> 1) I've read some authors who say that "writing" is a technology. Can we
>say that, because of that, language is an artifact?
> 2) Or maybe language is in part an artifact? Even if some part of language
>is biological, some part of language is part of culture.
Definitions are pretty critical here. If you accept a dominant linguistics
account of what language is... Linguistics has been so associated with
imperialistic and nationalistic processes, with standardization movements,
that national languages, like English, seem just to be common sense, but
what is English? What are its syntactic rules, its lexicon? What should
we make of "tests" like mutual intelligibility?
I'd say, following Voloshinov and Bakhtin, that language is a concrete,
historical phenomenon. Voloshinov's critique of abstract objectivist
approaches to language remains timely. In this sense, language is not *an*
artifact, but a confluence of dispersed, ever-evolving artifacts, something
more like a collection of speech genres (in Bakhtin's sense of typified
utterances, oral or written, associated with particular sociohistorical
spheres of activity). [There is certainly a biological affordance for
langauge--and other complex semiotic activity, but language-in-use,
language as a tool of communication, is fundamentally cultural-historical.
Chomsky's grammars, as far as I followed them, never actually generated
anything; they contain no priniciple of generation, just re-description of
sentences.]
As for writing, again what is writing? Writing is often imagined as texts
or as transcription of texts. Technologies are a necessary part of
writing, but as practice, as history, writing is not limited to some
technology of transcription. You also need to account for processes, for
resources, for the contents, functions and social significations of texts
in use.
> 4) If writing was an invention, it is obvious that literary genres are
>inventions too. But not only literary genres, since oral discourse can assume
>many formats that are analogous to literary genres. Can we say that speech
>genres are artifacts ?
>
> 5) If this is correct, is it useful to consider speech genres as artifacts?
>What we gain (in explanation power) by making this approximation?
>
>I'd appreciate any comments on these questions. Are they nonsense? Is
>there a better direction in which to explore these problems?
Paul Prior
p-prior@uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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