Page 156 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
other institutionally produced forms of social dis- course (the law, economics, medicine, etc.).
The next sections of this article trace the essential terms of structuralist and semiotic metalanguages, as these were derived from linguistics, and suggest that later poststructuralism is still very much indebted to these metalanguages.
2. Structuralism, Stylistics, and the Linguistic Metaphor
Twentieth-century linguistics has had a number of different kinds of influence on literary studies. Struc- turalism has primarily been concerned with the struc- tures of literary artefacts, specifically with the systematic nature of those structures. This sys- tematicity is seen to be what constructs them as liter- ary, rather than as some other kind of text. At one level then literary structuralism uses linguistics, specifically Saussurean linguistics, as a metaphor or model for thinking about the structures of literary texts as autonomous systems. The literary system which is a poem, for example, functions like the syn- chronic linguistic system which Saussure described for language.
Structuralism has been concerned with under- standing the 'grammars' or 'codes' which provide the resources, and the rules for the putting together of those resources, that enable the users of such gram- mars or codes to produce cultural phenomena such as myths, narratives, music, ritual, visual art, archi- tecture, and literary texts. In many kinds of struc- turalism, the use of linguistics remains largely metaphorical; nevertheless, a detailed structuralist analysis of a literary text also draws on the analyst's knowledge of the grammar of the language, and thus always involves some grammatical or linguistic theory which functions as a metalanguage for identifying and categorizing the linguistic patterns in the text. If one is going to identify patterns of verbs and nouns in a text, or patterns of stress and intonation, one first needs a grammar which identifies, and thus enables one to label, those categories.
There is a distinction to be drawn here between structuralism and stylistics or linguistic criticism. Styl- istics or critical linguistics takes some linguistic theory, and uses its categories to analyze a literary text as a piece of, an instance of, language. There need not be any presupposition that the text being analyzed functions like a language. That presupposition is, however, a usual aspect of the use of the linguistic metaphor in structuralism. A stylistician or critical linguist may be interested in the use of nom- inalizations in Hemingway's prose, or in the sys- tematic patterns of ungrammatically in E. E. Cummings's verse. He will tend to make sense of these in relation to the linguistic theory he is working with, using it as a metalanguage to decode the text, and
accepting the meanings it attributes to the categories heisidentifying.Atransformationalist willreadnom- inalizations as transformations of simpler deep struc- tures. A Hallidayan systemic linguist will read them as grammatical metaphors, requiring 'unpacking' to reveal the ideologies their compact grammatical form conceals.
Where the linguistic theories concerned are dis- course analysis, sociolinguistics or pragmatics, or a functional theory of language as social semiotic like Halliday's (1978), the analysis also involves another level, which roughly parallels, but is very different to, the level of language as metaphor in structuralism. In general, all these theories relate the patterns of language produced by linguistic analysis to the social contexts of the text's use. Consistent patterns of agent- less passives may thus be identified as marking the text's provenance as a scientific text. In a literary analysis from a feminist perspective, the fact that the female participant is never the subject of active verbs, or that what is attributed to her adjectivally is con- sistentlyattributed byamalewhoisalwaysthesubject of the verbs of knowing, may be read as indicating the text's provenance within a patriarchal order.
At stake here is the ability of the analyst first to identify, in terms of some linguistic metalanguage, and then to 'decode' in terms of the same meta- language, the patterns of language identified in the text. The decoding is a form of interpretation which depends on a theory of context and of text-context relationships, and which involves identifying parts or all of this text as being like other texts in the culture. Such analysis is frequently associated with analytical categories like register, genre, and ideology, or discourse, so that the patterns of language that con- stitute a text are identified as being those that charac- terize a particular register or genre, or that are characteristic of a particular set of beliefs or ideas (ideology or discourse of patriarchy, of science, of the child etc.). Much of this work also takes the next step and moves one level higher, to locate the registers, genres, ideologies, and discourses within institutional structures and in relation to power and issues like race, age, and gender. That is, such 'stylistic' work has become a 'critical linguistics' or 'social semiotics,' appropriating the rudiments of social and political theory in order to make sense of linguistic structures and the way they function in literary and other texts. In this respect it agrees with earlier forms of literary formalism or structuralism/semiotics, and has par- allels with later versionsof literary semiotics and post- structuralism.
The point of difference between the older and newer theoretical positions is the initial use of the Saussurean linguistic system as a metaphor for understanding the literary, and use of any linguistic theory as a meta- language to establish, in an apparently objective manner, the patterns and the meanings that constitute
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