166 CHAPTER 5. THE INTENSIONAL METATHEORY OF LANGUAGE next question is: 2. how can we characterize the second within the third?
Questions regarding the third class roughly coincide with questions asked in the classical paradigm. The important difference is: we do no longer fix the
“language” of the speaker, but rather “possible languages”; and which ones the speaker uses is an empirical matter.
On the downside, there is of course the danger that we solve all these problems and avoid all problems of the classical approach at the price of getting eve bigger ones. The main downside of our new approach is: the resulting intensional “languages” are very different from anything we are used to see as
“language”; in particular they are much more complex. It is of course interesting to do linguistics with these structures, but surely not in the same fashion as in the classical conception, where all formalisms are, in one way or other, are characterizations of (infinite) sets. We will devote a small subsection to the question what intensional linguistics actually looks like. As we will see, this is not too obvious; but still, intensional linguistics seems to be interesting to pursue, and maybe might even put into practice what some linguists already implicitly consider to be a “better linguistics”, without being too explicit about it.
5.3. THE THINKING SPEAKER: INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE 167 What this is to say, however, is the following: “language” cannot be separated from thereflecting speaker, who thinks about his own language; and knowledge of language cannot be separated from reasoning about language. We have gone some way to find this conclusion acceptable (or maybe even necessary). Looking back at the traditional concepts of linguistics, we find it at odds with almost all standard approaches, be they cognitive in the Chomskyan or anti-Chomskyan sense, or not interested in cognition at all.
Many people will without hesitation adopt the classical metatheory; probably the same will hold for the finitist metatheory. In fact, we can say that our treatment of these metatheories consists in making explicit and mathematically concise what many scholars do anyway. For the intensional metatheory I cannot make this claim; it is surely the most non-standard, and it deviates a lot from what (to my knowledge) all linguists usually think and do. In particular, the claim that the speaker who is explicitly reasoning should be subject of linguistics proper will be hard to accept for most scholars. For this reason, I think it is the only one of the meta-theories presented here which needs an explicit, independent justification and motivation. Therefore, before we go into the formal foundations, we give a short overview of theories and observations, which provide an independent motivation for a notion as the reasoning speaker.
The most important point we want to make here is that in most “peripheral disciplines” of linguistics, thethinking speaker plays an important role. This mostly concerns sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, but also some non-standard views on theoretical linguistics. So all we want to do is to bring him from the periphery of linguistics to the core. We do not want to make a conclusive argument why thethinking speaker should be the proper subject of linguistics proper; neither do we try to give a complete picture of the role he plays in the disciplines we have mentioned here. Both enterprises would result in a book on their own. What I undertake is rather: I present some topics and literature where the thinking speaker plays a crucial role. I know the only thing I can achieve thereby is to show that it is a conception which should not be dismissed easily; I content myself with that.
Granted that the speaker reasoning about his language is quite well-established in many areas of linguistics and it seems quite hard to “explain him away” (even though probably it is not impossible), the intensional metatheory only to brings him from the periphery of linguistics to the very core.
5.3.2 Language Change
In historical linguistics, we can hardly overestimate the reasoning processes of speakers. Firstly, there are rather peculiar phenomena as popular etymology, which cause processes capitolium → campidoglio(’fields of oil’), which rein-terpret a word which has become meaningless in a language into a meaningful one, even though there is no semantic motivation for it. It is clear that this kind of change presupposes a process of reasoning. Another example is the following:
it has been observed that vowel systems in Australian languages are somewhat more narrow than elsewhere in the world, that is, they occupy only a subspace of the space of possible vowels. This contradicts an old and often repeated hypothesis which was first made by Martinet ([49]), which says that if a language has nvowels, then it will most probably have the n most distinct vowels, in terms of articular and acoustic vowel space. That means that these vowels will
168 CHAPTER 5. THE INTENSIONAL METATHEORY OF LANGUAGE be most probably found at the outer ends of the vowel space (except for the case where a language has only one vowel, which is not attested to my knowledge).
For example, a language with three vowels will most probably have the vowels [a],[i],[u]; a language with five vowels will most probably have [a],[i],[u],[e],[o] etc.
This is a very natural hypothesis, which also has often been empirically confirmed (as a statistical universal, though). So it is puzzling that there is a geographical group of languages, the Australian aboriginal languages, which systematically deviates from this pattern. There is however a good explanation for this: in the area of Australian languages, there is a very common ear infection, which used to strike about half of the child population. This infection results in a loss of hearing mostly at the outer spectra of the human range, whereas the medium range rests quite intact. The Australian vowel systems are thus a direct adaptation to the needs of a large part of population with impaired hearing. The interesting thing is that this change cannot be triggered by language learners, as the disease strikes children which already master their language. Therefore, it has to be a (more or less) conscious change of the language by the speakers which has resulted in these vowel systems (see [68]).
Note that there are even more clear cases of language change: there seem to be changes which have been performed by conscious decision of a respected speaker or group of speaker. While the importance of these examples should not be underestimated, it should neither be overestimated: in the end of the day, these examples count as peculiarities. We will now consider one of the core processes of language change, namely analogy, which is (arguably) the most frequent and fundamental process to drive language change. We will see that analogy presupposes reasoning speakers, at least in the most plausible conception.
Let us take the case of sound change. Sound change often happens across the board, that is, a certain change equally affects all phones/phonemes in some phonetically/phonologically defined environment. Of course, there are exceptions to this: a sound change might affect only a particular item, say a very frequent one. Thinking about this, in fact, in fact it seems much more natural that sound change affects particular items rather than going across the board: surely sound change is triggered by speaking, and so it should not affect forms which are not affected by speech, such as rare forms, forms which belong to written language.
So in the end, it is across the board sound change which need an explanation;
and the most (only) natural explanation seems to be analogy. This of course presupposes that sound change is in fact triggered by capable speakers rather than language learners: otherwise, we would have to challenge the assumption that the same sounds are heard in the same way by humans (see also Lehmann, [44] p.209 for a similar criticism of the position that sound change only proceeds via language acquisition). So sound change must be triggered by what speakers do in their lifetime as capable speakers, and the fact that changes happen across the board must be due to their (more or less) conscious decisions on how to speak.
This however seems to be impossible without analogy of phonological contexts.
The same applies to morphologic change: we often see inflection paradigms change. Now if we make the (arguable) assumption that these paradigms do not exist as such in the mind of the speakers, these changes have to go by analogy.
So in order to get morphological changes across the board, we need analogy. If we admit that these changes are performed by capable speakers (even though not necessarily adults), then we have to admit that speakers think about their
5.3. THE THINKING SPEAKER: INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE 169 language, becausedrawing analogies (and inferences) is pretty much the essence of what we have treated as linguistic reasoning so far.
5.3.3 Sociolinguistic Typology: Trudgill
The “reasoning speaker” is also very well acknowledged in sociolinguistics. It is known since a long time that the spread of linguistic change crucially depends on social factors (see the famous work of Labov, [43]). There is a more recent and less widely accepted claim that not only the spread of linguistic innovations, but also thetype of linguistic change depends on social factors (see [68]). For example, there is strong evidence for the claim that languages which are rarely learned as a second language and which moreover are spoken in stable societies tend to become rather complex, contrary to language which are frequently learned by L2 speakers and/or develop in socially instable environments.
In this perspective it is much more plausible that language change is triggered by adults as well as by children: because how would children know about the need to make themselves comprehensible to a wide community of different native speakers, or the lack of this need? Moreover for language change to happen the way it does, it is necessary that adults reason about their language, reason about comprehensibility etc., and make conscious decisions based on their social experiences. Of course, this sharply contrasts with the classical, generative stair model of language change being triggered only by L1-learners; but it also contrasts with the conceptions that language and linguistic knowledge is untouchable for the reasoning of speakers. For an extensive treatment, we refer to [68].
5.3.4 Roy Harrison: The Language Makers
The main point we want to make here has already been made very explicitly by Roy Harris (see [23]). He claims that languages are social constructions, made up by the attitudes and ideology of speakers towards it. So whereas all communities have some language, this object is strongly underdetermined from various points of view. The object speakers think to be their language is determined by certain social/cultural/intellectual background conceptions. This is a direct approach to the same question we are after, though it has a very different background motivation, and also very different goals. The observation is however the same:
language as the collection of linguistic phenomena is a very incomplete object.
In order to make it the object of scientific study, we have to “complete” it by adding some feature. The topic of this work is a case in point: in order to be a satisfying model, “language” has to be infinite, whereas the linguistic objects we observe lack this quality. So even before we can look for a satisfying theory, we first need a satisfying model of reality.
We can pick up one particular aspect of Harris’ work. As Harris argues, our (modern) view of language is strongly determined by writing. Whereas he focusses on phonology, this is an important point also for syntax: can anyone be convinced that our standard projection and competence/performance distinction would be the same, if we did not consider written language at all? Not only as data, but just imagine also doing linguistics would be completely oral! Then it is easy to imagine that our usual conceptions rely to a huge extent on the fact that we write down sentences and ponder about them. Now assume we did
170 CHAPTER 5. THE INTENSIONAL METATHEORY OF LANGUAGE not have this possibility (or would not make use of it). I think many things which we claim to be “only performance restrictions” would actually be coded into competence, because we would not even see how to exceed them. This is actually a good point, as modern linguistics (at least linguistics proper) since de Saussure always underlined the priority of spoken language – but our usual linguistic conception of language is crucially based on writing. I do not think this in itself is a bad thing; but I think it is easy to agree that writing changed our conception of what is “language” – for the linguist as much as for the speaker;
and this is exactly because language is shaped by speakersthinking about it.
5.3.5 Coseriu on Knowledge of Language
Another place where we find many traces of the ideas we lay out here is the work of Coseriu. Actually, this is not very surprising: as Coseriu does not have a strong cognitive commitment, he is quite open minded on the structure of language. In fact, I think it has been the Chomskyan strong focus on “language”
as being something real in the mind/brain which has suffocated a lot of interesting discussions. We will therefore quickly review the work of Coseriu, mostly based on [11]. According to Coseriu, knowledge of language is quite fine-grained. This is firstly because he introduces the notion of the variousnorms of a language.
He establishes a well-known three-valued distinction, as opposed to the classical dualities: there is firstly the parole - habla - rede, which corresponds roughly to the notion in Chomsky and Saussure. There is thesystem, which roughly corresponds tolanguein Saussure. As a third and mediating object, he introduces thenorm, which specifies how one should speak, that is, it constrains the use of the system. In a natural language with a normal history, he goes on, there are always many norms, according to the (diaphasic, diastratic, diamesic) variations of the language, and usually speakers are fluent in more than one norm. So the system is more liberal than the norm, it has less constraints. Extensionally speaking, the system is larger than the norm, but for Coseriu, the system does not have an extension and it cannot be instantiated without a norm.
Why is this interesting? The norm is a social thing and not part of the language system; nonetheless it guides the way in which speakers speak. But as by assumption it is not part of proper linguistic knowledge, it must be extra-linguistic knowledge of the speakerwhich he puts to use while speaking. Actually, this is a clear thing: nobody ever claimed speakers do not think while they speak. But the thing is that norm really concerns the structure of language, it is a necessary instance for the instantiation of the system. Elaborating on this thought – to be honest – it is difficult for me staying in line with Coseriu, maybe because he thinks in structuralist terms, so often it remains unclear to me when he talks about the speaker’s mind or just about some abstract system of language.
However, there is another very interesting notion Coseriu introduces. In ([11],p.272,277), he introduces the notion of Sprachtypus (language type) as an additional concept, which is still more abstract and general than the system, which describes
”die Gesamtheit der funktionellen Zusammenh¨ange zwischen Funktionen und Verfahren, die auf der Ebene des Systems als verschieden auftreten.”
For Coseriu, type is rather functional than directly connected to language
5.4. THE MATHEMATICS OF INTENSIONAL LINGUISTICS 171