Pattern and Process: A Whiteheadian Perspective on Linguistics (review)

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) is remembered largely for his writings on mathematics and philosophy, and it may come as a surprise to see a book devoted to linguistic metatheory written in the context of his world of ideas. In this thoughtful essay, published as part of a recently inaugurated series on human cognition and language (the first volume, Ning Yu’s The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, appeared in 1998), Fortescue revisits the perennial dichotomy between linguistic form and function. More importantly, he reassesses the contemporary orientational division between formalists and functionalists from a temporally detached perspective. By revealing the linguistics in Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’, F is able to reassess the positions of both generativists and functionalists from a refreshingly neutral vantage, though F himself ‘confesses’ (3) to being more in sympathy with the functionalists. The result is a thought-provoking journey into philosophical and sometimes metaphysical realms that proves to be of unexpected relevance to the possible future trajectories of many trends dominant in linguistics today, from optimality theory to emergent grammar.

There are nine chapters and two appendices. After answering the anticipated question ‘Why White-head?’ (1–23), F proceeds to apply Whitehead’s writings on symbolism to language behavior (cf. especially Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). Although this is the first thorough-going attempt to connect Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ with modern linguistics, its outlines were already adumbrated in F’s earlier monograph, A discourse production model for twenty questions (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980). F’s core argument throughout is that form and function—though distinct in the Saussurean sense—are far more interdependent in reality than many linguists have been wont to treat them. Whitehead’s philosophy provides one key to this new holism. Individual chapters explore language as a unified system of signs but also separately from a form-oriented and a content-oriented perspective. There are also discussions of mental language processing, the comprehension of written texts, and the role of the individual language user in the historical transmission of language. F argues that language must be conceived of as a ‘complex external object’ rather than an ‘organism’. He further suggests (256) that full human language could well have developed as a postevolutionary consequence of social transmission rather than strictly in tandem with biological changes. Finally, F admonishes the linguist that langue and parole—or pattern and process—though real, separable aspects of language often warranting their own approaches, can never be studied entirely apart from one another.

Appendix 1 (245–50) briefly assesses White-head’s legacy within modern philosophy. Appendix 2 (251–53) uses Whiteheadian principles to schematically represent the production of the utterance ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was possible’. There is also a lengthy accumulation of endnotes (255–98) that more than reward the effort needed to check and read them as one moves through the chapters.

Any book that helps to bridge the often unnecessarily deep divide between formalism and functionalism is well worth the read. This is one such book.