The Seventh Function of Language

The officer who fired the shot comes over to explain: he saw the man reaching for a gun in his pocket and he didn’t have time to think, so he fired. Bayard notes that the cop has a finger missing on his left hand. He asks him what happened. The policeman replies he had an accident while he was chopping wood at his parents’ house in the countryside.

When the police divers fish the corpse out of the water, they will find in his jacket pocket not a firearm but Barthes’s copy of Essays in General Linguistics, and Bayard, still drying himself, will ask Simon: “For fuck’s sake, who is this Jakobson guy?” And so, at last, Simon will be able to finish his lecture.

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Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, born at the end of the nineteenth century, who was at the inception of a movement named Structuralism. After Saussure (1857–1913) and Peirce (1839–1914), and along with Hjelmslev (1899–1965), he is probably the most important theoretician among the founders of linguistics.

Beginning with two stylistic devices taken from ancient rhetoric, namely the metaphor (replacing one word with another linked to it by some sort of resemblance, “raging bull” for the boxer Jake LaMotta, for example) and metonymy (replacing one word with another linked to it by contiguity: “having a glass” to say that one drinks the liquid in the glass—the container for the contents, for example), he succeeded in explaining the functioning of language according to two axes: the paradigmatic axis and the syntagmatic axis.

Broadly speaking, the paradigmatic axis is vertical and concerns the choice of vocabulary: each time you pronounce a word, you choose it from a list that you have in mind and which you mentally scroll through. For example, “goat,” “economy,” “death,” “trousers,” “I-you-he,” or whatever.

Then you join it to other words: “belonging to Monsieur Seguin,” “stagnant,” “with his scythe,” “creased,” “undersigned,” to form a phrase: this chain is the horizontal axis, the word order that will enable you to make a sentence, then several sentences, and finally a speech. This is the syntagmatic axis.

With a noun, you must decide if it needs an adjective, an adverb, a verb, a coordinating conjunction, a preposition … and you must choose which adjective or which adverb or which verb: you renew the paradigmatic operation at each syntagmatic stage.

The paradigmatic axis makes you choose from a list of words in the equivalent grammatical class: a noun or a pronoun, an adjective or a relative proposition, an adverb, a verb, etc.

The syntagmatic axis makes you choose the order of words: subject-verb-complement or verb-subject or complement-subject-verb, and so on.

Vocabulary and syntax.

Each time you formulate a phrase, you are subconsciously practicing these two operations. The paradigmatic axis uses your hard disk, if you like, and the syntagmatic your processor. (Although I doubt whether Bayard knows much about computers.)

But in this particular case that is not what interests us.

(Bayard grumbles.)

Jakobson also summarized the process of communication with an outline that consists of the following elements: the sender, the receiver, the message, the context, the channel, and the code. It was from this outline that he drew the functions of language.

Jacques Bayard has no desire to learn more, but for the sake of the investigation he has to understand at least the broad outlines. So here are the functions:

• The “referential” function is the first and most obvious function of language. We use language to speak about something. The words used refer to a certain context, a certain reality, which one must provide information about.

• The “emotive” or “expressive” function is aimed at communicating the presence and position of the sender in relation to his or her message: interjections, modal adverbs, hints of judgment, use of irony, and so on. The way the sender expresses a piece of information referring to an exterior subject gives information about the sender. This is the “I” function.

• The “conative” function is the “you” function. It is directed toward the receiver. It is principally performed with the imperative or the vocative, i.e., the interpellation of whoever is being addressed: “Soldiers, I am satisfied with you!,” for example. (And remember, by the way, that a phrase is hardly ever reducible to a single function, but generally combines several. When he addresses his troops after Austerlitz, Napoleon marries the emotive function—“I am satisfied”—with the conative—“Soldiers/with you!”)