Language in the world: properties and powers
The purpose here is to demonstrate how the concepts elaborated so far throw light on some areas of policy and practice which are of particular interest to applied linguists. These are presented in order from the most micro, linguistic end to the most macro, social end of a notional continuum, and they include: linguistic autonomy; literacy and the writing system; language and literacy education policy in England; and the struggle over ideas about global and threatened languages. Obviously, each of these topics is very substantial, and we cannot possibly discuss them with the depth of treatment they receive elsewhere, so we will aim to explore how the concepts illuminate debates about these issues in what we hope is a distinctive and constructive way.
However, human beings have come to have access to language, as a species or as individuals, the products of linguistic activity can be seen as analytically separable from them, and it is this which points to the partial autonomy of language as a cultural emergent property. Before going on to consider evidence for 'autonomy', let us first deal with the qualifier in this label. We shall be demonstrating some of the ways in which language seems to function in its own right, and we find in the descriptions we cite of sound systems, morphology, syntax and corpus semantics some surprisingly similar discursive moves. Presumably because it is language systems which are the theme of these accounts, they sometimes appear to have agency ascribed to them. When this is no more than metaphorical, it is largely unproblematic. For example, the writers of teaching materials for Linguistics undergraduates at the University of Reading follow a stylistic convention in their presentation of examples of affixation when they write that 'many affixes in English select a free stem of a particular word-class'. We assume that this is intended simply to highlight a correlation, and not to suggest that morphemes literally have the capacity to choose between stems and demonstrate an evaluative preference for some above others. When writers (such as de Boer below) explicitly provide explanations for the apparent ability of language to organize itself, we see it as productive. However, when it seems that a serious claim is being made for the agential power of language independent of human beings, we have to insist on a recognition of the limits to what language, as a cultural emergent property, can be claimed to 'do'.
