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Language Sciences 32 (2010) 113 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

The historical ontology of language

Philip Seargeant *
Centre for Language and Communication, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AL, UK Received 2 September 2008; received in revised form 24 November 2008; accepted 30 November 2008

Abstract This article examines the ontology of language from a historico-cultural perspective. Acknowledging the importance of pre-ontological assumptions for setting the epistemic parameters within which scientic disciplines operate, the article discusses the elements of a methodological framework for theorising such assumptions, based upon Foucaults conception of historical ontology [Foucault, M., 1991. In: Rabinow, P. (Ed.), The Foucault Reader. Penguin, London]. By using a genealogical method that analyses ontological beliefs as they occur within their historical and cultural context, it is suggested that it is possible to narrow in on what is singular, contingent and arbitrary (p. 45) in any specic conceptualisation of language, and use this information as an important variable in the self-reexive analysis of linguistic research. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Historical ontology; Linguistics; Conceptual metaphor; Discipline; Foucault; Heidegger

1. Introduction What I am most loathe to renounce are the diverse perspectives which, from this genetic point of language in the human soul, open out into the wide elds of logic, aesthetics, and psychology, especially with regard to the question, how far can one think without and what must one think with language, a question whose subsequent applications would spread out into practically all branches of knowledge. Johann Gottfried Herder, Essay on the origin of language (Herder, 1986 [1772], p. 127). That language is an object of study in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and that it is also the chief medium of study for all these, is not an especially profound statement. The implications of such a statement, however, are profound; and they are also dauntingly complex. To become an object of scientic investigation it is necessary that that object be delimited and have boundaries imposed upon it, but with such regulation comes the danger of partialism, of ignoring the holistic picture (albeit out of practical necessity) in favour of something more manageable. The result is an object of study refracted by dierent disciplines, each of which attempts to animate an isolated feature while (temporarily) numbing the rest of the organism. A consequence of this is that the disciplinary nomenclature can become a determining factor in the way that
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0388-0001/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2008.11.001

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language is perceived and, to an extent, analysed, as the attempt is often to coerce all results of language behaviour into an explanation rooted in one relatively acute perspective. Even the term linguistics, ostensibly the broadest term for the study of language, has come, by the beginning of the twenty-rst century, to denote a very specically bounded approach; and often, in certain popular belief, the meaning of the term is restricted even further to one dominating theory.1 This is, in part, the consequence of certain historical processes. As Calvet (2006, p. 21) observes: When linguistics came into being, it needed to dene its eld of study in order to guarantee its scientic status. This denition transformed and even hardened practices into an object, but while structuralist linguistics needed to invent language, it does not realise that it is now a prisoner of that invention. To describe the conceptual apparatus that provides the analytic framework in which a scientic discipline conducts its research as a prison is, perhaps, to resort to a somewhat contentious metaphoric vocabulary. After all, any research into language needs rst to have a rm conception of what it takes language to be, and to ensure stability and coherence for the subsequent research programme it will then have to adhere consistently to the framework it has established for itself. Of theoretical interest, though, is not so much that scientic disciplines do conduct themselves within paradigmatic connes this has been a commonplace in the philosophy of science now for almost half a century (Kuhn, 1962) but rather how each discipline arrives at its conceptualisation of language, and how (or if) it attempts to ensure that these conceptual and terminological decisions do not become naturalised into epistemic assumptions which close down the scientic ambition of the research. The rhetorical move that names the object of study is also, of course, an ontological move, and operates to disclose the eld in which research and debate is to be pursued. Heidegger (1962 [1927], p. 30) observes that science always presupposes ontology, and that: Basic concepts determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subjectmatter underlying all the objects a science takes as its theme, and all positive investigation is guided by this understanding. His argument is that scientic investigation inevitably proceeds on the basis of pre-ontological assumptions (that is, embedded beliefs about being which have not been raised to the level of explicit theory2) about the entity that is the object of research. These pre-ontological assumptions constitute the background against which objects of interest are measured, and as such they are both inevitable and indispensable, as they provide the meaning-structure within which the foreground entity is understood. One way in which ontology is posited rather than pursued is unequivocal assertion of the sort that Chomsky (1957, p. 13) makes in his famous prefatory statement to Syntactic Structures: From now on I will consider a language to be a set (nite or innite) of sentences, each nite in length and constructed out of a nite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense. There is little acknowledgement here of the rationale or justication for interning such an exclusive portion of linguistic behaviour within what counts as language,3 and much has been made of the philosophical and dis1 Lawson (2001, p. 14), in his analysis of the way in which the concept of language is understood in linguistics textbooks, identies a startling trend in twentieth century linguistics in the United States [which] appears to be the progressive narrowing of language and language study such that introductory texts have come to act as indoctrination devices which impress the reader into one particular dominant theory rather than presenting several currently viable options in a meaningful way. Investigation of the strategies that result in such a narrowing of the disciplinary framework is the substantive subject of this article, and will be discussed in detail in later sections. 2 [I]f we should reserve the term ontology for that theoretical inquiry which is explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities, then what we have in mind in speaking of Daseins Being-ontological is to be designated as something pre-ontological. It does not signify simply being-ontical, however, but rather being in such a way that one has an understanding of Being (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 32). 3 I have not drawn a clear distinction between language and languages in this article as, in eect, such a distinction is part of the ideological approach to linguistic behaviour that abstracts from actual practice a singular concept which is then used as part of the theoretical apparatus to rationalise about that linguistic behaviour. In this respect it is a fundamental distinction for the study of language, but nevertheless it is one which is interpreted in dierent ways in dierent periods, and which is accorded dierent signicance by dierent sub-disciplines.

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cursive tradition to which Chomsky conforms in constructing his theoretical approach around such ontological assumptions. Lako and Johnson (1999, p. 496), for example, with their dissection of the conceptual metaphorical complexion of Western thought and its consequence for cognitive science,4 consider Chomskyan linguistics to be a perfect case of a priori philosophy predetermining specic scientic results. Their contention is that an adherence to Cartesian dualism is the foundation for the innateness paradigm, where language is a property of the mind, and physical and social manifestations of linguistic behaviour are thus quite separate and distinct phenomena (and thus beyond the purview of linguistics).5 I shall return below to the trend for critiques of the metaphysical and ontological assumptions upon which Chomskyan linguistics is founded. (One of the consequences of stage-managing a shift in scientic paradigms is that ones own argumentative and analytic approaches become a touchstone for revolutionary dissention.) For the moment, however, what is of note is that the ontological assertion comes by means of a blunt rhetorical strategy which acts to present this particular view of language (this denition of the concept) as a natural given. Any programme of language research, however, will involve in some form this same issue of how to deal with the meaning-structure (i.e. the complex of pre-ontological assumptions) latent in our rationalisations about linguistic behaviour, which constitutes the being of the entity under investigation; and it is this issue that the current article addresses. To frame the concern as a question, we can ask how language is conceptualised as a feature of the human experience, and what existential form it is understood to take within the world. As has been noted, this is an issue of ontology, and it is one of fundamental importance in that it sets the parameters for any subsequent discussion of language, thereby playing an inuential (albeit often a withdrawn) role in determining the direction of linguistic research. It is for this reason that it is important to formulate an operational means or methodology that will allow us to critique the (pre-)ontological assumptions from which we work, and scrutinise both the evidence upon which these are based and the implications to which they give rise. It is a discussion of the elements that would constitute such a methodology which forms the substance of this article. 2. Language myths and disciplinary matrices Before moving to an explication of the signicant features that this methodology will need to take account of it is worth briey reviewing some of the critiques that have been made of the assumptions upon which the discipline of linguistics is based. One major examination of this sort is that pursued by Harris with his integrationist linguistics project (Harris, 1998a,b). For Harris, theoretical linguistics within the Western tradition has structured itself around a myth (Harris, 1981) which conceives of language systems as autonomous objects which can be studied without reference to the contextual environs in which they operate as means of communication. His contention, by contrast, is that languages are inherently open-ended and variable, and thus it becomes vain to look for a xed code underlying the communicational practices of particular communities (Harris, 1998b, p. 24, italics added). Based upon such reasoning he suggests that for the integrationist it is possible to do linguistics without assuming that the linguistic universe consists of a large number of discrete objects called languages, let alone having to treat each such object as a self-contained system (p. 18). One consequence of this move is that it would appear to provide an alternative ontology for language which would involve the re-evaluation of much of the history of the language sciences. The recognition and analysis of an ideology which takes languages as discrete objects has also been a salient concern in linguistic anthropology (see, for example, Duranti, 1997, ch. 3.3), and of recent this has been explicitly theorised by Blommaert (2006, 2008b) with his identication of an artefactual view of language prevalent in many contemporary commonsense linguistic beliefs. Drawing upon the foundational work on language ideology by Silverstein (1979), Blommaert sees the belief that reference-and-predication is the chief function of linguistic behaviour (Silverstein, 1979, p. 205) as resulting in a conceptualisation of language as a
4 The job of the cognitive science of philosophy is to point out philosophy when it sees it, analyse the conceptual structure of the philosophy, and note its consequences (Lako and Johnson, 1999, p. 496). 5 Lako and Johnson (1999, p. 472) are emphatic in this contention, arguing that the basic tenets of Chomskys linguistics are taken directly from Descartes. Their thesis is that the adherence to this philosophical worldview produces a linguistics which is inconsistent with the cognitive science they propound.

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manipulable, bounded artefact consisting of (grammatical) structures with a clear function, denotation (Blommaert, 2006, p. 512). In such an artefactual view, ontology and function are closely linked, with the mainstream referential ideology6 privileging certain features of linguistic behaviour (those aspects that provide symbolic representation of the material world and of human interaction with this world, for example) and promoting these as essential to languages existence. The dialectical relationship with the disciplinary matrix is also overtly addressed in this analysis; as Blommaert notes: Linguistics has contributed in no small degree to the cultural construction of language in general as a stable, contextless individual mental object (p. 512). From this brief summary of some of the ways in which a self-reexive approach to the study of language is being pursued, and of how concern is taken over the epistemic traditions within which such study takes place, we can see that as institutional linguistics, and its several sub-categories, enters its second century, many of the foundational assumptions that structure the eld are being complexied in rigorous and productive fashion. Indeed, often it is dissatisfaction with the ontological assumptions of one trend within linguistics research which results in the formation of an alternative paradigm or sub-discipline. It is, however, worth appending two points to the emergent strand of scholarship that explicitly focuses upon a critique of the ontological assumptions in Western linguistics, and it is these two points which will provide the basis for the methodological approach that I am outlining. The rst point to be argued is that there is not simply one myth which constitutes the ontological foundations for Western linguistic science, but that at any historically situated place there is a specic conception of language which provides the elemental ingredients of the disciplinary matrix in which language is analysed and that each such conception will be moulded by specic events (and actual people). As such, the ontology of language should be seen as pluriform, and an appreciation of this is an important prerequisite for recognising the contingent nature of any one formulation. While there is often implicit consensus about the various factors which contribute to the general issue of the ontology of language, either within a specic discipline or within general commonsense belief, there is no absolute coherence to the conceptualisation, and indeed inconsistencies, and on occasion incompatibilities, exist within it. Thus, to talk, for example, of the artefactual view of language, requires the qualifying caveat that what the conceptualisation actually involves is a collection of attributions that do not necessarily produce a logically unied whole. An equally signicant point is that it is not possible simply dismiss this dominant myth. The task of the theoretician is not merely to unmask it (expose its rudimentary conceptual aws), and suggest in its place a more truthful explanation. For the myth (that is, the fallacious ontology) is likely to be consequential; indeed, it is how we constitute an important part of our lived experience. Language, after all, must, by necessity, be understood and interpreted (understood in procedural terms; and interpreted in propositional terms7) according to some conceptual framework. As Love (1998, p. 67) writes of the xed code theory of language: No attempt to ground an analytic understanding of how language works can aord to ignore the question of how far, in seeking such an understanding, the linguist can or should emancipate himself from preconceived views on that issue which may themselves be constitutive of certain kinds of communicational practice. In other words, the preconceived views are themselves constitutive of aspects of linguistic behaviour (Seargeant, 2008a), and therefore comprise part of the social reality of language. Thus it is that an ontology must take account of the eects provided by a pre-ontological understanding of language: the being of language depends in great part on beliefs about that being and the way in which these beliefs inuence practice. The implications of the pluriform nature of the ontology, and of the social consequence of ontological assumptions, are of a complex nature, and it is necessary therefore to identify and analyse them in far greater
The referential ideology is one identied by Silverstein (1979) which describes the privileging in metapragmatic exchanges of denotational or propositional meaning as the primary function of language. He writes of the tendency to rationalise the pragmatic system of language, in native understanding, with an ideology of language that centres on reference-and-predication (p. 208). 7 The terminology is (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]), and makes the distinction between pre-ontology and ontology, between taken-for-granted assumptions as the basis for action (understanding), and explicitly theorised (that is abstracted) premises as retrospective explanations for action (interpretation).
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detail than the synoptic sketch that I have provided so far. To assist with such an analysis I shall draw upon a methodology suggested by Foucault, which rejects the dominant and inuential approach to ontology ambitiously undertaken by Heidegger in Being and Time, and instead conceives of being as historical event. 3. Historical ontology In pursuing an ontology of language one strategy would be to begin by adopting a similar methodologically rhetorical move to Chomskys statement in Syntactic Structures and positing the existence of language according to certain essential features. An approach such as this would allow one to pursue what Heidegger refers to as formal designation (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]; Dreyfus, 2001), whereby agreement can be found that some phenomenon exists a complex sign system conveyed by modulations of sound and graphic mark, maybe8 to which we can (and do) assign the name language. Taking this as a form of rigid designator (a stable referent for designating the particular phenomenon according to a certain dening property (Kripke, 1980)), it would be possible to begin with a provisional conception which would provide a framework for subsequent investigation. Such an approach allows that one can designate something by its contingent properties and then be bound by that designation to research its essential properties (Dreyfus, 2001, p. 158). This is not the approach adopted by Foucault, however. For him, the search for essential properties is a chimera. Instead, it is the sediment of the discursively and practice-based conceptual attempts to dene the essence of the phenomenon (to do so either explicitly or in the taken-for-granted practices of everyday usage) that constitutes the social reality of that phenomenon. This sediment then becomes, for Foucault, the real object of investigation. A clear exposition of this position is to be found in the late essay What is Enlightenment?. In this essay, Foucault engages in an analysis of Kants disquisition on this same question (Was ist Aufklarung?) as a means of outlining his conception of what he considers to be the key problem for contemporary philosophy: that is, an understanding of our own subjectivity. [I]f the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, he writes, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? (Foucault, 1991, p. 45). Our focus should not be on universal questions of being, he contends, but instead we should ask: What is our actualite? what are we as part of our actualite? what is the target activity of philosophy as far as we are part of our actualite? (Foucault, 1983). To facilitate the process of oering an answer he promotes his archaeological and genealogical methods, by means of which we might investigate the historical ontology of ourselves (Foucault, 1991, p. 45), with the ambition of understanding the human subject through an investigation of its social relations as historically situated events.9 As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, p. 122) summarise the move, Foucault (like later Heidegger) replaces [traditional] ontology with a special kind of history that focuses on the cultural practices that have made us what we are. Hacking (2002, p. 23), who has adopted a similar historicising of philosophical presuppositions in his analysis of the coming into being of, amongst other things, psychological conditions in contemporary society, elucidates that: Historical ontology is about the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history. It is not to be practiced in terms of grand abstractions, but in terms of the explicit formations in which we can constitute ourselves.
8 Even this designation of features is controversial. Neither Saussure (1974 [1916]) nor Bloomeld (1935), for example, recognise writing as in any way synonymous with language, but instead demote it to a recording or representational role, with language, in their formulation, being equated only with speech. 9 The concerns articulated in the essay What is Enlightenment? originated in a colloquium given at Berkeley in 1983. A pair of lectures entitled The culture of the self, delivered at the same university in April of that year, elaborate upon similar ideas, as does an interview conducted by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow at this same time, whichwas included as an appendix to the second edition of their book on Foucault (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1983). It is in these three sources that the concept of thehistorical ontology of the self is developed.

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The rift with early Heideggerean ontology is clearly perceived in such an agenda. Commenting on the genealogical method which he developed in the latter part of his career, Foucault comments that this rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal signication and indenite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for origins (Foucault, 1991, p. 77). Whereas the Heidegger of Being and Time believes that a full understanding of the nature of being is initially hidden or disguised either through historical accident or for euphemistic purpose, but that we are able, through phenomenological analysis, to pursue what he terms fundamental ontology, for Foucault genealogy renounces metaphysics completely. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, p. 107) write: For the genealogist philosophy is over. . . Interpretation is not the uncovering of a hidden meaning. . . The more one interprets the more one nds not the xed meaning of a text, or the world, but only other interpretations. These interpretations have been created and imposed by other people, not by the nature of things. In the discovery of groundlessness the inherent arbitrariness of interpretation is revealed. Yet it is an awareness or realisation of this arbitrariness that becomes, for Foucault, an emancipatory force, liberating us from the subjectivity that our historical moment has assigned us: The critical ontology of ourselves. . . has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed upon us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. (Foucault, 1991, p. 50). The methodology he proposes for this project (genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method (Foucault, 1991, p. 46)) has been a productive force in the analysis of the nature of knowledge and social practice, and can, I would suggest, be valuably turned towards our critique of the role that language plays in the social existence of humankind. By using a historicist framework to examine the ways in which language has been conceptualised in terms of its existential form within the world, we are able to make explicit the types of assumption upon which more specic linguistic debate is founded, and address the issues of historico-cultural disciplinary structure raised by Blommaert, Calvet and Harris. In part, such an application for the present purpose is a narrowing of focus from the Foucauldian project, for the object of investigation is no longer human subjectivity in toto, but specically the existential nature of human language. As I shall argue, however, even with this more limited focus such a programme is never going to be solely scientic (that is, concerned with abstract physical entities and their properties and potentialities). It is also manifestly social (it considers the nature of language as it exists as a human that is social behaviour), and thus adopts many of the Fou cauldian concerns about the limits imposed on individual behaviour by the actualite of the historical moment. Drawing upon an ethnographic epistemology (Blommaert, 2008a) that is, the detailed examination of beliefs as they emerge and function within their historical and cultural context it is possible to narrow in on what is singular, contingent and arbitrary in any specic conceptualisation of language, and use this information both as an important variable in an on-going self-reexive analysis of linguistics research, and also as part of the wider analysis of the role that beliefs about language play in the actual use of language in the lived environment. In pursuing such an approach there are a number of salient structural features in the conceptualisation of language to which we can attend. These consist of (a) the conceptual schemas and patterns of fundamental metaphor by means of which the discourse of language is framed; (b) the disciplinary tradition within which conceptualisations are articulated, and the theoretical space that is opened up by scientic technologies or apparatuses for research into the subject; and (c) the antagonism of strategies which prescribe the limits of what is to be understood as language, and dene the object of study in relation to the various other faculties or behaviours with which it co-exists. I shall expand upon each of these in turn in the next three sections of the article, and draw upon examples from a particular debate that is current in one sub-eld of linguistics (the issue of the ownership of a language) to illustrate the role they can play in the historical construction of ontological assumptions about language.

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4. Conceptual schemas and foundational metaphors One technique available for making explicit the ways in which the nature of language is conventionally understood is to identify patterns of representation within discourse, and to map the metaphoric or conceptual associations that are made as part of such representations. Calvet (2006, p. 7) compiles an eclectic list of some of the many metaphors that have been employed in linguistics to conceptualise its subject. These include schemas such as languages as living beings (one talks of living and dead languages, of languages becoming extinct as the result of linguicide or even linguistic genocide (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000)); languages as existing within families, and assuming familial associations (being, for example, the mother tongue); language as part of an economic system (the linguistic market, linguistic capital); etc. Such a list is, as Calvet acknowledges, only a small proportion of the metalinguistic terminology that draws upon the structural architecture of dierent domains to furnish linguistics with an expressive vocabulary. To what extent such vocabulary operates as an intrinsic aspect of the ontological project, however, is a vexed question. Jacquette (2002, p. 2), for example, in discussing possible approaches to ontology, comments that: If we want to know what it means for something to be, we must try to understand the concept in more familiar terms. We might appeal to even simpler properties, if there are any; or we might be driven in desperation to clarify the meaning by resorting to metaphor and analogy. The suggestion here appears to be that metaphor is a somewhat crude tool for analysing the nature of being, and that sophisticated ontology should, if possible, avoid it. It is true that many of the metaphoric schemas mentioned by Calvet are to be found in popular conceptions of language, where precision of denotational vocabulary may not be a priority. Yet many of these schemas also operate as part of the technical vocabulary of linguistics and related disciplines, and often they represent paradigmatic approaches to research in particular areas of such disciplines (historical linguistics, for example, structures much of its work around the concept of dierent language families). Furthermore, from one theoretical perspective it is impossible to engage in the work of ontology without resorting to such language. As conceptual metaphor theory contends, the use of metaphors is not simply a rhetorical technique for adding vividness to the description of features of the natural or social world, but operates instead as a cognitive device for conceptualising and analysing that world (Lako and Johnson, 1980, 1999). According to Lako and Johnson (1999, p. 128), [t]he fundamental role of metaphor is to project inference patterns from the source domain to the target domain. Much of our reasoning is therefore metaphorical.10 The analysis of the systematic metaphoric patterns used as the foundational technical vocabulary of a particular discipline can therefore illuminate the conceptual assumptions and hypotheses with which that discipline works. Furthermore, as Makoni and Pennycook (2005, p. 144) suggest, making explicit the discursive role that such metaphors play can be an important disinventive strategy aimed at nding a way in which linguists and applied linguists can avoid being imprisoned by their own semiotic categories. The claim here is the same as that voiced by those scholars discussed in the earlier section of this article (and indeed, in making the claim, Makoni and Pennycook draw upon an identical metaphoric vocabulary to Calvet), which is that the initial act of conceptualising language sets the parameters for the programme of research and theorising which takes that concept of language as its object of investigation. We can explore this contention by looking at one particular metaphoric frame that is frequently used to conceptualise language. Though not included in the Calvet survey alluded to above, it is highlighted in Blommaerts (2006) anatomy of the artefactual view of language. This schema is what, in the terminology of conceptual metaphor theory, would be expressed as LANGUAGE is a POSSESSION. That is to say, the entity that is language is often conceptualised as an object that can be possessed by a person or group of people, and that has a range of properties compatible with such an action or with conceptually related behaviours.
There is a tendency in some of Lako and Johnsons work to privilege the inuence of metaphor within discourse to the disadvantage of other discursive or ideological structuring, and though the cultural specicity of conceptual metaphor is developed as party of their theoretical approach, the historic-political nature if discourse is far less of a concern for them. In this respect particularly their approach diers from Foucaults genealogy of concepts.
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This is a metaphor that Bakhtin, for example, has recourse to on a number of occasions (e.g. Bakhtin, 1986, p. 85). In Discourse in the novel, he writes that (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293): The word in language is half someone elses. It becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. The use of the possessives someone elses and ones own, and of the idea of appropriation, all point to a schema in which language is conceptualised as a possession. For Bakhtin, the use of this metaphor allows him to make a point about the social and embodied nature of all linguistic utterances, and his choice of language here is designed not as disinterested description, therefore, but as heuristic (Ricoeur, 1991). In other words, cultural knowledge about the nature of the source domain (possessions) is used to explain aspects of the target domain (language use) in a theoretically insightful way which would have been unachievable without recourse to this metaphor. The same metaphoric schema that of an artefactual linguistic entity that can be possessed by a language community or, indeed, by another language is also operative in the concept of the loanword, and in debate over the suitability of this traditional terminology (loans and borrowings) for the various phenomena to which it refers. Stanlaw (2004, p. 19), for example, referring to the case of English loans within the Japanese context, argues that English loanwords are not really loanwords at all, as there is no actual borrowing that occurs. Instead, he contends that the majority of the words referred to in this way are original to the Japanese language, and simply motivated by English vocabulary. Dissatisfaction with the conceptualisation that this particular metaphoric vocabulary results in has led to the term English-derived vocabulary being preferred in some recent scholarship (e.g. Miller, 1997; Hogan, 2003; Stanlaw, 2004). Here also, therefore, it is conict around the descriptive language that is used within the discipline (of sociolinguistics, in this case) that creates the theoretical stance which will dene that discipline. For scholars such as Stanlaw, the conventional metaphoric vocabulary is seen as theoretically consequential (and detrimentally so), and a process of scientic revision can thus begin with a rethinking of this aspect of the rhetoric. Another debate in which these foundational metaphors play a central role, acting as a fulcrum around which opposing opinions revolve, is the one over who owns the English language now that it has become the pre-eminent international mode of communication. This particular debate involves a number of ideological assumptions about the nature of language and its relation to other social dynamics. Predominant among these beliefs is that idea that there are such entities as discrete languages (English, French, Japanese, etc.), and that these languages are, as their names indicate, related within mainstream ideological understanding to wider beliefs about national identity (Seargeant, 2008b). This conceptual background allows for the idea that a language belongs (often by right of birth) to the peoples of a particular country, and that this proprietorial relationship gives those who are native to that country the authority to decree rules for the usage of the language. The categorial generalisations with which this argument operates do not stand up to much in the way of detailed scrutiny, however, as has been demonstrated in the literature on the problematic nature of the concept of the native speaker (e.g. Paikeday, 1985; Rampton, 1990; Cook, 1999; Davies, 2003). In contexts where these conceptual limitations are not explicitly foregrounded, however, they still act as ontological assumptions upon which arguments about sociolinguistic practice are founded, and it is within this context that the debate over the ownership of English within a globalised world takes place. The most explicit engagement with this issue comes from Widdowson (1994, p. 385), whose conclusion is that the very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it. . . it is only international to the extent that it is not [native speakers] language. . . Other people actually own it. In making such an assertion, Widdowson is drawing directly upon the conceptual metaphor of LANGUAGE is a POSSESSION, and refuting what he considers to be the dominant view of the present moment, especially within the TESOL community, that English belongs to those who have it as a mother tongue, and thus (courtesy of another piece of attenuated logic) mother tongue speakers should determine standards for its teaching internationally. His refutation, though, does not involve critiquing the metaphorical schema which provides the conceptual vocabulary for the established belief, but instead he provides a counter-argument framed within the same conceptual parameters. Ownership of the language is still propositionally treated as feasible; it is rather the personnel to whom ownership belongs that Widdowson contests. The eectiveness of his intervention, therefore, does not involve recasting ontological assumptions about the nature of language, but instead disputing political attitudes towards language practices within the world. Yet, as with the Stanlaw example, it is the specic conventional vocabulary which is crucial to the practical activity of scientic discussion.

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5. Theory as historico-cultural tool Debates such as those over the ownership of English exist, of course, within a specic time and place, and the conceptualisations of language that they employ are likewise historically specic, and fully signicant only in terms of wider contextual assumptions. Widdowsons argument, for example, is meaningful only in so far as it engages dialogically with alternate contemporary arguments (those which suggest that ownership of the language does indeed reside with EMT [English as a Mother Tongue] countries). As has been noted, one way in which it eects this dialogic engagement is to adopt the same metaphoric vocabulary as the discourse it seeks to dispute. Given that any theory is a cultural product in these terms, all theories must draw upon the specic tools of their own existential environs for their articulation. That is to say, a particular understanding of the concept of language requires a particular formulation of the world, and any conceptualisation of language only makes sense with the referential totality that constitutes that particular historical moment. It is for this reason that the sites in which analysis takes place, the apparatus used for such analysis, and the concerns of the contemporary moment, will all form part of the semiotic and semantic ingredients which constitute the actuality of any ontology. We can furnish examples of the way that such historical specicity feeds into ontological assumptions about language by elaborating on some of the points referred to at the beginning of this article. A number of scholars have explored the ways in which formal linguistics in the twentieth century has a distinct political genealogy. Harris (1998a), among others (e.g. Muhlhausler, 2000), argues that the xed nature of what is commonly understood as the linguistic system is a side-eect of the political divisions of nation-statehood that emerged in post-Enlightenment Europe, where linguistic behaviour was co-opted into ideologies of national identity. He goes on to suggest that linguistics as a science is merely an abstraction of the practices that constitute the language ideology of the time, and thus there is a marked circularity to the development of the discipline: what purports to be a culture-neutral science of language embodies a conceptualisation of languages that was already in daily use for purposes of formal linguistic education in the culture whose product that science is (Joseph et al., 2001, p. 218). The culture-neutral ideology was extended in the twentieth century as linguistics became professionalised and it was felt necessary to distinguish its concerns from those of other disciplines such as anthropology (Lawson, 2001). The object of study was therefore dened (delimited) in more emphatically expressed terms. Thus it is that we have the development of institutional apparatus for the generation (and regulation) of knowledge creating the concept they will study. In one sense, then, language is the result of the evolution of the university department structure and research traditions, and of what Whitley (1984) refers to as the social organisation of the sciences (in contradistinction with the intellectual organisation of the sciences). Yet the concept of language that was developed in this way that is a product of specic historical events is, paradoxically, a specically de-historicised entity. This move to de-historicise language is most salient in the work of Chomsky and in his contention that linguistics should properly concentrate on syntax rather than real-world function. Bernstein (1972, pp. 160161) directly addressed this issue at the time that the Chomskyan revolution was re-dening the discipline of linguistics, and it is worth quoting his critique at some length as it exposes a rift between diering ontological beliefs about language which still animates academic debate today: Chomsky neatly severs the study of the rule system of language from the study of the social rules which determine their contextual use. . . Competence refers to the childs tacit understanding of the rule system, performance relates to the essentially social use to which the rule system is put. Competence refers to man abstracted from contextual restraints. Performance refers to man in the grip of the contextual restraints which determine his speech acts. Competence refers to the Ideal, performance refers to the Fall. In this sense Chomskys notion of competence is Platonic. Competence has its source in the very biology of man. There is no dierence here between men in terms of their access to the linguistic rule system. Here Chomsky, like many other linguists before him, announces the communality of man, all men have equal access to the creative act which is language. The division is a familiar one in philosophy, with the Platonic Forms, the Kantian categories, and Russells logical objects being posited, in metaphysical terms, as the prior and necessary archetypes of the Platonic

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material particulars, the Kantian intuitions, and the empirical objects (Rorty, 1991). Just as the former are required to make the latter knowable or describable, so performance relies, for its structure and iterate capacity, on competence. Hacking (2002) suggests that the invocation (and pursuit) of universal grammar is of a similar ambitious order as that of the Adamic or original language; it is a move intended to bypass, nullify, or maybe remove history from the conceptualisation of language. The attempt here, as with similar strategies elsewhere in philosophy, is to return to origins, for with origins comes purity of concept. Shi-Xu (2000) suggests that it is for this reason that Chomsky is emphatic about placing the study of language within the natural rather than the human sciences. Aligning linguistics with the natural sciences ensures that a number of methodological and epistemological assumptions will then pertain which will determine the exact character of what is taken as the object of study. Abstraction, for example, is more readily accepted in natural science methodology than it is in the human sciences (the latter living, as they do, under the regal hegemony of context). As has been noted, Foucault, inuenced by Nietzsche, is highly critical of such an ambition within philosophy: Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin. . .? . . . because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession (Foucault, 1991, p. 78). Not only does such an approach irt with metaphysics, it also has concomitant political implications. For by nullifying history, one also, in eect, apoliticises the object of investigation. The quote from Bernstein above alludes to this as an egregious aw in the formal linguistic project, which ignores entirely social inequality and the important role played by language in this. Hobsbawm (1990, p. 57), utilising similar metaphoric vocabulary and invoking a similar philosophical tradition, suggests that the same process also happens in institutional conceptualisations of a standard language. As he writes, the mystical identication with a sort of platonic idea of language, existing behind and above all its variant and imperfect versions, is much more characteristic of nationalist intellectuals, of whom Herder is the prophet, than of the actual grassroots users of the idiom. It is a literary not an existential concept. In instances such as these, therefore, investigation of ontological conviction as historical event can reveal the political climate, agenda and consequence of the conceptualisation of language. Makoni and Pennycook (2005, p. 143), for example, have discussed how Indian languages were constructed by colonial institutions. They examine how acts of naming performatively called [discrete Indian] languages into being as part of Griersons mammoth Linguistic Survey of India, thus inventing these languages that is, circumscribing certain forms of linguistic behaviour and constraining them to normative contemporary Western language ideological beliefs about structure, function, and ontology. Of note is that such beliefs dismissed local naming and categorising practices (i.e. native metalinguistics) as inadequate, awed and unscientic. An historicising perspective appreciates immediately the political motivations: as Makoni and Pennycook further comment, [t]his whole project was of course a cornerstone of the Orientalist construction of the colonial subject (p. 143). Scrutiny of the cultural and historical processes that produce the foundational concept of language with which we work in any given situation can lead not only to the renement of scientic investigation, but also allow to a potentially emancipatory awareness of the relationship between linguistic study and cultural politics (Newmeyer, 1986). 6. The antagonism of strategies In attempting to critique the political technologies that have produced a situation whereby we are trapped in our own history, Foucault (1982, p. 210) suggests a further methodological approach: Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, [this approach] consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to nd out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the eld of insanity. And what we mean be legality in the eld of illegality. (p. 211). This same approach can usefully be applied to the conceptualisation of language, as here too, what is included within or excluded from the area of investigation becomes a key factor in determining the ontology of the object of study. An investigation of the bounds between what is to be examined as a fundamental part of language or linguistic behaviour and what is considered peripheral, unimportant or inessential or, in applied

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terms, between what is considered within particular social practice as legitimate language and what is considered awed or decient language can therefore assist in delineating fundamental ontological assumptions, and also in exposing the motivations for such beliefs. In his survey of the way in which the concept of language is discursively constructed in introductory linguistics textbooks, Lawson (2001) notes that one rhetorical strategy of any new generation of textbook is to dismiss the concerns of previous approaches as uninteresting. The concerns of the antecedent generation are not necessarily refuted as scientically incorrect, but rather as no longer constituting viable areas of scientic interest. In managing this inter-generational paradigm shift, absence of discussion is the principal rhetorical device used to construct a discourse in which only one specic theory will be seen as valid (p. 12). The substantive emphasis of one peer group becomes, in this way, a lacuna for the next. Lawson cites as an example changes taking place in-between the publication of Sapirs Language (1921) and Bloomelds Language (1935). These two books share a title, but the term of reference in that title has a signicantly dierent referent in each case; and it is the contents of each book that is responsible for constructing the shape of that referent. This, then, is one example of the way that it is not simply what is asserted as constituting the object of study (the rigid designator of Kripkes conceiving) that denes its shape, but how that assertion is fully signicant within the span of history, and how part of its signicance comes from what it ignores or dismisses. An examination of what is included and what is excluded from the concept of language in any one context also introduces a specically social dimension to the object of study, as often what is de-legitimised is related to who is speaking as much as to the shape or nature of the language that they speak. As has been noted in Makoni and Pennycooks work, assumptions held by the colonial powers in India about native languages had the eect of de-legitimising many native linguistic beliefs, and disregarding local linguistic knowledge as unscientic.11 An investigation of the boundaries erected between sanctioned beliefs about language and erroneous folk beliefs, or about canonical language use and impaired or incorrect usage can thus be revealing of how society conceptualises language, and of the social factors it considers relevant in making that conceptualisation.

7. Conclusion In conclusion, let me return to the sentiments expressed in the quote from Johann Herder with which I began. Herders interest in the extent to which language is complicit in all areas of knowledge is founded on the more fundamental question of how far can one think without and what must one think with language (Herder, 1986 [1772], p. 127). What we can and cannot think with language is, of course, an issue which still very much animates research in linguistics, and has led to both cognitive and cultural approaches within the wider discipline, including the many debates over linguistic relativism. Yet a similarly intriguing problem is what we can and cannot think about language. It would be an over-simplication to suggest that the ontology we presuppose limits unequivocally our access to alternative conceptions of language. Instead, it might be more useful to consider the pre-determination that results from a given ontological understanding as operating in the following two ways. The rst of these is that we do, by denition, foreclose possibilities with our initial description. The second is that the disciplinary framework in which research and discussion is located has a coercive power, both via the structuring of the research, and the dissemination and application of the knowledge it generates. The historical ontology of language allows us to examine how and why language has been conceptualised in the way that it has at particular times and places in history. It allows us to interrogate the processes that give rise to such conceptualisation, and evaluate their politics and the contingencies that contributed to them. Exposing the political structures that lie behind such conceptualisation, and the consequences played out in language-related social practices can, then, constitute an emancipatory act in both political and scientic terms. Within the context of critical applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2001), this approach can address itself directly to the power dynamics that comprise contemporary society, and the role allocated to language in
Another powerful example of the use of mainstream assumptions about normative linguistic behaviour as a tool for social discrimination is to be found in the work of Blommaert et al. (2005) on Dutch classes for immigrants in Belgium.
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the organisation of such dynamics. In doing so, the historical ontology of language becomes a powerful analytic tool for self-reective ethical practice. It can also operate to make explicit the assumptions upon which programmes of research are based, and again expose the contingent nature of many of these assumptions. Here also, an emancipatory eect results, as the boundaries of the object of study are being pushed backwards, and explanation of that object of study is expanded into unpredicted areas. Furthermore, historical ontology can track the consequences of specic acts of language conceptualisation, and analyse the ways in which such implications feed back into normative language behaviour, thus becoming a part of the language of any one speech community (the ideology of a standard language is the paradigmatic example here (Silverstein, 1996)). Thus, while linguistics (in its many traditions and disciplinary forms) may still take as one of its principal objects of study language as a thing-in-itself, the implications and consequences of the conceptual means by which it attempts to approach this object are also of great social interest as they play a signicant role in shaping what language as a part of the lived experience is understood to be. Acknowledgement I would like to express my gratitude to Theresa Lillis for providing very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article. References
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