According to the very latest estimates (2004), Spanish is the native tongue of well over 350 million people, 100 million of whom live in Mexico and 24 million in the USA. It is therefore a major world language, the fourth largest in terms of speakers. Its study thus offers all students a meaningful and attractive prospect of establishing contact with a very wide range of Spanish speakers coming from numerous countries. Any student of Spanish will benefit, both personally and culturally, from communication with such a vast array of people bound together by a common language. Spanish as a mother tongue unites countries as far apart as New York or London are from Pekin, but distance does not necessarily entail intractable difference. Surprising as it may seem, it is often as easy for an English-speaking student of Spanish to understand the Spanish of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru or Ecuador as it is for an English or American person to understand the language of some parts of Scotland, for instance, or for a Spanish speaker to understand the language of some regions of Andalucía.

Any learner of Spanish will need, certainly in the early stages of contact with the language, a grammar book which assists her/him through the initial maze. Such a volume needs to appeal both to the beginner and to the student who has acquired some basic knowledge.

Don't allow the term subjunctive to put you off. It may have all but disappeared in English though we still use it on occasions (“If I were you”), and is slowly slipping away in French, but it is still very much a mood to be reckoned with in Spanish, both in Spain and Spanish America. So it is a very necessary tool for correct expression in Spanish. Much as it is in Italian, in fact.

Before we embark on the subjunctive in Spanish, it is a good idea to see how complicated it is to express the subjunctive in English. You can be comforted by the fact that in Spanish the rules are logical whereas in English they are not. Examples in English: I want him to go / I wish he would go / It is necessary that he go / I am happy that he does it tomorrow.

Whereas the indicative (see unit 4) relates to clear knowledge and certainty, the subjunctive is linked to doubt, commands, uncertainty, desire, aspiration, risk, and danger. The indicative appears in both main and subordinate clauses but the subjunctive appears nearly always in subordinate ones. If we take the two following examples:

1. i Te he dicho que voy al cine I (have) told you I'm going to the movies

2. ii Te he dicho que vayas al cine I (have) told you to go to the movies

In the first sentence, we have a main clause (he dicho) and a subordinate clause (voy), both in the indicative.

Renaissance philosophy of language severed the Scholastic bond between the study of logic and the study of language and instead turned to the pragmatic and rhetorical dimensions of natural languages. Locke continues along this path by disparaging the relevance of logic to understanding the structure of mind and language. Locke's primary achievement, however, was to unite the study of language with the study of the human understanding, particularly its cognitive capacities. This new relationship immediately fostered new approaches in the philosophy of language. The two approaches that define the evolution of the philosophy of language in the modern period are due to Leibniz (1646–1716) and Condillac (1715–1780). Both philosophers recognized the significance of Locke's turn to language in the Essay, but they aimed to improve upon the Essay in distinct ways: Leibniz by reconnecting natural language, including ordinary usage, to an underlying logic, and Condillac by highlighting language as a human action.

Leibniz and Locke

Soon after the first publication of Locke's Essay in 1690, Leibniz wrote some comments on it and in 1696 asked Thomas Burnett to give them to Locke. Burnett delivered them almost a year later, but Locke had already received a copy of the comments from another source. Locke never responded to Leibniz, except indirectly in June 1704 when Locke, very ill and four months away from his death, asked Lady Masham to apologize for not writing back (Leibniz 1960, 3:351).

The genesis of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century has been characterized as “the linguistic turn” in the history of philosophy. It is true that a philosophical movement emerged in the beginning of this century that drew on the groundbreaking work of the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and held that “philosophical problems may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about language we presently use.” Nevertheless, the definite article in “the linguistic turn” is inappropriate because there were other significant turns to language besides Frege's.

Language was as central to the Prague Linguistic Circle as it was to the Vienna Circle, and the Prague Circle was also interdisciplinary, including not only linguists but also literary critics, anthropologists, and philosophers (Steiner 1982, ix–xii and 83). Rooted in Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857–1913) groundbreaking theory of language, the “Theses of the Prague Circle” was an important milestone in the history of structuralism and had a profound influence on European thought. The idea that language and its structural properties are appropriate models for understanding other fields of study, including philosophy, still reverberates in discussions of texts and subtexts. No less influential was the linguistic hypothesis formulated by Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorff (1897–1941) that human languages have incommensurable differences that cause human beings to perceive the world in radically different ways. This hypothesis has been so influential that it is considered a ruling paradigm in the contemporary social sciences.

Gottlob Frege has been called “the founder of modern mathematical logic,” “the father of ‘linguistic philosophy,’” and “one of the founders of analytic philosophy” (Dummett 1973, 665 and 683; Beaney 1996, 1). Frege, like Leibniz, Humboldt, and Mill before him, focuses on a form of language that runs deeper than its apparent grammatical structure, and he specifically follows Leibniz and Mill in isolating logical form. What distinguishes Frege is his mathematical perspective on language. Drawing on mathematics, Frege constructed a language of logic that he believed also served as a basis for understanding the essential components of all languages, whether natural or artificial. Mill reestablished the tie between logical and linguistic studies, but Frege gave this relation a mathematical character that left a lasting mark in the philosophy and science of logic and language. In doing so, Frege also filtered out what might be thought of as the human dimension of language, namely its psychological properties, and consequently Frege has contributed to the concept of language as an autonomous formal system.

Concept Script

Frege's development began with what is also by far his most significant contribution: his work on the language of logic published in 1879 in “an epoch-making little book” called Begriffsschrift, translated as Concept Script or Conceptual Notation (Kneale and Kneale 1962, 436). It has been compared in significance and scope with Aristotle's contribution to logic.

The pioneering historian of linguistics R. H. Robins began one of his essays with this important warning:

This warning holds for anyone preparing to read or write a history of any field or discipline, but it applies especially to the study of language, which is still ruled by several competing paradigms.

John Locke's linguistic turn in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding was the culmination of an intellectual evolution from Plato to Hobbes that steadily moved natural language to the center stage of philosophy. An important feature of this development is the legacy of Renaissance humanism. Reacting to the distortions of ordinary language when seen through the prism of syllogistic logic, the humanists elevated the role of natural language by making ordinary usage of natural language a standard for philosophical style and critique. The needs of formal logic distorted natural language, whereas ordinary usage, which included public oratory, preserved natural language. By turning to the diversity of purposes people have when ordinarily using language, humanist writers also began to tie language to psychology instead of logic. The concern for the systematic features of language and its underlying logical structure that marked Scholastic philosophy was to be transformed later by Leibniz in light of Locke's linguistic turn, as we will see in Chapter 3, but the road to Locke is a road that leads away from traditional logic and, as Locke put it, to “another sort of Logick and Critick, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with” (1975, 721, IV.21.4).

Plato

Before Plato (427?–347? b.c.e.) there is some discussion of linguistic issues. For example, Pythagoras argued that the connection between names and their referents is natural, not arbitrary; Parmenides distinguishes between true and false names in his argument against the existence of real difference and change; and the Sophists, particularly Protagoras, paid attention to the grammatical structure of natural language.

John Stuart Mill (1806–73) liked to use mottoes in his works that captured guiding themes of his overall philosophy. The mottoes he chose for his two major works on logic and politics, A System of Logic and On Liberty, are no exception and shed light on Mill's philosophy of language. Book I of his System of Logic, called “Of Names and Propositions,” is headed by two passages praising Scholastic contributions to philosophy. The first is by the French mathematician, philosopher, and revolutionary Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94); The second is from Discussions in Philosophy by the Scottish philosopher and logician William Hamilton (1788–1865):

These passages express Mill's esteem for formal logic. Mill writes in the preface to the System of Logic that he does not share “the contempt entertained by many modern philosophers for the syllogistic art,” and he announces that in book I he will revive “many useful principles and distinctions which were contained in the old Logic” (1974, 7:cxi–cxii). For this reason he worries that this discussion of “Of Names and Propositions” will “appear, to some readers, needlessly … scholastic” (1974, 7:cxii).

Frege, who was turning sixty-three in November 1911, was visited that fall by a twenty-two-year-old Austrian who was neglecting his studies in aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. While studying aeronautics, Ludwig Wittgenstein had become interested in the nature of mathematical proof, which led him to Russell's Principles of Mathematics. In this book Russell aimed to popularize the project he and Whitehead pursued in the Principia Mathematica, namely to show that mathematics is reducible to a few logical principles. The Principles also contained something new, namely an appendix devoted to “The Logical and Arithmetical Doctrines of Frege” (Russell 1903). While the Principles were being prepared for print, Russell discovered that Frege had already devoted a lifetime of work to the project of logicism, and so he decided quickly to study Frege's work and write an appendix for the book. This appendix brought Frege's neglected work into the limelight and to the attention of Wittgenstein.

Little is known about Wittgenstein's visit in Jena except Wittgenstein's comment that Frege “wiped the floor” with him. Frege recommended that Wittgenstein return to England and study with Russell at Cambridge University, which he did. Nevertheless, Frege and his works left a lasting impression on Wittgenstein, as Wittgenstein himself suggests in the preface to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published ten years after his meeting with Frege, when he writes, “I am indebted to Frege's magnificent [Großartig] works.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt's (1767–1835) major work, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts), labeled the “Kawi Introduction” by his editor, has been called “the first great book in general linguistics” (Bloomfield 1933, 133). It anticipates contemporary generative linguistics and, at the same time, is considered a precursor to linguistic relativism as developed early in the twentieth century by the anthropologists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941). It is even seen as anticipating the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

That Humboldt appears to fit generativism as well as relativism is striking because, strictly speaking, generativism and relativism in linguistics are incompatible. Whereas generativism looks for the universal linguistic and mental structures rooted in human nature, relativism denies such shared structures common to all human beings. Instead, relativism focuses on the diversity of linguistic structures and how these structures determine the way in which human beings see and know the world. But it should not be surprising that both of these trends have been located in Humboldt's work on language because his work is a crossroads of the directions set out by Leibniz and Condillac. Humboldt attempts to meld together the system and use perspectives on language, as well as the angelic and the earthly, into a synoptic empirical and philosophical theory of human language.

While linguistic performance – the actual use of language in speech and writing – is the most natural and empirical manifestation of human language, performance does not sustain the conception of language as a system. Wittgenstein's mature work in the Philosophical Investigations, Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist deconstructions, and Davidson's skepticism about language itself are dramatic instances of the pull of linguistic performance away from the idea of language as a determinant system that can be caught by the net of linguistic theory. In fact, these most recent linguistic turns to language are turns away from linguistic theory altogether. Performance is used to foil the work of theory.

Language Games

The style of Wittgenstein's Investigations already exemplifies the philosophy of language Wittgenstein recommends in this work. Whereas the Tractatus appears as a systematic formal treatise with hierarchically ordered propositions and new symbols, the Investigations consists of, according to Wittgenstein himself, “remarks, short paragraphs,” sometimes “jumping from one topic to another” (1953, ⅸ). Instead of a scientific or scholarly essay, he offers “a number of sketches of landscapes, … really only an album” (ibid.). Accordingly, the Investigations is driven by what might be considered case studies.

Wittgenstein begins his Investigations not with his own words but with a passage from Augustine's Confessions where he recalls how he learned language. “When they (my elders) named some objects,” Wittgenstein quotes Augustine, “and accordingly moved toward something, I saw this and grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered since they wanted to point it out” (1953, §1).