The South and Esperanto in the post-orientalist public space

Indian Journal of Linguistics 24:11-28 (2006)

Probal Dasgupta

Abstract

The global renegotiation of north-south relations has been under way for some time.One important moment was the identification of orientalist discourses as on the wholea coercive, asymmetric, power-tainted exercise guided by the interests of colonialprojects. But how is such recognition of complicity to translate into convivial sequelsthat help construct a global public space?

Negotiation works better when negotiators recognize that canons and norms areconstructed. The initial moment did involve showing that some elite had done the earlyconstructing. But the public can then get together, as convivially as possible, andarrange to have fresh construction jobs done, keeping in mind the interests of varioususers. The work of the old orientalists must be inherited, and tamed, since the newpublic space now emerging needs serious archives. We understand that the archiveswere fashioned asymmetrically and in their present form raise issues of ownership. Butwe have an opportunity to correct all this.

What provides this opportunity is the computer age. All archives are moving into thedigital mode, giving everybody a chance to reconfigure them. What shapes theopportunity is the fact that certain subcommunities that used to be oppressed are nolonger willing to take things lying down and at the same time need help to overcomedisenfranchisement and gain full access, especially to cultural resources. The digitalmode is particularly suited to the task of designing user-friendly arrangements.

For the sake of focus, I shall confine my discussion to the archiving of lexical resourcesin the languages of the south. Such archiving will, for some time to come, continue toneed help from orientalist enterprises in northern universities. We need to findtheoretically valid ways of preventing northern orientalists from feeling so guilty thatthe guilt prevents all archiving labour. If the nature of the new archive building task isrecognized, this gets done without specific and separate effort.

What role does Esperanto play in giving theoretical shape to this recognition? Toapproach an answer, note that the Esperanto lexicon is the only iconic case of a

constructed lexicon designed with issues of accessibility in mind. Apart from thisconceptual role, Esperanto alone is equipped to play a serious operational role in thisenterprise. Linguistics has accomplished a major bridge-building task in syntax andphonology but has not yet done so in the lexical domain. Esperanto is its best bet as astarting point for interlexical resource management. Any serious scholar hoping to getEnglish to do this work will have to redesign English until it approaches Esperanto, andat that point it will become clear that one does not wish to reinvent the wheel. UsingEsperanto as an interlexical resource does not mean abolishing other occupants ofother niches in the linguistic ecology; mathematical notation in physics has notabolished the role of natural language. Once the theoretical institutions of our timeallow Esperanto to play its proper role, it will become easier to see just how the issue ofthe south in the global public space is actually an issue of access. Negotiators who seethis clearly will negotiate better, and we will at last be able to overcome the negativeresidue of orientalism as a power structure while retaining its positive gains.

The formal construction of the public space has been a majorpolitical task of the modern period. It has long been clear thatpursuing this goal at the expense of substantive liberty,equality and fraternity becomes self-defeating after a point.Only in recent years, however, have there been resources enablingany headway on the theory and practice of the substantiveconstruction of the public space in which democratic practicesflourish. The digital revolution makes it possible to expect usall to work to reduce the gap between those who need expertiseand other assistance and those who are able to provide this. Toreduce this gap is to pursue the goal that was once calledfraternity, the third of the three Enlightenment values. Ifcommunication has to do with cooperation and understanding, andif the study of languages and cultures advances our understandingof communication, then it should follow that these themes need tobe on our screen.

The four corners of the present thematization – the South,Esperanto, the public space, and post-orientalism – characterizea particular response to the fact that the orientalist projectinitiated in the nineteenth century and tainted by complicitywith modern empires is widely regarded today as invalid. Thepresent intervention presents this response in relation to areconfiguration of linguistics that requires specific attention

in the context of the global exercise of renegotiating the publicspace.

Linguistics is a praxis and runs its own reconfigurations.It cannot be validly revised with reference to externalcompulsions. Even under acute pressure for immediate responses tospecific challenges, we who work in linguistics must keep faithwith the constitutive questions of the discipline. For otherwisethe answers we offer will lack seriousness. Therefore, in thisintervention the moves that have to come from linguistics areformulated in rigorously linguistic terms. However, thatformulation cannot be the first priority. The global context inwhich this response becomes relevant also has particularcharacteristics that require attention. Concretely, we propose toconsider the issue of the public space first.

The public space

The geopolitical public space in which the so-calledinternational community takes up political enterprises such asdismantling apartheid in South Africa or socio-economicenterprises such as addressing poverty or illiteracy hasundergone two well-known shifts. One of these has to do withdecolonization and the emergence of new states. A secondtransformation, especially evident since the end of the cold war,involves the state’s withdrawal from domains where NGOs and othercivil society actors are seen as more capable of effective andfocused action. Both of these shifts can be seen as pointing in ademocratic direction. If southern societies govern themselvesinstead of continuing to submit to imperial masters, this opensup the possibility of a truly international discourse once thestifling inequalities are addressed. Likewise, as civil societyexpands its space of operation, the field of negotiation becomesmore intricate, which mitigates the impact of the characteristicperversities of the state. However, the actual democratic contentof these shifts depends on the interplay, broadly speaking,between that international arena and the particular public spacesdistributed over the variously constituted nations with theirdiverse social forms. Only if participation and other civil

indicators grow in the individual nations can the internationalpublic space approach serious democratic norms. The reference isto norms that are scarcely imaginable in a period that keeps theoligarchic despotism of the powerful few firmly in place whilemaking noises about dismantling it.

Now, the national public space democratizes its functioningalong several dimensions, one of which is language. A societythat values democratic participation works to empower itself onthis axis as well. This involves maximizing access to mothertongue education at the primary and if possible also at thesecondary level for as many citizens as the society can makearrangements for. Reasonable approximations to this ideal includearrangements involving an additive bilingualism that guaranteesmother tongue proficiency in relation to the child’s seriouscognitive growth. These remarks are based on the standardliterature on linguistic human rights and are also applicable toEuropean societies, for example.

We need to go beyond these remarks, though. Certainsocieties of the South raise new issues in this domain. Considerthe communities known in India as Dalits; the term Dalit, whichmeans ‘oppressed’, has become the standard term for the castesonce regarded (and treated) by upper caste Hindus as untouchable.In such languages as Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, or Telugu, therise of Dalit authors forces us all to rethink languagemodernization. Modern Indian language policy had proceeded on theassumption that the point was to create terminology and a corpusof technical and serious public discourse in each of India’sunusually many languages and to disseminate it through theeducational system. But this policy’s elite-driven implementationreflected the lexical preferences of upper caste Hindus,especially Brahmins. Persistent Dalit failure in schools has beenin part a consequence of the (largely Sanskrit-based) Brahminhijack of the modern lexicon in Indian languages. Dalit literaryconsciousness has enabled new ways of visualizing Indianlanguages in relation to modernity. In recent decades, the scopeof this movement has expanded its social composition, coalescingwith other underprivileged allies described as “other backward

castes”, OBCs. Eroding the standard language varieties that hadbeen emerging on the basis of what an earlier consensus had takento be a neutral national imperative of technical vocabularymodernization, the Dalit-OBC movement in several regions of Indiahas reopened the question of cognitive and lexical access thatnationalism thought it had answered by promoting mother tongues.This is one aspect of the new challenge to the hegemonicstandardization of these mother tongues.

Careful commentary on the roots of Dalit resistance toBrahminization and Sanskritization has also expanded itshistorical and theoretical base in recent years. Current work(Naregal 2001) argues that nineteenth-century language policyenabled early Dalit participation in education in western India,whose British administrators chose mother tongue schooling andthus opened the doors to Dalits. The Britishers managing theaffairs of eastern India, with a longer history of colonization,chose a system where children first achieved mother tongueliteracy and then moved at once to an English immersion basedpedagogy for secondary school and beyond. These parametersexcluded Dalits and fuelled Sanskritization in Bengal andelsewhere in British India (the British capital Calcutta was inBengal, ensuring that the Sanskritization process made adisproportionate impact).

Now, the digital revolution has in part brought with it ahunger for certain types of standardization, but has at the sametime opened up the possibilities for non-standardizing managementof heterogeneity. If language communities today wish to allowspeakers of Telugu to achieve literacy in different forms of thelanguage in the Telangana, Rayalaseema and coastal Andhraregions, it is a fairly straightforward matter to fashionalgorithms that will take a text (or text-based multi-mediaeducational materials) back and forth across these normboundaries. Those at the bottom of the social ladder who wouldwish to promote multi-standard mother tongue education and thecomputer wizards at the top of the ladder who have the capabilityto deliver systems enabling this are not yet in social, politicaland technological contact. But it is only a matter of time before

some guilt-ridden rich children of the geeks bridge that gap. Bytomorrow, we can expect the democratic educational process torequire language standard diversity management services anchoredin linguistic theories and their technological implementations.This is a perfectly clear expectation in the Indian context, onethat has been discussed elsewhere. If the argument outlined hereis valid on a broader scale, the relevant civil society actors inthe international community are also going to support proposalsof that sort in order to promote substantive democracy inemergent societies.

In fact, demands for multi-standard educational practicesmay well emerge even in European societies, whose regional andlocal languages, once stifled under monoglot national regimes,have been experiencing little renaissances under the aegis of theEuro-processes.

We have offered this detailed take on the public space inorder to show that the contextual pressures match the defaultsocial science assumptions of linguistics fairly closely.Linguistics as a discipline has tended to present old grammariansas prescriptive authoritarians whose dogmas linguists resist inorder to promote democratic goals. There is every reason forlinguists to welcome a detailed articulation of just how thelinguistic and educational order can become more democratic withdirect help from linguists. The claim that this calls for areconfiguration of linguistics may raise a couple of eyebrows.But that is an issue for the next section to address.

Reconfiguring linguistics

Conventional formulations of the difference betweentraditional grammar and scientific linguistics have tended to pitthe prescriptive pressures of convention-bound society againstthe freedom of the individual, whose freedom of speech thelinguist must describe without advertent or inadvertentcomplicity with social forces trying to constrain this freedom.The topics just considered suggest that this is an oversimplified

picture. However, the linguistics of formal descriptions insyntax and phonology does take a certain basic individualism asits point of departure. We have no choice but to start there.

At the same time, in order to retain some coherence in thisproject, we must emphasize at the outset the two threads thatlink our consideration of the external social context to thespecifics of what we have to say about linguistics. The first,programmatic thread has to do with the common goal of archiving.Certain internal purposes within linguistics converge with socialcontextual factors on a consensus that we must build reasonableand responsive digital archives and corpora for all languages nowspoken and for many of their past versions. The second,methodological thread pertains to what we shall call thesubstantive economy issue. The quest for formally economicalformulations drives the scientific method and the labour ofextracting generalizations from data. Left unchecked andtranslated into market processes, a formal economy corresponds tocentralization of knowledge/ power, communities gettingmarginalized, and experts siding with the powerful against thedisenfranchised. To pursue the goal of substantive economy is totry to change this within the practice of linguistics and at theinterface where linguistics meets its applications.

The baseline of formal linguistic inquiry as most linguistsperceive it is the Individual Knowledge Representation Question:How is a person’s knowledge of language L represented in herbrain? The “sound-meaning mapping” answer to this question restson the standard generativist idealization. Scholars who focus onIKRQ conventionally imagine a member of a homogeneous speechcommunity who speak just one language L, speak it perfectly, andare fettered by no limits of memory and attention. To keep theissues under discussion here distinct from those of bilingualism,for argument’s sake, we choose not to contest the convention ofconsidering only monoglot communities.

Note that IKRQ so formulated and the usual mapping answer toit, even after refinement within some brand of phonology or ofsyntax, do not suggest any default answer to a natural second

question, here called SCRQ, the Social Convention RepresentationQuestion. SCRQ may be phrased as follows. How is a person’sawareness of convention L represented in her brain, the socialconvention that keeps her community focused on L and not on someother mapping? Another, possibly equivalent, formulation mightbe: How does an L-speaker’s brain represent her second-orderawareness of the fact that certain others have L-focused IKRsidentical to hers?

One answer to this question, available since the 1980s,postulates individualized archives. The following formulation ofthis answer makes a Lexicon Abbreviation move at (1d) that formsthe basis for the specific type of reconfiguration proposed inthe present intervention. Readers who wish to respond toformulation (1)’s other innovations will need to compare it withDasgupta 1988 and 1993. In particular, the move at (1c) opens upa connection between formal syntax and a deconstructionistapproach to the social construction of space, a matter notexplored here.

(1) The SCA (Social Convention Archive) proposal

a. The Micro-Archive: A particular speaker S of language Lmentally represents her awareness of convention L in theformat of an individualized micro-archive SCA(S) anchoredin the social macro-archive SCA(L).

b. The Macro-Archive: SCA(L), the canonical literary andcultural archive of the L community, is imaged as theunion or the intersection (cultures vary along thisdimension) of all SCA(S)’s, and contains exemplaryfiction, poetry, and encyclopaedic material.

c. The Anchoring: The way SCA(S) is anchored in SCA(L)reflects the fact that society names individuals andconstructs an inscribed space where persons situaterelevant entities. The proposal that a proper N moves toD, or a post-head-movement reconstruction of this notion,potentially connects linguistic indexing to the study ofSCA(L) space coordinates.

d. The Lexicon Abbreviation: SCA(L) is so organized that anindividual’s SCA(S) interfaces with IKR at her MentalLexicon, a formally specifiable abbreviation of theentire archive. Whether the union of all speakers’ mentallexicons exists as a Social Lexicon, a distinct formalobject within SCA(L), is a question different societiesanswer differently.

Proposal (1d) says that an individual speaker S of languageL cross-classifies her lexicon. In other words, S’s brain encodesit as part of her Individual Knowledge Representation IKR thatconstitutes her knowledge of the grammar of L. At the same time,S’s lexicon also counts as part of her SCA(S). In keeping withthis dual affiliation of ML(S, L), S’s mental lexicon forlanguage L, we envisage a dual representation. IKR no doubtimposes on ML(S, L) a format specifying phonological andsyntactic coordinates, and meeting these needs in ways that thegrammatical side of the interface must do detailed business with.But ML(S, L) is also an archive and must stay engaged with SCA(S)updates and with an ever-growing network of cognitive andaffective associations in encyclopaedic memory space. WheneverML(S, L) reaffirms its archival identity, it compresses phono-syntactic data and unfurls its seaworthy sails.

By way of moving to the discussion of methodology, considera small example of what this entails, at the edge of the factsone normally regards as exemplary. Take a native speaker S ofBangla (a.k.a. Bengali) and look at the fact that she knows theword /trikkhe/. This word occurs in exactly one line of themultiplication table learnt by children, /tin trikkhe nay/ ‘threethrees are nine’, where /tin/ ‘three’ and /nay/ ‘nine’, ordinarynumerals, work with /trikkhe/ ‘by three’, a specialmultiplicative form. The table is so structured that every otherform dedicated to this multiplicative role, such as /nang/ ‘bynine’ in the case of ‘nine’, occurs in more than one line, suchas /tin nang saataas/ ‘three nines are twenty-seven’ and /naynang eakaasi/ ‘nine nines are eighty-one’. But the word /trikkhe/occurs exactly once, in the line /tin trikkhe nay/ ‘three threesare nine’. The point we must focus on is how to relate S’s

lexical knowledge of the word /trikkhe/ ‘by three’ to herencyclopaedic knowledge of that line of the multiplication table.Can we tell one from the other?

We can certainly do it in principle. We can say /trikkhe/‘by three’ is one of the words in /tin trikkhe nay/ ‘three bythree is nine’. Two other words /tin/ ‘three’ and /nay/ ‘nine’occur in this sentence. Its syntactic format parallels all theother lines in the multiplication table. We can even imaginemodifications of the table. Under the counterfactual assumptionsof those imagined changes, /trikkhe/ would occur in other linesthat do not now exist in the culture. These conceivablemodifications make sense only because the lexical item /trikkhe/is identifiably distinct. If this reasoning is accepted, then theconcept of S’s lexical knowledge of /trikkhe/ counts asintelligible, and is distinguishable from S’s encyclopaedicmastery of that line in the table. Thus, even in this unusualcase of a particular word tied hand and foot to one sentence, thelexical item pays rent for a phono-syntactic room of its own inML(S, L).

These considerations set the stage for our proposal in thedomain of methodological reconfiguration. We suggest that theuniversalistic abstract enterprise of grammatical linguistics ormicrolinguistics focused on grammar and sidelining lexical-archival issues should associate speaker S’s IKR with the formalversion of S’s mental lexicon ML(S, L). The other side of ourproposal is that the particularistic concrete labour of situatedlinguistics or macrolinguistics that puts archival material firstand grammatical categorizations second should characterize S’sparticipation in SCA(L) on the basis of a substantive version ofS’s mental lexicon ML(S, L).

Methodologically, what does it mean to claim further thatgrammatical microlinguistics belongs to natural science andconcrete macrolinguistics to social science? That additionalclaim takes the form of continuing to associate abstractgrammatical linguistics with the instantaneous acquisition andhomogeneous speech community idealizations familiar from the

generative literature. In contrast, the new part of our proposalsays, a concrete or situated macrolinguistics can usefully followthe development of an iconic teenager. As we rationallyreconstruct her trajectory (see Dasgupta 2000 for one take onthis), the ideal-typical teenager is educated into sensitive,creative citizenship in a discursive community spatio-temporallydifferentiated into subcommunities, learns how to listen acrossdialect boundaries, and thus ends up anchoring her SCA(L) in aninclusive macro-archive SCA(S) accommodating community diversity.

As we sort out the theoretical implications of acting onproposal (1) so construed, we may wish to allocate explanatoryenergies to the natural science micro wing of such a linguisticendeavour and focus descriptive energies on the social sciencemacro sector. An inarticulate form of this move is alreadyavailable in certain grammatical descriptions. Linguists oftenclaim that their formal account explains the bulk of the data andthat a tiny enclave of special forms, artificially cultivated inthe culture and taught to speakers in the educational systemagainst the grain of natural language, resists formal explanationbecause it reflects cultural artifice. If we follow thisreasoning and make a whole sector of the enterprise responsiblefor culturally taught items in the language, we arrive at thefollowing division of labour. Grammatical microlinguists get todo all the formal explaining. Concrete macrolinguists describenot just the natural language patterns grammarians explain butalso the cultural patterns transmitted in the ideological system.This reallocation of explanatory and descriptive tasks is usefuland necessary. But it will hardly suffice.

One reason it will not suffice is that the relevant notionof dual (natural and cultural) description cannot be retrievedfrom the uncritical practices of most language describers. Fromthe very outset of the linguistic description enterprise, whenthe enlightenment oversaw the transition from Greco-Latin-inspired prescription to democratically minded description ofpopular practices in this domain, the notion of a descriptionvalid at the social rather than the individual level impliednormativity. In other words, at the level of the community of

speakers of L, the description of L involved the L-community’sprescribing unto itself the best normative coordinate systemaround which the variability of individual speakers S1, S2, S3would play out. It was to the linguist, the new grammarian, thatthe L-community delegated the nitty-gritty task of working outjust how this self-prescribing enterprise would proceed. If yourevisit that moment of formal and apparently neutral descriptionas a delegated self-prescription enterprise belonging to thelarger labour of setting up the democratic public space, you seeat once that modern linguistic description was part of the agendaof nationalism.

The presence of this default nationalism at the heart of thefoundational formulation of descriptivism is a matter that hasawaited theoretical clarification for centuries, and still awaitsit. The practices of linguists have been reasonably healthy.American structural linguistics worked closely with empoweringpractices in anthropology. When generativism broke thedisciplinary bond with anthropology, generativists in theiractual work continued to regard it a matter of tacit obligationthat native speakers of disenfranchised languages would be shownhow to place their data in the core corpus of generativism. Asfar as possible, departments and scholars have invested extraeffort to ensure that dying or weakened languages would be sodocumented as to maximally benefit the speech communities. Thisis not a case of teasing out tacit intentions. Noam Chomsky andRichard Kayne have both specifically stated this, in personalcommunication. What we need to respond to is the absence of suchspecifications in the theoretical articulations of contemporarylinguistics. Lack of goodwill is not the problem.

The community development task then has been allowed toremain at the ‘understood’ or tacit level. Its lack ofcodification has meant an elision of the social science componentof linguistics. This elision translates into a truncated diet onwhich linguistics coaches raise their young. We are now at apoint at which the formal linguistics training systems have beenaggressively disengaged from the social component of nationalismand from the various development doctrines that have taken over

after decolonization. This has been happening precisely when thecommunity is in crisis and urgently needs perceptive linguists,among others, to provide helpful commentary and something like arescue.

One aspect of the crisis comes from the fact that thecommunity of speakers of any language is typically a stretchedentity today. Centripetal members of the L-community live undercircumstances that most of the relevant observers identify ashome. They live in the core territory of the homeland andmaintain what count as the typical cultural practices of the L-community. Centrifugal members do business with the externalworld and for part of their biographies live in places far fromhome, in ambiences for which language L has no adequatevocabulary. The equation between centripetal and centrifugalexperiences of the community is a contested matter. Typicaldefinitions of what constitutes the community privilege thecentripetal members as real examples. Often, however, thenostalgia that foregrounds such images as the “heart” of thecommunity is most visible in centrifugal members wishing tocompensate for their weakened memories of the home. The Frenchthat Albert Camus learnt and cultivated in Algeria defined thecore anxiously and rigorously, while actual inhabitants of Pariswere straining at the leash and trying to break the norms.

Another dimension has to do with the Dalits of India’s manysocieties and corresponding ex-marginals in other countries wherea serious enterprise of undoing disenfranchisement is under way.And there must be other aspects of the crisis of the communitythat observers elsewhere will be able to articulate in ways thatcomplement this account.

Fortunately, linguistics does have resources, as we areabout to see, to provide helpful commentary and meet the crisishalf-way. Linguists need not rely exclusively on external socialcoordinates in order to engage with the polarizations that thiscontestation throws up. The terms of reference that drive formallinguistics itself give us an adequate basis for the necessaryintervention. In order to accommodate the diversity of points of

interest in formal linguistics, a fuller account would haveprovided several examples of what this basis might look like. Oneexample might come from the syntactic and semantic range ofanaphoric phenomena, where formal syntactic descriptions of thebinding-theoretic genre compete with descriptive resourcesprovided by pragmatics. Another example might pertain to theomissibility of non-subject arguments in clause structure, amatter that may or may not correlate with McLuhanesque culturalphenomena of the hot versus cool type, but has also been claimedfor syntax. The need to find a common focus that most readers arelikely to converge on leads us to concentrate here on issues oflexical economy.

Consider therefore the fact that the English verb weep hasthe irregular past form wept while the verb beep forms a regularpast, beeped. When we describe the fact that speakers of Englishdon’t say weeped, we often appeal to the concept of blocking. Wesay that the more specific, more particular form wept blocks theapplication of the more general schema that would have led toweeped. Chomsky (1995) proposed a generalization of blocking tosyntax, specifically suggesting that more economical derivationsblock less economical ones. This proposal would unify suchsyntactic blocking with standard morphological blocking under theassumption that using an irregular past form like wept, given theindependent lexical storage of the word wept, is more economicalthan having to apply the regular past tense schema to the baseweep and assemble a regular form like weeped. To be sure, thespecifics of Chomsky’s 1995 proposal cease to be directlyoperative in syntactic minimalism’s formal derivations once thephaseless numeration-based full-sentence derivational system isabandoned and the work of economy takes what is now called thethird factor on board, instead of staying focused on explanatoryadequacy considerations alone. However, the project offormulating a notion of economy that covers lexical blocking andsyntactic derivational economy clearly and uncontroversiallycontinues to drive the influential minimalist take on formallinguistics.

Now, notice that this familiar feature of the present-daytheoretical landscape of formal linguistics lends itself tointerpretation at the level that we are focusing on in thepresent intervention. Suppose we formulate this interpretation asa Lexical Particularization Principle:

(2) The Lexical Particularization Principle

The lexicon’s particularizations upstage the grammar’sgeneralizations.

The content of (2), as becomes obvious in the presentcontext, is that the economy of speaker S’s mental lexicon forlanguage L constitutively gives archival particularizationspriority over principled generalizations. But the other side ofthis coin is that formal principles, including principles ofeconomy, provide the means for speaker S’s mind to keep SCA(S) infocus (please revisit (1a) for the details of SCA(S)).

Linguists have known for a while that this economy is not aformal given mathematically deducible from first principles; itis an empirical issue. Rapid advances in linguistics have beenproviding clearer pictures of just what economy actually operatesin the way knowledge of language is stored and used. If thisonward march is to continue with clearer goals and methods, it isuseful to look at both the technical underpinnings of thisprogress and its material base.

Consider the technical underpinnings first. The adoption ofstandardized conceptual and notational apparatus in phonology, insyntax, and in semantics has accelerated advances in ourunderstanding, to the extent that the apparatus, especially thenotation, expresses what we take to be the operative economy ineach domain. Now, recent work has found it necessary to look atlexical items across languages and to raise questions of lexicaleconomy. The questions are of some theoretical importance; we dowish to know if (2) reduces to pragmatic principles of

conversational cooperation applied to the word level, forinstance. This research is handicapped, though, by the non-availability of a reasonable notation that would make it easierfor lexical researchers to compare notes across languages.

The problem is not that the conceptual apparatus is missing.On the contrary, Hale & Keyser (2002) formulate what has beenevolving into a consensual approach to the study of the syntax-lexicon interface, reinvigorating ideas first systematized byTesnière (1959). The difficulty is that Jay Keyser and the lateKen Hale have devised no notation that matches the specific needsof the enterprise they have initiated. Their mixture of syntactictree drawing, English glosses and technical labels, and objectlanguage words, though a useful toolkit in the absence ofanything better than their colleagues can use, does not add up toa representation of lexical patterns, posing importantoperational questions to which we return presently.

Let us now consider the material base for continued progressin our understanding of the principles of linguistic economy. Itis important to see that methodological issues are at stake here.As long as structural and early generative linguistics wasfocused on rules, it made sense to treat one’s data in terms ofregular facts fitting the rules and exceptions falling outsidethem. It also made sense to be satisfied with an account of ruletypes and to profess lack of interest in having too much data atone’s disposal. For we had no reason to be interested in theexceptions. But the last three decades of research have orientedus to principles rather than rules as the goal of thegeneralization enterprise. Now, principles, unlike rules, do notcreate exceptions as their systemic Other. Principles throw theconcept of exception into crisis.

The fundamental methodological point we wish to make at thelevel of the material base of our field is that a principledlinguistics is not entitled to say, “We have looked at so manylanguages that we must have explored all the rule types. We canclose our books now. Let us claim we have found reliable answersto major questions. Future discoveries will confirm our

generalizations, apart from a couple of glitches here or there.”Moving from rules to principles means that, for reasons ofprinciple, linguistics stays interested in data from alllanguages until the end of history. The kinds of interest andneglect that may have seemed rational before the digital erabecome scientifically irrational and socially unjust in a worldwhere textual data bases exist and have real effects.

It follows that our idiographic disposition of languagematerial will grow step by step with our nomothetic proposals asto what the right generalizations are. The question of the typesof economy that operate in the shaping of language getsrearticulated as these enterprises grow, if this exploration ofeconomy continues to link the idiographic sector of our work toits nomothetic sector in the ways just indicated. Logistic issuesarise. Saying what we are saying is all very well. How does allthis translate into practice? What will it mean for an enterpriseof exploring the notion of economy to link the idiographic andnomothetic sectors, especially if the nomoi, the generalizationsof the nomothetic wing, keep changing?

This is a question the relatively simplified picture of thenotion of economy invoked so far does not underwrite an answerto. We must in fact envisage a considerably richer exploration ofnotions of the “economy type”. Issues of optimality, naturalness,iconicity, basic level perception, the semiotics-pragmaticsinterface, metaphor, and the cognitive-affective interface willcome into play as inquiry forces the practitioners of each ofthese subenterprises to face results obtained by colleagues theyare waiting to find common ground with. The point is not to tryto second-guess at once what the picture of economy (or whateverit is called at that stage) will look like when everybody hasdone all the reading, the fantasy of the perfect university. Ifthe conjectures offered here have any reality, we will be lookingat an unmanaged set of enterprises in sectors as various ascommerce, industry, academia, government, and so forth, not asingle, manageable ship with clear rudders and captains. Theproject must involve establishing benchmarks, practices,criteria, that look reasonable to a variety of actors and will

support the accumulation of results and devices from multiplesources.

With these considerations in mind, we return to thetechnical underpinnings issue left pending earlier in thediscussion. Recall that we found that the Hale & Keyser toolkit,while it might be acceptable for the present disorganized stateof inter-lexical studies, looked like an obvious stopgap to beused as we awaited a major breakthrough.

Our concrete suggestion in the technical underpinningsdomain, which also provides a partial answer to the question ofhow to translate our theoretical initiative into a describablepractice, is based on the following example of what Hale &Keyser’s tools can do. Consider the Hale & Keyser analysis (2002:49, (7)) of the English verb phrase to bag the apples: V[ V[ bag1] P[DP[the apples] P[ P[t1] N[t1]]]]. The mechanism of Conflationconnects the sites marked by the numeral 1 in such a way that theelement bag in V, where it appears, conflates a prepositionalmeaning, roughly ‘in’, with a nominal meaning, roughly ‘bag’,under the aegis of an overriding verbal meaning that yields theoutcome ‘place in a bag’. Scholars who master the mechanics ofthe system operate it in the languages they deal with, and inEnglish as a glossing medium. But the fact that human beings donot speak in syntactic tree representations means that even ascholar who has really mastered the system does not developintuitions about which examples sound right and which ones do notat the level at which speakers of a language develop intuitivejudgments.

Now, notice that the normal word for the verb phrase to bagthe apples in the artificial language Esperanto is en-sak-ig-i lapomojn, where the constituents of the verb are a preposition en‘in’, a nominal root sak ‘bag’, a transitive verb formative ig ‘tocause, to make’, and an infinitival marker i. It requires littleeffort to imagine a world in which linguists who engage inlexical studies make it a professional point to learn basicEsperanto the way syntacticians learn how to draw trees andphonologists learn the IPA. In such a world, it becomes relevant

that even the artificial resources of Esperanto do not permit itsspeakers to insert the numeral tri ‘three’ or kvar ‘four’ and sayen-tri-sak-ig-i or en-kvar-sak-ig-i to convey the meaning ‘load intothree/four bags’. These words that one could conceivably createon the basis of the resources of Esperanto, while one would beable to process them with some analytical effort, sound unnaturaland are never used. An interlexical researcher for whom Esperantois the default tool of lexical structure representation is led tothe prediction (confirmed cross-linguistically, but I could bewrong) that no language allows you to speak of three-bagging theapples or four-bagging the apples. In contrast, a user of the Hale &Keyser machinery as it stands would have no intuitive basis formaking such a prediction.

To be sure, it would be unreasonable to suggest thatEsperanto vocabulary could simply replace the Hale & Keysermachinery. Tesnière’s original proposals, which may (at severalremoves) have partly inspired the Hale & Keyser generation of theinterlexical studies enterprise, represented a formal unpackingof what the form of Esperanto words had suggested to him. We donot doubt that some technical apparatus is required. Oursuggestion is that Esperanto lexical material be used as ananchor and as the default neutral medium of lexical contentrepresentation. The patterns of admissible and inadmissibleEsperanto words would then give concreteness to the linguist’sintuitive hunches and suggest lines of inquiry.

Thematizing equitable archiving practices

Coupled with this technical advantage of the proposedadoption of Esperanto as an interlexical representation tool isthe fact that a lot of actual lexicography interfacing manylanguages with Esperanto is already in place, and theinsufficiently appreciated fact that this lexicography comes fromthe standpoint of scholars working for equity in the practices oftextual traffic and archiving. A reconfigured linguistics givingEsperanto the role we are proposing would be able to buy intothese practices.

We have stressed the similarity between the interlexicalresearch tool Esperanto and the intersyntactic research device oftree-drawing. These are indeed similar when we regard them asnotations embodying certain notions of syntactic and lexicaleconomy. But they are distinct to the extent that Esperanto alsoexpresses an ideological economy, not just a formal conception.It seems likely that criticism of our proposals will largelyarise from ideological assumptions. Why, critics will ask, issuch adoption of Esperanto not going to strengthen a newhegemonic standpoint?

We would like to make two relevant points here, withoutelaboration that would make the present argument far heavier thanany reader’s attention span would be able to handle. Our firstpoint is that Esperanto structure encourages conceptual analysisworking hand in hand with formal analysis, as in skrib-il-o‘writing-implement’, skrib-il-ar-o ‘writing-implement-set,stationery’, skrib-il-ar-ej-o ‘writing-implement-set-place,stationery shop’. Consequently, Esperanto as an encoding deviceencourages the archivist to gloss a word like analiz-o ‘analysis’as dis-er-ig-o ‘separate-constituent-activity, an activity thatseparates into constituents’ or a word like sub-trah-i ‘tosubtract’ as de-pren-i ‘away.from-take-infinitive, to take awayfrom’. This makes the use of Esperanto especially suitable at atime when the international community intends to undo thedisenfranchisement of many currently still marginalized citizens.Individuals who need substantive and not just formal access tothe discursive network must receive help not just from helpfulpersons, but from helpful dualities in the structure where theycan niche themselves at various stages of acquiring andmaintaining membership of the community of learners. Esperantoprovides a relatively diffuse and analytical lexical take on therepresentations involved and yet does not impose principlesmaking compact-erudite words unintelligible (for this purpose itsuffices that there are some compact words like analiz-ocorresponding to diffuse-analytical unpackings like dis-er-ig-o).Thus, the use of Esperanto as a general glossing device inlexical archives, once it is entrenched, increases serious access

to the archives for such marginal members as India’s Dalits, whoneed systemic help in order to enter the discourse.

The second point is that the very constructedness ofEsperanto changes one’s notions of economy in an anti-hegemonicdirection. Imagine a generation of scholars brought up usingEsperanto as an interlexical research tool, a generation forwhich the archives postulated in the schematization at (1) havebecome a digital reality. Such a generation E, as we may callthem, will regard every standard written language as a codifiedconstruction designed to meet specific social needs. Generation Ewill take as a given the example of Esperanto, initially proposedand negotiated and later constantly renegotiated as a norm.Consequently generation E will take it as a default, as a matterof course, that linguistic codes in all societies shoulddemonstrably meet social needs, and that, if this match betweenneeds and resources stops being optimal at any time, the codeshould be renegotiated with marginals and others. Thisrenegotiability norm must exert unrelenting pressure if thenotion of design is to be taken seriously, if the digital worldis not to lapse into an elite-managed order of money andhereditary hierarchical power.

The notion of equitable archiving practices reflects theseideas. Early modernization endeavours had made the imperialistmistake of thrusting a narrowly conceived neo-classical canon onvictim societies and in the other direction of objectifying thevictim cultures into frozen, dissectable forms and of reducingcultural analysis to such objectification. As we learnt how tooutgrow “the indignity of speaking for others”, accountabilityhas grown. Orientalism in the old sense has stopped beingpossible. But the archive-maintaining habit of the orientalistenterprise, and the archives of languages spoken in non-metropolitan societies that that enterprise has preserved withcare, can become valuable again in our new context.

Let us work with a brief outline of the relevant moments inthis trajectory. Postmodernism has effectively questioned allcanons that pretend to represent the natural order and all

coalitions between power and knowledge. We who must learn fromthis can build a transmodern sequel. Our transmodern enterprisemust return to the labour of building archives, of providingenlightenment where and when needed, while observing precautionsto prevent familiar maladies from reappearing. Modernity oncesought to extract rules from chaos and to project the human orderas natural. The postmodern moment, reacting, emphasized howconstructed all natural-looking forms of order actually were. Nowthat this lesson has sunk in, transmodern practices can orientthemselves both to social constructions and to the limited butreal natural factors that make certain constructions possible andothers impossible. The practical mediation associating the modernfocus on nature with the postmodern focus on constructedness is areinvented notion of economy, one that refuses the old managerialcentralizations and relies on user-designed codifications. Thepoint of these transmodern practices is to ensure that, aspeople’s needs change, negotiation will reshape the resources tofit new needs, and to refine everybody’s sense of this notion offit. Only a democratic discourse, giving everybody a chance tohear the voices of relevant others, and yet avoiding a chaos thatdrowns every voice in an information deluge, will enable us toimprove our understanding of needs, of resources, and of thesocial activity of fitting one to the other. Our quest here isfor a proper use of Esperanto, a democratic discourse tool, tooptimize our understanding and our practices in this domain.

We cannot, in these remarks, explore the more far-reachingmodifications of current linguistic description practices thatare called for. Our point has been to identify a process thatwill introduce the necessary modifications incrementally, as theparticipants come to see them as necessary. Perhaps we need todraw the attention of aficionados of the old order to someproblems, however, lest they think that the status quo iscompatible with the points we are making. Globally speaking, thelinguistics that still prevails, despite important disavowals,continues to assume that describers can unproblematicallyidentify a manageably small set of native speakers of language Land use their judgments as a basis for specifying the content ofL, first, grammatically, as grammatical principles are

systematic, and second, lexically, since lexical facts areidiosyncratic and irregular. This essentially grammar-focusedstructural linguistics leaves a sociolinguistics as a residue tosweep up some diversities and commonalities that this approachleaves undescribed, treating as marginal the speakers that onechose not to consult.

It is important to notice that such a metropolitanlinguistics assumes an elite-managed public space, does businesswith that elite, and sidelines communities as well as theplurality of self-perceptions. In sharp contrast to that mind-set, many of us in the societies of the South have been compelledby our own realities to face more clearly the fact that speechcommunities socially acknowledge their own heterogeneity andcomplexity. Once linguistics officially allows the native speakerto locate herself in her community’s heterogeneous self-perceptions, the grammatical task of being faithful to herjudgments will become correspondingly more complex.

To compress one thread of future argumentation, we proposethat the rebooting of linguistics that has to come about canaccept as a point of departure the work of Ashok R. Kelkar (1997)whose unusual book on language and on Marathi proposes a newmodel of what may be usefully called a lexical linguistics. Ourpoint is that a community-based macro-linguistics can betheorized as putting the archive first and the grammar second. Ifwe image the community’s self-perceptions as lexically based(this is surely only an approximation), the methodologicalproposal is that such a lexical linguistics managed locally atthe community level needs to be envisaged as an enterprisecomplementary to a grammatical linguistics working with thestandard globalization of the syntax and phonology industries. Soconfigured, lexical linguistics can revitalize the long neglectedinterface between language studies and literary studies on thebasis of a concern with traditions and other local continuities.Globalized enterprises are ill-equipped to address theseconcerns, despite the global consensus about their significance.

We hardly need to make this point for readers aware of thevalue of orientalist research. The strength of the old-fashionedorientalist study of specific areas lies in the fact thatscholars trained in that tradition have never fallen into thetrap of worshipping globalized enterprises claiming to beanchored in an autonomous, a priori theory. As we close thesereflections, we reaffirm the value of the work done by Northernacademics on the languages of certain societies of the Southunder the methodological assumptions of Orientalism. We rejoiceat the continued vitality of those traditions of research. Wenote that the reconfigurations of the digital age providespecific academic opportunities in the context of the globalreconstruction of the public space within and across nationalboundaries, and that linguistics and Esperanto, between the twoof them, give us the resources to make good use of theseopportunities.

Colophon

This text was first presented as an invited talk at theUniversity of Helsinki’s Department of General Linguistics in2005.

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