abstracting from any contact between language and the world. Internal
linguistics does not ignore the mundane context: it deliberately excludes it.
Hence its angelic subjects and a language possessing only its standard form,
relegating anything pertaining to intercourse between language and the world
to the dubious realm of socio-linguistics.
The second principle is the principle of functionality. Language performs
functions (we remember the six functions of language in Roman Jakobson,
deduced from his diagram of communication: referential, phatic, conative,
emotive, metalinguistic, poetic).^15 Of course, there is a hierarchy among these
functions: while all of them are necessary, or represented in linguistic
phenomena, the function of exchanging information (the referential function)
is presented as essential or primary. This is because language is, in the first
instance, a means of communication, an instrument at the speaker’s disposal:
I speak my language, which means that I make it function as I intend. By
means of it – through it – I say what I mean. Any linguistic phenomenon
which does not boil down to this instrumentality or intentionalism (what I
say is what I mean to say, the meaning of the utterance is a function of the
speaker’s intended meaning) will be disregarded as noise, in the literal sense
of the term – a contingent and (it is to be hoped) temporary communication
difficulty.
The third principle is the principle of transparency. It follows from the preceding
principle. If language is an instrument of communication, its foremost
characteristic is its capacity to make itself invisible. What interests me is to
bang in the nail: the shape of the hammer’s handle and its colour are of little
importance to me. It follows that everything in language must be adapted to
the easy and efficient transmission of information. To take an obvious example,
when we speak our mother tongue, we employ a complex set of grammatical
rules, of which we are generally not aware. But when they are explained to
us, we become aware (like Monsieur Jourdain) that we knew them without
knowing them. It is that here language renders itself transparent and knows
how to make itself invisible. The moments when it is recalled to our attention,
as in a poetic text, must remain strictly limited to specialist, marginal language
games.
68 • Chapter Three
(^15) See Jakobson 1963, pp. 214–21.