The Grammar of Social Science PDF

Acta Sociologica
http://asj.sagepub.com
The Grammar of Social Science

Hans L. Zetterberg
Acta Sociologica 2006; 49; 245
DOI: 10.1177/0001699306067706
The online version of this article can be found at:

http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/3/245
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Nordic Sociological Association
Additional services and information for Acta Sociologica can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://asj.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Downloaded from http://asj.sagepub.com by Roli Talampas on May 31, 2008

© 2006 Scandinavian Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
ACTA SOCIOLOGICA 2006
HIGHLIGHTING SCANDINAVIAN SOCIOLOGY
The Grammar of Social Science

Hans L. Zetterberg
Bromma, Sweden
abstract: Claude Lévi-Strauss hinted that society was like a language. Kenneth
Pike’s distinction between emic and etic vernaculars probes the relation between
the language in a society and the language of social science. Our thesis is that etic
scholarly language that classifies social reality is synonymous with some deep
linguistic structure (in Noam Chomsky’s sense) of everyday emic language, in some
measure unconscious for the user, but discoverable by science. Adding insights of
Charles Morris and Charles Stevenson, we maintain that language becomes differ-
entiated into descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive usages, each of which contains
executive and emotive components. Such a language can codify societal orders,
represent riches, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness and
express virtues. It can be subject to the operations of the common language of
sciences, i.e. logics, mathematics and statistics. It opens an easy door to social struc-
turation and can rephrase dramas of human life.
keywords: deep structures ◆ linguistics ◆ philosophical pragmatism ◆ social

reality ◆ structuration
Emic and etic language

What is the difference between ordinary language in a society and the language used by
scientists, scholars and critics in their study of that society? Anthropologists have contributed
to our understanding of this issue by developing a distinction proposed by the linguist
Kenneth L. Pike (1954) between emic and etic language. The state of the art was illustrated in
1988 in a four-hour debate before an audience of 600 members of the American Anthropolog-
ical Association, later published in a book edited by Headland et al. (1990).
Emic sentences are those that tell how the world is seen by a particular people who live in
it. These sentences consist of verbalized beliefs, values, standards, techniques, et cetera.
Studies based solely on participation use only emic sentences and result in emic propositions
and conclusions.
Etic sentences, by contrast, contain additional information besides emic communications.
They are sentences of an observer or analyst rather than of a mere participant. They form the
language of science, scholarship and cultural criticism rather than that of mere reporting by a
participant.
Etic observation may contradict emic truths. The Aztec religion in pre-Columbian Mexico was
a solar religion. The sun god was the source of life. Belief in him incited the Aztecs to dominate
their region as the sun dominated the sky. This sun god required a daily human sacrifice from
the Aztecs if he was to return with light and warmth each day. Such were their emic truths.
The invading Spaniards with roots in medieval Catholicism might well have known of the
sacrificial rites of Abraham and Jesus and others. But the Aztec sacrifices were alien. Moreover,
Acta Sociologica ◆ September 2006 ◆ Vol 49(3): 245–256 ◆ DOI: 10.1177/0001699306067706

Copyright © 2006 Nordic Sociological Association and SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com
Acta Sociologica 49(3)
the navigators and officers from the Spanish ships that had crossed the Atlantic with the
Spanish invaders of the Aztec region were accustomed to thinking differently about the
movements of the celestial bodies. Their etic conclusion was that the Aztecs were wrong;
the sun would rise without a human sacrifice. Their grounded disbelief in Aztec magic gave
them a sense of superiority, a common sentiment when Europeans ventured to new worlds in
the era of colonialism.
Marvin Harris requires that the analyst also be an observer, not just a participant.
An emic sentence can be proven wrong if it can be shown that it contradicts the participants’ sense
that entities and events are similar or different, real, meaningful, significant, or appropriate. . . . Etic
statements cannot be proven wrong if they do not conform to the participants’ sense of what is signifi-
cant, real, meaningful, or appropriate. They can only be proven wrong by the failure of empirical
evidence gathered by observers to support the statement in question. (1999: 31–2)
Not everyone agrees with Harris. We can distinguish four positions or research strategies
for emic and etic material.
A first position refers to the scientific method as used in the natural sciences and some social
science, such as economics. The researcher may use emic language only if it is confirmed by
observation and/or is consistent with propositions that can be confirmed by other researchers
using the scientific method. This is also the position of Harris.
A second position is an acceptance of those etic sentences in analyses that are consistent
with the researcher’s intellectual tradition of choice. This pre-chosen tradition may be
Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Thomism, or some other. A Marxist may, for example,
reject certain emic reports from the field as ‘false consciousness’ while accepting others as
relevant information about class relations.
A third position refers to post-structuralist philosophy. It dismisses the need for any etic
considerations in analyses. It stays entirely with emic expressions. Many modern ethnographic
museums take this view, thus attempting to present exhibits without what they see as the bias
of Western interpretations.
A fourth position explores the possibility that the emic language actually contains a deep
structure that is the appropriate etic language for the proper study of mankind.
All these positions have some merits. The fourth one is a line of reasoning that is least self-
evident, and it is the one we will explore as a promising strategy in the social sciences. The
young Lévi-Strauss was a proponent of this research strategy. He often hinted that society was
like language. With enthusiasm he tackled primitive thought – with all its emic sentences – to
unearth the structure of societies. He was criticized for looking for the foundations and scaf-
foldings of society in language. Anthony Giddens (1987: 195) even declared that ‘structural-
ism, and post-structuralism also, are dead traditions of thought’. Later in life, Lévi-Strauss
tuned down his claim that the key to society was language, but he never abandoned his view.
Giddens’ judgment may be premature. Maybe it is true that Lévi-Strauss’s (1958, 1962:
206–31) insistence on recording and analysing most every myth in primitive thought is too long
a detour to reach the goals of social science. However, our ambition may still be to find a deep
structure in societies, in some measure unconscious for the user, but discoverable by science.
Enter la langue
Our understanding and use of symbols rests not only on what is manifest – the symbol-act
and its context – but also on something that is absent from view or hearing. There are hidden
semantic and syntactical codes embedded in symbols that are essential to an understanding
of them. Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), who inspired Lévi-Strauss, identified a nearly total
arbitrariness of signs, but he found little arbitrariness in the way signs combined into
246
Zetterberg: The Grammar of Social Science
sentences. While the number of symbols is virtually indefinite, the number of rules to combine
them into sentences is limited. These rules are systemic rather than concrete. They form la
langue rather than la parole, to use De Saussure’s classical distinction. A system of symbols
(la langue) is known only from the study of the actual and concrete use of its symbols (la
parole). But the use of symbols (la parole) is efficient communication only if it conforms,
however roughly, to the rule-governed system of symbols (la langue). Langue and parole
presuppose one another.
Languages produce the babble in Babel’s tower. However, in the past century linguists have
brought order into this chaos. Out of their controversies and agreements we can distil two
essential theses, both credited to Noam Chomsky.
Ordinary languages consist of a limited number of parts: nouns in the form of objects (e.g.
books), or in the form of persons (e.g. students), adverbs (slowly), adjectives (difficult), verbs
(read), auxiliary verbs (should), et cetera. However, the number of possible unique combina-
tions of them is very large. Most combinations make no sense: for example, ‘books students
slowly difficult read should’ are six words that can enter into hundreds of different combina-
tions. The exact number is calculated as multiplication 1 2 3 4 5 6 = 720, or
expressed in factorial mathematics: 6!=720. But at least one combination of 720 makes sense:
Students should read difficult books slowly. Why does this particular combination make
sense? It happens to follow the rules of langue, de Saussure would say, but the sentence would
also be understood when pronounced in sloppy parole. Noam Chomsky specified the relevant
rules in two major research steps: the younger Chomsky (1955) with a theory of generative
grammar and the older Chomsky (1981) with the so-called Principles and Parameters model
(P&P).
Rules of langue are necessary. Six words gave 720 possible combinations. When a child has
learned 60 words, something that usually happens before two years of age, the number of
possible combinations is 8 320 987 112 741 390 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
The rules of langue may remain hidden or ‘unconscious’. You may follow them without
being aware of them. Millions of people speak in perfectly understandable ways without any
conscious knowledge of the rules of any syntax. And even people who have no formal
knowledge of the rules may become dismayed (or amused) when someone breaks them in his
speech.
Inside man there is a set of recipes, or rules of thumb, to cook new sentences, some unheard
of, from the words we know. Linguists – also the young Chomsky – call this set of rules a
‘generative grammar’. A generative grammar is not a school grammar prescribing traditional
and polite writing. It is a programme for producing understandable speech from a vocabu-
lary and to understand the same speech when spoken by others.
Children pay attention not only to the images associated with words and to the synonyms
of words, but also to the way adults order the common features of their language. Thus
children learn not only a vocabulary; they also develop (‘grow’) a grammatical system to use
the vocabulary. The first Chomsky thesis is that human children are born with the ability to
infer the rules from his or her symbolic environment. They come to use this unconscious gener-
ative grammar because they have an inherited ability to do so. Here is the explanation why
young children may say ‘I have monies’ and ‘We buyed candy’ instead of ‘I have money’ and
‘We bought candy’. They have deduced the rules from their symbolic environment but not yet
found out about exceptions to the rules.
There is a parallel here between eyes and ears. The physical environment – matter of
different kinds and/or waves of different lengths – seems almost infinite in its variety. It is
remarkable but true that the pre-language brain finds a structure in this environment mediated
by the eyes so that we can see contours, shades, colours, movements and depth. And it is even
247
more remarkable that the language brain of humans finds a structure in the symbolic environ-
ment mediated by the ears so we can understand and speak a language. The parallel between
sight and sound, picture and word, fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein as a young man. He hit
the nail on its head in 1922 when he wrote that our thoughts and representations are best
understood as pictures of the way things are (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.1).
There are some 6000 known languages. The various languages, as the old grammarians
noted, have common features in that they have parts of speech such as nouns, adjectives,
verbs, et cetera. The ordering of these features into 6000 generative grammars differs
somewhat between languages, but not very much. In English we do not say ‘Knows Erland
how to sail a boat?’ English verbs (except do and be and auxiliary verbs) are put after the
subject: ‘Does Erland know how to sail a boat?’ In French you may put the verb before
the subject: ‘Erland sait-il naviguer un bateau?’ In German, the verb at times is put last in the
sentence: ‘Weisst Erland wie man einen Boot segeln kann?’
These differences do not change the fact that English, French and German all have subjects
and verbs and other standard features of language, and each has a consistent order that applies
to them. The young Chomsky advanced the thesis that the different generic grammars are in
fact variations on a single common prototype, a Universal Grammar. Given the huge number
of possible combinations of words, the differences between various generative grammars are
trivial. The Universal Grammar represents an overwhelming communality between them. In
Chomsky’s P&P model, the language facility is seen, not as generative grammars being vari-
ations of universal one, but as general principles of mankind’s biological language faculty,
plus a relatively short range of options (parameters) from a subpart of the lexicon and from
peripheral parts of the phonology. Any language is fully determined by the choice of values
for these parameters. The model shows that the many possible human languages can be
reduced to a limited number of fixed and invariant principles with limited options of variation.
Here we have the rules of any and all human symbolic environments. The proverbial visitor
from Mars with his special intelligence knows that the parts of speech in the languages of the
universe combine in a huge number of ways and that the rules of combination are legion. But
he would immediately hear that all earthlings, in spite of their varied vocabularies, use one
and the same set of dimensions in making their combinations, but give or take some local
differences in the values they assign to the dimensions.
To summarize the two Chomsky theses in our own words:
• The language brain of a young human being can infer the rules of a surrounding symbolic
environment.
• These rules are variations in the values attached to a limited set of dimensions in a language
instinct that is common to all mankind.
Although Chomsky does not think so, there are good reasons to believe that the language
instinct has evolved through natural selection, as have all other complex organs and hard
wirings in the brain (Pinker, 1994). So far, we do not have any other scientific explanation for
the emergence of organs other than the one Charles Darwin provided. Natural selection may
also be an explanation of the special ability of children to learn language. And, if mankind has
a common root in Africa, the important initial values of the dimensions of all languages of all
human earthlings may also have been set there.
The uses of symbols

No universal theory of society has (as yet) developed out of the discoveries of the universal
nature of languages. To achieve such a theory we must know the universal usages of language,
in addition to the universal nature of language. From pragmatic philosophers we may,
248
however, learn about the usage of sentences in human interaction and discourse. Their distinc-
tions may guide us to a general theory of society.
American philosophical pragmatism is a broad intellectual tent raised by Charles S. Peirce
(1839–1914). In it we find some well-known scholars who have significantly shaped the study
of society: Oliver Wendell Holms (jurisprudence), William James (religion), John Dewey
(education), George Herbert Mead (social psychology). We shall here look at some ideas of a
less known pragmatic philosopher, Charles Morris. To my knowledge he is the first to divide
the actual use of language into a universal classification and specify the most general usages
of signs and symbols: ‘These usages may be called in order the informative, the valuative, the
incitive, and the systemic uses of signs. These are the most general sign usages; other usages
are subdivisions and specializations of these four’ (Morris, 1946: 95, italics in original). The
informative category may have its root in what Peirce in his Harvard lectures (1903/1935)
called ‘indicative mode’ and the incitive category is his ‘imperative mode’. Morris’s fourth
category, the systemic use of language, is not separate from the three others. Nothing can be
systemic that is not originally informative, valuative and/or incitive. The systemic is an
attribute of the other three basic usages of communication. It is the attribute of rationalism.
Morris obfuscated his big discovery by trying to cross-classify his universal uses of language
with the grammatical modes of the language (1946: 125 f.). This produced a confusing 16-fold
classification that nobody except possibly a few students of rhetoric have appreciated. The
French linguist François Bally had already in 1913 shown that this was questionable. When
we say ‘It is raining’, we may actually communicate ‘It is now raining’, i.e. something inform-
ative; or, ‘The weather is bad’, i.e. something valuative, or, ‘Shut the window!’ i.e. something
incitive (Bally, 1913: 23). To understand a communication we have to know about the context
in which it occurs. Given such knowledge of the context, it is usually possible to place any
communicative act in the appropriate category, and above all to understand the intention of
a communication.
Another American philosopher of the same period and in the same tradition of pragma-
tism, Charles Stevenson (1944), clarified another attribute of language by penetrating its
emotive component. In Peirce (1907/1935, para. 475) this was called ‘the emotional intrerpre-
tant’. The appearance and presence of Romeo arouses Julia’s emotive reaction, and Romeo has
a similar reaction when Julia appears. Soon, however, the very names ‘Romeo’ and ‘Julia’
become loaded with emotion, also when their bearers are not on the scene. When words get
an emotive component Stevenson talks about their ‘independent emotive meaning’. Indepen-
dent emotive components of opinions, attitudes and behaviour received a first systematic
study by Himmelstrand (1960).
The American pragmatic philosophers corrected earlier, more simple-minded, versions of
the philosophy of language that had flourished among the analytical philosophers in Vienna
and Uppsala. For example, in Vienna and Prague, Rudolf Carnap (1935: 23–4) had argued that
the value judgment ‘Killing is evil’ is a misleading expression of the imperative ‘Do not kill!’
In Uppsala, Axel Hägerström (1895) had argued that value judgments were expressions of
feelings, not of facts. The pragmatists could counter Carnap by pointing out that the phrase
‘Killing is evil’ is ambiguous if given an imperative form. It may mean ‘Tell your children not
to kill!’, ‘Punish the murderers!’, or, ‘Do not use the death penalty!’ The pragmatists could
modify Hägerström by arguing that value judgments generally presume some facts. The
emotive component attached to these evaluative and factual expressions in moral discourse
separates them by degree but not kind from everyday down-to-earth language. For example,
when a judge in a court talks about killing it is more factual and less emotive than when a
mob shouts about killing.
In common parlance, a Stevenson’s duality is reflected by the distinction between head and
heart, or between skill and emotion. Let us express this dichotomy in terms of ‘executive
249
actions’, e.g. issuing instructions, giving a scientific lecture, driving a car, getting dressed for
a football game, as opposed to ‘emotive actions’, e.g. cheering a team’s victory in a football
game, reading romantic poetry, hand-wringing. The distinction is, of course, an analytic one:
almost every concrete behaviour contains both executive and emotive components.
In any analysis of rhetoric and art, ideology and religion, the separation of executive and
emotive components seems crucial. To take an example from Stevenson (1944: 73–4): When
we say with Shakespeare that ‘All the world’s a stage’ this emotive description is distinct,
Stevenson argues, from an executive descriptions such as ‘There is a routine in real life, each
man going through a prearranged course’; or, ‘There is a good deal of trivial make-believe in
each man’s conduct.’
Let us illustrate Morris’s distinctions by the terms we will use. Some words combine into
‘descriptions’, for example: ‘This is a paper on social science.’ Others are ‘evaluations’, for
example: ‘This is a difficult paper.’ Still others constitute ‘prescriptions’, for example: ‘Read
this paper!’ These terms correspond fully to Morris’s distinctions between the informative,
valuative and incitive use of language. By adding the executive or emotive distinction we have
a full range of usages of human communications: ‘Ouch, I’ve been hit’ (Emotive Descriptive
Usage) ‘Oh, my health is in danger’ (Emotive Evaluative Usage) ‘For goodness sake, please
help me!’ (Emotive Prescriptive Usage) ‘He is an MD’ (Executive Descriptive Usage) ‘He is a
good, inexpensive doctor’ (Executive Evaluative Usage) ‘See this doctor!’ (Executive Prescrip-
tive Usage).
In passing we may note that questions – what? who? how? where? when? and why? – may
usually be formulated as circumlocutions of prescriptions such as ‘Tell the doctor what
happened!’ In British English, interrogations may be used not to get an answer but to incite
agreement, as in ‘The weather is nasty, isn’t it?’
We summarize our conclusion about the use of communicative actions as two propositions.
• Any living symbolic environment tends to become differentiated into descriptive, evaluative
and prescriptive usages, each of which contains executive and emotive components.
• The language brains of persons in this symbolic environment tend to differentiate these
usages regardless of their syntax.
These two tendencies have the same important status as the two Chomsky theses. They are,
we assume, part of our language instinct and as such they are automatic and not necessarily
conscious. Here we may restart our search for a deep structure of society and a universal
theory of social reality based on a language.
The types of actions governed by the language brain and a first hint as to how they are
elaborated into modern institutions and lifestyles are found in Table 1.
It seems reasonable to assume that the insights about unconscious language rules with
universal properties can be generalized to insights about society. Man’s conscious codification
of his existence is only a part of the codes that govern society. Some beliefs and command-
ments were there before the stone tablets. Some commandments may have been obeyed even
before they had been formulated into words; it can then be said that the rule precedes its
decree.
Social theorizing
Let us briefly preview how an edifice of social theory based on basic language categories may
be conceived. We choose as building blocks the deep structure of emic language about any
society as revealed in the sixfold classification of language usage inspired by the philosophers
of language. Communicative actions such as ‘descriptions’, ‘evaluations’ and ‘prescriptions’ can
in an initial phase of research be established as understood. Then they can be used either by
250
Table 1 Basic communications and aspects of social reality
Elaboration of communicative acts into modern social reality of:
Communications Life areas Cardinal values Life styles
Primarily executive
Descriptions Science Knowledge Learning-buffs
Evaluations Economy Riches Business-minded
Prescriptions Polity Order Civic-minded
Primarily emotive
Descriptions Art Beauty Aesthetes
Evaluations Religion Sacredness Believers
Prescriptions Morality Virtue Do-gooders
biographers and psychologists with a focus on the individual, or by historians and sociologists–
anthropologists with a focus on collectivises. Different logical or mathematical operations,
common in the well-developed etic language of science, can produce precise scholarly vocab-
ularies. There are many examples of the use of statistical procedures in concept formation in
social science:
As a first operation consider any procedure used to find a ‘central tendency.’ Central tendencies of
descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions within one individual thus became defined as his
‘cognitions,’ ‘attitudes,’ and ‘expectations.’ Central tendencies of the same action types among an
aggregate of individuals become their ‘social beliefs,’ ‘social valuations,’ and ‘social norms.’ Any other
operation can be used to manipulate the primitives; the outcome is other derived terms. For example,
if we select the operation of ‘dispersion’ of the action types within one individual we get a definition
of his ‘rigidity’; if ‘dispersion’ is applied to actions in the aggregate of individuals we obtain a defi-
nition of their ‘consensus.’ We might also apply an operation finding ‘proportions’ to the primitives.
An individual with a high proportion of prescriptions among his actions might be defined as
‘dominant.’ As the economic geographer divides the earth into production areas, so the sociologist can
divide society into realms according to the proportion of actions of a certain type. The realm of society
with a high proportion of prescriptions (laws, ordinances, executive orders, platforms, decisions,
programs, commands, etc.) might then be defined as its ‘body politic’. (Zetterberg, 1965: 54–5)
By a series of separate logical operations, the units of descriptions, evaluations and prescrip-
tions thus begin to define units of a society: not only attitudes, valuations, norms, but a host
of other terms in the language of social science, such as positions, roles, organizations,
networks, media, markets and firms, et cetera.
Furthermore, by separating their executive and emotive modes of descriptions, evaluations
and prescriptions we obtain six types of expression. These building blocks of language help
us to divide the major discourses and life areas in modern society (Table 1). Discourse about
grounded knowledge (science and scholarship) is full of executive descriptions, for example,
accounts of methods, facts and generalizations. Economic and business discourses are loaded
with executive evaluations, for example, prices and costs. Politics and administration, as
mentioned, are connected with executive prescriptions, for example, laws and regulations. Art
in all its forms deals with descriptive visions that are emotive, expressive. Religious discourse
is characterized by expressive evaluations, for example, ideas about the fundamental value of
mankind and the meaning of life. Moral discourse contains expressive prescriptions, ethically
engaging rules of conduct.
251
Thus, the six communicative acts provide a potential for six fundamental life areas in social
reality: economy, polity, science, religion, morality and art. Together the latter give us a concep-
tion of many-splendored societies with multiple stratifications and a division of labour
between creators, preservers, distributors and receivers of knowledge, order, riches, beauty,
sacredness and virtue. They, in turn, allow us to identify central zones of society where the
elites from the life areas meet. On a lower level, the same descriptive, evaluative and prescrip-
tive language differentiates positions, roles, organizations and media. Such processes are
usually called ‘structuration’, a broad term indeed.
In sociological thinking structuration is associated primarily with Émile Durkheim (1893).
The modern usage of the term structuration dates from the work of Anthony Giddens (1984).
Prior to Giddens’ work it was customary to talk about man’s voluntary actions running into
the resistance of structures. Also the writings of famous sociologists, Talcott Parsons for one,
suggest that people repeatedly bang their creative heads against a wall raised by society. This
may, of course, be an actual experience of many a man. However, reality is not so one-sided.
If you look closer, social structures are also actions, and the process of structuration is a creative
one in which also at least some actions are voluntary. The current state of thinking in this field
is shown in Alexander and Colomy (1990).
It is my contention to maintain Giddens’ discovery, but focus on the use of language. As
language is used in human encounters, some parts of it are frozen into social forms. This
approach provides an easier and more parsimonious entry into this field than earlier
approaches. If mankind has the capacity to cook previously unheard-of sentences, it also has
the capacity to cook and serve social structures never before seen.
A man who has done much fishing one day shows a young boy in his community how to
fish. He tells him and demonstrates the ins and outs of fishing, prescribing: ‘Do this!’ and ‘Do
that!’ Another day he shows another boy how to fish, and a third and a fourth. In the course
of these events he becomes known and described in the community as ‘fishing teacher’. And
youngsters take on the position of ‘fishing apprentices’. The community now has established
the relation (the ‘social role’) of teacher-apprentice in fishing. Others may take on the position
of ‘fishing teacher’ along with the original one, or after him. As some teachers prove to be
better than others they may be given different ranks: master teacher and regular teacher. It is
the language in the community that structures positions, relations and ranks. Any talk about
learning how to fish or any showing others how to fish is henceforth both enabled and
constrained by this structuration.
Parents in the community say: ‘The fishing teacher shall bring the children back for dinner.’
The priest says: ‘Fishing teachers shall not do their work on religious holidays.’ The community
chief rules: ‘The catch shall be divided equally among the apprentices, as among the members
in our hunting teams.’ And the chief may also say: ‘Every tenth fish shall be given to the chief
as tax.’ The community thus establishes rules (prescriptions) for the new position.
The elementary processes of structuration by means of language result in ‘positions’,
‘relations’ and ‘ranks’. The advanced processes of structuration take these concepts as building
blocks. The fishing teachers in a community can form a ‘network’ to stay in touch with one
another. They may establish a ‘medium’ that broadcasts weather and fishing conditions, for
example, by visible hand signals or flag signals. A part of a network of fishermen may band
together in a lasting fishing team with a common leadership and top rank, in short, what we
call an ‘organization’. And not to be forgotten, the fishermen undoubtedly will discover that
they cannot themselves consume all their catch. So they exchange some of it for utensils and
firewood, for warm clothing to be able to fish in the cold season, et cetera. So, ‘markets’,
networks for exchange of properties become parts of their community.
In all, this becomes a marvellous and comprehensive scene for the human drama. Social
scientists who are to account for this drama cannot avoid the use of logic, some mathematical
252
notions, and some basic statistics, i.e. standard tools of natural science. In that sense social
science will be similar to natural science. Modern economics and demography are cases in
point.
The difference between natural and social scientists is shaped by the properties of their
respective subject matter. In modern natural science the subject matters of both micro cosmos
and macro cosmos are in themselves mathematical expressions. We are told that the very nature
of physical nature is mathematical. The Chomsky theses and the Morris–Stevenson classifica-
tions provide the building blocks of social reality. Here the subject matter of both macro and
micro social science is not mathematical but grammatical expressions.
This formulation emerges as a modern version of the old divide between Naturwissenschaften
and Geisteswissenschaften that the German philosopher William Dilthey explored in 1883. He
cemented a gulf between the two. This led to the breakdown of communication between the
sciences and the humanities that C. P. Snow (1956) diagnosed as The Two Cultures. With our
formulation the gulf does not seem to be insurmountable.
The dramatic consequences

The American critic Kenneth Burke has penetrated the dramatic use of language in literature
and drama. His analysis of language has been smoothly merged by Hugh Daziel Duncan
(1962) into the symbolic interaction theory of sociology, i.e. ideas emanating from fellow-
Chicagoan philosopher George Herbert Mead. Let us separate the descriptive, evaluative and
prescriptive aspects of his analysis.
Descriptive language is used to satisfy our curiosity about events. The question openers –
what? who? how? where? when? and why? – each prompt us to describe an aspect of an event:
the acts, the actors, the means, the scene, the time, the motivation. Kenneth Burke discovered
that together they provide a full account; none of these six questions can be omitted if the
description is to be exhaustive, and to add more questions adds confusion rather than illumi-
nation (Burke, 1945: xvii).
Use of descriptions allows us to know something without personally having experienced it.
Memories of events need not be hardwired into the human brain and passed on to coming
generations by heredity. Language, particularly descriptive language, does the job. Some of
this language is mundane and relates to the down-to-earth business of living. Other parts are
pristine and have been woven into fantastic webs about the earth and cosmos, about animals,
trees and plants, about our inner world, life and death. These tales are passed on to fellowmen
and future generations by means of language, sometimes supported by stone settings, sculp-
tures and pictures, sometimes recorded in writing. Their reception may be marked by wonder-
ment and aha-experiences, or by fear and desperation, thus giving an emotive component to
some descriptions.
A major descriptive dynamic was formulated in the 1920s by William I. Thomas, long before
we had the distinction between emic and etic language. ‘If men define situations as real they
are real in their consequences’ (1928: 572). The cognitions we have of each other’s actions need
not be scientifically correct to have effects. To take a more recent example, if a government
believes that a state prone to hostilities has weapons of mass destruction, this belief has real
consequences irrespective of the correctness of the belief. One consequence may be a preven-
tive war. Another consequence might be a practice of torture or humiliation to find out about
the weapons of mass destruction from prisoners.
Evaluative language allows us to grade and rank tools, food, housing, hunting grounds,
soils, transports and other things, but also humans, their actions and their states of mind.
Kenneth Burke argued forcefully that language as such produces human hierarchies, ‘inevi-
table in any social relation’ (1954: 294). We may specify this by saying that evaluative language
253
produces hierarchies, i.e. divisions into good or bad, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, rich
and poor, well bred and sloppy, competent and incompetent.
In the short term, the effect of belonging to hierarchies in the higher ranks is a feeling of
elation. In the lower ranks the effect is a state of humiliation that at best can be relieved but
never fully cured. Both elation and humiliation add emotive components to evaluative
language.
Use of prescriptions allows us in the first place to define that which is ‘the Negative’: all the
Don’ts that meet us, not only as children but also as adults. ‘The essential distinction between
the verbal and the non-verbal is in the fact that language [– prescriptive language we would
say –] adds the peculiar possibility of the Negative’ (Burke, 1952: 252). A non-verbal animal
would normally have to use physical restraints to achieve what humans can accomplish by
saying ‘Don’t do it!’ Man can infuse restrictions on times and places by calling them holidays
and holy sites. Tools, houses, land can be called private property to keep others from using
them. In the second place, prescriptions set up goals to achieve, actions to perform, standards
to meet, ladders to climb. The usefulness of using such a linguistic category in the study of
social control was seen by Segerstedt (1948).
It is obvious that all men cannot obey all negative and positive prescriptions at all times. In
time, prescriptive language, therefore, tends to cause guilt in the receiver. The guilt is an
emotive companion of prescriptive language.
The negative effects of prescriptive and evaluative language can be relieved by other usages
of language. The anguish that language has caused men is thus cured by new forms of
language. Kenneth Burke finds ample illustrations in literature and drama.
The humiliation arising from hierarchies can be atoned by mortification, the self-infliction
of punishment for one’s shortcomings. In comedy, the hero, like a clown, degrades himself so
deeply that his fellowmen laugh and reintegrate him into their companionship. In tragedy, the
hero is ultimately forced into exile or death. In all mortifications you, yourself, pay for your
sins.
Guilt due to disobedience of prescriptions can be atoned by victimage, by unburdening guilt
on to a sacrificial victim. The victim who is to be sacrificed is chosen in two ways: either you
find a scapegoat among the most polluted, or you find a sacrificial agent among the least
polluted. At Golgotha you have both kinds of victims; Christ as the sacrificial agent
surrounded by two criminal scapegoats. Others pay for your sins in all cases of victimage.
Burke found support for his views in the classics of world literature, ranging from Genesis
and Sophocles’ Antigone to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Othello and Kafka’s, The
Castle. Being himself a poet as well as a critic, he could summarize his theory in a poem (Burke,
1961: 4–5):
Here are the steps
In the Iron Law of History
That welds Order and Sacrifice:
Order leads to Guilt
(for who can keep commandments!)
Guilt needs Redemption
(for who would not be cleansed!)
Redemption needs Redeemer
(which is to say, A Victim!)
Order
Through Guilt
To Victimage
(hence: Cult of the Kill)
254
Note
In preparing this article I am grateful to conversations with Rhoda H. Kotzin and Bo Anderson.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Colomy, Paul (eds) (1990) Differentiation Theory and Social Change. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Bally, Charles (1913) La langage et la vie. Geneva: Edition Atar.
Burke, Kenneth (1945) A Grammar of Motives. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.
Burke, Kenneth (1952) ‘A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 38:
251–64.
Burke, Kenneth (1954) Permanence and Change, 2nd rev. edn. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications.
Burke, Kenneth (1961) The Rhetoric of Religion. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Carnap, Rudolf (1935) Philosophy and Logical Syntax. London: Kegan Paul.
Chomsky, Noam (1955) The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. New York, NY: Plenum Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, Holland and Cinnaminson, NJ:
Foris Publications.
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1883) Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium
der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte, Leipzig. Translated by Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi (1989)
Introduction to the Human Sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Duncan, Hugh Dalziel (1962) Communication and Social Order. Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press.
Durkheim, Émile (1893) De la division du travail social. Paris: Alcan. Translated by W. D. Halls (1933) The
Division of Labor in Society. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Giddens, Anthony (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Giddens, Anthony (1987) ‘Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and the Production of Culture’, in Anthony
Giddens and Jonathan Turner (eds) Social Theory Today. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Hägerström, Axel (1895) Om den moraliska känslan och driften såsom förnuftiga i den moderna rationalismens
huvudformer. Uppsala: Edv. Berling.
Harris, Marvin (1999) Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Headland, Thomas, Pike, Kenneth and Harris, Marvin (1990) Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Himmelstrand, Ulf (1960) Social Pressures, Attitudes and Democratic Processes. Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1958) Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon. Translated by Claire Jacobson and
Schoepf Brooke (1963) Structural Anthropology. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962) La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Translated (1966) The Savage Mind. London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Morris, Charles William (1946) Signs, Language and Behavior. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.
Peirce, Charles S. (1903/1997) Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard
Lectures on Pragmatism. Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Peirce, Charles S. (1907/1935) ‘Pragmatism’, in Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds) Collected Papers
of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pike, Kenneth L (1954) Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, vols 1,
2 (rev. ed. 1967). The Hague: Mouton.
Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
de Saussure, Ferdinand (1916) Cours de linguistique générale. Paris. Translated (1959) Course in General
Linguistics. New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
Segerstedt, Torgny T. (1948) Social Control as a Sociological Concept. Uppsala: Lundequistska.
Snow, C. P. (1956) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Rede lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Stevenson, Charles L. (1944) Ethics and Language. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Thomas, William I. (1928) ‘The Configurations of Personality’, in C. M. Child, et al. (eds) The Unconscious:
A Symposium. New York, NY: Knopf.
255
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. International Library of Philosophy. London:

Routledge.
Zetterberg, Hans L. (1965) On Theory and Verification in Sociology, 3rd edn. Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press.
Biographical Note: Hans L. Zetterberg (b. 1927) taught sociology at Columbia University in The City of
New York and at Ohio State University, where he was Chairman of the Sociology Department. He has
also been a publisher of scholarly books (Bedminster Press), the chief executive of a foundation in his
native Sweden (The Tri-Centennial Fund of the Bank of Sweden), a long-time pollster and market
researcher (Sifo AB), and the editor-in-chief of a large Stockholm newspaper (Svenska Dagbladet). He
is a past president of the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).
Address: Murarvägen 9B nb, SE-16833 Bromma, Sweden. [email: hlzetterberg@chello.se]
256

The Grammar of Social Science PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Grammar of Social Science PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Acta Sociologica

The Grammar of Social Science

The online version of this article can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Downloaded from http://asj.sagepub.com by Roli Talampas on May 31, 2008

The Grammar of Social Science

keywords: deep structures ◆ linguistics ◆ philosophical pragmatism ◆ social

Emic and etic language

Acta Sociologica ◆ September 2006 ◆ Vol 49(3): 245–256 ◆ DOI: 10.1177/0001699306067706

The uses of symbols

Table 1 Basic communications and aspects of social reality

Elaboration of communicative acts into modern social reality of:

Communications Life areas Cardinal values Life styles

The dramatic consequences

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. International Library of Philosophy. London:

You might also like