VIII

Coda

IN THE EUROPEAN Middle Ages, it was assumed that any piece of literature could be read on four levels—literal, metaphorical, allegorical, and eschatological. This book is intended neither as a work of literature nor as a piece of theology. Yet, like tets viewed through medieval eyes, it has intentionally been written to be read on several levels.

The most basic of these is the literal level, as an introduction to the study of human language. Like its contemporary counterparts, this book considers what a human language is and how languages are constructed. It addresses issues of language universals, language acquisition, and language change. However, unlike many of its contemporaries, it broadens the domain of linguistic inquiry from spoken language to linguistic representation more generally. What is more, this book suggests that questions of teleology—why languages have the shapes they do—are legitimate issues of linguistic analysis.

The reasons for these departures can be seen as stemming from the critical level, which approaches the study of human language with the pedagogue’s red pen. It considers contemporary approaches to language and asks whether the ways in which we analyze language have any structural problems. In chapter 3, we considered standard attempts to define human spoken language, and found them inadequate. The case studies of speech, writing, and sign in chapters 5, 6, and 7 revealed that the same vagueness of definition plagued written and gestural language as well. There is an object lesson to be learned from pursuing this definitional theme, through its oral and visual variations, to its indecisive end: structural approaches to language that attempt to circumvent the people by whom and for whom the language was created are subject to a priori decisions as to what should be studied and how the investigation should proceed. Wholly lacking is any sense of why such an investigation should take place in the first place.

This search for a reason for studying human language underlies the third level at which the book can be read. Having suggested that a study of human language can help us to understand how language both creates and solves problems in social interaction, I deduced a method for examining language that could complement the familiar structural approaches. This method asked why languages assume the particular shapes they do. Just as we saw that definitional criteria are no more useful in categorically identifying written or signed language than they are in identifying spoken language, we found that functional explanations for structure are as rich in dealing with visual language as they are in explaining oral language structures.

From chapters 5, 6, and 7, it should be clear that the third level of meaning is as much the outlining of a research program as it is the presentation of a research problématique— this text has repeated such phrases as “it seems that” or “more research needs to be done before.” For this reason, I have called this final section the Coda rather than Conclusions. It is much too soon to draw conclusions about an approach to language that has barely rbegun. Like a large jigsaw puzzle, we have bits and pieces that we have been able to fit together; yet there are vast areas about whose content we can only make rational conjectures.

Some of the puzzles posed herein will require no more than hard work and patience to solve. Concerted sociolinguistic efforts will provide sharper profiles of the deaf signing community or of the potential value of iconicity in language learning for autistic or retarded children; other battles will be harder to win. We may never succeed in deciphering enough of the Maya glyphs to completely understand the extent of phoneticism in Maya writing. More topically immediate, we may fail to comprehend the extent to which our habits of spoken language are responsible for our persistent failures in teaching our students to write lucid English prose.

This book began with an anecdote illustrating the communicative impasse to which our uses of written language may lead us. These misunderstandings continue to plague even the most articulate among us. At a recent Brown University commencement, the president was reading a prepared text of laudatory remarks about a prominent lawyer and judge who was being awarded an honorary degree. The president solemnly intoned that “Mr. X has led a long and distinguished career at the bar.” An audience of already slightly giddy celebrants responded with peals of laughter. The embarrassed president haltingly continued his address to the yet more embarrassed lawyer.

Over half a century ago, Malinowski pointed out that language has no meaning outside the social context in which it is used. This book has endeavored to give theoretical and empirical significance to this truism.