Pseudo-Applied Linguistics Series

A Slightly Jaundiced Introduction to Linguistics

(for People who Already Know Everything there is to Know on the Subject)


Nick McCaffery
E-mail care of ciaran@mindless.com

 
 Whenever man (henceforward a hypothetical individual named Smith) invents something, the first thing he does is name it, because without this first essential step, he cannot boast to his neighbour about the merits of his invention (which, for the purposes of this piece of doggrel, he has called the 'pneumatically/kinesically modulated sign generator'). His boast initiate the second step where his neighbour goes away and copies the idea, giving it a new and better name (the 'lan gauge'), and making his fortune.

 The process whereby Smith's idea ends up in his neighbour's head (and pocket) is called communication. Typically, when Smith finds out that his ideas are always ending up in someone else's head, he gets really cheesed off and sets out to find the reason why. If he is lucky he finds out that the process that he is trying to understand always happens under the same circumstances. He describes the circumstances and calls the set, (which is written: {the circumstances until N... C...... changes them}) a 'rule'. There may be many rules, and they may relate to one another in a regular sort of a way, thus forming a system. Alternatively they may not relate to anything more familiar than the far side of the moon seen through a blindfold of quarter inch lead, in which they are then deemed to be 'the subject of ongoing research' or 'an area which has received little attention'. If the rules appear to his friends to be intuitively accurate, Smith is deemed wise and becomes a leader. If his friends do not agree, then Smith is called a 'conspiracy theorist' and will suffer a degree of social deprivation ranging from being ostracised by his peers and called a degenerative semanticist, to execution or even psychotherapy.

 If Smith finds there are more than one rule systems and that they cannot be separated from one another, he has invented a science, which, once again he names. (In the case of communication, linguistics; and there is a rule which guarantees that every system inside the science will have a name ending in -ics: e.g. syntactics, semantics, pragmatics.) This naming is an action which carries very heavy karma since it guarantees that his peers will fight (for periods of millenia in the case of really good sciences) among themselves for the honour of separating the inseparable and thus demolishing Smith's system.

 Recently, that is to say in the last sixty or so years, the fight has divided Smith's peers into two camps: (a) those who believe that Smith did not invent the 'pneumatically/kinesically modulated sign generator' or UG (Yes, I know, but nobody else will notice) for short, but that he always had one and simply gave it  name, and (b) those who believe that he heard of the UG from some friends who live in Athens, and who had been using one for simply ages, and that he cunningly took out the world patent.

 Whatever the truth of the matter it is a matter of almost total indifference to the syntacticians, semanticists and pragmaticists who fight bitterly for the independence of their respective systems. People who study syntax - properly syntacticists - have had their subject name deliberately misspelled by aggrieved lexicologists, hurt by the syntacticists/-ians belief that in the end, all human endeavours will be proven to obey the B.C. (Basket Case) Theory of Quantum Syntax and White Gaps, of which more later. One of the more famous of the syntacticians was a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky who studied two humans for many years before deciding that nothing that they could possibly say would ever prove interesting enough to merit the effort of learning their lan guage. The field of battle upon which the proponents of the various subcategories of linguistic endeavour are engaged is littered with bodies and divided something like this:

 The syntacticians believe that the lan gauge is like a lego set, and that once they can find out what shapes they can fit together, they will be able to build the lan gauge from scratch. They build unlikely models which don't work and give them acronyms such as G.B. theory, R.E.S.T., P.S.G., H.P.S.G. etc. The main architect of all this restless (sorry) activity is a hyperactive, sexagenarian, subversive commie, draft card burner named Far Outsky, who works in a place in Boston, Massachussetts, called, fittingly enough, Emeyetea, and, as well as being a syntactician (or syntacticist), in his spare time, is attempting to embarrass the United States into admitting that bombing civilians, destabilizing governments and supporting dictators is not the ideal way for the world's most powerful nation to carry on. Surprisingly he finds it difficult to get his voice heard; it's almost as if the Pentagon didn't like him.

As a syntactician he is controversial. He started many years ago with the theory that all you had to do to show how languages really worked was to transform sentences into trees. (Not real trees, of course, that would be silly, drawings of trees. Upside down trees.) This was necessary because if you try to draw a tree and put the root - which he called S - on the top line of a page, there is nowhere for the branches to grow to. Unless, of course, you keep taping more bits of paper to the top of the original or start at the bottom line of the back page of your notebook. But the controversy surrounding Far Outsky's work is not only due to horticultural ineptitude; he compounds it by the simple process of positing a theory - let's say version 1 - waiting till someone finds fault with it and then immediately producing a revised version (version 2 that he had prepared several years earlier, and which starts "Proponents of the discredited version 1...") which is so complicated that it takes everyone three years just to read it by which time the new version (version 3 which starts with "As will be by now obvious version 2 was badly flawed...") is ready. In this way he never has to defend any version because it will always be out of date and he will always be the person to point out that the previous version is wrong. In this way he avoids debate and can take refuge in an unassailable didacticism that confuses all but the most dedicated, obsessive personalities.

The process started out with a theory of syntax. This quickly became a theory of Government and Blinding. (This was his major error: when a work called Introduction to Government and Blinding came out - not written by him - bookshops and libraries shelved it under politics which caused such confusion among scholars of that discipline, that Russian Communism collapsed taking with it the Berlin Wall and seventy years of left wing effort. It is no coincidence that two years after his seminal work 'Didactic Sculptures' was released on an unwary readership in 1957, the Chinese invaded and annexed Tibet.) When he realised that people were beginning to worry about his sanity, he quickly produced the conservatively named Principalities and Parabolics theory, hoping no doubt that conservatives would like the name and stop criticising him, but, when he saw that people were getting the hang of this, he reacted by bringing out the Min Prog. This, it is believed consists of reducing the whole of grammar to the number six, from which everything else can be inferred. Unfortunately he is now facing a series of expensive lawsuits by one Douglas Adams who is reportedly claiming prior rights to the idea.

 Semanticists work on the principle that everything is either true or false. This is either true or not true. If it is true then the semanticists are right and it is true also in just that case that it is false. So, the semanticists are always right. Or wrong. Either way they are right. Or wrong. If this is beginning to make your head spin then I suggest that you immediately take up the study of semantics. That way you will be among your peers, and you will be able to agonise over why sentences like:

and do not contain the same information. The fact that most adult speakers of the language have known for some time that these two sentences mean different things, does not deter semanticists one little bit. Just in case you thought that this was beginning to sound comprehensible, not all semanticists believe in truth-conditional semantics. Some of them believe in models that are firmly rooted in psychology. Of course, since psychology is concerned with mental reality, this means that the meaning of words can safely be debated without ever having to worry about things like truth-conditions. In this way, semantics can be done by people who have never even heard of logic.

 Pragmatics is (or are) concerned with the bits that the semanticists have left out. The truth-conditional semanticists have left out - or would like to - everything that is not either true or false, leaving pragmaticists with an awful lot of work, whereas those who reject truth-conditional semanticists do work that is so like the pragmaticists that the latter have nothing much left to play with. (Of course, the truth-conditional semanticists think that this is not true, and that ultimately the answer to life the universe and everything will be found to be either true or false.) Pragmaticists tend to think in rather more user-friendly ways. They rather touchingly believe that nothing is true or false; it's the way you think about it. Anything can mean anything in the right context; everything reduces to a sort of Zen linguistics. Most of the problems in pragmatics can be laid at the door of one H.Paul Grice who came up with the idea that all people want to cooperate, and called this his cooperative principle. After that after that everything else could be explained with his maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner. Expressed in everyday language this can be summed up as follows: assume that no-one lies, obfuscates, misleads or jokes. If they do, then tell them that they will never find Felicity. (Felicity has been hiding in Maxims and has run up a drinks bill like you wouldn't believe) Once they agree to cooperate everyone found that if they spoke very slowly, briefly, to the point and without laughing, communication was a doddle. To date, the only people who can manage this consistently are engineers, actuaries or Stephen Hawking. No-one has told the Irish, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, or Turks about this and, as a result, all these nations continue to have tremendous problems with their communciation.

Not content with this, a transsexual pragmaticist called Dansperberand Deirdrewilson decided to revolutionise all this by throwing out all the maxims except relevance, and proclaimed this to be the answer to everything. Many papers have been written expanding, embellishing and abolishing this theory which posits that (a) when people speak, they really mean it, and (b) you had better be listening. Relevance theory predicts that page sixty - four of the Uttar Pradesh Golden Pages can mean '4/6 Elsevier Science in the 2.30 at Chepstow' given the proper context.

 These then are the personalities you may expect to meet when you first approach the study of Linguistics. They are a diverse, argumentative, paranoid and psychologically unstable group whose outpourings have filled the public with avid boredom since what they say is rarely written for the enlightenment of the man on the Clapham Omnibus but rather for the resident of the top floor of the ivory tower nearest to you.


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