Roy
Harris
Online
Integrationism: a very brief introduction:
Language as a faculty
2. Language as a faculty.
2a. Language is the faculty that underlies both speech and writing. It may be considered one part or facet of a more comprehensive faculty: that of sign-making (for which there is no general term in common use). If we adopt the term sign, however, it must be clearly understood that for the integrationist a sign is not a form which carries its own meaning permanently around with it. A sign acquires a meaning only when occurring in a specific context. (See 4.)
2b. Language is often described as ‘the use of words’ or the capacity for ‘the use of words’. But that phrase hardly advances matters; in fact, it is no more perspicuous an expression than the term language itself. Perhaps less so, in certain respects. For it comes with the accumulated intellectual baggage acquired from centuries of use by grammarians, who were preoccupied with their own criteria for identifying the ‘units’ out of which ‘sentences’ are constructed. Furthermore, use of words is at best a clumsy phrase, because it is not at all clear what I am claiming to know if I claim to know that speech and writing both consist of words. (See 8c.)
2c. A linguistic act, in any case, does not necessarily require the utterance or inscription of words. (See 3c.)
