Linguistic Turn
The anaphoric or binding account is formulated as
an extension of discourse representation theory. The
basic tenet is that presuppositions are anaphoric
expressions (see Anaphora). Presuppositions only differ
from pronouns and other attenuated anaphors in that
they have internal structure and semantic content. The
basic requirement is not that the presuppositional
information is entailed by the context of utterance, but
that the presuppositional anaphor should find a
suitable antecedent. If no such antecedent is available,
the semantic material carried by the presuppositional
anaphor will be accommodated in the discourse
structure so as to provide an antecedent after all.
The context-change semantics of the satisfaction
theory generally yields weaker predictions than are
found in the anaphoric account. This is due to the
different status that presuppositional material has in
both theories and to the different ways in which this
material is processed. For example, for a conditional
of the form
χf ψg where ψ is triggered by χ the
satisfaction theory will predict
ψ as presuppo-
sition for the whole sentence. This yields for (15a) not
the presupposition that John has children, but the
presupposition that he has children pro
ided that
baldness is hereditary. Just like the classic semantic
account, the satisfaction theory has thus to appeal to
some pragmatic strengthening mechanism to derive
the stronger presupposition that John has children.
On the anaphoric account, presuppositional infor-
mation is never transformed into a new semantic
construct. Consider (15a) again. The presuppositional
anaphor associated with the consequent cannot be
bound to some preestablished antecedent. So some
entity representing the set of John’s children will be
accommodated in the main context, thus yielding the
stronger prediction that the utterance of (15a) pre-
supposes that John has children.
See also: Comprehension, Cognitive Psychology of;
Constructivism in Cognitive Psychology; Information
Processing Architectures: Fundamental Issues; Know-
ledge Activation in Text Comprehension and Problem
Solving, Psychology of; Linguistics: Overview; Prag-
matics: Linguistic; Sentence Comprehension, Psycho-
logy of; Semantics; Text Comprehension: Models in
Psychology
Bibliography
Beaver D I 1997 Presupposition. In: Benthem J A van, Meulen A
ter (eds.) Handbook of Logic and Language. Elsevier, Amster-
dam, pp. 939–1008
Gazdar G 1979 Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and
Logical Form. Academic Press, New York
Geurts B 1999 Presuppositions and Pronouns. Elsevier, Oxford,
UK
Heim I 1983 On the projection problem for presuppositions. In:
Barlow M, Flickinger D P, Wescoat M T (eds.) Proceedings of
the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics Volume 2.
Stanford Linguistics Association, Stanford, CA, pp. 114–25
[Reprinted in Davis S (ed.) Pragmatics. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 397–405]
Karttunen L 1973 Presuppositions of compound sentences.
Linguistic Inquiry 4: 167–93
Karttunen L 1974 Presupposition and linguistic context. Theor-
etical Linguistics 1: 181–94
Karttunen L, Peters S 1979 Conventional implicature. In: Oh
C K, Dineen D (eds.) Presupposition. Academic Press, New
York pp. 363–85
Sandt R V van der 1988 Context and Presupposition. Croom
Helm\Routledge, London
Sandt R A van der 1992 Presupposition projection as anaphora
resolution. Journal of Semantics 9: 333–77
Stalnaker R 1974 Pragmatic presuppositions. In: Munitz M K,
Unger P K (eds.) Semantics and Philosophy. New York
University Press, New York, pp. 197–214
R. A. van der Sandt
Linguistic Turn
‘The linguistic turn’ generally designates in the social
sciences a movement away from positivist or historicist
accounts of social and historical phenomena toward
analyses of the structures of representation that are
understood to have helped shape those phenomena.
The phrase is frequently (and sometimes loosely) used
to characterize contemporary forms of the critique of
ideology and the critical ‘demystification’ or ‘de-
mythologization’ of historical and socio-political re-
presentations that offer themselves as transparent or
natural accounts. Since such critical work often
proceeds by way of attention to the rhetorical and
conceptual articulations of representations that tend
to efface their very character as representations, and
since it frequently draws from philosophical and
even literary theories of language and represent-
ation, it is understood to participate in a turn
from socio-historical ‘realities’ to their linguistic
presentation.
The phrase is used so broadly, however, that its
strong meaning for theoretical methodology is fre-
quently lost. Frequently, the critique of representa-
tional structures proceeds without a consequent at-
tention to the question of language, and even some of
the strongest versions of ‘linguistic constructivism’ fail
to interrogate their own presuppositions. Thus, the
linguistic turn will be defined here fairly strictly from
the basis of its foundations in order to recover its
meaning and implications for the social sciences. It
will be defined as beginning when language is no
longer understood as an instrument in social practice,
but rather as the site or ‘ground’ for such practice. It
8913
Linguistic Turn
will be understood to have been fully undertaken when
such a fundamental understanding of language shapes
the procedures of the sciences themselves.
The beginnings of the linguistic turn may easily be
traced to the eighteenth century and seen to be lurking
in the very rich debate concerning the origins of
language. It is clearly occurring in the research of
Wilhelm von Humboldt and in the writings of the
German Romantics, and then actively recognized—
some would say, practiced—in the later works of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus, when the official occur-
rence of a linguistic turn is registered in Vienna for
philosophy of language, a more ‘fundamental’ turning
is already long underway in the tradition of German
philosophy that Walter Benjamin and Martin
Heidegger brought to the fore in their remarkably
convergent speculative writings on language. Indeed,
if Ludwig Wittgenstein himself was ready to grasp in
1929 the import of Heidegger’s still largely latent
meditation on language and the significance of
Heidegger’s own linguistic practice, it is because the
philosophical ground was well prepared for
Heidegger’s subsequent turn (his famous Kehre) from
an existential philosophy still marked by the meta-
physics of the human subject to a thought of what is
given of Being in and by language.
Historians of the social sciences will provide ample
testimony of methodological tremors linked to the
developments noted here in philosophy of language—
in short, a displacement of the human subject or
human consciousness as the grounding source of
meaning in signifying practice, and the requirement of
rethinking the subject\object relation and relation
itself. However, it may well be argued that the strong
turn realized by authors such as Benjamin and
Heidegger is not assumed in the social sciences in
Europe until the period of the structuralist movement
(a movement that explicitly unseated human con-
sciousness from its founding role in favor of broader
structures of determination: kinship systems, linguistic
structures, and the laws of sexuality or desire). Even
here, however, the turn to language remained fre-
quently at no more than the level of analogy, and
systems of myth or kinship were shown to be forma-
lized equally effectively with recourse to mathematical
logic (another form of appeal to a logos, some would
argue). Thus, while structural linguistics functioned as
a kind of ‘point science’ for the initiatives throughout
the human sciences in Europe for over a decade, only
the endeavors of ‘post-structuralist’ authors such as
Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, or
Gilles Deleuze actually carried the notion of the
linguistic constitution of being to its full import for the
social sciences. Only from the time of post-struc-
turalism did it become possible to entertain thinking
the social relation from language.
The linguistic turn has thus occurred, for example,
when Michel Foucault, in his methodological treatise
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), announces that
8914
the fundamental element for his study of discursive
formations will be the eT nonceT , the statement. In an
effort to displace the governing categories of the
history of thought (totalizing categories that establish
continuity and that all lead back, in Foucault’s view,
to the sovereignty of the human consciousness),
Foucault attempts a theoretical elaboration of a
discursive ‘object’ that is always relational and always
to be thought from its material emergence. ‘Object’
must be left here in quotation marks because the
statement, as Foucault understands it, is the ‘modality’
or ‘function’ of existence of discursive facts, what
‘gives’ them or enables them to occur as language and
thus as (a) a relation to a domain of objects; (b) a set
of possible positions for an enunciative subject; (c) an
element in a coexisting discursive field; and (d) a
repeatable materiality. A statement, in Foucault’s
definition, cannot be understood as a sentence that
lends itself to hermeneutic investigation or logical
analysis, but must rather be seen as the material,
always relational, condition for something like a
sentence or a proposition. Historical analyses that
seek the ‘signified’ of any group of signs (reading any
document for the meaning it bears, any text for its
‘allegorical’ sense), like linguistic studies that seek
rules of formation, invariably efface the irruptive,
eventful character of the fact of language, returning all
linguistic events to their organizing conditions. Thus
they participate in what Foucault calls, in his famous
Discourse on Language, the ‘ancient elision of the
reality of discourse.’ Foucault’s effort in thinking the
eT nonceT as the material function of existence of any
discursive act or organization is directed at honoring
the ‘anarchic’ character of language—a potential for
disruption which ‘disciplinary’ and institutional for-
mations seek to channel and control. At the heart of
his project is an assumption that the orders of
knowledge and the social institutions in which they are
embedded are organized by a fear of the undermining,
or even violent dimensions of discourse for the orders
in which it emerges (undermining for the mere fact
that it can reveal the inherent lack of foundations for
the social order, violent for the fact that it can carry
the irruption of desire):
‘There is undoubtedly in our society, and I would not be
surprised to see it in others, though taking different forms and
modes, a profound logophobia, a sort of dumb fear of these
events, of this mass of spoken things, of everything that could
possibly be violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered
even and perilous in it, of the incessant, disorderly buzzing of
discourse.’
Of course, Foucault’s own study, fiercely abstract in
its unfolding design, is not without its own violence.
Indeed, his Archaeology sometimes reads as a veritable
storm of theoretical elaboration; its winds tear un-
relentingly at the foundations of the history of

thought. But a glimpse at the virulence of reaction on
the part of proponents of rational norms of ‘com-
municative transparency’ and\or pragmatic ‘consen-
sus’ provide a clue to the explosive potential of
Foucault’s effort to honor the disruptive dimensions
of language.
Numerous authors have pursued Foucault’s ‘archeo-
logical’ analyses of discursive formations; in fact,
significant currents in the growing field of cultural and
‘post-colonial’ studies principally draw upon Foucault
for their understanding of the discursive constitution
of social reality. Theories of social construction are
deeply indebted to his analyses of ‘disciplinary’ knowl-
edge and mechanisms of control. Far fewer authors
have carried forward his understanding of the sub-
versive dimensions of the enunciative act, though one
sees its impact in the fields of gender studies and
sexuality or in a topic such as the study of ‘the
practices of the everyday’ by Michel de Certeau. It is
for this reason that one might regard the ‘linguistic
turn’—which many would undoubtedly anchor in the
widespread acceptance of the theory of linguistic or
social ‘constructionism’—as incomplete and even
faltering. Theories of social construction, and even
theories that stress the necessary ‘performative iter-
ation’ of social norms, almost inevitably turn short of
the engagement with language that marks Foucault’s
work (or that of the other ‘post-structuralist’ authors
to which I referred). They fail, in particular, to attend
to the materiality of discursive usage in that dimension
that involves what I might term an enunciative
experience with language. This avoidance is easily
attributable to Foucault’s own wariness regarding the
‘ontologizing’ and ‘transcendentalizing’ sources upon
which he silently draws (principally Heidegger), not to
speak of his strictures against anthropomorphism and
humanism. But Foucault’s own turn to ethical ques-
tions in his late work point firmly to the necessity of an
exploration of the subject’s engagement with the fact
of language at the fundamental level evoked in the
Archaeology—with the fact and manner of the way the
eT nonceT is given in its material singularity. What
dimension of experience is engaged with this ‘gift,’ and
what engagements (to evoke a motif pursued through-
out Jacques Derrida’s late work) does it presuppose if
the relations offered by the eT nonceT must be thought
from the way they are brought into existence in
singular instances of usage?
Heidegger had attempted in his later meditations on
language to name with precisely the term ‘usage’ the
human relation to the fact of language. To avoid
turning language into a kind of transcendental horizon
(a trap into which many ‘linguistic constructionists’
inevitably fall), and to hold to a thought of its finitude,
Heidegger attempted to think through the necessity of
a human ‘accession’ to language—i.e., the conditions
for any ‘interpellation’ of the human subject by
language, and any human response. He did not avoid
a certain anthropocentrism in this undertaking, but he
Linguistic Turn
also pointed beyond the purview of the metaphysics of
the human subject. Unfortunately, few authors have
followed through Heidegger’s thinking on this crucial
point, though among them we may count the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (whose thought of the
category of the ‘real’ presupposes this understanding
of the ‘human relation to the signifier’) and the French
writer Maurice Blanchot, whose enormous influence
on ‘post-structuralist’ thought still remains to be
measured. But their work, taken together with that of
the distinguished Jewish philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas and the more recent work of authors such as
Jean-Franc: ois Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy, make it
possible to pursue a thought of the manner in which
the social relation opens in and with language. From a
notion of the human engagement with language, they
elaborate an understanding of the event by which
human speech communicates a form of ‘finite tran-
scendence’: a transcendence of determined orders of
meaning that is first of all an exposure to the other
human being. They thus make it possible, in effect, to
return to a thought of the social relation like that
approached by Hannah Arendt in The Human Con-
dition (1998) in her effort to rethink the notion of
public space and the political act itself.
This latter thought of ‘communication’ (not a tran-
sparent communication of signified meaning, but
rather, as Walter Benjamin argued so powerfully, a
communication of the very possibility of relation)
clearly carries with it the obligation of defining the
conditions for its engagement in critical or theoretical
practice. For it is clear that the pertinence of a
traditionally ‘theoretical’ mode of inquiry must come
into question once language is engaged at levels that
exceed that of its representational or instrumental
function. Once a ‘saying’ that bespeaks the irreducible
presence of an enunciating subject becomes the object
of a meditation on the grounds and possibility of
community (but this can be no ‘object’ for description),
theory can no longer claim an exclusive purchase on
the question of the social relation. Or it must rethink
its own discursive modality and its relation to others
(to the language of literature, for example). The
challenge of the linguistic turn for the social sciences
thus bears upon the discursive practices of the sciences
themselves. It is not a challenge that requires the social
sciences to abjure their commitment to clarity and
rigor in analysis, but it does require them to entertain
the question of their own discursive usage and the
possibility of translation between discursive modes or
between their own usage and that of a singular event of
language. Here, it becomes clear that a fundamental
reflection on linguistic usage is the very condition for a
consequent engagement of the social relation—a
relation that is not reducible to its linguistic dete-
rminations, but also not thinkable apart from the site
of its emergence and articulation. The ‘linguistic turn’
isnotamethodological‘given,’apathalreadysecured;it
is a required turn to the grounds of meaning that must
8915
Linguistic Turn
be repeatedly undertaken if social analysis is to achieve
concreteness in its effort to regain the social itself.
See also: Constructivism\Constructionism: Meth-
odology; Foucault, Michel (1926–84); Linguistic Turn
and Discourse Analysis in History; Logical Positivism
and Logical Empiricism; Representation: History of
the Problem; Romanticism: Impact on Social Thought
Bibliography
Arendt H 1998 The Human Condition, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago
Butler J 1993 Bodies That Matter. Routledge, New York
Benjamin W 1972 Gessamelte Schriften. Tiedemann R,
Schweppenha$ user H (eds.). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany [Demetz P (ed.) 1986 Reflections. Schocken Books,
New York]
De Certeau M 1984 The Practice of E
eryday Life, trans.
Rendall S F. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
Foucault M 1969 L’ArcheT ologie du sa
oir. Editions Gallimard,
Paris.(1972TheArchaeologyofKnowledgeandTheDiscourse on
Language. Pantheon Books, New York, 1972)
Fynsk C 1996 Language and Relation … That There is Language.
Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
Heidegger M 1985 Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesamtausgabe, von
Hermann F (ed.) Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, Ger-
many, Vol. 12. [trans. Hertz P D 1971 On the Way to Language.
Harper and Row, New York]
Lacan J 1986 Le SeT minaire, L’En thique dans la psychanalyse.
Seuil, Paris
Lyotard J-F 1983 Le Diffrend. Editions de Minuit, Paris
Rorty R (ed.) 1992 The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical
Method. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Wittgenstein L 1965 Lecture on ethics. Philosophical Re
iew 74:
8–15
C. Fynsk
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in
History
1. The Linguistic Turn and the Post-modern
Epistemological Crisis
The term ‘linguistic turn’ emerged as common cur-
rency in discussions among historians during the 1980s
and 1990s to designate a sweeping, but vehemently
contested, shift in the framework within which both
the object or content of historical investigation (the
‘past’) and the methods of achieving historical knowl-
edge of this content were defined. In its weaker, least
contentious, form the linguistic turn referred to a more
intense and focused attentiveness to the opacity and
complexity of the linguistic forms through which all
8916
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
evidence of the past was mediated, and the ‘truth’ of
the past represented, reconstructed, and communi-
cated. The term itself was appropriated from dis-
cussions among philosophers, where it had been used
as a general description of the turn in twentieth-century
philosophy toward reformulating the epistemological
problem of the relationship between thought and
reality in terms of a relationship between language and
reality. In the stronger and more contentious form
that surfaced in debates among historians, however,
the linguistic turn came to designate a shift away from
the conventional view that language was a passive,
potentially transparent instrument for transmitting
content, for organizing, representing or expressing the
truth of a reality outside of itself, and toward a view of
language as the dense, fertile and autonomous site in
and through which the objective reality of the world as
well as the subjective reality of language users was
actively produced or constructed. From this latter
perspective, the act of taking the linguistic turn was
synonymous with the claim that the production and
communication of historical knowledge was inextri-
cably entangled in the epistemological crisis associated
with the transition from a modern to a ‘postmodern’
cultural condition.
As a particular disciplinary expression of this
epochal transition to postmodernism the linguistic
turn in history was grounded on three major premises.
First, it accepted the ultimate futility of the historical
quest to reconstruct a single, coherent narrative of
human history whose pattern or structure could
somehow be grasped and mapped in its totality from a
transcendent position outside of the particular, con-
tingent meanings that human beings in specific times
and places had imposed on the material traces of the
past, a quest most recently articulated in the national
liberation narratives, global modernization theories,
and Marxian historical dialectics of the Cold War
decades. Second, the linguistic turn appropriated from
poststructuralist theory the sweeping critique of re-
sidual beliefs in the existence of noncontingent stable
identities (whether natural kinds or metaphysical
essences) whose fates might be traced historically
through paths of accident, evolution, repression,
resistance, and liberation. National, ethnic, racial,
sexual, gender, and class identities were not treated as
material or metaphysical realities expressed in
language and culture, but contingent, constantly
changing, constructions produced in language and
culture. Third, this dissolution of essential identities
implied a transformation in the methods of historical
representation. Access to a reality not already shaped
and constructed by the linguistic medium in which it
was always presented to the knower, either as sub-
jectively lived experience or objectively perceived
external object or event, was considered impossible.
The historian could only interpret interpretations,
could only redescribe and thus reconstruct in his or her
own language the linguistic constructions of others.
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7