Page 160 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
intrinsic to it by virtue of its participation in the system that is language.
3.1.3 TheSystemandthePoeticFunctionofLanguage
One of the major tenets of Jakobson (1960) was that language was functionally differentiated in relation to the significant elements of the communication situ- ation. These he formulated as shown in (1):
erential function of language, lyric poetry (first per- son) is intimately linked with the emotive function, and second-person poetry is linked to the conative (see Sect. 3.3 below).
For Jakobson, the problem of the relativity of lit-
erary interpretation was solved by this bond between
functional varieties. The fact that even the poetic func-
tion always involved the referential actually limited
ADDRESSER
ADDRESSEE
the identity of the literary work. The conservative system of 'ordinary' language was common to suc- ceeding and different literary canons and sets of poetic norms. Although Jakobson claimed that 'every word of poetic language is in essence phonically and sem- antically deformed vis-a-vis practical language,' and that the aesthetic function is a specific variety 'gov- erned by its own immanent laws,' he concluded that 'a poetic form cannot distort its material to such a degree that it loses its linguistic nature' (Steiner 1984:231).
3.1.4 Phonology and the Problem of Poetic Violence
The structure that underpins all functional varieties is the phonological system of a given language. It was phonology that Jakobson chose as the key to the identity of the literary sign, even as he argued that it was phonological parallelism and repetition that produced semantic polysemy, ambiguity, and het- erogeneity in the literary artefact. Phonology was an important element of Saussure's system. The focus on phonology, and the idea that the spoken is the orig- inal, authentic form of language, constituted what Derrida (1976) would call phonocentrism in Saussure. For Saussure and Jakobson, phonology controls the infinite semiosis that is a consequence of written language, the result of the process of spatiotemporal dislocation which relativizes the identity of the written sign. If writing is made secondary to an originary speech, merely a representation of it, then the cause of the semiotic slippage, written language, is eliminated. Saussure's contradictory and violent narrative, struc- tured around the speech/writing binarism, of the viol- ence done to speech by writing (1960: ch. 6), was the text Derrida chose for his deconstruction of the intrinsic meaning arguments in linguistics (1976). The intrinsic value of the verbal sign is guaranteed only while it remains within the synchronic system of langue, written as the science of the phone, the latter's
amorphous multiplicity reduced to a limited inventory of elements and incorporated into the relational grid of similarities and differences that constitute that system.
The voice in Saussure is logocentric, the voice of reason. The phoneme, the minimal unit of the signi- fier, is defined through its relationship to the signified, in terms of the rational differentiations in meaning that it enables within the system. Phonology offered Jakobson the solution to both his problems. As a mere
CONTEXT MESSAGE CONTACT CODE
the spatiotemporal dislocation which might threaten (1)
The elements are related to six functions, one cor- responding to each of the factors in the com- munication situation as shown in (2):
EMOTIVE
REFERENTIAL
POETIC PHA TIC
MET ALINGUAL
(2) CONA TIVE
All messages were characterized by more than one function, and the dominant function (Jakobson "The dominant' 1935) in any one message specified it as belonging to one functional variety rather than another.
The referential function, oriented towards the context, the so-called 'denotative' function of language, which 'refers' to the extralinguistic, is often regarded as the predominant linguistic function. But Jakobson demonstrated that every message also involves a number of other functions, and that many messages foreground functions other than the ref- erential. The emotive function focuses on the addresser, offering a direct expression of the speaker's attitude to what he is speaking about. The conative function involvesan orientation toward the addressee, and finds its clearest grammatical expression in the vocative and imperative. The phatic function is ori- ented towards contact, and functions primarily to establish and maintain communication. The met- alingual function is focused on the code itself, but not only in scientific or theoretical modes of talking about language. Whenever speakers use language to check up on whether they are using the same code to explain meanings or to quote or refer to other language, they are using it metalingually.
The function of language which focuses on the message for its own sake is the poetic function of language: this is the dominant function in verbal art. In all other functions it acts as a subsidiary constitu- ent. On the other hand all the other functions also participate in verbal art: one cannot specify the par- ticularities of different poetic genres 'without speci- fying the differently ranked participation of the other functions alongside the poetic function' (Jakobson 1981:26). Epic poetry (third person) involves the ref-
138