An Essay on Language, Linguistics, and Cats

An Essay on Language, Linguistics, and Cats by Aslı Nur Gözen

Anyone who strives to be a linguist should have in their intellectual repertoire some ideas of what linguistics should be like both in its composition and execution, along with a definition of language to guide them in their linguistic endeavors. The current essay claims to offer neither a steadfast agenda for the discipline of linguistics nor a well-rounded definition of language. The present author, I, as someone who has been breathing the air and getting accustomed to the climate of linguistics for only a short while now, wish to share an account of my insights and opinions in a laid-back manner. I shall try as best as I can to put together my views on how language should be approached and what it is about language that makes it so special for humans. Then, I will try to see the place of language on the wider plane of human consciousness by taking our furry fellow cats as a reference point. I will finish off by attempting to explain what these ideas implicate for the orientation of linguistics as a discipline and the linguist as a researcher.

I believe the most valid way to determine the dimensions and elements of language is to take the actual users of language as a reference point. Basically, one should observe what the users do with language. A good starting point would be “the double articulation” principle widely recognized among linguists, which in Sausurrean terms refers to the interaction between the “indefinite plane of jumbled ideas” and the “plane of sounds”. Whether as small as a tribe or as large as a society, all speech communities conventionally match a point on the idea plane with a point on the sound plane for efficient reference or denotation in communication. This is a very basic understanding of how words emerge. Yet when we look at literature, humor, and the many ways languages offer to coin new words or derive new words from existing ones, we see that users are aware of elements smaller than words and also their meaning and functions. To that end, speakers are very much aware of their language’s formal resources. They are also very clever and creative in playing around with formal resources to exploit them for the meanings they want to convey or, when necessary, create completely new forms to articulate their ideas. This is the reason why terms such as “blocking”, “canceling out”, and “grammaticality judgments” in some approaches to especially syntax and morphology give one an uneasy feeling. While these approaches try to give an account of a language’s grammatical word and sentence formations, they demonstrate how and why the ungrammatical formations are not produced in the actual language. However, in doing so, they produce many instances that they claim are “blocked” or “canceled” by the grammar. If some word or sentence formations were blocked, we should not have been able to produce them in the first place. As a defense, the followers of these approaches would argue that since such forms are so illicit, we have to produce them very deliberately, whereas we would never produce them in our normal speech. However, I believe that whether a form has been produced consciously or unconsciously, it nevertheless is a genuine linguistic production that shows what a producer can do with their language. 

After the sub-word and word dimensions, we have the clause and sentence level. At this level, the speaker needs to have a lexicon and knowledge about the regularities of stringing words together, sociopragmatic competence, and context sensitivity. The five wh-questions and how are at the core of our linguistic production and interpretation agenda to decide how we should say what we want to say, how we believe what we say will be interpreted, and how we should interpret what others say. Here, the speaker constantly develops strategies to compromise the tension between achieving their goals and conforming to society’s sociopragmatic and sociolinguistic norms. These can be labeled the “savoir-faire” of being a functional member of a speech community. Understanding how and why a sentence has been formed in one manner and not another is a fundamental starting point for understanding speech acts, stylistics, and conversation. This is where communication as interaction through the medium of language begins. When one looks at sentences from such a perspective with linguistic and non-linguistic considerations, the model to account for them will inevitably be multi-systematic. This multi-functional and multi-systematic understanding of “sentence taxonomy” is so far best exemplified in Halliday’s SFG. As this essay does not aim to support one theory/model in linguistics superior to another or give detailed accounts of them, I will not describe SFG here. I highly urge all functionally oriented linguists to do some related readings. 

Finally, beyond the sentence comes the discourse level. At this level, we can truly understand the role language plays in creating the life we live. Human life is both a product and a process of culture and history. Culture, history, and language are interrelated and constantly affect each other to varying degrees. Regarding this trilogy, discourse is related to all of them, yet it is tied closer to language. Language provides forms and formal means for discourse to come into being, or we can say it provides it with “flesh” and “bones.” In turn, discourse becomes the pulse of language. Cultural practices and historical events characterize groups, and discourse takes on this character in every aspect of human life, from literature to gender roles. Then, discourse creates conventions and patterns for micro- and macro-scale behaviors according to their contexts. At the end of this process emerge the discoursal and social practices by which we lead our lives. These academic terms encompass everything emanating from discourse, from a society’s ideas on humor to how one should ask one’s friend a favor. Following this line of thought, it is safe to say that our perception and conception of life are only possible through a linguistic interface. In other words, our surroundings and experiences are meaningful and shareable with others to the extent that we can interpret them linguistically and store them in our minds for retrieval. How we do the storing in our minds has led to different proposals in the field like “schemas,” “scripts,” and “scenarios.” Fairclough’s notion of “member’s resource (MR)” is my preferred depiction of this phenomenon. I think the naming captures the nature of discourse and being part of a discourse quite well. Being a member of something means being aware of the self and of the others in your group and recognizing those not in your group. One must also know this group’s features, characteristics, and ideas. These are the “resources” members have to either identify with and sustain the group or disidentify from and rebel against it. 

At this point, we are faced with discourse’s very alive and dynamic nature. Discourses are sights of constant struggle. Since they emerge under the conventions and worldviews of one group or society, then there will inevitably arise a counter-discourse from another group with opposing conventions and worldviews. Depending on the relative power of the parties whose discourses clash, the effects of this clash will vary. If the opponents are governments, this can lead to war; if the opponents are authors from different movements, this can lead to a proliferation of styles and literary conventions and a silent battle in publishing houses to get published earlier or more. The struggle in discourse can lead to changes in discoursal practice, which can change social practices. Of course, this is only one of the scenarios, and change can sometimes start very abruptly, even from the social practice. Whatever the course of events, two things don’t change: The first is that from whichever phase change begins, the struggle will be reflected in the discourse level. The second is that participants in discourse are not only the objects or “effects” of discourse(s) but also actors with purposes and will. If this weren’t the case, change and struggle would not happen. To put it in another way, contradictions and struggle only occur when participants are masters of their own tide. 

At this point in the essay, the readers might wonder two things: where exactly does grammar situate itself in the dimensions of language that I am proposing, and how does it operate systematically? After all, grammar has been the essence of linguistic research for so long that any study of language whose backbone is not grammar may come across as too daring, if not wholly unprofessional. However, I humbly believe that grammar need not be the “God’s truth” of language. From an even more radical point of view, I think grammaticalness and grammaticality judgments are just extremely pervasive habits rather than an inevitable consequence of the nature of the human brain. Especially in societies where a recorded, written heritage is a hallmark of intellectuality, people are exposed to the style and norms of the written language both in writing and speech. It is inevitable that the more a person reads and writes, some of the grammatical and stylistic choices of the written language will be transferred to the oral speech. Children are exposed to vernacular and literary forms from the beginning of their lives in such societies. Then, they learn to read and write according to the norms and requirements of the “standard language,” which counts as grammar. What counts as grammatical becomes such an indispensable and profound part of their linguistic repertoire that I find it difficult to believe the claims of grammaticality judgment experiments in literate societies. I wonder how the researchers judge whether the speaker’s judgment shows what they have learned to count as grammatical or whether the judgment indicates something about the essence of what a human language is. In their defense, the proponents of grammaticalness might show cross-linguistic correspondences and tendencies among languages that favor specific structures over others. I would argue that this is not the consequence of the essence of language but rather the cognitive and biological makeup of the human race. If language depended entirely on biology or neurological makeup, then the cross-linguistic variation in the world would probably have been way scarcer than it is. As another proof of their view, they can show the data that there are mistakes that native speakers, even children, never make in their speech. I would still hold that this is the result of exposure and a collective heritage on the part of the speakers rather than proof that grammar exists as the determiner of how language operates. Language is a highly tricky issue, just like all things that have something to do with humans. As we mentioned, its users can use and exploit language creatively. Language and culture affect each other reciprocally, and the consequences are never entirely predictable. Moreover, languages and cultures contact other languages and cultures and affect each other unpredictably. Finally, speakers are capable of standardization, which means deciding what the grammar of a language should be like. This attitude, which is called prescriptivism, is highly doomed among linguists. However, I still find it valuable for showing the extent to which humans are capable of constructing and getting control of their language. Following this line of thought, I find it extremely difficult to neutralize all these factors and arrive at the pure grammar of a language that accords with the essence of what a human language should be like. To my mind, what we label as grammatical or as grammar is either the result of habit formation for maximum communicative efficiency or the consent a speech community shows to the standard devised by a group and legitimized by another group. Therefore, I opt for classifying linguistic production as “probable/common” and “unlikely/rare” rather than “grammatical” or “ungrammatical”. Grammar is a reductionist convenience that, at best, gives an idea of what a language looks like at a specific time. Nonetheless, linguists need systematic and well-defined tools and methods for analysis, so going for functional grammar models and text grammars would allow for systematicity and consistency in research. 

For now, I am bringing the discussion of the nature of language to an end, and I shall try to briefly comment on the relationship between humans, consciousness, language, and cats. The ideas I will draw upon in my discussion could be reminiscent of many philosophers. Still, I am influenced mainly by John Gray’s ideas from his book “Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life”. It has been said by many philosophers, including John Gray, that the main deriving force behind human activities that we regard so highly, like philosophy, is constant anxiety. And the reason behind this anxiety is self-consciousness. To put it in very primitive terms, one of the chief distinctions that all human beings need to make to live is distinguishing between the self, others, and an “extra-personal field” in which these characters are situated. Then, they are faced with the traumatizing fact that someday they will die and cease to exist. That’s why humans are madly anxious to live life to the fullest; in other words, they need to feel that their existence is “meaningful”. At this point, John Gray claims we have all the conditions necessary for humans to be inspired to create philosophies and religions so that they can try to ease this anxiety. I think before arriving at philosophy or religion, we should take a step back. I believe this is, in fact, the origin point of language. Language is an amazingly versatile, flexible, productive, and user-friendly tool to create, share, interpret, and recreate meanings. Language has the potential to create systems of meaning unlike anything in the physical world. Also, its potential to organize how we experience the surrounding world cannot be surpassed. That’s why humans desperately hold on to language. They use it to create things bigger than themselves or, in fact, bigger than life so that they can be part of those things to prove their life is meaningful. If they can manage to institutionalize or even persuade some others in their creation, then this also aids the fear of complete perish. Humans have and continue to accomplish this. Most, if not all, of the human race doesn’t live the life granted by nature. We live in a centuries-old linguistic, cultural, and historical heritage that we choose to call “life”. Philosophy, politics, science, arts, literature, religion- and many more institutions have become so pervasive, powerful, and diverse that one lifetime is not enough to be exposed to all they offer. Yet we are born into them, and through unpredictably many interactions, what we believe to be our genuine, original self is actually the effect of these interactions. The meanings are so vast and immense that we live our lives not even realizing how many of them we reproduce by every word we utter. Our struggles are not really just about survival but about finding a path that we believe to be worth following in this terrifyingly large and dynamic swarm of meanings. So far, I have not said anything about cats. I don’t want to claim anything about the nature of the consciousness of cats, so I won’t make a comparison in this aspect. However, I think it is safe to say that cats don’t talk like we do. And in turn, they don’t go to school, vote in the elections, or join biology conferences- they don’t live like we do. I think they live day by day. Living day by day immediately eliminates considerations of a past and a future. They live by balancing between inner nature and outer nature to sustain life. Anything out of the ordinary is taken one at a time, and when the issue is gone, the cat returns to its original balance, changing nothing in its way of life. Cats are peaceful and satisfied, and they live in the moment. No wonder they don’t need to speak. On the other hand, I am neither an enemy of the world humans have created nor an enemy of language. It is a miracle of nature that I don’t have the knowledge to explain that at some point in history, out of all the symbolic systems we could’ve opted for, we went with language. This has made all the difference for our species, even though our semiotic competence and language as its manifestation came at the cost of self-consciousness and anxiety.

To bring this essay to an end, I will describe my impression of what linguistics ought to investigate in light of the ideas I presented throughout the essay. I think it is evident that I believe linguistics cannot be reduced to constructing grammars that exist in complete perfection in the collective mind of a community. There are many varieties in language and in language use. There is not one speaker who can possibly be exposed to or have access to all this variation in one lifetime. Hence, I believe that describing a language as a whole or abstracting extremely formal systems underlying performance doesn’t have the virtue that has been ascribed to them in linguistics. I think the outcomes of such endeavors would not be real or meaningful for anyone else but academics. Therefore, I think linguists should feel free to choose what types or aspects of linguistic production they want to focus on. Then, they should investigate the issue they have selected with careful consideration of social context to show how that type or aspect of linguistic production plays a role in the reproduction or transformation of the life we know to live. This is crucial because it makes it more explicit that speakers are not just governed by the language they speak or the discourses they are part of, but they actively construct their identities and their way in life through them. As part of research ethos, the researchers must always make explicit the theoretical and philosophical orientations underlying their study. Furthermore, they should explain in minute detail the processes and motivations for data collection and analysis methods. Thus, the product of the researcher can also be judged and understood within the discourses that it is a part of. Also, one can understand what discourses it stands against or its interaction with indirectly related discourses.             

As a young and aspiring linguistics student, these ideas that I so far have formed in my mind are likely to grow mature as time goes by and perhaps even change radically in ways that I cannot predict now. However, one thing that I believe will never change is my fascination with language and the incredible capability of humans to use it to create the life we live. Language, the subject of linguistics, is so pervasive that its study should not be confined to lecture halls, labs, or language books. Then, linguists should look for language in life. As to quote from Thoreau, linguistics should not exhaust itself over matters that are “not life”.  

Aslı Nur Gözen
19.12.2024

Cite this article as:
Gözen, A. N. (2024, December 19). An Essay on Language, Linguistics, and Cats. The Hacettepe University Linguistics Community. https://hulinguistics.com/an-essay-on-language-linguistics-and-cats/