Integrationism

Integrationism (also known as integrational linguistics) is an approach in the theory of communication that emphasizes the importance of context and rejects rule-based models of language. It was developed by a group of linguists at the University of Oxford during the 1980s, notably Roy Harris.

The International Association for the Integrational Study of Language and Communication was founded in 1998 and has members in more than twenty-five countries around the world.

While the integrationist views of Harris and Dr Adrian Pablé, among others, differ from those who believe that cognition is distributed (i.e. Kravchenko and Love), the view on language between the two fields are quite similar. Both sides criticize the traditional view of linguistics which holds language as an individual internal psychological concern and takes written language as the base from which to begin analysis. Instead, integrationists view knowledge (which includes language) as “(i) linked to an individual’s experience, and therefore dependent on the ‘evidence available’ to that particular individual, but at the same time (ii) unpredictable because any integrational task involving sign-making and sign-interpreting is carried out in actual, time-embedded situations, which are not simply ‘given’, either.”. In other words, language usage is intrinsically, and without fail, contextual in all of its uses. Furthermore, Pablé, Haas & Christe question whether language is even amenable to scientific description, based upon its contextual nature. The contextual nature of language leads to a rejection of the notion that language is a ‘fixed code’. Harris discusses this extensively:

Instead of parts of a fixed code, language is looked at as a resource to conduct action with, an idea that echoes the notions put forth by speech act theorists such as Austin and Searle, interactional sociolinguists such as Gumperz, conversation analysts such as Sacks, Schegloff, and Goodwin, as well as others such as Goffman, all of whom were or are active in fields outside of linguistics, including language philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Harris claims that to not know what a word means is to not know what to do with the words, to not know “how to integrate the occurrence of the word into enough of our linguistic experience to satisfy the requirement of the [present] case”. Pablé explores the integrationist views of language in terms of the naming practices related to castles in Bellinzona, Switzerland. By asking locals the directions to castles using non-standard names for the castles, Pablé elicited various forms by which the locals referred to them, highlighting the idea that references to the places were “highly context sensitive” and that the “meaning” is created on the spot, and that “speakers always make sense of language in light of their own experience”.

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