Language in Use 193-194
In Part II, the focus was upon the individual's use of language to bring order and meaning to his experience of the world: in Part III, the focus is upon his use of language to bring order and meaning into his relationship with others. The three themes in this part of the volume are therefore concerned with the part language plays in creating and maintaining the fabric of human society, because that fabric is made up of an extraordinarily complex pattern of relationships which operate at many different levels and in many different ways.
Each of the three themes is primarily concerned with a different level of relationship, working outwards and upwards from the most Personal, straightforward, and immediate to the most public, complex and remote Theme H, Language in individual relationships, considers how the individual uses language as a member of a family and of a community to maintain relationships with both kin and neighbours. Theme Language and social relationships, moves on to consider the function and Ilse of language in the context of group interaction, while theme K, Language in social organisations, carries the argument into the world of work and public life, and looks at the part language plays in creating the structure and identity of organisations like school and business.
The three themes are also related in another way, for each focuses upon a particular feature that occurs in all relationships, but which can best be explored in connection with one level of relationship rather than another. The units in theme H have a great deal to say about the nature and function of role. This is because the theme is concerned with the way in which the individual learns how to function as a social being. A major part of this task requires him to discover what kind of behaviour is expected of him in different situations, in the family, amongst relatives, with friends of his own age, with adults that lie knows, and -with familiar faces in his community. In each of these situations, he comes to play one of a number of roles: son, brother, nephew, pupil, teen, er apprentice, office boy and so on. Intuitively, lie also comes to know when roles relate to each other and when they are distinct. Being a brother may only be relevant to being a pupil if the brother is at the same school, but being a son is relevant to taking up almost any role while one is still at school.
Learning to take up one of these roles means learning what can and cannot be done as a pupil or as apprentice in different situations, and learning what behaviour others expect of these roles in the situations concerned. At the same time, an individual comes to form his own idea of what it is to be a pupil, or an apprentice, and this may not always agree with what the adults around him have come to expect. Learning to take up a role, or forming an idea of what it means for oneself', involves an individual in learning the way in which the difference between one role and another can be expressed through language. As social beings, what we say in any situation is a major means of projecting the role or roles that we exercise in relation to others; consequently a role cannot be taken up, unless an individual can command the language through which it can be expressed.
Theme H considers the individual and what lie needs in order to function as a social being. Theme J looks at what happens between a number of individuals when they enter into a social relationship with each other. For this reason, the units in theme J explore different facets of the interaction between individuals in groups. Interaction is a valuable term, because it insists on the fact that behaviour is always a two-way matter: that an individual both acts and is acted upon, and that his intuitive sense of what is possible in any situation derives, in part, from his reading of how the other persons in it are behaving. From a linguistic point of view, the idea of interaction is most important, because one way of describing language in use is to call it the verbal aspect of interaction.
Finally, theme K, Language in social organisations, looks at the relationships which give identity to what the title of the theme calls social organisations. It is an interesting fact that there is no collective word in the common language for all those larger aggregates of relationships, which are variously called schools, colleges, shops, firms, businesses, factories, hospitals, and so on. Our words for them emphasise their bricks and mortar, their economic, or their social function, and obscure the fact that they only exist insofar as groups of individuals act together in particular places for particular ends. Theme K considers the part language plays in enabling such groups to create and maintain the particular identity of a school, or business, or factory, and to carry out the tasks appropriate to it.
For this reason, the units in theme K look, in particular, at the way in which the language patterns of a school or firm come to perform a cohesive function, and the degree to which an individual can only become an effective member of that school or firm by becoming familiar with its distinctive way of using language. The units also give attention to the fact that this task is difficult, because in most cases these distinctive ways of using language are implicit in the life of the organisation and nowhere spelt out in detail. They have to be learned by living the life of the organisation. In this sense, there is an analogy between the way in which language transmits culture (see page 118) and the way in which it transmits to successive generations of newcomers the values and assumptions that inhere in, and give identity to, a particular organisation like a school or business.