Approaches in the Field of Linguistics

Early Approaches: Pвnini and Grimm
Sobel S.P. The Cognitive Sciences:
An Interdisciplinary Approach. – London; Toronto:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 2001. - pp. 155-158.
The notion of linguistic competence introduced previously rests on the assumption of unconscious knowledge and unconscious cognitive activity. This is not a new assumption; it underlies, for example, the work of the grammarian Pвnini, who carried out his research in India sometime between the fifth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Pвnini sought to capture the underlying patterns of the Sanskrit he spoke and, in this fashion, to describe the whole of the language. The few examples presented in the previous section indicate something of the nature of the rules that a language rests on. How vast a task it would be to try to describe it all: rules affecting the sounds and their variants, rules for forming words, rules for generating all the possible sentences. Pвnini approached this monumental task by formulating detailed, highly condensed rules. Their nature was not prescriptive but rather descriptive. As such, they reflect the unconscious knowledge of speakers of the language rather than rules that might have been explicitly taught. They capture so much detail of the language so tersely that expanding and understanding them has required the work of many scholars and much time. Since Pвnini, no one has accomplished so impressive a description of any language.
The work of Pвnini, and of other Indian linguists of his time and earlier, was not known in the West until the 19th century. Linguistics scholars of the 1800s had observed many similarities among the languages of Europe and sought to trace their history, engaging in comparative studies of these related languages and projecting backward to arrive at a "reconstruction" of the ancestral language, or group of dialects, from which they derived. One of the most famous of these scholars was Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), of fairy-tale fame. Grimm's contribution to the understanding of certain important consonant shifts among the Indo-European languages (many of the languages most familiar to us, including English) is a staple of historical-comparative study, known to all linguistics students and scholars as Grimm's law. This law, which aids in the process of linguistic reconstruction, explains for example the historical relation between Latin p (as in pater) and English f (as in father), both of which derive from the same source, a language spoken some thousands of years ago and referred to today as Indo-European.
Linguistics scholars engaged in reconstructing early languages of which there is no written record made educated guesses as to what the earlier forms were based on evidence from all aspects of these languages—from the vocabulary they contained to the kinds of change exhibited over time in their sound systems and in their grammatical structures. This type of comparative-historical research contributed a great deal to our understanding of the processes languages undergo on their evolving paths. Access to information about Sanskrit played an important role in this endeavor.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
In line with this type of research was research carried out into this century by scholars who sought to learn what processes underlay the many languages spoken by Native American tribes. In the process, they encountered ways of thinking quite different from those of the Western European culture, which had up to then provided the background for their studies. These scholars drew attention to the many different possibilities inherent in languages for expressing perceptions and experiences common to humankind. Edward Sapir, the American linguist and anthropologist, made many contributions to the field, among them important technical studies in Native American, Indo-European, Semitic, and African languages. With this wide basis, he was able to provide the field with cogent analyses of the relation of language and culture. His interest in this aspect of linguistics extended to the relation of language and thought. He and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, expounded a view that had great influence on linguists and other scholars in the middle decades of the 20th century. Known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it was articulated thus by Whorf in 1940:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. 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 in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into conand ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreeto organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but Us terms are absolutely obligatory-, we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees, (in Carroll, 1956, pp. 213-214)
Whorf had held, for example, that the Hopi language reflects a different conception of time from that of English. He claimed that Hopi has no linguistic means of referring directly to time, as English does, no word for "past" or "future." If he was correct, then, according to some, the Hopi could not distinguish past from future. Whorf's point was that the Hopi language reflects a different worldview—one that our own language lacks the means of expressing.
The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds first that our language determines the way we think (linguistic determinism) and, second, that the distinctions found in a given language will not be the same as those in any other language (linguistic relativity). The basic principle follows from the observation, through study of the languages of different peoples that populations "carve up" in many different ways the natural world they experience. An instance is found in Whorf's paper "Science and Linguistics." After describing some of the characteristics that distinguish the worldview of speakers of the Hopi language from our own, Whorf says
What surprises most is to find that various grand generalizations of the Western world, such as time, velocity, and matter, are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe. The psychic experiences that we class under these headings are, of course, not destroyed; rather, categories derived from other kinds of experi-ences take over the rulership of the cosmology and seem to function just as well. Hopi may be called a timeless language. It recognizes psychological time. . . but this "time" is quite unlike the mathematical time T, used by our physicists. Among the peculiar properties of Hopi time are that it varies with each observer, does not permit of simultaneity, and has zero dimensions; i.e., it cannot be given a number greater than one. The Hopi do not say, "I stayed five days," but "I left on the fifth day." (in Carroll, 1956, p. 216)
Whorf's description of the Hopi conception of time seems to indicate that for the Hopi time exists as a series of points rather than as a continuous flow. This conception relates interestingly to Kant's discussion of time, in which he argues that "all appearances of succession in time are one and all only alterations . . . all change (succession) of appearances is merely alteration" (Kant, 1781/1965, p. 218). That is, we only recognize time by the sequential changes that we observe. A flow, or passage, of time, as we are accustomed to conceiving of it, and which seems to us the natural way of conceiving of it, is equally naturally perceived as a sequence of events, each one different from the preceding one. The Hopi's "I left on the fifth day" seems to accord with this conception of time better than our own characterization of the situation "I stayed five days": "The fifth day" marks one of a series of days, whereas "five days" combines them into a whole.
The notion that language serves not only to express thought but also to filter it leads easily to the idea embodied in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language serves to shape thought. This view was subsequently interpreted to mean that we cannot—and cannot learn to—think in any way but the way in which our language dictates. Because many felt this interpretation was incorrect—and was threatening to groups that might be politically affected by it—the hypothesis was rejected by the establishment. In fact, there was a strong reaction against it, because it seemed to predict that if one's language lacked some forms of expression its speakers were incapable of conceptualizing what such expressions express. Consider, for example, the construction that is second nature to English speakers: "If I were you. . . ." Of course I know perfectly well that I am not you. That is precisely why I put it in this way, using an if construction, paired with the special form were of the verb to be. There are languages that lack a construction of this sort, called a counterfactual, as it is counter to what is in fact so.
A weaker version of the hypothesis was somewhat more acceptable, namely, that the constructions of language make it relatively easier or more difficult to think in certain ways. But consideration of the effect of language on thought was for a period a topic many were unwilling to engage in.
More recently, scholars such as Alfred Bloom have returned to this issue, as we will in the next chapter.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Another approach to the field of linguistics was that introduced early in the 20th century, when attention turned from the focus on historical-comparative studies to the principles governing the structure of languages still being spoken. The theoretical ideas introduced at this time by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) were extremely influential, essentially redefining the field. These ideas were based on the observation by scholars going all the way back to Pвnini's time (and perhaps even before then) that when people actually speak they often produce sounds and constructions that they themselves would report as somehow being not "really right," but which are understood anyway. For example, if, around lunch-time, a friend called out to you, asking "Jeet jet? your response would probably not be "Huh?" but either "Yeah" or "No,joo?' What surfaces as Jeet jet? and No, joo? is clearly understood by both of you as "Did you eat yet'" "No, did you?" You could at any time "translate" the rapid form of these questions into the complete version you produce when slowing down and enunciating carefully. By means of rules specific to your language, a conversion takes place between what you know is the real underlying form of the utterance and what you actually say. All of this is part of the unconscious knowledge we have been calling your linguistic competence.
Pвnini's work on the rules underlying the language of speakers of his form of Sanskrit leads to a recognition of the distinction between those rules and the language they generate. The notion that something underlies the forms we actually produce is the important insight here, one that has been brought out at other times in the history of linguistics. Contemporary scholars such as Noam Chomsky give credit to, for example, Rene Descartes and to the authors of the volume Grammaire generale et raisonnee, published in France in 1660 (usually referred to as the Port-Royal Grammar), for reintroducing such insights from which much of modern-day linguistics has benefited.
More recently, Ferdinand de Saussure, working near the beginning of the 20th century, distinguished between langue, the linguistic system internalized by speakers of a language, and parole, the act of speaking. This distinction implies a tacit assumption that underlying the actual utterances of speakers of a given language is a shared structure, absorbed by speakers when very young and remaining largely below the level of consciousness. This implicit structure enables them to judge, for example, when one utterance is correctly formed, another is not, and a third is all right when speaking (especially quickly) but is not really the way it is "supposed to be," as our Jeet jet? example. Put more succinctly, the distinction is between what you know about your language (your linguistic competence, unconscious though it may be) and what you actually say, which linguists refer to as your linguistic performance.
Behaviorism: John B. Watson and B. E Skinner
Saussure's work has had great influence on contemporary linguistics. But the direction taken by the field was altered for a time, despite the insights he provided Land developed. With the advent of the "behavioristic" paradigm, the "mentalistic" approach to the study of language was abandoned. The American psychologist John B. Watson (1878-1958) struck out in a new direction, becoming the founder of the school known as behaviorism. Behaviorism operates on the principle that what goes on in the mind that is not directly observable or measurable is not an appropriate and useful subject of research. The only appropriate subject matter of psychology, according to the behaviorists, is behavior. Behavior is all that we can j hope to treat objectively, because it is all we can measure. This approach leaves no place for study, linguistic or otherwise, based on unconscious knowledge. The insights of scholars over a very long period were abandoned as linguists attempted a stimulus-response account of language.
B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) is today probably the best-known proponent of the behaviorist approach. Among his many works was the 1957 book Verbal Behavior, in which he sought to interpret and explain the major aspects of linguistic behavior within the behaviorist framework. In 1959 the American linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) published a review of Verbal Behavior in which he refuted Skinner's premise that it is possible to account for linguistic behavior within this framework. He systematically discussed each concept introduced by Skinner in order to show "that, in each case, if we take his terms in their literal meaning, the description covers almost no aspect of verbal behavior, and if we take them metaphorically, the description offers no improvement over various traditional formulations" (Chomsky, 1964, p. 574). This review sparked a period of debate and called attention to the beginning of a new phase in linguistics, in which Chomsky has figured prominently.
Major Themes in Linguistics
Origins
Crystal D. Linguistics. Second ed.
Penguin Book, 1990. – pp. 140-157.
The subject we now call linguistics began to take its present form at the beginning of this century. The interesting thing is that it seems to have developed in an almost independent way in two places at once - Europe and America. But the two approaches were radically different, each being very much the product of its own history, and each taking advantage of the kind of linguistic material which it found immediately available. The Europeans had a continuous tradition of philosophical thought, as we have seen, which stemmed from Classical times; and an immediate background of historical study of language which came from nineteenth-century 'comparative philology' (of which more below). Most of the data about language concerned the development of Classical and, to a lesser extent, modern European tongues. Based entirely on written records, their discussion of language had usually been from the viewpoint of textual interpretation - for example, in biblical studies, literary criticism, or history. Work on living languages had been considered secondary, and limited to the activities of a few who attempted to plot the differences between regional dialects, and to construct 'dialect atlases'. A few 'occasional' studies of new languages had been made by missionaries and colonial officials in various parts of the world, but these had been narrowly pedagogical for the most part, and were usually made within a Latinate analytical framework.
The tradition which the early European linguists grew up with and reacted to was very different from that available to American scholars, who had had relatively little direct contact with the European situation. American research began by turning to the sources most readily available, the American Indian languages, and the orientation was completely different. There was no written record in the case of these languages, and there were no earlier descriptions – hence it was impossible to develop a purely historical interest or to use writing as the basis of linguistic analysis. These languages were also so different from European languages that it was obvious that Classical procedures and terminology were going to be of little value; and in any case, many of the scholars involved had developed a strong distrust of the distortions which they were aware Latinate descriptions could impose. There was also a reaction against the use of meaning as the basis of an analysis of a language – again a contrast with the way in which considerations of meaning, logic, and so on had been used for the definition of grammatical categories in the European philosophical orientation. The first task of the linguist, it was felt, was to describe the physical forms that the language had: saying what those forms meant was a logically later activity. The emphasis was therefore on a meticulous description of the individuality of each language's structure, based on the only available source – the living speech activity of the users. This dynamic role given to language was largely due to the initiative of the anthropologists of the time, who stimulated this kind of approach from the very beginning as part of their drive to accumulate information about the dying Indian tribes. Franz Boas, one of the pioneers, emphasized the need for the linguist to 'go into the field', to get an accurate, detailed description of the human behaviour involved - before it was too late, and all the informants were dead! In 1911, the first volume of the Handbook of American Indian Languages, which he founded, was published. Ten years later, another anthropologically orientated book, subsequently extremely influential, appeared - Language, by Edward Sapir. These two books, and the students of their authors, were a formative influence on the development of linguistics in America, as we shall see in due course.
There was thus a simultaneous development in language studies on both sides of the Atlantic, with neither side in the early days knowing much about what the other was doing. However, it is usual to try to date the beginning of a science by referring to the publication date of some pioneering work; and those who have tried to do this for linguistics generally give the honours to a European. Despite the tendency these days to see the origins of linguistics in the work of almost every scholar since Plato, it is generally accepted in more sober mood that the work of the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure holds pride of place as the first real essay into linguistic theory as we understand it now. To call him the 'founder' of the subject, as is sometimes done, is perhaps a bit extreme, in view of the American work taking place at the same time. Moreover, there were other strands to the early history of linguistics which contributed to its foundation - for example, the general reaction against the principles and practices of traditional grammars, which had developed in the late nineteenth century in the context of a fresh pedagogical interest in language teaching, and associated with such names as Henry Sweet (satirized by Shaw as Henry Higgins in Pygmalion), Harold Palmer, and the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen. But there is no doubt that Saussure's pioneer thinking on theoretical issues had a fundamental and lasting effect on language study - and a very specific one too, in view of the fact that his was a dominant formative influence on at least three schools of linguistics later (those of Geneva, Prague, and Copenhagen). A number of his theoretical distinctions are striking anticipations of current issues - his distinction between langue and parole, for instance, which I shall shortly discuss appears with very little difference in the competence/performance distinction of generative grammar.
But it is not possible to understand what Saussure did without seeing him in his own time, and especially against the intellectual linguistic background of the nineteenth century, against which so much of his work is a reaction. Let us, then, begin near the beginning, with an excursus into the nature of nineteenth-century 'comparative philology'.
Comparative Philology
The easiest way to identify comparative philology is by saying that it is what most people coming across linguistics for the first time expect the subject to be about - the history of language and languages, and the study of the origins and development of words and their meanings ('etymology'). In fact, as we have seen in the first part of this book, this would be a highly misleading interpretation, for the history of language comprises but a small component of the discipline as a whole. It is, moreover, a component which many people have come to disparage, in view of the melodramatic approach to much historical study in earlier centuries (in connection with the origins of language), and the pedagogical tendency to confuse matters of history with matters of current relevance in language structure. The psychological gap between linguistics and philology has indeed been very great - and it still is, in some parts of the world, particularly on the continent of Europe. Linguists would get very emotional if they were referred to as philologists by mistake; and many philologists would look rather pityingly at the new upstart discipline which they would feel lacked the decades of painstaking textual analysis on which their approach was based. These days, however, there are many signs that the old opposition between the two fields is coming to an end. From the point of view of linguistics, at any rate, it is beginning to be realized that any opposition was due more to the use of different procedures in the analysis of data than to any radical difference of opinion as to the intrinsic interest of historical vs non-historical data. Nowadays, the problems which historical linguistics raises and the facts which its methods bring to light are seen as highly relevant to the development of linguistic theory as a whole. It has been recognized that a linguistic theory will be of very limited value unless it can provide an account of the mechanisms underlying language change - either as seen in the individual (as when a child learns a language, this being sometimes referred to as 'linguistic ontogeny'), or in the community as a whole (as when a language changes from one distinct form into another, e.g. Latin becoming French - 'linguistic phylogeny'). And with an increasing number of linguists becoming interested in historical matters and using modern techniques for their analysis, it is likely that an integrated approach to historical phenomena within linguistics will not be long in being formalized. There is, however, considerably less ecumenical spirit in many schools of traditional philology, and any attempt to identify philology with linguistics would still be premature. Even with the same subject-matter, and the use of similar techniques, it will be a long time before the pejorative connotations the two labels have acquired are eliminated. Accordingly, it is still prudent even these days to keep the terms 'historical linguist' and 'philologist' distinct, the former referring to someone trained in linguistics who is applying this knowledge to the study of the older states of language, the latter to a follower of the older, nineteenth-century traditions of study.
The contribution of the nineteenth century towards the development of a scientific approach to language cannot be underestimated, even though the preoccupation throughout this period was almost totally historical. Earlier study of language history, as we have seen, was largely haphazard and vague. There was little objective, systematic analysis of the similarities and differences between language forms, or of the chronological changes in a language. If similarities were noted, it was often to dismiss them as coincidental; differences were dismissed as unimportant, or reinterpreted to suit the presuppositions of a particular (e.g. original language) theory. If the changing nature of language was considered at all, it was as part of a natural process of corruption, measured against the changeless status of Latin. Above all, no one, with the possible exception of some early Jewish scholars, had noticed anything systematic about either resemblances or differences. The first to point out objectively the fact of a systematic language similarity was a French Jesuit missionary named Coeurdoux, who showed in 1767, with many examples, that Latin and Sanskrit had definite grammatical and lexical correspondences; but his suggestion was not published until much later, and by that time, Sir William Jones had said the same thing more emphatically, and included Greek and Celtic in his observations. He had had an opportunity of studying Sanskrit in detail while Chief Justice in Bengal, and in a speech to the Asiatic Society in February 1786, largely to do with matters other than language, he made a statement which was to inspire the basic principle of comparative linguistics:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. (My italics.)
Even though this was unsupported in detail, Jones's impressions were in print, and thus circulated widely. Within the following thirty years, the effects of the stimulus became apparent, and the reverberations of the theory took over a century to settle.
The first systematic attempt to study the implications of Jones's statement in detail was made by a Dane, Rasmus Rask, in an essay written in 1814, called An Investigation into the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic language. It was followed shortly afterwards by Franz Bopp's first major work, Concerning the Conjugation System of the Sanskrit Language in Comparison with those of the Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic Languages. This was published in 1816, three years before a third scholar, Jacob Grimm, enlarged and further systematized Rask's statement in his German (i.e. Germanic) Grammar. By 1833, the techniques and data amassed by these three, supplemented by much extra information from contemporaries, led to the production of Bopp's comprehensive handbook, which was extremely popular and went through three editions: the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic and German took nineteen years to prepare, and by its third edition incorporated Old Slavic, Celtic and Albanian.
The study began in an empirical way within its own field. However, it was not long before the comparative philologists shifted their focus of attention. From the comparative data which was being described, they began to deduce the features of a language which they assumed must have been in existence before the earliest records, which would account for the similarities in the forms of say, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. The hypothesis that the languages were related produced the further hypothesis that they had a common source. At first it was thought that Latin and Greek had descended from Sanskrit (which had always held a patriarchal position in the eyes of European scholars); but further research indicated that all three languages were 'cognate' - that is, had a common ancestor, which, in this case, had not survived in any recorded form. Work thus began on determining this old language's characteristics.
Modern Romance languages, of course, showed a similar pattern. The similarities existing between certain words and forms in Italian, Spanish and French, for example, indicated clearly that they came from the same parent language. The fact that the three words for 'father' had so much in common (Italian, padre, Spanish, padre, French, pere) would be just one case in point among thousands. But one could then go further, and suggest that the word, as it stood in the original parent tongue, must have had a p in it, because this is a common factor in the three modern languages; similarly the presence of an r might be deduced; and if sufficient comparative work was done, the reason for the vowel discrepancy might become clear, and the parent language vowel determined. In such a way, one could arrive at an ancestor form pater - which in this case exists, in Latin. By studying a large number of such cases, dealing with more complex grammatical constructions as well as with letters, the totality of the Latin we know could be deduced, as it were, backwards.
This reasoning, then, was applied to Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, which showed a very similar set of correspondences. Here the forms for 'father' were: Latin, pater, Greek, patзr, Sanskrit, pitar. The conclusion reached suggested that the parent language from which the three had derived would have had a word for 'father' of the form *p?ter. The asterisk in front of this form, or any other in comparative philology, indicates that it is a reconstruction along these lines which is not attested in written records. (It is a different use of the asterisk from that usual in contemporary, synchronic linguistics, where it refers to an unacceptable usage.) In other words, a reconstruction is a kind of hypothesis based on the consideration of a multiplicity of examples taken from as many cognate languages as would seem to be relevant. (The theoretical status of these reconstructed forms has been a source of recent debate in historical linguistics.) Thus, in deducing the older word for 'brother' one might well wish to consider as part of the evidence Latin, frвter, Greek, phrвtзr), Sanskrit, bhrвtвr, Old Church Slavonic, bratru, Gothic, bro?ar, Old Irish, brвthir, Old English brdbor, and so on, from which one could arrive at a form *bhrвter. (Most large dictionaries provide 'etymological' information of this kind.)
A further eye-catching example of relationship is the present-tense indicative conjunction of the verb 'to be' in Latin, Sanskrit and Greek (the forms of the latter two languages have been transfor ease of comparison):
sum бsmi eimн PIE *йsmi
es бsi essi *йsi
est бsti esti *йsti
The regularity of sets of phonetic correspondences existing in such listings was soon established beyond reasonable doubt, and provided the stimulus that led scholars to suggest lines of phonetic relationship between the languages. Thus, for example, the presence of an a vowel in the verb paradigm given above for Sanskrit corresponds systematically with an e vowel in the other two. The weight of evidence is therefore for an e vowel in the parent language (called Indo-European), the a having developed from this *e by some process of phonetic development. If this was so (and scholars assumed it was), the process could be described as 'Indo-European *e became Sanskrit a and Latin and Greek e*; or in a more simple shorthand: 'IE */e/>Skt /a/, L. Gk. /e/.' Such formulas were worked out in great detail and became known as 'sound-laws'. This was originally a metaphorical use of the word 'law', because the formulas were only representing what were thought of as very strong tendencies for the sounds to behave in such ways; they were not originally considered as exceptionless laws at all - an attitude to be sharply reversed later by the neogrammarian school of comparative philologists, discussed below.
The original parent language, then, was gradually reconstructed word by word, as far as the evidence of the written remains allowed, and is now called Proto-Indo-European (or PIE for short). It was assumed that it was being spoken before 3000 B.C. The languages which developed from it were thus called the Indo-European 'family' (according to the then popular model of linguistic description), and the relationship of one member language to another was described in kinship terms: Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were 'sister-languages'. Such a procedure accounted satisfactorily for the interrelationships of most European languages (Basque being an odd exception) by postulating various sub-families or groups of languages within the main family that had some kind of common structural core. From the practical point of view, PIE was given more attention by scholars, partly because there was more written material available in the daughter-languages, and partly because the users of the languages within the Indo-European complex were politically and economically more important. This is, of course, by no means to say that a language of Indo-European stock is some-how intrinsically 'better' than any other: a culture may be more powerful than another, but this does not affect the status of the languages used which are, linguistically speaking, of equal standing (cf. p. 70).
Thus, the major language 'families' of the world were suggested, and those of Europe given more detailed treatment:
THE GERMANIC FAMILY OF LANGUAGES
the Germanic family, the Romance, the Balto-Slavic, the Celtic, the Hellenic, and so on. The figure above shows one way, using the family tree model, of relating the languages of the Germanic group, of which English is a member. We should remember, of course, that arbitrarily to date and label language states with different names, as is usual in comparative work, is a distorting process. Language is continually in a state of flux; it is always changing. Latin did not suddenly become French overnight, nor Old English Middle English; and it is impossible to pin down the exact moment when any two dialects diverged to the point of unintelligibility, at which point we say they are separate languages (though there has been one movement in recent years which has tried to do just this - the technique variously called 'lexicostatistics' or 'glottochronology'). The names given to the different language states postulated in the comparative method are averages, approximations only, as are the dates. Transitional periods are always present between two arbitrarily determined states.
This was the genealogical method of classification. At the same time, attempts were being made to produce an alternative classification of languages, the typological, wherein each language would be placed according to its major structural characteristics. This procedure was first proposed in detail by A. von Schlegel in 1818. He suggested that there were three kinds of language that could be characterized in this way: at one extreme there were analytic (or isolating) languages, such as Chinese, which have no inflections; at the other extreme there were synthetic (or inflectional) languages, such as Greek or Sanskrit; and in between there were agglutinative (or affixing) languages, such as Turkish or Korean, which string verbal elements together in long sequences. Despite the fact that most languages fell between these points, Schlegel's theory had many adherents. It did provide a comprehensive standpoint at least, and showed that there were general structural tendencies in the ways languages indicated relationships. Its main advantage, too, was that it did not require a vast quantity of textual analysis before making its statements, and was therefore a more useful tool than the genealo-gical model for classifying languages which had no written records. The two techniques are not incompatible, of course; but for many reasons the genealogical approach remained more popular, and despite support by Sapir and other linguists, no broad classification has yet been produced on typological principles that is satisfactory.
It is important to be aware that the comparative method was largely empirical, and (under German stimulation) thorough; it was based on textual evidence, information about speech being deduced from an examination of writing; again, it was primarily concerned with comparison of individual sounds (rather than words, or meanings); and it tried to show the systematicness behind the linguistic variation which it noted - an aim which was not always successful, in view of the fact that insufficient attention was paid to the structural character of the language stares being compared before comparative decisions were made. Rut such an ordering of priorities (non-historical description preceding historical comparison) was not seen as important until Saussure. Meanwhile, as the century progressed, techniques were clarified, principles were more precisely stated, and a scientific atmosphere became more normal.
The remainder of the century saw the accumulation of a great deal of information on the history of languages, and, in particular, on the details of Proto-Indo-European. Sanskrit was of the utmost relevance in such work, and was hailed as such by many linguists; Max Miiller, for example, in 1868, said, 'A comparative philologist without a knowledge of Sanskrit is like an astronomer without a knowledge of mathematics.' An important reflex of this detailed study, however, was an increasing theoretical linguistic interest which took the newly discovered facts about language into consideration. Scholars began to meditate on the underlying principles which the facts of sound-change and related developments suggested. In particular, there was the growth of an evolutionary attitude to language, stimulated by Darwin's work. If plants and animals have a birth, development and death, then why not language too? Early on, W. von Humboldt had emphasized the fact of linguistic flux, in an attempt to explain the phenomenon in terms of the changing mental power of the users of language; and certain aspects of his thinking have been commended by Chomsky as striking anticipations of important features of current linguistic theory. August Schleicher first tried to develop the theory systematically, making Hegelian philosophy take account of the Darwinian theory of natural selection; to him, the typological classification of languages as isolating, agglutinative and inflectional was an example of a Hegelian triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Synthesis being the climax of development, the standard of excellence in language was thus tied to the amount of inflection it possessed: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit were indubitably best on this count, Chinese least of all, and all languages since Proto-Indo-European were in the stages of a slow decay, as the comparative method showed quite clearly that this parent language (Ursprache) was probably more inflected than any of the attested languages.
A fundamental objection to this approach, emphasized by many scholars, is that language has little in common with an organism, such as a plant. It has no separate physical existence, therefore it has no separate life or death. Language change resides primarily in the users of the language, and only indirectly, via these speakers, can language be seen as an abstracted whole. Language is but one aspect of an organism's behaviour, an activity which is continually changing; it is no more than a set of useful conventions. There is a further, more specific objection, that if languages like French and English are biologically distinct, on different 'branches' of the family tree, then once they have split up, how could the one influence the other in any direct way? Yet this has often been the case, as is shown by the number of words borrowed from French in recent centuries by the English. But despite these objections, such theories had a great influence on the development of linguistics during this part of the nineteenth century. The emphasis till then had been on philology in its more widely accepted sense, i.e. language study as an end to understanding a nation's culture (in particular, its literature). But with the stimulus of natural science, linguistics came to be studied as a more autonomous discipline, with the suggested status of a physical science. It began to be studied for its own sake. Otto Jespersen, in his book Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin, published in 1922, calls this the 'emancipation' of the subject. It was supported at the linguistic level by further developments among contemporary scholars.
The work of Jacob Grimm and others had already produced a more 'mechanical' outlook on linguistic data, with more and more sound-Maws' being formulated. But there was still a large amount of material that could not be accounted for, and sound-changes which seemed to be exceptions to the otherwise readily perceivable patterns of development. But when Karl Verner proved in 1875 that one set of unsatisfactorily explained sound-changes could be shown to fit a regular pattern by formulating a new phonetic principle hitherto ignored, a new attitude in linguistic scholarship became apparent; it was supported in other publications appearing at the same time (by Saussure, for example) that showed the relationship between Sanskrit and Indo-European more clearly. Certain scholars thus began to assume that all exceptions were explicable in the same way, that is, that they only remained exceptions because insufficient study had been made of the material to determine the underlying principles of development which could be formulated as laws. Sound-changes were not haphazard, it seemed: a comprehensive, objective examination of the data, paying careful attention to the mutual influence exerted by sounds, could produce a satisfactory explanation of a regularity behind all sound changes. 'Sound laws have no exceptions' became a canon of the new attitude, held by men who were called by their older contemporaries, a trifle sarcastically, 'neogrammarians' (Junggrammatiker). Of major importance in their doctrine was the concept of analogy (cf. p. 70), as this was seen as the linguistic force which tended to normalize differences in language.
This approach thus focused attention on the physical side of language; but its methodological rigidity naturally evoked some heated criticism. It was too mechanistic an approach, it was said, which left the human being out. Language had two sides, not one: there was form, but there was also function (or usage), and this social (or pragmatic) province provided an indispensable perspective for language study. But this criticism the neogrammarians largely ignored.
The criticisms were largely valid; the social basis of language had yet to be thoroughly expounded. However, the result of the movement was to inject a greater scientific precision and awareness into linguistics, and this supported the tendency to see the subject as a kind of natural science. The perspective was still evolutionary – all explanations continued to be historical in the following years - but there was a more rational, empirical approach to language, especially in its contemporary, living forms, which was first developed in theoretical detail in the work of Saussure. The old, fanciful, vague theorizing was gone; reliable major work, synthesizing and codifying the results of widespread scholarship, was becoming available. The comparative method had been proved to be of great use in historical linguistics, and a number of important points had been raised and clarified.
For example, such philological procedures firmly dissolved all the old theories that one of the spoken languages of the world was the oldest. Moreover, it caused further confusion in the
anthropological camp among those who maintained that whichever language it was that Adam and Eve spoke in Eden, it was sure to have been a simple language; for the comparative method indicated that the further back one went in reconstruction, the more complex the inflections of language appeared to be. Indo-European was much more inflected than either Greek or Sanskrit; and there was no evidence that Indo-European was anywhere near the starting-point of mankind's language. There was a geographic coincidence between the linguistic judgement and the historical, in so far as both sets of evidence pointed to a place of origin for civilization to the north of the Indian sub-continent, but it was all very hypothetical, and how long a variety of Indo-European was being spoken in that place was indeterminable.
While we can be optimistic about the gains linguistics has had from comparative philology, it is not to be thought that philology provides all the answers, even within its own field. In the Indo-European family, for example, for a variety of reasons, Basque, Sumerian and Etruscan have no obvious place. And the relationship of Indo-European to any other of the world's great language families (for example, the North American Indian languages, or the Malayo-Polynesian family) is impossible to ascertain in the present stage of study, though attempts, some misguided, have been made. Nor is philology likely to make much progress in this field: with primitive cultures there are rarely any written records and hence no basis for historical reconstruction. It is highly probable that many languages of non-Indo-European families have already disappeared, leaving no trace, and there are many hundreds of tongues that remain unanalysed to date.
There are also some important limitations to the comparative method as such, which should make us wary of relying too uncritically upon it. It concerns itself overmuch with dead languages, and with letters, rather than sounds. Secondly, it is preoccupied with the superficial similarities existing between languages, as opposed to the underlying differences. For example, the method does not allow for independent changes arising within a language once it has left its parent, which might not affect the parent at all; and an attempt to read such new features into the structure of the parent language (as the method is bound to do) can only produce distortion. Thirdly, and more important, there is the charge that the theory embodies a fundamental inconsistency in comparative procedure. The method characterizes a language as, say, Indo-European, by pointing to certain linguistic changes that have occurred in the course of its subsequent history; but in doing this it ignores other changes that have also occurred, which may be equally characteristic. Nor is there any criterion or principle furnished by which we can explain which type of change is relevant for deducing a parent language, and which is not, and this is dissatisfying. English may be Germanic in one sense, but it is Romance in another, especially when we consider it from the point of view of vocabulary. Fourthly, the method assumes that as soon as two languages split off from a parent, they no longer influence each other formally - which is by no means necessarily true -witness the influence of English on a variety of languages. Fifthly, the method fails to consider a variability in the degree of precision attainable at various periods of reconstruction: the further back we go in history, the more time and space we allow in between language states, and thus the more unknown influencing factors. It is not possible to talk of Indo-European with the same degree of certainty as of Old English, but the sound-laws are poker-faced, and equate all ages in their formulas. And finally, there is the assumption that Proto-Indo-European was a single language which can be deduced from all the forms evidenced in daughter languages. It is rather more likely (in view of certain contradictory pieces of evidence in the reconstructions, and in view of what we know about the nature of language) that the parent language involved many dialects, not just one which has been miraculously preserved in extant languages. But to determine the dialectology of Proto-Indo-European would be a task to wither even the most ardent German philologist's spirit.
The twentieth century, as we know, brought a reaction to purely historical studies, and today the most valuable and alive aspect of comparative linguistics is the subject of dialectology (or linguistic geography), which studies variation in speech forms of a language, and thus deals in the state of contemporary languages emphasizing speech to the almost total exclusion of writing. It is at this point, then, that we can take up the trail of modern linguistics, beginning with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose contribution to our subject remains outstanding.
Saussure
We are fortunate in having any of Saussure's theoretical ideas to" read at all. The chief book we have under his name was, in a way, unpremeditated. The Course in General Linguistics (Cours de Linguistique Generale) was published in 1916, three years after his death. It is a collection and expansion of notes taken by Saussure's students during various lecture courses that he gave. Understandably, it is rather fragmentary in character, and in many places there are hints only of the theoretical position which subsequent exegesis has concluded Saussure must have held. There is also very little in the way of detailed illustration of his views. But its influence has been unparalleled in European linguistics since, and it had a major formative role to play in the shaping of linguistic thought in Europe over the thirty or so years which followed its publication. In particular, it moved the subject away from the nineteenth-century emphases in language study. In Saussure, we can see a clear reaction against many of the ideas raised in my preceding section: again and again he emphasizes the importance of seeing language as a living phenomenon (as against the historical view), of studying speech (as opposed to written texts), of analysing the underlying system of a language in order to demonstrate an integrated structure (in place of isolated phonetic tendencies and occasional grammatical comparisons), and of placing language firmly in its social milieu (as opposed to seeing it solely as a set of physical features). The tradition of study which has grown up around Saussure has been to extract various theoretical dichotomies from his work and to concentrate on the clarification of these. I shall follow this tradition, and look briefly at the more important of them.
In opposition to the totally historical view of language of the previous hundred years, Saussure emphasized the importance of seeing language from two distinct and largely exclusive points of view, which he called synchronic and diachronic. The distinction was one which comparative philologists had often confused, but for Saussure - and, subsequently for linguistics - it was essential. Synchronic linguistics sees language as a living whole, existing as a 'state' at a particular point in time (an etat de langue, as Saussure put it). We can imagine this state as the accumulation of all the linguistic activities that a language community (or some section of it) engages in during a specific period, e.g. the language of the present-day working-class in Manchester. In order to study this, linguists will collect samples within the stated period, describing them regardless of any historical considerations which might have influenced the state of the language up to that time. Once linguists have isolated a focus-point for synchronic description, the time factor becomes irrelevant - whatever changes may be taking place in their material while they are collecting it, they consider trivial. To consider historical material is to enter the domain of diachronic linguistics. This deals with the evolution of a language through time, as a continually changing medium - a never-ending succession of language states. Thus we may wish to study the change from Old English to Middle English, or the way in which Shakespeare's style changes from youth to maturity: both would be examples of diachronic study. Saussure drew the inter-relationship of the two dimensions in this way:
Here AB is the synchronic 'axis of simultaneities', CD is the diachronic 'axis of successions'. AB is a language state at an arbitrarily chosen point in time on the line CD (at X); CD is the historical path the language has travelled, and the route which it is going to continue travelling.
(Crystal D. Linguistics. Second ed. Penguin Book, 1990. – pp. 140-157).

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