On certain consequences of the objectification of languages: a substantivist approach

Abstract

The practitioners of linguistics (in all its forms) hope to converge on tools suitable for describing all human languages within a shared terminological and conceptual framework, demarcating phenomena that lend themselves to meaningful cross-linguistic comparison from those that do not. To this end, linguists are obliged to treat languages, and speech communities, as objects of analysis. In this respect, the characteristic posture of linguistics authors vis-à-vis their readers contrasts with the non-objectifying attitude associated with Traditional Lexicography and Grammar (here called TLG). Those who write dictionaries and (normative and pedagogical) grammars that count as authoritative for various points on the literacy scale, ranging from schoolchildren to the most proficient users of the written language, address their readers as potential writers (and, crucially, as potential editors) of the language. The practices and attitudes characteristic of TLG reference a single editorial-normative community. As such, they are particularistic, but may occasionally involve more than one nation-state. Country A’s TLG workers negotiate with their counterparts in country B, to calibrate orthographic or other norms of a shared language like Dutch or German. Bilingual dictionaries operate with the TLG equipment of both the societies. As an enterprise, TLG crosses national boundaries only on this limited, transactional scale. It does not aspire to a universal scientific standpoint, and thus has no reason to objectify its language or its speech community. TLG represents, and intersubjectively addresses, only a circumscribed editorial-normative collectivity, the “we” to which its authors and readers belong. But linguistics references “us scientists of language,” a global professional network. Linguists hope to converge on a universal theoretical and descriptive framework applicable to all languages. Its scientific gaze theoretically places every language and every speech community under objective, descriptive scrutiny. The practical application of these principles has led to difficulties. We argue in this paper that these difficulties have to do with certain unresolved aspects of the relation between the ‘science’ of linguistics and the ‘cultural practice’ of TLG. Linguistics claims to deal primarily with spoken language (for linguistics to focus on written language would have made it non-universal; only a proper subset of spoken languages is wedded to writing systems). But every literate society’s TLG manages the pedagogy and the editorial-normative functioning of its written language, treating the spoken language as one implementation of the written. The task of optimizing the linguistics-TLG equation, then, is closely related to that of adequately articulating the relation between speech and writing. It is at this level that this paper hopes to contribute to the field of linguistics. We set out by adhering to the received wisdom that linguistics is an enterprise that has been improving and superseding TLG’s practices and operational machinery. As our argument develops, the limitations of this view will become evident. The argumentation in this paper represents a viewpoint anchored in formal linguistics but focused on the speech-writing equation. Given the talk of spoken and written ‘substances,’ referenced in the dictum that ‘language is form, not substance,’ we call our viewpoint substantivist linguistics, and describe those of our colleagues who focus on form alone as formalists. Linguistic Frontiers • 4(2) • 2021 DOI: 10.2478/lf-2021-0013