No meaning without other people

This book is about meaning. Probably no society has ever been more concerned with meaning than the one in which we live. Never before have so many people felt such an urge to make sense of the world they live in and of the lives they are leading. They find this sense not so much in themselves as in the discourse, which is the entirety of everything that has been said and written by the members of the discourse community to which they owe their identity. It is communication, this verbal interaction with others, which reassures them about their notions and ideas, and in which they find interpretations they can accept, rework or reject, and in which they can recognise themselves.

In principle, everyone has a voice in the discourse. But in reality we find that our modern society is neatly divided into those who are commissioned to produce texts for the media and the rest of us who consume them. While each of us may say whatever we want, it seems to carry less weight than what we are told by the discourse we find on the shelves of our content merchants: newspapers, magazines, television, much of the web, NHS brochures and similar pamphlets issued by our authorities, instruction manuals and even those old-fashioned things called books. Secondary experiences supplied by the media have taken over the role that a person's own experiences and those of their friends and neighbours had for former generations.

Both science and engineering are about new knowledge. While engineering is about inventing a new gadget or a new process, science is about discovering something that was already there but was not known about before. What is invented and what is discovered are part of the real world out there (or so it seems). Some doubts might not be amiss, however. New inventions are said to serve a purpose or to have a function. A plough is there to plough. But who decides what should be called ploughing and what not? A new pill is certainly real, but how real is the depression which it is supposed to cure? Artefacts and inventions presuppose a discourse. The discourse makes us aware that there is something we are missing. It gives us the idea that something could be done about it. Even before these artefacts and these inventions are around, we turn these objects of the world out there into discourse objects. We talk about our ideas, explain them in relationship to other discourse objects, and discuss what we like and do not like about them. As discourse objects, they become part of our knowledge. One of the reasons why even chimpanzees are pretty poor at engineering is that they cannot discuss their needs and the possible options to meet them.

Science is about facts. According to the Cobuild Dictionary (3rd edition 2001), facts are ‘pieces of information that can be discovered’.

As we have seen, we find speech situations in both oral and literate societies, and they differ accordingly. The invention of writing has changed the discourse at large to such an extent that we may well wonder if we really should subsume communication in oral and literate societies under the same umbrella term ‘language’.

A discourse, this entirety of contributions made by the members of a discourse community, is, as far as I see it, more or less equivalent with Saussure's concept of la parole, the manifestation of language. But what is a manifestation of language? How equivalent is the transitory acoustic phenomenon of a speech utterance to the material evidence of a text, carved in stone, written on parchment, or accessible on the internet, downloadable and printable as hardcopy? The spoken language of the primordial speech situation is more than just ‘text’. Text may be a vital part of symbolic interaction, but it is not its sole ingredient. As said above, the linguistic content of a spoken utterance cannot be separated from the setting in which it occurs, from the voice in which it is delivered, from the ostentation, the gestures and the facial expressions that accompany it, not even from the objects that make up the reality shared by the participants of the situation. All these ingredients extend the discourse and are inseparable from what is said.

In this chapter, I want to argue that the cognitive turn that characterises the second half of the twentieth century has not been able to clear up the mystery of meaning. In the 1950s, the cognitive sciences replaced previous paradigms trying to make sense of human interaction such as the American traditions of pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer) and of behaviourism (particularly B. F. Skinner). Both behaviourism and pragmatism have a social focus. Cognitivism, on the other hand, is about the working of the individual mind. It has become a prominent scientific paradigm in many disciplines of the human and social sciences, for instance in psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy, but also, interestingly, in biology and the computer sciences.

The pragmatists look at symbolic interaction. This is the kind of behaviour to which people assign meanings, and includes the interpretations we, the people, assign to the interactive behaviour of other people. In his investigation of verbal behaviour, the behaviourist B. F. Skinner attempted to correlate the verbal and other symbolic input to which a person is exposed, with their linguistic output (the utterances that person makes). For behaviourists who wanted to observe social interaction, an individual's verbal behaviour seemed to offer the only access to an understanding of how meaning is assigned to interaction.

Natural languages leave a lot to be desired. They are, as we have learned, full of vagueness and ambiguity. They are subject to constant change, and under closer scrutiny seemingly regular features tend to get lost in an almost infinite diversity of regional, situational, social, genre-specific and domain-specific variation. We are always encountering language usages which appear foreign to us. For thousands of years people have been complaining about the decay of language. Often when we question language use (normally the way other people use language) we look into the past. Then we ask ourselves what the word in question ‘really’ means, and for really we could read originally. Apparently we long for a Golden Age when there was still a natural, uncorrupted relationship between the word and what it stood for in the world outside. This explains the popularity of etymological dictionaries. But no matter how far we go back, we never seem to arrive at the ‘true’ meaning. Like everyone else, Plato, in his dialogue Cratylus, could not answer convincingly when asked what makes such a relationship natural. To Socrates' question ‘For the gods must clearly be supposed to call things by their right and natural names, do you not think so?’ Hermogenes responds: ‘Why, of course they call them rightly, if they call them at all’ (Plato, translated by B. Jowett on Project Gutenberg online). In which language do the Olympians converse among themselves?

Introduction

In this chapter we turn our attention to three commonly encountered general written registers – newspaper writing, academic prose, and fiction. A fundamental difference between the spoken registers in the last chapter and written registers concerns time for planning and revising. Of course, you can choose to write a quick note, or you can even write a quick academic paper (perhaps with disappointing results when you get the grade!). Unlike speech, however, writing allows you to sit and think about what you want to say, look over what you have written, and revise it. As we shall see, these characteristics have important consequences for the language of written registers generally. But writers can also choose to use their planning and revising time to create very different kinds of texts, and this chapter also illustrates some of the variation that exists among different written registers.

One major situational characteristic shared by many written registers is a primary focus on communicating information rather than on developing a personal relationship. Of course, there are few uncontestable “facts,” and so most communication – in writing or speech – reflects some ideological perspective. Further, it is possible in writing to be interpersonal, and registers like personal letters or e-mail messages can be focused more on sharing personal feelings and attitudes than conveying information.

Text varieties in your daily life

Before you begin this book, take a minute to think about all the different kinds of texts that you encounter over the course of a normal day. In the morning, maybe you have a conversation with a roommate. As you have breakfast, you might listen to a radio announcer or read the morning newspaper. Then you might make a telephone call to a friend or family member. As you get ready for a class, you might proofread a paper that is due that day or look over the reading you did for homework. When you attend the class, you probably talk with friends, listen to a lecture, and write notes. And that's just the first few hours of your day!

For most people, conversation is the most common type of spoken language that they produce. But people typically listen to many different kinds of spoken language: television shows, commercials, radio or television news reports, classroom lectures, political speeches, sermons, and so on. Written language also plays a very important role in daily life for many people. Students usually produce many kinds of writing: notes during class sessions, written assignments, term papers, and possibly numerous text messages and/or e-mail messages. But similar to spoken language, most people read more than they write. In fact, many people read even more different kinds of texts than they listen to: newspaper articles, editorials, novels, e-mail messages, blogs, text messages, letters and ads in the mail, magazine articles, ads in magazines, textbooks, research articles, course syllabi, and other written assignments or handouts.

The preceding chapters have introduced the concept of register in relation to the related concepts of genre and style. These chapters have additionally described a framework for doing register analysis, presented several case studies that have applied this framework, and discussed research findings on the more general patterns of register variation and historical change. In the present chapter, we return to some of the themes introduced in Chapter 1, discussing the place of register studies in relation to other academic fields and in relation to real-world applications.

Register studies in the broader context of linguistics

It is possible to consider linguistics as comprising two major subfields: the study of language structure (e.g., phonology, morphology, grammar) and the study of language use, how people acquire language and what they actually do with the structural resources of a language. The study of language use is intimately connected to the study of linguistic variation. All human languages exhibit linguistic variation: related linguistic structures that express similar meanings. Variation exists at all linguistic levels, including: allophones (e.g., t vs. th), synonymous words (e.g., dresser vs. chest of drawers), morphemes (e.g., -tion vs. -ment), grammatical constructions (e.g., relative clauses with and without a relative pronoun, active voice vs. passive voice). In large part, the study of language use is the study of linguistic variation, investigating the question of why a speaker uses one set of linguistic forms rather than another at any given time and place.