LINGUSTIC 2 : The Object Called "Language" and the Subject of Linguistics Asif Agha Journal of English Linguistics
The Object Called "Language" and the Subject of Linguistics Asif Agha Journal of English Linguistics
2007; 35; 217 DOI: 10.1177/0075424207304240
The online version of this article can be found at: http://eng.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/3/217
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Journal of English Linguistics Volume 35 Number 3 September 2007 217-235 The Object Called “Language”
© 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/0075424207304240 http://eng.sagepub.com and the Subject of Linguistics
hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Asif Agha University of Pennsylvania
Review
Linguistics is not simply “whatever linguists do.” In fact most of the activities in which linguists engage (e.g., driving to work, paying taxes) never count as linguistics. Activities that count as linguistics are activities oriented to particular objects of study, institutionalized audiences (journals, conferences), units of affiliation (departments, associations), and traditions of inquiry (a reference literature). The writer more specific goal is to invite to consider some problems that emerge when a certain kind of object that exists in our world an everyday, social fact called “language” is epistemically reconstituted by disciplinary agendas that focus on a select number of its features as extractable fractions, and, by taking them as objects of study, seek performatively to constitute themselves as unified disciplines. In what follows, writer use the determiner-specific expressions “the language,” “that language,” “a language,” “some language,” “any language” as well as the plural “languages” to refer to one or more of the kinds of sociohistorical formations that we ordinarily refer to as Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, or Tagalog. Language in this sense is the business of everyone. All of our affairs are conducted in it, are organized by it, are shaped and enabled through its uses. This has the important consequence that the study of any aspect of human affairs can be illuminated by the study of language, provided that writer have a useful set of models that serve analytically as “bridging constructs” that is, provide a revealing link or connection between some observable feature of language and the realm of human affairs that it informs. Linguists of a certain type might well say, “That’s not linguistics.” But no one cares. For the reciprocal fact is this: the “linguistic turn” is an orientation to the linguistic aspect of human affairs not toward what happens in departments of linguistics. It is evident that the two epistemic projects I have just discussed both exist as forms of “doing linguistics” today, though in somewhat distinct institutional zones of the twenty-first century academy. I have argued that this institutional context is defined partly by what practitioners in adjacent disciplines pursue as their objects of study. But it is also a context that unfolds as a future through the training of students.
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