The Relationship Between Language and Communication from a Descriptive/Typological Linguistic Perspective

Descriptive linguistics is devoted to describing (the grammars of) languages, most commonly their sounds and sound systems (or equivalents for sign languages), their morphology (prefixes, suffixes, plural marking, tenses, etc) and their syntax (the rules for putting sentences together). Typological linguistics picks particular linguistic features and looks at the various means different languages have for dealing with these features. Given this focus on language, it usually comes as a surprise to non-linguists (and first-year students) that 'general' linguistics, the base for descriptive and typological linguistics, makes almost no mention of communication. Many introductory linguistics texts don't mention communication at all. Some define communication as 'the use of a sign system', point out that language is a type of sign system, and never mention communication again. Many texts explicitly contrast language and communication in a discussion of human language versus animal communication. The reason for this lack of mention of communication, from the point of view of descriptive/typological linguists, is that we are interested in language, and language is prior to communication in the (usually unspoken) conceptualizations of the discipline. Communication is about one mind encoding an idea in language and transmitting it to another mind, which decodes the idea - the conduit metaphor, or the idea of the 'speech chain'. But descriptive/typological linguistics is not interested in the transmission phase of this conceptualization, only in the 'code' itself, in what can be encoded (in different languages), and in how the different parts of the code fit together. For descriptive/typological linguists, communication is the domain of pragmatics, the use of language, and the relative position of a chapter on pragmatics in general linguistics textbooks (if there is one) mirrors its position in the field - pragmatics is something that comes after the rest of general linguistics. The unwritten rule is that one can't talk about the use of language until one knows about the structure of the code; one must describe language first (our task) before even thinking about communication (someone else's job).