Historicism

In this chapter, I will discuss a number of twentieth-century movements in linguistics which have shaped current attitudes and assumptions. The first of these, to which I will give the label historicism, is usually thought of as being characteristic of an earlier period of linguistic thought. It is of importance in the present connection in that it prepared the way for structuralism.

Writing in 1922, the great Danish linguist, Otto Jespersen, began one of the most interesting and controversial of his general books on language with the following sentence: “The distinctive feature of the science of language as conceived nowadays is its historical character.” Jespersen was here expressing the same point of view as Hermann Paul had done in his Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Principles of Language History), first published in 1880 and commonly described as the bible of Neogrammarian orthodoxy: the view that (to quote from the fifth edition of Paul's book, which appeared in 1920) “as soon as one goes beyond the mere statement of individual facts, as soon as one tried to grasp their interconnection [den Zusammenhang], to understand the phenomena [die Erscheinungen], one enters upon the domain of history, albeit perhaps unconsciously”. Both Jespersen's book and the fifth edition of Paul's Prinzipien, it will be noted, were published several years after Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale, which inaugurated the movement now known as structuralism, and only a few years before the foundation of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in which structuralism was combined with functionalism and some of the ideas of present-day generativism had their origin.

What is language?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. At first sight this definition – which is one that will be found in most textbooks and general treatments of the subject – is straightforward enough. But what exactly is meant by ‘language’ and ‘scientific’? And can linguistics, as it is currently practised, be rightly described as a science?

The question “What is language?” is comparable with – and, some would say, hardly less profound than – “What is life?”, the presuppositions of which circumscribe and unify the biological sciences. Of course, “What is life?” is not the kind of question that the biologist has constantly before his mind in his everyday work. It has more of a philosophical ring to it. And the biologist, like other scientists, is usually too deeply immersed in the details of some specific problem to be pondering the implications of such general questions. Nevertheless, the presumed meaningfulness of the question “What is life?” – the presupposition that all living things share some property or set of properties which distinguishes them from non-living things – establishes the limits of the biologist's concerns and justifies the autonomy, or partial autonomy, of his discipline. Although the question “What is life?” can be said, in this sense, to provide biology with its very reason for existence, it is not so much the question itself as the particular interpretation that the biologist puts upon it and the unravelling of its more detailed implications within some currently accepted theoretical framework that nourish the biologist's day-to-day speculations and research.

Universal grammar and its relevance

From the earliest times there has been a close connection between the philosophy of language and such traditionally recognized branches of philosophy as logic (the study of reasoning) and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). As far as logic is concerned, the very name of what has now become a highly technical and more or less independent discipline proclaims the connection: the Greek word ‘logos’ is related to the verb meaning “to speak” or “to say” and can be translated, according to context, as either “reasoning” or “discourse”. That there should be this kind of historical connection is hardly surprising. Common sense and introspection support the view that thought is a kind of inner speech; and various more sophisticated versions of this view have been put forward, over the centuries, by philosophers. In fact, throughout most of the 2000 years or so during which Western traditional grammar held sway in the various centres of scholarship, no clear distinction was drawn, at the theoretical level, between grammar and logic. In particular periods – most notably in the thirteenth century and again in the eighteenth – systems of what came to be called universal grammar were developed, in which the connection between logic and grammar was made explicit and given some kind of philosophical justification. In all such cases it was grammar that was subordinated to logic, since the principles of logic were held to be of universal validity.

What is culture?

The word ‘culture’ (and its equivalent in other European languages) has several related senses, two of which it is important to mention and distinguish here.

There is, first of all, the sense in which ‘culture’ is more or less synonymous with ‘civilization’ and, in an older and extreme formulation of the contrast, opposed to ‘barbarism’. This is the sense that is operative, in English, in the adjective ‘cultured’. It rests ultimately upon the classical conception of what constitutes excellence in art, literature, manners and social institutions. Revived by the Renaissance humanists, the classical conception was emphasized by thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and associated by them with their view of human history as progress and self-development.

This view of history was challenged, as were many of the ideas of the Enlightenment, by Herder, who said of the German equivalent of ‘culture’: “nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing is more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods” (cf. Williams, 1976: 79). He was especially critical of the assumption that eighteenth-century European culture, dominated by French ideas and the French language, represented the high point of human progress. It is interesting to note, in this connection, that the expression ‘langue de culture’ (literally, “language of culture”) is commonly employed by French-speaking scholars to distinguish what are held to be culturally more advanced from culturally less advanced languages.

Sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and psycholinguistics

So far there is no generally accepted theoretical framework within which language can be studied, macrolinguistically, from several different, equally interesting, points of view: social, cultural, psychological, biological, etc. (cf. 2.1). Furthermore it is doubtful, to say the least, whether any such general theoretical framework will ever be constructed. It is important to keep this in mind.

Few linguists today would subscribe to the positivistic principles of reductionism in the form in which Bloomfield and his fellow-members of the Unity of Science movement did half-a-century ago (cf. 2.2). But there are many linguists who advocate a more limited kind of reductionism, giving priority to the links between linguistics and one, rather than another, of the several disciplines concerned with language. Some, like Chomsky and the generativists, will emphasize the points of contact between linguistics and cognitive psychology; others will tell us that, since language is a socially maintained and socially functioning institution, there is ultimately no distinction to be drawn between linguistics and either sociology or social anthropology. It is natural for one group of scholars, by virtue of their bent of mind, training or special interests, to adopt one of these two points of view in preference to the other. What must be condemned is the tendency for those who do adopt a particular point of view on this question to put it forward as the only one that is scientifically justifiable.

Syntax, inflection and morphology

The first thing that must be said in this chapter is that the term ‘grammar’ will be employed here and throughout this book (except in the phrases ‘traditional grammar’ and ‘generative grammar’) in a fairly narrow sense, in contrast with ‘phonology’, on the one hand, and with ‘semantics’, on the other. This is one of its traditional senses, and the one which is closest to the ordinary sense of ‘grammatical’. Nowadays, many linguists subsume ‘phonology’, and even ‘semantics’, under ‘grammar’. This can lead to confusion.

So far we have been operating with the assumption that languages have two levels of structure: their phonology and their syntax. This assumption will not be jettisoned in what follows. But it will need to be modified, unless we are prepared either to broaden our concept of phonology or to extend the term ‘syntax’ beyond the bounds of its traditional interpretation. We have already seen that there are in some, and presumably in all, natural languages inter-level dependencies which make it impossible to make a rigid separation between phonological and syntactic structure. We shall now see that, in certain languages at least, there is a gap, as it were, between the syntax (as the term ‘syntax’ is traditionally understood) and the phonology. This gap is covered in traditional grammar by the term ‘inflection’.

Branches of linguistics

As we have seen, both language in general and particular languages can be studied from different points of view. Therefore, the field of linguistics as a whole can be divided into several subfields according to the point of view that is adopted or the special emphasis that is given to one set of phenomena, or assumptions, rather than another.

The first distinction to be drawn is between general and descriptive linguistics. This is in itself straightforward enough. It corresponds to the distinction between studying language in general and describing particular languages. The question “What is language?” which, in the previous chapter, was said to be the central defining question of the whole discipline is more properly seen as the central question in general linguistics. General linguistics and descriptive linguistics are by no means unrelated. Each depends, explicitly or implicitly upon the other: general linguistics supplies the concepts and categories in terms of which particular languages are to be analysed; descriptive linguistics, in its turn, provides the data which confirm or refute the propositions and theories put forward in general linguistics. For example, the general linguist might formulate the hypothesis that all languages have nouns and verbs. The descriptive linguist might refute this with empirical evidence that there is at least one language in the description of which the distinction between nouns and verbs cannot be established.

The phonic medium

Although language-systems are, to a very considerable extent, independent of the medium in which they are manifest, the natural or primary medium of human language is sound. For this reason, the study of sound is of more central importance in linguistics than is the study of writing, of gestures, or of any other language-medium, whether actual or potential. But it is not sound as such, and not the full range of sound, that is of concern to the linguist. He is interested in the sounds that are produced by the human speech-organs in so far as these sounds have a role in language. Let us refer to this limited range of sounds as the phonic medium and to individual sounds within that range as speech-sounds. We may now define phonetics as the study of the phonic medium.

Phonetics, it must be emphasized, is not phonology; and speech-sounds are not to be identified with phonological elements, to which reference has been made in previous sections. Phonology, as we have seen, is one part of the study and description of language-systems, another being syntax, and yet another semantics. Phonology draws upon the findings of phonetics (though differently according to different theories of phonology); but, unlike phonetics, it does not deal with the phonic medium as such. The first three sections of this chapter deal, as simply as possible, with such basic concepts and categories of phonetics as are essential for the understanding of points made elsewhere in this book and of the notation that is employed in making them.

This book is designed for the course, entitled ‘Language and Linguistics’, which my colleagues and I teach to first-year students at the University of Sussex. Very few of these students come to the University with the intention of taking a degree in Linguistics. Some of them, having had their interest aroused by the course, do in fact transfer into Linguistics from other subjects. The vast majority, however, go on to complete their degree-work, as we expect that they will, in the discipline which they originally chose as their major subject in applying for admission. Our aim, therefore, in teaching ‘Language and Linguistics’ is to introduce our students to some of the more important theoretical concepts and empirical findings of modern linguistics, but to do so at a relatively non-technical level and in a way that emphasizes the connections between linguistics and the many other academic disciplines that are concerned, for their own purposes and from their own point of view, with the study of language. I trust that this book will prove to be equally suitable for similar courses on language, which now exist at many universities, polytechnics and colleges of education, both in this country and abroad. I hope that it will be of some interest also to the general reader who wishes to learn something of modern linguistics.

This book is broader in coverage, and less demanding in its central chapters, than my Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968).

The diversity of meaning

Semantics is the study of meaning. But what is meaning? Philosophers have debated the question, with particular reference to language, for well over 2000 years. No one has yet produced a satisfactory answer to it. One reason may be that the question, in the form in which it is posed, is unanswerable. It makes two presuppositions which are, to say the least, problematical: (a) that what we refer to, in English, with the word ‘meaning’ has some kind of existence or reality; (b) that everything referred to as meaning is similar, if not identical, in nature. We may call these, respectively: (a) the presupposition of existence and (b) the presupposition of homogeneity.

I am not saying that these two presuppositions are false, but simply that they are philosophically controversial. Too many introductions to semantics ride roughshod over this fact. In what follows, we shall be careful not to commit ourselves to either presupposition. In particular, we shall avoid saying, as several textbooks of linguistics do, that language throws a bridge between sound and meaning. Statements like this can, it is true, be given a rather sophisticated interpretation, which makes them more acceptable than they appear to be at first sight. Taken at their face value, however, they are misleading and philosophically tendentious. They encourage us to think that meaning, like sound, exists independently of language and is homogeneous in nature.

Historical linguistics

What is now called historical linguistics was developed, in its main lines at least, in the course of the nineteenth century (cf. 2.1).

Scholars had long been aware that languages change with time. They also knew that many of the modern languages of Europe were descended, in some sense, from more ancient languages. For example, it was known that English had developed out of Anglo-Saxon, and that what we now refer to as the Romance languages – French, Spanish, Italian, etc. – all had their origin in Latin. However, until the principles of historical linguistics were established it was not generally realized that language-change is universal, continuous and, to a very considerable degree, regular.

Each of these three aspects of language-change will be discussed in some detail later. Here it may be noted that the universality and continuity of the process of language-change – the fact that all living languages are subject to it and that the process itself is going on all the time – was obscured, for most people, by the conservatism of the standard literary languages of Europe and by the prescriptive attitudes of traditional grammar (cf. 2.4). The status of Latin is particularly important in this respect. It had been used for centuries in Western Europe as the language of scholaship, administration and international diplomacy.