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But for the study of language it was largely a period of linguistic lull.
I am aware that it will require intensive and careful research; I am only
proposing a tentative hypothesis: social upheavals and linguistic analysis
may be in inverse relationship. This disjunction between the study of language
and society partly has its roots in the rationalist Platonic tradition in
which there is overwhelming pressure to see the transience of the world
around us and to seek the real and the ideal which must exist beyond the
perceptual world, i.e., in the recesses of our minds. The search for linguistic
and cognitive universals has had a long history and it has given us some
of the most insightful theories of language and mind. There is a sense in
which as I said yesterday we share a feel for the overall architecture of
language, e.g., in the basic lexical categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives
and their symmetrical projections, in a set of functional categories that
would function as determiners, quantifiers and complementizers and in a
set of inflections or mechanisms that would indicate say person or plurality,
etc., and yet when somebody really pushes us to the wall to specify real
language universals, we do not feel particularly comfortable. Even the boundaries
between nounness and verbness may not be clearly definable. This is true
of the cognitive universals also, as, for example, we will see in the case
of how we conceptualise and structure space. In the study of language, the
rationalist impulse may gain new heights and strengths that are essentially
socio-politically neutral, irrespective of whether it is a time of social
upheavals or not. As Prof. Rajendra Singh (personal communication) tells
me, the view from Saussure's office in Geneva including the 'tranquillity
of the lake, the mountains and of the Swiss political economy' was indeed
peaceful; but the view from Chomsky's office from Building 20 at MIT in
the 1950s and 60s was far from quiet. |
Benjamin Lee Whorf, who, following Boas and Sapir, pioneered the theory
of linguistic relativity, had no doubt that the way we conceptualise space
is universal. Whorf (1956:158-9) said: |
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There is no (such) striking difference between Hopi
and Standard American English about space as about time, and probably
the apprehension of space is given in substantially that same form by
experience irrespective of language. |
As Foley (1997) shows, for a very long time it was believed that spatial
conception is strongly informed by innate universals and that in all languages
and cultures, our own body remains the reference point for structuring space.
The greatest of the relativists you notice wears a rationalist hat and often
vice versa. It was argued that the coordinates through which spatial orientations
are established are projected from ego, the deictic central reference point
for all spatial reckoning, along two horizontal axes and one vertical (p.215).
Front-back and left-right are along the horizontal axes, up down is along
the vertical axis. Since everyone structures space in terms of her/his body,
what is to my right is to your left. It was assumed that the axis of spatial
structuring could pass through only the human body and that we are innately
programmed to do so. Several studies since, particularly the ones conducted
at the Max-Planck Institute in Nijmegen, have shown that different languages
may have fundamentally different ways of describing spatial orientation.
It is possible to have absolute frames of reference (as even we have in
the case of south, north etc.) rather than purely egocentric ones. A given
culture could have mountains and rivers as absolute frames of reference
so that what is to your right remains to the right of your hearer also.
Once again one is not suggesting that there are no universals or that the
pursuit for universals is not worthwhile. What one is suggesting, however,
is that this pursuit should not be undertaken at the cost of social reality. |
Another rationality thread takes you to the promises of the Enlightenment
project, vision of a utopia, which promised happiness and peace to one and
all, if we simply tried to be rational. This view of progress and development
was indeed naïve. It not only ignored the disastrous social and environmental
consequences of the so-called technological progress, it also ignored the
questions of individual identity, small group dynamics, and local beliefs,
cultures and literacies. What is more, it completely ignored the role of
language in the construction of social reality. We as linguists failed not
only to take note of the dehumanising negative discourse structures, but
also of the liberating positive ones. In human history, the voices of protest
and rebellion, I guess, have overwhelmingly rejected the extant dominate
discourse constructing in the process a new 'speech'. I am grateful to Prof.
Singh for pointing out how Ashtadhyayi canonized Sanskrit and how Buddha
refused to speak in it; the same is perhaps true of Nanak and Kabir and
several alternative voices in the Bhakti movement; and again of the discourses
of the freedom movement. |
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