sociolinguistics article

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READING TWO

From Saussure to CriticalSociolinguistics:The Turn Towards aSocial View of LanguageGunther Kwss

There are many plausible ways to read the history of linguistics over the last one

hundred years or so. The viewpoint that one takes is, in the end, shaped by one'sown personal history and experience, and by what 1will call an 'ethical/politicalstance'. 'Evidence' will not carry the day, because someone else's theory, resting

on a different stance, will produce different kinds of evidence; or else it can

recast my own in the shape of the other theory. My own position is that social

factors take central place, that the influence of culture is crucial, and linguistic

practice is seen as one among very many socially and culturally significant

practices.

To approach this issue of the 'turn' towards a more social view of language we

needto

know what the 'turn' has been away from. That provides my startingpoint. 1 then want to formulate some of the questions which might characterize[he two positions. The overarching question clearly is: What is a social view oflanguage? And what, therefore, is not a social view of language? The 'non-social

view' puts into the foreground questions about language-as-system: What is asysrern like? It may have subsidiary questions, such as: 'Why is the system (orwhy is language) as it is? The first, the 'social view', puts into the foreground

questions such as: 'What is the role of the social in relation to language? Both askquestions about origins and characteristics: 'How does language come to be as itis?' And hoth have subsidiary questions that focus on the role of the individual.explicitly or implicitly, and on their potentials for action, for agency. The answersare deeply different in each case.

The mainstream in linguistic thinking in the twentiethcentury

'Western' linguistic thinking in the twentieth century has to be seen in the context

ofits origins in the previous century. That had been the century devoted to the

revolutionary discovery that (nearly all) European languages, and many of those

in the Middle East and of the Indian subcontinent (Hittite, Farsi, Hindi, Urdu)

were mernhers ofthe one Indo-European 'family' of languages. That insight gaverise ro a century's work in which connections were discovered, relationshipstmced and documented, and 'laws' - general principles - established, whichcould account for the diversity, the proliferation, and the fragmentation of this

'family'. I t is a story ofconstant change stretching across all ofEurope, the MiddleEast and the Indian subcontinent.


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Against this picture of ceaseless change. Ferdinand de Saussure (who himself

had participated in this enterprise and written a definitive work on the sound-system of Indo-European languages) posed the question: 'Rut what does a

language look like, what is it like at a particular moment?'. We know languages

change from one moment to another, but what are their characteristics, if wecould hold them still, freeze them, at one moment in time? The question was

posed in a series of lectures Saussure gave at the University of Geneva hetween1903 and 1904. After his death several of his students produced, from lecturenotes that they had made, the Coulse in General Linguistics (1916).

Of course. ideas of such significance do not occur in isolation even ifwe can

identify one individual as the seeming originator of them - they are 'about' at thetime, however subtly that may he. It is that 'aboutness' which ensured that out of

the rich and complex set of questions in the Cotllse (many of them social andhistorical) this one became focal for linguistics in the twentieth century. The

strand oflinguistics that it gave rise to is generally referred to as structuralist; ithecame the dominant mode of intellectual inquiry in that century nor only inlinguistics hut throughout the humanities and heyond.

The fundamental question posed in structuralism is that of th e characteristicsof the system. What are the elements of a structure (whatever it may he), andwhat are the relations between the elements? Saussure himself gave a complex

answer in which the focus was on the sign, and on the all-encompassing entity

in which signs exist, language as such or langue. I will return to the latter in amoment.

He focused on the characteristics of the sign in two ways: first on its internalcharacteristics, and second on its relation to entities outside th e sign. He alsospeculated on the principles sustaining these characteristics and relations.

He saw the sign as participating in two kinds of structures: one, its place in an

organized inventory of signs, which he referred to as the ~ m i sf association; andthe other, its place in an actual, outwardly visible form, which he called the axisofcomhirzation. (The Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1961) later named thesethe paradigmatic and the syntagmatic planes respectively, the names bywhich they are now referred to commonly.)

To exemplify: in the cultural system of furniture and the subsystems of objects

you can sit in or on, we might have a paradigmatic set such as: chair. stool.bench, easy chair, sofa, beanbag. In a system such as language we might have aparadigmatic set such as the vowel sounds of (Standard Southern) English: short

and long i, u. o, a, e: a reduced vowel (as in the final vowel of butter), the a esound as in had, etc.

Elements of these systems are combined into synlagmat ic structures. An easychair can be combined with an element from the subsystem of ohiects that youplace things on - a coffee table, say- and with another ohiect from the suhsystemof objects that we might lie on- a sofa, let's say - to make the structure of'an easychair and coffer table and sofa: a comfortable corner in our living room'. Inlanguage, a vowel might be combined with a consonant to form a syllable: it , hi; ortwo consonants with one vowel: hit, sin. etc.

Even from this tiny exemplification a large number of consequences follow.When I said, 'can be combined with', I didn't specify the agent who did thiscomhining. You might say, rrasonahly, that the syllables of a language such as


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English are simply 'there', so there is no combining for me to do. You might even

say that the same is true ofthe comfortable corner in the living room; go into ten

thousand middle-class homes in Europe and you'll find such an arrangement. Is

there choice? For Sauqsure the answer was that individuals make use of thestructures and elements that are there, but they do not change them. The

arrangements and elements are pre-given by society. This question ofagency hasbeen one of the central issues in the turn to a social view of language.A second consequence, perhaps the central one in structuralism generally and

in structuralist linguistics particularly, is that ofmeaning. If, in arranging thecomfortablecorner, I only have the one easy chair, coffee tahle and sofa, I simplyuse what I have. Of course, 1 can arrange them in different ways, and that makes

a difference in how the room feels in its 'meaning'. But as I had no choice in

what to use, no meaning attaches to my use of the three items. However. if I dohave a choice (a comfy old chair or a smart new one, a glass-ropped table or awooden one) then meaning does attach to my choice. 'Glass-topped tahle andsmart new easy chair' produces a different meaning to 'wooden table and a

comfy old chair'. Meaning of one kind arises from the possibilities ofselection

from a range ofelemenls within one paradigm. A second kind ofmeaning arisesfrom the fact that different types ofchairs are, in fact, cultural encodings of

different possible forms ofbehaviour: A stool asks me to sit differently to an easychair. Setting up the room for a job interview with a stool for the interviewee and

easy chairs for the interviewers - to make a ridiculous example - would set thetone decisively. The elements in systems ofchoice have meaning because they

refer to elements (obiects or practices) in other systems of choice.For Saussure both kinds of meaning were important. On the one hand, to put

it too simply, the sign is based on the relation of reference. The sign is a devicefor permitting form to express meaning because it is a means for allowing one

element to be the form (the signifier) through which another element, themeaning (the signified) finds it realization. its expression. A rose can he theform for the expression of the meaning 'love'. A connection is made between an

element in the system oflanguage, and an element in the system ofculturally

salient values. The former 'refers' to the latter. On the other hand, if there is asystem of elements (vowel sounds in language; furniture in the system ofcultural

ohjects: different flowers in that system), and I can select from a number (a roserather than an orchid), I have choice, therefore meaning attaches to my selection.

To select a straight-backed chair 'means' not to have chosen an easy chair or

stool that could also have been chosen. The meaning ofan element in the system

arises by virtue of its opposilion to the other elements. That meaning is its value.The greater the number of elements in a system, the greater the possibility of

choice, the smaller the value ofeach element. So, for example, if there are words

such as party, bash, get together, celebratiotr, raw,a smalldo, drinks a n d nibblesor supper in my everyday vocabulary, then my choice of one is significant in two

ways: 'celebration' refers to the particular kind ofevent I have in mind and, at the

same time, 'celebration' means 'not party'. 'not bash', 'not supper'. My meaning is

in effect, both of these together.

Saussure reflected on the relation ofform and meaning in the sign and stated

that in language it was both arbitrary and conventional (save some exceptions

such as onomatopoeia, for instance). The English word tree is, in French, arbre,


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and in German, b a u m , showing, so Saussure asserted, that the same meaning canbe expressed in very different forms; hence, he concluded, any form can be used

to express any meaning. just so long as the relation of form and meaning is

sustained by the force of conwentiotr. Given the power of convention theindividual is unahle to exert any influence on this arbitrary relation: the sign isthere to be used, hut cannot be altered. In Saussure's schema, this is so, both for

the individual sign and for the collection ofsigns, for language as a whole.

Langue, the system ofa particular language, is the expression ofa social force.both by making the arbitrary connection and in sustaining it in convention. Theindividual may make use of the system, in parole,hut the individual cannot

change the system, the language.

As I will point out in the last section, in my view this is a fundamental

misconception. The relation ofform and meaning is motivated, not arbitrary, and,at the same time, it is sustained by convention in particular ways. However, the

significant point here is that Saussure's views on the characteristics of systems,structure, signs, on langue and parole, shaped the development of mainstream

and non-mainstream linguistics in the twentieth century. In the mainstream theseviews allowed emphasis to be placed on relations within the system rather than

on reference; on structure rather than on function; on arbitrariness, thus

eliminating the force of individual agency, whether from the individual sign or

from the system of signs, the langue; and to treat langue as a phenomenon notdirectly connected to the social. After all, if individual action in and with the

system has no effect, then how can there be connections to the minutiae ofsociallife, or of its organization in larger systems?

This emphasis on the autonomy of langue. on relations of form rather than on

relations of meaning, on the power of the system rather than the effects of the

individual's action coincided with other political and intellectual strands, in

psychology for instance, as in cenain forms ofsociology. For linguistics, one

potent development was the conjunction of cognitivist psychology with

structuralism, as best and most influentially exemplified in the workofNoamChom sky (1965a and 1965h). Chomsky's question initially was precisely that of'origins'; it arose out of certain intractable problems that structuralism had runinto, questions concerned with the definition of(classes of) elements in a

structure. This is not the place to discuss that issue, hut it centred on the problem

ofestablishing relations and regularities in seemingly irregular and unrelatedphenomena. His solution was to draw a distinction between the level ofsurface

structure at which the irregularities existed, which he called performance

(again related to but not identical with Saussure'spamle), and a level below that.

the deep structure, at which there was regularity, which he called (thespeaker's) competence (related to but not identical with Saussure's langue). The

two were related by processes of transformation, which changed (abstract) deep

structures into (concrete/specific) surface structures.With this move the question of origins was solved: linguistic competence was

a property of the mind, and therefore common to all human minds. Linguisticperformance was a kind ofdistortion ofthe real structure, which lay beyond orbehind it. But with this move the question oforigins was also answered

decisively in favour of 'the mind' (or even the brain) and decisively against the

social. Stephen Pinker's (1994) more recent writings are contemporary revivals of


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Chomsky's ideas (themselves stemming from the politicaVintellectua1world ofradical sections of American intelligentsia in the 1940s and 1950s). Chomsky'spolitical radicalism with his espousals of ideals of social and political equality is

directly related to his;assumption of the equality of all humans (all humanminds). That political force is absent in Pinker's re-warming, where it becomesan a-political physiological cognitivism.

The force of the social

Speaking against this theoretical development is the 'evidence' of language-in-use. If, like Chomsky, we treat what speakers actually do, their performance. as

mere 'noise' (and in his more recent writings he treats actual languages -

Japanese, English, Swahili-

in that fashion), as 'distortions' of the real, an

exceedingly sparse inner, mentalist organization, then there really is nothing to

explain. If , like Saussure, we think that what speakers do - parole - has no effect

on the system. then we have no serious reason for investigating it. If, however.

we think that what people do needs to be understood, then we have a series of

questions. These are, as I said earlier, questions around the role of the social,

about the possibilities of real action by an individual acting in socialenvironments. Here I will outline three relatively distinct approaches to such

questions. I will characterize them as that ofcorrelation,that ofchoice,and

that ofcritique.

The first approach is the correlational.It points to the fact that certain forms oflinguistic hehaviour can be shown to correlate quite clearly with certain aspects ofsocial organization. In sociolingi~isticwork on 'code-switching' (Gumperz, 1982).it can be shown that speakers change the forms of language they use in quite

precisely describable social circumstances. Speakers might switch from a 'high'

form of their language to a 'low' form as and when the social environment

suggests that they should do so: they speak, let's say, a standard educated form of

[heir language in formal situations, and use a dialect form (whether social orgeographical or both) oftheir language in informal, casual situations. Speakersare seen to be aware of the 'correlations'; that one social situation demands the

use ofa particular form of the language and that another social situation demandsanother.

What is the case on the macro-level code was shown by Labov (1972) to be

the case with the micro-level of pronunciation. He showed conclusively that thepronunciation of specific words not only varied between speakers from different

strata in a social hierarchy, but also varied for the same speakers in environments

where either the degree offormality or the degree of attention drawn to thepronunciation ofa word had been changed. In informal, casual speech, middle-

class speakers in New York might pronounce the word 'beard' with an 'r'/hi:rd/whereas a taxi driver might say /bi:d/. However, when asked to read the word inisolation, the taxi driver might also say /bi:rd/.

For Labov, as for Gumperz, speakers are aware ofa code-like relationbetween linguistic features and features of the social environment. The role of

the social is to establish the correlation; the role of the individual is to implementand instantiate it as appropriate sociolinguistic behaviour. Speakers demonstrate

a competence that goes well beyond the grammaticaVsyntactic competence


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proposed by Chomsky. In an enormously influential article originally publishedin 1966 (as a counter to Chomsky's position) Dell Hymes (see Hynles andGumperz, 1972) called this communication competence, listing features that

might be included ih that. Correlation establishes a close connection between

language and the social, but does so by leaving rach as quite separate entities.and leaving language as autonomous; language itself is not changed by theactions of individuals. (Lahov revealingly used Chomskian gramniar - in my viewtheoretically quite at odds with his avowed purposes - to describe distinctions

Ixtween American middle-class (White) English, and Black English. treatingthem as identical at the level ofdeep structure, and differing at the level of

surface structure alone.)

The second approach, in which I will focus on the work of MichaelHalliday.

rests on the notion ofchoice. It takes the idea of the Saussurean (andHielmslevian) paradigm, and makes it and its correlates into the centre ofthetheory. In Halliday's theory (1978. 19851, grammar is a resource for meaningorganized as systems of choices. The speaker/writer makes complex sets ofchoices which lead to the realizations of the meaning in an actual structure. Thesystems are grouped into three broad functions which correspond to the tasks

that any communicational system is asked to perfom. These functions are:saying something about the state ofevents in the world, which Halliclay calls theideational

function; saying something about the state of the social relationsbetween those who are interacting by means of the communicational system,which he calls the in te rp er so na l function; and saying something about the

organization of the structure as a message, which he calls the textual function.Speakers choose simultaneously from options in each of these funcrions. So

for example, I might choose, within the ideational function. to have a clause-typewhich highlights agency [rioters bum ten cars]; within the interpersonalcomponent of the grammar I might choose a statement. so that the speaker has

the role o fsomeone who gives information (rather than asks a question or givesa cornmand) which would make a quire different social relation lxnveen thepeople interacting within the textual component; I might choose to highlight theagents of the action 'it was the rioters who bumed ten cars'.

The role of the speaker here is very different to that in the correlational view.

Here they are active in selecting from the range of options available to them in

response to the social contingencies in which they find themselves. Each of the

choices made in the brief example above can be shown to he made as a result ofthe speaker's assessment of the environment in which the speaker made the

choice. Instead of 'rioters bum ten cars' we could have had 'ten cars burned in

riots'; instead of a statement we could have had the questions: 'Was it ten carsthat were bumed?. 'Did the rioters burn ten cars?; and instead of highlighting theagents we could have had 'some loss of property in demonstrations'.

The third approach, that ofcritique,derives from a theoretical position such as

Halliday's. If the speakers' actions in choosing options are prompted by their

assessment ofthe social situation in which they find themselves, then we can, inprinciple at least, track back from the texts which have been produced to

uncover the choices that have been made, and why. Laying bare the choices

revealed in the structures is to lay bare the structures of the environments in

which the choice was made.


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tiHI(SS / FHOhl 5hlSSI:KE TO CRITICAL XX:IOLlN(;lllSTICS 35

In this move, text opens the door to an understanding of the social, and the

individual's action within it. Understanding the meanings of the choices made is

to understand the meanings ofthe social environment in which they were made.

Text opens the way tp an understanding of the social which goes beyond itsoven content, and thus can open the way to critique of the social.

In my own approach to this question of critique. tleveloped with others at theUniversityofEast Anglia in the early to mid 1970s (Aers el al.,1982; Fowler et al..1979; Hodge and Kress, 1988) the crucial question for me was: What is it that

gives rise to difference in language use? For myself the answer was 'power'.

Power is at play in all linguistic (inter)action, and much of the workofcriticallinguistics focused on the working of power in linguistic practices.

Of course. to focus on power as the motor for linguistic production, as the

generative principle of the very forms of linguistic utterances, was to invert therelation between the linguistic and the social, and to make the social prior. ForGumperz, as for Lahov, the social caused selections of different codes, but it did

not reach into the organization ofcode: language remained a discreet.

autonornous system. For Halliday, the social was responsible for the shape ofthesvstem - for him, language is as it is because of its social functions - and the

individual chooses within the potential of the system. Yet the conditions

prompting ('causing', 'determining', 'shaping') the choice of the individual were

not foregrounded in the theory, and the social conditions ofchoice were not

developed theoretically. In critical linguistics the social is seen as a field ofpower. and the linguistic action of socially formed and positioned individuals is

seen as shaped first and foremost by differences in power. All linguistic(interlaction is shaped by power differences of varying kinds, and no part oflinguistic action escapes its effects.

This was decisively not a stn~cturalistmove: it put (social) function first, aposition taken from the workofMichael Halliday. It also moved decisively away

from the building-blocks theory of language, in which small units are combined

to form larger units, which are then combined to the largest units. For example,

sounds combine to form syllables, syllables are available to make the phoneticshape of the word; words are combined to make phrases; phrases to make

clauses; clauses to make sentences; and, for certain theorists, sentences to make

text (Harris, 1995; van Dijk, 1977). In critical linguistics, linguistics action is socialaction of which texts are the outward manifestation. The text, not the sentence

(or the word, or the sound) is the basic unit, the starting point. All linguisticaction is textual action. Language is a means to instantiate, to realize and to give

shape to (aspects of) the social. There is no linguistic action other than as pan of

the unfolding making of text in social/linguistic action.In critical linguistics, action, as social action, is central, and with that the

question of the agency of individuals also moved to centre stage.

Towards a social view of language

The question 'What gives rise to difference in language use? could now, as a

result ofwork of critical linguistics he recast as: 'What are the possibilities ofchoice, and how does power enter into the possibilities of choosing? Clearly, in

any answer to this question it will he the powerful who are privileged, and it will


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36 IV.\HTO N F HF .A I ) IN


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historian- so I assume - wished to indicate his awareness of the political issues,

yet did not wish to adopt the perspective entailed in the use of 'invasion'.

The social conditions ofthe making of this utterance are thus in utterance, inits very form, in its shape. In my view, the syntactic potential of 'invasion'..invade2, as well as that of'coast', are changed: the grammar ofthe language itselfhas been altered in this use. In this view the social is in the linguistic sign: it is

not around it, not correlated with it nor is it there as a resource to use. Thesoda1 is in the sign; in its use the sign is transformed to assume the form thatbest, most plausibly realizes the interest of the maker ofthe sign at that moment.

The complex of signs made by this historian, and each of the signs in thecomplex 'invasion of the comr, 'a white invasion'. 'invasion of the coast','invasion of the coact', 'white inr~asion'arises out of this sign-maker's interest. Iuse 'interest' to capture a range offactors: his own social/historical formation, hisassessment of the political context in which he is writing, his assessment ofhis

audience, and his interest - his stance, his commitment, and his personal and

professional investment in this highly fraught issue - as someone who, in 1972,

was regarded as a progressive historian. At the moment of making the sign, lleattempts to find the form that will best represent his meanings, form (such as thewords, 'invasion', 'coast'. 'white') which have their histories and their

compactions and condensations ofmeaning from their prior use when they

expressed the interests of other sign-makers in other environments. The forms

carry the histories of the social (as Raymond Williams shows with suchpersuasiveness in his keyword^, 19991, that is, the histories of the making ofsignsby others in their social, political and personal/affective environments. Each sign-maker (never merely a sign-user) is therefore a transformer of the historicallyshaped resources for representation available in their culture in the light oftheir

interest.

In a plausible social view of language, sign-makers transform the cultural/linguistic resources available to them in their social environment and always

within fields ofpower. 'Interest' factors in the power of the sign-maker in relation

to the power of those who are the imagined audience/recipients of the sign-as-message (or utterance). Yet emphasis on 'interest' ensures that there is real

agency, transformative action, umrk:agency in relation to and working with

historically shaped resources.

The sign, the linguistic utterance (and this is the case for signs in all modes,whether image, gesture, music or 3D object) is the carrier of the meaning oftheenvironment in which it was made; the meaning which represents the interest

(social and personal) ofthe sign-maker. Once we adopt this position we have asocial view oflanguage in its fullest sense: the meanings of signs and the s i p -complex are open to view as a hypothesis about the environment in which asign was made, the structurings of power which obtained, and the interest of

the sign-maker.

'Critique' as it is usually implied in a phrase such as 'critical sociolinguistics' is

now redundant. It is now the taken-for-granted stance towards meaning. Criticalsociolinguistics can be seen to have been a response to an implausible theory of

language, and of meaning, where form is central, meaning is marginal. and thelinguistic is autonomous from the social. A plausibly social view oflanguage

replaces critique with 'design', foregrounding the interested action ofsign-


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