Episode 34: Choose Your Own Adventure

Structured Visions

I move from computer programmes to choose-your-own-adventure novels this week: metaphors abound to explore the idea of language/grammar as a system. Systems can be understood as complex matrices of choices at various levels of complexity. At the phonological level of a language, you can understand the difference between the words pat and bat in terms of whether your vocal cords vibrate when you pronounce the first consonant in each word. If you choose voiced (+voice), you get ‘bat’; voiceless (-voice) gives you ‘pat’. These tiny distinctions between phonemes make it possible for the phonemes to recombine in different ways to produce lots of different words.

How about the choices that can be made at higher levels of grammatical structure? What about the difference between active and passive voice in a clause? Think about Nicole’s story:

I had a car. It got wrecked. My dad wouldn’t get me another one.

Why wasn’t Nicole’s story something like this?

My dad gave me a car. I wrecked it. So he wouldn’t get me another one.

I argue that there’s more going on here than just two different construals of the same event. Consider this: using a voiceless bilabial stop (/p/), rather than a voiced bilabial stop (/b/) at the beginning of a word can produce a different word (‘pat’ rather than ‘bat’). Similarly, I’d say, the use of the passive voice in Nicole’s story produces a different world. It produces, in other words, a slight but significant difference in how the social world is configured. The participants in the two stories appear in different positions, they relate to each other differently, their social responsibilities are different.

The idea that different grammatical choices can produce different worlds makes it possible to explore the many different configurations of social structure that might be possible. That’s an adventure worth choosing! Next week we’ll explore more of these differently structured worlds.

Download Episode 34: Choose Your Own Adventure.