Reference:
Excerpts 'Critics of "radical pragmatics", and "functional grammar", assume that they and those they oppose share a common view of language,
that there is a pairing of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with "functions" (whatever they might be in the abstract), and
that the only point of disagreement is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from "functions" or whether the forms must be
described independently of "functions". I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms "function" and "functionalism", since the very restriction
of the investigation to an artificially defined level of "sentences" seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am
concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an
abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak' (140).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract | assumption | form |
function |
grammar |
language |
pragmatics |
rule |
sentence |
'The assumption, in other words, is that "grammar" (in the sense of the rules, constraints, and categories of the language attributed to
the speaker) must be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the speaker may make of it. That kind of
grammar is conventionally understood to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns and verbs, specify the forms
of additive categories like those of case, tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words can occur in a sentence.
Discourse, the actual use of language, is held to be in some sense an "implementation" of these structures, or the way in which the abstract
mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker is realized in particular utterances' (141).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract | assumption | case |
category |
grammar |
language |
mind |
noun |
rule |
structure |
tense |
transitivity |
verb |
'However consistently it can be predicted that a certain particle or aspectual form will function in a particular role in the discourse, it is
rare that the reverse is the case -- that a particular form is restricted to a single specifiable discourse role. To cut a very long story short, and
thereby probably caricature the dilemma, some way out of the vicious circle of form-to-function-to-form is needed' (141).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | form | function | role |
'This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is being proposed. The term "emergent" itself I take from an
essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of "culture" to that of "grammar". Clifford
remarks that "Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed" (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same is true of grammar, which like speech itself
must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but
never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my
field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender
group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed' (141-2).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | culture | emergent | grammar |
politics |
structure |
text |
'The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity, comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse
as much as it shapes discourse in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite for discourse, a prior
possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates, but are negotiable in face-to-face
interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context,
including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar
points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an
utterance' (142).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract | concrete | context |
discourse |
emergent |
form |
function |
grammar |
interaction |
interlocutor |
regularity |
structure |
'The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question
of "how" the grammar came to be the way it "is", but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards
structure, a postponement or "deferral" of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as
epiphenomenal, that is, as least as much an effect as a cause' (142).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | emergent | epiphenomenal | genealogy |
structure |
'Evidently the meanings represented by the English "indefinite article" are not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an
open ended set of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences of forms with the indefinite article is not
specifiable in advance, but is impromptu and negotiable. Even participants in the conversation may not "know" whether a specific new
mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction' (144).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | form | function | interaction |
meaning |
verbal |
'The point about the retention of archaisms in proverbial language has of course often been made. But it has less often been noted that
proverbial language is only an extreme case of repetition in discourse, at the other end of which are the morphological and syntactic
repetitions some of which are called grammar; this point is made cogently by Lambrecht 1984. In other words, real live discourse abounds in
all sorts of repetitions which have nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance, idioms, proverbs, clichÈs, formulas,
specialist phrases, transitions, openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent level at which these regularities
are statable. They are not necessarily "sentences", or "clauses", with recurrent internal structure, but they are often used holistically. Their
boundaries may or may not coincide with the constituent boundaries of our grammatical descriptions: subject and predicate, noun phrase,
prepositional phrase. Moreover, what is a formulaic expression in one context may not be in another' (144).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | context | discourse | formula |
grammar |
'It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated
parts. Language is, in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an improvised way out of ready-made elements.
Language is thus to be treated, in Wittgenstein's words, "from outside" (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120) -- not as governed by internalized
mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent material with which discourses can be devised ... Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing
language is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as "graft": new speech acts are "grafted onto" old ones and
of course serve in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are grafted ... Becker's idea of "prior texts" ... is also crucial here:
previous actual utterances form the basis of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew Pawley, and
others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic,
double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation: in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith
1980:60). There is no room -- no need -- for mediation by mental structures. It is in this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger
1976), speaking is more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following rules. It is a question of possessing a
repertoire of strategies for building discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them. Grammar is now not to
be seen as the only, or even the major, source of regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged, or
dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways' (144-5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | bricolage | discourse | explanation |
formula |
grammar |
language |
memory |
mind |
pastiche |
regularity |
rule |
strategy |
theory |
'Looking at language this way involves a serious adjustment for the linguist, since we have developed the habit of seeing utterances in
terms of a fixed framework of rules, and especially because we have been raised on the doctrine of the free generability of sentences, and
the privileging of novelty over prior texts. Indeed, novelty is a prized virtue in our society altogether, ... and we have many ways, some more
subtle than others, of censuring perceived repetitions of others' behavior and an enormous vocabulary dealing with repetition (copying,
imitation). Yet when one examines actual specimens of speech from the formulaic point of view the effect is a striking one, perhaps even a
memorable one, in that it is then extremely difficult to revert to the old rule-governed syntactic view of discourse' (145).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | censure | formula | language |
repetition |
rule |
sentence |
'All discourse is in some sense specialist discourse, moulded to the speaker's personality (i.e. personal history), the situation, and the
topic. It is precisely the point about Emergent Grammar that such "heteroglossic" aspects of language necessarily become integral parts of
the linguistic description, and are not set aside as a separate agenda irrelevant to the linguistic code and its structure' (147).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | code | context | description |
discourse |
structure |
'The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language still exists, of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic
system is now not to be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which, "exceptional" phenomena must be set aside as
inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations of real
utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas, in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors ... They do not, however,
merge into the kind of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation to subtend them' (147).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | formula | grammar | mind |
structure |
system |
'What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of re-contextualizing the notion of grammar -- not to abolish it, but rather to
suspend it with a view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to call emergent grammatical regularities. But as we
have seen, the doctrine of Emergent Grammar assignes an entirely different status to grammar from what might be called A Priori
Grammar' (147).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | discourse | emergent | grammar |
status |
'No principled line can be drawn between the emergent regularities designated to be "grammatical" and other regularities deemed to
be "rhetorical", "formulaic", etc.' (147-8).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | emergent | 'Any decision to limit the domain of grammar to just those phenomena which are relatively fixed and stable seems arbitrary'
(148).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | grammar | 'It is not a question of an invariant hyperform from which different clauses are derived by processes of deletion and movement. Instead
it seems that constructions spread outwards from a small nucleus and in turn form new nuclei (something like the metastasis of malignant
cells, to coopt a metaphor of Bolinger's), and the resultant array of clauses are in "family resemblance" relationships to one another'
(149).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | form | metaphor | 'A major pustulate, or working hypothesis, of Emergent Grammar is that the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to
become structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and serving as a basis for variation and extension'
(150).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | basis | consistency | construction |
emergent |
grammar |
'What I have wanted to stress here is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which that formal process
emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is anchored in particular, concrete utterances. It is this "prior textuality" of the construction
which explains why it has retained properties of a separate, external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting a
lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual conditions, presumable involving differences of topic
continuity' (153).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | agent | clause | concrete |
construction |
context |
discourse |
strategy |
topic |
'It will be seen that "grammar" begins life on page 2 [of Radford 1981] in its theoretically correct style, as a "model" of the native
speaker's "linguistic competence". But notice that by page 3, "grammar" is suddenly no longer a linguists construct, a formal characterization
of the abilities presumed to underlie the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's theory to something the
speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford, were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists for
alleged "confusion" over the notion of "grammar", and often accuse them of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept'
(154).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | competence | concept | discourse |
grammar |
theory |
'There is no question that "grammar" is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what "grammar"
is in the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This
asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the
speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a
mentally representated set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess
an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon -- "accessed"! -- in case they should ever need to speak' (154-5).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract | case | grammar |
system |
Last Modified:
July-12-96 9:44:47
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