The Philosophy of Grammar

Otto Jespersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135665753
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This study grew out of a series of lectures Jespersen gave at Columbia University in 1909-10, called "An Introduction to English Grammar." It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages through both direct observation of living speech and written and printed documents. "[The Philosophy of Grammar and Analytic Syntax] set forth the most extensive and original theory of universal grammar prior to the work of Chomsky and other generative grammarians of the last thirty years."--Arne Juul and Hans F. Nielsen, in Otto Jespersen: Facets of His Life and Work "Besides being one of the most perceptive observers and original thinkers that the field of linguistics has ever known, Jespersen was also one of its most entertaining writers, and reading The Philosophy of Grammar is fun. Read it, enjoy it."--James D. McCawley, from the Introduction Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), an authority on the growth and structure of language, was the Chair of the English Department at the University of Copenhagen. Among his many works are A Modern English Grammar and Analytic Syntax.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GRAMMAR

CHAPTER I
LIVING GRAMMAR

Speaker and Hearer. Formulas and Free Expressions. Grammatical Types. Building up of Sentences.

Speaker and Hearer.

THE essence of language is human activity—activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first. These two individuals, the producer and the recipient of language, or as we may more conveniently call them, the speaker and the hearer, and their relations to one another, should never be lost sight of if we want to understand the nature of language and of that part of language which is dealt with in grammar. But in former times this was often overlooked, and words and forms were often treated as if they were things or natural objects with an existence of their own—a conception which may have been to a great extent fostered through a too exclusive preoccupation with written or printed words, but which is fundamentally false, as will easily be seen with a little reflexion.

If the two individuals, the producer and the recipient of language, are here spoken of as the speaker and the hearer respectively, this is in consideration of the fact that the spoken and heard word is the primary form for language, and of far greater importance than the secondary form used in writing (printing) and reading. This is evidently true for the countless ages in which mankind had not yet invented the art of writing or made only a sparing use of it ; but even in our modern newspaper-ridden communities, the vast majority of us speak infinitely more than we write. At any rate we shall never be able to understand what language is and how it develops if we do not continually take into consideration first and foremost the activity of speaking and hearing, and if we forget for a moment that writing is only a substitute for speaking. A written word is mummified until someone imparts life to it by transposing it mentally into the corresponding spoken word.

The grammarian must be ever on his guard to avoid the pitfalls into which the ordinary spelling is apt to lead him. Let me give a few very elementary instances. The ending for the plural of substantives and for the third person singular of the present tense of verbs is in writing the same -s in such words as ends, locks, rises, but in reality we have three different endings, as seen when we transcribe them phonetically [endz, loks, raiziz]. Similarly the written ending -ed covers three different spoken endings in sailed, locked, ended, phonetically [seild, lokt, endid]. In the written language it looks as if the preterits paid and said were formed in the same way, but differently from stayed, but in reality paid and stayed are formed regularly [peid, steid], whereas said is irregular as having its vowel shortened [sed]. Where the written language recognizes only one word there, the spoken language distinguishes two both as to sound and signification (and grammatical import), as seen in the sentence “ There [ðə] were many people there ['ðє^.ə].” Quantity, stress, and intonation, which are very inadequately, if at all, indicated in the usual spelling, play important parts in the grammar of the spoken language, and thus we are in many ways reminded of the important truth that grammar should deal in the first instance with sounds and only secondarily with letters.

Formulas and Free Expressions.

If after these preliminary remarks we turn our attention to the psychological side of linguistic activity, it will be well at once to mention the important distinction between formulas or formular units and free expressions. Some things in language—in any language—are of the formula character ; that is to say, no one can change anything in them. A phrase like “ How do you do ?” is entirely different from such a phrase as “ I gave the boy a lump of sugar.” In the former everything is fixed : you cannot even change the stress, saying “ How do you do ?” or make a pause between the words, and it is not usual nowadays as in former times to say “ How does your father do ? ” or “ How did you do ? ” Even though it may still be possible, after saying “ How do you do ?” in the usual way to some of the people present, to alter the stress and say “ And how do you do, little Mary ? ” the phrase is for all practical purposes one unchanged and unchangeable formula. It is the same with “ Good morning ! ”, “ Thank you,” “ Beg your pardon,” and other similar expressions. One may indeed analyze such a formula and show that it consists of several words, but it is felt and handled as a unit, which may often mean something quite different from the meaning of the component words taken separately ; “ beg your pardon,” for instance, often means “ please repeat what you said, I did not catch it exactly ” ; “ how do you do ? ” is no longer a question requiring an answer, etc.

It is easy to see that “ I gave the boy a lump of sugar ” is of a totally different order. Here it is possible to stress any of the essential words and to make a pause, for instance, after “ boy,” or to substitute “ he ” or “ she ” for “ I,” “ lent ” for “ gave,” “ Tom ” for “ the boy,” etc. One may insert “ never ” and make other alterations. While in handling formulas memory, or the repetition of what one has once learned, is everything, free expressions involve another kind of mental activity ; they have to be created in each case anew by the speaker, who inserts the words that fit the particular situation. The sentence he thus creates may, or may not, be different in some one or more respects from anything he has ever heard or uttered before ; that is of no importance for our inquiry. What is essential is that in pronouncing it he conforms to a certain pattern. No matter what words he inserts, he builds up the sentence in the same way, and even without any special grammatical training we feel that the two sentences

John gave Mary the apple,

My uncle lent the joiner five shillings,

are analogous, that is, they are made after the same pattern. In both we have the same type. The words that make up the sentences are variable, but the type is fixed.

Now, how do such types come into existence in the mind of a speaker ? An infant is not taught the grammatical rule that the subject is to be placed first, or that the indirect object regularly precedes the direct object ; and yet, without any grammatical instruction, from innumerable sentences heard and understood he will abstract some notion of their structure which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own, though it is difficult or impossible to state what that notion is except by means of technical terms like subject, verb, etc. And when the child is heard to use a sentence correctly constructed according to some definite type, neither he nor his hearers are able to tell whether it is something new he has created himself or simply a sentence which he has heard before in exactly the same shape. The only thing that matters is that he is understood, and this he will be if his sentence s in accordance with the speech habits of the community in which he happens to be living. Had he been a French child, he would have heard an infinite number of sentences like

Pierre donne une pomme à Jean, Louise a donne sa poupée à sa sœur, etc.,

and he would thus have been prepared to say, when occasion arose, something like

Il va donner un sou à ce pauvre enfant.

And had he been a German boy, he would have constructed the corresponding sentences according to another type still, with dem and der instead of the French à, etc. (Cf. Language, Ch. VII.)

If, then, free expressions are defined as expressions created on the spur of the moment after a certain type which has come into existence in the speaker's subconsciousness as a result of his having heard many sentences possessing some trait or traits in common, it follows that the distinction between them and formulas cannot always be discovered except through a fairly close analysis ; to the hearer the two stand at first on the same footing, and accordingly formulas can and do play a great part in the formation of types in the minds of speakers, the more so as many of them are of very frequent occurrence. Let us take a few more examples.

” Long live the King !” Is this a formula or a free expression ?It is impossible to frame an indefinite number of other sentences on the same pattern. Combinations such as “ Late die the King ! ” or “ Soon come the train ! ” are not used nowadays to express a wish. On the other hand, we may say “ Long live the Queen ” or “ the President ” or “ Mr. Johnson.” In other words, the type, in, which an adverb is placed first, then a subjunctive, and lastly a subject, the whole being the expression of a wish, has totally gone out of the language as a living force. But those phrases which can still be used are a survival of that type, and the sentence “ Long live the King ” must therefore be analyzed as consisting of a formula “ Long live,” which is living though the type is dead, + a subject which is variable. We accordingly have a sentence type whose use is much more restricted in our own days than it was in older English.

In a paper on ethics by J. Royce I find the principle laid down “ Loyal is that loyally does.” This is at once felt as unnatural, as the author has taken as a pattern the proverb “ Handsome is that handsome does” without any regard to the fact that whatever it was at the time when the sentence was first framed, it is now to all intents and purposes nothing but a formula, as shown by the use of that without any antecedent and by the word-order.

The distinction between formulas and free expressions pervades all parts of grammar. Take morphology or accidence : here we have the same distinction with regard to flexional forms. The plural eyen was going out of use in the sixteenth century ; now the form is dead, but once not only that word, but the type according to which it was formed, were living elements of the English language. The only surviving instance of a plural formed through the addition of -en to the singular is oxen, which is living as a formula, though its type is extinct. Meanwhile, shoen, fone, eyen, kine have been supplanted by shoes, foes, eyes, cows ; that is, the plural of these words has been reshaped in accordance with the living type found in kings, lines, stones, etc. This type is now so universal that all new words have to conform to it : bicycles, photos, kodaks, aeroplanes, hooligans, ions, stunts, etc When eyes was first uttered instead of eyen, it was an analogical formation on the type of the numerous words which already had -s in the plural. But now when a child says eyes for the first time, it is impossible to decide whether he is reproducing a plural form already heard, or whether he has learned only the singular eye and then has himself added -s (phonetically [z]) in accordance with the type he has deduced from numerous similar words. The result in either case would be the same. If it were not the fact that the result of the individual's free combination of existing elements is in the vast majority of instances identical with the traditional form, the life of any language would be hampered ; a language would be a difficult thing to handle if its speakers had the burden imposed on them of remembering every little item separately.

It will be seen that in morphology what was above called a “ type ” is the same thing as the principle of what are generally called regular formations, while irregular forms are “ formulas.”

In the theory of word-formation it is customary to distinguish between productive and unproductive suffixes. An example of a productive suffix is -ness, because it is possible to form new words like weariness, closeness, perverseness, etc. On the contrary -lock in wedlock is unproductive, and so is -th in width, breadth, health, for Ruskin's attempt to construct a word illth on the an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Abbreviations of Book Titles, etc.
• Phonetic Symbols
• Chapter I Living Grammar
• Chapter II. Systematic Grammar
• Chapter III. Systematic Grammar (continued)
• Chapter IV. Parts of Speech
• Chapter V. Substantives and Adjectives
• Chapter VI. Parts of Speech (concluded)
• Chapter VII. The Three Ranks
• Chapter VIII. Junction and Nexus
• Chapter IX. Various Kinds of Nexus
• Chapter X. Nexus-Substantives. Final Words on Nexus
• Chapter XI. Subject and Predicate
• Chapter XII. Object. Active and Passive
• Chapter XIII. Case
• Chapter XIV. Number
• Chapter XV. Number (concluded)
• Chapter XVI. Person
• Chapter XVII. Sex and Gender
• Chapter XVIII. Comparison
• Chapter XIXI. Time and Tense
• Chapter XX. Time and Tense (concluded)
• Chapter XXI. Direct and Indirect Speech
• Chapter XXII. Classification of Utterances
• Chapter XXIII. Moods
• Chapter XXIV. Negation
• Chapter XXV. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index