Readers can see that what interests me in the study of the English language
is a much broader range of phenomena than the existence in its grammar of
a gerundive or irregular verbs. The interface between the language and the
world, the language and society, is what seems to me most important. But
to focus on these phenomena, which are usually relegated to the margins of
linguistics under the rubric of ‘socio-linguistics’, is to displace the object of
linguistics. It is to indicate the concept of language that we need – which is
not simply Saussure’s langueor language-system.
The concept of language we need
The main characteristic of langue, according to Saussure, is that it is a system.
Its study is then governed by a so-called principle of ‘immanence’: nothing
external to the system of langueis relevant to its description. This defines a
form of ‘internal’ linguistics, which constructs its object by firmly excluding
a significant quantity of the phenomena that are usually classed under the
concept of ‘language’. It will be remembered that, for Saussure, the scientific
study of languestopped with morphology and excluded syntax, which was
handed over to the arbitrary domain of parole– that is, the individual speaker’s
utilisation of the system of langue. The problem is that the phenomena that
interest me here are excluded by the construction of the system, in that they
are situated at the interface between language and society formed by its
speakers. I therefore need an externallinguistics – a term I borrow from Pierre
Bourdieu, who found it (unless I am mistaken) in Marcel Cohen:^8 a linguistics
interested in language as a social phenomenon. For it is clear that, for an
Anglicist today, it is at least as important to be interested in the dispersion
of the dialects that still make up what we call ‘English’, as with the exact
value of the contrast between the deictics ‘this’ and ‘that’ within an ‘English’
which is simply an increasingly vague abstraction.
But the Saussurian system has another major characteristic, encapsulated
in the concept of ‘synchrony’: it is stable – that is, temporally immobile. It is
not denied that languages (e.g. the English language) have a history, but
study of it is relegated to the margins of science under the agreeable rubric
of ‘diachrony’. But this ‘point in time’, as arrested as Zeno’s arrow and recalling
10 • Chapter One
(^8) See Bourdieu 1982.