Cladistic language concepts

[bwald]

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MG raises a difficult issue:
>               One point that I still would like clarified is the
>          relationship between the speaker of the language and the
>          language itself.
 
I think the frankest answer might be that linguists would like that to be
clarified as well.  They are almost invariably interested in
generalisations from individual speakers to groups of speakers of the
"same" language (or "same" dialect, etc.), or even to all speakers of all
languages (speakers = language "knowers", whatever you want to call them).
>From this perspective the least that I can say is that linguistics is
ultimately about approaching resolution of such issues -- and there is no
danger that you will get a definitive answer in the near future.  We're
still working on it in our various ways.  One strategy is to eliminate
certain a priori hypotheses, such as that the knowledge of any single
speaker can be identified with total knowledge of "the language", or even
that the total knowledge of all speakers exhaust the "possibilities" of the
language (or of "language").  I have to leave it at that for now.
 
MG continues:
 
The speaker is a part of a language
>          community and the vocabulary, grammar etc. are parts of the
>          language.  The speakers may be said to know, understand,
>          speak, participate in, etc. the language.  But we usually do
>          not call them parts of the language.
 
Right.  Because the speaker is part of the "language community", not of the
"language".  The "language community" is another difficult concept, for
reasons similar to why "the language" or "language" is/are.  What's
"English", for example?  And then, what's "language"?  We know some
properties, and are constantly in the process of discovering or debating
others, but we are not fololhardy enough to seriously attempt a definition
of the basic concept that motivates our field.  Isn't it the same for
"life" among biologists and such?  (bio = "life").  Aren't biologists
similar to linguists in trying to approach the problem of "life" by
studying the properties of "life" forms, without hoping to exhaust the
subject or seriously define its fundamental concept?
 
(Wouldn't we be unduly and even presumptuously limiting ourselves if we
offered definitions of our most fundamental concepts rather than leaving
them as problematic and subject to tacit, if somewhat inarticulate -- even
if vulnerable, agreement?)
 
Finally, MG brings in the concept of "culture" (a term that has both
"linguistic" and "biological" uses):
 
There are a whole
>          range of related problems with respect to culture in
>          general.  The way Tylor defined "culture" it includes
>          concrete artifacts.
 
I agree that the concepts "culture" and "language community" are related,
and share some similar problems.  In any case, for most "prehistoric
cultures" all we have are concrete artifacts.  If we would prefer to focus
on "culture" as something "soft", e.g., any given society's "solution" to
the problem of how to live, we still get a lot of ideas about that from how
members of that culture behave, and among those behaviors are the artifacts
they produce and/or use (or at least have some understanding of the use
of).  Again, a "language community" is interesting in how it reflects the
use of language, through a salient degree of uniformity or orderly
differentiation, to circumscribe a culture.  Apart from various lexical
semantic domains (e.g., kinship systems, lexical systems of beliefs, social
activities, social relations, artifacts...), it remains problematic what
inferences we can make about a culture simply from the its degree of
orderly differentiation or uniformity of language use.  (Indeed, we cannot
recognise the "orderliness" of linguistic variability within a culture
until we know what social features of the culture it correlates with.
However, given a number of empirical studies, we may have some expectations
about what social correlates to look for, when we observe a number of
individual speakers who we have some reason to assume are products of the
"same" culture.)  I guess about the degree of uniformity and/or variability
in a culture and a language, we have to tease out inferences about its age
and its complexity (which may interact).  Thus, when we compare the
variability in "American" and "British" English, we are tempted to ascribe
the "greater" variability of the latter to its age.  But if we remember to
include such varieites as African American English in "American English"
(as a product of its development within an American social context --
something that excludes inclusion of Caribbean English in "British
English"), then we greatly increase our view of variability of "American
English", but must account for it in terms of "complexity" of American
"culture", rather than "age" relative to British culture.