The Language Impact; Evolution - System - Discourse; Alwin Frank Fill

Alwin Frank Fill [+–]

University of Graz

Alwin Frank Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous books include Ökolinguistik: Eine Einführung (Gunter Narr, 1993), Das Prinzip Spannung (Gunter Narr, 2003 (2nd ed. 2007)) and (co-edited together with Peter Muhlhäusler) The Ecolinguistics Reader (Continuum, 2001).

The wheel, the steam-engine and the internet may have made our lives easier. But what about our ‘invention’ of speaking and writing? Has not language given us cooperation, which has made all other achievements possible? Its evolution, the author claims, has had the impact of a meteorite stirring up a cloud which is still spreading out further and further even today.

Is our thinking (and hence acting) really at the mercy of our language, as Whorf maintains, or do we think independently of language, as Steven Pinker claims? Linguistic determinism and relativity, but also mentalese approaches are discussed in the central part of the book.

‘Verbal caress can be more stimulating than manual.’ The language impact makes itself felt in the most intimate of situations. But do not words like foreplay and penetration describe love-making only from the male point-of-view? Can we change the way society conceives of women and men – by changing language, or at least by making people aware of its power?

With language, we can make things happen, we can influence, even manipulate other people. But language misunderstood can have disastrous consequences. July 1945: The mistranslation of Japan’s answer to the US ultimatum may have been responsible for the atom bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

This book is a long overdue survey of all the effects of language on the three levels of evolution, system and discourse – and of what thinkers have written about them. From Plato’s critique of Sophistry to Bacon’s idola fori, Humboldt’s ‘language is energy’, and finally Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’ – the 21 chapters of the book deal critically with the power of language and what philosophers have said about it. A glossary of terms and an annotated list of thinkers make this book easy to use.

Prelims

Preface and Acknowledgements ix – ix

Introduction

The Scope of Impact Linguistics [+–] 1 – 2

Introduction

The Three Levels of Language Impact [+–] 2 – 3

Introduction

Part I: The Impact of Speech on a Planet: a ‘Meteorite’ Hits the Earth

1. The Evolution of Language [+–] 7 – 19

Speech did not really hit our planet like a meteorite. It developed in an evolutionary process in one of millions of species during a period of more than a couple of million years. But its impact can be compared with that of a meteorite.

2. Functional Models of Language [+–] 20 – 27

As we saw in Chapter 1, the needs to be fulfilled which caused language to emerge developed into the ‘functions’ of language, i.e. the ‘things we do’ with language. Functions are ‘meanings in and on the world’. ‘Function’ implies purpose, but also activity and can thus be equated with ‘dynamic use’. An example of the dynamic use of language will introduce our discussion of functional models of language.

3. Religion, Philosophy and Language Impact Theories [+–] 28 – 35

Linguistics has a long tradition dating back to the Babylonian, the Hebrew and the Arabian cultures of Antiquity. In China, Japan and particularly India (with Panini as the greatest representative), language began to be studied more than 2500 years ago. But the early ‘linguists’ concerned themselves chiefly with grammar, with the sounds and the words of language, not so much with the effect language may have on the world (see the relevant chapters in Koerner and Asher eds 1995).

Part II: The Impact of Language as a System

4. Language as energeia: Wilhelm von Humboldt [+–] 39 – 47

A close connection between language and thought (or, to be more precise, language and the conceptualization of the world) was discovered by scholars before Humboldt, such as the authors of the Port Royal Grammar, the French philosopher Condillac (see Harris and Taylor 1997: 139–154), and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Hamann, who called language the ‘womb of the concepts’ (1967: 143; cf. Trabant 1994: 233). However, it was Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) who in his voluminous work on language (and languages) gave expression to this idea most clearly and most intensely. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt was one of the most widely quoted authors, whose influence still resonated well into the middle of the twentieth century.

5. Language, Thought, Reality [+–] 49 – 63

The present volume is not a treatise on the question of whether and to what extent we think with the help of language. Whether or not thought is only possible through words – or totally independent of them – will not be dealt with in detail. But necessarily the relation between language and thought plays a role for the impact of language on human actions.

6. The ‘Linguistic Seduction’ of Thought (Bacon, Locke, Berkeley, Hume; Mauthner, Kainz): The Harmful Impact of Language [+–] 64 – 81

In some of Whorf’s initial examples the topic of language misleading thought and thus resulting in the wrong action is addressed (see Chapter 5.4 above: the workman and the ‘empty’ gasoline drums). Ever since Antiquity, one group of scholars has approached the topic of the impact of language on thought from the negative side with the emphasis on the ‘misleading’ or in some other way harmful influence of language on our thinking and acting. The ‘Sprachverführung des Denkens’ [linguistic seduction of thought], as it was termed by Friedrich Kainz, has been a recurring theme in philosophy ever since the time of the Ancient Greek philosophers.

7. General Semantics (Korzybski, Hayakawa, Stuart Chase) [+–] 82 – 87

General Semantics was a movement in linguistics which is no longer regarded as a serious ‘school’ by many scholars. For the topic of this book, however, the General Semanticists are important because they believed that: 1. Language has a serious impact on thought and action (cf. Hayakawa’s book title). 2. This influence is frequently misleading and induces unnecessary suffering. 3. It is possible to overcome the negative influence of language through awareness of it: everyone should become a semanticist – semantics being understood as ‘the study of human interaction through communication’ (Hayakawa 1974: ix).

8. Linguistic Constructivism [+–] 88 – 101

Mirror and construction yard are two metaphors which Jonathan Potter (1996: 97) suggests for two contrasting views concerning the relation between language and the world. The mirror metaphor makes language into a passive echo of what happens in the world. The world along with everything that ‘is the case’ (Wittgenstein) moves on, changes and develops, but language merely follows suit and takes account of the occurrences and developments in the world. The construction yard metaphor, on the other hand, makes language into an active power which puts things together for us which previously were just fragments (Horace’s disiecta membra). It is this metaphor which expresses the ideas of linguistic constructivism, a school of thought represented among others by Michael Halliday and Christian Mathiessen, but also by some representatives of feminist linguistics.

9. Cognitive Linguistics: the Impact of Metaphor and Frame [+–] 102 – 109

The cognitive theory of metaphor, which is a theory of the impact of metaphor on our behaviour, goes back to Metaphors We Live By, a book written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and first published in 1980. In this book the thesis is postulated that our thinking is pervaded by metaphors and that without noticing, we are led and misled by long-standing metaphorical ideas such as LIFE is A JOURNEY, UP is GOOD and MORE is BETTER, etc. So understood, metaphor is not regarded as an embellishment of a (literary) text or as a poetic device which makes a text have a literal and a figurative meaning; rather, metaphor is seen as an every-day, even hidden phenomenon of thinking, which without our noticing determines the way we think about abstract ideas. Lakoff and Johnson speak of ‘conceptual metaphors’, not linguistic ones. Metaphor is something characteristic of our thinking; language is only the medium through which this metaphorical thinking is expressed.

10. Summary (Part II) [+–] 110 – 110

Summary of Part II

Part III: The Impact of Discourse on the World

11. Language as Discourse [+–] 113 – 114

Language as discourse

12. Precursors of Pragmatics [+–] 115 – 119

The precursors of Pragmatics

13. Pragmatics [+–] 120 – 121

About Pragmatics

14. Further Topic Areas in Pragmatics [+–] 122 – 128

Reviews

As a comprehensive survey of what must be top of the agenda for any socially and environmentally committed linguist or student of linguistics, this book is second to none.
Professor Andrew Goatly, Department of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

The breadth of humanities disciplines covered in the book is phenomenal: philosophers, (social) psychologists, humorologists, sociologists, discourse analysts of every possible hue, psychotherapists, not to mention innumerable linguists, hyphenated or otherwise, perform on his adroitly erected stage. The diverse scholarly sources tapped and incorporated into this well argued book are very aptly chosen. The overall rhythm and chain of argument together with the examples and quotations given to illustrate the phenomenon of language and discourse’s variegated impact are extremely persuasive. Both beginning students of language and linguistics and also common readers will be able to benefit from its not inconsiderable insights and erudition, as well as committed fellow researchers.
Professor Richard Alexander, Wirtschafts Universität Wien

Since the book accommodates insights from various scholarly paradigms, readers from all disciplines related to the Humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) will benefit from the ideas collected and discussed by the author. Linguists will particularly appreciate the perspective from which Fill looks at their object of study: The Language Impact does not primarily show what language users do with language (pragmatics) and to language (grammar), as standard linguistic research does, but reverses the perspective and explores what language does to its users. The book is theoretically precise and well-structured and thus also serves as a solid overview for advanced students on how language changed human existence on this planet (both in a positive and negative way) and, moreover, how the different views on its function and use changed through time with each new school or prevalent “-ism” (e.g. British empiricism, structuralism, constructivism, or functionalism). Finally, it is of crucial interest to those concerned to help develop impact linguistics into an established scholarly discipline.
ANGLIA, Volume 130, Number 2, 2012

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The Language Impact

Evolution - System - Discourse

Alwin Frank Fill [+–]

University of Graz

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