The linguist Deborah Cameron has suggested the following principle to guide her in her own work, although it is one that could perhaps guide social scientists more generally:
Be open about your agenda and negotiate at all stages.
This principle has been endorsed by her colleague John Rickford as a measure which, if adopted, “would be beneficial for sociolinguistic theory and application alike.”
In a more recent piece, appearing in the online magazine Popular Linguistics [1], Renée Blake and Cara Shousterman cite the article in which Rickford offers this endorsement, although they make no reference to Cameron’s principle (not to suggest that they are at fault for this). Nevertheless, they offer their own principle, one of ‘linguistic humanity’:
Those who investigate the language of a community of speakers should extend their knowledge of that language within those communities, as well as outside of the communities, with the utmost humanity.
From these two principles, I would like to address the following questions:
1. Does humanity entail openness of a researcher’s agenda to the public?
2. How does the utmost humanity relate to a consideration by researchers of what agendas their research may conceivably further?
3. How do the notions of a language of a community of speakers and of knowledge of a language relate to the issues of humanity and openness, specifically in regard to African-American English?
With regard to the first question, I will be extremely brief: YES, in my view, humanity does entail openness. In the words of Cameron et al. (1993):
If, as we would claim, people are not objects and should not be treated like objects, this surely entitles them to more than just respectful (ethical) treatment. It means that researcher and researched should interact; researchers should not try to pretend that their subjects can be studied as if the former were outside the social universe that included the latter.
From this, it is further suggested the possibility of doing research “not just on social subjects or for social subjects, but also with social subjects.” Indeed, if the point of inquiry is not, in the words of Karl Marx, to simply interpret the world but to change it, why not facilitate the cooperation between researchers and subjects toward that end?
Still, to be judicious, I will not assume that my answer of YES is absolute. We do, as humans, occasionally withhold information (or tell lies, even) in the service of an imagined humanitarian benefit. However, I would argue that such cases of imagination should at least be put through a test of rational argument among scholars. Likewise, if it supposed that social scientists should be doing something other than attempting to benefit humanity, arguments should be put forth as to why, and counterarguments should be responded to rationally. At this point, I will turn away from Question One as a general one, although it will regain relevance in a more specific sense once we turn to the issue of African-American English.
* * *
Regardless as to how the first question is ultimately answered, a researcher may obviously generate effects which go beyond fulfilling their own goals. Hence, my second question is intended to problematize the perhaps straw-person-like notion that it is sufficient for researchers to be clear about their own motivations in conducting research.
For instance, it is possible that an individual researcher is motivated simply by the prospect of doing something that they find interesting in exchange for a living. To superimpose an additional goal of, say, ‘describing Language X’ would not do much to inform the public, nor the researcher themself, of what consequences might arise from their research, especially if it were considered how the researcher might otherwise have chosen to spend their time (i.e., even if X, above, is filled in).
Therefore, I argue that if a researcher is to genuinely display the ‘utmost humanity’ they must at least spend some time questioning what possible benefits (and deficits) may result from their choice of research program. Exactly how much deliberation is necessary can receive no absolute answer. Nevertheless, I would argue that the notion of humanity entails – at minimum – a responsibility to respond to criticisms of one’s research program with regard to the expected humanitarian benefits (or deficits).
* * *
At this point, it makes sense to turn to a specific research program, and my third question leads us to one. Namely, it leads us to examine the program of investigating ‘the language of a community of speakers’ for the apparent goal of obtaining ‘knowledge’ of that language.
On the face of it, there may appear to be a certain irony in Blake & Shousterman’s principle of ‘linguistic humanity.’ That is, if we were to accept Walt Whitman’s contention that ‘the proper study of [hu]mankind is [hu]man[ity],’ why would a researcher work toward acquiring ‘knowledge of language,’ something which would at first glance appear to be at a remove from flesh and blood humans? Either there is a good reason for this move, or else there is not. But, either way, the issue cannot even be addressed without first explaining what is entailed by the proposition. In other words, what exactly is a ‘language of a speech community,’ and what is knowledge of it?
As far as I can tell, there are no answers to these questions in either Blake & Shousterman’s piece in Popular Linguistics, nor in their blog Word: The Online Journal of African-American English. In fact, there appears to be a widespread void in the discourse of linguists with regard to these questions, one whose basis is no doubt complex, and I will make no attempt here to unravel the historical, intellectual, economic, political, social and emotional threads which comprise this void as a generalized phenomenon, a phenomenon which, doubtlessly, is tied to many other issues of academic and humanitarian import. Instead, I will simply highlight a few points, first by drawing attention to a manuscript which might be dubbed theoretically foundational with respect to American sociolinguistics: Weinreich, Labov & Herzog’s 1968 “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change.”
In particular, I find it worthwhile to examine the authors’ treatment of the late-19th century scholar Hermann Paul. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog suggest that Paul took the language of a community, “unlike the idiolect [i.e., unlike an individual’s language]," to be "an artifact of the linguist.” In other words, according to the authors, what exists for Paul are the languages of individuals and not those of communities. There are indeed numerous passages within Paul’s magnum opus that might suggest this, for instance the following [2]:
All psychical processes come to their fulfillment in individual minds, and nowhere else. Neither the popular mind, nor elements of it, such as art, religion, etc., have any concrete existence...
It is apparently from such passages that Weinreich, Labov & Herzog come to the following conclusion:
The isolation of the individual, Paul thought, had the advantage of attaching linguistics to a more general science of psychology. The price of such isolation, however, was the creation of an irreconcilable opposition between the individual and society.
In contrast to placing such an emphasis on the individual, Weinreich, Labov & Herzog ultimately propose that “the grammars in which linguistic change occurs are grammars of the speech community.” It is not clear, however, how the ‘irreconcilable opposition’ between individual and society is thereby assuaged. Regardless, the bigger problem here is that Weinreich, Labov & Herzog have established (or perpetuated) a separate irreconcilable opposition, one that could have been avoided, in my view, had they genuinely understood Paul’s position.
For instance, it is at best misleading to suggest that Paul took the language of a community to be “(unlike the idiolect), an artifact of the linguist.” In fact, Paul had explained:
[E]ven if we speak of the language of an individual, we have to deal not with a concrete being, but with an abstraction...
For Paul, both the language of a community as well as the language of an individual represent abstractions over actual activity. Moreover, for Paul, this activity must necessarily involve interpretation, since linguistic communications do not literally pass from one brain to another as physical letters travel, say, by means of the United States Postal Service. Remarkably, Paul pushed a step further and offered an explanation for this species of confusion among linguists:
The self-deception under which grammarians labour depends on their having regarded the word not as a portion of the living language—audible for a moment, and then passing away—but as something independent to be analysed at leisure, with a view to its leisurely dismemberment. A further source of deception lies in the habit of starting not from the spoken, but from the written word. In writing, no doubt, the word seems separated into its elements…
As Roy Harris has more recently suggested, “Being able to put something down in writing has always been a powerful disincentive to self-questioning about what exactly is being ‘put down.’” [3]
In light of these comments, how are we to assess Weinreich, Labov & Herzog’s claim that “the grammars in which linguistic change occurs are grammars of the speech community”? Well, we can write grammars for communities, and we can write grammars for individuals, but in any case a grammar will have to be interpreted by a human in real-time if it is to be of any use. How linguistic change factors into this depends on one's definition of 'linguistic change.'[4]
The irony of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog’s paper is that, by suggesting that a grammar ‘really’ exists at the level of community but not at the level of individual, they invent (or perpetuate) a world in which a grammar has an objective existence at an irreconcilable remove from flesh and blood humans, a solution which is in fact markedly asocial compared to what Paul, the supposed solipsist, would have allowed under his theory.
This reification of grammar leads Weinreich, Labov & Herzog to betray the empirical within their ‘Empirical Foundations,’ although in a way which may be particularly helpful for understanding some of the issues surrounding African-American English. Consider the following passage from their text:
...it is claimed that in the speech of young Negro children in Northern cities, the copula does not appear in the present tense, as in You a swine! Yet for all speakers in this community the copula is will appear frequently in this portion. [...] To claim that this and hundreds of other such examples are instances of code-switching [i.e., to claim that the children have momentarily switched from one dialect to another] would be an artifact of the theory and hardly an inescapable conclusion demanded by the data.
To account for such intimate variation, it is necessary to introduce another concept into the mode of orderly heterogeneity which we are developing here: the linguistic variable—a variable element within the system controlled by a single rule.
Although the phrase “all speakers in this community” as combined with “frequently” should raise eyebrows, I will leave that aside and instead just make one point.
On one hand, the authors are absolutely correct to insist that classifying You a swine! and You is a swine! under separate dialects would be an artifact of one’s theory (or method). On the other hand, what they perhaps have failed to see is that classifying these two utterances as belonging to the same dialect is also an artifact of one’s theory (or method). The decision to group the utterances together under a single rule may be a convenient organizational tactic, but this does not otherwise amount to an empirically-based claim, nor is it an empirical matter as to whether this rule, once accepted, is classified as belonging to African-American English, or to Standard English, or to Earthlinguese, etc.[5]
* * *
I would like to return now to the research principles I began with:
Be open about your agenda and negotiate at all stages. [Cameron’s]
Those who investigate the language of a community of speakers should extend their knowledge of that language within those communities, as well as outside of the communities, with the utmost humanity. [Blake & Shousterman’s]
A point of concern should now be evident. That is, if researchers have as their goal the ‘investigation of a language,’ and if they communicate ‘openly’ to the public using such phrases, they run the risk of deceiving that public. To clarify, a layperson may be led to believe that the researcher is engaging in some purely objective pursuit, and this should seem particularly possible if we consider that they themselves have been inculcated by English teachers and so on to believe that a language is an object which exists independently of flesh and blood humans (as well-intentioned as the English teachers and so on may be).
None of this is to say that terms such as ‘language’ or ‘dialect,’ properly understood as abstractions, can not be justifiably used. However, the justification is often left missing, and hence, the possible agendas that research may serve (or hinder) is often left obscure.
In all fairness, Bill Labov took an important step forward when he proposed in his 1982 paper (‘Objectivity and Commitment in Linguistic Science...’) that linguists have a moral responsibility to the people they study, a responsibility that goes beyond what is required by institutional boards of review. The guidelines put forth in his paper in fact stood as the foundation for Blake & Shousterman’s more recent proposal.
However, the confusions present in Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968) were largely unhampered by Labov’s (1982) notion that there exists a “value-free atmosphere that is best for scientific work,” a notion which has already been critiqued by Cameron, among others. To put matters simply, if the decision to value a ‘value-free atmosphere’ as defined in some particular way is not based on values, what is it based on? [6]
* * *
An appeal to an untouchable objectivity, apparently, has been at least partly responsible for the failure among linguists to respond to criticisms of their actions. In Labov’s 1982 paper, for instance, he refers to two highly critical articles written by James Sledd [7]. In one of these articles, Sledd goes as far as to criticize the notion of there being two separate codes (i.e., Standard English vs. Black English) as an example of inhumanity.
However, Labov dismisses these criticisms by implying that the real issue is not with regard to how linguists categorize reality, but rather with regard to whether or not there are any detectable differences in the speech of Blacks, taken as a homogenized group, versus White Southerners, or, rather, whether there are any differences that would qualify for Labov as delineating dialects under his conception of the term.
Labov, unfortunately, thereby misses the main thrust of Sledd’s arguments, under my reading, at least. In short, the fact that one can categorize humanity racially does not make it ethical to do so. It is worth comparing the following remarks of Noam Chomsky:
Those who argue that there is a correlation between race and IQ and those who deny this claim are contributing to racism and other disorders, because what they are saying is based on the assumption that the answer to the question makes a difference; it does not, except to racists, sexist [sic], and the like. [8]
To be clear, the point of drawing attention to these criticisms is not to suggest that the critics are necessarily right. Rather, my point is to suggest that if scholars present issues to the public in such a one-sided manner that, in Wayne O’Neil’s words, there is “no offer to change the rules of the game or its name,” we thereby treat our subjects as though they are incapable of making their own decisions, as though they are something less than human. And sadly, the situation may in some sense be more dire than if human subjects were treated in the way chemists treat bottles of sulphuric acid, to borrow a depiction from Cameron et al. (1993). Because, a bottle of sulphuric acid, unlike a human, cannot be deceived.
* * *
To conclude, I praise Blake and Shousterman for extending Labov’s humanitarian principle to include humanity. What remains to be seen is to what degree linguists (and other researchers) are willing to take what would seem to be implied by the word humanity seriously (not to suggest that researchers have not necessarily been well-intentioned). Although a principle of humanity, I argue, implies openness with the public, it also implies, in my mind, a level of openness among ourselves as researchers that has unfortunately not been a general feature of academia. While this heightened openness may entail an increased level of cooperation, it may also require us to be more comfortable with what Susan Bickford has aptly termed “the dissonance of democracy.”
notes
[1] Blake & Shousterman’s article appears here
Cameron’s principle is from Cameron et al. (1992) Researching language... as cited by Rickford’s (1997) “Unequal partnership...” in Language in Society, 26. Cameron et al. (1993) refers to “Ethics, Advocacy & Empowerment...” in Language & Communication, 13.
[2] My quotes of Paul are from pages xxxiv-v, 23 (cf. p. xxxix), and 37 of his 1889 Principles, 2nd ed., freely available here
Note that Weinreich, Labov & Herzog cite other editions of this same text, and further note that their remarks on Paul were, according to the manuscript’s introduction, exclusively from Weinreich, who, unfortunately, died before the manuscript was completed.
[3] Harris (2009) Rationality & the Literate Mind, p. 145.
[4] Compare Saussure's (2006: 38, Writings in General Linguistics) statement that, "For there to be change, there would have to be an intrinsically defined object at a given time, and this never occurs," and Badouin de Courtenay's (1895, as cited by Lamb, 2004, Language & Reality: 176) contention that "What is ordinarily called phonetic ‘change’ or ‘transformation’ of one sound into another is, from an objective point of view, only coexistence, or alternation."
[5] This is to say that there is some a priori (or pragmatic) contribution beyond the realm of the empirical which deserves to be properly recognized. With regard to decisions of these sorts it may be fruitful to consider Chomsky’s distinction between “internal” and “external merge.”
[6] With regard to decisions of these sorts it may be fruitful to consider Chomsky’s distinction between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” (cf. Aspects, p. 19).
[7] See Sledd (1969) “Bi-Dialectalism...” in The English Journal, 58, and (1972) “Doublespeak...” in College English, 33. See also O’Neil (1972) “The Politics of bidialectalism,” College English, 33.
[8] Chomsky (1988) Language & Problems of Knowledge, p. 164.
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