Page 454 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
case of the 'Basque stick' (a punitive device used in the schools of the Basque lands, by which pupils were forced to carry a stick on their outstretched arms as punishment for having used a Basque word or expression, to be relieved only by the next sinner in line; cf. Mey 1985:27).
In a more profound sense, the question can be asked 'whose language' is the controlling norm and guideline for people's linguistic behavior. This question boils down to asking whose behavior is to be the standard of language use, and what aims such a use should set for itself. Such questions can be answered by referring back to Brecht, as quoted at the beginning of this section. If morals are indeed for the rich, moral behavior is something that one should be able to afford (but as a rule cannot). However, by appealing to some universally valid laws of justice and equity (which are strictly valid only under idealized cir- cumstances, in a so-called perfect but nowhereexisting society of the Utopian kind), the rich are allowed to get away with corruption and embezzlement, while the sheep thief and the poacher are strung up: 'One man can steal a horse and another cannot look over the fence' (cf. Brecht and Dudov 1932).
What is happening here is not only oppression, as defined above; it might also be called linguistic repression: a term covering the subtle but ever so per- nicious form of social control through language, as characterized above (see further Mey 1985:26; the distinction between 'oppression' and 'suppression' is originally due to Pateman 1980). The concept of repression plays an important role in defining and describing some pragmatic paradoxes that arise in late twentieth-century pedagogical thinking: either the student is considered to be a completely passive recep- tacle for the ideas and knowledge to be imparted by the teacher—the 'banking' concept, as Freire has aptly called it (e.g., Freire 1973; Freire and Macedo 1987: xvi)—or the students are supposed to be in the possession of exactly those qualifications, as pre- requisites to learning, that the teaching is supposed to imbue them with. In either case, the under privileged student is doomed to come out a loser: either he/she enters the 'rat race' on the ruling classes' premises (and obtains the privilege of membership in the rat club), or he/she never makes it in society, owing to an underprivileged start in life.
4.3 Other Social Contexts
Even though the educational system is perhaps the most obvious instance of the unequal distribution of social privilege, as it reflects itself in and is perpetuated through language, it is by no means the only one. Among the cases of linguistic repression that have attracted most attention are the language of the media and the medical interview. In both these cases, hidden presuppositions of the same kind as the ones char- acterized above are to be found.
The French sociolinguist Michele Lacoste has, in a thoughtful study (Lacoste 1981), drawn attention to the fact that the doctor-patient interview, despite its obvious usefulness and even necessity, sins gravely by way of linguistic repression. What the physician allows the patient to tell him or her, is not what the patient wants to tell, or is able to tell, but rather, what in the institutionalized 'discourse' of the doctor- patient relationship is pragmatically possible. That is to say, the pragmatic presuppositions that govern the use of language in this particular case are those that are defined by the social institution of the interview in which the interaction between doctor and patient takes place.
For the patient, talking in this way has nothing to do with expressing oneself or manifesting one's problems; it is more akin to filling out a form with preset categories of questions and answers, or to sub- mitting oneself to a 'multiple choice' type of exam- ination.
In Lacoste's case, an elderly lady is complaining to her doctor about pains in her spleen. However, the doctor denies this, and instead locates the pains in the lady's stomach. When the patient repeatedly and rather indignantly rejects this suggestion on the grounds that it is her body, and that she, if anyone, must be familiar with her own pains, the doctor cuts her off abruptly by saying that she does not even know what a spleen is, even less where it is located in the body.
This example shows two things: for one, the mere knowledge of a linguistic expression in medical ter- minology (such as 'spleen') and the ability to use it correctly are worth nothing, if the pragmatic pre- conditions for such a use are not met. The old lady's voice is not heard because she does not possess the necessary societal standing and clout to make herself understood. This observation is valid also in other connections, such as the tests mentioned in Sect. 4.2, where verbal abilities are gauged hi situations of unequal social power; all such cases bear clear tes- timony to the importance of the hidden conditions that determine the use of language and that steer its users.
The other point to be made in this connection is that the linguistic repression which is taking place has some very dangerous side-effects. The powerlessness of the repressed can easily turn into self-incrimination (by which the powerless attribute their lack of societal value to factors such as fate, God's will, their pre- destined stance in society ('Know your place'), their own lack of capability and potential, and so on), or else result in resignation, as happens in the case of the old lady, who ends up saying: 'Whatever you say, doctor'—thereby possibly exposing herself to the risk of a faulty diagnosis, with all its concomitant dangers both to herself (as a patient) and to the physician (as the potential target of a malpractice suit). Clearly, what is needed here is some form of technique or
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