Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South 2020056798, 2020056799, 9780367541842, 9781003088110, 9780367541859

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Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South

Exploring the nature of possible relationships between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, this volume examines various ways in which Integrational Linguistics can be used to support the decolonizing interests of Southern Epistemologies, particularly the lay-oriented nature of Integrational Linguistics that Southern Epistemologies find productive as a “positive counter-discourse”. As both an anti-elitist and antiestablishment way of thinking, these chapters consider how Integrational Linguistics can be consistent with the decolonial aspirations of Southern Epistemologies. They argue that the relationship between Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics is complicated by the fact that, while Integrational Linguistics is critical of what it calls a segregationist view of language, i.e., “the language myth”, Southern Epistemologies in language policy and planning and minority language movements find the language myth helpful in order to facilitate social transformation. And yet, both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism that are founded on notions of “named” languages. They are also both critical of linguistics as a decontextualized, and institutionalized, extension of ordinary metalinguistic practices, which at times influence the prejudices, preconceptions, and ideologies of dominant western cultures. This book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students not only within the field of integrational linguistics, but also in other language and communication fields, in particular the dialogic, distributed, and ecologicalenactive approaches, wherein integrational linguistics has been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. Sinfree B. Makoni currently teaches in the Department of Applied Linguistics and the African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. Deryn P. Verity is a Teaching Professor of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. Anna Kaiper-Marquez is the Associate Director and Assistant Teaching Professor of the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy and the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy at The Pennsylvania State University.

Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory Series Editor: Adrian Pablé

Language and History: Integrationist Perspectives Edited by Nigel Love Language Teaching Integrational Linguistic Approaches Edited by Michael Toolan Rationality and the Literate Mind Roy Harris Critical Humanist Perspectives The Integrational Turn in Philosophy of Language and Communications Edited by Adrian Pablé The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry Integrational Linguistics in Practice Dorthe Duncker Integrationism and the Self Reflections on the Legal Personhood of Animals Christopher Hutton Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume I The Sense-making Body Paul J. Thibault Distributed Languaging, Affective Dynamics, and the Human Ecology Volume II Co-articulating Self and World Paul J. Thibault Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South Edited by Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, and Anna Kaiper-Marquez For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Communication-and-Linguistic-Theory/book-series/ RACLT

Integrational Linguistics and Philosophy of Language in the Global South Edited by Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, and Anna Kaiper-Marquez

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity and Anna Kaiper-Marquez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity and Anna KaiperMarquez to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Makoni, Sinfree, editor. | Verity, Deryn P., editor. | Kaiper-Marquez, Anna, editor. Title: Integrational linguistics and philosophy of language in the global South / edited by Sinfree Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, and Anna Kaiper-Marquez. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in communication and linguistic theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056798 (print) | LCCN 2020056799 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367541842 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003088110 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Integrational linguistics (Oxford school) | Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) | Linguistics‐‐Southern Hemisphere. | Language and languages‐‐Philosophy. Classification: LCC P121 .I58 2021 (print) | LCC P121 (ebook) | DDC 410‐‐dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056798 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056799 ISBN: 978-0-367-54184-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54185-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08811-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface Introduction: Introducing integrational linguistics

vii viii xiii 1

SINFRE E B. M A K ON I , D ER YN P . V ER I TY AN D ANNA KA IPER-M AR QU E Z

1 Edward said, Roy asked, and the peasant responded: Reflections on peasants, popular culture, and intellectuals

18

DA VID B A DE

2 Three critical perspectives on the ontology of “language”

30

A DRIA N PA BL É

3 Integrationism, individualism and personalism: The politics of essentialism

48

CHR ISTO PHER H U TT O N

4 A clash of linguistic philosophies? Charles Goodwin’s “co-operative action” in integrationist perspective

66

PETE R E. J ON ES A N D D O RT HE D U N C KE R

5 Text annotations: Examining evidence for a multisemiotic instinct and the intertextuality of the sign in a database of pristine self-directed communication BA SSE Y E. AN T IA A N D L YN N MA FO FO

84

vi Contents

6 The semiological implications of knowledge ideologies: A Harrisian perspective

104

X UAN FANG

7 Rhetoric and integrationism: In search of rapprochement

122

KUNDA I C H I R I N D O

8 Integrationism and postcolonialism: Convergences or divergences? An integrational discussion on ethnocentricity and the (post)colonial translation myth

137

SINEAD KW OK

9 Integrationism and the Global South: Songs as epistemic frameworks

156

CR ISTINE G . SEV E R O A N D S I N FRE E B. M AK ONI

10 Words and other currencies

170

CO R Y JUHL

11 Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages

183

R OBIN SA B I N O

Index

197

List of Illustrations

Figures 5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4 5.5 11.1

Annotation on course notes on odontogenetic tumors by an international student (male, home-language Arabic) Annotation on a textbook on psychology by a female student (home-language isiXhosa) Annotation by same student as in 5.2. Source: University of the Western Cape. Text book of the Department of Psychology. Foundations of Psychology: Psychology 1 (Custom edition). Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2016 Annotation by a journal article on the political economy of health by a female student (home language Setswana) Meanings of underlines and highlights by students across disciplines Asymmetric frequency distribution of variants of the NP + MODAL + have construction from Sabino 2018

90 91

91 94 96 191

Tables 11.1 11.2

Phonological conditioning of the variable (a:) for 79 languagers from Elba, Alabama Influence of age and ethnicity on the use of (a:) in Elba, Alabama

188 190

Contributors

Sinfree B. Makoni holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Edinburgh University. He has held professional appointments at a number of Universities in Southern Africa including the University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa and University of Cape Town. He currently teaches in the Department of Applied Linguistics and the African Studies Program at The Pennsylvania State University. He is Extraordinary Professor in the Opentia Research Area in the Faculty of Humanities, at the University of the North West, South Africa. He is the Andrew Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at Laikipia University, Kenya. His main research areas are in Integrational Linguistics, Southern Epistemologies and Language Policy and Planning. His most recent publications are Innovations and Challenges to Applied Linguistics from the Global South coauthored with Alastair Pennycook, 2020, and Language Planning and Policy: Ideologies, Ethnicities, and Semiotic Spaces of Power (coedited with Ashraf Abdelhay & Cristine Severo), 2020. Deryn P. Verity is a Teaching Professor of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. A specialist in teaching English as a Second Language, and in language teacher education, she has published on sociocultural theory, curriculum design, online pedagogy and course design, academic writing tutor training, and the role of drama, SCT and task design in language teacher education. She has lived and worked in her home country, the United States of America, and in Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Thailand, and Japan. She is currently engaged in a longitudinal research study on concept development in language teacher education. Anna Kaiper-Marquez is the Associate Director and Assistant Teaching Professor of the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy and the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy in the College of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She has published several journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews on adult basic education (ABE), English language learning, and qualitative methodologies in national and international contexts. Anna’s current research is centered on adult and family language and literacy practices in U.S. urban areas as well as in

Contributors

ix

carceral settings. Anna was previously an ABE and English language instructor in New Mexico and has taught English to K-12 and adult learners in Thailand, Argentina, and South Africa as well as middle school special education in the Bronx, New York. Bassey E. Antia is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld (Germany). His teaching and research interests span Multilingualism (in Higher Education), Language Policy, Terminology, Health Communication, Corpus Linguistics, Decoloniality, Political Economy of English, and French as a Foreign Language. He has authored Terminology and Language Planning: An alternative framework of discourse and practice, edited Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP, and coedited Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes. He has also coedited Managing Change at Universities, vol. III. David Bade is a fifth-generation Illinois farmer and prior to his retirement in 2014, a Senior Librarian at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library. Kundai Chirindo is Associate Professor in the Rhetoric and Media Studies department at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the Director of Lewis & Clark College’s Ethnic Studies Program, as well as Director of General Education. A rhetorical scholar interested in discourses that relate to the African continent, Kundai’s work centers on discursive practices that contest, contribute to, and ultimately constitute ideas of Africa in American public life. Through exploring these themes, he contributes to scholarly conversations in rhetorical studies, environmental communication, African and African American Studies, and war and peace studies. His critical essays, commentaries, and book reviews have appeared in Advances in the History of Rhetoric (now Journal for the History of Rhetoric), Argumentation & Advocacy, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Women’s Studies in Communication, and in edited volumes. Dorthe Duncker is Associate Professor of Danish language at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen. Her interests combine material philology and digital humanities with integrational linguistics and focus on the foundational aspects of human communication and the reflexivity and dynamics of language. She is Editor of the journal Language & Communication and she recently published the monograph The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry: Integrational Linguistics in Practice, 2019. Fang Xuan (Nina) is a current PhD student at School of English, The University of Hong Kong and is writing a PhD thesis on integrational linguistics and cognitive linguistics. She graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, in 2007, with a Bachelor of Arts degree,

x Contributors majoring in German, and from the University of Hong Kong in 2009 with an MPhil degree, at School of Modern Languages and Cultures, supervised by Prof. Wayne Cristaudo. Her MPhil thesis is about Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and philosophy of language. She worked as an editor at Nanfang Daily Press from 2010 to 2011, where her job was to edit and publish translated books. Before enrolling in HKU again, from 2012 to 2019, she was a housewife. She is married and has two sons. Her research interests are in the following fields: integrational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science. Christopher Hutton is Chair Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He studied modern languages and general linguistics at the University of Oxford (BA 1980, DPhil 1988), and has an MA in Yiddish Studies and Linguistics from Columbia University (1985) as well as an LLB from Manchester Metropolitan University (2008). His research concerns the history of linguistics, in particular the relationship between linguistics and race theory. In the past decade, he has been working on the politics of language and interpretation in the context of the law. His publications include Linguistics and the Third Reich (1999), Race and the Third Reich (2005), A Dictionary of Cantonese Slang (2005), Word Meaning and Legal Interpretation (2014), and Integrationism and the Self (2019). Peter E. Jones is Reader in Language and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University. His interests range widely over general linguistic theory, integrational linguistics, the Marxist tradition and Marx’s methodology, the role of communication in social organization, and Vygotsky’s cultural-historical tradition in psychology. John E. Joseph is Professor of Applied Linguistics in the University of Edinburgh. His books include Eloquence and Power: The Rise of Language Standards and Standard Languages (1987), Ideologies of Language (1990), Landmarks in Linguistic Thought 2: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (with Nigel Love and Talbot J. Taylor, 2001), Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious (2004), Language and Politics (2006), Saussure (2012) and Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History. Cory Juhl received a BS in Physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1983 and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin in 1986. He received a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1992. He has published a few dozen articles pertaining to the philosophy of science, language, and mind. Since 1992 he has worked at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is currently Professor and associate chair. His main current interest is the relation between theories of language and mind on the one hand and the “hard sciences”.

Contributors

xi

Sinead Kwok is a PhD student from the School of English, the University of Hong Kong. She attained her BA from the same university. Her research interests lie in integrationism, semiology, semiotics, language philosophies, and translation theories. Kwok’s recent projects include a paper on an integrationist critique of colonialist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist translation premises and another one on integrationism as a humanist approach to the human–animal divide in language and communication. In her thesis, Kwok will revisit Western translation theories in terms of their underlying signification models and presuppositions regarding language and communication, as well as proffer some integrationist insight into central translation issues. Lynn Mafofo is a lecturer in the department of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She graduated from the same university in 2016. Her thesis explores issues of globalization, marketization, and the institutional branding of South African universities. Her current research interests include looking at security and language discourses in higher education, student-focused translanguaging discourses from the perspectives of systemic functional linguistics, sociolinguistics, and multisemiotic/ multimodality perspectives, among others. She is an emerging researcher in critical food studies dealing with issues of ideological discursive strategies on food branding, positioning, and consumption and their implications in the African context. Adrian Pablé is Associate Professor of English linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. He is the Secretary of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication (IAISLC) and series editor of the Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory. His scholarship focuses on the linguistic thought of Roy Harris, integrational linguistics, and philosophy of language. He is the editor of the volume Critical Humanist Perspectives (2017) and coauthor of the book Signs, Meaning and Experience (with Christopher Hutton, 2015). Dr. Robin Sabino is Professor Emerita at Auburn University. Research interests include linguistic contact, variation, and change and the working of language in the human brain. Published works include Languaging without Languages: Beyond trans-, pluri-, metro-, and multi- (2018) and Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack his jacket (2012). A forthcoming chapter on the U.S. Islands will appear in the Handbook of Caribbean Languages and Linguistics, vol 1. Honors include Auburn Alumni Association’s 2014 Minority Achievement Award and Auburn University’s Research Award in the Study of Diversity (2008). Cristine Gorski Severo is Associate Professor at the Department of Portuguese and at the Post Graduate Program of Linguistics, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil). Her research experience includes comparative research of primary sources in Portuguese and Spanish

xii Contributors language related to colonization and forms of resistance through language. Her most recent books include Os jesuítas e as línguas [The Jesuits and languages in Brazil-African colonial era] (2019) and Language planning and policy: Ideologies, ethnicities and semiotic spaces of power (2020), coedited with Ashraf Abdelhey and Sinfree B. Makoni.

Preface

Linguistics and the Moral Compass South and North are points on an ideological compass showing who have been underdogs in science and culture and who the self-proclaimed and selfperpetuating top dogs. The old East-West compass stopped working when Russia, Eastern Europe, and (arguably) China and India ceded underdog status to Africa, Southeast Asia, and much of South America. Such outposts of the Global North as Australia and New Zealand contain a strong Southern core; but then throughout the North runs a Southern stratum, wherever there is oppression rooted in disparity. It is all around us, including in our universities, where it is at last starting to shed its cloak of invisibility. Other than mining it for data, linguistics has remained blind to the Global South more persistently than have contiguous fields such as anthropology, geography, and literary and cultural studies. Since the nineteenth century, linguists have sought to align themselves with the sciences and to reap the cultural prestige and financial support this brings. The physical sciences have been especially resistant to suggestions that an ideological dimension belies their self-conception as realms of pure observation and reason. Linguists want to eat their cake and have it, proclaiming their scientific purity along with what they see as the inherently liberating effect of their doctrine that all languages and dialects are equal from a structural point of view. Believing their hands to be already clean, they are disinclined to hear critiques of their theories or methods as being in need of decolonizing. This is less true of applied linguistics, which has been in an internal critique mode since Robert Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism (1992), and lately has seen major steps forward, for instance with Allison Phipps’s Decolonising Multilingualism (2019), and now a suite of books written or organized by Sinfree B. Makoni and his collaborators. In the present volume, all the authors have responded to the editors’ invitation to reflect on how their particular contributions connect with applied concerns. It is however with a theoretical school that this book seeks to build a bridge to Southern Theory. Integrationism, although grounded in Northern thinking, is not a linguistics but an anti-linguistics. This book is the fruit of

xiv Preface an intuition that Southern Theory and Integrationism have an affinity in what they oppose. Testing this affinity brings to light characteristics of each theory that have not been obvious, for instance, the focus of Integrationism on the individual, as noted by some of the contributors here. It rings true: but it was long masked by the Integrationist insistence that communication needs to define the scope of study. Communication in its usual sense requires at least two people having an exchange of some sort, which involves not just production but interpretation. Making communication the basis of Integrationism seemed to set the theory in contrast to the individualism of mainstream linguistics, embodied for the last half century in Chomsky’s “idealised native speakerlistener”. Gradually, however, Integrationists would come to define communication as including “all processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs” (Roy Harris, Signs, Language and Communication, 1996). Now the exchange – the communication in the everyday sense – becomes optional, accidental rather than essential, to put it in terms of classical Northern logic. It is good to see Integrationists acknowledge the inherent individualism, prompted in part by recognizing the much more profound distributionalism that characterizes Southern Theory and to set as a future aim to pass beyond it. Amongst the theories’ other differences which emerge in the pages that follow, the “adultocentrism” of Integrationism is a less daunting obstacle to the desired meeting of minds, although its “humanism”, in contrast with the posthumanism of those Southern Theorists who extend agency to things, is a still greater one. Integrationism and Southern Theory bring complementary benefits to the table. Integrationism was based on a mapping of the holes in the cheese of linguistic theory, historical and contemporary; its force has always been intellectual rather than ethical or moral. This is not to deny that it has been usefully applied to ethical matters, for instance in Deborah Cameron’s work in the linguistics of gender, or that Southern Theorists have mustered strong intellectual arguments for their rejection of traditional Northern intellectual argumentation. But Integrationism has cohesion to spare, which Southern Theory, in its vast expanse, could do worse than to acquire some of in exchange for helping to bring Integrationists in from the academic cold, now that decolonizing the curriculum tops the academic agenda. When some of the contributors to this volume claim that Integrationism is non-Eurocentric, one wonders whether that entails a threshold low enough for most theories with aspirations to universal application to pass. When I arrived at the University of Hong Kong to succeed Roy Harris, the founder of Integrationism, as Professor of English Language and Linguistics, on the curriculum for all first-year students in our department was On Liberty by John Stuart Mill; Harris had made it mandatory in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He was unflinching in his belief that what Mill proclaims is universal in

Preface

xv

application, not specific to European cultures, in the face of a fierce rhetoric of “Asian values” that portrayed On Liberty as a neo-colonialist text. He was right about this, in my view, and the obstinacy of his political and moral stance on the power of the state was brave. Ironically, the same obstinacy exercised over his theory of communication imposed certain strictures on the liberty of those who were drawn to follow it. Still, Harris’s was such a lone voice of dissent against a linguistics establishment which demanded adhesion to its dogmas that his determination to keep the integrationist critique unified is understandable. His treatment of “folk” conceptions implied a similar homogeneity, noting repeatedly that, whilst everyone’s experience as a communicator qualifies them to have an opinion about language, not all opinions are valid. It is less a contradiction than a paradox. Southern Theory demands diversity at the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological levels, and not just in the treatment of communicativesemiotic activity. There is perhaps a certain paradox in the desire of scholars to band together as Southern Theorists or Integrationists, to strengthen their individual voices through an identity generated by their difference from the Global North or mainstream linguistics. In calling this a paradox, I do not mean that it is a weakness. On the contrary, it is the source of a creative tension that is never going to be resolved and should be acknowledged rather than ignored. Indeed, it should be embraced. This book launches what one hopes will be an ongoing search for a hybrid space in which Integrationists and Southern Theorists can collaborate, each tempering such orthodoxies as they may have inherited, remembering that hybrids are stronger than the strains that give rise to them. Latin hybrida, with its origins in the outrage of Greek hubris, denoted amongst other things the child of a free citizen and a slave. If Integrationism has sometimes seemed enslaved to its dogma, Southern Theory has developed in the sort of freedom that can make it harder to find a steady way forward. Their offspring shows promise of inheriting enough of the strengths of each to supply the clear direction and creative scope that applied linguists in particular hope to find in any novel approach, whatever its compass setting. John E. Joseph University of Edinburgh

Introduction: Introducing integrational linguistics Sinfree B. Makoni, Deryn P. Verity, and Anna Kaiper-Marquez

This book comprises eleven papers, most of which were originally presented at the Seventh International Conference of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication (September 1–2, 2019). The conference was hosted by the Department of Applied Linguistics and the African Studies Program on the campus of The Pennsylvania State University, in State College, Pennsylvania, USA. The main objective of the conference was to explore the “emerging tensions and complementarities between Integrational Linguistics and other philosophies of language and their implications for Linguistic Theory and Applied Linguistics”, and led to the formation of this book. The final chapter by Robin Sabino and the foreword by John Joseph were commissioned especially for this volume. In this book, we subject to critical scrutiny core concepts of Integrational Linguistics through the prism of Southern Epistemologies, thereby complementing the internal debates about the relevance and status of dialogic, distributed, and ecological-enactive approaches currently taking place within Integrational Linguistics. Southern Epistemologies emerge from the experiences of colonization and are empowered by their moral arguments against colonization. Colonialism was characterized by acts of “linguistic appropriation, description, and invisibilization (that) were a constitutive feature of this epistemicide” (Kerfoot & Hylltenstam, 2017, p. 2). Epistemicide is part of the “grand erasure of experiences” of people from the Global South (Connell, 2007). The experiences of people from the Global South are terra firma upon which Southern Epistemologies are built. The term Global South has a number of different meanings. In Santos’ (2007) work, it suggests a type of struggle, and particularly when used with Southern Epistemologies, it may be used to refer to alternative epistemologies and a “symbolic enlargement of knowledge, practices, and agents in order to identify therein the tendencies of the future” (Santos, 2016, p. 181). The South is therefore a “position, a politics” (Shepherd, 2002, p. 81). Our argument and advocacy for Southern Epistemologies should not be construed to mean that it is either the only way or the single best way to theorize conditions about inequality. It is a reflection of our awareness that

2 Makoni, Verity, Kaiper-Marquez there are different ways of theorizing these inequalities that have different consequences for what we find, understand, and convey to others. Our objective here is to seek ways of expanding the analytical repertoires of language scholarship by drawing on Southern thought in combination with Integrational Linguistics wherever feasible. An applied linguistics underwritten by epistemologies of the South has to be grounded in concepts that expand the repertoires of social emancipation. In Southern Epistemologies, we seek to move beyond Northern folklinguistic categories to include the Global South as a rich, diverse, constantly shifting, and open field of radically different metalinguistic discourses. For us, it is not a question of “world views based on language, but of views of language based on world views” (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, p. 114). Having said this, some of the folklinguistic categories are controversial. For example, the indigenous is controversial in Francophone Africa and some scholars prefer the term endogeneity instead (Ela, 1998; Hountodji, 1995; Makoni & Meinhof, 2004). Other terms that are widely used but have been subjected to criticism recently are ubuntu (I am human because you are human too) and buen vivir (living well, collective well-being). Walsh (2010) argues that the use of buen vivir does not necessarily facilitate a shift toward sustainable forms of development. Tomaselli (2018) articulates a similar trenchant critique of the African philosophy of ubuntu when he notes: The populist and pervasive mythologizing discourses of African values ubuntu and communitarianism for example, are promoted as benign but they often conceal regressive patriarchal, classist tendencies that, under specific conditions, result in authoritarianism. (p. ix) Drawing from these conversations, this book marks an important milestone in the development of Integrational Linguistics and Southern Theories. It initiates an important dialog – the first of its kind, to the best of our knowledge – between scholars formally trained from an Integrational Linguistics background and decolonial scholars interested in the development of Southern Epistemologies who are exploring the relevance of Integrational Linguistics to decolonial scholarship. The objective of the book is to initiate a conversation on how Integrational Linguistics can contribute toward enhancing the development of a viable decolonized sociolinguistics. As Bade (this volume) contends, “Southern Theory arises from the experience of colonization and is both oriented, empowered, and limited by its moral argument with the other world it opposes, the European empires, and their successors in political regimes and mentality” (p. 19). The goal of Southern Epistemologies is, in origin, an attempt to help realize social justice both in the Global South and geographical North. Even though Southern Epistemologies are relevant to the geographical North, issues such as social justice, citizenship, and rights might mean different things in the Global South than in the geographical North.

Introduction

3

The final chapter by Sabino makes an important contribution to this volume specifically and to Integrational Linguistics. Sabino has worked on issues about language ideology and not Integrational Linguistics. She considers the similarities and differences between Integrational Linguistics and her approach to human languaging, drawing on her definitions about languaging, entrenchment, conventionalization, vernacularization, continually emerging systems, and the A-curve. So the concluding chapter is an account of what Integrational Linguistics looks like from a language ideological perspective which is amenable to Southern Epistemological analysis. The book has a unique format. In addition to the individual chapters, each contributor was asked to address the following three questions: 1.

2.

3.

What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics (such as language teaching, second language acquisition, language policy, and Southern Epistemologies, for example)? How would you formulate and explain these connections to someone who works in these areas? After you wrote your paper, presented it at the conference, and spent a few days in conversation with other attendees, what themes or ideas in your paper became clearer to you, or perhaps less clear? In other words, how did being at the conference change your own understanding of Integrational Linguistics and where your paper fits in to it? In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field (future readership, future modes of communication, future collaborative conferences, the future of linguistics, etc.)?

Responses to these questions appear at the end of each chapter to give readers a better understanding of the main issues that prompted each contributor’s writing. We as editors felt that this was important to better inform readers who might be new to or interested in further exploring Integrational linguistics. Moreover, by including not only authors’ main chapters but also their responses to these questions, we seek to disrupt more traditional handbooks that do not allow authors’ voices to occur in multiple forums and formats.

Objectives of Integrational Linguistics Integrational Linguistics is basically concerned with issues about communication rather than language or languages. It is linked to the intellectual beliefs and the scholarship of Roy Harris (1931–2015) who believed communication was of primary importance because Homo sapiens were Homocommunicators. For Harris, there could not be a separate scientific study of language. However, while Harris is the originator of the field, as the

4 Makoni, Verity, Kaiper-Marquez present volume indicates, work in Integrational Linguistics is being taken up in different regions across the world by scholars with a diverse range of interests. In this book, Integrational Linguistics is explored by decolonial scholars. Briefly, Integrational Linguistics (Harris, 1981, 1996) rejects the theoretical assumptions of orthodox linguistics. These assumptions Harris termed “mythical” on the grounds that they decontextualize communication by postulating the existence of an abstract system (“the language”) which enables the speaker/writer to transfer thoughts to the mind of the hearer/reader. He referred to the two fallacies of the “fixed code” and “telementation” (thought transfer) as the “language myth”. The focus in Integrational Linguistics is on human activities that are contextually integrated by means of signs of various kinds, and no absolute distinction between “linguistic” and “nonlinguistic” activities is accepted. From an Integrational Linguistic perspective, there are no signs which exist independently of communicational activities in the here and now. It is not feasible to argue for the existence of a sign outside its communicational role in an activity. Another approach to language which Integrational Linguistics is critical of is what Harris referred to as “segregationism”. Segregationism is an assumption that languages constitute a distinct field of academic study with experts in the various subfields (Pablé, 2019, p. 1) and that language is best studied by being broken down into a hierarchy of levels and units of analysis such as phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, etc. The discipline of linguistics can also be distinguished from other disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. There is an underlying ambiguity in the objectives of Integrational Linguistics. It is not self-evident whether its main objective is to “demythologize the academic discipline of linguistics and the Western tradition on which it draws, or whether the goal is a radical demythologization of Western society’s metalinguistic beliefs” (Hutton, this volume, p. 50). A radical demythologization of “metadiscursive regimes” is necessary in decolonial sociolinguistics because race and racial hierarchies were critically important principles in the organization of nineteenth-century comparative philology and dialectology. The legacy of the racial hierarchies is still selfevident in contemporary sociolinguistics and manifests itself in some popular views about language. The colonial patterns of representation of speech– particularly African speech– involved, among other things, the process of connecting linguistic material with the sociobiological indexicality of race, family relations, and sociopolitical relations. For example, the idea of Bantu languages as a “family” is not an objective reality that predated the imposition of Western frames of linguistics and epistemology of Africa (Abdelhay et al., 2020). A “heteronormative” comprehension of “family” also involves the notion of hierarchy, which is why we can envision the operation of power through an understanding of family relations.

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The important issue in a decolonization of scholarship should not necessarily be restricted to the support of indigenous languages (however desirable that may be), but rather, the development of alternative ways of reflecting upon the language frameworks that are deployed in an organization of the linguistic landscape. What is required is a demythologization of scholarly and popular “metadiscursive regimes” and a development of alternative epistemologies and ontologies that take into account the degree to which race is a critical part of the intellectual history of linguistics in colonial and postcolonial linguistics. As Bade argues in this volume (p. 20), “The myths of the colonizers prevented them from ever encountering the realities of the ‘Orient’; the colonizers (and their descendants) almost always everywhere see only their myths”. In Bantu languages, a demythologization of metalinguistic beliefs about language is necessary because cultural stories – theology, fantasy, and fiction, for instance – mutually reinforce each other, a correspondence which has implications on the construction and representation of indigenous languages in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The classification and categorization of indigenous languages is a statement of power based on race and heteronormative relations. Demythologization should critically examine and resist the tendency to “overextend biological metaphors” which reinforce racial and genetic classifications of language (Bongfolio, 2013), mother tongue, native speakers, etc. In spite of this ambiguity about the objectives of Integrational Linguistics (see Hutton, this volume), we explore how Integrational Linguistics can be mobilized as a “positive counter-discourse” (Pablé, this volume, p. 32) and as an analytical framework in the service of the advancement of Southern Theories, in spite of the Northernness of Integrational Linguistics (Fang, this volume; Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). Southern Epistemologies do not seek to delink from scholarship of the Global North but to put some aspects of scholarship of the Global North, such as Integrational Linguistics, into the global project of social justice in Southern Epistemologies. Southern Epistemologies seek to advocate justice through advocacy of language; hence, the importance of language policy and planning, minority language movement, and language rights scholarship in the construction of Southern Epistemologies. There is a potential tension, however, between how the notion of “language” is framed in Integrational Linguistics and how it is framed in advocacy work in Southern Epistemologies, language policy and planning, and research into endangered languages. Southern Epistemologies, like other “politically inflected work” (Hutton, 2011, p. 503) exhibit a tendency to “reify” language and “treat” languages as “autonomous” and “well-defined entities” (Pablé & Hutton, 2015, p. 32). This provides stable systems of representation – a philosophical practice which Integrational Linguistics rejects as segregationist because it is based on a “language myth”. Southern Epistemologies accept that, when using Integrational Linguistics, even adopting a segregationist perspective to

6 Makoni, Verity, Kaiper-Marquez language may render it feasible to effect socially transformative functions. In other words, the nature of the relationship between segregationist and Integrationist approaches to language and language politics is extremely complicated (see Hutton, this volume). Both Southern Epistemologies and Integrational Linguistics advocate a holistic approach to language, but Southern Theories adopt a much more expansive view of language than Integrational Linguistics. In Southern Epistemologies, language is not separated and cannot be distinguished from other aspects of an individual’s life, such as their spirituality, because “language is life” and “life is language” (Severo & Makoni, 2021). Furthermore, songs and singing are part of the ontologies of language (see Severo & Makoni, this volume). Integrational Linguistics is lay-oriented. It does not recognize the legitimacy of orthodox linguistics. As Harris (1981) says, A linguist theorist speaks with no greater authority and insight about language than a baker or bus conductor. I doubt whether it is possible to become a linguist theorist of any status without reminding oneself constantly of that fact. (p. 237) The proposition that the authority of the everyday language user is no different from that of the linguist has a positive resonance in decolonial contexts in which language expertise may historically have been construed to reside with educated outsiders. Integrational Linguistics’ lay-oriented nature is an attractive proposition to Southern Epistemologies because it is anti-elitist and antiestablishment. It seeks to replace the authority of linguistic science with that of a speaker who has something to say, to someone, at a given time, in a specific context. This lay-oriented focus is also consistent with the efforts by Southern Epistemologies to be based on many sites and to represent a multiplicity of social, ethnic, and racial experiences (Connell, 2007), both of which are relevant to a democratizing language scholarship consistent with Southern Theories. “Integrationism is lay-oriented, in the sense that it rejects any distinction between what one might term ‘everyday’ views about language and the views of specialists in academic linguists” (Pablé & Hutton, 2015, p. 44). In Integrational Linguistics, an individual’s unique experiences are the terra firma upon which reflections about language must be built, and since we have diverse experiences of language, the diversity has to be built into our language analysis. In his novel Mongolia, the Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho juxtaposed the travel diaries of a Brazilian photographer who had disappeared in Mongolia with the notebook of a Brazilian diplomat sent to track him down. “The photographer had responded to each person with delight, surprise, and keen interest. The diplomat, following the route indicated in the diary, records his suspicious, hostile disdain for all that he

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encountered along the same route” (Bade, this volume, p. 18). The world of analysis of Southern Epistemologies should grow larger with each sociolinguistic encounter. Southern Epistemologies follow the orientation of the photographer more than that of the diplomat, if we use the fictional characters in Carvalho’s novel. Southern Epistemologies seek to be alive to “differences, and are keenly interested in the details” (p. 18). In Southern Epistemologies, there are two perspectives about language: language as mass and language as count. Diversity and pluralization occur not only in the language as count, as is the case in most accounts of multilingualism, but diversity is also evident in the notion of language as mass (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). Ontologically, we are therefore positing that our views about language should also be pluralizable. Many scholars have pointed out the extent to which the Western academy and indeed non-Western universities are dominated by Eurocentrism (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020; Fang, this volume; Cupples & Grosfoguel, 2019). Bhambra et al. (2018) define Eurocentrism as the philosophical assumption that ideas which should govern scholarship are those that developed endogenously within the cultural-geographical sphere of Europe. One of the ways in which academics subvert Eurocentrism is for scholars to organize themselves as explicitly political actors versus thinkers, whose work may contribute to one another, or another political movement or debate. Mignolo and Walsh (2018) argue that the time has arrived to challenge the idea that there is one truth and one law which can capture all human behavior. Eurocentrism is the dominant philosophy underpinning the Western academy. It is founded on assumptions that the truth generated in one part of the world is necessarily true and valid in all parts of the world. Southern Epistemologies are adamant that the only truth that is universal is the truth of complexity, and reality is always much more than it appears. As Santos (2016) underscores over and over again with various phrases, “the Western understanding of the world is as important as it is partial” (p. 263). While, on the one hand, Southern Epistemologies are critical of Eurocentrism, they are also quick to point out the irony that Eurocentrism and the hegemony of the Western academy is facilitated by the language myth (a myth which Southern Epistemologies mobilize in language policy and planning and minority language movements in support of social justice) because “[v]irtually every discourse in Western academia, if Integrationists are right, is to some degree based on assumptions derived from the language myth” (Harris, 1981, p. vii) (in this case, Southern Epistemologies believe you can use the “Master’s tools to destroy the Master’s House”). In spite of the argument that in some instances Southern Epistemologies support the idea of a language myth, particularly in contexts of language advocacy, Integrational Linguistics is critical of the strong commitment of Western sociolinguistics to a linguistic ideology of the existence of separate and identifiable languages. Southern Epistemologies are critical of approaches to multilingualism which are predicated upon segregationist views of the

8 Makoni, Verity, Kaiper-Marquez existence of “named” languages because they do not move discussions forward about multilingualism beyond “plural monolingualism” (Makoni, 1998). Both Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies, if they are critical of the notion of language which permeates the Western academy, will be skeptical of the trumpeted discovery of multilingualism in the Western academy which, as Heugh and Stroud (2019) point out, scholars in the Global South have been writing about: “Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent ‘re-awakenings’ in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity” (p. 1). Southern epistemologies and indigenous ontologies do not constitute a fixed body of knowledge, but rather, an emergent set of possibilities (Severo & Makoni, 2021). Interest in the Global South and Southern Epistemologies is occurring at the same time that there is a decolonial turn in knowledge production. In this volume we explore to what extent Integrational Linguistics may be used to contribute toward a decolonization of language scholarship.

Integrational Linguistic perspectives on communication Even though Integrational Linguistics is a critique of the Western grammatical tradition, it is primarily about communication and not language. How is communication framed in Integrational Linguistics? Even though Integrational Linguistics is a critique of the Western grammatical tradition, it is part of the scholarship of the Global North. It is only recently that Integrational Linguistics has begun to be extended to the Global South, and in colonial and postcolonial contexts in southern Africa and colonial Brazil (Makoni, 2011). The main question that this volume addresses is the extent to which a philosophical approach to language such as Integrational Linguistics is consistent with the objectives of the Southern Epistemologies and decolonial scholarship. According to Pablé (2019, this volume), Integrational Linguistics is not “ethnocentric”. It is semiological in nature because it encompasses processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs. In a humanistic critique of modern linguistics, individuals are understood as agents who create and recreate signs, situated within the flow of time and against a background of contingency and indeterminacy. As Pablé & Hutton (2015) note, “to communicate is to create but against a background of unknowability and lack of transparency, to understand is to situate events objects, utterances, texts, signs etc. within our own understandings of the points of view of others” (p. 10). Formalist linguistics posits a model of structure minus the self and agency, whereas Integrational Linguistics argues for self-agency without structure. Communication starts from the notion of the active sign-making agent. It is an active process, irrespective of who is playing the role of speaker,

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listener, reader, or writer. Communication according to Integrational Linguistics is “me” oriented which means I can always reinterpret what has been said; it is radically open. From this view, Southern Epistemologies may endorse the idea of communication as an active process, and as being “me” oriented. The disagreement lies in what “me” stands for ontologically when used in Southern Epistemologies. The idea of communication as an active sign-making process can be expanded in Southern Epistemologies through the notion of “System D” as a metaphor for language (Makoni, 2020). “System D” is a way of capturing the nature and use of language which occurs in the buying and selling in the midst of a traffic jam, an improvised boat, at mobile street kiosks, or on a blanket on a side walk. “System D” entails an integration of knowledge and social action. The term “System D” is based on the French colonial word débrouillardise, which is meant to capture notions of self-reliance and creativity. “System D” leaves us with something like a color wheel with one idiolect blending seamlessly into the next. It values what a language user can accomplish, instead of judging it against a standard of correctness. Framing language through “System D” renders it feasible to undo some of the colonial, monolingual, multilingualism approaches to language and standardized language varieties. Southern Epistemologies are not opposed to the idea of a standard language, but to the sociolinguistic mechanisms through which a standard language variety is created. All forms of communication, when seen from an Integrational Linguistics perspective, demand continuously monitored creative activity. Even the most trivial act of communication is subject to this requirement. Communication is not a closed process of automatic “transmission” of given signs or messages from one person’s mind to another, but of setting up conditions which allow all parties involved the free construction of possible interpretations, depending on the context. These contextual possibilities are intrinsically ongoing and open-ended. This open-endedness outstrips and defies any rules or codes that participants may think can be imposed, either in advance or retrospectively. Southern Theorists (e.g., Covarrubias, 2007; Gunrante, 2009; Yoshitaka, 2017) and other scholars from the Global South have drawn attention to the problematic and culturally biased nature of the notion of communication in Western scholarship (see Pablé, this volume). For Southern scholars, even though it is “communication” and not “language” which should form the basis of the analytical enterprise in a decolonized sociolinguistics – a position which Integrational Linguistics may endorse – there may be differences in how communication is conceptualized between Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies. While in Integrational Linguistics, a sign may not mean the same thing to two different people (Pablé, 2019), it is debatable whether Southern Epistemologies would be willing to go so far as to argue the same thing. The difference between Integrational Linguistics and

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Southern Epistemologies on the notion of a sign is one of degree and not of kind. For Integrational Linguistics, communication is the cornerstone of human, social, and political life. It defies efforts to be mechanically and/or pragmatically decoded and categorized. Southern Theorists view of communication is “adultocentric” because the initial account of language and communication is socio-politically motivated. Integrational Linguistics seems to equivocate on the topic as reflected in the reaction by Pablé (this volume) to Berger’s (2011) “adultocentric” critique leveled at Integrational Linguistics. Pennycook and Makoni (2020), in a position which is different from that of Integrational Linguistics, extend the notion of agency to inanimate objects, thus blurring distinctions between humans and nonhumans. According to Pennycook and Makoni (2020), the African “talking drums” practice of sending messages can be construed as agentive. African drums in themselves, and also when used to transmit messages, are agentive particularly when they imitate speech. Communication in Southern Epistemologies has to be framed in at least two ways intersemiotically and transmodally (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020) and requires a broader understanding in which the existence of communication is projected as not only existing between humans but also between humans and nonhumans. Even if interspecies communication is conceptually feasible, communicational universes do not match across species because of similar anatomical traits. As Pablé writes “Infrastructures are discontinuous and species specific” (current volume, p. 30). This draws on and further adapts Hauck and Hank’s contention that if language has multiple natures, it is logical to expect that communication may have “multiple natures” as well (as cited in Pablé, this volume, p. 32).

Parameters in Communication According to Harris, there are three main factors which constrain human communication: (1) biomechanical, (2) circumstantial, and (3) macrosocial (Pablé & Hutton, 2015). “Biomechanical factors relate to the physical and mental capacities of the human being. Macrosocial factors relate to practices established in some group within the community and circumstantial factors relate to the specifics of particular situations” (Harris, 1998, p. 29, as cited in Pablé & Hutton, 2015, p. 15). Southern Epistemologies are not only interested in exploring the impact of the different parameters that constrain the nature of communication but also in investigating the politics of the parameters. Thus, the issue for Southern Epistemologies is not how many parameters there are or their relationship with each other – in spite of the importance of these factors – but the political implications of such parameters. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (2011), Deumert (2019) advances a “rhizomatic” interpretation. “The Mangrove or Moving with and beyond the Rhizome” encourages us to look at language and communication differently. In this metaphor, languages emerge not only as complex entangled

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practices of meaning-making but also as poetic futures, and as ambivalent formations that exist on the border of the binary. A further extension of this rhizomatic thinking can be attributed to Bou Ayash (2019), who proposes the use of “entangled electricity cables” as a way of framing language practices and communication. The metaphor of “rhizomes, with multiple roots and indistinguishable branches”, suggests a different starting point for learning and proficiency. A rhizome metaphor favors an activity orientation of meaning-making and ontologies. Following Santos’ call for a sociology of absences and emergences (2007), we instigate a comparable call for alternative conceptions of language which draw from a combination of Integrational Linguistics and Southern Epistemologies as a way of challenging what Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo calls the colonization of the mind and Santos (2016) labels epistemicide.

Chapter summaries Summaries of the chapters in the book and interconnections between them are presented below. Chapter One: David Bade Edward said, Roy asked, and the peasant responded: Reflections on peasants, popular culture, and intellectuals This chapter is framed in a manner to capture the connections between Bade’s personal life and analytical experiences. In a sense, it can be understood as an auto-ethnographical account of Integrational Linguistics. Bade makes the general argument that Southern Theories, like other theories, begin “somewhere with someone in the interests of some project”. For Bade, the quest for Southern Theories arises from a strong belief that prevailing theories do not successfully account for the experiences of those who advocate for Southern Theories. Southern Theories, according to Bade, is “empowered” and paradoxically “limited” by the power of the moral argument with the world that it opposes. Chapter Two: Adrian Pablé Three critical perspectives on the ontology of “language” If, in the first chapter, Bade discusses issues about Southern Theories at a broad and general level in an autobiographical form, in the next chapter Adrian Pablé narrows down the discussion to more specific ontological matters. Using Pennycook and Makoni’s (2020) Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South as a springboard, Pablé argues that Integrationism and Southern Theories are compatible, even though the former was not framed with the explicit objective of addressing the sociopolitical concerns of the Global South. Pablé illustrates how Integrationism can be used as a “positive counterdiscourse” to Western orthodox linguistics and that although Integrational Linguistics does not have an explicit political agenda, it is compatible with

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Southern Theories because both Integrationism and Southern Theories seek to challenge prevailing linguistic orthodoxies. Pablé expands the argument made by Pennycook and Makoni by maintaining that perhaps what is required is not an expansion of existing analytical repertoires of language but, rather, an extension of existing repertoires not of language but of communication. The expansion of existing repertoires of communication, however, will entail the reformulation of notions of communication so that the orientations toward communication are not Anglocentric. Pablé identifies what he thinks might be a potential source of tension in Southern Theories between “indigenous cosmovisions”, which emphasize issues related to social differences and posthumanism and downplay the differences among humans and between humans and nonhumans. It is not clear, however, at least at this moment, the extent to which Southern Epistemologies can accommodate the tension (or contradiction) in both theory and practice between “indigenous cosmovisions and posthumanism”. Chapter Three: Christopher Hutton Integrationism, individualism, and personalism: The politics of essentialism If Pablé is interested in the ontologies of language, Hutton extends the argument by exploring the politics of ontologies of language. Even though Integrationism, unlike Southern Theories, does not have an explicit political agenda, Hutton explores the nature of the relationship between Integrationism and language politics. Hutton argues that Integrationism, unlike Southern Theories, lacks an explicit politics of language at the macrosocial level. Nevertheless, Integrationism’s “lay” orientation is predicated on a form of antielitism, because the “only concept of language worth having”, according to the Integrationist position, is that of the layperson. The lay-oriented nature of language in Integrationism makes it compatible with the language politics of Southern Theories. The critical argument that Integrationists make is that there is a complex relationship between essentialization or de-essentialization and politics. Hutton argues that there is no one-to-one relationship between essentialization or de-essentialization and progressive politics. For example, essentialization may be part of progressive politics in the advocacy of indigenous languages, whereas deessentialization may be part of retrogressive politics in the promotion of English. Chapter Four: Peter E. Jones and Dorthe Duncker A clash of linguistic philosophies? Charles Goodwin’s “co-operative action”: An integrationist perspective Jones and Duncker broaden the discussion about ontologies by analyzing the tension between an Integrationist approach to Charles Goodwin and the potential ethnocentric nature of universalist approaches to conversational analysis. Jones and Duncker cast a critical lens on Charles Goodwin’s “co-operative action”. They argue that cooperative action is grounded both in its methodology and analysis in a segregationist perspective toward language interaction. They insist Goodwin’s cooperative interaction is grounded in the language myth.

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Analytically, they illustrate the problematic nature of using transcriptions in language analysis, particularly if one subscribes to a view of language as radically indeterminate further complicated by the lack of intrinsic structure of language. They point out that any third-person analysis is reductionist. They raise an important philosophical issue that is pertinent to this volume: the nature of the relationship between Integrationism and Southern Theories. They are ambivalent in their argumentation on this critical topic. On the one hand, they insist that it is conceptually feasible for Integrationism to be used in the service of the development of Southern Theories and decolonial sociolinguistics, even though Integrationist Linguistics is grounded in Northern scholarship. On the other hand, they call for careful thinking of the collaboration between Integrationism and Southern Theories, given the fact that Integrationism may be open to the critique that it is ethnocentric itself. Chapter Five: Bassey E. Antia and Lynn Mafofo Text annotations: Examining evidence for a multisemiotic instinct and the intertextuality of the sign in a database of pristine self-directed communication Antia and Mafofo extend the discussion of Integrationism to written texts. They analyze the inscriptions in the margins of written texts used by students. The advantage of their approach is that they explore the nature of the complex relationships between Integrationism and other approaches to language, such as visual semiotics and systemic functional grammars. In their chapter, Antia and Mafofo direct their attention to the textual analysis of annotations. The analysis of the annotations on these texts is illuminating because they reflect a special type of communication. While Jones and Duncker focus on other communication, Antia and Mafofo pay much more intimate attention to self-communication. They adopt a holistic approach to the analysis of self-communication that is conceptually eclectic in bringing together a number of different analytical approaches: translingualism, systemic functional analysis, and semiotic and visual analysis. Antia and Mafofo also adopt another holistic approach by taking into account the different types of annotations, drawings, colorings, and comments inserted. The inserted comments provide opportunities to recall fragments and propositions in the text. The holistic approach to an analysis of the annotated texts is relevant to other applied linguistic areas, such as reading. Chapter Six: Xuan Fang The semiological implications of knowledge-ideologies: A Harrisian perspective While Anita and Mafofo’s emphasis is on written inscriptions of texts read by students, Fang adopts a much broader view of Integrational Linguistics by exploring the role of Eurocentrism in both Southern Theories and Integrational Linguistics – an important topic given the Eurocentric nature of the Western academy. Fang explores how Southern Epistemologies can be used to challenge Eurocentrism, which undergirds the nature of most contemporary universities.

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Eurocentrism forms the basis of knowledge ideology in the academic world and, linguistically, is predicated on the language myth. The main focus of Eurocentric scholarship is the notion of universal truths. There are a number of different types of universal truths. For Fang, however, the only truth that is relevant to Southern Theorists is that Western theories can only partially capture the complex realities of the globe. “The truth is always much more than it appears”. Using Integrational Linguistics, Fang reframes in an innovative manner the Global South as a “second-order abstraction” – a product of human communicational discourses. Following Pennycook and Makoni (2020), the Southern epistemological critique that Fang adopts does not amount to a delinking of Southern Theories from theories about language from the Global North but, rather, is indicative of an awareness of the entanglement between the Global North and Global South. Southern Theories and indeed Integrational Linguistics may be influenced by the language myth and potential performative self-contradiction, which, ironically, are the objects of their critique. Chapter Seven: Kundai Chirindo Rhetoric and integrationism: In search of rapprochement Chirindo takes discussions about Integrational Linguistics in a different direction. He analyzes and explores the role that the quest for a more nuanced understanding of context in Integrational Linguistics might provide to research in rhetoric studies. He draws his data from texts in Liberia. Chirindo poses two related questions: (1) how much can Integrationism contribute to rhetorical studies? and (2) what might rhetorical studies contribute toward our understanding of Integrational Linguistics? According to Chirindo, most rhetorical studies have tended to adopt a segregationalist and telementational view of language and rhetoric. Integrational Linguistics provides opportunities to situate rhetoric studies in context and to shift away from a telementational and segregationalist view of language and a deterministic reading of texts and discourses. Integrational Linguistics renders it important for rhetoric studies to conceptualize communication as including all processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs, irrespective of modality, i.e., spoken or written. Rhetoric may enhance our understanding of Integrational Linguistics if we treat rhetoric as communicational, a type of discourse, or, to borrow from Harris, a second-order abstract. Chapter Eight: Sinead Kwok Integrationism and postcolonialism: Divergences or convergences? An integrational discussion on ethnocentricity and the (post)colonial translation myth Kwok examines the tensions between Integrationism and Southern Theories. If Chirindo was interested in colonial contexts, Kwok analyzes the nature of the relationship between Integrationism and Southern Theories. She explores the degree to which both Integrationism and Southern Theories may allegedly be ethnocentric.

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Kwok makes two sets of potentially contradictory arguments. She argues that Integrational Linguistics and decolonial scholarship are compatible because they both constitute challenges to orthodox scholarship. Nevertheless, there is one major difference between Integrational Linguistics and postcolonialism. Kwok argues that, whereas Integrational Linguistics is not ethnocentric, postcolonialism is ethnocentric. Thus, a fruitful collaboration between the two approaches to language cannot be successfully carried out in a joint enterprise due to these radical differences in how they orient toward ethnocentricity. Another critical difference between the two is that, whereas Integrational Linguistics seeks to establish a superordinate theory, postcolonial theory is concerned only with local contexts. Chapter Nine: Cristine Severo and Sinfree B. Makoni Integrationism and the Global South: Songs as epistemic and ontological frameworks in language studies Severo and Makoni return to the issues about ontology but situate the research within a particular ethnic group in Brazil. Unlike Pablé and to some extent Hutton, they adopt a more holistic ontological approach to language, arguing that songs and singing need to be integrated in our understanding of the notion of language. Severo and Makoni seek to expand the Integrationist view toward the epistemologies and ontologies of language. They argue that most of the analyses of songs have been segregationalistic and have adopted a telementational view of language that echoes colonial views about language as a fixed code. The authors’ expansive view of language combines Integrational Linguistics with historical sociolinguistics of the Global South. They contend that even though, from an Integrationist perspective, the sign is universal as a feature of the architecture of communication, the meanings of songs and how they are interpreted may be radically different among different ethnicities. The authors illustrate the extent to which songs are constructed, inchoate, pluralistic, and indeterminate in terms of both form and meaning, drawing on examples from the Guarani indigenous group in Brazil. Chapter Ten: Cory Juhl Words and other currencies Juhl focuses his attention on an analysis of semantics. He explores the ways in which surrogational views of language have shaped studies in semantics and how a different vision of semantics may emerge if we adopt an Integrationist approach to it. Juhl notes that Harris rejected a surrogational view of language that is predicated upon a “fixed-code” view. Harris argued that surrogationalist approaches to language with their “quasi-mechanistic models” of language are inadequate and unsatisfactory because they do not capture individuals’ experiences of language. Cory explores the implications of viewing naturalized semantics through a non-surrogationalist view of language and examines the

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implications of an Integrationist approach to language through an analysis of currencies. Chapter Eleven: Robin Sabino Beyond IL from the perspective of Languaging without languages In the final chapter, Sabino compares her approach to human languaging with the one that forms the basis of Integrational Linguistics. She argues that there are certain elements of the philosophy of language in Integrational Linguistics that are compatible with her approach to human languaging. She endorses the critique of languages as fixed and clearly delineated entities. She also, like Integrationists, is critical of the telementation orientation toward communication. There are, however, significant differences between her position and Integrational Linguistics. She feels that the argument that each interactional event is unique and cannot be repeated goes too far. She also has a much more central role for idiolects than Integrational Linguistics does. Her interest in the ideological underpinnings of theory formation makes her position, to some extent, compatible with Southern Epistemologies.

References Abdelhay, A., Makoni, S. & Severo, C. (2020). Language planning and policy: Ideologies, ethnicities, and semiotic spaces of power. Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Berger, L. (2011). Language and the ineffable. Lexington Books. Bhambra, G., Gebrial, D. & Nisancioglu, K. (2018). Introduction: Decolonizing the university? In Bhambra G., Gebrial D. & Nisancioglu K. (Eds.), Decolonizing university (pp. 1–19). Pluto Press. Bongfolio, T. P. (2013). The invention of the native speaker. Critical Multilingualism Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1(2), 29–58. Bou Ayash, N. (2019). Toward translingual realities in composition: (Re)working local language representations and practices. Utah State University Press. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Polity. Covarrubias, P. (2007). (Un)biased in Western theory: Generative silence in American Indian communication. Communication Monographs, 74(2), 265–271. Cupples, J. & Grosfoguel, R. (2019). Decolonization and feminisms in global teaching and learning. London & New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2011). The production of the new. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deumert, A. (2019, September 27). The mangrove or moving with and beyond the rhizome. https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/mangrove-or-moving-and-beyond-rhizome Ela, J. M. (1998). Innovations sociales et renaissance de l’ Afrique noire. Hartman. Gunrante, S. (2009). Emerging global divides in media and communication theory: European universalism and non-Western reactions. Asian Journal of Communication, 19(4), 366–383. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Duckworth. Harris, R. (1996). Signs of writing. Routledge. Harris, R. (1998). Integrational linguistics: A first reader. Pergamon.

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Heugh, K. & Stroud, C. (2019). Diversities, affinities and diasporas: A southern lens and methodology for understanding multilingualisms. Current Issues in Language Planning, 20, 1–15. Hountodji, P. (1995). Producing knowledge in Africa today. African Studies Review, 38(3), 1–10. Hutton, C. (2011). The politics of the language myth: Reflections on the writings of Roy Harris. Language Sciences, 33(4), 503–510. Kerfoot, C. & Hyltenstam, K. (2017). Entangled discourses: South‐North orders of visibility. New York: Routledge. Makoni, S. (1998). In the beginning was the missionaries’ word. The European invention of African languages. In K. Prah (Ed.), Between extinction and distinction: The harmonization and standardization of African languages (pp. 157–165). Wits University Press. Makoni, S. (2011). Sociolinguistics, colonial and postcolonial: An integrationist perspective. In A. Pablé (Ed.), Critical humanist perspective: The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communication (pp. 63–76). Routledge. Makoni, S. (2020). Framing economies of language using system D and spontaneous orders. In Blewett, K., Donahue, T. & Monroe, C. (Eds.), Expanding the universe of writing studies higher education writing research (pp. 217-229). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Makoni, S. B. & Meinhof, U. (2004). Western perspectives in applied linguistics. AILA Review, 17(1), 77–104. Mignolo, W. & Walsh, D. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics in African literature. James Currey. Pablé, A. (2019). Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua, 230 102735. Pablé, A. & Hutton, C. (2015). Signs, meaning and experience: Integrational approaches to linguistics and semiotics. DeGruyter Mouton. Pennycook, A. & Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. Routledge. Santos, B. De S. (2007). Another knowledge is possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso. Santos, B. De S. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge. Severo, C. & Makoni, S. (2021). Is a southern epistemological orientation to applied linguistics possible and desirable. In Cunningham, C. & Hall, C. (Eds.), Vulnerabilities, challenges and risks. Multilingual Matters. Shepherd, N. (2002). Heading south, looking north. Archaeological Dialogues, 9(2), 74–82. Tomaselli, T. (2018). Foreword: Implicit geographies. In Mutsvairo, B. (Ed), The Palgrave handbook of media and communication research in Africa, (pp. v–ix). Palgrave Publishers. Yoshitaka, M. (2017). An Asiacentric reflection on Eurocentric bias in communication theory. Communication Monographs, 74(2), 272–278. Walsh, C. (2010). Development as buen vivir institutional arrangements and decolonial entanglements. Development, 53(1), 15–21.

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Edward said, Roy asked, and the peasant responded: Reflections on peasants, popular culture, and intellectuals David Bade for Sinfree B. Makoni

J’accuse: Orientations In his novel Mongólia, the Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho juxtaposed the travel diaries of a Brazilian photographer who had disappeared in Mongolia with the notebooks of a Brazilian diplomat sent to Mongolia to track him down. The photographer had responded to each place and person with delight, surprise, and keen interest. The diplomat, following the route indicated in the diary, recorded his suspicious, hostile disdain for all that he encountered along the same route. The photographer was oriented and animated by the world he encountered as a new friend; the diplomat was disoriented everywhere by a world that he refused to embrace. Two Brazilians in Mongolia recording the same world of places and peoples produced two irreconcilable narratives that the narrator of the novel tries to reconcile: the world is my friend, the world is my enemy. We are oriented by what we love and disoriented by what we hate. Carvalho’s two Brazilians demonstrate two orientations toward the world that preceded any and all of their experiences and perceptions. The photographer was open to and changed by his experiences. He was attentive to everything around him, alive to differences, keenly interested in the details. His world grew larger and fuller with every encounter. The diplomat, on the other hand, closed himself off to experience, encountered everyone and everything as an opponent to be reconstructed according to his preconceptions about the way the world ought to be. He learned nothing, rejected the differences, and was blind to the details. These two contrasting orientations toward the world were not conscious, or rationally arrived at theories, but the perceptions and interpretations of Carvalho’s characters were determined by those orientations. Outside the world of fiction, in the real world in which we live, we too are oriented toward the world in one or the other fashion. For most of us I suspect, we are oriented in one way at times, and in another way at other times, for experience can radically change the way in which we live in the world, as any victim of violence can affirm.

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Southern Theory, as all theory, begins somewhere with someone in the interest of some project, dream, desire, hope, question, or pathological condition. Southern Theory, as any theory, can be oriented in different ways depending upon who is elaborating the theory. In the 2019 Integrationist conference, organizers stated that our purpose was “to contribute towards the development of scholarship … from decidedly Global South perspectives”. This implies that there are other perspectives, whether those are thought of as Northern, Eastern, historical, alternative, or wrong. A “Global South” perspective implies, at a minimum, a different experience than a “Global North” perspective, and perhaps different conceptions of justice, religious beliefs, hopes, or desired futures. My interest is precisely in the existence of these different perspectives and orientations: they exist in practice, but can they exist in theory? Specifically, can Southern Theory assist us in thinking and living our differences alongside and together with our vehement opponents? Do proponents of Southern Theory follow the orientation of Carvalho’s photographer or Carvalho’s diplomat? The orienting beliefs-desires-hopes-fantasies of Not-So-Southern-Theory are those of modern science and can be seen clearly at its birth. Consider Galileo’s remark (1960, p. 148) “if nothing useful were to be expected from it [i.e., knowledge], all the work employed in its acquisition would be in vain”. Add to that Bacon’s announcement (1964, p. 62) “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave” and Hobbes’ assertion (1839, v. 1, p. 7) “The end of knowledge is power; and the use of theorems (which, among geometricians, serve for the finding out of properties) is for the construction of problems; and, lastly, the scope of all speculation is the performing of some action, or thing to be done”. Feminists (among others) have rightly seen in this foundation domination as goal and rape as means and method. Theologians have seen in this an expression of a recurrent religious fantasy, namely the desire to become God, a desire explicitly stated by the atheist Stephen Hawking (1988): [I]f we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God. (p. 193) The quest for theory always arises from an atheoretical impulse and an orientation, an impulse and orientation that the theory does not account for but projects into all matters upon which it touches. That impulse arises from the situation in which the theory builder lives. And here the virtues and shortcomings and possibilities and limitations of all theories come into question. Southern Theory arises from the experience of colonization and is both oriented and empowered, and limited, by its moral argument with the

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other world which it opposes, the European empires and their successors in political regimes and in mentality. Edward Said, a precursor of Southern Theory, argued that the perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs of citizens of colonizing states were largely oriented and determined by the interests of their nations. In particular, opinions about the peoples and civilizations of the colonized lands – Asia, Africa, indigenous America – were prejudiced by the myths and propaganda issuing from those pursuing and justifying the domination of those lands instead of and even in spite of all experience and evidence to the contrary. The myths of the colonizers prevented them from ever encountering the realities of the “Orient”; the colonizers (and their descendants) almost always and almost everywhere see only their own myths. The problem, of course, is not just academic and not just for colonialists: understanding the world of our own experience is an every moment task for everyone. Not long ago, I hired a chimney sweep to check my fireplace and upon his arrival he noticed my peacocks in the driveway. “Where do you keep your peacocks?” he asked, and I replied “They like to roost atop the chimney”. He shook his head and said “Peacocks are flightless birds, they cannot fly” and as he said this, one peacock flew straight up over his head and alighted about 35 feet up on the roof near the chimney. He stood there staring at the peacock on the roof and repeated “Peacocks are flightless birds. They cannot fly” as if to drive his point home to that insolent rooftop peacock, or perhaps merely to reassure himself in his knowledge. When theory becomes unquestionable ideology, when our experiences of the world are denied in favor of what we have been told rather than changed by our encounters with the world, we become incapable of learning, and from that incapacity we become incapable of doing justice to the world in our theories and in our actions. Yet even in the best situations of persons open to the world of experience and being changed by it, the question remains: How can anyone, necessarily thinking from one experience of the world, arrive at a theory that can do justice to all the experiences of the world? How can Northern do justice to Southern? How can feminism do justice to men? How can race theory do justice to all races? How can queer theory do justice to children? My short answer to that – not to be interpreted as an expression of the mind of God – is that theory can never do justice and can in fact only do injustice whenever it is believed in – as so often appears to be the case among advocates and adherents of theories past, present, right, left, on the roof, and off the wall. What I want to suggest in this paper, not through scholarship or theoretical argument but from personal experience – Roy Harris’s and my own – is that theory can never lead us toward a mutually livable understanding of the world, but listening to each other just might. Southern Theory will not lead us to know the mind of God, but I allow myself to hope that it will lead me to better understand my own mind.

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Respondeo etsi mutabor: Roy Harris and the peasant In his 1990 essay “The dialect myth,” Roy Harris recounts a conversation with a peasant in 1966: From my own experience of fieldwork in dialectology, the best evidence I can cite in support of Schuchardt’s answer was given to me by an old man whom I asked whether the patois of his Alpine village was the same as that of another locality a few miles distant. I here translate his reply, given in (what I at that time called) ‘“Valdôtain”: Is it the same? I would not know how to answer you. Even in this village the younger people speak differently from my generation. And in the next valley perhaps they use words we don’t use here. But, for all that, everyone understands everyone else well enough. Is that the same? By turning my own question back on me, he had made me understand that the mistake lay in the question. What I was asking corresponded to nothing in his own linguistic experience which could provide a determinate answer. When theorists begin to ask unanswerable questions about language (or – which amounts to the same thing – questions which can be answered “yes” or “no” as you please) that is the surest indication that in their investigations linguistic myth has taken over from linguistic reality. (p. 18) Elsewhere in the world’s scholarly literature, there are anecdotes about scholars learning something important from the object of their study and changing their minds and their theories accordingly, but this passage is the only such passage that I can recall from my readings in linguistics. What is remarkable about it is that Harris specifically indicates that the peasant provoked his theoretical reflections precisely by turning his question back on him and that the issue in question later became the foundation of all his theorizing. The peasant didn’t respond with a theory of his own so much as to describe how things seemed to him, what seemed to be important, and then sending the question back at Harris. There was no debate, no agonistic academic ritual, but simply two people listening to each other and trying to understand what the other meant, and how the other understood the matters in question. The theoretical positions that eventually arose from that encounter were not those of the peasant for he had no need of theory; rather they were Harris’s theoretical demolition of western linguistic theory. 25 years after the peasant spoke, we find his own words put forth as the “best evidence” in support of the critical perspectives for which Harris was arguing. When reading this passage in Harris (1990), what most struck me was the contrast between Harris’s attitude toward the theories he knew – what he had been taught in school – and the world of orientalism against which

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Edward Said turned all his attention and intelligence. I don’t know what Said ever said or wrote or thought about Harris – if anything – but surely had he read this passage with a knowledge of how much western theory Harris rejected in accepting the peasant’s reply, he would have gushed with appreciation and admiration. I certainly do. The passage is clear evidence that theory was abandoned precisely because Harris regarded the peasant’s understanding of his own situation as the only one that made any sense. And this regard for the peasant later became one of the pillars of Harris’s perspective on language: the primacy of the lay perspective. What I wish to stress is that Integrational theory did not lead Harris to engage the peasant with respect, attention, and an openness to learn and to be changed by the encounter. Instead, it was the reverse: it was Harris’s attitude toward the peasant that enabled him to learn from the peasant and pursue his extraordinary theoretical explorations. Positive social change and social justice come from respectful, loving attention to the Other, not from social theory. It is perhaps also worth noting that this passage may be the only passage in the entire corpus of Harris’s writings in which he acknowledges that someone else was right and he was wrong. Harris, like many intellectuals, was rarely willing to acknowledge the value of another’s opinions even when they thought they were agreeing with him. And it does seem to be the case that the normal attitude of intellectuals is “I talk, you listen” which is somehow presented as dialog or the quest for truth and justice, if not boldly declared to be “speaking truth to power”. Taking differences seriously requires listening to and understanding dissenting voices from all sides, making room for all our differences with the hope of our being changed during the process into something better; it does not mean just listening to one side condemn the others. The passage from Harris means far more to me than it may mean for many others because of the differences between my experience and Harris’s. Harris, the professor doing research among peasants and trying to understand that world, and David Bade, the child of Pentecostal Bible Belt American farmers who wanted their son to study at a school in which the Bible was the only textbook but who was somehow accidentally admitted into an atheist public university. (A neighbor woman who worked in the university’s admissions office was probably responsible for this little “accident” but I will never know. My mother believes it must have been God’s will, while my father thinks the Devil did it.) My path was more or less the reverse of Harris’s: a deeply religious teenager trying to overcome religious prejudices in order to understand modern science and linguistic theory. That young boy also had an intense longing to learn about and eventually live in an Asia known only from a childhood filled with missionary tales of preChristian Africa and Asia, the television series Kung Fu, biographies of Albert Schweitzer, Tarzan books, and an old atlas in which Africa consisted of a few very large areas “belonging” to some European nations, and a few countries with actual names.

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Ich bin kein Berliner: Embracing the other without debasing oneself Religious conversion frequently involves embracing some exotic Other – for Mongolians this is often some form of Christianity, while for Americans this is often some form of oriental religion – while turning away in contempt from the world within which we have been born and formed as children. This is as common in the world of intellectuals as in the world of religion, and we should probably best understand these religious and intellectual conversions as instances of the same development: beliefs about the world, whether described as religious, philosophical, ideological, or theoretical, are abandoned in favor of other beliefs. When Chomsky’s as yet unpublished Pisa lectures began to circulate as photocopies, all the generative semanticists in the department abandoned Lakoff and McCawley overnight and scrambled to put themselves in the vanguard of the Pisa program. This is the usual course of events when science has become one’s only religion, for there is no other perspective available from which to challenge it. Harris and the peasant followed a different trajectory: learning to appreciate the other perspective while also coming to understand their own worlds from outside as well as from within. Harris did not become a peasant, nor did the peasant become a professor; I imagine that neither would have been happy in the other’s shoes but they were able to have an extremely productive conversation. How does a white, Christian boy from a farming/working class family in central Illinois learn to embrace the Other without debasing the world which made him what he is? Is it true – as some believe – that our origins preclude us from ever doing anything other than upholding and reproducing our gender, our class, and our national and racial origins? Must our perceptions be determined by our nationality and race as Said claimed? I do not think so and here is why: I adored my professor of Chinese linguistics C.C. Cheng and my Palestinian Arabic instructor Nicola Talhami (as well as his sister Aida). I thought Cornelius Muthuri, the Meru farm boy who was the language source in my field methods class, stood shoulder to shoulder with the finest human beings known to me. In graduate school, it was fellow student Daniel Bitrus and roommate Mobil Kolbon and still later my ESL student Nam-ju Lee. Then in the library, a Thai co-worker whose name I have forgotten but whose gift I still wear 40 years later and Mamadou Niang for whom I cataloged 11,000 volumes of Northwestern University Library’s collection of books in African languages in order that he would know what they had. In middle age Khotgoid ovogt Makhburiadyn Purevbadam taught me the songs of her grandmother from Khuvsgul AND how delicious were the wild cherries in my parents’ front yard, cherries that I had never even known were edible. Through these encounters, I learned of the real Africa and Asia, while at the same time understanding that Tarzan, Kung Fu, and missionary tales were just what they were, and not the real story, much less

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the whole story. I am still grateful for Edgar Rice Burroughs, ABC Television, and all those missionaries who gave me a child’s pleasures and started me dreaming about the Orient, but I cannot imagine how anyone could or would prefer those images of Asia and Africa over C.C. Cheng, Aida Talhami, and Cornelius Muthuri. When you delight in a friendship, cherish a relationship, or love someone, all prejudices, images from popular culture, theories, and even religions can be modified, set aside, or tossed in the trash for being of less importance than the person who is here. The other side of those encounters is how I renegotiated my relationship to my own past, my own family, the world I knew, and loved prior to those encounters with other worlds. One significant moment for me involved a conversation with a professor who held most of us in awe at his academic reputation and verbal wizardry. In speaking to him once, I mentioned that his remarks on religion had made a profound impact on me and he responded by saying “Had I known that, I would have made much more concerted efforts to destroy your faith”. His response was entirely unexpected and I immediately lost all respect for him. Why? Because I had understood that science and scholarship were solely interested in understanding the world, in discovering the truth (that is, I had believed the usual self-serving propaganda disseminated by universities and scientists). In order to feel that one has a right, even a duty to destroy someone’s faith, one must believe that one’s own beliefs are unquestionably true while the other’s beliefs are unquestionably wrong. Yet all that professor knew of my beliefs – something we had never discussed – apparently came from something he had heard from a third party. That professor learned nothing from me because he assumed that there was nothing to be learned; and in the end I learned from him only that closed mindedness, hubris, prejudice, and the desire to dominate and control the next generation’s mind and soul were as much a part of the academic world as of the religious and political worlds. Trying to destroy someone’s inherited culture, beliefs, and orientation in the world seemed to me then, as it does now, to be beneath contempt. I was trying to understand that world into which I had been born, and still am; turning my back on it all in contempt would have made understanding myself forever impossible. If you compare that professor’s response to me with Harris’s response to the peasant, you will understand why reading about the latter sent me into ecstasy. I did not become a missionary linguist as planned. Instead, I fell in love with a woman who was of the wrong religion. A follower of the Anti-Christ my parents would have said had they ever known of her. After having abandoned my religion in favor of her (nota bene, not her religion), she informed me that she was not interested in me. Such is life: we have only the love in our hearts. “My weight is my love, by it I am borne whithersoever I am borne” wrote Augustine, the African Christian. And so, it is with theory: it is oriented by our loves. Unfortunately, theory is not only oriented by our loves, but often also by our hatreds. Therein lie the crucial questions to be

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directed at all theories and religions and those who profess them: Who do you love? And who do you refuse to love? (For some, of course, the questions would have to be “Whom do you love? ” etc. but among those influenced by Roy Harris you can get away with either way of expressing yourself. The important issue is the bit about love.)

Amo, Amas, Amat … In an earlier discussion of Said (Bade, 2013), I suggested that the main complaint and accusation in his Orientalism is that we intellectuals have read too much and loved too little. Theories about peoples and cultures founded upon what we have only read and elaborations of such second-hand learning, when unchecked by our direct experience, usually blind us to the social realities of our world. More reading and more theory can never deliver us from our imagined unrealities; only a different kind of relationship to our Others can accomplish that. A relationship in which we reveal ourselves to each other, learn from each other and are changed by each other is the necessary condition for producing a world in which north/south, male/ female, black/white are experienced as romances or marriages rather than as wars or as separate worlds in mutual excommunication. Carvalho’s photographer, not Carvalho’s diplomat, should be our guide. Southern Theory is in origin and in intent an attempt to help realize social justice by theoretically disestablishing the justifications for perceived injustices, specifically those injustices which correlate with the divide between a northern hemisphere that embraces science and capitalism and a southern hemisphere that is dominated and exploited by the northern. Yet justice is understood quite differently in the north and in the south. Any theory that is oriented by one perspective and is not engaged with others as necessary partners in learning is doomed to create a theoretical world of injustice in half the world, if not in most of it. A just theory must come from an encounter in which all are continually shaped by attending to the voices of all around us. All of those voices, even those we have been taught – at home, through religious instruction, at school – to despise and condemn. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a Jewish exhortation in origin, affirmed by Jesus though oft ignored by his Christian followers (for a marvelous discussion, see Mendes-Flohr, 2007). A few thousand years ago somewhere in the region of Iraq-Palestine-Sinai-Egypt, an old man urged upon his people this orientation as a path toward social justice. That man, portrayed as an old man with white hair and a beard, became both the iconic image of God and the demonized father of patriarchy. Yet as a guide to social justice, his was a very, very good idea. I know of none better. The Christianization of Europe was the Oriental refashioning of a new world from the ashes of empire by means of that vision. It is that Oriental heritage from the distant past that formed my childhood, and by returning to reaffirm this element of my own past, the world of my parents, my place and

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my time, I also embrace the world of Asia 3000 years ago. How could I, why would I, turn against “Love your neighbor as yourself”? I embrace this ancient commandment not as a religious believer or member of any class, group or organization, much less as one colonized, dominated or oppressed by a foreign religion, but as one who acknowledges and appreciates that inheritance. In loving the world as I encounter it, I find the only orientation that does justice to it. I find this to be an orientation that allows and even encourages me to embrace and learn from those worlds that were not given to me at birth, nor at home, nor at school. I have been Oriented. In the end (or at least at the present moment), after my encounters with professors who would dominate me (if they but could), preachers who would cast me into an eternal lake of fire (if they but could), neighbors who would assault me (and did) and friends from around the world who have loved me in spite of my gender, my race, my class origins, my nationality, my ignorance, my beliefs and my unbeliefs, I am neither young nor beautiful, neither Republican nor Democrat, neither Jewish nor Christian, neither Buddhist nor Muslim, nor even – to my great chagrin – a Chinese sage (I am still enthralled by this image from my childhood). My encounters with the real worlds of men, women, black, white, sexual assault, racial violence, inner city, desert solitude, homelessness, day labor, white- and blue collar employment, farming, graduate school, tenure, science, scholarship, Mexico, Africa, Asia, Communism, antiCommunism, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, marriage, separation, fatherhood, justice, injustice, dancing with joy, weeping alone, and mourning the deaths of some of those whom I have loved have led me to radically rethink my own heritage and to understand it anew and differently. How could I not? Changing and deepening our understanding of the worlds into which we are born in light of our encounters with the worlds of the Others need not lead to rejecting and reviling the worlds of our mothers and fathers in contempt (turning them into the justifiably despised Others so common in social theory), but can and should lead each of us, as in my case, to a deeper appreciation of our own heritages, a recognition of the multiple relations between cultures that have formed all the worlds we inhabit, more tolerance toward and appreciation of other ways of living, and a good deal of humility in the face of a world that is surely a far more fluid and creative polylogue of futures in the making than any empirical science could ever imagine, much less mathematically model or delimit in theory. A theory that is based upon and oriented by only one experience, one perspective or one “revelation” – whether that is the world in which we were born or the world of our professors, heroes and gurus – banishes all else to a world apart, ignored or condemned or persecuted. Let us have instead theoretical discussions that will be oriented by that Jewish exhortation to love one another and the Buddhist doctrine of the Bodhisattva: no one achieves enlightenment unless and until we all do. That will not make any of us Jewish or Buddhist, much less social scientists, but it will probably enhance the social value of our theories immensely.

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I leave you with a passage from Carson McCullers’ (1942) story “A tree. A rock. A cloud”. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved. Do you realize what a science like mine can mean? Now that is my kind of Southern Theory.

References Bacon, F. (1964). Temporis partus masculus. In B. Farrington, The philosophy of Francis Bacon (pp. 60–72). Liverpool University Press. Bade, D. (2013). Imaginary travels in post-socialist Mongolia. Inner Asia, 15(1), 135–164. Carvalho, B. (2003). Mongólia. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras. Charbonneau, B. (2019). Quatre témoins de la liberté: Rousseau, Montaigne, Berdiaev, Dostoïevski. R&N Éditions. Galileo G. (1960). On motion and on mechanics (Comprising De Motu (ca. 1590) translated with introduction and notes by I.E. Drabkin and Le meccaniche (ca. 1600) translated with introduction and notes by Stillman Drake). The University of Wisconsin Press. Harris, R. (1990). The dialect myth. In J.A. Edmondson, C. Feagin & P. Mühlhäusler (Eds.), Development and diversity: Language variation across time and space: A Festschrift for Charles-James N. Bailey (pp. 3–10). Summer Institute of Linguistics; University of Texas. Hawking, S. (1988). A brief history of time. Bantam. Hobbes, T. (1839). The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (William Molesworth, Ed.). John Bohn. McCullers, C. (1942). A tree. A rock. A cloud. Harper’s Bazaar, 76, 50, 96–99. Mendes-Flohr, P. (2007). Love, accusative and dative: Reflections on Leviticus 19:18. Syracuse University Press. Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. Penguin.

Q&A: David Bade CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? The central argument of my paper was that listening to others should change us, not them, while those who listen to us (whoever that “we” may be) should be both changed by listening and allowed, even expected, to respond. Listening to others presupposes an effort at understanding the language of our interlocutors, which may differ from our own in as many ways as there are ways of speaking in the world. And that means

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David Bade an effort at learning languages, dialects, disciplinary terminology, and all the inflections of social difference that characterize language, an effort that should be incorporated into the curriculum of each student as early as possible. How that language instruction is to be undertaken is a matter of great importance, something Roy Harris indicated in notes to a lecture on bilingualism read before the Sir Robert Taylor Society in 1981: [T]he future of the world in which I shall be living in my foreseeable lifetime is going to depend quite a lot on people’s attitudes to foreigners, foreign cultures, and foreign political systems. And if the kind of foreign language teaching and learning we engage in is simply going to perpetuate misconceptions about such matters –and I fear there is considerable evidence that it has and does –then it seems to me that it would be best for the whole of that part of our present educational system, as at present constituted, just to wither away…. If we are trying to follow in the well-intentioned footsteps of Sir Robert Taylor, if we are in the business of trying to teach Englishmen foreign languages in the 1980s, then let us not start by deceiving ourselves with a lot of facile cultural claptrap about literature, linguistic sophistication, and intellectual values. Let us try to look objectively at what today is known about language, languages, bilingualism, the varieties of language use, the varieties of language function, and the effects of language-teaching programmes.

CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? Harris’ main critiques of what Chomsky calls “the standard theory” are notoriously difficult to grasp, and that seemed to be evident in a number of the comments I heard at the conference, both from other speakers and in remarks from the audience. Harris did not try to establish a linguistics to compete with “the standard theory” in doing the same sorts of things that “the standard theory” attempts to do. Harris replaced the authority of “science” – in particular linguistic science – with the authority of the speaker who has something to say, to someone, at a particular time, in particular circumstances, for a particular reason. To understand language as that sort of activity – rather than as neurochemical activity in no one’s brain in particular – requires us to pay attention to both speaker/writer and listener/reader and all of the political, social, economic, religious, and lived realities of all the participants in any communicative action. The results of such an effort will not be like any science that we have ever known, but, like language itself, will be characterized by temporality and indeterminacy. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field?

Edward said, Roy asked

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One of the most brilliant of all Roy Harris’ writings is the epilog to The Language Machine, in which Saussure’s two talking heads are allowed to speak for themselves. Their language and style of speaking, like their gender, hair, skin color, clothing, political orientations, social perspectives, religious (un)beliefs, educational background and every other aspect of any real human being, are banished from the “speech circuit” for all of that is irrelevant to a language organ as that is posited in linguistic theory. Yet in every real linguistic exchange – spoken or written – ALL of those matters are crucial for understanding and communication to take place. As Harris noted in the passage quoted above, the world in which we live in depends “quite a lot on people’s attitudes to foreigners, foreign cultures, and foreign political systems” and any linguistics that intends to be relevant to that world cannot proceed on the basis of Saussure’s speech circuit or Chomsky’s language organ.

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Three critical perspectives on the ontology of “language” Adrian Pablé

“Language” as a myth? In their highly engaging book Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, Pennycook and Makoni (2019) devote several chapters to the issue of “language” (mass) versus “languages” (count) as part of a holistic approach that challenges (northern) linguistic theory: in fact, the authors propose that it is not only the notion of “a language” (what Saussure termed langue) that is in need of demythologization, but the very notion of “language” itself (i.e., langage in Saussurean terminology). In other words, the authors argue that we need to reformulate our inquiry into the nature of “language” (“What is language itself?”), and they suggest that this be done by adopting southern perspectives that will complement dominant paradigms from the Global North. Linguistic ideologies, the authors remind us, are not limited to beliefs about “languages”, but extend to beliefs about what constitutes “language”. They further argue that the academic debate about language ideology has been an internal one, producing a northern critique of linguistic theory – in fact, a northern critique of northern linguistic theory. However, perpetuating northern epistemologies and ontologies is not in the interest of the authors, whose aim is to develop a southern linguistic theory that can be put to use in applied linguistics. Pennycook and Makoni thus seek to subvert a (northern) commonsense conception of “language” as a “unified underlying principle” (2019, p. 86), which they consider to be ideological, by questioning its universal nature: namely, the thesis that humans are endowed with an innate species-specific language faculty manifesting itself at both the biological and psychological levels as something purely cognitive and abstract. The southern critique of northern linguistic theory is a critique of Cartesian dualism and the idea that “language” has a location, the individual mind, and the collective linguistic system, respectively.1 Arguably the “language” debate in southern theory follows in the footsteps of a posthumanist critique of Western dualist thinking (2019, p. 135), comprising dichotomous notions such as “subject-object”, “human-animal”, “mind-mindless”, “verbal-non-verbal”, “culture-nature”. It is not primarily a controversy

Critical perspectives on the ontology 31 over the semantics of the English word language, or its etymological roots.2 Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 58) make it clear that the envisioned southern project for a more inclusive applied linguistics might benefit from integrational linguistics (which they consider to be “northern scholarship”) when it comes to showing how dominant modes of thinking are flawed. In my own critical integrationist work, I have argued that integrationism is humanist without being committed to the “Language Myth”, unlike other secular forms of humanism (Pablé, 2017). I recently suggested that the posthumanist critique, as presented in Pennycook’s Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (2018), is precisely anthropocentric in its rejection of anthropocentrism (Pablé, 2019): our viewpoint, I argue, is always human and on top of that it is always situated. The (empirically driven) conclusion that animals have “language”, as recently proposed as part of an inclusive linguistics (Cornips, 2019), must ultimately be derived from our own personal experience of “language”. Anything we grasp is ipso facto “humanized” by the very fact of grasping it, i.e., it involves, as the integrationist puts it, the making of signs – human signs. If southern theory is informed by both posthumanism and integrationism, it would seem that southern theory is primarily interested in the latter insofar as it provides a powerful critique of mainstream (northern) linguistics and not as a positive theory with an explanatory power (Harris, 1996, 1998). Pennycook and Makoni do not engage with integrationism in any substantial way in their book regarding Harris’ own views on the ontology of “language”. They refer instead to Harris’ pioneering work on “languages” as a myth (which has become the mainstream way of acknowledging the importance of Harris’ work in sociolinguistics). Integrationists do not consider “language” to be a myth, however. In fact, Pennycook and Makoni (2019) do not mistake one position for the other when discussing Harris. Southern theory would no doubt connect more deeply with an integrational linguistics that declares “language” to be a myth. In its northern intellectual conception, Harris does indeed treat the idea of “language” (a human faculty underlying specific “languages”) as mythical. However, Harris does not dismiss “language” as a lay theoretical concept derived from everyday communicational experience. As the integrationist would argue, “language” plays a crucial role in human interaction – certainly not in all interactions and perhaps in varying degrees across radically different cultures. Moreover, there are individuals who do not use “language” (e.g., because they cannot speak or mustn’t speak), but to deny it as a universal aspect of human communication on the grounds that we cannot speak for all human cultures – past, present, and future – would amount to a denial that there is a human “communicational infrastructure” which is “already in place” (Harris, 1996, p. 24). It would be comparable to denying the universal nature of human gesturing. As a folkmetalinguistic term, “language” is primarily, but not exclusively, reserved for the human domain. The integrationist does not think it problematic that

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“language” has very different linguistic applications and cultural conceptions, but (like the southern theorist) takes a critical position toward the uses of “language” as a scientific term, where it is treated as having some “real definition” (Harris & Hutton, 2007; Hutton, 2019). From an integrational point of view, “language” qua theoretical concept has one major drawback: it does not designate any activity (*the activity of “language”), unlike the commonly recognized “language”-related activities of speaking, listening, writing, and reading. The sociolinguistic term “languaging” has provided redress on that score, but it remains unclear in what way this coinage constitutes an improvement on the more traditional lay vocabulary capturing our linguistic experience.3 The lay orientation of integrationism is of a different kind than the lay orientation of ordinary language philosophy: for the integrationist, the validity of a lay-oriented theoretical concept (like “activity”) is not tied to the grammatical distinctions and morphological possibilities that “a language” makes available (as in the case of the English gerund). I believe that introducing Harrisian linguistics as a positive counterdiscourse (i.e., as a viable alternative to orthodox explanations rather than just a critique) would have been an asset to Pennycook and Makoni’s book, in which the authors promote precisely the linguistic thought of original, radical and marginalized thinkers. Their focus on “applied linguistics” may have been one reason for refraining from devoting a chapter to integrationism. Integrational theory (in this positive conception) is primarily about communication – it is not a “linguistic” theory (though it is a critique of Western linguistics).4 Building on an integrationist conception of communication, the present chapter continues a dialog started at the 2019 IAISLC conference held at Penn State. It seeks to probe further into how southern theory and integrationism may inspire each other, but also to explore the boundaries to their common grounds. It does so by taking ontological questions about “language” as its starting-point, in particular the “multiple language ontologies” argument advanced by Pennycook and Makoni (2019). The last section will introduce the reader to a third holistic approach to the ontology of “language” – one which challenges integrationism and southern theory by drawing on an ontogenetic argument. The challenge has been identified by philosopher of psychology Louis S. Berger (2005, 2011) as adultocentrism, a theoretical bias that Berger ascribes to Harris specifically. However, it is a critique that southern theorists ought to take seriously, and engage with, as well.

The multiple natures of “language” Following Hauck and Heurich (2018), Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 72) concord that “language” (mass) is an “equivocal term”: the idea of language itself, they (2019, p. 74) suggest, may be “pluralizable”. Language, the authors tell us, may have “multiple natures”, adding that we may have been

Critical perspectives on the ontology 33 pluralizing the wrong idea (“a language”). Instead of world views that languages encapsulate, Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 73) propose that worlds may vary in themselves, thus shifting the goalposts from epistemology to ontology. As the authors put it elegantly: “This is not a question of world views based on particular languages but on views of language based in particular world views” (2019, p. 114). It is a thought-provoking position, anti-Whorfian in some sense, which ought not to be easily dismissed. It is, moreover, a position that challenges orthodox science, i.e., the common assumption that the reality of the world is shared and given. This resonates with Harris’ critique presented in The Semantics of Science (Harris, 2005); namely, that there is no privileged view “from nowhere”, just as there is no “language of science” capable of mirroring this mind-independent reality. It is difficult to ascertain whether Harris would have agreed without reservation with the thesis that people from radically different cultures collectively live “in different worlds”, where “language” turns out to have different natures. He never put it in this way, but I think one could make a claim in this direction without being accused of distorting Harrisian thinking. Harris’ aim, however, was ultimately to formulate a general theory, with an emphasis on human commonalities and the individual’s uniqueness, without neglecting the importance of the macrosocial (i.e., the collectively determined) dimension of human communication. It is on the questions of universalism and individualism that southern theory and integrationism might hesitate to fully commit to each other’s positions. Concerning the thesis of a universally shared and given reality, Harris has firmly rejected Aristotelian realism as well as the (Whorfian) thesis of linguistic relativity. At the center of Harris’ world view are human activities – not a mindindependent physical reality, or “languages” as pre-existing deterministic structures. He was suspicious of the claim that we live in the “same” reality, instead subscribing to the view that human life is a continuous process of (re-)contextualization. Pennycook and Makoni, in turn, do not suggest that the physical world is radically different “when we step across some cultural or linguistic divide” (2019, p. 73). The claim is that the categories of nature, culture or language are not predefined: they need to be understood in relation to how people understand their world – and different people (understood collectively as people from different cultures rather than individuals) understand their worlds differently. What may be articulated in noncolonial languages, the authors go on to argue, might be an alternative ontology (rather than an alternative epistemology). They cite the Tlingit of the circumpolar North, whose “alternative ontological water (ice) consciousness” differs radically from a Eurocentric model of categorizing and understanding the natural world. The authors also mention indigenous peoples in Northwestern Canada and in the Amazon, who “frequently enter complex communicative relationships with numerous non-humans, often by using special linguistic forms” (2019, p. 110). In relation to the belief that objects have agency, Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 112) mention the

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African “talking drums” practice of sending messages, the drums imitating speech. These examples (and many more) serve the purpose to illustrate that from the point of view of indigenous cosmovisions, “language” has to be framed “intersemiotically and transmodally” and requires a broader understanding, thereby doing justice to the “particular dynamics of affect between people, animals, plants, and spirits” (2019, p. 112).5 The inclusion of alternative cosmovisions, according to the authors, helps us understand that not all natures of “language” are anthropocentric. To believe that one’s “language” is “sleeping” or “awakening”, Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 81) argue, is not metaphorical (i.e., a metaphor for the northern concepts of “language death” or “language revitalization”), but constitutes an indigenous cosmovision. In the context of a comparison between integrationism and southern theory, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves of a statement made by Harris in a chapter devoted to a critique of “scientific” linguistics, namely that “all linguistics is folk-linguistics” (1990, p. 464), hence including academic linguistics.6 From a southern perspective, it is interesting to point out how in said publication, Harris, a northern linguist, discusses the folklinguistic theories of the Dogon of Mali – not as a quaint piece of folklore to present to a Western readership familiar with scientific linguistics, but to make the point that Western linguistic theory is no more plausible than any “nonscientific” explanation of how linguistic communication works. Implicitly, however, Harris (1990) argues that any explanation of communication which is not general and grounded in personal experience must ultimately feature mystical elements as its explanantia. Harris (1990) focuses on the commonly accepted “circuit de la parole” by Saussure, which he contrasts to the Dogon model. Based on the account provided by the renowned French ethnolinguist Geneviève Calame-Griaule in her book Ethnologie et Langage: La parole chez les Dogon (1963), Harris summarizes the Dogon theory of verbal communication as follows: for the Dogon, words are bodily fluids. Each utterance is said to begin within the body of the speaker as a quantity of fluid secretion, which is warmed in the liver by heat from the heart. The heated verbal fluid vaporizes, and the vapor is expelled by the lungs, in the process acquiring acoustic properties. The vapor gets trapped in the hearer’s ear, then transferred to his/her larynx, condensed into liquid and swallowed. The liquid will have different properties depending on whether the speech was “good” or “bad” (which in turn depends on the vapor rotation, i.e., whether the speech is expelled by filling the right lung followed by the left lung, or vice versa). Good speech, in the form of the swallowed liquid, refreshes the heart and nourishes the liver, while bad speech causes the swallowed liquid to dry, which in turn heats the heart and contracts the liver. The bad verbal liquid is rejected by the liver and passed on to the spleen. The darkened spleen causes all sorts of physical discomfort. Good speech, on the other hand, is seen as “food” for the hearer, as the intestines “digest” the verbal fluid and distribute the extracted nutritive elements to the other parts

Critical perspectives on the ontology 35 of the body. Harris (1990) maintains that this account is no more mythical than the corresponding account of speech acts which European students of linguistics find in their textbooks. Harris (1990) argues as follows: It is worth noting that if Saussure’s ‘scientific’ account is correct, the Dogon folk-linguistic account cannot be entirely incorrect, since the two accounts partially coincide. […] A scientific linguist might well object that no one has ever seen the hypothesized verbal fluid which features in the Dogon account. But a Dogon folk-linguist might equally well object that no one has ever seen an atomic concept in the human brain, of the kind which features in Saussure’s account. And if the process by which the direction of spiral rotation of verbal vapour determines the beneficial or noxious properties of the liquid which the hearer swallows, according to the Dogon account, seems somewhat mysterious, it can hardly be more mysterious than the unexplained way in which Saussure’s speaker and hearer have acquired identically matching stored sets of concepts and sound patterns. Finally, although a Saussurean might protest that the Dogon account simply omits the cognitive phase of ‘understanding’ altogether, a Dogon folk-linguist might complain in return that Saussure’s speech circuit does not explain how speech can cause tears, laughter, anger and other bodily effects. In sum, both the Saussurean and the Dogon folk-linguist can believe in a science of language, and agree that science involves producing good explanations. The difference between them will be that neither thinks the other’s explanation of the speech process worth having. (p. 463) Traditionally, the Dogon would hardly have entertained the idea of a “science” of language, but what they are more likely to have entertained is the idea of a “good explanation”. I am not suggesting here that we should credit Harris with having any particular expertise with southern ways of thinking about “language”. What is noteworthy in the present context is rather that Harris presents his reader with two accounts of linguistic communication, one from the Global North and one from the Global South, without arguing that the former is superior on the basis of its socalled “scientific” status. They are rather presented as two very different accounts derived from different cosmovisions. Words, it would seem, are indeed something very different (ontologically) for the Dogon and for the Saussureans.

A theory of communication rather than a theory of “language” The communication theorist may choose at any point to focus on either of two diametrically opposed views of humanity: the radical diversity between humans on the one hand and their commonalities on the other hand. I do not think that focusing on the latter is necessarily a “northern” ideological

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move, just as focusing on the former is not automatically tantamount to adopting a “southern” perspective. In their book, Pennycook and Makoni (2019) put the focus mainly on how different humans are from each other (e.g., in terms of incommensurable cosmovisions), and from a lay linguistic perspective there are indeed valid reasons for supporting such a thesis. Still, if a connection is to be made between southern theory and the posthumanist turn, it is interesting to note on that score that while the former promotes the notion that human communities are radically different from each other, the latter supports the thesis that humans and non-humans are not that different in the end. From an integrational point of view, it is striking that the two theses are treated as if somehow complementing rather than contradicting one another. Arguably the focus on the radical difference thesis within southern theory is a direct result of its rejection of northern (nonholistic) theories of “language”, which, being “segregational” (Harris, 1996), separate the “linguistic” from the “non-linguistic”. Faced with radically different southern conceptions of what “a language” is and, more importantly, of what “language” is, southern theorists prefer to downplay human commonalities lest they should be judged complicit in the promotion of northern (universalist) paradigms. It could be argued, however, that a holistic approach in linguistics cannot rest on ontological differences between “language” but must turn its attention to the question of whether “communication” might also possess multiple natures. If, as Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 114) suggest, there are “differences in what language may be”, might it not equally be the case that there are differences in what communication may be? In other words, instead of “broaden[ing] the epistemological repertoires of our understanding of language” (2019, p. 114), I am suggesting that we may need to broaden our understanding of communication, namely in such a way that we can state in general terms the conditions for “communication” (self-communication as well as interpersonal communication) to occur without providing a culturally biased definition of communication. This, I believe, is precisely what an integrationist understanding of communication manages to do, given its rejection of the abstract sign. Obviously, “communication” is not an unproblematic concept – it is in many ways as problematic as the “language” concept. Goddard (2009), for instance, has argued that communication (as promoted in Anglophone scholarship) is unsuitable as a concept for the human sciences, being language-specific and culture-bound, while communication scholars from the Global South (e.g., Covarrubias, 2007; Gunaratne, 2009; Yoshitake, 2007) have pointed out on various occasions that communication theory is culturally biased toward a Western cosmovision of “communication”. In Signs, Language, and Communication, Harris presented a very different vision of human communication – one that could not easily be dismissed as ethnocentric. In fact, he proposed that “communication includes all processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs” (1996, p. 11). Communication, Harris argued, is

Critical perspectives on the ontology 37 semiological in nature. “Semiology” is, obviously, a product of northern theory, which the southern theorist might reject on these very grounds. To view communication as involving “signs”, one might argue, is to revert to some form of Saussurean linguistics and thus to admit “languages” (as a northern concept) back into one’s theory. As the southern theorist would rightly object, no communication theory can be both general and culturally biased. This is precisely northern universalism. In a critical response article, the (northern) communication scholar Robert T. Craig (2019) argued that integrationism takes a Western perspective. He also questioned the claim that integrationism may have a special status among the communication theories derived from various northern intellectual traditions. Craig (2019, p. 105) points to a circularity in Harris’ argument, which he formulates as “all communication theory is semiological if and only if we choose to define communication as human sign-making”. He then adds: “For those who are not already-committed integrationists, not all communication theory falls in the domain of semiology” (2019, p. 105). Studying communication processes from a semiological perspective is thus, for Craig, a choice rather than a necessity. Harris, in turn, insists that in order to consider “in a unified way the whole range of our communicational experience” (1996, p. 13) no other view than a semiological one will do, which Craig (2019, p. 105) regards as too narrow for communication theory as a field. This is the exact opposite of what Harris (1996, p. 13) claims: namely, that adopting a nonsemiological perspective would be “too narrow” because it would not be able to “accommodate the sheer diversity” of our communicational experience. Not all (northern) traditions in communication theory, Craig (2019, p. 105) tells the reader, are “centrally concerned with problems of signification”. Moreover, Craig notes that some of them “take no position on the priority of the sign”, adding that in the phenomenological tradition “an authentic experience of communication transcends signs entirely” (2019, p. 106). Of further interest in the present context is Craig’s remark that “non-western traditions are apparently beyond the pale for Harris, but I suspect we can discover several ‘third’ perspectives there as well” (2019, p. 106), alluding to Harris’ claim that there have only been two – mutually exclusive – traditions of theorizing communication, “integrational” and “segregational”. If one is to heed Craig, integrationism only corroborates the critical stance of southern theory: any theory is inherently ethnocentric. Conversely, Craig’s pragmatism – “no theory can serve for all purposes”, but “integrationism is better than other theories for some purposes” (2019, p. 105) – is not a position Harris would have endorsed. Craig’s critique of integrational semiology as too narrow, it could be argued, is merely a reaffirmation of his own (meta-)theoretical bias. The integrationist starts from an understanding of communication centered on the notion of the sign-making agent. Communication is never passive, whatever “roles” we adopt (speaker, listener, overhearer, writer,

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reader, etc.). Harris construes communication as having a radically active, “me”-related sense. Thus, even though we may say things like “something was communicated to me” (or “nothing was communicated to me”), the integrationist insists that we ourselves are the sign-makers. For communication to occur, Harris (1996, p. 63) argues, I have to construct an “integrated sequel” to something which I interpret as an “initiative” from someone else (or based on an observation that I myself make). A communicational initiative only exists from somebody’s point of view. No objective criteria apply in order to ascertain whether there was an initiative in the first place and for whom it was intended, or whether a sequel was produced and, if yes, whether it “complemented” the initiative. Communication processes are radically open, which means that anything can be (re-)interpreted by me (at any time) as anybody’s initiative or anybody’s sequel along the continuum that constitutes my life. Communication, as Harris (2006) puts it, is a perspective, not a fact. The integrationist thus admits the first-person perspective as the only human communicational reality. Anything “exists” for me in the present circumstances: I engage in acts of interpretation, whether I am participating in a heated philosophical discussion with someone or turning the door knob (for a millionth time) to get out of my room (and back in again). Whatever it is I am doing (including doing nothing), it requires the making of signs on my part – if it is to count as an activity. However, the Harrisian sign is not the sign as traditionally conceived in northern semiotic and semiological theories: the integrational sign is radically indeterminate in both form and meaning (Harris & Hutton, 2007). It is a creation in the here-and-now that serves a particular integrational function for someone. What needs to be integrated by means of the sign is my, and other people’s, activities – at various levels. The sign is held to be “radically indeterminate” by the integrationist because the sign conception in northern (segregational) theories presupposes a third-person perspective, i.e., it involves a decontextualization of the sign. The decontextualization consists in positing that whether something is a sign at all for me, and what it means for me in the present circumstances, is a question that can be established by somebody else. Arguably, from the point of view of the sign-makers themselves (i.e., the first-person perspective), the sign is not indeterminate at all. Instead, its function and meaning depend on its contextualization, which in turn presupposes agency: I make it mean something (whether that suffices for its successful integration for the present communicational purposes is a different question). If we accept the contextualized sign as the only semiological reality, we also accept its universality. Saussure declared semiology to be a “science”. No such claim can be attributed to an integrational semiology, which is why one cannot dismiss out of hand any universalist claim on the part of integrationism. Harris’ lay-orientation is not confined to the conceptualization of the sign as personal, but crucially relies on the insight that human life consists in a continuous integration of time-bound activities of various kinds. This insight is reached by considering

Critical perspectives on the ontology 39 one’s personal communicational biography, from which any generalization must start. Based on this, the integrationist concludes that “communication processes”, “activities”, and “integration” are human universals. Moreover, the integrationist believes that human communication in general is constrained biomechanically, circumstantially, and macrosocially (Harris, 1998). These three parameters operate interdependently and as such cannot constitute empirical criteria for a “scientific” linguistics. For instance, it is impossible to determine where exactly the boundaries lie between the circumstantial and the macrosocial parameters. No two individuals are ever constrained by the parameters in identical ways. The parameters constitute lay perspectives and laypeople may focus on any one parameter or any combination of them in their analyses. Linguists are equally inclined to restrict their research focus to one dimension, e.g., the macrosocial parameter in sociolinguistics and in critical applied linguistics: the integrationist objects to this practice (as part of the institutionalized activity) on the grounds that it is reductionist. Nobody is ever only constrained macrosocially in any communicative situation. The macrosocial factors (including radically different understandings of “language”) are highly variable across cultures and communities but cannot ultimately override how the individual integrates what is presently going on with his/her (remembered) past experience and (anticipated) future experience. The “now” presupposes that there was a “before” and that there will be an “after” (another universal, another lesson drawn from personal experience). Any claim in support of the human–animal continuum (or, as it were, the human–alien continuum) needs to be checked against another one of Harris’ core concepts, that of the “communicational infrastructure”. As Harris (1996, p. 24) argues, we are born into a world which has a certain communicational infrastructure already in place. […] Its existence predetermines the range of communicational possibilities available to us. […] This range of possibilities structures our communicational universe. This species-specific infrastructure, then, is given, and it is given to all human beings. As humans we are biomechanically (mentally and physiologically) as well as circumstantially constrained in certain ways. Phylogenetically, humans have been subject to physiological changes (e.g., human height), but even the presently tallest and shortest man on earth are perfectly able to communicate with each other. The differences are not such as to justify talking about different human infrastructures, though circumstantially and biomechanically the communicational possibilities may of course be limited in certain ways if, say, one person measures 2.30 m and the other person measures 1.30 m. Moreover, we are not beings born already fully developed (in terms of our mental and bodily capacities), which explains the remarkable communicational

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differences between adults and neonates. But adults and neonates, Harris (1996) argues, communicate constantly (for the latter it is a matter of survival). Some scholars believe that the human neonate and the human adult live in incommensurable worlds. In fact, we do not remember anything about our lives as neonates. There are hardly any points of connection between the baby I once was and the adult that I now am. At the same time, there are equally good reasons to claim that the human baby is a thousand times closer to the human adult than it is to the gorilla baby: in fact, there are no shared interspecies communicational infrastructures which diversify at some point, e.g., once the human child supposedly acquires “a language”. What makes the difference between the human and the non-human being is communication (not to be construed as linguistic communication): the activities may be the same (e.g., suckling), but the biomechanical and circumstantial factors constraining how the activities are integrated are different. Even though different species may exhibit similar anatomical traits, it doesn't follow that their communicational universes partly match. Infrastructures are discontinuous and species-specific. Lastly, human communities may have developed divergent culture-dependent institutional practices (interpersonal integration) and highly differentiated place-dependent skills (environmental integration), but the limits within which our communicational possibilities develop are immutable.

Adultocentrism: A challenge for integrationism and southern theory? Nonsegregational theories of language are a rarity in northern scholarship. A remarkable exception is Louis S. Berger’s ontogenetic approach to “language” (e.g., Berger, 2005, 2011). Berger, a philosopher and clinical psychologist, mentions Roy Harris’ work favorably in several of his books, especially in connection with Harris’ critique of orthodox linguistics. However, Berger refers to integrational linguistics as “adultocentric”, i.e., integrationism takes the human adult as the point of departure for its theorizing, which distorts how we understand human ontology – an ontology which, according to Berger, is that of being a “person-in-the-world”.7 In other words, adultocentrism fragments what is “unboundaried” (Berger, 2005). Berger holds that Harris’ general approach is “adultocentric, intralogical, essentially epistemological rather than ontological let alone ontogenetic” (2005, p. 161). Berger’s stance turns out be more radical than Harris’ (a rare distinction), insofar as the former asks for more indeterminacy rather than less. As Berger makes clear, “any understanding of language that is truly integrational needs to attend to ontogenesis, because that is where the roots of the holistic ties are to be found”. Harris, it seems, failed to notice that “the undoing of fragmentation ought to begin at the beginning” (Berger, 2005, p. 161), though I shall return to Harris’

Critical perspectives on the ontology 41 adultocentrism in the second part of this section. Berger takes a universalist approach to human ontology – an ontology he thinks can only be properly addressed by acknowledging the mystery of “ineffability” – and insists that we need to turn our attention to the “ineffable neonatal unitary world” (2011, p. 67), the state of “being-at-one-with-the-world” (2011, p. 57). This holistic phase in our early life is characterized by absence of dualist distinctions (self-other, subject-object, something-nothing, internal-external, past-present-future). Berger talks about a “hatching” stage—some sort of “psychological birth”—that the infant undergoes, when introduced to the adult’s dual world: what was nameless becomes linguistically labeled. Some of Berger’s critique must resonate with the southern theorist: in particular his insistence that questions about ontology take priority over epistemology. Also, Berger’s rejection of dualist (scientific) thinking parallels the southern emphasis that indigenous cosmovisions do not apply northern categorizations to reality. Lastly, the southern theorist will agree with Berger’s “linguistic ineffability” thesis, which indirectly supports the “multiple language ontologies” argument (because it, too, challenges the determinate nature of “language”). There are also obvious divergences between the two approaches. Southern theory takes an adultocentric standpoint, and necessarily so: its critique is socio-politically motivated. Berger’s ontogenetic framework must be frowned upon by the southern theorist in some respects, e.g., for positing that there is a specific ontology that all human beings share (albeit for a short period), a thesis that southern theorists may consider problematic for its explicit universalism. Unlike southern theorists, Berger pursues no political ends (other than demystifying academic disciplines) and warns against the essentializing nature of language. In turn, the raison d’être of southern theory is arguably linguistic essentialism: the political instrumentalization of two linguistic labels, North and South, which Pennycook and Makoni (2019, p. 5) admit are highly ambiguous: “The South may also be in the North, and […] the geographical South by no means guarantees a southern viewpoint”. Does the ontogenetic challenge apply to integrationism? While it could be argued, against southern theory, that a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication is possible (if premised on integrational principles), it is more difficult to argue that integrationism is radically holistic (in Berger’s sense). How might integrationism respond to the charge that it is adultocentric? In terms of its bedrock concepts (Hutton, 2019), integrationism seems to endorse some form of dualism: the distinction between “self ” and “other”, for instance, is crucial to Harrisian semiology. So is the insight that (my present) personal linguistic experience constitutes the only “terra firma” (Harris, 1981, p. 204) from which to understand “language” – an adultocentric bias, as Berger would point out. The integrationist, in turn, acknowledges that our communicational biography started with our birth (and arguably a good deal prior to that); however, it is epistemologically grounded in the here-and-now. Though we experienced it,

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in fact, we cannot personally recall any of the early communication processes we were engaged in, nor can we somehow imagine what our neonate experience was like.8 The Harrisian starting point is everyday linguistic experience, on which a general theory of human communication is to be constructed. It is drawn from the only standpoint we have, that of being “in medias res”. Taking this particular point of departure, namely “now”, Harris works his way back to the beginnings of our personal communicational biography, to the time “before communication” (Harris, 1996). One of the core concepts of integrational theory, i.e., “activity”, is indeed adultocentric insofar as the majority of human activities presuppose a macrosocial background against which they unfold. It is difficult to conceive of human activities in any other way. At the same time, the integrationist believes that babies engage in activities as well, though we cannot directly relate to them. The activities the baby engages in, at any rate, are of a very different nature from the activities the adult engages in: the former are “only” constrained biomechanically and circumstantially, while the latter are also constrained macrosocially – they include, for example, what laypeople commonly refer to as “linguistic” activities (the southern theorist might object that in some cosmovisions the baby’s crying constitutes “language”. Berger would probably agree with the objection). If we assume an ontogenetic perspective, there can be no general theory of human communication which is not at the same time adultocentric (in some sense). “Language” and linguistic communication must be a mystery for anyone who considers the human being ontogenetically in Berger’s sense: how can aconceptual experience develop into conceptual experience? No theory (let alone “science”) of experience could provide a satisfactory account. Berger (2011) raises an interesting point when he remarks: Were researches of animal behavior to infer something about an animal’s inner experiences from behavioral observations, they would be severely criticized for their anthropomorphism, and rightly so. I maintain that unless we are wearing our civilian hats […], we have no more justification for drawing such inferences from infant studies than we do from animal studies. (p. 51) For Berger, the Harrisian notion of “lay-orientation” would have to be rejected because neonates hold no lay views about anything nor do they reflect on, or analyze, their communicational experiences. When adults attempt to do this (in their stead), Berger implies, it is almost – but not quite – as if they “anthropomorphized” the baby’s inner life. Berger is not claiming that human babies are like animals: he is saying that we do not know anything about the inner lives of either. They are unknowable. Still, there is a connection between adult and baby that goes far beyond the “connection” established in evolutionary biology between man and ape. I can look at a photo of myself as a baby and say “That’s me”. We may (and often do)

Critical perspectives on the ontology 43 recognize our adult selves in our baby selves (albeit not in terms of a continuum of inner experience). Conversely, you don’t see “yourself” in the chimpanzee (nor, arguably, do you see “your remote ancestor”). Our sense of self is experientially grounded, which is why the self is a “bedrock concept” in integrationism (Hutton, 2019). It is arguably a sense of “postholistic” self. As far as early childhood is concerned, our self is entirely (re-) constructed. This is where the “other” becomes truly essential (parents, older siblings, relatives), together with extant materials such as photographs, video films, etc. This rupture with our own past experience is, for the most part, inconsequential for the communicational purposes of the here-andnow, as opposed to being unable to remember – and integrate – one’s immediate past, which is communicationally far more consequential (adultocentrism again). Concerning the question of the ontological nature of “language”, the three holistic approaches discussed here – southern theory, ontogenesis, and integrationism – all provide unorthodox answers based on very different sources of understanding, commonly ignored or downplayed in orthodox linguistics because of their radical nature. For the southern theorist, those sources are the many indigenous ontologies and epistemologies which the North has either neglected or discursively appropriated. For Berger (2005, p. 123), it is the “undifferentiated unitary neonate”, whose prelinguistic experiences “provide a broad and integrating basis” for all the “special structuralizations” that later come to characterize the adult’s experiential world – a world differentiated by language. Lastly, for the integrationist, that source is the “terra firma” of our own personal experience, grounded in the adult me, here-and-now.9

Notes 1 For a discussion of “mind” as an Anglo concept perpetuated (crossculturally) in modern cognitive and linguistic science, see Levisen (2019). 2 The “language (mass)” concept and the “language (count)” concept as used in ordinary as well as scientific English have been analyzed by Goddard (2009) from a (northern) universalist approach known as Natural Semantic Metalanguage. 3 Unlike Goddard (2009), however, the integrationist does not wish to argue that “languaging” is conceptually too complex for any non-native speaker of English to fully grasp and hence unsuitable as a theoretical term. 4 It is interesting on that score that the term communication does not feature in the index of Pennycook and Makoni’s book. 5 Pennycook and Makoni remain silent on the issue of human–animal communication as a “Global North” phenomenon (beyond the common practice of talking to one’s pets). For example, St. Francis of Assisi is said to have been conversing with animals in the wild, even preaching to them. The animals did not talk back to him, but are said to have understood him and displayed their understanding to him in various ways. The main difference is that in Francis’ days talking to wild animals (or to trees, etc.) was looked upon as extraordinary or delusional, respectively, i.e., it was not a community-wide macrosocial practice, as it may be (or may have been) among communities in the Global South.

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6 However, whether Harris’ integrational linguistics is itself a form of “folklinguistics”, obviously depends on whether we adopt a Western academic view of what counts as “folklinguistics”. But even if we do not, it needs to be pointed out that integrational linguistics, for Harris, is “lay-oriented” rather than a “lay theory”. 7 Berger does not specify what he means by “adult”, i.e., whether he defines it based on age, puberty, cognitive development, etc. 8 In Luc Besson’s movie Lucy (2014), the human inability to remember early childhood is said to be due to our low cerebral activity, i.e., we cannot take full conscious control over our brains. After ingesting a synthetic drug which greatly enhances her brain capacity, the film’s protagonist Lucy gains “superhuman” mental abilities. Among other things, she is now able to remember what it felt like when, as a one-year old, she stroked the smooth fur of her Siamese cat. 9 Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank Sinead Kwok and the editors for commenting on earlier drafts of this article.

References Berger, L. S. (2005). The unboundaried self: Putting the person back into the view from nowhere. Trafford Publishing. Berger, L. S. (2011). Language and the ineffable. Lexington Books. Calame-Griaule, G. (1963). Ethnologie et langage: la Parole chez les Dogon. Gallimard. Cornips, L. (2019). The final frontier: Non-human animals on the linguistic research agenda. In J. Berns & E. Tribushinina (Eds.). Linguistics in the Netherlands 2019 (pp. 13–19). John Benjamins. Covarrubias, P. (2007). (Un)Biased in Western theory: Generative silence in American Indian communication. Communication Monographs, 74(2), 265–271. Craig, R. T. (2019). Welcome to the metamodel: A reply to Pablé. Empedocles, 10(1), 101–108. Goddard, C. (2009). The ‘communication’ concept and the ‘language’ concept in everyday English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 29(1), 11–25. Gunaratne, S. (2009). Emerging global divides in media and communication theory: European universalism and non-Western reactions. Asian Journal of Communication, 19(4), 366–383. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Duckworth. Harris, R. (1990). On ‘folk’ and ‘scientific’ linguistic beliefs. In L. S. Tsohatzidis (Ed.). Meanings and prototypes (pp. 449–464). Routledge. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language and communication. Routledge. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. Pergamon Press. Harris, R. (2005). The semantics of science. Continuum Press. Harris, R. (2006). Integrationist notes and papers 2003–2005. Tree Tongue. Harris, R. & Hutton, C. (2007). Definition in theory and practice. Continuum Press. Hauck, J. D. & Heurich, G. O. (2018). Language in the Amerindian imagination: An inquiry into linguistic natures. Language & Communication, 63, 1–8. Hutton, C. (2019). Integrationism and the self: Reflections on the legal personhood of animals. Routledge. Levisen, C. (2019). Biases we live by: Anglocentrism in linguistics and cognitive sciences. Language Sciences 76. Article 101173.

Critical perspectives on the ontology 45 Pablé, A. (2017). Secular humanist discourses on rationality. Explorations in the philosophy of language and communication. In A. Pablé (Ed.). Critical humanist perspectives (pp. 13–27). Routledge. Pablé, A. (2019). Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, 230, 150–159. 102735. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Routledge. Pennycook, A. & Makoni, S. (2019). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. Routledge. Yoshitake, M. (2007). An Asiacentric reflection on Eurocentric bias in communication theory. Communication Monographs, 74(2), 272–278.

Q&A: Adrian Pablé CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? In spite of its name, integrational linguistics is not a discipline or field on a par with applied linguistics, or sociolinguistics. Nor is it a sub-discipline of either. Harris’ IL was meant primarily as a critique of commonly accepted ideas in academic linguistics, among them the very idea that a “scientific” approach to language and languages was possible. Applied to the particular case of language, integrational linguistics is interested in exploring how we make communicational sense of our linguistic experience. The integrational focus, however, lies on communication given that integrationists do not think “languages” as scientifically describable objects exist. Whether “linguistic experience” constitutes a delimitable phenomenon of its own is questionable on the grounds that we do not experience “language” separately from the rest of the activities that make up the communication processes we engage in (Does reading count as a “linguistic” activity? What about thinking?). In my paper I point out that applied linguistics (as exemplified in Pennycook and Makoni’s book) focuses on “language” in a way the integrationist cannot commit to. Applied linguistics cannot subscribe to an integrational view on communication, as it is concerned with pedagogical and political aspects of language teaching and language policy, which by their very nature require an approach that transcends the individual level of sign-making. Applied linguistics has no particular view on communication theory, while integrational linguistics cannot be “applied” to achieve particular communicational purposes of a pedagogical or political nature. My paper seeks connections between integrationism and southern theory in a different direction: both approaches, in fact, purport to be “holistic”. In this respect, I think the intellectual domain of southern theory is philosophy of language (as with integrationism). Southern theory provides alternative accounts on

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Adrian Pablé language and languages that are little known to integrationists, while integrationism provides universal accounts of human communication that the southern theorist can commit to without having to give up the macrosocial emphasis on difference.

CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? What struck me in particular at the conference was a point raised on several occasions by scholars in African Studies against integrational semiology. In many African cultures, in fact, (linguistic) experience is said to exist as shared. Thus experience, it was admitted, can be personal but it also is (and crucially so) collective. From what I gathered, this was not primarily an epistemological stance, but one that regarded the ontological nature of experience. The argument was presented, roughly, as follows: while the North may think (linguistic) experience is individual and personal (universally speaking), this is no more than a cultural belief. It is not ontologically true for the South: there is no universal way that human experience “is”. This poses a challenge to integrational theory: for the integrationist, experience is a semiological process, and signs are made by the individual sign-maker. Even when there are two sign-makers integrating each other’s activities, or a whole village gathered together, the integrationist would still insist that each signmaker is making their own signs individually. No sign is ‘shared’ or can mean “the same” for any two persons. These were moments when a cultural divide concerning questions of ontology was palpable. I realize now that the aim cannot be to convince the other party of one’s own theoretical convictions. As I argue in my paper, there are different holistic perspectives within non-segregational traditions (e.g., on the ontology of “language”), but there is no supra-holistic structure that brings the various approaches together. The approaches remain, to some extent, incommensurate. I don’t see this as something negative. Mutual critical engagement is the only way to advance the “new linguistics” that both integrationists and southern theorists envisage for the future. What unites the approaches is a certain way of thinking holistically and a non-compromising stance on segregationism. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? My paper introduces a third holistic (non-segregational) approach that might be relevant for future interdisciplinary scholarship in southern theory and integrationism. This third paradigm, embracing an ontogenetic view on the person, maintains that all other holistic approaches are “adultocentric”. If that is so, both southern theory and integrationism

Critical perspectives on the ontology 47 need to engage with their own “adultocentrism”, defend their position (if it is defensible) but also reflect on the theoretical consequences of their adultocentrism. A conference organized by scholars in southern (linguistic) theory and integrationism with a theme on adultocentrism would be a welcome and new way of bringing the two approaches into a dialog. It would ask scholars to engage with both southern and northern (adultocentric) views on human ontology, the beginnings of human life, human development, language acquisition, and adult-neonate communication as well as with the (linguistic) ideologies that such views entail. It would be a conference emphasizing questions of ontology and epistemology. Southern theory and integrational linguistics both take a critical stance toward linguistics as a ‘northern’ field of knowledge. Both approaches have a vision of the future of linguistics as radically different from how linguistics is being taught at universities these days. On writing this paper I realized that the future of linguistics needs to be both “lay-oriented” and “folklinguistic”. This is a goal that southern theory and integrationism combined can achieve. It also means that northern linguistic scholarship will become one particular branch of folklinguistics (on a par with southern conceptions), admittedly however a branch that has greatly influenced our lay thinking about language and communication. I believe that ethnocentric and non-ethnocentric views on human (linguistic) communication can both become an integral part of this new linguistics. The former studies the macrosocial (i.e., collective) aspects of our thinking about language (from a decontextualized perspective) while the latter explains human communication “integrationally”, based on the biomechanical, circumstantial and macrosocial parameters (as they operate interdependently).

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Integrationism, individualism, and personalism: The politics of essentialism Christopher Hutton

Integrationism reflects a set of individualist assumptions. This is not set out explicitly as a foundational principle, but a rejection of antiindividualism and collectivism of linguistics runs through the totality of integrational writings. The creativity of each act of speaking and writing, as well as listening and reading, puts the individual at the center of an unfolding and dynamic process of sign-making. Any claim to a thirdperson perspective on sign-making is viewed as an illegitimate form of reductionism. Integrationism denies the possibility of a methodology that allows us to assign definitively and objectively meanings to utterances, texts, and to human behavior in general. The individual’s unique experiences, according to Roy Harris, are the terra firma on which any reflections about language must be built (1981, p. 204). In a humanistic critique of modern linguistics, individuals are understood as agents who create and recreate signs, situated within the flow of time and against a background of contingency and indeterminacy. Communication escapes capture in any systems-based model (Harris, 1987, pp. 163–174). It follows that modern linguistics, in denying this agency, disempowers the individual, and obscures the creativity that all individuals bring to their interactions. Saussure’s model of langue reflected a collectivist viewpoint on “Europe’s most critical social and political problems in the first half of the twentieth century”, in that (Harris, 1980): Its quasi-mystical appeal to the absolute sovereignty of the community, its deliberate subordination of the linguistic role of the individual, and its presentation of la langue as a kind of psychological manifestation of collective uniformity can hardly have counted for nothing in its rapid and widespread acceptance[.] (p. 157) Harris appears here as a representative of classic English liberalism grounded in Lockean notions of self-ownership and the mini-sovereignty of the individual (Locke, [1690] 1980, p. 19), in a clash with European collectivist Romanticism, as found in theories of Volk identity from the early nineteenth century (Fichte, 1808).

The politics of essentialism 49 This paper presents aspects of the interrelationship between integrationism and language politics, concluding that its own model of the self cannot escape intellectual and political challenge. It is argued that the lay-oriented stance of integrationism potentially complements the language politics of Southern Theories, in that integrationism’s lay orientation could in principle open the door to the recognition of hitherto ignored or marginalized voices. At the same time, the notion of personalism is suggested as providing a superior foundational concept for integrationism.

Systems theory Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure, 1922) is often seen, together with the work of C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), as one of the founding texts of modern semiology or semiotics. Semiotics is a branch of modern systems theory, according to which systems change and reorganize themselves in unpredictable ways in response to external stimuli (a process known as “autopoiesis”). For the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, the self is epiphenomenal, and individual or even collective agency cannot steer the direction of social change (Luhmann, 1986). Similarly, in the case of Saussure’s langue, there is no way for the individual speaker, or the speech community, to act directly upon the system. The individual produces willed acts of parole, but these only contingently and unpredictably coalesce into changes at the system’s level. The values at the level of system are purely arbitrary, in that they are not tied to any external properties or factors – in contrast to the value of land, for example (Saussure, 1922). Different linguistic systems, or langues, may be incommensurable one with the other, but these differences are not presented as reflecting distinct, historically embedded cultures. For Saussure, while there can be a linguistics of diachrony, there can be no coherent sociocultural or historical narrative which focuses on the language system. The individual self is a node in Saussure’s system, and individual selves – the “talking heads” – occupy interchangeable positions in relation to the values established by the system (Harris, 1987, pp. 163–174; Saussure, 1922, p. 27). Folk beliefs, such as the belief that words are names of things, are external to the system and do not characterize it (Saussure, 1922, p. 98). Similarly, Chomsky’s paradigm reflects the broad framework of systems theory. The distinction between E-language and I-language is an assertion of the primacy of system over the disordered world of experience (Chomsky, 2007). The deep autonomy of the system is even more radical than is the case of Saussure, in that the system is not accessible to consciousness. There is ultimately one invariant system which is common to, and identical in, all members of the human species, and which shares no characteristics with the biological underpinnings of animal communication. The language faculty has no history, nor did it evolve gradually, but rather arose as a result of a “saltational leap”. It lies beyond human agency (Hutton, 2010). Formalist

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linguistics offers a model of structure without individual self or agency, whereas integrationism argues for self and agency without structure (see Duncker, 2017, 2019; Hutton, 2017).

Macrosocial politics? One of the three parameters constraining or shaping human communication is identified by Harris as the macrosocial (see Harris, 1998, p. 29; Pablé & Hutton, 2015, pp. 24–28). This suggests a supra-individual set of constraints that stand outside the first-order flow of communication, apparently running counter to the individualism of integrationism. Harris writes that language change at this level occurs when the results of individual to individual “adaptation to communicational requirements” become “visible at the macro-linguistic level of community-wide behaviour” (Harris, 1981, p. 164). Changes are revealed “when communicative behaviour is studied en masse” (Duncker, 2019, p. 109; Harris, 1984, p. 280). At first sight, this is a strikingly Saussurean account of language change, with volitional acts at the level of parole coalescing into changes at the level of langue. However, for Harris, these changes are “visible” as social perceptions, whereas for Saussure, their visibility or salience is a secondary matter. Yet, the status of the macrosocial remains problematic within integrational theory. One way to reconcile the macrosocial with the contextualism of integrationism is to understand the macrosocial as a projection of individual acts of integration in their contexts, rather than as an autonomous level of intersubjective reality. The macrosocial is in this sense constructed locally. Alternatively, it is a lay category, a kind of inchoate common sense constructed out of background regularities and aggregated experiences which cannot be made more precise by academic investigation. Given its individualism, integrationism lacks an explicit politics of language at this macrosocial level. Yet Harris argues that communities and societies are also language makers, and should, like individuals, take responsibility for their language usage and metalinguistic beliefs (Harris, 1989; Hutton, 1996; Pablé, 2012). Mythologies reflect the societies that create or foster them (Harris, 1987, p. 170), and societies in the grip of the language myth deny or repress awareness of the individual creativity that underlies language use. As Harris contends (1981): A demythologised linguistics would be an investigation of the renewal of language as a continuously creative process. Awareness of this process is the all-pervasive and perhaps the only authentic characteristic of the individual’s involvement in language. In this sense the aim of a demythologised linguistics would be to provide an account of linguistic experience. (p. 164)

The politics of essentialism 51 It is in this “authentic” experience that we find “that renewal of language which is our living inheritance” (Harris, 1981, p. 152). For Harris, demythologization is a process that happens both at the individual and the societal level. It involves recognition of “the mythological processes which language itself engenders”. Linguistic inquiry proceeds according to these processes, but it must also transcend them: Harris 1987 “Only then and thus can language makers become language masters, and a society enter into its linguistic inheritance” (Harris, 1987, p.174). The notions of “living inheritance” and “linguistic inheritance” are, however, not fully explicated. The term “linguistic inheritance” is also used by Harris in a discussion of John Wilkins’s “ideal character” (Wilkins, 1688). There Harris (2005) comments: “I see no prospect of extracting a semantically sanitized language of science from the soiled tangle of non-scientific verbiage that is our linguistic inheritance” (p. 175). But in this context, unlike in the quotation from the Language Machine, linguistic inheritance is already in our possession, rather than being something that is aspired to. In the Language Machine, one can identify a distinct element of logophobia, in that it is language itself that creates myths about language, presumably through the affordances of reification that it provides. For linguistics, the primary reification is achieved through writing, especially printing. Harris suggests that these mythological processes must be countered by conscious intellectual work, as a form of societal therapy. This is a view associated with General Semantics (Hayakawa, 1990; Korzybski, 1994), an overtly social-therapeutic movement, one of whose offshoots is Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Harris made the therapeutic point as follows: “everyone who would rather not end up as a dope of communication needs a personal communication survival kit” (Harris, 1996, p. 265). In the Language Machine, Harris identifies contemporary society as suffering “from the pollution of its communicational space” (1987, p. 172). This is Harris’s most Swiftian work (see Swift, 1712), though he would have rejected the comparison, in that Harris links decline and crisis to jargon within “a semantically bemused society” (1987, p. 172). More generally, there is uncertainty within integrationism as to whether its primary task is the demythologization of the academic discipline of linguistics, together with the Western intellectual tradition on which it draws, or whether the goal is a radical demythologization of metalinguistic beliefs that pervade Western societies. What a demythologized society would look like in practice is unclear. Terms like “community” and “society” are also question begging, since integrationism would look sceptically upon sociological or anthropological attempts to provide definitions of these terms; yet a demythologizing politics by its very nature would be interpersonal, institutional, societal, etc. To put the point another way, there is no clear guidance within integrationism as to the nature of the politics of demythologization in practice and the institutional order which would be required in order to underwrite a therapeutic agenda at the level of community or society.

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Expertise and the linguist Unlike sociolinguistics and Southern Theories, integrationism has not been tied to a clearly identifiable political agenda (Hutton, 2011), with sometime students of Roy Harris and integrationists taking up an array of political and ideological positions. In sensibility, however, integrationism reflects a paradoxical form of antinomian rebellion originating at the heart of the British academic establishment, the University of Oxford, while never becoming any kind of orthodoxy or institutionally recognized theoretical orientation. Its “lay” orientation suggests a form of anti-elitism, in that “the language-user already has the only concept of a language worth having” (Harris, 1980, p. 3). In this sense, “everybody is a linguist” (Harris, 1998, p. 20). But the question then becomes how to represent or mediate lay speaker views, returning the linguist to the role of “objective” commentator and expert. Expertise in the social sciences is inextricably bound up with the alienated reflexivity constituted by social distance, which is in tension with (or in contradiction to) engaged social critique or polemical commentary. For example, Jaspers (2014) sought in vain to embed the term informal urban vernacular in journalistic accounts of speech styles associated with Belgian youth of Turkish or North African heritage, as opposed to an array of stigmatizing labels such as Murkish, Illegaals, Kebab-Flemish. One could understand this encounter in terms of expert-lay interaction, in which the linguist attempted (unsuccessfully) to correct lay usage. Alternatively, there were two forms of professional opinion in conflict, and the linguist’s view was simply a political position without any claim to disciplinary authority. Modernity creates the possibility of imagining an objective space from which society may be observed and analyzed, yet the accompanying reflexivity makes such a space impossible to sustain fully. In displacing traditional dogmas and religious beliefs, Enlightenment thought did not however create epistemological certainty, since one of its fundamental characteristics is the questioning of the foundations of belief systems: “the reflexivity of modernity actually undermines the certainty of knowledge” (Giddens, 1991, p. 21). Giddens’s concept of the “double hermeneutic” reifies the distinction between abstract expertise and embedded practice, yet it also associates them in a system of circulation and interaction. Giddens sees modernity and its institutions as performing a process of disembedding, that is, “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts and their rearticulation across indefinite tracts of time-space” (Giddens, 1991, p. 18). Expertise is the marker of modernity, but with the transition from modernity to postmodernity, it is undercut by a proliferation of frames of reference and the marketization of knowledge (Bauman, 1987).

The politics of essentialism 53 For integrationism, the location of expertise likewise becomes a key concern. As Harris (1997) argued: A linguistic theorist speaks with no greater authority and insight about language than a baker or a bus-conductor. I doubt whether it is possible to become a linguistic theorist of any stature without reminding oneself constantly of that fact. (p. 151) This suggests that, in integrational theory, the category of “linguistic theorist” remains in place, albeit with a deferred and uncertain claim to authority: “all linguistics is folk linguistics” (Harris, 1990, p. 464). It is unclear whether this statement would loop back to include integrational linguistics, since integrationism is both lay oriented yet also intellectually reflexive in a way that lay linguistics is not. In Davis (2001, p. 1), the adoption of a “folktheoretical approach” provides analytical purchase on language use: “it is by the expression of their own reflexive understandings that lay speakers are able to impose regularities and constraints upon language use”. This parallels, to a degree, the framework of linguistic anthropology, within which language ideologies are defined as the “beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use, which often index the political economic interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups, and nation-states” (Kroskrity, 2010, p. 192). The integrationist, however, would find the term “index” problematic, since it suggests an externally observable mapping between a concept or belief and a social category. Reflecting a form of cultural Marxism, this kind of analysis takes the form of seeing through or laying bare covert language ideologies and is often focused on issues of inequality, colonialism, and social institutions that enact or promote forms of oppression (see Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). Thus, while integrationism often attracts interest from left-progressive scholars in virtue of its rejection of key tenets of the Western intellectual tradition – a stance which can be read as an attack on class-based elitism and ethnocentrism – it falls short of claiming more explicit politics along the lines of postcolonial theory, cultural Marxism, feminism, and so on. Committed politics require the reification of key concepts and invoke deterministic readings of texts or discourses (as in critical strands of Applied Linguistics). These radical approaches can appear to the integrationist as a form of decontextual or “segregational” thinking. Within left-progressive academia, the strategy of de-essentializing is directed primarily at suspect political discourses, such as racialization in the media, gender essentialism, linguistic prescriptivism, etc. Integrationism runs the risk of being labeled, on closer inspection, as ivorytower scepticism, rather than as a radical, lay-oriented, intervention in language politics. Harris himself moved away from the Swiftian cultural pessimism of his work in the 1980s to emphasize integrationism as primarily a semiology grounded in radical indeterminacy (see Harris, 1998).

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Models of the self One potential criticism of integrationism is that, as a philosophical position, it reflects Western individualism. The integrational self, on this view, is the autonomous, self-aware, and atomistic inner reality posited by Western philosophers from the eighteenth century onwards, rather than a universal feature of the human psychological make-up. This notion of self is, arguably, a secular reworking of the Christian concept of the soul (Hutton, 2019). From this, it follows that society is understood as an aggregation of selves, in that this notion of the individual self is central to political liberalism of the laissez-faire variety and to the ideological assumptions of common law systems. The modern, initially Western, model of the self is grounded in a distinction between the inner and outer facets of the human individual. This represents a contrast between the inner self, the secularized, unique “soul” which forms the private reality that makes up the authentic self, and the persona, the person, who faces the world and who is defined by appearance, performance, social relationships, and social status and role. The tension between these two is fundamental to modernity. Modernity laid down the preconditions to create this authentic, private self, most notably through notions of secular individualism, at the same time as it demanded that this self be compromised or in part suppressed, given the demands of social order, family structure, social norms, commercial and bureaucratic work systems, etc. The tension between the inner self and the social persona threatens the modern individual with lack of fulfillment, or worse, a potential feeling of inauthenticity and even humiliation in the face of overwhelmingly powerful social and economic forces. Added to this is the intellectual assault on the autonomy and authenticity of this private self which emerged almost simultaneously with its articulation, in the work of David Hume in particular ([1738] 1888): There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. (p. 252) However, the individual was “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” ([1738] 1888, p. 252). The denial of individual autonomy and agency was key to a range of disciplines that emerged under the impact of Darwinism. This became the systems theory critique of the self, where private authentic interiority was presented as epiphenomenal, essentially a self-sustaining fiction narrated by the self to the self. When viewed from an external vantage point, this subjective sense of self lacked coherence and credibility (see discussion in James, 1890, pp. 291–401).

The politics of essentialism 55 The secularization process which undermined belief in the soul began in turn to undermine the notion of a private self. For systems theorists, the self was correctly viewed as a contingent construct, and notions of individual autonomy and agency were folk fictions or narratives. Sociological perspectives on the self have tended to stress the dramaturgical or performative frame within which to understand individual identity (Burke, 1945). Rather than it being the self that generates the social persona and submitting to the compromises of that performed identity, it is the social persona which ultimately constructs the (sense of) private self. In developing a social role or persona the individual engages in a social performance, the initial and primary audience for which is the individual him or herself. The individual self is a construct of the performance, which must be sustained in the social sphere but must also retain narrative coherence and plausibility for the individual overall. In this sense, the modern individual is always on stage, even when alone (Goffman, 1956). One contemporary set of systems theoretical approaches speaks of the self as “extended” or “distributed” (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Attributes generally attributed in folk psychology to the individual (or the individual’s mind) are seen as extended or distributed over groups within a cognitive or social ecology. It follows that a clear-cut distinction between the private, inner self and the public, social exterior is impossible to draw (see Menary, 2010). The sense of inner self arises in dialectic with external factors and cannot be characterized independently. It is not that the preformed self acts upon the environment and interacts with other selves, but rather, that there is an ecology of behavior which cannot be resolved down to individuals acting autonomously. The denial of the self is now a commonplace of contemporary neuropsychology (Dennett, 1991; Graziano, 2019). One branch of systems theory is Marxism, for which the bourgeois individual reflects a historically located ideology rather than being part of an immutable human nature. Human relationships are fundamentally determined by underlying economic and other processes. The notion that the individual or aggregates of individuals can, by acts of agency, steer the direction of social change, is rejected. For critics of Marxism, anti-individualism is its cardinal sin: “from the viewpoint of Marx and Engels, the individual was a negligible thing in the eyes of the nation. […] According to them, history goes its own way. The material productive forces go their own way, developing independently of the wills of individuals” (von Mises, 2006, pp. 19–20). Further critiques of the self/person model can be found in the psychoanalytical literature, including for example Jung’s assertion that the persona is “a more or less accidental or arbitrary slice of the collective psyche” and that individuality is a role or performance (Jung, 1928, pp. 164–165). The contentious status of personhood and the self within modernity are at the center of debates within postmodernity. The self and individual is presented as fluid and contested, the site of contradictions, formed at the intersection of ideological forces. The individual bourgeois self is one of

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the grand narratives of Western culture which postmodernism seeks to disrupt. At the same time, and in tension with this, contemporary identity politics among hitherto marginalized social and cultural groups seeks to assert agency both over self-definition, including historical narrative, as part of a political project. Thus, we can find critiques of postmodernism as Eurocentric and bound to Western values, in that it retains traces of individualism: in effect, an identity politics critique of postmodernism (see Yin, 2018).

The politics of anti-essentialism The politics of reification take on a highly complex form. This can be seen in contemporary, socially inflected linguistics. The reification of system correlates with the dereification of the self, so that an autonomous, voluntarist, self implies the absence of system. What does it mean to assert or deny the existence and autonomy of languages as systems or as cultural products? The language myth, to use Harris’s term (Harris, 1981), is without doubt, like the individualistic self, one of the grand narratives of the Western. To deny the existence of languages as autonomous, abstract systems disrupts an intertwined set of intellectual and political mythologies, in particular the linguistic politics of the modern nation state. For integrationists, languages are second-order constructs that are reified in contingent ways, but that do not exist as autonomous systems outside the flow of first-order interactions. But this does not tell us much about how to understand the politics of nation states, institutions, or families. Harris sees the language myth within modernity as “a cultural product of post-Renaissance Europe”, reflecting “the political psychology of nationalism, and an education system devoted to standardising the linguistic behaviour of pupils” (1981, p. 9). In modern education policy, the myth underwrites a form of authoritarian control. Specifically, its anti-individualism involves the imposition of institutionalized uniformity onto individual difference. Language use is understood a form of behavior and any attempt to standardize it represents a denial of individual freedom, creativity, and autonomy. A similar strand of critique, though inflected through cultural Marxism rather than individualism, has become more prominent in sociolinguistics in the past decade, drawing on Bauman and Briggs (2003). The argument in essence is that national languages are suspect political constructs: Named languages – “English”, “German”, “Bengali” – are ideological constructions historically tied to the emergence of the nation-state in the 19th Century, when the idea of autonomous languages free from agency and individual intervention meshed with the differentiation of peoples in terms of spiritual essences. (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011, p. 5)

The politics of essentialism 57 Related to this is the view that the modern concept of a language has been exported and imposed via colonialism on the distinct and complex language ecologies of precolonial societies. Colonial linguistics was, in this sense, a “dream factory” for the invention and imposition of labels and of a particular metalanguage (Hutton, 1999, p. 305). As Errington (2001) argues, this global linguistics was bound together by “common presuppositions about languages’ writability” and about the “patterned relations between meanings of talk, on one hand, and speech sounds or their orthographic counterparts on the other” (p. 19). This allowed the reification of “language objects”, which were “abstractable in textual form from communities and verbal conduct”. This can lead to a broader critique of the notion of a language within colonial and nationalist practice, given the understanding that “all languages are social constructions, artifacts analogous to other constructions such as time” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, p. 1). According to Makoni and Pennycook, languages are not identifiable according to linguistic criteria, rather they are the product of “important social and semiotic processes” which include “the development of colonial and nationalist ideologies through literacy programmes” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, p. 1). What was implicit in Harris’s attack on the Western tradition emerges explicitly in these more recent writings, namely that the Western construct of “a language” is a reification that has colonized, and continues to colonize, the life worlds of language. If we follow further down this path, then a challenging set of methodological and theoretical questions are raised, most recently under the heading of Southern Theories (Pennycook & Makoni, 2019). Underlying much of contemporary debate seems to be the assumption that essentialism is, in general, politically suspect, whereas social constructionism is associated with progressive politics. It is not difficult to understand why this should be the case, given that essentialism in the discourse of race, and within debates concerning sex/gender, is seen as furthering oppressive ideological positions. In linguistics, broadly conceived, notions such as languaging and translanguaging, as well as integration, reflect anti-essentialist positions and various forms of contextualism. If languages are political constructs of modernity, then this might suggest the loss of a premodern classificatory innocence, a state in which linguistic and other sociocultural phenomena had existed along continua. If the language myth is an episteme within colonial governance, then it operates destructively on premodern and non-modern linguistic ecologies. This can be seen as a form of Foucault-inflected postmodernism, where the institutions of modernity, with their normalizing gaze and reification of the third-person perspective, are toxic in relation to received and “organically different” custom and practice. Yet the discipline of sociolinguistics retains a strong commitment to vernacular liberation, to the need to recognize and liberate (and thereby reify) minor, marginal, or non-hegemonic languages from the

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strait-jacket of state modernity. This reflects a language ideology that can be traced directly to German Romanticism (see Fichte, 1808). Further issues arise in relation to so-called “traditional” cultures. Many have their own hierarchies of language varieties and their own forms of philology, either in relation to written texts (Pollock et al., 2015) or in the transmission of non-written practices, for example performance, as “oral philology” (Cohen et al., 2007). The status of these language cultures is unclear when set alongside political strategies of linguistic dereification.

The polarity between the English language and indigenous languages Another approach to understanding issues raised by anti-essentialism is to set up a polarity between English on the one hand, and marginal or endangered languages on the other. In this discussion I am adopting rhetorically the stance of progressive or critical sociolinguistics. If we take the contested category of “native speaker”, then the consensus would be that, in the case of English, there should be no native speaker privilege, in terms of language ownership, language teaching, authority over usage, etc. Given its colonial history and role in postcolonial globalization, English cannot be seen as the special private property of a nation, set of nations, or ethnicity. The exact opposite is the case with indigenous, marginal or endangered languages as the native speakers are the authentic representatives and exclusive owners of the language. (In what follows, I will refer to these as “indigenous”, while being fully aware that this category is a reification for the purposes of exposition here.) Prescriptivism is condemned as elitist in relation to English, whereas the internal linguistic norms of indigenous languages are validated as an authentic component of cultural expression, even where these reflect social hierarchies of age or gender. English is understood as pluricentric and not associated with a particular set of cultural values, whereas indigenous languages are typically seen as monocultural. While there are no genealogical ties among the world community of English speakers, indigenous languages are spoken by a tribal or kinship groups bound together by “blood ties”. English has no direct or ideologically unproblematic relation to territory. This is evident from the language and identity politics of the British Isles. However, indigenous languages, even those spoken by nomadic groups, have an authentic grounding in place. English possesses high cultural capital, pragmatic power, as a globalized language variety (see Park & Wee, 2013). By contrast, indigenous languages have a “sacred status” arising from historical trauma and dispossession (Fontaine, 2018; Meissner, 2018). English is non-owned, whereas indigenous languages are in effect hyper-owned (Warner, 1999). English is an open domain for linguistic study, analysis, and critique, whereas in the case of indigenous languages and cultures, there are increasingly high barriers to entry for linguistic and ethnographic study, and demands for community

The politics of essentialism 59 participation and tangible benefit within the process (Gaudry, 2011). This is a contentious domain, where top-down and bottom-up processes are entangled in complex ways (Makoni, 2016; Muehlmann, 2008). From a particular vantage point, the argument that there is no autonomous system corresponding to the label “English language” might lead to a critique of political, legal, or pedagogical systems. But there is no straightforward corresponding move to be made in relation to indigenous languages. Colonialism threatened indigenous languages with eradication, yet it simultaneously objectified them. There was dispossession, genocide, forced assimilation on the one hand, and Bible translation, documentation, labeling by colonial officials or missionaries on the other. It is difficult to conceive of a situation where an anti-essentialist argument concerning language ontology would be directly empowering for an indigenous community, even though notions of authenticity have the potential to create complex problems for such communities within state modernity (Muehlmann, 2008). One conclusion that can be reached is that there is no direct relationship – at the abstract level – between anti-essentialism in language theory and progressive politics. Put another way, the anti-essentialist assertion of indeterminacy is, paradoxically, a third-person perspective on social action, given that “insider” actors inevitably reify and construct both contingently and at the level of social imaginary. The argument here is not that all language varieties and situations should be treated alike, as there is an evident rationale for the set of contradictory binaries laid out above. It is rather to point out that almost all sociocultural and political cases lie on a continuum between the two poles discussed – a recipe for ideological confusion.

Integrationism and the self In integrational linguistics, the assertion is made that the sign is indeterminate, both in form and in meaning. Further, this is universally true of all signs. Paradoxically, this represents simultaneously a radically contextual as well as an “acontextual” theory of the sign. For the integrationist, all assertions that form and/or meaning are determinate are either (a) false if asserted from an “objective” standpoint, or (b) neither true nor false, but rather part of second-order “lay” discourse. Integrationists share the belief that the language myth is the false foundation on which Western linguistics is built, but differ as to whether and to what extent it is ideologically pernicious. Late in his career, Harris began to identify the language myth in a range of cultures and saw in the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 150–250 C.E.), for example, a critic of linguistic reification in his very different intellectual context: “I now think that Nagarjuna’s heretical views about speech were in all probability a protest against an indigenous ‘language myth’ current in his own day” (Harris, 2011, p. 4; see Harris, 2003a; Kalupahana, 2012). But does demythologization travel unproblematically across time and sociocultural context in this way? Where does that leave

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other understandings of language, both lay views within the Western tradition, and lay and specialist views outside it? Essentialisms are non-uniform and are tied to particular historical, societal, cultural, and religious norms. Integrationism cannot relativize its notion of the sign. Rather, of necessity, it recognizes the social life of reification, the lay understanding of language. This is an uneasy position, intellectually, where the comfort zone consists of the diagnosis of the intellectual ills of modern linguistics. Beyond that zone, integrationism’s lay orientation inevitably is in tension with its antiessentialism. The integrational notion of the self is more open to challenge in the theory’s own terms. There is the implication in integrational theory that the agentive self stands autonomously outside the dynamic stream of interaction and sign-creation. Its understanding of the self is what distinguishes integrationism from other forms of anti-essentialism and from systems theory. One might argue, however, that radical contextualism does not allow for an autonomous self, since the self as it integrates surely cannot be detached from the unfolding, dynamic process of integration. Integration implicates the self. Memory is sign-making and memory is constitutive of the self. One possible response might be that the self is essentially a lay concept, or at least, that it cannot be grounded scientifically. Harris makes this point in relation to mind, arguing that it makes no sense to doubt that one has a mind and that there is nothing to be gained by replacing what he terms “vulgar mindspeak” with the jargon of modern cognitive neuroscience, i.e., “cognobabble” (Harris, 2003b). Here Harris draws on an ordinary language argument, as well as a form of “commonsensism” associated with the philosopher G.E. Moore. One of Moore’s truisms was: “there exists at present a living human body, which is my body” (Moore, 1925, p. 193, emphasis in original). The self, like the mind, is a bedrock concept, which does not respond well to introspection and definitional interrogation (Hutton, 2019). The denial of the self is a pervasive and apparently appealing intellectual and philosophical idea, as is the denial of the existence of languages. But is hard to see how one can assert the existence of the self and, at the same time, deny the existence of languages. Parallel issues of reification, experience, lay discourse, etc., underlie both. One has private access to a sense of self, unlike one’s experience of languages as real phenomena in the world. But there is no way to cash out that sense of private access, except as another lay experience, which like the experience of discrete languages, is arguably historically and culturally contingent.

Conclusion The Romantic individualism and Swiftian pessimism that underlie Harris’s most political writings are arguably no less intractable than the Romantic collectivism and reified identity politics that inform much of sociolinguistics

The politics of essentialism 61 and related fields. Both lack sensitivity to the unassimilability of lay experience. In dealing with these issues, it is useful to draw a distinction between individualism and personalism. Personalism is a cover term for frameworks, both religious and secular, that put the human person at the center, philosophically, methodologically, and ethically. Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) found the essence of the person “in the living activity of selfcreation, of communication and of attachment, that grasps and knows itself, in the act, as the movement of becoming personal” (1952, p. x). Personalism rejects both individualism as atomistic and collectivism as deterministic. The label of personalism captures the personal, first-person nature of sign-making, as well as its ethical dimension. It is arguably a more accurate label for integrationism than individualism or humanism. Sign-making is personal, rather than individual or human, and therefore, cannot be subject to a definitive reduction to a third-person viewpoint. In its personal nature lies the assumption that others are also persons and that sign-making must orient itself to them. While individualism is identified with the Western tradition, personalism, its Greek origins notwithstanding, need not be (see Chirindo, 2016). In any case I take comfort from the unassimilability of lay experience within academic theory, including integrationism. This offers a powerful counterweight to the temptation to prescribe the principles of sound language politics in terms of ex cathedra stipulations and represents a potential complementarity with the critique by Southern Theories of established academic epistemologies.

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indigenous peoples to speak and make decisions for themselves in language and cultural revitalization. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30, 68–93. Wilkins, J. (1688). An essay towards a real character and a philosophical language. Gellibrand. Woolard, K., & Schieffelin, B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 23, 55–82. Yin J. (2018). Beyond postmodernism: A non-western perspective on identity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 13, 193–219.

Q&A: Christopher Hutton CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? This paper tries to think about integrationism in the context of the kind of politics that Southern Theory represents, though it does so rather obliquely. Integrationism has a comfort zone, namely its critique of mainstream linguistics, and this critique has been articulated very clearly by its practitioners. But my sense is that it is much less comfortable dealing with topics beyond this, particularly those outside the West. In the post-WWII era language policy was dominated by a particular model of decolonization, namely linguistic liberation. This continued the framework derived from the vernacular politics of European languages, i.e., the Romantic model of language recognition and validation. Integrationism is one of several strands of thinking that question the ontological model of language that underlies this, but its focus has been on semiology rather than practical politics of language. I am trying in this paper to point to the dilemmas that arise in de-essentializing languages, no less than in their essentialization. In the background is my awareness, given the equation of global modernity with the West, that thinking one’s way outside the categories of Western modernity is fraught with difficulty, as it is easy to lapse into a kind of Romanticism as an antidote to Western models of rationality. CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? The conference confirmed my view that integrationism both attracts and repels for interesting reasons. It attracts by virtue of its critique of a key tenet of Western thinking, namely the “language myth”, but it repels by its seeming lack of interest in what others understand as the political consequences of this, particularly in relation to progressive identity politics. My own view is that the assertion of indeterminacy as an academic principle seems to clash with any potential general politics of language, but that conclusion depends on how one understands the

The politics of essentialism 65 status of lay discourse and lay reification. I am interested in thinking about the relation between academic and non-academic concepts, the nature of expertise, and the “insider-outsider” dichotomy. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? My personal interest lies in the politics of linguistics and in language politics. Integrationists differ markedly in their interest in, and opinions about, politics, and I have no problem with that. I find that sociolinguistics requires a form of political conformism and even if I agree with many aspects of this, I am uncomfortable with what seems to be a set of fixed, a priori positions. I would like to see more attention paid to crosscultural/regional issues and also to the political model of the self that integrationism assumes or constructs. Linguistics is changing and integrationism is in danger of developing a kind of negative nostalgia for a discipline that no longer exists. One area that I am interested is close sociological and political analysis. I am suspicious of global or abstract language politics and think it is useful to focus in detail on institutions or social contexts. This comes close to straightforward ethnography, except that it is reflexively informed by an integrational framework.

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A clash of linguistic philosophies? Charles Goodwin’s “co-operative action” in integrationist perspective Peter E. Jones and Dorthe Duncker

The late Charles Goodwin developed a far-reaching, holistic approach to human sociality, its origins and historical transformations based on a distinctive conception of ‘co-operative action’. At the heart of Goodwin’s theory is a perspective on language itself as a distinctive type of co-operative semiotic action within the open-ended ecology of ‘multi-modal’ communicational practices (Goodwin, 2018, p. 13). In this paper, we cast a critical integrationist eye on Charles Goodwin’s theory of ‘co-operative action’ as it applies to linguistic communication. We examine the extent to which Goodwin’s treatment maintains a commitment to segregationist views of language grounded in a positivist emphasis on the allegedly observable, shared, or public character of linguistic form and structure. Given the wider conference theme, we also wanted to consider the relevance of an integrationist critique of Goodwin’s ‘co-operative action’ in the service of emerging alternative linguistic ontologies and epistemologies in the global north and south (cf. Pennycook & Makoni, 2020) and, in particular, the possible value of such critical reflections in the context of discussions of ‘Southern Theory’ (Connell, 2007). At first glance, differences in perspective between integrationism and Goodwin’s theory of ‘co-operative action’ appear to be very relevant to Connell’s critical examination of ‘Northern Theory’ within her home discipline of sociology. ‘[M]ainstream sociology’, she argues, ‘turns out to be an ethno-sociology of metropolitan society. This is concealed by its language, especially the framing of its theories as universal propositions or universal tools’ (Connell, 2007, p. 226). Connell by no means rejects the entirety of Northern social science, but argues that sociology’s theorising is vitiated whenever it refuses to recognise its ethnosociological being – or, to put it another way, its situation in the world and its history in the world. The failures of recognition documented in the first part of this book have consequences. They result not in minor

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omissions but in major incompleteness, and a profound problem about the truthfulness of arguments framed as universal generalisations. (Connell, 2007, p. 226) These observations are relevant in the case of Goodwin’s attempt to use the Western tradition of linguistic analysis to underpin what is, in effect, presented as a universalising sociological perspective on ‘co-operative action’. This, Goodwin argues, can inform not only our understanding of contemporary social realities, but can also be back-projected onto the (assumed) historical-evolutionary process of origin, development of language, and of human society itself. The primary issues for integrationism in all this, therefore, are the ways in which (a) a particular, Eurocentric ‘meta-linguistic framework’ (Harris, 1996a) is vehicled to ground far-reaching claims about human sociality and, conversely, (b) a universal sociologising perspective is offered which appears to vindicate the meta-linguistic framework in question. Of course, there is no doubting that integrationism itself as a current of meta-linguistic theorising forms part of ‘Northern Theory’.1 The question as to integrationism’s own ethnocentric character and limits in regards both to linguistic and sociological matters is therefore an important one for us to collectively confront, although we will not treat this issue here in any depth (Harris, 1998, p. 100; Pablé, 2019). Indeed, Harris was well aware of the intimate connection between theories of communication and theories of society. He warned against the uncritical importing of sociological assumptions into our examination of communicational processes (and vice versa): What the integrationist seeks is an explanatory account of communication which will accord with our lay understanding of human existence but does not prejudge fundamental questions about how and why human beings communicate. The point of departure for such an account, if it is to avoid circularity, must be one which does not tacitly take human communication skills for granted. This limits the range of possible basic premisses very considerably. (It rules out, for instance, any premiss relating to human social behaviour.) (Harris, 1996b, p. x; emphasis in original) Harris’s comment on circularity is significant: you can’t start out on a theory of communication from some supposed ‘sociological’ premises if ‘sociality’ itself as a theoretical construct already implies a conception of communication in general, or of language more narrowly. In that light, it would also be valuable to examine the sociological theorists criticised by Connell (notably Giddens, Bourdieu, and Coleman) for the communicational assumptions which their sociological concepts embody.

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Harris goes on to describe the typical vision of the social individual that Western language ideology, and its modern linguistic offshoots, has conjured up: What this means, in effect, is banishing introspection and reconstituting oneself as a third party. Immediately, all the arts of communication become alien objects of inquiry, and all languages foreign languages (even though they are said to have “native” speakers). The individual becomes an anonymous social token and communication is decontextualized. Contexts, like persons, must be ignored altogether as far as possible, because they all seem to be different from one another, and thus hinder the great work of scientific generalization. (Harris, 1996b, pp. ix–x) “So how has the theoretical monster been conjured up?” asks Harris (1996b, p. ix): The explanation is to be sought in the division of labour imposed upon themselves by the modern academic disciplines. Each will treat only of one selected part of the human being or human activities, and insists on treating it from the outside. This is because the various disciplines all want to safeguard their claims to be regarded as ‘sciences’.2 (Harris 1996b, p. ix) One consequence of such disciplinary regimentation is the projection – by metaphor or analogy – of supposedly primary sociological or socioeconomic constructs or frameworks onto conceptions of language and communication. The ‘linguistic market’ concept of Bourdieu (1991), for example, is particularly well known. The irony, of course, is that all such sociological conceptions already imply communicational processes or practices and can in no way, therefore, be considered as independently existing, or analysable, ‘systems’ of human behaviour. As Harris put it: To call any human activity a ‘system’ is to reify it. This applies equally to transport systems, currency systems, postal systems, supply systems, agricultural systems, salary systems and any other form of human organization. The term system suggests that one is dealing with an independent supra-individual entity set up in its own particular way, which delimits the role that individuals may play in being subject to it or contributing to it. (Harris, 2012, p. 105) Consequently, integrationism rejects the view that there can be any single, universal bedrock ontology of linguistic or communicational practice:

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The ontological commitments of integrationism are not given in advance of how speakers and writers discuss the world on particular occasions. On the contrary, those commitments are relative to the ontological framework provided by the assumptions made in those discussions. Thus, for example, it makes sense from an integrationist perspective to argue about Hamlet’s motives, even though Hamlet was not a ‘real person’. (Harris, 2012, p. 91) Instead, the integrationist inclination has been to emphasise the value of a humanist perspective as an approach to language and communication (Pablé, 2017). The humanist tradition appealed to, however, is not one that is vulnerable to the critique of humanistic rationality in the enlightenment tradition by those who advocate for a ‘post-humanism’ (Pennycook, 2018). The integrationist perspective, rather, emphasises that no humanly relevant factors, whether in practices or beliefs, can be dismissed out of hand or excluded (on ‘theoretical’ or ‘methodological’ grounds) from consideration of “what language is” in our experience, if it is anything at all. The term ‘integration’ itself, despite any mechanistic connotations, merely serves to foreground the inseparability in principle of ‘language’ (including conceptions of language) and the concrete dealings of social life. Consequently, integrationism makes no assumptions about the kind or extent of communion (or conflict), harmony (or disharmony), collectivity (or singularity), connectivity (or distancing) enabled by, and enabling, the communicational proficiencies of the social actors involved. By the same token, integrationism has centred on the exposure and analysis of the specifically Eurocentric language ideology known as the ‘language myth’ (Harris, 1981); that is, the picture of a segregated domain of linguistic ‘facts’ supposedly common to whole societies or communities of language users. While this is simply the beginning of a discussion around these themes, it is one which integrationism welcomes and to which integrationism, among ‘Northern’ theories, is perhaps uniquely open. This is because of its intellectual origins and commitments and the developing body of culturally diverse work which it has so far sponsored. It is in that spirit that we take a brief first look here at the specifically linguistic underpinning of Goodwin’s approach to ‘co-operative action’ (Goodwin, 2018) which, on the face of it, appears to provide a response to the disciplinary fragmentation that Harris observes.

The linguistics of ‘co-operative action’ Goodwin’s argument is ‘that there is a distinctive organization to the practices that human beings use to build actions’ and that the ‘unique characteristics of co-operative action are central to the human adaptation’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 477). Goodwin’s approach to linguistic communication

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forms part, therefore, of the more general project to throw light on the distinctive character of human sociality: Study of the many manifestations of co-operative action explores the possibility of recovering through ongoing research the integrated vision of human capacities in their full linguistic, social, material, biological, cognitive, and historical intertwining, which sits at the root of anthropology’s original, radical vision of what it is to be human. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 478) ‘Co-operative action’ for Goodwin does not mean ‘cooperation’ in any kind of ethological or moral sense; it does not mean reciprocal action for mutual benefit, for example, and has no connotations of altruism. Instead, what it means is ‘building new action by decomposing and reusing with transformation resources provided by earlier actors’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 429). As Goodwin explains: ‘action is built by collecting together different kinds of materials into arrangements of mutual elaboration’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 429) or ‘by joining together different parts’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 430).3 Such parts ‘can be drawn from a common domain, different kinds of linguistic units, for example’ or ‘by collecting together very different kinds of phenomena such as language, gesture, objects in the world, and features of a setting’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 430). To illustrate the last point, Goodwin presents – as parallel instances of what is fundamentally the same co-operative action process – the historically reconstructed process of modification of the Acheulean Hand Ax, on the one hand, and, on the other, a fragment from a conversation in which one participant builds a contribution from the utterance of a previous participant (Goodwin, 2018, p. 431). Each of these cases illustrates ‘[b]uilding new action by performing accumulative transformation on materials created by earlier actors’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 431). In the conversation fragment, the second participant decomposes the utterance of the first into its constituent parts and re-uses some of them (while adding to them) in the building of a new utterance. The linguistic material produced by one participant is thereby picked up and transformed by a second in the same sense that the physical material of the axe is re-used and modified in the process of technological innovation. Thus, according to Goodwin, we ‘build action by performing accumulative transformations on a public substrate constituted through the work of predecessors’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 38). Human actors do not treat language as simply, or even primarily, a means of stating propositions so that information can be transferred from one head to another. Instead its detailed structure and organization provide crucial materials for the co-operative construction, though processes such as decomposition and reuse with transformation, of new action that is consequentially different while also visibly

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tied to the actions that preceded it, indeed inheriting with modification the linguistic resources they provided. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 434) Goodwin makes explicit the connection between his linguistic assumptions and methodology and the broader sociological aims of his theory of ‘cooperative action’: The way in which subsequent utterances, and the sentences visible within these utterances, are constructed co-operatively through systematic operations on the structure provided by earlier units of talk … has enormous consequences. First, language and social organization are traditionally investigated as separate autonomous phenomena, indeed within entirely different disciplines such as linguistics or sociology. Here we find that public grammatical operations constitute powerful and pervasive resources for the construction of not only syntactically complex sentences, but also social organization. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 434) Our concerns here, then, are, firstly, the appeal to ‘linguistic units’ as ‘parts’ from which co-operative communicational action (either within or across speakers’ utterances) can be built and, secondly, the conception of intersubjectivity on which Goodwin’s view of the ‘public’, ‘visible’ character of linguistic units and operations is based. Let us take one of his examples in more detail. Consider the transcription of a linguistic interchange involving two participants (names) which Goodwin offers into evidence (Goodwin, 2018, p. 29; Figure 2.3), retranscribed below: 1 2 3,4 5 6 7

Eddie: Sharon: Eddie: Sharon: Eddie:

Heh Heh! I don’t I I I ‘cause

know what know what know know

you I’m I’m you you

ain’t ain’t

laughin’ at. laughin’ at. your head. laughin’ at your head too. laughin’ laughin’.

Such sequences as those in the above turns 2–7 look almost like language drills. Utterances, and the sentences that emerge through these utterances, are decomposed into the parts, such as individual words and morphemes and syntactic patterns, used to create them, and these parts are then rearranged and combined with other materials to make something new. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 40)

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We note, then, that Goodwin’s linguistic case for his conception of ‘cooperative action’ is based on the claim that participants’ linguistic acts deploy pre-existing, intersubjectively real, structural characteristics and regularities which are ‘on display’ and, therefore, representable in transcribed form. ‘Although speakership changes’, he claims, ‘the underlying pattern used to construct the utterance of the moment is preserved’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 29; our emphasis). More specifically, Goodwin argues: Conceptualizing what happens here as a sequence of abstract actions obscures the way in which the participants, in an almost musical way, are exploring, one after another, the possible variations that are inherent in the detailed structure of the utterances they are producing. The surface structure of the talk in these data is anything but superficial in terms of its power to provide organization for the sequencing of the exchange. Through the way in which next moves are built co-operatively (by performing systematic operations on structure placed in a public environment by another) materials for building action densely accumulate while being transformed. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 29; our emphasis) As an initial comment, one may note that the casual use of the term ‘surface structure’, taken from the objectivising and ultra-segregational tradition of Chomskyan generative grammar, is quite telling in itself as a clue to the meta-linguistic framework that Goodwin is assuming in his treatment. The Chomskyan legacy of ‘autonomous’ syntactic analysis, and the separation of linguistic ‘levels’ (syntax, semantics, etc.) with it, is even more directly implied from Goodwin’s comment on a later example (Goodwin, 2018, p. 33; Figure 2.4): ‘In lines 6, 10, and 13 of A … Joey constructs a counter to Cameron by using the exact words Cameron himself has just used. But, although the surface structure of the original and that of the repeat are identical, the meanings are not …’ (our emphasis). The significance of such statements lies in the reifying assumption that there is such a thing as an inherent or intrinsic ‘detailed structure’ to utterances which is intersubjectively observable and can be displayed in public (like the hand ax and its parts) and on which ‘systematic operations’ can be performed (Goodwin, 2018, p. 30). Goodwin’s argument, moreover, rests on the claim that linguistic interactions involve an accumulation of such structured entities (or their decomposed ‘parts’). As he puts it: Building new action co-operatively by including in each next action materials placed in a public environment by earlier actors leads systematically to the accumulation of structure being organized as resources for the construction of relevant action. This is most vividly seen in Figure 2.3 in the almost baroque decomposition and reuse with transformation of structure provided by unfolding talk. (Goodwin, 2018, p. 31; our emphasis)

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What strikes the integrationist about the communicational artefact displayed in the re-transcription above, however, is that it is primarily the spatialisation and consequent apparent temporal suspension of ‘data’ produced by the practice of written transcription that creates the impression of an ‘accumulation’ taking place. The only thing that in fact ‘accumulates’, one might argue, is the set of visible second-order ‘units’ (the debris, so to speak) of the communicational activity of the transcriber-analyst. However, the ways in which the ‘professional gaze’ of the linguistic analyst makes ‘transparent’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 398; cf. Jones, 2016) a menagerie of ‘units’, ‘patterns’ and ‘structures’ within the ‘material’ under description are not addressed by (remain ‘invisible’ to) Goodwin, a point to which we will return. Goodwin owes his analysis of the structures within talk at least partly to John Du Bois and his theory of ‘dialogic syntax’ (Du Bois, 2014) which ‘encompasses the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when speakers selectively reproduce aspects of prior utterances’ (Du Bois 2014, p. 359). Du Bois’ model is congenial for Goodwin since it also presupposes the intersubjective existence and identifiability of pre-structured linguistic ‘objects’ in play within interaction as well as the publicly accessible character of such objects as displayed in situ of live interaction. Thus, the dialogic model assumes that participants share linguistic experiences – experiences of what are unproblematically taken to be ‘the same’ linguistic structuring, ‘the same’ units – as other co-present participants in interaction; the reciprocal display of dialogically designed utterances constitutes an intersubjective grounding of experience through the use of linguistic objects that transcend the individual language-user. By subscribing to this model, Goodwin and Du Bois paint a picture of human communication that prioritises and builds on a third-person perspective. Linguistic structure, it is assumed, is ‘out there’ – objectively observable and, therefore, equally accessible both to the participants and to the linguistic analyst who can identify and record the very units deployed. On those assumptions, the manifest units and structuring within the observable linguistic ‘data’ afford the opportunity for the linguistic analyst to develop graphically displayable renderings of their structural relationships in the shape of Du Bois’ ‘diagraphs’. As ‘linguistic reality’, Du Bois (2014, p. 377) argues, the diagraph is ‘a situated structure in distributed cognition’ (Du Bois, 2014, p. 388), but when it is transformed and displayed graphically, it allows analysts to abstract, re-process, and share the dialogic experience of the participants. When an analyst can see a pattern in the diagraph, this is the same pattern as the one the situated participants could see. This analysis involves a decontextualisation of speakers’ utterances via a practice of transcription that separates ‘representations’ of them from the temporal continuum in which they are made, and rearranges them spatially for immediate inspection and comparison as co-existing objects and as material artefacts. Thus, the diagraph is a spatialised meta-linguistic construct of the

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transcriber-analyst. However, the visual inspection and comparison of two coexisting utterance transcriptions which the practice affords clearly cannot be shared with the actual historical participants to whom the first utterance was already gone when the second was being articulated – a consequence of the fundamental ‘co-temporality’ of communicational acts in context (Harris, 1981). Nevertheless, Du Bois insists (2014, p. 360): ‘The most visible reflex of dialogic syntax occurs when one speaker constructs an utterance based on the immediately co-present utterance of a dialogic partner’ (our emphasis). Though Du Bois distinguishes the structure ‘constructed dynamically by participants in real time’ from ‘the analyst’s representation of this structure’ (Du Bois, 2014, p. 362), it is the re-viewable analytic ‘representation’ that underpins the assumptions about identifiable units and licences the whole perspective. The dialogic syntax perspective, and Goodwin’s appeal to it in ‘co-operative action’, is therefore a mere continuation of the ‘conceptualization of time on the analogy of space’ (Harris, 2003, p. 173) which is pervasive in the Western language tradition. It is no accident that Goodwin extols the virtues of C.S. Peirce’s ‘diagrammatic reasoning in human thinking’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 436). For integrationism, on the other hand, ‘there is a way of looking at language, which depends on not reducing time to some kind of metaphorical extension of space’ (Harris, 2003, p. 173). Harris further remarks: That difference is what ultimately separates integrationism from the orthodox linguistics of the twentieth century. I shall also argue that this makes integrational linguistics not just a minor offshoot from the mainstream tradition but a radical departure in philosophy of language. (Harris, 2003, pp. 173–174) In presenting his case, Harris draws on the commentary on verbal repetition of the Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna: What is said cannot be repeated. For repetition would require further words. But unless the further words were identical with those previously uttered, the attempted repetition would fail, granted that difference is incompatible with repetition. However, unless there is difference the words are not additional to those originally uttered, but the same. Therefore, what is said cannot be repeated. (Nagarjuna, Refutation of Logic, Section LXX, in Harris, 2003, p. 179) As Harris notes, the ‘typical modern Western reaction to this argument would be to object that it is based on a confusion between types and tokens’ (Harris, 2003, p. 179; cf. Hutton, 1990) and it is indeed such a Peircean typetoken approach that Goodwin invokes (2018, Section 25.5.3) as the very foundation of his linguistic take on ‘co-operative action’. But ‘such a reaction would be inadequate’, Harris argues, since it begs the question of ‘the

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basis of comparison’ between spatio-temporally unique utterances (Harris, 2003, p. 179). For orthodox linguistics, as Harris notes, the basis of comparison is precisely the Peircean ‘type’ – an a-temporal abstraction ‘based on the tacit assimilation of temporal configurations to spatial configurations’ (Harris, 2003, p. 186). ‘Orthodox twentieth-century linguistics’, Harris goes on, ‘assumes that this holds for speech as well’ (Harris, 2003, p. 186).

Integrational Linguistics: Indeterminacy and reflexivity In integrational semiology, signs are created in the here-and-now: they can have no objective trans-situational existence and, therefore, no crossutterance (cross-turn) identity. Unless we assume that a fixed linguistic code is in play in language use, there are no objective criteria for deciding what counts communicationally as the same ‘pattern’ at any level of abstraction. What the participants might take in context as a relevant ‘matching’ of patterns remains in principle quite indeterminate; though repetition is a mundane, lay meta-linguistic activity (Love, 1990; cf. Duncker, 2019), it cannot be the process – built on Peircean ‘types’ – that Goodwin takes it to be. ‘Language’, as Love (1990, p. 105) puts it, ‘is radically indeterminate, as regards both what is meant and what is said’. Consequently: ‘No viable descriptive science of spoken language can be based on the idea that utterances are to be understood as the outward manifestation of members of a determinate set of underlying abstractions’ (Love, 1990, p. 105). As Harris notes, integrationism – unlike the approaches of orthodox linguistics – ‘emphasises indeterminacy of both form and meaning in human communication’ (Harris, 2006, p. 39; cf. Harris, 1993). Such indeterminacy, as Taylor (1990) argues, is not communicationally disabling but fundamental to the ways in which language ‘matters’ to us: ‘How language “matters” (in the largest sense) to its users is context- and person- and interaction-dependent; consequently, linguistic form is equally context-, person-, and interaction-dependent’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 144). Taylor goes on to argue that ‘the contingency of linguistic form’ is intimately connected to ‘the contingency of what I have been calling norms’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 144). The mistake, in attempting to understand the regularities we undoubtedly feel, perceive, expect, count on and exploit in our linguistic and communicational behaviour, is in ‘resorting to such deterministic explanations of linguistic regularities … based on a formalization of the products of verbal interactions’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 147). Such formalisation ‘only masks the normative (and explanatory) source of those regularities in the everyday, humdrum political battles of will that make up the normative practices of verbal interaction’ (1990, p. 147). At the same time: ‘What norm applies in a given speech situation is open to contextual determination. The answer to the question “What norms applies here?” does not somehow preexist the context in which the question occurs’ (Taylor, 1990, pp. 144–145).

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Whatever else one might say about the Goodwin-DuBois approach, then, there is a fundamental failure to recognise the role and significance of linguistic reflexivity in both the ‘first order’ linguistic activity of lay language users as well as in the framing of the ‘second order’ meta-linguistic framework of the professional language-describer. As Harris notes: In order to describe or discuss the linguistic activities of others, we must ourselves engage in linguistic activity of our own. What makes this both possible and necessary? This is the question that takes us to the heart of linguistic inquiry. And the integrationist answer is that language (unlike tennis) is reflexive. It is only through the reflexivity of language that linguistics is possible. (Harris, 1998, p. 25) Harris proceeds to clarify the methodological assumptions and consequences of this reflexivity for linguistic theorising: It is a model which assumes that in some culture-neutral sense it is perfectly clear what is going on both (i) when anonymous A speaks to anonymous B, and also (ii) when an anonymous linguist proposes some account of what A and B are saying. And this is one basic respect in which the model is segregationist: it presupposes that linguistic inquiry – and linguistic theory in general – can somehow be divorced from a consideration of the particular circumstances in which it arises and the conditions of linguistic reflexivity which make it possible. For the integrationist this is an unacceptable premise. (Harris, 1998, p. 26) Taylor sees such ‘conditions of linguistic reflexivity’ as rooted in the specific cultural assumptions and methodological traditions of contemporary linguistic theory. The view of linguistic theory as ‘culturally neutral and valuefree’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 145) is itself an extension of our own ‘ordinary metalinguistic practices’ and therefore ‘cannot help but reflect, reproduce, and at the same time influence the prejudices, preconceptions, and ideologies of our culture’ (Taylor, 1990, p. 146). In integrationist terms, then, the approaches of Goodwin and Du Bois are beset by ‘circularity’ (Harris, 1996b, p. x; cf. above) in that they offer a communication model founded on the unexamined linguistic reflexivity of the linguistic analyst. To see this more clearly, take the slight re-working of Goodwin’s transcription below: A: B:

I don’t know what you laughin’ at. I know what I’m laughin’ at.

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The transcription methodology projects ‘the same unit’, the ‘same grammatical pattern’ (the sentence), the ‘same words’ as unproblematically present and accounted for in the linguistic activity (and consciousness) of the original creators of the communicational episode (A and B) as well as that of the analyst (C) working in third person ‘overhearer’ mode. What B hears A say is apparently just what the transcription tells us A said; what both A and B heard and said is what C’s transcription tells us that C heard, which could then be ‘written down’. Thus, the transcription methodology and associated analytic framework present us with the circulation of a set of pre-existing, pre-established ‘units’ and ‘structures’ that are identical and equally available to all. Goodwin does not understand that the implicit linguistic reflexivity of the transcriber-analyst provides the unstated ground of the assumption of objectivity or intersubjectivity, of the ‘intrinsic’ identity of forms, meanings and grammatical patterning of the ‘units’ supposedly in play. Similarly, it is this scriptist (Harris, 1990) technology of description allied with more general segregational commitments that licences the position that linguistic communication has its own, separate ‘material’ to which other kinds of semiological ‘material’ may be added in particular communicational episodes. In effect, written language practices and meta-language appear to mesh here with more fundamental and deeply ingrained assumptions in western philosophy about abstraction and categorisation. Love, for example, concedes that in the lay practices of linguistic communication ‘[s]patiotemporally distinct objects and events must be treated as “the same” in some respect relevant to the purposes of the discourse. Something like a typetoken analysis is required’ (Love, 1990, p. 97). However, he goes on: What is problematic is the further assumption that the analysis into types and tokens – what counts as an underlying invariant, and what counts as an instance of a particular invariant – is uniform for a whole linguistic community, determined for every member of that community by an abstraction called ‘the language’. (Love, 1990, p. 97) In that light, ‘Types and tokens are undeniably “real” for speakers, but what the types and tokens are is something for speakers themselves to decide in particular contexts’ (Love, 1990, p. 98). And, one may add, speakers may disagree strongly – particular in situations of communicational conflict – on the ‘types and tokens’ involved. Any act of identifying or ‘repeating’ a linguistic or communicational ‘type’ during an interaction might therefore best be seen as a creative and, consequently, potentially contentious or partisan attempt or bid to (retrospectively) ‘typify’ something about what was said on the ‘model’ of what seems to be offered now. Reflexivity is ‘constructive’, not ‘descriptive’ (Jones, 2017) and subject to the creative and opportunistic communicational goals of the

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moment. In sum, for the integrationist, there is no ‘intrinsic structure’ to utterances in the sense of a determinate, publicly displayable, intersubjectively known set of units in combination. In that light, we might have no problem with the idea that what someone might say (or do) in some way builds on (or recycles) what others have said or done. But saying this does not licence the positivist orientation of the Du Bois-Goodwin approach to the supposed constructional ‘materials’ (and their transformations) of utterances or actions. While Goodwin claims that ‘the proposal that much human action is built by performing systematic operations on the detailed organization of structured materials placed within a public environment by others’ is ‘[c]entral to the argument being developed here’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 30), some of his examples strain the limits of this bric-à-brac semiology. For instance, he refers to a case in which ‘the particular pattern that we have been examining is abandoned when Sharon shifts from talking about laughter to laughter itself’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 30; our emphasis). He argues: ‘despite the abandoning of the format, this utterance is built by transforming “laughing” into an instance of what is described through this term’. Here, we submit, the reification train completely skids off the rails. What if Sharon had done nothing (a kind of protest on her part) or playfully flicked the previous speaker on the forehead or done something else that in context was designed (or taken) to be a ‘follow up’, or to ‘build on’ what was said (about ‘laughing’)? For the integrationist, what ‘building on’ or ‘running with’ might or might not involve in any particular case is completely open-ended and certainly cannot, in principle, be equated with or reduced to any ‘material’ or ‘structural’ comparisons or considerations.

Understanding the cultural conditions of linguistic reflexivity While there is certainly much more to be said about the respective positions of Goodwin and integrationism, in the end there are some fundamental differences of orientation with a number of important implications for our approach to language and the social organisation of linguistic activity. These differences ultimately stem from the diverging perspectives, starting points, and journeys of the two currents of thinking. Harris’s integrationism has its roots and upward trajectory in a systematic, self-conscious critical penetration of the most basic tenets and commitments of the Western language tradition. Unlike all other currents of ‘Northern’ linguistic research, it represents an uncompromising attempt to reveal the (elite) Euro-/ethnocentric cultural practices and assumptions, originating in the classical world, which underpin, enable and render culturally intelligible the varied and successive metalinguistic systematisations within that tradition. As Harris noted: ‘Modern linguistics did not suddenly drop into the cultural landscape out of a clear blue sky. Its origins lie quite specifically in one academic tradition, the European grammatical tradition’ (Harris, 1998, p. 7), a

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tradition which ‘had much deeper roots in European culture’ (Harris, 1998, p. 7) over several millennia. Integrational linguistics, Harris explained, therefore represented a challenge to the Eurocentrism of ‘the Western grammatical tradition and its modern linguistic continuations’ (Harris, 1998, p. 9). Language, Harris argued: has always eluded the comprehension of Western grammarians and logicians. For in their schematizations, the individual qua individual does not have to be anything other than the possible bearer of a name, the possible referent of a referring expression, and a possible speaker or hearer. Thus the notion of speech as a creative, interactive function of individuals is replaced by the notion of verbal objects. These objects are all treated as replicas of independently existing patterns. Once the relevant patterns are identified, the replicas can then be analysed with respect to their internal structure, by analytic techniques that the grammarian and the logician have developed for just such a purpose. In short, speech ceases to be treated as speech and is subjected to a decontextualizing process. Speech goes in at one end and sentences, propositions and other metalinguistic abstractions come out at the other. (Harris, 1996a, pp. 164–165) ‘The course the ancient grammarians opted for was a simple one’, Harris explained: They chose to concentrate on those features of the speech process that were audible and visible … The rest – everything that was neither audible nor visible – they relegated to a position of secondary importance, or else did not bother with at all. In short, they focussed on what was immediately (and publicly) available to sense-perception. In this respect, grammar is the first form of empiricism in Western ‘philosophy of language’. (Harris, 1996a, p. 35; our emphasis) The ‘consequences of that choice’, he went on, ‘meant that anything that started out as a human utterance ended up, as far as the grammarians were concerned, as the utterance of a certain sequence of units. Any features of the original utterance that resisted the compression were discarded’ (Harris, 1996a, p. 35). In that light, Harris notes, the emphasis of the grammarian is on what Saussure explicitly identified as ‘linearity’ since ‘it gives the grammarian the advantage of being able to treat analysis as segmentation. In short, the foundation of grammar in the Western tradition is a procedure by which a consecutive string of vocalization is segmented into non-overlapping constituent parts’ (Harris, 1996a, p. 37).

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At root, then, Goodwin’s approach, with its grounding in the supposedly ‘public’ character of linguistic form and linear composition, preserves this empiricism of the Western metalinguistic framework along with its attendant reifications. The unreflecting application of a written transcription methodology in itself is a clear manifestation of the literate underpinnings of this Western tradition. In particular, it licences an exclusively ‘third person’ perspective on language which disguises and obscures the linguistic reflexivity of the living communicational agents being observed and completely overlooks the reflexivity of the linguistic analyst in his/ her construction and reading of the ‘data’. Further, in assimilating the progress of particular conversational episodes into the materialsaccumulation-and-transformation model, Goodwin gives us a kind of LEGO brick semiology. Communicational practices are treated as assemblages of independently established, objectively present ‘parts’, or ‘materials’ which are already intersubjectively shared within the putative linguistic system. Here, then, is the legacy of the Western grammatical tradition as Harris describes it. While one may ask why such intellectual moves necessary to linguistic analysis, Harris argues: And the answer is that without them, grammar (whether in the sense of Panini or of Dionysus Thrax) is immediately threatened. Homo grammaticus, grammatical man, desperately needs a foundation for his pathetic belief that one can actually “set out” the rules of grammar in some quasi-definitive form, even while conceding that tomorrow the rules may have changed. (Harris, 2003, p. 182) Integrationism, on the other hand, rejects the whole set of assumptions on which this tradition is founded and maintained. By contrast, integrationism emphasises the radical indeterminacy of linguistic form and meaning and the highly unstable and contextualised character of such communicational determinacies as may be claimed or ‘fixed’ in particular situations for particular (perhaps conflicting) communicational purposes. More generally, Goodwin’s commitment to the ‘language myth’, as integrationists see it (Harris, 1981), cannot be without implications for the more general social validity of his conception of ‘co-operative action’. In effect, the empiricism and positivism of the Western linguistic tradition is being used both to reinforce and to amplify a generalised model of social activity in which semiological functions or properties are assimilated to physical properties in a unitary process of production, accumulation and processing of ‘materials’. While there is certainly much more to be said on this question, the integrationist would baulk at such an assimilation: a recognition of the integrated character of communicational processes, including those of ‘material action’, does not mean that the materialsprocessing perspective that Goodwin adopts is applicable to the open-ended

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continuum of communicational practices that may constitute the process as a whole. The parallel Goodwin draws between utterances and physical tools is particularly telling – as if a ‘sentence’ comes to pieces like a hand axe. Here, the integrationist insistence on the irreducible semiological character of the sign – of form as well as meaning (or integrational value) – is most significant. The over-riding problem, then, is an alienating third person perspective in which linguistic communication is viewed as the assemblage and accumulation of pre-fabricated semioticised ‘resources’, a view which bears the historical stamp, as well as the contemporary resonance, of the Western grammatical tradition. By contrast, the integrationist perspective aims at the decentring of Eurocentrism in language theory and the consequent unbalancing of ‘Northern’ perspectives in modern linguistic research. The general value that integrationism may have in relation to the discussion of Southern Theory lies, then, in its ruthless exploration of the ways in which our linguistic powers have been conceived and analysed according to the pretentions of the Northern cultures whose methods of linguistic description and analysis have become globally dominant. And there is more specific interest, perhaps, in the integrationist attempts to understand (a) the specific cultural roots (particularly literate) of this tradition and the political and institutional conditions which have enabled and nurtured it, and (b) the effects and consequences of this tradition in education, politics and social life more generally. However, it is clear that such pressing and ambitious aims can only be successfully advanced and attained in productive collaboration with other traditions and perspectives (Northern and Southern) formed independently of and/or in critical opposition to the linguistic ontology and epistemology ‘adopted in the Western grammatical tradition and its modern linguistic continuations’ (Harris, 1998, p. 9).

Notes 1 For accounts of the origins and development of integrationist linguistics see for example Harris (1981, 1996b, 1998), Pablé and Hutton (2015). 2 See also the comments in Goodwin (2018) on the intellectual fragmentation wrought by disciplinary division and specialisation with which integrationists would broadly support. 3 In that respect, there is a close affinity between Goodwin’s approach and other ‘post-humanist’ perspectives on language which emphasise the role of ‘assemblages’ etc. (Pennycook, 2018).

References Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Harvard University Press. Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Polity. Du Bois, J. W. (2014). Towards a dialogic syntax. Cognitive Linguistics 25(3), 359–410.

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Duncker, D. (2019). The reflexivity of language and linguistic inquiry: Integrational linguistics in practice. Routledge. Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge University Press. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Duckworth. Harris, R. (1990). Scriptism. In N. Love (Ed.), The foundations of linguistic theory. Selected writings of Roy Harris (pp. 180–196). Routledge. Harris, R. (1993). Integrational linguistics. In A. Crochetière, J.-C. Boulanger & C. Ouellon (Eds.), Actes du XVe congrès international des linguistes (pp. 321–323). Presses de l’Université Laval. Harris, R. (1996a). The language connection. Thoemmes Press. Harris, R. (1996b). Signs, language and communication. Routledge. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. Pergamon Press. Harris, R. (2003). Nagarjuna, Heracleitus and the problem of language. In H. G. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Rethinking linguistics (pp. 171–188). RoutledgeCurzon. Harris, R. (2006). Integrationist notes and papers 2003–2005. Tree Tongue. Harris, R. (2012). Integrating reality. Bright Pen. Hutton, C. (1990). Abstraction and instance. The type-token relation in linguistic theory. Pergamon Press. Jones, P. E. (2016). ‘Coordination’ (Herbert H Clark), ‘integration’ (Roy Harris) and the foundations of communication theory: Common ground or competing visions? Language Sciences, 53, 31–43. Jones, P. E. (2017). Language – the transparent tool: Reflections on reflexivity and instrumentality. Language Sciences, 61, 5–16. Love, N. (1990). The locus of languages in a redefined linguistics. In H. G. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Redefining linguistics (pp. 53–117). Routledge. Pablé, A. (Ed.). (2017). Critical humanist perspectives. The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communication. Routledge. Pablé, A. (2019). Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, 230, 102735. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.lingua.2019.102735 Pablé, A. & Hutton, C. (2015). Signs, meaning and experience: Integrational approaches to linguistics and semiotics. Walter de Gruyter. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Routledge. Pennycook, A. & Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the global south. Routledge. Taylor, T. J. (1990). Normativity and linguistic form. In H. G. Davis & T. J. Taylor (Eds.), Redefining linguistics (pp. 111–148). Routledge.

Q&A: Peter E. Jones & Dorthe Duncker CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? The paper links up explicitly to general debates in Applied Linguistics over the ideological and ethnocentric foundations of linguistic theory, foregrounding the relevance of a specific perspective on linguistic interaction to the broader sociological concerns of Southern Theory

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as well as the prospects for a decolonised linguistics. The paper attempts to show how a particular conception of cooperative linguistic action developed by Charles Goodwin draws centrally and uncritically on Western paradigms of linguistic thought, specifically the Western grammatical tradition. The paper demonstrates how the critical perspective on this tradition offered by the integrationist communicational philosophy developed by Roy Harris opens up for critical interrogation not only the problematic rationale and assumptions of this whole metalinguistic framework but, at the same time, the implications of this Eurocentric view of language for a broader view of sociality. CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? One vital issue that became clear in the preparation, presentation and subsequent discussion of the paper is the question of the relationship between integrationist linguistics and the scholarly movement in favour of Southern Theory and the decolonisation of linguistics in particular. What can IL contribute to this movement? Is integrationism itself an ethnocentric (Eurocentric) perspective on language and communication? These issues are fundamental given the present international interest in IL in relation to the development of ‘alternative epistemologies’ for language study and invite thorough examination and critical discussion. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? The treatment of this particular topic in our paper is principally an invitation to scholars of different traditions and perspectives to engage with the integrationist critique of orthodox linguistics and, in particular, to consider key issues relating to the nature of ‘grammar’, cooperation in social interaction and intersubjectivity, including issues relating to the analytic process itself. We hope that the critique of Charles Goodwin’s work will attract a new audience and will encourage wider debate on issues that are fundamental to the history and future of linguistic thought. In particular, we hope to have identified key aspects of that historical linguistic tradition which are of concern to a decolonised linguistic perspective.

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Text annotations: Examining evidence for a multisemiotic instinct and the intertextuality of the sign in a database of pristine self-directed communication Bassey E. Antia and Lynn Mafofo

The nature of language and communication has recently come under intense scrutiny from a number of scholarly directions in what is a new cycle, within Applied/Sociolinguistics, of Thomas Kuhn’s crisis in a paradigm (Kuhn, 2012). A crisis occurs when confidence is eroded in the explanatory ade­ quacy of an existing paradigm. In Applied/Sociolinguistics, the fervor of recent critique of foundational notions is emblematic of this crisis. Consider the following exemplary directions: The translingual paradigm contests a view of individual multilingualism as separate or plural monolingualisms and does so at both competence and performance levels. It substitutes symbiotic repertoire and fluidity of language practices for these views (Antia, 2017a; Canagarajah, 2011; García, 2009; Lewis et al., 2012; Makalela, 2015; Otheguy et al., 2015). An ecological perspective on re­ pertoire implies that “communication transcends individual languages” and even “transcends words and involves diverse semiotic resources” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 6), leading to an eclectic use of semiotic resources without concerns of diglossia or functional separation. Depending on the context, translingualism as a negotiative construct normalizes or seeks to normalize communication that draws and reconfigures material from fea­ tures enregistered as different languages and does not therefore see such communication as a transitional arrangement in the mold of Fishman’s bilingualism without diglossia (Fishman, 1967). Multimodality takes issue with the primacy and centrality accorded lan­ guage in communication. It argues that, in the ordinary course of re­ presentation and communication, several culturally shaped meaning-making resources are drawn upon and that verbal language is not necessarily the most important mode (Kress, 2010). Language “whether in speech or writing, has always existed as just one mode in the ensemble of modes in­ volved in the production of texts, spoken or written” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 41). Thus, in the construction and mediation of meaning, a range of

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resources, including colors, composition, gesture, and dress, are called to do duty. Integrationism, the framework underpinning many of the contributions in this book, self-identifies as a framework for the study of holistic meaningmaking, but one in which language is no more than a “variable extra” (Harris, 2009, p. 44). Whereas eclecticism of semiotic resources typifies language and communication in the scholarly directions described pre­ viously, integrationism radically decenters language, viewing the linguistic sign as being constituted and meaningful only in relation to the activities (e.g., finding one’s way, observing, walking, using a tool, etc.) in which it occurs or into which the sign user integrates it. In Harris’ words, an im­ portant axiom of integrationism is that what “constitutes a sign is not given independently of the situation in which it occurs or of its material mani­ festation in that situation” (Harris, 1996, p. 154). While there is no denying that in a community there is a landmark which can be considered a sign, the integrationist’s sign is not made by convention but through its function and interpretation within the specific, individual activities within which it occurs. Hopper (2000, p. 1, as cited in Lund, 2012, p. 14) succinctly makes the point that “integration[ism] sees an act of communication as a nexus in which the sign serves not to signal pre-established meanings but to link together all the different aspects of the act”. Not surprisingly, then, “the sign does not ‘have’ its own meaning: it is ‘made to mean’ whatever the circumstances require” (Harris & Hutton, 2007, p. 202). Although there are other perspectives as well, with their different vantage points, the above perspectives awaken “hopes of greater descriptive and explanatory adequacy” for accounts of language and communication, to use Allwood’s (2008, p. 258) characterization of embodied communication – yet another perspective. Common to all or a subset of these paradigms is that (1) they burst the myth of languages as reifications, alerting us rather to their emergent nature; (2) they burst another myth by historicizing socially pri­ vileged forms of language (e.g., standardized languages) and modes of communication (e.g., writing as opposed to drawing), thus unlocking the power and ideological rationales associated with these privileged forms and modes; and (3) they query the idea that the burden of communication can be borne by one resource independently of others in the available resource pool (named language 1, 2 … n, nonverbal elements, activities, etc.). In this chapter, our argument is that the problematization of language and communication in these exemplary directions is in certain respects problematic. We offer four possible bases for critique. First, there would seem to have been precious little contact among several of these approaches, with the implication that the collective knowledge generated by all of them has not been deployed to elucidate overarching questions that arguably unite them. Thus, multimodality has not frequently considered different named languages as modes, and translingualism is still uncertain about in­ corporating nonlinguistic resources. Second, and relatedly, some paradigms

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have not been able to draw on the insights generated by others to enhance their uptake or even their explanatory adequacy. For instance, and all other factors being equal, integrationism’s account of the indeterminacy of the sign is arguably more nuanced and better taken up when framed as resemiotization. Third, in several of these paradigms, and especially with respect to written communication, the communication experience on which theorization has been based has, with a few exceptions such as text messa­ ging, come largely from sources that skew models of language/commu­ nication to elite, nonlay practices. Textbooks or manuals or advertisements, by virtue of the production processes (countless author drafts, input by layers of gate-keepers) through which the publicly seen final products come into existence, are very weak residues of the original sets of expression, and therefore of qualified interest and use for understanding those forms of communication that bear fewer imprints of normative activity or con­ sciousness. Fourth, there has been relatively scant attention in these ap­ proaches to whether semiotic eclecticism also holds true when language and communication occur in a context of private consumption primarily, rather than of public production. Little is known from these approaches about the semiotic ecology mobilized in the reception of communication. In sum, then, we see a need for synergistic perspectives on communication generally, and in particular, reception-oriented communication. In this chapter, we offer one such perspective (i.e., multisemioticity) and apply it to a rather unique database (i.e., text annotations) to pursue two goals. First, we seek to verify the claim of a multisemiotic instinct (calqued on Li Wei’s (2018) translanguaging instinct), according to which the human instinct is to communicate by deploying a communicative repertoire, as Otheguy et al. (2015, p. 281) put it, “without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries” of semiotic resources. These resources need not only be named languages; they can also be nonlinguistic semiotics. We are interested in the extent to which this claim also holds true for reception-oriented communication. Second, we seek to offer a more nuanced argument regarding the integrationist position on indeterminacy of the sign. In subsequent sections, the following are addressed in turn: a theory of multisemioticity, text annotation as a database of strong residues of original thought and communication processes, method, analysis, and discussion. In addition to implications of the analysis for reading instruction, the con­ clusion also offers a southern epistemological note.

A theory of multisemioticity Multisemioticity is a synergistic perspective on language and communication with varied scholarly antecedents and contemporary links (including but not restricted to Systemic Functional Linguistics, Multimodality and Visual Grammar, Multilingualism, Integrationism, Embodied Communication, and Linguistic Anthropology). As developed here, multisemioticity claims that, in

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the ordinary course of communicating, no one single meaning-making re­ source does duty exclusively. Rather, it views meaning-making in any given context as involving the mobilization and weaving together of several semiotics. Our characterization of this framework is inspired by accounts that take a broad yet granular view of both communication resources and levels for analyzing communication. Kress & van Leeuwen’s work (1996) develops a sophisticated account of meaning-making resources in which color, gestures, artifacts, image/drawing, composition, and so on have conventionalized representational but also relatively free or interpersonal meanings. Indeed, Halliday’s systemic functional theory, drawn upon by van Leeuwen & Kress, not only recognizes levels and devices of a linguistic nature in the analysis of texts but, inspired by McIntosh (1961), it also acknowledges the graphological resources of written language. As fleshed out by Wales (2001), these include punctuation marks, paragraphing, spacing, capitalization, typefaces, and sizes, etc. (Gómez-Jiménez, 2015). Needless to say, different named languages, registers, intonation, and other enregistered forms constitute, alongside the nonverbal elements, what Rymes (2014) calls a communicative repertoire. While the foregoing provides an account of the anatomy of multi­ semioticity, there is also an oft-neglected dimension dealing with the dy­ namics or the physiology of these varied semiotics. Iedema (2003) proposes the concept of resemiotization to show how semiotics are mobilized and circulate in the meaning-making process. Resemiotization is “about how meaning making shifts from context to context, from practice to practice” (Iedema, 2003, p. 48). Thus, it emphasizes the mobility of different semiotics and how they get purposed, repurposed, and circulated, assuming different forms and meanings in the process. Resemiotization helps in mapping out the intertextualities of these semiotic forms. As an account of creative in­ tertextuality, it acknowledges a starting point in which a sign has been constituted, and this could be but need not be a social repository of forms and meanings that are more or less conventionalized; it underscores the historicization of meaning-making as a process in which resources are in­ eluctably reused across contexts; it recognizes that as contexts evolve and previous forms/meanings are recycled, the potential exists for a shift in the form or meaning of conventionalized items. These shifts, which are func­ tional within specific activities, constitute the making and remaking of the sign in integrationism. One shift that has been amply demonstrated is demodalization, a process in which meanings are increasingly reified and distanced through a variety of strategies from their original contexts (Iedema, 2000). There are obviously other shifts as well, and with our focus on annotation here we can draw on Jakobson’s classic work on translation (Jakobson, 1959). Substituting “intrasemiotic” for Jakobson’s original “intralingual”, we are able to view shifts in semiotic material occurring in resemiotization as

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three types of translation: intersemiotic (e.g., where verbal signs become nonverbal or vice versa), interlingual (where signs of one named language are rendered as signs of another named language), and “intrasemiotic” (as reformulation or recoding within one semiotic system, e.g., named lan­ guage, a graphological system, etc.). Expectedly, in these context-induced translations, meanings will emerge that will be in varying degrees of corre­ spondence to conventionalized or earlier meanings. Indeed, a related con­ cept, semiotic remediation, addresses the reuse in a new medium of semiotic material from another medium, with the same or a new/extended sense (Banda & Jimaima, 2015; Bolter & Grusin, 1999). Repurposing is the term for the latter acceptation of semiotic remediation. While semiotic remedia­ tion and specifically repurposing are easily applicable when hand-written annotations for private consumption become electronic glosses for public consumption (Antia, 2017b), such a claim in respect of hand-written an­ notations on hardcopy texts may be tenuous, except annotation, and the primary text were considered different media.

Text annotations: Overview of a unique database Text annotations, also called marginalia, date as far back as medieval times, when readers “persistently used the interlinear spaces and margins of manuscripts to discuss, critique, and learn from the annotations left behind by earlier readers” (Wolfe & Neuwirth, 2001, p. 333). When readers underline texts, doodle, color, draw, apply punctuation marks, write cryptic or self-evident comments in extremely constrained spaces (on the margins or in between lines of an original paper or electronic text), they are inscribing moments of meaning-making in their journey through text. They are also capturing thought processes occurring simultaneously with, or punctuating, reading. In annotation, although communication is ob­ viously produced, the overall context is one of reception, an activity that is clearly an active process. In the terminology of annotations (cf. Marshall, 2010), a body is in­ formation or content that has been incorporated by a reader into a text, and this can be in a variety of forms, e.g., a note, a drawing, an asterisk. When the content is only implicit (as in highlights or underlines) rather than ex­ plicit, as in a text, the reference would be to a null-content annotation. Anchors serve to indicate what portion of text an annotation refers to, and they can be explicit, as when lines or curvy brackets are employed, or im­ plicit, when there is no apparent framing or delimitation. Implicit anchors can have a narrow scope referring to only a small segment of the text, or a broad scope, in which case it could be the entire document that is referred to. Annotations have been associated with a number of functions: helping to locate information; calling attention to topics and important passages; fa­ cilitating comprehension of text; fostering critical thinking; and recording the reader’s spontaneous reactions to text, among others (Marshall, 2010;

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Wolfe, 2000; Wolfe & Neuwirth, 2001). Annotations are a heuristic, re­ vealing forms of reader-engagement with a text, from momentary nonen­ gagement or disconnection (the mind taking a break and wandering away) to polemicizing and acquiescing with the text, and building on the text. What makes text annotations a unique database from the standpoint of investigating the multisemiotic instinct is, first, the fact of their being or­ iented toward reception (rather than production as such) and, second, their status as a rather pristine form of communication, possibly associated with inner speech. Vygotsky (1987) regards inner speech as thinking in pure meanings – in the same way as the private notebooks of writers and scien­ tists have been referred to as “inner speech writing” or “jottings of the mind” by John-Steiner (1992, p. 292). To the extent that Billy Collins’ poem, Marginalia, depicts in some measure our collective experiences of annota­ tion, then these spontaneous and self-directed reactions to text reflect a range of documented features of inner speech, including: condensation or abbreviatedness, presence of other people as well as auditory or/and visual images of them, (self-)regulation or metacognition, dialogicality, evaluation/ critique (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015; John-Steiner, 1992; McCarthy-Jones & Fernyhough, 2011). Readers unfamiliar with the poem can point their web browser to “Bill Collins Marginalia” to retrieve text and audio versions of this enchanting poem. Devoid as they often are of con­ cerns around social norms of communication, annotations indeed capture some of the motivation for a linguistics of the first-order communication experience as prodded by integrationism.

Method As part of an ongoing project in which students’ reading is approached through the lens of annotations as heuristic and resource, annotations made on recommended literature, course notes, and assessment tasks are being elicited from students across disciplines at a South African university. In addition, students’ commentaries on the annotations are obtained in socalled text-talks. In this chapter, annotated material relates to three different texts in English: course notes on odontogenetic tumors in dentistry, a journal article on the political economics of health, and a textbook on theories of personality in psychology. Although for reasons of space an­ notated data from linguistics is not included, information garnered from text-talks with students in linguistics is incorporated into the analysis. The data is analyzed using multimodal discourse analysis (Kress, 2011), which, consistent with the theoretical perspective outlined previously, we may also refer to as multisemiotic discourse analysis. Central to analysis in this frame is the idea that a text is an ensemble of semiotic modes, and therefore the “meanings of the maker of a text as a whole reside in the meanings made jointly by all the modes in a text” (Kress, 2011, p. 37), in­ cluding different named languages.

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This commitment implies determining what meaning-making resources (verbal and nonverbal) are deployed in the annotations, and at what level of granularity. Thus, while the verbal would involve the identification of items enregistered as named language 1, 2, … n or variety 1, 2, … n, the nonverbal would comprise any images, colors, typographical features, lines, punctuation marks (e.g., exclamation, question), among others, appearing in annotations. Levels of delicate granularity may be achieved for several of these; for instance, images can be analyzed in terms of three systems of composition, namely, salience, framing, and information value (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). The analysis above feeds into an account of the semiotic ecology of an­ notations proper, a task that comprises minimally an analysis of (1) the interaction of these marginal semiotics among themselves or/and with the text segments to which they apply to acquire certain functions for text readers; (2) how these marginal semiotics translate the text segments to which they apply; and (3) the relationship between meanings ascribed to specific marginal semiotics in different literacy events of annotation and the meanings of these same semiotics as may be codified in a dictionary or by social convention. The text-talks are useful for these tasks. This approach should make it possible to verify the hypothesized multisemiotic instinct in communicating/processing communication as well to offer a nuanced perspective on the nonfixity of the sign.

Results and discussion In the following two subsections, we present and analyze data related to the two objectives of this chapter. Is there a multisemiotic instinct in consuming communication? The annotated material for this section is presented as Figures 5.1–5.3. We see multiple semiotics being mobilized for the consumption of commu­ nication as mediated by annotations. What is particularly striking in our overall corpus is the rich layering of semiotics in the annotation experience of the readers. Let us begin with Figure 5.1:

Figure 5.1 Annotation on course notes on odontogenetic tumors by an international student (male, home-language Arabic), University of the Western Cape, Faculty of Dentistry, Lecture handouts on odontogenetic tumors, 2018.

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Figure 5.2 Annotation on a textbook on psychology by a female student (homelanguage isiXhosa), University of the Western Cape. Text book of the Department of Psychology. Foundations of Psychology: Psychology 1 (Custom edition). Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Figure 5.3 Annotation by same student as in Figure 5.2, University of the Western Cape, Department of Psychology. Foundations of Psychology: Psychology 1 (Custom edition). Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2016.

In Figure 5.1, we see that paragraphs are numbered, as are forms of “deposition”. Besides text segments being highlighted in different colors (yellow, pink, orange – not evident in this black-and-white reproduction) or left unhighlighted, we also see other segments in which one color of highlight is overlaid with another, or with emphatic (double) underlining. We also see Arabic translations of “primordial” ‫))ﺑﺪﺍﰃ‬, “induction” (‫ )ﺍﺣﺪﺍﺙ‬and de­ position (‫ )ﺗﺮﺳﻴﺐ‬incorporated into the text. In the specific (lay) experience of this student, what may perhaps be considered over-exuberant annotation, especially of the null-content type, is actually very functional. In text-talks, the student states that underlines and

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multicolored highlights, but also numbering, help with attention manage­ ment as an integral part of cognition. Substantial memorization is often the outcome of the way this student engages with text. In part because of a concern with written proficiency in English, the student finds himself reading a text multiple times, and acquiring a mental image of the text’s wording as a consequence. The different colors and the numbers within paragraphs serve to segment text passages into the different ideas or points they contain, and these then become the object of what appears to be this student’s phe­ nomenal ability to memorize. In the same way, the numbers attached to paragraphs help him plan for, implement, and monitor memorization. The foregoing does not suggest that the student makes no effort to un­ derstand: see for instance, the resemiotization of English (terminology) into Arabic. In other data from this student, we find additional instances of resemiotization of text meaning, e.g., epithelial cells, in text being in­ tralingually rendered in annotation as a lexically subordinate synonym, keratinocytes, thus allowing the student to make connections between a concept in text and a previously acquired concept; human papillomavirus in text being abbreviated as HPV in annotation, etc. In effect, we see how a wide range of semiotic resources is mobilized to dis-member the original text, for it to be re-membered as a consumable or digestible piece of com­ munication. Although in Figures 5.2 and 5.3 that follow (excerpts on a text on per­ sonality) the semiotic ecology of annotation is not quite as busy as in Figure 5.1, we nonetheless see the use of both verbal and nonverbal resources. In Figure 5.2 “defining personality” is underlined and processed as an­ nouncing a definiendum (term to be defined), and this null-content annota­ tion is understood as linked to the actual definiens (or definition) in the first paragraph of the second column, which is also underlined. On their own, these null-content annotations communicate the student’s metacognition; in other words, her attempt at working out the macrostructure of the passage. The definiens in text is resemiotized into isiXhosa in annotation, and the link between text and annotation is established through an anchor in the form of an arrow. In the course of text-talks, the student points out that there are so many “big words” (sensu incomprehensible) in the definition provided for the term “personality”. As a result, she reports unconsciously writing out in isiXhosa, her home language, what she thinks the definition is saying (see literal translation in the bubble). Of course, it is not known if the idea of “enduring” and “distinctive”, present in the English but absent in the isiXhosa translation, is a shift the student realizes can be consequential in an assessment context. In Figure 5.3, we see a text passage being resemiotized as a hybrid nonverbal–verbal representation in the form of an exploded image of a la­ beled hamburger. Clearly, the hamburger is mobilized from a food context and repurposed as an account of three levels of consciousness: conscious (not shown as it appears in the preceding page), preconscious and

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unconscious. As the figure shows, the hamburger has an implicit anchor with a broad scope. In explaining the choice of the hamburger image-metaphor, the student says: I wanted to (.) show the different levels of (.) how (.) of the different types of consciousness and eh the conscious is the top of the band of the burger to (.) represent how close it is to reality. And the [unconscious­ ness] is at the very bottom to illustrate how further away it is from the reality. The preconscious is the juicy part or the meat or whatever one puts in the band because it contains memories one can choose to push back to the unconscious or memories that one maybe will like to tell to somebody and else brings it to the conscious mind. Thus far, what we see for the two readers above is how multiple semiotics across the verbal and nonverbal divide are mobilized and called to do duty of different kinds in the receptive processing of texts via annotation. The verbal repertoire of the annotations for English texts includes, besides English itself (Figure 5.3), Arabic (Figure 5.1) and isiXhosa (Figure 5.2). The nonverbal repertoire mobilized includes such null-content resources as underlines (Figures 5.1 and 5.2) and highlights (Figure 5.1), drawing of a hamburger (Figure 5.3) and numbering (Figure 5.1). Together with data not presented here for reasons of space (e.g., question marks, exclamation marks, one-word clauses, etc.), the annotated material presented above lends credence to a multisemiotic instinct undergirding the consumption of communication. Secondarily, the data also reflect several of the aforementioned features of inner speech. In the next section, we turn to the question of the fixity/nonfixity of the sign. Does a sign (not) pre-exist the activity in which it is used? Integrationism, as was explained earlier, argues that a sign is idiosyn­ cratically constituted and is meaningful only in relation to the specific ac­ tivity in which it occurs. Harris appears not to admit of the role of social convention in sign-making. His readers are encouraged, if they wish to understand sign and signification, not “to start with the notion of a social convention already in situ. For our own experience tells us that we attribute significations to things and events, irrespective of whether there is any social convention about the matter or not. Signs do not necessarily have a social dimension at all” (Harris, 1996, pp. 67–68). This view, which refutes a practice such as repetition, has not sat well, not even with sympathizers of integrationism (cf. Makoni, 2014, p. 78). To answer the question posed in this section, let us again consider the burger image (Figure 5.3). The integrationist argument of a sign being “the product of creative and purposive activity [which] does not preexist that activity as something one finds, takes and interprets” (Bade & Pablé, 2012, p. 57) would appear to be so well illustrated in both the choice of the burger

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image and the explanation provided. The hermeneutic activity of this stu­ dent is unique, and involves, among others, determinations of how distal and proximate points or levels are imagined to be relative to reality, bidir­ ectionality, etc. Within this context, there is hardly any disputing that a burger as sign has been made, probably without antecedent, to stand for levels of consciousness – thus linking together a number of strands of the interpretative process. Even though from the standpoint of form (i.e., three levels) there is clearly a connection between the text account and the burger image, it can still be conceded that, as yet, there is nothing social or con­ ventional about the burger sign in the context of a treatise on levels of consciousness. While we find confirmation here for integrationism, the view confirmed, albeit in respect of a non-linguistic sign, is not without its critics, as seen above. The challenge is how to account for this example and others within a single frame. We comment on Figure 5.4 and employ text-talks on other annotation samples that raise some of the issues that Figure 5.4 throws up as a basis for considering how resemiotization provides a more nuanced ac­ count that is likely to enhance broader uptake of sign indeterminacy in in­ tegrationism. Let us begin then with Figure 5.4. In response to a question on the meaning of the highlights, the author of the annotation in Figure 5.4 instructively reformulates the question to include underlines: So usually I highlight underline things that I find important (.) right? So the different colors means that ah ah (.) it’s like what’s this (.) subheadings in an essay. So the different colors means the different ideas in terms of what I find important (.) maybe the different colors address certain things within this whole paragraph. […] And then if I didn’t have the different colors honestly I wouldn’t have been able to identify the different ideas within (.) let’s say (.) one paragraph. Yeah they alert me to the different ideas within this paragraph

Figure 5.4 Annotation by a journal article on the political economy of health by a female student (home language Setswana), Gilbert, T. & Gilbert, L. (2004). Globalisation and local power: Influences on health matters in South Africa. Health Policy, 67(3), 245–255.

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The author subsequently fleshes out this general function in the context of the particular article, noting for instance that the passage underlined in brown ‘examines …’, the highlight in orange ‘questions …’, the blue ink underline states what the paper is not about, while the pink highlight states what the paper is about (colors not evident in this black-and-white reproduction of Figure 5.4). Here, as in the burger example, there is hardly any basis for contesting the unprecedented novelty of these signs – brown for ‘examines’, etc. If we posited two levels of resemiotization, arbitrary and motivated, the intersemiotic rendering of an idea such as ‘this paper examines’ in text (which is a particular type of authoring practice) as color brown in annotation (a different type of authoring practice) would illustrate arbitrary re­ semiotization. Shifts such as these substitute socially unprecedented symbols, thus non-iconic and non-indexical visual designs, for explicit meaning con­ veyed in language. Motivated resemiotization would be interested in inter­ textual meaning ties, and this is where the discarding of the socialconventional in integrationism may sometimes be perceived as a problem. Based on the above student’s account of the uses of highlights/underlines, as well as accounts from students in a different discipline (linguistics) who had used underlines and/or highlights in their annotated texts, we probed motivated resemiotization. A picture of understandings of highlight/under­ line is provided in Figure 5.5. In each instance or set of instances of the literacy event of annotating, highlight/underline appears to be uniquely and arbitrarily constituted. Such interpretative diversity of highlight/underline as a sign clearly follows from active individual reader engagement with the process of making meaning in text. Perhaps more importantly in this context, the diversity would be confirmation for the integrationist point. On the other hand, it can be said that there is a core, conventionalized understanding of highlighting and underlining, suggesting that they both serve to call attention to something in text. Arguably, this core meaning is present, and what the various instances illustrate are shifts that index in­ dividual orientations to that core meaning in localized annotation activities or contexts. For some of the authors of the annotation, this core meaning is oriented toward understanding text macrostructure (sub-head, important points, map different ideas, imminence of definition); for others, the or­ ientation is more toward a cognitive and emotional appraisal of the content to which attention has been called (mark agreement, mark disagreement, a good point, item understood, item not understood, beautify text); for yet others, there is more of an action orientation to what has been marked out (memorization, mark for reuse, point to elaborate on, item for research further). A logical chain can, therefore, be established among all three or­ ientations – that is, from the putative conventionalized meaning of attention calling. Awareness of the macrostructure may lead to cognitive/emotional appraisal or vice versa (see below), which in turn determines what the reader is ready to do.

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point to elaborate

subhead

a good point

important items map diff. ideas

memorization

mark for reuse Highlight/ underlining

item for further research

mark agreement

item not understood item understood

mark disagreement

imminence of definition

beautify text

Figure 5.5 Meanings of underlines and highlights by students across disciplines.

In sum, both arbitrary and motivated resemiotization suggest that across contexts or practices, signs are not necessarily always made anew and without regard to a collective social meaning-making experience. As an aside, the importance to readers of what may be considered exuberant highlighting is perhaps better appreciated in light of the remark by Blommaert (2008, p. 113) that the “essential role of aesthetics in the production of meaning has … not been widely recognized in the study of language”. A final example from the text-talks involving question marks similarly makes the point that signs are not necessarily always made anew and without regard to a collective social meaning-making experience. Students’ comments on their use of question marks in annotating a particular text pointed to several interpretations: lack of comprehension, confusion, dis­ pleasure, problem to be returned to, and disagreement, among others. Consider the following sample views on the question mark: A:

is to show that I don’t understand it so I need someone to explain it to me because if I go and search from internet I am not sure if I will

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understand so I need someone to explain to me before I go … to the Internet… [Double question mark,??] is to emphasize you must do this and one [?] is like maybe you have a little bit of understanding… [Triple question marks,???] ah the reason I did this is ahmm I wanted to ask … because this does not look like a linguistics fieldwork kind of a thing … in fact I did not understand anything here, nothing B: means I don’t understand and I went to search … that is the meaning? … means like when I don’t understand I am like what are you trying to say? C: for me it is like I am annoyed … so moments of question mark I am just like (sighs) not dumb like but oh ok you are not getting it or like whoever the author is ah … I will come back to it or like (to author) why could you not say it easier (laughs) … The question mark intersemiotically translates as punctuation items or passages in verbal text. While the diversity of meanings assigned to this punctuation by individual text annotators in specific practices could be said to illustrate the integrationist point, motivated resemiotization would offer a more nuanced argument. In conventional usage, a question mark is understood as a request for information. This core meaning underpins or­ ientations in annotation toward the question mark suggestive of causal re­ lations: I need more information because something is not clear; I need more information because I am confused; I need to get more information later; I am compelled now to get more information when I could have been spared the effort by a simpler formulation, hence my irritation; etc. Motivated resemiotization argues, then, that there is a measure of conventionality and predictability in successive uses and interpretations of the question mark in annotations. It is instructive that Wittgenstein, acknowledged as an influence in the emergence of integrationism, himself recognized intertextual ties in manifes­ tations of the sign. In his construct of language games, Wittgenstein (1953) argues that undergirding the various tokens of, for instance, “water” – used in different actions to mean a request, a warning, a secret code, etc. – is the idea of family resemblance. Wittgenstein’s account, thus, does not overwork the sign interpreter as would an account that suggested each and every use of a sign were completely unique and unlike anything before it.

Conclusion: Implications and a southern epistemological footnote As a consequence of Kuhn’s paradigm crisis in sociolinguistics, a raft of new conceptualizations is forcing a rethink of the scope of language and com­ munication as object of study, as well as also seeking to enhance the ex­ planatory adequacy of frameworks. This chapter has brought three of such conceptualizations into some conversation and offered multisemioticity as

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partial distillation of these conceptualizations. The multisemiotic lens has been applied to a relatively understudied database of first-order and re­ ceptive (rather than productive) communication – annotations. As jottings of the mind, annotations bear fewer imprints of normative consciousness and activity, and therefore are an interesting source for both investigating and enhancing the explanatory adequacy of theorization around lan­ guage and communication. Analysis of the chosen database allows for the claim that there appears to be a multisemiotic cognitive architecture for consuming text. We have seen how in the course of annotation as self-directed, more or less spontaneous, communication, our readers mobilize diverse verbal and nonverbal re­ sources at varying levels of delicacy: underlines and highlights (and specific colors), English, Arabic, isiXhosa, numbers, arrows, question marks, etc. We see how an entire semiotic ecology supports a range of functions, in­ cluding understanding the macro-structure of text, marking out items as especially worth attending to for a variety of reasons, understanding across named languages, and interpreting on the basis of analogy, among other kinds of meaning-making. Our database also suggests that there are processes of translation or re­ semiotization at work within this ecology and in its relation to the original texts to which annotations refer. Kress (2011) makes the point that in “the semiotic work of interpretation, the internal re-making the text, the inter­ preter of a semiotic entity also produces a coherent, newly made text, the result of her or his interpretation”. Our data show that items in the new text do not necessarily exclude or forbid logical or meaning ties to material in the prompting text or to previous uses of these items. Underlines and highlights or question marks were seen to have core meanings, and although their use in the activity of annotation differed somewhat from these core meanings, there were intertextual meaning ties. Let us turn briefly to the overall project on annotation in reading within which the research reported here arose. Findings of this study in which translingualism, multimodality, and integrationism have been funneled into multisemioticity can be operationalized as a pedagogy for reading. The overall message seems to be that annotations frequently make it possible for texts to be first dismembered, then remembered as a consumable or diges­ tible piece of communication for a particular reader in their more or less idiosyncratic hermeneutic activities. Given the well-known three-level modeling of reading (surface, deep, and critical), a multisemiotic perspective draws attention to the range of re­ sources available for these purposes, of course without constituting the re­ sources into a prescribed code. The latter point cannot be emphasized enough, and what we do below is only to exemplify the diversity of options. At a surface reading level, where the concern may be to get the gist of the text, possibly also to figure out the macrostructure of the text and generally to determine how to allocate attentional/cognitive resources, a number of

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points have become obvious from this study. Highlights can serve to seg­ ment ideas, with specific colors sometimes being used consistently, in the same way that numbers can be deployed for similar purposes. Lines, with or without arrowheads, can mark out related ideas on the same page, in the same way that other symbols (asterisks, plus-signs, etc.) can serve the same purpose on the same page or across pages. Same language (variety) or a different language (variety) can be used to gloss vocabulary or to re­ formulate clauses/ideas considered difficult at first pass. At a deep reading level, where the focus moves beyond getting the gist to making one’s own sense of text-mediated knowledge, resemiotization in­ volving movement from text to image or image to text would be an option, as would be summarizing/reformulating content in text or bulleted point form – in the same but especially in a different language. Question marks or other punctuation employed to indicate ideas that need to be followed up, as other symbols and emoticons expressing emotional reactions to text, would also belong here. At a critical reading level, symbols communicating acquiescence or po­ lemicization with text contents could be drawn upon, such as an X sign, a question mark, ticks, one-word clauses (No! Yes! What? Kidding?) or multiple word clauses. Available options might also include letter/font size, capitalization, and so on. Let us conclude with a southern epistemological footnote. Modeling of reading has tended to assume that reading is a monolingual and monomodal process, sometimes also one of telementation. In foregrounding the experi­ ences of reading in a context of the Global South, experiences that have not always made into mainstream models of reading, this chapter has underscored alternative ways of doing literacy. In contexts of southern multilingualisms, if not also elsewhere, reading reflects a multisemiotic in­ stinct, unfolding as it does through a rich and interacting repertoire of communicative resources.

Acknowledgment Bassey E. Antia is grateful to UWC’s University Development Capacity Grant and the African Digital Humanities Program for funding to support his project on text annotation/electronic glossing.

References Alderson-Day, B. & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Inner speech: Development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin, 141(5), 931–965. Antia, B. E. (2017a). Electronic terminology glosses, communities of practice and multilingual academic literacies. edition – Die Fachzeitschrift für Terminologie, 1, 13–17.

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Antia, B. E. (2017b). Shh, hushed multilingualism! Accounting for the discreet genre of translanguaged siding in lecture halls at a South African university. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 243, 183–198. Allwood, J. (2008). Dimensions of embodied communication—Towards a typology of embodied communication. In I. Wachsmuth, M. Lenzen & G. Knoblich (Eds.), Embodied communication in humans and machines (pp. 257–284). Oxford University Press. Bade, D. & Pablé, A. (2012). Signs unfounded and confounded. A reply to Søren Lund. RASK. International Journal of Language and Communication, 35(1), 43–85. Banda, F. & Jimaima, H. (2015). The semiotic ecology of linguistic landscapes in rural Zambia. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(5), 643–670. Blommaert, J. (2008). Grassroots literacy: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. Routledge. Bolter, J. & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding new media. MIT Press. Canagarajah, A. S. (2011). Translanguaging in the classroom: Emerging issues for research and pedagogy. Applied Linguistics Review, 2(1), 1–27. Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Translingual practice: Global Englishes and cosmopolitan relations. Routledge. Fishman, J. A. (1967). Bilingualism with and without diglossia; Diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues, 23(2), 29–38. García, O. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Wiley-Blackwell. Gómez-Jiménez, E. (2015). An introduction to graphology: Definition, theoretical background and levels of analysis. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 51, 71–85. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language, and communication: Integrational and segrega­ tional approaches. Routledge. Harris, R. (2009). Implicit and explicit language teaching. In M. Toolan (Ed.), Language teaching: Integrational approaches (pp.24–47). Routledge. Harris, R. & Hutton, C. (2007). Definition in theory and practice. Continuum. Hopper, P. (2000). The ideal of consistency in thinking about language. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 19, 1–10. Iedema, R. (2000). Bureaucratic planning and resemiotisation. In: E. Ventola (Ed.), Discourse and community: Doing functional linguistics (pp. 47–70). Narr. Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of dis­ course as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication, 2(1), 29–57. Jakobson, R. (1959). On linguistic aspects of translation. In: R. A. Brower, (Ed.), On Translation (pp. 232–239). Harvard University Press. John-Steiner, V. (1992). Private speech among adults. In: L. E. Berk & R. M. Diaz (Eds.), Private speech: From social interaction to self-regulation (pp.285–296). Erlbaum. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality. A social semiotic approach to contemporary com­ munication. Routledge. Kress, G. (2011). Multimodal discourse analysis. In: J. P. Gee & M. Handford (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 35–50). Routledge. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. Routledge. Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. 4th ed. The University of Chicago Press.

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Lewis, G., Jones, B. & Baker, C. (2012). Translanguaging: Origins and development from school to street and beyond. Educational Research and Evaluation, 18, 641–654. Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. Lund, S. (2012). On Professor Roy Harris’s ‘integrational turn’ in linguistics. RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication, 35, 3–42. Makalela, L. (2015). Moving out of linguistic boxes: The effects of translanguaging strategies for multilingual classrooms. Language and Education, 29(3), 200–217. Makoni, S. (2014). The Lord is my shock absorber: A sociohistorical integrationist approach to mid-twentieth-century literacy practices in Ghana. In: A. Blackledge & A. Creese (Eds.), Heteroglossia as practice and pedagogy (pp. 75–97). Springer. Marshall, C. C. (2010). Reading and writing the electronic book (Synthesis lectures on information concepts, retrieval, and services #9). DOI: 10.2200/s00215ed1v01 y200907icr009. McCarthy-Jones, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2011). The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults. Consciousness and Cognition, 20(4), 1586–1593. McIntosh, A. (1961). Graphology and meaning. Archivum Linguisticum, 13(2), 107–120. Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and de­ constructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281–307. Rymes, B. (2014). Communicative repertoire. In: C. Leung & B. Street (Eds.) Routledge companion to English language studies (pp. 287–301). Routledge. Vygotsky L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. The collected works of Lev Vygotsky (Vol. 1). Plenum Press. Wales, K. (2001). A dictionary of stylistics. Longman. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Transl. G. E. M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell. Wolfe, J. L. (2000). Effects of annotations on student readers and writers. Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on digital libraries. San Antonio, Tex., USA: ACM Press, pp. 19–26. https://doi.org/10.1145/336597.336620 Wolfe, J. L. & Neuwirth, C. M. (2001). From the margins to the center: The future of annotation. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 15(3), 333–371.

Q&A: Bassey Antia & Lynn Mafofo CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? The paper submitted, in fact, arose from preoccupation with a topic of interest in Applied Linguistics, namely, reading (pedagogy). In the chapter, integrationism, translanguaging, and multimodality are funneled into an overarching framework, namely, multisemioticity, in order to unlock often-ignored practices of/in annotation that sometimes take place in the course of reading academic texts. Understanding text annotation through the lens of multisemioticity as proposed in this chapter provides, we believe, new tools for observing, describing and analyzing reading by students, and pedagogically intervening to empower them as text readers.

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This enterprise is of potential interest not only within academic devel­ opment practice but also in research on academic literacies. Aspects of IL discussed in the conference and reflected in the chapter are reminiscent of work done in other fields. A case in point is in­ determinacy of the sign, which has been a subject in a number of other fields (physics, terminology, law, translation, etc.). In his editorial introduction to Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins), Antia (2007) provides an account of variants of an overall indeterminacy principle in relativity theory and quantum mechanics in physics, with implications for language use. In the col­ lection, productive indeterminacy is discussed in a range of fields, from the law, economics, ontologies, technical translation, etc. Hopefully, continuing engagement with IL should allow for the application of a modified IL view of the indeterminacy of the sign (as developed in this chapter) to a re-reading of previous work in text analysis, translation and terminology which demonstrate co-textual variations in the ac­ ceptation of the same terms in text progression: Antia, B. E., & Kamai, R. A. (2016). Writing biology, assessing biology: The nature and effects of variation in terminology. Terminology: International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication, 22(2), 201–223. Antia, B. E., Budin, G., Picht, H., Rogers, M., Schmitz, K.-D., & Wright, S. E. (2005). Shaping translation: A view from terminology research. META: Translators’ Journal, 50(4). CD-ROM Publication. Antia, B. E. (2002). II termine: Contesto definitorio e contesto d’uso. In M. Magris, M.T. Musacchio, L. Rega, & F. Scarpa (Eds.), Manuale di ter­ minologia. Aspetti teorici, metodologici e applicativi (pp. 99–114). Milan: Hoepli. Antia, B. E. (2001). Terminological investigations into specialized knowledge and texts: A case study of legislative discourse. Terminology: International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication, 7(1), 5–29. CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? The presentation for the conference had no explicit links to IL. Although the pre-conference workshop offered some possibilities for links, the picture remained largely incoherent for us. A leitmotif of confusion at­ tending presentations (workshop and conference) as well as interaction with attendees was the very notion of “integration”. It has taken quite a bit of post-conference reading around for an understanding of this foundational notion to emerge, and for the chapter submitted to draw on it and on IL more broadly. Thus, a key gain of the conference was to whet the appetite for IL. Retrospectively, the confusion may well-nigh have arisen from our inability (no thanks to a conventionalized

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understanding of integration) to see how integration was being con­ stituted into a sign by expert IL presenters in the activity of unfolding a theory of many parts. Integrationism confirmed!!! During the conference, however, a need was vaguely felt to have IL enter into conversation with other theories covering some of the same theo­ retical and analytical ground of concerns. See, for instance, answer to question 1. Reading up further on integrationism confirmed these in­ tuitions and led, we believe, to the version of the chapter submitted in which an attempt has been made both to position IL in relation to translingualism and multimodality, and to leverage on the strengths of all three in accounting for a relatively understudied database. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? Both the IL conference theme and the perspective adopted in the chapter underscore the importance of ongoing efforts aimed at enhancing the explanatory adequacy of theorization about language and communica­ tion. For purposes of deepening understanding of the object of study, and that alone, we envision the focus in many branches of the field increas­ ingly being oriented toward the study of communication, one in which language or specific languages are incorporated in ways that are not al­ ways predictable, but which on analysis are seen to express some logic. IL notions of the lay communicator (reader, speaker, writer, etc.) and the first-order communication experience are powerful concepts for framing this future of the field, with conferences and journals co-opted as strategic allies for the implementation of the vision. In this future, IL may have to accept, to its delight or chagrin, that the acceptation of ‘integration/ism’ be extended in the direction of eclecticism and intertextuality, or resemiotization as illustrated in the paper submitted.

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The semiological implications of knowledge ideologies: A Harrisian perspective Xuan Fang

In his TED talk entitled “The Way We Think about Work is Broken” Barry Schwartz (2014), professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in the United States, managed to succinctly elucidate the dark side of ideology. Schwartz reminds us that ideology represents a vision of humanity and society imbued by a set of ideas, which are made real by authority. He also points out that even when those ideas turn out utterly false, they will still become reality, and there are always tough practical challenges awaiting anyone skeptical of those ideas. In that sense, the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the academic world is an ideological issue. To briefly tell the relevant intellectual history of Eurocentrism, at first there is a theory of knowledge, an epistemology, which originates in the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, pp. 20, 66, 75), the core idea of which is about how to deploy human rationality to find, or learn about, the abstract “apodeitic” that transcends the mere empirical (Kant, 1786, p. 4, as cited in Harris, 2005, p. xii). Henceforth, rationalist epistemology nourishes the prosperity of scientific theories and technological advancements in Western countries and has been deemed a crucial part of modernity even till this very day. Given its commitment to rationalism and westernization (whether foisted upon a culture or willingly adopted), as well as its global reach, Eurocentrism has become enthroned, unsurprisingly, as a predominant ideology of knowledge in the academic world. As Schwartz warns (1997), when ideas become ideology, they are no longer just academic, or theoretical, but have practical consequences. In the case of Eurocentrism, it is more than just “an economy of ideas”, but also “an economy of salaries, perks, and privileges” (Cusicanqui, 2012, pp. 102–103, as cited in Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, p. 33). The livelihood of scholars, their careers, their “teaching and publishing opportunities”, are all regulated by the mechanism of this economy (Connell, 2007, pp. 217–218). Universities can hardly escape the dominance of such a powerful force either, an unfortunate fact that has been critically pointed out by, to name but a few, Connell (2007) and the contributors to the volume of Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University (Cupples & Grosfoguel, 2019). On the one hand, Western universities have always been

Semiological implications 105 home for Eurocentric values and take pride in that, and, on the other hand, non-Western universities all over the world tend toward being westernized, for that seems to be an effective way to earn prestige and financial support. Usually, westernization means ecology-engineering, both academically and administratively, to harbor Eurocentric epistemology, namely, to make revolve around it funding policy, assessment criteria, standard and norms of knowledge-producing, among other things. At first glimpse, westernization looks like an adaptive strategy adopted by universities for the purpose of acquiring more resources. Yet there is a more important motivation – embracing Eurocentrism seems like a morally right thing to do and a reasonable move since it is tantamount to embracing “enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress” and those are widely accepted as “wellspring of universal learning, of science and philosophy” (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, pp. 20, 34). Therefore, for universities to support Eurocentrism systematically, it appears to be on the right side of history, i.e., a more developed phase. As a recurrent theme in modern history, the victory of Eurocentrism always goes hand in hand with the triumph of rationalism. There has been no lack of defenders of the irrational, as Camus points out (Camus, 1955/1991), e.g., Karl Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. However, as scholars aligning as the Global South would contest, those thinkers’ criticism of rationalism still belongs to the framework of the Global North, their goals tremendously incompatible with what Southern theorists are looking to achieve. Now, as is widely accepted, there are two fundamental proposals of rationalism that are taken as maxims by followers of rationalism: one for its humanism – it assumes that rational minds think alike, e.g., science and art, amongst many, have no borders for human beings of any citizenship to appreciate; and the other for its universal validity – it supposes that rationality can manage to give an account of what is universally true. It is exactly these two “maxims” that are under attack most of the time by critics of rationalism. But what makes Southern theorists’ refutation distinctive is that they want to go beyond just theoretical bickering and track down the realistic and historic strings attached to the appearance of universality of rationalism. They want to go after what they believe is the real reason for rationalist epistemology to prevail and the concomitant non-benign consequences. Hence, from the point of view of the Global South, the selfrighteous superiority and the condescension of being more advanced conveyed in the notion of Eurocentrism that always attempts to belittle the “otherness” of the world is not only unjustifiable but also a story told by turning a blind eye on the dark moments of human history that saw the crimes of imperialism and colonialism. Is it really the case that non-Western civilizations are inferior just the way they are, or did plundering of the colonizers deprive those civilizations of the chance to explore the full potential and prospects of their own cultures? For Southern scholars, the only truth

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that is universal is the truth of complexity. That is to say, reality is always much more than what it appears to be. As Santos underscores over and over again with various phrases, “the western understanding of the world is as important as it is partial” (2016, p. 263). If so, what happens to the voice of the otherness and why is it that it seems to be silenced and muted? One reason why the partial can be misguidedly portrayed as the universal is because of the omission whether inadvertent, or deliberate, of the severe direct-effects, side-effects, and after-effects of capitalism and colonialism, the conditions of inequality imposed by the alien hands of the colonizers, the suffering and resistance of the indigenous and the colonized, the despair of inequitability, and of unfair marginalization in the name of cultural preservation (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020; Santos, 2016; Connell, 2007; Araújo & Maeso, 2015). “The Eurocentric narrative’s effect is to silence its premise of coloniality/racism” (Bertaux, 2016, p. 2432). To see Eurocentrism for what it really is and to debunk the hegemony it tacitly and ideologically asserts over the academic world, Southern theory attempts – against all odds and pressures – a brave new slant on important issues that are once only studied within the intellectual genealogies of Western traditions, which is known as epistemologies of the South. The present chapter endeavors to attain new insight into the epistemological clash between Eurocentrism and the Global South by resorting to integrationist linguist Roy Harris’s specific intellectual perspective. Harris would have pointed out that both terms – the Global South and the Global North – are of the same nature as the supercategories he has studied such as Science or Art (Harris, 2003, 2005), in the sense that (1) both are also the products of a series of human communicational activities – second-order abstractions (Pablé, 2019b) and (2) the epistemological views of neither side exist in a communicational vacuum, but are discursively made and language-dependent. Hence, we need to develop an understanding of two major conceptual fields, namely, “what assumptions underlie the language” of both (Harris, 2005) and what communication processes have been involved to make them what they are now – what Harris means by communication is open ended and interweaving sequels of human activities not limited to just those involving application of words (Harris, 1996). Having adopted Harris’s perspective, I would like to suggest that Eurocentrism – both its ideology and its epistemology, and what Harris (1981, 2002b) criticizes as the language myth are profoundly intertwined, and that ontological and epistemological views of Southern thinkers in general are endorsable by Harrisian integrationism.

The language myth and Eurocentrism: Two sides of the same coin From a Northern perspective, the rise of Eurocentrism is a natural course, the triumph of pragmatism, inasmuch as science and technology are deemed

Semiological implications 107 axiomatically superior to superstition and the primitive. For those who hold an adamant belief in the universality of natural laws and scientific truth, everything else, e.g., religious ideas, cultural phenomena, discourses in other fields of humanities, are at best positive nonsense and at worst jokes, and whoever claims that science, like any other discourses, is discursively made and socially constructed, is a “hypocrite”. In illustration of this point, I would like to draw on what was famously (and controversially) said by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in these much-quoted passages: Just as you entrust your travel to a Boeing 747 rather than a magic carpet or a broomstick; just as you take your tumour to the best surgeon available, rather than a shaman or a mundu mugu, so you will find that the scientific version of truth works. (Dawkins, 2009) Lewis Wolpert is to be congratulated for standing up at the British Association and blowing the whistle on the chic drivel of the ‘all knowledge is a social construct and merits equal attention’ persuasion … Western science works … When you take a 747 to an international convention of sociologists or literary critics, the reason you will arrive in one piece is that a lot of western-trained scientists and engineers got their sums right. If it gives you satisfaction to say that the theory of aerodynamics is a social construct that is your privilege, but why do you then entrust travel plans to a Boeing rather than a magic carpet? As I have put it before, show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I will show you a hypocrite. (Dawkins, 1994, pp. 17–18) These passages resonate with what Jackendoff claims about logical and mathematical truth: “these are surely eternal, abstract, and independent of humans. Two plus two would still equal four, five would still be a prime, and [p and q] would still entail p even if we weren’t around to appreciate it” (Jackendoff, 2002, p. 299). Plenty of similar-sounding theses run through the literature of philosophy and linguistics. In fact, this argument, which has gradually turned into a self-evident presupposition, that scientific truth is objective, independent of any culture, society, or individual, is the origin of all the issues we will discuss in this chapter. From the assumption of the existence of such an entity as “scientific truth” immediately ensue a series of ontological inquiries, which would then entail semiological ones. First, three rationalist corollaries can be drawn at this point: (1) scientific truth per se is an abstract entity – invisible, invariable, and formless; (2) abstract entities can be grasped by humans in the form of thoughts; and (3) thoughts can be made known by one person to another only via the measure of semiological media, e.g., a mathematician, no matter how great his mathematical thoughts may be, has to “write them down” for them to count

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as anything at all; if his thoughts remain boxed in his brain, then nobody can learn them from him. “Any proposal has to be formulated in language before it can be tested or even discussed” (Magee, 1973, p. 71, as cited in Harris, 2009, p. 128). As Harris has argued in The Language Myth (1981), long before the concept of “science” in today’s sense arose, Aristotle proposed the thesis that some abstract mental facts should be uniform for all human beings, and those are “mental affections or impressions” of concrete objects (Harris, 1981, p. 9). This thesis remains controversial even today because probing thoughts directly is still beyond today’s most advanced technology, but the thesis nevertheless acts as a metaphysical source of the concept of “scientific truth”. That is why the story of “the language myth” told by Harris starts with his criticism of Aristotle’s assumption, and also why the concept of “scientific truth” much flaunted by Eurocentrism is taken by Southern thinkers as more about ideology than truth. To argue against it, Southern theorists even see “the need for what Grosfoguel (2011) calls epistemological critique”: Grosfoguel and other Latin American decolonial thinkers point to the fact that since the 16th century, hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms have informed Western philosophy, science, and rationality and have attributed to themselves a neutral, objective point of view, which has hidden their locus of enunciation and with it the historical, sociocultural, political and economic interests that traverse and color their perceptions and knowledges. It is from this, a-historical, body-less, abstract point of view that so-called Modernity and Western Science define themselves as universal, disqualifying other modernities, knowledges, and science produced from other historical and sociocultural locations. (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, p. xi) Second, with the human inventions of various semiological tools – language, painting, quipu (tying knots with strings to make records), etc. – unperceivable ideas in the human mind can be solidified and passed down to others. Universal truths also can be semiologically embodied and become “knowledge” to be spread around. This is what Harris called the “pattern transference” (Harris, 2002b, pp. 11–12). For those who view pattern transference – copy of thoughts from one mind to another by means of semiological activities, as possible in principle, a semiological item can embody something that is otherwise abstract and formless. For example, we can talk about someone’s thoughts in his works or we can write down the physical laws – truth about the cycle of stars, all that was once only written across the night sky – on a sheet of paper. We can, in an ineffable way, pierce through the painting of Van Gogh and see a glimpse of his mind. However, along this chain of logic, the question of how it happens, that semiological items as perceivable objects can embody abstract and formless things, provided that there indeed are such entities as thoughts and truth,

Semiological implications 109 becomes inevitable. To explain that, these questions will also have to be answered: how does a word get its meaning, how is thought communicated to us through some text? Third, the enterprise of trusting semiological media with precious ideas can be quite perilous, as many great thinkers have realized. Plato and Aristotle condemn the using of “rhetoric”, for they both discern the capabilities that words have to misconstrue, distort and misguide in the hands of eloquent sophists; Bacon, as pointed out by Harris, also “warns us against the misunderstandings engendered by words themselves” (1981, p. 1); arguing that media of any kind, not just language, are measures to deceive, Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005) reveals how manipulating media can fabricate any kind of “truth” or “fact” at the will of the manipulators. If the blemishes of communicating by means of language are so obvious, why is it that language seems to work perfectly fine most of the time? That has something to do with a well-known issue to be discussed, which is much more complicated than it seems to be, and Harris is the one and only linguist who takes an uncompromising position regarding this complexity. In fact, in some sense the majority of Harris’s works are devoted to expounding the conflict between common sense belief about language and communication and what they might actually be. All the ideas about language that seem truisms today are also at the same time what “the language myth” is made of, namely, (1) the feasibility of the code model of communication that implies we can achieve “pattern transference” of intactly transmitting thought from one mind to another by using a shared code that is an autonomous linguistic system; and (2) the claim that the same words can mean the same uniformly for all people at all times provided that they all know the same language. The former is dubbed the “telementation fallacy” and the latter the “determinacy fallacy” by Harris (1981). Logically, it is incontrovertible that the Western enterprise of scientific-knowledge-producing presupposes these two theses about language and communication. To use a text to represent a thought and let others read the text and get the thought is what academic journal articles are all about. So a particular piece of thought once copied onto a piece of paper has the chance of outliving its creator and always being on the paper regardless of whether there is a reader or not. What is demanded for this assumption to hold true is that texts and the abstract things they stand for have to bond tightly as an inseparable whole, like the head and tail of the same coin, and the corresponding relations between a pair of text and thought are fixed, so that text can inscribe thoughts accurately and what a text means, the thought it conveys, can be uniformly received by anyone. Hence, it is important that knowledge “exists only on paper”, as argued by Magee and approved by the Western knowledge-industry known as the academy (1973, p. 71, as cited in Harris, 2009, p. 128), and also that “knowledge in the objective sense is knowledge without a knower: it is

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knowledge without a knowing subject” (Popper, 1972, p. 109, as cited in Harris, 2009, p. 128). The problem with this very traditional Western view of knowledge and the semiological assumptions underlying it, as Harris’s works indicate, is not that they fail to see that language and communication don’t always work that way – precisely conveying thoughts through the process of decoding and encoding. On the contrary, Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, and Locke – before Harris – are all more or less aware of the inevitable misunderstandings various interpretations of language can cause. Rather, the problem lies in the misconception of communication processes, as explained in the following section. First, despite everything, there are many people, ordinary people as well as scholars, who believe that the code model is in principle workable, as long as precautions are taken to deal with problematic usage of words. Terminology of different subjects, for one, is to fixate a list of words/glossaries to a list of corresponding referents. Protocols for academic publication, for another, act as precautions to ensure thoughts conveyed by a particular piece make similar sense for different reviewers. These practices, as well as many others, have but one target, to maximally dehumanize and decontextualize knowledge-business, making sure that academic texts are doing a good job of semiologically preserving and representing found scientific truth as knowledge. But, even if every conceivable effort is exercised, the ideal that the code-model exhibits can only be approximated to, and never really be achieved. Second, it is a common delusion that as long as they use the same one language, fluency and proficiency in regard to communication or understanding one another have been enjoyed by people, no matter whether they live close to or far away from each other, in time as well as in space. But that is not true. In fact, there are two prerequisites for communication as we know today to transpire, and I mean communication in the way that seems to approximate to the code-model. One is technology that allows fast and wide transmission of information and the other is availability of education opportunities for the majority of the population. Only with those two prerequisite conditions can national institutions impose and implement the standardization of written and spoken language nationwide. For example, students at schools are required to use standard spelling of words for writing and standard accent of spoken language is applied for public broadcasting. Hence, it is a modern thing that people from the same country seem able to speak and understand language in a similar way. However, in the past when there was lack of technology and education opportunities for the majority, the communication landscape has been totally different. Take the area of China where I was born and raised for example. We have a local dialect called “Teochew Dialect”, and it is spoken by people living in the villages and cities of the eastern part of Guangdong Province. However, it has varieties. The remarkable thing is that the scale of difference between any

Semiological implications 111 two varieties is proportionate to the length of distance between their locations. So the spoken language already sounds slightly different a few miles away. If I met someone from a city tens of miles away who also speaks the same dialect as I, I would most likely rather talk in Putonghua with that person, because the variety of dialect that person speaks would be almost unintelligible to me unless that person talks very very slow. This is not a problem for young people in China today because we can all speak Putonghua. However, for the elders in their 80s or 90s who live in this area, most of them unable to speak Putonghua for historical reasons, it would be a problem. Also, in ancient times, even for the literate, lack of uniformity in their literacy-education made them more prone to misunderstanding than understanding each other’s writings. Harris sums this up with the following passage: The language myth in its modern form is a cultural product of postRenaissance Europe. It reflects the political psychology of nationalism, and an educational system devoted to standardizing the linguistic behavior of pupils. (1981, p. 9) The theoretical implication of that point is made clear by Davis: Harris’s point is not merely that the myth shapes the science of language for better or worse. It is also that the myth shapes other areas of intellectual endeavor (science, scientific method, philosophy, and the popular understanding of these) and the behavior based on them. This observation redefines intellectual history. (Davis, 2002, p. 140) In pointing out that the abovementioned common belief about communication imbued in “the language myth” is delusive, Harris’s contention throughout is that, if a particular communicational purpose is achieved, it is never by the mechanism of the code-model, but rather by the efforts on the part of the proficient communicative participators: that is the real and only irreducible reason successful communication can ever happen. But, it is rather such a semiological assumption – that the theses of “the language myth” are realizable proposals, that underwrites Eurocentric ontology and epistemology, and what Harris insists to be extremely vital – the various unique ways in which human participants contribute to communicational activities, are reduced into an identically mechanical way of encoding-decoding.

The postmodernist chorus of integrationism and the Global South Not only do they aim at different ends – integrationism is about demythologizing Western academy, while Southern Theory is an enterprise to

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debunk cognitive injustice in a deeply inequitable world tragically begotten by colonialism, but also a Harrisian investigation wouldn’t render the semiological assumption underlying the Global South distinctly unorthodox, any more than Southern theorists would regard integrationism as belonging to the Global South. In fact, Pennycook and Makoni make it clear (2020, pp. 14–15) about “what it means to understand language from a Southern perspective” (p. 14), and it does not mean to “dismiss Northern canons” (p. 14), but just to be alert to questions such as where do the Northern canons come from, how did they develop to be what they are now, and are their premises proven to be solid? The Northernness of integrationism is conspicuous from the Southern perspective for it doesn’t address a major Southern concern – the global inequality and the inequitable – nor does it ever mention colonized people’s perspectives concerning ontology and epistemology. But arguably the cut-and-dry dichotomy of the Global South vs. the Global North is not without problems. There should be a twilight zone, as Pablé (2019b) argues for; as a non-ethnocentric theory, integrationism is irreducible to either Northern Theory or Southern Theory. However, the point to be made relevant here is that, even though integrationism and Southern Theory are mutually exclusive, they do share quite some theoretical common ground – the paths taken by the two paradigms seem to intersect at the postmodern crossroads. In the very preface of The Language Myth in Western Culture (2002a), Harris points out that “virtually every discourse in Western academia, if integrationists are right, is to some degree moulded by assumptions derived from the language myth” (p. vii). In the years after the publication of that anthology, Harris wrote several books to elucidate this point: The Linguistics of History (2004), The Semantics of Science (2005), and The Necessity of Artspeak (2003): “Integrationism thus has its own distinctive contribution to make to the contemporary current of thinking that is often called ‘postmodern’”, (Harris, 2002a, p. vii). Although Harris did not say much about the postmodern nature of integrationism, such arguments have been made more full-fledged by Mühlhäustler (2004) in his review of The Language Myth in Western Culture. As Mühlhäustler indicates, the postmodern nature of integrationism is manifested in the following characteristics: “its critique of common sense knowledge; its insistence that our understanding of the world is contingent on history and culture; its emphasis on the social processes that bring into being and sustain knowledge; and the integration of knowledge and social action” (2004, p. 285). The postmodernism of integrationism is not sufficient to categorize it as a non-Northern kind of knowledge according to Southern Theory’s criteria, inasmuch as it belongs to what Santos (2007) calls “acceptable knowledge” of the Northern kind. Santos (2007) discerns two kinds of “acceptable knowledge” within the epistemological realm of the North: (1) those about which “the scientific true/false distinction” can be told and (2) “the scientifically unascertainable truths of philosophy and theology” that

Semiological implications 113 constitute all the other acceptable knowledge of the North (Santos, 2007, p. 4). Disputes between these two camps of knowledge are not rare, but, as long as the other side of the abyssal line (the Global South) remains invisible to both of them, they are like the civil wars of one country. What follows is an illustration of what such a “war” would be like. It is quite usual in the Northern intellectual history that scientists, e.g., Dawkins (1994), Sokal and Bricmont (1998), Wolpert (1992), and others like to downplay works from fields of the humanities, not least the core notions of postmodernism, such as social construct, cultural construct, and epistemological relativism (Broks, 2006, pp. 112–114; Marks, 2009, pp. 86–91; Morrall, 2002, pp. 61–68). In many cases, retaliations to this kind of assault launched by the scientific side consist in one or more of these arguments. First, they argue that scientists are not experts in non-scientific matters and their lack of credentials results in their misconstrual about disciplines of humanities, e.g., as Marks criticizes, by smugly asking the question, “when you actually fly to your international conference of cultural anthropologists, do you go on a magic carpet or do you go on a Boeing 747?”, Dawkins is “rejecting the scholarship of the experts in favor of a vulgar and commonsensical assertion” (2009, p. 87), and “Dawkins’s critique is thus not of cultural relativism, for no competent anthropologist would invoke a contrast of the relative efficiencies of a flying carpet and a Boeing 747 to encapsulate the spectrum of cultural difference” (2009, p. 88). Second, they argue that scientists are also particular individuals living in their own particular cultural milieus; thus existing as cultural beings, they cannot “bracket off the scientific from the moral”, any more than they can bracket themselves off from responsibilities and moral contemplations (Marks, 2009, pp. 87–89). Third, they argue that both scientific knowledge and the concept of Science like any other supercategory, e.g., History, Art, Religion, are discursively made, and cannot exist in a communicational vacuum, any more than semiological activities can (Harris, 2005). Finally they argue from the position of epistemological relativism, viewing science as “only a ‘narrative’ (or ‘discourse’)” – “that is, science tells a story about the events that has gained high merit in society, but is no more accurate than any other story that could be told” (Morrall, 2002, pp. 61–62). Despite the Northernness of integrationism, the implications of the ontology and epistemology of integrationism are sympathetic to all the core notions of Southern ideas. Both regard the accumulation of knowledge as social activity – time-space bounded like any other human activity, involving local, cultural and historical factors, e.g., in Africa, many communities have social, moral and ontological outlooks richly expressed in oral, visual or ceremonial forms (Connell, 2007, p. XII). On that basis, both integrationism and the South question the universal validity of theories made from the social experience of the North. The superiority embedded in Eurocentric epistemology is unfairly and unjustifiably asserted for its universality while in fact this universality is as much self-flattery as it is an ideology insidiously

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foisted on the Global South through numerous cruel colonial projects. Southern theorists’ contention against the Northern monopoly of knowledge-system and Harris’s critique of the reification fallacy deeply rooted in the western semiological tradition can be drawn on to reveal these uncomfortable truths. Connell observes that theories of social science developed from the social, political and cultural experience of the North are regarded as universally true, and the South is typically seen as nothing more than a “data-mine”, a place to apply, testify and improve those theories by providing data and alternative conditions (Connell, 2007; Muller, 2009): The common logic is that a system of categories is created by metropolitan intellectuals and read outwards to societies in the periphery, where the categories are filled in empirically. Put so bluntly, the operation sounds crude – yet it can be done with respect and may be intellectually important … The societies of the periphery, however respectfully studied, function as sources of data to be fitted into a system. (Connell, 2007, p. 66) Santos also ridicules the knowledge-criteria of the North, and ironically raises this question – if those criteria make sense, wouldn’t the Global South areas seem to have zero knowledge? – and to claim that non-Western areas have no knowledge is no less arrogant than ignorant: On the other side of the line, there is no real knowledge; there are beliefs, opinions, intuitive or subjective understandings, which, at the most, may become objects or raw material for scientific inquiry … On the other [side], knowledges rendered incommensurable and incomprehensible for meeting neither the scientific methods of truth nor their acknowledged contesters in the realm of philosophy and theology. (Santos, 2007, p. 4) In fact, Harris’s insight into the “reification issue” of orthodox linguistics can also account for problems with Northern kind of research on Southern societies. As Hutton points out, “the politics of integrationism relate centrally to the idea of reification: this is at the heart of the attack on the language myth and the language machine” (2011, p. 509). Harris makes a strong argument about this point, that the segregational approaches to language disembody communicational activities and bracket off from them the abstract as subject of linguistic studies, and fail to provide a comprehensive account for the complexity of concrete and situated communications. Not just in the field of linguistics, segregationism’s obsession with abstract also extends to other scholarly fields, as The Language Myth in Western Culture (Harris, 2002b) indicates.

Semiological implications 115 For Southern theorists, the reification fallacy of the Northern takes the form of distorting the picture of reality in the Global South by imposing northern categories onto actually heterogeneous Southern social inequalities and struggles. Their argumentation goes as follows. First, within the intellectual realm of the North, there are theories of criticism on capitalism, racism, gender discrimination, e.g., Marxism and feminism, since the social issue of the “power hierarchy of superiority and inferiority along the line of the human” also exists within Northern societies (Grosfoguel, 2019, p. 264). However, as pointed out by Santos (2007), Fanon (2010) and Grosfoguel (2019), people of the North have racial privileges; therefore, the suffering and struggling of those oppressed are mitigated because of their living in the “zone of being” (privileged), namely on the visible side of the “abyssal line”, whereas in the zone of non-being, on the invisible side of the abyssal line, subjects under oppression experience conditions that are severely aggravated by colonialism. Hence, oppression on one side is much more “devastating” than it is on the other side (Grosfoguel, 2019, p. 266). The two sides/zones are heterogeneous, disparate and qualitatively different in respect to class conflicts, oppression, and inequality, e.g., “a worker in a maquiladora in Ciudad Juarez who earns two dollars a day is formally a waged worker, her lived experience has nothing to do with that of a waged manual worker in Boeing Company in Seattle who earns 100 dollars an hour” and yet “knowledge produced by subjects belonging to the zone of being … is automatically considered universally valid for all contexts and situations in the world” (Grosfoguel, 2019, pp. 268–270). So, problems ensue when theories generated from the social experience of the North are applied to explain Southern social phenomena. Grosfoguel lays out the problem in these words: critical theory produced from the zone of being does not consider the social conflicts and colonial particularities of the oppressions lived in the zone of non-being. And when it does consider them, it is done from the perspective of the social-historical experience of the oppressed in the zone of being. The imposition of this critical theory from the zone of being onto the zone of non-being constitutes a coloniality of knowledge from the left (Grosfoguel, 2019, p. 270). Second, with confidence endowed by the purported universality of scientific truth, the Northern view toward the South, indigenous peoples, and minority peoples tends to be ostensibly inclusive in a politically-correct way and yet alienative in a sense that the “otherness” is regarded as at best some romantic and exotic extraordinary phenomena and at worst a more primitive phase of social and human development. The renowned cultural critic Slavoj Žižek argues that multiculturalism is Eurocentric in the sense that multiculturalist “retains his position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly

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other particular cultures” (Žižek, 1997, p. 44, as cited in Santos et al., 2007, p. xxiii). The well-known moral philosopher Stephen Toulmin said: The analysis of theoretical arguments in terms of abstract concepts, and the insistence on explanations in terms of universal laws – with formal, general, timeless, context-free, and value-neutral arguments – is nowadays the business of logic; the study of factual narratives about particular objects or situations, in the form of substantive, timely, local, situation-dependent, and ethically loaded argumentation, is at its best a matter for rhetoric, academic philosophers and serious-minded theorists in any field are concerned only with the first … Consider all the “theories” we appeal to in one situation or another: how far are these framed in ways that are indifferent to who is presenting them to whom, where and when they are invoked, how they are presented, and so on – in a word, how they are “embodied” in human lives? Given the varied kinds of facts we observe and report in one situation or another, again, how far can these be described in terms of context-free and timeless concepts? (Toulmin, 2007, p. xiii) “The objects or situations we have occasion to notice and investigate are exposed to cultural variations and historical changes, and it is the business of empirical inquiry to explore and throw light on those vicissitudes”, as Toulmin further argues (2007, p. xiv).

The predicament besetting integrationism and the Global South First, though the Eurocentric academy posits itself as a place open to and welcoming non-mainstream ideas, practically speaking, it only pays lipservice to them. The real situation confronting the unorthodox is analogous to the situation that indigenous people living in the North find themselves in. As Pennycook and Makoni’s analysis suggests, Northern inclusiveness has “deleterious effects” in the sense that on the one hand indigenous people are encouraged to use their own non-mainstream local language, while on the other hand, society fails “to establish any clear connections between language and social, cultural and economic change” (2020, p. 88). Indigenous people who don’t know English can hardly succeed in an English-speaking Northern country, any more than scholars of marginalized interests can in the established academy. Second, critical theories like Southern epistemologies and integrationism aim to deconstruct certain target theories or traditions, and their values are downplayed if they fail to deliver something constructive, like satisfactory alternative answers to the questions they point out. Both Southern theory and integrationism are struggling with keeping the balance between

Semiological implications 117 overturning the old regime and exploring new possibilities. However, since intellectual resources and efforts are limited, when too much of them are invested in one matter, little would be left for the other matter. Hence, as Pennycook and Makoni remark, for critical theories, it is possible that they would be dragging the baggage of what they are alternatives to and couldn’t go much further than that (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, pp. 57–58). Third, both have to face the internal challenge of conquering the issue of potential performative self-contradiction to convince the other side of the dispute. In the case of integrationism, Harris receives almost as many harsh critiques as he sends out, and detestation of integrationism is about three issues: (1) Harris himself is also a beneficiary of the language myth projects implemented by Western institutional powers, insofar as the linguistic and cultural ecology – certainly not the utopia of his idealist visions, is the only way and only place he can make his voice heard, even his voice of denouncement; (2) in an attempt to shun performative self-contradiction while attempting to construct a theoretical edifice of his own, Harris’s tactic is to make it “lay-oriented” (Pablé, 2019a), and consequently his theorizing is vulnerable to the accusation of being more “rhetoric” than being “substantial” (Weigand, 2018) and full of “red herrings” (Joseph, 1997); (3) if, as Davis said, “we (integrationists) are responding to an ideology with a counterideology” (2002, p. 140), then the enterprise of demythologization could turn out to be a slippery slope towards the same old path of the language de-myth and the warrior to fight the monster becomes a monster himself in the sense of one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster” (1989, p. 89). Likewise, there seems to be no escaping from similar conundrums for Southern theories. All the well-known Southern scholars are good at northern theories and they “make free use of powerful Northern theory” (Muller, 2009, p. 508); they know their way well around northern academia, and take what means that are made available by the western institutional systems to make their voices heard, such as publishing in academic journals in English, attending influential international conferences held by prestigious Northern organizations, and so on, because there seems to be no other measures quite as effective or available; and last, Southern theorists’ ultimate ideal seems to just replace one generalization with another generalization, which is a new form of universalism for the current universalism: Connell wishes to retain the particulars of place-connectedness that ethnographies and histories supply even as she wishes to retain the generalising arc of the social scientific endeavour. Quite how this is to be accomplished, however, remains elusive. (Muller, 2009, p. 508) Those are points made by Muller in his critique of Connell’s work Southern Theory: the Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science, and he asks,

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“Has she made her case? Does the indictment against Northern/‘universal’ theory stick?” And he answers. “Only partly” (Muller, 2009).

Conclusion Harris’s perspective, while wholeheartedly celebrated by some scholars, is made notorious by others, and yet it is intellectually valuable with respect to the Southern-Northern epistemological collision. First, by revealing the semiological presumptions of Eurocentric epistemology, integrationism also debunks the problematic humanism of enlightenment rationalism, which assumes a universal and uniform rationality applicable to all human beings – the core premise of Eurocentrism. Second, the anthropocentrism (Pablé, 2019b) imbued in integrationism is of an existentialist nature, as Harris declares (2013, p. 56). It consists in the following two aspects: (1) it doesn’t believe that as human beings we can actually understand non-humanorganisms without imposing anthropomorphism (Pablé, 2019b) – which is also a point made by Camus: Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism “all thought is anthropomorphic” has no other meaning. (Camus, 1955/1991, p. 17) And (2) it insists on the various and also unique ways of individuals’ understanding and knowing the world and themselves – which resonates with Camus’s famous words: “In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ ‘Know thyself’ has as much value as the ‘Be virtuous’ of our confessionals” (1955/1991, p. 19). And as the thesis of the present chapter indicates, Southern epistemologies, while requesting a more inclusive intellectual atmosphere, have been emphasizing the value of diversities and varieties of human intellectual activities that are not of the Northern kind.

References Araújo, M. & Maeso, S. R. (Eds.). (2015). Eurocentrism, racism and knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan. Bertaux, S. (2016). Eurocentrism, racism and knowledge: Debates on history and power in Europe and the Americas. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2431–2433. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1186812 Broks, P. (2006). Understanding popular science. Open University Press. Camus, A. (1991). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Vintage International. (Original work published 1955). Connell, R. (2007). Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Allen & Unwin. Cupples, J. & Grosfoguel, R. (Eds.). (2019). Unsettling Eurocentrism in the westernized university. Routledge.

Semiological implications 119 Davis, D. R. (2002). The language myth and mathematical notation as a language of nature. In R. Harris (Eds.), The language myth in western culture (pp. 139–158). Curzon Press. Dawkins, R. (1994, September 30). The moon is not a calabash. Times Higher Educational Supplement, p. 17. Dawkins, R. (2009, February 11). Heat the hornet. Times Literary Supplement, 3–5. Fanon, F. (2010). Piel negra, mascaras blancas. Akal. Grosfoguel, R. (2011). Decolonizing, post-colonial studies and paradigms of political economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(1). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq Grosfoguel, R. (2019). What is racism? Zone of being and zone of non-being in the work of Frantz Fanon and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In J. Cupples & R. Grosfoguel. (Eds.). & J. Rodriguez. (Trans.). Unsettling Eurocentrism in the westernized university (pp. 264–274). Routledge. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Duckworth. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language and communication. Routledge. Harris, R. (2002a). Preface. In R. Harris. (Ed.). The language myth in Western culture (p. vii). Curzon Press. Harris, R. (Ed.). (2002b). The language myth in Western culture. Curzon Press. Harris, R. (2003). The necessity of artspeak. Continuum. Harris, R. (2004). The linguistics of history. Edinburgh University Press. Harris, R. (2005). The semantics of science. Continuum. Harris, R. (2009). After epistemology. Authors Online. Harris, R. (2013). Language and intelligence. Bright Pen. Hutton, C. (2011). The politics of the language myth: Reflections on the writings of Roy Harris. Language Sciences, 33(4), 503–510. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci. 2011.04.005 Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of language. Oxford University Press. Joseph, J. E. (1997). The “Language Myth” myth: Roy Harris’s red herrings. In G. Wolf & N. Love. (Eds.). Linguistics inside out (pp. 9–41). John Benjamins B.V. Magee, B. (1973). Popper. Fontana/Collins. Marks, J. (2009). Why I am not a scientist: Anthropology and modern knowledge. University of California Press. Morrall, P. (2002). Sociology and nursing (2nd ed.). Routledge. Mühlhäustler, P. (2004). Reviews. Language in Society, 33, 285–310. 10.10170S004 7404504212052 Muller, J. (2009). Essay review: Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 7(4), 505–509. https://doi. org/10.1080/14767720903412325 Nietzsche, F.. (1989). Beyond good and evil (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1886). Pablé, A. (2019a). In what sense is integrational theory lay-oriented? Language Sciences, 72(1), 150–159. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.langsci.2018.10.001 Pablé, A. (2019b). Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, 230, 102735. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102735.

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Pennycook, A., & Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. Routledge. Popper, K. R. (1972). Objective knowledge. Clarendon. Postman, N. (2005). Amusing ourselves to death. Penguin. Santos, B. de S. (2007). Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review, 30(1), 45–89. Santos, B. de S. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide (2nd ed.). Routledge. Santos, B. de S., Nunes, J. A., & Meneses, M. P. (2007). Introduction: Opening up the canon of knowledge and recognition of difference. In B. de Sousa Santos. (Ed.). Another knowledge is possible (pp. vii–xvix). Verso. Schwartz, B. (1997). Psychology, idea technology, and ideology. Psychological Science, 8(1), 21–27. Schwartz, B. (2014). The way we think about work is broken. TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_the_way_ we_think_about_work_is_broken?language=en#t-303354 Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1998). Fashionable nonsense: The postmodern intellectual’s abuse of science. Picador. Toulmin, S. (2007). Preface: How reason lost its balance. In B. de S. Santos (Ed.). Cognitive justice in a global world (pp. ix–xv). Lexington Books. Weigand, E. (2018). The theory myth. Language and Dialogue, 8(2), 289–305. Wolpert, L. (1992). The unnatural nature of science. Harvard University Press. Žižek, S. (1997). Multiculturalism, or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism. New Left Review, 225, 28–51.

Q&A: Xuan Fang CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? I discern two specific connections between my paper and issues concerning Applied Linguistics. First, in my paper I talk about the insidious advocating of saving in-danger rare languages promoted by Northern scholars. At first glimpse, such projects are said to be for the purpose of maintaining linguistic and cultural diversity, and yet practically, it is unfair to those affected, and a kind of oppression in disguise too. On the one hand, policies require that public schools for the minority groups, especially for the indigenous people living within Northern territories, should use the rare local language as teaching language, and also encourage the use of a particular native non-main-stream language within the community, but on the other hand, society fails to provide enough career opportunities for people with such linguistic background. Hence, unrealistic language policies are harmful, even if in the name of culturallinguistic preservation. Second, I mention the problematic assumption that human rationality is everywhere identical, universal and uniform, and it could be made relevant to second-language acquisition in the sense that due to unique

Semiological implications 121 life-experience of individuals, second-language acquisition research shouldn’t just focus on the teaching-learning-performance lineage, but should also study the personal motivation as well as social incentives for start/stop learning a second language, expectations of the learners, available resources, chances of applying, etc. CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? Initially I thought IL is a very unpopular field of study and is embraced by just a few scholars. I realized I was wrong after I took part in the conference. In fact, many people have done amazing research and studies with IL and present them at the conference. I also thought the idea of bringing IL and Southern Theory together is quite brilliant. Not only does it confirm the intellectual force of IL, but also it is quite encouraging for those of us engaging in research with IL. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? What I could envisage for the future of the field is that it would be regarded as more than just a branch of linguistics in the traditional sense, but that it could be a critical theory to be used to do research on a wide range of topics – not just those Harris himself has discussed.

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Rhetoric and integrationism: In search of rapprochement Kundai Chirindo

To begin, consider this: A recent book on the colonization of Liberia mines the archival records of the American Colonization Society – the lay organization that advocated for colonization of territory in West Africa for the explicit purpose of resettling formerly enslaved African-Americans in the early nineteenth century – to provide a rhetorical account of discourses of colonization that circulated in the United States. Readers of the book learn, for example, that the White spokesmen of the Society “aimed to address two primary audiences: northern reformers and southern slaveholders”, but not “the free black population that would be the object of the plan” (Stillion Southard, 2019, p. 26). We are told, too, that for their part, some freed Blacks made appeals for the colonization of Liberia that pointed simultaneously to the anti-Black sentiment that characterized American society at the time, and the unusual hope of “planting ‘a nation of colored people on the soil of Africa’” (American Colonization Society quoted in Stillion Southard, 2019, p. 111). Conspicuously absent in this account, however, is any consideration of the context these discourses of colonization, civic republicanism, and nation building affected most: I’m talking here, of course, about the local/internal Liberian context. This omission appears in bold relief when one considers the fact that there is universal consensus among historians and anthropologists of early Liberia that the territory the settlers took over was not a vacuum. Harry Johnston, for example, wrote in 1906 – some 50 years after the occupation – that, “If an estimate may be hazarded that the number of Americo-Liberians at present living in this country is 12,000, then by similar methods of computation the population of indigenous Negroes may be placed at something like two millions” (Johnston, 1969, p. 884, italics in the original). More to the point, these aboriginal people sustained and were sustained by vibrant sociolinguistic practices. It is true that “in integrational linguistics, language is not a code, a fixed plan” (Makoni, 2012, p. 2), and that many so-called indigenous languages and peoples of Africa are inventions of colonial epistemology and politics. Still, it is worth noting that historians and anthropologists have routinely estimated that anywhere between 3 and 28 languages flourished, and along with these, as many (if not more) recognized cultural groups in Liberia at the time

Rhetoric and integrationism 123 of American occupation. Yet the book has nothing to offer about those people or their linguistic practices relative to how they affected the colonial moment. After all, settler occupation was made possible by the 1821 Treaty of Mesurado – the communicative event through which local rulers sold Cape Mesurado/Montserado and Dozoa (now known as Providence Island). The point is that there is abundant local context omitted in the book. This partial rhetorical history of Liberia’s founding leaves us with many important questions of interest particularly to those concerned with colonial linguistics and the rhetorics of colonialism and nationhood on the African continent. Some of these questions include What persuasive resources facilitated treaty “negotiations”? How were meanings constructed, shared, and misconstrued in this specific context? How do these meaning making and meaning-sharing processes compare to rhetorical practices elsewhere? In other words, what are in/transitive qualities of this particular sociolinguistic rhetorical encounter? I begin with this example, not because I want to criticize this attempt to add to the very few rhetorical accounts concerning Africa produced in rhetorical studies. I point to this example of the rhetorical dimensions of Liberia’s founding because it illustrates a fairly mundane fact about rhetorical studies. Though there is a small but respectable number of studies having to do with Africa, most rhetoricians seldom engage local sociocultural logics in their analyses. However, if rhetoric and rhetoricity are evolved capacities (Kennedy, 1992, 1998; Parrish, 2015) that all humans and nonhumans exhibit in varying degrees, as has been argued in the recent posthuman turn in rhetorical theory (Davis, 2014; Davis & Ballif, 2014; Gates, 2013; Rickert, 2013), how can rhetoricians catalog the various ways these instincts manifest in these specific contexts? This is a challenge that is increasingly pronounced due to two recent developments relative to rhetorical studies, one external and the second derived from within the discipline. The first reason is one that affects scholars working in the humanities and humanistic social sciences broadly: it is that with the arrival of the Anthropocene, marked by a recognition that “we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence” (Chakrabarty, 2009, p. 218), rhetorical scholars need to situate their objects of inquiry in terms of (human) evolution and in light of the human species as a whole. This in turn has renewed the challenge to an overreliance on heuristics that are too narrowly grounded in the experiences of communities of the North Atlantic in rhetorical studies (see for example, Alcoff, 2017; Chakrabarty, 2009; Chakravartty et al., 2018; Chirindo, 2019; Pitts, 2017; Wynter, 2003). The challenge for scholars in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences in the Anthropocene is to (re)engage in what Sylvia Wynter called the “‘the politics of being’; that is, as a politics that is everywhere fought over what is to be the descriptive statement, the governing sociogenic principle, instituting of each genre of the human” (2003, p. 318). The second reason is a critique of rhetorical studies’ century-long

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preference of the Greco-Roman episteme and its ideas. This preference is why “Africa, both in its historical and contemporary contexts, has not featured prominently in rhetorical scholarship … There simply has not been any significant contribution in rhetorical scholarship, on African contributions to rhetorical theory, not to mention the African origins of rhetorical theory” (Blake, 2010, p. 36). So the question is: how can rhetorical scholars incorporate the rhetorical practices of the people of Africa into the catalog of human rhetorical practices? This chapter argues that the intersection of rhetoric and integrationism, what I call rhetorical integrationism, offers one way to recover and account for the politics of language, identity, and humanism in ways that allow rhetoricians to better engage the discourses on, from, and about Africa. My argument develops in three phases; first, I briefly trace a history of rhetorical studies highlighting the role of segregationism, instrumentalism, and telementation. Second, I turn to the example of hunhu – the Shona variant of uBuntu/Bantuism – to demonstrate how an integrationist concept of rhetoric can help rhetorical scholars better account for the rhetorical characteristics of some communities in Africa. I conclude with a brief discussion of what rhetorical integrationism might contribute to integrationism.

Linking rhetoric to integrationism: The mutual critique of instrumentalism, segregation, and telementation We might begin this section by asking what is rhetoric? With what exactly does rhetorical studies concern itself ? What relations might we detect between rhetoric and integrationism? There can only be one correct answer to the question, “what is rhetoric?” That answer is: “it depends”. It depends on who you ask, who is asking, and in what context one asks the question. That is to say, understandings of what rhetoric is and what it does are context bound, they depend on each context. From the Kemetic writings of Ptah Hotep we learn, for example, that successful rhetorical practice upholds Ma’at – the goddess of truth, balance, order, and harmony. During the 100 schools phase in Ancient China, the Confucianists tied rhetorical effectivity to the maintenance of order. During the Vedic period in Ancient India, by contrast, the ideal of proper language-use stressed consistency with the eternal essence of the universe, the Brahman or the cosmic soul. It is clear from this very basic gloss that each of these contexts implied differing conceptions, ideals, and limits of rhetoric. This picture of a vibrant and colorful plurality loses much of its luster with the emergence of Athens to cultural and intellectual dominance. It is not until the rise of Athens, simultaneous with the rise of orthography there, that two ideas having to do with language come to dominate how people think of rhetoric. First was the rise of the written word, which made it possible for people to conceive of language outside of people. The

Rhetoric and integrationism 125 objectification of language largely underwrote the Sophists’ linguistic commerce via logography. This is something for which the Sophists were famously derided by Plato (Havelock, 1998; Ong & Hartley, 2013). Taken together, the objectification of language, and the success of logography as a commercial enterprise, approximate the segregationist or language myth thesis integrationists took exception to in traditional linguistics (Makoni, 2013). Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion” adds an instrumentalist dimension to the segregationism that emerged from the dominance of writing. Language, on this Aristotelian theory, is a means of effecting persuasion – it is used by one individual to affect another. The precise mechanism by which this persuasive process happens is explained in the neo-Aristotelian school of thought, which dates back to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Formulated within the close confines of a nascent social scientific discipline in the study of human communication, which was itself influenced in no small part by Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, neo-Aristotelian rhetorical approaches shared two key features with what came to be known as the Shannon-Weaver model of communication (SMCR). The first of these features was an information theory of communication. Communication, in this model, is a transmission process involving the exchange of discrete bits of information via encoding, reception, and decoding. Neo-Aristotelianists thus disaggregated persuasion and significance, teleology, and epistemology. Meaning and significance were thought to exist outside of the persuasive event proper. Persuasion was simply a matter of bringing one’s audience to some belief or another. That notion, of affecting one’s audience – i.e., bringing them to one conviction or another – signals the second weakness mutual among neo-Aristotelian rhetorical theory, the Shannon model, and traditional linguistics: all three share (uni) directional conceptions of communicative exchange, or what Harris called telementation (Harris, 2015; Makoni, 2013). This instrumentalist fallacy in neo-Aristotelian rhetorical theory is an effect of the segregationist fallacy identified in integrationism. Even though Aristotelianism – neo or classical – ceased to be a dominant perspective in rhetorical theory in the mid-1960s, part of Aristotle’s legacy in rhetorical studies is the prominence of a representationalist orientation to language and symbols (Rorty, 1989; Runia, 2014; Vivian, 2004). This acquiescence to representationalism undermines rhetoricians’ ability to account for the rhetorical practices in contexts in which language functions otherwise, as is the case in many Bantu speaking societies. At its worst, representationalism’s prominence in rhetorical studies functions tautologically: many rhetorical scholars are trained to look for only some modalities of rhetoric. And when they encounter discursive conventions outside the typologies that are familiar to them, they are more apt look elsewhere (for the familiar) than they are to update their theoretical

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toolkits to account for novel cases. Rhetoricians, in short, need different models to explain rhetorical situations that cannot be accounted for by conventional theory. Pursuing alternative models of symbolic action enhances our understanding of the symbolic dimensions of being human via “perspective by incongruity”1 – the more perspectives we have to juxtapose to each other, the richer and likely more accurate comprehension we are likely to eventually accumulate of the human rhetorical situation. That is the chief obligation of rhetorical studies: to explain the rhetoricity of the worlds in which we make our being. The hunhu-based concept of symbolic action I advance in the next section is just another entry by which we can generate the “multiplication of perspectives” (Burke, 1969, pp. 77–85) which would better position rhetorical studies to engage a greater plurality of our species’ rhetorical output. To understand this, I rely on integrationist insights that might infuse the rhetoricians’ quest to comprehend rhetoricity with contextual and cultural specificity.

Toward integrative rhetoric Let us begin our sketch of a hunhu-inspired theory of rhetoric by delineating the specificity of hunhu within the Bantu cosmological outlook. The terms Bantu and uBuntu signify both a subgroup of Niger/Congo languages and what some have argued is a worldview shared among the speakers of Bantu languages (Chimuka, 2001; Chirindo, 2016; Chivaura, 2006; Makoni & Severo, 2017; Mangena, 2016; Mukandi, 2017). Despite the commercial and global popularity of this generalized understanding of the Bantu worldview, integrationism demands that we reject the temptation to flatten distinctions between different Bantu-speaking locales. After all, a basic tenet of integrationist thought recognizes that “what it means to be human varies between different languages and communities and sociopolitical contexts” (Makoni & Severo, 2017, p. 64). On this point, the case of Shona, versions of which are spoken by people in Zimbabwe and in neighboring countries, is instructive. The conventional wisdom holds that Shona refers to both a human group and a collection of similar dialects spoken in present day Zimbabwe. The scholarly account, however, is a bit more complicated. We know, for starters, that the term Shona “was imposed from without and there is no certainty about how the name arose”, and that “Shona dialects are no different in their diversity from the other Bantu languages” (Fortune, 1969, pp. 56 and 57; Kahari, 1984/5, p. 56 see fn. 3). Even though the term Shona is an invention,2 and though there is a great variety of Shona dialects, this does not obviate the need for better explanations for how hunhu relates to uBuntu. Makoni and Severo (2017), for instance, note that, “Hunhu [the Shona cognate of uBuntu] and Ubuntu although closely related, are different because hunhu refers to manners, but the primary meaning of Ubuntu is being human” (64).

Rhetoric and integrationism 127 To help us compare and contrast hunhu and ubuntu, let us begin with the example of the popular Bantu maxim: “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” which in English approximates to “a person is [only] a person among/because of [other] people”. Philosopher Fainos Mangena tells us that the literal equivalent of this expression in Shona is, “munhu munhu muvanhu” (2016, p. 67) – a person is a person in other people, which is a slight deviation from a more literal translation which would be “munhu munhu navanhu (or pavanhu)” or a person is [only] a person among/around people. That slight difference indicates that one key incongruency between hunhu and ubuntu has to do with role of relationships. Chemhuru and Makuvaza (2014), for example, in their call for an indigenous basis for Zimbabwean education, assert that “the philosophy of hunhu is best captured in the aphorism kunzi munhu vanhu or umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (2014, p. 6). Kunzi munhu vanhu in English is “to be called a person is [because of (one’s relationship to) other] people”. The clause in brackets gets at the tacit meaning of the expression. Chimuka explains: in hunhu, “since life is a shared enterprise, munhu vanhu, namely, one’s humanity is affirmed as one affirms the humanity of others and vice versa” (2001, pp. 30–31). In fact, hunhu – the highest ideal in Bantuism – is only expressed in, and is a function of, one’s relationships with others. As I, following many others, have stressed elsewhere, in hunhu personhood hinges on relatedness or ukama (in Shona). The fullness of “an individual’s character is understood at once as a product and a reflection of that person’s circles of belonging” (Chirindo, 2016, p. 448; see also Mukandi, 2017). Hunhu specifies that ideal relationships with others are what mark a person as an ideal kind of person. That specificity marks one distinction of hunhu from ubuntu. Generic Bantuism does not specify either explicitly or implicitly what it is about other people by which personhood is indexed: only that a person is a person in/through/because of others – Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. That nonspecificity is reflected in another mantra that is often brought up in relation to Ubuntu in the American popular imagination: “I am because you are”, which can be traced back to John Mbiti (see Mangena, 2016, p. 67). In this connection, Mnyaka and Motlhabi tell us, “Ubuntu is not only about human acts, it is about being, it is a disposition, and it concerns values that contribute to the well-being of others and of community” (2005, p. 217). In general, we could say ubuntu is a socio-moral system that configures human beings relationally on the plane of being. Returning to the Shona expression of ubuntu, hunhu, we see that relationship/ukama is both what qualifies a person as having hunhu, and also the principle by which our moral obligations extend beyond the realm of human-(to)-human relations. The means by which hunhu extends the ambit of one’s moral commitments is the vector of appropriateness or fittingness of conduct or relations. Ukama, Murove tells us, “is not restricted to marital and blood ties” (2009, p. 316); it extends to strangers, the deceased, and to other objects in our environments (including animals, forests, etc.). So, the

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virtue of conduct (and of one’s relations) is indexed by the appropriateness of that conduct to upholding the well-being of entire community of non-/ humans. We might say that hunhu is an integrative framework for ascertaining the morality of conduct: it is an integrative understanding of conduct, and of all conduct as integrating of the whole community. Hunhu through ukama is not just about people: it is a “Common Moral Position (CMP)” (Mangena, 2016) mutual among members of communities including nonhuman constituents (Chirindo, 2016; Le Grange, 2012; Murove, 2009). Moreover, it is possible for a person not to manifest hunhu and for a nonhuman entity to manifest hunhu. How? Via conduct that is judged as upholding or contributing to the well-being of the community. Thus, the Shona attest that simba vanhu: power or strength is qualified as such by the people among whom it is exercised. Alternatively, one of the common refrains of censure in Shona is maiitiro ako aya ane hunhu here? (do your actions have/reflect personhood?), a rhetorical question that is posed to admonish misguided behavior. Through ukama (relatedness), which is a condition and conduit of hunhu, we can begin to conceive of an integrationist rhetorical inducement grounded in this particular worldview. The function of hunhu as a “seat of argument” or source of rhetorical inducement is closely tied to appropriateness as I have just shown. Appropriateness is about fitness or suitability. In rhetorical theory, the Roman lawyer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero theorized appropriateness in terms of decorum. “In an oration”, Cicero writes, “as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate” (2001, p. 339). For Cicero the telos of decorum is eloquence. Eloquence for him is a function of the ability to discern the appropriate linguistic style for discussing different subjects. The eloquent person, Cicero intones, achieves decorum when s/he “can discuss trivial matters in a plain style, matters of moderate significance in the tempered style, and weighty affairs in the grand manner” (2001, p. 343). Suffice it to note that Cicero’s formulation here is both segregationist and instrumentalist: linguistic style exists independent of and beyond individual rhetorical performances, and the various styles are there to be used to effect eloquence. So Ciceronian decorum does not help us develop an integrationist theory of rhetoric. Shona speakers, Mangena tells us, are endowed with the sense of a common moral imperative that is hunhu. Less a discrete set of rules and instructions than it is a shared sensibility in which “the community is at the centre of all moral deliberations” (Mangena, 2016, p. 75), hunhu compels the evaluation of all conduct in terms of its alignment with a community’s wellbeing. From this perspective, hunhu is recognized only through the assessment of fitness with community interests. It is important to remember that the operative sense of community here is an expansive one; it includes the living and the dead, as well as plants, animals, and elements of geography (Maathai, 2004, 2006, 2010; Mangena, 2016; Murove, 2009). Thus, the rhetorical imperative of hunhu qualifies discourse as moral to the extent that

Rhetoric and integrationism 129 it respects, upholds, and furthers the interests of the community. This is why it is possible in Shona to say of a rhetorical performance such as a speech that hapana zvaatura/haana kutaura (s/he said nothing/she or he did not speak). Or: ndookutaura chaiko/agona kutaura (this is true speaking/he or she spoke well). Neither the praise nor the scorn is premised on the words/ symbols alone. In hunhu, words are recognized as words because of their alignment with the common moral position: they must integrate a shared sense of morality. The theory of rhetoric premised on hunhu’s is integrationist in this regard: rhetoric comes about and is only “good” when it is what integrates the worlds and interests of all elements in a given rhetorical situation. Integrational rhetoric demands that discourse instantiates the integration of the common moral sensibilities of interlocutors. This is what I see as one of integrationism’s contributions to rhetorical theory. Integrationist rhetoric is not instrumentalist, nor is it solely concerned with persuasion. The success of a rhetorical communicative event depends, from the integrationist perspective, not on persuasive intent but on attaining and reflecting the moral sensibilities of the interlocutor(s) both human and nonhuman. Of course, persuasion can support this general goal too. Having now seen how the integrationist approach might contribute to rhetorical studies, I would like to turn now to the reciprocal question: what might rhetorical scholarship contribute to integrationism? To see the potential contributions of rhetorical studies to integrationism, let’s begin with two common criticisms of integrationism: the appearance of linguistic nihilism, and concomitantly, the problem of infinite regress. Let’s start with the former. Integrationism’s absolute rejection of telementation raises the specter of linguistic nihilism. Holding that signs and symbols carry no other significance independent of the specific contexts of their circulation risks eliding distinctions between discourse as a series of practices, and the modalities of discourse in ways that would render a great deal of discursive activity, including this very chapter, moot. I am hardly the first one to have sussed out this potential problem. Makoni, in his article on integrationism and colonialism, puts it this way: “From an integrationist standpoint, each word has a number of meanings, and nothing is either given in advance or predetermined” (p. 90). The problem, he continues is that “If the meanings of words are variable and cannot be given in advance, then the idea of the countability of words is difficult to sustain” (Makoni, 2013, p. 90). The limits of this position emerge when we extrapolate this logic to symbols more generally. It does not take too much imagination to come up with situations in which signs and symbols like words are countable outside of communicative events, in various archival forms, for example. One could, for example, count how many stop signs there are in a small college town in central Pennsylvania without much concern about the exact contexts in which each individual sign exists. Makoni puts things more poignantly when he writes that if meaning is as radically intransitive as is suggested in integrationism, “then communication becomes much messier

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than it already is, and ironically, this article is a futile exercise” (2013, p. 90). So the first problem we have is this: how can we remain open to the possibility that “differences will exist in how meanings are interpreted” (p. 90) and that communicative events involve both interior and exterior trajectories (Jasinski & Mercieca, 2010, pp. 315–321)? That is to say, how might we hold on to the language myth thesis while acknowledging the coherency that is sustained through symbol systems in a general sense? A second problem that is related to the potential for linguistic nihilism is the possibility that rhetorical critics and integrationists must curtail the potential for infinite regress to preserve the integrity of their work. If each communication event is the culmination of the integration of interlocutors’ complete worlds (including their very subjectivities), it can be difficult to know where to draw the lines around communicative events. By what principle will a critic distinguish between elements integrated from prior contexts, and new horizons of possibility instituted in the communication? It is also unclear by what principle critics can start (and stop!) including elements in their analyses of rhetorical situations. This could raise the prospect of an endless “whataboutism” in response to integrationist accounts. On the one hand, integrationism’s rejection of telementation is susceptible to linguistic nihilism. On the other, integrationists ironically face potential accusations of not being integrative enough. One solution to these dual problems is what rhetorician Bradford Vivian has called the “middle voice of rhetoric” (Vivian, 2004, pp. 88–94). Grasping rhetoric’s middle voice turns on understanding discourse as practice: if words and symbols have no autonomous meanings beyond the specific contexts in which they circulate, their entire significance arises from situated practices. Even though one can reasonably assert that the practices bear no autonomous significance of their own, it is clear that practices accrue histories as they are repeated across time and space. Thus, Vivian writes, “Discourses reflect neither consciousness alone or ideal representations of collective understanding or experience. Discourse is neither the intended statement of an individual nor an aggregate of individual statements” (p. 95). What sustains discourse, according to Vivian, is that it is “characterized by its historicity, by its emergence, maintenance, or transformation in successive stages” (p. 95). Thus, “to study the formation of a discourse is to study the dispersion and transformation of specific institutional practices relating to thought, knowledge, and speech” (p. 97). The rhetorician’s concern, he specifies, is “how a discursive formation is engendered by transformations in institutional practices, which presupposes that one regard the ‘formation’ of discourse as a process without origin or telos, as a verb rather than a noun” (p. 100). From this we can understand that “the ethos of a discourse does not reflect the inherent reason or virtue of a transcendental human subject, nor on a transhistorical essence. Its ethos is produced by discursive differences rather than the representation of an essential identity” (p. 101). Vivian is emphatic on this point:

Rhetoric and integrationism 131 the ethos of a discourse refers to the discursive formation of symbolic relations (social, political, and ethical) without which specific senses of self and other, just and unjust, or good and evil would exist. Such a process neither originates nor culminates in either “character” or “custom” (in either self or other, in the either an essential or aesthetic subject) but occurs, rather, in the middle, as these antithesis gain discursive meaning and value as organizing principles of social relations and subject positions. (p. 102) By “the middle voice of rhetoric”, Vivian means the unique traces that specific social, political, ethical, and cultural contexts contribute to each and every discourse, giving discourse its inimitable singularity. The ethos of the middle voice, we might say, is contingent on context. Jasinski and Mercieca are therefore right to note that, “textual vehicles emerge and circulate within a world of alternative, frequently competing, constitutive rhetorics” (2010, p. 320), and to exhort rhetorical critics to attend to both “rhetorical interiors” i.e., intent, textual dynamics, and “rhetorical exteriors” which have to do with “reception, circulation, and articulation” of meanings (p. 319). Though I am partial to the idea of the interiority and exteriority of discourse, or what Foucault, in The Archeology of Knowledge, distinguishes as discourse and the conditions of its possibility (1972), the umbra of structuralism seems to loom too close for comfort in this account. Scott Stroud, another rhetorician, offers us a way to account for the interiority, exteriority, and contextuality of discourse while avoiding the structuralist critique via his concept of rhetorical multivalence. Stroud distinguishes multivalence from polyvalence, and polysemy, thus: “Texts can be polysemic, which indicates that differing auditors find different meanings in the text … A text is polyvalent when differing auditors evaluate the same understood text in different ways … a multivalent text … can use seemingly contradictory value structures and statements to entice the auditor” (Stroud, 2002, p. 379). More to the (integrationist’s) point, Stroud explains that a multivalent discourse demands the interlocutors figure out how “disparate value statements can be reconciled in one’s understanding of a text” (p. 379). In other words, meaning to a participant in a multivalent rhetorical encounter is apprehended only by a process of integrating competing values. Notice though that meaning making in multivalence is not ex nihilo: the text retains its histories of contradiction, and the auditor retains his/her sensemaking histories too, so that though the range of possible meanings is not pre-given, it also confined within some realm of possibility. With integration in mind, I think that all discourse can be viewed as multivalent. Fragments of discourse are like electrons that encircle an atom’s nucleus in different orbits which are themselves transformed (they either gain or lose energy) as they transfer from one orbit to another, even as their arrivals and departures change the orbits themselves. Approximating discourse and its elements to electrons is not a backdoor endorsement of the

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language myth: symbols are both products of the specific communication situations, and they can have a trace existence outside of specific communicative events. On this view, we can still defend the human encounter with and through communication as a sensemaking one that works by integration. The rhetorical critic and integrationist analyst’s tasks in light of rhetorical multivalence is to document the integrative moves that comprise a specific rhetorical situation with particular attention to how these moves result in compliance and influence gaining. Rhetorical multivalence is additionally valuable as it allows us to view the values that attend to texts not as independent phenomena, but as the historical exteriors and “trajectories” of discursive artifacts. This is what I think of as a rhetorical integrationism or the contribution of rhetorical scholarship to integration.

Conclusion I have argued that an integrationist theory of rhetoric stipulates an alternative logic by which rhetorical communication functions from that offered in representationalist accounts. If, as I stated at the outset, rhetoric and rhetoricity are faculties shared among all humans and with our non-human cohabitants on this planet, viewing rhetorical encounters from the integrative lens gives rhetorical scholars a way beyond the chauvinism of Anthro- and Euro-centrism. This is because the “myth of Man”, a phrase I am using as shorthand for both the desire for and a belief in a situation in which “the interests, reality, and well-being of the empirical human world continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of ‘Man’” (Wynter, 2003, p. 262), holds significant appeal in rhetorical studies (Chakravartty et al., 2018). Just as Wynter, following Cesaire, bemoans the fact that even though science has “enabled us to obtain knowledge of our nonhuman levels of reality, we have hitherto had no such parallel knowledge with respect to ourselves” (317), rhetoricians have done little to explore the invention “man” and alternatives to the myth of man. Achille Mbembe in The Critique of Black Reason demonstrates the importance of scholars of language taking up this very injunction when he observes that “Language does not only constitute the locus of forms. It is the very system of life. It is meant to offer up things to our gaze, but with a visibility so stunning that it actually shields what language itself has to say and what life has to offer” (Mbembe & Dubois, 2017, p. 52). The difficulty is that “language – and, mutatis mutandis, life itself – offers itself to be read 'as a sun'” (2017, p. 52). What is needed, Wynter avers, is a study “of our narratively inscribed, governing sociogenic principles, descriptive statements, or code of symbolic life/death together with the overall symbolic representational processes to which they give rise” (p. 328). Likewise, Mbembe exhorts us to “imagine a politics of humanity that is fundamentally a politics of the similar, but in a context which what we all share from the beginning is difference” (Mbembe & Dubois, 2017, p. 178).

Rhetoric and integrationism 133 Integrationism enables us to show just how language manifests at the nexus of people’s claims to life, and to being human. At the same time, rhetorical impulses about the trajectories of discourse and the conditions of its possibility help integrationists to circumvent the prospect of linguistic nihilism and infinite regress. So how might one contribute to the rhetorical history of Liberia that I started off with in light of what we have just covered? I think the challenge and the opportunity here is one of folding integrative sociolinguistics analysis into critical evaluations to explain the sources of inducement as they relate to the worldview and cosmology in the local context. Such an account would expand the purview of this rhetorical history in the direction that views the founding of Liberia as a robust integrative encounter.

Notes 1 See Burke (1984, p. 94). 2 I am using invention in the specifically technical sense, Makoni (2013) tells us the term is used for in African studies: there, it is used to “historicize development of some the [sociolinguistic] constructs” (Makoni, 2013, p. 89).

References Alcoff, L. M. (2017). Philosophy and philosophical practice: Eurocentrism as an epistemology of ignorance. In I. J. Kidd, J. Medina, & J. G. Pohlhaus (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (pp. 397–408). Routledge. Blake, C. (2010). African origins of rhetoric. Routledge. Burke, K. (1969). A grammar of motives. University of California Press. Burke, K. (1984). Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. University of California Press. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222. 10.1086/596640 Chakravartty, P., Kuo, R., Grubbs, V., & McIlwain, C. (2018). #CommunicationSoWhite. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 254–266. 10.1093/joc/jqy003 Chemhuru, O. H., & Makuvaza, N. (2014). Hunhu: In search of an indigenous philosophy for the Zimbabwean education system. Journal of Indigenous Social Development, 3(1), 1–15. Chimuka, T. A. (2001). Ethics among the Shona. Zambezia: A Journal of Social Studies in Southern and Central Africa Zambezia, 28(1), 23–37. Chirindo, K. (2016). Bantu sociolinguistics in Wangari Maathai’s peacebuilding rhetoric. Women’s Studies in Communication, 39(4), 442–459. 10.1080/07491409. 2016.1228552 Chirindo, K. (2019). Micronations and postnational rhetorics. Women’s Studies in Communication, 41, 383–393. 10.1080/07491409.2018.1551686. Chivaura, V. G. (2006). Hunhu/Ubuntu: A substantial approach to endogenous development, biocultural diversity and protection of the environment in Africa. Paper presented at the Endogenous Development and Bio-Cultural Diversity Conference, Geneva, Switzerland.

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Cicero. (2001). Orator. In P. Bizzell & B. Herzberg (Eds.), The rhetorical tradition: Readings from classical times to the present (pp. 339–346). Bedford/St. Martin’s. Davis, D. (2014). Breaking down “Man”: A conversation with Avital Ronell. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 47(4), 354–385. Davis, D., & Ballif, M. (2014). Guest editors’ introduction: Pushing the limits of the Anthropos. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 47(4), 346–353. Fortune, G. (1969). 75 years of writing in Shona. Zambezia: A Journal of Social Studies in Southern and Central Africa Zambezia, 1(1), 55–67. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. Pantheon Books. Gates, K. (2013). Key questions for communication and critical-cultural studies: Posthumanism, network infrastructures, and sustainability. Communication in Critical/Cultura Studies, 10(2–3), 242–247. 10.1080/14791420.2013.812596 Harris, R. (2015). Integrationism: A very brief introduction. http://www. royharrisonline.com/integrational_linguistics/integrationism_introduction.html Havelock, E. A. (1998). Preface to Plato. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jasinski, J., & Mercieca, J. R. (2010). Analyzing constitutive rhetorics. In S. J. ParryGiles & J. M. Hogan (Eds.), The handbook of rhetoric and public address (pp. 313–341). Wiley-Blackwell. Johnston, H. (1969). Liberia. Negro Universities Press. Kahari, G. P. (1984/5). Cultural identity and cross-cultural communication: Problems of translation. Zambezia, 12(1), 55–73. Kennedy, G. A. (1992). A hoot in the dark: The evolution of general rhetoric. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 25(1), 1–21. Kennedy, G. A. (1998). Comparative rhetoric: An historical and cross-cultural introduction. Oxford University Press. Le Grange, L. (2012). Ubuntu, ukama, environment and moral education. Journal of Moral Education, 41(3), 11. Maathai, W. (2004). Nobel lecture. The Nobel Foundation. Maathai, W. (2006). Unbowed: A memoir. Alfred A. Knopf. Maathai, W. (2010). The challenge for Africa. Anchor Books. Makoni, S. B. (2012). Language and human rights discourses in Africa: Lessons from the African experience. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 7(1), 1–20. Makoni, S. B. (2013). An integrationist perspective on colonial linguistics. LSC Language Sciences, 35, 87–96. Makoni, S. B., & Severo, C. G. (2017). An integrationist perspective on African philosophy. In A. Pablé (Ed.), Critical humanist perspectives: The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communication (pp. 63–76). Routledge. Mangena, F. (2016). African ethics through Ubuntu: A postmodern exposition. Africology: Journal of Pan African Studies, 9, 66–80. Mbembe, J.-A., & Dubois, L. (2017). Critique of black reason. Duke University Press. Mnyaka, M., & Motlhabi, M. (2005). The African concept of Ubuntu/Botho and its socio-moral significance. Black Theology Black Theology, 3(2), 215–237. Mukandi, B. (2017). South-south dialogue: In search of humanity. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 47(1), 73–81. 10.1017/jie.2017.24 Murove, M. F. (2009). An African environmental ethic based on the concepts of Ukama and Ubuntu. In M. F. Murove (Ed.), African ethics: An anthology of comparative and applied ethics (pp. 315–331). University of Kwazulu-Natal Press.

Rhetoric and integrationism 135 Ong, W. J., & Hartley, J. (2013). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Routledge. Parrish, A. C. (2015). Adaptive rhetoric. Routledge. Pitts, A. J. (2017). Decolonial praxis and epistemic injustice. In I. J. Kidd, J. Medina, & J. G. Pohlhaus (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (pp. 149–157). New York: Routledge. Rickert, T. J. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. University of Pittsburgh Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Runia, E. (2014). Moved by the past: Discontinuity and historical mutation. Columbia University Press. Stillion Southard, B. F. (2019). Peculiar rhetoric: Slavery, freedom, and the African colonization movement. University Press of Mississippi. Stroud, S. R. (2002). Multivalent narratives: Extending the narrative paradigm with insights from ancient Indian philosophical thought. Western Journal of Communication, 66(3), 369-393. Vivian, B. (2004). Being made strange: Rhetoric beyond representation. State University of New York Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337.

Q&A: Kundai Chirindo CONNECTIONS: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? This goal of this chapter is to think through how we might relate rhetorical studies and integrationism. In particular, I stress how the integrationist approach might enhance the efforts to diversify both the concepts and cases that are studied in rhetorical studies. At the same time the chapter suggests that the rhetorical concepts of the “middle voice” and “rhetorical multivalence” might be helpful in addressing integrationism’s potential problems with the absolute rejection of language’s autonomous existence, and the potential for infinite regress making in integrationist analyses unwieldy. GREATER CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? The conference was a revelation for me. I had only a superficial understanding of the issues and stakes in integrationism before attending the conference. The conference made clear to me that integrationism is a powerful force that can be marshaled in the project of pluralizing the ways we establish, disseminate, and practice knowledge. As a rhetorician, who has struggled for some time court more interest in the discourses on/of/from Africa in my field, I was encouraged by the

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LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? I think integrationist rhetoric/rhetorical integration could be a vibrant (perhaps new even?) direction of inquiry in the future. As I suggest in the chapter, integrationist approaches offer those in rhetorical studies novel ways to contend with the specificity of cultures and contexts beyond those that constitute the current mainstream in rhetorical studies. This is something that is both timely as rhetorical studies is undergoing something of a comparative (re)turn.In turn, the rhetorical concepts I discuss (the middle voice of discourse and multivalence) offer potential solutions to two criticisms that are sometimes levied at integrationism – linguistic nihilism and the challenge of infinite regress.

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Integrationism and postcolonialism: Convergences or divergences? An integrational discussion on ethnocentricity and the (post)colonial translation myth Sinead Kwok

Are integrationism and postcolonialism compatible? The 2019 Annual Conference of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication (IAISLC) was what prompted me to contemplate for the first time the potential continuities between integrationism and Southern theories. Regarded as alternatives to epistemologies in the global North, superficial overlaps between the two “-isms” began to unfold as the central theme of the conference presentations and exchanges. To name a few examples of the ostensible convergences: First, both integrationism and postcolonialism appear to be more of a critique of the status quo than a theory in its strictest sense. Harris did introduce integrationism as “a view of human communication in general” (1998, p. 1) which offers a “critique of the orthodox thinking which still shapes many university courses in linguistics, psycholinguistics, communication studies and allied subjects” (p. ix). Dismissing mainstream Western linguistic and communication theories as merely perpetuating a theoretical fiction of fixed codes and homogeneous linguistic communities, hence unable to illuminate creative, communicative episodes, integrationism has never been strongly conceived of or pursued as a traditional theory. It is, at the very least, not one in a Foucaultian manner, i.e., “the deduction, on the basis of a number of axioms, of an abstract model applicable to an indefinite number of empirical descriptions” (Foucault, 1972, p. 114). While minimalist axioms of integrational semiology have been proffered by Harris (2009a, p. 70), integrationism is nowhere near and has never set out to be an abstract model that puts applicability before soundness1 (Harris, 1997, p. 303). Seemingly resonating with this tenet of integrationism is postcolonialism’s nature as a form of reactionism against colonial orthodoxy instead of a theoretical foundation. It is not at all a theory according to the Foucaultian definition, but instead asserts a political critique that “draws on a wide, often contested, range of theory from different disciplines in order to develop its own

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insights” (Young, 2016, p. 64). In this sense it does not provide a single methodology to be applied when studying colonial and neocolonial histories, as well as postcoloniality. Rather it is a supply of conceptual resources (p. 64) and subaltern2 perspectives of viewing the impacts of Western politics, history and epistemology which otherwise could only be framed in a Eurocentric vision. Both integrationists and postcolonialists thus display a propensity to reform, to put orthodoxy into perspective than to create a new doctrine of “what ought to be”. Associated with the first, the second intersection between the two approaches is the emphasis on subjectivity. Questioning traditional linguists’ practice of introducing abstract linguistic models that do not address daily individual linguistic communication, an integrationist does not claim to be a linguistic expert ranking above lay speakers by possessing so-called professional insight on language and communication. Instead the integrationist renounces this idea of separating experts from non-experts when it comes to “language about language”, which is always situated in daily linguistic intercourse (Harris, 1997, p. 257). Hence the lay-orientedness of integrationism and its focus on the individual and the personal, for everyone is equally valid in their own unique linguistic experience. In fact, Harris (1981) regards personal experience as the only terra firma on which anyone can possibly develop any understanding of language and communication: The language-bound theorist, like the earth-bound Archimedes, has nowhere else to stand but where he does. He has ultimately no leverage to bring to bear on understanding language other than such leverage as can be exerted from the terra firma of his own linguistic experience. (p. 204) Whereas postcolonialism’s antitheoretical streak is what gives primacy to the “value of individual consciousness and experience” (Young, 2016, p. 64). The borrowings from and reformation of a range of theoretical insights, in lieu of the construction of a superordinate theory overpowering all the diverse perspectives, allow postcolonial studies to remain on a personal and subjective level in order to give a voice to the subaltern (Spivak, 1988). It is thus plausible to assert that just as integrationism addresses the personal and actual in communication, the postcolonial project traces the personal and actual of the colonized or once colonized subjects. Yet this chapter seeks to focus on a major chasm between integrationism and postcolonialism which renders them ultimately incompatible—their ethnocentricity (or lack thereof). This is not to deny that both integrationism and postcolonialism reject Western ethnocentric/Eurocentric thoughts in some ways (yet another similarity). It can even be argued that both center around a rethinking of Western ethnocentrism and its impacts on linguistics, history, politics, sociology, and cultural studies. Specifically, both are concerned with how predominant Western models exclude or even distort what actually should be studied (the

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lay linguistic experience according to integrationists; the realities of the subaltern to the postcolonialists), or how these models create unrealistic gulfs between an imagined superior and inferior group. The Western language myth posited by Harris, a myth of language(s) based on a perception of fixed codes which thus sponsors the development of linguistics as a “science” (Harris, 1981), is described by him (2009b) as a tradition which encourages and cultivates transparency by assuming that ‘everyone knows’ what the words mean. If it turns out that you personally don’t know ‘what everyone knows’, all that shows is that you are not a competent speaker of the language and hence by your own admission disqualified from taking any further part in the discussion. (pp. 175–176) Here Harris expresses dissatisfaction with how modern Western linguistics treats as a first-order truth the divide between people by their possession of presumably “transparent” linguistic knowledge (gauged in terms of whether they know or do not know a certain code well, as a black-and-white question), which determines whether such and such group can engage in communication or not. Also repudiating the Western transparency narrative are the postcolonialists, who see this alleged transparency as contamination and concealment of victims suppressed by imperialism (During, 1990), rationalized by the assumption that “the white male western point of view is the norm and the true” (Young, 2016, p. 65). Western ethnocentrism, in postcolonialist eyes, is the culprit for the unwavering historical, philosophical, and sociological canons proposed by the West which exclude or misrepresent alternative knowledge and works of the other. However, as will be developed as the main thesis of this chapter, a significant fissure between integrationism and postcolonialism which pronounces them essentially irreconcilable is that the former is nonethnocentric while the latter has to be ethnocentric by nature, despite their shared repudiation of Western ethnocentric thoughts. This crucial difference is based on the integrational view that ethnocentrism is a product of decontextualizing communication (Pablé, 2019). It will be argued that postcolonialists have to regard a successful communication process as a smooth telementation and have to rely on second-order constructions (e.g., languages) as their ontological foundation to forward their political cause. In so doing they are just as subscribed to the language myth, i.e., ethnocentric presuppositions of language(s) and communication to which mainstream Western theories hold fast. The rest of this chapter will take the postcolonial discourse on translation as a case in point to elucidate how ethnocentrism is derived from the colonial and postcolonial decontextualization of communication and thus their language myth, from which integrationism sternly withdraws.

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Communication decontextualized in the (post)colonial translation discourse The western translation façade What the postcolonial discourse has against Western ethnocentrism is not simply the naturalized belief of the superiority of Westerners over nonWesterners. Among postcolonial intellectuals specifically, the crux lies in how this superiority is rationalized through the masking of the voices and realities of the outsider group by Western standards and norms. Allegedly, this masking is achieved by a “representation” and “transparency” façade put up by the Western powers, and a perfect demonstration of this can be found in translation theories and practices. Translations of the indigenous languages and cultures of the subaltern in Western literatures have always been presented as a transparent representation of the subaltern truth, which in the postcolonial lens is a colonial scheme to erase and silence the subaltern realities. In other words, this representation is merely manipulative representation of the Western intellectuals as transparent reporters of the subaltern stories but not accurate re-presentation of subaltern lives (Spivak, 1988, p. 275). Specifically, in the historical development of Western translation theories, one translation ideal has always been dominant: The translation of meaning rather than form. The general preference for a liberal meaning transference instead of a strict literal translation approach has been reinforced over time by the perceived impossibility of rendering a language literally into another and the belief that the inner, the psychological substance of a text is more essential than its outer, i.e., the structural and formal. To Western theorists, meaning transference suffices for a transparent representation of reality. It is the way that other cultures can be best communicated from one linguistic community to another—through sharable meanings instead of non-sharable forms exclusive to individual languages. This Western transference model (as it will be referred to as in the rest of this chapter) is however met with postcolonial attacks on its authenticity, i.e., whether meaning transfer constitutes an accurate rendering of the original or a dissolution of it. Here is a quick example: In her famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak talks of the Western depiction of the Indian sati, which can refer both to a rite by which the Hindu widow “ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it” (1988, p. 297) and to the burning widow herself. This rite is, according to Spivak, a sacred act committed by a woman with full consciousness and consent—as she puts it, “The woman actually wanted to die” (p. 297). This actuality is however veiled by the British abolition of this rite and the Western translation of the satis, from heroic women with a determination to withstand the fire to be with their husbands again, into mere victims engulfed by the funeral pyre against their

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own will. Accordingly, this disingenuous Western translation takes place in the name of a grand Western vision of translation, viz. the transference of meaning, by which the important indigenous signifiers are abandoned and substitute signifieds are used in translations to frame the subaltern story to the liking of Westerners. One example of this from the sati case is the translation of the designated name sati, whereby the form sati is often left behind and Westernized meanings of it like “the good wife” or simply the “victim” (1988, pp. 306–307) are supplied in the Western texts about sati (like Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and R. K. Narayan’s The Painter of Signs), to create the impression of the British as saviors who rescued Indian women from Indian men by legally abolishing the rite (p. 297). Here the Western transference model of translation, with its focus on meaning rather than form and a promise of transparent representation, is shown to be a colonial plot to encroach on and distort the subaltern voices and truths. As Spivak warns in her paper, “one never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice-consciousness” (p. 297). What is supposed to be smooth communication between two linguistic communities is not actually communication between the two—as the subaltern does not really speak. Against this colonial narrative arises two translation “movements” or new “mentalities” developed in the postcolonial discourse: One is called here “postcolonial literalism”, which borrows a great deal from poststructuralist theories and strives to redirect significance from the meaning to the form in translation; second is Antropofagia or the anthropophagic movement which, upon seeing the transference model as Western manipulation in disguise, builds on this model and makes effective use of it to “counter-manipulate”. These two movements will be briefly explicated below, and it will be revealed that both of them still rely on the decontextualization of communication, like the Western transference model they avow to overturn. Postcolonial literalism Postcolonial literalism is staged as a refusal to be “transferred” under the grand Western transference narrative, hence escaping the fate of having subaltern realities subsumed by it. This refusal takes form of a shift of significance long dedicated to the meaning in the Western tradition of translating back to the form, i.e., the advocacy of a literal translation approach. Postcolonial literalism is built on a poststructuralist premise of indeterminate, ever-changing meaning. “Poststructuralism’s attempt”, says postcolonialist Niranjana, “to dismantle the hegemonic West” is “congruent with postcolonial praxis” (Niranjana, 1992, p. 171). In fact, postcolonialists have tremendously borrowed from poststructuralists like Walter Benjamin, who suggests that the meaning of a sign cannot be revealed immediately in just one language but only after various forms in different languages join in

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the state of harmony which he calls the “pure language” (Benjamin, 2002, p. 257); as well as Derrida, whose notion of différance (Norris, 1991, p. 32) defines meaning as that which is always deferred as it is forever regenerated through a sign entering into an infinite number of different relationships with other signs. Based on this elusive and hence easily manipulated nature of meaning, it does not serve as a steady bedrock on which the reality of the original text can be preserved during translation. This brings about the promulgation of a literalist approach in postcolonial translation in order to retain the undistorted subaltern truth, the resistance against any smooth transfer between texts and a highlight of the presence of the original in terms of its exclusive linguistic forms. An example is found in Niranjana’s book Siting Translation (1992), where she evaluates different translations of a vacana poem which originated in India. Underscoring the “untransferability” of certain forms in the original poem, she demands that these forms be preserved so as to express the true subaltern reality. For example, she complains about the grammatical changes to the original verbs in two translations of vacana (p. 184). She also laments the negligence toward the indispensable signifiers of light, such as the linga (p. 184). Proper names like Guhesvara, an ancient God in the indigenous culture, should be directly copied to the translation without going through any “transference of meaning” that erases the form (p. 183). Yet this literalist approach advocated by certain postcolonialists actually presupposes a mainstream Western conception of what translation is, or more fundamentally, what communication is. It is the acceptance of a vision of communication that involves a transfer of meaning from one source to another, i.e., what the Western transference model presumes. It is the acceptance of this Western notion of communication that results in postcolonial defiance against being “communicable” in translation (subsumed in the meaning transference process). This Western conception is what integrationists refer to as a “telementational” model, or “senderreceiver” model of communication (Harris, 1998, pp. 20–22). It is an oversimplified, dehumanized, and mechanic visual of supposedly human communication as meaning transmission from a sender to a receiver through a process of encoding the meaning in its corresponding form and decoding it from the form. Applying it to the translation process, a translation that communicates the original to the new readers implies a telementational process that might work according to the simplistic model just described, except that the number of languages and concomitant linguistic forms are doubled.3 The equation between communication and meaning transfer can be traced back to the poststructuralists who influenced postcolonial arguments. Benjamin, for instance, regards the essential quality of translation not as “communication or the imparting of information” (2002, p. 253). Meanwhile, Derrida proposes that translation “communicates nothing” for “no meaning bears detaching, transferring, transporting, or translating into

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another tongue as such” (1985, p. 204). In a similar vein, postcolonial remarks on translation also feature an aim to make the translation less “communicable” through a literalist approach which rejects meaning transference. Prasad comments that a literalistic approach is an attempt to make postcolonial translations “read like translations” (1999, p. 54) while Mulk Raj Anand renders it as a refusal to smoothly communicate realities “for sale to the jaded reading public, in a manner which may be easy … to swallow” (p. 54). Hence a literalist way to translate, i.e., the preservation of form instead of meaning, amounts to the opposite of smooth communication. This only confirms postcolonialists’ disposition to the Western communication model. In short, the postcolonial logic runs as follows: As ideal communication equals transparent meaning transference, and as meaning is by nature forever in flux and is neither capturable nor shareable between languages, postcolonial translation should deter attempts at communication in the translation process and focus on the retention of distinguishable forms. A postcolonial attack on the Western translation vision stems from an acceptance of a decontextualized model of communication popularized in the West. Also worth noting is how the conception of a decontextualized, bipartite sign that looms large in postcolonial writings is also a remnant of Western semiology developed by figures like Saussure. A bilateral sign structure made of a fixed form and an attached meaning is inextricable from postcolonial discussions of translation. The postcolonial idea of unstable meaning extended from poststructuralist premises is entailed from the attachment of this meaning to a fixed form. Meaning is only forever deferred when put in juxtaposition to a determinate form, according to a postSaussurean, holistic model of internal signification among bipartite signs. This makes the postcolonial signification model, composed of a determinate form and an indeterminate meaning, one that decontextualizes communication—a trademark also of the Saussurean sign. The integrationist, however, departs from the postcolonialist in the ways of viewing communication and signs. To the integrationist, translation is a form of communication as it involves the integration of a series of activities via signs. Contrary to postcolonial sayings, a translator cannot but communicate during translation. The integrationist rejection of the Western transference model starts from an objection to—not acceptance of—the equation between communication and a telementational transference of meaning, which decontextualizes communication and does not illuminate our actual translational practices (a type of communicational practices). To make full sense of this, one has to start by perusing the integrational way of looking at communication and signs. Communication, to integrationists, is always contextualized. It is a process “in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs” (Harris, 1996, p. 11)—in other words, these activities are integrated in the co-temporally contextualized creation of signs. Signs thus presuppose

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communication: “They are its products, not its prerequisites” (p. 7). A sign is only an individual’s creation at a particular instance of contextualization and does not exist “independently of the situation in which it occurs” (Harris, 2009a, p. 70). It is therefore not pre-given. Communication in an integrational sense is therefore essential to human existence, for humans cannot proceed without constantly integrating activities that otherwise remain unintegrated, or without incessantly creating signs and their meanings. Quoting from Harris (1996), Communication is not something additional to or separable from the rest of human life and the constantly changing circumstances that it presents, but an integrated part of it. We are not creatures who have any choice about whether to bother with communication or not, as if that were an optional extra to a more basic existence. There is no more basic existence: there is no existence at all for Homo sapiens without communication, any more than there is for a fish without water. (p. 13) To accept the integrational view on communication is to reject the transference picture of communication dominant in mainstream Western linguistics and presupposed by postcolonialists, as well as to deny the possibility of making translation “non-communicable”. In fact, the postcolonial conviction that communication can be separable from linguistic exchanges like interlingual translation reflects a segregational way of perceiving communication as what comes after languages. This classical segregational standpoint conceives of signs as pre-given and prior to communication (Harris, 1996, p. 6), followed by a presumption of communication to be more or less telementational, where the pre-given signs are employed and transferred from a source to a target. In the case of translation, it is a telementational process between a source community and a target community (the members of which are treated as identical in terms of their linguistic knowledge required for the communication to take place). Taking this segregational perspective, postcolonialists can thus detach communication from translation, by preserving signs but not enabling communication which employs these preexistent signs, signs which would not perish without communication. In this very process of separating signs from communication, postcolonialists have already decontextualized communication. Following from the integrational view on communication, the integrationist also departs from a postcolonial conception of a bipartite sign. Instead of a bipartite sign made up of a signifier and signified, i.e., form and meaning, the integrationist sign is “three-dimensional”, including the dimensions of “height, breadth, and depth” (Davis, 1997, p. 24). That by no means implies the application of a given two-dimensional sign of form and meaning into a third, real-time dimension. Rather, it implies that no form or meaning can be detached from the three-dimensional sign, for this

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sign cannot come into existence unless in a three-dimensional context (Davis, 1997, pp. 24–25). Integrationally speaking, there are no contextless signs. It is also important to note that the context here does not refer to any stable backdrop or list of relevant factors to be considered in communication, but like any sign, it is a product of contextualization, i.e., what is conceived only at the particular instance of contextualizing. By that, the three-dimensional sign is a co-temporal creation, existing in the here and now. Doing away completely with a fixed two-part structure of the sign, integrationists hence do not concur with the postcolonial notion of “indeterminate meaning”, as that is derived and inextricable from a fixed form. Referring to Harris, “to describe something as a sign in integrational terms is to say nothing about its physical constitution” (Harris, 2009a, p. 68)—this is not to say that the integrational sign does not bear any form at all, but this form is not what in principle makes a sign a sign. A sign is whatever has a “semiological value or function of some kind” (p. 68), which is conferred upon the sign by its “role in articulating the integration of activities” at particular moments of contextualization (p. 76). So rather than consisting of a fixed form and an indeterminate meaning, the integrational sign is indeterminate in both form and meaning – which is not saying that a sign does not have a form or meaning, but they are both created only in the moment of contextualization. The radically indeterminate meaning proposed by integrationism is not indeterminate relative to a determinate form, and its general indeterminacy does not point to its elusiveness at particular meaning-making circumstances. Meaning then, contrary to postcolonial beliefs, can never be “deferred” in this sense. The creation of meanings cannot be delayed in communication – it is what makes it communication. To see it otherwise like postcolonialists do is to decontextualize communication. Antropofagia Antropofagia is another form of postcolonial reactionism against the Western transference precept. Whereas literalism displays a reluctance to be transferred and subdued, Antropofagia showcases how postcolonialists can make use of the transference model to counter-encroach upon the Western language and culture. Antropofagia is when a one-way intrusion has turned into a two-way intrusion. The postcolonial era is a time that nurtures bilingualism (or multilingualism) and instigates the proliferation of interlinguistic exchanges. Amidst the exchanges is a strategic orchestration of linguistic interplays to counterinfluence the colonial presence in literature translation. This has engendered the concept of anthropophagy, or Antropofagia, literally meaning “cannibalism”. Haroldo de Campos, an influential Brazilian poet and translator, first introduced Antropofagia into postcolonial translation

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studies and repackaged it as an assertive yet reverent act of nourishment from the former colonizers instead of a tactic to avoid their interference (which features in the literalist mentality). Below is how de Campos rephrased and redefined the digestive metaphor: the cannibal was a polemicist (from the Greek polemos, meaning struggle or combat) but he was also an : he devoured only the enemies he considered strong, to take from them the marrow and protein to fortify and renew his own natural energies. (de Campos & Wolff, 1986, p. 44) Beyond a vindictive urge to exterminate the colonial roots, the anthropophagic act is more of an acknowledgment of colonial existence and an incentive to renegotiate between the local and the foreign. Bringing it into the translation field, Antropofagia is a reflective way of making effective use of the Western transference model through a reform based on the very model. Lying at the heart of Antropofagia is the concept of “transcreation” (de Campos, 1981, p. 185). It suggests that translation should no longer be one-way but multidirectional, involving the appropriation, blending, and recreation of the forms and styles amidst a pool of languages. It thus becomes an imaginative and productive engagement in interlingual exchanges, fully acknowledging the inevitable interference on languages during interlingual translation. Transcreation is manifested in different postcolonial contexts, a quick example being the Indian context: Inspired by this notion, Indian English writers-translators like Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, and Salman Rushdie keep experimenting with the creative mutation between Urdu and English in their production of English novels, through generating new linguistic forms by combining old forms extracted from both languages. While it is one thing to appreciate the creative value inspired by the concepts of Antropofagia and transcreation in literary production, it is a totally different thing to contemplate whether it has actually undermined Western transference logic. Ostensibly, the conception of translation as a unilateral meaning transfer from one stable language to another has come to crumble. For one, postcolonial translation is no longer considered unilateral, but is always reciprocal (de Campos 2007). Eventually, it is no longer just two clear-cut language codes involved in the translation process. A third language has arisen to occupy a space “in between” the two languages (Mehrez, 1992, p. 121). As Simon puts it, translation no longer only “negotiates between languages, but comes to inhabit the space of language itself” (1992, p. 174). The stability of languages involved in translation is in this sense crippled. Despite its destabilization and reinvention of the Western transference picture from the outset, the concept of Antropofagia still hinges on a root premise of this transference model, a root premise that essentially

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decontextualizes communication: It is the treatment of language systems or codes as the ontological foundation on which translation takes place and on which a translation model is based. In other words, it is the firm reliance on second-order, decontextualized abstractions (language systems) that renders the anthropophagic revolution insufficiently radical. The anthropophagic transformation of the translation process from a unidirectional transference to a multidirectional one and its stress on the malleability of languages involved in the process are merely renovations built on the very idea of transference. Instead of a complete refutation, these renovations are based on the presuppositions upheld by the transference model, i.e., the supposition of two abstract language systems in place at the very beginning, ready to be transformed by any translational exchanges between the two of them. The attention drawn to the instability and pliability of languages during translation only stems from an initial conception of them as fixed codes which are then destabilized and renewed in the succeeding translation process. Language systems are still a pre-given form of existence that precedes and enables linguistic exchanges. The anthropophagic revolt is still far from questioning the need for pre-existent language systems for translation to take place. It is doubtful whether postcolonial discourse will ever reach the stage of completely discarding languages when explaining translation, given postcolonialists’ dependence on the ontological existence of linguistic communities separated by language systems, of the first-order reality of the language differences superimposing upon the communities themselves, which they claim to be what sustains the divide between the former colonial powers and the decolonized. Conversely, integrationism does not come with the kind of political baggage that postcolonialism is necessarily attached to and can thus do away with the concept of “languages” altogether. An integrationist explanation of the translation process precludes any second-order construct including the concept of a language to be the prerequisite for translation to happen, in order to forestall decontextualization of this translative, communicational process. This conviction proceeds from the integrational notion of the radically indeterminate sign, the identification and interpretation of which are completely subject to particular instances of contextualization, where alternate contextualization and recontextualization are always possible (Harris, 2009a, p. 81). Thus, “languages” as postulated systems of signs that are indeterminate in nature and can never be contextless are themselves never autonomous. While they can be conjured up in specific moments of contextualization to fulfill integrative functions, they cannot be treated as preexisting systems that precede communication. The integrationist proposition of radical indeterminacy nullifies any basis of linguistic determinacy (Harris, 2009a), and eventually, the availability of language systems before translation, such as postcolonialists presuppose.

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The divide between integrationism and postcolonialism: More on ethnocentricity The ethnocentric language myth as (post)colonialists’ mainstay A term that unites both colonialists and postcolonialists alike and underlies their decontextualization of communication is an essentially ethnocentric language myth/translation myth. The language myth originated in the West as an idée fixe for the classification of proper language names and systems, propelled by political factors. It could be traced back to the post-Renaissance West and “the rigid political divisions into autonomous nation-states that are a feature of that period of European history” (Harris, 1998, p. 31). Hence, this myth of languages being identifiable and distinguishable systems spoken by different linguistic communities (nations) is fundamentally a political, patriotic, and thus ethnocentric enterprise. The myth consists of two fallacies, namely (1) the fallacy of “telementation”, which provides the conception of communication as a process of thought transference from one mind to another and (2) the fallacy of “fixed codes”, which guarantees linguistic determinacy by the postulation of supposedly stable language systems (Harris, 1981). These two theses often join in tandem, the combination of which assures that individuals share meanings of the words they use in communication because they possess knowledge of a language built up of invariant forms and meanings belonging to their specific community (Harris, 1981, p. 10). The joint fallacies are also what contribute to the decontextualization of communication, where the supposition of stable language codes in place leads to the exclusion of the individual sign-making creativity and the infinite variations involved in communication. Extending from the language myth is the “translation myth” (Harris, 2011, p. 85), an application of the two fallacies to explain translation. It is a myth that presupposes the existence of two approximately fixed language codes in place for translation to take place as a telementational transfer in between. It is argued that the nature of postcolonialism as an ultimately political enterprise necessitates its embrace of the ethnocentric language myth and translation myth. As demonstrated, postcolonial rejectionist responses to the Western translation ideal emanate from the alleged Western assimilation of the subaltern caused by a transference imagery. The challenges posed to the Western model are to postcolonialists a political statement of subaltern power. This pronounced political nature of the postcolonial translation project is the reason why postcolonialists are unable to extricate themselves from the ethnocentric language/translation myth, which is simply reinstated in the postcolonial discourse. The decolonized subaltern is affected by the same nationalistic mentality nurtured in the post-Renaissance West to establish and propagate proper forms of national languages for

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self-determined states. This need for the establishment of language systems assigned to and representative of different political powers to demarcate the in-group and out-group is basically a reincarnation of the Western ethnocentric language myth and the derived translation myth. This is especially displayed by how postcolonial literalism and Antropofagia both simply reenact the two fallacies of the myth—the presumption of pre-given language systems made of determinate forms which precede a potential telementational communication, two fallacies that constitute the decontextualizing of real-time communication. In contrast, integrationism is developed as a universalist, general semiology that is grounded in contextualized, personal sign-making experience rather than scientific abstractions like languages. Its development is not at all politically driven. This non-political origin plus the integrationist aim to accommodate a “sheer diversity” involved in human communication (Harris, 1996, p. 13) allow integrationism to rid of the Western ethnocentric myth of decontextualized languages and linguistic communication. Relativism and subjectivity: Postcolonialism versus integrationism The ethnocentric nature of postcolonialism and the non-ethnocentric nature of integrationism are linked to further concomitant differences between the two, including their espoused forms of relativism and their focuses on subjectivity. Ultimately, what perpetuates postcolonialists’ ethnocentricity is their need for linguistic relativism. By linguistic relativism I refer to the view that treats distinct linguistic communities and the particular languages they speak as ontologically real, and these different languages as collective systems of signs known by members of the respective linguistic communities, systems that determine the linguistic communities’ thoughts, i.e., serve as “essential instruments through which humans beings constitute and articulate their world” (Harris, 1988, p. ix). Hence, according to linguistic relativists, these objectively real languages are what constrain people belonging to different communities from truly and completely understanding each other’s world. This assumption is located in a series of postcolonial discussions on epistemic violence sparked off by Spivak (1988), who describes it as the condition where the subaltern ways of knowing the world, encapsulated in their languages and cultures, are dismissed and subjugated by the Western perspective of the world constructed in Western languages and cultures. By declaring that “the subaltern cannot speak”, Spivak seems to be suggesting that there cannot be smooth or true communication between the speaker speaking language A (a subaltern community) and the hearer speaking language B (Westerners) unless the speaker is imbued with the words, cases, clauses, idioms and cadences of language B. That is, only if the speaker is phenomenologically sharing the same language as the speaker, through translation, can the speaker speak to the hearer. But by converting into

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language B, the translated speaker can only be confined in the conceptual world of the hearer, so the supposed subaltern realities, knowledge and experience presented to the West can only be Westerners’ reality, knowledge, and experience. As Briggs and Sharp put it, “the subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself, but always already interpreted” (Briggs & Sharp, 2004, p. 664). Hence by saying “the subaltern cannot speak”, what the postcolonialist would like to deliver is that “the subaltern cannot truly speak except in her own language”. Thus, linguistic relativism has permeated this discussion in two patent ways: First, languages permit and restrict communication. Whether smooth communication can take place between a speaker and a hearer depends on whether there is a shared language between the two, which in turn assures a telementational transfer of thoughts (that which the language system shapes) between them. A second noticeable trademark of linguistic relativism is shown by how postcolonialists regard linguistic practices as relative on a group basis, i.e., relative to different linguistic communities. The speaker and hearer in the question are both represented by a group of people, the subaltern and the Westerners, the members of each group are de-individualized and treated as one unit. Embedded in this is a classical element of linguistic relativism, i.e., the homogenization of people within a demarcated linguistic group in order to develop the thesis of a language as a collective system accessible to every one of its native speakers and hence shaping their thoughts and perceptions in the same way. This relates to another quality of postcolonialism—that its proclaimed focus on subjectivity tends to be subjectivity on a group basis. Constituting another factor that renders postcolonialism inevitably ethnocentric is its emphasis on one united group. The concept of ethnocentrism, as popularized by Sumner (1906), was defined by him as the centering of one’s own group while marginalizing all other groups, treating them as centering around it. Scholars like Levine and Campbell also focus on inter-group dynamics when discussing ethnocentrism, stressing the aversion against an outer group and/or a lack of understanding of an outer group by an inner group due to undervaluing (Levine & Campbell, 1972). Emerging from political reactionism against colonial domination, postcolonialists have to structure their discourse in terms of one united force against another, which explains their group basis. It would not suffice to justify the immense effect of Western epistemic violence and socioeconomic exploitation by quoting just one individual’s experience. It would not suffice to address the urgency and social value of postcolonialism if it did not cater for a group of marginalized people, with a certain number of them sharing the same decolonized reality. In fact, it is imperative that postcolonialism gives first-order ontological statuses to a metropolitan, dominating group and a marginalized group, as this is where its ethos lies. Postcolonial discourses are the retelling of the stories of postcolonial subjects—“this is how it is—for us, this was how it was—for us” (Young, 2009, p. 18). The intergroup differences and dynamics, especially on the topic of translation as

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covered in this chapter, are best reinforced by proposing superordinate, abstract language systems supposed to mark the irreconcilable chasm between two groups. Hence fundamentally, postcolonialism is themed around a language-marked collectivity, a group subjectivity, which is essential to the concept of ethnocentrism. Postcolonialism is ethnocentric in exactly this way. In contrast, integrationism purports to be another form of relativism (Harris, 2013, p. 31)—relative to one’s personal experience and the infinite range of contextualization possibilities instead of to linguistic communities. The subjective in the integrationist book is the personal perspective, not a collective perspective. Integrationism serves as a form of humanism that seeks to provide a general way of explaining communication without imposing on individuals’ sign-making abilities and communication possibilities, hence the kind that does not dehumanize or deindividualize language and communication. In this regard, integrationism proclaims to be nonethnocentric: Its critique of Western ethnocentric thoughts involves a detachment from these thoughts instead of reliance on them, while a postcolonial critique is not entirely extricable from a Western theoretical foundation. Yet this chapter should not be counted as a criticism of postcolonialism based on how ‘Westernized’ it is—for first, postcolonialism never claims to be an annihilative, seclusive attempt to sever ties with Western influences, and to dismiss postcolonialism “on the grounds that it is itself western is to make a profound mistake” (Young, 2016, p. 65). Second, and more importantly in relation to this chapter, it is within the nonethnocentric nature of integrationism that it does not dismiss colonial theories for originating in the “imperial West” or shun postcolonial remarks for relying on theories that originated in the “imperial West”. What integrationists object to is the decontextualization of and hence failure to illuminate real-time communication acts, be it translation or other forms of communication, in colonial and postcolonial discourses. This position is also what renders integrationism and postcolonialism essentially irreconcilable.

Notes 1 This is not to claim that integrationism does not value applicability. After all, integrationism is propounded to be a universalist approach to human communication that seeks to offer a general explanation of how humans communicate, and this ultimately warrants its applicability. 2 Delineation of “subaltern” in this paper is necessary here, as it is central to the discussion: Varying definitions and scopes of the “subaltern” have been proffered by scholars with different interests in postcolonial works and critical theories, but this paper centers more on a Spivakian view on the application of the term. Especially when it comes to postcolonial perspectives, Spivak clearly warns against an overgeneralized usage of this key term, which she believes should not be a substitute for the word “oppressed” (de Kock, 1992). Accordingly, an oppressed individual or community is not necessarily subaltern. For a person or group of people to be classified as subaltern, he/she/they have to be part of a racial and/or

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cultural minority group socio-politically discriminated against, whose presence serves as a contrast to as well as a definition of those who hold hegemonic power. With the Spivakian standpoint as a basis, “subaltern” here takes into account the (post)colonial populations who stand sociopolitically outside of the hegemony of the (former) colonial powers, who occupy a central role in postcolonial studies. 3 This is based on the supposition that linguistic expressions belonging to two different languages can share a similar meaning despite differing in form (Harris, 2011, p. 86), a supposition renounced by poststructuralists and postcolonialists whose expositions dispose of a determinate meaning.

References Benjamin, W. (2002). The task of the translator. In M. Bullock, M. Jennings, H. Eiland & G. Smith (Eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected writings, Volume I: 1913–1926 (pp. 253–263). Belknap Press. Briggs, J., & Sharp, J. (2004). Indigenous knowledges and development: A postcolonial caution. Third World Quarterly 25(4), 661–676. Davis, D. R. (1997). The three-dimensional sign. Language Sciences 19(1), 23–31. de Campos, H. (1981). Deus e o Diabo no Fausto de Goethe. Perspectiva. de Campos, H. (2007). Translation as creation and criticism. In A. S. Bessa & O. Cisneros (Eds.), Novas: Selected writings (pp. 312–326; D. Gibson & H. de Campos, Trans). Northwestern University Press. de Campos, H., & Wolff, M. T. (1986). The rule of anthropophagy: Europe under the sign of devoration. Latin American Literary Review 14(27), 42–60. de Kock, L. (1992). Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference In South Africa. ARIEL 23(3), 29–47. Derrida, J. (1985). Des Tours de Babel. In J. F. Graham (Ed.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–207). Cornell University Press. During, S. (1990). Postmodernism or post-colonialism today. In A. Milner, P. Thompson & C. Worth (Eds.), Postmodern conditions (pp. 113–131). Berg. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. Sheridan, Trans). London: Tavistock (Original work published 1969). Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. Ducksworth. Harris, R. (1988). Language, saussure and wittgenstein. Routledge. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language and communication. Routledge. Harris, R. (1997). From an integrational point of view. In G. Wolf and N. Love (Eds.), Linguistics inside out: Roy Harris and his critics (pp. 229–310). John Benjamins. Harris, R. (1998). Introduction to integrational linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Harris, R. (2009a). Integrational notes and papers 2006–2008. Bright Pen. Harris, R. (2009b). After epistemology. Bright Pen. Harris, R. (2011). Integrationist notes and papers 2009–2011. Bright Pen. Harris, R. (2013). Integrational notes and papers 2013. Bright Pen. Levine, R. A., & Campbell, D. T. (1972). Ethnocentrism: Theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes, and group behavior. Wiley. Mehrez, S. (1992). Translation and the postcolonial experience: The francophone North African text. In L. Venuti (Ed.), Rethinking translation: Discourse subjectivity ideology (pp. 120–138). Routledge.

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Niranjana, T. (1992). Siting translation: History, post-structuralism and the colonial context. University of California Press. Norris, C. (1991). Deconstruction: Theory and practice. Routledge. Pablé, A. (2019). Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, 230, 150-159, 102735. Prasad, G. J. V. (1999). Writing translation: The strange case of the Indian English novel. In S. Bassnett & H. Trivedi (Eds.), Postcolonial translation: Theory and practice (pp. 41–57). Taylor & Francis Routledge. Simon, S. (1992). The language of cultural difference: Figures of alterity in Canadian translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), Rethinking translation: Discourse subjectivity ideology (pp. 159–176). Routledge. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Macmillan Education. Sumner, W. G. (1906). Folkways. Dover Publications. Young, R. J. C. (2009). What is the postcolonial? ARIEL 40(1), 13–25. Young, R. J. C. (2016). Postcolonialism: An historical introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

Q&A: Sinead Kwok CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? My paper connects integrationist ideas with colonial and postcolonial expositions, as manifested in their respective views on translation, which I believe can be seen as providing a different perspective that supplements Southern theories. Integrationism presents an unprecedented, unique way of scrutinizing colonialism or neocolonialism—to see it as essentially a linguistic issue. It means to see what have been overlooked or treated as peripheral to the colonial-postcolonial divide as actually central to it, i.e., the presuppositions about language and communication. A discussion of the colonial vision of translation in my paper and the postcolonial retaliation against it reveals that the alleged Western/Northern misrepresentation of the East/South stems from a telementational and relativistic understanding of linguistic communication: The notion of “epistemic violence” in the West, the colonial powers’ act of “silencing” the colonized/decolonized, or the phenomenon in which “the subaltern cannot speak” in front of the metropolitan, are all taken to be grounded in a lack of successful transference of thoughts from the speaker (former colonies) to the hearer (former colonizers). This transference is presupposed by the dominant Western narrative to be the actual happening but refuted by postcolonialists as an illusion since any possible transference is blocked by irreconcilable interlinguistic differences (thus shows the relativistic influences therein). The root of the tension between colonial and postcolonial thus lies in a

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Sinead Kwok Western metalinguistic reflection, a perception of languages as systems binding and separating people and marking out the communicational possibilities. This is also what integrationists refer to as the “language myth”, a myth that has permeated many disciplines for long, within linguistics and outside it, e.g., colonial and postcolonial studies. The purpose of my paper is to point this out. Hence this refreshed perspective offered by an integrational semiology not only allows for a retrospection of colonialism in relation to an ethnocentric language myth, but also enables a reflection on how the postcolonial contexts are inseparable from this very myth, and finally a contemplation of the limits of postcolonial studies and the prospect of a new, nonethnocentric kind of postcolonialism.

CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? I was not very sure about the reception of integrationism among Southern theorists before I attended the conference. After my presentation and exchanges with other attendees, the appeal of integrationism to Southern theories became clearer to me. As stated in the beginning of my paper, I believe the appeal lies in integrationism itself being an alternative, anti-constructivist and liberating approach which stresses on a theory that illuminates the real-time happenings and the subjective. There were a number of conference presentations dedicated to demonstrating the similarities and even, on smaller aspects, equations between integrationism and subjects like literature and rhetorics. That at the same time made me more wary of attempts at drawing connections with certain integrational axioms and quotes, and drew more of my attention to the historical, circumstantial development of integrational linguistics which makes it what it is. This is what contributes to the differences in essence between integrationism and southern theories, as I proceeded to explicate in my paper. To address the essential incompatibilities between the two has become the aim of my paper and this is how it fits into the theme of the conference/this book—exploring the potentials of integrationism and its engagement with other research areas or disciplines. Despite the incompatibilities, it is still within my purpose to elucidate how integrationism can shed light on many other fields that seek an alternative understanding of the status quo.

Reference Haas, M. (2011). ‘The question is not whether integrationism can survive outside linguistics, but whether linguistics can survive outside integrationism’: an interview with Roy Harris. Language Sciences 33, 498–501.

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LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? Through my paper I hope to show that integrationism does not stop short of putting existing theories in doubt without offering anything new. Referring to my paper content, I believe the demolishing of the relativistic doctrine of homogenous communities entrapped in their own respective languages does not equal to naught. Instead, the proposal of heterogeneity, individuality and radical indeterminacy is a much harder proposal to espouse, which reaches further than any branches of linguistics could have ever gone and can spark off many different research works in different areas based on this integrationist proposition. Connected to the previous point, my paper also adds to the extension of the integrationist view into other disciplines and fields of inquiry. Harris once said that “linguistics will only be of interest to other disciplines when linguists start pointing out that what these disciplines treat as substantive questions are actually linguistic questions in disguise, and demand linguistic answers” (2011, p. 499). Integrationism fulfills exactly this purpose—to promote the inseparability between linguistics and disciplines self-proclaimed or often depicted as non-linguistic, to identify or even rectify the linguistic philosophies on which every ‘non-linguistically-centered’ field lies. The recent integrationist involvement in the domains of science, art, philosophy, history, law, etc., and after this conference, Southern theories, is only a beginning.

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Integrationism and the Global South: Songs as epistemic frameworks Cristine G. Severo and Sinfree B. Makoni

In this chapter, we argue for an expansive view of language that includes life as part of language. By so doing, we propose a “Southern semiotic” perspective that incorporates Integrationism and the sociolinguistics of the Global South. By the Global South, we are referring to indigenous cosmovisions about language and life whose origins can be found in postcolonial societies in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. We agree with the notion articulated by Integrationism: “By proposing a semiology grounded in experience, Harris (as cited in Pablé, 2019) proposes a radically new conception of the sign, which transcends the usual concerns about ethnocentrism” (p. 3). For Harris (1998a), “The romantic view of the origin of writing is a very ethnocentric view, and specifically a Eurocentric view” (p. 252). When questioning this Eurocentric concept of language, we argue that, even though the sign is part of the common architecture of communication across most of human society, indigenous cosmovisions may interpret and enact signs in different ways. People from diverse worlds have dissimilar cosmovisions and languages which have pluralistic natures (Hauck & Heurich, 2018, p. 2; Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, p. 72). We argue that such a radically new conception may include songs as part of the meaning-making process. In this regard, Integrationism has been defined as an alternative approach that: sees language as manifested in a complex of human abilities and activities that are all integrated in social interaction, often intricately so and in such a manner that it makes little sense to segregate the linguistic from the nonlinguistic components. (Harris, 1998b, p. 6) By arguing that songs are an integral part of language, we seek to avoid segregating language from other areas that may be regarded as part of the language of Southern indigenous cosmovisions. Our objective is to adopt a holistic approach to songs that can be construed as an expanded approach to Integrationism in the Global South.

Integrationism and the Global South 157 Although Integrationism is deeply connected to a contextual, interactional, and dialogical approach to language practices and sign-making processes, it was not written or framed with the sociolinguistics of the Global South in mind. There is evidence, however, that Integrationism may be relevant to some colonial and postcolonial contexts in southern Africa, such as South Africa and Mozambique (Makoni, 2011; Makoni & Severo, 2017; Pablé, 2019). That line of thinking, however, has not been expanded to include the important phenomenon of songs in the Global South, by which we mean the postcolonial world, which is the majority world. We describe songs from a combination of Southern epistemological perspectives and Integrationism. In this sense, this chapter differs from other studies on songs from the Global South, which have tended to adopt a largely monological and segregationist approach. Although there is a broad scholarship that deals with songs, it does not frame songs from a Southern Integrationist perspective (Ross & Rivers, 2018; Shonekan, 2015; Watts & Morrissey, 2019). From a semiotic perspective, Integrationism problematizes the way that linguistics has contributed to several reductionist and segregational epistemological processes, such as the one that limits the representation of speech to an alphabetic notation system. We argue, like Harris (2009) that songs can teach us how to deal with sounds, voice, and speech in a more complex way. [T]here was no longer any excuse for failing to recognize that writing is a mode of communication sui generis and has no intrinsic connexion with speech at all. This should already have been evident from the long history of musical notation, but linguists turned a professional blind eye to music. (p. 139) In this chapter, we ask: What are the epistemic and ontological implications of songs for Integrationism in the Global South? By tracing the contextual, historical, aesthetical, ethical, and political elements that integrate the indigenous concept of songs, we contribute to a development of a Southern semiotic perspective that integrates Integrationism and Southern epistemologies. When doing so, we consider the colonial and postcolonial meanings of songs according to the Guarani’s perspective, an ethnic and cultural group in South America for whom “song works as a way of communication and transformation” (Macedo, 2011, p. 377), in which songs function in most indigenous societies as ways of communication. A combination of Integrationism and Southern theories is ultimately aimed at contributing to the creation of analytical frameworks of communication that address the Western-centric modes of analysis of most research in communication.

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Songs as an ontological framework for language in the indigenous context In this section, we explore the role played by songs in colonial and postcolonial Brazil. We take into account the Guarani’s perspective, a group who has been identified as speakers of the Guarani language. Although we understand that such categories are colonial inheritances, we recognize that forms of language have been resignified by local indigenous people as a marker of social and political resistance. In the Latin American colonial era, as seen in Brazil, Christianity played a crucial role in colonization by taking the evangelization of indigenous people as one of its main objectives. Such missions integrated a broader colonial project centered in Portugal and Spain through the Padroado, an official agreement between the kingdom and the Holy See that delegated to the kings the power to rule local churches. This arrangement lasted until the eighteenth century, when the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese Government. The Padroado was an official system that encouraged the religious domination of Latin America by Christianity. The Jesuits carried out the main tasks of the missionary work in Portuguese colonization, which also included parts of Africa and some regions in Asia. “The Jesuits took the lead not only in converting the indigenous Brazilians but also African slaves whom they encountered” (Thornton, 2014, p. 259). Religious conversion resulted in the emergence of a syncretized Christianity. The Jesuits learned local languages as a strategy to evangelize indigenous peoples. They produced several grammars and translated religious discourses into indigenous languages, such as Guarani and Tupi (Severo, 2016). The production of grammars was a complicated process that included the conversion of dialogic into monologic texts (Makoni, 2011). This practice of learning local languages and local customs by the Jesuits was used as a strategy that made the Jesuits known by their defense of the accommodation of local and indigenous practices rather than by the practice of assimilation. “The primary challenge that the Jesuits, and indeed all missionaries, faced was that of presenting concepts in a different idiom. At its heart the accommodation method was an attempt to translation” (Brockey, 2014, p. 288). Such an adaptation and accommodation method produced the emergence of several Christian discourses translated to an invented variety of Jesuitic Guarani and Tupi languages. In Brazil, the Jesuits are known as the creators of grammars and cathecisms, such as the Arte de grammatica da Lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil [Art of the grammar of the most used language along the coast of Brazil], written by the priest José de Anchieta in 1595. The production of these grammars is sociolinguistically important because they subsequently had an impact on how the formally literate were to experience their own languages.

Integrationism and the Global South 159 In relation to political issues that concern the use of grammar, we know that “the basic linguistic terminology of Western education, including the term grammar, presupposes acquaintance with writing” (Harris, 2000, p. 208). Writing worked as a colonial epistemology used to frame—and invent—local languages with an oral tradition (Makoni, 1998). Harris (2000), in Rethinking Writing, does not mention the use of writing as a template to frame languages in the colonial context, although, according to Pablé (2019, p. 1) he does recognize that the ethnocentrism of linguistics “was the direct result of literacy as developed by the ancient Greeks onwards (and concomitantly in various Eastern civilizations)”. In addition to the use of written practices in the context of preaching, the Jesuits also used songs as a way of approaching indigenous oral practices. According to Hansen (2010), “By observing that the indigenous peoples like to dance and sing from an early age the priests used music as a catechetical instrument, considering it as effective in transmitting the doctrine” (p. 99).1 Evidently, the indigenous people and the Jesuits did not share the same meanings of singing and dancing. The meanings of songs and dancing are, from an Integrationist perspective, indeterminate (Harris, 1996). Hansen notes that the missionaries who accompanied the Provincial of the Jesuits Manuel Nóbrega in Brazil/Bahia in 1595 were all singers. The seductive role of music for the practice of evangelization was also emphasized by the Brazilian sociologist Freyre (1933) who noted, “Nóbrega shared the opinion that through music he would be able to bring under the Catholic union all the naked Indigenous from the forests of America” (p. 222).2 We see how complex the role played by songs was in the colonial context. It was not by chance that music was used as a strategy to attract indigenous people to Christianity. The missionaries made use of songs and dances as instruments of evangelization, gradually changing the indigenous lyrics to reflect religious themes and replacing local instruments with European instruments. According to the Jesuit Manoel da Nóbrega, “It was more skillful to start with the sounds of maracas and taquaras and conclude … with ‘organ singing music and flutes’” (Leite, 1938, p. 101).3 The ritualistic use of indigenous songs with Catholic lyrics in indigenous languages did not mean that indigenous’ musical practices had disappeared or been passively appropriated for religious purposes. One of the results of the musical approach between Portuguese, indigenous people, and Africans in Brazil would have been, according to Freyre (1933), the emergence, from the eighteenth century on, of Brazilian poetry and music, such as the modinhas and ladainhas. Another musical style that emerged in the colonial context was the lundu, a genre that mixed the musical and dancing practices of Portuguese and enslaved Africans from Bantu regions in Brazil. Such songs have both influenced the salon genres and been considered the ancestors of the samba and other popular Brazilian music (Kiefer, 1977). Integrationism, when used to describe songs in Brazil, needs to be sensitive to the socio-historical

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contexts of colonial Brazil. The segregationist idea of songs as distinct from other facets of indigenous life is a colonial invention (Makoni et al., 2020). We therefore use Integrationism to challenge the legacy of colonial analytical practices. The relationship between language and religiosity seems to characterize not only Christianity’s ontology but also Guarani cosmology in different ways. “The language is the most ‘divine’ and is latent in the Guarani people” (Melià, 1997, p. 252).4 The complexity of the Guarani’s concept of language can be seen in the Guarani terms ñe’ẽ, ayvu, and ã, which mean “voice, speech, language, language, soul, name, life, personality” (Chamorro, 2008, p. 56). Another example of this semantic plurality is noted by Nimuendaju (1987) in relation to the Guarani terms ava-ñeé, ñandé, and ayvú used to designate language: “ñeé in old Guarani means ‘language’, while in Apapocúva [a Guarani language group] designates exclusively the voice of an animal … the Apapocúva word for ‘language’ is ayvú that in old Guarani means ‘noise’” (p. 17).5 Such semantic plurality signals the polysemy that characterizes the indigenous language, which makes the work of translation necessarily a work of deep interpretation. The two-way form-function model does not capture the complexities of a rhizomatic concept of the world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Viveiros de Castro, 1986) or of language (Severo, 2019). We argue that such a rhizomatic concept of language works as an ontological and political framework that can be approximated to what we call Southern Integrationism. For the Guaranis, language gives life to things in a special kind of relationship between language, being, and verticality. As an example, we can mention the Guarani’s naming politics. In children’s naming ceremonies, the proper name is a sacred word attributed by a shaman. The child’s proper name is the soul blown out of the shaman’s ear by the smoke of the gods. Thus, in the ceremony of naming a Guarani child: His/her real name is revealed by the priest after birth. Communicating that name would literally mean, for them, to split itself into two, to separate the body from the word … which would mean exposing oneself to disease and perhaps death.6 (Clastres, 1990, p. 115) For this reason, the use of a non-Guarani name often works as a protection of the original name and, therefore, of the Guarani soul. This original name is kept in secret in case of Christian baptism and conversion. An example of using a name as a form of resistance was noted by the explorer Hans Staden in the sixteenth century (Vainfas, 1995). According to Vainfas (1995), the indigenous people had many names, which were often mixed and changed as strategy of resistance. Names were not used in a positivistic sense to refer to a body, but rather in terms of pragmatics, to refer to a specific act, resistance, and compliance.

Integrationism and the Global South 161 According to the Guarani’s perspective, the word—understood as Ñembo—materializes itself in the form of myths and songs whose understanding requires an articulation between hearing, chanting, and seeing the word in a conjunction between the human and the sacred. The word becomes visible because it generates divinity. Singing, dancing, rituals, praying, and myths play an important role in the relationship with the sacred. “Ñembo means to pronounce sacred words, it means to become like them. This term is commonly translated as ‘pray’” (Chamorro, 2008, p. 243).7 The ritualistic dance is strongly linked to language and religions. There also is a relationship between singing and the Guarani soul, as we can notice in the Mbya Ñengarete creation myth, considered either an epic poem (Cadogan, 1971) or the good word, true prayer (Chamorro, 2008). According to the Paraguayan ethnologist Cadogan (1971), this myth reinforces the hypothesis that: Ñande Ru Tenonde, our first Father, emerges from the action, creates four gods who will be in charge of the universe and create their own future consorts; having done this, Ñande Ru inspires in them the sacred song of the man and the woman, respectively.8 (p. 35) We notice in this myth a relationship between the creation of man and woman as the result of sacred singing. In this context, we can suggest a parody of the biblical text: In the Guarani symbolic universe, “in the beginning it was the song”, but song as understood in an Integrationist and Southern epistemological perspective as open-ended, pluralistic, and indeterminate in meaning. Languages behave like songs, and songs behave like language. The two are inextricably linked. Cadogan (1971), in his research on the Guarani Mbya worldview, also presents an association between the tree and the word: The word flows from the tree, which configurates another conception of language that places the human, the animal, nature, and the sacred into an ontological relationship of horizontality and intercommunication. In this regard, the wood of some sacred trees is used to make drums and other musical instruments that operate as means of communication with the extra-human. In addition, Cadogan (1971) translates the Guarani word ayvu as “human language” and ñe’eng as “soul-word” (palavra-alma). There is a deep and religious relationship between life (animals, trees, and humans) and language, as one word designates both at the same time—soul-word. Notice that in ordinary Guarani, the words ñe’eng and ñe’ē mean both human language and the songs of some birds and insects. The expression ñe’ē Porá Tenonde means “the first beautiful words”, which are related to the original Guarani Mbya myth. The following sentences translated by Cadogan provide an example of the complex role played by “language” in the Guarani Mbya’s indigenous cosmovisions (Cadogan, 1971):

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Cristine G. Severo and Sinfree B. Makoni Ayvu Rapyta oguero-jera, oguero-yvára Ñande Ru tenonde ñe’eng mbyte rã = el fundamento del lenguaje humano lo creó nuestro Primer Padre e hizo que formara parte de su divinidad, para médula de la palabra-alma [The foundation of human language was created by our First Father who made it part of his divinity, to the core of the soul-word]. Ayvu Rapyta, ñe’eng ypy, Nãnde Ru tenonde kuéry yvy rupa re opu’ã va’erã gua’y reta omboú ma vy omboja'o i ãguã = el fundamento del lenguaje humano es la palabra-alma originaria, la que nuestros primeros Padres, al enviar a sus numerosos hijos a la morada terrenal para erguirse, les repartirían [The foundation of human language is the original soul-word, which our first Fathers when sending their many children to the earthly abode to rise up, would distribute to them]. (p. 54)

In regard to singing and language in the Tupi-Guarani symbolic universe, Viveiros de Castro (1986) addresses the relationship between the Araweté and songs, in which shamans play a central role. The Araweté are locally evaluated by the shamanistic songs that they sing, known as music of the gods, whose polyphonic and dialogic structure reinforces a complex concept of language and interpretation. The shamans are not the authors of the songs but, rather, mediators who report, by singing, what has been transmitted to them by the gods in their dreams: Usually, the production of a song follows this sequence: a man sleeps, dreams, wakes up, smokes and begins to sing, narrating what he saw and heard in the dream; when the gods and the dead want to come to earth, then the song unfolds into a narration of the descent of these beings … “The shaman is like a radio”, they say. By this they mean that he is a vehicle, and that the body-subject of the voice is elsewhere, that it is not within the shaman. The shaman does not incorporate the deities and the dead, he tells—sings what he sees and hears.9 (pp. 542–543) These songs can be repeated and used daily by women and children, but their forms vary, as each song is inherently pluralistic, although they are not reproduced by shamans for religious purposes. Strictly speaking, each song cannot be repeated because it is unique to the context in which it is produced and is tied to many other social and political relationships that prevail at that particular time. The argument that we are making echoes what Harris (1998a) states about language: Human experience is constantly structured and restructured by the need to make sense of preset events in the light of past events and vice versa. Language is both a product and a mechanism of this process, by which the ceaseless flow of sensations, perceptions, feelings and judgments

Integrationism and the Global South 163 which contribute to the mental life of the individual are integrated into a continuum, and a stable framework of beliefs and expectations about the world is constructed and maintained. (p. 19) In addition, unlike the music of the gods, which works as a unique and singular event, enemy songs, called awī marakã, are sung from the perspective of the dead enemy, who becomes the symbolic singer. In this context, “the acquisition of songs from dead enemies seems more fundamental then the acquisition of names: enemies are called ‘future music’, not ‘future names’” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 242). Different from the case of enemy songs, the shamanic communication between the gods and the living happens through songs: “The gods are singing as they descend to earth, while the shamans sing as they go up to the sky to meet them” (Viveiros de Castro, 1992, p. 74). Although different ethnic groups have different conceptions of language, as well as different linguistic practices, we understand, in relation to the Tupi-Guarani symbolic universe, that the various groups share an “equally surprising homogeneity in terms of cosmological discourse, mythical, and religious life, which spans centuries of history and thousands of kilometers”10 (Viveiros de Castro, 1986, p. 90). The linguistic-structural proximity between the Tupi-Guarani languages, however, does not reflect social homogeneity or a semantic identity between the terms but, rather, a varied, plastic social structure and a discursive polysemy, both submitted to a native metaphysics. In other words, the approaches to songs are neo-Whorfian in that each ethnic group has unique songs and orientations, but the underlying philosophies of songs are universal, as some of the indigenous ethnic groups share similar cosmological views. Although Global South epistemologies aim to capture unique experiences, Integrationism seeks to provide a universal analytical framework that can cut across different experiences. The analytical framework that we seek to develop provides an interplay between a universalistic tendency in scholarship and an inclination toward more sitespecific analysis, as captured in notions about indigenous cosmovisions. The challenge is whether the analytical framework can accommodate the conflicting tendency toward universalism and radical differences. The logical systematization of indigenous language in the form of vocabularies and grammars by the missionaries did not imply a deep comprehension of what counts as language for the local people. The Jesuits used to have a strong intellectual formation based on logical reasoning, following “the synthesis between Greek thought and Christianity that Thomas Aquinas had initiated in the thirteenth century” (Brockey, 2014, p. 45). The missionary language policies operated in favor of the Jesuits, whose knowledge of language was taken as a model for understanding and “reducing” the language of the Other. We see that, in the Guarani context, the concept of language is complex and requires a Southern semiotic perspective that becomes sensitive to local experience and interpretation. We know that

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it is about being able to not only hear the word but also to see it, which was impossible for the Jesuit verbal framework to capture. On face of this indigenous perspective, the very concept of language is questioned, based on a broader and integrated view that considers the various social, cultural, religious, and political elements that help to define what counts as a language. We assume a radical plural conception of language, in which “[l]anguage is a sign system, a form of action, a social practice, and a cultural resource, but it is also something more than that, something that we might not yet have the right vocabulary to describe” (Hauck & Heurich, 2018, p. 2). We understand that Southern Integrationism has to be able to deal with this “something more”. The “something” may be beyond the intellectual; it could potentially be spiritual. This is particularly so among communities in which the spiritual and secular are different sides of the same coin.

Songs as an ontological framework: Toward a southern integrationism For Integrationism, songs—as well as language—should not be considered from an idealist framework that views them as distinct and separate: “No one doubts that a piece of music may acquire signification by association” (Harris, 1996, p. 226) with other forms of communication and other semiotic elements. Further, music should not be restricted to a representational or to an expressive framework that reinforces a fragmented and codificatory conception of music. Rather, we argue that music works as a template that conjures different metaphysics and political orientations: “Music embodies a kind of rhythmic infrastructure of phenomena”11 (Wisnik, 1989, p. 26) with a powerful symbolic efficacy, as we notice in indigenous contexts whose cosmology is deeply connected to a musical conception. Rhythm, pace, voice, body, breath, and movement are taken as key elements to define what counts as songs, and means of communication for some indigenous communities. The dual concept of language, based on the relations of form-function, form-content, expression-representation, and performancecompetence, is problematized from a more complex local perspective. We argue that Integrationism and Southern perspectives can be epistemologically linked by considering the ontological and political implication of this rhizomatic concept of language (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Viveiros de Castro, 1986). This means that the ideas of multiplicity, horizontality, and space play an important epistemological role: Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many “transformational multiplicities”, even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 11–12)

Integrationism and the Global South 165 Rhizome works, as the elements of the Guarani’s framework are multiple, interchangeable, moving, and contextually connected. The multiplicity of elements and the modes of connection are relevant in the rhizome’s configuration, which means that a rizhomatic concept of song brings to bear several nondichotomic elements such as the relationship between humans, animals, gods, spirits, dead and living beings, enemies and relatives, life, personality, sound and image, and so on, which are central to a non-western conceptualization of the universe. By considering songs as an ontological framework to define language, we assume it as an element of a semiotic chain that works “like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). What we are proposing is that, by considering indigenous songs as an ontological framework, we bring together Integrationism and Southern epistemological views. Returning to the Guarani context, the word is not restricted to a communicative or representational function, nor is it defined on the basis of its grammatical or lexical structures only; rather, it is about the “word-dance, more than diction, it is movement, ritual paradigm” (Chamorro, 2008, p. 59).12 The conception of language in some indigenous groups destabilizes the distinction between human and nonhuman or between culture and nature. It is, therefore, Integrationist in a maximalist sense. For example, indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon, such as the Achuar and Runa, share complex communicative practices that integrate humans and nonhumans, making use of specific linguistic resources. In other contexts, such as that of the North American indigenous people, the land also communicates with the Apache people (Hauck & Heurich, 2018). From such a perspective, the land also can sing. The Integrationism that we seek to advocate as part of Southern epistemologies is one in which language and songs are restricted to neither one racial or ethnic group nor to only birds and other species that can sing. It is only for this point that language sciences scholarship has not yet developed the apparatus to carry out such an analysis. In the Brazilian Amazon, the Marubo people, especially the shamans, use iconography and visual representation in the construction of meaning in which “narrative and cosmographic structures are transposed to paper, by articulating them with the framework of poetic formulas and with the general disposition of memory involved in the processes of shamanic knowledge transmission”13 (Cesarino, 2013, p. 437). Such shamans have the legitimacy to draw the so-called yochĩ, which comprise maps of the village, remedies from the forest, trees, or compositions that constitute the structure of the sacred and ritualistic songs used in Marubo shamanism. The objectives of this shamanism include the pluralization of the person in double-brothers, integrating into a complex cosmology the actual and the virtual (Cesarino, 2013). The Marubo shaman symbolically carries with it notions of being more than a single human—represented by the image of four auxiliary spirits—that make knowledge, thinking, and poetic creation possible.

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Such pluralization of elements assembled together in the format of a rhizome presupposesthat there are “no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). Because Integrationism emerged as a critical perspective of the dominance of structuralism and generativism in linguistics (Harris, 1998b), it may intellectually be compatible with the rhizomatic thinking as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari. In the antistructuralist and antiessentialist rhizome’s conception, there are lines of flight and deterritorialization that connect several (likely and unlikely) elements of the multiplicity. As an example of this perspective, we may consider the nomadic nature of the Guarani people, who share a deep capacity for deterritorialization, which is also associated with the role played by language as the locus of being-Guarani preservation (Viveiros de Castro, 1986).

Conclusion In this chapter, we have attempted to illustrate how an Integrationist perspective can be adopted to enrich an analysis of songs in the Global South. We have argued that, even though Integrationism can be used in conjunction with Southern epistemologies, Integrationism may need to be expanded to include songs as part of the way language is analyzed. An analysis of language that excludes songs lends itself to a charge of segregationalism, as songs are an integral part of the lives and lived experiences of some indigenous communities, as articulated by the Guarani and other indigenous groups. The argument that we make has ramifications that go beyond Integrationism and Southern epistemologies to include areas such as language rights and language planning. From an Integrationist/Southern epistemological perspective, language policies and language rights should include a preservation of the songs that are used by the indigenous communities, as the songs are part of the language used by these indigenous communities. Paradoxically, as songs are inchoate and constantly changing, by seeking to preserve them, we are freezing them in time and rendering them into museum artifacts. We also seek to develop a critical orientation toward Integrationism as well by exploring and highlighting its limitations. In other words, we are arguing for a framework in which indigenous songs constitute a central element in a definition of what counts as language. This means that songs are not treated as things capable of being decoded by a linguistic theory, but rather as practices that reflect a specific indigenous cosmovision. By combining Integrationism with Southern epistemologies, we are postulating that the very concept of song make sense when it is viewed as a product of local social practices. A combination of Southern Integrationism with Southern epistemologies will also help us understand songs when viewed through a rhizomatic perspective thus providing us with opportunities to “develop metaphors that are consistent with the communities

Integrationism and the Global South 167 that we are describing” (Pennycook & Makoni, 2020, p. 111). This means we should seek to problematize and expand the metalanguage we use by “listening” to the language about language by the local communities.

Notes 1 “Observando que os índios gostavam de dançar e cantar, desde cedo os padres usaram a música como instrumento catequético, julgando-a eficaz na transmissão da doutrina”. 2 “Nóbrega chegava a ser de opinião que pela música conseguiria trazer ao grêmio católico tudo quanto fosse índio nu das florestas da América”. 3 “Mais hábil foi, realmente, começar pelo som dos maracás e taquaras, para acabar … por ‘música de canto de órgão e frautas”. 4 “La lengua es lo más ‘divino’ que está todavía latente en lo Guaraní”. 5 “Ñeé em guarani antigo significa ‘língua’, enquanto no Apapocúva [grupo guarani] designa exclusivamente a voz animal … a palavra Apapocúva para ‘língua’, ayvú, em guarani antigo significa ‘ruído’”. 6 “Seu verdadeiro nome é o que é revelado pelo sacerdote após o nascimento. Comunicar esse nome seria literalmente, para eles, dividir-se em dois, separar o corpo da Palavra […] seria sem dúvida expor-se à doença e talvez à morte”. 7 “‘Ñembo é pronunciar palavras sagradas, é tornar-se parecido com elas. Comumente esse termo é traduzido por ‘reza’”. 8 “Ñande Ru Tenonde, nuestro primer Padre surge a la actividad, crea cuatro dioses que tendrán a su cargo el universo, y éllos crean a sus futuras consortes; hecho esto, Ñande Ru les inspira el canto sagrado del hombre y de la mujer, respectivamente”. 9 “Normalmente, a geração de um canto segue esta sequência: um homem dorme, sonha, acorda, fuma, e começa a cantar, narrando o que viu e ouviu no sonho; quando os deuses e mortos querem vir a terra, então o canto se desdobra em uma narração da descida destes seres … ‘O xamã é como um rádio’, dizem. Com isto querem dizer que ele é um veículo, e que o corpo-sujeito da voz está alhures, que não está dentro do xamã. O xamã não incorpora as divindades e os mortos, ele conta-canta o que vê e ouve”. 10 “Homogeneidade igualmente surpreendente quanto ao discurso cosmológico, os temas míticos e a vida religiosa, que atravessa séculos de história e milhares de quilômetros de distância”. 11 “A música encarna uma espécie de infra-estrutura rítmica dos fenômenos”. 12 “Palavra-dança, mais do que dicção, é movimento, paradigma ritual”. 13 “Estruturas narrativas e cosmográficas se encontram transpostas para o papel, a partir de sua articulação com o arcabouço de fórmulas poéticas e com a disposição geral da memória envolvida nos processos de transmissão dos conhecimentos xamanísticos”.

References Brockey, L. M. (2014). The visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cadogan, L. (1971). Ywyra ñe'ery: Fluye del árbol la palavra—sugestiones para el estudio de la cultura Guarani. Paraguai/Assução, Brazil: Centro de Estudios Antropologicos de La Universidad Catolica.

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Cesarino, P. (2013). Cartografias do cosmos: Conhecimento, iconografia e artes verbais entre os Marubo. Mana, 19(3), 437–471. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S010493132013000300002 Chamorro, G. (2008). Terra Madura Yvy Araguyje: Fundamento da Palavra Guarani. Dourados, Brazil: Editora UFGD. Clastres, P. (1990). A fala sagrada, mitos e cantos sagrados dos índios guarani. Campinas: Papirus. Clastres, P. (1990). A fala sagrada, mitos e cantos sagrados dos índios guarani. Campinas: Papirus. Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus.Minneapolis, MN:University of Minnesota Press. Freyre, G. (1933). Casa-grande and senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economiapatriarcal [The masters and the slaves: A study in the development of Brazilian civilization]. São Paulo, Brazil: Global. Hansen, J. A. (2010). Prefácio. In M. da Nóbrega (Ed.). Diálogo sobre a Conversão do Gentio (pp. 1–10). Recife, Brazil: MEC/Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana. Harris, R. (1996). Signs, language, and communication: Integrational and segregational approaches. London, UK: Routledge. Harris, R. (1998a). Integrational linguistics: A first reader. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. Harris, R. (1998b). Introduction to integrationist linguistics. Oxford, UK: Pergamon. Harris, R. (2000). Rethinking writing. New York, NY: Continuum. Harris, R. (2009). Rationality and the literate mind. New York, NY: Routledge. Hauck, G., & Heurich, J. D. (2018). Language in the Amerindian imagination: An inquiry into linguistic natures. Language and Communication, 63, 1–8. Kiefer, B. (1977). A modinha e o lundú; duas raízes da música popular brasileira. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Movimento/UFRS. Leite, S. (1938). História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil. Tomo 2.Lisboa, Portugal: Livraria Portugália/Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Civilização Brasileira. Macedo, V. (2011). Tracking Guarani songs: Between villages, cities and worlds. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 8(1), 377–410. https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/ S1809-43412011000100014 Makoni, S. (1998). In the beginning was the missionaries’ word: The European invention of African languages: The case of Shona in Zimbabwe. In K. Prah (Ed.), Between extinction and distinction: The harmonization and standardization of African languages (pp. 157–165). Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press. Makoni, S. (2011). Sociolinguistics, colonial and postcolonial: An integrationist perspective. Language Sciences, 33, 680–688. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2011.04.020 Makoni, S., & Severo, C. G. (2017). An integrationist perspective on African philosophy. In A. Pablé (Ed.), Critical humanist perspectives: The integrational turn in philosophy of language and communication (pp. 63–76). London, UK: Routledge. Makoni, S., Severo, C. G., & Abdelhay, A. (2020). Colonial linguistics and the invention of language. In A. Abdelhay, S. B. Makoni, & C. G. Severo (Eds.), Language planning and policy ideologies, ethnicities, and semiotic spaces of power (pp. 211–228). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Melià, B. (1997). El guaraní conquistado y reducido: ensayos de etnohistoria.Asunción del Paraguay: CEADUC.

Integrationism and the Global South 169 Nimuendaju, C. U. (1987). As lendas da criação e destruição do mundo como fundamento da religião dos Apapocúva-Guarani (C. Emmerich & E. B. Viveiros de Castro, Trans). São Paulo, Brazil: EDUSP/Hucitec. Pablé, A. (2019) Is a general non-ethnocentric theory of human communication possible? An integrationist approach. Lingua. International Review of General Linguistics, 230, 150–159. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2019.102735 Pennycook, A. & Makoni, S. (2020). Innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the Global South. London: Routledge. Ross, A. S., Rivers, D. J. (Eds.). (2018). The sociolinguistics of hip-hop as critical conscience: Dissatisfaction and dissent. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Severo, C. G. (2016). The colonial invention of languages in America. Alfa, 60(1), 11–27. Severo, C. G. (2019). Os Jesuítas e as Línguas: Brasil a África [The Jesuits and the Languages in Colonial Brazil and Africa]. Campinas, Brazil: Pontes. Shonekan S. (2015) Semiotics and songs: Visual and oral meanings. In S. Shonekan (Ed.), Soul, country, and the USA (pp. 121–131). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Thornton, J. (2014). Conquest and theology: The Jesuits in Angola, 1548–1650. Journal of Jesuit Studies, 1, 245–259. Vainfas, R. (1995). A heresia dos índios. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1986). Araweté: Os deuses canibais. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: ANPOCS/Jorge Zahar. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1987). Nimuendaju e os Guaranti. In C. U. Nimuendaju (Ed.), As lendas da criação e destruição do mundo como fundamento da religião dos Apapocúva-Guarani (C. Emmerich & E. B. Viveiros de Castro, Trans; pp. xvii–xxxviii). São Paulo, Brazil: EDUSP/Hucitec. Viveiros de Castro, E. (1992). Araweté—From the enemy’s point of view: Humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Watts, R. J., & Morrissey, F. A. (Eds.). (2019). Language, the singer and the song: The sociolinguistics of folk performance. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Wisnik, J. M. (1989). O som e o sentido: Uma outra história da música. São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras.

10 Words and other currencies Cory Juhl

Consider any sentence that we would classify as either true or false, such as “Tigers have stripes” or “Mars is less massive than Pluto”. It seems obvious that we could have used those sequences of words to mean something very different, about bacteria and their metabolisms or what have you. This obvious contingency of facts about truth values, as well as meanings, motivates some theorists to ask questions as to why and how that sentence has the meaning or truth condition or truth value that it does, as opposed to some other semantic value(s) that it might or could have had. Furthermore, there is a widely accepted view shared by many philosophers and linguists and cognitive scientists according to which scientific investigation is the ultimate arbiter of what entities and properties are real, genuinely “out there in the world”, as opposed to mere fictitious posits that might be pragmatically useful to posit but are nevertheless not “genuine” parts or aspects of reality. According to this view, the best way to answer questions as to how or why sentences or words have the semantic values that they do is via scientific investigation. The project of seeking a broadly scientific explanation of semantic values is called the project of “naturalized semantics”, of understanding what semantic values are by explaining how they are constituted by genuinely real, scientifically validated objects and properties. Roy Harris rejected what he called a “fixed-code” picture of language1 and extant theories for naturalized semantics presuppose such a picture Harris, 1980; 1981; 1987; 1996a). Harris also rejected the view (Harris, 2005) that science is an ultimate arbiter of reality,2 so Harris would find the project at least doubly misguided. More broadly, Harris rejected what he termed a “surrogationalist” model of language, according to which words stand for things. Again, naturalized semantics has tended to presuppose a surrogationalist picture, and then attempts to answer such questions as, why does the word “dog” stand for dogs, and not cats?3 It is impossible to summarize the enormous range of penetrating observations that constitute the case that Harris makes against such views of language. It would be akin to summarizing the evidence that Darwin gives for his theory in The Origin of Species. One important strand of Harris’ core

Words and other currencies 171 view about language, as I understand him, is that language is deployed on occasions for purposes at hand. He briefly discusses in a few places, including in his elaboration of his integrationist picture of communication, the analogy of monetary tokens and their monetary values.4 Although the expression “to coin a word” is widely known, to my knowledge no one has explored at length the analogy between linguistic token production and exchanges on one hand, and monetary token production and exchanges on the other, beyond some relatively cursory comments.5 In this paper, I will pursue the analogy at greater length in order to sketch an argument against the project of naturalizing semantics as well as against a kind of scientistic methodology for determining what is real. In my view, the monetary analogy to language helps us to more clearly discern some aspects of language, along with the role of “meanings” or “semantic values” or their assignments within explanations of various linguistic phenomena. Crucially for my present purposes, some key analogies between possible views concerning monetary currencies and values and semantic currencies and values provide a way of seeing how neither sort of value is straightforwardly a part of the scientific/causal-explanatory project, and so, in a sense to be explained below, cannot be elucidated by appeal to, or reduced to, features that are straightforwardly at home within what might be loosely termed “the science project”. This paper attempts to show how the monetary currency value analogy can help us to see that the idea of “naturalizing” semantics is based on a mistaken conception of the relation between semantic features and features attributed on the basis of scientific investigations. I am a philosopher rather than a linguist, so my emphasis and my expertise are somewhat different from Harris’. Nevertheless, I think that Harris is difficult to pigeonhole as either a linguist or a philosopher, or within a single “standard” academic area. His observations and theoretical insights are brilliant, and in my view many philosophers of language and linguists and cognitive scientists committed to seemingly irresistible standard pictures would benefit immensely from reading his works. In this paper, I pursue a thread inspired by Harris’ pregnant comments about monetary values.

Currencies and monetary values We take for granted in ordinary life that monetary tokens have monetary values. We think that two ten-ruble bills are equal in monetary value to a single 20-ruble bill. In fact, on the bills themselves their values are inscribed, lest there be any doubt.6 How, we might ask, do monetary tokens acquire their respective values, or even relative values? One type of answer that was provided for many centuries is that their values were parasitic on the values of some intrinsically valuable item, quantities of gold being the most common in Europe. A ten-pound note was officially equivalent to, exchangeable for, a fixed quantity of gold. Gold,

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according to some theorists of monetary value, is intrinsically valuable, has its “monetary” value in some more fundamental way that is normally left unexplained. We might call this the “parasitic” view, or a “surrogational” view, in that the monetary currency tokens “code for” something else that is intrinsically valuable, and in that sense shares exactly the same (quantity of ) monetary value. Since the adoption of “fiat currencies” throughout much of the world, the surrogational explanation has required a replacement, at least for the rare soul who considers the question how currencies (and/or their tokens) acquire values. Often there is a vague gesture toward an explanation according to which currencies are “backed by the government”, but just how this “backing” works and how we are supposed to determine whether any attempted backing is successful is left unspecified. For present purposes, I will provide a minimal sketch of a type of view concerning nonsurrogationalist currencies such as fiat currencies. The view is roughly: we believe that they have value x, so they do have value x. Or, we treat them as though they have value x, so they do. Or, that’s what the fact of their having value is, our treating it as though it does. I will call this kind of view a “response dependence” view. According to such views, the currency tokens do, in fact, have monetary values. What such facts are, or reduce to, is a complex of facts about how human beings are disposed to exchange tokens, talk about them, seek them, and whatever other responses are deemed constitutive of monetary values. One advantage of a response-dependence view is that it appears to vindicate our beliefs about currencies, telling us that we are correct in our attributions of monetary values. Prior to reflection, we all take for granted that a ten-dollar bill is worth ten dollars, and worth ten onedollar bills, and similar “facts”. Response-dependence views enable us to continue to believe such things are really true. I find such accounts unsatisfying, in spite of their tempting simplicity and their seeming vindication of our prior, unreflective realism. One reason for my dissatisfaction is that I do not see a helpful response in support of the response-dependence view to the following question: what is the difference, if any, between our falsely believing in common that they have such values, and thereby benefitting from participation in a valuable practice, versus our correctly believing that they have such values? If there is no reason to choose one or the other answer, to that extent a suspicion that perhaps there is no fact of the matter becomes salient. Consider an alternative account of monetary currency (purported) values: Fictionalism/Illusionism: There are no monetary values. But we nearly all either believe or pretend that there are. Enough realists are around to make it pragmatically valuable to go along with the ruse, to react to monetary tokens in ways that others expect and find natural. What scientifically ascertainable facts can adjudicate a dispute between the illusionist and the response-dependentist? To the extent that there is no scientific evidence that can be introduced in support of either response-dependence

Words and other currencies 173 realism or shared-illusionism, it seems that either view is equally defensible (empirically/scientifically, at least) and equally adequate for causally explaining features of the practice that we might want to explain, such as dispositions toward patterns of exchange. What the response-dependentist will describe as people correctly believing that a ten-dollar bill is worth ten one-dollar bills, by virtue of the fact that members of the relevant community share various beliefs and response-dispositions, the illusionist will explain equally well by appeal to the same beliefs and response dispositions. The two views label our shared beliefs true rather than false, but other than that they are liable to say exactly the same things about why people exchange currency tokens in the ways that we do. The main reason that I emphasize this explanatory equivalence from a scientific point of view is that such equivalence raises the specter that there may be no fact of the matter to explain or do any explaining. If it is not clear that there is a fact of monetary value acquisition to be explained, then it is also unclear that we have helpfully explained what monetary values are, since our explanation proceeds via an account for which there is no foreseeable evidence. It is reasonable to ask whether we need to scientifically explain what monetary values or facts about them “really are”, if there is no empirical difference between their existing and not existing.

Semantic features of word- and sentence-tokens Word tokens are normally taken to have semantic values or features that speakers of the relevant language recognize and understand. There are views about how such items acquire their values, or what the facts are by virtue of which they have the values that they have, and they parallel the views that we have considered for monetary values. Primitive/intrinsic intentionality (Searle,7 many others): Sentence tokens acquire their semantic contents by virtue of some relation (perhaps a kind of exchangeability) with a mental state/belief that has semantic content “intrinsically”, not parasitically. Whether the mental state is itself connected to some abstract Form or property, or contains a “concept” that is contentful, this view parallels the gold-standard view in some respects. The picture is also very widespread and has intuitive appeal. Intuitively, maybe common sensically, the basis of word meaning is thoughts or intentions that transmit to words or imbue words with meanings, and these thought contents are somehow transferred to the words used to express or communicate thoughts. This view also has what Harris called “surrogational” aspects, to the extent that we take the expressions to “stand for” the thoughts or ideas. A second view, a view that might be found attractive by a behaviorist or some cognitive scientists, is a “response-dependence” view, in this case about linguistic tokens or types rather than monetary tokens or types.

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Response-dependence: Syntactic items such as some sentences have semantic contents by virtue of our treating them in a certain way, our uttering them in various circumstance-types, or our accepting various tokens as synonymous/equivalent/exchangeable. According the response-dependence view of semantic value facts, then, the fact that words have semantic values just is the fact that they are used in various ways, or our having various complex dispositions to produce them and treat them as equivalent or not. An advantage of this type of view for a scientist, who wants to study semantic values empirically, is that such dispositions are empirically examinable to some degree. An answer to a question such as whether two expressions are synonymous might be justified by, or at least taken to be empirically determined by appeal to, dispositional or usage patterns. The fact that there are ways of (stipulatively) defining various usage or dispositional complexes as the ones “constitutive of” semantic or other value is a matter to which we will return, since some seemingly devastating objections to a nonfactualist position are most forcefully expressed with such operationalist profiles in mind. I will argue that the possibility of such “operational definitions/characterizations” of semantic or other values does not undermine the force of the observation that in an important sense, there is no empirical support for the existence or nonexistence of any uniquely correct assignment of semantic values; nor does it undermine, so far as I can see, some important consequences of that observation. Fictionalism/Illusionism(?): There are no semantic values of sentence tokens. But we all “accept” the fiction/theory that they have semantic values, and widespread acceptance of this fiction makes it pragmatically valuable to act as the rest of the community acts concerning sentences. Is there any additional scientific/experimental basis for choosing between (or from among versions of) these views in the sentence token case vs. the currency token case? I propose that there is not. This will require some argument beyond what was presented for the monetary case, even to allow the position to withstand two fairly obvious and seemingly overwhelmingly powerful objections to the analogy. I shall raise these two objections in a moment. But for the moment I will treat the analogy as though it is fairly seamless and straightforward. For my purposes, I will assume that a response-dependence view is a salient possible view for us as scientists interested in these “abstract value” phenomena, and that it is not ruled out by any observable data concerning language use. Just as in the monetary value case, if a dispute arises between an illusionist about semantic values and a response-dependentist, say, it appears that any behaviors exhibited by people exchanging either words or currency tokens are comparably explanatory of the observed behaviors and interactions. The responsedependentist describes the situation as one in which the tokens really have values, and that these are the values had because, or by virtue of the fact that, people believe that they do. The fictionalist/illusionist describes the situation nearly identically, except that when describing whether there really

Words and other currencies 175 are such values, they say that in spite of the fact that people either believe or pretend to believe that the tokens have their corresponding values, such beliefs/pretenses are false. There are two different varieties of response-dependence views to distinguish for our purposes. One view says that it is the contents of our beliefs that token t has value v that constitutes t having value v. We might label this view the “intentionalist” version of response-dependence, in that we can “read off” the values from the contents of our beliefs about them. The other sort of response-dependentist simply posits some complex of dispositions to produce or exchange tokens, and “reads off” what the operationalistically stipulated “value” is from the facts, using their stipulated recipe. The latter does not require that we are correct in our beliefs about the values that we take tokens to have. A scientific virtue, perhaps, of such a view is that it enables us to preserve our belief that we “discover” the “real values” of a one-pound note or word-token by careful data analysis. However, such views have the cost that there are arbitrarily many different such stipulated recipes for reading such “values” off from data, raising doubts about whether we are actually “reading” anything as opposed to projecting it onto the data, and making the view to that extent difficult to discern from an illusionist who grants that there are myriad stipulated “assignments of value”, all equally illusory or fictitious. The former, intentionalist, version is in some respects the more difficult to deal with for my purposes because it appears to make ineliminable appeal to intentional contents, which is exactly what an illusionist needs to eliminate from her account if it is to remain a coherent theoretical option. The operationist response-dependentist is awkward for the illusionist in a different way. The mutually-agreed-upon existence of operational stipulations concerning value makes it delicate to state what exactly the illusionist purports to claim is illusory or unreal. I will explain how I think that an illusionist should explain their position by contrast to an operationist response-dependentist, so as to motivate the general point of paper, that there is an important sense in which the abstract values posited are not required in order to explain anything, although they can be freely posited in order to describe some regularities that we might find of interest for some purpose, scientific, or practical.

Two serious objections to semantic illusionism In this section, I will address two prima facie devastating objections to an illusionism concerning semantic values of expressions. One is a general “selfunderminingness” objection that might be raised either by a parasitist or by a response-dependentist concerning semantic values. The other is an objection on the basis that the illusionist view flies in the face of obvious, even incontrovertible, introspectible facts. The first objection proceeds as follows. Even if we grant that illusionism about monetary values is coherent, to the extent that we can make sense of

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the view, it makes essential appeal to intentional states of agents involved in the practice of exchanging and describing monetary tokens. That is, what we can intelligibly have in mind as a form of illusionism about monetary value is a view according to which people falsely believe various contents, contents such as “This (token) bill is worth one hundred yuan”. They have intentions with contents such as “If Verity gives me her thousand-yuan note, then I will give her ten one-hundred yuan notes in exchange”. Such semantic contents, associated with mental states of participants in the monetary practices, are very natural to posit as explaining why, in spite of the widespread false beliefs about the presence of monetary values, we can explain participants’ behaviors. It is very difficult to see how else to proceed in making sense of illusionism about monetary values. Yet if we adopt an analogous picture of semantic illusionism, we thereby posit contents for mental states, and so do not avoid appeal to semantic contents within our theoretical picture. This is a serious objection for illusionism, since if it cannot be given a satisfactory response, then it at least seems to undermine the theoretical interest of the illusionist position. Once we have posited contents as explanatorily essential within our explanatory account of linguistic practices, even within participants’ minds or brains rather than directly to the public linguistic tokens, it appears to render such an illusionism at best completely uninteresting. It appears to at best be a mere verbal maneuver, relabeling linguistic expression tokens as “contentless”, even though according to the view there is an objective, explanatorily relevant difference between different token production and -exchange phenomena, namely, whether there are associated contents within the minds of the producers of the tokens. The second serious objection that arises immediately and may provide the main reason why semantic illusionism has rarely been taken seriously enough to pursue for more than a momentary spell of confusion or weakness, is that each of us is aware of contentful states within our minds, contents that we understand to also attach in most cases to our linguistic token utterances. It seems as impossible to deny that we have such contents within us or our minds as it would be to deny that we are in pain when we are. Such contents are immediately introspectible. To that extent, even if there were clever ways to argue that there is a response to the first objection that avoids self-undermining by appealing to the very kinds of posits that illusionism would have rendered optional, any such fancy footwork would be impossible to take seriously as undermining our direct introspective awareness of our own contentful states. Thus something like a parasitism, or at least a response-dependence view, according to which contents of public linguistic tokens are parasitic on mental contents in some way whose details it is not urgent to work out in order to respond to an illusionist, seems irresistible. Illusionism of any interesting or significant sort is immediately ruled out by introspection, in perhaps much the way that eliminativism about pain is similarly ruled out.

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Possible responses to these objections Although the two objections raised are only two of many, I will sketch a line of response to both, below. The reason that I focus on these two is that my own intuitive sense, as well as my experience in engaging others concerning semantic illusionism, is that these two objections seem to many to be devastating objections, and motivate the view that it is simply not worth wasting any further time or effort on refuting such a nonstarter of a view as semantic illusionism. If there was room for at least a beginning of a response to these objections, then semantic illusionism, along with the significance of the (as I argue) fact that it is not straightforwardly shown to be false by any scientific means, might be considered at some further length. In my view, given the perplexities that have surrounded the mind, thought contents, and language for millennia, and their problematic status within the broadly scientific enterprise, further examination of these matters is of theoretical value, whatever our ultimate verdict on the matters. The general line of response to these two pressing objections is to focus on what we have evidence of a scientifically incontrovertible kind for the presence or absence of contents within minds, including our own minds. I will argue that when we reflect on the situation, it is not at all clear that there is reason to accept the existence of contents, even within our own minds, independent of our dispositions to classify our mental states in terms of “contents”; second, I note that there is in the present context no evidence of a suitably (in a sense to be explained) independent sort in support of such classifications; and third, it will be argued that the dispositions to classify need not themselves be characterized as contentful in order to explain whatever it is that they do in fact explain. To the extent that this sketch can be provided, we will thereby have found a way to at least begin a serious reflection concerning the possibility of treating semantic contents as akin to monetary values, as explanatorily dispensable in principle from the point of view of the scientific enterprise. After this sketch is given, we will briefly also consider the significance of the possibility of scientific agnosticism concerning semantic content. Such a possibility may undermine the project of an explanation of semantic contents. This possibility runs contrary to many attempts, labeled the project of “naturalizing” semantics, showing how semantic contents can be scientifically explained, how semantic values can be “reduced to” facts of physics or biology. I will first discuss the matter of independent evidence for the existence of contents, empirical evidence, that is, that is suitably independent of our own dispositions to classify our states and those of others as semantically contentful. I propose that arguments about whether semantic contents explain behaviors have repeatedly bogged down due to the fact that “explanation” is itself vague and what exactly should be required for explanation in general and scientific explanation in particular is deeply vexed within philosophy of science. In order to break out from this quagmire I propose that we shift to

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considering a particular sort of explanation, causal explanation, and in addition appeal to the notion of causation from the “manipulationist” or “interventionist” tradition [See Pearl & Mackenzie, 2018; Price & Menzies, 1993; Woodward, 2003]. It is impossible to summarize the relevant rather vast literatures concerning causation in this paper. I will simply assert that the manipulationist approach to causation seems to me particularly helpful in clarifying a sense of “independence” that should be required to adjudicate whether there is “suitably independent evidence” for the existence of semantic contents. The reason is that manipulationist causation requires some sort of isolation of causal role, a kind of directed detection of precisely what causal chains are involved within experimentally reproducible circumstances. Manipulationist models are the kinds used to check, say, whether taking vitamin E is among the causes of lupus, whether smoking causes cancer, whether this fertilizer is more effective for growing wheat in central India than another, and how much more effective it is. Answering such questions is a matter of setting up controlled experiments, where “control” means both manipulating the causal factors that one wants, and (hopefully) fixing other causally relevant factors in order to avoid “confounding variables” that mislead us about causal roles. The general idea here is that manipulationist causal claims, and experimental checks thereof are understood to require abilities to target particular causally relevant features, to detect the presence or absence of causes and effects, and to manipulate them in various ways. When scientists are working within such frameworks, they can detect the presence of some causal factor and tell us the causal pathways in which this factor is implicated. Such experimentation provides a “gold standard” of “independence” of evidence for the presence and role of purported causal factors. Now that we have sketched the general enterprise of manipulationist causal explanation, I will apply it to the clarification of a sense in which I want to claim that there is no suitably independent evidence (independent of our “beliefs” concerning their presence or absence, i.e., our dispositions to classify items as having or not having such features) for the existence of either monetary values or semantic values. The idea is that there is no way to “detect” such values by any means other than determining speakers’ dispositions to classify them as having such values. However, it is easy to be distracted by the possibility of what I call “stipulated” or “operationally defined” values. So, I will briefly discuss the monetary case and the semantic case in turn. In the monetary value case, imagine that economists propose to “measure” the “true value” of a dollar bill. What the units of measure would be would introduce some arbitrariness. Let us pick something, some commodity such as ounces of gold, say. They explain some complex way of computing the gold value of a dollar bill and show us graphs according to which the computed value is taken to vary as the day proceeds, depending in complex ways on how various items are traded during the day. It seems obvious that there will be many such operational definitions of the value of a

Words and other currencies 179 dollar, each with comparable virtues with respect to predicting future values or trades. But even with respect to the question whether future trades are predicted better or worse, one can raise various questions, such as, by virtue of what is the supposed “real value” of a dollar bill tied in any particular way to what people are willing to trade on some future occasion? Or on some present occasion for that matter? Can’t people be wildly wrong about the “true value” of a dollar, and trade in “genuinely irrational” ways? If not, why not? This is not the place to pursue this sort of point at great length. But the basic idea is glaringly obvious once pointed out: unlike measurements and detection of features within the hard sciences, there appears to be no way to empirically discover, as opposed to stipulate or project, a “true” value of a dollar by performing experiments. And if we attempt to introduce a stipulated scheme for measuring, immediate questions arise concerning what makes that stipulation uniquely correct. The point is that on reflection, it seems clear that there is no interesting project for empirically discovering, as opposed to stipulating, some “correct value” for a monetary currency token. Similar considerations can be brought to bear upon linguistic tokens and their purported semantic contents. Aside from our dispositions to apply “Higgs boson”, or “sandwich”, there seems to be nothing to appeal to, empirically, to settle upon any “real semantic value”, as opposed to, at best, some value that is introduced stipulatively, some averaging over dispositions within some community to apply “taco” to this or that food item, for example. This phenomenon is what has led to such perplexities for those who have wanted to explain how our brains are able to have thoughts or representations with definite semantic contents. It seems impossible to settle empirically what some supposed brain representation “really represents”, any more than settling what some linguistic expression represents, and for reasons similar to those in play with monetary tokens. The respective values seem equally transparent to any possible empirical observation. The fact that some values can be stipulated and used to make various behavioral predictions does not bear any more clearly in the semantic case on the “real” values than it does in the monetary case. But what about our direct introspective awareness of real semantic values? The answer will have to be only very briefly sketched here: Any such awareness seems to reduce to dispositions to speak and act and psychologically transition in various ways, and such dispositions are of no significance or of indeterminate significance for empirically settling what any supposed “real values” are. The idea is that we can all be wrong about “flat”, in believing that the Earth is flat, so our dispositions to apply “flat” are insufficient to settle the purportedly correct extension of “flat”. More generally, our acceptance of the fact that our beliefs about what is true do not perfectly track the real truth requires us to be skeptical of any attempt to reduce the “real content” of an expression to how we are inclined to apply it, even within our own internal deliberations.

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A possible ramification of the empirical inaccessibility of semantic contents If the monetary analogy is apt, and there is no empirical reduction of semantic content that can be suitably supported by observational data, then the program of reducing semantic values to empirically ascertainable facts is rendered pointless. There is no particular reduction of any scientifically compelling sort to be had; no empirical evidence is possible in support of any particular reduction. Alternatively, we could say that there are too many equally empirically supported stipulative or operational reductions, so no particular reduction is of any distinctive empirical significance. If correct, this raises a general difficulty for physicalism. If there are semantic contents and hence facts about what is really true, even within scientific deployments of language, but there is no interesting reduction of such facts to be given, this undermines physicalism as a view about the determination of real or genuine facts. It undermines a fairly widespread form of scientific hegemony, a form of hegemony to which Harris was also opposed, “methodological naturalism”, according to which only classifications that are reducible to physics or basic natural facts and categories are to be countenanced as philosophically or ontologically or epistemically legitimate. To the extent that we cannot coherently reject, if we take science to be a source or real truth, the idea that there are real truths and hence real semantic contents, to that extent we should acknowledge that there are classifications that transcend the capacity to reduce all genuine facts to empirically ascertainable facts. Roy Harris spent much of his time explaining various ways in which standard quasi-mechanistic models of how language works are unsatisfactory. In this paper, I have discussed further reasons, inspired in part by Harris’ writings, for questioning such scientistic models of language and thought. Explorations of the sort pursued by Harris and a few others are important in that they free us from pictures that seem to force us in standard directions. Harris reveals novel ways to understand language that connect linguistic phenomena to human negotiation and politics, and thereby escape the commonly accepted straitjacket of causal models which ignore essential aspects of language.

Notes 1 Harris repeatedly returns to this matter, which is discussed in several of his books in the 1980s and 1990s. 2 Harris’ antipathy toward this sort of scientism or “naturalism” suffuses his 2005 book, The Semantics of Science. 3 Two recent authors whose views about such matters share at least some sympathy with Harris’ objections to orthodox views of language are listed in the references, Jackendoff (2012) and Baz (2012). 4 Harris (1996b, p. 112).

Words and other currencies 181 5 Harris quotes Francis Bacon as observing that the science of signs is a concern because words provide “as it were the mint of knowledge” and that “words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values” (Harris, 1996b, p. 112). 6 It would be interesting to perform an experiment in which bills were not so inscribed, but just, say, different colors, but such that people are told at the outset what their “correct/true exchange rates” are. It would presumably be much more likely for participants to begin to exchange the bills in ways that were “floating” more freely from their antecedently “established” rates. 7 See, e.g., Searle (1983, p. 5).

References Baz, A. (2012). When words are called for. Harvard University Press. Harris, R. (1980). The language makers. Cornell University Press. Harris, R. (1981). The language myth. St. Martin’s. Harris, R. (1987). The language machine, Cornell University Press. Harris, R. (1996a). The language connection. Thoemmes. Harris, R. (1996b). Signs, language, and communication. Routledge. Harris, R. (2005). The semantics of science. Continuum. Jackendoff, R. (2012). A user’s guide to thought and meaning. Oxford University Press. Pearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why the new science of cause and effect. Basic Books. Price, H., & Menzies, P. (1993). Causation as a secondary quality. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 44(1), 187–203. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge University Press. Woodward, J. (2003). Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Oxford University Press.

Q&A: Cory Juhl CONNECTION: What specific connections can you make between the ideas in your paper and the issues of concern in other areas of Applied Linguistics? From what I learned in listening to talks and conversations with conference participants, there are many practical concerns concerning language learning that interact with fundamental theories of language use. Exactly how the more abstract and general theoretical matters with which IL is also concerned will engage with the more practical concerns is a matter that cannot, I expect, be fully anticipated in advance of the many people working out the consequences along many strands of integration. But in my view it is a strength of the IL movement(s) that the strands of connections flow back and forth along many paths between the applied and the theoretical. I think that progress along all fronts, from abstract fundamental theory of language to applied concerns, should be kept constantly in play within the movement.

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CLARITY: How did being at the conference change your own understanding of IL and where your paper fits into it? My reading of IL has been attentive to what I now would consider the more ‘pure theory’ side of Roy Harris’ writings, in which he raises fundamental theoretical objections to standard ‘surrogationalist’ models of how language functions. This includes the ‘transfer’ model of communication in which what occurs is the transfer of a private mental object from one mind to another via the production of a linguistic token that ‘carries it’. Related to this picture is what Harris calls the ‘fixed code’ model, according to which language provides a way to encode fixed items that then can be conveyed between minds by stringing together “code” words. Upon attending the conference at Penn State University I came to realize that there are many strands of what one might call an IL “movement”. Some of these are broadly social and political, connecting to Southern theory, and others are practical proposals and implementations of ways of improving language education in areas of the world in which improvements in language acquisition help people to live better lives. I was moved by the stories of the many participants’ efforts to teach students, in which both the teachers and students overcame seemingly insuperable obstacles in order to learn a new language. I think that the diversity of the IL movement from pure theory to applied theory to application and implementation of policy connects people with very different kinds of expertise and knowledge. I look forward to many more years of such collaborations between so many interestingly connected scholars. LOOKING AHEAD: In what ways does the main Integrationist Linguistics (IL) theme or topic discussed in your paper connect to the future of the field? I think that Harris raised many fundamental questions and objections to orthodox views of the functioning of language. To the extent that these objections are extended and made more widely known by linguists and philosophers of language, our understanding of language can be liberated and deepened in unforeseen ways by adopting pictures that are precluded within the contemporary orthodoxy. I look forward to seeing how this process unfolds, and whether Harris’ insights can be brought to bear on theory and application in ways that will impress observers who would otherwise remain satisfied with the orthodox pictures of language and computer models of the mind that supposedly undergird our linguistic abilities.

11 Beyond IL: Languaging without languages Robin Sabino

I was invited to the Seventh International Conference of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication as a participant in a panel on my 2018 monograph, Languaging without Languages: Beyond metro-, multi-, poly-, pluri-, and translanguaging. I be­ came conversant with IL by reading in preparation for the panel and by attending conference sessions and social events. The discussion that follows is a distillation of my panel presentation informed by the conference ac­ tivities and by the chapters in this volume. In what follows, I consider similarities and differences between IL and my approach to a theory of human language focusing on definitions of languaging, entrenchment, conventionalization, vernacularization, con­ tinually emerging systems, and the A-curve. I also address the role that ideology plays in theory making and briefly touch on a concern that my approach shares with Southern Theory.

Similarities and differences between IL and a theory of languaging without languages There are several points of agreement between my perspective and that of IL. Like IL theorists, I find the assumptions of orthodox linguistics do not sa­ tisfactorily explain human languaging and thus fail to provide adequate in­ sight into the nature of human language. For example, I find insightful IL’s rejection of the “fixed code” and “telementation” fallacies which Harris (2002) subsumes under the “language myth”. Thus, like IL, I reject determinate form/meaning mappings and bounded systems (e.g., languages, dialects, and the like) as empirical objects. Additionally, like IL, I recognize that linguistic variation arises in responses to biomechanical, situational, and sociocultural factors (e.g., Orman, 2013; Makoni, 2011). I also understand descriptive ca­ tegories as metalinguistic (e.g., Love, 2017) and distinguish languaging from linguistic data sets (Duncker, 2011, p. 536). However, my concerns are both more narrow and broader than those of IL as discussed in the literature and by conference participants. My concerns are narrower in that unlike IL theorists, I distinguish linguistic activity from

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nonlinguistic activity although I do not claim to be always able to make a clean cut between the two. Nevertheless, while I find Bassey and Mafofo’s (this volume, p. 98) evidence for “a multisemiotic cognitive architecture for consuming text” compelling, I do not consider either the burger drawn by their consultant or textual underlining to be linguistic elements. Thus, from IL’s perspective, my approach is “segregationist”. My concerns are broader than those of IL in that, although I reject fully determined form/meaning mappings, I contend that human language emerges and is stored in prob­ abilistic patterns of discourse-specific use, evidence of which is amenable to analysis. Because of this, I am concerned with the development of a theo­ retical perspective that accounts for how, as agentful individuals with fluid identities, humans acquire, store, and navigate the heterogeneous patterns of form/meaning potentials that emerge during languaging. Another difference between my approach and that of IL is that I ac­ knowledge the validity of theories that best account for accumulated evidence and believe that methodologies can be established for collecting such evi­ dence. For this reason, I question what I understand as IL’s embrace of lay orientation. For example, Jones and Duncker (this volume, p. 69) explain that for IL theorists, “no humanly relevant factors, whether in practices or beliefs, can be dismissed out of hand or excluded (on ‘theoretical’ or ‘methodological’ grounds) from consideration of ‘what language is’ in our experience …” [italics and single quotes in the original]. However, empirical evidence from nineteenth-century autopsies of language-impaired individuals, twentiethcentury surgeries to relieve the catastrophic effects of epilepsy, and twentyfirst-century brain-to-text decoding have demonstrated that an individual’s linguistic resources are resident in the human brain. In my view, linguistic theory and methodology must accommodate this and other well-established facts despite alternative lay understandings. This is not to say, however, that the insights of experts cannot be both wrong and remain unchallenged for extended periods. For example, the now discredited idea of plastic virtue (i.e., that the earth spontaneously produced entities mimicking naturally occurring objects such as shells) predominated thinking from the fifth century B.C.E. to the sixteenth century C.E. Nor does it mean that nonprofessionals cannot contribute important insights. For example, Bade (this volume, p. 21) quotes Harris’s conversation with a lay consultant that provoked Harris to revise his understanding of the nature of communication. The next sections address key components of a theory of languaging without languages: languaging, entrenchment, conventionalization, verna­ cularization, and emergent systems and the A-Curve.

Languaging In contrast to research on bounded linguistic systems, attention to langua­ ging explores the accrual, deployment, and processing of linguistic re­ sources. I understand languaging as including speaking, understanding,

Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 185 writing, and reading, and argue for developing insights into the relationship between multi-modal activity and the emergence of linguistic resources as Deaf identities develop (McIlroy & Storbeck, 2011) and for examining the entrenchment and deployment of linguistic resources by persons who, like Helen Keller, process and produce language tactilely. This perspective also accommodates the languaging of Araweté women and children who repeat the songs sung by shamans and the drummers who activate the talking drums mentioned Severo and Makoni (this volume, p. 161). It accounts for the “striking parallels between” the neurological underpinnings of signed and spoken communication while recognizing the difference between signed languaging and “pantomimes by hearing non-signers” (Poeppel et al., 2012, p. 14129). It also accounts for the documented similarities in the perceptual tuning for signing and speech and the ways these differ from the perceptual tuning for non-linguistic input (Poeppel et al., 2012). Further, this approach calls for the examination of patterned heterogeneity at the level of the in­ dividual and at the level of the sociocultural group.

Entrenchment During communication, it is reasonable to see signs, as IL does, as emerging in the here and now. As Hopper (2015, p. 301) puts it, linguistic memories are “unstable and intrinsically incomplete… constantly being created and recreated in the course of each occasion of use”. However, with respect to human language, I think IL goes too far when it assumes that an “objective trans-situational existence” is only possible when “a fixed linguistic code is in play in language use” (Jones & Dunker, this volume, p. 75). Instead, I hold that, as we language, we store linguistic memories, with each mod­ ification altering our continually emerging idiolects. Idiolects reflect patterned heterogeneity at the level of the individual. Because linguistic resources (re)emerge through experience, although similar experiences produce parallel and partially overlapping resources, each idiolect is unique. However, despite individual differences, all members of the single species homo sapiens have essentially the same neurocognitive architecture. We currently understand the electrochemical activity of our brains as pro­ cesses, many of which are germane to languaging. These include abstraction, aggregation, analogical reasoning, automatization, categorization, crossmodal association, decontextualization, generalization, habituation, hier­ archical organization, imitation, inferencing, pattern recognition, planning, schematization, segmentation, sequential learning, and the capacity for in­ tegrating relevant content as well as for purging irrelevant content. When linguistic resources are understood as derived from patterns of languaging that emerge during situated use, the idiolect can be con­ ceptualized as a self-organizing complex system that continually emerges as interconnected neurological entities individually respond to changing local conditions (e.g., Bybee, 2010; Kretzschmar, 2009, 2015). Complex

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systems are characterized by feedback loops that either dampen or am­ plify potential changes. In human languaging, this is manifest as a reliance on probabilistic processing for incremental interpretation. Thus, as lin­ guistic resources are accrued, probabilistic learning prioritizes appropriate and/or likely responses and understandings. As an illustration, phones are randomly produced during cooing, but sensitivities to distributional probabilities in the infant’s linguistic environment prompt the develop­ ment of neurological structure that registers phonological inventories (Kuhl, 2010). Schmid (2014, p. 3) usefully describes entrenchment in terms of “memory consolidation, chunking, and automatization”. Linguistic memories are entrenched as a languager encounters linguistic material under conditions that allow it to become part of his or her linguistic re­ pertoire.1 Following Bybee (2010), I understand the linguistic memories entrenched in the brain as consisting of network auditory patterns, kinesic activity (whether spoken, signed, or touched), paradigmatic and syntag­ matic patterning, previously negotiated meaning(s), details of the contexts in which use occurred, and inferences derived from communication in those contexts. With each encounter, our networked system of entrenched linguistic memories is updated. As with the sequencing of all tasks that result in automatic behavior, frequently associated linguistic elements create new memories that facilitate processing. A number of these, such as [he’d], [ʌlat], [fɪ]̃ ‘fixing to’,2 [aimɪnə] ‘I’m going to’, confound traditional grammatical categories. Emergence of the idiolect begins in utero and continues across the life­ span. For example, newborn cries have been found to reflect the intonation patterns used in their communities (Mampe et al., 2009). Poeppel et al. (2012) comment on the impact of literacy on the formation of neurological networks. Flege (1987), comparing groups from the United States and France, demonstrates that repeated encounters with members of a different cultural group can lead to modification of voicing onset time initially de­ veloped while conversing with members of one’s primary cultural group. Idiolectal difference also emerges as a result of nonlinguistic experiences. For example, Ladd et al. (2015) discuss several studies that together suggest that seasonal and geographic variation in UV radiation available at birth produces individual difference with respect to the mapping of colors and color names. Entrenchment is only part of the story, however. The Bantu hold that “a person is [only] a person among/because of other people” (Chirindo, this volume, p. 127). In parallel, human languaging functions only to the extent that linguistic resources reflect coordinated expectations of language use. In fact, Backus (2014, p. 116) contends that the primary challenge of a de­ scriptively adequate theory of human language is understanding “how individual-based entrenchment and community-based conventionalization relate to one another”.

Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 187

Conventionalization Although I reject IL’s assertion that meanings cannot be assigned to lin­ guistic forms, I nevertheless contend that it is not similarly entrenched form/ meaning mappings that result in conventionalization. Rather languaging produces and modifies probabilistic expectations for discourse-specific use with respect to potential form/meaning linkages. This is the key to the re­ lationship between entrenchment and conventionalization. That is, pat­ terned heterogeneity emerges at the level of the sociocultural group when highly probable alternatives are selected and “passed around among speakers in comparable social circumstances” (Hopper, 2015, p. 303). Put another way, conventionalization results from the “outward bound” (Labov, 2010) nature of linguistic resource accrual. Thus, although neither forms nor meanings are fully determinate, idiolectal parallels emerge that both reflect similar input and similar responses to that input. The result is overlapping paradigmatic and syntagmatic associations in the brains of multiple individuals and similar expectations for the deployment of lin­ guistic resources. In fact, if conventionalization did not occur, endeavors like the conference and the present volume would not be possible. Conventionalization also plays a role in language learning and linguistic change. During interaction, positive and negative feedback of the emergent system’s feedback loops help the inexperienced languager develop prob­ abilistic expectations as s/he transitions from the idiosyncratic language use that characterizes the early stages of learning to the successful deployment of highly conventionalized linguistic resources. Forms and meanings not only conventionalize, they reconventionalize, producing what traditionally has been analyzed as linguistic change. For example, changes in form have been described as folk etymologies, mergers, and splits. Grammaticalization chains (with or without phonological change) illustrate changes in meaning, as when a verb of motion is reanalyzed as a future marker. Because languaging is an agentful, situated activity, it is characterized by moment-to-moment unpredictability. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that languaging is not only probabilistic, a good bit of it is formulaic (e.g., Conklin & Schmitt, 2012). Thus, despite having access to alternatives, in­ dividuals often choose to accommodate to high frequency patterns at the local, regional, and national levels. This can be illustrated by a Google Ngram search of the American English corpus for so-called irreversible bi­ nomials. For example, although black and white is more highly con­ ventionalized than white and black, both occur. In a second example, the construction different to has 317 citations in the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). In contrast, different from has 10,651 ci­ tations, suggesting that for the languagers whose data comprises the corpus, different from is more highly conventionalized. However, while con­ ventionalization produces overlapping (not necessarily identical) expecta­ tions for the deployment of linguistic resources, expectations are not always

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met. For example, my experience with student writers at Auburn University suggests that in the southern United States, different to is more highly conventionalized than different from. Further, conventionalization makes the categorization of similar but nonidentical tokens and analysis of data possible with a reasonable degree of reliability. In addition to corpus studies, quantitative sociolinguistics has shown that complicated probabilistic patterns of discourse-specific use are amenable to description and thus can serve as a basis for theory building. The table below shows a partial pattern of conventionalization for 79 people audio-recorded by Head (2012). All the languagers who produced the 5094 vowel tokens under consideration were well known to her. The variant choices available to Head’s consultants are categorized as [ai] and [a:]. Table 11.1 shows words ending in this vowel to be very highly conventionalized. So much so that the pronunciations why, I, or by are seldom heard; instead, one hears [wa:], [a:], and [ba:]. Among these speakers, one also hears pronunciations like [wa:d] much more frequently than pro­ nunciations like [waid]. In contrast, words ending in voiceless obstruents are more than twice as likely to be pronounced with [ai] instead of [a:], so [wait] is more common than [wa:t] although, as with the other phonological en­ vironments, both are possible. The general pattern of phonological conditioning for the vowel in why, wide, and white is attested for a number of communities, suggesting that it is highly conventionalized in the American South. However, none of the speakers considered here was categorical, indicating that while predictions can be made with some degree of surety, it is not possible to predict languagers’ choices moment to moment. In part, this reflects the fact that phonological conditioning was only one of several factors impacting variant choice. The consultants’ gender, age, ethnicity, and social status were correlated with variant selection as were speech style, word stress, word frequency, and part of speech. Moreover, even when these factors were considered together, they accounted for only 56% of the variation in the corpus. This is not surprising, because as IL recognizes, languagers are agents.

Vernacularization Our identities are fluid, reflecting shared experiences, goals, sympathies, and concerns. As we language, we form probabilistic expectations about how Table 11.1 Phonological conditioning of the variable (a:) for 79 languagers from Elba, Alabama Following phonological environment Word boundary (e.g., why, I, by) Voiced obstruent (e.g., wide, live, oblige) Voiceless obstruent (e.g., white, life, ice)

Number of vowel tokens

Percent [a:]

3242 846 1006

98 93 40

Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 189 linguistic variants are used to enact sociocultural identities, stances, and af­ filiations. The linkage of variant choice to sociocultural categories and stances is called indexing. In parallel to conventionalization, vernacularization occurs when multiple languagers entrench similar indexes. Thus, indexes not only serve to signal identities but they also create the categories that make identity performance possible. Linguistic alternatives can be indexed to particular people, activities, and orientations. For example, Gramling (2016) describes the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, worshipping in Spanish, conducting heterosexual relations in Italian, homosexual relations in French, and prac­ ticing horsemanship in German. As another example, the choice of democrat rather than democratic in constructions such as democrat senators indexes strong affiliation with the Republican Party in the United States. Like con­ ventionalization, vernacularization plays a role in language learning and lin­ guistic change. Eckert (2011, p. 86) observes that the ability to manipulate “the social-indexical” aspects of variation independently of time and place is an essential component of successful languaging. The examples below illustrate the indexing of stance in the COME OF INDIGNATION construction (Spears, 1982) and the critical NPiCALLS NPiSELF VING construction (Wolfram, 1994). In (1a) by selecting come instead of came, the languager signals resentment and disapproval. In (1b) the speaker signals his/her evaluation of the object of her attention as a poor dancer. 1a. He come in here walking like he owned the place. 1b. She calls herself dancing. As part of entrenched linguistic memories, indexes exist only “in the minds of individuals” (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller, 1985, p. 4). Because en­ trenchment is ongoing, like conventionalization, vernacularization is emer­ gent. To put it another way, as parallel and partially overlapping indexes are (re)assigned and circulated, languagers continually draw on them to create the sociocultural categories that form the basis of linguistic identities. Highly vernacularized indexes (e.g., those that signal regional affiliation) are rela­ tively stable. These can be of any size and degree of compositionality. For example, yall and [a:] in word final position and after obstruents are widely indexed as southern U.S., while [juz] and [a:] preceding [r] (e.g., [ka:pa:k] ‘car park’) are indexed as Bostonian. In a second example, describing an unin­ tended automobile collision as a accident, an accident, a crash, or a wreck can index place of origin, or since these choices are easily learned, regional affiliation. Other indexes, like slang terms, are more ephemeral: when out­ siders use them to claim insider status, slang terms are abandoned. Quantitative variation studies can revel potential indexes. Recall that in the discussion of monophthongal [a:] above, age and ethnicity were among the factors impacting the use of [ai] or [a:]. As Table 11.2 shows, Head’s older and younger European-American consultants used more [a:] than her

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Table 11.2 Influence of age and ethnicity on the use of [a:] in Elba, Alabama Age Older Younger

African-American [a:] use 89% 76%

European-American [a:] use 93% 98%

African-American consultants. However, notice that while her younger African-American languagers used less [a:] than the older generation, younger European-American speakers increased their percentage of [a:] to near categorical. This suggests that, for these languagers, the mono­ phthongal variant was more likely to be used to signal European-American southern identity than African-American southern identity, particularly for languagers born after 1990 when talking with a European-American inter­ viewer well known to them. Data on the variable (ɔ:), also from Head (2012), provide a second example: although both men and women say [kɔ:n] and [kɔin] “coin”, men are almost twice as likely to say [kɔ:n] making [ɔ:] available for indexing southern masculinity.

Emergent complex systems and the A-Curve In complex systems, large numbers of self-organizing, independently interacting elements give rise to unpredictable behaviors. Bee swarms, bird flocks, schools of fish, shifting sand dunes, weather systems, traffic patterns, and banking activity have all been analyzed as emergent complex systems. Chialvo (2010) proposes an emergent-complex-systems approach to understanding how the brains’ billions of neurons and trillions of synapses function. Following Kretzschmar’s (2009, 2015) lead, Languaging without Languages argues for theorizing human language as a continually emergent, complex system. The emergent nature of complex systems reflects ongoing change. Evidence from imaging studies supports this approach. For example, Kemmerer and Eggleston (2010, p. 2688) suggest word classes are best un­ derstood as “constructionally defined” elements reflecting recency, fre­ quency, cultural salience, and pragmatic and syntactic contexts. Similarly, Vigliocco et al. (2011, p. 408) find grammatical class to be an emergent property that reflects “semantic distinctions and patterns of co-occurrence”. This means that, because data sets are decontextualized, analysis can only characterize them, writing grammars for bounded, shared systems is not a linguistically valid activity. Linguistic data sets represent languaging at levels of scale ranging from the idiolect to supranational aggregates. The tokens in data sets can be analyzed as frequency distributions. Sufficiently large distributions in­ variably turn out to be asymmetric with a few very high frequency forms and a large number of low frequency items. For example, Kretzschmar (2012), reveals fourteen pronunciations for the vowel in half are documented in the

Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 191 Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States. While two variants were produced by 156 and 114 persons and another was produced by 51 interviewees, the remaining forms were infrequent. Along the same lines, Sabino (2018) discusses a data set of 80 terms offered by 481 Alabamians in response to a request to name a picture of a piece of furniture. The two most frequent terms, wardrobe and armoire, each accounted for 26% of the total. Cabinet accounted for 9% of responses. In contrast, 51 terms were offered by only a single respondent. In the half and furniture item examples, graphing the frequencies from highest to lowest creates an asymmetric curve. Frequency distributions of both forms and meanings reflect use by par­ ticular languagers, under particular circumstances, at particular times. Thus, when subsets of tokens are analyzed (e.g., only tokens produced by women, or by people over the age of 30), the frequencies change. However, the asymmetric distribution always reappears. Kretzschmar (2015, p. 24) no­ minates these distributions, which he calls A-curves, as “the most striking evidence of speech as a complex system”. As with other linguistic elements, the choices associated with slots in constructions can be ordered in terms of frequency. The first slot in the MODAL + HAVE + VERB construction can be filled with simple or complex forms. For example, a single modal expressed as a full form or as a pho­ nologically reduced form attached to the subject. Cliticized variants and single model + of are also attested (e.g., We should have/should’ve/shoulda/ should of asked permission). Figure 11.1 illustrates the frequency of three of

Figure 11.1 Asymmetric frequency distribution of variants of the NP + MODAL + have construction from Sabino (2018).

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the four MODAL + HAVE + VERB construction ariants extracted from the Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010).3 Ranking the tokens from most to least frequent produces the expected A-curve distribution. As predictable from the primarily written (as opposed to oral) sources on which the corpus is based, full forms tend to occur more frequently than reduced forms. However, a comparison of matched rankings for the full and reduced variants reveals a more complex view of con­ ventionalization in this data set. A positive correlation (rs = 0.82, p < 0.05) exists indicating a pairing of etymologically related forms. That is, in ad­ dition to would have being more frequent than will have, would’ve is more frequent than will’ve. There is no correlation between the frequency of either of these forms and the cliticized variants, perhaps because the latter are not well represented in the corpus.

Ideology and theory making Ideologies are understandings acquired, expressed, and perpetuated, or modified through social practice. As invisible, widely shared complexes, they describe and shape our experiences, establishing common interests and un­ derstandings. As ideologies establish standards of similarity and difference, they naturalize distributions of privilege and power. By providing the pri­ mitive notions that form the basis of both common sense and formal sys­ tems, ideologies help us to know why things are as they are and shape our expectations of how they should be. They also, as McGee (1980) points out, provide the discursive resources for making it so. Because scientific progress is enacted discursively, it is not surprising that analysis and theory making are encumbered with ideological baggage. However, although unavoidable, ideologies can be negotiated and trans­ formed. For this reason, scientific progress is characterized by the replace­ ment of limited understandings with those that are more insightful. The illusion of grammatical unity created by conventionalization and vernacu­ larization undergird the myth that bounded linguistic systems exist. Sabino (2018) identifies belief in the existence of these systems, the methodologies developed to analyze them, and the decisions made based on insights gleaned from those analyses as part of the languages ideology. IL provides valuable insight into languaging that moves us beyond reified bounded linguistic systems, but it does not fully account for human language. Doing so requires ideological shift. Approaching languaging from the perspective of emergent complex systems, Kretzschmar (2015) concludes that there is only one human language. I argue that this language is made up of idiolects which are themselves continually emerging complex systems of stored linguistic memories. Any subset of data is just that: a subset partially representing the idiolects of the languagers who provided the data under particular circumstances–circumstances that must be reported if we are to understand what the data reveal about human languaging.

Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 193

Languaging without languages and Southern Theory Regarding the second theme of the conference, I must admit that my knowledge of Southern Theory is that of a neophyte. Nevertheless, there appears to be common ground here as well. The commonality resides in my nearly four decades of working to understand how transhipped, disparate West Africans when landed in the Danish West Indies (and by extension elsewhere in the New World) created community and established partially overlapping linguistic resources under the horrific circumstances of chattel slavery. The linguistic data available for consideration for that project were heterogeneous: an eighteenth-century traditional grammar and collection of dialogues, published religious texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, close phonetic transcriptions of folk tales published in the early twentieth century, and several years of audio-recorded personal interviews I conducted with a woman who uniquely controlled the linguistic resources I was interested in (Sabino, 2012). Like all ideologies, the languages ideology has circulated discursively, asserting the normalcy of dominant groups, attributing difference and de­ viance, and disadvantaging the less powerful. Hence, the intimate associa­ tion of language and racism and the widely accepted distinction between pure (homogeneous) and corrupted/broken (heterogeneous) linguistic sys­ tems that emerged as a result of cultural contact. The connection of Languaging without Languages with Southern Theory arises from treating all linguistic data as the product of emergent, complex idiolectal systems at the level of the individual and as the product of an emergent system of con­ ventionalized and vernacularized linguistic alternatives at the group level. Putting the Caribbean data that I examined on a footing equal to the data of every other languager furthers the cause of social justice by eradicating entities that standard approaches have labeled interlanguages, pidgins, creoles, and dying languages. Further, this approach understands that the narrowing of linguistic choice traditionally discussed as standardization proceeds via vernacularization as linguistic alternatives indexed to presti­ gious identities and valued sociocultural activities become ever more highly conventionalized.

Conclusion Our linguistic choices reflect a relationship between agency and opportunity. It is languaging, not languages, that enables us to enact our identities, es­ tablish our social relationships, and communicate our needs, wants, sor­ rows, and joys. As Bassey and Mafofo (this volume, p. 97) indicate, fundamental sociolinguistic tenets are being scrutinized and reformulated with considerable agreement that languages, sociolects, etc. are not em­ pirically verifiable objects. But there is disagreement as to what they are. IL holds they are useful second-order constructs. Languaging without

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Languages denies their existence for the purpose of developing linguistic theory. Instead, I argue for a theoretical perspective that views human language as a single continually emergent system at various levels of scale. Languaging without Languages holds that idiolects emerge as linguistic memories are entrenched. It recognizes that probabilistic discourse-specific use leads to conventionalized heterogeneity at the level of the sociocultural group, and it appreciates that vernacularization emerges from interaction between individuals who simultaneously identify as members of multiple and fluid sociocultural groups. The complex emergent system model of linguistic behavior is providing insights into the nature of variability. Neurocognitive research will further reveal the working of the idiolect, or it will provide better models. Quantitative and ethnographic analyses continue to provide data and pro­ duce analyses that prompt us to refine our understandings of languaging. Because of these achievements, I remain firm in my belief that as a science, linguistics one day will reveal what language is and how we humans create, store, and use our linguistic resources.

Notes 1 Sabino (2012) discusses a variety of factors that inhibit entrenchment. 2 Used as an inchoative aspect marker in the southern United States, as in I’m fixing to/fixin to/fina/fɪ̃ go to the store. 3 For reasons of space and because they are very infrequent, the modal + of tokens are not included in the figure.

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Beyond IL: Languaging without Languages 195 Flege, J. E. (1987). The production of new and similar phones in a foreign language: Evidence for the effect of equivalence classification. Journal of Phonetics, 15(1), 45–65. http://doi.org/10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30537-6 Gramling, D. (2016). The invention of monolingualism. Bloomsbury Academic. Harris, R. (2002). The language myth in Western culture. Curzon Press. Head, A. R. (2012). The sounds of social change: Phonology and identity in Elba, Alabama. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Auburn University. Hopper, P. J. (2015). Emergent grammar. In J. P. Gee & M. Handford (Eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (p. 301–314). Routledge. Kay, P., Regir, T., Gilbert, A. L. & Ivy, R. B. (2009). Lateralized Whorf: Language influences perceptual decision in the right visual field. In J. W. Minette & W. S.-Y. Wang (Eds.), Language, evolution and the brain (pp. 261–284). City University of Hong Kong Press. Kemmerer, D., & Eggleston, A. (2010). Nouns and verbs in the brain: Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience. Lingua. International review of general linguistics. Revue internationale de linguistique generale, 120(12), 2686–2690. 10.1016/ j.lingua.2010.03.013. Kretzschmar, W. A. (2009). The linguistics of speech. Cambridge University Press. Kretzschmar, W. A. (2012). Variation in the traditional vowels of the Eastern States. American Speech, 87(4 ): 378–390. Kretzschmar, W. A. (2015). Language and complex systems. Cambridge University Press. Kuhl, P. (2010). The linguistic genius of babies. http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies?language=en (17 June 2015). Labov, W. (2010). What is to be learned? A paper presented at 34th LAUD Symposium on Cognitive Linguistics, University of Koblenz-Landau, Mainz, Germany. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/WTBL.pdf (3 July 2011). Ladd, D. R., Roberts, S. G. and Dediu, D. 2015. Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics 1, 221–241. http://doi.org/ 10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124819 Le Page, R. B. & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based ap­ proaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press. Love, N. (2017). On languaging and languages. Language Sciences, 61, 113–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2017.04.001 Makoni, S. B. (2011). Sociolinguistics, colonial and postcolonial: A integrationist perspective. Language Sciences, 33, 680–688. Mampe, B., Friederici, A. D., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns cry melody is shaped by their native language. Current Biology, 19(23), 1994–1997. 10. 1016/j.cub.2009.09.064/j.cub.2009.09.064 McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 66(1), 1–16. 10.1080/00335638009383499 McIlroy, G., & Storbeck, C. (2011). Development of deaf identity: An ethnographic study. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 16(4), 494–511. 10.1093/deafed/ enr017 Orman, J. (2013). Linguistic diversity and language loss: A view from integrational linguistics. Language Sciences, 40, 1–11. 10.1016/j.langsci.2013.04.005 Poeppel, D., Emmorey, K., Hickok, G., & Pylkkanen, L. (2012). Towards a new neurobiology of language. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(41), 14125–14131. 10.1523/ jneurosci.3244-12.2012

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Sabino, R. (2012). Language contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack his jacket. Brill. Sabino, R. (2018). Languaging without languages: Beyond metro-, multi-, poly-, pluriand translanguaging. Brill. Schmid, H.-J. (2014). Entrenchment, memory and automaticity: The psychology of linguistic knowledge and language learning. http://www.anglistik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/ professoren/schmid/schmid_publ/introduction_entrenchment.pdf (2 July 2015). Spears, A. K. (1982). The Black English semi-auxiliary come. Language, 58, 850–872. 10.2307/413960 Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D. P., Druks, J., Barber, H., & Cappa, S. F. (2011). Nouns and verbs in the brain: A review of behavioral, electrophysiological, neu­ ropsychological and imaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(3), 407–426. 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.04.007 Wolfram, W. (1994). Resolving dialect status: Levels of evidence in assessing African-American Vernacular English forms. In C. Bernstein, T. E. Nunnally, & R. Sabino (Eds.). Language Variation in the South (pp. 490–507). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Index

A-curve 3, 183, 184, 190, 191, 192 adultocentric; see adultocentrism adultocentrism xiv, 32, 40, 41, 47 Africa 2, 4, 8, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 34, 46, 89, 94, 113, 122, 123, 124, 135, 156, 157, 158, 159, 190, 193 agency xiv, 8, 10, 33, 38, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 193 annotations v, 13, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98 anthropocentrism 31, 118 anti-essentialism 56, 58, 59, 60 Antropofagia 145, 146, 149 Apapocúva 160, 167 Aquinas, Thomas 163 Arabic 23, 90, 91, 92, 93, 98 arbitrary resemiotization 95 Aristotle 108, 109, 110, 125 Asia xiii, xv, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 156, 158 Bantu 4, 5, 125, 126, 127, 159, 186 Bantuism 124, 127 bedrock concept 41, 43, 60 Berger, L. 10, 32, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 biomechanical 10, 39, 40, 42, 47, 183 Blommaert 56, 61, 96, 100 Bodhisattva 26 Brasil 158 Brazil 6, 8, 15, 18, 145, 158, 159, 160, 165 Buddhist philosopher; see Nagarjuna Calame-Griaule, G. 34, 44 Canagarajah, S. 84, 100 Carvalho, B. 6, 7, 18, 19, 25, 27 Catholic 159 Cesarino, P. 165, 168 Chamorro, G. 160, 161, 165, 168 Chomsky, N. xiv, 23, 28, 29, 49, 61, 72

Chomskyan 7 Christian 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 54, 158, 159, 160 Christianity 23, 158, 159, 160, 163 Cicero 128, 134 circumstantial 10, 39, 40, 42, 47, 154 code-model 110, 111 colonialism 1, 53, 57, 59, 105, 106, 112, 115, 123, 129, 153, 154 complex emergent system 194 Connell, R. 1, 6, 16, 66, 67, 81, 104, 106, 113, 114, 117, 118 conventionalization 3, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 192 co-operative action 12, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 80 Cornips, L. 31, 44 cosmology 133, 160, 164, 165 cosmovision 12, 34, 35, 36, 41, 42, 156, 161, 163, 166 Covarrubias, P. 9, 16, 36, 44 Craig, R. T. 37, 44 Darwin, C. 170 Darwinism 54 de Campos, H. 145, 146, 152 de Castro, Viveiros 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169 demodalization 87 demythologization 4, 5, 30, 51, 59, 117 Derrida, J. 142, 152 dialogic syntax 73, 74, 81 Dogon 34, 35 domination 19, 20, 150, 158 Duncker, D. v, ix, 12, 13, 50, 61, 62, 66, 75, 82, 184, 194 early childhood 43, 44

198

Index

English language 58, 59 enlightenment 3, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 194 entrenched 186, 187, 189, 194 entrenchment 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 196, 197 epistemological critique 14, 108 epistemology 4, 33, 41, 47, 81, 104, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 118, 122, 125, 138, 159 essentialism 41, 48, 53, 57, 60 ethnocentrism 53, 138, 139, 140, 150, 151, 156, 159 Eurocentrism 7, 13, 14, 79, 81, 104, 105, 106, 108, 118 expertise 6, 35, 52, 53, 65, 171, 182 Fichte, J. 48, 58, 62 fixed-code 170 folklinguistics 44, 47 formulaic 187, 194 frequency vii, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192 Freyre, G. 159, 168 General Semantics 51 Giddens 52, 62, 67 global North xiii, xv, 5, 8, 14, 19, 30, 35, 44, 66, 105, 106, 112, 137 global South xiii, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, 35, 36, 43, 99, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 156, 157, 163, 166 Goddard, C. 36, 43, 44 grammar 13, 72, 79, 80, 83, 86, 158, 159, 163, 190, 193 Grosfoguel, R. 7, 16, 104, 108, 115, 118, 119 Guarani 15, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167 Guarani Mbya myth 162 Gunaratne, S. 36, 44 Halliday 87 Hansen, J. A. 159, 168 Hauck, G. 10, 32, 44, 156, 164, 165, 168 Hawking, S. 19, 27 Heurich, J. D. 32, 44, 156, 164, 165, 168 Hobbes, T. 19, 27 holistic 6, 13, 15, 30, 32, 36, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 66, 85, 143, 156 humanism 31, 61, 105, 118, 124, 151 Hume, D. 54, 62 Hunhu 124, 126, 127, 128, 129 Hutton, C. v, x, xi, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15,

17, 32, 38, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64, 74, 81, 82, 85, 100, 114, 119 ideology i, vi, 3, 7, 14, 20, 30, 47, 53, 55, 57, 58, 68, 69, 76, 104, 106, 108, 113, 117, 183, 192, 193 idiolect 9, 16, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194 Iedema 87, 100 indeterminacy 8, 28, 40, 48, 53, 59, 64, 75, 80, 86, 94, 102, 145, 147, 155 indigenous languages 5, 12, 58, 59, 122, 140, 158, 159 individualism v, xiv, 12, 33, 48, 50, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61 infrastructure 10, 31, 39, 40, 164 inner speech 89, 93 integrated sequel 38 integrational linguistics i, v, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 31, 40, 44, 45, 47, 53, 59, 74, 75, 79, 122, 154 intersemiotic 10, 34, 88, 95, 97 isiXhosa vii, 91, 92, 93, 98 Jakobson, R. 87, 100 Jesuits 158, 159, 163 Johnston, H. 122, 134 Jones, P. E. v, x, 12, 13, 66, 73, 77, 82, 184, 185 Joseph, J. E. x, xv Judaism 26 Jung, C. 55, 63 justice 2, 5, 7, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 193 Kress, G. 84, 87, 89, 90, 98, 100 Kuhn, T. 84, 97, 100 language (mass); see mass language myth i, 5, 7, 13, 14, 31, 50, 56, 57, 59, 64, 69, 80, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 114, 117, 125, 130, 132, 139, 148, 149, 154, 183 lay orientation 32, 49, 60, 184 Li Wei 86, 101 linguistic nihilism 129, 130, 133, 136 linguistic reflexivity 76, 77, 78, 80 linguistic resources 71, 165, 184, 185, 186, 187, 193, 194 literalism 141, 145, 149 Locke, J. 48, 63, 110 logophobia 51 Luhmann, N. 49, 63

Index 199 lundu 159 Macedo, V. 157, 168 macrosocial 10, 12, 33, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 50 Makoni, S. B. v, vi, viii, xii, xiii, 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 41, 43, 45, 57, 59, 63, 66, 82, 93, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108, 112, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 126, 129, 133, 134, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 167, 168, 169, 183, 185, 195 Mangena, F. 126, 127, 128, 134 Marubo 165 Marxism 53, 55, 56, 115 mass 7, 30, 32, 43 meaning potentials 184 Mehrez, S. 146, 152 metalanguage 43, 57, 77, 167 model of the self 49, 54, 65 monetary value 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Moore, G. E. 60, 63 motivated resemiotization 95, 96, 97 Mounier, E. 61, 63 multimodal discourse analysis 89 multiple language ontologies 32, 41 myth 4, 5, 20, 21, 30, 31, 35, 50, 51, 85, 132, 137, 148, 149, 161, 163, 192 Nagarjuna 59, 74 nationalism 56, 111 Niranjana, T. 141, 142, 153 ontogenesis 40, 43 Pablé, A. v, xi, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 30, 31, 44, 45, 50, 53, 61, 62, 63, 67, 69, 81, 82, 93, 100, 106, 112, 117, 118, 119, 134, 139, 153, 156, 157, 159, 168, 169 Paraguayan ethnologist 161 parasitism 176 pattern transference 108, 109 peacocks 20 peasants v, 18, 22 Peirce, C. S. 49, 74, 75 performative self-contradiction 14, 117 persona 54, 55 physicalism 180 Plato 109, 110, 125 Portuguese Government 158

postcolonial theory 15, 53 postcolonial translation 142, 143, 145, 146, 148 postcolonialism 15, 137, 138, 139, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154 posthumanism xiv, 12, 31 postmodernism 56, 57, 112, 113 Prasad, G. J. V. 146, 153 probabilistic learning 186 probabilistic patterns 184, 188 Putonghua 111 rationalism 104, 105, 118 religion 23, 24, 25, 26, 113, 161 representationalism 125 resemiotization 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 103 response-dependence view 172, 174, 175, 176 Romanticism 48, 58, 64 Sabino, R. xi, 1, 3, 16, 183, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196 Said, Edward 18, 20, 21 Santos, B. De S. 1, 7, 11, 17, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120 Saussure, F. 29, 30, 34, 35, 38, 48, 49, 50, 63, 79, 143 Saussurean 30, 35, 37, 50, 143 scientific truth 107, 108, 110, 115 segregationist i, 5, 6, 7, 12, 66, 76, 125, 128, 157, 160, 184 semiology 37, 38, 41, 46, 49, 53, 64, 75, 78, 80, 137, 143, 149, 154, 156 Shona 124, 126, 127, 128, 129 Shonekan 157, 169 Simon, S. 146, 153 social change 22, 49, 55 songs 6, 15, 23, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 185 sophists 109, 125 Southern Epistemologies 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 116, 118, 157, 165, 166 Southern semiotic 156, 157, 163 Southern Theory xiii, xiv, xv, 2, 18, 19, 20, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 64, 66, 81, 83, 106, 111, 112, 116, 117, 121, 182, 183, 193 Spivak, G. C. 138, 140, 141, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154 stance xv, 37, 40, 46, 47, 49, 53, 58, 189 Stroud, S. R. 8, 17, 131, 135

200

Index

supercategory 113 surrogational 15, 170, 172, 173, 182 Swift 51, 53, 60, 63 Swiftian; see Swift systemic functional 13, 86, 87 systems theory 49, 54, 55, 60

Vainfas, R. 160, 169 van Leeuwen, T. 84, 87, 90, 100 vernacularization 3, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194 Vivian, B. 125, 130, 131, 135 Volk 48

telementation 4, 14, 15, 16, 99, 109, 125, 129, 130, 139, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 153, 183 Teochew Dialect 110 Thornton, J. 158, 169 Tupi 158, 162, 163

Watts & Morrissey 157, 169 Western grammatical tradition 8, 79, 80, 81, 83 Wilkins, J. 51, 64 Wittgenstein, L. 97, 101 Wynter, S. 123, 132, 135

uBuntu 2, 124, 126, 127 ukama 127, 128 universalism 33, 37, 41, 118, 163

Yoshitake, M. 36, 45 Young, R. J. C. 138, 139, 150, 151, 153