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193 REIFICATION
Turns of phrase like Schibsbye’s (1970: 37) ‘The subjunctive in principal
clauses cannot be said to be living in modern English’ are in principle better,
since they allow us to understand them as ‘in modern English usage’, but even
they reify ‘English’ as opposed to the forms produced by English speakers or
the speakers themselves. A formulation such as Gimson’s (1962: 158) ‘Some
RP speakers will also use [ʔ] to replace /t/ . ..’clearly shows where the variation
(in this case) arises: with the speakers. (Gimson also uses other formulations,
of course.)
How important is all this? As long as one is aware of the reification, it is probably
not very important. But it is easy to lose track of the fact that one is dealing
with a reification, and then it can be important. For example, if we say ‘New
Zealand English is in the process of merging the near and the square vowels’
we get a rather different picture from if we say ‘Speakers of New Zealand
English are less and less likely to distinguish the near and square vowels.’ Only
in the latter case do we see a reason to ask, ‘Why should people behave in this
way?’ Asking why language changes in a particular way might be seen as a very
different question, with a different set of possible answers. So there are times
when it is valuable to remind ourselves that a language such as English or
German or Japanese is a reification of an abstract idea.
It is probably less of a problem to remind ourselves that theoretical constructs
such as the Right-hand Head Rule or Move-Alpha or a particular morphophonemic
transcription are equally abstract constructs. While we remain
aware of them as hypotheses, or structures and concepts generated within a
particular theory, there is little danger of misusing them. If we start to think of
them as realities which inhabit the world of linguistics, there is the potential for
problems to arise.
The result is that a statement such as ‘English has /p/’ is a theory-laden
statement. It presents a reification of English, it assumes a notion of a
phoneme, which it assumes has some kind of reality, and it assumes the correctness
of a classification in which ‘p’ is meaningful. Every one of these
assumptions has been challenged at some point. If we don’t make assumptions
about our theoretical bases, on the other hand, it becomes extremely difficult
to talk about things at all. ‘Speakers of English have been observed to used a
[p]-sound contrastively’ is not only far more long-winded than ‘English has
/p/’, it fails to cancel all of the assumptions in that shorter statement.
Reification is unavoidable; at times, making a deliberate effort to overcome the
reification can be a useful thing to do.
References
Gimson, A. C. (1962). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London:
Arnold.