TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN
LINGUISTICS
When the Linguistic Society of America was founded in 1924, linguistics became
professionalized and was no longer the domain of philologists or amateur students
of language. From an initial consideration of seventeenth-century missionary
studies of indigenous languages, Toward a History of American Linguistics goes on to
focus mainly on the ideas of scholars who dominated linguistic thinking in the
post-1924 period.
Beginning with the anthropological linguistic tradition associated primarily
with Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and their students, and concluding with the work
of Noam Chomsky and William Labov at the end of the twentieth century, this
book offers a comprehensive account of essential periods and areas of research in
the history of American linguistics and also addresses contemporary debates and
issues within linguistics.
Topics covered include, among others:
• the sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’
• Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de linguistique générale
• the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ and its historiography
• the origins of morphophonemics in American linguistics
• William Labov and the origins of sociolinguistics in America
Toward a History of American Linguistics is invaluable reading for academics and
advanced students within the fields of linguistics and the history of linguistics.
E.F.K.Koerner is Emeritus Professor in General Linguistics of the University
of Ottawa. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Cologne,
supported by a research award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Formerly a fellow-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in
the Humanities and Social Sciences, he also holds an honorary doctorate of the
University of Sofia and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal
Society of Arts (UK).
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF
LINGUISTICS
Series Editor: Talbot Taylor
1 LINGUISTICS AND THE THIRD REICH
Mother-tongue fascism, race and the science of language
Christopher M.Hutton
2 WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
Three American stories from the first half of the twentieth century
Julia S.Falk
3 ETHNOCENTRISM AND THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY
Phil Benson
4 THE BATTLE OVER SPANISH BETWEEN 1800 AND 2000
Language ideologies and Hispanic intellectuals
Edited by José del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman
5 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
E.F.K.Koerner
TOWARD A HISTORY OF
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
E.F.K.Koerner
University of Cologne
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2002
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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© 2002 E.F.K.Koerner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Under the above heading usually come at least two kinds of statements, one
referring to the various origins of the subjects treated in the present book, the
other to the various persons who have helped the author, in one way or another,
to put the volume together and, as I should like to think, have made the text
much more readable.
As regards the first subject, I have always taken the attitude that one’s
intellectual property cannot be copyrighted by others, unless it was written for an
encyclopedia or a collective work for which one has received payment and thus
traded one’s rights to a publisher. Cannibalizing one’s own writings, as the late
James McCawley used to call it, is fair game. For the benefit of the
bibliographical sleuth, however, I am providing references to early locations
where the subjects treated in the present volume—chapters 1, 6, and 9 have no
published ‘predecessor’—have been dealt with in some fashion, in all instances in
much less developed form.1
For chapter 2: “Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics”. The Fourteenth
LACUS Forum 1987 ed. by Sheila Embleton, 336–343. Lake Bluff, III.: Linguistic
Society of Canada and the United States (LACUS), 1988.
For chapter 3: “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: A preliminary history and a
bibliographical essay”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2.173–198 (1992).
For chapter 4: “Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de linguistique générale”.
Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 43.55–63 (1989).2
For chapter 5: “Bloomfieldian Linguistics and the Problem of ‘Meaning’: A
chapter in the history and study of language”. Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien/ German
Yearbook of American Studies 15.162–183 (1970).
1 For those interested in further reincarnations of other (partial) versions of some of these
articles, readers may wish refer to a fairly complete bibliography of my writings down to
late 1999; see The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the transition from
historical-comparative to structural linguistics in honour of E.F.K.Koerner ed. by Sheila Embleton,
John E.Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999),
vol.I, xxi–lvii. For a still more detailed account, see E.F.K.Koerner: A bio-bibliography ed. by
Pierre Swiggers (Leuven: Peeters for Centre International de Dialectologie Générale,
1999), iv, 195 pp.; 1 portr.
vi
For chapter 7: “Chomsky’s Readings of the Cours de linguistique générale”.
Lingua e Stile 29.267–284 (1994).
For chapter 8: “The Chomskyan ‘Revolution’ and its Historiography: A few
critical comments”. Language & Communication 3.147–169 (1983).
For chapter 10: “Toward a History of Modern Sociolinguistics”. American
Speech 66.57–70 (1991).
Where the other statement is concerned, I can only hope that I have not left
out anyone from the list of those who have read earlier versions of individual
chapters. I would like to thank Julia S.Falk (San Diego) for commenting on the
introductory chapter; John E.Joseph (Edinburgh)* and Geoffrey J.Huck
(Toronto), for general discussion and for comments on drafts of several chapters;
Anne Simpson (NIAS, Wassenaar) and Robin D.Smith (Leiden) for reading
various chapters for style and offering a variety of suggestions to make my
argument more precise. Needless to say, none is responsible for any weakness of
the book that may still remain.
This is also the place to thank Talbot J.Taylor (College of William & Mary),
editor of the “Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics” series, for having
warmly recommended the project to the London publisher, and to James
Whiting, Commissioning Editor of Routledge Research, for having accepted it
and for agreeing that I submit camera-ready text. May they both be happy with
their respective decisions.
Last, but not least, I owe a public expression of gratitude to the staff of the
Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(NIAS) who made my sojourn as fellow-in-residence during the 2001–2002
academic year not only an intellectually stimulating experience but also provided
me with the kind of logistic support that made these ten months a very happy and
productive experience. The efficiency of the information desk and the library
services and the cheerfulness with which support of various kinds has been
delivered have been truly exemplary. Special thanks are also due to Yves de Roo
for having prepared the reproductions on the basis of which the portraits of
Bloomfield and Chomsky, the two most important 20th-century American
linguists, can be included in the present book.
Wassenaar, The Netherlands, May 2002
E.F.K.K.
2 Of these seven titles, items 4 and 5 have been reprinted in Leonard Bloomfield: Critical
assessments ed. by John G.Fought, vol.II, 142–166 and 210–217 (London & New York:
Routledge, 1999), respectively.
* As this book goes to press, I rejoice in the knowledge that my long-time friend and
colleague John E.Joseph is himself preparing a book entitled Essays in the History of
American Linguistics, which I am sure will complement my own efforts in the most
stimulating manner.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
v
Prefatory Observations
ix
1.
The Historiography of American Linguistics
1
2.
Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics
17
3.
On the Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’
39
4.
Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de linguistique générale
63
5.
American Structuralist Linguistics and the’Problem of Meaning’
75
6.
On the Rise and Fall of Generative Semantics
105
7.
Noam Chomsky’s Readings of Saussure after 1961
131
8.
The ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ and its Historiography
151
9.
On the Origins of Morphophonemics in American Linguistics
209
10.
William Labov and the Origins of Sociolinguistics in America
253
In Lieu of a Conclusion: On the importance of the history of
linguistics
285
Index of Subjects & Terms
303
Index of Biographical Names
309
About the Author
316
To the memory of James D.McCawley, who might
have approved of it
PREFATORY OBSERVATIONS
My first interest in American linguistics goes back to 1966, when I was a graduate
student in English and German philology at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, a
provincial city north of Frankfurt. My professor, a Germanic philologist who had
taken an interest in structural linguistics, decided to offer a seminar in which each
student was to prepare a report on a major book. I ended up with Charles
Hockett’s Course in Modern Linguistics which I found difficult to understand, not
only because it was rather technical in parts but also because I found nonhistorical thinking a strange angle from which to approach anything, not just
language. At the time, I had no idea that two years later I would be in North
America and taking formal courses in ‘modern linguistics’, phonology,
morphology, syntax and general linguistic theory.
If memory serves me well, my first major paper, which I sent off to a German
journal after two semesters of doctoral studies at Simon Fraser University in
Vancouver, B.C., had its origin in the same Giessen seminar where each
participant also had to submit a paper at the end of the course. Mine dealt with the
issue of the treatment of meaning in American structural linguistics.1 In other
words, my interest in the history of American linguistics is of long standing. My
European, philological background (I had previously studied at the Universities of
Göttingen, Berlin, and Edinburgh) and general interest in history may help
explain why the history of western linguistics eventually became my chosen field
of academic pursuit following the completion and defence of my doctoral thesis
at the end of 1971.2
The present book is to some extent the summary of my incursions into the
history of American linguistics from 17th-century missionary study of indigenous
languages to the work of Noam Chomsky and William Labov at the end of the
20th century. It responds in a way to several other studies pertaining to the
development of linguistics in North America, including at least three that have
1 See Koerner, “Bloomfieldian Linguistics and the Problem of ‘Meaning’: A chapter in the
history and study of language”, Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien/German Yearbook of American
Studies 15.162–183 (Heidelberg, 1970). It was anthologized almost thirty years later in
Leonard Bloomfield: Critical assessments ed. by John G.Fought, vol.II, 142–166 (London &
New York: Routledge, 1999).
x
appeared in the Routledge History of Linguistic Thought Series during the 1990s. Julie
T.Andresen’s Linguistics in America 1769–1924: A critical history (1990) ends with
the year of the founding of the Linguistic Society of America, 1924, i.e., the year
when linguistics was beginning to become professionalized and no longer the
domain of philologists or amateur students of language. Chapter 2 of the present
book goes more than a century farther back than Andresen’s work, in an attempt
to delineate the evolution of the study of American Indian languages from early
missionary work to the much more scientific analysis of ‘exotic’ languages by
specially trained linguists of the early 20th century. In Chapter 3 (“On Sources of
the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’”) an important portion of the anthropological
linguistics tradition, associated primarily with the names of Franz Boas, Edward
Sapir, and their students, is revisited, at the same time the theme of Chap. 2
(“Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics”) is taken up. The bulk of the
present book, however, is devoted to the development of important strains in
20th-century linguistic thought in America, from Leonard Bloomfield’s reception
of Saussurean ideas to the work of Noam Chomsky and William Labov.
In particular with respect to Chomsky’s theories and their evolution from
structuralism to generativism, after presenting a much more in-depth treatment of
the history of the study of ‘meaning’ in American linguistics (Chap. 5), the book
revisits the debate of the rise, fall, and at least partial revival of Generative
Semantics (Chap. 6) that has been the subject of Geoffrey J.Huck & John
A.Goldsmith’s Ideology and Linguistic Theory (Routledge, 1995). It also critically
addresses (in Chaps. 7, 8, and 9) a variety of claims regarding the origin,
development, and impact of Chomsky’s linguistics that have been presented in
rather different light in such works as Frederick J.Newmeyer’s Generative
Linguistics: A historical perspective (Routledge, 1996) and other writings by the same
author. At the same time, the book does not wish to neglect Labov’s
sociolinguistic enterprise which since the later 1960s has often been presented as a
‘realistic’ alternative to Chomsky’s theory-driven framework and, in addition, has
kept alive an interest in questions of linguistic change that were in danger of
being drowned out by the trumpets of the Chomskyan ‘paradigm’ (Chap. 10).
The title chosen for the present book indicates that it does not pretend to offer
a complete history of American linguistics. On the contrary, it is meant to serve
as the basis for critical analysis in graduate seminars and perhaps as an inducement
to others to undertake a much fuller coverage of the rich linguistic heritage of
American linguistics.
2 It was the basis of Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of His Linguistic
Thought in Western Studies of Language. A contribution to the history and theory of linguistics
(Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1973), a book which was later also translated
into Hungarian (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1982), Japanese (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1982),
and Spanish (Madrid: Gredos, 1982).
CHAPTER 1
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Impartiality (even if desirable) is unattainable by human beings with
inevitable backgrounds, needs, beliefs, and desires. It is dangerous for
a scholar even to imagine that he might attain complete neutrality, for
then one stops being vigilant about personal preferences and their
influences—and then one truly falls victim to the dictates of prejudice.
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data,
not absence of preference.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996
[1981]), pp.36–37.
1.
Introductory observations
Compared with the vast production of both descriptive and theoretical linguistic
literature in North America, the scholarship devoted to the historical accounting
for such work—and this observation does not apply to linguistics exclusively but
to most subjects in the humanities as well as to the social and natural sciences—
has been disappointingly small. This dearth of historiographical scholarship has, no
doubt, its roots in American culture, which is forward-looking, traditionally
optimistic and, by European standards, somewhat naïve. The belief that the most
recent discovery or product is the best and supersedes previous ones seems almost
constutional. It is therefore no accident that, more often than not, historical
delineations of the path of linguistic thinking is produced either by authors who
are European immigrants or by their students. The worship of the most recent
publication and the belief that it renders previous publications obsolete is not part
of European tradition. Indeed, a historical approach to a given subject seems to
most Europeans to be the best way to gain an understanding of present
commitments. To put it another way, it appears that Europeans and Americans
have different approaches to the same subject. The European is more likely to ask
how a particular outlook on matters linguistic has evolved; the American would
more likely ask how this particular theory works and what it can produce. In
other words, Americans tend to be utilitarian in outlook, Europeans are more likely
2 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
to seek the bigger picture before delving into particulars. At least in linguistics,
this difference also shows in the widespread lack of interest among Americans for
discussing matters of methodology and epistemology that ought to the foundation
of theory construction and debate.
2.
Surveying the historiography of American linguistics
For the purpose of this introductory chapter at least, the term ‘historiography’
will be used in the more traditional sense of “(mere) history writing”, not in the
more recent use of “principled accounting of past developments and activities”, in
a particular field of interest, in this case, linguistics. In this first chapter, an attempt
is made to survey the work on the history of American linguistics that has already
been accomplished.
The opposing approaches to human affairs and their study briefly characterized
at the outset of this introductory chapter may have become somewhat blurred in
recent decades, due, in no small part, to the Americanization of Europe after the
Second World War, but they are still detectable, also because of the
Europeanization of the American academy during the 1930s and 1940s. On the
other hand, at least where historical scholarship is concerned, the influence of
European thinking on American work has been significant, though it required, it
seems, Noam Chomsky’s 1962 plenary paper at the Ninth International Congress
in Linguists in Cambridge, Mass.,1 and, more importantly, his Cartesian Linguistics
of 1966, to make Americans feel that engaging in the history of linguistics was at
least in some way not entirely pointless.2 Still, in a number of instances, the result
of the scholarship in this area done by those without a European background was,
at best, presentist (cf. Newmeyer 1986[1980] and Anderson 1985, for typical
examples) and, at worst, bore little resemblance to history as will become obvious
in the various chapters of the present study in which certain works are critically
assessed.
An important impetus to engage in historiographcal work may have come from
the enterprising editorial efforts of the late Hungarian-born Thomas A. Sebeok of
Indiana University who conceived of adding a concluding massive tome to his
encyclopedic Current Trends in Linguistics series (The Hague: Mouton, 1966–
1976). But, on the whole, the two resulting Historiography of Linguistics volumes
did little more than survey past scholarship in the history of linguistics from the
ancient times to the mid-20th century (Sebeok 1975). Nevertheless, while most
contributions to these two volumes were anything but innovative in their
1 Interestingly, in anticipation of this important international meeting, three European
scholars had prepared a volume of papers surveying the history and trends of Western
linguistics (Mohrmann et al. 1961), which also included a piece on the so-called
‘Bloomfield School’ (Fries 1961).
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 3
approach,3 the materials brought together by the various contributors may well
have played an important role in motivating younger scholars to investigate
particular areas and subjects more deeply. The bulk of this undertaking was taken
up by surveys of ‘the Western Tradition’ (pp. 3–1209 [sic]), but it also carried
articles on linguistic traditions in China, among the Arabs and the Hebrews, and
also on the study of native languages in the Americas.4
Significantly, a good number of the contributors to Sebeok’s Historiography of
Linguistics, such as Robert Austerlitz, G.L.Bursill-Hall, Rudolf Engler, Rosane
Rocher, and several others, all of them European born, participated in the first
International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS) held
in Ottawa, Canada, in August 1978. Indeed, despite its fairly convenient
geographic location, the majority of those in attendance had come from outside of
North America (see Koerner 1980, for the proceedings5). Nevertheless, about
that time, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) had come to recognize the
History of Linguistics as one of the areas in which papers could be given at the
Society’s annual meetings (though few were ever given during the 1970s and
1980s). It would be nearly another ten years after the Ottawa Conference of 1978
before the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences
(NAAHoLS) was launched in December 1987 (cf. Koerner 2000, for an account
of its early history). Since 1988, NAAHoLS has been meeting annually together
with the LSA and several other learned societies devoted to linguistics.
It must be mentioned, however, that earlier, Dell Hymes (b.1927), not
European-born, but a great admirer of the Russian scholar Roman Jakobson, had
engaged in research in the history of anthropological linguistics (cf. Hymes 1963,
for his first major article on the subject). It was he who encour aged Regna
2
The impact of Chomsky’s historical references may also be seen from a variety of
dissertations dealing with aspects of the history of linguistics that were written in the
United States during the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Miller 1968, Penn 1972, Kilbury 1976).
Of course, this is not quite fair to Haugen’s much earlier attempt to get his American
colleagues to pay more attention to the work of Europeans like Saussure, Trubetzkoy, and
Hjelmslev (Haugen 1951; cf. his remarks in Hoenigswald [1979:2] about the rather mixed
reception he received from fellow Americans at the time).
3 In fact, it is an irony of history that the results of two conferences devoted to the history
of (largely anthropological) linguistics, held at Burg Wartenstein near Gloggnitz, Austria, in
1964 and in Chicago in 1968, both sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation of New
York, were not published before 1974 (edited by Dell Hymes). In matters concerning
historiographical methodolology, some of the papers might have have had a greater impact
than they had. The 519-page, unindexed volume contained no contribution concerning
the history of American linguistics, apart from two papers dealing with the study of
Amerindian languages (on which see Chapter 2).
4 The contribution of the Sanskrit grammarians (by Rosane Rocher) was placed at the
beginning of the ‘Western tradition’ (3–67), probably because of its reception by Europeans
from the late 18th century onwards.
5 See also Historiographia Linguistica 5:3.347–352 (1978) for the full ICHoLS I program.
4 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Darnell (b.1943) to undertake historiographical research and who supervised her
M.A. and Ph.D. theses in this area of interest during the late 1960s. Yet, typically,
the time was not yet ripe for such books, it seems, as both works were only
published much later in a thoroughly revised form (Darnell 1988, 1998). By that
time NAAHoLS had begun to meet annually. Hymes’ own incursions into the
history of American linguistics have conveniently been brought together in a 400page volume (Hymes 1983). Earlier, Hymes, together with a junior colleague at
the University of Pennsylvania at the time, John G.Fought (b.1938), had
completed a 200-page contribution to Sebeok (1975) on “American
Structuralism”. Through its detailed analyses of the primary sources, including the
careful study of the Bulletins published by the LSA since its founding in
December 1924, this work has proved to be an important reference for anyone
wishing to establish a factual account of American linguistics in the first half of the
20th century (Hymes & Fought 1981[1975]).
Another impetus to engage in historical study of the field came from the
‘golden anniversary’ celebrations of the Linguistic Society of America during
1974. These resulted in three separate symposia being held, and as many separate
publications (see Austerlitz 1975, Chafe 1976, and Hoenigswald 1979), of which
the third symposium, devoted to European background of American linguistics, is
probably the most interesting. However, in the interest of fairness, all three volumes
derived from these symposia will be briefly considered.
The First Golden Anniversary Symposium, held in July 1974 at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, which at the time had a strong program in Chomsky
an linguistics. Yet the papers given at this meeting were in the main given by
scholars who did not subscribe to this framework. The first was by Kenneth
L.Pike (1912–2000) “On Describing Languages”, a broad exposé of his tagmemic
approach. It was followed by Winfred P.Lehmann’s (b.1916) “The Challenge of
History”, which was a proposal for the study of Indo-European syntax; by
Charles A.Ferguson (1921–1999) on “Applications of Linguistics”; by William
Labov on “Empirical Foundations of Linguistic Theory”, a detailed argument in
favour of his ‘realist’, sociolinguistic framework; and by Charles J.Fillmore (b.
1929) on “The Future of Semantics”, which presents a variety of ideas about
meaning, but nothing systematic. The last contribution was by Noam Chomsky
(b.1928) who, in his paper on “Questions of Form and Interpretation”, argued in
favour of an ‘interpretive’, syntax-centered view of semantics.6 All in all, these
papers were clearly about the present and near future of American linguistics, not
about the past.
The Second Golden Anniversary Symposium, held on America’s West Coast,
in Berkeley, California, in November 1974, was devoted to the ‘Americanist
Tradition’, as Dell Hymes’ paper is entitled, with the other contributions dealing
with “Theoretical Linguistics in Relation to American Indian Communities” by
Kenneth Hale (1934–2001), who by that time had moved from Indiana
University to Noam Chomsky’s department at M.I.T.; “Boas, Sapir, and
Bloomfield” by Mary R.Haas (1910–1996), a short (59–69) paper commenting
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 5
on their work on indigenous languages; “Some Recent (and Not So Recent)
Attempts to Interpret Semantics of Native Languages in North America” by
C.F.Voegelin (1906–1986) and Florence M.Voegelin (1927– 1989), and a very
substantial historical account by Norman A.McQuown (b.1914) on “American
Indian Linguistics in New Spain [i.e., today’s Mexico and Guatemala]”, surveying
the many grammars of and other works dealing with the many indigenous
languages written by missionaries and, much later, also by trained linguists from
1524 until the early 1970s.7
The Third—and concluding—Golden Anniversary Symposium was, fittingly,
held in New York on 27 December 1974, almost to the day that fifty years earlier
the constituent session had been held in the same city. The topic of this meeting,
‘The European Background to American Linguistics’, made it almost inevitable
that the presentations would be by Europeans. Rulon S. Wells (b.1919), professor
of philosophy and linguistics at Yale at the time, was the exception to the rule.8
The proceedings ranged from an accounts by Rosane Rocher (b.1937) of William
Dwight Whitney’s (1827–1894) training as a Sanskritist in Germany and his
relationship to the Neogrammarians to E. M.Uhlenbeck’s (b.1913) “Linguistics in
America 1924–1974: A detached view”. In the latter, Uhlenbeck traces the
beginnings of phonology (as the first step, in his view, of structuralism) to Edward
Sapir’s celebrated “Sound Patterns” article of 1925 and the work of members of
the Prague School of the late 1920s to the late 1930s. Roman Jakobson’s
concluding address provided examples of what he termed ‘movements and
continuity’ between European and American linguistics. He also refers to the
connection between Sapir and members of the Prague School, but in addition
reminisces on his early years in the United States including his meetings—and
close ties— with Bloomfield and Boas, before addressing the intellectual
relationships he sees between Bloomfield and Saussure and some other European
scholars. Jakobson’s contribution contained a number of other interesting
observations. However, like the bulk of the other articles in the volume, there is
little scholarship to be found in them on which a fair account of the development
of the LSA or, by extension, the history of American linguistics between 1924
6 Pike’s and Lehmann’s papers were discussed by Raimo Anttila (b.1935); Fillmore’s and
Chomsky’s by Barbara Hall Partee (b.1940), an early student of Chomsky’s (Ph.D., MIT,
1965). The other two contributions were discussed by William G.Moulton (1914–2000),
but apparently not found substantial enough to justify publication (cf. Austerlitz 1975:210).
7 Each of these papers were discussed individually, by Bruce Rigsby, Margaret H.Langdon
(b.1939), David S.Rood, Ronald W.Langacker (b.1942), and Viola Waterhouse (1918–
1998). Of these commentators, as far as I know, only Langdon was European born,
however.
8 The only other non-European, apart from Einar Haugen (who, as in the two preceding
symposia, provided a brief introduction), was D.Terence Langendoen (b.1939), who
commented, at considerable length (145–153), on the papers by Malkiel and Uhlenbeck,
which led to a rather heated exchange between the latter and Langendoen (153–159).
6 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
and 1974, could be constructed. By comparison, a 48-page article on the first
twenty-five years of the LSA by Stephen O.Murray (1991), provides more food
for thought on the develoment of American linguistics than the whole 180 pages
of this celebratory volume (Hoenigswald 1979).
Other activities related to and, potentially, beneficial for the study of the
history of linguistics in 20th-century America should be mentioned. To begin
with, in preparation of the Golden Anniversary of the LSA’s executive committee
and the one in charge of publications decided to sponsor the writing of the
Society’s history from 1924 till 1974. It was to be a joint effort by the previous
secretary-treasurers, with J Milton Cowan (1907–1993), who had held this office
during 1940–1950, also covering the preceding 15 years of Roland G.Kent’s
(1877–1952) years of service (1924–1939). For a variety of reasons (see Foreword
to Joos 1986, for details), the project never materialized. However, Martin Joos’
(1907–1978) account of the first twenty-five years of the LSA (1924–1950),
written during the last two years of his life, was published posthumously (Joos
1986); Archibald A.Hill’s (1902–1992) portion, covering his years as secretarytreasurer (1951–1968), was eventually published too (Hill 1991). Neither can be
regarded as history, but both provide mines of information on the evolution of
the LSA and the professionalization of the field of linguistics, as the frequent
references to them in Stephen Murray’s work (see especially Murray 1991,9 1994)
makes evident. Indeed, when it comes to the history of the founding and
organization of the LSA in the first half of the 20th century, one may find a more
adequate historical treatment in studies like Falk (1999), even if the focus is on the
fate of women scholars during this period such as the anthropologist and “parttime linguist” (p.95) Gladys A.Reichard (1893–1955) and Indo-Europeanist and
specialist of Hittite E.Adelaide Hahn (1893–1967).
Barely five years after the Golden Anniversary meetings, in March 1979, Boyd
H.Davis organized a Conference on an Oral Archive for the History of American
Linguistics, held in Charlotte, North Carolina. For this she had invited a dozen
American linguists of retirement age, such as Einar Haugen (1906–1994), Raven
I.McDavid (1911–1984), William G.Moulton (1914– 2000) and Charles F.Hockett
(1916–2000), and also two scholars of the following generation, Dell Hymes and
William Bright (b.1928), to act as a link to the present (see Davis & O’Cain
1980). However, the Oral Archive Committee at the LSA, which included Davis
and Henry M.Hoenigswald (b. 1915), another participant in the Charlotte
conference, as members, never developed into any serious activity. It was
abandoned several years later, when the LSA decided to deposit its own archives
at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Mo. Here the archives were effectively
buried as this is an essentially undergraduate teaching institution in the American
9 To be sure, important information on the role of the LSA may also be gleaned from
Hymes & Fought (1981), especially pp. 43–46, 51–54, and 117–120.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 7
Middle West with little research tradition, not exactly a place that scholars would
have easy access to.10
It appears that—if we ignore Hymes & Fought’s study on American
structuralism (1981 [1975]) and a few papers on the subject (e.g., Murray 1980)—
it was not until the late 1980s and the 1990s that a more serious kind of broader
scholarship in the history of linguistics emerged. This included work by younger,
American-born linguists, notably John E.Joseph and Julia S.Falk (cf. Joseph 1996,
Falk 1995; Joseph & Falk 1994, 1996), and, somewhat earlier, several
contributions to Dinneen & Koerner (1990). Particular mention should be made
of the articles by Julie T.Andresen on Chomsky and his well-known attack of
1959 on the Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner (1904–1990), Regna Darnell on
the American text tradition in ethnology, and Roger Shuy on American
sociolinguistics.11 No doubt, the most important work that launched
historiographical scholarship in the 1990s was Andresen’s Linguistics in America, in
which she traces the development of linguistic study in the United States from the
founding, in 1769, of American Philosophical Society for Useful Knowledge by
Benjamin Franklin (1706– 1790) in Philadelphia to the founding of the LSA in
New York in 1924 (Andresen 1990b).12
The autobiographical accounts by senior American scholars, collected in the two
volumes of First Person Singular (Koerner 1991, 1998), which followed in the
footsteps of the Davis & O’Cain volume of 1980, have provided additional
sources of information.13 These three books contain autobiographical sketches of
altogether 27 American scholars born between 1902 and 1932,14 many of which
played an important role in the advancement of the discipline during the 1940s
through the 1960s and in many instances well beyond the ‘Chomskyan
revolution’. They can serve in many ways to complete the picture of the
development of linguistics in the United States from the war years to the 1990s in
areas such as Amerindian, Chinese, Indology, Arabic Studies, Machine
Translation, Romance Philology, English Grammar, IndoEuropean, Germanic
languages, Sociolinguistics, Phonetics, Dictionary-Making, and many other fields
of study, illustrating the great variety of work that is part of what is called
Linguistics.15
These autobiographical testimonials of the 1990s were preceded by the
centenaries of the two most influential American linguists of the first half of the
20th century, Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887– 1949).
Sapir’s legacy has been duly accounted for in the proceedings of the international
10 Julia S.Falk, who has made use of these papers now held in the ‘Western Historical
Manuscript Collection’ of the University of Missouri Library, did so while these papers
were still located in the archives of American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia
(see Falk 1998:171n. 1), where they ought to have remained.
11 The same volume also carries important contributions by John E.Joseph, Daniel
J.Taylor, and others, which however are not devoted to the subject of the present book.
8 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
conference held in Ottawa in 1984 (Cowan et al. 1986). Bloomfield’s work was
evaluated in the form of invited papers which were subsequently published in
book form (Hall 1987). The contributors to both volumes not only reminisced of
the impact that the work of Sapir and Bloomfield had on them, but also assessed
the work of the two linguists in the light of past influences as well as current
debates and commitments in fields such as Phonology and Morphology,
Historical Linguistics, Dialectology, Semantics, and many other subjects.
3.
Preview of the other chapters of the present study
Looking at the publications surveyed above and the efforts made by scholars like
Julie T.Andresen, Julia S.Falk, John E.Joseph, and Stephen O. Murray,16 it can be
seen that writing the history of American linguistics has become a much more
professional activity now than it was at the time of the golden anniversary
celebrations of the LSA in 1974. Nevertheless, the present book cannot be said to
provide a full history of American linguistics. It is a selection of areas which the
author believes shed interesting light on the development of the craft during the
20th century. There can be no thought of replacing the works of Hymes &
Fought,(1981), Andresen (1990), Murray (1994), or Falk (1999)—or Matthews
(1993), Huck & Goldsmith (1995), and Newmeyer (1996), for that matter, but
the aim of the present work is essentially to complement them, at times critically,
offering additional perspectives on linguistic trends and traditions in America.
Chapter 2, “Toward a History of Americanist Linguistics”, delineates the
linguistic activity in the Americas that can boast the longest history, and which
has had a much stronger impact on linguistic practice in America than in Europe.
The description of unwritten languages in North America from the 17th century
onwards suggests they there was no need for Saussure’s Cours de linguistique
12 Of course, as we have seen, there were earlier studies conducted in America, of which
the sociological investigation on the ‘Chomskyan revolution’ by Murray (1980) may be
usefully contrasted with the partisan account by Newmeyer (1980), on which see further
Chapter 8 of the present work.
13 Unfortunately, Paulston & Tucker (1997) provide little new and/or useful information
regarding the history of American linguistics; the best contribution is a reprint of Shuy
(1990).
14 This effort to make available autobiographical accounts is ongoing; cf. the contribution
to Historiographia Linguistica by the late Algonquinist William Cowan (1929–2001) in
volume 28:1/2.229–248 (2001), by the sociolinguist William Labov (b.1927) in HL 28:3.
457–468 (2001), and by the Iroquianist Wallace J.Chafe (b. 1927) to appear in HL 29:1/2
(2002).
15 I am thinking in particular of the work by Ian Catford (b.1917), Charles A.Ferguson
(1921–1999), Kenneth L.Pike (1912–2000), Dwight L.Bolinger (1907–1992), Paul L.
Garvin (1919–1994), Robert A.Hall, Jr (1911–1997), Joseph H.Greenberg (1915–2001),
Joshua A.Fishman (b.1926), and several others.
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 9
générale for the adoption of a ‘synchronic’ approach. An analysis of the language
system, not a delineation of its development, was the most natural thing to do.
Chapter 3, “On the Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’”, deals with a
subject that still today receives a fair amount of discussion, in individual research
(cf., e.g., Lee 1994) and at international conferences (e.g., Pütz & Verspoor
2000). Not surprisingly, then, Landmarks of Linguistic Thought II: The Western
tradition in the twentieth century (Joseph et al. 2001) contains a chapter on “Whorf
on language and thought”. The present discussion, however, was provoked by
Joseph’s (1996) paper, in which he showed that there was, contrary to received
opinion which traces the roots of the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ to
German language theory of the late 18th to early 19th century, notably to the
ideas of Herder and Humboldt, a much more direct link between Sapir’s thinking
and Ogden & Richards’ book The Meaning of Meaning of 1923. Moreover, Joseph
shows that Whorf, drawn by Sapir to structural linguistics from originally mystical
interests in language, developed his ‘linguistic relativity principle’ as a result of
both his theosophist interests and his linguistic field work on the Hopi language.
Still, while it is true that there are no references to either Herder or Humboldt in
Whorf’s writings, he does refer to Boas and Sapir, both of whom can be shown to
have been familiar with the German intellectual tradition, as his major sources of
inspiration.
Interestingly, as Chapter 4, “Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de linguistique
générale”, suggests, although Bloomfield had analyzed an ‘exotic’ language well
before he took note of the existence of the Cours, it remains true that
Bloomfield’s reading of the book in 1923 was not without consequences for the
development of his theoretical views in linguistics. On the contrary, various
subsequent publications, notably his programmatic article of 1926, “A Set of
Postulates for the Science of Language”, and his main book Language, first published
in 1933, demonstrate the extent to which the Cours shaped his ideas. Even though
most of Bloomfield’s followers from the 1930s through the 1950s never bothered
to read Saussure,17 important points of his doctrine had been filtered through
Bloomfield and had become part and parcel of American structuralism, whether
acknowledged or not (cf. Hymes & Fought 1981:14–17, 113–114).
It remains true, however, as becomes obvious in Chapter 5, “American
Structuralist Linguistics and the Problem of ‘Meaning’”, that Bloomfield did not
subscribe to Saussure’s ‘mentalism’, nor did he embrace his concept of the
linguistic sign. The emphasis on ‘rigor’ and the desire to make linguistics a
‘science’, so obvious in Bloomfield’s work from his review of the Cours onwards,
are at the bottom of the difficulties that he and his followers encountered when
they came to deal with semantics. While Bloomfield acknowledged his problems,
many of his successors tried to sweep ‘meaning’ under the rug or proposed to
16 Mention should also be made of German-born Michael Mackert whose various writings
on 19th-century work on American Indian languages will be mentioned in Chapter 2.
10 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
analyze language—usually at the phonological level where only ‘difference’
needed to be established—without reference to the semantic side.
Chapter 6, “On the Rise and Fall of Generative Semantics”, deals with perhaps
little more than an episode in American linguistics in the middle of the 20th
century, but, as its historiography seems to suggest, the fallout of this debate,
between those who argued that the meaning part of language could be treated by
an ever more sophisticated machinery of syntactic devices and those who felt that
even syntax would have to start from a ‘semantic base’, is still with us. While
Chomsky, in Aspects (1965), had suggested that there had to be a semantic
component of some sort, he vigorously fought off attempts by several of his
students and early followers to pursue this line of investigation. The opposition,
small in number and not very well organized, collapsed, and no formal treatment
of linguistic meaning, apart from less than successful attempts to press notions
derived from logic into service, is in sight.
Given the dominance of Noam Chomsky in American linguistics by from the
early 1960s to well into the 1990s, the present book contains more than one
chapter dealing with his work;the sources of his linguistic inspiration as well as the
effect of his teachings (which is already felt in Chapter 5). In 1959, the first
English translation of the Cours was published, and several years later Chomsky
began to study it. Chapter 7, “Noam Chomsky’s Readings of Saussure after
1961”, depicts the manner in which Chomsky read the text, and how he made
use of it at various stages of development of his own theory, from 1962 to the
present. American linguistics had gone through considerable changes since
Bloomfield had read the Cours some forty years earlier.
Much has been said about the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in linguistics, and in
retrospect even the skeptics have come to acknowledge that paradigmatic changes
had taken place during the 1960s that cannot but be associated with Chomsky’s
work. Chapter 8, “The ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ and its Historiography”,
investigates how these changes were brought about and what treatment they
received by historians of 20th-century American linguistics.
Chapter 9, “On the Origins of Morphophonemics in American Linguistics”,
too, deals much more with Noam Chomsky than the title would suggest. This is
not surprising. On the one hand, a morphological approach to phonological issues
17 The late Charles Hockett, regarded by many as Bloomfield’s intellectual heir, confided
to me in private conversation at an LSA meeting in 1991 that he had read the Cours only
in the early 1980s. At the March 1979 meeting, which led to Davis & O’Cain (1980), he
had told me that he just been reading Whitney and that he was impressed by Whitney’s
modernity (cf. also Hockett 1980:106). The other date, too, can be documented, thanks to
Julia Falk, who had corresponded with Hockett during the last years of his life. For
instance, in his letter to her of 15 January 1994, Hockett wrote: “In fact, I didn’t read the
Cours until after I retired from Cornell, in 1982, in the de Mauro French edition (my copy
bears the date 1980 on the title page)”. (Reference is to Saussure 1972 or a subsequent
reprint.)
THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 11
has had a fairly long tradition (some say it goes back to P ini’s work of the fifth
century B.C., which Bloomfield held in high regard); on the other, as recently as
1997, Noam Chomsky has reiterated what he had affirmed on several previous
occasions, especially during the 1970s, namely, that when working out his ideas
on rule ordering for his Master’s thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in
1951, he did not have access to Bloomfield’s 1939 paper “Menomini
Morphophonemics”, suggesting that the generative model of linguistic analysis he
developed at the time was more or less original. The present chapter argues that
Chomsky’s memory of his early work and of what he read at the time has been at
best sketchy. Even if Chomsky did not have direct access to a copy of Travaux du
Cercle Linguistique de Prague vol. 8 prior to the completion of his M.A. thesis in
1951, he had probably absorbed the essentials of Bloomfield’s ideas about rule
ordering in a number of ways, including from reading the proofs of his
supervisor, Zellig S.Harris’ main theoretical work, Methods in Structural Linguistics,
in early 1947, in which the salient points of Bloomfield’s 1939 argument are
discussed in a section entitled “Morphophonemics”. As in the previous chapter, it
is suggested that there has been much more continuity and cumulative advance in
American linguistics than we have been made to believe both by the active
participants in the ‘revolution’ and some of its historians.
Finally, chapter 10, “William Labov and the Origins of Sociolinguistics in
America”, takes due notice of the importance of sociolinguistic work in North
America,18 and the particular role Labov has played in this. In Joseph et al.’s recent
Landmarks, Labov’s major contribution is seen in his recognition of the
importance of linguistic variation among speakers of different social groups using
the ‘same’ language, and how these variations can produce language change (2001:
140–154). This concluding chapter tries to cover more ground, and to show how
much Labov is indebted to the work of his predecessors. That his research
program attracted a number of linguists who had become disillusioned with the
Chomsky an framework (e.g., Anthony Kroch and Anthony J.Naro, who both
had done their doctorates at MIT) is only one of the reasons why any account of
American linguistics in the 20th century cannot ignore Labov’s contribution to
American linguistics.
4.
Concluding observations
One area of importance in American linguistics during the second half of the 20th
century has hardly been touched upon in the present book: syntax or, rather the
theory of syntax, since after more than forty years of effort on the part of a fairly
large number of linguists who followed Chomsky’s lead or who branched off in
similar directions, it is not clear to me what concrete re suits have been achieved.
19 There still is no book on English syntax based on any of Chomsky’s proposals
available;20 the late James McCawley’s The Syntactic Phenomena of English
(McCawley 1988) is the most complete to date, and it owes more to the
12 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
pioneering, voluminous work of Otto Jespersen (1860–1943) than to Noam
Chomsky, in whose department McCawley did his doctorate in 1965. Readers
interested in the development of Chomsky’s syntactic theories from the late 1950s
to the late 1970s may turn to Frederick Newmeyer’s 1980 account or to the
second, updated edition of his Linguistics in America of 1986, which includes a
treatment of Chomsky’s Government & Binding approach (pp. 197–229), which
dominated the 1980s. For a more dispassionate discussion of “The ‘Chomskian
program’”, Giorgio Graffi’s 200 Years of Syntax, which in addition covers the
‘Minimalist Program’ of the 1990s, is recommended reading (Graffi 2001:425–
485). For those looking for more critical analyses of Chomsky’s theoretical
accomplishments—and failures, reference is made to Pieter Seuren (1998:242–
285).
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Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986a[1980]. Linguistic Theory in America. 2nd rev. and enlarged
ed. Orlando, Fla. & London: Academic Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986b. “Was There a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’?”. Language 62.1–
18. (Repr. in Newmeyer 1996.23–38.)
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986c. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1996. Generative Linguistics: Historical perspectives. London & New
York: Routledge.
Ogden, C[harles] K. & I[vor] A.Richards. 1923. The Meaning of Meaning: A study of the
influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Paulston, Christina Bratt & G.Richard Tucker, eds. 1997. The Early Days of Sociolinguistics:
Memories and Reflections. (=Publications in Sociolinguistics, 2.) Dallas, Tex.: The Summer
Institute of Linguistics
Pedersen, Holger. 1931 [1924]. Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century. Transl, from the
Danish by John Webster Spargo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
(Repr., with the new title The Discovery of Language’, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 1967.)
Penn, Julia M. 1972[1966]. Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas: The origins of the SapirWhorf hypothesis in German thought. The Hague: Mouton. [Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Texas at Austin.]
Pütz, Martin & Marjolijn Verspoor, eds. 2000. Explorations in Linguistic Relativity.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1972. Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et
Albert Sechehaye, avec la collaboration de Albert Ried-linger. Édition critique de
Tullio de Mauro. Paris: Payot. (Repr., with a postface by Louis-Jean Calvet, 1985.)
16 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. (with Hans Aarsleff, Robert Austerlitz, Dell Hymes & Edward
Stankiewicz as associate editors). 1975. Historiography of Linguistics (= Current Issues in
Linguistics, 13.) 2 vols. The Hague: Mouton.
Seuren, Pieter A.M. 1998. Western Linguistics: An historical introduction. Oxford & Maiden,
Mass.: Blackwell.
Shuy, Roger W. 1990. “A Brief History of American Sociolinguistics, 1949–1989”.
Dinneen & Koerner 1990.183–209. (Repr. in Paulston & Tucker 1997.11–32.)
CHAPTER 2
TOWARD A HISTORY OF
AMERICANIST LINGUISTICS
1.
Preliminary remarks
If we are to believe veteran anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, “Linguistics did
not become a separate discipline until some ten years after World War II”, that
“Boas taught his students how to learn native languages and to work out
grammars by appropriate questioning of native speakers”, and that “[t]his is where
the scientific study of language began and out of which the early linguists came”
(Goldschmidt 2000:801). If we were to connect the scientific study of language
with the establishment of separate linguistics departments in the United States,
Goldschmidt may not have been that far off the mark. It is true that despite the
founding of the Linguistics Society of America in 1924, there were few
universities that could boast a department of linguistics (in contrast with traditional
Indo-European philology units which frequently were housed within
departments of classics) before the 1950s or even the 1960s. However, using
formal institutionalization as the criterion for marking the beginning of linguistics
as a scientific discipline would mean taking a rather narrow view. In fact, it would
suggest that 19th-century historical-comparative Indo-European linguistics and,
more importantly in the present context, the great work of Sapir and Bloomfield
of the first half of the 20th century was not yet ‘scientific’, because their work was
done within departments of anthropology and Germanic languages, respectively.
However, as Julie Andresen has shown in her book Linguistics in America 1769–
1924, we could safely go back at least to the work of William Dwight Whitney
(1827–1894) when talking about what she calls ‘the arc of development of
“linguistic science’” (Andresen 1990:180ff.). As a matter of fact, she sketches the
‘institutionalization of American linguistics’ from 1842 onwards, with the
founding of the American Ethnological Society, in which Albert Gallatin (1761–
1849), a former Swiss financier, played a seminal role (Andresen 1990:120). For
Robert E.Bieder, in his Science Encounters the Indian, 1820– 1880 (1986), the
scientific study of American Indian languages would have begun even earlier and,
as I intend to show in this chapter, there may be good reasons for putting the date
18 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
of the beginning of linguistic analyses of languages without written tradition
much further back than the early 19th century.
2.
The historiography of Amerindian linguistics
Prior to the 1980s it would be fair to say that although a fair number of scholars
were engaged in the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas, few of
them were also interested in the history of the study of the native languages. In
North America—to leave aside Meso- and Southamerica for the moment—such
work tended to be rare. In 1943, the Indo-Europeanist at Yale University,
Franklin Edgerton (1885–1967), published a ten-page paper on “Notes on Early
American Work in Linguistics” devoted to early 19th-century efforts of amateur
scholars like Picketing and Du Ponceau (on whom more below) dealing with
American Indian languages, notably Algonquian. A year earlier, an anthropologist
colleague of his, Clark Wissler (1870–1947), wrote a 15-page report on the work
on the culture and languages of the American Indians and the role which the
American Philosophical Society played in it. During the 1950s, only one short
paper of note appeared (Stevens 1957), which led to an even shorter demurrer
(Kenny 1957). Apart from dissertations written under the supervision of Dell
Hymes (b.1927) during the 1960s, which remained unpublished for many years
(e.g., Darnell 1998 [1969]), the 1960s saw only two papers of note: Gruber’s
(1967) paper on the anthropologicallinguistic fieldwork of Horatio Hale (1817–
1897), who once was Boas’ research director, and Wolf art’s insightful “Notes on
the Early History of American Indian Linguistics” of the same year. The sole
monograph of the period was written by the Hungarian-born Romanist Victor
Hanzeli (1925–1991) entitled Missionary Linguistics in New France, essentially the
work of 18thcentury French missionaries among the Indian tribes of Quebec.
The 1970s witnessed a significant increase in articles, as before mostly authored by
anthropologists (e.g., Darnell 1970a,b; Hymes 1976, Landar 1975a,b; Stocking
1974), though several of these writers were more linguistics-oriented in their
work (Haas 1978, McQuown 1979), were not essentially linguists (like Miner
1974).
The 1970s also saw a new breed of scholars contributing to the historiography
of Amerindian linguistics. Kurt Müller-Vollmer (b.1928) is a literary historian
who, through his work on Wilhelm von Humboldt, took an interest in Humboldt’s
contacts with Americanists in the United States of the early 19th century (MüllerVollmer 1976). From the 1980s onwards, we encounter scholars who are
primarily historians with an interest in the work of Americanists (e.g., Brotherston
1981, Smith 1983, Bieder 1986), but also devoted students of Amerindian
languages who have taken an interest in the early history of the field (e.g., Cowan
1984, Guice 1987, Hymes 1983) as well as others who turned their interest from
Romance linguistics (Hanzeli 1984, Dümmler-Cote 1987), but in these and other
instances the writers in question are Europeans and their area of interest is Latin
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 19
America, a phenomenon which we have encountered more often in recent years
(cf. many of the contributions to Auroux & Queixalos 1984).
During the 1990s and the turn toward the 21st century, we finally meet
organized attempts to cover the history of the study of American Indian
languages. It began with the 500th anniversary festivities of the ‘discovery’ of
America by Christopher Columbus in 1492, which also marked the year of the
Reconquista, i.e., the recovery of the final parts of Spain from the Moors by the
Spanish crown, and, co-incidentally, the appearance of Antonio Nebrija (1444?–
1522) Castillian grammar (Escavy et al. [1994], especially the contributions by
Collet Sedola, González, Haßler, Hoyos, Koerner). Zimmermann’s 450-page
collective volume is a much more impressive undertaking; it contains 18 studies,
along with an introduction by the editor. The essays are divided into four parts:
the first, on the Grammar and Vocabulary of Meso-American languages, contains
eight articles; the second, on the Grammar and Vocabulary of Andean languages,
contains six articles; the third, on grammatical descriptions of Brazilian and
Paraguayan indigenous languages, consists of two articles, as does the final section,
which is on the grammatical descriptions of American Indian languages of
Columbia (Zimmermann 1997).
The 1990s also turned out to be a major decade devoted to what is generally
called ‘missionary linguistics’, i.e., the work of Christian missionaries who, from
the early 16th century onwards, arrived in the new territories colonized by the
Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French, and the British. While the coverage in
Hovdhaugen (1996) and Novak (1999) includes work in both Americas, Zwartjes
(2000) is restricted to Spanish America. The analysis of individual contributions is
beyond the scope of this brief survey. What is interesting to note is that all these
collective volumes are European undertakings (cf. also Monzón 1999, Navarro
1997, Oesterreicher & Schmidt-Riese 1999, Schlieben-Lange 1999, Wolfart
1989). By comparison, the scholarship in this area of interest by North Americans
is rather limited and largely due to a few authors, in particular the anthropologist
Regna Darnell (1998, 2001), the historian Edward Gray (1999), and Germanborn linguist Michael Mackert (1992, 1993, 1994a,b, 1995, 1996, 1999a,b).
The year 2000 was particularly fruitful in terms of both quantity and quality.
While, as we have noted, Zwartjes (2000) is fairly limited in its scope, the
coverage in the encyclopedia edited by Auroux and others of the same year
contains altogether 11 articles, from Hovdhaugen’s “The Great Travellers and the
study of ‘exotic’ languages” to three contributions beyond the Americas, i.e.,
Africa, the Far East, and Oceania. The prospects for future research devoted to
the history of the study of indigenous languages are excellent, although there is
still room for American scholars to engage in it.
20 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
3.
The study of the native languages of the Americas
It is interesting to note that in 1493, barely a year after Columbus had set foot on
one of the ‘West Indian’ islands, Pope Alexander VI passed a decree stating that
Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain could hold title to the newly discovered territories
on the condition that they would undertake the Christianization of the indigenous
people. This was a tall order; naturally things would have been easier if the
natives had simply adopted Spanish as their everyday language soon after the
arrival of the conquistadores. But resistance on the part of the Indians was strong,
and assimilation did not come about, barring few exceptions, during the 16th and
17th centuries. As a result, it was necessary for the missionaries to familiarize
themselves with the languages of the original inhabitants of these territories in order
to carry out their task (cf. the papers by Collet Sedola, González Luís, and others
in the conference volume edited by Escavy et al. in 1994, for detailed accounts of
these activities).1
With regard to missionary work in North America, following the first successful
settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the landing of the Mayflower in
Massachusetts in 1620, we may notice similar developments, first in the New
England states, then also in other parts of North America. Before surveying its
history, it seems useful to take a closer look at the study of indigenous languages
in Meso- and South America, in part also because from the early 20th century
onwards North American scholars and missionaries have taken an active interest
in the native peoples, their languages and their cultures.
3.1
The study of native languages in Latin America
As is well known, actual missionary work began in 1524, with the arrival of the
first group of Franciscan monks in New Spain (what is largely Mexico today);
they were followed by the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and eventually, and in
much greater numbers, by the Jesuits. In his brief sketch of the study of
Mesoamerican Indian languages of 1983, the late Jorge Alberto Suaréz (1927–
1985) distinguished three phases in the history of Americanist linguistics, the first
beginning with the arrival of missionaries in New Spain in 1524 and lasting roughly
to the end of the 17th century. This first phase is properly called the period of
‘missionary linguistics’, given the fact that the majority, if not all, of those
analyzing the native languages were missionaries. The second phase, according to
Suaréz (1983:5) began in the 19th century, with the 18th century witnessing a
1
In 19th-century Mexico for instance the political leaders were convinced that the
indigenous languages were doomed to disappear and suggestions were made to integrate
select traits of at least the most prominent of them, Nahuatl, into the national, now
‘decolonialized’ Spanish idiom of the country (cf. Cifuentes 1994).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 21
considerable decline in the work on American Indian languages, probably as a
result of the Enlightenment preoccupation with philosophical and universal
grammar, not to mention its concern for the development of logical systems of
communication (cf. Rowe 1974:367). The third phase covers the present
century. No doubt, this classification is much too schematic, especially with
regard to the last two periods, and probably requires revision and refinement. It
must be added, however, that the 18th century was particularly stagnant with
regard to linguistic progress in the understanding of the native languages; most of
the work done in this area boiled down to the collection of languages for
classificatory purposes in a Linnaean fashion, though attention was given to the
individual génie des langues in certain quarters (cf. Haßler 1994).
What is interesting—and requires further investigation into how these
institutions were organized and operated—is that as early as 1580, Philip II of
Spain ordered the creation of chairs for such indigenous languages which were
looked upon as ‘lenguas generales’, i.e., those that were widely used and could
serve the missionary effort particularly well. For instance, in 1582 such a chair was
created in New Granada (Colombia) for Chibcha, also called Mosca, and chairs for
Nahuatl in New Spain (Mexico) and Quechua in South America followed. The
bulk of the descriptions produced of these languages were rather short, containing
little information on orthography, phonetics or phonology; evidently, Latin
values remained the basis for these ‘artes’. These materials usually remained
manuscript, but were copied, adapted to individual needs, and transmitted in
various forms. Most consisted of grammatical sketches, word lists, translations of
the catechism and of prayers, and everyday phrases.
Inspection of the available material produced by missionaries in North America
reveals a very similar picture. However, very little historiographical work was
done during the past decade (cf. §2 above) on pre-19th century history of
linguistics in Central and South America. Even where the 19th century is
concerned, it appears that the Philadelphia anthropologist Daniel Garrison
Brinton (1837–1899) was the first historiographer (Brinton 1891), with few
followers, to the extent that I can add little to Herbert Landar’s brief survey
(1975b:1359–1373). In other words, while the data on American Indian
assembled by the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, is enormous—witness the
massive compilations produced by Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro
(1730–1809) during the late 18th century (Hervás 1800; cf. Breva 2001)—an
historical accounting of their work is still lacking (but see now Zwartjes 2002,
with regard to Brazil).
However, given the subject of this book, the focus must be turned back to the
North American scene for the remainder of this chapter. This tradition of
working with unwritten and, hence, non-historical languages explains to no small
degree the empirical, descriptive approach to linguistic analysis which has
predominated in the United States until the mid-1960s, when the Chomskyan,
inductive-deductive, but generally theoretical approach began to dominate
research and scholarship, at least until the late 1980s.
22 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
3.1
The study of native languages in North America
In 1974, William Cowan distinguished ‘three main traditions’ according to the
place of origin of the missionaries, Spanish, English, and French, as they arrived at
different times, in different places, and frequently with different attitudes.2 This
first period of the history of the study of indigenous languages of the Americas,
i.e., what we identified as ‘missionary linguistics’, was, I submit, similar in all
three ‘traditions’. They are still continued in a way by the Summer Institute of
Linguistics (SIL), begun by William Cameron Townsend (1896–1982) in the
1930s in Mexico as Institutes de Verano, where missionaries are trained in the
various languages of the Americas. However, there is an important difference: the
missionaries of earlier periods were not linguists by training; they had no interest
in the study of these languages per se, a situation which began to change only in
the 19th century, notably with the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–
1835), who took an early interest in the analysis of indigenous languages (e.g.,
Brinton 1885; cf. Koerner 1989, 1990 for details).
For an account of the missionary linguists in New France, the 1969 study by the
late Victor Hanzeli is still the best to date (see also Hanzeli 1984). No work of
comparable thoroughness exists for the British tradition (pace Hewson in Auroux
et al. 2000), and so the following comments in that tradition will remain fairly
superficial.
Mention should at least be made of the pioneering work of missionaries such as
John Eliot (1604–1690), Thomas Mayhew (1592–1682), Experience Mayhew
(1673–1758), and Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who produced translations of
biblical and other devotional texts into half a dozen different Indian languages,
frequently compiling dictionaries or writing grammars of these languages on the
way. Several of these works were reissued by John Picketing some 150 years later
(see below). But the most important and influential work was no doubt John
Eliot’s The Indian Grammar Begun of 1666, basically a grammar of the
Massachusett language or Natick modeled after the structure of Latin, but
produced with a thorough acquaintance with the native language and the help of
informants (cf. Miner 1974 and Cowan 1984, for details). This work, probably
the first American Indian grammar written in North America, was republished by
Pickering in 1822 and received critical attention from later Algonquianists,
beginning with James Hammond Trumbull (1821–1897), who was to criticize
Eliot’s efforts to ‘cast [Natick] into a classical mould’, which led to a failure to
recognize important grammatical features properly (Trumbull 1871:60; Cowan
1984:294–295; for a different view of Eliot’s achievement, see Smith 1979:31).
The other influential missionary linguist of 17th-century New England was
Roger Williams (1603–1683), a close contemporary of Eliot, whose Key to the
2 No mention is made of Portuguese and Dutch traditions in Cowan’s article.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 23
Indian Language of 1643 (reissued by Pickering in 1827), has received due
attention by 20th-century Algonquianists (e.g., Haas 1967), and has more recently
been characterized as
a roughly 200-page long phrase book and description of Indian culture
which contains a respectably large number of words, phrases, and sentences
of Narragansett, another extinct Algonquian language [like Massachusett],
formerly spoken in Rhode Island and only dialectically different from
Massachusett. (Cowan 1984:294).
Williams’ case is interesting as he was not simply a missionary, although he had
started out as one, but was also a future landowner. He was one of the cofounders
of the state of Rhode Island and used the Key effectively in his bid to convince
the authorities back in England not only that progress in missionary work was
possible but also of the rightfulness of his land claims (Brotherston 1981). By about
1700 another group of people took an interest in American Indian languages,
namely, travellers intrigued by their ‘exotic’ nature (cf. Wolfart 1989). But as I
said earlier, it is not my intention to spend much time on this early phase of
Amerindian linguistics in this paper, though it deserves much more attention than
it has hitherto received (cf. Haas 1978:110–112).
The second phase in the study of Amerindian languages will occupy us more
than the first, since it is this period which sees the kind of work undertaken that
was to shape much of the later research. Characteristically, most of the pioneers of
this new stage were no longer missionaries or other churchmen, but people from
public life such as lawyers and politicians. Several of them were European-born,
among them the Frenchman Pierre Étienne (alias Peter Stephen) Du Ponceau
(1760–1844) and the Swiss financier Albert Gallatin (1761–1849). But there was a
growing number of scholars born in North America, the most distinguished of
whom was John Pickering (1777–1846), whose work is discussed below, and
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1828), the third president of the United States, who
showed an early interest in the study of American Indian languages and
encouraged the work of others in this area, especially during his tenure as
president of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia (1797–1814).
However, the work produced during this period was by no means a complete
break with tradition, though it did attempt to study the American Indian
languages on their own terms, and not to impose on them a Latin model.
As an early indication of the transition to a new appraisal of the indigenous
languages, I may cite a lecture by a “pastor of a church in New Haven”, given at
a meeting of the Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences on 23 October 1787,
and published in the following year under the descriptive title “Observations on
the Language of the Muhhekaneew Indians; in which the extent of that language
in North-America is shown; its genius is grammatically traced; …”. This 17-page
pamphlet by Jonathan Edwards (1745–1801) is of distinct interest for several
reasons, including its serving as an example for the kind of work that preceded
24 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
that of Du Ponceau, Picketing, and others toward the end of the 18th and in the
first four decades of the 19th century. (I am thinking of the naturalist Benjamin
Smith Barton (1766–1815), a member of the American Philosophical Society
since 1789, who in 1797 published his New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and
Nations of America, whose argument in favour of the Asiatic origin of the Indians
must have aroused interest in their languages too.) In this 1787 paper, Edwards
“asserts” from his “own knowledge”, as he says, that “the languages of the several
tribes in New England, of the Delawares, and of Mr. Eliot’s bible [i.e., Natick],
are radically the same with Mohegan” (1788:5). This is however not merely a
theoretical assertion on Edwards’ part, but is backed up with evidence from a
comparison of some 60 vocabulary items, phrases, and grammatical features that
“the languages of the Shawanese and Chippewaus is radically the same with
Mohegan” (p.6), and that “Mohauk, which is the language of the six nations[,] is
entirely different from that of the Mohegans” (p.9). In other words, Edwards
identified a number of Algonquian languages as structurally identical, and
Mohawk, an Iroquoian language, as unrelated, an observation which is basically
correct. But there is at least one other observation in Edwards’ paper which
deserves our special attention, in particular if we realize that it was made before
Sir William Jones’ (1746–1794) famous statement about the relationship between
Indic and the major European languages was published. Further, after having
provided parallel data from Mohegan and Chippewau (now usually referred to as
Ojibwa), Edwards concludes:
It is not to be supposed, that the like coincidence is extended to all the
words of those languages. Very many words are totally different. Still the
analogy is such as is sufficient to show, that they are mere dialects of the same
original language. (Edwards 1788:8; my italics: EFKK)
This is an important statement as it suggests to us that the principles of
comparative linguistics and the establishment of language families along
structuralgenetic lines did not require Jones’ celebrated passage in his Third
Anniversary Discourse of 2 February 1786 (Jones 1788) to come up with such an
insight. However, as in the case of Jones, it required someone to follow up on
this hint. Friedrich Schlegel, in his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier of 1808
did it for Jones, and it was none other than John Pickering who republished
Edwards’ paper in 1823, together with copious notes of his own.
Interestingly enough, unlike Edwards, who obviously had undertaken field
work (in fact he had become a fluent speaker of several of the Algonquian
languages), Du Ponceau and Pickering (like Humboldt) relied almost exclusively
on written documents, especially grammars and other accounts by missionaries.
Moreover, they did not venture much beyond Algonquian, and so it fell to later
generations of scholars to establish the various American Indian language families.
The most famous of these classifications was John Wesley Powell’s (1834–1902)
of 1891, which in recent years has received renewed attention (cf. Darnell 1971).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 25
Indeed, most of the work of Du Ponceau and Pickering was concerned with the
preservation of Amerindian language material provided by others. The bulk of Du
Ponceau’s writings on Amerindian languages date from the last 25 years of his life,
by which time comparative-historical linguistics had made considerable advances
in Europe (I am referring to the work of F.Schlegel, Rask, Bopp, Grimm, and
Humboldt of the years 1808–1822), including the classification and compilation of
samples of a great number of North American Indian languages in tome III, part 3
of Adelung & Vater’s influential Mithridates of some 250 pages (1816:170–424).
Although Du Ponceau had written earlier on Amerindian subjects, and had, by
1816 translated the grammar of the Delaware Indians by the Moravian missionary
David Zeisberger (1721–1803), it was only in 1819, in the first volume of the
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, that his first publication appeared
(cf. Wissler 1942, for an appraisal of his Americanist work). However, it was in this
“Report on the General Character and Forms of the Languages of the American
Indian” that Du Ponceau introduced (p.xxvii) the term ‘polysynthetic’ into
linguistic nomenclature, a term that certainly made history as we may see in
subsequent typological work, most prominently in Sapir’s Language of 1921,
chapter six (“Types of Linguistic Structure”, 127– 156).
Like Du Ponceau, Picketing was, professionally, a lawyer and served (like him)
as a diplomat for a few years. However, Pickering had received a good grounding
in classical philology at Harvard and was a linguist by avocation. He first worked
in the classical field in his spare time, then published a dictionary of American
English in 1814. It was from 1820 onwards, however, when he published his
Essay on a Uniform Orthography for the Indian Languages that we see him virtually
devoting all his attention (outside his many public offices; cf. Edgerton 1943:28n.
17) to the study of American Indian languages, though he did prepare second and
third editions of his Greek-English dictionary in 1829 and 1846. It was soon after
the publication of his Essay that Pickering got in touch with Wilhelm von
Humboldt through the offices of the young George Bancroft (1800–1891).
Bancroft, who had received a doctorate at the University of Göttingen in 1820,
had moved to Berlin for further study and made it a point to seek out the famous
man, who by that time had retired from public life to devote himself to linguistic
study. (The correspondence between Pickering and Humboldt continued until
the death of the latter; cf. Müller-Vollmer’s [1976] edition of Humboldt’s letters
to Pickering.) But instead of turning to empirical research at a time when a large
number of Indian languages were still spoken, Pickering, like Du Ponceau (and,
understandably, Humboldt), devoted most of his energies to the preservation of
existing materials, beginning with a new edition of John Eliot’s Indian Grammar in
1822, followed in 1823 by that of Edwards’ 1787 essay already mentioned earlier,
Roger Williams’ Key to the Indian Language in 1827, and two other texts in 1830
and 1833 (cf. Edgerton 1943:27, for details).
Vilén Belyj, in a paper on Du Ponceau as ‘the father of American philology’,
nevertheless concedes that he was a transitory figure (1975:42), a judgment which
agrees with H.Kenny’s (1957:204) assessment of Du Ponceau some twenty years
26 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
earlier (and which includes Pickering too). Indeed, it appears that it required the
foundation of learned societies, such as the American Ethnological Society in
1842, and the establishment of research institutions such as the Smithsonian in
1846 and the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1880, to allow for better
coordination of research efforts and scientific advances through improved lines of
communication. Pickering himself must have felt the desirability of such
organizations since it was he who founded the American Oriental Society in
1842. It appears justified therefore to regard the second phase of Americanist
work as stretching from the late 18th century (perhaps taking Edwards’ paper of
1787 as a starting point) to the 1840s, when these various agencies and societies
were established and Du Ponceau and Pickering died (in 1844 and 1846,
respectively). Indeed, we may say that the third phase, beginning in the second half
of the 19th century, is characterized by an increase in professionalism in
Amerindian linguistics; Du Ponceau and Pickering had remained amateurs in the
best sense of the term.
I have said little so far about the Geneva-born statesman Albert Gallatin (1761–
1849), mentioned earlier in this chapter. His role in the development of
Amerindian ethnology has been thoroughly treated by Robert Bieder in his book
Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880 (Bieder 1986:16–54). It was Gallatin
whom Powell later (1891:9) called a Linnaeus of Amerindian linguistics for his
classification of the Indian languages of North America in 1836. His 422-page
“Synopsis of the Indian Tribes”—published in a volume entitled Archœologia
Americana edited by Lewis Cass (1782–1866), governor of Michigan (1812–1830)
with a life-long interest in Indian culture—constitutes, as Stevens (1957:47) has
pointed out, a summation of the work of Du Ponceau, Pickering, and others.
Gallatin produced two more studies of comparable length, one on the Indians of
Central America, including Mexico (Gallatin 1845), the other intended as a 160page introduction to Horatio Hale’s Indians of North-West America, and Vocabularies
of North America (Gallatin 1848). But it is for his classification of North American
Indian languages that he is best known. Yet Stevens (1957:47) may be right in
saying that Gallatin’s work marks “not only the summation of an era in Indian
linguistics but [also] the beginning of a new era”, if we take note of the fact that
he assumed a leading role in the foundation of the American Ethnological Society
and subsidized the publication of the first two volumes of its Transactions (1845,
1847). Indeed, Gallatin was its first president, and because of his poor health,
most meetings were held at his house (cf. Bieder 1986:43–44). Considering these
facts, we might find it difficult to clearly divide the history of Amerindian
linguistics into periods and to draw sharp dividing lines between the second and
third phase of its development. However, it is probably the move away from the
gentleman scholar to the professional in matters Amerindian during the 1880s and
1890s that can best be offered as the beginning of the new era.
In this chapter, I shall be brief as regards the third important phase in the study
of American Indian languages, largely because much more historiographical work
has been done on it (albeit not yet in an organized fashion). There has been a
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 27
tendency to regard the foundation of the American Anthropological Association
in 1879 and, especially, the arrival in 1886 of Franz Boas (1858–1942) on the
Continent as the beginning of the new phase, though ‘transition’ may be a more
apt term (cf. Darnell 1970). But there is a danger in downplaying the important
work on Amerindian language and culture undertaken by others, many of them
American-born: in particular of Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837–1899) and John
Wesley Powell (1834–1902) as the prime movers, though the work of James
Constantine Pilling (1846–1895), the Swiss-born Albert Samuel Gatschet (1832–
1907), and Horatio Emmons Hale (1817–1896) deserves particular mention as
well (on the latter, see especially Mackert 1995, 1999b).
Indeed, as Gruber (1967) suggests, Boas did not create an intellectual tradition
in North American ethnology or ethnography, but joined a well-established,
ongoing but changing enterprise when he came to the United States in 1886.
However, Boas soon began to play an important institutional role in the
reorganization of American anthropology (cf. Stocking 1968:281–285) and,
although mainly self-trained in the study of Amerindian languages, contributed
significantly to the professionalization of the field by producing a considerable
number of students who largely shaped ethnological research in North America
(Stocking 1974, Darnell 1998). On the anthropological side, we may refer to
Albert Louis Kroeber (1876–1960), Boas’ first doctoral candidate at Columbia in
1901, Robert Harry Lowie (1883–1957), Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887– 1948),
and to Margaret Mead (1901–1978), to mention just a few. On the linguistic side,
the name of Edward Sapir (1884–1939) appears to overshadow many other
important Americanists, most notably Truman Michelson (1879– 1938) and John
Peabody Harrington (1884–1961). Interestingly, while Sapir had no objection to
collaborating with missionary linguists—his relationship with Father Berard Haile,
O.F.M. (1874–1961) regarding the study of Navaho is particularly well-known,
Bloomfield did not have much use for them:
Those works can be used only with caution, for the authors, untrained in
the recognition of foreign speech sounds, could make no accurate record,
and knowing only the terminology of Latin grammar, distorted their
exposition by fitting it into this frame. (Bloomfield 1933:9, quoted in
Hanzeli 1969:16)
While it is true that many missionaries in the past confessed that they were unable
to describe sounds unknown to them, this does not apply to missionaries today,
many of whom are professionally trained as linguists (and not only as theologians).
This is particularly true of the missionary linguists of the U.S.-based Summer
Institute of Linguistics, which is supported by the American Bible Association, the
Wycliffe Translators Society, and other organizations. Indeed, as far as I can see,
no distinction is made between linguists who study Amerindian languages for
their own sake and for a better understanding of speakers’ cultures, and those who
study them in order to convert them to the Christian faith. An informal
28 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
predecessor to The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the
Americas (SSILA), had been launched by the anthropological linguist Charles
Frederick Voegelin (1906–1986) at Indiana University in 1964,3 and enjoys an
ever growing international membership. As we may gather from the SSILA
Bulletin #157 (17 Feb. 2002), transmitted electronically to its membership,
A 50th Anniversary Celebration of the Survey of California Indian
Languages will be held June 8–9, 2002, at the University of California,
Berkeley. The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages was
founded in 1952, a few months prior to the official establishment of the
Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Over
the years, the Survey has supported the work of scores of students and
researchers, hosted numerous Native Americans coming to research their
languages, and developed valuable archives of fieldnotes and sound
recordings.
As a matter of fact, the large majority of senior American linguists studying the
native languages today trace their initiation to the field back to students of Sapir
(and in a few instances, like Harry Hoijer [1904–1976], students of Kroeber), who
had made the study of American Indian languages their prime objective, e.g.,
C.F. (“Carl”) Voegelin, whom Kroeber had sent to Sapir for the completion of
his training, Morris Swadesh (1909–1967), Mary R.Haas (1910– 1996), and
Stanley S.Newman (1905–1984).
Linguists like Charles F.Hockett (1916–2001) and Zellig S.Harris (1909– 1992)
saw themselves as students of both Sapir and Bloomfield. Indeed, in all of this we
should not forget to mention the important work on American Indian languages,
in particular those belonging to the Algonquian stock such as Fox, Menominee,
Ojibwa, and Plains Cree, done by Leonard Bloomfield (1887– 1949) who, at least
in this field, was nobody’s student, but who, being trained in Indo-European
linguistics, successfully introduced the historical-comparative method into the
study of the indigenous languages (e.g., Bloomfield 1925; cf. also Sapir’s [1931]
appraisal of Bloomfield’s work in this field and, much more thoroughly, Goddard
1986).
4.
Concluding remarks
What has been said above, is rather sketchy. Indeed, the subject deserves
monograph treatment, and I have confined my observations largely to those
aspects of the North American scene with which I feel somewhat more at home.
Several scholars who attended the 1992 Nebrija Congress are much more
3 However, as Victor Golla informs me (e-mail of 20 March 2002),
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 29
knowledgeable in the history of the study of the indigenous languages of what is
usually referred to as Latin America, including present-day work on these
languages.4 Yet as far as North America is concerned, far more substantial work in
this area of interest could still be done to do justice to what I would regard as the
true Americanist tradition,5 which has found, to no small degree, entry into the
mainstream of North American linguistics.6
It is this long-standing tradition of work on Amerindian languages which
explains that American linguists did not need to read Saussure’s Cours in order to
focus on the descriptive, ‘synchronie’ side of language structure. Indeed, as the
careers of both Bloomfield and Chomsky (see Chapters 4 and 7 of the present
book, for details) amply illustrate, both would have done the same kind of
structuralist work, irrespective of whether or not they had read the posthumous
work on general linguistics by this great Swiss genius.
SSILA’s founding meeting was held on December 5, 1981, at that year’s AAA [=American
Association of Anthropology] meeting (in Los Angeles). […] Previous to that, one or more
sessions of the Conference on American Indian Languages had been held annually as part of
the AAA meeting, beginning in 1964, but not under institutional sponsorship. Carl
Voegelin, and later Eric Hamp, did the organizing personally, as an extension of their
editorial roles in IJAL. With Carl’s retirement as IJAL editor many of us felt that it would
be wise to form a society to look after these (and other) matters in the future, and thus
SSILA came into existence.
According to the SSILA Membership Directory 2002, the Society has over 875 members.
4 See also the double issue of Amerindia: Revue d’ethnolinguistique amérindienne Nos.19/20
(Paris, 1994–1995) entitled “La ‘découverte’ des langues et des écritures d’Amérique”
which contains a good number of articles devoted to (the history of) the study of native
languages in Central and South America, but also a couple of papers on Canadian (Inuit
and Algonquian) languages.
5 However, this is not to minimize the monumental importance of the 1996 Handbook of
North American Indians, Volume 17: Languages ed. by Ives Goddard (Washington, D.C.:
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution), xiii, 957 pp. in-4°; many
photographs and illustrations; 2 maps. The first 13 contributions, which include an Editor’s
Introduction (in which a detailed classification is advanced which goes far beyond Sapir’s
work), focus on various aspects of North American Indian languages: the history of their
description by Europeans, questions of borrowings and language contact, writing systems,
place-names. Of particular historical interest are Goddard’s “The Description of the Native
Languages of North America before Boas”, Marianne Mithun’s “The Description of the
Native Languages of North America: Boas and after”, and Michael K.Foster’s “Language
and the Culture History of North America”. The second, larger part consists of twelve
articles constituting sketches of various individual American Indian languages by the
acknowledged experts in their analysis (such as H.C.Wolfart on Cree, the late Stanley
Newman on Zuni, Wallace Chafe on Seneca, and the late Wick R.Miller on Shoshone).
The final article exam-ines sources. A massive bibliography of great historical value (762–
924) and detailed general index (926–957) round out this impressive volume. A pocket at
the end of the volume contains two maps: One of today’s distribution of Native American
Language families (developed by the volume editor), the other a reproduction of the
“Linguistic Stocks of American Indians North of Mexico” as first published by John
Wesley Powell (1834–1902) in 1891.
30 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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32 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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Monzón, Cristina. 1999. “Tradition and Innovation in Sixteenth Century Grammars of
New Spain”. Nowak 1999.31–51.
Monzón, Cristina. 2000. “La influencia del español en la conjugación: La Nueva España en
el període de 1547 a 1574”. Zwartjes 2000a.l07–122.
Müller-Vollmer, Kurt. 1976. “Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Anfang der
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TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 35
Wissenschaft im Werk und Wirken der Brüder Humboldt ed. by Klaus Hammacher, 259–
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36 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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Linguistics”. Studies in the History of Linguistics ed. by Dell Hymes, 454– 484.
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Viñaza, conde de la, see under Muñoz y Manzano, Cipriano
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(Facs.-reprint, Menston, Yorks.: Scolar Press, 1971; also available as an ed., with a
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2.1–28.
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Anthropological Linguistics 5:1.104–144.
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Iberoamericana, 450 pp. [A collection of eighteen essays, along with an introduction
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TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERCANIST LINGUISTICS 37
Contributors include Michel Launey, Manfred Ringmacher, Willem Adelaar, Julio
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by Manuel Álvares”. Historiographia Linguistica 29:1/2.19– 70.
38
CHAPTER 3
ON THE SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIRWHORF HYPOTHESIS’
1.
Introductory remarks
In her recent account of the history of the concept of ‘linguistic relativity’ in
American anthropological linguistics Regna Darnell noted the following about
the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’:
Oral tradition identifies Sapir as the crucial catalyst in what would
eventually become the Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. Moreover,
the sometime addition of Sapir’s name implies that Whorf merely
elaborated, perhaps exaggerated to the point of caricature, the ideas of his
prestigious mentor. (Darnell 2001:176)
While I do not quite know by Darnell meant by ‘oral tradition’—perhaps she has
had in mind the kind of stories that first-year students in anthropology or
linguistics are being told by their instructors, it could be said that much of what we
read in textbooks is pretty close to her depiction, too.
The subject matter of ‘influence’ in linguistic historiography has been one dear
to me as the record shows. Its fullest expression to date was given in the
proceedings from ICHoLS III, held in Princeton in 1984 (see Koerner 1987).
However, as will become obvious from what follows, John E.Joseph’s recent
paper “The Immediate Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’” (Joseph 1996) has
challenged me on my own terms, and having pronounced myself on various
occasions on what I thought to be an important source of inspiration in this
connection (e.g., Koerner 1992a), it is only appropriate—and indeed desirable—
that I respond to the challenge, lest this methodological issue become muddled
again.
In traditional scholarship concerning the intellectual roots of the so-called
‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’—a term perhaps first used by Harry Hoijer (1904–
1976) in 1954 in a paper at a conference devoted to the subject, but probably
made more widely known through John B.Carroll’s (b.1916) posthumous edition
of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s papers in 1956 (cf. Whorf 1956: 27)—these are traced
40 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
largely, but not exclusively, to German language theory of the 17th (e.g., Leibniz)
through the early 19th century, which, in Humboldt’s version, connects the
‘inner form’1 of a language with the particularity of a world view of the nation
that speaks it. This traditional view (surveyed in Koerner 1992a) has recently been
challenged by Joseph (1996) and, where Whorf’s work in general is concerned, by
Lee (1996) in her monograph treatment of Whorf’s ‘theory complex’ (especially
chap.3). In this short chapter the argument is made that these seemingly opposite
positions concerning intellectual indebtnedness are not necessarily mutually
exclusive, but that an allowance should be made for the presence, latent or keenly
felt, of two distinct but at least loosely connected layers of influence discernible in
the work of North American linguists and anthropologists studying indigenous
languages from Whitney2 to Whorf and his followers. So while the first, perhaps
more general and less explicit kind of influence (at least where Whorf is
concerrned) derives from a fairly long-standing tradition in German philosophy of
language, appropriate room should definitely be given to the more immediate
sources of the idea that one’s native language determines individual and cultural
patterns of thought which Joseph (1996) has documented so carefully. He, for
one, distinguishes these more immediate sources from the version of this idea held
by Herder and, notably, by Humboldt (which he dubs the ‘magic key’ view),
whereby language is seen as embodying the rational mind and unfolding in line with
the Romantic concept of history, in contrast to the other version (dubbed by him
‘metaphysical garbage’), which envisions language developing within an
evolutionary view of history and which is seen as introducing obstacles to logical
thought. This latter view, Joseph holds, appears to have been commonplace in
Cambridge analytical philosophy, represented most prominently by Alfred North
Whitehead (1861–1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and in Viennese
logical positivism, reflected in the work of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). Joseph
identifies Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) as the key link between Cambridge
and Vienna, whose influential book of 1923 The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored
with Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979), subtitled “The influence of language
on thought and of the science of symbolism”, contains, Joseph demonstrates,
many of the positions held by both Whorf and Sapir.
According to Joseph (1996), Sapir’s positive review of the same year of Ogden
& Richards’ influential book marks a turning point from his view of language as a
cultural product (as in his 1921 book Language, which incidentally was one of the
1 The (otherwise successful) term ‘inner form’ cannot be found in Humboldt’s work; it
was introduced by his explicator Heymann Steinthal a generation after Humboldt’s death.
2 Indeed, as is obvious from what follows, Humboldt’s influence on North American
anthropological linguistics well predates Whitney’s writings. We may also cite the work of
the Swiss-born financier by profession and ethnologist by avocation Albert Gallatin (1761–
1849) of the 1830s and 1840s as one such example (cf. Koerner 1992, for details). Gallatin
got introduced to Humboldt’s work through his brother Alexander von Humboldt (1769–
1855).
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 41
works criticized in Ogden & Richards) to a sort of template around which the
rest of culture is structured, as argued in his “The Status of Linguistics as a
Science” (1929). This paper, Joseph suggests, like others of Sapir’s writings from
1923 on, takes up the rhetoric of ‘metaphysical garbage’ almost exclusively.
Whorf, in turn, drawn by Sapir to structuralism from originally mystical interests
in language—beginning with his discovery in 1924 of the quasi-Cabbalistic
writings of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1768–1825)—likewise takes up this ‘garbage’
line, interweaving it with the ‘magic key’ only in the two years between Sapir’s
death and his own. Joseph —in his important, indeed ground-breaking study on
the subject—also investigates other influences on Whorf, for instance the writings
of the analytic philosopher Count Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), founder of the
General Semantics movement in the United States. As a result, my own paper,
like my previous research on the subject, can be regarded as dealing more with part
of the general intellectual climate that informed American scholarship during
much of the 19th and the early 20th century, than with most of the direct,
textually traceable sources of the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that Joseph
has identified.
2.
The Humboldtian tradition of linguistic worldview
In line with this understanding, the present paper is not intended to attempt an
analysis of all the various interpretations that have been made of the so-called
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (henceforth: SWH) over the past fifty or more years (cf.
Trager 1959 and Fishman 1960, for early attempts at a systematization), a variety
that caused Max Black in 1969 to throw up his arms in despair, suggesting that
“an enterprising Ph.D. candidate would have no trouble in producing at least 108
versions of Whorfianism” (p.30). Instead, I would like to offer a tentative
historical overview of the subject, which may shed additional light on the
transmission of ideas found in SWH whose sources are traditionally seen, almost
exclusively, in observations made by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the
great intellectual mover and shaker in 19th-century language studies, linguistic
philosophy, and education in general. However, as Christmann (1967) has already
shown, essential ingredients of the idea can be found in the writings of a number
of 17th- and 18thcentury thinkers, among them Vico and Herder, with the result
that Justice (1987:56) spoke of a “Vico-Herder-Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis”, referring in a note to a “full pedigree” (p.93), which still awaits
elaboration. In 1992, Robert Pula added another variation on the lineage by
musing about a ‘Nietzsche-Korzybski-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’. Others, such as
Bock (1992:248), go as far back as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, though I believe we are on
safer ground by referring to Leibniz (Heintz 1973) as a forerunner of the ‘point de
vue’ idea or suggesting Locke’s Essay of 1690 as Leibniz’s main source of
inspiration (Weimann 1965), and much less so 18th-century French thinkers (cf.
42 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Haßler 1976)3 as possible sources for the ‘linguistic relativity principle’ as SWH
has frequently been called since Whorf’s (1940a) paper.
Since Sampson (1980:81), for example, can trace some general observations
contained in SWH back only as far as Franz Boas (1858–1942), Sapir’s teacher at
Columbia—though without offering any specific evidence for the connection—it
seems important that we be reminded of the fact that Humboldt had been in
intense contact with North American scholars interested in American Indian
languages during the 1820s and 1830s (cf. Müller-Vollmer 1976), and that it did
not require Boas’ arrival in North America to transmit Humboldtian ideas of
language and mind. In fact, in 1885, one year before Boas’ departure from
Germany, the Philadelphia anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837–1899)
published an English translation of a manuscript (since lost) by Humboldt on the
verb in Amerindian languages (Brinton 1885). Ten years earlier, in 1875, the
most influential American linguist of the second half of the 19th century, William
Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), had written the following in his book The Life and
Growth of Language which we could easily trace back to observations made by
Humboldt— though clearly mediated through the writings of Heymann Steinthal
(1823– 1899) whom he mentioned as one of his major sources of inspiration in
1867:4
Every single language has […] its own peculiar framework of established
distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human
being who learns that language as his “mother-tongue”, is cast the content
and product of the mind, his store house of impressions, however acquired,
his experience and knowledge of the world. This is what is sometimes
called the “inner form” of language, the shape and cast of thought, as fitted
to a certain body of expression. (Whitney 1875:21–22)
In addition to Whitney and Brinton, who can be shown to have held views
strongly influenced by Humboldt—compare his remark that there is “a fixed
relation between the idiom and the ideas of a people” (Brinton 1891:33)—it
could be shown that many other scholars in the United States working on
American Indian languages and cultures held very similar positions. Arguably the
3 This claim that the tradition of Condillac and his sensualist followers had a significant
influence on Humboldt’s linguistic thinking ignores a number of important historical facts,
including the one that at least by the end of the 18th century Germany had already
developed an intellectual tradition completely of its own making (cf. Cloeren 1988, for
details, also Sweet 1989 and Mueller-Vollmer 1990).
4 Since Whitney is known for his attacks on Steinthal and August Schleicher (1821–1868)
in the 1870s, it is important to remember that he had both singled out as the two scholars
“whose works (he) had constantly upon (his) table” in the preface to his earlier book,
Language and the Study of Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), pp.vi–vii.
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 43
most influential among these was John Wesley Powell (1834– 1902), a Western
explorer who became head of the Geological Survey of the Smithsonian
Institution and, within it, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which he
organized in 1879, well before Boas’ arrival on the scholarly scene (cf. Powell
1877, 21880). It remains true, however, that the training of students in
anthropological linguistics by Boas, given his German background and his
ethnolinguistic interests, had a reinforcing impact on North American scholarship
with regard to broadly Humboldtian ideas of language and mind, as we shall see
in what follows. (For much useful information on the presence of Humboldtian
ideas in the works of Powell, Brinton, and others, see now Darnell 1998.)
3.
Humboldtian ethnolinguistics in North America and SWH
The success story of Boasian ethnolinguistics was largely the result of his
institutionalization of the subject at Columbia University during the late 1890s
and the training of students in anthropological-linguistic fieldwork, with Alfred
Louis Kroeber (1876–1960) being the first to complete his doctorate there in
1901. Within linguistics proper, it was undoubtedly Edward Sapir (1884–1939)
who turned out to be Boas’ most gifted student (Ph.D., 1909). It is to no small
extent through Sapir and the various anthropologists and linguists trained by him
that we can trace the continuing line of Humboldtian ideas in 20th-century
American linguistics, which includes Charles Frederick Voegelin (1906–1986),
trained first by Kroeber in anthropological research and subsequently in linguistics
by Sapir, during his Yale years. Hoijer too, a student of Kroeber’s and Sapir’s
successor at the University of Chicago in 1931, whose role in the organized
debate of SWH during the 1950s cannot be underestimated (Hoijer ed. 1954),
can be mentioned as well as the work of other Sapir students such as Stanley
S.Newman (1905–1984), Morris Swadesh (1909–1967), and Mary R.Haas (1910–
1996), and in turn their various students. In the present context, however, particular
mention must of course be made of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–
1941), who attended Sapir’s lectures at Yale during the mid-1930s, and of George
L. Trager (1909–1992), who collaborated with Whorf on (remote) linguistic
relationships among American Indian languages and taught briefly at Yale. After
all, it was Trager who first collected and published Whorf’s ‘metalinguistic’ papers
in 1949, stirring the interest in the ‘Whorf Hypothesis’.
3.1
Boas and the ‘inner form’ of language
Before preceding any further, it should first of all be firmly established that Boas
was indeed much imbued with Humboldtian linguistic ideas, as has recently been
carefully illustrated, with the help of primary German archival sources, in Bunzl’s
(1996) essay, which also traces the use Boas made of ideas from comparative Indo-
44 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
European philology. Liss (1996), in her contribution to the same volume,
“German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas”, describes
Boasian Geisteswissenschaft in relation to the German Romanticist ideal of selfcultivation, Bildung, which was so central to Humboldtian thought, and suggests
how Boas’s personal Bildung leads him to new contexts for applying and
elaborating the Volksgeist research program. Indeed, given the established fact that
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was one of Humboldt’s sources of
inspiration, it is interesting to note that Boas, while a student at the University of
Bonn in the summer of 1877 (when he was just 19 years old), bought a 40-volume
set of Herder’s works (Kluckhohn & Prufer 1959:8). Many years later, in his
paper on “The History of Anthropology” (1904), Boas refers to Herder’s
voluminous Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791) in which he found
“perhaps for the first time the fundamental thought of the culture of mankind as a
whole […] clearly expressed” (p.514). This reference to Herder is also of interest
because, as has been recently proven by Stephen Murray (1985), it must have
been around that time that Edward Sapir, then pursuing graduate studies in
German and Anthropology at Columbia University, met Boas. As a matter of
fact, Sapir enrolled in Boas’ Anthropology 5 course on “American Languages” in
the Fall of 1903. It would therefore not be surprising if Boas had had something
to do with the choice of the subject of Sapir’s Master’s thesis, completed in 1905,
on “Herder’s Ursprung der Sprache”, submitted to Columbia’s German
Department.
It is true that Humboldt is rarely mentioned in Boas’ writings; as Regna
Darnell has noted, “Boas was notoriously poor at citing his intellectual
predecessors” (1987:31). However, in his writings Boas does refer to the work of
a number of 19th-century Humboldtians such as the anthropologist Adolf Bastian
(1826–1905), whom he served as an assistant at the Royal Ethnographic Museum
in Berlin during 1885–1886, the Leipzig psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–
1920), and, especially, the linguist Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899).5 In his 1904
paper mentioned earlier, for instance, Boas makes the following revealing
statement:
It is necessary to speak here of one line of anthropological research that we
have hitherto disregarded. I mean the linguistic method. The origin of
language was one of the much-discussed problems of the nineteenth
century, and, owing to its relation to the development of culture, it has a
direct anthropological bearing. The intimate ties between language and
ethnic psychology were expressed by no one more clearly than by
Steinthal, who perceived that the form of thought is molded by the whole
social environment of which language is part. Owing to the rapid change of
language, the historical treatment of the linguistic problem had developed
long before the historic aspect of the natural sciences was understood. The
genetic relationship of languages was clearly recognized when the genetic
relationship of species was hardly thought of. With the increasing
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 45
knowledge of languages, they were grouped according to common descent,
and, when no further relationship could be proved, a classification
according to morphology was attempted. To the linguist [such as Steinthal
and other 19th-century Humboldtians: EFKK], whose whole attention is
directed to the study of the expression of thought by language, language is
the individuality of a people, and therefore a classificaion of languages must
present itself to him as a classification of peoples. No other manifestation of
the mental life of man can be classified so minutely and definitely as
language. In none are the genetic relations more clearly established. It is
only when no further genetic and morphological relationship can be found,
that the linguist is compelled to coördinate languages and can give no
further clue regarding their relationship and origin. No wonder, then, that
this method was used to classify mankind, although in reality the linguist
classified only languages. The result of the classification seems eminently
satisfactory on account of its definiteness as compared with the result of
biological and cultural classifications. (Boas 1974 [1904]:28–29)
This lengthy quotation is interesting for a variety of reasons, and not only because
of Boas’ explicit reference to Steinthal (cf. Bunzl [1996:63–71], for details),
professor of general linguistics at the University of Berlin since 1862. It is
revealing in that it may help explain his life-long interest in linguistic classification
(e.g., Boas 1894, 1920b, 1929), which was one of Steinthal’s preoccupations too
(e.g., Steinthal 1850, 1860), albeit on genetic rather than typological grounds, and
Boas’ motives for engaging in this kind of work. It should be pointed out,
however, that Boas would probably not have endorsed Sapir’s well-known
chapter 6 in Language on “Types of Linguistic Structure” (Sapir 1921:127–156);
he was too much aware of the limitations of such undertakings. It is true that
Boas was not a student at the University of Berlin where Steinthal taught, but the
two had met during the period that Boas was Bastian’s assistant; the American
Philosophical Society in Philadelphia has a letter from Steinthal to Boas dated 15
Sept. 1888 in its archives (Stocking 1974:455). According to Jakobson (1944:
188), Boas later “regretted never having attended” Steinthal’s lectures, and Lowie
(1943:184) reports that Boas once told him that his aim was to realize Steinthal’s
goals.6 That Boas used Humboldt’s concept of ‘inner form’ in his characterization
of the diversity of Amerindian languages and tended to see languages as
conditioning the world views of those speaking them, has been pointed out by
Hymes (1961; cf. Stocking 1968:159). However, Boas remained highly critical of
5 In his 647-page collection of papers published toward the end of his life (Boas 1940)
there are frequent references to Bastian (e.g., pp. 13, 270–273 passim, 306, 435, 444, etc.)
and to Wundt (e.g., 319, 456,458, 476, 485, etc.), but I have not found a reference to
Steinthal (this massive volume has no index). However, few of the papers included there
deal with general linguistics or address questions of the relationship between language and
mind, i.e., the central areas of Steinthal’s interest.
46 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
the respects in which the Herder-Humboldt tradition carried the germ of later
stereotyping and misconception about the languages and cultures of peoples such
as the American Indians.7 As Lucy (1985a:81) has suggested, it was only “late in
his life [that] Boas (1942:181–183) gave a very cautious endorsement of ideas
similar to those adopted by Whorf.”
However, Lucy’s contention is probably quite wrong. As Robert E.Maclaury
reminded me recently (p.c., February 1998), and what he suspects—mistakingly,
I think—to be Boas’ “first self-inspired statement” on ‘linguistic relativity’, Boas
pronounced the following in 1909, at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of
the opening of Clark University, which was published in the Journal of Psychology
a year later:
The behavior of primitive man and of the uneducated demonstrates that
such linguistic classifications never rise into consciousness, and that
consequently their origin must be sought, not in rational, but in automatic
mental process. In various cultures these classifications may be founded on
fundamentally distinct principles. A knowledge of the categories under
which in various cultures experience is classified will, therefore, help to an
understanding of early psychological processes. Differences of principles of
classification are found in the domain of sensations. For instance: it has been
observed that colors are classified in quite distinct groups according to their
similarities, without any accompanying difference in the ability to
distinguish shades of color. What we call green and blue is often combined
under a term like “gall-color,” or yellow and green are combined into one
concept which may be named, “color of young leaves.” In course of time
we have been adding names for additional hues which in earlier times, in
part also
now in daily life, are not distinguished. The importance of the fact that in
speech and thought the word calls forth a different picture, according to the
classification of green and yellow or green and blue as one group can hardly
be exaggerated. (Boas 1910:377, quoted from the slightly revised version in
The Mind of Primitive Man [New York: Macmillan, 1911], p.190)
6 The impact of Steinthal on Boas’ “view of linguistic categories as a window to the
human mind” has been thoroughly demonstrated in Mackert (1993).
7 Like Humboldt, Boas stresses the uniqueness of each language, emphasizing the great
differences among Amerindian languages, stating that “the psychological basis of
morphology is not by any means the same in the fifty-five stocks [identified by John
Wesley Powell in the 1892 classification] that occur on our continent” (Boas 1906:644).
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 47
So while the first lengthy quotation from Boas’ 1904 paper illustrates his
intellectual heritage with regard to his linguistic and ethnological thinking
generally, the second citation from a statement made five years later would attest
more clearly to Boas’ ideas adumbrating the linguistic relativity principle, perhaps
not so much in terms of what he has to say about the perception and naming of
colour than his references to psychological processes generally and linguistic
classifications specifically. Indeed, since Whorf was to name only Boas and Sapir
as his sources of inspiration on this issue—and not anyone else in the
Humboldtian tradition that I have been particularly concerned with, it would
probably be quite fruitful to look much more closely into Boas’ writings for other
such passages.
In the present chapter, I shall deal mainly with the transmission of the socalled
Humboldtian world-view idea.8 It is of course true that the linguistic tradition
associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt is much richer and more
varied than that. It can be characterized grosso modo as the line of research that was
preoccupied with subjects that were neglected or ignored by 19th-century
‘mainstream’ linguistics, namely, the study of non-Indo-European, especially
‘exotic’, languages, and the investigation of grammatical categories in many
languages throughout the world—a subject that Boas (e.g., 1911:67), Sapir (1921:
86–126 passim; 1931), Whorf (1956:67–111 passim), and their successors took a
strong interest in. To these lines of the Humboldtian tradition should be added
work in typological (in contrast to genetic) classification of diverse languages, on
semantics and the psychology of language, and the relationship between language
structure and social and cultural organization. All of these tie in, in one way or
another, with the Weltanschauungshypothese, traceable in Whorf although he, as
noted already, referred only to Boas and Sapir as his intellectual sources on this
subject.
We thus could, in Whorf’s case, only expect a mediated, watered-down, as it
were, kind of influence of broadly Humboldtian ideas. An adequate treatment of
the Humboldtian research program, however, would go beyond the scope of a
single chapter. It is hoped, however, that by tracing the transmis sion of mainly
one facet of the Humboldtian linguistic tradition, the field will be opened for
further—and deeper—scholarly research.
8 As an example of its impact in 20th-century Germany, we may refer to the neo-Kantian
philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who maintained that “every particular language
represents its own ‘subjective world view’, from which it cannot and will not detach itself”
(Cassirer 1957[1929]:341).
48 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
3.2
Humboldt, Sapir and the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’
The Herder-Humboldt line of linguistic thinking was clearly drawn by one of
Boas’ most distinguished students, Edward Sapir (1884–1939) in his MA thesis,
mentioned earlier, where he compares Herder’s views with Humboldt’s and
discusses Herder’s influence on Humboldt (Sapir 1984 [1907]: 385–388). In these
pages Sapir also refers to a work by Steinthal (1858), in which Steinthal contests
the correctness of this filiation, which had previously been put forward by Haym
(1856). The Humboldt-Sapir connection has been explored much more fully by
Drechsel (1988), especially with regard to the ‘inner form’ idea (cf. Sapir 1921:
115) and the so-called ‘SapirWhorf Hypothesis’. Indeed, it is this
Weltanschauungstheorie, which has occupied anthropological linguists especially
during the 1950s and 1960s (cf. Brown 1967, Miller 1968, Penn 1972, for
historical treatments), and which would therefore best serve to illustrate the
continuing presence of Humboldtian ideas in North American linguistics.
Accordingly, this paper will be largely devoted to tracing the transmission of this
idea.9
In a letter to Friedrich Schiller of 1798, written several years before he had first
made contact with a non-Indo-European language (such as Basque in 1801 and
American Indian languages seven years later during his sojourn in Rome, where
he got access to the materials amassed by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro in the
Vatican Library), Wilhelm von Humboldt adumbrated his Weltansicht hypothesis
in the following manner:
Language appears to present to us subjectively our entire mental activity (in
a manner of our procedure), but it generates at the same time the objects in
as much as they are objects in our thinking […]. Language is, therefore, if
not altogether, at least in terms of perception, the means by which [each]
human being constructs at the same time himself and the world or, by
which he, rather, becomes conscious of himself by discriminating between
himself and the world. (Cited after Heeschen 1977:133–134)
[Die Sprache stellt offenbar unsre ganze geistige Tätigkeit subjektiv (nach
der Art unsres Verfahrens) dar, aber sie erzeugt auch zugleich die
Gegenstände, insofern sie Objekte unseres Denkens sind […]. Die Sprache
ist daher, wenn nicht überhaupt, doch wenigstens sinnlich das Mittel, durch
welches der Mensch zugleich sich selbst und die Welt bildet oder vielmehr
seiner dadurch bewusst wird, dass er eine Welt von sich abscheidet]
9 The Humboldtian interest in language typology could serve as another such line of
tradition from the work of Steinthal, August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), Georg von
der Gabelentz (1840–1893) and others to Boas, Sapir, and his students and
eventually to the work of Joseph H.Greenberg (1915–2002) and his associates from
the later 1950s onwards.
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 49
More than ten years later, in his 1812 Essai sur les langues du Nouveau Continent,
originally drafted for a project by his brother Alexander but never published
during the author’s life-time, Wilhelm von Humboldt noted that “le monde dans
lequel nous vivons est […] exactement celui dans lequel nous transplante l’idiôme
que nous parlons [the world in which we live…is exactly that into which the
language we speak transplants us]” (Gesammelte Schriften III, p.332). Many years
later, in 1827, after his retirement from public office and following several years
of exchanges between himself and John Pickering (1777–1846) as well as Peter
Stephen Du Ponceau (1760– 1844), Humboldt presented a paper to the Prussian
Academy entitled “Über den Dualis”, in which he put forward his idea of
language as the mirror of the mind and as determining the world-view of the
speaker in the following terms:
Language is by no means a mere means of communication, but the mirror
of the mind and of the world view of the speaker. [Die Sprache ist
durchaus kein blosses Verständigungsmittel, sondern der Abdruck des
Geistes und der Weltansicht des Redenden.] (Gesammelte Schriften VI, p.23)
Similar observations can be found in many other places in Humboldt’s writings
(see Penn [1972:19–22] for further references). Yet these few citations above may
suffice to characterize, at least superficially, what has been called Humboldt’s
Weltanschauungstheorie, his theory of the interrelationship between language and
world view, and, more specifically, between linguistic structure and the particular
manner in which a speaker of a given language conceptualizes his universe. One
more citation from Humboldt’s posthumous magnum opus may serve to round out
the picture, where he declares that
[…] there resides in every language a characteristic world-view. As the
individual sound stands between man and the object, so the entire language
steps in between him and the nature that operates, both inwardly and
outwardly, upon him. He surrounds himself with a world of sounds so as to
assimilate and process within himself the world of objects. These
expressions in no way outstrip the measure of the simple truth. Man lives
primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on
his presentations, he actually does so exclusively, as language presents them
to him. (Humboldt 1988[1836]:60)
Boas, in his famous Introduction to Volume I of the Handbook of American Indian
Languages, written in 1908, stated the following, which clearly echoes Humboldt:
Inferences based on peculiar forms of classification of ideas, and due to the
fact that a whole group of distinct ideas are expressed by a single term, occur
commonly in the terms of relationship of various languages; as, for instance,
in our term uncle, which means two distinct classes of father’s brother and
50 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
mother’s brother. Here also, it is commonly assumed that the linguistic
expression is a secondary reflex of the customs of the people; but the
question is quite open in how far the one phenomenon is the primary one
and the other the secondary one, and whether the customs of the people
have not rather developed from the unconsciously developed terminology
[…]. Finally, a few examples may be given of cases in which the use of
descriptive terms of certain concepts, or the metaphorical use of these terms,
has led to peculiar views or customs. […] the peculiar characteristics of
language are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the peoples of the
world. (Boas 1911:72–73)
Whereas Humboldt appears to have affirmed that the language we are speaking
determines our way of looking at things, Boas was hedging, allowing for a
possibly reciprocal influence between language and thought (which was not
actually excluded by Humboldt). Sapir, who had completed his doctorate under
Boas in 1909, made a much more forceful statement twenty years later, after
having worked with American Indian languages for many years, regarding the
interrelationship between language and world-view. Speaking at a joint meeting
of the Linguistic Society of America and various other American learned societies
held in New York City in December 1928, Sapir stated:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the
world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the
mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of
expression of their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts
to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely
an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or
reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. […] We see
and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because of the
language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
interpretation. (Sapir 1929: 209–210=1949:162)
In view of the opinion expressed by A.L.Kroeber thirty years after Sapir’s
statement, namely, that the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ ought properly be
called ‘Whorf’s Hypothesis’ alone (see Kroeber 1984[1959]:135– 136), a position
reiterated by others (e.g., Alford 1978), it seems important not to overlook Sapir’s
argument expressed publicly before a large audience. As Dell Hymes has observed
on various occasions (1983 passim), the above quotation from Sapir is not an
isolated observation concerning the ‘relativity principle’. Interestingly enough,
given the recent suggestions that Whorf took this term from Einstein (e.g.,
Heynick 1983),10 Sapir, in his paper “The Grammarian and His Language”,
published in a popular magazine in 1924, spoke of ‘relativity’ in the following
terms (which, I submit, has an unmis-takingly Humboldtian ring to it):
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 51
The upshoot of it all [i.e., the analysis of experience in different languages]
would be to make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden
from us by our naïve acceptance of fixed habits of speech as guides to an
objective understanding of the nature of experience. This is the relativity of
concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought.
(Sapir 1949[1924]:159; also quoted in Hymes 1983:153–154)
As Sapir’s influence on Whorf is undeniable (cf. Darnell [1990:375–382] for an
account of their relationship), we might see in passages like these some of the
immediate sources of Whorf’s inspiration. Indeed, we should at least cite another
—much more forceful—statement of Sapir’s, published in Science, another public
forum, somewhat later in order to dispel the mistaken idea that Whorf developed
his ideas on the subject entirely independently of Sapir’s inspiration:11
Language […] not only refers to experience largely acquired without its
help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal
completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit
expectations into the field of experience […]. Such categories as number,
gender, case, tense, […] are not so much dis-covered by experience as
imposed upon it because of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon
our orientation in the world. (Sapir 1931).
It should be pointed out, however, that Sapir appears to have adopted a more
sceptical position on this subject toward the end of his life. In his posthumously
published paper on “American Indian Grammatical Categories”, which had been
completed from manuscript by his favorite student Morris Swadesh (1909–1967),
we can read:
It would be naive to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent
on pattern expressed in language. Any concept, whether or not it forms
part of the system of grammatical categories, can be conveyed in any
language. If a not in is lacking in a given series, it implies a difference of
10 Even if Whorf did so consciously, I would be surprised if Whorf had not first
found the term in Sapir; one may doubt that Sapir’s use of term ‘relativity’ in 1924
had much to do with Einstein’s theory, which became more widely accepted by
physicists by the mid-1920s only and did not become a popular notion before much
later (see, however, note 11).
11 Indeed, in his 1924 paper, in which he also refers to Ogden & Richards (1923)
The Meaning of Meaning (1949[1924]:157), Sapir continues our previous quotation
by noting: “It is not so difficult to grasp as the physical relativity of Einstein” (p.
159), thus making the connection that Whorf obviously had in mind when he
formulated his ‘new principle of relativity’ in 1940.
52 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
configuration and not a lack of expressive power. (Sapir & Swadesh 1946:
106)
In Regna Darnell’s (2001:184) words, this joint paper “provided the
longpromised generalization of Boas’s argument [concerning grammatical
categories]” and his view, also maintained by Whorf, that ‘psychological
selection’ motivated their diversity.
3.3
Traces of ‘Humboldtian’ ideas in the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
It is true, however, that it was Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941)—the chemical
engineer and fire-insurance investigator by profession and the linguist by
avocation, who had undertaken extensive research into the language of the Hopi
Indians of Arizona (not in situ, but through an informant residing in New York
City) during 1932–1935—who went beyond what his predecessors had suggested
concerning the relationship between cognition and grammatical categories.
Indeed, it has been suggested by Regna Darnell (1990:380–382) that Whorf did
so quite consciously, in an attempt to attract (largely non-linguistics) students to
the course in American Indian linguistics which he was teaching at Yale during
1937–1938, substituting for Sapir who had taken sabbatical leave for the year.
Thus, in a paper on “Science and Linguistics” published in a non-linguistic
journal in 1940 (and frequently reprinted in various places thereafter), Whorf was
addressing notably scientists when he argued that
the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each
language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but
rather is itself a shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s
mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental
stock in trade. (Whorf 1956[1940a]:212)
In the same paper he noted further (p.213):
The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we
do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the
contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions
which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the
linguistic systems of our minds.
As as result, Whorf (p.214) held that we are thus
introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers
are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 53
universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way
be calibrated.
These are not the only places in which Whorf discussed his ‘relativity principle’
(cf. Whorf 1956:240, 252, and elsewhere, e.g., Whorf 1950[1936])— Sapir, as we
have seen, had earlier spoken of the “relativity of the form of thought” and
indeed made a reference to “the physical relativity of Einstein” (1949[1924]:159),
and so it cannot be doubted that Whorf, too, was alluding to Einstein when he
spoke of “a new principle of relativity”, given that the journal for which he had
drafted his article was M.I.T.’s Technology Review whose readership were natural
scientists and engineers, not members from the arts and social sciences.12 Whorf’s
1940 paper has become the locus classicus of what has ever since been called ‘the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’.13 No doubt, these above statements are the most
forceful ones, but Whorf made similar statements in other ‘metalinguistic’ papers
first assembled by his friend George L.Trager in 1949 and later included in the
collected papers edited by John B.Carroll (Whorf 1956).
There is no indication that Whorf ever referred to Humboldt in his writings,
published and unpublished (cf. Lee 1996). Sapir too made no direct references to
Humboldt after his 1905 MA thesis either, as far as I know, and so the ‘argument
of influence’ (Koerner 1987) may be regarded as somewhat far-fetched in either
case. Yet to speak of a latent tradition to think in Humboldtian terms that goes
back to at least the last quarter of the 19th century in America may not be
inappropriate. Passages in Whorf like the following appear at least to echo
Humboldtian terms, when he argued for mental evolution through the direct
experience of linguistic diversity:
I believe that those who envision a world speaking only one tongue,
whether English, German, or Russian, or any other, hold a misguided ideal
and would do the evolution of the human mind the greatest disservice.
Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality
and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only
correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent
evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses.
(Whorf 1956[1941b]:244)
Given the extensive literature concerning SWH from at least the 1950s onwards
(cf. Koerner 1992a), it is a bit surprising to note that as recent as 1985 John
A.Lucy charged that “despite this interest, few undertook the empirical and
theoretical tasks necessary to seriously investigate and develop his [i.e., Whorf’s]
ideas” (p.89). Typically, Lucy, a psycho-sociologist, not primarily a linguist,
12 On Whorf’s thorough acquaintance with and abiding interest in the goings-on in the
sciences is stressed by Darnell (2001:177–178).
54 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
focuses on Whorf’s conceptual distinction between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ categories
in language (76–80), taking Whorf’s work on Hopi at face value (81–89; see also
Lee 1985:114ff.). Obviously, Lucy was ignoring Helmut Gipper’s (b.1919)
monograph-length research report of 1972, disproving many of Whorf’s claims
concerning this American Indian language. Similarly, the research findings of
Gipper’s student, Ekkehart Malotki (1979, 1983), which refute much of Whorf’s
proposals on empirical grounds, have only recently been taken note of by rather
few scholars in North America (cf. Shaul’s 1985 review of Malotki’s books).
While it is true that the interest in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis among North
American anthropologists and linguists somewhat abated during the 1960s and
1970s—compared to the early 1950s, during which altogether four meetings were
held in the United States on the subject within a span of three years (cf. Hymes
[1983:174–176] for details) as against only two during the 1970s (see Pinxten
1976; McCormack & Wurm 1977), there are no indications that the issue has
been abandoned because of the difficulty, if not sheer impossibility, of verifying
its basic correctness. Interestingly enough, Paul Kay, for instance, who in 1969
together with a colleague, published the result of experiments dealing with colour
perception and naming (Berlin & Kay 1969), which supposedly refuted SWH,
fifteen years later reports on a study in which he and another researcher conclude
their new research into the matter, saying: “A more cautious Whorfianism seems
to be supported by the results reported here” (Kay & Kempton 1984:77).
4.
Concluding remarks
In 1963 Hymes spoke of “the gradual remission of amnesia as to the past
anthropological history of the problems dramatized by Whorf”, and referred to
the fact that Whorf himself never regarded his ideas as revolutionary but “saw his
work as deriving from Sapir and Boas”, adding that the “record of continuity is in
fact much longer, going back, of course, to Wilhelm von Humboldt” (Hymes
1983:16). In this short paper, I have sketched only the transmission of the socalled ‘Weltanschauungstheorie’ from Humboldt to 20th-century American
ethnolinguistics. While the history is far from being complete, a systematic
classification of the accumulated discussion over the past fifty years, since Whorf’s
seminal paper of 1940, appears desirable. The list of references provided in
13 It became fashionable from these early 1950s onwards to treat Whorf’s views—and, not
infrequently, by extension Sapir’s—on the relationship between linguistic organization of a
given language and cultural patterns of its speakers as a testable ‘hypothesis’, a term which
neither Whorf nor Sapir ever used in this connection, and probably would not have
approved of—hence the use of ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (i.e., within quotation marks).
Indeed, the more ‘testable’ the idea of linguistic relativity was made, the more restricted it
became. For a valuable attempt to disentangle the linguistic relativity hypothesis from what
she identifies as Whorf’s more general ‘theory complex’, see Penny Lee (1996).
SOURCES OF THE ‘SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS’ 55
Koerner (1995:218–240) may serve as basis for someone willing to take on this
demanding task.
The 1990s have witnessed a revival of interest in SWH, now more often
associated with Whorf’s writings alone, probably because his formulations have
been particularly provocative and challenging to anthropologists, sociologists,
philosophers and psychologists (cf. Bock 1992). Several recent publications and
related activities seem to suggest such an increased attention: I am referring to the
various contributions to the festschrift in honour of Joshua A.Fishman, The Influence
of Language on Culture and Thought (Cooper & Spolsky 1991) and the convening
of a symposium on ‘Rethinking Linguistic Relativity’ in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, on
3–11 May 1991, co-chaired by John J.Gumperz & Stephen C.Levinson, the
papers drawing from these discussions been published (Gumperz & Levinson
1996).
In 1992 John A.Lucy published two monographs (both going back to his 1987
Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago), one entitled Language Diversity
and Thought with the subtitle “A reformulation of the linguistic relativity
hypothesis”, the other titled Grammatical Categories and Cognition and based on
empirical studies conducted by the author comparing the grammar of American
English with that of Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of southeastern
Mexico (Lucy 1992a, b). For the present survey, the first-mentioned book is of
particular interest as it offers, in the first two chapters, an historical account of the
development of SWH beginning with Boas, but not venturing at all into its
prehistory—the name of Humboldt, for instance, is not mentioned once in the
300 pages of narrative (cf. Lee 1994 for a critique). The remaining chapters survey
various ethnographic case studies from the 1940s onwards, other anthropologicallinguistic approaches, experimental studies on the lexical coding of colour, and,
notably, research in comparative psycholinguistics (with regard to Hopi and
Navaho by authors who were all following Whorf’s basic approach). The work of
Alfred Bloom (1981), based on experiments conducted during his tenure at the
University of Hong Kong, receives ample treatment (Lucy 1992a: 208–252). No
doubt, judging from the discussions it engendered, Bloom’s investigation of
hypothetical and theoretical thinking common among speakers of English versus
its seemingly marginal presence among speakers of Chinese (Cantonese)— on socalled counterfactual reasoning—appears to be still one of the most interesting
studies on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to date (cf. apart from many earlier
responses to Bloom’s findings, Takano 1989 and Lardiere 1992).
Even in Europe—though the active involvement of psycholinguists from
North America like Herbert Clark, John Lucy, Dan I.Slobin and others cannot be
overlooked—there has been a revival of interest in SWH, not in the form of a ‘naïve
Neo-Whorfianism’, as a member from the research team on ‘cognitive
anthropology’ at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The
Netherlands, assures us, but in an ongoing, carefully controlled effort, begun
several years earlier, to verify empirically the ‘SapirWhorf Hypothesis’ (Senft
1994:428n.1) of ‘the linguistic determination of conceptual organization’ (ibid., p.
56 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
413). The papers from the International Symposium ‘Humboldt and Whorf
Revisited: Universal and culture-specific conceptualizations in grammar and
lexis’, held at Gerhard Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany, 1–4 April 1998
(cf. Pütz & Verspoor 2000), have gone well beyond mere stock-taking, and the
discussion has become clearly much more interdisciplinary and profound, if
various contributions to the recent volume edited by Gumperz and Levinson
(1996), notably Slobin’s, are any guide—than the discussion of the subject over
the forty or more preceding years.
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Berlin, Brent & Paul Key. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley
& Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Black, Max. 1969. “Some Troubles with Whorfianism”. Language and Philosophy: A
symposium ed. by Sidney Hook, 30–35. New York: New York University Press.
Bloom, Alfred H. 1981. The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A study on the impact of language
on thinking in China and in the West. Hillsdale, N.J.: Laurence Earlbaum.
Boas, Franz. 1894. “Classification of the Languages of the North Pacific Coast”. Memoirs of
the International Congress of Anthropology, 339–346. Chicago: Schulte. (Repr. in Boas
1974.159–166.)
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CHAPTER 4
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD AND THE
COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GÉNÉRALE
1.
Introductory observations
Leonard Bloomfield’s (1887–1949) theory of language dominated the North
American linguistic scene from the mid-1930s until at least the end of the 1950s.1
With the publication of his book Language in 1933 Bloomfield— whether it was
his intention or not—soon replaced the Sapirian approach to language through a
much more rigorous, formal approach, which emphasized the autonomous nature
of language, cut the traditional ties between linguistics and literature, and
distanced linguistics from other social sciences, notably sociology and
anthropology (pace Murray [1994:113–115] who views Bloomfield much more in
tune with Boas and Sapir than I would be ready to concede). Although it is true
that Bloomfield agreed with Franz Boas (1858– 1942), whom he regarded as “the
pioneer and master in the study of Amerian languages and the teacher in one or
another sense, of us all” (1972[1946]: 265), and Edward Sapir (1884–1939) on
matters of linguistic analysis, his philosophy of science was inspired by rather
different intellectual sources. (There is no indication that Sapir ever read Saussure,
for example.)
Those familiar with Bloomfield’s work will easily notice that Chomskyan
‘autonomous linguistics’ has much more in common with Bloomfield’s linguistic
theory and practice than with Sapir’s—quite in contrast to the official stance
within Generative Grammar according to which Bloomfield has been dismissed as
a ‘taxonomist’ and Sapir praised as a ‘mentalist’. An indication of the refusal to
recognize the significance of Bloomfield’s contribution to linguistics may be seen
in the fact that one of the commercially most successful textbooks in North America
—such as the third edition of Fromkin & Rodman’s An Introduction to Language of
1983—does not even make mention of Bloomfield’s name in its 385 pages,
whereas Sapir is at least referred to in
passing (p.303), in connection with the historical-comparative method (which
actually was not the field he was known for).2 Typically, Ferdinand de Saussure
64 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
© John Benjamins Publ. Co., Amsterdam*
1Indeed, as Murray (1994:129n.29) reports, the hardcover edition of Bloomfield’s (1933)
Language remained in print until 1976, and sold more than twice as many copies after what
has often been regarded as the dawn of a new era in linguistics, i.e., 1957, the year in
which Syntactic Structures appeared: 12,800 copies were sold between 1933 and 1956, but
26,800 between 1957 and 1976. The book was reprinted in 1984, with a foreword by
Charles F. Hockett, by University of Chicago Press.
LEONARD BLOOMFEELD AND THE COURS 65
(1857–1913) is mentioned (p.110) only as “the nineteenth-century [sic] Swiss
linguist […], who discussed the arbitrary union between the sounds (form) and
meaning (concept) of the linguistic sign.” (No acknowledgment is made of
Saussure’s hardly less influential dichotomies such as langue versus parole or
synchrony versus diachrony.)
I shall not now enter into a discussion of the manner in which the history of
‘modern linguistics’ in America has been presented; Chapters 6, 8, and 9 will on
occasion touch upon this subject, however. Instead I’ll deal with the impact that
the Cours de linguistique générale made on Bloomfield and consider what this may
have meant for the subsequent development of general linguistic theory in North
America.3
2.
Bloomfield and the ‘Cours’
2.1 In Bloomfield’s 1922 review of Sapir’s Language we find (p. 142) his first
public reference to Saussure. There Bloomfield raises the question whether Sapir
had read the Cours while writing Language, at the same time suggesting that this
question was not really important since, as he noted several years later, “both
authors take steps toward a delimitation of linguistics” (Bloomfield 1926:154n.4),
and that is, Bloomfield felt, what really mattered.
In a letter to Algonquianist Truman Michelson (1879–1938) of 23 December
1919, Bloomfield indicated he had been alerted to the appearance of the Cours
earlier that year by his former teacher at the University of Göttingen, Jacob
Wackernagel (1853–1938),4 and that he was “anxious to see it” (see Hockett
* This photograph was first published in Leonard Bloomfield, An Introduction to the Study of
Language (New York, 1914). Edited, with an introduction by Joseph F.Kess. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1983), p.viii.
2 In the 4th (Fromkin & Rodman 1988:367) and subsequent editions (1993:393; 1998:
317), there is at least one reference to Bloomfield, namely, a partial quotation at the head of
Chapter 8, “Language Acquisition”. It reads:
The acquisition of language is “doubtless the greatest intellectual feat any
one of us is ever required to perform.” Leonard Bloomfield, Language,
(1933)
What the authors conveniently left out is the antecedent: “Every child that is
born into a group acquires these habits of speech and response in the first years of
his life. This is doubtless […] (Bloomfield 1933:29). Strangely enough, neither a
full reference to the exact locus of this quote nor a listing of the book itself is to
be found in Fromkin & Rodman’s text.
3 Compare, with the present chapter, the insightful analyses of Joseph (1989, 1990).
66 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
1987:41). When in 1922 a second edition of the Cours was published, Bloomfield
acquired a copy reviewing it in the following year. His review makes interesting
reading because we can see Bloomfield giving a particular interpretation of
Saussure’s teachings characteristic of the American’s subsequent stance in matters
of general linguistic theory.
By the time Bloomfield was reading the Cours, he had moved from the
University of Illinois to Ohio State University. There Bloomfield was soon
greatly influenced by his psychologist colleague Albert Paul Weiss (1879– 1931),
whose “Set of Postulates for a Behavioral Psychology” of 1925 was to become the
model for his own ‘Postulates’ paper of 1926. We may recall that in his first book
on linguistics, Introduction to the Study of Language, Bloomfield had subscribed to
the mentalist psychology of Leipzig’s Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), as is
especially evident in the preface and chap.3, “The Mental Basis of Language”, of
his 1914 book.5
There were a number of things Bloomfield found important in the Cours,
whose value, he stated, “lies in its clear and rigorous demonstration of
fundamental principles” (Bloomfield 1923:317). Note should perhaps be taken of
the fact that in these two pages of the review Bloomfield used expressions such as
‘rigorous’ and ‘rigid’ several times, expressions we find frequently in his writings as
well as in those of his followers, notably Charles F.Hockett (1916–2000) and
Zellig S.Harris (1909–1992).
2.2 First and foremost, from his reading of the Cours Bloomfield concludes that
Saussure has proved “that psychology and phonetics do not matter at all and are,
in principle, irrelevant to the study of language” (Bloomfield 1923: 318). In the
Cours it is actually stated on page 21 that “l’essentiel de la langue […] est étranger
au caractère phonique du signe linguistique”, and there are other observations
which suggest that phonetics is not an essential part of the object of linguistics.
However, a similar statement is not found concerning psychology, which in
Saussure’s understanding underlies the nature and mechanisms of language (cf.
Saussure [1922:23]: “tout est psychologique dans le langage”, etc.). We may
recall, however, that Saussure suggested to embed linguistics within on overall
science of signs—a semiology—whose base would be socially, not psychologically
motivated, and so it is obvious that Saussure does not build his linguistics on
psychology. As a result, we may say that Bloomfield’s conclusions are not that farfetched after all. Yet in his programmatic statement of 1926, “A Set of Postulates
4 Like the present writer Charles Hockett was surprised that Bloomfield should refer to
Wackernagel as his teacher (cf. Hockett 1987:42, where this statement is regarded as
‘unique’) since Wackernagel is commonly associated with the University of Basel which
Bloomfield never visited. The explanation of this seeming discrepancy is to be found in the
fact that Wackernagel held a professorship at the University of Göttingen from 1902 to
1915, which, according to Schwyzer’s obituary of Wackernagel (1966[1938]:54),
represented “den Höhepunkt von Wackernagels Lehrtätigkeit [the high point of
Wackernagel’s teaching career]”, and
LEONARD BLOOMFEELD AND THE COURS 67
for the Science of Language”, Bloomfield seems to backtrack on at least part of
this interpretation, probably as a result of his adoption of Weiss’s vision of
behaviorist psychology, when he affirms (p. 154):
[…], the physiologic and acoustic description of acts of speech belongs to
other sciences than ours. The existence and interaction of social groups held
together by language is granted by psychology and anthropology.
2.3 The next of Bloomfield’s comments on the Cours in order of importance is
that Saussure “distinguishes sharply between ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’
linguistics (1923:318; emphasis added: EFKK). The concluding sentence of his
review makes Bloomfield’s particular reading of the text even more pronounced:
The essential point, […], is this, that de Saussure has here first mapped out
the world in which historical Indo-European grammar (the great
achievement of the past century) is merely a single province; he has given
us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech. (Bloomfield 1923:319;
my emphasis: EFKK)
Here, I believe, is the first intimation of Bloomfield’s later decision to treat the
synchrony/diachrony distinction as a theoretical underpinning for an approach in
which there are in effect two kinds of linguistics, with no essential meeting points
between them. This interpretation of the Cours is most pronounced in his book
Language published ten years later, where it led to a de-facto division of these two
‘points de vue’. It resulted in chapters 1 to 16 dealing with synchronic matters or,
as he called it (p.317), ‘descriptive linguistics’, the remaining half of the book
being exclusively devoted to aspects of historical linguistics. As a matter of fact,
Bloomfield, unlike Saussure, made no direct crossreferences between those two
domains at all, with the result that the publisher of his 1933 book could bring out
—as late as 1965 —a separate publication of chapters 17 to 28 under the title of
Historical Linguistics (Bloomfield 1965), with a preface by Harry Hoijer (1904–
1976) and additions to the bibliography but no other changes.
2.4 Keeping in mind that, as we know, Chomkyan linguistics is entirely
‘synchronic’, another subject Bloomfield raised in his review of the Cours, namely,
his interpretation of the Saussurean trichotomy of langage, langue, and parole takes
on an added significance. He states:
it is of course in Göttingen, not in Basel, where Bloomfield followed his lectures. (The
editor of the 1966 reprint of Schwyzer’s obituary did not know what ‘Georgia Augusta’
stood for, offering the absurd explanation “[Augusta, Georgial” in a footnote!)
5 For details, see the new introduction to the 1983 reprint of the text and Murray (1994:
121).
68 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
This rigid system, the subject matter of “descriptive linguistics”, as we
should say, is la langue, language. But le langage, human speech, includes
something more, for the individuals who make up the community do not
succeed in following the system with perfect uniformity. Actual speechutterance, la parole, varies not only as to matters not fixed by the system (e.g.,
the exact phonetic character of each sound), but also as to the system itself:
different speakers at times will violate almost any feature of the system.
(Bloomfield 1923:317)
Now, this interpretation sounds pretty close to Saussure’s teachings, but if we
look at it in the light of the concluding remark cited earlier (“…science of human
speech”), we will notice a subtle shift: the object of linguistics in the final analysis
is not the abstract system, Saussure’s langue, but the much more concrete concept
of ‘speech’, probably much closer to Saussure’s langage, which in effect comprises
both langue and parole (as suggested in the Cours, p.112). This shift is made obvious
by Bloomfield’s subsequent statements concerning the subject matter of
linguistics, especially in the “Postulates” of 1926 and the 1933 book. For instance,
Definition 4 of his 1926 paper (p. 155) reads: “The totality of utterances that can
be made in a speech-community is the language of that speech-community.” Here
Bloomfield uses ‘language’, not ‘speech’; however, his concept of ‘language’ is far
removed from Saussure’s abstract system underlying speech production. The
distinction between langue and langage, maintained in the 1923 review, now
appears blurred.6 The reason for this must be sought in Bloomfield’s philosophy of
science; it is not merely terminological, i.e., as a result of the lack of a lexical
distinction in English between langue and langage. Unlike Saussure, who was
imbued with a Cartesian spirit, which has a long tradition in French culture, and
makes him proceed deductively, Bloomfield clearly followed the Anglo-American
tradition. This approach is most likely adopted from William Dwight Whitney
(1827–1894), whose books served Bloomfield as models when he wrote his 1914
Introduction to the Study of Language, and which follow an empirical, inductive line
of argument.
2.5 Another aspect of Saussure’s theory referred to by Bloomfield in his review
of the Cours—which has become stock-in-trade in modern textbooks in linguistics,
frequently without mention of Saussure (see, e.g., Chisholm 1981: 4; Fromkin &
Rodman 1983:7) — concerns the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign or, more
precisely, the arbitrary and conventional bond holding between signifié “signified”
and signifiant “signifier”. For Bloomfield this simply means that ‘the language of a
community’ should be understood as “a complex and arbitrary system of social
habit” (1923:318). We find no trace of this concept in his “Postulates” published
three years later. However, in his book Language we read that “the connection of
linguistic forms with their meanings is wholly arbitrary” (1933:145), which
corresponds with what we find in Saussure (1922:100). In the 1926 paper we find
other, related concepts included in his series of definitions, namely, the distinction
between ‘form’ and ‘meaning’ (p.154)—which could be seen as harking back to
LEONARD BLOOMFEELD AND THE COURS 69
Saussure’s signifié/signifiant distinction—and the same/different distinction in
Bloomfield’s Definition 5 (p.155), which obviously derives from Saussure’s
observation that the language mechanism “déroule sur identité et différence”
(Saussure 1922:155; cf. also Bloomfield 1933:128). This ‘same’/‘different’
distinction is also important for thé identification of phonemes—cf. Bloomfield
(1933:76–78, 128, and elsewhere—on which see the next section), as it was for
Saussure (e.g., 21922[1916]:68–69).
2.6 There are several other instances where proposals and definitions in
Bloomfield’s writings can be traced to passages in the Cours. At times these
connections are not obvious, as in Bloomfield’s Definition 1, “An act of speech is
an utterance” (1926:154). This definition, I believe, would have to be seen in the
light of what Saussure says about the ‘syntagme’ (cf. Saussure 1922:155), where
Saussure in effect reintroduces the concept of ‘parole’ under a different guise.
Another Bloomfieldian concept no doubt influenced by statements found in the
Cours is that of the phoneme. He characterizes it as ‘a distinctive sound’ in 1926,
and later defines it more forcefully in his book Language (cf. Bloomfield 1933:77–
80, 141 and 366 with Saussure 1922:83, 164).
However, when talking of ‘influences’ and whatever we may wish to imply by
this, we should not only look at the Cours as a source of Bloomfield’s linguistic
inspiration. We have already noted earlier that Sapir’s Language was regarded by
Bloomfield as a book leading toward the ‘newer trend’ in linguistics, and we can
see him incorporating Sapir’s ‘sound pattern’ idea in his 1926 “Postulates” (cf.
Definition 20, “The orders of phonemes which occur are the sound-patterns of the
language” [Bloomfield 1926:157]). Other sources for Bloomfield were the work
of Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929),
Berthold Delbrück (1842–1922), Hermann Paul (1846–1921), Otto Jespersen
(1860–1943), and various other authors mentioned in his papers and reviews
written during the 1920s (cf., e.g., Bloomfield 1926:153n.4, 160, 161; 1927a, b),
and also in his later writings, including Language (1933), where the references are
tucked away in the notes and, as a result, less obvious. (Indeed, one would have
to consult the notes and the bibliography carefully, since the index does not cover
the back matter.) For example, the fact that Saussure’s name was listed in the
index under ‘De Saussure’—a convention still followed in Hymes & Fought
6 Interestingly, in his 1927 review of Jespersen’s Philosophy of Language Bloomfield, perhaps
in an effort to assert himself as a theorist of language, discussed Saussure’s langue/parole
dichotomy again, affirming among other things the following: “Our science can deal only
with those features of language, de Saussure’s la langue, which are common to all speakers
of a community,—the phonemes, grammatical categories, lexicon, and so on. These are
abstractions, for they are only (recurrent) partial features of speech utterances. […] They
form a rigid system,—so rigid that without any adequate physiologic information and with
psychology in a state of chaos, we are nevertheless able to subject it to scientific
treatment.” (Bloomfield 1927a:444; cf. Fries [1961:220–221] for further quotations from
Bloomfield’s review and a brief analysis). No similar affirmation concerning langue can be
found in Bloomfield’s subsequent writings.
70 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
(1981) for instance— led a number of hasty critics to claim that Bloomfield had
ignored Saussure! Bloomfield has also been frequently accused for failing to deal
with ‘meaning’ by people who apparently did not consult Language (since his
1933 book in fact contains a chapter nine entitled “Meaning” as well as a chapter
24 headed “Semantic Change”).7 In other words, it is not something exclusively
characteristic of ‘modern linguistics’ that authors are criticized by people who do
not read them.
3.
Concluding remarks
In the present context, the following passage in a letter, dated 15 January 1945,
from Bloomfield to J Milton Cowan is of interest:
Denunciations are coming thick & fast; I expect to be completely
discredited in the end. There is a statement going round that De Saussure is
not mentioned in my Language text book (which reflects his Cours on every
page). Also that it does not deal with meaning—it seems there is no chapter
on this topic. (Cowan 1987:29)
Bloomfield does not mention the accuser; he simply added: “I do not intend to
give any recognition to falsehood of this kind or to discourses which contain them
or are based on them.” However, we may assume that one of his detractors was Leo
Spitzer (1884–1960), who carried on polemical exchanges with various linguists of
the Bloomfieldian mould during the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Spitzer 1943; Hall
1946) and may well have been the culprit.8 Bloomfield replied to these accusations
only by indirection (see Bloomfield 1944). Of course, those who read
Bloomfield’s Language up to page 19 will have seen the explicit reference to
Saussure’s lectures (although giving a 1915 date of publication, which appears to
have been one of the sources for later—usually North American—copyists). But
less obvious references to the Cours can be found in a variety of notes (see
Bloomfield 1933:512, 514, 516, 517, etc.; cf. Koerner 1971:449–450n.1, for the
exact locations).
7 See Koerner (1970) for a treatment of this aspect of American linguistics from Bloomfield
to Chomsky. (See now Chapter 3 of the present book.)
8 The late Robert A.Hall of Cornell University informed me in a letter dated 3 October
1988 that Bloomfield’s statement quoted above had largely been prompted by a claim
made by Giuliano Bonfante (b.1904), at the time a professor at Princeton, to the effect that
Language contained no reference to Saussure. (Like other Europeans, e.g., Eugenio Coseriu,
Bonfante had fallen victim to the American convention to list Saussure as “De Saussure”,
i.e., under “D”, not “S”, as is now universally customary. Of course, had they chosen to
read Bloomfield’s book at least up to page 19, they could have saved themselves from this
blunder. Indexes are shortcuts, but not always reliable ones.)
LEONARD BLOOMFEELD AND THE COURS 71
Bloomfield’s claim that his book Language “reflects (Saussure’s) Cours on every
page” seems somewhat hyperbolic for we know, thanks to the careful study by
David Rogers, how much Bloomfield was in fact influenced by the grammatical
system developed by P ini (Rogers 1987). But in terms of general linguistic
theory, the importance of the role that the Cours played in Bloomfield’s own
deliberations can be established with certainty. Given Bloomfield’s predisposition
(and perhaps also his experience as a field worker), however, it is not surprising that
he did not develop Saussure’s insights into a concise, deductive theory of language
but rather a more formal—and indeed ‘rigid’— methodology of linguistic analysis.
If we accept that Bloomfield’s concept of ‘speech’ is closer to Saussure’s langage
(rather than parole), William Chisholm may have been correct in saying that
“Saussure’s ideas served as a catalyst to both Leonard Bloomfield and Noam
Chomsky. But it was speech that Bloomfield proposed to analyze, whereas it was
language that captured Chomsky’s attention” (Chisholm 1981:13).
For the history of American linguistics to be understood better, Bloomfield
will have to be read much more fully than he has been during the past thirty or more
years. In his writings we would discover many of the ideas that some of us tend to
associate with much more recent developments, whether it be Bloomfield’s
insistence on the importance of syntax, already announced in his review of the
Cours (Bloomfield 1923:319; cf. 1926:158 and, especially, 1933, where we find a
24-page chapter on the subject [pp.184–206]),9 his treatment of other linguistic
subjects (e.g., morphophonemics [Bloomfield 1939a]), or his philosophy of
science. Bloomfield’s particular view of linguistics is expressed in his 1929 address
to the Modern Language Association of America (Bloomfield 1930) as well as in
his 1936 paper, “Language or Ideas?”, where he joins the logicians of the Vienna
Circle and ventures the following observation:10
Linguistics as actually practised employs only such terms as are translatable
into the language of physical and biological science; in this linguistics differs
from nearly all other discussion of human affairs. Within the next
generations mankind will learn that only such terms are usable in any
science. (Bloomfield 1936:89).
One may wonder to what extent Bloomfield’s prediction has come true.
9 Interestingly, the chapter on syntax in Bernard Bloch & George L.Trager’s influential 82page Outline of Linguistic Analysis (Baltimore, Md.: Linguistic Society of America, 1942) was
written by Bloomfield (cf. Hockett & Hall 1987:229, for details). Charles Hockett (in a
letter to this writer of 3 September 1988) reports that Trager, for his part, did not like
Bloomfield’s contribution.—Kenneth L.Pike’s acknowledgement of Bloomfield’s interest
in syntax is pertinent here (see the summary of his paper in the LSA Meeting Handbook, San
Francisco, Dec. 1987, p.xxii); a revised version of Pike’s reminiscences of Bloomfield
appeared in Historiographia Linguistica 16:1/2.217–223 (1989).
72 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
REFERENCES
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1914. An Introduction to the Study of Language. New York: Henry
Holt & Co. (New ed., together with an introduction by Joseph F. Kess, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 1983.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1922. Review of Sapir (1921). Classical Weekley 15.142– 143 .
(Repr. in Bloomfield 1970.91–94, and in Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work
ed. with an introd. by Konrad Koerner, 47–50. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1984.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1923. Review of Saussure (21922). Modern Language Journal 8.317–
319. (Repr. in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 21.133–135 [1964] and in Bloomfield
1970.106–108.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. “A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language”. Language 2.
153–164. (Repr. in IJAL 15.195–202 [1949]; in Readings in Linguistics ed. by Martin
Joos [Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies, 1957; 4th ed.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966], 19–25, and in Bloomfield 1970.128–
140.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1927a. “On Recent Work in General Linguistics”. Modern Philology
25.211–230. (Repr. in Bloomfield 1970.173–190.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1927b. Review of Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Language
(London: Allen & Unwin; New York: H.Holt & Co., 1924). Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 26.444–446. (Repr. in Bloomfield 1970. 141–143.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1930. “Linguistics as a Science”. Studies in Philology 27.553–557.
(Repr. in Bloomfield 1970:227–230.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt & Co. (Paperback ed., with
a foreword by Charles F.Hockett, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1936. “Language or Ideas?”. Language 12.89–95. (Repr. in Bloomfield 1970:322–328.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1939a. “Menomini Morphophonemics”. Études phonologiques dédiées
à la mémoire de N.S.Trubetzkoy (=Travaux du Cercle Lin guistique de Prague, 8), 105–115.
Prague: Cercle Linguistique de Prague. (Repr. in Bloomfield 1970.351–362.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1939b. Linguistic Aspects of Science. (=International Encyclopedia of
Unified Science, I:4 .) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (10th printing, 1969.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1944. “Secondary and Tertiary Responses to Language”. Language
20.45–55. (Repr. in Bloomfield 1970:413–425.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1965. Language History. Ed. by Harry Hoijer. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1970. A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. Ed. by Charles F. Hockett.
Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. (Abridged paperback ed.,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.)
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1972[1946]. “The Original Preface to Linguistic Structures of Native
America”. IJAL 38.265–266.
10 Still more explicit statements concerning Bloomfield’s philosophy of science can be
found in his contribution to the monograph series launched by members of the
Vienna Circle, “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science” (Bloomfield 1939b).
LEONARD BLOOMFEELD AND THE COURS 73
Chisholm, William S., Jr. 1981. Elements of English Linguistics. London & New York:
Longman.
Cowan, J Milton. 1987. “The Whimsical Bloomfield”. Hall 1987.23–37.
Esper, Erwin A. 1968. Mentalism and Objectivism in Linguistics: The sources of Leonard
Bloomfield’s psychology of language. New York: American Elsevier.
Fries, Charles C. 1961. “The Bloomfield ‘School’”. Trends in European and American
Linguistics, 1930–1960 ed. by Christine Mohrmann, Alf Sommerfelt & Joshua
Whatmough, 196–224. Utrecht & Antwerp: Spectrum.
Fromkin, Victoria & Robert Rodman. 1983[1974]. An Introduction to Language. 3rd revised
ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (6th ed., New York: Harcourt Brace,
1998.)
Hall, Robert A, Jr. 1946. “The State of Linguistics: Crisis or reaction?”. Italica 23.30–34.
Hall, Robert A., with the collaboration of Konrad Koerner, ed. 1987. Leonard Bloomfield:
Essays on his life and work. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hockett, Charles F. 1987. “Letters from Bloomfield to Michelson and Sapir”. Hall 1987.
39–60.
Hockett, Charles F. & Robert A.Hall, Jr., comps. 1987. “A New Leonard Bloomfield
Bibliography”. Hall 1987.221–233.
Hymes, Dell & John Fought. 1981 [1975]. American Structuralism. The Hague: Mouton.
Joseph, John E. 1989. “Bloomfield’s Saussureanism”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 43.43–
53.
Joseph, John E. 1990. “Ideologizing Saussure: Bloomfield’s and Chomsky’s readings of the
Cours de linguistique générale”. Ideologies of Language ed. by J.E.Joseph & Talbot J.Taylor,
51–79. London & New York: Routledge.
Koerner, E.F.K. 1970. “Bloomfieldian Linguistics and the Problem of ‘Meaning’”. Jahrbuch
für Amerikastudien 15.162–183. (Repr. in Leonard Bloomfield: Critical assessments ed. by
John G.Fought, vol.II, 142–166. London & New York: Routledge, 1999.)
Koeraer, E.F.K. 1971. Review of Lexique de la terminologie saussurienne comp. by Rudolf
Engler (Utrecht & Antwerp: Spectrum, 1968). Language 47. 447–450 .
Murray, Stephen O. 1994. Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A social
history. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rogers, David E. 1987. “The Influence of P ini on Leonard Bloomfield”. Hall 1987.89–
138.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt,
Brace & Co. [Note that the later paperback edition has a different pagination.]
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1922. Cours de linguistique générale. Publié par Charles Bally et
Albert Sechehaye, avec la collaboration de Albert Ried-linger. 2nd ed. Paris: Payot.
(First ed., 1916; 3rd and last corrected ed., 1931.) [Note that all subsequent editions
follow the pagination of the 2nd edition.]
Spitzer, Leo. 1943. “Why Does Language Change?”. Modern Language Quarterly 4.413–431.
Schwyzer, Eduard. 1938. “Jacob Wackernagel”. Forschungen und Fortschritte 14.227–228.
(Repr. in Portraits of Linguists ed. by Thomas A.Sebeok, vol. II, 52–55. Bloomington
& London: Indiana University Press, 1966.)
Weiss, Albert Paul. 1925. “A Set of Postulates for a Behavioristic Psychology”. Psychological
Review 32.83–87.
74
CHAPTER 5
AMERICAN STRUCTURALIST
LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM
OF MEANING’
1.
Introduction
This chapter attempts to delineate the debate concerning the main tenets of the
American descriptivist or ‘mechanist’ approach to language from the 1940s to the
1950s, and well into the 1960s, and to evaluate central proposals concerning the
nature of language and the methods of analysis maintained by the majority of its
adherents. The main focus of the account is the issue of ‘meaning’ in linguistics
during the years preceding the publication of Chomsky’s Aspects in 1965, which
moved the attention away from the study of linguistic meaning as previously
attempted. While it is not argued that Bloomfield himself neglected the content
side of language in his work, it is nevertheless held that his teachings and writings
have laid much of the foundation for the theoretical bias so characteristic of the
arguments of many eminent linguists of the post-Bloomfieldian era. Their general
data-orientation, with a strong emphasis on the description of speech in
conjunction with the rejection of any ‘mentalistic’ speculation about semantic
implications in linguistic analysis, made them argue against the use of ‘meaning’
however defined. As semantic matters could not be readily expressed in certain
‘rigorous’ terms, phonology, which soon came to be called phonemics, became
the main focus of attention, in the belief that one could bypass semantic
considerations by simply determining whether a particular form was the ‘same’ or
‘different’—and could be done by asking a native informant.1
It is perhaps possible to agree with Karl V.Teeter’s (b.1929) assessment in 1964
that most American linguists of the period were subject to what he called the
‘post-Bloomfieldian fallacy’ of taking rigorous data-manipulation for theory. But
by that time transformational-generative linguistics had begun to sweep the
American linguistic community.2 The Chomskyan emphasis on syntax as against
the levels of morphology and phonology as well as its general theory orientation
1 Sapir’s 1933 paper on “La réalité psychologique des phonèmes” (English version first
published in Sapir [1949:46–60]) is probably the most classic example of this procedure.
76 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
led during the 1960s to a widening of the scope of the discussion of linguistic
issues by including ideas taken from logic, psychology, mathematics and other
fields of possible epistemological relevance in the search for the explanation of
language phenomena. Yet, although the problem of semantic formalization in
descriptive—or ‘generative’—terms has been tackled from various sides, the
results are still far from satisfactory. The scientific study of ‘meaning’ within
general linguistic terms appears to remain a hardy perennial; those who have
made semantics the focus of their studies, both synchronically and diachronically,
have done better (e.g., Cruse 1986, Ellis 1966, Hurford & Heasley 1983, Lyons
1977, and others).
American structuralism from the 1940s until at least the 1960s has had to face
two main criticisms by linguists of different backgrounds and research traditions,
especially from Europeans. First, it was argued that structuralism, by focussing on
the ‘merely’ descriptive, synchronic method of linguistic analysis, was excluding
historical aspects of language.3 Its preoccupation with language states and the
description of systems would exclude the traditional historical approach to
language, the explanation of linguistic changes of various kinds. Second, and this
was even more severely criticized, structuralists were said not to take into account
‘meaning’ in their language description.4 As for the neglect of semantic
2 Looking back some 35 years later, Teeter (1998:253) is able to give a more balanced
analysis of what the situation in American linguistics was at that time.
3 Since we are not concerned here with the relation of structural or so-called ‘descriptive’
approaches to language to historical-comparative or ‘diachronic’ linguistics, we may simply
refer the reader to the criticisms of Reid (1956, 1960), and Nehring (1962) as examples of
this reproach. (Reid is also critical of the narrowness of the historical approach as found in
Robert A.Hall’s work, including the absence of such considerations as meaning and
variation.) That these charges cannot be laid against Bloomfield himself can clearly be seen
from the fact that he devoted almost half of his great synthesis of the study of language to
problems of historical linguistics (Bloomfield 1933:281–495), although it remains true that
the strict separation of these two domains led most of his successors to be entirely satisfied
with dealing with non-historical aspects of linguistic analysis exclusively. Characteristically,
the 4-volume, 1,600-page Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Presss, 1988) ed. by American linguist Frederick J.Newmeyer, with Robert
N.Ubell as executive editor, did not contain a single chapter on Historical Linguistics.
4 That this criticism did not come exclusively from Europeans may be gathered from the
first two quotations. Einar Haugen (1951:219=Joos 1957:362) noted: “The minimizing of
meaning as a factor in linguistic description was at first a healthy reaction against the misuse
of meaning in establishing linguistic categories, but has now become almost a fetish with
some linguists.”—J.B.Carroll (1953:31–32) has been even more explicit on that issue: “A
general characteristic of the methodology of descriptive linguistics, as practiced by many
American linguists today, is the effort to analyze linguistic structure without reference to
meaning. It is thought possible in theory that one could identify the phonemes and
morphemes of a language purely on the basis of their distribution, that is, by noting the
linguistic environment in which they occur.” The British linguist J.R.Firth observed:
“Certain leading linguists especially in America find it possible to exclude the study of
what they call ‘mean
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 77
considerations in linguistic analysis, William Sidney Allen (b.1918), a former
student of J.R.Firth at the University of London, could denounce their bias in
pungent terms:
Meaning, as at least one linguist has expressed it, has become a “dirty
word”; but if the name tends to be avoided, there is no doubt that every
linguist employs the concept, though some would be unwilling to admit to
such improper thought. And surely without meaning linguistics cannot
exist. (Allen 1957:22)
This is doubtless a rather sharp reproach and obviously meant to be a severe attack
on some structural linguists’ attitude of disregarding what is generally (and
somewhat loosely) called ‘meaning’.5
However, before investigating the position held by some linguists that may be
said to represent the linguistics of the early thirties up to the late fifties in America,
it appears to be worthwhile to consider some of the reasons for their specific
approach to language.
2.
The background of Bloomfieldian linguistics
When dealing with structural linguistics, both tendencies, i.e., the neglect of
diachronic aspects and the avoidance of semantic criteria in the study of language,
which have aroused so much opposition from many linguists must be seen in
their historical context.
At the very end of the 19th century, Franz Boas (1858–1942), who had
completed all his studies in Germany, had turned his interest first to the language
and culture of the Inuit of Baffin Island in Canada’s North and, after having
settled in New York City, devoted his attenion to the aboriginal Indian languages
in North America, notably those of Canada’s West Coast.6 He soon received
valuable assistance from his highly gifted pupil Edward Sapir (1884– 1939), for
whom he had found the position of Chief of Anthropology at the Geological
Survey of Canada in Ottawa in 1910. It is often forgotten that the bulk of Sapir’s
descriptions of Ameridian languages was produced during his fifteen years (until
1925) in Canada’s capital.7
Since the analysis of these native languages could not be based on any written
record, a synchronic descriptive method turned out to be the only adequate
procedure for linguistic investigation. The study of what Ferdinand de Saussure
had called ‘parole’ opened up a wide field to practical phonetics, phonology and
ing’ from scientific linguistics, but only by deliberately excluding anything in the nature of
mind, thought, idea, concept. ‘Mentalism’ is taboo” (Firth 1951:82).
78 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
morphology, as is already suggested by the subtitle of Sapir’s book written in
Ottawa and published in New York in 1921.8
This interest in the investigation of the languages and cultures of the Americas
has been pursued by a number of linguists, all of whom have in one form or
another associated with Sapir, most of them as students, such as Mary Haas (1910–
1996), Harry Hoijer (1904–1976), Stanley S.Newman (1905– 1984), Morris
Swadesh (1909–1967), Charles F.Voegelin (1906–1986), and, to a certain extent,
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) and George L.Trager (1906–1992), and even
Kenneth L.Pike (1912–2000), who took Sapir’s courses at the 1937 Linguistic
Institute held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zellig S. Harris (1909–1992), like Charles
F.Hockett (1916–2001) regarded himself as a student and follower of both Sapir’s
and Bloomfield’s; Joseph H.Greenberg (1915–2001), who arrived at Yale too late
to meet Sapir in person, always felt himself indebted to Sapir’s work. This list is
by no means exhaustive. A number of other Boas students who regarded
themselves as first and foremost anthropologists, like A.L.Kroeber (1876–1960)
and Robert H.Lowie (1883– 1957), also conducted linguistic fieldwork among
American Indian tribes. Murray B.Emeneau (b.1904), another Sapir student,
worked mostly on East Indian languages, and from 1935, when the founders of
the Summer Intitute of Linguistics recognized the importance of learning the
indigenous languages of the Americas (and later also in various countries of the
5 Since we are primarily concerned with a factual historically oriented account on the topic
of ‘meaning’ in the present paper, we will not attempt an outline of the meaning of
‘meaning.’ As we will see in the following chapters, this term has been used rather vaguely
by Bloomfieldian linguists themselves. Hill (1958:409), for example, admits that he has
used the term throughout his book without giving a definition; he instead attempts a
description and relegates ‘meaning’ to the metalinguistic level of language, but holds: “As
long as one operates strictly within the microlinguistic level, only what has been called
‘differential meaning’ is relevant.” Hill’s later discussion of “Linguistic Principles for
Interpreting Meaning” (1961) deals with “correspondence meaning” (and mentions
“translating meaning”), but does not attempt a definition of either term; see also his article
(1962), esp. p.346n.2, criticising Ziff (1960). For pertinent statements on poly systematic
theories of semantic concepts, one might wish to consult Lyons’ accounts (1963, esp. pp.
37–50; 51–90; 1968:400–442; 443–481; esp. p.435 on “structural semantics”).
6 On Boas, see the articles by Emeneau (1943), Jakobson (1939/45, 1959), Kluckhohn &
Prufer (1959), and Postal (1964).—The most influential publication of Boas is his “Intro
duction” to the Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), which has been reprinted
several times. See also the voluminous collection of essays by Boas (1940, esp. pp. 199–
210, 211–218, 219–225).
7 From the numerous obituaries of Sapir (e.g., those by Franklin Edgerton, Franz Boas,
Leslie Spier, Louis Hjelmslev, and others), see that by his pupil and collaborator Morris
Swadesh (1939), and also the commemorative volume on Sapir, ed. by L.Spier et al.
(1941). These have all been conveniently brought together in Koerner (1984).—Sapir’s
most important essays have been collected and published with an almost exhaustive
bibliography of Sapir’s writings (pp.601–617), by David G.Mandelbaum (Sapir 1949); cf.
Harris’ insightful review article of this collection in Language 26.288–333 (1951).
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 79
Far East, South East Asia and Africa), the techniques developed in the analysis and
description of North American Indian languages were applied to many other
languages of the world which had no written tradition.9
Military, diplomatic, and political purposes also reinforced the interest in
foreign languages, especially in those which had not been scientifically analyzed
before and which seemed to be of some importance for being taught. Early in
1941, an “Intensive Language Programme” was initiated in the United States (cf.
Carroll 1953:173–177; Bohlen 1956:24–25), and in the following year two
influential contributions to the teaching and learning of foreign languages were
published: a small pamphlet by Leonard Bloomfield, and a rather condensed book
on linguistic analysis by George L.Trager and Bernard Bloch (1907–1965).10
These efforts were followed by Charles C.Fries (1887–1967) who, in his book
English as a Foreign Language (1945), based his work on the principles laid down in
these two publications on structural procedures of language analysis and their
application.
During the last two decades at least, industry and government have become
increasingly interested in the construction of effective devices to facilitate
language translations. It is not surprising, therefore, that computational linguistics
has become a very powerful branch of linguistic science. This concern with
methods of learning foreign languages in a short period of time, of translating a
large number of texts from one language into another, of analyzing languages
which have a spoken tradition only, but no definable history, all these
considerations have given rise to a linguistic approach that is essentially based on
the analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a given language,
since diachronic comparative methods turned out to be entirely inadequate.11
The manner in which these goals of linguistic study account for the tendency to
8 Language: An introduction to the study of speech (Sapir 1921). The question of whether Sapir
had read F.de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Paris & Lausanne: Payot, 1916) before
writing his book, a question already raised by Bloomfield (1922:142), has not yet been
clearly answered. Levin’s findings (1965) can surely not be regarded as the last word on this
issue. From what I have read of Sapir’s work, I believe that he ignored the Cours, whose
general principles run counter to Sapir’s methodology and linguistic practice.
9 We dispense with a list of the publications of these well-known American linguists so as
not to render this chaper too disproportionate as far as actual relation between text and
references is concerned.—Many analysts agree that, unlike behaviourist psychology of the
1930s, the investigation of Amerindian languages has had an essential impact on the
development of American structuralism; cf. Hall (1951:112ff.), Christmann (1958/59:29),
Nehring (1962: 21), Bierwisch (1966:100). For a general survey of the field of linguistic
anthropology and its development between 1890 and 1960, see Hoijer (1961) and Hymes
& Fought (1981:67– 77).
10 Bloomfield (1942) [see the review by E.H.Sturtevant in Language 19.42–44 (1945)], and
Trager & Bloch (1942) [see the review by Hans Kurath in American Journal of Philology 71.
206–210(1945)].
80 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
avoid semantic notations that cannot immediately be formalized and structurally
expressed, will be the subject of the following chapters.
3.
Leonard Bloomfield’s position concerning ‘meaning’
Although Edward Sapir’s book Language (1921) represents the first general
attempt (in America) to investigate languages on the basis of their phonological
systems (‘patterns’), Leonard Bloomfield’s work of the same title has become “the
standard handbook of American descriptive linguistics” (Gleason 1961:485).
Bloomfield (1887–1949), who had studied at the universities of Göttingen and
Leipzig before the First World War, had become familiar with the methods of
linguistic investigation taught by the Junggrammatiker and contemporary
psychology,12 and it is therefore not surprising that he devoted almost one half of
his book to historical linguistics.13 He nevertheless departed widely from the
neogrammarian comparative method and the underlying psychology of their
explanations of linguistic change,14 emphasizing a synchronically oriented
approach to the study of language: “To study this co-ordination of certain sounds
with certain meanings”, he held, “is to study language” (1933:27). As can already
be clearly seen from Bloomfield’s earlier publications, he emphasized the scientific
aspect of linguistics aimed at rigorous statements about language.15 His “Set of
Postulates for the Science of Language” of 1926, modelled after the programmatic
article of Albert Paul Weiss (1879–1931), “One Set of Postulates for a
Behavioristic Psychology” (1925), shows Bloomfield at his best in developing a
highly forceful axiomatic system of definitions to provide for a rigid approach to
11 Ernst Leisi (1964:191) wrongly assumes the root of the American structural synchronic
approach to language analysis to be found in the absence of a linguistic history of American
English (as the history of American English was more or less identical with that of British
English), and its emancipation from British English as a language in its own right, which
has led to a non-historical comparison with its British origin.
12 Bloomfield, in the preface to his thoroughly revised work Language (1933),
acknowledges himself that his first book, Introduction to the Study of Language (New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1914), had mainly been based on the principles of the psychology
developed by Wilhelm Wundt (cf. the latter’s Völkerpsychologie, Part I, Die Sprache, 3rd ed.,
Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1911–1912).
13 It is for this reason that Harry Hoijer was able publish the chapters XVII to XXVIII of
Bloomfield’s Language separately in a volume entitled Language History (New York: Holt,
Rinehard & Winston, 1965).
14 Bloomfield (1933:16ff.) starts out with a severe criticism of Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien
der Sprachgeschichte (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1880, 5th ed., 1920; the 2nd edition of 1886
was translated into English by Henry A.Strong, London, 1889), in which he found
exhibited all the shortcomings and fallacies of the Neogrammarian approach to language.
15 It is rather significant for Bloomfield’s position that the adjective rigid appears four times
in a two-page review article on Jespersen’s Philosophy of Grammar of 1927.
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 81
linguistic analysis.16 These Bloomfieldian Postulates” demonstrate not only an
adaptation of Weiss’ behavioral concepts for an outline of scientific principles for
linguistic investigation,17 but also a fervent rejection of “mentalistic” explanations
of linguistic processes which is so characteristic of his principle work of 1933.18
Since Bloomfield made the study of the actual spoken language (‘parole’) his
primary object of linguistic analysis, as had Sapir before him, his concern with the
observable features of language led him to employ those extra-linguistic aspects
which he considered to be immediately connected with the communication
process. Thus, summing up his famous Jack and Jill example, which makes
excessive use of the Weissian stimulus-reaction model (1933:22–27), he defined
the “meaning of a linguistic form as the situation in which the speaker utters it
and the response which it calls forth in the hearer” (1933:139).19 In his
monograph Linguistic Aspects of Science, Bloomfield developed his statement on
‘meaning’ as follows:
The term “meaning”, which is used by all linguists, is necessarily inclusive,
since it must embrace all aspects of semiosis that may be distinguished by a
philosophical or logical analysis: relation, on various levels, of speech-forms
to other speech-forms, relation of speech-forms to non-verbal situations
(objects, events, etc.), and relations, again on various levels, to the persons
who are participating in the act of communication. (1939:18)20
16 On looking back upon his linguistic work and that of his fellow-Bloomfieldians, C.F.
Hockett (1968:31n.1) concedes: “In our synchronic work, we accepted without question
the Saussurean-Bloomfieldian characterization of language as a ‘rigid’ system, and sought to
match its rigidity with our rigor.”—Actually, F.de Saussure never spoke of a rigid system;
it is, in fact, already part of Bloomfield’s interpretation of Saussure (see Bloomfield 1924:
318); see also Hockett (1968:7–37 passim).
17 Cf. Weiss (1918:637): “The significant thing about speech reaction is that it may be
either the adequate reaction to a situation, or it may be the adequate stimulus for another
speech reaction or some bodily reaction” (quoted by Bloomfield 1926:154n.6). See the
following paragraphs of the present paper. It is interesting to note that the Bloomfieldian
adaptation of behaviorist concepts was not contested before the end of the Second World
War; cf. Gray (1945:49), Hall (1946), Pei (1946), Schlauch (1946), Spitzer (1946), Coates
(1966), and, in particular, Katz (1964). For a general account on ‘mechanist’ versus
‘mentalist’ view of language, see Bolinger (1968:220–221n.1).
18 See Bloomfield’s famous passages in which he attacks “mentalist psychology” (1933:32–
33, 142–144) and where he explains why he had to reject ‘mentalistic’ abstractions as they
are linguistically indefinable and therefore ‘unscientific’.—Cf. R.S.Wells’ criticism of
Bloomfield’s position (1954:240–241).
19 See also Bloomfield (1933:407); for a criticism, see Ullmann (1962:58ff.).
20 Compare also Bloomfield (1933:74): “In principle, the student of language is concerned
with the actual speech (B); the study of speakers’ situations and hearers’ responses (A and C)
82 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
This rather eclectic approach of integrating the semantic impact on the structure
and analysis of linguistic expression appears to be similar to the functional
interpretation of grammatical and phonological relations by the adherents of the
‘Prague School’ of the 1930s. Yet Bloomfield, in an article written ten years after
the publication of Language, he clearly declines to accept the apparently rather
favoured notion of ‘function’, arguing that there are only the aspects of ‘form’ and
‘meaning’ whereby the grammatical function of a given linguistic unit is a
property of the form (Bloomfield 1944). As for the statement of meaning in
linguistic description, Bloomfield had previously conceded that it is “the weak
point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very
far beyond this present state” (1933:140).21 Thus he held, rejecting any
speculation about meaning in the manner “mentalists” tend to practise it, that
“linguistic study must always start from the phonetic form [as signals are
analyzable] and not from the meaning” (p. 162). However, when dealing with
phonology, Bloomfield tried to integrate the semantic aspect by defining the
phoneme as “a minimum unit of distinctive sound-feature” (p.79; emphasis in the
original; cf. also pp. 93, 128, 137–138), and more explicitly, though more
negatively, he defined the smallest operational unit in language: “A linguistic form
which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form, is a
single form or a morpheme” (p. 161).
4.
Moderate Bloomfieldians’ attitude towards ‘meaning’
Concerning the attitude towards the use of semantic notations in linguistic
analysis, a grouping among Bloornfield’s followers appears to be possible. It
appears that the moderate adherents of the ‘Bloomfield School’ tend to employ the
concept of meaning either in their definitions of linguistic items or analytical
is equivalent to the sum total of human knowledge. If we had an accurate knowledge of
every speaker’s situation and every hearer’s response, — […] — we could register these facts
as the meaning (A–C) of a given speech utterance (B), […]”. A similar view is expressed by
Bloch & Trager: “The meaning of a linguistic form […] is the feature common to all the
situations in which it is used” (1942:6). R.H.Robins (1952) tried to amend the apparent
shortcomings of this Bloomfieldian attempt to define meaning by applying the concept of
‘context of situation’, which had been introduced by Bronislaw Malinowsky in Supplement
I to Ogden and Richards’ celebrated book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923), esp. pp. 306–
309 (see, however, Carroll’s [1953:239–240] severe criticism of Malinowsky), and
developed by J.R. Firth (1935, 1937, chap.10; 1951, and elsewhere). Cf. also Ellis (1966)
as well as the critique by Lyons (1966).
21 Hockett, seems to echo his former teacher twenty-five years later, when he says that “in
order to give a scientifically accurate definition of meaning for every form of language, we
should have to have a scientifically accurate knowledge of everything in the speaker’s
world” (1958:139).
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 83
procedures, whereas others tend to admit only its heuristic use or even to deny its
use at all.
Twenty-five years after Bloomfield’s publication of Language, one of his pupils,
Charles F.Hockett (1916–2000), introduced ‘meaning’ even more directly into
the definition of morphemes, describing them as the “smallest individually
meaningful elements in the utterances of a language”.22. But Hockett was met
with severe criticism from another Bloomfieldian linguist, George L. Trager
(1906–1992), who termed his definition to be “meaningless as well as unfortunately
misleading”. Trager argued:
A morphemics based on meaning cannot be successful in fully analyzing a
language. It is not meaning but distribution and arrangement of recurrent
partials that is the basis of morphemes, as well as for any other level of
grammatical analysis.23
Many years earlier, but quite in line with Trager’s position on ‘meaning’, the
sociologist Paul Hanly Furfey (1896–1992) of the Catholic University in
Washington, D.C., published an article in the journal edited by Trager entitled
“The Semantic and Grammatical Principles in Linguistic Analysis”, in which
Bloomfield is taken to task for not being rigorous enough in his elimination of
semantic considerations in distributional analysis (Furfey 1944; Joseph 1992).
Though Trager’s harsh criticism hardly applies to Hockett (since he rarely
resorts to the semantic value of a linguistic unit) it could, with more justice,
characterize the work of Eugene A.Nida (b.1914), which has been termed
“perhaps the most significant attempt to treat meaning structurally” (thus Pike in
1957). As a matter of fact, Nida not only explicitly includes a pragmatic concept
of meaning in his definition of morphemes,24 but he also resorts to semantic
considerations as often and as deliberately as seems necessary to him for linguistic
discrimination.25 He expresses a common opinion among linguists when he
makes the “non-existence” of real synonyms his first principle of semantic
analysis, his criterion for real synonymy being “capacity for occurrence in
precisely the same linguistic and contextual environments with the same
meanings, both denotative and connotative”, leaving, however, both kinds of
“meaning” unexplained (Nida 1949:151).
22 Hockett (1958:123; see also p.93). On p. 153, however, Hockett restricts the scope of
his definition, when he argues: “Some morphemes, […], serve not directly as carriers of
meanings, but only as markers of the structural relationships between other forms.” (For a
review of Hockett’s Course in Modern Linguistics, see U.Weinreich 1959.)
23 George L.Trager in Studies in Linguistics 14 (1959), 77ff.; here p.79.
24 “Morphemes are the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of
words” (Nida 1949:i).
25 Nida (1949) passim; see also Nida (1948, 1958).
84 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Hockett, in contrast, tries to avoid semantic considerations whenever possible,
even at the expense of clarity and validity of statement. Thus he argues, for
example, that in wild animal house “the ICs [i.e., immediate constituents] are
clearly wild animal and house, rather than wild and animal house” (Hockett 1958:
152). It seems, however, that only the native speaker may unconsciously refer to
meaning without seeing any evidence to state this reference; structurally, the
example just quoted is ambiguous as long as we do not discern between
meaningful combinations or constructions. Hockett, it is true, regarded semantics
as well as phonetics as peripheral subsystems of a language, the three central
subsystems being:
(1) The grammatical system: a stock of morphemes, and the arrangements in
which they occur;
(2) The phonological system: a stock of phonemes, and the arrangements in
which they occur;
(3) The morphophonemic system: the code which ties together the grammatical
and the phonological systems. (1958:137–138)
The difficulties that arise from an attempt to clearly define the basic units of
morphological and phonological analysis with regard to ‘meaning’ can be studied
in Henry Allan Gleason’s (b.1917) revised edition of his Introduction to Descriptive
Linguistics, which appeared three years after Hockett’s Course. There the author
observes:
A phonological study of language, no matter how detailed, can tell us
nothing about meaning, because the phonemes themselves have no direct
connection with content. They are merely units by which the speaker and
the hearer identify the morphemes. For any further study of language, the
morphemes and combinations must be examined. (Gleason 1961:51)
Since the Bloomfieldians have generally favoured an inductive approach in their
analysis of (mostly spoken) linguistic data, Gleason’s observation clearly exhibits
the descriptivist’s difficulty in showing the immediate place where “meaning”
appears to be attached to or inherent in a basic linguistic unit. Following the
rather debatable assumption that morphemes consist of short sequences of
phonemes, an assumption he appears to share with other structural linguists, notably
A.A.Hill,26 Gleason rightly shows hesitation:
Perhaps the best that can be done is to define the morpheme as the smallest
unit which is grammatically pertinent. But it would then be necessary to
define grammar as the study of morphemes and their combinations. This is
obviously circular and hence is no definition. (1961:52–53)
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 85
In place of a definition, Gleason then suggests the following procedure: “[…, we
must merely describe certain features of morphemes and give some general
smallest meaningful units in the structure of the language” (1961:53). And further
on, viewing the morpheme from a structural aspect: “A morpheme is a group of one
or more allomorphs which conform to certain, usually rather clearly definable,
criteria of distribution and meaning” (p.61).27 Gleason finally holds that a
morpheme is “the smallest element in the expression which has a direct relationship
with any point of the context system” (p.61), thus propounding a linguistic
theory of structural semantics similar to the neo-Firthian concepts of lexis (cf.
Halliday 1961:273–277).28
Even in 1958, when descriptive linguistics appears to have entered its phase of
decline, Archibald A.Hill echoes Bloomfield when he holds: “Same and different
[…] are identity in speaker-hearer behavior” (1958:410), although he hastens to
add that “meaning proper” is “ultimately correspondence between a linguistic
item and an item in the nonsymbolic world” (ibid.). Hill is hopeful that a
“genuinely scientific semantics”—in contrast with the views of Bloomfield (1933:
140)—is no longer beyond the reach of orderly investigation. Yet this of course
does not apply to his own findings. As a matter of fact, he himself admits to
having used the term ‘meaning’ throughout his book without offering at least a
tentative definition, and attempts a description instead. He then states:
In terms of the familiar three-level map of linguistics, meaning exists only
on the metalinguistic level, only what has been called “differential
meaning” is relevant. (Hill 1958:409)
In his paper of 1961 Hill offers various definitions of meaning, after having stated
that it is to him a “peculiar pleasure” to say at least a few things about this topic,
but none of the “current techniques of investigating meaning” described by him
is very satisfying. He accounts for four different notions of meaning as employed
by linguists. The first definition appears to be derived from a rather crude
misunderstanding of what is generally known as ‘information theory’:
26 This is already indicated by the sub-title of his book, Introduction to Linguistic Structures
(1958), which reads: “From Sound to Sentence in English”; cf. also Z.Harris’ article,
“From Phoneme to Morpheme” of the same year.—For an opposite view, see
M.A.K.Halliday (1961:285–286 and passim).
27
As for the classification of elements into morphemes, Gleason expects that two
observable features show some correlation with what he terms “expression-content
relationship” between linguistic units: “these two are meaning (in the vague and somewhat
unscientific sense) and distribution. Of these the most objectively observable is
distribution” (1961:79).– For the concept of ‘context’, cf. Bolinger (1968:29–30).
28 See also the contributions of Halliday, J.McH.Sinclair, and J.O.Ellis in Bazell et al.
(1966).
86 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Perhaps the most general way of describing meaning is to say that meaning
is partial predictability. That is, any item which is totally predictable is
totally redundant, and so meaningless. (Hill 1961:466)
It is clear that such a definition is meaningless and useless for the linguist. Things
like “total predictability” hardly occur in a syntagmatic string of linguistic units,
and who would claim that the verb-ending {-s} for third person singular in the
present active is ‘meaningless’, because it has nearly one hundred per cent
predictability?
Hill’s second kind of ‘meaning’ of a given linguistic unit is “the sum total of
linguistic contexts in which it may occur” (p.466). This definition appears to come
back to the half-understood suggestion of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889– 1951),
according to which the meaning of a linguistic item is its use (cf. Wells 1954).29
That this is hardly feasible can be drawn from the apparent difficulties neoFirthians have encountered in their approach to lexis by applying their teacher’s
concept of ‘contextualization’ (cf. Sinclair 1966)—until the availability of
powerful computers in the 1980s.
The third type Hill mentions is what is generally known as ‘translation’ or
‘dictionary meaning’, a concept which follows the naive assumption that all
linguistic units have something like a Grundbedeutung. He could have read in Nida
(1958) that the substitutional method he advocates applies only to some extent
and is seldom adequate. As for the last type that Hill enumerates and which he
finds the “most basically important” one, Hill holds:
[…] any linguistic item has correspondence meaning if it can be shown that
it corresponds to an item in the non-linguistic world. Further, this
correspondence is the meaning of the linguistic item. That is, we can
identify the meaning of a linguistic item like “dog”, by referring to the
animal. (1961:467)
The fact that many items refer to concepts which are lodged only in the human
mind will render this concept of ‘referential meaning’ rather debatable. While
Hill concedes that these latter two statements (to avoid the term ‘definition’)
about meaning have been avoided by linguists, although they “have always and
properly constituted the heart of meaning, and the justification of language” (p.
467), he believes that Z.S.Harris (cf. 1952:10–11) has been able to provide a
method of establishing satisfactory substitute meanings. He also gives Martin Joos’
findings on ‘translation meaning’ (1958) much credit for having given rise to an
investigation of structural correspondence meaning that could start “within
language, instead of starting outside language and working in” (Hill 1961:469) as
has always been the aim of structuralists.
The demand that linguistic form be “used as a primary basis for analysis, in
preference to meaning”, as advocated by Robert A.Hall, Jr. (1911–1997), is
definitely in line with Bloomfield’s position (Bloomfield 1933:144–145, 158– 159,
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 87
and elsewhere; 1939:18). Hall, as his master has done so often (cf. Fries 1961:212–
217), emphasizes, however, that this statement meant neither a denial of the
existence of meaning nor the exclusion of this aspect as an object of linguistic
study, though he holds that this sequence in analytic procedure puts the question
of meaning “in its proper place with relation to the study of form” (Hall 1946:32;
see also Hall 1960:121–134). A similar statement can be found in Hall’s
Introductory Linguistics where he affirms, after arguing that linguistics with regard to
its methodology is to be located as intermediate between the natural and the social
sciences:
[…], linguistics deals with the simplest subject matter of all social sciences,
specifically because it eliminates from its initial consideration (though not
from its ultimate concern!) the factor of meaning, which is the principal
concern of the social sciences in general. Meaning then returns at a later
stage in linguistic analysis, after the functional units and their groupings
have been determined. (Hall 1964:419)
This statement obviously presupposes a separation between what Hall terms
“linguistic meaning” and “real-life meaning”, a dichotomy which apparently
implies that the former is what is often referred to as relationships of forms of
linguistic expression, whereas the latter could be equated with what has been
termed “referential meaning” though Hall gives no definite description of his
terms (cf. Hall 1964:264, 428ff.).
As for the basic units of linguistic analysis, Hall follows the idea that the “units
of sound” (phonemes) are combined into larger “units of meaningful linguistic
form (morphemes) and their combination” (1964:14–15). He apparently follows
Hockett (1958:137–138) when he states that linguistic analysis is “concerned
primarily with the central three of these structural levels: phonology,
morphology, and syntax” (Hall 1964:32). Hall admits with surprising frankness,
however—though once again he emphasizes that “considerations of form must
take precedence over considerations of meaning”—that when dealing with
phonemics, “we have to make use of meaning for the differentiation of functional
units” (p.33).
29 Wittgenstein actually had said in his Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1967), p.35: “Man kann für eine große Klasse von Fallen der Benutzung des
Wortes Bedeutung—wenn auch nicht für alle Fälle seiner Benutzung—dieses Wort so
erläutern: Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache.” This is much
less definitive, and sounds more like a suggestion open for debate than a definition.
88 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
5.
Some structuralists’ opposition to the use of ‘meaning’
Bloomfield had always borne in mind that “different sounds have different
meanings”, and that the student of language cannot analyze and identify
phonemes (or morphemes) without at least some reference to ‘meaning’ (1933:
27). Yet there is one group of his followers who attempted a linguistic approach
which could discern morphological and phonological structures of a given
language without including semantic considerations (cf. Fries 1961:216– 217).
Charles C.Fries (1887–1967), for instance, made a clear distinction between
what he termed ‘lexical’ and ‘structural’ meaning, which was obviously foreign to
Bloomfield. ‘Lexical meaning’, however, or what Harald Weinrich has termed as
“die Semantik isolierter Einzelwörter [the meaning of individual words in
isolation]” (1966:20), remains irrelevant for Fries’ purpose, since he states: “The
grammar of a language consists of the devices that signal structural meaning” (1952:56;
emphasis in the original). And further on (p.58):
One of the basic assumptions of our approaches here to the grammatical
analysis of sentences is that all the structural signals in English are strictly
formal matters that can be described in physical terms of forms, correlations
of these forms, and arrangements of order.
And Fries assumes further that these formal signals function systematically when
he states: “The items of form and arrangement have signalling significance only as
they are parts of patterns in a structural whole” (ibid.) In an article, published two
years later, Charles Fries approaches the viewpoints of other structuralists of the
‘Bloomfield School’, who tend to exclude meaning almost completely from their
procedures of linguistic analysis. He argues:
I should like to insist that as a general principle any use of meaning is
unscientific whenever the fact of our knowing the meaning leads us to stop
short of finding the precise formal signals that operate to convey that
meaning. (Fries 1954:60)30
One group of pupils seems to have misinterpreted their master’s failure to offer a
definite method of handling ‘meaning’ in language description, and attempted an
almost entire deletion of the semantic aspect(s) of language. While Fries may be
said to have taken a somewhat ambivalent position, the group of structuralists
who try to minimize the reference to semantic criteria comprises George
L.Trager (1906–1992), Bernard Bloch (1907–1965), Henry Lee Smith, Jr. (1913–
1972), and Zellig S.Harris (1909–1992).
Bernard Bloch, for example, believed that a definition of the phoneme ought
to be possible without reference to the semantic-contrastive aspects of linguistic
form, provided that one can be assured that “every part of the sample meant
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 89
something” (Bloch 1948:5–6n.8).31 Yet already a few years earlier he and G.L.Trager
had shown little concern in dealing with ‘meaning’. They both agreed that they
would only refer to semantic notions if they had to decide whether two forms were
“identical” or “different” (1942:53).32 Again, when Trager reviewed J.B.Carroll’s
report, The Study of Language, he reaffirmed his view of the use of ‘meaning’ in
language analysis:
Without discussing whether Bloomfield was in error for his time, the
reviewer wishes to point out that he maintains quite a different point of
view: he believes that the structure of a language as an object of analysis in
microlinguistics, is to be arrived at by recourse to differences of meaning only
(“Is A the same as B, or is it not?”); […]; Bloomfield based morphemes on
meaning, whereas the reviewer treats morphemes as he does phonemes—as
recurring partials, to be identified by differences of meaning but without
regard to what meaning is. (1954:26)33
As can be concluded from this quotation, Trager admits only “differential”
meaning to be employed when analyzing language at the morphological level;
“referential meaning (‘real meaning,’ ‘metalinguistic meaning’)”, he downgraded
what he called “the work of a macrolinguist” (1954:27), i.e., the student of
language who is concerned with linguistic strings beginning with the word.
In their Outline of English Structure, a book that became most influential in the
teaching of English as a foreign language during the 1950s, G.L.Trager and
H.L.Smith, Jr., admitted that it might be “most convenient” to identify morphemes
with the help of ‘meaning’; this procedure however can only be applied in those
instances in which the language is already known to the analyst. How else should
the linguist know what is ‘different’ and what is the ‘same’, if he were not a
native speaker of the language under investigation?34 For a more general linguistic
analysis they insisted that the “theoretical basis of the analysis becomes evident: it
consists of the recognition of the recurrences and distributions of similar patterns
and sequences” (Trager & Smith 1951: 54).35
30 For a detailed criticism of Fries’ own descriptive techniques as well as his at times rather
heuristic use of traditional concepts of meaning in his syntactic analyses, see Funke (1954:
144–150).
31 Bloch states here explicitly that his approach “differs in some respects from Bloomfield’s
—chiefly in that Bloomfield invokes meaning as a fundamental criterion” (1948:5–6n.8).
32 For an opposing view, see Reid (1956:34ff.).
33 See also Trager’s objections to Hjelmslev’s basic linguistic category of semantics as a
criterion for grammatical analysis (1941:173).
34 For a similar observation, see Haugen (1951:219).
90 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
It is conceded that the analyst must have a special ability to deduce from his
observations the different distributions (and hence “meanings”) of a given
linguistic unit.
Zellig S.Harris’ highly technical book, Methods in Structural Linguistics, displays
an even more rigorous approach to linguistic analysis. He explains his central
linguistic concern as follows:
The main research of descriptive linguistics, and the only relation which
will be accepted as relevant in the present survey, is the distribution or
arrangement within the flow of speech of some parts or features relatively to
others. (Harris 1951:5)
Harris’ new and independent approach is characterized by his definition of the
phoneme since it is no longer based on and supported by the traditional notation
of phonological oppositions: “[…] our method does not depend on pairs to yield
the phonemic distinctions. The phonemes are formed from the regular differences
noticed in each environment” (1951:76).36 Harris does not describe how he
‘notices’ such ‘regular differences’.
By this procedure the single phoneme tends to lose its theoretical identity, as
the phonemes are no longer considered as representing a particular observable
element which occupies an environment, but rather as the environment itself.
Harris concludes: “We may therefore speak of interenvironment relations, or of
occupyings of positions, as being our fundamental elements” (p.371).
As for the use of ‘meaning’, Harris believes that this concept needs to be
involved only to the extent of determining what is repetition. Thus he argues:
If we know that life and rife are not entirely repetitions of each other, we
will then discover that they differ in distribution (and hence in “meaning”).
It may be presumed that any two morphemes A and B having different
meanings also differ somewhere in distribution: there are some
environments in which one occurs and the other does not. (1951a:7n.4; see
also Harris 1954)
Judging from this statement, it is obvious that the employment of a descriptive
procedure of this kind, which fails to provide for a genuine semantic theory and
avoids taking semantics into consideration, would make an indefinite amount of
linguistic material necessary. It would also mean that a given language could
never be described entirely, but only in rather restricted parts or portions of
linguistic utterances (cf. Haugen 1951:220–221).
35 They emphasized: “The analyst must therefore constantly keep in mind this theoretical
basis, and be aware that the hunches about what goes with what are really shortcut
conclusions about distributional facts” (Trager & Smith 1951:54).
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 91
In a later chapter of the same book, which had been circulating in manuscript
since 1946, Harris explains his attitude towards the notion of ‘meaning’ quite
explicitly, summing up his former accounts on this subject matter:
In determining the morphemes of a particular language, linguists use, in
addition to distributional criteria, also (in varying degrees) criteria of
meaning difference. In exact descriptive linguistic work, however, such
considerations of meaning can only be used heuristically, as a source of
hints, and the determining criteria will always have to be stated in
distributional terms […]. The methods presented in the preceding chapters
offer distributional investigations as alternatives to meaning considerations.
The chief means whereby such distributional operations can take the place
of information about meaning is by taking ever larger environments of the
element in question into consideration. (1951a:365n.6)37
Interestingly, in his review article of Sapir’s Selected Writings, Harris ex-patiated on
the subject of the treatment of meaning in a very different manner.
The formal analysis of language is an empirical discovery of the same kinds
of relations and combinations which are devised in logic and mathematics;
and their empirical discovery in language is of value because languages
contain (or suggest) more complicated types of combination than people
have invented for logic. In much the same way, we have here [i.e., in
Sapir’s semantic papers] an empirical discovery of elements of meaning in
natural languages, instead of the seemingly hopeless task of inventing basic
elements of meaning in speculative abstract semantics. […] Such isolating of
‘elements of meaning’ is not subject to the usual criticisms directed against
semantic work, because it is an empirical linguistic investigation. It does not
derive elements of meaning from some deductive system of presumed basic
meanings, but discovers what elements can be separated out of the total
meaning of each word; and it discovers this by comparing the various
words of a semantic set, by seeing the linguistic environment in which these
occur, and the social situation or meaning of each use. All these investigations
involving meaning, when carried out with the kind of approach that Sapir
used, have validity and utility. (Harris 1951b: 301; emphasis added: EFKK)
36 This definition of the phoneme may be contrasted with that by H.A.Gleason: “The
phoneme is the minimum feature of the expression system of a spoken language by which
one thing that may be said is distinguished from any other thing which might have been
said. We will find that bill and pill differ in only one phoneme. They are therefore a
minimal pair” (Gleason 1961:16).
92 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
However, seen in the light of Harris’ research practice, it is clear that this kind of
empirical accounting of the meaning of linguistic entities was not what he was
seeking.
If one looks more closely, the evidence becomes more obvious than even in
those rigorous procedures as advocated by Harris, Bloch, Trager, and others, that
the analyst often had to resort to the ‘meaning’ of a given linguistic unit in the
sense that they had to know what is ‘different’ and what ‘the same’. This means
that in establishing the basic characteristics of a given language, generally
confining themselves to the level of ‘micro-linguistics’, i.e., phonology and
morphology, the linguist could not help using the knowledge he had of his
mother tongue (if this was the object of investigation as is the case in many
structural analyses). Neither could he help asking his informant whether these
sounds or combinations of sounds were identical or not (in which case the
informant’s knowledge of his native language was used). The ‘environmental’
approach as suggested by Harris has never been employed by the linguist himself;
this circumlocution of linguistically relevant information about the actual
functional quality of a given linguistic unit with regard to others of the same
syntagmatic string would have turned out to be too tiresome and hardly available
to the analyst as to make it a worthwhile methodological axiom.
There remains, however, the apparent difficulty of assigning to ‘meaning’ or to
‘semantics’ a level of easy access similar to those of phonology, morphology or
syntax. To assign to semantics the status of an interlevel, as Hockett has done, is
at least a theoretical way out; in practice, this problem is not solved.
Karl V.Teeter (b.1929), in a provocative review article “Descriptive Linguistics
in America: Triviality versus irrelevance”, observed that the postBloomfieldian
linguists have tended to equate theory to practice (1964:20–22). Teeter did not
find much fault in Bloomfield’s teachings or writings as such. He sees
Bloomfield’s work as an important source for later developments in descriptive
linguistics in America. This could clearly be seen with regard to the question of
‘meaning’ in linguistics (though Teeter does not mention it); Teeter regards this
issue as closely connected with what he called the “post-Bloomfieldian fallacy”.
Indeed, the apparent quest for a scientific approach to language study (which could
be found in many of Bloomfield’s writings), combined with a visible neglect of a
powerful general linguistic theory (as can be found in de Saussure, Hjelmslev, or
Chomsky), led a number of Bloomfield’s pupils to develop thorough procedural
methods of linguistic analysis as a perhaps unconscious substitute for a theory. As a
result, Charles Fries’ defence, relegated to a footnote, could hardly have
convinced those linguists who criticized American structuralists for their neglect of
semantic criteria in linguistic description:
37 Cf. Bierwisch (1965:44–60), especially pp.47–48.
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 93
This challenge of the conventional use of meaning as the basic tool of
analysis must not lead to the conclusion that I have ignored meaning as
such, nor that I deny that the chief business of language is to communicate
meanings of various kinds, and that the linguistic student must consequently
deal with meanings. (1952:8n.8.)38
This assertion, which might be taken as representing a viewpoint shared by many
of his fellow-linguists, hardly invalidates Stephen Ullmann’s (1914– 1976)
accusation aimed at structuralists of the post-Bloomfieldian tradition in which he
pointedly denounced what he believed to be the root of their tendency to avoid
semantic criteria in linguistic analysis:
Modern linguistics prides itself on its scientific rigor, and this can be applied
much more readily to the clear-cut problems of phonology and
morphology than to the shifting sands of semantics and syntax. (Ullmann
1957:318–319)
This statement appears to be echoed in André Martinet’s (1908–1999) critical
observation:
Certains linguistes se sont fixé comme idéal la mise au point d’une méthode
de description qui ne ferait pas intervenir les sens des unités significatives.
Ceci donnerait plus de rigueur à la linguistique, en élimenant un domaine
où l’expérience montre qu’il n’est pas facile d’ordonner les faits. (Martinet
1967:33)
[Certain linguists have taken to the ideal of establishing a descriptive
method which would not take into account the meaning of significant
units. This would give more rigor to linguistics, by eliminating a domain
where experience has shown that it is not easy to bring order to the facts.]
In 1958, Hockett himself made an observation about the problems in dealing with
what he had termed ‘peripheral sub-systems’ of linguistic expression: the fields of
semantics and those of articulatory and acoustic phonetics. These were, Hockett
said, just as important as the “central sub-systems” of morphology, phonology,
and morphophonology, but that they were “much harder to study and that, so far,
less has been learned about them” (1958: 138).39
38 As for the way in which Fries handled ‘meaning’ in his descriptions of English
morphology and grammar, see J.Wheatly’s article of 1964.
94 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
6.
The state of semantics in linguistic theory in the 1960s
Still in 1963, C.C.Fries had noted:
Some who are counted among our linguistic scholars have so vigorously
condemned all “uses of meaning” that for many linguistic students the word
meaning itself has almost become anathema. (1963:95)
But it is a matter of some doubt whether he could still be heard at that time since
a few years earlier a booklet of only a hundred pages had aroused so much
attention that these problems concerning the statement of meaning in linguistic
description appeared to have vanished. In 1957, Noam Chomsky, a pupil of
Zellig Harris,40 published his study, Syntactic Structures, which, rightly or
wrongly, was soon hailed as a break with traditional Bloomfieldian descriptivist
linguistics.41
In contrast with various post-Bloomfieldian methods of data description and
manipulation, Chomsky’s approach to language has proposed a program in
linguistic theory which:
(1) emphasizes the importance of grammar and syntax against the
postBloomfieldian micro-linguistic approach which was almost exclusively
based on the levels of phonology and morphology;
(2) is based on ‘mentalistic’42 assumptions (against the ‘mechanist’ bias
which tended to exclude everything which is not directly observable) such
as the assumption that every human being has a ‘built-in’ grammar43 which
allows him to ‘generate’ (grammatically correct) sentences;
(3) follows a deductive (against the traditional inductive) procedure
which attempts to take semantic considerations into appropriate account
before setting up operational rules for generating sentences.
It is this last aspect with which we are mainly concerned here, but the problem of
semantics is interrelated with the other aspects of Chomsky’s transformationalgenerative approach. Already in his Syntactic Structures, Chomsky had declared that
he would use “syntactic structure both in the broad sense (as opposed to
semantics) and the narrow sense (as opposed to phonemics and morphology)”
(1957:5). Chomsky has further recognized that the system of rules (i.e., a
39 Hockett notes furthermore (ibid.): “This may be surprising, in the face of the obvious
additional fact, […], that an analyst can get at the central sub-systems only by working
through sound and meaning.” See also Hockett (1968:24–25) for much the same position.
40 In order to characterize of this student-mentor relationship, a few passages in Chomsky’s
writings could be referred to where he either defends his teacher (as in 1955b: 149) or
clearly
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 95
generative grammar) could be analyzed into the following three constituents: the
syntactic, the phonological, and the semantic components. The latter two appear
to have primarily interpretive functions, since Chomsky’s main concern is with
the domain of syntax. Thus, differentiating between ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface
structure’ of sentences, Chomsky holds that, while phonology interprets the
surface structure of a string of linguistic items, semantics has the task of
interpreting its underlying structures (Chomsky 1965:16).
As we shall see from Chomsky’s own work, he escapes the difficulty of clearly
specifying what he means by “semantic component” by dealing with the syntax
of English, his own mother tongue, and by relying on himself as the possibly
most competent informant.44 As for the problem of semantics in language
description, Chomsky has only dealt twice with this issue, in his time before the
publication of Syntactic Structures, and even then it was done in rather abstract
philosophical way and not in truly linguistic terms (Chomsky 1955a,b). Ten years
later, Chomsky (1965:198n.10) stated that he had followed the exposition as
described by two of his collaborators of the 1960s, Paul M.Postal and Jerrold
J.Katz, in particular their joint work (Katz & Postal 1964).45
As a matter of fact, Chomsky avoided saying anything specific on this issue of
‘meaning’, expecting that the findings and the further research of his colleagues,
notably by two language philosophers (Katz 1964, 1966, 1967a, b; Fodor 1965,
and earlier Fodor in collaboration with Katz 1963), would provide for an
adequate theory of the semantic component in grammatical analysis. However, as
the record shows, neither work was regarded as particularly successful and was
contested by R.M.W.Dixon (1963, 1964), Uriel Weinreich (1967), T.R.Girill
(1968), and others. It seems that their as well as Chomsky’s failures in these
attempts led to the Generative Semantics movement by a number of former
students of his eager to solve these problems within a TransformationalGenerative framework (cf. Chapter 6, for details)
deviates from him (Chomsky 1964:62–63n.2). For the general influence of Harris on
Chomsky, see Hockett (1968:35–36) and, more fully, Seuren (1998:231–242).
41 This book was first appraised by Robert B.Lees’ enthusiastic review article on Syntactic
Structures in Language 33.375–408 (1957). The actual reception, especially in Europe, took
somewhat longer; cf. E.M.Uhlenbeck’s appraisal in Lingua 12.1–18 (1963) or Manfred
Bierwisch’s statement: “Als Noam Chomsky 1957 unter dem Titel Syntactic Structures einen
Auszug aus umfassenden theoretischen Untersuchungen über Grundlagen und Aufbau der
Linguistik veröffentlichte, war eine neue Entwicklungsstufe der strukturellen
Sprachwissenschaft markiert” (1966:104). In the English translation, the passage simply
reads: “When Chomsky published Syntactic Structures in 1957, structural linguistics entered
a new phase” (Bierwisch 1971:45).
42 Though this feature is not yet obvious in Chomsky (1957), but was beginning to appear
in his writings of the early 1960s only.
43 This concept rests upon the central assumption of ‘generative grammar’ that ‘innate
ideas’ do exist (cf. Chomsky 1968a: 58–85 passim, and Chomsky 1968b).
96 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
The approach to deductively split linguistic units into their semantic elements,
to ‘atomize meaning’ so to speak (cf. Bolinger 1965), which has been done by
A.J.Greimas (1917–1992) in Europe in a similar fashion in his book Sémantique
structurale (1966), is still far from being sufficiently satisfactory to be applied to
language description.
John Lyons’ observation made in 1968, according to which many of the more
influential books that were published during the preceding three decades devoted
little or no attention to semantics, still holds true for much of the three decades
thereafter,46 and clearly for Noam Chomsky’s writings. Though progress has been
made in the field of linguistic science since Bloomfield, the actual facts about
language have not changed. We are therefore inclined to follow Lyons’
argument, since he can be called an expert in this field (Lyons 1963, and later,
Lyons 1977), for the reasons for the apparent reserve of a great number of
linguists on ‘the problem of meaning’:
The reason for that is that many linguists have come to doubt whether
meaning can be studied as objectively and as rigorously as grammar and
phonology, for the present at least. Furthermore, whereas phonology and
grammar quite clearly fall wholly within the province of linguistics […],
what is commonly referred to as “the problem of meaning” might seem to
be of equal, if not greater, concern to philosophy, logic and psychology,
and perhaps also to other disciplines such as anthropology and sociology.
(Lyons 1968:400)
It is obvious that the ‘problem of meaning’ will remain something of a hardy
perennial, not only for linguistics but beyond the scope of one discipline. For the
history of American linguistics—and leading over to the next chapter of the
present book—it may be of interest to investigate to what extent Seuren (1998:
242) is right when he argues that, in passages like the following, Zellig Harris
indeed prefigured Generative Semantics:
44 See also the article by McCawley (1968) on the role of semantics in a generative
grammar, but also Bierwisch (1965).
45 While Chomsky took a negative attitude towards meaning in Syntactic Structures by
insisting that “grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning” (1957:17), this
position mellowed during the early 1960s and in Aspects we may detect an overture towards
allowing ‘meaning’ to have its share in the analysis of language. Subsequently, within the
framework of the so-called Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) of
transformational grammar, some type of representation of ‘meaning’ was allowed, but most
of the restrictions remained. Introducing the level of ‘logical form’, Chomsky & Lasnik
(1977:428) for instance explain that meaning was “strictly determined by sentence
grammar, not involving situational context, background beliefs, speaker’s intentions, etc.”
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS AND THE ‘PROBLEM OF MEANING’ 97
When we have transformations which are associated with meaning change,
it is usually possible to attribute the meaning change to the special
morphemes (combiners, introducers, subclasses of the primary V[erb]) in
whose environment the transformation occurs. To what extent, and in
what sense, transformations hold meaning con-stant is a matter for
investigation; but enough is known to make transformations a possible tool
for reducing the complexity of sentences under semantically controlled
conditions. (Harris 1981[1957]:203)
Made on the occasion of his December 1955 LSA Presidential Address and
frequently reprinted in various other places, there can be no doubt that this
passage (as well as other observations made by Harris in this paper) has not been
ignored by generative linguists of all persuasions.
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CHAPTER 6
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF
GENERATIVE SEMANTICS
1.
Introductory remarks
In the previous chapter, an account was provided of how linguists working within
the so-called Bloomfieldian tradition treated the aspect of ‘meaning’ in their
analyses, how they tried either to bypass the problem altogether or put forward
ideas on how the semantic part of language could be captured in some way. In
general terms, their approach was inductive, starting with the smallest, empirically
identifiable linguistic units, trying to build from the ground up, as it were, aiming
at the highest level, i.e., that of syntax. While the post-Bloomfieldians could
pretend, on the level of phonology, that they could do without reference to
semantic content by simply asking (themselves or an informant) whether a phonic
structure was the ‘same’ or ‘different’, the trouble with meaning began to surface
on the level of morphology, not to mention syntax (which few of them were
concerned with at the time). As we have seen, in his early work Noam Chomsky,
in particular his Syntactic Structures of 1957, continued to operate within the
(post-) Bloomfieldian tradition,1 especially that line which held that semantic
considerations weren’t really needed when analyzing language in a ‘rigorous’
manner.2 This was evident when attention was diverted to the level of syntax as
against the levels of phonology and mor phology which were the principal
domains of Descriptive Linguistics. Indeed, in Chomsky’s approach to language,
1
As C.H.van Schooneveld (b.1921), the editor Janua Linguarum, in which Syntactic
Structures was published, recalls (after recounting that Morris Halle had handed him the
typescript in August 1956, urging him to publish it): “I read it at that time and came to the
conclusion that it was based on distributionalism. I had been a distributionalist myself but
had abandoned that approach because I think it creates a circular argument” (Historicgraphia
Linguistica 28:3.470 [2001]). As the correspondence between van Schooneveld, like Halle a
student of Roman Jakobson, and the director of Mouton, Peter de Ridder, reveals, it was
due to the latter that Chomsky’s book was accepted for publication (p.c., 30 January 2002,
of Dr Jan Paul Hinrichs, who has catalogued the van Schooneveld papers, deposited since
early 2001 at the University of Leiden Library [cf. Historicgraphia Linguistica 28:3.474
(2001)].)
106 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
syntax became the focus of attention, and we can see fairly early in his work that
the inductive, corpus-based, empirical approach from which generalizations could
be drawn soon gave way to a deductive, ‘top-down’, approach where the linguist
makes use of his native-speaker intuition and makes up the kind of examples that
he needs for exem-plification of a particular theorem.
Chapter 5 discussed the history of this debate about the place of meaning in
linguistic analysis from the time of Bloomfield’s “Postulates” of 1926 until the
mid-1960s, and so overlaps with the period during which Noam Chomsky’s
theories were rapidly gaining ground. The present chapter covers roughly the
period from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. It may seem surprising that several
book-length accounts of an episode in the history of American linguistics
published some twenty-five years later. This episode saw some rather bitter
exchanges between Chomsky and several of his students on the place of semantics
in syntax, all of which appear to have ended with Chomsky’s position holding
ground, though perhaps not because he necessarily had all the best arguments on
his side (cf. Harris 1993b, Huck & Goldsmith 1995, Seuren 1998:502–527). Yet
the observation could be made that important questions that were raised by
Chomsky’s critics at the time still require a satisfactory answer, especially
regarding the proper relationship between syntax and semantics, even though so
much ink has already been spilled on the subject. Indeed, it is doubtful that the
frameworks put forward by Chomsky and his close associates since the
mid-1960s, could have produced a satisfactory solution to this problem, although
their theories have since then undergone a number of considerable revisions, if not
revolutions, in the original sense of the term. None of these has seriously, let
alone successfully, addressed the problem of how to treat linguistic meaning
within their theoretical edifice. I am aware that some (e.g., Seuren 1998) may
disagree with this assessment, but then they have been talking about a kind of
formal semantics that is inspired by proposals made by philosophers, notably
logicians, not students of language.3
Within the framework of Transformational Grammar, attempts were made in
1963 by Jerrold Jacob Katz (1932–2002) and Jerry Allen Fodor (b.1935) to
2 What else could one make of his remarks in chap.9, “Syntax and Semantics”, of his
book:
A great deal of effort has been expended in attempting to answer the
question: “How can you construct a grammar with no appeal to meaning?”
The question itself is wrongly put, since the implication that obviously one
can construct a grammar with appeal to meaning is totally unsupported. One
might with equal justification ask: “How can you construct a grammar with
no knowledge of the hair color of the speakers?” (Chomsky 1957:93; italics
in the original).
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 107
expand on Chomsky’s notion of ‘linguistic competence’. Both were philosophers by training but at the time fairly closely associated with Chomsky. Their
intention was to include the semantic aspect in the analysis of sentences (Katz &
Fodor 1963)—‘semantic representation’, they called it—but which could hardly
have been expected to be successfully integrated into Chomsky’s pre1964 syntaxoriented framework. A year prior to the publication of Aspects,4 the philosopher
Katz and the linguist Paul M.Postal (b.1936), at the time studying with Chomsky,
had published An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Katz & Postal 1964). As
George Lakoff reported many years later (Huck & Goldsmith 1995:107), it was in
1964 “that Postal and Katz talked Chomsky into the idea of deep structure”
which we find elaborated a year later in Aspects (Chomsky 1965:128–147 passim).
The proposal by Katz & Fodor (1963) and the modifications suggested by Katz &
Postal in the following year (Katz & Postal 1964) led Chomsky to revise his
framework in order to accommodate what he termed ‘lexical entries’ (Chomsky
1965:160) among other things (cf. R.Lakoff 1989:956–957). Thus the door
appeared to have been opened for a semantically-informed syntax. At least this
was how a number of Chomsky’s students saw it at the time.
Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax of 1965 represents a book which
comes close to the ideal as ‘exemplar’ within the Kuhnian morphology of
scientific revolutions, i.e., a work which sets the parameters for subsequent
developments in the field, but which is, at the same time, sufficiently openended
to allow for further articulation—and revision. In Aspects, Chomsky introduced
several concepts which have since become the stock-in-trade of general linguistic
discourse. One important innovation was the redefinition of Saussure’s langue/
parole distinction as (the native speaker’s) ‘competence’ and (his actual)
‘performance’ (as a speaker); another, still more successful, distinction (which took
its cue in part from Wittgenstein’s ‘Oberflächen-’ versus ‘Tiefengrammatik’) was
that of ‘surface structure’ and ‘deep structure’. In post-Saussurean fashion, Louis
Hjelmslev (1899–1965) had already argued that ‘parole’ or ‘chaîne’ (i.e., the linear
arrangement of speech) was directly observable, whereas ‘langue’ was not.
‘Langue’, in Hjelmslev’s view, constitutes the underlying system which could be
accessed only indirectly but which was the locus of grammatical categories, the
lexicon, and the rules determining their connection and possible combination in
the actual speech process. Chom sky argued that the ‘deep structure’ included a
‘base component’ which appeared to suggest a way to account for semantic
considerations.
3 In 1996, Pieter Seuren even produced a Semantic Syntax (Oxford: Blackwell), which
illustrates the kind of formal, logical approach to the subject which he advocates. I for one
favour the kind of attitude that is announced in the title of James D.McCawley’s
posthumous collection of papers, Against Virtue in Syntax and Semantics (University of
Chicago Press, 2002) as I doubt that semantic issues can be solved as formally and
rigorously as matters of phonology, morphology, or syntax.
108 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Suggestions laid down in Aspects led a handful of linguists from the first
generation of Chomsky’s students to try their hand at taking their teacher’s
proposals to what they hoped to be their logical conclusions. The nucleus of this
group consisted of James D.McCawley (1938–1999) and John Robert (“Háj”)
Ross (b.1938), who had completed their doctorates at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1965 and 1967, respectively, and George Lakoff (b.1941) and
Paul M.Postal, who had both, at least technically, completed their PhD theses at
Indiana University in 19655 and Yale University in 1963,6 respectively.7 All four
had spent most of their formative time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during
roughly the same period, and in fairly close contact with Chomsky. These four,
principally (there were other young linguists too who were involved in the
process) took up suggestions made in Aspects, arguing that much of what
Chomsky had proposed would not quite produce the required results. These
theoretical disagreements and counter-proposals, which ought to have been quite
normal within any given framework, appear, at least in hindsight, to have been
blown out of all proportion, leading one of Chomsky’s former doctoral students
(PhD, MIT, 1969) to claim that the arguments of these contestants represented ‘a
Bloomfieldian counter-revolution’ (Dougherty 1974). This claim was countered
by others in short order (McCawley 1975a, Kuiper 1975), but, as Dougherty’s
(1975) reply suggests, the discussants were arguing at cross-purposes, in part because
Dougherty was barking at the wrong door,8 but also because Dougherty, insisting
that Syntactic Structures had “initiated a revolution in linguistics” (1975:269)
appeared not to realize (cf. p.266) that by the time Aspects appeared, the frame of
reference had shifted significantly: in Syntactic Structures Chomsky had maintained
an asemantic position like many of the Bloomfieldians,9 notably Zellig Harris, his
teacher, whereas in Aspects he opened up at least the prospect of dealing with
semantics within syntax.
4 At least during the 1960s, a number of papers were circulated in manuscript only, and
usually among only those who were thought to be actively involved in ‘the Chomskyan
enterprise’; some were never published or only much later (e.g., Lakoff 1976[1963]).
Various books by Chomsky were circulated in typescript form for at least a year, at times
for several years, before they appeared in print. It was part of the culture at MIT that only
the ‘initiated’ received copies of such drafts, a policy still largely maintained to this day.
5 See “George Lakoff in conversation with John Goldsmith” dating from about 1986, but
thoroughly revised in 1992, in Huck & Goldsmith (1995:107–119), for insights into his
background and intellectual voyage.
6 For details on Postal and his early intellectual development and his retrospective
assessment of Chomsky an linguistics during the 1960s, see the interview in Huck &
Goldsmith (1995:126–142).
7 At least technically, if not much more substantially, Lakoff’s thesis director was the
linguist and classicist Fred W.Householder (1913–1994), and Postal’s was the
anthropological linguist and specialist in Iroquoian languages, Floyd G.Lounsbury (1914–
1998).
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 109
2.
Observerions on the historiography of the debate
The debate about the respective merits of the opposing positions on the nature of
‘deep structure’, the place of semantics in the theory of language and related
subjects still lingers on. Many years later after the battle between the socalled
‘generative semanticists’ and the ‘interpretive semanticists’ had become a thing of
the past, a doctoral dissertation was submitted to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
Troy, N.Y., in 1990. This work was entitled “The Generativist Heresy: A
rhetorical anatomy” and was later revised and published under the title The
Linguistics Wars (R.A.Harris 1993b).10 As this book and, especially, Huck &
Goldsmith’s Ideology and Linguistic Theory (1995) suggest, the issues raised by
Chomsky and his young critics were again regarded as serious enough by later
generative linguists for them to attempt a redress of the history of this debate.
Newmeyer’s review of Huck & Goldsmith’s book (Newmeyer 1996:127–137) led
to a lengthy reply (Huck & Goldsmith 1998), and one wonders whether this should
not have been the end of this debate. If we are to believe Pieter Seuren (1998:
522–527), the Generative Semantics movement of the late 1960s through the
mid-1970s could have become ‘mainstream’ had it not been for the unfair tactics
used by Chomsky to make his position appear to hold sway (cf. the
documentation of some of these maneuvers that can be found in Huck & Goldsmith
1995:30–35 and elsewhere). Among the ‘tricks’ Chomsky is said to have used was
the rhetorical argument that the proposals made by McCawley, Lakoff, and others
were nothing but ‘notational variants’ of his own “extended standard theory”
(Chomsky 1972: 5).
By the time the Generative Semantics movement had more or less collapsed
for a variety of reasons, scientific, social, and political, a first attempt was made to
account for its history. This was done by Frederick J.Newmeyer (b.1944), who
had completed his dissertation under the direction of Chomsky’s first close associate
in the area of syntax, Robert B.Lees (1922–1996), who then was chairing the
8 As McCawley (1975:151–152) points out, Dougherty hardly refers to any of the GS
statements, taking instead a paper by Postal, in which he had proposed to discontinue the
use of pronouns as a grammatical category (Postal 1966), as representative of the GS at a
time when Postal still maintained the ‘standard theory’.
9 As in many other instances, Chomsky held out, toward the end of his monograph, the
possibility that semantics might indeed come into someone’s purview, when he says: “An
investigation of the semantic function of level structure […], might be a reasonable step
towards a theory of the interconnections between syntax and semantics” (Chomsky 1957:
102), but only a theory, and then one wonders what he meant by ‘semantics’. In his
concluding sentence (p. 108) he hints a future work: “These correlations [between
syntactic structure and meaning] could form a more general theory of language concerned
with syntax and semantics and their points of connection.”
10 Its working title had been The Life and Death of Generative Semantics, clearly indebted,
like the title of the final book (Harris 1993b), to Newmeyer’s (1980) account.
110 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
linguistics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(Newmeyer 1975 [1968]). This first assessment occurred at the first International
Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, held at the University of
Ottawa, Canada, 28–31 August 1978.11 The subject of Newmeyer’s paper on
“The Decline of Generative Semantics” was subsequently elaborated in the
author’s provocative Linguistic Theory in America (Newmeyer 1980:93–174 passim).
Newmeyer, after a good deal of discussion and making a chronicle of the issues,
came to the following conclusions: Generative Semantics (henceforth: GS) had
abandoned its scientific responsibilities and was consequently driven from the
scene by more respectable approaches to the treatment of syntax; in particular, by
Chomsky’s updated model (Chomsky 1972), his so-called Extended Standard
Theory (EST). New-meyer’s verdicts were that, among others, the GS
movement had “DESTROYED ITSELF” (p.167); “it simply gave up on
attempting to EXPLAIN grammatical phenomena” (ibid.); it degenerated into a
“data fetishism” (p. 168), and was thus becoming “THEORETICALLY
bankrupt” (p. 173; Newmeyer’s emphasis in all quotations).
Newmeyer’s account of the history of GS and his particular explanation of its
failure provoked Robin Tolmach Lakoff (b.1942)—perhaps not one of the main
players in the GS debate but certainly an active participant on the GS side —, to
respond in the form of a personal account of how she experienced the debate
(R.Lakoff 1989). As a Latinist12 much interested in semantic issues generally (see
R.Lakoff 1968), she produced a 50-page ‘memoir’ in order “to discourage future
distortions of the Newmeyer type” (R.Lakoff 1989:939). While Newmeyer had
adopted Chomsky’s ‘lexicalist’, ‘interpretive semantics’, and, eventually, his
‘government and binding’ approach (Chomsky 1981 [1979]), Robin Lakoff held
on to her past commitments (which included respect for ‘context’ à la J.R.Firth),
arguing that
11
The summary of the paper was printed in the Conference Handbook: International
Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (Ottawa: Linguistics Documentation Centre,
University of Ottawa, 1978), pp.29–30, though, on the advice of the selection committee,
the paper itself was not included in the conference proceedings (Koerner 1980). The
abstract reads: “In the late 1960s, virtually every practicing syntactician was a generative
semanticist— interpret!vism was confined to Chomsky and his students at M.I.T. Yet by
1975, Generative Semantics (henceforth G.S.), was all but dead. In this paper I will
attempt to explain this dramatic change by reference to the following factors: 1) the
internal dynamic of G.S., which led to its abandonment of theory construction, 2) the
presentational style of G.S. which repelled many linguists, 3) the falsification of those few
distinct empirical claims which G.S. did make, 4) the apparent success of the rival model in
producing a highly constrained model of syntax. I will conclude by pointing out that G.S.
has achieved a sort of victory in defeat, as many interpretivists have adopted some of its
fundamental ideas.”
12 Like her former husband George (see note 4 above), Robin Lakoff too had Fred
Householder as her thesis supervisor.
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 111
[Newmeyer’s] work suffers from flaws which detract critically from its
utility and belie its author’s claim to be presenting a generally dispassionate
history. Newmeyer’s bias is the most dangerous kind—inexplicit, perhaps
not fully recognized even by the author. No one who lived through the
period as a participant in the ‘linguistics wars’ can claim the status of
disinterested observer. By his appearance of doing so, Newmeyer misleads
the reader and distorts the facts. I believe that, when a historian is in a
position to be biased, it is his or her responsibility […] to make it clear to
the audience. (R.Lakoff 1989:940)
It is clear that Lakoff’s exposé is biased, too, but it has the advantage that the
reader is aware of this right from the start and can draw his/her own conclusions.
Her insider status provides a great deal material for a history that could one day be
written by someone not involved in the original debate (as Huck & Goldsmith
1995 have done to some extent). (We may refer to her account as well as those of
others who ‘were there’ for a composite picture.)
Several years later, another writer found these two main accounts of the GS
movement “firmly polarized” (Harris 1993a:399), and so after putting the work
of both Newmeyer and R.Lakoff in perspective, he set out to provide what he
believed to be a more balanced account. Born in 1956, i.e., being about fifteen
years younger than the protagonists, and actually working at the periphery of
linguistics, namely English composition and rhetoric, Randy Allen Harris was in a
way better suited to the task because he was the outsider looking in, with apparently
no stake in the outcome of his investigation.13 In order to establish both the facts
and the extraneous circumstances, Harris engaged in epistolary exchanges and
personal interviews with some forty persons altogether (cf. the acknowledgment
on p.399, and his subsequent explanatory and/or illustrative footnotes, 403–421
passim), including Chomsky and his associates. In this manner, Harris managed to
put together a much fuller and probably more objective picture than Newmeyer
or R.Lakoff (with whom he had exchanges too) could provide.14
R.A.Harris’ 350-page book The Linguistics Wars of 1993 (Harris 1993b) gives a
detailed, some would say thorough, account of the complex dispute between
Noam Chomsky and several of his close allies, notably Ray Jackendoff (b.1945),
on the one hand, and the so-called ‘generative semanticists’, in particular
McCawley, George Lakoff, and Háj Ross, on the other, on the place of
13 Yet given his findings, namely, that McCawley, G.Lakoff, and their associates had made
significant contributions to the field—many of which Chomsky was to incorporate into his
own work without acknowledgment of his sources (Harris 1993b:240–260), the reader
may be surprised to see Harris depicting Chomsky as a hero of science comparable to
Aristotle or Copernicus (p.260) where one might more easily agree with his assessment of
Chomsky as “a tremendously skilled rhetor” (p.244).
14 Still, critics of R.A.Harris’ book have argued that he did not always grasp the linguistic
ideas that were traded, but this is a charge easily made since the issues were so multifacetted
112 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
‘meaning’ in linguistic (read: grammatical=syntactic) theory. It explores this
controversy from its beginnings in the mid-sixties, through the seventies, and all
the way to its present-day repercussions, until the appearance Chomsky’s
‘minimalist program’ in 1992.15
The end-result of Harris’ story is not quite a demonstration of the importance
of rhetoric in the development of linguistics (or any other field)— though there
are of course places in the narrative where rhetoric appears to have taken the
place of cogent argumentation—nor something like a ‘rhetoric of history’, but
still a useful contribution to the history of an important period in American
theoretical linguistics. Some may rank it higher—it is certainly fuller—in scholarly
terms than Newmeyer’s Linguistics in America, with which it shares
(understandably perhaps) certain biases and an exaggerated title: while
Newmeyer’s book deals almost exclusively with syntax—and only one ‘tradition’
of syntactic theory, one might add—and certainly not with linguistics in North
America as a whole, Harris’ study should have been called something like
“Generative Infights of the 60s and 70s”, since in order to have ‘war’ one must
also have, for of all intents and purposes, troops and not a mere handful of
soldiers, most of whom want to be captains. As it was, Chomsky, in his usual way
(well described in many places in Harris’s book), often alone or with one aide-decamp or two at one time or another, such as Ray Jackendoff, Joseph Emonds (b.
1940), the late Adrian Akmajian (1944– 1983), and Ray C.Dougherty (whom
Harris uncharitably characterizes as a ‘mere polemicist’), was fencing against
former students and/or associates of his, several of whom never truly managed to
cut their umbilical cords from him. Indeed, also in view of the availability of
Harris’ 40-page article on the subject (Harris 1993a), one wonders whether these
‘battles’ and their outcome deserved monograph-length treatment, given the fact
that even today syntax is practiced by many as if it could be treated without
that even among the brightest generative theoreticians there were disagreements about the
issues.
15 It does so in ten chapters entitled “Language, thought, and the linguistics wars” (3–9);
“Linguistics” (10–34), in which the author attempts—but essentially fails to provide—a
tour d’horizon of the subject from its 19th-century beginnings to Chomsky’s redefinition of
its goals; “The Chomskyan revolution” (35–73), which is much in line with Newmeyer’s
(1980, 21986) interpretation; “The beauty of deep structure” (74–100), in which we learn
more about Chomsky’s personality than the Aspects model. The remaining chapters,
“Generative semantics 1: The model” (101–134); “Generative semantics 2: The heresy”
(135–159); “The vicissitudes of war” (160–197); “Generative semantics 3: The ethos”
(198–213); and “Generative semantics 4: The collapse” (214–239) provide the author’s
views on the stages of development and the different levels of argument. The concluding
chapter, “Whence and whither” (240–260), deals with the aftermath of the battle, the
losses and the possible gains. The back matter has copious—and often very important—
endnotes (261–310), a list of some 850 “Works cited” (311–340), with curious omissions
(e.g., Koerner 1970, 1983, 1984, 1989; Murray 1981, 1989, among others), and a general
index (341–356).
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 113
proper regard to semantics (cf. Ellis [1993:15–26, 97–114 et passim], for a
judicious account of the ‘initial missteps’ and the miserable outcome of this false
division).16 Yet Harris is at pains to reassure his readers (1993b:139) that Chomsky
“has always had a sidelong interest in meaning, but he is a deep and abiding
syntactic fundamentalist”. One wonders whether these aren’t mutually exclusive
positions.
As noted earlier, while R.A.Harris’s educational background was not in
linguistics, one must appreciate how well he has worked himself into the subject
matter and presented much of the intricacies of the debate. Still, one cannot help
noticing that he uncritically accepts at face value Chomsky’s self-serving accounts
of what American linguistics was like during his formative years and how much
his approach differed from that of his teacher Zellig S.Harris (1909–1992; cf.
Nevin 1993, for an appraisal of the latter’s work), as he accepts Newmeyer’s
retold versions (1986a,b,c) of the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ without ever asking
himself what constitutes a scientific revolution. It may be a ‘psychological fact’ for
those who want to believe that there was one, but from the point of view of
philosophy of science, there is little evidence that a ‘scientific revolution’ occurred
following the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 (cf. Chapter 8 of the
present book, for details). There may, however, have occurred a kind of
‘revolution’, though it was more likely a social one, as has been suggested (e.g.,
by Murray 1980), and there was certainly a rhetoric of revolution (cf., e.g.,
Anttila 1975 and, more fully, Murray 1994: 225–247). However, consensus has
been growing on the question that if there was anything like a Kuhnian paradigm
shift, it was with Aspects, not Syntactic Structures. Yet Newmeyer, for his part, tries
hard to argue for “The Revolutionary Import of Syntactic Structures” (1986a:18–
21), though his evidence is at best weak. One instance is the observation that in
Syntactic Structures Chomsky had demonstrated “the parallels between linguistic
theory, as he conceived it, and what uncontroversially [!] would be taken to be
scientific theories” (by scientists, one presumes), and because “it placed syntactic
relations at the center of langue”, bolstering his argument with the incorrect
assertion that Saussure treated syntax as a matter parole (p.19).17 Besides,
Chomsky’s suggestion (1957:14) that his building of a theory on the basis of
“clear cases” and his subsequent suggestion that what he was doing would give
his kind of linguistics a scientific status because this was what modern science
generally does, is a total misrepresentation: since at least the beginning of the 20th
century, if not much earlier, scientists have focused on anomalies, not the ‘clear
cases’ (as if ‘clear cases’ could explain the unclear ones, which they don’t, of
course).
16 Not untypically, Newmeyer (1986a: 92) candidly concedes that within MIT linguistics
“the assumption that syntactic and semantic processes are fundamentally distinct” had
“gone unchallenged since the inception of transformational generative grammar”, without
mentioning that many outsiders to the ‘paradigm’ had always challenged this notion (cf.,
e.g., Koerner 1970 and literature cited therein).
114 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
In the preface to his book, R.A.Harris (1993b: ix) notes that “two people
disagree so violently with the substance of this book as to require special notice,
Chomsky and Lakoff”. Readers will find it hard to believe that Harris had indeed
“sided with the interpretative semanticists”, as George Lakoff contends, although
Chomsky’s reaction is more understandable, albeit not only because Harris has
“told the generative semantics version” (ibid.). There can be no doubt where
Harris’s sympathies lie, namely, with the younger generation. George Lakoff may
have been disappointed to see that in Harris’s narrative the true hero is James
McCawley,18 but his primary dissatisfaction with Harris (and perhaps Chomsky’s
too) more likely based on Harris’s treatment of the theoretical issues and his
occasionaly injudicious asides about his character. But Chomsky has much more
to worry about since the picture that Harris draws of his character on a variety of
occasions—the manner in which he fights his adversaries, his attitude toward the
‘intellectual property’ of others, and his human shortcomings generally (Harris
1993b:236, 246, 253, 254, and elsewhere) is anything but complimentary.
Harris’s hand-waving on the concluding page of the book, referring to his
personal gratitude “for the dynamism of Chomsky’s mind” (p.260), cannot undo
the damage done to Chomsky’s image as a fair trader of ideas.19
Nevertheless, as the record shows, attempts to set the record straight
concerning the goals, development, and eventual fate of Generative Semantics
have continued. At about the time Randy Harris was preparing his 1990 thesis on
the subject, Geoffrey J.Huck (b.1944) of the University of Chicago Press (PhD,
University of Chicago, 1984) and John A.Goldsmith (b.1951) of the University of
Chicago (PhD, MIT, 1976) had already been working on their monographlength account of the story (Huck & Goldsmith 1995;20 cf. Harris 1993a: 435).
Like Harris before them, they too interviewed many people who were
participants in the GS debate, notably Ray Jackendoff (b.1945; PhD, MIT, 1969),
the author of a prime work on the type of Interpretivist work that Chomsky
embraced (Jackendoff 1972), George Lakoff, J.R.Ross and Paul Postal. In fact,
they printed revised versions of these interviews (Huck & Goldsmith 1995:97–
17 Elsewhere Newmeyer (1980:17) quotes a remark by Charles F.Voegelin (1906–1986), a
close collaborator of Zellig Harris and a supporter of the young Chomsky, out of context,
giving the impression that Voegelin had thought of Syntactic Structures as having
“accomplished a Copernican revolution” by conveniently leaving out Voegelin’s qualifying
footnote which reads: “A palace revolution, perhaps, in contrast to the interdisciplinary
revolutions plotted by David Bidney, Six Copernican Revolutions, Explorations I: Studies
in Culture and Communication pp. 6–14 (1953)” (Voegelin 1958:230n.2).
18 This view appears to be shared by Seuren (1998:495–502), in whose account G.Lakoff
plays a much less important role, in part because it was McCawley who first suggested the
introduction of predicate calculus formulae (which Seuren has found particularly fruitful).
19 What attentive students of the evolution of Chomsky’s linguistics reading Chomsky’s
own (retrospective) accounts of his meanderings have noted, at times with amazement, is
that
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 115
142). As the title of their book, Ideology and Linguistic Theory, indicates, the
authors named an aspect which has frequently been assumed to have played a role
in the debates, namely, that the choice of one theory over another is not an
entirely rational matter but that, more often than one would expect, ideological
considerations, explicitly or not, at times carry an important weight in this
process.21
Huck & Goldsmith (1995), like R.Lakoff (1989) before them, were writing their
story partly in order to counter especially Newmeyer’s (1986a, b) presentation of
the rise and fall of GS, but also to rectify the often distorted views on what the
generative semanticists stood for as expressed widely in the generative literature of
the 1980s (cf. Huck & Goldsmith 1995:143, for relevant quotations), notably the
frequently made assertion that GS simply failed because of a lack of theoretical
consistency and empirical verification.
3.
Some of the main arguments of Generative Semantics
Although the term ‘generative semantics’ first appeared in a paper by George
Lakoff, not widely circulated at the time (Lakoff 1963), it took several more years
for any real movement under the name to come to the fore. In most instances in
the history of a particular field, developments precede the adoption of a collective
term rather than follow it. Generative Semantics (GS) originated in, at least in
he never concedes that he was wrong on one or the other point in the past, but that he
chooses instead to continue using a term but to change its meaning and application. A
more disturbing incident at which Chomsky, in control of the microphone, cut off those
who wanted to present counter examples (cf. note 22 below). About Chomsky’s character,
the following anecdote appears not untypical. The incident is supposed to have occurred
following a heated debate between him and a few generative semanticists after which
Chomsky, stepping out of the room, asked his colleague Sylvain Bromberger: “Did I
win?”, to which Bromberger replied “Yes, Noam, you won, but you were all wrong!”. To
leave the anecdotal, I’d like to refer to a recent remark by Carol D.Chomsky (PhD
Harvard, 1958), Noam Chomsky’s wife for over fifty years. When asked whether she ever
disagrees with her husband about politics, the subject which Chomsky has become perhaps
even more widely known for internationally, she replied: “Sometimes I do disagree […].
Mostly I keep quiet about it, because one never wins an argument with Noam.” (Hughes
2001:45)
20 As the first author informs me (e-mail of 22 Jan. 2002), “most of the book had been
written by 1991” though largely delayed because of his “(more than) full time“ work at
the University of Chicago Press.
21 However, Huck & Goldsmith did not define the term ‘ideology’ in their 1995 book,
and so they felt the need to address it in their response to Newmeyer’s (1996:127–137)
critique (Huck & Goldsmith 1998:366–368), indicating that, in their book, they had “simply
[been] taking ideology to refer to the self-interest that affects both the content of one’s
beliefs and the tenacity with which one holds to them” (p.367). But see now Lawson
(2001) on how linguistic arguments are often ‘framed’ to serve a particular argument.
116 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
part, collaborative work between Paul Postal and Lakoff. Especially during the
Linguistic Institute held in Bloomington, Indiana, in the summer of 1964, Lakoff
might be regarded as Postal’s student. They both attempted to exploit possibilities
opened up by the revisions of the transformational syntactic framework proposed
in Katz & Postal (1964) and Chomsky (1965). While Postal godfathered a number
of ideas that became ingredients in the various arguments put forward by the
generative semanticists, notably George Lakoff, he left the fray in the early 1970s
(cf. Postal 1972, 1974) and moved, together with David M.Perlmutter (b.1938;
PhD, MIT 1968), to develop what they called Relational Grammar (cf.
Perlmutter 1983), increasingly distancing himself from Chomsky an linguistics
generally, and from Chomsky personally (cf. Postal 1988).
By contrast, Lakoff, in his doctoral dissertation submitted to Indiana University
late in 1965, explored the idea of developing a more precise account of the way
in which a lexical item could affect the applicability of transformations to
structures containing the given item. In this, he sought to put on a more solid
footing those analyses found in Chomsky’s Aspects in which the choice of lexical
items affected the possibilities for derivations. While suggesting a theory of ‘rule
government’, Lakoff realized that it could be exploited in ways that narrowed the
distance between semantic structure and syntactic deep structure, in contrast with
what Chomsky had been arguing in favour of. For instance Lakoff (1970[1965])
argued that this could be illustrated by treating inchoative and causative clauses in
terms of underlying structures that contained a corresponding stative clause—e.g.,
the structures underlying The door opened and He opened the door would contain an
embedded sentence corresponding to The door is open—and by treating certain
part-of-speech distinctions as differences in the applicability of transformations that
inserted a copula or adjoined a preposition to a noun phrase. As Lakoff explained
his argument in 1992, he had asked himself
[…] how one could account for systematic relationships among stative,
inchoative, and causative constructions, such as The milk is cool, The milk
cooled, and John cooled the milk. I posited an underlying logical form with
abstract predicates of causation and change, and argued that the intransitive
verb cool was derived by an inchoative transformation from the adjective
cool by appending the adjective below the inchoative verb. Likewise, the
transitive verb was derived by a causative transformation from the
inchoative verb by appending the inchoative cool below the abstract
causative predicate, thus creating a transitive verb. (Lakoff in Huck &
Goldsmith 1995:108)
One may ask whether there would not be simpler ways of treating these
sentences. Keeping in mind that a picture says more than a thousand words, let us
compare a GS analysis of the sentence Floyd broke the glass with what it would
have looked like in an Aspects model. While the latter (Fig.2)—see overleaf—
looks much more straightforward and neat, the former (Fig.1), supplying
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 117
underlying semantic structures for ‘break+past tense’, the resultative effect of the
action, and the like, certainly looks much more complex.
But according to Robin Lakoff (1989:953), from whose article the example has
been chosen,22
This [i.e., the analysis presented in Fig.1] was, in fact, a considerably more
powerful system. The dispute was not over relative power, but over the
necessity, with CTG [=Classical Transformational Grammar] claiming its
system was sufficient to cover all that its proponents required of a grammar,
and GS affirming the same of its [system]. But, […], the argument existed
because each side had a very different notion about what the grammar ought
to do, which in turn went back to a covert dispute about the nature of
what a grammar was supposed to describe—language.
It is clear that much more was at issue than matters of elegance of the analysis or
simplicity of the the rules.
Similarly, an attempt to refine and add substance to Chomsky’s suggestion that
referential indices (‘features’) were a part of underlying syntactic structures (1965:
145) led McCawley (1968) to argue that all rules whose application is contingent
on the identity of two units—the reference is to Chomsky’s examples John hurts
John and The boy hurt the boy—are sensitive to the purported reference of those
units and of their parts, with the proviso that one identifies correctly what units
purport to refer and what units figure in identity
requirements. As one may
gather from this argument, two isolated sentences are compared, and logical
arguments are advanced to treat hypothetical identities which in normal speech
rarely produce a problem.
From these few examples one may draw the conclusion that both Lakoff and
McCawley saw themselves as essentially engaging Chomsky in a scientific
discourse on issues Chomsky had raised, but not in a move to tear down the
entire edifice that Chomsky had erected. Indeed, it seems that even where they
were proposing arguments in favour of a more dedicated approach to including
semantic considerations in the argument, it seems that they remained
(transformationalist) syntacticians at heart. Chomsky had proposed the use of
lexical insertion rules which he thought he could conveniently make use of when
needed (cf. Chomsky 1965:87, 122, and elsewhere), though he was never able to
demonstrate how this would work.
There were many other issues and many more proposals, such as J.R. Ross’s
(1969) analysis of English auxiliary verbs as being verbs that take nonfinite
22 See also the context Lakoff (1989:951–952), in which the example has been presented.
It seems, however, that this Floyd broke the glass example has had a fairly long history. For
instance, it shows up in Newmeyer (1980) already, where the GS analysis is still much
more elaborate, in fact taking up a full page (p.95), perhaps in an attempt to suggest its
absurdity.
118 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Fig.1: The ‘underlying structure’ of Floyd broke the glass in a GS analysis
Fig.2: The ‘deep structure’ tree for Floyd broke the glass in the Aspects model
sentential complements in the manner of such verbs as seem, hereby reducing the
number of categories.23 However, one would be hard pressed to show that Postal,
Lakoff, McCawley, and Ross, who are generally regarded as the main leaders of
the GS camp, formed a unified group. In Lakoff’s much later characterization, the
four linguists shared the following kinds of commitments, though not in the same
order of priorities and with differing emphases:
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 119
— Cognitive (“to take seriously empirical results about the nature of the mind
and to make the theory of language fit those results”);
— Generalization (“to seek maximal generalization over the full range of
linguistic data, both within and across all domains of language—syn-tax,
semantics, pragmatics, discourse, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and
so on”);
— Fregean (“to characterize semantics using the tools of formal logic”,24 and
— Formal Symbol System (“the commitment to the Chomskyan metaphor
[…] that a language is a formal system”) (cf. Lakoff in Huck & Goldsmith
1995:109).
To these, Lakoff added, for McCawley’s stance, a Solid Ground Commitment, as
“McCawley wants to do theoretical linguistics at all times using ideas and
representational techniques that he feels are well understood, like formal logic and
classical transformational grammar” (p. 110). Indeed, according to Lakoff, neither
Ross nor Postal subscribed to the Cognitive Commitment, which played only a
minor role in McCawley’s scheme of things and which only Lakoff himself
embraced (p.111). Besides, studying the writings of both Postal and Ross, one
would be hard-pressed to find them referring to such areas as pragmatics and
discourse analysis. In other words, even on the metalevel of their argumentation,
one cannot find many common denominators among the leaders of the GS
school.
Seuren (1998:518) has identified the following among “most important issues
that were […] discussed as if they were essential to general semantics”; as we shall
see, they were certainly recognized by Chomsky as points that he needed to
attack in order to (re)assert his position as the leader of Generative Linguistics.
1) Ross’s (1969) analysis of auxiliaries as main verbs (mentioned earlier);
2) The role of nominalizations (are they lexical or grammatical transforms);
3) The mechanism of ‘lexical insertion’ and the status of ‘deep structure’ (cf.
McCawley 1968)
4) The status of derivational constraints (cf., e.g., Ross 1967);
5) Postal’s (1971[1969]) analysis of the verb remind;
6) The status of thematic roles or functions (cf. Fillmore 1968[1967]).
During the 1966–1967 academic year, Chomsky spent his sabbatical leave at the
University of California in Berkeley, but is unlikely that he failed to follow the
discussions that had been going on in Cambridge, Mass., during his absence. As
23 Chomsky (1972b: 65–66, 120), typically, dismissed this proposal in part as being merely
a notational variant of his own ideas and for the rest as unconvincing.
24 In Lakoff (1987:583–585) he recanted the GS policy of adopting a conception of semantic
structure that was closely tied to formal logic and model theory.
120 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Harris (1993b: 119) reports, Chomsky, in his 1967–1968 lectures at MIT, began
what Newmeyer (1980:114; 21986:107) describes as his “counteroffensive”.
Although he argued that he was revisiting Robert B. Lees’s 1960 Grammar of
English Nominalizations (Lees 51968[1960]), which had been written with
considerable input on Chomsky’s part at the time, it was clear to everyone around
that Chomsky was in fact attacking views propounded by the generative
semanticists (item two in the above list). Much of Chomsky’s argument formed
the basis of his “Remarks on Nominalization”, first published in 1970, in which
he also referred to unpublished papers and dissertations by Lakoff, McCawley, Ross
and others dating from the 1966– 1967 period (cf. Chomsky 1972:60–61). The
most important attack, by all accounts, came in October 1969, at a conference
held at the University of Texas at Austin, whose proceedings were published only
in 1972. In his preface, Stanley Peters (b.1941; B.S., MIT, 1962) noted, among
other things:
Apparently divergent developments of transformational grammar had been
perceptible for two to three years [prior to the 1969 conference]. Simply
bringing together peo ple who disagree is not guaranteed to produce
agreement, as the reader will discover. (Peters 1972:vii)
On Chomsky’s contribution,25 Peters (p.viii) remarks that it
deals with objections raised by generative grammarians to his Aspects […]
and certain subsequent proposals about the relations between syntax and
semantics in grammar. He revises the Aspects theory and argues that
extending interpretative semantic rules to operate on the surface structure
meets the criticisms of generative semanticists.
This is a rather careful statement as one would expect from an editor of a
collective volume, but Peters fails to mention that the main protagonists of GS,
Lakoff, McCawley, and Ross had not been given the opportunity to present their
views.26
In his paper at the 1969 Texas Conference, “Some Empirical Issues in the
Theory of Transformational Grammar”, Chomsky did counter what he regarded
as his objections to the six issues listed earlier in a manner that many of his critics
would say typifies his rhetorical strategies and style of indirection and
misrepresentation of the views of others. One longer quotation may stand for
many.
Summarizing so far, we have specified a general framework and three
specific variants: the standard theory, the extended standard theory, and
generative semantics. In my opinion, the standard theory is inadequate and
must be modified. The evidence now available seems to me to indicate that
it must be modified to the extended standard theory (EST). Furthermore,
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 121
when some vagueness and faulty formulations are eliminated. I think we
can show that generative semantics converges with EST in most respects.
There are a few differences, which I will identify and discuss, but in most
cases I think that the differences are either terminological, or lie in an area
where both theories are comparably inexplicit, so that no empirical issue
can, at the moment, be formulated. The clearest and probably most
important difference between EST and generative semantics has to do with
the ordering of lexical and nonlexical transformations. This, in fact, seems
to me the only fairly clear issue with empirical import that distinguishes
these theories. My feeling is that present evidence supports the narrower
and more restrictive assumption of the (extended) standard theory that
nonlexical transformations follow all lexical transformations, so that “deep
structure” is a well-defined notion, and that the conditions on deep
structure given by base rules narrowly constrain K (the class of derivations
). This, however, is an empirical is sue, as distinct from a number of
others that seem to me terminological, or in an area of indeterminacy and
vagueness. (Chomsky 1972[1969]:74–75)
It hardly needs to be added that no real evidence for any of the assertions, notably
the empirical ones, is adduced in the remainder of the paper27 in which proposals
by Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Fillmore, and a few others are discussed, for the
most past dismissed as not in any way relevant to his argument, and the extended
standard theory (EST) is maintained.
As Huck & Goldsmith, in their chapter on “What happened to Generative
Semantics?” (1995:79–89), noticed with apparent surprise, Chomsky in fact spent
a great amount of time and effort in warding off the various proposals by the GS
protagonists, with considerable assistance from his students (as is evident from his
acknowledgments in his 1972 Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar).
In Chomsky’s six major publications between 1973 and 1977 […], he refers
to the work of no fewer than forty-eight linguists who had graduated or
who would ultimately graduate from the linguistics program at MIT. Often
in these publications, Chomsky relied on arguments suggested by these
25 The other contributors to the volume were Charles J.Fillmore (b.1927), Joseph
Emonds (b.1940; PhD, MIT, 1967), Paul Postal, and Paul Kiparsky (b.1941; PhD,
MIT, 1967), but J.R.Ross and other Chomsky students were at least present at the
conference.
26 I shall not enter a discussion of the story, reported by Ross and discussed at length
by Postal in Huck & Goldsmith (1995:125, 134), and which I was told about shortly
after my arrival as a post-doctoral fellow in December 1971 by people at the
University of Texas linguistics department who witnessed it, according to which
Chomsky prevented his former student and junior colleague Ross from finishing his
comments on Chomsky’s paper.
122 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
students in advancing his case. It can reasonably be inferred, therefore, that
the role played in the development of the Interpretivist research program by
MIT graduate students has not been inconsequential. Huck & Goldsmith
1995:81)
Needless to add, this rather extraordinary scenario played a significant, albeit not
exclusive role in the fairly quick demise of the GS movement. With such a
geballte Kraft or ‘bundling of brain power’, and the successful incorporation of
‘interesting’ ideas from the work of Lakoff, McCawley, Postal, Ross and others—
Postal’s (1988) ‘right to salvage’ strategy comes to mind—into what was soon
dubbed the Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST). There was hardly any
place left for a GS program by 1977; it simply evaporated.
4.
Observations on the external history of Generative Semantics 28
Something like a first GS ‘research community’ (if this isn’t an exalted term) came
into being during the 1966–1967 academic year, when Lakoff and J.R.Ross teamtaught courses on syntactic theory at Harvard and MIT, respectively. In these
courses they proposed and refined a large body of socalled ‘abstract syntax’
analyses that provided much of the core of subsequent GS research; it soon
stimulated a considerable amount of discussion and research effort within their
evolving framework by students at the two institutions. Already as early as April
1967, GS attained prominence outside of the Harvard-MIT linguistic community
at a conference held at the University of Texas at Austin, whose proceedings were
published as Bach & Harms (1968), with papers by Charles Fillmore (b.1927),
Emmon Bach (b.1929), James McCawley, and Paul Kiparsky (b.1941; PhD, MIT
1967), with Lakoff and Ross among the invited discussants, which also included
several other MIT PhDs such as D.Terence Langendoen (b.1939; PhD, MIT
1964). As the editors noted in their “Preface” (Bach & Harms 1968:vii):
We expressed our regrets above for the omission of direct records of the
discussion that followed the papers. We would give a totally false picture of
27 What is striking is the actual length (close to 70 printed pages, in contrast to between 20
to 40 pages for the other five contributions) of Chomsky’s paper, which suggests that he
was given an opportunity to expand considerably on what he had presented at the
conference. (This is not the first time that such a situation came about. Chomsky’s 1962
plenary paper at the International Congress of Linguists, for instance, mushroomed from
some 30 pages in the pre-print version to book length, thus giving Chomsky an
opportunity to incorporate responses to all the important comments he had received at the
Congress without necessarily acknowledging the sources. Cf. Chomsky 1964[1962].)
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 123
the symposium if we did not mention the contribution of Ross and Lakoff,
who not only played a role as discussants but were kind enough to remain
in Austin to devote approximately six hours to a presentation of some of
their recent work.
The GS community increased considerably in size during the Linguistic Institute
held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in summer 1968, at which
numerous students were exposed to large doses of GS syntax and semantics in
courses taught by Lakoff, McCawley, and Ross. Their teaching included for the
first time a detailed presentation of the conception of semantic structure that
figured with increasing prominence in GS research. Less than a year later, at the
fifth annual conference of the Chicago Linguistic Society (henceforth: CLS), in
April 1969, the attendance had increased consid erably, attracting a large
proportion of those who were by then engaged in GS research. For the next
several years, the number of submissions and the number of papers actually
presented at the CLS meetings were considerable. In a way, these annual served
as a gathering of the GS linguists. As a result, their proceedings (regular
publication of the papers had begun with the fourth, 1968, conference only)
contain a sizable proportion of the published GS research that was done during
those years. (For a selection of representative papers from the 1968 to 1975
period, see Schiller et al. 1988; cf. Newmeyer’s [1996:138–140] demurrer.)
During the mid-1970s, however, the number of linguists engaged in GS work
rapidly decreased; by the end of the decade, no real GS community could be said
to exist any longer. McCawley (1995:346) observed:
The reasons for this decline are a matter of controversy. It was not simply a
matter of interpretive semanticists and others refuting theoretical claims of
28 This account owes much to McCawley’s (1995:345–347) presentation (with may be
compared with Robin Lakoff’s “The basic history” [1989:940–945]). Although he is seen
as the major force in the GS movement of the 1960s and 1970s, he had gone his own way,
like Lakoff and others, by the early 1980s, if not earlier, and by temperament and by his
philosophy of science, can be counted on to give a reasonably fair treatment of the subject.
Cf. the testimonial by one of McCawley’s former students, Barbara Need:
Several students took his classes, not because they were interested in syntax
or Negation or Japanese, but because he was teaching and his classes would
be interesting and they would learn a lot. Nothing was irrelevant. He
taught us by example to challenge the established theories. You didn’t need
to agree with him theoretically, but you had to think about the position
you had taken and not simply accept it as gospel. And yet in disagreeing
with others in this field, he was never mean or personal. It was the ideas,
not the people, that received his strongest comments. (Historiographia
Linguistica 26, p.269 [1999]).
124 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
GS, since GS-ists and interpretive semanticists had comparable success in
refuting the others’ theoretical claims (see, e.g., the detailed dissection in
McCawley 1975 of the positive claims put forward in Chomsky 1972 and of
Chomsky’s arguments against various tenets of GS). In several of the factual
domains that figured prominently in disputes between GS and interpretive
semantics, the facts were not what either camp predicted them to be. For
example, adverbials that modified semantic constituents of the meaning of a
semantically complex word (as in He lent me his bicycle until Tuesday, where
until Tuesday modifies ‘I have his bicycle’) were neither always possible (as
GS analyses in their pristine form implied) nor never possible (as tenets of
interpretive semantics implied); neither camp ever succeeded in explaining
which cases did and which did not allow such modifiers, though each
continued to cite the cases that worked in the desired way as confirmations
of its own position and refutations of the opposing position. […]. While the
grammar of nominalizations played a major role in interpretive semanticists’
attacks on GS and in the rationale for their ‘lexicalist’29 framework, no
detailed study of nominalizations was produced by any interpretive
semanticist, and the only at all comprehensive study of nominalizations
produced in the 1970s (Levi 1978) was done in a GS framework.
These could be called ‘internal’ factors that obviously played a role in the
precipitous decline of GS, i.e., pertaining to the theoretical proposals made by
generative semanticists (GS-ists), and others could be added (see Section 3
above). But there were other factors that could be termed ‘external’ ones, having
to do with social, institutional, and career matters, and maybe also matters of the
personalities involved (on the latter point, cf. R.Lakoff 1989:970–977). Huck &
Goldsmith (1995:81) noted that Lakoff, Postal, and Ross “were no longer
defending Generative Semantics after the early 1970s”, and McCawley (1995:
346) notes that “the development of a variety of alternative approaches to syntax
and semantics […] for various reasons attracted substantial numbers of neophyte
linguists and a certain number of erstwhile GS-ists”. McCawley (ibid.) refers to
29 Ross commented on Chomsky’s reasons for taking a ‘lexicalist’ posiiton in a 1986
interview (printed in Huck & Goldsmith 1995:123–124) as follows:
Lexicalism, I thought of, and think of now, was a huge rug under which to
sweep all this clutter which clearly to Noam’s mind had nothing to do with
real language; remember, language is like algebra and algebra has no lexical
exceptions. What Noam wanted to do is push into something called the
lexicon these examples which worked for five verbs, so that he could
concentrate on real language, which was exceptionless, pure, beautiful. It
had nothing to do with semantics, nothing to do with phonology, nothing
to do with lexical classes. It worked structure-dependently.
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 125
other factors which should not be overlooked in a history of linguistics, and
which we may call academic power and influence. Apart from McCawley
himself, who by 1968 had a tenured position at the University of Chicago and a
considerable following, the situation regarding the other three main protagonists
were as follows: Ross was the sole GS-ist on the MIT linguistics faculty that was
otherwise openly hostile to GS; his influence during the 1970s became minimal.
Postal, after brief stints at MIT (1963–1965) and the City University of New
York (1965–1967), had accepted an industrial research position in 1967 and, as a
result, did no teaching. And Lakoff, who had taught at Harvard and Michigan for
only brief periods (1965–1968 and 1969– 1971, respectively), had become a
professor of linguistics at Berkeley in 1972, far removed from the GS centers. As
McCawley (1995:346) reports, “none of his Berkeley students finished their PhDs
until after the decline of the GS community was far advanced”. In Robin Lakoff’s
(1989:973) words:
GS was, organizationally, disorganized, or at best, collaborative rather than
hierarchical. There were leaders, but they were seen not so much as masters
but primi inter pares. The spirit was democratic. […]. This made for a lively
group and a lively field, but one that must have seemed chaotic to the outer
world, especially those used to the rigid ipse dixits of MIT. Chomsky had
disciples in a strict hierarchy: There were the inner circle, the various outer
circles, Limbo, and Bad Guys [the latter term referring to the postBloomfieldian ‘structuralists’].
In addition, and by comparison, apart from the growing strength, financial (the
funds in support of research and graduate students that flowed in were
considerable30) and intellectual (in particular where the production of PhD
dissertations are concerned), at MIT itself, the late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the
creation of many new linguistics programs and departments (e.g., at the
University of California in Los Angeles, the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, Brandeis University, and many others31), and more often than not the
jobs were filled by MIT graduates. In this way, too, the Interpretivist position
maintained by Chomsky and his associates became the only framework of
Generative Grammar. Those who did not subscribe to this ‘paradigm’ had few
options (if they did not have their careers ended): either they sought refuge in
language or anthropology departments or, if they were particularly theoryoriented, they branched out into other frameworks such as Relational Grammar
(Perlmutter and Postal), Generalized (or Head-Driven) Phrase Structure Grammar
30 On this and related matters, see Chapter 8 (below).
31 For details, one may consult the various editions of Linguistic Programs in the United
States and Canada brochure published by the LSA during the 1980s and 1990s, which list
the faculty and the year a linguistics program or department was established.
126 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
(Gazdar and Pullum; cf. Levine & Green 1999), Cognitive Grammar (Langacker
1995; Lakoff 1987), or, more recently, Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky;
cf. Archangeli & Langendoen 1997), to mention just a few.
5.
Closing remarks
R.A.Harris’s paper on “Origin and Development of Generative Semantics”
(1993a: 432) carries the following concluding paragraph:
It is worth getting the history right. Generative semantics was the first big
fermenting cloud of dust kicked up within the most influential linguistic
program of the second half of the 20th century, Chomsky’s
transformational-generative grammar, and it came at a very pivotal time,
when hegemony for that program seemed virtually guaranteed, at least in
North America. The Post-Bloomfieldians had been driven toward the
margins of the field, neighbouring disciplines were recognizing only
transformationalists as representatives of linguistics, and new departments
were opening with exclusively Chomsky an orientations. Generative
semantics and the turmoil which surrounded it have helped ensure a
healthier and more diverse field.
One cannot be sure that Harris’ assessment is right. Generative Semantics did, in
the final analysis, move Chomsky to regenerate his ‘standard theory’, but it
cannot be said that it made the field of linguistics generally a healthier one. In
Pieter Seuren’s (1998:526) assessment, “Largely as a result of Chomsky’s actions,
linguistics is now sociologically in a very unhealthy state.” One does not have to
agree with either view. To be sure GS did not bring about the kind of syntaxsemantics interface that would in all honesty acknowledge that if there was any
deep, underlying structure in language, it was essentially semantic, and that syntax
has remained an attempt to explain how surface structure comes about. Indeed,
where the treatment of meaning is concerned, GS provided many more
promissory notes than actual solutions.32
To refer to the experience of—and reaction to—Generative Linguistics of the
1970s by a linguist of the same generation as Chomsky, we may quote from the
testimony of Wallace L.Chafe (b.1927; PhD,33 Yale 1958). Looking back at his
career, Chafe (2002:251) recalls:
32 One such example of this was model-theoretic semantics, based on the work of the
mathematicien Richard Montague (1932–1971), developed by Partee (1976) and others,
that sought to establish a truth-condition logic for sentences of natural languages.
ON THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERATIVE SEMANTICS 127
[…] in the 1960s I focused on the notion that if deep structure were to
make any sense, it would have to be equated with semantic structure, and
that was the perspective I tried to develop in Chafe (1970a).
The timing was bad. My attempt to base grammar on semantics just
happened to coincide with the rise of generative semantics, an offshoot of
generative grammar, which I thought was right in associating deep structure
with semantics but wrong in the way it conceived of semantics itself. To
oversimplify the difference, whereas I thought that syntax should be more
like semantics, the generative semanticists conceived of semantics as
structured in a form still dictated by generative syntax. For a moment I
thought I could join them, but I soon gave up when I heard about lexical
decomposition and realized how beholden the generative semanticists still
were to what I saw as a deficient view of language. While I was a visiting
professor at Cornell in 1968 I gathered material for a sketch of another
Iroquoian language, Onondaga, spoken not far from Ithaca, and at first I
titled it A Generative Semantic Sketch of Onondaga. With my disillusionment I
scratched out that title and replaced it with A Semantically Based Sketch of
Onondaga (Chafe 1970b).
Unless we agree with philosophically-minded scholars like Seuren (1998),
according to whom semantic problems in linguistics could be handled properly
through due attention to the work in logic pioneered by Gottlob Frege (1948–
1925) and further developed by others working in the area of modern predicate
calculus, we would have to concede that not only have the generative
semanticists of the 1970s not succeeded in creating a satisfactory framework for
the proper handling of the lexicon in linguistic theory (as we have seen above) but
that in general meaning cannot be properly handled within the realm of
‘autonomous syntax’, as Chomsky has continued to claim.
At least we can say that while ‘the study of meaning’ (pace Seuren 1998: 367–
458) may elude a formal treatment by linguists,34 by the late 1980s, while
Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding produced another ‘revolutionary’
turn in syntactic theory, the field of linguistics generally was well on the road to
recovery from the Chomskyan hegemony, even in North America, with subjects
like historical linguistics and the study of the native languages of the Americas
flourishing as never before.35
33 Like Postal several years later (see note 7 above), Chafe had Floyd Lounsbury as his
thesis supervisor; see Chafe’s obituary of Lounsbury in Historiographia Linguistica 26.333–
341 (1999).
34 I shall gladly leave it to others to judge whether Ray Jackendoff’s most recent book,
immodestly entitled Foundations of Language and endorsed in the most glowing terms by
Newmeyer and others on the dust jacket, will prove me wrong (Jackendoff 2002).
35 Sociolinguistics, too, has had a share in these developments toward what Labov likes to
call a more ‘realistic linguistics’ (cf. Chapter 10, for details).
128 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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Kuiper, Koenraad. 1975. Discussion of Ray C.Dougherty [1974]. International Journal of
Dravidian Linguistics 4.159–161.
Lakoff, George. 1963. “Toward Generative Semantics”. Internal memorandum of the
Mechanical Translation Group, Reserch Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Cambridge, Mass. (Published in McCawley 1976a.43–61.)
Lakoff, George. 1970 [1965]. Irregularity in Syntax. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
[Original title: “On the nature of syntactic irregularity”.]
Lakoff, George. 1970. “Global Rules”. Language 46.627–639.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the
mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, Robin [Tolmach]. 1968. Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation. (= Research
monograph, 49.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1989. “The Way We Were; or, the Real Actual Truth about
Generative Semantics: A memoir”. Journal of Pragmatics 13.939–988.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1995. “Cognitive Grammar”. Koerner & Asher 1995. 364–368.
Lawson, Aaron. 2001. “Ideology and Indoctrination: The framing of language in
twentieth-century introductions to linguistics”. Language Sciences 23.1–14.
Lees, Robert B. 1968[1960]. The Grammar of English Nominalizations. 5th printing.
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Levi, Judith N. 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York: Academic
Press.
Levine, Robert D. & Georgia M.Green, eds. 1999. Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure
Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCawley, James D. 1968[1967]. “The Role of Semantics in a Grammar”. Universals in
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Rinehart & Winston.
McCawley, James D. 1968. “Lexical Insertion in a Transformational Grammar without
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71–80. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
130 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
McCawley, James D. 1975a. “Discussion of Ray C.Dougherty’s ‘Generative Semantics
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Voegelin, C.F. 1958. Review of Chomsky (1957). International Journal of American
Linguistics 24.229–231.
CHAPTER 7
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF
SAUSSURE AFTER 1961
1.
Introductory observations
August 1992 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Noam Chomsky’s first
international exposure, and there is no doubt that his plenary paper at the Ninth
International Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August
1962, held outside Europe for the first time in the history of these congresses and,
co-incidentally, on Chomsky’s ‘home turf’, proved to be the most important
event in acquainting the linguistic world with the fundamentals of
Transformational-Generative Grammar.1 In recognition of the significance of this
momentous event, Frederick J.Newmeyer, the well-known writer on
Chomskyan linguistics, organized a panel discussion at the Fifteenth International
Congress of Linguists, held in Quebec City in August 1992, devoted to a
retrospective appraisal of this historic date and an evaluation of the evolution of
Chomsky’s research program outlined in his 1962 paper to the present (cf.
Newmeyer 1996:66–79).2 This chapter, by contrast, constitutes a much more
modest contribution to the development of American linguistics, namely, an
investigation of the European sources of Chomsky’s linguistic inspiration, in
particular his references to the Cours de linguistique générale which also made their
first public appearance in this 1962 plenary address.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that Martin Joos (1907–1978), who
edited the widely read anthology of American ‘structuralist’ papers in the year of
the first publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (Joos 1957), made the
following observation in a paper entitled “Linguistic Prospects in the United
States”, which had been written expressly “on the occasion of the Ninth
International Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts”, as the
volume’s title-page states:
1
Cf. Koerner (1989:116–117) for details concerning the circumstances that led to
Chomsky’s privileged position at the Congress and after.
132 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
It is principally a group gathered around Zellig Harris and his pupils,
notably Noam Chomsky, who have been developing a new procedure of
description for language, called Transformation Grammar and then by the
more general term Generative Grammar. We must attempt to place this
movement in relation to our neo-Saussurean tradition, in which our neoBloomfieldian ‘descriptive linguistics’ is the most conspicuous sect on the
American scene. The Generative Grammar movement seems to flout this
tradition; but it does that not so much by denying or reversing any of its
tenets as by disregarding some of them as irrelevant to the descriptive
program. This makes it possible to attempt to describe the movement as a
heresy within the neo-Saussurean tradition rather than as a competitor to it.
(Joos 1961:17)
This lengthy passage is interesting for a number of reasons, only few of which are
pertinent to the present argument. However, since this article is rarely cited by
historians of American linguistics, one may take this quotation (and other
statements in the same text) as an indication, if not proof, that Chomsky’s work at
the time was regarded as little more than a variant of ‘descriptive linguistics’ and
well received by the establishment of American linguistics. In the present context,
it is worth noting that Joos regarded the predominant strain of American
decriptivism as ‘neo-Saussurean’, an expression which he reiterates several times
more on subsequent pages, especially in view of the fact that Saussure was rarely
mentioned in the writings of Bloomfield’s followers.
Historically-inclined scholars, in particular those with a European education,
when first encountering writings by Noam Chomsky, tended to ask themselves to
what extent Saussure’s ideas influenced Chomsky’s theories. At least in my personal
experience, working between spring 1969 and fall 1971 on my dissertation
devoted to Saussure and the impact of the Cours on 20th-century linguistic
theory, and also at a university with a strong commitment to Chomskyan
linguistics, it was natural to inquire into this question (cf. Koerner 1971b, Index p.
420, for references to Chomsky). As a result, I read all the early texts of Chomsky
I could lay my hands on, including the mimeographed version of his The Logical
Structure of Linguistic Theory (henceforth: LSLT) of 1955, only to discover that in
these early writings, including his by then famous Syntactic Structures of 1957, not a
single reference to the Cours de linguistique générale could be traced. I realized only
much later that I should not have been surprised.
If we investigate the general intellectual climate prevailing in American
linguistics since the 1930s, we will discover that references to Saussure until the
2 The assessment of this event was co-authored with Stephen R.Anderson, Sandra Chung,
and James McCloskey, all of them generativists, but none of them, apart from Newmeyer
himself and perhaps Anderson, also a historian (cf. Anderson 1984, though devoted to
phonology, not syntax). Their statements have been included in Newmeyer (1996:66–79).
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 133
first appearance of an English translation of the Cours in 1959 are rare, excepting
those made in the work of European emigrés,3 notably Roman Jakobson, lectures
by whom Chomsky attended between 1951 and 1955 while he was a Junior
Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard (cf. Chomsky 1983). However, it
appears, if Wittmann (1966:83) is right, that it required the publication of the
English version of the Cours to induce Chomsky to read the text. However, I am
more inclined to believe that an important incentive to study European linguistic
work had been given by the decision of the Comité International Permanent des
Linguistes to hold the 9th International Congress of Linguists outside Europe for
the first time, particularly as it was to be held in Cambridge, Mass., where both
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are located and
where Chomsky had joined Morris Halle at the Laboratory of Electronics in the
Fall of 1955. We should recall that despite Bloomfield’s appreciation of the Cours
(cf. Joseph 1989, Koerner 1989), his followers were so busy working out his
descriptive program that they not only neglected to read Saussure but also failed
to undertake any historical linguistic research, a neglect that did not notably
change during the Chomskyan years—a few claims that synchronic rules could
reflect diachronic changes notwithstanding (cf. Koerner 1971a). Indeed, despite
Rulon Wells’ (b.1919) 1947 paper on “De Saussure’s System of Linguistics”4
which, significantly enough, appeared in Word, founded by émigré scholars like
Jakobson, André Martinet and others, and not in Language, Einar Haugen (1906–
1994), in his 1950 Presidential Address, found it necessary to chastize his fellowmembers of the Linguistic Society of America in the following manner:5
3 Still, it could be shown that Saussure was not unknown to the generation of Chomsky’s
teachers; as just one an example, we may refer to Zellig Harris’ review of Louis H.Gray’s
(1875–1955) Foundations of Language of 1939, where he says (Harris 1970[1940]:704):
Gray speaks of three aspects of language […], basing himself on the langueparole dichotomy of de Saussure and many Continental linguists. This
division, however, is misleading, in setting up two parallel levels of
linguistics. ‘Parole’ is merely the physical events which we count as
language, while ‘langue’ is the scientist’s analysis and arrangements of them.
The relation between the two is the same as between the world of physical
events and the science of physics.
4 Re-reading Wells’ paper today, one is surprised to find the author trying to ally and
compare Saussure’s ideas with those that American structuralists were most pre-occupied
with, namely, phonemics and immediate constituent analysis. Indeed, Wells could hardly be
said to have understood Saussure’s central themes. As Matthews (1993:9) notes: “Wells’s
paper cannot be recommended for its exegesis of Saussure, but for a student of American
views in its own time it is very revealing.”
134 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Rarely does one see a reference in American writings on linguistic theory to
the works of de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, or other European writers, although
they are the thinkers who gave us the instruments with which we work. I
yield to no one in my admiration for Bloomfield and Sapir; but I regard it
as a kind of provincialism to suppose that all sound linguistics began with
them. (Haugen 1951:211=1957:357)
It is interesting to note that in his address Haugen should present to his colleagues
essential ingredients of the linguistic theory of Louis Hjelmslev (1899– 1965), on
the basis of his Omkring sprogleoriens grundlœggelse of 1943 (Haugen 1951:
213ff.=1957:358ff.). The Danish text appeared in an English translation in the
United States in 1953, barely half a year after Hjelmslev had taught on the subject
of his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language at the LSA Summer Institute held in
Bloomington, Indiana (cf. Hill 1991:70).6 These facts are interesting for at least
two reasons: first, because it was Hjelmslev who more than any other theoretician
developed Saussurean notions further, and second, because we can find—perhaps
as a result of Haugen’s LSA Address—Chomsky referring to Hjelmslev’s
Prolegomena in various places in his 1955 LSLT. Since, interestingly, all these
references to the work of Hjelmslev were expunged from the 1975 publication of
LSLT, I am referring to Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures as an early published
instance where an explicit reference to the Prolegomena is made (see also the
bibliography, p. 115). There, when discussing his criteria of ‘external conditions of
adequacy’ and the ‘condition of generality’ that a theory must satisfy, Chomsky
(1957: 50n) notes: “I presume that these two conditions are similar to what
Hjelmslev [1953:8] has in mind when he speaks of the appropriateness and
arbitrariness of linguistic theory.”7 Indeed, reading further in Hjelmslev’s
Prolegomena, Chomsky might have found the following passage in Section 6 of
the monograph, “The aim of linguistic theory” (9–11), interesting which I am
quoting at length since few North Americans seem to have read Hjelmslev:8
But linguistic theory must be of use for describing and predicting not only
any possible text composed in a certain language, but on the basis of the
information that it gives about language in general, any possible text
composed in any language whatsoever. The linguistic theoretician must of
5 An indication of the climate change during the 1940s and 1950s may be gathered from
the response by the structuralist George L.Trager (1906–1992) to the paper by the IndoEuropeanist George S.Lane (1902–1981), “Changes of Emphasis in Linguistics with
Particular Reference to Paul and Bloomfield”, in Studies in Philology 42.465–483 (1945;
Trager’s rejoinder appeared in the same journal, 43.461–464, 1946).
6 The imprint on the reverse side of the title page states “Issued January 1, 1953”. See next
note for further information on the production of this translation. The “Translator’s Note”
(p. [v]) acknowledges “valuable help” received from André Martinet and also from Roman
Jakobson, John Lotz, Lawrence L.Thomas, and others.
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 135
course attempt to satisfy this requirement likewise, by starting with a certain
selection of texts in different languages. Obviously, it would be humanly
impossible to work through all existing texts, and moreover, the labor
would be futile since the theory must also cover texts as yet unrealized.
Hence the linguistic theoretician, like any other theoretician, must take the
precaution to foresee all conceivable possibilities—even such possibilities as
he himself has not experienced or seen realized—and to admit them into
his theory so that it will be applicable even to texts and languages that have
not appeared in his practice, or to languages that have perhaps never been
realized, and some of which will probably never be realized. Only thus can
he produce a linguistic theory of ensured applicability. (Hjelmslev 1953:
10=1961:17)
Admittedly, Chomsky never went as far as Hjelmslev proposed; unlike Hjelmslev
who knew many languages, Chomsky is essentially monolingual. But it is
interesting that an early reader, probably from the 1960s, of the copy in the
University of Hong Kong Library (call no. 401 H677 o) marked this paragraph,
adding a laconic “generative” in the margins.9
The wide-spread ignorance of European work on linguistic theory in general
and of the Cours in particular during the years between 1924, the year in which
the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) was founded, and the mid1960s may also
be gathered from the fact that the histories of the LSA written by Joos (1986) and
Hill (1991) do not contain a single reference to Saussure. It appears that it
required a strongly theory-oriented linguist like Chomsky, plus some other
external factors, to have the works of Hjelmslev and Saussure read again.10
7 While it is obvious (to me at least) that the subject of the influence of Hjelmslev’s
Prolegomena on Chomsky’s theorizing merits a separate investigation, it deserves to be
mentioned here at least that Robert Benjamin Lees (1922–1996), one of Chomsky’s closest
collaborators (though Chomsky [1979:135] rejects the suggestion that Lees had been his
student, as most of us assume he was, despite the fact that he was Chomsky’s senior by
several years) during the later 1950s, had enrolled in Hjelmslev’s course “Structural
Analysis of Language” at the LSA-sponsored Linguistic Institute held at Bloomington,
Indiana, in the summer of 1952. It was at this LI that, according to the translator (letter to
the author of 10 Dec. 1991), the first draft of the English translation Francis J.Whitfield
(1916–1996) had produced was used by Hjelmslev, who during the LI collaborated with
the translator on the revision for publication a year later. Another interesting paper that
Hjelmslev might have used in his Bloomington lectures is his “The Basic Structure of
Language”, which he presented in London and Edinburgh in 1947, and which are strongly
inspired by Saussurean notions.—Given the fact that Lees had switched from chemical
engineering to linguistics before joining
Chomsky at M.I.T., it is interesting to read in Syntactic Structures (p.48): “Perhaps the issue
[i.e., his view that “we can reconstruct the formal relations that hold among these
utterances in terms of the notions of phrase structure, transformational structure, etc.”] can
be clarified by an analogy to a part of chemical theory concerned with the structurally
possible compounds.”
136 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
2.
Chomsky’s readings of Saussure
In his recent, perceptive, analysis of the work of both Leonard Bloomfield and
Noam Chomsky vis-à-vis Saussure, John Joseph has distinguished various phases
in the reception of the Cours in the evolution of Chomsky’s own theoretical
positions, namely, ‘Chomsky the Saussurean’ (cf. Chomsky 1963), ‘Chomsky the
Anti-Saussurean’ (1965–1979), and, in 1986, as a possible ‘Neo-Saussurean’
(Joseph 1990:67–73), with an interlude during 1962–1964 of ‘reaching further
back’ to other non-American sources of inspiration (69– 71). We shall see in
what follows the extent to which Joseph’s analysis may require modification. It
should be stated at the outset that there is hardly a passage of significance that has
escaped his attention, and that my own discussion has been aided significantly by
his circumspection. There is no doubt in my mind that Joseph is right in saying (p.
74) that “there is abundant evidence that Chomsky—like Bloomfield, Saussure
and probably every other linguist— has read [the work of others] according to his
agenda.” We need to ascertain whether or not these varying interpretations of
Saussure’s findings are simply ascribable to a regular development of Chomsky’s
theoretical commitments.
To every informed reader of Chomsky’s early linguistic work it is obvious that
his theoretical thinking developed out of the post-Bloomfieldian milieu in which
he was trained, in particular, the work of those scholars who dominated the
theoretical debate from the mid-1940s through the 1950s, namely, Zellig S.
Harris (1909–1992), his linguist teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, and
Charles F.Hockett (1916–2000) of Cornell University (cf. Koerner 1989:122–
129, for details). We already have noted that Chomsky’s writings before 1962 do
not contain no reference to Saussure whatsoever. Yet it appears that fairly early on
in his career Chomsky was not entirely satisfied with the manner in which
linguistics was practiced in America and that, by 1959, he disagreed with the
antimentalist stand of Bloomfield and his followers, probably as a result of other
influences dating from his student years at Penn (1946–1951), notably the work in
philosophy by Nelson Goodman (1906–1998), and, more importantly, that of
other scholars and scientists during his years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard (1951–
1955), in fields ranging from linguistics to logic, early computer work used for
8 An exception to this rule is Sydney M.Lamb (b.1929), the creator of Stratificational
Grammar who had studied Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena by the early 1960s at least, and his
associates during the 1970s.
9 I am allowing myself this side track to suggest that Hjelmslev must have had a much
more profound influence on Chomsky’s theorizing during the 1950s than he would ever
want to concede. There is a topic for at least a Master’s thesis here.
10 Re Hjelmslev, see note 7 (above). Charles F.Hockett admitted to me in private
conversation that he did not read Saussure before the early 1980s; hard to believe from the
author of
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 137
translation and other purposes, information theory, and neurology (cf. Koerner
1989a:137, for a tentative list of possible influences).11 The International Congress
of Linguists to be held in Cambridge, Mass., in 1962 was Chomsky’s first
opportunity to address an international audience directly, and given the hundreds
of European scholars who could be expected to attend (also because their travel was
generously funded by U.S. agencies), there must have been a special incentive to
read the works of others, in particular of those that the Europeans could be
assumed to be familiar with.
If this Congress was an external factor, there were theory-internal ones too.
Huybregts & van Riemsdijk, in their interviews with Chomsky (published as
Chomsky 1982), distinguished the following phases in the evolution of
Chomsky’s linguistic theory, each marked by a particular work: 1955 (LSLT),
1965 (Aspects), 1973 (Conditions), and 1981 (Government & Binding). In other words,
they distinguish four phases: 1955–1964, 1965–1972, 1973– 1980, and the period
since 1981,12 phases which they characterized “successive theories” each of them
attempting to find “ways of constraining the transformational power” which
LSLT had unleashed (Chomsky 1982:61). If we ignore the ‘pre-Saussurean’ phase,
we may note an overlap between their periodization and Joseph’s presented
earlier, although it should be pointed out that the Huybregts & van Riemsdijk
periodization was based on Chomsky’s syntactic theories rather than his general
linguistic views. For his part, Frederick Newmeyer, the most influential historian
of Chomskyan linguistics in North America, though almost exclusively interested
in syntax (but more recently also in the ideological side of Chomsky’s theories),
has recently presented the following periodization of Chomsky’s theoretical
stances (Newmeyer 1990:169):
PERIOD
NATURE
Early
transformational
grammar
Generative
semantics
Rule-oriented
Lexicalism
YEARS
PRINCIPAL
PREDOMINAN INSPIRATION
T
1957–1965
Chomsky (1957)
Principle-oriented 1965–1972
Rule-oriented
1972–1981
Katz & Postal
(1964); Chomsky
(1965)
Chomsky (1970)
a Course in Modern Linguistics (New York: Macmillan, 1958) and, we might add, of insights
similar to those found in the passage from Hjelmslev quoted above he expressed in a 1954
paper (cf. note 17 below).
11 I was referring in particular to the work of John von Neumann (1903–1957) and Alan
Mathison Turing (1912–1954) in mathematics and early computational theory and Karl
138 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
PERIOD
Principles
parameters
NATURE
YEARS
PRINCIPAL
PREDOMINAN INSPIRATION
T
& Principle-oriented 1981–
Chomsky (1981)
Newmeyer (p. 169) specifies that these are “four distinct periods in the
development of the theory of competence, each of which can be characterized in
terms of whether rules or principles have formed its principal research focus.” We
shall see in what follows whether this periodization is paralleled by the varying
interpretations Chomsky has offered of selected passages from the Cours. So if we
exclude the first phase of Chomsky’s work, i.e., the years before his first reading of
Saussure (1951–1961), we may identify three subsequent periods in Chomsky’s
theoretical development, each marked by a different attitude towards the Cours.
2.1
Phase II: 1962–1972: Frequent references to Saussure’s work
While I do not know on what grounds Joseph (1990:67) states that Chomsky’s
1963 article on “Formal Properties of Grammars” constitutes the earliest reference
to the Cours, it is obvious that it must be one of the first, since there is no
indication in Chomsky’s work that he had familiarized himself with Saussurean
tenets before 1960 (even though he must have heard them mentioned in
Jakobson’s lectures at Harvard, at least some of which he attended), and probably
only in 1961, when the 9th International Congress of Linguists was on the
horizon. It is interesting, however, to find the following passages in Chomsky’s
85-page contribution to a Handbook of Mathematical Psychology (and not a regular
linguistics outlet):
In a work that inaugurated the modern era of language study Ferdinand de
Saussure (1916) drew a fundamental distinction between what he called
langue and parole. The first is the grammatical and semantic system
Spence Lashley’s (1890–1958) work on neurology, but I was also thinking of Shannon &
Weaver’s study in communication theory of 1949, reviewed by none other than Charles
F. Hockett in great detail in Language 29.69–93 (1953).—I’m not arguing that Chomsky
necessarily read all their works at the time, but that he could not have escaped their
influence as they were part of the intellectual climate at Harvard during the 1950s. Many
years later Chomsky (1968:2–3) refers to Lashley and von Neumann, thought in different
contexts.
12 Needless to say that from about 1990 onwards we must speak of the beginning of the
fifth phase in Chomsky’s ever (r)evolving theoretical positions, to wit ‘Minimalism’.
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 139
represented in the brain of the speaker; the second is the actual acoustic
output from his vocal organs and input to his ears. (Chomsky 1963:327)
It seems that Saussure regarded langue as essentially a storehouse of signs
(e.g., words, fixed phrases) and their grammatical properties, including,
perhaps, certain “phrase types”. Consequently, he was unable to deal with
questions of sentence structure in any serious way and was forced to the
conclusion that formation of sentences is basically a matter of parole rather
than langue, that is, a matter of free and voluntary creation rather than
systematic rule. (Ibid., p.328)
Second, our conception of langue differs from Saussure’s in one
fundamental respect; namely, langue must be represented as a generative
process based on recursive rules. […] Once we reformulate the notion of
langue in these terms, we can hope to incorporate into its description a full
account of syntactic structure. (Ibid.)
I am not sure whether De Mauro (1972:400) was right when he characterizes
these passages as “une véritable profession de foi saussurienne [a true profession of
the Saussurean faith]”, especially when placed back into their context. At least there
is a recognition in Chomsky’s analysis of Saussure’s concept of ‘langue’ that it is
basically a useful concept, and one he could attach his own ideas to. But it is clear
from the start that Chomsky’s view of language is much more restrictive: syntax is
central to his considerations, and so he quickly dis-tances himself from Saussure
by stating that his “discussion departs from a strict Saussurian conception in two
ways” (p.328), namely, by side-stepping “the semantic side of langue” while at the
same time reformulating the notion of langue so that it becomes “a grammar that
generates sentences with structural descriptions; that is to say, […] the speaker’s
linguistic intuition, his knowledge of the language” (p.329), something which is
quite un-Saussurean indeed. As a result, Joseph’s (1990:68) interpretation that
“the agenda behind Chomsky (1963) is to highlight every possible correlation
between” the Cours and his own work appears to me something of an
oversimplificatation, if it meant to imply a careful analysis of Saussure’s intentions.
Not only does Chomsky misread Saussure and ignore most of the characteristics of
Saussure’s concept of ‘langue’ (as Joseph succinctly shows), there is little evidence
that he was deeply interested in Saussure’s linguistic theory. The compe-tence/
performance distinction which Chomsky was soon to advocate was at best an
impoverished reinterpretation of Saussure’s all-important langue/parole distinction
for the purpose of propping-up of a theory of syntax, not of language and its
functioning generally. However, Chomsky’s desire to align himself with Saussure
in some form remains interesting in the present context.
The other—and historically more important text—written about the same time
is Chomsky’s plenary paper at the International Congress of Linguists in late
August 1962.13 There the external situation is quite different: Chomsky has for
the first time in his career an opportunity to present his ideas in front of an
international audience (whereas in the 1963 paper he was addressing a much more
140 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
specialized readership), and so it is not surpriing that he should signal his
differences vis-à-vis the Cours somewhat more forcefully. For instance, he
presents his own ideas first and then draws parallels between his and Saussure’s or,
rather, refers to the authority of Saussure to lend support to his own position:
The generative grammar internalized by someone who has acquired a
language defines what in Saussurian terms we may call langue (with a
qualification to be specified below, on p.23). In performing as a speaker or
hearer, he puts his device to use. […] Clearly the description of intrinsic
competence provided by the grammar is not to be confused with an account
of actual performance, as de Saussure emphasized with such lucidity […].
It seems natural to suppose that the study of actual linguistic performance
can be seriously pursued only to the extent that we have a good
understanding of the generative grammars that are acquired by the learner
and put to use by the speaker or hearer. The classical Saussurian assumption
of the logical priority of the study of langue (and we may add, the
generative grammars that describe it) seems quite inescapable. (Chomsky
1964:10–11)14
On page 23 of the same text, Chomsky, after having interpreted Saussure’s
concept of ‘langue’ as “basically a store of signs with their grammatical
properties”—an interpretation he was to repeat on various subsequent occasions,
criticizes him for not having provided a “place in his scheme for ‘rule-governed
creativity’ of the kind involved in the everyday use of language”. So while
Saussure (and his intellectual predecessor, William Dwight Whitney) are chastized
for their allegedly static views of language, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept of
‘Form’ is presented as akin to his own view because of Humboldt’s appreciation of
“the ‘creative’ aspect of language” and the generative processes involved
(Chomsky 1964:23)—note that Chomsky uses the term ‘creative’ in single
quotation marks, here and elsewhere. This particular interpretation of
Humboldt’s ideas of language must have struck a positive chord in his audience,
since, as Joseph, comparing the 1962 preprint text with the 1964 publication, has
noted (1990:69–70), the discussion of Humboldt’s views were considerably
expanded in the various subsequent published versions of the paper (e.g.,
Chomsky 1964:17–25 passim). One may speculate about the reasons for what
Joseph takes as a reversal of Chomsky’s attitudes; one may well have been that it
was only after the Congress that he became more thoroughly acquainted with
Humboldt’s thought, largely as a result of John Viertel’s work on Humboldt for a
13 The similarity of the two texts when he talks about Saussure—on p.512 of the
Preprints of the Congress paper, for instance, Chomsky repeats his statement that his
view of language “differs from that of Saussure in two respects” almost verbatim (see
the quotation from his 1963 paper above), though the ‘only’ before ‘in two respects’
is gone—sugpports this assumption.
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 141
dissertation under his direction (cf. the acknowledgments in Chomsky 1964:7n.1;
1966:[viii], p.86n.36–37; 1979:135).15 Be that as it may, in the 1964 version of
his Congress paper, it is clear that Saussure— and with him the rest of 20thcentury linguistic theory—can easily be dispensed with:
Modern linguistics is much under the influence of Saussure’s conception of
langue as an inventory of elements (Saussure, 1916, 154, and elsewhere,
frequently) and his preoccupation with systems of elements rather than the
systems of rules which were the focus of attention in traditional grammar
and in the general linguistics of Humboldt. (Chomsky 1964:23)
Not only did Chomsky go back to Humboldt’s views antedating Saussure’s by
some eighty years (and refer approvingly to Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien along the
way [Chomsky 1964:8]), he went farther back into European linguistic history, for
example the 17th-century ‘Cartesian’ Geraud de Cordemoy’s Discours physique de
la parole (Paris, 1667). From that time onwards, we find, in Chomsky’s writings
between 1964 and 1972, more frequent and more detailed references to French
grammarians whom he associates, perhaps not always rightly, with the philosophy
of Descartes as laid down in his Discours de la méthode of 1637 and other works.16
As regards our present topic, namely, Chomsky’s attitude toward Saussure, we
find him exploiting on various subsequent occasions notions he found in the
Cours and which may help to bring out his particular theoretical argument, but it
seems to me that Humboldt and, by 1965, the authors of the Grammaire générale et
raisonnée, first published in 1660, and their 18th-century followers, carry the day.
Thus, in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, we find more references to Humboldt and
the 17th-century grammarians (see Chomsky 1965: v, 4, 8, 9, 51, 198–199, 205,
209 [for explicit references to Humboldt] and pp. 6, 117–118, 137, 199, 221 [for
references to Lancelot & Arnauld]) than to Saussure (cf. pp. 4, 8, 47). Besides, in
the two more important passages, Saussure loses out in comparison with
Humboldt, notably in the following passage (p.4):
14 I am referring to the 1964 monograph as it is the most easily accessible and most widely
read of the altogether 4 different versions of the 1962 Congress paper (see Koerner &
Tajima [1986:14–15, 18–19], for details)
15 in November 1976, during the 7th annual meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic
Society (NELS) held at M.I.T., John Viertel told me that he had been employed by Chomsky
as a translator of Humboldt’s work into English (Chomsky [1979:135] himself presents the
story somewhat differently). Viertel, however, never completed his thesis (announced as
‘forthcoming’ in Chomsky [1964:21]), but published a couple of papers dealing with the
earlier history of German linguistics during the 1960s. Chomsky, for his part, admitted freely
to have had a considerable struggle with reading Humboldt in the original (1982:39), a
difficulty even native speakers of German can sympathize with.
142 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
The distinction [between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’] I am noting
here is related the the langue-parole distinction of Saussure; but it is necessary
to reject his concept of langue as merely a systematic inventory of items and
to return rather to the Humboldtian conception of underlying competence
as a system of generative processes. For discussion, see Chomsky (1964).
Indeed, Chomsky’s characterization of Saussure’s concept of langue in this manner
(i.e., ‘as a storehouse of words’ and the like) is repeated almost every time it is
mentioned. It seems to have become the leitmotif of his Methodenklage
(“methodological complaint”) directed against the Genevan linguist. No attempt
is made to present any of the other, equally important, definitions that Saussure
has given to this concept central to his entire theory, such as ‘langue’ as a social,
supra-individual entity shared by all speakers of the language, its mental reality,
and as consisting of a system and of rules (cf. Cours, p.43).
Typical of Chomsky’s treatment of Saussure are the few passing references
made when Chomsky expanded his historical argument in Cartesian Linguistics of
1966. On pages 12 and 55, Saussure is mentioned together with Jespersen and
Hermann Paul or Bloomfield in conjunction with ‘analogy’ as the operative
principle of language innovation. (On p.59, there’s a passing reference to ‘langue’
without mention of Saussure.) The situation is similar in Chomsky’s 1968 essay
Language and Mind (revised ed., 1972), where Saussure is recognized as “[t]he great
Swiss linguist […] who […] laid the groundwork for modern structural
linguistics” (p.17=1972:19), only to be criticized, together with Whitney, for his
“impoverished and thoroughly inadequate conception of language” (p.18=1972:
20) a page later. A passing reference to “Saussure’s pioneering work” is also found
in his Russell Lectures (Chomsky 1971:25).
2.2
Phase III: 1973–1983: Rare references to Saussure
During the period characterized by Newmeyer as the ‘rule-oriented’ lexicalism
phase in the evolution of Chomsky’s theory, it seems that he was preoccupied
with defending particulars internal to his theory. It was also the period during
which Chomsky’s European audience had dropped off considerably. (In Germany,
which may be taken as representative of European linguistics of the time,
transformational-generative grammar enjoyed its largest following in the years
between 1966 and 1974, the first and the ninth annual Linguistisches Kolloquium.)
These internal and external factors may help explain why we hardly find a
reference to Saussure in Chomsky’s writings of the period. Typically, such
16 Since this subject is outside our present concern, I simply refer to the many critical
reviews of Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics listed in Koeraer & Tajima (1986:24–27).
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 143
references to the Cours are more likely to be prompted by others, such as by
Mitsou Ronat in her interviews with Chomsky (cf. Chomsky 1979: 50–51, 97–
98 [where only the interviewer speaks of Saussure’s langue explicitly]). In those
held with Huybregts & van Riemsdijk (Chomsky 1982), I found not a single
reference to Saussure (or Humboldt, for that matter). The last-mentioned
interviewers, it should be added, while Europeans, represent a new generation of
linguists who followed Chomsky’s Pisa Lectures of 1979, which in their published
form of 1981—Lectures on Government and Binding—sparked considerable debate
and produced a new framework for doing syntax. This new generation of
linguists is largely oblivious to long-standing traditions, but also to earlier, now
‘classic’ statements of theory by Chomsky himself. As they indicate in their
preface to Chomsky (1982:2), Huybregts & van Riemsdijk endorse Newmeyer’s
(1980) history of American linguistics fully, which entails that linguistics before
Chomsky was not yet a science. Hence no need to care about ‘pre-scientific’
linguists, one may conclude. So rather than find Chomsky criticizing Saussure,
which, as we have seen usually means attacking a particular remark found in the
Cours, we find Saussure simply ignored.
3.3
Phase IV: 1984–: Renewed interest in Saussure?
By the Orwellian year 1984, Chomsky is past the age of 55, and he appears—if
we ignore his engagement in debates focussed largely on U.S. foreign policy
attitudes and decisions, which at least since the mid-1970s has outstripped his
linguistic output (cf. the relevant sections in Koerner & Tajima 1986)—to have
become more conscious of his own place within linguistics. And more
philosophical too, if we note that in what appears to have been his attempt at a
synthesis of his linguistic thinking, his 300-page book Knowledge of Language
(1986), the bulk is taken up by chapter 3 entitled “Facing Plato’s problem” (51–
220!), which he describes in the Preface (p.xxvii) as his struggle with an attempt “to
explain how we know so much, given that the evidence available to us is so
sparse”. Of course, Chomsky is referring to ‘knowledge’ in his idiosyncratic way
of interpreting the human capacity for language, which he identifies as the focus
of inquiry in the introductory chapter. Chapter 2, “Concepts of language”, is of
regular length (15–50), and it seems that the author is concerned here with
establishing his place within post-Saussurean linguistics. Considering the 70 years
that have passed since the first publication of the Cours in 1916, Chomsky offers
the following assessment, after having drawn the distinction between ‘I
[nternalized]-language’ (the grammar in the mind of an individual speaker) and ‘E
[xternalized] language’ (the ‘commonsense’ acceptance of the term ‘language’):
Modern linguistics commonly avoided these questions by considering an
idealized ‘speech community’ that is internally consistent in its linguistic
practice.[…]. No attempt is made to capture or formulate any concept with
144 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
the sociopolitical or normative-teleological aspects of informal usage of the
term ‘language’. The same is true of approaches that understand language to
be a social product in accordance with the Saussurean concept of ‘langue’.
(Chomsky 1986:16)
Clearly, Chomsky is not concerned with what he calls ‘E[xternalized] language’,
the notion of a language like ‘English’, which Chomsky terms a “mere artifact”
(p.26), having “no corresponding real-world object’” and thus existing “at a
higher order of abstraction” than I[nternalized]-language (p.27), and an “artificial
construct” (pp. 26, 27, 29, 31). While it is true that Saussure does not appear to
have established a thoroughgoing terminological distinction between the
metalinguistic concept of ‘langue’ and ‘langue’ as in ‘langue française’ , it is clear
that he was aware of the two levels of abstraction, though in an inverse sense:
‘langue’ as the focus of linguistic analysis was the more abstract of the two.
However, as Joseph (1990:63) notes, “the last sentence is ambiguous: it is not
immediately apparent whether ‘The same is true…’ refers just to the preceding
sentence (‘No attempt is made to capture or formulate any concept…’) or to the
whole paragraph, including the positing of an idealized speech community.”
Joseph opts for the second interpretation, “if the passage is to be deemed
consistent with a later reference to ‘the familiar SaussureanBloomfieldian
idealization of a homogeneous speech community’ (ibid.: 147).” But this
‘idealization’, identified by Newmeyer (1980:250, and elsewhere) as the hallmark
of Chomskyan linguistic theory, seems to me what Chomsky himself argued for
in Aspects for instance (see Chomsky 1965:4). Indeed, Chomsky’s criticism of
‘modern linguistics’ for its failure to distinguish between E-language and Ilanguage, which in his view resulted in the study of the mere epiphenomena of Elanguage, shows him as pre-occupied, as twenty years earlier, with syntax (which,
by the way, Saussure subsumed under his concept of ‘syntagmatique’):
Structural and descriptive linguistics, behavioral psychology, and other
contemporary approaches tended to view a language as a collection of
actions, of utterances, or linguistic forms (words, sentences) paired with
meanings, or as a system of linguistic forms or events. In Saussurean
structuralism, a language (langue) was taken to be a system of sounds and an
associated system of concepts; the notion of sentence was left in a kind of
limbo, perhaps to be accommodated within the study of language use.
(Chomsky 1986:19)
What appears at first sight to be a strong criticism of Saussure (in line with what
Chomsky never seems to have tired of repeating during the 1960s), is modified
later in the same chapter when he notes (p.31):
It should be noted that familiar characterizations of ‘language’ as a code or a
game point correctly toward I-language, not the artificial construct E-
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 145
language. A code is not a set of representations but rather a specific system
of rules that assigns coded representations to message-representations. Two
codes may be different, although extensionally identical in the messagecode pairings that they provide. Similarly, a game is not a set of moves but
rather the rule system that underlies them. The Saussurean concept of
langue, although far too narrow in conception, might be interpreted as
appropriate in this respect.
In other words, it seems that Chomsky’s position vis-à-vis Saussure’s theory of
language has mellowed. At the same time, as one might have guessed from the
title of his 1986 book, Chomsky has selected another scholar for special attention,
namely, Saussure’s contemporary Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), in whose
Philosophy of Grammar of 1924 Chomsky (1979:156) located him as “one of the
first to have stressed […] the ‘creative’ aspect of language”, having gone “a good
deal further than the structuralists, including Saussure”. In 1922, Jespersen had
published a popular book with the title Language: Its nature, development and origin;
this is echoed by Knowledge of Language: Its nature, origin, and use (Chomsky 1986).
Apparently, Chomsky is not aware of the fact that Jespersen had very little to
say about Saussure’s general linguistic theory when reviewing the Cours in in
1916, and that he still insisted six years later: “The distinctive feature of the
science of language as conceived nowadays is its historical character” (Jespersen
1922:7). But then Chomsky was thinking of Jespersen, the syntactician and
author of The Philosophy of Grammar, when he argues that Jespersen had a ‘notion
of structure’ in the mind of the speaker “which is definite enough to guide him in
framing sentences of his own”, in particular, “‘free expressions’ that may be new
to the speaker and to others” (Chomsky 1986:21–22).17 Some ten years earlier,
Jespersen was not (yet) seen in as positive a light:
[…] I think it is fair to say that for the most part he [i.e., Jespersen]
remained within the framework of traditional grammar which, […], offers
examples and descriptions without giving the explicit principles that account
for them. He did not formulate the problem of designing an explicit
linguistic theory. But his work remains a mine of perceptive and useful
observations. (Chomsky 1979:157)
In his 1986 book Saussurean ‘langue’ is “far too narrow” because it does not
explicitly provide for the possibility of such creativity, nor indeed for the sentence
(p.19). In other words, “Saussurean structuralism had placed Jesper-sen’s
observation about ‘free expressions’ outside of the scope of the study of language
structure, of Saussure’s langue”, he argues (p.32). So while Chomsky at least now
credits Saussure with the characterization of langue as an underlying system rather
than as a set (‘storehouse’) of elements as he did during the 1960s, he criticizes
him for taking langue to be a social product, necessitating a fictitious idealized
speech community and preventing it from capturing ‘the sociopolitical and
146 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
normative-teleological aspects’ of E-language, whatever Chomsky means by this
since we nowhere find him attempting anything like this himself. No effort is
made, either, to grasp the intent of Saussure’s de-tailed discussion of syntagmatics
(Cours, 172–174, 176–177, and elsewhere), and his reasons for regarding the
sentence as a ‘fait de parole’.
3.
Concluding remarks
The present account is perhaps more of a progress-report of on-going research
than the final word on the subject (cf. also note 11), although if one may hazard a
guess, there won’t be many more references to Saussure found in Chomsky’s
writings, past (cf. Koerner & Tajima 1986:3–87), present (Chomsky 2000), and
future. From his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics onwards, those references are typically
found in works addressed to a wider audience (e.g., Chomsky 1979, 1986), and
there have not been many such publications in recent years.
However, the final result seems predictable, namely, that Chomsky’s attitude
toward Saussure and certain of his ideas—note that we never see an attempt on
Chomsky’s part to analyze Saussure’s theory of language in general but to pick
out more or less isolated remarks that suit his purposes—shifts with the context,
e.g., whether a serious scholarly argument is intended or whether an audience is
to be persuaded of the superiority of his views, and tends to change or, rather,
fluctuate with the evolution of his theories. At the same time, we should
understand that the maturing—and success—of Chomsky’s views and his
achievement not only of prominence but indeed world-wide preeminence in the
linguistic profession may account for a more generous attitude toward Saussure. But
as Joseph’s analysis (1990:63–65) suggests, his interpretation of and comments on
selected aspects of Saussure’s theory have remained essentially what they had been
more than 20 years earlier, i.e., out-of-context citations for critical, if not
academic-political, purposes —legitimization of Chomsky’s thought, either in a
positive or a negative manner. If a summary of his changing attitudes to Saussure
17 Keen observers of Chomsky’s technique of covering up his true sources of theoretical
insight by referring to other, in fact quite unlikely candidates, will recall that Charles F.
Hockett for instance, in his influential paper “Two Models of Grammatical Description”,
but also in various earlier papers, all familiar to Chomsky (cf. Koerner 1989a:126–129, for
detailed discussion), observed that “A model [proposed by the linguist] must be
PRODUCTIVE, when applied to a given language, the results must make possible the
creation of an indefinite number of valid new utterances” and that with its aid he “must be able to
generate any number of utterances in the language, above and beyond those observed in advance
by the analyst—new utterances most, if not all, of which will pass the test of casual
acceptance by a native speaker” (Hockett 1954:232–233; italics added: EFKK).
NOAM CHOMSKY’S READINGS OF SAUSSSURE AFTER 1961 147
could be made, we may distinguish the following periods in Chomsky’s scientific
curriculum vitae:
I. 1951–61: non-Saussurean;
III. 1973–83: non-Saussurean;
II. 1962–72: mildly Saussurean;
IV. 1984–: mildly Saussurean.18
No doubt, such a depiction of Chomsky’s changing attitude toward Saussure is
overly schematic, and may seem to focus too much on publication dates of certain
works to be exact. But the general impression will prevail, namely, that his
references to Saussure, whenever they occur, show up in phases of pendulum
swings between Chomsky’s desire to assume the role of a generalist looking at the
‘big picture’ of linguistic thought, possibly even aspiring to be seen as a
philosopher of language, and that of a technician of the craft capable to enter into
any debate about the bricks and mortar of his never complete edifice. Indeed, if
his recent statements is any guide, he appears19 ready to tear down much of this
lofty construction himself before it crumbles under its own weight. Such an
assessment may, however, be quite mistaken: First the sheer number of people
whose livelihood depends on the idea or at least appearance of continuity is so
large that this ‘paradigm’ will not go away easily; second, Chomsky himself has,
some public pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding,20 consistently
avoided admitting to past errors by continuing the use of previously introduced
terminology while assigning new meanings to them. For instance, ‘deep structure’
was seemingly discarded decades ago in response to proposals made by generative
semanticists (cf. Chapter 6), whereas ‘D[eep]-structure’ continues to serve in
rather similar arguments where semantic niceties appear to have to be accounted
for.
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Hjelmslev, Louis. 1973[1947]. “The Basic Structure of Language”. Essais Linguistiques II by
L.Hjelmslev, ed. by Niels Ege, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen et al., 119–153. Copenhagen:
Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag.
Hockett, Charles F. 1954. “Two Models of Grammatical Description”. Word 10. 210–231.
(Repr. in Joos 1957.386–399.)
Jespersen, Otto. 1916. Review of Saussure (1916). Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 4.37–
41. (French transl, published in Linguistica: Selected papers in English, French and German
by O.Jespersen, 109–115. Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaard, 1933.)
Jespersen, Otto. 1922. Language: Its nature, development and origin. London: Allen & Unwin.
(Repr., New York: W.W.Norton, 1964.)
Jespersen, Otto. 1924. The Philosophy of Grammar. London: Allen & Unwin; New York:
H.Holt & Co. (Repr., with an Introduction by James D. McCawley, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984.)
Joos, Martin, ed. 1957. Readings in Linguistics [I]: The development of descriptive linguistics in
America since 1925 [later changed to:…1925–56]. Washington, D.C.: American
Council of Learned Societies. (4th ed., Chicago & London: University of Chicago
Press, 1966.)
Joos, Martin. 1961. “Linguistic Prospects in the United States”. Trends in European and
American Linguistics 1930–1960. Edited on the occassion of the of the Ninth International
Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 27 August—1 September 1962, for the
Permanent International Commitee of Linguists by Christine Mohrmann, Alf Sommefelt &
Joshua Whatmough, 11– 20. Utrecht & Antwerp: Spectrum.
Joos, Martin. 1986[1976]. Notes on the Development of the Linguistic Society of America, 1924–
1950. Ithaca, N.Y.: Linguistica.
Joseph, John E. 1989. “Bloomfield’s Saussureanism”. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 43.43–
53.
Joseph, John E. 1990. “Ideologizing Saussure: Bloomfield’s and Chomsky’s readings of the
Cours de linguistique générale”. Ideologies of Language ed. by J.E.Joseph & Talbot
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Katz, Jerrold J. & Paul M.Postal. 1964. An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
150 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Koerner, E.F.K. 1971a. “A Note on Transformational-Generative Grammar and the
Saussurean Dichotomy of Synchrony versus Diachrony”. Linguistische Berichte No.13.
25–32.
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critical remarks”. Language & Communication 3.147–169.
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Ferdinand de Saussure 43.55–63. (Also in Practicing Linguistic Historiography, 435–443.
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1951–1986. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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1957.1–18.)
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Journal of Linguistics 11.83–93.
CHAPTER 8
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’
AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY
1.
Opening the question
In a searching review article, significantly entitled “The Structure of Linguistic
Revolutions”, John E.Joseph (1995) critically analyzes recent scholarship in 20thcentury historiography concerning American linguistics, in particular Harris (1993)
and Murray (1994). Joseph suggests, furthermore—undoubtedly speaking against
conservative historians of linguistics such as myself (e.g., Koerner 1989; cf. Joseph
1991) — that the concept of ‘revolution’ may not only have to be seen as central
to linguistic history-writing but would also have to be taken as something which
occurs much more frequently in the evolution of linguistic science than I would
have assumed, though perhaps on a much more modest scale. As a result, there
may be a variety of small-scale revolutions to be accounted for, ‘counterrevolutions’ against previous revolutions, even ‘serial revolutions’, as witnessed in
Chomsky’s work over the past forty or more years. Indeed, Joseph suggests that,
in the understanding of the nature of linguistic revolutions, at least, there may
well be four distinct stages in our assessment of such changes, namely, the
Popperian type, the Kuhnian type, and the two exhibited to some degree in the
two books he was reviewing, i.e., Murray (‘sociology of science’) and Harris
(‘rhetoric of science’).
In this chapter, I shall say comparatively little about the concept of ‘revolution’
in terms of the various philosophies of science (Kuhnian, Popperian, etc.). Here, I
shall consider, however, John Joseph’s position that “[m]ost revolutions are
essentially rhetorical, with the substantive change being one of personnel” (Joseph
1995:384n.5), while at the same time not ignoring Stephen Murray’s ‘three
factors’ defining what he believes to be all coherent scientific groups: good ideas,
intellectual leadership, and organizational leadership (cf. Murray 1994:22–23).
However, I will first offer some of my own thoughts on the issue of ‘revolutions’
in general and in linguistics in particular (Section 2) and also refer to a few points
in 19th and 20th century history of linguistics for illustration (Section 3). The
question of what kind(s) of ‘revolution’ Noam Chomsky’s work has produced
appears to be a complex one (see Section 4),
152 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
© John Benjamins Publ. Co., Amsterdam *
and it might be safer to let the reader reach his own conclusions, rather than
trying to impose a particular interpretation.
* This photograph was first published in Konrad Koerner & Matsuji Tajima (comps.),
Noam Chomsky: A personal bibliography, 1951–1986. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1986), p.vi.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 153
2.
Remarks on the term ‘revolution’ generally and specifically
As is to be expected, there are a variety of factors that would determine whether a
particular ‘revolution’ in linguistic theory and practice is recognized and widely
accepted. More often than not, certain works are regarded as turning-points post
rem (e.g., Bopp 1816; Chomsky 1957) where one is hard pressed to discover the
locus of such a claim, whether by analyzing the text itself or its original reception.
Extra-linguistic factors, both social and political, would have to be taken into
account to explain the success or failure of important proposals and indeed
advances made by an author. As the record shows, rhetorical, at times even polemic,
aspects have played a not insignificant role in the acceptance or rejection of a
particular ‘paradigm’, and this not only in ‘modern linguistics’.
In this chapter, I shall try to address the question of ‘revolution’ in linguistics;
not so much from the point of view of the philosophy of science or any other
particular framework—I presume that I should heed John Joseph’s (1991) advice
to follow ‘common usage’—but more from the point of view of what has actually
happened in linguistics over the past two hundred years. I should add that here I
confine myself to the main currents in 19th and 20th century linguistics, namely,
comparative-historical grammar and structuralism, respectively, for must it be
remembered that linguistics is in no way exhausted by these ‘mainstream’ activities:
a lot of linguistic work continues to be done outside these perhaps more general
concerns, whether it deals with lexicographic, phonetic, didactic, dialectological,
or any other work, even though within those activities, too, fairly sudden changes
of method, important advances and other events may occur that their
practitioners may liken to revolutions within their particular domain.
3.
Illustrations of continuities, discontinuities, and possible
revolutions
When compared with the case of the breakthrough or breakthroughs associated
with Noam Chomsky’s name, earlier instances appear to have been much less
complex, but this may be due to our ignorance of many of the circumstances that
would explain to us the successes or failures of certain publications in earlier periods
of linguistics. They certainly involved changes in research methodology,
generational differences, and polemical exchanges, too (cf. Koerner 1999, for
details).
3.1
Initial methodological considerations
Writing in 1980, István Báton suggested that it was still too early to evaluate
Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics in a historical perspective, largely because
154 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
‘the waves of his revolution (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) have not yet come to
a standstill’ (Bátori 1982:103). A similar sentiment has been expressed more
recently by Herbert Penzel (1987:418). However, in light of the fact that the
history of the school associated with Chomsky’s name is currently being written
in a less than objective manner, it appears desirable to raise the question as to the
proper method of treating the subject now, before certain misconceptions and,
indeed, myths are cemented as facts. I am thinking of such erroneous claims as the
one that Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures was ‘turned down by numerous established
publishers’ (as found for instance in the “Geleitwort der Herausgeber” to No.95
of Linguistische Berichte of February 1985, p.1),1 or that “the publication of
Syntactic Structures radically changed the goals, the methodology, and the research
questions of the field” (Fromkin 1991:78).
Ideally, the historian should be at a certain distance from his subject, in the
sense that he should have no personal stake in the outcome of his research but be
guided by a desire to set the record straight.2 Of course this is not the only
prerequisite for a historian, but it seems that one of the main prerequisites for any
historical work is not to approach a subject with preconceived ideas, trying to
establish a particular point which may be of importance to his immediate
interests. In a word, we may say that a historiographer should remain as impartial
as he possibly can. Neither distance from the subject matter nor impartiality,
however, need necessarily entail the exclusion of what Kuhn (1977: 149),
invoking Bertrand Russell, called ‘hypothetical sympathy’.
Certainly, I am not advocating a narrow positivistic approach interested in little
else than what Comte called ‘les petites choses vraies’. Indeed, I am not at all in
favour of a one-sided preoccupation with mere ‘facts’, since, as was clear long ago
even to empiricist theorists of linguistics such as Hermann Paul (1880:6), we
hardly ever have to do with facts without a certain amount of— what he termed
— ‘speculation’. The historiographer’s ideal, as I see it, may be called ‘broad
positivism’, an approach to the subject which is committed to analyse, describe,
and present historical events in line with Leopold von Ranke’s (1795–1886)
program first announced in his Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker
of 1824—several years before the appearance of August Comte’s (1798–1857) 6volume Cours de philosophie positive (Paris, 1830–1842). That this ideal is hardly
ever reached may be evident to the reader of the present account as in most other
instances, including Ranke’s own post-1824 work. Still, I would like to refer to
Ranke’s frequently-quoted affirmation—usually associated with his much later
voluminous work— namely, that history is neither supposed to judge the past nor
instruct the present on how to act for the benefit of the future, but to depict how
things really happened.3 To some this suggestion may appear excessively
conservative, but those who are interested in the history of linguistics in the 20th
century cannot escape the conclusion that in the wake of partisan accounts
published in recent years a return to basic historiographic principles appears to be
called for.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 155
3.2
Some additional prerequisites
I have discussed, on various other occasions, the prerequisites for linguistic
historiography (e.g., Koerner 1976[1972], 1982) and do not intend to repeat them
here at length. It needs hardly be emphasized that familiarity with the particular
linguistic theories at issue is of prime importance: a historian of linguistics should
have formal training in linguistics. Less obvious perhaps but of equal importance
is general knowledge of the various extra-linguistic factors, intellectual,
sociological and possibly even political, which may have had an impact on the
course of events in a given field of scientific inquiry at particular periods of its
development. Without this knowledge of the extra-linguistic ‘context of situation’
it would be difficult to understand changes of emphasis in linguistic theory or
‘revolutions’ within the discipline (for instance the increased importance attached
to syntax, over and above morphology and phon ology in the early 1960s). It is
important that we distinguish between intralinguistic developments (i.e., those
specific to the particular discipline that tend to be picked up where the preceding
generation of researchers left off, for example, often coupled with the desire to
overcome the enduring problem of dealing with semantics in an adequate manner
(cf. Chapters 5 and 6, for details), and various extra-linguistic factors. The latter
have nothing to do with the operation of the craft, its methodology, its specific
data, or its findings per se; however, they may have, and in many instances do
have, a considerable impact on the wide-spread acceptance of a particular
1 It appears that Chomsky himself may have had something to do with this myth. For
instance, in conversation with Herman Parret, he asserted that “Syntactic Structures was not
written for publication. It is basically a set of lecture notes for an undergradute course at
M.I.T.” (Chomsky 1974:27). This is hard to believe when looking at the publication itself.
More importantly, accounts concerning the publication of Syntactic Structures suggest that
the typescript was handed by Morris Halle for exactly that purpose to C.H.van
Schooneveld (b.1921), the editor of the Mouton series. It was indeed carefully prepared
for publication (cf. Murray 1999, Noordegraaf 2001).
2 It seems clear from this point of view that accounts such as in Hymes (1972, 1974) may
be vulnerable to criticism. However, if the historian states his commitments clearly,
allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions, we are still already much better served than
in the partisan accounts that present themselves as objective history.
3 Since this statement is usually quoted out of context and without proper reference to its
original source, I am supplying both in the following: ‘History has been assumed to serve
the task of passing judgment on the past and to teaching one’s contemporaries for the
benefit of the future: the present essay does not pretend to serve such lofty goals: it simply
wants to show what really happened’ [“Man hat der Historie das Amt, die Vergangenheit
zu richten, die Mitwelt zum Nutzen zukünftiger Jahre zu belehren, bey gemessen: so hoher
Aemter unterwindet sich gegenwärtiger Versuch nicht: er will bloß sagen wie es eigentlich
gewesen.]” See Leopold Ranke, “Vorrede”, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen
Völker von 1494 bis 1535 (Leipzig & Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1824), i–xi, on pp.v–vi;
emphasis mine: EFKK).
156 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
framework or philosophy of science as well as on the foci of attention in research,
and this frequently with social ramifications of some consequence.
3.3
Further methodological considerations
So far, I have referred to general attitudes on the part of the historiographer (i.e.,
that he should be capable of treating his subject matter with a certain detachment)
and the fundamental distinction between what may be called the intra-disciplinary
requirements of and the extra-disciplinary influences on the field. For anyone
interested in undertaking historical research these generalities can only suffice as
the most rudimentary guidelines. The historiographer must know how to
ascertain the relevant data, material which cannot simply be obtained by
consulting the textbooks of a given period or school of thought. No doubt these
texts have their value too; they usually present the accepted doctrine in a
pragmatic fashion. (For instance, the number of editions of any such book may
give an indication as to its popularity, and the extent to which it is receiving the
attention of linguistic practitioners.) However, textbooks constitute secondary
sources only, for they tend to dilute the theoretical issues in order to make them
accessible to a wide audience.
In an early state-of-the-art account of the history of linguistics, Yakov Malkiel
provided a list of what he regarded as source material for the historian of linguistic
science. The list includes autobiographies, memoirs, prefaces, correspondence,
Festschriften, book reviews, summations at symposia, institutional records, and
other material (Malkiel 1969:641–643). Hymes & Fought (1981:25) added
newspaper articles to the list. In addition to the material mentioned, it has
recently become more widely accepted that unpublished writings and especially
correspondence between scholars conducted without the public in mind, may
well constitute important documentary evidence for certain events. Thus Stephen
Murray (1980) has been able to establish—something which many of us had
suspected but were unable to prove beyond doubt— that Bernard Bloch, editor of
the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language, from 1941 until his
death in 1965, played an important, if not decisive, role in the promotion of
Noam Chomsky and his linguistic theories during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Bloch’s role was certainly much more crucial than chroniclers of the ‘Chomskyan
paradigm’ (e.g., Newmeyer 1980:47– 48) are willing to concede.4 Perhaps such
oversight occurrs simply because the Bernard Bloch papers deposited at the
Sterling Library of Yale University were not consulted. However, judging from
more recent publications (Newmeyer 1986a, b), the impression made by his 1980
book, namely, that Newmeyer does not seem interested in presenting anything
close to objective history, is confirmed (cf. Murray 1989).
One other source, where contemporary linguistic historiography is concerned,
has so far remained largely untapped. I am referring to direct interviews with
persons who participated in the events and, more generally, to what is nowadays
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 157
termed oral history (cf. Davis & O’Cain 1980, for the first such undertaking in
North-American linguistics which has become available in print). Murray (1980,
1994), a sociologist, made extensive use of interviews as well as correspondence
with both Chomsky and his associates and with scholars not following or
opposing transformationalist theories, whereas Newmeyer (1980; 21986) appears
to have only communicated with adherents and staunch supporters of one side.5
Newmeyer (1980:xii), however, maintains that his own participation in the
events of the 1960s and early 1970s has given him “a real advantage” and that it
has permitted him “an inside view of the field that would be denied to the more
displaced historian.” It remains to be seen whether a critical reading of his book
bears out this claim.
4.
The ‘Chomsky an Revolution’ in Linguistics
It has become common-place to talk about a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in the
study of language, with the result that few, if any, would pause to think about what
the term ‘revolution’ implies or is taken to imply. It is interesting to note that it is
non-linguists in particular (e.g., Sklar 1968; Searle 1972)6 who referred to
‘Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics’. Interestingly, no such term can be found, for
example, in Bierwisch (1971), the noted linguist and very early and steadfast
proponent of transformational-generative grammar. This appears all the more
surprising when we note that Malkiel (1969:539) spoke of Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1962) as a ‘sensationally successful book’. Yet the absence of
the term in accounts of transformational theory by Chomsky’s followers during
the 1960s and 1970s does not imply their rejection of the use of the Kuhnian
morphology of scientific revolutions. Bach (1965:123), interestingly enough,
refers to ‘revolution’ without mentioning Kuhn, whose name is also
conspicuously absent from Newmeyer’s (1980) book (but compare the second
edition of 1986, pp.38–39, where explicit references to Kuhn are made). Others,
usually European-trained linguists, though with direct exposure to
transformational grammar (e.g., Meisel 1973; Anttila 1975; Weydt 1976), cast
doubt on the actual occurrence of a ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in the study of
language in the regular sense of the term.
4 Still in 1998, Julia S.Falk, herself a generativist de la première heure, reviewing Murray
(1994), found that “there is no evidence that he [Bloch] did anything more than any
reasonable and responsible editor and teacher might do” (Falk 1998:446).
5 McCawley (1981:911), who is otherwise quite critical of Newmeyer’s account, gives the
misleading impression that Newmeyer did indeed make much use of interviews.
6 A fairly early statement about a “transformationalist revolution in Linguistics” came,
typically, from participants in the ‘revolution’ (see Katz & Bever 1976[1974]:11).
158 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
4.1
A few remarks on the concept of ‘revolution’
Our first association with the term ‘revolution’ is political in nature; we think of
governments being overthrown in a coup d’état and one system of government
being replaced by another. Herbert Izzo (1976:51) has given the following
characterization of what he refers to as ‘successful social revolutions’:
[They] rewrite history for their own justification […]. The Soviet example,
though not the first, is the most familiar and one of the most thorough.
First the old order must be condemned en bloc; everything about it must be
shown to have been bad to justify its overthrow and prevent its return.
Then any changes of direction of the new order must be consigned to
oblivion. […] Finally, it becomes desirable to show that the new order is in
reality not so much new as a return to the correct, traditional ways, from
which only the immediately preceding regime had been a deviation and a
usurpation. Along the way there may have been a return to many features of
that same preceding regime. These will not, however, be represented as
regressions but as new developments.
For those who have observed the history of transformational-generative linguistics
in North America unfolding during the mid 1960s and early 1970s, Izzo’s
description of a ‘social revolution’ appears to apply quite well to what actually
happened. (For some examples of propaganda emanating from the centres of this
movement, see below.)
4.1.1 Fashion? Hymes (1974:48–49) and others (e.g., Murray 1980) have
suggested that the so-called ‘Chomskyan revolution in linguistics’ may be largely
due to social factors which have little to do with the theory and its inherent
value, its ‘explanatory adequacy’, the ‘power’ of its ‘generative’ device, etc.
Maher (1982:3ff.) goes so far as to associate the success story of transformationalgenerative linguistics (henceforth: TGG) with fashion, referring to the following
statement made by Bertrand Russell—in his 1959 preface to Ernest Gellner’s
criticism of the Wittgensteinians at Oxford—according to which “the power of
fashion is great, and soon the most cogent arguments fail to convince if they are
not in line with the trend of current opinion” (Gellner 1959:13). To support his
claim Maher (1982:4) refers to observations made more than fifty years earlier by
the American sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) who noted at the
beginning of the last century:
Fashion is by no means trivial. It is the form of the dominance of the group
over the individual, and it is quite often as harmful as beneficial. There is no
arguing with fashion. […] The authority of fashion is imperative as to
everything which it touches. The sanctions are ridicule and powerlessness.
The dissenter hurts himself… (Sumner 1906:194).
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 159
While a consideration of the effects of fashion in linguistics (as in any other
human affair) is not to be ignored, I believe that this aspect may cloud some of
the issues rather than elucidate them. It is certainly difficult to believe that it was
the particular theoretical proposals of TGG exclusively which appealed to the
young students of language who entered university during the sixties and early
seventies. Newmeyer (1980:52ff.) presents statistics, of which, in particular, the
table showing the growth of the membership in the Linguistic Society of America
(LSA) indicates the tremendous academic population explosion of the period:
1950:829 members; 1960:1,768 members, and 1970: 4,383 members, with the
peak having been reached in 1971 (4,723 members). For Newmeyer, this growth
reflects the appeal and strength of the ‘Chomskyan paradigm’; however, when
this development levels off and shows a decline, he explains this as the result of
the bleak employment picture in linguistics (Newmeyer 1980:53). Here one is
constrained to ask ‘Why not a reflection of a widespread disenchantment with
TGG?’, since Newmeyer earlier (p.52) regarded the membership increase in the
LSA as being “considerably above the average [compared with which other
discipline?], suggesting that it was the appeal of transformational generative
grammar rather than economic growth”. Murray (1981:109) saw the reasons for
this dramatic expansion (in addition to the general growth of institutions of
secondary and post-secondary education) in what he describes as
the zeitgeist of a rebellious generation coming along at the time of rapid
expansion of the academic sector in North America. The channeling of so
much of the available money to an institution [i.e., the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, in particular the Linguistics Department there]
where it was astutely used by accomplished academic warriors further
enhanced the attractiveness of a perspective in which the elders were
dismissed just when generational rebellion was particularly prominent in the
general culture.
In other words, TGG would not and could not have gained in strength to the
extent that it did during the 1960s and early 1970s if there had not been other,
major, factors helping to bring the ‘Chomskyan revolution’ about.
4.1.2 Funding? We have mentioned the question of funding, which Newmeyer
(1980:52 and n.8) has reduced to a few lines in a 250-page account of the first 25
years (1955–1980) of TGG, but which, I believe, was of distinct importance in
the furtherance of the transformationalist cause. Writing about how government
spending on research and education significantly advanced the diffusion of this
particular linguistic doctrine, James McCawley, who did his doctorate with
Chomsky at M.I.T. in 1965, and who has always remained an adherent of
generativism—albeit taking a critical point of view on particular issues,
philosophical or otherwise (cf. Chapter 6), noted the following:
160 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
I maintain that government subsidization of research and education,
regardless of how benevolently and fairly it is administered, increases the
likelihood of scientific revolutions for the worse, since it makes it possible
for a subcommunity to increase its membership drastically without
demonstrating that its intellectual credit so warrants. The kind of
development that I have in mind is illustrated by the rapid growth of
American universities during the late 1950s and 1960s, stimulated by
massive spending by the federal government. This spending made is possible
for many universities to start linguistics programs that otherwise would not
have been started or would not have been started so early, or to expand
existing programs much further than they would otherwise have been
expanded. Given the situation of the early 1960s, it was inevitable that a
large proportion of the new teaching jobs in linguistics would go to
transformational grammarians. In the case of new programs, since at that
time transformational grammar was the kind of linguistics in which it was
most obvious that new and interesting things were going on, many
administrators would prefer to get a transformational grammarian to
organize the new program; in the case of expansion of existing programs,
even when those who had charge of the new funds would not speculate their
personal intellectual capital on the new theory, it was to their advantage to
speculate their newfound monetary capital on it, since if the new theory was
going to become influential, a department would have to offer instruction
in it if the department was to attract students in numbers that were in
keeping with its newfound riches. And with the first couple of bunches of
students turned out by the holders of these new jobs, the membership of
the transformational subcommunity swelled greatly. (McCawley 1976b: 25)
Such a long quotation is justified for a number of reasons, especially since it
provides readers not familiar with the mind-set and operational modes of NorthAmerican university administrators with at least some insight. Naturally, the
informed reader would like to underscore particular passages in the citation,
comment on certain points of detail, and draw further conclusions from the
observations made; but in general it characterizes well both the mentality of
administrators (frequently académiques manqués eager to be seen as progressive, by
their superiors and their former colleagues) and the particular situation they found
themselves in, just at the time when Chomsky’s ideas began to gain ground, if not
fame—though not exclusively for reasons directly related to linguistics, as I shall
try to argue in this chapter. In McCawley’s account there seems to be a lurking
suspicion that the rapid growth of TGG may have had something to do with a fad
(cf. Maher’s observations in section 4.1.1 above), a suspicion I had during my
graduate years in linguistics at a North American university in the late 1960s.
4.1.3 Ideology? Robert A.Hall, himself a staunch Bloomfieldian ‘structuralist’,
reviewing Newmeyer’s (1980) book, mentions another reason for the apparent
success of TGG, namely, that it had more to do with ideology and less to do with
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 161
the honest attempt of a group of linguists to provide a more adequate theory of
language—in contrast to a theory of linguistics. Hall (1981:185) notes the particular
choice of vocabulary on the part of Newmeyer, for instance when relating in
chapter 2 of his book titled “The Chomskyan Revolution” how this turn of
events was brought about. Expressions suggesting military and political conflict,
e.g., ‘campaigner’, ‘old guard’, ‘rebellion’, ‘revolution’, ‘struggle’, ‘tactic’,
‘defend’, ‘confront’, and ‘win victories’ abound. Politicoreligious terms are not
rare either, e.g., ‘charisma’, ‘convert’, ‘hegemony’, ‘win over’ (cf. Newmeyer
1980:45 and elsewhere). Newmeyer’s chapter thus fits Maurice Cranston’s (1974:
196) characterization of ‘ideology’ very well indeed:
It is characteristic of ideology both to exalt action and to regard action in
terms of a military analogy. Some observers have pointed out that one has
only to consider the prose style of the founders of most ideologies to be
struck by the military and warlike language that they habitually use,
including words like struggle, resist, march, victory and overcome; the literature
of ideology is replete with martial expressions. In such a view, commitment
to an ideology becomes a form of enlistment so that to become the adherent
of an ideology is to become a combatant or partisan.
Especially during the early 1970s, many enthusiasts of TGG spoke of a revolution
in linguistics (cf. in addition to those mentioned at the outset of section 4 above:
Dingwall 1971:759; Greene 1972:189; Yergin 1972). It is interesting to note that
more recent publications that maintain the same argument (e.g., Smith & Wilson
1979:10; Newmeyer 1980:20) no longer make an explicit reference to Kuhn’s
(1962) book on scientific revolutions, perhaps because the ideas therein appear to
them as a chose acquise that need no longer be demonstrated. As a matter of fact, I
suggested the existence of something like a ‘Chomskyan Paradigm’ as early as
1972 (cf. Koerner 1976:703) because I was of the opinion (and still am) that with
Chomsky and his circle a definite shift of emphasis in the goals of linguistic theory
was brought about which superficially at least seemed dramatic enough to
resemble Kuhn’s concepts of disciplinary ‘paradigm’ and ‘revolution’. These
changes in the general approach to language and, concomitantly, the philosophy
of science, were probably not in all respects beneficial to linguistic studies as a
whole. Yet it cannot be denied that a number of proposals, procedures of analysis
and concepts of theoretical argument have become part of the linguist’s tool-kit
and general outlook, which no one seriously interested in theory construction can
any longer ignore7 (though linguistic practitioners, i.e., those conducting
empirical research instead of selecting data from the work of others that might
confirm their theoretical claims, may well have been able to do without them). In
other words, whether we like it or not, we will have to agree that noticeable
changes, in the linguist’s attitude towards language and within the linguistic
discipline itself, did take place during the past forty or so years, changes which a
162 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
number of people have likened to a ‘revolution’ in the Kuhnian sense of the term
(cf. Pear son 1978, for a discussion).
However, we may ask ourselves whether such changes of focus and emphasis,
this introduction of new terminology (frequently replacing traditional terms
describing the same phenomena), and this ‘idealization’—which Newmeyer
(1980:250) invokes to support his claim that “more has been learned about the
nature of language in the last 25 years [i.e., 1955–1980] than in the previous
2500”—have indeed produced something like a revolution in the field
necessitating, as it were, not just a new outfitting of every linguist’s operating kit
but also a relearning of the trade. In fact, a closer analysis of what was really done
by linguistic practitioners (not by armchair theoreticians who tend to ignore data
that could disconfirm their hypotheses) in North America and in Europe during
the the same period may well bring to light the following:
1) A number of linguistic schools continued to survive (e.g., Tagmemics,
largely associated with the work of Kenneth Lee Pike and his collaborators, and
Systemic Grammar, a neo-Firthian approach headed by Michael A.K. Halliday, as
well as Stratificational-Cognitive Grammar, introduced by Sydney M.Lamb
during the 1960s); indeed, several of these schools have been thriving in recent
years, suggesting not only that there has not been one all-embracing theoretical
framework operating in North-American linguistics during the past 40 or more
years (as Newmeyer and others would like us to believe), but also that the
paradigma fostered by TGG has long since lost its attraction for, and grip on, the
minds of many present-day linguists.
(2) TGG provoked to no small degree the development of approaches to
language which have tried to account for specifically those aspects of language
study (e.g., human communication, social conditioning, and actual language use—
Chomsky’s talk about the latter notwithstanding), which the Chomskyan model
consistently eliminated from its list of ‘interesting’ phenomena. Thus the revival of
interest in discourse analysis, speech act theory, pragmatics, and various
sociolinguistic approaches since the late 1960s would probably not have been as
pronounced had the Chomskyan ‘paradigm’ not focussed so much on abstract
‘data’ (usually made up by the analyst in support of a theoretical argument) far
removed from actual speech, or what Labov has called ‘realistic linguistics’ (cf.
Chapter 10, for details).
In short, as will become still clearer from what follows, it seems that, upon
closer inspection, the term ‘revolution’ does not properly apply to TGG, if this
was to mean that one framework of how to conduct research replaced previous
or competing frameworks, as Lavoisier’s New Chemistry replacing Stahl’s
Phlogiston Theory. Despite many disclaimers, TGG is basically post-Saussurean
7 On this, cf. Neil V.Smith’s (1939) advice in his Foreword to a recent collection of
Chomsky’s papers: “You may not agree with Chomsky’s work, but it would be shortsighted and unscholarly to ignore it” (Chomsky 2000:v).
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 163
structuralism,8 although Joos (1961:17) characterized the movement, which he
associated with the work of both Harris and Chomsky, “as a heresy within the
neo-Saussurean tradition rather than a competition to it”. TGG is still basically, in
Joos’ view, excessively concerned with ‘langue’, the underlying grammatical
system, to the detriment of ‘parole’, the actual speech act; or, in other terms, with
an abstract formalism claiming to represent the essence of language structure
instead of the analysis of the function and use of human language. (It is often
forgotten that formalization by itself does not lead to new insights about the
nature of language.) However, it cannot be denied that many young men and
women in linguistics during the 1960s and 1970s believed that they were
witnessing a revolution in the field, and it appears that this widespread belief (and
the associated enthusiasm that young people tend to generate) has been, I submit,
at the bottom of the ‘Chomskyan revolution’. (Some of the participants in the
‘revolution’ I have talked over the past twenty or more years still today get a
gleam in the eye when they recount their recollections of linguistics in the
1960s.)
To do justice to historical fact, it should be remembered that—like Curtius,
who in 1885 felt that the Neogrammarians had embarked on a course that
constituted a break with the past (cf. Koerner 1981:168–169) —there were
scholars of the post-Bloomfieldian generation who, at least during the early
1960s, conceived of TGG as a ‘breakthrough’ (Hockett 1965:196; although he
associated it with the name of Sydney M.Lamb as well!). Earlier, in 1963, Rulon
S.Wells (b.1919) expressed a similar apprehension of change when he spoke of
“some neglected opportunities in descriptive linguistics”. Wells (1963:48),
however, approached the subject somewhat more cautiously:
Whether the change that actually took place—the advent of and eager
reception of the approach called transformation-theory—should be
described as internal or external, as a revision and rehabilitation of
Descriptive] L[inguistics] or as a displacement of it, is no simple one, for
which reason I save it for another day. Some major change did take place;
the episode ended; and the present paper is a historian’s attempt to explain
the change. It does not, however, purport to explain the advent of
transformation-theory (TT), but only the reception of it. Given the TTapproach was put forward when it was, why was it taken up in the way it was?
It would be laborious beyond the ambitions of my paper to describe this
way with any great accuracy; it must suffice to say that there arose a very
widespread belief that TT, the successor to DL, could lead linguistics to
fruitful successes where its predecessor had proved unable to do so. My own
judgment as a linguist about such a belief is that mixed in with a solid core
of truth there is much that is false, gratuitous, or misleading. But in the
8 Indeed, Joseph (1999) has suggested that true structuralism begins with Chomsky’s work.
164 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
present paper I try to set aside my own views as a linguist, and to speak only
as a historian of linguistics, without taking sides.
Wells, whose own paper on ‘constituent analysis’ of 1947 may be credited for
having gone beyond the mere descriptive stage of post-Bloomfieldian linguistics,
feels the “norm of pure description [which] was the Zeitgeist in the thirties and
forties” (p.49) was to blame for the abandonment of the merely descriptive in
favour of a more explanatory approach in the 1950s and 1960s, and the switch
from DL to TGG. Sydney M.Lamb (b.1929), a theory-oriented linguist of
Chomsky’s age, found that one of the shortcomings of the postBloomfieldians
was their excessive concern “with trying to specify procedures of analysis” (Lamb
1967:414) — Zellig Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics of 1951 immediately
comes to mind here. It seems however that extra-linguistic matters (i.e., what
may be called changes in the intellectual climate) had more to do with the rise of
TGG in the period than the problems that beset the, at times, extreme positivist
tendency of linguistic analysis among Bloomfield’s successors. (We shall see in
Section 4.4 examples of how several postBloomfieldian linguists anticipate many
basic ideas later associated with Chomsky alone.)
4.2
Concrete factors contributing to the Chomskyan ‘revolution’
I have already referred to the ‘climate of opinion’ during the 1960s and the
sociological aspects of the relationship between ‘old guard’ and the ‘young
Turks’. A conflict normally exists between generations but can be heightened and
intensified by socio-economic and political causes. For example, the civil rights
movement of the Kennedy and Johnson years, the opposition to the American
involvement in the Vietnam war, and other issues polarized the diverging views of
the old and the young. These are external factors meriting the attention of the
historian of any discipline, though probably more in the humanities and social
sciences than the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, that is, the natural sciences as well as
mathematics (although the introduction of the ‘new math’ into the educational
system during the 1960s was probably not exclusively motivated by the
superiority of the new approach over the traditional one). Yet I believe that the
Geisteswissenschaften generally are more likely to be influenced by intellectual
currents of any sort than the Naturwissenschaften as Dilthey, Rickert and others
noted more than one hundred years ago. Notwithstanding that it is impossible to
map out all these spheres of influence within the confines of one exploratory
essay, these external factors have so far been largely neglected by historians of
most disciplines, and certainly those dealing with the history of linguistics.
There is however at least one factor that can be fairly easily identified. It is
related to the widespread acceptance of TGG during the 1960s and early 1970s —
the funding of university programs during that period. We have already referred
to this subject (see 4.1.2 above), and quoted from a 1976 statement made by James
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 165
McCawley concerning the impact of the National Defense Education Act (passed
by the United States government in late 1958) on linguistics (cf. also Mildenberger
1962). As a matter of fact, Newmeyer—who tends to downplay the role of the
large sums of money that were poured into all kinds of linguistic research during
the 1960s—documented, in a paper done with his partner Joseph Emonds in
1971, that these monies in effect constituted “a great shot-in-the-arm to the field
of linguistics” (Newmeyer & Emonds 1971:287). But since Newmeyer wishes us
to believe that the success of Chomskyan linguistics is exclusively due to its
scientific merits, the subject of funding is mentioned only in a single footnote in
his 250-page Linguistics in America9 In his 1986 Linguistics and Politics no reference
to this quite revealing paper can be found (Newmeyer 1986b)
In what follows, I will try to illustrate the point with the help of just three
examples, though they could be multiplied almost ad libitum. One is the statement
made by Chomsky himself in an interview in 1971; the other two are public
acknowledgements of funding. All three suggest the extent the financial aspect
played in the expansion of linguistics in general, and the success of TGG in
particular.
Asked about the question of funding and the reason why Syntactic Structures and
many other works of his contained acknowledgements of support from agencies of
the U.S. Defense Department, Chomsky replied:
Ever since the Second World War, the Defense Department has been the
main channel for the support of the universities, because Congress and
society as a whole have been unwilling to provide adequate public funds […].
Luckily, Congress doesn’t look too closely at the Defense Department
budget, and the Defense Department, which is a vast and complex
organization, doesn’t look closely at the projects it supports—its right hand
doesn’t know what its left hand is doing.10 Until 1969, more than half the
M.I.T. budget came from the Defense Department, but this funding at
M.I.T. is a bookkeeping trick. Although I’m a full-time teacher, M.I.T.
pays only thirty or forty per cent of my salary. The rest comes from other
sources — most of it from the Defense Department. But I get the money
through M.I.T. (Mehta 1971:193)
I am not quoting Chomsky’s account to ‘raise the moral index finger’ (as we say
in German) but to give an idea of the tremendous non-academic involvement in
9 It reads: “Newmeyer and Emonds 1971 have discussed at length the funding of linguistic
resarch in the United States. The point is made that while, of course, the source of funding
is irrelevant to the ultimate CORRECTNESS of a theory, is is by no means irrelevant to a
(partial) explanation of one’s ACCEPTANCE. It is tempting to speculate on the speed
with which transformational grammar would have won general acceptance had Chomsky
and Halle’s students had to contend with today’s more austere conditions, in which not
just military, but
166 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
the funding of research, including work not visibly (at least to an outsider)
connected with military interests. (Interestingly, Newmeyer & Emonds [1971:301]
noted that a “result of the reliance on outside funding agencies is the occasional
deliberate falsification of the nature of linguistic work.”) It should be remembered
that one of the major projects of the Defense Department during the 1950s was
machine translation, and that M.I.T. had a major stake in it (cf. Locke & Booth
1955; Yngve 2000). Morris Halle, Chomsky’s longtime supporter and ally, for
instance, acknowledged the kind of support that existed there at the time:
During the past eight years [i.e., since 1951: EFKK] it has been my great
and good fortune to be associated with the Research Laboratory of
Electronics, M.I.T. This unique research organization has been an ideal
environment in which to carry on in vestigations that overlap a number of
traditional boundaries between disciplines. (Halle 1959:15)
Needless to add that Halle, like Chomsky, was in a comparatively sheltered
position during the 1950s. (Who, with only a Master’s degree to his credit, would
nowadays obtain a four-year fellowship with no other strings attached than to
pursue independent research, and who would be employed, several years before
completing one’s Ph.D., in a research position at M.I.T.?) That the funds which
were received by the Research Laboratory of Electronics and later also by the
Department of Linguistics, founded at M.I.T. in 1961, were used for proselytizing
purposes as well, may be deduced from the number of acknowledgements of
support by workers in linguistics. That at least part of these funds was intended to
convert young students to the new faith may be surmised from the
acknowledgement printed at the bottom of Robert Lees’ widely acclaimed
‘review’ of Syntactic Structures (Lees 1957:375), which was written and published
while Lees was a close associate and, for all practical purposes, still a doctoral
student of Chomsky’s at M.I.T. (Lees 1960 constitutes his dissertation published
shortly after its completion.) Owing to the godfatherly attitude that Bernard
Bloch displayed (cf. Murray 1980), Lees’ propaganda piece for Chomsky’s ideas
appeared in Language (still today the most widely circulated linguistics journal in
the world) almost at the same time Syntactic Structures itself was published.11 Under
normal circumstances, a review would take at least a year to appear in print
following the publication of a book; also one may wonder if Lees was indeed the
ALL sources of funding have been sharply curtailed, and the number of new positions has
been declining yearly.” (Newmeyer 1980:52n.8; emphasis in the original).
10 One may doubt this assumption and instead be inclined to believe that Chomsky’s
reductionist approach to language and the highly operationalist nature of his theory may
have appealed to certain administrators in the Pentagon (and elsewhere) who prefer to deal
with diagrams and program sheets rather than with the untidiness of much of regular
linguistic work.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 167
sole author of the ‘review’, considering his employment situation at M.I.T. at the
time. But even if the arguments were all Lees’ own, as Chomsky emphatically
maintained in a letter to the present writer commenting on Koerner (1984b), it
can be at least assumed that Chomsky—and probably Halle too—had seen and
approved the text before it was sent to Bloch. (That Lees had published a paper in
Language as early as 1953, and thus established previous contact with Bloch,
cannot serve as a convincing counter-argument of collusion.)
The question of ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ will occupy us in section 4.3 (below);
however, in the present context we may refer to Jerrold J.Katz’s (1964)
apprenticeship piece in this area entitled “Mentalism in Linguistics”. Together
with Paul M.Postal’s Constituent Structure of the same year, it set the stage for the
transformationalists’ polemics against the so-called taxonomists (a term created by
Chomsky [1964:11]) or, as Voegelin & Voegelin (1963:12–13) characterized the
phenomenon, Katz’s paper embarked on the ‘controversal stance’ with a view to
establishing the ‘eclipsing stance’. Chomsky had given the signal for this kind of
attack in 1957 (cf. Voegelin 1958: 229). It is interesting to note that in Katz’s
piece it was not the linguistics of the older scholars that was not attacked, but
rather what Katz made out to be their particular view of science. In other words,
ideological questions appear to have offered a more promising forum for his attack
than actual linguistic analyses of the Bloomfieldians from whom Chomsky himself
had learned his craft.12 Katz’s paper on “Mentalism in Linguistics”, which Bloch,
the Bloomfieldian stalwart, accepted for publication in Language, though it
contains little that may be termed research, has the following acknowledgement:
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force
under Contract DA36–039-AMC-03200(E); in part by the U.S. Air Force,
ESD Contract AF 19(628)–2887; and in part by the National Science
Foundation (Grant G-16526), the National Institutes of Health (Grant
MH-04737–03), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(Grant NsG-496). This paper, although based on work sponsored in part by
the U.S. Air Force, has not been approved or disapproved by that agency.
(Katz 1964:124, n.*)
In addition to public acknowledgements such as these, other documents (e.g., the
annual report of the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C.) could be
cited to show the magnitude of the financial support received by major
universities and in particular by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which
can be fairly said to have built its flourishing Linguistics Department from a rather
11 Chomsky (1975:3) noted himself that “there would have been little notice in the
profession if it had not been for a provocative and extensive review article by Robert Lees that
appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of S[yntactic] S[tructures]” (emphasis
added: EFKK). Naturally, Chomsky does not indicate how this came about; for details, see
Murray (1980:79–81, and especially footnote 55 on p.87).
168 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
modest Department of Modern Languages on the strength of the tremendous sums
of money that flowed into its coffers during the 1960s and early 1970s. While it
would be unfair to say that money alone has made the success story of TGG
possible—to maintain such a view would mean to deny the existence of human
resourcefulness and creativity (not in the Chomskyan sense, nota bene!)—
nevertheless every researcher knows the importance of funding for any project s/
he might conceive.
4.3
The rhetoric of revolution
All who have lived through the period of the 1960s and early 1970s in North
American linguistics will recall instances—at professional meetings, national or
international conferences, at the Linguistic Institutes sponsored by the Linguistic
Society of America as well as those of other associations and institutions—where
propaganda of one kind or another was made for the ‘radically novel’ approach to
linguistic analysis provided by TGG. Indeed, I believe that many students in
linguistics, if not the majority, were glad to see what was regarded as establishment
scholars being attacked by members of the younger generation (see below for
illustration). Many students having come from Europe during the mid- or late
1960s, usually after having completed at least their first university diploma there,
tended to embrace the new brand of theory; they could never have warmed up to
the models of language analysis provided by Bloch, Harris, Trager, Smith, and
others. But they felt they could easily associate with ideas that seemed to hark
back to Descartes, Port-Royal, and Humboldt. One may doubt that these young
Europeans regarded TGG as particularly revolutionary; indeed, many of them
soon detected that for all practical purposes the alleged ‘mentalist’ view of
language had little effect on the actual practice which retained much of the earlier
kind of data-manipulation in accordance with prescribed rule. To them it
probably did not really seem that much different from earlier procedures
stigmatized as ‘taxonomic’, ‘mechanistic’, and ‘uninteresting’. Many of them
abandoned TGG a few years after their return to Europe. The more critical
attitude of many European students (e.g., Anttila 1975, Meisel 1973) suggests
12 In this context, it is almost curious to see Chomsky’s debt to Harris’ work
acknowledged in a history of linguistics by a one-time adherent of TGG (cf. Sampson
1980:134–138 passim). Indeed, Chomsky himself (1975:41–45), writing on Harris’ concept
of ‘grammatical transformation’ and of his attempts at discourse analysis, acknowledges his
introduction to linguistics through Harris on this and other occasions (e.g., Mehta 1971:
187–188), though always stressing the differences between his and Harris’ views. In
another interview (Sklar 1968:215) Chomsky indicated that his introduction to linguistics
began by proofreading Harris’ Methods of Structural Linguistics, a manuscript edition of
which was circulating at least since 1946. (It had been completed early in 1947, but was
published in Chicago only in 1951.)
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 169
that, in order to understand the success story of TGG during the 1960s and
1970s, we must go beyond the technical framework of the theory and recapture,
as much as possible, the general atmosphere within which it was proposed. (On
‘linguistic rhetoric’, see also Paul Postal’s [1988] rather revealing analysis.)
In order to map out this intellectual climate fully, the historiographer would
have to interview the participants in the discussions held during the period (as was
done by R.A.Harris 1993b, Murray 1994, and Huck & Goldsmith 1995),
especially at those public meetings which were regarded as important by the
strategists of ‘modern linguistics’ (a term dear to TGG discourse; cf. Smith &
Wilson 1979). These professional meetings include the Ninth International
Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 1962, and
various other meetings in North America thereafter, especially the (until the
1980s still) semiannual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, which, as we
know, provided handy forums for public debates and even attacks on the views of
others not bowing to the new theory. This is admitted by adherents of the
Chomsky school (cf. the references to Newmeyer’s accounts below), and needs
no further docu-mentation in the present chapter; instead, I would like to raise
some questions concerning the 1962 International Congress held at Harvard and
M.I.T (for the first time in the history of this organization outside Europe).
Was it really “sheer coincidence”, as Newmeyer (1980:51) claims, that the
Congress was held at Cambridge, Mass., with Morris Halle and William N.
Locke, then chairman of the M.I.T.’s Modern Languages Department, on the
local arrangements committee? (In fact, Locke also held the position of Secretary
General of the Congress and Halle the post of secretary of the Executive
Committee according to the information supplied in Lunt [1964:v].) And what
happened to Joshua Whatmough (1897–1964) of Harvard, who “was the chief
figure in securing the invitation for the 9th International Congress to meet in the
United States, and who was instrumental in obtaining two substantial grants for
support of that congress” (as Eric P.Hamp reports in Language 42.622, 1966)?13
And why did Zellig Harris turn down the offer to present one of the five major
papers to be given at the Congress’ plenary sessions? (The other four scholars,
Jerzy Kurylowicz, Émile Benveniste, André Martinet, and Nikolaj D.Andreev,
were between 52 and 66 years old.) The fact is that Chomsky, less than 35 years
of age and without any prior international exposure, was given the spot not taken
by his former teacher. Was it an accident that Roman Jakobson, with whom
Halle had collaborated on phonological research since the late 1940s and
completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1955, presented Chomsky to the Congress
participants as the rising star?14 (An indication of how much Chomsky owed
Jakobson may be gathered from his own testimony in A Tribute to Roman Jakobson
published in 1983.)
Chomsky’s “Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory” presentation was by far the
longest of these five plenary papers; it was given as the fifth and last of the
plenaries (in seeming deference to the international standing of the other four
speakers), but it had 62 pages in the printed Proceedings in comparison to
170 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
between 22 (Kurylowicz’s paper) and 10 pages (for each of the three remaining
plenary speakers). Likewise, the discussion of Chomsky’s paper took up 30 pages
in contrast with between 5 and 10 pages for the four others. (Comparison
between the Preprints of the Congress—edited by no other person than Morris
Halle—and the Proceedings edited by another former student of Jakobson’s,
Horace Gray Lunt (b.1918), reveals that Chomsky was given unlimited
opportunity subsequent to the Congress to expand on his views and to answer
any of the objections raised in these discussions that he considered relevant.)15
It is also interesting to note that it was at this Congress, which was attended by
some 950 scholars from all over the world, especially from Europe,16 that
Chomsky talked for the first time about Saussure, Humboldt, and the PortRoyal
grammar, all the time trying to demonstrate how much his own theory had in
common with these hallowed traditions of 17th to 19th century Europe. I believe
that it was at this well-orchestrated Congress where Chomsky’s appeal to a
‘rationalist’ tradition underlying his linguistic ideas first attracted the attention of
many Europeans to his work. (Before 1962—the year when Syntactic Structures
was reprinted for the first time, evidently for the International Congress—few
Europeans had taken note of Chomsky.) Murray (1980) appears to have been one
of the first scholars to devote particular attention to the socio-political
manoeuvres of the TGG group around Chomsky and his early and enduring ally,
Morris Halle. It is from him (Murray 1980:88, n.85) that I took the idea of
‘rhetoric of revolution’, about which I would like to say a few things in what
follows. Indeed, Halle’s role in the promotion of Noam Chomsky and TGG should
be thoroughly examined (cf. Chapter 9); his talents as organizer and administrator
are acknowledged by Newmeyer (1980:39), who unfortunately says nothing about
Halle as an academic politician. However, as one visiting fellow at M.I.T. at the
time recalls, in the spring and early summer of 1962, prior to the tenure of the
International Congress (which took place on 27–31 August), he was “watching
Morris Halle plot as if he were Lenin in Zurich” (John Gumperz in a 1977
interview with Stephen Murray).
13 As a matter of fact, Whatmough, professor of comparative philology at Harvard, had
originally been selected to serve as President of the Congress, but as the 1964 Proceedings
indicate, he was replaced prior to its tenure by Einar Haugen (who at the time was still at
the University of Wisconsin). Whatmough’s name does not even appear in the list of
Congress participants (cf. Lunt 1964:1145–1171). He thus was effectively written out of
the historical record.
14 Professor Johann Knobloch, who participated in the 1962 Congress, told me when I
gave a paper on the present topic in 1982 at the University of Bonn, that he had felt at the
time that he was witnessing the ‘inthronization’ of Noam Chomsky.
15 Note that Chomsky’s paper at the Congress was by no means the only one promoting
TGG; papers by William S-Y. Wang, Samuel R.Levin, Paul M.Postal, Emmon Bach, Paul
Schachter, and others too (cf. Lunt 1964:191–202, 308–314, 346–355, 672–677, 692–692,
in that order) had their share in it.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 171
We may forego here an analysis of what Murray has termed Chomsky’s
‘publishing woes’ (on which see now Murray 1999) and the standard myth of
young Chomsky’s intellectual isolation during the 1950s, a claim he never tires of
reiterating (cf. Sklar 1968:214; Chomsky 1979:131; 1982:42–43). As a matter of
fact, and contrary to what Newmeyer (1980:34–35) and others have been saying,
Murray (1980, 1981) has convincingly established that only one paper by
Chomsky was ever rejected, and this by the then editor of Word, André Martinet
(1908–1999), despite a strong recommendation by the late Uriel Weinreich
(1926–1967), the journal’s associate editor at the time (cf. Murray 1980:77) and
Jakobson’s pleading with Martinet to reverse his decision.17 But then neither the
journal nor the editor subscribed to the Bloomfieldian type of structuralism that
lays at the bottom of Chomsky’s linguistics. Language, the official organ of the
Linguistic Society, and with it its long-time editor, Bernard Bloch (1907–1965),
supported Chomsky in every possible way. Similar observations could be made
about the publication of Chomsky’s books; consider Murray’s (1980:76–77; 1999)
account of the fate of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, which the author
released for publication some twenty years after it had been written, although
previous offers to publish it had been made (see also Chomsky’s own [1975:3]
account of this). As can be gathered from Chomsky’s bibliography, he published
papers and reviews in all recognized outlets in the field, especially in Language and
the International Journal of American Linguistics (usual acronym: IJAL), but also in
Word (cf. Chomsky 1961) during 1954–1961 (cf. Koerner & Tajima [1986:3–13]
for details).
Another important aspect of the success story of TGG during the 1960s had little
to do with scholarship. Newmeyer (1980), who regarded it as a commendable
feature on the part of the young adherents of TGG, describes it in the following
terms (p.50):
The missionary zeal with which “the other guys”18 were attacked may have
led some linguists, along with Wallace Chafe (1970), to be “repelled by the
arrogance with which [the generativists’] ideas were propounded [p.2],” but
overall the effect was positive. Seeing the leaders of the field constantly on
the defensive at every professional meeting helped recruit younger linguists
far more successfully and rapidly than would have been the case if the
debate had been confined to the journals. [Robert Benjamin] Lees and [Paul
Martin] Postal, in particular, became legends as a result of their
16 Following my paper on the present subject at the University of Vienna on 16 December
1982, Prof. Wolfgang U.Dressler, who served as the president of the 1977 International
Congress, commented that, according to his information, there had never been as much
money available for a congress as for the one held at Cambridge, Mass., in 1962, and that
there would probably never again be so much money available in the future. According to
him, hundreds (!) of foreign scholars had their travel expenses paid by the congress
organizers.
172 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
uncompromising attacks on every structuralist [i.e., non-TGG]-oriented
paper at every meeting.
Newmeyer hints that both Chomsky and Morris Halle encouraged students to
engage in this type of aggressive and openly polemical activity which not
infrequently turned into ad-hominem attacks (cf. also Chomsky & Halle 1965);
he concedes that there may have been some excesses:
The combative spirit may have gotten a bit out of hand at times, as even
undergraduate advocates of the theory such as Thomas Bever and James
Fidelholtz got into the act, embarrassing their teachers as they ruthlessly lit
into linguists old enough to be their grandparents. (Newmeyer 1980:50–51)
It was in the publications and, in particular, in the public debates of the followers
of TGG that the rhetoric of revolution, the claim to novelty, ‘creativity’, and
originality, came to the fore, coupled with the claim of a lack of comprehension
and support on the part of the older generation of linguists. Murray (1980; 1994:
228–235) has shown, on the contrary, that support from the older academics was
indeed forthcoming. For instance, Chomsky was invited twice, in 1958 and 1959,
to expound his theories at conferences on the structure of English held at the
University of Texas at Austin. If we are to believe Newmeyer (1980:46),
however, Archibald Hill (1902–1992), the organizer and host of these
conferences had invited Chomsky for the express purpose of “confronting it [i.e.,
TGG] directly with the intent of snuffing it out before any serious damage could
be done [to Bloomfieldian structuralism]”. Anyone familiar with Hill as a person
would find this hard to believe, and everyone interested in verifying what
happened at the 1958 conference may read the faithfully transcribed discussion
17 The Roman Jakobson Papers at M.I.T. (Box 44, folder 12) contains a copy of the letter
from Jakobson to Martinet, dated 28 October 1953, which carries the following passage
(Jakobson was serving as an associate editor of Word at the time):
I’d like also to bring to your attention Noam Chomsky, who has the high
tribute of being Junior Fellow of Harvard. Both Harris and the outstanding
logician Goodman (Penn), as well as our Quine, consider him as a
remarkable thinker in linguistics and logic. He was very unhappy about your
rejection of his paper, which on my recommendation he submitted to you
for Word. I think, however, that for the sake of understandability to the
average linguist, it was useful, as you suggested, to retouch this indeed
valuable piece of work. Now that he has done it, may I again bring his
study to your attention. I am sure that Quine and Harris will fully support
my recommendation and I know that you in your turn find these problems
as important to be raised.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 173
following the presentation of each paper. “Here”, according to Newmeyer (1980:
35),
we can see the history documented as nowhere else—Chomsky, the enfant
terrible, taking on some of the giants of the field and making them look like
rather confused students in a beginning linguistics course.
Personally, I do not notice any ‘giant’ in the roster of speakers, but it is clear from
the proceedings (Hill 1962) that Chomsky was little interested in compromise;
instead, he sought ways to make his ideas look controversial, because in his words
“they go to the root of the problem and give radical answers”, as he later claimed
in an interview, where he expounded on his general attitude as follows:
Even before I came to M.I.T. [i.e., in 1955], I was told that my work
would arouse much less antagonism if I didn’t always couple my
presentation of transformational grammar with a sweeping attack on
empiricists and behaviorists and on other linguists. A lot of kind older
people who were well disposed toward me told me I should stick to my own
work and leave other people alone. But that struck me as an anti-intellectual
counsel. (Mehta 1971:190–191)
It is clear from this statement (as well as others made by Chomsky publicly and
privately) that the new theory was to be presented in a polemical fashion.
However, during the 1950s and even until the mid-1960s, most American
linguists of the older generation were well disposed not only toward Chomsky as
a person but also toward his theory. The Bloomfieldian descriptivists felt that
Chomsky’s syntactic theory was extending their own endeavours, and the fact
that he had done his doctorate with Zellig Harris19 at the University of
Pennsylvania persuaded them to believe that he was one of theirs. Despite the
attacks on the Old Guard by Chomsky and his associates, the fairly positive
attitude of the older generation of scholars (which included not only the
‘Bloomfieldians’ but the ‘Sapirians’ as well) did not noticeably change until Halle
and Chomsky began attacking their work in phonology, an area typically ignored
in Newmeyer’s (1980) survey of TGG.20 We may refer to the ex change between
Householder (1965) and Chomsky & Halle (1965), as well as Hockett’s verdict
about “Chomskyan-Hallean ‘phonology’”, which, in his opinion (Hockett 1968a:
18 Sampson (1980:252n.12) reports that the “course which Halle’s and Chomsky’s
department offers on non-Chomskyan linguistics […] is popularly known, by staff and
students alike as ‘The Bad Guys’. Obviously the name is not intended [to be taken] too
seriously, but it is indicative [of their general attitude towards the ideas of others displayed
at MIT]”. (I am completing here Sampson’s elliptical sentence: EFKK.)
174 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
3), was “completely bankrupt”. Hockett had earlier (1965: 187) indicated his
reactions to the style of Young Turks like Lees:
We do not enjoy being told that we are fools. We can shrug off an
imprecation from a religious fanatic, because it does not particularly worry
us that every such nut is sure he holds the only key to salvation. But when a
respected colleague holds our cherished opinions up to ridicule, there is
always the sneaking suspicion that he may be right.
Although Hockett was referring to Lees’ review of Syntactic Structures and the
introductory remarks Lees had made in his Grammar of English Nominalizations
(Lees 1960), the real bone of contention was phonology and the phoneme
concept, as Murray (1981:110–111) has pointed out; compare Archibald A.Hill’s
observation:
I think that if one can speak of partial survival [in the revolution of
Chomskyan and post-Chomsky an linguistics], I have partially survived it.
[…]. I could stay with the Transformationalists pretty well, until they
attacked my darling, the phoneme. I will never be a complete
transformationalist because I am still a phonemicist. (Hill 1980: 75)
19 Actually, this statement requires modification. Chomsky had left for Harvard shortly after
completion of his M.A. in 1951, and it cannot properly be said that Harris supervised his
dissertation. What actually happened has recently been recounted by Chomsky himself. In
April 1955, he had received a draft notice from the U.S. Army:
I was 1-A. I was going to be drafted right away. I figured I’d try to get
myself a six-week deferment until the middle of June, so I applied for a
Ph.D. I asked Harris and Goodman, who were still at Penn, if they would
mind if I re-registed—I had not been registered at Penn in four years. I just
handed a chapter of what I was working on for a thesis, and they sent me
some questions via mail, which I wrote inadequate [sic] answers to—that
was my exams. I got the six-week deferment, and I got my Ph.D. (Hughes
2001:41)
As a result, Chomsky was freed from miltary service. The particular handling of
Chomsky’s thesis defence also explains why the dissertation carries only Zellig
Harris’ signature, both as thesis supervisor and as committee chair, and no else’s as
would have been regular procedure.
20 In the preface to his book Newmeyer (1980:xi) states: “In fact, there is no discussion of
developments in phonology since the early 1960s.” Apart from one of his colleague’s (at the
University of Washington, Seattle) suggestion that Newmeyer would not know enough
about the subject to write about its evolution, it is a simple fact that volumes of collective
articles
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 175
Hill’s statement is an important document for the historian of linguistics since it
dispels the widely accepted myth that it was the early work on syntax that had
revolutionized linguistics (and antagonized the older generation). Note
Bierwisch’s (1971:45) affirmation: “When Chomsky published Syntactic Structures
in 1957, structural linguistics entered a new phase”21 Newmeyer goes a few steps
further, trying to establish the view that in fact a revolution was taking place, and
that it began in 1955, when Chomsky had completed his “truly incredible work
of the highest degree of creativity”, i.e., his study The Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory (henceforth: LSLT), which “completely shattered the prevailing
structuralist conception of linguistic theory” (Newmeyer 1980:35). Newmeyer
does not adduce much evidence to support his claim, something which would be
difficult to do since this bulky work was published only twenty years later
(Chomsky 1975). In his 1986 paper on ‘the Chomsky an revolution’ Newmeyer
(p.8) now concedes that Bernard Bloch, “arguably the most influential linguist of
the period, concretely abetted Chomsky and his theory in a number of ways”, as
Murray (1980) had clearly documented earlier (see also Newmeyer [1980:47–48]
for an early indication of Bloch’s support of TGG).
As a matter of fact, by the mid-sixties the North American linguistic scene was
much like the characterization that Sydney Lamb gave it in his review of Current
Isues in Linguistic Theory and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1964, 1965):
The prevailing attitudes are of two different types. Older-generation
linguists, upon encountering some of these pages [in Chomsky 1964 and
1965], will stare with incredulity and no little irritation at the distortions
and misunderstandings of their ideas and practices and those of their
colleagues; while students who never knew what neoBloomfieldian
linguistics was really like, and those from fields outside linguistics, are led to
the false impression that all linguists before Chomsky (except, of course,
Humboldt, Sapir, and a few other candidates for canonization) were
hopelessly misguided bumblers, from whose inept clutches Chomsky has
heroically rescued the field of linguistics. (Lamb 1967:414)
No doubt the fact that a great many, if not most, of the Ph.D. students that
arrived at M.I.T. during the mid-1960s came from fields outside linguistics such
on ‘generative linguistics’, at least those published during the 1970s, are heavily tilted
toward phonology, with comparatively few contributions devoted to syntax. This may
have changed somewhat since the early 1980s when the Government-and-Binding
approach became popular among the new generation of linguists trained at MIT, Amherst,
UCLA, USC, and a few other places (e.g., the University of Arizona).—The history of
phonology by Anderson (1985), while not free from generativist bias, has been judged as
much more balanced that Newmeyer’s (1980) treatment of syntax (cf. Howell 1986).
21 In view of the attempt of some to characterize Syntactic Structures as the work that
ushered in Chomsky’s revolution of the field, Bierwisch’s observation is important.
176 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
as chemistry (e.g., Robert B.Lees, James A.Foley), mathematics (e.g., James
D.McCawley, Barbara Hall Partee), and other sciences (e.g., D.Terence
Langendoen, Sc.B., M.I.T., 1961) and, as a result, had no prior exposure to, and
no previous theoretical commitment within, linguistics, fostered this view of
things as described by Lamb.
4.4
Continuity and/or discontinuity
It is interesting to note that Newmeyer, who has tried so hard to establish
something like a rupture épistémologique (Bachelard) between Chomsky’s theories
and those of his immediate predecessors, refers to two papers by Harris and
Hockett published in 1954, which contain statements which sound very
‘Chomskyan’ to me. However, according to Newmeyer (1980:37), these
statements must be regarded as uncharacteristic of the work of these two theorists.
I presume he means to say that they were intellectual Entgleisungen, accidental
slips of the pen, which, as Newmeyer maintains, “clashed head-on with their
usual methodological assumptions” and that therefore, “it is not surprising that
they did not develop them.” While it is true that neither Harris nor Hockett
developed the generative model now associated with Chomsky’s name,
nevertheless the context in which these ideas were put forward indicate clearly
that they were anything but mental lapses. It is obvious, however, that those
stressing discontinuity rather than continuity in the development of American
linguistics during the later 1950s would like to see it that way. In order to answer
this question about their theoretical outlook, let us inspect the two 1954 papers
by Harris and Hockett separately as well as earlier statements by these two
scholars in view of Newmeyer’s attempt to push the date of the origin of TGG
back to the year 1951, i.e., Chomsky’s M.A. Thesis (Newmeyer 1986a:5n.4). In
this connection, it may be interesting to read that George Lakoff, himself an early
adherent of ‘modern linguistics’, regarded at least the earlier phase of TGG as “a
natural outgrowth of American structural linguistics” (1971:267–268).
2.4.1 Harris. Zellig S.Harris’ 1954 paper is entitled “Transfer Grammar”. (The
terminological change from ‘transfer grammar’ to ‘transformational grammar’
appears to me comparable to the terminological pair ‘evolution theory’ and
‘evolutionary theory’; Wells, writing in 1963, still spoke of ‘trans-formation
theory’.) In his paper Harris was concerned with developing a model of language
transfer, i.e., the construction of methods by which phon-ological,
morphological, and also syntactic structures of one language could be transferred
to those of another language. In short, Harris was working on a theory of
language translation which could be used by a machine. As men-tioned earlier in
this chapter, machine translation was one of the major interests of theoretical
linguists at the time (cf., e.g., Bar-Hillell 1954, Casagrande 1954, Locke 1955)
and received considerable financial support from various U.S. government
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 177
agencies, including the CIA (cf. Hutchins 2000, for details). Harris (1954a: 259)
believed that one should begin the task of mechanical translation by
defining difference between languages as the number and content of the
grammatical instructions needed to generate the utterances of one language out of the
utterances of the other. (Italics mine: EFKK)
He subsequently defines ‘grammar’ as “a set of instructions which generates the
sentences of a language” (p.260), and this definition is repeated in the paper—in
other words, it was not meant to be a remark à part but a definition, at least an
operational one. Section 5 of Harris’ paper (pp.267–270) is devoted to syntax, an
area which is said to have been neglected, if not totally ignored, by linguists
before Chomsky (cf., however, Bloomfield 1942a,b; Nida 1966 [1943]; Bloch
1946). Interestingly, Harris proposes a transfer of sentences from English to
Modern Hebrew, a language whose morphophonemic system occupied Chomsky
for a number of years (1949–1951; cf. Chapter 9, for details).22 The chart on page
268 of Harris’ paper, its explanation and the discussion deserve particular
attention, since they show quite clearly his tendency toward formalization. This
penchant for mathematical formulae and algebraic expression, which characterizes
Chomsky’s approach to syntax in Syntactic Structures several years later, is also very
obvious in Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics, a book which Chomsky read in
proof in 1947. Chomsky (1975:25) in fact acknowledged that this reading was his
“formal introduction to the field of linguistics”. In the early 1950s, Chomsky (p.
29) was “firmly committed to the belief that the procedural analysis of Harris’
Methods and similar work should really provide complete and accurate grammars
if properly redefined and elaborated.” But before quoting an interesting passage
from Harris’ book Methods, which Norman McQuown (b.1914) called
‘epochmaking’ in his 1952 review (p.495), let me refer to an important statement
by Harris in his 1954 paper (which Chomsky may well have seen in manuscript a
year or two prior to its publication), as it shows that Harris had a definite purpose
in mind when he distinguished between ‘transfer grammar’ and ‘transformational
grammar’:
Even in the grammar of a single language by itself, it is possible to generate
some of the sentences of the language out of other sentences of the same
language by particular grammatical transformations. However the
conditions for these grammatical transformations are quite different from
those that carry us from the sentences of one language to those of another
[as in transfer grammar]. (Harris 1954:260n.2)
Statements like this speak for themselves and refute suggestions that “such views
clashed head-on with (Harris’) usual methodological assumptions” and that it
required Chomsky to come along and develop them (Newmeyer 1980: 37). Note
178 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
also Harris’ formulation of a principle of formation rules in his Methods completed
in 1947, if not earlier:
The work of analysis leads right up to the statements which enable anyone
to synthesize or predict utterances in the language. These statements form a
deductive system with axiomatically defined initial elements and with
theorems concerning the relations among them. The final theorems would
indicate the structure of the utterances of the language in terms of the
preceding parts of the system. (Harris 1951:372–373)
That an approach like this was important for his development of the theory of
transformational grammar is acknowledged by Chomsky when he reports on his
early research:
When I began to investigate generative syntax more seriously a few years
later [i.e., after completion of Chomsky (1951)], I was able to adopt for this
purpose a new concept that had been developed by Zellig Harris and some
of his students, namely, the concept of “grammatical transformation”. It
was quickly apparent that with this new concept, many of the inadequacies
of the model that I had used earlier could be overcome. (Chomsky 1975:
40–41)
Seen in this light, it is no longer surprising when McQuown of Chicago found
Harris’ emphasis on following basic methodological assumptions to their logical
conclusion ‘wholly admirable’, and considered Harris’ contribution to linguistics
epoch-marking in the double sense: first in that it marks the culmination of
a development of linguistic methodology AWAY from a stage of
intuitionism, frequently culture-bound; and second in that it marks the
beginning of a new period, in which the new methods will be applied ever
more rigorously to ever widening areas in human culture. (McQuown
1952:495; emphasis in the original)
Chomsky was unquestionably the most important developer of key ideas first
formulated by Harris (cf. also Seuren 1998:248–249). Regarding this we have
Chomsky’s own account (1975:41–45), where he delineates the basic lines of
argument made in Harris’ 1955 Presidential Address to the Linguistic Society of
America, “Transformation in Linguistic Structure” — published two years later
with a different title (Harris 1957).23 More or less the same ideas were published
in a much later paper (Harris 1965), by which time Chomsky’s and Harris’ views
22 To suggest, as Newmeyer (1980:34) does, that Harris never “even looked at it [i.e.,
Chomsky (1951)]”, is at best gratuitous.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 179
had visibly diverged. However, it should not be forgotten that Chomsky was also
familiar with Harris’ earlier papers on ‘discourse analysis’, which clearly paved the
way for the study of syntax (Harris 1952a, 1952b — mentioned only in a footnote
in Chomsky’s account [1975:46n.6].) One could go back to even earlier
statements by Harris (especially his Methods whose preface [p.v] is dated ‘January
1947’) to show that his concern with the subject of syntax did not only date from
1951 onwards. The contrary view would ignore the fact that the postBloomfieldians had been struggling with the problem for some time, at least on
the level of what was later called ‘phrase structure’ (see the long article by Rulon
Wells on ‘immediate constituents’ of 1947 as evidence of this effort). In this
context it is interesting to note that Daladier [1980:59n.1], who otherwise is at
pains to show that Chomsky and Harris are worlds apart, affirms that Chomsky
took the distinction between ‘acceptability’ and ‘grammaticality’ from Harris.
To sum up, it appears that the more closely we look into the discussion going
on in American linguistics during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the more
obvious it becomes that what many people today want to call a ‘revolution’,
namely, the movement said to have been initiated by the publication of Chomsky’s
Syntactic Structures, was at most an evolution of then current work (cf. Anders
1984). As late as 1973, reviewing Hockett’s volume of selected papers by Leonard
Bloomfield, Harris points to this continuity in American linguistics when he states
(p.255):
The work of Bloomfield can be looked at as paving the way for the later
methods of transformational analysis. But his work is not only of historical
relevance. It created the apparatus for a certain type and degree of linguistic
analysis, and the body of analytic concepts which are a necessary part of any
theory of grammar.
It can be seen that Newmeyer’s attempts to establish the priority of Chomsky
over Harris (and Hockett—see 4.4.2 below) by referring to “Chomsky’s
undergraduate thesis and his 1951 master’s thesis” as antedating “the [1954] Harris
and Hockett papers by several years” (1986a: 5n.4) is simply not born out by the
facts. Indeed, in his 1980 book Newmeyer himself (p.36) menioned Bloomfield’s
1939 paper on Menomini morphophonemics as well as Roman Jakobson’s 1948
paper on Russian conjugation as clearly exhibiting the spirit “of a generative
phonology”. It is therefore not surprising to find references to these two
publications in the printed version of Chomsky’s Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory (LSLT) of 1955 (Chomsky 1975:571, 572), even though a number of
other revealing references contained in the original typescript, notably those to
23 It is interesting to note that, as late as 1964, three papers by Harris, including this LSA
Presidential address, were republished in a volume edited by Fodor & Katz and evidently
intended to promote TGG.
180 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Hjelmslev’s 1953 Prolegomena, had been removed. Also noteworthy is Henry
Ku era’s claim that Jakobson’s “Russian Conjugation” of 1948 constitutes “a full
generative description on the morphological level” (1983:878). Its publication in
Word, the only other major linguistic journal of the period, besides Language and
International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL), makes it highly unlikely that
Chomsky was not aware of this paper in 1949.
At least until the 1960s, when Chomsky began introducing the concepts of
‘deep’ or ‘underlying structure’ in contrast with ‘surface structure’—cf. Chomsky
[1965:198–199n.12] for the ancestry of this distinction—the difference in
Chomsky’s approach to syntax as found in LSLT and Syntactic Structures
(compared to Harris’ approach in his 1954 paper for example) seems to be that
Chomsky was concerned with transfers (and transpositions) within a single
language only (e.g., Chomsky 1957:61–84 passim).
Regarding the background to his work in a more general way, it is interesting
to note that Chomsky consistently denied that it had anything to do with
“attempts to use electronic computers” (e.g., Chomsky 1964:25; cf. also
Chomsky 1982:63). It seems to me, however, that Chomsky is engaged in
rewriting his own past, seemingly in an attempt to widen the difference between
his work and Harris’ and to suggest discontinuity and novelty of his own
approach. Thus in a 1979 interview Chomsky tried to explain away as simply a
concession to the prevailing fashion of the times that Syntactic Structures contained
a discussion of automata (Chomsky 1982:63). Given the fact that he had been
employed since the fall of 1955 at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at
M.I.T., one would indeed expect such contemporary references. Thus in a 1958
paper (not mentioned in Newmeyer 1980 or its revised 1986 edition), Chomsky
suggested, among other things, that
the study of this intermediate area between full scale Turing machines [cf.
Turing 1950] and absolutely bounded automata is however quite
important, not only for linguistics (it is, in a good sense, the general theory
of grammar), but also […] of intellectual processes. (Chomsky 1958:437;
also cited in Maher 1982:18)
That the reference to computer work cannot be discounted as a passing remark may
be gathered from a 1971 interview (Mehta 1971, cited in Maher 1982:17), in
which Chomsky said much the same. This is not at all surprising when we note
that his collaborator Morris Halle stated in the 1959 preface to the publication of
the revised version of his 1955 thesis:
I have assumed that an adequate description of a language can take the form
of a set of rules—analogous perhaps to a program of an electronic
computing machine — which when provided with further special
instructions, could in principle produce all and only well-formed
(grammatical) utterances in the language in question. This set of rules,
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 181
which we shall call the grammar of the language and of which phonology
[i.e., Halle’s special interest: EFKK] forms a separate chapter, embodies what
one must know in order to communicate in the given language…(Halle
1959:12–13).
Halle’s statement, in which he clearly aligns himself with Chomsky’s work (as is
evident from the two immediately preceding paragraphs in his foreword) leads us
back to the other important 1954 paper, namely, Charles Hockett’s celebrated
“Two Models of Grammatical Description”, to which Chomsky refers frequently
in his writings during 1955 and 1964, and to which his 1956 paper is a kind of
response.
4.4.2 Hockett. Since Newmeyer (1980:37) refers to Charles F.Hockett’s “Two
Models of Grammatical Description” as one of the two 1954 papers that
‘uncharacteristically’ contained the seed of generative grammar, this wellknown,
programmatic article merits somewhat closer inspection. Hockett (1954:210)
himself said, the “bulk of the […] paper was written between 1949 and 1951”;
but because of the fact that he recognized, in 1951, that it gave the “erroneous
impression that there were principally just two archetypes [of grammatical
description] to be dealt with”, he withheld the paper from publication for a
number of years. However, the typescript version was circulating among
Hockett’s colleagues as early as 1951 (cf. Voegelin & Voegelin 1963: 25), and it
appears that Hockett made use of it when the editors of Word, specifically André
Martinet, asked him for a contribution to their special volume celebrating the
tenth anniversary of the journal which they entitled “Linguistics Today”. (The
volume features, among others, a paper by Benoît Mandelbrot on “Structure
formelle des textes et communication”, one by Zellig Harris on “Distributional
Structure”, and one by Rulon Wells on “Meaning and Use”.) In his paper
Hockett makes, as I read it, a strong argument in favour of a dynamic—in his
terminology ‘Item and Process’ (IP) — approach, in contrast to the more usual
‘Item and Arrangement’ (IA) approach characteristic of most of the work done until
then in North American linguistics, although, as Hockett (1954:210–211) himself
remarked, the IP model was the older, though it had largely been confined to
historical linguistics.
Hockett’s paper is intended as an important theoretical statement; indeed, we
see him grappling with problems which Chomsky attacked soon after more
successfully, and it is not be difficult to see the importance the paper had for
Chomsky (cf. also his 1956 paper, whose title echoes Hockett’s). In his argument,
Hockett makes a series of theoretical statements and definitions, first with regard
to IA analysis (211–227), giving particular attention to the problems arising from
various definitions. Then, parallel to the preceding discussion, he presents the
various definitions basic to a descriptive analysis within a process framework (227–
228), before making a comparison between the two approaches (229–232). The
final page (232–233) consists of a discussion of more general considerations in
‘grammatical description’. I shall return shortly to this last-mentioned issue; before
182 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
doing so, however, I would like to quote one of the statements made by Hockett
with regard to IP analysis, the one pertaining to ‘derived forms’. Hockett says:
A derived form consists of one or more UNDERLYING FORMS to
which a process has been applied. The underlying forms and the process all
recur (save for occasional uniqueness) in other forms. The underlying form
or forms is (or are) the IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENT(S) of the derived
form, […] (Hockett 1954:227–228; small capitals in the original).
When we are told by Chomsky that his first interest in language derived from his
acquaintance during childhood with his father’s historical work on medieval
Hebrew and that his “original interest in generative grammar was based on a
perfectly conscious analogy to historical Semitic linguistics” (quoted in Koerner
1978:44; see also Yergin 1972:112), it is not surprising to find terms and concepts
such as ‘derivation’ and ‘underlying form’ in Chomsky’s nonhistorical work.
Indeed, as Hockett indicates (1954:210–211), Chomsky’s teacher Harris referred
to this historical analogue in his work as early as in 1944.
If the above theoretical considerations are Little other than common
knowledge in the field at the time, a number of Hockett’s general stipulations
regarding the criteria “for the evaluation of a grammatical description” were
probably not. Apart from the criteria of generality, specificity, and what he terms
‘efficiency’ of a model, the requirement of ‘productivity’ deserves particular
attention, especially since it is related to another observation to which I shall turn
in a moment:
(4) A model must be PRODUCTIVE: when applied to a given language,
the results must make possible the creation of an indefinite number of valid new
utterances. This is the analog of the ‘prescriptive’ criterion for descriptions.
(Hockett 1954:232– 233; italics added: EFKK)
This criterion is preceded by one of ‘inclusiveness’, by which Hockett means that
when a model is “applied to a given language, the results must cover all the
observed data and, by implication, at least a very high percentage of all the notyetobserved data.” That this is not simply an unimportant passing remark is clear
from the earlier general requirement of a satisfactory grammatical description:
The description must also be prescriptive, not of course in the Fidditch
sense, but in the sense that by following the statements one must be able to
generate any number of utterances in the language, above and beyond those observed
in advance by the analyst—new utterances most, if not all, of which will pass the
test of casual acceptance by a native speaker. (Hockett 1954:232; italics mine:
EFKK)
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 183
It is clear that Hockett means something like ‘predictive’ when he uses the term
‘prescriptive’ (see also the preceding quotation). Moreover, Hockett’s 1954 paper
was the result of a number of years of reflection, especially on the importance of
‘prediction’ in linguistic theory.
That these observations are by no means isolated in Hockett’s thinking during
the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Chomsky was a young student of linguistics,
can be shown by two other important theoretical statements of his, published in
1948 and 1950 (not mentioned by Newmeyer in his 1980 book on the history of
TGG as well as its second edition of 1986). Both papers are short; the first was
reprinted in Martin Joos’ 1957 Readings in Linguistics, included in Newmeyer’s
(1980:263) bibliography and therefore accessible to him; the other appeared in
George L.Trager’s working-paper-type journal Studies in Linguistics (1943–1973).
I am tempted simply to reproduce in full Hockett’s 1948 “A Note on
‘Structure’”, but a few salient passages will have to suffice here to show how
much the Cornell linguist—arguably the most interesting general theorist of his
generation—was ahead of his time. Outlining the “task of the structural linguist,
as a scientist”, Hockett emphasizes that it must go much beyond classification and
the simple accounting for all the utterances which comprise the corpus of a
language at a given time; he states,
the analysis of the linguistic SCIENTIST is to be of such a nature that the
linguist can account also for utterances which are NOT in his corpus at a
given time. That is, as a result of his examination he must be able to predict
what OTHER utterances the speakers of the language might produce…
(Hockett 1948:269; small capitals in the original).
And as if to anticipate much of Chomsky’s later argument about (the
Bloomfieldians’ aversion to) ‘mentalism’ and his proposal of a (rather abstract)
‘language acquisition device’, Hockett continues in the next paragraph:
The analytical process thus parallels what goes on in the nervous system of a
language learner, particularly, perhaps, that of a child learning his first
language. The child hears, and eventually produces, various utterances.
Sooner or later, the child produces utterances he has not previously heard
from someone else. (Hockett 1948: 269–270)
The essential difference between the child’s acquisition of the language and the
analyst’s procedure is described by Hockett in the same paper as follows:
[…] the linguist has to make his analysis overtly, in communicable form, in
the shape of a set of statements which can be understood by any properly
trained person, who in turn can predict utterances not yet observed with
the same degree of accuracy as can the original analyst. The child’s ‘analysis’
consists, on the other hand, of a mass of various synaptic potentials in his
184 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
nervous system. The child in time comes to BEHAVE the language; the
linguist must come to STATE it. (Hockett 1948:270; emphasis in the
original)
In the final analysis, a ‘linguistic scientist’ must “determine the structure actually
created by the speakers of the language”, not impose one, for “a language is what
it is, it has the structure it has, whether studied and analyzed by a linguist or not”
(Hockett 1948:270–271).
Referring to what he believes is the unquestionable promise of ‘immediate
constituent’ analysis, Hockett in his 1950 paper observed that it is “not an
analytical technique, but a hypothesis about the nature of talking and hearing
language”; at the same time he admitted:
The problem is to develop techniques by which the hierarchical structure
of the utterances of a language can be revealed and stated. A child learning
to speak has such a technique; our objective techniques are as yet quite
faulty, but at least they are good enough to reveal this very important
feature of linguistic structure. (Hockett 1950: 56)
4.4.3 Preliminary conclusions. From what has been presented in the two preceding
subsections, we may be allowed to ask, some fifty years later, how far our insights
into human language have advanced since then. Seen in this way, what is
frequently described as a ‘revolution’ in linguistics, upon closer inspection of the
evidence, looks much more like a natural outgrowth, an ‘evolution’, of theoretical
discussions and methodological commitments characteristic of the period
immediately following the end of World War II. True, neither Harris nor
Hockett carried through on several of their proposals, but the further development
of certain aspects of their theoretical statements by someone else, and especially by
someone who grew up within their tradition, does not make that person’s theory
revolutionary—and it certainly was not seen that way by the generation of Harris
(1909–1992) and Hockett (1916–2000), neither during the 1950s, nor the early
1960s—unless we make allowances for a variety of other, non-linguistic factors,
generational, ideological, and political, to have played their part in fostering this
view.
4.5
Rewriting the history of TGG
Parallel to the “eclipsing stance” (Voegelin & Voegelin 1963:12) that Chomsky
and his associates had adopted fairly early in the development of TGG, various
efforts were made from the beginning of the 1960s onwards to rewrite the history
of North American linguistics. Attempts by others (e.g., Hymes & Fought 1981
[1975]:154–157) to redress the one-sided picture were “categor-ically rejected”
(Newmeyer 1980:5n.4). Such an attitude, which refuses to read primary sources—
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 185
and interpretations thereof—in an unbiased manner, cannot result in a proper
historical account. What this leads to may be illustrated by two examples from
Newmeyer’s manner of presentation, although many other such instances could
be cited.24
On p.46 of his 1980 book, Newmeyer states that Hockett, in his 1964 LSA
Presidential address (Hockett 1965:185), “actually characterized the publication of
Syntactic Structures as one of ‘only four major breakthroughs’ in the history of
modern linguistics”. It is clear that at the time Hockett, aware of a possible rift
separating the old and the young, was making friendly overtures towards
Chomsky and his followers. Nevertheless, in the opening paragraph to his
address, Hockett does not exactly say what Newmeyer is claiming he said; rather,
when he comes to talking about what he terms ‘the accountability hypothesis’,
Hockett in fact states the following (p.196):
We are currently [i.e., in 1964] living in the period of what I believe is our
fourth major breakthrough; it is therefore difficult to see the forest for the
trees, and requires a measure of derecthesis on my part to say anything not
wholly vague. Instead of a long list of names, I shall venture only the two
of which I am sure; and since the two are rarely linked I shall carefully put
them almost a sentence apart. I mean Noam Chomsky on the one hand and,
on the other, Sydney M.Lamb. The order is intentional: Chomsky is
unquestionably the prime mover.
No doubt this statement is much more measured than what Newmeyer would like
us to believe; indeed, Sydney Lamb is not mentioned only in passing in Hockett’s
paper but is referred to several times thereafter in conjunction with Chomsky and
Halle’s (morpho)phonology (cf. Hockett 1965:200). Newmeyer’s affirmation
quoted earlier may simply have been the result of a young writer’s impatience
with the judicious observation of an intellectual. However, when one finds several
more such extrapolations of the statements of others that tend to say more than
what was actually said, one is no longer sure whether Newmeyer’s accounts are
indeed to be relied on. To cite yet another example from his 1980 book. When
he begins talking about the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’, Newmeyer, after having
highlighted the importance of Lees’ ‘review’ of Chomsky (1957), seeks further
support for his view that a revolution in linguistics had taken place at that time by
referring to a statement made by a scholar of the older generation, Charles
(“Carl”) Frederick Voegelin (1906–1986), a former pupil of Albert Louis Kroeber
(1876–1960) and also of Edward Sapir (not Bloomfield) and actually a good friend
of Zellig Harris. Newmeyer writes (p. 19):
24
Cf. the exchange between Newmeyer and his reviewer, Stephen Murray, in
Historiographia Linguistica 9.185–186 and 187 (1982) for additional examples, and also what
I say in section 4.4 (above).
186 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
And C.F.Voegelin (1958), in another review, noted that even if Syntactic
Structures managed to accomplish only part of its goals, “it will have
accomplished a Copernican revolution [p.229].”
Unfortunately it is impossible to reproduce Voegelin’s argument in full,
something which would be desirable in a detailed history of TGG, but I shall cite
at least two passages from his two-page review, one from which Newmeyer has
lifted the phrase he cites, another giving quite a different interpretation of
Chomsky’s accomplishments.
Having stated that “immediately after reading Chomsky” he “had formed a
rather strong positive impression, and developed an equally strong negative bias”,
Voegelin (1958:230) noted on ‘the negative side’,
I would not accept the strategy of criticism adopted by Chomsky and his
explicator [i.e., Robert Lees in his ‘review’ of Syntactic Structures: EFKK] —
putting the burden of justification on anyone who would maintain the
validity of pre-transform grammar. Some would (almost) accept this; thus,
one of my western friends says that Chomsky (almost) convinced him that
morphemics was a poor old dead dog. And if transform grammar also
persuades linguists to relegate phonemics to a preliminary stage of analysis
(called ‘discovery’), and to operate in final analysis (called ‘description’)
exclusively with morphophonemics, it will have accomplished a
Copernican revolution.
I submit that this sounds quite different from the interpretation that Newmeyer
tries to give. As we know, Chomsky had moved from morphophonemics
(Chomsky 1951) to syntax by 1955 at the latest. Moreover, it is clear for Voegelin
that Zellig Harris was the inventor of this approach and that the “application of
the principle of transformation to grammar” was “certainly not new” (Voegelin
1958:230n.1). Finally, Voegelin replies to his own rhetorical question “Will they
[i.e., Chomsky, Lees, and perhaps others] start a Copernican revolution within
linguistics?” with the following footnote:
A palace revolution, perhaps, in contrast to the interdisciplinary revolutions
plotted by David Bidney, Six Copernican Revolutions, Explorations I:
Studies in Culture and Communication pp. 6–14 (1953). (Voegelin 1958:
230n.2)
Little needs to be added to suggest that Newmeyer’s quotations are at best unreliable and at worst say virtually the opposite of what the authors have said.
Voegelin’s reference to a ‘palace revolution’, however, gets us back to our theme,
namely, the attempt of adherents of the TGG school to rewrite and eventually
cement a history of American linguistics corresponding to the advantages they see
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 187
in it for their own current position. (See Newmeyer’s later [1986a: 9–10n.11]
defense of his ‘selective’ interpretation of Voegelin’s review.)
We have already mentioned Noam Chomsky’s reiterated claim that he had not
been understood by his older colleagues during the 1950s. The suggestion not to
be lost on his audience of course is that a kind of Kuhnian phenomenon of
incommensurability of theoretical views about language existed in American
linguistics which ultimately had to lead to a ‘scientific revolution’. We have
already referred to Chomsky’s repeated, though less than ‘candid’, remarks about
the lack of publication possibilities for his ‘radical’ views of linguistic theory—
note that he did not make any of his political views known to the public before
1966 (cf. Koerner & Tajima 1986:91), i.e., after Aspects (1965) and The Sound
Pattern of English25 had in fact been written.26
Earlier in this chapter, I referred to Chomsky’s attempts (from 1962 onwards)
to rewrite the history of TGG by claiming, for one thing, ‘Cartesian’ ancestry for
his theory of language. In regard to this let me cite just one such example. The
absence of “any discussion of mentalism in Syntactic Structures” was pointed out
to Chomsky by interviewers in 1979, but—as the published transcripts indicate,
Chomsky made no reply except for a reference to the ‘MIT-context’ and the
purpose of the book (i.e., to serve as teaching material for an undergraduate
course at M.I.T.) which, one supposes Chomsky felt, sufficed to explain the
omission (see Chomsky 1982:63). However, it appears from other sources that
statements concerning the mentalism idea—touched upon in his attack on
Skinner (Chomsky 1959) — were played up only from the early 1960s onwards
(cf. Katz 1964).27 Yet Chomsky, intent on rewriting his intellectual development,
does not want to have others see things this way. Thus lain Boal, a linguist (who
taught the history of science at Harvard and was later working for California
University Press), comparing the 1975 printed version of LSLT with the 1955
manuscript, in which he found “no claims about making grammars
psychologically valid”,28 noted the following:
Indeed, in the original mimeograph he [=Chomsky] said that “the
introduction of dispositions (or mentalistic terms) [e.g., mind, belief,
meaning—IAB] is either irrelevant or trivializes the theory”, and he ruled
out all talk of mind for “its obscurity and general uselessness in linguistic
theory”. In the version published in 1975, these passages are expunged and
he writes that the “psychological analogue” (i.e., the radical idea that a
grammar models knowledge that is actually incorprated in our heads) “is
not discussed but it lay in the background of my thinking. To raise this
25 This work, though published only in 1968, had been available in typescript form by
1964, two years after Halle (1962) had ‘opened up the field’ for the inclusion of phonology
in TGG. It is not quite correct to say, as Newmeyer (1980:40) does, perhaps in hindsight,
that Halle’s The Sound Pattern of Russian, published in 1959, though largely derived from
his
188 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
issue seemed to me, at the time, too audacious.” This has brought from an
old colleague of Chomsky the wry comment that ‘it is hard not to be
skeptical about Chomsky’s claim that timidity prevented a thought of his
from becoming known.’ (Boal 1984:15)
There is no doubt in my mind that a careful comparison of the 1975 publication
of LSLT with the original typescript would yield many such instances where
Chomsky has revised his intellectual past. (I have already mentioned the deletion
of all references to Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena—the English translation of which had
appeared early in 1953 — where there are many metalinguistic considerations
that we find discussed in Chomsky’s work from 1955 onwards, and one would
expect to discover other such instances of deletion as well as revision in of earlier
positions in LSLT.) However, writers of partisan histories of TGG, of which
Newmeyer’s Linguistic Theory in America of 1980 is the most successful example,
tends to rely on Chomsky’s personal depiction of the origins and development of
TGG as if these accounts could be taken at face value without further
corroboration. On other occasions, Newmeyer treats his sources much more
selectively,29 and presents one particular line of thought in American linguistics
as if it reflected the entire development of the discipline. For him the
paradigmatic nature of Syntactic Structures remains in force: “A truly alternative
theory with any credibility has yet to emerge” (p.20).
A historian of linguistics, however, knows that although certain hints may be
found (usually in hindsight) in the early works of a scholar or scientist who is
important in a field, it is usually a later work that becomes to be regarded as
paradigmatic for subsequent research. We might mention, for example, Bopp’s
Conjugationssystem of 1816, which traditional histories of linguistics regard as the
beginning of comparative linguistics (as if Schlegel’s work of 1808 had not
mapped out the field in which Bopp and others were to harvest thereafter);
however, it was Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik appearing in successive volumes
from 1833 onwards which provided the framework for the subsequent generation
of comparative-historical linguists. Similarly, it was with his Compendium der
dissertation completed under Jakobson’s supervision in 1955, constitutes the “first major
work of generative phonology”.
26 A recent selection of Chomsky’s political writings contains only a few newspaper articles
dating from the late 1960s (see Chomsky 1980).
27 On this issue, compare Steinberg (1999), which is a devastating review of Chomsky’s
theories and their applications from the point of view of linguistic psychologist. He shows
first that Chomsky was an anti-mentalist formalist before 1959, and that when he adopted
mentalism in 1965, his grammars were useless for psycholinguistic purposes because they
are centered on syntax rather than semantics.
28 For a thorough analysis of Chomsky’s transition from a fervently formalist and
antimentalist stance during the 1950s to his thorough-going mentalist advocacy in Aspects,
see Steinberg (1999).
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 189
vergleichenden Grammatik of 1861–1862 (4th ed., 1876), not with his earlier books,
that Schleicher’s work became the point of reference for linguistic research of
much of the next two and more decades (cf. Koerner 1982). In the case of
Saussure, the situation is somewhat more complicated because the Cours was
published posthumously and did not have the author’s imprimatur.30 In addition,
a number of factors external (but also internal) to linguistics delayed the impact of
his synchronic theory of language.
29 In his review of Newmeyer (1980), Fought (1982:317) noted that Newmeyer’s
treatment of Zellig Harris’ role in the development of TGG was insufficient and faulty. It
is true that Newmeyer, quite in line with his attempt to emphasize the ‘revolutionary’
nature of Chomsky’s proposals, virtually eliminates the question of Harris’ influence on
Chomsky, suggesting instead that Chomsky did just what his teacher tried to persuade him
not to do. Typically, we would search in vain in Newmeyer for references to documents
that could weaken the image of TGG as the theory that was ‘winning over’ (Newmeyer’s
term) the brightest linguists of the ‘revolutionary’ period. I am referring to the 1962 debate
on “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Transformation Grammar” held in the framework
of the 13th Annual Round Table Meeting at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.,
and published in the following year (Woodworth & DiPietro 1963:3–50) as just one
example. The discussion was chaired by Eric P.Hamp; Paul M.Postal was the main
speaker. (Postal, although officially enrolled at Yale for his doctorate, actually worked at
MIT’s Laboratory of Electronics at the time, and had served as a crusader for TGG since
1961, especially at the LSA summer and winter meetings.)
Anyone reading the 48-page proceedings of the debate will understand why Newmeyer
has conveniently overlooked this important piece of historical evidence. To be sure, this
encounter does not show TGG winning in the way that Newmeyer depicts the march of
the revolution in linguistics: On every theoretical point or claim made by Postal at the
symposium, he was very effectively knocked down by Paul Garvin—a scholar whose
career could be said to never have quite come off, possibly, if not probably, because he saw
too early the flaws of transformational theory and could not be won over to the TGG
camp (like Sol Saporta or Robert Stockwell). It is probably not surprising that Garvin’s
name does not appear even once in Newmeyer’s 250-page account of American
linguistics.
From the exchange between Postal and Garvin, let me present just one excerpt to illustrate
how far transformationalists may go if pressed for explanations. Postal has just outlined what
a generative grammar could do in the analysis of sentences of a given language, when
Garvin states his objections (Woodworth & DiPietro 1963:36–37):
MR. GARVIN: I would disagree for one very serious reason. One way of
verifying the validity of a theory is by writing a recognition
routine based on this allegedly correct, and allegedly only correct
grammar, and then by seeing whether it indeed does
“recognize.” I deliberately mentioned the Washington Post and
Times Herald, because to a large number of speakers of English, it
contains grammatical sentences.
MR. POSTAL: Most of the sentences would not be sentences at all.
MR. GARVIN: What a preposterous claim! On behalf of the Washington Post I
protest! This is a very common brand of English.
190 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
From these observations it is not surprising that the ‘revolution’ in ‘modern’
linguistics should be associated with Chomsky’s later synthesis rather than with his
early writings. In this connection, I may refer James McCawley’s opinion. In his
view (and he takes Kuhn’s morphology of scientific revolutions for granted), it
was Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) rather than Syntactic Structures (1957) that
provided the basis for a ‘revolution’, for several reasons: (1) Aspects “brought
semantics out of the closet” (McCawley 1976b: 6), which “increased the inherent
interest in doing transformational syntax, as well as making it relatively easy to
come up with analyses that stood a chance of being right” (p.7); (2) its ‘greater
systematicity’ made the theory more appealing and “relatively easy to determine
what the grosser implications of a given analysis were” (pp.7–8), and (3) the
separation of syntactic category from “various factors that affect what co-occurs
with what” (p.7) made it “relatively easy to formulate transformational analyses in
general terms without any loss of precision, and to start dealing seriously with
syntactic universals” (p.8).
McCawley had Kuhn’s idea of a ‘scientific paradigm’ in mind when he
formulated his views on the status of Aspects, especially Kuhn’s (1970:10)
suggestion concerning the relative open-endedness of those ‘paradigmatic’ works
which “leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to
resolve”. In other words, if we are going to talk about something resembling a
revolution in syntax during the past thirty or more years, it should be associated
with Chomsky’s work of the 1960s, and in particular with the introduction of the
concept of ‘deep strucure’ and associated notions, which were absent from his
earlier writings, i.e., with Aspects rather than with Syntactic Structures, despite the
impression that Chomsky and his associates have tried to create, and which at
times succeeded in impressing on certain post-Bloomfieldians of the earlier 1960s.
As we may gather from the history of the neogrammarian school (cf. Koerner
1981), the propaganda distributed by adherents of a particular view of linguistic
theory and the impression it produces on the minds of many of their
MR. POSTAL: I would say it is a very common brand of non-English, that is,
not complete English sentences.
MR. GARVIN: Then, of course, you are in the marvelous position where
whenever you can’t analyze something you simply say, “this is
not English.”
Observers of the linguistic scene of the 1960s and early 1970s will no doubt
remember the debate over ‘grammaticality’ (cf. Hill’s early critique of 1961, and
Chomsky’s aggressive rebuttal of the same year) and related notions, and realize
that Garvin’s hunches were correct.
30 Interestingly enough, Calvert Watkins told me that in his view scholars who do not fully
grasp the significance of Saussure’s Mémoire of 1878 are unable to understand the meaning
of his Cours either. See his paper, “Remarques sur la méthode de Ferdinand de Saussure
comparatiste”, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 32.59–68 (1978).
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 191
contemporaries is one thing; the actual story of how it really was—“wie es
eigentlich gewesen” (Ranke 1824:vi) — is quite another.
5.
Further aspects of a historiography of American linguistics
The preceding discussion suggests that we are still far removed from an adequate
history of linguistics in North America for the past fifty years or so, in particular
where the sources and the development of transformational-generative grammar
are concerned. An effort has been made to identify several issues which need to
be clarified and areas which ought to be investigated more closely. In my
opinion, the task is not an easy one for a number of reasons, including that of the
vested interests of what has been called ‘institutional linguistics’ in holding the
camp together and in fighting off ‘heresies’ as well as ‘counter-revolutions’ (cf.
Newmeyer’s [1980:167ff.] account of the ‘collapse of generative semantics’). But
there are basic problems of scholarship as well, including that of outlining an
exact work chronology—which in a history of TGG is of vital importance if an
accurate picture of the on-going theoretical discussion is to emerge—which
Newmeyer, perhaps for reasons of convenience, choose to ignore. Anyone even
the least superficially familiar with TGG and the behaviour of generative
grammarians knows, among other things, that many of their products circulate only
among members of the ‘in’group, with a number of papers never being printed or
published only many years later, by which time many positions therein defended
have long been discretely abandoned (cf. Grunig’s [1982:290] account of this
traditional strategy.)31 However, Newmeyer (1980:xii–xiii), for his part,
announces: “Throughout the text, I cite books and articles by the year of their
first publication, not by the year that they were written.” For example,
McCawley’s (1976b) edition of a significant number of papers dating from
between 1960 and 1967, published under the title of Notes from the Linguistic
Underground is tucked away in Newmeyer’s bibliography (1980:268) under the
innocuous series title “Syntax and Semantics”, vol.7; besides, there is no
indication that any of the papers published therein has actually been used in
Newmeyer’s account of the history of TGG.
The situation is quite frustrating for the historiographer of linguistics trying to
establish what really happened in order to present an adequate picture of the
history of linguistics in North America during the past forty or more years.
Polemics, even if written in masterly manner with the insight and humour that
Maher (1982) achieves, proves ineffective. Those who believe Maher is right do
not belong to the TGG camp, and those who do belong to it, stonewall his
challenge: they will not read his (or anyone else’s) work (unless it subscribes to
the basic tenets of TGG); there is a general agreement among them to keep silent
about such non-TGG work, and students are asked by their teachers to ignore it.
Polemic exchanges, it appears, are valuable only when both sides are in search of
truth, but there are few signs that those who associate themselves with the
192 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
‘Chomskyan Revolution’ are in any non-trivial way interested in that.
Newmeyer isn’t, and Chomsky and his associates have consistently shown
themselves to only want to win the fight, and in such a manner that no rematch
will take place.32
5.1
Organizational linguistics in the U.S.A.
Something should be said about what is referred to as ‘organizational linguistics’,
i.e., the influence on, if not control over, access to publication and research
funding for example. It appears that early on in the generativist movement leaders
saw to it that this kind of support was forthcoming. How else could it be
explained, for instance, that within less than a year of the publication of
Newmeyer’s 1980 book, a glowing review appears in Language (the journal with
the widest circulation of all linguistics periodicals in the world, no less). The
review was written by Donna Jo Napoli, who, like Newmeyer, was serving as an
associate editor of Language at the time, by the way. Napoli sees a particular
benefit of Linguistics in America in that “the structuralist [!] who stopped reading
generative work sometime soon after Chomsky’s Aspects can [now] follow more
recent developments” (Napoli 1981:456).33 No doubt the question of ‘The
Politics of Linguistics’ needs to be addressed; but in a manner much different from
Newmeyer’s recent book by that title (Newmeyer 1986b; cf. Murray 1989). In that
book no attempt is made to lay bare the operation of social networks in the manner
of, for instance, Murray (1983). Newmeyer instead published a paper defending
the ‘Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics’ (Newmeyer 1986a), where he argued
that it occurred ‘sociologically’ and ‘intellectually’, while at the same time
denying that there was any ‘power grab’ (p.9) on the part of the TGG school,
unexpectedly claiming that “their influence [in American linguistics] is
disproportionately small” (p.12). In a footnote (p.12n.14) Newmeyer
31 That this technique of referring to either still unpublished or not readily accessible
papers and dissertations (so well displayed in Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures) in support of
one’s particular theory or claim is still practiced among members of the TGG camp, I
witnessed myself in Spring 1982, when a doctoral student from M.I.T. gave a paper at the
University of Ottawa. (Indeed, a similar event took place here as recently as November
1987 on the occasion of another paper given by an M.I.T. Ph.D.)—For just one example
from a printed source, the reader may refer to Linguistic Theory and Natural Language 6.128
(1988), where altogether 14 references can be found, of which 7 are to unpublished
writings (mostly MIT dissertations) and an eighth—by the author of the paper—to a
forthcoming article.
32 As a typical example of the tactics employed by Chomsky’s associates, one can refer to
the well-documented exchange between Uriel Weinreich and Jerrold J.Katz. The latter
incorporated many corrections to faults in his theory to which Weinreich had alerted him
in his criticism, pretending that they had been his own initiatives. Cf. Katz’s “Recent
Issues in
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 193
acknowledges that “Paul Chapin, the National Science Foundation Director for
linguistics, has a doctorate from MIT”, but that the “1983 advisory panel
contained only one generativist”. What he does not mention is the important fact
that Chapin—Chomsky’s seventh Ph.D. student (cf. Koerner & Tajima 1986:196)
—was the first incumbent in this position, which was established on 31 October
1975,34 and that he held on to it for about 25 years, retiring only in 1999, though
still associated with the National Science Foundation (NSF) until early 2001 in
another capacity.35 While no suggestion is made that Chapin may not have acted
properly in his position, it is only natural to assume that he would have looked
favourably upon grant applications from persons with generativist credentials. The
fact remains that, of the many millions of dollars distributed by the agency’s
Linguistics Program, M.I.T. and its associate institutions have received—and I am
referring to the 1960s and 1970s especially—a considerable, and at times a rather
disproportionate amount (as may be gathered from the NSF’s annual reports).36
Another important aspect not mentioned by Newmeyer in his 1986 paper on
the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ is the fact that Chomsky’s first (official) doctoral
student, D.Terence Langendoen, served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic
Society of America for a five-year term (1984–1989),37 and that he had been
preceded by Victoria A.Fromkin (from 1979), who can surely be included in the
TGG camp, too. If indeed we were to accept Newmeyer’s claim that there were
“many major universities […] dominated by non-generativists” [1986a: 12],
suggesting at the same time that the number of generativists at the time were
fairly small, one cannot fail to notice that they are disproportionally
overrepresented in the important LSA committees. For instance—as may be
gathered from the LSA Bulletin No.117 of October 1987 — the Nominating
Committee proposed two candidates for the 1988–1990 Executive Committee,
one an M.I.T. Ph.D., the other a distinguished generativist, with a third candi-
Semantic Theory”, Foundations of Language 3.124–194, and Weinreich’s brief response, in
which he expressed his astonishment about such a procedure, “On Arguing with Mr.
Katz”, ibid., 284–287 (1967).—For Chomsky’s manner of conduct when challenged, see
Chapter 6.
33 To select just a few further statements from the review: “This book is astounding for its
information, intelligence and insight” (p.456); “[…] the greatest value of LTA
[=Newmeyer 1980] lies not so much in the material it covers, but how it covers that
material” (p.457), “This is a major contribution to our knowledge of the history of
linguistic theory [as if there was only one on the market of ideas]” (p.459). Where one can
agree with the reviewer is when she states that the book is devoted to the history of
“syntactic theory”—of a particular kind, of course—not of the history of American
linguistics generally (p.456).
34 Prior to this date the Special Projects Program in NSF’s Division of Social Sciences
would have processed grant applications; from summer 1973 onwards, Alan E.Bell of the
University of Colorado’s linguistics department served as staff associate to handle these requests.
194 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
date, who did his doctorate at M.I.T. in 1976, being nominated by more than ten
LSA members.
Unlike the LSA president (note, for instance, that Chomsky’s third doctoral
student, Barbara Hall Partee, was president in 1986, preceded by Victoria
Fromkin in 1985, and followed by Elizabeth Traugott, also an early associate of
the TGG school, in 1987), who usually does not exercise much influence during
his/her one-year tenure,38 the Secretary-Treasurer, who is an ex officio member of
most of the important committees (e.g., those distributing travel grants,
fellowships, delegate positions), plays an important role in American linguistics.
Besides, we should not forget that the LSA is by far the largest professional
organization of linguists in the world. But ‘organizational linguistics’, i.e., the
power and influence exercized by people who, whenever an associate of the
‘TGG paradigm’ is criticized, rush to his/her defence, does not stop there. It
would be interesting to find out how many other linguistics organizations that
deal with fellowships, decide on visiting appointments and the like are effectively
controlled by people who at least in a broad sense belong to this generativist
movement. Likewise, one would like to know how many of them are in
positions of political power in the universities as chair-men, deans, etc. Besides, if
there was no ‘power grab’, how could anyone claim that a ‘revolution’ took
place? Yet this is just another aspect (though probably a very crucial one) that
requires thorough investigation.
35 In his detailed e-mail to the author of 15 January 2002, Dr Chapin kindly provided me
with these (and other) details; his last NSF position was that of Senior Program Director
for Cross-Disciplinary Initiatives.
36 I recall that, since I had been asked by Dr Bell (cf. note 34) in that year to serve as one of
the referees for the project of the LSA to organize a Third Golden Anniversary Symposium
in 1974, this time devoted to ‘The European Background of American Linguistics’ (cf.
Chapter 1, for details), I received the annual report issued by the NSF Linguistics Program
early in 1974. From it I could gather that while the major scholars of the day (like Charles
Ferguson of Stanford for the Phonological Archive) received a grant of $30,000 or $40,000,
none other than Morris Halle of MIT received an amount of many times that much, $120,
000 or more, for a project entitled “The Study of Language”. It would be interesting to check
all these annual reports in order to obtain an idea of how heavily TGG-type research
proposals were funded. (Paul Chapin, in his e-mail to the author of 17 Jan. 2002, promised
“the next time I have occasion to go through the boxes in my storeroom, I’ll keep an eye
out for the lists, and will let you know promptly if I find them”, but had not yet done so
by late May 2002.)
37 It may seem ironic to some that no other than Newmeyer should have been chosen at
the LSA December 1988 meeting to replace Langendoen who resigned from this position
following his acceptance of a position at the University of Arizona in 1988.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 195
5.2
Effective access to and control over linguistics journals
I have already mentioned the subject of access to publication as an important part
of organizational linguistics. Following the death of Bernard Bloch (who we have
already seen as very sympathetic to and supportive of Noam Chomsky) in 1965,
William Bright, an anthropological linguist at the University of California in Los
Angles (UCLA) was selected as editor of Language, largely as a result of Robert
Stockwell’s recommendation who since 1961 had been busy building a fledgling
linguistics program into strong TGG department with clearly generativist agenda
(cf. Hill 1991:128 and the note by Martin Joos; Stockwell 1998:236–239). Bright,
who served as the editor of Language for some twenty years (1966–1987), was by
no means an adherent of TGG, but he soon moved from the Anthropology
Department at UCLA to its Linguistics Department (which probably was the
biggest such department in the US at the time) and he obviously was amenable
to this school.39 Bright’s successor until 1996, Sarah Gray Thomason, likewise
was by no stretch of the term a follower of Chomskyan linguistics, but the
evidence shows that she bent over backwards to accommodate the work of
linguists of this persuasion. The turn toward generativist linguistics became more
ovious during the fiveyear tenure (1997–2001) of Mark Aronoff (PhD, MIT,
1976) as editor of Language.
However, focussing on Language gives a distorted picture of the North
American scene as far as publishing papers in linguistics journals was concerned, as
I had to realize when I was trying to place a paper which I eventully published in
Europe (Koerner 1983), because of the hold that TGG held over the most
important outlets, Linguistic Inquiry (launched at MIT in 1970), Linguistic Analysis,
Linguistics and Philosophy, and other periodicals. Not unlike the Neogrammarians
during the 1870s, who either started new journals (Beiträge zur Geschichte der
deutschen Sprache in 1874 and Morphologische Untersuchungen in 1878) or redefined
the goals of established ones (like Zeit-schrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung in 1876),
once they had gained editorial control over them, linguists at MIT and those
allied with them did much the same thing, adding Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory (which was launched at MIT in 1983) to their arsenal.
6.
Concluding observations
Returning to observations made by Stephen Murray and John Joseph at the
outset of this chapter, we may attempt a kind of résumé. If we accept Murray’s
38 Although it should not be forgotten that subsequent to their tenure former presidents
often sit on important LSA committees and are called upon by the administration to serve
as (informal) advisors. The 2002 LSA presidency went to Frederick J.Newmeyer; the one
for 2003 has gone to Ray Jackendoff.
196 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
(1994:22–23) ‘three factors’ defining scientific groups which ultimately decide
who drives the agenda—good ideas, intellectual leadership, and organizational
leadership—one cannot deny that TGG, from the late 1960s onwards, and more
clearly during the 1970s, could lay claim to all three: Chomsky’s ideas, notably
from Aspects onwards, provided what could be called the ‘good ideas’; together
with Morris Halle, he provided ‘intellectual leadership’, and one could say that
Halle provided ‘organizational leadership’, at least beginning with the preparations
for the 1962 International Congress. If indeed, if “[m]ost revolutions are
essentially rhetorical, with the substantive change being one of personnel—who is
in charge of the government, who defines the mainstream”, as Joseph (1995:384n.
5) has it, we would have come to the conclusion that there was a ‘Chomskyan
Revolution’.
That this revolution did not occur overnight, and that it took about a decade
after the publication of Syntactic Structures to carry the day, may be gathered from
the fact that even in departments with a fairly strong generative bias like UCLA,
we could have witnessed the following canon of post-Bloomfieldian literature to
be required reading:
Prior to the mid-1960s, the typical MA student, […], was required to have
a “theoretical” background based on Joos’s (1958[recte: 1957]) Readings in
Linguistics, including Bloomfield’s (1939) Linguistic Aspects of Science and
Bloch’s (1948) Postulates. A major topic in seminars concerned “item and
arrangement”: vs. “item and process” [Hockett 1954] analysis. Bloomfield’s
(1933) Language and Hockett’s (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics were
39 As an example of this I may refer to a personal experience. In summer 1982, I submitted
what was to become Koerner (1983) to Bright for possible publication in Language. It was
largely a critique of the manner in which Newmeyer (1980) had depicted the history of
American linguistics. I recall that at the International Congress of Linguists held in Tokyo
that year, I announced that I had submitted a paper on the subject of the ‘Chomskyan
Revolution’ to Language, but that I expected it to be rejected. Subsequent to this
announcement, I was stopped in the corridor by Victoria Fromkin of UCLA’s linguistics
department who assured me that Bright would give it a fair treatment. Bright chose three
referees, Charles Hockett (who had previously encouraged me to send the paper to
Language), Dell Hymes (who complained that I had not sufficiently considered his work on
the subject), and none other than Frederick Newmeyer (whose scholarship I had
questioned). Essentially on the advice of the latter the paper was rejected. But the story
does not end here. Several years later Newmeyer was given the opportunity to respond to
my paper in Language, although it had not appeared there. (That it was a reply to Murray’s
1980 paper [as Newmeyer (1986b: 159n.18) tries to make his readers believe] can be easily
disproved by simply counting the frequent references to my 1983 article in his 1986
paper.) That he should refer in the same paper to the editor of Language as being
“scrupulously fair in his handling of submissions to the journal”, adding that he knows
“from personal experience that he [William Bright] is a model of impartiality” (Newmeyer
1986a: 14n.17), strains credulity.
THE ‘CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION’ AND ITS HISTORIOGRAPHY 197
the texts for the prerequisite courses for graduate study. (Fromkin 1991:78)
40
It is not only because of this, but also because of the documented evidence
provided in this chapter (and also in Chapter 9) of the indebtedness of Chomsky
to his predecessors that I have tended to argue in favour of ‘evolution’ rather than
‘revolution’ when referring to the changes that occurred in American linguistics
during the 1960s and 1970s.
But perhaps we should give Noam Chomsky the last word. As far as I know,
he never claimed himself to have produced a revolution in linguistics, at least not
in his writings or interviews during the 1960s through 1980s that I am aware of,
although he may not have objected to others attributing to him having caused
one. This appears to have changed during the 1990s. Whereas in a 1994 interview
with the editors of Linguistische Berichte, he merely hinted that his Government &
Binding (GB), also referred to as Principles & Parameters (P&P) theory,
constituted an important departure from the earlier frameworks he had proposed
(Chomsky 1994), he came out much more strongly in an interview he gave in
Brazil in November 1996. There he said about the GB theory first outlined in
Chomsky (1981):
It was the first genuine theory of language that had ever been produced in
2500 years because it showed how you could, in principle and to some
extent even in practice, overcome the conflict between descriptive and
explanatory adequacy. (Chomsky 1997: 169–170)
Chomsky (p.171) added in all seriousness (and as if to echo almost verbatim
Newmeyer [1980:250] concluding statement): “Probably more was learned about
language in the 1980s than in the entire preceding 2500 years.”
While Chomsky did not use the term, he surely meant to say that the GB/P&P
approach did produce a revolution, in fact one of staggering proportions. It then
must seem at least ironic, if such an insightful framework for the analysis and
understanding of language should become obsolete after a shelf life of only a
decade. As Chomsky explains further to his interviewers (1997: 171):
That brings us to the Minimalist Program [Chomsky 1992, 1995], which is
an attempt to try to show that these great successes [of BG/P&P] are based
on sand. That is, they are based on descriptive technology that works but is
wrong because it is unmotivated and should be taken apart.
40 When I entered graduate school at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver in September
1968, Fromkin’s depiction of the required readings still applied, together with writings by
Sapir, despite the fact that several staff members espoused strong TGG persuasions.
198 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Seen in the light of these pronouncements, one cannot but agree with Joseph
(1995:380), when he spoke of “Noam Chomsky, Serial Revolutionary”.41
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CHAPTER 9
ON THE ORIGINS OF
MORPHOPHONEMICS IN
AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
1.
Introductory remarks
As recently as 1997, Noam Chomsky reiterated what he had affirmed on several
occasions much earlier that when working out his ideas on rule ordering for his
Master’s thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951, he had not had
access to Bloomfield’s “Menomini Morphophonemics” paper of 1939, at the
same time suggesting that the generative model of linguistic analysis he developed
during his student years was more or less original with him. In this chapter it is
argued that Chomsky’s memory of his early work and of what he read at the time
has at best been sketchy, and that in effect even if he did not have direct access to
a copy of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague vol. 8 prior to the completion of
his M.A. thesis, he had very likely been able to absorb the essentials of Bloomfield’s
ideas about rule ordering through, among others, reading the proofs of his
supervisor’s main theoretical work, Zellig S.Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics.
In this book, which had been circulating in manuscript form since 1946, Harris
discusses the salient points of Bloomfield’s 1939 argument in a section entitled
“Morphophonemics”. Although Harris’ book was not published until 1951, its
preface, signed January 1947, thanks none other than Noam Chomsky for helping
with the proofs. It may also be pointed out that Harris’ Methods contains the
essentials of the generative approach to language which is by now almost
exclusively associated with Noam Chomsky’s name, not to mention the fact that
Harris’ 1941 and 1948 articles on Hebrew provided more than simply the data of
which Chomsky’s 1951 M.A. thesis constitutes largely a ‘restatement’ in a much
more abstract, technical form of his own making. In other words, it is the subject
of this chapter to demonstrate that there has been much more continuity and
cumulative advance in American linguistics than we have been made to believe
both by the active participants in the ‘revolution’, the followers, and the court
historians (cf. Chapter 8, for details).
When engaging in historiographical work, a serious scholar ascertains all
possible sources for the documentation of a given subject, notably written materials,
published or unpublished. He will of course pay particular attention to the
210 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
published work and any available written statement by the authors whose output
is under scrutiny about matters of educational background, formative influences,
and the like. If a given author is still alive, the historiographer might try to engage
him and ask specific questions that are deemed pertinent to the investigation. In
the case of Noam Chomsky the materials that the researcher can access are
enormous, if not overwhelming (cf. Koerner & Tajima 1986, which also lists a
great number of published interviews and other biographical data). Additional
information may also be gleaned from historical accounts that contain excerpts
from interviews or epistolary exchanges with Chomsky (e.g., Newmeyer 1980,
1996; R.A.Harris 1993, Murray 1994, Barsky 1997). In short there is, unlike in so
many other instances, no dearth of information available where Noam Chomsky
is concerned, the man and his work.
2.
The treatment of the subject in historical accounts
Given this apparent wealth of information on Chomsky (b.1928), there may still
be puzzles confronting the historical investigator regarding specific points in
Chomsky’s intellectual biography. One puzzling subject concerns the exact role
that Zellig Sabbettai Harris (1909–1992), Chomsky’s acknowledged linguistics
teacher at the University of Pennsylvania during the years 1946/47–1951, played
in the development of Chomsky’s ideas concerning generative grammar, in part
because Harris himself appears to have been rather reticent about what he
regarded as personal or private matters.1 As a result, the historiographer is largely
left with statements about their student-mentor relationship made by Chomsky
many years after the fact. Fortunately, there are a number of such
acknowledgments available, notably Chomsky’s introduction to the 1975
publication of an—indeed in parts heavily—edited (and in places severely
reduced) version of his The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory manuscript of 1955–
1956. There we can read the following important passage which bears quotation
in the light of the subject of the present chapter:
My formal introduction to the field of linguistics was in 1947, when Zellig
Harris gave me the proofs of his Methods in Structural Linguistics to read. I
found it very intriguing and, after some stimulating discussions with Harris,
decided to major in linguistics as an undergraduate at the University of
Pennsylvania. (Chomsky 1975 [1973]:25)
1
But see Harris (1990), in which he recounts the development of transformational
grammar, which his close contemporaries regularly used to associate with his work of the
1940s.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 211
Another, hardly less important part of the historiographer’s narrative would have
to be to map out the general atmosphere of the time and to provide an idea as to
what would have been available to an undergraduate in linguistics in terms of
publications, the prevailing mode of thought, and the discussion conducted in the
regular scholarly outlets. This would lead us, among other things, to realize that,
apart from several philological periodicals which carried studies in historicalcomparative Indo-European linguistics, there were only three regular linguistics
journals around at the time: Language, the official organ of the Linguistic Society
of America, published since 1925; International Journal of American Linguistics
(acronym: IJAL), originally launched by Franz Boas (1858–1942) in 1917,
petering out in 1939 and relaunched by Charles Frederick (“Carl”) Voegelin
(1906–1986) in 1944, and Word, the journal created in 1945 by European émigré
linguists residing in the New York City area, under the intellectual leadership of
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982).2 Unlike the late 1960s and 1970s, which saw the
establishment of a large number of linguistics journals on both sides of the
Atlantic, the American student of the 1940s and 1950s could manage to read
everything in the field that had been published since the 1930s, including all the
books, at least everything that had appeared in the United States.
In the historical accounts concerning American linguistics, notably Frederick
Newmeyer’s influential book of 1980, we find little on the subject of
‘morphophonemics’. Neither the first nor the second, revised edition of 1986 has
an index entry on it. Bloomfield’s 1939 paper is listed in the references of both
editions (Newmeyer 1980:253=1986:234) and is briefly mentioned in the section
“Early Generative Phonology” (39–42), which is essentially a celebration of
Morris Halle’s 1962 paper “Phonology in Generative Grammar”. Bloomfield’s
1939 is credited with having been the first to observe that “the synchronic order
of rules characteristically mirrors their relative chronology” (p.41=1986:35).
Earlier (p.36 [not retained in the 1986 edition]), “Bloomfield’s treatment of
Menomini morphophonemics (1939) and Jakob son’s Russian conjugation
(1948)” are recognized as “clearly” exhibiting the spirit “of a generative
phonology, although their rules are not treated formally.”
In 1976, in his survey of The Development of Morphophonemic Theory3 James
Kilbury—a former student of the late Charles Hockett, by the way — mentions
2 Perhaps we should also add the existence of a working-paper kind of journal edited by
George Leonard Trager (1906–1992), Studies in Linguistics, which appeared during 1942–
1975, and indeed published a variety of interesting papers, including several by Charles F.
Hockett, which Chomsky can be expected to have read at the time, given that, unlike
today, there was at the time such a dearth of linguistics periodicals. Interestingly, one of the
altogether five (including an unpublished paper by himself!) items listed by Chomsky in his
M.A. thesis (p.74) is Hockett’s 5-page note on “Which Approach in Linguistics is
‘Scientific’?” (Hockett 1950), to which an approving reference is made in Chomsky (1951:
3n.4; p.67), when the discussion concerns “explicit considerations of simplicity imposed on
the grammatical statement”.—On the distribution of articles by Harris’ generation in
Word, Studies in Linguistics, and Language, see the table in Murray (1994:218).
212 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Bloomfield’s 1939 paper in Chapter 4, “American Linguistics through
Bloomfield” (39–53) only very briefly (51–52), arguing (p.51):
It seems reasonable to conclude that Bloomfield’s choice of the title
“Menomini Morphophonemics” […] was explicitly intended to honor
Trubetzkoy and recognize his theoretical contributions. But neither this nor
Bloomfield’s earlier works give a picture of the position of
morphophonemics within his own framework.
Fair enough, but the rest of Kilbury’s account does not contain a discussion of
this paper beyond a mention of it in conjunction with Harris’ 1942 “Morpheme
Alternants” paper (p.87). In the concluding chapter, “American Linguistics since
Generative Grammar” (103–119), which begins with a presentation of the main
points of Chomsky’s 1951 M.A. thesis, Bloomfield’s 1939 paper is simply
mentioned as an example in support of the argument that “earlier descriptions in
terms of ordered morphophonemic rules […] had been content merely to specify
sufficient conditions of ordering” (p.106; emphasis in the original). There is no
mention of the possible influence that Bloomfield’s paper might have had on
Chomsky.
In Stephen Anderson’s Phonology in the Twentieth Century we find a section on
“Morphophonemics and the description of alternations” (1985: 270–276) in the
chapter devoted to Bloomfield (250–276), but only a small portion of it is
devoted to his 1939 paper. Anderson repeats Chomsky’s 1962 statement that
Bloomfield’s “classic 1939 paper on Menomini” constitutes “[t]he first systematic
treatment of morphophonemics” (p.271), only to warn the reader against
anachronism:
While Bloomfield was certainly one of the most noteworthy early
practioners of the morphophonemic method of description, […], we should
not therefore make the anachronistic assumption that he understood such
descriptions in the same way linguists do today.
Later in the book, Anderson describes Chomsky’s “first substantial results” in the
field of generative phonology in his 1951 M.A. thesis as having been “achieved
without substantial reference to structuralist assumptions” (315– 316). In the
section “The antecedents of generative phonological theory” (322–327),
Bloomfield’s 1939 article is only mentioned as a reference to Halle and
Chomsky’s writings of the 1950s. In essence, Chomsky is pre sented as the
independent thinker who was in no way significantly influenced by his
structuralist predecessors.4
3 Kilbury(1976), curiously enough, is not listed,.in Newmeyer (1980; 21986, 1996).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 213
Last but not least, the most specific treatment of the central subject of this
paper, namely, whether or not (the main tenets of) Bloomfield’s Menomini article
had an impact on Chomsky’s morphophonemics work during 1949– 1951 is
found in Newmeyer (1996:12–14). I shall return to the author’s observations,
outright claims and unsubstantiated deductions later in the present chapter (see
also note 5 below).
3.
A return to the sources of morphophonemics
Much has been said in the literature about the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’. If we
take the Communist overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia in 1917 as an
example, we may detect some similaries between this social and political
revolution and what happened in American linguistics during the 1960s. I am
thinking in particular of the manner in which representatives of the ancien régime
were treated (they may not have lost their lives, but many academic careers of those
who did not join the new faith were negatively effected, some were ruined) and,
what is of special interest in the present context, of the manner in which history
was rewritten, memory of the immediate past was obliterated and replaced by
something else. What this was will have become clear toward the end of this chapter.
Those who lived through the 1960s in the United States will have witnessed, if
they had not been swept away by the revolutionary fervour of the period, the
slash-and-burn strategy that Noam Chomsky, his close associate from the early
1950s onwards, Morris Halle (b.1923), and soon also an number of their students
were engaged in, notably were the work of Chomsky’s (and to some degree also
Halle’s) immediate predecessors and teachers were concerned. Instead, we can see
Chomsky building an Ersatz-history of his own supposed linguistic inspiration
during the same period (cf. Chomsky 1964, 1966). I hope to show, in the course
of the investigation below, that the idea of rule ordering played a central role in
the ‘revolution’ in American lin guistics. As a result, it is with regard to antecedents
of this idea that some of the revolutionary claims of Chomsky and his associates may
be said to stand or fall. If this assessment is correct, the emphasis on the part of the
protagonists will be on discontinuity, possibly even rupture (Michel Foucault
4 Curiously enough, Matthews’s Grammatical Theory in the United States from Bloomfield to
Chomsky, merely mentions Chomsky’s use of ‘morphonological rules’ and his argument in
favour of the establishment of a ‘morphonological level’ in Chomsky (1975[1955/56]), but
not Chomsky’s M.A. thesis of 1951 (it is not even included in his list of Chomsky’s
writings [Matthews 1993:255–256]), though Bloomfield’s 1939 paper is at least mentioned
(p.93) for his reference to ‘morpholexical variation’ (Bloomfield 1970[1939]:352). This is
all the more surprising as Matthews makes a long-running argument to demonstrate that
“Chomsky and his colleague Halle […] did not abandon Bloomfieldian ideas” and “[w]ith
some qualifications, […] retained the morpheme unit, much as the Post-Bloomfieldians
had conceived it” (86–87).
214 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
following Bachelard), with the immediate past. In other words, the supposedly
first work which contained in nuce the concept of generative grammar—
Chomsky’s 1951 Master’s thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew done under
Harris at the University of Pennsylvania—must be seen as entirely original, and
not in any way indebted to his structuralist predecessors. To the ‘revisionists’, it will
be incumbent upon them to demonstrate that Chomsky’s ideas indeed had
antecedents and that one can safely assume that he was familiar with them, when
writing his M.A. thesis.5
3.1
The idea of ordered rules in Bloomfield
The linguists teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the
‘revolutionary’ 1960s are reported as having actively discouraged students from
reading the work of the so-called Bloomfieldians, except for what Postal later
(1988:134) called ‘the right of salvage’ (cf., e.g., Langendoen 1968[1964], Bever
1967). The line that they were given was that their work was ‘prescientific’,
barely attaining ‘observational adequacy’, and hence of little value. Needless to
say, students are eager to follow their teachers’ advice, especially if it makes their
lives easier. As a result, few of them read Bloomfield’s book Language attentively at
the time, and even fewer with the intent of recognizing its significance for the
5
In his most recent historical accounts of the development of generative linguistics,
Frederick Newmeyer has argued, among other things, that prior to writing his M.A. thesis,
Chomsky had already worked out his ideas in a 1949 undergradute essay. Having
compiled, with the endorsement of Noam Chomsky and the assistance of his secretary, a
most detailed bibliography of his writings down to 1986 (Koeraer & Tajima 1986), I was
not aware of the existence of this work which, according to Newmeyer (apparently
following Chomsky’s own [1979:111] account), bore the same title. When I asked
Newmeyer in December 1988, when the paper was originally presented at the first annual
meeting of NAAHoLS, held at Tulane University in New Orleans, whether he had a copy
of the essay, he admitted that he had no such copy and in fact had never seen it but that
Chomsky had told him all about it. It may well be the case that Chomsky’s M.A. thesis,
began as a term paper, but I know of no place in which Chomsky lists his 1949 essay, not
even in his M.A. thesis, where it might have made sense, especially given the fact that he
lists among the five (!) items of his bibliography (p.74) an unpublished (and undated) paper
of his which appears to be an elaboration on Nelson Goodman’s (1906–1998) 1943 article
“On the Simplicity of Ideas”. (Let us not forget that Chomsky at the time was about as
much a student of Goodmann’s as of Harris’, and that it was the former who got him the
four-year Harvard Junior Fellowship.) However, given the lack of trustworthy evidence,
one may be justified in thinking that the 1949 date was advanced in an attempt to shore up
Chomsky’s claim to originality: at least it could have suggested that in 1949 Chomsky
might not yet have seen Jakobson (1948). Indeed, Newmeyer (1996:14) makes this point.
Be that as it may, we will see in what follows that it hardly matters for the present
argument whether or not Chomsky had laid down his ideas about generative grammars in
1949 or in 1951.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 215
development of American linguistics for more than one generation or for the
linguistic discussions of the 1950s and 1960s
Although it is hard to believe in view of the circumstantial evidence (see below)
that Chomsky had not seen, or, rather, had no knowledge of the ideas put
forward in Bloomfield’s ten-page paper of 1939, “Menomini Morphophonemics”,
when drafting his Master’s thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951,
let us assume for the moment that he had not. For someone who said that he
‘decided to enroll in linguistics’ in 1947, one would be safe to assume that he
soon acquired—or borrowed from the main library at the University of
Pennsylvania—a copy of Bloomfield’s Language, the main reference in any serious
linguistic discussion in America until well into the early 1960s. There, in the chapter
on Morphology (Bloomfield 1933:207–226), which, as Encrevé (1997:112) notes,
Harris was preoccupied with in rewriting during the 1940s, we find Bloomfield
discussing the formation of English plural forms, in particular “some instances of
the constituent form” in the latter as differing phonetically from “the underlying
singular form[s]” as in knife/knives, mouth/mouths, house/houses. There he proposes
(p.213):
We can describe the peculiarity of these plurals by saying that the final [f, ,
s] of the underlying singular is replaced by [v, ð, z] before the form [i.e., {s}] is added. The word “before” in this statement means that the alternant of
the bound form is the one appropriate to the substituted sound; thus, the
plural of knife adds not [-s], but [-z]: “first” the [-f] is replaced by [-v], and
“then” the appropriate alternant [-z] is added. The terms “before, after,
first, then,” and so on, in such statements, tell the descriptive order. Ther
actual sequence of constituents, and their structural order (§ 13.3) are a part
of the language, but the descriptive order of grammatical features is a fiction
and results simply from our method of describing the forms; it goes without
saying, for instance, that the speaker who says knives, does not “first”
replace [f] by [v] and “then” add [-z], but merely utters a form (knives)
which in certain features resembles and in certain features differs from a
certain other form (namely, knife).
In the section to which Bloomfield refers back to, he notes, among other things
(p.210):
The principle of immediate constituents leads us to observe the structural
order of the constituents, which may differ from their actual sequence;
thus, ungentlemanly consists of un- and gentlemanly, with the bound form
added at the beginning, but gentlemanly consists of gentleman and -ly with the
bound form added at the end.
216 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
It is obvious from this discussion that Bloomfield was quite aware of the important
distinction between ‘descriptive order’ (established by the linguist) and ‘structural
order’ (which he observes or ‘discovers’). Given the so-called PostBloomfieldians’ interest in, if not preoccupation with, the structure of English
during the 1940s, it is difficult to see that these passages in a twentypage chapter
could have escaped the attention of young linguists such as Noam Chomsky, who,
in 1962, at the Ninth Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
takes issue with Bloomfield’s (1933:213) passage quoted above in the following
fashion:
He regarded ordering of rules as an artifact—an invention of the linguist—as
compared with order of constituents, which is “part of language”. But this
depreciation of the role of order of synchronic processes is just one aspect
of the general antipathy to theory (the so-called “anti-mentalism” that
Bloomfield developed and bequeathed to modem linguistics). (Chomsky
1964[1962]:70n.8)
Leaving Chomsky’s claim about the lack of interest in theory on the part of
Bloomfield and his followers aside—which could be disproven easily—it is
significant that Chomsky continues his remarks by noting that “Harris showed
(1951a, 237) that some of Bloomfield’s examples of ordering can be handled by
unordred rules that state the phonemic composition of a morphophoneme in a
strictly morphophonemic context. But his method does not generalize to such
examples as the one given below; …” (Chomsky 1964 [1962]:70n.8; italics in the
original), and he goes on to criticize Harris essentially for not having clarified the
“italicized condition on morphophonemic rules” as he, Chomsky, thinks he
should have.
What may be more interesting is what Chomsky said in the running text of the
same page (since remarks in footnotes are not usually read aloud during oral
presentations). There, Chomsky makes a plea in favour of the importance of the
‘ordering of rules’ in phonology, notably the importance of “a fairly strict
ordering [that] must be imposed on phonological processes” (p.70). He then
comes to talk about two important papers of the 1930s, namely, Edward Sapir’s
celebrated “La réalité psychologique des phonèmes” of 1933 (published in English
only in 1949) and Bloomfield’s “Menomini Morphophonemics” paper of 1939,
stating that (ibid.):
[…] most of the examples in Sapir (1933) involve ordering, though he does
not mention the fact. Bloomfield was much more concerned with questions
of ordering and his Menomini morphophonemics (1939) is the first modern
example of a segment of a generative grammar with ordered rules.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 217
Chomsky then goes on to note that “Bloomfield does not discuss the extent or
depth of ordering6 in this grammar” and that it probably “does not exceed five”
whereas he, in his 1951 Master’s thesis on Modern Hebrew, had arrived at “a
depth of ordering that reaches the range of twenty to thirty”,7 pointing out that
“[r]ecent work [the reference he gives leads to no such thing] gives strong
support to the belief that ordering relations among phonological processes are
quite strict” (p.71).
There can be no doubt that important advances in phonological theory had
been made between 1939 and 1962; it may just be another question whether
these were simply due to Chomsky’s work alone. Since he refers to a passage in
Zellig Harris’ Methods in Structural Linguistics published in 1951, where Harris
discusses “some of Bloomfield’s examples of ordering” in the same note we have
already quoted from, it may be useful to inspect the page 237 in question, apart
from other passages in Methods.
3.2
The idea of ordered rules in Harris
In a proper history of generative linguistics still to be written, the role of Zellig
S.Harris (1909–1992) could hardly be underestimated. Together with Charles
F.Hockett (1916–2000), Harris was the main force in the theoretical discussions
of the 1940s and 1950s in American linguistics. Small wonder that Chomsky
includes, in his ‘bibliography’ to the 1951 M.A. thesis (p.74), Harris’ Methods and
a small but rather insightful paper by Hockett (1950a).8 Since the suggestion has
been made that Harris’ book or, perhaps more correctly, its contents had not been
available to the young Chomsky when developing his ideas from, say, 1949
onwards, two claims may have to be countered first; namely, the unavailability of
the work prior to its publication in 1951 and the suggestion (recently repeated by
Newmeyer [1996:14]) that the manuscript version of Methods did not contain the
portions that are of relevance to the present argument.9
6
By ‘depth of ordering’ is meant the number of sequentially ordered rules in a
grammatical description. Jensen (1999:82) is therefore not quite correct when he suggests
that Chomsky and Halle introduced the concept in SPE, though it is true that they
regarded “[t]he hypothesis that rules are ordered […] to be one of the best-supported
assumptions of linguistic theory” (Chomsky & Halle 1968:342).
7 Barely five years later, Thomas Gordon Bever (b.1939), a student of Halle, had
augmented the depth count of Bloomfield’s ordering to eleven and reduced the size of
Chomsky’s earlier claims considerably (Bever 1967; cf. Chomsky & Halle 1968:18n.4) —
after having exaggerated the distance of their respective ‘depths’ earlier (see Bever 1963).
8 The other two were, next to an otherwise unknown, unpublished paper by Chomsky
himself on “Some Comments on Simplicity and the Form of Grammars”, Goodman (1943)
and Greenberg (1950).
218 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
In their book American Structuralism, Hymes & Fought (1981) made the
following interesting statement (p.136):
By 1946 a full-scale treatment of language structure as a whole in such
[distinctively Bloomfieldian?] terms existed in the form of the manuscript of
Harris’ Methods in descriptive (later: structural) linguistics, recommended for
publication by the LSA’s committee on such matters, but languishing for
lack of funds.
In an article based on an interview given to Anne Daladier in Paris toward the
end of his life, we can read the author’s own affirmation that Methods “était rédigé
et circulait en 1946 mais n’est paru qu’en 1951” (Harris 1990:10). Indeed,
Hockett, in his 1947 paper on “Problems of Morphemic Analysis”, published in
Language, refers (p.331n.25) to the work (without naming its title) as “In his
unpublished material, Harris shows how this [theoretical requirement] can be
handled. His example is English /tuw/ (to, too, two), which in the absence of
semantic criteria first appears as a single morph.” Martin Joos (1907–1978), when
re-editing the paper in his Reader of 1957, identified the reference as follows: “See
now his Methods in Structural Linguistics, p.202” (Joos 1957:235). That Harris
submitted his manuscript to the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for possible
publication in their monograph series sometimes in 1947, may be gathered from
the following excerpt from the LSA Bulletin10 No.21:3 (1948), p.15 — referred to
in Hymes & Fought (1981[1975]:9–10) and, in some more detail, in Murray
(1994:164), who also notes (with reference to LSA Bulletin No.22:13–14) that
publication of Harris’ book was recommended by Bernard Bloch (1907–1965), the
Editor of Language since 1942, Charles C.Fries (1887–1967), Robert A.Hall
(1911–1997), Hockett, as well as Hans Kurath (1891–1992).11
9 When challenged by the present writer to reveal the basis of his assertion, Newmeyer
conceded: “Unfortunately, I never did see the ms version of Harris. Everything that I
know/ think about it comes from word of mouth (mouths, actually, since I had input from
several people).” (E-mail message of 8 October 2000).
10 The complete source is: Bulletin of the Linguistic Society of America (Supplement to
Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America), vol.24, No.3 (July-September 1948), p.
15 (from the Proceedings of the LSA meeting held at Yale University, New Haven, 29–30
December 1947).
11 This is based on information printed in LSA Bulletin No.22 (Oct.–Dec. 1949), where
Hans Kurath, as chair of the Standing Committee on Research, reports, after having
reported that Hall’s book was to be published shortly, the folllowing:
As far as the Committee knows, no arrangements have as yet been made for
publishing Harris’s book. It is to be hoped that this important contribution
to the methodology of descriptive linguistics can be published soon. The
manuscript was read not only by the members of the Com
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 219
Mr. [J Milton] Cowan [(1907–1993), the LSA Secretary] read the following
report for Mr. Hans Kurath [(1891–1992)], chairman of the Standing
Committee on Research.
Two manuscripts have been considered by the Committee; their
publication under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of America has been
recommended:
1. Robert A.Hall Jr., Descriptive Italian Grammar
2. Zellig S.Harris, Methods in Descriptive [sic] Linguistics
Hall’s manuscript is ready for the printer. Harris’ manuscript should be
carefully edited before it goes to press.
Both books are important. Hall’s is the first detailed grammar of a wellknown language prepared in accordance with the new descriptive
technique. Harris’ book represents the first consistent exposition of the
technique (or one technique) of analyzing and describing languages from a
structural point of view.
It appears, however, that despite Kurath’s suggestion, Harris’ manuscript was not
substantially revised, though it is fair to assume that at least some editing was done
and certain changes and even additions were made before Methods was published
by the University of Chicago Press in 1951.12 Reasons for the delay in publishing
Harris’ book are probably many, including, as those at the University of
Pennsylvania who knew Harris personally could attest to, that he was not someone
who would trouble himself to have a work of his published expeditiously;13 once
he felt he had done his part, others could be expected to see to it that it was
printed. Still, the more important reason for the delay may simply have been
economic. Unlike the fairly short and straightforward text by Robert A.Hall, who
used to prepare carefully typed copy, often camera-ready text, Harris’ book was
much longer, more technical, and more complex. As Norman A.McQuown (b.
1914) stated at the outset of his review of Methods, “This epoch-making book
was much read in manuscript before publication, and the author’s influence was
patent in many articles and reviews long before this summation appeared” (1952:
495). Given the later—one is almost tempted to say studied—ignorance of the
book, let us read a bit further to what else the Chicago anthropologist has to say
about Methods in these introductory paragraphs (ibid.):
mittee [consisting of Kurath, Hoenigswald, and the Indo-Europeanist
George S.Lane (1902– 1981)], but also by Bernard Bloch, […], who
unanimously support the recommendation of the Committee. (13–14)
220 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
[…]. Not since Bloomfield’s Language has there been such an ambitious
attempt to cover the whole field. Unlike Bloomfield’s, however, this book
is limited to the presentation of one principle and one method of linguistic
analysis and description. […]
The book follows out these basic methodological assumptions [laid out
by the reviewer in the preceding paragraph] to their logical conclusion,
exploiting every extension, every parallelism, every implication. The field
of linguistic analysis is covered. The methodological assumptions are
followed even where they prove ‘cumbersome’; indeed, we are warned
([p.] 371) that we must not stray from their rigorous application, no matter
how we may be tempted: ‘The utility of these operations is compromised,
however, if any results are recognized other than those obtained by means
of the stated operations.’ Stated in the simplest terms, you must know what
you are doing and why you are doing it, and be able to tell someone else
how. There is a high premium on responsibility.
The reviewer finds this emphasis wholly admirable, and looks forward to
the day when similar descriptive systems will be applicable with equal rigor
to all aspects of human behavior. He considers Harris’ contribution epochmarking in the double sense: first in that it marks the culmination of a
development of linguistics AWAY from a stage of intuitionism, frequently
culture-bound; and second in that it marks the beginning of a new period,
12 For instance, checking all of the many bibliographical footnotes in Methods, one notes that
especially in the first chapter, “Methodological Preliminaries”, Harris added references to
studies by Martin Joos on acoustics of 1948 and 1950 (p.4n.1 and p.16n.17, respectively) as
well as to the 1949 volume of Sapir’s writings (p.22n.24; see also p. 59n.1 and p.226n.17),
on which he published a very insightful review article (Harris 1951). Finally, there are
references to a 1949 paper by Einar Haugen (1906–1994) on “Phoneme or Prosodeme?”
(p.47n.2) and, toward the end of his book (p.359n. 19), to two minor pieces, a 3-page
note and an even shorter addendum of 1950 and 1951, respectively, published by his
colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Henry M.Hoenigswald (b.1915), evidently
added in the last minute to a much longer list of references. Also, one could imagine that
the “Appendix to Chapters 7–9: The Phonemes of Swahili. A Sample Phonemic Analysis
prepared with the collaboration of Nathan Glazer” (1951[1947]:97–124) as a post-1947
addition, though I doubt that the same holds true of the various other appendices which
are found at the end of each of the 19 chapters: they are typically illustrations, with data
from a variety of languages, though some of them are also addressing particular theoretical
issues, e.g., “Appendix to 12.41: The Criterion of Meaning” (186–195), where one might
argue—as long as one has not been able to inspect a copy of the 1947 manuscript—that it
had been added as a result of criticism Harris had received from colleagues.
However, one cannot be certain, unless a copy of the 1946 manuscript has been located. In
an e-mail message (dated 2 December 1999) to the present writer, Geoffrey J.Huck of the
University of Chicago Press wrote: “I did search the University of Chicago Press files on
Harris’s Methods, which are in the archives in Regenstein Library on the University of
Chicago campus. Alas, it was a sparse file and I could find nothing there which touched on
the matter either way [i.e., whether certain passages in the book had been added later or
not].”
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 221
in which the new methods will be applied ever more rigorously to ever
widening areas in human culture. (Emphasis in the original.)
Similar assessments were made by various others of Harris’ peers (cf. Koerner
1993:513, for locations of reviews). For instance, Stanley S.Newman (1905–
1984), a former student of Sapir’s, noted that “There will be little disagreement
among linguists that this book is the most important contribution to descriptive
linguistics since […] Bloomfield’s Language” (1952:404).14 This is also the book of
which Noam Chomsky stated in 1973 —this testimony bears being repeated
here: “My formal introduction to the field of linguistics was in 1947, when Zellig
Harris gave me the proofs of his Methods in Structural Linguistics to read. I found it
very intriguing and, after some stimulating discussions with Harris, decided to
major in linguistics as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania”
(Chomsky 1975:25). Of course, one should stress the word ‘formal’ in Chomsky’s
statement since— as he acknowledged in a footnote (p.50n.44) —that he had
“read proofs” of the edition of David Kim i’s Hebrew Grammar by his father
William Chomsky (1896–1971), a professor at Gratz College in Philadelphia (later
also at Dropsie College), published in 1952, “many years earlier”, i.e., before 1947,
and he had also been “studying Arabic with Giorgio Levi Della Vida [(1904–
1971)]” (ibid.).
Chomsky’s account on how he started out from Harris’ suggestions and
developed his own ideas, first in a 1949 ‘undergraduate thesis’, then in his M.A.
thesis of 1951 (1975:25ff.) reads rather well, and Harris’ Methods is given an
13 An example of Harris’ ‘carelessness’ about the fate of his work may be seen from
the fact that, as may be gathered from Bloch’s footnote at the end of Harris (1965:
401n.56): “[This article has not been proofread by the author.]”. The paper had
been submitted much earlier; Harris simply relied on Bloch to do the rest. (Note
that this footnote was dropped in the 1970, 1972, and 1981 reprints.) Interestingly,
no further publication from Harris’ pen appeared in Language after this 40-page
“Transformational Theory” article; one may speculate as to the reasons for this,
given that Harris remained scholarly productive right to the end of his life in 1992.
No doubt, the change of the editorship after Bloch’s untimely death of cancer in
1965 had something to do with it. In fact, Harris had not published anything in
Language between 1957 and 1965. Matthews (1999:114) comments: “I have not
thought it my business to inquire into the circumstances”, but historians might wish
to do so. Reading Harris’ last contribution to Language, in particular the footnote he
appended to the his remark “To interrelate these analyses, it is necessary to
understand that these are not competing theories, but rather complement each other
in the description of sentences”, it seems that Harris was giving his parting shot—in
the strongest terms he ever seems to have used in print:
The pitting of one linguistic tool against another has in it something
of the absolutist post-war temper of social institutions, but it is not
required by the character and range of those tools of analysis. (Harris
1965:365n.6)
222 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
important role in the narrative, but one must realize that Chomsky is
reconstructing what had happened in his theoretical mind more than twenty years
earlier and from the vantage point of the incredible success of his own linguistic
thinking.
While it may be understandable that Chomsky should credit his former teacher
Harris less than might have been his due, readers might be surprised to read that
he had encountered an “almost total lack of interest” in his 1951 thesis (1975:30),
“[w]ith the exception of Henry Hoenigswald, who read the work carefully and
made helpful comments” (p.51n.51).15 Given that certain accounts of the
development of Generative Linguistics, notably those by Newmeyer beginning in
1980, tend to credit Chomsky with having developed the basic ideas almost
single-handedly, it may be useful to remind the reader that the notion of a
generative grammar was neatly sketched in the concluding chapter of Methods,
where Harris summarizes the results of his discussion (261–378) —even if the
term ‘generative’ is not mentioned:16
The work of analysis leads right up to the statements which enable anyone
to synthesize or predict utterances in the language. These statements form a
deductive system with axiomatically defined initial elements and with
theorems concerning the relations among them. The final theorems would
indicate the structure of the utterances of the language in terms of the
preceding parts of the system.
There may be various ways of presenting this system, which constitutes
the description of the language structure. The system can be presented most
baldly in an ordered set of statements defining the elements at each
successive level or stating the sequences which occur at that level [footnote
17 omitted]. Compactness, inspectability, and clarity of structure may be
ganied at various points by the use of symbols for class, variable member,
and relation, or by the construction of geometric models (diagrams).
Other types of presentation which have frequently been used have
depended ultimately on moving-parts models such as machines or historical
sciences. In using such models, the linguistic presentation would speak, for
example, of base forms (e.g. in morphophonemics, where the observed
forms are obtained from the base form by applying a phonemic
substitution), of derived forms (e.g. stems plus those affixes which are added
in the descriptive order might be called derived stems), or processes which
yield one form out of another. In all these types of presentation, the elements
14 Newman (1952:405) also noted that “Harris’ use of compact statements, particularly in
the form of an algebraic type of descriptive notation, required concentrated attention.” He
lauds Harris for referring “more frequently to the contributions of European linguists than
has been the custom in recent American books on linguistics” (ibid.). Indeed, one finds
frequent references to the work of Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Jespersen, Saussure, and others
in Harris’ many bibliographical footnotes.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 223
are seen as having histories, so that the relation of an element to sequences
which contain it becomes the history of the element as it is subjected to
various processes and extensions. (Harris 1951:372–273)17
Reading these passages, one is inclined to underline various observations or add
other means of emphasis, but it should suffice to consign accounts of ‘Chomsky’s
revolution’ as found in Newmeyer (1980, 21986; 1996) and emulators to
something other than history. Chomsky himself acknowledged that “[t]he concept
of ‘grammatical transformation’ developed out of Harris’s work on discourse
analysis” (1975:41), but when he dates this as after the completion of Methods and
connects it with Harris’ turning his investigation of ‘discourse analysis’ as if this
was an unrelated subject matter from what he himself was to pursue, the above
quote at least weakens his acknowledgment, since no doubt Harris had held these
ideas well before 1951.18
However, since the present chapter is concerned essentially with the genealogy
of the idea of ‘morphophonemics’ and the concept of ‘ordered rules’ in American
linguistics, we must turn to it in what follows.
3.3
Suggested lines of transmission: Bloomfield—>Harris—>Chomsky
Even from Chomsky’s own early work, if read carefully, the impression prevails
that there was more evolution than revolution occurring in American linguistics
15 At least in the revised version of Chomsky’s M.A. thesis of December 1951,
where one might have expected it, no such acknowledgement can be found.
16 In order to counter the suggestion that these statements were added much later
and not part of the manuscript that Harris submitted to the LSA, I may quote from
an e-mail message from Prof. Chomsky to Dr Brace E.Nevin of 28 June 2001
(quoted here with permission granted by Chomsky on 23 July 2001), where he
wrote:
You asked about the status of the Methods ms. My information is
limited. I read proofs—I think page proofs, but can’t be sure after all
this time—in 1947; my understanding was that that was the final
proof-reading. I assumed that the ms had been circulated in 1946 or
even before, and though I don’t recall, I presume the Preface was
signed before the ms went to the publisher, so January 1947 is not at
all surprising. I doubt that substantive changes would have been
introduced after proofreading of the proofs. I never noticed any, and
wouldn’t have been able to check anyway, since I did not have the
proofs available after I finished with them in 1947 and gave them
back to Zellig.
224 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
during the 1940s and 1950s.19 In order to put all the pieces to gether, a
monograph would probably be required, but perhaps even a sketch will suggest
that the transmission of ideas in linguistics during that period was much facilitated
by the small size of the community of scholars and the relatively small number of
publications: most American linguists of the time knew each other personally.
They met regularly at the annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of America,
always held in the last week of December in cities like Philadelphia, New York,
or Chicago, and during the annual Summer Institutes, mostly held at the
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor during that period. There was collaboration
(and co-publication) among these linguists and they circulated manuscipts,
sometimes for several years before they were published.
While personal information on Harris is not readily available in print,20 we may
glean some information on his intellectual biography by looking at his scholarly
output. From this we may gather that his training was in Semitics in a fairly broad
sense, both philological and linguistic, and from his master’s thesis of 1932 until
the publication of his monograph Development of the Canaanite Dialects in 1939, we
do not see him as a theorist and generalist (cf. Koerner 1993:510–511, for details).
The focus of attention appears to have changed around 1939, as we may gather
from his list of publications, beginning with an edition of Hidatsa Texts collected
by Robert H.Lowie (1883–1957), a student of Boas’ and a friend of Sapir’, with
17 Part of footnote 18 reads: “In such presentations, a relation between two elements a and
b is essentially the difference between two historical or otherwise derivational paths: that
from A to a and that from A to b. A is set up as a base from which both a and b have, by
different paths, been derived.”
18 This holds also true of Charles Hockett’s ideas of ‘transformation’, which go back at
least to 1949 (cf. Koerner 1989:126–128, for details). Interestingly, Katz & Bever (1976:
17) affirmed that “contrary to popular belief, transformations come into modern
linguistics, not with Chomsky, but with Harris’s rules relating sentence forms. These are
genuine transformations, since they are structure-dependent mappings of phrase markers
onto phrase markers. That this is so can be seen from the examples of transformations
Harris gives”. Coming from people with close ties to Chomsky, this statement should
count for something. Indeed, a list of ‘grammatical transformations’ of English was
included in the report presented to the Linguistic Society of America in 1950, and
published in Harris’ “Discourse Analysis”, Language 28.1–30 (1952), §2.33.
19 In what follows, as well as in other parts of this paper, I gratefully acknowledge the
spade work and a variety of suggestions made by Pierre Encrevé (1997), who, unlike
myself, is a phonologist and much more familiar with the internal history of ‘generative’
phonology, having translated the theoretial portions of Chomsky & Halle (1968) as
Principes de phonologie générative (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973). It should be pointed out at
least at this stage of the discussion that Encrevé’s article is an impressive attempt at writing
the preSPE, SPE, and post-SPE history of generative phonology (see especially pp. 100–
102, 107– 113, and 114–120 passim), whereas my paper focusses on the subject of the
transmission
of
ideas
surrounding
the
concept
(and
term)
of
‘morphophonology’/‘morphophonemics’—note
that
the
phonology/phonemics
distinction would soon be used to distinguish ‘generative’
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 225
grammatical notes and phonograph transcriptions by him and C.F. (“Carl”)
Voegelin, a one-time student of Sapir’s. With this undertaking, Harris opens his
horizon toward the study of Amerindian languages and non-historical linguistic
data, and given the complexity of many of these indigenous languages (as well as
their structural differences from Semitic and Indo-European languages), special
techniques were needed to analyse and describe them adequately. For instance,
the American Philosophical Society Library in Philadelphia holds “Cherokee
Materials” of some 575 slips and 10 discs dating from 1941–1946, giving evidence
of Harris’ work with informants during the period. In his short Preface to
Methods, signed Philadelphia, January 1947, Harris acknowledged, among others,
the friendship he had held with Sapir and Bloomfield, both of whom had studied
Amerindian languages extensively.
It is around 1939/1940 that Harris appears to have begun to take a special
interest in general linguistic questions and matters of theory and methodology.21
It is not by chance that in his seminars, as Leigh Lisker (b.1918) recalls,
transformations were mentioned between 1940 (perhaps as early as late 1939,
when Lisker took his first linguistics course) and the term ending June 1941,
when he got his B.A. (Lisker in an e-mail message to Bruce Nevin, 1 March
2000). Influential papers of the 1940s, such as “Morpheme Alternants in
Linguistic Analysis” (Harris 1942), “Simultaneous Components in Phonology”
(Harris 1944), and “Discontinuous Morphemes” (Harris 1945), had already been
published by the time the 17-year-old Chomsky enrolled at the University of
Pennsylvania, and well before he met Harris, possibly in late 1946, though the
year regularly given by Chomsky as the time he decided to seriously study
linguistics with the former is 1947 (e.g., Chomsky 1975:25; cf. Barsky 1997:51).
Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that matters of phonology and
morphology and their interrelationships were very much discussed at the time by
the main representatives of the so-called PostBloomfieldians, in addition to
phonology from ‘Bloomfieldian’ phonology (see Chomsky 1964[1962])—and the idea of
‘ordered rules’, while at the same time trying to offer at least hints at what might be called
‘external history’, but which I found largely missing in Encrevé.
20 Apart from obituaries of Harris which are short on biographical particulars (apart from
the suggestion that Harris’ name might have been made up by himself- see Nevin [1992:
60]), I know only of Barsky (1997), which contains a chapter (47–93), which however
deals only in passing with linguistic matters (49–72), and mainly with Harris’ social and
political beliefs and activities and their influence on Chomsky during the late 1940s and
early 1950s (cf. Harris 1997 on his political views; Chomsky’s are sufficiently well known
to require a particular reference here; cf. Part II in Koerner & Tajima 1986, for detailed
lists of Chomsky’s publications on political issues). It appears that Harris was a rather
private man. Curiously, no American was found to write the official obituary that every
other deceased former president of the LSA (Harris served in that capacity in 1955) has
received in Language. The one that P.H.Matthews of Cambridge was eventually
commissioned to undertake possibly constitutes a fairer appraisal of Harris’ work than any
American linguist of today might have written (Matthews 1999).
226 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Harris, such as Bloch, Hockett, Nida, Swadesh, Trager, Voegelin, and Wells (cf.
Joos 1957, for the reprinting of many of their papers), when young Chomsky
entered the scene. There was little evidence of a lack of interest in ‘theory’ during
the 1940s and 1950s, as Chomsky in 1962 and thereafter frequently tried to
depict these decades. Chomsky’s own writings of the period (e.g., Chomsky
1955b, 1955/56) were quite typical of what was said and done, and Harris’ ideas
loom large.
Before we attempt a discussion of the issues that many of the American
descriptivists of the 1940s and 1950s were concerned with, let me quote a passage
in Barsky’s biography of Chomsky, in which he draws an interesting picture of
Harris’ social and intellectual habits (which corroborates what former colleagues
and students of Harris have told me over the years):
Harris encouraged the kind of unstructured, lively, and creative debate that
had been the mainstay of Chomsky’s early education and upon which he
had thrived […]. Course requirements, formal relationships, and scholarly
hierarchies were rejected in favor of informal gatherings, broad-based
discussions, and intellectual exchange. The University of Pennsylvania’s
linguistics department comprised, at that time, a very small group of
graduate students who shared an enthusiasm not only for linguistics, but also
for politics. They shunned the classroom, and met either at the nearby
Horn and Hardart Restaurant or at Harris’s apartment in Princeton or New
York. The discussions could last for days, and Chomsky remembers them as
being “intellectually exciting as well as personally very meaningful
experiences”. (Barsky 1997:51)22
Harris’ manner of conducting himself suggests a general generosity, which
certainly included his readiness to share his ideas with interested parties, and not
claim ownership, as many teachers do, of his particular discoveries, theoretical
findings, or terminological choices.23 Still, it appears from what I have been given
to understand by those who knew him, that Harris was a person who often went
his own way and left those behind who did not follow the general path of his
thinking. In an attempt to round out the picture of Harris’ enigmatic personality,
I would like to add a statement of his. Characterizing both Bloomfield and Sapir
in 1973, Harris noted the following, which may well apply to his own
professional credo, and possibly with a swipe at what he observed in American
linguistics from the 1960s onwards:
21 One indication is that, apart from a one-page review of a volume in his original area of
interest in 1935 (Language 11.262–263), Harris starts his series of contribtions to Language in
1940 with a review of a book on general linguistics, followed by Harris (1941, 1942, 1944,
etc.) and a variety of other articles until 1957, after which only Harris (1965) appeared in
that journal. Matthews (1999:112), too, refers to 1940 as the year by which Harris “had
already turned to general linguistics”.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 227
Neither competed, or saw his scientific achievement as a matter of personal
aggrandissement. And this was not for lack of a sense of history about their
work. Both men knew that they were creating—or rather participating
centrally in the creation of —a science. There was an excitement around
them, in their ideas among their students and colleagues. Each of them
pushed for his ideas—Bloomfield by incisive argument, Sapir by brilliant
exposition—though without seeking to pre-empt the field. (Harris 1973:
255)
Much has been made by MIT linguists (see Section 3, below) and their
‘historians’ (see Section 1, above) of the issue of whether or not the young Noam
Chomsky, when working on his ideas from 1949 onwards that led to his M.A.
thesis Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (Chomsky 1951), had had access to a
copy of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, volume 8 (Prague, 1939), which
contained Bloomfield’s subsequently celebrated 101/2-page article “Menomini
Morphophonemics” (which he had submitted as a tribute to Nikolaj Sergeevi
Trubetzkoy, who had died in Vienna in August 1938). True, the fact that the
University of Pennsylvania Library had acquired a copy of this Gedenkschrift early
on,24 or that Harris reviewed Trubetzkoy’s Grundzüge (which had appeared in the
same series in the same year) two years later (Harris 1941b) could at least serve as
circumstantial evidence that Bloomfield’s article was in all likelihood available to
any inquisitive student there in the 1940s.
Yet, before entering this discussion, let me quote a few passages from
Bloomfield’s paper, which cannot but strike even the reader of today as carefully
crafted and succinctly stated. It deals with “the internal sandhi or morphophonemics of
the language [i.e., Menomini, an Algonquian language spoken by a small number
(Bloomfields mentions some 1,700 of mostly bilingual speakers residing in
22 This last quotation has been taken from The Chomsky Reader ed. by James Peck (New
York: Pantheon, 1987), p.8.
23 Those who knew Harris well—like Bruce E.Nevin (b.1945), who was his student from
1966 through 1970—may feel that in the following characterization which Harris gave of
Bloomfield and Sapir he reveals much of himself:
Each [Bloomfield and Sapir] were, to the good fortune of those who knew
him and I hope of themselves, an extremely decent person of high
integrity; each had utter and explicit contempt for the posturings and status
in this society as well as for its vast injustice and inequality. They were people
not with ambition, least of all with ambition in the terms of this society,
but with satisfaction in what he was producing. Those who remember
Bloomfield and Sapir know this about them. (Harris 1973:255; cf. Nevin
1992:63)
228 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Wisconsin), which he had studied very assiduously for many years (see Bloomfield
1962)]” (Bloomfield 1939:105; italics in the original), thus providing a nod in the
direction of both Trubetzkoy (1929, 1931, 1934) as well as traditional P inian
type grammar.25 Bloomfield early on in his paper describes his approach to the
subject in the following terms:
The process of description leads us to set up each morphological element in
a theoretical basic form, and then to state the deviations from this basic form
which appear when the element is combined with other elements. If one
starts with the basic forms and supplies our statements (§§ 10 and following)
in the order in which we give them, one will arrive finally at the forms of
words as they are actually spoken. Our basic forms are not ancient forms,
say of the Proto-Algonquian parent language, and our statements of internal
sandhi are not historical but descriptive, and appear in a purely descriptive
order. (Bloomfield 1939:105–106; italics in the original)
However, as if to anticipate criticism by later commentators, Bloomfield (p. 106)
points to the fact that most of these ‘theoretical basic forms’ and the processes
applied to them “approximate the historical development from
ProtoAlgonquian to present-day Menomini”. The result of his ‘morpholexical’
treatment of the language is that “[t]he forms now arrived at are phonemic forms of
the actual Menomini language. Menomini phonetics, however, allows a great
deal of latitude to some of its phonemes and of some overlapping between
phonemes” (1939:115; italics in the original). Charles Voegelin, who reviewed
the Trubetzkoy memorial volume in Language in 1940, spending about 30%26 of
the six odd pages on discussing Bloomfield’s “unrestricted description of a sound
system [as compared to the other contributions, notably those by fellowAmericans Morris Swadesh and George L. Trager]”, answers his own rhetorical
question about the advantages of Bloomfield’s morphophonemic approach as
follows:
Bloomfield’s Menomini may be distinguished from Nootka [described in
detail by Sapir and Swadesh], Tübatulabal [Swadesh & Voegelin (1939)],
and Potawatomi [done in Hockett’s 1939 doctoral dissertation under
Bloomfield] studies in that it alone is good to the reader: it gives him few
theoretical forms and only single rules to remember. (Voegelin 1940:257)
24 According to Thomas C.Mason (e-mail to author of 6 March 2000) “UPenn’s Franklin
Library owns a copy of TCLP 8; it’s shelved in High Density Storage and carries a Dewey
call number, suggesting that the volume has probably been there for the past 60 years.”
25 The fact that Bloomfield regarded P
ini as a major influence has been shown by
Rogers (1987); see also Cardona (1965).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 229
Two years after the appearance of these comments on Bloomfield’s article, we
have Harris’ short, programmatic paper in the same journal, which, as mentioned
earlier, led to a lively debate. In “Morpheme Alternants in Linguistic Analysis”,
Harris characterizes the purpose of his paper as doing nothing else but
[…] to suggest a technique for determining the morphemes of a language,
as rigorous as the model used now for finding its phonemes. The proposed
technique differs only in details of arrangement from the methods used by
linguists today. However, the small differences suffice to simplify the
arrangement of grammars. (1942:169; emphasis added: EFKK)
Not surprisingly, perhaps—we ought to remind ourselves that the article appeared
four years before Bloomfield’s debilitating stroke in 1946 — the first reference (p.
169n.1) is to Bloomfield’s 1933 book,27 but in the elaboration of his technique on
the subsequent pages Harris explicitly refers six times in all to Bloomfield’s 1939
article, beginning with a mention that “[s]ome linguists have called such pairs [of
alternating forms] morpholexical alternants of one morpheme” (p. 170). His
statement “The difference between those two cases [of alternants in Hebrew] is
seen again in the Menomini e, which is an alternant of the morpheme juncture /-/”
(p. 175) deserves mention especially because of the data cited. Further, when
talking about ‘external sandhi’ and similar phenomena (p.176), Harris refers to
examples from Bloomfield’s analysis three times (notes 18–20), and, finally, when
supplying examples for morpheme alternants in unique enviroments (p.178),
Harris again quotes from Bloomfield’s Menomini paper (in note 22).
Given Harris’ manner of conducting himself as a mentor and Chomsky’s
enthusianism for doing linguistics with him during the late 1940s and early 1950s
—not to mention Chomsky’s voracious reading habits, then as still today, one
would be hard pressed to believe that when he was writing his B.A. honours
paper in 1949, Chomsky was unaware of Bloomfield’s proposals concerning rule
ordering and morphophonemic analysis, whether or not he had read Bloomfield’s
Language and his 1939 Menomini article at the time or not. As hinted earlier,
Harris’ 1942 paper got a discussion going that included most of the main players
in the descriptivist debate about phonology, morphology, and their interaction.28
Bernard Bloch (1947:398) sets out the framework “[t]o describe the structure of a
language as a whole”, specifying that “the linguist must be able to describe also
the structure of any single sentence or part of a sentence that occurs in the
language. He does this in terms of constructions—essentially in terms of
26 Out of altogether 31 contributions (not counting a couple of posthumous papers by
Trubetzkoy himself), which are all enumerated and a number of which, especially in the
area of phonology, are discussed.
27 Followed by another on page 171 (note 7), not to mention an unreferenced discussion of
Bloomfield’s knife/knives, etc. examples (p.173) quoted in §2.1 of the present paper.
230 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
MORPHEMES and their ORDER” (emphasis in the original). Section 7,
entitled “Morphophonemes“ (414–418), discusses the treatment of different forms
that occur in the same environment, but are not entirely in free variation with
each other. Hockett’s paper of the same year as Bloch’s (and published primo loco
in the same issue of Language) announces that it “develops further the morphemic
analysis presented by Zellig S.Harris in 1942” (p.321). Hockett does not refer to
Bloomfield’s 1939 article, but when illustrating his procedures, he notes: “I
choose Fox [another Algonquian language treated by Bloomfield] rather than
Menomini because the examples are a bit easier to cite” (p.332n.22). Nida,
referring to both Harris (1942) and Hockett (1947a), likewise, does not refer to
Bloomfield’s Menomini paper either,29 but to pages in Bloomfield’s Morphology
chapter in Language. Interestingly, in a footnote extending the bibliographical
reference to Bloomfield (1933:217), Nida remarks: “William L.Wonderly has
proposed in discussion that these French forms [i.e., ‘subtractive’ morphemes,
taking the feminine form as ‘basic’] might be most economically handled
morphophonologically” (Nida 1948:441 n.51; emphasis added: EFKK), together with
a reference to Trager (1940).
That the alleged failure to make explicit references to Bloomfield’s 1939 article
is not truly an indication of neglect may be gathered from the fact that even in his
article in Language entitled “Peiping Morphophonemics” Hockett does not make
a mention of it, but refers instead to Harris (1942) and his later revision of some
of Harris’ assumptions (Hockett 1947a) as the basis of his treatment of Chinese
(Hockett 1950b: 63n.1). It seems understandable that once the essential points of
Bloomfield’s proposals had become part and parcel of the ongoing discussion,
such an explicit mention was no longer regarded as necessary. These linguists
certainly did not see a change of position from Bloomfield (1933) to Bloomfield
(1939), but rightly saw his later analysis as fully in line with his previous work.
Other papers published during the 1940s, notably in Language, albeit not
exclusively, could be referred to in order to document that when Noam
Chomsky entered the field, linguistics was anything but a theoretical wasteland
(cf., e.g., Bloch 1941, 1948). Harris’ Methods of 1947, in which there is an entire
chapter devoted to “Morphophonemes” (219–242), has two explicit references to
28 That the (Post-)Bloomfieldians regarded this area of interest as most representative of
their work may be gathered from the reprints in Readings in Linguistics “[e]dited for the
Committee on the Language Program by Martin Joos” (Joos 1957, title-page). Apart from
the fact that 28 articles out of a total of 43 were originally published (with few exceptions
in Language) between 1941 and 1951, the great majority were devoted to these areas of
linguistic structure, their analysis and description.
29 However, as Encrevé (1997:105) has documented, there are other places where
Bloomfield’s 1939 article is referred to and/or quoted from; for instance, in Harris’ review
article of Sapir’s Selected Writings of 1949 (Harris 1951:291n.7; 292n.8, and 293), in Floyd
G.Lounsbury’s (1914–1998) methodological chapter to his important Oneida Verb
Morphology book (Lounsbury 1953), and in Hockett’s Manual of Phonology of 1955, which
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 231
Bloomfield’s Menomini paper (p.231n.29; p.237n. 42),30 and a third reference in
a later chapter on “Constructions” (325–348), where he discusses ‘zero
morphemes’ (Harris 1951[1947]:336n.22, referring to Bloomfield 1939: 108). It is
difficult to believe that these passages (and explicit references) were not in the
1946 manuscript version whose proofs Chomsky himself confirms he had read
(Chomsky 1975:25; 1979:196n.5). On page 231, Harris discusses a “slightly
different type of regularity […] in Menomini, where every morpheme ending in
a non-syllabic [structure?] has a member with added /e/ when it occurs before a
consonant”, evidence for which he takes directly from Bloomfield (1939:109).
On page 237, he addresses the issue of ‘Morphophonemic Equivalent for
Descriptive Order of Alternation’, where he adds in a footnote supplying the full
bibliographical reference: “Bloomfield calls the necessary order of the statements
[…] ‘descriptive order.’ See also in his Language 213” (note 42; see also n.39 on
page 236). After having discussed examples taken from Bloomfield’s article, Harris
concludes: “The effect of this descriptive order of the statements about alternation
can be obtained alternatively by an exact statement of the representation of the
morphophonemes” (p.237).
The concept and importance of ‘descriptive order’ is then treated at length in
Harris’ chapter on “Morpheme Classes” (243–261 on pp.246ff.). It is probably
not by chance that he presents examples of ‘descriptive order’ from Modern
Hebrew (246–248), given that he was a Semiticist, a speaker of the language, and
had previously published a succinct paper on “Componential Analysis of a
[Modern] Hebrew Paradigm” in Language in 1948, which starts out with the
statement: “The linguistic structure of an utterance is presumed to be fully stated
by a list of the morphemes which constitute it, and by their order” (Harris 1948:
87). Isn’t this what Chomsky was working out in his B.A. essay of 1949 and his
M.A. thesis of 1951? Earlier, in 1941, Harris had already published a very detailed
paper on “Linguistic Structure of [Classical] Hebrew”, which he says, “is an attempt
to state the structure of Hebrew (of 600 B.C.) in terms of a formal method,
which asks only what forms exist and in what combinations” (Harris 1941a: 143).
There (pp.153–154) he notes: “The phoneme, or phoneme combination, or
absence of a phoneme, which is replaced by other phonemes in the variants of a
morpheme-unit may be called a morphophoneme.” In short, both in terms of
data from Hebrew and ideas about morphonological analysis there was a plethora
Chomsky reviewed in 1957. However, my main focus in the present paper has been on
pre1949 publications in which Bloomfield’s morphophonological ideas were discussed.
30 For extensive quotations from Harris (1951:231, 237), see Fought (1999:315–316), who
concludes, having cited relevant passages from Bloomfield (1933, 1939): “Together, then,
these excerpts from Harris (1951) cover the essential elements of Bloomfield’s
morphophonemics: dual levels of representation, the need to use knowledge of
morphological boundaries, and the principles of conversion from basic to phonemic forms
using rules ordered for that purpose.”
232 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
of material and suggestions available from Harris’ pen alone to set the stage for
Chomsky’s early linguistic efforts.31
3.4
Methodological statements in Chomsky (1951)
Lest we leave the tertium comparationis out of the present discussion, at least a few
passages from the introductory statements in Chomsky’s 1951 thesis should be
supplied in order to give an idea of his argument. If we assume that Chomsky
turned an undergraduate paper into an Master’s thesis, something which happens
quite regularly, it is understandable that he has not made a reference to it in the
bibliography of The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, though one might have
expected a mention of it in the “0. Intro duction” (1–6), as is customary. Instead,
the revised text of December 1951, dispensing with any such traditional talk about
the origin of or motive for the thesis, addresses the subject right from the start in a
surprisingly self-assured manner:
A grammar of a language must meet two distinct kinds of criteria of
adequacy. On the one hand it must correctly describe the ‘structure’ of the
language (i.e., it must isolate the linguistic units, and, in particular, must
distinguish and characterize just those utterances which are considered
‘grammatical’ or ‘possible’ by the informant), including as a special subclass
those of the analyzed corpus. On the other hand it must meet requirements
of adequacy imposed by its special purposes (e.g., pedagogical; as a basis for
comparative study, etc.), or, in the case of a linguistic grammar having no
such special purposes, requirements of simplicity, economy, compactness,
etc.1 Thus the linguistic analysis of a language L can be described as the
process of determining the set of ‘grammatical’ or ‘significant’ sentences of L
(i.e., of determining the extension of the predicate ‘grammatical in L’), or,
in other words, it is the process of converting an open set of sentences—the
linguist’s incomplete and in general expandable corpus—into a closed2 set—
the set of gramatical sentences—and of characterizing this latter set in some
interesting way. Accordingly we might distinguish and consider separately
two aspects of the linguistic analysis of a language, a process of ‘discovery’
consisting of the application of the mixture of formal and experimental
procedures constituting linguistic method, and a process of ‘description’
consisting of the construction of a grammar describing the sentences [p.2]
which we know from step one to be grammatical, and framed in
accordance with the criteria related to its special purposes. (Chomsky 1951:
1–2)32
31 Or should we assume that already the term ‘morphophonemics’ itself was an
independent creation of Noam Chomsky’s in 1949?
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 233
In other words, Chomsky moves medias in res so to speak very quickly and his
argument becomes more and more technical. Much is made of what he calls
‘certain criteria of simplicity’ (p.4), and “any relatively precise notion of
simplicity” (p.5),33 in order to be kept “from reducing to an absurdity, the
notations must be fixed in advance” (ibid.). Referring to his unpublished paper (p.
9), Chomsky defines “the criteria of simplicity governing the ordering of
statements […] as follows: that the shorter grammar is the simpler, and that among
equally short grammars, the simplest is that which the average length of
derivations of sentences is least” (ibid.)
Having read at least part of what Harris, Hockett, and others had written
during the 1940s and early 1950s, Chomsky’s statements do not appear all that
novel, and are certainly in line with the discourse of the time and place. Still, one
may detect an edge to the argumentation indicative of someone striving to
develop a voice of his own. The argument in favour of ‘simplicity’ (which
appears to be a forerunner of the term ‘idealization’; cf. Chomsky 1979:55–58
passim) which is made use of early on seems to be brought to bear in order to
differentiate himself from his predecessors—but isn’t this concept much the same
as speaking of “the saving in work” when disregarding “the very small classes
which are included in some general class” in morphological analysis (Harris 1951
[1947]:251) to cite just a brief remark from Methods?34
The rest of Chomsky’s Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew is a veritable tour de
force, replete with a most involved technical apparatus, to set up the various
phonological, morphological, and in part syntactic rules necessary to produce the
relatively small body of material from Modern Hebrew. Commenting on what he
was trying to do in his M.A. thesis twentyfive years later, Chomsky 1979[1977]:
112) conceded:
Reading back into this work the explicit concerns of a later period, one
might say, then, that the goal was to show exactly how this grammar with
its empirical consequences would be constructed by someone initially
equipped with the framework for rules and the definition of simplicity
([...]), and given a sufficient sample of the data. Actually, this was done in
far greater detail and scale than anything I’ve attempted since, and was far
too ambitious, I suppose.
32 Footnote 1 refers to Goodman (1943); footnote 2 (both on p.67) specifies: “Though not
necessarily finite. Thus the resulting grammar will in general contain a recursive
specification of a denumerable set of sentences.”
33 Cf. Harris, when discussing ‘morphemic long components’: “The criteria for selecting a
basic alternant are not meaning or tradition, but descriptive order, i.e. resultant simplicity of
description in deriving the other forms from the base.” (1951[1947]:308n.14; emphasis
added: EFKK)
234 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
One can imagine that Harris’ general philosophy of science—and what Hockett
in 1968 called, perhaps not quite fairly so but still in the direction of a tendency
on Harris’ part, ‘theoretical nihilism’ — could not satisfy a young student who
more likely is looking for certainty, not at a variety of possible solutions. Still, it is
at least obvious to me that Chomsky received much more than food for thought
from his mentor than Harris has been credited for. However, as we shall see from
what follows, this influence has routinely been minimized by Noan Chomsky and
his close associate Morris Halle.
4.
A counter-history emanating from MIT
What may have appeared as a fairly gradual development, in scientific terms, of
linguistic theories in American linguistics in the preceding portion of the present
chapter was not in the interest of the strategists at MIT’s Modern Languages
Department, which soon become the Linguistics Department in time for the 9th
International Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Mass., in August 1962, at
which Chomsky had his first international exposure and, one may add, major
breakthrough (cf. Koerner 1989). Germans have an expression what would
characterize their attitude at the time: Es kann nicht sein, was nicht sein darf (“It
cannot be what cannot be allowed to be”). What I mean by this is that by the time
the 9th Congress was on the horizon, which was ably prepared and effectively run
by Halle, the strategy had become to sell Chomsky’s ideas as having little to do
with the linguistics of his American teachers and predecessors, but as being the
result of a radically different approach which supposedly harkens back to ideas
found in the ‘Cartesian’ linguistics of the 17th-century Port-Royal grammarians
and to the early 19th-century treatises by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835).
In order to make this argument stick, not only did connections have to be drawn
to the work of these pre-20th century thinkers, but also connections with the
work of Chomsky’s immediate predecessors had to be minimized, if not erased. As
we know, this strategy has been rather successful and the story of the
noncumulative, indeed ‘revolutionary’, nature of ‘generative’ linguistics has been
reproduced in text books and historical accounts, to the extent that this
concoction has become accepted as historical fact by many followers. The present
chapter deals only with the first aspect of the strategy, which, as Sydney M.Lamb
(b.1929) described, led to the following situation:
34 Of course, terms such as ‘simplicity’, ‘economy’, and the like show up rather regularly in
the writings of American descriptivists well before Chomsky made use of them; see some of
the quotations earlier in this chapter, notably Harris’ (1942a) article in which he comments
on Bloomfield (1939), but also McQuown’s (1952) review of Harris (1951).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 235
Older-generation linguists, upon encountering some of these pages [in
Chomsky 1964 and 1965], will stare with incredulity and no little irritation
at the distortions and misunderstandings of their ideas and practices and
those of their colleagues; while students who never knew what neoBloomfiedian linguistics was really like, […], are led to the false impression
that all linguists before Chomsky (except, of course, Humboldt, Sapir, and a
few other candidates for canonization) were hopelessly misguided bumblers,
from whose inept clutches Chomsky heroically rescued the field of
linguistics. (Lamb 1967:414)
We all know from history that revolutionaries have always targeted the younger
generations as they will soon define the agenda once the older ones have been
pushed aside. As in the American electoral system, it is winner takes all.
4.1
Morris Halle’s claims concerning Bloomfield’s ‘morphophonology’
Halle’s important role as an academic politician and strategist cannot be
underestimated. Indeed, find it doubtful that Chomsky’s success during the 1960s
could have been as great without the help of his clearly committed running mate
from about 1953 onwards or at least since 1955, the year in which both he and
Chomsky completed their doctorates, and Chomsky received his first appointments
at MIT’s Laboratory of Electronics. However, the present chapter deals only with
one particular ingredient of the over-all strategy, namely, what Barsky (1997:55),
following Harold Bloom, called ‘the anxiety of influence’, which involves at least
the downplaying of an impact that their immediate teachers might have had,
Roman Jakobson in Halle’s case, and Zellig Harris in Chomsky’s case, at times in
the face of impressive evidence to the contrary. Encrevé (1997:111–114 passim)
devotes much space to the manner in which Jakobson’s 1948 paper “Russian
Conjugation” was treated, by Halle and also by Chomsky, namely, ignored,
although it could be shown that it had had an influence on both linguists. But
Jakobson represents in the main the European structuralist tradition, not the
American ‘descriptivist’ tradition, which is the focus of the present chapter.
At least for outsiders, by the time Halle’s Sound Pattern of Russian appeared in
1959, readers of the author’s preface could not fail to realize that he had
effectively hitched his phonology carriage to the Chomskyan syntactic
bandwagon (see Halle 1962), and it was obvious that Halle had become a
determined promoter of Chomsky’s cause by that time. That he should unhitch
his cart thirty years later was not done to harm his relationship with Chomsky,
who had not worked in phonology since their joint work The Sound Pattern of
English in 1968, and by 1988 was going into the direction of abandoning all
thoughts of rule ordering so dear to Halle. That this is so is evident from Halle’s
joint paper with Sylvain Bromberger (b.1924), another senior member of
Chomsky’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, which was first presented
236 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
at a symposium, “The Chomskyan Turn”, held in Jerusalem in April 1988, and to
which the authors appended a “Note on Recent History” (Bromberger & Halle
1989:65–69), which confirms Halle’s continuing commitment to Chomsky. In it,
the authors give the reader the benefit of a long quotation from Bloomfield’s
“Menomini Morphophonemics” paper (1939:105–106; see §2.1 above for the
relevant text), but only to conclude that Bloomfield erroneously held to a belief
that was typically shared by linguists of the 1930s, namely, “that principles
operative in languages conceived as synchronic systems functioning autonomously
were totally different from the principles operative in the historical evolution of
languages” (Bromberger & Halle 1989:66). Apart from the fact that Bloomfield —
even in the quotation provided—does not use the word ‘totally’, but admits that
the synchronic rules he had set up for present-day Menomini “approximate the
historical development from Proto-Algonquian”, language historians have agreed
for a long time that linguistic change involves rule change; they have however
not argued that these rules are recoverable in synchronic analysis (cf. Hoenigswald
1946, for an early statement concerning diachronic change).
Next, Bromberger & Halle (1989:66) provide the quotation from Bloomfield’s
Language in which he affirmed that “the descriptive order of grammatical features
is a fiction [set up by the analyst]” (Bloomfield 1933:213), with the intent of
proving that when Bloomfield wrote his Menomini paper, he “had changed
positions”, adding: “The fact that he had done so, however, was totally ignored
by the American linguistic community in the 1940s and 1950s”. They cite the fact
that Hockett had not referred to it either in a 1948 paper in an issue of Language
in honour of Bloomfield or in his oft-quoted “Two Models of Grammatical
Description” paper, which contains a passage (Hockett 1954:211) “which echoes
the passage from Bloomfield (1933[not 1939!]) almost verbatim” (Bromberger &
Halle, p.66) as well as the fact that Bloomfield’s 1939 paper was not included in
Joos (1957) as evidence for this neglect, adding in a footnote (p.68n.16) that
“Bloomfield’s paper was treated as a curious experiment—not to say, indiscretion
—that did not merit extensive discussion.” Indeed, Bromberger & Halle go so far
as to claim that “the article was so unknown in America that Chomsky tells us35
that he had not read ‘Menomini Morphophonemics’ until his attention was drawn
to it by Halle in the late 1950s” (p.67).
In the following paragraphs the authors expand on their claim that this
“alternative approach to phonological description […] tested successfully by
Bloomfield was hardly known at the time” (ibid.), and that as a consequence
Chomsky had to develop his challenge to ‘the prevailing wisdom’ in ignorance of
this earlier work. Although Chomsky makes no reference to the fact that “some
rules of Modern Hebrew are identical with well-known sound changes” in his
1951 thesis, Bromberger & Halle boldly affirm that he “was of course fully aware
of these parallels between synchronic and diachronic rules”, adding: “Unlike most
linguistics of that period he was not concerned about confusing synchronic and
diachronic descriptions and viewed parallels between the two types of rules as
evidence in support of his proposed
analysis (Chomsky (personal
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 237
communication))” (67–68). Well, if that was Chomsky’s thinking at the time, it
could be explained by his lack of training in historical linguistics; it is certainly
not a strong argument at all. The authors go on to summarize their story by
saying (p.68):
In 1951 Chomsky thus was independently led to the same conclusions that
Bloomfield had reached twelve years earlier.36 It is a matter of puzzlement
that none of Chomsky’s teachers at the University of Pennsylvania drew his
attention to Bloomfield’s paper and suggested that he take account of it at
least by including it in his bibliography. It is idle at this distance in time to
speculate about the reasons for this oversight. In any event, as noted above,
Chomsky learned of the existence of Bloomfield’s paper only in the late
1950s, many years after submitting his Master’s thesis.
Encrevé (1997:105), referring to these affirmations, is quite surprised, to say the
least, since, he argues, Chomsky and Halle had become close friends by 1953, and
that Halle could be expected to have read Chomsky’s The Logical Structure of
Linguistic Theory of 1955/56 at the time in which explicit references to Bloomfield
(1939) can be found. Myself, I am inclined to believe that Halle may not have
read the rather bulky manuscript and, as we have seen from the above quotes,
simply relied on Chomsky’s word on the matter. Be that as it may, it is safe to
assume that Chomsky had seen the paper in question at least by the early 1950s, if
not earlier.37
4.2
Chomsky’s own affirmations concerning Bloomfield (1939)
While some may find Halle’s arguments at different points in the evolution of
generative linguistics, notably generative phonology, sufficiently transparent and
‘politically’ motivated, Chomsky’s remarks regarding the development of his
linguistic ideas appear to be more complex, if not diffuse, and at times
contradictory, if we follow the actual chronology of his work.
For instance, in a letter to Robert Barsky of 31 March 1995, Chomsky writes:
Hoenigswald and Harris were very close to Bloomfield, and certainly knew
his work. But neither of them mentioned to their only [?!] undergraduate
35 Note that the claim emanates from Chomsky himself, and does not appear to be based
on the Bromberger & Halle’s independent research.
36 Note that no reference is made to the 1949 B.A./undergraduate thesis/paper/essay;
references to its very existence seem to go all back to Chomsky’s own affirmations alone.
Several efforts to obtain information from the University of Pennsylvania administration on
whether at that time any formal requirement existed or whether the submission of such an
essay or thesis had been registered or a copy of the piece kept have led to nothing.
238 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
student that he was rediscovering, more or less, what Bloomfield had just
done eight years before. It’s not surprising in Harris’s case, because he
didn’t know what I was doing. But Hoenigswald read it [i.e., what was to
become Chomsky 1951], and must have recognized the similarities, back to
classical India. I learned nothing of this [i.e., Bloomfield 1939] until the
1960s, when Morris Halle found out about Bloomfield’s work. (Barsky
1997: 55)
As Barsky (ibid.) puts it, Bloomfield’s Menomini paper “is an extraordinary text,
completely inconsistent with Bloomfield’s other writings about language and how
research should be done. This, Chomsky believes, was one of the reasons
Bloomfield decided to publish it in Europe.”38 People familiar with the published
work by American linguists of the 1940s and 1950s (see §2.2–3 above for
illustraton) will find the above claims hard to swallow. That Chomsky ‘found out
about’ Bloomfield’s 1939 paper only in the 1960s is clearly contradicted by
Chomsky himself. In the printed version of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
(henceforth: LSLT)—and I might add, for example, that all references to the
work of Hjelmslev in the 1955/56 version were expunged from the 1975
publication (cf. Koerner 1995:98–99, for details) — there are still three explict
references to this paper (including its listing in the bibliography, p.571). The most
interesting reference is found in Chapter IV, “Simplicity and the Form of
Grammars” (113–128), where we can read in a lengthy footnote:
Note that phonemes can often be “embedded” in the morphophonemic
level as primes of this level. English, in fact, is a poor source for interesting
morphological examples, and the simplification effected by
morphophonemic analysis in this case is rather small. But in many languages
where such morphophonemes have wide distribution and are complexly
interrelated, such analysis can lead to very great economy. See Bloomfield,
“Menomini morphophonemics,” my Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew,
and many other linguistic studies. (Chomsky 1975[1955/56]:115n.5)
Both the order of the references and the acknowledgement that ‘many other
linguistic studies’ treated this subject by at least 1954 are important here. Indeed,
we should recall that Chomsky had been working on these matters eventually
37 In an exchange with the present writer, Thomas G.Bever, who finished his doctoral
thesis in 1967, but who had worked with Bloomfield’s 1939 paper several years earlier (see
Bever 1963) wrote (orthography normalized): “My […] cher maître would be Morris not
Noam, but Noam claims that he was directed to B[loomfield]’s Menomini
morphophonemics paper by Harris, could have been very early fifties at the latest. For a
long time I had a xerox of Noam’s own copy, but it was not dated” (e-mail of 1
December 1999).
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 239
combined in LSLT at least since his Master’s thesis,39 so we could expect that
(other) pre-1951 writings (than Bloomfield’s) are meant to be included here.
The other reference—hardly less significantly, since it suggests, among others,
that when writing Methods, Harris made use of them—is to “[s]everal methods of
presenting grammars of the first type [i.e., the ‘operational’ form] are discussed by
Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics, §20.3;40 cf. Bloomfield, “Menomini
morphophonemics,” Jakobson, “Russian conjugation,” as examples of this
general form” (Chomsky 1975 [1955/56]:78n.2). Although there is no explicit
reference to Jakobson’s 1948 paper to be found in Methods, Harris refers to earlier
papers by him (cf. Harris 1951 [1947]: 334n.19);41 besides, in his Preface (p.v),
Harris acknowledges “important criticisms” from Jakobson and two American
linguists,42 and he may have seen Jakobson’s paper, which was inspired by
Bloomfield’s work, in manuscript.
As we have seen from Chomsky’s 1962 paper presented at the Ninth
International Congress of Linguists, of which a pre-print was available many
months in advance (cf. Koerner & Tajima 1986:14, 18–19, for details), it sounded
as if he had been well aware of Bloomfield’s Menomini paper for quite some time
(cf. §2.3 above). However, by the early 1970s, for reasons difficult to fathom, it
seems that Chomsky changed his mode of discussing the paper—or should we
assume that he simply had forgotten all about it? In 1973, when he penned his
Introduction to LSLT, Chomsky affirmed that his 1951 M.A. thesis had been
written “in ignorance of Bloomfield’s [1939] study” (1975:47n.16), and in his
January 1976 conversations with a young French follower, Mitsou Ronat (1946–
1984), he reiterated the claim in the following fashion, in response to her question
“When did you think for the first time of proposing an explanatory theory in
linguistics?”:
38 There are many assertions in Barsky’s book which are based on what Chomsky had told
him, not on the author’s own research.
39 In the original manuscript of LSLT Chomsky included about everything he had written
by that time with the exclusion of his published reviews and articles of the early 1950s; for
instance, his M.A. thesis was added as an appendix to Chap.VI, “Lower Levels of
Grammatical Structure” (cf. Chomsky 1975:169, where a brief summary is offered in its
stead). His Ph.D. dissertation, submitted in 1955 to the University of Pennsylvania, formed
Chap.
VIII (and Chap.IX in the 1975 publication). No doubt, in its 1955/56 form LSLT was
unpublishable (for details on the fate of the altogether three 750+page versions of LSLT,
see Murray 1999). In 1973, Chomsky himself admits that the “manuscript was never
actually prepared for publication” (1975:1). See also Koerner & Tajima (1986:3–5, 56) for
some details on the different versions and, for a closer analysis, see Ryckman (1986, chap.
3), notably note 1, which extends over 4 pages (143–147).
40 That is on pp.372–373 (“Description of the Language Structure”), from which I have
cited passages in §2.2 (above).
240 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
That was what interested me about linguistics in the first place. As an
undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1940s I did an
undergraduate thesis called “Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew,” later
expanded to a master’s thesis with the same title in 1951. That work, […],
was a “generative grammar” in the contemporary sense; it’s primary focus
was what is now called “generative phonology,” but there was also a
rudimentary syntax.43 I suppose one might say that it was the first
“generative grammar” in the contemporary sense of the term. Of course
there were classical precedents: Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit is the most
famous and important case, and at the level of morphology and phonology,
there is Bloomfield’s Menomini Morphophonology, published a few years
earlier, though I did not know about it at the time. (Chomsky 1979[1977]:
111–112)44
There are probably other places where Chomsky has made the same or rather
similar claims. Two more recent ones, published in 1996 and 1997, respectively,
may suffice. In a letter of 17 November 1988 to Frederick J. Newmeyer,
Chomsky tells nearly the same story and elaborates on ‘the mood of the times’ in
this way:
It is rather astonishing that no one at Penn suggested to me that I look at
the Bloomfield article. It is not surprising that Harris didn’t, given his
theoretical outlook. But more surprising that Henry Hoenigswald45 never
mentioned it. He must have known about Bloomfield’s article as well as the
Paninian tradition on which it was based. The fact that none of this was
ever brought to my attention in a department consisting of Bloomfield’s
students and close friends is quite remarkable, […]. (Newmeyer 1996: 14)
By the 1990s, this view of his own past with regard to Bloomfield’s work, and the
failure of his teachers to draw attention to it, seems to have become Chomsky’s
fixed position. We have already quoted from his 1995 letter to his biographer
Barsky above, and I shall quote just one other passage where the essentials are
repeated—within the context of a public lecture on the History of Linguistics,
thirty years after Cartesian Linguistics, interestingly enough. On this occasion the
story line went thus:
41 In a letter of 17 November 1988 to Newmeyer, Chomsky went so far as to assert that
“in an American linguistics programme [at that time] such as that at Penn, no one ever
read a word of Jakobson’s, on any topic” (1996:14).
42 A rather obscure William D.Preston (d.1954), who published a few reviews and short
papers during 1946 and 1949 (e.g., “Problems in Text Attestation in Ethnography and
Linguistics”, IJAL 12.173–177 [1946]) and Fred Lukoff (1920–2000), who was known for
his work on Korean.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 241
[I]n 1939, Bloomfield wrote a generative grammar of Menomini, an
American Indian language, very much in the style of Panini. That work,
even though he was the leading American linguist, was not known in the
United States, except to his immediate students. In fact, when he died a few
years later and there was a comprehensive study of his work on Algonkian
languages, done by one of his main students, this was omitted.46 It wasn’t
even listed. He actually published that article in the Travaux du Cercle
Linguistique de Prague, in Czechoslovakia (Bloomfield 1939).
I didn’t know Bloomfield personally. But in retrospect what I would
have liked to ask him is whether he published it in Prague because it was
not the kind of work hardheaded linguists did in the United States. If you
look at the ideas, you will see that his schizophrenia is rather deep. In his
[…] major text of modern American linguistics [i.e., Bloomfield (1933)], he
is very critical of the concept of hidden structures, ordered rules, and that
sort of thing: “this is old fashionable mentalism, we want to get rid of this
crazy ideological baggage”47. On the other hand, if you look at his
grammar of Menomini, his generative grammar in the Paninian tradition, it
is full of hidden structures and ordered rules. […]
Even more striking was that no one pointed out to me, a young
undergraduate doing some work, that just a few years earlier, the leading
figure of American Linguistics had done something very similar, on another
language. I found out about it almost twenty years later, when I had
become interested in History of Linguistics. (Chomsky 1997:108)
Reading this account, one is not sure what to make of it, especially if one has read
at least the few bits of what Bloomfield actually stood for, such as those passages
quoted earlier in the present chapter (Section 2.1). Paul Postal (b.1936), who in
the 1960s worked fairly closely with Chomsky, in later years took a rather critical
view of this ‘principle’ of how to make strong arguments without providing the
evidence. It suggests to “simply assert” and as boldly as possible so that few will
dare to question the assertion. By way of illustration, Postal (1988:133), quotes
43 A few years earlier, Chomsky (1975[1973]:26) had voluntered that “the syntactic
component was rudimentary. It consisted of phrase structure rules modeled on
Harris’s morpheme-to-utterance formulas (cf. Methods, Chapter 16)”, which seems
to suggest that he had access to the manuscript version at that time, though we
could also refer to Harris (1946) where this approach had been worked out in detail.
Curiously, in the Bibliography to Chomsky (1975), there are no references to
pre-1951 publications of Harris (cf. p.572).
44 Interestingly, the reference to Bloomfield’s 1939 paper was added to the English
version.
45 Elsewhere in the book, Hoenigswald was singled out as the only linguist, apart
from Bernard Bloch, “the well-known Yale phonologist”, as having shown an
interest in Chomsky’s 1951 thesis (1979[1977]:130).
242 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Chomsky as saying: “Suppose that counterevidence is discovered—as we should
expect and as we should in fact hope, since precisely this eventually will offer the
possibility of a deeper understanding of the principles involved.”48 Chomsky is of
course referring to matters of theoretical argument in this quotation, but one may
ask whether the same approach does not also apply to the manner in which sees
his own intellectual development.
4.
Conclusions
Reading Chomsky’s statements concerning the development of generative
linguistics—and also Halle’s propagations of some of these astonishing views—one
may come to the conclusion that they served much the same purpose, at least on
the surface of things. Why some of these—in the face of the evidence which I
hope to have supplied in this paper—at best contradictory claims have been made
when they were made, are not part of the historiographer’s task; he wants to be
seen as letting the facts (in as much as they can be established) speak for themselves.
The evidence seems to suggest that in Halle’s case these assertions have been
made in support of his friend Noam Chomsky and, of course, and as part of the
long-standing ‘eclipsing stance’ (Charles Voegelin in 1963) of ‘The Chomskyan
Enterprise’ that Chomsky had embarked on by the mid-1950s. That many of
these claims have been made many years after the ‘Revolution’ had succeeded—
in most instances from the mid-1970s onwards—must be a puzzlement for the
historian, as they don’t seem to serve even any political purpose.
In Chomsky’s case historians of American linguistics for the most part seem to
hold the view that when it comes to his linguistic past, Chomsky has been less
than truthful. Most of the Generative Semanticists interviewed by R.A.Harris
(1993) expressed the sentiment that his self-history was dishonest and
manipulative, and in 1998 he has come out to say so himself. Huck & Goldsmith
(1995), in their searching analysis of the Generative Semanticists’ clash with the
46 The footnote refers to Hockett’s 1948 paper and his later admission, when he reprinted
it, that he had (inadvertently, he said) overlooked it at the time (see Bloomfield 1970:495).
47 Note that this phrase is not a quotation from an existing source, but a typical example of
the caricature that Chomsky and his followers disseminated regularly during the 1960s
until the next generation of linguists took it as truth. The entire campaign against the
Bloomfieldians at the time was full of these half-truths if not falsehoods about their
‘taxonomic’, mindless, atheoretical, inductive, positivistic, etc. approach to language and
linguistic analysis, and still in the 1990s textbooks of ‘modern’ linguistics contain much of
these distortions. For how this is done in pro-generativist textbooks, see Lawson (2001:8–
14).
48 N.Chomsky, Some Concepts and Some Consequences of the Theory of Government and
Binding (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p.76.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 243
Interpretive Semanticists led by Chomsky during the late 1960s and the early
1970s (which was covered by R.A.Harris in 1993, but perhaps not with
comparable thoroughness), were careful not to pass a similar judgment even
though some of their findings might have suggested it.49 Taking the high road,50
they only went so far as saying that the claim of Chomsky and his associates that
Generative Semantics was falsified was “essentially ideological in character and
scientifically unjustifiable” (p.93). Stephen Murray, whose well-researched 1980
paper “Gatekeepers and the ‘Chomskian Revolution’” so upset self-appointed
historians of the victory march of Generative Linguistics like Newmeyer, and
who has done more serious research in this area of interest than anyone else (e.g.,
Murray 1994, especially chaps. 8–9; Murray 1999), would probably speak of
Chomsky as being ‘delusional’ (Murray 1994:246). However, John E.Joseph,
familar with the views held the above scholars, states “I am not convinced. My
own dealings with Chomsky have strongly suggested that his belief in this view of
his history is genuine and absolute”, adding “To affirm the sincerity of
Chomsky’s interpretation of his own past is by no means to say that I agree with
it” (Joseph 1999:421–422). I think we might safely agree with the following
conclusion drawn by John Fought, who has given the matter discussed here a
careful analysis:
[…] I believe that the similarities between the strategy and techniques of
Bloomfield’s Menomini Morphophonemics and the architecture of early
Chomskyan generative phonology are most plausibly explained by
Chomsky’s prior acquaintance with the Bloomfield paper, either directly or
through summaries in Harris (1951). I regard Chomsky’s denial of any such
influence by Bloomfield as another example of his solipsism, though
perhaps a less glaring one than his failure even to mention Harris in this
connection. (Fought 1999:316)51
Whatever it is, it appears to me that Chomsky is at least doing what most of us do,
and more often than not unconsciously, namely, to reinterpret our own past as
we grow older, while at the same time our memory of this past has become much
less reliable than we may believe it to be. Reading Chomsky’s accounts of his
own intellectual development—which is always given as a statement of fact—one
is left with the impression that he actually believes what he’s saying to be true at
49 Including their observation that many ingredients of Generative Semantics argument
that had been attacked and dismissed by Chomsky subsequently found their way into his
own argument. Compare, as just one example of how the losing side felt, Paul Postal’s
reply to their question whether there had been ‘an intellectual battle or a social battle [with
Chomsky] or both?’: “Mostly a propaganda battle” (Huck & Goldsmith 1995:137).
50 After all, their book was dedicated to Chomsky, Halle, and several other scholars.
244 ORIGINS OF MORPHOPHONEMICS IN AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
the time he is saying it. (He also appears to be too busy to check what he said
about the same subject on previous occasions.)
For the, admittedly, tremendous success story of the ‘Chomskyan Paradigm’,
when the history of 20th-century is being written, Chomsky’s own accounts of
its development will probably not count for much. The historiographer will rely
on what has actually been written by the various participants in the undertaking
and not how the discussions are remembered and often misremembered by the
central figure in the story. There can be no doubt that whatever training
Chomsky got and how much attention his teachers gave or did not give to his early
work, one will have to admit that on the basis of what he learned (at home, at
college, and from others, elders or peers), Chomsky—largely single-handedly—
developed a research program that many young men and women found
attractive, notably during the 1960s and 1970s. That this program has turned out
to be truly structuralist in conception—more like the epitome of what his
mentors did not manage to carry out52—and very Bloomfieldian in outlook, may
be regarded as the irony of his career, and more often than not a regular
occurrence in history as in human life: after all these efforts of our adolesence and
early adulthood to set us off from our fathers, we end up being very much like
them.53
Looking back at the development of Amerian linguistics of the past fifty years,
one may wonder how far the field has actually progressed, how many real insights
into the nature of language have been gained. Opinions on this may differ, but it
should have be obvious from the present incursion into the history of
morphophonemics that there were many important pre-1951 findings in this area.
A central challenge in writing the history of any scientific discipline lies in
reconciling its practitioners’ rhetorical claims of revolutionary turns and
paradigmatic incommensurabilities with evidence that, in hindsight, suggests more
continuity and cumulative advance (or in some cases even regression) at the
substantive levels of methodology and genuine understanding. The present study
has shown how the collective forgetting of certain works, possibly abetted by
their having been ahead of their time, and by the disciplinary, institutional and
social or personal factors that drove the rhetoric of revolution, has brought about
a distortion of history that it is in all of our interests to rectify.
51 For the more recent period of Chomskyan linguistics, a catalogue of instances where
Chomsky’s as well as Halle’s [and his co-author’s] claims clash with well-documented facts
has been provided in Geoffrey K.Pullum (1996:139–144 passim). Indeed, Chomsky is
accused as being “disingenuous” (p.142) and commenting on Halle’s and Alec Marantz’
(Ph.D., MIT, 1981) joint contribution, Pullum (p.144) notes: “Halle & Marantz argue not
like scientists interested in theory improvement but like crusaders defending a faith against
a minor heresy”.
TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS 245
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252
CHAPTER 10
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS
OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN AMERICA
1.
Introductory observations
It appears to be a regular part of North American culture that when something is
declared to be new, few people care to ask a question about what in effect
distinguishes this allegedly novel idea, project or product from the old. The past is
soon forgotten and people are happy to be part of a trendy present which holds
out the promise of becoming the future. There are reasons for this phenomenon,
historical, socio-political, and economic; however, an analysis of these reasons is
not my concern here. I am simply trying to explain to myself why linguists on
this continent often lack a historical consciousness regarding their own field of
study and, as a result, can be easily led into believing claims of novelty,
discontinuity, breakthrough, and revolution made by someone in favour of a new
approach or, for that matter, a theoretical stance. I still recall my own
astonishment about the enthusiasm of some of my teachers about ‘sociolinguistics’
during the late 1960s, which then was, as it is still today, largely associated with
the name of William Labov (cf. Macaulay 1988: 154–157 passim),1 at least in
North America. Indeed, the opinio communis regarding the origins of
sociolinguistics still today appears to be what the editor of the 1,000-page Concise
Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics has noted, namely, that “sociolinguistics as a specially
demarcated area of language study only dates to the early 1960s” (Mesthrie 2001:
1).2
In this chapter I refer mainly to this brand of sociolinguistics rather than the
line of research usually pursued by scholars coming from sociology like Basil
Bernstein (1924–2000)3 in Britain (e.g., Bernstein 1971) and Joshua A.Fishman (b.
1926) in the United States (e.g., Fishman 1972), which is perhaps better defined
by the phrase ‘sociology of language’, or the research programs laid out by others
with anthropological backgrounds like Dell Hymes’ (b.1927) ‘ethnography of
1 For an interesting—and very detailed—criticism of Labov’s theories, not attempted in the
present chapter, see Figueroa (1994:69–110).
254 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
speaking’ (e.g., Hymes 1974) and by scholars like John Gumperz (b.1922) who
favour an interactionist and discourse analysis approach (e.g., Gumperz 1971).4
I admit to be non-plussed to hear students who took courses with a former
doctoral student of Labov telling me that the concepts of ‘drag chain’ and ‘push
chain’,5 for example, stem from William Labov instead of going back at least to
André Martinet’s (1908–1999) paper on “Function, Structure, and Sound
Change” where these terms are used and explicated, e.g., with reference to
palatalization phenomena in Romance (Martinet 1952a:11). It is also interesting
to note that in a review of Sever Pop’s (1910–1960) voluminous Dialectologie,
published in the same journal the same year, Martinet made the following
observation:
This is only a sampling of all the possible socio-linguistic patterns in
connection with which the word ‘dialect’ is actually used[…]. Therefore
we may expect to come accross socio-linguistic situations which we may
hesitate to class in one or another of our four categories[…]. (Martinet
1952b:261)
Thus for anyone familiar with Labov’s career, it is clear that he got this idea ‘drag
chain’ vs ‘push chain’ (and many other ideas), if not directly from reading
Martinet’s work,6 then mediated through Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967),
Martinet’s student during the late 1940s and early 1950s and subsequently Labov’s
teacher during the early through mid-1960s.7
2 Mesthrie’s sole references regarding the history of the field are Shuy (1989) and Paulston
& Tucker (1997). There is no chapter in this massive quarto-size volume on the subject.
3 For a sympathetic and thorough analysis of Bernstein’s work—and its success outside the
United States, see Hasan (2000).
4 On their various research programs, traditions, organizational strengths, etc., see the
studies by Stephen O.Murray (1994, Chaps. 10–14) and Murray (1998, a more focused
reworking of those parts of the preceding work which deal with sociolinguistics in the
broadest sense possible).
5 In Labov (2000:463), the terms used are ‘pull chains’ and ‘push chains’, respectively.
6 See also Martinet’s influential 1955 book Économie des changements phonétiques where they
are called ‘chaîne de traction’ and ‘chaîne de propulsion’, respectively. Since Martinet
(1952a) appeared in Word, i.e., right in front of Labov’s nose, so to speak, as it was edited
by Martinet together with Weinreich at the time, one would be hard pressed to believe
that Labov had no knowledge of this article, even if it is not listed in the “Bibliography” to
his 1972 collection of his major 1963–1970 papers, which does include a reference to
Économie, however (p.334). In earlier work, the 1952 article and the 1955 book together
are properly acknowledged as “Martinet’s theories of the internal economy of
phonological structures” which “were more comprehensive and systematic than any
published previously” (Labov 1966a[1964]:17). Of course, the same would apply to
Martinet (1952b).
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 255
Given what I noted at the outset, I probably should not have been surprised to
find next to nothing on the history of ‘sociolinguistics’ when I first ventured to
investigate the history of the subject some fifteen years ago (cf. Koerner 1986).8
However, I had expected a scholar like Dell Hymes, who has written on other
aspects of the history of linguistics during the past twenty-five and more years (cf.
Hymes 1983, for a collection of his papers in this area), and who published, among
other things, a book on the Foundations of Sociolinguistics (Hymes 1974), to have
enlightened us on the origins, sources, and development of the field. However,
one searches in vain for any such account in the bibliography of this prolific
writer. An early contribution to the history of sociolinguistics was Yakov
Malkiel’s (1976) paper, which traces its development from Romance scholarship
via dialectological work. There are of course a few brief textbook accounts of the
‘history’ of sociolinguistics to be found (e.g., Wolfram & Fasold 1972:26–32; Bell
1976:28–29; Milroy 1987:5–11), but these are rather short and totally inadequate,
usually going little beyond acknowledging the existence of a link between work
in dialectology and sociolinguistics. A number of sociolinguistics textbooks (e.g.,
Fasold 1984, Wardhaugh 1986, Romaine 1994, Holmes 2001[1990]) treat the
subject without any historical perspective at all.
In other words, to a considerable extent (pace Murray 1998) the history of
Sociolinguistics in America has still to be written.9 At least in Europe this
unsatisfactory situation has been somewhat remedied by the publication of the
first tome of the recent Sociolinguistics handbook (Ammon et al. 1988), which
contains a fairly large section on “History of Sociolinguistics as a Disci pline”,10
7 It should be pointed out that Labov himself would never have made any such claim and,
as one may gather from his writings, indeed, he has been much more generous when it
comes to acknowledging his indebtedness to others than, for instance, Noam Chomsky has
done. His doctoral dissertation of 1964 (Labov 1966a) is a good source for tracing
references to earlier work. There we find, inter alia, acknowledgments like this one: “Many
of Martinet’s ideas have found application in the present study” (p.26n.7; cf. also Labov
2001:262, 498, etc.).
8 At least not from the side of linguists; cf. the accounts by the sociologist Stephen O.
Murray, such as his Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America, which carry
chapters 10, “Language contact and early sociolinguisics” (Murray 1994:249–287), which
is devoted to the work of Haugen, U.Weinreich, Fishman, and others; 11, “The
ethnography of speaking” (289–340), dealing with the work Ferguson, Gumperz, Dell
Hymes, and others, whereas Labov is placed into Chap. 12, “Related Perspectives” (341–
389), together with sociologists and anthropologists, not linguists.
9 This chapter leaves out an entire strand of sociolinguistic work which should be part of
an overall history of the subject, but which I believe North American scholars, including
Labov, were not aware of at the time (and probably still are not today): I am referring in
particular to the work of John Rupert Firth (1890–1960), but also Bronislaw Malinowski
(1884–1942), (Sir) Alan Henderson Gardiner (1879–1963), and possibly others in Britain
during the 1930s through the 1950s (e.g., Abercrombie 1948; cf. Aarts 1976:240–244), a
tradition which informs the work of M.A.K.Halliday (e.g., Halliday 1975) and, especially,
Ruqaiya Hasan (e.g., Hasan 1973).
256 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
though as far as I can see, only Hagen’s contribution comes in any way close to what
I am trying to do here (Hagen 1988).11 The late 1980s saw also at least two
modest contributions to the subject (Koerner 1986; Shuy 1989, written in
ignorance of the former). The 1990s started on a more hopeful note with a series
of more in-depth papers (Shuy 1990, Koerner 1991, Joseph 1992) and were
followed by several book-size publications. The first was in the form of five
chapters included a 594-page “social history” of North American Linguistics
(Murray 1994). In it, chapters 10–14 [pp.249–429]) deal with various research
programs, traditions, organizational strengths of areas such as language contact and
bilingualism (with Haugen 1953 and Weinreich 1953 as prime ‘exemplars’),
‘ethnography of speaking’ (represented especially by the work of John Gumperz,
Dell Hymes and their associates [e.g., Gumperz & Hymes 1964, 1972], and “The
Sociology of Language” (419–429), in which one looks in vain for a treatment of
Joshua A.Fishman’s contribution, given that Fishman himself has described his
research area as such.12 Curiously, alhough Fishman has had few students and
hardly a follower of note,13 he gets Murray’s tabular sociological analysis
treatment in terms of leadership, ‘paradigm statement’, ‘exemplars’, and the like
(p.268), something he denies William Labov, who is tucked away in Chapter 12,
“Related Perspectives” (341– 389), together with, inter alios, British-born
anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and Canadian-born sociologist
Erving Goffman (1922–1982), neither of the two a linguist (374–389). This is all
the more surprising as Murray (p.389) concludes his fairly detailed account of
Labov’s work by saying: “In Kuhnian terms, Labov produced exemplary research
that others could emulate.” Hardly anyone in the field of 20th-century
sociolinguistics would doubt that Labov’s 1966 The Social Stratification of English in
New York City constitutes such an exemplar, and several other seminal works
were to follow (e.g., Labov 1969b, 1972c).
The next publication, The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and reflections
edited by Paulston & Tucker (1997), does not compare at all in thor oughness
with Murray’s work. It contains many individual pieces of reminiscences,
including a chapter on “Early Institutional Supporters for the New Field” which
consists of an interview with Rudolph C.Troike (b.1933), formerly of the Center
10 This section includes also a paper by Michael Clyne on the history of language contact
and another by Ian Hancock on research on Pidgins and Creoles, thus effectively enlarging
the scope of ‘sociolinguistics’ beyond what is meant by the term in the present chapter.
11 As in the case of Malkiel, it is revealing to note that those who account for the history
are, in most instances, Europeans, not Americans.
12 However, Fishman’s work and influence is discussed at considerable length in Chap. 10
(“Language Contact and Early Sociolinguistics”), pp.259–268, the reason being that
Fishman, too, had, like Haugen and U.Weinreich, an “interest in bilingualism and
language maintenance” (p.259). But unlike the former, Fishman is essentially a sociologist,
not a linguist, and, as a result, had a rather different approach and research practice.
13 According to Murray (1994:265n.12), “Robert Cooper is a very notable exception.”
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 257
for Applied Linguistics, by the first editor, who also recalls Einar Haugen in the
“Remembrances” section. The most substantive contribution to this volume is a
reprint of Roger W.Shuy’s (b.1931) 1990 article “A Brief History of American
Sociolinguistics, 1949–1989” (11–32), which in the main focusses on the Black
English work of the 1960s and 1970s.14
The most comprehensive effort in the direction of a history of sociolinguistics
to date is Stephen O.Murray’s American Sociolinguistics of 1998, which however is,
by the author’s own description, a “study of postwar anthropological linguistics”
(p.1). In fact, this book is essentially a selection and slight reworking of five
chapters of Murray (1994);15 as a result, the work of Labov, surely the prime
mover and shaker in this field, is not given more space here than in the earlier
account. The fact that Murray is a sociologist, not a linguist may help explain his
choices, interpretation, and emphasis. So the challenge is out for a sociolinguist to
at least to complement Murray’s work.
William Labov, the leader of this field of research, should not be expected to
have engaged himself in writing the history of Sociolinguistics, of course. In his
early work he reveals many of the sources of his own linguistic thinking and
approach, notably in his (1964) dissertation (cf. Labov 1966a: 8–41) as we shall see
in what follows.16 To be sure, the pioneering organizer of the modern field of
Sociolinguistics does not need to involve himself in history-writing. (That he
may have done so nevertheless through the manner in which he represented and
critized previous work and ignored or dismissed other important writings is
another matter).17 Indeed, we may be grateful that Labov, unlike his close
contemporary Noam Chomsky, has not taken a personal interest in writing the
history of his field of study. While it is true that Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics of
14 The volume’s contributions are divided into six main thematic fields: “Sociolinguistics:
A Personal View” by Basil Bernstein is one of the contributions to the chapter “Pioneers”.
Other articles in this chapter are by William Labov, Joshua Fishman (who also contributes
to the chapter titled “Journal Editors”), the Montreal psychologist Wallace Earl Lambert (b.
1922) and Carol Myers-Scotton, among others.
15 The section on Labov (Murray 1998:167–179) is almost identical to the one in Murray
(1994), with only a few footnotes reduced or deleted; this section certainly worth reading,
in particular the one on “Prestige dialects” (Murray 1998:170–177=1994:378–382).
16 Still much less about his biography is publicly known than about several other important
figures in Sociolinguistics broadly defined (cf. Haugen 1980, Hymes 1980, McDavid
1980a, Fishman 1991, Ferguson 1998). In my experience, Labov has been rather reticent
when it comes to writing an autobiographical account, and, as a result, one has to obtain
any such information, as much as this is possible, from remarks in his scholarly
publications. The “Published Interviews” listed in Guy et al. (1996), vol.II, p.352, apart
from Rosen (1967), which contains nothing about Labov’s biography, are hard to come by
as they appeared in rather obscure places. Typically, there is no entry on him in the
Directory of American Scholars, vol.III: Foreign Languages, Linguistics & Philology, 9th ed.
(Detroit, London, etc.: Gage, 1999). It is only very recently that we have a more personal
statement by Labov concerning the reasons why he decided to return to university life in
1961 and what this decision has led to (Labov 2001[1997]).
258 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
1966 has given the History of Linguistics an initial boost at the time, it did not
lead to serious historiographical work by those who followed his example but
encouraged others to produce Whiggish accounts of the development of
generative linguistics (cf. Newmeyer 1980, 1996, for the most accomplished18
examples of this kind of writing).
It remains true, however, that a scientific field reaches its maturity only by
becoming aware of its own history and by taking a serious interest in having it
documented. The present account is hardly more than an attempt to come to
grips with the task of presenting the sources and early development of
sociolinguistics, an area of research generally and erroneously thought to have
arisen in the mid-1960s, perhaps as a result of the publication of the papers of the
November 1963 San Francisco Conference on the Ethnography of
Communication (Gumperz & Hymes 1964) and, more likely, of the proceedings
of the 1964 UCLA—Lake Arrowhead—conference devoted to the
Sociolinguistics expressis verbis (Bright 1966),19 which no doubt served as a rallying
point for this line of research. It is interesting to note that William Labov had,
early on in his career, ample opportunity to present his findings at both these
meetings and have his views discussed (Labov 1964, 1966b), quite a feat if we
remember that Labov had entered Linguistics only in 1961 and completed his
Master’s thesis in 1963, and that his doctoral dissertation was in the course of being
written at the time (published, with minor changes, as Labov 1966a). His mentor,
Uriel Weinreich, to whom the invitations had originally been extended, had
Labov participate in his place, surely not merely because of his declining health.20
17 As one such example, one wonders why Labov had only three lines of comment on a
programmatic article by Stanley A.Sapon (b.1924), who, as Joseph (1992:121) reports, had
done his Ph.D. in Romance linguistics at Columbia in 1949, with Martinet as one his
advisors and “who was working on a larger study of socioeconomic variables in Mexico
City that was never published”. Sapon’s (1953) paper is simply described as “A
methodology for studying socio-economic differentials in language” of which “no results
seem to have appeared” (Labov 1966a:21), but one wonders whether Labov could not
have had access to Sapon’s unpublished work during his years at the same university (1961–
1969).
18 If we keep in mind what Henry Butterfield, in The Whig Interpretation of History (New
York: Scribners, 1931), p.v, had to say about “the tendency of historians[…]to produce a
story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present”.
19 Calvet (1999) celebrates the latter as a kind of breakthrough for sociolinguistics and
devoted a detailed “analyse interne” (34–41) to it, which makes for interesting reading.
Labov (1972b: 296), however, regards Ferguson & Gumperz (1960) as the defining
publication.
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 259
2.
The sources of modern sociolinguistics
My own research suggests that we could envisage the broad Labovian type of
sociolinguistics to be the confluent, if not the synthesis, of various lines of research
that go back to at least several generations of linguistic workers, though it remains
true that the field was crystalizing during the 1950s and essentially on American
soil. The link between dialect geography and sociolinguistics, which is very
obvious from Labov’s writings right from the beginning, has been made by
various scholars (e.g., Grassi 1980, Trudgill 1983). It is probably too obvious to be
overlooked and may also explain why it has not been as frequently mentioned as
one might expect.
Another line of linguistic thought goes back to the later 19th century when
scholars such as William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) in America, Michel Bréal
(1832–1915) in France, Hermann Paul (1846–1921) in Germany, Jan Baudouin
de Courtenay (1845–1929) in Russia,21 and others reacted against the view,
usually associated with the views propounded by August Schleicher (1821–1868),
Max Müller (1823–1900), and others, according to which linguistics should be
thought of as a science and that language ought to be treated like a living
organism, and that, consequently, linguistics was to be ranked among the natural,
not the social, sciences.22 This change in philosophical outlook among linguists
became fairly general in the wake of the publication of such works as Wilhelm
Dilthey’s (1833–1911) Einleitung in die Geisteswis- senschaften of 1883 and the
ensuing debate over the essential differences between Naturwissenschaft and
Geisteswissenschaft in Germany and elsewhere (cf. Koerner 1982:187–188). This
reference to the change in the intellectual climate is important as it provides the
background for a better understanding of the establishment of a specific line of
20 Weinreich died of leukemia early in 1967, at the age of 41, “not suddenly, of cancer, at
the age of 39”, as Labov had it in the 1997 version of Labov (2001).—Labov’s cometic rise
to prominence by the time he finished his doctorate is a story not easily explained. By a
curious coincidence, Zeilig S.Harris (1909–1992), Chomsky’s (more than merely nominal)
supervisor for both the M.A. (1951) and Ph.D. (1955) theses at the University of
Pennsylvania, ceded to his student a perhaps still more important opportunity to present
his views in the same year, namely, at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists held in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962. Calvet (1999:47, following Murray 1994:377) believes
that Weinreich appears to have been the only person at the time who had a strategy to
advance sociolinguistics and, in particular, Labov’s career.
21 While Bréal and Baudouin are not mentioned in Labov (1972b), Paul comes in for
criticism on his views on linguistic change in Labov (1972b: 261–263; 1972a). However,
Paul’s views had been much more thoroughly discussed earlier by Weinreich in Weinreich
et al. (1968:104–129).
22 It therefore comes as a surprise when the author of a recent sociolinguistics paper makes
the following remark: “Languages are, in fact, remarkably stable organisms, transmitting
their essential characteristics from one generation to the next” (Macaulay 1988:156–157);
elsewhere in his paper he complains about a lack of methodological rigor in the field.
260 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
research. So in addition to dialectology, we may also have to recognize a
particular kind of approach to language in general and to questions of language
change that is sociological in orientation. Finally, we may become aware of the
influx somewhat later of work on biand multilingualism—and, much more
recently, issues of language contact, language planning, and linguistic conflicts23—
into sociolinguistic research.
The influence of Whitney, Paul, Baudouin de Courtenay, and others on
Saussure is well established (see Koerner 1973, for details); it suggests at the same
time that Saussure did not need Durkheim in order to be able to characterize
language as a ‘fait social’ (pace Bierbach 1978). To illustrate this point, let me cite
just one passage from Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language, to which
Saussure frequently referred in his lectures on general linguistics at the beginning
of the 20th century:
Speech is not a personal possession, but a social; it belongs, not to the
individual, but to the member of society. No item of existing language is the
work of an individual; for what we may severally choose to say is not
language until it be accepted and employed by our fellows. The whole
development of speech, though initiated by the acts of individuals, is
wrought out by the community. (Whitney 1867:404)24
I shall return to the importance of Whitney in section 2.2 (below). The role he
played in European linguistics during the last quarter of the 19th century has been
discussed elsewhere already (Koerner 1980).
2.1
From dialect geography to sociolinguistics
As mentioned earlier, Malkiel (1976) established a regular line of connection
between dialectological work in Romance languages and sociolinguistic efforts. In
other words, we do well to go back to the beginnings of fieldwork in dialect
geography during the last decades of the 19th century to see the sociological
component slowly infiltrating linguistic geography. Unlike Malkiel, I am thinking
in particular of the Marburger Schule established by Georg Wenker (1852–1911),
which is still active today (cf. Knoop et al. 1982) and the school created
somewhat later by the Swiss Jules Gilliéron (1854– 1926) in Paris (cf. Jaberg
23 If these areas of investigation are not more correctly ascribed to ‘sociology of language’
programs, not ‘sociolinguistics’ as here defined.
24 Labov (1972b: 261) quotes the first sentence only, though he also quotes (ibid.) another
passage from Whitney (1901[1867]:401) to illustrate Whitney’s emphasis on the socialcommunicative function of language: “Man speaks, then, primarily not in order to think,
but in order to impart his thought. His social needs, his social instincts, force him to
expression.”
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 261
1908), whose students Jacob Jud (1882–1952) and Karl Jaberg (1877–1958),
together with the assistance of Paul Scheuermeier (1888–1973), Gerhard Rohlfs
(1892–1984) and Max Leopold Wagner (1880– 1962), compiled the voluminous
Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de l’Italie et de la Suisse méridionale (Jaberg & Jud
1928–1940). Both the German and the Swiss enterprises are of particular interest
in the present context as I shall indicate in what follows.25
To begin with, Max Weinreich (1894–1969), the father of the much better
known Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967), did his doctoral dissertation on Yiddish,
both its language and its literature, under the direction of Ferdinand Wrede
(1863–1934), Wenker’s successor at the University of Marburg (Weinreich 1923).
(From 1926 onwards, Wrede brought out in successive volumes the massive
Deutscher Sprachatlas, initiated many years earlier by Wenker.) More interestingly
perhaps, Wrede—whom Meillet cites in his famous 1905 paper (see Meillet 1921:
255)—much earlier drew parallels between ethnography and dialectology,
distinguishing between ‘individuallinguistische’ and ‘soziallinguistische’ instances
of borrowing among languages (Wrede 1902).26
Perhaps more important in the present context is the fact that, in 1931, the
Swiss dialectologists Jud and Scheuermeier were brought over to the United States
for the summer in order to train American students to undertake dialectological
field work. The Austrian-born Hans Kurath (1891–1992) had secured a grant
from the American Council of Learned Societies for this purpose. We know that
Raven I.McDavid (1911–1984) for instance (McDavid 1980b: 8) was one of
those young trainees who later participated in the research that led to the
Linguistic Atlas of New England edited by Kurath and others (1939–1943). It is
therefore interesting in the present context that McDavid published an article
entitled “Dialect Geography and Social Science Problems” as early as 1946. More
importantly, his 1948 ‘social analysis’ on “PostVocalic /-r/ in South Carolina”,
has been hailed as a pioneering instance of ‘variation study’ (Shuy 1989:297).27 By
the time McDavid and his student Raymond O’Cain published their 1973 paper
on “Sociolinguistics and Dialect Geography”, the connection between
dialectology and sociolinguistics had become more widely recognized, though
perhaps more implicitly than overtly acknowledged.
25 The fact that Labov does not seem to refer to these works in his writings (e.g., Labov
1972b) is no reason to leave out mention of this research. In fact, dialectological traditions
and practices loom large in Labov’s oeuvre.
26 It is safe to assume that Paul’s Prinzipien, which had its third edition by 1894, had an
influence Wrede’s thinking concerning the social nature of language.
27 Curiously enough, in the bibliography to his 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns one looks in
vain for an entry on McDavid. One wonders whether McDavid’s review of Labov (1966a)
in American Anthropologist 70.425–426 (1968) has something to do with it, in which
McDavid wondered why “[c]ertain groups are not represented—notably the old stock
white Protestants, who still make up a very large portion of the New York upperclass […]
and have other
262 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Even outside established schools important dialectological work was done in
the later 19th century; mention can be made of Schleicher’s little known study of
his native dialect (Schleicher 1858) and of lost Winteler’s (1846– 1929) celebrated
Kerenzer Mundart of 1875 as just two such examples. That the social component in
language variation was recognized before the turn of the 20th century may be
gathered from Richard Löwe’s (1863-c.1942) paper of 1882, which Hagen
(1988b: 408) has referred to as the “only […] known early study on social dialect
variation in cities”, and the dialect work of yet another scholar of the time,
Philipp Wegener (1848–1916), who, dealing with the same geographic area as
Löwe, noted the following in his 1891 contribution to Hermann Paul’s Grundriss:
In the Magdeburg region the rural workers go into the cities in large
numbers to work there as masons, handy-men or in the factories. The joint
work brings them into regular contact with the urban workers; the Low
German rural worker usually does not mind being influenced by the
common speech of the city dwellers, and this the more so, the larger the
distance from his rural dialect and the higher his esteem for the advantages
of urban life. (Wegener 1891:937; my translation: EFKK)
[In der Magdeburger Gegend gehen die ländlichen Arbeiter in grosser
Zahl in die Städte, um hier als Maurer, Handlanger oder in den Fabriken zu
ar-beiten. Die gemeinsame Arbeit bringt diese in steten Verkehr mit den
städtischen Arbeitern; der niederdeutsche ländliche Arbeiter lässt sich
durchweg von der städtischen Vulgärsprache beeinflussen, und zwar um so
mehr, je grösser der Abstand derselben von der ländlichen Mundart ist und
je höher die Schätzung der städtischen Vorzuge.]
I shall resist the temptation to give this statement a modern interpretation. I
believe, however, that in observations like these we may discern an awareness of
the ‘sociology of language’ avant la lettre, and I am sure that many other such
statements could be found in the early work of dialectologists. (Cf. also Olmsted
& Timm [1983] on Baudouin de Courtenay, who, a former student of
Schleicher’s, conducted considerable field work from the 1870s onwards.) No
doubt the actual contact in these linguistic investigations with speakers of
different varieties of language in differing socio-economic settings fostered such
awareness, to the extent that it becomes at times difficult to distinguish sharply
between dialectology and sociolinguistics in the work of these scholars, especially
in areas of research that are now being called ‘urban dialectology’.
prestige models than Labov’s” (p.379). (In fact, Labov’s 1966 ‘social stratification’ had left
out the upper classes entirely.) McDavid’s name appears in Labov’s (1972b[1963]:11)
reference to Kurath & McDavid (1951). McDavid’s (1948) paper is included in the
bibliography of his 1964 dissertation (Labov 1966a: 586), but given only two lines in the
body of the thesis (p.22). McDavid’s (1946) paper is not included. Is this just an oversight?
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 263
In order to establish a more obvious connection between the different lines of
development in the history of sociolinguistics, let me draw something like a
genealogy. Before we are able to do so, however, a few additional links will have
to be established. I mentioned Saussure’s high esteem for Whitney which
probably goes back to his studies at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin (1876–
1880).28 During his years in Paris, Saussure’s most distinguished student was
Antoine Meillet (1866–1936),29 who in turn had André Martinet (1908–1999) as
his student. I mention this fact because Martinet wrote a monograph-length study
of his native dialect during his time in a German prisoners of war camp, which
was published shortly after World War II (Martinet 1946), and also because
Labov, like Meillet and Martinet, has always been particularly interested in
questions of language change.30 More important still, while a professor at Columbia
University in New York City during 1948– 1955, Martinet had Uriel Weinreich
as his student, both for the M.A. and the Ph.D. degrees.31 It was Weinreich’s 568page doctoral thesis of 1951 on “Research Problems in Bilingualism with Special
Reference to Switzerland” which formed the basis for his succinct book he
became famous for, namely, Languages in Contact (Weinreich 1954), a sociogeographical study of bilingualism whose title he had taken from a series of
lectures given by Martinet (as Weinreich indicates in his Acknowledgements,
28 Thanks to the diligent search among the Whitney papers at Yale’s Sterling Library by
John E. Joseph, we know that Saussure wrote a letter to Whitney on 7 April 1879 in
which he referred to their meeting “il y a quelques jours”; see his paper, “Saussure’s
Meeting with Whitney, Berlin, 1879”, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 42.205–213 (1988).
Whitney had returned to Germany in order to see his Sanskrit Grammar and its parallel
German translation by one of Saussure’s Berlin professors, Heinrich Zimmer (1851–1910)
through the press. (Both were published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1879.)
29 Labov (1966:10) quotes from a paper given by Meillet in 1906—not 1905—in which
Meillet had argued that because language was a social science “le seul élément variable
auquel on puisse recourrir pour rendre compte du changement linguistique est le
changement social dont les variations du langage ne sont que les conséquences parfois
immédiates et directes, et le plus souvent médiates et indirectes” (Meillet 1921:17). Labov
offers a—not always felicitous—English rendering of the French original. One can
sympathize with Labov’s difficulties, however, considering that even native speakers of
French find Meillet somewhat impenetrable at times.
30 Indeed, I regard his contribution to this subject as the centre piece of his work, as Labov
himself would admit if asked (cf. his reply to Rosen 1967:19).
31 In his autobiography Mémoires d’un linguiste: Vivre les langues entretiens avec Georges
Kassai et avec la collaboration de Jeanne Martinet (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1993), Martinet
later claimed to have been instrumental in the establishment of a chair for Yiddish for his
former student. Interestingly, Murray (1994:256) credits Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)
with having been Weinreich’s thesis supervisor, an attribution apparently relying on
Malkiel (1969), where Martinet is at least recognized for his “major influence” on
Weinreich during the latter’s “training period” (Malkiel 1969:128, cited in Murray 1994:
257). Maybe the fact that Jakobson wrote a preface to Weinreich’s College Yiddish (1949)
has led to this confusion?
264 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Fig.1: From Whitney to Labov
p.x). It should be added that Weinreich also studied under Jakob Jud—the same
scholar who had trained American linguists in dialectological fieldwork in 1931—
in Zürich during the academic year 1948–1949, doing fieldwork for his
dissertation, thus establishing another Swiss connection in the early history of
sociolinguistics. Finally, we need only recall the fact that William Labov took
both his Master’s and doctoral degrees with Weinreich (see Labov 1963, 1966a) in
order to establish a kind of genealogical line leading from Whitney to Labov and
to contemporary sociolinguistics—if one may be permitted to draw such a
unilinear picture, which is, admittedly, an oversimplification of intellectual
indebtedness of any kind:32
No doubt this is an overly simplistic ‘lineage’ and much more evidence, textual
as well as biographical, would have to be supplied in order to offer a more
adequate picture. The next section will add to this composite account. But those
familiar with Labov’s work know of his frequent acknowledgement of debt to his
teacher Uriel Weinreich33 and of his references to the works of Meillet,
Saussure, Hermann Paul, and others34 to make this genealogy at least somewhat
more realistic.35
That the transition from dialectological work to sociological research is
something of a natural development can be shown also by reference to work done
for example on Dutch (and Low German) during the first decades of the 20th
century. Noting that ‘the sociological approach had scarcely found its way into
32 Needless to add that all these scholars a referred to, at times critically, by Labov (cf.
Labov 1972:xiii, 185–186, 266–267 [on Saussure]; 185n2, 263, 266, 318, 319 [on Meillet];
xiv, 2, 181, 185, 262, 265. 266, 271 [on Martinet], etc.). We have mentioned Labov’s
approval of Whitney already (see note 22, above); Sociolinguistic Patterns is expressly
dedicated to Uriel Weinreich.
33 Cf. Labov’s (1982[1966]:iii) acknowledgment: “When I entered the field, I had my own
ideas about contributing an empirical foundation to linguistics. But I find that Weinreich had
anticipated me, and many of the ideas I thought were my own were undoubtedly a
reorgan
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 265
linguistics’, Jacobus van Ginneken (1877–1945) attempted to bring about just this
sort of approach in his 2-volume Handboek der Nederlandse taal (Van Ginneken
1913–1914), as he indicated in the subtitle to his work: “De sociologische
structuur van het Nederlands” (cf. Hagen 1988a: 271–272, for details). The next
decade saw the publication of a work which Hagen (p.273) rightly characterizes
as “a very advanced socio-linguistic study”, namely, Gesinus Gerhardus Kloeke’s
(1877–1963) De Hollandsche expansie of 1927, a work which Bloomfield, in his
book Language, treated as paradigmatic for the discussion of isoglosses in his
chapter on dialectology (Bloomfield 1933:328– 331).36 As the full title of his book
indicates (see the References), the author is combining in his research geography,
dialectology, and history. Sound change —one of his famous examples is the
divergent development of Common Germanic pair h s/m s (“house"/"mouse”)
in Dutch—in his work is demonstrated as taking place by a process of social
adaptation or borrowing from the speech of the upper classes by speakers from the
socio-economically lower classes.37
2.2
Historical linguistics, language change, and sociolinguistics
While the dialectology-sociolinguistics connection seems rather obvious (cf.
Grootaers 1982), the link that exists between certain traditions in historical
linguistic work and sociolinguistics perhaps not. Interestingly enough, very early
in his career, Labov had made it clear that the focus of his research “has always
been on the understanding of linguistic change” (1966b: 102). It is therefore not
surprising that, realizing where he had come from, we can find the connection
between sociolinguistics and early work on language change acknowledged in the
work of Labov. It began early on in his linguistic studies, when working on the
materials for his Master’s thesis (Labov 1963), which later formed the first chapter
of his Sociolinguistic Patterns of 1972, the year he wrote what appears to be his first
thorough critique of traditional historical linguistics (Labov 1972a), inspired no
doubt by his close collaboration with Uriel Weinreich on the by now classic
article “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change” (Weinreich et
al. 1968). Already in his M.A. thesis, we note Labov’s opposition to the
ization of my thinking under the influence of one of the most profound and powerful
linguists of our time.” Labov (2001) is appropriately dedicated to Uriel Weinreich.
34 Not to mention the by now ‘classic’ studies by Gauchat (1905) and Hermann (1929),
which in a way god-fathered his M.A. thesis on Martha’s Vineyard (cf. Labov 1972b
[1963]: 15n.25 and 23), since Labov dealt with a similar situation and lapse of time
between Guy Lowman’s analysis of the early 1930s and his own of the early 1960s.
35 Calvet (1999), who reproduces an earlier (Koerner 1991) version of this diagram (p.27),
takes issue with it and almost builds his entire 30-page article around it without providing
a more convincing scenario, in part because his bibliographical base (55–57) is much too
limited.
266 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
positivistic approach to the subject he still found in Lehmann (1962), whereas
Martinet’s Économie des changements phonétiques of 1955 is seen as having received
empirical confirmation in William G.Moulton’s (1914–2000) dialectological work
of 1962 (Labov 1972b[1963]:2). Edgar H.Sturtevant (1875–1952), too, receives
praise both in 1963 and in 1972 for his recognition of social factors such as
prestige (Sturtevant 1947:80–81,38 cited in Labov 1972b:3 and 263). Sturtevant
would find himself in a group of praiseworthy scholars together with Whitney
and Meillet, though barely, representing “a late survival of Meillet’s fading notion
that we might search for an explanation of the fluctuatins of linguistic change in
the fluctuation course of social events” (263–264). In his important article orig
inally commissioned by Thomas A.Sebeok for Current Trends, “The Social Setting
of Linguistic Change” (1972a), Labov states:
36 However, as Gerritsen (2001) has shown, the idea of ‘expansion’ (German:
Ausbreitung), with which Kloeke is often credited, derives from research conducted by
Theodor Frings (1886–1968) and published in 1926, a year before Kloeke’s magisterial
work was published. As Gerritsen (p.1545) illustrates, Kloeke was well acquainted with
Frings’ work:
In the 1920s Frings worked at the university of Bonn. This job gave him
plenty of time to do research but due to strong inflation not enough money
to support his family. In the same period, Kloeke worked as teacher of
German at the Leiden gymnasium, spending long hours, but making lots of
money. Being a bachelor at that time Kloeke could afford to wish more for
research time than money. In light of their respective circumstances, the
two arranged to switch places in ’21–’22. In his new situation in Bonn
period Kloeke became well acquainted with expansions as an explanatory
device (W.U.S. Kloeke personal communication).
See also Frings & van Ginneken (1919) and Frings’ work with Jozef van den
Heuvel (1889–1966) of 1921, which, according to Gerritsen (p.1541) constitutes
“[t]he most scientific publication of Dutch dialect texts of this period […], in
which we find among other things the 40 sentences that Wenker used for the first
dialect survey in the world [Wenker 1877]. They are translated and phonetically
described in 56 southern dialects.”
37 I dwell on the German and Dutch work in dialectology because it is underrepresented in
Labov’s scholarship, if recognized at all, although it was this work, together with the Swiss
research led by Jaberg and Jud (which itself was an outgrowth of the ‘Marburg school’),
and which was transplanted into North America, which was so important, not the work of
Swissborn Jules Gilliéron (1854–1926) and his single, energetic, bicycling field worker
Edmont Édmond (1849–1926) in France on the Atlas linguistique de la France (Paris, 1902–
1910).
38 Labov does not seem to have referred to Sturtevant’s earlier book (Sturtevant 1917;
repr., 1961), which dealt expressly with language change.
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 267
In 1905, Meillet predicted that this century would be devoted to isolating
the causes of language change within a social matrix in which language is
embedded. But that did not happen. In fact, there were almost no empirical
studies of language change in its social context in the 50 years following
Meillet’s pronouncement. (1972b: 267)
Labov appears to be referring to the celebrated paper by Antoine Meillet,39
“Comment les mots changent de sens”, which Meillet published in volume 9 of
Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) periodical Année sociologique, and which still today
is regarded as exemplary in the semantic change debate (cf. Arlotto 1972: 163–
183 passim; Lehmann 1962:198–199; 21973:212–213). One might assume that
Labov (cf. 1972[1963]:23; also Labov 1966:11, 2001:279) would have taken the by
now ‘classic’ studies by Louis Gauchat (1866–1942) of 1905 and by Eduard
Hermann (1869–1950) of 1929 on language change in a particular speech
community as exceptions to his pronouncement (cf. Lehmann 21973: 163–164)40;
however, one misses a reference to the work of Kloeke for instance in Labov’s
chapters on historical change in Sociolinguistic Patterns.41 Earlier in his work Labov
(1966a: 263) quoted, with approval, the following passage from Joseph Vendryes’
Le Langage: Introduction linguistique à l’histoire (completed, according to the author,
in 1914, but published only in 1921; and translated into English by a former
student of Franz Boas in 1925):
Language is […] the social fact par excellence, the result of social contact. It
has become one of the strongest bonds uniting societies, and it owes its
development to the existence of the social group. (Vendryes 1925[1921]:
11)
Vendryes (1875–1960), first a pupil and later a long-time collaborator of Meillet’s,
fully shared his teacher’s views on the social nature of language and on the
desirability of establishing a sociological linguistics. His goal, like Meillet’s and his
school (cf. Bolelli 1979), was to pinpoint the causes of linguistic change and not
simply describe the mechanism of linguistic evolution as was common practice
among the more traditional, Indo-Europeanist historical linguists, of the 19th and
39 I say “appears to be” since Labov does not supply a reference; in fact, from other references
to Meillet in the same volume (Labov 1972b: 185n.2, 263, 318), it would seem that he is
in fact referring to Meillet’s paper of 1906 inaugural address (as in Labov 1966:10).
40 Interestingly, neither Gauchat (1905) nor Hermann (1929) are mentioned in Lehmann
(1962); their findings are, however, discussed in Weinreich et al. (1968) and probably in
other historical linguistics texts. In his 1973 edition of Historical Linguistics (p.163),
Lehmann refers to Sommerfelt’s 1930 article (listed in Labov 1972b: 335, but only
criticized for lack of terminological clarity on p.277) as a study which found similar results
(as those of Gauchat) concerning the difference among speakers of varying ages in Welsh
and Irish speaking communities.
268 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
early 20th century. While Meillet ventured little beyond the area of lexical
change (which in many instances offers itself best to a sociological interpretation
as regards the reasons for meaning change, loss of words and the like), Vendryes,
as the title of his book suggests—although he too devotes two chapters to
meaning change alone (Vendryes 1925:192–211 and 212– 230)—tried to argue
that linguistic evolution is but a reflection of social evolution (pp.352ff.).
Yet while other students of Meillet’s, such as Alf Somrnerfelt (1892–1965) from
the 1930s onwards (e.g., Somrnerfelt 1932) and Marcel Cohen (1884– 1974) in
his later years (e.g., Cohen 1956a), belaboured the subject of a sociology of
language, it is fair to say that little concrete advance was made in the explanation
of language change on the basis of social factors (cf. Labov’s [1972:267] remarks).
However, Meillet’s student André Martinet did instill in his student Uriel
Weinreich a strong interest in historical linguistics and the explanation of the
causes of linguistic change (cf. Martinet 1955), an interest Weinreich in turn
passed on to his student, William Labov (cf. Weinreich et al. 1968), as may be
gathered from much of his research from the mid-1960s onwards (e.g., Labov
1982, for a monograph-length account; Labov 1992, 1994). Labov’s work may
thus be said to constitute a synthesis of earlier attempts at a sociological approach
to questions of language change, beginning with Meillet’s paper of 1905 (if not
much earlier) and dialectological research done in the United States since the
1930s which, as we have seen, goes back to European traditions established
during the last quarter of the 19th century. Even Whitney, who made such
seemingly modern-sounding observations as the following, was largely Europeantrained:
We regard every language, […], as an institution, one of those which, in
each community, make up its culture. Like all the constituent elements of
culture, it is various in every community, even in the different individuals
composing each. (Whitney 1875:280)
2.3
Bilingualism, multilingualism, and languages in contact
There is yet a third line traceable in more recent work (ignoring the late 19thcentury debate on ‘Mischsprachen’ and the like) that filtered, I believe, into much
modern-day work in sociolinguistics. I am much less concerned here with the
kind of bilingualism research that Werner F.Leopold (1896– 1984) conducted in
the 1930s and 1940s (Leopold 1939–1950),42 which is more directly associated
41 Kloeke’s name does not appear in Weinreich’s huge bibliography [1953:123–146]
either.
42 Leopold’s work served however as a valuable source for Roman Jakobson’s (1896–1982)
work on child language, for example.
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 269
with ‘psycholinguistics’, especially first and second language acquisition, but with
bilingualism research that is conscious of the socio-political environment in which
it occurs. I am thinking in particular of the work of Einar Haugen (1906–1994)
from the early 1950s onwards, especially his ground-breaking study of the
Norwegian language in the United States (Haugen 1953). In this context, it is
interesting to note that Weinreich père, like his son a fluent speaker of Yiddish,
published papers on bilingualism as early as in 1931 (M.Weinreich 1931a,b). It is
easy to imagine that following the arrival of the Weinreichs on the North
American continent during World War II, and given the multilingual situations
that they must have encountered in New York City, their interest in
plurilingualism and language contact would have increased. (In this last regard
Martinet’s influence on Uriel Weinreich must have been of singular importance.)
In other words, the sources of modern-day sociolinguistics are diverse and
complex, and they all had a bearing on the development of the various research
programs from the 1960s onwards. In the North American context, where over
10% of the population is of African ancestry, we should not forget the importance
that was attached by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the study of
what was soon called ‘Black English’ (cf. Drake 1977:78–106, for details), research
in which Labov was very prominent (cf. Labov 1966a, 1972a; see also Wolfram &
Fasold 1972), though by no means the first (e.g., Stewart 1957).43
However, there is a line of work in the United States—conveniently dismissed
by Labov early on in his career so that it was completely ignored by his followers
—which rightly should have been added to an adequate history of
‘sociolinguistics’. I am referring to the pioneering work by the sociologist at the
Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Paul Hanly Furfey (1896–
1991), from the 1930s onwards, and the field work carried out in the inner city of
Washington, D.C., by two of his doctoral students, George Nelson Putnam
(1909–1991) and Edna M.O’Hern (b.1919), whose results were published in a
combined work in the monograph series of the Linguistic Society of America
(Putnam & O’Hern 1955),44 years before it become fashionable to study ‘Black
English’ and to combine urban dialectology with sociological theory.
A reviewer of this work by Putnam and O’Hern in Language was very critical of
what he regarded as their poor methodology (Evans 1956),45 and it appears that
Labov echoes this judgment, when he notes:
43 I have not addressed the question of the tremendous funding that Labov and his
associates received during this period, a subject at least Americans know how crucial this
aspect is when it comes to developing a following. Until Congress established the National
Defence Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, there was no such largesse available to linguistic
research.
44 Indeed, Pickford (1956:223) found their study “remarkable for its sociological
awareness” and “a significant attempt to establish the importance of speech as a mark of
social status”.
270 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
The work suffered from a number of limitations: the selection of
informants was totally unsystematic, and from the occasional background
information which was collected, it appears that only a minority of
informants had any connection with the neighborhood or Washington
during their formative years. The speech of the informants was judged as a
whole, and it is not clear what the judges were reacting to, or how
representative their judgments were. (Labov 1966a[1964]:19)
Indeed, one wonders whether Labov based his severe criticism on his own study
of this rather compact 32-page work or whether he was simply guided by Evans’
critical review. As Joseph (1992) has shown in his careful analysis of Monsignor
Furfey’s contribution to sociolinguistics, the work by his students was anything
but a careless effort to study the speech of a socially disadvanaged group of
people, but an all-out effort at what Labov likes to call a “socially realistic
description” (Labov 1966a: 9, 25n.5). As Joseph (120–121) shows, Putnam &
O’Hern (1955) undertook a large number of interviews presenting their informants
with various tasks, transcribed the responses on the spot as well as taped them for
subsequent spectographic analysis. They offered in addition a description of the
non-standard morphological and syntactic features that they had noticed, before
undertaking a social analysis of the speech of a dozen selected informants with
regard to the social status that others would associate with it. Tapes were
presented to altogether seventy other persons in order to obtain their reactions
and rankings in terms of social class. These rankings in turn were compared with
the actual status of these speakers in terms of the Index of Status Characteristics
(I.S.C.), which had been developed by W.Lloyd Warner (1898–1970) during the
1940s (see Warner et al. 1949), and to which Labov refers in his own work, e.g.,
in his chapter on “Class Differentiation of the Variables” (Labov 1966a: 207–268,
at p.236 and note 10 on p.268; see also Labov 2001:60).
Putnam & O’Hern reported that the ratings of only two out of the twelve
speakers had been rated by these judges “above other speakers whose I.S.C.
scores were higher” (p.26). They pointed out that in their view (p.27): “These
results bear out the hypothesis of this study, that the dialect of Columbus Court
residents does reflect low socio-economic status”. They also found it “most
45 Evans (1956:825) concludes his review in the following manner:
Interesting as it is, the Putnam-O’Hern study is almost completely vitiated,
[…], by the absence of an adequate methodology, both in obtaining and
analyzing the data. Any subsequent investigations in sociolinguistics ought
rather to profit by its mistakes than to repeat them.
Cohen’s (1956b) review of the same 32-page study is much more generous, if less
thorough.
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 271
remarkable” that their study had demonstrated “that untrained judges could rate
the social status of speakers so accurately after listening to a very short speech
selection in the absence of all irrelevant cues” (p.29).
In Joseph’s (1992:120–121) assessment, in Putnam & O’Hern’s study, we see
the coming together of “phonetics, the distributional method, dialect geography,
highly organized sociological investigation, formal scientific method”, in addition
to the social activism that their mentor was known for, when they conclude their
work with the following observation:
The importance of speech as a mark of social status (at least in the case of
this particular group) is a matter of great social significance[…]. Persons
who grow to adulthood as members of an underprivileged social group may
carry a mark of their origin through life and suffer from the various forms
of discrimination which society imposes on members of the lower socioeconomic classes. (Putnam & O’Hern 1955: 29)
It appears that the result of Labov’s dismissal, as the first item on the agenda in his
section on “Studies of subjective evaluation of language” (1966a: 19–23), was that
Putnam & O’Hern’s pioneering efforts were effectively written out of the
historical record.46 Joseph (1992:123) found only one other reference to their
work by the social psychologist Susan Ervin-Tripp (b.1927; on her, cf. Murray
1998:98–99). She gave credit to the authors by describing their work in the
following manner:
Another kind of participation-form study is illustrated by Putnam and
O’Hern (1955) of the relation between social status, judged by sociological
indices, and linguiste features of speech in a Negro community in
Washington, D.C. This study has many similarities in method to
dialectology, but adds a procedure of judges’ blind ratings of status from
tapes, to make a three-way comparison possible between objective status,
perceived status, and specific features. (Ervin-Tripp 1964:9247)
But then she adds: “Labov (1964) gives a sophisticated analysis of a statusform
relation” (ibid.), thereby suggesting that from now on, beginning with Labov’s
Columbia dissertation, Putnam & O’Hern’s work could safely be ignored, which
indeed it was. As Joseph (1992:122) suggests, Labov’s work was soon taken by the
younger generation of linguists, for instance Ralph W. Fasold (b.1940) an Walter
A.Wolfram (b.1941), as the beginning of a new field of research with
“tremendous potential for generating grant support”.
46 There is no mention of their work in Labov’s 572-page Principles…, vol.II: Social factors
(Labov 2001).
272 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
3.
Concluding observations
Writing at the beginning of the century under the influence of Durkheimian
sociology, Meillet (1905, 1906) did not have a name for the new approach to
language and language change in particular. But just a few years later, in 1909, his
compatriot Raoul de la Grasserie (1839–1914) spoke of ‘sociologie linguistique’ in
a programmatic article. 48 The term ‘sociolinguistics’ however— at least in North
America—did not make its appearance in regular print before around 1950, but
apparently was still too fresh to be employed in (the titles of) either Haugen’s or
Weinreich’s studies of 1953. Supposedly coined by Haver C.Currie (1908–1993)
and used in a programmatic paper dealing with what we would refer to as ‘(social)
register’ of speech, the term ‘sociolinguistics’ was picked up by Ethel Wallis49 in
1956, the same year that Glenna Pickford50 offered a ‘sociological appraisal’—and
indeed a very critical view of the dialectological work of Kurath and his
took almost ten more years before
associates.51 It appears, however, that it
‘sociolinguistics’ became the generally accepted name for an important subfield of
linguistic research (e.g., Bright 1966).
Considering the different sources of modern sociolinguistics traced in this
paper, we might depict the evolution of the field with the help of the following
(obviously incomplete) diagram—admittedly leaving out several indeed
pioneering studies which did not become part of the Labovian ‘canon’:
In particular, the diagram excludes extralinguistic, in notably sociological and
psychological,52 work that has exercised an influence on sociolinguistic theory and
practice, and so at least one such example should be mentioned.53 In view of the
fact that the work of the French sociologist Jean Gabriel de Tarde (1848–1904)
has almost been forgotten (cf. Lubek’s 1981 account of “psychologies sociales
perdues”) and largely pushed aside by Durkheim and the work of his nephew and
successor Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), it is refreshing to see some of his ideas
being rehabilitated in Labov’s work (in which Durkheim’s work receives short
shrift). In several places of his writings Labov refers to what he calls ‘Tarde’s Law’,
47 The correct location of this quote has been taken from Murray (1998:56n.11), who also
notes that Labov had also ignored Furfey’s work entirely, notably his (1926) book on gangs
and his (1944) paper on ‘substandard’ English (Murray, p.56).
48 Leo Jordan’s “Essai de sociologie linguistique”, Romanic Review 20.305–325 (1929), has
little to do with the subject. It’s essentially a philological paper devoted to treating the
history of select lexical items of French by reference to dialect mixture and social
stratification.
49 Ethel Emily Wallis (b. c.1920), still today associated with the Summer Institute of
Linguistics, Arizona branch in Tucson, published a 146-page book entitled God Speaks
Navajo (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Her previous work (1951–1963) is listed in
Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 1935–1972 compiled by Alan C.Wares
(Hungtington Beach, Cal.: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1974), pp. 93–94, 149–150,
and 152.
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 273
Fig.2: The sources of sociolinguistics
50 As the author (e-mail of 30 March 2001) kindly informs me, this article “was written as
[her] thesis for a Master’s degree in English at Fresno State College, now California State
University, Fresno” under Earl D.Lyon and in consultation with William Beatty,
anthropologist, and Wendell Bell, sociologist. Mrs Pickford (b.1921) is the wife of the
well-known American aquarellist Rollin Pickford, and has not pursued an academic
career. Her article is a severe critique of the methodology, training, provincialism,
unreliability of the data collected by Kurath and his associates for the American Linguistic
Atlas project (see Kurath 1949; Kurath et al. 1941). She concludes her (1956) article with
the following observation:
The relative insignificance of a geographical study causes the Atlas project to
be ignored by the very social scientists whose cooperation would be most
salutary. It is hoped that future research in American speech will be used to
determine the more significant questions and will bring the professedly
sociological branch of linguistics up to date on social theory and scientific
method.
A reader of this passage marked “Labov” in the margin of the page in the copy of
Word held by the Perry-Castañeda Library of the University of Texas at Austin.
Pickford’s article is not mentioned in Labov (1972).
274 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
54 though without explaining it. In a nutshell, Tarde has argued that imitation
(“l’amant imite l’aimé”) is at the bottom of social change, and language may fall
under a similar spell that Labov and others have called ‘prestige’.
While it is true that the appearance of a cover term for a particular field of
research does not necessarily signal the beginning of a discipline, it may be seen to
mark the point at which professional identification of a particular enterprise is
regarded as desirable by at least some of its practitioners. Labov himself
(1972b:xiii, 183–184), with initial hesitation, settled on ‘sociolinguistics’, which
has become the broad term which also has come to include ‘sociology of
language’ in most instances. He celebrates Ferguson & Gumperz’s 1960 volume
Linguistic Diversity in South Asia as “the beginning of the current interest in
sociolinguistic studies” (p.296). But, as we have shown, Labov had absorbed
many of the ideas of much earlier work in linguistics which, when working out
his own program of a “socially realistic linguistics” (Labov 1972b:xiii).
Labov’s kind of sociolinguistics has been seen, with some justification, as an
antidote to the kind of socially unredeeming and linguistically non-empirical
work that has come out of Chomskyan-type of linguistics over the past forty and
more years. His dedicated return to both internal and social issues in the
investigation of language change (Labov 1994, 2001) promises to become his
legacy.
51 Thus Shuy (1989:298) is probably quite wrong in asserting that Currie’s use of the term
‘sociolinguistics’ in 1952 was “the only extant use preceding the Lake Arrowhead and the
1964 UCLA Institute”. For instance, Paul Friedrich, reviewing Ferguson & Gumperz
(1960), spoke quite liberally of ‘sociolinguistics’ as if it had already been a widely
established term (see Friedrich 1961:163). Indeed, Joseph (1992:125n.1) cites a number of
other loci where the term ‘sociolinguistics’ was used such as by Eugene A.Nida (b.1914) in
1949 in the second edition of his influential Morphology (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan), Einar Haugen
(1906–1994) in 1951 (the printed text of his December 1950 LSA Presidential Address), to
cite at least two predating Currie (1952). The most intriguing reference, however, appears
to be Thomas Callan Hodson’s (1871–1953) use of the hyphenated term as early as 1939.
Hodson had retired from the British Civil Service in India before he was made the first
occupant of the Chair of Anthropology at Cambridge in 1932. (I wonder whether there
wasn’t any connection between Hodson and J.R.Firth during the 1930s, given Firth’s
many years in India during the 1920s and his own sociolinguistic outlook.)
52 Characteristically, Labov had given the work in both areas short shrift in his dissertation,
asserting: “In general, it may be said that psychologists and sociologists have lacked the
linguistic training required to isolate particular elements of structure, and have worked
primarily with vocabulary in content analysis” (Labov 1966a: 23). No particular works are
cited, but this assertion soon entered textbook history (e.g., Wolfram 1969:7).
53 Notably in his 1964 dissertation Labov, a number of works by sociologists are listed in
the relatively short bibliography (1966a: 583–588), but discussed only very briefly (e.g., p.
23).
WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 275
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Labov, William. 1966b. “Hypercorrection by the Lower Middle Class as a Factor of
Linguistic Change” . Bright 1966.83–113. (Repr. in Labov 1972b.122– 142.)
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280 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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55
Labov’s own website http://www.ling.unpenn.edu/–labov./WLBIB.html,
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WILLIAM LABOV AND THE ORIGINS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 281
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284 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
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IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION ON THE
IMPORTANCE OF THE HISTORY OF
LINGUISTICS
As can be shown from history, those who have no past, usually have
no future either.
Manfred Fuhrmann*
1.
Introductory remarks
For some thirty years now, I have been arguing for the importance of the history
of linguistics, and while not everyone has been convinced by the arguments, the
climate of opinion has indeed changed. During the early 1970s, in the earlier
stages of the institutionalization effort of the history of linguistics as a bona fide
subject of instruction within linguistics proper, it seemed natural to make a strong
appeal to the methodological soundness of linguistic historiography in order to
render the subject respectable in the eyes of ‘real’ linguists for whom linguistics
meant ‘theory’ (see Koerner 1972, 1976 as examples of this approach). This
original attitude to matters historical might, at least initially, have had something
to do with the success of Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics (1966), given that
Chomsky was in a way combining theory with an interest in finding antecedents
for what he was doing. Even though this type of ancestor hunt, an essentially
presentist and unhistorical approach, was soon discredited, Chomsky’s incursions
into the linguistic past made an engagement in this kind of activity appear
legitimate for a number of North Americans during the late 1960s and early
1970s.1
In Europe as well as among European-born linguists living in America, a
historical approach to many subjects had a long tradition, and this may explain the
fact that the scholarly reactions to Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics were almost
universally critical, at times rather harshly so (cf. Koerner & Tajima [1986:24–26]
* “Wie sich durch Beispiele aus der Geschichte belegen läßt, pflegt derjenige, der keine
Vergangenheit hat, auch keine Zukunft zu haben.” (Manfred Fuhrmann, Bildung: Europas
kulturelle Identität, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2001, p.111).
286 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
which list some 30 reviews of the English original alone). This long-standing
European interest in the History of Linguistics would also explain the large
number of textbooks in this area which had been written prior to 1966, from
Delbrück in 1880 to Leroy (1963), Malmberg (1964), or I vi (1965). The last
two of these had already been written by 1959 in Swedish and Serbo-Croatian,
respectively, i.e., several years before the Ninth Congress of Linguists held in
Cambridge, Mass., in August 1962, at which Noam Chomsky ventured into
pre-20th-century linguistics for the first time (Chomsky 1964).
In the meantime, since the late 1970s, the History of Linguistics has become a
recognized subject of serious scholarly endeavour, notably in Europe but also
elsewhere, and it appears to many in the field that discussion of the subject’s raison
d’être is no longer required. (Perhaps given my long-standing North American
exposure in matters historical, I may be permitted to differ, for my intention had
never been to convince people in Germany, Italy, or Spain for instance that a
historical perspective to our work in linguistics or language philosophy would be
desirable. It would have meant carrying coals to Newcastle, since in these and
many other countries there has been a long-standing tradition of seeing subjects in
a historical mode.)
In North America, the situation does not look as rosy. With the advent of
structuralism in its various articulations (Bloomfieldian descriptivism, Chomskyan
generativism, etc.), historical aspects had generally fallen by the wayside.2
Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics gave the History of Linguistics an initial boost and
probably motivated the editor of Current Trends in Linguistics to have, as the
concluding stone to his multi-volume edifice begun in the early 1960s, a twovolume Historiography of Linguistics (Sebeok 1975). However, it cannot be said that
either undertaking produced much useful scholarly activity in the field, and
probably neither of them really could anyway: Chomsky’s work was not truly
history, but as he now would call it, an account of the way in which he thinks
things should have happened but didn’t,3 and Sebeok’s volumes largely contain
contributions surveying past writings in the history of linguistics but little original
research—certainly not a demonstration of how work in this area ought to be
conducted.4 I could also add that, still today, the North American Association for
the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS), launched in late 1987, has
fewer than one hundred members, and that no more than a dozen papers are usually
1 For a critique of this naïve approach to the subject, see my reviews of Peter H.Salus’ On
Language: Plato to von Humboldt (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969) in Lingua
25:4.419–431 (1970), and of the same author’s P nini to Postal: A bibliography in the history
of linguistics (Edmonton, Alta. & Champaign, Ill.: Linguistic Research, Inc., 1971) in
Foundations of Language 10:4.589–594 (1973).
2 This has also affected Historical Linguistics greatly, notably between 1933 (the year of
Bloomfield’s Language) and the 1980s (I would like to believe that the launching of
Diachronica in 1984 has helped in the subject’s comeback, notably during the 1990s).
3 See his most recently published views on the history of linguistics (Chomsky 1997).
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 287
given at the annual meetings which are regularly held together with those of the
Linguistic Society of America (which counts “about 4,000 personal members”5).
2.
The uses of the history of a discipline for the field in general
Given the ultilitarian tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, I have always felt, having
lived for altogether over thirty years in North America, that it would be good, if
not necessary, to demonstrate the usefulness of a subject like the history of
linguistics for the sciences dealing with language. Nowadays, with world-wide
downsizing of academic institutions, in particular in the areas of the liberal arts
and social sciences, this task may even be more diificult to accomplish, though it
seems that what Richards (1999:44) has recently identified as “a probably
transient culturally reflective mood obsessed by fin de siècle and a sense of
heritage”, the impression may have been created that there is a strong sense of
history in the air that could benefit an ‘esoteric’ subject like the History of
Linguistics. If this assessment is accurate, it seems that, at least in North America,
continued efforts to explain the usefulness of the subject may be required. My
European colleagues, I know, feel that given the existence of three journals
devoted to the subject and a few additional minor periodicals (bulletins,
newsletters, etc.), monograph series, many specialized conferences, regional and
international, and scholarly societies in many countries, there is no need to lobby
for a place of the History of Linguistics within linguistics tout court any more. I
would like to think that they are right.
It remains interesting to note that subjects like the History of Medicine and the
History of Science generally, for example, are flourishing subjects in North
America; even the History of Psychology and the History of Philosophy are wellestablished subjects of research and university instruction. So one might well ask
why the History of Linguistics has fared less well. Even if we put the beginning of
linguistics as a science only as far back as 200 years, the study of language can
boast a tradition as long as chemistry or biology. It is therefore curious to note
that, whereas these natural (and some social) sciences have enjoyed the
establishment of courses devoted to the history of their own discipline, no
comparable arrangement exists with regard to linguistics. The science of language,
a discipline in which the coexistence of diverging theoretical views and possibly
contrasting methodological procedures, would, in my view, need a historical
perspective more, not less, than, say, that modern medicine would be in need of
history to guide its understanding of present-day health sciences.
4 In fact much of the methodological discussion in my own contribution to the project
(Koerner 1975) was deleted from the manuscript by the editors.
5 Information supplied by Margaret W.Reynolds, Executive Director of the LSA (e-mail to
author, 8 April 1999).
288 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
In view of this state of affairs regarding the History of Linguistics we may have
to ask ourselves whether the work of historians of other disciplines has a sounder
scientific basis, or how the apparent flourishing of the history of science may
otherwise be explained. The fact that the natural sciences (and medicine) in
general receive more governmental and other public support may be considered
as one of the factors involved, but not necessarily the only or most important
one.
2.1
The introduction to the field of linguistics through its history
The most obvious use of the history of linguistics is to introduce the neophyte to
the subject of linguistics proper, to the various modes of thinking about what the
discipline regards as its object of investigation and the methods and concepts that
make up its essential tool kit. Once a student has grasped the basics, however,
there is the likelihood that the history of the subject, the genesis of its conceptformation, the awareness of the changing goals of linguistics during the long
development of human preoccupation with language tends to be dropped, if it
was ever discussed. The student will now be trained in the science of language and
its component parts such as syntax, phonology, morphology, and various
hyphenated speciality areas; s/he will be provided with the current thinking in
these areas of interest and provided with the tools to participate in the work of
the particular subdisciplines. The student may never become educated in
developing an awareness of the relativity of his or her linguistic practice—unless of
course the instructor is of the view that a student must have a thorough
grounding in the heritage that informs current research activity.6
I doubt that the issue is whether the history of linguistics bores the average
linguist, as may well be the case with a number of scientists engaged in what the
late Thomas S.Kuhn had termed the ‘puzzle-solving operations’ of ‘normal
science’. To put the question in negative terms and somewhat more bluntly: is it
that—as some historians of science have asked themselves on one occasion or
another—the study of its history puts a brake on the progress of science itself (cf.
Synge 1958)? Or should we agree with the physicist S.G. Brush (1973), who
suggested that the history of science should be given an ‘X’ certificate, i.e., made
available only to mature students and fully-fledged scientists?
I admit that I, for one, am displeased to hear and read that Noam Chomsky is
given credit for what Catherine Chvany (1996) has recently termed ‘the by now
swollen notion’ of mark and markedness where I feel that every properly
6 For the purpose of introducing students to a wide range of 20th-century frameworks in
general linguistics as well as theories of syntax, morphology, and other subjects, the various
individual articles in Koerner & Asher (1995:221–419) may prove especially helpful. Until
the appearance of Tome III of History of the Language Sciences (Koerner et al. 2000–), this
1995 volume will remain as the best reference work.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 289
educated linguist should be expected to know that this concept originates with
Trubetzkoy in his exchanges with Roman Jakobson, and that it was transmitted
to North America most likely through the latter. If Chomsky did not pick it up
from Jakobson directly during his four years as a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–
1955), it is safe to assume that he received knowledge of the idea through his
contacts and subsequent collaboration with Jakobson’s doctoral student Morris
Halle from the mid-1950s onwards. As already said earlier, I’m non-plussed to be
told by students that the concepts of ‘drag chain’ and ‘push chain’ stem from
William Labov instead of going back at least to André Martinet’s (1908–1999)
well-known 1952 paper on “Function, Structure, and Sound Change”. I is clear
that Labov got the idea if not from reading Martinet’s article, then mediated
through Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967),7 Martinet’s student during the late 1940s
and early 1950s and Labov’s teacher during the early 1960s (cf. Chapter 10, for
details).
However, it is not so much the ignorance of linguistics students of anything
preceding the most recent past that is disturbing—though this may be regrettable
enough in itself. What is disturbing is that the attributions seem to suggest that
Chomsky, Labov, or any other ‘greats’ in the field need to be seen as having
originated almost any idea that is regarded as of current relevancy. However, their
importance does not lie in having been so inventive and so utterly original, but in
having produced a synthesis of the accumulated linguistic and, at times, extralinguistic knowledge, and thus having established a framework of their own,
irrespective of the provenience of particular ideas contained in them.
2.2
Historical knowledge of the subject as part of a scientist’s education
For many years my argument has been that the History of Linguistics should do
much more than to serve initiating purposes as sketched above (cf. Koerner 1972,
1973). In my view, what I prefer to call (extending the traditional meaning of the
term) the Historiography of Linguistics, by which I mean a principled manner of
dealing with our linguistic past, or Linguistic Histori ography for short, furnishes
the practising linguists with the material for acquiring a knowledge of the
development of their own field. I would argue that it is this knowledge or
informed awareness that makes the essential difference between the scientist and
the laboratory assistant: The scientist knows where the techniques came from and
what their limitations are; the laboratory assistant, having only control of the
mechanics of the trade, does not, and may get stuck easily when a procedure he
expected to be correct to follow at all times fails to produce the desired result.
7 Martinet’s 1952 paper is not only listed in the bibliography of Weinreich’s 1953 book,
Languages in Contact, but also frequently referred to in the text (pp. 16n.6, 21n.18; 22n.20;
p.24 and note 24).
290 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
Perhaps a real-life example can explain what I mean when I argue in favour of
historical knowledge of the field a linguist is engaged in. Several years ago, I had a
colleague in my Department at the University of Ottawa who holds a Ph.D. in
Phonology from MIT; Morris Halle had been his thesis supervisor. Everyone
agreed that he was a fine phonologist. What struck me as odd was that he was
constantly concerned that in some place someone might have come up with an
insight or a new theoretical precept in phonology without his having received the
information within a matter of a few weeks, and, as a result, he spent much of his
time watching the internet to ensure that he did not miss anything. To my way
of thinking, such a concern was indeed uncalled for if one had a sound
knowledge of the evolution of the field since the time of Trubetzkoy, a
grounding in the various procedures of analysis by different researchers, and also a
sense of what has often happened in American linguistics at least since The Sound
Pattern of English when theoretical proposals in phonology (or in syntax for that
matter) were abandoned almost as quickly as they had been advanced. In short,
one may save time and effort by waiting a bit until the dust has settled.8 As far as I
know, there is no Nobel Prize for Linguistics which might motivate people to
worry constantly that someone somewhere may make an important discovery
first.
We should remember—as Benware (1974) has demonstrated with respect to
Jacob Grimm’s insistence of the basic vowel triad in Germanic and its impact on
subsequent research—the practicing linguist may be well advised to be aware of
the danger that strict adherence to a given system of thought may lead to error,
and that acceptance of theories on authority may in fact put a brake on the
development of the discipline (as it did in 19th-century historical linguistics in the
case just cited).9
2.3
Historical knowledge as a means of evaluating new hypotheses
Already in the 1970s I had argued that Linguistic Historiography, inasmuch as it is
theory-oriented,10 provides the scientist with the perspective and distance that
will permit him to differentiate substantial gains within the discipline from poorly
supported ‘theories’ and unsubstantiated claims. In other words—in addition to
the two above-mentioned arguments in favour of instruction in the history of
linguistic ideas as part of the general training of a linguist—linguistic
8 As far as I know, the phonologist in question is now happily ensconced in Optimality
Theory (OT), a framework he has had a part in developing.
9 As is well known, it took historical-comparative Indo-European linguistics until about
1875 to overthrow the mistaken idea that Sanskrit, not Greek, Latin or Lithuanian, for that
matter, represented the basic vowel system closest to the Indo-European Ursprache, and
that this position had been maintained largely on the authority of Bopp, Schleicher, and
others.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 291
historiography, by providing the experience of the development of one’s own
discipline, promotes skill in the judgment of novel or opposing theories, and thus
at the same time safeguards us against uncritically accepting excessive claims in
support of one particular linguistic theory.
That this historical knowledge may prevent the practicing linguist from
dogmatism in linguistic theory and lead him/her to circumspection with regard to
seemingly new ideas offered on the market of ideas and, possibly, the acceptance
of a diversity of views that hardly can be overvalued in current linguistic debate.
Or, as Klaas Willems (1997) has recently suggested, we may recognize that the
historiography of linguistics is indeed a “therapeutic discipline” because it presents
the scientific study of language as “an unstable equilibrium between changing
argumentation and undeniable historical roots”.
2.4
Historical knowledge as leading to moderation in linguistic theory
If there has indeed been a genuine revival of interest in our linguistic past —and
there are signs in some places that it has—this may be taken as an indication that
linguistics proper has come of age. An adolescent discipline, to be sure, needs no
history; such an activity would seriously impair its initial vigour and unduly bridle
its curiosity. Linguistics—and the history of linguistics may well support its
essential truth—may have to accept the general validity of Goethe’s often-cited
dictum: “Alles Gescheite ist schon einmal gedacht worden; man muss nur
versuchen, es noch einmal zu denken [Anything intelligent has already been
thought before; it is just a matter of thinking it once again]”; in other words, the
main facts about the nature of language (unless we include in our purview
problems in language that are in fact merely theory-generated, not empirical facts)
have long been recognized by many of our predecessors; the great remaining task
(for linguistics proper) is to rediscover them, in the light of our own
understanding of things and present-day challenges and commitments. In this way,
the history of linguistics may well serve as a guard against exaggerated claims of
novelty, originality, breakthrough, and revolution in our (re)discoveries and,
thus, lead to a more balanced kind of scientific discourse, or, as the late Paul
Garvin suggested many years ago, a ‘moderation in linguistic theory’ (Garvin
1970).
10 I admit that I have become less convinced about the importance of (meta)metahistorical
debates than Peter Schmitter appears to be (cf., e.g., Schmitter 1998).
292 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
2.5
Historical knowledge as furthering unity within a complex subject
We may add two further points in favour of studying the history of linguistics. Both
may appear ephemeral to some, but I feel that they should not be dismissed out of
hand. One concerns my belief that on certain occasions linguistic historiography
may allow the scholar to participate in scientific endeavours that lie outside his
own lifetime, thus expanding our personal experience. For instance, if we read
the Mémoire of 1878 in the proper spirit, we actually experience Saussure’s
struggle with the perplexities of Indo-European ablaut.
The other point may perhaps be easier to accept. At a time of ever increasing
specialization of linguistic research into diverse subfields—it seems that linguistics
has indeed abandoned the autonomy of the subject that Saussure was so
concerned about establishing early in the century—the History of Linguistics may
well serve as an overarching and unifying agent.
3.
What kind of History of Linguistics ?
One may of course ask what kind of History of Linguistics we are talking about,
the kind that we see in the regular textbooks that seem to relate past battles from
a present-day perspective, or are there any other approaches that may be of more
genuine interest to the practicing linguist.
Almost thirty years ago, I spoke of four different manners of dealing with the
history of linguistics (Koerner 1974). I distinguished between ‘summingup’
histories, propagandistic accounts, possibly fairly detached kinds of histories, and a
more critical and methodological type that still needed to be established. These
separate types have more recently been echoed by Simone (1995), who agrees
with my view that historians of linguistics must also be linguists if they are to do a
reasonably adequate job—although they should not wedded to a specific theory.
3.1
Summing-up histories
First, there is the type of history written at a time when a particular generation or
an individual representing the ideas, beliefs and commitments of his generation to
a significant extent, is convinced that a desired goal has been reached and that
subsequent work in the field will mainly be concerned with what T.S.Kuhn
called ‘mopping-up operations’. These writers believe that the framework for
conducting research has been sufficiently mapped out for the ordinary member of
the scientific community to conduct their investigations, and that there is no
longer any need for a major revision of the methodology. This standpoint seems
to be best expressed in Benfey’s voluminous Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und
orientalischen Philologie (1869) appearing one year after Schleicher’s untimely death,
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 293
but is also exemplified by Raumer’s Geschichte der germanischen Philologie (1870). We
now know that it was in fact a period of relative stagnation in Indo-European
linguistics, and that the mid-1870s were to witness a considerable reshaping of the
manner in which comparative-historical research was done: I am of course
referring to the advent of the Junggrammatiker.
A similar observation, it would seem, could be made about Pedersen’s 1924
history of the achievements of 19th century Indo-Europeanists, which was
preceded by a similar and somewhat shorter account of 1916 (see Pedersen 1931
and 1983, for the respective English translations), the year of the completion of the
second edition of Brugmann & Delbrück’s Grundriss as well as the appearance of
Saussure’s posthumous Cours. By the end of World War I the work of the
Neogrammarians had in turn become rather stale. It was therefore typical that
Streitberg from 1916 onwards produced his multi-volume survey of IndoEuropean linguistics. Those undertakings—compare Sebeok’s Current Trends
produced largely during the 1960s when structuralism in its various articulations
appears to have been losing momentum—usually occur toward the end of a
certain phase of development.
Indeed, it appears to me that the histories by Ivi (1965), Leroy (1963),
Malmberg (1964), and others fulfilled a similar function of summing up previous
attainments in linguistic science as well as presenting us with the various
structuralist schools.11 By the same token, the histories by Malmberg, Ivi , Leroy,
and other similarly slanted studies put forward particular post-Saussurean trends as
the most significant achievements of the discipline to date, whether they
emanated from Bloomfield or Hjelmslev or the Prague Circle. Like what Benfey,
Raumer, Pedersen, Streitberg, and others had done for an earlier stage in the
development of linguistics, their endeavour was to a large extent the presentation
of a framework of research in which they themselves had been brought up, and,
possibly, an attempt to retain the strength and impact of the structuralist mode of
thought. In other words, even those summingup histories are by no means
innocent of pursuing a specific ‘agenda’ such as celebrating and maintaining a
particular view of the discipline even if this may not be immediately obvious to
the reader.12
3.2
Propagandist histories of linguistics
No doubt the traditional, conservative kind of history writing (which has been
the predominant type to date) has its drawbacks, perhaps because its authors share
the subconscious optimism that the delineation of the development of a given
11 I have selected only a few histories in order to illustrate my points; for a much more
comprehensive list of studies of this kind that appeared between the 19th century and the
20th until the mid-1970s, see Koerner (1978).
294 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
discipline involves the illustration of a steady growth of knowledge, an increase of
sophistication, etc. in that field of study, frequently coupled with a tendency to
maintain what has so far been achieved rather than an attempt to open up the
subject for a possible break with tradition.
In this respect, what I have termed a ‘propagandist’ approach to the history of
linguistics may have its benefits as long as its Whiggish nature is recognized. Such
a study of the past with reference to the present was aptly characterized by Henry
Butterfield many years ago in the following terms:
Through this system of immediate reference to the present-day, historical
personages can easily be classed into the men who furthered progress and
the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by
which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of
emphasis. (Butterfield 1931:11)
No further comment to this ‘Whig interpretation of history’ is needed; the
reference to certain contemporary activities in the history of linguistics seems
clear enough.
This second type of history-writing activity may be characterized by the
intention on the part of an individual author usually in his thirties (not late forties
or older as is generally true of authors of the ‘summing-up’ type), again
representing a particular group, to launch a campaign opposing previously
cherished views and still prevailing doctrines. Thus in contrast to Benfey (1869),
for example, Delbrück’s (1842–1922) 1880 Einleitung served as the mouthpiece of
a new generation of scholars eager to demonstrate that their achievements
significantly surpassed previous attainments in the field and that their theories
rightfully replaced those taught by the preceding generation of linguists.
History appears to have been repeating itself when exactly 100 years later, in
1980, Newmeyer (b.1944) published his Linguistics in America.13 This endeavour
to prove earlier linguistic views—especially the imrnmediately preceding ones—
as utterly insufficient and inadequate and to embark on what Carl Voegelin once
termed the ‘eclipsing stance’ was evident in Chomsky’s presentation at the Ninth
International Congress (Chomsky 1964[1962]). Soon thereafter, a number of his
followers ardently engaged in writing their particular view of history (e.g., Dingwall
1963, Bach 1965, Bierwisch 1970 [1966]). Of course, Chomsky’s 1966 Cartesian
Linguistics provided the best model for the pro-domo type of writing—or rewriting
12 Robins (1967), hardly less derivative than the other textbooks of the period, was perhaps
the ideologically most neutral of the lot (i.e., those authored by Ivi , Leroy, Malmberg, and
others), and being written in elegant English, proved to be the most successful.
13 Of Newmeyer’s 1980 book a second edition appeared in 1986, to which we should add
his 1996 collection of papers in which he has defended his view of things against the
criticism of others (e.g., Koerner 1983, 1984; Huck & Goldsmith 1995).
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 295
—the history of linguistics. Today, while we may still discover a considerable
amount of useful information in the histories written for the purpose of summing
up previous work in the field, such as the accounts by Benfey, Raumer,
Pedersen, and others—although we are quite aware of their biases and
shortcomings—histories of the propagandistic category rapidly become dated
once their particular ‘mission’ has been accomplished.14
3.3
‘Problemgeschichte’
There is, perhaps, a third type of history written that is intended as neither
advocating a specific framework or ‘paradigm’ nor attempting to provide an
argument in favour of various kinds of ‘scientific revolution’ within the discipline.
This kind of history is less partisan than the other two instances presented above
as it aims at a sine ira et studio approach to the subject matter. To my mind, the
best example of this type is Arens’ book Sprachwissenschaft (1969), in which the
attempt was made to delineate the development of western linguistic thought
from the early discussions among the Greeks about the nature of language to
contemporary linguistic work, certainly with a view to indicating not only that
our discipline has come a long way to gain those insights we now cherish and the
methods we have developed, but also that we all have built, knowingly or not, on
the findings of previous generations of linguists, and that we owe much more to
our predecessors than we might ever become fully aware of.
While this way of presenting the history of linguistics might well have been the
result of a very personal choice, it appears that Arens’ book expressed the
endeavour of a whole generation of scholars to rebuild a discipline that had
become largely discredited through the infusion of Nazi ideology. Pedersen’s
1924 book, which appeared after the loss of prestige of much of the
Junggrammatiker framework, may well be included in the third category in that it
sought to re-affirm a linguistic tradition which in his belief could continue to serve
as a sound basis for subsequent work in the field.
Undoubtedly, other, often non-linguistic, factors played a role in presenting
the history of the discipline in one way or another. Thus it should also be recalled
14 I still remember how my colleagues working in the generative mould received
Newmeyer’s book during the 1980s: finally someone who tells us what we have always
believed to be true, namely, that the post-Bloomfieldians, notably Harris and Hockett, had
no idea what science was and that Chomsky was right all along. Of course, every student
had to get a copy of the book in order to know why there was a Chomskyan ‘revolution’
in linguistics. Perhaps the students of Brugmann et al. heard a similar line about the ‘new
beginnings’ (Delbrück’s term after having dispatched Schleicher as adhering to Bopp’s by
then discredited views). As a matter of fact, Delbrück’s Einleitung had six editions between
1880 and 1919, more than Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien, which had five between 1880 and
1920. Both were widely used as textbooks; Paul’s book is still in press today.
296 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
that particular socio-economic conditions, historical events, or political situations
often have had a considerable influence on the motivation for writing the history
of a given discipline or the acceptance of a seemingly new theoretical framework
of research or mode of thought. The works of Benfey and Raumer, for instance,
were motivated in part by the rise of German nationalism at the time of
Bismarck. On the other hand, Malkiel (1969:557) quite rightly observed that the
success of Saussure’s Cours “cannot be properly measured without some allowance
for the feelings of that time: The acceptance of the leadership of a French-Swiss
genius connoted for many Westerners then opposed to Germany a strongly
desired, rationalized escape from the world of Brugmann, Leskien, Osthoff, and
Paul.”
3.4
The historiography of linguistics
Yet despite my respect for works of the third type, especially Arens’ book, I
strongly believe that we need a fourth type of history-writing, namely, a kind of
accounting of our linguistic past as an integral part of the discipline itself and, at
the same time, as an activity founded on well-defined principles that can rival
those of ‘normal science’ (Kuhn) itself with regard to soundness of method and
rigour of application. I do not advocate that the history of linguistics should
become solely subservient to the discipline, but that it would have to establish itself
as serving a function comparable to that of the history of science for the natural
scientist. In linguistics, an intrinsically social discipline by the nature of its object
of investigation, this goal may well prove much more difficult to attain than what
the historian of science may be required to do. Largely as a result of its absorption
of principles of analysis derived from natural scientists, especially comparative
anatomists, biologists, in particular botanists, and geologists, linguistics has attained
the status of a science during the past 150 and more years. So maybe there are
parallels after all.
It is obvious from what I stated earlier that while histories of the first and third
type have their uses, I do not think that works written in the manner of
Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics are histories at all. As a result of my general
dissatisfaction with the state of affairs as I encountered it as a doctoral student
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent much of my scholarship on establishing
—and exemplifying (see Koerner 1973[1971], 1975[1972])—the kind of historywriting that I felt was required, not only to serve our understanding of linguistics
and its evolution better, but also to ensure that we do not repeat the
shortcomings, errors and serious distortions, of previous accounts. Obviously, I
would not subscribe to Brekle’s (1985) view that each generation should be
expected to write its own history. Such a free-wheeling attitude would lead, I
submit, to Whig history, not to the kind of history I have in mind.
The linguistic historiography that I have pursued has an important task to
perform within the discipline as a whole. The fact that the history of linguistics
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 297
may well constitute a very valuable key to a better understanding and appreciation
of the history of ideas in general can only enhance its significance. I therefore,
right from the start, subscribed to Malkiel’s view (1969:532) that the historian of a
given science must he equipped with a ‘dual expertise’ with which, in addition to
“the specific knowledge of a scientific[…]domain”, he “ought to know a good
deal about the intellectual history (embedded within the matrix of general
history)”. The historiographer of linguistics, however, needs more than this dual
expertise but must also address issues of methodology and even epistemology.
To me, it seems at times that tendencies in linguistics proper, perhaps unduly
motivated by excessive claims of originality in matters of theory, are often
reminiscent of what Troike (1976) warned us of, namely, attempts at reinventing
the wheel. A greater general awareness of antecedents of our current thinking
appears therefore desirable. As a result, I would not subscribe to a history of
linguistics that becomes “a discipline apart” (Kuhn 1971:272), an enterprise for its
own sake. But then linguistics is not quite a subject comparable to, say,
theoretical physics. That does not exclude the legitimacy of a formal,
mathematical, statistical, or logical treatment of certain component parts of the
linguistic enterprise, of course, and even the attempt on the part of some to
propose an overall general theory of linguistics which is rather abstract (e.g., Lieb
1984).
In a comment on the relationship between science and art Kuhn (1969: 407–
408) had noted that “science destroys its past”, namely, that the work of Einstein
and Schrödinger, for instance, has rendered that of Galileo and Newton largely
irrelevant, the ‘Einsteinian paradigm’, so to speak, having replaced the frame of
reference defined by Newton and others. By contrast we note that Picasso’s art
has not made Rembrandt’s paintings obsolete. If we accept the general
correctness of this observation, we may wonder what function the history of
science, a well-established university subject, has for the advancement of science,
and indeed we may question its relevance even for a better understanding of
history if Kuhn’s (1971:271–272) complaint that students from the sciences hardly
ever attend his courses holds true for the subject in general. Linguistics may be an
exact science with respect to certain methodological questions and procedures of
analysis; however, it cannot be argued that one particular theory generally makes
other competing theories obsolete, to the extent that a paradigm change, a
‘revolution’ in the Kuhnian sense of the term, takes place which justly demands
strict adherence from every member of the scientific community who wants to
remain and work within the discipline. As a matter of fact, we are currently
witnessing a diversity of views in matters concerning both general theory and the
treatment of specific aspects of linguistic analysis which would not have seemed
possible in linguistics fifteen or so years ago.
Yet instead of merely making general statements, I should refer to a few
particulars concerning the kind of historiography of linguistics that I have been
engaged in during the past thirty years. I’m not referring to the organizational side
of the enterprise: the journals, monograph series, learned societies, conferences,
298 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
and the like which have become part of the professional landscape for the past
twenty and more years, but to the principles guiding the historian that I felt are
needed in order to render research in this area of interest respectable and useful, if
these are the proper terms here.
Among other things, following a certain amount of polemics against what I
regarded as unsatisfactory history-writing during the 1970s (cf. note 1, above)
and, at times, also during the early 1980s (Koerner 1983, 1984), I addressed issues
that I believe to be central to linguistic historiography. For instance, in a 1982
paper I discussed the various ways in which the development of disciplines tend to
be depicted and I presented arguments and models to illustrate a variety of
parametres, such as progress-by-accumulation, ‘mainstream’ vs ‘undercurrent’,
epistemological pendulum swings, discontinuity vs continuity, as well as
accounting for external factors, for instance, with reference to Becker’s ‘climate of
opinion’ (Koerner 1984[1982]). At a congress on the history of linguistics two
years later, I addressed the fuzziness of the frequently invoked argument of
‘influence’ and proposed criteria for a useful definition of the concept and its
proper application (Koerner 1987b[1984]). Subsequently, on several occasions
(Koerner 1987a[1984], 1993) I discussed what I have called ‘the problem of
metalanguage’ in linguistic historiogaphy, an important issue indeed, given the
terminological and epistemological problems the historian encounters when
dealing with past theories as he may have to operate on a meta-metalevel of
discourse. To be sure, some of these matters may remain ‘persistent issues’
(Koerner 1995b), but the historiographer should not lose sight of them, and the
field is in much better shape today than it was when I first encountered it during
1969–1971, when I was writing my dissertation on the origin, development, and
current relevance of Saussure’s linguistic theory (Koerner 1973[1971]).
5.
Concluding plea for the history of linguistics
To sum up, looking back at the development of linguistic historiography, it may
appear to many that the subject has sufficiently matured and the field become so
effectively organized internationally that a concern for its vigorous continuity
would no longer be justified. The triennial International Conferences on the
History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS), inaugurated in 1978 and meeting for
the eighth time in September 1999 in Paris, typically attended by some 100
scholars from about 20 different countries, alone may seem re-assuring enough.
This optimism concerning the status of linguistic historiography has been
expressed most recently by Schmitter (1997), where the history of linguistics takes
centre stage in general linguistic education. (Elffers-van Ketel, writing in 1991,
was still much more restrained in this regard.) Such optimism, however, does not
seem to be shared by American historians of linguistics if we consider
Newmeyer’s (1996) experience according to which most linguists there regard the
field as occupying “a status level even lower than that of a ‘semiotician’” (p.2).
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION 299
Possibly Newmeyer has been talking to different people than I have. I for one do
not subscribe to either extreme position but argue in favour of a continuing
discussion of the position that the history of the discipline and the history of its
discourses should hold within the sciences of language. As I see it, there is no
reason for complacency.
It remains true, however, that I have hardly ever met a linguist who was not in
one way or another interested in the history of linguistics. In my opinion this has
little to do with the question of whether linguistics is an exact science, an
empirical science, or merely a speculative science; perhaps it is simply because
linguistics is essentially a human and social science, at any rate a Geisteswissenschaft,
which has man’s curiosity about himself, and his thought, as its true source of
inquiry. This may well be a good position to start from.
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INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND TERMS
Bildung: 43
Black English: 256, 268, 270
Bloomfieldian linguistics
(see also under Language [Bloomfield] and
Descriptive linguistics): 81, 83, 88, 104,
135, 163, 173, 244, 285
Brazilian languages: 18
Bureau of American Ethnology
(Washington, D.C.): 25
A.
Adequacy criterion: 133, 231
Allomorph: 84
American Anthropological Association
(AAA): 26
American Bible Association: 27
American Ethnological Society: 25, 26
American Indian languages
(see also under Languages): 41, 42, 45,
50, 224, 225
— study of ~: 4, 18, 18, 18, 19 passim,
29
American linguistics: 22 et passim
— historiography of ~: x passim (and
throughout the book)
American Oriental Society: 25
American Philosophical Society
(Philadelphia): 6n, 23, 24, 225
Americanist liguistics: 8, 18
— history of: 16 passim
Anthropological linguistics: 18, 47, 53
Anthropology: 40, 62, 77, 193
Applied Linguistics: 3, 78
Arabic studies: 7
Arbitrariness of the sign: 63, 68
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky):
10, 107, 107, 115, 137, 141, 175, 186,
195
Autonomous syntax: 126
C.
Cartesian Linguistics (Chomsky): 2, 146,
239, 257, 284, 285, 294
Castillian grammar: 18
Categories, grammatical
(see also Linguistic categories): 50
Chicago Linguistics Society (CLS): 112,
113
Child language: 267n
Classification of languages
(see also Language typology): 29n, 44,
45
Climate of opinion (Becker): 297
Cognitive linguistics: 125
Colleges (in North America):
—Gratz (Philadelphia): 220
—Dropsie (Philadelphia): 220
Colour perception: 53
Comparative-historical linguistics
(see also Historical linguistics): 16, 28,
152, 210
‘competence’ (vs ‘performance’): 105, 107,
138, 139, 141
Connotation: 82
‘context of situation’ (Firth): 114
B.
Baffin Island: 76
Base form: 227
Behaviorist psychology: 65, 66, 79
Bilingualism: 255n, 263, 267, 272
303
304 INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND TERMS
Contextualization: 82
Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure): 8, 9,
10, 63 passim, 77n, 130, 131, 134, 139,
141, 144, 145, 146, 292, 295
—English translation of ~: 10, 131
Course in Modern Linguistics, A (Hockett):
viii, 82n, 82, 158n
D.
Data orientation (vs Theory orientation):
73
Déduction: 105
Deep grammar, see Surface grammar ‘deep’
vs ‘surface’ structure: 94, 108, 147
Denotation: 82
Derivational constraints: 119
Descriptive linguistics: x, 21, 29, 66, 75,
83, 89, 92, 105, 131, 163, 180, 218, 220,
225, 231, 235
Descriptive order: 231, 232n
Dialectology: 254, 258, 259, 264, 267, 271,
272
Dialect atlasses:
—of France: 265n
—of Germany: 259
—of Switzerland: 259
—of the United States: 259
Distinctive feature(s): 81
Distinctiveness (same/different): 9, 73, 84,
88, 90, 104
Distribution: 84
‘drag chain’ (Martinet): 283, 288
E.
Empiricism: 105, 115, 154
Environmental approach: 43
‘ethnography of speaking/communication’
(Hymes): 257
Ethnolinguistics: 42, 53
Explanation: 75
Extended Standard Theory (EST): 108,
109, 120, 121
External factors (in revolutions): 152, 155,
158, 185, 184, 244
Externalized language: 143, 144, 145
F.
Fashion: 157
Fieldwork: 75, 268
Functionalism: 81
Funding of research: 159, 164, 193
G.
Geisteswissenschaft (vs Naturwissenschaft): 43,
164, 258, 298
Generative grammar
(see also Transformational-Generative
grammar): 75, 131, 190, 222, 239, 257,
285
Generative Semantics (GS): 10, 96, 104
passim, 242
General Semantics (Korzybski): 40, 66n
génie des langues: 20
Golden Anniversary celebrations (LSA): 3,
5
Government & Binding (GB): 11, 110,
126, 137, 142, 197
Grammaire générale et raisonnée (Arnauld &
Lancelot): 141
H.
Historical-comparative grammar
(see also Comparative-historical
linguistics): 16, 28, 152
Historical linguistics: 66, 181, 210, 262,
264, 265, 266, 272, 285, 289
Historiography of linguistics: 2, 154, 155,
156, 188, 190, 208, 212, 256, 284 passsim
History of linguistics: 2, 257 et passim, esp.
284 passim
History of science: 286
I.
Immediate constituent (IC): 83, 178, 183
Idealizaton: 144, 161, 233
Ideology: 114, 137, 160, 184, 241, 242,
295
Indo-European linguistics
(see also Historical linguistics): 7, 28,
133, 210, 224, 291
Indology: 7
Induction: 105
‘Inner form’ (Steinthal/Humboldt): 40, 47
Intensive Language Program (ILP): 78
INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND TERMS 305
Internalized language (Chomsky): 143, 144
International Conference on the History of
the Language Sciences (ICHoLS): 7,
109, 298
International Congress of Linguists (ICL),
Ninth (1962): 130, 135, 138, 168, 169,
169, 195, 215, 234, 285, 294
J.
Journals in Linguistics
—International Journal of American Linguistics
(IJAL): 179, 210
—Language: 155, 166, 170, 179, 192, 193,
195, 210, 217, 220n, 225n, 228, 229,
231, 236
—Studies in Linguistics: 210n
—Word: 170, 179, 181, 210
Junggrammatiker, see Neogrammarians
L.
Language (Bloomfield): 62, 68, 69, 70, 82,
214, 220, 230, 264, 285n
Language (Jespersen): 145
Language (Sapir): 40, 68, 77n
Language change, see Historical linguistics
Language classification, see Classification of
language(s):
Languages (individual or families of):
—Algonquian: 28, 29n, 287, 229, 235
—Cherokee: 225
—Cree: 28, 29n
—Fox: 28, 229
—Germanic: 289
—Hebrew: 208, 220, 228, 291
—Modern ~: 176, 213, 214, 216, 231,
233, 236, 243
—Hidatsa: 224
—Hopi: 9
—Inuit: 29n
—Mohawk: 23
—Mohegan: 23
—Menominee: 28, 211, 212, 214, 215,
227, 228, 229, 230, 235, 236, 239
—Nootka: 228
—Potowatomi: 228
—Russian: 211, 235
—Semitic: 181, 224
—Seneca: 29n
—Shoshone: 23, 29n
—Tübatulabel: 228
—Yiddish: 260, 268
—Zuñi: 29n
langue (vs parole): 63, 66, 68, 68, 70, 107,
113, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145
lenguas generales: 20
Lexical insertion: 117, 119
Lexical vs structural meaning: 88
Lexicalist position: 109
Lexicography: 7
Life and Growth of Language (Whitney): 41
Linguistic Aspects of Science (Bloomfield): 80
Linguistic categories: 45, 50, 53
Linguistic Institute(s): 115, 168
Linguistic Society of America (LSA): ix, 3,
133, 134, 155, 158, 168, 178, 217, 268
—archives of ~: 6
Logic: 75, 105, 117, 126, 296
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT),
The (Chomsky): 131, 170, 173, 179,
209, 236, 237
M.
Markedness: 288
Mathematics: 75
Meaning
(see also Semantics): 69, 73 passsim, 104
Meaning of Meaning, The (Ogden &
Richards): 40, 50n, 80n
Mechanist approach: 73
Mentalism: 9, 166, 167, 183, 187
Metalinguistics: 43, 84, 88
‘metaphysical garbage’ (Joseph): 40, 40
Methods in Structural Linguistics (Harris): 11,
89, 163, 178, 208, 209, 216, 217, 219,
220, 222, 225, 230, 233, 239
Minimalist Program: 10, 137n, 197
Missionary linguistics: 19, 21, 24, 27
Mithridates (Adelung & Vater): 24
Morpheme (defined): 81, 82, 88, 229
Morphology: 73, 77, 84, 94, 104, 117, 179,
214
Morphophonemics/~phonology: 10, 11,
70, 184, 186, 208 passim
306 INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND TERMS
N.
National Defense Education Act (NDEA):
164
National Science Foundation (NSF): 167,
192
Neogrammarians: 4, 79, 292
New York: 224
Nominalization: 119
North American Association for the
History of the Language Sciences
(NAAHoLS): 3, 285
Notational variant(s): 108
O.
Observational adequacy: 213
Optimality Theory (OT): 125
Organizational linguistics: 192 passim
P.
parole (see also langue): 77, 80, 162
Pendulum swings: 297
‘performance’, see ‘competence’
Philadelphia: 224
Philosophy of science: 70
Phoneme, concept of: 68, 88, 88, 89
Phonemics: 94
Phonetics: 7
Phonology: 73, 77, 94
Polysynthetic: 24
Port-Royal: 168
Positivism: 40, 153, 154
Pragmatics: 111
Prague School of Linguistics: 81
Predictability: 85, 143, 182
Principles & Paramenters, see Government
& Binding (approach)
Prolegomena (Hjelmslev): 133, 179, 188
Productivity: 182
Progress by accumulation: 297
Psycholinguistics: 55
Psychology: 43, 45, 51, 55, 65
Push chains, see Drag chains
R.
Referential meaning: 86
Relational grammar: 115, 125
Relativity principle: 46, 50, 51
Revised Extended Standard Theory
(REST): 44n, 121
Revolution(s) in linguistics: 7, 10, 107,
111n, 112, 126, 150 passim, 212, 234,
242, 244, 251, 290, 297
Rhetoric: 108, 111, 120, 150, 166, 169,
244
Rigor in linguistics: 9, 65, 68n, 73, 93,
104, 228
Rule government: 115, 140, 142
Rule ordering: 10, 210, 216, 227, 228, 229
S.
sandhi: 227
‘Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis’: ix, 8, 37 passim
Semantic representation: 107
Semantics: 9, 73 passim, 104 passim
Semiotics/semiology: 65
Semiosis: 80
signifié vs signifiant: 68
Simplicity principle: 116, 231, 233, 237,
244n
Society for the Study of the Indigenous
Languages of the Americas (SSILA),
The: 27
Sociology: 259, 268, 271, 272
Sociology of science: 150, 156
Sociolinguistics: 6, 7, 251 passim
‘sound pattern’ (Sapir): 68
Sound Pattern of English (SPE), The
(Chomsky & Halle): 186, 223n, 225,
289
Statistics: 158
Stimulus-reaction model: 80
Stratificational grammar/theory: 161
Structuralism: 152, 183
—American ~: 3, 4, 6, 9, 73 passim, 171,
176, 217
—European ~: 4
Substitution: 85
Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL): 21,
27
Surface vs deep grammar: 107
Sychronic vs diachronic: 63, 66, 75, 133,
188, 236
INDEX OF SUBJECTS AND TERMS 307
Syntactic Structures (Chomsky): 63, 66, 75,
104, 107, 112, 130, 131, 153, 165, 166,
169, 173, 77, 179, 180, 184, 195
Syntax, work in/theory of: 11, 11, 70, 73,
94, 104, 111, 111, 137, 138, 176
System in language: 68, 83
Systemic grammar (Halliday): 161
—Berlin: viii
—Edinburgh: viii
—Giessen: viii
—Göttingen: viii, 63n
—Oxford: 158
—Prague: 208, 227
—Tokyo: 195n
T.
Taxonomist linguistics: 167
Texas Conference on English Syntax,
Third: 171
Thematic roles: 119
‘theory complex’ (Whorf): 40, 53n
Transfer Grammar: 177
Transformational-generative grammar
(TGG): 105, 130, 157, 158, 160, 162,
163, 167, 170, 171, 186, 191, 193, 197,
230 (and elsewhere)
Translation meaning: 85
Translation studies: 7
Typology of language
(see also Linguistic classification): 44:
V.
Variables, social: 267, 269
Vienna Circle: 71
Volksgeist: 43
U.
Underlying structure(s): 95, 116, 162, 181
Universais (in language): 190
Universities (in North America)
—Brandeis: 124
—California, Berkeley: 124
—California, Los Angeles (UCLA): 124,
193, 195
—Catholic (Washington, D.C.): 82
—Chicago: 124, 218, 219, 224
—Columbia (New York): 27
—Harvard: 124, 133, 135, 169
—Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT): 124, 133, 166, 167, 169, 193,
234, 235, 289 (and elsewhere)
—Michigan (Ann Arbor): 124
—Ottawa: 289
—Pennsylvania: 135, 209, 213, 220, 239
—Simon Fraser (Vancouver, B.C.): viii,
195n
—Texas at Austin: 171
Universities (outside of North America):
—Basel: 63n
W.
Weltanschauung(stheorie): 46, 47, 48
Whig history: 293, 294, 296
Whorfianism: 40, 49
Women scholars: 5, 162
World view
(see also Weltanschauung): 29, 47, 49
Wycliffe (Bible) Translators Society: 27
Z.
Zero morpheme: 230
308
INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES
Bloch, Bernard (1907–1965): 70n, 78, 88
88, 90, 94n, 155, 156, 166, 168, 170,
175, 176, 217, 218, 225, 229, 239n
Bloomfield, Leonard (1887–1949): ix, 4, 5,
7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 27, 28, 29, 62 passim,
73, 75n, 79, 84, 86, 105, 135, 176, 179,
195, 208, 211, 214, 215, 216, 219, 226,
228, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 236,
239, 241, 285n, 292
Boas, Franz (1858–1942): ix, 4, 5, 9, 26,
27, 41, 42, 43, 48, 53, 62, 76, 77, 210,
224, 266
Bolinger, Dwight L(eMerton, 1907–1992):
7n, 84n, 95
Bopp, Franz (1791–1967): 152. 188, 269n,
294n
Bréal, Michel (1832–1915): 258
Bright, William (Oliver, b.1928): 6, 193,
195n, 272
Brinton, Daniel G(arrison, 1837–1899): 20,
21, 26, 41, 42
Bromberger, Sylvain (b.1924):235, 236
Brugmann, Karl (1849–1919): 292, 294n,
295
Bursill-Hall, Geoffrey L(eslie, 1920–1998):
2
Butterfield, (Sir) Herbert (1900–1979):
257n, 293
A.
Abercrombie, David (1909–1992): 254n
Adelung, Johann Christoph (1732–1806):
24
Akmajian, Adrian (1944–1983): 111
Allen, William Sidney (b.1918): 76
Anderson, Stephen R(obert, b.1943): 2,
130n, 211
Andresen, Julia Tetel (b.1950): ix, 6, 7, 8
Anttila, Raimo (b.1935): 4n, 68, 157, 168
Arens, Hans(b.1911): 294, 295
Arnauld, Antoine (1612–1694): 141
Austerlitz, Robert (1923–1994): 2, 3
B.
Bach, Emmon (Werner, b.1929): 122,
169n, 294
Bancroft, George (1800–1891): 25
Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua (1915–1980):
Bastian, (Philipp Wilhelm) Adolf (1826–
1905): 43, 44n
Bateson, Gregory (1904–1980): 255
Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1845–1929):
68, 258, 259, 261
Becker, Carl L(otus, 1873–1945): 297
Benedict, Ruth Fulton (1887–1948): 27
Benfey, Theodor (1809–1881): 292, 293,
294, 295
Bernstein, Basil B(enjamin, 1924–2000):
251, 256n
Bever, Thomas G(ordon, b.1939): 213,
216n, 223n, 236n
Bierwisch, Manfred (b.1930): 78n, 90n,
95n, 156, 294
C.
Calvet, Louis-Jean (b.1942): 257n
Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970): 40
Carroll, John B(issell, b.1908): 37, 78n, 88
Cass, Lous (1782–1866): 26
Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945): 46n
309
310 INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES
Catford, John Cunnison (“Ian”, b.1917): 7n
Chafe, Wallace L. (b.1927): 3, 7n, 126
Chapin, Paul G(ipson, b.1938): 192
Chomsky, (Avram) Noam (b.1928): viii, ix,
2, 3, 7, 11, 11, 29, 62, 70, 73, 92, 93,
94, 95, 104, 108, 110, 113, 115, 117,
119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 130 passim,
150, 152, 153, 156 passim, 209 passim,
257, 284, 288, 296
Chomsky, William (1896–1971): 220
Christmann, Hans Helmut (1929–1995):
40, 78n
Chvany, Catherine V(akar, b.1927): 288
Cohen, Marcel (1884–1974): 267, 269n
Columbus, Christopher (Cristóbal Colón,
c. 1451–1506): 18, 19
Comte, Auguste (1798–1857): 154
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de Mably de,
abbé (1714–1780): 41n
Cordemoy, Gérau(l)d de (1626–1684): 141
Cowan, J Milton (“Milt”, 1907–1993): 5,
69, 218
Cowan William (George, 1929–2001): 7,
18, 21, 22
Currie, Haver C(ecil, 1908–1993): 271,
272n
Curtius, Georg (1820–1885): 162
D.
Darnell, Regna (b.1943): 3, 6, 18, 18, 24,
26, 27, 37, 42, 43
Davis, Boyd H(arriet, b.1940): 6, 7, 156
DeCamp, David (1927–1979):
Delbrück, Berthold (1842–1922): 68, 285,
292, 294n
Descartes, René (Cartesius, 1596–1650):
141, 168
Dilthey, Wilhelm (1833–1911): 164, 258
Dinneen, Francis P., S.J. (1923–1994): 6
Dixon, Robert Malcolm Ward (b.1939):
95
Dougherty, Ray C(ordell, b.1940): 107,
112
Drake, Glendon F(rank, b.1933):
Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen (alias Pierre
Étienne, 1766–1844): 18, 22, 24, 25, 48
Durkheim, Émile (1858–1917): 266, 272
E.
Edgerton, Franklin (1885–1967): 18, 25,
77n
Edwards, Rev. Jonathan, Jr. (1745–1801):
23, 24
Einstein, Albert (1879–1955): 50, 53
Ellis, Jeffrey O. (b.1930?): 81n, 84n
Eliot, John, “of Massachusetts” (1604–
1690): 21, 22, 23, 25
Emeneau, Murray B(arnson, b.1904): 76n,
78
Emonds, Joseph (Embley, b.1940): 111,
120, 164, 165
Encrevé, Pierre (b.1940): 214, 223, 229n,
235, 244n
Engler, Rudolf (b.1930): 2
Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. (b.1927): 270
F.
Fabre d’Olivet, Antoine (1768–1825): 40
Falk, Julia S(alebski, b.1941): 5, 6, 8, 9n,
156n
Fasold, Ralph W(illiam August, b.1940):
254, 268, 270
Ferguson, Charles A(lbert, 1921–1998): 3,
7n, 257n, 271n, 272, 272
Fillmore, Charles J(ohn, b.1929): 3, 119,
120n, 121, 122
Firth, John Rupert (1890–1960): 75n, 76,
110, 272n
Fishman, Joshua A(aron, b.1926): 7n, 40,
251, 255
Fodor, Jerry A(lan, b.1935): 95, 105, 107
Foley, James A(ddison, b.1938): 175
Fought, John G(uy, b.1938): 3, 5n, 6, 8, 9,
69, 78n, 155, 184, 188, 217, 243
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–1790): 6
Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925): 126
Friedrich, Paul W. (b.1927): 271n, 272
Fries, Charles C(arpenter, 1887–1967): 2n,
68n, 78, 88, 92, 217
Frings, Theodor (1886–1968):
Fromkin, Victoria A(delina, 1923–2000):
63, 63n, 68, 193, 193, 195n, 195
Furfey, Msgr. Paul Hanly (1896–1992): 82,
270n
INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES 311
G.
Gabelentz, (Hans) Georg (Conon) von der
(1840–1893): 47n
Gallatin, Albert (1761–1849): 16, 22, 26,
40
Gardiner, (Sir) Alan Henderson (1879–
1963): 254n
Garvin, Paul L(ucian, 1919–1994): 7n, 188,
291
Gatschet, Albert Samuel (1832–1907): 27
Gauchat, Louis (1866–1942): 264n, 266,
272
Geertz, Clifford (b.1926): 48
Gilliéron, Jules (Louis, 1854–1926): 260,
265n
Gipper, Helmut (b.1919): 53
Gleason, Henry Allen, Jr. (“Al”, b.1917):
79, 83, 84, 89n
Goddard, R.H.Ives (b.1941): 29n
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (von, 1749–
1832): 290
Goffman, Erving (1922–1982): 255
Goldschmidt, Walter R. (b.1913): 16
Goldsmith, John A. (b.1951): ix, 8, 105,
107n, 108, 114, 115, 121, 124, 168
Golla, Victor (Karl, b.1939): 28n
Goodman, Nelson (1906–1998): 213n,
216n, 231n
Gould, Stephen Jay (1941–2002): x
Graffi, Giorgio (b.1949): 11
Gray, Louis Herbert (1875–1955): 131 n
Greenberg, Joseph H(arold, 1915–2001):
7n, 47n, 216n
Greimas, Algirdas Julien (1917–1992): 95
Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863): 289
Grootaers, Willem A. (1911–1999): 265
Gumperz, John J(oseph, b.1922): 170, 251,
257n, 271n, 272, 272
H.
Haas, Mary R(osamond, 1910–1996): 4,
18, 22, 23, 42, 77
Hagen, Anton(ius Maria, b.1936): 255,
261, 264
Hahn, E(mma) Adelaide (1893–1967): 6
Haile, Father Berard, O.F.M. (1874–1961):
27
Hale, Horatio Emmons (1817–1897): 18,
26, 27
Hale, Kenneth C. (“Ken”, 1934–2001): 4
Hall, Robert A(nderson), Jr. (1911–1997):
7, 75n, 86, 160, 217, 218, 219
Halle, Morris (b.1923): 104n, 133, 153n,
165, 166, 169, 169, 171, 173, 180, 185,
195, 210, 211, 212, 233, 234 passim,
242, 243n
Halliday, Michael A(lexander) K(irkwood,
b.1925): 83n, 84, 161, 254n
Hamp, Eric P(ratt, b.1920): 169, 187n
Hanzeli, Victor E(gon, 1925–1991): 18, 21
Harris, Randy Allen (b.1956): 105, 108,
110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 125, 150, 168,
209, 242
Harris, Zellig S(abbettai, 1909–1992): 11,
65, 77n, 83n, 88, 89, 92, 93, 96, 112,
113, 131, 135, 162, 163, 167n, 168, 169,
173, 175, 176 passim, 181, 182, 184,
208, 209, 213, 216, 218, 219, 222, 223,
224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 235,
239, 294n
Hasan, Ruqaiya (b.1931): 251n, 254n
Haugen, Einar (Ingersoll, 1906–1994): 2n,
4n, 6, 75n, 89, 133, 169n, 255n, 256,
268, 271n, 272
Haym, Rudolf (1821–1901): 47
Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803): 8,
9, 40, 40, 43, 44
Hermann, Eduard (1867–1950): 264n, 266,
272
Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo (1735–1809):
20, 47
Hewson, John (b.1930): 96n
Hill, Archibald A(nderson, 1902–1992): 5,
76n, 83, 84, 85, 134, 171, 173, 173, 193
Hjelmslev, Louis (Trolle, 1899–1965): 2n,
77n, 92, 107, 133, 134, 292
Hockett, Charles F(rancis, 1916–2000): 6,
9n, 62n, 63n, 65, 70n, 80n, 81n, 82, 83,
86, 93, 94n, 134n, 135, 137n, 145n, 163,
173, 175, 176, 179, 180 passim, 195,
210n, 211, 216, 223n, 225, 229, 233,
294n
Hodson, Thomas Callan (1871–1953): 272n
Hoenigswald, Henry M(ax, b.1915): 2n, 3,
6, 218n, 222, 239
312 INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES
Hoijer, Harry (1904–1976): 37, 66, 77, 78n
Householder, Fred W(alter, 1913–1994):
107n, 109n, 173
Hovdhaugen, Even (b.1941): 18
Huck, Geoffrey J. (b.1944): ix, 8, 105,
107n, 108, 114, 115, 121, 124, 168,
218n
Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835): 8,
9, 21, 24, 25, 40n, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45,
46, 47, 49, 53, 53, 140, 141, 168, 169,
234
Hymes, Dell (Hathaway, b.1927): 2, 3, 4,
5n. 6, 8, 9, 18, 49, 53, 69, 78n, 153n,
155, 157, 184, 217, 218n, 251, 254
I.
Ivi , Milka (b.1922): 285, 292
Izzo, Herbert J(ohn, b.1928): 157
J.
Jaberg, Karl (1877–1958): 200, 272
Jackendoff, Ray S(aul, b.1945): 111, 114,
126n, 193n
Jakobson, Roman (Osipovi , 1896–1982):
2, 5, 45, 76n, 104n, 131, 133n, 138,
169, 170n, 179, 210, 211, 220n, 235,
239, 262n, 267n, 288
Jefferson, Thomas (3rd Pres, of the U.S.,
1743–1826): 23
Jespersen, Otto (1860–1943): 11, 68n, 68,
79n, 144, 145, 220n
Joos, Martin (George, 1907–1978): 5, 130
131, 134, 162, 182, 193, 195, 217, 229n
Joseph, John E(earl, b.1956): 6n, 8, 11, 37,
40, 40, 63n, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139,
140, 144, 146, 150, 152, 162n, 195, 197,
243, 255, 262n, 269, 270, 271n
Jud, Jakob (1882–1952): 260, 263
K.
Katz, Jerrold J(acob, 1932–2002): 80n, 95,
105, 107, 115, 166, 167, 187, 191n,
223n
Kent, Roland G(rubb, 1877–1952): 5
Kilbury, James S. (b.1946): 2n, 211
Kiparsky, Paul (b.1941): 120n, 122
Kloeke, G(esinus) G(erhardus, 1887–1963):
264, 266
Korzybski, Alfred (count, Habdank Skarbek,
1879–1950): 40, 41
Kroch, Anthony S. (b. c.1950): 11
Kroeber, Alfred Louis (1876–1960): 27, 28,
42, 49, 77, 185
Ku era, Henry (b.1925): 179
Kuhn, Thomas S(amuel, 1922–1996): 112,
150, 153, 157, 160, 188, 190, 295, 296,
297
Kurath, Hans (1891–1992): 78n, 217, 218,
260, 271
L.
Labov, William (b.1927): viii, ix, 3, 7n, 11,
162, 251 passim, 288
La Grasserie, Raoul de (1839–1914):
Lakoff, George (b.1941): 107, 107, 108,
113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122,
124
Lakoff, Robin Tolmach (b.1942): 107, 109,
110, 116, 124
Lamb, Sydney M(acDonald, b.1929): 134n,
161, 163, 234
Lancelot, Dom Claude (1616–1695): 141
Landar, Herbert J(ay, b.1927): 18, 20
Lane, George S(herman, 1902–1981):
133n, 218n
Langacker, Ronald W(ayne, b.1942): 119
Langdon, Margaret H(offman, b.1939): 4n,
122
Langendoen, D(onald) Terence (b.1939):
4n, 175, 193, 213
Lashley, Karl S(pence, 1890–1958): 135n
Lee, Penny (alias Penelope, b.1944): 8, 40,
53n
Lees, Robert B(enjamin, 1922–1996): 94n,
109, 119, 133, 166, 171, 173, 175
Lehmann, Winfred P(hilipp, b.1916): 265
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (Freiherr von,
1646–1716): 37, 41
Léon, Fernández (1840–1887): 29n
Leopold, WernerF(riedrich, 1896–1984):
267
Leroy, Maurice (1909–1991): 285, 292
Leskien, August (1840–1916): 295
INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES 313
Levi Della Vida, Giorgio (1904–1971): 220
Lisker, Leigh (b.1918): 225
Locke, John (1632–1704): 41
Locke, William N(ash, 1909–1980?): 165,
169
Lounsbury, Floyd G(len, 1914–1998):
107n, 229n
Lowie, Robert H(arry, 1883–1957): 224
Lucy, John A(rthur, b.1949): 53, 53, 55
Lukoff, Fred (1920–2000): 239n
Lunt, Horace G(ray, b.1918): 169
Lyons, (Sir) John (b.1932): 75, 76n, 96,
244
M.
Mackert, Michael (Victor, b.1958): 18, 45n
Maher, J(ohn) Peter (b.1933): 157, 160,
180, 191
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942): 81n,
254n
Malkiel, Yakov (1914–1998): 155, 156,
254, 259, 262n, 295
Malmberg, Bertil (1913–1994): 285, 292
Martinet, André (1908–1999): 93, 133n,
169, 170, 181, 253, 257n, 265, 267, 268,
272, 288
Mather, Cotton (1663–1728): 21
Matthews, Peter H(ugoe, b.1934): 133n,
212n, 219n, 224n, 225n
Mayhew, Experience (1673–1758): 21
McCawley, James D(avid, 1938–1999): 11,
95n, 105n, 107, 108, 110n, 113, 116,
117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 159,
164, 175, 188, 190, 191
McDavid, Raven Ioor, Jr. (1911–1984): 6,
260, 261n, 272
McQuown, Norman A(nthony, b.1914):
177, 178, 219, 233n
Mead, Margaret (1901–1978): 27
Meiliet, Antoine (1866–1936): 68, 260,
262, 263, 264, 272
Mesthrie, Ray (b.1954): 251
Miller, Robert L(ee, b.1928): 2n, 47
Mohrmann, Christine (1903–1988): 2n
Montague, Richard (1932–1971): 125n
Moulton, William G(amwell, 1914–2000):
6, 204
Müller-Vollmer, Kurt (b.1928): 18, 41
Muñoz y Manzano, Cipriano (el conde de la
Viñaza, 1862–1933): 29n
Murray, Stephen O(mar, b.1950): 5, 8, 43,
62, 65, 150, 155, 157, 158, 166n, 168,
169, 173, 184n, 192, 195, 195, 209, 237,
242, 253n, 254
N.
Naro, Anthony J(ulius, b.1943): 11, 29
Nebrija, Antonio de (1444?–1522): 18
Neumann, John von (1903–1957): 135n
Nevin, Bruce E(dwin, b.1945): 112, 232n,
224n, 244n
Newman, Stanley S(tewart, 1905–1984):
28, 42, 77, 220
Newmeyer, Frederick J(aret, b.1944): ix, 2,
8, 75n, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113n, 119,
123, 130, 138, 142, 144, 156, 157, 158,
159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 171, 173, 176,
179, 180, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193,
193n, 195n, 209, 212, 217n, 222, 230,
239n, 243, 257, 293, 298
Nida, Eugene A(lbert, b.1914): 82, 85,
225, 271n
O.
Ogden, Charles Kay (1889–1957): 8, 40,
40, 50n, 81n
O’Hern, Edna M. (b.1919): 268, 269, 270
P.
Palmer, Frank Robert (b.1922): 96
P ini (c.500 B.C.): 70, 227n, 239
Partee, Barbara H(all, b.1940): 4, 125n,
175, 193
Paul, Hermann (1846–1921): 68, 141, 258,
259, 260n, 264
Paulston, Christina Bratt (b.1932): 251n,
255
Pedersen, Holger (1867–1953): 292, 294,
295
Penn, Julia M(yrle, b.1937): 2n, 47, 48
Perlmuter, David M(ichael, b.1938): 115
Peters, (Paul) Stanley (b.1941): 119
Pickering, John (1777–1846): 18, 21, 22,
24, 25, 48
314 INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES
Pickford, Glenna Ruth (b.1921): 268n,
271
Pike, Kenneth L(ee, 1912–2000): 3, 4n, 7n,
70n, 77, 161
Pilling, James Constantin (1846–1895): 26
Pop, Sever (1901–1961): 253
Postal, Paul M(artin, b.1936): 11n, 95, 107,
107, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120n, 121, 124,
166, 168, 169n, 171, 187n, 213, 241
Pott, August Friedrich (1802–1887): 47n
Powell, John Wesley (1834–1902): 24, 26,
42, 45n
Pullum, Geoffrey K(eith, b.1944): 243n
Putnam, George N(elson, 1909–1991):
268, 269, 270
R.
Ranke, Leopold (von, 1795–1886): 154,
190
Raumer, Rudolf von (1815–1876): 292,
294, 295
Reichard, Gladys A(manda, 1893–1955): 6
Reid, Thomas Bertram Wallace (1901–
1981): 75n, 88n
Richards, Ivor Armstrong (1893–1979): 8,
40, 40, 50n, 81n
Robins, Robert H(enry, 1921–2000): 81n,
293n
Rocher, Rosane (Debels, b.1937): 2, 4
Rohlfs, Gerhard (1892–1986): 260
Ronat, Mitsou (1946–1984): 239
Ross, John Robert (“Háj”, b.1938): 107,
114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123n, 124
Russell, Bertrand (3rd Earl Russell, 1872–
1970): 40, 153, 158
Ryckman, Thomas A(lan, b.1949): 237n
S.
Sampson, Geoffrey (b.1945): 171n
Sapir, Edward (1884–1939): ix, 4, 5, 7, 8,
9, 16, 24, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47,
49, 53, 62, 73n, 77, 90, 96, 215, 224,
226, 228
Sapon, Stanley A. (b.1924): 256n
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913): ix,
2n, 5, 8, 9, 10, 62, 63 passim, 77n, 92
passim, 130 passim, 169, 220n, 262, 263,
264
Schlegel, (Carl Wilhelm) Friedrich (von,
1772–1829): 24
Schleicher, August (1821–1868): 41n,
289n, 292
Scheuermeier, Paul (1888–1973): 260
Schmitter, Peter (b.1943): 290n, 298
Searle, John R(ogers, b.1932): 156, 197n
Sebeok, Thomas A(lbert, 1920?–2001): 2,
2, 266
Seuren, Pieter A.M. (b.1934): 11, 94n,
105, 113n, 119, 125, 126
Shannon, Claude E(lwood, 1916–2001):
135n
Shuy, Roger W. (b.1931): 6, 251n, 255,
256, 260
Sinclair, John McH(ardy, b.1933): 84n, 85
Skinner, Burrus Frederick (1904–1990): 6,
187
Slobin, Dan I(saac, b.1939): 55
Smith, Henry Lee (“Haxie”, 1913–1972):
88, 88, 168
Sommerfelt, Alf (Axelsøn, 1892–1965):
266n, 267, 272
Spitzer, Leo (1887–1960): 69
Steinberg, Danny D(avid, b.1934): 187n
Steinthal, Heymann (1823–1899): 40n,
41n, 43, 47n
Stocking, George W., Jr. (b.1928): 18, 27,
45
Stockwell, Robert P(aul, b.1925): 188n,
193
Streitberg, Wilhelm (1864–1925): 292
Suárez, Jorge A(lberto, 1927–1985): 19, 20
Sturtevant, Edgar Howard (1875–1952):
78n, 265
Sumner, William Graham (1840–1910):
158
Swadesh, Morris (1909–1967): 28, 42, 50,
77, 225, 228
Synge, John Lighten (1897–1995): 287
T.
Tarde, (Jean) Gabriel (de, 1843–1904): 272
Teeter, Karl V(an Duyn, b.1929): 73, 92
INDEX OF BIOGRAPHICAL NAMES 315
Townsend, William Cameron (1896–
1982): 21
Trager, George L(eonard, 1906–1992): 40,
42, 43, 53, 70n, 78, 82, 88, 88, 90,
133n, 168, 182, 210n, 225, 228
Troike, Rudolph C(harles, b.1933): 256,
296
Trubetzkoy, Prince Nikolaj Sergeevi (1890–
1938): 2n, 211, 21n, 227, 228
Trudgill, Peter J(ohn, b.1943): 258
Trumbull, James Hammond (1821–1897):
22
Tucker, G.Richard (b.1942): 251n, 255
Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–1954): 135n,
180
U.
Uhlenbeck, Eugenius M(arius, “Bob”, b.
1913): 4
Ullmann, Stephen (1914–1976): 80n, 92
V.
Van Schooneveld, Cornelis H(endrik, b.
1921): 104n, 153n
Vater, Johann Severin (1772–1826): 24
Vendryes, Joseph (1875–1960): 266, 267,
272
Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744): 40
Viñaza, conde de la, see under Muñoz y
Manzano, Cipriano
Voegelin, C(harles) Frederick, “Carl”,
1906–1986): 4, 27, 28, 42, 77, 113, 167,
181, 185, 210, 224, 228, 242, 294
Voegelin, Florence M(argret, 1927–1989):
4, 167, 181
W.
Wackernagel, Jacob (1853–1938): 63
Wagner, Max Leopold (1880–1962): 260
Warner, W(illiam) Lloyd (1989–1970): 269
Waterhouse, Viola G. (1918–1998): 4n
Weaver, Warren (1894–1978): 137n
Wegener, Philipp (1848–1916): 261
Weinreich, Max (1894–1969): 260, 268,
272
Weinreich, Uriel (1926–1967): 82n, 1982,
192n, 254n, 258n, 262, 266, 267, 268,
272, 288n
Weiss, Albert Paul (1879–1931): 65, 66,
79, 80
Wells, Rulon S(eymour, III, b.1919): 4,
133, 163, 265
Weaver, Warren (1894–1978): 137n
Wenker, Georg (1852–1911): 259, 260,
264n
Whatmough, Joshua (1897–1964): 169
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947): 40
Whitney, William Dwight (1827–1894): 4,
16, 41, 42, 258, 259, 262, 263, 265
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1897–1941): ix, 8,
37, 40, 42, 48, 50n, 51
Williams, Roger (c. 1604–1683): 22, 25
Winteler, Jost (1846–1929): 261
Wissler, Clark (1870–1947): 18, 24
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951): 85,
107, 158
Wolfart, H(ans) Chris(toph, b.1943): 18,
18
Wolfram, Walter A. (“Walt”, b.1941): 254,
268, 270, 272n
Wonderley, William L(ower, 1916–1988):
230
Wrede, Ferdinand (1863–1934): 260, 272
Wundt, Wilhelm (1832–1920): 43, 44n
Y.
Yngve, Victor H(use, b.1920): 165
Z.
Zeisberger, David (1721–1808): 24
Zimmermann, Klaus (b.1947): 18
Zwartjes, Otto (b.1958): 18, 21
About the author
E.F.K. (“Konrad”) Koerner (B.Phil., M.A., Ph.D.) has been a Professor of
General Linguistics at the University of Ottawa since 1976. He is probably best
known for his various books on the origin, development, and impact of
Saussure’s Cours and his work in the history of 19th and 20th century Western
linguistic thought generally. He is the founding editor of Historicgraphia Linguistica,
Diachronica, and various associated monograph series published by John Benjamins
of Amsterdam and Philadelphia (since 1973 more than 350 volumes have
appeared) as well as being organizer of international meetings and societies in
linguistic historiography. His efforts over the past 30 years have been recognized
by three Festschriften, various medals and diplomas, an honorary doctorate and
memberships in the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of Arts
(London). More recently, he has received the Year 2000 Konrad Adenauer
Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (for which he is to
spend the 2002–2003 academic year in Germany). He is a currently a fellow-inresidence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and
Social Sciences in Wassenaar near Leiden (2001– 2002).
Books authored by him include:
Bibliographia Saussureana 1870–1970: An annotated, classified bibliography on the
background, development, and actual relevance of Ferdinand de Saussure’s general theory of
language (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1972).
Contribution au débat post-saussurien sur le signe linguistique: Introduction générale et
bibliographie annotée (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1972).
Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of His Linguistic Thought in Western
Studies of Language. A contribution to the history and theory of linguistics
(Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1973).—Translated into Hungarian
(Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1982); Japanese (Tokyo: Taishukan, 1982), and
Spanish (Madrid: Gredos, 1982).
Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: Selected essays. Foreword by R.H. Robins
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1978).
(Together with Matsuji Tajima) Noam Chomsky: A personal bibliography, 1951–
1986 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986).
Saussurean Studies/Études saussuriennes. Avant-propos de Rudolf Engler
(Geneva: Éditions Slatkine, 1988).
316
317
Practicing Linguistic Historiography: Selected essays (Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
John Benjamins, 1989).
Professing Linguistic Historiography (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
1995).
Linguistic Historiography: Projects & prospects (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 1999).