Since my background is that of an ordinary linguist rather than that of a historian of linguistic science, I cannot undertake the enormous task of tracing the ideological and social history behind current linguistic theory. Our conception of linguistic behavior is biased by a tendency to treat processes, activities, and conditions on them in terms of object-like, static, autonomous and permanent structures, i.e., as if they shared such properties with written characters, words, texts, pictures and images. Though my discussion will be confined to linguistics, I am well aware that the same type of bias can be found in many other sciences. As I have already stated, this book will deal with people's thinking about language . If we focus on linguistics and philosophy we will see that in these the object metaphor is very pervasive.
Linguistic expressions are objects.
In communication, a speaker sends a fixed meaning to a hearer via the linguistic expression associated with that meaning. The main point of this book, however, is that our most common ways of thinking about language in general, our most cherished metaphors, are, if not wholly derived from, at least heavily influenced by our time-honored traditions of dealing with language mostly, and often exclusively, in its written forms.