Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Aims of integrational linguistics
8. Aims of integrational linguistics.
8a. It should be evident from the above that integrational linguistics does not aim to provide improved ‘alternatives’ to the misleadingly compartmentalized studies that are offered in the name of ‘linguistics’ in many university courses. Integrationists are not attempting to set up such rival studies as ‘integrational phonology’, ‘integrational morphology’, ‘integrational syntax’ or ‘integrational semantics’. All these alleged subdisciplines – phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – are artifacts of the methods employed to compartmentalize them. They do not correspond to anything in the actual linguistic experience of day-to-day communication. They are convenient fictions of the classroom, intellectual hangovers from the centuries during which Western education was based on the copying and studying of approved written texts.
8b. The integrational approach to language seeks to liberate linguistic thought from these classroom shibboleths and provide a way forward for those seeking a clearer analytic understanding of their own communicational experience. Every episode of communication, however trivial, necessarily involves creative activity by the participants, including their own interpretation of the situation in which it occurs. Every utterance is a new utterance, no matter how many times someone may have ‘said it before’. Words are not temporal invariants (as dictionaries like to present them). The static abstractions listed by lexicographers thus impose yet another linguistic misconception on the unfortunate student. The lexicographer’s view of language is a case of trying to impose a normative straitjacket on an open-ended flux of relations between linguistic acts and the world.
8c. What role, then, do words play in these relations? Words may be thought of as components of linguistic acts, and linguistic acts are events in people’s lives. They belong in the same temporal continuum as the other events that go to make up all we do or are called upon to deal with in the course of a day. The main reason which prevents people from realizing this simple fact is that they tend to focus on the overt form in which the word appears and remains in the mind. The written forms visible in a text such as the one you are now scanning are not words, but preserved traces of prior acts of writing. You are in the process of transforming these traces into words on your own account by integrating them into a context other than that in which these traces originally appeared. You yourself have to supply this contextualization: no one else, not even the writer can supply it for you. And the result of the process is what is commonly called ‘reading’. So words do not have some unique time-track of their own, or a status that sets them apart from other events. You may think you can read ‘the same text’ tomorrow, but the reading will not be the same. For one thing, you will bring to bear on it the experience of having read it before. Yesterday’s words cannnot be re-used again today, any more than the meal we ate yesterday can be eaten over again today, or the goal scored yesterday can be scored once more today. Those who have learnt this fundamental integrationist lesson may then come to see themselves not as language-users but as language-makers, which is indeed their natural role in the never-ending evolution of human communication. They may also come to advance their understanding of language beyond the conceptual oversimplifications that have for so long surrounded it.
Why is it worth bothering about any of this? Certainly not for any academic motive, such as adding a few footnotes to the long history of linguistics. It is worth bothering for one reason only: because we all live under the ancient injunction inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘know thyself’. This Carlyle regarded as an ‘impossible precept’, but I regard it as an indispensable precept. Self-knowledge is the key to understanding other people and our relations with them. No progress towards self-knowledge can be based on misconceptions about language and the role it plays in our lives, because that role is too central in its contribution to our humanity.
R.H.
The author is grateful to Adrian Pablé and Marc Haas for comments on an earlier version of this text.
