Jeppe Bundsgaards hjemmeside

Within the dominant linguistic theory of the last century, the European – or Saussurean – structuralism, a fundamental notion is that of the Sign. In this key term all the central theoretic ideas of structuralism are embedded. Among these are the arbitrarity of the sign, the semiological system, the notion of valeur, the distinction between diachronic and synchronic linguistics and the distinction between langue and parole.

These terms all date back to the pater sine qua non of structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure (cf. Cours de linguistique générale, 1916). The breakthrough of this new linguistic paradigm was due to a change in the sociology of science, which took place in the beginning of the 20^th century, and which might be described as a bureaucratization of the scientific community – a parallel to the modern Western bureaucraties as described by Max Weber. In this development, scientists made attempts to define their fields in a mutually exclusive way. Within the field of linguistics, Saussure did so by claiming a special object of study, la langue, which, he claimed, was unattainable for other scientific approaches.

Although the Saussurean terms are forming a theoretical whole, it could be argued that especially one is a constituting basis of structuralism, namely the arbitrarity of the sign (cf. Steffensen 2000). The arbitrarity of the sign is indeed a crucial constituting factor in the structuralist view of language as a self-contained closed system of linguistic signs.

Within the linguistics of this 21^st century there are several hyphenated linguistic disciplines, all descending from the Saussurean inheritance. But there is one remarkable exception, and that is ecolinguistics. Ecolinguistics is an ”umbrella term” which covers a rich diversity of theoretical approaches (cf. Fill 1996). In this context we find it more fruitful to draw the attention to the similarities of the diverse ecolinguistic approaches than to the differences. Following Haugen’s definition – according to which ecolinguistics is ”the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen 1972:325) – the environmental constitution of language is an important research field of ecolinguistics. This means, in our point of view, that structural linguistics and ecological linguistics are incompatible, since the former denies the very theoretical (or axiomatic) starting point of the latter. Furthermore, we suggest that a recognition and discussion of the different approaches to the environmental constitution of language is crucial for maintaining and developing ecolinguistics as a forum of friendly and democratic dialogues. It is fundamentally undemocratic to exclude the study of language from public discussion by claiming that other persons than linguists do not even know what the “true” questions regarding language “really” are.

Within Danish Dialectical Linguistics, or The Odense School of Ecolinguistics (developed by Jørgen Chr. Bang & Jørgen Døør since the 1970s, and within The ELI Research Group: Ecology – Language – Ideology since 1990), we consider language to be a constitutive and constituted part of a social praxis: Language is a social product of human activities, but at the same time language changes or modifies the human activity and the social praxis. This means that there is a dialectical relation

^[1] between language and social praxis. In our point of view, the social praxis is the dominating and language the dominated individuality ^[2] of this dialectical relation, since a social praxis without language is a logical possibility, but language without a social praxis is historically and logically impossible: The former is utopian, the latter is atopian (cf. Bang & Døør 1990:5).

The dialectical relationship between language and social praxis means that the scientific investigation of language at the same time is a scientific investigation of our social praxis. And it means that a theory of language is also a theory of social praxis. This goes for all (linguistic) theories, whether they acknowledge it or not. The democratic implication of such a view is that language studies are the matter of everyone interested, not reserved for a scientific élite.

The three-dimensionality of the social praxis

Danish Dialectical Linguistics is characterized by (i) explicating the axiological and political implications of our (and others) doing linguistics, and by (ii) formulating our linguistic theories in relation to an explicit dialectical theory of the social praxis – historically and transhistorically (cf. Døør 1998). Two important aspects of our dialectical theory are (i) the Core Contradictions and (ii) the three-dimensionality of the social praxis. In this presentation we focus on the latter which we present by quoting Bang & Døør’s Dialogue Model (Bang & Døør 1995:47):[3]

Dialogue Model

The three-dimensionality of the social praxis can readily be seen as Bang & Døør’s, or the Odense School’s, theoretical frame – or basis – of understanding and explaining the environmental constitution of language.

The three dimensions are dialectically determined and determing. The three logical dimensions are interrelated historical and dynamic systems of recurrent invariances, patterns and tendencies (cf. Døør 1998:65). The ideo-logical dimension is about our individual and collective mental, cognitive, ideological and psychic systems. The socio-logical dimension is about the ways we organize our interrelations in order to maintain a collectivity of individuals, whether these individuals love each other (eg. in a family and between friends), know each other (eg. between neighbours or in a tribe) or are strangers to each other (eg. in political systems, like a region, a state or the EEC). The bio-logical dimension is about our biological collectivity and our coexistance with other species (animals, plants, soil, oceans, microorganisms, macroorganisms etc.) – within Gaia or outside of Gaia.

No phenomenon is mono-logical or mono-dimensional, according to our dialectical theory. Our way of breathing is not just determining our bio-logical being and well-being, but also our mental and social well being (cf. the breathing exercises within all kinds of meditation). Capitalism is not just a specific socio-logical order of production, distribution and consumption within and between social classes. It is also a specific ideo-logical configuration of capitalist ideologemes like ”more is better”, ”growth through production”, ”competitiveness”, ”profit” and the like. Also it is a specific bio-logical configuration of exploitation, pollution and ecological unsustainability.

This three-dimensionality of the social praxis means that also language is a three-dimensional entity in a social praxis. Therefore linguistics needs to describe language in these three dimensions. Structuralism described language only as an individual and collective ideo-logical phenomenon. One of the greatest predecessors of our dialectical tradition, the Marxist linguist V.N. Vološinov (cf. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 1930/1973) described language as a purely socio-logical phenomenon.

^[4] On this point we disagree with as well the structuralist tradition as with Vološinov.

In our opinion, ecolinguistics is the study of the interrelations of bio-, socio- and ideo-logical dimensions of language. The ecological well-being of Gaia and the mental and social well-being of mankind go hand in hand. Therefore our efforts in favour of ecological sustainability – and ecolinguistics – are inseparable from our critique of the capitalist and bureaucratic societies and ideologies.

1. Why Morphology?

Science and society are inseparable. This means that normal science (cf. Kuhn 1962, Sjørup Simonsen 2000) inevitably must be compatible with the dominant ideology of society in order to obtain economical support from Gemeinschafte and Gesellschafte. We have chosen to work with the concept of morphology for two reasons. First, because the discipline of morphology possesses a central position in traditional linguistics, which means that traditional morphology is inscribed in – or compatible with – an ideology which is a part of the ecological crisis. Second, because morphology touches upon central linguistic questions like the individual and collective creation and creativity of language.

We ask the question whether it is possible to create and develop an Ecological Morphology – or Ecomorphology – that makes us become more aware of our environmental problems. This we do in the same way as Bang & Døør on the ecolinguistic section of AILA 1993 in Amsterdam suggested a radical approach to the ethical dimension of the ecological crisis:

One part of the research community tries to handle the serious ethical problematic of our ecological crisis by applying traditional and well-established ethical theories and concepts to ecological problems.

Another part of the research community has realized that traditional ethics is part of the problematic and are co-producers of ecological contradictions and dilemmas. Therefore, what is needed is a fresh approach to ethics and the ethical dimension of the ecological crisis. (Bang & Døør 1995b:36)

The axiological and methodological implication of this point of view is that we must make a radical re-interpretation of what morphology is.

Traditional definitions

Before we reach our attempt to formulate an ecological morphology, we will quote five traditional linguistic definitions of morphology.

1. Within the Danish Dialectical Linguistics, we often refer to the encyclopedic writings of David Crystal because they have a canonical status of presenting social sense definitions of linguistic terms. This is Crystals definition of morphology and of a morpheme:

morphology (gram) The study of word structure, esp. in terms of morphemes. […] morpheme (gram) The smallest contrastive unit of grammar. (Crystal 1998:432)

We might add that Crystal defines contrast as ”Any formal difference that serves to distinguish meaning in a language.” (Crystal 1998:424).

2. One of the best over-all treatments of morphology is probably P.H. Matthews’ ”Morphology” (1974, 2^nd ed. 1991). This book is part of the ”Cambridge textbooks in linguistics”-series, which gives it a canonical status within linguistics. Matthews defines morphology in this way:

’Morphology’, therefore, is simply a term for that branch of linguistics which is concerned with the ’forms of words’ in different uses and constructions. (Matthews 1991:3)

[…] we can say that morphology is, briefly, the branch of grammar that deals with the internal structure of words. (Matthews 1991:9)

3. In (one of) the newest handbook(s) of morphology, ”The Handbook of Morphology” (1998), the editors, Andrew Spencer & Arnold M. Zwicky, open their ”Introduction” with this proclamation:

Morphology is at the conceptual centre of linguistics. This is not because it is the dominant subdiscipline, but because morphology is the study of word structure, and words are at the interface between phonology, syntax and semantics. (Spencer & Zwicky 1998:1; our italics, jb&ss)

4. Also Saussure himself offers us some thoughts on morphology. Naturally, what he has to say about morphology is coloured by the philologism of the contemporary academic milieus. When Saussure in Cours claims that ”Linguistiquement, la morphologie n’a pas d’objet réel et autonome; elle ne peut constituer une discipline distincte de la syntaxe” (Saussure 1916/1973:186), he is merely alluding to the isolated paradigms of declination (puer, puerum, etc.) and conjugation (sum, es, est, etc.). But elsewhere Saussure actually does define morphology, namely in a manuscript from ca. 1894-1895 which is quoted in Robert Godel’s A Geneva School Reader in Linguistics (Bloomington & London 1969). Here Saussure states:

Définition. La morphologie est la science qui traite des unités de son correspondant à une partie de l’idée, et du groupement de ces unités. […] Le vrai nom de la morphologie serait: la théorie des signes, et non des formes. (Godel 1969:28)

5. Finally, we present one of the great Danish linguists, Viggo Brøndal (1887-1942). Brøndal was not directly a part of the Copenhagen School of Hjelmslev (actually they couldn´t stand each other!), but in many ways his thoughts were quite close to those of the contemporary strucuralists. His definition of morphology is (in Danish and in our translation):

Morfologi, i vid Forstand defineret som Logisk Systematik, betragter udelukkende Ordenes indre Form, Kategorier og Systemer, – men ikke deres Combinationer. (Brøndal 1932:8)

Morphology, defined – in its broadest sense – as Logical Systematism, considers exclusively the inner form, categories and systems of the words, – but not the combinations of these. (Brøndal 1932:8; our translation, jb&ss)

We identify three main problems in these definitions of morphology and – explicitly or implicitly – of morphemes. These problems are (i) The problem of meaningfulness, (ii) The problem of relationality and (iii) The problem of ’smallest unit’. We discuss these three points in 2-4.

2. Meaning in Ecolinguistics

The problem of meaningfulness is for instance seen in Crystal’s definition. His definition of the morpheme isolates the notion of meaningfulness from our human experiences with what makes sense. Crystal does not ask the question: What makes sense – and how does it make sense?

We get a hint of the answers to these questions if we just for a second consider the etymology of the word ’morpheme’. Etymologically, ’morpheme’ constitutes and is constituted by the morphemes ’morph-’ and ’ema’. ’morph-’ means ’form-’, and ’-ema’ is used in greek nominalized verbs, and indicates what is remaining after a given action. The structuralist use of the suffix ’-eme’ seems to ignore this processual background, thus leaving the ’-emes’ at any given level as an ahistorical and de-personalized distinctive unit or element. An ecolinguistic definition should be based on the processual forming and creation of meaningfulness. To quote Vološinov:

For a person speaking his native tongue, a word [or, a morpheme; jb&ss] presents itself not as an item of vocabulary but as a word that has been used in a wide variety of utterances by co-speaker A, co-speaker B, co-speaker C and so on, and has been variously used in the speaker’s own utterances. (Vološinov 1973:70)

Thus, a morpheme definition must take its starting point in the dialogical reality of fluent speech. As human beings we were capable of communicating already in the uterus (Bang 1987). When we were born we continued developing this capacity – by crying, moving, making facial expressions etc. Later we started cooing and babbling, and later again we started uttering words and sentences. And all the time we developed our awareness of actions and utterances of our parents, brothers, sisters and others. Through this growing awareness we noticed differences and similarities of their speech, and our awareness of these differences and similarities depended on our way of sensing the rhythmes of language – or the melody of language – and the rhymes of texts, words and parts of words. We did not perform structuralist commutation tests, we heard the melody of our mother tongue.

It was our co-creative re-productions of these differences and similarities that led us to our own speech. It was our acts of interpreting, re-producing and re-creating rhymes and rhythmes that made us able to distinguish those parts of our family’s speech that made sense in relation to a particular situation. And at the same time we learned that the recurring patterns in their speech depended on the situations and intentions of their speaking. This is how we first found out about morphemes – not as independent building blocks in the construction of a sentence, but as concrete individualities in the creation of meaning. In a sense we met the complete utterance as a textual whole or as an individuality with an understandable meaning, depending on – and derived from – the situation. But we soon became aware of smaller individualities which made sense within the utterance. We performed acts of natural linguistic analysis and creativity, thus creating and developing our own speech. Morphemes are produced and consumed as individualities that are dialectically constituted by and constituting an utterance in a dialogue.

In order to distinguish the significance of the utterance from the significance of the smaller individualities of the utterance, Vološinov talked about theme and meaning:

Let us call the significance of a whole utterance its theme. [...] The theme of an utterance itself is individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. […] By meaning [...] we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self-identical in all instances of repetition. […] Theme is the upper, actual limit of linguistic significance; [...] Meaning is the lower limit of linguistic significance. (Vološinov 1973:99-101)

We widely agree with Vološinov, although we do not consider morphemes to be ”self-identical in all instances of repetition.” Identity is always situational and there is thus no absolute self-identity, but only more or less identical textual phenomena, produced and consumed by human beings. It follows from this that a reproduction is not an identical copy or repetition, but a situational re-creation of those textual phenomena we have experienced.

A dialectical morpheme definition

These comments lead us to suggest a dialectical or ecolinguistic definition of the morpheme:

Definition. Morphemes are rhythmical and rhymic identifiable textual individualities which: (i) Are constituted by and constituting a textual whole (text, utterance, sentence, word). (ii) Are creatively formed, co-formed and con-formed individualities in a dialogue situation (socio-, bio- and ideo-logical). (iii) Are individualities in our cognitive and bodily configurations of knowledge and memory – and thus recreatable in a dialogue situation (bio-, socio- and ideo-logical).

The forming, co-forming and con-forming of morphemes as parts – or shares – of dialogical utterances are always situational and personal. The morphemic forming is an act of the text producer (S₁ or ’the speaker’). The co-forming is an collective act of all subjects present in the communication situation (S₁, S₂ and S₃). And the con-forming is the subjects’ uttering of that social and cultural order that to a certain degree pre-organizes our linguistic actions. We emphasize that linguistic actions have two interdependent dimensions: Form and content. We reproduce a certain meaning by reproducing a certain form. Our linguistic forming, co-forming and con-forming of form is our forming, co-forming and con-forming of content.

When we learn our mother tongue we (unconsciously) internalize a social and cultural order (cf. Døør 1998:42). In our modern Western societies, we generally internalize different aspects of a capitalist and unecological way of living, thinking and communicating. This internalization is inevitable. In our living, thinking and communicating we can more or less support or non-support (trans-form or con-firm) the internalized social and cultural order. We do not learn our mother tongue once and for all, but in a lifelong creative, co-creative and con-creative process. Therefore we always have a possibility of changing our way of living, thinking and communicating – but this takes thorough reflexions.

The subjects of the internalization process are both those who (knowingly and unknowingly) internalize and those who (knowingly and unknowingly) utter the social and cultural order as the neutral background for our living, thinking and communicating. We are all subjects of internalization processes – as loving and caring parents and as teachers, examiners and scientists.

We consider it to be a task for ecolinguists to promote healthy ways of becoming aware of these internalization processes. Being aware is the only way of identifying the subjects and interests at work in a given situation. Without this awareness we are confronted with the anonymous third, ie. a cultural and societal order that presents itself (sic!) as-if it was neutral and objective.

^[5]

In the third point of our definition we propose that we know or remember morphemes in order to recreate them. This knowledge or memory is as well cognitive as bodily, because our experiences are as well cognitive as bodily.

^[6] At the same time our knowledge or memory is situational. We do not remember atomized units, waiting to be used in utterances. We remember parts/shares of situations (and probably also our mood and feelings in that situation), and we recreate these shares in our present situation. And sometimes we forget such shares, especially if we rarely use them. We tend to forget ’perlocutionary’ rather than ’we’!

3. Relationality in Ecolinguistics

All of the structural definitions quoted in 1.1. have one thing in common: They only treat the inner relations of the word, and this they do in isolation from all other textual and contextual phenomena. Two key terms in structural morphology therefore seems to be: Word and Internality. In these definitions there is an implicit claim that the word can be isolated from other textual aspects, and that inner relations can be isolated from other types of relations.

We disagree with such an explanation. We consider every individuality (ie. person, group, word, text, etc.) to exist in three relational dimensions: Intra-relationality, inter-relationality and extra-relationality. Intra-relations are relations within the individuality. Inter-relations are relations between an individuality and other individualities of the same kind or species. Extra-relations are relations between an individuality and other individualities of other kinds or species.

^[7]

Our starting point in our linguistic analyses is always texts in dialogues. When we work with textual phenomena, our theoretical basis for a description of relationality is the “Triple Model of Reference.” This model was produced by Jørgen Chr. Bang and Jørgen Døør – together with Harry Perridon, Amsterdam University – in 1990 (Bang & Døør 1990:30). The Triple Model describes (1) the traditional term for referential parts of a text (”Dimension of reference”), (2) the relationality of the referential part of the text – ie. inter-/intra-/extra-relationality (”Dominating reference”) and (3) what the part of the text refers to, ie. whether the referred-to is cotextual, intextual, or contextual. The Triple Model is presented here:

Triple Model of Reference

C-prod = the context of the producer(s)

C-comm = the context of the communicator(s)

C-cons = the context of the consumer(s)

C-derivated = the context of the recontextualizer(s)

Furthermore, it could be added that the inter-textual reference is primarily a semantic category, the intra-textual reference primarily a syntactic category, and the extra-textual reference primarily a pragmatic category. This means that our description of the inter-textuality of morphemes is primarily a semantic description – or a description of morphological semantics. Similar points go for the intra- and extra-textuality (respectively morphological syntax and morphological pragmatics).

Traditional definitions of morphology are incompatible with these relational principles, since there is no such notion as extra-textuality in traditional morphology, only the intra-textual function of morphemes is acknowledged. We suggest that an ecolinguistic morphology takes all three kinds of relationality into consideration.

Haugen’s definition of ecolinguistics is primarily concerned with the extra-relations of language, and indeed that is exactly what structural linguistics and morphology has ignored. But Haugen does not in his definition of ecolinguistics take into account that the extra-relationality of language (ie. the environmental interactions) changes the intra- and inter-relationality of language. Seen from our dialectical point of view, ecolinguistics is the study of intra-, inter- and extra-relations and of the relations between these relations.

In the following we shall shortly comment on the inter-, intra- and extra-textual function of morphemes.

The inter-textual function of the morpheme

We start with the inter-textual function of the morpheme because we already have touched on that subject in 2. It is one of the most crucial and beautiful things about language that it is learnable for each new generation. Indeed, there would be no language if our children could not consume it and (re)produce it. Language is not a closed circuit between two homogenous adults, and therefore Saussure’s ”circuit de la parole” – and for that sake Chomsky’s theories – are not theories on language, but on calculations of language.

Most words have an ideo-logical existence for us (we know them, can produce and consume them), because they first have had a socio-logical existence for us (we have heard them in a dialogical situation in a social praxis).

^[8] The sustainability of language depends on this ability of the language producers and consumers ^[9] to remember and to reproduce language. The relation between our consumption of language in one situation, our memory and our re-production in another situation is an inter-relation between the linguistic phenomena in the two situations. In our morpheme definition we understood the linguistic memory as a morphemic memory, ie. our lexicon as a morphemic lexicon. This is due to our understanding of morphology as a principle of linguistic (re)creation.

But we do not just remember morphemes, we do also remember the situational background of them. Our parents did not use the same morphemes as our teachers in school, and even if they did we did not understand them in the same way, because they had different institutional status. This is what the great ecolinguist Adam Makkai describes (in ”How does a sememe mean?” (Makkai 1993:208-231)), as a sememic difference between psychosememes, cognosememes and technosememes (cf. Makkai 1993:230). We would like to add that this sememic difference is due to the situational and social environment of our experiences with these sememes or morphemes, and not due to specific sememic, morphemic or cognitive proportions.

Everytime we produce or consume textual shares, ie. morphemes, in a dialogue situation, we reproduce semantic meaning that is non-identical with the meaning of the ”same” morphemes in another situation. But even though there is a non-identity between these morphemes in different dialogue situations, the meaning and form of a morpheme is more or less constant in different situations, just as all situations have some general proportions in common.

^[10] So our semantics has a general dimension, the situational and textual constancy, and a specific dimension, the situational and textual variability.

At the same time meaning can be more or less common for a community. Meaning is at the same time shared between the individualities in a community and individual for each member of the community. In other words, we operate with a universal semantic dimension and a particular semantic dimension. These two dimensions are the constituting axes of the dialectical Semantic Matrix that Jørgen Chr. Bang & Jørgen Døør formulated in Bang & Døør 1990. In the Semantic Matrix they constitute four semantic fields that all are simultaneously present in every text: The Social Sense, the Social Import, the Individual Meaning and the Personal Significance (For further explanations, see Bang & Døør 1990:14ff.).

Tekstboks:
The semantic Matrix

Some shares of our speech are morphemes in a more social sense, and some shares are morphemes in some persons individual meaning but not in others. Here we disagree with those structuralists, who say that a given utterance always have the same morphemes. We say that it depends on the situation and on what the participants of the dialogue consider to be morphemes in the utterance and in the dialogue.

Finally, one important bio-logical phenomenon is at work in the inter-textual function of the morpheme: We must be able to remember morphemes, and morphemes must be easily reproduced. It is a healthy ecological principle that those words we use most (eg. the personal pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we, my etc.) are one-syllabic, and technical terms (eg. psychosememes) are poly-syllabic.

The extra-textual function of the morpheme

Language is always produced in a social praxis, and therefore every dialogue, every text and every part/share of a text are related to the dialogue situation. This relation between text and situation is extremely complex. We try to recognize at least three dimensions of extra-textual reference: A deictic dimension, a modal dimension and a metaphoric dimension.

vDeixis is a key term in dialectical linguistics. Bang & Døør have now through three decades investigated and explained the social raison d’être of texts and dialogues, and this they have primarily done through thorough analyses of deictic phenomena. We quote the newest deixis definition made by Bang & Døør:

Deixis A category used to subsume features of languages which indicate

(i) personal, objectical, and medial;

(ii) topical (i.e. temporal-locational features);

(iii) logical,(iv) modal, and (v) lexical characteristics of

(a) the text-context-discourse, or language game,

(b) the dialogue-situation, and

(c) the form of life/praxis within which an utterance takes place