|
|
|
El¿bieta W¹sik (Poznan) |
The focus of
our polemic will concentrate around investigative consequences, which may have
resulted from the strict application of the distinction made between physical
and logical domains and in a human-centered study of the pragmatics of
linguistic communication. This distinction was endorsed in the book of Victor
H. Yngve From Grammar to Science (Amsterdam 1986: Benjamins) claiming
that the only accessible objects of scientific study, understood in terms of
physics, chemistry and biology, are linguistic properties of human individuals
communicating with other individuals in temporary and long-lasting linkages.
Accepting a “hard-science” tenet, we agree that: “There is no such thing in
nature as an utterance that carries with it a linguistic segmentation or
structure of any sort, whether in terms of phonemes, syllables, words,
sentences, or any other of the constructs usually invoked to describe them” (p.
9). However, we cannot say the same about the statement: “Instead we have in
nature only the physical sound waves themselves and the people producing,
sensing, and interpreting them” (ibid.). In fact, true is only the first part
of it pertaining to observable channels and referring behavior of
communicators. “Interpreting” activity has to be relegated, along with
“knowledge”, “concepts”, or even communicative “tasks hierarchies”, to the
logical domain based on inferences and conditional reasoning in the same way as
“competence” is seen as “not a part of the real world” (p. 341, cf. 97). Thus,
philosophical foundations of linguistic pragmatics are unavoidable as a
complementary part of human communication including the self-awareness of communicators
not only from the intellectual and emotional but also from chemical-electrical
and motoric-kinetic points of view. It would be necessary to consider the
distinctions between observable and concluded reality related to
extraorganismic and intraorganismic properties of communicating individuals, if
the opposition between physical and psychical in terms of biology were
untenable. The refutation of distinctions derived from “soft-sciences”, for the
lack of theoretical constructs providing a base of solipsistic experiences of
both scientists and ordinary human beings, would impede the possibility of
communication about the discoveries made in the real world being remote in time
and space. The only thing we could state about the real world of linguistic properties
of people is that there are observable links between communicating individuals
constituting parts of a dynamic linguistic community with open boundaries.
These interindividual links constitute inter alia energy flows exchanged
through particle and wave duality in the physical domain of verbal expressions.
While remaining in the logical domain of a source agent, the material shape of
verbal expressions is received or not by a target agent. As such the logical
domain exists separately in the knowledge of communicating individuals as a
mental connection between the two domains, the domain of expression and the
domain of reference. Thus, individuals communicating about the same domain of
reference are supposed to be endowed with the same knowledge of how to
interpret the domain of expression of a given language in a relatively similar
way.