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Reification
The Macquarie Dictionary (3rd edition) defines reify as ‘to convert into or
regard as a concrete thing’. Where linguistics is concerned, the problem is
regarding the constructs of linguists as concrete objects which have a reality
independent of the linguists who thought them up. Nowhere is that tendency
stronger than with the notion of languages.
One of the differences between a lay approach to the notion of a language
like German and that of the linguist is that lay people tend to imagine languages
having a definition ‘out there’. Linguists, on the other hand, see a language like
German being made up of such agreement as there is between those people
who believe that they are speaking and listening to German. In this latter view,
it is very difficult to point to something and say ‘that is the German language’,
though easy to point to something and say ‘that is a use of German’. Part of the
distinction between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to language lies in
whether we believe that there is some external reality to which we can refer for
how ‘the language’ ought to be. Most linguists would say there is no such external
authority except an artificial one imposed by a certain class of speakers. To
find out what the language is like, we have to observe the behaviour of its speakers.
If speakers of English say It is me, then It is me is part of the English language,
even if some self-appointed guardians tell us that we ought to prefer It
is I. (See further, section 1.)
But even linguists reify languages. We find statements like ‘English has no
future tense’ (Palmer 1971: 193), ‘German is a V2 language’, or ‘Our primary
concern . . . is to describe the grammar of English’ (Quirk et al. 1985: 14). Most
of the time, this is probably a harmless enough metaphor. But it does set up languages
as realities. Formulations such as ‘English does not allow us to . ..’are
worse. Here the language is not only reified but in some sense made animate.