Page 123 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

at different strata in the language system. Moreover, each individual utterance of a language is seen as a potential which in the interpretation process is reduced and given a coherent structure. Interpretation thus happens according to a more or less conscious choice of what is called a 'dominant': among the poss- ible functions of an utterance in a specific com- municative situation, the one is picked that is felt to be the most important for the message. It was in this way that Roman Jakobson explained the poetic quality of language: not as something extrinsic, but as an inherentquality.
3.3 Rommetveit's Message Structure Theory
The Norwegian psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit developed his theory of message structure over the years 1968-90, often in opposition to dominant para- digms in American linguistic research, such as Gen- erative Grammar and Montague Grammar. The theoretical basis for his theory is a combination of experimental psychology (e.g., experiments with word associations), G. H. Mead's symbolic interactionism, and the European hermeneutic tradition. In fact, Rommetveit has made a point of being a methodical pluralist.
Rommetveit's basic idea is that language is embed- ded in a social matrix or context. Language can never be studied in isolation from the interaction of context. The analysis of interaction and communication is then related to the actual needs, feelings, intentions, and understanding of the subjects involved and their life worlds. Therefore, meaning is necessarily bound to context. Rommetveit attacks all ideas about 'literal' meaning, minimal semantic universals, etc., as fan- tasies based on theories of language that are in reality theories of written, formal language. On the content plane, messages are considered to be so-called 'mean- ing potentials.' Rommetveit, without being a nihilist, advocates a theory of perspectival relativity, in keep- ing with the sociological perspective of his theory. The social nature of language is guaranteed by so-called 'drafts of contracts.'
Contracts are seen as a process of negotiating tacit agreement and a shared world of discourse; the pro- cess is characterized by the notion of message struc- ture. In the process of structuring a message, the communicators try to build a temporarily shared social reality. The message structure consists of cyclic patterns of nesting new (or, as it is called, 'free') infor- mation into given (or 'bound') information.
To the theoretical-oriented linguist,Rommetveit's theory appears to be somewhat limited, as it seldom focuses on what the theory means in terms of the grammar. It is basically an interaction theory which focuses on the content plane of messages, not on the structure of the sign vehicles.
3.4 Halliday's Socio-semiotic Theory of Language
As a student of the English linguist J. R. Firth , M. A. K. Halliday was also influenced (albeit indirectly)
by the anthropologist Malinowski. Consequently, he has referred to his theory as an 'ethnographic or descriptive grammar.' Language, or as it is called, the combination of a 'semantic,' a 'lexico-grammatical,' and a 'phonological system,' is studied as the product of a social process, a social reality is schematized (or 'encoded') as a semantic system. However, among the systems that construct culture (the semiotic systems, as they are called), language is just one, even though it has a privileged place: most other semioticsystems are obligatorily mediated through language and its system. The product of the social process is the 'code'; human behavior is essential for its explanation. In Halliday's words the 'system is determined by the process.'
Typical of Halliday, then, is the endeavor to explain the structure of language as a consequence of social dialogue, of which it is in some way an abstraction. As this dialogic process is determined by the exchange of commodities, language is both determined by the nature of the commodity (such as 'goods and services' versus 'information'), and by the rules defined for the commodity exchange (such as 'giving' and 'demand- ing'). However, this is not a monolithic process: language develops characteristic realizations at its different levels in accordance with what Halliday calls 'congruence patterns.'
Thus, Halliday's theory of language is structured as a system network, where the expression plane is conceived of as manifestations of meaningschosen from a semantic system (the encoded social reality). While the notion of 'choice' is central to Halliday, it should not be mistaken for a conscious act of choos- ing, but understood as a term referring to the pro- cessual nature of the socio-semiotic system of language.
4. Future Work
A great deal of what has been discussed above is often classified as belonging to the domain of 'pragmatics' in linguistics. But if pragmatics is conceived as a super- ficial attribution to, or even as a 'waste-basket' for the more systematic, and therefore more prestigious, studies of syntax and semantics, this is a mis- representation. Among the fundamentally radical views that some of the most important com- munication-oriented linguists share, not least the four 'schools' explicitly mentioned here have inspired, or are still systematically searching for, such an alter- native. For the linguist who is skeptical about most of the traditional conceptions in linguistics associated with what has been referred to here as 'abstract objec- tivism,' there exist several research alternatives.
Bibliography
Bakhtin M M 1981 The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX
Bourdieu P 1982 Ce que parler veut dire. Libraire Artheme 101
Communication