Main Trends in the Science of Language (Routledge Revivals)

Roman Jakobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317857389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

First published in Great Britain in 1973, Main Trends in the Science of Language was part of a series of books that resulted from a study carried out by UNESCO in collaboration with national and international research centres in the social sciences, as well as with groups of individual scholars. The book examines the position of linguistics in the years surrounding the publication of the book before considering the subject's potential, future development. It looks at linguistic vistas, the place of linguistics among the sciences of man and linguistics and natural sciences. This book will be of interest to the educated reader, research workers, and professional associations as well as to national and international institutions that organize, plan and finance scientific research.

1 Linguistic Vistas

DOI: 10.4324/9781315831947-1

Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner, whether static or developmental, laws of this system. What appears to be the focus of scientific preoccupations is no longer the outer stimulus, but the internal premises of the development; now the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their functions. Therefore immanent structural considerations of language and literature were predestined to take a prominent place in the debates of the [Prague International Slavistic] Congress, and a paragraph devoted to structural linguistics naturally entered into the resolution of the Congress plenum. The Prague Linguistic Circle, which has faced the Congress with a whole set of problems of structural linguistics (cf. 132), unites a number of young Czech and German researchers from Czechoslovakia as well as several young Russian linguists. The activities of the Prague Linguistic Circle are not the work of an isolated group, but are closely linked with the contemporary streams of Western and Russian linguistics. One must, moreover, take into account the relationship between these activities and the international linguistic life of our time, in particular, such events as the methodological achievements of French linguistics, the fertile crisis of German science, and the endeavours towards a synthesis of two schools, one of which had been founded by the Pole Baudouin de Courtenay and the other by the Russian F. F. Fortunatov. There were no substantial objections to the theses (48) defended by the Circle at the Congress, and especially the resolution about the tasks of Slavic structural linguistics was accepted unanimously. If, however, it had been submitted to a secret ballot, it would have certainly provoked a few votes against it. Such was, at least, the impression gained from talks in the corridors. But, as a matter of fact, do the votes against mean much when they are devoid of any attempt towards argumentation? Such silent voices belong to those who realize that the recognition of the principles of structural linguistics generates the necessity for fundamental changes in the field of synchrony, in linguistic history and geography, and in the description of literary languages, whereas such a thorough reorganization does not suit the adversaries’ temperament. Hence it is a resistance of a psychological rather than logical nature. Owing to a weaker methodological elaboration of literary studies as compared to linguistics, these studies are in danger of a lengthier crisis and the transitional stage in literary scholarship threatens with an inundation of hopeless attempts at some eclectic solution; but essentially Slavic literary studies are undergoing an evolution parallel to the development of Slavic linguistics.

ČIN, October 31, 1929 (140)

Although the Biblical span of forty years separates us from the First International Congress of Slavists which gathered in Prague in October 1929, the vistas of this historic assembly hastily sketched in its above account still remain appropriate.

At first glance, linguistic theory of our time seems to offer a stunning variety and disparity of clashing doctrines. Like any age of innovative experimentation, the present stage of reflections on language has been marked by intensive contentions and tumultuous controversies. Yet a careful, unprejudiced examination of all these sectarian creeds and vehement polemics reveals an essentially monolithic whoie behind the striking divergences in terms, slogans, and technical contrivances. To use the distinction between deep and superficial structures that is current today in linguistic phraseology, one may state that most of these allegedly irreconcilable contradictions appear to be confined to the surface of our science, whereas in its deep foundations the linguistics of the last decades exhibits an amazing uniformity. This communality of basic tendencies is particularly impressive in comparison with the substantially heterogeneous tenets that characterized some earlier epochs of this discipline, in particular, the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. Factually, most of the recent discord is based partly on dissimilarities in terminology and style of presentation and partly upon a different distribution of linguistic problems chosen and pointed out by single scholars or teams of inquirers as the most urgent and important. Indeed, sometimes such selection amounts to a rigid confinement of research and to an abstention from the topics that have been ruled out.

At present, different sciences display similar phenomena. In the same way that general topology underlies and encompasses a wide range of mathematical approaches, the manifold treatments of language reflect merely the plurality of its aspects that are in complementary relation with each other. This view is beginning to gain ground among experts. Thus, Noam Chomsky emphasizes the necessity for a synthesis between those major linguistic currents, one of which ‘has raised the precision of discourse about language to entirely new levels’, while the other is ‘devoted to abstract generalization’.

The inquiry into the verbal structure is the undeniable aim of contemporary linguistics in all its varieties, and the cardinal principles of such a structural (or in other terms, nomothetic) approach to language that are common to all the shades and sectors of this research may be defined as the conjugate ideas of invariance and relativity. The habitual bias branded by Edward Sapir as a ‘dogged acceptance of absolutes’ which ‘fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit’, was gradually overcome. The scrutiny of the verbal system demanded an ever deepening insight into its intrinsic coherence and into the strictly relational and hierarchical nature of all its constituents, instead of their mechanical itemization condemned by the pioneers of a structural approach to language. The next indispensable request was for a similar insight into the general laws governing all verbal systems and, finally, into the interconnection between these implicational laws. Thus, the elicitation and interpretation of the entire linguistic network – or, in remodelled wording, ‘the concern for explanatory adequacy’ – has been the dominant theme of the movement that took shape during the interwar period under the label ‘structural linguistics’, coined in Prague in 1928-9 (cf. 139).

Sometimes a parochial overestimation of strife and factiousness threatens to distort the developmental history of linguistics from the first world war until its present state. In particular, the inflationary myth of gradual revolutions allegedly experienced by the science of language throughout this period arbitrarily assigns certain strivings and ideas to single phases of this period. Hence, for example, the structural trend in general linguistics which took root with the International Congresses of the late twenties and early thirties is now being reproved for its supposed estrangement from philosophy, whereas in reality the international protagonists of this movement had close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian and Hegelian versions.

At the beginning of our century the thought of Husserl (1859-1938), developed in the second volume of his Logische Untersuchungen and particularly in the chapter where he treats ‘the difference between independent and dependent meaning and the idea of pure grammar’, became a powerful factor for the first steps of structural linguistics by superimposing ‘the idea of a general and a priori grammar’ on ‘the exclusively empiric’ grammar which at that time was the only one accepted. Husserl advocated the idea of universal grammar ‘as it was conceived by the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (115). Anton Marty (1847-1914), the critical adept of Husserl, noted in this connection the valuable contribution to general grammar made by the Stoics, then by Scholastic science, later by the Cartesians, such as the authors of the Port-Royal grammar, and finally, by Locke’s Essay Concerning Humane Understanding and by Leibniz’ New Essays (185, p. 69).

In the Moscow Linguistic Circle of the early twenties (cf. 131), continuous and ardent debates led by the philosopher of language Gustav Špet (1878–1940) – in Husserl’s opinion, one of his most remarkable students – were concerned with the linguistic use of the Logische Untersuchungen and especially with Edmund Husserl’s and Anton Marty’s avowed and suggestive return to the thought of a universal grammar. T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937) and Marty, both of whom, like their friend Husserl, had been moulded in the school of F. Brentano (1838-1917) (cf., in particular, 26), exerted a wholesome influence on their auditor, Vilém Mathesius (see 188), the later founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, where Husserl’s ideas and his memorable personal address of 18 November 1935 – ‘Phänomenologie der Sprache’ – met with a responsive welcome. Acta Linguistica, published by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, were inaugurated in 1939 with an editorial article by Viggo Bröndal (1887-1942), which treats the structure of language ‘as an autonomous object, and therefore non-derivable from the elements of which it is neither the aggregate nor the sum; that is why one must consider the study of possible systems and of their form as being of the utmost importance’. It is significant that Bröndal’s essay developing this thesis ends with a reference to ‘Husserl’s penetrating meditations on phenomenology as an inspiring source for any logician of language’ (30). As early as 1933, at the Third International Congress of Linguists in Rome, this remarkable representative of Danish linguistic thought stated his agreement with ‘the structuralism advocated in our time by Trubetzkoy’, as well as ‘with the universalism demanded and practised a century ago by the great master of general linguistics Wilhelm von Humboldt’ (31).

Hendrik Pos (1898-1955), the Dutch disciple of Husserl, has taken a prominent part in advancing the phenomenology of language and the theory of structural linguistics. (See in particular 221 and 222.) In his beautiful study of 1939 on the science of language and phenomenology, Pos clearly indicated the point of departure of linguistic structuralism_ ‘It is evident that the behaviourist observer tries to cut all the ties which can connect the sujet parlant with the sujet scientifique. Consciousness is not admitted even to explain the speaker’s knowledge concerning meanings: exterior observation will posit meanings as ways of behaviour, without consulting the primary consciousness and even in spite of it. The linguistic subject and the scientific subject lose their common ground, and the former becomes the object of the latter … The phenomenological point of view … is opposed to this theory of cognition, which pretends that the object is constituted in the scientific construct; the phenomenologist establishes that any knowledge is determined by the primary cognition … The linguist who takes the facts of language into account by an extension that his knowledge goes through will merely affirm his consciousness as the speaker which he was before the science and which he continues to be: his knowledge, in the final analysis, will be based on the intuitive data which permit an objectivation without being graspable by it. The divergence between primary consciousness and science is not unlimited: the linguist is a linguist, thanks to the fact that he is a speaker and not regardless of this fact … The reality en soi of the primary subjectivity will always be his point of reference’ (223). This decisive role of the speaker’s intuition is particularly emphasized in the present stage of international structural linguistics.

Hegelian phenomenology and dialectics, too, left a manifest imprint on the formation of structural linguistics. One could again refer to the already mentioned groups and individual searchers. The preface by Emile Benveniste (1902–) to Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen (1935) begins with a reminder: ‘Actually people hardly go beyond the establishment of facts. The considerable and meritorious effort, which has been applied to the description of forms, has not been followed by any serious attempt to interpret them’ (13). This foreword ended with an appeal to Hegel’s beneficial proposition: ‘Das Wahre ist das Ganze’ (The true is the all). Subsequently, in his contribution to the inaugural issue of Acta Linguistica the sagacious French inquirer conceived ‘the dialectic necessity of values in constant opposition’ as the chief structural principle of language (12).

It was, one may say, the most prescient forerunner of modern linguistics among scholars of the late nineteenth century, Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851–87), who in 1882 wrote to Jan Baudouin de Courtenay that in addition to the extant science of language it is necessary to establish and develop ‘a new one, more general’ and definable as ‘a certain kind of phenomenology of language’. According to the proponent, ‘the permanent foundations of such a science are to be found in language itself’ (see 142). The young linguist must have detected the concept of phenomenology in Eduard von Hartmann’s Phänomenologie des Unbewussten (1875), which H. Spiegelberg’s History of the Phenomenological Movement (1965) views as ‘an isolated landmark on the way from Hegel to Husserl’ (261, p. 16). Kruszewski’s earlier statements disclose that it was the ‘unconscious character’ of linguistic processes which evoked his ‘magnetic attraction’ to the logic of language and to the problem of general linguistic laws. Although Hartmann’s book was disapproved of by Kruszewski as being ‘tedious, boring’ and unfit in its conception of subliminal processes, certain items in Hartmann’s chapter on language are akin both to Kruszewski’s search and to the lines of modern linguistic theory, in particular, the philosopher’s insistence on the universality of the nuclear grammatical categories (Grundformen) as an ‘unconscious creation by the spirit of humanity’, and his commendation of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s teaching on language and mind. Kruszewski, in turn, pointed to the ‘eternal creativity of language’ with an enforcing reference to Humboldt (150). In his address to the Second International Congress of Linguists (1931), Mathesius (1882-1946) presented the Humboldtian doctrine of language as a substantial constituent of ‘functional and structural linguistics’ (189); and – in a posthumous volume of inspiring precepts – one of the first French representatives of this movement, Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954), extolling Humboldt as ‘a great linguist, with the intuitions of genius, to whom modern linguistics is far from doing justice’ and ‘a universal mind, highly refined and endowed, in particular, with a profound scientific culture’, blamed the neogrammarian tradition which underrated this great spirit and which gave preference to ‘a mere technician of comparative grammar like Bopp’ (267). Thus, the recent restitution of Humboldtian thoughts (G. Ramišvili: 228; N. Chomsky: 50) has merely strengthened a tendency which had been inherent in structural linguistics.

The legend of a ‘militant anti-psychologism’, allegedly proper to this movement, is based on several misunderstandings. When phenomenologically oriented linguists resorted to the slogans of anti-psychologism (cf. 61), they used this term in the same way as Husserl did when he opposed a model of a new, phenomenological psychology with its fundamental concept of intentionality to the orthodox behaviourism and to other varieties of stimuli-responses psychology (116). This Husserlian model and kindred psychological orientations met with vivid interest among linguists and also with their readiness to co-operate. The classification of associations, which plays a role of great importance in the structural analysis of language (141), finds effective support in the phenomenology of association drafted by Husserl and his school (114).

It should be noted in this connection that the idea of a ‘nomological psychology’ was advanced at the beginning of our century by Peirce (212). This discipline, ‘greatly influenced by phenomenology’ (I, §189) is called upon to discover ‘the general elements and laws of mental phenomena’. Here belongs ‘the great law of association (including fusion), a principle strikingly analogous to gravitation, since it is an attraction between ideas’ (I, §270).

One sees the points of contact and of convergence between the research of F. de Saussure (1857-1913) and E. Claparède (1873-1940), who understood that ‘the manner of being of each element depends on the structure of the ensemble and on the laws which govern it’. One recollects as well the fruitful discussions between N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) and Karl Bühler (1879-1963) and the assiduous attention which linguists of the two hemispheres paid to the progress of Gestalt psychology. What seems to remain particularly instructive are the warnings of both American experts in the relationship between language and mind, E. Sapir (...