David Rose Misunderstanding Immanence, Transcendence And 'Language Turned Back On Itself'

David Rose replied to Kieran McGillicuddy on Sysfling on 28/8/23 at 14:13:

There’s more to Firth’s apparent disavowal than meets the eye. And times have changed. Here’s a prosaic gloss...

1 Our schematic constructs must be judged with reference to their combined tool power in a way our dealings with linguistic events in the social process.

‘Our metalanguage is designed for research’

2 Such constructs have no ontological status

‘Its terms shouldn't be mistaken for reality’

3 and we do not project them as having being or existence.

‘We don’t pretend they are’

4 They are neither immanent nor transcendent,

I dunno... hence my q to Ed

5 but just language turned back on itself.

‘but now I’m just going to bend your mind’.

and added at 19:53:

Please forgive me all, my ignorance

Immanence and transcendence were of course, not currents in lx theory, but in Christian theology, of the spirit located within or above the material world. But Firth’s readers would all have known that.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, Firth's first point is that theory must be judged according to its explanatory power in modelling language in context.

[2] To be clear, Firth's second and third points are that, in his view, the schematic constructs themselves have no ontological status: no being or existence.

[3] To be clear Firth's fourth point makes reference to opposing orientations to meaning in linguistic traditions, not Christian theology. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 415, 416):

We can identify two main traditions in Western thinking about meaning (see Halliday, 1977):

(i) one oriented towards logic and philosophy, with language seen as a system of rules;

(ii) one oriented towards rhetoric and ethnography, with language seen as resource. …

The two orientations towards meaning thus differ externally in what disciplines they recognise as models. These external differences are associated with internal differences as well.

(i) First, the orientations differ with respect to where they locate meaning in relation to the stratal interpretation of language:

(a) intra-stratal: meaning is seen as immanent — something that is constructed in, and so is part of, language itself. The immanent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the rhetorical-ethnographic orientation, including our own approach.

(b) extra-stratal: meaning is seen as transcendent — something that lies outside the limits of language. The transcendent interpretation of meaning is characteristic of the logico-philosophical orientation.

Many traditional notions of meaning are of the second kind — meaning as reference, meaning as idea or concept, meaning as image. These notions have in common that they are 'external' conceptions of meaning; instead of accounting for meaning in terms of a stratum within language, they interpret it in terms of some system outside of language, either the 'real world' or another semiotic system such as that of imagery.

[4] Again, Firth's fifth point is simply that linguistic theory is the use of language to model language; linguistic theory is language about language: a metalanguage.