This volume contains the contributions presented at the first plenary conference on Integrational Linguistics held in London in 2000, an event at which I participated. The basic tenets of Integrational Linguistics were developed by Roy Harris at Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s; while many aspects of this approach remain a matter of debate, its assumptions and practices have become sufficiently firm to be the subject of a couple of introductory texts (Harris 1998, Toolan 1996). Harris's agenda has been “to challenge the monumental complacency of mainstream linguistics” (p. 3) by pointing out that the discipline is no more than an elaborate edifice built on a myth.Peter Mühlhäusle

Mühlhäusler, P.

Language in Society

Adelaide Research &amp; Scholarship

 PUBLISHED VERSION       Muhlhausler, Peter.  The language myth in Western culture, Language in Society, 2004; 33 (2):285-289. Copyright © 2004 Cambridge University Press                 http://hdl.handle.net/2440/38720  PERMISSIONS http://journals.cambridge.org/action/stream?pageId=4088&level=2#4408  The right to post the definitive version of the contribution as published at Cambridge Journals Online (in PDF or HTML form) in the Institutional Repository of the institution in which they worked at the time the paper was first submitted, or (for appropriate journals) in PubMed Central or UK PubMed Central, no sooner than one year after first publication of the paper in the journal, subject to file availability and provided the posting includes a prominent statement of the full bibliographical details, a copyright notice in the name of the copyright holder (Cambridge University Press or the sponsoring Society, as appropriate), and a link to the online edition of the journal at Cambridge Journals Online.  Inclusion of this definitive version after one year in Institutional Repositories outside of the institution in which the contributor worked at the time the paper was first submitted will be subject to the additional permission of Cambridge University Press (not to be unreasonably withheld).  2nd  May 2011  REVIEWSLanguage in Society 33 (2004). Printed in the United States of AmericaDOI: 10.10170S0047404504212052Roy Harris (ed.), The language myth in Western culture. Pp. 227. London: Cur-zon Press, 2002. Hb $90.00.Reviewed by Peter MühlhäuslerGeneral Linguistics, University of AdelaideAdelaide, South Australia 5005peter.muhlhausler@adelaide.edu.auThis volume contains the contributions presented at the first plenary conferenceon Integrational Linguistics held in London in 2000, an event at which I partici-pated. The basic tenets of Integrational Linguistics were developed by Roy Harrisat Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s; while many aspects of this approach remain amatter of debate, its assumptions and practices have become sufficiently firm tobe the subject of a couple of introductory texts (Harris 1998, Toolan 1996). Har-ris’s agenda has been “to challenge the monumental complacency of mainstreamlinguistics” (p. 3) by pointing out that the discipline is no more than an elaborateedifice built on a myth. As Harris observes, this message is unlikely to be widelywelcomed:It is readily understandable that linguists should not take kindly to being toldthat what they are presenting to their students as up-to-date science is actuallyno more than recycled myth. (5)The reluctance to embrace integrational criticism is reinforced by the fact that itchallenges not only established views on language and linguistics but also common-sense views in numerous domains, such as art, law, and mathematics. This chal-lenge is elaborated in a number of contributions to this volume.As stated in the preface, “Integrationism . . . has its own distinctive contribu-tion to make to the contemporary current of thinking that is often called ‘post-modern’” (vii). Its postmodern nature is manifested in the following widelydebated (e.g. in Barr 1995:3ff ) characteristics:• its critique of common sense knowledge;• its insistence that our understanding of the world is contingent on history andculture;• its emphasis on the social processes that bring into being and sustain knowl-edge; and• the integration of knowledge and social action.Language in Society 33, 285–310. Printed in the United States of America© 2004 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045004 $12.00 285The common-sense knowledge about language that is challenged by integrationallinguistics is what one finds in most introductory textbooks on linguistics, in-cluding the following characteristics:• surrogationalism, or treating language as a system of signs that stand for orare surrogates of a set of things in the world or a set of ideas;• instrumentalism, or regarding linguistic signs as tools; and• contractualism, or emphasizing the contractual or conventional nature of thecommunicative signs (for details, see Davis’s contribution, 142ff ).The communication model underlying this myth, the conduit model, in itself hasa mythological character. It implies that we transfer a copy of our private messageto our listeners (“telementation”), and that this transfer is enabled by a fixed codeshared by the interlocutors. I note that this communication myth has been thetarget of extensive criticism in communication studies ever since Reddy (1979)castigated it for its pernicious nature. The continued use of the conduit metaphorby the vast majority of linguists would indeed seem a great error, though, asReddy has illustrated, it represents common sense. The conduit metaphor, ofcourse, is one of the key metaphors by which not just linguists but most educatedmembers of Western societies live.Harris, in his introduction, summarizes the arguments against the languagemyth, leaving out details discussed in earlier publications, in particular Harris1981. Central among these criticisms is the contention that our ideas about lan-guage are not natural but historically contingent (the confusion of history andnature, or transformation of history into nature, has been identified by manyscholars, beginning with Giovanni Vico in the Renaissance era, as the essence ofmyth); thus, Harris writes, the term “natural language” as the subject of linguisticinquiry seems to be a serious instance of mislabeling. The historical roots of thelanguage myth date back to Classical Greek philosophy, as seen in Aristotle’smodel of sense perception (11ff.), and the myth has been reinforced by sub-sequent changes in technology, such as the invention of the telegraph (in Shannon& Weaver’s model of communication) and more recently the biocomputer. Thatprocessing of information by human brains cannot be characterized in terms ofunits and rules for the combination of units is well established in neuroscience(Shanks 1993), but this has not prevented linguists from continuing to employthese notions as essential to their discipline.Implicit in the criticism of mainstream or “segregationalist” linguistics is itsstatus as a science. Crowley 1990, writing in an earlier collection of integrational-ist papers, has called a science of language “that obscure object of desire.” Ascience needs to meet the minimal requirement of having reliable criteria fordemonstrating that two things are the same or different, and criteria for sayingwhether one is dealing with one or two objects. It is noted that Harris’s firstmonograph in the integrationist mode was a critique of the notion of synonymy(Harris 1973), a privileged sense relation central to many theoretical argumentsP E T E R M Ü H L H A¨ U S L E R286 Language in Society 33:2 (2004)about language – indeed, to rather futile arguments, such as the protracted debatebetween Chomsky and Lakoff (analyzed in Botha 1970) as to whether Seymoursliced the salami with a knife and Seymour used a knife to slice the salami doindeed have the same meaning. The failure to have non-arbitrary criteria for same-ness has serious implications for type-token theory and for claims about allo-phones of the “same” phoneme or allomorphs of the “same” morph, as well as, atthe macro level, the debate about language and dialects, as anyone seriouslyexamining standard language inventories such as the Ethnologue will find.The social processes that brought the Western language myth into being andsustain it account for a vast array of cultural practices, including, as Harris ad-mits, “values and practices that Western culture would be poorer without” (1).According to Harris, “In its modern form it is a cultural product of post-RenaissanceEurope. It reflects the political psychology of nationalism, and an educationalsystem devoted to standardizing the linguistic behaviour of pupils” (1981:9).One might want to argue that the contributions of the French Enlightenmentscholars in the entries concerned with language in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772) helped to elevate the myth to the status of scholarship. There are, however,many other, earlier factors, in particular “scriptism,” a fixation on written texts. Aparticularly graphic illustration of the fixation of modern linguists on writtensentences, despite their insistence on the primacy of speaking, is seen in theexamples used in linguistic textbooks. (Pop 1971 managed to write a comic playmade up entirely from sample sentences culled from linguistics textbooks.) Thedominance of the written word is also evident in the etymology of the term gram-mar (from the past participle of the Greek verb graphein ‘to write’). Text-basedreligion and popular understandings of communication technology have broughtinto being a text-oriented culture. Its impact on linguistic thinking is manifestedin the separation of text from reader and context (segregationalism), and thereification of language as the code needed to produce texts.All of these social and historical factors underpin the ideology linguists sub-scribe to, which makes it hard to conceptualize linguistics otherwise. Linguistsneed to understand how much of their subject is a product of such socio-historicalforces, and to what extent the validity of their argumentation is dependent onunstated assumptions.As postmodernists, integrationalists can hardly be expected to subscribe to aconcept of absolute truth, and the justification of their emphasis needs to beassessed against (i) the success achieved by their demythologizing of linguistics,and (ii) their ability to integrate knowledge and social actions. Unexpectedly,several of the contributors address topics of social importance: Davis’s com-ments on the teaching of Standard English in British schools (a critique of JohnHoney), and Toolan’s discussion of its role in law and justice. Hutton highlightsthe relationship between the language myth and racist ideologies. Interestingly,Mufwene 2001, from a very different perspective, has castigated the racism im-plicit in many treatments of varieties of English spoken by non-British people.R E V I E W SLanguage in Society 33:2 (2004) 287At this point, the enterprise of demythologizing language – promoting socialaction though applied integrational linguistics (if indeed one can separate theoryfrom applications) – remains underdeveloped. One reason for this may be itspostmodern orientation and rejection of absolute values. I remain unsure howintegrationalism would see linguistic human rights, language maintenance andrevival, or the movement for biocultural diversity; the absence of discussion ofsuch topical issues may be one reason why it has not received a wider audience.Taylor, in his contribution, raises an important issue when he asks how integra-tionists should deal with folk psychology and folk linguistics. Taylor’s questionscould be extended to how one should deal with names, folk beliefs, and metalin-guistic systems from outside the European tradition. In spite of the positive com-ments on Whorf (33) by Harris, the volume remainsAnglo- or at least Eurocentric.This seems to reflect the contributors’ own backgrounds rather than deliberatedecisions or inherent limitations. Indeed, as Weigand remarks (80), by looking atlanguage as not separate from the world or from human beings, and by empha-sizing the indeterminacy of meaning, integrationalism has humanized the subjectof linguistics.Integrational linguistics has been around for more than 20 years now. Whilethe first generation of integrationalists were all closely associated with the Uni-versity of Oxford, it has begun to attract the attention of others, particularly thoseconcerned with the issues of communication rather than with core linguistics. Itis good to see that Carr, in his contribution on phonology, is prepared to enter adialogue though disagreeing with many aspects of integrationalism.Linguistics somehow has not experienced the crisis that some neighboringdisciplines have as its leading practitioners have adopted the Galilean style, char-acterized by Chomsky thus:The great successes of modern natural sciences can be attributed to the pursuitof explanatory depth which is very frequently taken to outweigh empiricalinadequacies. This is the real intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century.(1978:10)The message of this collection is that one needs not only to problematize theempirical inadequacies or methods of the discipline of linguistics, but also toexamine the assumptions that underpin it.R E F E R E N C E SBotha, Rudolph P. (1970). The methodological status of grammatical argumentation. The Hague:MoutonChomsky, Noam (1978). Interview with Sol Saporta. Working Papers in Linguistics, 4, Supplement.Seattle: University of Washington Department of Linguistics.Crowley, Tony (1990). That obscure object of desire: A science of language. In John E. Joseph &Talbot Taylor (eds.), Ideologies of language, 27–50. London: Routledge.Harris, Roy (1973). Synonymy and linguistic analysis. Oxford: Blackwell._ (1980). The language makers. London: Duckworth. [2nd ed., 1981.]P E T E R M Ü H L H A¨ U S L E R288 Language in Society 33:2 (2004)_(1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon.Mufwene, Salikoko (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Pop, Fom (1971). Memories from the collective subconscious: A tentative reconstruction. In ArnoldZwicky et al. (eds.), Studies from left field: Defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley,179–83. Edmonton: Linguistic Research.Reddy, Michael T. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language aboutlanguage. In Anthony Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and thought, 164–201. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.Shanks, David (1993). Breaking Chomsky’s rules. New Scientist 1858:26–30.Toolan, Michael (1996). Total speech. Durham & London: Duke University Press.(Received 23 July 2003)Language in Society 33 (2004). Printed in the United States of AmericaDOI: 10.10170S0047404504222059Kaplan, Robert B. (ed.), The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x, 641. Hb $74.00.Reviewed by Elizabeth Grace WinklerDepartment of LinguisticsUniversity of ArizonaTucson, AZ 85721winkler2@email.arizona.eduSince graduate school, I have seen applied linguistics (AL) treated by too manyof my professors and colleagues as the bastard child of “real” linguistics – ac-cused of being too interdisciplinary, too pedagogically oriented, and lacking in anall-encompassing theoretical framework. Sadly, even those practicing AL aresometimes apologetic or defensive about their supposed faults. In some ways,this book represents a coming-out party, a celebration of accomplishments anddirections for future research and involvement.William Grabe introduces the book by providing its rationale and portrays thediscipline’s strengths and weaknesses. I was troubled, however, by his use of thewords “problems and inequalities” to describe the major areas of study. Accord-ing to Grabe, the goal of the volume was not to provide a comprehensive treat-ment of every topic, but an overview of the main subfields of AL for which theeditors were able to get submissions. This is noted because some chapters werenever submitted – a problem most editors face.Although early research in AL was overwhelmingly focused on second lan-guage acquisition (SLA) and pedagogy, AL has grown, and the book’s scopereflects that in a limited way. Although the volume still manifests this bias (24chapters out of 36, excluding the introduction and conclusion, are on these top-ics), other areas are represented: variationist studies, multilingualism, and lan-guage planning. However, coverage of these areas is sometimes quite limited,and other areas of AL are completely missing (e.g., forensic linguistics, artificialintelligence, speech therapy). A quick look at the table of contents reveals theemphasis on SLA.R E V I E W SLanguage in Society 33:2 (2004) 289

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