The transformations of linguistic science

As it developed, linguistics clarified its object of research; its perspective came to be modified as it extended its scope to all of the world’s languages. Linguistics moved from a naturalistic to a historical perspective, then to a sociological perspective. An earlier conception of language as organism shifted to a conception of language as structure. [1. Historical linguistics and the Neogrammarians] Among the human sciences, linguistics is one of the earliest fields of study: it has been developing for almost 150 years. Moreover, it is a discipline whose modern orientations are of general epistemological interest. Like any science, it has progressed by applying its methods to an ever broadening domain of observable facts; by developing its conceptual foundation; by demanding greater rigour; and by constantly re-examining the validity of its postulates. It has also built on progress that was being made in neighbouring fields. During the first years of the 19th century, the study of European languages did not yield a satisfactory account of the origin of vocabulary and grammatical forms. The discovery of Sanskrit, and the comparison of Sanskrit with classical languages, gave a decisive impetus to the development of a type of explanation that would dominate throughout the 19th century: historical explanation. According to F. Bopp’s (1833) program for the missions of linguistics, linguistics aims “to provide a description of the organism of the languages listed in the book’s title; to André-Georges Haudricourt 2 compare facts of the same nature, to study the physical and mechanical laws that govern these languages, and to look for the origin of the forms that express grammatical relationships” [cited from Bréal 1867]. This program would still be considered valid by modern linguists, except that Bopp based his ideas on a set of postulates [some of which would not be accepted in the current state of the discipline]. Bopp postulated that comparison concerned comparable elements in different languages, and that an explanation for grammatical forms in daughter languages was to be found in the mother language [proto-language]. In Bopp’s days, there was an implicit assumption that the mother language must be simple and regular. This led Bopp to believe that there were only three original vowels (proto-vowels), *i, *u, and *a [in proto-Indo-European], and that the short vowels e ̆and o ̆in Greek must be derived from a short a ̆in Sanskrit: “Among simple vowels, the Ancient Indian alphabet lacks vowels corresponding to Greek ɛ and . In case these sounds developed at a stage when Sanskrit was still a living language, they must have developed from the short a after the time when the alphabet was fixed, because this alphabet represents the finest differences in sound, and would certainly have reflected the difference between a,̆ e ̆and o ̆if it had existed.” [Bopp 1833:3, cited from Bréal 1867:31] At the time, it was not conceivable that *e ̆ and *o ̆ could have existed and later merged into *a before Sanskrit writing became fixed. Work from this period aimed to explain the origin of the rich morphology of IndoEuropean languages; it was implicitly assumed that a language with invariable elements is more basic than a language with inflectional morphology (whose root vowels vary according to declension and conjugation). It was believed that the natural development of languages consisted of evolution from a stage in which all elements are clearly distinct from one another, to a stage in which they merge into a single word. Between 1871 and 1880, a whole series of discoveries called the earlier postulates into question. One such example was the fact that short *e ̆ and *o ̆had left traces in Sanskrit: in this language, earlier *ke ̆ and *ko ̆yielded ca and ka, respectively. These findings led to the development of a school of linguistics known as the Neogrammarian school (Junggrammatik), which questioned any sort of explanatory and evolutionary postulates, and only recognized facts and laws, in a perspective that may be called The transformations of linguistic science (1957) 3 positivist. What the Neogrammarians referred to as “laws” were essentially phonetic laws, which Brugmann characterized as follows: Every sound change, inasmuch as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws that admit no exception. (…) all words in which the sound subjected to the change appears in the same relationship are affected by the change, without exception. [Osthoff & Brugmann 1878:13] For example, any Latin c [k] followed by an a yields ch [ʃ] in French. Any exception to this rule is to be explained as resulting from analogy or borrowing. For instance, Latin vincam [subjunctive, ‘that I conquer’] yields French que je vainque [vɛk̃] and not vainche [vɛʃ̃], by analogy with the indicative [cf. the infinitive vaincre [vɛk̃ʁ] ‘to conquer’], which has a velar stop: [k]. Processes of borrowing can be illustrated by the example of French canine ‘canine’ and cavalier ‘horseman’, which are learned words introduced by scholars who deliberately devised these words on the basis of Latin roots. Instead of searching for a rational origin for grammatical forms, the Neogrammarians are content to explain through which phonetic laws or analogical processes these forms may be derived from earlier forms. The principle of consistency of phonetic laws led to increased methodological rigour, leading researchers to clarify which cases constitute exceptions to phonetic laws and require an explanation in terms of analogy. [2. Saussure and the development of general linguistics] The Neogrammarians’ method had a major shortcoming, however: it projected automatically into the past any anomaly that was found in the data. Ferdinand de Saussure was the only linguist at the time who reintroduced the notion of language as an organism. In his celebrated Memoir on the Primitive System of Vowels in Indo-European Languages (1879), he attempted to treat the reconstructed Indo-European language, not as a repository for aberrant forms, but as a full-fledged language possessing a structure of its own. This led him to reconstruct consonants for which no attestation was known at the time, and whose existence was proved forty years later when Hittite was deciphered. Only in the 20th century, particularly after the posthumous publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916), did linguistics, which until then had been practically synonymous with comparative grammar, André-Georges Haudricourt 4 become a much broader field, General Linguistics. Saussure showed that linguistics should first and foremost adopt a synchronic point of view: studying language in use, as a system of signs used by a given human group. Diachronic or historical studies only come next, and are subordinate to synchronic studies. Since Saussure, a significant step forward has consisted of studying the history of languages in terms of the evolution of their structure: taking into account the overall state of the language’s structure when studying individual sound changes (Martinet 1955). But to take stock of the progress realized in linguistics during this period, we need to consider the relationship of linguistics with related sciences: phonetics and ethnology, which played the role of auxiliaries1 in the development of linguistics. [3. The role of phonetics/phonology] In the initial phase of comparative work on classical languages, the material under study consisted of letters; the first chapters of Bopp’s book on IndoEuropean linguistics are accordingly entitled “Sanskrit alphabet”, “Slavic alphabet”, and so on. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that an increasing familiarity with foreign languages in their spoken form, along with the need to transcribe languages that did not have a writing system, led linguists to distinguish clearly between sounds and letters. This distinction led to the creation of phonetic alphabets, providing a direct representation of sounds, independent from spelling habits associated with a specific language. With this system, a single, unchanging letter is consistently used to represent a single sound, for instance using [ʃ] for a sound which is variously written as ch in French, sh in English, sch in German, ski in Swedish, sci in Italian, sz in Polish, and so on. From that point on, there was far clearer awareness than before of the physical, material aspect of languages. Physicists set out to study the nature of these sounds. The sounds of language, considered in themselves and defined by their physical and physiological properties, seemed to offer a field of study akin to that of 1. [The term ‘auxiliary’, auxiliaire, is by no means derogatory: it is applied to disciplines that are distinct from linguistics proper, but which make a contribution to its development. In Haudricourt’s view, this includes experimental phonetics, which is concerned with acoustics and physiology, and thus belongs to the natural sciences.] The transformations of linguistic science (1957) 5 the Natural Sciences. The rigour of the phonetic laws discovered by the Neogrammarians seemed to confirm the biological nature of human language. One of the best-known phoneticians of the end of the 19th century, Pierre-Jean Rousselot [“l’abbé Rousselot”], believed that changes in pronunciation were caused by a disease in the nerve endings of muscles in the tongue and the phonatory apparatus. Rev. Van Ginneken tried to demonstrate that “brachycephalic races” [human groups supposedly characterized by shorter skulls] mostly used sounds articulated at the back of the mouth.