Language, Mind, and Social Life

H.G. Widdowson

Linguistics is the name given to the discipline which studies human language. Two questions come immediately to mind. Firstly, what is human language? How, in general terms, can it be characterised? Secondly, what does its study involve? What is it that defines linguistics as a discipline?

According to the Bible: 'In the beginning was the Word'. According to the Talmud: 'God created the world by a Word, instantaneously, without toil or pains'. Whatever more mystical meaning these pieces of scripture might have, they both point to the primacy of language in the way human beings conceive of the world.

Language certainly figures centrally in our lives. We discover our identity as individuals and social beings when we acquire it during childhood. It serves as a means of cognition and communication: it enables us to think for ourselves and to co-operate with other people in our community. It provides for present needs and future plans, and at the same time carries with it the impression of the things past.

Language seems to be a feature of our essential humanity which enables us to rise above the condition of mere brutish beings, real or imagined. But is it specifically and uniquely human? Is it species-specific? And if yes, does it mean that it is something we are born with, part of our genetic make-up, an innate endowment?

The argument for the genetic uniqueness of language is that it provides an explanation for a number of facts which would otherwise be inexplicable. One of these is the ease with which children learn their own language. They rapidly acquire a complex grammar which goes well beyond imitation of any utterances they might hear. So, the idea is that as human beings we are 'wired up' for language: that is to say, for language in general, of course, not for any particular language. We are born with a cognitive learning capability which is wired genetically into our brain.

From this perspective, the essential nature of language is cognitive: it is seen as a psychological phenomenon. But this is not the only perspective, and not the only aspect of language, that warrants attention as being pre-eminently human. For although language may indeed be, in one sense, a kind of cognitive construct, it is not only that. It also functions as a means of communication and social control. True, it is internalised in the mind as abstract knowledge, but in order for this to happen it must also be experienced in the external world as actual behaviour.

Another way of looking at language, therefore, would see it in terms of the social functions it serves. What is particularly striking about language from this point of view is the way it is fashioned as systems of signs to meet the elaborate cultural and communal needs of human societies. The focus of attention in this case is on what Michael Halliday calls 'language as social semiotic', that is to say, on language as a system of signs which are socially motivated or informed in that they have been developed to express social meanings.

With this social view of language, as with the cognitive one outlined earlier, there is a concern for explanation. Why is human language as it is? The answer this time, however, is that it has evolved not with the biological evolution of the species but with the socio-cultural evolution of human communities. Thus, one requirement of language is that it should provide the means for people to act upon their environment, for the first person (ego) to cope with the third person reality of events and entities 'out there', to classify and organise it and so bring it under control by a process of what we might call conceptual projection. In other words (Halliday's words) language has to have an ideational function. Another necessity is for language to provide a means for people to interact with each other, for the first person to cope with the second person, to establish a basis for co-operative action social relations: so language needs to discharge in interpersonal function as well. And both of these functions, and perhaps others, will be reflected within the abstract systems of the linguistic code itself.

So language can be seen as distinctive because of its intricate association with the human mind and with human society. It is related to both, cognition and communication; it is both, abstract knowledge and actual behaviour. We can attempt to define its essential character by specifying a whole range of design features: its arbitrariness and duality, the fact that it is context-independent, operates across different media (speech and writing) and at different levels of organisation (sounds, words, sentences), and so on. The phenomenon as a whole is both pervasive and elusive. How then can it be pinned down and systematically studied?

This question moves us from the properties of language to the principles of the discipline which studies them, from the design features of language to the design features of linguistics.

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