11 - Language and social explanation

Summary

Where, finally, does linguistics stand as a science? Does it belong to the natural sciences, with biology, or to the social sciences? … Behind the apparent lawlessness of social phenomena there is a regularity of configuration and tendency which is just as real as the regularity of physical processes … though it is a regularity of infinitely less apparent rigidity and of another mode of apprehension on our part. Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such. Its regularity and formal development rest on considerations of a biological and psychological nature to be sure. But this regularity and our underlying unconsciousness of its typical forms do not make linguistics a mere adjunct of either biology or psychology.

Sapir (1929)

When we do an analysis as we did in Figure 10.6 of ‘When's the next strike then, Tom?’, in what sense can we be said to have explained the utterance? In chapter ten we looked at a discourse theory based on the idea that utterances are actions. That theory yields an account of Arthur's utterance as an array of illocutionary acts and demonstrates how the acts were inferentially derived. Alternatively, chapter nine showed how we could have interpreted Arthur's utterance as a communicative act, having an informative intent. Relevance theory would allow us to identify that intent by calculating the optimal relevance of the utterance. It is likely that the phatic dimension of the behaviour is not part of any conscious intent.