too narrow and too broad. For instance, the Russian word for cow originally
meant ‘horned’, and the word for mouse, ‘thief’. But there is much more to
a cow than horns, and to a mouse than pilfering; thus their names are too
narrow. On the other hand, they are too broad, since the same epithets may
be applied – and actually are applied in some other languages – to a number
of other creatures. The result is a ceaseless struggle within the developing
language between conceptual thought and the heritage of primitive thinking
in complexes.^20What is interesting about a genetic approach of this sort is that it inverts the
usual relationship (adopted by the dominant philosophy of language) between
the literal and the metaphorical, between denotation and connotation. The
literal (the concept) is the result of a process of literalisation of the metaphorical
(which restricts or expands what was originally too broad or too narrow):
thus the complex, the purely verbal meaning, the pseudo-concept yield to
the concept. Metaphoris, therefore, the motor of the history of the meaning
of words, which it causes to drift, just as metonymyis the synchronic motor
of the meaning of the sentence, when the nodal point – the moment when
the meaning is revealed – closes the sentence and retrospectively impose a
meaning on it (‘So that was what it meant!’), which sequential processes in
a Markov chain construct word by word. (I shall return to this point at the
end of the chapter.)
I announced a second aspect of my first positive thesis: language not only
has a history, it ishistory. If we accept Gramsci’s thesis that every language
contains a conception of the world, we shall draw from it the conclusion that
language is sedimented history. It is in the work of Raymond Williams that
this thesis is set out most powerfully.
Williams devotes one of the chapters of his book Marxism and Literatureto
language: language is one of his ‘basic concepts’. He begins by deploring the
absence of a Marxist tradition in thinking about language and attempts to
construct a Marxist concept of language, largely inspired by Voloshinov.
The following two quotations illustrate his starting-point and conclusion
respectively:
158 • Chapter Six
(^20) Vygotsky 1962, p. 74.