Language & Communication 42 (2015) iii–iv

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Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

Roy Harris (1931–2015)

Nigel Love
Department of Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
– Jonathan Swift
Or, if we find the satirist’s language hyperbolic, let’s put it this way. When by far the most interesting contemporary
thinker about language appears in the world, we may know he’s on to something worth attending to by this sign: that
(almost) all the academics professionally concerned with language are hostile or dismissive.
Roy Harris was educated at Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital, Bristol (not a hospital but a Tudor ‘bluecoat’ school), from where he
went on to read Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall, the first of seven Oxford colleges with which he came to be associated
in one capacity or another. He took up a lecturing post in French at Leicester in 1957, the year in which the London-sponsored
college there received its royal charter and its emancipation as an independent university; and having meanwhile completed
his Oxford DPhil (‘Latin IRE and its rivals in the Romance languages: an onomasiological study’) he returned to Oxford in 1960.
For several years he covered the syllabus in French philology and medieval literature for a number of colleges without holding
a fellowship at any of them, until Keble elected him Fellow and Tutor in Romance Philology in 1967 – just before the focus of
his attention shifted to general linguistics and philosophy of language.
Harris saw this as a definite career change, requiring him to undergo a formal academic makeover. Accordingly he signed
on at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to undertake, under the supervision of C. E. Bazell, a theoretical
study of the role in descriptive linguistics of the concept of synonymy, submitted for a PhD in 1970. Synonymy and Linguistic
Analysis was his first book, published in 1973. Thereafter he added virtually nothing to the handful of essays and reviews that
were all he had ever published on specifically Romance topics – which, just three years later, made him the ideal candidate to
succeed Stephen Ullmann as Professor of the Romance Languages at Oxford. During his brief tenure of that Chair, his main
preoccupation was with truth-conditional semantics.
Moved sideways in 1978 into the newly established post of Professor of General Linguistics, Harris lost no time in giving an
inaugural lecture (‘Communication and language’) that defined his position vis-à-vis linguistics and prepared the ground for
his dire reputation among linguists. The theme of the lecture was what he saw as the paradox whereby modern linguistics, far
from helping to fill the ‘academic gap in the place where a science of human communication ought to be’, was in fact one of
the greatest obstacles to any such enterprise. This bold announcement that he saw the subject he ostensibly professed mainly
as a hindrance to the study of something else – something else that many linguists in any case discounted as irrelevant – was
widely greeted as a provocation best met with silence. Undaunted, Harris spent his time as Oxford’s professor of linguistics
not so much explaining to his enthusiastic and devoted graduate students just how and why linguistics as usually practised got
in the way of understanding communication, but applying the Socratic method to encouraging them to see it for themselves,
meanwhile publishing in support of this teaching a series of books, on Saussure (including a prize-winning translation of the
Cours de linguistique générale), on writing, and a trilogy of short works – The Language-Makers (1980), The Language Myth
(1981) and The Language Machine (1987) – whose lucid, easy style masked an intellectual depth that few outside a small
coterie felt inclined to explore. Inverting the title of his seminal lecture, he also founded, and edited or co-edited for 29 years,
the flourishing journal in which these words now appear.
In 1988 he embarked on a three-year stint as Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, where he again got off to
a controversial start with an inaugural lecture (‘The worst English in the world?’) that might have been calculated to foment

E-mail address: Nigel.Love@uct.ac.za.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0271-5309(15)00038-5
0271-5309/Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
iv N. Love / Language & Communication 42 (2015) iii–iv

hackle-raising misinterpretation. From 1991, apart from short-term visiting posts in Paris, Boston, New Delhi and Adelaide, he
was effectively in retirement, free to pour out the stream of books in which, among other things, he elaborated his ‘inte-
grationist’ philosophy of communication.
The obstacle that modern (mainstream, ‘orthodox’) linguistics presents to understanding communication is a discipline-
constitutive insistence on reifying languages as systems of abstract units (words, sentences, etc.) each uniting a form with a
meaning. In the predominant, psychologistic version of this doctrine, the system is ‘known’ by speakers of the language in
question, and this shared ‘knowledge’ is the basis on which communication in the language is possible. On the contrary, said
Harris, languages in this sense are ex post facto metalinguistic systematisations, second-order cultural products of a first-order
communication process best understood as a matter of creatively endowing linguistic phenomena (speech, writing) with
semiotic significance in order to operate relevantly on the world in accordance with the moment to moment exigencies of an
incessant flow of unique situations. Language is a device with which we integrate and make sense of our activities, meshing
together and rendering coherent our understanding of our past and present and shaping our anticipation of the future.
Communication is not a closed, ‘segregated’ process of automatic transmission of given signs or messages from one person’s
mind to another’s, but involves setting up conditions which allow all parties concerned the free construction of possible
interpretations, depending on the personal context in which they come to the interpretative task. There is no one ‘message’
that I am here and now transmitting to anyone who reads this, but as many messages as there are individuals making their
own particular sense, in the light of their own unique experience, of what I am writing. So, for instance, the detailed sig-
nificance of what I just wrote about the free construction of possible interpretations may be different for those who recognise
that phrase as a direct quotation from Harris as compared with those who do not.
Scattered among his voluminous writings are many lapidary remarks that might be taken to encapsulate the essence of his
understanding of language and his attitude to linguistic inquiry, notably the comment that ‘a linguistic theorist speaks with
no greater authority and insight about language than a baker or a bus-conductor’. Or, he might have added, than a tyro
undergraduate just beginning the study of linguistics. That may retrospectively explain why, in 1970, the very first academic
task he set me was to consider half a dozen short passages from the works of various gurus and textbook writers of the time
(Jespersen, Saussure, Bloomfield, Hockett, Lyons, Chomsky). In these excerpts they laid out their most general ideas about the
nature of language and languages, and I was to ‘say what I thought of them’. Say what I thought of them? Say what I thought of
them? This approach to teaching exhilarated and empowered anyone prepared to throw off initial trepidation. I don’t think he
ever told me anything. Even a small query as to whether there really was a palatal nasal phoneme in French distinct from the
sequence [nj] met with the response that it would depend on whether French speakers systematically make such a
distinction. At the time I found this irritating: I thought he was withholding the simple factual answer I wanted for peda-
gogical reasons to do with its being good for me to research the question for myself. Only later did I realise that what he said
was the only possible answer: there was no simple fact of the matter. But even if there were, I don’t think he would have
revealed it.
Latterly, moving ever onwards and upwards, Harris explored the possibility of extending the idea of linguistic commu-
nication as a process of integration to an understanding of other aspects of human experience. This led him to a radical
critique of how philosophers have traditionally discussed ontology and epistemology. Our belief in the reality of everyday
objects, he argued, derives from the way different sensory experiences of them are integrated, in that they confirm one
another. I can see the cup of coffee; I can touch the cup; I can taste the contents. The simplest way to accommodate these
diverse experiences intellectually is to believe in the reality of the cup of coffee. What we call its ‘reality’ is nothing but that
integration. As for epistemology, knowledge is not information, and acquiring knowledge is not a matter of gaining access to
something outside yourself. Rather, ‘all knowledge is internally generated by the human capacity for sign-making. The
external world supplies input to this creative process but does not predetermine the outcome. Signs, and hence knowledge,
arise from creative attempts to integrate the various activities of which human beings are capable’.
Thus did integrational linguistics give way to integrationism, a powerful, original philosophy that he didn’t live to articulate
fully, and which, it must be said, led him in old age to some hasty, intemperate judgments. Hence the spectacle of the
erstwhile lecturer in French philology taking issue with Einstein on simultaneity and dismissing Darwin’s Origin on the
ground that he never defined the term ‘species’. Such late overreachings aside, the magnificent edifice of his writings is
founded on a cogent, incisive analysis of the whole sweep of Western thought pertaining to language. His panoptic erudition
in the field was unmatched by any contemporary, perhaps by anyone ever. But his standing within academia suffered from the
fact that his ever-changing departmental affiliation never adequately reflected the nature and scope of his intellectual project.
That, and his cheeky, combative style, ensured that in his lifetime the dunces felt secure in their confederacy of overt or silent
rejection. Now the books are left to speak for themselves, to a posterity ever more unconcerned with the academic politics of
Harris’s time, and untroubled by the need to decide how to live alongside their inspired, iconoclastic creator.