LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND INTERACTION

Peter Eglin

¹

This chapter departs from the conventional handbook format by presenting a more or less continuous argument throughout. Instead of a historical survey of positions, issues, and research contributions, these matters are treated in relation to a single question, namely the proper understanding of language, since this has fundamental consequences for what social inquiry into language, culture, and interaction could possibly be like. The error is to abstract language from its uses as if it was a thing independent of them. Making this mistake confounds the understanding of how words mean.‘Language’,‘culture’, and‘interaction’are, in thefirst place, words, expressing concepts.‘Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments’(Wittgenstein 1972: 569; see Lee 1991).

Introduction: the problem of language

The fundamental problem, then, is philosophical. It is expressed in the question: how shall language be conceptualized? This is clearly not a question that ordinarily arises when members of society are engaged in the activities of everyday life under the auspices of the natural or practical attitude. Language is not a problem for us in this sense. On the contrary, language is like the air we breathe. It is just there, used but, for the most part, unnoticed. Of course, it can be a problem if you don’t speak the language that you need to know in order to understand what others are saying or doing. Neither my wife nor I speak Japanese. It limited our interactional possibilities on a visit to Japan. But we got about Tokyo on that city’s wonderful and complex railway system with the aid of maps and diagrams, our existing knowledge of railways from other countries, helpful Japanese who offered their assistance …So languagecanbe a problem for the practical actor, though not necessarily an insuperable one. It depends on the circumstances. But then

‘language’as the medium of communication and thought, and‘language’as in French, Urdu, or Ojibwa, are not the same thing, though named with the same word. Odd that, if you reflect on it, as philosophers are wont to do, but not odd as you live with it. Quite unremarkable, in fact.

The reflective oddity comes about when one considers that reflecting on multiple meaning (or polysemy) does not generally lead the professional, scientific language inquirer in the direction of noticing further and further variability to the point of losing the determinate object assumed to be named by the word. Instead, professional, scientific inquiry, like the common-sense actor

(Sharrock and Anderson 1991: 56), hangs on to the idea of the determinate object, seeing the variability as just varieties ofit.Itremains. But since what is apprehended is the variety,itmust exist somewhere else than in the realm of apprehension, either the‘reality’beneath the variable

‘appearances’ or the ‘ideal’ object realized in the imperfect expressions of it, the abstracted competence generating the degenerate performance.

I speak English, Michel speaks French. One can say this and be understood. It is also true to say, though, that Michel speaks English and I can get by in French. But to say this is to miss the point of saying that I speak English and Michel speaks French (which is true even when neither of us is speaking at all, or speaking‘each other’s language’). One can be saying, and be heard to be saying, that my native language is English, Michel’s French, that I am an English speaker and that Michel is a French speaker. One may even be (heard to be) saying that I‘am’English and Michel ‘is’ French. But within France one might say that Michel speaks ‘Parisian French’ whereas Claude speaks Provençal. But then, again, in the environs of the border between France and Italy onefinds people who speak‘varieties of French and Italian’ respectively that are mutually intelligible (Hockett 1958: 324). I believe this phenomenon is repeated in the environs of the French and Spanish border, and in many other similar situations. Linguistics tries to capture such variation with the concepts of dialect and, indeed, idiolect, referring to an individual’s particular way of speaking. Hockett’s classic linguistics textbook does recognize that

‘the ease with which people can understand each other, and the degree of resemblance of their speech habits, are both functions of the amount of talking that takes place among them’(1958:

326), but rather than leading the linguist to investigate such talking, including its geographical context for the speakers, mutual intelligibility leads back via‘idiolect differentiation’to the idea of a‘common core’and‘overall pattern’in the structure of the presupposed determinate object,

‘language’(1958: 331ff.).

But then what of the‘language’of barter, of auctioneering, of stock market exchangefloors, of slam poetry, railway station announcements, nuclear physics, TV weather reports (‘up in through’), lecturing, bull sessions, football huddles, and so on endlessly? Where isit? There is no core element that is common to all the things that can be called‘games’(Wittgenstein 1972:

66–71). Think, moreover, of what can be a person in law:‘In 1886 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled for thefirst time, without argument, that business corporations were entitled, as “persons”, to protection from the arbitrary authority of the states under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, an amendment intended for the protection of freed slaves’(Noble 2005: 117). The abstracted, ideal, named object is just what isnotreal except in the theories of linguistics. If ‘language’ does not name a determinate object, then what are theories of language? Playful inventions. Like language. Yet this is no problem at all to language speakers or language users, who mostly have no need of theories, and when they do have need of them it’s typically to handle some local, situational, contingent matter.

Culture

The same argument may be made about culture. No sooner is an attempt made to establish a formal definition for it (thought of as a determinate thing)–for example, an‘integrated and distinct set of rules which give meaning to activities’ (Sharrock and Anderson 1982: 120) or, famously,

‘whatever it is one has to know or believe to operate in a manner acceptable to [a society’s members], and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves’(Goodenough 1957:

167)–than it has to be admitted that in any actual case accommodation will have to be made for subcultures, local cultures, the cultures of particular groups of all sorts and the idea, say, that while some set of cultural practices may be‘shared’by neighbouring societies one of them‘owns’the

cultural practices in question and the other has‘copied’them (Sharrock 1974: 49–51). For many of its uses‘culture’may be replaced with‘society’,‘values’,‘customs’,‘mores’,‘the way we do things round here’without it ever being possible to pin down once and for all what that‘way’is. Cultures as determinate objects are professional anthropologists’ inventions, the product of ‘ethnographic work’ in the ‘organization of fieldwork data’ (Anderson and Sharrock 1982). Persons in the conduct of their mundane affairs in the practical attitude of everyday life surely have their uses for the concept of culture (e.g. Katz and Sharrock 1979), but it does not pose the sort of systematic problem for them that it does for professional ethnographers.

To paraphrase further the papers by Anderson and Sharrock just cited, the problem arises for the professional anthropological ethnographer only so long as culture is treated as the presupposition of inquiry rather than its discovered outcome. If, however, the‘native’whose thoughts and actions the professional ethnographer seeks to understand is himself or herself regarded as a (lay) ethno- grapher of their own culture and society, then howtheygo aboutfinding out‘what gives here’ in any actual social situation they encounter can become the subject of analytic inquiry. Rather than supposing that the‘native’is a carrier of the‘native point of view’ –with all the problems of accessibility and relativism such a view entails for the professional anthropological (or indeed sociological) ethnographer–treating him or her as themself an inquirer into the values, mores, habits, rules, and ways of acting appropriate to the event, occasion, situation, setting, and society in which they find themself holds out the promise of discovering the interpretive methods in, through and by which anyonenavigates their way into and through–and thereby appropriates for themself–their own way of life.

Language and culture: (ethnographic) semantics

Ethnographic semantics, or ethnosemantics (see Chapter 4 this volume), is one field that, straddling the boundary of linguistics and cultural (cognitive) anthropology, has acknowledged the problem of variability in the meaning of words and attempted to deal with it in its own terms.

Thus,‘variations are not mere deviations from some assumed basic organization; with their rules of occurrencethey are the organization’(Tyler 1969: 5). Rules of occurrence can then be adumbrated in terms of‘core’or‘primary’meanings, ‘metaphor’or ‘extended’meanings, and‘polysemy’and

‘homonymy’, these last two being used as intermediate disambiguating devices (Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971; Wallace and Atkins 1960). Beyond these devices analysts have invoked a semantic domain’s‘fuzzy boundaries’,‘probabilistic considerations’and a range of sociolinguistic variables to systematize their accounts of variation. I say‘devices’deliberately in order to draw attention to how‘polysemy’,‘homonymy’, and the like may be viewed as professional semantic analysts’ permissive theoretical methods of making sense, of producing rational results, even where the devices are admittedly problematic (Lyons 1977: 552). This two-sided practice of acknowledging variation while rescuing word meaning by theoretical stipulation is perspicuously evident in John Lyons’s magnum opus Semantics(1977).

Thus, Lyons is prepared to surmise that it ‘may well be that the whole notion of discrete lexical senses is ill-founded’(1977: 554, see also 544), to allow that‘words may be correctly and incorrectly applied to persons and things…for all sorts of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with their denotations’ (213), to acknowledge that a ‘host of additional complexities’(187) attends indefinite reference, to take half a page to mention family resemblances (212), and to quote Bar-Hillel on the‘essentially pragmatic character’of ordinary language (117). With magnanimity he concedes that‘until we have a satisfactory theory of culture, in the construction of which not only sociology, but also cognitive and social psychology, have playedtheir part, it is idle to speculate further about the possibility of constructing anything more than a rather ad hoc practical

Language, culture, and interaction

account of the denotation of lexemes’(210). Notice the recourse to an as-yet-to-be-invented

‘theory of culture’as a solution to the problem of indefinite reference. Culture is thefirst and last refuge of sense-making, for professional and lay analysts alike (Garfinkel 1967: 71, 76–7), as we shall see again below.

But one feels that these are, in effect, concessionary rejections, ways of dispensing with problems by acknowledging them. For in conjunction with them goes the elaborate work of definition whereby the edifice of linguistics as a discrete, formalistic, natural–scientific enterprise is shored up.

This methodological moat-building consists in the liberal use of‘methodological fiat’(742, 566) and in such operations as the following:

(a) preserving‘denotation’to hold‘independently of particular occasions of utterances’(208), and leaving‘reference’as an‘utterance-bound relation’holding of‘expressions in context’ (208), then

(b) saving reference by (if we ignore the trick of preferring‘for terminological reasons’to say thatexpressionsrefer rather thanspeakers(177)) (i) distinguishing between the‘utterance-act’ and its product, the‘utterance-signal’, and opting for the latter as the analytical object (26), and by (ii) making ‘context-of-utterance’ a theoretical construct referring only to sources of‘systematic’variation (572; cf. Lyons 1968: 420), while leaving‘random’variation

‘to be discounted in terms of

[c] the distinction of competence and performance’ (572, 29), that renowned filler of wastebaskets (586), a distinction that itself relies on

(d) the claim that ‘idealization is inevitable’(586), ‘the very considerable problems involved in [which]’ (586) are handled for all practical textbook purposes by defining sub-types, namely‘regularization’(586),‘standardization’(588), and‘decontextualization’(588). Add to these the distinctions between ‘productivity’ and ‘creativity’ (549), and ‘rules’ and

‘strategies’(549), and the concept of‘metaphorical transfer’(566).

All this theoretically stipulative, definitional work is directed towards the goal of savinglanguage andlinguisticsfor each other: ‘It is pointless to argue, however, that there is no such thing as a homogeneous language-system underlying the language-behaviour of the whole language- community’ (588); the validity of such a concept ‘is proved by the practical usefulness of the grammars, phonological descriptions and dictionaries that are produced by descriptive linguistics’ (588). The tone here is one of embattled‘constructive analysis’(Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 340), faintly reminiscent of Phaedrus’s impassioned defence of the Church of Reason he has lost his faith in (Pirsig 1976: 146). From within linguistics Roy Harris has most forcefully made the case that‘language’as the determinate object is not to be found since it is a product of human making, as the titles of the two books containing the argument, The Language Myth (1981: 9–10 for the ‘determinacy fallacy’) and the Language Makers (1980), indicate: ‘Languages do not come ready-made…They are what men make them. As language-makers, men…take part in the many social activities which alone provide the context for a relevant conceptualization of what a language is’(Harris 1980: Preface).

From without linguistics we may turn to Emanuel Schegloffwho, through attending rigorously to the data of‘performance’in the form of conversation analysis, came to put the whole question of language as a determinate object in question:

In continually writing of a ‘syntax-for-conversation’ I mean to treat explicitly as hypothetical what seems to me to be prematurely treated as presupposed fact, and that is the existence of A syntax. That there is a trans-discourse-type syntax may end up to

be the case; it should be found, not presupposed. With that, I also mean to make explicitly hypothetical the current sense of‘a language’, or ‘language’. The notion ‘a language’ seems to be the product of an assumption about some common, stable, underlying properties of an immense range of human behaviour–from talking to the family to reciting Shakespeare to cadging alms to writing memoranda to lecturing, etc.–each of which is embedded in its own combination of organizational structures, constraints and resources. Much attention has been devoted to these supposedly common features; relatively little to their respective environments of use, which differentiate them.

(1979: 282) Conversational analysis and a serious treatment of Wittgenstein are conspicuously absent from Lyons’s text. As for idealization as an inevitable requirement of scientific methodology –

‘Without abstraction and idealization there is no systematization’ (Chomsky 1988: 37; Searle 1969: 56) – consider the following on Bar-Hillel’s indexical (context-dependent) expressions (which is to say, on all of language):

In a search for rigour the ingenious practice is followed whereby such expressions are first transformed into ideal expressions. Structures are then analyzed as properties of the ideals, and the results are assigned to actual expressions as their properties, though with disclaimers of ‘appropriate scientific modesty’.

(Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 339) Just as linguistics may be said to have a vested professional interest in preserving the idea of language as a determinate object requiring the expertise of its personnel for its explication, so it may be said that anthropology has such an interest in the determinate existence of culture (and sociology, likewise, in society).

Language, culture, and interaction

Returning to the (ethno-)semantic argument about word meaning, consider the following two data consisting of a sign in a bookstore window advertising a sale, and a two-utterance exchange overheard on a university campus sidewalk as A and B crossed paths.

(1) Books and paperbacks (2) A: Do you want a coffee?

B: No, I’ve just eaten

Now while these two cases might atfirst appear to contradict simple taxonomic relations that one might propose for the domains of‘books’and of‘food’or‘drinks’, and thereby cause problems for ethnosemantics, the enterprise can be saved, so it is said, by invoking polysemy. That is, in (1) the contradiction would be resolved in some such fashion as this: allow ‘book’ to have (at least) two senses, namely that (a) in which it includes hardback and paperback books, and that (b) in which it means hardback books and so contrasts with paperbacks; conclude that thereby the second sense is the one relevant here. In (2) either the dictionary specification for‘a coffee’is allowed to include an additional sense, namely something like‘a snack’(though this seems highly implausible), or the domain of‘food’or‘something to eat’(Frake 1969: 31–2) is so constructed to

Language, culture, and interaction

allow for‘food1’to include both‘food2’and‘drinks’. Here the analyst could appeal to the familiar condition of the head term of a taxonomy also being a category label at a lower level of contrast.

Thus Hays (personal communication, 1977) proposed, if informally, that (2) is a case of polysemy, as when someone says‘Let’s have a coke’, meaning by‘coke’in that context‘any soft drink’. Once again, the dictionary definition of a term,‘coke’, will have to be allowed to incorporate the separate sense‘any soft drink’.

The crucial problem with this strategy is, however,‘the fact that distinctions of sense can be multiplied indefinitely’ (Lyons 1977: 554, emphasis added). The prospect is one of an ever-expanding dictionary, its size depending only on the breadth of knowledge, imagination, and endurance of the compiler. This captures neither the point of dictionaries nor, crucially, how members, including professional ethnographers, decide what the terms in (1) and (2) mean and how they mean what they do,‘how’and‘what’being, of course, inseparable. How is it that‘book₂’, and

‘food₁’ are seen to be the relevant categories in these instances? Appeal to the context, it is always said. Yes, but, allowing for a degree of predictability on syntactic and prosodic grounds (Lyons 1977: 569, 186–7), how is it that one, whether actor or observer, selects just that bit of the indefinite context of these particulars that points to the relevant sense of the terms? Trite though it may seem to say so, we cannot dispense with the notion that members of society rely on each other tolookandfindjust that relation between context and term that will render the term’s use intelligible/sensible/rational/appropriate (Garfinkel 1967; Schegloff1972: 115). Abstracting from users, Garfinkel and Sacks (1970: 338) put it this way:‘a description, for example, in the ways it may be a constituent part of the circumstances it describes, in endless ways and unavoidably, elaborates those circumstances and is elaborated by them’. Societal members may be said, that is, to orient to one another as practical reasoners in the sense of being inquirers into, ethnographers of, their own social circumstances. No sooner is one, whether as actor or observer, lay or pro- fessional analyst of the scene, confronted with the cases at hand than one is elaborating the sense of the items and the occasions in which they (might have) occurred in order to render those uses plausible (Sacks 1976; Wieder 1970: 134). In so doing one draws inevitably and implicitly on presumed, and situationally relevant, common-sense knowledge, yet semantic analysts rarely, if ever, take that knowledge explicitly into account (Hymes 1974: 154).

Thus in (1) one can take it that a person viewing the sign can discover (literally) in the (findable) fact that a book sale is being advertised by the sign, that whereas some sales are of paperbacks only, and some of hardbacks only,thissale is ofboth; moreover,thatfact is something that a bookshop having a sale might beinterestedin having the people seeing the sign, that is its (now) potential customers, be aware of, because as anybody knows who looks in bookshop windows, different if overlapping sets of customers are interested in paperbacks and hardbacks.

That interest provides the point of the sign. Recognizing that interest, motivation or intentionin the sign, or imputing ittothe sign, provides an intelligible reading ofthe sign and of the terms in it, including that itisa sign. There is obviously some connection here with the treatment of intention in speech-act theory (see Wootton 1975: 48), but the general point has been most elegantly formulated, in several places, by Harvey Sacks (1976: G6; 1972a: 57; 1972b: 339).

This analysis is a members’analysis, having recourse to such members’analytical categories as

‘interest’ (cf.‘intention’,‘motive’, and so on) and to the related, setting-relevant, membership categorization device ‘buyer/seller’. I suggest that professional semantic ethnographers trade on such analyses in order to identify the particular sense in which a term is being employed (Cicourel 1964: 76), but, like members, do not make a topic of that analysis; instead, they theorize it as a case of polysemy, in the name of the definite, if not unitary, sense of lexemes.

‘Members’ analyses’ are the domain of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (CA).

To introduce these sociological approaches to language, culture, and interaction, consider the