Page 457 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

To understand an utterance, the language user would ideally have to be able to say it her/himself, in the context of her/his conversational partners—which, after all, is not more than is generally expected of interlocutors in any good conversation. Language-in- use (and in particular, the use of metaphor) is there- fore at the same time a necessary instrument of cog- nition and the expression of that cognition itself: it is a user's language, a user's pragmatic precondition to understanding their context, and to being understood in and through that context (which includes other language users).
4.6 Pragmatics and the Social Struggle
The growing interest in pragmatics as a user-oriented science of language naturally leads to the question of the sense in which pragmatics is useful to the users. In particular, given the fact that a sizable portion of the users of any language are 'underprivileged' in their relation to language, and are so, on a deeper level, because of their underprivileged position in society, it seems only reasonable to assume that an insight into the causes of societal underprivilege could trigger a renewed insight into the role of language in social processes, and that, vice versa, a renewed con- sciousness of language use as the expression of social inequalities could result in what is often called an 'emancipatory' language use.
The first efforts at establishing 'remedial' programs of language training date back to the 1960s, when the so-called 'Head Start' programs endeavored to give underprivileged children from US urban ghettos a chance to keep up with their white, suburban peers by teaching them the extra skills (in particular, language capabilities) that they needed to follow the regular curriculum. The results of these programs, if there were any, usually did not last, because they con- centrated on the pure transfer of skills, without any connection to the contexts in which these skills were going to be used, or to the real reasons for the lack of culture and educational privilege: the societal context of the children in question.
The insights that resulted from Basil Bernstein's (1971-90) work with underprivileged children came to serve as guidelines for much of western (European) sociolinguistic and pragmatically inspired research in the 1970s. The terminology that Bernstein developed (in particular, his distinction between an 'elaborated' and a 'restricted' code) was, for a decade or so, domi- nant in the discourse of emancipatory linguistics.
Briefly, according to Bernstein, lower-class chil- dren, by virtue of their social origin, do not have access to the 'elaborated' linguistic code that is used in schoolteaching. These children, being native speak- ers of a 'restricted' code, cannot identify with the school language (which simply is not theirs); therefore, their school achievements stay significantly below those of the other children, who are dealing with the
school's 'elaborated' code as a matter of course, since they have been exposed to that code all their lives.
For all its good intentions, Bernstein's solutions to the problem of selective, deficient school instruction did not yield the desired results. For one thing, he focused exclusively on the formal (morphological, syntactic, etc.) aspects of the 'codes,' rather than on matters of content and how that content was trans- mitted. Also, he did not pay explicit attention to the societal background of his codes, except as descriptive scaffolding and motivational support. But on the whole, and from a general sociolinguistic standpoint, one can safely say that Bernstein's notion of the societal context, especially as this concept is mani- fested in his theory of social stratification, despite all its weaknesses, was significantly more relevant than the class analyses practiced by the majority of his contemporary American and earlier European col- leagues (such 'analyses' mainly consisted in setting up levels of social standing depending on how much money people made, or how often they went to the theater or concert hall, and so on).
The question now is whether, in the face of these failed efforts to apply the findings of linguistics to the problems of society, there can be any hopes of practicing pragmatics in the sense of what is so hope- fully called 'emancipatory' linguistics.
The answer to that question, of course, depends to a great extent on what is understood by 'eman- cipation.' If that concept is understood as the elim- ination of social injustice, as getting rid of the 'bonds' that are inherent in the very word 'emancipation,' then language is not the tool to use. However, if the focus is placed on the consciousness of the bondage that is instrumental in creating and maintaining the divisions in society, between haves and have-nots, between rich and poor, between male and female, young and old, and so on, then there are rich opportunities for prag- matic linguists to step into the fray and contribute positively to the outcome of the social struggles. The way to do this is for linguists to stay linguists, while orienting themselves toward the pragmatic aspects of their science, that is, focusing on the users. The ques- tion is thus simply how a 'raised-consciousness' linguistics can contribute to making the users more aware of the language they are using, and in particu- lar, how it can make the underprivileged users 'tran- scend' the boundaries of their underprivileged ('restricted') use without having them buy into the myths and fantasies of the privileged classes; and vice versa, how the privileged users' consciousness can be raised, so that they no longer consider the privileges of their position as natural and uncontroversial, societally speaking.
Some of the best illustrations of the potential of this (admittedly modest) approach are the results that have been obtained in the 'linguistic war against sexism' that has been going on since at least the 1960s. Of
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