Page 453 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

is social more than anything else. This entails that the social conditions for language use are 'built in,' so to say, to the very foundation of language acquisition and use; but also, that such conditions are difficult to detect and determine as to their exact effect: the results of linguistic development in very early life become only evident much later, when young people enter the first stages of their formal education by joining the school system.
It is therefore not surprising that some of the earliest research interests of a truly pragmatic nature con- centrated precisely on the problems of school environ- ment versus home environment. A positive correlation could be established between children's school per- formance and their social status; school achievement is in important respects dependent on the learner's earlier development in the home. White middle-class children, as a whole, could be shown to be significantly better school performers than their peers from lower strata of society, that is, from nonwhite and, in general, nonmainstream environments. (The name of Basil Bernstein is inextricably bound up with this important research, even though later workers came to have a more critical view of his conclusions; see below, Sect. 4.6.)
The case of the young person's school achievement is a good illustration of what pragmatics is really about, because it very clearly demonstrates why the pragmatic pattern of thinking originally met with such resistance, and why the earliest impulses to pragmatic research had to come from the outside, so to speak; from the ranks not of linguists, but of educationalists and sociologists. The core of the matter here is that the pragmatic determiners are nearly always totally hidden: one has to postulate them almost without any regard to initial plausibility. Social theory, at least as it was practiced until the mid-1960s, had no expla- nation to offer for its own statistical results. It was not until the hidden conditions of societal structure and domination were brought out into the open that cer- tain pragmatic features could be identified as impor- tant for language use. One of the most crucial of these turned out to be the question of the 'ownership' of cultural goods, and how this ownership was admin- istered through various patterns of'hegemony' (a term originally due to the Italian Marxist theoretician and linguist Antonio Gramsci), in cultural as in other respects.
The following subsections deal with some of these hidden assumptions by playing some of the charac- teristic themes, all orchestrated as variations on the main theme: 'Whose language are we speaking, when we use "our" language?' (see Mey 1985).
4.2 Language in Education: A Privileged Matter
'Morals are for the rich,' Bertolt Brecht used to say, echoing an earlier saying by Georg Buchner (Woy- zeck, 1838). With a slight variation on this dictum, it
could be said that education is only for those who can afford it. Here, one must consider not only the prohibitively high costs of education in the so-called free enterprise system (at the beginning of the 1990s, tuition costs for US private universities ranged from $14,000 to over $20,000 a year; source: Daily North- westerner, January 10, 1991), but also the affordances having to do with coming from the right social back- ground. The same classes that have established the institutions of higher education have also been material in structuring that education and organizing their curricula; and here one is faced with a self- perpetuating, coopting system that favors those who are most similar to itself—par nobis, as the expression used to be.
One of the requirements for those who aspire to participate in any college or university program is to pass the appropriate tests. Characteristically, these tests are geared to the values of the white, middle- class, male-dominated segments of society; minority students typically do less well on these tests, as is the case with foreigners too. It is not uncommon to observe a foreign student who performs relatively well on the mathematical parts of the GRE (the 'Graduate Record Examination,' a prerequisite to entering graduate school), but who almost fails the verbal part; this alone should induce a healthy skepticism toward the value of such testing as a whole, and draw atten- tion to the part that language plays in devising and administering the test.
At stake here is, among other things, what many educational researchers have dubbed the 'hidden cur- riculum.' Schools are not only supposed to mediate a professional subject matter through their teaching; equally important are the attitudes and beliefs that are fostered and reinforced through the educational institutions. If one asks what these attitudes are about, one has to go back once more to the question of societal power, raised earlier: the prevalent attitudes reflect the attitudes of the powerful segments of society, and are (implicitly or explicitly)geared toward perpetuating the possession of that power among the ruling classes.
This means, with respect to language, that those people who are able to decide what language can be deemed acceptable, which uses of language should be furthered and encouraged, and which demoted and discouraged, are in a position of power and hence can control the future of whole segments of the population by controlling their actual language behavior.
The classic case of this linguistic oppression (as it is called) is that of 'low' versus 'high' prestige dialects of one and the same language, or that of 'pidgin' versus 'standard' languages, where pidgins are considered to be mere deteriorated variants of some higher entity called 'the' language. Gross cases of oppressive linguistic behavior control include the total or partial criminalization of local or vernacular idioms, as in the
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