Pergamon

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Language Sciences, Vol. 19, No. I, pp. 7-13, 1997 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

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WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE: E X P E R T A N D P O P U L A R D I S C O U R S E O N L A N G U A G E

D E B O R A H C A M E R O N

One of the most important things I learned from Roy Harris was to read the texts of western linguistics as texts; to locate them in an intellectual tradition with a history, to pay attention to their rhetorical properties, to notice their discursive and ideological preconceptions. This is not to propound a postmodernist thesis that there is nothing 'outside the text'. Rather it is a corrective to the still-common idea that certain texts--scientific writings for example--can be read simply and straightforwardly for their content, treated as if they were not in any significant way historical, rhetorical or ideological productions. I find it more enlightening to assume that whatever kind of discourse one is dealing with, there is something to be learned by considering not only what is said, but also how it is said.

About language, a great deal is constantly being said and written, in a number of different ways. And it seems to be an enduring feature of discourse about language in the west that there is disagreement not just about substance, about the nature of language, but also (and, of course, connectedly) about how linguistic matters should properly be discussed. These disagreements arise between experts and laypeople, and also between different schools of experts. Aristotle's comment on the linguistic sophistry of Prodicus--'this is the sort of thing said by men who love to lay down trivial laws, but have no care to say anything sensible'--testifies to an ancient tradition of argument about what forms of metalinguistic discourse are valid, useful, significant or sensible.

This is an argument that is still very much alive. Here I will consider the version of it which is perhaps most salient in the era of modern western linguistics: the argument between linguistic science and its significant other, prescriptivism. And I will pay attention to the 'how' as well as the 'what ' of this argument.

Conflicting discourses

In an essay titled 'Strunk, White, and grammar as morality', the philosopher Berel Lang (1991) remarks on the characteristically imperious prose found in prescriptivist texts like Strunk and White's classic volume about good writing, Elements o f Style (Strunk and White, 1979). There is, Lang points out, a dearth of argument in such texts; little effort is made actively to convince readers that the prescriptions set out in the book are worth following. Instead, what we get is a series of commandments: 'the reader is constantly ordered about, and if the rules do not persuade by their own force they will not persuade at all' (Lang, 1991, p. 15).

Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Deborah Cameron, Program in Literary Linguistics, University of Strathclyde, Richmond St., Glasgow GI IXH, Scotland.

8 DEBORAH CAMERON

For Lang, our willingness to tolerate this convention of the genre points to an underlying assumption (shared by readers as well as writers) that linguistic imperatives are really moral imperatives. As with other moral axioms ( 'thou shalt not kill ' , 'eating people is wrong') , the ' force ' of a linguistic prescription has little to do with persuasion in sense of rational argument.

Professional linguists writing for a nonspecialist audience take a different approach. Occasionally they may lapse into the bald imperative (a classic example is Robert Hall J r . ' s no-punches-pulled title of 1950, Leave Your Language Alone, though this was revised in later editions to the more anodyne Linguistics and Your Language), but in general they prefer to cast themselves as rational persuaders--sometimes displaying in their style a degree of humility which is strikingly at odds with the content or message.

The point may be illustrated with a couple of examples, chosen more or less at random from recent popular texts. In their book Bad Language (1990), the sociolinguists Lars-Gunnar Andersson and Peter Trudgill describe their purpose thus: 'we want to make a plea for a better understanding of some linguistic realities. It is our hope that, after reading this book, at least some people will not be as harsh in their linguistic judgements as they have been' (p. 4). And after cataloguing some of the things that 'everyone knows' about language, Steven Pinker tells readers of his bestselling book The Language Instinct, ' In the pages that follow I will try to convince you that every one of these common opinions is wrongt ' (Pinker, 1994, p. 18). When linguists address the lay public, their aims are essentially as didactic as Strunk and White 's . Yet their rhetoric is all about 'pleading' and 'hoping' and ' trying to convince' . Why?

There is a fairly obvious explanation. Although the authors of popular linguistics texts are frequently impelled to write by a conviction that linguists are right about language while prescriptivists of the Strunk and White school are wrong, they cannot be seen to make their case in the same authoritarian, moralistic and dogmatic way as the prescriptivists present theirs, since this way of talking about linguistic questions is exactly what linguistic science stands against, and what it wants lay speakers to reject. The form of the linguist's argument must be congruent with what is asserted in it: that is, it must persuade by the force of reason.

The norm of rationality applies to all popular science writing, but linguists writing for a general audience face a more difficult task than astrophysicists or geneticists, who do not nowadays have to compete with a powerful dogmatic tradition of writing on the same topic. Authors explaining the workings of the universe do not feel called upon to write against the belief that the sun goes around the earth; geneticists pondering evolution for a mass audience do not construct their discussions with an eye to refuting the minority belief in 'creationism'. These scientists can safely assume that committed geocentrists and creationists will not be among their readers--or even if they are, there is no need to take such ' fringe' views seriously. Linguists by contrast have to recognize that the attitudes they take issue with are probably held by a majority of their readers. It is the essence of popular linguistics to be writing not on a blank or near-blank slate but actually against the grain of a highly elaborated secular common sense.

The fact that there is resistance to their arguments makes it all the more important for linguists to present those arguments as persuasively as possible, but even so, the project of winning hearts and minds has brought frustratingly meagre rewards to those engaged in it during the past 50 years. The pious hopes of Andersson and Trudgill, the barely-disguised irritation of Stephen Pinker, would be instantly recognizable to former generations of scholars, since they made exactly the same points in their own popular books, often using exactly the same examples to illustrate them. The linguist's message is by now familiar, but it has not been

DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE 9

rendered any more persuasive by constant repetition. In fact, it has become more rather than less common to find linguists being attacked in public for their absurd and destructive ideas (see Cameron, 1995 for illustrations).

All this raises an intriguing question. In a supposedly scientific age, it might seem curious that so many people have such contempt for linguistic science. Even if we allow, as some commentators have suggested, that people are increasingly sceptical about science in general, it is interesting that in the case of language, this scepticism is directed only against the authority of science, and does not seem to apply to more traditional forms of linguistic authority. The puzzle lies in the apparent inconsistency: at a point in western history when the temper of the times is by common consent antiauthoritarian, suspicious of moral certainties and impatient with every kind of dogma, why should people be willing to be ordered about by the likes of Strunk and White, while remaining unmoved by the linguist's attempt at persuasion? Why is the 'moral ' discourse about language that Berel Lang identifies so enduring, pervasive and powerful?

To the extent that linguists have an answer to this question, it is that people's beliefs about language are not really about language at all. They are, in effect, social judgements, not to say prejudices, projected into the realm of language where they take on an aura of greater objectivity, or at least become less overtly objectionable. Thus, for example, it is hardly reasonable to express a generalized prejudice towards people from Birmingham; but it is acceptable to shudder at the 'nasal' Brummie accent. One does not say in polite company that working class people are stupid, but one may say that their glottal stops are 'sloppy' and their double negatives 'illogical'. In circles where it would be uncool to confess your antipathy to feminists, blacks or gays, you may meet with a more understanding response if you air your anxieties about 'what these people are doing to the English language'. Steven Pinker informs us that linguistic judgements have served at least since biblical times as a smokescreen for social ones: 'since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble' (1994, p. 374).

If the real basis for judgements on language is social rather than linguistic, arguments against them based on their arbitrariness and incoherence in linguistic terms may not be effective in shifting them. Furthermore, the judgements in question carry the kind of emotional charge associated with social identities and distinctions like those of class, race and nation, and in consequence they will tend to prevail over more rational considerations. This, at least, is what many linguists believe--though they clearly have not given up all hope of persuading people to see things differently.

Undeniably, language functions as a social symbol; nor can it be coincidence that on the whole, the harshest judgements attach to the language of the least privileged or most despised speakers. But those linguists who take the social symbolism of language as an all-purpose explanation of people's attraction to particular prescriptions and their disdain for others-- notably, the linguistic scientist's prescription 'thou shalt not prescribe'--seem curiously reluctant to entertain the possibility that moralizing about language may be, precisely, moralizing about language; it does not have to be a disguised or symbolic way of moralizing about something else. To appreciate this, however, we would have to take seriously the concept of language that is held by language-users.

People are hostile to the anti-prescriptive stance of linguistics not merely because they have an investment in specific prescriptions--time-honoured shibboleths like 'don't split infinitives',

10 DEBORAH CAMERON

'never start a sentence with and', and so on--but because they are wedded to the more general principle that language using is a normative practice. The idea that some ways of speaking and writing may be preferred to others, that linguistic performance may legitimately be evaluated and if necessary criticized, is absolutely central to the ordinary speaker's whole conception of language. That verbal communication could proceed satisfactorily in the absence of norms about 'good" and 'bad' language is for most people unimaginable and incomprehensible. And on this issue, there is something to be said for the lay speaker's point of view.

'Natural' language and 'moral' judgement

A great deal of popular linguistics writing is directed to the goal of making lay speakers see that a moralistic or judgemental discourse about language is not appropriate: it is a kind of category mistake. When linguists try to argue along these lines, a rhetorical device that turns up time and time again is the appeal to 'nature'. Linguists seek to depict language as part of the natural world, a world in which (it is commonly assumed) moral judgement is beside the point.

There is an excellent example of this kind of rhetoric in The Language Instinct. In his introduction to a chapter called 'The language mavens', whose subject is of course the triviality, stupidity and bigotry of prescriptive discourse on language, Steven Pinker asks us to imagine a television nature programme in which various animals are shown engaging in their natural activities while on the soundtrack a commentator notes disapprovingly that

Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees' nests are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-known errors, and monkeys' cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years (Pinker, 1994, p. 370).

Pinker has particular motivations for locating language in the sphere of nature. His book is titled The Language Instinct: he wants to emphasise the innate or 'instinctive' properties of human language, and so say not merely that language-using is like animal behaviour, but that it is a kind of animal behaviour. For this purpose, his nature programme scenario is brilliantly conceived: we recognize at once how inappropriate it would be to talk about the 'debasement' of sparrows' calls or criticise 'errors' in the song of the humpback whale. We are thus made receptive to Pinker's argument that it is similarly inappropriate to talk in this way about natural languages. But is it really necessary to buy the whole package here? I do not disagree with Pinker (and nor does anyone else that I know of) that human language has a biological basis. But I do disagree with the implication (it is not stated directly, and this is a mark of Pinker's rhetorical skill) that language-using can be reduced to a form of instinctual behaviour, and that humans talking can be equated directly with pandas eating, or birds building nests, or indeed monkeys communicating vocally with one another.

There is a crucial distinction between the animal behavio,r Pinker describes and the human behaviour he analogizes it to: the imaginary commentator's disapproving remarks are not, and could not be, echoed (or challenged) by the animals themselves. Sparrows do not have arguments about the merits of small variations in their calls. Monkeys do not pass comment on one another's cries. There is consequently no potential for their communicative behaviour to be affected by a normative metadiscourse about it. Humans, by contrast, do not merely behave, they attribute meaning to behaviour and may modify their behaviour in the light of the meanings attributed to it. In the sphere of language-use, they do argue about what is good and bad, and they do pass comment on their own and others' performance. Furthermore, these

D I S C O U R S E O N L A N G U A G E 1 I

activities are not just carried on in some separate sphere, their effects spill over into the realm of linguistic behaviour itself.

For instance, as Pinker himself implicitly acknowledges, the norms elaborated by prescrip- tivists and institutionalized in various cultural practices (such as schooling) are punctiliously observed by a minority of speakers (and more sporadically by a majority, as many socio- linguistic surveys show), in spite of being so 'psychologically unnatural' that great effort is required to master them. From Pinker's own perspective, this flying in the face of nature ought to seem more extraordinary than it evidently does. The effectiveness of unnatural prescriptions, however limited, surely requires some explanation, precisely because (if you go along with Pinker) it suggests that enormously powerful 'natural' mechanisms are capable of being overridden.

By what, and for what purpose? Although I have no great desire to argue in these terms, it could be argued that human language-using is itself 'naturally' a reflective rather than unreflective process. I would certainly wish to argue that the observation of prescriptive rules or shibboleths is but one application of a much more general metalinguistic ability. All competent speakers are able to reflect upon language and to evaluate specific examples of it against various norms. Even if we believed it would in principle be possible for humans to communicate just as well without using this ability, the fact is that in practice they do use it. And that is one reason why the ordinary speaker's conception of language lays such stress on norms and value-judgements. Referring to norms and making value-judgements is something speakers are aware of doing routinely. In my view it is also something they must be able to do if linguistic communication is to go on in the ways we know it does go on.

Here I am indebted to the argument of Roy Harris (cf especially Harris, 1981) that western linguistic thought has traditionally conceived of language as a 'fixed code' of form-to-meaning correspondences whose aim and effect is to enable 'telementation': the transfer of ideas from one mind to another. (This model of language pervades Steven Pinker's first, scene-setting chapter in The Language Instinct: he tells us for instance that 'simply by making noises with our mouths, we can cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds' (1994, p. 15).) Harris suggests that the telementation/fixed code model has been adopted a priori as the orthodox view of language and communication, and thinkers have worked back- wards from the answer to the question. If, by contrast, we did not assume that telementation was the essence of human linguistic communication, and that only a fixed code could therefore explain the regular occurrence of successful communication, the effect would be to reformulate the question of what communication is, and this in turn might make the metalinguistic ability to evaluate linguistic performance far more central in the account of how it gets done.

A code model of language tends to downplay the relevance of the judgements and inferences which speakers regularly bring to bear on verbal interaction. It suggests an analogy with machines, such as computers, which either recognise input as part of the code, in which case there will be 'perfect' communication, or else reject it entirely ('garbage in, garbage out'). But this is not a particularly good analogy. On one hand, there are data-manipulation tasks which human language-users perform far less well than machines. On the other hand, we are much more successful than machines in making sense out of garbage. That might be why we often do not appreciate how much garbage there actually is--garbage not in the sense of what linguists call 'word salad', but in the sense that many utterances are not part of any existing code, yet they can still be rendered meaningful on condition we do a little more than merely try (and fail) to decode them.

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12 DEBORAH CAMERON

Whatever may be true of humpback whales, even the most enthusiastic proponent of a 'language instinct' must acknowledge that in practice human speakers produce things which count unambiguously as errors, and which need to be identified as such in order to be 'repaired'. For example, yesterday I heard a tennis player who had walked off court in the middle of a match defend himself on TV by saying ' I ' m an intellectual who doesn't just fly off the cuff for no good reason'. No speaker of English, not even the 'intellectual' who uttered this remark, has the expression 'to fly off the cuff' stored in their mental dictionary, but still it is unlikely that viewers across the nation were baffled by it. Presumably, most made the same evaluation I did, namely that the speaker 'meant to say' (or 'should have said') 'fly off the handle'. Presumably, too, I was not the only viewer who went to the (minimal) trouble of analysing the error as a case where the speaker chose the wrong option from two similar idioms, [fly] offthe handle and [speak] offthe cuff. (Without going through this reconstruction, could I have made the 'correct ' correction?) The point is, though, it is certainly not inappro- priate in this case to assert that what the speaker said was 'wrong ' or ' incorrect ' . If we could not make this kind of metalinguistic judgement, the slightest glitch in performance would be enough to derail communication.

Whether or not it is 'natural ' , the ability to make normative metalinguistic judgements is not an extraneous or merely contingent aspect of human language-use. It is highly functional within a system of communication which, unlike the singing of humpback whales, does not preclude the possibility of things going wrong. But what are the implications of this argument for the linguist's mission to persuade lay speakers they should cease and desist from making what Andersson and Trudgill call 'harsh' judgements on language? Are the kinds of judgements linguists deplore as arbitrary, illogical, prejudiced and overly 'harsh' connected with the kinds which, according to my argument, fulfill important communicative functions?

I believe that there is indeed a connection: the same ability which enables people to remark on and repair an error like 'fly off the cuff' also enables them to build an elaborate edifice of aesthetic and moral norms for language-use. In itself, therefore, the tendency for language-users to be judgemental about language may well be incorrigible. But this need not mean we are stuck with all the judgements whose unfairness and absurdity have driven linguists to distraction for decades. The general commitment speakers have to normative metalinguistic discourse does not have to entail commitment to any particular set of norms (just as my abstract belief that a society must have laws does not mean I support all the laws we have now). Norms are open to challenge and to change: one could--that is, linguists could--engage in argument not about whether there should be norms, but about which norms there should be.

However, this proposal does not resolve the deeper problem that when they construct their arguments, scientists and lay language-users typically orient to conflicting discourses: the one naturalizing language, the other moralizing it. And most linguists remain convinced that it is both mistaken and futile to moralize. This might prompt us to return to a question I posed earlier: why is moral discourse on language, a discourse which scarcely even attempts to justify itself, so powerful for so many?

This is a question Berel Lang addresses in his essay on Strunk and White, and his answer, essentially, is that speaking and (especially) writing are taken, not unreasonably, to be intentional acts, things one person does to or for another, and for which s/he can therefore be held accountable. Such acts are also and inevitably taken as expressions of the actor 's self, of his or her (moral) character:

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On any but the crudest and most mechanical view, writing is expressive even when it is attempting to be only informative: often we can hardly distinguish between what is expressed and what is asserted, between style and substance, form and content . . . . As expression reveals the agent, the relation of them both to the character of that agent soon appears as well. Actions both constitute the person and reveal him; we cannot imagine character so hidden or deep that it will not show itself in action (Lang, 1991, p. 12).

As long as linguistic acts are taken as indicative of the language-user's 'character ' , it will not be surprising to find that moral strictures are applied to the way people use language. (Who, for instance, can prevent themselves moving from the judgement that the tennis player cited above 'ought to have said' something different from what he did say, to judgements on the tennis player himself ( 'he is dumb'; 'he must have been under stress'; 'he hasn't had much practice giving interviews')? And, one might add, is not the linguist using exactly the same kind of shorthand when s/he attributes morally culpable traits like ignorance and intolerance to the 'language mavens'?)

The 'moral ' and the 'natural ' as paradigms for understanding and talking about language have long coexisted in the discourse of ordinary language-users: they are not impervious to the 'natural ' rhetoric that linguistic science prefers, though they tend to be more familiar with an old-fashioned version 'organic ' version of it, expressed in the platitudinous observation that 'language is a living thing'. If it seems contradictory that people can both accept that language is a natural organism and believe that it is properly subject to all kinds of moral judgements, we should remind ourselves that one of the central dramatic themes of the western cultural tradition is the struggle of 'man against nature': a struggle to bring the forces of nature under human control, and indeed to improve on what nature has ordained. Thus the sort of rhetoric used by Steven Pinker in the 'nature programme' passage I quoted above is unlikely to be perceived,by most people as the knockdown argument he thinks it is. 'Natural ' is not always best: the desire to assert our mastery over the natural world and subject it to laws of our own making is as much part of the human condition as our ability to acquire natural languages.

Discussing the perennial appeal of texts like Elements of Style, Berel Lang draws attention to the somewhat curious fact that far more people read 'how-to ' books of all kinds than ever actually act on the guidance they offer, despite the fact that the ostensible point of the genre is to enable the reader to do something. Control, Lang suggests, is exercised first in the imagination (sometimes only there), and in the exercise there is pleasure (Lang, 1991, p. 14):

[T] here is the pleasure of the representations themselves, the comfort in them of fictional and idealized worlds, of regularity, control. This attraction is still more intense when the idealized world is that of language and writing. There, too, the reader is drawn by a glimpse of imagined power and vicarious strength, as the space in his experience taken up by language is brought more fully under his control.

Perhaps the creation of 'idealized worlds' by talking about language in particular ways is among those 'linguistic realities' of which linguists, no less than lay language-users, need a 'better understanding'.

REFERENCES

ANDERSSON, L.-G. and TRUDGILL, P. 1990 Bad Language. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

CAMERON, D. 1995 Verbal Hygiene. Routledge, London. HALL, R. 1950 Leave Your Language Alone. Anchor, Garden City, NJ.

HARRIS, R. 1981 The Language Myth. Duckworth, London. LANG, B. 1991 Language and the Moral Self. Routledge, London.

PINKER, S. 1994 The Language Instinct. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

STRUNK, W. and WHITE, E. B. 1979 Elements of Style. (3rd ed.) Macmillan, New York.