The External Reality of Linguistic Descriptions

Abstract

Many working syntacticians or phonologists do not care about what all linguists tend to call philosophical issues, such as “What kind of object is a language?” They are happy to leave the ontological basis of their work unanalyzed. It is possible to accept this situation. We may choose to inquire directly and separately in what way pieces of external evidence from Acquisition, Borrowing, Change, and Damage may have an impact on ideas considered seriously by working linguists. However, the moment we decide to group the ABCD of these four domains together under the E of Externality, thus trying to organize them into an area of inquiry, this decision leads naturally to a more general type of question. Unless we grapple with such a question, our ABCD list begins to look like the well-known Borges quotation from a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia stating that animals are divided into:(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies, (quoted by Foucault 1974:xv)