Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey – A Festschrift
Edited by Bruce Fraser and Ken Turner
© 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
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THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE AND ITS TEMPORAL
UNFOLDING
Alessandro Duranti
1. CONTEXT AS KNOWLEDGE
Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field has expanded the concept of language as an object
of inquiry to include the use of language by its speakers. This interest among pragmaticians
originated from two sets of observations: (1) some linguistic expressions cannot be understood
without reference to the context of their use (e.g. personal pronouns and other deictic elements
of linguistic systems) and (2) utterances not only describe the world or, rather, the experience of
it, but also act upon the world, affecting our experience and the experience of others. From its
inception, then, pragmatics has been two-faceted. It encouraged an expansion of the notion of
language both as a code and as action. In terms of language as a code, pragmaticians focused on
the grammaticalization of contextual variants such as the social status of the speaker and hearer
or their social relations. In terms of language as action, the focus has been on the conditions that
allow for a given utterance to have certain conventional effects.
In both cases, researchers saw pragmatics as an alternative both to the logicians’ view of
meaning as a propositional calculus and to Chomsky’s favoring of linguistic competence over
linguistic performance. The new focus of interest for pragmatics was not just on “language” but
“language in context.” At first, this meant that researchers wrestled with one main question: How
does the context shape the ways in which language is used? The range of factors or dimensions
deemed relevant for identifying the impact of context on language was quite vast and included
the age, sex, and social class of speakers or hearers, the style of speaking, the events or activities in which language was being used, the institutional roles of participants in the interaction,
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Alessandro Duranti
and the organization (or flow) of information in the prior discourse. Soon, however, researchers
also realized that the relationship between language and context was bidirectional. Language
shapes context just as much context shapes language (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992). For example,
the choice of a particular linguistic expression (e.g. tu vs. vous in French) not only presupposes
certain aspects of context, it also establishes them as part of the context that is being currently
constructed. A request (e.g. can I borrow your car?) sets up a context in which the response that
follows is likely to be interpreted as either an agreement or a rejection.
Despite this insight, however, most students of pragmatics have continued to treat context
as knowledge and have thus failed to properly address one major question: How is knowledge
transformed into action? In other words, we still do not have a clear understanding of how words
actually move people to act in certain ways as opposed to others. More generally, it has been
difficult for pragmaticians to bridge the gap between the notions of language as code and language
as action. In what follows, I will suggest that this is partly due to the tendency to think in terms of
strategic interaction (e.g. in discussing politeness) and the inability to fully appreciate the ethical
implications of temporality in human interaction. Before getting to this issue, however, we need
to reconsider the notion of the “force” of language.
2. FORCE OF LANGUAGE
The idea that language has some kind of power and plays a major role in the constitution
of the social world in which speakers find themselves is by no means new, as demonstrated
by the treatises of public oratory written by ancient Greek and Roman authors (e.g. Barthes,
1970; Pernot, 2000) and by the vast literature on linguistic relativity (Whorf, 1956; Hill and
Mannheim, 1992; Lucy, 1992; Duranti, 1999). But the idea that the concept of meaning could
also be understood as a force is more recent. It is found in the writings of two important thinkers of the twentieth century: the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the philosopher
J.L. Austin.
Malinowski uses the term “force” in his examination of the power that magical formulas
seemed to have for the Trobrianders (Malinowski, 1935, Vol. 2, p. 9). In his analysis, “… language
is a cultural force in its own right. It enters into manual and bodily activities and plays a significant
part in them, a part sui generis which cannot be replaced, even as it does not replace anything
else” (Malinowski, 1935, Vol. 2, p. 21). This perspective suggests that the force of language is
crucial for the constitution of particular social activities and at the same time cannot be understood
outside of those activities.
Austin’s concept of “force” is found in his posthumous How to Do Things with Words and was
meant to capture the ways in which a given utterance should be “taken,” that is, in terms of its
effects on language users and the context of their interactions. Austin’s introduction of the concept