Linguistic analysis often carries a quiet companion: an appeal to thought, intention, or understanding lurking behind the data. When an analysis stalls, it is tempting to reach inward — to explain choices by what speakers meant, intended, or had in mind.
But this move is telling. It usually appears precisely where explanation has run out.
If we ask instead what actually does the explanatory work in successful linguistic analysis, a very different picture emerges.
The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
Appeals to inner thought feel explanatory because they sound deep. They gesture toward cognition, agency, and subjectivity. Yet when examined closely, they explain nothing.
Saying that a speaker chose a wording because they “thought X” simply restates the phenomenon in different terms. It does not tell us:
why that wording rather than another was available
why it mattered in that situation
why similar meanings are realised differently across registers
Inner thought functions here as a gloss, not an explanation.
Where Explanatory Traction Actually Comes From
By contrast, analyses gain traction when they attend to structures that are public, systematic, and historically sedimented.
In practice, the work is done by:
System networks, which model meaning as organised choice, not expression
Probabilities of selection, which explain typicality and markedness
Register, which relates choices to situation types
Context of situation, which constrains what distinctions are functional
Histories of use, which stabilise meanings over time
These resources explain not just what was said, but why it mattered and why it worked.
Why Thoughts Add Nothing
Once these resources are in play, appeals to thought become redundant. They do not sharpen predictions, refine descriptions, or increase explanatory power.
Indeed, they often obscure analysis by shifting attention away from semiotic organisation toward unverifiable interiors. Explanation becomes anecdotal, resting on what analysts imagine speakers must have been thinking.
The irony is that the more rigorously one analyses language as system and choice, the less need there is to invoke thought at all.
Meaning Without Interiors
This does not mean that speakers lack agency or experience. It means that agency is exercised through choice within systems, not through the transmission of pre-formed meanings.
Meaning is not first constructed privately and then expressed publicly. It is actualised in the act of semiotic choice itself, under constraints of system, register, and situation.
This is why linguistic analysis scales. It can explain patterns across texts, genres, and communities without multiplying invisible mental entities.
A Practical Test
A useful heuristic for analysts is this:
If removing references to inner thought weakens your analysis, then the analysis was never doing the explanatory work in the first place.
Strong analyses survive — and often improve — when interior glosses are stripped away.
The Payoff
Once we stop asking what speakers meant inside their heads and start asking what distinctions were made available and taken up in language, explanation moves outward.
It lands where it belongs: in systems, in situations, and in histories of use.
That is what actually does the work in linguistic analysis.
No comments:
Post a Comment