Thursday 21 July 2016

Reification Of Experience In Scientific English: 17th–19th C

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 575):
The most central aspect of the various changes that took place was the reification of experience — the grammatical metaphor whereby processes were construed as things.
Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 576):
This change in the grammar entailed a change in world view, towards a static, reified world — so much so that Bohm (1979) complains that language makes it hard to represent the kind of flux that modern physics likes to deal with. Bohm’s dissatisfaction is directed at language in general; but his real target is — or should be — the language of science. The everyday language of casual speech is, by and large, a language of flux, construing experience in much the way that Bohm seems to demand.