Language in the mind: An introduction to Guillaume's theory (review)

Guillaume's theory of language remains unknown to the non-French world with the exception of some fragmented quotations mentioned by scholars (e.g., Binnick 1991). Walter Hirtle's Language in the mind: An introduction to Guillaume's theory finally compensates this situation by providing an overview of Guillaume's thoughts on language, and shows how this theory can explain the linguistic peculiarities of English. This undoubtedly constitutes a real contribution.

The book contains 16 chapters, the first six of which provide an outline of Guillaume's theory of language. The following eight chapters (Chapters 7 to 14) deal with the grammatical categories of English showing how the theory works in construing meaning. Since Guillaume's theory bears on human cognition, Chapter 15 deals with the relationship between language and thought. The concluding chapter discusses the future possibilities of the approach in understanding language-based phenomena. The book ends with a glossary and an index of technical terms.

Guillaume's approach to language, as portrayed in the current work, revolves around concepts such as "emergentism", "intentionalism", "contextualism", and "dynamism". Guillaume provides a comprehensive view of the way meaning potential is realized in discourse through a process of languaging, integrating the relevant domains of specific knowledge. The approach views lexeme as a systematic representation of the cross-domain dependencies in terms of "procedures", which remain implicit in the meaning construing capacity of the language user. This procedural aspect of meaning construction is inaccessible to our consciousness (Mandler 2004:46). Therefore, the goal of linguistic analysis, according to Guillaume, is to systematize the procedural aspect of meaning construction.

To demonstrate the validity of Guillaumean insights on language, Hirtle argues that neither langue nor "competence" is the suitable object of linguistic investigation. Both are highly idealized and abstracted forms of actual language. Hirtle indeed claims that "competence, like langue, has no existence outside the linguist's imagination and so can provide no basis for describing a real speaker's language ability, or potential" (p. 19). Saussure and Chomsky conceptualize langue and competence as a static storehouse of readymade concepts in their respective approaches. On the contrary, the Guillaumean approach considers concept as an emerging entity whose "actual existence is something transitional, arising only in the act of language as the output of an act of representation and the input for an act of expression" (p. 45). For each utterance of a particular expression, the corresponding concept emerges due to the systematic interactions between different underlying psycho-systems that are invoked on encountering the context (p. 123). In this sense, the process of "languaging" remains operative in establishing a relation between "tongue" (i.e., the underlying linguistic potential) and "discourse" (i.e., the manifested linguistic realization). Notably, Guillaume viewed the act of languaging as unconscious (p. 20). Instead of considering a word as "a readymade item in an inventory", Hirtle views it as "a made-to-order product, reconstructed on each occasion for use in the sentence under construction" (p. 24).

Like Guillaume, Hirtle too emphasizes the primacy of the word over the sentence. Both believe that the word as a construal comes into existence due to the act of languaging (p. 45). Each occurrence of a word in a sentence, therefore, is the result of a "constructional process" (p. 46). Significantly, Guillaume's proposal of "operative time" involved in the preconscious representational operations inherent in underlying meaning potentials of the linguistic cognition is an effort to conceptualize the word as a dynamic entity (p. 91). In a sentential context, the communicative intent of a word is constructed by certain conditions to actualize its meaning potential. These conditions are contextually embedded and termed as "summatory conditions" (p. 47). Accordingly, the grammatical make-up of a word as actualized syntacto-semantically in a sentence is determined by the underlying hierarchies of different psycho-systems (p. 125). This position leads to the systematic exploration of tongue as "a system of systems" (pp. 133...