Language is irrational. Gloriously so.
This is what comes up if you google “literally”. Note that the second sense, universally loathed by language purists, has started creeping into dictionaries.
At this point, literally is a dead horse that has been beaten one too many times. The purists have pointed out the illogic and descriptive linguists have pointed out that it’s part of the natural evolution of language and nothing to worry about. It’s still interesting to look at how and why this kind of semantic shift occurs, and what that says about language.
Literally is in good company: words like very and really have undergone the same change. It’s funny that articles like this one decry replacing “very” with “literally”, given that “very” itself evolved from “true, real, genuine” via “actual, sheer” to its current role as intensifier. That is, the article is annoyed that people substitute literally for a word that has undergone almost exactly the same process, and which would have been decried by the language purists of the 15th century. But what, exactly, is this process?
For that, I direct you to this paper by Michael Israel, who has done what the purists won’t and can’t do: actually study semantic shift in detail. The short of it is as follows: words like very or literally experience a shift in which conversational implicatures gradually overtake the conventional meaning of the word. That is, what is suggested, but not strictly implied by the word becomes so strongly attached to the word that it becomes the primary meaning. In the case of literally, it has shifted meaning from emphasizing the relation between a situation and its description to emphasizing the relation between a description and the speaker’s attitude towards it (I really, strongly feel like this figurative expression). However, literally has not yet turned into a full-blown intensifier:
True intensifiers force a scalar reading even where none seems to be available: expressions like very married or very pregnant force a construal in which pregnancy and marriage are viewed as scalar properties. This sort of accommodation simply does not happen with literally.
But it might be on its way, and if so, this is the opposite of what’s happened so far: literally has become subjectivized, based in the speaker’s attitudes, but if it’s to become an intensifier, it must be brought back to the objective situation. If it does, that’s just another case where conversational implicatures overtake an old meaning. Israel also points out that the word the existence of the word literally actually undermines the folk theory about “literal meaning” that it depends on:
There is a certain irony in this process as it applies to literally, for the history of this form seems to undermine the very folk theory which has driven its development. The folk theory associates literal meaning with the true meaning of a word, from which it follows that to say something literally is to say precisely what one means. But as soon as one insists that one is saying what one means, one inevitably says more: the literal meaning of literally turns out to be inherently unstable. The word itself presupposes that words have meaning prior to and independently of the speakers who use them; but the word’s current uses show that literal meaning is also always driven forward by the particular pragmatic ends it can serve. As it turns out, the meaning inherent in the letters of literally cannot be easily separated from the meanings we derive from its use in context. And so the very word which profiles the objectivity of semantics reveals in its uses the fundamental subjectivity of linguistic meaning.
Human culture steadily marches forwards. We continually make technological, scientific and moral improvements. Rarely do we slide backwards: it seems like we are always moving forwards, always approaching an unreachable perfect state. Or at least, that is the narrative we have been fed by our culture. That we are always becoming more knowledgeable, more correct, that our world is being brought closer to some sort of logical perfection. It can be hard, then, to accept that language change is irrational. We can debate whether we’re moving towards some sort of logical perfection when it comes to technology or ethics, but there is no debate in linguistics. Language is, without a doubt, irrational, and it changes unpredictably (but according to well-known patterns) between one irrational state and the next.
There is nothing about Proto-Indo-European—the theoretical ancestor of languages as diverse as English, Sanskrit, Greek, Farsi, Icelandic and Russian, spoken some 5,000 years ago—that its modern descendants improve upon. Nothing. If we only invented new words to describe the new things that have appeared in the last five thousand years, we could do perfectly well with PIE. Or with any other natural language. One language is not more logical, or more perfect or more expressive, than any other. This doesn’t only imply that English isn’t objectively better than Arabic or Yoruba, but also that modern English isn’t better than Middle English or Future English. In a language purist’s eyes, expressions like “could care less” or “literally” to mean “strongly, but figuratively” make English less logical. What they fail to realize is that language is fundamentally arbitrary and illogical.
Why is water water? What is it about those few phonemes that make them suitable for referring to that wet, slippery substance we now know has the chemical formula H2O? Why not agua? Why not fnordquarlax? Apart from a very small group of words, the onomatopoeia, there is no logical connection between words and what they denote. Language is full of contradictions, paradoxes, and arbitrary connections.
Many of those paradoxes and contradictions are simply cases of what Wittgenstein called “language on holiday”. They’re what happens when an expression has one meaning in a narrow context, but this meaning then “goes on holiday” into a wider or different context, where the meaning is obviously nonsensical. This is not because there is some contradiction in the meaning of the word, but because words mean different things in different contexts. Language purists have a very narrow idea of what language looks like, an idea that mistakenly tries to pidgeonhole language into a kind of formal logic. According to this view, language is chaotic and irrational. But that might be because the purist fails to see the true nature of language.
Language, in all its glory, is the most complete, the most complex, and perhaps the most beautiful of all humanity’s creations. It is irrational, illogical, arbitrary, clever, dumb, rich, poor, deluded and enlightened. In that respect, it is a perfect match for mankind’s view of the world, which is irrational, illogical, arbitrary, clever, dumb, rich, poor, deluded and enlightened in equal measure. To refuse to see this cornucopia as anything but a nice plate with one kind of food arranged in one kind of pattern, is the highest sin a professed lover of language can commit. It is also epidemic among language purists.
Jan 11, 2012