Michael Silverstein
University of Chicago

Edward Sapir (1884-1939) arrived at the University of Chicago for Autumn Quarter, 1925, having spent the summer, in transit from Ottawa, in New York City teaching summer school at Columbia. Two years later, in 1927, Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), a native Chicagoan who had his Ph.D. in Germanic Philology from Chicago (1909), returned to succeed his Doktorvater, Francis A. Wood (1859-1948), who had just retired, as Professor in Germanic. The two great figures in the history of linguistics in America were thus colleagues at Chicago for four years, through the 1930-31 academic year, after which Sapir removed to New Haven as Sterling Professor and founding Chair of the Yale Department of Anthropology, with a concurrent appointment in Linguistics. (After the death of Bloomfield’s early mentor, Eduard Prokosch, in August, 1938, and of Sapir, in February, 1939, Bloomfield, too, would go to Yale as Sterling Professor in Linguistics and Germanic, in effect replacing both.)

Linguistics at Chicago, originally denoted by the expression “Comparative Philology,” was one of the original subjects, or “departments of knowledge,” filled by President William Rainey Harper (1856-1906). Harper himself had gotten his Ph.D. in Hebrew and Semitic Philology at Yale under the great William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), and in 1892 another Whitney student more in the master’s image, Carl Darling Buck (1866-1955), started as “Assistant Professor of Sanskrit and Indo-European Comparative Philology” on return from a degree at Leipzig. By the mid-1920s, Buck presided over a department captioned “Comparative Philology, General Linguistics, and Indo-Iranian Philology,” with a set of course offerings both by himself and by various others whose primary appointments were in other departments. Sapir, originally appointed in Spring, 1925, as Associate Professor of Anthropology and of American Indian Languages in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (as it then was), taught a range of linguistics courses, listed as well among the offerings in Comparative Philology, to the coterie of students who would continue and expand Boasian anthropological linguistics in the 1930s. (They would all be marginalized by the more doctrinaire Bloomfieldians, as it turned out.) By Autumn Quarter 1927, Sapir was a full “Professor of Anthropology and General Linguistics,” and early in Winter Quarter, 1928, Buck formally arranged for Sapir’s titular appointment in the department, as attested by an exchange of administrative letters with higher-ups in the central administration. Bloomfield’s courses in Germanic, too, were listed under the umbrella of Comparative Philology on his 1927 return, and since Francis Wood had been a member of the department, so, too, was his student and successor, Bloomfield (and would be Bloomfield’s successor, George J. Metcalf [1908-1994]). A number of the students of the late 1920s, for example Li Fang-Kuei (1902-1987) and Mary R. Haas (1910-1996) took courses with all three of Buck, Bloomfield, and Sapir, recalling for me in later years their very different pedagogical styles and emphases.

But it is not pedagogical style as such that concerns me so much as intellectual and professional affiliations and outlooks, and the way that these emerged in a face that linguistics as a discipline would for some time show to its congener disciplines at Chicago and in America more generally. Everything we know about Sapir’s and Bloomfield’s biographies shows that their centers of intellectual gravity and their aspirational commitments pulled in very different directions. This was already very clear by the time they had joined Buck’s enterprise at Chicago, each of them in his early 40s and each of them accomplished and authoritative in his respective scholarly work, and each widely connected in their own disciplinary networks of “invisible colleges,” as Merton termed them.

Sapir was the broader scholar with the ability to dazzle an audience of laypersons as well as graduate students with an extempore display of genius at work, integrating details of some matter in a framework of wider significance. By the time he arrived at Chicago, he had published in The American Mercury as well as many other New York highbrow intellectual venues; he had as well compiled an incredible record of descriptive and comparative publication on Native American languages and ethnological phenomena, the vast majority gathered in his own fieldwork (which he continued vigorously at Chicago, for example on Gweabo [Jabo] of Liberia, and Athapascan languages Hupa, Navajo, etc.). Sapir moved easily in the field of Boas’s first generation of anthropology students, focused on problems of typological and historical reconstruction of the culture history of North America as well as on the way that newer currents in psychology and psychiatry – Freud, Jung, Koffka – were disturbing the New York intelligentsia and, disciplinarily, the various emerging social sciences on the North American side of the Atlantic. His essays from this time forward are arabesques of newly traced connections. He wrote poetry and poetry criticism, book reviews, etc.

Bloomfield, too, appeared at Chicago with a distinguished record of fieldwork on Tagalog and on at least three Algonquian languages, Menomini and both Plains and Swampy Cree (funded through a contract from the Victoria Memorial Museum of Canada that was arranged by Sapir). He was an Indo-European comparative philologist by training, to be sure, with a specialty in Germanic and a love of Sanskrit. Both Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) and Algonquian were additional specialties he cultivated as he suffered from the ennui of a brilliant analytic intellectual cast as a German, Gothic, and Dutch language instructor during the decade of the ’teens at University of Illinois. Bloomfield saw linguistics as applicable to practical matters, such as language pedagogy and literacy, and his triumph in this was to come later in wartime mobilization of the whole profession of linguistics for the ACLS/Army Language Program.

The two men obviously met intellectually on the field of American Native languages, as Franz Boas (1858-1942) termed them. Both clearly saw that these languages and their descriptive and comparative study contributed something unique to the development of linguistics in America. Indeed, fieldwork with people who were among the last fluent speakers, if not everyday users, of these languages was, for three or four academic generations, a central component of the training and professional activities of linguists in America no matter what their main scholarly specialties. The data from such field elicitation underlay theory and teaching of analytic methods as well. An empirical triumph of those in Boas’s footsteps, this became the prototype for all “inductive” study of languages during World War II and the foundation of the linguistically informed language pedagogies of post-War “direct method” or “spoken language” teaching – even of Latin!

Recall a bit of the organizational context of Sapir’s and Bloomfield’s mutual gaze as Chicago colleagues. From 1910 on, Sapir had been running the Division of Anthropology at the Victoria Memorial Museum, administering collections and supervising exhibits as well as contracting with various others – such as Bloomfield himself in 1925 – as fieldworkers. He had already held various positions in the governing and editorial councils of the American Anthropological Association as these migrated from old line scholars to the up-and-coming Boasian generation, and thus linguistics as such was for Sapir the “subdiscipline” of Boasian anthropology in which he simply had no peer and in which all deferred to his genius. Sapir looked at culture through language-in-use, and thence, at a host of problems in the history and sociology of humankind. He came to Chicago, in fact, for the promise of psychological anthropology as part of a Rockefeller Fund project to integrate the social sciences around problems of “deviance” – we would now term it ethnic and other kinds of diversity – in American society. Chicago’s departments of the social sciences were already at the forefront of such integrative moves as the founding, in late 1923, of the Social Science Research Council as a coordinating consortium of the principal social science associations for the purpose of maintaining a flow of support to cutting-edge research and training at the major centers in the various disciplines. By 1927, Sapir was a member of several of its boards and committees.

Bloomfield, to be sure, belonged to the various philological organizations and attended their meetings, where he gave papers. But decisive in his trajectory was his founding role as the youngest of the triumvirate of George Melville Bolling (1871-1963), Edgar Howard Sturtevant (1875-1952), and himself, the organizing committee that led to the founding, in late December, 1924, of the Linguistic Society of America. Bloomfield wrote the letters to enlist people – among them, by contacting Boas (letter LB to FB 18 I 24), Sapir – to sign on to “The Call” for the organizational meeting, and in a real sense the organization ever after was his baby, the institutionalization of what he again and again, following Bolling, referred to with the welcoming, inclusive expression, “our science,” all the while stimulating and presiding over its exclusionary narrowing in the name of Science. It was, for Bloomfield, clearly a matter of differentiation of “our science” from philology and literature, the domains of the American Philological Association, the American Oriental Society, the Modern Language Association, etc., and from the rest of the social sciences. “In the domain of anthropology –” he would proclaim in plenary address to the MLA & LSA in Cleveland in 1929, “– that is, in the study of man’s super-biological activities – science has been unsuccessful.” (A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology [1970], 227) Except, as it turns out, in the triumphs of linguistics, which, over the course of human history, have been two: Pāņini’s grammar and “the historical linguistics of the nineteenth century” which “owed its origin largely to Europe’s acquaintance with Indian grammar.” (LBA, 219 [Rev. of Liebich]) Thus, as Bloomfield noted, Sapir (who had a year earlier spoken on “The status of linguistics as a science”) “would probably agree with very little of what I am saying tonight” (LBA, 227); indeed, Bloomfield’s stance on what counts as worthwhile “science” was limited to inductive generalizations about linguistic form and its changes over time.

Sapir and Bloomfield both were trained in the methods of Indo-European comparative philology and Neogrammarian historical linguistics. Both were specialists in Germanic, in fact, though it was Bloomfield who was employed professionally as such. Both men were offended that as late as 1924, in Les langues du monde, no less a personage than Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), surely among the greatest Indo-Europeanists – after Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) – could opine that the regularities of Neogrammarian “sound laws” were no doubt suspended on the North American continent, making comparative-historical linguistics there impossible. (Franz Boas, perhaps, had been one unfortunate source of this view, his series of editorials and papers from a diffusionist point of view asserting that Stammbaum concepts of relationship made no sense for indigenous North American languages – a view he continued to hold despite Bloomfield’s and Sapir’s triumphs of method in language family after language family!)

It was on such grounds that Bloomfield had, in fact, formed his exceedingly high opinion of Sapir. His early approaches to the senior scholar of the linguistics of American Native languages, started in early 1924 when, based in Columbus, Ohio at Ohio State University’s Department of German, he wanted Sapir’s support for founding the Linguistic Society of America. As well, he wanted Sapir’s intervention in landing a Canadian government contract to study Cree, one of the “Central Algonquian” languages akin to Fox, on which he had done philological work from others’ published texts, and to Menomini, on which he had done two summers of fieldwork in 1920 and 1921. His earliest note (LB to ES, 29 I [11 II] 24) compliments Sapir on the latter’s American Mercury piece of February, 1924, “The grammarian and his language,” proclaiming it “to be the very best kind of popularizing and at the same time of sound and novel scientific content.”

As the epistolary relationship developed, Bloomfield – who did, in fact, get a research contract for Summer, 1925 – had been drawn into the early production of the Linguistic Society’s journal by its first Editor and Chair of the Committee on Publications, none other than his senior colleague and close professional mentor at Ohio State University, George Melville Bolling. Since Bloomfield was clearly the theoretical head behind the transformation of linguistics into “our science,” Bolling gave him the manuscript of Sapir’s “Sound patterns in language” to read in early 1925, as the second issue of Language was being prepared. In a letter to Sapir dated 9 April, Bloomfield said that the paper “greatly pleased [him]” because it is “really beautiful,” and offered, diffidently, some queries and a substantive improvement to one of Sapir’s points (on the [ŋ] in sing : singer, duly acknowledged in the published text [Sapir 1925:49, n.6]). Later that month, on the 25th or 26th, Bloomfield reports that Bolling “insisted on my reading your S. Paiute grammar, although I don’t see how there could be any question of its value. … [I]t is beautiful, both the language and the work.” By the 6th of May, Bloomfield reports that he “ha[s] told Bolling he should get your texts and lexicon, as well as grammar.”

In this very same letter, Bloomfield reports to Sapir that “Bolling will probably soon send you the paper I have submitted for Language, in this I try to set up equations for the sounds of Men[omini], Fox, Cree, Ojibwa.” This is clearly “On the sound system of Central Algonquian,” printed in the journal’s second volume (pp.130-56) in 1926. Sapir sent comments to Bloomfield, acknowledged and responded to in a letter of May 27th 1925. Again on the 3rd of June, 1925, Bloomfield continues a responsive discussion of his manuscript, among other matters, and really begins to open up in the tone of what we recognize as an enthusiastic and grateful structurally junior person. Bloomfield’s discussion turns to general matters of theory and outlook suggested by his paper. Calling himself a “behaviorist,” he summarizes the doctrines he imbibed around the lunch table in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State, doctrines about how through “language-reactions” to stimuli “the social group … becomes … a new and more complex type of organism.” “All this I have from Weiss, our psychologist,” he reports to Sapir – who must indeed have begun to wonder what this would-be chum was rambling on about with such puerile nonsense such as that he had already slammed down in his 1917 American Anthroplogist reply to A. L. Kroeber’s “The Superorganic.”

But Bloomfield’s discussion here is most revealing of how he, and, recapitulating him, Sapir, represented the achievements of “scientific” linguistics in the mid-1920s. Bloomfield goes on in his letter to explain why Weiss’s behavioristic psychology so appealed to him:

The first appeal this made to me was due to the fact that in our actual work we do exclude ‘mental’ factors, i.e., sound-change won’t stop for desires or fears. (Some of the Germans, I see from the Streitberg volume, are going in for the theory that ‘useless’ sound–groups are ‘more easily lost[’] – which seems to me to be pure bunk, resting upon vague ideas of what ‘usefulness’ and ‘meaning’ etc. are. Jespersen started it, with the notion that E[nglish] case-endings dropped off because no longer significant. I take it that a ‘useless’ case-ending is just as much and just as little meaningful and necessary to the speakers as any other part of the vocal series.)

As can be seen, what is at issue is the exceptionlessness of sound-law, which, as Bloomfield was to say in a footnote in his 1925 article on Proto-Central Algonquian, “is either a universal trait of human speech or nothing at all, an error.” Again, in his 1926 supplementary paper he terms it “a tested hypothesis: in so far as one may speak of such a thing … a proved truth.” It is in this light that we must understand Bloomfield’s report that “[he] ha[s] cut the angry reference to Meillet out of [his] article [which he in fact did not, ultimately], – all the more reason, if your Athabascan forms will give added proof, for not re-stating the fundamental laws of our science [!] every time someone forgets them.”

And so one can see that the place at which these two great scholars found common ground was in the great Neogrammarian achievement of the earlier century. Bloomfield’s “Postulates” of 1926, were to re-state Saussure’s Cours in a behaviorist and especially operationalist idiom (see Percy Bridgman, Bloomfield’s Harvard College classmate, on operationalist philosophy of science). And, doing so, Bloomfield followed the order of presentation of Saussure’s editors as of Sapir’s book Language of 1921, in that the synchronic nature of language comes first, and then the phenomena of language change – sound law, analogic change, semantic change, borrowing, etc. – constitute the dénouement of the whole (as well in Bloomfield’s own 1933 book Language, written at the University of Chicago). For Bloomfield, sound law rests on the postulate that “phonemes change,” i.e., that no matter what other kinds of changes do or do not affect a particular lexical form, its phonological shape can change independent of all these other factors, because the plane of structural phonology is taken to be relatively autonomous of all other planes of structure and function in language.

But more to the point: in 1927, by which time both Bloomfield and Sapir were at Chicago, an extraordinary paper appeared by the then young Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895-1978), in which was emphasized not just the regularity of the assumption that “phonemes change,” but indeed the predictive value of the assumption of the regularity of sound change as an autonomous plane of diachrony. Saussure himself, in a burst of youthful genius, had done a reconstructive structural analysis of the phonology of the Proto-Indo-European lexical root, stem, and inflectional theme, and had postulated the existence of certain “coéfficients sonantiques” – later to be termed laryngeal consonants – in the parent language that had disappeared in the course of language history, but had left traces in certain colorations and quantitative alterations of adjacent root and suffix vowels. Bedřich Hrozný (1879-1952) had published his book on the decipherment of cuneiform Hittite in 1917, and in his startling 1927 paper in the festschrift volume for Jan Rozwadowski, Kuryłowicz shows that Hittite graphic ĥ and ĥĥ appear as reflexes in several of the positions where Saussure’s laryngeal theory had reconstructed them for Proto-Indo-European forms, the segments lost in the reflexes in the other branches.

Bloomfield and Sapir obviously understood the importance of this confirmatory discovery of heretofore unknown Hittite forms that confirmed, in the main, the Saussurean reconstructions that the young master had based on a structural phonemic analysis of lexical form. By early 1928, Bloomfield, whose “On the sound system of Central Algonquian,” recall, had appeared in the second issue of Language in 1925, had himself done fieldwork – courtesy Sapir and the Canadian museum – on a dialect of Cree, Swampy Cree (Manitoba), different from the one he had earlier used in his reconstructions. In that earlier work, he had postulated the existence of a proto-language cluster *-çk– on the basis of one stem, meaning ‘it is red’, *meçkusiwa in Bloomfield’s reconstruction, that showed correspondences among the four daughter languages slightly divergent from all the other examples. Sure enough, this new dialect of Cree, Swampy Cree, shows a distinct reflex, –htk-, precisely where the specially reconstructed cluster predicts something different.

When the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Scientific Method in the Social Sciences was putting together its Methods in Social Science: A Case Book (ed. Stuart A. Rice [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931]) in 1927 and 1928, it turned among others to leading members of the Committee, among them Edward Sapir, for case studies illustrative of how particular social scientists had used particular methods to yield breakthrough results in one or another of the fields of endeavor. Sapir’s essay, written in December, 1928, and revised in February, 1929, is not, as one might have expected, based on any of the achievements of recent synchronic linguistic breakthroughs in which he and Bloomfield were leaders. To recall, Sapir’s formulation of what became phonemics, “Sound patterns in language,” was a landmark that had appeared in the very second issue of the journal Language in Spring, 1925. Bloomfield’s “A set of postulates for the science of language,” in the journal the very next year, set out the entire field as a conceptual architectonic of postulates, definitions, and corollaries, seeming to fashion a rigorous “science” ab initio. By contrast, Sapir’s piece in the Methods case book is entitled “The concept of phonetic law as tested in primitive languages by Leonard Bloomfield” (pp.297-306). It comprises one of three analyses in section V., “Interpretations of Change as a Developmental Stage,” where J. B. Bury’s historical analysis of the concept of ‘progress’ is analyzed, as well as A.L. Kroeber’s studies of cycles in women’s sartorial fashion. As the editor, Stuart Rice, explains the grouping of papers in his “Introduction” (pp.12-13), here

Change is viewed somewhat in the light of an unfolding within a particular cultural entity itself. The papers in this section will have particular interest to those who are concerned with the possibilities of prediction in social science. Anaylsis 21, for example, [Sapir’s of sound law,] describes a foreseen discovery of linguistic forms which recalls to mind the predictions by astronomers of the discovery of Neptune and the newer trans-Neptune planet [presumably, Pluto].

Note the image projected for historical linguistics, akin to astrophysics in its power of prediction.

Sapir, recapitulating Bloomfield’s two Algonquian papers as well as his own even earlier work on Athapascan, projects a powerful historical “science” that, valid in North America no less than in Eurasia, both contravenes Meillet and in a sense outdoes Kuryłowicz (who was later to be Sapir’s student at Yale) on the terrain of American Native languages. Such was the way the two great Chicago scholars joined forces at the cusp of The Depression years. Both Bloomfield and Sapir were instrumental in what became, retrospectively in the 1930s, the great achievement of synchronic structuralism, the discovery of phonological structure and the application of parallel approaches to morphological and syntactic structure. Yet for Bloomfield, certainly, as I have already quoted, Pāņini’s synchronic linguistics had already made that breakthrough.

For him, the breakthrough of modern linguistics was elevating the Neogrammarian method of residues involved in modifying the Grimm’s Law regularities with Verner’s Law and Grassmann’s Law to a postulate of exceptionless of autonomous phonological change. Sapir’s book Language of 1921 had already stated, in somewhat nontechnical form, that the locus of sound law is in an abstract configurational system of ideal, inner sounds, in effect an abstract pattern of phonemic categories, and had reiterated this as the dénouement of his famous 1925 paper on “Sound patterns.” The discovery of the phoneme, then, allows us to see both that phonological systems are the loci of the sound law component of diachrony, and to make predictions about what shapes daughter forms should take. Sapir uses the occasion of his methodological paper to show parallel examples of this from Bloomfield’s Algonquian work and from his own work on Athapascan, where the predicted form had appeared in his data of Summer Quarter, 1927, in Hupa, a language of California.

If the synchronic phoneme, as Bloomfield wrote in 1927, made a science of linguistics, its predictive power lay in the very Neogrammarian diachrony that Sapir and his students would do so much to marginalize in the era of linguistic theory to come.

How to cite this post

Silverstein, Michael. 2014. In Praise of “Exceptionless”: Linguistics Among the Human Sciences at Bloomfield and Sapir’s Chicago. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2014/11/26/in-praise-of-exceptionless-linguistics-among-the-human-sciences-at-bloomfield-and-sapirs-chicago

Sónia Duarte
Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto

En la historia de la enseñanza/aprendizaje del español en Portugal, Nicolau António Peixoto (?–1862) ocupa un lugar fundamental cuyo significado se procurará precisar aquí, presentando su Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos Portuguezes (Oporto 1848) e intentando aclarar cuál es la aportación de esa obra como soporte del susodicho proceso.

Peixoto 1848 portada

Esta es, según los datos disponibles hasta el momento, la primera gramática de español publicada en Portugal, como ya han puesto de relieve varios estudios (Álvarez 2005; Ponce de León 2005, 2007; Salas 2005; Duarte 2008, 2009, 2010, en prensa). Importa, no obstante, matizar dos aspectos: i) su carácter inaugural; ii) el rol que en ella ha jugado Nicolau Peixoto.

Respecto a la primera cuestión, cabe advertir que, cuando el texto sale a la luz, se contaba ya, naturalmente, con la información que sobre el español ofrecía, en su conjunto, la tradición metalingüística portuguesa y latino-portuguesa. Pero, además, se habían incluso publicado ya algunos opúsculos con un enfoque explícitamente contrastivo entre los dos idiomas – “Of the Portugues language or subdialect” (Londres 1662) de James Howell; “Methodo breve, y facil para entender Castellanos la lengua portuguesa” (Lisboa 1721) de Rafael Bluteau; Taboas de Declinação e Conjugação para apprender as Linguas Hespanhola, Italiana e Francesa comparando-as com a Portugueza (Coimbra1821) de José Vicente Gomes de Moura. Sea como fuere, en rigor, pese a la información metagramatical aportada por dichos trabajos, ninguno de ellos se puede clasificar como una gramática y, en ese sentido, la obra en cuestión viene efectivamente a rellenar un vacío, observado por el mismo Nicolau Peixoto: “De que será, que ninguem até agora se désse ao trabalho de beneficiar a Nação portugueza com um methodo de aprender esta rica e bella lingua?” (Peixoto 2008[1848]: 1[3]).

Peixoto 1860 portada

En cuanto al papel de Peixoto en esta obra, esta es una cuestión que levanta más interrogantes. La información disponible no permite reconocerle como autor y el mismo Peixoto parece diferenciar entre la identidad del autor, que permanece por asignar, y la del editor, con la que se identifica expresamente al firmar como tal una breve nota preliminar (Peixoto 2008[1848]: 1[3]). De todas formas, sin más datos, queda por aclarar quién ha sido efectivamente el autor del texto del que aquí se trata, si se descarta la posibilidad de que la hubiera escrito a los 15 años el hijo de Nicolau Peixoto, José Maria Borges da Costa Peixoto, quien en la Guia da conversação Hespanhola para uso dos Portuguezes (Lisboa 1860) se presenta en portada como autor de la Grammatica.

De esta gramática se publicó en Lisboa, en 1858, una segunda edición ampliada y revisada a cargo del ya nombrado José Peixoto, la cual, en lo que atañe a la exposición de la teoría gramatical, no difiere de la primera edición. Los cambios introducidos en 1858 conciernen exclusivamente a la corrección de erratas, opciones ortográficas y suplementos.

Peixoto 1848 contraportada

Las dos ediciones de la gramática en conjunto con la ya referida Guia da conversação y los Diccionarios Hespanhol-Portuguez e Portuguez-Hespanhol, anunciados en la contraportada de la edición de 1848 de la Grammatica y en el periódico de Oporto Defensor Diario de los días 17, 18 y 19 de agosto del mismo año, parecen formar lo que Ponce de León (2005: 677) ha planteado como un “proyecto didáctico” fundado en la complementariedad entre gramaticografía y lexicografía. De todas formas, como pone de manifiesto Ponce de León (2007: 63), no hay constancia de que estos diccionarios se hayan efectivamente publicado o siquiera de que su edición estuviese a cargo de los Peixoto.

O Defensor Diario (17 de agosto de 1848, sem. 2, p. 740)

Sea como fuere, la información existente sobre el conjunto de estas obras parece evidenciar un ambiente favorable a la edición de materiales para la enseñanza/aprendizaje del español en Portugal. En los textos preliminares de la Grammatica se avanza, de alguna forma, con una explicación para ello. El prólogo refiere un clima propicio al aprendizaje de idiomas en términos generales, al que se identifica con el “espirito do seculo” (Peixoto 2008[1848]: 2[5]). Además, como pone de manifiesto Salas (2005: 2-3), ahí se razona específicamente sobre el interés que el español presenta para los portugueses, subrayando supuestos de orden socioeconómico – en que destacan las razones comerciales – y de índole literaria y lingüística – en que sobresale la semejanza entre los dos idiomas.

Centrando ya la atención sobre el texto en sí, este está redactado en portugués y ocupa un total de 147 páginas, estructuradas en cuatro partes, precedidas de la nota del editor y del prólogo (pp. 3-8). La primera parte (pp. 9-14) está dedicada a la ortoepía y prosodia; la segunda (pp. 15-105) – la más extensa – a la morfología; la tercera (pp. 105- 119), a la sintaxis; la cuarta (pp. 119-131), a la ortografía. Desde la perspectiva de los postulados teóricos, esta estructura (división cuaternaria), como, por cierto, ocurre con otros aspectos de la doctrina expuesta, como la definición de gramática o el sistema de clases de palabras – revela conformidad con opciones muy generalizadas en la tradición gramatical. Ya desde una perspectiva metodológica, la ordenación, de las materias parece indicar una orientación hacia la oralidad, reforzada por la publicación de la Guia de Conversação en la secuencia de la Grammatica.

No es el lugar para extenderme en postulados teóricos o supuestos metodológicos, sobre los que, además, se ahonda en otro lugar (Duarte 2008: XIXXXXI). Sin embargo, importa todavía dedicar algunas palabras a las fuentes consultadas y la información que ofrecen para situar las opciones del autor del texto en el ámbito doctrinal, así como, desde el ámbito de la metodología, comentar
brevemente la tipología de esta gramática, su público y enfoque.

De las dos primeras cuestiones se ha tratado específicamente en Duarte (2009). Ahí se identifican las obras metalingüísticas citadas en la Grammatica. Desde la perspectiva aquí asumida, lo más relevante parece ser como esas referencias permiten identificar algunos de los textos que en Portugal servían de referente sobre el español y entre los que estarían la gramática y el diccionario de la Real Academia Española, aludidos ahí, por cierto, de forma bastante crítica en diversas ocasiones, no obstante el peso que asumen en Peixoto y sobre el que se ahonda en otro lugar (Duarte 2010). Por otra parte, Peixoto no realiza ninguna mención a los ya referidos trabajos de Howell y, en especial, de Bluteau y de Moura, ambos publicados en Portugal y, en el último caso, poco antes de la obra editada por los Peixoto.

Sobre la vertiente metodológica, no se conocen estudios específicos, aunque en Duarte (2008: XXVIII-XXIX) se alude a esa materia identificando la gramática de los Peixoto por una parte, entre las de “tipo explicativo”, dada la insistencia en la descripción gramatical, y, por otra, como una gramática escolar, por su orientación hacia la situación de aprendizaje, pese a que fuera de un contexto institucional, ya que la introducción, dentro del sistema educativo portugués, de asignaturas relacionadas con la lengua española ocurre tan sólo a inicios del siglo XX, en la enseñanza superior, y en 1991, en la no superior (Duarte 2008: I, 29 n. 71). También en Duarte (2008: XX) se procura caracterizar a grandes rasgos el público al que la obra va destinada y sobre el cuál ofrece algunas pistas. Efectivamente, al insistir en determinados ámbitos profesionales (diplomacia, política, comercio…), al presuponer determinados conocimientos previos (metalenguaje, lenguas clásicas, lenguas extranjeras…) y al traer a colación determinadas actitudes lingüísticas (excesiva seguridad como hablantes) o representaciones (semejanza entre ambos idiomas y facilidad de aprendizaje), el texto construye un perfil marcado sociolingüísticamente de forma bastante significativa. Como primera gramática del español en Portugal, otro aspecto que merece relieve en el plano metodológico es la presencia de un enfoque contrastivo orientado predominantemente a subrayar la semejanza entre ambas lenguas. Sobre esto cabe aun añadir que, como ya se ha puesto en evidencia en Duarte (en prensa), el recurso a esta estrategia no presenta sistematicidad, no tiene como criterio las cuestiones más problemáticas desde la perspectiva de la didáctica del español en un contexto lusohablante y normalmente no corresponde a los tópicos más arraigados en la tradición metagramatical, especialmente en la que asume ese enfoque contrastivo, a pesar de algunas coincidencias, en concreto, con los textos de Bluteau y de Moura.

En definitiva, pese a la matización que se ha realizado aquí del estatuto pionero de esta obra dentro de la tradición de materiales sobre el español en Portugal, tal relativización, como también aquí se ha sostenido, no anula totalmente su carácter fundacional y no invalida tampoco sus rasgos distintivos respecto de las obras precedentes. Al editar la Grammatica de forma articulada con otros materiales, los Peixoto han asegurado una base bibliográfica para el desarrollo del aprendizaje del español entre los portugueses, cuyo impacto en la tradición posterior  todavía está por determinar.

Referencias

Álvarez, Eloísa. 2005. “Decadencia de la lengua española, primeras gramáticas para luso-hablantes y comienzos de la enseñanza de esta literatura en la Universidad de Coimbra”. In: Luís Filipe Teixeira, Maria José Salema & Ana Clara Santos (Orgs.). O livro no ensino das Línguas e Literaturas Modernas em Portugal: do Século XVIII ao final da Primeira República. Actas do II Colóquio da A.P.H.E.L.L.E. Coimbra: A.P.H.E.L.L.E., 39-56.

Duarte, Sónia. 2008. O contributo de Nicolau Peixoto para o ensino do Espanhol em Portugal: edição crítica da Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos portuguezes, Tese de Mestrado, Departamento de Linguística e Literaturas, Universidade de Évora.

—————–. 2009. “Fuentes de la Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos Portugueses de Nicolau Peixoto (1848)”. Documents pour l’ histoire du Français langue étrangère ou seconde – Aproches constrastives et multilinguisme dans l’enseignement des langues en Europe (XVIe-XXe siècles). 42: 165-183.

—————–. 2010. “A presença da GRAE em Peixoto (Porto 1848) e Cervaens y Rodriguez (Porto 1895)”. In: Carlos Assunção, Gonçalo Fernandes & Marlene Loureiro. Ideias Linguísticas na Península Ibérica (séc. XIV a séc. XIX), vol. I . Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 177-188.

—————–. En prensa. “O contraste portugués/espanhol em Nicolau Peixoto (1848)”. Revista de Linguística, 9.

Peixoto, José Maria Borges da Costa. 1858. Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos portuguezes, segunda edição correcta e muito aumentada, contendo no fim um vocabulário portuguezhespanhol das palavras mais usuaes e necessárias, Lisboa, Typ. de Maria da Madre de Deus.

——————. 1858. Guia da Conversação Hespanhola para uso dos portugueses contendo regras da pronúncia, e acentuação das palavras; um vocabulario, phrases, e diálogos familiares; modelos epistolares; e uma táboa comparativa no valor das moedas hespanholas e portuguezas, colligida dos melhores auctores e ordenada por José M. B. Da Costa Peixoto, auctor da Grammatica Hespanhola, obra util para aprender o hespanhol e para os viajantes á qual se ajuntou, no fim, uma collecção de locuções hespanholas, etc. por outro auctor. Lisboa: Typ. de Maria da Madre de Deus.

Peixoto, Nicolau António. 1848. Grammatica Hespanhola para uso dos portuguezes, dada á luz por Nicolau António Peixoto. Porto: Typ. Commercial. [ed. Sónia Duarte en 2008]

Ponce de León, Rogelio. 2005. “Textos para la enseñanza-aprendizaje del español en Portugal durante el siglo XIX: una breve historia”. In: Actas del XV Congreso Internacional de ASELE. Sevilla: Facultad de Filología de la Universidad de Sevilha, 675-682.

—————–. 2007. “Materiales para la enseñanza del español en Portugal y para la enseñanza del portugués en España: gramáticas, manuales, guías de conversación (1850-
1950)”. In: Gabriel Magalhães (Coord.). Actas do Congresso RELIPES III. Covilhã/Salamanca: UBI/Celya, 59-86.

Salas Quesada, Pilar. 2005. “Los inicios de la enseñanza de la lengua española en Portugal”. In: María Auxiliadora Castillo et al (Ed.). Las gramáticas y los diccionarios en la enseñanza del español como segunda lengua: deseo y realidad: Actas del XV Congreso Internacional de ASELE, Sevilla, 22 al 25 de septiembre de 2004. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla – Servicio de Publicaciones, 799-804.

How to cite this post

Duarte, Sónia. 2014. La aportación de Nicolau Peixoto para el estudio del español en Portugal. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2014/12/10/la-aportacion-de-nicolau-peixoto-para-el-estudio-del-espanol-en-portugal

Sabine Fiedler
University of Leipzig

Terminology and characteristics

A number of different terms have been used to name the topic of this blog entry. For example, in English, the following expressions are used synonymously: multi-word lexemes, phrasemes, set phrases, prefabricated speech, lexical bundles, formulaic sequences, clichés, idioms, lexical phrases, phrasal lexemes and phrasal lexical items. I prefer the traditional expression phraseological unit, which has been widely used recently, largely due to international cooperation between phraseology researchers and the dominant role the English language plays in the linguistic community. It is also significant that it has equivalents in many languages, such as unité phraséologique in French, фразеологическая единица in Russian, phraseologische Einheit in German. Charles Bally introduced unité phraséologique as early as 1909 in his Traité de Stylistique Française.

There are five main defining characteristics of phraseological units (PU) (cf. Burger et al. 2007; Fiedler 2007): (1) they have a polylexemic structure, i.e., phraseological units are word-groups or sentences; (2) they are characterized, in principle, by semantic and syntactic stability;¹ (3) they are lexicalized, i.e., as ready-made units of the lexicon they are not created productively by the speaker/writer but reproduced; furthermore, (4) they are mainly idiomatic² and (5) most of them have connotative features. Because of these characteristics PUs may fulfil various pragmatic functions in discourse.

Historical development

The term phraseology can be used, firstly, to denote the set of linguistic units that are defined above, which constitute the phrasicon of a language, i.e. the block or inventory of idioms and phrases, and, secondly, to name the field of study (phraseology research). Phraseology as a branch of linguistics can look back on a significant tradition. Charles Bally’s ideas were taken up by V.V. Vinogradov in the 1940s, resulting in a large number of publications on phraseological phenomena in Russian. It was only in the 1970s, however, that phraseology became an internationally recognized and rapidly developing field of research with a growing body of monographs and doctoral dissertations dealing with a variety of languages. A milestone for phraseology on its way to becoming an independent linguistic discipline was the establishment of the European Society for Phraseology (EUROPHRAS) in 1999. Its regular conferences and publications support the international exchange in this area. An international handbook on phraseology appeared in 2007 (Burger et al. 2007), and a de Gruyter journal, Yearbook of Phraseology, was initiated in 2010 – publishing exclusively on phraseology, and covering all areas of the field – to facilitate dialogue between English-speaking scholars in the field from all over the world.

Classification

There are different ways to classify phraseological units. A basic division into word-groups (word-like phraseological units) and sentences (sentence-like units) seems to be of importance. When applying a structural-semantic classification, as is often done in phraseology, we find the following types of units to be especially relevant (cf. Burger et al. 2007; Fiedler 2007):

1. phraseological nominations (e.g. blind date; spill the beans)
2. binomials (e.g. odds and ends; up and down)
3. stereotyped comparisons (e.g. eat like a horse; as dry as a bone)
4. proverbs (e.g. Let sleeping dogs lie; Every cloud has a silver lining)
5. winged words/catch phrases (e.g. speak softly and carry a big stick; to boldly go where no man has gone before)
6. routine formulae (e.g. you’re welcome; as it were)

In addition to this type of classification phraseological units are often subdivided according to their constituents. Beyond linguistic and cultural boundaries, some elements of the lexicon are productive to a higher extent than others as phraseological constituents. These are colour terms (e.g. a white lie), terms naming the parts of the human body (e.g. keep one’s fingers crossed), proper names (e.g. go Dutch), and numbers (e.g. on cloud nine).

Functions

Phraseological units fulfil a multitude of functions in texts. The fact that they carry connotative meanings and therefore give the text a special flavour in terms of expressive and stylistic values does not mean that they are merely ornamental and could thus be omitted. Indeed, phraseological units clearly work as text-forming elements. Their text-constituting function is based, more than anything else, on their complex structure. Since they are polylexemic (word groups and sentences), they are syntactically and structurally variable. Isolated phraseological constituents can, in fact, be reiterated to play a specific role in the text.

In journalistic texts they are often employed as the headlines of articles and in captions, where they function as catchphrases to attract the reader’s interest. In literary texts PUs are used for emotive and expressive effects. They are used to describe situations and feelings in a vivid way and to characterise literary figures (in the so-called linguistic portrait). What would be Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye without phrases such as not know one’s ass from one’s elbow; … as hell; not give a damn; … and all and give sb. a pain in the ass.

Creative uses

Text analyses show that in about a quarter of all examples phraseological units are used in a particular way. This means constituents are left out, other words are added, phraseological units are combined, used in both their literal and figurative meanings, or even made the theme of a whole paragraphs and texts to produce specific stylistic effects. In contrast to the phraseological variations mentioned in footnote 1, modifications are ad-hoc exploitations. They are situational, innovative and closely related to a specific text or communicative act. The most frequent types of modification are substitution (e.g. a breath of fresh Eire [about the smoking ban in Ireland]), expansion (e.g. … serve as the electoral Trojan horse), permutation, i.e. the reordering of phraseological constituents (e.g. Britannia has waived the rules [“Rebranding” of the National Maritime Museum]), and reduction (e.g. Grapevine [title of a column in a magazine announcing the latest gossip about celebrities]). In phraseological puns, authors provide conditions to make both readings (i.e. the literal and the figurative meaning) of a phraseological unite relevant to a textual environment and in doing so to produce deliberate ambiguity (e.g. Blood, Toil, Tears, Sweat [article on the National Health Service]).

Processing advantages for native and non-native speakers

As mentioned before, phraseological units are a substantial constituent of language. Data about their proportion in communication vary and depend on register and genre. Erman and Warren (2000) found that as much as 58.6% of spoken discourse and 52.3% of written language was prefabricated. Howarth (1998) in his study on academic writing found that between 31% and 40% was made up of phraseological units (collocations and idioms). Phraseology serves to facilitate language use by providing a processing advantage and, as a number of studies have revealed, the use of prefabricated phrases and sentences decreases processing efforts in speech production and improves learners’ fluency (e.g. Wray, 2002; Conklin & Schmitt, 2008). Pawley & Syder (1983: 208), introducing the term “institutionalized sentence stem” for holistically stored sequences, were among the first to describe this:

Indeed, we believe that memorized sentences and phrases are the normal building blocks of fluent spoken discourse, and at the same time, that they provide models for the creation of many (partly) new sequences which are memorable and in their turn enter the stock of familiar usages.

The knowledge of phraseological units is also advantageous to foreign language learners — both in receptive and productive language use. It aids comprehension because it makes the incoming language flow predictive, and eases processing loads in speech production as the speaker is able to concentrate on passages which are produced creatively (Lennon, 1998: 18).

Recent trends

The phrasicon of a language is generally comprised of both a national (or culture-bound) and an international stock of items. In addition to expressions that are deeply embedded in the history of a speech community (such as send sb. to Coventry, catch-22 or be green with envy to take English examples), we find units that are widely known due to common sources, such as the Bible or antique mythology. Examples are black sheep, Pyrrhic victory, one hand washes the other and swim with the tide. Another important reason for transculturally common phraseological units is language contact. Currently, due to its dominant role in education, science, business, travel and popular media, English is making an important contribution in disseminating phraseological units. Young people, who want to be part of a global culture, find it attractive and stylish to insert ready-made English phrases (e.g. … at its best; the best … ever; just for fun) into their German sentences. Loan translations (e.g. literal translations of formulae such as The thing is; at the end of the day; to go the extra mile; and pigs might fly) can be heard and read everywhere. They provide hidden influences that are sometimes difficult to detect. Similar trends can be observed in other languages such as French and Spanish (cf. Furiassi et al. 2012: 169-277). This might be seen as an indicator of a globalization of language and culture, which would, however, be a topic for another blog entry.

Notes

¹ The restriction in principle is to indicate the fact that, within definite constraints, there are variants. The use of function words (prepositions, determiners etc.) can vary (e.g. in/by leaps and bounds) as well as lexical constituents (e.g. sweep sth. under the carpet/rug).

² Phraseological units can have different degrees of idiomaticity. At one end of the scale there are real idioms, i.e. fully opaque expressions. At the opposite end of the scale, we find fully transparent units, which are, however, legitimately included in the phrasicon because they are polylexemic, stable, and lexicalised. Idioms are therefore a subset of phraseological units.

References

Bally, C. (1909): Traité de Stylistique Française. Heidelberg: Winter.

Burger, H. et al. (eds.) (2007): Phraseologie. Phraseology. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

Conklin, C. & Schmitt, N. (2008): Formulaic Sentences: Are the Processed More Quickly Than Nonformulaic Language by Native and Nonnative Speakers? Applied Linguistics, 28, 1-18.

Erman, B. & Warren, B. (2000): The idiom principle and the open-choice principle. Text, 20, 29-62.

Fiedler, Sabine (2007): English Phraseology. A Coursebook. Tübingen: Narr.

Furiassi, Cristiano/Pulcini, Virginia/Rodríguez Ganzález, Félix (eds.) (2012): The Anglicization of European Lexis. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Howarth, P. (1998): Phraseology and second language proficiency. Applied Linguistics, 19 (1), 24-44.

Lennon, P. (1998): Approaches to the Teaching of Idiomatic English. IRAL, XXXVI (1), 11-30.

Pawley, A. & Syder, F.H. (1983): Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Richards, J.C./Schmidt, R.W. (eds.), Language and Communication (pp. 191-226). Harlow & London: Longman.

Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How to cite this post

Fiedler, Sabine. 2015. Somewhat caught between lexicology and syntax: a look at phraseology. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/02/11/somewhat-caught-between-lexicology-and-syntax-a-look-at-phraseology/

Anna Pytlowany
University of Amsterdam

This is Part II of a series. Part I is here.

At first glance, the history of Dutch East India Company (VOC) linguistics is simply a history of texts. Published or not, edited, translated, or not – the wordlists, grammars and phrasebooks remain a witness to the times when Dutch merchants and missionaries started documenting the new cultures and languages they encountered overseas.

But the historical reality is more multifaceted.

Besides the ones kept in the main VOC archives, some of these Dutch manuscripts and printed books are scattered in private and public collections from Paris, to London, to Venice, to Sydney. How to reconstruct the itineraries of displaced books? How to uncover the real place of creation of a manuscript? How to decide whether two similar copies are related or not, and how to date them? How to establish authorship of anonymous works?

The answers are contained in the very materiality of these objects. But to unlock them, we need to know what we are looking for.

Bookbinding

The main function of bookbinding is to protect the leaves and keep them together. However, the external visible elements, such as the cover and decoration (or, in the medieval manuscripts, the metal ‘furniture’­, i.e. clasps or ornaments) have, historically, also been an indicator of social status. Books were often sold without covers – these were provided later by the owners to match their own collection. Although until recently the history of bookbinding was limited to the study of binding decoration, to an expert eye, it is precisely the covert internal structure, the type of sewing, endleaf structure, and the kind of endbands (the meticulous sewing at the head and tail of the textblock spine) that can reveal the most valuable information on the origin of a book.

The sewing and covering of a book is called binding. A set of sheets folded, nested and sewn together forms a quire (also called a gathering or section). These are arranged side-by-side and sewn at the fold. By analysing holes at the fold of each quire we can see whether the book was rebound, or if it is in its original state.

Why are quires a good idea? Just compare an Indian book with only one massive quire of 400 pages with a structure combining small quires:

MS “Carmen Guzzuraticum” (Ms. Hasselquist, “Ex dono Reginæ Ludovicæ Udalricæ” UUB, O. Okatal. 3).

Hand-crafted Coptic style exposed-spine binding. Source: Cassandra Crafts

In some cases, even the thread used for sewing might provide precious geographical clues, as in the case of unusual thick brown thread used in Ketelaar’s Instructie from Paris, and in De Tours’ Grammatica Linguae Indianae from Rome. The two unrelated manuscripts possibly share the same place of creation: Surat in India, and the analysis of the thread fibres could corroborate this theory.

Just like contemporary paper formats, the book formats refer to how many times the initial sheet of paper was folded: once for folio, resulting in two leafs; twice for quarto – four leaves; three times for octavo – eight leaves, respectively abbreviated as “2^o,” “4^o” and “8^o.” (Interestingly, in some catalogues, the manuscripts are arranged first by size, and only then alphabetically.) Usually, quires in one book are regular and contain from four to ten leaves. In the Middle Ages, eight leaves quires (quaternions) were the most popular in the West, while in Islamic manuscripts, for example, the norm was quires composed of 5 folded leaves (i.e. 10 pages). If the quires are irregular, like in the manuscript of François-Marie de Tours’ Grammatica Linguae Indianae, where consecutive quires consist of 20, 16, 10, 14 and 18 leaves, it may suggest that the book was created by an amateur.

Foliation vs. pagination

Unlike in modern books, where each page is numbered separately, in medieval codices only individual leaves were numbered (if numbered at all). In each folio (from Latin folium, pl. folia), the two sides are then referred to as recto (the page on the right as you open a book) and verso (the reverse) (hence page references such as 14v, or 22r). This order is opposite for books written in right-to-left scripts, so that the European “front” is Oriental verso.

As obvious as it seems, the orientation of the text may sometimes be overlooked. One such examples is an anonymous Persian-Dutch vocabulary from Leiden University Library, miscataloged as “nautical and botanical” just because these two sections are at the “European” front. In fact, it is a classical thematic vocabulary, starting with God, the world, planets, etc. and ending with botanical and medical substances (the chapter on the ship equipment is a separate addition altogether). Accordingly, its title page figures on the verso of the last folio in the European system – so, the “very end” of the text.

Title page of Vocabularium Persico-Belgicum, f. 111v of European foliation system (MS LTK 589)

Since, to avoid this confusion, another system has been introduced, with the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ instead of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ or ‘front’ and ‘back’.

Even though the mainstream Western tradition preserved the “cover to cover” binding model as we know it today, historically, book craftsmen, at times, experimented with more unusual forms: from “dos-à-dos” (back to back) “Siamese twins” books, to a book that opens in six ways:

Source: Erik Kwakkel 

Where West meets East

Sometimes, the information on the origin comes from the very structure of the book, or the way the leaves are bound. The Dutch-Formosan dictionary from Utrecht University Library looks nothing out of ordinary when we look at the beautifully digitised book online. However, in the original, every second page is blank: the rice paper it’s written on is very thin, so only one side of each page is used, verso and recto, and the next centre fold (pages facing each other) remain blank. The blank pages were skipped in digitisation (or at least in the online presentation), and only comparing the page edges reveals that recto does not always match verso:

Source: Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht Hs. 1483.

This format resembles the Chinese “butterfly binding”. Traditional Chinese books were usually printed on one side of the paper. If the page was folded inward in the middle, the binding is called ‘butterfly’ (hudie zhuang), if folded outward – ‘wrapped-back’ or ‘thread-binding’ (xianzhuang):

Chinese book binding types. Source: Burkus-Chasson 2005: 372.

Unfortunately, due to a later re-binding, it is hard to check how the pages of the manuscript from Utrecht were originally glued together. It would be interesting to compare the binding with those of contemporary Chinese manuscripts from Taiwan to confirm whether the MS was initially created there by a local bookbinder.

Adding sophistication

The technical description of quires and number of pages in each quire is called collation. It can be enlightening – or really confusing. On the basic level, it shows whether a manuscript was bought blank and bound, or whether the binding took place after the writing. However, the history rarely stops there; books and manuscripts are notoriously being “doctored”, i.e. leaves are added or removed to produce a “more perfect”, or sophisticated copy. It takes a real expert to uncover such practices when they are done for monetary gain; but even when the modifications are done openly, the motives may not be clear. Anquetil Duperron added his introduction as well as extra title page in the middle of Thesaurus Linguae Indianae by Francois-Marie de Tours ­– was he possibly preparing it for publication?

Sadly enough, loose pages from manuscripts, especially illuminated codices, accumulate more money at auctions than the complete manuscript would. At this stage, the only way to reunite them is by reassembling them in virtual space – the main objective of projects such as manuscriptlink.

But appearances can be misleading. If we look at a manuscript of the Dutch-Malay vocabulary from Erpenius Collection in Cambridge, we might be outraged that three pages of the text have been brutally cut off:

Source: Cambridge University Library, Gg.6.40, Part IV

However, when we look at the quire structure, we realise that in fact, three pages have not been removed, but added at the beginning. They must have come from a book of which further part was not relevant to the Malay language and therefore discarded.

Membra disjecta

As bookbinding materials, especially parchment, were quite expensive yet durable, fragments of older manuscripts were often recycled into new bindings. We can find them as membra disjecta, or scattered fragments, in much later books, like in this example from 16^th century (Nationaal Archief, Coll. Sypesteyn):

Two pages from a 13^th century French missal were folded and used to strengthen the cover stitching. (Although in this case, the pieces were evaluated as not important enough to undo the original 16^th century binding, the conservator assured me that they would undo it if requested by an interested medievalist.)

The analysis of disjecta membra can also add to the understanding of book’s history.

Provenance

Provenancing, i.e. determining the chronology of the ownership and location of a book or a manuscript, can be studied in two ways: by examining the item itself (bookseller plates; labels; symbols and inscriptions), or by finding references in external sources, such as auction catalogues, library records, etc. Personally, I’m particularly interested in ‘catalogues du feu…’ (‘of the late…’), prepared after the death of a (famous) person: it’s as close to peeking into the persons’ library as it can get, trying to understand their influences.

We have to keep in mind that provenance is not the same as origin. However, it can help authenticate the object. It can also be as lucrative as it is fascinating, even in modern manuscripts and books, where a proven ownership by an important or famous person can increase the value of a book tremendously. Biggest auction houses hire exceptionally skilled ‘book detectives’ who can easily recognize less obvious clues, such as bookseller’s price codes (booksellers typically avoided writing any prices on books explicitly, yet they still needed to remember how much they paid for a book, so for this reason they developed idiosyncratic price codes they could use to identify the price).

Still unidentified symbols, possibly price codes at the rear pastedown of Ketelaar’s Instructie (Custodia MS 1991-A615)

In the case of the Dutch linguistic documents from the times of the East India Company (VOC), provenance is particularly important for two reasons: in many cases, we find linguistically significant texts with no information on the author; equally often, we may know of famous Orientalists – but lack any actual books written by them. Knowing the history of individual manuscripts, we can trace the connections, textual transmission, and even establish the authorship.

In the example below, we see identical bookseller plates on two unrelated 17th c. Dutch manuscripts, which proves that they were in the same bookshop in Paris at around the same time. This may explain the mistaken dating of the first Hindustani grammar; Emilio Teza, who bought the Malay grammar (right), was also the first one to mention the year in relation to Ketelaar’s work (left). Ketelaar’s manuscript disappeared for years, yet the date 1715 entered into the received history of linguistics.

Right: Malay grammar (Biblioteca Marciana, Legato Teza, Or. 237).

Left: Ketelaar’s Hindustani grammar (Fondation Custodia MS 1991-A615). The number 2550 refers to Maisonneuve’s catalogue from 1872.

The principle of archive provenance states that fonds (documents originating in the same source) and collections should be kept together. When the only available piece of information is what other books or manuscripts are next to the particular item on the shelf, with some luck and a lot of searching, it may nevertheless be a useful start to uncover its history.

Annotations

The study of marginalia, or the handwritten notes and comments left in the margins by the reader (presumably owner) contribute to our understanding of reading practices, as well as the social and intellectual impact of the text.

One great example is a monumental study of all 560 copies of first and second edition of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) tracked down by Owen Gingerich. He described the fascinating story of his research in The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. 

Appreciating the true value of what may seem to many to be simple vandalism, twelve special collections libraries from the Netherlands, US and England joined forces to create a digital archive of early modern annotated books. Other libraries create their own online projects, as University of Pennsylvania Rare Book & Manuscript Library did, appealing to the broader public for help with identifying annotations.

We are merely an episode in the life of objects. I hope the next time you hold a crumbling and stained manuscript in your hands, you’ll search for the story it has to tell; the story of people who created and owned it over the years; the memory of places enshrined in plant fibres, leather, ink, and sand.

With special thanks to Alberto Campagnolo

Selected bibliography:

Burkus-Chasson, Anne. 2005. “Visual Hermeneutics and the Act of Turning the Leaf”. In Cynthia J. Brokaw, Kai-Wing Chow. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. University of California Press.

Brown, Michelle P. 1994. Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts: A Guide to Technical Terms. J. Paul Getty Museum: Malibu and British Library: London.

Pearson, David. 1998. Provenance Research in Book History: a Handbook. New Castle, Delaware and London, England: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library.

–––– 2012. Books As History: The Importance Of Books Beyond Their Texts. New Castle, Delaware and London, England: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library.

Pickwoad, Nicholas. 2000. “The Use of Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts in the Construction and Covering of Bindings on the Printed Books.” In Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books. Proceedings of The Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, Oxford, 1998. Brownrigg, Linda L. & Smith, Margaret M. (eds.) 1–20. Los Altos Hills (CA); London: Anderson-Lovelace; Red Gull Press.

Sharpe, John Lawrence. 1999. “The Earliest Bindings with Wooden Board Covers: The Coptic Contribution to Binding Construction.” In International Conference on Conservation and Restoration of Archival and Library Materials. Erice 22nd-29th April 1996, edited by Carlo Federici and Paola Munafò, 2:455–78. Palermo: Palumbo Editore.

How to cite this post:

Pytlowany, Anna. 2015. Examining material aspects of manuscripts. Part II: Bindings and provenance. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/02/25/examining-material-aspects-of-manuscripts-part-ii-bindings-and-provenance

Samuel Lewin
University of Sydney

I

Let me start with some background. In recent decades, linguists and philosophers have debated the role played by context in determining what we say, as opposed to what we imply or otherwise mean, when we utter a sentence. The debate hinges on whether the grammar of a sentence is sufficient to establish something truth-valued, granting, of course, that some context-sensitivity is grammatically mandated – the reference of personal pronouns, for example. The way theorists answer this question dictates their initial conception of pragmatics (viz. narrow linguistic pragmatics; for a broader historical picture, see Nerlich 2006). Take Gazdar’s formulation:

Pragmatics has as its topic those aspects of the meaning of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforward reference to the truth conditions of the sentences uttered. Put crudely: PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH CONDITIONS (1979: 2)

In this picture, truth is the crucial semantic notion. Words in a sentence are paired with meanings (usually assumed to be senses) that combine, according to the rules of the language, to produce something truth-valued, a proposition or thought. Apparently, we can understand an astonishing number of novel thoughts because the sentences that express them decompose into familiar elements. This wouldn’t be possible, in Frege’s venerated words, “wenn wir in dem Gedanken nicht Teile unterscheiden könnten, denen Satzteile entsprächen, so daß der Aufbau des Satzes als Bild gelten könnte des Aufbaues des Gedankens” (1993: 72).

At one pole in the current debate, then, the minimalist takes the view that saying is sensitive to context “only when this is necessary to ‘complete’ the meaning of the sentence and make it propositional”, whereby necessary context-sensitivity extends to only a limited number of context-dependent expressions, like “I” and “yesterday” (my usage here follows Recanati 2004: 7-8). As minimalists Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore put it, “context interacts with meaning only when triggered by the grammar of the sentence” (2005b: 70). If this is right, the proper object for pragmatics is what speakers mean, imply, suggest, over and above what they say. To revisit Gazdar’s useful crudity, PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH CONDITIONS.

At the opposite pole lies radical contextualism, the view that context-sensitivity is pervasive (I am again following Recanati’s usage; for a survey of intermediate positions, see his 2004). Charles Travis calls this “the pragmatic view”:

It is intrinsically part of what expressions of (say) English mean that any English (or whatever) sentence may, on one speaking of it or another, have any of indefinitely many different truth conditions, and that any English (or whatever) expression may, meaning what it does, make any of many different contributions to truth conditions of wholes in which it figures as a part. (1997: 87)

If this is right, then truth can’t be a purely semantic notion. I’ll illustrate this by reproducing one of Travis’s examples, an utterance of “The kettle is black”. Suppose this is said when “the kettle is normal aluminum, but soot covered; normal aluminum but painted; cast iron, but glowing from heat; cast iron, but enameled white on the inside; on the outside; cast iron with a lot of brown grease stains on the outside; etc.” (1985: 197). Without knowing what will count as a black kettle on a given occasion, which is by no means self-evident, it remains unclear how I am supposed to ascribe truth-conditions to “The kettle is black”. This seems to suggest, to quote Austin, that “the apparently common-sense distinction between ‘What is the meaning of the word x’ and ‘What particular things are x and to what degrees?’ is not of universal application by any means” (1979: 74). To maintain that “black” contributes identically to what is said whenever someone uses it, the minimalist has to argue for a context-insensitive notion of something like blackness. How such a notion might figure in communication is, at best, opaque. It is preferable, the radical contextualist argues, to generalise context-sensitivity, and to allow that “black” can contribute variously to what is said, just like expressions traditionally acknowledged to be indexical, context-dependent. Truth, then, is necessarily also pragmatic. For the radical contextualist, pragmatics cuts across the distinction between what a speaker says and what she means. But so much for background.

II

I have been aware of this debate at least since my first, undergraduate reading of Recanati’s Literal Meaning, and I have been thinking seriously about it since. I am what Capellen and Lepore might call an “impure, contaminated student” (see their 2005a: 1); I find the arguments in favour of radical contextualism quite convincing. But I don’t want to revisit them here. Rather, I want to plumb the idea of communication that seems to me to underlie the whole debate. I am impressed, namely, by an apparent consensus that knowledge of a word’s meaning (whether this is understood to be a sense or something less than a sense) is fungible, and that what a speaker says is public, objective. This is implicit, of course, in the unavoidable expression “what is said”. Given that pragmatics occupies a “remedial” position in the history of linguistics and philosophy (so descibed, for example, in the preface to Levinson 1983), it is hardly surprising that this sort of objectivity is a virtue; the constitutive idealizations of Chomskyan linguistics and formal semantics were simply carried over in various articulations of the new discipline. This is a matter for intellectual history. Yet objectivity is still presupposed in the Fragestellung of the debate, in the very way that questions about saying are asked, and so both sides skirt epistemological problems, such as the status of speakers’ assumption that they share a language (see Davidson 2001). I want to turn to such problems here, in order to complicate the picture somewhat.

It is easy to see how objective meaning figures in a minimalist view of communication. If grammar drives context-sensitivity, then two speakers of the same language will just recognize what is said. Despite its largely begging the question of what communication consists in, the simplicity of this picture is often suggested as an argument supporting minimalism. A telling example can be found in Capellen and Lepore’s ingenuous chapter ‘Objections to Radical Contextualism (II): Makes Communication Impossible’. They object that, “[i]f RC were true, it would be a miracle if speakers in different contexts were ever able to agree, disagree, or more generally, share contents” (my emphasis, 2005a: 124). The chapter is valuable because the authors’ position rests openly on their intuition that communication is the dressing and undressing of thought in words. Their response to the very possibility of uncertainty in communication is simply to say “it’s not a bullet we would like to bite” (2005a: 126-27). Reading this, I am reminded that “[a]ll epistemology begins in fear” (Daston and Galison 2010: 372). If the expectation that communication is content-sharing turns out to be unwarranted, they feel, then we simply can’t be communicating. It seems to me that this way of thinking is quite common, although it is seldom so conspicuous.

Another reason for thinking that saying is objective is that this seems to be required by the adoption of Grice’s account of intentional communication (I assume that this is reasonably familiar to anyone interested in pragmatics). I want to focus on this. For a word to mean something is, pace Grice, for it to be involved in an intentional communicative act; for a speaker to mean something is for the speaker to intend an utterance “to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention” (1957: 220). If saying is to be recognizable, then the speaker’s intention has to be overt, public, which is guaranteed by the language. This view is enshrined in Recanati’s Availability Principle, “according to which ‘what is said’ must be analysed in conformity to the intuitions shared by those who fully understand the utterance” (2004: 14). The difficulty for Recanati is that, as others have argued, pervasive context-sensitivity allows at least for the possibility that intuitions are not shared. At this point, radical contextualism strains against the ideal of content-sharing (and see chapter 8 of Recanati 2004). Recanati can maintain that full understanding is shared only by equating what is said with “what a normal interpreter would understand as being said”. The normal interpreter “knows which sentence was uttered, knows the meaning of that sentence, knows the relevant contextual facts” (2004: 19- 20). The normal interpreter is able to recognize the speaker’s intention.

But this is contrived. It’s not at all clear what normal interpretation is supposed to cover. Donald Davidson writes:

If we ask for a cup of coffee, direct a taxi driver, or order a crate of lemons, we may know so little about our intended interpreter that we can do no better than to assume that he will interpret our speech along what we take to be standard lines. But this is relative. In fact we always have the interpreter in mind; there is no such thing as how we expect, in the abstract, to be interpreted. (my emphasis, 1986: 170)

This fact is neglected in the rush to secure what is said, at both poles of the debate. Consider this little story, told by Grice:

I was listening to a French lesson being given to the small daughter of a friend. I noticed that she thinks that a certain sentence in French means “Help yourself to a piece of cake,” though in fact it means something quite different. When there is some cake in the vicinity, I address to her this French sentence, and as I intended, she helps herself. I intended her to think (and to think that I intended her to think) that the sentence uttered by me meant “Help yourself to some cake”; and I would say that the fact that the sentence meant and was known by me to mean something quite different is no obstacle to my having meant something by my utterance (namely, that she was to have some cake). (1969: 162-63).

The normal interpreter would be helpless. Clearly, what matters is that Grice can correctly guess what the girl will take him to mean in using that certain French sentence. This depends not on shared linguistic knowledge, but on Grice’s having observed her using it in interacting with her environment. As Davidson argues, the preponderance of such examples gives us good reason to think that we have different interpretive theories for different speakers (1986: 171). Communication is possible in such cases because speakers and hearers agree massively in their knowledge of the environment, in their extra-linguistic knowledge. Davidson goes on to acknowledge that, “if we do say this, then we should realize that we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally” (173). Now, I admit, this is a far more radical view than I suspect Grice would allow, yet this is where the general import of something like his Cooperative Principle becomes most evident. If communication depends on general principles for rational interaction, as Grice clearly thinks it does, then there is no need for an autonomous notion of what is said. Word meanings, especially, do not need to be fungible, as we can converge on words’ use in other ways.

Let’s return, finally, to Travis’s kettle. Abstracting a little, I feel that the category in question – “black kettles”, say – is a Streitgegenstand, is up for grabs, rather than being given in context. Surely, communication succeeds when two people can jointly agree that something counts as a member of that category, which in no way depends on there being an established fact of the matter about what they have said. This is assuming, too, that they have the kettle in front of them. Without the kettle in front of them, it seems obvious to me that two people who hear or read “The kettle is black” will have different – and differently black – kettles in mind. Moreover, there’s simply no need for them to agree. If we view communication as motivated by principles of cooperation, or charity, rather than sheer linguistic agreement, cases like this don’t pose anything like the problems that they seem to. This gives us reason enough to doubt whether the objectivity of what is said is necessary to communication, and, therefore, what place it deserves in linguistic and philosophical theory. This is also a good place to stop, as the present line of thinking carries us well beyond the bounds of the debate and into a reconstruction of linguistic semantics (for which, see Peregrin 1999). As I said before, however, I do feel that radical contextualism strains in that direction.

References

Austin, J. L. (1979): ‘The Meaning of a Word’. Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press: 55-75.

Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore (2005a): Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism, Blackwell.

Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore (2005b): ‘Radical and Moderate Pragmatics: Does Meaning Determine Truth Conditions?’. Semantics Versus Pragmatics. Z. Szabo, Oxford University Press: 45- 71.

Daston, L. and P. Galison (2010): Objectivity, Zone Books.

Davidson, D. (1986): ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’. Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, Clarendon: 157-74.

Davidson, D. (2001): ‘Radical Interpretation’. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press: 125-39.

Frege, G. (1993): Logische Untersuchungen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Gazdar, G. (1979): Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form, Academic Press.

Grice, P. (1957): ‘Meaning.’ The Philosophical Review 66(3): 377-88.

Grice, P. (1969): ‘Utterer’s Meaning and Intention’ The Philosophical Review 78(2): 147-77.

Levinson, S. (1983): Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press.

Nerlich, B. (2006): ‘Pragmatics: History’. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier.

Peregrin, J. (1999): ‘The Pragmatization of Semantics’. The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View. K. Turner, Elsevier: 419-42.

Recanati, F. (2004): Literal Meaning, Cambridge University Press.

Recanati, F. (2010): Truth-Conditional Pragmatics, Oxford.

Szabo, Z., Ed. (2005): Semantics Versus Pragmatics, Oxford University Press.

Travis, C. (1985): ‘On What Is Strictly Speaking True’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15(2): 187- 229.

Travis, C. (1997): ‘Pragmatics’. A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. B. Hale and C. Wright, Blackwell: 87-107.

Turner, K., Ed. (1999): The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View, Elsevier.

How to cite this post:

Lewin, Samuel. 2015. Some Remarks on Objectivity in Pragmatics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/03/13/some-remarks-on-objectivity-in-pragmatics

Els Elffers
University of Amsterdam

1. From sensualism to intentionalism. Four examples.

What do Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Jacques van Ginneken (1877-1945), Ernst Cassirer (1894-1945) and Martinus Langeveld (1905-1989) have in common?

Apart from the fact that they were all men, prominent scholars, and active in the first half of the 20^th century, there seem to be few common features at first sight. Wundt was a pioneer German psychologist, Van Ginneken was a well-known Dutch linguist, Cassirer was a famous German neo-Kantian philosopher, and the Dutchman Langeveld was one of the founders of pedagogy as a scientific discipline.

However, they shared one interest: language, and its relation to thought. In Wundt’s most famous work, the ten-volume Völkerpsychologie, two volumes are devoted to language and its psychological foundations. For Van Ginneken, this issue was the central theme of his internationally recognized Principes de linguistique psychologique. Also Cassirer’s three-volume Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen deals with this theme and is regarded as his most original work. Finally, Langeveld started his successful career with his influential thesis Taal en denken (Language and thought), written when he was still a language teacher, which explains why he connects the theme to problems of language education at secondary schools.[1]

What is more, the positions of the four scholars in the contemporary language-and-thought debate are similar. In very general terms, this debate concerned the transition from sensualism to intentionalism.

According to sensualism, mental life mainly consists of representations and associations, all based upon sense data and internal sensations; language exteriorizes mental life, so meanings are mainly equated with successive representations. This view became prominent in the 18^th century and, despite criticism (for example by Humboldt), it continued during the whole 19^th century. Condillac, Steinthal and Paul are well-known defenders. From the end of the 19^th century onwards, this view was gradually abandoned in favor of a more active view of mental life. Meanings of words and sentences were no longer seen as purely representational. As their mental counterparts, more complex volitional acts were assumed. Initially these acts were conceived as purely intra-psychical. Later on, genuine intentional acts were assumed: acts not definable solely in terms of internal occurrences in the speaker’s mind, but also in terms of their purpose, their appeal to the listener, and, moreover, in terms of their being about objects and states-of-affairs. The work of Marty and especially Bühler exemplifies this transition. Bühler’s famous triangular organon-model can be regarded as the pinnacle of this development: linguistic signs are not only symptoms, expressing the speaker’s mental state, but also purposeful signals, appealing to the listener, and symbols, representing external objects and states of affairs (Bühler 1990 [1934]: 34).

The four scholars all participated in this general transition, each in his own way. They took steps away from sensualism, and towards a more active and intentionalist view of mental life and linguistic semantics. But the main reason why I focus on these four scholars is that they all exhibit remarkable and similar ideas about special, allegedly “lower-level” types of language and thought; for example the language and thought of small children, of so-called primitive people, or of mentally deficient people. The language and thought of these groups is described in purely sensualistic terms.

This is somewhat surprising: the four scholars all regard non-sensualistic features as essential for human language and thought in general. At the same time there appears to be residual sensualism in their description of these special types of human language: sensualism for dummies.[2]

How did they defend these seemingly paradoxical views?

2. Intentionalism for normal people, sensualism for dummies.

2.1 Wundt

In general, Wundt ’s view of language and thought is still near to sensualism. He regards language as a pure exteriorization of the speaker’s inner mental processes, in which representations and associations are central elements.

A non-sensualistic aspect is, however, his appeal to apperception, an active inner process that is essential to language. Wundt rejects the earlier idea of sentences as simple concatenations of words, each word corresponding to a representation. Separate representations (Einzelvorstellungen) are not regarded as the basic elements of thought, they come about through isolation from a holistic substrate, the Gesamtvorstellung, by means of apperception, which is an act of willful focusing on specific mental elements. In the act of apperception [during word isolation], there is a “voluntary isolation of […] elements, which results in separate representations.[…] If there is an inclination to communication, an outward reaction necessarily accompanies this apperception as a natural expressive movement” (Wundt 1911³: 615).[3]

But Wundt also claims that primitive people (“Naturmenschen”) proceed in a quite different way. They lack the essential capacity of breaking up a holistic Gesamtvorstellung into elements. “It is different for primitive people, in whose thought words do not exist as isolated elements; only sentences appear as units of thought” (Wundt 1911³: 611).

So there is a paradox about primitive language: there are sentences but they lack the main feature attributed to sentences by Wundt: their being an outward reaction to the analysis of a Gesamtvorstellung.

2.2 Van Ginneken

Like Wundt, Van Ginneken still defends some sensualistic ideas. For example, in a book about child language, he describes children’s sentences as direct reflexes of what the child “sees” through the “window” of its consciousness. Van Ginneken owed a lot to Wundt but he also wanted to surpass him. For example, he rejected Wundt’s concept “apperception” as too vague and confusing. Instead, he developed a concept “assent” (“adhésion” in his Principes), which refers to active claims about states-of-affairs. This goes beyond Wundt, because it relates language to extra-mental entities.

Van Ginneken argues that language cannot exist without reality-assent: “The question is: are representations of words and objects sufficient to make language possible? […] Our answer is: they are not sufficient. The facts of language show that assent is necessary as well” (Van Ginneken 1904-1906: 54).

He even ridicules the idea that speakers only want to convey their mental images to their listeners. As an example, he refers to the soldiers in Xenophon’s Anabasis, who began running to the sea after hearing the joyous cry “Thalassa!” His comment: “Of course they did not run because of a mental image, but because of the expectation of the real sea” (Van Ginneken 1904-1906: 62). In all its simplicity, this is a substantial step towards intentionalism.

At the same time, we are told that feeble-minded people lack the capacity of reality-assent. Van Ginneken extensively studied the work of pioneer psychiatrists of his day, such as Janet and Binet. Janet observed that during the progression of mental deficiency, psychical functions disappear in a strict hierarchical sequence: first the more exacting and complex functions, later the simpler ones. The first function to disappear is the “reality function” (la fonction du réel). Van Ginneken equates this function with reality-assent and thus concludes that mentally disabled people lack this capacity, whereas representations and especially visual images, remain available: “Until the last stages of [mental] illness, representations are staying, they even become more clear and vivid, but reality-assent has disappeared.” (Van Ginneken 1904-1906: 57-58). So their language conforms to the sensualist mode of pure expression of representations.

Again the paradox: a non-sensualistic feature regarded as inherent in language is denied to the language of a specific group of people.

2.3 Cassirer

Cassirer is the first of our four scholars who explicitly rejects a sensualist approach to linguistics. Discussing the complexities of language and thought, his conclusion is: “Sensualism strives in vain to derive them from the immediate content of particular impressions” (Cassirer 1968⁷: 94).

His own view reflects many ideas of Wundt, but also of Humboldt. His central claim about language and art is that they do not copy reality but create reality. Especially linguistic symbolism implies an active grasp of the world through conceptual schemes. Against passive sensualism, and in line with intentionalism, he claims that even a sense datum is inherently symbolic, it “reaches beyond itself”. For language this implies that “…not in proximity to the immediately given, but in progressive removal from it, lie the value and the specific character of linguistic as of artistic formation, […] Language […] begins only where our immediate relation to sensory expression […] ceases”( Cassirer 1968⁷: 106).

Nevertheless, for Cassirer, the language of small children and primitive people consists of an exact copy of the speaker’s sense data. Precisely the situation which, according to Cassirer himself, makes impossible even the beginnings of language, applies to these groups: “Here the sounds seeks to approach the sensory impression and reproduce its diversity as faithfully as possible. This striving plays an important part in the speech both of children and “primitive” people” (Cassirer 1968⁷: 190). Again the same paradox.

2.4 Langeveld

Langeveld is the latest of our four scholars. When he wrote Taal en denken, he could, unlike the others, benefit from Bühler’s most elaborate versions of his views of language and thought (esp. Bühler 1934). Like Cassirer and Bühler himself, Langeveld explicitly rejects sensualism. He sharply criticizes the view of a colleague-teacher who regards language as a kind of inner storehouse, with perception-based “photo-images” of objects and their associations with words: “This has nothing to do with language […] Word comprehension does not consist in the appearance of a visual image of the object referred to […], as one should expect according to sensualistic ideas” (Langeveld 1934: 88-90). Langeveld claims that language embodies intentional acts of thought, which are guided by abstract conceptual schemes, corresponding to grammatical structures.

However, in a later passage Langeveld again refers to this colleague’s ideas, this time not to reject them, but to apply them, namely to specific types of language use: the language of small children and of primitive people. But in Langeveld’s case, there are other “dummies” as well. Due to his practice as a teacher and his wide reading of psychological and pedagogical literature, he includes the language of deaf and dumb people, and especially the language of what he calls “eloquent stupids”: unintelligent children who talk fluently and impeccably, but go off the rails in tasks such as retelling a story. According to Langeveld, all these types of language use are direct reflexes of chaotic explosions of images, uncontrolled by the abstract organizing schemes.[4] Again, several types of languages use are characterized in terms of sensualistic ideas, in Langeveld’s case: ideas characterized by himself as “having nothing to do with language”.

3. Explaining the paradox

How can these paradoxical views be explained? I can go into this question only in a tentative way. First, we have to take into account that the entire transition from sensualism to intentionalism was a difficult and complex development, which proceeded not at all smoothly and coherently. There were more paradoxes than the one just discussed. Knobloch (1988: 298), in his outstanding book about linguistics and psychology in 19^th-century Germany, justifiably characterizes the transition as “a long process, beset with contradictions”.

Of course, the paradox was also facilitated by the contemporary intellectual climate, which allowed labeling peoples and groups as “primitive” and “incapable of abstract and logical thought”.

But more specific triggers must be relevant, if only because these remnants of sensualism are not at all omnipresent. For example, they are entirely absent in Bühler’s work, and also in the work of the contemporary linguist Reichling (Bühler 1990 [1934], Reichling 1967² [1935]).

A crucial factor seems to be the presence or absence of some rudimentary sensualistic elements in the total theory of language and thought. If present, such elements are located in a sensualistic substrate, a “primitive” bottom layer of representations and associations, upon which intentional acts take place. Such a view facilitates and is facilitated by ideas about levels in the development of language and thought.

Precisely this is what we find in the work of the four scholars. I mentioned Van Ginneken’s appeal to Janet’s hierarchy of psychical functions. The others defend their own hierarchies. In Wundt’s developmental model, the very first stage, preceding conscious thought and Gesamtvorstellungen, consists of a substrate of representations. Cassirer presents his own well-known layered view of mimetic, analogical and symbolic expression. Finally, Langeveld appeals to layered models of human consciousness, developed by contemporary psychologists (especially Sassenfeld), whose first layer consists of separate representations. Given such a stratified view of language and thought, and the assumption of a sensualist lowest level, it is a small step towards applying the levels in the way we observed to allegedly lesser developed forms of language.

For Bühler and Reichling, such levels don’t exist. For Bühler (1990 [1934]: 45), the purposive appeal function of language is essential, even in animal language: “[…] all forms of learning, ranging from those encountered in the infusoria to human learning, involve […] objectively detectable reactions to signals.” For Reichling (1967² [1935]: 123), the very first words of infants are intentionally directed: “it [the child] utters its strivings towards a purpose, a purpose that can consist in a “thing” or an “action”, or, better formulated, a “thing to be acted upon”.

My tentative conclusion: a fundamental and broad intentionalism prevents all sensualism. In the works of our four scholars, intentionalism is either only rudimentarily present (Wundt and Van Ginneken) or present in the narrow intellectualistic variety of abstract conceptual schemes (Cassirer and Langeveld). In both cases, “sensualism for dummies” may appear, especially in relation to a layered model of language.

Notes

[1] Full titles:
W. Wundt – Die Sprache (vol. 1 and 2 of Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte). Leipzig 1900.
J. van Ginneken – Principes de linguistique psychologique. Essay synthétique. Amsterdam 1907.
E. Cassirer – Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Vol.1-3. Berlin 1923-1929.
M. Langeveld – Taal en denken. Een theoretiese en didaktiese bijdrage tot het voortgezet onderwijs in de moedertaal, inzonderheid tot dat der grammatika. Groningen 1934.

[2] There may be more scholars whose work contains remnants of sensualism. These are the four I know about; further research may reveal other examples.

[3] Translations from German and Dutch into English are mine (E.E.), if published translations were not available (see the References).

[4] Language performance can, therefore, be improved through grammatical training, according to Langeveld. He thus provided a rather influential pro-argument in the contemporary debate about the usefulness or uselessness of school grammar.

References (see also note 1)

Bühler, K. 1990 [1934]. Theory of language: the representational function of language. Transl. by D.F Goodwin, with an introd. by A. Eschbach. Amsterdam etc.

Cassirer, E. 1968⁷. The philosophy of symbolic forms. Vol 1: Language. Transl. by R. Manheim. Preface and introd. by Ch. W. Hendel. New Haven etc.

Ginneken, Jac. van 1904-1906. Grondbeginselen van de psychologische taalwetenschap. Eene synthetische proeve. 2 vols. Reprint from Leuvensche Bijdragen VI. Lier (orig. Dutch version of Van Ginneken 1907).

Knobloch, C. 1988. Geschichte der psychologischen Sprachauffassung in Deutschland von 1850 bis 1920. Tübingen.

Reichling, A. 1967² [1935]. Het woord. Een studie omtrent de grondslag van taal en taalgebruik. Zwolle.

Wundt, W. 1911³ [1900]. Die Sprache (vol. 1 of Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte). Leipzig.

How to cite this post

Elffers, Els. 2015. Sensualism for dummies. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/03/25/sensualism-for-dummies

Patrick Flack
sdvig press

Le Formalisme russe, à bien des égards, constitue un phénomène paradoxal. Il a, c’est bien connu, fourni les fondements d’une approche systématique de la littérature (ou du « langage poétique « ) et contribué à produire une grande partie du lexique et de l’arsenal conceptuel de la théorie littéraire moderne. A ce double titre, il figure comme une étape essentielle et reconnue dans le développement de cette discipline comme « science »  autonome. Toutefois, on sait aussi que le Formalisme russe n’a jamais opéré en tant qu’école ou mouvement unifié : le terme dénote un ensemble de travaux et de personnalités au demeurant très divers. Malgré leur fécondité conceptuelle et leur souci de fonder une théorie systématique de l’analyse littéraire, les formalistes russes n’ont pas non plus formulé un corps de doctrine spécifique ou bien défini. Surtout, la plupart des idées formalistes ont été très tôt vivement critiquées pour leur manque de rigueu. Le modèle formaliste a ainsi vite été remplacé par un paradigme plus puissant, celui de la linguistique structurale.

Les interprètes du Formalisme russe (Victor Erlich, Aage Hansen-Löve, Tsvetan Todorov, etc.) ont tous résolu le paradoxe que représente son originalité et son influence d’une part, ses évidentes lacunes d’autre part en suggérant que les contributions formalistes n’ont constitué de fait qu’une phase transitoire ou « inter-paradigmatique » (Steiner 1984, p.10) dans l’évolution de la théorie littéraire. Par ailleurs, ils s’accordent sur le fait non seulement que l’évolution de la théorie littéraire formaliste, sous l’égide en particulier de Roman Jakobson, s’est faite clairement dans la direction et avec l’appui du paradigme structuraliste, mais aussi que cette évolution a assuré sa pérennité et son influence. Ces deux conclusions, en elles-mêmes, sont parfaitement justifiées: il est incontestable que les intuitions fondatrices des formalistes russes quant aux propriétés du phénomène littéraire et des méthodes de son analyse ont été pour l’essentiel récupérées avec succès d’abord dans le contexte du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, du structuralisme tchèque (Jan Mukařovský, Felix Vodička), puis, bien entendu, du structuralisme français (Todorov, Barthes, etc.). De même, l’œuvre de Tynjanov démontre aussi sans l’ombre d’un doute que la transition vers le structuralisme a été délibérément voulue et a débuté à l’intérieur même de la mouvance formaliste (cf. Ehlers 1992).

Il n’en reste pas moins que l’histoire du Formalisme russe et de sa transition vers le structuralisme est marquée par une rupture majeure au début des années 1930. Sous la pression du régime stalinien, l’énergie créatrice des formalistes restés en URSS s’est estompée quasi définitivement à ce moment là. Plus important encore, les échanges entre le nouveau centre névralgique du développement de la linguistique structurale (Prague) et les penseurs soviétiques ont été interrompus, alors pourtant que les parties concernées (Roman Jakobson, Jurij Tynjanov, Viktor Šklovskij) étaient à la recherche d’un renouvellement de leur collaboration et de la dynamique du Formalisme de la première heure (cf. Depretto 2005). En raison à la fois de cette rupture et, plus généralement, des problèmes qui ont accompagné la réception en Occident de la pensée soviétique des années 1920-30 (cf. Sériot 2008), certains des aspects les plus radicaux et les plus typiques des idées formalistes n’ont dès lors pas reçu l’écho qu’ils auraient mérité, que ce soit dans le structuralisme praguois, ou bien moins encore, dans le structuralisme français.

Mon objectif ici sera de réévaluer positivement l’importance théorique du Formalisme pour le structuralisme, et notamment pour la linguistique structurale. Pour ce faire, je compte indiquer très brièvement que certaines des idées constitutives les plus radicales du tout premier Formalisme – la notion de langage poétique, la perceptibilité de la forme poétique, le mot comme chose (vešč) concrète et expressive – ont contribué à forger chez Jakobson une conception de la linguistique structurale qui est fort différente de celle proposée par Saussure. Démontrer de la sorte l’originalité « formaliste » de la linguistique structurale jakobsonienne est un élément essentiel dans la défense du potentiel linguistique du Formalisme russe. La linguistique structurale (et en particulier la phonologie), en effet, constitue un modèle théorique scientifiquement rigoureux, qui peut fournir une base cohérente aux idées littéraires souvent vagues et immatures des formalistes. De surcroît, elle fut la matrice du développement du structuralisme comme paradigme des sciences humaines.

Le rôle accordé à la linguistique par les Formalistes eux-mêmes demeure à vrai dire très imprécis. On sait bien sûr que le Formalisme russe s’est développé dans deux centres distincts, l’OPOJAZ de St-Pétersbourg et le Cercle Linguistique de Moscou. On sait tout aussi bien que l’OPOJAZ, avec Šklovskij, Tynjanov ou Eichenbaum, a adopté une orientation clairement littéraire, contrastant avec une conception plus linguistique du projet formaliste défendue par les moscovites, Jakobson en particulier. En d’autres termes, il est clairement admis que le Formalisme russe comporte une dimension linguistique. Du fait de la disjonction géographique et méthodologique entre l’OPOJAZ et le Cercle Linguistique de Moscou, cependant, la critique a eu tendance à considérer leurs productions isolément l’une de l’autre. Le Formalisme russe est ainsi bien souvent présenté comme une pure théorie littéraire associée presque exclusivement à l’OPOJAZ pétersbourgeois. Ses débouchés linguistiques, par exemple les travaux des moscovites Jakobson et Trubeckoj en phonologie ou sur le fonctionnalisme du langage, sont quant à eux considérés comme relevant déjà du paradigme structuraliste. Même sans remettre en cause ni l’existence des fertiles échanges entre les deux centres, ni le fait que l’on retrouve de nombreux concepts de l’OPOJAZ dans la linguistique de Jakobson, l’impression qui se dégage est que la composante linguistique du Formalisme russe s’est développée indépendamment. Il semble ainsi que les éléments littéraires de l’OPOJAZ sont en fait intégrés et systématisés de façon originale par Jakobson dans un modèle structuraliste préexistant (celui de la linguistique saussurienne), plus qu’ils ne contribuent à produire un modèle linguistique inédit, d’origine incontestablement « formaliste ».

Dans la perspective de l’histoire de la linguistique, on retrouve des doutes similaires quant à l’unité et à la pertinence du rôle joué par les Formalistes russes dans le développement de la linguistique structurale (même dans sa forme praguoise). Les interprétations traditionnelles ne reconnaissent certainement pas le développement d’une pensée linguistique qui soit particulière et intrinsèque au Formalisme russe. Cette position critique est bien reflétée par deux arguments qui confirment la prépondérance de la linguistique saussurienne sur le développement à la fois du structuralisme dans son ensemble, et de l’œuvre de Jakobson en particulier. Le premier de ces arguments suggère simplement que Jakobson n’a de facto été que très peu influencé par les travaux linguistiques de ses collègues formalistes et que ses propres contributions s’inscrivent donc dans la directe lignée de Saussure (Koerner 1997). Le second argument, plus polémique, avance que dans la mesure où Jakobson (selon ses propres affirmations) propose un modèle linguistique différent de celui de Saussure, ce modèle s’avère plus faible et moins cohérent que celui esquissée par Saussure (Harris 2001).

Tout en évitant de m’aventurer trop avant sur le sujet contesté de l’influence relative de Saussure sur les Formalistes (et ex-Formalistes) russes, je me propose maintenant de critiquer les positions négatives mentionnées ci-dessus quant au rôle des formalistes dans l’histoire de la linguistique et, inversement, quant à celui de la linguistique structurale comme expression plus mature de leurs concepts littéraires. Pour ce faire, je veux d’abord mettre en avant trois éléments du modèle linguistique de Jakobson qui le démarque clairement de Saussure, ou plutôt, qui témoigne d’une influence directe entre l’OPOJAZ et le Cercle Linguistique de Moscou sur le terrain spécifique de la linguistique.

Le premier élément typique de la linguistique jakobsonienne qu’il est clairement erroné de vouloir attribuer à Saussure plutôt qu’aux formalistes est l’insistance de Jakobson sur l’importance de la dimension « poétique » du langage comme relevant à part entière de l’analyse linguistique. (Il est intéressant de remarquer que ceux qui reprochent à Jakobson un manqué d’unité systématique (Harris), ou relativisent l’influence des formalistes sur celui-ci (Koerner) ont tendance à accorder moins (ou aucune) importance à la dimension poétique de son oeuvre). Pour Jakobson, comme pour tous les formalistes sans exceptions, le langage est un phénomène essentiellement et irréductiblement poétique. La distinction majeure entre Jakobson et, par exemple, Šklovskij, est que celui-là intègre et explique cette dimension poétique dans un modèle systématique et fonctionnel du langage, plutôt que de postuler l’existence d’un « langage poétique » comme phénomène autonome.

Le deuxième élément qui rapproche le linguiste Jakobson des formalistes est sa notion de « fonction poétique », qu’il définit ainsi dans son article-bilan Linguistique et Poétique: “This function, by promoting the palpability of signs [c’est moi qui souligne], deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.” (Jakobson 1971). L’idée de la « palpabilité » du signe est liée, sans conteste, au concept de « défamiliarisation » et au primat qu’il accorde à l’acte de perception sensible comme une fin esthétique en soi (Šklovskij 1983). Mais ici encore, Jakobson remplace un concept vague (Šklovskij n’explicite jamais les implications psychologiques, cognitives ou même existentielles de la défamiliarisation) par une explication linguistique beaucoup plus précise : la poéticité du langage correspond à son expressivité en tant que système de signes concrets, perceptifs.

Le dernier élément qui différencie Jakobson de Saussure est justement cette notion poétique de « signe concret », dont l’origine semble bien être formaliste. Pour Jakobson, en effet, le signe ne correspond pas à la conception saussurienne, qui en fait une pure valeur dans un système d’oppositions négatives et différentielles. Comme le démontre sa définition du phonème comme une hiérarchie de traits acoustiques, le signe implique l’idée d’une structuration expressive d’un matériau concret tout autant que celle de la différenciation et de l’organisation idéale d’éléments abstraits. En d’autres termes, le phonème est un “objet” concret, dont les propriétés sont liées inséparablement à sa structure expressive et à sa valeur linguistique. A ce titre, la définition jakobsonienne du phonème recèle, je pense, la clé du potentiel théorique du Formalisme russe vis-à-vis du structuralisme et représente la culmination scientifique de idées littéraires formalistes sur la dimension à la fois concrète et formellement expressive du langage et de la perception. En tous les cas, les problématiques du statut du phonème comme objet (psychologique, fictif, ou phénoménologique) et de la relation qu’il institue entre ses couches phonétique (sensible, perceptive) et phonologique (intelligible, idéale) impliquent en condensé des enjeux fondamentaux sur la relation entre forme et perception, et plus généralement, sur les origines du sens et de la signification –linguistique ou non – dans la perception sensible (cf. Holenstein 1975).

Pour compléter mon (très superficiel) argument quant aux inflexions spécifiquement formalistes de la linguistique jakobsonienne et sa capacité à donner des fondements méthodologiquement plus solides aux idées d’un Šklovskij sur le pouvoir poétique « perceptif » de la forme littéraire, je souhaite conclure en indiquant l’existence d’une étape intermédiaire dans le processus de maturation des idées du premier Formalisme en direction de la linguistique. Cette étape intermédiaire est constituée par les œuvres de Evgenij Polivanov et de Lev Jakubinskij. Le rôle de ces linguistes, tous deux très tôt membres de l’OPOJAZ, est de plus particulièrement intéressante du fait qu’il souligne l’étendue des interactions entre linguistes et théoriciens de la littérature au sein du Formalisme russe et rompt avec l’idée d’une coupure nette entre l’OPOJAZ littéraire et le Cercle Linguistique de Moscou. En effet, la contribution autant de Polivanov que de Jakubinskij est concrète (ils publient dans les premiers recueils de l’OPOJAZ) et leur influence sur le travail littéraire de leurs collègues est réelle (Šklovskij, p.ex. cite Jakubinskij dans “L’art comme procédé”).

Pour éviter tout malentendu, je tiens à préciser que je ne cherche pas à suggérer ici qu’il y ait eu une véritable continuité entre Polivanov, Jakubinskij et Jakobson en ce qui concerne leurs principes généraux quant au langage ou à la linguistique. Les linguistes pétersbourgeois, tous deux élèves de Baudouin de Courtenay, sont restés fortement marqué par le “psychologisme” de leur maître, ce qui les distancie fortement de l’orientation structuraliste de Jakobson (Cette opposition au psychologisme est un des arguments majeurs employés par les critiques d’une continuité intra-formaliste, au profit d’une source plus saussurienne de la linguistique de Jakobson). Leur orientation vers les problèmes de la sociolinguistique, leurs définitions essentiellement “communicatives” du langage et leurs affinités avec le Marxisme ne se retrouvent pas non plus chez Jakobson.

Cela dit, en ce qui concerne Polivanov plus particulièrement, deux aspects de son œuvre le profilent malgré tout comme un “chainon manquant” entre les intuitions littéraires d’un Šklovskij et la pensée linguistique de Jakobson. Il s’agit, au premier chef, de l’importance accordée par Polivanov aux propriétés poétiques du langage. Pour être plus précis, Polivanov est connu pour avoir été un des premiers linguistes à avoir suggéré que les effets poétiques du langage peuvent être expliqués en termes de propriétés purement linguistiques. Il aurait, par exemple, voulu écrire un “Corpus poeticarum”, i.e. une étude comparée des langues et de leurs systèmes poétiques (On retrouve des aspects de ce projet dans Polivanov (1963)). Cette idée d’une “linguistique poétique” se retrouve évidemment chez Jakobson, de façon même encore plus puissante, puisque non seulement il explique les effets poétiques du langage en termes linguistiques, mais il associe la fonction poétique de façon constitutive et essentielle (au moyen d’un modèle fonctionnel inspiré par Jakubinskij) à la définition même du langage (cf. Jakobson 1971).

Le second élément qui souligne l’origine formaliste des idées jakobsoniennes mentionnées ci-dessus est le traitement fait par Polivanov de la question de la phonétique. Ici encore, il faut remarquer que Polivanov reste très marqué par Baudouin, et que son influence sur Jakobson en matière de phonologie pure se résume à des aspects spécifiques (par exemple, à l’idée de convergence et divergence des phonèmes). Mais ce qui rapproche Polivanov de Jakobson est son insistance sur le rôle poétique des aspects phonétiques du langage (Polivanov 1916, 1963). Selon Polivanov, en effet, les propriétés poétiques d’une langue sont liées directement à sa structure phonétique (ou phonologique). En donnant ainsi une base clairement linguistique à l’intuition des formalistes que le langage doit sa poéticité d’abord à sa nature concrète, acoustique, cet aspect de l’œuvre de Polivanov montre le potentiel générique des intuitions de Šklovskij à recevoir une interprétation linguistique. Il confirme aussi l’origine poétique des recherches sur le phonème de Jakobson, confirmée bien sûr par les travaux de Jakobson lui-même, par exemple sur le vers tchèque (cf. Kiparsky 1983, p.20).

Bibliographie

Depretto, Catherine (2005). “La correspondance des formalistes”, in coll., Les Formalistes Russes, Paris, Revue Europe.

Ehlers, Klaas-Hinrich (1992). Das dynamische System : zur Entwicklung von Begriff und Metaphorik des Systems bei Jurij N. Tynjanov, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang.

Hansen-Löve, Aage (1978). Der russische Formalismus : methodologische Rekonstruktion seiner Entwicklung aus dem Prinzip der Verfremdung, Wien, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Harris, Roy (2001). “Jakobson’s Saussure”, in : Saussure and his interpreters, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Holenstein, Elmar (1975). Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer Strukturalismus, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.

Jakobson, Roman (1971). “Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement,” in: Thomas Sebeok, Style in Language, Cambridge Mass., M.I.T. Press.

Kiparsky, Paul (1983). “The Grammar of Poetry”, in Morris Halle, Jakobson – What he taught us, Columbus, Slavica Publ.

Koerner, E.F.K. (1997). “Remarks on the Sources of R. Jakobson’s Linguistic Inspirations”, in Sériot (ed,), Roman Jakobson entre l’Est et l’Ouest, Lausanne, Cahiers de l’ILSL 9.

Polivanov, Evgenij (1916). “Po povodu “zvukovyh žestov” japonskogo jazyka, Sborniki po teorii poetičeskogo jazika 1, Petrograd, 1916.

– (1963). “Obščij fonetičeksij princip vsjakoj poetičeskoj tehniki”, Voprosy jazykoznanija 1.

Sériot, Patrick (2008). Langage et Pensée: Union Soviétique années 1920 – 1930, Lausanne, Cahiers de l’ILSL 24.

Šklovskij, Viktor (1983) [1925]. O teorii prozy, Moscou, Sovetskij pisatel’.

Steiner, Peter (1984). Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

How to cite this post

Flack, Patrick. 2015. Le Formalisme russe dans l’histoire de la linguistique. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/04/23/le-formalisme-russe-dans-lhistoire-de-la-linguistique/

This frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Philipinas (1698) is an allegory of the relationship between the colonial State and Church in the Philippines. King Philip II of Spain (right) is seen pointing to the Philippine islands, while St Augustine (left), the founder of the Augustinian order, offers his heart, the usual iconographic symbol for this saint, to illuminate the archipelago through divine light, as symbolized by the Christogram above. Behind the saint are Fray Andrés de Urdaneta and Fray Martín de Rada, the first Augustinians in the Philippines.

Marlon James SALES
Monash University

The pastoral visit of Pope Francis to the Philippines in January 2015, which gathered the biggest crowd ever assembled for a Papal event in history, has put to fore the nexus between translation and religion in this Southeast Asian archipelago. During his many engagements, the Pontiff delivered off-the-cuff homilies in his native Spanish, which were then translated into English by Monsignor Mark Miles of the Vatican Secretariat of State. There were also some instances—such as when the Pope had lunch with victims of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in Leyte, or when he spoke with two former street children during a catechesis at the University of Santo Tomas—that even required that interpretation be done into Filipino, with Manila archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle stepping in to provide some help.

The oldest extant grammar of Tagalog

The role that translation played in the recent Papal visit is indicative of the history of evangelization and colonization of this overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Christianity was introduced into the country by Catholic missionaries, who began arriving in the 16th century as members of expeditions financed by the Spanish Crown. Although the Philippines proved to be a profitless enterprise, it was retained for more than three centuries as a strategic colonial outpost in the Pacific and as a springboard for the evangelization of other Asian nations, most notably China and Japan (Kamen 2002, 203, Phelan 1959, 14). A corollary to the establishment of Spanish settlements in the archipelago was the repartition of its many ethnolinguistic groups as objects of Catholic mission among various religious orders present there (Sueiro Justel 2007, 51). Given that Spanish migration into the country remained scant throughout the colonial period, the priests were the closest contact many Filipinos had with Spain (Ridruejo 2003, 181).

Beyond the spiritual exigencies of their ministry, the priests were likewise tasked to perform civic and temporal duties, and were regarded as a complete arsenal of both Empire and Church. This view was best summed up in a 1765 missive that the Viceroy of New Spain reportedly sent to Charles III: “En cada fraile que pise el suelo filipino, V[uestra] M[ajestad] tiene un capitán general y un ejército” (Anonymous 1898, 39).[i] One important consequence of this symbiotic relationship between the colonial State and Church—which was so deftly allegorized in the frontispiece of Fray Gaspar de San Agustín’s history—was that in order to carry out their mission to spread the Catholic faith, the priests pioneered an extensive and systematic textualization of local knowledges through the publication of the first grammars, dictionaries and other similar texts on and in the indigenous languages. Sueiro Justel (171) notes that by 1898 there were about 124 grammars and 108 references to vocabularies of Philippine languages, which in absolute terms constituted an achievement that was similar to, if not greater than, that of Latin America. It was in this context that the Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala, the oldest extant grammar of Tagalog, came into being.

Title page of the first edition of Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala (1610). The book was printed on papel de China or rice paper measuring 14 x 20 cms (Quilis 1997, 29). From the collection of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Published in 1610 in the province of Bataan some 116 kilometers northwest of the capital city of Manila, the Arte was considered by the missionaries as the most authoritative colonial grammar of Tagalog, one of the major languages in the island of Luzon, and was often recommended as a supplement to other grammars printed subsequently. Its author, the Dominican friar Francisco Blancas de San José, a native of Tarazona, Spain who arrived in the Philippines in 1595 (Aduarte 1693, 403-413, Ocio 1895, 25-26), was described in Philippine missionary writings as the Achilles (San Agustín 1787 [1703], n.p.), Demosthenes (Noceda and Sanlúcar 1832 [1754], n.p.), and Cicero (Totanés 1745, n.p.) of the Tagalog language. His Arte proved to be so important a resource that the University of San Tomas in Manila printed a second edition in 1752, while a third edition, printed by José María Dayot, came out in 1832 (Quilis 1997, 31-32). In the course of my PhD research at Monash University, I have discovered that the State Library of Victoria houses what seems to be the only extant copy of the Arte on Australian soil. As far as I know, this copy has never been included in previous catalogues of Philippine missionary linguistics.

Even though the book appears at first glance as a mere grammatical treatise that compared Tagalog to Latin through Castilian Spanish as a metalanguage, an approach that was, by and large, the accepted mode of grammatization during the colonial period (cf., Auroux 1994, Esparza Torres 2007, Rafael 1993), we also find in Arte an early formulation of a theory of translation that emplaced the Tagalog people and their language into the grand narrative of Christian redemption. A common trope in missionary grammars was to imagine linguistic diversity as a defect incurred at the Tower of Babel (Barnstone 1993, 43). As such, it was not uncommon for missionaries to refer to linguistic diversity as a corruption of an original and unitary state of grace. Jesuit historian Francisco Colín, for example, wrote that, “se oluida la lengua común, y cada vno queda con la suya tan corrompida”[ii] (1663, 57). Franciscan grammarian Sebastián de Totanés, on the other hand, dismissed indigenous modes of speech as uncivilized, and even added that the Tagalogs were “toscos, zafios y de poca reflexión”.[iii] These views call to mind Antonio de Nebrija’s take on the transcendence of reducing a language to grammatical rules “para que lo que agora et de aqui adelante en él se escriviere pueda quedar en un tenor, et estender se en toda la duración de los tiempos que están por venir…”[iv] (Quilis 1980, 100-101).

The majesty of divine meanings

To grammatize a language for the preaching of Christian truth was therefore to restore it to its pre-Babelian state of grace (Mühlhäusler 1996, 171). The study of languages per se was not seen as relevant; Blancas himself, in his 1605 Memorial de la vida cristiana, argued that,

[p]orque si bien la lengua Tagala por lo que en si es ella, es negocio de poca importancia, y que vá poco en errar, ó en acertar á hablarla; pero en cuanto por medio de ella predicamos la verdad de Dios á Gentes que no le conocían, cierto que es ya como otra en el valor. (457) [v]

Missionaries regarded themselves as mediators between God and the colony, who by virtue of the gift of tongues dispensed to the Apostles on Pentecost, were equally empowered to convey God’s truth in a multitude of languages (Rafael 1993, 31). “Lengua de fuego os pido,” the Dominican prayed at the beginning of his Arte in allusion to the Holy Spirit that the Apostles received on that fateful day, “con q̃ abrasado mi pecho, se enciendan los oyentes con vuestro amor.”[vi] Blancas located the labors of the missionary grammarian in the interstitial niche between the divine and the colony. The gift of language must be granted to him first, the grammarian ensconced in that colonial in-betweenness, before the Christian doctrine could reach the colonized Filipinos, whom he described as gullible and weak of heart.

In the course of my research, I found a copy of the third edition of Blancas’ Arte at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. As far as I can tell, this copy is unaccounted for in the bibliographies on Philippine missionary linguistics.

Along these lines, translationality in the grammatization of languages was imagined as a search for divine meanings. Blancas spoke of a certain divinorum sensuum maiestatem as an operative term in the publication of a grammar. The concept, which was borrowed from St Jerome’s epistle to Hedibia and was acknowledged by the author in the marginalia, differentiated linguistic competence from translational competence. Not all preachers were blessed with the gift of tongue, according to the commentary of Cardinal Tommaso de Vio Cajetan on the promise of language to the early Church, which Blancas cited in his exhortation to ministers. In Cajetan’s view, the “discovery” of what was thought of then as the uncharted regions of the world belied the prodigiousness of Pentecost (“Experimento enim apparet Ecclesiam lingua, vel linguis carere multarum gentium temporibus istis repertarum…”). The new reality of colonial expansion led some ministers of the Gospel to rely on translators (“interpretes”) in the performance of their mission. St Paul himself, Blancas continued, was not capable of speaking Greek in a way that was worthy of the majesty of divine meanings (“diuinorum sensuum maiestatem, digno non poterat græci eloquii explicare sermone”), even though he certainly possessed the gift of tongues and had a command of the Scriptures. It was for this reason that the Apostle of the Gentiles had to rely on St Titus for interpretation (“Habebat ergo Titum interpretem”), and St Titus acted as his mouth in preaching the Gospel (“Ergo et Paulus Apostolus contristatur, quia prædicationis suæ in præsentirum fistulam organum que per quod Christo caneret non inuenerat”).

Blancas emphasized that translational competence was contingent upon one’s familiarity with a particular textual typology and semantic field. Basing his explanation on a passage from the Summa theologica of St Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican missionary wrote that the linguistic knowledge that permitted his brothers in the cloth to preach on matters of faith was not necessarily sufficient to allow them to study the ‘acquired sciences’, such as arithmetic and geometry (“non autem quantum ad omnia quæ per scientiam acquisitam cognoscuntur; puta de conclusionibus Arithmeticæ vel Geometriæ”). In other words, while language was ideated as a numinous gift, the extent to which it could be utilized outside the realm of religion depended on other considerations. Language was thought of as an instrument to gain understanding of other fields of knowledge, a view that echoed the humanist traditions in Europe (Sánchez Salor 2002, 293, 297-298, Ynduráin 1994, 74, 202). Grammar was both translatus and translatio: it was both the product and the process of transfer.

The foregoing discussion on Fray Francisco Blancas de San José’s Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala provides a preamble on a bigger research project that I am completing for my dissertation. The next stages of my investigation will look into specific examples of translationality and the establishment of a schematic equivalent effect by emplotting linguistic knowledge into a Christian(ized) discourse. That, I guess, will be for another post.

Notes

[i] ‘In each friar who steps on Philippine soil, Your Majesty has a captain general and an army.’ All translations from Spanish are mine.

[ii] ‘The common tongue is forgotten, with each one speaking in his own corrupt language.’

[iii] ‘crude, uncouth and of little reflection’

[iv] “so that whatever will be written in it from here on now can retain a certain tenor, and extend itself throughout the age that is about to come…”

[v] ‘The Tagalog language in itself is an endeavor of little importance, and it does not matter so much if one errs or does well in speaking it. Once through it we preach God’s truth to people who did not know Him, its value then becomes rightfully different.’

[vi] ‘A tongue of fire I ask from You so that after burning my heart, it will then illumine my listeners with Your love’

References

Aduarte, Diego de. 1693. Historia de la provincia del Sancto Rosario de Filipinas, Iapon, y China de la sagrada Orden de Predicadores. Zaragoza: Domingo Gascón.

Anonymous. 1898. Los frailes filipinos. Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos.

Auroux, Sylvain. 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation: Introduction à l’histoire des sciences du langage, Philosophie et langage. Liège: Mardaga.

Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The poetics of translation : history, theory, practice. New Haven; London: Yale University Press.

Blancas de San José, Francisco. 1610. Arte y reglas de la lengva tagala. Bataan: Tomás Pinpin [typesetter].

Blancas de San José, Francisco. 1832 [1605]. Memorial de la vida Christiana en lengua tagala [Librong mahal na ang ngala’y Memorial de la Vida Christiana]. 2nd ed. Manila(?): Imprenta de José Mª Dayot, Tomás Oliva [typesetter].

Colín, Francisco. 1663. Labor euangelica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañia de Iesvs : fvndacion, y progressos de su Prouincia en las islas Filipinas. 4 vols. Vol. 1. Madrid: Ioseph Fernandez de Buendia

Esparza Torres, Miguel Angel. 2007. “Nebrija y los modelos de los misioneros lingüistas del náhuatl.” In Missionary Linguistics III/ Lingüística Misionera III: Morphology and Syntax-Selected papers from the Third and Fourth International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, edited by Otto Zwartjes, Gregory James and Emilio Ridruejo, 3-40. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Kamen, Henry Arthur Francis. 2002. Spain’s road to empire : the making of a world power, 1492-1763. London: Allen Lane.

Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology : language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London, New York: Routledge.

Noceda, Juan de, and Pedro de Sanlúcar. 1832 [1754]. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. 2nd ed. Valladolid: Higinio Roldán.

Ocio, Hilario María. 1895. Compendio de la reseña biográfica de los religiosos de la provincia del Santisimo Rosario de Filipinas desde su fundacion hasta nuestros dias. Manila: (Estab. Tip. del Real Colegio de Sto. Tomas).

Phelan, John Leddy. 1959. The Hispanization of the Philippines : Spanish aims and Filipino responses, 1565-1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Quilis, Antonio. 1980. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Editora Nacional.

Quilis, Antonio. 1997. Fray Francisco Blancas de San José, Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala. Estudio y edición. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica-AECI.

Rafael, Vicente L. 1993. Contracting colonialism : translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog society under early Spanish rule. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Ridruejo, Emilio. 2003. “La primitiva tradición gramatical sobre el pampango.” In Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística misionera-Selected papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, edited by Otto  Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen, 179-200. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

San Agustín, Gaspar de. 1787 [1703]. Compendio de la arte de la Lengua Tagala. 2nd ed. Manila: Convento de Nra. Sra. de Loreto.

Sánchez Salor, Eustaquio. 2002. De las “elegancias” a las “causas” de la lengua : retórica y gramática del humanismo. Alcañiz-Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto.

Sueiro Justel, Joaquín. 2007. Historia de la lingüística española en Filipinas (1580-1898). 2nd ed. Lugo: Axac.

Totanés, Sebastián de. 1745. Arte de la lengua tagala, y manual tagalog, para la administracion de los santos sacramentos. Sampaloc, Manila: Convento de Nra. Sra. de Loreto.

Ynduráin, Domingo. 1994. Humanismo y renacimiento en España. Madrid: Cátedra.

How to cite this post

Sales, Marlon James. 2015. Translation as a search for divine meanings: Fray Francisco Blancas de San José and his grammar of the Tagalog language. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/05/06/translation-as-a-search-for-divine-meanings-fray-francisco-blancas-de-san-jose-and-his-grammar-of-the-tagalog-language

Johannes Mücke & Silvio Moreira de Sousa [1]
Hugo Schuchardt Archiv, University of Graz

“Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth.”
Frank Zappa (1979)

Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927)
Source: Hugo Schuchardt Archiv

Information:

The goal of the project “Network of Knowledge” (runtime 2012-2015, FWF project number P 24400-G15, main researcher: Bernhard Hurch) appears to be very linear at first sight: the online, open access presentation (and consequent analysis) of the papers of Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), combining the digital facsimile edition of all of Schuchardt’s publications with the also digital edition of his correspondence and a bibliography of secondary literature.

Preserved at the University’s library in Graz, the Hugo Schuchardt Papers account for nearly 14,000 letters received from virtually all over the world. The actual tally for the digital edition of Schuchardt’s correspondence is at the moment (May 2015) around more than 2,000 edited letters. Furthermore, all of Schuchardt’s works (a growing number of them also as OCR scanned searchable PDFs) are already available for consultation, together with an ever increasing collection of more than 315 reviews, which are being processed and will be put online. In order to allow the connection between different kinds of sources, an over-arching search tool is being developed, composed of a controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) for source document tagging. For example, a letter, a publication, and a review can be linked through the keyword ‘Neo-grammarians’ or ‘French-based creole languages’.

The analysis of these sources will provide the means to reconstruct the scientific network developed during the second half of the 19th century in the language sciences along the lines of the following hypothesis (cf. also Hurch 2009): innovations that occurred in 19th-century (communication) media, such as a) the formation of a modern global system of postal services and b) the creation of modern printing and publishing companies, followed by the foundation of scientific periodicals, are interrelated with changes in the language sciences, e. g. the opening of new fields of research, the establishment of new scientific discourse practices, new ways of obtaining knowledge, and a differentiation of scientific disciplines, coupled with their institutionalization in universities or scientific societies.

Chart of worldwide traffic and postal communication
Source: Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon (1894-1896). 14th edition. Leipzig: Brockhaus.

Knowledge:

The world wide web of postal service enabled the global movement of goods, capital, and knowledge. In the 19th century, the amount of posted mail exploded. The necessary preconditions were not only infrastructural and technical developments, such as the railroad network across Europe or the growing number of public postboxes, but also organizational innovations; for example, the development of postage, which went from the first stamp in the modern sense in 1840 (“One Penny Black” in Great Britain) to the foundation of the World Postal Union in 1874 (as “General Postal Union”) in Bern, which established rules for an international postal service.

A growing number of new journals could well be simultaneously the cause and consequence of the increased use of new technologies in the printing of periodicals, thus enabling a larger number of copies and an accelerated rhythm of publication. In addition, the new process of pulping wood fibers, which made paper an object of mass production, also contributed to this outcome. In this context, researchers and publishers became entrepreneurial partners. One could say that this was a Gründerzeit – a “Founder’s Era” – in modern language sciences. There is a whole generation of researchers, mostly born in the 1840s or later, who established periodicals from the late 1860s onward. Names like those of Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer (who founded the Romania in 1872), Graziadio Ascoli (Archivio Glotologico Italiano, 1872), Adalbert Bezzenberger (Beiträge zu Kunde der Indogermanischen Sprachen or “Bezzenberger’s Beiträge”, 1877) or Gustav Gröber (Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie or “Gröber’s Zeitschrift”, 1877) represent a European phenomenon that affected all disciplines of the language sciences (see Tagliavini 1968: 132-135). All of these founder-editors were in more or less frequent epistolary contact with Schuchardt.

Wisdom:

There are two possible approaches for a historiographic investigation into the interrelationships between these developments. On the one hand, there is the classical qualitative or hermeneutic approach of interpreting the content of the sources, e.g. the linguistic data, bibliographical references they contain, or whether they represent polemics, comments, descriptions or wrong conclusions. On the other, there is a quantitative or statistical approach for investigating metadata, which is used a lot in the Digital Humanities. Metadata don’t lie: the fact that a letter was sent from one person to another at a certain time is a historical fact quite separate from the content of the letter. Using both methods on the Hugo Schuchardt Papers, one finds strong arguments for the hypothesis sketched above.

One example for the qualitative method: on September 12th 1886, Schuchardt wrote to Otto Jespersen (consult the letter here) having just read and positively reviewed an article written by the Danish linguist (Jespersen 1886) in the Deutsche Litteraturzeitung (Schuchardt 1886). Jespersen had asked Schuchardt if he would be in favour of a German translation, to which Schuchardt not only approved, but went on to recommend a journal that reached a wider circulation and a greater audience, along with a journal that had no Neo-grammarian as a founder-editor. In addition, Schuchardt stressed that time is a key factor, since every new development in the ongoing debate between the Neo-grammarians and their critics was being brought up nearly every month in 1886 (Hurch & Constantini 2007). In the end, the translation (Jespersen 1887) was published in 1887 in the Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (or “Techmer’s Zeitschrift”).

Front page of Techmer’s Zeitschrift for 1884. 1st volume.

Using the quantitative approach, it is possible to give structural information about Schuchardt’s contacts to the scientific journals of his time. Schuchardt corresponded to a great extent with those founder-editors in whose periodicals he published a lot, for example with Gröber (160 received letters, 288 articles and 9 reviews in “Gröber’s Zeitschrift”), and where his works were reviewed quite often (12 reviews). Another argument making a strong case for the connection between communication, publication, and reception is the fact that Schuchardt did not receive many letters from those founder-editors in whose periodicals he did not publish. Subsequently, Schuchardt was not much reviewed in those same periodicals. While this seems to be quite obvious, there are indications of anomalies: Schuchardt maintained an extensive mail exchange with Gaston Paris (98 received letters), but he published only 9 articles in the Romania – despite having his works reviewed 19 times in that periodical. Moreover, even though there was intensive epistolary contact between Schuchardt and Ascoli (139 received letters; cf. Lichem & Würdinger 2013), Schuchardt neither published anything in the Archivio Glottologico Italiano, nor had he any of his work reviewed there. But both Paris and Ascoli were part of Schuchardt’s network of knowledge: by comparing the epistolary inventories, one establishes the fact that Ascoli and Schuchardt have 130 common correspondents, and Paris and Schuchardt as many as 175.

All this resulted in a broad variety of new types and specific modes of reference: if on one side there is mixing of text forms, on the other there is also merging of text forms. We see an entanglement of text forms: how very often the scientific discourse is not limited to one specific text form, but continues over a variety of different communication media (letters, reviews, replies, postscripts, etc.). Some discussions alternate between different discourse forms (cf. Mücke 2015). Another phenomenon we observe is the amalgamation of text forms: how boundaries between public and private text forms become blurred. Several transitional text forms can be found: scientific publications in the form of letters, letters published as scientific essays, open letters, letters to the editor or even personal dedications.

Another instance supporting the assumption that the network of language sciences at the turn of the 19th century was indeed international is the advisory board of several periodicals. Ascoli, Coelho, Gabelentz, Lepsius, Pott or Miklosich – all of them part of the advisory boards of “Techmer’s Zeitschrift” – are present with letters in Schuchardt’s legacy. But, also important, they stood presumably in postal contact with each other.

Truth:

So, it should be quite clear by now that the current project “Network of Knowledge” not only stands for itself, but can also be seen as preliminary groundwork for a joint investigation of the linked networks of knowledge in Europe at Schuchardt’s time.

[1] This blog entry is partly based on a presentation held by one of the authors together with Bernhard Hurch at the International Conference of the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS) 2014 in Vila Real. The authors would like to thank Bernhard Hurch for his support and advice in the project work.

References:

Hurch, Bernhard & Francesco Costantini. 2007. “Die Korrespondenz zwischen Otto Jespersen und Hugo Schuchardt”. In Bernhard Hurch (ed.) (2007-). Hugo Schuchardt Archiv. Online: http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/516 (4.5.2015).

Hurch, Bernhard. 2009. “Bausteine zur Rekonstruktion eines Netzwerks I: Einleitung – Prolegomena”. In: Hurch, Bernhard (ed.). Bausteine zur Rekonstrukion eines Netzwerks I: Caroline Michaëlis, Elise Richter, Hugo Schuchardt und Leo Spitzer. Graz: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft (= Grazer Linguistische Studien 72), 5-17.

Jespersen, Otto. 1886. “Til spörgsmålet om lydlove”. In Nordisk tidskrift for filologi. Ny Række 7: 207-245.

Jespersen, Otto. 1887. “Zur Lautgesetzfrage”. In Internationale Zeitschrift für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 3: 188-216.

Lichem, Klaus & Wolfgang Würdinger. 2013. “Die Korrespondenz zwischen Graziadio Isaia Ascoli und Hugo Schuchardt”. In Bernhard Hurch (ed.) (2007-). Hugo Schuchardt Archiv. Online: http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/254 (4.5.2015).

Mücke, Johannes. 2015. “‘… unsere freundschaftlichen Beziehungen…’. Zum Verhältnis von Hermann Paul und Hugo Schuchardt”. In: Melchior, Luca; Mücke, Johannes (eds.). Bausteine zur Rekonstruktion eines Netzwerks IV: Von Diez zur Sprachanthropologie. Graz: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft (= Grazer Linguistische Studien 80), 125-164.

Schuchardt, Hugo. 1886. “[Rez. von:] Otto Jespersen, Til spörgsmålet om lydlove; Jakob Hornemann Bredsdorff, Om Aarsagerne til Sprogenes Forandringer. Paa ny udgivet af Vilh. Thomsen”. In Deutsche Literaturzeitung 7: 1557-1559 (HSA 197). Online: http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/werk/online/548  (4.5.2015).

Tagliavini, Carlo. 1968. Panorama di storia della linguistica. Bologna: R. Patron.

Zappa, Frank. 1979. “Packard Goose”. In Joe’s Garage, Act III. Zappa Records.

How to cite this post

Mücke, Johannes and Silvio Moreira de Sousa. 2015. Hugo Schuchardt and his Network of Knowledge. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/05/20/hugo-schuchardt-netknowl

Welcome to the first salon. The purpose of our salons is to provide a forum for discussing topics of interest in linguistic historiography and related fields. This salon will focus on ‘anachronism in linguistic historiography’. The discussion opens below with contributions from:

• John Joseph (Edinburgh)
• Gerda Haßler (Potsdam)
• Andrew Linn (Sheffield)

Everyone is invited — and indeed encouraged — to continue the conversation in the comments thread.

John E. Joseph
University of Edinburgh

Corpse Puppetry: Anachronisms of consistency, continuity and progress in the history of linguistics

[L]’histoire […] n’est, après tout, qu’un ramas de tracasseries qu’on fait aux morts.
Voltaire to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, 9 Feb. 1757

To teach or write effectively, it helps to think about one’s audience and their concerns, interests and needs. Thinking about the audience does however open cans of worms when teaching or writing the history of an academic field. A figure from the 13^th century belonged to a world vastly different from the one that I, my colleagues and our students inhabit. It’s an uphill struggle convincing them that anything Thomas Aquinas wrote about language relates to their own concerns. Were I to take them on an intellectual archaeological dig to establish simply what ‘language’ meant to Aquinas, some would be fascinated, but most would see it as a retrograde diversion.

What I find myself doing, then, is making figures from the past appear to share present-day concerns: corpse puppetry, we might call it, one of the ‘harrassments inflicted on the dead’, as Voltaire describes history in the epigram above. When writing about Plato’s Cratylus, I ventriloquize Socrates saying ‘word’ (or in some contexts ‘noun’) where what Plato wrote was onoma, traditionally translated as ‘name’. Modern linguistics doesn’t have a clear place for names. It has one for ‘word’, less central than the place for morpheme or sign, but that’s all right: the slight eccentricity of ‘word’ gives my translation the tinge of exoticism that connotes authenticity. The first English translation of Humboldt’s Kawi-Sprache (1971) didn’t ring true because it used terms such as ‘phoneme’. That isn’t to dismiss the translators as disastrous anachronists, but they did make Humboldt come off as a half-baked structuralist rather than a far-seeing man of his time.

Having Plato discuss ‘words’ or Humboldt ‘phonemes’ is anachronism at its most striking, but for that very reason also its least deceptive. Harder to see through is the level of anachronism brought out in Bergs’s (2012) discussion of how ‘social class’ is used in historical sociolinguistics. Deeper still are the anachronisms that, Quentin Skinner (1969) argued, produce ‘mythologies’. He was reacting to the notion of ‘paradigm’ in Gombrich (1960) and Kuhn (1962), which when applied to the history of ideas, Skinner says, fosters a mythology that how people thought at any given period was more unified than has ever historically been the case. This then leads to further mythologies:

The most persistent mythology is generated when the historian is set by the expectation that each classic writer ([…]) will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject. It is a dangerously short step from being under the influence (however unconsciously) of such a paradigm to ‘finding’ a given author’s doctrines on all of the mandatory themes. The (very frequent) result is a type of discussion which might be labelled the mythology of doctrines. (Skinner 1969: 7)

One then ends up ‘mistaking some scattered or incidental remarks by one of the classic theorists for his “doctrine” on one of the themes which the historian is set to expect’, or else ‘a classic theorist who fairly clearly does fail to come up with a recognizable doctrine on one of the mandatory themes is then criticized for his failure to do so’ (ibid., p. 14). At its worst, this can become ‘a means to fix one’s own prejudices on to the most charismatic names, under the guise of innocuous historical speculation. History then indeed becomes a pack of tricks we play on the dead’ (pp. 13-14).

While Skinner was essentially right, I prefer to avoid the terms ‘myth’ and ‘mythology’ because, once introduced, they impede a neutral investigation. Moreover, the ‘myth’ metaphor doesn’t lend itself to capturing the fact that in scientific and intellectual history something like Newton’s Third Law of Motion applies, whereby every conceptual action has an equal and opposite reaction. A case in point is the polarization between Nature and Subject/Society that Latour (1991) posits as defining the ‘constitution’ of ‘modern’ thought. Since the 17^th century, people writing on various subjects have tried to ‘purify’ their work onto one or the other pole – an impossible aim, Latour argues. Its result has been the covert proliferation of ‘hybrids’ within the space between the two poles.

Skinner’s mythology of authorial consistency has its polarized reaction in a mythology of authorial inconsistency based on an assumption of progress from an early to a late phase of an individual’s work. It was long the received wisdom about Saussure that his interest in general linguistics began with his lectures on the topic in 1907. Hence his manuscripts at Harvard exploring general linguistic and semiological issues were assumed to date to late in his career. Marchese’s (1995) close study of the manuscripts has shown however that they are from the early 1880s – which means that there wasn’t actually an ‘early’ and ‘late’ Saussure, but a man whose core interests were consistent from his early 20s until his death. On the other hand, some key aspects of his thought didn’t develop into their final form until he was actually lecturing on them, revisiting them and refining them.

Identifying a consistency/inconsistency polarization and locating an individual in the hybrid middle ground is an example of Latourian ‘symmetrical anthropology’. I shall briefly discuss two further examples: continuity/discontinuity, and progress/regress.

The first question concerning continuity/discontinuity is: how far can we take ‘linguistics’ back into a time when the term itself isn’t yet attested, and long before it was institutionalized as an academic subject in the 19^th and 20^th centuries? Attempts at skirting this question by replacing ‘linguistics’ with ‘linguistic thought’ are another case of an anachronism that is possibly more misleading because subtler. ‘Linguistic thought’ still means projecting back into the past the concerns about language that present-day linguists can relate to, or, alternatively – and herein lies the symmetry – denying that they relate to present-day concerns, and exoticizing them to the point that they are ghettoized into a dusty historical cupboard, further strengthening assumptions of our present-day superiority.

To write the history of linguistics well requires navigating a path through this polarized conceptual field. It means constantly bearing in mind, and finding discreet ways to remind readers, that our continuity with the past is always a semi-fictional construct; and not forgetting what Skinner’s point about consistency implies: that views belonging to the distant past often still have a reflex somewhere, and the potential to be rediscovered as what Levelt (2013) calls ‘sleeping beauties’.

Progress/regress follows on from Skinner’s point about expecting each writer to maintain a consistent doctrine. We also expect later writers to have either absorbed or rejected the doctrines that preceded them (this despite our awareness that our own contemporaries in linguistics are seldom masters of the discipline’s history). And so we anticipate an arc of progress over the centuries, or, symmetrically, of regress. Either provides a good narrative frame (though progressive ones tend to attract more grant funding). This can lead us, when doing our research, to cherry-pick just those texts and ideas that fit our plot of progress or regress, and to read past the ones that don’t – or, if we include them, to downplay them, even if they were hugely important. That, again, is deep-level anachronism.

An example with direct implications for the history of linguistics is the question of whether the head or the heart is the location of the mind/soul. For Plato it was the head, but Aristotle, his student, the ‘prince of philosophers’ and son of a physician, with a far greater knowledge of anatomy, believed it was the heart. An awkward blip like this one works nicely in a historical account, lending interest, reminding us that Aristotle was human and that regress happens. But it wasn’t a one-off blip. Four centuries after Aristotle, Galen demonstrated that the brain was in fact the controlling centre: squeeze the heart of a living creature with forceps, he wrote, and it will merely spasm and cry out, whereas squeezing the brain results in total silent paralysis. Yet for a further 1500 years medical, theological and philosophical texts go on siding messily with either Plato or Aristotle. So too with the body’s management of the vital and animal spirits, which relate directly to views on the production and reception of language. The result of the messiness is that histories of mind and language tend to ignore all this, preferring a massive historical erasure of everything between Aristotle and Descartes, or simply before Descartes.

Skinner’s mythology metaphor itself reflects a desire to purify history of anachronism, playing into a polarized ideology of progress. Of course uncontrolled anachronism must be avoided – that’s too obvious to bear stating. But I began this paper by trying to show that controlled anachronism can have positive effects, helping us to teach and write history that contemporary linguists can appreciate; and I have argued that we should locate history within the space of hybrids, between the poles of consistency and inconsistency, continuity and discontinuity, progress and regress. Skinner was right to reject any pre-set expectation that all classic writers will have a consistent doctrine regarding every aspect of the present-day academic field with which they are associated, but no better is the polarly opposed alternative of assuming that no such doctrine can be reconstructed for anyone from the past. Much research into intellectual history and personal biography is needed before one can make an informed decision concerning any individual writer.

There is another way of interpreting my phrase ‘corpse puppetry’: that we historians are the dummies, and that it is the corpse ventriloquists who speak through us. This is the illusion most of us want to foster, indeed to believe ourselves. What we do would be simpler and more elegant if context informed by deep research provided the key to a full reading of the ideas and texts of the past, or if a ‘history of ideas’ were detachable from the people who enunciated, received and recirculated them. But that is chimerical. Each of us needs finally to interpret the texts and ideas, becoming in the process the puppeteers of their authors’ corpses.

The scariest film ever, Cavalcanti’s ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ sequence in Dead of Night (1945), plays on our deep fear of how controller and controlled are inextricably intertwined, each eventually becoming the other. Corpse puppetry may mean that each of us, living historian and historicized corpse, has our hand up the other’s backside. Unpleasant, but I have chosen the metaphor in an attempt at brutal honesty, which is invariably ugly. Ultimately what I have tried to propose is that we should aim, not for a polarized extreme of embracing or eschewing anachronism, but for a hybrid practice that allows us to maximise its positive uses.

References

Bergs, Alexander. 2012. ‘Uniformitarianism and the risk of anachronisms in language and social history’, in Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics, edited by Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, 80-98. Malden, Mass., Oxford & Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Gombrich, E. H. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon; New York: Pantheon.

Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1971 [1836]. Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development. Trans. by George C. Buck & Frithjof A. Raven. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte.

Levelt, Willem J. M. 2013. A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marchese, Maria Pia (ed.). 1995. Ferdinand de Saussure, Phonétique: Il manoscritto di Harvard Houghton Library bMS Fr 266 (8). Padova: Unipress.

Skinner, Quentin. 1969. ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’, in History and Theory 8/1: 3-53.

Gerda Haßler
Universität Potsdam

‘Communicating the past to the present’: Is anachronism inevitable? Desirable?

On the question as to whether anachronism is inevitable or perhaps even desirable in the history of linguistics there are two diametrically opposed views: that of fundamentalist historicism, according to which any theory can only be explained from a historical perspective and can only be understood in terms of its historical background; and that of radical utilitarianism, which maintains that history of linguistics should only be undertaken with a view to its use for modern linguistics. If we take the first position, anachronism becomes something objectionable. From the second position, by contrast, anachronism is simply a matter of course. Precisely where an individual researcher will place themselves between these two extremes depends on their intentions and the area in which they work. I cannot say that I have always avoided these two extremes, even though I see myself as a linguist who (also) has historiographic interests and do indeed think it is sensible to avoid these two extremes.

1. Historicism without anachronism

There can be no place for anachronism when investigating previously unexamined or relatively poorly known texts. For example, when examining manuscripts written as entries in the 1797 competition of the Institut National on the question of the influence of signs on ideas, it would not help us at all to assume the categories of modern cognitive linguistics and to blithely identify these in these early texts. Rather, we have to adopt the epistemological outlook of the time, see the authors’ arguments in relation to it, and compare their arguments with one another. The history of institutions, personal history and social history are also required here to understand such problems as why the prize was advertised again two years later and why the winning entry deviated significantly from the expectations as outlined in the prize call and yet met those of the jury. Historical-philological work that seeks to orient itself to the outlook of the time and to avoid anachronisms is not at all obsolete. Working through the store of treatises, grammars, dictionaries, letters and other texts that in part remain unexamined is an important task of linguistic historiography. This work is not only about capturing past manifestations of linguistic consciousness, but is also a part of cultural history, which has received differing degrees of attention in different periods and regions.

Anachronisms in the form of references to later linguistic approaches or even to modern theories should not be ruled out here, but they do not lead to a better understanding of the texts being examined. In some cases they can lead the reader or even the researcher astray, in that they might prompt premature and simplistic conclusions about the impact of the texts on later thought.

2. Anachronisms and their use for modern linguistics

The opposing position, according to which anachronisms are considered necessary for historiographic work, is one I have taken in several articles in which I wanted to highlight a possible false path taken in modern linguistics. From colleagues who work in the modern field of information structure I have repeatedly heard the following claim in various forms: “Inversions of word order cause higher costs.” What they mean is that the preposing of the object as a definite marking in the information structure causes higher processing costs – that is, is cognitively more expensive and raises the question of cost and benefit. A classic example of such a marking is the inversion of subject and object that is, for instance, permitted and indeed unproblematic in German:

In the German sentence Maria appears in the first position and so is interpreted as the subject of the sentence. Since it is morphologically ambiguous and could be either a nominative, dative or accusative, it will initially be interpreted as the subject and the teacher as the direct object. But then we recognise, on a further level of analysis, that the verb hilft governs an argument in the nominative and another in the dative. This new analysis leads us to correct our original interpretation of the sentence and arrive at the right one:

The greater effort required for the two-step analysis in cases of inversion can be observed by measuring the activity of certain brain regions or by examining eye movements while reading. If no inversions are used or when a language does not allow them at all, the effort required for comprehension would be smaller, the brain activity lower and eye movements less extensive.

This line of argument reminds me of the doctrine of natural word order, which reached its climax in France in the 17^th century. Of course we cannot expect to find attempts at experimental verification of the doctrine of an easier, natural word order in the 17^th century, but something similar is proposed by Le Laboureur when he characterises the preferred order in French of subject-verb-object as that dictated by nature. The Latin-speaking Romans could not have thought in a different way from the French, since their minds were shaped the same way – they must therefore have thought in the same order, applied reorderings only in their expression, and through this additional effort made it difficult for themselves to speak logically and intelligibly. So the order was in fact the same in all languages; it was just that the French had the best chance to follow it also in their expression.

Nous suivons en tous nos discours exactement l’ordre de la pensée qui est celui de la Nature; […] l’usage et la coûtume ne sauraient nous imposer en cela, où la raison se fait presque sentir et toucher.[1]

The question of whether the large differences between Latin and French word order mean that the Romans thought differently from the French is answered on the basis of the rationalist separation of language and thought. Raison, and by consequence the laws of thought, are the same for all nations. In the context of Descartes’ rationalism there can be no doubt about the uniformity and indivisibility of raison.

There is a parallel to the rationalist theory of word order in modern research. The fixed word order subject-verb-object is treated as the unproblematic basic form, and all orders that deviate from this are seen as effects of information structure. The rationally determined syntactic structure is described as the ID structure, while the word order that comes about as the result of a language-specific ordering is characterised as an LP surface form independent of the ID structure.

The rationalist theories and modern neurolinguists are in agreement that inversions of word order involve greater cognitive effort for comprehension. But how do we really determine the effort involved? The subjects who are given these sentences while in the CT scanner are offered neither a broader context nor a natural speech situation; they must therefore rely solely on the sentence they are given and the word order used in it. As a result, they must of course expend greater effort to understand the sentence …dass Maria die Lehrerin hilft. In the context Paul hat niemanden, der ihm bei den Hausaufgaben helfen würde. Es ist gut, dass Maria die Lehrerin hilft. the effort required would be significantly less, possibly even less than in the sentence with the ‘normal’ word order. To determine what the actual ‘costs’ would be, we really need pragmatic investigations of information structure that seek to capture the process of understanding in its full complexity.

The need to consider the intention of the speaker and the pragmatic context of the utterance when judging the naturalness of word order was already brought into the vigorous discussion of the 18^th century. Charles Batteux presented a new, sensualistic dogma when he said that there was no natural word order in French, but rather only inversions. The standard for naturalness here is not a prefigured rationalist sequence of thought, but the order of thoughts according to their importance for the speaker. So we say rotundus est sol, since this sentence is about a property of the sun and not whether or not it exists. When we want to emphasise particular properties of an object, the appropriate place for the adjective is before the substantive. So in the presence of a Roman we would say romanum imperium and not imperium romanum.[2] Diderot went even further when he described the fixed order subject-verb-object not as the natural order, but as the institutional or didactic order. He supposed it to be the result of a craving for rules of word order and the development of syntactic norms. He redefined the term ordre naturel and used it to describe the original word order based on the senses, from which we have progressively moved further away in the course of the development of language and thought.

It is undoubtedly an anachronism to use a historical analogy to back up the demand to investigate information structure as a pragmatic phenomenon and to relativise its rationalist foundation, but it is an anachronism that strikes me as very appropriate. Admittedly this line of argument has been ignored by modern linguists and has not been understood by historians of linguistics. Perhaps we should draw from this the conclusion that there is no value in anachronisms in the historiography of linguistics. But it seems to me that offering a way to rethink modern theories and methods is also a legitimate task of historiographic research.

3. Anachronism for research into conceptual history?

Whether or not anachronisms are appropriate for historiographic work is a question that must be continually addressed especially in the context of conceptual history. A conceptual work that looks at a period that is far away from present-day thinking on language itself has to come to terms with the question of whether it should proceed retrospectively or whether it should try to reconstruct the authentic concepts of the period under consideration. Key concepts of the present – such as ‘pragmatic’, ‘functional’, ‘generative’, ‘modular’, ‘cognitive’, ‘structural’ – may illustrate just how complex the intertwining of problems and their concepts can be, as long as we are dealing with authentic self-descriptions and not polemical or tendentious descriptions imposed from outside. In this context the question arises as to what extent we should adopt present-day claims about language itself that are conceptually anchored in one or more theories as the point of departure for historiographic research, or whether we should attempt to exclusively reconstruct concepts from the linguistic thought of the period being investigated, in an effort to avoid any kind of teleological perspective.

Research in the history of science is not concerned with the properties of language, but with the discourse of linguistic research. But a claim about language is not always transparent: as a form of expression, it is always dependent on the conditions under which it was made. A high priority for the historian of science is to reconstruct these conditions for recipients who do not have the same forms of expression and are not part of the situation in which they emerged.

Every cognitive act is a historical fact; its form of existence is not the ideal timelessness of the logical level of truth. Because of its historical limitedness, knowledge has a horizon of retrospection and a horizon of projection.[3] Science does not destroy its past, but rather organises it, selects, forgets, interprets, idealises, just as it anticipates and construes its future. What is special about historiographic work as opposed to the approach of the scientist who is simply interested in the history of their discipline can be seen precisely in the reconstruction of the emergence of theories and positions in context. For this task it is quite appropriate to warn against anachronisms. The correction of retrospective selections of facts and of mainstream opinions will necessarily also lead to accentuating forgotten or marginalised knowledge.

If we have the goal of examining conceptualisations in linguistic thinking before the institutionalisation of linguistics and do not want to rule out that such an undertaking can contribute to our understanding of the points of departure and foundations of the conceptual positions that today differ significantly among individual schools and currents of linguistics, then both a retrospective view and a prospective view from the perspective of the period being considered is implied. Despite constant change of conceptual contents, we can establish also for the metalinguistic realm a relative continuity in the foundational structures and relations. Kosellek asserted this for general conceptual history with the following words: “Man kann Begriffsgeschichte(n) als Wandel von Bedeutungen und Pragmatiken nur thematisieren, wenn man weiß, daß eine ganze Menge anderes sich gleich bleibt und also repetitiv ist.”[4]

Of course this cannot be allowed to lead to the establishment of linear continuities that take no account of either the conditions under which individual concepts formed or the network of relations in which they exist. The basis of the comparison across time must rather be sufficiently general questions that tend to lead to comparable answers. To describe this kind of questions and solutions I prefer the term conceptualisations, which draws out the process-like nature of the phenomenon described. A static description of the concept could only produce results which for their own part would have to be made transparent through examination in the context of their historical relations and the historical conditions of their emergence.

Concepts are units of knowledge that group phenomena and objects together into classes according to their characteristics and which determine their relation to other classes of phenomena. While phenomena change over time, concepts generalise and subsume in their grouping. The networks of relations and functional connections that are represented in this way can be described with a sufficient degree of generality to capture greater commonalities in questions and answers even in the case of greater historical changes. The search for authentic concepts of a period makes the characteristics on which the formation of classes are based transparent, justifies them in their historical boundedness and determines the place of the concept in the time-bound network. Work in conceptual history then proceeds retrospectively when it starts with those conceptual characteristics that correspond to the views on the subject matter of a particular period and seeks earlier conceptualisations that are comparable. Retrospective observation can help to establish sufficiently general characteristics for conceptualisations, but it must of course not be allowed to make the mistake of laying a temporally bound ‘standard’ on an earlier period of linguistic thought. Occasionally it is only through such a view that we will even notice authentic concepts that correspond to contemporary research questions, since they can be obscured through the lack of current lexical forms.

In this way we will search in vain for terms that correspond to our focalisation and topicalisation in the late 18^th century. However, the research question corresponding to this concept appears under the less specific term Nachdruck (emphasis) in Daniel Jenisch’s Philosopisch-kritische Vergleichung und Würdigung von vierzehn ältern und neuern Sprachen Europens (1796) and is even introduced in its relation to other conceptualisations (grammatischer Bau ‘grammatical structure’, Wortstellung ‘word order’, Syntax, Sprache ‘language’ vs. (Strom der) Rede ‘(stream of) speech’):

Zu dem grammatikalischen Bau, in so fern er auf den Nachdruck der Sprache Beziehung hat, gehört vorzüglich auch die Wortstellung (Syntax). Sind die Gesetze derselben für jeden Fall durchaus bestimmt und unab­änderlich, wie z. B. in der Französischen Sprache: so kann der Geist da, wo es der Strom der Rede und die Heftigkeit der Empfindung erfordert, daß der Gegenstand aus der Masse der Ideen besonders herausgehoben und dem Auge nahe gebracht werde, und wo ofte das, was in dem ruhigen Flusse der Rede das erste Wort seyn würde, das letzte seyn muß, und umgekehrt; – so kann er hier Empfindung und Leidenschaft nicht mit aller der Fülle und nach allen den Nüanzen in der Sprache darstellen, als er’s ohne dieß würde thun können.[5]

As this example shows, the retrospective view also leads us into the region of the onomasiological approach. The corresponding question here might be: How was the movement of sentence constituents according to their communicative value that is now known as topicalisation conceptualised in the late 18th century and how was the corresponding concept named? The question of conceptualisation could be broken down into the following sub-questions:

• Were linguistic phenomena put into classes on the basis of the characteristic ‘movement with a change in communicative value’?
• Were there current or, as the case may be, even specific names for this class?
• What relational networks and functional connections were put together in other classes?

The way we have posed this question makes it clear that we are focussing on cognitive processes in concept formation and that we do not reduce the onomasiological question to a listing of authentic terms for a fixed concept. This grouping by characteristics during the process of conceptualisation can also be observed at a pre-conceptual stage, which can be revealed at a linguistic level by non-specific or periphrastic terms. The establishment of a concept itself is generally not concluded with the coining of a term, since the network of relations in which the concept is situated might only solidify later or could be reconstituted. Even a change in the constitutive characteristics of the conceptual formation is possible here.

In our example of Nachdruck we have taken a very non-specific term for the change in the communicative value of a sentence constituent, which however, because of its explicit relations, is part of a meaningful network. The grammatischer Bau is introduced as something superordinate and can only be brought partially into relation with Nachdruck, while Wortstellung is put into an immediate relation and explained in brackets with Syntax. A clear relation of Nachdruck to Strom der Rede is also set up.

We could say the same about the use of the word language in metalinguistic statements of earlier times. Here we also have to consider the various ranges of meaning associated with this word in different languages. Since Saussure there is a terminological distinction usually made in French between langue, parole, and langage, which it is difficult to reproduce in English and German. But even the identification of this tripartition with Saussure is in fact an anachronism. A differentiation of langue as a system of means of expression, langage as the faculty of language, and parole as the product of this faculty was already inherent in the French language, as the following excerpt from the Cours de psychologie (1801) by Benoni Debrun shows:

C’est-à-dire, que la voix, l’écriture et le geste deviennent les trois moyens que nous employons pour la communication des pensées, et un système quelconque de ces moyens, est ce qu’on nomme une langue, du principal organe que nous employons à cette communication; c’est à la faculté d’employer ces moyens, prise d’une manière générale, qu’on donne le nom de langage, et à l’Acte de cette faculté, qu’on donne celui de parole.[6]

It is therefore not so much the distinction that should be attributed to Saussure, but rather the settling of the terms, which answered to the need for conceptualisation in his time.

In research into conceptual history a certain degree of anachronism is inevitable. Anachronism can even help us to recognise connections. Such a view is of course susceptible to the criticism that certain concepts ‘belong’ to certain authors. But does the notion of linguistic relativity really belong to Wilhelm von Humboldt, for instance, and does the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign belong to Saussure? Ideas and theories do not come out of the blue. When we examine their development retrospectively or prospectively, we of course proceed anachronistically. There is no harm in anachronism as long as we are conscious of its possibilities and limits.

Notes

[1] Le Laboureur, Louis, Avantages de la langue françoise sur la langue latine. Paris: G. de Luyne 1669, 173

[2] Batteux, Charles, “Lettres sur la phrase françoise comparée avec la phrase latine, à Monsieur l’abbé d’Olivet de l’Académie Françoise”. Cours de belles-lettres distribué par exercices. Paris : Desaint et Saillant 1747-1748, Vol. II, 18

[3] Auroux, Sylvain, ‟Science et temporalité”, Language Philosophies and the Language Sciences. A Historical Perspective in Honour of Lia Formigari, ed. by Daniele Gambarara & Stefano Gensini & Antonino Pennisi, Münster, Nodus Publikationen 1996: 27-32 : horizon de rétrospection, horizon de projection.

[4] Koselleck, Reinhart, Begriffsgeschichten, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2006, 60.

[5] Jenisch, Daniel, Philosophisch-kritische Vergleichung und Würdigung von vierzehn ältern und neuern Sprachen Europens, namentlich: der Griechischen, Lateinischen; Italienischen, Spanischen, Portugiesischen, Französischen; Englischen, Deutschen, Holländischen, Dänischen, Schwedischen; Polnischen, Russischen, Litthauischen. Eine von der Königl. Preuss. Akademie der Wissenschaften gekrönte Preisschrift des Herrn D. Jenisch, Prediger in Berlin. Berlin: Friedrich Maurer 1796, 26/27

[6] Debrun, François-Joseph-Bénoni, Cours de psycologie. Traite de psycographie […] Traité de Grammaire. Laon: Derbigny 1801, 64.

Andrew Linn
University of Sheffield

Communicating the past to the present: Is anachronism inevitable? desirable?

One of the most dramatic chapters in European history is the mass migration to North America and beyond during the nineteenth century. The statistics are jaw-dropping. Some 60 million Europeans departed in the course of a hundred year period, with around 43 million finding their way to North America. In 1800 the population of Norway was a mere 883,000, but a century later around the same number of Norwegians had emigrated to the USA, such that there are now as many Norwegian-Americans as there are Norwegian Norwegians. What the top-level figures fail to express, and what is also lost in the surviving evidence, such as port records, is that this comprises an aggregation of personal stories and dramas. There is plenty of debate about the extent to which push factors or pull factors predominated, but “there is, of course, no general explanation” (Norman & Runblom 1988: 112); the past is made of millions of individual stories. 19^th-centry emigration is not remote history. There are records and there are photographs and there are surviving artefacts and stories in the possession of the descendants, so surely it must be possible to capture those personal realities. Surely, with all the technology at our disposal, it must be possible to communicate this particular past to the present in a direct way.

I have recently completed a project which sought to present Norwegian emigration history to a modern audience using 3D virtual-world technology. One aim of this project was to animate the journey made by a generic Norwegian peasant (Ola Nordmann or the Norwegian Everyman) from rural Norway via what by the 1880s had become the standard emigration route, from Bergen to Hull to Liverpool and on to New York. The 3D world was fully informed by the evidence and involved the reconstruction of 19^th-century places and buildings, means of transport and artefacts. 21^st-century computer users could then enter the world and accompany our generic emigrant on his journey and literally enter the past. Although the project is now complete and no new accounts can be created, the website is still available and contains more information about this attempt to bridge the gap between the past and the present using computer technology (www.olanordmann.co.uk) and a full account and discussion of the project is in Linn (2015).

Was it successful? In some ways, yes. We did what we set out to do, but this could never recapture the reality of the journey. There were no sounds or smells in the ports or on board ship. There were no other travellers in the world, which is completely unrealistic given the vast numbers in transit. However, this was another way of getting into the past. There were some deliberately anachronistic moments, such as the modern Norwegian signage to show visitors where to go, and the chance to fly through the world and be teleported from one location to another, but it all contributes to the number of access points to the past. It may be that we will always be looking at the past through a lens tinted by our own context, but more lenses result in greater clarity, and anyway the past isn’t going to engage many visitors if it’s not fun to go there.

What can this project suggest to historians of linguistics? Here are some ideas, which will, I hope, prove fruitful for further discussion via this blog:

• Strikingly absent from the history of linguistics is the view from below, the experience of the recipient of linguistics: the pupil, the learner, the reader. History from below is hard work, but it can be done, especially if we can be a bit less precious about the nature of our sources.
• What would a virtual-world history of linguistics look like? It is a colourful world of global travel, of scholars and institutions and debates. Who wouldn’t want to visit it?
• The history of linguistics is typically a desiccated enterprise of books and articles and conference papers. Where is the technology in its research, its dissemination and its teaching?
• Anachronism should be celebrated. Ola Nordmann’s world was about preventing the individual and the personal disappearing from sight amongst the historical stats. The historiography of linguistics is about allowing the voices of those who can no longer speak for themselves to continue to contribute to our ongoing efforts to make sense of language.

References

Norman, Hans & Harald Runblom 1988. Transatlantic Connections: Nordic Migration to the New World after 1800. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.

Linn, Andrew 2015. From Voss to New York: Norwegian transmigration to America and the use of virtual worlds in historical research. Historisk tidsskrift 94, 232-259.

Ken Miner
University of Kansas (emer.)

Esperantism is one of those many small worlds that have more substance to them than outsiders think but less than most insiders think. The twain rarely meet. Much linguistic attention to Esperanto, including almost all of my own, is in Esperanto and therefore inaccessible to non-Esperantists. For this reason I have responded to James McElvenny’s invitation to say something about the language here. I will simply summarize some of the work I and others have done; the basic information about the language, its origin, history and progress, is readily available elsewhere.

My affiliation with Esperanto has been somewhat unusual. I learned the language from the age of about fourteen, but regarding the movement – the attempt to advance Esperanto as a serious solution to the world’s “language problem” – from the sixties I favored instead an inward-turning approach: acknowledge the futility of getting the language “recognized” and simply nurture the language and its community of speakers. (Apparently I was not alone; in the eighties, a group sharing this view actually factionalized themselves and are today known as Raumists.)

Not being an “Esperanto salesman” (see Language Log for November 21, 2011) I was not disturbed when my later linguistic work, in part following on that of others, revealed aspects of the language well outside its usual portrayal. Throughout the history of the movement, Esperanto was promoted as regular and easy to learn, with intuitive word-formation reducible to early “keys” containing, with basic grammar, lists of morphemes (available in 26 languages by 1933). But the regularity of Esperanto is only in its inflectional morphology; its derivational morphology, as actually developed, is quite capricious, and certain aspectual and pragmatic matters are actually undetermined. As for ease of learning, the excellent practical grammar, Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko [complete handbook of Esperanto grammar] (ELNA, 2005), by the tireless Bertil Wennergren, runs to nearly 700 pages. For a quick comparison, admittedly perhaps unfair, Michael Coulson’s Teach Yourself Sanskrit, widely used as a college textbook, is only 513 pages, and it has reading selections and a lexicon.

Phonology

Esperanto is supposed to have only minor allophonic variation; the basic principle is “one letter, one sound”. This quite overlooks what happens in poetic elision, where final /-o/ (marking nouns) may optionally drop, being replaced in writing by an apostrophe and leaving final clusters, including voiceless obstruent + /r, m/: /kapr/, /ŝultr/, /supr/, /pastr/, /patr/, /astr/, /majstr/, /ventr/; /abism/, /skism/, /komunism/, etc.[1] These are no problem if a vowel follows in the next syllable, but we find lines of verse like

• El supr’ ĉiela mi ne ĵetos fulmojn
  from heavenly height I will not cast bolts
• Kun ĉefpastr’ kapitol’-supron irados plu
  with Monsignor will continue going to the top of Campidoglio
• Nigra aperas abism’ senradia
  black appears an abyss with no ray [of light]

The pronunciation of such lines without introducing an extra syllable is not provided for; presumably the sonorants will be devoiced, resulting in voiceless allophones. Zamenhof apparently gave little thought to the results of elision (although his own usage has been examined). Since any root or radical can be left standing, even things like line-final /latv/, /lingv/, /pugn/ and /himn/ (with non-syllabic /n/), /binokl/ (with non-syllabic /l/) etc. are theoretically possible. Admittedly most of the objectionable actual examples are from the hand of a single poet-translator, the prolific Antoni Grabowsky (1857-1921). But since for many Esperantists the language has been chiefly or only a written one, there has been carelessness about elision. One translator of Catullus’ line “vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus” even came up with Ni vivu kaj ni amu, mia Lesb’ which is going to give you either /lezb/ or /lesp/, since obviously once voicing ceases within a syllable, it cannot begin again in the same syllable; this will result in morphophonemic variation, no less, since /s/, /z/, /p/ and /b/ are all phonemes.

Incidentally, one might wonder why one would write poetry and other literature in a language designed to be an auxiliary language, but Zamenhof and his followers did exactly that. This in part accounts for the Raumist point of view: one can argue that from the beginning there was a tendency to nurture not merely a movement but a language.

Morphology

Here is where the most interesting issues are; they involve lexical categories and the word as a morphological unit – conflicts between what appear to have been the original ideas of Esperanto and subsequent development of the language, some of it quite early. I will begin with lexical categories, discussed by Grimley Evans (1997) and others. Nouns are marked by a suffix /-o/, adjectives by a suffix /-a/, verbs in the infinitive by /-i/. Thus we have /detruo/ ‘destruction’, /detrua/ ‘destructive’, /detrui/ ‘to destroy’. This leaves the root, /detru/, in theory a “naked root” similar to those of Semitic, supposedly unmarked for category. However, the actual development of the language has decided against “naked roots”: roots turn out to belong in themselves to nominal, adjectival, or verbal categories. This shows up when suffixes other than /-o/, /-a/, /-i/ are attached to them. For example there is a suffix /-iĝ/ meaning ‘become whatever the root signifies’. Take /detru/: /detruiĝi/ means ‘to be destroyed’. If /detru/ were nominal, /detruiĝi/ would mean something like ‘to become destruction’. If /detru/ were adjectival, /detruiĝi/ would mean ‘to become destructive’. Therefore /detru/ is inherently verbal. Take /virg/ ‘virginal’. /Virgo/ does not mean ‘virgin’ but if anything ‘virginity’ (though the word actually used with that meaning is /virgeco/, with /-ec/ ‘characteristic’). A virgin is a /virgulino/ (/-ul/ ‘person’, /-in/ ‘feminine’). Thus /virg/ is inherently adjectival.

Two realities ensue: (a) contrary to what it seems Zamenhof intended, when one learns a new root one must also learn what its inherent category is, and (b) all lexical words other than adverbs are doubly marked for category. Thus /detrui/ is marked twice as a verb, once in the inherently verbal root and once in the suffix /-i/. /Virga/ ‘virginal’ is marked twice as an adjective, once in the inherently adjectival root and once in the suffix /-a/. And so on.

In addition, the categories turn out to be arbitrary. This can be shown by selecting pairs of roots belonging to the same semantic field, such as /bros/ ‘brush’ and /komb/ ‘comb’. Here the categories of the roots can be determined with the help of the suffix /-il/ ‘tool’: one brushes with a /broso/ but one combs with a /kombilo/, showing that /bros/ is inherently nominal, while /komb/ is inherently verbal. Yet the meanings of the roots, which are so similar, could scarcely be the reason for the difference in category.

A similar pair, again from the same semantic field, is /elegant/ and /dand/: here we can use the suffix /-ul/ ‘person’, mentioned above, to reveal the categories. A /dando/ is a dandy; /dandulo/ would therefore be redundant. An elegant person however is an /elegantulo/. This shows that /elegant/ is inherently adjectival while /dand/ is inherently nominal.

Though there is a long story behind all this (as Wennergren has extensively documented), we can explain this arbitrariness simply by saying that when roots were taken from the national languages, they were taken with their categories, not as “naked roots”. Transitivity is also arbitrary for the same reason. Here a useful pair from the same semantic field is /dron/ and /sufok/. The useful suffix in this case is /-ig/, ‘cause’. /Droni/ means ‘to drown’ and is intransitive. /Sufoki/ means ‘to suffocate’ and is transitive. Therefore /dronigi/ meaning ‘cause to drown’ is fine while /sufokigi/ could only mean ‘to cause someone to suffocate someone else’ and I haven’t seen it used.

Most Esperantists today, especially those who are linguistically sophisticated (and many are),[2] are willing to live with arbitrary root categories and root transitivity. However, due to compounding, lexical category and transitivity must also be properties of words. In the case of lexical category, there is no issue: the final element of the compound determines the category of the whole – as in many languages. Not so with transitivity.

Many simple verbs are transitive: /filtri/ ‘to filter’, /ŝovi/ ‘to shove, shift’, /ĝeni/ ‘to disturb’, /generi/ ‘to generate’. Many simple verbs are intransitive: /babili/ ‘to chat’, /ĝemi/ ‘to groan’, /stari/ ‘to stand’, /esti/ ‘to be’, /halti/ ‘to stop’. Some are both: /zumi/ ‘to hum’, /eskapi/ ‘to escape’, /fiŝi/ ‘to fish’, /afekti/ ‘to pretend’, /paroli/ ‘to speak’, /nebuli/ ‘to (be)cloud’, /ludi/ ‘to play’. Since all these simple verbs consist only of root and verbal suffix, the transitivity (submorphemic) must be marked on the root: /filtr/ +tr ; /babil/ -tr ; /zum/ ±tr, etc.

However many compound verbs show that transitivity must be marked also on the entire word. Take for example /postkuri/ ‘to chase’ from /post/ ‘after’ and /kuri/ ‘to run’. /Kuri/ is intransitive, but /postkuri/ is transitive. Clearly /postkuri/ is transitive as a word. Among similar examples are /preterkuri/, ‘to outrun’, /antaŭiri/ ‘to precede’, /ĉirkaŭiri/ ‘to go around’, /eniri/ ‘to enter’, all based on the intransitive verbs /iri/ ‘to go’ and /kuri/. But other verbs made with /iri/ and /kuri/ are intransitive: /deiri/, ‘to start from’, /antaŭeniri/ ‘to go forward’, /foriri/ ‘to go away’, /forkuri/ ‘to run away’. Similarly /perlabori/ ‘to earn’, /ellabori/ ‘to develop’ based on the intransitive verb /labori/ ‘to work’.

But the word is not a morphological unit in what we might call Esperantic theory: the unit is the morpheme. Words are in theory linearly built up.[3] Yet from the beginning, dictionaries were compiled, and still are, based on the word. Necessarily, because the meanings of many words (as in most languages) cannot be determined only from their component parts. A /vortaro/, from /vort/ ‘word’ and /-ar/ ‘collection’, is not just any collection of words, but a dictionary. Thus it appears that there has long been a tension in the language between word-based grammar and morpheme-based grammar.

Grimley Evans (1997) has shown that prefixes must sometimes modify not merely the following element, but the entire word. One example is /alglui/ ‘to glue something to something’, from /al-/ ‘to’, /glu/ ‘glue’. /Glu/ is an inherently nominal root. The structure has to be [al[glui]] and not [[alglu]i], since [alglu] by itself is not meaningful. This fortifies the notion of the word as a unit, but it leaves us with the problem of the scope of prefixes. There is no way to predict the structure of a given word. Some go one way, some the other. In the following, the prefix modifies its following element (see the Appendix for a detailed explanation of all the examples):

• ekskoloniano [[ekskoloni][ano]], not *[[eks][koloniano]] ‘excolonial’ (person)
• ĉefministrejo [[ĉefministr][ejo]], not *[[ĉef][ministrejo]] ‘prime minister’s office’
• plibonigi [[plibon][igi]], not *[[pli][bonigi]] ‘improve’
• malavarega [[malavar][ega]], not *[[mal][avarega]] ‘extremely generous’

But in the following, the prefix modifies the entire word:

• ĉefoficejo [[ĉef][oficejo]], not *[[ĉefofic][ejo]] ‘main office’
• pludaŭrigi [[plu][daŭrigi]], not *[[pludaŭr][igi]] ‘continue further’
• mallaborema [[mal][laborema]], not *[[mallabor][ema]] ‘lazy’
• eksklubano [[eks][klubano]], not *[[eksklub][ano]] ‘ex-club-member’

The above examples are more or less standard words; their meanings are fixed by usage. In the case of more spontaneous formations, wherein lies the oft-noted creativity of the language, one often cannot be sure of the structure and therefore of the precise meaning:

• fibestejo: [[fibest][ejo]] or [[fi][bestejo]]? A place for contemptible animals or a contemptible place for animals?
• fireĝido: [[fireĝ][ido]] or [[fi][reĝido]]? The son of a contemptible king or the contemptible son of a king?
• praspecano: [[praspec][ano]] or [[pra][specano]]? A member of a primitive species or a primitive member of a species?
• eklegigi: [[ekleg][igi]] or [[ek][legigi]]? To make someone suddenly read or to suddenly make someone read?
• mismemorigi: [[mismemor][igi]] or [[mis][memorigi]]? To make someone remember wrongly or to wrongly make someone remember?
• ĉeffakulo: [[ĉeffak][ulo]] or [[ĉef][fakulo]]? A specialist in the main field or the main specialist?

There are other morphological problems here and there. A standard word is /ekfloro/ ‘a sudden flowering’ from /ek-/ ‘suddenly; incipiently’ and /flor/ ‘flower’. /Ek-/ is normally attached to verbs. The root /flor/ is nominal: /floro/ is a flower. However, there is a verb /flori/ ‘to flower’. If we insist that the root is the same in the verb and the noun, then in /ekfloro/ we have /ek-/ attached to a nominal root. I will admit that ‘a sudden flower’ is very poetic, but /ekfloro/ does not mean that.

Much of what I have written above would seem to support the notion, now popular among thoughtful Esperantists and perhaps especially those of the Raumist persuasion, that Esperanto, though created as an artificial, regular and morphologically ideal language, has through its century and a quarter of use become more like a natural language. Except in the areas of tense & aspect, telicity and pragmatics (on these see below), there is something to be said for that idea.

Tense & aspect: there was long a dispute, which survives today, about compound tenses. The passive system is not symmetrical with the active system. This asymmetry had two solutions; some speakers went one way, some the other, probably depending on their native languages. The problem was officially resolved by fiat and in favor of the apparent majority (there is a language academy after all), but to this day speakers differ; therefore one is never certain whether /mia aŭto estis riparata/ means ‘my car was repaired’ or ‘my car was being repaired’. (The issue of aspect involves a suffix /-ad/ ‘duration’ and is too complex to go into here.)

A problem that has never been resolved, however, is that of telicity in general. A simple descriptive assertion like /li iris en la domon/ ‘he went/was going into the house’ for some speakers is telic, for some atelic, as can be seen from very lengthy disputes in the newsgroup soc.culture.esperanto in past years. But telicity was only really understood after Zeno Vendler’s work beginning in the fifties (e.g., Vendler 1957); Zamenhof and early Esperantists could not have been expected to be aware of Aktionsarten at all, even if Zamenhof had paid any attention to the linguistics of his time, which he did not.

Another area developed only in recent times is pragmatics, including factivity: it is not clear in Esperanto which verbs and head nouns are factive in cases where their meanings do not make it obvious. Factivity is not clear in, for example, /indigni ke/ ‘resent (it) that’, /lamenti ke/ ‘lament that’, /plendi ke/ ‘complain that’, /priplori/ ‘bemoan’, /grumbli ke/ ‘grumble that’, /koleri ke/ ‘be angry that’, /montri ke/ ‘show that’. The entire area of pragmatics in relation to Esperanto is in need of attention. Presumably speakers simply apply the pragmatics of their native languages to Esperanto. (Alan Reed Libert has already, in this blog, broached the subject.)

Here then are the difficulties in the notion of Esperanto’s acquired naturalism: speakers of natural languages can be presumed to know (tacitly of course) their compound tenses, which verb phrases are telic and which are atelic, and which verbs are factive. And they have apparently mastered rich systems of pragmatics. It is difficult to see how such problems could ever be resolved for Esperanto, even by a language academy. A planned language has to stop somewhere, while linguistic insights into natural languages continue to develop.

“Native speakers”

There are people whose first language was Esperanto, and these are often referred to by movement Esperantists as “native speakers” (in part because in Esperanto the standard term for “native speaker” is /denaska parolanto/ and /denaska/ means literally ‘from birth’). Obviously they are not native speakers; they did not grow up in a language community speaking Esperanto, and they are not a source of grammaticality and meanings as are native speakers of natural languages. Their situation is often no different from that of an acquaintance of my youth, whose best language was American English, but whose first language was Croatian, of which he remembered only a few phrases. The fallacies are, apparently, (a) the notion that one’s first language is necessarily one’s native language and/or (b) the belief that one learns one’s native language primarily from one’s parents. I have encountered two denaskaj speakers of Esperanto; one, whose father is influential in the movement, kept up his interest in the language and blogged in it for a time, but of course his Esperanto is no better than mine; the other also still used the language but seemed rather embarrassed at being constantly touted as a “native speaker”, and sometimes needed a dictionary. I am told that many of these people never use the language in adulthood at all. (George and Paul Soros are said to be examples.)

Esperanto was devised as an auxiliary language, therefore its ideal use would supposedly be that of a monolingual. Yet the best Esperantists are, as one might expect, polyglot and/or linguistically sophisticated. They quickly pick up on turns of phrase used in the national languages; these enter Esperanto and enrich it. Perhaps as a result of this enrichment, the language works quite well in spite of the points of vagueness I have mentioned, even among non-Europeans, especially if they are polyglot. But even after a century and a quarter, it is still likely that the comprehension of Esperanto is best between speakers in the same branch of Indo-European: Germanic to Germanic, Romance to Romance, Slavic to Slavic, etc. I say “likely” because, oddly enough, the comprehension of Esperanto has never been systematically examined to my knowledge at all.

Would it work in some kind of official capacity? Probably the main problem is vocabulary. Many thousands of words are added every year to the important national languages, mainly due to the rapid development of science and technology. Esperanto vocabulary development is geared to a somewhat smaller world, although in theory any “international word” is automatically an Esperanto word (properly Esperantized of course). But it seems that if there were any interest at all on the part of the EU countries in an artificial auxiliary language, there would be talk of Interlingua, which is quite widely readable for the educated even without study and which has no potentially embarrassing ideological and emotional baggage. But to my knowledge there isn’t.

Something ought to be said about the number of Esperanto speakers. In the past, exaggerated claims have been made. Even today (well, last time I looked), Wikipedia tells us there are at least 100,000 fluent speakers (and, of course, around 1,000 “native speakers”). I think 50,000 is more likely.[4] But there are still people around who seem to believe that since determining the number of speakers is next to impossible (who counts as a speaker? etc.), it is perfectly all right to claim a million or two.

Prejudices

One thing that seems to offend amateur linguists about Esperanto is that it uses the pronominal form /mi/ even in the nominative, as if it were a pidgin or a creole; in most of Indo-European, m-forms are found only in the oblique cases. But Celtic (at least Goidelic), where the VSO order obscures it, and, for that matter, Hindi-Urdu, where the SOV order doesn’t obscure it, also have m-forms in the nominative; in fact the pronoun “I” in Scots Gaelic happens to be identical with the Esperanto. Some are bothered by constantly seeing /la/ ‘the’ used with nouns ending in /-o/ (since all nouns end in /-o/). Esperanto has no grammatical gender, but in Occitan final /a/ becomes [ɔ]. So Esperanto is not as odd as it at first seems.

Notes

[1] I append here a glossary, arranged alphabetically, of the morphemes used in the examples some of which are not glossed in the text:

/abism/ ‘abyss’; /-an/ ‘member’; /astr/ ‘heavenly body’; /avar/ ‘greedy’; /best/ ‘animal’; /binokl/ ‘binoculars’; /bon/ ‘good’; /ĉef-/ ‘main’; /daŭr/ ‘duration’; /-eg/ augmentative; /-ej/ ‘place’; /eks-/ ‘ex-, former’; /-em/ ‘tending toward’; /fak/ ‘specialty’; /fi-/ ‘contemptible’; /himn/ ‘hymn’; /-id/ ‘offspring’; /-ig/ ‘cause to become’; /-iĝ/ ‘become’; /kapr/ ‘goat’; /klub/ ‘club’; /koloni/ ‘colony’; /komunism/ ‘communism’; /labor/ ‘work’; /latv/ ‘Latvian’; /leg/ ‘read’; /lingv/ ‘language’; /majstr/ ‘master’; /mal-/ ‘opposite’; /memor/ ‘remember’; /ministr/ ‘minister’; /mis-/ ‘wrongly’; /ofic/ ‘office’ (position); /pastr/ ‘pastor’; /patr/ ‘father’; /pli-/ ‘more’; /plu/ ‘further’; /pra-/ ‘early, primeval’; /pugn/ ‘fist’; /reĝ/ ‘king’; /skism/ ‘schism’; /spec/ ‘kind, species’; /ŝultr/ ‘shoulder’; /supr/ ‘above’; /-ul/ ‘person’; /ventr/ ‘stomach’

[2] Indeed there are professional linguists other than myself who are Esperantists: Jouko Lindstedt, Cyril Brosch, Marc van Oostendorp, Probal Dasgupta, John C. Wells, Ilona Koutny, Liu Haitao, Detlev Blanke, to name a few. Amateur linguists have contributed a great deal to most of the topics I discuss here. This article is bibliographically weak in that I no longer remember who pointed out what, and even Grimley Evans 1997 is no longer available online. Any help from readers would be appreciated. As far as I know, mine are: (1) the phonological observations, (2) the claim that wide scope of prefixes is quite common, (3) noting uncertainty of structure in nonce forms, (4) the points about tense & aspect, telicity in general, factivity and general pragmatics, and (5) the point about “native speakers”. For the rest I cannot claim originality, other than the language of discussion.

[3] There seems to have been much dependence on “logic” in the early days. In 1913 the Academy accepted a proposal of René de Saussure (the brother of Ferdinand de Saussure, often called the father of structural linguistics), to the effect that “word-formation in Esperanto is founded on the logical and direct construction of each separate word and not on so-called rules of derivation.” Significantly, in early writings on Esperanto grammar, morphemes were called “words”.

[4] That is the estimate of van Dijk (1999; 2^nd edition 2003), an important work which, unfortunately, remains untranslated.

Appendix: details of examples

ekskoloniano [[ekskoloni][ano]], not *[[eks][koloniano]] ‘excolonial’ (person)

The first bracketing denotes a member of an entity which used to be a colony. The second bracketing denotes someone who used to be a member of a colony. A native of Congo would be designated by the first; a former native of Anguilla would be designated by the second.

ĉefministrejo [[ĉefministr][ejo]], not *[[ĉef][ministrejo]] ‘prime minister’s office’

The first bracketing denotes a place where a prime minister lives or works. The second bracketing denotes the main abode or workplace of a minister or ministers. 10 Downing Street would be designated by the first; 70 Whitehall would be designated by the second.

plibonigi [[plibon][igi]], not *[[pli][bonigi]] ‘improve’

The first bracketing denotes the activity of making better; the second bracketing denotes the activity of augmenting an improvement. If I add a wing to my house, I am doing the first. If I add floor heating to that wing, I am doing the second.

malavarega [[malavar][ega]], not *[[mal][avarega]] ‘extremely generous’

The first bracketing describes someone who is very generous. The second describes someone who is abstemious to the point of sainthood (the opposite of rapacious). Warren Buffet might be designated by the first; St. Francis of Assisi might be designated by the second.

ĉefoficejo [[ĉef][oficejo]], not *[[ĉefofic][ejo]] ‘main office’

The first bracketing denotes a main office. The second denotes the abode or workplace of the main office-holder. The main office of a corporate headquarters would be designated by the first; the Oval Office in the White House would be designated by the second.

pludaŭrigi [[plu][daŭrigi]], not *[[pludaŭr][igi]] ‘continue further’

The first bracketing denotes the activity of continuing further to make something last. The second denotes the activity of making something last longer. Continuing a filibuster would be an example of the first; painting a house would be an example of the second.

mallaborema [[mal][laborema]], not *[[mallabor][ema]] ‘lazy’

The first describes someone who is lazy; the second is really not a possibility since [mallabor] suggests that there is an activity that is the opposite of work – play perhaps; but /mallabori/ is not used with that meaning (/ludi/) other than in jest.

eksklubano [[eks][klubano]], not *[[eksklub][ano]] ‘ex-club-member’

The first denotes a person who was formerly a member of a club. The second denotes a member of an entity which was formerly a club. The present British Prime Minister, formerly a member of the Bullington Club, is an example of the first. If the Sierra Club becomes incorporated, its members will be examples of the second.

If some of the distinctions seem hazy, there clearly are differences in sense, even if their referents were to be the same.

References

Grimley Evans, Edmund, “Lingvaj notoj” [language notes], La Brita Esperantisto (Mar-Apr 1997, pp 57-59).

Van Dijk, Ziko, Esperanto Sen Mitoj [Esperanto Without Myths], Flandra Esperanto-Ligo, 1999.

Vendler, Zeno. “Verbs and Times”, The Philosophical Review 66(2):143-160 (1957).

How to cite this post

Miner, Ken. 2015. Esperanto: some observations of a speaker-linguist. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/08/05/esperanto-some-observations-of-a-speaker-linguist/

María José García Folgado
Universitat de València – Grupo GIEL

La historia de la enseñanza de la gramática es un campo que, en el marco hispánico, solo recientemente está siendo objeto de investigación. Aunque desde la Historiografía Lingüística se han abordado muchas obras que, stricto sensu, son textos escolares (producidos por enseñantes y para la enseñanza), no se ha tenido en cuenta este hecho en su análisis, lo que supone, en última instancia, una interpretación sesgada de la historia gramatical. Un principio determinante en la investigación de la gramática escolar y su historia es la necesaria imbricación en el análisis de factores externos e internos que aporten datos empíricos que permitan abordar desde sus diferentes esferas el fenómeno: no solo el texto, sino el contexto; no solo la teoría gramatical, sino los supuestos didácticos que la acompañan; no solo el autor, sino los receptores (maestros y alumnos), etc. (vid. Swiggers 2012). En este trabajo, ofrecemos una muy breve muestra de investigación de tres manuales escolares de gramática producidos para un centro concreto (el Instituto de Figueras), en un momento histórico de desarrollo y cambio de las enseñanzas medias en España.

A mediados del siglo XIX, los cambios sociales, económicos, políticos y científicos posibilitan una transformación de objeto y de perspectiva de las enseñanzas medias que pasan a ocupar un lugar privilegiado en los planes de estudio (Ruiz Berrio 2008): la consolidación definitiva de la enseñanza secundaria se lleva a cabo entre 1836 y 1845; en 1836, el llamado Plan Rivas ya adopta la estructura y enfoque que marcaría este nivel educativo hasta el siglo XX. En él se indica que “la instrucción secundaria comprende aquellos estudios […] que son necesarios para completar la educación general de las clases acomodadas, y seguir con fruto las facultades mayores y escuelas especiales” (MEC 1979 [1836]: 124), además, se denomina a los establecimientos públicos destinados a impartir estas enseñanzas, Institutos. Pese a que apenas tuvo validez legislativa unos 10 días, como indica Ruiz Berrio (2008: 31) “sirvió de guía para la realidad de la política educativa durante los diez años siguientes, además de constituirse en punto de partida para los sucesivos proyectos de Ley o de Plan de estudios que se intentaron aprobar en 1838, 1841 y 1844”. Las enseñanzas lingüísticas que comprende el plan son gramática española y latina, lenguas vivas “más usuales”, elementos de literatura y elementos de ideología, así como griego, árabe y hebreo “según fuese más conveniente” (MEC 1979 [1836]: 125). Pese a lo efímero de su aplicación, en la práctica, el Plan Rivas impulsó la creación de diversos establecimientos destinados específicamente a la instrucción secundaria: desde 1836 hasta 1845 algunas capitales de provincia y ciudades de cierto tamaño que carecían de Universidad recibieron autorización para la instauración de este tipo de centros. Una de esas ciudades fue Figueras, donde en 1839 el Ayuntamiento encargó al padre Julián González de Soto la creación del Colegio de Humanidades de la Villa que se transformaría poco años después en Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza (vid. Marqués y Sureda 1985; Ferrerós 2010).

Julián González de Soto

Julián González de Soto (1803-1864), presbítero de la Congregación de San Vicente de Paúl, fue un importante pedagogo que dirigió centros educativos en Madrid, Barcelona y Vitoria. Ejerció como docente en el Instituto de Girona y escribió diversos libros de texto. Asimismo, estuvo vinculado al desarrollo de la frenología (vid. (Marqués i Sureda 1985, Subirats et al. 1998).

El Colegio se inauguró el 1 de octubre de 1839 y, tal y como reza su Prospecto (González de Soto 1839), un breve opúsculo informativo sobre el futuro centro, el objetivo del Ayuntamiento, como el del propio González de Soto, era dotar a la ciudad de un Colegio propio que abrazara “todos los ramos de la enseñanza general que profesan los mejores colegios de Europa” para, entre otras cosas, evitar que los jóvenes hubieran de ir a estudiar a Francia. Las asignaturas que se impartían inicialmente aparecen recogidas en ese prospecto fundacional, dentro del marco de la denominada “Educación literaria”. Allí, repartidas en dos “series” o agrupaciones distintas, se encuentran las diversas materias lingüísticas: la primera serie –que incluye también el estudio de la Geografía y la Historia– se destina a los “Estudios de la lengua castellana”, mientras que la tercera serie se destina a “Lenguas” (principalmente, latín y francés, aunque el Prospecto también contempla la posibilidad de impartir griego clásico, inglés y alemán). La primera integra conocimientos básicos (alfabeto, silabario y lectura de prosa y verso), así como cursos de “Gramática castellana y su análisis. Tropos, ideología y gramática general. Lógica y su análisis. Retórica, pasiones y urbanidad. Elocuencia poética y declamación. Filosofía superior”.

Pese a esta disposición en cursos, parece que la introducción lingüística incluía la gramática castellana, nociones de gramática general, destinadas a que “los niños no hayan de aprender distintas definiciones en las gramáticas particulares” (1840a: portada) y análisis lógico, que constituían el paso previo al estudio filosófico. De hecho, González de Soto compuso tres tratados para esta primera serie: una gramática general (1840a), un tratado de análisis (1840b) y una gramática castellana (1842); los tres textos son, como vamos a ver, complementarios en diversas formas. Así, su Compendio de Gramática General se destina a servir de introducción “á las Gramáticas castellana, latina, francesa, italiana, é inglesa que se publicarán en breve” (1840a: 6).

González de Soto 1840a: Portada

El autor otorga a la gramática general un fin absolutamente propedéutico, alejado de la lógica y el análisis del pensamiento. De hecho, para el autor la gramática general es “la ciencia de las palabras sueltas y enlazadas” frente a la gramática de una lengua que es “el arte de hablar bien”. La habitual distinción entre gramática-ciencia (= gramática general) y gramática-arte (= gramática particular) (vid. Gómez Asencio 1981) no es operativa en el sistema de González de Soto, dado que su gramática general se aleja de las obras descriptivo-especulativas de raigambre filosófica (i.e. Hermosilla 1835); esto se aprecia perfectamente en la teoría que sustenta la obra que se mueve entre la adopción de términos y nociones procedentes de la gramática filosófica pero dislocados y simplificados.

En el Compendio de Gramática General el autor huye conscientemente de todos los aspectos que considera “farragosos” y admite haber suprimido de su tratado “cuantas cuestiones no ha podido entender”; de hecho, el prólogo es una clara crítica “a los que hablan jerigonza” e indica “porque jerigonza creo que son sus ideas” (1840a: 6). Entre esos hablantes de jerigonza cita un buen número de autores franceses, ingleses y alemanes:

Desde los enciclopedistas hasta acá se han llenado muchísimos volúmenes de Metafísica, Lógica, Gramática general, etc. Melabranche, Locke, Condillac, Tracy, Degerando, Reid, Stewart, Kant, Cousin, La Romiguiere, Tichte, Tennemann, Maistre, Bonald, Eckstein y que se yo cuantos otros, se han hilado los sesos en garlar; y después de haberlos leído con atención, me he quedado á corta diferencia como me estaba antes (1840a: 4-5).

No es la única crítica que hará; en una carta fechada en 1844 (publicada en Cubí y Soler 1848), habla de las “preciosas necedades” y de las “indigestas y aisladas doctrinas” de autores como Condillac, Destutt, Kant, Cousin, etc. (Cubí y Soler 1848: 523). El autor está en la línea de adaptación de la gramática general a las aulas de muchos otros autores posteriores (vid. Lépinette 2008 y García Folgado e. p.), quienes siguen las directrices que marca la ley en cuanto a contenidos, pero ven en las obras de referencia (principalmente, los tratados de Hermosilla y Destutt) un exceso de carga filosófica que puede ser compleja para los alumnos de segunda enseñanza. Asimismo, el grueso de estos autores, al igual que ocurre en el Colegio de Figueras, reinterpretan la gramática general como una introducción general al conocimiento gramatical (vid. García Folgado 2014 y e. p.).

Frente a la gramática general, el tratado de análisis se vincula de forma más clara con la lógica y la filosofía y, de hecho, tal y como estaba pensada la progresión de los estudios, primero los alumnos debían iniciarse en el estudio de la gramática general, luego el análisis y la síntesis y de ahí se pasaría a la Filosofía y la Elocuencia, por lo que se comprende que haya una progresión.

González de Soto 1840b: Portada

Por último cronológicamente, el manual de gramática castellana se destina al perfeccionamiento de esta lengua, a “hablar bien” (1842: 3) y, desde esa perspectiva, se entiende como contenido indispensable: los alumnos se iniciaban en su totalidad en los estudios de gramática castellana para, posteriormente, en función de sus aspiraciones profesionales, profundizar en mayor o menor medida en los diferentes contenidos de cada serie. En este sentido, las enseñanzas impartidas en el Colegio se caracterizaban por su practicidad “la educación” afirma González de Soto “ha de acomodarse á las ecsigencias [sic] legítimas del siglo en que vivimos” y “el sufrirse en hombres sólidamente formados, que no sepan espresarse con propiedad y gracia en castellano, y ni acaso estender una carta, no son cosas de nuestro siglo” (1839: 4 y 5). No hay ninguna referencia en el Prospecto ni en la Gramática castellana a la lengua catalana propia de la zona más allá de esa vaga indicación.

González de Soto 1842: Portada

Los tres tratados, desde sus diferentes objetivos particulares, conforman un conjunto de conocimientos necesarios para los alumnos y suponen una entrada al resto de los estudios. Desde esa perspectiva, y se conciben como textos complementarios: si en el Compendio de Gramática General se ofrecen definiciones acompañadas de breves ejemplos, en la Gramática Castellana se desarrolla de manera amplia la información, con cuadros sinópticos para cada categoría, ejemplos amplios y ejercicios diversos y, por último, en el Tratado se focaliza la atención en los aspectos analíticos. La gradación se da desde las explicaciones más vinculadas a lo lingüístico-gramatical, hacia definiciones que se aproximan a la filosofía gramatical.

Vamos a abordar, únicamente, la noción de ‘proposición’ y sus componentes para ejemplificar cómo se articulan los contenidos en cada tratado y cómo se gradúan en un camino que conduce desde la gramática hacia la filosofía.

En el Compendio de gramática general el autor no aborda el análisis de la unidad proposición entendida como juicio: se habla de discurso, proposición y cláusula, pero siempre desde una perspectiva gramatical, esto es qué elementos forman cada una y cómo se organizan jerárquicamente. Desde esta perspectiva, la proposición, entendida como “proposición gramatical” se define como “la concordancia de un sustantivo ó sustantivado con un verbo adjetivo ó adjetivado” (1840a: 42). En cambio, en la Gramática castellana, si bien se habla también de “proposición u oración gramatical” la definición se aproxima a la lógica al indicar que “es el conjunto de palabras, con que se espresa un pensamiento” (1842: 148). Por último, en el tratado de análisis sí considera la proposición en tanto que manifestación del juicio: “Proposición es el juicio que hacemos de una cosa, manifestado con palabras” (1840b: 1). La línea de menor a mayor logicismo entre la gramática general, la gramática castellana y el tratado de análisis se aprecia perfectamente al contrastar las definiciones ofrecidas por el autor en cada uno de estos manuales de los componentes de la proposición; así, en el Compendio de gramática general el sujeto se define como “La persona o cosa de quien se dice algo”, mientras que en la gramática castellana y el tratado de análisis se añade la referencia al juicio: “La persona o cosa de quien se juzga y dice algo” (1840b: 4 y 1842: 148) y de idéntica manera, para el atributo: en la gramática general es “lo que se dice del sujeto” (1840a: 42) y en las otras dos obras se define como “lo que se juzga o dice del sujeto” (1840b: 4 y 1842: 148).

En general, en el tratado de análisis y en la gramática castellana se abordan con mayor amplitud todos los aspectos relacionados con la proposición, mientras que en la Gramática general apenas se le destinan tres páginas dentro de la construcción. Así, por ejemplo, el autor se detiene en explicar los diferentes tipos de sujetos y atributos, así como las categorías que pueden realizar cada función. La diferencia fundamental entre el tratado de análisis y la gramática castellana se encuentra en la clasificación de las proposiciones, dado que la gramática incorpora una taxonomía basada en criterios puramente gramaticales como el tipo de verbo (proposiciones de verbo ser/de activa/de pasiva/impersonales…), o el tipo de conector que las antecede (de relativo/causales/finales…). De hecho, desde esa misma perspectiva, un aspecto a destacar, y que aleja a González de los autores inmediatamente posteriores es que no introduce en el tratado de análisis entre los elementos oracionales, ni siquiera como parte del atributo, los tipos de complementos. Esto es, para el autor, el atributo se compone de dos partes: “la primera la afirmación ó negación, y la segunda la cosa afirmada o negada” y añade “(la afirmación está siempre implícita en el verbo: y la negación se expresa con la partícula no antepuesta al verbo)” (1840b: 4). La clasificación posterior está en consonancia con la división que establece en la gramática general entre verbo sustantivo o simple “el que solo encierra la afirmación y la unión entre el actor y la cosa hecha” (1840a: 24) y verbo adjetivo o compuesto: “el que encierra al simple, y una parte de la cosa afirmada” (id.). González de Soto no habla de verbo en el tratado de análisis sino de afirmación porque elude de manera consciente las nociones gramaticales y por la misma razón no se detiene a examinar los diferentes tipos de complementos, ya que eso, en su programa, pertenece propiamente a la gramática, donde, de hecho, uno de los apartados de la sintaxis se destina, precisamente, a ellos. Desde esta perspectiva se evidencia la complementariedad de los manuales.

Para finalizar esta breve exposición, nos gustaría destacar que el Colegio de Figueras puede servir como ejemplo de la articulación de las disciplinas lingüísticas en los inicios de los Institutos de Segunda Enseñanza en el XIX en España: la gramática particular (significativamente, la castellana), la gramática general y el análisis lógico se disponen en un marco que va de la gramática a la filosofía y que persigue, en última instancia, preparar al individuo para ejercer conscientemente sus funciones en la sociedad.

Referencias bibliográficas:

Cubí y Soler, Mariano. 1848. Polémica religioso-frenolójico-magnética: sostenida ante el tribunal eclesiástico de Santiago… Barcelona: Imprenta de José Tauló.

Ferrerós, Joan. 2010. “L’Institut Ramon Muntaner”. Disponible en red: www.iesrm.net/historia/ [Consultada 10 de julio de 2015].

García Folgado, María José. 2014. “La gramática general y las enseñanzas lingüísticas (1812-1823)”. Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historiografía Lingüística, 9, 91-109. Disponible en red: http://www.sehl.es/uploads/1/2/0/4/12045009/014_garciafolgado.pdf

García Folgado, María José. E. p. “Del saber sabio al saber escolar: la gramática general en las aulas”.

Gómez Asencio, José J. 1981 . Gramática y categorías verbales en la tradición española (1771-1847). Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.

González de Soto, Julián. 1839. Prospecto del Colegio de Figueras fundado y dirigido por el Presbítero Don Julián González de Soto, Figueras: Gregorio Matas y de Bodallés.

González de Soto, Julián. 1840a. Compendio de gramática general: o sea introducción a las lenguas: para que los niños no hayan de aprender distintas definiciones en las gramáticas particulares / por D. Julián González de Soto, Figueras: Gregorio Matas.

González de Soto, Julián. 1840b. Tratado de la descomposición y composición de los periodos considerados por parte de los pensamientos que encierras: o sea del análisis y síntesis lógica, Figueras: Gregorio Matas y de Bodallés.

González de Soto, Julián. 1842. Gramática de la lengua castellana: con ejercicios graduados para alivio de maestros y discípulos y con todos los verbos regulares e irregulares / puestos por estenso por Julián Gonzalez de Soto, Figueras: Gregorio Matas y de Bodallés.

Gómez Hermosilla, José. 1835. Principios de gramática general, Madrid: Imprenta Real.

Lépinette, Brigitte. 2008. “La penetración del modelo gramatical ‘general’ de tipo escolar en España. Sus orígenes franceses (final del siglo XVIII y principio del XIX)”. Historiographia Lingüística, 35:3, 305-341.

Marqués i Sureda; salomó. 1985. “El col·legi d’Humanitats de Figueres (1839-45)”. Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins, 28, 381-410. Diponible en red : http://www.raco.cat/index.php/AnnalsGironins/article/view/53997/64419 [Consultada 15 de julio de 2015].

MEC (1979). Historia de la Educación en España: textos y documentos, vol. II. (De las Cortes de Cádiz a la Revolución de 1868), Madrid: Ministerio de Educación.

Berrio, Julio. 2008. “El Plan Pidal de 1845: Los institutos públicos, dinamizadores de las capitales de provincia”. CEE Participación Educativa, 7, marzo 2008, 28-38.

Subirats, Mercé; Corts, Ramón & Galtés, Joan. 1998. Diccionari d’història eclesiàstica de Catalunya, vol. 2. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya.

Swiggers, Pierre. 2012. “Historiografía de la gramaticografía didáctica: apuntes metodológicos con referencia a la (historia de la) gramática española y francesa”. En Vila Rubio, Neus (ed.). Lengua, literatura y educación en la España del siglo XX. Bern: Peter Lang/Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 15-38.

How to cite this post

García Folgado, María José. 2015. Las disciplinas lingüísticas en la España decimonónica: Julián González de Soto y el Colegio de Figueras (1839-1845). History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/09/02/las-disciplinas-linguisticas-en-la-espana-decimononica-julian-gonzalez-de-soto-y-el-colegio-de-figueras-1839-1845

Roxana Sarion
University of Tromsø, Norway

Matías Ruíz Blanco (1643-1705/1708?) was a Franciscan friar who served as a missionary, historian and linguist in colonial Venezuela. Born in the village of Estepa in the Spanish region of Andalusia, he was devoted from early youth to religious practice. He was most probably educated in the Convent of Grace. By the age of 23 he was already recognized as a teacher of philosophy at the Monastery of the Valley in the Province of Seville. In 1672, during the third Franciscan expedition to America, he was sent as new lector of philosophy and theology. He continued teaching until early 1675 when, together with other fourteen missionaries, he was sent to evangelize the indigenous people in the province of New Andalusia, Cumana, on the banks of the Orinoco river and in other parts of Southern Venezuela.

Johanes de Laet (Leiden, 1625) – Engraved map representing present-day North Eastern Venezuela territory with some Caribbean islands, which includes the mouth of the Orinoco river (courtesy of John Carter Brown online library)

He was therefore engaged in converting the Cumanagot, Chaima and Palenque indigenous peoples to Catholicism. He was elected superior of the missions of Piritu three times and in 1683 (as indicated in his works) he was made synodical examiner of the diocese of Puerto Rico and provincial commissioner of the San Francisco Order.

He most probably died at the end of his third and final prelacy, around 1708. In Antonio Caulín’s Historia corográfica, natal y evangélica de la Nueva Andalucia (1779) there is a different death year indicated. According to Caulín, he must have died in 1705, after having composed significant works related to the history of the indigenous peoples in the Province of Cumana: Manual para catequizar y administrar los santos sacramentos a los indios que habitan en las provincias de la Nueva Andalucía (Burgos, Juan de Viar, 1683) and Conversión de Píritu de indios cumanagotos, palenques y otros (Madrid, Juan Gracia Infançon, 1690).

Living amongst the Cumanagot and the Palenque peoples, Ruíz Blanco became a determined missionary, walking miles to take care of the spiritual and physical needs of his charges. He returned to Spain several times, where he acted as a representative of the missionaries in their attempts to ensure government support for the protection of indigenous people against the abuses of the Spanish colonists. He also took the risk of creating subversive discourses against the evangelization policies that ruled in the Americas, such as the canonical Third Provincial Council of Lima from 1582-83.

The main purpose of his missionary text Conversión de Píritu (1690) was both to engage and to guide prospective missionaries in the Province of Piritu, though he was very clear in respect to the dangers and struggles to be overcome. The final result was a hybrid text composed of five different sections, among which we can identify a historical introduction, the principles followed in the translation of Christian texts into indigenous languages, the precepts of the Decalogue and of the holy Church, a grammar of the Cumanagot language and a Spanish-Cumanagot vocabulary.

Matías Ruiz Blanco (Madrid, Juan García Infanzón, 1690) – Conversión en Píritu de indios cumanagotos y palenques, y otros (courtesy of John Carter Brown online library)

Translator proditor[1]

Although the initial goal was not to create linguistic artefacts, Spanish missionaries who arrived in America began to explore various linguistic adaptation strategies to find ways of overcoming the difficulties of translating religious terms that did not exist in the indigenous languages and to begin the evangelization process. To avoid confusions and misunderstandings regarding the religious concepts, some missionaries decided to introduce loans from Castilian (hispanismos), others employed as linguistic strategies literal translations (ad literam), while others opted for the use of neologisms or semantic use of substitutions and additions (ad sensum) and linguistic adaptation strategies.

Matías Ruíz Blanco’s philological awareness allowed him to translate the main prayers and the principles of Christian life into the indigenous languages in the Province of Cumana. He openly showed his disagreements with the translation guidelines imposed on the “New World” at that time by the 3^rd Council of Lima (1582-83) in the methodological handbook Epístola sobre la traducción, published in Doctrina cristiana y catecismo para instrucción de los indios y demás personas que han de ser enseñadas en nuestra fe (Anonimus, 1584).

He pleaded constantly for a different method of translating religious doctrine, in spite of the official guidelines. He stated his own approach to the indigenous languages and described his technique by arguing the advantages of his linguistic decisions, given the peculiarities of the language context in which he was working. Although at the beginning these comments were made in the prologues of his works or were inserted in between the lines of the catechetic texts, in Conversión de Píritu (1690) he dedicates a full chapter to evangelization practices and his translation principles, Práctica que hay en la enseñanza de los indios, con directivo para que los religiosos puedan cómodamente instruirse en las cosas esenciales de la religión cristiana.

In this theoretical study, Ruiz Blanco reviews his working methods and emphasizes his decision to translate Christian doctrine ad sensum by following San Jerome’s (347–420) principles expressed in De óptimo genere interpretandi, Carta 57, Ad Pammachium, and not by following the standard rules, word-by-word (ad literam). Ruíz Blanco explains that he tries to interpret the voices of the Castilian language with equivalent terms in the indigenous languages, starting from the meaning of the whole sentence (“phrasis”) and not only of isolated words:

[…] in one of the Councils of Lima there is a guideline for the translation of Christian doctrine, which [recommends that] when some terms in the languages of the Indians are missing, they must be replaced with others of the Spanish language; then it does not prevent from filling Castilian voices with those of any other language of the Indians […].

(Ruíz Blanco, 1690 – Práctica, Capítulo II, pag.171)[2]

In fact, Ruíz Blanco replies here to one of the precepts of the 3^rd Council of Lima. According to him, it is not sustainable to combine Castilian words with indigenous terms, knowing that none of the indigenous languages is formally equivalent to Spanish. He argues that in this way, it will never help the indigenous people to really understand the Christian doctrine:

[…] if the meaning of the word God is never offered in terms of their language, they may never become aware of its meaning, and consequently they cannot have faith in the first article which admits there is a Lord who is the Creator of all things. The same happens with the word Jesus Christ, which means to be Son of the Creator, together with Virgin Mary […]

(Ruíz Blanco, 1690 – Práctica, Capítulo III, pag.171)[3]

The affirmation of the authorial voice

Ruíz Blanco’s critical spirit led him to complain about the deviations of meaning in previous translations, the lack of precision in their terminology, which finally has led to a deviation in Christian doctrine itself. In his opinion, the translations of religious texts must adapt to the methodological needs of the audience for which they are designed, either friars or indigenous people:

[…] hence are the teachers whose doctrine is composed of artifice looking for applause and esteem rather than for the winning of souls; they work and disclose in vain and they belong to winds of vanity of the world, being swept away easily, and thus they spoil their studies and they do not take advantage of them, nor other people born in ignorance or experienced in Christian doctrine, and so little amend their vices, yet for this cause they grow more and more.[4]

The translation practice undertaken by this missionary is characterized by a commitment to the role of mediator that he played during the evangelization process. He is fully aware of his responsibility as translator-author of the religious works to be used within the Christianization activities.

Ruíz Blanco reveals a conception of the missionary translation project which, seen from a modern perspective, reveals itself as an epistemic (not only teaching) project, a discursive plan adapted to the characteristics of the indigenous community to which it was addressed. As it can be read in his works, he was involved in a relentless pursuit of a discursive identity through linguistic adaptation strategies within the idiosyncratic framework of the indigenous languages in the Province of Cumana.

Notes

[1] From Latin (translātor, ōris, m. transfero > one who carries or hands over, a translator; prōdĭtor, ōris, m. prodo > a betrayer, traitor) this expression means translator traitor and it refers to the “untranslatability” or the difficulty to reconstruct the “complete” meaning of the Christian doctrine into the indigenous languages.

[2] All the translations in the text are mine.

“[…] en uno de los concilios limenses hay precepto para que en la traducción de la doctrina cristiana, cuando falten términos de los lenguajes de los indios, se suplan con otros de la lengua castellana; luego no obsta la interposición de voces castellanas con las de cualquiera otro idioma de los indios […]”. (Ruíz Blanco, 1690 – Práctica, Capítulo II, pag.171)

[3] “[…] si lo que significa esta palabra Dios, nunca se les propone en términos de su lengua, tampoco podrán tener conocimiento de su significado, y consiguientemente no podrán tener Fe del primer articulo, que confiesa hay un Señor que es Criador de todas las cosas. Lo mismo digo de la palabra Jesucristo, cuyo significado es ser Hijo de este Criador, y juntamente de una Mujer Virgen […]”. (Ruíz Blanco, 1690 – Práctica, Capítulo III, pag.171)

[4] […] así son los maestros que su doctrina la componen de artificio mirando al aplauso y estimación más que al aprovechamiento de las almas; trabajan y se desvelan en vano y son del viento de la vanidad del mundo arrastrados con facilidad y así malogran sus estudios y con ellos no aprovechan á sí ni á los pueblos, de que nace tanta ignorancia como experimentamos de la doctrina cristiana y tan poca enmienda en los vicios, que van creciendo cada día más por esta causa. (Ruíz Blanco, 1690 – Práctica, pag.189)

References

Arellano, Fernando (1986) Una introducción a la Venezuela prehispánica: culturas de las naciones indígenas venezolanas. Caracas: UCAB

Bastín, G. L. and Pérez Arreaza, L. (2004) Las traducciones franciscanas en Venezuela: entre la práctica y la teoría. Histal: Université de Montréal. Canada.

Vega Cernuda, Miguel Ángel (2014) La Conversión de Piritú de Matías Ruiz Blanco, OFM, un texto híbrido de lingüística, traducción y etnografía. In-Traduções, Florianópolis, v. 6, n. p. 155-170.

How to cite this post

Sarion, Roxana. 2015. Translator proditor. The affirmation of the authorial voice in Matías Ruiz Blanco. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/09/30/translator-proditor-the-affirmation-of-the-authorial-voice-in-matias-ruiz-blanco

Jean-Michel Fortis
Université Paris Diderot

The motivation for writing this post is twofold: first, there is still something to be said about the origins of the notion of family resemblance and its application to semantics, most notably in the version of prototype theory which has gained currency in cognitive linguistics; second, exploring this genealogy puts us in a position to dispel an illusion. This is the illusion that cognitive semantics is an innovative approach, especially because it does away with the so-called “classical” conception of concepts as definable in terms of necessary and sufficient properties. My point is that a notion of prototype and family resemblance can be and was found in Aristotle’s thought, that is, in the tradition which is also the source of the classical conception; further, analyses similar in spirit to those of cognitive semantics have been put forward long before family resemblance was mobilized to justify them.

To start, let us go back to the sources of Rosch and the context in which family resemblance was exported to prototype theory (for more details, Fortis 2010).

Thanks to James McElvenny and Nick Riemer for their review and very useful remarks.

The sources of Rosch

As pointed out in Baker’s and Hacker’s commentary (2005), family resemblance was intended as an antidote to Wittgenstein’s first attempts at defining the essence of terms like ‘proposition’, or ‘language’ (see also Krüger 1994).

§§66-67 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are the locus classicus. Here is an abridged reminder of them:

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ” — but look and see whether there is anything common to them all. (…) And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances” [Familienähnlichkeiten]; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. — And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.
(2006 [1953]: 27-28)

Games being heterogeneous, language games are too; on this account, there is nothing common to all language games in virtue of which we call them so. The consequence, says Wittgenstein, is that “what we call “sentence” and “language” has not the formal unity that I imagined [i.e. in the Tractatus], but is the family of structures more or less related to one another” (2006 [1953], §108: 40).

Let us now turn to the role which was given by Rosch to the notion of family resemblance.

In the 1970s, Rosch was extending her prototype theory from “natural categories” (colors and shapes) to “semantic categories” (= lexical “concepts”), but, unlike natural categories, semantic categories could not be structured along a continuum of variations with peaks of typicality corresponding to prototypes. In other words, she needed for “semantic categories” a counterpart of this Gestalt-like “internal structure” of natural categories. This is where family resemblance entered the scene; it was introduced by Rosch in the following terms:

This principle was first suggested in philosophy; Wittgenstein (1953) argued that the referents of a word need not have common elements in order for the word to be understood and used in the normal functioning | of language. He suggested that, rather, a family resemblance might be what linked the various referents of a word. A family resemblance relationship consists of a set of items of the form AB, BC, CD, DE. That is, each item has at least one, and probably several, elements in common with one or more items, but no, or few, elements are common to all items.
(Rosch & Mervis 1975: 574-5)

Once it was established that semantic categories had a family resemblance structure, Rosch felt she needed an explanation for the formation of these categories, since their structure could not be due to perceptual principles. More precisely, three aspects of this structure had to be accounted for: 1) Why are semantic categories formed at all? 2) How can they be cohesive given that their members need not have features common to all? 3) How can the taxonomical organization of semantic categories be explained?

The answer to the first question was both probabilist and, in spirit, pragmatist: categories are formed because they are useful, and they are useful because they correspond to bundles of interpredictable attributes (e.g. what looks like an apple is also edible); interpredictability was measured by a probabilist index (cue validity, first proposed by the Viennese psychologist Egon Brunswik, 1903-1955). As for the second aspect, cohesiveness, it was “shown” that the degree to which members of a category resemble each other was higher than the degree to which they resemble members of contrastive categories (in fact, the demonstration was based on artificial categories of meaningless items, because it had turned out to be impossible to conduct the experiment with “semantic categories”); in this respect, of all members, a prototype could be defined as the one with the highest cue validity (Rosch & Mervis 1975: 602). Finally, the very existence of degrees of genericity (taxonomy) was not thoroughly justified, except for a level called “basic level”, which, explained Rosch, among other properties, was the level with the highest number of interpredictable attributes.

In short, family resemblance was incorporated into a probabilist theory which, unlike Wittgenstein, posited the existence of prototypical members and focused on taxonomical organization (a very “Aristotelian”, or Porphyrian concern, by the way, though Rosch’s inspiration was principally Berlin’s work on folk taxonomies).

The first cognitive linguists, who sought to enter fields left open by generative linguistics, from which they were disaffiliated, were, to a certain extent, cut off from the tradition of lexical semantics. They found that prototype theory was a handy tool for engaging in this line of research and especially for dealing with polysemy (on this transition, see Kleiber 1990); it should be noted, however, that they failed to take into account cue validity, and consequently tended to neglect the contrastive dimension of categories. As a consequence, prototype theory was essentially reduced to two tenets: there are central meanings, and meanings of polysemous words are linked by family resemblance. Note that by identifying prototypes with attested meanings (e.g. certain spatial relations in the case of prepositional meanings), cognitive linguists interpreted Roschian prototypes as members of a category. They were justified to do so insofar as Rosch & Mervis (1975) explicitly invited this interpretation. However, in other places, Rosch warned against this construal, speaking of prototypes as “grammatical fictions” resulting from the reification of judgments of typicality (Rosch 1978: 40).

To sum up, a simplified and reifying version of prototype theory served to reopen the field of lexical semantics, in an environment (American post-Bloomfieldian linguistics and generative linguistics) which showed little concern for it (but see Katz & Fodor 1963), or was to a large extent oblivious of the modern European tradition, still well alive for example in Ullmann’s book, The Principles of Semantics (1951), that is, shortly before the advent of generative linguistics.

Complexive groupings

The reference to Wittgenstein’s family resemblance should not eclipse another line of inquiry, which Rosch mentions in passing, and whose influence, therefore, is difficult to assess. I shall dwell on it a little, since this work does not seem to be very well known. I am alluding here to the following passage (Rosch & Mervis 1975: 602): “The principle of family resemblances in adult categories casts a new perspective on children’s classifications. Young children have been shown to classify objects or pictures by means of complexive classes, that is, classes in which items are related to each other by attributes not shared by all members of the class (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield, 1966; Vygotsky, 1962).” It is probable that Rosch, a former student at Harvard, where she wrote a dissertation on child psychology, had first-hand acquaintance with complexive classes through the work of Bruner, who was an authority on child development and was working in the same university. Now, Bruner himself had borrowed the notion from Vygotsky, which is duly acknowledged in Rosch’s references above. Note that Bruner may have influenced Rosch in other ways, for example in his pragmatist views on categorization (Fortis 2010).

A few words need be said on complexive classes. Their closest origin is the developmental theory of Heinz Werner, whom Vygotsky quotes on several occasions (1962; 1988 [1934]). For Werner (1933), complex states are undifferentiated psychological contents or acts which are grasped as total units. The most primitive complex states are intuitive groupings which give rise to collections organized according to Gestalt-like principles. Further, connections between objects are initially context-dependent, so that features linking objects can hardly be abstracted from the situation hic et nunc. Being subject to circumstances and merged into complex psychological units, these linking features cannot stabilize a word’s meaning, with the consequence that the child’s verbal concepts do not have the character of generic concepts subsuming clearly defined instances. Conceptual development requires that holistic and situation-dependent states be progressively differentiated into recurring features. Importantly, complex thinking is an inferior form of cognitive functioning, which is the hallmark of so-called Naturvölker, children and subjects suffering from mental disorders (esp. schizophrenia, agnosia and aphasia). Werner’s insistence on the feeble capacity of “primitive” people for abstraction, and his willingness to confirm his own prejudices with a perfunctory use of the literature are a most unpleasant aspect of the book.

As in Werner’s theory, in Vygotsky’s account complexive classes are characteristic of a stage in the cognitive development of the child. During this stage, objects are grouped together through attributes that may vary from one pair of associated items to the next. Classes thus formed may have various structures: they may be built around a nucleus, i.e. a central instance sharing at least one attribute with every member; they may comprise objects that are functionally related (like ‘fork’ and ‘plate’), or made up of elements chained together like the links of an associative chain, or even be unified by features that are themselves somewhat vague or diffuse. Since complexive classes are not based on consistently applied features, they are not yet “concepts”. Features criterial of a concept must be consistently singled out and, as it were, stabilized for concept formation to take off. But such stabilization is made possible, says Vygotsky, through language; and it is thanks to this verbal instrumentation (as Bruner was later to put it), in interaction with adults, that the child raises itself above this stage of erratic categorization.

Remarkably, of words as they are used by children when referring to complexive classes, Vygotsky says they are akin to family names, insofar as they connect objects by similarity without there being consistency in the features establishing this similarity. A last point deserves mention. Vygotsky notes that lexical semantic change is typically complexive, since it is generally the case that new meanings link up with older ones through features of a contingent and unpredictable nature.

In pursuing Vygotsky’s ideas on complexive classes and the role of language, Bruner, or so it seems to me, is faithful to his Russian precursor. His typology of complexive classes is close to that of Vygotsky (Bruner 1964; Bruner et al. 1966).

Obviously, for Rosch, complexive classes do not characterize an inferior stage of cognitive development. The family resemblance structure of semantic categories and their very cohesiveness ensure that Rosch’s complexive classes are not collections of straggling members contingently brought together under a name. In short, though they have a comparable structure, they are more tightly organized than Vygotsky’s complexive classes. And Rosch’s concern is not to explain how we get from complexive classes to bona fide concepts with clearcut boundaries.

Sketch of a partial genealogy

There is an abundant literature on the origins and interpretation of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance. To the best of my knowledge, the most comprehensive review can be found in Goeres (2000). As far as we know, the term first appeared in a remark on Spengler’s Decline of the West, in a passage where Wittgenstein compares the network of similiarities between Kulturperioden to those which exist between members of the same family and across different families (Wittgenstein 1977: 48; cf. Ferber 1991 on the relation to Spengler).

Roughly, we may say that the possible sources for the term (i.e. Familienähnlichkeit), that is, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Mauthner, do not have the best claim to having inspired the idea itself. The matter of the intellectual sources is further complicated by the fact that some authors, like Kries, consider that recollecting by resemblance is a property of a type of concept formation (i.e. synchytische Begriffsbildung) which can be considered independently of the use of language, while others, like Bühler, define such concepts with respect to their linguistic expression.

In what follows, I will focus on views which are related both to the Wittgensteinian idea of Familienähnlichkeit and to what became of it in cognitive semantics.

“Analogy”

At the beginning of Women, fire and dangerous things (1987: 18), we see Lakoff praising Austin (1961 [1940]) for having “prefigured much of contemporary cognitive semantics”, especially on account of Austin’s discussion of the polysemy of healthy. Let me reproduce Austin’s text as quoted by Lakoff:

The adjective ‘healthy’: when I talk of a healthy body, and again of a healthy complexion, of healthy exercise: the word is not just being used equivocally… there is what we may call a primary nuclear sense of ‘healthy’: the sense in which ‘healthy’ is used of a healthy body: I call this nuclear because it is ‘contained as a part’ in the other two senses which may be set out as ‘productive of healthy bodies’ and ‘resulting from a healthy body’… Now are we content to say that the exercise, the complexion, and the body are all called ‘healthy’ because they are similar? Such a remark cannot fail to be misleading. Why make it?

On Lakoff’s view, Austin’s primary nuclear sense would be a precursor of the notion of prototypical meaning. Readers acquainted with the philosophical tradition will have recognized in healthy the example Aristotle cites when he introduces a form of polysemy which he calls pros hen (i.e. said with respect to one ). The example occurs in a famous passage of the Metaphysics (Γ 2, 1003a33), in the context of a discussion of the polysemy of ‘be’, which, were it to be a case of genuine equivocality, would undermine the very enterprise of metaphysics. Now, Austin does acknowledge his debt in the above passage but Lakoff took care to suppress the mention of Aristotle in Austin’s text, perhaps because it would not have squared well with trumpeting the novelty of his own views.

For reasons that need not detain us here, in the case of ‘be’ and ‘healthy’, tradition has often spoken of analogy pros hen, or even of homonymy pros hen (see e.g. Porphyry in Sorabji 2005: 234-5) although Aristotle just speaks of pros hen kai mian phusin legesthai (‘be said relatively to one thing and one nature’), and certainly not of analogy nor homonymy. It is interesting to note that when Brentano (1862: 96) discusses this form of “analogy” (his word), he finds it apt to say that terms like healthy behave, with respect to what they refer to, like family names (Familiennamen) with respect to their referents; in other words, languages are often unspecific and designate with one and the same “name” things whose family resemblance stems from the fact that they are all related to a fundamental meaning.

The recognition of the phenomenon of polysemy by Aristotle is especially clear in his treatment of the Greek preposition en ‘in’, in Physics (209a15sqq). The passage enumerates the various meanings of en, of which the spatial meaning is singled out as “primary”:

1. a finger is in a hand (a part is in a whole)
2. a whole consists in parts
3. man is in animal (eidos en genei ‘species in genus’)
4. animal is in man (meros tou eidous en tôi tou eidous logôi ‘part of the form in the definition of the form’)
5. health in warm and cold things (to eidos en tèi hulèi ‘form in matter’)
6. the affairs of Greece lie in the King’s hands (en tôi prôtôi kinètikôi ‘in the first mover’ i.e. in the efficient cause)
7. [the motive to action is found] in the [expected] good (en tôi telei ‘in the goal’, i.e. in the final cause)
8. primary sense (kuriôtaton): ‘in a vessel’ and generally ‘in a place’.

Although Aristotle’s description is localist, since he regards the relation of spatial containment as primary, his localism is not justified on cognitive grounds. Rather, space is primary because, says Aristotle, “that without which nothing else can exist but which can exist without anything else is primary” (Physics 209a1-2). With this restriction in mind, the style of his analysis is reminiscent of the localist descriptions of prepositions of which cognitive semantics has given us so many illustrations.

To sum up, if Austin is a precursor of the notions of prototype and family resemblance, and even of cognitive semantics at large, then Aristotle is a precursor too. The claim that cognitive semantics goes against the philosophical tradition “from Aristotle to the later work of Wittgenstein” (Lakoff 1987: 6) should therefore be taken with a grain of salt.

Semantic analysis and semantic change

Baker and Hacker (2005) note that Wittgenstein was not the first philosopher to fight against this “craving for generality” (Wittgenstein 1958: 17) which manifests itself in the temptation to define concepts in terms of common properties shared by their instances. By way of illustration they cite Dugald Stewart’s essay On the Beautiful, in which Stewart condemns the prejudice “that when a word admits of a variety of significations, these different significations must all be species of the same genus; and must consequently include some essential idea common to every individual to which the generic term can be applied” (1816: 260). Instead, Stewart’s suggestion is to analyze the meaning of ‘beautiful’ as a chain of meanings linked together by successive generalizing steps.

Stewart, referring back to D’Alembert and his discussion of figurative meaning / meaning par extension, points to a line of thought which is connected with philosophy but has let its influence be felt also in lexicography and rhetoric. The connection which links up reflections about primary and derived meanings with philosophy is especially clear for texts which betray, I think, an influence of empiricist ideas. We see, for example, a number of authors (not necessarily proponents of empiricism), from Leibniz to Condillac, Harris and some linguists of the 19^th century defend localist analyses of prepositions and cases, i.e. analyses in which the primary function of prepositions and cases is that of expressing concrete, spatial relations (Fortis 2014). A quite common claim is that primary meanings are extended to more abstract meanings by metonymy, metaphor or some sorts of synesthesia or syncretic perception. In this respect, cognitive semantics is a continuation of this philosophically impregnated strand.

In several studies (esp. 1988, 2010), Geeraerts has drawn attention to similarities between modern cognitive semantics and the historical-philological tradition. This is not the place to expatiate on this subject, let it just be emphasized that in this tradition, somewhat artificially segregated from the one just mentioned, analyses by semantic chains have been practiced for a long time. The parallel with cognitive semantics goes even further. In La Vie des Mots, Darmesteter (e.g. 1887: 82-3) proposes diagrammatic representations of semantic change that may be taken as diachronic counterparts of the semantic networks which Lakoff, Brugmann and others made fashionable from the 1980s on. When nearly a hundred years after Darmesteter, Nunberg (1978) rummaged through these antiquated studies, he thought that something could be gleaned from them for synchronic analysis, or, to borrow his words “that the meaning-relations that held between new and old uses of words were very like the meaning-relations that hold synchronically among the psenses [= particular uses of words] of polysemous words…” This was not to say that the ghostly presence of the etymon still made itself felt, as had been sometimes speculated. Rather the notion that central and derived meanings are linked by associations, analogies, metaphors etc. could be applied to synchronic analysis. Note, however, that Nunberg had qualms about the possibility of identifying a central meaning in every instance (Nunberg 1979). At any rate, since Lakoff read Nunberg, an influence of Darmesteter cannot be ruled out.

What is the conclusion, or perhaps the lesson, to be drawn from this discussion? We should not speak purely and simply of “rediscovery” nor lament the amnesia of linguists. First, the reintroduction of ideas of yore fulfilled a strategic goal, that of finding a niche for practitioners who had broken up with generative linguistics. Old and venerable ideas are especially well-suited to pursuing this aim: their distant but unmistakable familiarity lends them credence and makes them easier to adopt. Second, ideas of the philosophical, rhetorical and philological tradition did get transmitted after all, although the depth of their roots was probably underestimated and distant sources were sometimes forgotten or downplayed, or dissimulated. However, for the next generation, trained after the emergence of cognitive semantics, there is a risk that the reinvention of the wheel be taken as a breakthrough.

References

Aristotle. 1933. Metaphysics (tr. by H. Tredennick). Cambridge (Mass.) / London, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann Ltd.

Aristotle. 1957. The Physics (tr. by P.M. Wicksteed & F.M. Cornford). Cambridge (Mass.) / London, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann Ltd.

Austin, John L. 1961 [1940]. The meaning of a word. The Moral Sciences Club of the University of Cambridge and the Jowett Society of the University of Oxford. In Philosophical Papers, 1961, James O. Urmson and Geoffrey J. Warnock (eds.). Oxford: Clarendon Press: 55-75.

Baker, Gordon P. & Hacker, Peter M. S. 2005. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Part I: Essays (vol. 1 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations). Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

Brentano, Franz. 1816. Von der Mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg im Breisgau, Herdersche Verlagshandlung.

Bruner, Jerome S. 1964. The course of cognitive growth. American Psychologist 19(1): 1-15.

Bruner, Jerome S., Olver, Rose, Greenfield, Patricia et al. 1966. Sudies in Cognitive Growth. New York, Wiley.

Darmesteter, Arsène. 1887. La Vie des Mots Etudiée dans leurs Significations. Paris, Librairie Charles Delagrave.

Ferber, Rafael. 1991. Wittgenstein und Spengler. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 73: 188-207.

Fortis, Jean-Michel. 2010. De l’hypothèse de Sapir-Whorf au prototype: sources et genèse de la théorie d’Eleanor Rosch, Corela: http://corela.revues.org/1243

Fortis, Jean-Michel. 2014. Localisme et théorie des cas. In S. Archaimbault, J.-M. Fournier & V. Raby (ed.), Penser l’Histoire des Savoirs Linguistiques. Etudes Epistémologiques, Historiques et Linguistiques en Hommage à Sylvain Auroux, Lyon, ENS Editions: 75-85.

Geeraerts, Dirk, 1988. Cognitive grammar and the history of lexical semantics, in B. Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 647-677.

Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of Lexical Semantics, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Goeres, Ralf. 2000. Die Entwicklung der Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Logikkonzeptionen. Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann.

Katz, Jerrold J. & Fodor, Jerry A. 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Language, 39(2): 170-210.

Kleiber, Georges. 1990. La Sémantique du Prototype. Catégories et Sens Lexical. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Krüger, Wilhelm. 1994. Ähnlichkeiten und Analogien – Diachronische Bemerkungen zur Entstehung des Wittgensteinschen Begriffs der Familienähnlichkeit. Wittgenstein Studien, 1 (2).

Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Nunberg, Geoffrey D. 1978. The Pragmatics of Reference. Bloomington, The Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1979. The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy 3: 143-184.

Rosch, Eleanor & Mervis, Carolyn B. 1975. Family resemblances: studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7: 573-605.

Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Rosch, Eleanor & Lloyd, Barbara B. (ed.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 27-48.

Sorabji, Richard. 2005. The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200-600 AD. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

Stewart, Dugald. 1816. Philosophical Essays (2^nd edition). Edinburgh, Archibald Constable.

Ullmann, Stephen. 1951. The Principles of Semantics. Glasgow, Jackson, Son & Company.

Vygotsky, Lev S. 1962. Thought and Language. Cambridge (Mass.), M.I.T. Press.

Vygotsky, Lev S.. 1988 [1934]. An experimental study of concept development. In Vygotsky, Lev S., The Collected Works. Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology, including the volume Thinking and Speech, Rieber, Robert W. & Carton, Aaron S. (ed.), New York, Plenum Press.

Werner, Heinz. 1933. Einführung in die Entwicklungspsychologie. Leipzig, Johann Ambrosius Barth.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1977. Vermischte Bemerkungen. Eine Auswahl aus dem Nachlaß. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2006 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.

How to cite this post

Fortis, Jean-Michel. 2015. Family resemblance and semantics: the vagaries of a not so new concept. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/10/13/family-resemblance-and-semantics-the-vagaries-of-a-not-so-new-concept

Andrew Linn
University of Sheffield

Several new journals of the late 1870s (Englische studien, Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie and the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie) gave the linguistics of the modern languages the means for their proponents to talk to each other in a scholarly forum as the modern languages established themselves as university disciplines. One of the key outlets for this ‘new philology’ was the slightly later arrival on the scene, Phonetische studien [Phonetic studies]. This was very much the preferred organ of the Reform Movement in language teaching (for more on the Reform Movement, see Howatt and Smith 2002). It also rapidly became the principal discourse forum for the wider community of predominantly younger scholars, working both within and outside universities, inspired by the opportunities for new forms of applied language work offered by the new science of phonetics (for more on this ‘discourse community’, see Linn 2008).

Phonetische studien (it did not adopt upper-case letters word-initially in nouns) first appeared in 1888 with the subtitle Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und praktische phonetik mit besonderer rücksicht auf den unterricht in der aussprache [Journal of scientific and practical phonetics with particular emphasis on the teaching of pronunciation]. The title was a work in progress, as we shall see in due course, and its fluidity tells us much about the journal and the community it served. The style of the title was clearly calqued on that of the earlier journals, and it served to position the newcomer amongst them as a serious contribution to the philological literature. By the 1880s journals had come to “represent the most important single source of information for the scientific research community” (Meadows 1979: 1) and any self-respecting scholarly endeavour needed one to give it credibility as well as serving “to create and solidify a bonding sense of community for scholars who might otherwise have remained isolated individuals or small cadres” (Christie 1990: 17). The 1886 meeting of Scandinavian philologists in Stockholm, attended by Paul Passy (1859-1940) in the year in which he founded the Phonetic Teachers Association, had resulted in the establishment of the four key principles of language teaching reform (see Linn 2002). This, and the other philologists’ conferences which were by now a regular fixture in the annual calendar, must have been an invigorating and empowering experience for the phonetically minded language teaching reformers, and the new journal was a way of keeping the community together and focused. Regular reports on efforts to put reform measures into practice provided a source of encouragement to those who felt themselves to be lone voices in a chorus of traditional methods. However, those lone voices were joining forces rapidly to form a new chorus of reforming zeal. Writing in 1893, and looking back over the previous years, the German reform pioneer Wilhelm Viëtor (1850-1918) charts the dramatic development of this community of scholars and teachers dedicated to applying the insights of phonetics to language teaching reform. He notes that “this rather insignificant germ of reform literature has meanwhile grown to very considerable dimensions” (1893: 353) and that the community is coming together in significant numbers:

The … Verband der Neuphilologen Deutschlands now numbers about one thousand members, and may be said to be thoroughly representative…Between five and six hundred modern language teachers of different countries have joined [the Phonetic Teachers’ Association] (354)

The editor of Phonetische studien was Wilhelm Viëtor himself, “the main initiator of the late 19^th century Reform Movement” (Smith 2007), its primus motor via his famous reform pamphlet (Quousque Tandem 1882), but the involvement of the whole community is clear from the title page on which the members of the editorial board are listed. Volume 1 was published ‘unter mitwirkung von’ [with the collaboration of] fifty-one leading names in the interlinked fields of phonetics and language teaching, although the fifty one were evidently only the most noteworthy, as the list concludes “u.a.” [amongst others]. The group numbers 77 “u.a.” in volume 2 and this is an ever-growing army of supporters such that the list is replaced from volume 3 by the statement “unter mitwirkung zahlreicher fachgenossen” [with the collaboration of numerous colleagues]. Amongst the list of names are those of Henry Sweet (1845-1912), Johan Storm (1836-1920), Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), the Swedish Slavist Johan August Lundell (1851-1940) and the Norwegian teacher and grammarian, August Western (1856-1940), as well as eminences grises of the older generation of phonetics such as Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905) and A. J. Ellis (1814-1890). The new journal is by the community for the community and crucially shows itself to have the authority to take on this role.

It was not unusual for new journals to open with a ‘manifesto’, setting out the agenda for the new publication, siting it within the market and clarifying what readers could expect. Phonetische studien doesn’t open with a statement by the editor but with an article from the pen of one of the first to hold a university position in phonetics and the architect of the teaching reform principles elaborated at the 1886 Stockholm meeting, J. A. Lundell. It is, however, a rhetorically daring manifesto for the new journal and the ambitions of the community it served.

Lundell’s enthusiasm and his sense of being involved in a paradigm shift are palpable. His manifesto, with the seemingly innocuous tile ‘Die phonetik als universitätsfach’ [Phonetics as a university subject] opens with a clear statement of that shift. The article starts with quotations from William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) and from Sweet, predicting a bright phonetic future and immediately marshalling two of the leading linguists on either side of the Atlantic to the cause:

[Phonetics] will also become by itself a definite science, or department of study, having its close and important relations to physiology and acoustics, as well as to philology. Whitney 1875.

I have little doubt that before many years there will be professors of phonetics and elocution at many of the Continental universities. Sweet 1882. (Lundell 1888: 1)

With these giants looking forward, Lundell immediately looks back to the previous generations, to Bopp, Grimm and Schleicher, as ‘yesterday’s men’. His enthusiasm for what phonetics can achieve is almost unbounded. He makes the case for the role of phonetic insights in historical-comparative language study, but he also maintains that phonetics will revolutionize orthographies, the teaching of reading, the education of the deaf and dumb [die taubstummenbildung], speech pathology, the study of metrics, rhetoric and the art of singing. As if this list of beneficiaries from the science of phonetics isn’t long enough, he finally erupts: “Also auch hier mehr phonetik!” (p. 6).

While Lundell’s manifesto is a clarion call for the increased study of phonetics, as might well be expected at the start of a publication entitled Phonetische studien, reform in language teaching is the focus of many of the articles and reports which fill the pages of the early volumes. In fact it feels as though the journal can’t quite make up its mind what its role is, as witnessed by the constantly changing title in those first volumes. The constantly changing title is indicative of a community in a hurry, acting first and then thinking later, wanting to get on with what they believed to be important reforms. The first volume of 1888 was entitled Phonetische studien. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und praktische phonetik mit besonderer rücksicht auf den unterricht in der aussprache. So, to begin with phonetics was in the foreground with the teaching of pronunciation listed as a particular focus. The titles of subsequent volumes are as follows. Volume 2 is Phonetische studien. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und praktische phonetik mit besonderer rücksicht auf die phonetische reform des sprachunterrichts, such that it is not only the teaching of pronunciation that is in the spotlight now but reform in language teaching more broadly. Volume 3 is Phonetische studien. Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und praktische phonetik mit besonderer rücksicht auf die REFORM des sprachunterrichts, the phonetic element of the reform being no longer specified but with reform upgraded via the use of upper case letters; reform has now become more overtly visible. Volume 7 is effectively Volume 1 of Die neueren sprachen. Zeitschrift für den neusprachlichen unterricht mit dem beiblatt Phonetische Studien, so by 1893 phonetics has drifted into the background, with the former journal described as a “beiblatt” [an insert]. Volume 6 of Die neueren sprachen (1899) simply describes itself as a “fortsetzung [continuation] der phonetischen studien” and by the new century the rhetorical shift is complete, from a journal of phonetic studies to a journal of modern language teaching, appearing in 10 annual instalments. On the front of volume 10 for 1902/1903 phonetic studies are no longer mentioned at all.

Another manifestation of the immediacy of the work is the fact that reviews and replies to those reviews could appear in the same volume. The discourse is ongoing. In volume 1 Willem Sijbrand Logeman of Newton School, Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, and subsequently professor of modern languages at the South African College (later the University of Cape Town), published a series of “remarks” on Passy’s views on the phonetics of French in June 1887, and these were immediately followed by Passy’s response of August 1887. This exchange was good-natured, although Logeman did take the opportunity to have a swipe at the “enthusiasm for dealing with ‘living realities’” (Logeman 1888: 170) and the opinion of Western and others that teachers should teach their own dialect:

Would Mr Western like a Lancashire or Dorsetshire man to teach the dialect of his county as “English”? or that of Alsace or say dep. Puy de Dôme as French? (Logeman 1888: 170)

Logeman was a future professor and a textbook author, so it would be wrong to characterize this sort of disagreement as one between scholars and practitioners, but the roster of contributors is one which doesn’t discriminate between academic linguists and those dealing with language matters from a practical point of view. One of the strengths of the Reform Movement, I maintain (see Linn 2011), was precisely that practice and theory were undifferentiated; there was just the ‘living language’. This was a journal of “wissenschaftliche und praktische phonetik” [scientific and practical phonetics].

However, given the immediacy of response in this discourse community, real arguments could blow up, as when R. M‘Lintock of Liverpool published a review of Sweet’s Elementarbuch des gesprochenen englisch in volume 2 of Phonetische studien in which he objected in the strongest possible terms to Sweet’s version of London English, “wie er in gebildeten kreisen gesprochen wird” [as it is spoken in educated milieus] (Sweet 1885: iii). For M‘Lintock this was a variety which “the cultured—and even the half-cultured—of three fourths of the kingdom can scarcely hear without a feeling of somewhat scornful displeasure tempered with amusement at the curious combination of (apparent) mincing affectation and (real) slovenliness displayed by it” (M‘Lintock 1889: 212). Sweet’s ‘Reply to Mr Maclintock’s Review’ [note the misspelling of his surname] was characteristically explosive:

Mr M‘Lintock’s review … shows such utter and complacent ignorance of the elements of phonetics and philology, and involves so many gross misunderstandings of plain statements in my book that I shall not stop to discuss details, but content myself with a few general remarks. (Sweet 1890: 114).

M‘Lintock’s mournful response, published straight afterwards, notes that, regarding the “prejudices” of which Sweet accuses him, he has “no interest in them whatsoever” (M‘Lintock 1890: 115). (R. J. Lloyd (1846-1906) would later (Lloyd 1895: 52) recommend that the student of English should “choose a sound via media, and speak an English which will be recognised as pure and good everywhere”!) Academic fights make for amusing reading, but there are some serious points here about the nature of the discourse community as it talks to itself in the journal: it brought all those committed to the ‘living language’ together, regardless of their status or views; it was one of immediacy, of ‘speak now and worry about the consequences later’; it was made up of passionate people for whom language was something important.

Phonetische studien was more than just a signal that an applied lnguistics had come of age. It had a title which placed it alongside the other serious philological journals and it had an extensive international editorial board to give its contents the necessary imprimatur. From the historiographical point of view it allows us to see the Reform Movement in operation, to hear its voice. That voice is one of urgency and enthusiasm, exemplified above all in the ever-changing title but also in the way in which debate is actively taking place in its pages. This is no dry academic publication, but rather a hot-house of impassioned views about the importance of phonetics and the need for a revolution in language teaching based on the study and application of phonetics. Given this, it is noteworthy how quickly phonetics slips into the background in terms of how the journal presents itself. Scientific journals had become specialized fora, and another journal for phonetics was established at the same time. In May 1886 the first issue of Dhi Fonètik Tîtcer was published by Dhi Fonètik Tîtcerz’ Asóciécon as the brainchild of Passy (MacMahon 1986). This journal also underwent a name change, becoming le maître phonétique in 1889 before later morphing in 1970 into the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. The 1880s were heady times, and the air of excitement, infecting those within and beyond academia, the sense that language learning is important, is one that we would do well to try to recapture today.

This post is adapted from:

Linn, Andrew. forthcoming 2016. Modern foreign language teachers get a voice. The role of the journals. In: Nicola McLelland and Richard Smith (eds.), The History of Language Learning and Teaching II: 19th-20th Century Europe. Oxford: Legenda.

References

Christie, John R. R. 1990. The Development of the Historiography of Science. In: R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie and M. J. S. Hodge, eds. Companion to the History of Modern Science. London and New York: Routledge, 5-22.

Howatt, A. P. R. & Smith, Richard C., eds. 2002. Modern Language Teaching: The Reform Movement. 5 vols. London: Routledge.

Linn, Andrew R. 2002. Quousque Tandem. Language-Teaching Reform in 19th-Century Scandinavia. The Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 38: 34-42.

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Linn, Andrew R. 2011. Impact: Linguistics in the Real World. Histoire Epistémologie Langage 33(1): 15-27.

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How to cite this post

Linn, Andrew. 2015. Phonetische studien — applied linguistics gets its first journal. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/10/28/phonetische-studien-applied-linguistics-gets-its-first-journal

Sébastien Moret
Université de Tartu / Université de Lausanne

L’année 2015 marque le centième anniversaire des tragiques événements que subirent les populations arméniennes de l’empire ottoman en 1915[1], événements auxquels la quasi-totalité de la communauté internationale attribue le terme de génocide. A cette occasion, l’année a vu se succéder toute une série de manifestations souvent symboliques. Ainsi, le 12 avril, lors d’une messe en l’honneur des Arméniens en la basilique Saint-Pierre de Rome, le pape François utilisa publiquement pour la première fois le terme génocide, donnant ainsi un cadre solennel et retentissant à la réitération de la reconnaissance par le Vatican du caractère génocidaire des massacres[2] ; quelques jours après, c’étaient les députés du Parlement européen qui avaient, à leur tour, réaffirmé la reconnaissance du génocide[3], lui adjoignant un hommage rendu aux victimes arméniennes et l’idée d’une journée internationale de commémoration des génocides « afin de réaffirmer le droit de tous les peuples et de toutes les nations du monde à la paix et à la dignité »[4].

A côté de ces manifestations « politiques », il faut mentionner aussi toute une série d’importantes manifestations scientifiques, publications ou colloques, souhaitant revenir sur ces événements[5]. Parmi ces dernières, nous en mentionnerons quelques-unes : l’ouvrage de Vincent Duclert (2015) sur La France face au génocide des Arméniens ; le colloque international « Le génocide des Arméniens de l’Empire ottoman dans la Grande Guerre 1915-2015 : cent ans de recherche » tenu à Paris en mars 2015 et dont les Actes ont déjà paru (Becker et al. 2015) ; enfin le livre du journaliste allemand Jürgen Gottschlich (2015) qui revient sur le rôle des Allemands dans les massacres.

Dans le cadre de ces quelques lignes, nous aimerions aussi revenir sur ces événements, mais en les appréhendant du point de vue de celui qui était à ce moment-là en Europe certainement « le meilleur connaisseur du domaine [arménien] parmi les linguistes occidentaux » (Lamberterie 2006, p. 161), celui qui avait à deux reprises déjà (en 1891 et en 1903) visité les territoires arméniens de Russie et de l’empire ottoman (Gandon 2014b, p. 27-33), celui enfin vers lequel, alors « maître incontesté » (Lamberterie 2006, p. 162) et spécialiste adoubé (ibid., p. 152), se tournaient non seulement ses collègues philologues et linguistes (ibid., p. 155), mais aussi les hommes politiques[6] quand il s’agissait de problèmes arméniens, à savoir Antoine Meillet (1866-1936).

Né à Moulins, spécialiste de presque toutes les langues du domaine indo-européen (mais, répétons-le, surtout de l’arménien[7]), professeur au Collège de France et à l’Ecole pratique des hautes études, couvert d’honneurs en France comme à l’étranger (Vendryes 1937, p. 12-13), Meillet avait aussi été un homme de son temps, pour qui « rien de ce qui [était] moderne [n’était] étranger » (Lefèvre 1925, p. 31). Plusieurs de ses publications témoignent de cet intérêt pour l’actualité, le plus célèbre exemple demeurant les deux éditions de ses Langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Meillet 1918a et 1928), ouvrage qui, à l’en croire, n’aurait pas été écrit « sans les événements actuels » (Meillet 1918a, p. 7). Cette contribution fournira d’autres exemples de publications ancrées dans leur temps.

Les travaux arménologiques de Meillet, mais aussi ses voyages et ses activités « philarmène[s] » (Lamberterie 2006, p. 183) ont déjà attiré l’attention de quelques chercheurs (Fryba-Reber 2006 ; Gandon 2014a, ou Lamberterie 2006), mais aucune recherche ne s’est pour le moment intéressée en détail à ce que Meillet avait dit des événements d’Arménie de 1915 ; de plus, nous allons proposer une étude basée sur une bibliographie de Meillet fortement complétée, grâce notamment aux recherches de Jean Loicq (2006) qui ont permis de faire ressurgir des textes longtemps ignorés, et notamment des textes publiés pendant la guerre (souvent anonymement) dans le Bulletin de l’Alliance française (Meillet 1915a et 1916). Nous aurons l’occasion de voir comment ces massacres ont pu servir de révélateur à certaines idées de Meillet. Plus généralement, il sera aussi question de son rapport et de ses conceptions quant à l’avenir de l’Arménie après la Première guerre mondiale.

Très rapidement après les rafles, dès la nuit du 24 au 25 avril 1915, des intellectuels arméniens de Constantinople, rafles qui marquent le début de ce qui aboutira à une extermination systématique des populations arméniennes de l’empire ottoman, les chancelleries occidentales sont au courant des massacres. En témoigne, le 24 mai 1915, la déclaration commune de la France, de la Russie et de la Grande-Bretagne :

« Depuis un mois environ, la population kurde et turque de l’Arménie procède de connivence et souvent avec l’aide des autorités ottomanes à des massacres des Arméniens. […]

En présence de ces nouveaux crimes de la Turquie contre l’humanité et la civilisation, les gouvernements alliés font savoir publiquement à la Sublime-Porte qu’ils en tiendront personnellement responsables desdits crimes tous les membres du gouvernement ottoman ainsi que ceux de ses agents qui se trouveraient impliqués dans de pareils massacres. » (Texte reproduit dans Duclert 2015, p. 58)[8]

Les journaux européens et américains reprennent l’information (Duclert 2015, p. 630, n. 17), mais ce n’est que quelques mois plus tard que des articles rendent compte des exactions et des atrocités grâce, notamment, aux correspondants de guerre sur le front de l’Est de certains journaux français ou américains (ibid., p. 217-218). Des informations sont dont relativement rapidement disponibles, et Meillet en parlera dans deux articles parus anonymement dans le Bulletin de l’Alliance française. Le premier de ces articles, intitulé « L’extermination des Arméniens » (Meillet 1915a), paraît dans le numéro du 1^er novembre 1915. Meillet n’y commente rien, il raconte « [l]a misère et le désespoir des Arméniens [qui] vont croissants [sic] », la « persécution » qui sévit « [d]ans toute l’Asie mineure » (ibid., p. 109). Il raconte les « arrestations en masse des hommes les plus en vue », les exécutions « sans jugement », les déportations avec des « femmes traînant leurs enfants après elles et les perdant en route ou les jetant dans des rivières », avec des « vieillards succombant à la fatigue, sans nourriture, poussés en avant à coups de bâton et de baïonnette », il raconte ce « marché aux esclaves » où les « Turcs [se] pourvoyaient de femmes et d’enfants » (ibid., p. 110). Puis ce sont des hommes précipités dans le fleuve, des Turcs qui partent « à cheval à la chasse des Arméniens qui s’étaient sauvés dans la montagne », des bateaux rentrant « à vide, la cargaison [ayant] été massacrée et jetée à la mer » (ibid.). Il y a aussi ces Arméniens qui avaient résisté aux conditions des déportations, « en haillons, sales, affamés, malades », ces « mères qui offraient leurs enfants à qui voulait les prendre », ces « jeunes filles que les Turcs voulaient garder chez eux », ou ceux qui « se jetèrent sur le foin qu’on leur donna comme à des bêtes » (ibid., p. 111). « Comme à des bêtes ». Avec le titre de l’article (« L’extermination des Arméniens ») et des expressions comme « terribles violences » ou « de la façon la plus effroyable » (ibid.), ce sont là les quelques traces de la présence de Meillet dans cet article essentiellement descriptif[9] qui se termine de façon abrupte :

« Tout essai de résistance, bientôt réprimé par des forces supérieures, ne sert qu’à provoquer un massacre plus général encore, ainsi que cela est arrivé par places, entre autres dans le Nord, à Schabin Karahissar, et dans le Sud, près de Marasch, au village de Foundajak, qui a été réduit en cendres. » (ibid.)

Quelques mois plus tard, dans le numéro du 1^er mars 1916 de ce même Bulletin de l’Alliance française, Meillet fera paraître, là aussi anonymement, un second article sur « Les massacres d’Arménie » (Meillet 1916). Cette fois, le ton est beaucoup moins neutre, puisque l’article affirme que le « massacre en masse de l’été et de l’automne derniers […] s’est accompli sous les yeux et avec l’approbation de fonctionnaires allemands qui étaient sur les lieux, même, en certains cas, avec leur concours actif », alors que « la diplomatie allemande détournait les yeux et refusait de faire aucune représentation » (ibid., p. 47-48) :

« On ne peut pas prétendre sérieusement que les Allemands […] ignoraient les desseins des Turcs. Huit jours avant le massacre à Erzindjian, le directeur allemand de l’hôpital militaire informa les trois infirmières allemandes qui étaient sous ses ordres que le Gouvernement turc avait l’intention d’exterminer les Arméniens, et les pria de ne pas s’alarmer des scènes déchirantes dont elles allaient être témoins.

La part des Allemands dans le butin semble avoir été stipulée à l’avance. Après la déportation des Arméniens, le mobilier et les autres objets trouvés dans leurs maisons furent vendus aux enchères ; des pianos, dit-on, semblaient chers à 50 piastres (un peu plus de 10 francs). Mais tous les ustensiles de cuivre furent soigneusement recueillis, et envoyés à des adresses allemandes à Constantinople. » (ibid., p. 48)

Cet article de Meillet fait état de la présence dans l’empire ottoman d’un certain nombre d’Allemands ; rappelons ici à ce propos que dans le dernier quart du XIX^e siècle un rapprochement avait eu lieu entre l’empire allemand et la Sublime Porte (notamment pour contrecarrer les ambitions russes et françaises dans les Balkans et au Levant), avec l’envoi de capitaux, mais aussi d’ingénieurs et de conseillers militaires (Duclert 2015, p. 141).

Cet article de Meillet doit aussi être remis dans son contexte, celui de la Première guerre mondiale. C’est le conflit avec l’ennemi de toujours, l’Allemagne, et durant ces années nombreux furent les écrits à vouloir mettre en avant la « barbarie intrinsèque » (Audoin-Rouzeau & Becker, 2000, p. 264) du peuple allemand, que l’on aimait à considérer « comme le produit naturel d’une culture qui n’avait au fond jamais dominé que par la force » (Prochasson & Rasmussen, 1996, p. 283). Signalons encore que Meillet, en 1918, toujours dans le Bulletin de l’Alliance française, pointera à nouveau son doigt sur les responsabilités allemandes. En plus du reproche moral répété que les Allemands savaient mais n’ont rien fait (« Les autorités allemandes ont connu ces massacres ; elles n’ont pas protesté. » [Meillet 1918b, p. 3]), Meillet y adjoint l’idée d’une sorte de responsabilité technique et opérationnelle : « Et depuis que le Gouvernement jeune-turc s’est allié aux empires du Centre et que les Allemands lui ont enseigné l’organisation, il a, en 1915, organisé, avec une science nouvelle, la destruction des Arméniens » (ibid.). Avec le recul de l’histoire, ces quelques lignes qui mettent ensemble « organisation » allemande, « science nouvelle » et « destruction » d’un groupe ne manquent pas d’interpeller : un peu plus de vingt ans avant, elles renvoient le lecteur contemporain au deuxième génocide du siècle, dont la réalisation apparaît, pour certains historiens, en lien plus ou moins direct avec celui des Arméniens[10].

Ce sont là, à notre connaissance, les deux seuls écrits de Meillet directement consacrés aux massacres d’Arménie de l’année 1915. Mais ces événements réapparaîtront dans d’autres textes, que nous allons maintenant analyser.

Si l’on peut considérer Meillet commet un homme de son temps parce qu’il se tenait au courant de l’évolution du monde dans lequel il vivait, il l’était aussi par son rapport à la colonisation, considérée à cette époque encore comme un phénomène licite et ne soulevant pas de contestations généralisées :

« Les nations européennes, au moins dans les circonstances actuelles, ont des colonies parce qu’elles sont les seules en mesure de porter les pays africains et une part des pays asiatiques au niveau de la civilisation moderne et d’en tirer parti. » (Meillet, 1919a, p. 14-15)

Meillet, en phase avec son époque, adjoint au processus colonial, la notion de « civilisation » : c’est la valeur de leur civilisation qui donne aux « populations européennes » le « droit […] de [la] répandre […] dans le monde » (Meillet 1919c, p. 7). Nous sommes donc en présence d’une représentation hiérarchisante des diversités humaines. C’est là un discours typique de ces années-là et nous n’avons aucune raison d’en tenir rigueur à Meillet. Si, comme nous l’avons déjà vu, les massacres de 1915 auront été l’occasion de démontrer la « barbarie » des Allemands, ils serviront aussi à pointer du doigt un autre ennemi du moment, les Turcs, et à opposer des groupes.

En 1918, dans un article intitulé « La nation arménienne » publié comme supplément au numéro de mars du Bulletin de l’Alliance française, Meillet, en ouverture, écrivait ceci :

« Sans souci de l’humanité ni du droit des gens, nos ennemis ont tenu pour bon et pour permis tout ce qui pouvait leur faciliter le succès.

Les chefs jeunes-turcs ont voulu faire mieux que leurs alliés allemands : décidés à unifier leur empire, et sachant qu’ils ne pourraient s’assimiler les Arméniens, plus civilisés, plus Européens qu’eux-mêmes, ils les ont exterminés. » (Meillet 1918b, p. 1)

Meillet y explique que les Turcs ont eu soin de vouloir dépasser « leurs alliés allemands », ce qu’il ne fait que sous-entendre, c’est que cette « course » eut lieu dans le domaine tout à fait particulier de la « barbarie ». Dans d’autres textes, la « politique barbare des Turcs » (Meillet 1919b, p. 15) ou leur « barbarie systématique » (Meillet 1918b, p. 3) sera clairement évoquée et opposée aux Arméniens « plus civilisés » (Ibid., p. 1) parce que représentant « dans l’Orient proche l’avant-garde de la civilisation occidentale. » (Meillet 1921, p. 90). L’effroyable réalité des massacres est donc là pour opposer Turcs et Arméniens, bien sûr, mais aussi, indirectement, la Turquie et l’Europe, un certain Orient « barbare » et un Occident « civilisé ». C’est ainsi, par exemple, l’opposition, selon un même système axiologique, de deux visions politiques :

« Je ne vais pas essayer de vous retracer l’histoire du problème au cours du XIX^e siècle ; ce sont des tentatives toujours vaines pour concilier deux inconciliables : le pouvoir absolu des Turcs d’une part, et, de l’autre, la volonté inflexible d’une nation qui savait qu’elle a le droit de vivre […]. » (ibid.),

En 1915, Meillet avait déjà pointé un doigt accusateur sur le système de gouvernance des Turcs qui dominent « par la force » et « dont l’administration désordonnée tient en respect ses sujets par des massacres organisés » (Meillet 1915b, p. 192). Ou encore l’opposition de deux religions et de deux « potentiels » :

« Tant que les chrétiens ont été d’humbles sujets qui se laissaient exploiter sans résister, sans esquisser même une protestation, les Turcs ont paru ne guère se soucier des sentiments nationaux qui subsistaient. Mais du jour où ils ont éprouvé une résistance, les Turcs ont montré qu’ils n’admettaient pas le moindre changement dans la situation : le musulman devait rester le maître absolu, le chrétien n’être toléré qu’à condition de ne pas élever la voix. Dès que les chrétiens, qui étaient les principaux et souvent les seuls artisans de la prospérité du pays, prenaient conscience de leur force, un conflit devait se produire avec leurs maîtres musulmans.

L’empire ottoman est fondé sur la conquête par les armes. Les Turcs n’ont apporté aucune civilisation propre, et depuis qu’ils ont établi leur empire ils n’en ont inventé aucune ; ils ont accepté purement et simplement des Arabes et des Persans la civilisation islamique sans y rien ajouter ; ils ont donné à l’Islam des généraux, des administrateurs, jamais un savant ou un philosophe. Mais ils ne pouvaient sans ruiner leur domination laisser les nations chrétiennes sujettes profiter de leur supériorité intellectuelle et économique pour se poser à l’intérieur du pays en rivales de l’autorité turque. » (Meillet 1919b, p. 9-10)

« Cette volonté de vivre, cette activités, cette intelligence, ces succès, ce caractère européen ont rendu les Arméniens odieux à leurs maîtres turcs, moins industrieux qu’eux. » (Meillet 1918b, p. 2)

Si les massacres des Arméniens ont permis d’opposer un Orient « barbare » et un Occident « civilisé », comment ne pas s’interroger sur l’indifférence affichée après la guerre par les puissances occidentales à l’égard de l’Arménie (nous reviendrons sur cette indifférence) ? Ainsi, au début de l’année 1923, la Revue des études arméniennes reprenait dans ses pages un « Appel pour l’Arménie » (publié d’abord dans le Journal des débats du 17 décembre 1922 et signé, notamment par Anatole France ou Maurice Barrès) qui commençait ainsi : « La situation effroyable dans laquelle se trouve actuellement la population arménienne de Turquie est une honte pour le monde civilisé » (Appel 1923, p. 89). Initié par « M. A. Meillet », cet appel à la conférence de Lausanne (celle qui devait reprendre les négociations avec la Turquie suite, d’une part, au refus par le nouveau gouvernement jeune-turc d’Atatürk des conclusions du Traité de Sèvres accepté par le Sultan avant son renversement et, d’autre part, à la guerre arméno-turque de 1920) lui demandait d’agir au nom de l’ « humanité » et de la « justice », au nom de l’ « honneur des Alliés » (ibid., p. 90).

En 1918, Meillet terminait ainsi son article sur « La nation arménienne » :

« Au cours des persécutions qui ont duré des siècles et qui sont devenues plus sanglantes au fur et à mesure que la civilisation grandissait dans l’Orient, les Turcs ont prouvé qu’ils ne pouvaient dominer une nation comme la nation arménienne. Ce serait donner une prime à la barbarie que de laisser prescrire par des massacres le droit des Arméniens. Comme le retour de l’Alsace-Lorraine à la France, la libération de l’Arménie symbolisera le triomphe des principes au nom desquels combattent les Alliés et pour lesquels les Etats-Unis sont entrés dans la guerre. » (Meillet 1918b, p. 4)

Les notions de « civilisation » et de « barbarie » y sont toujours présentes, associées cette fois au « droit des Arméniens ». Dans l’esprit de Meillet, un lien est fait entre les massacres subis, entre les atrocités perpétrées et le futur de l’Arménie. Il l’avait écrit en 1919 dans son rapport pour le Quai d’Orsay :

« Les massacres de 1915 ont trop éloquemment montré ce que l’on peut attendre des Turcs pour qu’une solution de la question arménienne, respectant l’intégrité de l’ancienne Turquie, soit désormais envisagée. » (Meillet 1919b, p. 13)

Tournons-nous donc maintenant vers les considérations de Meillet relatives à l’avenir politique de l’Arménie, et vers la place qu’y occupent les massacres de 1915.

Dans un petit message daté du 7 décembre 1917, mais publié en 1918, Antoine Meillet avait eu ces mots :

« Les Alliés luttent pour que chaque nation ait le droit de disposer d’elle-même.

Le retour de l’Alsace-Lorraine à sa patrie d’élection sera le symbole de la victoire du droit sur la force en Occident.

Il faut que, en Orient, la nation arménienne échappe à la tyrannie des Turcs, à la sauvagerie des Kurdes. Aucune nation n’a subi un martyre aussi cruel. Une Arménie autonome est donc le symbole le plus net du triomphe du droit. » (Meillet 1918c, p. 9)

Nous y retrouvons la « tyrannie », la « sauvagerie » dont nous venons de parler. Mais nous retiendrons maintenant surtout l’idée défendue par Meillet, celle d’une indépendance de l’Arménie. Meillet écrit en 1917, la guerre n’est pas encore terminée, mais déjà s’ébauchent les projets pour l’Europe nouvelle, celle que dessineront les conférences de paix. A propos de l’Arménie, Meillet ne changea jamais d’avis, il fut un solide partisan d’une indépendance nationale et politique : « l’autonomie de la nation arménienne » est la seule « solution possible », écrira-t-il dans son rapport sur La nation arménienne rédigé à la demande du gouvernement français (Meillet 1919b, p. 13). Dans certains de ses textes consacrés à l’indépendance future de l’Arménie, les massacres furent parfois avancés pour fournir quelques arguments auxiliaires à côté de la justification prinicipale de l’époque, celle qui ouvre le petit message reproduit ci-dessus : « Les Alliés luttent pour que chaque nation ait le droit de disposer d’elle-même » (Meillet 1918c, p. 9). Voyons comment.

Un des rapprochements que Meillet fait entre les massacres et l’indépendance de l’Arménie lui semble si « évident » qu’il « [s]e reprocherai[t] d’y insister » (Meillet 1919c, p. 6) ; c’est celui qui verrait l’octroi d’une indépendance comme une sorte de réconfort, comme une sorte de devoir moral face à l’horreur : « Le massacre est un titre de plus pour la nation arménienne à reprendre le sol qu’on a essayé de lui enlever par une violence odieuse » (ibid.). A plusieurs reprises, il répétera aussi le postulat inverse : il ne faut pas que « le bénéfice de ces massacres [soit] accordé aux massacreurs » (ibid.), il ne faut pas que les massacres « constitue[nt] un titre de possession pour les Turcs » (Meillet 1921, p. 92).

Que ce fût dans son rapport sur La nation arménienne (Meillet 1919b), mais aussi dans une intervention non titrée qu’il donna en juillet 1920 lors d’une Conférence internationale philarménienne tenue à Paris (Meillet 1921), Antoine Meillet eut à quelques reprises l’occasion de revenir sur l’histoire de l’Arménie ; ce qu’il en retient, c’est un passage entre indépendance et soumission et une succession de malheurs :

« Depuis qu’elle s’est donné une culture autonome, la nation arménienne a subi tous les désastres politiques. Le pays a été souvent envahi par des hordes qui le dévastaient. Il a été souvent la proie de voisins plus puissants. […] Elle a retrouvé par deux fois une indépendance plus ou moins complète. D’abord, à l’ombre des royaumes arabes, il y a eu la royauté des Bagratides dont le centre était au Nord-Ouest du domaine arménien, à Ani. […] Puis les croisades ont permis aux Arméniens d’avoir une nouvelle période d’autonomie et de prospérité relative en Cilicie à partir de la fin du XIe siècle et durant les XIIe et XIIIe siècles […]. » (Meillet 1919b, p. 4-5)

Mais malgré ces malheurs dont certains « ont dépassé la mesure commune » (Meillet 1921, p. 85), malgré que soient venus « [i]nvasions, pillages, massacres » (Meillet 1919b, p. 5), « la nation [arménienne] n’a jamais perdu le sentiment d’être distincte de toute autre » (ibid.). Meillet insistera régulièrement sur cette vigueur particulière du sentiment national des Arméniens, dont les massacres ont pu servir de révélateur. Cette « puissante vitalité » (ibid., p. 8) a permis de conserver l’idée nationale arménienne lors des périodes de domination étrangère :

« Nulle part les Arméniens ne disposaient d’une force à eux, nulle part ils n’avaient un gouvernement à eux, mais il s’était constitué un esprit national qui vivait dans leurs monuments, leur Eglise qui ne ressemble à aucune autre Eglise, qui vivait dans leur littérature, une littérature qui a sa langue propre, ses caractères propres ; et l’absence de toute espèce d’Etat arménien, la perte de tout pouvoir propre n’a jamais pu entamer le sentiment national qui a subsisté à travers les siècles. » (Meillet 1921, p. 88-89),

mais aussi lors des terribles épreuves traversées par les Arméniens : « Tous les malheurs ont pu intervenir, toutes les persécutions ont pu se faire sentir, jamais la nation [arménienne] n’a oublié qu’elle existait par elle-même et qu’elle avait une âme à elle » (ibid., p. 89). Les massacres sont là comme pour témoigner de la vigueur de la nation arménienne. Cette résistance particulière est, pour Meillet, le signe que la nation arménienne fait preuve d’une « volonté de vivre » (Meillet 1918b, p. 2), qui se manifeste encore sous une autre forme, puisque, nous dit Meillet, les Arméniens sont restés vigoureux même en dehors de leur domaine propre :

« Les deux villes où il y a le plus d’Arméniens sont hors du domaine arménien ; le principal centre des Arméniens de Turquie est Constantinople, et le principal centre des Arméniens de Russie, Tiflis, capitale de la Géorgie. A Constantinople comme à Tiflis et à Bakou, les Arméniens ont pris une situation considérable. A Tiflis, ils jouent dans les affaires un rôle infiniment plus grand que la population géorgienne ; à Bakou, ils sont les premiers ; à Constantinople, ils rivalisent même avec les Grecs.

On jugera de l’activité des émigrés arméniens par le fait qu’ils ont fourni à Byzance des empereurs et que le plus grand ministre qu’ait eu l’Egypte au XIXe siècle, Nubar pacha[11], était un Arménien. » (Meillet, 1919b, p. 7)

De plus, cette émigration importante qui « aurait dû épuiser la race » (ibid.) n’a pas empêché les Arméniens « d’occuper fermement leur pays » (ibid., p. 8). Ainsi, Meillet fut un partisan acharné de l’indépendance nationale et politique de cette Arménie « qui n’[a] jamais perdu le sentiment profond de son existence » (Meillet 1921, p. 89) malgré les massacres et les atrocités subies, ce qu’elle peut mettre en avant comme un « titre politique » (Meillet 1920a, p. 9) :

« Tout le monde connaît les malheurs des Arméniens. Les malheurs des Arméniens ont passé la mesure commune, mais ce qui est l’honneur des Arméniens, ce n’est pas d’être malheureux. Etre malheureux, ce n’est pas un titre politique ; ce qui est un titre politique, c’est que, dans les malheurs qui ont passé la mesure commune, les Arméniens ont conservé leur force, c’est que les Arméniens ont montré qu’ils étaient une nation capable de durer ; leurs malheurs ont eu beau, je le répète, passer la mesure commune, ils ont prouvé que leur force aussi passait la mesure commune, et ils ont établi par là qu’ils étaient qualifiés pour durer, qualifiés pour relever un Etat abattu depuis tant de siècles. » (ibid., p. 9-10)

Dans le même discours prononcé en février 1919 lors d’une réunion intitulée « Pour la libération de l’Arménie » dont nous tirons l’extrait ci-dessus, Meillet avait parlé de la « douleur sans fond » (ibid., p. 12) du peuple arménien, mais il avait vite ajouté qu’au fond de cette douleur « perce la confiance » : « Ce n’est pas le désespoir ; c’est la douleur avec la conviction que, quelles que soient les tristesses du présent, il y aura un avenir meilleur » (ibid.) dont lui-même finissait par se porter garant :

« Il faut les avoir vus au Caucase où ils ont quelque liberté pour savoir de quoi ils sont capables. Je ne veux pas insister ; mon rôle ici, c’est d’écouter, c’est de donner la parole aux hommes éminents qui viendront vous parler de l’Arménie ; mais je tiens, avant de m’asseoir, avant de commencer à écouter ces paroles éloquentes que vous entendrez au sujet de l’Arménie, je tiens à vous dire : j’ai dans l’avenir de l’Arménie la confiance la plus entière, et je suis convaincu que, si on fait confiance à la nation arménienne, elle ne trahira pas l’espoir que nous mettons en elle. » (ibid., p. 13)

Malgré ces propos bienveillants et porteurs d’un certain espoir, Meillet est néanmoins conscient d’une chose importante : les massacres ont fortement affaibli les populations arméniennes et cela pourrait constituer comme une pierre sur le chemin vers l’indépendance : « [I]l n’en reste pas moins que la nation a souffert, que ses forces sont restreintes et que, par elle-même, elle est hors d’état de défendre, de mettre en valeur un pays immense et singulièrement difficile » (Meillet 1921, p. 92). Il fut ainsi amené à admettre, lors d’une conférence donnée en 1919 devant le Comité national d’études sociales et politiques[12], qu’ « il faudra aux Arméniens une aide » (Meillet 1919c, p. 9). C’est sur cela qu’il terminait son rapport de 1919 destiné au Comité d’études du Quai d’Orsay :

« Même autonome, un Etat arménien ne pourra de longtemps vivre par lui-même. Le pays est ruiné et dépeuplé. […] La situation politique sera grandement compliquée par les droits qui devront être assurés aux populations musulmanes. Il faudra donc à l’Arménie une protection pour établir la sécurité, et un large concours financier, des aides de toute sorte, pour mettre en valeur le pays, car ce qui reste de la population arménienne d’Arménie turque est en partie dispersé dans l’Arménie russe et en Syrie. Il faut rétablir les Arméniens sur leur terre où ceux qui subsistent ont hâte de rentrer, récupérer ce que les Kurdes se sont approprié, pourvoir les exploitations des ressources indispensables en vivres, en instruments, en bétail, en un mot remettre en état un pays dévasté, relever un peuple abattu. Depuis l’effondrement de l’empire russe, aucun Etat européen n’est particulièrement désigné pour remplir à lui seul cette mission qui sera d’ailleurs une lourde charge, et les Arméniens, qui sont fiers, supporteraient mal d’être protégés par une grande puissance dont ils seraient en quelque sorte les vassaux. Le cas de l’Arménie est de ceux où l’aide collective des puissances sera nécessaire. » (Meillet 1919b, p. 16-17)

Mais sur cette aide vue comme une des « [c]onditions d’existence d’un Etat arménien » (ibid., p. 16), il allait préciser une chose importante. Il ne s’agira « pas du tout » d’une aide « du type des colonies » (Meillet 1919c, p. 9) :

« Il y a des pays qu’il faut non seulement aider, mais administrer. Nous savons ce que les Arméniens valent, ils n’ont pas besoin d’être administrés, ils sauront s’administrer eux-mêmes. Ce qu’il leur faut, c’est une aide matérielle qui leur permette de se développer. […] Il y a le type d’assistance purement colonial ; il y a le type d’assistance à des populations que les circonstances rendent incapables de faire tout le nécessaire, mais qui sont appelées à bref délai à se suffire elles-mêmes. Les Arméniens appartiennent à ce second type ; nous pouvons compter qu’ils feront beaucoup par eux-mêmes dans un très bref délai. » (ibid.)

Ce sont donc bien les « circonstances » qui rendent nécessaire cette aide temporaire, et aucunement une quelconque faiblesse intrinsèque de la nation arménienne.

Nous aimerions enfin mentionner une autre raison qui pousse Meillet à militer en faveur de l’indépendance de l’Arménie ; cette raison a trait à la problématique civilisationnelle mentionnée plus haut. Les Arméniens sont, nous l’avons vu, des « porteurs de la civilisation européenne » (Meillet 1918b, p. 1), ce qui leur octroie, à lire Meillet, un droit supplémentaire à l’indépendance :

« Le droit que les Arméniens revendiquent de conserver le domaine historique qu’ils occupaient et que des populations turques, kurdes et autres ont envahi depuis le commencement de l’époque historique, ils le revendiquent, non pas au nom du droit historique qui ne compte pas, mais au nom du droit qu’ont les populations européennes de répandre la civilisation dans le monde. » (Meillet 1919c, p. 7)

Pour Meillet, favoriser l’indépendance des Arméniens qui sont, sur leurs territoires, sur cette « partie de l’Asie qui est par sa nature un lieu de passage entre l’Orient et l’Occident », une « force de la civilisation occidentale » (ibid.), c’est ouvrir la voie à une expansion plus à l’Est encore de « la civilisation » (ibid., p. 9) :

« Ce n’est pas une hypothèse que de dire que les Arméniens sont capables de répandre dans l’Asie antérieure la civilisation, qu’ils sont capables de porter la culture européenne en Perse où elle peut se développer très rapidement et très puissamment, de la porter en Asie centrale. C’est une affirmation qui repose sur une expérience toute récente et sur ce que nous savons de l’activité de la nation arménienne. » (ibid.)

Une expansion toute porteuse de promesses :

« On peut compter que ce jour-là [quand existera une Arménie indépendante sur les territoires arméniens – SM] l’Europe trouvera une population capable de porter en Asie la civilisation européenne et d’y développer un mouvement d’affaires dont on n’a aucune idée actuellement. Le problème arménien est de ceux qui, tout en paraissant secondaire parce qu’il porte sur un nombre d’hommes relativement restreint sur un territoire qui n’est pas immense, sont de première importance par l’avenir de l’Europe même, parce que l’Europe ne peut vivre qu’en colonisant le monde, en répandant sa civilisation sur les parties voisines et que créer une Arménie c’est le moyen de répandre au dehors la civilisation européenne. » (ibid., p. 10)

Antoine Meillet verra ses espoirs rapidement brisés. Même si la révolution bolchevique de 1917 et le principe de l’autodétermination des minorités de l’ex-empire des tsars prôné par Lénine avaient permis la proclamation, le 28 mai 1918, d’une République arménienne indépendante[13], même si la chute de la Porte face aux Alliés en octobre 1918 avait permis d’espérer voir les conférences de paix proclamer l’indépendance de l’Arménie sur toutes les terres arméniennes, les vents finirent par se faire moins favorables pour le futur de l’Arménie :

« Il fallait trouver une grande nation ou un ensemble de nations qui voudraient bien prendre l’Arménie pour ainsi dire par la main, pour l’aider à franchir les quelques dizaines d’années difficiles qui ne pouvaient pas manquer de lui rendre les commencements singulièrement pénibles ; il fallait trouver un mandataire pour l’Arménie. Mais vous savez aussi que s’il y a eu pendant les années de guerre un certain sentiment de désintéressement chez les nations et surtout chez les peuples, les gouvernements ont retrouvé depuis tout leur égoïsme, un égoïsme qu’ils ont volontiers qualifié de sacré, et cet égoïsme a suffi pour que l’Arménie, qui représente aujourd’hui une charge, ne trouve aucun défenseur, ne trouve personne qui veuille se charger de soutenir ses pas et de lui faire retrouver la situation que les massacres lui ont fait perdre. La difficulté actuelle, c’est qu’il n’y a personne […] qui soit prêt à lui donner les moyens de transport, les capitaux dont elle a besoin pour commencer à se développer. » (Meillet 1921, p. 92-93)

Il y eut bien le Traité de Sèvres signé le 10 août 1920 par les Alliés et l’empire ottoman et qui réunissait au sein d’une Arménie indépendante une grande partie des terres arméniennes qui avaient appartenu autrefois aussi bien à l’empire ottoman qu’à l’empire russe. Mais ce traité, signé par le sultan, ne fut pas reconnu par le gouvernement de Mustafa Kemal Atatürk et la situation politique qu’il avait officialisée ne survécut pas à la guerre arméno-turque de 1920. En signant avec la Turquie le Traité d’Alexandropol (2 décembre 1920), la République d’Arménie actera la perte de nombreux territoires octroyés par le Traité de Sèvres et sa soviétisation[14] progressive, avant de voir le Traité de Lausanne du 24 juillet 1923 mettre pour longtemps une croix sur les rêves d’indépendance de l’Arménie[15].

La signature du Traité de Lausanne officialise l’ « abandon » (Duclert 2015, p. 266-269, notamment) de l’Arménie par les Alliés, ceux-là mêmes qui avaient promu l’autodétermination des peuples comme base intangible de négociations et qui avaient promis à plusieurs reprises d’assurer à l’Arménie une indépendance nationale et politique, comme peut en témoigner cette lettre[16] d’Aristide Briant, alors Président du Conseil et Ministre des affaires étrangères, à Louis Martin, Sénateur du Var, datée du 7 novembre 1916 :

« Le Gouvernement de la République a déjà pris soin de faire notifier officiellement à la Sublime-Porte que les Puissances Alliées tiendront personnellement responsables des crimes commis tous les membres du Gouvernement Ottoman, ainsi que ceux de ses agents qui se trouveraient impliqués dans les massacres. Quand l’heure aura sonné des réparations légitimes, il ne mettra pas en oubli les douloureuses épreuves de la Nation Arménienne et, d’accord avec ses alliés, il prendra les mesures nécessaires pour lui assurer une vie de paix et de progrès. »

Meillet, contemporain de cet abandon, ne resta pas indifférent face à ce changement de politique des Alliés. En 1923, dans la Revue des études arméniennes – revue fondée en 1920, « en un temps où, après des souffrances inouïes, le peuple arménien reprend sa place dans le conseil des Nations » (Macler & Meillet 1920, p. 2)[17] – il signa un article consacré au « Traité de Lausanne » ; après avoir explicitement déclaré que la nation arménienne « y [était] abandonnée » (Meillet 1923a, p. 97), il poursuivait ainsi :

« C’est dire que l’Europe a tacitement reconnu pour acquise l’œuvre que le gouvernement turc a réalisée en massacrant, en exilant, en dépouillant de leurs biens les Arméniens d’Asie Mineure et en enlevant par la violence à la nation arménienne le territoire qui était le sien depuis plus de deux mille ans. » (ibid., p. 98)

Lui qui avait à plusieurs reprise affirmé qu’ « [o]n ne saurait, sans blesser la morale, faire bénéficier les Turcs et les Kurdes des pillages et des massacres qu’ils [avaient] organisés » (Meillet 1919b, p. 15) finit par faire face à une cruelle « désillusion » (Lamberterie 2006, p. 184). Quelque quatre ans après le Traité de Lausanne, dans un compte rendu que signale Charles de Lamberterie (2006, p. 185), il reviendra amèrement sur le retournement des Alliés :

« Si cette revue [= La Revue des études arméniennes] était le lieu qui convient pour exprimer des vues sur la politique contemporaine, je profiterais de l’occasion que m’offre le livre de M. Mandelstam pour montrer, dans le geste par lequel l’Europe a livré à ses persécuteurs la nation arménienne et a, dans des traités, consacré l’expulsion hors de l’Anatolie des populations chrétiennes qui y avaient leurs demeures de longs siècles avant l’arrivée des Turcs, un exemple illustre de la faiblesse des Etats occidentaux vis-à-vis des peuples orientaux depuis la guerre et de la manière dont, en abandonnant ceux qui espéraient en la justice de l’Europe, ils se sont abandonnés eux-mêmes. Ce n’est pas ici le lieu de le faire. » (Meillet 1927, p. 205)

Au terme de cette exploration de la façon dont les massacres d’Arménie de 1915 furent appréhendés et considérés par Antoine Meillet, nous pouvons mettre en avant plusieurs choses. Tout d’abord, l’attention que Meillet porta sur ces événements témoigne, une fois encore, de son intérêt pour le monde dans lequel il vivait ; il n’était pas « ce qu’un vain peuple pense » d’un linguiste, (Lefèvre 1925, p. 31), il n’était pas un « vieux monsieur tout habité d’étranges manies et de tics, protégeant, d’une antique calotte de velours, un chef dénudé et vivant au milieu de la poussière d’innombrables in-folio » (ibid.), mais quelqu’un de concerné par l’actualité. Par ailleurs, la façon dont les événements tragiques de 1915 furent traités par Meillet a servi de révélateur à certaines idées : d’une part la mise en avant de la force et de la vigueur de la nation arménienne (qui serviront d’argument auxiliaire pour justifier d’une Arménie indépendante) et, d’autre part, dans le contexte général (colonialiste) de l’époque mais aussi dans celui, particulier, instauré par la guerre, la mise en opposition de groupes ou de concepts : les Allemands « barbares » vs. les Alliés « civilisés »  ; les Turcs « barbares » vs. les Alliés « civilisés » ; un certain Orient vs. un certain Occident ; la chrétienté vs. le monde musulman ; la « civilisation » vs. la « barbarie ». Dans sa « Présentation générale » qu’il donne à la publication des journaux et correspondance de Meillet, Francis Gandon avait déjà relevé sa propension à « impose[r] au genre humain » des « catégories » généralisantes (Gandon 2014b, p. 49). C’est peut-être là un trait propre à Meillet, mais peut-être aussi une tendance générale d’une époque, comme le fait de « se satisfaire des seules explications traditionnelles sur la “barbarie orientale” ou la “sauvagerie turque” véhiculées jusqu’à la fin du siècle, par exemple par Victor Hugo dénonçant le massacre des Grecs sur l’île de Chios en 1822 » (Duclert 2015, p. 44) en ces mots : « Les Turcs ont passé là. Tout est ruine et deuil. »[18].

Cette conclusion sera aussi pour nous l’occasion de revenir brièvement sur le « reproche » fait par Francis Gandon à Meillet. Dans sa présentation déjà citée, il s’était étonné de l’ « indifférence » (Gandon 2014b, p. 42) de Meillet, de sa « cécité aux pulsions génocidaires récurrentes dans la région » (ibid., p. 36), du fait qu’il n’ait, en 1903, « subodor[é] en rien la montée de l’épuration ethnique » (ibid., p. 35), tout cela alors qu’il séjourna par deux fois dans la région, d’abord en 1891 (donc peu avant les massacres de 1894-1896), puis en 1903 (donc, là aussi, peu avant les massacres de 1909). Certes, tant les massacres hamidiens que leurs suites effroyables ont été jugés prévisibles au vu de ce qu’il s’était déjà passé (Duclert 2015, p. 32 et 144), mais il nous semble pourtant exagéré de vouloir en tenir rigueur à Meillet. Il ne s’était pas rendu dans la région pour y faire une analyse politique, et l’absence de traces dans ses journaux ne permet pas, selon nous, d’affirmer « cécité » et « indifférence ». Meillet ne resta pas indifférent face aux tragiques événements d’Arménie de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècles (d’ailleurs, F. Gandon [2014b, p. 37] lui-même mentionne le compte rendu Meillet 1927) : « [d]ès 1895, il figure dans les comités de Français arménophiles qui dénoncent les massacres perpétrés en Turquie sous le règne d’Abdul Hamid » (Lamberterie 2006, p. 183) ; quant à ses considérations des massacres de 1915, elles ont été au centre de ces propos.

Notes

[1] Rappelons ici quelques points. Les massacres de 1915 ne sont pas les premiers. Les exactions ottomanes à l’encontre des Arméniens débutent en 1894-1896 avec ce qu’on a coutume d’appeler les « grands massacres hamidiens » (Duclert 2015, p. 90), du nom du sultan Abdul Hamid II. Vinrent ensuite les massacres perpétrés à Adana en Cilicie en avril 1909. Quant aux massacres de 1915 dont il sera essentiellement question ici, ils se prolongent en fait jusqu’à l’été 1916.

[2] http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2015/04/12/01016-20150412ARTFIG00048-le-pape-francois-evoque-le-genocide-des-armeniens.php

[3] http://www.rfi.fr/europe/20150415-turquie-armenie-genocide-vatican-erdogan-parlement-europeen-reconnait-

[4] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/fr/news-room/content/20150413IPR41671/html/Génocide-arménien-la Turquie-et-l’Arménie-invitées-à-normaliser-leurs-relations

[5] Signalons que Vincent Duclert consacre un chapitre aux événements scientifiques de l’année 2015 (Duclert 2015, p. 359-362).

[6] Nous faisons ici référence à la participation d’Antoine Meillet au Comité d’études mis sur pied dès 1917 par le Ministère français des affaires étrangères dans le but de préparer les futures négociations de paix à l’aide de rapports et d’études rédigés par un groupe de savants et d’universitaires. Meillet rédigea pour l’occasion deux rapports : l’un intitulé « Pologne et Lituanie » (Meillet 1919a) et l’autre sur « La nation arménienne » (Meillet 1919b) sur lequel nous aurons l’occasion de revenir. Sur la participation de Meillet à ce Comité d’études, on pourra consulter nos deux recherches Moret 2003 et 2011.

[7] Citons Charles de Lamberterie (2006, p. 149) : « [S]es travaux sur l’arménien sont, dans l’ensemble de son œuvre scientifique, ceux qui ont le mieux résisté à l’épreuve du temps, ce qui tient à leur caractère fondateur : dans le domaine des études arméniennes, il y a véritablement un abîme entre la situation qu’a trouvée Meillet et celle qu’il a laissée. »

[8] Les menaces sous-jacentes à ce texte resteront lettre morte, et jamais les puissances européennes, malgré leurs promesses, n’apporteront autre chose qu’un soutien moral aux populations arméniennes. Nous aurons l’occasion d’y revenir.

[9] On ne connaît pas les sources de Meillet pour écrire cet article, mais, comme nous l’avons déjà dit, les journaux de l’époque se faisaient l’écho des événements d’Arménie, et les relations des massacres ne manquaient pas. Meillet ayant été un lecteur assidu (« Il avait l’habitude de lire chaque jour un grand nombre de journaux, représentant les opinions les plus diverses, y compris les journaux financiers », nous rappelle Joseph Vendryes (1937, p. 8) dans sa nécrologie de Meillet), c’est certainenement dans la presse qu’il avait trouvé les situations concrètes qui composent son texte. Par ailleurs, dans un autre article, Meillet (1918b, p. 4) renverra ses lecteurs vers le livre du vicomte Bryce, The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman empire (Londres, 1916) et à sa traduction française Le traitement des Arméniens (Laval : Kavanagh) pour tous les prinicpaux documents relatifs aux massacres.

[10] Cf., par exemple, Ternon 1999 ou ces propos de Vincent Duclert (2015, p. 22-23) que nous reproduisons sans les notes de bas de page originales : « L’oubli du premier génocide, l’abandon des survivants, l’absence de reconnaissance, de justice et de réparation encouragent le déclenchement par l’Allemagne nazie d’un deuxième génocide. […] Le génocide des Arméniens n’a pas été un modèle pour la solution finale. Mais il en a renforcé la possibilité et l’opérationnalité, d’autant mieux qu’au sein du proche entourage d’Hitler agissent des officiers qui ont servi dans l’Empire ottoman. »

[11] Nubar Pacha (1825-1899) fut un homme politique égyptien d’origine arménienne. Il fut premier ministre de l’Egypte à trois reprises : 1878-1879, 1884-1888 et 1894-1895.

[12] Créé en 1916 par le banquier philanthrope Albert Kahn, le Comité national d’études sociales et politiques s’était donné pour but, selon ses statuts, de « grouper des Français représentatifs de toutes les opinions, de toutes les croyances et de tous les milieux, en vue de l’Etude positive des questions d’ordre social et politique d’un intérêt général ». Entre 1916 et 1931, le Comité national d’études sociales et politiques « explor[a] des voies, des solutions potentielles aux problèmes de son époque » lors de plus de quatre cent cinquante séances, tenues pour la plupart à la Cour de cassation de Paris. Pour plus de détails sur ce Comité, on consultera Baud-Berthier, 1995, et spécialement les pages 227-228 pour les citations ci-dessus.

[13] Dans le tout premier tome de la nouvellement créée Revue des études arméniennes, Meillet revint dans un article sur ce « grand fait dans l’histoire de l’Arménie » (Meillet 1920b, p. 139).

[14] En 1923, Meillet publie un petit article intitulé « Note sur la loi fondamentale de l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques », dans lequel il cherche à « apprécier […] ce qui reste d’autonomie à la république arménienne d’Erivan » après son intégration à l’URSS (Meillet 1923b, p. 79).

[15] Sur tous ces événenements, de la proclamation de la République arménienne jusqu’au Traité de Sèvres et la guerre arméno-turque de 1920, on consultera Ter Minassian 2006.

[16] http://www.imprescriptible.fr/documents/briand/martin/index.php

[17] Jean-Pierre Mahé (2000) a replacé cette revue dans son contexte d’apparition : « Puisque le jeu des armes et de la diplomatie avait nié les droits et déçu les aspirations d’une nation trois fois millénaire, il ne restait plus qu’à la défendre par les œuvres de l’esprit en recueillant tous les témoignages de son existence, en élucidant tous les épisodes de son passé, en montrant son apport aux lettres et à la civilisation. »

[18] Il s’agit du premier vers du poème « L’enfant » paru dans le recueil Les Orientales de 1829.

Bibliographie

Appel 1923
[divers auteurs], « Un appel pour l’Arménie », Revue des études arméniennes, Tome III, 1923, p. 89-90

Audouin-Rouzeau & Becker 2000
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau & Annette Becker, 14-18, retrouver la guerre, Paris : Gallimard, 2000

Baud-Berthier 1995
Gilles Baud-Berthier, « Le Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, 1916- 1931 », in J. Beausoleil & P. Ory (dir.), Albert Kahn, 1860-1940 : réalités d’une utopie, Boulogne : Musée Albert Kahn & Département des Hauts-de-Seine, 1995, p. 227-236

Becker et al. 2015
Annette Becker et al., Le génocide des Arméniens. Un siècle de recherche 1915-2015, Paris : Armand Colin, 2015

Duclert 2015
Vincent Duclert, La France face au génocide des Arméniens du milieu du XIXe siècle à nos jours, Paris : Fayard, 2015

Fryba-Reber 2006
Anne-Marguerite Fryba-Reber, « Antoine Meillet, le chroniqueur et le voyageur à la lumière de deux manuscrits inédits », in G. Bergounioux & Ch. de Lamberterie (dir.), Meillet aujourd’hui, Leuven & Paris : Peeters, 2006, p. 3-19.

Gandon 2014a
Francis Gandon (éd.), Meillet en Arménie. Journaux et correspondance (1891, 1903), Limoges : Lambert-Lucas, 2014

Gandon 2014b
Francis Gandon, « Présentation générale », in Gandon 2014a, p. 15-71

Gottschlich 2015
Jürgen Gottschlich, Beihilfe zum Völkermord. Deutschlands Rolle bei der Vernichtung der Armenier, Berlin : Ch. Links Verlag, 2015

Lamberterie 2006
Charles de Lamberterie, « La place de l’arménien dans la vie et l’œuvre d’Antoine Meillet », in G. Bergounioux & Ch. de Lamberterie (dir.), Meillet aujourd’hui, Leuven & Paris : Peeters, 2006, p. 147-189

Lefèvre 1925
Frédéric Lefèvre, « A. Meillet », in F. Lefèvre, Une heure avec…, Paris : Gallimard, 1925, p. 31-41

Loicq 2006
Jean Loicq, « Mémorial Antoine Meillet publié à l’occasion du centenaire de sa nomination au Collège de France (1906-2006) », Studia indo-europaea. Revue de mythologie et de linguistique comparée, Bucarest, III (2006), p. 5-169

Macler & Meillet 1920
Frédéric Macler & Antoine Meillet, [« Avertissement »], Revue des études arméniennes, Tome premier, 1920, p. 1-2

Mahé 2000
Jean-Pierre Mahé, « La Revue des études arméniennes », disponible en ligne : https://www.clio.fr/BIBLIOTHEQUE/pdf/pdf_la_revue_des_etudes_armeniennes.pdf

Meillet 1915a
[Antoine Meillet], « L’extermination des Arméniens », Bulletin de l’Alliance française, № 25 (1er novembre 1915), p. 109-111

Meillet 1915b
Antoine Meillet, « Les langues et les nationalités », Scientia, № 18, 1915, p. 192-201

Meillet 1916
[Antoine Meillet], « Les massacres d’Arménie », Bulletin de l’Alliance française, № 33 (1er mars 1916), p. 47-48

Meillet 1918a
Antoine Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, Paris : Payot, 1918

Meillet 1918b
Antoine Meillet, « La nation arménienne », supplément au Bulletin de l’Alliance française, № 79 (mars 1918), p. 1-4

Meillet 1918c
Antoine Meillet, « Un symbole », in Les Alliés et l’Arménie, Paris : Ernest Leroux, 1918, p. 15

Meillet 1919a
Antoine Meillet, Pologne et Lituanie, Paris : Imprimerie nationale, 1919

Meillet 1919b
Antoine Meillet, La nation arménienne, Paris : Imprimerie nationale, 1919

Meillet 1919c
Antoine Meillet, La question arménienne et ses conséquences pour l’avenir international, Paris : Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, 1919

Meillet 1920a
Antoine Meillet, « Discours de M. A. Meillet », in Pour la libération de l’Arménie, Paris : Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1920, p. 9-13

Meillet 1920b
Antoine Meillet, « L’Etat arménien », Revue des études arméniennes, Tome premier, 1920, p. 139-140

Meillet 1921
Antoine Meillet, [Intervention sans titre], in Conférence internationale philarménienne réunie à Paris les 6 et 7 juillet 1920. Compte rendu sténographique, Paris : Lang, Blanchon & Cie, 1921, p. 85-94.

Meillet 1923a
Antoine Meillet, « Le Traité de Lausanne », Revue des études arméniennes, Tome III, 1923, p. 97-98

Meillet 1923b
Antoine Meillet, « Note sur la loi fondamentale de l’Union des Républiques Socialistes Soviétiques », Revue des études arméniennes, Tome III, 1923, p. 79-80.

Meillet 1927
Antoine Meillet « [Compte rendu de :] André N. Mandelstam. La Société des Nations et les puissances devant le problème arménien. Paris (Pédone), 1926, in-8^o, viii-355 pages (édition spéciale de la Revue du droit international public) », Revue des études arméniennes, Tome VII, 1927, p. 205

Meillet 1928
Antoine Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, 2^e édition, Paris : Payot, 1928

Moret 2003
Sébastien Moret, « Antoine Meillet et l’indépendance nationale » in P. Sériot (éd.), Contributions suisses au XIII^e congrès mondial des slavistes à Ljubljana, août 2003, Berne [etc.] : Peter Lang, 2003 p. 183-198

Moret 2011
Sébastien Moret, « Antoine Meillet et le futur des empires après la Première guerre mondiale », Langages 182: Théories du langage et politique des linguistes, juin 2011, p. 11-24

Prochasson & Rasmussen 1996
Christophe Prochasson & Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la patrie : les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale (1910-1919), Paris : La Découverte, 1996

Ter Minassian 2006
Anahide Ter Minassian, 1918-1920 : la République d’Arménie, Bruxelles : Editions Complexe, 2006

Ternon 1999
Yves Ternon, « La qualité de la preuve. A propos des documents Andonian et de la petite phrase d’Hitler », in L’actualité du génocide arménien, Créteil : Edipol, 1999, p. 135-141

Vendryes 1937
Joseph Vendryes, « Antoine Meillet », Bulletin de la société de linguistique de Paris, XXXVIII, 1937, p. 1-42

How to cite this post

Moret, Sébastien. 2015. Antoine Meillet et les massacres d’Arménie de 1915. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/11/30/antoine-meillet-et-les-massacres-darmenie-de-1915

Sónia Duarte
Centro de Linguística da Universidade do Porto

Despite the geographic and linguistic proximity between Spain and Portugal, the first Spanish grammar to be printed in Portugal and for Portuguese native speakers only dates back to 1848, as explored in a previous post on this blog (Duarte 2014). That is especially interesting if we keep in mind that bibliographical resources concerning other not so similar or more distantly related languages appear as early as the 16^th century.

Nevertheless, as it is common knowledge to most people, Spanish was no stranger to Portuguese speakers prior to 1848. In fact, from the 16^th up to the 18^th century, it coexists with the native tongue in Portuguese territory, assuming the role of a prestige language favoured for political and editorial purposes – and this makes the whole situation even more bewildering. That period is commonly known as a period of bilingualism, although, in fact, it describes a diglossic situation.

We might ask ourselves, therefore, exactly what knowledge Portuguese people had of the Spanish language and what kind of information circulated in Portugal about such language and how. In this post I will attempt to address this issue by referring to the data that can be found in Portuguese grammars and orthographies from the beginning of the Portuguese metalinguistic tradition up to 1848 and concerning both the language itself as well as the linguistic representations or images and the purposes of that same information.

Bearing this in mind, I will now briefly approach the outcomes of the investigation on a corpus of texts from before 1848 that I’ve been studying for some time, which contains the 34 Portuguese grammatical and orthographical works listed bellow.

i) Grammars

ii) Orthographies

In these works, Portuguese constitutes both the object of study and the language in which the text is written. However, the focus of my analysis lies not on Portuguese but on Spanish language: more precisely, on the objective information on the Spanish language, on the subjective images or perceptions of the Spanish language and on the purposes and strategies underlying the comments that convey that same information.

Furthermore, these texts are all published in Portugal and written by Portuguese authors. The stress on, so to say, a national criterion – i.e. based on what nowadays one conceives as nationality and which cannot be strictly applied to the whole chronological framework of this post – is related to an epistemological frame known as the language issue in Portugal (“a questão da língua em Portugal”). This concept, originally referring to the 16^th century linguistic debate, was clearly depicted by Stegagno-Picchio (1959) and Buescu (1983) as a diglossic situation enhancing a conflictive relation between Portuguese and Spanish. In this situation Latin is held up as a role model used to help reaffirm the identity and status of Portuguese against Spanish. Here I will attempt to determine the extent, the development and the repercussions of that same theoretical framework concerning the whole of the chronology established for this study, which was organised according to an adaptation of Leite de Vasconcellos’ (1929) well known periodization proposal for the Portuguese and Latin philological tradition. Next, I will sum up the data, addressing separately grammar and orthography.

1. Grammars

Table 1 focuses on the linguistic phenomena the grammatical texts deal with. To begin with, objectively there is very little data up to 1779, with a significant increase and growing diversity between 1779 and 1848. Nevertheless, such escalation does not so much correspond to a real change on the peripheral condition of the information on Spanish as to an increase of the publication rate of grammatical texts, which, in its turn, is to be explained by a change of circumstances regarding access to books and reading.

As to the topics focused on in such comments, the plural forms (mainly concerning the corresponding Portuguese endings in nasal diphthongs ([ãw̃]; [ɐ̃j̃]; [õj̃]) and the masculine definite article (mainly concerning the expression el-Rei) clearly stand out. As for the nasal diphthongs, which are the most prominent markers, their occurrence appears to be related to the great significance of the subject itself in the Portuguese metalinguistic tradition, and not so much to the intrinsic value of such matter in Spanish grammar. Just out of curiosity, the fact that, in the 17th century, Antonio de Mello da Fonseca dedicates his 426-page work Antidoto da Lingua Portugueza (Amsterdam [1710]) solely to this subject clearly illustrates the significance of the topic. Although these matters are quite relevant on the global results, they are not the main subjects throughout the chronology. While none of the phenomena crosses all the three periods, the question of the Latin origin of both tongues is the one which covers a longer timespan. Nevertheless, it amounts only to three mentions on the whole.

In terms of the accuracy of the information provided, though in most cases there’s historical evidence of such linguistic data, on some occasions the texts do seem to sustain misconceived notions of the Spanish language. It is relevant to notice here that the Portuguese grammarians don’t always base their comments on references to the Spanish metalinguistic tradition.

Table 2 offers a synthesis of the collected data concerning the perception of the Spanish language. This information is presented according to García Martín’s (2005) proposal, which differentiates four types of images: structural, genetic, sensorial and moral images, though not all apply to the current corpus. Here, the genetic and sensorial images outweigh the others, though it’s the first one (mainly regarding the (lesser) affinity with Latin) that prevails over time. The fact that this same representation cannot be found in 16^th century texts should not puzzle us, since this absence seems to be limited to this specific type of texts (grammars) and does not apply to, for instance, orthographies, as will be demonstrated below.

From the point of view of what seem to be the purposes of the comments on the Spanish Language, the data support the notion sustained by Ponce de León (2005) that, up to the 18^th century, as far as the Portuguese and Latin Portuguese tradition is concerned, those comments serve mainly an accessory function and Spanish itself is not so important or at least less important than Portuguese. A contrastive purpose clearly prevails throughout the corpus, associated mainly with a didactic strategy intended to reinforce the acquisition of the rules of Portuguese language.

Regarding the theoretical framework, the collected data do not acknowledge throughout the entire timeline what Buescu (1983) describes as a competitive linguistic relationship in a conflictive environment. From the 18^th century onwards that picture no longer applies. However, there are visible traces of the apologetic rhetoric and argumentation that embodies the above-mentioned theoretical frame. An example of this is the role played by Latin on the remarks on the Spanish language: it still holds an extremely important and strategic part on the praise of the Portuguese language versus Spanish. Even in the period that goes from the late 17^th century to 1779, the texts still provide evidences of a claim of more affinity and similarity between Portuguese and Latin than the one that exists between Latin and Spanish. In fact, as it has already been mentioned, the perception of that resemblance prevails amongst the imagery of Spanish in Portuguese texts.

2. Orthographies

Regarding the linguistic phenomena, table 3 shows that the comments on lexical and etymological issues and the ones addressing the combination of vowels stand out, especially regarding the equivalent Portuguese endings in nasal diphthongs, a significant part of which corresponds to plural forms. However, we must put the weight of lexicographic remarks into perspective, since the vast majority of those remarks belong to one work only. Instead, the contrastive mentions concerning the nasal diphthong [ãw̃] acquire a special significance, considering the relevance of this subject to the Portuguese tradition.

As far as the image of Spanish is concerned, table 4 highlights the information conveyed by the corpus. Most of it corresponds to genetic imagery related to the etymological role of Latin and the historical processes explaining the results on both languages. Whether they stress similarities or point out differences, in both cases the implications of the language issue framework are inferred. A special mention is due to the comments on the correspondence and affinity between Portuguese and Spanish. The remarks on such perception suggest awareness of a distinctive relation between both languages, no matter the positive or negative connotations underlying them, as well as the implicit or explicit intentions of proximity or detachment from the Spanish. The latter are obviously more evident during the language issue period but also come into view during the 17^th century. As we might expect, the main purpose of those comments seems to be a contrastive one. They usually play a supplementary part in a didactic strategy concerning Portuguese orthography.

3. Final considerations

To sum up, it is only fair to say that, throughout the established time frame, there is a shortage of references to the Spanish language, both on grammaticographic and on orthographic texts. Still, the collected data are neither insufficient nor insignificant. In fact, they provide relevant and meaningful information to understand the evolution of the theoretical framework. It is true that from the 18^th century onwards, Spanish no longer holds the role of the prestigious language in Portugal and the diglossic setting is no longer effective. Nevertheless, the corpus demonstrates that both the essential perceptions and the rhetorical strategies associated to the language issue in the 16^th century have not been fully overcome up to at least 1848.

References

Buescu, Maria Leonor Carvalhão. 1983. Babel ou a ruptura do signo. A gramática e os gramáticos portugueses do Século XVI. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda.

Duarte, Sónia. 2014. La aportación de Nicolau Peixoto para el estudio del español en Portugal. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2014/12/10/la-aportacion-de-nicolau-peixoto-para-el-estudio-del-espanol-en-portugal (last accessed 04/12/2015).

García Martín, Ana M.ª 2005a. “Estereótipos linguísticos e apologia do português: apontamentos sobre um subgénero da historiografia linguística”. Estudios Portugueses: revista de filología portuguesa 5. 25-43.

Ponce de León Romeo, Rogelio. 2005. “Textos para la enseñanza-aprendizaje del español en Portugal durante el siglo XIX: una breve historia”. In: Castillo, M. A. et al. (coord.). Actas del XV Congreso Internacional de ASELE. 675-682. Sevilha: Facultad de Filología de la Universidad de Sevilla.

Stegagno-Picchio Luciana (ed.). 1959. “La questione della lengua in Portogallo”. In João de Barros, Diálogo em louvor da nossa Linguagem, 57-68. Modena, Soc. Tipográfica Modonese.

Vasconcellos, José Leite de. 1929. “A Filologia Portuguesa Esboço Histórico”. In Opúsculos. IV. Filologia. Parte II. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade. 839-919.

How to cite this post

Duarte, Sónia. 2015. Spanish language in Portuguese texts (16th to 19th centuries). History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/12/09/spanish-language-in-portuguese-texts-16th-to-19th-centuries

Silvio Moreira de Sousa & Johannes Mücke
Hugo Schuchardt Archive, University of Graz

Rodolfo Lenz (1863-1938). Source: Filosofía U. De Chile, via Wikimedia Commons

As the call for papers for the upcoming Coloquio Rodolfo Lenz 2016 is open until February 22^nd (the conference will be held on May 5^th 2016, at the Universidad de Chile), a second look at the correspondence between Rodolfo Lenz and Hugo Schuchardt would seem to be timely and fortuitous.[1] The goal of this article, however, relates to Bachmann (2004), where a survey of the works of Rodolfo Lenz provides a sketch of his theoretical positions on linguistics – Lenz had a strong background in linguistics as practised in Germany – and an explanation of his range of works on Amerindian languages, which were influenced by his life in Chile (Bachmann 2004: 380).

While the letters from Lenz to Schuchardt were easily accessible – the Hugo Schuchardt Nachlass is preserved at the Sondersammlung of the university library in Graz – the letters from Schuchardt required a fair bit of networking: the Archivo Lenz is maintained by the Universidad Metropolitana de las Ciencias de Educación in Santiago de Chile and we had no contacts whatsoever to Chile. Luckily, through our participation in the 13^th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, we met Darío Rojas, who kindly provided us with pictures of the letters.

With a good amount of biographical information on both linguists already available online (cf. Dannemann 2000-2001, Hurch 2007, 2007-, Maas 2010, Mücke & Sousa 2015a), we will not repeat too many details here. Rodolfo (or Rudolf) Lenz, who studied in Bonn and Berlin, was hired by the Chilean government to teach at the Instituto Pedagógico and insofar took part in the German emigration movement to Chile in the 19^th century.

Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927). Source: Hugo Schuchardt Archiv.

Soon after his arrival in Chile in 1890, Lenz began research on the language and culture of the Mapuche people. While enjoying his holidays in 1921, Lenz came into contact with Papiamentu, an Iberian-based Creole language spoken in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao. This happened due to a stopover in Curaçao on his way from Santiago to Hamburg. Even though Lenz (1926-1927, 1928) is less well known when compared to his other works (Escudero 1963: 464), Kramer (2004: 38) lists four reviews and one book about his monography on Papiamentu: Gillet (1930), Wagner (1931), Hesseling (1933), Seifert (1933) and Maduro (1967). Labarías & Cárdenas (1998: 38-39) mention two other reviews (Álvarez 1928, Nykl 1928) and there are others still to be found (for example, Wallensköld 1929). As for Hugo Schuchardt, “the father of creolistics” (Markey 1982: 204) studied in Jena and Bonn. From 1873 to 1876, he was Professor for Romance Philology at Halle and in 1876 he assumed the chair of Romance Philology at the University of Graz.[2]

Our work on editing the correspondence allows us to make some remarks concerning the amount of material preserved today. The 9 pieces of correspondence kept in Santiago de Chile and in Graz were exchanged between 1892 and 1926. From these available pieces, we could deduce that some went missing. Right from the start, we could not find in the letters one passage mentioned in Lenz (1926-1927, 1928):

“Respecto del Papiamento me escribió Schuchardt: ‘Yo mismo he mencionado el papiamento sólo ocasionalmente. Creía sempre, que, siendo suficientemente conocido, mereceria algún día un tratamento serio de alguna outra persona. Nunca lo he perdido de vista’.” (Lenz 1926: 703, 1928: 11)

Lenz’s first letter to Schuchardt is a reaction to Schuchardt’s review of Wulff (1889, 1891), where Lenz’s work Zur physiologie und geschichte der palatalen (Lenz 1888) is mentioned very positively (cf. Schuchardt 1892). Lenz’s reply gives an insight into his controversial future studies (Lenz 1891, 1892, 1893a, 1893b) on the influence of the Native languages of South American on the Chilean Spanish and the connection to his earlier work:

“Mit dem Chilenischen habe ich, glaube ich, Glück gehabt. Bisher habe ich noch keine Ahnung, ob sich eine ähnlich starke ethnologische Beeinflussung in Amerika noch einmal findet. Aber auch dieses eine Beispiel wird für die Sprachgeschichte von Wichtigkeit sein. Bei den Palatalen habe ich das ‘Wie’ der Entwickelung zeigen wollen, hier erkennen wir einmal klar das ‘Warum’.” (Lenz to Schuchardt, July 1892; No. 06397)[3]

It also becomes quite clear that Lenz saw himself as isolated and far away from the scientific centre of Europe, leading him to emphasize the importance of epistolary networking:

“Glauben Sie, verehrter Herr Professor, es tut einem hier doppelt wohl, zu erfahren, daß man noch nicht von allen Fachgenossen in Europa vergessen ist und ein solcher kleiner Ansporn ist hier nötig um nicht den Mut zum wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten zu verlieren, das bei dem Mangel von Bibliotheken und der Entfernung von den Druckorten nur eine halbe Freunde ist.” (Lenz to Schuchardt, July 1892; No. 06397)

Transatlantic steamship lines around 1900. Source: Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus (14th ed.)

Their contact, apparently sporadic until 1921, intensifies only after Lenz became acquainted with Papiamentu. Still in 1921, long after his last original publication on a Creole language (cf. Schuchardt 1914), Schuchardt was seen as the academic authority on this particular matter (cf. Lenz 1926: 702). So, it should not come as a surprise that Lenz took the initiative of contacting Schuchardt soon after his arrival in Germany. In his letter from June 14^th 1921, Lenz explains how he came into contact with Papiamentu.[4] During the three-weeks journey from Curaçao to Europe, Lenz gathered 50 manuscript pages with language samples, while explaining to Schuchardt the methodology he applied.[5] Natividad Sillie, the cook on board of the freighter, supplied Lenz with folk tales, folk songs and his own literary pieces in verse and prose. Moreover, Sillie also read out loud, allowing Lenz to take notes on phonetics and other topics. Strongly believing that his notes were worthy of publishing, Lenz searched for Schuchardt’s help in obtaining bibliographical references. Here begins the networking.

Natividad Sillie. Picture taken from Lenz (1926-1927: 696)

On June 25^th 1921, replying to a piece of correspondence that was not maintained, Lenz thanked Schuchardt for the references, inquired about a possible offer of Schuchardt’s duplicates and states his opinion on Schuchardt (1914). In the postscriptum, he briefly evaluated Gatschet (1885) and stated his hope to obtain more material from Curaçao.[6] A few days later, Lenz expressed his gratitude for offer of the duplicates, stating that he will start working on Papiamentu in 1922, when he is back again in Chile.[7] From the extensive bibliography provided in his grammatical description of Papiamentu (Lenz 1928: 18-29), one can identify the list provided by Schuchardt and which books were sent to Lenz as duplicates. Also, Lenz (1928: 21-23) sets out a list of publications that he had acquired in Curaçao. These lists are of particular interest, because we were not able to locate any of Schuchardt’s collected materials on Papiamentu in the Schuchardt Nachlass in Graz. We only found two of the 25 mentioned works; the rest is neither catalogued in Weiss (³1986), nor in Wolf (1993).

But why did it take Lenz so long to elaborate and publish his ground-breaking work on Papiamentu (Lenz 1928)? In the next letter one finds some hints on the obstacles. The letter dates from 1925 and came as a reply to the shipment of Schuchardt (1925). In addition to the coincidence of opinion on several topics related to language evolution and language affinity, Lenz comments that European scientific journals had been unavailable in Chile since the beginning of World War I. This means that Lenz depended on his personal library and from whatever publications he received through networking:

“Leider fühlte ich auch wieder das Unglück meiner Vereinsamung ‘im letzten Winkel der Welt’, wo ich ausser meiner eignen Bibli[o]thek kaum ein einziges wissenschaftliches Buch zu sehen bekomme. Seit dem Kriege habe ich keine wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriften aus Europa bekommen und im Instituto Pedagógico gieb[t] es solche überflüssigen Dinge wie Gröber’s Zeitschrift und Romania schon seit 1909 nicht mehr.” (Lenz to Schuchardt, April 1925; No. 06401)[8]

Catalogue of the Lenz Archive (Labarías & Cárdenas 1998)

However, war was not the only socio-historical event influencing the development of science. Lenz reports that, upon his arrival in Chile in 1921, he was appointed head of the Instituto Pedagógico and, a couple of months later, during student strikes his secretary stole 10 000 pesos. This left him almost ruined and unfit to work. Even after Lenz was able to occupy himself with Papiamentu from 1923 onwards, he encountered further obstacles to the development of his research: his house underwent some sort of construction and his classes stacked up to 18 hours per week. Nonetheless, the grammar part of the monograph was almost finished. By March 1926, Lenz communicated to Schuchardt that he was hoping to publish his studies on Papiamentu in that same year, which happened after overcoming another obstacle: according to the letter of November 17^th 1926, the journal Anales de la Universidad could only publish every three months due to lack of funding. This led to the partial publication of the study in seven separate articles in 1926 and 1927 in the Anales.[9] Because of that, Lenz could only send Schuchardt the first part of the grammatical description together with that letter. At this moment, Lenz expresses his alignment with Schuchardt’s theoretical stance on Creole languages, notwithstanding the fact that Schuchardt never professed in any of his articles the notion that creole languages were basically minimalist and did not exhibit traces of the substrate languages (cf. Lenz 1928: 14):

“Wie Sie sehen werden, bin ich ganz ihrer Ansicht über das Kreolische: es ist ‘gramática mínima’ aber nicht ‘africana’.” (Lenz to Schuchardt, November 1926; No. 06403)[10]

Two theoretical stances have been identified in Schuchardt’s work on creole languages – a substratist approach in the 1880s and a more universalist approach in the 1910s (cf. Gilbert 1980: 8) – but none of them really matches Lenz’s assertion. If we go back to the letter sent on April 26^th 1925, we observe that Lenz confesses that his work relies on the majority of articles published by Schuchardt on the Creoles.[11] More, one could think of passages which could have led Lenz to assume that he and Schuchardt were in agreement:

“Es ist richtig, wir haben keine Divergenz, sondern Parallelismus; sie [the Atlantic Creole languages, SMdS & JM] sind aus verschiedenem Stoff nach dem gleichen Plan, in gleichem Stil gebildet.” (Schuchardt 1914: vii).

One could argue that from this position a direct link can be established to Lenz’s view on Papiamentu as having a “grámatica más sencilla” (cf. Bachmann 2004: 386); a link which was made possible through – sometimes obstructed – networking.

Notes

[1] For more information on the Coloquio Rodolfo Lenz 2016, please contact Darío Rojas [darioroj@u.uchile.cl] or consult https://sites.google.com/a/u.uchile.cl/coloquio-rodolfo-lenz-2016/home.

[2] For a general introduction to the FWF funded project „Network of Knowledge“ cf. Mücke & Sousa (2015b) here on this blog at http://hiphilangsci.net/2015/05/20/hugo-schuchardt-netknowl/.

[3] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/01-06397.

[4] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/04-06398.

[5] According to Labarías & Cárdenas (1998: 38), one can total 80 manuscript pages in the Archivo Rodolfo Lenz.

[6] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/05-06399.

[7] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/06-06400.

[8] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/07-06401.

[9] Neither the articles, nor the monography could be found in the University Library of Graz.

[10] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/09-06403.

[11] See http://schuchardt.uni-graz.at/korrespondenz/briefe/korrespondenzpartner/bearbeitete/599/briefe/08-06402.

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How to cite this post

Sousa, Silvio Moreira de and Johannes Mücke. 2016. Networking and the obstacles to the development of the Language Sciences through the correspondence between Rodolfo Lenz and Hugo Schuchardt. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2016/02/17/networking-and-the-obstacles-to-the-development-of-the-language-sciences

Lorenzo Cigana
Université de Liège

Questo nostro intervento si concentra su alcuni aspetti del pensiero hjelmsleviano e della teoria glossematica in cui è più forte il respiro interdisciplinare che intreccia tra loro almeno i seguenti problemi: a) il ruolo gnoseologico della lingua, b) la modalità in cui la teoria linguistica rappresenta il suo oggetto, c) la questione di stabilire se tale modalità sia iconica, metaforica o costitutiva. Il filo rosso che intendiamo seguire, e che collega i problemi appena menzionati, è l’idea di spazio nella lingua e nella teoria glossematica del linguaggio. Si tratta di un aspetto già studiato approfonditamente da Picciarelli (1999), cui rimandiamo senz’altro. D’altra parte, il motivo per cui intendiamo tornare su tali questioni non è solo per dare continuità a una prospettiva di ricerca sovente trascurata, ma anche perché alcune considerazioni, forse di dettaglio ma proprio per questo importanti, restano in qualche modo pendenti: su di esse vale la pena tornare.

1. Lo spazio del linguaggio

A tutta prima, che l’idea di spazio – la si voglia qualificare come rappresentazione mentale o, kantianamente, come intuizione pura – possa riguardare in qualche misura la lingua è piuttosto controintuitivo, dal momento che essa sembra anticipare il linguaggio, collocarsi al di qua di esso, qualificarsi come prelinguistica: in che senso la lingua ha a che fare in modo specifico con lo spazio? Lo stesso vale, sebbene forse in misura minore, per la linguistica: in fondo, possiamo sfruttare un modello geometrico dal punto di vista metalinguistico, ovvero ricorrere all’idea di spazio come espediente descrittivo. Ma è poi così netta questa distinzione? Non c’è il rischio che qualcosa filtri surrettiziamente dallo strumento di descrizione all’oggetto descritto? E ancora: si tratta di un rischio o piuttosto dell’inevitabile prezzo da pagare della teoresi? E in ogni caso, in che modo la teoria della lingua dovrebbe utilizzare l’idea di spazio?

Ebbene, proprio a partire dalla linguistica degli Anni Trenta si registra il fiorire di un lessico più o meno tecnico, o forse di una vera e propria mitologia, che cerca di tradurre le forze all’opera nel linguaggio nei termini di dinamiche tra campi, di linee di frattura, di spazi di tensione, di pressioni tra categorie, di domini sfumati, di transizioni di frontiere, di intersezioni di dimensioni, piani e assi, e così via. In alcuni casi, gli strutturalisti di prima generazione arrivano a discutere, spesso indipendentemente gli uni dagli altri, proprio dell’appropriatezza di metafore spaziali o matematico-geometriche e della natura stessa di queste – com’è stato riconosciuto in alcuni lavori (Petitot 1990, Skrebtsova 2014, Picciarelli 1999, Diodato 2005, 2006, Vachek 1966). Si può pensare che ciò derivasse dalla forte esigenza, fortemente avvertita dalla linguistica strutturalista degli Anni Trenta, di una solida terminologia scientifica e di modelli teorici condivisi. Ma possiamo anche pensare che sotto sotto agisse l’intento, consapevole o meno, di voler sottrarre i fatti del linguaggio e più in generale i fenomeni di senso al dominio del “soggettivo” e del “fattore umano”, cercando di oggettivizzarli, traducendoli nei termini di una vera e propria fisica delle forze. Come rileva Skrebtsova, un marcato ricorso alle metafore geometrico-spaziali caratterizza il pensiero di Karcevskij, Mathesius, Martinet, ma è in nuce già presente in Saussure (cf. Ducrot 1968: 47, cit. qui in nota 7); in ambito tedesco lo si riscontra in Trier, Weisgerber, Porzig, e più recentemente nel concetto di dominio nozionale nella teoria delle operazioni enunciative di Culioli (1982, cf. La Mantia 2014) o per la semantica dei prototipi di Rosch (Rosch 1973, Lakoff 1987), sebbene la portata della metafora si sia estesa ben oltre la linguistica e abbia raggiunto il dominio delle scienze sociali (si veda, uno per tutti, la nozione di “campo” in Bourdieu 1985).

Skrebtsova non rileva, tuttavia, che tra i linguisti strutturalisti che hanno adottato e sviluppato alcune nozioni o metafore “geometriche”, Louis Hjelmslev occupa una posizione di rilevo. Nella glossematica, infatti, l’idea di spazio viene declinata in almeno tre direzioni: una direzione teorica, una empirica ed una che potremmo chiamare “parateorico”.

La direzione teorica (§ 2) riguarda la concezione spaziale o “posizionale” implicata dal modello stesso di lingua come struttura e come sistema: un teoria è strutturalista se concepisce[1] il proprio oggetto come una struttura, ovvero come totalità in cui le parti non hanno senso se non per la posizione che occupano, per la funzione che svolgono tra loro e rispetto al tutto. Descrivere una qualsiasi unità della lingua significherà descrivere le coordinate che la individuano all’interno del sistema di cui fa parte, il nodo sulla rete, il punto nello spazio; quali definizioni permettono di descrivere la lingua in questi termini?

La direzione empirica (§ 3) riguarda il significato fondamentale che secondo la cosiddetta “ipotesi localista” (cf. Picciarelli 1999: 32 sgg.) di cui la glossematica si fa portavoce, soggiace alla categoria grammaticale dei casi, ovvero l’idea di “relazione”. Ma cosa significa dire che il significato dei casi grammaticali si lascia spiegare in termini direzionali? E che implicazioni ha ciò sul piano della teoria della conoscenza?

Infine, la direzione “parateorica” (§ 4) riguarda il problema della raffigurazione grafica specifica della glossematica, ovvero quel corredo di soluzioni grafiche, schemi, diagrammi, modelli che affiancano le definizioni verbali date nella teoria (su questo cf. Badir 2005, 2008, 2009) come trasposizioni visuali di queste. In più, esse dovrebbero permettere un colpo d’occhio sintetico dell’ossatura dell’oggetto, proprio come le corrispettive raffigurazioni dei rapporti di parentela dell’antropologia (cf. Bertin 1967 in Benveniste 2001) o le strutture ad albero proposte dalla teoria generativo-trasformazionale.

Questi tre aspetti sono certamente legati tra loro, ma il loro rapporto va articolato attentamente, onde evitare alcuni rischi interpretativi che abbiamo sottolineati altrove[2]. Vediamo come.

2. Struttura, funzione e posizione

Il primo aspetto non è specifico della teoria hjelmsleviana, anzi si può dire che la connotazione spaziale supportata dall’idea di “posizione” sia propria di tutto lo strutturalismo linguistico. Dire che la lingua è un sistema costituito da rapporti, in cui le grandezze che vi entrano non sono definite tanto dalle loro qualità concrete, positive (o dalla cosiddetta “sostanza”) quanto soprattutto dal loro reciproco opporsi (cioè dalla loro “forma”), significa concepire la lingua come un intreccio di luoghi vuoti fondato su una vera e propria differenza di potenziale. Essendo la lingua una “struttura”, ovvero una totalità il cui valore supera la somma delle parti, le unità della lingua assumono senso solo in virtù della posizione che esse rivestono all’interno del sistema, le une rispetto alle altre. Il principium individuationis delle unità linguistiche è dunque, almeno idealmente, cartesiano: descrivere un’unità linguistica (un morfema, un fonema, una sillaba, e così via) in una data lingua significa localizzarla, ovvero stabilire il reticolo di coordinate che la individua all’interno della totalità in cui rientra (la categoria grammaticale di caso, la categoria delle vocali, la classe delle sillabe che possono occorrere in posizione iniziale di parola, e così via), e di questo rispetto alle altre totalità (le altre categorie nominali, la categoria delle consonanti, l’insieme delle posizioni sillabiche, ecc.). Per spiegare meglio questo stato di cose, Hjelmslev sceglie un’unità linguistica particolare, come la r francese: si può dapprima definire la r francese come una “vibrante sonora rotata alveolare” o come “fricativa sonora uvulare” (Hjelmslev 1988: 146), cercando di esaurire tutti i tratti positivi che si riscontrano nella sua pronuncia standard. Ma un tale punto di vista, se spiega come essa sia pronunciata, non spiega perché essa lo sia; in più, qualsiasi pronuncia particolare che variasse qualche tratto di questa specifica r porterebbe alla strana conclusione per cui in realtà ci troviamo all’interno di un’altra lingua: “qualunque cambiamento della definizione data porterebbe a un cambiamento di lingua, e il francese pronunciato con una r differente, ad esempio retroflessa, faringale, fricativo-palatale, sarebbe una lingua diversa dal francese che conosciamo” (Hjelmslev 1988: 146). Immaginiamo lo stesso problema moltiplicato per tutte le vocali di una lingua: avremmo tante lingue quante sono le pronunce – il che, se da un lato potrebbe avallare il misticismo di alcune interpretazioni, dall’altro vanificherebbe 1) l’idea di lingua come istituzione collettiva biplanare e 2) la possibilità stessa di una scienza della lingua. D’altra parte, possiamo concepire la r francese come una “vibrante che ammette come variante libera la pronuncia di fricativa posteriore” (Hjelmslev 1988: 145). Così definita, essa include già un momento formale – per esempio una classe di varianti; inoltre, la sua definizione positiva è ridotta per così dire al minimo: “l’r francese si definisce adesso come un’entità oppositiva e relativa sì, ma munita di una qualità positiva: per le sue vibrazioni si oppone alle non-vibranti; per la sua articolazione posteriore si oppone alle altre fricative; per la sua pronuncia fricativa si oppone alle occlusive […]. D’altra parte, le qualità positive che la definizione attribuisce alla r francese sono ridotte al minimo differenziale: per questo essa non comporta alcuna precisazione riguardo al luogo di articolazione” (Hjelmslev 1988: 146). Ci siamo mossi di un passo in direzione dell’essenza linguistica dell’unità considerata, ma ancora essa ci sfugge. Per raggiungerla, secondo Hjelmslev è necessario abbandonare i criteri di pronuncia e adottare criteri formali, di posizione: l’r francese è tale perché (1) è una consonante, (2) può occorrere indifferentemente in posizione sillabica iniziale o finale, (3) è prossima alle vocali e può occorrere in prima posizione in un gruppo finale, (4) contrae commutazione con altri elementi delle stesse categorie (come l). Rispetto a tale definizione, la r rimane tale anche se pronunciata in modi differenti: “ciò che la distingue dagli altri elementi non è la sua qualità propria e positiva, ma semplicemente il fatto che non si confonde con essi” (Hjelmslev 1988: 144-145). Ciò significa che il sistema profondo della lingua, ovvero ciò che fa di una lingua quella lingua, rimane tale a prescindere da fatto che essa si realizzi in una materia fonica o grafica, in un linguaggio di gesti, in un sistema di segnali con bandiere, nell’alfabeto morse, e così via. Il problema dell’identità delle grandezze linguistiche coincide dunque con il problema di stabilire il ruolo di tali grandezze nel sistema, cioè la loro funzione o, in termini spaziali, la loro posizione.

La suggestione spaziale implicata in questa idea traspare fin dalla metafora saussuriana della lingua come gioco di scacchi, il cui principio fondamentale è il rapporto di distribuzione dei pezzi sulla scacchiera. Oswald Ducrot[3] giustamente ricorda, inoltre, che Saussure stesso aveva adottato l’idea di lingua come sistema di segni intesi come spazi fonetici e semantici tra loro concorrenti: all’interno della lingua, ogni segno si ritaglia un dominio la cui limitazione è data solo ab externo, cioè dalla presenza degli altri segni. D’altra parte, si sarebbe in errore nel ritenere che le frontiere tra i segni siano assolutamente sclerotiche, rigide: al contrario, nella lingua vige uno stato di sincronica[4] fluidità e i limiti che marcano il dominio di ciascun segno sono generalmente permeabili. La metafora delle zone segniche implica che tra queste zone vi sia sempre una certa sovrapponibilità che viene assunta per principio in quanto diretta espressione dei fenomeni tipici della struttura della lingua (si pensi ai casi di sinonimia, omonimia, neutralizzazioni, fusioni, implicazioni ecc.), ma che risulta difficilmente traducibili in termini grafici.

Ora, all’interno di questa grande metafora geometrico-spaziale, la glossematica apporta una sua propria, specifica “mitologia”. Già nel 1934, durante il ciclo di conferenze che sarebbero state pubblicate postume con il titolo di Sprogsystem og Sprogforandring (SoS), Hjelmslev descrive la lingua come una serie di settori concentrici, dal più interno (il sistema grammaticale) al più esterno (i sistemi fonetico e semantico), a loro volta organizzati in zone nucleari o centrali, linguisticamente più profonde (e antropologicamente o cognitivamente più pregnanti), astratte e per questo frequentemente irregolari, e zone periferiche, più superficiali, concrete e regolarizzate, stabilizzate dall’uso cosciente dei soggetti parlanti[5]. Inoltre, se scorriamo il testo che dovrebbe rappresentare la versione formalizzata della teoria del linguaggio proposta da Hjelmslev, ovvero il Résumé di una teoria del linguaggio (TLR), vedremo che le definizioni ivi contenute sono in larga parte termini carichi di connotazioni topologiche, come per esempio: “ampiezza” (def 184), “area” (def 87), “campo” (def 72), “centrale” (def 254), “centrifugo” (def 331), “centripeto” (def 332), “configurazione” (def 77), “dimensione” (def 88), “direzione” (def 220), “esterno” (def 166), “interno” (def 165), “lato” (def 270), “linea” (189), “mappatura” (151), “marginale” (def 246), “periferico” (def 242), “piano” (def 25), “sezione” (def 124), “sovrapposizione” (def 105). Ora, la questione è di stabilire se la metafora spaziale suggerita da questi termini sia costitutiva, ovvero iconica, oppure solamente accessoria. Innanzitutto, l’intenso lavoro di riformulazione dei termini che Hjelmslev intraprende fin dal 1936, lavorando fianco a fianco con Uldall, e che giunge alla sistemazione relativamente stabile (seppur non conclusiva) del Résumé ci sembra possa dimostrare che una tale terminologia non è scelta a caso: la metafora spaziale è ritenuta particolarmente adatta all’oggetto che si tratta di costituire (la struttura generale delle semiotiche). D’altra parte, i termini non sono stati scelti in base al significato spaziale che normalmente si accorda a questi termini: una loro ridefinizione tecnica sarebbe stata, forse, inutile. L’interpretazione spaziale supportata da queste definizioni sarebbe appunto un elemento connotativo, una sfumatura che, per quanto legittima e dunque presente nella teoria, non dovrebbe essere considerata costitutiva, essenziale, per quest’ultima. Prova ne sia che nessuno dei termini citati più sopra riceve una definizione geometrica: nessuno dei definientes di tali termini è collegato esplicitamente al dominio comunemente chiamato “geometria”, ovvero al sistema di definizioni che costituisce tale disciplina. Così, per esempio, per “lato” non s’intende un segmento di un poligono, ma un “membro di una paradigmatica”; il “piano”, che in geometria è un concetto primitivo, cessa di esserlo nella glossematica, in cui assume il significato tutt’altro che intuitivo di “componente di una semiotica”; per non parlare dell’“area”, che da misura dell’estensione della superficie diviene grosso modo la zona concettuale a partire da cui le opposizioni semplici, contrarie e contraddittorie assumono senso. Si tratta allora di etichette. Queste nozioni parlano alla nostra immaginazione, fanno parte del bagaglio di informazioni con cui ci apprestiamo a entrare nel dominio della teoria glossematica del linguaggio, ma, una volta penetrativici, dobbiamo per forza spogliarcene, o meglio trasformarle, accettando che il loro significato sia completamente differente dalla comune accezione che riserviamo loro nella nostra esperienza, derivi essa dal quotidiano o dalla nostra competenza di matematici o geometri. Semplicemente, si tratta di microlingue differenti. Eppure, ancora una volta, questa spiegazione non convince: perché scegliere proprio questi termini? Una domanda legittima, tanto più che la glossematica dà prova di un’inventiva notevole quando si tratta di escogitare nozioni e definizioni che evitino eventuali ambiguità o conflitti con termini tecnici di altre teorie[6], arrivando talvolta a neologismi del tutto criptici[7]? Non ci sono soluzioni facili: un termine tecnico sarà necessariamente accompagnato da una serie di connotazioni, alcune delle quali derivano dalla nostra esperienza di tutti i giorni, dai nostri studi pregressi, dalla cultura in cui siamo inseriti, e così via. Queste associazioni non sono eliminabili, possiamo solamente farne una temporanea “epoché”, sospendendo la loro validità a livello di significati primari.

Allora, a essere interessante non è più la questione di stabilire se l’idea di spazio veicolata da questi termini sia metaforica o costitutiva, ma è l’alternativa stessa, il modo in cui questo problema si pone e che vale anche per altre “fluttuazioni interdisciplinari” come ad esempio il conflitto tra punto di vista linguistico e punto di vista logico nella definizione di “funzione” (cf. Cigana 2016). Ciò significa che quando operiamo all’interno della teoria del linguaggio chiamata “glossematica”, operiamo con una batteria di categorie o di concetti specifici che, proprio per via della loro specificità, si pongono su un livello fortemente astratto. Gestirli senza tentare di ricondurli ai termini primitivi da cui dipendono è difficile: una padronanza di tale lessico richiederebbe almeno che questo entrasse lentamente nell’uso scientifico diffuso, cioè che vi fosse accordo nella comunità scientifica e che si sviluppasse una vera e propria tradizione basata sull’uso continuo e condiviso di tali termini[8]. L’intuizione, allora, accorre in nostro aiuto: di fronte alla necessità di utilizzare nozioni così astratte e lontane dal senso comune, adottiamo implicitamente le connotazioni suggerite dalle stesse nozioni come supporto concreto per la mente, come spazio analogico di rappresentazione. Questo ci aiuta a ricondurre il discorso a una dimensione in cui possiamo “visualizzare” e “manipolare” i termini attraverso le rappresentazioni collaterali che essi ci forniscono. Così siamo legittimati a raffigurarci i piani della semiotica grosso modo come due superfici in cui si essa si divide, da un lato l’espressione e dall’altro il contenuto. Allo stesso modo, siamo legittimati a concepire intuitivamente il lato come una parte, o un “aspetto”, del poligono costituito dalla semiotica stessa. E siamo legittimati a concepire l’“area” come una zona all’interno della superficie (sublogica) su cui s’innestano le opposizioni che governano i rapporti tra le unità della lingua stessa. E così via per tutti i termini menzionati. E non solo: per via dell’ambiguità costitutiva della nozione di “funzione”, essa va intesa a partire da un significato intermedio che includa sia il significato di “rapporto” che quello di “ruolo” e che partecipi dell’uno e dell’altro – come Hjelmslev del resto esplicitamente suggerisce (cf. FTL: 37-38). In definitiva, ci è sempre possibile concepire implicitamente la lingua come un’entità spazializzata, gestendo i termini tecnici come componenti di questa, al fine di farci un’idea generale di come la lingua venga articolata dalla teoria stessa. Questo ha naturalmente un rischio: raffigurandoci mentalmente la lingua come un’entità spazializzata, e manipolando idealmente i suoi componenti (i “piani”, “lati”, “aree”) come se davvero le grandezze che ne fanno parte fossero le entità geometriche suggerite, facciamo appello alla nostra esperienza implicita in fatto di operazioni di manipolazione possibili (suddivisioni, partizioni, mappature, distribuzioni, scambi commutativi, ecc.). Questo può generare interpretazioni fallaci, che in realtà non sono supportate dal significato logico-concettuale specifico dei termini: un esempio classico di tale “precomprensione” riguarda il carattere lineare del significante evocato dal concetto di “sintagma” o “processo”. In entrambi i casi, si ha a che fare con la struttura profonda del testo, ravvisata tanto da Saussure che da Hjelmslev nei rapporti sintagmatici o in praesentia che uniscono le parti (parole, sillabe, vocali e consonanti, e così via). L’esecuzione dell’atto di parole, dice Saussure, si sviluppa naturalmente nel tempo: si tratta infatti di pronunciare, articolandoli uno dopo l’altro, i componenti del sintagma in questione. Eppure, sostiene Hjelmslev, quando si tratta di arrivare alla forma, notiamo che questo principio non regge. Esso si fonda su un intreccio intuitivo, e surrettizio, tra tre distinzioni eterogenee: 1) tra struttura virtuale e sua realizzazione concreta, 2) tra sistema e processo, 3) tra significato e significante. Ora, prosegue Hjelmslev, se si analizza la sola idea di “sintagma” o di “processo”, fondata sul solo rapporto logico espresso dalla funzione “e…e”, si noterà che nulla in essa implica una spazializzazione o una distribuzione lineare tra i termini che contraggono questa funzione. Siamo legittimati a ricorrere alla rappresentazione lineare solo quando si tratta di analizzare il modo in cui la struttura virtuale della langue si realizza concretamente, nella sostanza. Donde la critica, da parte di Hjelmslev, alla nozione di “asse delle successività” con cui Jakobson riformula la teoria saussuriana[9]. La rappresentazione spaziale della linea è dunque solo un appiglio per visualizzare i rapporti sintagmatici, ma può essere sviante quando si considera che il fondamento logico non riguarda la distribuzione delle grandezze sintagmatiche, ma solo la loro coesistenza: la nostra mente, facendo leva sulle rappresentazioni spaziali suggerite dalle definizioni (o da una certa vulgata interpretativa), costruisce un modello visivo dell’oggetto della teoria che tuttavia può obbedire a regole differenti da quelle prescritte dalla teoria stessa.

Ancora una volta, tuttavia, questo rischio interpretativo non basta per liquidare la questione della spazializzazione delle grandezze linguistiche come una mera visualizzazione: non si tratta semplicemente di un pericolo del pensiero analogico che suggerisce di trattare grandezze logico-concettuali come grandezze spazializzate. Il rischio mostra solo la necessità di costruire modelli adeguati alle indicazioni che riceviamo dalla teoria, senza lasciare che il sottile equilibrio tra la dimensione logica e quella geometrico-spaziale cessi di essere tale. In fondo, abbiamo visto più sopra quel reticolo di funzioni, che secondo l’impostazione strutturalista costituisce la natura dell’oggetto “lingua”, supporti un’interpretazione spaziale, topologica, e una fenomenologica, coesistenti: al senso logico di “funzione” come rapporto si affianca un senso fenomenologico di “ruolo” ed un senso topologico di “posizione”. Ciò significa che una grandezza linguistica è definita dal fatto di “contrarre una funzione”, di “svolgere un ruolo”, di “occupare una posizione”. Allo stesso modo, si può parlare della “consonante” come “costituente marginale” intendendo, da un lato, che le consonanti si collocano posizionalmente ai margini delle vocali, che costituiscono invece il nucleo centrale della sillaba, e dall’altro che nella sillaba le consonanti presuppongono logicamente le vocali come condizione costante. Un’interpretazione fenomenologica possibile della funzione di commutazione sarà quella di “confronto tra scambi” – perché queste sono le operazioni intenzionali che esprimono in concreto, sul piano pratico (e grazie a cui possiamo riconoscere) la funzione di relazione tra due correlazioni sui due piani della lingua definita appunto commutazione. Sempre giocando tra questi punti di vista potremo dire che le funzioni si lasciano interpretare spazialmente come vettori (Rajnović 2003), e le posizioni si lasciano interpretare logicamente come intersezione di funzioni. E così via.

Ora, se queste differenti classi d’interpretazioni coesistono, non sono tuttavia perfettamente equivalenti: tra queste possibilità, Hjelmslev da priorità al senso logico, che viene assunto nella teoria in quanto si basa su un minor numero di premesse che non le altre definizioni (FTL: 38). Ciò tuttavia non significa che queste ultime vengano escluse dalla teoria: esse passano solo in secondo piano, sullo sfondo, pronte ad emergere in corrispondenza di opportune sollecitazioni. E le sollecitazioni non sono costituite solo da questo intervento (come speriamo che esso sia), ma proprio dagli altri due aspetti dell’idea di spazio cui conviene ora avvicinarci.

3. La grammaticalizzazione dello spazio

Abbiamo visto che la spazializzazione (che è una sorta di ipostatizzazione) dell’oggetto che la teoria veicola non è accessoria, metaforica, non è un mero espediente di visualizzazione legato ad un bisogno cognitivo; essa riflette uno sforzo concreto di modellizzazione da parte della teoria stessa: quello che la teoria del linguaggio intende proporre è un metodo di analisi della semiotica insieme ad una rappresentazione di questa come intreccio di rapporti qualitativi tra termini. Non è un caso che il termine primitivo di “descrizione” sintetizzi proprio questo doppio aspetto: la descrizione è allo stesso tempo una predicazione di qualità relative ad un oggetto già presente alla coscienza, e dall’altro è la restituzione di tale oggetto alla coscienza, la “presentificazione” di esso alla coscienza stessa. In quest’ ultima accezione, si può dire che essa “faccia”, “costruisca”, l’oggetto, dal momento che la descrizione è tale solo a partire da alcuni criteri fondamentali (il “punto di vista”) che essa stessa fissa come pertinenti. Fin qui, tuttavia, la questione si è mantenuta sul solo livello epistemologico, riguardante cioè la teoria. Vi è però un punto, nel modello di lingua proposto dalla teoria glossematica, in cui l’idea di spazio sembra provenire non più dalla teoria ma dall’oggetto stesso, in cui cioè la spazializzazione sia imposta alla teoria dalla lingua stessa: si tratta dell’analisi del contenuto delle categorie morfologiche generali di caso, di persona e di diatesi, discussa nell’opera La categoria dei casi (CdC) e il saggio Per una teoria dei morfemi (Hjelmslev 1991: 97 sgg.).

È bene chiarire subito la posta in gioco. Per Hjelmslev la “morfologia” ha un ruolo più ampio della sua tradizionale definizione per opposizione alla sintassi (FTL: 91), che è inclusa in essa. Intesa in termini tecnici, si tratta di quel livello della lingua che ha a che fare con le categorie dei cosiddetti “esponenti” chiamati a modificare la base tematica (l’insieme costituito dalle radici e dagli affissi, l’altra grande parte della grammatica) e a plasmare il piano del contenuto linguistico secondo un’articolazione finita di unità. Nella prospettiva di Hjelmslev, la morfologia rappresenta il dominio più interno della lingua, il cuore del sistema in cui essa mette in gioco i propri strumenti per dare forma alla molteplice varietà dei nostri vissuti, alle nostre rappresentazioni, rendendoli condivisibili e comunicabili – un aspetto fenomenologico (per non dire cognitivo) della teoria glossematica su cui abbiamo già richiamato più volte l’attenzione (Cigana 2014a, 2014b).

È bene chiarire subito la posta in gioco. Per Hjelmslev la “morfologia” ha un ruolo più ampio della sua tradizionale definizione per opposizione alla sintassi (FTL: 91), che è inclusa in essa. Intesa in termini tecnici, si tratta di quel livello della lingua che ha a che fare con le categorie dei cosiddetti “esponenti” chiamati a modificare la base tematica (l’insieme costituito dalle radici e dagli affissi, l’altra grande parte della grammatica) e a plasmare il piano del contenuto linguistico secondo un’articolazione finita di unità. Nella prospettiva di Hjelmslev, la morfologia rappresenta il dominio più interno della lingua, il cuore del sistema in cui essa mette in gioco i propri strumenti per dare forma alla molteplice varietà dei nostri vissuti, alle nostre rappresentazioni, rendendoli condivisibili e comunicabili – un aspetto fenomenologico (per non dire cognitivo) della teoria glossematica su cui abbiamo già richiamato più volte l’attenzione (Cigana 2014a, 2014b).

Le categorie morfologiche in effetti costituiscono la “rete” che, stesa sulla nostra esperienza, filtra e plasma quest’ultima secondo la propria forma: ogni lingua organizza in modo diverso un set profondo di categorie generali (nominali e verbali, ovvero rispettivamente caso, articolo, comparazione, numero-genere da un lato, e modo, tempo, aspetto, diatesi, persona, enfasi dall’altro) condivise da tutte[10]. Ogni categoria è definita in un doppio momento: formalmente, dai fatti di funzione che permettono a ciascuna categoria di ritagliarsi un dominio nella struttura della lingua; e semanticamente, dai diversi significati che è possibile associare alla categoria generale e alle diverse articolazioni che si realizzano nelle singole lingue – ovvero dalla natura di quello stesso ritaglio[11]. Così, ad esempio, la categoria morfologica generale di comparazione è riconoscibile per il fatto di costituirsi per “direzione nessica eteronessuale”[12], e per il fatto di supportare una sostanza del contenuto specifica (un’idea latente del linguaggio, nel senso di Bréal) – l’idea platonica di “intensità”. Di conseguenza, ogni volta che facciamo ricorso alla categoria di comparazione nella nostra lingua, stiamo plasmando il nostro atto di parole secondo quelle regole che, dal punto di vista discorsivo, formano e presentano (a prescindere dal fatto che ne siamo coscienti) all’interlocutore un universo di senso in cui si istituisce un confronto tra gradienti di intensità tra due o più realtà legate funzionalmente rispetto ad una data qualità. Ma non solo: il fatto stesso che per esprimere una data relazione semantica noi dobbiamo adottare una convenzione sintagmatica (morfosintattica) precisa, rientra nel modo in cui le categorie grammaticali organizzano il pensiero e le sue operazioni. In effetti, secondo Hjelmslev il potere formativo delle categorie morfologiche si estende su un doppio livello: (1) quello “cognitivo”, relativo alla discorsivizzazione delle strutture linguistiche e all’organizzazione dei dati e dei vissuti esperienziali, (2) e quello “metacognitivo”, relativo al modo in cui pensiamo il pensiero – esempio principe di questo tipo d’influenza è proprio la categoria di caso.

(1) Il primo livello corrisponde in parte a quella che Bühler chiamava la funzione di rappresentazione della lingua, salvo che in questo caso la scommessa è più profonda: le categorie morfologiche orientano, modificano e plasmano la nostra esperienza, avvicinandosi molto ad una sorta di archetipi collettivi. E dal momento che esse sono pensate non come riflesso verbale delle rappresentazioni mentali, ma come vero e proprio principio di formazione di queste, ad esse spetta il compito di coordinare in modo sovraindividuale dati provenienti da qualsiasi aspetto del vissuto fenomenologico dell’uomo: il linguaggio esprime e dà forma “al contenuto della coscienza in generale, non solamente della coscienza intellettuale, ma anche della coscienza affettiva, dell’emozione e della volizione” (PGG: 20, n. 46), ivi inclusa la coscienza percettivo-corporea. Dal momento che dal punto di vista linguistico prima delle differenze introdotte dalla lingua il vissuto va considerato come un continuum amorfo, a rigore la distinzione che abbiamo appena proposto non è pertinente. L’idea di relazione andrà dunque presa in senso steinthaliano come una rappresentazione di rappresentazioni (PGG: 22, n. 51): essa agisce come un catalizzatore capace di articolare subconsciamente i contenuti di coscienza a prescindere dalla loro natura. Tanto più che, proseguendo lungo questa direzione, la stessa barriera tra fisico e mentale viene meno: secondo Hjelmslev, nella lingua non esiste alcuna separazione ontologica prestabilita e insuperabile tra oggetti astratti e oggetti concreti, dunque nella scienza del linguaggio è opportuno rifiutare siffatta distinzione insieme all’impostazione riduttivista che ne deriva[13]. Come dirà esplicitamente, “il contenuto del linguaggio è il mondo stesso che ci circonda […] la lampada che è sul mio tavolo è un significato particolare della parola lampada; io stesso sono un significato particolare della parola uomo”[14] (cf. Hjelmslev 1970: 138). Ciò significa, in ultima analisi, porre la modalità di conoscenza come costitutiva dell’oggetto di conoscenza stesso, qualunque esso sia[15].

2) Ora, tra le idee linguistiche fondamentali (o “sematemi”) associate alle categorie morfologiche, quella associata alla categoria di caso è proprio l’idea di relazione: “Il fenomeno soggettivo[16] designato da tale categoria è la concezione spaziale; tale concezione è applicata dal soggetto parlante ai diversi ordini del fenomeno oggettivo, che si tratti dello spazio, del tempo, della causalità logica o della rection sintagmatica” (CdC: 120). In base alla già citata ipotesi del localismo, “si sostiene che il principio di direzione si manifesta su due piani differenti, su un piano astratto e su un piano concreto” (CdC: 109), ovvero relativamente ai rapporti logico-grammaticali e a quelli spaziali – due aspetti che, così, cessano di opporsi in base alla loro presunta consistenza ontologica: “tutti i casi sono in una certa misura applicabili nello stesso tempo a relazioni concrete o locali e a relazioni più astratta di ordine grammaticale o ‘logico’, e che in ciò non vi è alcuna differenza essenziale” (CdC: 150). Il significato di relazione proprio della categoria di caso non viene ristretto solamente alle rappresentazioni veicolate nel messaggio, ma anche alle (meta)rappresentazioni che vi facciamo delle strutture grammaticali stesse in termini di “funzioni”, cioè di rapporti spazializzati. Come a dire che, poiché la categoria di caso si estrinseca attraverso relazioni morfosintattiche specifiche, queste non sono che un altro aspetto della categoria. Le stesse funzioni che realizzano la dipendenza casuale e che a noi sembrano pure forme prive di contenuto, rapporti convenzionali puramente meccaniche, norme sintattiche che in sé non dicono nulla (come i rapporti di accordo o di reggenza), in realtà rientrano nel valore stesso della categoria, realizzandone la forma del contenuto:

“In tutte le lingue vi è una rection casuale la cui ragione è la parentela semantica esistente tra il termine reggente e il morfema casuale del termine retto, e che, dall’altra, il morfema casuale implica un significato proprio indipendente dai fatti di rection […]. La rection casuale non è un fatto meccanico; essa si spiega attraverso il valore dei casi in questione. […] Tutto quello che resta del principio invocato da questa teoria è il fatto che la prima dimensione casuale, quella di direzione, agisce in maniera sintomatica sulle rection sintagmatiche” (CdC).

In altre parole, per Hjelmslev anche il modo in cui si esplicita la funzione della reggenza dipende dalla categoria di caso stessa, o, per dirla in termini tecnici, i fatti sintagmatici risultano plasmati dai fatti paradigmatici (morfologici):

Prendiamo un sintagma che per la sua estensione ricopre una frase nel senso classico, come

Abbiamo riportato le rections in cui sono implicati fatti di caso. Le frecce al di sopra della linea indicano le relazioni puramente casuali. Le frecce al di sotto indicano le relazioni in cui i casi sono implicati in connessione con altre categorie morfematiche (persona, numero e genere). È possibile qui osservare un gioco evidente di allontanamento e di avvicinamento (CdC: 135).

Riassumiamo. L’idea di relazione, intrinseca della categoria di caso, emerge anche nell’apparato sintagmatico, ovvero nel gioco tra termine reggente e termine retto: ciò significa che il sintagma e le sue regole di costruzione spazializzano il contenuto astratto della categoria di caso. Nell’intera teoria di Hjelmslev, questo è il luogo in cui emerge con più chiarezza una suggestione hegeliana: ovvero l’idea che un elemento astratto si fa concreto in virtù della sua stessa natura. Ora, se l’idea di relazione della categoria di caso si declina in termini spaziali, coglibili concretamente, ciò significa che alla teoria spetta il compito di fornirne una rappresentazione quanto più adeguata possibile, e questo è possibile sfruttando metalinguisticamente un’idea fornita dalla lingua stessa. Ecco che, di colpo, l’impianto nominalista della glossematica diviene improvvisamente realista: la rappresentazione grafica delle funzioni è il modo in cui la teoria può cogliere la più vera natura delle funzioni stesse della lingua. In questo senso, la schematizzazione (grafica) delle funzioni linguistiche non è più uno stratagemma esterno, arbitrario del linguista, attraverso cui la teoria si impone sull’oggetto, ma diviene il modo in cui l’oggetto stesso si lascia cogliere, e chiede alla teoria di essere colto: come afferma giustamente Picciarelli, “il localismo non pertiene solamente alla struttura linguistica, ma anche al modello che pretende di rappresentarla” (Picciarelli 1999: 33). Noi possiamo rappresentarci metalinguisticamente la lingua come spazializzata perché la lingua stessa supporta, almeno entro certi limiti, questa possibilità. Una tale prospettiva abbandona decisamente l’idea per cui la lingua esprime uno stato di cose, per abbracciare l’idea per cui la lingua forma uno stato di cose o la sua rappresentazione.

Questa concezione, d’altra parte, pone dei problemi piuttosto gravi. Innanzitutto, è ovvio che l’apparato funzionale della glossematica (ovvero le diverse funzioni di interdipendenza, determinazione, costellazione moltiplicate per i due diversi punti di vista, sintagmatico e paradigmatico) è costruito dalla teoria: tali funzioni rappresentano una mossa epistemologica, propria del metalinguaggio, mentre la categoria di caso è una categoria morfologica generale a fianco di altre. Se la categoria dei casi orienta la nostra stessa concettualizzazione (anche puramente epistemologica) delle relazioni, come alcuni punti nell’argomentazione di Hjelmslev fanno effettivamente credere, questo significherebbe

a) che vi sarebbe un’asimmetria nel sistema delle categorie morfologiche, dal momento che la categoria di caso dovrebbe influenzare il metalinguaggio utilizzato per descrivere le altre categorie morfologiche;

b) che la categoria di caso dovrebbe essere universale;

c) che ogniqualvolta ci collochiamo sul piano metalinguistico, epistemologico, e ci rappresentiamo mentalmente le funzioni in termini di rapporti spaziali, in questo processo interviene in qualche modo all’idea di caso, ad una forma casuale. Qualunque forma di modellizzazione spaziale, dovrebbe cioè far leva sul linguaggio e più precisamente sulla categoria morfologica di caso;

d) più in generale, che qualsiasi forma di concettualizzazione dipende in qualche misura dalla struttura della semiotica onniformativa per eccellenza, la lingua storico-naturale.

Difficile riuscire a dimostrare queste ipotesi, che riposano in parte su una scommessa teorica, in parte su assunzioni di metodo, in parte su evidenze empiriche. Di seguito le discutiamo brevemente, prima di passare all’ultima questione.

(a) In realtà, non solo il significato generale (sematema) di caso ma tutti i significati profondi delle categorie morfologiche, ovvero le quattro idee platoniche discusse in Hjelmslev (1991: 102), sono concepiti come talmente astratti da poter rappresentare delle operazioni cognitive fondamentali, di carattere logico-psicologico, dunque certo, anche metalinguistiche: le idee di relazione, intensità, consistenza e realtà, insieme alle loro specifiche articolazioni, forniscono delle coordinate dotate di un valore totemico che organizzano vissuti differenti, su livelli diversi, dalle proporzioni spaziali (caso) e relazionali (diatesi), alle rappresentazioni ontologiche (le sostanze metafisiche distinte in base alle opposizioni concentrato vs. diffuso, massivo vs. puntuale della categoria di numero-genere; la reificazione dell’azione e del tempo secondo i criteri di limitato vs. illimitato supportati della categoria di aspetto), ai rapporti qualitativi (comparazione), l’attribuzione di un senso di realtà o irrealtà (articolo e modo), e così via[17]. La griglia delle categorie linguistiche costituisce dunque un punto d’indagine centrale per osservare le istituzioni del pensiero, semplicemente perché la lingua stessa è – nell’ipotesi hjelmsleviana – quella “istituzione zero” che permette di rappresentarsi le altre stesse istituzioni. In più, dal punto di vista gnoseologico, se volessimo tentare un confronto con la teoria kantiana della conoscenza, dovremmo dire che le categorie linguistiche sono più vicine allo schematismo che non alle categorie dell’intelletto: esse costituiscono il momento di articolazione tra le intuizioni pure e le classi conoscitive del pensiero che risulta, a questo punto, intimamente linguisticizzato. Questo è quanto sembrano suggerirci le parole del linguista danese: “qualunque operazione poggia in ultima analisi sulle concezioni di spazio e di tempo. L’operazione intellettuale consiste nel ricondurre i fatti osservati nel mondo oggettivo a formule spaziali e temporali” (CdC: 120; c.vo ns.).

(b) Questo punto riguarda in realtà il problema della differenza tra “generale” e “universale” nella glossematica. Basti dire che le categorie sono dette “generali” proprio perché si ritrovano in tutte le lingue, sebbene ciascuna lingua possa configurarle in modo differente, non solo dal punto di vista interno (il greco suddivide la categoria di caso in modo diverso dal latino) ma anche in relazione alle altre categorie, sopprimendone alcune ma in realtà “convertendole”, per esempio “lessicalizzandole” (come per il sistema delle preposizioni che tipicamente rappresentano la categoria dei casi allo stato convertito)[18].

(c-d) Queste due ipotesi riposano, come ricordato, sul principio dell’onniformatività della lingua. È in effetti la teoria stessa a costruire la lingua come tale, nel momento in cui si definisce “lingua” quella “paradigmatica di una semiotica denotativa i cui paradigmi sono manifestati da tutte le materie” (TLR, Def 38), ovvero, detto in parole povere, il sistema più versatile di tutti:

“Chiunque studi il contenuto significativo delle categorie della lingua non può fare a meno di rendersi conto che tali categorie costituiscono in qualche modo delle categorie epistemologiche. Tra le categorie della lingua e quelle del pensiero c’è un’intima relazione. Il che non vuol dire che vi sia identità. Tutto quello che si può pretendere anticipatamente è che la lingua costituisce in ultima analisi un sistema epistemologico, e che di conseguenza i concetti più profondi della lingua sono in linea di principio della stessa natura degli ultimi concetti dell’analisi logica” (CdC: 111).

Certo, un sistema epistemologico a fianco di altri, ma comunque il più estensivamente utilizzato, di cui possiamo forse narcotizzare la pertinenza a vantaggio di codici, criteri e scopi differenti, ma mai eluderlo completamente o prescinderne del tutto.

“La forma del linguaggio è una forma categoriale […]. Ciò non significa ancora che la forma categoriale di cui si tratta preesista al linguaggio. Al contrario, significa che c’è una forma specifica di ordine categoriale che viene rivelata attraverso il linguaggio, e solo attraverso questo. Sarebbe azzardato ed inutile pretendere a priori che le categorie rivelate attraverso il linguaggio differiscano per definizione da qualsiasi categoria epistemologica individuata attraverso speculazioni non-linguistiche. È almeno già molto verosimile che le speculazioni epistemologiche e le tavole categoriali individuate attraverso queste siano in parte costituite sui fatti linguistici” (CdC: 132).

Queste considerazioni complessive ci portano a credere che per la glossematica sia centrale proprio quello che Petitot-Cocorda le critica come debolezza (Petitot 1990: 222): una semiotizzazione dello spazio, laddove per il programma di morfogenesi del senso inaugurato da R. Thom (a cui appunto Petitot si richiama) sarebbe al contrario necessaria una spazializzazione della semiotica (cf. Picciarelli 1999: 44). Il punto è che non potrebbe essere diversamente: nella prospettiva glossematica, lo abbiamo visto, la semiotica può essere spazializzata solo perché lo spazio stesso è stato semiotizzato. Il paralogismo rilevato da Petitot, per cui la glossematica “afferma […] che l’intuizione spaziale deve saper dar forma alla sintassi, ma immediatamente dopo, per non perdere di vista il significato della categoria globale dei casi, essa deve negare quest’affermazione” (Petitot 1990: 221, cit. in Picciarelli 1999: 44), si scioglie notando che:

1) non è affatto l’intuizione spaziale a dover formare la sintassi, ma la rappresentazione linguistica dello spazio stessa, che si fa sintassi;

2) a rigore, la prospettiva di Petitot si mantiene ancora all’interno dell’opposizione sintassi (forma) vs. semantica (contenuto), laddove la nozione glossematica di forma del contenuto, di fatto, la rifonda completamente (cf. FTL: 57 sgg.; Hjelmslev 1988: 213 sgg.);

3) tutto dipende dalla scelta di quale linguaggio sfruttare come strumento di costruzione (e da quale ontologia intendiamo adottare): se il linguaggio matematico-topologico o il linguaggio naturale. Occupato a reperire il fondamento che dalla sostanza conduce alla forma (in conformità alla direzione del programma morfogenetico), Petitot si fonda esplicitamente su un punto esterno alla forma linguistica stessa, ovvero sullo spazio considerato come supporto astratto e regolato da criteri topologici. L’ipotesi è che lo spazio sia l’intuizione alla base dell’emersione delle forme, dunque anche di quelle linguistiche, e che la linguistica in quanto teoria rientri dunque nella topologia (lo studio dell’emersione delle forme). Il fatto è che, da un punto di vista semiotico, la teoria è un linguaggio (cf. Hjelmslev 1988: 128), e la teoria linguistica è dunque un linguaggio che si fa metalinguaggio. Dunque, anche la topologia sarebbe un linguaggio che semiotizza a suo modo lo spazio stesso. Ecco perché la scelta diviene se scegliere tra due semiotizzazioni diverse dello spazio: a partire da un linguaggio esterno alla lingua o a partire dal metalinguaggio interno, immanente[19], che nell’ipotesi glossematica è appunto la lingua stessa. L’obiettivo primario, in fondo, non è costituire un modello geometrico-spaziale della lingua, ma viceversa di cogliere il modo specifico in cui la lingua geometrizza le rappresentazioni, orientando la percezione, la comprensione e la comunicazione della realtà (ivi incluso il linguaggio).

4. Trasposizione grafica

È proprio la semiotizzazione dello spazio che garantisce la possibilità di passare dal dominio verbale a quello della rappresentazione grafica. Naturalmente, la traduzione da un ordine all’altro non è uniforme: la modellizzazione grafica obbedisce a criteri propri (in casu: geometrici) che si sovrappongono alle indicazioni verbali senza che vi sia coincidenza: alcune lacune vengono colmate, altre indicazioni vengono eluse e, in generale, tra l’organizzazione della sostanza verbale e l’organizzazione della sostanza grafica atte a manifestare una stessa forma linguistica sembra vi sia sempre uno stato di tensione, sebbene tra le due classi di sostanze Hjelmslev postuli una affinità: “Una teoria che si basa sul significato di una categoria grammaticale è sempre schematizzabile” (CdC: 93-94).

Per farci un’idea della questione possiamo concentrarci sugli schemi che in CdC dovrebbero restituire la struttura complessiva di una categoria morfologica:

• il sistema dei 48 casi della lingua lak (esempio A)
  
• il sistema dei 36 casi della lingua avara (esempio B)
  
• il sistema dei 52 casi del tabassarano (esempio C)
  

Tali soluzioni grafiche sintetizzano sinotticamente l’articolazione interna della categoria secondo i principi costitutivi della sua descrizione, generando un effetto “retorico” d’iconismo: nonostante l’aspetto particolarmente artificioso di tali schemi, se essi riescono effettivamente a riprodurre la sistematicità che supponiamo sia propria delle categorie reali, è legittimo supporre che siamo riusciti a coglierne visualmente la natura, secondo la proporzione [sistematicità logica = sistematicità grafica].

Conviene comunque ricordare che lo stato di cose riflesso graficamente è in realtà il prodotto di una serie di operazioni dinamiche, il precipitato di una complessa procedura di scomposizione che viene appunto ricomposta e cristallizzata. Ci pare che le opposizioni “statico vs. dinamico” e “sinottico vs. graduale” si prestino bene a connotare il rapporto tra ordine verbale e ordine grafico: quest’ultimo tipo di soluzione cristallizza staticamente il risultato delle operazioni di analisi e riduzione che, supportate dal corpus di definizioni e regole, intervengono una dopo l’altra come tappe progressive di un algoritmo descrittivo. Quello che queste rappresentazioni non permettono di cogliere è dunque la “generazione”, per via gerarchica, dei “glossemi” (le unità minime che costituiscono i casi e che sono rappresentati dalle lettere greche) a partire dai “tassemi” (i casi incasellati) e dalle “dimensioni” (le classi di tassemi rappresentate dagli assi verticali, orizzontali o trasversali).

Per cogliere questo percorso che porta fino alle unità fondamentali, possiamo scegliere un altro tipo di rappresentazione. Per esempio, potremmo rappresentarci il sistema dei casi della lingua avara (esempio B) in questo modo:

Questa rappresentazione permette di cogliere[20] il procedimento di suddivisione della categoria nei suoi costituenti, stabilita dalla successione delle operazioni di scomposizione descritte dalla teoria. Visivamente, si coglie il principio per cui è la categoria, e non i tassemi (casi), ad essere divisa in costituenti; si coglie il fatto che questi sorgono per così dire per combinazione (moltiplicazione) dei glossemi. Si perde, in cambio, il colpo d’occhio sulla distribuzione interna della stessa, l’idea della lingua come un oggetto complesso, globale, sintetico (come class as one), piuttosto che come oggetto analizzato, “dispiegato” secondo la linea imposta dalla procedura (come class as many).

In generale, dunque, la rappresentazione grafica impone certe scelte che di per sé sarebbero esterne alle caratteristiche puramente astratte del modello: per esempio, la distribuzione delle dimensioni come assi verticale, orizzontale e trasversale non è certo implicata nella rispettiva definizione verbale, così come l’aspetto regolare delle caselle della griglia non è richiesto dalla loro analisi. Questi aspetti derivano dalle convenzioni implicite del codice adottato, in questo caso lo spazio geometrizzato, rispetto a cui il modello logico è indifferente: che i casi vengano rappresentati come poligoni regolari, invece che come figure irregolari, può certo facilitare la comprensione da parte di chi osserva lo schema, ma di per sé non influenza il loro statuto logico. Semmai, proprio in virtù di questa indifferenza tra statuto logico e statuto geometrico degli elementi, è possibile ipotizzare che la suddivisione regolare delle caselle rifletta la suddivisione uniforme della zona della categoria, secondo i principi del protocollo glossematico, e così via. Ancora una volta, queste equivalenze ci risultano significative ma 1) esse sono suggerite, e non sempre stabilite esplicitamente dalla teoria stessa, che può fissare un rapporto di trasposizione solo per alcuni elementi (per esempio: le dimensioni come assi, i casi come caselle, i glossemi come coordinate) mentre tutto il resto (l’orientamento degli assi, lunghezza e spessore delle linee, regolarità della griglia, ecc.) viene demandato alle convenzioni e alle necessità intrinseche del codice geometrico utilizzato; 2) inoltre, queste equivalenze si possono stabilire proprio a partire da questa non conformità tra codici; esse cioè assumono senso proprio a partire da una differenza intersemiotica (Badir 2009: 525). Ancora una volta, si può dare trasposizione biunivoca solo tra alcuni settori della sostanza verbale e della sostanza grafica, opportunamente pertinentizzati.

5. Considerazioni conclusive

L’affermazione di Hjelmslev sopra menzionata, relativa alla schematizzabilità di una teoria del significato grammaticale, va dunque interpretata con cautela: innanzitutto ci viene detto che ad essere schematizzabile, ovvero rappresentabile spazialmente secondo un codice geometrico, è la teoria del significato grammaticale, e non direttamente il significato. Ma in realtà, la scommessa implicita è che la teoria sia schematizzabile proprio perché si appoggia sull’intrinseca sistematicità del contenuto grammaticale stesso, a sua volta derivante dalla forma categoriale della lingua: la capacità modellizzante della lingua nei confronti dello spazio deriva dal fatto che la forma della lingua è un principio universale di formazione (FTL: 82) dotato di una sua ontologia “empirica” (Hjelmslev 1991: 129). È dunque la teoria a essere innanzitutto raffigurativa, ma se essa può raffigurare il proprio oggetto, il linguaggio, ciò dipende dal fatto che essa si comporta come un linguaggio: tramite la selezione di tratti pertinenti, essa fornisce una forma all’oggetto trasponendola in una sostanza o in un’altra. Dal punto di vista tecnico, per avvalorare ulteriormente questa interpretazione, si dovrebbe stabilire che il codice grafico-geometrico sia effettivamente una semiotica oppure un sistema simbolico; si potrebbe poi stabilire se i funtivi dei due codici (codice geometrico da una parte e codice verbale dall’altra) siano conversi, ovvero se possano contrarre sostituzione reciproca una volta estratti i connotatori “codice grafico” o “codice verbale”. In effetti, se fosse possibile stabilire che due funtivi (poniamo il concetto di “dimensione” appartenente al codice verbale e l’“asse” nel codice grafico) contraggano sostituzione una volta soppresso il rispettivo connotatore, si potrebbe legittimamente dire che i due funtivi sono “trasposti” (TLR, Def 197), e che realizzano due varianti (verbale e grafica) del medesimo funtivo “dimensione”. Questo rimane però un problema aperto che non possiamo risolvere qui, e di cui ci limitiamo a tracciare una possibile, ipotetica, direzione di ricerca.

In ogni caso, distinguendo e riallacciando tra loro i tre livelli dell’idea di “spazio” identificati sopra, ci sembra che la soluzione proposta da Hjelmslev vada nella stessa direzione di quella di Trier, oltrepassandola. In effetti, dovendo qualificare dal punto di vista epistemologico il ricorso alla categoria di “campo”, Trier optò per la seguente mossa: il “campo lessicale”, disse, è sì una metafora, ma la metafora è essenziale alla natura del linguaggio – essa presiede al suo stesso funzionamento (cf. Trier 1973, cit. in Skrebtsova 2014: 146). A ben vedere, è dunque il funzionamento metaforico del linguaggio, e non propriamente la metafora spaziale, a garantire continuità tra oggetto e descrizione.

Il caso di Hjelmslev è interessante perché “rilancia” la mossa di Trier: introducendo la categoria di spazio all’interno del linguaggio, a livello di significato morfologico, essa legittima vieppiù il cortocircuito, o se vogliamo il rapporto analogico, tra rappresentazione spaziale, rappresentazione linguistica (cognitivo-gnoseologica, propria del linguaggio) e rappresentazione metalinguistica (epistemologica, propria della teoria del linguaggio). In breve, adottando una formula sintetica, potremmo dire che la teoria linguistica spazializza la lingua perché già la lingua spazializza il mondo, inclusa se stessa.

Come si vede, il cortocircuito dello “spazio” deriva dai suoi omologhi: il cortocircuito della “struttura” e il cortocircuito della “lingua” – un circolo virtuoso che caratterizza in profondità l’approccio strutturalista stesso.

Bibliografia

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Badir, S. (2008), “Sémiotique des graphiques / Graphiques de sémiotique”, Visible, 4: 13-62.

Badir, S. (2009), “Les graphiques chez Hjelmslev”, Cahiers Parisiens, 5: 523-535.

Barthes, R. (2006), “L’attività strutturalista”, in S. Moravia (a cura di), Lo strutturalismo francese, Firenze, Le Lettere: 49-55.

Benjamin, W. (1995a), “Sulla lingua in generale e sulla lingua dell’uomo”, in Benjamin 1995b: 53-70.

Benjamin, W. (1995b), Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti, Torino, Einaudi.

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Bertin, J. (1967), Sémiologie graphique, Paris, Mouton-Gauthier-Villars.

Bourdieu, P. (1985), “The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and Field”, Sociocriticism 2(2): 11-24.

Cigana, L. (2014a), La nozione di “partecipazone” nella Glossematica di L. Hjelmslev (La notion de “participation” dans la glossématique de L. Hjelmslev), tesi di dottorato in cotutela (Università della Calabria, Université de Liège).

Cigana, L. (2014b), “Langage et cognition entre Saussure et Hjelmslev”, Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 67: 21-46.

Cigana, L. (2014c), “Sprogsystem og Sprogforandring: il dinamismo del sistema”, in Strutturalismo, Strutturalismi e loro forme. Janus. Quaderni del Circolo glossematico, 13: 45-63.

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Diodato, F. (2006), “Campi semantici e traduzione: il problema della determinazione del contenuto”, Tradurre e comprendere. Pluralità dei linguaggi e delle culture. Atti del XII convegno nazionale della Società di Filosofia del Linguaggio, Piano di Sorrento, 29-30 Settembre – 1 ottobre 2005, Roma, Aracne: 65-79.

Ducrot, O. (1968), Le structuralisme en linguistique, in Ducrot, O., Todorov, Tzv. (a cura di), Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme, Paris, Seuil: 15-96.

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Hjelmslev, L. (1998), Principi di grammatica generale, Bari, Levante.

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Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

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Rosch, E.H. (1973), “Natural categories”, Cognitive Psychology, 4(3): 328–350.

Saussure, F. de (2005), Scritti inediti di linguistica generale, Roma-Bari, Laterza.

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Note

[1] O costruisce, dotandosi dell’apparato concettuale necessario a descriverlo come tale.

[2] Uno su tutti, cui abbiamo accennato in Cigana 2016, è quello di considerare lo studio della Categoria dei Casi come un’opera in cui pars (est) pro toto, per cui cioè l’idea di spazio associata alla grammatica vale per la teoria del linguaggio nel suo complesso. Ciò deriva dal fatto che Hjelmslev “sfrutta” per così dire uno studio specifico (dedicato a una delle categorie morfologiche) per trattare di principi la cui portata va ben oltre la morfologia I due ambiti restano distinti: per esempio, il concetto di “dimensione” che viene discusso in CdC non è specifico della categoria casuale ma ha una portata generale, poiché dipende dal modo in cui un sistema si “complessifica”. L’idea di spazio implicata in tale nozione non coincide dunque con il significato spaziale associato alla categoria casuale.

[3] “Le zones phoniques et sémantiques attribuées à un signe ne se terminent donc […] que là où commence le domaine d’un autre. Bien que cette condition ne soit pas suffisante, puisque les chevauchements de signes, homonymies et synonymies partielles, sont chose courante, elle est en tout cas nécessaire. L’unité linguistique est expansionniste […] : seul la résistance des autres la contient. Saussure parle pour cette raison de la « limitation négative » que les signes exercent les uns sur les autres : la « plus exacte caractéristique » d’un élément linguistique « est d’être ce que les autres ne sont pas »” (Ducrot 1968: 47).

[4] Specifichiamo questo per evitare che si riproduca la proporzione sviante “statico : sincronico = dinamico : diacronico”.

[5] Questa interessante considerazione, piuttosto controintuitiva, si coglie bene in SoS: 142 (cf. anche Cigana 2014c).

[6] Per un esempio di discussione terminologica cf. FTL: 41-42.

[7] Uno su tutti si veda la nozione di “parola”, termine che rientra nell’esperienza epilinguistica di ciascun parlante, definita “segno di potenza minima, definita dalla permutazione delle glossematie che entrano in essa” (TLR def 401).

[8] Questo non vale per le scienze umane e per le scienze del linguaggio in particolare – in parte per il loro stesso statuto, in parte per “colpa” collettiva – figurarsi per una teoria particolare.

[9] Per l’argomentazione completa di Hjelmslev, si veda Hjelmslev 1995.

[10] Si registrano cioè fenomeni interni di conversione, sincretismi, difettività, semplificazioni e così via (cf. Hjelmslev 1991: 108).

[11] Non si creda che il primo momento sia puramente sintattico e il secondo puramente semantico: per Hjelmslev si tratta di due aspetti di una stessa medaglia, la forma del contenuto.

[12] Scomponiamo la definizione: “direzione” = funzione di presupposizione fra elementi di sintagmi diversi come tra i morfemi di caso, genere e numero nei due sintagmi di liberi mei; “nessica” = detta di funzione che regge una nessia o enunciato, per esempio quella tra soggetto e predicato; “eteronessuale” = detta di funzione che si stabilisce tra due enunciati differenti, ovvero che oltrepassa sempre i confini di un solo nesso (cf. Hjelmslev 1991: 99 sgg.).

[13] Cf. “Questa specificazione dal fisico all’ontologico risulta sostanzialmente esterna […] e non trova posto nell’oggetto sotto indagine […]” (TLR, N 54).

[14] In questo frammento riecheggia il noto passo di Walter Benjamin sull’essere linguistico della lampada, la “lampada-del-linguaggio” (Benjamin 1995a: 55), anche se, in realtà, l’impostazione a cui i due passaggi si richiamano è piuttosto differente.

[15] Le stesse idee di “forma”, “sistema” o “struttura” funzionano esattamente così: esse vengono concepite dall’atto conoscitivo come costitutive dell’oggetto e, proprio per questo, garantiscono un appiglio “interno all’oggetto su cui la descrizione possa basarsi. Barthes lo spiega molto chiaramente: “La struttura è dunque in realtà un simulacro dell’oggetto, ma un simulacro orientato, interessato, poiché l’oggetto imitato fa apparire qualcosa che restava invisibile o, se si preferisce, inintelligibile nell’oggetto naturale […] il simulacro è l’intelletto aggiunto all’oggetto” (Barthes 2006: 50).

[16] Soggettivo non significa sottoposto all’arbitrio del soggetto, ma dotato di un valore trascendentale: “Il soggetto parlante non sceglie le forme grammaticali secondo le esigenze dello stato di cose oggettivo o reale, a secondo un principio imposto dalla concezione o dall’idea […] attraverso cui egli considera il fatto oggettivo” (CdC: 120). Ora, le idee o concezioni depositate nella lingua sono “oggettive” per il soggetto stesso.

[17] Sul semantismo delle categorie morfologiche, si veda soprattutto SoS: 90 sgg.

[18] Su questo cf. Cigana 2016.

[19] Non è un caso se Petitot, giusto al contrario, è indotto ad auspicarsi un approccio trascendente.

[20] Ci si scuserà il disordine che risulta dalle linee di combinazione. In effetti, uno schema “ordinato” facilita le operazioni mentali di riconoscimento: la mente cioè può “scommettere” in anticipo sulla distribuzione degli elementi anche se non verificata dall’occhio. Questa viene dunque valutata come vero e proprio elemento informativo. Il “colpo d’occhio” è dunque un’operazione interpretativa che risulta da una promessa di senso.

How to cite this post

Cigana, Lorenzo. 2016. Aree, volumi e spazi: la geometria linguistica di Hjelmslev. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2016/03/10/aree-volumi-e-spazi-la-geometria-linguistica-di-hjelmslev

Christina Behme
Mount St Vincent University

In many recent (and some not so recent) publications Noam Chomsky makes an appeal to Galilean science and claims the Galilean framework justifies his own approach to scientific inquiry (e.g., Chomsky, 2002, 2009, 2010, 2012). Allegedly, this approach has a distinguished scientific and philosophical tradition. “Chomsky’s science of language is a science in the Cartesian-Galilean tradition. It is a branch of the study of biology” (McGilvray 2005: 4). In this blog post I argue that this approach should be rejected because it rests on a superficial and incorrect interpretation of Galileo’s work, has been rejected already by Rene Descartes, and is contrary to established scientific practice.

Without a doubt, Noam Chomsky is the best known linguist and his success has been linked to his persuasive debating style and his emphasis on rigorous scientific methodology for linguistic research. Yet, over the years Chomsky’s attitude towards the scientific method has changed, and he acts now as if no data can challenge his own proposals. For example when asked what kind of empirical discovery would lead to the rejection of the strong minimalist thesis, Chomsky replied: “All the phenomena of language appear to refute it” (Chomsky, 2002, 124, emphasis added). Yet, he is not willing to abandon the minimalist thesis. Instead he suggests dismissing the data that seem to challenge it. Chomsky claims that such a large-scale dismissal of data that are inconvenient for his view is based on a “Galilean style… [which] is the recognition that…the array of phenomena is some distortion of the truth … [and] it often makes good sense to disregard phenomena and search for principles” (Chomsky, 2002, 99). Chomsky calls this attitude the “Galilean move towards discarding recalcitrant phenomena” (Chomsky, 2002, 102). He claims that massive data dismissal was advocated by Galileo: “[Galileo] dismissed a lot of data; he was willing to say: ‘Look, if the data refute the theory, the data are probably wrong.’ And the data that he threw out were not minor” (Chomsky, 2002, 98). He then proposes that is was accepted by other famous scientists (e.g., Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Monod) and that it “is pretty much the way science often seems to work …You just see that some ideas simply look right, and then you sort of put aside the data that refute them” (Chomsky, 2009, 36). Data-dismissal has been advocated numerous times in Chomsky’s publications, culminating in the argument from the Norman Conquest: “… if you want to study distinctive properties of language – what really makes it different from the digestive system … you’re going to abstract away from the Norman Conquest. But that means abstracting away from the whole mass of data that interests the linguist who wants to work on a particular language” (Chomsky, 2012, 84, emphasis added). Arguably the most bizarre invocation of the Galilean style occurs when Chomsky suggests: “…if we want a productive theory-constructive [effort], we’re going to have to relax our stringent criteria and accept things that we know don’t make any sense, and hope that some day somebody will make some sense out of them” (Chomsky, 2012, 169).

Chomsky is not the only defender of the Galilean style. It has been suggested that “[a] significant feature of the Generative Revolution in linguistics has been the development of a Galilean style in that field” (Freidin & Vergnaud, 2001, 647). Attaching the label Galilean to a style of inquiry suggests two things. First, it implies that Galileo worked using the same or a very similar style. Second, given the massive success of the Galilean scientific revolution, it suggests that work adopting a Galilean style is superior to (all) other work. While the second suggestion seems uncontroversial, the first needs support from the actual work of Galileo. Below I argue that the success of Galileo as a scientist was not based on a massive dismal of data that were inconvenient to his theories and that he would have rejected proposals that required him “to accept things that make no sense”.

1. The Feyerabendian/Chomskyan interpretation of the Galilean Style

Interpretation of the Galilean method is notoriously controversial. One historian of science remarks: “Hardly any other icon of modern science has become as much a victim of his interpreters as Galileo” (Fischer, 1992, 165). Many interpretations were not based on impartial evaluation of the original work but on fashionable historicism or on the desire to bolster one’s own methodology by appeal to Galilean authority. Interpreters attribute to Galileo views from inductionism (Mach) to rationalism (Cassirer, Lewin) and methodological anarchism (Feyerabend).

Feyerabend alleges that Galileo replaced a well-established philosophical/scientific system and violated rationally grounded methodology to justify a worldview (heliocentrism) that clashed with observable data. He attributes the success of the Galilean model to the invention of auxiliary hypotheses and fraudulent tricks that compensated for lack of explanatory power of the Copernican theory (the centerpiece of Galileo’s world view).

Dogmatic insistence on a falsified central hypothesis, the development of a scaffolding of auxiliary hypotheses from related sciences, and reinterpretation of problematic evidence allowed the emergence of a new system of natural science that replaced the old… Galileo’s success became possible because he proceeded pragmatically, without feeling bound by any rules of rationality or methodology.
(Fischer, 1992, 168)

Chomsky seems to share Feyerabend’s conviction that Galileo discarded results that did not fit his theories and that he insisted confidently on the correctness of his hypothesis. Possibly he even agrees with Feyerabend that Galileo employed fraudulent tricks to bolster his hypotheses. For Feyerabend one such trick is the use of the telescope. He claims that the use of this new instrument was problematic for several reasons. First, Galileo never ruled out that the images seen had been based on optical illusions. Second, it was not clear at the time that the instrument would work as reliably for astronomical observation as it did for terrestrial observation. Third, the rather primitive first telescopes produced images that were unfocused, contained distortions, coloured edges, halos, and other impurities. Therefore, it was difficult to determine which part of the image was caused by celestial bodies and which by imperfections of the telescope.

Feyerabend claimed that because of these problems Galileo could not base his theory on empirical observation but instead inferred the telescopic images from his theory. The picture that emerges is intended to suggest that Galileo violated not only the rules of the existing paradigm but all rules of rational inquiry. He is depicted not as brilliant scientist but as self-serving opportunistic propagandist: “Galileo was – simply said – the better charlatan and evangelist … He used rules in an opportunistic way to promote his ideas” (Fischer, 1992, 168). Feyerabend was deeply skeptical of the value of scientific inquiry and used Galileo’s success, based exclusively on methodological anarchism as one important case to support his anti-scientism. He claimed that, ultimately, science is just another form of religion and that theories attempting to establish the objective superiority of scientific methodology are a “previously not described form of insanity ” (Feyerabend, 1978, 7).

Chomsky seems to accept claims about the methodological anarchism of Galileo. But, unlike Feyerabend, he consider this anarchism a virtue, an essential component of rational scientific inquiry. He claims it is precisely the willingness to adjust the data to his hypothesis that allows him to make significant scientific progress and cite the far reaching success of the Galilean revolution as supporting evidence for this claim (e.g., Chomsky, 2002, 2009, 2012). This raises the question of whether Galileo’s success was indeed based on an anarchistic methodology. The next section answers this question.

2. Galileo, the (non-anarchistic) scientist

Chomsky seems to hold that the Galilean style is superior because it constituted a radical break from the accepted practices of the day and that this break allowed scientists to gain novel insights. The claim that Galileo’s science was a complete break from the then dominant Aristotelian science has been widely popularized by Thomas Kuhn. He holds Galileo’s new method exemplified a paradigm shift in science, making it incommensurable with the previous methodology: “Normal research, guided by [Aristotelian conceptual categories] could not have produced the laws Galileo discovered” (Kuhn, 1996, 123). Yet, it has also been suggested that the break was not as complete and dramatic but resulted from a gradual process of changes to scientific paradigms. Below I defend this second position.

Fischer suggests that Galileo was not overthrowing a well functioning system of natural philosophy but responding to developments beginning in the 14th century that had failed to address “endemic problems of the late scholastic syntheses” (Fischer, 1992, 168). The system of natural philosophy at Galileo’s time was an “eclectic and somewhat pluralistic conglomerate… proponents of different factions chose different approaches in response to new challenges” (Fischer, 1992, 169). In astronomy the new Copernican/Galilean system (developing a theory based exclusively on uniform circular motion) was in fact closer to Aristotelian ideals than the more complex, dominant Ptolemean system. Further, the Copernican theory was not in opposition to all existing approaches but had important predecessors in the work of some ancient thinkers (Aristarch, Seleucus, Philolaus, Plutarch), and some medieval scholastics (Buridan, Oresme). Presumably, there was also some influence from some Muslim Theologians (Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, Al-Zamakhshari, Ebussuud Efendi). Their proposals and hypotheses arose from within the Aristotelian framework, not in complete opposition to it. Thus, Copernicus and Galileo did not reject a single rational alternative to their own hypotheses.

Similarly, one can evaluate the validity of Galileo’s telescope-observations from a different perspective. The Galilean telescope may appear flawed and primitive from our perspective, but it was an important advance in technology in the 16th century. And it was continually improved, extending gradually the original (1609) 3-fold magnification (Drake, 1990, 133-4). Like any new technology there were certain risks in its use and uncertainties about its reliability. But the use of the telescope does not seem to be an instance of reckless methodological anarchism. Nor was Galileo the only one relying on the telescope. The new invention quickly gained popularity and was used by others who confirmed Galileo’s observations (Scheiner, Clavius). This is not to say that there were no problems with some of the observations and/or interpretations. Observations in 1610 led Galileo to the hypothesis that Saturn was accompanied by two small moons: “It is clear that Galileo assumes here wrongly that the blurred image is caused by a merging of the bright images of the members of a hypothesized three bodied system ” (Fischer, 1992, 170). Observations in 1612, when Saturn’s rings were edge-on from Earth’s perspective (seemingly disappearing), made him question this hypothesis: ‘I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel’. Further observations in 1616 and 1626 added evidence that challenged the three-body system hypothesis, and in 1655 Christian Huygens proposed after further careful observation that Saturn was surrounded by a solid ring. Thus, continued observation of the phenomenon resulted eventually in the correct hypothesis. Conflicting evidence was not ‘set aside’ but prompted further investigation which resulted eventually in the rejection of a hypothesis that had seemed reasonable based on the initially available evidence. It would be unreasonable to expect that every observation made leads straight away to the correct hypothesis. On the other hand, formulating hypotheses based on insufficient evidence can become a problem if scientists refuse to give up this hypothesis in light of new evidence.

Did Galileo use tricks and propaganda to support a hypothesis that had no solid theoretical grounding and conflicted with empirical evidence? In some cases this might have happened but in the context of Galileo’s entire body of work the defence of the Copernican world view is hardly an act of dogmatism in the face of empirical counter-evidence. Galileo’s physics had been developed prior to and independently of any Copernican commitments. They were based on existing knowledge and careful systematic experimentation. Galileo used Archimedean principles to solve problems in mechanics (hydraulics, movement of bodies, inertia etc.) and extended this approach gradually to new applications. At the same time he began his search for unifying mathematical principles. It is true that Galileo had great confidence in his method but this confidence was based on a systematic approach to well defined problems:

Where others speculate based on vague premises or arbitrarily changing suppositions Galileo makes deductions from evident and explicitly stated premises. Where others search for compromises Galileo strives for precise propositions and definite decisions. Where others appeal to authority Galileo demands evident axioms or conclusive empirical results.
(Fischer, 1992, 176)

Further, Galileo’s focus on mathematical analysis required conceptual precision. He understood that there is a difference between calculations based on ideal conditions and the observable movements of physical bodies. Galileo believed that this difference needs to be accounted for. However, it does not interfere with the ability to calculate based on general principles as long as it can be shown that it is accidental and insignificant. For Galileo it was important to separate accidental from essential properties. Finding essential properties allowed him to formulate hypotheses that make testable predictions. It took Galileo years of experimentation and theory refinement to arrive at proofs for some of the laws he had discovered.

While Galileo’s debating style might share self-confidence and assertiveness with Chomsky’s there are also considerable differences. When arguing with opponents Galileo first demonstrated that their assumption either led to logical contradictions or can be rejected on empirical grounds. Then, he introduced his own solutions and explained the mathematical and physical assumption that supported his premises. Next, he deduced consequences and showed how his conclusions could be supported empirically. Hypotheses that had been subjected to this testing procedure were assumed to be confirmed (demonstrated) but they were not irrefutable. It remained possible that further experiments provided refuting evidence. Many of the commendable aspects of the Galilean method are absent in the recent (post-2000) work of Chomsky. And, it is rather unlikely that Galileo would have advocated to ‘set aside’ recalcitrant evidence or to accept things that do not make any sense.

3. Descartes on the Galilean style

Given that Chomsky likes to call his method not only Galilean but also Cartesian (e.g., Chomsky 1966a, 2002, 2009, 2012), it seems relevant to consider Descartes’ opinion of the Galilean method. Descartes followed Galileo’s work with great interest. Especially Galileo’s trial and condemnation in 1633 had a profound impact on Descartes and he commented numerous times on Galileo’s work. However, Descartes’ critical evaluation of Galileo’s work has received only scant attention. Roger Ariew suggests this is the case because those who have commented on Descartes’ criticism “are generally in agreement that Descartes’ assertions lack value” (Ariew, 1986, 79). Ariew makes a convincing case rejecting the claims that Descartes arguments were defective, not meant for anyone but Mersenne’s attention, based on a desire to demean what did not conform to his own philosophy, or a reaction to unjustified plagiarism charges. Like Ariew I believe that Descartes gives an overall fair evaluation of Galileo’s work and raises some valid points of concern regarding the Galilean method. For example, Descartes deals with Galileo’s work in a letter to Mersenne (14/8/1634), providing his first reaction to The World: “I find that [Galileo] philosophizes well enough on motion, though there is very little he has to say about it that I find entirely true. As far as I could see, he goes wrong more often when following received opinion than when going beyond it” (CSMK III, 44). This comment indicates that Descartes values the original part of Galileo’s work as superior to that following the traditional method. Further, Descartes observes some flaws in the presentation of Galileo’s results: “The arguments which he uses to demonstrate the movement of the earth are very good; but it seems to me that he does not set them out in the way that is required if they are to be convincing, for the digressions which he introduces make you forget the earlier arguments when you are in the process of reading the later ones” (Ibid.). The concerns about methodological issues are more detailed in the following discussion (letter to Mersenne, 11/10/1638).

Generally speaking, I find [Galileo] philosophizes much more ably than is usual, in that, so far as he can, he abandons the errors of the Schools and tries to use mathematical methods in the investigation of physical questions. On that score, I am completely at one with him, for I hold that there is no other way to discover the truth. But he continually digresses, and he does not take time to explain matters fully. This, in my view, is a mistake: it shows that he has not investigated matters in an orderly way, and has merely sought explanations for some particular effects, without going into the primary causes in nature; hence his building lacks a foundation. Now the closer his style of philosophizing gets to the truth, the easier it is to recognize its faults, just as it is easier to tell when those who sometimes take the right road go astray than it is to point out aberrations in the case of those who never begin to follow it.
(CSMK III, 124)

This passage is important for two reasons. First, Descartes compliments Galileo on “philosophizing more ably than usual” and on using mathematical methods when investigating physical problems. This constitutes an improvement over the dominating scholastic approach. Second, the problems Descartes noticed earlier remain and lead to the accusation that Galileo’s building of reasoning lacks a foundation. In spite of some visible admiration for Galileo’s work, the criticism Descartes levels against his method is serious. Galileo has violated two “basic Cartesian methodological prescriptions ‘to consider a subject in an orderly fashion’ and ‘to explain a subject fully’” (Ariew, 1986, 83). That means Descartes is critical precisely of the aspects of Galileo’s work that Chomsky considers to be the foundations of the Galilean style.

4. Epilogue

Of course, Chomsky himself does not apply the Galilean style consistently. Many of his own ideas that “simply looked right” turned out to be wrong, including the following. In his early work Chomsky proposed that the base of a transformational grammar involves phrase structure (rewriting) rules (e.g. Chomsky 1957, 13-17; 1962, 127; 1975, 80); in later work these rules were abandoned (e.g. Chomsky 1986a, 82-83; 1986b, 3; 1995, 25). Chomsky first proposed that transformational rules are either optional or obligatory (Chomsky, 1957, 45; 1962, 136), then abandoned this proposal (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1977, 41), and claimed that transformational rules are all optional (Chomsky and Lasnik, 1977, 41). This proposal was subsequently abandoned (Chomsky 2000c, 130). In his early work, Chomsky proposed that a notion of well-formed (sentence) is fundamental to linguistics (Chomsky, 1957, 13-14; 1966b, 32; 1972, 64), but decades later he abandoned that proposal (Chomsky, 1995, 194, 213). In early work Chomsky insisted that the notion of deep structure is fundamental to NL syntax (Chomsky, 1966b, 91). Later he announced that language has no D-structure (Chomsky, 1995, 186-189). These are only a few of many instances in which Chomsky changed his mind about ideas that “just seemed right”. And he did this based on new data, which suggests that even in his own case the Galilean style has only very limited applicability. Finally, Chomsky does not accept the Galilean style for the work of others but rather strongly objects to massive dismissal of data: “Quine and those influenced by his paradigm are enjoining the ‘field linguist’ to depart radically from the procedures of the sciences, limiting themselves to a small part of the relevant evidence, selected in accordance with behaviorist dogma; and also reject the standard procedures used in theory construction in the sciences” (Chomsky, 2000, 54). According to this remark it is not justified to limit the evidence to suit one’s theory. I conclude that the Galilean style should be rejected.

References

Ariew, Roger. (1986). Descartes as Critic of Galileo’s Scientific Methodology, Synthese 67, 77–90.

Chomsky, Noam. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam (1962) A Transformational Approach to Syntax. Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English, Austin, Texas, The University of Texas.

Chomsky, Noam. (1966a). Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Haper&Row.

Chomsky, Noam (1966b) Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, The Hague, Mouton and Company.

Chomsky, Noam (1971) The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature.
Video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
Transcript on official Chomsky website: https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx/

Chomsky, Noam. (1972). Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar. In: S. Peters (Ed.) Goals of linguistic theory. (pp. 63-130). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Chomsky, Noam (2009). Opening Remarks. In: Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo Uriagereka, Juan & Pello Salaburu (Eds.). Of minds and language: a dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country. (pp. 13-43). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. (2012). The Science of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Drake, Stillman. (1990). Galileo: Pioneer Scientist. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press.

Feyerabend, Paul. (1978). Redet nicht, organisiert Euch! In: Duerr, H. P. (Ed.) Unter dem Pflaster liegt der Strand, Bd. 10, (pp. 1-16). Frankfurt: Karin Kramer Verlag.

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McGilvray, James (2005.) The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How to cite this post

Behme, Christina. 2016. How Galilean is the ‘Galilean Method’?. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2016/04/02/how-galilean-is-the-galilean-method