THE SCOPE OF PHENOMENA COVERED

Before looking at the evidence in detail, let us reexamine the question of the scope of observations that are of interest. The scope of a discipline is to some extent arbitrary, depending on the focus and breadth of interest of the investigators and the range of the questions they are initially asking. But a science may also be guided by theoretical considerations. If certain observations initially appear to be interrelated, it may prove fruitful to seek additional related observations in the hope of interconnecting them by means of an appropriate unifying theory. As various investigations are carried out and various theories are explored, the scope of the discipline may fluctuate. Then ultimately, when theory becomes more settled, the scope of the discipline will be seen more in terms of the scope of current theory than in terms of the initial range of the questions asked.

Can the broad scope of linguistics laid out in chapter 2 be justified on the basis of perceived interrelations of the observations? In support of a broad scope it is sometimes pointed out (Pike 1967:30) that different types of communicative behavior may be substitutable or partially substitutable. Clearly there are cases where speech and writing are substitutable: One can call a person on the telephone or write a letter instead. Gestures and speech are sometimes substitutable: There are clear gestures for Good-bye, Come here, May I have one?, Look over there, Yes, No, and others. Furthermore, when such gestures accompany speech there are constraints of appropriateness resembling the familiar phenomena of grammaticality. There are methods of signing used by the deaf that substitute for speech. In terms of signs and symbols one need only point to standard international traffic and highway signs, such as for No parking, and standard international signs to mark restaurants, rest rooms, access for the handicapped, etc. In the area of clothing, uniforms, and badges, one can see substitutes for an explicit spoken introduction or announcement of the person’s occupation, rank, or position. Foote (1983) has studied color usage in the facades of public buildings using a human linguistics perspective. He has shown that facades can be seen as indicating to the public the type of organization housed in the building (bank, church, expensive restaurant, cheap restaurant), and that this in a sense substitutes for a barker out front announcing what is inside the building.

Traditional linguistic theory cannot cover such a broad scope. It represents the end point of a long series of investigations focused first on philosophical questions in the area of logic and the theory of knowledge, and second on specifying how to speak and write the language with propriety. These endeavors have bequeathed to us a traditional scope defined in terms of grammatical theory, a scope that has seemed too narrow to encompass all the phenomena of interest. Efforts to broaden the scope in semiotics have run into difficulties in how to accommodate the vast richness of detail confronted by grammatical theory without the narrowness of grammatical theory.

Human linguistics has a scope that covers the full range of verbal and nonverbal communicative phenomena and at the same time it provides a nongrammatical theoretical structure that can accommodate the full complexity of verbal communicative behavior.

THE FACTS OF VARIATION

Let us first review a point of observation already made: We observe that everyone is different. No two people we study speak exactly alike, and no one person speaks the same at different times. This has been recognized by virtually every leading linguist for the last century and a half, and can easily be tested to any reasonable degree of certainty.

We also observe that different people are partially alike. For any two people, or any one person at different times, similarities can be observed. This is not as often emphasized, but it is just as true, and can also be put to the test.

The observed communicative similarities of people are not as often remarked as the differences, for the traditional concept of language has always implied uniformity. For example, uniformity was implied in Bloomfield’s assumption through the concept of a speech-community, which was defined as those who speak the same language. Traditional theories have treated observed similarities as simply reflecting the assumed uniformity, and then have had the problem of trying to explain or explain away the differences. This has caused a long series of practical problems in the conduct of linguistic research, particularly research on variation and on historical change.

Early linguists developed the comparative method on the twin tacit assumptions of uniform languages and sudden splits; individual variation was attributed to individual style and free will (Schleicher 1850:24), and thus its consideration was placed outside of linguistics. Saussure attributed similarities to langue but made individual variation a part of parole, which he did not treat, even though he recognized that it was the source of language change. But the assumptions underlying the comparative method of uniform languages and sudden splits proved not to correspond well with the historical evidence.

In dialect geography there was initial surprise that sharp lines of demarcation could not be found between different dialects. Then it was found that even with individual speech-sounds it was impossible to find sharp lines of demarcation, and even with the pronunciation of a single word an isogloss could not be drawn, as usage often fluctuated over a wider area.

Recently such problems have been magnified in trying to deal with observations of creole situations and of social variation using concepts of dialect that imply uniformity. Bloomfield was aware of the problems and produced many paragraphs explaining that the term speech-community has only a relative value (1933:54). Yet he did not abandon it, and an assumption of perfectly uniform speech-communities is sometimes still explicitly made even today, in spite of frequent objections from those who study variation. Perfectly uniform speech-communities are conceivable, but any scientific hypothesis of uniformity is refuted by over a century of field studies. The remarkable persistence of this idea in the face of such massive contradictory evidence attests to the degree to which the assumptions of the grammatical tradition have been ingrained into our culture by two millennia of normative grammar in the schools.

In science it is necessary to give priority to the evidence over traditional theory or a priori assumptions. If the evidence shows that any two people, or the same person at different times, are partly alike and partly different communicatively, and that any two groups are likewise partly alike and partly different, then we should have a theory that mirrors these observations, rather than one that reflects a uniformity that does not exist.

In human linguistics these observations of partial similarities and differences, rather than being ignored in the core theory, are actually taken as observational evidence supporting the most basic law in the foundations of the discipline: the law of componential partitioning, which makes available the concept of properties for use in research in human linguistics, and the methods of sames and differents already familiar in the other domain. With the concept of properties, a human-linguistic theory of groups has at hand a ready apparatus for handling variation of all sorts and for understanding communication between individuals who are different in some respects and the same in other respects.

Much of the recent work on variation, creole studies, and sociolinguistics has focused on linguistic differences and has provided valuable evidence and insights that could be carried over rather easily into the human-linguistics framework. It would require recasting the results into the form of postulated properties of individuals and statements of the distribution of these properties over the population studied. Some of the published data are already almost in this form; for example, Bickerton (1973) reports data on several points of usage by a number of speakers of Guyanese creole, keeping the observed usage of different speakers separate. Then group properties could be postulated and various simple and compound linkages set up to try to capture the social and community phenomena underlying the data. It should be possible to retain the best insights of creole continua and wave-theory accounts while eliminating some of their difficulties.

Furthermore, with methods available for handling contextual factors in the individual in a straightforward way, there is the possibility of explicitly accounting for the sociolinguistic factors operating in the individual that underlie the choice between variant forms. One could then account for variation within the same individual. And when individuals with quite different properties communicate through a pidgin, it can be understood through the concepts of role part and participant how they can do the same thing in quite different ways.

Besides ridding the studies of unsupported assumptions, this course would provide additional insight through a clearer separation of individual and social phenomena, and the possibility of working out the interesting and intricate linguistic interrelations between the individual and the group or society that he participates in. Such attempts would undoubtedly raise new questions requiring the gathering of additional observational evidence.

INTUITIONS AND THE CORRECTION OF
MISTAKES

It is observed that while people are speaking they sometimes stop and correct themselves. When asked, they generally acknowledge that they misspoke or that they made an error. They can also often be observed to correct their own writing.

Further, people can express opinions about whether a given utterance is something that they would say or something that they would not say, or whether it is correct or not, or according to good usage or not, or whether it is something that one can say in the language or not. Such judgments are often carefully elicited by linguists for use as grammaticality judgments, and are a major source of evidence for linguistic research in business as usual.

It is also observed that the judgments of different people differ as to what one can say in the language or not. Field linguists are also well aware that what people report that they would or would not say often does not correspond with what they do in fact habitually say, even when there is no question of their having misspoken or made a mistake.

In the normative tradition, such opinions were seen as reflecting views concerning a prescriptive norm. Differences of opinion were settled by reference to authority. Grammarians sometimes trusted their own judgment and intuitions, or more often followed older authorities or the usage of prestigious literary figures or eminent personages. Most people relied on the authority of grammars, style manuals, and dictionaries. And they still do. Thus it did not strike one as odd that people would make mistakes, especially in view of the fact that the road to knowledge was through literacy, and the road to literacy was through grammar taught in grammar school. The model of the speaker or writer could easily be seen as the schoolchild or still insecure adult struggling with Latin, or with some other standard language differing from his own speech, and inevitably making mistakes.

Then when grammarians in the new discipline of linguistics ceased being lawgivers and became instead scientists describing a language, the concept of language as normative was set aside, but the assumption that it was an ideal of perfection was retained. And for those who also accepted the assumption of the social or psychological reality of grammar, this ideal was given a social or psychological embodiment. Thus for Saussure language was not complete in any speaker; it existed perfectly only in a collectivity: it was a grammatical system having only a potential existence in each brain, and he spoke in terms of the metaphors of the rules of chess or the score for an orchestral work as ideals of perfection separate and distinct from the tactics of the chess player or the interpretations or mistakes of the musicians. For Chomsky, on the other hand, language was not embodied in a collectivity but in an assumed paragon, “an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance” (Chomsky 1965:3).¹ The speaker-listener was hypothesized to have a linguistic competence mirroring this ideal of perfection, and this competence could be tapped by studying grammatical intuitions as revealed in grammaticality judgments. In this view, the object of study in linguistics was to be the competence of the ideal speaker-listener, not mere performance, which was marred by errors and other deviations that should be of no interest to the linguist. However, competence was supposed to underlie performance.

A number of cogent criticisms of this view may be found in the literature, among them that it does not adequately take into account that different people have different intuitions, there being no way of resolving the differences. Also one cannot obtain scientific evidence about competence. Since all of our evidence comes from mere mortals who are doomed to make errors, we are not able to test claims about the ideal speaker-listener’s language or grammar. If actual speakers do not conform to a proposed ideal, the differences between theory and observation could be brushed aside as due to irrelevant performance factors, thus making the theory untestable and therefore unscientific.

The assumption that information about linguistic “competence” can be obtained from speaker’s intuitions also has problems. If competence refers to knowledge of community norms and standards, there is the problem that in fact different speakers (and different linguists) have different intuitions. If it is assumed that competence refers to the speaker’s own internal grammar, we run into the psychological reality of grammar fallacy. If competence is assumed to underlie performance, there is the problem that informant’s reports of what they say are often at variance from what they do regularly say. And with only one standard, competence cannot account for mistakes. Since the theory cannot account for mistakes, their study has been rejected along with the study of variation and the differences between the individual and the community. This raises serious questions as to the actual relevance of data from intuitions, and casts considerable doubt on the concept of competence.

We have to conclude that neither the older nor the newer traditionally oriented theories do a very good job of confronting the evidence on intuitions and on the correction of mistakes.

In human linguistics the strong intuitions that speakers have of uniformity in the speech-community and of accepted community norms and standards are predicated of the individuals, who project them as stereotypes on themselves, on others, and on the community. Since in this theory all individuals are different we can easily handle the observations that different people have different stereotypes, and since there is also a theory of groups, we can study and analyze the properties of the community itself and compare these findings with the different stereotypes. We can also analyze the single individual from several points of view: On the basis of observational evidence we can postulate properties responsible for what the individual actually does when he speaks. On the basis of evidence from “errors” that are corrected, we can postulate other properties at a different level responsible for the observed monitoring and corrective behavior. Then we can face the separate issue of whether the individual properties implied by informant responses on intuitions, projections, and stereotypes actually coincide or not with the properties responsible for the “mistakes” or the properties responsible for the “corrections.”

DYNAMIC ASPECTS OF COMMUNICATIVE
BEHAVIOR

Next let us look at some additional observational evidence already mentioned, evidence that is so obvious that it seems banal. Yet there have been difficulties in accommodating it in business as usual. It is observed that communicative behavior is a dynamic process that takes place in time. When people speak, or when they communicate in other ways, their positions and movements change with time, and these cause energy flows such as sound waves and reflected light that change with time. Since people and the energy flows exist in the real world, this may seem unsurprising. But not every object in the real world shows such complex and highly structured temporal changes. It is not only individual persons that show changes with time as they communicate. Groups of persons also show changes with time as the people making up the group communicate with each other. Why has it been so difficult to accommodate these elementary observational facts?

Grammar provides an inherently static picture, a presumed relation between sound and meaning. Grammar answers to static data, such as judgments of well-formedness or grammaticality. The grammatical analysis of a sentence has sometimes been described rather aptly as a marble-slab approach. Grammar does not model physical processes taking place in time; it was not designed for that purpose.

However, the use of process terms that invoke a dynamic metaphor when talking about static grammar has been a continuing source of confusion. The ancient processes of addition, deletion, substitution, and transposition have led in modern times to process terms being applied almost everywhere in linguistics. Terms like “transform” and “generate” are the hallmark of modern generative and transformational approaches, which are characterized by rules of grammar that are applied to yield “outputs.”

If one does not take this talk metaphorically, a number of questions are raised. In what domain do linguistic processes take place? In what realm are the intermediate results of a derivation to be found? Who applies grammatical rules? Are they rules to be consulted by writers or editors in normalizing a text as in prescriptive grammar? Are they rules of calculation applied by the linguist in deducing the consequences of his theory? Are they like rules of logic or rules of algebra? Are they simply a way of writing down assumed relations between assumed linguistic entities? The issue is seldom faced explicitly in the linguistics literature. Instead one finds the agent suppressed by use of the passive, a nominalization, or other means: this rule is applied . . . , the rule application . . . , this rule produces. . . .

Because many linguists are basically interested in people, there has been an almost irresistible urge to try to account for what people do by assuming that grammar rules control communicative behavior when people speak and understand. Most linguists, including the author, have succumbed to this urge at one time or another. This is in spite of the admonitions of eminent linguists, which are regularly repeated, and in spite of the widespread understanding that to make such an assumption would be to ignore a fallacy. Grammar rules do not model the flow of time in the physical sense. They would have to have a physical embodiment if their execution controlled behavior. Grammar rules are in the logical domain, not the physical. There is a greater gulf between these two domains than the gulf between soul and body in Descartes’s thinking. Not only would we run into the psychological and social reality of grammar fallacies, but we would be tempted to institute a fruitless search for some pineal-gland principle to connect competence and performance.

In human linguistics, observations of the physical positions and motions of people when they communicate, and the observed effects of communicative behavior on noncommunicative behavior, constitute the physical evidence behind the theory. Human-linguistic theory does model the flow of time in the physical sense. It models the physical reality of people, individually and collectively, from the point of view of how they communicate. The dynamic aspects of speaking and understanding are accounted for in terms of the execution of procedures under the control of the conditional properties.

Procedures are not like rules. A rule is usually thought of as something a person can apply or not as he sees fit, like a normative rule, and thus a speaker could make a mistake and not apply the rule, or he could deliberately ignore the rule if he wished. Under this conception the rules do not account for mistakes and the grammar does not account for deliberate violations. A procedure, on the other hand, is a part of a scientific theory of the person or group, postulated to account for the observed communicative behavior of the person or group. Whether a procedure executes or not depends on the state of the individual at that point, also postulated to account for observed communicative behavior.

True, there may be some carry-over of theoretical results from phrase-structure conceptions into a structure of task procedures and selection procedures. This can aid in the further development of human-linguistic theory and help to preserve valid insights already gained. Phrase-structure approaches to grammar promise to be more helpful than transformational approaches. But although the phrase structure of a sentence sometimes resembles the structure of the nested task procedures carried out when an individual speaks or understands, sometimes there are differences. Since the two theoretical structures rest on quite different foundations, considerable care will have to be exercised so as not to introduce unsupported assumptions and erroneous results.

REFERENTIAL PHENOMENA

If one nevertheless presses on with business as usual, ignoring the problems already discussed, more problems emerge in trying to account for frequent and familiar observations. Among the most pressing are problems of ambiguity in reference. Let us look at some of the evidence:

A frequently cited example is the word bank, which can mean a financial institution or the edge of a river. However a glance at a dictionary will reveal that most words are listed with multiple meanings. The word run is perhaps the extreme case in English. Yet we are usually not confused by this when we talk or listen to others, and generally understand what is intended in spite of the many seeming ambiguities. How do we manage to communicate effectively in the face of these apparently insurmountable difficulties?

Another puzzling area has been pronominal reference. Words like he, it, they, and you, continually shift their reference, designating different people or things at different times. For this reason they have sometimes been called shifters. Yet in actual conversation we are rarely confused as to what person or thing is being referred to. How can we account for this?

A possibly related and well-known phenomenon is that a single word to a close friend may often be sufficient for what would require a long explanation with a casual acquaintance. How can we understand this fact?

Such observations are difficult to understand and to account for in business as usual because the linguistics of language has been based on traditional sign theory. Since in this theory words signify concepts, there is a presumption that signifiers stand in one-to-one relation to the things signified. This would be important in a theory of knowledge, where ambiguity could not be tolerated, and it is still widely considered to be the standard case from which deviations must be explained. The problem of ambiguity was considered at length by the ancients and has given rise to an extensive literature in modern times. It is often said that the answer to the ease of resolution of ambiguity in ordinary discourse rests in the context. This does little more than give the problem a name: the problem of context. How can we take the context into account?

The ancients introduced the concept of grammatical level to explain observations of ambiguity. They pointed out that an item that was ambiguous at the lower level of diction (lexis) was not ambiguous at the higher level of speech (logos). A standard Stoic example was equivalent to the familiar pair a name, an aim, which sound alike at one level but are different at a higher level. Modern linguists use similar arguments to introduce transformational or other levels. But this device has only limited usefulness in dealing with the general problem of ambiguity.

Some modern attempts postulate operations of scanning back and forth in the surrounding text for clues that would resolve ambiguities. Context is thus seen as the surrounding text. Some cases can be handled in this way. But the whole enterprise breaks down with the more difficult examples such as pronominal reference to something not yet mentioned, pronominal reference to something not previously expressed in a single word or phrase, and especially cases where a single word between close friends suffices for what would require a long explanation with others. And no good explanations are at hand for how a person can distinguish which sense of bank or of run was intended by the speaker.

One has to conclude that after 2,000 years of effort, traditional approaches to the problem of ambiguity and to reference in general are still less than satisfactory and leave many questions unanswered and many puzzles unresolved. The reason for this is that traditional sign theory provides no conceptual apparatus for taking the context into account, and neither does grammatical theory, which descended from it.

Human linguistics, on the other hand, does offer a means in its underlying structure for taking the context into account: At any given point in time the context is represented in the conditional properties. During communicative behavior the conditional properties of the individual in the domain of control are continually changing, constituting the changing context of situation for the individual. And it is the changing conditional properties that help to control the dynamic processes of producing and understanding communicative behavior. Thus an analysis of the individual in terms of properties automatically includes an analysis of the effect of the context of situation on communicative behavior.

If the speaker and hearer have sufficient commonality of properties, the speaker will produce signals that will trigger appropriate changes in the conditional properties of the listener that represent correct understanding. If the speaker and hearer do not at the moment have sufficient commonality of properties, the signal produced will be inappropriate or ineffective for the hearer, and a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding will occur. Thus there is the possibility of our being able to analyze not only understanding but misunderstanding as well. Although the detailed analysis of properties in human linguistics is only at its beginning, there is nothing in principle standing in the way of accounting for the evidence given above and other evidence of a similar sort.

In a discussion of philosophical views of referring, Linsky (1967:116) has said that it is the users of language who refer, not expressions. Although the concept of users of language is problematic, this statement is correct in that it points to people as the locus of the phenomena. To achieve a scientific understanding of referring, we need a theory of people, not a theory of expressions, words, or signs.

DISCOURSE PHENOMENA

Considerable attention of late has been paid to phenomena of discourse. Such studies have gone under the name of the study of dialog, the study of conversation, face-to-face interaction, discourse analysis, and text linguistics. Typical among the phenomena are those related to question-answer sequences, the topic of conversation, the thread of conversation, the organization of stories, and negotiation and agreement in dialog.

Attempts have been made to confront these phenomena with apparatus similar to the apparatus of grammar. Concepts of cohesion and coherence of discourse have been modeled on concepts of grammaticality of sentences, and efforts have been made to discover the devices of cohesion, such as various types of connective words, pronouns, and the like. Difficulties have shown up due to the assumed constraints of cohesion across sentence boundaries appearing not to be as strong as the constraints of grammar and syntax within the domain of a sentence, and the suspicion that cohesive phenomena may be of a different nature altogether from grammatical phenomena.

Some of the most interesting results coming from these studies have to do with the realization of the importance of the situational context and attempts at taking it into account. It is often assumed that when a topic of conversation is established, or a question is up for discussion, or an agreement has been reached, that the topic, the question, or the agreement “exist in the conversation.” This has the problem that it offers no means for analyzing cases where the different parties to the conversation are talking to slightly different topics or discussing slightly different questions, or differ as to whether agreement has been reached. It is an advance over purely text-based ideas, however, because the topic, the question, or the agreement is assumed to be currently salient rather than existing in the prior text that set it up. It could thus affect the current course of the conversation directly without our having to assume some routines of scanning back into the previous text for an indefinite distance. This is the advantage of a state approach, but it needs to be anchored in reality, for something “existing in the conversation” is at best only in the logical or grammatical domain, and therefore not actually available to affect what a conversationalist does next.

In human linguistics the topic, the question, or the agreement would exist first in the state properties of each individual, that is, remembered in their conditional properties, and therefore available to affect what each may say or do next by helping to control which procedures are executed. The topic, question, or agreement need not be identically represented in the properties of the different individuals. In human linguistics the topic, the question, or the agreement can also be analyzed at the group or linkage level. It takes at least two people to agree, to disagree, or to negotiate, and the linkage can have properties of agreement or disagreement in the group, or of a continuing state of negotiation. Thus in human linguistics the context of situation is embedded in the properties of the individuals and linkages rather than being a free-floating abstraction.²

PRAGMATIC PHENOMENA

Pragmatic phenomena have excited considerable interest in recent years. It is observed that by means of speech signals people can make promises, seal bargains, make bets, and christen ships. They can do such things as warning, commanding, asking, requesting. They can carry out many other everyday activities simply by means of speech or other communicative behavior.

To this one should add phenomena of cooperation. It can be observed that the exchange of communicative signals such as speech serves to coordinate social activities of all sorts, from the family to friendships to activities in the workplace to shopping to participation in all the public and private entities that a person is associated with.

Pragmatic phenomena were seen as anomalous from the point of view of theories that placed emphasis on logic and the idea that sentences express propositions that can be judged true or false (Austin 1962). Attempts have been made by philosophers and linguists to treat such phenomena in a pragmatic theory, and a number of interesting insights have been gained. The effort, however, has had many problems well known to those who have followed the literature. These problems are usually related to the retention of traditional concepts of language. For example, when someone makes a promise to someone else, what really happens? A discussion rooted in the domain of language and grammar does not offer satisfactory answers.

A distinction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics was formulated by Morris (1938:6) and Carnap (1942:9). According to this distinction, investigations that make explicit reference to the user of a language are in the field of pragmatics. If they abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata (i.e., what is referred to), they are in the field of semantics. If they abstract from the designata also and analyze only the relations between the expressions, they are in the field of (logical) syntax. Thus in this view semantics includes syntax, and pragmatics includes both semantics and syntax. This conception, on the face of it, appears to surmount the barrier between the domain of logic and language and the domain of people, and to move in the direction of a human linguistics.

Linguistics owes a debt of gratitude to Austin and the others who have explored pragmatic phenomena for opening up a field of study and raising new questions that demand answers. In continuing to assume objects of language and grammar, the program instituted has retained strong ties to the grammatical tradition in the logical domain. This has initially appeared to tie the work in pragmatics to earlier work, thus increasing its apparent relevance to other linguistic concerns. Many pragmatic studies thus paradoxically continue to abstract away from people by introducing additional assumed entities such as speech acts, or they interpret their results as providing information on what people do with words or how people use language. But it has not been clear what kind of a conception of words or of language would support the idea that they could be used by someone for some purpose. Again we run into the psychological and social reality of grammar fallacies.

If pragmatics includes both semantics and syntax, the distinction introduced in earlier years as an a priori programmatic partitioning of the domain of study may no longer be necessary. A restructuring may be possible and appropriate. Human linguistics is that restructuring: it moves the treatment of all the phenomena over from the logical side of the barrier to the physical side. Thus human linguistics can be viewed as pragmatics freed from any ties to signs, language, and grammar.³

Such a restructuring on the human side is also necessary if pragmatics is to mature, to cut the apron strings, as so many other fields of inquiry have done, and move away from philosophy to accept the discipline and control of science. The reason for this is simply that people are a part of nature, observable, and given in advance, while the objects of logic and language are not.

In human linguistics we can say that when someone makes a promise, his state properties change in ways that can be verified by observing his subsequent behavior in keeping the promise, and the state properties of the person to whom he has made the promise also change in ways that affect his future observable behavior. He expects the promise to be kept, and if it is not kept he may complain or even institute a lawsuit. Thus the state of having made a promise and the state of having been promised are of the very nature that human linguistics has been designed to handle with its concept of conditional properties, and there is a mechanism in the procedural properties for understanding how these states affect future observable behavior. Furthermore, human linguistics treats phenomena that have previously been seen as semantic, syntactic, even phonological, by these same means, that is, in terms of the properties of the people involved and their changes. Human linguistics can be viewed as a linguistic theory that has been moved to the physical domain so that it can be pragmatic from top to bottom.

PHENOMENA OF METAPHOR AND FIGURATIVE
LANGUAGE

Having come this far in understanding the influence of context, we are ready to consider some observational evidence that has seemed even more puzzling: the phenomena usually referred to as figurative language. Perhaps the most perplexing have been the phenomena of metaphor, where it is said that a word or phrase literally meaning one thing is used to refer to something different so as to suggest a likeness or analogy between the two things, and of irony, where a word or phrase may be used to express the opposite of its literal meaning.

Such phenomena have seemed anomalous from the point of view of traditional theories. How can we understand that a word can mean something that it doesn’t mean, or even just the opposite, in a theory of signs with an assumed norm of one word one meaning?

Of the four ancient processes, substitution has sometimes been suggested in attempted explanations: it is assumed that the word used has been substituted for the word meant on the basis of some principle of similarity or relatedness—no real explanation. Some modern grammarians have suggested that there are degrees of grammaticality, with metaphor being semigrammatical. But the phenomena seem to be semantic in nature rather than grammatical or syntactic. Some logicians have suggested that metaphors are simply false, or else trivially true, yet logic is incapable of accounting for the phenomena. These are but a few of the suggestions that have been put forward: the literature on metaphor is as vast as it is diverse and scientifically unsatisfactory.

Another of the ancient processes, deletion (ellipsis), has sometimes been invoked in explanations of metaphor. Metaphor would be an elliptical simile: War is like hell → War is hell; He’s like a prince → He’s a prince. But it would be more difficult to treat adequately in this way Plato’s metaphor as quoted in Aristotle’s Poetics 21 : Old age is the sunset of life. There are several problems with explanations assuming a process of ellipsis. If the assumption of the objects of language and grammar such as speech-sounds, words, and phrases is unjustified, the status of objects of language assumed and then deleted is even more tenuous. Using this principle, even irony could be handled by deletion of but I mean just the opposite. This point is related to objections raised against deletion transformations on the basis that they would make the grammar too powerful.

The appeal to ellipsis is at least as old as the second century (Apollonius Dyscolus), but it seems more like a fudge or a clever trick than an explanation: When the analysis of an expression is difficult in a theory inadequate to handle the context of situation, assume some clarifying text (or its equivalent in underlying form) overtly expressing the needed situational context, handle the whole thing with traditional methods for handling text, then delete the clarifying text.

In human linguistics all dynamic processes are hypothesized as carried out in systems modeling real objects—people. Such hypotheses are not immune to test in the way that assumptions of ellipsis in an assumed domain of language or grammar would be.

When traditional theory would assume that some process of ellipsis has deleted things that are “understood but not expressed,” human linguistics would treat them as being in the salient context of situation represented in the conditional properties of the people involved. Here they are available to contribute to the understanding of metaphor and irony. These properties are set up and changed over the length of a conversation or even an acquaintanceship. Thus they may have been set up at times arbitrarily distant in the past, and problems associated with taking the surrounding words as the context do not arise. The processes by which these properties are made selectively salient at any given moment are complex but subject to linguistic investigation. An adequate treatment of the phenomena of figurative language would appear to require a dynamic theory of this type, for the understanding of a metaphor, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder, and different people may exhibit different understandings when their relevant properties are different.

Much that has been written on topics of figurative language will be relevant for human linguistics. Works by humanistic scholars in the areas of literature and poetics in particular can be expected to contain valuable insights to be carried over. Social disciplines as well, such as area studies, social and cultural anthropology, and the history of civilizations, cultures, and institutions, are rich resources. In this vast literature the most insightful work is often also the least formalized. The keenest insights on metaphor come from the fields of rhetoric and literary criticism. Unhampered by a rigorous formalized theory, these authors have been free to speculate, contrive, and improvise. They have seen that the allusions involved in the phenomena of figurative language are personal and often idiosyncratic, and marked by extreme contextual dependence. Complex dynamic mental processes are required for their explanation. Human linguistics provides a dynamic state theory appropriate to this need that lends itself to formalization and careful scientific test against observational evidence.

Considering the difficulties of handling figurative language in the linguistics of language, it is no wonder that literary critics and others who are sensitive to the nuance and beauty in literature have not flocked to formal linguistics for theoretical underpinnings. But human linguistics can provide the formal apparatus they need. Thus by moving decidedly into the natural sciences, linguistics stands to make greater contributions to humanistic studies. This may seem paradoxical to those who have imagined some inherent incompatibility between the aims of the humanities and the methods of science. Human linguistics bridges what has sometimes been perceived as a wide gap by providing a greater insight into the human mechanisms underlying the poetic and artistic qualities we value so highly in the best writing.

THE SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF COMMUNICATIVE
BEHAVIOR

A number of interesting observations about communicative phenomena in small social groups have been reported by the sociologist Erving Goffman. His insightful work and the work of others on the study of collective behavior deals with face-to-face interaction in everyday activities. It concentrates on the communicative glue so intimately involved in ordinary gatherings and encounters in a society. The work treats such topics as situated activity, games, rituals, performances, and the allocation of involvement. It is concerned with deference, situational proprieties and improprieties, embarrassment, alienation, face, role, and being in character. There is no doubt that these phenomena have a heavy communicative component and are very important for any scientific study of how people communicate. An entry into the work of this prolific writer can be made through Goffman (1963).

Goffman’s work describes the phenomena so vividly that the reader recognizes things out of his own experience that he has never noticed before or seen in this light. Like the broad-ranging observations of the great naturalists of the 19th century, it has revealed the phenomena to our eyes. This is a necessary first step; one needs to be able to see something before one can study it. The next step would be to study the phenomena more closely and try to test the claims that have been made.

Although the insights presented are usually intuitively obvious and perhaps correct, one cannot rely on the intuitions of readers as adequate tests for the validity of scientific claims. One would need more formal and objective tests. For this it will be necessary to state the claims in precise terms, that is, to formalize them. But no means of formalization has been provided.

Neither traditional linguistic theory nor modern formal linguistics provide support for treating such observations. They completely lack any apparatus suited to confronting phenomena of this order. Thus the linguistics of language is largely innocent of any connection with social communicative phenomena. Undoubtedly for this reason work like Goffman’s is equally innocent of any connection with traditional linguistic or grammatical theory. Here we have two disciplines, current sociology and current linguistics in business as usual, both dealing centrally with human communication, and they are as separate as two islands.

Human linguistics does provide the necessary formal apparatus. It was designed not only to solve the problems facing grammatical approaches but also to be adequate for formalizing the sorts of insights we have from people like Goffman. In fact Goffman’s work was a great stimulus in the development of the human linguistic theory of groups. Linkage theory in particular can be used for formalizing various concepts of groups, engagements, and encounters in terms of their properties in a dynamic theory. And the concepts of participant, role part, and role type are suitable for formalizing the involvements of the individual in terms of properties. Then we will be ready for large-scale formalization of work in this area and careful research aimed at enlarging the scope of validated scientific knowledge in the social sciences.

WRITING AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF
KNOWLEDGE

Let us end by looking at another aspect of communication that is beyond the capabilities of the linguistics of language. This is the physical-domain social and cultural role of writing in modern societies. Writing has been extremely important in the advancement of knowledge and the rise of modern civilizations. Written material is the repository for much of our culture and an agent of its propagation to succeeding generations.

In human linguistics, writing can be considered as a type of channel in a linkage, or the written material can be analyzed as props that directly couple different linkages. In either case one of its most salient characteristics is the usual separation in time and space of the two participants, the writer and the reader.

This separation introduces a delay and the impossibility of immediate responses. Understanding is relative to the reader, but the writer is denied feedback as to the changing state properties of the reader as he reads and tries to understand. If the reader does not understand, he can only give further study to what has been written.

A writer is therefore well advised to be clearer and more explicit than he would need to be in a face-to-face interaction. This results inevitably in differences in style. And when the writing is directed not to a known person but to an unknown audience, the writer is less sure as to what he can assume on the part of the readers, and there is a concomitant pressure for the assumption of a standard audience and for developing standard ways of writing. This may be one of the reasons for the emergence of normative grammars, dictionaries, and style manuals, and the continuing need for them in modern society. These points seem quite obvious in human linguistics, but they cannot be discussed at all, much less tested scientifically, in the linguistics of language, which is often content to dismiss writing as merely secondary to speech.

What is the nature of the linkages involving books as props? The characteristics of delay open up the possibility of multiple readers through time. When a book has many readers, it serves as a prop in a linkage with each reader, and couples the linkages to each other with the broadcast type of coupling through contact in the prop. When the readers read the book, they develop commonality of properties. If a person reads many books he will be a participant in many such linkages that are coupled in this way to many other linkages. Note also that writers will refer to, allude to, or build on the work of others, thus expanding the circle connected to the reader. For some people linkages through writing vie in importance with personal contacts in relation to certain subject matters. In this way we begin to appreciate the nature of a literature and of an intellectual community or discipline. The human-linguistic theory of groups applies beautifully to these areas, for it has a conceptual structure of participants and props, direct and indirect coupling, and simple and compound linkages for treating overlapping and interacting groups organized around certain commonalities of properties.

The characteristics of delay also open up the possibility of storage and preservation for posterity. What exactly is it that is stored? We know, of course, that it is not just books that are stored. Some would say that it is “information,” but then the debate begins as to what sort of thing “information” might be. In human linguistics the relativity of understanding to the readers as participants in linkages with the books as props becomes clear, and formal methods exist for precise analysis.

Note the freedom of association afforded to the individual by the availability of an open literature as provided by libraries. A person is free to set up his own linkages with the props. He can enter into any society of published scientists, scholars, and writers without invitation, and can participate in their intellectual culture. Already important in ancient times, the library has grown over the years to serve the functions of storing, preserving, organizing, and providing access to these materials until today we have multilibrary networks and huge computerized data banks all for handling the written word. These institutions are subject to analysis at every level in human linguistics terms, for the library is first and foremost an instrument of communication.

Knowledge has to do with a potentiality for taking action. But this requires having all the required knowledge in the same person. The main barrier to this is the immensity of the written record, which has given rise to specialization, with each person knowing only a fraction of the total. It is sometimes thought that if something is published, it thereby becomes “known.” This raises the problem “known by whom?” If a person lacks certain needed knowledge, it is not always easy for him to find it even if he suspects it might exist. But if not, what is he to do? The result has been the often fortuitous aspect of progress in scientific research, the adventitious direct contact between linkages in a scientist as a participant in both. A report in Science (Lewin 1985) states that “owing to the fortuitous combination of two diverse interests—those of slime mold biology and the habits of migratory songbirds—in a Princeton researcher . . . one curious aspect of this natural history appears to have been solved.”

The vastness of the printed record points up the importance of organization for retrieval. The difficulty of looking something up that one doesn’t know exists has led to reviews of the literature and encyclopedias. A report on a biology-wide computerized information system summarized in the same issue of Science (Holden 1985) suggests that better organization of existing information may well yield new knowledge.

So much for science. What about the humanities? What about novels, short stories, poems? What about history? Some of the same considerations hold here as well, particularly the adventitious nature of a person’s background, which gives him a view of culture unique to himself. The uniqueness of the individual is central in human linguistics, figuring importantly in the very foundations of the theoretical structure. Philological and literary applications can be foreseen, and aid in understanding the nature of popular culture and the media, which are very important for determining the direction and values of society.

One problem the individual sometimes has in communicating with others and in confronting the written record is the language barrier. Human linguistics holds potentialities for understanding the nature of bilingualism in the individual and in the community. And it also will have much to say about translation, which takes place in the contact between linkages in the translator. The importance of translation in the modern world is clear when we remember that all communication between different linguistic areas must take place through individuals that are to some extent bilingual.

Other points of comparison could also be brought forward between the promise of human linguistics and the past performance of the linguistics of language, such as developmental, historical, ecological, evolutionary, and genetic considerations, which deal with changes in properties, and where a treatment in terms of the linguistics of language involves a category mistake or the psychological or social reality of grammar fallacies. These comparisons would only reinforce the conclusions already reached.

While it must be admitted that the grammatical tradition is strongly entrenched after 2000 years, the human-linguistics approach shows considerable promise already in its infancy. It would seem worthwhile to nurture it with care in the hope that as it matures it will help us to achieve a deeper and fuller understanding of how people communicate.