ABSTRACT
It is common to assume we know what language is and what is needed to capture and describe it; hence, by implication, what ‘language’ in essence is. But there are many contending theories, too easily forgotten in the understandable rush to document and describe. These need to be considered at the outset, above all the performance approach to linguistic action entailed in pragmatic perspectives, and the issue of how and for whom linguistic accounts are constructed in the first place. The study of oral poetry, performance, and ‘oral literature’ more generally, hammered home one point. Both in Africa and further afield, those creating performed literary art deploy not just writable words but a vast range of non-verbalized auditory devices of which those conventionally captured in written text are only a small sample. In the European high art song tradition of ‘text-setting’, words and music are indeed in a sense separated and then artificially, as it were brought together.
