Toward a History of 'Language': Ong and Derrida

Oxford Literary Review

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 73-90

  Golumbia, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0344594880     PISSN: 03051498     EISSN: 17571634     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/olr.1999.005     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. For suggestive and comprehensive accounts of the historical records, see e.g. Nina G. Jablonski and Leslie C. Aiello, eds, The Origin and Diversification of Language (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences/University of California Press, 1998);
2. and Wayne M. Senner, ed., The Origins of Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
3. David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
4. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, trans. Sarah Thorne (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
5. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 132-3.
6. See especially the highly suggestive list of nine characteristics of primary orality in Chapter 3 of Orality and Literacy, 'Some Psycho-dynamics of Orality', pp. 31-49.
7. Deborah Cameron, 'When Worlds Collide: Expert and Popular Discourse on Language', Language Sciences 19:1 (January 1997), pp. 7-13, provides a good, brief attempt at just such a demonstration.
8. For a (relatively) neutral discussion of just this part of the story, see Richard Hudson, 'Inherent Variability and Linguistic Theory', Cognitive Linguistics, 8:1 (1997), pp. 73-108.
9. Per Linell, The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (Linkoping, Sweden: University of Linkoping, 1982), p. 51.
10. An even more telling expose of generativism in particular is found in Carson T. Schutze, The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which explicitly (and to some extent under Chomsky's watchful eye) questions the empirical justification for the notion of grammaticality as such, on which much of generative linguistics rests.
11. Walter S.J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 40.
12. See Senner, ed., The Origins of Writing; and Olson, The World on Paper.
13. Margreta de Grazia, 'Homonyms Before and After Lexical Standardization', Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1990), pp. 149, 153-4.
14. For fuller explications of the general pattern in modern editorial work on Shakespeare, see in particular Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
15. and Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, 'The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text', Shakespeare Quarterly, 44:3 (Fall 1993).
16. The cultural and ideological consequences of these developments are traced out most clearly in Margreta de Grazia, 'Soliloquies and Wages in the Age of Emergent Consciousness', Textual Practice, 9:1 (Spring 1995);
17. and Peter Stallybrass, 'Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text', in Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992).
18. General background on the linguistic condition of early modern England supports this supposedly radical view of linguistic practice: see, in particular, Manfred Gorlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
19. On the general history and consequences of the spread of printing in early modern Europe, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
20. The closest reader of early modern English printing technologies, on which some of the most radical of recent cultural materialist argument rests, is Randall McLeod: see in particular McLeod, 'Spellbound: Typography and the Concept of Old-Spelling Editions', Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme New Series, 3:1 (1979);
21. 'Unemending Shakespeare's Sonnet 111', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 21:1 (Winter 1981);
22. Random Clod, 'Information on Information', in D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill, eds, TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 5 (New York: AMS Press, 1991;
23. Random Cloud, 'The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos', Shakespeare Quarterly, 33:4 (Winter 1982);
24. Random Cloud, '"The Very Names of the Persons": Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character', in David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds, Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan andJacobean Drama (New York: Routledge, 1991).
25. Juliet Fleming, 'Dictionary English and the Female Tongue', in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds, Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)
26. and Jeffrey Masten, 'Pressing Subjects: Or, the Secret Lives of Shakespeare's Compositors', in Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers, eds, Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997),
27. offer explicitly feminist and queer discussions of the changes described here. Also see the overtly deconstructive Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), which studies early modern handwriting practices.
28. Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin Williams, On the Definition of Word (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 3.
29. P.H. Matthews, Morphology, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 208.
30. Some more orthodox generative studies have come dangerously close to questioning the status of words in general; in addition to Di Sciullo and Williams, see in particular Rochelle Lieber, Deconstructing Morphology: Word Formation in Syntactic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
31. Elisabeth Selkirk, The Syntax of Words (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982),
32. and, from a different perspective, James D. McCawley, 'Morphological Indeterminacy in Underlying Syntactic Structure', in Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
33. Paul Hopper's 'Where Do Words Come From?', in Keith Denning, Suzanne Kemmer and William Croft, eds, Studies in Typology and Diachrony: Papers Presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on His 75th Birthday (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990) interrogates the matter of words in the loose framework of emergent grammar, described below.
34. For the general outlines of Derrida's approach to these matters, see in particular Of Grammatology, as well as 'Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language' (1967), and 'The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics' (1971), both trans. Alan Bass, in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982),
35. and 'Scribble (writing-power)' (1977), trans. Cary Plotkin, in Michel Beaujour, ed., In Memory of Jacques Ehrmann: Inside Play Outside Game, Yale French Studies 58 (1979).
36. Among recent works, On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995),
37. and Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1996), trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), extend these earlier reflections on some of the structuring aspects of language, but these concerns are omnipresent in Derrida's writing.
38. An especially powerful critique along these lines (and from a carefully traced late-Wittgensteinian perspective) is found in chs 7 and 8 of G.P. Baker, and P.M.S. Hacker, Language, Sense and Nonsense: A Critical Investigation into Modern Theories of Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). I appreciate Tim Clark's leading me to this fascinating book, as well as Baker and Hacker's own reminders about the important and highly relevant works of Roy Harris - see, e.g., The Language Makers (London: Duckworth, 1980) and The Language Myth (London: Duckworth, 1981).
39. For Postal's writings relevant to the broad issues of the foundations of grammar addressed here, see in particular D. Terence Langendoen and Paul M. Postal, The Vastness of Natural Languages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984);
40. and Paul M. Postal, Masked Inversion in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
41. and Three Investigations of Extraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
42. For McCawley see, among many valuable contributions to the subject, James D. McCawley, 'Morphological Indeterminacy in Underlying Syntactic Structure', in Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);
43. 'An Un-Syntax', in Edith A. Moravcsik and Jessica R. Wirth, eds, Syntax and Semantics 13: Current Approaches to Syntax (New York: Academic Press, 1981);
44. and Thirty Million Theories of Grammar (London: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
45. All of Noam Chomsky's linguistic writings address these questions, but see in particular Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965),
46. the recent The Minimalist Program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995),
47. and 'Bare Phrase Structure', in Gert Webelhuth, ed., Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program: Principles and Parameters in Syntactic Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
48. (as well as the very recent interview with CJ. Cela-Conde and G. Marty, 'The Minimalist Program and the Philosophy of Mind', Syntax 1:1 (April 1998);
49. it is fair to say that Chomsky's views have if anything grown more idiosyncratic recently). The history of Chomsky's linguistic program and its various apostasies (including McCawley and Postal) is thoroughly accounted in both the more overtly political Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
50. arid the more overtly linguistic P.H. Matthews, Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
51. For much more on these tensions see Harris, Linguistics Wars; and Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith, 'On Comparing Linguistic Theories: Further Notes on the Generative Semantics/Interpretive Semantics Debate in American Linguistics', Historiographia Linguistica 25:3 (1998).
52. This is the wrong place to delve into an explication of recent generative grammar with an eye toward cultural politics, but see Chomsky's own recent discussions of the object of linguistic study in, e.g., 'Language and Interpretation: Philosophical Reflections and Empirical Inquiry' (in John Earman, ed., Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)),
53. as well as the philosopher Hilary Putnam's telling 'Reply' to some of these writings in Philosophical Topics 20:1 (Spring 1992).
54. See David W. Lightfoot, Principles of Diachronic Syntax (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
55. and The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
56. See especially TheDevelopment of Language, pp. 232-51, on maladaptive features in some grammars.
57. In addition to Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Grammaticalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
58. see Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine, eds, Approaches to Grammaticalization, 2 vols (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991).
59. Hopper and Traugott, Grammaticalization, p. 72.
60. Paul Hopper, 'Emergent Grammar', in Berkeley Linguistics Society, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting, February 14-16, 1987.
61. General Session and Parasession on Grammar and Cognition (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1987), p. 155.
62. For Hopper's thought in detail, see his 'Emergent Grammar' and 'Emergent Grammar and the A Priori Grammar Postulate', in Deborah Tannen, ed., Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding. Lectures from the 1985 LSA/TESOL and NEH Institutes (Norwood: Ablex Publishing Company, 1988);
63. and Hopper and Traugott, Grammaticalization. Also see T. Weber, 'The Emergence of Linguistic Structure: Paul Hopper's Emergent Grammar Hypothesis Revisited', Language Sciences 19:2 (April 1997),
64. and Philip W. Davis, ed., Alternative Linguistics: Descriptive and Theoretical Modes (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995).
65. Hopper, 'Emergent Grammar and the A Priori Grammar Postulate', p. 118, emphasis in original.
66. See Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), for apposite reflection with regard to Plato's Greece and many of the matters discussed here.
67. Hopper, 'Emergent Grammar and the A Priori Grammar Postulate', p. 145. Another line of thought informs the argument at this point, namely recent attempts to trace out just how we might determine what we study when we examine the history of languages (asked prior to what had been the reigning query about reconstructing early languages). See in particular Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
68. R.M.W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
69. and Alice C. Harris and Lyle Campbell, Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially the first parts of all three works, which offer compelling critiques of common approaches toward understanding language in history.
70. For some extremely provocative thoughts about what the 'something else' is that public language can carry, specifically with regard to the Western literate and political record, see Margarita Zamora, Reading Columbus(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
71. whose thesis about rhetorical effects of language is echoed in de Grazia, 'Soliloquies and Wages'. Another line of suggestive inquiry, and one which is no less disturbing, is found in the recent collection edited by Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley, eds, Endangered Languages: Current Issues and Future Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
72. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p. 65.