THEORIES: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 20TH CENTURY LINGUISTICS
5. THE REVIVAL OF THE BIOLOGICAL
MODEL OF LANGUAGE IN 20TH CENTURY SOCIOLINGUISTICS: THE CASE OF THE DEBATE ON GLOBAL ENGLISH39
The loss of discursive prominence of culturalist interpretations and of the biologi-cal metaphors towards the end of the 19th century need to be seen in the light of a changing zeitgeist and of the advent and increasing dominance of new approaches in linguistics, with their own specific sets of key metaphors. However, biological metaphors did not completely disappear from linguistic discourse. It is especially in the context of linguistic diversity that they continued to be used. And it is precisely in this context that they returned to popularity in sociolinguistics towards the end of the 20th century. A key figure in this revival is certainly Haugen with his notion of the ‘ecology of language’. The following passage is particularly relevant to my discussion, since Haugen develops his view from explicit considerations on metaphors in the language science and their heuristic function:
39 My discussion leans on the earlier and more comprehensive account given in Polzenhagen – Dirven 2008.
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“Today the biological model is not popular among linguists. It was clearly a metaphor only, which brought out certain analogues between languages and biological organisms, but could not be pushed too far. Any conclusions drawn about language from this model were patently false: a language does not breathe;
it has no life of its own from those who use it; and it has none of the tangible qualities of such organism. […] Even if we reject the biological, the instrumental, or the structural metaphors, we recognize the heuristic value of such fictions.
Languages do have life, purpose, and form, each of which can be studied and analyzed as soon as we strip them of their metaphorical or mystical content.”40 Haugen’s ‘ecology of language’ view had a significant impact in the field of sociolin-guistics in general, and it was also made part of a revival of the biological model in the specific discourse on global English. In my subsequent discussion, I will focus on the applications of this model by proponents of a view that may be called, to borrow a term from Schmied, “alienationist”.41 Under this view, English is regarded as “alien” and “destructive” to local “ecologies” at the various dimensions, i.e. to linguistic, cultural and even natural “ecologies”.
As noted above, biological metaphors have come to be a common choice in the context of linguistic diversity. Many linguist of various persuasions have used them this way, and, evidently, this usage does not per se point to an author’s adherence to a fully-fledged biological model of language. One may cite, as a representative example, Aitchison, who certainly has no inclinations towards organicism:
“Yet there is one extra worry to add in language loss. Ninety per cent of the world’s languages may be in danger. […] The splendiferous bouquet of current languages will be withered down to a small posy with only a few different flowers.”42
It is instructive to contrast Aitchison’s bouquet metaphor with the metaphorisa-tions used in the alienationist discourse on global languages. Consider the follow-ing statement by Skutnabb-Kangas:
“While new trees can be planted and habitats restored, it is much more difficult to restore languages once they have been murdered. Languages are today disap-pearing at a faster pace than ever before in human history. What happens is linguistic genocide on a massive scale, with formal education and media as
40 Haugen 1972: 326–327.
41 Schmied 1991: 104.
42 Aitchison 1997: 95.
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the main concrete culprits but with the world’s political, economic and mili-tary structures as the more basic causal factors. Big languages turn into killer languages, monsters that gobble up others, when they are learnt at the cost of the small ones.”43
This passage clearly differs from the spirit of the bouquet metaphor, first of all, in its explicit, ideologically motivated choice of negatively loaded and radical terms.44 Furthermore, in the logic of these metaphors, languages are agents capa-ble of willful actions (more specifically, cardinal crimes); i.e. these metaphors ascribe properties to their target domain languages which languages do precisely not have, which makes them, also from a heuristic point of view, dubious and inappropriate.45
In the above statement, the killer-language rhetoric basically frames the alleged effects of global languages like English on local “linguistic ecologies”. However, in much of this discourse, a far broader notion of ‘ecology’ is advocated. The claim goes that language, culture and the biological world coevolve as elements of a common overarching ecology, that they are interrelated, interdependent and even determining each other.46 This claim is expressed, for instance, by Maffi, in her survey of the development of the ecolinguistic movement:
“However, in these initial pronouncements, no significant attempt was made to go beyond such parallels and ask whether there might be more than a meta-phorical relationship between these phenomena. It is only recently that this question has been explicitly asked and the idea proposed that, along with cul-tural diversity, linguistic diversity should also be seen as inextricably linked to biodiversity.”47
Here, the relationship assumed between languages and the biological world is not any more at the level of metaphor but factual. The biological model is no longer employed as a heuristic tool; instead, it is taken literally.
43 Skutnabb-Kangas 2003: 33; italics in the original, boldface mine.
44 Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: xxxii herself notes the “inevitable shock effect” of her metaphors.
What is shocking indeed about terms like “linguistic genocide” is, in the light of the atrocity of real genocide, that such an analogy is drawn at all and propagated in the title of a book that is meant to argue for a sensitive stance towards the cultural experience of others.
45 See Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: xxxii–xxxiii for her own view in defence of her terms, and Lucko 2003 and Polzenhagen – Dirven 2008: 270–273 for discussion.
46 Studies along these line thus typically present tables that compare and correlate the number of biological species and the number of languages and cultures in some region, arguing that the various dimensions of diversity overlap (see, e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: Ch. 2).
47 Maffi 1998: 12–13; italics mine.
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By some authors, the relationship between the various dimensions of the assumed overarching “ecosystem” is explicitly characterised as a causal link.
Languages, specifically, are regarded as agents in this ecology. A prominent example of this view is a paper by Mühlhäusler with the telling title “English as an exotic language”.48 There, he makes one of the senses of exotic, namely ‘(of plants and animals) foreign and not acclimatized’ the input of his considerations on the degree of “adaptation” of English to his specific context of investigation (Pitcairn Island) and on the effects the English language has, according to him, on this setting. He concludes that English has remained “ill-adapted” to its “new environment” in many places. Discussing the alleged destructive effect of English, Mühlhäusler even finds it plausible to put the blame for ecological disasters on this language, making English a causal factor for such disasters:
“The fact that an increasing number of well-adapted small local languages are being replaced by English is in all likelihood one of the reasons for global environmental deterioration.”49
The group of authors that support such far-reaching claims derived from reasoning along the lines of the biological model is certainly small, although rather vocal in the debate. Parallel to the case of organicism in the 19th century, there is no fully homogeneous picture of metaphor use even within otherwise more or less delineated strands like ecolinguistics and the “linguistic-human-rights” movement.
Furthermore, the ecological view of language is far from being the monopoly of alienationists in the debate. Authors like Mufwene, for instance, whose approach is explicitly modelled along the lines of an ecological view, arrive at very different interpretations against this background and regard language shift as a dynamic adaptation to changing socio-cultural ecologies.50
It is again straightforward to relate the “revival” of the biological model of language to Kövecses’ notion of ‘context’. Broadly speaking, it certainly reflects the general ecological zeitgeist that emerged in the 1970s at the wider societal level in Western countries, and growing concerns about the effects of globalisation. From the former, the discourse sketched above takes its preservationist/conservationist stance and its view of diversity as an asset and an imperative. As regards the issue of globalisation, the alienationists take side with an anti-Western, anti-globalisation ideology. This ideology leads some of these authors to an overt “West-bashing”,
48 Mühlhäusler 2003.
49 Mühlhäusler 2003: 78.
50 Mufwene 2002.
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as Edwards aptly calls it,51 which is taken to the linguistic front as overt “English-bashing”. It is worth mentioning that, in this endeavour, they make use of the classic romantic-relativist conceptualisation of language as bearer of world-view (cf. section 4 for some notes on the 19th version of “culturalist” discourse), too, and depict English variously as inextricably bound to and embodying Western world-view, Western values and Western imperialism, as ecologically unsound, as the conceptual Trojan Horse of the West, etc.52
With respect to another level of “context”, namely current foci within the very discipline of linguistics, one also needs to bear in mind that the return of the biological model in the specific discourse on global English is not an isolated phenomenon. The more global subject of “language evolution”, for instance, has come to be a thriving topic in linguistics in general, from the various theoretical perspectives. It is also worth noting that the communication between linguistics and biology is not one-directional; biologists, too, turn to linguistic models as a source of analogy for their own target domain.53
6. CONCLUSIONS
The perspective taken in the present paper bears an obvious reference to the Kuhnian notion of ‘paradigms in science’54 and related ones proposed and dis-cussed in critical accounts of Kuhn’s model. There is no space to go into detail here on these notions, but I still wish to make them the background of four concluding remarks: (i) While in the so-called “hard sciences” it may be the case that in paradigm shifts the new one completely replaces the old one (Kuhn’s notion of
‘revolution’, with the prototypical example of the Copernican turn), the situation is markedly different in the social sciences (including linguistics). There, although a particular paradigm may be dominant at a given time, it is a natural and even mature state that several paradigms coexist, and less dominant ones my again return to prominence over time. This observation has already been made by early commentators on Kuhn’s account; cf. Hymes’ alternative notion of ‘cynosures’.55 (ii) The dominance of a model as well as its specific makeup often reflect a par-ticular zeitgeist, and parallel observations can be made as regards the impact of specific overt ideologies. Koerner elaborates on the notion of ‘climate of opinion’
51 Edwards 2002: 8.
52 On these and further ideological stances see the criticism in Edwards 2002; Lucko 2003 and Polzen hagen – Dirven 2008.
53 See Dirven – Polzenhagen – Wolf 2007 for a brief survey.
54 Kuhn 1962.
55 Hymes 1974.
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to capture this point and contrasts it with Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’.56 There is an obvious consonance between the notions of ‘climate of opinion’ in this sense and ‘global context’ in the sense of Kövecses. (iii) There is a thriving communication and mutual recourse between the various sciences (“hard” and “soft”) which manifests in their choice of metaphors. It is a recurrent pattern that models developed in a specific discipline are used in other sciences as a source domain for analogies.
(iv) As already noted by Kuhn,57 particular paradigms come with a set of specific key metaphors and paradigm shifts hence involve shifts in metaphors. However, one may also notice, in a given discipline, a stock of salient metaphors that are recurrently drawn upon and reinterpreted, and here, a specific metaphor is not bound exclusively to one particular model. Scientific communities are hence
‘thought collectives’ in the sense of Fleck58 and, to apply a notion of Weinrich to this context, ‘image-field communities’ (Bildfeldgemeinschaften)59 with respect to their metaphor use. This concord notwithstanding, there is, however, considerable variation in the elaboration of specific metaphors across individual authors even within the same strand in a discipline.
The account that can be given in a paper of the present length is necessarily scarcely more than a sketch. Indeed, it would be worthwhile and promising to work out a history of the language science based on the comparison of the key metaphors of the various theories proposed over the centuries, on their origins and implications and on their development in linguistic discourse.
NOTE
The present paper is an abridged version of a manuscript in preparation.
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MEtAPhor S
In LInGuIStIc DIScour SE
c o MPa r i n g c o n c ePt u a l iSa t io n S o F l a n g u ag e i n S e a r l e a nd c h o MSK y
1. INTRODUCTION
Scientific thinking, like any other product of the human mind, is impossible with-out the use of metaphors. Metaphors are omnipresent in scientific discourse, and the discourse of linguistics is no exception. In order to find evidence for this, it suf-fices to take a look at conceptual metaphor theory itself. The conceptual metaphor METAPHOR IS TRANSPORT is already realised in the term “metaphor”, which historically means ‘transfer‘. The change of location that is related to the concept of transport becomes evident in the notion of “domain”. The “source domain”
Scientific thinking, like any other product of the human mind, is impossible with-out the use of metaphors. Metaphors are omnipresent in scientific discourse, and the discourse of linguistics is no exception. In order to find evidence for this, it suf-fices to take a look at conceptual metaphor theory itself. The conceptual metaphor METAPHOR IS TRANSPORT is already realised in the term “metaphor”, which historically means ‘transfer‘. The change of location that is related to the concept of transport becomes evident in the notion of “domain”. The “source domain”