A Report to the Academy: Talbot Taylor and the rhetorical roots of contemporary language theory

This essay offers a critical overview of Talbot Taylor's critique of the linguistic and philosophical positions taken by modern language theory on the nature of language, linguistics, and the capacity of non-human species to master language. It traces Taylor's argument regarding the compulsive assumption of all language theory, whether derived from empiricists like Locke or rationalists like Descartes, that it is its business to offer a theoretical explanation of how communication must take place between human beings in Mutual Misunderstanding and Theorizing Language, noting Taylor's indebtedness to Wittgenstein and especially his insistence that language is fundamentally normative. It explicates some of the implications of this normative theory for the notion of the fundamentally political character of language by relating it to the role that Saussure has played in the recent turn towards linguistic theory in literary studies, before finally discussing Taylor's stance on the debate about the species-specific nature of language in relation to Frans Kafka and J.M. Coetzee.