Silverstein - Functions

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Michael SilversteinUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Functions

Functionalism in the study of language and other sociocultural forma-tions has generally been a teleologic or teleonomic exercise. Theparticular sociocultural form being considered is interrogated for itsinstrumental role in some dynamic tendencywhether (1) of users oflanguage and cultural forms, (2) of social structure as a self-regulativesystem , or (3) of a pre-linguistic or pre-sociocultural order to be found inhum an "natu re" or in sociocentric "infrastructure."(1) In user-focused functionalisms, the "functions" of language involveintentionalities, purposes, and strategic plans; these mental (intensional)states are thought to be m ade manifest in the way that sending and receivingverbal messages achieves or accomplishes various kinds of interpersonaladjustments of the intensional states of the participants involved. TTius lan-guage and other behaviors "function" to reveal the mental states of oneparticipant to another, principally propositionally modeled representationsof states-of-affairs in various worlds, and participants' intensional stateswith respect to them. (Notice also that even com municative "ease" and "dif-ficulty" are basically degree descriptions of language in these terms.)One might think here also of ordinary language philosophy and its de-velopment in speech act philosophy. Language is said to be used by sendersof messages for the purpose of m aking senders' intentions apparently both"actual" and "conventional"manifest to addressees. Critical attempts toturn such a functionalist program to cross-cultural empirical ends has re-vealed the many ways in which it is no more than a Western philosophicalconstruction.(2) In a functionalist perspective focused on social structure, the frame-work construes events of communicating as the means of re-enforcing theinterpersonal social arrangements of categories of people in society, re-cruited to communicative roles. Thus the language forms used in commu-nicative events are referred to such a typology of events of language use.Language use here thus "functions" institutionally as the primary channelJournal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1 -2)76- 79 . Copyright 2000, American AnthropologicalAssociation.


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of social organization. One might think here of British structural-function-alism, which, insofar as acknow ledging that people communicate, see eventsof interpersonal nam ing, joking, circumspection in verbal u sage, etc., as rolediacritics of an essentially autonomous social structure of positionalities,tunelessly maintained (or at least maintainable) by such linguistic, as byother, social behaviors. Here, too, lies much of the "ethnography of speak-ing" (or of communication), in which the speech event, principally the pub-lic,ritualspeech event, is assum ed to have a function insofar as maintaininga structural-functional order.It should also be noted in this connection that what in the disciplinarydiscourse of linguistics isironicallycalled "formalism" to distinguish it-self from "functionalism" (of our type [1]), is actually a structural-functionalperspective on language. From Ferdinand de Saussure through LeonardBloomfield to N oa m Chomsky and his followers, it has concentrated on theautonomy of language as an internally organized form. Thus the "function"of forms is to be integrated into the whole. Autonomous language formconstitutes, moreover, a primary institutional fact in its own order, whetheror not we want to call this order "mental" in this special sense. (This con-trasts with the role-diacritic structural-functionalism, concerned as it is withsocial structure and social organization, characterized just above.) In thewritings of C hom sky, structural-functional "formalism" has necessitated theclaim that linguistic formedness is, in essence, its own function, the fact offormedness now being ultimately biologized and termed an autonomousfaculty or "mental organ." Here, perhaps, is the deeper connection to "struc-turalist" thought in anthropology that sees culture as an autonomous, ahis-torical, pan-specific fact of human mentality; both are a kind of "upwardreduction."(3) This leads, by contrast, to the two varieties of classically "reductivefunctionalism," the psychobiological and the sociocentric. Language and allother aspects of meaningful human social action are seen as merely anepiphenomenal packaging for functional tendencies that exist and can bedefined in more basic orders of phenomena independent of the semioticproperties seeming to inhere in language alone, reflexive intensionality (lan-guage being its own meta-semiotic) the central one among them.Thus in a reductively "functional" approach of one sort, one purports todiscover in the individual human psychobiology that asymmetries in thesyntactic form of case-marking code-and-concealbut, when analyzed, re-vealthe egocentrically focused cognitive capacity of hum ans; or it discov-ers that there is a universal and pre-sociocultural affective calculus of "face"(and "threats" to it) coded-and-concealed, and, thus, analytically, revealed,cross-culturally in the very language forms of degrees and kinds of "polite-ness." (This approach easily lends itself to meshing with the program of"evolutionary psychology" and human ethology, since aggressive animalnature, red in tooth and claw , can thus be seen to lurk behind every tu andvous!)

Again, at the level of a sociocentric system, sociocultural forms, includinglanguage, become codings-and-concealings ("mystifications" is the technicalterm) that can be analytically penetrated to reveal their relation to a stadial.


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78 Journal of L inguistic A nthropology

evolutionary scenario about the fundamental d imensions of the constitutionof interpersonal relations in the means of production of economic value.See Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault or any of the other extra-disciplinarywriters on linguistic anthropology who use completely unanalyzed notionsof "capital""real" as well as "symbolic"and "power" as ether- or phlo-giston-like properties of sociality in order to "reduce" communicational tex-tuality and subjectively meaningful action to what seems to them to liebeneath.All of these three kinds of older functionalisms many, alas, still practicedthough involving comparable teleological mystificationspresent views oflanguage constructed out of perhaps familiar folk ideolog ies of language inparticular and of humans and their social formations more generally. Atthe sam e time, they do , in fact, duplicate in one or another w ay the variousfolk functionalisms of the very users of language whom we encounter asour interlocutory partners in trying to understand something of what wemight mean by the term "functions of language." In the Malinowski-eraTrobriands, language, properly formed and properly whispered over axesand other garden implements, puts some principle into the soil that madethe yam s grow big and fat. In the United States, language, properly formedby the decision of an infant's legal guardian(s) as communicated by a nam edlicensee of the state and inscribed in the form of a (birth) certificate, actuallycreates the properly existentbecause properly named or baptizedindi-vidual social person.

In contemporary theory, by contrast, the only viable notions of "func-tions" of language take the semiotic, or sign's-eye, view of the matter. lin-guistic anthropology studies emergent real-time sign-structures called"texts" (and their parts) in relation to their "contexts" of occurrence, includ-ing larger "co-textual" structures of which they constitute aspects. Such con-textualization-functions are studied as varieties of what one calls indexical-ity, how one thing signals the spatial, temporal, or causal co-presence ofanother. The role or "function" of language in social life is all based on thefact that linguisticand dependent culturaltexts project (index) the meta-phorically "surrounding" contexts in which they by degrees "appropriately"occur, as well as project (index) the contexts that, by their occurrence, theyhave "effectively" brought into being. All the rest is a development of thisfundamental fact.(See also codes, competence, genre, grammar, indexicality, maxim, perfbrmativ-

ity, reflexivity)B i b l i o g r a p h y

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson198 7 Politeness: Som e Universals in Language Usag e. Cam bridge: Cam bridge

University P ress.Grice, Paul1989 Stud ies in the Way of W ords. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


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Hy m es /D eU H.1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press.Nichols, Johanna1984 Functional Theories of Grammar. Annual Review of Anthropology13:97-117.Scherer, Klaus R., and Howard Giles, eds.

1979 Social Markers in Speech. Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press.SearleJohnR.1969 Speech Acts: A n Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cam-bridge U niversity Press.Sherzerjoel1977 The Ethnography of Speaking: A Critical Appraisal. In Georgetown Uni-versity Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Muriel Saville-Troike, ed .Pp. 43-57. W ashington, DC: Georgetow n U niversity Press.Silverstein, Michael198 7 The Three Faces of "Function": Preliminaries to a Psychology of Language.In Social and Functional Approaches to Language and T hought. Maya H ick-mann, ed. Pp. 17-38 . Orlando, FL: Academ ic Press.Sperber, Dan, and D eirdre W ilson198 6 Relevance: Com munication and Cognition. Cam bridge, MA : Harvard Un i-versity Press.W illiams, Glyn1992 Sociolinguistics: A Sociological Critique. London: Routledge.

Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 East 59th StreetChicago, IL [email protected]

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Silverstein - Functions