Hi folks, just a short post today. I've started reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, that book published a few years ago that caused a whole bunch of stir, mainly by drawing out reclusive sticklers such as myself from our grammatical-fanatical (and solitary) caves and into public society, obsessions and all. In the first chapter, Truss, the author, distinguishes the descriptive from the prescriptive (sometimes also called the "normative") stance with respect to language. A descriptive account of language seeks merely to catalogue how the language is actually used, whereas a prescriptive account makes a claim about how the language ought to be used.
Before delving into the main issue I'd like to treat here, namely the relationship between linguistic evolution and prescriptive accounts of usage, I'd like to briefly discuss the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive accounts. It seems at first glance like the distinction is a nice clean one, but further scrutiny makes the case far less clear. In assembling a descriptive account, one cannot simply dump every single usage in a pile and say, "See, that's how we use it." Every single usage, each and every data point of linguistic behaviour, is simply not available to us. What this situation forces us to do is select data that we consider to be typical or normal, and simple description there is tinged with the normative: one selects one's data points because "they are the normal ones" to which others are supposed to live up (or up to which the others are supposed to live, if one really wants to be stickly about it). The data points one doesn't select are abnormal, there's something particular about them that makes them bad choices, and the evaluation process that leads to these decisions is not a purely descriptive one. Anyway, all that's to say that descriptive accounts are not so easily distinguished from prescriptive accounts as it may seem.
On to the meat. One major criticism of prescriptive accounts of language is that they prohibit or impede the evolution of language. Whether we want language to evolve or not is another matter, and probably not even an important one because we're powerless to stop it anyway, but the question of how prescriptive accounts can leave room for linguistic evolution is, I think, an interesting one. But is the criticism appropriate, do prescriptive accounts actually impede evolution. I actually think not. Conceived one way, a prescriptive account stipulates how one must use the tools of language, point final, and such a conception of prescriptive accounts might well impede evolution of languages. However, a more nuanced understanding of such accounts might disengage the problem: I propose that we instead conceive of prescriptive accounts as offering us a set of rules not about how apostrophes (for example) must be used, but how an apostrophe, used according to such and such a rule, conveys such and such a meaning. (Some questions may arise as to whether this account is still prescriptive, or whether it has lapsed into description. My response is to just repeat that the whole distinction is messy and simply not respond to such questions at all.)
The prescriptive account gives us a set of rules about how punctuation, used "correctly," conveys sense in a particular way. However, one can intentionally deviate from the "correct" into the "incorrect," and thereby explore new ways of expressing meaning. The new usages deviate intentionally and meaningfully from the standard and appropriate usage: it is always with reference to the accepted standard that a new usage can open up a new space to articulate meaning in a novel way, or so I'm claiming here. There is no incorrect usage without reference to a standard of correctness; there is no novelty without reference to established practice.
So what does this account, if one finds it at all attractive, mean? There certainly are practical implications. It means that we do not need to abandon prescriptive accounts; instead, I'm calling for us to re-orient the way that we think about such accounts, and then to adopt them whole-heartedly. Never will I believe that correcting a child's grammar would stifle their linguistic creativity: it is only with an established familiarity with the "old" rules that anyone could go on to innovate something interestingly new.
Herein also lies the kernel of my disdain for hipsters: my understanding of hipsters is that each one is trying to innovate her or his own counter-culture. As soon as something is established, it is uncool, passé, and discarded. What seems to be missing here is twofold. The first missing element is that a new culture must evolve out of an existing culture if it is to be at all meaningful. And I don't mean that it won't be important unless it evolves out of another culture: what I'm saying is that in order for it to understandable, for it to even contain any meaning as opposed to being merely a system of empty symbols, it must evolve out of an existing culture. So the complete abandonment of any and every cultural reference point as soon as it becomes established is a quick way to make a (counter-)culture completely meaningless.
The second missing element is dialogue amongst those who are establishing the counter-culture itself. If we each have our own culture, then the meaning is entirely personal to us, and we therefore are not able to communicate it to anyone else. (We may not even be able to communicate it to ourselves, though that's a more complicated argument that I'll save for another time. If you're interested, have a read through Cassirer's The Myth of the State, or my paper "Fight, Flight, and the Frontier of the Future," in which I treat that section of Cassirer's work.) Some may not see that communication is an important part of culture, but I think that kind of position is pretty weak, especially once we get onto the topic of the specifically linguistic aspects of culture. For a language to hold no communicative potential, which would be the case if we all had our own linguistic counter-cultures, would really neuter language in some substantive and undesirable ways.
In any case, these are simply some thoughts on the matter, and with the return from the criticism of hipster culture to the issue of language, we get back to where we started, which seems an appropriate place to stop. As always, I look forward to your comments and hope you're having a wonderful weekend.
N'est-ce pas. La rotation ascendante de la culture autour du pôle de la « tradition » est une question que Ricoeur traite très bien dans Temps et Récit I. Je ne serais pas être plus en accord avec ton affirmation qu'une culture existante est nécessaire pour le jeu de son innovation (sic). Non seulement est-il nécessaire pour une contre-culture de s'appuyer sur une culture « mainstream », mais toute culture ne s’appuie-t-elle pas sur une tradition plus profonde, plus vieille, qui en encadre les paramètres généraux? Je ne me souviens plus comment Ricoeur nommait ce concept (paradigmes?). En tout cas, ces structures plus profondes s’approchaient des archétypes décrits par Jung : formes linguistiques et culturelles cristallisées dans une sédimentarisation du sens, depuis oubliée (mais vivante).
ReplyDeleteLa critique du hipsterisme est intéressante or, je croyais que cette culture reposait sur une série de normes et de codes aisément repérables. La référence aux hippies et aux beatniks est flagrante (quoique les hipsters, tout comme les hippies, viennent de la bourgeoisie; mais que contrairement aux derniers, les premiers ne sont pas prêt à rejeter les privilèges de leur classe) aussi, les prétentions intellectuelles, genre « grand classique de la littérature » est une marque visible; quoique, là encore, les prétentions ne sont pas toujours à la hauteur de la réalité. Mais ce qui est le plus caractéristique reste cette musique perchée et « orchestrale » que l’on nomme « indie » qui, quoique vaste, reste reconnaissable de loin.
Peut-être, le seul reproche que nous pourrions faire aux hipster porterait, justement, sur cette question de la réinvention permanente de la culture, en ce qu’ils ne réinventent rien (ou justement si : ils ré-invente), mais recycle. À l’heure de l’environnementalisme, le hipsterisme est probablement une forme de recyclage, non pas de nos matières plastiques ou de notre carton, mais des formes de l’esprit et de la culture. Cet état d’esprit a pour avantage de créer, au passage, des produits culturels variés (et nouveaux!), qui ne manqueront pas d’êtres marquant pour les années futures.
Ce que tu dis par rapport à la rétention de leurs privilèges est intéressant aussi: par exemple, une de mes amies se fesez critiquait par un hipster, lui qui portait des souliers en cuire à 300$, sans bas évidemment, et accusait mon amie d'être bourgeoise. C'est pas seulement que les hipsters retiennent leurs privilèges, mais en plus ils/elles ne le reconnaissent pas comme tel. (C'est peut-être quelque chose de typique pour notre culture moderne en gros: on ne voit pas notre richesse quand on l'a.)
DeleteMais celà n'est pas ce qui m'interesse le plus de ce que t'as écrit. Tu dis qu'il y a sûrement une saveure liée au hipsterisme, un style assez définit. Je suis d'accord, mais ce que je distinguer içi ces le résultat et le processus. Ma critique vise le processus, ce qui semble (à moi) d'être la réjection de ce qui est mainstream, pour le fait simple que c'est mainstream. De là, les hipsters doivent trouver/inventer quelque chose de nouveau, et je pense que là on trouve qu'ils/elles se pointent largement aux mêmes sources.
Mais impossible qu'on se pointe à ses sources là parce que les autres le font! Non, c'est parce que chacun entre nous est inspiré, dirait mon bon petit hipster, et notre inspiration tout à fait individuel nous pointe dans cette direction! Là ma critique retourne: si chacun/e était tout à fait individuel/e et inspiré/e, ça serait assez improbable que chacunes de nos contrecultur auraient une visage tellement reconnaissable, tellement semblables à celles d'autour.
Alors, tu nous montre que le hipsterisme à une style reconnaissable. Je pense que celà enrichi (au lieu de contredire, si cela était ton intention, ce que je ne pense pas est le cas) ma conclusion par rapport au hipsterisme.
Par rapport au recyclage de la cultur, je trouve ça intéressant, et je dirais que le recyclage est toujours une réinterpretation et une nouvelle création. Cette création durera-t-elle si on ne met pas de l'effort pour addresser un discours commun par rapport au sujet au lieu de simplement se contenter de rester en dedans de nous-mêmes?
Hey Brooke,
ReplyDeleteFirst, I'm all for creative uses of language and of people using new words in different ways. Here's an example: in Kenya, people use the expression "last week, but one" to mean "2 weeks ago", or "last week, but two" to mean "3 weeks ago". This took me a long time to figure out, haha. What I realized was that even if I considered this "wrong", everyone speaking English in Kenya used it. It seemed very colonialist for me to criticize their use of language, especially when everyone uses that expression, and more importantly everyone understands what is meant by that. It seems to me that the main goal of language is to communicate clearly. If people can communicate clearly amongst themselves, I would find it hard to describe their use of language as "wrong". Of course, this makes it harder to communicate with people who don't use the same expressions, but from a practical point of view, Kenyans are interacting with Kenyans most of the time, not Canadians. Also, I think diversity is valuable in and of itself and so I think diversity in language is a great thing. Frankly, I think language is a dynamic thing, and since there wasn't ever a base version of the language, anything we classify as normal is necessarily arbitrary.
I didn't really follow what you were proposing so I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with what you were saying...
Either way, very interesting!
Hi Dave, thanks for commenting once again.
DeleteThat example from Kenya is a really interesting one, and shows how even "the same language" can give us a number of different ways to think about time, how to break it into different pieces, and how to relate those pieces to one another. Some interesting philosophical issues that come up there: first, what makes it "the same language" when you find divergent usages like this, how different can usages be before you start calling something a dialect or a different language altogether. My intuition on that is that there is no strong demarcating line, but lots of grey area. However, that doesn't discount the possibility of pointing out two different languages and showing that they're different (i.e.: just because one isn't sure whether Cockney is a dialect or even a language all of its own doesn't mean that we can't conclusively say that French is a legitimately different language from English).
The second issue is time. It's a philosophical gold mine for neat and head-bending stuff. But what I'll say here is that we usually don't think about how important language is for understanding how time works and how we work in it. I like that your example shows how even in a single language, time can be parsed in different ways. That's just a thread, and if one pulls hard enough, the whole problem of language and time will unravel.
As for what your position is relative to mine, I feel that you're agreeing with what I wrote. And I'm very sorry that I didn't write it more clearly. I try to make these things pretty accessible and not too steeped in heavy philosophy, but sometimes it runs away with me despite my best efforts. Here's a quick rundown of the practical fallout of what I was suggesting: those who say that language must be free to evolve often claim that we shouldn't be teaching kids/adults "proper" grammar, because that stifles their creativity and locks language into a pattern rather than letting it grow. My response to that position is that we should look at the prescriptions of grammar in a different way, instead seeing them as rules that tell us how different linguistic structures communicate different meaning. Furthermore, there is no last word on grammar, because the language changes. Grammatical rules are always situated in their era: they're always the rules as they stand right now, and as your example points out, also the rules as they stand in a particular geographical region.
But how can the language change if we write rules that hold right now? Simply by accepting that rules were made to be broken. The rules outline certain ways for meaning to be communicated in language from one individual to another. But if both parties are well versed in the rules, then one can deviate from them in particular and intentional ways, thereby creating a new potential for language. When we break the rules on purpose, and in a particular direction, we communicate in a way that wasn't open to our language according to the previous rules. But in order to break them on purpose, and to give that rule breaking a particular direction, we had to know the rules in the first place (and I'd argue that you'd need to know them pretty darn well, too). Furthermore, if you never respect the rules ever, you can never signal something important by breaking them. Think about how much more effective a scream is coming from someone who speaks seldom and softly than it is coming from someone who's always bellowing about this or that and seldom shuts up. Similarly, if someone always makes grammatical mistakes, then their intention to deviate from the rules this time in particular way gets lost: it just gets written off as another mistake rather than being investigated as an intentional deviation into new territory.
Hey, thanks for the detailed response! I think I just needed to have it repeated to get it. "But if both parties are well versed in the rules, then one can deviate from them in particular and intentional ways, thereby creating a new potential for language." I definitely agree with that. I think having a strong base is important before we switch things up. Well said.
DeleteI like how your conception of prescriptive grammar is more pragmatic than normative in some kind of transcendental sense :P I was trying to think of some other examples of systems that work that way- they are more like flexible pragmatic negotiations than absolute rules. I recently picked up `philosophy bites`by David Edmonds and Nigel Waterburn (just something light and fun) and they interview a guy named Simon Blackburn on moral relativism. Blackburn said basically that he doesn't believe in a `morality-in-itself`, `but he thinks moral relativists sort of dodge the real problem of morality because the whole reason we talk about ethics is so we can work together in a functioning social system, so just saying `look, guy A thinks we should burn the corpse and guy B thinks we should bury him` is just completely dodging the point. I think language works a lot the same way, like really there`s no truth-in-itself about apostrophes but we have to agree on something if we plan on making the English language function.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that you're right. This kind of pragmatic approach does seem to hold value. But to elaborate on it a bit further, we need these rules not only as a way to function together right now, but also as a backdrop to functioning together in the future, when we'll face hurdles that we can't yet foresee. So we need a pragmatic set of rules, but those rules need to be able to develop over time, and what I'm driving at here is that progress doesn't come simply by rejecting a no-longer-adequate set of rules, but by allowing the rules to adapt. When we notice something missing from the old rules, we break them in an intentional and directed way to open up a new potential for our language. We can't do that if we never learn the rules in the first place, because we have no idea what their strengths and weaknesses are!
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