User:Juniper Branchflower/sandbox

Ideas for Roy Harris article improvement for ENGL612

Add content beyond the basics of birthdate and academic career timeline. Provide comprehensive information about his philosophy of language/communication. Provide opposing views from respected scholars in the field. Provide information about his students and followers.

The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form, among speakers of a language or languages. Prestige varieties are those varieties which are generally considered, by a society, to be the most correct or otherwise superior variety for a given situation or sociopolitical context. The prestige variety, in many cases, is considered to be the standard form of the language. Prestige varieties do not exhibit features, grammatically speaking, which prove them superior in terms of logic, efficacy or aesthetics(Preston). They are the language varieties of prestigious social classes (Labov).Therefore, prestige varieties of a given language community or nation-state may operate as symbols or instruments of political power.

The terms and conditions of prestige assigned to a language variety are subject to change depending on speaker, situation and context. A dialect or variety which is considered prestigious in one context will not carry the same status in another. The relative status of language varieties according to audience, situation and other contextual elements is known as covert prestige.(trudgill)

some possible articles to cite for the improvement of this article:

Wodak, R., Johnstone, B. & Kerswill, P. (2011). The SAGE handbook of sociolinguistics London: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: 10.4135/9781446200957

Labov, W. (2006). The social stratification of English in New York city. Cambridge University Press.

Eckert, Penelope, and Rickford, John R., eds. Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 26 October 2016.

Rough Draft/Outline for Roy Harris page improvements for ENGL612

Roy Harris (24 February 1931 - 9 February 2015) was Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He was professor of Romance Languages at Oxford from 1967-1977. He also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

He was a founding member of the International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication (IAISLC) and founding editor of the journal Language & Communication.

Harris is well known for developing Integrational Linguistics, a theory of language that considers language to be among many semiological forms used for communication rather than a separate rule-bound system. Language, according to an integrationist view, is not a fixed code transferred between users. Rather, it is a creative process unfolding in real time that cannot be adequately understood outside of the context of its creation.

Integrational Linguistics rejects theories of telementation that seek to describe language as a fixed, rule-bound code that is transferred from speaker to listener. Also rejected by integrationism are reocentric understandings of language that suppose words stand in for objects outside the speaker’s experience of reality or for thoughts in the mind (Hutton  2011). Integrationism seeks to reform what Harris termed ‘orthodox’ linguistics which treats language as an autonomous subject that can be abstracted and separated from speakers, hearers, contexts and temporal reality (Hutton 2011). Orthodox linguistics categorizes and separates by establishing categories of study such as pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, and phonetics. This parsing out and separating, Harris called segregationism. Harris sees flaw in further separation between linguistics and surrounding disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, etc.

According to integrationist principles, the separation of linguistic phenomena into distinct parts of study is a fundamental error in the conceptualization of language. In The Language Myth, Harris postulates that the isolation and subsequent segregational approach of orthodox linguistics is a result of the fact of language itself being the descriptive medium for it’s own study. A problem arises when we consider words as stand-ins for things. When we then have a word for a language, the word misleads us to consider languages to be things out there in the world rather than real time, second order processes undergoing consent adjustment. Harris critically examined foundational works in the field of linguistics particularly, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale) which itself questioned thinking about language as a static entity.

An integrationist perspective believes communicational processes are a stream of ever-changing reference points of which we are all a part. We can never examine language from outside of this stream of language, therefore, we are all participants in the process of language creation in real time. Meaning is refreshed and recreated with each interaction since the particulars of any given language situation are infinite and impossible to foresee. As such, meaning is “always now.” (Toolan 1996). Language, according to integrationism, is interaction. Linguistic meaning occurs between speakers, not in the mind of one speaker who can transpose the meaning by fixed code into another’s mind.

The work of Harris and his followers is controversial among Linguists and in other fields of study as well since it asks for a reexamination of the role we have given language in our understanding of them. If language and languages are not fixed entities, but rather negotiated real time events that unfold within unpredictable contexts, then other areas of study which have mistaken words for representations of things, are subject to the same mythbusting language study has undergone at the hands of Integrationism. History, Art, Science, and Psychology are all areas Harris and his band of Integrationists have stirred by reconsidering these fields as second order ideas rather than certain things containing certain facts about reality.

Further Possible Expansions:

Super Categories and Broader Implications

Speech Act Thoerists and Integrationism

Speech and Writing ala Harris

Arts and Sciences under Integrationism

Links to add:

create IAISLC page (possibly)

http://www.integrationists.com

https://www.facebook.com/IAISLC/