The Reflexivity of Language and Linguistic Inquiry
Integrational Linguistics in Practice
Dorthe Duncker
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Names: Duncker, Dorthe, author.
Title: The reflexivity of language and linguistic inquiry : integrational linguistics in practice / by Dorthe Duncker.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, [2018] | Series: Routledge advances in communication and linguistic theory ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037795 | ISBN 9781138481534 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351060394 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Integrational linguistics (Oxford school) | Linguistic analysis (Linguistics) | Language and languages—Discourse analysis. Classification: LCC P123 .D86 2018 | DDC 401/.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037795
ISBN: 978-1-138-48153-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-06039-4 (ebk)
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List of figures vii
List of tables viii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction 1
1.1 “Language as we know it” 6
1.2 The tenets of integrational linguistics 13
2 Language about language 33
2.1 The logic of lying, naming, and quoting 34
2.1.1 Supposition – the doctrine of what words “stand for” and when they do so 36
2.1.2 Imposition – the doctrine of naming and of naming names 42
2.1.3 Pushing the boundaries of supposition and imposition 45
2.1.4 The quest for linguistic truth 52
2.2 Tarskian metalanguage 55
2.3 Metalanguage as a linguistic problem 59
2.3.1 Duplex structures 61
2.3.2 Metalanguage and everyday language 63
2.3.3 Metalingual function 65
2.4 From metalanguage to metapragmatics 66
2.4.1 Metapragmatics and universal pragmatics 70
2.4.2 Registers and indexicality 73
2.5 Metalingual reflections 79
3 Linguistic inquiry 92
3.1 Language in two orders 95
3.1.1 The idea that utterances are repeatable 98
3.1.2 Repeatability and the time of the sign 104
3.1.3 Why invent a language? 105
3.1.4 Macrosocial mischief 107
3.1.5 Functionally reassigning the private sign 110
3.1.6 Techniques for reducing indeterminacies 113
3.1.7 Repetition and conventionalization 116
3.2 Methodology matters 119
3.2.1 A paradigm case of investigation by interference 121
3.2.2 The object is not given in advance of the viewpoint 123
3.2.3 The methodological mindset 125
3.2.4 The lay and the professional linguist 127
3.2.5 The personal anecdote 129
3.2.6 Data-driven linguistic inquiry 134
3.2.7 Sponsored data and linguistic scholarship 142
4 Exploiting linguistic reflexivity 153
4.1 Initiating datafication 159
4.2 All decontextualization distorts 163
4.2.1 A prima facie violation of contextual integrity 166
4.3 The character of emoticons 169
4.3.1 Emoticons in linguistics 172
4.3.2 Deciding where to start 175
4.3.3 Deciding “what was meant” 177
4.3.4 How to do things – with words and images 181
5 Meaning is always “now”
4.1 Schematic layout of debate threads and posts.
4.2 Distribution of debate threads created from 2005 to 2014.
4.3 Time series showing 1,113 instances when users talk about emoticons.
161
163
176
4.1 Word forms relating to “back slapping” found in 79 debates from 2008 to 2014.
4.2 Overview of 72 users’ potential prior “back slapping” reading experience.
4.3 Repetition history of the word form “back slapper smiley” across four debate threads.
184
187
188
1 Introduction
Linguistic reflexivity is language about language. This book is about linguistic reflexivity, its importance to language, and its importance to the study of language. In this chapter, besides giving a brief chapter overview, I introduce the line of questioning that I will pursue, and the integrational approach of the analysis. Integrational linguistics offers a view of language that resonates with the experience of situated communicating participants. In particular, it recognizes the perspective of the first person, and it pays specific attention to the temporality of linguistic communication. Temporality is essential to language and to the reflexivity of language.
For a start, I want to invite you to take part in a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world without linguistic reflexivity – in a world where it was impossible to ask people what they meant by what they said, or even to ask them to repeat their last utterance; where you could not ask someone about an unknown word, and you had no dictionary to look it up, because written language did not exist; where it was impossible to tell one person what another person had just told you; where there were no ways of talking about words, questions, meanings, promises, etc., etc.; where you had no way of making your interlocutor aware that you had not understood a word of what (s)he had just said and where you did not have a name, or any idea about what a name was.
In this strange world, you would probably still be able to say things like “Good morning!”, “Close the door, please”, and “The cat is on the mat”, but you would have no means of describing what you were thereby doing as saying something –and especially of describing your sayings as greetings, requests, statements, etc. If you were in doubt about what the people around you were doing when they did similar things, you would have no way of finding out about it, apart from the explanations you were able to come up with by yourself. Of course, you would not be able to think of them or describe them as explanations. Now, imagining that you lived in this world, and that this, roughly but fairly, was an account of the kind of communicational activities you could engage in, and the kind of interpersonal and semiological action space you would have to make do with, would you consider this activity to be language? It would not be a language without words, because you would be able to say things, but it would be a language without words
for words. It would be a language shorn of the reflexivity that we are used to having at our disposal, a language with no metalinguistic equipment at all.
Apart from verbal language, as we know it, no other form of human communication is reflexive. There may be reflexive elements, but they are inessential. Such elements are found, inter alia, in pictorial communication, music, architecture, dance, and fashion, but in none of these cases have participants found it necessary or relevant to produce explicit signs for the signs pertaining to the activity itself. Verbal language has not only words, but also words for words. Other forms of communication incorporate no metasigns. That is, they have no subset of forms, devices, or techniques dedicated solely to the playing of music, depiction of pictures, building of buildings, etc. (Harris 1998a: 27).
However, reflexivity as such is not a preserve of verbal language. It derives from the human capacity for reflecting on experience and applies to all kinds of experience, not only linguistic experience, but, when reflexivity is expressed, it is articulated verbally, irrespective of the kind of experience concerned. While pictures can depict pictures, a picture can depict itself recursively, and one piece of music can quote or thematically incorporate parts of itself or another work, such self-similar effects are qualitatively different from the reflexivity of language, because they do not involve any metasigns. A picture cannot be about a picture, and a musical work cannot be about music, but linguistic utterances can be about linguistic utterances, and when we want to talk about music or pictures or any other forms of human expression, artistic or otherwise, we need to do so verbally. “Language is our great general medium of concerted and systematic inquiry. It can be used to investigate and talk about anything under the sun, not to mention the sun itself” (Joseph et al. 2001: 212). Whenever we want to investigate and articulate our understanding of something, we have to talk about it in verbal language. This applies as much to language itself as it does to everything else.
Reflexivity is a difficult notion to comprehend because it seems to be biting its own tail, and people have been perplexed about it for millennia. Merely asking you to entertain the idea of living in a world of non-reflexive language borders on being a con trick, since it is logically impossible even to wonder about what it would be like without engaging in the very activity the possibility of which you are supposed to negate. However, considering its obvious importance to language, reflexivity should be expected to be extensively researched and heavily theorized by linguistics, but this is far from being the case. The reflexivity of language is strangely underresearched. Once in a while, collective volumes are published that endeavour to provide an overview of the existing research (e.g. Lucy 1993a; Jaworski et al. 2004), but the significance of this research to the study of language has not been widely appreciated, and no general acknowledgement of linguistic reflexivity pervades linguistics. John R. Lucy argued that
[a]n understanding of the reflexive capacity of natural language will be essential for an adequate understanding not only of language but also of all those spheres of life which depend on the use of language – including the research enterprise itself.
Therefore, “[e]xploring the structure, functioning, limitations, and power of reflexive language must now become ‘the work itself’ if we are to make any real progress in the human disciplines” (Lucy 1993b: 25). Now, 25 years later, it can be concluded that this did not happen, and questions such as “how and why do words, phrases, sentences arise as items in the Western (or any) metadiscursive repertoire?” (Love 2017: 124) have not been widely addressed, let alone answered.
It is acknowledged that laypeople may have opinions about and attitudes towards language (e.g. Kristiansen 1991; Niedzielski & Preston 1999; Kristiansen 2009), and the question of reflexive language has appeared on the linguistic research agenda, more or less persistently (e.g. Silverstein 1976; Silverstein 1981; Taylor 1986; Harris 1990; Silverstein 1993; Harris 1996a, 1996b; Taylor 1997; Harris 1998a; Taylor 2000; Agha 2007; Taylor 2016). Reflexivity has been identified as a methodological issue in relation to the research enterprise, by sociolinguistics (e.g. Johnstone 2006) and, more broadly, the social sciences (e.g. Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992), but, in general, linguistics seems to be somewhat resistant to its investigation. One possible explanation for this, as claimed by Roy Harris and others (pace Coupland & Jaworski 2004: 17), is that the traditional model of linguistic communication “effaces linguistic reflexivity by simply ignoring it” (Harris 1998a: 26). This does not mean to say that linguists are generally unappreciative of the usefulness of metalinguistic resources – especially applied linguists working with second-language acquisition appreciate their importance to learners – but typically the reflexive properties of language are seen as supplemental and inessential. “The typical assumption appears to be that reflexive discourse is a superficial supplement to language itself, one which could be removed without seriously affecting language” (Taylor 2000: 486).
The logic seems to be that a metalanguage must presuppose a language to avoid causing hen-and-egg circularity. Hence, users of a language may use the metalanguage to describe, inquire, and inform about the elements and features of the (object) language, and this, of course, is useful to teachers and learners, but, apart from that, once the language has been acquired, no metalanguage is essentially required. During first-language acquisition, it cannot be required either, as this would entail the absurd implication that the child had to learn a metalanguage before it could acquire its first language. Linguists and teachers have to develop a terminology to describe the language, and these terms are obviously metalinguistic, but the linguistic phenomena thereby described presumably already exist and are available to the language users, even though they may not be conscious of them. This resonates with the strange experience of many schoolchildren, to whom it may make good sense that they need to be taught the grammar of a foreign language, but less sense that they are also taught the grammar of their own language. It may not appear to be obvious to them how this “school” knowledge is relevant to their continued communicational life, since they are already living it. How these nameless metalinguistic concepts have ended up in children’s minds is disputed (Taylor 2000, 2010, 2012, 2017). Some theorists, in the tradition of generative grammar, posit that the concepts are innate and that babies are born with a “language organ” (Chomsky 1975, 2000) in which structural slots for
constituents and parts of speech are already instinctively in place at the time of birth (Pinker 1994). According to Noam Chomsky:
The universal grammar doesn’t tell you that tree means “tree” in English. But once you’ve learned the vocabulary items and fixed the grammatical parameters for English, the whole system is in place. And the general principles genetically programmed into the language organ just churn away to yield all the particular facts about English grammar. (Chomsky [1983]2004: 379–380)
The individual speakers are not required to know the names of the non-terminal symbols of their innate grammar. They do not need to know what NPs and VPs are called, and they do not have to talk about them, as long as they have all the relevant constituent structures installed in the right order of derivation and are ready to extract the terminal symbols from the speech of the members of the community into which they were born, their “primary linguistic data”, and fill in the blanks of their mental lexicon.
This is one version of what Talbot J. Taylor calls the “Immanency Thesis” (Taylor 2000), that is, the thesis that reflexive discourse is inessential to language because the relevant metalinguistic concepts are already in place from birth or, as suggested by John R. Searle, because they are constituted by language itself. “[L]anguage does not need language because it already is language” (Searle 1995: 72). Language is constitutive of institutional facts, but since linguistic facts are also institutional facts, “we have to have some symbolic devices for marking these institutional facts” (ibid.), even the symbolic devices themselves. This means that the symbolic devices mark themselves as symbolic, and that “language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts” (ibid. 73).
Unless a version of the Immanency Thesis is presumed, it seems difficult to explain how the categories that linguists describe and make inventories of and that presumably underlie actual utterances have come into existence. It is hard to imagine what the tasks of linguistics would be if they were not to unearth and describe the pre-existing categories and structures that speakers, albeit unconsciously, refer to and rely on when they speak. In this sense, reflexive discourse has to be supplemental, because the alternative would make speakers responsible for the institution of these categories. If reflexive discourse was in fact constitutive of and essential to language, it would mean that language would have to be constructed by means of language. Nevertheless, this is the bizarre thought experiment that Taylor invites us to consider. If we posit that the “first inventors of language”
were not able to engage in any reflexive linguistic practices, then their communicational behaviour could not have had the semiotic, cognitive, and interactional characteristics that not only characterize all known instances of language but also appear to be essential to the functioning of any form of behavior as language. It might therefore be more to the point to say that we
modern humans would not recognize such a form of behavior as language because it would not have been language. (Taylor 2000: 491)
However, if the form of behaviour that we modern humans recognize as language essentially incorporates reflexive discourse, this opposes the assumption that although we can talk about language, we don’t have to, because “it already is language” (Searle 1995: 72). This could be one explanation for the fact that linguistic reflexivity is underappreciated as well as underresearched, because the consequences of adopting the idea of “language constructing language” (Taylor 2000: 497) are not only mindboggling but also seem to undermine our established ideas about what language is and how it works. Thus, for linguistics, the safest strategy appears to be to efface linguistic reflexivity “by simply ignoring it” (Harris 1998a: 26), thereby successfully avoiding having to “recognize the context-dependence of its applications” (Harris 2003: 59).
On a bolder note, the matter may be worth pursuing by asking whether it is at all possible to reconcile a particular understanding of language with linguistic reflexivity without causing inconsistencies. This is the question I will explore, theoretically and empirically, over the following chapters. In short, I want to investigate how, in which forms, when, and why linguistic reflexivity is exploited by communicating participants. I begin, in Chapter 2, by asking about the (Western) historical background for the notion of a metalanguage. In Chapter 3, I investigate the reflexivity of language from the perspective of the communicating participants, and discuss the consequences of this perspective for linguistic inquiry as well as considering how the difficulties that they give rise to may be addressed. In Chapter 4, I take these theoretical solutions and apply them to linguistic analysis in practice. I follow the textual traces of the debates in an open forum on the public Web over a period of ten years and analyse, diachronically, the way in which users deal with linguistic matters pertaining to their written communication; how they, together and in real time, establish and renew a linguistic order of their own creation by exploiting the reflexivity of language – that is to say, how they make their language while they are busy communicating.
For the remainder of the present chapter, I will lay out the theoretical basis on which I conduct the investigation. In Chapter 1.1, I consider some of the assumptions that underlie the received view of language that have continued to dominate the theorizing of language into the 21st century. As a consequence of this view, the reflexivity of language is considered to be inessential and hence ignorable. I will argue that to reconcile the investigation of language with linguistic reflexivity, it is necessary to adopt an integrational perspective that is free from the influence of the Immanency Thesis. In Chapter 1.2, I present an overview of the tenets of this approach (see, e.g., Harris 1996a, 1998a; Pablé & Hutton 2015) and point out the major methodological stumbling blocks inherent in the attempt to apply integrational linguistics. Thus, the goal of the book is twofold. One part of the goal is to exploit the reflexivity of language to investigate reflexivity, and another part of the goal is to exploit the reflexivity of language to investigate language.
1.1 “Language as we know it”
When we engage in conversations with other people on an everyday basis, we take it for granted that we are able to do so more or less like yesterday and the day before and in general, and that the communicational function of our utterances does not change every five minutes. We expect continuity because we experience continuity, but we also expect to be able to deal flexibly with whatever demands the current communication situation places on us.
On the one hand, signs are expected to provide an assurance of continuity, of reliability, of conformity to established patterns, of our willingness to cooperate with others; on the other hand, signs are also expected to be communicationally adaptable, to confront the unforeseen, to deal appropriately with novel circumstances and requirements as they arise.
(Harris 1996a: 244)
We expect to be able to have it both ways, because our experience tells us that this is indeed possible. More often than not, we experience being understood by the people whom we talk to, and we experience that we understand them. We gain the impression of having achieved mutual understanding, and we acknowledge that this impression is based on our linguistic experience – that language is responsible for our understanding one another and that the words I speak mean the same to you as they do to me, that they mean the same tomorrow as they do today, and if both of us were to engage in conversation with someone else at some point, the same would apply. We have the impression that language is something that we share.
As a general outline, this is how language has been understood in the Western tradition from antiquity onwards into the 21st century. In various guises, this is how it has been theorized and how it has been taught in the educational systems throughout the centuries, and it does seem to be a highly sensible and reasonable explanation – maybe even the only reasonable explanation – of how language works and what it is. Nevertheless, something is not quite right about it. It does not explain how we manage to talk about something new in novel circumstances, and it does not explain how we make new words. If we are supposed to be sharing words in advance, it is a mystery how we should also be able to use words that are not shared. Hence, the explanation does not account for the unforeseen. It does not explain how “we find ourselves completely unfazed by the banal ease with which we can call in question or change our minds about our criteria for identifying linguistic units” (Love 2007: 707).
The explanation also ignores the fragility of this communicational set-up, for if the words of one participant do not mean exactly the same as the words of another, or if the words are not shared after all, “when any Word does not excite in the Hearer the same Idea which it stands for in the Mind of the Speaker” (Locke 1694: 3.9.4), then language will become inoperable, and the inevitable result will be communicational breakdown. The explanation passes over in silence the facts,
as well as their implications, that speakers may not pronounce the same words in exactly the same way and that pronunciations, spellings, meanings, word order, and many other linguistic phenomena differ along the temporal dimension and across individuals. If words are invariant and they are necessarily shared, how can language change – and why should it change?
This explanation, however convincing it may appear to be at first, fails to account for our linguistic experience in toto, and it creates more (theoretical) problems than it solves. Adopting the strategy of construing signs as invariants “is not viable as a strategy unless one abstracts from the actual temporal course of events involved in communication and resorts to identifying the sign by some set of a-temporal qualitative features” (Harris 1996a: 154). It only explains part of the linguistic experience, the stable, reliable, predictable, context-neutral part that fits into regular patterns of linguistic behaviour, and, by accounting only for certain aspects of our experience with language, while purporting to cover all of it, it ends up misconstruing the whole experience. It lures us into believing that communicational success is due “not to the efforts of any individual participant but to the fact that the words they use already have invariant meanings that exist, and continue to exist, irrespective of variations in interlocutors and situations” (Harris & Hutton 2007: 203). This belief is strange, indeed, for it means that the theory of language that we derive from our linguistic experience effectively contradicts or even negates that experience, and it means that the perspective of the first person is ignored.
The consequence of this trust in language per se is a mistrust in the subjective experience and perception and hence in consciousness. The analytically produced intersubjectively based manifestation, the linguistically procured, negotiated meaning comes to attain objective validity even though it is only seemingly shared. The perspective of the first person is being set aside by a third-person perspective.
(Perregaard 2016: 73; my trans.)
We know very well from episodes of everyday communication that genuine communicational breakdowns are quite rare and that, usually, unconventional or novel usage does not bring conversations to a halt by preventing us from attaching meaning to each other’s utterances. On the contrary, in most situations, we are perfectly able “to meet the exigencies of communication” (Harris 1993: 321). Thus, it seems that, by forgetting about or ignoring our own concerted accomplishments, we simultaneously underestimate and belittle our versatile capacity for making sense in particular episodes of communication and, instead, project this capacity onto an idea about a shared inventory of invariant signs that exists prior to and independently of our own communicational efforts, as if successful communication is “something for which there are criteria external to our own understanding of the interactional situation in which we find ourselves” (Love 1990: 106). It is as if we see ourselves as the complying users of an existing language instead of its sovereign makers and remakers and, as a consequence, abdicate responsibility for
our communicational successes as well as for our failures in the process. Eventually, this leads us to believe in a language that, as Ferdinand de Saussure envisaged it, is “external to the individual, who by himself is powerless either to create it or to modify it” (Saussure [1916/1922]1983: [31]).
Most problematically, we come to think of language as something that it is not, and this carries over to the study of language. If indeed language has an independent, external existence, it follows that it can also be studied independently of particular episodes of communication and that it can be studied objectively from “the view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986). Its structure, units, and regularities become the object of study in terms of a contextually neutral and abstract but, nevertheless, shared language system. The idea is that, when we speak, we consult this shared system and manifest it in our utterances. Different theories offer different explanations regarding the locus and workings of the system and how it came into existence (whether it is socially instituted and collective or genetically specific and innate), but it is agreed that the proper object of study is the language system and not the contextualized linguistic practice in particular communicational episodes.
It becomes theoretically necessary to presume the existence of a shared or universal system because, without such an assumption, usage appears to be quite unexplainable. How could it otherwise be possible to use something if it is not there, if it is not available? The notion of usage already presumes as much. This means that linguistic structure comes to outline and chart its own investigation internally, by constituting the frame for the possible as well as the relevant and acceptable research questions that can be asked; for example, how does this or that structural feature work, what does it accomplish in practice, and how is it used? Agency comes to be invested in the system, while particular persons and their actual utterances become secondary. Communicating participants come to be thought of as actors, rather than individually accountable agents. Usage becomes a messy site for investigation but also the only, albeit indirect, access point and entry to the innermost part of the collective system or a check-list for the grammaticality of the system hypothesized by the linguist, not something of importance in its own right. Thus, the study of linguistic structure becomes “a higher calling” (Bybee & Hopper 2001: 1) for the analyst.
Still, it is strange that we should come to embrace and accept an explanation of language that not only is partial but amounts to a theory, or a complex of theories, that effectively contradicts our own linguistic experience. This only seems to be possible on the assumption that we are somehow inattentive to or oblivious of the contradiction. However, this also sounds strange, for how should it be possible to be inattentive to something that at the same time constitutes the basis for the attention we are supposedly ignoring? It would mean that we are inattentive to our own attentiveness. This, however, is not as mysterious and unusual as it may seem at first; it is what happens whenever we take something for granted. Naively, we take those things for granted that experience tells us that we can always rely on, because we have (had) no opportunity to doubt them. We take it for granted that the sun rises every morning and that the ground we walk on is solid. We do not
expect the ground beneath our feet to give in to our treading on it. Such attentiveness only becomes apparent to us upon surprise, and surprise presupposes expectation, so even though we are not always knowingly aware of our expectations, we are nevertheless capable of entertaining them. Our capacity for inattentive attentiveness is quite practical, because it saves us the trouble of having to concentrate on things that usually do not require our attention, and this means that we can turn our attention towards more immediately pertinent matters. It is in this sense that we take for granted language and what we can accomplish by means of it.
The trouble is that, when we make statements about a phenomenon that directly or indirectly presuppose the things we take for granted, we may inadvertently violate the very basis on which the statements are made, because we fail to pay attention to it; what is more, the violation is likely to pass unnoticed, because our inattentiveness extends to the violation itself. When this happens to statements about language, violations are particularly difficult to detect, or easy to ignore, depending on our viewpoint. The problem is that our inattentiveness lets us violate the conditions for description seemingly successfully. In particular, two of what Peter Zinkernagel (1988) calls “logically necessary relations” may be overlooked and forgotten when statements about language are made, namely the relation between person and body, and the relation between person and situation.
Zinkernagel argues that there are conditions for description besides formal logic, and that logic is constituted by necessary relations between different entities. Starting from the principle of non-contradiction, he shows that this principle can be stated as a necessary relation between different entities. The principle states that we cannot contradict ourselves. It is impossible to assert and deny the same claim at the same time. If the principle is rephrased so that something can only be a statement if it cannot simultaneously be asserted and denied, we have a necessary relation between statements, assertions, and denials, and then there is no reason to assume the non-existence of other necessary relations between different entities. An example is the necessary relation between point and distance. Although points and distances are different entities, we can only identify points through their distances to other points, and we can only identify distances between points. That is, it is only possible to identify one entity by reference to the other, and vice versa. Just as logical relations are necessary relations between different entities, entities exist through necessary relations. Hence, it is not logically possible to refer to a person except with reference to that person’s body, and it is not possible for a person to be a situated someone without being embodied – to claim otherwise would be nothing short of sheer nonsense. It would be as absurd as to claim that having an experience did not presuppose an embodied experiencer. In our personal experience, there is one entity of which we cannot doubt the physical continuity, and that is our own body. We are not only “time-bound agents” (Harris 1996a: 154); we are also space-bound. Hence, it is impossible for a person not to be situated.
This immediately sounds suspicious, for how on earth should we be able to forget that we are embodied, and that this fact ultimately conditions our living as well as the statements we make about it? Well, this rather depends on the activity
in question. If the ground were suddenly to give way beneath my feet, I would not have doubts about my embodied presence in that situation, because I would inevitably fall. This is probably why no one in their right mind is likely to deem the report of a person walking on water as anything less than miraculous, since it would otherwise contradict our personal walking experience.
Thus, with respect to an activity such as walking, it is not very likely that it will be forgotten that this activity presupposes an embodied walker, even though the activity may be nominalized and talked about in the abstract as “a walk”. However, with language it is easier to forget in which ways the activity presupposes persons, and to forget that “[l]anguage is a temporally situated, ongoing process –the process of making and remaking signs in contextualised episodes of communicative behaviour” (Love 2007: 705). First and foremost, when language is already conceptualized as an object that is abstracted from the situated activity of communicating by means of signs, the reification itself cancels its dynamic implications. Secondly, when the object supposedly exists prior to and independently of the activity, in the sense that this is what makes the activity possible in the first place, the order of presupposition is turned upside down. That is, language is no longer seen as an activity persons engage in but as a “thing” they refer to, rely on, and use.
Then it seemingly becomes possible to acknowledge that the linguistic performance is undertaken by situated persons while simultaneously ignoring the idea that the “thing” they are supposedly manifesting while performing logically presupposes its own manifestation. In this way, the spatio-temporal conditions that necessarily govern the manifestation become inconsequential to the ontological precedence of the abstraction. Hence, it becomes possible to forget and ignore that language presupposes communicating persons just as much as walking presupposes a walker.
This forgetfulness does not only apply to linguistics. A parallel case can be found in medical science. In medical science, persons may be forgotten even more easily than in linguistics, although all medical conditions in humans necessarily presuppose human bodies – and although the whole point of medicine ultimately is to prevent the relation between person and body from being destroyed. The notion of a disease in the abstract, i.e. a disease that exists prior to and independently of particular individuals, is nonsensical. However, when each condition is abstracted as an isolated area of treatment and research (diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, depression, etc.), and the abstraction is taken directly into the laboratory and studied in vitro rather than in vivo, this distance itself becomes a source of oblivion. Medical research is (for ethical and practical reasons) primarily not conducted on persons but on qualitatively different levels of being, on tissue samples, extracted human cells in petri dishes, and various animal (rodent) models. Hence, it becomes possible to develop a science based on an (ethically irreproachable) idea of medical conditions that negates personal experience while at the same time ignoring the contradiction.
Now, according to Zinkernagel (1988: 11), the statements that violate the conditions for description are not made false when we negate them: they are destroyed.
Such statements that violate the things we take for granted and cannot doubt (or have (had) no reason to doubt) are not simply false but nonsensical – given the world as we know it; for the proverbial Martian, the situation may be different. If someone claims that he went to a dinner party last night but that, because he was in a hurry, he forgot to bring his left leg, you have two and only two options to consider to try to make sense of this claim: either that this person has an artificial leg, which may be true or false, or that he is talking nonsense.1 Logically, he can be lying or telling the truth about going to the dinner party and/or about being in a hurry, but he cannot be lying or telling the truth about forgetting to bring the leg – unless the leg is not an integral part of his person. (Even so, the claim is strange, as it seems to require additional information to explain how he managed to travel to the dinner party with only one leg.) In this invented example, it is rather obvious that the claim is void and not merely false, because, under normal circumstances, limbs are not detachable. It is much more difficult to discover that signs (like medical conditions) presuppose situated persons and that they cannot be detached from particular circumstances either – that signs cannot be decontextualized.
However, when it is realized that words and all other semiological phenomena cannot be decontextualized, that they cannot be abstracted “from the time track of occurrences” (Firth [1948]1964: 147) because they presuppose speakers who are already situated, it follows that it is not merely false to claim that they can but that the claim is void and that, hence, it does not make any sense. It would imply that signs can be decontextualized when they are not an integral part of the communicational process in which they function, but that would be impossible because a sign cannot not function in a communicational process. Unless someone in a particular situation attaches semiological value to it, the sign simply is not a sign. A sign does not have a form of existence in which it is not contextualized by a person. “[T]he act of contextualization and the establishment of the sign are one and the same” (Harris 2009: 72).
Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to treat signs in this way, as if they were decontextualizable, without discovering that their identity and original (historical) semiological status are thereby affected, misconstrued, and possibly even destroyed, because it is impossible to talk about an abstraction without (re)contextualizing it. This can happen because and only because language is reflexive. With language we can talk about anything under the sun, including language itself (Joseph et al. 2001: 212), but the statements we make about language may be true or false or plain nonsense, and telling the difference can be very difficult, because it is impossible to talk about language without engaging in it. This makes it extremely hard to detect claims that violate the semiological basis on which their functionality simultaneously rests – much harder than detecting that something it not quite right when a person claims that he forgot to bring his left leg. In other words, it is all too easy to say something nonsensical about language and for it to pass unnoticed, because our success in making the claim in practice cancels out any contradictions and inconsistencies. In this sense, language is indestructible while statements made about it are not.
Unlike democracy, which may be powerless to defeat dictatorship through its own democratic forces and principles, language cannot be brought down by linguistic means, nor does language stand in opposition to any other form of communication in the sense that democracy and dictatorship constitute opposite forms of government. Language is different from other forms of communication because it is reflexive, but the reflexivity of language cannot destroy it.
Controversially, while the reflexivity of language cannot destroy language, it can destroy linguistics – in the sense that it does not protect linguistics from making nonsensical theoretical claims about its own subject matter. This was a major concern to John R. Firth:
An utterance happens in time. The stream of speech with all its items integrated unrolls itself, so to speak, on the time track of occurrences. But the systemic abstractions which we isolate in language systems are not limited by the time-track dimensions of the utterances from which they are taken. The statement of the systems when we talk or write about them have their own time track, since they are also speech events. The reflexive character of linguistics in which language is turned back upon itself is one of our major problems.
(Firth [1948]1964: 147)
The lesson Firth drew from this observation was overly pessimistic, and it unfairly ended up earning him a dubious reputation as a “hocus-pocus linguist” (see Chapter 2.1.4). However, he was right in pointing out that the reflexivity of language makes it difficult to perform linguistics sensibly and properly, while at the same time reflexivity is the ultimate prerequisite for performing linguistics at all. Unlike all other academic disciplines, linguistics constitutes “its own subject matter” (Love 1990: 114). Language is “both the object and the instrument of investigation, as well as the medium in which the linguist’s conclusions are ultimately formulated” (Harris 1997: 273). This means that while the reflexivity of language may be “one of our major problems”, it also simultaneously constitutes the key to the solution to this problem. While “the formal instrument we are using to represent and describe our own linguistic system as a referential device is ultimately drawn from that very same system” (Lucy 1993b: 24), at the same time “[i]t exploits the reflexivity of language to deal with a problem that arises out of that reflexivity” (Harris 1998a: 25). Only when the linguist’s “systemic abstractions” misconstrue linguistic experience does linguistics become in danger of constituting a body of specious and void claims about that experience. Thus, the goal for linguistics should be to perform linguistics responsibly by aiming for the largest possible coverage of linguistic experience and taking care not to obscure or divert attention from “the features that, for the overwhelming majority of people, characterize the lay exercise of one’s linguistic abilities in daily affairs” (Harris n.d.: 1f). This requires linguistics to revisit the conditions for human sign making and to acknowledge its presuppositions. It will not suffice merely to revise the traditional conception of what language is and how it works,
because this conception is inherently blind to the spatio-temporal consequences for the renewal of linguistic experience. Furthermore, this revisiting investigation begins and ends with the reflexivity of language.
1.2 The tenets of integrational linguistics
The points made above about the received view of language and the problems inherent in this view have been recognized and discussed to some extent by scholars from a wide range of research traditions, e.g. language philosophy (Davidson 1984, 1986), sociolinguistics (e.g. Blommaert 2005), pragmatics (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1986; Weigand 2010), and psycholinguistics (e.g. Clark 1996; see Jones 2016), but it has been analysed most critically and thoroughly within integrational linguistics. This view represents the most fundamental principle that underpins modern theories of language, namely what Taylor (1981) and Taylor and Cameron (1987) call “the principle of intersubjectivity” and what Harris (1981) calls “the language myth”. According to this principle, “communication is a means of bringing participants in it to a mutual awareness, a common perception, of an idea, an emotion, a representation, a governing structure and so on” (Taylor & Cameron 1987: 161). The principle implies that “linguistic knowledge is essentially a matter of knowing which words stand for which ideas. For words, according to this view, are symbols devised by man for transferring thoughts from one mind to another. Speech is a form of telementation” (Harris 1981: 9). This is what Harris calls “the telementation fallacy”.
The notion that communication should basically be a matter of thought transference, of telementation, appears clearly from the sender-receiver model of communication, implemented into as well as derived from information theory (see Chapter 2.3). The sender-receiver model permeates all the ideas about communicational processes that understand these processes as a matter of sending and receiving messages between individuals, and, throughout the educational system, this model is the one contained in practically every textbook that deals with linguistic communication. For this principle to work, a fixed code must necessarily be presumed, “in the sense that the same forms are paired with the same meanings for all speakers of the language” (Wolf & Love 1997: 2). Unless the sender can code his or her thoughts reliably into a transmittable message format, and the receiver can decode the transmitted signal and extract the same thoughts from the message, the process will not work. When the sender-receiver model is presumed for human communication, the participants require a fixed code in exactly the same way as telegraph clerks at both ends of the wire require Morse code. The hypothetical alternative to a fixed code explanation would be something even more imaginative and science fictional, such as the possibility of unmediated thought reading.
Harris calls this idea of a fixed code underpinning telementation “the determinacy fallacy”, and it completes the complex of “interconnected errors” in the language myth. “Although logically independent, the two fallacies complement each other” (Harris 1981: 9), and together they provide a closed-circle explanation
of linguistic communication that makes function and mechanism balance. The power of the language myth is that the model of linguistic communication it offers “sounds suspiciously like an analysis dictated by common sense” (ibid. 10–11), and it is hard to argue against common sense.
Individuals are able to exchange their thoughts by means of words because –and insofar as – they have come to understand and to adhere to a fixed public plan for doing so. The plan is based on recurrent instantiations of invariant items belonging to a set known to all members of the community. These items are the “sentences” of the community’s language. They are invariant items in two respects: form and meaning. Knowing the forms of sentences enables those who know the language to express appropriately the thoughts they intend to convey. Knowing the meanings of sentences enables those who know the language to identify the thoughts thus expressed. Being invariant, sentences are context-free, and so proof against the vagaries of changing speakers, hearers and circumstances, rather as coin of the realm is valid irrespective of the honesty or dishonesty of individual transactions.
(Harris 1981: 10)
“The language myth” is a catchy name, and it beautifully captures the notion that we truly believe that we actually need a shared language. From this belief, it follows that we must share the same invariant linguistic units and that language is the only way of achieving intersubjectivity. As soon as communication is understood in terms of thought transference there is no way around a shared, fixed language code. The trouble is that “there is no fixed code. And if there is no fixed code, then a fortiori communication is not a matter of swapping messages in it” (Love 1990: 95; 2007).
At first, the consequences of giving up believing in the language myth in favour of the open-endedness of lay linguistic experience may appear to be revolutionary as well as anxiety-provoking, but this only demonstrates the power of the myth. It induces the fear of losing something that did not depend on it in the first place. Intersubjectivity does not depend on language (pace Habermas 2005: 84), and it is not something we have to achieve (pace Tomasello 1999: 96). As Bettina Perregaard puts it, “intersubjectivity is unthinkable without subjects, and vice versa: no subjects can exist and experience without intersubjectivity” (Perregaard 2016: 71; my trans.). This relation between subjects is another of the necessary logical relations pointed out by Zinkernagel: only persons can have social relations, and social, i.e. interpersonal, relations are the ones that exist between persons, like points and distances, which are reciprocally defined in geometry (Zinkernagel 1988: 42).2
Social relatedness is already presupposed at the level of the individual embodied and situated person, whose perspective on the situation in which (s)he finds himor herself is necessarily the individual and unique perspective of the first person. “We cannot even describe our situation without talking about other persons and we can certainly not talk about other persons without attributing consciousness to
15 them” (Zinkernagel 1988: 50; my trans.). However, this implies that another person co-present in that situation will have his or her own perspective on it, and that this perspective will necessarily be different from the other person’s perspective. Even if no one else is present, this possibility remains. There is always another side to things, literally.
An encounter between two people is an encounter between two 1st person perspectives. The encounter gives rise to individual experiences. The experience of one person can never be the same as that of the other, even though the two of them in some kind of unanimity may be directed toward one another or to the same phenomena in the world.
(Perregaard 2016: 72; my trans.)
This means that, even though two people are co-present in the same spatiotemporally conditioned situation, they are not, strictly speaking, “co-situated”. They do not experience the same by being in the same situation together. “We do not ‘share’ anything simply by being physically co-present” (Harris 1997: 283). Each of us contextualizes individually.
However, if it is a fact that we each contextualize individually and hence differently, how, then, is interpersonal communication still possible? Merely asking this question is another symptom of the influential ways in which the language myth exerts its power. “To mistake a language, qua codified system of abstractions, for a first-order reality is the essence of the language myth” (Love 2002: 34). In order to rethink communication, it has to be “demythologized”. The principle of intersubjectivity must be redefined, and the telementational model must be rejected completely – without becoming stuck in the attempt to “patch up its most glaring implausibilities” (Harris 1997: 284). This is the aim of an “integrational linguistics” (Harris 1981: 165) as a linguistics that refuses to erect particular sign-making traditions into “theoretical systems which can be invoked to explain and delimit in advance what it is possible for a sign to signify” (Harris 1996a: 245).
Thus, if communication is not thought transference, what is it? The integrational answer is that communication includes “all processes in which human activities are contextually integrated by means of signs” (Harris 1996a: 11), and from this answer it may be deduced that “context” and “sign” are notions that integrational linguistics treats differently from linguistics in general. The concept of “integration” is particular to integrational linguistics, and it concerns situations in which human activities are thereby linked, combined, and/or co-ordinated so that something can be accomplished that would not have been the case had the activities remained unintegrated.
In general terms, two or more activities may be said to be integrated when in combination they produce results which could not have been achieved by any of those single activities independently.
(Harris 2009: 69)
The successful integration of activities has the consequence of altering or extending the action potential of the individual, the agent. A very familiar example would be the temporally correlated co-ordination and monitoring of hand and mouth movements required to drink from a cup. Semiological integration occurs when the activities are integrated by means of signs, that is to say, when the agent has to work something out based on observation, find out what something “means”, and the result of this operation implements the process of integration. For example, under normal circumstances, people are not likely to drink from an empty cup they cannot reach, so determining whether there is a cup, whether it is within reach, whether the cup contains liquid, and whether this liquid is of the desired sort and temperature may all be involved in a successfully integrated “drinking” episode. The point is that the observations, taken in the broadest possible sense, are interpreted relative to a particular projected series of events, and that their interpretation fits in with this programme of activity. The more complex the series of projected events becomes and the more agents are involved, the more complex the processes of integration also become, and this is when semiologically integrated activity becomes essential.
In Harrisian semiology, signs are the contextualized products of communication, not its prerequisites (Harris 1996a: 7). This means that, when various activities are integrated by means of signs, it is the sign makers’ signs that implement the process. These signs do not pre-exist particular situations in which particular activities are integrated for the simple reason that the integration of activities does not pre-exist the situation in which it is achieved.
A sign is any observable feature or complex of features which, by virtue of its integrational function, plays some role in our diverse but continuous practices of making sense. The sole necessary and sufficient condition for the constitution of a sign is our recognition of this role.
(Harris 1998b: 19)
Once the sign has been made, this is when integration occurs, and vice versa. The integrational sign “is not a sign until it is contextualized” (Harris 2009: 72). The making of a sign is both accomplishment (duration) and achievement (the critical, opportune or “kairic” moment; see Chapter 3.1.2), it institutes a change, and there is a “before” and an “after” in relation to every sign.
Activities are always integrated in particular situations by particular persons under particular circumstances; therefore, signs only occur there and then, determined by their particular contextualization. That is, “the people responsible for contextualization are the participants themselves. Signification and contextualization are not two independent elements but facets of the same creative activity” (Harris 1996a: 164). When an integrational process is completed, the sign has exhausted its function. The sign only exists in the situation in which it is made, and it only exists for the duration of its semiological function.
The material from which the sign was made, the phenomenon that was observed, may have an existence that outlasts the situation, but its “signhood” is
unique to that moment in which it was assigned a semiological value by someone. To take a physically tangible example, assume that you have a puncture on the road and take out your warning triangle from the boot of your car and erect it on the verge of the road. In that case, the triangle is assigned a semiological function by passing motorists and everyone else who is familiar with this practice. Once the roadside service has fixed your car problem and you are ready to drive on, you will fold up the triangle and return it to its place in the boot. At this point, it no longer has any semiological function, while its material condition is unaffected; i.e. it is no longer a sign, but it is still a warning triangle.3 Thus, the meaning of the warning triangle, its “warning” function, is determined and constrained by the spatio-temporal circumstances that apply to its erection and observation within a certain projected series of events. This function is not a property of the material artefact but one that is made by the individuals who notice it and integrate it into their programme of activities (e.g. by slowing down and driving carefully past, by stopping and asking whether you need any help, or by saying to their co-driver, “Oh, look! I’m glad that’s not my car!”).4 A similar case can be made for written texts. As long as no one is reading a text, its words, layout, and other textual features have no semiological function. They are nothing but markings on a physical artefact, a text bearer. The visible marks only have a semiological function insofar as and for as long as someone reads them and attaches semiological value to them.
Outside the symbolizing process they are but remnants of a linguistic process –just as a dead organism is but the remnants of a living organism. The sounds or figures are becoming symbols again, only if they are again used as such by becoming part of a new symbolizing process.
(Jørgensen 1953: 292)
In ordinary face-to-face communication, the sign material does not outlast the situation in which the sign was made. Speech sounds and gestures are notoriously ephemeral. The participants make signs continuously throughout the encounter, and the signs they make simultaneously structure and ensure the progress of the interaction in a single integrated continuum. A minimum of two persons is required for communication to be implemented interactionally:
We communicate with others, i.e. engage in the [communication] process, either by taking an initiative to which others construct an integrated sequel, or else by constructing such a sequel ourselves in response to the initiative taken by someone else.
(Harris 1996a: 63)
It follows that communication processes come off interactionally on the condition that someone produces an integrated sequel to an initiative made by someone else. This presupposes (i) that the second person notices that the first person has done something and (ii) that the second person treats this “doing something” as a communicational initiative, that is, as something to which an integrated sequel could
be made. If the second person takes the first person’s act to be an initiative, the sequel will depend on the series of events that the second person interprets the initiative as projecting (Harris 1996a: 70). Thus, when a sequel is made it contributes to the initial act by complementing it, thereby fulfilling the projection. However, which series of events the second person interprets the initiative as projecting is a question that cannot be answered independently of this person or of the circumstantial parameters that constrain this particular projection.
Irrespective of whether or not an integrational sequel is made, the initial act is still an act. That is, its status of being an act is not determined by the sequel. “[W]hen A communicates with B by means of signs, the signs in question integrate (i) those activities by means of which A engages in the process, and (ii) those activities by means of which B constructs a sequel to A’s initiative” (Harris 1996a: 58). The activities by means of which A engages in the process do not suddenly disappear or become purposeless because of a missing sequel, but a missing sequel means that the process in which A engages will terminate differently. That is, the upshot will be that A did not in fact communicate with B, but that A made the effort nevertheless.
On the other hand, A may not have attempted to engage in a communicational process and yet end up being involved in one, namely when “[s]omething A does is treated as a sign by B, who produces a sequel, whether or not A expected it” (Harris 1996a: 65). The point is that A does not have the option to decide and cannot predict whether a certain act will have a communicational function, and, even when a sequel ensues, neither A nor B is invested with the power to identify that function objectively and unambiguously. This would require either a superordinate level of abstraction to which both parties had access and on which they could fix their identification or one of them to be able to control the contextualization of the other. But “[a]ny explanation of communication that resorts to elements allegedly ‘shared’ or ‘common’ as between individuals or contexts tacitly presupposes the validity of some external viewpoint which guarantees the underlying sameness in question” (Harris 1997: 288). This is the intricate difficulty that the language myth solves by delegating to the language the power to guarantee sameness.
In the absence of a shared fixed code, the participants themselves have to find out whether or not their respective projections converge and what to do about it if they discover it not to be the case; for the participants to come to realize that their projections do not converge may prove to be just as laborious as ensuring that they do. This requires the participants to monitor each other’s behaviour continuously and assess and adjust the direction in which their interaction develops semiologically, because they cannot “press rewind” and return to a previous “place” in the conversation. The temporality that conditions their encounter forces them to keep renewing their language.
The fugacious nature of signs is captured succinctly in Michael Toolan’s ultimate integrational one-liner: “meaning is always ‘now’ ” (Toolan 1996: 125). This catchphrase distils the core of the integrational approach to communication, and from this phrase most other integrational tenets can be derived. Meaning is not a
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CHAPTER I TWO WOMEN
“DO you see her now, Mr. David?”
I nodded, pointing into the coals. “I see a lion, and an old witch, and a monkey. I don’t see any woman.”
“There! There!” I cried. “She’s just going through the postern gate. Oh, she’s gone, lad! Never mind! Next time you may see her.”
“And is she prettier’n Wanza, Mr. David?”
“Perhaps not prettier,” I responded. “Wanza looking out from beneath the pink-lined umbrella on her peddler’s cart is very charming, indeed. But the woman I see in the fire is—oh, she’s altogether different!”
This was the customary tenor of my conversation with Joey as we sat before our fire of pine knots of an evening. The lad would point out to me queer kaleidoscopic creatures he saw deep in the heart of the pine fire; but his young eyes never saw the face I beheld there, and so I was obliged to describe my wonder woman to him.
It was not strange that Joey should share my confidence in this fashion. He had been my sole companion since the night four years before when I had found him—poor tiny lad—sobbing on the doorstep of a shack some three miles down the river. I had lifted him to my shoulder and entered the shack to find there a dying woman. The woman died that night, but before she passed away she gave the child to me, saying: “He is only a waif! I took him from my poor brother when he died over on the Sound, about six months ago. My brother was a fisherman. He picked the child up on the beach one morning after a fierce storm a year ago. I was meaning to keep the boy always, poor as I be. But now—you take Joey, mister,—he’ll be a blessing to you!”
A blessing! I said the words over to myself as I carried the boy home that night. I said them to myself when I awakened in the morning and looked down at him cradled in the hollow of my arm. I had been out of conceit with life. For me the world was “jagged and broken” in very truth. But looking down at the young stranger I thrilled with the sudden desire to smooth and shape my days again. To stand sure! And here was a companion for me! I was through with living alone!
I went to the window, threw it wide, and saw the dawn rosy in the east. A mountain bluebird that had a nest in a hole in a cottonwood tree hard by was perched on a serviceberry bush beside the window. I heard its song with rapture. I was smiling when I turned back to the bunk where I had left the child. The child was smiling too. He sat straight up among the blankets, his eyes were fixed on the bird, and he was holding out his little arms. I lifted him and carried him to the window, and he lisped: “I love birdie! I love you!”
And so Joey became my boy.
It was not only in the heart of the pine fire that I saw the radiant creature I described to Joey. When I looked from my workshop door at twilight across the shadowy river to the cool purple peaks of the mountains, the nebular mist arising seemed the cloud-folds of her garments. And when I lay on my back at noon time, in the cedar grove, gazing upward through the shivering green dome at the sky, I always dreamed of the splendor of her eyes.
I grew to wonder how I should meet her. Someway, I always pictured myself astride my good cayuse, Buttons, on the river road returning from Roselake village, gay in my holiday clothes, with a freshly shaven face, and a bag of peppermints in my pocket for Joey.
As it fell out I was in my shop by the river at work on a cedar chest. I was garbed in a dark-blue flannel shirt and blue overalls, and needed a hair-cut sadly. I heard a sound and looked up. “She has come!” I said to myself. “Out of the land of dreams she has come to me!”
A young woman stood before me. The face I saw was oval and flawless. The cheeks were a delicate pink. Her lips were vivid, her
eyes luminous as stars. Her silky, lustrous hair was bound with a broad band of blue ribbon. Although her riding skirt was torn, her blouse soiled, although she was dusty and disheveled, with shadows of weariness about her splendid eyes, her manner was that of a young princess as she addressed me.
“This place is for sale, I understand?”
I had not thought of selling the few acres that remained of the hundred-and-sixty-acre homestead I had taken up eight years before; but I was so overcome with awe and confusion, that I stammered forth:
“Why, no—that is, I think not! I shall sell some time, I dare say.”
Her face showed a flash of amusement and then grew thoughtful.
“It is a desirable place,” she murmured, half to herself.
I knew then she had come to the shop by the yew path—the path that runs beneath the trailing yews and winds in and out like a purple-brown ribbon near the spring, where the moss is downy and green, and the bracken is high, and the breeze makes a sibilant sound in the rushes. I straightened my shoulders, laid aside my plane, and rolled down my sleeves. Thus far I had not fully appraised my visitor, having fallen a prey to the creeping paralysis of shyness at my first glance, but now, grown bolder, I stole a hardier look at her face. I saw the scarlet lips, the brilliant eyes, and the ivory forehead beneath the midnight hair. I saw the rose tint on her cheek, the tan on her tender throat where the rolled-back collar left it bare. I saw— and I breathed: “God help me!” deep in my heart; and there must have crept a warmth that was disquieting into my gaze, for she lowered her eyes swiftly, and slid her hand, in its riding glove, caressingly along the smooth surface of the cedar chest between us.
“What beautiful wood,” she said softly. “You are a carpenter—a craftsman,” she amended. “How wonderful to work with wood like this.”
“Christ was a carpenter,” a voice—a wee voice announced from behind us. Joey had stolen into the shop through the rear window as
was his custom, and curled up on my work bench among the shavings.
“Who told you, lad?” I queried, being used to Joey’s terse and unexpected utterances.
My wonder woman looked at him sharply. Her black brows came together as she surveyed him, and she did not smile. Joey stared and stared at her, until I thought he never would have done, and she continued to scrutinize him. I saw her eyes wander over his attire. Poor lad—his collection of wearing apparel was motley enough—an old hunting coat of mine that almost covered him, a pair of trousers unmistakably cut over, a straw hat that was set down so far on his brown head that his ears had perforce to bear the weight; a faded shirt, and scuffed out shoes. But Joey’s scrutiny was more persistent than the one accorded him, and presently, my wonder woman was tricked into speech.
“Well?” she murmured, her lips relaxing.
Joey gave a great sigh, kicked up his heels like a fractious colt, and rolled over among the shavings. “Gracious Lord!” was his comment, delivered in awed tones.
“Joey!” I gasped, turning. But Joey was slipping, feet first, through the window. I caught him by the trousers and gave him a surreptitious shake, as I lowered him wriggling to the ground. He rolled over, rose to his knees; his brown eyes, big and soft, looked up at me affectionately; his lips parted in a grin of understanding.
“I’ll put the potatoes on, Mr. David,” he vouchsafed, and vanished.
The beautiful face was questioning when I turned back. “Mr. David,” she repeated. “He is not your boy then?”
I hesitated. “No,” I said slowly. Somehow, I was in no mood to tell her Joey’s story at that moment.
“Joey has the manners of a young Indian,” I apologized. “I hope he did not annoy you.”
“Children never annoy me,” she replied.
A tiny dimple played at one corner of her mouth and died suddenly as the half smile left her face. She bent her riding-whip between her hands and a look of distress came into her eyes.
“I am wrong, then, about this place being for sale? I saw a signboard back there on the road. It said ‘For Sale’ in bold black letters. There was a big hand that pointed this way.”
A light broke in on me.
“It must be Russell’s old ranch on Hidden Lake,” I said. “To be sure, that is for sale. It has been for sale ever since I can remember.”
I saw her eyes brighten.
“There is a place I can buy, then? What is it like—this Hidden Lake?”
“It is a mere pond, hidden in the thickets. It can be reached from the river. If you can find the lead you can pole in with a canoe. It’s a famous place for ducks. The tules almost fill it in summer. There’s a good spring on the place, and I guess the soil is fair. One could raise vegetables and berries.”
“I don’t want to raise anything.”
I fancied her lip curled.
“No—no—why, I dare say not! How stupid of me,” I murmured.
She flirted her whip impatiently.
“Is there a road I can take?”
“I will show you,” I replied, and she walked out of the shop as if anxious to be off.
She paused in the cedar thicket beyond, and I joined her. We could see the river shining like silver gauze through the green latticed walls of the grove, and the sky above the steeples of the trees was amethyst and gray. The sun was low in the west, and the shadows lay purple along the wood aisles.
It was a magical May day. Hawthorn and serviceberry bushes waved snowy arms along the river bank and dropped white petals in the stream, the birch trees dangled long festoons of moss above the
water, balm o’ Gileads shed their pungent perfume abroad, and the honeysuckle and wild clematis hung from the limbs of the slender young maples.
I held aside the underbrush for my wonder woman that she might pass, and we went through the cedar thicket, threaded our way through aspens and buck brush, and reached the trailing yews that were bending to dip their shining prisms in the spring.
“This is the yew path,” I explained, breaking the silence that we had maintained since leaving the shop. “It winds through the meadow and joins a trail that skirts Nigger Head mountain. Follow the trail, and it will take you to Hidden Lake.”
The soft neighing of a horse interrupted me. I peered through the buck brush, and glimpsed a bay mare tethered to the meadow bars. My companion gave a soft chirrup and pushed on before me. She had the mare’s bridle in her hand, and was stroking the animal’s nose when I reached her side.
I said, “Allow me,” and offered my hand for her foot. She glanced at my hand, looked into my face, and smiled slowly as if amused. I felt the hot blood mount to my brow, and then her foot pressed my palm, and she was in the saddle, and her mare was wheeling.
“Good Sonia,” I heard her murmur, and saw her gauntleted hand steal along the arching neck. She bent to me. The grace of her supple figure, the vital alluring face, her baffling beautiful eyes, her ripe lips with their dimpled corners, were sweet as life to me. For a moment our eyes met. She said gratefully: “Thank you. My ride will be splendid beneath those whispering yews.”
Of a sudden my hands grew cold, my tongue stiffened in my throat, and my eyes smarted. She was going. I had no power to detain her, no sophisticated words to cajole her. I stared after her, and saw her ride away through the swaying meadow-grass to the yew path, the sun dappling her blue riding skirt, and the breeze lifting and swaying her bonny tresses.
When I went indoors after a retrospective half hour beside the spring, I found Joey in the grip of intense excitement. The table in
the front room was laid for three, there was a roaring fire in the kitchen stove, and Joey’s face was crimson as he stood on a stool at the sink turning the boiling water off a kettle of potatoes.
“I’ve made squatty biscuits like you showed me once,” he volunteered in a loud whisper, “and stewed apples. And, Mr. David— I’ve hung a clean towel over the wash-bench, and scoured the basin with rushes.”
I looked at Joey. Out in the woods I had undergone a savage battle with my old self that had walked out of the shadows and confronted me. I had remembered things—submerged, well-forgotten things; I had exhumed skeletons from their charnel house—skeletons long buried; I had seen faces I had no wish to see, heard voices, the music of whose tones I could not sustain with equanimity; I had suffered. But as I looked at Joey, the futile little friend who loved me, and saw his pitiful efforts to please, the ice went out of my heart, and the fever out of my brain. I turned aside to the window and stood looking out with tightening throat.
Joey came and hovered near my elbow.
“There are only two pieces of gingerbread, Mr. David. I’ve put them on, and you can just say you don’t believe in giving children sweets.”
I laid my arm across the lad’s shoulders. I looked down into the honest brown eyes seeking mine for approval. The pressure of the two small rough hands on my arm was comforting.
“You’re a splendid provider, Joey,” I cried. “But you may eat your gingerbread, my boy. There will be no guest. She has gone on to Hidden Lake.”
Joey looked aghast. His jaw dropped, and his eyes grew black with disappointment.
“And I’ve sweetened the apple sauce with white sugar, and gone and wasted all that butter in those biscuits!”
I strolled into the front room and viewed the preparations. There was a large bunch of lupine in the big blue bowl in the center of the table, and all our best china was set forth in brave array. The bread-board I
had carved graced one end of the table; at the other, Joey had arranged the two thick slabs of gingerbread on a pressed glass comport, a paper napkin beneath. I was smiling as I stood there, but I had an uncomfortable feeling that all was not well with Joey. A sound from the kitchen attracted me. I went toward it. Joey leaned across the sink, his face buried in the roller towel. His young shoulders were heaving.
“I wanted her—oh, I wanted her to stay!” he blubbered.
I knew not what to say to comfort my lad, and so I said nothing. I caught up the pail and went outside to the spring for water
I had filled my pail and was stooping to gather a handful of cress when I heard the sharp click of wheels in the underbrush behind me. Some one was driving over the uneven ground that lay between the cabin and the workshop. I looked around. A girl sitting beneath a pink-lined, green umbrella, in a two-wheeled cart, waved her whip at me. I straightened up, dropped the cress, and ran through the buck brush after her.
“Wait, wait, Wanza,” I cried.
I heard her say: “Whoa, Rosebud!” And the buckskin pony she was driving curveted and pawed the ground and set the green paper rosettes on its harness bobbing coquettishly as she pulled it up.
“Were you coming to the cabin, Wanza?” I asked, as I reached the cart.
“Whoa, Rosebud! No, I wasn’t to-night, Mr. Dale—I was only taking a short cut through your field.”
