Concepts of Convention and Models of Critical Discourse

Abstract

YW A HEN Harry Levin compiled his Notes on Convention in 1950, he observed that recognition of convention ... historically coincided with its repudiation in the Romantic period. But the capacity of the term to survive this initial onus, he went on to say, was reflected in the way it gathers importance with current aesthetic discussion.' In the thirty years since Levin's essay, the magnitude of this importance has been overwhelmingly confirmed by developments not only in aesthetics, but also in sociology, anthropology, mathematical logic, and the philosophy of science. From the point of view of language and literature, but to a degree in most of these disciplines, the decisive developments have been in structuralism, an enterprise which takes its departure from the notion of convention and the arbitrariness of the sign. L'affirmation de l'arbitraire du signe, Greimas notes, has permitted progres considerables dans la connaissance de la structure interne des langues: indeed, the notion of the arbitrary is what guarantees the possibility of linguistic and semiotic science.2 The arbitrary permits what is not arbitrary, a segmentation and articulation of linguistic order through a system of differences. According to this logic, the term convention derives one level of its significance not only through antonymic relation to such terms as nature, universal, individual, but also through near but incomplete synonymy with multilateral series that would include norm, rule, usage, law, custom, habit, art. The linguistic province of such terms depends, furthermore, on underlying differences like arbitrary/nonarbitrary or motivated/unmotivated. Vigorous activity in linguistics and semiotics has brought greater specificity but also greater fluidity to the areas marked out by these terms. To account for their alignment in particular technical languages would be an immense and frustrating task, one further complicated by what technical languages take from natural languages and their heritages of