Language in Use 117-119
The three themes in Part II are concerned with the part language plays in relating an individual to the world about him. One way of looking at language is to see it, as a vast cataloguing device which we use to sort out, and keep distinct from one another, the elements of our experience, and to make explicit for us the relationships that we perceive between them. Our experience of the world comes to us as sensation and we make sense of it by subjecting it to a rigorous process of sorting and selecting. The crucial age in this process is the point at which language enters, because it provides us with the means to label, categorise, store and hence recall at will, what we sort and select.
This process is so much a part of being human that we tend to be unaware of its operation, except on those rare occasions when we are 'speechless', or 'lost for words', or 'can't think how to describe it'. Momentarily, we sense the distinction between what we experience and what we understand by that experience once we have languaged it. Most of the time, however, we remain unaware of the degree to which our experience of the world is given shape and meaning by the way we language it. In this sense, we can speak of language standing between us and the world, as though the patterns of language were a fine mesh screen through which our experience is necessarily filtered. As the fundamental patterns of languages differ, those who speak them will interpret their experience of the world differently.
If we hold a fine-mesh screen close to the eye, we can see through it as though it were not there. The further away we put it, the more we become aware of the pattern of its mesh imposed upon what we are looking at. In the same way, the patterns of our language can interpret the world for us entirely unawares; we can be just conscious of their indistinct outline; or we can deliberately set out to manipulate the patterns to interpret what we experience. The three themes in this part of the volume explore, in turn, each of these possibilities.
Theme E, 'Language and reality', looks at the way in which the patterns of a language cannot help but influence the interpretation of their experience of those who speak it. In learning our language, we learn to name all that we see about us. Progressivly, we make more and re distinctions amongst the things that we see. To a two-year old, anything with four legs that moves is a 'goggie'. To a five-year old, 'horse', 'dog', 'cow' and 'cat' are quite distinct, each with its own name, but intuitively lie knows that they remain closely related to each other, because the rules of his language require him to use the names in the same way. He can use some verbs with them, like 'run' or 'eat', that lie cannot use with other names like 'house' or 'table'. 'Bark' belongs to 'dog', 'moo' to 'cow', and so on. In this way, the process of learning a language involves the building up of an enormously complex web of relationships between objects and attributes by means of which the world about us achieves distinctness and meaning.
There are less tangible aspects of our experience which are equally affected by the patterns of language. Our notion of time, how we think about the present in relation to the past and the future; our sense of number, of what we can count and what is uncountable; our intuition about like and unlike, what things go together and what things are different from each other-these are three examples of the pervasiveness with which the rules of a language impose their distinctive pattern upon the meaning that we give to our experience. In this sense, what we understand by 'reality' is a product of the network of distinctions and relationships which go to make up the structure of our language.
While theme E, 'Language and reality', is concerned with the determining effect of the actual structure of language upon the way that we interpret our experience of the world, theme F, 'Language and culture' shifts the focus onto the effects of custom and habit as they act upon us through language. Individuals acquire their culture through being born at a particular point in time and growing tip in a particular family which belongs to a particular community. As they grow, they have to learn what it means to be a member of the larger society which embraces both family and community. What they learn in the process are the customs, values, and assumptions about the world which give to family, community and society, their own identity-that is, their culture. Language is the primary means by which this culture is expressed, maintained and passed on from one generation to the next.
What an individual automatically regards as right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, do-able or not do-able, is the product of his culture. People do not examine the interpretations of their day-to- experience that their culture provides, because those interpretations make up their natural and habitual way of looking at the world.
An individual acquires the values embedded in his culture in the process of learning the language which gives them expression, so that he does not think to distinguish between the values and the language in which they are expressed. Consequently, when these values are the subject of conversation, they are prefaced by such phrases as 'Everyone knows that . . .', 'No-one would think that . . ... . Who Would believe that . . .', 'No-one would do a thing like that . . .'.
Theme G. 'Language and experience' deals with our deliberate and conscious use of language to give meaning to our experience of the world. The focus is primarily upon two aspects of using language in this way: the nature of the relationship between our words and the events to which they relate, and the part played by our sense of the relevant audience in our choice of what words to use. For this reason, many of the topics pursued may seem familiar to experienced teachers of English. What is different is the point of view, the specifically linguistic approach to -Such things as judging an audience and writing a report that is set out in the units.
There is no real break between the subject matter of this theme and those that precede it. There is a continuous line to be drawn from those aspects of language structure whose power to order our experience is least apparent to us, like our use of colour words, through to such deliberate and conscious activity as the precise writing up of a scientific experiment. At each point, the interesting question is the degree to which an individual is aware of the fact that his experience of the world acquires order and coherence through being languaged, and that the process of languaging experience is constrained by the structure of the language that he speaks.