Abstract
While the field of linguistics is far from an undifferentiated whole,1 much linguistic theorizing over the centuries is unified by an understanding of linguistic patterns as being separate from individual and cultural knowledge. With the end of the Cold War, however, that conceptualization is seen as severely hindering our ability to address pressing problems on all levels of society. Among these are the concurrent demands for sophisticated levels of multiliteracies in the multicultural environment of the global information age, even as countries must deal with the consequences of dramatic migrations of entire ethnic groups and momentous country-internal demographic and economic shifts. All of these involve the ability to use languages competently in order for individuals and groups to participate in and contribute to the knowledge of societies, indeed in order to enable the existence of a viable multicultural civil society.
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Notes
For a particularly noteworthy case, see Rugaiya Hasan’s comprehensive analysis of Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power in “The Disempowerment Game: Bourdieu and Language in Literacy,” Linguistics and Education, 10, 1 (1999): 25–87, and the potentially negative impact she attributes to his position with regard to literacy education understood as a complex ability to decipher the world.
A. L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) uses this felicitous term to realign the privileged focus on language as a system, by saying: “A language is essentially a dictionary and a grammar. Languaging, on the other hand, is context shaping. Languaging both shapes and is shaped by context. It is a kind of attunement between a person and a context” (9). Readers who hear in Becker’s verbalization of a noun an echo of Heidegger’s often-times extraordinary uses of grammatical metaphor will also recognize in that practice the intent to reverse the highly problematic reification of much of our world, in language and in cultural practice. Cf. my additional comments on the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor in the body of the paper.
Cf the introduction to The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1981).
Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel,in Holquist, op. cit., 269–272.
Ibid., 272.
Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 103–131.
Op. cit., 107–113.
For an excellent discussion of these issues, see the “General Orientation” in M. A. K. Halliday and James R. Martin, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (London/Washington: Falmer Press, 1993), 3–21.
Clifford Geertz, “Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination” in Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 36–54. The quote is from 48.
Hasan, “The Conception of Context in Text” in Peter H. Fries and Michael Gregory, eds., Discourse in Society: Systemic Functional Perspectives: Meaning and Choice in Language – Studies for Michael Halliday (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995), 185–283. The quote is from page 184.
Talmy Givon, “The Functional Approach to Grammar” in Michael Tomasello, ed., The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 41–66.
Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), xiii.
Ibid., xiv.
Halliday, “Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning,” Linguistics and Education, 5, 2 (1993): 93116.
See particularly Hasan, “The Disempowerment Game,” 53.
Ibid., 62.
Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre As Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70, 2 (1984): 151–167.
Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres” in Emerson and Holquist, eds., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 60–102.
For elaboration of this point, see Jay L. Lemke, Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 1–18.
For an in-depth investigation of larger discursive aspects of this phenomenon, see Charles Bazerman’s study, Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
For a particularly thoughtful analysis of the relationship between situated cognition and language processing, see Dan I. Slobin, “From `Thought and Language’ to `Thinking for Speaking”’ in John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1996), 70–96. Much like Becker, Slobin, too, prefers verbal over nominal forms of expressing the kind of dynamic decision-making that takes place in actual speech.
In the following discussion, I rely heavily on the various studies included in Halliday and Martin, op cit.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
While I claim no expertise in scientific analysis nor in philosophical reasoning, it seems to me that a number of publications by Patrick A. Heelan point in a direction similar to what I have here explicated from the linguistic viewpoint, e. g., “Galileo, Luther, and the Hermeneutics of Natural Science” in T. Stapleton, ed., The Question of Hermeneutics: Festschrift for Joseph Kockelmans (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 363–375; “The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural Science,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 29.2 (19980): 273–298; Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin, “Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science,” Synthese 115 (1998): 269–302.
The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Translated and with a commentary by George E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992).
Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises From Socrates to Foucault. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 20. Particularly useful is the lengthy introduction by Arnold I. Davidson which provides an overview of the major arguments Hadot makes in the book.
Ibid.
For a particularly powerful affirmation of what he perceives to be an essential relationship between theology and philosophy, see the encyclical by Pope John Paul II, issued in September 1998, Fides et Ratio. See also Patrick A. Heelan’s manuscript of a presentation at the Jesuit Core Conference, Seattle University, March 2, 2000, entitled “Faith and Reason: The Core of a Jesuit Liberal Education.”
Though I have had the privilege of doing the Exercises in their Annotation XIX version with Patrick Heelan as my director over a ten-month period, and although I belong to an extraordinarily vibrant Jesuit parish, the observations I make here reflect strictly my own personal continued engagement with both the content and the form of the Exercises. Furthermore, given the centrality of the Exercises for the Jesuit order andtheir significant contribution to Roman Catholic spirituality in general, a voluminous scholarly secondary literature exists, aside from numerous published aids to spiritual growth based on the Exercises. With few exceptions, my comments here do not refer to either of these source categories.
For an accessible overview of the progression of the Exercises, particularly from the perspective of the role of the imagination, see Frederick G. McLeod, “Imagination with the Act of Faith,” Review for Religious, 46 (1986): 242–256.
Bakhtin, The Problem of the Text, particularly 120–127. The quote is from 126–127.
For an extensive discussion of inner speech, see Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). This quote is from 249.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty” in Catherine Philips, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 132–133.
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Byrnes, H. (2002). The Dialogism of Meaning, The Discursive Embeddedness of Knowledge, The Colloquy of Being. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_36
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