THE WILL TO SPEAK

THE WILL TO SPEAK

  In Bréal’s and Whitney’s theories of the origin and evolution of language, the speakers’ and hearers’ (cf. Whitney LSL: 474), acts of language-making and language- understanding, their active, intentional adaptation of means to ends, their need to communicate and interact via vocal signs, have assumed a place of prime importance: they are the key to unlocking the ‘infinite mysteries involved in every act of language- making and language-using’ (LI: 724). Language is essentially a product of collaboration. Those who listen have as great a part in it as those who speak (cf. HM: 199; LSL: 13f.). In their intention to speak and the effort to understand, the speakers and hearers collaborate in the construction of meaning—in context. To call this activity ‘communication’ does not mean reducing it, as is the tendency nowadays, to the simple encoding and decoding of information on the basis of wordforms. In FF (1866) Bréal had stressed that words have different functions, depending on the use they are put to in different circumstances. The intention to speak here and now, to this or that hearer always ‘transforms’ (to use one of Bréal’s favourite terms) the underlying convention or value (what Paul had called ‘usual meaning’; cf. [1880] 1909 4th edition: ch. IV), which in its turn is only the product of accumulated intentional acts of speech (where we give words ‘occasional meaning’; cf. Paul ibid.). Speaking is more than encoding, it is a creative adaptation of means to ends. Understanding is more than decoding, it is a creative interpretation of signs in context. These new polarities, introduced by Bréal and Whitney—speaker and hearer, intention and convention, meaning and value, form and function, speaking and understanding, etc.—are all linked to one central knot in their theories of language: the will.

  This concept must have deeply upset the linguistic establishment of the day, who believed that languages evolve independently of the will of the speaker, a theory that was

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  indeed essential for their attribution of language to the realm of natural objects and of linguistics to the realm of science. To adopt the concept of the will as an explanatory tool was a highly subversive enterprise. Bréal readily acknowledged this when he introduced it in his Essai: ‘To permit will to intervene in the history of Language seems almost a heresy, so carefully has it been banished and excluded for forty years’ (ES: 76). Paul Regnaud reviewed the Essai and took the opportunity to express his resentment against Bréal’s ‘heresy’:

  we have all grounds to believe in a coordinated and spontaneous development, that is to say a natural creation of the forms and a natural attribution of the meanings, which is formally in opposition to the ideas of the author on the intervention of mind or better of consciousness in the development of language…. In this long work [of grammatical evolution] there is nothing, says Mr Bréal, that does not derive from the will.

  We readily affirm just the contrary: in linguistic evolution nothing or almost nothing is of conscious or voluntary origin; and it is because of this that…, semantics has laws, that it can become the object of a science, and that Mr Bréal’s book, which intends to prove the contrary, cries out for others where these laws will be set out and experimentally demonstrated.

  (Regnaud 1898:64–5, 67)

  By adopting this controversial term, Bréal and Whitney wanted to demonstrate once and for all that the nature of the forces and laws underlying linguistic change are categorically different from those discovered in biology and geology, although they may be compared to these laws and analysed analogously. The opposition they encountered was due to the fact that this attempt to redefine the basic assumptions of linguistics endangered the status of linguistics as a science.

  The will, the individual, and society

  The forces of change are of individual and social nature, given that language is a means of communication and a social institution. Whitney saw the mutual influences of individual and society on language much more clearly than Bréal. He wrote in ‘Logical consistency in views of language’:

  A social institution is a body of habits, of customary modes of action, whereby men in a certain community or congeries of communities attain a certain social end, regarded as conducing to their social welfare. The apprehension of the end and the formation of the means to its attainment are an outcome of the insight and experience of the community; the institution, we may say, grows gradually up in the never-ending contest between human nature and human circumstances; it is a historical product of the joint activity of generations, each one of which has contributed to its elaboration.

  (1880:342f.)

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  This view of language as an institution rooted in social action made Whitney immune from those views that attributed to the realm of nature everything that was not directly determined by the individual. Whitney made it clear that nobody can make or change language arbitrarily, and that ‘in a sense, it is not the individual, but the community, that makes and changes language’ (LGL: 149). But the ‘community cannot act save by the initiative of its single members; they can accomplish nothing save by its cooperation’ (LGL: 150f.). Language as an institution changes under the ‘control’ of those who use it. Without use, there is no change. However, this control is only a very indirect one (cf. Bréal ES: 7f.6f.). In fact, the individual alone has no power to change language (cf. LSL: 45), even though she continuously changes it in communication (i.e. with others) through the continuous adaptation of a common possession to private ends. Although it is the community of speakers that determines language, the adoption of new words and the abolition of old ones, it can only do so through the action of the individual speakers, and these actions, as all actions, are guided by the will.

  The only way to reconcile individual and society for Whitney is as follows: he regards language-change as a democratic process (metaphorically speaking): ‘The speakers of language thus constitute a republic, or rather a democracy, in which authority is conferred only by general suffrage and for due cause, and is exercised under constant supervision and control’ (LSL: 38).

  Whitney is in agreement with Paris when he writes: ‘each individual is, in a way, constantly trying experiments of modification upon his mother-tongue’ (LSL: 36f.); ‘the immediate agent is the will of men, working under the joint direction of impelling wants,

  The ambiguity of this metaphor becomes clear when one reads it in the context of Darmesteter’s

  book: ‘Universal suffrage has not always existed in politics; it has always existed in the domain of language. There the people are all-powerful, and are infallible because their errors sooner or later make the law. Language, in fact, is a natural creation, and not an edifice regularly planned and “built up”’ (1886:1091887:117).

  governing circumstances, and established habits’ (LSL, 49; cf. 36). But the individual innovations have to be ratified by the community, which ‘checks’ there is no better name available, if it conforms to the general framework of the language, etc. (cf. LSL: 40ff.):

  The whole process of language-making and language-changing, in all its different departments, is composed of single acts, performed by individuals; yet each act is determined, not alone by the needs of the particular case, but also by the general usages of the community as acting in and represented by the individual; so that, in its initiation as well as its acceptance and ratification, it is virtually the act of the community, as truly conventional as if men held a meeting for its discussion and decision.

  (LSL: 148)

  The control exercised by ‘language’ over the individual lies in the exclusion of too apparent anomalies or deviations from general usage, and on the other hand, by providing the individual with models of change. That is to say: the individual will is free, we can choose and innovate, but we are not pre-eminent, we cannot act autocratically over language. Our freedom has certain limits. The constraints on the democratic process of

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  word-making are the following: the already existing material and usages of speech and most importantly the already existing analogies, the preferred models of language- making (cf. Bréal LN: 627). If certain variations or innovations do not conform to the framework of existing analogies, they cannot survive (cf. LGL: 150). This framework, which sets the limits of individual variation, is also called the ‘inner form’ of language (cf. LGL: 22, passim), a term borrowed by Whitney from Humboldt to designate what one would nowadays call the structure of a language. This structure, which constrains change from within, is not ‘natural’. It is as radically arbitrary and conventional as the tie between sign and idea:

  Every single language has thus its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his ‘mother-tongue,’ is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions…his experience and knowledge of the world. This is sometimes called the ‘inner form’ of language—the shape and the cast of thought, as fitted to a certain body of expression.

  (LGL: 21–2)

  Thus, although the will is important, language is from the outset a social phenomenon.

  Bréal was aware of the individual–social dilemma too, but tried to solve it somewhat differently. In his view we always follow or obey the laws of the language, but we can always free ourselves from these laws, because in the end they are of our own making:

  [Language] is made by the consent of many intelligences, by the agreement of many wills, the ones present and acting, the others vanished and disappeared a long time ago. To attribute to it only an ideal existence does not diminish the importance of language: on the contrary, this means that it belongs to those things that are of prime importance and exercise the most influence on the world, because these ideal entities—religions, laws, traditions, customs—are those that give a form to human life. We are normally subject to their action, but we possess always the power to free ourselves from them. They belong to the world of thought and will.

  (LN: 619–20)

  Using the same arguments, Saussure might have said that la langue est un fait social, and likewise, though more emphatically, would Meillet, another of Bréal’s former students. In his obituary of Bréal he wrote that his teacher had clearly understood that language was an organ of society and that one could, to a large extent, explain linguistic facts through the life of man in society. But ‘he would not have said easily, like me the day when I became his successor [in 1905], and as did in Geneva, in his course on general linguistics, F. de Saussure, that language is a social fact’ (Meillet [1930] 1966:452). For Bréal, language was first and foremost an intellectual fact.

  To summarize: Bréal and Whitney would have agreed on the following statement, clearly in accord with Paul’s conception of language change:

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  The sum of what all the individual speakers contribute to the common store of thought and knowledge by original work has to be worked into the ‘inner form’ of their language along with and by means of some alterations in its outer form.

  Here, then, at any rate, are two obvious forces, having their roots in human action, and constantly operating towards the change of language.

  (LGL: 35)

  The two forces are that of the individual and of society, the latter being a conservative force, the former an alterative force, the one commanding conformity to the established framework of the language, the other stimulating innovation by provoking speakers to adapt their inherited tools to new uses.

  The will and the mind

  Whitney and Bréal were in full accord as far as the role of the will in language evolution was concerned; it is the moving agent of speech and the hidden and indirect cause of language change. But for Bréal, even more so than for Whitney, the will is supported by intelligence, or what one would nowadays call the mind. For him intentionality and cognition are the forces that shape speech and language, the latter even more so than the former. It is only understandable then that his scientific ambition was to discover the intellectual (one would nowadays say cognitive) laws of language-change. Though stressing the importance of the will and of human action more than Bréal, Whitney did not ignore thought and mind as forces of language-change either:

  But the human mind, seeking and choosing expression for human thought, stands as a middle term between all determining causes and their results in the development of language…

  In language…the ultimate agencies are intelligent beings, the material is—not articulated sound alone which might, in a certain sense, be regarded as a physical product, but—sound made significant of thought.

  (LSL: 48, 49)

  Although thought, intelligence, the mind, and the will (the latter ultimately driving the former) are the motors of change in language, this does not imply that the speakers know what they are doing to language; they only know what they want or will to do with it. Knowing only what they want to do with language, speakers are unaware of what language does for them (providing a framework, an inner form, for their thought) and they cannot predict what effects their linguistic action will have in the long run on this framework.

  To put it in Darwinian terms; the speaker’s experiments to modify language are voluntary but random, the selection by the community is blind but systematic. The speakers of a language have no overview over the whole synchronic state of a language and they do not care about its diachronic evolution which they produce in every act of speech. This is the reason why Whitney and Bréal always stress the futility of etymology for actual language use.

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  Confronted with this paradoxical situation, where language change seems to have its source in intelligent human action without being its direct product, Bréal tries to escape from it by introducing different degrees of consciousness: ‘Between the actions of a consciously deliberate will, and the purely instinctive phenomenon, there is room for many intermediate states’ (ES: 76; cf. Whitney LGL: 137). In his review of Darmesteter (HM) Bréal warns linguists not to confound intelligence with reflection or premeditation: ‘Though not premeditated, the facts of language are none the less inspired and guided by an intelligent will’ (1887:210). In his Essai he experiments with another term and speculates about a ‘will, dim but persistent, [that] presides over the changes of Language’ (ES: 77). This obscure will should be represented in the form of ‘thousands, of millions, of billions of furtive attempts, for the most part unfortunate, sometimes attended by a partial success, attempts which, thus guided, thus corrected, thus made perfect, attain to definiteness in some specified direction’ (ES: 7f.7). The tendencies that one can observe in the evolution of words are the trace of this experimental process of communication. They are as systematic as the system of language itself, without being the product of systematic voluntary change. Bréal’s obscure will could be compared to Keller’s invisible hand process (1985), an insight into the nature of change that Whitney anticipated even more explicitly: ‘Men will directly to use their means of communication for the various ends of communication; but this voluntary action is exposed to all the modifying influences which gradually alter voluntary action in other departments’ (Whitney 1880:9– 10).

  The language-makers are quite heedless of its [the change’s] position and value as part of a system, or as a record with historical content, nor do they analyse and set before their consciousness the mental tendencies which it gratifies. A language is, in very truth, a grand system, of a highly complicated and symmetrical structure; it is fitly comparable with an organized body; but this is not because any human mind had planned such structure and skilfully worked it out. Each simple part is conscious and intentional, the whole is instinctive and natural.

  (LSL: 50)

  Human beings, the language-makers, must be regarded as ‘blind watchmakers’ (cf. Dawkins 1986; and LSL: 74) They produce the complex structure of language and unconsciously change it, systematically and continuously. The only planning they do is a short-term moment-to-moment application of given means to immediate ends, adapting the traditional tools of speech to ever new situations. Without saying so explicitly, Bréal and Whitney were true Darwinian linguists. They had grasped the essential message of Origin of Species; that although adaptations are not the result of design, they are nevertheless purposive (cf. Goudge 1973:180). Historical linguistic evolution is thus not essentially different from biological evolution—it is an invisible hand process, determined neither by nature nor by intention. This parallel between biology and linguistics is also suggested by Michael Silverstein in his ‘Whitney on language’, which serves as an introduction to the collection of Whitney’s essays, edited by Silverstein under the same title:

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  It becomes clear then, that language change is a feedback mechanism where the results of innovation in the system are subject to selection by the community, and the external influence, the social forces exerted by the speakers, are observable variables. Hence in history lies the experimental paradigm for determining the internal structural coherence of language. It is for this reason that ‘explanation’ must be historical, because we cannot experiment with people in the necessary fashion.

  (Silverstein 1971:x–xxiv)

  Having used the will as their immediate weapon against naturalism in linguistics, both Bréal and Whitney came to the conclusion that linguistics must be a moral and an historical science:

  the study of language, whose dependence upon voluntary action is so absolute that not one word ever was or ever will be uttered without the distinct exertion of the human will, cannot but be regarded as a moral science.

  (LSL: 50)

  There is no room for another force than the human will. Semantics belongs by its nature to history.

  (HM: 210)