routledge.
Harris, R. (2010), ‘Wittgenstein on “primitive” languages’. In V. Munz, K. Puhl and J.Wang (eds), Language and World Part One: Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Ontos Verlag, Heusenstamm, pp.242-63.
Jakobson, R. (1985), ‘Sign and system of language’. In R. Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Matthews, P.H. (2007), Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Saussure, F. de (1922), Cours de linguistique générale, 2nd edn, Paris, Payot. Course in General Linguistics, trans. and annotated by Roy Harris, London, Duckworth, 1983.
Wittgenstein, L. (1969), The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (2001), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, 3rd edn, Oxford, Blackwell.
