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Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I. The Place of Method in Linguistics
Some Aspects of the Relation between Theory and Method
Method and Theory in the Perspective of Anthropological Linguistics
Method, Theory and Phenomenology
Part II. Methodological Principles
Behavioral Tests in Linguistics
The Method of Universal Grammar
One Instance of Prague School Methodology: Functional Analysis of Utterance and Text
Basic Principles of the Comparative Method
Part III. Theoretical Approaches
Theory-Building in the Descriptive Approach
Hierarchy in Language
Part IV. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
A Structural View of Sociolinguistics
Experimental Method in Psycholinguistics
Linguistic Method in Ethnography: Its Development in the United States
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
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METHOD AND THEORY IN LINGUISTICS

JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA M E M O R I A E NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA

edenda curat

C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD I N D I A N A UNIVERSITY

SERIES M A I O R 40

Ei 1970

MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

METHOD AND THEORY IN LINGUISTICS edited by

PAUL L. GARVIN

n 1970

MOUTON THE H A G U E · PARIS

© Copyright 1970 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. Ν.V., Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 75-110950

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume represents the corrected and revised proceedings of the 1966 Linguistic Institute Conference on Linguistic Method, organized by The Bunker-Ramo Corporation under the auspices of the University of California, Los Angeles, and under the sponsorship of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research of the Office of Aerospace Research, under Contract No. AF 49(638)1677, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1-3 August 1966. Thanks are due to Joan Arias who single-handedly managed all of the administrative details of the Conference. Work on Paul L. Garvin's contribution was completed under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, under Contract C-516 with the Special Projects Program of the Social Sciences Division. Madeleine Mathiot's contribution is based on research sponsored by the U.S. Office of Education under Contract No. 2-014-007. It was completed under Contract No. OEC-0-8-062864-0230(014) with the Office of Education.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

5

INTRODUCTION

9

PART I. THE PLACE OF METHOD IN LINGUISTICS YUEN REN CHAO

Some Aspects of the Relation between Theory and Method Discussion*

15 20

HARVEY PITKIN

Method and Theory in the Perspective of Anthropological Linguistics . . Discussion

27 33

JOHN W . M . VERHAAR

Method, Theory and Phenomenology Discussion

42 83

PART Π. METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES PAUL L . GARVIN

Behavioral Tests in Linguistics Discussion

95 109

PAUL M . POSTAL

The Method of Universal Grammar Discussion

113 128

FRANTISEK DANES

One Instance of Prague School Methodology: Functional Analysis of Utterance and Text Discussion

132 141

8

CONTENTS

WERNER WINTER

Basic Principles of the Comparative Method Discussion

147 153

PART III. THEORETICAL APPROACHES MADELEINE MATHIOT

Theory-Building in the Descriptive Approach Discussion

159 168

ROBERT E. LONGACRE

Hierarchy in Language Discussion

173 191

PART IV. CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES JOSÉ PEDRO RONA

A Structural View of Sociolinguistics Discussion

199 208

JEAN DUBOIS a n d L. IRIGARAY

Experimental Method in Psycholinguistics Discussion

212 245

DELL H . HYMES

Linguistic Method in Ethnography Discussion

249 312

INDEX OF NAMES

327

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

331

* In the transcript of the discussion, contributors to this volume are cited by last name only. Other discussants are cited by full name and affiliation at the time of the Conference, when they first appear in the discussion of a particular contribution, in later appearances in the same discussion by last name only.

INTRODUCTION

The original purpose of the conference upon which this volume is based was to discuss the place of method in linguistics. As it turned out, the conference dealt with method only to a limited extent, in spite of the fact that, in deference to the wishes of the chairman, the word method was used more frequently than is the custom in most of today's linguistic discussions. The conference was supposed to deal with three basis topics : 1. The relation of method to theory, 2. The development of methodological principles, 3. The application of method to particular problems. As the reader will be able to see for himself, there was indeed some discussion on the relation of method to theory. Much less was said on the development of methodological principles, and only a little more on the application of method to particular linguistic problems. This is disappointing only to the extent to which one judges the success of conferences by the degree to which they meet the objectives set for them by their organizers. Sometimes conferences turn out to be revealing in a manner not foreseen at the time of their planning. This is what has happened in the present case. Precisely because this conference did not live up to the objectives that were staked out for it, it has yielded results that are perhaps even more significant. The very fact that even in a conference specifically devoted to the problem of method most of the discussions have concerned matters of theory, has served to highlight the fundamental weakness that characterizes the state of linguistics in the late nineteen hundred and sixties. This is the glaring imbalance between method and theory, an imbalance which, I believe, has no place in an empirical field of inquiry such as linguistics ought to be. Another weakness of current linguistics which this conference has revealed is the excessive preoccupation with the one theory of the moment. Although the overwhelming majority of conference participants were not followers of transformational theory, an unreasonably large portion of the discussion was devoted to arguments in favor of or against this one theoretical position. This was reflected in the priority given to various issues in the conference discussions.

10

INTRODUCTION

Three issues kept recurring throughout the conference. The first of these was the issue of universale. The second was that of behaviorism versus mentalism. The third was that of competence versus performance. I am not sure whether or not these issues are as fundamental to linguistics as the attention given to them seems to indicate. I AM sure, however, that the manner in which these issues are raised does not always contribute to their clarification. What I am opposed to is, specifically, the formulation of these issues in absolute terms. Let me elaborate. Take the issue of universals. The way this issue is usually raised is : do you or do you not believe in language universals. This is a consequence of the two extreme positions held in the recent history of American linguistics : the earlier position, in which universals were rejected as wholly premature; the more recent position, in which no linguistic effort is considered worth its salt unless it in some way deals with universals. I consider both attitudes extreme and oversimplified. The real question is not whether or not one accepts universals as a worthy aim. Rather, the question is what kinds of universals one postulates, and how these postulated universals relate to the remaining assumptions that one holds about natural language. While the question of universals is no doubt a real issue, the dispute between behaviorism and mentalism is to my mind a false one. Neither a purely behavioristic attitude, which denies the significance of an underlying system as inferred from the behavioral data, nor a purely mentalistic attitude, which denies the need for conclusions about the underlying system to be based upon inferences from behavioral data, can contribute to the balanced view of linguistics which I think is essential for its further progress. Finally, the issue of competence versus performance. This is not really a new issue, but rather a new version of the old issue of "langue" versus "parole". While this is undoubtedly a real issue, much of the argument around it has centered on a wholly fallacious formulation of the problem. That is, whether the proper province of linguistics is the study of competence or of performance. To my mind both competence and performance are of interest to linguistics, and the relation between the two is quite simple. Competence is manifested by performance. Even if one assumes that only competence is the proper province of linguistics, this cannot exclude the study of performance, since it is only from observed performance that one can infer the inherently unobservable features of competence. Note how closely these three issues are related. The dispute over behaviorism versus mentalism in a sense concerns the linguist's attitudes towards observable behavior and inferential structures, that is, towards performance and competence. And the extent to which the description of the underlying structure of language is based upon inferences from observed behavior or upon detailed theoretical assumptions is closely related to the type of universals which are postulated by a given theory. In spite of this unplanned emphasis on theoretical issues, the basic problems of linguistic methodology were not ignored. The three basic problem areas staked out in the original program of the conference, namely, the relation of method to theory,

INTRODUCTION

11

the development of methodological principles, and the application of linguistic methods to particular problem areas, each were given sufficient attention to justify a summary opinion. First, concerning the relation of theory to method. It is clear from my emphasis on a balanced view of linguistics that I think that theory and method should be mutually supportive. Undue emphasis on one without corresponding emphasis on the other consitutes a weakness. The development of American linguistics over the past generation has shown the weakness of method without theory, and I expect that the future development of the field will show the weakness of theory without method. In regard to methodological principles, two basic questions can be raised. One concerns the nature of these principles, the second concerns their origin. I strongly favor the classical view that linguistics is a behavioral science, and that consequently linguistic method has to be a behavorial method. Conclusions about linguistic structure should be inferred from the organized observation and deliberate manipulation of linguistic behavior. As to the origin of methodological principles in linguistics, I agree with the usual view that they are derived from a theoretical frame of reference. The basic question then is : which theoretical frame of reference is best suited to give rise to effective methodological principles. There is, however, an additional source of methodological principles in linguistics which is often ignored in theoretical discussions about method. This is what I should like to call the 'trans-theoretical' experience of the profession. What I mean is that, independently of their theoretical position, 'good' linguistic analysts have developed good work habits. These good habits are most often unformulated and implicit in their statements and have to be extracted by a laborious process of extrapolation. The sound theoretical principles upon which these good habits are based are likewise often covert and not infrequently are even contradicted by the overt theoretical statements of their practioners. This gap between covert principles and overt positions is another consequence of the imbalance between method and theory which I have already mentioned. Let me now comment on the application of method to particular linguistic problems. I think that the most significant observation which can be made in this respect is that the only area of linguistics in which there is any consistency of methodological principles at all is that of linguistic comparison and reconstruction. This is perhaps not accidental. A look at the development of historical linguistics will show that there has been no scarcity of explanatory theories about linguistic history. Note, however, how most of these explanations, no matter how attractive they may have seemed at the time they were proposed, have since been relegated to oblivion. Whatever deep insights into linguistic history they may have suggested turned out to be unacceptable to succeeding generations of linguists. What has remained constant throughout the development of historical linguistics is a heritage of comparative method. Irrespective of many disputes about details, there is a core of incontrovertible general principles which is as valid today as it was when these principles were first introduced in the past century. I yet have to hear a paper on comparative linguistics where there isn't some

12

INTRODUCTION

mention of cognates, of phonetic correspondences, of analogy, and of a host of other concepts which are as valid today as the day they werefirstintroduced, although their current interpretation may be vastly different from that which they were originally given. It is the equivalent of this that is lacking in the rest of the field. PAUL L. GARVIN

PARTI

THE PLACE OF METHOD IN LINGUISTICS

SOME ASPECTS OF THE RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND METHOD1 YUEN REN CHAO

Nothing is so clear and simple to describe as the relation between theory and method. Theory is just the systematic statement about a set of things and method is the ways and means by which the things are to be studied in order to arrive at a theory about them. First method, then theory. As soon, however, as we start to examine more closely this oversimplified description of the relation, a host of problems will arise. What things and which things are to be included in a theory? Does method have to do with the gathering and choice of data and facts about the things or with the construction of the theory, or with both? Given a set of data, is there only one theory to account for them, or—as many of you present here will expect me to say—are there more than one, and if so, by what method are we to choose among alternate theories? Stated in such general terms, one could really raise the same questions in any field of inquiry, though under the circumstances of this Conference on Linguistic Method one will more naturally tend to think of applications to problems in linguistics. I am indeed fortunate to be given the opportunity of giving the first paper at this conference, so that I can raise all the problems and make a mess of things and by the time you are through, you will have answered all the questions concerning the relation between theory and method and end up with everything in perfect order in the closing session. I shall now begin with some questions, not only about theory and method, but also questions about a number of related terms. If I may paraphrase Confucius a bit, "You cannot talk fluently without having your terms properly defined" (The Analects Bk. 13, Chap. 1). Here we shall at once meet with not only divergences of usage of terms, but also a lack of consistency in the same term when it appears in different grammatical shape. For example, 'theory' as such suggests much more an activity closely associated with method than 'A theory', which suggests results arrived at in some systematic form, while 'THE theory' of something suggests such and such a theory in contrast with other theories about the same thing. Again, 'theoretical' is not always simply 'pertaining to theory', but more often taken in contrast with 'practical' or with 'actual'. With some of the associated terms being considered, the attempt is sometimes made to vary the form so as to differentiate more precisely which aspect is 1

Read, with comments, by Martin Joos.

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YUEN REN CHAO

meant, as in 'systemic' versus 'systematic', 'methodic' versus 'methodological', but such distinctive forms have been rather accidental and haphazard and I think such variations in the related terms are worth looking into, if not for their intrinsic import, at least to avoid possible confusion. A tabulation of usages, perhaps with comparisons in other languages, will be useful. To be sure, such a procedure may degenerate into a set of Webster-Merriam lists of near-synonyms with remarks on their differences, but isn't it true that Webster-Merriam is becoming linguistically more sophisticated nowadays, in proportion to its unpopularity among nonlinguists? I shall now make a cursory review of a representative, though by no means exhaustive, list of terms bearing on the relation between theory and method before taking up some of them for closer examination. For simplicity I am giving all the terms in their nominal forms, although, as we have just seen, it sometimes makes a difference whether they are in nominal, adjectival, or adverbial forms. I shall arrange them in five headings, tentatively to be called : (1) thing, (2) set, (3) symbol, (4) method, (5) theory. It will be seen that as we start with the bare thing under heading (1), there is a minimum of theory and method, and, as we go down the list from item to item and from heading to heading, more and more theory is involved, until we reach the end of heading (5), evaluation and theory, where a maximum of theory is involved. (1) 'Thing'. — Under this heading we shall mention 'thing', 'object', 'matter', 'sense data', and 'fact'. By 'thing' we shall understand anything one starts with, be it the speech of a language informant, or a piece of rock a geologist is looking at. An object is here taken in the sense of object of study and therefore in a wider sense than the next item, physical matter (whatever physical theory we follow as to its constitution). Sense data is often taken to be the more primary data, as against the thing of naïve realism, which takes physical objects for granted. Instead of taking sides, the position of what Kotarbiñski (1955, esp. 488-9) calls pansomatism is to take body, or something corporeal, and soul, or something sentient, as equally basic. Finally, the fact that the mentioning of a fact is usually in the form of an assertive sentence makes it a step nearer in the direction of theory. To be sure, one speaks of 'mere fact', but when there is a fact, there is also a sense of the fact, as noted long ago by Walter Pater (1897:4); in other words, facts are not always so mere. (2) Under 'set' we shall consider one or more things, that is, set in the set-theoretical sense. As soon as we have more than one thing, there is 'relation'. In relation to a set a thing is an 'item', and in relation to a 'class' a thing is a 'member' ; moreover classes in which the members are in certain relations (which we shall not go into) form a 'group', in the group-theoretical sense. In relation to relation, 'items' are 'terms'. In linguistics, sets in certain relations are said to form 'levels'. Finally, we have 'systems' of various 'structures' as large organized sets, and in 'categories' we have the most general ways in which things go together to form sets and systems. The closeness of the last items to method and theory is obvious. (3) Under 'symbol' we shall include 'sign' in the Charles Morris' sense (1946, 10, 354), which is the most general term; then we have 'icon' or 'picture'; 'symbol' as

THE RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND METHOD

17

reproducible conventionalized sign; 'term' as word or phrase used in a prescribed way; 'map' as a more or less pictorial isomorphic representation of something; 'code* as a translation of symbols into other symbols (usually in technologically more usable form); 'transform' as a representation in a different form of the same kind; and finally 'representation', in words or otherwise, as a symbolizing of anything in the most general sense. (4) Under 'method' we are including various activities, beginning with 'operations' in general and going on to 'observation', 'description', 'recording', 'study' (in general), 'analysis', 'synthesis', 'organization', 'transformation'; and all these processes will have various 'procedures' and 'techniques', or 'method' par excellence. (5) 'Theory' is what we have when all the preceding reaches a certain degree of 'organization'. The stating of a fact or even the sense of fact is not yet theory. The carrying out of a certain method may be based on a theory or used to check a theory, but in itself is not theory. Theory begins when the preceding operations result in 'systems' with 'rules' (e.g. the phase rule) and 'laws' (e.g. the law of gravity). Then we have increasingly more theory in 'explanations', 'predictions', and 'reconstructions' (e.g. past and future stages of the solar system or of primitive Indo-European), 'interpretations', 'evaluations', and finally 'philosophies'. The preceding is of course an extremely sketchy and unrigorous account of scientific activities, but I hope it gives some idea of how and where method and theory come in at certain stages — as a matter of fact, at rather uncertain stages. We shall now look a little more closely into a few related items among the above and consider how linguists and other theorists have used or discussed those terms. Starting from the last item under heading (5) we find that theory is often contrasted with philosophy. For example, Margaret K. Bonney (1967:58), in criticizing Mario Pei's complaint against the influence of Bloomfield and Fries, says : "There have been over a period of two hundred years works by linguists who took an objective view of the nature of English ... These (Leonard Bloomfield, Language, 1933 and Charles C. Fries, The structure of English, 1940) consitute a scientific look at the structure of English and might qualify as theories, but hardly as philosophies ... Pei infers that their theorizing has influenced the schools of education ... thus responsible for the present sorry state." Here philosophy is obviously taken to include approval or disapproval, promoting or discouraging certain directions of action, such as certain educational policies and programs. The term 'philosophies' taken in this sense, especially in the plural form, is certainly common, good usage; on the other hand, in the sense of a more general, more systematic, and more articulated analysis and synthesis of things, as for example in Jespersen's Philosophy of Grammar (1923), it is still a form of theory again, and the line between theory and philosophy becomes once more blurred. Looking now more directly at method in its relation to theory, it seems that one aspect of it is its increasing approach to theorizing as we go from methods of collecting data to methods of description. From a certain point of view we can say that no

18

YUEN REN CHAO

theory is involved in the collection of raw data (under heading 1 above), such as the segments or distinctive features 2 of speech. The mere recording and presentation of the data in recognizable form, whether in 'narrow' phonetic notation of the segments, or in a two- or more-dimensional presentation of the distinctive features, is not yet description or at least not a full description. Further ordering of our data at increasingly more highly organized levels will give more and more descriptive presentation of the subject matter and the result will be more and more like what one would consider a theory. To the above statement of one aspect of the relation between theory and method, two observations have to be made. I said that the collection of raw data involves no theory and qualified the statement by 'from a certain point of view', since from another point of view the primacy of phonetic data or in fact of any data is a highly sophisticated form of methodology. Taken more seriously, it is not only a theory, but in its general form, it is the philosophy of phenomenology. I personally do not take it seriously, and therefore consider the phenomenological approach in phonetics or in any other science as methodological rather than philosophical. But Chomsky (1965: 194) regards it as what he calls an out-of-date positivist philosophy of science. Citing Freeman Twaddell, who proposes to limit 'theory' to a 'summary of data', and R. M. W. Dixon, who finds the discussion of 'theories' sufficiently vague as to allow other interpretations, he says further: "Perhaps this loss of interest in theory, in the usual sense — I would interrupt, in what sense? — was fostered by certain ideas (e.g. strict operationalism or strong verificationism) that were considered briefly in positivist philosophy of science, but rejected in the early 1930's." The other observation is that from data to theory there are not only merely higher and higher levels of organization, but also other factors which make theory of more of an evaluating nature (heading 5 above) than method of presentation of description (headings 3 & 4). On this I should like to quote from Halliday and Voegelin on the evaluating aspect of theory. Halliday (1961:241-292) sets up four fundamental categories for the theory of grammar: unit, structure, class, and system. These he treats as 'mutually defining'. Incidentally there is nothing intrinsically objectionable in allowing such defining in a circle, since not only mathematics, but all scientific theory is defining in one big circle, provided that the circle is big enough. Halliday notes further that presentation is not the same as description and that description is not the same as theory; that moreover both the methods of discovery and the methods of description are not the same as theory. What I regard as his crucial distinction between theory and what leads to theory, if I understand him correctly, is that theory provides a means for EVALUATION (emphasis mine) of descriptions without reference to the order in which the facts are accounted for. Both the Voegelins and Chomsky, whom they quote, put emphasis on the part evaluation plays in theory. In their paper on structuralizing in America, C. F. and F. M. Voegelin (1963:27) quote Chomsky's five points of evaluation: * The phrase 'distinctive features' is here used in the Jakobson sense.

THE RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND METHOD

19

(a) Our ultimate aim is to provide an objective, non-intuitive way to evaluate grammar; (b) Notice that this theory may not tell us how to go about constructing the grammar ... But it may tell us how to evaluate such a grammar ...; (c) See my 'The logical structure of linguistic theory' for discussion of methods for evaluating grammar ...; (d) The most that can reasonably be expected of linguistic theory is that it shall provide an evaluation procedure ...; (e) The point of view adopted here is that it is unreasonable to demand of linguistic theory that it provides anything more than a practical evaluating procedure ... and then the Voegelins add: "It is not the transformation-generative model itself that has persuaded many linguists to follow new directions in structuralizing, but the evaluation procedure associated with theory in terms of (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), above." Thus, from the preceding discussions and samplings from the theorists and methodologists we find no consensus of usage, and the points of view are not only divergent, but the points are ever shifting as if in a world of Brownian movements. I shall now conclude by adding to the confusion and taking the liberty of quoting myself on a related term 'model' (heading 2 above), which is closely tied up with theory and method and has equally divergent usages. I found (Chao 1962:558-566) that a model can be one of the following: I. A frame of reference; 2. archetypical frames of reference; 3. a description; 4. a way — shall we say 'method'? — of handling language. C. F. Hockett. 5. A conception of linguistic structure; 6. a grammar; 7. a theory (!). Noam Chomsky. 8. An impersonal plan (or model) ; 9. a Standpunkt (transi, from Kleinschmidt as 'model'); 10. (model or) style. C. F. Voegelin. II. Analog (or model) ; 12. a proposed method (!) of research ( Φ 32). K. N. Stevens. 13. (Quoting Webster) a miniature representation of a thing; 14. a representation (cf. 39); 15. an abstraction. A. G. Oettinger. 16. A grammar and a mechanism. V. H. Yngve. 17. (Four) programs for separate sets of behavior. J. B. Carroll. 18. A framework in respect to which language is described; 19. a picture of how the linguistic system works; 20. a particular style of grammar; 21. a particular uninterpreted or partially interpreted system of marks, which becomes : 22. a theory (!) of the structure of something (when interpreted). Z. S. Harris. 23. A formalized or semi-formalized theory [!] ; 24. theoruncula, theorita. R. Braithwaite. 25. A psychological crutch. H. Putnam. 26. A possible realization (of a theory) in which all sentences of the theory are satisfied. Patrick Suppes. 27. An abstraction of a system (but cf. 35). S. P. Diliberto. 28. An abstraction. R. O. Kapp. 29. A set of constraints. G. Pask.

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30. (The corporate model will be) a formulation of the company's strategy in optimizing its profit. H. R. Karp. By contrast the following are non-synonyms of 'model' : 31. Framework of representation (half a dozen of which can be reduced to two or more models). C. F. Voegelin. 32. A design for a complete machine. K. N. Stevens. 33. The language system (of which the model is a model); 34. a structure ( φ model, since several apparently different structures may have the same model and vice versa); 35. an abstract system (Φ model, since the same abstract system can have different styles of description, or models). Z. S. Harris. 36. Concrete system; 37. reality. A. G. Oettinger. 38. A system, or the set of physical objects; 39. a representation, or physical realization of the model (in the form of symbols, etc., but cf. 14). S. P. Diliberto. The above does not of course include studies which have appeared since, among them especially the three linguistic models by Paul L. Garvin et al. as listed in Garvin 1963. I shall not digress further into the many aspects of models, as my plan was only to comment on some aspects of the relation between theory and method. But models, in whichever sense you take the term, will always serve as good methods for constructing, presenting, and even evaluating theories.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

DISCUSSION* GARVIN:

Would you care to comment on the problem of hypothesis-making in the light of Prof. Chao's paper? JOOS:

We're both old-fashioned about this. We belong to the days when Percy Bridgman published a book on how scientists think, and we still regard it as very fresh and new and worth reading. The same holds for the essay by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré on how mathematicians think. You will find that Poincaré essay as the first item in a volume collecting many things about how scientists and artists of various kinds think, and that volume was a University of California Press book, published about a dozen years ago. The title is The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin, 1952, now available as a paperback for 60 cents (Mentor Book No. MP383). Hypothesis-making linguistics fits perfectly with everything in that volume. Incidentally, it is interesting to see how the mathematician explains it more clearly and persuasively than the literary artists in the same book do. •

Y. R. Chao's paper was read by Martin Joos, who represented Chao's viewpoint in this discussion.

THE RELATION BETWEEN THEORY AND METHOD

21

Hypothesis comes about in this way: you collect a mass of data which have been interesting to you — pebbles on the beach, you know — and you try to make sense out of your collection. You worry about it anywhere from three days to three weeks. By conscious thinking, you can't get a satisfactory accounting for what you have collected. Then, in my case, it wakes me up at night about 3 a.m. A hunch suddenly comes to you, seemingly out of nowhere. This is the beginning of hypothesis. If, in the waking hours, the hunch does not seem utterly ridiculous, you adopt it as a working hypothesis and hope to improve it or to disprove it, in which case you will have to try again, which means once more worry, and once more wait for the hunch. Hypothesis, then, is the earliest stage of theory from this point of view; and this is the historical point of view, the way it works in a particular case. All experience shows that you can't take the step from data to theory logically; it has to be an illogical or irresponsible notion — a hunch, as I call it. (UCLA): Prof. Joos referred to Poincaré. I don't know whether it was in the same book, but in one place Poincaré made the statement that physics has a subject matter and sociology seems to do nothing but concern itself with method. When I first read that quote, since I was in linguistics, I felt that he could perhaps have substituted the word linguistics for sociology. I think that it is an interesting question for those of us in linguistics to ask at this stage in the game as to why we seem to be still so unclear as to the relationship between method and theory. Perhaps it is because for so many years in American linguistics we confused the two and felt that the very methodological procedures which linguists used in gathering data itself constituted theory, or, on the other hand, could be used to justify theories which were presented. I think perhaps we have reached the stage, and this conference is an example, where we are beginning to recognize the sharp difference between methodology and theory, and that once we begin to really theorize and test these theories according to the requirements of all other sciences we will begin to make real advances in linguistics as a science. VICTORIA FROMKIN,

JOOS:

Let me ask for one point of clarification. When you use the word 'theory' at the end here, were you looking at this from Chomsky's point of view. FROMKIN :

I was looking at it from what I think is a scientific point of view which I think can be found among most philosophers of sciences, as well as most scientists themselves. Perhaps I was using it from the Chomskyan point of view and also from an Einsteinian point of view. JOOS:

It must be remarked — it would be unfair to leave it unsaid — that the Chomskyan

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use of the word 'theory' is very precise, or in other terms, very narrowly restricted. So this is why my question to you deserves a straight 'yes' or 'no' answer. FROMKIN:

I would say yes, then. JOOS:

Thank you. (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany) : From an epistemological point of view, the ordering which Chao has made here is very appealing to me, because he starts with facts. After collecting and describing facts, he arrives at evaluation and theory. This is to say that to me it is the correct way — from practice to theory and from theory again back to practice. Secondly, when I have a look at the list of quotations for the term 'model' in literature, there is one missing. Namely, the one used in set theory, or system theory as we say in German, in mathematics. Prof. Kennerer at our university, who teaches fundamentals of mathematical logic and mathematical cybernetics, stresses the fact that the term 'model' should be used only in this sense, namely, that we arrive at a model by making two homomorphic systems isomorphic. In this isomorphism, perhaps, we might see what we call a model. HARRY SPITZBARDT

JOOS:

To take your two points in reverse order: your last point, I think, is identical with what we used to say 25 years ago ; and I still say, of course, that, for example, the phonemic system of a particular language is what is in common or shared by all the competent presentations by different workers on the same language. They first look similar; they are homomorphic; you check through carefully point by point, lining up the items as terms and the relations. You must line them both up. You line up the terms and the relations, and you find them, then, isomorphic; and there is the model. You can find me in print on that in my note appended to Hockett's Ά Note on "Structure" ' in Readings in Linguistics. As for your first remark, you there defined yourself as belonging to the scientific tradition which has been continuous and unbroken for a hundred years amid various revolutions; induction on particular points; illuminiferous ether has disappeared, but the scientific way of thinking remained unbroken through that change. This is the way I think of this kind of work and of method and theory, too. One of our tasks in this conference will be to determine very precisely in what respects the use of the word 'theory' by Chomsky and his school differs from this, for it does. (General Electric, Santa Barbara, Calif.) : To me, theory is a very broad subject. Model-building is a methodology of theory.

DAVID KLEINECKE

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It is perhaps the only effective methodology of theory. Model-building is traditionally an abstraction from the practice of scientists. The scientists par excellence are the physicists. Model-building is supposed to be an abstraction from the technique of physicists. However, physicists do not build models very effectively. They are perhaps the worst people to go to for learning how to build models. My own observations are that probably statisticians would be the best source of good behavior with respect to model-building. What they do is the following: they look at reality, then they build an abstracted theory from reality. JOOS:

From reality? KLEINECKE:

From reality; reality is prior to science. JOOS:

Will you take it this way : parallel to reality? KLEINECKE:

They must have physical exposure to reality before they build a theory, chronologically. They build an abstract theory using what tools they can. In the present day, the theories that are effective are almost invariably algebraic in nature. This is where physicists have achieved their great results. This is where most of the big payoff comes. There are nonalgebraic theories; and Freudian psychology is probably the best, most obvious, example of a nonalgebraic theory that has produced finite results. This is a form of behavior that we can observe in scientists. We can observe a lot of people talking about models; particularly Suppes, mentioned in Chao's paper, is a representative of these people, where they take a theory, and they say a model is a realization of theory. In my book, they have it exactly backwards. The model is the theory of which the representation is the original substance. They ought to make a distinction between a representation theory and a model theory. JOOS:

The discussion is staying right on the line where it belongs, I believe. I would like to speak now once more to the young lady who mentioned Poincaré in another connection. It was not in the essay I was referring to, but much later. That essay was confined strictly to how mathematicians think. The Poincaré of this other thing spoke of the difference between sociology and the physical sciences. As I view it, and I think at least a few people will agree with me, the real reason for this difference between the sociologists, including linguists, and other scientists, is that we can't see the woods for the trees. We need very drastic devices for getting a distance from what we are talking about so that we just won't be trying to keep a fire in a

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wooden stove. You get the detachment automatically when you deal with chemistry or physics, or above all, nuclear physics, for no one can ever see one of those 36 or 48 subatomic particles. The opposite extreme is linguistics or anything sociological; and here, then, we have to work hard and long on methodology and theory to get out of this trap of trying to build a fire in the wooden stove. (Bunker-Ramo, Canoga Park, Calif.) : I have, first of all, a very brief comment addressed to Mr. Joos concerning his remark about hypothesis — the place of hypothesis in science. I really think that it is indisputable, and I think he will recognize it himself in a minute, that hypothesis precedes the collection of data. In fact, one of the most crucial issues in science is to clarify the manner in which the hypothesis preceding data collection, in fact, shapes the collection of data. I think your own statement on the subject gave this away when you said first you go around collecting data that is of interest to you. Then you wait until three in the morning and a hypothesis shows up, if you are fortunate. The fact is that the crucial phrase in the sentence is 'data of interest to you'. Certain kinds of data will be collected, and other kinds of data will be regarded as background material, or 'noise', or material of little interest or little relevance, precisely depending upon the kind of hypotheses that you formed about the subject matter before you began collecting data or observing material. The second comment I have really applies to everything that has been said since the beginning of this Conference. I recall having read Kleene's Introduction to Metamathematics. On about page 30 — very early in the book before he really gets into the subject matter — he takes about four paragraphs to set straight the meaning of theory and the meaning of model. He does it so eminently well that I would expect that anyone who really would like to come out of this morning's discussion with a clear head on these topics might take about four minutes to read his discussion. He does this in such a clear way and devotes so little time to it that I suspect that people who are engaged in better developed sciences than linguistics really don't find the need to discuss these things. I think this was part of the point of Dr. Fromkin's remark, that we spend so much time discussing methodology, perhaps because we can't find, or we don't want to face up to, issues that are really more worth discussing. GARY MARTINS

(UCLA) I think it is important to contradict Mr. Martins' remarks which, to all intents and purposes, pointed out an error in Dr. Joos'. It is not a matter of whether hypothesis making is prior to data collection. In fact, this very error in assuming a linear ordering misleads all of us. What is involved is a very large loop. One of the steps in the loop happens to be data collection. Another happens to be hypothesis formulation. If you will pay attention to the eminent textbooks in the field of scientific method, you will notice that this process, which is a very large cycle, is repeated again and again. So the notion of linearity in time, chronological linearity, is quite misleading. It is worse than HAROLD P. EDMUNDSON

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just irrelevant; it is absolutely misleading. There is no inherent order in this cyclic process. Clearly, in the formation of a model, it is the obligation of the investigator to repeat the process if he finds the model inadequate. So the process of modeling and remodeling goes on and on, in the same sense as Einsteinian models of mechanics superseded Newtonian mechanics. This will happen to Chomsky's theory, to any other linguist's theory, in the models that form a part of their theory. c. ι. J . M . S T U A R T (Georgetown University): I am rather disturbed by a general tone of timidity in discussing concepts like theory, model, hypothesis. It is almost as if we are afraid that some authoritarian legislative assembly is going to chastise us because we have been using words wrongly. I think Gary Martins just simply can't be serious about what he said about hypotheses, although he may have been tricked into it by the fact that Martin Joos was talking about the psychology of hypothesization, not the structure of hypothesis. Technically, of course, a hypothesis is simply a proposition, so that it describes nothing, it asserts no matter of fact. But given an attachment to an appropriate logical structure, we can derive from it a further proposition, still not asserting a matter of empirical fact but which, under adequate conditions of observation, will turn out to be isomorphic with, or transformable into, a sentence that is an observation statement or report. That is what a hypothesis is. This leads me to the second point. I can speak dogmatically like this for a very simple reason : I do science the way I was taught to do, until such time that I discover that those methods are inadequate. So one can be assertive on the strength of a long and distinguished tradition of one's forebears. We stand on the shoulders of distinguished men. That gives us the right to be bold about these things. When we discover that what they taught us was wrong, we begin to mend our ways, tentatively, but with some measure of excitement. Finally, about models. Again, we are striving to be sure that we are saying the right kind of thing. It's preposterous. There is no such thing as a meaning of model. There are many different meanings, used with technical accuracy by many different investigators. No one has mentioned, for example, the familiar mathematical usage for model, which goes as follows : if you have a purely formal system — that is, a collection of symbols with no intended interpretation, that system is abstract. If, at any time, you introduce names for entities that may have some existence other than in that abstract system, then you have constructed a model of that abstract system. What we are doing in linguistics presumably is squabbling over whether or not we are using the correct technical apparatus instead of simply leaning upon a tradition that has provided a good deal of it for us. One suspects that most of us weren't paying attention while we were being trained in those things. JOOS:

The time has been short, and I probably thought of it as shorter than it actually was

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when I neglected to mention the non-linearity of the progress from thing to theory. Of course, one always doubles back repeatedly. And any time you get stuck, you step back and start over again, if you are aiming at a theory. If you are aiming at knowing more about the object you are talking about, you do more than that. You go all the way back to new data, and collect new data over and over again. The linearity method is shorthand for all this, but is definitely misleading. My neglect to mention nonlinearity is an error on my part, but I do not think it evidences that I cannot think straight about it.

REFERENCES Analects, The. Bonney, Margaret K., 1962 "An English Teacher Answers Mario Pei", The Saturday Review. Sept. 15. Chao, Y. R., 1962 "Models in Linguistics and Models in General", Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science: Proc. of the 1960 International Congress, ed. by Ernest Nagel, P. Suppes, A. Tarski, 558-660 (Stanford University Press). Chomsky, Noam, 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press). Dixon, R. W., 1963 Linguistic Science and Logic (The Hague, Mouton). Garvin, Paul L., 1963 Natural Language and the Computer (New York, McGraw-Hill): Paul L. Garvin, "The Definitional Model of Language", 3-22; Robert P. Stockwell, "The Transformational Model of Generative or Predictive Grammar", 23-46; Thomas A. Sebeok, "The Informational Model of Language: Analog and Digital Coding in Animal and Human Communication", 47-64. Explicit mention of models is also made in: Robert M. Hayes, "Mathematical Models in Informational Retrieval", in the same volume, 268-389. Halliday, M. A. K„ 1961 "Categories of the Theory of Grammar", Word 17.241-292. Jespersen, Otto., 1923 The Philosophy of Grammar (London, Allen & Unwin). Kotarbinski, Tadeusz., 1955 "The fundamental Ideas of Pansomatism", tr. from the Polish by Alfred Tarski and David Rynin, Mind ser. 2, 64.488-500. Morris, Charles, 1946 Sign, Language, and Behavior (New York, Prentice-Hall). Pater, Walter, 1897 Appreciations; with an Essay on Style (London, New York, Macmillan). Twaddell, Freeman, 1935 On Defining the Phoneme, (= Language Monograph no. 16). Reprinted in part in Martin Joos, ed., Readings in Linguistics, 1957 (Washington). Voegelin, C. F. & F. M., 1963 "On the History of Structuralizing in Twentieth century America", Anthropological Linguistics 5.1.12-37.

METHOD AND THEORY IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS HARVEY PITKIN

Events in the recent history of the field of linguistics have emphasized the autonomy of the discipline. New boundaries have been created by the extraordinary attention paid to theory, models and the form of rules for presenting the statement of an analysis. This is, in my opinion, too narrow a view of the field. Linguistics, one of the four traditional branches of anthropology, is a legitimate sector of investigation within the science studying man, because language is one of the most characteristically human attributes to be found universally. It is not an autonomous discipline (like philology or linguistic philosophy), because language is not discretely bounded but forms a continuum with the rest of human behavior. The definition of a language requires notions borrowed from social science, and its study demands consideration of extralinguistic behavior and contexts. Not only have recent trends narrowed the field unnecessarily, they have also sharply divorced theory from any connection with questions of analytic practice. Many linguists have turned their attention to questions regarding language (with capital L) and its internal self-contained contexts. It seems appropriate now to re-emphasize other aspects of linguistics which have been inappropriately de-emphasized — more specifically, to re-emphasize the anthrolopogical tradition in linguistics. This tradition is concerned with studying specific languages, whether literate or nonliterate, in both spoken and written forms, synchronically and diachronically, in all the range of temporal, geographic, and social diversity which may be found, and with deriving significant generalizations from this study. It has grown from a fusion of traditions from philology and anthropology, and its classics are Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield. In my discussion of anthropological linguistics, I intend to use the term in the broadest sense and to include especially those topics which it is now fashionable to neglect and relegate to a peripheral area outside the mainstream of the field. I consider the following seven notions basic to an anthropological approach to linguistics as I conceive of it. The first is the interdependence of language and other behavioral phenomena. This notion has already been stressed by Mathiot (pp. 159-67), by Danes (pp. 132-40), and by Garvin (pp. 95-108), so there is no need to elaborate on it.

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The second notion is the significance of the contexts which are external to language. I mean those extralinguistic phenomena of essential relevance to the study of language, usually involving nonverbal behavior, without whose study a deeper understanding of the significance of the grammatical and lexical characteristics of a language is impossible. The third notion underlines the need for attention to linguistic diversity, so that scholarly judgments about typological and universal phenomena can be made on an informed basis. Two languages are not enough for statements claiming to be universal. The fourth is the previously mentioned emphasis on the study of particular languages rather than just language as the general phenomenon. The fifth notion stresses the value of rules which are primarily adequately retrodictive, that is, which account for observations previously made. This seems to me an essential characteristic of a social science — as a minimum it must account for what has already happened, what could have been observed. I wish to distinguish this from questions of prediction, which are a bonus that cannot always be attained with any degree of realism. The sixth notion acknowledges the significance of analytic techniques which can be productively employed. In my view, the linguist's conclusions should be based on an observation of language behavior. This observation should be conducted in an organized way, and its results should be exploited systematically — both of which require an interest in the procedures of analysis. The final, seventh, notion stipulates the recognition of the potentialities for the gradual development of sound linguistic theories which grow from field work and from the functional analysis of the behavior of native speakers or of texts produced by them. The primary problem of method depends on the recognition of the essential relations which obtain among speech, meaning, and behavior of various kinds. Linguistics has specialized in the first two areas, anthropology in the second two. I think there is very little benefit in separating the three. The recent proliferation of hyphenated fields and specialties appears to me to be an essentially unsatisfactory attempt to deal with this arbitrary compartmentalization and to compensate for the fragmentation of the field of linguistics. This fragmentation has resulted in part from specialization but also from the continuing constriction of the domain proper to linguistic study to an increasingly narrow, more autonomous study of language based primarily on theoretical approaches which arbitrarily exclude concerns for methods of analysis. Let me now give you an outline of the conceptual frame of reference upon which my judgments are based. A language is a system of systems "où tout se tient", that is, where every part depends on and is related to the other parts. It is a system whose primary function is taken to be communication, although other functions such as the sociological and esthetic are also presumed. A language is not "an infinite set of sentences", although

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a language may be understood as the source for the production of a very large number of utterances. While a structure may be said to be a configuration of elements, i.e. an arrangement of units or items in a pattern, a system (which incorporates and subsumes the notion of structure) includes relations and processes, i.e. dynamics, as well as static arrangements. The two basic parameters of a language are form and meaning: the form or expression being for the most part accessible to observation and analysis, and the meaning or content requiring in addition resort to native-speaker intuition and extralinguistic experience of reality. Form and meaning may be combined in three ways to organize a description of linguistic hierarchy: (1) when only form is present without meaning, (2) when form and meaning both vary, and (3) when meaning is present without necessarily being represented by isolable formal units. This tripartite hierarchical organization specifies three systems : (1) phonology, the study of minimal functional units of form, called phonemes, (2) morphology, the study of minimal units of form and meaning, called morphemes, and (3) syntax, the study of meaning as expressed in relations between elements without any necessarily isolable formal units. Two activities of linguistic practice must be noted as separate although they are mutually influential: the analysis of the data, and the statement or presentation of that analysis. In both the analysis and statement (description) of a language it seems best to include both static and dynamic aspects of such systems. While all languages so far as is known have been and always are in the process of change (which presumes a model of language minimally including the dynamic), they change only very slowly, and so a largely static model is fairly efficient in treating a good deal of language both at one point in time (a synchronic description) and also in its development through time (a diachronic description). Linguistics has had experience of models of analysis that are exclusively static or dynamic, and metaphors of statement that also emphasize one or the other approach, as well as mixtures of both in both activities. I propose that a static and a dynamic approach should be combined in the analysis and the statement wherever appropriate, according to the requirements imposed by the data. Thus the model here offered is emphatically data-oriented and in part inductive in method, encouraging empirical testing. It is a pragmatic orientation to linguistics rather than a purely deductive adherence to a set of basic postulates or axioms. Field work, a large corpus of data and a strong orientation to data, are ranked as prior to a strong orientation to a very detailed model. A definitional model will be presented insofar as there are units or processes which are thought to be universal and to allow for crosscultural definition. Other units and processes will have perforce to be defined for each specific language. Description should proceed first through a taxonomic phase wherein the data are classified on the basis of an analysis following the canons of (1) completeness, (2) consistency, and (3) economy. All the data must be accounted for, with no internal contradictions, and in as parsimonious a reduction as will allow the resultant state-

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ment to follow three canons : (1) accurately and adequately reflect the facts, (2) allow for the full retrieval of the unanalyzed original input data observed, and (3) be in as clear and accessible a format and notation as the purpose of the study dictates. The taxonomic portion of the description will note three basic relations in its discussion of the way in which units are represented in the hierarchical structure of a language: (1) the allo/eme relation, (2) the class/member relation, and (3) the construction/constituent relation. Additionally and more importantly, each unit or process in the system will be treated from two basic points of view: (4) its internal structure and (5) its external function. The latter two views, (4) and (5), encompass the first three in another dimension. While an ultimate goal in studying a language is to account for that knowledge or competence internal in the mind of a native speaker, the linguistic behavior and the utterances produced by speakers comprise the observable data which are in fact available for study. Since native speaker intuition is an invaluably rich source of additional data and hypotheses, and since arbitrary analyses are eschewed, two attacks on language description are implied. The first tactic focuses on the overt performance, speech itself, and classifies the behavior as far as possible beginning at the bottom of the hierarchy with the basic phonological units and processes which permit a language to be reduced to writing. Discovery of morphological units and processes which bear meaning, and their classification, follows. And the taxonomy concludes at the top of the hierarchy with attention to meaning-bearing arrangements and relations between units. The second tactic focuses on the creative potentiality of language to generate new utterances, and begins at the top of the hierarchical system, exploiting the units and relations available from the taxonomic description, and moves down over the same terrain already covered from a generative point of view. At this point, three criteria which apply to the descriptive rules are invoked. The rules, to be descriptively adequate, must account for the generation of utterances which are (1) grammatical, (2) acceptable, and (3) appropriate to native speakers in native situations {i.e. appropriate in extra-linguistic cultural contexts). These two mutually complementary tactical approaches combine behavioristic and mentalistic views, and both seem indispensable to the ideal goals of linguistics : to study the covert psychological system composing native speaker competence ('langue') and the overtly manifested observable and varying performance ('parole') which together comprise language. The many new ethno-, socio-, psycho-, anthropological linguistic orientations testify (in part by their programmatic overlapping) to the very intimate interrelations of speech, meaning, and non-verbal behavior and to the unbounded intergrading between them, which are crucial to the frame of reference presented here. No entirely arbitrary segmentations are in accord with the phenomenological continuities, in spite of the current fashion in favor of them. Self-contained contexts, exclusively internal to language, are insufficient to account for language phenomena — resort

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must be made to extra-linguistic, behavioral and other contexts in order to fully account for the most interesting aspects of verbal behavior — and for this reason speech, meaning, and behavior are necessarily closely interwoven, and so must be their examination. Now, however, it is the most fashionable practice for general linguists to deliberately restrict their study to intra-language data and even to intra-individual subjective studies. It is also the unfortunate case that some studies of purely linguistic phenomena, such as semantic studies of lexical sets, are misunderstood to be more than linguistic, i.e. are thought to be analyses of nonlinguistic behavior. In fact, they are analyses of only the labels for those behaviors. As such, they constitute an excellent point of entry into the study of sociocultural phenomena, but their study is no less linguistic for that. In the recent history of linguistics, at least in the United States, and certainly since the publication of Leonard Bloomfield's Language, our approach to the subject has operated with fictions sharply dichotomizing theory and method, meaning and form, competence and performance, dynamics and statics, item-arrangement and process, intuition and analytical procedure, always with results which have biased our view and exaggerated our difficulties. It has been the practice, in finding one end of a pair of polarities unsatisfactory, to discard it, the good with the bad of it, the baby with the bath water. At a later stage, the opposite polarity might be espoused in an equally extremist position. Let me give some attention to one dichotomy which is of particular concern to today's debates in linguistics : that between performance and competence. It has been said that in some deep and revealing way, performance is irrelevant to competence. I agree that performance may be too complex to be fully accounted for in any simple way. I don't agree, however, that performance is not an appropriate concern for the linguist, to be relegated to a hyphenated discipline, such as psycholinguistics. On the contrary, since competence is inaccessible to independent and direct observation, it must be inferred from a study of performance — another reason why speech, meaning, and behavior are not discretely segmentable as separate entities to be considered wholly independently from each other. Such arbitrary separations of polarities have at times been stimulating, but their ultimate artificiality is a temporary expedient which has recently led linguistics to abandon almost all interest in method. An interest in methodology is, however, essential if we are to advance from an art subjectively and intuitively practiced to the pretentions of an empirical science. Such a science can only be based on the assumption that the observable data are the proper starting points of the scientific investigations, and that statements which strive for increasing explicitness about the covert procedures of analysis that elaborate inductive method can only serve to perfect our work. Anthropology, which has traditionally in the United States embraced linguistics as one of its four components, has a well-developed interest in the participant-observer

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role of the investigator, and seems already to have recognized that the insight and explanations provided by native informants only comprise additional data to assist the investigator, but should not in themselves be taken as constituting on analysis. The investigator, it seems to me, may not abdicate his responsibility as analyst and limit his function to the area in which he is competent as a native informant himself. This would be to assert that other cultures or languages are uninvestigable, and further that our primary tool is intuition. Intuition alone without method is antithetical to empirical scientific investigation. A methodology for linguistics can obviously not be limited to the Talmudic scholastic post-Bloomfieldian specification of very rote procedures of a strictly sequential linear, fixed type, as sterile as recipes. Maybe they would be fairly adequate for some kinds of two-dimensional structures; but for the account of dynamic systems such as language where processual and dynamic relations obtain, some kind of disciplined control requires integrated, non-linear, cyclical passes to be repeatedly made at the same configurations, while the hierarchical structure is being investigated, of course, with attention to the concomitant relations between layers of structure. In this connection, I find some of our discussion about the context suitable for the description of phonological units a bit naive, in the sense that it would seem legitimate to me, for example, to describe phonological units from more than one standpoint: in phonological context terms as well as in grammatical context terms ; the yield being, of course, quite different in the two cases, and the two kinds of insights not being in any way equivalent or able to be sacrificed. One would certainly want both of them; this would give additional insight into the structure being considered. An open-minded linguistic description should not be limited to isomorphic relations but should also include the ambiguities of language. Retrievability of input data from descriptive statements is an essential requirement — it follows from the need for retrodictive adequacy which is one of the basic tenets of anthropological linguistics that I have cited above. The canons of completeness, consistency and simplicity have, in my opinion, been mistakenly applied to the evaluation of the process of analysis (which, in my frame of reference, should be sharply differentiated from the statement). I think, to be light for just a moment, I might say that on the one hand, consistency is the hobgloblin of small minds and that on the other hand, excessive use of Occam's razor as a shoehorn may sever the tendons of the foot so as to cripple the patient. Another element of caution contributed by the anthropological view to today's theoretical discussions in linguistics is the cross-cultural perspective. The diversity of the languages and cultures of the world is not to be underestimated — a universal model based on our language or culture is perhaps even more unfortunate than the earlier Latin model of grammar has been. In conclusion, let me first set forth the demands which an anthropological view places upon linguistics, and finally sum up the essential contributions which such an approach can make to the field.

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The demands are the following: First, anthropological linguistics urges that the descriptions of linguistic events at least account for a specified REAL corpus and additionally be appropriate to unobserved behavior as far as possible, before introducing the praiseworthy but often vain hope of predicting all conceivable behaviors. Second, the insights of the investigator must be distinguished from analyses arrived at from a too hasty structuralization based on the superstition of fictional dichotomies or from superficial mathematizations which may add no more economy to the analysis than notational abbreviation and perhaps convenient metaphor, notwithstanding the manipulative advantages that might be expected from certain kinds of mathematical formalizations. Third, the balance between analysis and statement must be restored. What has to be conveyed is the underlying analysis, not the statement for its own sake. Whatever metaphor or metalanguage is used to present the analysis should be considered as only its vehicle. Statements should certainly be permitted to fluctuate in form, contingent on the goal and the audience involved (for example, the difference between a human audience and a computer, where quite obviously different presentations are effective). Fourth, both a theoretical framework and a methodology are essential and nourish each other, it's not an either/or relation, and I don't think that either of them can be dispensed with, except at very high cost to linguistics and the more general study of man. The contributions are the following: First, the emphasis on the confrontation of a corpus of real text, whether oral or written. Second, the anticipation that the analytic experience of real languages considered free of ethno- and linguo-centric bias will serve to productively elaborate both theory and method. Third, discrimination between the participant and observer components in the role of the investigator. Fourth, awareness of the interrelations of behavioral phenomena including languages. Fifth, distinction between analysis and statement. Sixth, interest in history as a minimal desideratum. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

DISCUSSION

c.

(Georgetown University) If the concern with orderliness is a sign of smallness of mind, then I must confess to being afflicted with it to a pathological degree. I. J. M. STUART

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First of all, I want to worry about the broad implications of your notion of prediction as against retrodiction. Prediction surely means this: the property by which a proposition derived within a logical structure can be matched against an observation report. It doesn't matter what chronological access one adopts. Whether you find a mapping from your proposition to an observation report made three centuries ago, or whether you have to wait three centuries until you find an appropriate observation, you are still dealing with prediction. Secondly, it's very loose to talk about such things, but I think at the moment the climate of opinion deserves it. The issue is not whether or not linguistics is a science, because in my sense, science is a language, it is simply a system of propositions, and we haven't got there yet. The real issue is whether when carrying out one's own investigation, one is working as a scientist — that is, within a certain frame of reference. This is the question we have to ask ourselves. I like to think that I am a scientist in that sense. Thirdly, the question of cyclical parsing has been discussed with admirable clarity by Garvin more than anyone else, and I accept that rationale. But it is not an intuitive procedure essentially. The point is that when analyzed out it turns out to be a thoroughly principled and very tight logical structure. The fact that we haven't exhibited this structure publicly is not the important point. The important point is whether the linguist admits it or not. Much that he often refers to as purely intuitive responses to data can be shown to be logically very tightly principled. Fourthly, I agree with two points which you made. With the question of competence — yes, it is inaccessible. One of the prime problems in the kind of research that I do is to find out what it is that the subject is capable of doing in spite of the fact that his performance is shoddy. I can't for the life of me find out what the notion of his competence means, and I suspect that Chomsky's concept of competence is too prolix. It is paralogical; it has the appearance of a logical discussion, but it is paralogical. I would like to get to my final point now, and this completes the cyclical pass. Y o u complain about the use of symbolism and metaphor — symbolism used as metaphor. I think that is exactly the point, and I think you put your finger upon it. What's happening in modern linguistic theory is the use of symbolism to elaborate a metaphoric outlook, and the trouble is that in Chomsky's hands, it happens to a pathological degree. I say that was my last point; now one final addendum. There is another point where I agree with you, and that is the integration of theory and analytical procedure. It's a patent absurdity to set theory on one side and method on another. Now, I thought four years ago I'd finally settled that business with my concept of linguistic protocols. I still think the idea of a linguistic protocol has some importance for us, but I now discover that the problems go far deeper than I thought at that time. However, I agree with you in principle. I should like to thank you for what seems to me to be an admirably clear and important contribution.

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pitkin:

I really don't think that I should answer, in a sense, since you put things so admirably. I would like to clarify one point at least, however: that matter of prediction. A n d I would like to say how I would like to be able to evaluate a grammar in general, and in what sense I am interested in prediction. I would not like to have the responsibility in a series of descriptive statements of a language to account for more than has actually been manifested as linguistic behavior. In that sense, I think, as I make the point in a review of Karl Teeter's Wiyot grammar, that what is essential is that the rules in the grammar plus the lexicon provided by the linguist and the collection of text, the corpus that was subjected to analysis, that all these have a particular kind of relation with each other so that one may in fact account for those utterances in terms of that grammar. This matter of prediction, then, is a more limited matter for me. A s far as the cyclical passes go, I think that it would be nice to recognize that some discussions that we have had in linguistics which have proved so troublesome about the relations between layers and structural hierarchies, and so on, are obviated by making clear interrelations between levels, certainly, as well as between units on the same level. A lot of our discussion that has been so fruitless seems often to center about the area of morphophonemics as though there were only to be a single approach to a particular kind of unit, and its relations up and down or next door were in some way excluded by a particular approach with other units of the same size. A s far as making overt one's analytic practice so as to shrink the area which can be said to be intuitional, I think this happens increasingly. I'm all in favor of it. I acknowledge my debt to Garvin, and I think that it's some kind of modesty on his part when he uses a term like intuition. I think it means something simply along the line of not being able as yet to make explicit as completely as one would hope in the future. In connection with performance and competence, I was, in fact, speaking to a point raised by Paul Postal at the Linguistic Circle of New Y o r k meeting at which he spoke last year, during which he denied categorically that a matter like performance could be studied. And it was in that sense that I wanted the two to be linked, and that I wanted special attention directed toward performance as the only way in which observable data could be included in a formal sense, in connection with an investigation. VICTORIA FROMKIN ( U C L A ) :

First, I would like to agree completely that performance is, and an interest in performance must be, included in the field of linguistics. If what you said was the position of Postal in New Y o r k , I would certainly disagree with him, as anybody who has heard anything I have had to say recently would know. I think, however, that the problem of what data are observable and whether we can form or construct theories when certain data are not directly observable is an important question for linguistics, as it has been an important question throughout the history of science in

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other fields. It's obvious that, if in the most advanced sciences such as physics, all of the theories which were constructed were limited to theories which could be supported by immediately observable data or by available instruments or techniques, we would not have atom bombs or H bombs — perhaps it would in some way be better. But the fact is that these theories, and atomic theory is one, were developed when the data was not directly observable. There are many other examples, of course, which could be given. I have the feeling that there are more points of agreement between you and those whom you seem to be criticizing than would appear. I think that those people who today are interested in language are not uninterested in languages. I think that the interest in universale arises because we cannot really understand what is idiosyncratic or unique about certain languages unless we can see how they are separated from each other in terms of what is similar about these languages. I think also that in terms of the desire to understand the universale of language, it is very plausible to erect hypotheses about universale, even if you do this based on only one language or even no language. If the hypothesis is subjected to test and it is wrong, it can be easily refuted. In a sense it is as if somebody said to Newton, "You only saw one apple fall. You better first go and look not only at all the other apples that fall, but at all the pears and the trees and everything which possibly falls before you dare suggest any universal hypotheses about the laws of mechanics", etc. I think that it's absolutely correct that every hypothesis must be subject to disproof or else it's not a scientific hypothesis, that we must find ways of testing it, but the selection, or the setting up, of the construction of any hypothesis is certainly worthwhile if it then allows us to do further research to test whether this tells us something about language or not. PITKIN:

If I may make a comment about that, I doubt two things: that the linguistic community is made up of Newtons ; and I doubt as well that there is really place for an analogy between linguistics and a universe of phenomena that concerns physics which consists, it seems to me, at this stage of research, of fewer entities in fewer relations, than linguistics. In other words, a much simpler universe of data. For me, behavioral manifestations are infinitely more complex than those confronted in natural science. I think that while one may construct a hypothesis about universals from a single language, one must at the same time recognize how weak such a hypothesis may be. I think that the notion of universals already says something about a number of instances. More than that, I find very strange even a title that links the notion of method to the notion of universal grammar. That may be simply an esthetic matter for me. As far as observable data and nonobservable data in connection with performance and competence, I would say that before physics (an unfortunate analogy for us that is so fashionable) was concerned with unobservable data, many things had been seen to fall. I don't think we linguists are in that position.

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(Harvard University) : Actually the comments of the first two speakers and Professor Pitkin's answers have taken care of a number of things I wanted to say, so I'll abbreviate my main point considerably. First of all, I don't see how one can fail to associate oneself with the spirit of the paper and the aims that it suggests, the deeper study of method, the importance of paying attention to real languages, and so forth, and so on. However, in the interests of historical accuracy, I think it is necessary to say something about at least a few of the enormous array of straw men which Professor Pitkin apparently felt necessary to put into his paper. This without in most cases naming a specific target, although in general we all know what he is talking about. I like to talk to people of all theoretical persuasions and listen to what they say, and I would like to say that, first of all, I have never heard anybody of any theoretical persuasion who suggested ignoring the observable data. Secondly, not having had the occasion to hear Postal in New York as cited by Professor Pitkin, I don't know about that occasion. But I have never heard anybody of any theoretical persuasion whatsoever suggest that linguistic performance should not be studied. Thirdly, I have ne'ver heard anybody suggest that intuition should be a replacement for method. I believe that those were Professor Pitkin's terms. So while, as I say, I associate myself very much with the spirit of this paper, I think it's admirable and applaud it, I think that one does not combat overstatements on one side properly by making overstatements on another side.

KARL TEETER

PITKIN:

I am sorry that you may think I have exaggerated the case. That perhaps is the result of the fact that the case had already been exaggerated, and this was a genuine response to what I feel were genuine attitudes. It certainly is the case that the role of observable data had been relegated to another position in the recent period, and the role of intuition, had been, as far as I am concerned, exaggerated rather considerably in terms of method, but this may be a difference of opinion. (Bunker-Ramo, Canoga Park, Calif.) : Just one very brief statement to one point. It seems to be a very common fallacy among many linguists that the advantages of mathematical notation of one kind or another are merely notational, that one achieves a certain compactness on the printed page at the expense perhaps of clarity to human readers. This is a very serious fallacy, because had linguists — at least a certain class of linguists — not taken up the notion of mathematicizing their science, the most important work of linguists, such as Sheila Greibach, Seymour Ginsburg, Gene Rose, and others, would not have been possible. Now it's clear particularly from the point of view of fieldwork-oriented linguists that papers such as those dealing with the preservations of languages by linear bounded transducers and so on, are of marginal interest if of interest at all. But the day is perhaps not too far off when, as fieldwork-oriented linguists or anthropological GARY MARTINS

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linguists make of their own field more and more an exact science (which does seem to be a commonly accepted aim), these mathematically oriented works will cease to be of no interest at all. I think it is a very serious mistake to look upon the work of these people as being merely of notational value and in particular to characterize it as pathological. PITKIN:

I quite agree with the potential value of formalizations. I only object to the abuse of the notion as a fashionable technique that far surpasses in delicacy the delicacy of analyses. But I think I quite understand. (Stanford University): The question I would like to ask, and which stems probably from misunderstanding, is also addressed in part to Dr. Fromkin's question about prediction. It seems to me that in part of your lecture you mentioned that it is essential for methodology to develop from being an art to being scientific. But later, if I understand right, you seem to have some aversion to consistency as being the hobgoblin of small minds. It seems to me that there has to be a choice between either methodology in linguistics remaining an art, and art becoming scientific, or else adopting consistency along with being scientific, which, I suppose, is part of a scientific method. o . OYELARAN

PITKIN:

I quite agree that consistency has a very important role. I wouldn't deny it at all. I don't think it's the only parameter to be considered in the collection. I think that simplicity, completeness, and retrievability of input data all have their place. I object only to putting undue emphasis on consistency to the detriment of other evaluative principles. There are some systems that are perfectly consistent which I am not charmed by particularly. This may again be only an esthetic criticism, but I could point to one such. I think the model known as stratificational is one which is extremely consistent. To me it seems it has other weaknesses. (California State College at Los Angeles): My question has to do with examination of a corpus, in reference to a comment that came up early in your lecture and which was fairly mystifying, in which you said that if Postal had said something about universale, which he didn't say, you would have said something about universale, which you didn't say. I wondered whether you would tell us what it was that he didn't say and what it would be that you would say. HERBERT LAND AR

PITKIN:

I would be delighted to. I hope this isn't taking too much of a liberty, but as the abstracts of Professor Postal's talk were distributed, one was prepared to have him in fact present them to the audience. Perhaps I might read the version that he generously

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supplied. The two sentences that especially provoked me were: well, perhaps just one of them will be enough : "Describing each language in its own terms, which is the slogan of so much structural linguistics, is as misguided as it is impossible", and it is to this statement that I take objection. FROMKIN:

One very simple question. If you are dealing with the phonologies of different languages, do you believe that it is possible to describe the phonology of a language in its own terms. It's interesting that this was a point which Firth in Britain raised, feeling that each language, each segment or phonematic unit in a language, should be described in terms of its formal place in a system without any reference to a universal phonetic theory. I think that the tradition that you are stressing has always placed emphasis on phonetic reality in the phonological system of each language and therefore would you not agree with Postal at least in relation to phonology that one cannot describe a language on its own terms? PITKIN :

In terms of phonology, it is much more easy to agree, since we know more about phonology and have rather decent apparatus for serving as a filter of what may or may not be significant. Even within phonology, I think it depends very much on the goals of the particular study, and I think different linguists have quite different goals or different languages, as perhaps Stuart would put it. I wouldn't like to insist on a small inventory of universal features. I would like rather, when I object to the Postal statement, to leave room for the development of those tools, universalistic types, or others, to be altered in connection with the confrontation of new data. I think moreover that a minimal number of universal assumptions is sufficiently useful and that an overcharacterization at this point is really quite unwarranted, given the small advance of this field. HYMES :

Since you brought this up, I have about three pages in my paper on this point. I would like to make two points on this: one is an historical one. If you reject the slogan 'each language described in its own terms', you are rejecting the work of Boas and Sapir, whom Postal otherwise admires. The slogan originated — I think you will find the first explicit statement of it, to my knowledge — in the introduction to Sapir's Takelma Grammar, which was his doctoral dissertation, in which he thanks Boas for teaching him to describe a language sui generis, which let's say is equivalent to describing each language in his own terms. The point there was a very important one, and a very necessary one for linguistics in the anthropological tradition at that time. People were lousing up the descriptions of languages by not doing what describing them sui generis implied. They were applying to them frames of reference which distorted what the facts of those languages were actually found to be. There are many

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particular examples of this problem. It had to be established as a principle that certain kinds of universalistic notions then existing were, in fact, inadequate to the diversity of American Indian languages. I don't think there can be any argument about that fact. But equally, it is important to recognize that when men like Boas and Sapir and Kroeber in the same period stressed the necessity of what they meant by describing each language in its own terms, they did not understand the slogan to mean rejecting the idea of universale in general. You can find in Boas' introduction to the Handbook, for example, a precise statement that the basic grammatical concepts for all languages are the same: that there are universale of grammatical concepts. So it would be an extreme oversimplification to juxtapose this slogan in terms of the role it has played historically in the development of anthropological linguistics, as in flat opposition to an interest in universale. This was not the way it was seen by the very men whom we honor most for their introduction of the tradition of attending to the real diversity of languages and what we might now call surface structure. It may be, and I think in fact it was the case, that subsequently some individuals took this slogan in the more simple-minded sense and rejected the entire notion of universal grammar. This was never the only position in existence in American anthropological linguistics. This was not the position of the men whom we honor as founders. The second point is a little bit different. If I understand Postal's recent comment in IJAL, responding to questions by Bill Bright, there seems to me to be an internal contradiction in two positions he takes. I may be missing an angle to this, and I would be glad to be corrected if that's the case, but I understand him to be saying on the one hand that one should attempt to describe each language in terms of universals and that indeed on the basis of comparing English and Mohawk, one can get a pretty good idea, not claimed to be perfect, but a pretty good idea of what might be a universal basis for the description of reflexivity in any language. He also seems to be saying that only a linguistically trained native speaker of a language really can describe the grammar of that language. These two points of view seem to me to be in contradiction. To the extent that one can expect reflexivity to turn out to be the same in the next language that you look at, to that extent you don't need a native speaker to tell you what it's like. If I understand the positions correctly, then it seems to me that the more rapidly that Postal makes progress in universal grammar, the less will the other position seem tenable. That's an observation. longacre:

I won't promise to be moderately brief. We use the term anthropological linguistics, I think, in the sense that it applies to 1966. We do not use it in terms of the type of field work done in the year, say, 1945. This was the time when a person would go out and maybe spend eight weeks on some Indian reservation in the Southwest and then would come back and write a grammar of the language based upon eight weeks of field work. If there has been a reaction against this in certain quarters, I personally feel quite gratified. It seems that we do need to spend more time than eight weeks or three

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months with a language if we are to make an adequate study of it. However, we don't have to go to the extremes of those who insist that only the native speaker analyst can write a description. It seems, though, that if possible we should stay with a language long enough to gain some sort of a speaking knowledge of it because in this way we program our brains with all sorts of bits and pieces of information which attain something similar to the intuitions of the native speaker. So that all I'm trying to say is that the term anthropological linguistics today is uttered against the background of the work done since 1957, and we don't want to return to the period prior to 1957. Then, if I may briefly make some anecdotal comments on these points about anthropological linguistics and some of its characteristics with emphasis on the confrontation of a corpus of real text. I'm glad you say written or oral because I for one have sensed more and more the inadequacy of simply basing work on text, no matter how large the corpus. It certainly has to be supplemented with the reactions of the native speaker in terms of trying to elicit a battery of transformations in the Hiz sense of the word. So that the battery of transformations, getting into paraphrase (the same sentence several different ways), gives us material. We may look through a thousand pages of text and never get anything near as complete a picture. So that we always balance the real text versus elicitation at every stage of the game. Then the matter of analytic experience of real languages free of ethno- and linguocentric bias ties in to what we have come to speak of as the etic/emic difference. This begins to emerge as one of the rather live issues on the current scene; that is, the balancing of universal characteristics of a language versus its particular characteristics. Undoubtedly descriptive linguistics went too far in the direction, I believe, of denying universal characteristics and emphasizing the particulars, and the pendulum has swung the other way now. For instance, Firth, in his article in the Roman Jakobson volume, actually says that there can be no such thing as universal grammar. It just can't be. He just says that it can't be done. We have seen emphasized the particular characteristics of languages, and we must also look for universal features, and let's do both. The matter of discrimination between the participant and the observer is extremely important; perhaps in the naive empiricism of linguistics prior to 1957, say 1933 to 1957, sometimes we almost forgot that there was an observer at all. That was all that there was to it. We forgot the role of the observer and his inevitable perspective and assumptions.

METHOD, THEORY, AND PHENOMENOLOGY* JOHN W. M. VERHAAR

SCOPE OF THE PAPER; THEORIES

This paper is expository. Though it will contain a certain amount of argumentation and also some conclusions, the purpose is not to 'prove' or otherwise establish a theory or a method. It will concentrate on a comparative exposition of some trends in contemporary theory and methodology, more particularly in connection with philosophy, phenomenological linguistic theory, and transformational generative grammar. In none of these fields should the expositions be expected to attain anything even remotely approaching exhaustiveness. By 'theory' I shall understand the explicit framework within which a certain explanation is attempted, or a certain method justified ; by 'method' I shall mean the actual manner of pursuing research, prescinding, in most cases, from the question of whether this manner is based on, or leads to, the explanation (or the theory) arrived at; or both. I shall otherwise be mainly concerned with theory. By calling a theory a 'framework' I refer to its systematic character and comparatively high degree of explicitness ; that distinguishes a theory from what I shall throughout the paper call a 'frame of reference', which rather represents an attitude in that its degree of explicitness is extremely low and in that it contains many features that the theorist is not necessarily completely aware of even in advanced stages of explication, let alone in initial ones. One's frame of reference has important consequences for the way one sets about the kind of research one is doing. Progressive explication of one's frame of reference presumably affects that frame of reference in ways which are still very obscure. A frame of reference is what makes a metaphysician, or an Oxonian linguistic analyst, or a behaviorist, or a phenomenologist. To the extent that a frame of reference becomes explicit it will be a theory. It is here assumed that no theory is altogether explicit in the sense that it has exhaustively organized the underlying frame of reference. A frame of reference is largely intuitionistic, profoundly influences the * I am greatly indebted to Professor A. Noam Chomsky for many useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Some of them have been acknowledged as "personal communication", but I have made ample use of many more. (This paper is presented as written in 1966 and has not been revised.)

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selection of heuristic principles, and is 'introspectionistic' not only in the case of those who favor introspection methodologically, but also in the case of those who do not. A theory is to a certain extent a prioristic in that it is influenced by the underlying frame of reference, and in that respect it shows similarity with a hypothesis, or a set of hypotheses. The difference is that a hypothesis is a less recognizable explication of the underlying frame of reference than a theory.1 A hypothesis depends for its validity much more on verification, giving way, therefore, to a posteriori material. This is not to conceal the fact that a hypothesis is usually — and admittedly — conceived on a priori grounds, but that is its occasion rather than its justification. A theory, as I understand it in this paper, is much more a matter of principle than a hypothesis with its rather provisional, practical and tentative objectives. One reason for distinguishing theory and hypothesis the way I do is a psychological one : a hypothesis is usually given up in favor of one apparently better more readily than is a theory, which is much more a matter of principle, i.e. much more recognizably connected with the underlying frame of refrence. Practically this means that a scientist or philosopher finding that his facts conflict with his theory will more easily be motivated to rearrange his facts or to doubt the way he selected them, than he would be to revise his theory.2 Finally, a hypothesis will belong to method rather than to theory, by reason of its largely provisional and operational character. It will after this be clear that frame of reference overlaps with theory, theory with hypothesis. To the extent that a frame of reference is rooted in what we might call 'experience' in a sense so inclusive that it is sufficiently vague to forestall the criticism of 'category mistake', the distinction between a priori and a posteriori proportionately fades into irrelevance. It is hoped that the importance of the way I define the above central notions will appear below, that is, they may turn out not to be so arbitrary as may at first sight appear, nor so unduly vague that, in the concluding words of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, we must consign them to silence. Indeed, without suggesting in the least that the topic of this paper constitutes 'the mystical', I do agree there are things very difficult to put into words; but I also think that there are things that make themselves manifest, and that therefore they can be spoken about (Wittgenstein 1961:151,6.522if.). This attitude suggests the phenomenological frame of reference, to which Wittgenstein was closer than seems to be generally known (van Peursen 1959). The purpose of this paper is to approach the problems of theory and method from the phenomenological frame of reference, in a double sense: (a) in that one trend of linguistics coming 1

I therefore define theory in a way different from Chomsky. See Chomsky 1964:7. The case of Hegel, who, when it was pointed out to him that the facts were incompatible with his theory, is supposed to have remarked that was "all the worse for the facts" is certainly an extreme case of philosophical bias, presumably possible only in metaphysical idealism. But it also represents an attitude which is, in my opinion, not rare in many types of research. The theory, insofar as it is an explication of a frame of reference, shares with this frame of reference its intensity of conviction, even so that factual counter-evidence will not easily and completely lead to a rejection of the theory, but rather to doubts as to whether the facts were handled adequately. J

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up for discussion will be phenomenological, (b) in that the philosophical aspects of my approach will also be phenomenological. Before, however, describing the phenomenological frame of reference a few more remarks about theory, with some more concrete allusions, will be in order: these remarks will at the same time already introduce the relevance of phenomenology.

SOME OTHER NOTIONS OF 'THEORY'; METATHEORY

If it is true that a theory may (in a somewhat flexible terminology) stand for a frame of reference, and therefore could be called, in that sense, an 'implicit' theory, that is not the only sense of 'implicit' theory. I wish to indicate here two senses of 'theory' where it means 'implicit theory'. The first is when it is said that a purely inductive approach (in an empirical science) is impossible, because the distinction between significant and insignificant facts is already made on the basis of a 'theory' (Staal 1965a); then here 'theory' would be 'implicit', but it would actually stand for a frame of reference. The second 'theory' in the 'implicit' sense refers to a dispositional ability. A good example of this is in what Chomsky calls 'competence' (of a native speaker), and a clear context I may quote from his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1959): "The child who learns a language has in some sense constructed the grammar for himself [... and ...] has succeeded in carrying out what from the formal point of view, at least, seems to be remarkable type of theory construction." The 'theory' here is of course not only implicit in a sense that a frame of reference is not, but also in a manner defying any more than a trivial degree of conscious awareness of it (as Chomsky has justly and repeatedly pointed out).3 Any dispositional ability in Ryle's and Ayer's terminology called a 'knowing how' as distinguished from a 'knowing that' would in that sense be a 'theory' and 'implicit', like the ability to drive a car or playing tennis (Ayer 1957:13-4, Ryle 1958:278"., 40ff.), even though such examples are admittedly less interesting than a native speaker's competence. But, to return to Chomsky's remark just quoted, the addition "from the formal point of view at least" (as also 'in some sense') is very significant. It really means that the DESCRIPTIVE COUNTERPART of the speaker's competence amounts to a theory, this time, of course, and more in particular by Chomsky's own standards, an explicit one. Likewise Katz and Fodor (1964) maintain that "a semantic theory of a natural language is part of a linguistic DESCRIPTION of that language". This description is then said to be 'abstract', and a 'characterization of the abstract form' is then said to be a metatheory. This 'metatheory', then, comes close to what in the present paper, i.e. within the phenomenological frame of reference, would be called a 'theory'. It is typical of the largely logical frame of reference (about this concept more below) of transformational grammar and the semantic theory here referred to that there can be such a metatheory at all, and it is equally typical of the '

Passim, for example 1966a.

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phenomenological frame of reference that there can be no such thing (as we hope to show in more detail), let alone a metametatheory, etc. A theory in the sense of Chomsky and the semantic theory is a descriptive COUNTERPART of the material (facts, data) (to be) explained; it is a COUNTERPART in the sense that it is, as it were, the epistemological (or 'scientific') mirror-image of the material under discussion; or, it is, seeing that there is no such strong requirement involved as that imposed by a discovery procedure, not considered as isomorphic with the matter in hand. 4 Precisely for that reason such a description needs its own justification in terms of, say, the conceptual machinery involved, freedom from (logical!) circularity, etc. This new justification is then provided by a metatheory. Purely theoretically such a metatheory would obviously require a metametatheory, and so forth, but this, for equally obvious reasons, soon becomes unfruitful in that it is then becoming too much divorced from the PRACTICAL purposes of the pursuit of an empirical science. In this way the problem of an infinite regress does not in actual fact come up. When I speak of the 'logical frame of reference', I do so mainly because logic can hardly be called a 'theory' (there are conflicting theories within logic as a body of research), but it is here also of interest to note that logic is, at least by some logicians, considered to be mainly PRACTICAL in purpose, in that various theories (conflicting ones among themselves) may "turn out to be useful as a basis for the language of sciences" (Carnap 1955). And this, therefore, is where not only the practical attitude of the scientist, but even the practical impact of his (logical) frame of reference makes the infinite regress to metametameta ... superfluous and impossible. In contrast, it is typical of the phenomenological frame of reference that a description amounts, in some sense which is still obscure, to a theory; a description is supposed to reflect so immediately the matter described that it cannot be called a COUNTERPART in any methodologically relevant sense; it therefore needs no justification, in its turn, on theoretical grounds. There is, if I may be forgiven a logically contradictory expression (a forgiveness readily to be expected from the phenomenologist), so much isomorphism that the term isomorphism ceases to be relevant. At most a theory in the phenomenological sense would differ from individual descriptions in that the latter are bound to be more piecemeal than a theory, which is more general. But once that more general character has been adequately revealed, there is no need for a metatheory to justify the theory. Ideally a theory in the phenomeno4 J. J. Katz, 1964a, claims 'isomorphism' for the agreement between syntactic description and neurological processes. But the isomorphism is precisely what would have to be proved. 'Compatibility' would perhaps be a more felicitous word. I wish to add a clarification which I owe to Chomsky. It would not be correct to say that in transformational theory there is no discovery procedure at all. There must be some procedure, technically speaking, which selects a particular grammar on the basis of the kind of data available to the child in process of language acquisition; in fact, a theory meeting the condition of explanatory adequacy does suggest such a procedure, which would meet the conditions described in Chomsky 1965:31. Such a discovery procedure, however, would not be of the practical type obtaining in structural linguistics (personal communication). However, this type of discovery procedure is not the one I have in mind at this point, but rather the ones, as obtaining, for example, but not only, in field work techniques.

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logical sense would not be subject to revision any more once all the descriptions which it epitomizes are complete. However, less ideally, the descriptions are never complete. I am here reminded of Chomsky's remark (1965:159) that semantic systems and systems of knowledge and belief interpenetrate in obscure ways; the context is with regard to the problem of the boundaries of semantics and syntax, but it has a much wider application, in that any method or theory poses 'semantic' problems in a wider sense: does a description immediately 'reflect' or only mediately 'represent' the matter described? And would 'knowledge' and/or 'belief' not rather refer to what we have called the frame of reference inspiring the particular theories one maintains? In phenomenology, however, the frame of reference always has a genetic priority, genetic in the sense that one has to work 'back' to ensure consistency methodologically and theoretically, while it seems that within the logical frame of reference (as conceived here) one works (or builds) 'up to' (or 'constructs') a theory, from there to a metatheory, which is about as 'high' as a theoretical construction will usually go, for the reasons already revealed. 5

PHENOMENOLOGY

After these provisional clarifications concerning the notion of theory, I propose to follow up what has already been suggested about the phenomenological frame of reference by a special section on this difficult notion. Like many other frames of reference, phenomenology cannot be defined. Unlike many others, it is not widely known outside of Europe. In several ways the term does not commend itself. It is a little esoteric, 6 it is not too felicitous from a point of view of terminological aptitude, 7 it stands, like many other frames of reference, for a confusing number of trends (cf. Spiegelberg I960) 8 , and is, in the words of the late J. L. Austin (1961b:130), 'rather a mouthful'. I would be happy to replace it by any other term if I knew one. But I do not. Phenomenology is of interdisciplinary concern; for the topic of this paper it is considered relevant for linguistics and philosophy. The most elaborate representation of phenomenological linguistics is found in the works of Reichling. 9 In philosophy it ' I am not therefore saying that phenomenology does not have a comparable infinite regress problem i n its justification, but only that this would not have the meta (meta...) structure. More foundational research is always possible. * It does not seem to appeal to whoever does not share the underlying frame of reference. Only thus can it be explained that it has been the most successful way of thinking in Europe in the last two generations, while in the U.S.A. and England it never very much caught on. 7 There should be at least some kind of relation between the recognizable etymological content of a term (in this case, the science of 'what appears', or of what 'shows itself') and its conceptual content. This relation seems largely lacking here. See Verhaar 1963:134. ' This work is very valuable in the way it presents itself, i.e. as 'a historical introduction'; but it is not very successful in giving in any way a sketch of what phenomenology as a 'movement' is. However, there is no better. • Mainly 1935, 1940, and 1957. Later publications are of varying interest, but no single item is a good specimen of Reichling's linguistic theory as a whole.

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was originated by Edmund Husserl (1913, see also Färber 1962 and Lauer 1965a), continued by Scheler, Heidegger, Fink, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur. It has figured as mainly a method (the early Husserl), and as a philosophy tout court (the later Husserl, Merleau-Ponty). It has the most divergent mainstreams: of methodological preoccupation (Husserl), or of a more predominant vagueness not without esoterism (Heidegger), of outspoken controversy with both traditional metaphysics and modern empirical science (Merleau-Ponty). It has profoundly influenced empirical psychology, to some extent sociology, to a somewhat greater extent linguistics, and to a truly confusing extent existentialism. It has profound affinities with such at first sight incompatible 'schools' like Oxonian philosophical analysis, as striking as rarely revealed (see van Peursen 1959, Staal 1963:8-9, Spiegelberg 1960:2. 670 and 1965.1)10, and even with a discipline mostly so much as a matter of course associated with what we have called the logical frame of reference, i.e. the philosophy of science, (van de Hulst and van Peursen 1953, Caws 1965 ; see also fn. 14). In general I would say that it has certain features which make it less of an exception in contemporary nontraditional philosophies than is usually (gratuitously) supposed. I shall later point out certain affinities with generative transformational grammar. In what follows I propose to characterize the frame of reference of phenomenology, limiting myself to those features that seem of importance for the topic of this paper. For each feature 1 shall indicate what contrasts with that feature, with concrete examples for greater clarity. (1) Phenomenology has the mark of totality, that is, it attempts to cover the totality relevant to a field of research; in this it would, at least in philosophy, find a competitor in metaphysics, but in an uninteresting sense, first because metaphysics is deeply distrusted nowadays, second because most trends in phenomenology are profoundly antimetaphysical. Note that metaphysics is, in many of its varieties, synthetic, while 10 As a brief and interesting example, I quote from Staal 1963:8-9 (in my translation) : "In another place [Merleau-Ponty] repudiates the conception of thought as independent of language as follows: 'La pensée n'est rien d'intérieur, elle n'existe pas hors du monde et hors des mots.' Such a statement could very well have been taken from the French translation of an English analytic philosophical study. Actually it is an ever-recurring theme in Wittgenstein's philosophy, as, for example, in: 'When I think in language, there aren't any [meanings] going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought" (1953:229). I may add as of special interest for the present paper the fact that H. P. Grice's recent seminars in Oxford manifest similarities with Reichling's analyses (of the speech situation) so close that this can only be due to a common frame of reference, seeing that, to my knowledge, Reichling's work, most of which is in Dutch, has not been accessible to Grice. If I may now take the step from analytic philosophy of language to Carnap's philosophy I should point to another paper now largely of historical interest after the full development of transformational generative grammar and its interest in a 'universal grammar', Bar-Hillel 1956-7; in this article, there is also an interesting confrontation of the thought of Husserl and Carnap. For psychology see Wann, 1964; the contributors to this volume were Sigmund Koch, R. B. MacLeod, Norman Malcolm, Carl R. Rogers, Michael Scriven, B. F. Skinner. The majority of them believe in some co-existence of the two 'bases' (frames of reference) given in the title, with the exception of Koch and (not a surprise to linguistics) Skinner. This, to my knowledge, exhausts the literature interested in these affinities. The recent Royaumont Conference, at which English analytical philosophy and French phenomenology met, was a failure.

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the method of phenomenology is analytic. A straight contrast would be any reductionist method, marking off a certain field in a larger field (which in itself is as reasonable as it is unavoidable), which is then entirely left out of consideration; in phenomenology such a larger field, though itself not the object of research, would still be relevant in that its inclusion in the investigation gives one a better view of the structures obtaining in the proper field of research. Examples of such reductionist trends would be, say, an exclusively neurological approach to speech production and recognition; or to consider sounds only under their acoustic aspect; to deny all relevance of phonemics for phonetics; or to dismiss reference for a theory of meaning. (2) The totality mentioned sub (1) is assumed to be already there, previous to and independent of the investigation, in a manner which is indicated by any of the following terms (depending upon what special type of phenomenology is followed): nonthematically, antepredicatively, prereflexively, prephilosophically. Phenomenology therefore, does not seek to ESTABLISH unity (which would not be an analytic but a synthetic procedure), but to work on the basis of a unity ALREADY THERE; for this reason the analytic procedure is quite unlike analyses of the atomistic kind. Moreover, seeing that man has already in some sense a 'knowledge', or 'experience', of that totality (nonthematically, prereflexively, etc.) previous to the analyses, these are as much analyses of this 'knowledge' or 'experience' as of the totality forming the object of the 'knowledge' or 'experience'. As already hinted, the description or analysis would for that reason NOT be in the full sense a COUNTERPART of its object. The descriptions would in that sense be isomorphic. Also, the totality mentioned sub (1) is not therefore only that objective totality, but equally much the unity of subject and object. A contrast here, then, would be found in any theory distrusting the insights, however implicit in this prereflexive knowledge or experience; most of behaviorism would belong here, and an extreme case would be Skinner (Wann 1964).11 (3) Inclusion of what may be (rather dualistically) called the 'subjective' side is, therefore, basic for phenomenology. An obvious objection here might be that there is necessarily a danger of 'subjectivism' involved. This is, however, no more necessary than in any other frame of reference. It is rather that not only is inclusion of the subjective element necessary for an adequate analysis of the object, but also certain subjective elements will have to be accepted as relevant as necessary conditions for the object to be the way it is. This formula is admittedly abstract to the limit of vagueness, but a more elaborate explanation will follow below (in the section Types of Theories, where phenomenological theories will be explained as 'mid-level' ones) and also now immediately, by way of contrast. Such a contrast, then, to (3) would be constituted by any linguistic theory leaving meaning out of consideration, and more widely any antimentalistic theory. Consequently, in linguistics, for a phenomenologist to speak about a word is already to INCLUDE (thematically or nonthematically) its meaning, and to speak about a meaning is not only to consider it as 'embedded' in a word, but 11

Skinner's behaviorism is extreme ; from the point of view of phenomenology, generative grammar would present a case of moderate behaviorism, not as a theory, but as part of the frame of reference.

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also as (a certain mode of) thought; for him any speech sound is already 'functional' (no matter whether he calls it a phoneme or not). All these 'implications' are necessary conditions for there to be such a thing as a word at all. Therefore, from the point of view of phenomenology, the issue of mentalism versus antimentalism not only has to do with goals and interests (but obviously also with those). It also has to do with truth and falsity (or with whatever it is that these notions, belonging primarily in the logical frame of reference, are translated into in the phenomenological frame of reference, say, [irrelevance or descriptive [inadequacy). Pursuing this reference to Chomsky (1965:193-4, note 1 to ch. 1), I would say that (a) speaking about a 'nonmaterial medium' would indeed be dualism, but only because of the (phenomenologically) unwarranted division between spirit and matter 12 ; (b) behaviorism is much more comprehensive than the Skinner approach in Verbal Behavior, in that it is also reflected, in quite many ways, in the works of Chomsky and the other generative grammarians (more detailed examples to follow below), even though what Chomsky calls 'behaviorism' is quite rightly rejected; (c) introspectionism comes nearest — in Chomsky's survey of the possible approaches — to what would appeal to the phenomenologist, but it would in the latter's eyes still be dualistic, in that the unity between subject and object (here, perhaps, more adequately indicated as between 'interiority' and 'exteriority') would be violated.13 There are, therefore, clearly DEGREES of contrast in this respect among linguistic theories, the Chomskyan approach being the weakest case of it, and therefore closer to phenomenology than any other linguistic theory I know of (however, one might argue for the glossematic approach). (4) Phenomenology, therefore, proceeds neither inductively nor deductively, does not, as a frame of reference, fit the distinction between a posteriori and a priori quite adequately, but proceeds analytically, by way of what is usually called 'explication' or 'explicitation' : that is, at once by way of the unity of all objects as already there previous to analysis (or description), and of the prereflexive knowledge of that unity, as explained sub (2). I prefer 'explication' as a term, since it can also mean 'explanation', which is, phenomenologically, precisely what it is, while moreover it indicates the process of 'unfolding' what is implicit, which is what it is also. Explication and explanation are therefore the same, also, as description (and analysis, since the description is analytic) by reason of the isomorphism of the description with what is described. Both deduction and induction are based upon the assumption that something already known ('general principles' or 'facts' respectively) leads to something not directly accessible (the particular and the universal respectively). The phenomenologist, however, does not so readily confide in 'truths' arrived at in a method not itself having the structure of the totality to be analysed; a method, that is, he suspects might be unduly imposed on that totality from without (see sub (5), below). It might 12

In Verhaar 1964,1 still used the categories 'material' and 'spiritual'. I now think these terms are theoretically hazardous, but that does not basically affect my point there, which was to bring out a polarity different from that suggested by 'exterior'. 18 The 'opposite' term in psychology, 'projection', would be equally unphenomenological for precisely the same reason.

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at this point be asked whether the phenomenologist does, or does not, believe in 'new' knowledge to be arrived at through his research. He would and he would not. The results of his analyses would be 'new' in the sense that the implicit, and therefore the unrecognized, is explicated, and therefore explained; but insofar as the implicit is never entirely an alien element in man's 'knowledge' or 'belief' or 'experience', there would always be a certain amount of recognition also. The fact that there is recognition in some sense would of course be patently untrue for many results in the Naturwissenschaften.14 But there would be recognition in some sense in the Geisteswissenschaften (in English inadequately but usually rendered by 'the behavioral sciences'). Within this distinction of disciplines, then, of (originally) Dilthey, phenomenology (which has interesting historical roots in Dilthey's thought) would be relevant to the Geisteswissenschaften, but not to the Naturwissenschaften. However, the distinction is no longer so clearcut between these two modes of scientific pursuit, but this need not trouble us here, since I have not said, nor will say, that phenomenology is the only eligible frame of reference even for the Geisteswissenschaften (to which I reckon linguistic science). The purpose of this paper is comparative (cf. Apel 1967). In contrast, then, to this feature of phenomenology as mainly explicative we might mention strongly deductive theories like those of the glossematic school, weakly deductive ones like those aiming at a 'summary of data', mainly in the way of classification, calling this, inappropriately, a theory, an attitude probably inspired by strict operationalism or strong verificationalism (Chomsky 1965:194).15 Since no one nowadays seriously believes in either sheer deduction or sheer induction, the differences are a matter of degree. One such degree is reflected by the preference for an evaluation procedure in the sense of Chomsky (for example 1957:50-3), in which intuitionistic insights determine heuristic principles and theory in general, but in which this insight is never invoked in justification of the theory (Chomsky 1955: passim), this justification being rather sought in (a) applicability to data, and (b) internal consistency of the theory. This, too, is as little deductive as inductive, and to that extent comes closer to the phenomenological conception. (5) All phenomenologists make much of the requirement, in one form or another, of stepping back from prejudice. In this, obviously, their intention does not differ from those of other philosophers and scientists, but phenomenology shows perhaps a 14

The fact, for example, that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade occasions no 'recognition' for one who did not yet know this; the same is true for the person who learns afterwards that this does not hold for different atmospheric pressures. But when he probes deeper, he will 'recognize' a human factor; for example, how does he measure the temperature without interfering with it? Similar though more sophisticated problems face the quantum physicist. How does the terminology in physics cover reality? How relevant, or obscuring, are the inevitable metaphors like 'field' of energy, etc. To quote Heisenberg from van Meisen 1961:214: "Even in physical science the object of research is no longer nature in itself, but nature as opposed to man's questioning and in this sense man here also encounters again himself." 16 I call Hjelmslev's theory 'strongly' deductive largely in comparison with the much less 'strongly' deductive character of the Saussurian theory. Apart from this comparison, it is doubtful whether the glossematic theory is not actually less deductive than its terminology suggests.

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more clearly marked reluctance to accept the prejudice possibly contained IN ONE PARTICULAR FRAME OF REFRENCE. Thus, the phenomenologist would have his doubts about accepting laws of logic to guide his research in any case in which logic is an arbitrary frame of reference with regard to the data to be analysed ; quite inversely, (philosophical) phenomenology would even go the other way around and examine the foundations of logic in something itself so little (formally) logical as natural language (which would be the 'subjective' side, described sub (3), above). 16 Consistently the phenomenologist would also not be greatly perturbed about the charge of logical circularity in his analyses ; he would recognize that what would appear as circularity from a logical point of view might still be revealing as a form of explication. In contrast we might point to the logical basis and structure of linguistic theory in transformational generative grammar, though it is by no means easy to assess to what extent logic is the FRAME OF REFERENCE. That is, that logic is used for brevity of formalization purposes is here irrelevant, seeing the many undeniable advantages of this, and also on the ground that these devices to attain brevity for the sake of clarity are patently different from the kind of logic adduced to vindicate the foundations of transformational generative theory. Thus in one place Chomsky expressly mentions the difference between 'grammar' and 'logical grammar' in the sense of Wittgenstein (1964:51), and although the particular problem referred to in that passage is the relation between semantics and syntax, or, more in particular, and perhaps more correctly, the relation between surface and deep structures, at least so much is clear that 'logic' as the name of a frame of reference, and as appearing in the title of an earlier work of Chomsky's (1955) is more inclusive than many other uses of the term 'logic', and probably the contrast indicated here is proportionately weaker. 17 In terms of this contrast a stronger case would be constituted by the logical reasoning in which Fodor and Katz, in The Structure of a Semantic Theory, try to establish that the situation, or 'setting', should be left out of consideration. This is the kind of reasoning the phenomenologist would feel particularly reluctant to accept (Katz and Fodor 1964:486-9). 18 18 The semantic theory in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal holds unprecedented potential for foundational research in logic; see Staal 1966, Foundations of Language 2.67-93 (1966). This paper pursues a topic already discussed in Katz 1964b. A more recent paper doing comparable foundational research on the basis of natural language is Fillmore 1966. 17 The weaker contrast meant here is, of course, also proportionately vague AND more important in the meaning of the notion of 'logic'. First, 'logic' in a more comprehensive sense can mean something like 'epistemology', as also, not infrequently, in the French (substantive) 'logique'. Thus for example, 'logic' in Evans, 1963. But that, of course, would again be a more or less EXPLICIT 'epistemology'. The point here is rather what I call the 'frame of reference', which is by definition at a very low level of explicitness. Thus it would be an exciting piece of research to find out what frame of reference or, which is the same, what kind of inexplicit epistemology, is involved in the methodological requirements appearing in connection with the term 'logic' in recent work on transformational generative theory, or even in Chomsky 1955 alone. The phenomenologist would be interested in such a question in the first place. In any event, the suggestion here is not just that transformational grammar is based on some explicit kind of logic. This suggestion has been made more often, but that would be perpetuating confusion. 18

The logical framework for the theory seems complete as far as it goes. However, (a) it turns out

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(6) While getting back from prejudice in the sense described would in itself be a matter of method rather than theory, the theory behind it (i.e. the necessity of the holistic view of whatever it is that is analysed) is also characteristic of phenomenology in another respect. The basic idea here is that our attention is normally (Husserl would say 'naturally') so divided, and so subtly influenced by largely prevailing but quite possibly biased opinions (Husserl's 'natural attitude') that we cannot see, or 'intuit', the unity right away.19 Or, the holistic approach takes a special effort. Merleau-Ponty (1945: Avant-propos) calls this a 'stepping back' (and this is largely the same as what is indicated sub (5), above). Two remarks seem of basic importance in this connection: (a) In view of the holistic approach, a subjective involvement as described sub (3) is essential. This inclusion has different names in different phenomenologies. In Husserl's conception the subjective element would be consciousness; for Merleau-Ponty, however, this would be dualistic and HE looks for that center of (what he would himself NOT call) 'interiority' in what he terms the body-subject (CORPS SUJET). According to Merleau-Ponty (1945: passim) one should 'retreat' ('step back') into that 'center', far enough for the 'threads of intentionality' to stand taut, enabling us better to see their structure and where they lead. For Reichling, as a linguist, it is thought, in the sense explained before, (b) There is an exact and necessary polar 'counterpart' to this retreat into subjectivity, if at least we are to keep our holistic approach intact in a manner which also STRUCTURALLY (see sub (7), below) makes sense, i.e. the 'extension' to the object. More in general this is already postulated by that most basic of all laws in phenomenology : that consciousness (to take now the Husserlian version) is always consciousness-OF-soMETHiNG, or, for short, consciousness-OF. This is also expressed by saying that consciousness is 'intentional', intended, that is, to an object. 20 Transposing this to Reichling's theory it means that in a holistic approach to language we should also consider the REFERENTS, the entities talked about, referred to. Not because they are in themselves language, but because they belong in the lingual situation (on which see a special section below). The word has essentially a NAMING function. A contrast, then, to this conception would be found in any theory not bringing the reference dimension of speech to bear

that the authors are not exclusively concerned with natural language, as is clearly apparent from Katz and Fodor 1964:488, footnote 7; (b) to show the impossibility of setting selection one of the arguments is that it is impossible for any semantic theory to take care of passwords, nonce-words, etc., so that "any sentence can be made to mean anything you like" (488) ; this, however, is either completely true, but then we have to do with an artificial language and a language derivate; or it is only partially so, but then this would be to confuse the set of all possible idiolects within a language (e.g. distinct sorts of slang) with just one single member, or proper subset, of that set; (c) the theory overlooks reference as affecting meaning, a datum that is subject to certain laws independent of particular settings; on (c), see below, the section on 'implied meaning'. For all these three oversights, the too exclusively logical frame of reference seems responsible. 19 On the 'natural attitude', see Husserl 1931:257. I have not checked the accuracy of the translation, and therefore wish to repeat the warning by Lauer (1965b) that it leaves something to be desired. 20 In the later Husserl, the intentionality of consciousness became 'constitution' in a semi-idealistic sense. But this issue I wish to sidestep, and at any rate, I am making no metaphysical implications.

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upon the analyses. Reichling would call such theories 'psychologistic', and on that ground he has, for example, criticized de Saussure (1935:23, 31, 307). The KatzFodor-Postal theory would of course be a clear case of contrast, for the same reason : reference and the situation ('setting') is left out of consideration, even where setting selection could solve ambiguity (Katz and Fodor 1964, Katz and Postal 1964).21 While de Saussure and Katz-Fodor-Postal would clash with (b), Bloomfield (1933) would clash with (a) in that he does not recognize meaning as a datum one can work with. If, finally, the intuition of meaning is really often a misnomer for the intuition of linguistic form, as Chomsky (1955, 1957) has suggested, then we would have here an interesting intermediate case between (a) and its contrast. (7) Phenomenology traditionally (and especially in the words of Husserl) looks for 'structures'. A closer analysis of this feature would have interesting consequences for what to consider as phenomenology and what not, for example with regard to Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published work (1964) which leans more towards existentialism. Although this problem does not directly concern our topic, I wish to mention it to explode a too common notion that phenomenology is 'vague' (for the phenomenology of language; a characteristic example of this is Kwant 1965). A parallel with linguistics would naturally be found in 'structural' linguistics. Insofar as that name stands for nongenerative trends (roughly, therefore, the taxonomic ones), the parallel is too superficial to be of interest, especially since these 'structures' are mostly conceived in the 'diacritical' manner, not only in trends relying heavily on distributional methods, but also in those not afraid to work with meaning, itself conceived of diacritically, as in the glossematic school. The parallel becomes more interesting in the case of generative grammar, since the 'structures' go deeper, are syntax-dominated, and because of the refinement of formalization techniques, which is where the affinities fade away, and a contrast to phenomenological 'structures' appears. Again, the contrast should not in the first place be sought in the strictness and explicitness of the formalization techniques, but rather in their abstractness. Later developments in phenomenology (which indeed tend to be vague) should not 21

I am aware that the Katz-Fodor-Postal theory does not aim at disambiguation, but only at giving at least two readings for ambiguous sentences; and also that they allow that 'setting selection' if bringing it in were not setting the aims of a semantic theory too high, would provide clues for disambiguation of a sentence otherwise not yielding a selected reading. The question therefore is whether it is true that bringing in the situation is setting the aims of a semantic theory too high. If, as Katz-Fodor claim, the only way were to systematize all the knowledge of the world speakers share (489-90), then those aims would indeed be impossible to attain. However, (a) besides the linguistic ability of the speaker on the one hand and his knowledge of the world on the other, there is THE RELATION BETWEEN THOSE TWO, the referential dimension; surely that can be systematized, and it will be provisionally attempted later in the present paper; (b) the dichotomy the semantic theory assumes between a theory of meaning and one of reference seems too absolute; this absolute distinction between evidently overlapping approaches is typical of the excessive demands for clarity obtaining in theories based on a logical frame of reference (this point to be elaborated further on in the present paper ; see also footnote 18) ; (c) situational clues which could help disambiguate a sentence in isolation are often 'duplicated' in a larger body of context; therefore the semantic theory would have to say something on 'discourse analysis' (see also note 24 and the text that it comments on).

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make us oblivious of Husserl's original methodological requirement of phenomenology as a 'rigorous science' ('strenge Wissenschaft') which, first of all, attempts as much explicitness as is possible without the tools of mathematical logic (of which Husserl, originally a mathematician, would presumably have been capable), but which was also as much opposed to positivism as Chomsky (1959) to Skinner's behaviorism. Husserl, also, relied on intuition to see that entirety he felt he could not detotalize with impunity, much as Chomsky relies on intuition (his term introspection would, as hinted before, have less appeal to the phenomenologist), to guarantee the holistic approach of HIS field of interest. Finally, as Husserl never hammered an explicit argumentation out of the mere existence of the intuition which was yet so essential to his approach, but rather relied on the convincingness of his analyses, in a similar manner Chomsky is careful never to appeal, methodologically, to an intuition he has otherwise no intention of disowning, for the establishment of the results he is aiming at. In either case the strucures revealed are expected to carry conviction on their own merits. These affinities I consider of great importance for comparative studies in contemporary linguistic theories. The contrast is rather that the structures of a theory like Chomsky's are very abstract, convincing in their application to the data, while in phenomenology the structures are more concrete and speak, as it were, more for themselves. As far as grammaticality is concerned it would seem that the abstractness of Chomsky's approach is clearly superior to that of Reichling, partly because of its unprecedented power of unification of linguistic levels. A clearer case of contrast with the value of structural analysis in the phenomenological sense should be sought in the post-Humboldtian inner form theories, including that of Weisgerber {cf. Hartmann 1963, Yidos 1959); surprisingly enough, since these theories are in some sense clearly 'mentalistic'. The affinity between these later inner form theories and the Whorfian hypothesis is here also fairly obvious. (8) Of paramount importance in phenomenology is the notion of 'situation'. As the elaboration of this feature is of greater importance for what follows than any other single feature discussed so far, I shall devote a separate section to it. After that we shall consider various types of theories, try to assess what place phenomenological theories would occupy among them, finally to see what conclusions will follow from this comparative approach.

THE SITUATION

I will here restrict myself to the phenomenological notion of situation, later to be used as point of reference for comparative purposes with other notions of situations (whatever the name in other theories). Not all that I shall say goes back to Reichling, but the main inspiration does, and I would therefore like to acknowledge my debt to Reichling at this point in this general way. I shall not in every case indicate what I add to Reichling's theory or where I disagree with it.

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The situation as meant here is the speech situation, not, say, the communication situation, a misleading name used in many books and articles on this topic.22 A communication, not only lingual ones, would determine the structure of the situation (Reichling 1935:28, 229, 357, 408 note). Seeing that language is only one form of communication, and moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, irreducible to nonlingual forms of communication, the communication situation is not the unique setting for a proper analysis of speech phenomena. The structure of the situation is determined by its 'core', or basic features. For the speech situation, especially as different from the communication situation, fruitful analyses have already been made by Reichling (1935:402ff.).23 As for the core elements of the speech situation in the sense of Reichling I will not now go beyond what seems of importance for my topic, and I enumerate : the speaker, the hearer, the things said (the utterances), the things talked about (the referents), and what Reichling calls 'the field of use' ('gebruiksveld'), about which more in a moment. If it is commented that this enumeration amounts to the trivial, I answer that it is not trivial, but obvious, the obvious that tends to be overlooked, especially by those who talk about the 'physical' as if that is not an almost dangerously unscientific concept, looked at with suspicion in quite a few disciplines in recent research. Both problems, i.e. the importance of 'hunting the obvious' and a profound suspicion of terms like 'physical' will come up for elaboration in a moment. To be more precise, every new sentence constitutes a new situation, but since it would methodologically be far too unwieldy to deal with situations in such a particularized sense and in such great numbers (one for every sentence), let the speech situation here be defined generically as comprising potentially all the elements mentioned as structured by new utterances. This potentiality is Reichling's FIELD OF USE, and for every utterance the potentialities are usually quite limited in number, the limitations being imposed by the minimum degree of continuity of the conversation (corpus, if you will), the variable elements being mainly (and, if not mainly, then at least most importantly for our topic) the referents (Reichling 1935:408 ff.). Let a simple example of a speech situation be that I am talking to a friend about his chances of getting a salary raise. The structuring elements are the speaker, the hearer (either function being alternately taken by my friend and myself, and in a more sophisticated sense of proprioceptive mechanisms, feedback, etc., each function being always taken simultaneously by both), those elements in the total experience of my friend and myself that have some bearing on the conversation, then the referents (say, my friend's employer, his family, certain sums of money, his hopes of getting the raise, his fears of not getting it, etc., depending upon how the conversation goes). If we were to take the situation only 'physically' (whatever that means and at any rate an unphenomenological thing to do), then all 'nonphysical' elements involved 22

A recent example is to be found in Katz 1964:128, but the notion is almost ubiquitous in publications on the nature of language. 23 Reichling's analysis is slightly different.

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will fail to 'show up' in the analysis of the situation, such as my friend's hopes and fears (supposing those are actually talked about, or are in some manner relevant to what is talked about). There are of course many elements, whether 'physical' or not, that are not relevant, say, that the sun is shining in the room where we are talking, the fact that he offers me a bourbon, etc. (except, again, if and when they become topics of the conversation). These elements, then, will shift, and so will their structure, with every new sentence. There is also a distinct continuity in all the successive situations, which is why we can speak about 'the' situation of such (one) conversation in a generic sense at all. There would be a complete break only at the end of the conversation (which could otherwise be resumed) ; and of course there could be interruptions. It is more precise to say that every situation (in the nongeneric sense) is 'handled' or 'taken care o f ' by every new sentence, and after that sentence has been uttered there is

POTENTIALLY

a new situation

(field of use), whose potentialities are again narrowed down to one particular realization of them by a new sentence being uttered. It is important here to note that I say that the situation is structurally determined by its basic features. In other words, the situation is determined in terms of itself. It may be methodologically useful to point out that certain features are irrelevant to the situation (those, say, that

WOULD

be relevant if we were to treat the occasion, not as a

speech situation, but as a communication situation, such as gestures, facial expressions, etc),

but that would only serve purposes of delimitation. The fact remains

that the situation is determined in its own terms. From the point of view of a logical frame of reference this would be circular, from that of the frame of reference of behaviorism it would be indulging in unwarranted vagueness, and from the point of view of a semantic theory rejecting reference as irrelevant or unmanageable or both, it would be lack of methodology. But from the phenomenological point of view it would be revealing, because the descriptive analyses would be explicative as synonymous with explanatory. Note that what all these frames of reference have in common is that none of them can ultimately be founded theoretically, whether (phenomenologically) by 'retreating' into more basic and thereby theoretically more 'convincing' structures, or (nonphenomenologically) by building up to a meta- and metametatheory, etc. or, as in strong operationalism, by dismissing the importance of theory altogether.

In each case the per impossibile consists in an infinite regress.

It is

probably fair to say that nonphenomenologically the attempts at founding theory and method stop at a point of weak operationalism and weak verificationalism, and that phenomenologically they cease where descriptive isomorphism with the matter described is felt to be adequate. In the former case there is less concern about the intuitive

UNITY

of theory and the data it is supposed to explain (a more extreme case

being where theory is synonymous with hypothesis or a set of hypotheses), in the latter there is more such concern. In the former intuitition plays a more initial role, in the latter less initial (in the sense that there is more doubt, greater meticulousness of the kind that makes, say, reading Husserl such a burden), but the role of intuition

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is there a more sustained attending phenomenon as analyses progress. More about this, with more concrete examples, will follow below in the section 'Types of Theories'. The point now is that either way of stopping the tendency toward infinite regress of the kind described is as understandable as it is theoretically impossible. Returning to the speech situation, I would exclude as terminologically unfeasible the British (Firthian) 'context of situation', in as much as 'context' is more often and more felicitously restricted to 'environment' as this term is understood in distributional approaches. It is not quite obviously wrong-headed to use 'context' in the metaphorical sense of 'situation', the more so since situational clues (or, in the Fodor-Katz term, 'setting selection') can have, and often have, their contextual parallels, for example in contextual resolutions of ambiguity, whether syntactic or semantic. 24 But in general, of course, the two meanings of 'context' have to be kept carefully apart in the sense that 'context of situation' as a term is either confusing or redundant. Another and more important reason for rejecting this phrase is the idea, sometimes associated with it, and apparently held by Firth himself, that what words mean is in many cases decisively dependent upon that context of situation. This, I fully agree with Langendoen and Reichling (who discusses the same problem from a different viewpoint) cannot be seriously maintained (Langendoen 1964, Reichling 1935: passim).25 This, then, leads me to the question of how relevant the situation is for the understanding of sentences uttered in it. But before we get around to that there are quite a few other things, the first of which is to show that it was by no means Reichling alone nor the Firthian 'school' who have operated with the notion of situation or comparable ones. Let an example be the speaker-hearer relation which de Saussure (1949) still treated as a speech circuit in terms of certain correspondences between 'concepts' and 'acoustic images' in the cases of A and B, these A and Β having their less prosaic parallels inBloomfields'Jack and Jill, ( 1933:22-7) and Gardiner's James and Mary ( 1951:71 ). Hockett's refinement of Bloomfield's Jack-and-Jill (introducing such items as grammatical functions, feedback, etc.) leaves Bloomfield's behavioristic approach intact, while leaving out the latter's elaboration of extralingual data (1955:4). Again, Gardiner mentions as part of the 'situation' the language-user's MEMORY OF THE PAST, as represented in James' memory of the class noun 'rain', so that, as surprisingly as unbelievably, not the actual rain, but previous experiences of rain become the referent of 'rain' as used in the conversation! (1951:71). These examples, chosen rather at random and well enough known not to be treated here in full, could, equally randomly, be added to, for example by bringing in the 'triangle' of Ogden and Richards (1930:11), and the later fate of that diagram in its elaboration by Colin Cherry (1957:110) in the 'functional flow diagram'. The notion of 'comsigns' in Morris' earlier 'semiotic' (1946:39) would also provide interesting comparative material (on this whole passage, see Verhaar 1963:94-103). 11

In fact in the Katz-Fodor semantic theory, 'setting' does have the double meaning of 'context' and 'situation'; see Katz and Fodor 1964:488. " 'Context' in 'context of situation' perhaps really means 'structure'.

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It is characteristic of all these approaches that whatever there is to be found of the 'situation' as understood in this paper is treated in terms of pure physicalism.26 There seems not to have been the slightest opposition to this in linguistic theory, including very recent work, with Reichling (1961) as virtually the only exception.27 The intriguing point here is that a trend so entirely original, more powerful grammatically, and, this time, finally, MENTALISTIC as that of the transformational generative grammarians has so far shown no sign of repudiating the behavioristic FRAMEWORK of Bloomfieldian approaches, FIGHTING ONLY THEIR ANTIMENTALISM. The only clear criticism of the behavioristic character of generative grammar has been given, recently, by Reichling (1961), but against the unfortunate background of what must be called a serious misunderstanding of the MENTALISTIC character of the theory at issue. Yet it remains an absolute novelty in the history of linguistic science that a mentalistic theory in behavioristic terminology (partly at least) has come up at all, and we can learn various things from this: first, that it is apparently not the privilege of phenomenology alone to be mentalistic, while its weakness is the lack of a formal apparatus to accomplish what generative grammar has accomplished — so far the best treatment of 'grammaticality' ; second, that it might prove a weakness on the part of generative grammar that its behavioristic presentation places unnecessary limitations on the mentalistic value of the theory. This is true of some of Chomsky's followers rather than of Chomsky himself, as I hope to show. Before continuing, a few remarks on how I understand 'physicalism' and 'behaviorism' are in order, more especially because Chomsky, while he is antibehavioristic, has taken no stand on physicalism (personal communication). Extreme behaviorism would be any approach denying (not just ignoring, unless that were to amount to a denial) the existence of a 'mind'; extreme behaviorism would therefore be, for obvious reasons, physicalistic. Moderate behaviorism leaves the matter of the mind open, or may even postulate it, but in any event it would, from the phenomenological point of view, amount to dualism. It will be noted at the end of the paper, in the last of the conclusions, that the term 'moderate behaviorism' is used. Physicalism, therefore, just mentions an aspect of the behaviorist stand, as I understand it in the present paper. Physicalism is moreover closer to a theory, while behaviorism may be either a theory or a frame of reference. The reason why I call Chomsky's frame of reference behavioristic is that this is what it would be from the phenomenological point of view. 2

' An exception is Colin Cherry (1957) in his section 'The subjective and objective worlds. — The Cartesian dualism', where he refers the student to two diagrams, in one of which the observer of the lingual communication situation is external to that situation, while in the other he is both observer and participant. The later case comes closer to phenomenology. See Verhaar 1963:95-97. Since I shall be mentioning the behavioristic character of transformational grammar in a moment, it is now necessary to add that in that theory a similar affinity with the phenomenological stand is present in that (shall we say?) the linguist is his own informant. See also Ziff 1960:17-8. " The only other significant exception is not a recent one and was in reaction to the almost universally (but gratuitously) accepted Saussurian concept of the lingual sign as 'arbitrary'. I am now referring to the controversy involving Benveniste, Lerch, Pichón, Buyssens, Frei, Sechehaye (see Verhaar 1963:47, note 1).

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It is not to deny that Chomsky has impressively opposed Bloomfieldian behaviorism. I wish to add that the dualism that is recognizable in Chomsky's theory is not of the type of the post-Cartesian tradition; not, that is, the psychophysical parallelism of Malebranche's 'occasionalism' or Leibniz's 'preestablished harmony'. It is interesting in this connection to examine the reasons adduced by Katz for rejecting the charge of dualism. He says (1964a: 128) that the mechanism of speech is correctly represented by the linguistic theory he advocates and that that mechanism is a 'brain mechanism'. Surely a brain mechanism is no less physical than any feature of overt behavior (once 'physical' has been accepted in the sense of Katz), and the fact that it is inaccessible to observation NOW (it surely will not remain inaccessible forever, as neurology progresses) in no way seriously belies this claim. Microbehavior is not mentalistic as compared to physical macrobehavior. It is true, of course, that Katz considers the realization of the neurological processes immaterial to the correct linguistic description. In other words : the linguistic description itself is mentalistic in that it predicts and explains manifestations of the competence of the speaker, and all of them, and none but those. In that sense Katz's claim cannot be said to be a kind of psychophysical dualism. But that is only because Katz tells the linguist what his business is and the neurologist what HIS is. If the neurologist examines the neurophysiological realizations of what the correct linguistic description represents, he is, of course, a physicalist; the linguist providing the said description is a mentalist. Katz's psychophysical dualism consists in his insistence on an ABSOLUTE distinction between the two disciplines, for which no reasons are given, and in disregard of the literature that has challenged such a division on grounds compelling serious attention (Merleau-Ponty 1945:Chapter VI). 28 I am not suggesting that it is invariably imperative for linguistic science to study its overlappings with neurophysiology. But IF some cooperation (of two disciplines gratuitously supposed to have so little to do with one another as linguistics and neurophysiology) is advocated, as it is by Katz 1964a: 136), then also it is difficult to see why "the neurophysiologist [is expected] to tell [the linguist] about the neurophysiological realization of his abstract linguistic description". This is not only more than the neurophysiologist, who has his own methodology, might care to do for his perhaps too autonomous colleague in language research, but also it is hard to see why that colleague should not expect to have HIS descriptions influenced by what the neurologist has to say on language. For example, why is a notion like recursiveness, derived from a logical frame of reference, so necessarily the master and why is the modern neurophysiologist with his sophisticated elaboration of cybernetic principles so unavoidably the pupil? For that is unmis" Katz's position would have been termed 'empiricism' by Merleau-Ponty, and this empiricism is not only challenged with regard to language, but also with regard to many other aspects of human behavior. The book is so packed with empirical material against the physicalist position that no one can afford to overlook it. It is typical of the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty that the complicated whole of functions operative in human behavior cannot be disentangled with a view to unraveling its structure, unless one also pays attention to cases of disintegration of those functions: data from psychopathology. For language this means concentration on aphasia.

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takably Katz's implied suggestion: the linguist has done a good job, which the neurologist (by reason of his different nameplate) has no possible grounds for questioning; let then the neurophysiologist avail himself of the linguist's results.29 In my criticism of Katz's position my main point is not only that the exclusiveness of one particular frame of reference, in which a theory or method is always either 'correct' or 'incorrect' with apparently no intermediate possibilities, and in which the distinction between disciplines is correspondingly one as between black and white, is methodologically a mere postulate; but, more importantly, and this time not only from the phenomenological point of view, there may be serious doubt whether Katz (1964a) agrees with Chomsky's basic inspirations. I do not say that Katz has any obligation to agree with Chomsky; but his exposition does not, I think, do all the justice to Chomsky's basic insights that it might. Chomsky has always been very much at pains to explain that the generative conception of language is NOT a model of speech PRODUCTION (even though 'generation' and 'production' are used indiscriminately passim, especially in Syntactic Structures). He would understandably expect results from his theory for the psychology of language, and for a theory of language acquisition in particular, but he has characterized his theory as 'abstract' also with the implication that it does not stand for a concrete model of speech production. Models like these have been given by Katz (1964a) and by Katz and Postal (1964). For the comparative purposes of the present paper it may be useful to take a look at such a model (Katz's) from the phenomenological point of view. First, the model is supposed to reconstruct the communication situation. Phenomenologically this would be a description or analysis of the speech situation, but that difference is not in itself very revealing. However, then the speaker 'selects some thought' (previous to its wording? but there is a veritable spate of literature asserting that that is a misconception),30 a 'message' (metaphorically and unnecessarily derived from language derivative information procedures); a semantic component gives a 'form' to that message (note the strong implications of successivity), whereupon the 'sentence production procedure' is 'used' to 'obtain' an 'abstract' syntactic structure properly conceptualizing the thought; the 'phonetic shape' is then provided by an entity called the 'phonological component', which is 'then' 'encoded' into a 'signal' 'causing* the articulatory system to vocalize (finally) an utterance of the sentence. The whole process in the case of the hearer is then in the inverse order (even though no doubt against the same background of analysis-through-synthesis; Katz 1964a: 132-3, Katz and Postal 1964:168). This is uncomfortably close to physicalism and in any event behavioristic; and it is no more obviously 'mentalistic' than any other form of human behavior. The term 'model' in the philosophy of science has a quite particular meaning, with much less " Katz 1966a takes a more liberal stand with regard to overlappings between disciplines; however, in Katz 1966b there is again an absolute divorce between (in this case) a theory of meaning and a theory of reference. In phenomenological literature (Merleau-Ponty foremost, and not only in 1945: Chapter VI), in Wittgenstein, and more generally in British analytic philosophy (see note 10, above).

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of a truth claim than, say, theories. In that respect I readily admit that to set up such a model is not subject to any other laws of serious research than that it is somehow supposed to 'work'. For all I know, it may; but how?31 In phenomenology the utterance is already meaning, does not have to be INTERPRETED semantically, but is already so UNDERSTOOD, does not go through any decoding or encoding process, is not RECOGNIZED, etc. Katz's model is synthetic, phenomenology is analytic on intuitional bases; and so, for that matter, is Chomsky's structural research. That research is structurally unifying in that it is syntax-dominated, Katz's model is atomistic in that it is, if I may coin that contrastive phrase, atomistically built up from the bottom. True, it may be a 'reconstruction' of a unifying theory like Chomsky's, but not until after that unity has been unduly broken down. This disintegration cannot of course be successfully repaired, not even by the argument that the diversity of the components involved is the ultimate explanation of the Saussurian principle that the relation between form and meaning is arbitrary (Katz and Postal 1964:161-2). For the theory of the arbitrariness of the lingual sign is itself dualistic and is therefore unable to repair splits which should never have been made in the first place. In Chomskyan terms it might be said that, although a theory of competence is necessary for a proper understanding of performance, one cannot with impunity transfer structures, whose abstractness is precisely adequate in that they describe competence, to performance in just breaking components of that abstract structure down to supposedly successive stages of performance. Nor am I sure that Chomsky would endorse such a transfer. More generally transformational generative grammar uses a terminology strongly reminiscent of behaviorism, like 'input' and 'output', 'signals' (instead of 'signs'), 'automata', 'conceptual machinery', etc. All this is, of course, not without connection with the fact that the description concerned is a COUNTERPART, as has been said, of the facts described. This also founds, I would think, the distinction between formal and substantive universals. In behavioristic linguistics the position concerning meaning, finally, may be represented as follows: either it is possible to say precisely what meaning is, or not; if not, then we had better abandon the notion for the purposes of linguistic research;32 meaning should be studied but entirely diacritically (glossematic school) ; the intuition of meaning leads to unsolvable problems unless it is not confused, as it easily is, with the intuition of linguistic form (Chomsky) ; meanings should be organized in an (ideal) dictionary, with certain procedures for the recognition of ambiguities (not the ones 81

In Katz and Postal 1964, the authors are much more cautious than Katz was earlier. We read about the means that "the speaker himself actually uses when he essentially INSTANTANEOUSLY understands the sentences he hears" (p. 167, stress mine). This sounds more acceptable. However, whether the grounds given for this are true, namely that the human brain cannot take care of the astronomically high number of operations involved in, say, a twenty word sentence, is a question that must be asked. Why is the brain so obviously incapable of accomplishing this? 82 Thus Bloomfield, but much more so his followers; more so, because as Katz has pointed out (1964a: 124-6), Bloomfieldians inferred more from their master's position than was justified.

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due to constructional homonymity), and only then, but completely divorced from reference, can one study meaning scientifically (Katz-Fodor-Postal). What all these approaches have in common is their impatience with vagueness, their demand for clarity. Obviously there is such a drawback in any kind of research as undue vagueness. But the demand for clarity is basically a theoretical, not a methodological constraint. It is that because it derives from a frame of reference in which the values of an impeccable theory sacrifice the imponderables in the treatment of meaning. Since I do not think any one would claim that imponderables are necessarily unimportant, uninteresting, or irrelevant, it is clearly a constraint on theory that leads to their neglect. This is precisely what a phenomenologist — of almost any color — would repudiate : first because the dualism between theory and data handled by it is unacceptable to him; second, since no constraint of ANY sort could motivate the investigator to knead the data into what is perhaps no longer the material AS IT IS. Before we now try to connect up the situation and meaning as relevant, we ought to say something more about meaning itself.

MEANING

There are a great many theoretical terms behind which we might suspect a whole historical background, revealing for its underlying frame of reference terms such as, say, 'realism', 'idealism', 'materialism'. It is not so obvious that this is the case with a notion like 'meaning' which, however, has a revealing history, too.33 One way of making it show up is to look for comparable terms (words, if you will) in classical Greek thought. There, as for example in Plato's Cratylus, we never read that words have meanings. We do not even read about words, but names. And names belonged to things. The world of things was supposed to be a sort of primary objectivity in a way incommensurable with modern empirical approaches. For these create a polar distinction between the objective world and the subjective mind, whereas in classical Greek thought the unity of both was prominent, and the polar opposition at best latent (but I would doubt that, even for Aristotle). What we now call words, therefore, are onomata, belonging to things. It is not until Stoic philosophy that language, and therefore words, become a sort of secondary objectivity by the side of the primary objectivity of the world of things ; and once the latter had come to be distinguished from the former, it became possible to consider the names of things as 'words'; words, therefore, as belonging to the subject (a language user, we might now say), and finally called for that sophistication in further distinctions on the subjective side, whereby words 'have' meanings. This represents an entirely new 'theory', still largely ** For what follows, see Verhaar 1963:77 ff., where also bibliographical references are listed. I should add Kahn 1966 as relevant to some of the points brought up. A more elaborate version of this paper is forthcoming in the Supplementary Series of Foundations of Language. For the Stoics on language, see Mates 1961.

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implicit, partly explicit, based on the entirely implicit frame of reference underlying the attitude towards language on the part of both the Sophists and the rhetoricians : language AS A TOOL. Stoic philosophy is the Adam of all later semasiologies, including the Saussurian distinction between signifiant and signifié, and also the source of dualism of many of those theories (scholastic ones, for example), including the Saussurian thesis of l'arbitraire du signe linguistique. But this is not all. Not only did what we now call a word develop from what was first the natural name of a thing into an arbitrary tool for 'communication' (the wrong setting to characterize language, as we have seen, but ineradicable in even modern linguistic studies), but here is also the foundational possibility, as far as language was concerned, for such a trend as nominalism, whereby the word becomes a flatus vocis, fruit of a frame of reference that treated speech in a manner as if it were not at all necessary, but just happened to be there. The word, or language, having thus become so arbitrarily 'exteriorized' that the way became open for such a largely physicalist approach to language research as we find in the majority of linguists, with the exception of philosophers like Husserl, Pos and Merleau-Ponty, linguists like Reichling, and up to but largely excluding the generative grammarians (but including speech models in the sense of Katz, and of Katz and Fodor). A special complication of the word 'meaning' in English is that it is (characteristically!) ambiguous: 'to mean' can also stand for reference, it can 'mean' (!) the thing'meant' (!). In this English 'meaning' differs from German Bedeutung, Dutch betekenis, and presumably from parallels in other languages. Needless to say, this does not assert that modern theories fail to be aware of the difference between meaning and reference; but it is to characterize an underlying frame of reference, in which this distinction is either not made OR exaggerated (for example, in theories of meaning excluding reference as a distinct and not necessarily relevant field of study). From the phenomenological point of view the circumstance that an entity is difficult to describe is no excuse for ignoring that entity as somehow (i.e. of course, within a certain frame of reference) unmanageable. Note that meaning as an entity has not only a distinct ontological status from the word (or phrase), with which it nevertheless forms an unbreakable unity in phenomenological analyses,34 but also in an approach taking its point of departure from such an entirely different frame of reference as Ziff's where he borrows the distinction of token and type (1960:12, 52). There is, of course, Chomsky's warning that intuition of meaning is not to be confused with intuition of linguistic form, and admittedly it is necessary to keep this in mind in circumventing the problem of obscurity so easily attending semantic analysis. But also, at least in the elaboration of that insight in the Katz-Fodor-Postal semantic theory, this formal requirement suffers from a great number of ad hoc means of formalization, and more importantly (and anticipating a result arrived at later in this " Cairns 1940 concentrates on Husserl 1929 to establish this distinct status of the word; for this, however, see also Husserl 1913: 2.225-93, and Peter Hartmann's discussion of this (1954). Reichling has elaborated Husserl's analyses (1935, esp. pp. 243-4).

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paper), it handles language under the aspect of rationality in perhaps too exclusive a manner. Thus there still seems to be room for a theory of meaning in the sense of Reichling, of which I shall now discuss just the few features we shall need for our topic, and to which I shall add some views of my own. The main item of discussion in what follows will be what I shall call 'implied meaning'. But in order to show how 'implied meaning' compares with other sorts of meaning within the phenomenological frame of reference, or rather, within theories deriving from that frame of reference, I have to make a rather long digression first, and I shall briefly, and in a largely simplifying manner, describe (a) word meaning, (b) phrase meaning, (c) sentence meaning, (d) suggested meaning.

VARIETIES OF M E A N I N G

Word meaning is sometimes distinguished from grammatical meaning, the latter exemplified by, say, the third person suffix -s in plays. Some bound morphemes would be better examples, like -less in speechless. One might also argue whether free forms like to (in certain cases) are not 'free' purely formally, so that in terms of semantic relevance (if any) they would be on a par with bound morphemes. But, first, this matter is of no particular importance for our topic, and, second, it is based upon a notion of grammaticality that has, at least in transformational generative grammar, been replaced by a more powerful and comprehensive one. We shall therefore now ignore this part of the problem. I am also not now concerned with the definition of a word as a morphological unit, or as a syntagma. From the phenomenological point of view it would summon up many problems that it cost Reichling a voluminous tome to analyse, and anyway transformational grammar has now provided more powerful means to deal with words as syntagmata, even though not too clearly with the other aspects treated by Reichling. Note that the issue here really is which has priority structurally, the word or the sentence, or both, and in what sense of 'priority', and if in different senses, which has priority in which of the senses. This also we can now fortunately dismiss as largely irrelevant to our topic. Once the word has been defined roughly in a manner in which it coincides with its identification in writing by blanks before and after (and this seems enough for my purposes of delimitation), the vexing question comes up of what is traditionally known as the categorematica and the syncategorematica. We shall here be mainly concerned with the former, because the reference dimension is in evidence more clearly here than in the latter, if there at all.35 Then I say that a word taken in this 85

It would here perhaps be necessary to elaborate Reichling's distinction between dependent and independent meaning, in its turn inspired by Husserl's distinction (1913:2.313) between dependent and independent 'objectivity': cf. Reichling 1935:273ff. Though Reichling is, to my knowledge, the only LINGUIST to have used Husserl's distinction, this matter is virtually unexplored. I cannot resist

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rather limited and presumably incontrovertible sense has a meaning, or embodies a meaning, or (even) stands for a thought, whichever phrase one might prefer, taking due account of what frame of reference underlies the choice of the metaphor in question. I would further say, presumably backed up by most linguists, and in accord with Reichling, that every word is a constant in the language (in the sense of langue), retaining a basic unity or identity, as considered, that is, not so much with regard to context (but ignoring, for my purpose, any diacritical implications), but rather with regard to the situation; and more in particular, with regard to the referent. Special problems concerning this relative constancy and autonomy of word meaning are constituted in the case of proper names (as has been largely unrecognized in the theory of language), and with words like personal pronouns of first and second person, demonstratives presupposing a frame of reference with regard to the experience of spatial categories, in short deictic words (as has been long recognized; see Biihler 1934:107 if., 385 ff., Reichling 1935:30,267,30 ; for a generative approach, see Fillmore 1966). Those special problems will require our attention briefly later. I wish to add with Gardiner and Reichling that, though the word with the attendant constancy of its meaning is a unit of the langue, it does not acquire its referential capacity unless actually used in the parole, whose unit is the sentence. Note that, although phenomenologically a meaning is identically also a thought, it is not that in the langue (dictionaries and grammars do not think), but only in the parole, an indubitable fact which has some interesting consequences. First, that the sentence does have priority in Reichling's theory, but only in terms of his underlying frame of reference, which shows up analytically in the description of the situation, in which description it becomes explicit, acquiring the nature of a theory; second, that it also has priority in the generative theory in the sense of Chomsky but then explicitly, as a theory, therefore also in our sense, but abstractly and divorced from the situation (i.e. Chomsky [1965:197-8] does not claim that the speaker first decides upon an (empty) S, then upon its constituents, etc., a thing done, e.g., by Yngve); third, that de Saussure's thesis that our point of departure in linguistic research should be not the parole but the langue as the NORM is justly criticized by Reichling (1935:2, note),36 the temptation to mention one example: the word 'or'. It is, of course, syncategorematic. The referring dimension we shall sidestep. But is there not a PURELY CONNECTIVE function of 'or' different from what handbooks of logic call 'disjunctive' or 'exclusive' (Latin aut) and 'inclusive' (Latin ve/)? But how about Latin seu or Dutch oftewell There are probably DEGREES of syncategorematicity, this example being either entirely nonreferring or entirely context-referring. Anaphoric words sometimes constitute a comparable problem. 3 * Criticized, not rejected. Reichling's criticism runs as follows (1935): De Saussure first asks the question (23) : what is the integral and concrete object of linguistics? Then, instead of answering this question, and after developing several of the problems involved, de Saussure winds up by defining the POINT OF DEPARTURE, i.e., as NORM, saying that it is the 'langue' and 'parole', the totality of the language event. Now it is by no means a representative expression of Reichling's theory as a whole to say that point of departure is the same as norm. An IMPLICIT point of departure should be the 'langue', and so far Reichling would virtually concur with Chomsky's notion of intuition of the native speaker; but EXPLICITY Reichling would claim that the 'parole' is the point of departure, in

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while it is applauded by Chomsky (1966a) in a manner consistent with HIS theory. Finally, Reichling, who considers lingual communication as a (special) form of COOPERATION therefore also considers the use of words as an ACTIVITY, or more correctly, as a use of their MEANINGS. This view will prove important for the topic of implied meaning. Only a few remarks are called for with regard to the notion of PHRASE MEANING. By 'phrase' I now understand any sequence of words, whether continuous or discontinuous in terms of linearity. I may here include also compounds, although Reichling (1935:377) has adduced impressive evidence for the status of a compound as essentially different from that of a word group. I symbolize the irrelevance of all these problems for my topic by using the word 'phrase' in a conveniently vague sense. Traditional IC analysis and especially modern phrase structure as a component of a broader notion of grammaticality have taken adequate care of the problems involved, and I shall have occasion only to discuss of possible IMPLIED MEANINGS of phrases. SENTENCE MEANING, as understood here, establishes a relation of relevance or adequacy between words/phrases and their referents, exceeding the referential dimension itself in that it is applicable to a certain universe of discourse. Dependent upon frame of reference, BOTH of the speaker and hearer with regard to what they speak about AND of the scientific philosophical handling, this relevance or adequacy may be called "truth", or "consistency", or what have you. Therefore I use the more generic terms relevance or adequacy. An example: the fact that my utterance "I saw John yesterday" is irrelevant (let us say, untrue) in no way changes the fact that this sentence posits what is conveyed by the meanings and their structural relationships in toto as relevant (say, true). The only exception would be constituted by certain types of suggested meanings (see below), but they are linguistically of no importance. Suggested meaning is really just one type of implied meaning, but the only type of it irrelevant to my topic, which is why I make it terminologically a distinct category. Let an example be that I wish to visit A, go to his house, and am told 'Mr. A is not at home' or 'Mr. A is busy', in a case where this clearly is meant to convey that Mr. A does not wish to see me, although he is at home and bored to death. Or, someone might write me "I was wondering whether you might not prefer t o . . . " , where the last thing he is concerned about is my preference and where he is also not wondering, but is just telling me to do something. The background of these wordings are social restraints and certain taboos, and although these same backgrounds also influence some kinds of implied meaning in the sense important for my paper, in cases like these there is no real difference between them and forms of behavior like a meaningful the sense of the concrete material with which the linguist works. It would therefore be a better rendering of Reichling's standpoint to say that the 'langue' is the implicit norm, but the 'parole' is the explicit point of departure. For the 'parole', not the 'langue', is characterized by the referential dimension, and since the latter should, in Reichling's opinion, be brought in for an adequate description of what happens in actual speech, what we have here is a theoretical alternative to Chomsky's views.

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silence, certain suggestions conveyed by gestures, and other forms of nonlingual communication. IMPLIED MEANINGS

Implied meanings may have to do with certain typical forms of referring, or they may function in ways not bound up with such typical forms. Of the latter type are probably those meaning phenomena falling under entailment in the sense of Katz, under presupposition in the sense of Katz and Postal, and supposition in the sense of Fillmore. (I have had no access to Katz's work on entailment; for presupposition, see Katz and Postal 1964:116; for supposition, Fillmore 1965; this 'supposition' was still called 'entailment'). I shall not allude to those important contributions to semantics any more, my main point now being the relevance of reference. This relevance is illustrated by Reichling's account of the metaphor, to which I shall add metonym and other uses often (nonlinguistically) indicated as 'figures of style'. Reichling's theory (see 1935, esp. Chapter VIII, 319) may here be presented, in a simplified manner, as follows. Though the meaning of a word (sometimes of a phrase in the sense indicated above) is essentially ONE, i.e. 'unbreakable' if the word that is the 'bearer' of the meaning is not to lose its very identity (which, in view of homonymy, cannot always be supported by the phonetic Gestalt alone), this is not to say that there cannot be, or that there usually are not, various distinguishable ELEMENTS within the unity of that meaning. This may be explained in two ways. The first (not Reichling's) is to show that, say, all objects called 'table' display likenesses, making up that which makes us identify each of those objects, notwithstanding their great variety in shape, size, color, etc., as tables. It would no doubt be difficult to reveal those 'essentials', such as that a table is used to put things on, to sit at, and so forth, since none of these features separately need necessarily be realized in order for there to be a table, while also each (presumably) may be a feature of an object not a table. Though no one is at a loss to know what a table is, neither would anyone find it easy to give a description of what makes a table so easily identifiable as such, and as different from other (even similar) objects. However, these difficulties in no way affect the fact at issue, but only its description. A person may be an excellent driver without being able to give an adequate account of why he drives the way he does. Just as no one would infer from this difficulty that the person does not drive well, in a comparable manner it is safe to claim that a person is able to identify a table by its 'essentials' without hesitation. From a philosophical and common-sense point of view the second way (Reichling's) is based on the former. It shows that the meaning of 'table' consists of various 'elements' (Reichling borrows the Hegelian term 'moments', otherwise also used by Husserl, to show that they belong inextricably together) more or less in complete accord with the properties as described in the first way. It is, obviously, as difficult to give an exhaustive inventory of these (meaning) elements as it was above to give

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one of the features of a table. But here also, that is only a difficulty of description. Characteristically we would, when asked for the meaning of 'table', resort to what has been called 'ostensive definition' and point at a table. As the difficulty of description is not a difficulty in the theory of reference to be developed now, it does not affect the matter methodologically to any serious degree.37 The USE of meaning Reichling calls its APPLICATION. When I apply all, or most, of the elements of which a meaning consists to its referent (according to the parallelism of the two ways of approaching unity of meaning and identity of the referent), we have what is called DENOMINATION PROPER; it is the 'normal' application of meaning, as when I call a table table, a man man, love love, and so forth. All the meaning elements are then CONJUNCTIVELY RELEVANT to the application of the meaning. In metaphoric use, I apply ONLY SOME OR ONE of the meaning elements, to the exclusion of the other elements, which are in that case only DISJUNCTIVELY RELEVANT to the application of the meaning. What is stylistically called a metaphor is linguistically DISJUNCTIVE APPLICATION. 38 Also in disjunctive application the unity of the meaning remains intact, or 'unbreakable', which is precisely why a metaphor is stylistically so striking and especially why a metaphor is different from a misnomer. Examples are when I call a certain part of a book its 'back', a certain part of a bottle its 'neck', and a man who strikes me as particularly aggressive and on the alert a 'terrier' (in which case, therefore, the meaning elements 'aggressive' and 'on the alert' are applied to that man, but not the other meaning elements of 'terrier'). Of the meaning elements NOT applied in metaphoric denomination Reichling says that they are nevertheless ACTUATED, i.e. 'thought along with' the elements applied. 'Situation' as we have seen can be used in a generic and in a particular sense. For a metaphor clearly any type of situation would justify the disjunctive application. To call a boy who strikes me as 'amusing', or 'unpredictable', or 'up to mischief, or all of these, a 'monkey' would be an acceptable metaphor in most situations. But there are also modes of application other than metaphoric ones, in which familiarity with the situation is required for the understanding of that figure of style. One such is a metonym. The mode of meaning application in a metonym is, somewhat surprisingly, that NONE of the meaning elements is applied to the actual referent, but only one or more elements which are in some way ASSOCIATED with the referent and also with the meaning of the word used, and only IN ONE PARTICULAR SITUATION (or type of situation) at that (Verhaar 1963:88). Let me clarify what is meant here by association. One might say that the meaning elements of a word are thought 'in' that word, in which the whole meaning is (if you will) embedded, but it is also possible to think 37

Reichling, as noted, rejects the first explanation. I agree with his reasons, but they do not affect my approach here, which is somewhat different. It would lead me too far here to elaborate this. 88 I am simplifying Reichling's account quite drastically. Actually disjunctive relevance and disjunctive application is not at all the same in his theory. My account of the same subject matter in Verhaar 1963:85-7 is somewhat more accurate.

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other things 'with' that word, 'with' that meaning. This will even be usually the case, but that does not in itself lead normally to special applications of the meaning in the manner of a metonym. Thus what is for me associated with the word 'school' is that I have done a certain amount of teaching in the past; 'London' may take on, for me, the association of 'the place where I once lived'. But is it not inherent in the meaning of 'school' that I teach or taught, nor in that of 'London' that I once lived there. Let a métonymie case be the following. Suppose that I say in a class of high school boys Ί wish the left near corner there were silent', then the referent is: the boys occupying that corner; suppose further that the evil-doers there fail to catch my remark, another boy may whisper to them that 'the cigar wants you to shut up', thereby associating me with my habit of smoking cigars in class. I would term this way of denomination 'extrasemantic', as NONE of the meaning elements of the word used is applied. Also here of course the meaning itself would refuse to be divorced from the word it belongs to, and therefore be 'actuated', 'thought along with' the associated elements of thought actually applied to the referent. Of course no adequate projection rules could be devised for metonyms, and therefore they constitute a case where reference would be a necessary part of a theory of meaning. But also in the metaphor a comparable difficulty would obtain : the metaphoric possibility of a word makes many sentences ambiguous, like Ziff's Ί saw a shark' (1965). Not only would setting selection here be necessary for disambiguation, but even the providing of different readings would call for too much adhoensss in the rules, in a semantic theory in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal. The main point here is that a semantic theory claiming validity for a natural language cannot afford to ignore the imponderables of natural language in its complicated relations with the situation, and also the imponderables of that aspect of natural language which, in contradistinction to artificial languages, makes it (sometimes) so utterly IRRATONAL in the sense of unintellectual, defying 'laws' of thinking. This is not to deny the advantages of formalization and other merits of a theory like that of Katz-Fodor-Postal, even less its importance for foundational research in philosophy, but it is to indicate its limitations (ones that its originators will otherwise doubtless admit), and also to give instances of these limitations where they have not, to my knowledge, been so far adequately revealed. Before going on to discuss more sophisticated forms of extrasemantic denomination than that of the metonym, it may be worthwhile to show that the very fact of leaving the 'setting' and its selective capacity out of consideration makes some modes of disambiguation less convincing. For example, the sentence the stuff is light enough to carry by no means necessitates the reading of 'light ' as 'light in weight' (Katz and Postal 1964:15). A possible paraphrase of the sentence might be (in a certain situation) 'the stuff is light enough ( = reflects enough light) to carry along this dark road', meaning that it would be dangerous to carry objects reflecting too little light to warn approaching vehicles. This would no doubt be a more exceptional reading, but that is not the point. The second reading is possible and it is therefore impossible to

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disambiguate the sentence without having recourse to setting selection. A doubtful case of ambiguity, i.e. doubtful as to whether the situation comes in or not, is constituted by what we may call polarity of meaning in one and the same word (see Verhaar 1963:120). Examples are in words like Latin alius (meaning both 'high' and 'deep') and sacer ('sacred' and 'cursed'). This feature of polarity of meaning is quite common, I have been informed, in Arabic, and presumably also in other languages. A good heuristic principle here would be to look for the solution of the (psychological) problem of where the rational and irrational meet. The problem has been elaborately discussed by Hofstätter, (1944), but I am not competent to say how conclusively. Less doubtful, but very interesting cases are presented, not by irrational factors, but by factors of what might be termed 'neutralization' (in natural language). Thus the sentence the wall around the garden is only three feet high provides a meaning for 'high' synonymous with 'low'. Here a meaning is polarized by the sort of beginning of conceptualization that still remains within the boundaries of natural language. These conceptualizations are more frequent in more sophisticated language: thus in logic we speak about 'truth' values of a proposition, in which 'false' could be one of the readings of 'true'. But even apart from such more sophisticated cases, it remains t o be shown how even an ideal dictionary in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal could take care of such complications. 39 As has been pointed out by Staal, quotation is closely related to what we here call conceptualization (the comparison with Staal's treatment [1965b] being with reification and nominalization). We will now sidestep sophisticated forms of quotation (of which logic seems to be taking adequate care), and draw the attention to forms of quotation perfectly normal in natural language, involving also polarization of meaning, and even more drastically so than in a hypostatized meaning of 'high' as 'low', where, after all, there are no instances of polar opposites of meaning of one and the same word 'high' in one and the same sentence. I am here referring to what stylistically is known as irony. Let an example be that A says to Β that C is, in A's opinion, a 'gentleman' ; Β may then disagree by saying that 'that gentleman (of yours) has just swindled me out of a hundred dollars'. Then there is not only the semantic incompatibility of the meanings of 'gentleman' with 'swindler' ('has swindled'), but also, contextually, with 'gentleman' of the sentence uttered by A. Other examples : 'Your proofs do not prove anything' ; 'your analogies are not analogous' ; 'his evidence is unconvincing'. There are, of course, well-known cases in logic like 'Pegasus does not " Since I wrote this I had the privilege of seeing a pre-publication version of Bierwisch 1967. This treats of approximately the same problems as touched upon here and finds rules for them within the scope of the Katz-Fodor-Postal approach, which moves the question to the stage where it should be asked if my doubts still hold; that is, it should be investigated whether the comparatively simple structural lines indicated in my analyses are not too simple, whether the rules found by Bierwisch are, or are not, too much ad hoc for linguistic purposes, even though their importance for foundational research of a 'logic' of natural language is no doubt considerable; or both. The results would be extremely important for the comparative evaluation of the alternative frames of reference I am attempting.

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exist', but should we not perhaps call that a logical treatment of what is otherwise not a logical problem, basically (i.e. in terms of foundational research), but a semantic problem in natural language? Very little research about these modes of quotational use, affecting as they do the semantic readings involved, seems to have been done. The factors of irrationality in metaphor, metonym, irony, neutralization and quotational use meet in a manner profoundly affecting any semantic theory at all interested in them, and the reason why the question of whether a semantic theory in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal deals with them adequately is worth asking is not only with regard to the circumstance that such a theory leaves the setting out of account, but also with the fact that it approaches natural language in perhaps too rationalistic a manner. This is even the very reason why the situation is not considered : it would make the theory too unwieldy and therefore detract from clarity. Phenomenology, by reason of its lesser insistence on clarity and the greater value it attaches to the isomorphism between the approach and the data, seems an alternative approach worth considering. Am I, therefore, fighting the Katz-Fodor-Postal theory? By no means. For, first of all, the phenomenological approach has not been shown to be more powerful in an OVERALL sense. With regard to semantics I feel that it is, but I may be wrong, and at any rate I have not proved it. Secondly, this paper has for its principal purpose to compare methods and theories. For purposes of this comparative study, then, it will now be in order to state that the semantic theory at issue is powerful enough for the more 'intellectual' aspects of meaning in language, and has therefore greater value as the kind of linguistic foundational research that enables the logician to solve questions intimately bound up with the basis of logic in natural language, than as linguistics for its own sake. More particularly and importantly, since the nonintellectual elements in natural language would presumably be more in evidence in the lexicon of a language than in its grammatical (in the sense of syntactic) structures, the drawback of major concentration on the predominantly intellectual side of natural language is of a considerably less important kind in syntactic research than in the semantic theory. Here is one of the reasons why the semantic theory under discussion is 'integrated' into previous work in syntax only to the extent that it could be, but at the expense of a better view of the function of the lexicon in a language. It may, incidentally, here be the place to point out that the phenomenon of quotation ALSO has its parallel in what has been called 'echo' in recent SYNTACTIC research ('who told whom what?'), and that a more technical treatment of this feature of syntactic structure might have to be tied up with a more sophisticated elaboration of the traditional problem in logic known under the name of use and mention, or, more precisely, mention for use. 40 This might perhaps be done by creating a special grammatical category dominating those constituents, which would not only take care of simpler cases like " 7 ' is a personal pronoun', but also of more sophisticated ones like 'one cannot elapse a book' 40 Phenomenologically, I would prefer 'noumenon tor phenomenon', but duly purged of Kantian connotations.

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(Chomsky 1965:158) and John had what before he died? (Katz and Postal 1964:109). Consider also the following example : in answer to A's utterance I can't, Β might say either What do you mean I can't or What do you mean you can't, BOTH together constituting a case of what might be called constructional SYNonymity (violating the first-second person alternation by reason of quotational use in the former case), while the former constitutes a case of constructional HOMonymity, at least when taken out of context (for the same reason). In sum, consideration of quotational use ('echo' seems less felicitous as a term) is relevant also in syntactic research, BUT FAR MORE RARELY than in the semantic theory, justifying therefore much more easily the introduction of ad hoc categories, and affecting less the whole theory. But of course syntactic features are in the nature of the case more intellectual (as von Humboldt [1876:2.104] already stated) than lexical ones. Syntactic studies in the sense of Chomsky are therefore of great importance for foundational research in logic, BUT ALSO — and here is where its importance, caeteris paribus, is so much greater than of the semantic theory in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal — it provides a more powerful approach to linguistic problems (as distinguished from philosophy) than other recent developments in linguistic theory.

TYPES OF THEORIES

Now that we have taken a closer look at situation and meaning as considered from a phenomenological point of view, I next wish to distinguish various types of theories, considering them also in connection with their underlying frames of reference. I think there would be general agreement as to the thesis that no theory is entirely a posteriori. As shown before, from the phenomenological point of view a theory would be a (partial) explication of a frame of reference. The frame of reference in a larger sense, that is the one within which certain types of theories are distinguished in what follows, is the phenomenological one. This does not mean that I hold the original idea of Husserl of a complete lack of presuppositions (Voraussetzungslosigkeit); there are always a prioris involved, and there is always more foundational research possible, as has been explained above (at the end of the paragraph "Some other notions of 'theory' : metatheory"). This view of the impossibility of complete lack of presuppositions seems generally accepted nowadays, also in the philosophy of science. In Chomsky's theory this circumstance is probably the reason why a discovery procedure as used in other approaches in linguistics is rejected, as imposing impossibly strong requirements. Again, few theories (if any) would be entirely a priori, that is, apart from completely deductive systems such as those in mathematical logic. Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that there is at least one acceptable way of classifying theories, namely with regard to the extent to which a priori or a posteriori apply. In strongly a priori theories the distance between data and theory will be great, in strongly a posteriori

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theories that distance will be proportionately minimal. If we call the former type high-level theories and the latter low-level, then we have at least two constants of theory appraisal, although we should of course remember that the standards applied here are relative, i.e. to one another. I already had occasion before to distinguish a theory, which is by definition (in this paper) explicit, from a frame of reference. When it is therefore said that the choice between significant and insignificant facts is already made on behalf of a theory, then in terms of this paper we would have to say: on the basis of a frame of reference. It is here now the place to point out that in actual fact this distinction may be confused by various factors. Let the example be that of a linguist who starts from certain heuristic insights (we may be fairly sure that is always the case), suiting his frame of reference, then arrives at a theory either on the basis of his facts or (what is not the same) merely in keeping with his facts. Then in that process of tentative approaches, and reaching results by trial and error, he may (and usually will) summarize all his efforts in a form which BEGINS with his theory (a 'set of postulates', for example), and then marshal his facts in the light of that theory. Then in a superficial and unrevealing sense he has chosen his facts in the light of a theory. But this by no means necessarily reflects the way in which he arrived at his results.41 It would therefore perhaps be better to describe the difference between what we have called high- and low-level theories as follows. A low-level theorist makes an early (high-level theorists would perhaps say, premature) and comparatively unsophisticated choice between significant and insignificant facts, largely led by intuition, including the kind he may not own up to, and ultimately by the underlying frame of reference. Facts are not really selected on the basis of a theory; it is rather the case that the researcher builds up to a theory, depending upon how he organizes his data. If that organization is not more than a summary of data, the theory will be poor. Whether that fact, that is of the theory being a poor one, is important, depends upon his objectives, and also upon how much claim he lays to having founded a theory. If his objectives are mainly practical, say, a way of doing field work on hitherto unrecorded languages, it is hard to see what can be held against him. To the extent that he has claimed to have founded a theory, objections deriving from a different frame of reference will still be only doubtfully relevant.42 In general it may 41

That is why publications of field work procedures, which more readily reflect the actual order of the research done, are more vulnerable to the theoretical critic, but not always justly so. The field worker acknowledges his frame of reference, so to speak, the theoretical linguist does not do this to the same extent. Not only does he not reveal his own frame of reference, but there is no cogent reason to suppose that he is necessarily aware of it. The only restraint he feels he has to impose upon his theory is that it should be shown to be internally consistent, and in keeping with the data handled. In short, there seems room for doubt whether the field worker and the theoretical linguist are talking about the same thing, even though both will use the term 'theory' for certain claims. 42 When we have a rule, for example, that an adjective in English can be compared by adding -er and -est and that the resultant forms are also adjectives, then the comment that this would be tantamount to a recursive series of rules that would generate forms like *sloweresterer (Bach 1964:47) is very much to the point in a generative grammar, but not in, say, a pedagogical grammar, any more

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perhaps be said that low-level theories, although they do not always necessarily lay themselves open to criticism on theoretical grounds, do so frequently in actual fact, either because some claim to having founded a theory is easily made, or because a critic more interested in theory is easily annoyed at those not having that interest; and usually both. But none of these circumstances should obscure the fact that the basic reason for misunderstanding is usually in different frames of reference. There are of course theories so low in level that any interest in a higher form of unification of data is lacking, that exception to it must be taken. Skinner's Verbal Behavior is presumably a case in point, but comment on this seems hardly called for after Chomsky's review of that book (1959). I might add that a criticism from the phenomenological point of view would have been as serious as Chomsky's. This properly understood, let us accept as a possible approach a theory which (a) does not claim to have been erected on the data only (or, is not absolutely inductive, or a posteriori, or a discovery procedure pure and simple); (b) relies on a certain intuition, founded in a certain frame of reference, even though this intuition should not, obviously, be adduced as evidence, or determine methodology; (c) requires verification in terms of how well the data under investigation are handled (explained, described). Then, and speaking from a phenomenological point of view, the UNITY discussed sub feature (3) of the section "Phenomenology" above is guaranteed by (b), which in turn is made acceptable by (c), while (a) still leaves some doubts (theoretically) about the relation between theory and data. That is, while (b) does not meet requirements of scientific explicitness, (c), although it takes care of (b), does not connect data and theory DIRECTLY. And this is what could be called REMOTENESS of the theory from the data. In other words, then we would have a HIGH-level theory. In general, high-level theories are largely deductive, low-level theories are largely inductive. And seeing that, in the empirical sciences, no one seriously believes in either sheer deduction or sheer induction, the introduction of the notions of high- and low-level theories, because of their relativity in terms of mutual relations, creates a generic terminology replacing the contradictory notions of deduction and induction. In this manner we shall be in a position to allow for a whole gamut of intermediate possibilities between the two extremes of sheer deduction and sheer induction. It would not be enough to distinguish theories only as different in terms of high and low level (as such it would easily remain abstract in an uninteresting sense), but ALSO in terms of the prevalent frame of reference. There are admittedly quite a number of frames of reference within which one could analyse language as object of research. De Saussure considered semiology as the discipline qualifying best for language research, and this semiology he allotted a place within psychology. However, one of the theoretical problems yet partly unsolved in the Cours is that the semiological framework competed with the sociological one, before gaining the day, rather hesitantly (see Yerhaar 1964). Thus already in one theory we see the influence of two, than it would be apposite to comment on the statement that 8 + 3 = 11, by saying that it would not be true in nondecimal systems.

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possibly three, underlying frames of reference. The glossematic school borrowed the semiological framework in a much more radical version than found in its source, de Saussure. Neither theory has much to say for the SITUATION as relevant to linguistic research. This is found in Reichling, as explained above, and Reichling was heavily indebted to the early Husserl. A behavioristic version of the situation we find in Bloomfield and others, but that theory was antimentalistically conceived. In terms of the history of ideas, who does not here recognize the whole Cartesian framework of the man-machine, unfortunately forgetting Descartes' ideae innatae, or the autonomy of the human mind?43 While this autonomy has now been revealed by transformational generative grammar, that theory has no qualms in sticking to a whole array of behavioristic terminology (see above, in the section "Situation"), and it seems clear that this is due not to any matter of explicit principle, but to an underlying frame of reference. As is well-known, Karl Biihler's painstaking analyses of speech phenomena, also in terms of the situation, did not prevent him from having a behavioristic conception of das konkrete Schallphänomen (1934:28). This catalogue of different frames of reference could be indefinitely extended. Clear cases would be constituted by theories where the frame of reference has a particular name, i.e. that of a particular discipline as distinct from other disciplines. There is a psychology of language, a psychopathology of language, a philosophy of language, there are the approaches of neurophysiology, of communication engineering, cybernetics, logic, automata theory, statistics, etc. It is here that important and complicated problems arise. Are the different disciplines just arbitrary names for arbitrary limitations of interests and goals? Is linguistics adequately represented by a researcher who approaches language psychologically, and who still either calls himself expressly a linguist or does so implicitly by positing his approach as an alternative (perhaps, he might claim, a better one) to other approaches deemed 'linguistic'? Is 'psycholinguistics' linguistics or psychology? Is anthropological linguistics anthropology or linguistics? Is sociolinguistics sociology or linguistics? Are all the contributions to the Readings in the Philosophy of Language by Fodor and Katz (1964) so unquestionably philosophical? In most cases different disciplines no doubt reflect different frames of reference. But is the inverse also true? It seems not, for phenomenology is certainly a frame of reference but its relevance is as certainly interdisciplinary. I myself have argued that what constitutes the proper field of research for the linguist is only a propaedeutic for the philosopher (of language), while, inversely, the (phenomenological) linguist would 43

I say 'Cartesian' framework of the man-machine, and not Descartes' framework of the manmachine. 'Cartesian' here means that his dualism carried over into the philosophies of followers like Malebranche and Leibniz, following Descartes' own dictum that it is God who unites the body and the soul (see above, p. 35). Descartes' own position, however, is confusing. He often tried to attenuate the dualism of the res cogitans — res extensa distinction (especially in his correspondence), but even these were attempts against a background of a spirit-matter dualism. In short, and simply, Descartes was inconsistent. His emphasis on unity has only become better known in recent research. See Chomsky 1966b and van Peursen 1966:18-33.

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take for his point of departure certain basic insights about language of the kind that are not fully made explicit until the philosopher comes along with HIS analyses (Verhaar 1963:12). Or, I have equivalently said that what is for the philosopher of language the end (in some relative sense) in the form of an explicit THEORY is, in its largely implicit form, and therefore rather as a FRAME OF REFERENCE, the starting point for the linguist. I do not know of any nonphenomenological approach to interdisciplinary questions that is able to clarify such refractory problems. There is no doubt that many linguists, when pressed to develop the point, would find themselves admitting that one particular frame of reference is uniquely theirs. Only few researchers of language would term 'linguistics' ANY approach to language, as for example Hockett. In transformational generative grammar the one-disciplineconception of the study of language is frequently, though not invariably, in evidence. The journal Foundations of Language has evaded the issue of what term would cover its interdisciplinary interests plus its more purely philosophical ones by covering it under the asymmetrical semantics of the phrase contained in the subtitle Journal of Language and Philosophy. There is further the interesting view, propounded by the late J. L. Austin (1961a; 180), that what we need now is a universal science of language, as a new example of an area of research ridding itself of philosophical ascendancy and irrelevance, and kicking philosophy upstairs. Whether Austin's prediction that this was going to be the main scientific event of the twentieth century is indeed coming true remains to be seen, but there has in this century certainly been a considerable development in language research, mainly in the progress made in recent work in generative grammar, less and only more potentially in the pursuit — the umpteenth one — of a universal grammar, still less but, in my opinion, with equal potentialities, in phenomenology as of particular interdisciplinary interest; and last but not least in the fact (still so largely unexplored) that such interesting affinities exist between phenomenology and generative grammar on the one hand, and between phenomenology and Oxonian language analysis on the other. To return to the distinction between high- and low-level theories again, it would seem that the more comprehensive a frame of reference, the 'higher' the theory will be, and the theory will be 'lower' in proportion as the frame of reference is less comprehensive. That, however, does not mean that all theories can be classified in terms of comprehensiveness only. The comprehensiveness of semiology as a frame of reference is presumably incommensurable with the comprehensiveness of grammaticality in what seems to be increasingly synonymous with formalizability. But both would be comparatively high level with regard to many other theories, in that they would be more comprehensive than those. Thus semiology comprises within a sign system that which is only one particular case of the use of signs: language; and grammaticality in the sense of formalizability concentrates only on one case of formalizability of human behavior : language. High degree of remoteness from data, in a theory, also differs within the same

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framework according to what data are in question (in need of explanation). Syntactic theory in terms of formalization in the manner of transformational grammar is least remote from the syntactic structures THEMSELVES, more from morphological structures, most from phonological patterns. Hence transformational grammar as a theory handling phonology will reduce sound patterns to abstract objects of some sort, as far remote from what will often interest, say, laboratory phoneticians as the framework of the distinctive features. Of course the syntactic description is ALSO highly abstract in transformational grammar, but that does not in itself argue a high degree of remoteness, since syntactic structures indeed reflect, MORE IMMEDIATELY, something IN ITSELF so abstract as what, already according to a philosopher so little given to formalization as von Humboldt, is mainly INTELLECTUAL in language. It is presumably because of this that more linguists seem to have qualms about the generative approach to phonology than about a generative approach to syntax. There are, as Hill (1966) observes, nowadays phonologists who wish to work both 'down' and 'up' ; in terms of this discussion : they want to avail themselves of the respective advantages of both high- and low-degree theories. Whether that is at all possible, I am not in a position to judge. Let us take another example, this time from morphology, as encompassed within the syntax-dominated approach of transformational grammar. One constituent of likes in the sentence the boy likes candy will be labeled an 'auxiliary', and a similar description will be assigned to will in the boy will like candy. In a non-syntax-dominated approach to morphology it will obviously be imperative to distinguish between an auxiliary will and a suffix -s. I know of no morphologist who would like to work also both 'down' and 'up' to meet what is missed in either alternative theory, but I would not be surprised if there were those methodologically so disposed. From a theoretical point of view it looks as if one cannot eat one's cake and have it. The syntax-dominated approach to morphology is therefore, in comparison with a more traditional (taxonomic) approach, a high-level theory. To put it differently : to claim structural priority for the WORD is low degree, to claim it for the SENTENCE is high degree. But then it might be argued that there are various sorts of priority, as Reichling has done. (1935:415-6)44 The important thing here is that it would be futile ABSTRACTLY to decide in favor of either priority, since it just depends what aspects the linguist is primarily interested in. Would this difference of interest be motivated only in terms of a certain discipline one is committed to? These are questions difficult to answer in general. In conclusion it seems safe to say that philosophical approaches are always fairly high-level. A greater comprehensiveness is typical of philosophy in most cases. But here, again, phenomenology is something of an exception.

44

Reichling admits priority of the SENTENCE in its characteristic of positing AS REAL that which the individual words name: priority is accorded to the word insofar as the WORD has to be already there with all its essentials of identifiability, constancy of meaning, etc., if there are to be sentences at all.

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PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORIES

Phenomenological theories are neither high- nor low-level. There is a central 'mid'level datum or set of data, or, if you will, center of the frame of reference, From it one works 'up' and 'down'. In the early Husserl, for example, that datum is consciousness, that is, as explained before, consciousness-op; consciousness is always intentional, requires an object. That does not mean that the object of consciousness is somehow not really there, or that it is postulated, in a non-empirical sense (a thing useful to remember, since Husserl uses the term 'constitution', which summons up idealistic connotations, and which in the later Husserl was definitely semi-idealistic), by consciousness. To realize how little true that would be it is sufficient to remember that Husserl's main objective was : back to the things themselves (zurück zu den Sachen). Also the fact that the object is not postulated non-empirically is precisely that in which the way 'down' differs from the way 'up', as we shall see in a moment. All the intentionality of consciousness means theoretically is that the object cannot be viewed as divorced from consciousness. This is basically because of the subject-object unity discussed in (2) of the section "Phenomenology", above. Therefore, from consciousness one goes 'down' for an 'unprejudiced' view of the object. O n the other hand, one also goes 'up', but then one does not go 'up' from consciousness to, say, a higher 'object', but rather one inquires into the CONDITIONS A N D IMPLICATIONS of consciousness itself. In the case of Husserl's philosophy this led to transcendental subjectivity (among other things), a very important point for comparative systematic philosophy because of its profound affinities with Wittgenstein's Τ and its later analogue, for example, in the philosophy of Gilbert Ryle (1958:195). 45 The way 'down' is, if I may word it in terms of the historical background of phenomenology, characteristically un-Kantian, the way 'up' is characteristically Kantian (transcendental deduction). In both respects it differs from Kant in that it is much more down to earth, more 'empirical' in a way less usual in the British empiricist tradition (even though it is true that Kant without Hume would be unimaginable), a fact that may more or less seriously be obscured by the laborious and elaborate character of Husserl's analyses. Another affinity in terms of modern philosophy is with contemporary philosophy of science, but for the important differences in terms of different frames of reference : in science the involvement of the subject is still largely considered as a methodological PROBLEM (without much of a theoretical justification of why it is a problem, see van de Hulst and van Peursen 1953), while the same involvement in the phenomenological frame of reference is a BASIC LAW. I should add that consciousness as a central datum of mid-level concentration is not universal in phenomenological philosophy, but that need not concern us now. In Yerhaar 1963 I have taken SPEECH as that central datum, and within the scope of the general topic of that work it was, in its mid-level position, halfway between per" Of course, Oxonian analysts clearly follow the way 'up' in that they philosophize ON THE BASIS OF language rather than ABOUT language.

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ception (or, rather, the objects denominated as perceived) and thought (that is, thought as embedded in speech). Yet my book was mainly philosophical, and for linguistics I shall have to use another example in a moment. But I should like to add that the contemporary central interest in foundational research has its distinctly phenomenological relevance : it is taken care of by the way 'up' from the central datum. Thus if we take modern foundational research in logic as an example, logic itself would be the higher level, investigated not so much in terms of internal consistency, but foundational^ explained (in some sense) by approaching that higher level from the lower level determining the very conditions for its possibility: natural language. For that reason, and speaking from the phenomenological point of view, and in terms of foundational research in epistemology, one way of characterizing transformational generative grammar would be to say that it is the first successful formalization of natural language, providing a new sort of logic as compared to mathematical logic. However, it should be noted that this is not the usual way of looking at transformational grammar; for example, the higher level would be constituted, among other things, by what in that theory is indicated as 'deep' structures. While recognizing that metaphoric terminology is presumably unavoidable in ANY theory, and in ANY field of research, it is not without interest to see why the metaphors have been chosen the way they have; such analyses constitute the via regia to the underlying frame of reference, especially those elements in it that have not come to full explication in the theory based on it. Thus I would myself, EVEN from the phenomenological frame of reference, still maintain the metaphor 'deep' in 'deep structures', but my reason would be one inconsistent with one aspect of transformational generative theory : that, as I see it, the speaker's competence is, though certainly 'mental' in the sense of Chomsky, yet only to a certain extent the 'principle', or 'source', of CREATIVITY in speech. 46 Most certainly the generative capacity of the speaker's (hearer's) competence is INFINITE. But this (mathematical!) infinity is quite distinct from the infinity of the parole parlante as compared to the parole parlée in the sense of Merleau-Ponty (1945 : Chapter VI) and of the pensée pensante as compared to the pensée pensée in the sense of Blondel ( 1 9 3 4 ) . THAT creativity is much more of a 'high' level as compared to actual speech (of the language-user's performance) than the infinite generative capacity in the sense of Chomsky, which I would consider ALSO as 'deep', or as a substratum in some sense, in that it is also LIMITING with regard to what can be said, in a broader sense of 'conveyed'. In that sense Chomsky's theory also poses LIMITS to the creativity of speech. I am not sure that it would be fair to offer this as a direct criticism of Chomsky's theory, seeing that none of those speaking about 'creativity' in the broader sense suggested here ever troubled to enquire into it STRUCTURALLY. Nor did Chomsky ever claim that his notion of 'creativity' covers all its senses. But for comparative purposes this point seems of great importance, and it is certainly time for some more research to be done in the VARIOUS ASPECTS of creativity in language. 47 In the present 4

*

47

I have elaborated this in Verhaar 1964. As I write this, Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics (1967) is not yet available to me. Since that book

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context, I would emphasize IRRATIONAL aspects primarily, as suggested above. So much for philosophy at the moment. Though Reichling is not the only phenomenological linguist,48 we will take some features of his theory as good examples of the mid-level centrality of some basic data. Reichling 1935 has elaborated further Gardiner's thesis that the word is the basic unit of the language (Saussurian langue) in contradistinction to the sentence as the basic unit of speech. It is with reference to the word as central datum that both lower- and higher-level entities should be analysed. Thus the word is prior, phenomenologically, to any other string of sounds, the smallest unit being the phoneme, the longest the sentence. About utterances larger than the word Reichling does not say much, this not being the main topic of the book, but what he does say is still interesting in that it practically represents a variety of left-to-right generation (as different from production!) in the sense that any word uttered limits the possibilities of what may follow according to a pattern determined by that word (1935:416). It is probably no longer the best foundation of syntactic analysis, but it does constitute an interesting alternative to the top-to-bottom generation in a manner not necessarily the same as that suggested by the comparison of the finite-state Markov process (Chomsky 1957:19). For although Reichling's 'formulation' (formulering) is more than just a production model of speaker (hearer) in that the target of the formulation is the SENTENCE, it is also less radically divorced from the purely abstract character of generation in the Chomskyan sense, in his case from top to bottom. It is not, I think, the case that in the top-to-bottom generation the speaker (hearer) first decides upon a dummy sentence, then upon constituents like noun phrase and verb phrase, themselves also empty, and so on until the actual sentences are produced (see Chomsky 1965:197-8). Presumably we would have to say that Reichling gives principles for performance in a manner less divorced from competence, but then it must also be recognized that Reichling's 'formulation' did not provide such powerful tools for syntactic analyses as Chomsky twenty years later. And even phonological problems defy adequate handling (as recently again pointed out by Postal [1966]) on any lower level than that of syntax. However, grammaticality is not the only business of the linguist, not even if that notion is widened so as to include everything formalizable in language. In other words, phenomenological linguistics is not only a mid-level theory in the area of different levels of formalizability (grammaticality) in a language, but it is also mid-level in that quite different area enclosed by meaning on the one and the referents on the other hand: the situation. It is here that Reichling's theory will easily be an alternative to the semantic theory in the sense of Katz-Fodor-Postal, as suggested above.

inquires into the philosophical traditions, back to Descartes, showing continuity with some fundamental concepts of transformational generative theory, it is bound to be of great importance for the question of creativity as raised here. (See, however, note 43, above, in fine.) 48 Peter Hartmann is another, but I am not competent to discuss his theories in the fashion it would have to be done in the present paper. Hartmann has written voluminously; see especially 1963.

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EXPLANATORY CAPACITY OF MID- AND HIGH-LEVEL THEORIES; CONCLUSIONS

Thus we finally arrive at a more direct confrontation between phenomenological linguistics and transformational generative grammar, both of them taken in their own right as linguistic research and in their capacity of accomplishing foundational research in philosophy. In what follows I (rather arbitrarily) distinguish transformational generative grammar from the Katz-Fodor-Postal semantic theory, just for the sake of clarity, and despite the strong similarity of approach. Then I would tentatively offer the following formulations: (1) Chomsky's notion of syntax is high-level as compared to the traditional notion of syntax, the reason being that Chomsky's notion of grammaticality is more flexible and therefore more comprehensive, while at the same time it is able, in the case of doubtful material ('semi-sentences' for example), to fall back upon a constant: the speaker's (hearer's) competence, relegating questions like those of acceptability to the province of performance (see Chomsky 1965:10; on 'semi-sentences' see Katz 1964c). (2) Chomsky's notion of syntax is NOT high-level as compared to his own, new, notion of syntax. The impression of a high-level character of Chomsky's syntactic theory is easily obtained by reason of the highly abstract character of the formalization used, but unjustly so, because the object described, syntax, is ITSELF very abstract. We should therefore say that Chomskyan syntactic theory is low-level with regard to its object, syntax; this is the reason why it is so irrefutably adequate in terms of isomorphism between theory and data. Or, more simply, the best syntactic theory so far. (3) Chomsky's notion of syntax is (comparatively) high-level for morphology and (very) high-level for phonology, and in this case the abstract character of formalization is indeed high-level in that there is a certain lack of isomorphism between theory and data. The question must be asked if mid-level theories like Reichling's are not possibly able to deal more adequately with morphological and phonological patterns in their own right. A good question. It is not clear whether there is a separate DISCIPLINE (not just an arbitrary alternative approach, therefore, arbitrarily labeled 'morphology') justifying, on methodological and theoretical grounds, a non-syntax-dominated approach to what is more traditionally known as 'morphology'. For phonology such an alternative approach is presumably not arbitrary, since it is not clear that whatever approach in the study of speech sounds must of necessity be so abstract as the distinctive-feature theory. This would be a question for laboratory phoneticians and communication engineers to answer. In doing so, they would of course have to pay serious attention to the forthcoming Sound Patterns of English of Halle and Chomsky. (4) The abstractness of the semantic theory is unnecessarily great for linguistic research. Because of this abstractness it deals with the predominantly intellectual elements in semantics better than any alternative theory I know of, but it seems inadequate to account for the largely irrational elements in language, which nevertheless play a much more important role in the lexicon than in grammatical structure. The abstractness is due, first to the similar inspiration which is at the basis of generative

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grammar, and to that extent it is valuable, because it allows the linguist to see to what extent an integration of generative grammar and the semantic theory is possible; second, to the mainly logical frame of reference which avoids such imponderables as those entailed by bringing the situation to bear upon the analyses. Linguistically speaking a phenomenological theory is possibly better able to treat certain problems of meaning. (5) A consequence of the low-level character of generative grammar (at least with regard to syntax) and the high-level character of the semantic theory is that the two do not really convincingly amount to an 'integrated theory'. But this is not to say that the overlappings, more particularly the possibility in principle of projection rules, do not constitute an interesting area of research. (6) The philosophical importance of the semantic theory is considerable, by reason of the possibilities it opens for foundational research in logic; it would seem less important for a philosophical epistemology more in general (as distinguished from logic) by reason of the overly rationalistic approach incidental to the theory. (7) I find it difficult to assess the philosophical importance of generative grammar in terms of foundational research. There is no doubt that recent work in generative grammar constitutes the best formalization of natural language so far and thus contributes considerably to the study of a 'universal grammar'. Videant logicil (8) For epistemology in general Reichling's theory provides means for foundational research much more powerful than did his source, the early Husserl. Yet as compared to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language Reichling is still distinctly (and slightly unduly) rationalistic; on the other hand Reichling is clearer methodologically than the French phenomenologist. (9) Reichling's analyses of the speech situation present most interesting affinities with recent Oxonian analysis, as did Husserl with Wittgenstein. These affinities should be explored more in detail, especially since the affinities between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language and Oxonian analysis are also too obvious to be ignored. (10) Reichling and Chomsky provide two entirely different theories for a mentalistic conception of language. This shows that mentalism is not the prerogative of the phenomenologist, nor is it impossible in association with a moderately behavioristic frame of reference. In summary: both generative grammar and phenomenological linguistics seem important areas of research, and a task of more immediate importance would seem to consist in investigations as to whether they are as incompatible as it is perhaps too often thought they are. UNIVERSITY OF INDONESIA*



Affiliation at the time of the Conference: Ateneo de Manila University.

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DISCUSSION JOOS:

I have nothing to say on this as a whole beyond the obvious point that it is highly useful to have phenomenology explained as a whole by an expert, so that it is no longer terrifying and so that we no longer need to reject it. Apart from that, I have one little example to comment on. The Latin word sacer translates into English sometimes as 'sacred' and sometimes as 'accursed,' and these two then are regarded as polar opposites which, as I understood it, meant that the Latin word was presented as containing opposite meanings in one word. Is that correct, opposite meanings in the one word? Well, in recent technical English, we have one word which means exactly those two opposite things, namely the word taboo. And here we either have to say that the existence of the single word taboo shows that there is another language which unites just these two opposites under one word, or else we will have to say that both words taboo and sacer are exempt from internal contradiction. VERHAAR:

If I understand your remark correctly, then I would say that the notion of contradiction would here be (that's why I called them diametrically opposed) derived from a logical frame of reference, which I think does not suit natural language. It would not be incorrect, but it would be irrelevant in the sense that it would generate the impression that the lexicon or certain parts of the lexicon are contradictory. But I would say that I do not know the cause, psychologically speaking. There is a book on this by Peter R. Hofstätter, an Austrian psychologist, i.e., on Plato's Cratylus. He has elaborately discussed this opposition of meaning within the same words. I derived these examples from him, but not being a psychologist I am not competent to say how conclusive it is. JOOS:

It is now possible for me to say this very briefly. I am suspicious about logic that seems to depend on particular languages. I don't know how I can admit that there is a logical contradiction in the two meanings of the Latin word sacer. Once I have at least one other language which unites precisely these polar opposites, to me it means that the meaning of sacer or taboo does not contain a polar opposition at all, but a quite simple notion which could be paraphrased by the experts something like this : that which one approaches only with awe and with an apprehension of danger; and that's a single meaning. VERHAAR:

It is a single explanation of two meanings. HYMES:

I was going to use the taboo example almost as you did, but also with regard to

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alius, the other example frequently cited. I think this question of opposite meanings goes back to Freud, to Karl Abel, the man who worked on Egyptian. I think there is a very grave problem of method involved here; namely, to what extent our ideas about the existence of these opposite meanings depend upon translation from one language into a particular other language. I have always understood that the word alius meant something like 'at a distance or removed from the plane', depending upon your vantage point. This would be 'high' in English if you are looking up, and 'deep' if you are looking down. VERHAAR:

It strikes me that Karl Abel is precisely the source also mentioned by Hofstätter. I personally would have no difficulty in accepting this, that it would come out only in translation. However, 1 feel, but I cannot really prove, that there are two cases of this polarity of meaning. The first one depends upon perspective, as when I can say that the sky is high; but when I am lying on my back, I can say that the skies are deep. Whether that would constitute two meanings or only one would entirely depend upon the theory of meaning that one has. In the case of sacer, meaning both 'holy' and 'cursed', there seems to be psychologically something behind that, since there is this tendency in man, as you say, of apprehension and at the same time awe and also love towards the Supreme Being. These overlap with one another in ways which psychologists seem to know more about. But I would insist that these are two different cases. HYMES:

I can't possibly deny that there may not exist very valid examples of this, but both of these seem to me exceptions to the problem. There was a translation aspect of taboo too. I think one of the first missionaries to the Sioux Indians in the United States had difficulty in taking their word which corresponds to taboo as equivalent to 'sacred', and therefore finding people not coming to his church. The reason being that that which is sacred was also to be avoided because it was dangerous. (Columbia University): I want to pursue this question a little farther, and I hope that I am not diverging too far from the general topic under discussion. It seems that when we are considering lexicographical matters, of which these are examples, there are several problems we can introduce which, strictly speaking, could be set aside for later consideration if we take as our objective only the formulation of a lexicon, or a statement of a portion of a lexicon which is to be used by the speaker. Now I take polysémie forms and homonyms both as introduced problems which could be set aside. These become problems because you depart from the form, let us say the form monkey, and see that it has several usages. Whereas if you were to place monkey, shark, or terrier in a taxonomy as the lexicographer would, you would see

MANER THORPE

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that indeed you do have these forms appearing in several different taxonomies. But your justification for bringing them together is one of interest of a phylogenetic rather than an ontogenetic nature. You are asking historical questions nonhistorically. For the speaker homonyms in polysémie forms do not exist, the homonym being one in which historical analysis shows you to have never been an original unity and the polysémie form which historical analysis shows you to have once had a unity. These are interesting questions indeed, but we can simplify initially and certainly end up with a much more simplified final description if we set aside these phylogenetic questions. I think this makes a bit clearer where Katz and Fodor stand with their formalistic, or as you would say, more rational approach to language. They are at this point not taking up phylogeny, they are only interested in ontogeny, and departing not from forms but from some reference, as you have used the word. VERHAAR:

It just occurs to me that if I were to be asked whether I mean it phylogenetically or ontogenetically, I would say ontogenetically. I am not concerned as a synchronic linguist with how homonymy is traceable historically and to what sources, but in the experience (because phenomenology always has for its object experience) of the language user. Now, of course, I have to have methodological constraints to make sure that not everybody is saying what he feels in a way that can hardly be expected to appeal to other linguists, and Reichling has laid down such principles. But I do think that there must be some way by which such an approach could still be ontogenetic, and yet not be so, what I would call, overintellectual as the Katz-Fodor theory. THORPE:

My objection was that to bring together those two usages of shark and see that therein lies a problem is to implicitly bring forth a phylogenetic question. Because from the point of view of the taxonomies in which the two sharks, terriers, and so forth, appear, they would never be brought together even though the forms, of course, are identical. (UCLA): It has been claimed that phenomenology as a sort of mid-level abstraction is isomorphic to the facts, I wonder if you could provide an explicit description of some aspect of phenomenology, relating it to say, metonymy, or analogy, or metaphor. ROBERT WILSON

VERHAAR:

Actually, Reichling's book is 450 pages long, and when he comes to speak about the metaphor, he already presupposes various claims that he has made — for example, the complete identity of the word meaning and also the autonomy of the word meaning as compared to the situation. Further, he has given principles for the isolation of the word as such, its identification in terms of what would later be called,

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I would say, basically distributional. The approach is basically one of taking concrete examples of language users. Let me give one example which is very clear, although it has nothing to do with metaphor. If I ask the man in the street, not a linguist, what the meaning is of s in speaks, he speaks, the man would probably be flabbergasted and say it doesn't mean anything, it just means speaks or something like that. He would miss the point. Reichling says the fact that he cannot formulate it linguistically does not disprove the fact that he does know the way in which speaks is different from speak, or — a plural is a better case — books is different from book because if you say I have one books, he will immediately retort by saying You can't say that, Ws not English. And that sort of knowledge, that implicit knowledge, is what he elaborates in his phenomenological analyses. So, of course, you see how close it is to Chomsky's view, although the method is quite different. Now with the metaphor, he does a similar thing. He shows first of all that a metaphor is not just a misnomer, and then why. Then he shows that it depends upon the experience of the language user. He gives an example of a learned biologist conversing with his six-year-old son about a cow, and then he explains that for the child the cow is no more than a moo-moo maker, but for the biologist it would be a whole world of knowledge. Now the reason why they can still converse with one another about it is because there is a basic identity of meaning in the language (in the langue). In metaphoric denomination, it is possible to isolate certain elements of that meaning, apply those, and not the others. That would be very briefly the analysis that he follows. (University of Kiel, Germany) : We talked a minute ago about polysemy and homophony, and we agreed it's a question of whether you approach them historically or nonhistorically. If you approach them synchronically, they are both the same. But at any rate, I take it then that Prof. Verhaar accepts the idea of multiple meaning. I am principally interested in what phenomenologists think of Laszlo Antal's idea — this Marxist objective idea of meaning in which there is only one meaning possible, and meaning is the rule for the use of the word, preceding the word. Since it precedes the word there can be only one meaning for every word, and we would have to consider things like polysemy as separate words with one meaning attached to each. I am sort of an advocatus diaboli at present; I am neither a Marxist nor do I appreciate this idea. One doesn't run into phenomologists of your caliber too often so I raise this question here. GERHARD NICKEL

VERHAAR:

I am not sure, could you just frame the question itself into one sentence? NICKEL:

I am interested in your attitude, the attitude of a phenomenologist, towards Antal's ideas as expressed in Questions of Meaning and in Meaning in Content Analysis — that

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meaning is the rule for the use of a word and that every kind of linguistics until now was subjective, including Saussure, confusingly subjective, that language is social, objective (the Marxist view), that there is one meaning, a meaning given by the rule for the word. In other words, there is no polysemy, because we instead deal with another word. So this is my question. Please don't identify me with it; I could not give the answer of a phenomenologist and I grasp this opportunity to put the question to you. VERHAAR:

1 have not studied Antal's books carefully. In just flipping the pages, what interested me is that, in a certain way, he includes the situation. These are, of course, all external factors of judging a theory. I also find that anthropological linguists are apparently more intersted in them, and I certainly find that generative grammarians are particularly uninterested in them. The way you convey Antal's thesis, I would not say that it was phenomenological. But, comparatively speaking, it would be more phenomenological than the semantic theory of Fodor and Katz, and that, unfortunately, is the only thing I can say about it because I have not read the books carefully. (UCLA) : I am not quite sure how your own position differs from that taken in the transformational-generative approach to the difference between competence and performance. I agree with you absolutely that the model as proposed by Katz in his article 'Mentalism' seems to be neither a model of competence nor of performance. Perhaps it is an attempt to be both, but the setting into little boxes in the brain which he posits of different components of grammar and also the neurophysiological mechanisms would seem to make the entire model a behavioristic model. However, one can separate these two aspects of language, which I think that you do, and, while not giving a physical basis or a behavioristic basis to a model of competence, one can at the same time posit that there are nonmechanistic causal principles involved which one is seeking to discover. And I got confused as to how your own position differs from that which I believe is present in the approach that is taken but not represented by Katz's article. VICTORIA FROMKIN

VERHAAR:

First of all, I would say that I also have the impression that Katz's articles make what I would consider to be a dualistic separation between performance and competence. On the other hand, I do not see that this model would suit either competence or performance. Actually, I repeat, I am not at all sure what the model stands for. I just cannot believe that he seriously means that all sorts of flip-flop cards and things go on in the brain in successive stages. It is somehow supposed to work, but he does not say how. My point was that it was rather behavioristic and especially that I think it does not do sufficient justice to Chomsky's basic insights, because Chomsky precisely

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has a totalizing view of the whole of speech generation, and then Katz starts talking about speech production, breaking it down. If I may be forgiven a seemingly contradictory expression it seems that Katz is atomistically building u p f r o m the b o t t o m what Chomsky has synthesized f r o m the top, but not until after he has unduly broken down what should not have been broken down in the first place. A n d this is one of my reasons for thinking that Chomsky probably will not go along with this. N o w of course it is the privilege of Katz to differ with Chomsky, but after all he does appeal t o Chomsky and he purports to explain his principles, and I d o not think that is what he does. As f o r the dualism, I have n o views on that. F o r example, Reichling, who is certainly far f r o m any dualism, has a very interesting sort of generation which would be a left-to-right generation in generative terms, but not of the Markov kind. I think that it certainly should touch some of the purely competence kind of generation that Chomsky has, but I do not see just how.

REFERENCES Apel, K. O., 1967 The Development of Analytical Philosophy of Language as Related to the Problem of the 'Geisteswissenschaften' (= Supplementary Series of Foundations of Language, No. 4.) (Dordrecht, Reidel). Austin, J. L., 1961a "Ifs and Cans", Philosophical Papers, ed. by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, pp. 153-80 (London, Oxford University Press). 1961b "A Plea for Excuses", Philosophical Papers, ed. by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, pp. 123-52 (London, Oxford University Press). Ayer, Α., 1957 The Problem of Knowledge (Penguin Books). Bach, Emmon, 1964 An Introduction to Generative Grammars (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1956-7. "Husserl's Conception of a Purely Logical Grammar", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 17.362-9. Bierwisch, Manfred, 1967 "Some Semantic Universale of German Adjectivale", Foundations of Language 3.1-36. Blondel, Maurice, 1934 La Pensée. 2 vols. (Paris, Alean). Bloomfield, Leonard, 1933 Language (New York, Holt). Bühler, Karl, 1934 Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Jena, Gustav Fischer). Caims, Dorion, 1940 "The Ideality of Verbal Expressions", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1.453-62. Carnap, Rudolf, 1955 "Foundations of Logic and Mathematics". International Encyclopedia of Unified Sciences. 1.143-71. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Caws, Peter, 1965 The Philosophy of Science. A Systematic Account (Princeton, N. J., D. van Nostrand Co). Cherry, E. Colin, 1957 On Human Communication. A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism. (Cambridge, Mass., Technology Press).

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Chomsky, Noam, 1955 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, Microfilm (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Library). 1957 Syntactic Structures (The Hague, Mouton). 1959 Review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner, Language 35.26-58. 1964 Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague, Mouton. 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press). 1966a "Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar", Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok. 3.1-60 (The Hague, Mouton). 1966b Cartesian Linguistics (New York, Harper and Row), de Saussure, Ferdinand, 1949 Cours de linguistique générale, 4th ed. (Paris, Payot). Evans, Donald, 1963 The Logic of Self-Involvement (London, SCM Press). Farber, Marvin, 1962 The Foundation of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Philosophy (New York, Paine-Whitman). Fillmore, Charles H., 1965 "Entailment Rules in a Semantic Theory", The Ohio State University Research Foundation. Project on Linguistic Analysis. Report No. 10. 1966 "Deictic Categories in the Semantics of 'Come' ", Foundations of Language 2.219-39. Fodor, Jerry A. and Jerrold J. Katz, eds., 1964 The Structure, of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall). Gardiner, Sir Alan. 1951 The Theory of Speech and Language, 2nd ed. (London, Oxford University Press). Hartmann, Peter, 1963 Theorie der Grammatik (The Hague, Mouton). 1954 "Die Rolle der Sprache in Husserl's Lehre von der Konstitution. Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis der Leistung der Sprache", Der Deutschunterricht 2.29-55. 1963 "Die Sprachbetrachtung Leo Weisgerbers—System und Kritik", Der Deutschunterricht 11.104-24. Hill, Archibald Α., 1966 "Non-Grammatical Prerequisites to Phonological Statement" Foundations of Language (2.319-337). Hockett, Charles F., 1955 A Manual of Phonology (Baltimore, Md., Waverly Press). Hofstätter, Peter R., 1949 Vom Leben des Wortes. Das Problem an Piatons 'Kratylos' dargestellt (Wien, Braumüller). Husserl, Edmund, 1913 Logische Untersuchungen. 2nd revised ed. (Halle an der Saale, Niemeyer). 1929 "Formale und Transzendentale Logik", Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 10.17 ff. (Halle an der Saale, Niemeyer). 1931 Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Trans, by W. R. Boyce Gibson (London Allen and Unwin). Kahn, Charles H., 1966 "The Greek Verb 'To Be' and the Concept of Being", Foundations of Language 2.245-65. Katz, Jerrold J. 1964a "Mentalism in Linguistics", Language 40.124-37. 1964b "Analyticity and Contradiction in Natural Language", The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz, 519-34 (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall). 1964 "Semi-sentences", The Structure of Language. Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz, 400-16 (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall). 1966a The Philosophy of Language (New York, Harper and Row). 1966b "Mr. Pfeifer on Questions of Reference", Foundations of Language 2.241-4.

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Katz, Jerrold J. and Jerry A. Fodor, 1964 "The Structure of a Semantic Theory", The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language, ed. by Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz, 479-518. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall). Katz, Jerrold J. and Paul M. Postal, 1964 An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press). Kwant, R. C., 1965 1965 Phenomenology of Language (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press). Langendoen, D. Terence, 1964 Review of Studies in Linguistic Analysis, Language 40.305-21. Lauer, Quentin, 1965a Phenomenology, its Genesis and Prospect (New York, Harper and Row). Lauer, Quentin, 1965b Foreword to the translation of Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy by Edmund Husserl (New York, Harper and Row). Mates, Benson, 1961 Stoic Logic (Berkeley, University of California Press). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945 Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris, Gallimard). 1964 L'œil et l'esprit (Paris, Gallimard). Morris, Charles, 1946 Signs, Language and Behavior (New York, Prentice-Hall). Ogden, C. K. and I. A. Richards, 1930 The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. 3rd ed. (London, Kegan Paul). Postal, Paul M., 1966 Review of Elements of General Linguistics by André Martinet, Foundations of Language 2.151-86. Reichling, Μ. Α., 1935 Het Woord. Een Studie omirent de grondslag van taal en taalgebruik (Nijmegen, Berkhout). 1940 "Over het personaal aspect in het taalgebruik", Bündel de Vooys (Groningen and Batavia, J. B. Wolters). 1957 "Het handlingskarakter van het woord", Nieuwe Taalgids 31.308-21. 1961 "Principles and Methods of Syntax: Cryptanalytical Formalism", Lingua 10.1-17. Ryle, Gilbert, 1958 The Concept of Mind (London, Hutchinson). Spiegelberg, H., 1960 The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols. (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff). 1965 "A Phenomenological Approach to the Ego", The Monist 49.1-17. Staal, J. F., 1963 Euclidei and Panini (Amsterdam, Polak en van Gennep). 1965a "Generative Syntax and Semantics", Foundations of Language 1.133-53. 1965b "Reification, Quotation and Nominalization", Essays in Honor of J. M. BocheAski, 152-87 (Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing Co.). 1966 "Analyticity" Foundations bf Language 2.67-93. van de Hulst, H. C. and C. A. van Peursen, 1953 Phaenomenologie en natuurwetenschap (Utrecht, Bijleveld). van Meisen, Α., 1961 Science and Technology (Pittsburgh, Duquesne Studies), van Peursen, C. Α., 1959 "Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20.181-97. 1966 Body, Soul, Spirit, A Survey of the Body-Mind Problem. Transi, from the Dutch by H. H. Hoskins (London, Oxford University). Verhaar, John M. W., 1963 Some Relations Between Perception, Speech and Thought. (Assen, van Gorcum).

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1964 "Speech, Language and Inner Form", Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, Cambridge, Mass., 1962, ed. by Horace G. Lunt, 748-55., (The Hague, Mouton). Vidos, B. E., 1959 Manuale di linguistica romanza (Firenze, Leo S. Oschi). von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 1876 Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, ed. by Α. F. Pott (Berlin). Wann, T. W. ed., 1964 Psychology, Contrasting Bases for Behaviorism and Phenomenology. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953 Philosophical Investigations, transi, by G. Ε. M. Anscombe. (Oxford, Blackwell). 1961 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transi, by D. F. Pears and D. F. McGuinness (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Ziff, Paul, 1960 Semantic Analysis (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press). 1965 "About What an Adequate Grammar Couldn't Do", Foundations of Language 1.5-13.

PART II

METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES

BEHAVIORAL TESTS IN LINGUISTICS PAUL L. GARVIN

1. PLACE OF BEHAVIORAL TESTS IN A METHOD-ORIENTED APPROACH

Behavioral tests are highly formatted behavioral techniques used in the process of linguistic analysis. They differ from less highly formatted techniques such as elicitation which is used for systematic data collection (cf. Garvin 1964:144). Behavioral tests play an essential part in the method-oriented approach to linguistics which I am advocating. The aim of this approach is to develop the theoretical and methodological apparatus needed for the conduct of a "controlled empirical inquiry" (Nagel 1961:453) in linguistics. It is my contention that at the present stage of the field such a development should be given priority over the formulation of elaborate deductive theories. This does not mean that a method-oriented approach is opposed to theory.1 It differs from the more popular model-oriented approaches by including in its theoretical considerations, not only questions of the nature of language, but also the problem of the nature of the process of linguistic analysis and of its relation to the theoretical assumptions about the nature of language. Another significant difference lies in the conception of the nature of theory itself : theory is understood to be, not a deductive system in the strong logico-mathematical sense, but a set of assumptions about the nature of the object in a less ambitious humanistic sense. Consequently, the grammar of a language is here not considered a theory,2 but a description based on a theory. The description is obtained by deriving from the general properties of language as stipulated by the theory, not a set of more specific properties of particular languages, but a set of methodological principles by means of which these specific properties are ascertained (see Garvin 1964:9-11). These methodological principles stipulate both the aims of the description and the procedures by which it is to be accomplished. The aims of the description are formulated in terms of the theoretical point of view adopted by the analyst. In my point of view, "language is viewed as consisting of a 1

Cf. Kiefer (1967: 15): "Garvin's approach is, in contrast to the previous ones, anti-theoretic...". ' The contrary view is exemplified by the well-known statement by Chomsky (1957: 49) that "a grammar of the language L is essentially a theory of L".

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system of units of different defining characteristics and orders of complexity which are linked to each other — and defined — by the relations into which they enter" (Garvin 1963:22). Consequently, the aim of linguistic description is to ascertain these units and relations. The procedures of the description are formulated in terms of the rigor imposed by a method-oriented approach. It is not enough that units and relations be observed (or intuited) and reported on — they must be properly defined.3 This means that initially the types of units and relations which are to be described must be precisely specified. This means further that ultimately the recognition criteria must be established for determining the representatives of the different types and classes of units and relations, and for distinguishing these types and classes from each other as well as from other objects with which they could be confused.4 The desired rigor both in the initial specification and in the ultimate establishment of recognition criteria is achieved by a technique of definition; for both purposes, appropriate types of definitions are formulated and applied. The means for the initial specification of units and relations are stipulative definitions (see Robinson 1962:59-92), that is, verbal definitions in the Aristotelian tradition which set forth their functionally relevant characteristics. These are formulated in terms of a theoretical or observational motivation: the choice of the notions to be defined and the postulation of their assumed defining characteristics are motivated by theoretical considerations or insights gained from observation. The means for the establishment of recognition criteria are operational definitions which prescribe the procedural steps by which the presence of relevant characteristics of units and relations is ascertained in particular cases.5 The procedural steps prescribed by the operational definitions consist of various types of analytic operations. 8 These operations are carried out by means of appropriate analytic techniques which in turn are, whenever possible, implemented by behavioral tests in which the analyst's informants serve as test subjects — the closest approximation, in linguistics, to controlled experiments (cf. Nagel 1961:451-2). Summing up the above discussion, the procedural sequence leading up to behavioral tests can be stated as follows:7 s

The emphasis on definition does not mean the exclusion of observation and intuition from a method-oriented approach. What it does mean is that the trained investigator's intuitive observations are merely a first step in the analysis, to be followed by a procedural sequence leading up to the necessary definitions and their application. * For a strong opinion to the contrary, see Lees 1962. 5 Note that in my approach verbal and operational definitions are not considered mutually exclusive (as for instance in Rapoport 1953:11-29), but rather mutually supportive: the verbal definition establishes the theoretical interest of the terms to be defined and thereby specifies the aims of the description, and the operational definition is a basic tool for achieving this aim. ' For a listing and discussion of various analytic operations in linguistics, see Garvin 1964, particularly pp. 22-77. 7 Note that this is an ideal sequence; there are cases in which the stipulative definition cannot be formulated separately but coincides with the operational definition; there are other cases in which the

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motivation (theory/observation) stipulative definitions operational definitions analytic operations analytic techniques implementation by behavioral tests. Let me illustrate this sequence by using the well-known initial unit of morphological analysis, the morph (see Garvin 1964:23-7), as an example. In the American descritivist tradition, the concept of the morph is closely associated with that of the morpheme (cf Hockett 1947). This association is further specified in my own theoretical view: the morpheme — like all linguistic units — represents a range of permissible variation (see Garvin 1952); the morph is one of the observable elementary units of form that may enter into the range of a morpheme. The stipulative definition of the morph states precisely this condition. It merely formulates the aim of the description (which is to ascertain the elements that enter into the range of a morpheme) without providing the means for determining the necessary recognition criteria. Consequently, an operational definition is required, which has been formulated as follows : a morph is a "smallest separable stretch of form with identifiable presence of meaning" (Garvin 1964:23). The analytic operations prescribed by this definition are the separation of forms 8 (carried out by the techniques of substitution and dropping; Ibid. 23-5); and the identification of the presence of meaning (based on the operational representations of meaning by translation or paraphrase; Ibid. 26-7). The techniques of substitution and dropping lend themselves to implementation by behavioral tests; these will be discussed further below. An important characteristic of the procedural sequence set forth above is that its final two steps, the analytic techniques and behavioral tests, are in a certain sense independent of the preceding ones; the same analytic techniques with their implementations by behavioral tests can be applied to carry out more than one kind of analytic operation in the definition of more than one type of unit or relation. Thus, the technique of substitution, used in the operation of separating forms, can also be applied in the operation of establishing functional equivalence (Garvin 1964:9-10). An instance of this is the determination of morpheme clusters. The stipulative definition of this type of unit reads : a sequence of morphemes which, within a word, is functionally equivalent to a single morpheme. The operational definition is based on the procedural rule that a relation of functional equivalence corresponds operationIly to a relation of right substitutability (cf. Ibid. 60-1). In its formulation, the

operational definition cannot be formulated separately but simply consists in a statement of the analytic operations. * This operation must be carried out exhaustively in order to insure that the separable stretches of form are indeed 'smallest'.

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following considerations have to be taken into account: the substitution technique by which this relation is ascertained requires, in addition to a criterion for Tightness Ibid. 61), also a properly defined frame. Since the morpheme cluster in the case of many languages enters into the definition of the word {Ibid. 32), it has to be defined at a stage of the analysis where the word has not yet been defined and thus is not available as a proper frame. Consequently, another frame has to be employed. Such a frame is given by the behavioral unit of morphological analysis, the informant word.9 The operational definition of the morpheme cluster thus is: a sequence of morphemes rightly substitutable, within an informant word, for a single morpheme. The substitution test used to implement the substitution technique for carrying out this definition will differ from the same test used in the separation of forms by the conditions affecting the performance of the test. (For example, see Tables 1 and 2 below.)

2. SPECIFICATION OF BEHAVIORAL TESTS

As was illustrated in the final portions of the preceding section, the crucial question in the proper application of behavioral tests is that of the conditions under which they apply and of the variables that enter into them. In order to meet these requirements, the design of behavioral tests has to be precisely specified. This includes, as a minimum, the following design features : (1) The ORIGINAL UTTERANCE — the utterance upon which the test is to be performed. The original utterance consists of a suitably defined segment, with a structure commensurate to the purpose of the test, and specified in terms of the state of the analysis at the stage at which the test is applied. The structure of the original utterance is commensurate to the purpose of the test in the sense that it contains, or consists of, portions that are likely candidates for the types of units, or for carriers of the relations, which the test is intended to ascertain. The original utterance is specified in terms of the state of the analysis in the sense that the types of units and relations defined in previous stages of the analysis are taken into account in its specification. (2) The TESTING OPERATION — the operation that is to be performed on the original utterance in the course of the test. This includes a stipulation of those utterance elements that are to be held constant and those that are to be varied, as well as of other conditions affecting the performance of the test. (3) The RESULTANT UTTERANCE — the utterance resulting from the performance of the test. The resultant utterance will be related to the original utterance in some • A behavioral unit is a unit, the boundaries of which are given by direct observation. It is opposed to analytic units, the boundaries of which have to be ascertained by a process of analysis. An informant word is an example given by an informant in response to a question by the analyst which contains only one lexical meaning and only the types of grammatical meaning that are likely to be represented by morphological categories. Examples of informant words are the forms obtained in the elicitation of paradigms designed to illustrate the grammatical categories of, say, the verb (such as forms corresponding to Ί am walking' or 'they were sitting')·

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manner relevant to the purpose of the test and in accord with the criterion for Tightness (see below). (4) The CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS — the criterion by which it is determined whether or not the test operation has been performed rightly, that is, in such a manner that its results are both reliable and meaningful in terms of the purpose of the test. In the actual performance of the test, the analyst's informant will serve as a test subject. His participation may apply to all the aspects of the test. Thus, he either can be asked to formulate the original utterance, or it can be presented to him. He can be asked to perform the test operation and produce the resultant utterance. His responses will serve as a basis for applying the criterion for rightness. The latter is the necessary minimum for the proper performance of a behavioral test : while it is possible for the analyst to formulate the original utterance and to perform the testing operation without calling upon the informant, the test will be valid only if it is related to the informant's verbal response pattern at least in the application of the criterion for rightness which is the essential ingredient in the evaluation of the test. Let me illustrate the design of behavioral tests by using the substitution test as an example, first as applied to the separation of forms, then as applied to the establishment of morpheme clusters. In both applications of the substitution test, the original utterance consists of an informant word and the resultant utterance likewise consists of an informant word. However, the two applications differ in terms of the stipulated conditions. In the test performed for separating morphs, no further condition is imposed on the original utterance, partly because no such further stipulation is necessary for the purposes of this test, partly because none is possible at the early stage of the analysis at which this test is applied. On the other hand, in the test performed for establishing morpheme clusters, the original utterance is required to be an informant word previously segmented into morphs which have, in addition, been assigned to morphemes to the extent possible. This is necessary because the testing operation is to be performed in terms of morphemes, and it is possible, since this test is not applied until a later stage of the analysis at which the required preceding operations of segmenting into morphs and assigning at least some morphs to morphemes as their allomorphs have already been performed. In both applications, the testing operation consists of the replacement of a portion of the original utterance by another form. However, the conditions that have to be stipulated differ, as does the criterion for rightness. In the case of the substitution test applied to the separation of forms, no further condition is imposed on either the portion to be replaced or the portion which replaces it, since any substitution whatsoever will result in establishing the separability of forms which the test was intended to ascertain. In the case of the substitution test performed for establishing morpheme clusters, on the other hand, further conditions are imposed : the portion to be replaced should consist of more than one morph, while the portion replacing it should consist

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of a single morph only. The reason for this is that only if the substitutability of one morph for several morphs can be shown will the test serve to ascertain the presence of morpheme clusters. The criterion for Tightness in the case of the separation of forms is simply that the resultant utterance should again be an informant word; this criterion is sufficient in view of the limited aim of the operation. In the case of the establishment of morpheme clusters, an additional criterion is imposed — the portion to be replaced and the portion replacing it must have the same category meaning (e.g. both indicate person, or both have lexical meanings impressionistically assignable to the same word class); this additional stipulation is required to determine whether the condition of functional equivalence set forth in the stipulative definition has been met. Examples (taken from Kutenai, an American Indian language spoken in Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia) are shown on Tables 1 and 2. TABLE 1

Application of Substitution Test to Separation of Forms hucPinaxe· Ί am going there' replace hu- in hucPinaxe- by AIMRESULTANT UTTERANCE: hincPinaxe· 'You (sg.) are going there' CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS: the resultant utterance is viable, hence both hu- and Amare separable forms.

ORIGINAL UTTERANCE: TESTING OPERATION:

TABLE 2

Application of Substitution Test to Establishment of Morpheme Clusters hin-cP-in-ax-e· 'You (sg.) are going there' replace -cP-in-ax- in hin-cP-in-ax-e· by -ce-katRESULTANT UTTERANCE: hin-ce-kat-e· 'You (sg.) are showing (it)' CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS : resultant utterance is viable, both -cP-in-ax- and -ce-kathave verbal stem meaning, hence -cP—in=ax- is a morpheme cluster.

ORIGINAL UTTERANCE: TESTING OPERATION:

3. EXAMPLES OF BEHAVIORAL TESTS

The discussion so far might give the impression that the use of behavioral tests is limited to the early morphological stages of morphemic analysis.10 This is, of course, not so. In the following, I shall illustrate their application in the more advanced stages of the analysis such as syntax. More specifically, I shall discuss the use of behavioral tests in the syntactic analysis which is a prerequisite to machine translation research. 10

Note that in my theoretical frame of reference the morphemic level of structuring includes both morphology and syntax.

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I shall be concerned with the definitional problems posed by two sets of relations in Russian syntax that are of particular importance for the achievement of adequate translations into English. They are : (1) the differentiation between two basic syntactic functions of prepositional structures, namely, government and complementation (roughly corresponding to strong and weak rection in traditional Russian grammar) ; (2) the identification of two important syntactic functions of genitival constructions, namely, genitive of subject and genitive of object. The priority given to these two definitional problems in formulating the aims of a syntactic description of Russian is not primarily based on a theoretical frame of reference, although they do constitute classical problems in the treatment of Slavic syntax. Rather, it is based on insights stemming from the observation of their importance to the adequate translation from Russian into English. This affects the definitional sequence to the extent of reducing the significance of a stipulative definition, as opposed to a theoretically motivated description in which such a definition is an essential ingredient. The reason is that the aim of the translationally motivated description follows clearly enough from the formulation of the translational requirements and thus the further specification given by a stipulative definition is less necessary. In the discussion below, the procedural sequence set forth in section 1 (motivation, stipulative definitions, operational definitions, analytic operations, analytic techniques, implementation by behavioral tests) will be followed. 3.1 Government and Complementation The insight motivating the formulation of this descriptive problem stems from the observation that the correct translation of the Russian preposition into English depends primarily on the syntactic function of the prepositional structure of which it forms part. In cases of government, the translation of the Russian preposition depends primarily on the governor of the governed prepositional structure. In cases of complementation, the translation of the preposition depends primarily on its prepositional object. An example of government is the relation between predicate and prepositional structure in the clause OH cozAauiaemcn na onepaifuio 'he agrees to the operation' ; the Russian preposition na is translated by English 'to' because its governor is the verb cozatuambCH 'consent' and just as coznauiambcn in Russian governs m, so 'consent* in English governs 'to'. The dependence of the translation on the governing predicate becomes evident when one considers an example containing the same preposition, but dependent on another governor. Thus, in the case of the clause OH eo3deûcmeyem Ha compyÒHma 'he has an effect on (his) co-worker', the Russian preposition is translated by English 'on' because its governor is the verb eo3deucmeoeamb and its English equivalent 'have an effect' governs 'on'. An example of complementation is the relation between predicate and prepositional MOTIVATION.

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structure in the clause OH paöomaem na φαόριικβ 'he works at the factory'. The Russian preposition na is translated by English 'at' because its object is the noun φαδριικα, and just as φαβριικα in Russian requires m to form a complement of place, so 'factory' in English requires 'at'. The dependence of the translation on the prepositional object becomes evident when an example containing the same preposition, but with another object, is considered. Thus, in the case of the clause OH paöomaem πα yAuije 'he works on the street', the Russian preposition is translated by English 'on' because its object is the noun yjuifa, and its English equivalent 'street' requires 'on' to form a complement of place. STiPULATivE DEFINITIONS. As was stated in the preceding section, the translational motivation for the differentiation of government and complementation is strong enough to reduce the requirement for stipulative definitions. Thus, tentative stipulative definitions will be adequate to the purpose. These can be formulated by specifying more precisely the traditional notions of strong and weak rection. Rection can be defined as a relation of determination between a superordinate and a subordinate structure. Strength and weakness can be defined in terms of the number and kinds of properties of the subordinate structure that are determined by the superordinate one. In these terms, government can be defined as a relation in which not only the selection, but also the grammatical form of the governed structure are determined by the governing structure. Complementation, on the other hand, can then be defined as a relation in which only the selection, but not the grammatical form of the complement is determined by a pivotal structure. Thus, in the above example of government, both the selection and the grammatical form of the governed structure na onepatfuw are determined by the governing structure cozAauiaemca: the choice of governed structures depends on the selection restrictions imposed by the governing structure (one can agree only to certain things) ; a given structure, in order to be governed by the predicate cozAauiaemcn has to have the grammatical form of a prepositional structure introduced by na. In the above example of complementation, only the selection of the complement πα φαδριικβ is determined by the pivotal structure paöomaem ·. the choice of complements depends on the selection restrictions imposed by the pivotal structure (there are only so many places one can work in) ; the grammatical form of the complement depends on the prepositional object (with φαδριικα, it may be na, but not, for instance β; with cad 'garden', it may be β, as in β cady 'in the garden', but not na). OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS. The operational definitions pertain, not to the relations themselves, but to the prepositional structures that manifest these relations and have to be differentiated with respect to them. The definitions are derived from a more detailed examination of the selection restrictions for the two relations under consideration: the class of permitted complements for a given pivotal structure may include adverbs, while the class of permitted governed structures for a given governing structure may not. As a consequence, prepositional structures functioning as complements can be considered functionally

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equivalent to adverbs, while such structures functioning as governed structures cannot. Since functional equivalence corresponds operationally to right substitutability, prepositional structures can be defined as complements whenever they are rightly substitutable for adverbs, as governed structures whenever they are not, the criterion for Tightness being semantic parallelism. Thus, it is possible rightly to substitute the adverb όαΛβκο 'far away' for the prepositional structure πα φαβριικβ in the clause OH paöomaem πα (ßaöpme, yielding OH paöomaem όαΛβκο 'he works far away'. Consequently, this prepositional structure is defined as a complement. It is not possible rightly to substitute any adverb for the prepositional structure Ha onepaifuio in the clause OH cozAaiuaemcn na onepaywo. Consequently, this prepositional structure is defined as a governed structure. ANALYTIC OPERATION. The analytic operation can be defined as the determination of the function (government or complementation) of a given prepositional structure. ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE. The analytic technique for determining the function of a given prepositional structure is based on the operational definition set forth further above. This definition uses as a criterion the right substitutability for adverbs of prepositional structures functioning as complements, and hence the analytic technique will be a substitution technique. The basic problem in developing such a technique is finding the particular adverb for which a given prepositional structure is substitutable in order to insure the consistent applicability of a substitution technique to all cases. If there were an adverb corresponding to each prepositional structure that is a candidate for complement, then a substitution technique could be devised using a given adverb for each given prepositional structure. Clearly, this is not the case in Russian : while, for example, there exists a Russian adverb φαόρηΗΗο 'by factory methods', it does not correspond to prepositional structures such as πα φαδρηκε and is therefore not rightly substitutable for them in clauses such as OH paöomaem πα φαόριικβ.

The only type of adverb for which a prepositional structure functioning as complement will consistently be rightly substitutable is a generalized adverb such as an adverbial demonstrative (e.g., maM, mozda) or interrogative (e.g., ¿de, κοζόα); these will be the ones used in the substitution technique needed here. The use of generalized forms such as demonstratives or interrogatives further allows for extension of the substitution technique to include the identification of prepositional structures functioning as governed structures: these are not rightly substitutable for adverbs, but they are rightly substitutable for other prepositional structures such as prepositional demonstratives or interrogatives (e.g., na 3mo, na nmo as in OH cozAaiuaemcH na smo 'he consents to this', na umo OH cozAaiuaemcn 'what does he consent to?'). Use of demonstrative forms will yield a variant of the usual substitution technique, while use of interrogatives will require a recasting of the substitution technique in an interrogative format. Although the former may appear to be more straightforward, the interrogative substitution technique is operationally preferable because it coin-

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cides with a tradition in conventional Russian grammar. It is thus more familiar to literate Russian informants and consequently allows easier and more consistent implementation. BEHAVIORAL TESTS. The interrogative substitution technique can be implemented by a simple question test which is a more precise version of the question technique used in conventional Russian grammar. The design of this test is as follows: the original utterance consists of a simple declarative clause containing the prepositional structure, the function of which is to be determined, as well as a subject and predicate; the testing operating consists in rephrasing this clause into a question in which an interrogative adverb or prepositional interrogative is substituted for the original prepositional structure, while retaining the original subject and predicate; the resultant utterance will be a correspondingly phrased question ; finally, the criterion for lightness will be the appropriateness of the question to the original utterance. In case the original prepositional structure functions as a complement, the question test using an interrogative adverb is expected to succeed and that using a prepositional interrogative is expected to fail. In case the original prepositional structure functions as a governed structure, on the other hand, the question test using an interrogative adverb is expected to fail and the question test using a prepositional interrogative is expected to succeed. For examples, see tables 3 and 4. In most applications of the above definitional sequence to Russian data, informant responses to the question tests are wholly definitive. In a number of cases, however, responses were given only with some hesitation. In these cases, the hesitant responses furthermore did not correspond to the intuitive understanding of the function of the prepositional structures concerned, nor to the understanding of their function reached on the basis of translation practice. These cases are illustrated by instances of the type y otciieomHbix 'in animals', as in the clause amo mÔModaemcn y Mcueommix 'this is observed in animals'. In applying the question test to this example, informants will, after some hesitation, reluctantly accept y κοζ o amo HaÔModaemcn? 'In whom is this observed?' rather than rde amo HaÔAwdaemcn? 'Where is this observed?' as the appropriate question. This would suggest the possible assignment of governed-structure function to the prepositional structure, but — in view of the indefiniteness of the response — not serve as conclusive evidence. In addition, this inconclusive assignment conflicts with the intuitive impression that this prepositional structure is more likely to function as a complement than a governed structure. This impression is confirmed by the practice of translating examples of this type in terms of the prepositional object (irrespective of predicate, y with prepositional objects designating biological entities is translated by 'in', as in y ΗβΛοβεκα 'in man', y cKoma 'in cattle', y Myx 'in flies'). The basic question raised by these indeterminacies is that of the validity of the behavioral tests and of the definitional sequence which they serve to implement. In my opinion, such indeterminacies, far from invalidating the procedure, highlight its

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TABLE 3

Application of Question Test to Determination of Complement Function ORIGINAL UTTERANCE: OH paöomaem na (ßaöpuxe 'he works at the factory'. TESTING OPERATION : phrase question in which πα (fiaôpuxe is replaced by ade or m ΗΒΜ and OH paöomaem is retained. RESULTANT UTTERANCES: Tde OH paöomaem? 'Where does he work?', Ha veM OH paöomaem? 'What is he working on?' CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS: The resultant utterance Tde OH paöomaem? constitutes a question appropriate to the original utterance, the resultant utterance Ha WM OH paöomaem? does not, hence na cßaöpme functions as complement. TABLE 4

Application of Question Test to Determination of Governed-Structure Function ORIGINAL UTTERANCE: OH coznauiaemcn Ha onepatfuto 'he consents to the operation'. TESTING OPERATION : phrase question in which m onepaifuw is replaced by Kyda or m nmo and OH cozMuiaemcn is retained. RESULTANT UTTERANCES: Kyda OH cozAauiaemca? 'Where does he consent to?', Ha umo OH coBAaiuaemcH? 'What does he consent to?' CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS: The resultant utterance Ha umo OH coAzaiuaemcn? constitutes a question appropriate to the original utterance, the resultant utterance Kyda OH cozAaiuaemcn? does not, hence m onepaifuw functions as a governed structure. value by focusing attention on the inherent indeterminacies of linguistic structure. In this particular case, the conclusion to be drawn is that government and complementation are not two wholly distinct relations, but rather that they represent two extremes of a continuum of dependence relations. Indeterminacies in the application of the definitional sequence point to the existence of relations that have an intermediate status between government and complementation. These intermediate relations require, and deserve, further detailed investigation. 3.2 Genitive of Subject and Genitive of Object MOTIVATION. The insight motivating the formulation of this descriptive problem stems from the observation that the correct translation of Russian sentences containing genitives of subject or object often depends on the recognition of the special function of the latter. This recognition problem is particularly acute when the genitive of subject or object is not adjacent to the deverbative head noun to which it belongs, but is separated from it by an intervening structure such as a prepositional structure. In these cases, it becomes necessary to eliminate the possibility of misinterpreting

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genitives of subject or object as attributive genitives modifying the intervening structures. An example of a genitive of subject separated from the deverbative head noun by an intervening prepositional structure is the clause fragment eAumue Ha onnm ycAoeuü 'the effect on the experiment of conditions'. The recognition problem here consists of identifying the link between the head noun eAunuue and the genitive of subject ycjioeuü, rather than mistakenly interpreting ycjioeuü as an attributive genitive to onbim (it is not an EXPERIMENT OF CONDITIONS, but the EFFECT OF CONDITIONS). An example of a genitive of object separated from the deverbative head noun by an intervening prepositional structure is the clause fragment eo36yMcdenue cpedu aedumopuu uumepeca 'the arousal among the audience of interest'. Here again, the recognition problem consists of identifying the link between the head noun eo36yMcdeme and the genitive of object uumepeca, rather than mistakenly interpreting uumepeca as an attributive genitive to aedumopuu (it is not an AUDIENCE OF INTEREST, b u t a n AROUSAL OF INTEREST).

In fact, while English admits the separation from the head noun of the prepositional structure corresponding to the Russian genitive of subject or object, the placement of this structure immediately adjacent to the head noun seems preferable, particularly in those cases in which the prepositional structure is not accompanied by modifying participial constructions, relative clauses or other complex structures. In the two examples cited above, the preferable English translation will thus be: 'the effect of conditions on the experiment', 'the arousal of interest among the audience'. Additional aspects of the translation problem posed by the difference between genitives of subject or object and attributive genitives will not be discussed here. In the present context, these merely serve to strengthen the motivation for this differentiation which has been established by the preceding argument. STIPULATIVE DEFINITIONS. Here, as in the preceding case, tentative stipulative definitions are sufficient for genitive of subject and genitive of object. Such definitions can be based on the traditional semantic conception of these structures. Thus, a genitive of subject can be defined as a genitive structure which has subject meaning with respect to the verbal meaning of the deverbative head noun, a genitive of object as one which has an object meaning with respect to the verbal meaning of the deverbative head noun. In the examples cited above, ycAoeuit has a subject meaning ('conditions have an effect'), mmepeca has an object meaning ('something arouses interest'). OPERATIONAL DEFINITIONS. The operational definitions of genitive of subject and genitive of object follow from the stipulative definitions suggested above, and from the consideration that a semantically defined function corresponds operationally to a condition of susceptibility to controlled paraphrasing. Hence, a genitive of subject can be defined as a genitive structure which lends itself to paraphrasing into the subject of a clause, the predicate of which corresponds to the deverbative head noun of the genitive of subject. A genitive of object can be defined

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as a genitive structure which lends itself to paraphrasing into the object of a clause the predicate of which corresponds to the deverbative head noun of the genitive of object. Thus, in the above-cited examples, the genitive of subject ycAoeuü lends itself to paraphrasing into the subject of a clause, the predicate of which corresponds to the deverbative head noun emmue: ycAoeua enuniom Ha onum 'conditions have an effect on the experiment' ; the genitive of object unmepeca lends itself to paraphrasing into the object of a clause, the predicate of which corresponds to the deverbative head n o u n eo3ÔyoKdeHue: umo-mo eo3ÔyMcdaem mmepec

cpedu aedumopuu

'something

arouses interest among the audience'. ANALYTIC OPERATION. The analytic operation here can be defined as the determination of the function (subject-genitive or object-genitive function) of a given genitive structure. ANALYTIC TECHNIQUE. The analytic technique for determining the function of a given genitive structure is based on the operational definition set forth further above. This definition uses as a criterion the susceptibility to paraphrasing into subjects or objects of genitives of subject or object. Consequently, the technique will be a paraphrasing technique. In applying such a technique to the identification of genitives of subject, these genitives will, as suggested above, be paraphrased into the subjects of clauses, and their deverbative noun heads into the predicates of these clauses. Analogously, for the identification of genitives of object, the genitives can be paraphrased into objects and their deverbative heads into predicates. This application of paraphrasing has the disadvantage of resulting in active clauses with indefinite pronouns for subjects, which are less common in Russian than corresponding passive clauses. The paraphrasing technique can, however, easily be modified to yield such passive clauses by taking advantage of the semantic correspondence between the objects of active clauses and the subjects of passive clauses. The genitive of object will then, instead of being paraphrased into the object of an active clause, be paraphrased into the subject of a corresponding passive clause, and consequently, its deverbative head noun will be paraphrased into a reflexive passive verb form (which is more common than the participial passive form) : instead of umo-mo eo30yoKdaem mmepec, the paraphrase will read mmepec eo30yMcdaemcH 'interest is aroused'. BEHAVIORAL TESTS. Because of the current custom of referring to the relation of genitives of subject or object with their heads to the corresponding clauses, as well as to the relation of passive to active clauses, as transformations, the behavioral test for implementing the above paraphrasing techniques is called the transformation test. The design of this test is as follows : the original utterance consists of a clause fragment containing a genitive of subject or object together with its deverbative head noun; the testing operation consists in rephrasing this clause fragment into a clause containing a subject corresponding to the genitive structure and a predicate corresponding to the head noun, active in the case of genitive of subject, reflexive passive in the case of genitive of object; the resultant utterance will be a correspondingly phrased simple

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declarative clause; finally, the criterion for Tightness will be the semantic parallelism of the resultant utterance to the original utterance. For examples, see tables 5 and 6. TABLE 5

Application of Transformation Test to Identification of Genitive of Subject ORIGINAL UTTERANCE :

eAumue Ha omim ycjoeuü 'the effect of conditions on the

experiment*. Rephrase into clause containing subject corresponding to ycAoeuü and active predicate corresponding to enuHHue. RESULTANT UTTERANCE : ycAoeun eAURwm na onum 'conditions have an effect on the experiment'. CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS: Resultant utterance is semantically parallel to original utterance, hence, ycAoeuü is genitive of subject. TESTING OPERATION:

TABLE 6

Application of Transformation Test to Identification of Genitive of Object eo36yoKdeme cpedu aedumopuu unmepeca 'arousal of interest among the audience'. TESTING OPERATION: Rephrase into clause containing subject corresponding to wmepeca and reflexive passive predicate corresponding to eo36yoKdeme. RESULTANT UTTERANCE: mmepec eo3ÔyMcdaemca cpedu aedumopuu 'interest is aroused among the audience'. CRITERION FOR RIGHTNESS: Resultant utterance is semantically parallel to original utterance, hence, mmepeca is genitive of object. ORIGINAL UTTERANCE:

4. SIGNIFICANCE OF BEHAVIORAL TESTS

The procedural sequence that I have discussed is part of an overall approach to linguistic analysis which, as I have initially stated, overtly aims at the development of "methods of analysis that an investigator might actually use... to construct a grammar of a language from raw data" (Chomsky 1957:52). This is not a recent aim — it is the classical aim of the American descriptivist tradition. That the followers of this tradition have failed to attain this aim is one of the truisms of present-day theorizing in linguistics. So is the validity of Chomsky's assertion (ibid.) that "it is questionable that this goal is attainable in any interesting way". While I agree that the American descriptivist tradition has failed to provide a "method of analysis that an investigator might actually use", it should be obvious by

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now that I do not agree that this aim in unattainable. When I examine the failure of American descriptivism in the light of the present discussion, the reasons for this failure become quite clear. The procedures proposed in their classical writings (cf. Joos 1958, Harris 1951) are in reality most often not procedures at all. They are primarily statements of the theoretical aims of the description, without any clear indication as to how these aims are to be achieved. But procedures should deal primarily with the achievement of aims. This is the key problem in the development of a method-oriented approach, and herein lies the significance of behavioral tests. By providing the means for the implementation of the techniques needed to achieve a given analytic objective, they make the procedural sequence realistic, and thereby make the development of methods of analysis of thoroughly attainable goal. Thus, behavioral tests become the tools for converting theoretical concepts and intuitive observations into validated analytic results. STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO*

DISCUSSION LONGACRE :

Just a brief comment: your paraphrase test has a relation to transformation. It seems related to the transformations of the Harris and Hiz school. Does this sound somewhat similar to Hiz talking of batteries of transformations and other criteria of this sort? GARVÍN:

One of the advantages of doing this sort of thing is that it lends itself to a variety of theoretical interpretations, all of which turn out to be in favor of what I am doing. So, I clearly agree that perhaps this is Hiz's transformations rather than Chomsky's. DANES:

Is it possible to strictly differentiate between government and complementation? There are a number of unclear cases. How do you treat them? GARVÍN:

Those we consider intermediate cases. It is very often the case with any attempt at definition that you clearly get intermediate phenomena; and if you don't try to force them in either direction but are willing to accept an indeterminate class in-between, you are representing whatever you have attempted to represent. Clearly, if one insists on a binary-type treatment, one will have trouble with the in-between cases; but if one does not insist on treating it in a strictly binary way, one simply says o.k., there are two extremes and then there is the middle. * Affiliation at the time of the Conference : The Bunker-Ramo Corporation.

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DUBOIS:

I basically agree with the general lines of your presentation. It was all the more interesting since simulating verbal behavior with a machine is a very good way of working on syntactic problems. However, I would like to insist on a clarification of your conception of the term theory, since this is the main theme of this conference. You have been talking about the inductive method, the handling of verbal behavior, machine simulation, and various types of experiments. It seems to me that the mere fact of talking about such things actually implies the existence of an implicit theory and even of a philosophy of language. If so, that is, if the answer to my own question is yes, isn't it a theory based on the fact that the speaker is considered as an object of the world which can be studied according to general scientific methods and procedures? This can be seen, for example, when one takes into account the speaker's opinions concerning his own language — that is, the speaker's intuitive reactions, and makes them part of the data. And if we say yes to this question, we are dealing here with a philosophy of language. GARVÍN:

I feel very highly complimented by having been suspected of having a theory or philosophy of language. I will wholeheartedly agree that I do have one, but I find it necessary to stress it less than to stress some other things for two reasons : one is that my theory of language is really very simple. It has to do with the fact that language is an object outside of oneself that one studies, and it has to do with some relatively simple assumptions about the nature of language. Once one has stated these, I think the real problem begins. Namely, how do you translate this theory into some kind of results that you are satisfied with if your aim is not merely to refine your own thinking, but also to relate your own thinking to the external world of which language is a part. Hence my primary interest in method. Now this has been strengthened by the fact that, as is commonly known, the interest in method is neglected in many other quarters. There is enough talk about theory going on in so many circles that it is enough for me to give a brief reference to my own point of view. I do not wish to advertise my theoretical views but to stress the things that are neglected in the presentday discussions in linguistics, which are matters of method. I wholly agree that there is an underlying theory which I believe in as firmly as other people believe in their theories. But to me this is not as important at present as a very specific discussion of methodological principles. c.

(Georgetown University) : I feel a little embarrassed about raising this point, but I think it's worth raising because we are dealing after all with questions of method. I'm rather violently opposed to the use of Aristotelian definitions. I think there's a very good reason why they're not used much in science these days, and that is because they are formally equivalent to the method of single variation in experimental design I . J. M . S T U A R T

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and we can't trust that. I mean a strictly formal equivalence, and I think consequently there are severe limits on the kind of sensitivity you introduced into your discussion or your investigation when you use this method. So, it would be interesting to see what could be done by replacing Aristotelian definitions (the differentia specifica is precisely what is the method of single variation) by other more contemporary modes of definition. Secondly, I think there's a little terminological quibble that's worth entering into, because one gets a little tired in linguistics these days of people using technical terms with meanings that are never revealed and are quite different from those that are ordinarily understood. I know very well that you would be one of the last linguists to do this kind of thing, but it's methodologically important so let me draw attention to it. I would suggest that for OPERATIONAL DEFINITION you should read OSTENSIVE DEFINITION, because the definitions you introduce are ostensive and not operational. For your BEHAVIORAL TEST, read OPERATIONAL DEFINITION because you have excellent operational definitions there. After that terminological quibble, it seems to me that things open up rather extensively. You have now, 1 think, on your hands an opportunity to follow your operational definitions by tests using machine translation and informant response that deal with the primary linguistic question of the message, such as, what is invariant under translation, which is a major problem for linguistics. Let me just stress that I only wanted to enter into this quibble over terminology because it's methodologically significant to change your terms around in the manner I suggested and the nature of your investigation seems to me now to have extended itself very considerably. GARVÍN:

I was tempted in my earlier days to give up this Aristotelian business, but it turns out that every time you want to have an operational definition, you ask yourself what is it that you want to define operationally. And so there you are back to your old Aristotelian thing; and if you don't like Aristotle, drop him and call it stipulati ve. You cannot have an operational definition of a phoneme without first stating what your theory would like a phoneme to be, and this is all I mean by a stipulative Aristotelian definition. I call it Aristotelian because that was the bon mot used in the particular short article in epistemology which I read years ago, and since which I haven't read any others. Now, as far as the problem of what is invariant in translation is concerned, I haven't dealt with it in my present talk. I think it is a very fascinating problem, and I think it is unanswerable at this stage in any theoretical way. The way we deal with this is we simply assume that there is some invariant, and we don't worry about its metaphysical nature; and if we like the translation, we feel we have captured it, and if we don't, we think we haven't.

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HARRY SPITZBARDT (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany) :

What sounds highly appealing in Dr. Garvin's papers and reports is the fact that he inspires those people that are interested in natural languages and applied linguistics to leave the synthetic, artificial forest of plastic trees and enter the complex giant of natural languages. In this respect, I should like to compare him to Rousseau. We could call Dr. Garvin the Rousseau of twentieth-century linguistics.

REFERENCES Chomsky, Noam, 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The M.I.T. Press). Kiefer, Ference, 1967 Current Recognition Procedures. (= KVAL PM 300, Forskningsgruppen for kvantitativ linguistik, February 8, 1967) (Stockholm). Garvin, Paul L., 1952 "Structure and Variations in Language and Culture", Indian Tribes of Aboriginal America, Selected Papers of the XXIX International Congress of Americanists, ed. by Sol Tax. 3.216-21 (Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago Press). 1963 "The Definitional Model of Language", Natural Language and the Computer, ed. by Paul L. Garvin. 3-22 (New York, McGraw-Hill). 1964 On Linguistic Method (The Hague, Mouton). Harris, Zellig S., 1951 Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Hockett, Charles F., 1947 "Problems of Morphemic Analysis", Language, 23.321-43. Joos, Martin, ed. 1958 Readings in Linguistics (New York, American Council of Learned Societies). Lees, Robert B., 1962 In Reply to Certain Criticisms. Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, No. 13, Appendix IV, pp. 182-4 (Washington, D. C., Georgetown University Press). Nagel, Ernest, 1961 The Structure of Science (New York and Burlingame, Harcourt, Brace and World). Rapoport, Anatol. 1953 Operational Philosophy (New York, Harper and Brothers). Robinson, Richard, 1962 Definition (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

THE METHOD OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR P A U L M. POSTAL

I. I N T R O D U C T I O N

The term 'grammar' is used with systematic ambiguity to refer on the one hand to the overall system of knowledge possessed by speakers of a language, and on the other to the linguist's attempts at characterizing such systems. In this sense, grammar is concerned with that overall mentalistic domain involving syntactic, semantic, and phonological features. There is an ancient tradition which insists that the grammars of individual languages have two different aspects, one particular to the language in question, the other not and also characteristic of other languages. In other words, underlying all particular grammars is a Universal Grammar characterizing the NECESSARY properties of all human languages. James Beattie (1788) stated this view as follows (quoted in Chomsky [1965]). Languages, therefore, resemble men in this respect, that although each has peculiarities, whereby it is distinguished from every other, yet all have certain qualities in common. The peculiarities of individual tongues are explained in their respective grammars and dictionaries. Those things that all languages have in common, or that are necessary to every language, are treated of in a science, which some have called UNIVERSAL or PHILOSOPHICAL grammar. Modern structural or descriptive linguistics of almost all varieties has been largely uninterested in and hostile to universal grammar. Some extreme adherents have even gone so far as to deny its existence. It is widely believed that modern linguistics has disproved a range of purported linguistic universals which traditional universal grammar advanced on a too narrow empirical basis. In this regard, modern linguistics, with its strong inductivist bent, is regarded by its advocates as having made a great advance methodologically. The approach of generative grammar, which has steadily developed over the last decade, represents a break with structural linguistics on many fundamental issues of principle. None is more important than the issue of universal grammar. Here generative grammar makes an explicit return to the approach and method of tradi-

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tional universalistic linguistics. For discussion cf. especially Chomsky (1964. 1965, 1966). And this is one important factor which has made it difficult for the structural linguist, with his largely antiuniversalistic training, to understand generative grammar. The advocate of generative grammar insists that the real failure of traditional universal grammar lays, not in its universal assumptions or methodology, but rather in technical deficiencies in the conception of linguistic description. Namely, these were informal, vague, imprecise, and to a great extent therefore untestable. Most significantly, all of these properties are, to only a slightly lessened extent, characteristic of modern structuralist grammars, which also fail to provide testable descriptions of the infinite sets of sentences of the languages in question. In short, the fundamental limitation of both traditional and structural linguistics lies in a failure to understand the methodological necessity of constructing and justifying explicit theories of sentences, i.e. generative grammars. Rather than trying to defend and justify the universal position abstractly, or to criticize the inductivist assumptions of most structural linguistics, the present paper will attempt to illustrate the method of universal grammar, generatively interpreted, with real linguistic material. The aim is to suggest that languages do share deep and significant grammatical properties which can be formulated as part of general linguistic theory. Incidentally, I do not apologize for presenting a partially substantive paper at a conference on methods. It seems to me that talk of methods is of interest only in connection with results. The only real test of any method is whether or not it produces insight into the nature of language. It goes without saying that, in the face of our present extraordinarily limited knowledge, of both universal grammatical theory and the grammars of particular languages, the empirical base for universal hypotheses must at the moment be small. In the present instance, only two languages will be dealt with, Mohawk, a North American Indian language of the Iroquoian family, and English. In particular, I shall compare reflexive constructions in the two languages, considering a number of different syntactic and semantic properties which each manifests. It is shown that many of these properties are in a clear sense common to both languages, while certain syntactic properties are quite different. The question is then raised how the theory of grammar might be formulated in such a way as to represent the similarities without denying the differences. That is, how can linguistic theory eliminate the need for the particular grammars of Mohawk and English (and presumably all other languages as well) to contain descriptions of the common facts. These must be extracted as linguistic universale and defined within linguistic theory, i.e. extracted as part of the genetically given knowledge which is not learned but brought to the language learning situation by the prelinguistic child. A proviso is in order. Time limitations here are severe and everything said is oversimplified and too brief. Most fundamentally, reflexivization is really, I would claim, a subtype of a more general universal process of anaphoric pronominalization. One of the most misleading aspects of the present paper is its concentration on re-

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flexivization without proper attention to the more general phenomenon. I have tried to take account of various possible objections and difficulties in footnotes. The proposed universal account of reflexivization is stated within the terms of the general theory of transformational syntax, and is impossible without the fundamental assumption of this theory. This is that the syntactic structure of a sentence has two distinct aspects 1 , a deep structure, highly abstract and relevant for semantic interpretation, and a surface structure, akin to the categorization of the actual string of words which all linguists regard as syntactic structure. This latter is really only relevant for phonological interpretation, and no mistake is more fundamental and widespread than the attempt to give principles for semantically interpreting surface forms. This is actually quite relevant to a discussion of reflexivization, although space prohibits a discussion here. 2 These two aspects of structure are related by a complex chain of transformational syntactic rules. 3 It is possible to suggest a common account of Mohawk-English reflexivization in spite of the enormous differences between the surface forms of English and Mohawk sentences because it is possible to justify claims of essential similarity in the deep structures of the relevant constructions and because it is possible to discern fundamental similarities in the processes which associate surface structures with their deeper forms. Another aspect of contemporary transformational grammar is quite crucial to the discussion. This is the assumption that the terminal elements4 of lexical categories, noun, verb, etc., have an analysis into independent syntactic features, animate, singular, masculine, etc. Although syntactic features and their role in a transformational grammar have been discussed in print (Chomsky, 1965), no published version of feature apparatus is, I believe, really adequate to handle the kind of facts discussed below. Since time prevents a discussion of these matters here, I shall be forced to be even more informal on these grounds than otherwise. 5

1 The present writer is coming to believe that there may exist an intermediate level of structure, which might be called shallow structure. This level would be relevant for the statement of agreement rules, case assignment, and, more importantly for this paper, anaphora. It also would be the level relevant for idiom interpretation. Although some things could be said, exactly how to characterize such a level generally is far from clear. 2 For example, it is quite common to attempt to assign some 'meaning' directly to the surface structure indicators of reflexivization, a more or less hopeless task as suggested by such problems as the ambiguity of sentences like John told Maxheim about himself. * This remark is quite possibly not true to the extent that there are universal syntactic rules playing a role in the derivation of surface structures. There is no reason to expect such rules to meet the same set of constraints met by language particular (i.e. learned) rules. 4 The restriction of features to terminal elements is a strong claim which very likely will have to be given up. Exactly how to constrain the grammatical system in the absence of such a condition is not known. 5 What is involved primarily is the assumption that noun positions, verb positions, etc. have their own feature analyses independent of those of any particular lexical items which might be inserted in these positions. Hence rules which affect feature composition affect the features of the position, not those of the lexical items which fill it. It is thus possible for these to conflict, i.e. for a position to be [+Reflexive] but the inserted item [—Reflexive], which can be taken as a formal mark of ill-formedness

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I shall try to consider what is similar and what not in classes of sentences in English and Mohawk which have traditionally been called reflexive.® In English this refers to sentences like (l)-(3): (1) I defended myself (2) Schwartz bought something for himself (3) you may injure yourself Speaking very generally, this class of sentences is characterized by at least the following properties, numbered E1-E10: El

Reflexivization is indicated in the surface forms of sentences by the element self ¡selve, which is part of a noun constituent. Often self ¡selve has been taken to be a grammatical morpheme (Lees and Klima 1963). But it is not difficult to show that it is in fact a noun stem occurring with preceding genitive case articles. That is, as I have claimed in a recent paper (Postal 1966), the traditional class of personal pronouns I, you, us, his, etc., are actually special forms of definite article used with certain pronouns. When they occur alone in actual sentences like (4),

(4)

I like you the underlying pronoun stem which determined the special article has dropped.

E2

There is 'agreement' between the form of the reflexive word and some 'antecedent' noun phrase (henceforth : NP). Thus :

(5) (6)

*I criticized yourself *Mary amused myself

E3

Reflexive sentences fill a gap in a semantic paradigm defined by ordinary sentences with nonreflexive NP. For example, if we consider meanings like Ά saw B' and 'B saw A', etc., they can be represented by ordinary transitive sentences. But meanings like Ά saw A' and 'B saw B' cannot. This gap is, however, filled by reflexive sentences which are exactly those used for a subset of cases where two NP are coreferential. In nonthird person cases, reflexive sentences also fill a syntactic gap. That is, the most simple formulation of rules will derive sequences like (7)-(9) :

E4

(7) (8) (9)

*I like I, me *you like you *we like we, us

* English uses the apparatus for reflexivization in ways which seem idiosyncratic, as, for example, in emphatic constructions: John himself did it, and in expressions like John has a picture of himself. Our discussion does not therefore cover these usages.

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But these are not possible. However, nonthird person reflexive forms manifest all the properties to be expected of (7)-(9) allowing for reflexive-nonreflexive differences. In particular the reflexive forms manifest the properties discussed in E7 below. Although sentences with identical subjects and, for example, objects are possible in English in third person cases, i.e. sentences like (10) and (11) are grammatical,

(10) Harry likes Harry (11) the men caught the men

E6

they must be interpreted in such a way that the superficially identical NP refer to different objects. Identical NP, third person or not, can occur in the same sentence and refer to identical objects only if they do not occur in the same simple sentence. By simple sentence I refer to a structure which contains no embedded or conjoined sentences. It is under exactly these conditions that reflexive forms cannot occur. Thus one finds the distribution of reflexive and nonreflexive forms as shown in (12)-(17).

(12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17)

*I saw the man who hates myself I saw the man who hates me *I will go if myself can I will go if I can *John will do it if I ask himself John will do it if I ask him What such facts show is that there are in English two different subtypes of NP anaphora, one relevant for NP within the same simple sentence, the other relevant for identical NP within the same macrosentence but not within the same simple one. Reflexivization is the former. 7

E7

The class of verbal forms occurring with reflexive NP in simple predicates is defined8 by an identity condition in roughly9 the following sense: one can in general find a simple sentence of the form NPi+verbalj+X+reflexive+Y just

7 The relevance of 'simple sentence' for defining the scope of reflexivization was, as far as I know, first pointed out by Lees and Klima (1963). They took this to be a special fact about English, however. 8 There are exceptions to this condition. As Lees and Klima (1963) note, there are reflexive verbs in English, behave, perjure, pride, etc. These are to be treated, as they suggest, by a special rule which doubles their subjects in post-verbal position, i.e. they are really intransitive verbs. As Emmon Bach has noted, there are also quite possibly irreflexive verbs, verbs which do not permit reflexivization even though they meet the otherwise valid conditions determining it. Possible examples are precede, beg, etc. Like all exceptions to rules, these are as such irrelevant. If the choice is between listing all verbs as idiosyncratic under reflexivization, or in giving a principle and listing these few verbs as exceptions, the correct decision is clear. 9 The condition is rough for many reasons. It ignores the difference between existing surface forms and an earlier point at which the identity is really relevant; it ignores the simple sentence constraint; it ignores possible word order differences; etc.

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in case one can find two other sentences of the form N P 1 + v e r b a l J + X + N P z + Y and NPjs+verbalj+X+NPi+Y. This is illustrated in (18)-(32). (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) (32)

I criticized myself Bill criticized me I criticized Bill *Schwartz condescended himself *I condescended Schwartz * Schwartz condescended me *I think myself *Bill thinks me *I think Bill I think about myself Bill thinks about me I think about Bill *I implied myself *Bill implied me *I implied Bill The implication of such facts is clear. Reflexive forms occur in essentially those verbal contexts where one would expect to find identical NP occurring within a simple sentence and referring to the same objects, and they do not occur in verbal contexts where independent constraints would prohibit the presence of identical NP. For example, if a verb does not take animate objects, it will not have reflexive forms with myself, himself, etc. The fact that intransitive verbs do not in general take reflexives is, of course, a function of this identity condition.10

E8

The reflexive forms and other possible full NP are mutually exclusive within the same simple sentence; as illustrated in (33) and (34).

(33) *I saw myself the boy (34) "John likes himself Mary's father 11 E9

In some cases the 'possessor' NP of a genitive construction reflexivizes as illustrated in (35) and (36).

(35) I lost my own book (36) Bill ruined his own car That the element own in English actually is reflexive is suggested by the agreement with an antecedent NP typical of all English reflexives. Hence (37) and (38) are not well-formed. le

The reflexive verbs of footnote 8 are the exceptions here. Sentences like John likes Mary's father himself are not, of course, exceptions here but simply functions of the optional rule which moves an emphatic reflexive to sentence final position. This also accounts for the ambiguity of the example which could have the underlying structure similar to that of John himself likes Mary's father. 11

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(37) *I lost your own book (38) *Carlton bought Mary's own dress But it is shown most clearly by the fact that the distribution of own follows the simple sentence constraint of other reflexives which differentiates it from nonreflexive pronominalization. Thus (40) and (42) are ill-formed because the antecedent of the reflexive form is not within the same simple sentence. (39) (40) (41) (42) E10

I said that Bill ruined my car *I said that Bill ruined my own car George claimed Barbara stole his bike *George claimed Barbara stole his own bike In all cases reflexivization is governed by the LEFTMOST NP, that is, it is the rightmost of two identical NP which is in fact reflexivized. Apparent counterexamples like (43)

(43) after tiring myself, I rested on the beach are only apparent since reflexivization is governed here not by the occurrence of I which directly precedes rested but by the deep subject of tire, which drops but only after reflexivization.12 Turning now to Mohawk, the task of describing the facts is, of course, even more difficult, and I shall be even more terse. From the point of view of the phenomenon we are considering, there are two facts about Mohawk grammar which are fundamental. First, verbal forms agree in a very abstract but nonetheless quite definite way with both their subjects and objects. The subject and object agreement markers are contiguous and their surface structure representatives occur as prefixes.13 Secondly, underlying nonemphatic definite pronouns drop, as for example in Spanish. Hence English sentences like (44) or (45) can be translated into Mohawk by, respectively, the single verb sentences given in (46) and (47). (44) he likes her (45) I saw him 12 Examples like the perhaps possible himself, John will spend money for are more interesting. These show that the left to right condition cannot be stated over surface structures which is obvious on many other grounds. This is why we speak of that point κ in derivations at which reflexivization occurs and at which the left to right condition is relevant. We are thus claiming that at this point such examples have the reflexivized N P to the right. The existence of sentences like John will spend money for himself as well as the special intonation of the first example support this view. One should relate these matters to our remark in footnote 1 about a level of shallow structure and to Chomsky's remarks (1965:127, 221-2) that cases are determined at an intermediate level prior to that exhibited by such front shifted NP. It is suspected that it is exactly the level of shallow structure which is relevant both for case assignment and the left to right condition (or more generally for anaphora rules). 18 Actually this must be an oversimplification since there is a complex set of rules which operate on the internal structure of the subject and object agreement markers, rules which delete elements, shift order, and add new elements. Hence the order subject marker + object marker is not a comment about surface structures as such, although it often holds for them. For discussion cf. Postal (1962).

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(46) hshakaonuhwePs14 (masculine(M)+feminine(F)+objective+'to like'+serial) 16 (47) waPhraikA? (aorist+M+first person+'to see'+punctual) In comparing Mohawk and English reflexivization, I shall consider the analogous properties to E1-E10, labelling them correlatively M1-M10. Ml

Reflexivization is indicated in the surface forms of sentences by the element atat which is found in verbs in exactly the place where object agreement markers are typically found, i.e. directly after subject agreement markers. Examples are given in (48) and (49).

(48) katatnuhwePs Ί like myself' (first person+reflexive+'to like'+serial) (49) waPhraatatkA? 'he saw himself' (aorist+M+reflexive+'to see'+punctual) M2 There is no analogue of the English agreement. The shape of the reflexive marker is constant and independent of the character of any cooccurring NP. It is clear then that with respect to these initial two properties Mohawk and English reflexivization are quite different. With respect to other properties, however, the situation is more interesting. M3 With respect to E3, the situation in Mohawk is exactly analogous. Just as in English, Mohawk reflexive sentences fill a gap in a semantic paradigm otherwise expressed by ordinary transitive sentences, the gap being exactly where NP in the same simple sentence would be coreferential. M4 Here also the situation is almost exactly analogous. Simple Mohawk sentences, embedded or not, may not contain more than one first person or second person NP. Again, however, the natural rules will generate such sentences and reflexive sentences have all the properties to be expected of such, given the reflexivenonreflexive differences. M5 Here again the facts are parallel. A Mohawk sentence like (50) (50) kor waPhraokA? ne kor 'Paul saw Paul' ('Paul'+aorist+M+objective+'to see'+punctual+particle+'Paul') can only be understood to refer to two different individuals named Paul. M6 For the sixth property, the facts in Mohawk are again analogous, although this is partly disguised by the fact that definite pronominal forms in Mohawk normally drop. The basic point is that, just as in English, reflexivization is limited to the domain of simple sentences at the point of reflexivization. Thus in Mohawk if one wants to say something like 'Paul saw himself, one needs a sentence like (51). 11

Mohawk forms are written in a morphophonemic representation with morpheme boundaries omitted and word boundaries indicated by spaces. 14 Word order in Mohawk is quite free. I have picked English-like word orders to facilitate comparisons. Although these are always well-formed, they are not always the preferred order.

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(51) w a P h r a a t a t k A ? ne kor (aorist+M+reflexive+'to s e e ' + p u n c t u a l + p a r t i c l e + 'Paul') That is, there must be a reflexive verb since the underlying subject and object NP occurred in a single simple sentence. But if one wants to say something like 'Paul noticed that he likes chickens' on the reading where 'he' refers back to 'Paul', one has a sentence like (52), (52) waPhraattok? ne kor si? hranuhwePs ne kitkit (aorist+M+'to notice'+punctual +particle+'Paul'+particle+M+'to like'+serial+particle+'chicken') in which the embedded verb hranuhwePs is not and cannot possibly be reflexive. Although subjects of main verb and embedded verb are identical, no reflexivization takes place because they are not within the same simple sentence. Instead, nonreflexive anaphoric pronominalization occurs but this does not effect the form of verbs. It only leads to deletion of the pronominalized NP. Hence the underlying subject of hranuhwePs drops.16 M7 For the seventh property, the situation in Mohawk is almost exactly the same. The class of verbs accepting the reflexive element is defined by exactly the same identity condition as determines which English verbals cooccur with reflexives. The implications are the same too. Reflexives must be derived from identical NP within the same simple sentence. M8 For the eighth property, the analogue in Mohawk holds, but in a rather different way. In English a reflexive NP is exclusive with another NP in the same grammatical relation, showing that the reflexive is derived from a full NP. In Mohawk, a reflexive verb cannot, for example, occur with any Surface object at all. Thus (53) is hopelessly ill-formed. (53) *kor waPhraatatkA? ne sawatis ('Paul'+aorist+M+reflexive+'to see'+punctual+particle+' John') Hence the parallel assumption in Mohawk is supported. Reflexive predicates are derived from ordinary predicates which contain an NP identical to some other NP within the same simple sentence. M9 In Mohawk also the 'possessor' NP of a genitive type construction may be reflexivized. This is, for example, the case in (54). (54) sawatis hraatat?srehtnuhwe?s 'John likes his own car' ('John'+M+reflexive+ + ' c a r ' + ' t o like'+serial) However, there are some apparent differences. In English the 'possessor' reflexivizes in the presence of the 'possessed' noun. In Mohawk this is evidently not possible. Reflexivization with the 'possessor' is only possible when the " (52) is, of course, ambiguous since the underlying subject of hranuhwePs might not have been kor with index identical to the subject of waPhraattok? but rather simply a definite masculine pronoun. Hence on one reading the subject of the embedded verb is not the same as that of the main verb. The situation is thus quite parallel to the English Paul said he would come.

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original 'possessed' noun is deleted AFTER A DOUBLE OF IT IS INCORPORATED IN THE Thus parallel to (54) are sentences like (55) and (56), (55) sawatis hranuhwePs ne sawatis hraoPsreht 'Johnj likes John's 2 car' ('John'+M + ' t o like'+serial+particle+'John'+M+objective+'car') his car (56) sawatis hranuhwePs ne hraoPsreht 'John likes his own car' in neither of which has the noun stem been incorporated. What requires explanation is the reflexive interpretation of (56), which is possible although the verb is not reflexive. Furthermore, a reflexive verb is impossible in such cases as shown by (57). (57) *sawatis hraatatnuhwePs ne hraoPsreht VERB.

Actually, however, these facts are perfectly regular and automatic. As is emphasized further below, verbs are marked with the reflexive as a function of the object agreement rule under fixed conditions. But agreement always occurs between the HEAD noun of an NP and the verb of that simple sentence. In a structure like (56), the reflexivized possessor is not the head of the NP. Rather it is the noun 'car' which is head. Hence, in this case, reflexivization does not effect the agreement marking of the verb and the form of the verb is unchanged. The only consequence of reflexivization is the deletion of the reflexivized NP, which is also regular as we see below. When there is noun incorporation with possessive constructions, there are also some apparent deviations from the analogues in English, insofar as sentences with incorporation can be said to have English analogues.17 What requires comment is the nonexistence of sentences like (58) in which there is a reflexive verb with a subject as in (54), but also a possessed object noun as in (56) in which the verb is nonreflexive. (58) *sawatis hraatatPsrehtnuhwePs ne hraoPsreht But actually the ungrammaticality of (58) follows from independently required statements in Mohawk grammar. For in fact the structure which would otherwise yield (58) actually yields (54) by virtue of a special rule. This requires a noun to drop if it has both undergone the incorporation rule (i.e. a double of it has been placed in the verb) and if it stands in an NP alone, i.e. without 'modifying' elements such as 'possessors', demonstratives, relative phrases, etc. Thus such nonpossessive sentences as (59) are well formed (59) sawatis hraPsrehtnuhwePs thikA kaPsreht 'John likes that car' ('John'+M-f*car'+'to like'+serial+'that'+neuter+'car') since the object NP contains a modifier, namely, thikA 'that'. But (60) is impossible, (60) *sawatis hraPsrehtnuhwePs ne kaPsreht 17

I see no reason why they cannot be said to have such since incorporation is easily shown to be an operation on V e r b + N P structures and thus a late overlay in Mohawk grammar. Cf. Postal (1962).

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since the noun stem has been incorporated but the object NP contains only a simple noun. Hence the same rule which derives (54) from the structure underlying (58) derives (61) from the structure underlying (60). (61) sawatis hra?srehtnuhwe?s 'John likes the car' The absence of (58) is thus a function of the quite general rule in Mohawk that incorporation yields surface doubling of noun stems only when the external noun keeps at least one modifying element. Thus the ungrammaticality of (58) does not really represent an important difference between Mohawk and English with respect to the reflexivization of 'possessors'. 'Possessor' reflexivization is important because it is clear in both English and Mohawk that genitive type constructions have underlying relative phrases as their deep structures. Hence the NP which is reflexivized and the NP which determines its reflexivization do not start out in the same simple sentence in deep structures. They become part of the same simple sentence only as a result of certain transformational operations which eliminate the sentence structure of the relative phrase when it is transformationally deformed. This is quite important because it shows that the point κ in derivations over which the notion 'simple sentence' relevant for reflexivization is to be defined is not equal in either English or Mohawk to the level of deep structure. Nor obviously is it the level of surface structure. If there is some general, language-neutral way of specifying the point κ, 18 this would indicate that there is some partially significant level of structure intermediate between them, a conclusion which is also suggested, at least to the present writer, by a variety of other phenomena. Further indication of such a level in the area of anaphora is possibly provided by the left to right condition. MIO It is difficult to tell whether reflexivization is governed in Mohawk by the leftmost NP since reflexivized NP drop and major constituent order, especially that of NP and verbals, is quite free. However, nothing known to me in the language mitigates against assuming that at the point κ where reflexivization occurs it is left to right. That is, while unlike English, Mohawk does not strongly confirm an assumption of left to right reflexivization, it is not by any means incompatible with it. Furthermore, some indirect grounds for the left to right assumption can be found in Mohawk. The left to right assumption is consistent with the fact that in a vast number of cases it is the subject which governs reflexivization. But there is evidence of a tendency for the subject NP to be leftmost. In Mohawk, given cases where the verb markers do not uniquely indicate which of two cooccurring NP is subject, the leftmost will be interpreted as subject, given normal intonation. That such a tendency is something of a universal is suggested by such studies as Greenberg (1963). Furthermore, it should be pointed out that " It is possible I suppose that this point could be a variable differing from language to language. But this does not seem likely to the present writer. The fact that 'possessors' reflexivize in a wide variety of languages suggests that there is something language independent here, for example.

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in nonreflexive anaphora Mohawk supports a left to right condition more directly.

III. TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL STATEMENT OF REFLEXIVIZATION

I will now attempt to propose the basis of an explanation for the similarities in Mohawk-English reflexivization which have been discussed which is not incompatible with their differences. Let us say that two NP 19 are ANAPHORICALLY CONNECTED if they occur in the same overall phrase marker and are identical. 'Identical' here must be understood in a special way. We have seen that in the case of third-person elements the same item may occur in a sentence without referring to the same object. This suggests that we assume lexical items are indexed, with say integers, and that when a lexical item is inserted into a phrase marker it is assigned one of the possible indices. The interpretation of the indices is as follows. If two otherwise identical lexical items have the same index, they refer to the same object(s). The indexing represents the claim within linguistic theory that the same lexical item may be used to refer to an endless class of distinct objects. While grammars obviously do not (and could not) keep track of reference as such, they do often keep track of identity of reference. Let us say in addition that two identical NP are REFLEXIVELY CONNECTED if they are anaphorically connected and, in addition, at some point κ in transformational derivations there is no occurrence of Sentence which dominates one which does not also dominate the other. In other words, they are in the same simple sentence at point κ. Let us assume further that we may define the ANAPHORICALLY SUBORDINATE NP as one of two NP which are anaphorically connected. Tentatively, or rather very tentatively, I assume that of two NP which are anaphorically connected at point κ, that one is subordinate which is to the right of the other. I now assume the following, remembering that nouns and other lexical elements have a syntactic feature analysis. There are obligatory universal rules of ORDINARY ANAPHORA and REFLEXIVE ANAPHORA which assign features to the head nouns of anaphorically connected NP. In both cases, these features include at least the features [+Pro(noun)], [+Definite], [+Anaphoric]. The reflexive rule also assigns the feature [+Reflexive]. The assumption is that all nouns start out in deep structures as [-Anaphoric], [-Reflexive], although some may be [+Pro] and obviously some are [+Definite]. The universal rules thus generate feature contrasts over Anaphoric and Reflexive. The assumption is, therefore, that NP anaphora in the sense of feature marking is not a language-particular process. Notice, however, that as such these universal anaphora rules have no effect whatever on the destined surface forms of reflexive sentences. These consequences depend " The reader may be surprised to find so little attention devoted to the assumption of a universal set of underlying constituents NP, Verb, etc., presupposed by our account. Besides space limitations, this is due to the fact that a formal definition of such notions appears to present little difficulty, given the distinction between deep and surface structure. For some brief discussion, cf. Chomsky (1965).

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upon language-limited treatment of nouns with [+Pro], [+Anaphoric], and [+Reflexive] markings. There is, however, I believe at least one universal surface-structure consequence. Namely, within the NP whose head noun is marked [+Anaphoric], all modifiers are removed, i.e. relative phrases, etc. What can remain consists of at most the head noun, its articles, if any,20 and special marks which different languages introduce more or less ad hoc as indicators of these processes, including special replacement forms for the head noun itself. Other than this process of modifier removal, consequences depend on the rules and lexical conditions of the relevant language. In English, for example, there is an ad hoc rule which turns a [-f-Reflexive] noun [+Genitive]. This then determines by later rules genitive articles him, her, my, your, etc., instead of the nongenitive special articles him, her, me, you, etc., to be found with pronouns in general (the stems drop, of course). English also has a special condition that the only noun which can occur in surface structures with the marking [+Reflexive] is self ¡selve (and its irregular 'possessive' variant own). All nouns in positions where this marking is assigned by the universal rule must be replaced by self ¡selve. Hence from a structure with identical NP of the type which would yield the boy, we end up with himself and not himboy. English has a rule to drop definite pronouns in many cases yielding him from him one, it from it thing, we from we ones, etc., but this does not work in reflexive cases. Hence an actual reflexive noun stem ends up in surface structures. In Mohawk, the situation is rather different. Definite pronouns, i.e. those nouns which are both [+Pro] and [+Definite], drop, as suggested by examples like (46) and (47) mentioned earlier. Therefore, given the assignment of features [+Definite] and [+Pro] by the universal anaphora rules, we predict that both reflexive and nonreflexive anaphorically subordinate NP should drop in Mohawk. And, of course, they do. Hence the lack of object NP in Mohawk reflexive sentences follows automatically from the universal rules plus the independently needed rule for dropping definite pronouns. However, the features of nouns determine the kind of agreement marker placed on the verb by subject and object agreement rules. By assuming that the agreement rules FOLLOW reflexivization, we can insure automatically that the prefix assigned to verbs by the object agreement rule has a somewhat different feature composition when the noun is [ + Reflexive]. It is then necessary to say ad hoc that such a marker has the phonological form atat regardless of all other features. Hence the so-called reflexive morpheme in Mohawk verbs is actually only the special form of the object agreement marker assigned by exactly the same object agreement rule which assigns all other verbal object markers. The only difference is the special shape fact when the agreement marker devolves upon an object noun which is marked [+Reflexive]. The ao

My assumption would be that articles have a quite different origin from other NP modifiers. Namely, they are segmentalizations of features of the head noun while other modifiers are either embedded sentences, or NP, or their reductions.

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merging of all object markers to the form atat in Mohawk verbs whose simple sentences have undergone reflexivization is thus interestingly parallel to the merging of predicate nouns in English to self!selve under conditions of reflexivization. Under this analysis, what is really unique to Mohawk and English reflexivization is, respectively, the shape of the reflexive prefix as atat in the former, the fact that there is only one [+Reflexive] noun stem in English, and that its shape is self!selve¡own, and that [+R.eflexive] determines [+Genitive]. Everything else is apparently a function of universal anaphora principles plus rules which the two languages must contain independently. For Mohawk, these include the incorporation rule, the rule which drops a noun which has undergone incorporation if it is unmodified, and the object agreement and definite pronoun deletion rules. In English, what is chiefly involved are the rules which determine special articles with definite pronouns, articles which have in the past been called pronouns. If space permitted, I would review in detail how this account actually does predict the similarities and differences in the ten properties that were discussed earlier for each language. I think, however, that this is fairly clear in most cases already. I will thus only briefly discuss the point, revealed by properties 4 and 5, that there is an apparent asymmetry in reflexivization with respect to first and second person NP on the one hand, and third person NP on the other. This is to be accounted for by a contrast between third person nouns which are assigned all possible reference indices, 1, 2, ... and first and second person elements which are not. Chomsky's suggestion (1965:226) is that first person elements receive only the index 1, second person only the index 2. An essentially equivalent, and to me somewhat more natural, proposal is that these elements and these alone require no indexing at all since they are inherently not capable of multiple references for a fixed occurrence. This ignores certain possible problems arising in the plural, exclusive-inclusive differences, etc. Given these assumptions, however, the asymmetry in reflexivization is only apparent. There is a real asymmetry but it lies completely in the domain of differential reference possibilities. Reflexivization is defined over identical NP. And only third person elements offer the possibility of forming superficially identical NP which are not deeply identical because they have different indices. It should be pointed out that, given this analysis, pronominalization provides an interesting basis for a partial characterization of notions like first and second person vs. third person in universal terms. Further content can be added to such an account by taking note of the first person-second person interchange in question and answer which is also languageneutral (for some far from adequate discussion, cf. Katz and Postal (1964)).

IV, CONCLUSION

What has been accomplished? In a way, obviously very little. Even if one includes the further justifications, clarifications, and exemplifications which could be given

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under lesser time constraints, certainly the account runs into many fundamental problems even for Mohawk and English. In particular, the point κ in derivations is unspecified, how the principles work in the case of conjoined NP is very unclear, and there are many, possibly not at all minor, difficulties involving particular facts in both languages. The left to right characterization of anaphoric subordination is also extremely tenuous. When further languages are investigated, surely the difficulties will not decrease. No doubt the account given will have to be modified or extended or both in various ways. At the same time, I cannot fail to believe that something has been accomplished. If it is possible in the face of present extraordinary ignorance of individual grammars to formulate an even partially adequate account in universal terms of phenomena in such diverse and superficially different languages as Mohawk and English, this is some evidence that a rich universal grammar does exist and is discoverable. These remarks should be related to the more general fact that in both syntax and phonology the modern linguist's typical rejection of linguistic universale and belief that these have been disconfirmed by his studies is largely exaggerated. What has been shown, insofar as it has, is only that the surface structures of languages are rather different (even this is easily exaggerated), and also their surface phonological structures. But deep structures and the principles which relate these to their surface forms in both syntax and phonology have hardly been studied at all in most modern linguistics. No conclusions about vast differences in these aspects have any empirical basis. It is thus crucial to see how languages differing superficially in syntax about as much as two can, like Mohawk and English, may nonetheless reveal fundamental similiarities in deep structures and in syntactic rules. The search for a universal grammar was given up much too soon, because it was wrongly associated with a failure to distinguish surface grammar from deep grammar. It is often claimed that universal grammar is 'unscientific', 'speculative', and 'untestable'. As the present paper partially illustrates, universal assumptions are, on the contrary, the most testable of all linguistic assertions. For example, given a description of Mohawk and English reflexivization which involves some rules particular to each language, but some which are claimed to be part of language as such, the overall account involves claims about all other languages and is thus testable against the facts of reflexivization in every other language. More generally, this illustrates central principles of the method of universal grammar : every remark about any language is at least partly a remark about the nature of language as such; every descriptive decision in every language is partly to be determined on the basis of the facts of other languages. 'Describing each language in its own terms', which is the slogan of so much structural linguistics, is really as misguided as it is impossible. THOMAS J. WATSON RESEARCH LABORATORY, IBM CORPORATION*

* Affiliation at the time of the Conference: Queens College of the City University of New York.

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DISCUSSION WINTER:

I was delighted to have a statement that the discussion should center around cases. I understood Mr. Postal to imply that in semantically reflexive constructions, the position of the object could not be filled by nouns, and that this was a kind of a universal. I find the sentences Werner Winter loves Werner Winter or Paul Postal admires Paul Postal perfectly acceptable, and I would not brush these aside by saying that they were replacements of reflexive constructions, but competing constructions. I just wonder how these bear on the present discussion. POSTAL:

I think one ought to bring in the notion of contrastive stress here or some kind of stress or emphasis. I am sure it's not irrelevant to these examples. That is, the examples cited by Professor Winter are well-formed under the proposed interpretation only if the objects have contrastive stress. I was discussing sentences with neutral intonation only. (UCLA) : I am not sure about how many of the different properties that are common to both Mohawk and English you postulate are universal. Are you suggesting that the leftright ordering is universal; because if so, I don't see the justification based on two languages, when we know that ordering is very often unique to languages even though certain universal functions can be established. VICTORIA FROMKIN

POSTAL:

This is certainly the weakest point in the discussion. One might want to weaken the claim to say something as follows: you can only define anaphoric connection, and which one pronominalizes which is totally language-specific. That's logically possible. It seems to me that if there is anything universal to be said in the way of ordering, then left-to-right is the best hypothesis. It's not true that I base that on only two languages. I did try and ask a number of people who knew weird languages whether there was a tendency for pronominalization to work left to right and, insofar as there was clear evidence, it seemed to me that there was. Certainly there are a lot of tough cases even in English, for example, IF-clauses. So maybe one will ultimately be driven back to the weakest assumption, which is that there is nothing universal to be said about which determines which, or maybe it has nothing to do with order. Maybe there is some property of the trees that would determine it, although I can't imagine what that would be. I tried to figure one out, and I was totally unable to say anything. A lot of people would like to say that somehow it's the subject that dominates, but that certainly won't work, and I couldn't think of anything better. Certainly you are right that this is the weakest point in that aspect of the argument.

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(University of Chicago): First, a comment concerning anaphora was that this would involve the elimination of modifiers from the anaphoric element. I wonder if you would comment on the very common type of anaphora which you get in journalistic English. For example, an anaphoric noun phrase involving a totally different head noun with loads of modifiers. To take a typical example : Sen. Dirksen announced his supportfor Johnson's (whatever the bill is). The Illinois Republican stated so and so. This is extremely common in journalistic English and also, the intonation which you get associated with it is quite different from, say, a noun phrase of the same type, such as The Nebraska Democrat, however, supported it. I wonder how this would fit with what you are saying about the nature of anaphora. The other point which I would like to raise has to do with Dr. Fromkin's remarks concerning the left-to-right ordering which you were talking about in connection with reflexivization, and your response to this. I am wondering if the situation might not be that you have indeed universal principles with respect to both reflexivization and pronominalization, and that, as far as ordering for pronominalization is concerned, it is indeed governed by left to right ordering, but for reflexivization it's the subject relationship which is involved. You didn't give any examples of your statement concerning the difficulty of stating that the subject governs reflexivization. I wonder if you would elaborate further on that. JAMES MCCAWLEY

POSTAL:

Let me answer in reverse order. What about John told Schwartz about himself, things like that, where it doesn't seem to have anything to do with subject, but where left-to-right works. As for the first thing, what I would say about that is that it's not anaphora in the sense that I was talking about. I believe this is relevant to claims that there is something funny about sentences such as Napoleon likes Bonaparte, which don't seem to me funny at all because these depend on factual knowledge quite independent of the language. That is, one could know English quite well and not know that Sen. Dirksen was the Illinois Republican. It seems to me what the headlines depend upon there is extralinguistic knowledge, and that's not anaphora at all. It's the use of two noun phrases which, as a matter of fact, have the same reference. But that's not something that you know by knowing English. Anaphora seems to me to indicate identity of reference which you must know by virtue of knowing the language, unless there are ambiguities in the language itself, which there sometimes are. This seems to me quite different. (University of Tel Aviv, Israel) : I would like to come back to the question of identity of reference to which you just referred. I take it that the notion of identity, whether you mean strong identity or nondistinctness, is very well motivated in syntactic description. However, I think that RUTH AARONSON

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the notion with respect to reflexivization, discussed by yourself today, and say by Lees and Klima, perhaps with respect to pronominalization in general, seems to be semantically based, where I take semantics to mean understanding by virtue of your knowledge of English. Even if you introduce the indices, Harry l5 Harry2, Harry a , these would in fact be semantic features which would have syntactic consequences rather than the other way around. POSTAL:

It seems to me that this is an issue of terminology. It's quite clear that the indices have a semantic function, they do indicate identity of reference, which is a bit strange to talk about, since, although identity might be well-defined, reference is rather obscure. I can't do anything about that. But then, of course, they do have syntactic functions, since they determine the operation of the reflexivization rules, for example. So I have no objection if you want to call them semantic or syntactic. It seems to be that both aspects are involved. DANES:

I am afraid that I don't understand one thing, maybe because of my stupidity. What theoretical assumption enables you to make universal statements on the basis of contrastive study of only two languages. POSTAL:

I discussed this a bit in the last part of the paper, which I didn't get a chance to read because I made it too long. In fact, I would be willing to postulate universale on the basis of an even weaker study, namely of one language. It seems to me that this is entirely appropriate. Your remarks relate to the idea that universal assumptions are untestable and speculative. Notice on the contrary that they are the most testable of all linguistic assumptions. There seems to be a strange idea that one should play it safe and claim as little as possible. I suppose that I maintain the opposite view — that one ought to be as radical as possible. What's wrong with basing a universal hypothesis on two languages. If it's wrong, then dozens of people will immediately come forward and present the evidence. It is clear that the ideal of studying, say, a hundred or two hundred languages and then stating hypotheses is wonderful. The odds are that if one did that the hypotheses would be much more correct. But unfortunately no one has been able to do that. 1 see nothing wrong with basing hypotheses on the small number of languages which it is possible to study at all by one person, and letting those who have not studied those languages, but have studied other languages, determine whether these hypotheses are correct. I see no possible flaw in that approach. It seems to me that it's perfectly reasonable. So I can't imagine why you object to it.

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REFERENCES Beattie, James, 1788 Theory of language (London). Chomsky, Noam, 1964 Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague, Mouton). 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MIT Press). 1966 Cartesian Linguistics (New York, Harper and Row). Greenberg, Joseph, 1963 'Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements', in J. Greenberg, ed. Universals of Language 58-90 (Cambridge, MIT Press). Katz, Jen-old and Paul M. Postal, 1964 An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, ΜΓΓ Press). Lees, Robert B. and Edward Klima, 1963 "Rules for English Pronominalization", Language 39.17-28. Postal, Paul M., 1962 Some Syntactic Rules in Mohawk. Doctoral dissertation (New Haven, Yale University). 1966 "On So-called Pronouns in English". Report of the Seventeenth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies, ed. by F. Dineen (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Institute of Languages and Linguistics).

ONE INSTANCE OF PRAGUE SCHOOL METHODOLOGY: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF UTTERANCE AND TEXT FRANTISEK DANES

0. The methodology of any particular science is determined mainly by three major factors : (1) the general methodological principles, (2) the aim of investigation, (3) the object under investigation. Those linguists who are inclined to emphasize the first and second factors are interested more in the forms of description, while the others, emphasizing the last factor, concentrate their interest rather on the forms of particular languages. It seems to me that the linguists of the Prague School (PS) avoided the justmentioned onesidedness; on the one hand, they undoubtedly contributed much to the purely methodological questions of our science (in the framework of the ideological structure of their period; cf. Trnka 1966) — one should remember the fact that they initiated, as early as in the late twenties and early thirties, statistical investigations (esp. in phonology),1 and saw the significance of modern logic for linguistic methodology as well as of the cooperation of various scientific disciplines for the advance of the whole of science2 — on the other hand, they never neglected the study of particular facts of languages and their detailed description, they never ceased to consider linguistics an empirical science. We may say that PS methodology was balanced in another respect as well. If we consider Trnka's distinction between the system of language and language experience as mutually related counterparts, we may say that "some scholars are more inclined to analyze the former of the two aspects of language and lay particular stress on the 1

For some early contributions, see Mathesius 1929 and Trnka 1935; for some more recent ones, see Kiámsky 1964 and Ludvíková and Kraus 1966. * Trnka points out (as early as in 1943) that "... the noetic model begins to be supplied by logic. This shift is noticable also in other sciences, social as well as natural, and things appear to be tending to an era of a certain mental balance, such as used to characterize the eighteenth century" (1966:164). Chomsky's appraisal of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century linguistics is not without interest in this connection (1966). {Cf. also Trnka:) "Modern logic takes on the part of the leading science in the structure of the sciences of today." (ibid. 159), and: "The progress of the structure of science is best implemented in peaceful cultural communities whose linguists or aestheticians or physicists can draw inspiration from their philosopher and sociologist colleagues, and, the other way round, whose philosophers and sociologists can be stimulated by their linguist, aesthetician, physicist colleagues who are able to keep pace with the latest developments in their sciences, who can experience and assimilate the results of these developments, and so can exercise leadership in pioneering research work" {ibid. 164ff.).

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postulate of absolute regularity of language phenomena, while others ... prefer to observe language experience and speak only of language trends and tendencies" (Trnka 1966:163). Though both inclinations may be traced among the Prague scholars (e.g., V. Mathesius belonged to the latter type, while the Russian members rather to the former one), as a whole the PS showed a sound balance in this respect (this is characteristic, e.g., of the work of J. Vachek). The most characteristic feature of the Prague structuralists, in contradistinction to other structuralist schools, is the functional approach. It follows from the recognition of the instrumental character of language (cf. "Thèse", TCLP 1 (1929), p.7: "... la langue est un système de moyens d'expression appropriés à un but") and is manifested in the lasting interest in the problems of meaning, in the "linguistics of parole", in stylistics, in the analysis of text, as well as in practical applications (standardization, etc).

This approach was formulated by the late Professor V. Mathesius whose methodological advice, comprising both the structural and functional approach, reads as follows : "... the way of investigation leads from SPEECH, which is immediately given, to LANGUAGE, as a system having an ideal reality only, and from FUNCTIONAL NECESSITIES to the FORMAL MEANS by which they are satisfied" (1936:97-8). 1.0 The former dichotomy, speech versus language, is revealed in the double sense attached to the fundamental term SENTENCE. This name denotes, on the one hand, a certain syntactic form, i.e., an abstract PATTERN which represents one of several formal grammatical units of a given linguistic system, and on the other hand, particular concrete UTTERANCES, which are realizations (implementations) of sentence patterns in the act of communication.3 In contradistinction to the abstract sentence pattern, the utterance refers to a concrete piece of reality, to a particular situation and is an organic constituent of a discourse (text). This distinction also obtains, of course, with respect to words as items of the lexical system on the one hand, and as members of a particular utterance on the other. But it would be a mistake to think that the utterance and discourse belong fully to the domain of la parole, that any difference between an utterance and its underlying grammatical sentence structure is of an individual and accidental character only and thus defies any scientific linguistic 8

The term 'sentence' might be reserved for the notion of a sentence pattern filled in with particular words but not yet related to a concrete piece of reality (to a particular event) and uttered in a concrete situation. Schematically:

It is not without interest that Prof. Y. Bar-Hillel, in one of his forum lectures held at the Linguistic Institute in 1966, pointed out as one of the most topical problems of the philosophy of language just this dichotomy between sentence and utterance. This question involves some fundamental problems of meaning and reference. Cf. Danesi 1964.

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description and interpretation. On the contrary, we maintain that even the utterance as such displays some social, ¿.e.general nonindividual and nonaccidental, properties. Speech is controlled by certain norms, some of them being linguistic norms (these being both of grammatical and nongrammatical and stylistic character), others of some other nature. 4 One of the most interesting tasks of our science is the study of the nongrammatical linguistic structure of utterance and discourse (text). Such a 'theory of utterance', as well as an 'utterance level' of the linguistic system were postulated by Czech and Slovak scholars several decades ago and since investigated by their younger colleagues in some detail (cf. Skalicka 1948, Pauliny 1948, Danes 1964).5 1.1 One such principle of utterance organization (and of text as well) has been ascertained by V. Mathesius and termed FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE (FP), or, more precisely, utterance perspective. Analyzing the organization of the utterance, we state as a rule its bipartite structure. The two parts (more precisely, the partial communicative functions assigned to them) may be defined from two different points of view: (1) Taking for granted that in the act of communication an utterance appears to be, in essence, an enunciation (statement) about something (questions should be treated separately), we shall call the parts THEME (something that one is talking about, TOPIC) and RHEME (what one says about it, COMMENT). 6 (2) Following the other line, linking up utterance with the context and/or situation, we recognize that, as a rule, one part contains old, already know or given elements, functioning thus as a 'starting point' of the utterance, while the other conveys a new piece of information (being thus the 'core' of the utterance). But, as in most cases, the two aspects coincide, we shall, in our following discussion, disregard the said distinction. The following passage from J. B. Carroll's textbook on language and thought (1964: 51) will serve as an illustrative example: "In reporting a baseball game, we might say Jones hit Smith with a fast ball if we are primarily interested in what Jones did; but we would be likely to say Smith was hit with a fast ball if we are detailing what happened to Smith and why he was sent to the hospital." In the first utterance, it is 'Jones' that represents the topic, while the topic of the second one is 'Smith'. (It is worth noting that the principle of FP may be traced even in texts of mathematics; cf. e.g. such expressions as A > Β and Β < A, which are equal; nevertheless, their distribution depends on certain 'contextual' circumstances.) Further, what is relevant is not only the actual bipartition, but also the ordering of the two parts. The normal sequence {cf. the above examples) is such that Τ precedes 1

Cf. Trost 1936:289 : "Soziale Normen des Sprechens decken sich nicht mit der Sprache". The utterance level is also recognized by Β. Trnka (cf. 1964) and most recently by R. E. Longacre (see pp. 173-90 in the present volume). • As to theriseof the terms THEME and RHEME, see Firbas 1957. s

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R (at least in languages of our type; Hockett [1963:18] remarks that in some languages it is the other order that is experienced as 'normal')· Mathesius calls such an ordering 'the OBJECTIVE sequence', in contradistinction to the SUBJECTIVE one, i.e. R-T, starting with the new piece of information and thus revealing the expressive, emotional attitude of the speaker. Let us adduce an example : (Children are expecting their father; hearing some steps, they report :) (Children do not expect the return of their father; hearing some steps and recognizing them as familiar, the children report this unexpected event:)

Τ-R "Daddy is coming" R-T "Daddy is coming!"

Beside the subjective sequence, another marked modification of the FP is to be distinguished, viz. emphasis for contrast, which is intended to show that a word is contrasted with another (either implied or previously expressed), or that it "introduces an unexpected idea" (D. Jones). D. L. Bolinger (1952:1123) calls such utterances 'second-instance sentences' (e.g. What are you going to do?). Two additional remarks seem to be necessary: (1) We have to be aware of the fact that the boundary line between Τ and R is often not sharp; there are either transitional elements between the Τ proper and R proper (in consequence of the uneven distribution of the amount [degree] of communicative relevance of the particular elements), or the elements of the two components of FP are interwoven to some extent (due to certain grammatical or semantic rules). (2) The concept of FP should be identified neither with the semantic content and structure of the underlying sentence, nor with the amount of the selective information rendered by the parts of the sentence. Without going into a detailed discussion of these problems, we can briefly state at least two relevant facts : First, the FP-structure of utterances simply depends neither on the meanings of the particular lexical items contained in the utterance, nor on the semantic function of the syntactic elements of the sentence (such as agent, action, etc.). Second, it is evident that the entropy of the words placed at the end of an utterance is relatively low (as their predictability is relatively high). Nevertheless, this is scarcely to deny that it is just these words (functioning as the comment [R] of the utterance) that carry the highest communicative relevance (from this point of view, even a binary choice may be, and often is, associated with a very high communicative value — e.g., if one expects a 'yes-no' answer). In other words, the FP should be interpreted in terms of the different degrees of actual communicative value of various elements of utterance in a particular act of communication. And as the two parts of utterance that constitute the framework for the distribution of this value might be duly termed THEME (TOPIC) and RHEME (COMMENT), respectively, we might call the FP-organization of utterance (and text) the 'thematic structure of the utterance' (in contradistinction to the semantic structure of the sentence).

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1.2 So far we have tried to describe the functional aspect of the phenomenon called 'functional perspective'. Let us now consider THE MEANS by which the said functions are rendered. The contrastive comparison of languages (on the basis of common communicative needs of people, of their 'functional necessities') — one of the basic methodological tools of the Prague approach — shows many distinct differences between languages (related to their typological structure). Yet two devices of the whole available set of means seem to be the most common and important (at least in languages of our kind), namely, order of elements (word order) and sentence intonation. As regards English, Mathesius and his followers, esp. J. Firbas, 7 pointed out some other means as well. Thus in the above example Smith was hit with a fast ball, it is the use of the passive construction that enables the speaker to begin the utterance with the selected topic. In some other cases, we may use a specific construction, such as It was Jones who hit Smith ..., or the so-called preparatory THERE (with inversion): There are some pictures (R) on the wall. In utterances like A boy came into the room, it is the definite and indefinite articles (along with the semantic class of the verb)8 that signal the unknown and known elements, respectively, etc. Techniques used in other languages are particles, morphological means and others (see Hatcher 1956, Novák 1958, 1959, Polivanov 1936). A contrastive analysis of the means indicating FP in Czech and English reveals some interesting points (cf. Firbas 1964a). Generally speaking, English, in essence, is no less sensitive to the needs of FP than the languages with so-called free word order (such as Slavic languages, especially Czech), but the difference lies in the different means employed by them for this purpose. As regards word order and sentence intonation, I arrived at the following conclusion: In both languages, the terminal center of intonation in the utterance (CI) will be located on R (this rule seems to be effective in many other languages as well). Now, whereas in Czech the great variability of the word order in unmarked utterances is compensated by a rather uniform and automatized location of the terminal CI on the terminal stress unit (mostly a word), in English, on the other hand, the highly fixed word order (i.e. fixed according to the rules of grammar) is compensated for by a great variety of the possible positions of the CI in the utterance. To put it differently, in English it is rather the suprasegmental phonological structure that signals the FP (i.e. the points of the highest amount of communicative value; cf. the relatively high frequency of italicized words in English texts). In Czech, this is done by the position of the elements (words) in the utterance. Thus we may conclude that the functional load of the two linguistic devices on the utterance level is different in various languages (and is, to a certain extent, proportionate to the employment of the same means on the other levels of linguistic structure). 9 7

In a series of papers, cf. at least 1964a. • Particularly the class of verbs denoting the notion of 'bringing into existence or upon stage*. Cf. Firbas 1962. • For more detailed discussion of this topic, see DaneS 1967.

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In summary, it may be stated that the devices available for the indication of FP in various languages are of two kinds : they are either specific (primary) to this function (though not necessarily employed exclusively for it; thus word order in Czech is such a primary specific device for FP, but at the same time it is employed to a small extent by the grammar as well), or the utterance level (FP) makes secondary use of linguistic means (units) belonging primarily to the 'lower' levels (e.g. in English, the grammatical passive construction is employed for the purposes of FP; cf. the above example Smith was· hit by a fast ball, or in Spanish and Albanian, the doubling of thematic objects). Thus the hierarchy of the structure of linguistic levels is revealed; the lower levels are subservient to the higher levels and are encompassed by them. 2.0 It is obvious that the principles of FP, which can also be interpreted as the 'thematic organization,' are not confined to single utterances only. They 'permeate', so to speak, the structure of the whole text; they work in utterance sections (units delimited by means of intonational disjunctures), as well as in utterance groups, i.e. in portions of text comprising a number of utterances (such as paragraphs, sections, chapters, etc), or the text (discourse) as a whole. The study of this domain is only beginning and comprises such problems as types of discourses (K. Hausenblas [1964] suggests the following three basic distinctions: simplicity vs. complexity; independence vs. dependence; continuity vs. discontinuity), segmentation of discourse, the hierarchy of its thematic structure and the different possible ways of the progression of subject matter presentation ('thematic progression', TP), etc. 2.1 As for the latter problem, I will discuss it here in some detail. The TP might be described in terms of FP, i.e. each utterance will be represented as a nexus of T-R; and as we must assume that each Τ (as an already known, old piece of infomation) had to be chosen (derived) from the subject matter already presented in the given discourse (text) or from the common stock of knowledge of the participants of the discourse (potential readers of the text), our task is to find out this contextual or situational connection for each T. This connection will be indicated here by means of a vertical arrow j (while the horizontal arrow -> indicates the T-R nexus in an utterance). Thus the TP might be defined as the concatenation of particular T's and their connection with the text, its subparts and situation. There are, of course, a number of different types of this concatenation, with different stylistic values. I can adduce here only some typical ones : (1) Tx

R1

\ T 2 ( = Rx)

Rz

i

Ts (=R 2 ) -> Rs This is an elementary and basic type characterized by the fact that R! in the utterance

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UJ appears in the next U 1 + 1 as its T 1 + 1 ; or, in other words, each R becomes the Τ of the next utterance. This type of TP could be termed SIMPLE LINEAR PROGRESSION. (2) (Tx

Rx) T2 ( = R J - R a I τ2

- R3

I T2

-» R 4

This scheme presents a PROGRESSION WITH A CONTINUOUS THEME. One and the same theme appears in a series of utterances (to be sure, in not fully identical wording), to which different rhemes are linked up. (3) Tx - R 1 ( = R,' + Ri")

¿ ' •'

τ;

ν

ψ Ν

>

Ν

This type is characterized by the fact that a certain R is explicitly or implicitly doubled (R' + R"), so that it gives rise to a pair of thematic progressions : first, R' is expounded and after this progression is finished, R" becomes the theme of a second progression. Let us call this type of TP THE EXPOSITION OF A SPLIT THEME. (4) The above-mentioned types (l)-(3) have one property in common: the particular utterance themes are derived from the rhemes of some of the preceding utterances. A different type is represented by such progressions in which the Τ of one or more utterances is derived not from the rheme of a preceding utterance, but directly from the overall hyper-theme of some of the hierarchically superior portions of the text (i.e. of the paragraph, etc.) ; the choice and sequence of particular utterance themes of which will be controlled by various principles (such as time sequence, or stable elements of the overall theme and their sequence fixed by a technical convention, or given by natural relations, etc.). This TP might be called TP WITH DERIVED themes. (5) The so-called thematic jump may be considered a special type of thematic concatenation. Essentially, it consists of the omission of one (or more) utterances in a thematic progression, when the thematic content of such an utterance is quite evident, plainly implied by the context, and therefore redundant, unnecessary. This modification of TP might be called TP WITH AN OMITTED LINK. These just stated five types of TP have to be considered as abstract principles. In

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particular texts, they are employed in various ways and combinations. Thus, e.g., type (3) may be combined with type (1), so that the two expositions of a split theme have the structure of a simple linear progression. The combination of (1) and (2) is also frequent, etc. Besides, the TP is often complicated by various insertions (supplements, explanatory notes) and asides. At the same time, it is evident that the concrete realization of these abstract principles depends on the properties of the given language, especially on the different means available for rendering FP. Another interesting fact is that languages have at their disposal some special means even for the purpose of TP. Thus, e.g., such expressions as English both ... and, on the one hand ...on the other hand, in the first instance ... in the second instance, etc., are often used with connections of type (3), etc. Every text (especially in scientific or technical style) is interwoven with such expressions, signaling significant points of the TP of a given text. The distribution of such expressions in a particular text might be termed its NETWORK OF ORIENTATION. The ascertaining of the set of such expressions for each language and their functional classification seems to be an important and interesting task. 3.0 These considerations have some practical implications. Our knowledge of the facts of FP is applicable in practical stylistics and computational linguistics, especially in information retrieval. In regard to stylistics, Mathesius' view is relevant: any utterance, even a long and complex one, should contain, in essence, one theme-rheme nexus only, as the intelligibility of any utterance depends to a great extent on hearer's (reader's) recognition of what the speaker (writer) is talking about and what he says about it. The same requirement is valid, analogously, even for larger portions of text (paragraphs, etc.) : the text should be worded in such a way that the reader might without difficulties follow the thematic progression. The computational questions are of a different kind : not how to present, but how to disclose the progression of subject matter presentation. 10 The main question is how to make the concept of FP workable on a large scale in the nonhuman conditions of a computer. The linguistic investigation of FP has so far been concerned with finding out all the different possible means of rendering FP and the interplay of the particular factors controlling their employment. It has investigated particular interesting instances and neglected an analysis in bulk of relatively extensive texts of different types, especially scientific and technical texts. Such research may show how the FP really works and what formal cues could be most effective for computation (for different languages). Such cues might be either direct or indirect. The direct ones correspond to the 10 We do not, of course, maintain that the viewpoint of the reader is absent in stylistics. But practical stylistics is primarily concerned with the writer's problem of 'how to present in words', and the relation to the reader is only of a subsidiary, secondary nature. The computational approach, on the other hand, is the approach of the reader — its starting point can be the text and its structural properties only.

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primary means of FP (see 1.2), e.g., in some languages word order, in other languages special morphemes, articles, doubling of objects, deictic pronouns, etc. The indirect means may belong either to the level of FP (utterance level), or they may belong to other levels. Thus when trying to find out the 'known, old, given' elements (i.e. the theme), we analyze a certain portion of the preceding context. With such a procedure, several open questions remain. For instance, the upper limit of such a portion must be empirically determined (i.e., how many utterances should it comprise). Going too far back could be dangerous as the notion of 'know, old' or 'new, unknown' ought to be taken relative to a certain portion of text a paragraph, or a section, or a chapter, not absolutely for the whole text. Further, one must remember that one and the same thematic or rhematic element may occur in different wordings, so that a list of groups of synonymous expressions and of their possible paraphrases seems to be necessary.11 At the same time, it is evident that many elements can be evaluated as 'known' indirectly, inferred from the preceding context. Thus, for example, the expression 'his illness', occurring in an utterance, might be experienced as a thematic, i.e. known element, in the case when in a preceding utterance 'his health' has been somehow mentioned. Some other instances of this kind : 'restaurant' — 'lunch'; 'summer' — 'vacations'; 'science' — 'investigators'. If this study of SEMANTIC INFERENCE (or SEMANTIC IMPLICATION, if viewed from the other side) is to be based on relatively exact foundations, one cannot content oneself with a psychological and rather impressionistic notion of associations. The investigation of semantic inference (implication) must have its starting point in the semantic analysis of constituent (distinctive) semantic features. If the semantic content of an expression of a given language is described as a set of hierarchically ordered features, then we might tentatively suggest that the relation of inference between expressions might be defined as a (qualified) intersection of the respective sets ; the relation of inference holds when the intersection is a nonempty set. It appears, then, that the identity of both sets, i.e. the synonymy, represents an extreme case of the inference relation. By the indirect cues that belong to the other levels, I mean certain correspondences between the FP and these levels. Such correspondences may obtain between the grammatical structure of the utterance and FP (e.g. it would be useful to state, by means of statistical methods, the degree of functional coincidence of grammatical sentence elements such as subject, predicate, etc., and the elements of FP12 — i.e. the frequency of the subject functioning as the theme of the utterance, etc., which, of course, differs from language to language), or between some semantic types of verbs, such as point out, show, assume, appear, and their transitory function between Τ and R. CZECHOSLOVAK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

11

"

I mean something like the work by Garvin and his group, cf. Garvin, Brewer and Mathiot 1967. This phenomenon was investigated for English in some detail by J. Firbas. Cf. at least 1964b.

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DISCUSSION DUBOIS:

This paper has been all the more interesting since the ideas of the Prague School and Saussurian concepts have been and still are very important in France. I have two comments or questions concerning the principles of functional analysis as presented here. The first question : by emphasizing the social nature of language and the various situational factors which enable us to understand the utterance as a whole, are we not transforming linguistic analysis into sociological analysis? The elements which can play a part in the total meaning of the utterance are so varied that in extreme cases communication becomes impossible. This is a problem that has been raised by Bar-Hillel when he asserted that translation is impossible because the machine would have to have in its memory all the real-world experience that only a human being can have. Therefore, one would also have to have the experience of the word that the person receiving the message has. DANE§:

Linguistics has to describe and interpret all the relevant facts of natural languages and their use that display a systematic and conventional (inter-individual) character, that belong to social norm. In a sense, the functional approach is a secondary one, since what is immediately accessible to our observations, and necessarily appears as the primary starting point of our analysis, are the forms of linguistic expressions. Nevertheless, since we have some previous experience from our own language and many other languages as well, we may assume the existence of some functions and meanings even in the language under analysis, and try to find out whether and how they are manifested in it. To pretend that nothing is known about the possible functions of the language we have to describe, can hardly serve. In the very process of analysis, linguists often switch from one approach to the other. DUBOIS:

The second question is as follows : if we are to emphasize the importance of the role of intonation in the utterance, it seems to me that we must also take into account in our linguistic analysis all the gestures accompanying or substituting for an utterance and then the possibility of confusing the production of a sentence with the particular use of language in a given situation. DANES:

May I refer to a very interesting book by two British scholars, Crystal and Quirk, about intonation and paralinguistic features (1964). Truly, intonation is the most elementary means of expression and has many nonlinguistic functions as well. Nevertheless, a part of intonation forms a system which has been already described for many languages. It seems to me necessary to find out systematic uses of intonation, even though the greater part of the use of intonation does not belong to the domain of language proper.

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LONGACRE:

I am wondering if the distinction between functional onomatology and functional syntax is at all parallel to the distinction between lexis and grammar or lexicon and grammar as found in, say, the thinking of the Firthian School, Halliday, and so forth, where they distinguish lexis from grammar, or Pike, who distinguishes the lexeme from grammar. 1 assume that this is a somewhat similar distinction. Am I correct in that?

DANES:

Functional onomatology accounts for all kinds of naming units (words, groups of words, morphemes). Functional syntax deals with the ways of putting naming units into mutual relations, and thus it does not cover the same field as grammar. Formal morphology cuts across these functional domains (serving both of them). (Columbia University) : I just want to point out that there are two very distinct ways in which the word 'functional' or 'function' is being used with respect to language. The first of these says in general (this may not be perfectly accurate, but I think it reflects closely enough the distinction I wish to make) that the function of the utterance is to convey certain comments about certain topics; that is, an expression. This is very closely akin to the semantics of the utterance. It does not take you over into sociolinguistics in any sense. The second notion of function which hasn't been considered in this last discussion is the one in which we consider why the expression elicits some response. This is not at all the same thing as the semantic function of the utterance. I don't think that Prof. Danes was concerning himself with what I would call this second function, that he is much more closely interested in the semantic rather than the sociological function of speech. MANER THORPE

DANE§ :

I would distinguish three levels in syntax : the grammatical level, the semantic level, and the level of functional perspective. Different semantic elements of the sentence acquire the partial communicative functions of Τ and R, respectively, when the sentence is used in the capacity of utterance in a particular context and situation. THORPE :

But if we subsume a situation in which language is used under a functionalism, it is concerned with the utterance as an instrument for conveying comments about topics. Something further is to be said even if this is completely explicated. That further thing is the explanation of why the comments about the topics were conveyed to begin with; that is, without this kind of a motivation there would be no reason to convey comments about topics, and then you would be into the sociological aspect.

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daneS:

Yes, but these problems do not belong to linguistics proper. Nevertheless they are very important and should be studied by sociolinguists and sociologists. thorpe:

But in both cases, the phrase 'functional approach to language' is used. I wanted to point out that they are quite distinct. danes:

Yes, the aims and the methods of investigation are different. h a r r y spitzbardt (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany) : Dr. Danes, you know that the linguistic circle of our university is entirely appreciative of the linguistics of the Prague School. We've got our own idea of it, and I want to make sure whether our idea holds good. Are we right in assuming that one of the main differences between the Prague idea of structuring and that of de Saussure is that you of the Prague School have made provision for an interaction between the diachronic and synchronic approach, whereas Saussurian theory has made arrangements only for the synchronic approach? A m I right on that? Secondly, I'm not quite sure, or I didn't quite understand, what you meant by your structural approach toward dictionary building. I think there is no harm in having the good old alphabetical order. We are in the same position as the Czech-speaking people with the word 'glücklich', which might mean 'lucky' or 'happy'. When I look in a German-English dictionary for the word 'glücklich', I find two entries — either 'lucky' with an explanation and some idiom like 'lucky boy' or 'lucky strike', or I find 'happy' with explanatory remarks. Going from English to German, I will have to look first at 'lucky', and second at 'happy', and so on, and find the German entries there. There is no harm in this. On the other hand, Indonesian dictionaries are quite a bad example of what you might call a structural dictionary. There is the one by Prof. Karl from Leipzig, who made reservations for agglutinative features. Even so, you find, for instance, the root batya which means 'to read', but at the same time you find 'reader' not under 'b' but under 'p' (pinbadye). dane§:

I want to point out that there are two very important methodological devices for finding out the meaning of words. The first is to contrast it with another language ; the second is to contrast it with other terms — synonyms, antonyms, and so on — in the same language. If one uses these two methods, he necessarily would ascertain two different meanings of the word. In regard to the first question, it seems to me that there are some differences between the conception of de Saussure and the Prague School. But the distinction between synchronic and diachronic could be found in de Saussure. It seems to me that only a few linguists maintain that de Saussure wasn't interested in diachrony. The novum in

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the Prague approach was not to identify synchronic with static. We maintain that even in the synchronic approach, in the synchronic description of language, we must take into account the dynamic character of language, Of course, synchronic description is not a motion picture, it is only a snapshot; but we must try to find out the synchronic projection of the movements, the changes in the language. For instance, such facts as differences between elements belonging to the center of the language and the peripheral elements which are either obsolete or quite new, and some other stylistic differences, are just indicators of the dynamic character of the synchronic description. The other innovation of the Prague School was that we do not maintain that la parole, which is a somewhat obscure notion even in de Saussure's Cours, should be interpreted as an individual fact only. Cf. Skaliöka's "linguistics of parole' ; this is why I pointed out that even the utterance brings some linguistic problems because it is a social fact and is organized on some general principles. It may be that it would be necessary to coin a new term, 'theory of utterance', or something of this sort, to cover such problems. (UCLA) : I agree very much that since linguistics is an empirical science, that which concerns the form without content is meaningless in our field. However, I don't think that you meant to imply that formalisms of the properties of real language are unimportant. Particularly, it seems to me that one of the important needs that we have is to be able to formalize the knowledge we have about language so that we can also test it in as rigorous a way as possible. Has there been any formalization of some of the points which you have raised today; for instance, (1) the question of the relationship between the topic and either the syntactic or logical subject of the sentence, and (2) the relationship between theme and intonation in a way that we can then examine and see (even though I know that you are not in favor of suggesting universale from just a study of a few languages) whether we can hypothesize that perhaps there are some universal questions involved?

VICTORIA FROMKIN

DANES:

Unfortunately, the words 'form', 'formalize', and 'formalisms', have not one meaning but several; and it is sometimes difficult to find out what is really meant. If I understand you right, I must confess that no such attempt — such a formalization as the one you probably mean — has been tried as yet. But it seems to me that such an attempt could be useful.

REFERENCES Bolinger, Dwight L., 1952 "Linear Modification. The Effect of the 'Linear Geometry' of the Sentence upon English and Spanish", Publications of the Modern Language Association 67.1117-44.

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Carrol, John B., 1964 Language and Thought (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice-Hall). Chomsky, Noam, 1966 Cartesian Linguistics (New York, Harper and Row). Crystal, David and Randolph Quirk, 1964 Systems of Prosodie andParalinguistic Features in English (The Hague, Mouton). Danes, Frantisek, 1964 "A Three-Level Approach to Syntax", Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1.225-40. 1967 "Order of Elements and Sentence Intonation", To Honor Roman Jakobson, 499-512 (The Hague, Mouton). Firbas, Jan, 1957 "Some Thoughts on the Function of Word-Order in Old English and Modern English", Sbornik praci filosofické fakulty Brnënské university A5.72-100. 1962 "Notes on the Sentence in Act of Communication", Sbornik praci filosofické fakulty Brnënské university AIO. 133-48. 1964a "Comparative Word Order Studies", Brno Studies in English 4.111-28. 1964b "On Defining the Theme in Functional Sentence Analysis", Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1.267-80. Garvin, Paul L., Jocelyn Brewer and Madeleine Mathiot, 1967 Predication-Typing — A Pilot Study in Semantic Analysis (= Language Monograph No. 27). Hatcher, Anna Granville, 1956 Theme and Underlying Question. Two Studies of Spanish Word Order (= Word Monograph No. 3). Hausenblas, Karel, 1964 "On the Characterization and Classification of Discourse", Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1.67-83. Hockett, Charles F., 1963 "The Problem of Universals in Language", Universals of Language, ed. by Joseph Greenberg, 1-22 (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press). Krámsk^, Jiri, 1964 "A Quantitative Phonemic Analysis of Italian Mono-, Di- and Trisyllabic Words", Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1.129-44. Ludvíková, Marie and Jiri Kraus, 1966 "Kvantitativni vlastnosti öeskych fonémû (Quantitative characteristics of Czech phonemes",) Slovo a slovestnost 27.334-44. Mathesius, Vilém, 1929 "La structure phonologique du tchèque moderne", Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 1.67-84. 1936 "On Some Problems of the Systematic Analysis of Grammar", Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6.95-107. Novák, P., 1958 "K zdvojování predmëtu ν albânâtinë (On the Doubling of the Object in Albanian)", Sbornik slavistickych praci vënovany IV mezinárodnímu sjezdu slavisti ν Moskvë 27-32. (Prague, Universitas Carolina). 1959 "O prostredcích aktuálního clenëni (On the Means of Functional Perspective)", Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philologica 1.9-15. Pauliny, Eugen, 1948 "La phrase et l'énonciation", Recueil Linguistique de Bratislava 59-66. Polivanov, E., 1936 "Zur Frage der Betonungsfunktion", Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6. 75-81. Skalicka, Vladimir, 1948 "The Need for a Linguistics of Parole", Recueil Linguistique de Bratislava 21-38. Trnka, Bohumil, 1935 A Phonological Analysis of Present-Day Standard English (= Studies in English by Members of the English Seminar of the Charles University, Prague. Fifth Volume) (Prague, Facultas Philosophica Universitatis Carolinae).

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1964 "On the Linguistic Sign and the Multilevel Organization of Language", Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1. 33-40. 1966 "Linguistics and the Ideological Structure of the Period", The Linguistic School of Prague, by Josef Vachek, Appendix ΙΠ, 152-165 (Bloomington, Ind., and London, Indiana University Press). Trost, Pavel, 1936 "Bemerkungen zum Sprachtabu", Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 6. 288-94.

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE COMPARATIVE METHOD WERNER WINTER

Comparative linguistics is concerned with agreement and nonagreement on the plane of content-plus-expression. It does not concern itself, as typology does to some extent, with phenomena limited to the expression level (e.g., canonical forms), nor does it study content separate from overt expression, as does the recently revived school of universal grammar; an alleged agreement at a deeper stratum that is not manifested by an agreement on the surface is not taken to be of any consequence for the work of a comparative linguist. Of crucial importance for the work of a comparativist is the concept of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs (note again the anti-universalistic position) ; neither is the selection of content units universal (they can be isolated only to the extent that they are matched by expression units), nor is the selection of expression units (which in turn can be identified only by recourse to content) conditioned by the nature of the content unit. It is only the arbitrariness of the sign selection that makes an agreement between signs significant; if there were a complete determinacy of selection, no nonagreement between signs would occur. It follows that any agreement is insignificant that was achieved by the suspension of the arbitrariness principle: agreement between onomatopoeic forms is trivial; such forms are interesting only to the extent that they have become part of a linguistic system proper. Agreement then means something; what can it mean? First, agreement may be due to chance. While this statement cannot be contested, it lacks preciseness. But the calculation of the probabilities for chance agreement remains uncertain, if not impossible — a result of the arbitrariness condition: the probability that a certain expression feature should be assigned to a certain content feature (or vice versa) cannot be calculated as long as the number of both content and expression features cannot be determined as finite. The probability for chance agreement is relatively high only in the nonarbitrary or partially arbitrary area of onomatopoeic forms; but even here the inclusion of content features is arbitrary, and finiteness cannot be achieved. Thus we have to be content with the preliminary formulation that chance agreement does indeed occur, but that the probability of its occurring is extremely small, so that for all practical purposes an agreement not limited to just a

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very few items in a large inventory should be interpreted as resulting not from chance, but from other causes. Secondly then, agreement may stem from a special relationship existing between two or more languages. Two kinds of relationship can be distinguished, a borrowing relationship and a genetic relationship. As for borrowing, diffusion of linguistic features is a normal phenomenon observable both within a language and across language boundaries. In order to posit borrowing, a basic requirement has to be met: it has to be established that the possibility of a contact between users of the giving language and users of the taking language existed at the time to which the transfer is ascribed. Three characteristics of borrowed material may be listed : a) There is a high degree of overt formal agreement between the source form and the transferred item, b) A borrowed item may be found to be more or less isolated in the inventory of the borrowing language, c) Formal correspondences found between the giving and the taking language in borrowed items have only a limited recurrence in other items of the same two languages. The diagnostic value of these characteristics is unfortunately only limited. Criterion a) can be used without reservations when the borrowing process involves two genetically unrelated languages (e.g., German and Hungarian) ; in the case of languages that are genetically related, very close overt formal agreement may also be observed in items not borrowed. A further limitation to the usefulness of criterion a) must not be overlooked: the degree of overt similarity decreases as time goes on after the transfer; once a borrowed item has become part of the inventory of the borrowing language, it is subject to all changes that occur in this language after the time of the transfer. As for criterion b), archaic forms of native origin are often as isolated as borrowed items, frequently even more so as borrowings tend to be adapted to productive existing patterns. And — this concerns criterion c) — old loan items that have been subject to regular sound developments of the borrowing language will be included in groups with what may be quite frequently recurring correspondence features. The second type of special relationship causing agreement between two and more languages is genetic relationship. If an agreement between forms of two different languages can be ascribed neither to chance nor to borrowing, it has to be assumed that the two languages represent developments from a common source. Statements about non-chance, non-borrowing relationships between two or more different languages therefore imply the claim that these languages are related in a very specific way involving the split of a more unified language into two or more differentiated languages in the course of an at least initially unspecified period of time. Comparative statements of this sort are by their very nature ultimately always diachronic statements. We consider now the steps taken to evaluate material suspected to be genetically related; we will concentrate on phonological materials. The central notion that determines the working procedures of a comparativist is that of systematic recurrence. When he finds systematically recurring correspondences, he will for all practical purposes be protected against interference from chance resemblance between un-

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related items, and if the correspondences happen to recur with sufficient frequency and with an internal patterning, also from the interference of resemblance due to borrowing. Systematic recurrence means that a correspondence found in a set A must recur in the sets A ' , A", etc., unless it can be shown that special conditions prevailed in these sets that prevented the occurrence of the correspondence found in set A . The crucial assumption then is that correspondences between genetically related forms are ipso facto regular, and that deviations are due to the intersection of one regular development with another, conflicting one. Regularity of sound change is assumed to be all-pervasive, and all deviations therefrom have to be accounted for. By virtue of its regularity, sound change does not affect the systematic recurrence of correspondences, although it will affect the substance of the fillers of the positions to the left and to the right of a correspondence symbol. The requirement that correspondences be systematically recurrent is much more stringent than the similarity requirement applied in lexicostatistics. It is therefore understandable that comparativists have strong misgivings about the validity of some of the more impressionistic findings of glottochronologists. Likewise, the classification-by-inspection method used in large-scale language taxonomy impresses the comparativist as a technique lacking scientific rigor, which leads often to a more or less pronounced resentment against the sweeping claims made by the classifiers. For the comparativist, inspection is merely a first step. He will look at a number of languages of which he has reason to believe that they might be genetically related, and if his inspection seems to reveal a sufficient number of apparently recurrent correspondences, he will begin his sorting. A t this first stage, he will be particularily interested in correspondences between nonidentical features, as these will reduce the danger of his being misled by loanwords taken over from one language into the other or shared by both. Inspection thus is followed by sorting. It involves a listing of all correspondence types observed. The number of resulting classes will be relatively high even for just one pair of languages; when an entire group is considered at one time (a much preferable procedure), the number of classes will be increased greatly, since every interference occurring in just one of the languages will lead to the introduction of a new correspondence class. Thus, the correspondence chains a-a-a-a-a and a-b-a-a-a cannot be subsumed under one class at this stage, even though the occurrence of the feature b in the second language studied may be easily explainable. Sorting thus does not yet involve explanation, which means that up to this point the possibility of an error is limited to errors of omission, not of commission: correspondences may well have been overlooked, but those obtained have not been subject to any manipulation yet. The next step will be the reduction to major correspondence classes. All chains obtained are inspected for possible conditioning factors that might explain them as variants of other chains. If, for instance, a set of correspondences o-u-a-a-a occurs only when the vowel studied is found preceding a labial consonant, the question will

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have to be raised whether this chain might be a variant of another chain a-a-a-a-a found only in a nonlabial environment. Our aim thus is to determine whether two or more correspondence chains are in complementary distribution. If the only conditioning factors to become operative would be features of the phonological environment, our task would be very simple indeed. However, interference with regular correspondence will be from other quarters too : a variant may owe its existence to paradigmatic interference or other analogical processes. Such conditions are very much harder to pinpoint. We get some guidance from the relative frequency of correspondence chains : a frequently found pattern is very likely to be that which has not suffered from interference; a correspondence pattern attested just once or twice may very well show the effects of paradigmatic interference. This is hardly more than a rule of thumb, but it does help us make intelligent guesses. The collapsing of classes of corresponding chains into major classes is the first step in our procedure that involves the positing of hypotheses; the earlier steps concerned only the arrangement of data, not their interpretation. The next step leads us to further hypotheses. We could limit ourselves to a mere labeling of correspondence chains and even major correspondence classes with numbers or other arbitrarily selected symbols ; this would not involve a further hypothetical step. However, this is not what we do. We do select a label, but our selection is determined by phonological properties of the members of the class of correspondences. Our label for the class has to meet two requirements : it must not be used again at this level of analysis to identify another class of correspondences, and it must be related in a definable way to the members of the class it labels. Generally speaking, we try to achieve minimum difference between label and class members; thus, we will always attempt to label a correspondence class with an undifferentiated correspondence chain m-m-m-m-m with the symbol m. To this cover symbol, we prefix an asterisk to indicate that we are not describing data, but an abstraction from data; it seems a pity that generative and comparative grammar use the same sign with almost diametrically opposed functions — it would make much more sense if transformationalists were to label their nonoccurring strings with, say, a raised zero ; but I guess we will just have to live with inconsistencies like this one. The use of the cover symbol *m for the class m-m-m-m-m excludes its use as a label for any other class of correspondences occurring in the same reduced list of major, that is, contrastive, correspondence classes; a class, say, m-b-m-b-m will have to be labeled with a different symbol. By selecting labels with a maximum of similarity with the items labeled, a further step in our procedure becomes possible. We assume that the agreement among the individual members of a correspondence class is caused by the fact that they represent differing reflexes of a common earlier form from which all the attested forms derive. The label was originally chosen as a descriptive symbol, by virtue of its being maximally similar to the items it represents and of its thus requiring a minimum number of rules leading from label to item or from item to label. The label now becomes the expression of a historical hypothesis : it is now assumed that the asterisked symbol we

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have selected represents a linguistic reality at an earlier stage in the history of the group of languages we are investigating. The assumption that a label properly chosen corresponds to some linguistic reality and is not merely a convenient fiction, leads us to the next step in our reconstructional procedures: we try to map the labels into a system, checking it for internal consistency; that is, we apply the notion that languages are systems to our reconstructed material. Our checking cannot amount to a strictly formalized testing procedure; we know from the observation of actually attested languages that phonological systems are very often only partially symmetrical; that there is, in natural languages, almost always a certain imbalance to be found (which is, by the way, apparently one of the major reasons for linguistic change). We are therefore limited to what amounts to a common-sense appraisal : does the system as we obtain it from the reconstruction of protoforms seem to match other types of systems we know? Our investigation at this point is further complicated by the fact that the items we reconstruct and to which we refer by our labels may belong to different chronological strata, and that only some of the items, but not all, may be properly included in a particular reconstructed pattern. If our check for agreement with a reconstructible pattern yields satisfactory results, we can consider our series of procedural steps concluded. We have established correspondences, have classified them, have reconstructed earlier forms that account for the correspondences, and have reconstructed patterns pertaining to earlier stages in the development of the group of languages under investigation. Thus far, we have operated in a context in which regularity of sound change was considered to be all-pervasive. Even when chains with different membership were collapsed into major correspondence classes, we for all practical purposes limited ourselves to such chains as would permit an explanation of variations in terms of varying phonological environment. This, however, as has been said earlier, is not the only area in which strict regularity of development is disrupted. Interference occurs not only within the bounds of a specific form, but also across its boundaries. Two types of such less limited interference can be noted: interference within strings of text, which we may want to call syntagmatic interference, and interference within sets of forms related in various ways, which we may call paradigmatic interference. The former is next to impossible to detect as soon as we work with languages not directly attested; if we are lucky, some fixed phrase or compound may preserve a clue for us, but that will happen only now and then. Paradigmatic interference seems much more common; perhaps it only seems so as here we have a fair chance of finding the source of an interference disrupting the regularity of sound change. Paradigms in which interference operates are of varying sorts; analogical change, reshaping of a regularity expected form after the pattern provided by another form, occurs in what we may call grammatical paradigms as well as in what we may call semantic paradigms (though I am not sure that I could say where the boundary between the two lies).

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At first sight, analogical change seems to operate at random, without any direction thereof being predictable, the only rule then being 'anything goes'. However, certain regularities can be detected. To me, very many developments observed seem to support a general rule of the following nature : if analogical change takes place at all (and its occurrence seems to be of an optional character), it is more probable that the stronger form replaces a weaker one than vice versa. This rule is not very helpful until 'strong' is defined in a testable way. Such a definition seems at least in part possible. In very many instances, 'strong' seems to be equivalent with 'frequent', so that we can study the relative frequency of forms and draw our conclusions about the probable direction of a possible analogical change. Unfortunately for all those of us who want precise procedures, the relative frequency to be taken into account is of two types : text frequency and paradigmatic frequency, and certain severe limitations to the effectiveness of our approach remain. Moreover, strength of a form cannot be defined statistically at all when analogical interference operates within semantic paradigms; at best we can reverse the argument and insist that since an analogical change has taken a direction from Κ to L, Κ must be the stronger member, and we can then try to determine what gives Κ this strength. The field of analogical interference is then a rather messy one. However, we cannot aiford to bypass it in our reconstructional work, since that would amount to sacrificing the basic assumption that sound changes are regular, and that therefore earlier stages of languages can be recovered by retracing regular developments. We have to view analogical change not as a completely random phenomenon, but rather as the replacement of rules of regular sound change by rules of change within a paradigm (the perturbing fact being that here obligatory rules are superseded by optionally applicable ones). The trouble of course is that we still know very little about these intraparadigmatic rules. In our attempts to reconstruct earlier stages of languages, we have to sort out instances of analogical interference, delete, in our reasoning, its effects, and use the underlying forms thus arrived at on a par with actually attested forms that do not show the effects of analogical interference. We will never be completely successful, but that should not keep us from trying. In my brief remarks I have attempted to state, in rather simplified terms, some of the basic notions and procedures that guide a comparativist in his work. I have omitted all reference to a very important branch of reconstructional work — that which is commonly called internal reconstruction (although in eliminating the effects of analogical change upon forms one wants to study, one does indeed use its techniques). The methods of internal reconstruction are different from those of comparative reconstruction, the criteria for accepting or rejecting a reconstruction are not the same, and often internal reconstruction is even more removed from attested data than comparative reconstruction. On the whole, it seems that it would help clarify our thinking considerably if we refrained from the all-too-common joint treatment of

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forms arrived at by the two reconstruction processes, and it seems therefore appropriate that I limit myself here to a discussion of external comparative reconstruction. UNIVERSITY OF KIEL

DISCUSSION GARVIN:

One of the things that has always intrigued me in the little contact that I have had with comparative linguistics is the question of what are the criteria that are chosen when particular labels are selected for correspondence classes. Or, to rephrase it, why it is a given reconstructed form taken to be in that particular, rather than in some other, shape? WINTER:

Well, first of all, it is extremely healthy for us to realize that anything to which we have to affix an asterisk is a hypothetical form and that it may very well be wrong. I think this preface is necessary because Indo-Europeanists have tended to forget it. They have lived so long with some of the reconstructions that they simply could not imagine that there might be anything faulty about them. I think if we, for the sake of the argument, follow the procedures I suggested, we can answer the question, at least in part. Remember I made the stipulation that the labels should be chosen in such a way that a minimum distance to the attested forms was achieved. Thus, if we have initial m for a word throughout the modern IndoEuropean languages, we would have no choice under this rule but to use the m symbol as a cover symbol, as a label, for this correspondence. Now note the following thing: by doing this, by using, in fact, the one-to-one correspondences as a starting point (there are not too many of them in a large group of languages, but in my experience there have always been some), the blocking rule would go into effect. The labeling of this correspondence chain by m eliminates the use of m for every other correspondence chain unless it can be shown that this correspondence chain is a variant of the m chain. I mean, for instance, mnn in final position would be a variant chain in Indo-European 'languages, which could be subsumed under the same label. So you get a certain number of symbols blocked that way. Now, then, you come to chains in which there is no one-to-one correspondence and where you have to make your decision. At that point, I would again operate from the general stipulation that the fewest number of steps should be required. This is not always done, and in a few instances it may not even be the right decision. But this would be the first step. And the steps would be counted, shall we say, in number of distinctive features necessary to arrive from the label at the terminal symbol, or from the terminal symbol at the label. The direction doesn't make a bit of difference. That way we would at least get an approximation to what may have been the phonological reality of the underlying sounds. There will

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be mistakes, but I think the blocking of certain possibilities helps you to narrow down the choices. Now if you think this through for some of the classical problems for Indo-European, for instance, you would not come up with a bh at all because this is just limited to Sanskrit, and you would think twice before you took that by itself. But you would have to come up with something different from both ρ and b which would have been blocked beforehand, and you would need something different. Whether it's the bh or whether, for instance, you take simply an aspirate which is not distinctively voiced is a matter you have to decide later. But ρ and b have been blocked, so you need something else which has either a stop or spirant character; thus, the choices are narrowed down and you take your pick in a way that will permit you to get by with the fewest possible steps afterwards. Does that roughly answer your question? GARVÍN:

Except, of course, for an implicit assumption which I have never heard voiced in any courses, namely, that there is some way of measuring phonetic similarity or dissimilarity between the reconstructed forms which must be based on some notion of phonological features or some other reason for choosing at least something phonetically similar rather than wholly different. WINTER:

I think there is at least one person who has used this concept for determining matters of linguistic change — William M. Austin in an article in Language. It certainly has not entered classical teaching as far as I am informed. It is essentially a hit and miss procedure, and one is always impressed with the antiquity of certain languages. There are all kinds of imponderables, but I think the proposal made here is a way of elaborating on something Austin had tried to work out, and something which I think adds a certain measure of objectivity to our selection. (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany): All of us are aware of the fact, and I think Prof. Winter mentioned it in his paper, that there might be a case of two languages where there are regular correspondences, but the two languages under comparison are not genetically related. My question is a terminological one: take contrastive analysis as opposed to comparative analysis. My question is whether you would keep these two terms apart or just speak about comparative analysis and make comparisons. HARRY SPITZBARDT

WINTERS

This is a matter of words, I think. Of course, I meant comparative in the sense of traditional vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, and not of contrastive studies. But this is still, of course, not an adequate answer. I would think that the chances for chance agreement between unrelated languages (excluding onomatopoeic items) decrease very much if we limit our interest to strings which do not involve one-to-one relationships, but which involve a recurrent jump from a to b to c. This may not be more than a

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hunch, but I think it is not so likely that we will turn up with correspondences of this nature in unrelated languages. Moreover, of course, the similarities in unrelated languages will decrease in number the moment we increase the number of languages compared that are unrelated. Whereas if we take genetically related languages and compare them, the more languages we take, the more, at least partial, agreement will we get. So I think there are certain safeguards which one can introduce to provide protection against interference from genetically nonrelated languages. (Ohio State University): My question relates to the relationship between analogical change and regular sound change. If I understood you correctly, you stated that analogical change could be interpreted as an optional rule which, however, operates before the obligatory rule, namely the sound change, and thus the sound change applies only to those forms which were not eliminated from the domain of sound change by the operation of the optional rule that produces analogical change. I am afraid that, if this statement is adopted as a definition, then we are really mixing up historical change and the statement of historical rules and descriptive rules. Because there are a number of counterexamples to disprove your statement. If I may quote one: this is the so-called second palatization in Slavic by which the velars have changed into corresponding palatals to form a diphthong. Now in old Russian we find forms where this change has occurred both in stems and in suffixes, whereas in contemporary Russian paradigms the change has been eliminated. The sound change as such is common Slavic, whereas the analogical change is centuries later.

ILSE LEHISTE

WINTER:

I am very grateful for that comment, because I really wanted the discussion to go in that direction. I think perhaps I didn't make it clear enough that to me it seems if one took an ahistoric view of the matter and tried to set up rules just by reasoning one could hardly escape the conclusion I tried to draw, namely that the optional rules would have to operate before the other ones. But I tried to say in half a sentence, although I didn't say it so strongly, that it seemed to me dubious that this really reflected the historical reality. Rather that there would be in many a case an elimination of a change that had already taken place by analogical change, which I think you beautifully illustrated. This, then, goes to show that we have to use the utmost care against interpreting rules which provide a description of the phonological material before us in strictly historical terms. I think this would be a good example. There would be many more if we paused to think about it, and it seems to me that the result of the writing of rules may at times reflect a historical process, but need not reflect it. Therefore, we cannot turn around and say this is the sequence of rules and hence we have this development. This would be dangerous ; this would be jumping to conclusions. Just as I think that the rules of generative grammarians do not necessarily have anything to do with the generation of the actual sentence.

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(University of Michigan) : I have two brief questions to ask Prof. Winter. First of all, in the case where we have series of correspondences which are not of the type mnn and which are quite different, to what extent do, although I don't like to use the term, UNIVERSALS come into play? In other words, to what extent does the comparative linguist take recourse to work in other areas and perhaps try to account for changes of least resistance by some universal phonological principle? The other question is, although you did not deal with this at all, to what extent are higher levels of language reconstructible in, for example, Indo-European? I am thinking in particular of any syntax studies that might have been undertaken. I can only think of one : Calvert Watkins' study which was published in the proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists and which deals really not with sentences but only with the smaller phrases and then again with only four or five different elements. PAUL RAPOPORT

WINTER :

May I take the second question first. Reconstruction on the morphological level is relatively safe and easy to perform; syntax is hard. I think it has become harder since the introduction of transformationalist notions. Because before we had to reckon with the possibility of deriving something in an order b a, by a transformation from something in an order a b, we could take such things as the order of members of a compound as an indication of the order in phrases that were unified into a word. This has an old tradition, back to the 19th century, so it is something that has been around. But I think I would be more reluctant nowadays to jump to conclusions from the order of parts in a compound than I would have been fifteen years ago. As for the first part, there is a certain tendency to take universal evidence in preference to internal evidence. I have been through that myself in a specific case which you may want to check up on. I used the inventory of the reflexes of Indo-European voiceless stops in classical Armenian (where you have a wide variety, aspirated stop, spirant, h, y, w, de-voiced stops, on under varying conditions) in such a way as to take them as allophones first and then see what kind of base form I could take for this phoneme from which to derive the existing allophones by the simplest procedures. I came up with a suggestion that the great Armenian sound change led not to aspirated stops but to voiceless spirants. To the best of my knowledge, only one of the about six people who are active in the field has accepted this interpretation, which leaves me in a miserable minority position. I still think I am right on that, but the argument against it is that we know from Germanic that the direction towards spirants goes through an aspirated stop. I do not think this is a legitimate argument. At least it is not more legitimate than an argument that operates with internal evidence within the family. But you see there you would have a case in question.

PART III

THEORETICAL APPROACHES

THEORY-BUILDING IN THE DESCRIPTIVE APPROACH MADELEINE MATHIOT

0. INTRODUCTION

Roger Brown in his discussion of the SSRC Conference on Transcultural Studies in Cognition (Romney and D'Andrade 1964:243-7) stresses the importance of the distinction between the hypothetico-deductive approach and the descriptive approach in the social sciences. As I understand it, in the hypothetico-deductive approach a hypothesis is formulated to explain a certain phenomenon, and the goal of the study is to test this hypothesis. In the descriptive approach, a given phenomenon is chosen as the object for description, and the aim is to discover some hitherto unknown attributes of this phenomenon. The alternative between hypothetico-deductive approach and descriptive approach pinpoints one of the major controversies in current linguistics, namely, that involving the relation of theory to method. 1 The examination of theory and method attempted here will be conducted in terms of their respective apparatuses. By theoretical apparatus are meant the concepts and distinctions manifesting a particular theory2 of the phenomenon under investigation. By methodological apparatus is meant the sequence of steps to be followed in the analysis together with the procedures and techniques to be used both for data collection and for the analysis itself. Agreement might be reached among social scientists regarding the proposition that a phenomenon cannot be investigated without both a theoretical and a methodological 1 The difference between the two approaches is presented by Bolinger (1968:210) as follows : "Unlike those linguists whose main business is to survey usage, who amass evidence and then attempt to set it in order inductively and formulate theories about it, the formalists take an early leap to their hypotheses and then test them deductively against the data." The controversy opposing the proponents of the hypothetico-deductive approach to those of the descriptive approach goes back to the argument over rationalism versus empiricism. The other major controversy particularly alive in linguistics at the moment is that over process versus structure. * By theory is meant the body of beliefs regarded by the analyst as accounting for — or explaining — a particular phenomenon or set of phenomena. These beliefs may be more or less well grounded in empirical findings.

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apparatus. Agreement might still be reached regarding the proposition that theory and method are interrelated, more specifically that method is directly dependent on theory — that a particular methodological apparatus is directly influenced by the particular theoretical apparatus adopted for a given investigation. A lot of disagreement exists, however, as soon as it comes to specify what a theory — and consequently the theoretical apparatus for the investigation of a given phenomenon — should be like. The basic difference between the hypothetico-deductive approach and the descriptive approach in this respect can be stated in terms of the degree of elaborateness of the theoretical apparatus that is favored in the initial investigation of a phenomenon in order to meet the respective goals of the two approaches. In the hypothetico-deductive approach a very detailed theoretical apparatus generally accompanies the onset of research. This theoretical apparatus takes the shape of a model of the phenomenon under investigation. A model is an abstract representation of the relevant aspects of a given phenomenon. If a model is adequate, all the manifestations of the phenomenon which it represents can be deduced from the model itself.3 The basic principle of the descriptive approach is that a detailed theory of the phenomenon under investigation should not be formulated at the outset. Rather, it should emerge as a result of successive descriptive studies. The progressive increase in specificity of the theoretical apparatus is thus directly connected with the corresponding development of the methodological apparatus. In the descriptive approach as I have followed it, two phases in the investigation of a given phenomenon can be distinguished : an initial phase 'concerned with the development of an appropriate research strategy'; a second phase 'concerned with the application of this strategy to the given problem area'. A study pertaining to the first phase is a pilot study. A study pertaining to the second phase is a study in depth (Garvin, Brewer and Mathiot 1967:2). The theoretical apparatus of studies pertaining to these two phases differs greatly in terms of the degree to which it is elaborated. In a study in depth, the theoretical apparatus is much more specific than in a pilot study, but only to the extent warranted by the experience gained. The purpose of the present paper is not to argue in favor of the descriptive approach as over the hypothetico-deductive approach. Rather, it is to present an instance of theory-building in the descriptive approach. In the remaining portion of this paper, I will attempt to show in detail how a particular theoretical apparatus acquired further specificity, by comparing two successive individual studies of the same phenomenon. The investigation concerns the cultural significance of linguistic distinctions, i.e., the relation of language to the rest of culture. The two successive individual studies referred to in this paper deal with the same aspect of a language, namely, the gram8

The advantage of a 'strong' theory (i.e. one in which the model is as detailed as possible) is pointed out by Bolinger (ibid : 202) : "It was not necessary for us to have had in our collection any such examples as these last ones. We could have deduced their possibility from the hypothesis. The advantage of a theoretical model is that just such deductions can be made and confirmations sought."

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matical category of nominal number in Papago, an Indian language of Arizona. The first individual study is called the pilot study (Mathiot 1962). The second individual study is called the follow-up study (Mathiot 1967); it is based on a larger study in depth of the same phenomenon (Mathiot 1968). Within the theoretical apparatus pertaining to a given investigation, a three-way distinction can be made on the basis of the questions that this theoretical apparatus aims at answering. These questions are: (1) What is to be discovered about the phenomenon under investigation? (2) What is known at the outset about the phenomenon under investigation that has direct bearing on the analysis? (3) What are the 'tools' to be used in the analysis? The answer to the first question is expressed in the form of an overall hypothesis. The answer to the second question is expressed in the form of a set of initial assumptions. The answer to the third question is expressed in the form of a set of conceptual tools. Both the overall hypothesis and the initial assumptions are based on particular tenets of a general theoretical frame of reference. The conceptual tools, on the other hand, emerge entirely from the research. All three components of the theoretical apparatus are specified with increasing accuracy as their ramifications become apparent in the course of the research. They become more closely interrelated, in the sense that newly developed conceptual tools enter into the reformulated overall hypothesis and initial assumptions. The way in which the overall hypothesis, the initial assumptions and the conceptual tools of the pilot study4 were further specified in the follow-up study will now be examined in some detail.

1. OVERALL HYPOTHESIS

As I conceive of it, the overall hypothesis — like all hypotheses — is a particular presupposition based on certain aspects of a general theoretical frame of reference, a presupposition which is to be tested at some appropriate stage in the research. In the initial investigation of a given phenomenon, however, the immediate aim is not to test the overall hypothesis but to substantiate it. By testing is meant the performance of suitable controlled experiments, such as psychological ones. By substantiation is meant the application of the hypothesis to particular cases. The substantiation of a hypothesis results in some very specific statements which supplement the general statements that constitute the overall hypothesis. Throughout the substantiation phase of the investigation, results are subjected to validation checks in order to insure their reliability. Thus, the testing of a hypothesis is to be performed on the validated results of the investigation conducted to substantiate this hypothesis. In line with the above, the aim of the overall hypothesis is simply to state what 4 Nowhere in the pilot study do I explicitely state what the theoretical apparatus is. For purposes of the present paper, the overall hypothesis, the initial assumptions and the conceptual tools of the pilot study are reconstructed on the basis of my memory of the way in which the study was conducted.

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phenomenon has been selected for study and what place this phenomenon is considered to occupy in a broader context. This type of hypothesis is not intended to be an explanation but only an identification of the problem area. In this paper, the discussion will be limited to a comparison of the overall hypothesis in the pilot study and the follow-up study. Questions involving the validation of results, or their reliability in general, will not be dealt with. 5 1.1 Overall Hypothesis in the Pilot Study In the pilot study, the overall hypothesis is a moderate version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The broad theoretical frame of reference is the postulation that language is related to the rest of culture through its 'meaning', i.e., through its various functions.® The basic tenets of this frame of reference involve distinctions that pertain to the initial assumptions, rather than to the overall hypothesis, and that will therefore be only mentioned here and not further elaborated. These distinctions are, on the one hand, between two types of characteristics of the linguistic system, namely internal characteristics and external characteristics; on the other hand, between two types of cultural behavior, namely, verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior. The internal characteristics of the linguistic system concern the structure of language, the external characteristics concern the functions of language. Cultural verbal behavior is that which manifests the linguistic system. Cultural nonverbal behavior is that which manifests all of culture outside of language. The latter is referred to in this paper as nonverbal culture (Mathiot 1968:10-11). In terms of the above, postulating a relationship between language and the rest of culture implies the postulation of a relationship between particular manifestations of verbal behavior (such as a grammatical category or a lexical set) and particular manifestations of nonverbal culture (such as beliefs, either overtly stated or covertly manifested in actions). In the pilot study, it was proposed to investigate the relationship of language to nonverbal culture through the 'meaning' of language. It was assumed that: (1) the 'meaning' of language manifests the world view of the speakers ; (2) the world view as manifested in language is related to nonverbal culture. 6 In the pilot study (Mathiot 1962:346) it is proposed to evaluate the reliability of results in terms of two closely related criteria: (1) the extent to which a given inference has already been validated; (2) the extent and nature of additional verification needed to validate a given inference. A threefold distinction is made regarding the validation of results. It can be achieved through (1) supportive evidence, i.e., evidence from other linguistic levels, (2) corroborative evidence, i.e., evidence from nonverbal behavior and (3) empirical testing, such as psychological tests. In a later formulation (Mathiot 1968:150) a criterion of logical reliability, i.e., reliability based on the consistent application of the approach chosen for a given research, is preferred to the distinction between supportive and corroborative evidence specified above. • For purposes of the present discussion, by functions of language are meant the three functions suggested by Karl Bühler (referential, expressive and appeal) as well as the poetic function proposed by the Prague School. For a more detailed discussion of this question see Mathiot 1968:198-9.

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The 'meaning' of language is one of the initial assumptions. The world view as manifested in language is one of the conceptual tools. They will be discussed under these headings (see sections 2 and 3 below). The relationship postulated between world view as manifested in language on the one hand and nonverbal culture on the other, constitutes the overall hypothesis of the pilot study. It is with respect to the type of this relationship that the difference between a moderate version of the SapirWhorf hypothesis and the extreme version is crucial. The extreme version postulates a necessary deterministic influence on nonverbal culture of the world view as manifested in language. In more moderate versions, this is replaced by the postulation of direct correlations. The version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis adopted in the pilot study is even more guarded. It requires no premature commitment on the part of the analyst. A specification of the postulated relationship between world view as manifested in language, and nonverbal culture, is left to emerge from the investigation of particular cases. 1.2 Overall Hypothesis in the Follow-up Study The overall hypothesis in the follow-up study is based on the differentiation between language and nonverbal culture. This differentiation has as a consequence the further specification of the central conceptual tool of the pilot study, namely, the world view. In the follow-up study, the concept of world view is equated to that of cognitive system, defined as 'the unformalized conception of reality' held by a people (Mathiot 1968:1).7 Furthermore, the world view as manifested in language is distinguished from the world view as manifested in nonverbal culture. The former is limited to the cognitive patterns reflected in the language of a people, called the themes of the language. The latter is limited to the cognitive patterns reflected in the nonverbal culture of a people, called the themes of the culture. The properties commonly attributed to the themes of a culture are extended to the themes of a language : both kinds of themes are believed to be (a) few in number, and (b) patterned. Each set of patterns is viewed as constituting a separate system, namely, the theme structure of the culture and the theme structure of the language, respectively. In view of the above, in the follow-up study the overall hypothesis was reformulated as follows: The theme structure of the language is related to the theme structure of the culture. The degree to which the two structures are related constitutes the degree of integratedness of the language into the total culture. In line with this hypothesis, it is held that a complete study of the cognitive system of a people should include three objectives; (1) the uncovering of the themes and the theme structure of a given language, i.e., the cognitive analysis of a given language; 7 Note that by cognitive system I do not mean the psychological mechanisms which enter into individual cognition. The latter I consider to belong, not to the province of the ethnolinguistic study of cognitive systems which is the focus of my interest, but to that of the psychological study of cognitive processes.

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(2) the uncovering of the themes and the theme structure of the culture, i.e., the cognitive analysis of a given nonverbal culture; (3) the determination of the degree of integratedness of the language into the total culture, i.e., the determination of the relation of a given language to a given nonverbal culture. In the follow-up study, the overall hypothesis is as guarded as it was in the pilot study, in the sense that the type of the relationship postulated between language and the rest of culture is again left unspecified : The hypothesis allows for varying degrees of integratedness of a language into a total culture. What the overall hypothesis of the follow-up study does specify is the nature of the terms of the relationship between language and the rest of culture that was left totally unspecified before: The themes of the language are to be related not to nonverbal culture as a whole, but more specifically to the themes of the culture — i.e. the cognitive patterns inferred from the observation of nonverbal culture. This means that language-and-culture relations are expected to emerge on a higher level of abstraction.

2. INITIAL ASSUMPTIONS

They are presuppositions as to the bearing on the analysis of what is known at the outset about the phenomenon under investigation. In other words, they are presuppositions as to the bearing on the analysis of the general frame of reference. Two types of initial assumptions can be distinguished. The first type includes assumptions as to what aspects of the theoretical frame of reference are directly relevant to the investigation. The second type of initial assumptions are those stating the way in which certain aspects of the theoretical frame of reference are relevant to the investigation. Just as the overall hypothesis, the initial assumptions are thus based on particular aspects of a general theoretical frame of reference. Unlike the overall hypothesis, which is ultimately subject to testing, the initial assumptions are not to be tested either immediately or at a later stage in the research. They are, however, subject to constant specification (and possible revision) on the basis of the results obtained in the course of the research.8 The initial assumptions in the pilot study and the follow-up study diifer only in the details of the answers proposed for the following theoretical questions : What characteristics of the linguistic system, and what aspects of nonverbal culture, are relevant in each case, and in what way are they relevant? In the case of the pilot study relevance is established in terms of the relation of world view as manifested in language, to 8

Note that revisions of the initial assumptions are to be distinguished from revisions of the general theoretical frame of reference. An instance of the latter concerns the interpretation of the theoretical status of folk taxonomic classes. These were considered part of nonverbal culture in the pilot study (Mathiot 1962:343). In the follow-up study they are interpreted as part of the linguistic system, more specifically the lexical dimension. This revision of the general theoretical frame of reference is a consequence of closer examination of the role of the lexicon in the structure of language (Mathiot 1967b).

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nonverbal culture ; in the follow-up study it is established in terms of the cognitive analysis of language. Some of the initial assumptions of the pilot study will now be compared to their counterparts in the follow-up study, in order to illustrate the extent to which the latter have been made more specific. The initial assumptions to be compared concern some of the characteristics of the linguistic system, both its external characteristics (i.e. its functions) and its internal characteristics (i.e. its structure). The initial assumptions regarding the functions of language illustrate how the first type of assumptions, namely, those stating WHAT ASPECTS of the theoretical frame of reference are relevant, have been further specified in the course of the investigation; those regarding the structure of language illustrate how the second type of initial assumptions, namely, those stating IN WHAT WAY certain aspects of the theoretical frame of reference are relevant, have been specified. They will be examined in turn. In the pilot study 'meaning' is used in a holistic sense, i.e., without further differentiation according to the various functions of language (see fn. 6). In the followup study 'meaning' is differentiated in terms of the various functions of language, which are considered to correspond to various aspects of meaning. Referential meaning is the aspect of meaning regarded as most directly relevant to the cognitive study of language (Mathiot 1968:4). In regard to the structure of language, both the pilot study and the follow-up study acknowledge the necessity for differentiating between grammar and lexicon. They differ, however, in the way in which these two dimensions of language are held to be relevant to the phenomenon under study. This can be shown by comparing three conceptual tools that the two studies share, namely, the problem area — i.e., the aspect of language under investigation, the variables — i.e., the conditions of variation that affect the aspect of language under investigation, and the data base — i.e., the source of linguistic data on which to base the investigation. In both the pilot study and the follow-up study the distinction between grammar and lexicon is relevant in two respects: (1) The problem area may belong to either the grammar or the lexicon and has to be treated accordingly;9 (2) The variables affecting the problem area may belong to either the grammar or the lexicon and again have to be treated accordingly.10 In the follow-up study, an additional respect in which the difference between the two

* It is assumed that "both grammar and lexicon potentially have cognitive significance" and that "the cognitive significance of either dimension should be investigated separately" (Mathiot 1968:8). So far, however, a procedure has been worked out only for an investigation of problem areas chosen from the grammatical dimension. It is expected that some revision of this procedure might be necessary to make it applicable to problem areas chosen from the lexical dimension. 10 In the pilot study the initial selection of the variables was done on the basis of some assumption of expected easy tractability (Mathiot 1962:340). In the follow-up study this criterion is made more systematic and explicit. "The order of priority for the examination of the two types of linguistic variables is the extent of knowledge: that which is better known is examined before that which is less well known. In terms of this criterion, grammatical variables have priority over lexical variables at this stage in our linguistic knowledge" (Mathiot 1968:16).

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dimensions of language is relevant emerged : It is the lexicon that furnishes the data base, in the sense that the data base for any investigation of this type — irrespective of whether the problem area belongs to the grammar or to the lexicon — consists of lexical units. In the pilot study, the constitution of the data base — whether it should be grammatical or lexical or could be either — was left unspecified.11

3. CONCEPTUAL TOOLS

These are the analytic concepts in terms of which the description of the phenomenon under investigation is to be carried out. Examples of such conceptual tools are the traits of classical ethnography or the phonemes and morphemes of descriptive linguistics. The bearing of a given conceptual apparatus, i.e., of the set of conceptual tools for a given investigation, is not restricted to the study of the phenomenon in connection with which these conceptual tools were developed. Some — or all — of the latter may become part of the initial assumptions in the study of related phenomena. This is the way in which the theoretical knowledge of a field of inquiry can be progressively extended.12 What conceptual apparatus is needed for a given analysis becomes apparent as the investigation progresses and acquires more depth. As the conceptual tools emerge in the course of the investigation, it is crucial that each should be defined operationally and that its generality be tested. In the course of a given investigation, two types of modification of the conceptual apparatus can be distinguished: (1) the addition of a new conceptual tool, (2) the further differentiation of an existing conceptual tool. The first type of modification constitutes a specification of the conceptual apparatus as a whole. The second type of 11

It is proposed that the data base for the cognitive study of a given language should consist of the lexical units of that language. The latter allow for a maximal differentiation of linguistic categories and properties in both the lexical and the grammatical dimensions, which, as previously mentioned, are regarded as equally relevant to the cognitive study of language. Ideally, the data base should include all the lexical behavioral units of the language. In practice, however, only those lexical units can be considered for which appropriate data-collection techniques are available. In my work, these have been NAMING UNITS. The latter are defined as the culturally established names of concrete entities, actions and events. They refer to perceptually identifiable (i.e. concrete) phenomena for which simple behavioral tests — such as pointing — or their behavioral substitutes — such as reproduction by pictures or mimicking — can serve as unambiguous defining criteria. It is important to note that in every detail of the cognitive study of a given aspect of language it has proved to be essential to distinguish between the data base and the carriers of the linguistic aspect under investigation. The carriers of a given aspect of language are the units, grammatical or lexical, which contrast with each other on the basis of that aspect. The data base, on the other hand, is constituted by the naming units pertinent to the particular cognitive study. It may — but need not — include the carriers of the aspect of language under investigation (Mathiot 1968:12-15). " The claim that the conceptual tools may become part of the initial assumptions in a related study can be illustrated by a subsequent pilot study, namely, the cognitive analysis of myth, which I have recently conducted (Mathiot forthcoming). In this study, I was able to use a previously developed conceptual tool, namely the distinction between semantic and cognitive, as one of the initial assumptions.

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modification constitutes a specification of one aspect of the conceptual apparatus. The way in which the conceptual apparatus of the pilot study was further specified in the follow-up study will now be illustrated by showing how the addition of a new conceptual tool resulted in the further differentiation of an existing one. The new conceptual tool is the underlying concept. It is the probable universal concept assumed by the analyst to be manifested in a given aspect of language (Mathiot 1968:18).13 The previously existing conceptual tool is that of world view as used in the pilot study. It is the cultural conception of reality as manifested in language. This conceptual tool is superseded in the follow-up study by the newly developed concepts of the semantic and cognitive domains of language. The semantic domain of a language is constituted by the relation between the signs of that language and the reality they stand for, i.e., denote or connote. The cognitive domain of a language is constituted by the relationship between the speakers of that language and reality as mediated by the language (Mathiot 1968:5). The operational link between the semantic domain and the cognitive domain is provided by the new conceptual tool, namely, the underlying concept. The latter furnishes the means for inferring the cognitive content of a specified aspect of language from its semantic distinctive features, that is, from the invariant characteristics of the meaning of a given aspect of language (Mathiot ibid). They are inferred directly from the contrastive patterns exhibited by the data. The cognitive content of a given aspect of language is ascertained by relating the semantic distinctive features of that aspect to the underlying concept. In line with the above, the following distinction between underlying concept and cognitive content is proposed : An underlying concept is the probable universal concept assumed by the analyst to be manifested in a given aspect of language. The cognitive content of an aspect of language, on the other hand, is the analytic abstraction resulting from cognitive analysis that is regarded as the manifestation of a given underlying concept unique to the language-and-culture context under investigation. The bearing of this definition of cognitive content on the cognitive study of language is the following: The cognitive study of language can be said to consist in the uncovering of the cognitive system of a people through an investigation of the probable universal concepts manifested in their language. The cognitive analysis of any given aspect of language includes, therefore, three main objectives: The postulation of the underlying concept manifested in that aspect; the uncovering of the semantic distinctive features of that aspect; the uncovering of the cognitive distinctive features constituting its cognitive content. 13

The underlying concept introduced in the follow-up study in connection with the Papago category of nominal number is the concept of multiplicity. It is postulated on the basis of the range of meaning variation of the category of nominal number as revealed by the naming units that are the carriers of that category (see fn. 11). The meaning variants exhibited by these naming units all involve ways of viewing oneness as opposed to nononeness.

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MADELEINE MATHIOT 4. C O N C L U S I O N

As can be seen from the preceding discussion, theory-building in the descriptive approach is a cumulative process. In this process the role of theory is not exclusively to explain what is already known but primarily to serve as a basis for the development of methods to discover what is as yet unknown. The application of the method to particular descriptions, in turn, contributes to the further development of the theoretical foundations. It is believed that it is through this alternation of interpretation and description that reliable knowledge can be gained. STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK AT BUFFALO*

DISCUSSION

c.

I. J. M. STUART (Georgetown University) : I was very much interested in everything you had to say, especially because at Georgetown University I have the almost unique opportunity to investigate schizophrenics, conversion hysterics, and plain brain-damaged people. I am very much interested in any method of analysis which can establish connections between linguistic variables and cultural ones. Did I understand you correctly though to make a complete separation of grammar from lexis, because I have seen no evidence so far of impairment in grammatical function without some sign of lexical debility. MATHIOT:

Are you trying to say that you object to a categorical distinction between grammar and lexicon? STUART:

Are you separating grammar from lexicon? MATHIOT:

Yes, I would like to separate grammatical variables from lexical variables as much as possible. I am perfectly aware that in language, as in life, everything is interrelated. As far as I am concerned, the role of the analyst is to separate out the relevant variables and then put them back together. Why? Because I know that they are related, but I don't know how they are related. So I want to isolate them in order to study each variable separately. Once I know something about them, I can study how they are tied together. POSTAL:

Could you say something about this idea of a theme of a language. It's an idea that I find hard to come to grips with. Is it possible to give any examples? *

Affiliation at the time of the Conference : none.

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MATHIOT:

Here is an example : the Papago theme of compactness versus lack of compactness. What is meant by this opposition is highly abstract. Y o u cannot avoid being abstract when you try to summarize something as complex as meaning in a single opposition. Maybe I can make it more understandable to you if I clarify how I arrived at this theme. Themes are inferred from their variants, i.e., the cognitive contents of linguistic aspects which are cognitively related. T w o or more linguistic aspects are considered to be cognitively related if they manifest the same underlying concept. So for instance I consider that, in Papago, the various grammatical categories of number (such as nominal number, pronominal number, verbal number) are cognitively related : they all manifest the Papago concept of multiplicity. A t this stage only one of the variants of this theme has been derived by actual analysis rather than just impressionistically. It is the cognitive content of the category of nominal number. This category entails two cognitive features, collocation and dispersion. By this I mean that the culture pays attention not only to the number of entities but also to their location, i.e., whether or not they are placed together in a single place — collocation, or spread out in more than one place — dispersion. I compare this to the cognitive contents of the other variants of this theme which I have observed impressionistically. Some of these are as follows : for the category of pronominal number, the cognitive feature of dispersion ; for the categories of verbal number, the cognitive features of multiplicity of actor and of acted upon, multiplicity of agency, multiplicity of situations for actions and for events. Then I attempt to summarize all these cognitive contents into a single opposition which to me appears to cover them all. This is the one I mentioned initially, namely, compactness versus lack of compactness.

POSTAL :

Is it fair to say that a theme is a very general semantic feature which recurs in many different categories, in the sense which you use categories; that is, something which is superficially marked in the actual form of the sentence. MATHIOT:

It is unfair to say semantic, since I make a big point about the difference between semantic and cognitive. But outside of that, I would say it's not too unfair. VERHAAR:

Part of the problem I had has already been answered, except for one point: what distinction do you make between semantic and cognitive? MATHIOT:

Semantic is the relation between the linguistic signs and the reality they stand for; cognitive is the relation between the speakers of a given language and the outside world as mediated by that language.

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VERHAAR:

Now let's take an example: I remember reading an article in Language (I forget whom it was by) about colors in Welsh. It appeared that the contiguity of colors in the spectrum of the colors was different in Welsh from English. I forget what the order was, but what was called green in English on one side of the spectrum would already be the next color in the other side of the spectrum in Welsh. Now, because I seem to be getting hold of it only in the case of an example, could you say in what sense the semantic element would come in here? MATHIOT :

You are getting right into a very difficult problem which I do not know how to answer. You are getting into the lexical dimension. I have not done a study of this sort myself. I can only tell you how I would proceed. I would try to take a lexical category. Now, are color terms part of a lexical category? I would first have to establish this. Then once I have established that I am dealing with a genuine lexical category, I would extract the semantic distinctive features of that category. What they are I do not know beforehand. But suppose that there are certain oppositions like those I remember having seen in Conklin's description of colors in Hanunoo. Among the Hanunoo, the important distinction is not one of saturation (which seems to be scientifically significant), but one of moisture. Although Conklin doesn't use the term semantic distinctive feature to refer to this distinction, I have the feeling that the term could be applied to it. Now what would be the corresponding cognitive feature(s) is another question — it would be on a higher level of abstraction. One would have to postulate an underlying concept before this could be determined. (Columbia University): Could you say something about the nature of the lexical forms that you investigate? Do you require that they be all of a piece? Do you require that they be constant in the various contexts in which they occur, and so forth? How do you isolate the formal units? MANER T h o r p e

mathiot:

The lexical forms that I investigate? thorpe:

Well, yes, the point of departure, the formal unit, the data base. What is the nature of it? mathiot:

I call them lexical behavioral units. They are units obtained directly from informants by simple behavioral tests in order to avoid the danger of getting a wrong answer. An instance, of such a behavioral test is pointing to a chair and saying,

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171

"What do you call that?" The answer to this question is the name of a given entity. This type of lexical behavioral unit I call a naming unit. THORPE:

It is a single piece of phonological form? MATHIOT:

One of my initial assumptions is that when you ask for the name of an object, you get in answer to this question some kind of lexical unit. Whether or not this lexical unit is made up of several phonological or grammatical components is irrelevant as far as I am concerned. THORPE:

Or if it were scattered about in a lengthy utterance, bits and pieces here and there. MATHIOT:

You mean a verbal form such as "to look somebody up"? THORPE:

Possibly so, also concord, or agreement, and so forth. MATHIOT:

Well, these I consider to be grammatical problems unrelated to the problem of setting up lexical units. Grammatical entities, such as words, are not lexical entities and grammatical relations, such as agreement, are not lexically relevant. From a lexical standpoint what is important is to have a means of deciding what constitutes the name of a single concept — whether this concept refers to a piece of furniture or an action or an event. This single name is a single lexical unit of sorts. THORPE:

I brought this up because there still remain some difficulties in formal definitions of lexemes. MATHIOT:

This has to do with the definition of lexical analytic units. The lexeme is a lexical analytic unit. I agree with you that there are still difficulties regarding its formal definition. I have some ideas as to how to solve this problem but it would require another paper to discuss them.

172

MADELEINE MATHIOT REFERENCES

Bolinger, Dwight, 1968 Aspects of Language (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World). Conklin, Harold, 1955 "Hanunoo Color Categories", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 11:339-344; reprinted in Hymes 1964: 189-192. Garvin, Paul L., Jocelyn Brewer, and Madeleine Mathiot, 1967 Predication-Typing: A Pilot Study in Semantic Analysis (= Language Monograph, No. 27), Supplement to Language, 43, No. 2, pt. 2. Hymes, Dell H. ed., 1964 Language in Culture and Society; A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology (New York, Harper and Row). 1967 Studies in Southwestern Ethno-Linguistics (The Hague, and Paris, Mouton and Co). Mathiot, Madeleine 1962 "Noun Classes and Folk Taxonomy in Papago", American Anthropologist, 64:340-350; reprinted in Hymes 1964:154-163. 1967a "The Cognitive Significance of the Category of Nominal Number in Papago", in Hymes 1967:197-237. 1967b "The Place of the Dictionary in Linguistic Description", Language 43:703-24. 1968 An Approach to the Cognitive Study of Language (= Publication 45 of the Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics) (Baltimore). forthcoming "Cognitive Analysis of a Myth — An Exercise in Method". Romney, Kimball A. and Roy Goodwin D'Andrade, eds., 1964 Transcultural Studies in Cognition, Special Publication ( = American Anthropologist 66:3, Part 2).

HIERARCHY IN LANGUAGE ROBERT E. LONGACRE

As is generally conceded, descriptive linguistics during the second quarter of this century was largely preoccupied with methodology. In turn, methodology was conceived of largely in terms of discovery procedure. A covert assumption seems to have been that discovery procedure was largely equivalent to theory: DP = T. In the inevitable reaction which has set in to such preoccupation with discovery procedure, there is danger of forgetting procedure entirely. Some anxiety on this score is reflected in the fact that this conference on methodology has been called. But, if it be conceded that DP Φ Τ, there remain other ways of relating the two. We might suggest that theory leads to discovery procedure (T>DP), and that there is an inevitable feedback from discovery procedure (as application of theory) into theory itself: D P > T . If it be true that theory leads to discovery procedure, then what do we mean by the latter term, and why are procedures necessary? Perhaps it is easier to answer the latter question first. Procedures are necessary if (a) new phases of languages already studied are to be studied; (b) new languages previously unstudied are to be studied; or (c) languages previously studied are to be studied from a new and more fruitful perspective. In brief, procedures exist for the resolution of unsolved problems or for better solutions of problems previously considered to be solved. Probably what we really want in the way of linguistic discovery procedure is guidelines which consist of satisfactory notions concerning the nature of language. To the extent that such notions are developed and detailed, we are prepared to approach a new problem in any language, whether previously studied or not. To this degree, I think, I agree with Paul Postal's paper (see pp. 113-27 in the present volume). Hierarchy is here assumed to be a universal and important feature of language. An understanding of hierarchy is therefore vital to methodology. This paper will be concerned exclusively with grammatical hierarchy. Phonological hierarchy, with which this paper is not concerned, deals with the interrelationships of such units and strings as phonemes, syllables, stress groups, rhythm groups, phonological sentences, and discourses. Lexical hierarchy deals with distribution of lexemes into progressively larger lexical strings. In general, hierarchy is not as important to the lexicon as to

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ROBERT E. LONGACRE

grammar and phonology. For a detailed exposition of the theory of tri-modal structure here assumed see Pike (1967) and Longacre (1964a). Hierarchy is one of four fundamental emphases of tagmemics (Longacre 1965) — as the type of grammar here exposited has been somewhat unsatisfactorily called. Tagmeme, syntagmeme, and field structure must be taken along with hierarchy for an adequate understanding of the system. In particular, it is necessary to underscore the fact that tagmemics involves much more than emphasis on the tagmeme. I can, in fact, envision a variety of tagmemics in which the tagmeme plays no role — although I would not find such a variety of tagmemics very satisfactory or congenial. Tagmemics has not discovered hierarchy as such. Assumption of hierarchy is implicit in the immediate constituent approach of descriptive linguistics. But, the immediate constituent approach to hierarchy never succeeded in arriving at a generalized picture of hierarchy. As I wrote a few years ago (1963:478, fn. 9) : "It needs to be emphasized that the crucial deficiency of immediate-constituent analysis has been the ad hoc segmentation of individual sentences, with no ready way of correlating the results into a system. Thus, immediate-constituent analysis is unable to obtain a coherent picture of the grammatical structure of a language. Constituent analysis which arrives at a generalized model of a structure for a language is different in kind from such ad hoc segmentation. This point is consistently missed by critics of phrase structure grammars, who indiscriminately lump together immediate constituent analysis and the more recent and more satisfactory approaches of Harris, Halliday and Pike." As the quotation indicates, attempts at systemic hierarchy characterize not only Pike's work, but also Harris' String Analysis of Sentence Structure (1962) and Halliday's Scale-and-Category Grammar (1960). The latter is especially close in outlook and assumptions to tagmemics.1 This paper presents some parameters of hierarchy, then assembles these into an overall scheme, and concludes with some specific methodological suggestions. Tree diagrams are employed in sections 1-6 below to illustrate varieties of exponence (manifestation of a tagmeme). A tree diagram necessarily represents a given example of a construction — although other examples may be shown to conform to the same diagram. The generalized structure of a construction type (syntagmeme) is more appropriately given in a tagmemic formula. The formula, through its readings, permutations, and exponential combinations, generates specific examples of the construction type. A tree diagram is a graph of such an example.2 The tagmemic trees here shown diifer from trees of the sort found in writings of the Chomsky transformational school in that: (1) branches are labeled as well as nodes. Branches represent tagmemes (an inherently relational notion) while nodes represent exponents of tagmemes (syntagmemes and morphemes). In that a tree diagram is specific to a 1 One difference of note between scale and category grammar versus tagmemics is that the former provides no room for level-skipping (Sec. 2 above). This has touched off a lively debate between Matthews (1966) and Halliday (1966). * Tree diagrams are therefore simply convenient illustrative devices. They have no formal status in tagmemic theory (such as that of phrasemarker in generative-transformational grammar).

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given construction, each branch terminates in a node where only one exponent is given from the set of exponents which characterizes each tagmeme. (2) The trees are open at the top in that a sentence is an exponent of a discourse-level tagmeme. (3) Trees which do not display back-looping (Section 3) show regular banking of nodes according to hierarchicl rank. In summary, tagmemic trees emphasize relations (functions) as well as component constructions; are but part of discourse-level trees and not autonomous entities; and are hierarchically oriented.

'u (θ Paragraph)

X Anil Sentence

iTr Clause ψ» X Tr.Pred \ς*· lAtirNP

•ΑΗΓ.ΝΡ

|VP

Afin NP

3 •o

Λ

Ì,NW

Mv

.NW

\Nom

M

11 M do

1> M not

1( M

M

MM

Fused Fused Attn Head S \

VW

'AW

MM

have TREE D I A G R A M I

1. Descending exponence is exemplified in Tree Diagram I. Five structural levels are represented. The lowest level, the MORPHEME, is not really a level in that it involves no structural complexity of a grammatical sort. We assign it, then, Level O; WORD is Level 1 ; PHRASE is Level 2; CLAUSE is Level 3 ; and SENTENCE is Level 4. Presumably, the sentence fills some function in a PARAGRAPH (Level 5), which would in turn be functional on the DISCOURSE level (Level 6). For this reason, the branch above the node 'Antithetical Sentence' is labelled X (i.e. some paragraphevel function manifested by an 'Antithetical Sentence'). The sentence itself has three

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ROBERT E. LONGACRE

constituent tagmemes. 'Thesis' : 'Declarative Transitive Active Clause' ; 'Adversative' : but; 'Antithesis': 'Declarative Transitive Active Clause'. The first clause has three constituent tagmemes, 'Subject' : 'Attributive Noun Phrase' ; 'Transitive Active Predicate' : 'Active Emphatic Verb Phrase' ; and 'Object' : 'Attributive Noun Phrase'. The second clause likewise has three tagmemes, 'Subject': 'Attributive Noun Phrase'; 'Transitive Active Predicate': 'Active Non-emphatic Verb Phrase'; and 'Object': 'Comparison Noun Phrase'. The first noun phrase, Green frogs, has two tagmemes, 'Modifier (color)': 'adjective'; 'Head': 'noun'. The first verb phrase has three tagmemes, 'Auxiliary': 'auxiliary verb'; 'Negative': not; 'Main': 'verb'. The last noun phrase in Clause 1 has two tagmemes, 'Modifier (size)': 'adjective'; 'Head': 'noun'. The first noun phrase in the second clause likewise has but one tagmeme, 'Head': 'noun'. The verb phrase likewise has one verb tagmeme, 'Main': 'verb'. The last noun phrase has but one tagmeme, 'Modifier (comparison)': 'comparative adjective'. The head is omitted in the last phrase, but may be contextually supplied from the first clause. Detailed analysis could be carried down to the morpheme level, but we refrain. Several words in the sentence {frogs, intelligence, jellyfish) clearly consist of more than one morpheme; others may add further morphemes (green, greener, greenest·, do, does, did; have, has, had, having-, great, greater, greatest", less, least). Two putative words, not and but, are not inflected. While in Bloomfieldian parlance these would also be called 'words' (minimal free units), we call them simply morphemes. This sentence tree shows the typical pyramiding structure characteristic of descending hierarchy. While there are some fifteen morphemes in the sentence, there are eight words, six phrases, two clauses, and but one sentence. The analysis of this sentence, which presupposes analysis of other sentences, is not ad hoc. Thus, the label 'Antithetical Sentence' implies that there are other examples of this sentence type, and that a generative formula can be assembled along with appropriate rules for this sentence type. It implies that the 'Antithetical Sentence' may be distinguished, compared with, and related to other sentence types such as 'Coordinate (with medial and)', 'Alternative (with medial or)', 'Direct' and 'Indirect Quotations', 'Contrary to Fact' and 'General Conditions', and a few types involving juxtaposition without conjunction. These sentence types differ, not only in internal composition, but in other ways such as capacity to imbed other sentence types, and capacity for ellipsis. In the 'Antithetical Sentence' type exemplified in Tree Diagram I, certain patterns of elision of elements in the second clause are frequent (as seen in the elision of intelligence after less). Both component clauses of the sentence exemplify 'Declarative Transitive Active Clause'. For this clause type, a generative formula and accompanying rules may likewise be assembled. The formula will contain not only the nuclear tagmemes 'Subject', 'Predicate', 'Object' as exemplified in the clauses of this example, but also such peripheral tagmemes as 'Time', 'Location', 'Manner'. This, in turn, implies a system of clause types : intransitive active, transitive active, ditransitive active, passive,

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177

equative, and others.3 These clause types differ in internal composition and in respect to transformational potential. For the phrases found in this example, a division must be made between 'Noun Phrases' and 'Verb Phrases'. There are three examples of the 'Attributive Noun Phrase' type. A generative formula for this phrase type must include at least a dozen distinct 'Modifiers' preceding a Head tagmeme. The contrasts among the various 'Modifier' positions may not only be positionally established by comparison of many examples, but may also be established by transformational considerations.4 The last Noun Phrase belongs, however, to a more restricted string which may be called the Comparison Noun Phrase. Thus, while we can expand green frogs to two dozen slimy, speckled, jumpy green frogs we cannot so expand less intelligence. The Verb Phrases can be classified according to various parameters such as 'negative' versus 'positive' ; 'present' versus 'past'; 'progressive' versus 'nonprogressive'; 'perfect' versus 'nonperfect'; 'active' versus 'passive'; and 'emphatic' versus 'nonemphatic'. Of these parameters the last two (active versus passive and emphatic versus nonemphatic) seem to be of primary importance in determining phrase types. Word types can also be classified. 'Nouns' have characteristic inflection versus that of 'Verbs'. There is, furthermore, a wealth of contrasting patterns of derivation and composition. The important thing to note in the above is that the analysis of this particular sentence implies much beyond the bounds of this sentence. The sentence, clause, phrase, and word types here represented must be considered in conjunction with other manifestations of this same type and of other contrasting types. Furthermore, systems of types (and systems of systems) must be assembled before our job is through. It is important to note also the significance of the concept of contrasting type. Any such type on any hierarchical level is a SYNTAGMEME. The syntagmeme is a domain of concatenation. For example, within a 'Transitive Clause', 'Subject' is concatenated to 'Predicate', which is in turn concatenated to 'Object' and to whatever further tagmemes occur. Thus, a syntagmeme is a relation in η-tuples. The syntagmeme is composed of tagmemes. From the point of view of the internal structure of the syntagmeme, each tagmeme is a functional point. Since the syntagmeme usually has optional as well as obligatory parts it has more than one combinatorial possibility or READING . Furthermore, some syntagmemes permit a reading to permute in various ways without transforming that syntagmeme to another syntagmeme. Finally, a given PERMUTATION of a given reading may have varying EXPONENTS (realizations or manifestations) of its component tagmemes. Thus, if a syntagmeme has three component tagmemes and each tagmeme has five lower-level syntagmemes that may manifest it then there are 125 possible exponential combinations. From this point of view, a ' Nguyen Dang Liem 1966:47 posits 87 complete clause types for English. The types are marshalled in a two-dimensional 10 x 10 system (one parameter of which is, broadly speaking, voice + transitivity; and the other, modal) with 13 lacunae. My labeling of clause types follows, as a whole, his analysis. 1 cf. Zeno Vendler (1963). Similar analyses are suggested in Harris (1962:36-7) and Longacre (1946:97-8).

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ROBERT E. LONGACRE

syntagmeme is an idealized Cartesian product. Actually, most syntagmemes are subject to various constraints on exponential combination so that by no means may all exponents of a given tagmeme 'X' co-occur with all exponents of another tagmeme Ύ . Likewise, syntagmemic readings and permutations — as well as exponential combinations — are subject to constraints imposed by the context in which a syntagmeme appears. This gives rise to systemic variants of a syntagmeme (Longacre 1966). We have taken a bit of time on Tree Diagram I in order to explain what we mean by tagmeme and syntagmeme; the understanding of this is crucial to all that follows. Hierarchy as exemplified in this first diagram involves descending exponence, i.e. each tagmeme is manifested by a syntagmeme (or unit) on the next descending level. Thus, the paragraph-level tagmeme 'X' is manifested by a sentence type. The first and third sentence-level tagmemes (more about the second later) are manifested by clause types. Clause-level tagmemes are manifested by phrase types. And phrase-level tagmemes (with one exception) are manifested by word types. Using S to symbolize syntagmeme, Τ to symbolize tagmeme, and η to symbolize a given level, we may summarize (Fig. 1) : • Sn

/ 7 7



I 1

' ·

\Tn \ \

Sn 1 · Sn-1

Figure 1

2. We have not accounted for the hierarchical behavior of the words but and not in the above discussion of the Tree Diagram I. It seems obviously necessary to set up the adversative conjunction but as an integral part of the antithetical sentence. The assigning of but to either the preceding or following clause would get rid of but as a constituent of the sentence. However, but can scarcely go at the end of the first clause, and we can assign it to the second (as some sort of 'Introducer' tagmeme) only by studiously ignoring the fact that such an adversative conjunction depends on the presence of both the preceding and following elements (even ellipsis of the former implies its presence in context or situation). But if we set up an adversative tagmeme manifested by but it is obvious that this part of the sentence is not manifested by a clause but by a morpheme. The theory of hierarchy must not be so hide-bound as to ignore such data. We consider, therefore, that while most of the sentence given in diagram I exemplifies descending exponence, but exemplifies level-skipping exponence. Thus, the exponent of sentence-level adversative tagmeme (level 4) is but, which is a morpheme (hence of level 0). Similarly, not is a morpheme (not a word) which is an

HIERARCHY IN LANGUAGE

179

exponent of phrase-level negative tagmeme. Here, there is a skip from level 2 to level 0. Not all level-skipping must be to level 0, however. When a sentence-level tagmeme is manifested by a phrase, there is a skip from level 4 to level 2. When a clause tagmeme is manifested by a word, there is a skip from level 3 to level 1 as in Tree Diagram IV (pronouns I and me). Level-skipping could arbitrarily be avoided by asserting that but is not only a morpheme, but also a word, a phrase, and a clause. But this would confuse the very notions of word, phrase, and clause. Level-skipping exponence may be schematically represented as follows (Fig. 2) :

Sn — a (a > 1) Figure 2

3. To descending and level-skipping exponence must be added recursive exponence. Recursion here is used broadly to indicate that a tagmeme on a given level is manifested by a syntagmeme on the same level. The manifesting syntagmeme need not be the same as the syntagmeme one of whose tagmemes it manifests, but such imbedding of the same type within itself is not uncommon (cf. mother''s brother's son, where possessive phrase is imbedded in possessive phrase). Tree Diagram II exemplifies recursive exponence on the phrase level. The sentence type is a 'Simple Sentence' (assumed, again, to occur in a paragraph of some connected discourse). This sentence contains but one component tagmeme: the 'Sentence Base': 'Equative Clause'. The 'Equative Clause' has three component tagmemes: 'Subject': 'Possesive Noun Phrase' ; 'Equative Predicate' : 'Active Verb Phrase' ; 'Complement' : 'Adjective Phrase'. The string The proposition of the committee of the senior members of the legislature of this state is a nest of thirteen phrases: (1) The proposition of the committee of the senior members of the legislature of this state·, (2) of the committee of the senior members of the legislature of this state·, (3) the committee of the senior members of the legislature of this state; (4) of the senior members of the legislature of this state; (5) the senior members of the legislature of this state·, (6) of the legislature of this state; (7) the legislature of this state·, (8) of this state·, (9) this state; (10) the proposition·, (11) the committee·, (12) the senior members·, and (13) the legislature. Phrases (1), (3), (5) and (7) are 'Possessor Phrases (NP2)'. Phrase (2), (4), (6) and (8) are 'Relator-Axis (prepositional) Phrases. Phrases (9) — (13) are 'Attributive Phrases' (NPi)'. Phrase (1) has two component tagmemes: 'Item': Phrase (10) and 'Possessor': Phrase (2). Phrase (3) likewise has these two tagmemes: 'Item': Phrase (11) and 'Possessor':

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ROBERT E. LONGACRE

The proposition of the committee of the senior members of the legislature of this state is

untenable.

TREE D I A G R A M Π

Phrase (4). The analysis of phrases (5) and (7) is similar. Phrase (2) has two tagmemes : 'Relator': of and 'Axis': Phrase (3). Similarly, Phrase (4) has these two tagmemes: 'Relator' : of and 'Axis' : Phrase (5). Phrases (6) and (8) have similar analyses. The lowest layering of phrases is (10) — (13). These phrases do not have phrases as manifestations of their component tagmemes but, rather, words and morphemes. This exemplifies a feature of recursive exponence : When a syntagmeme is a nest, the lowest layer of syntagmemes in the nest is constituted of tagmemes whose exponents are non-recursive, i.e. descending or level-skipping. Therefore, although recursive exponence involves an indefinite amount of looping around on the same level, it must eventually issue in descending or level-skipping exponence, i.e. it must eventually loop down to lower levels. Recursive exponence (including its necessary termination in descending or level-skipping exponence) may be schematically represented as in Figure 3. 4. Still another variety of exponence is illustrated in Tree Diagrams IV and V (as contrasted with Tree Diagram III). For simplicity, these diagrams deal with simple, one-clause sentences. Their complexity lies in the choice of exponent of 'Modifier' tagmeme in the noun phrase which manifests 'Subject' tagmeme.

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181

• Sn



\

·

· Sn

Tn • Sn — a (a > 1) Figure 3

There is nothing very unusual about such a clause as His uncooperative attitude distresses me (Tree Diagram III). On the clause level, 'Subject' has a 'Possessive Noun Phrase', his uncooperative attitude, as exponent; the 'Transitive Predicate' has an 'Active Unemphatic Verb Phrase', distresses, as exponent; and 'Object' has a 'Pronoun Word' me as exponent (level-skipping from 3 to 1). On the phrase level, 'Possessor' has a 'Pronoun' his as exponent; 'Modifier' has an 'Adjective Word' uncooperative as exponent, and 'Item' has a 'Noun Word' attitude. Some recursion on the word level is seen in uncooperative, which is an 'Adjective Word' derived from another 'Adjective Word' cooperative, which is derived from a 'Verb' cooperate, which is in turn derived from the 'Verb' operate. His and me are treated here somewhat diffidently as bimorphemic words consisting of pronoun morphemes plus morphemes (not readily isolable) which indicate 'genitive' and 'accusative'. By contrast, in Tree Diagram IV, 'Modifier' tagmeme has as exponent not an adjective word but a clause: I won't contribute. Admittedly, qua tree diagram, the complexity of the structure dominated by 'Possessive Noun Phrase' in IV is only slightly more complex than that dominated by the same node in III. Hierarchically, however, the structures are very different. While in ΠΙ, the complexity is on the word level, in IV the complexity consists in a clause (level 3) serving as exponent of a phrase-level tagmeme (level 2). Here, we have an example of BACK-LOOPING exponence, which may be schematized as (Fig. 4) :

/

/

/

/

/

• Sn

\• Sn + Figure 4

a (a > 1)

ROBERT E. LONGACRE

His

uncooperative

attitude

distresses

me.

TREE DIAGRAM m

/

won't

contribute attitude TREE DIAGRAM IV

distresses

me.

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HIERARCHY IN LANGUAGE

His

heads

I win

tails

you

lose

attitude

distresses

me .

TREE DIAGRAM V Pass

His

heads

I win

tails

you lose

attitude

TREE DIAGRAM VI

distresses

me.

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ROBERT E. LONGACRE

In Diagram IV, a phrase level tagmeme (level 2) is manifested by a clause type (level 3). This exemplifies first order back-looping. Second order back-looping is exemplified in Tree Diagram V. In the latter, a phrase-level tagmeme is manifested by a sentence type (level 4), Heads I win, tails you lose. The sentence type is probably an antithetical sentence with deleted but. While in previous diagrams it has been possible to keep the nodes orderly ranked as to hierarchy, in Tree Diagrams IV and V this is more awkward. Tree diagrams do not lend themselves well to problems of this complexity. We can, however, alternatively diagram as in Tree Diagram VI, where an attempt is made to illustrate back-looping graphically. In this diagram, the orderly ranking of nodes is preserved according to hierarchical level and the whole 'Antithetical Sentence' is seen to be an exponent of phrase-level 'Modifier' tagmeme. By contrast, the 'Simple Sentence' (in which the 'Antithetical Sentence' is imbedded) is an exponent of some paragraph-level tagmeme. Just as recursion must eventually issue in descending of level-skipping exponence, so back-looping must eventually terminate as well. 5. Still another type of exponence is different from any of the above, i.e., portmanteau functioning of a given LEXICAL string as simultaneous manifestation of tagmemes and syntagmemes on two or more levels. Thus, Come is a 'Main' tagmeme of its 'Verb Phrase'; 'Predicate' tagmeme of an 'Imperative Clause'; and 'Sentence Base' tagmeme of a 'Simple Sentence'. As a phrase Cornel may be expanded to Do come\ and Don't cornei As a clause, it may be expanded to such strings as Come here immediately or Come to dinner without your tuxedo. As a sentence, it may be expanded still differently: Come; I need you; Come, but be quiet; or Come if you must. Portmanteau exponence of this sort may be schematized as follows: (Fig. 5 where L symbolizes a string of lexical items which manifest a syntagmeme) : • Sn + 2 Tn + 2 o Sn + 1 Tn + 1 • Sn [where L (Sn) = L (Sn + 1) = L (Sn + 2)] Figure 5

In Totonac of Mexico, a when clause may function simultaneously as (1) manifestation of clause level 'time' tagmeme; (2) 'temporal margin' tagmeme of a sentence;

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HIERARCHY IN LANGUAGE

M

w

Ρ

c

S

li

M

w

Ρ

c

S

M

w

Ρ

C

S

1

M

w

Ρ

c

S

M

w

Ρ

C

Ts T

c

TP

Tw

Periodic

mafrix

Recursive

2

S

Back - looping

1

Level - Skipping

c

1

2

Level - Skipping

Ρ

Back - looping

3

Level - Skipping

w

Descending

4

TD

Level - Skipping

(3) 'orientation' tagmeme initial to a paragraph, and (4) 'aperture' tagmeme of an entire discourse.5 This is probably not without parallel in other languages. In English fairy stories, Once upon a time... may not be dissimilar in function. This latter type of portmanteau exponence does not lend itself well to representation in tree diagrams.

D

of hierarchical

D D

structuring.

DIAGRAM VII

6. Attempts to define hierarchy overly rigidly in terms of exclusively descending exponence can only lead to complete jettisoning of the notion of hierarchy. The exceptions are too glaring to rationalize away successfully for very long. Such efforts are, however, quite unnecessary. Descending exponence, level-skipping, recursiveness, and back-looping are not unrelated and may be brought together in one conceptual framework. I repeat here (Diagram VII) with modification a diagram already published elsewhere (Longacre 1965:76). The vertical axis of this diagram gives tagmemes on various structural levels : discourse, paragraph, sentence, clause, phrase, word. The horizontal axis gives a progression of various sorts of exponence: third-degree level• Data are from my colleagues Aileen Reid, Ruth Bishop and Ella Buttons of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

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skipping, second-degree level-skipping, first degree level-skipping, descending, recursive, first-degree back-looping, second-degree back-looping. The chart is open at both sides in that it could conceivably be extended out to further degrees of levelskipping and back-looping. Intersection of the two axes is filled with symbols for levels. Thus, the intersection of T s and DESCENDING is to be read : 'Sentence Level Tagmeme' : 'Clause Level Syntagmeme' {i.e. clause type). In this periodic matrix, with its peculiar diagonally slanting structure, descending exponence is seen to be but a special instance of exponence in general, while other sorts of exponence (levelskipping, recursiveness, and back-looping) need no longer be considered to be aberrant or extrasystemic. Hierarchy is like a river meandering from its source (discourse level) to the sea (morpheme level where no further internal grammatical distinctions are posited). Often, the course of the river is smooth (descending hierarchy) ; there may be, however, a cataract here and there (level-skipping) or eddies of various degrees of turbulence (back-looping) or lakes (recursions). The presence of cataracts, eddies and lakes in no way contradicts the fact that the river is progressing in a general downward direction. Without the downward pull of gravitation, no river would exist. Similarly, without the general downward thrust of constituent structure, there could not be hierarchy. Descending hierarchy and level-skipping are but different instances here of the same tendency. Furthermore, both recursion and back-looping must, eventually, terminate and give way to the downward thrust.®. While, however, all types of exponence are possible and tolerated within the general scheme, it is an empirical fact that descending and recursive exponence are the most common, while level-skipping and back-looping are more rare. In general, then, in moving out from the central columns of the chart to the sides, we find the theoretical possibilities harder to document. 7. The general scheme of hierarchy here presented can provide convenient analytical guidelines where hierarchical considerations enter into the analysis. For a few years, in the analysis of Trique, I postulated a COLON level intermediate between clause and sentence (Longacre 1964b:132ff). Trique and Otomanguean in general have a fondness for parataxis and build many constructions by juxtaposing clause to clause without intervening conjunction. Thus, where Indo-European says something on the order of I told it to her, Trique says the equivalent of Ί told she heard'. Again, where English says I brought it, Trique says Ί had it I came'. Where English says He made me drop it, Trique says Ί dropped it he did/made'. The richness and variety of such structures, their close-knit character, and the absence of conjunction originally led me to consider them to be a separate level. This level had the peculiarity that it had no syntagmemes which could be actualized as one tagmeme, but was inevitably bipartite. The colon level was considered to be distinct from clause • This insight is, I believe, an adequate answer to Arthur C. Day's criticism of my general scheme of hierarchy as tautological (Day 1966: 267).

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on the one hand and sentence on the other. To sentence proper were relegated such things as 'Conditional Sentences', 'Quotations' and 'Alternative Sentences'. When the general scheme of hierarchy here sketched was posited several years ago, Trique structure — including the posited colon level — was reviewed. The fact emerged that, if colon was a lower level than sentence, then we had an uncommonly high incidence of back-looping in Trique. In two Trique colon types, the 'Paraphrase' and the 'Recapitulation', it was not uncommon to find each member of the colon manifested, not by a clause, but by a sentence (e.g. by a quotation sentence or by a conditional sentence). Feeling grew that this amount of back-looping was implausible. It was further noted that paragraph-level slots were even more frequently filled with the so-called colons than with what we called sentence proper. If these colons were not sentences, but were instead a lower level, then there was an uncommonly high incidence of level-skipping in Trique paragraph structure. Both these matters were resolved by reinterpreting the colon level as a special system of closely-knit sentences. This made possible the interpretation of sentence within colon as simply recursive exponence of sentence within sentence. The colons filling paragraph-level slots were now sentences, so level-skipping was no longer involved, rather, descending exponence. In short, a rather unusual and implausible sort of hierarchy involving a new and bizarre level was reinterpreted as a quite run-of-the-mill sort of hierarchy. The Trique system of closely-knit sentences (Longacre 1966) remains as a feature quite characteristic of Otomanguean (and quite unlike Indo-European) structure, but the type of linguistic hierarchy found in Trique is not distinctive. The fact that Trique closelyknit sentences and loosely-knit sentences are quite distinct from each other structurally does not mean that they may not occur on the same hierarchial level. 'Noun Phrase' and 'Verb Phrase' are characteristically distinct in most (if not all) languages, but both occur on the phrase level. 8. I conclude this paper with a few methodological observations and suggestions. The first four directly follow from the general scheme of hierarchy. The latter three are more tangential. (1) A syntagmeme should be assigned to a given level so that it is an exponent of tagmeme(s) on its own or the next ascending level; it may also be an exponent of tagmemes on other levels. (2) A syntagmeme should not be assigned to a level so that all its tagmemes have only level-skipping exponents. (3) A syntagmeme should not be assigned to a level so that all its tagmemes have only back-looping exponents. (4) When a syntagmeme is a nest on a given level, the syntagmemes which constitute the lowest layer of the nest on that level consist of tagmemes whose exponents are from lower levels. (5) A coordination of syntagmemes (including a series) belongs to the same level as that of the syntagmemes thus coordinated.

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(6) A syntagmeme of relator-axis structure belongs to the same level as the syntagmeme which is exponent of the axis. (7) Non-contiguous levels are often exponentially more similar than contiguous levels. Number (1) is phrased so as to permit setting up of syntagmemes, all of whose tagmemes have recursive exponents. Thus, in many languages, there occurs an appositional phrase whose two tagmemes ('Theme' and 'Appositive') have as exponents most noun-phrase types in the language; the exponents of these tagmemes may be exhaustively summarized in terms of other phrase types (granting that a single noun is a minimal phrase). The thrust of observation (1) is best seen in reference to the corollaries (2) and (3). In reference to (2), the so-called' 'Particle Sentence' type is relevant. Should such stretches as Ohl, Ouch\, Yes, The Commons Restaurant, and Five be considered sentences? If so, of what sort? It can, of course, be argued that only sentences containing complete clauses should be called sentences — or perhaps should be studied at all. Such an approach, however, consigns whole systemic stretches of normal daily speech to a limbo beyond the reach of linguistic science. In tagmemics, we have set up particle-based sentences (as well as clause-based sentences) to accommodate these constructions. In doing this, however, we posit a syntagmeme on the sentence level (level 4) whose only tagmeme (its base) is manifested, but by morphemes (level 0), words (level 1), and phrases (level 2). Maybe it would be better to combine such particle-based sentences with other simple (clause-based) sentences. We would have, then, a sentence type not consisting entirely of tagmemes with level-skipping exponents. Furthermore, such sentences probably are ellipses of fuller simple sentences. Thus, Ohl, Ouchl, and Yes are peripheral tagmemes of simple sentences from which the clause base tagmeme has been deleted: Oh, I see the point now\, Ouch, I stubbed my toe!, Yes, I'll come at once\. Such response sentences as The Commons Restaurant (answering a question such as Where did you eatT) is a simple sentence from which most of the clause has been deleted : I ate at the Commons Restaurant. Such a sentence as Five, (answering How many slices do you want!) is a similar deletion of I want five slices. In the latter, not only have clause-level 'Subject' and 'Predicate' been deleted, but phrase-level 'Head' tagmeme as well. On the other hand, although it does not seem feasible to posit syntagmemes all of whose tagmemes have level-skipping or back-looping exponents, certain component tagmemes may be limited to one or the other variety of exponence. Thus, as we have seen, there may occur a sentence-level 'Adversative' tagmeme whose sole exponent is but. In the 'Verb Phrase', there may occur a 'Negative' tagmeme whose sole exponent is not. In 'Direct Quote Sentences', it is probably better to consider that the exponents of the 'Quoted' tagmeme are paragraphs. 'Quoted' tagmemes would, thus, have only back-looping exponence. In commenting on (5), we note that of the three possibilities — assignment to the same level, to a lower level, or to a higher level •— only the former seems very plausible. Old men and young children would scarcely be relegated to a lower level (the word) nor

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to a higher level (the clause). A n ad hoc level could be created especially for it — a level of coordinated phrases — but such a level would not stand up under the requirements of the general scheme of hierarchy. In that coordinated phrases are rarer than other phrase types, the posited level would be of comparatively infrequent occurrence. Consequently, all cases of other non-coordinated phrases (e.g. old men) which occur as manifestations of clause-level tagmemes would have to be considered to be instances of level-skipping exponence. Level-skipping exponence would then be much more frequent than descending hierarchy. This would indicate something basically wrong with the hierarchical scheme, i.e. the positing of such a coordinated-phrase level. This argument holds against any such level. Thus, two coordinated sentences should be considered to be a further sentence type, not a higher level of coordinated sentence. Coordinated independent clauses, however, are probably not coordinated as clauses — in which case they would belong to the clause level — but as one-clause simple sentences. In commenting on (6), we note a certain parallelism of prepositional phrases to clauses subordinated with a subordinating conjunction: Boston: from Boston: : You came : When you came. The parallelism is incomplete because when, unlike from, has a tagmemic function within the syntagmeme which it subordinates. The point of essential parallelism is that, just as a propositional phrase is not a further level but simply a further type on the phrase level, so a subordinated clause is not a further level but a further type of clause. All relator-axis constructions have a bipartite structure: 'Relator', 'Axis'. It might be argued that all subordinated clauses should be considered to be phrases. This suggestion has the initial appeal of eliminating a certain amount of recursive and back-looping exponence. Thus, in the sentence The boy who lives next door called yesterday, the construction who lives next door manifests 'Modifier' tagmeme in a 'Noun Phrase' of which boy is the manifestation of 'Head'. If who lives next door is a clause, then it is an instance of back-looping exponence. But if it is a phrase, then descending exponence is involved. A s a phrase, who might be considered to be its 'Head' and lives next door its 'Modifier'. Wholly aside from the counterintuitive character of such an analysis for English (a finite verb does not apparently function as 'Modifier'), the suggested analysis jeopardizes the integrity of our notions of phrase and clause. In setting up a hierarchical system, we must work back and forth between levels and units on the levels. T o define levels wholly in terms of units with neatly descending hierarchy results in incoherent, non-distinctive units (here, a blurring of the distinction between phrase and clause). On the other hand, to define levels overmuch in terms of an etic idea of what the units on a level look like is to obtain levels that do not make a plausible hierarchical scheme. We must meet the twin demands of plausible, contrasting units and plausible, contrasting levels. It is probable that most structural levels up to and including the sentence may have one or more relator-axis syntagmemes. Thus, on the phrase level, prepositions occur; on the clause level, subordinating conjunctions occur; and on the sentence level (in

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many languages including Totonac and Trique) conjunctions and particles occur and subordinate whole sentences exactly as clauses are subordinated. Possibly the universal occurrence of such relators facilitates recursion and back-looping without recourse to special features of phonology as in such relatively awkward examples as those displayed in Tree Diagrams V and VI. Thesis (7) is suggested as a possibility. Phrase is similar to sentence in respect to high incidence of recursive exponence. This is exemplified in the sentence : If either he comes to tell you or you find out for yourself, then you cannot justly complain that you've not been treated fairly, said General Brown. The whole sentence is a 'Direct Quote Sentence' whose 'Quoted' tagmeme is manifested by a 'Conditional Sentence'. The 'Protasis' of the 'Conditional Sentence' is manifested by an 'Alternative Sentence' either he comes to tell you or you find out for yourself. The 'Apodosis' is manifested by an 'Indirect Quotation Sentence' you cannot justly complain that you've not been treated fairly. A few tagmemes with level-skipping exponents occur: 'Hypothesis': if', 'Internal Conjunction': then·, 'Sign of Indirect Quote': that. The recursive nesting of sentence type within sentence type is broadly parallel to the recursive nesting of phrase type within phrase type seen in diagram Π. In brief, both phrase and sentence tend to be NESTS. In languages with relative orders of inflectional affixes, word and clause are broadly similar in that both are STRINGS rather than nests, (although some nesting of clause within clause is found in that subordinate clauses are universal).7 Specific parallels between verb structures and clause structures are not uncommon. Thus, a verb may have its stem and tagmemes of tense, person of subject, person of object, and even rough indicators of location and manner in a way not dissimilar from the way that clauses are structured with tagmemes indicating predicate, subject, object, time, location, and manner. If, as here suggested, word and clause tend to be strings, while phrase and sentence tend to be nests, what of higher levels? It would be nicely parallel if we were to find that, while the paragraph approximates a string, the discourse approximates a nest. This is, however, apparently not true. Both paragraph and discourse appear to be highly recursive structures. We can, in fact, have a theory of a finite number of paragraph or discourse types in a given language only if we posit recursion of paragraph within paragraph and of discourse within discourse. Otherwise, every new complexity of paragraph or discourse structure would lead us to posit new types on these levels. It remains true, however, that on the lower levels, for any two contiguous levels, one is typically a nest and the other is typically a string. SUMMER INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTICS

' In some languages, e.g., Zoque of southern Mexico, the stem (derivational) and the word (inflectional) are clearly separate levels. Stems tend to be nests, while words tend to be strings.

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DISCUSSION DANES:

I agree with Longacre's statement that the interest of linguistics doesn't end with the sentence, but I only wonder whether it is useful to call these relations contextual. I don't know whether to call them grammatical relations, because it seems to me that they are of 'another' order. It would be better to find another term for them. LONGACRE:

If I may comment on that, I've had the same doubts, and they were resolved during some work on Totonac paragraph structure. It happened to be Totonac ; it could have been English or something else. We had about ten contrasting paragraph types just as we have contrasting clause types and contrasting sentence types. We found that we could state our formulas for our various paragraph types. We found that we could draw trees for examples of particular paragraph types. We felt, therefore, that if we could have contrasting types and generative formulas and trees for particular examples of paragraphs just as we had for sentence and clause, why not also speak of the grammar of the paragraph as well as of the grammar of sentence and clause? It seemed to be more of the same thing, and in no essential way different from what we had found on the lower levels. At this point, after being in doubt for several months, I for one decided that there was something worth looking for grammatically on the paragraph and discourse levels. (Columbia University) : You pointed out earlier in your paper that you are not recognizing a morphologysyntax division. Yet you have a bit later taken into account the fact that you have a number of things that we will call morphemes which are not potentially expandable. Do you not feel that there you have something which you might use as a characteristic of the difference between a morphological and a syntactic level; that is, not and but in a particular sentence cannot be expanded and neither can a variety of inflectional suffixes? Do we not have here a clear distinction — a point which we pass at which we must recognize that different processes are at work? MANER THORPE

LONGACRE :

Well, when I look at the entire picture, when I back off and see the word structure of a given language and when I see also its system of phrase structure and its system of clauses and sentences, I get the feeling that the break between, say, word and phrase is simply one interesting break in a whole system of structural thresholds. Since the thing has to terminate somewhere, we do get down to the place where there is no more internal complexity, and this is the stopping point of the whole system; that is, the hierarchy ends somewhere. I had a paragraph in the paper, which I didn't get to read, that hierarchy tends from the discourse to the morpheme, and the morpheme is

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the termination of the downward process of hierarchy. As such, it is very interesting in that it is the terminal point. THORPE:

But it turns out that if you lay more emphasis upon this division which you have recognized, you will find that this is the point at which you isolate these things that in semantic analysis we find necessary to establish as lexemes, and that when you have penetrated some kind of a construction to the point where you have separated-pieces which themselves are not capable of expansion, you have in fact destroyed what we must establish as a lexeme. You have destroyed a lexical unit. I would like to refer to Lees' work with English compound nouns as an example of destruction of lexemes on a grand scale. For semantic purposes, for purposes of the lexicon, for the speaker who is going to produce utterances it is not, I feel, necessary to break up things like hunting boots, seaplane, and so on, and talk about derivation. That is, it is not necessary to go down to the level of morphemes and destroy the lexical units, the lexemes. And therefore, I think that your recognition of the potentiality of expansion is a very important one for setting a bottom threshold of syntax, if you like. LONGACRE:

At this point, we would have to take account of one more emphasis of tagmemics ; that is, we believe in trimodal structure — not in tripartite structure, but in trimodal structure. We believe that there is, in addition to a grammatical structuring of a stretch of discourse, its phonological structuring which goes right up from syllable and stress group to intonation spans and to the phonological features of an entire discourse. Discourse has phonological closure of some kind, like the rundown of the preacher at the end of his sermon, the long intonational rundown which tells you that he is just about through preaching and you reach for your hat. Moreover, a sentence, a stretch of discourse, has its lexical structure as well. At this point I will shift into a different hierarchy entirely for my discussion of lexical units. The lexemes sometimes are smaller than what I want to call the grammatical morpheme. I may want to go down to bits and pieces of morphemes and compare them in sort of a componential analysis. Sometimes also the lexemes are much bigger ; they comprise a whole proverblike thing. Does that help any? THORPE:

Yes, I agree. (UCLA) : These three modes, are they separate and independent descriptions or in some way interdependent? And if so, what is the interdependence relationship?

JEREMY BRIGSTOCKE

LONGACRE:

They are semi-autonomous but interlocking, and we have no algorithm for getting from one mode to the other. In a sense, we start all over with each description; that is,

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we go at the phonology, go at the grammar, go at the lexicon somewhat as an independent jump. As a matter of fact, there is a large amount of congruence between them. One point where congruence has to be taken into account is where you have, say, lexical or phonological features relevant to grammar, or grammatical or phonological features relevant to the lexicon. There are all sorts of multiple interrelationships between them, and this is a thing which I would like to work on much more. MARK GOLD

(Stanford University) : In your examples, you showed that the levels introduced all sorts of complications. Now my question is why you have the levels.

LONGACRE:

Because it gives me a very nice way to compare things that are highly comparable. For instance, when I'm dealing with phrase types within a given language, I'm dealing with stuff somewhat of the same sort. I can show that I have a system of verb phrases, a system of noun phrases; the whole system of noun phrase versus the system of verb phrase has some interesting comparisons and differences. Then I go down into the structure of noun phrases, and I bring together essentially comparable things in a point where they seem to belong together to me. Also, it means that in my description I do not have to back up to rule 1,205 perhaps if I want to talk about phrase. That is, in a sense because of these natural thresholds if I want to I can renumber my rules, I can have, for instance, Sx, S2, S3, rules for sentence, Q , C 2 , C3, C4) rules for clause, Pi, P2, P3, P4, rules for phrase, and the rules for word formation. This, to me, seems strategic enough for the practical writing of a grammar; that is, I am interested in taxonomy. I'm not ashamed of the word. I like taxonomy. I think that one job we have is to lay out and describe the component parts of a language structure, always keeping in mind that we must not only be generative but taxonomic as well, and I do not believe that this whole fuss and bother about opposition between generation and taxonomy is anything more than one more of those pseudo-issues, those red herrings that have held up human thought down through the centuries. RON LIDEKER

(University of California, San Diego): I have a question about sentence of Tree Diagram No. 1 : "Green frogs do not have great intelligence, but jellyfish have less." I would like to know how in your description you would account for the fact that when a speaker of English encounters a sentence like this he interprets it as meaning that jellyfish have less intelligence rather than having less body weight or sense of humor, and so forth. LONGACRE:

I think it's a fact that certain sentence types have other characteristics beside their

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constituent structure. For instance, sentence types differ from each other in their capacity for ellipsis and for types of ellipsis, and the antithetical sentence is a type which especially invites ellipses of various sorts. What we have to do is state certain deletion rules to accompany our tagmemic formulas; that is, I envision a mode of description in which the tagmemic formula is some sort of a rule which is given priority. It is accompanied by further rules, some of which can be transformational. I don't care what you call them. This entire thing is, then, a tagmemic apparatus (formula and accompanying rules) and what you pointed out is a very important fact; and our description is not done until it is taken care of. I agree with you. (University of California, San Diego) : I would like to ask a question concerning the relationship between lexical items at the lowest level. In your Cartesian matrix, you pointed out the fact that although conceivably all items in slots could occur, it is generally the case that there are certain constraints in the language, and all of them do not. Do you simply list those that do, or do you have certain principles or explanations for why some of them are not possible? That's the first part of the question. Also, very much part of the same question is the business about lexical constraints ; how the particular lexical items that could fit into grammatical slots, let's say, are accounted for in your tagmemic formulas. It's not the case that any noun or any adjective can co-occur in such a slot. How do you handle constraints of this type? It seems to me this is also part of taxonomy, since you do want to describe what the transformationalists are calling 'surface structures'. In particular, I'm concerned about things like his intelligence amazed me as against, say, its intelligence, if that's possible, or the table's intelligence. And then completely different types of structures, for example, sentence correlates: He is intelligent or he is cooperative against his cooperation, and things of this type. That is, the same constraints that hold for sentences show up within, say, phrases or clauses or lower levels. SANFORD SHANE

LONGACRE :

I can answer that quite briefly. We haven't done our homework well at this point; I'll say that very frankly to you. On the other hand, what I have always thought we would do is have some sort of a cross-reference, some lexical work which would crossreference to the grammar and which would handle all these co-occurrence possibilities in their own right. We have begun to see some very interesting developments in the feature approach of generative grammar where these are worked into the grammar proper. At this point, I'm not above trying to take a page or two out of the book of my generative-grammar colleagues of the Chomsky transformational school. We have owed a great deal to them in the past, and we shall continue to scrounge from them in the future.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Day, Arthur C.f 1966 The syntax of Tho, a Tai Language of Vietnam (London, School of Oriental and African studies). Halliday, Μ. A. K., 1961 "Categories of the Theory of Grammar".. Word 17.241-92. 1966 "The Concept of Rank : a Reply", Journal of Linguistics. 2.110-18. Harris, Zellig S., 1962 String Analysis of Sentence Structure (= Papers on Formal Linguistics. No. 1.) (The Hague, Mouton). Longacre, R. E., 1963 Review of String Analysis of Sentence Structure, by Z. S. Harris. Language 39.161-78. 1964a "Prolegomona to Lexical Structure", Linguistics 5.5-24. 1964b Grammar Discovery Procedures. (= Janua Linguarum 33) (The Hague, Mouton). 1965 "Some Fundamental Insights of Tagmemics", Language 41.61-76. 1966 "Trique clause and sentence : A study in Contrast, Variation, and Distribution", International Journal of American Linguistics, 32.242-52. Mathews, P. H., 1966 "The Concept of Rank in 'Neo-Firthian' Grammar", Journal of Linguistics. 2.101-9. Nguyen, Dang Liem, 1966 English Grammar, a Combined Tagmeme and Transformational Approach (Canberra, The Australian National University). Pike, Kenneth L., 1967 Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, (= Janua Linguarum, Series Major 24) (The Hague, Mouton). Vendler, Zeno, 1963 The Transformational Grammar of English Adjectives. (= Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers No. 52) (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania).

PART IV

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

A STRUCTURAL VIEW OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS JOSÉ PEDRO RONA

1. THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

It is impossible to do accurate work in any science without first having delimited the scope, the theory, and the methodology of that science. A s far as I know, the scope of sociolinguistics has never been adequately delimited. It has been generally and generically understood that sociolinguistics should study the so-called 'social' aspects of language. This would be well within the

LINGUISTIQUE EXTERNE

of de Saussure,

and could be approached as (1) study of the effect of society on language, and (2) study of the effect of language on society. A s a matter of fact, sociolinguistic research work has been carried on on the general basis of 'social', i.e. nonlinguistic criteria. I had some doubt whether to speak at this conference about my own research work and its results, or to enter into an overall discussion of sociolinguistics. Half an hour is evidently not sufficient time for a good exposition of any of these subjects. Finally I decided on an overall discussion, because it seems to me that, as stated very clearly at this Conference, MATTER.

THERE IS NO OVERALL CONSISTENT THEORY OF THIS SUBJECT

I have been exploring, for many years now, the possible research methods

in sociolinguistics, and I feel that there are certain considerations which should be taken into account. Many scholars of the European structuralist schools realized very soon that de Saussure's concept of

LANGUE

is too diffuse and that several different concepts could

be extracted from it. Thus, while it is true that there is a concept of opposed to

PAROLE,

it is also true that when we speak about a

as opposed to French dialects and patois, this FRANÇAISE;

in itself, and, if we are speaking of

to German, Spanish, or English, this

LANGUE

LANGUE LANGUE

LANGUE

(LJ)

LANGUE FRANÇAISE

(LA)

includes

FRANÇAISE

PAROLE

as opposed

(L3) includes even the French

dialects and patois. This difference between L x , L 2 , and L 3 has always been the principal difficulty which prevented the structural method from being applied to dialectology; while the purely descriptive structural method refers to L l f dialectologists are concerned rather with L s , or with internal stratification within L 3 , which is, of course, external to L j . Coseriu's

ARCHISISTEMA,

Hjelmslev's Weinreich's

ARCHITECTURE DIASYSTEM,

(CHARPENTE)

OF

LANGUAGE,

the expression 'system of systems'

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sometimes used by the Prague School, and even my own remarks on the sociocultural stratification of language (1958) were attempts to solve this problem, i.e. to apply structural methods to L3, not only to 1^. This would mean, of course, that a structural dialectology would fall at least in part within the LINGUISTIQUE INTERNE, as stated very clearly and accurately by Hutterer (1963). The same thing could be said about sociolinguistics. It is within the field of external linguistics only if a mere structural description of Lx is envisaged, but it will be partially internal linguistics if our aim is the description of L s . Thus, we should differentiate between 'linguistic' and 'nonlinguistic' sociolinguistics. The first will study the internal stratification of Ls, while the second will deal with the effect of society on L s and with the effect of L8 on society.

II. THE DIASYSTEM

I accept Weinreich's term as synonymous to Lj, although Weinreich writes only about horizontal (dialectal) stratification. I feel that 'metasystem' would be the obvious term for a system of systems (in the Russellian way), but then it would be homonymous to the system of metalanguage. A diasystem would then obviously be a concept very similar to Hockett's L-COMPLEX, too. My representation of an ideal diasystem is a cube, within which, at least theoretically, every point represents an idiolect, i.e. an Lj.

The three axes of this cube could be called (Flydal, 1951) the DIATOPIC, the DIASTRATIC and the DIACHRONIC axis. In reality, there is generally only an insignificant difference between two neighboring idiolects; we do not speak of an 'English of 42nd Street' as different from the 'English of 43rd Street'; of the 'English of July 30, 1966' as different from the 'English of July 31, 1966'; or of the 'English of the bus drivers of Los Angeles' as different from the 'English of the bus inspectors of Los Angeles'. But we do differentiate between certain major geographical areas, chronological

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periods, and sociocultural strata. It is supposed that idiolects are approximately identical within the same area, the same period, and the same stratum. Hence, the sum of those idiolects may also be considered as Lx, and be the subject of a structural description, which should therefore be syntopic, synchronic, and synstratic (i.e. not merely synchronic, as stated by de Saussure). Any such study which goes beyond such a group of idiolects will be external to Lj, but internal to L s . The study of only extra-diasystematic facts would be external to L3.1 Comparative structural studies along the three axes of the diasystem have been initiated in the last years. On the diachronic axis, this means so-called diachronic phonology (Prague School) and morphology. On the diatopic axis, structural dialectology has lately been the subject of some research, both theoretical and descriptive. Structural research in sociolinguistics, which would correspond to the diastratic axis, will be discussed here. I have tried to show in a paper of mine (1962) that structural phenomena on the diastratic axis have some startling resemblances with those on the diatopic one. This arises from the fact that diastratic differentiation is very much alike diatopic (dialectal) differentiation. Its study may be structural, therefore, in three senses, which are the same which were explicitated for dialectal differentiation by Ivic (1964).

m . THE SUBJECTS OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS

We may divide the subjects of sociolinguistics, on the basis of what I have said, into the following classes: (a) Internal stratification of the diasystem: (1) Description of any given group of idiolects, if sufficiently uniform, must be made in a syntopic, synchronic, and synstratic way. Any such description will therefore be a description of a given sociocultural stratum, different from other strata existing in the same area and period. (2) Comparison of different strata existing in the same area will yield knowledge which may be compared with dialectology. (3) Influence of one stratum on any other stratum existing in the same area is to be understood as contact research, and studied with the same methods as proposed for bilingualism by Weinreich (1953). 1 Needless to say, the diachronic: synchronic dichotomy comes from Saussure. The other two {diastratic: synstratic, diatopic: syntopic) have been introduced by Flydal for stylistics and for the Study of loanwords, and the whole terminology has been adopted by me as far back as 1958, and ever since used in all my publications. Coseriu adopts this descriptive system in 1966, adding a fourth dichotomy: diaphasic:symphasic, meaning the descriptive vs. comparative study of "language styles". The distinction does not seem to me to be of the same rank, i.e. it cannot enter into a descriptive system together with the first three, because those study L t and their units are idiolects, while "language style" is only a part of Lx and Coseriu's diaphasic study compares elements of the same idiolect.

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Effect of society on the diasystem: Since a language sign is an association of a SIGNIFIANT and a SIGNIFIÉ, the effect of society on the language sign may affect the SIGNIFIANT. This is the case of the many kinds of taboos and euphemisms. It may also affect the SIGNIFIÉ. This is the case of many semantic divergences due to the structure of society. A good example is that of the two Germanies both calling themselves 'democratic', though 'not democratic' to each other. The preceding phenomena are related to the symbolic value of the language sign. The language sign has, however, a symptomatic value, too. This symptomatic factor becomes more apparent when unexpected, but it is always present in speech. Thus, if we are crossing a jungle and at a given moment we hear somebody say 'there is a trap within two hundred feet', then we are receiving two pieces of information : the symbolic content of the sentence informs us about the existence of a trap; its symptomatic content conveys information about the fact that there is somebody behind a bush. This symptomatic information is properly noted, because we usually do not expect — at least the present speaker does not expect — to find anybody hiding behind bushes when we cross jungles. It is quite evident, however, that the symptomatic content does exist, though unnoticed, even when a professor is talking about linguistics to his students or to his colleagues. The symptomatic content tells us not only the mere fact that somebody is actually speaking, but also whether the speaker is male or female, old or young, American or Uruguayan, and, last but not least, the sociocultural stratum to which the speaker belongs within the diasystem. The study of this last kind of information should, of course, be included in sociolinguistics, and its units are not language signs, but language attitudes, which may be expressed in terms of the sociocultural STATUS of a given sign within the system, of a given system within the diasystem, or even the sociocultural status of a whole diasystem (as e.g. that of Guaraní and of Spanish in Paraguay). In a paper by Garvin and Mathiot (1956), I find an enumeration of the functions of a standard language. These are : the the the the

unifying function separatist function prestige function, and frame-of-reference function.

While I cannot enter into details, I hope that the audience will agree with me if I say that all these functions are symptomatic, in the sense I have just pointed out. Symptomatic value is also the basis for NORM, a notion which was disclosed by Coseriu in 1952. A NORM is an aspect of language, which, not being pertinent to the system, is continuously observed by the speaking community. As an example, I shall mention the fact that, in Uruguayan Spanish, there is a phoneme j i j with two allophones, one voiced [z] and the other unvoiced [§]. Theoretically,

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either of these allophones might be used in any context, because they are not distinctive. Nonetheless, the unvoiced allophone occurs only in clusters before unvoiced consonants, while in any other phonemic context only the voiced allophone is employed. Standardization is based on norm, i.e. on a selection between isofunctional possibilities, and, after standardization, the two isofunctional possibilities, while identical from the point of view of the system, have different symptomatic values. Sometimes there is a shift in the norm, and Coseriu claims that all linguistic changes are the consequence of shifts in the norm. The same thing could be said about the subjects that Malkiel (1960) called the 'external history' of a language. The history of a language is nothing else than a sequence of shifts of the symptomatic value of a language as a whole or of any of its parts. This is the way in which Romance or Germanic languages become national, or literary, or standard languages. It is occurring at present in many countries. (c) Effect of the diasystem on society: This subject falls only indirectly within the scope of linguistics or sociolinguistics, because it would deal with changes in society, not with changes in language. Those changes should therefore be studied by the sociologist, not by the linguist. It is possible, however, to study which aspects of the language do produce changes in society and in what way. Prescriptive grammar, alphabetization, etc., have been the traditional ways, since they contribute toward a certain displacement of the equilibrium among the different social strata. It should be noted, however, that all this involves only the symptomatic value of language, since a learned person is, from the linguistic point of view, merely a person who only uses such language signs as are usually employed by learned persons, and who does not use such language signs as are usually employed by uneducated people. There is therefore no major difference between this subject and b. 3. From a practical point of view, however, I should mention here that a society is not merely a society, that is, a major entity, but also a group of people, i.e. the sum of minor entities, every one of which is affected by the symptomatic differences on the diastratic axis of the diasystem. Here, linguists may be very useful to the sociologist, to the social worker, and to the educator. Therefore, while the investigation of the effect of diastratic differences on the society, or even on individuals, is not a very attractive task for the linguist, it must be done, and it must be done most urgently. The present speaker, in a paper read at the I Inter-American Symposium on Linguistics and Language Teaching, held in Cartagena in 1963 (1965), and Hymes, in a paper read in 1964 at the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference (1966: 116) both stressed the fact that linguists, even sociolinguists, tend to overlook the concrete level at which differences in language help and hinder individuals in the conduct of their daily lives. (d) We might even go beyond a single language, i.e. beyond one single diasystem,

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either for mere comparison, or to study the mutual interaction of two or more languages. But that would be a cross-linguistic aspect, or cross-cultural, and I believe that, as stated by Hymes in 1964 (1966), appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, linguistic relativity is predominantly an intracultural aspect. Inclusion of cross-cultural interaction, though not impossible, would lead us too far afield. The term 'sociolinguistics' is more often applied — and we intend to continue applying it — to studies of linguistic variation within a single society. Differences between two languages are usually regarded as a 'language-and-culture' subject (Fischer, 1966). IV. RESEARCH METHODS

It is evident that my discussion about the scope of sociolinguistics and my attempt to find a structural division of the subjects of this science (III), were intended to show the diverse research methods which should be used in sociolinguistics. I rather feel that most of the work heretofore done in this field is affected by the lack of an adequate idea of the theory and of the methods. Some of my colleagues have pointed out earlier during this conference that method should always precede theory, which should thus be a method-oriented theory. Other colleagues claimed that theory should be first, method and application later. Longacre (see pp. 173-90 in this volume) pointed out that there is a two-way feedback relation between theory and method. I feel that all these colleagues are absolutely right. What I claim is that there must always be two distinct types of theory: a theory of the subject matter, and a theory of the method. The first would be a metalanguage, because we are speaking of language; the second, a meta-metalanguage, because we are speaking of linguistics, which is itself a metalanguage. If we do not take these hierarchies into account, we are bound to get merely a paradox, as was shown by Russell. I feel that a good part of the discussion during this conference, and elsewhere in American linguistics, is based on this kind of paradox. To sum up, a good theory is always a method-oriented theory; I also feel, however, that there should always be another theory which ought to precede the method, and be a true theory of the method. This theory of the method is different from the theory of the subject of the science, which cannot be reached until after having collected the necessary data. Theory of the method is understood by the present speaker as being the same thing as a model. This does not mean that I reject the statement that method must be prior to theory. There is, of course, a method for the theory of the method, but this is not a part of the science itself. It is common to all sciences, and hence belongs to epistemology. It is obvious that every subject mentioned in section III will require a special research method of its own. My representation of the diasystem and of the internal relations on its diastratic axis, was intended to be a model, i.e. a means of arriving at proper research methods.

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Description of a sufficiently uniform group of idiolects (a. 1) means the description of a system (1^). It may be achieved by means of the research methods of descriptive linguistics per se ; hence, it is not truly a subject of sociolinguistics, as it is not a subject of dialectology or of historical grammar. (I do not agree with Hutterer on this matter.) A language system, or parts of a language system, represent theoretically a mere point in a diasystem. It can be described, structurally or nonstructurally, with the aid of any model or grammatical procedure, but it cannot be located within the diasystem, i.e. its situation in the diasystem cannot be determined, except by comparison with other language systems belonging to the same diasystem. Therefore, comparison of different strata (a. 2) will be the aim of diastratic linguistics, i.e. sociolinguistics, in the same way as comparison of different places should be the aim of diatopic linguistics, i.e. dialectology. This comparison can be merely diastratic (a. 2), or diastratic-diachronic (a. 3), just as dialectology can be merely diatopic, or diatopic-diachronic. Failure to realize these facts has until recently prevented both sociolinguistics and dialectology from being developed on a structural basis. The major methodological difference between sociolinguistics and dialectology lies in the fact that speakers of the various language systems representing strata happen to live in the same community. Good choice of informants, which is extremely difficult in dialectological research, becomes almost unachievable in sociolinguistic research. Therefore, the research methods of dialectology could not properly be applied to sociolinguistics. The most powerful factor making for dialect differentiation consists in the lack of concrete opportunities to communicate. This factor is usually almost nonexistent on the diastratic axis, because the speakers of the various strata usually meet one another quite frequently, and this circumstance reduces the possibility of diastratic differentiation. There is also a prestige factor which makes many language signs of the higher stratum appear among the responses of the informants of a lower stratum. As a result, it is seldom possible to perform an accurate comparative analysis of two or more language systems belonging to two or more strata of the same place. Sometimes it can be carried out (e.g. in some small towns of Southern Mexico), but not generally. It is much more common to find communities showing a continuous scale of idiolects, from the lowest stratum to the highest, where the majority of language signs occur at random, i.e. irregularly, while the sociolinguistic differences are represented by certain traits, words, or structures which are known not to be employed by the 'other' end of the scale. Such is the case of short and long words in American English, the 'lunfardo' in River Plate Spanish, etc. In Uruguay, two persons may converse for quite a long time and use exactly the same words, but, if one of them uses just once the form haiga or estea, he is revealed as a 'vulgar' speaker. This means, of course, that each of these verb forms is taken at its symptomatic value. In other words, words or expressions may be divided into three groups : (1) those which appear in all strata; (2) those used only in the lowest stratum; and (3) those

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employed only in the highest stratum. In most communities, a very high percentage belongs to group (1). Words or expressions of groups (2) and (3) are, however, symptomatic of the respective strata. The most fertile field of research for sociolinguistics will therefore be found in attitude research (b. 3). A language attitude is an entity more complex than a language sign, but its structure is very similar. It could be described as an association of a language fact and a belief about language, i.e. an association between the symbolic and the symptomatic values of a language, or of part of a language, or of a single language sign. This is the same kind of association which was postulated by de Saussure between the SIGNIFIANT a n d t h e SIGNIFIÉ.

The present speaker has conducted some research on language attitudes in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina, with some very interesting results. He was not especially concerned with creating a new terminology for this kind of research, and therefore called the symptomatic value simply CREENCIA, a Spanish term which could perhaps be translated into English as BELIEF. Then, an ATTITUDE could be defined as an association of a belief and a fact. This term does not refer only to language facts (and beliefs regarding language facts), but also to any other kind of facts. In any case, there is a clear difference between a belief and an attitude. The first can be defined in itself, while the second is meaningful only if associated or compared with actual facts. My conception of ATTITUDE could be compared with de Saussure's conception of a language sign in the following way :

The same belief can be a part of more than one attitude, if associated with different facts. If somebody says "My country is very large", this is merely a belief, if we do not know where he comes from. Now if an American and an Uruguayan say "My country is very large", this statement reveals two very different attitudes; because, of course, the United States is large, but Uruguay is not. We might deduce, therefore, one attitude on the part of the American and a quite different one on the part of the Uruguayan. It is easy to note the parallelism with the case of the SIGNIFIANT [sal] which is part of quite different language signs in Spanish ('salt'), in French ('dirty'), and in Hungarian ('stem'), and which is not a language sign at all for many English speakers or for a Japanese, in whose speech no meaning is attached to it. Thus, we have three sets of data. Two of them are primary, and therefore they can be obtained only through direct research, though there should be a different research method for each. The third, the set of 'attitude data', must be deduced from the primary ones.

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Now the second set of data ('factual data') may involve facts from any field of human activities, or even beyond human activities. If and only if the factual data refer to language or the use of language, the attitude data refer to language attitudes, and are therefore within the scope of linguistics (or sociolinguistics). But the 'belief data' could not possibly show us anything about the language or about the use of language. I think that one major weakness of the sociolinguistic research carried out until now lies in the circumstance that the structure of language attitudes, or of the symptomatic nature of sociolinguistic facts, has remained largely unnoticed. Many excellent scholars have been simply misled by their informants, because they did not realize that the so-called 'native speaker', while he has necessarily a good knowledge (at least the kind of knowledge that Coseriu calls 'practical' or 'empirical') of the language itself, has not necessarily a good knowledge (not even a 'practical' knowledge) of the symptomatic factor. This means that in sociolinguistics we can seldom trust our informants. By way of example, if we ask our information "How do you say when a liquid is easy to set on fire?", and he answers FLAMMABLE, we may trust him and be sure that at least in his idiolect this is the word for that concept. This is linguistics. But if we ask him whether the word FLAMMABLE is correct, or standard, or elegant, or beautiful, or educated, or pleasant, we cannot accept his answer that easily, not even on statistical grounds. If the majority says that FLAMMABLE is standard English, this will not prove that it is, but nevertheless it will show that the majority in that community does not know standard English, which is an attitude datum, and a most valuable conclusion in sociolinguistic research. (Of course, when I choose an example from American English, it is possible and even probable that it turns out that ι do not know standard English.) Furthermore, I dare say that attitudes do form a system, and a structure (in de Saussure's sense), just as language signs do. Within a given community, or part of a community, every attitude toward a given part or aspect of language, will depend on attitudes toward all other parts or aspects of language. If one attitude is modified, added, or suppressed, all other attitudes will undergo a change, at least theoretically. This is particularly evident in the facts that we have listed in b. 1 and b. 2 in section III. I think that an attempt ought to be made to describe the structure of language attitudes in some community, and I am at present trying to do so with respect to Paraguayan Guarani. In this field, therefore, there are two equivalent or almost equivalent research methods possible. We may either ask questions of our informants to which we know the answer in advance, and then check the answer against reality as we know it. Or, we may simply ask questions and then try to confirm the truth of the answer by means of extrainformant investigation. The result may be very surprising. Thus, my Paraguayan informants told me, almost without exception, that 100 per cent of Paraguayans know how to speak Guaraní. This is, of course, false as a language fact, but it is nevertheless very interesting as a language attitude. I am now applying the same method to the 'fronterizo' dialect of the northern region

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of Uruguay, which is a Portuguese dialect with a strong Spanish influence. For the sake of an example, I shall mention that four of my informants told me, in fluent 'fronterizo', that they did not know 'fronterizo', but only Spanish. This points toward an important shift in language attitude, and makes me think that the 'fronterizo' will NOW change toward Spanish. I do not think that all possibilities of research aimed at exploring the symptomatic aspects of language, could be enumerated here. I only wanted to show some of those possibilities, because I believe — it is my attitude — that this line of research would be most fruitful in sociolinguistics. UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA*

DISCUSSION HYMES:

I was particularly interested in your use of the terms DIATOPIC and DIASTRATIC. I would like to ask whether you devised them. I had not been familiar with DIATOPIC before; in fact, I thought of it this summer when I was writing another paper, but I wonder if this is in the literature earlier, or is this original in your present paper. RONA:

This terminology has been taken over from a paper by Leiv Flydal which appeared in 1951 in Norsk Tidskrift for Sprogvidenskap, under the title of "Remarques sur certains rapports entre le style et l'état de langue". He created that terminology for stylistics. I adopted it for dialectology and for sociolinguistics because it seems to me to be very easy to handle and very expressive. HYMES:

It seems to me quite interesting. I suppose that in recent United States writing where you have DIASTRATIC, people have been perhaps more commonly speaking of social dialect, implying, I suppose, the concept of social space. But otherwise I think the distinction is quite the same. RONA:

I have very often seen the expression SOCIAL DIALECT in American literature; and not only in America, also in Europe. But there are some colleagues in Latin America and in Europe, too, who are using (I think I have been the first) Flydal's terminology because a social dialect is not a dialect at all. PITKIN:

I offer my compliments; I think it was an excellent paper and discusses topics that •

Affiliation at the time of the Conference: University of Montevideo.

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are rarely properly discussed in the literature. I admire most of all this organizing principle and unified approach, and I must say that the clarification between dialect and stratified segment, and especially the clarification of the role of the informant in certain kinds of research, are especially welcomed. (University of California, Berkeley) : I have two questions to ask. One possibility of bringing together the point of view of the speaker and that of Prof. Hymes, expressed in his first comment, is perhaps to draw attention to urban dialect as against rural dialect. Most dialectologists have operated with a bucolic or pastoral scene. But if you take as a dialect, say, something like the dialect of San Francisco or Buenos Aires, you find a situation of considerable relevance to the sociologist. This is my first question — to what extent do urban dialects bring together the two disciplines? My second question refers to any possible bridge from the old sociological approach to linguistics associated with Durkheim, with the French school, to some extent with de Saussure, and perhaps outside of France with Alf Sommerfelt, to the new discipline of sociolinguistics that has emerged in the last ten years or so. Yakov Malkiel

Rona:

I prefer to use Flydal's terminology. I don't think there could be a bridge between the other terminology and mine because there is a very interesting, very suitable aspect to my terminology. If we speak of social dialects, what do we call the absence of social dialects? With Flydal's and my terminology, his in stylistics and mine in dialectology and sociolinguistics, we can speak of a syntopic and a diatopic study, of a synstratic and a diastratic study, which is not possible with the other terminology, or, at least, I don't see how it could be done. It is only a matter of convenience; it is not a matter of principle. Then, for the second question, it is a question of approach. The difference is definitely not in the subject itself, but only in our approach. Language facts cannot be separated from other human institutions. Sociolinguistics, just as structural linguistics, language-and-culture research, and so on, has come about only as a consequence of an arbitrary limitation of the scope of linguistics. I would say a self-mutilating limitation adopted by some structural schools in North America from Bloomfield on, but principally in the post-war years. The Prague School of which I am a heretic offspring always envisioned language structure as a social institution. Therefore, Prague linguistics includes sociolinguistics. The fact is that the Bloomfieldian schools limited the scope to verbal behavior, which is but part of linguistic behavior, and linguistic behavior is only a part of language as a social institution — this fact made it necessary for those schools to create psycho-, socio-, and other hyphenated linguistics, or even semantics, as separate and accessory sciences. So while 1 am here to discuss the field of sociolinguistics, I don't even believe in the existence of sociolinguistics as a separate field.

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Dubois:

Given the indications especially in the last part of your paper, I am wondering if I agree with you about the two different disciplines — that is, sociolinguistics and social psychology. It seems to me that in some cases when we speak of rejection of certain linguistic forms or certain dialects by the subjects we are actually dealing with the two fields at once. This is a matter common to social psychology and to sociolinguistics, whereas in other matters we definitely have to consider that they are two different fields. Rona:

Prof. Dubois is right. I specifically stated in the last words of my paper that it would take some weeks to evaluate all aspects of what I have said today. I agree completely with Prof. Dubois. Hymes:

I wanted to agree with your remark that the coming into existence of such terms as 'ethnolinguistics', 'psycholinguistics', and 'sociolinguistics' was a product of the narrowness of the definition of the field of linguistics. And I wanted to add that many of those people who are most concerned with what is being called sociolinguistics now do not, in fact, think of their work as constituting a separate science but as a part of a broader conception of linguistics.

REFERENCES Coseriu, Eugenio, 1952 Sistema, norma y habla (Montevideo, Departamento de Lingüística). 1966 "Structure lexicale et enseignement du vocabulaire", Actes du Premier Colloque International de Linguistique Appliquée, pp. 175-217 (Nancy). Fischer, John L., 1966 "Syntax and Social Structure : Truk and Ponape", Sociolinguistics, Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964, ed. by William Bright, pp. 168-87 (The Hague, Mouton). Flydal, Leiv, 1951 "Remarques sur certains rapports entre le style et l'état de langue", Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap 16:240-257. Garvin, Paul L. and Madeleine Mathiot, 1956 "The Urbanization of the Guaraní Language. A Problem in Language and Culture", Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, pp. 783-790 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press). Hjelmslev, Louis, 1942 "Langue et Parole", Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 2.43. Hockett, Charles F., 1959 A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York). Hutterer, Claus, 1963 "Nyelvföldrajz és dialektológia", Âltalânos Nyelvészeti Tanulmànyok. 143-59. (Budapest) Spanish translation by José Pedro Rona, under the title La Geografía Lingüistica y la Dialectología (Montevideo, Departamento de Lingüística, 1965).

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Hymes, DeU H., 1966 "Two Types of Linguistic Relativity", Sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference 1964, ed. by William Bright. 114-167 (The Hague, Mouton). Ivic, Pavle, 1964 "Structure and Typology of Dialectal Differentiation", Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, 1962, pp. 115-21 (The Hague, Mouton). Malkiel, Yakov, 1960 "A Tentative Typology of Romance Historical Grammars", Lingua 9:321-416. Rona, José P., 1958 Aspectos metodológicos de la dialectología hispanoamericana (Montevideo, Departamento de Lingüistica). 1962 Vulgarización o adaptación diastrática de neologismos y cultismos (Montevideo, Departamento de Lingüística). 1965 "Relación entre la investigación dialectológica y la enseñanza de la lengua materna", El simposio de Cartagena, 1963, pp. 333-43 (Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo). 1966 "The Social and Cultural Status of Guarani in Paraguay", Sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964 ed. by William Bright, pp. 277-292 (The Hague, Mouton). Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1915 Cours de Linguistique Générale (Paris). Weinreich, Uriel, 1953 Languages in Contact (New York). Weinreich, Uriel, 1954 "Is a Structural Dialectology PossibleP Word 10:388-400.

EXPERIMENTAL METHOD IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS J . DUBOIS and L. IRIGARAY

Generative grammar has led psycholinguists to define the interrelations between the constituent parts of a minimal sentence in terms of simple distributions and taxonomic analysis. It has also led them to distinguish competence models from performance models, to investigate the degree and nature of syntactic and/or semantic relations, and to postulate a new basis for the study of anomalous and ambiguous sentences. Analyses of co-occurrence patterns and transformational relations, however, are usually based on ready-made sentences and traditional rules of grammar. The same is true of studies of respondents' intuitive reactions to tests designed to establish the degree of ungrammaticality or (semantic) acceptability of anomalous sentences. Tests simulating the production of sentences thus seemed worthwhile. We wished to study the strategies adopted by normal subjects, aphasies, subjects suffering from senile dementia, and schizophrenics, when faced with the problems of sentence production under certain set linguistic conditions and, in particular, when those conditions involved linguistic ambiguities. It is true that the production of sentences is definitely rooted in a specific relationship between the respondent and the world from which he draws his experience. In addition, the responses can be only simulations of normal sentence production, from which they are distinguished by the external restraints imposed by the conditions of the experiment. In any case, the precise hypotheses which underlie our experiments and which have already been embodied in a transformational analysis of French permit us to regard these tests as a reasonable first experimental approach to the problem of co-occurrence. IN THIS PAPER, WE SHALL PRESENT ONLY THE RESULTS OF EXPERIMENTS MADE WITH NORMAL SUBJECTS.

1. DESCRIPTION OF THE EXPERIMENTS; SYNTACTIC CONSIDERATIONS

1.1 The tests consisted in presenting to the respondents two or more words (up to five) in a definite order with the injunction to form a 'single sentence, the simplest possible'. No time limitation was imposed.

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Since a single, simple sentence was to be produced, the restraint inherent in the injunction was dependent upon the respondent's intuition and his knowledge of the pattern of the minimal sentence. It is true that complements of both the subject and object, transformationally derived, were not formally excluded by the injunction; but the indication of the minimum possible resulted in making their interpretation 'faulty.' The injunction was, moreover, accompanied by an example which defined the minimal sentence by a simple construction without complements : porte, infirmière 'door,' 'nurse'; Γ infirmière ouvre la porte 'the nurse opens the door'. 1.2 In fact, the original instruction included two different injunctions — a SINGLE sentence and a SIMPLE sentence. These two injunctions are reflected differently in the resolution of ambiguities. If the respondent takes the former injunction to be primary, he will employ one or two transformations in order to produce a single sentence; if the latter injunction is regarded as the more important, he might produce more than one sentence. 1.3 The minimal sentence we regard as being composed of a noun phrase and a verb phrase, the latter including a verb form and an object noun phrase. The kernel sentence is active, positive, and includes the unmarked tense or aspect form. The grammatical sentence requested is defined by the morpho-syntactic means required to produce it. A hypothesis can be formulated to the effect that the syntactic and/or semantic correlations ascertained between lexical classes (animate/inanimate, physical object/ abstract quality, etc.) and inferred from performances in standard language WILL BE SHOWN IN VARYING DEGREES ACCORDING TO THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF THE CONSTITUENT PARTS OF THE STATEMENT FORMULATED. If a taxonomic model were employed to explain in traditional form this relation between distance and constraints, it could be said that syntactic correlations (such as could be extracted based on the passive transformation) appear on several levels (intrasyntagmatic, intraclausal, interclausal). If a transformational model were employed, it could be said that the subject noun phrase is by nature different from the object noun phrase. Thus the restrictions operating between the indirect object noun and the subject noun are less strong than those between the subject noun and the verb in the basic sentence. The strongest restrictions are intrasyntagmatic; they are compatibilities which hold between the determiner and the noun ma mère 'my mother', between the adjective and the noun une lumière aveuglante 'a blinding light', between the complement of the noun and the head noun la maison de ma mère 'my mother's house'. Conversely, the compatibilities between two sequential sentences p 1 and p2 are less pregnant. Insofar as the verb phrase of p 2 can be transformed into an indirect object noun phrase, the types of restraints between successive sentences can be reduced to the compatibilities which hold between the verb phrase and the indirect object noun phrase.

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Juxtaposition and coordination are more or less equivalent representations of more or less strong restrictions between minimal sentences. The hierarchy of semantic and/ or syntactic constraints can be roughly symbolized by the hierarchy of transformations : PVP2; SNj/SNa; SNJSNa; SNx/adjective; where SNX is subject, SN2 object, and SN s indirect object. This being granted, it is clear that, if two words χ and y are both included in a noun phrase such that χ is the subject and y is the object or indirect object, the constraints on χ and y will be stronger in the case when y is the object than when y is the indirect object. As a first hypothesis, we can postulate that a sentence in which the syntactic and/or semantic constraints are strongest will be more difficult to generate than a sentence for which the constraints are less strict. Thus with the words mère 'mother' and table 'table' two types of sentences can be obtained, ma mère met la table' 'my mother sets the table' and ma mère va à table' my mother goes to the table', the restrictions being stronger in the first sentence. 1.4 Responses were elicited from various groups of subjects in two forms: oral and written. In both cases, the test words were presented to the subjects orally. We may assume that, since the pattern of the minimal sentence is the same in both cases, the written responses will represent the application of the transformation rules specifically. In the group composed of students (Faculté des Lettres), two limitations were imposed on the written responses in order to reduce the difference between the oral and written tests : (1) The lapse of time between the presentation of the sets of words was reduced to a minimum, and the students were asked to write the first sentence which came into their heads. (2) All corrections and erasures were forbidden in order to encourage the writers to continue a sentence once begun and not to reformulate it on a new basis.

2. LEXICAL CONSIDERATIONS

2.1 The words whose incorporation was required of the subjects were selected from a stock of root words based upon certain hypotheses concerning SYNTACTIC CORRELATIONS BETWEEN LEXICAL CLASSES AND VARIOUS TYPES OF AMBIGUITY (levels and degrees). The following sets of words were given, in the first series of tests, to Group I (students, schizophrenics, and subjects suffering from senile dementia). The problem of ambiguity arising from homophony will be examined later: (1) (2) (3) (4)

maison, mère 'house,' 'mother' récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' lumière, lampe 'light', 'lamp' maison, chat 'house' 'cat'

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enfant, père, absent 'child' 'father' 'absent' crayon, écrire, bleu, feuille' 'pencil', 'to write', 'blue', 'sheet of paper' détacher, feuille, voler 'to loosen', 'leaf/sheet', 'to fly/steal' rouge, voir, cheval 'red', 'to see', 'horse'

In a second series, the following words were proposed to Group II (aphasies, subjects suffering from senile dementia, normal control groups) : (1) fauteuil, docteur, asseoir 'armchair', 'doctor', 'to sit' (2) bureau, tiroir, ouvrir 'desk', 'drawer', 'to open' (3) hôpital, enfant 'hospital', 'child' (4) arbre, vert, feuille, voir (or être) 'tree', 'green', 'leaf/sheet', 'to see (or to be)' (5) table, mère 'table,' 'mother' (6) table, livre, être 'table', 'book', 'to be' (7) froid, hiver 'cold', 'winter' (8) crayon,feuille, écrire, blanc, bleu 'pencil', 'sheet of paper', 'to write', 'white', 'blue' 2.2 The terms were chosen in order to make a study of the various correlations between words of the same class (nouns), words belonging to complementary classes (verbs and nouns), and words belonging to syntagmatic classes (adjectives and adverbs) co-occurring with verbs and nouns. The choice of terms made possible an analysis of intrasyntagmatic dependents (adjective and noun, or adverb and verb), intraclausal co-occurrents (between the major sentence constituents) and, finally, interclausal dependents. The conditions of the test did not prohibit the inclusion of words other than those proposed. Specifically, when two nouns were given, the production of a sentence assumed the use of an operative verb. The production of a noun phrase assumed the selection of determiners. What the instructions required was that all the words proposed would be incorporated in the sentence produced by the respondent.

3. SEMANTIC CONSIDERATIONS

The lexical morphemes given in the test reflect two different types of semantic restrictions : (1) Lexemes which exclude by virtue of their meaning (combinatory characteristics) any message which would not contain them. (2) Lexemes which present compatibilities and incompatibilities between themselves in their relative functions as subject and object or object and indirect object, etc. Two different types can thus be distinguished: (1) Semantic compatibilities between two or more terms define in a certain sense the

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semiological possibilities of forming the message. It is clear that the terms appeal to the experience of the respondent. On this point, differences exist in idiosemiological experience which can facilitate the message or can, on the contrary, be an obstacle. This idiosemiological experience can be expressed in three forms : Immediate versus indirect experience — if a patient were offered the three terms, fauteuil, docteur, asseoir 'armchair', 'doctor', 'to sit', the message produced describes an immediate situation. Past or deduced experience — if a respondent is offered the words hôpital, enfant 'hospital', 'child', the formation of l'enfant est à l'hôpital 'the child is in the hospital' is facilitated by the presence in his memory of such an event. Emotionally motivated experience versus experience not so motivated — if the set récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child', is offered, the sentence produced (if any) will reflect the respondent's emotional desires. Two types of aids or obstacles are apparent: determination by integration in the previous experience of the respondent, and over-determination which operates in the modification of the strategies of interpretation in excluding this or that possible decision. Syntactic-semantic combinatory possibilities are a function of the terms presented. Thus one of the nouns may belong to a potential subject class while the other may belong to a class which is employed especially as the object of the verb form. This is the result of compatibilities between the animate/inanimate and the contained/ containing classes, etc.

It is not only true that these two types of co-occurrence patterns do not coincide, but also that semantic co-occurrence patterns can be contradicted or complicated by syntactic restrictions. In fact, in spontaneous statements semantic incompatibilities among lexical morphemes are generally resolved by the formation of several sentences, each term then having its preferential grammatical function. When terms must be incorporated in the same minimal sentence, such incompatibilities make the production of the sentence more difficult.

4. THE MESSAGE RECEIVED AND THE MESSAGE PRODUCED

4.1 The very presentation of the words constitutes in itself a message given by the tester. It forms a more or less ungrammatical and/or a more or less anomalous ('unsemantic') sentence. The order in which the terms are presented creates in the respondent the conditions for one or more sentences. Each term evokes a constellation of experience which the subsequent terms circumscribe, each term restricting the following. It is therefore understandable that the sequence of presentation is not immaterial to the content. It must be emphasized that the compatibilities existing

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between the given morphemes can act in a reverse direction (if noir, cheval 'black'' 'horse' is given, the positional ungrammaticalness is less strong than the semantic compatibilities existing between cheval and noir 'horse' and 'black'). 4.2 The order of words is a morpheme for the same reasons as prepositions or conjunctions are, and it creates a certain type of connection. In French the order is that of determined-determiner (for the complement of the noun), subject-object, objectindirect object. In other words, the sequence offered in the original presentation was a message in which elementary syntactic relationships were implicit. When they were contradictory to semantic correlations, two solutions for the conflict appeared : the lexemic correlations caused the transposition of the order of the terms (e.g. noir, cheval 'black', 'horse') ; or the inertia of the received message caused the production of ungrammatical or anomalous sentences, at least when transformations were not employed to solve the difficulties created by the order of the segments. 4.3 Two problems of sentence production are involved. The first of these is defined both by grammatical restrictions (within a single sentence) and by semantic constraints (in the sequential association of two or more terms). The given pseudo-sentence includes certain ambiguities in that contradictions exist between the lexemic correlations and the grammatical functions of the classes of words ; thus table, mère 'table', 'mother' reverses the preferred order (animate subject/inanimate object). The production of the sentence by the respondent involves a second problem of incorporating the unambiguous portions of the given message into a valid sentence. The message presented includes certain segments for which particular interpretations (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) must be selected. This requires both the evaluation of the degree of compatibility of possible interpretations of the terms and the comparison of the sentence produced with the totality of grammatically and/or semantically valid sentences possible with these terms. Thus a decision to accept or reject each potential sentence is implied. The test therefore assumes both the integration of certain types of verbal performances in a sentence pattern as well as the ability to refer to a stock of grammatical sentence types. 4.4 The order of presentation of lexemes can create ambiguities. Thus a different order of presentation of two nouns belonging to the same grammatical function class (complements of objects of the verb) like lampe 'lamp' and lumière 'light' can suggest two different types of messages : (1) lampe, lumière — la lampe donne de la lumière 'lamp', 'light' — 'the lamp gives light' (2) lumière, lampe — la lumière de la lampe 'light', 'lamp' — 'the light of the lamp (the lamp has a light)' Such examples make clear the conflict which may exist for semantic interpretation

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between two variants : first, there is the influence of the ORDER OF PRESENTATION of the terms, which can be ascribed to the inertia of the received message, and second, there is the factor of the LEXEMIC CORRELATIONS themselves. It is apparent that the animate/ inanimate correlation alwasy exerts more influence than the inertia of the presentation. For example, when maison 'house' and chat 'cat' are given, the respondents almost always provide le chat est (Joue, mange, etc.) dans la maison 'the cat is (plays, eats, etc.) in the house'. 4.5 The variable nature of the restrictions on lexemic correlations is also apparent; that is, the degree of sensitivity of the interrelations between classes of lexemes. Thus, in the tests the invariant maison 'house' was presented followed by either mère 'mother' or chat 'cat' . Both mère and chat are members of the class of animates which is subdivided into HUMAN versus NONHUMAN. Chat, furthermore, belongs to a subclass of the latter, that of DOMESTIC ANIMALS. The syntactic correlation existing between a similar class of inanimates and two classes of animates could be analyzed. In this way, the correlations between the classes of lexemes could be classified. 4.6 Ambiguities may be resolved in various ways, depending upon whether the order of the presentation of the word, the idiosemiological experience of the subject, or the syntactic ambiguity take precedence. The terms crayon, écrire, bleu, feuille 'pencil', 'to write', 'blue', 'sheet of paper/leaf' were given in order to measure the compatibilities existing between bleu 'blue' and the two terms crayon 'pencil' and feuille 'sheet of paper/leaf', as well as with the verb écrire 'to write'. Several sentences could in theory be obtained : (1) J'écris avec un crayon bleu sur une feuille. Ί write with a blue pencil on a sheet of paper.' (2) J'écris avec un crayon sur une feuille bleue. Ί write with a pencil on a blue sheet of paper.' (3) J'écris bleu avec un crayon sur une feuille. Ί write in blue with a pencil on a sheet of paper.' The order of presentation may vary; bleu could be presented after écrire, before crayon, or before feuille. Within homogeneous groups of respondents, the power of selective correlations between classes of nouns and classes of semantically definite adjectives could be evaluated. 4.7 The order of presentation is even more important when the terms presented are polysemous; that is, they would correspond in a descriptive analysis of performance to two different types of distribution. Voler can take an animate subject, in which case it means 'to steal' and is active, transitive, and can take either an animate or an inanimate object in two different constructions: il vole un portefeuille 'he steals a wallet' versus il vole un passant 'he steals from a passerby.' Voler can, on the other

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hand, have an inanimate subject in which case it means 'to fly', is intransitive, and admits of no direct object: (1) la feuille vole 'the leaf flies' (2) l'avion vole 'the airplane flies' If the three words feuille, voler, écolier 'leaf/sheet of paper', 'to fly/to steal', 'school child' were presented, two sentence types could in theory be obtained : (1) La feuille vole devant Vécolier. 'The leaf flies in front of the school child.' Vécolier vole une feuille 'The school child steals a sheet of paper.' Feuille is in fact polysemous and is appropriate to two types of situations. The order of presentation will be a determining factor, since it constitutes a presumption of the message. The order subject/verb is implicit for example in: feuille, voler, écolier or écolier, voler, feuille The correlation existing between the two meanings for voler thus can be established on the basis of the nature of the lexemes. The order of presentation suggests ways to disambiguate the sentence which can be accepted or rejected by the respondent. This same presentation could reflect a conflict when the message is received but not accepted because it is contrary to the respondent's semiological experience, or is rejected by reason of emotional barriers. Thus, the restrictive presentation écolier, voler, feuille 'school child' 'to steal/to fly', 'sheet of paper' can be transformed into feuille, voler {la feuille de l'écolier vole 'the school child's sheet of paper flies away'), as a result of a refusal to accept the message received, which is excluded by the recipient's system of values; that is, l'écolier vole une feuille 'the school child steals a sheet of paper' is rejected. The solutions given to the ambiguities presented can therefore be the object of a double analysis: first a linguistic analysis of the syntactic and/or semantic interrelations of lexemes, and second, a psycholinguistic analysis of the conditions under which messages are accepted. In the problem of ungrammaticalness and acceptability lies the principal question of the production of sentences.

5. PRODUCTION OF THE KERNEL SENTENCE AND SYNTACTIC INTERRELATIONS OF LEXICAL CLASSES: A GENERAL EXAMINATION OF THE PROBLEMS

5.1 When a kernel sentence is produced, the two noun phrases, subject and object, include nouns the distribution of which as subject or object of the verb depends on the correlation existing between the two lexical classes to which these two nouns belong. The grammatical function is defined by the co-occurrence of the two nouns in different positions in relation to the verb form. There is an interdependence between the semantic correlations which define the relationships between the classes of

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lexemes and the syntactic correlations of lexemes in the kernel sentences. Nouns may be categorized according to their characteristic grammatical functions. Thus, the subject and object noun phrases typically differ semantically : (1) subject/object — the class of animate lexemes (subject) opposes the lexemes denoting in animates; (2) subject/object/indirect object — the class of animates (subject) is opposed to two distinct classes of inanimates, one class preferentially the object of the verb, the other preferentially the indirect object of the verb. Thus the terms soulier, lampe, récompense 'shoe', 'lamp', reward' function preferentially as objects in relation to the subjects mère, enfant, chat, 'mother', 'child', 'cat', and the terms hôpital, maison 'hospital', 'house' function preferentially as indirect objects. In the syntactic distribution of lexical classes, a term such as table 'table' can be the object of the verb with an animate subject, and an indirect object with an inanimate subject. In other words, the syntactic function is not inherent in the class itself, but in t h e RELATIONSHIPS OF THE LEXEMIC CLASS WITH OTHER CLASSES.

Grammatical function is not then unrelated to the nature of the noun (animate/ inanimate, concrete inanimai e/abstract inanimate, contained inanimate/containing inanimate, etc.). If two nouns of a different nature are offered to a respondent, the grammatical function which he assigns them in the produced sentence depends on the nature of the nouns and their potential for interrelation based on their lexemic class membership. 5.2 The results of the tests verified the following basic hypotheses : 5.2.1 When nouns belonging to different lexical classes are presented, they are consistently distributed in terms of grammatical function. Thus, when the respondent is given an animate and an inanimate noun, he always makes the animate noun the subject, and the inanimate the object or indirect object, based upon two interdependent considerations (e.g., maison 'house' and chat 'cat' ; le chat est dans la maison 'the cat is in the house'). 5.2.2 When the nouns belong to the same syntactic class (two animate nouns, two inanimate nouns), syntactic ambiguity is resolved by various strategies. In some cases, two sentences were produced instead of transforming the second into a noun phrase. Devices such as substitution and deletion were employed, tending to produce a sentence with a single verb phrase. Thus if lampe 'lamp' and lumière 'light' were given, the following types could be theoretically obtained : (1) J'ai une lampe; elle donne de la lumière. Ί have a lamp; it gives light.' (2) Ma lampe donne de la lumière. 'My lamp gives light.' (3) La lampe a une lumière; elle est jolie ...la lumière de la lampe est jolie. 'The lamp has a light; it is pretty ... the light of the lamp is pretty.'

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If two animate nouns are presented to the respondent, the normal syntactic distribution will assign them both the subject function. In such instances, two sentences should be produced. If the respondent wishes to reduce the double sentence to a single sentence, he must employ one or more (optional) transformations. 5.2.3 Syntactic compatibilities or incompatibilities between classes of nouns are not alone in determining formations of sentences. Verbs are also distributed according to the class of noun preferred as subject or object. As previously noted, there are verbs which take only animate nouns as subjects, such as voir, entendre, écouter, apprendre, etc. 'to see', 'to hear', 'to listen', 'to learn', etc. On the other hand, there are others which admit only of inanimate nouns as subjects, such as germer, fleurir, pleuvoir 'to sprout', 'to flower', 'to rain'. Moreover, an analysis of the distribution of verbs in terms of their object complements could be made. We have already examined (Dubois, 1966) the way in which this correlation of subject and object is important in understanding the passive transformation of a complete active sentence. Thus, when a nonfavored syntactic order is implicit in the presentation (inanimate noun/animate noun), the passive transformation allows the re-establishment of the favored order. A study of the nouns thus examined discloses that: (1) If two nouns and nothing else are given, the selection of the operative verb used to form the sentence involves the class of nouns. Two complementary classes of verbs might consequently be defined. (2) If two nouns are given in conjunction with a verb, the syntactic distribution of the verb is reflected in the type of sentence produced. (3) If a verb and an inanimate noun functioning as an indirect object are given, the sentences produced enable us to define the classes of words obtained as subjects. 5.3.1 Semantic Anomaly. — If the terms rouge, cheval, voir 'red' 'horse' 'to see' are given to a respondent, the syntactic compatibilities of the terms between themselves (adjective, verb with animate subject, animate nouns) allow for two possible sentence types : (1) Le cheval voit rouge. 'The horse sees red.' (2) Je vois un cheval rouge. Ί see a red horse.' These two statements contradict the personal experience of the respondent. The rejection of the message, i.e., of the semantic anomaly which arises from incompatibilities between the classes represented, results in specific strategies for the removal of the anomaly. The basic problem is the relationship between the semantic anomaly (nonacceptability of the message) and ungrammaticalness (incorrect grammar in the sentence). Will the respondents accepts the anomaly, or will they endeavor to remove it at the cost of a certain degree of ungrammaticalness?

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5.3.2 Semantic Ambiguity. — The question then is to present the respondent with polysemous lexemes whose meanings represent different words or distributions. Thus the phonetic sequence [we/·] represents mère 'mother', maire 'mayor', mer 'sea', etc. The resolution of the ambiguity obviously depends on the class of the verb or the second noun offered, but this is not the only consideration. The resolution of the ambiguity can be considered from two different points of view : (1) From the linguistic point of view (competence model), the type of sentence produced will depend on the solution chosen for the problem of homophony. Thus, if the respondent chooses mère 'mother', it will be the subject of the sentence la mère est dans la maison, la mère met la table 'mother is in the house', 'mother sets the table'. If the favored solution is mer 'sea', the syntactic distribution will be different: la maison est au bord de la mer 'the house is on the seashore', mer 'sea' being the indirect object. (2) From the psychological point of view (performance model), the choice between the various solutions possible in cases of homophony is not only of a syntactic nature; it depends equally upon the strategy employed to choose a certain meaning or a certain word. In the case of mer, mère, maire 'sea', 'mother', 'mayor', it may be said that, for basically sociocultural reasons which are reflected in the frequency of mère 'mother' in relation to the other two in speech, the respondents will normally choose mère. Inversely, it may be concluded that the respondents who choose maire 'mayor' or mer 'sea' do not simply select one of these words, but must specifically reject mère. The motives for this rejection should be sought in the other factors which contribute to the determination of the message produced. 6.1 Correlation between animate and inanimate nouns. — When the two nouns presented belonged to different classes, the sentences produced by the respondents favored, in general, the following order: animate subject/inanimate object. The responses to the following pairs demonstrate this correlation between the designated grammatical function in the kernel sentence and the lexeme class in the cases in which words belong to two different categories : (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

maison, mère 'house', 'mother' maison, table 'house', 'table' maison, chat 'house', 'cat' hôpital, enfant 'hospital', 'child' récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child'

The pairs 1, 3, and 5 were given to Group I and the pairs 2 and 4 to Group II. The results from Group I (maison, mère) are shown in Table 1. Five people chose the solution maire 'mayor' and mer 'sea' as a result of lexical ambiguity. In those cases when the animate noun maire 'mayor' was selected, the

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Subject la, ma mère la, ma mère la maison la maison de ma, sa, la mère la maison-mère la maison la maison

Verb est, reste, habite habite à est est est à X est est

Complement or Attribute

Number of Respondents

à, dans la maison une, la, notre maison à ma mère

16 4

jolie, petite, etc.

11 3 1 1

une mère celle de ma mère

1

resulting phrase was la maison du maire 'the mayor's house' similar to la maison de la mère 'mother's house'. The respondents gave mère 'mother' as the subject in 20 cases out of 37 comparable replies. In 12 cases, mère 'mother' was used as the complement of a noun or pronoun. This reflects the transformation into a noun phrase of a sentence of the type: Ma mère a une maison; elle est jolie La maison de ma mère est jolie. 'My mother has a house; it is pretty' -> 'My mother's house is pretty.' The transformation is evidenced by a comparison between the number of components used in sentences of the type ma mère est dans la maison 'my mother is in the house' and in sentences of the type la maison de ma mère est jolie 'my mother's house is pretty'. The addition, in the second case, of words such as joli 'pretty', petit 'small', etc. (as opposed to operative verbs and prepositions) can be noted. The respondents, in 32 cases out of 37, gave mère 'mother' as the subject of a kernel sentence, either transformed or not. In the remaining 5 cases, mère 'mother' is either in apposition: la maison mère 'the mother house'; or used as an attribute: la maison est une mère 'the house is a mother'; or as the subject of a sentence with avoir 'to have' : ma mère a une maison -* la maison de ma mère 'my mother has a house' ->• 'the house of my mother'. All the respondents avoided assigning mère 'mother' the function of direct or indirect object. Inversely, in 20 cases, maison 'house' is the direct or indirect object. It is the subject of the sentence in 12 cases (la maison de ma mère), but this, in fact, is the result of a transformation of the preferred sentence as we have just seen. A table of the results for the sequence maison, chat 'house', 'cat' demonstrates this phenomenon even more clearly (see Table 2).

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Subject le chat le chat le chat le chat de la maison la maison du chat elle

Number of Respondents

Verb

Complement

est, dort, rentre, sort, etc. aime, ignore est

dans, à, de, vers, devant, la maison la maison sur le toit de la maison

est

sur le toit

4

le chat

1 1

fit sortir

29 5 2

In four cases, chat 'cat' is the subject of the sentence, but its object function has been changed to that of subject as the result of a transformation : la maison a un chat -* le chat de la maison 'the house has a cat' -*• 'the cat of the house'. Chat 'cat' remains an indirect object eifectively in only one case : la maison du chat -*• le chat a une maison 'the house of the cat' -»• 'the cat has a house'. The sequence récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' shows the same grammatical distribution. In 39 replies in which récompense 'reward' was given, the results were as shown in Table 3. TABLE 3

Subject

Verb

Γ enfant Venfant

reçoit agit

je

donne

la récompense de l'enfant

Object une récompense pour une recompense une récompense à l'enfant

Number of Respondents 32 1 2

3

There was only one reply of the type la récompense plait à Γ enfant 'the reward pleases the child', and it must be noted that plait 'pleases' is not a verb likely to take a

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direct object. The distribution animate subject/inanimate object occurs in more than 90 per cent of the replies if transformations are taken into consideration, and in more than 60 per cent if only verbal performances (subjects of sentences actually produced) are considered. The relative correlation between grammatical function and the nature of the noun is therefore established. When the nouns presented are of different lexical classes, the animate is almost exclusively the subject. When it is not, it rarely has the function of an object, and never that of an indirect object. Inversely, inanimate words, rarely the subjects of a kernel sentence, are more often direct or indirect objects. The law of syntactic-semantic correlation, more restrictive for animate than inanimate nouns, is one of the fundamental conditions of the basic sentence. Even when the presentation of items is the inverse of the normal distribution (that is, when the animate is given after the inanimate) it must be concluded that : (1) The law of correlation is generally strong enough to overcome the inertia of the presentation. (2) When the inertia prevails and the subject of the sentence produced is maison 'house', the replies show that the respondent prefers a precorrected transformation to the nonfavored order of nouns : la maison de ma mère est jolie 'my mother's house is pretty'. The order of words in the presentation also explains certain variations in the replies, such as la maison-mère 'the mother house' and la maison est celle de ma mère 'the house is my mother's'. The sentences produced enable the establishment of hierarchy in the solutions offered by the respondents when, after beginning a sentence with an inanimate, an animate noun has to be included. Every solution involves a transformation for, in fact, the respondent may produce two kernel sentences before giving the function of object to an animate. Sentences in which the order is inanimate subject/animate object are usually considered awkward by the respondents. 6.2 Syntactic subclasses of animate nouns. — Concerning the syntactic behavior of the subdivisions of animates, the following question may be posed : Is the opposition of personal versus impersonal, which is reflected morpho-syntactically by a relative difference in the use of gender (je, tu, il Τ , 'you', 'he' or 'it') or by a change in the interrogative (qui 'who' for people, qui 'who' and/or quoi 'what' for animals), also reflected in syntactic distribution? What happens in the production of the sentence: (1) when two animate nouns of different classes are presented? (2) when two animate nouns of different classes and an inanimate are given, the last being the invariant: maison, chat — maison, mère 'house', 'cat' — 'house', 'mother'? In the first case, the subordination of one subclass to another is apparent. If mère, chat 'mother', 'cat' are offered, the sentences sometimes include chat 'cat' as the

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subject of the resultant clause, but in fact this is the result of a transformation: le chat de ma mère est joli 'the cat of my mother is pretty' is derived from the basic sentence ma mère a un joli chat 'my mother has a pretty cat'. The distribution personal subject/ nonpersonal object which characterizes the syntactic hierarchy of the classes of lexemes is confirmed by the fact that the rare solutions which do not give chat 'cat' or enfant 'child' as the subjects in the pairs maison, chat 'house', 'cat' or récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' include the personal pronoun je Τ as fundamental subject, representing EGO. In the second case, when maison is given as the invariant, the syntactic behavior of mère and chat present certain differences. Chat is the subject of the resultant sentence more often than the mère (40 cases versus 20). Inversely, a certain dissymmetry is shown in the position of the complement (which corresponds before transformation to a subject of the kernel sentence) : la maison de ma mère la maison du chat

11 1

Le chat de la maison dort 'the cat of the house is sleeping', which is a transform of la maison a un chat; il dort 'the house has a cat; it is sleeping', affords the solution of this divergence by comparison. In reality, a greater semantic compatibility exists between maison, a human habitation, and mère, a person, than between maison and chat, an animal, whence arises the possibility of introducing mère and maison as subject and object in the same sentence: la mère a une maison -> la maison de ma mère 'mother has a house' -*• 'my mother's house'. Such a solution is more difficult for chat and maison and impossible, without expressing some abnormality, for tigre 'tiger' and maison. Further corroboration is provided by the fact that maison functions as a direct and indirect object with mère, while it functions only as an indirect object with chat. Constraints are stronger between subject and object than between subject and indirect object. Thus the behavior of the two subclasses, personal and impersonal, is reflected as much in the grammatical function of the animate in relation to the inanimate (subject/ object and/or indirect object) as in the specific semantic relationship between mère and chat on the one hand, and maison on the other. The semantic distance (the greater semantic incompatibility) between chat and maison, as opposed to mère and maison, results in a greater syntactic distance. There is also a difference related to the preceding in the choice of operative verbs employed in the phrases. On the one hand, when maison is an indirect object, verbs capable of being used instead of être 'to be' (passives, pronominale, intransitives) appear, but in the case when maison is the indirect object, verbs capable of being used in place of avoir 'to have' are used. The question of the choice of verbs in this connection will be considered later. We can then conclude that within the animate class the two subclasses (personal/

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nonpersonal), while fulfilling the syntactic function of subject, are mutually dependent and indicate the semantic distance from the inanimates. It is the syntactic behavior of the inanimates in relation to these two classes which emphasizes this difference. The two semantic subclasses are distinguished therefore by the syntactic correlations with each other and with the classes of inanimate nouns. 6.3 Restrictions on the correlation of animates and inanimates. — The restrictions which are imposed on the formulation of the produced sentence can be inferred on the one hand by the relation between the message received and the message emitted, and on the other hand by the strategies used in precorrection. When words are presented in the order inanimate/animate, that is to say maison, mère; maison, chat ; récompense, enfant, the clause structure implies that the relationship between the two terms is that of inanimate subject and animate object. In almost all cases, either this message is not accepted by the respondent or the degree of receptivity is very low, since the sentence produced by the respondent does not convey the grammatical functions implied by the order of the segments. The correlation animate subject/inanimate object or indirect object is strong enough to set aside the initial message and to proceed to a reconstruction on different bases. The message which has been received, characterized by a certain ungrammaticalness, can, however, influence by inertia the sentence which is produced in reply. The form of the initial statement implies a certain form in the reproduced statement. The order of presentation drafts a message capable of being interpreted beyond inherent ungrammaticalness, and acts in two different ways, according to variable constraints, dependent on the initiative of the respondent. 6.3.1 The message received can act in a very restrictive manner on the few respondents who make an inanimate noun the subject of their sentence, thus conforming to the ungrammatical syntactic pattern which has been presented to them. They can only formulate a more or less unsemantic or ungrammatical sentence, such as la récompense a été donée à Venfant 'the reward has been given to the child', an awkward passive sentence, or la récompense plaît à l'enfant 'the reward pleases the child'. In fact, such solutions are rare, and this alone shows the strength of the correlation existing between fundamental semantic classes and syntactic classes. 6.3.2 The message received may act in a less restrictive fashion and, in the case of many respondents, percorrection strategies are employed. In such instances, the received sentence is rejected in its ungrammatical form, but the formulation of the emitted sentence will always depend on it to a greater or lesser degree. The strategy of precorrection appears in different ways depending upon the correlations existing between the subclasses. Thus a close relationship exists between the class of human nouns and the class of places serving people; for example, mère and maison. In this case, the inertia of the message received would make the word maison the subject of

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the produced sentence, but at the price of the transformation of two successive kernel sentences. This process can be simulated in the following way: La maison est jolie; ma mère a cette maison -»· La maison de ma mère est jolie. 'The house is pretty; my mother has this house -> My mother's house is pretty' This last sentence can also be produced by the sequence: ma mère a une maison; elle est jolie 'my mother has a house; it is pretty'. Even though this latter solution is identical with the former in its final form, it does not take account of the relationship between reception and emission and should be disregarded. The strategies involved in precorrection are most interesting in the case of the various solutions adopted by the respondent who has begun his sentence with maison and is barred from giving the status of direct or indirect object to the word mère. In this case, mère may become a joint subject in apposition : la maison-mère 'the mother house', or as an attributive: la maison est une mère 'the house is a mother'. The solution mer 'sea' rather than mère given by four out of 42 respondents may also in a certain sense be implicit in the presentation of the word maison as the initial word (subject). The strategy in this case consisted of discarding the animate solution as nonsyntactic and considering the term inanimate. The re-establishment of the standard order of the sentence can be achieved at the price of a certain number of subprocesses developed in order to obtain the conventional syntactic result; but this can only be done to the detriment of the meaning of the message which may be distorted or weakened, or at the cost of a fairly high degree of ungrammaticalness. It is in this perspective that the anacolutha produced by noninductive speech should be analyzed. 6.4 The case of two animate nouns of the same class. — When two animate nouns of the same class (human) are presented simultaneously, their preferential syntactic function is in both cases that of subject. It can be foreseen that one of the solutions will be to formulate a single clause as a result of the transformation of two symmetrical sentences. Thus enfant, père, absent 'child', 'father', 'absent', where absent belongs to the class of indefinite adjectives compatible with the transformation of number, would produce the following result: Le père est absent; Γ enfant est absent -> Le père et Γ enfant sont absents. 'The father is absent; the child is absent' -»· 'The father and the child are absent.' The plural sentences result from the coordination transformation and by the addition of two subjects. This solution was adopted by 4 respondents out of 42. The presentation also suggests a message in which the relationship of the two words is that of subject/object. In this case, the adjective occurs in a second sentence and the transformation will consist of deletion. The following illustrate this : L'enfant a un père; il est absent -> le père de l'enfant est absent. 'The child has a father; he is absent' -»· 'The father of the child is absent.' This alternative was adopted by 15 respondents. There were also sentences in which the relation subject/object was

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inverted: Le père a un enfant; il est absent -> V enfant du père est absent. 'The father has a child; he is absent' -»• 'The father's child is absent.' This was the choice of 4 respondents. Similar formulations in which the adjective absent is linked to the object rather than the subject are less frequent (7 respondents). They require the use of a specific transitive operative verb which necessitates a longer selection process than for être: Venfant pleure son père absent. Le père attend Venfant absent. 'The child weeps for his absent father.' 'The father waits for his absent child.' All these solutions give the function of subject of the sentence to one of the animates. The second noun can therefore be a complement only in a more elaborate sentence for which the selective processes (search for compatibilities between verb and nouns) are longer and more numerous. The simplest solution among these strategies consists of giving the function of subject to one of the two nouns and that of complement to the other, thus avoiding the formation of an object for a specific verb in the resultant sentence. The complement affords the elegant solution of participating in the subject noun phrase. It is clear that certain respondents (11) preferred the solution of two separate sentences with enfant 'child' and père 'father' as subjects to the solution which necessitated a transformation. In so doing, they did not respond to the syntactic order, but they conformed with the major correlation between semantic and syntactic classes. Thus a typical sentence is le père est tranquille quand Venfant est absent 'the father is quiet when the child is absent'. By one strategy or another, 34 respondents out of 42 finally made the semantic-syntactic relationship hold good. A secondary problem remains : why did the phrase le père de Venfant 'the father of the child' prevail over the phrase Venfant du père 'the child of the father'? One must conclude that a dominant direction exists in the semantic correlations between lexical classes. This direction may moreover be defined in terms of redundancy or tautology. The word père implies the word enfant in the syntactic relation subject/object and the message is thus tautological: le père a un enfant, Venfant du père 'the father has a child, the child of the father'. The inverse syntactic relationship l'enfant a un père, le père de Venfant 'the child has a father, the child's father', is not tautological in the same way, since it is in opposition to the inclusion in the message of both père and mère and the choice of père implies the exclusion of mère in the message. In a componential analysis of the linguistic structure of family relationship terms, both relations must be taken into account. 6.5 Syntactic classes of inanimate nouns. — When sentences produced with a human animate noun (mère, enfant) and an inanimate (récompense or maison) are examined, it can be stated generally that the preferential grammatical functions are those of indirect object for maison and direct object for récompense. The existence of two groups of inanimates, differentiated by their syntactic function in relation to animate nouns, must be accounted for. This grammatical function can be defined semantically by the distribution between nouns denoting concrete objects and by abstract terms on the

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one hand, and on the other by nouns denoting place and time. This elementary semantic distribution is cited simply to make clear the existence of several distinct classes of inanimates. What is most important is the connection between the syntactic classes of inanimates (direct or indirect object) and the terms of the animate class. Thus the word maison is more often an indirect object with chat 'cat' than with mère 'mother'. In this case, the least restrictive syntactic relationship, that which unites the subject to the indirect object (the result of the nominal transformation of a second kernel sentence), shows that there is a closer semantic similarity between the two classes of nouns. There is thus a close analogy between the class of persons and that of the places in which they live or work : ma mère a une maison 'my mother has a house', mon père a une boulangerie 'my father has a bakery', etc. The class of animals on the contrary has a strict relationship with only a small number of terms, such as tanière 'lair', terrier 'burrow', of which only one part is shared with the preceding class. Often the names of the habitats of particular animals are specific. Semantic compatibility is closest between subject and object. Grammatically, in fact, the object noun phrase is part of the verb phrase itself which is correlated to the subject noun phrase. It implies the use of a transitive verb, that is to say of a verb determined by its compatibilities with a class of subjects and a class of objects. Indirect objects, however, are determined relatively by both transitive and intransitive verbs; that is to say, only compatibilities with the class of subjects enter into the processes of selection. In order to analyze the difference in restrictions, consider the example of la maison de la mère 'the mother's house' and la maison du chat 'the house of the cat', which assume an object function for maison in the kernel sentence before its transformation into a noun phrase: la mère a une maison, le chat a une maison 'the mother has a house', 'the cat has a house'. The realization of these two sentences is very different; only the former is freqeuntly used. The latter is still possible because chat belongs to the class of domestic animals which possesses a common characteristic with the class of persons. Maison consequently enjoys a different relationship with the class of persons and with the class of nonpersons. The condition of belonging to a definite syntactic class is less compelling than that of belonging to inanimate classes more or less remote from animate classes and as a result assuming the grammatical functions which more or less determine the relationships between verb and subject. The same inanimate word will be a direct or indirect object according to the semantic constraints operating between subject and verb. In this perspective, it can be said that certain inanimate nouns, whatever the class of the animate subject may be, are, by preference, either indirect objects or direct objects of the verb (e.g., maison as compared to récompense). If it is admitted that classes of inanimates exist which by preference constitute direct or indirect objects, it is interesting to study in the simulations of the production of sentences the solutions which are adopted when conflicts arise between nouns of the same category. In the case when two inanimates of a different class are given without an animate noun, such as

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soulier, table 'shoe', 'table', the produced sentence usually includes an animate subject, transformed in reference to the respondent je T . The distribution of two inanimate nouns is constant in terms of direct object/indirect object. Thus with table and soulier, the following typical sentence is obtained : Je mets mes souliers sous la table. Ί put my shoes under the table.' With the 10 respondents in Group 2, table appeared 10 times as an indirect object and soulier 8 times as a direct object of the verb. In the case of two inanimates having the same preferential syntactic function, as lampe 'lamp' and lumière 'light' the produced sentences employ parallel solutions with those utilized in the case of two animates of the same class such as père, enfant. The two words lampe and lumière, presented separately, both suggest a complement function : f éteins la lumière Ί put out the light', je prends la lampe Ί take the lamp', j'ai une lampe Ί have a lamp', etc. When they are presented together (in the order lampe, lumière), the following typical replies are obtained : La lampe répand (donné) de la lumière. 'The lamp spreads (gives) light.' 25 respondents La lumière de la lampe -* La lampe a de la lumière. 'The light of the lamp' ->• 'The lamp has light.' 10 respondents La lumière vient de la lampe. 'Light comes from the lamp.' 6 respondents In the verbal replies, 1 respondent produced two sentences with both words in subject position. In Group 2 (6 respondents), where the order of presentation was lumière, lampe 'light', 'lamp', the results were: lampe was the subject 4 times and lumière twice; lampe was object 2 times and lumière 4 times. Syntactic ambiguity thus is resolved : (1) by the nominal transformation of the sentence — subject (lampe)jobbet (lumière). (2) by the use of an elementary sentence in which both words are used as subject and object. For this, operative verbs are employed and while they allow the polyvalence of subjects (animate or inanimate), they are preferentially construed with an animate subject. In the present case, the verbs are of the kind donner 'to give', produire 'to produce', fournir 'to provide', diffuser 'to spread', émettre 'to give forth'; ye donne une pomme/la lampe donne de la lumière Ί give an apple/the lamp gives light'. The following remarks may be added: (1) The nominalization of the sentence in which lampe 'lamp' is the subject and lumière 'light' the object, necessitates the realization of a complementary verb phrase (être + adjective) and the effort is greater. It allows a more appropriate system of semantic compatibilities to be obtained by two clauses. (2) The preferential distribution of lampe as subject and lumière as object holds true whatever the order of presentation; the inertia of the emitted message has no

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influence, the syntactic distribution is not modified. This distribution implies a direction in the compatibilities and constraints of the two words and raises the question of possible substitutions: la lampe est faible, la lumière est faible 'the lamp is weak', 'the light is weak'; la lampe m'aveugle, la lumière m'aveugle 'the lamp blinds me', 'the light blinds me'. It bears witness to the relations within the class of concrete inanimates, objects of the verb, between lexemes of the same type (the phenomenon is then identical to that relating to père and enfant). This hierarchy in syntactic dependents should not be traced to the nature of the denoted object and particularly not to the relation between the persons and the objects themselves, but in a more general fashion to the relation between two classes, the second of which is linked to the first by a relevant systematic characteristic (as the negative term implies the corresponding positive term: grand/petit 'big/little', allumer/éteindre 'light/extinguish'). When two inanimate nouns, both preferentially indirect objects, are presented with an operative verb, as for example, j'écris avec un crayon Ί write with a pencil', j'écris sur une feuille Ί write on a sheet of paper', the resultant distribution is that of two complementary indirect objects; that is, in traditional terminology, a complement of manner and a complement of place. Out of 42 respondents, 29 produced: f écris avec un crayon bleu sur une feuille Ί write with a blue pencil on a sheet of paper' or j'écris avec un crayon sur une feuille bleue Ί write with a pencil on a blue sheet of paper'. Some respondents produced two sentences with the same function. In 11 cases, the sentence was : le crayon écrit bleu sur la feuille 'the pencil writes in blue on the sheet of paper' ; that is, a polarization of the differences between crayon used as a subject, and feuille as an indirect object. The verb écrire allows animate persons as subjects, but it can also animate the means used to write. This animation is a process involving the zero-grade of the animate subject of the resultant active sentence. The intransitive form of the verb écrire arises from the transformation : On écrit mal avec ce crayon ->• Le crayon écrit mal. One writes badly with this pencil -* The pencil writes badly.' Inanimates can have a subjectival grammatical function, but essentially only with intransitive or pronominal verbs (passive transformation). Thus the following sentences can be produced with feuille, détacher, voler 'sheet of paper', 'loosen', 'to fly' : la feuille détachée du cahier vola 'the sheet of paper loosened from the exercise book flew away' ; la feuille se détache et vole 'the sheet of paper becomes loose and flies away'. Two classes of inanimate lexemes exist, defined by their relationships with animate lexemes. They could be defined provisionally simply as the classes of 'objects made by man' and 'objects not made by man', since the differential characteristic arises from the presence or absence of the human factor.

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7. S T U D Y O F VERBS I N BASIC SENTENCES

Two different cases must be considered : (1) When the verb is not included in the terms given, the problem concerns the selection of a verb in order to form the sentence. (2) When the verb is included in the terms given, the problem concerns the compatibilities between the verb phrase, the subject noun phrase, and, finally, the direct or indirect object noun phrase. In the first case, the verb acts as an operative of the sentence; the formation of substitute verb patterns can then be taken into account. In the second case, analyses bearing on combinatorial semantics may be undertaken. 7.1 Operative Verbs. — The formation of sentences for which only noun lexemes are given shows that two series of complementary verbs exist, one series interchangeable with avoir 'to have' and the other with être 'to be' In other words, as a diachronic analysis of various languages also makes clear, the verbs avoir and être appear as complementary variants allowing two types of sentences to be produced, which can be called in a preliminary definition the active sentence (avoir) and the passive sentence (être). The former sentence type includes the mass of transitive verbs, the latter perhaps represented in French by the passive forms (to be + participle), pronominal and intransitive verbs; that is, the mass of forms included in the morphosyntactic rules of the passive transformation. These two sentence types are in opposition by the very fact that the latter is an incomplete type (excluding the complement of the direct object). The choice of the class of operative verb depends on the semantic compatibility between two nouns. If there is a close accordance, the operative verb will be of the series avoir since the two lexemes are distributed respectively as subject and object; but if there is a wider, less restrictive compatibility, the operative verb will be of the series être and the noun phrases will then be respectively subject and indirect object. Thus when the respondents include mère and maison in a sentence — as to 20 who gave mère as the grammatical subject of the sentence — 4 form a close relationship (subject/object) of the type: Ma mère habite, a une maison 'My mother lives in, has a house' ; and 16 form a weaker relationship (subject/indirect object) of the type: Ma mère est, reste à la maison, 'My mother is, stays in the house'. An even stronger relationship would consist, as has been demonstrated, of the nominalization of a sentence formed with avoir : Ma mère a une maison -> la maison de ma mère 'My mother has a house -> my mother's house'.

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When the respondents form close relationships between the two terms in the sequence récompense, enfant 'reward, child', the verbs employed are variants of avoir 'to have', donner 'to give' recevoir 'to receive', and the sentences are of the type: Π enfant a, a eu, obtient, mérite, reçoit, etc., une récompense. 'The child has, has had, obtains, deserves, receives, etc., a reward'. In the very infrequent cases when récompense 'reward' is the indirect object, the verb is intransitive (series être) : L'enfant agit pour une récompense. 'The child acts for a reward.' In the sequence chat, maison, the semantic compatibilities formed are generally weaker than in the case of mère, maison. The verbs offer various forms of the intransitive/passive: Le chat est, est allongé, dort, s'ennuie devant la maison. 'The cat is, is lying, sleeps» is bored in front of the house. In five cases, the respondents formed a strong relationship, producing moreover a degree of semantic anomaly. The transitive verb allows the relationship subject/ object : Le chat fuit sa maison, a quitté, aimé, ignoré la maison. 'The cat flees from his house, has left, loved, ignored the house.' In the sequence lampe, lumière 'lamp' 'light', a strong semantic relationship is formed between the two words. In 24 cases out of 42, the presence of a transitive verb interchangeable with donner 'to give?, fournir 'to provide', diffuser 'to give forth', produire 'to produce', répandre 'to spread' can be noted. When lumière is the subject and lampe the indirect object, the verb is an intransitive form or passive variant of être, such as venir 'to come', est donee 'is given', est diffusée 'is diffused'. A stronger compatibility can be observed in the direction lumière, lampe than in the reverse direction. Between the variants of the two basic verbs, avoir and être, the respondent has the power of selection. As a first estimate, the frequency of occurrence of a verb in the whole output of produced sentences on the basis of the items given would appear to define the degree of specificity of the word in relation both to the basic term (avoir or être) and the semantic compatibilities formed between the verb and the two noun phrases. Thus for mère, maison, the 16 respondents chose: être 'to be' 12 times; rester 'to remain' 2 times; demeurer 'to dwell' 1 time; est allée 'went' 1 time.

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For récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child', the frequencies were : avoir 'to have', a 'has', eu 'had', aura 'will have '11 times; recevoir 'to receive' 7 times; obtenir 'to obtain' 4 times; mériter 'to deserve' 2 times ; aimer 'to love' 4 times; attendre 'to wait' 2 times; vouloir 'to wish' 1 time; acquérir 'to gain' 1 time. The distribution of frequencies in the choice is not the only phenomenon worthy of note; the range of terms chosen, often quasisynonymous, is very weak. The words originally stated are often those least frequently offered, as in the pair obtenir, acquérir 'to obtain, to gain'. The verbs chosen to produce sentences are operative insofar as their function is to form complete or incomplete sentences. The fact of finding specific verbs instead of the two basic complementary forms avoir and être is subordinate to the essential function of two preferred sentences and should consequently be analyzed further. In considering the initial projected message and the ensuing message produced by the respondents, the verbs substituted for avoir and être are simple semantic modulations of the syntactic pattern which includes the nouns. 7.2 The classes of verbs presented. — If among the items given a specific verb is presented, it comes from one of the two major classes avoir or etre. Its position in the sentence is determined by the semantic relationships it has with the subject and object nouns. In other words, the classes of active verbs can be classified on the basis of whether they allow: (1) as a minimal subject noun phrase an animate, as in il écoute 'he listens'. This is often expressed, for example, by the inclusion of the personal pronouns je and tu as subject. Other verbs are used exclusively with an inanimate, as for example, il germe 'it sprouts', since the respondent finds it impossible to give je or tu as subjects in such cases. (2) an animate noun as an object noun phrase (vexer quelqu'un 'to annoy someone') to the exclusion of an inanimate noun, or inversely an inanimate (construire quelque chose 'to build something') to the exclusion of an animate object. Four elementary classes of verbs are thus obtained, defined by the following compatibilities : (1) (2) (3) (4)

animate subject (verb) inanimate object animate subject (verb) animate object inanimate subject (verb) animate object inanimate subject (verb) inanimate object

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There are some verbs which are distributed exclusively in one of the four classes, but most often verbs belong to two classes or form mixed classes in which the compatibility for the inanimate subject does not absolutely exclude the animate and vice versa. In this case, however, the "sense" are different : conduire un ami à la gare 'to take a friend to the station' conduire des travaux 'to direct construction work' The preferential combination in the verb presented to the respondent must therefore be defined: Voir 'to see' assumes an animate subject and an inanimate object (the animates used as indirect objects in the sentences can be considered as inanimates). Écrire 'to write' assumes an animate subject, without wholly eliminating inanimates, in this case 'animated', such as le crayon écrit quelques mots 'the pencil writes a few words'. In this case, the "thing" crayon implies in reality a transference to the "person" holding the pencil. The two verbs voir and écrire evidently imply a human noun as subject and exclude other animates (subclass of animals). Détacher 'to detach', on the other hand, allows as subject either an animate (Je détache la feuille Ί detach the sheet of paper') or an inanimate {le vent détache les feuilles des arbres 'the wind shakes off leaves from the trees'). With regard to voler 'to fly, to steal', the sense is completely different, depending on whether the subject phrase is animate (il lui a volé son portefeuille 'he stole his wallet') or inanimate (la feuille vole 'the leaf flies'), and dependent moreover on the transitive/intransitive opposition. This is also true of ouvrir (j'ouvre la porte Ί open the door' ; la porte ouvre sur le jardin 'the door opens onto the garden.). Asseoir 'to seat', (pronominal form s'asseoir 'to sit') allows only animate noun phrases as subjects. The results obtained in the test of simulated production bring several phenomena to light: (1) If none of the items proposed is an animate noun and if the verb allows only an animate as the subject of an active transitive sentence, the respondents introduce the typical animate subject, that is, the personal pronoun je. When the sentence had to incorporate crayon 'pencil', écrire 'to write', bleu 'blue', and feuille 'sheet of paper', 30 out of 42 respondents gave an animate subject (including il 'he' or on 'one' — 7 times ; and je Ί ' — 23 times). On the other hand, when they produced a sentence with an inanimate as subject (crayon in 12 cases), the verb was the intransitive écrire in 11 cases : le crayon écrit bleu sur la feuille 'the pencil writes in blue on the sheet'. When the received message included the verbs voler 'to fly, to steal' and détacher 'to detach', which allow two classes of subjects, and an inanimate subject feuille 'leaf' or 'sheet', the resultant sentence has feuille as subject. When the two verbs are used in the passive or intransitive (la feuille est détachée 'the sheet is detached' or la feuille vole 'the leaf flies') or in the reflexive, (la feuille

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se détache 'the leaf [sheet] becomes loose'), however, these forms all assume the passive transformation of an active sentence in which the subject is represented by a zero animate noun phrase. Similarly, when the verb ouvrir 'to open' is given with two inanimate nouns, tiroir 'drawer' and bureau 'desk', the typical sentence is : j'ouvre le tiroir du bureau Ί open the drawer of the desk'. When the subject is an animate pronoun of the type je, or the passive transformation, implying a zero active animate subject, we get: le tiroir du bureau est ouvert 'the desk drawer is open'. (2) The most interesting case is that in which the verb voir 'to see', which allows animates as subjects, is presented with the two words rouge 'red' and cheval 'horse'. These two terms are almost mutually exclusive. The color red is one of the least probable for a horse and the phrase voir rouge 'to see red' exclusively implies a human subject. The two typical sentences obtained are : je vois un cheval rouge Ί see a red horse' with the human subject je, and le cheval voit rouge 'the horse sees red' with an animate nonhuman subject. These two sentences constitute anomalies of different form, yet the syntactic-semantic pattern is so strong that these two types are obtained more often than such abnormal statements as: je vois un cheval rouge Ί see a red horse' given by 11 respondents ; le cheval voit rouge 'the horse sees red' given by 13 respondents. Other replies offer various solutions for the existing contradiction between the syntactic combination and the content of the message. Among these are the negative transformation je ne vois pas Ί do not see', 3 cases; the adjunction of an indirect object; and the formation of two propositions. Such techniques are used in order to remove the ambiguities. It is interesting to note the prevalence of the syntactic pattern over the content of the message, the respondents having chosen the grammaticality of the sentence rather than semantic validity of the message. Solutions of ambiguities or semantic anomalies are found in sentences or sequences of sentences containing a personal pronoun as subject: je vois un cheval avec une charrette rouge Ί see a horse with a red cart', je suis rouge de voir un cheval Ί am red upon seeing a horse', etc.

8. THE RULES OF SELECTION IN THE CASE OF ADJECTIVES

Adjectives pose a double problem from the points of view of syntax and/or semantics. 8.1. ADJECTIVES ARE SYNTACTICALLY AMBIGUOUS insofar as their definition assumes their incorporation either in the noun phrase (adjectives proper) or in the verb phrase (adverbs). Thus the term froid 'cold' can be an adjective in un hiverfroid 'a cold winter' and an adverb in ilfait froid''it is cold', similarly fort 'strong' in une forte prise 'a strong hold' and il chante fort 'he sings loudly'. The difference in distribution correlates most often with a morphological process, different for the adjective and adverb (e.g., agréable¡agréablement, 'pleasant/plea-

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santly'). This syntactic ambiguity can be more complete; bleu 'blue' can be an adjective, a noun, or an adverb : il écrit bleu sur la feuille 'he writes in blue on the sheet of paper', un crayon bleu 'a blue pencil', le bleu du ciel 'the blue of the sky', écrire en bleu 'to write in blue'. The word froid, 'cold' can be an adjective, an adverb, or a noun: le froid est vif ce matin 'the cold is sharp this morning'. A produced sentence should resolve this syntactic ambiguity. 8 . 2 ADJECTIVES APPEAR TO BE SPECIFIED BY THE CLASS OF NOUNS WITH WHICH THEY CAN CO-OCCUR;

thus, several classes of semantically specified adjectives could be

defined: (i) Adjectives co-occurring only with animate nouns, such as absent 'absent'. (ii) Adjectives which co-occur with inanimate nouns; thus, among adjectives indicating color, mauve 'mauve' can modify only inanimate nouns. (iii) Adjectives co-occurring with nouns of two classes either with different meaning (thus the opposition between what may be called the real meaning and the figurative meaning: une feuille verte 'a green leaf',/e suis vert de peur Ί am green with fear', or with analogous meaning: un ciel extraordinaire 'an extraordinary sky', un personnage extraordinaire 'an extraordinary character'. Selection within these classes of nouns operates according to more delicate co-occurrence patterns. The links which exist between bleu and feuille are slighter than between bleu and crayon, not only because of the ambiguity offeuille 'leaf' or 'sheet', which, in one of its senses (feuille de Γ arbre 'leaf of a tree'), does not admit of the adjective bleu·, but also because of the sociocultural bounds which limit the realization of the content and make the adjunction of bleu less probable for feuille than for crayon _ These semantic co-occurrence patterns and these lexical ambiguities are clearly shown in the production of sentences containing an adjective. If the sentence includes an animate adjective and animate nouns, the combinations do not present anomalies and all the sentences produced by syntactic ambiguity are acceptable solutions : le père absent 'the absent father' or est absent 'is absent' Venfant absent 'the absent child' or est absent 'is absent' le père et Γ enfant absents 'the absent father and child' or sont absents 'are absent'. When the sentence includes an adjective and inanimate nouns with different compatibilities, a significant distribution occurs. Thus bleu is given : as an adjective with crayon 23 times feuille 10 times as a noun en bleu 'in blue' 3 times le bleu 'the blue' 1 time as an adverb écrire bleu 'to write blue' 5 times Bleu is sometimes an adjunct to nouns, sometimes to the verb. If it is an adjunct to the verb, it can only be in the form of an adverb or of a noun as indirect object.

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The difference in the treatment of the two adjectives absent and bleu proves inversely the relative degree of compatibility between the two subclasses of nouns. When the sequence vert 'green', voir 'to see', arbre 'tree',/m7/e 'leaf' (Group II), was given, the ambiguity of vert 'green', verre 'glass', vers 'toward', vair 'vair' was removed by the spelling of the word. The strong compatibility between feuille 'leaf', and verte 'green' (les feuilles vertes de Γ arbre 'the green leaves of the tree') resulted in dispelling the ambiguity of feuille (feuille de papier 'sheet of paper' versus feuille de Γ arbre 'leaf of the tree') for the reason of the difficulty of production of la feuille de papier verte 'the green sheet of paper'. When the message includes froid 'cold' and hiver 'winter', a strong connection exists between the two words. At the same time, the fact that hiver 'winter' belongs to the class of nouns which are preferentially indirect objects allows froid 'cold' to be used as an adverb (il fait froid cet hiver 'it is cold this winter') or as an adjective (l'hiver est froid 'the winter is cold'). 8.3. Cases of double incompatibility. — In the series of words rouge 'red', cheval 'horse', voir 'to see', the term rouge is preferentially an adjective and can be incorporated in a syntactically correct sentence: je vois un cheval rouge Ί see a red horse'. In this case, the personal subject je is in opposition to the nonpersonal object noun phrase cheval which also includes the adjective rouge. There are exceptions of a different type — first an exception of a syntactic-semantic nature, implicit in the existence of a class of specific adjectives for the colors of the coats of horses, such as alezan 'chestnut'. These adjectives form a complete and finite structure which a componential analysis must take into account. Other adjectives denoting color, brun 'brown', jaune 'yellow', etc., can be part of this microsystem or can be excluded according to circumstances. Here rouge 'red' is not part of the group of adjectives compatible with cheval 'horse'. Second, an extension of an anthropological nature is apparent. In a society such as ours, le cheval rouge 'the red horse'' remains a cultural abnormality, which may not necessarily be the case in other civilizations. The fact of joining rouge to cheval creates a semantic and/or cultural anomaly which in turn makes the sentence anomalous. The possibility of using rouge as an adverb is afforded by the idiomatic phrase voir rouge 'to see red', which necessarily takes a human subject, and which is an 'unfinished' phrase, excluding an object of the verb. In this case, the only possibility offered by the sequence of three words is : le cheval voit rouge 'the horse sees red'. This sentence is anomalous, since the incorporation of cheval 'horse' as subject of voir rouge 'to see red' personifies it and ascribes to it human behavior. The sentence is thus not impossible, but the anomaly it presents is enough to cause it to be rejected by certain respondents. 8.4. Operative adjectives. — It would be an error to think that adjectives figure necessarily as secondary terms in these produced sentences and that apart from some personal performances dependent on individual variation, they do not play a part in

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the kernel sentence. In reality, if operative verbs are essential when only two nouns are given, such a presentation can also lead to the incorporation of an adjective in order to remove certain kinds of incompatibilities. This solution is especially apt when the two nouns given belong to the same syntactic class and when the respondent prefers to produce two successive kernel sentences using the two terms in order then to effect the transformation which would allow him to respond partially to the order of the minimal sentence. The formation of the two sentences assumes the existence of two operative verbs. Thus, with lumière, lampe a preliminary estimate can be made : la lampe a une lumière, cette lumière est... 'this lamp has a light, this light is...'. The first sentence combines the two terms, but it appears to be tautologous as a result of the fact that both words belong to the same syntactic-semantic structure; semantic validity will be derived from a complementary sentence including one of the two terms proposed and utilizing an operative verb of the type être + participle or adjective, which excludes a substantive object of the verb. Operative verbs of this type are formed either from strictly intransitive, pronominal or passive verbs, or from the equivalent combination, être followed by an adjective/participle: la lampe a une lumière; cette lumière est aveuglante 'the lamp has a light; this light is blinding'. The nominalization of the first sentence with a substitution of the phrase so produced for the subject of the following clause (the contextual reference being useless) gives : la lumière de la lampe est aveuglante 'the light of the lamp is blinding'. The adjectives used in this phrase are called operative adjectives; their selection is conditioned by two factors: (a) the necessity of removing the tautology of the first clause (b) compatibility with lumière. The operative adjectives used in the tests of simulated production were as follows : aveuglant 'blinding' 3 times faible 'weak' 2 times défectueuse 'defective' 1 time insuffisante 'insufficient' 1 time éteinte 'extinguished' 1 time The equivalence between the operative verb and être + the operative adjective is shown by parallel sentences with an intransitive verb: la lumière aveuglante 'the blinding light', la lumière de la lampe brûle 'the light of the lamp burns', etc. Adjectives are distributed in two classes which can be defined by a simple semantic correlation (positive/negative) with quantitative variations in the two groups. Their semantic selection thus follows simple rules. Their frequent pejorative value (in the whole of the connotations) arises from individual or group over-determinations. Such a study cannot be taken up in the present work, but their prevalence is worthy of note.

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9. STUDY OF AMBIGUITIES

The study of ambiguities and the respondents' strategies to resolve them can be considered from two points of view, each of which depends on a separate analysis: (1) There is ambiguity in the message received when one of the terms given has two distinct meanings and the form and position of the second lexeme is not sufficient to clarify the ambiguity. Thus, in French, the phonic sequence [mer] corresponds to the three invariants maire¡mère¡mer 'mayor/mother/sea'. All three messages are acceptable, since three solutions are possible in the reconstructions of the original message : La mère est dans la maison, maison du maire, la maison est près de la mer 'the mother is in the house', 'the house of the mayor', 'the house is near the sea'. The problem then is the attitude of the respondent when faced with these final messages and the study of his decisions, that is, the factors relevant to the user's model. (2) There is an ambiguity in the presented message when one lexeme has two possible distributions, such as feuille de l'arbre 'leaf of a tree' and feuille de papier 'sheet of paper', and when the other lexemes are suitable for either solution. The message produced preserves the ambiguity of the message received: les feuilles détachées volent 'loosened leaves/sheets fly'. Neither an observer nor a person taking the test could know how to interpret the ambiguity of whether it means A SHEET OF PAPER or A LEAF OF A TREE. The respondent to the test is generally inclined to interpret the message by the preceding information given or by his personal terms of reference (here, for example, les feuilles des arbres 'the leaves of the trees'). The study of ambiguities leads to the study of semantic anomalies (unacceptable messages) or ungrammaticalness (messages which are acceptable but grammatically incorrect). Thus, the message rouge, cheval, voir 'red', 'horse', 'to see' affects the various strategies necessary to avoid statements which are semantically anomalous (le cheval voit rouge/'the horse sees red'), or culturally inadmissible {je vois un cheval rouge Ί see a red horse'). Taking these verbal guides into consideration permits the formulation of the fundamental rules necessary to produce kernel sentences, particularly the rule of the prevalence of the personal subject type je over all possible subjects. 9.1 The removal of ambiguities. — An ambiguity can arise between words belonging to different grammatical classes or between words of the same class. 9.1.1. Invariants belonging to different classes. — An ambiguity exists when the message as presented includes terms which can be nouns or verbs, adjectives or adverbs, etc. Thus, the set of two terms récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' presents an ambiguity; the word récompense 'reward' can be a noun, substitutable for the negative term punition 'punishment', or a verb, substitutable for the negative term

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punit 'punishes'. The same root word can be either a noun or a verb. The presentation of récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' implies a verb followed by an object; that is, it suggests a verb phrase, the subject of which is left to the choice of the recipient of the message (je, il, le maître 'the teacher'), or the verb form does not involve a particular person (in speech, récompense 'reward' as a verb is possible for the three persons singular and the third plural). The solution l'enfant mérite une récompense 'the child deserves a reward', on the contrary, implies that the order of the two lexemes has played a less important role than the correlation between the two basic words, and the freedom from grammatical ambiguity of the word enfant 'child', which can only be an animate noun and subject, has resulted in assigning récompense 'reward' the role of noun and object. In the production (or the reception) of these sentences, the prevailing correlation is between words of the same class which form the two noun phrases of the minimal sentence and not between the verbs and the object noun phrase. Confirmation can be found in the fact that cross-restrictions prevail over direct sequential restrictions. Enfant was given as subject by 33 respondents, and 5 gave récompense, for a total of 38. Three gave récompense as a verb. The other respondents (2) gave récompense and enfant the status of noun object and gave as subject je or il. 9.1.2. Invariants of the same grammatical class. — The class previously cited was that of [mer] : maire, mer, mère 'mayor', 'sea', 'mother'. The prevailing solution was that of mère (36), over mer (4) and maire (1). The correlation between the two animate (human) terms and the word maison 'house' is of the same nature ; it does not therefore play a part in the respondents' decision. On the other hand, the correlation between the inanimates mer and maison presents a syntactic problem insofar as the production of a sentence implies an animate subject. When the two words are used to produce a sentence, the distribution is always subject maison and indirect object mer. The ambiguity of the phonetic sequence [mer] resulted generally in a decision for mère, but this solution was rejected by a few respondents (5) who were obliged to produce sentences that were more complex or less probable (for others). The solution of the ambiguity belongs to what may be called microgenetics, emotional barriers which play their part. 9.1.3. Ambiguity in the same semantic category. — The word feuille, which is in the inanimate class, subclass of objects, carriers two different meanings: la feuille de papier 'the sheet of paper' and la feuille de Γ arbre 'the leaf of the tree'. The ambiguity will be limited by the terms included in the pseudo-message given in the test, e.g., crayon, écrire, bleu, feuille. The position offeuille is such that the syntactic constraints of the whole of the preceding forms affect the respondents' decision. In particular, crayon and écrire imply a sentence of the type f écris avec un crayon or mon crayon écrit Ί write with a pencil' or 'my pencil writes'. The strongest restraint is imposed by bleu 'blue' which belongs to a class of adjectives incompatible with feuille de l'arbre. The decision arises therefore as much as from the inclusion caused by crayon and

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écrire as the exclusion caused by bleu. All the respondents in Group I interpreted feuille as sheet. Inversely, when the set feuille, vert, voir, arbre 'leaf', 'green', 'to see', 'tree' was proposed to Group II immediately after the sequence crayon, écrire, bleu, feuille, it must be expected that the preceding reply influences by inertia a prevalent decision for the following sentence, feuille being the first term given. But the adjective vert is capable of being combined semantically with feuille de l'arbre ; although the word does not completely exclude feuille de papier, such a combination would be culturally less acceptable. The decision is finally determined by arbre 'tree', which with feuille forms the minimal sentence l'arbre a des feuilles 'the tree has leaves'. All the respondents interpreted the received message as unambiguous. When the set détacher, feuille, voler 'to detach', 'leaf/sheet', 'to fly/to steal' (interpreted as volet 'shutter/cover' by some respondents) was given, a certain distribution was obtained between feuille de papier (especially in the case of volet) and feuille de Γ arbre when the respondents chose voler. It must, moreover, be noted that voler¡volet comes later than feuille in the set, and it is consequently possible that the loss of ambiguity of the latter word has already occurred and resulted in the morpho-semantic interpretation of [vole] as voler or volet. There are two types of statements (with passive transformations) : (1) les feuilles détachées volent 'the loose leaves fly' (2) les feuilles sont détachées du volet 'the sheets are detached from the cover' The ambiguity of [vole] is not modified whatever decision is taken to free feuille of its ambiguity. Two types of sentences are in fact implied by the elements proposed : (je) détache une feuille Ί detach a sheet', which implies a SHEET OF PAPER, and les feuilles volent 'the leaves fly', which implies LEAVES OF A TREE. The solution je détache la feuille (active phrase given in variations by eight respondents ; two respondents employed a passive transformation) implies a second desicion on the level of [vole]. If voler is chosen, the respondent is obliged to produce two sentences : je détache la feuille-, elle vole Ί detach the leaf/sheet; it flies'. If the respondent obeys the instruction to produce a single sentence, he must choose volet 'cover' : je détache la feuille de son volet Ί detach the sheet from its cover'. The first decision involves a passive transformation of χ détache la feuille·, elle vole -> la feuille se détache et vole, or la feuille détachée vole 'x detaches the leaf/sheet; it flies' 'the leaf/sheet is detached and flies' or 'the loose leaf flies'. 9.2 Anomalies. — A thorough study of anomalies must be made on both the syntactic and semantic levels in order to be worthwhile. It should take account not only of the morpho-syntactic rules and the resolution of ambiguities, but also of the variants which form the systems of exclusions arising from microgenetics (user's model). Thus, the respondent who, when faced with the ambiguity of [mer], rejects the

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solution of mère, encounters problems different from those for whom such an exclusion has not played a part. A grammatical anomaly can arise from a lack of regard for the basic order of forming a sentence: (a) Sentence without a verb The formation of a statement reduced simply to a noun phrase is due to the fact that the first sentence drafted has undergone a nominalization : ma mère a une maison la maison de ma mère 'my mother has a house -+ the house of my mother' The respondent should therefore produce a verb phrase by transforming a second sentence which was not given to him in the original message. This absence of presentation can lead to nonproduction of a verb phrase. The result is an ungrammatical sentence: la maison de ma mère 'my mother's house', la récompense de Venfant 'the child's reward'. (b) Asyndeton The production of the noun phrase alone can result in self-correction by the addition of an untransformed second sentence: la maison de ma mère·, j'y habite 'my mother's house; I live there'. Asyndeta thus form a second group of grammatical anomalies. They were infrequent in the written tests, but much more numerous in the oral tests in which controls were exercised in different ways. In la maison du chat qui pilote 'the house of the cat playing with a ball of wool', the relativization of the second sentence leaves in suspense the verb phrase which should result from the transformation of a third sentence. (c) Inversion and distance A third type of ungrammaticalness consists in not using morpho-syntactic rules in their entirety: la lumière est faible que donne la lampe 'the light which the lamp gives is weak' includes a relativization of the first sentence : la lampe donne de la lumière-, cette lumière est faible 'the lamp gives light; this light is weak'. The inversion of the transformations which the preferential order lumière, lampe 'light', 'lamp' necessitates results in relative ungrammaticalness due to the minimal distance not being respected between the relative and its antecedent. (d) Inadequate passive transformation In the sentence la récompense a été donnée à l'enfant 'the reward has been given to the child', the passive transformation is triggered by the order of presentation of récompense, enfant 'reward', 'child' which prevails over the favorite order animate/inanimate (l'enfant reçoit une récompense 'the child receives a reward'). The formation of the sentence is only possible by means of a passive transformation which keeps the animate subject: on donne une récompense à l'enfant 'they give a reward to the child', etc.

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CONCLUSIONS

To offer definite and formalized conclusions for an experimental approach would exceed the purposes of this preliminary work. These analyses, which were made quickly and which remain elementary in many respects, have been undertaken simply to show how far such an experimental approach can shed light on syntactic-semantic problems in the kernel sentence. After study of the strategies adopted by the respondents to resolve the ambiguities which were presented to them, we come closer to defining two models and classifying syntactic facts by distinguishing the grammatical validity of sentences from the acceptability of messages. An experimental approach enables us to go beyond mere rewriting in the description of transformations ; it can provide a basis for psycholinguistic analysis. UNIVERSITY OF PARIS

DISCUSSION DANES :

Did you study the intonation of aphasies? It seems to me that some investigators cling to the conclusion, which I expected, that sentence intonation is the last thing which the aphasie patient dropped. I don't mean the emotional intonation; I mean the intonation with a structural function, the intonation contour of the sentence. DUBOIS:

Among aphasies, you have to recognize different categories. You cannot consider them as just one group. There are certain aphasies who can hardly talk; there are others who, on the other hand, can speak very fluently. In those aphasies who can still speak fluently, there is no problem with intonation. It conforms to the general patterns. For those aphasies who do have speaking difficulties, it is somewhat difficult to analyze intonation because of the fact that speech is slowed down and this brings about a certain amount of dysprosodia. In some aphasies, intonation subsists even if they cannot make up a minimal sentence. But then intonation is concentrated on one word which becomes lengthened and has expressive intonation; so some intonation can subsist even in some aphasies who cannot make full sentences. LONGACRE:

I have a feeling that this is a very important paper for several reasons. I am anxious to see it in print so that we can give it a more careful study. For one thing, the problem of co-occurrence restrictions is to me a very live problem. I've been occupied for the past twenty years with the preparation of literature for a primitive people in southern Mexico; and in the course of our Bible translation

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program, there is no more pressing problem that we have than this matter of lexical co-occurrence restrictions which are not the same in the target language as in Greek or Spanish or English. Words which can collocate in one language, words which seem similar, seem the nearest equivalent, often do not collocate in another language. So this whole thing is a very live and a very pressing issue. And I'm glad to see some experimental approach of this sort to it. Secondly, I am concerned with what Fries used to call structural meaning; that is, the fact that such meanings as subject, object, head, modifier, and so forth, are relevant and that we have a right to talk about such structural meanings, or, to put it in terms of my own frame of reference, the meaning of a tagmeme such as subject. It seems that if we think of a meaning such as ACTOR or SUBJECT as being associated with this tagmeme, it is a very interesting fact that experimentally the first choice is an animate over an inanimate noun. This seems to have something to do with the overall structural meaning of subject. It seems a more appropriate thing to choose an animate than an inanimate noun. These experimental data are very interesting in this regard. I'm thinking of an example of a more extreme sort from the Mixe language of southern Mexico, data from Cyril Hokshagen, in which we have a ditransitive clause with an animate subject and what one would call an animate object and an indirect object in English. In other words, 'he gave her a book' and 'he hit her with a stick' have the same structure ; they translate literally as 'he gave her by means of a book', 'he hit her by means of a stick'. And it was rather an extraordinary thing both behaviorally and linguistically when there occurred a sentence 'he hit her with her baby', that is, he picked up the baby by the heels and slugged his wife with the baby. I think it is high time some sort of experimental approach of this sort is made, and I'm happy to see Prof. Dubois make it. DUBOIS:

I first want to thank Prof. Longacre for his remarks. The experiments that we are doing now, either with normal people or aphasies, and so on, allow us to see the relationship between grammatical subject and the agent himself. We can look at it in two different ways. First, the production of sentences. By giving words of different categories we can observe what are the sentences produced, and it will show that usually an animate noun is chosen for the function of subject, and that inanimate nouns tend not to be chosen as subjects and rather function as objects. It can also be shown by such transformations as a passive transformation that if the nonpreferred order is given, that is, if the words given were in the order inanimate-animate, a transformation of such type as the passive will re-establish the favored order. The passive transformation is frequent in such cases; that is, when transformation is needed to restore the favored order: animate subject, inanimate object. In schizophrenics, and I have studied over 70 of them in my tests, the user's model imposes certain rejections. It causes certain digressions from the type of rules and causes stylistic transformations which allow again avoiding an inanimate subject.

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GARVIN:

Do you feel that the use of the transformational frame of reference was essential to your very fascinating experiments, or do you feel that perhaps using tagmemics or traditional French grammar your results might have come out very similar? DUBOIS:

I think that Prof. Danes raised this very same problem earlier. French linguistics is dominated by the concepts of the Prague School and Saussurian ideas. In the theories we are offered now, some problems raised about the relationship between language and speech are answered better, for example, by generative grammar. But I view grammars only as operational tools. I do not think they have any value transcending reality. For me, they are just tools and not goals. DANES:

It seems to me that the notion of transformation may be explained in many ways. I am convinced that the notion of a transformation as it was used in the first version of Chomsky's grammar was more important because it explains some of our intuitions. The notion of transformation is not necessarily connected with generative grammar or with any sort of grammar. It only explains some relations in the language system. It seems to me, and I don't know whether Prof. Dubois will agree with me, that if the transformational relations are not invented by linguists themselves, but if they exist in the intuition of the native speakers, then they must have some bearing on the behavior of normal speakers and of aphasie patients. But without any reference to a concrete framework of any generative transformational grammar, we have paradigmatic relations and we have syntagmatic relations. Maybe transformational relations are a sort of paradigmatic relation. DUBOIS:

I just want to answer Prof. Danes's last comment. Analysis along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis has been done by Jakobson on aphasies. It is certainly interesting, especially for those who have never seen aphasies themselves; but it simplifies everything, and in this case the explanations given are just an artifact of the method. Given the two axes Jakobson started with, he comes to distinguish two classes of aphasies. I would myself say that there are not just two classes of aphasies, but there are at least five, if not six. And they are totally different classes of aphasies with, of course, common features. But they are different classes. c.

I . J. M . S T U A R T (Georgetown University) : Just one problem. I could not discern whether your experiment was designed to test the language facility retained over a wide variety of different types of clinical patients, or the kind of language facility lost by those patients, or thirdly, whether you were using clinical subjects in order to gain information about the kind of conclusions

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one can draw through the use of a grammatical theory. In other words, I don't know which were the independent and which were the dependent variables. Would you mind explaining please? DUBOIS:

What I dealt with today in my paper was only part of the experiments I have conducted, those that were done on normal people in order to determine linguistic elements ; and I gave you only a summary of this. For many different kinds of people, for those who have cortical lesions, or those who just have behavioral disturbances, the tests I have performed are, of course, only part of a general analysis of spontaneous language. The data collected in these experiments would be useless if not correlated with other, more general data on verbal behavior.

REFERENCE Dubois, Jean, 1966 "Problèmes de linguistique transformationnelle. Modèles précorrecteurs d'erreurs dans la transformation passive", Journal de psychologie 1.29.57.

LINGUISTIC METHOD IN ETHNOGRAPHY: ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE UNITED STATES1 DELL HYMES

I To understand the development of anthropology, and of ethnography within it, one must consider many things, from Kant to colonialism. For anthropology in the United States, one of the most important considerations is the study of language. In the nineteenth century the classification of languages as to origin and type loomed largest. The work was seen as an avenue into the history and minds of the American Indians, around whom anthropology in the United States first found unity. Horatio Hale (1892; quoted in Dieserud 1908), went so far as to urge: Solely by their languages can the tribes of men be scientifically classified, their affiliations discovered, and their mental qualities discerned ... Linguistic anthropology is the only true science of man. Hale reflected a pervasive concern. Classification of the peoples of the world was seen as a central task, and the respective claims of language, race, and culture, as bases of classification, were in dispute. In the United States the work of the Bureau of (American) Ethnology, under John Wesley Powell, settled the immediate question, so far as the American Indians north of Mexico were concerned. The Bureau's linguistic classification (Powell 1891) was fundamental to its own ethnological synthesis (the Handbook of American Indians, edited by F. W. Hodge [1907-11]), and to the study of the American Indians, and hence to American anthropology, for some time to come. It gave a sense of order out of chaos, so much so, indeed, that American anthropology has been haunted since, both by the Bureau classification's particular results (there has been no agreement on revision or successor until the present decade), and by the implicit image of a world made up of stable, language-bounded, one-language cultural units. 1

I should like to dedicate this study to Carl Voegelin, who set me on the path that has led to it. For comments on the first version, I am much indebted to Harold Conklin; for making it possible to complete that version, Bob Schölte and Joan Davlin; and for his many courtesies and great patience, Paul Garvin.

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(On the history of the Powell classification and the work by Sapir and others that should have replaced it, see Hymes ms. a; on recent consequences of its implicit ethnolinguistic model, cf. Hymes 1966, 1968b, 1969.) The success of the Bureau classification may be seen as the triumph of one sort of linguistic method. The impact was one of establishing boundaries and of providing a frame of reference, however, not one of affecting the conduct of ethnography, except in as much as collection of data bearing on linguistic classification was considered a worthwhile part of ethnography. The Bureau's method, vocabulary elicitation, seems to have had no consequences for the rest of ethnographic work. (On the characteristics of ethnography in the period, see the University of Pennsylvania dissertation [1969] by Regna Darnell.) 2 In general, linguistics does not appear to have influenced conceptions of method in anthropology in the period. The methods of comparative and historical linguistics did come to be admired by many, but I know of no evidence of a desire to emulate them (outside of folklore). 3 It would seem to be a striking but isolated fact that one linguist did assert the superiority of linguistic method in much the same terms (imutatis mutandi, given the historical context) as would be used later in the context of synchronic study (Paul 1886: 5): Es gibt keinen Zweig der Kultur, bei dem sich die Bedingungen der Entwicklung mit solcher Exaktheit erkennen lassen als bei der Sprache, und daher keine Kulturwissenschaft, deren Methode zu solchem Grade der Vollkommenheit gebracht werden kann wie die der Sprachwissenschaft. (It is worth noting that Paul, like Whitney and de Saussure, placed linguistics among 2

Note the blunt restriction of 'linguistic anthropology' stated by Mason (1881: 397): "The mere acquisition of a language (i.e., learning of it for fieldwork), or even the accurate study of its phonology, its etymology, and its syntax, is not a part of anthropology. Linguistic anthropology has reference, first to the origin and life history of languages as a whole, and, second, to the comparative study of the languages of the globe as a means of grouping its peoples." (I owe this quotation to Regna Darnell.) • Sir Henry Maine did appeal to comparative philology to warrant his use of comparative method in ethnology. Indeed, he considered ethnological comparisons valid only within what philology had shown to be a single group (cf. Burrow 1966: 232, 148-149, concerning writings of Maine in 1886 especially), and objected to the brothers McLennan that they used the comparative method in a rigid way that would make comparative philology itself impossible. American anthropologists seem to have been innocent of the methods of comparative philology and historical linguistics, until Sapir and the students he trained. Comparative philology might be appealed to as an example, but I know no instance of its method being applied outside its own domain. Radin's chastisement of Boas for using comparative philology as representative of ethnological methods of securing time perspective, and the statement of Boas he quotes, show only that neither understood the subject (Radin 1933: 14-15); "the comparison of static phenomena combined with the study of their distribution" hardly describes linguistic reconstruction. Sapir's precision in delineating methods of ethnological reconstruction no doubt owes something to his linguistic training, as Radin (1933: 55, 60) maintains. Significant influence in this period, however, was the other way. The pioneering areal-typological studies of linguistic traits by Dixon and Kroeber, and Boas' later arguments, against Sapir and others, as to the nature of language classification, invoke a methodological perspective developed in ethnology (cf. Hymes 1961d, n. 25 [= 1964a: 764, n. 21]).

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the social sciences: Die Kulturwissenschaft ist immer Gesellschaftswissenschaft. Erst Gesellschaft ermöglicht die Kultur, erst Gesellschaft macht den Menschen zu einem geschichtlichen Wesen.) It is in the twentieth century that linguistics comes to be a recurrent methodological model for anthropologists. The beginning is with Boas, just before the First World War. Boas did not put the issue in its full form, but present understanding of it is the outcome of a development that stems from him. He and his students shaped modern professional anthropology in the United States, and shaped also its conception of the relationship between study of language and study of culture. I shall first sketch some distinctions regarding the notion of 'linguistic method of ethnography' (II), then trace the development of the notion. Boas creates a stage in which the unity of linguistics and ethnography is explicit with regard to subject matter, implicit with regard to method (III). With Sapir comes the second stage, explicit recognition of a methodological role for linguistics (IV). In Sapir this comes about in the course of a subtle development of thought, from a separation of language from culture toward a substantive unity of language and culture, then toward a changed conception of the nature of the unity. After the Second World War, one finds a third stage, containing a rapid, yet clear, succession of phases : concern with a strained relation between linguistics and anthropology, and with the suddenly discovered importance of Whorf (V); methodological impact of structural linguistics (VI) ; and, most recently, changes set in motion by new models of grammar, and by anthropological critiques of linguistics and linguistics-related methods (VII). The discovery of these clearly delimitable, connected stages was unexpected. They are a striking fact that the focus in this paper on the history of one chain of ideas can only partly explain; a larger context, intellectual, social, personal, will be required.

II Anthropologists have been concerned with both the use of language and the use of linguistics. The phrase 'linguistic method of ethnography' is thus ambiguous; it could refer to either (since no one says 'language method of ethnography' for the first). The development traced in this paper can be seen as the development of yet a third, deeper meaning for the phrase, a development in ethnography from (1) use of language, and (2) use of linguistics with regard to language, to (3) use of linguistic method beyond language. The history of the first two meanings cannot be traced here in detail, but something must be said by way of context. This can be done by considering the use of language, and linguistics, as ranging along something of a scale, from least involvement of technical linguistics to most. Roughly, one can distinguish uses of a linguistic method of ethnography as (1) facilitating, (2) generating, (3) validating, (4) 'penetrating', and (5) foundational. These uses are not mutually exclusive; a thoroughgoing conception

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of ethnography would incorporate them all. At the same time opinions and interests with regard to them differ. By a FACILITATING role is meant use of a language for access to a community, for survival and rapport within it. By a GENERATING role is meant use of a language for the production of data. By a VALIDATING role is meant use of a language as a criterion of adequacy and validity. These three roles have in common the possibility of no use of technical linguistics, being first of all matters of what one does or has IN a language, rather than of what one does το a language as an object of study. A language may be known in advance, an existing analysis may be relied upon, or, as must have happened again and again in history, a language may be acquired on the ground without recourse to any technical framework. If a language is made an object of study, it may be only as a means of entrée and preface to actual work — as an initial facilitating step. In supplementing observation by interview, taking down conversations, eliciting names and stories, the focus may be on the translatable content, not on interviews, conversations, names or stories as having interesting systematic properties of their own. One language is then a means of generating data that is handled essentially in another. And it may be the fact of use of a language, not of its analysis, that confers validity, as in ability to check upon an interpreter or to work independently of one. Collection of texts may confer validity through independence of, and subsequent check upon, oneself, by letting members of a community 'tell it like it is' in their own words, largely independent of one's own purposes and queries. None of these purposes need lead to all or part of a grammar, dictionary, or linguistics-based analysis of discourse. It remains that the leaders of the first generation of academic anthropology in the United States (Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Radin, Sapir) believed in control of the native language as a matter of scholarly standards, if ethnography was to stand comparison with the disciplines studying classical, oriental and contemporary European cultures. For some studies, such as of poetry, which Boas classed among 'deeper problems of ethnology', only native language data would be acceptable. Radin (1933) carried concern with authentic native language documents to the point of making them the defining goal of ethnology. These men and their students did produce grammars, dictionaries, and analyzed texts, and occasional special studies in onomastics (toponymy, personal names, botanical terms, etc). If linguistic analysis was sometimes seen as a contribution more to ethnography than to linguistics, it was a recognized and valued contribution. Many ethnographic situations, indeed, make the roles so far discussed difficult, if not impossible, without some use of linguistic analysis. The three roles just discussed shade into a fourth. Nadel's interest in native terms as 'cognitive summaries' (Nadel 1951) and Bohannon's insistence (1958) on use of native terms show concern for language as a source of validity and cultural insight; but serious analysis of native terminology is analysis of language itself. Here one begins to deal with language itself as a cultural system. The predominant interest of

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this sort in the United States has of course been with kinship terminology and grammatical categories, the latter taken as indication of world view (recall the initial quotation from Hale, and cf. Hymes 1961a) — viz., Boas' concern to write grammars in terms of the 'psychological groupings', the 'inner form' of each language (1911: 81) and Whorf's "Linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities" (1956a). The grammatical analyses undertaken by Boas and Whorf were in effect uses (and developments) of technical linguistics to pursue a problem set by cultural anthropology. The sense of reaching deeper, commonly tacit, levels of thought and pattern suggests PENETRATING for this fourth role. There is finally a concern with language as a cultural system, such that linguistic methods are found relevant beyond language, by direct application, or as part of the methodological foundations of the study of culture as a whole. Such a foundational role may arise from personal contact and intellectual affinity, as in the effect of Boas' linguistic teaching on Kroeber, and of Sapir's on Kluckhohn. And such factors presumably played a part in the genesis of the article in which Lévi-Strauss first treated linguistics as an inspiration to social anthropology (1945). It appeared in a New York-based but European oriented journal, the linguistic model was that of Prague structuralism, and Lévi-Strauss was at the time a colleague at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York of the great Prague structuralist, Roman Jakobson (Lévi-Strauss 1949b: xxvi). I take the emergence of a foundational role for linguistics to depend first of all, however, upon inclusion of linguistics in anthropological training. A comparison with British anthropology may make clear the importance of this claim. British anthropologists have stressed use of the native language, as a heritage from Malinowski, and have been known to inquire in this respect about the proficiency of eminent Americans (cf. the remarks of the British-influenced Bohannan [1958]). Moreover, the structural orientation of the group might be thought to have provided a congenial climate for a structural orientation toward language. Malinowski himself had done empirical linguistic work, and had called for an ethnographic theory of language. The pioneer of British structural linguistics, J. R. Firth, did in fact gain inspiration from Malinowski, and I have been told of a scholar who might have served as a continuing personal link between the two, had he not prematurely died (Peter Strevens, personal communication). But if Malinowski persuaded British anthropologists to think functionally and contextually about language, he did not lead them to learn linguistics. Apart from the possibility of training in a particular language, or in phonetics, for field work, training of a linguistic sort did not form part of training in anthropology. In particular the techniques and operational concepts of linguistics did not. (I have known a British anthropologist to respond with surprise to the suggestion that such training might have helped one field worker who had to give up for failure to master a local language.) Apart from Evans-Pritchard (see references in Hymes 1964a: 225), British social anthropologists until recently showed little interest in linguistic matters, and linguistics played no part in theory (cf. now Leach 1964, Whiteley 1966).

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The difference between British and American anthropology may have to do with the period of neglect of culture in favor of social structure among the former. That might explain relative inattention to language, which, as such, would seem quite epiphenomenal (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1957: 142-3). Yet Lévi-Strauss has shown that analysis of social structure can give importance to linguistics as a model. Much depends on underlying assumptions and orientations, but the crucial factor, I think, is a climate of opinion in which the techniques and operational concepts of linguistic work are familiar, as opposed to one in which they are not. To prove this point would require comparative study of several national traditions in anthropology. The presence or absence of linguistic training, even if found to be diagnostic, might prove symptomatic rather than fundamental. For anthropology in the United States, at least, it does appear to be crucial. The traditional inclusion of linguistics in anthropological training is, I think, the institutional basis for the intellectual development traced in this paper. It is not that American anthropologists are often skilled linguists. The number of ethnographers able to write a grammar or to handle text analyses and lexicography has always been small. The fact of obligatory linguistic training, however, has ensured a certain familiarity with linguistics on the part of most anthropologists, and a certain number of ethnographers who contribute to linguistics. The fact of training has meant a continuing opportunity for some anthropological students to find a personal or theoretical significance in linguistics, in relation to their other training; and it has meant the presence within anthropology departments of linguists to provide the training, and thus the opportunity for informal mutual influence. Working among anthropologists, and often enough considering themselves anthropologists, some linguists thus have come to relate their work to anthropology as a whole. The result has been an attention to linguistics, and a legitimacy of concern for it, and, indeed, an influence of linguistically oriented thought out of all proportion to the number of linguists in anthropology. The influence of linguistics has not been equally important for all departments of anthropology, nor uniform among any of them throughout their history. The development treated in this paper is to a marked degree a story of a few centers at certain times: Columbia; Yale, especially, together with Chicago; Berkeley; Indiana; Harvard. (Comparative analysis of departments within the United States would be valuable.) Personal affinities and abilities, and purely institutional factors, have played roles that are only partly known. And the influence of linguistics has been controversial (as will be discussed in VII). Kluckhohn perhaps overstated its significance for the field (although not for his own view of the field) when he wrote (1959: 262): But the distinctive aspects of the anthropological outlook derive primarily from the second historical factor: among behavioral scientists, only cultural anthropologists have been in sustained contact with the extraordinary developments in structural linguistics over the past generation.

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Not all anthropologists have seen, as did Kluckhohn, the intellectual importance of linguistics; many have thought of linguistics as at most a practical tool. The fact remains that the practical role has been commonly granted, and training provided toward that end; and that out of this pervasively institutionalized ground have recurrently grown contributions to method and theory. Use of language has implied use of linguistics, and linguistics has given rise to reconsideration of the nature of culture itself.

Ill The beginning, as was said, is with Boas. Boas had engaged in linguistic work as a museum employee in Berlin with visiting Bella Coola informants, before his first visit to the field. He continued linguistic work in the Arctic (1884-5) and on the North Pacific Coast (in the late 1880s and the 1890s, some of the time under the official direction of Hale). It is known that he had met Steinthal and later described his linguistic work as having been based on Steinthal's principles (Stocking 1970: 347, n. 33). To my knowledge, it is in a lecture of 1907 (1908: 23) that he first asserted with regard to general anthropology that the study of language promises to point the way in which many of our problems may find their solution. Boas repeated and developed this theme in the section on "Linguistics and ethnology" of his major statement on language, the well-known Introduction to the Handbook of American Indian languages (1911). There he went beyond the "practical need of linguistic studies for ethnological purposes" to stress the "theoretical importance of linguistic sudies". (The introduction was written in 1908 [cf. Lévi-Strauss 1958:26].) These statements are the more notable because in 1904 Boas had seen as not far distant the time when specialization of method would require anthropology proper to deal only with customs and beliefs, and when a separate linguistics would continue and develop "the work that we are doing now because no one else cares for it" (1904). In the 1911 Introduction, however, such a view is explicitly rejected. It is noted that other subjects important to ethnology also require specialization of method. Boas' general thesis becomes: the purely linguistic inquiry is part and parcel of a thorough investigation of the psychology of the peoples of the world. If ethnology is understood as the science dealing with the mental phenomena of the life of the peoples of the world, human language, one of the most important manifestations of mental life, would seem to belong naturally to thefieldof work of ethnology, unless special reasons can be adduced why it should not be so considered. In particular, linguistic processes and categories are argued to be of the same kind as those of ethnology, and to be peculiarly illuminating, because, while the origin is

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unconscious in both cases, ethnological phenomena often rise into consciousness and become subject to secondary reasoning and reinterpretation that obscure their fundamental nature. Linguistic phenomena, in contrast, tend to remain unconscious, hence not secondarily reinterpreted, hence privileged for the understanding of the nature of ethnological phenomena in general. Boas' mature formulation thus seems to emerge within the few years between 1904 and 1908. (To judge from the contents and dates of these published works; unpublished correspondence might modify the inference.) There seems here the first instance of a cycle of practical separation, then theoretical reintegration, of linguistics and ethnology. It was to recur in Sapir's thought in the late 1920s (IV), somewhat in Kluckhohn's in the 1950s (V), and more generally within anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s (V-YI), and to begin to occur between anthropology and theoretical linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s (VI-VII). (Notice that for Boas 'ethnology' is equivalent to current 'cultural anthropology', comprising field investigation, theory, and comparative analysis [as in his "Linguistics and ethnology"]. The 'mental sciences' are equivalent to the Geisteswissenschaften. Although influenced by psychologists [Galton, Wundt and others], Boas is not here placing anthropology within professional psychology. He can be said to have been a mentalist, however, in the sense in which the term is now used in American linguistics, given his assumptions about the goals of linguistic and ethnological study.) What was the outcome of the Boasian formulation of a principle of unity for language and culture, especially with regard to a linguistic method of ethnography? An implicit unity in method

The only concrete result in the Handbook of American Indian languages is the principle just noted. This universalistic claim is argued at some length, examples being developed to show the unconscious origins of both linguistic and ethnological traits. The Boasian thesis was upheld by Lowie (1921: 12), elaborated in a seminal paper by Sapir (1927), and made a requirement of structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology by Lévi-Strauss (with acknowledgement to Boas), as a guarantee of validity, objectivity, and universality (see Lévi-Strauss 1958 [1949]: 26, 1950: xxx, 1953: 526-7, and cf. Jakobson 1944, and Whorf 1956). Boas himself seems to have done no more with it (except to state that the unconscious categories of language had nothing to do with Freud's unconscious [1920: 321]). Although Boas argued the identity of linguistic and ethnological phenomena in kind, he did not specify an identity in any particular features, whether of content or form. Nor did he suggest that identity in kind (unconscious origin) might support a unity in method. He does take a stand, regarding both, against imposition of a priori frameworks, and demands the discovery of authentic native categories. Boas' work has a more specific methodological unity, however, and appropriately enough, it is a unity that did not rise to conscious expression, nor undergo secondary

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elaboration. The unity can be found in his frame of reference in dealing with folklore, grammar, and cultural phenomena generally. For Boas, the context of explanation was commonly a developmental one. As an 'historical school', Boas and his students focussed, not on the tracing of origins, but on the understanding of outcomes. Insofar as phenomena were traced to earlier origins, it was not to reconstruct (a possibility in which Boas placed little confidence, whether in regard to proto-languages, tale types, or culture complexes), but to disclose the diverse provenience of the elements in question, the processes by which they had come to be given a contemporary coherence and common significance, and the patterns or orientations in terms of which coherence, significance, was assigned. The terms of analysis, in short, were ELEMENTS, PROCESSES, and PATTERNS. One can see the same mode of thought in the Boasian analysis of folk tales in the 1890s and in the Boasian analysis of grammars in the 1900s. With folk tales one compared texts within and between communities, showing them to be composed of elements of diverse histories secondarily combined. With language one compared sentences and words within and between texts, showing them to be composed of elements ('phonetic groups'), also of diverse origin and secondarily combined. Given analysis into fundamental elements, one could trace the particular mode of formation of the products embodying each, and consider the underlying ideas so expressed. With folk tales, the products were texts, the mode of formation historical, and the underlying ideas distinctive cultural orientations and interests. With language the products were words and sentences, texts under a different aspect, and the mode of formation and the underlying ideas had technical names: grammatical processes, grammatical categories. (On Boas and folklore in this respect, see Hymes 196Id, 1962b; on the unity of approach, Hymes 1963; on its subsequent role in American ethnology, Hymes 1957a. The linguistic approach continues in Sapir — cf. his chapters on "Form in language: grammatical processes" and "Form in language: grammatical concepts" [1921, Chs. IV, V], and has been revived by Jakobson [1957]. On Boas' analytic approach, see now the important study by Stocking [1970].) An implicit unity of approach can also be found in work of Sapir, of Kroeber, and of Radin, with regard both to language and to culture. With each the grammars can be seen to have been written by the men who wrote the ethnographies. The unity is in both the climate of opinion and the style of the individual scholar, and is brought to language, rather than extrapolated from its study. In sum, for Boas linguistic method in ethnography comprised the facilitating, generating, and, especially, the validating and penetrating roles suggested in II above. He stated no foundational role. There was a deep foundational unity of his linguistics with his ethnology, but it remained implicit. There was no development in detail of methodology, in linguistics or in ethnology, let alone in a linking of the two.

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Outcome and context of the Boasian stage

Development of linguistic methodology might have led Boas further in the development of its relation to ethnography; but Boas was not a structural linguist. He was a pre-structuralist, a man who had some of the essential understandings of structural linguistics, and who cleared the way for it. Certain kinds of generalization and inference, especially as to underlying relations, certain kinds of systematization, were alien to his spirit, perhaps more so in his later years. He was not in principle a 'taxonomic' linguist, but was so in practice. Boas would have accepted the earlier statements of Whitney (1867: 10, 54) that the goal of linguistics was not to describe, but to explain. It is fair to say, however, that his own work laid foundations for explanation, but did not move very far toward the goal. Indeed, a generation later, some linguists would be puzzled as to why he was interested in such things as grammatical categories. His deeper theoretical motivation would be temporarily forgotten, and only his contribution to clearing the way for adequate description remembered. Boas' program of linguistic inquiry into the psychology of the peoples of the world was not itself completed. A comparative study of the grammatical categories of American Indian languages had been planned for the first volume of the Handbook (1911). In the Introduction it was announced as postponed until completion of further work, and it never appeared. Boas, of course, had other problems to investigate and many roles to play — in physical anthropology, in art, in organization, in building a fledgling profession and combating racism (see Stocking 1969, Chs. 7-11). In the present context he can be fairly judged as a figure of his times, as a man who saw a role to play — his 'psychological' approach to language was cause for comment — and who played it decisively. In effect he built and set a stage which Sapir, taking up themes announced by him, was to animate and transform. IV The thrust of Sapir's first writing on language in relation to culture (implicitly, on linguistics in relation to anthropology) is to separate the two (1949 [1912]: 89-103). The issue is the notion that language is a reflection of culture. Words of course always reflect detached cultural elements, but, Sapir maintains, the relation between the form of language (grammatical categories and processes) and the forms of cultural thought and activity is practically impossible to detect (he remarks that he does not maintain that there is NO relation). One can imagine an initial stage in which both words and grammar symbolized culture, but change inevitably occurs in the form and the content of both language and culture and the relation must cease to hold.4 Cultural * Cf. Sapir's critique of fragmentary sciences of man (1949 [1939]: 578-589), and the first published statement of this perspective, in which he says that society is often spoken of as if it were a static structure defined by tradition, but in the more intimate sense ('intimate' here has suggestions of depth

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elements, as more definitely serving the immediate needs of society and entering more clearly into consciousness, will change more rapidly than those of language; and the form itself of culture, giving each element its relative significance,5 will be continually shaping itself anew. In sum, changes in culture are the result, to at least a considerable extent, of conscious processes or of processes more easily made conscious, whereas those of language are to be explained, if explained at all, as due to the more minute action of psychological factors beyond the control of will or reason (1941 [1912]: 100).

A necessary consequence is that "the forms of language will in course of time cease to symbolize those of culture, and THIS IS OUR MAIN THESIS" (1949 [1912]: 102; emphasis mine). Sapir reiterated this view in his celebrated monograph on time perspective (1949 [1916]: 432-3), and elaborated it in his concept of drift in Language (1921, Ch. VIII; cf. pp. iii-iv, 232-4). In one respect the view is a response to an empirical fact which Sapir, more than any American anthropologist, was able to see: that the persistence of recognizable form over time and space is greater in language than in culture. (Linguistic form, of course, must here be understood as morphology, the grammatical categories and processes of surface structure. Even grammatical elements with cultural meaning are separated out as really vocabulary, as not grammatical form, but merely the content ofthat form (1949 [1912]: 100).) Linguistic connections could be traced where cultural connections were tenuous or invisible. Combining the observation with this thesis of the inherent adequacy of all languages, he considered language as almost impervious to external influence "under normal circumstances" (1949 [1916]: 433). The explanation, as above, was that language was the most functionally specialized, self-contained, least often conscious of historical products (cf. 1949 [1916]: 433, 1921 : iii-iv, 232-4). There is an irony here. Sapir takes the Boasian theses of the unconscious nature of linguistic form, and the crosscutting of cultural form by secondary rationalization, and pushes the two as far apart as possible. Culture is not wholly equated with the conscious, nor denied structural form; but form in language is equated with the subconscious. In effect Sapir takes the Boasian view of the value of language because of "the unconscious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure" (1921 : iv), and runs with it, leaving culture to shift for itself. The variability and dynamics implied in the view of culture do not, in this stage of his life, at all attract him (cf. the of structure as well as of the personally meaningful) is a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity. Though apparently a static sum of social institutions, it actually is reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature among the individuals participating in it (1949 [1931]: 104). 6 Notice that Sapir already had the notion of form as defining the status of elements in terms of their relations to one another. He here applies it to culture, but his development of it in phonology (1921,1925) is thus not surprising. What is unknown is its source in his thinking in 1912. As we shall see, as of 1921, the notion became assimilated to notions of the aesthetic derived from Croce.

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concluding statement in "The grammarian and his language" (1949 [1924]: 159). It is the impersonal stability, the "strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit" [1921 :iii], language as "the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations" [1921:235].) It is the independence of language (and linguistics) that is at stake, as was noted. The parallel to the views of de Saussure in the same period is striking. Sapir's work in this period can be seen as a hymn to the autonomy of linguistic form. His historical conceptions are the projection of his view of the essence of language (this is not to deny their merit; the projective relation is a common one). He criticizes the Bureau of American Ethnology, and Boas anonymously, for neglecting true historical work, and refers slightingly to the attempt to relate the study of grammar to psychology (1917).6 He writes in letters to Ruth Benedict of the lonely vision that is his of the remote unities of American Indian languages (Mead 1959:53). He speaks of linguistics as having for a certain type of mind the profoundly serene and satisfying quality inherent in mathematics and music, the creation out of simple elements of a selfcontained universe of forms, within it lies hidden the same classical spirit, the same freedom in restraint, a spirit antagonistic to the romanticism rampant in America, debauching so much of science with its frenetic desire (1949 [1924]: 159). By 1921 a new development is broached. On the one hand, language is even more saliently the realm of form. The parallelism to culture (recall that in 1912 both had had form, though differing in its source and rate of change), almost disappears. That culture and language are in any true sense causally related, Sapir says, he cannot believe (here the issue is still culture as cause of language). The latent content of all languages is the same, the intuitive SCIENCE of experience, but language itself is a collective ART of thought [Sapir's emphases]. Culture is WHAT a society does and thinks, language a particular HOW of thought [Sapir's emphases again]. It is difficult to see causal relations between an inventory of experience and a manner of expressing it. The drift of language is not properly concerned with changes of content at all, only changes in formal expression. So far, then, one has the issues of 1912 even more sharply posed, Sapir insisting that language does not reflect culture, just as he insists, here and later, on the formal adequacy, completeness, and equality of all languages, primitive as well as 'cultured'. (The second argument is of course in a sense the continuation of the first.) On the other hand, Sapir remarks as the one possibility (1921: 233-234): If it can be shown that culture has an innate-form, a series of contours, quite apart from subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a means of relating it to language. But until such purely formal patterns of culture are discovered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the drifts of language and culture to be non-comparable and unrelated processes (1921: 233-234). • One must realize that it was Sapir, and other students of Boas, who developed an American method of historical ethnology, and who did so at about this time (First World War and after). Boas had used historical methods more as a means of analysis and criticism than as a means of reconstruction.

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At the very point of questioning the presence of form in culture, Sapir begins to describe cultural form as something to be discovered, and as something that, to be form, would have to be like form in language. By implication, the form that had been attributed to culture in 1912 was no longer satisfactory in kind. Perhaps the parallel presence of form in language and culture had been taken for granted then as a carrying over of Boas' view (Boas had flatly stated that culture was structured in the opening of a chapter of his major ethnological book (1963 [1911]: 149).) In any case, the stress now, almost as an afterthought, on an innate form to be discovered and laid bare, which MIGHT again link the drifts of language and culture — the 1912 conclusion is suddenly qualified — would seem to signal a turning point. In the next decade two changes occur. The 'how' comes to have an increasingly active connection with the 'what', and the 'what', culture, is assimilated to, reunited with the 'how', language — on language's own terms, so to speak. The concern for the autnomy of language as self-contained form continues to be expressed, but it is as if autonomy having been won, relations to culture can be explored again from the newly established position. The temptation latent in the view of language as form, culture as content — namely, to see language as giving form to content — begins to emerge. The relation that was eschewed in 1912, between language and culture, begins to be taken up again, but from the opposite end, and with a change in character. The question is not one of reflection (which seemed to have been associated with content primarily), but of moulding, explicitly associated with form. The source of the notion of 'form-feeling' is clear. It is Croce. That Sapir speaks in this period of'intuition', 'feeling', 'aesthetic' and the like, where a linguist today would refer to much the same matters in cognitive terms, seems due to the Italian scholar. Having stated his concern that linguistics escape sterility through knowledge of its wider relations, Sapir continues (1921 : iii): Among contemporary writers of influence on liberal thought Croce is one of the very few who have gained an understanding of the fundamental significance of language. He has pointed out its close relation to the problem of art. I am deeply indebted to him for this insight.7 One sentence in the 1921 Language sums up the position of this period (58, concluding a chapter) : "Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show the intuitive feeling of language for form." There one has the unconscious knowledge, aesthetically phrased ('intuitive feeling'), the superorganic autonomy (it is language to which feeling is attributed), and the leitmotif, form. The inner dynamic of Sapir's subsequent thought can be glimpsed in "The grammarian and his language" (1949 [1924]: 150-159). Like other articles, it is highly expressive on the autonomy of linguistic form, and most of the article is about 7

Professor A. Momigliano points out to me that the English translation of Croce is a wretched one, and that Croce himself cannot be considered a liberal in the period in question. My concern of course must be with what Sapir made of Croce. Let me here thank Prof. Momigliano and Prof. E. Gombrich for the opportunity to discuss Sapir in a seminar at the Warburg Institute, London.

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the implications of the idea. The one qualification is joined to the notion's strongest statement: "To say in so many words that the noblest task of linguistics is to understand languages as form rather than function or as historical process is not to say that it can be understood as form alone" (1949 [1924]: 152). What happens that is new is twofold. STRESS IS LAID ON FORM-FEELING AS A POSITIVE FORCE. In a passage that anticipates later criticism of behaviorism by Chomsky (1959), Sapir speaks of "a certain innate striving for formal elaboration and expression and ... an unconscious patterning of sets of related elements of experience" (1949 [1924]: 156). And THIS NOTION IS JOINED TO THE 'OUTSTANDING FACT ABOUT ANY LANGUAGE', ITS 'FORMAL COMPLETENESS' (1949 [1924]: 153). The ineluctable adequacy of any language to express whatever its speakers need to express (recall the Time perspective essay (1949 [1916]: 433, n. 18)) is held to

establish a definite relational feeling or attitude towards all possible contents of experience, in so far, of course, as experience is capable of expression in linguistic terms ... The world of linguistic forms ... is a complete system of reference, very much ... as a set of geometrical axes of coordinates is a complete system of reference to all points of a given space.

And Sapir continues in a passage that must be quoted in full (1949 [1924]: 153): The mathematical analogy is by no means as fanciful as it appears to be. To pass from one language to another is psychologically parallel to passing from one geometrical system of reference to another. The environing world which is referred to is the same for either language; the world of points is the same in either frame of reference. But the formal method of approach to the expressed item of experience, as to the given point of space, is so different that the resulting feeling of orientation can be the same neither in the two languages, nor in the two frames of reference. Entirely distinct, or at least measurably distinct, formal adjustments have to be made and these differences have their psychological correlates.

Philosophers are warned against the likelihood of becoming dupes of their own speech forms, since the mould of their thought, typically a linguistic mould, is apt to be projected into their conceptions of the world (157). And Sapir goes on to say that examples of incommensurable analyses of experience in diiferent languages would make very real to us (1949 [1924]: 159): a kind of RELATIVITY [my emphasis] that is generally hidden from us by our naive acceptance of fixed habits of speech as guides to an objective understanding of the nature of experience. This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought.

It is difficult not to see in these passages the source of Whorf's reference to the need for speakers of different languages to calibrate their linguistic backgrounds, to the value of linguistics for transcending the influence of a single language, and to relativity.8 In a major paper on linguistic method the next year, there is but one sentence, the last, that bears on these questions ; it indicates the generalization of perspective that is taking place (1949 [1925]: 45): 8

From this discussion it should be clear how misleading is any attempt to erect a fundamental opposition between Sapir and Whorf on these points (as in Landar 1966).

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The present discussion [of sound patteras] is really a special illustration of the necessity of getting behind the sense data of any type of expression in order to grasp the intuitively felt and communicated forms which alone give significance to such expression. The generalization is developed explicitly two years later in "The unconscious patterning of behavior in society" (1949 [1927]: 544-559). The aesthetic nature and autonomy of language again are stressed, and the formal completeness, and adequacy (1949 [1927] : 550-1); but this discussion takes language as prime example of something true of all socialized behavior. It is enclosed between the claim that "All cultural behavior is patterned" and the conclusion that, while not all forms of cultural behavior so well illustrate unconscious patterning as does linguistic behavior, "the more carefully we study cultural behavior, the more thoroughly we become convinced that the differences are but differences of degree" (1949 [1927]: 546, 556, cf. Kroeber 1923). One striking aspect of the article is the way in which Sapir hesitates at the edge of a concept of tacit knowledge. He refers to the 'intuitive repertoire' of the native speaker (551), and interprets the notion of cultural patterning of behavior in terms of crucial turning points in the course of action that give formal significance to the whole in the minds of those who possess the key to its understanding (546-7). Because the connection between forms and functions (practical purposes) is unstable, a functional approach does not suffice; one can not stop with asking why something is done, one must also know "what is the precise manner and articulation of the doing" (547). Normally, an individual cannot, however, accurately articulate the forms of behavior he follows, or give a general rule of which specific behaviors are examples, although all the while he acts as though the rule were perfectly well known to him. IN A SENSE IT is WELL KNOWN το HIM (Sapir's emphasis). But this knowledge is not capable of conscious manipulation in terms of word symbols. It is, rather, a very delicately nuanced feeling of subtle relations, both experienced and possible. To this kind of knowledge may be applied the term 'intuition' ... (1949 [1927]: 548). It is because the term 'knowledge' in itself implied conscious knowing, that Sapir used 'intuition' ( c f . 1949 [1927]: 548, in regard to unconscious status: "these patterns are not so much known as felt"). Clearly the references to 'form-feeling' and the like are concerned with what today would be called 'tacit knowledge', a tacit knowledge of formal relations. Indeed, inasmuch as the knowledge is of possible, not experienced, relations, it is implicitly generative. Notice that Sapir here revises the 1912 principle of the dependence of cultural form on consciousness. It is now not the form so much as the function of cultural patterns that is readily reshaped. It is just because or "the readiness with which forms of human conduct lose or modify their original functions or take on entirely new ones [that] it becomes necessary to see social behavior from a formal as well as from a functional point of view" (1949 [1927] : 547), to know "what is the precise manner and articulation of the doing". It is a commonplace, Sapir continues, that "the reasoning intelligence seeks to attach itself rather to the functions than to the forms of conduct"

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(1949 [1927]: 547). Insofar as rapidity of change is still linked in Sapir's mind with conscious awareness, one now has in culture a kind of form whose slower drift may be more in keeping with that of language. Indeed, a viewpoint rather like that of romantic historicism comes to the fore with a vengeance at the end of this essay, when "a healthy unconsciousness of the forms of socialized behavior to which we are subject" is said to be as necessary to society as unawareness of the workings of the viscera to the health of the body. Awareness should be left to the student whose business it is to understand such patterns. "Complete analysis and the conscious control that comes with a complete analysis are at best but the medicine of society, not its food" (1949 [1927]: 558-559). One sees the union of the ideas developed in the articles of 1924 and 1927 in "The status of linguistics as a science" (1949 [1929] : 160-166) : (1) the form-feeling and formal completeness, adequacy of language, as tending to give form for individuals to cultural behavior (1924), and (2) all cultural behavior as sharing with language a determination by unconscious patterning — cultural behavior as a realm of pervasive, tacitly known form (1927). This union may be seen to underlie the often-quoted paragraph on language as a guide to social reality. What had been an admonition about habits of speech becomes a flatly stated general doctrine: language powerfully conditions all our thinking; human beings are very much at the mercy of their particular language; indeed, The 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached (162). The wheel has come full circle in a sense. Where in 1912 one could not accept language as a reflection of culture, one can now speak of "language as the SYMBOLIC GUIDE TO CULTURE" (1949 [1929]: 162; emphasis Sapir's). The logic of ideas whose unfolding has just been discussed is essential, but nevertheless I do not think it the whole story. There is the question of Sapir's receptiveness to the inspiration he received from Croce, and also of the constancy and force with which he repeats in almost every article the autonomy, the completeness and adequacy, of language; the force of his statement of the positive feeling for form; what seems the increased power with which he states the unconscious pattern of behavior in 1927, not simply as a proposition, but as a tyrannical hold, that should not be lightly broken. These are matters on which biographical information may shed more light. The renewal of a view of culture as patterned must be studied in the context of the development of ideas of pattern in the Boasian tradition (Boas 1911 [cf. Hymes 1967a: 37-9], Lowie 1914: 20). From the thesis of language as a guide to social reality was to follow, after Whorf's rediscovery in the late nineteen-forties, one kind of linguistic method of ethnography, language as a guide to world view. From a second thesis of the 1929 essay was to follow the development that is the main concern of this paper: "linguistics is of

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strategic importance for the methodology of social science" (1949 [1929]: 166). This thesis also depended on the development just traced: the rediscovered unity of language with all of cultural behavior as unconsciously patterned (166) and the special nature of language as the most self-contained sector of tacitly known form (164-5). One can see the implication already in the essay on unconscious patterning. There Sapir mentions gesture and posture (1949 [1927]: 557) and breathing (545-6) in a way that anticipates the development of kinesics, proxemics, and paralinguistics a generation later. That same article spoke of unconsciously known rules with regard to terms of address and permitted social relationships. One can see in the concluding sentence of "Sound patterns in language" a further hint of a linguistics-based methodology, applied to the discovery of the tacit knowledge governing social interaction and communication (1949 (1925]: 45) and, in that same article, the starting point for the methodological foundations of such an approach — the initial statement of structural contrast, of the distinction between 'emic' and 'etic' analysis of behavoir, and of the relations among levels in language that, when carried through to its conclusion, comes to implicate a level of speech acts, and nonverbal acts, together with language proper. None of this is set forth by Sapir himself. He does move to a view of culture in terms of social interaction; he reiterates in telling ways the view of a "more intimate structure of culture", of underlying relationships missed by the 'table of contents' approach that divides cultures up into a priori categories; he repudiates the "desire to lose oneself safely in the historically determined patterns of behavior" that he sees underlying the study of culture as such (1949 [1934]: 592) in favor of an approach that brings every cultural pattern back to the living context from which it has been abstracted in the first place (592). And he sketches the consequences for language (1949 [1934]: 592-3): The social psychology into which the conventional cultural and psychological disciplines must eventually be resolved is related to these paradigmatic studies as an investigation into living speech is related to grammar. I think few cultural disciplines are as exact, as rigorously confiigurated, as self-contained as grammar, but if it is desired to have grammar contribute a significant share to our understanding of human behavior, its definitions, meanings, and classifications must be capable of a significant restatement in terms of a social psychology which transcends the best that we have yet been able to offer in this perilous field of investigation. What applies to grammar applies no less significantly, of course, to the study of ... any segment ... which convenience or tradition leads us to carve out of the actual contexts of human behavior. Set in the context of the rest of Sapir's latest views on the study of man, this passage suggests very strongly the kind of work now being begun under the rubrics of the 'ethnography of speaking' and 'sociolinguistics'. Sapir's very argument as to the failure of conventional approaches, which deal with supposedly self-contained patterns, because behavior is not a recomposition of abstracted patterns, but the very matrix out of which the abstractions have been made in the first place (1949 [1934]:

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594) — that argument is the same as was to be given, more than a generation later, for the ethnography of speaking as an approach that sought the relation of language and culture, not as disparate abstractions, but where it actually existed, in speech. Sapir would seem to have transcended, not only the 'obscure opposition in spirit' of the cultural and personal (1949 [1934]: 592), but also the opposition of language to culture with which this intellectual development had begun. On Aber le's critique It has been argued that linguistics did in fact have an immediate major role in shaping cultural anthropology in the period just discussed. Writing on "the influence of linguistics on early culture and personality theory", Aberle (1960) maintains that methodological assumptions in the linguistic work of Boas and Sapir shaped the limited success, and the eventual cul-de-sac, of the culture-and-personality work of Benedict and others. A mechanical transfer or imposition of linguistics is not suggested. Rather, Given a striking early success in one field of cultural analysis, it would appear natural that the analogy adopted [for an approach to culture] would be that of language. I am not arguing that the approach to language developed in independence of thinking about culture and was then applied to culture. Rather I am saying that certain general assumptions made about culture, including language, proved particularly fruitful for work in linguistics, and that success and more detailed theoretical development in linguistics made the extension of assumptions derived from linguistics to total culture exceedingly tempting. Linguistics is seen to have been influential through the drawing of parallels, explicitly and implicitly, between language and culture as a whole. Aberle locates the ultimate failure of the approach in its restriction of its object of study to just two terms: a cognitively shared culture, on the one hand, and an isomorphic personality, on the other. Missing was a necessary third term, that of 'cultural system' (equivalent to social structure, or network of social interaction). This third term was not derivable from the shared value-orientations and knowledge on which the culture-and-personality approach (a dominant approach in the American anthropology of the time) came to focus. The 'cultural system' is one in which persons participate and through the relationships of persons to values and knowledge can be made intelligible. Its study entails an analysis of the on-going adult system of technological, economic and political interaction within an ecological context. Aberle's critique would apply to the main influence of linguistics (especially generative grammar) on the study of culture and persons today; it faces a cul-de-sac because it cannot handle the matrix of social interaction. 1 agree with Aberle, and indeed wish he would not, like so many social anthropologists, excuse linguistics by saying that what is untenable anthropologically may of course be quite all right for linguists. The difficulty with Aberle's analysis, as a historical account, is that Sapir pretty much agreed with him as well. More precisely, the account does not catch the

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development of Sapir's own thought. If culture-and-personality took the direction it did partly because of an appeal to linguistics, it did so after 1934 in contradiction to Sapir's own views.9 There was indeed a prevalent approach which saw but two terms of analysis, general cultural patterns and individuals; for which cultural patterns were uniform, and the problem of personality study that of explaining the replication of the uniformity in successive generations {cf. the related critiques by Schneider 1965 and Wallace 1961). It would be widely agreed that personality must be studied in terms of what Wallace calls 'organization of diversity' — differential acquisition and possession of values, knowledge, expectations, within a shared social system. Sapir himself came to criticize cultural anthropology, and, in passing, linguistics itself, in such terms. His celebrated articles on the study of personality have just this point, summed up in the often-quoted comment on an idiosyncratic Omaha Indian: "In some sense, Two Crows is never wrong" (Sapir 1949 [1933]: 572; for an application of the perspective to linguistics, adapting Sapir's language, see Hymes 1967c). Sapir's point was that the essence of the cultural is not that it is shared (consensus) but that it is capable of communication to other individuals (symbolic). An idiosyncratic divergence has from the very beginning the essential possibility of culturalized behavior. And in fact from the standpoint of the individual, cultural behavior is not a matter of abstract patterns (Sapir came to speak of them as 'cold' and 'indifferent'), but of participation in various subcultures. He came to conclude that "it is only through an analysis of variation that the reality and meaning of a norm can be established at all" (1949 [1938]: 576), and that "In spite of all that has been claimed to the contrary, we cannot thoroughly understand the dynamics of culture, of society, of history, without sooner or later taking account of the actual interrelationships of human beings" (575). Sapir did not develop his perspective in terms of a third concept, that of social or 'cultural' system. He rejected one term, cultural pattern, as starting point, in favor of the other, the person. Instead of asking how culture was transmitted, he wished to ask how culture was acquired, created, used and shaped, how meaningful. He saw his approach as one of "explicit stress on the total personality as the central point of reference in all problems of behavior and in all problems of 'culture' (analysis of socialized patterns)" (1949 [1939]: 479, n. 1 ; the quotes are Sapir's). But he did also reject the conventional contrast between individual and society (1949 [1932]: 519) to recognize subgroups and subcultures as the common locus of patterns, and he repeatedly insisted on systems of interrelationship, social matrix, experienced realities of communication, specific interactions, as "the true locus of culture" (1949 [1932]: 515). If his focus remained the differential participation of persons, his concern for

9

Harris (1951: 315) suggests that Sapir's formulations in the study of personality "have hardly been understood or used by any professionals, because they are so incisive and lead so readily to social criticism".

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personal meaningfulness and adaptation complements, if it does not indeed lead to, analysis of the social, economic and ecological dimensions. Language and linguistics become caught up in this 'psychiatric' perspective ('psychiatric' for Sapir explicitly means focus on the total personality as central point of reference (1949 [1939]: 579, n. 1); cf. the admonition to set ourselves at the vantage point, not of a passively inquiring, but of a culture-acquiring child (1949 [1934] : 596).) At the end of his life Sapir thus broached a perspective radically different from that with which he began. Indeed, there is no point or publication in his career that can be safely taken as representing 'Sapir's view'. Sapir's view of the relation between language and culture, between linguistics and anthropology, was a continuously changing one. Beginning with ideas and problems set by Boas, he continued to develop their implications, partly in terms of an internal logic, partly in response to factors around him, until his death. It is in the context of this continuing development that one can understand his enunciation of linguistic method as a model for social science. It remains that Sapir's appeal to linguistics as a source of method was not developed by him. In its immediate context it is an argument for the autonomy of the human sciences as a whole (1949 [1929]: 166): Better than any other social science, linguistics shows by its data and methods, necessarily more easily defined than the data and methods of any other type of discipline dealing with socialized behavior, the possibility of a truly scientific study of society which does not ape the methods nor attempt to adopt unrevised the concepts of the natural sciences. And a call for a wide view of the field of linguistics, for it continues : It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. The years after Sapir's death in 1939 were to see, not a broadening, but a narrowing of the effective scope of linguistics in the United States. There were a few studies by students of Sapir in his spirit (notably Newman 1939, 1941), but generally the history of the relation of language to culture after Sapir's death in 1939 can be said almost to have recapitulated, twice, the outlines of his own personal development. An emphasis on the separateness of language and linguistics, a sense of achievement with regard to linguistic form, a beginning to seek out a broader relevance to social life on the basis of that achievement — such can be said to be the course, very roughly, of linguistics, first under Bloomfieldian, then under Chomskian auspices.

Y Sapir enunciated the significance of linguistic method for the cultural sciences in 1929 ; significant professional attention to the notion came in the 1950s. This intervening

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period — roughly, the 1930s and 1940s — saw a great deal of work that was to have importance in cultural anthropology: the development of the structural concepts that were to provide specific exemplars of linguistic method, and the writings on the relation of language to world view that were to provide the first great excitement as to the importance of linguistics after the Second World War. This work, like Sapir's move in the 1930s to a somewhat 'phenomenological', 'existential' approach, did not have apparent consequences at the time. The mid-point of the period — the brink of the Second World War — seems in fact to have been something of a low point for the relation of linguistics to cultural anthropology, so far as published statements by anthropologists are concerned. Lowie elaborated on the Boasian theme of the validating role of practical use of linguistics, but said nothing of Boas' concern for the theoretical importance of linguistics for ethnology (1937: 70, 89, 95, 130, 132-3). Mead (1939) was perceived as a challenge to the view that mastery of the native language (and perhaps of linguistics) was essential (Lowie 1940). An anthropologist was chosen president of the Linguistic Society of America, but not for current work. His presidential address (Kroeber 1941) was brief ; its five pages reviewed four ways in which linguistics and ethnology might contribute one to the other with historical findings. Kluckhohn (1941:110-112) does present the first explicit appeal by a anthropologist to linguistics for conceptions of patterning, and he cites Sapir — but the paper of 1927 and one on phonetic law, not the methodological claim of 1929 or the methodological demonstration of 1925. The concern is to establish the pervasive EXISTENCE of patterning and regularity in culture. Kluckhohn distinguishes overt structures and covert configurations; he stresses the detailed, interrelated, culturally specific character of patterns, as against the relative crudity and arbitrariness of traits defined for crosscultural comparison. Explicit and forceful as he is, more so than any predecessor in the Boasian tradition of concern for cultural pattern, Kluckhohn does not here break with a conception of patterning limited to summative LIKENESS within cultures, contrastiveness only between them. He cites Sapir's example of French speakers not distinguishing English /s/ and /Θ/, but his interest is in the evidence of regularity and stable cross-cultural difference in categorization. Nothing is said of the basis on which /s/ and /Θ/ are found to be units in English. Only after the Second World War would anthropologists begin to think of pattern as a matter of DIFFERENCES within a culture as a matter of relations among units established by internal contrastive relevance. (Kluckhohn himself would cite Sapir's French example [1959] with this added understanding.) The change depended, I believe, on the spread of actual experience, training, in the methods of linguistics, especially of phonology, during the 1940s. Some seven of the other papers in the same volume, a posthumous memorial to Sapir (Spier et al. 1941) were concerned with the relation of linguistics to anthropology (by Voegelin, Swadesh, Trager, Herzog, Emeneau, Newman, Whorf), and the book might have symbolized development of closer ties on the basis of a Sapir tradition. The Second World War intervened.

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The years just after the Second World War show some tension in the relation of linguistics to antropology. The two men who had most powerfully united the two fields in their own persons, Boas and Sapir, were dead (in 1942 and 1939, respectively). Kroeber's interest in linguistics was at a low ebb (see Hymes 1961d). And two activities that had sustained a common world of reference — the study of the American Indian, and problems of historical ethnology — became rapidly peripheral. Most leading linguists in anthropology were identified with Amerindian work, but anthropologists as a whole increasingly were not. Amerindian examples of linguistic structure remained popular, but the historical relationships, and even the names, of American Indian languages passed from common knowledge to esoteric lore. The situation was conditioned by a change of generations. For most linguists, especially students of Sapir and Bloomfield, the relationship to anthropology was important. The approach to language teaching that had been the major focus of the profession during the war, and that had brought linguistics considerable attention, was often called an 'anthropological' approach. Conceptions of method were linked to (although no uniquely determined by) an ethnographic style of work. Anthropology was the main alternative to the otherwise dominant language and literature departments as an intellectual framework and as a source of employment. (The close connections of linguistics to psychology and logic from the late 1950s on were not yet in sight, and separate departments of linguistics had hardly begun to emerge.) Even linguists not close to anthropology often considered their dicipline in principle a branch of anthropology. On the side of cultural anthropology, a change was marked organizationally by revamping of the American Anthropological Association in 1946, a move spearheaded by men trained in the 1930s. It is my impression that such men had less interest in linguistics, and that two factors were important in shaping such an attitude. On the one hand, this generation was at a second remove from the German cultural tradition, evident in Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir, and Radin, that linked anthropology with cultural studies generally, and made language an essential instrument as well as object of interest. On the other hand, this generation did not have much opportunity (or necessity) to learn the methods of linguistic analysis newly developed during the 1930s and early 1940s. Its conception of linguistics harked back to the Boasian style. (The difference extended to orthographic loyalties. Sapir and his students [Herzog et al. 1934] initiated a symbolic change in two senses of the word.) After the war, then, many anthropologists found linguistics officially a branch of their profession, yet a novelty, if not an enigma or a mistake, in its approach. 10 10

Linton (1945b) talked of configuration, but not of language, seemingly pointedly ignoring the linking of the two by Kluckhohn (1941), and the relation of speech to personality and patterning shown earlier by Sapir. As testimony to the climate of opinion, note Trager (1966:25) : "Good ethnographers have always paid attention to 'minute details' of meaning. The 'new phase in descriptive ethnography' that Colby notes is not new — it is merely a long-neglected continuation of the old, tried and true methods of Boas and all founding fathers of our field. True, they were followed by a generation of much lesser stature, with a kind of inbred fear of language and its uses, and the 'graet thinkers'

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Shifts in educational backgrounds of students entering colleges and universities may have had some part; cf. the complaint of Lowie (1944). A further factor may have been the growing prominence, after the war, of British social anthropology, and American anthropology derived from it. As has been noted earlier, British social anthropology (especially under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown, who has pre-eminent at the time), had no place for linguistics as such. In the lectures in the 1930s responsible for his great influence at Chicago he considered language the one subject that might be excluded from a 'natural science of society' (1957:142-143). Some bearers of the new linguistics, proud of their subject and lacking proper recognition, were for their part aggressive in what the Voegelins have called an 'eclipsing stance' (1963: 12) toward previous work. Some seemed to make a dogma of exclusion of the study of meaning, and to derogate vocabulary and texts, as against formal grammar and phonology. It came to seem to some anthropologists that no substantive interest mediated between them and linguistics. The new work in linguistics, and the new linguists, might acquire prestige, but their subject-matter and method appeared disjunct. (A noted postwar anthology [Linton 1945] explicitly excluded linguistics on the grounds of its irrelevance. Cf. also the sense of disjunction signalled in the title of Voegelin 1949a, "Linguistics without meaning and culture without words".) A sense of a traditional unity, yet a patent gap, evoked a series of writings on the relations between linguistics and anthropology, and between language and culture, such as had not been seen since the preceding century. Then the context had been controversy as to the proper basis for classifying ethnic groups as to their history and origin ; now the context was the analysis and explanation of culture. In this respect, the years from the end of the Second World War to 1952-1953 form something of a natural unit. They begin with the resumption of normal academic activity (anticipated, to be sure, before the war was actually over, as in the resumption of the International Journal of American Linguistics at the end of 1944, and the lauching of the new international journal Word in New York in 1945), and end with several, conferences that together express the end of one set of relations for linguistic method and the beginning of a new. The flurry of discussion in these years has three phases: general discussion of the scope and relevance of the two disciplines with regard to each other; discussion of relation between the patterns of language and those of culture, focussed especially on Whorf; and the beginnings of general anthropological of that generation went in for theory, or what they thought was theory, without bothering with troublesome data. There are now once again anthropologists who insist on recording data, including language and remarks about other data ...". In the period itself, one linguist dispassionately noted the anthropologist's viewpoint (Greenberg 1948 [1964]: 28): "Present-day descriptive linguists strive towards formulations in which elements are defined by a purely formal procedure without reference to meaning. While it is in syntactics [i.e., semiotically, in the kind of study just indicated] that recent linguistics has made its most significant méthodologie progress, the remoteness of this aspect of language has led to the recurrent complaints of the cultural scientist against the irrelevance to his problem of a large portion of contemporary linguistics." Cf. Newman in Spier, et al. 1941:94.

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discussion of extensions and transfers of the methods of linguistics to the rest of culture. Scope and relevance. — A number of anthropologically-oriented linguists joined in attempts to define the place and relevance of the new work in linguistics within a larger cultural frame of reference (Voegelin and Harris 1945, 1947; Greenberg 1948; Hockett 1948a, 1948b; Nida 1948; Trager 1949; Olmsted 1950). The principal controversialist was Voegelin (perhaps sensitive to the situation, as chairman of a new department of antropology). He challenged the traditional unity of the two disciplines (1949a), and of language and culture as well (1950), provoking vigorous objection from an ethnologist (Opler 1949), a fellow linguist and a student of Hoijer (Bittle 1952), but persisting in exploring the differences further (1949b, 1951). The thrust of Yoegelin's writings can be seen as provoked by, and intentionally provocative to, the neglect of linguistics by the cultural anthropologists of his generation. They could not both have credit for linguistics in principle and ignore it in practice. Yoegelin's tactic was to seize upon practice as the true test. Method entered into discussions only as an evidence of difference (e.g. Olmsted 1950: 7-8). References to Boas and Sapir did not elaborate on the ideas treated earlier in this paper. When Greenberg concluded a comprehensive analysis with the view that a mature science of culture is unlikely to emerge without the linguistic approach to culture having played a significant role he included questions of method in the "rewarding field which awaits the linguistically oriented ethnologist" only in terms of practical skills and understanding of the linguist's technical processes for the sake of informed use of their product. He did not include use of those technical processes by the ethnologist himself, let alone for the sake of other, non-linguistic products (Greenberg 1948: 147). Sturtevant has pointed out (1964: 124, n. 3): It is significant that Olmsted in a general survey of the relations between linguistics and ethnology made in 1950 envisaged nothing like the present adaptation of linguistic methods to ethnography. Lévi-Strauss had indeed published "L'analyse structurale en linguistique et anthropologie" in New York in 1945. There he had appealed, as had Sapir, to the special place and methodological example of linguistics among the human sciences, specifying the work of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson for its concern with unconscious, rather than conscious, structure; with relations, rather than terms; with, indeed, systems of relations; and with the discovery of necessary relations, general laws. Although LéviStrauss and Jakobson both were in the United States from early in the 1940s, and Jakobson remained (having stayed initially in fact with Boas), their influence on relations between linguistics and anthropology in the United States was to become prominent only with conferences of 1952 and in the period following. Lévi-Strauss' 1945 paper was not taken up, partly perhaps because in French, but no doubt partly because of the prevalent suspicion of things 'European' and 'metaphysical' in the American linguistics of the time.

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The one explicit discussion of relations in method, among the papers here considered, was in one of the pair that initiated the American discussion. Observing that the data of linguistics and ethnology were in general the same, their methods different, Yoegelin and Harris noted specifically (1947: 593; c/Voegelin 1949a: 36, Olmsted 1950: 7-8): Cultural anthropology is dependent upon comparative considerations for finding its elements ; linguistics is not. That is, units of culture were in practice determined by considerations of cross-cultural comparison and classification, those of linguistics through internal analysis of structural relationships. (The issue is independent of the question of the place of general theory, or universals, in analysis of a particular culture or language. Either way of determining units makes assumptions as to theory and universals; either might be a priori or inductive in emphasis.) The Voegelin and Harris statement neglects some study of social structure and cultural patterning, but does reflect a prevalent practice of treating ethnography as not a theoretical activity in its own right, but rather as the filling in of a set of chapter-headings for major departments of culture, the checking off of a list of traits diagnostic within an area, or the identification of one of a set of cross-culturally significant alternative types. 11 It was precisely as warrant for an alternative to such practices that linguistics was to attract some ethnographers a few years later. Voegelin and Harris correctly reflect the sense of disjunction in method at the time they wrote. The same sense of disjunction is to be found with regard to two specific subjectmatters, wherein a congruence of method might be expected, and where, indeed, it was later to emerge, semantics, and social interaction. Writing when semantics was not on the agenda of linguistics, Nida argued the necessity of an ethnological approach (especially from the standpoint of his concern for translation), conluding that "A combination of analytical social anthropology and descriptive linguistics provides the key to the study of semantics" (1945: 208). Greenberg shared Nida's view (1948 [1964: 28]), and went on to argue the importance of semantic description to the ethnologist as well. Both men, the one to a linguistic audience, the other to an anthropological, write in terms of a gap to be overcome by cooperation. Where sharing of training and method are mentioned, it is the linguist who is thought of as acquiring social anthropology, not the converse (Nida 1945: 194, Greenberg 1948 [1964: 28]). In their first article, Voegelin and Harris (1945: 356-7) define 'ethnolinguistic situation' as one in which both verbal and nonverbal behavior are integral parts, and again speak in terms of disjunction: The result of this practical divorce of linguistic work from cultural investigation often means that the final linguistic statements and the final cultural statements are incomplete; or statements covering the ethnolinguistic situation as a whole are neglected. Greenberg (1948 [1964: 28-29]) pointed to study of the use of language under the 11

An interesting, though jaundiced, view of the background can be gained from Radin (1933, ohs. 4-5).

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category of 'pragmatics', including there all that related language to its users, but singling out patterns of (and in) speaking. At the same time he correctly observed that the interest of the linguist was merely marginal, and that though verbal behavoir should be an object of study in its own right to the ethnologist, description of its patterning as a whole was never attempted. In retrospect, one can see the rest of the story of linguistic method in ethnography (and of ethnographic method in linguistics) as largely a response to these three problems : the implicit challenge to reconsider the nature of the cultural, in relation to language; the challenge to take up again the ethnographic study of meaning; the challenge to recast the scope of linguistics and ethnography to encompass patterns of speaking. For the moment, attention was to be focussed elsewhere. Following on discussion of the possible connections between linguistics and ethnography, there was to be concentrated discussion of a connection of the greatest import, language as a key to world view. Language and world view. —Whorf had died in 1941. In 1952 and 1953 it seemed as if the 'Whorf hypothesis' was the question of the relation between language and culture, and between linguistics and anthropology. "Language and culture" seemed for the moment almost to mean Whorf. The timing of the focus on Whorf, and the focus itself, need explanation. Whorf's most comprehensive, and ethnologically judicious, paper on language and culture had appeared in a prominent anthropological volume, the Sapir Festschrift of 1941. Nor was he the only source for such an interest. Papers by Dorothy Lee had begun to appear in 1938 (on Wintu) and 1940 (on Trobriands), and a comprehensive account of her Wintu analysis was published in 1944 in the first issue of the new I JAL. Kluckhohn had cited her 1938 and 1940 articles (and none of Whorf's) in an essay on the nature of culture in a prominent postwar anthropological collection, quoting: "Grammar contains in crystallized form the accumulated and accumulating experience, the Weltanschauung, of a people" (Lee 1938: 89; cited in Kluckhohn and Kelly 1945 [1962: 60]). As the Kluckhohn essay shows, these ideas fitted readily into the concern of American anthropology with cultural pattern (within which, indeed, they had arisen), and particularly fitted the concern with culture and personality, then at its height. The surge of interest at the outset of the 1950s depended, no doubt, on the issuing of four of Whorf's papers in a single pamphlet in 1949. They might, however, have been ignored. The interest they excited was due, I think, to their indentification with linguistics, and to the situation in the relation of linguistics to anthropology that has just been described. First, the four papers in important part were on the nature and promise of linguistics ("Science and linguistics", "Linguistics as an exact science", along with "Languages and logic" and "The relation of habitual thought and behavoir to language" [the paper from the Sapir Festschrift]). Second, the papers were reissued, and rechristened (as 'metalinguistics') by a colleague and friend then near the height

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of his career as a leader of the new linguistics, who with the christening fitted them into a scheme of the relations between the new linguistics and culture, from a linguistic standpoint (Trager 1949). Third, Whorf himself had standing as a linguist, in the line of succession from Sapir, and where Lee treated linguistic facts, Whorf himself wrote grammars (as well as also contributing to historical linguistics). When reissued in 1949, then, Whorf's ideas benefited from the new prestige of linguistics in anthropology. In the minds of many they were associated with its claims of new insight and rigor. At the time there was little knowledge or use of the new linguistics in anthropology. It was as if the concern over the relationship between linguistics and anthropology brought a principle of compensation into play, day-to-day neglect of linguistics in ethnography being matched by interest in language as a major determinant of what ethnographers study. It was as if grammar-writing might again, with Boas, be a method of ethnography, although one that now would not be part of the ethnographer's repertoire, but provided by linguists such as Whorf. There was also excitement at Whorf's sometimes extreme statements, the appeal for the unmasking of unconscious forces (the silver cord of one's mother tongue), and for a new weapon against ethnocentrism. Both Whorf and Lee appealed to interest in inferring cultural pattern, but Whorf appealed as well to the anthropologist's willingness to use relativism in critique of his own civilization. Lee symphatetically interpreted the Wintu, Whorf hailed the Hopi. The sense of excitement was abetted by an initial ignorance of the history of the problem {cf. Hymes 1963: 72-73). In the immediate period the name of the temporary cultural focus proliferated rapidly, from 'Whorf hypothesis' to 'Whorf-Lee hypothesis, (I believe that Kluckhohn so put it to Voegelin in 1952), to the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', as more of its history and precedent became familiar (Hoijer 1953, 1954; cf. Hoijer 1951), and, anonymously, with some recognition of W. von Humboldt and perhaps of Lee, the ' Weltanschauung problem' (Osgood and Sebeok 1952). The initial impact of the 1949 republication would seem to have prevailed, aided perhaps by the collection of much more of Whorf's work (Carroll 1956); later essays refer again simply to the *Whorf(ian) hypothesis' (Trager 1959, Fishman 1960), or to his phrase, adopted from Sapir perhaps, but made famous by him, 'linguistic relativity' (Hymes 1966). If the four papers on 'metalinguistics' (1949) came something like a spark in a charged atmosphere, the fire swirled and died out in very few years. It was Whorf's lot to be cast (mistakenly) as an apostle of radical relativism, as the pendulum swung away from relativism. Mixed results from two summers of experimental studies in the American Southwest in 1955-1956 discouraged some, and were interpreted by others as grounds for ignoring effects of language. In general, recognition that the problem was complex and not amenable to ready experiment, criticism of Whorf's faults, both real and imagined, and a reluctance among many linguists themselves to entertain notions of world view, effectively ended serious investigation. Many had been hostile from the start, to any suggestion of linguistic determinism or relativity, unwittingly

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perpetuating idealism in the name of materialism, by assigning language to the other camp. A consistent and comprehensive materialism, or naturalism, would see in languages sets of verbal tools, and recognize that they, like other tools, condition what they produce, without wholly determining it. But as will be seen with regard to linguistic method in ethnography generally, linguistic approaches tend to be treated in all or nothing terms. (I have tried to assess Whorf's work more fully elsewhere [Hymes 1961a, 1966, 1967].) It is important to note what of Whorf's work was not taken up at the time. His bold statements were discussed, sometimes out of context, but his efforts to develop semantic description and semantic typology were neglected. His key notion of 'fashions of speaking' (in the 1941 paper) was not taken up, though it might easily have led in a sociolinguistic direction. In some of his writings (particularly 'Linguistics as an exact science'), Whorf carried on the theme of Sapir's 1929 claim for the importance of linguistic method. That was to be noted later (Kluckhohn 1959: 265), but not now. In all these respects, the response to Whorf was within the limits of the discussions of scope and relevance in the same years. Turning point. — Conferences in 1952 and 1953 round out the period in focus here, and for the first time bring to the fore some ingredients of the next. The major anthropological conference, held in 1952 at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, was conceived as 'an encyclopedic inventory', international in scope if American in weighting, meeting to assess the postwar situation of the discipline (Published as Anthropology Today [Kroeber et al. 1953]). Four linguistics papers were scheduled, on field work, historical linguistics, structural schools, and "The relation of language to culture" (Hoijer 1953). The general relations were discussed as an introduction, Hoijer rebuffing Voegelin's suggestion of the separation of the two. The body of the essay treated Whorf and Lee (and some of Hoijer's own work). "The central problem of this report is, then, a thesis suggested by Sapir in many of his writings and later developed in more detail by Whorf and others" (Hoijer 1953: 558). At a conference of anthropologists and linguists just following, organized by Voegelin, the same topic was on the agenda (urged on the organizer as the most essential one by Kluckhohn), among several other substantive questions. Yet again in the same summer (and same town) the ' Weltanschauung problem' was included in the report of a seminar that was to herald the emergence of a new major partner for linguistics among the social sciences, psychology. Semantics was salient here, as it had not been at the other; but methodology was not a focus at either. Finally, a special conference was held in Chicago in 1953, following on the main theme of Hoijer's 1952 report, and making Whorf again the focus of the general question of the relations between language and culture, linguistics and anthropology. All this might have seemed a case of putting all the eggs in one basket, so far as the role of linguistics in cultural anthropology was concerned. In the event, even though the place of linguistics was indeed closely interwoven with the fate of Whorfian interests

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(cf. Kluckhohn 1956a), the two were to prove independent. In two of the conferences themselves, the question of linguistic method had come to public attention, although not in the set topics. 12 In his prepared paper ("Universal categories of culture") Kluckhohn took note of the achievements of structural linguistics, but with doubt that they could be duplicated elsewhere (1953: 507, 517): .. .linguistics alone of the branches of anthropology has discovered elemental units (phonemes, morphemes) which are universal, objective, and theorectically meaningful. ...It is arguable whether such units are, in principle, discoverable in sectors of culture less automatic then speech and less closely tied (in some ways) to biological fact (Wiener vs. Lévi-Strauss 1951). In the same year Kluckhohn had published with Kroeber a comprehensive study of the nature of culture, which included a review of much of the literature on the mutual scope and relevance of linguistics and ethnography cited above. The review reached no definite conclusion, and summed up, with regard to method (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 124): It is also clear that language is the most easily separable part or aspect of total culture, that its processes are the most distinctive as well as the best defined in the social sciences. What the 'cultural' equivalent of phonemes or the linguistic equivalent of 'cultural traits' may be has not yet become apparent; it may be unanswerable until the question is reformulated. A few years later Kluckhohn was to state vigorously a quite different conclusion. Tracing first the distinctive character of anthropology to its ties with linguistics, he would refer to papers by Sapir such as "Sound patterns in language" and "The unconscious patterning of behavior in society" as having had a profound impact upon cultural anthropologists, especially such 'configurationalists' as Ruth Benedict (Kluckhohn had himself contributed a paper, "Patterning as exemplified in Navaho culture" to the Sapir Festschrift), and then take from a phonological example of Sapir, not the concept of the phoneme as a unit, but the notions of configuration and contrast as the basis of a method: Sapir pointed out that ".. .the naive Frenchman confounds the two sounds's' of 'sick' and 'th' of 'thick' in a single pattern point—not because he is really unable to hear the difference, but because the setting up of such a difference disturbs his feeling for the necessary configuration of linguistic sounds." T H I S STATEMENT CONSTITUTES A MINISCULE PARADIGM FOR A WHOLE THEORY (my emphasis — DH). What is often decisive in the realms of culture (of which language is one) is not so and so much of something or whether or not phenomena have random distribution (cultural phenomena, by definition, have other than a chance distribution), but rather the question of order and arrangement. ... In my opinion, the study of cultural phenomena will progress mainly along linguistic lines by distinguishing contrastive categories — rather than by measurement as such (1959: 263-264, 267). What had happened in the interval between 1952 and 1959 was that the focus of concern for the relation of linguistics to ethnography had changed drastically. The question of 'cultural' equivalent of the phoneme had come to seem answerable, because in fact it had been reformulated as the question of relevant contrast in all of " The immediately preceding background in linguistics, beginning about 1949, is discussed in VI following.

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culture (including language). The reformulation indeed had already begun when the conferences of 1952 and 1953 were planned. It emerged first in the discussions at the 'Anthropology Today' meeting. An ethnologist's query as to the cultural equivalent of the phoneme led to a discussion by Lounsbury; in response to another request, Lounsbury presented what was in fact the first published sketch of a componential analysis of kinship systems; and, under the published heading of "Minimum units in various aspects of culture", Lévi-Strauss presented examples of structural analysis in art history, technology, social organization, religion and mythology, analysis offered as being of the same type as those in linguistics {i.e., in terms of contrastive distinctive features), requiring only that the materials be approached in terms of function, or use (Tax et al. 1953: 283-7, 278-9, 293-6). At the 1953 'Language in Culture' conference McQuown interjected the question of relations in method into his prepared paper (1954:24-29), and Hockett led off with it (1954: 106-111), presenting as one subheading: "IIB. Development of methods for use in one field on the basis of methods already in use in the other"( 107). Theoretically, he wrote, there are two sets of methods in linguistics, those that work in language because language is culture, and those that work in language because of the special characteristics which distinguish language from all other phases of culture. Which was which, was not yet known (112). Interest in the topic (phrased by Hockett as "linguistics may have methodological lessons for other phases of ethnography" [110]), was strong in the conference discussions, together with interest in semantic description, then regarded as outside linguistics (and hence, a province of ethnography), and tended at times to take attention away from the prescribed theme (see pp. 162-166, 147-250 of the discussions, finely edited by Hoijer). The papers and discussions thus commingle several kinds of use of linguistics as a method of ethnography: a 'penetrating' role of the most important sort, that of disclosing world view; something of a 'validating' role, by example, if not actual transfer, stimulating search for cultural units as universally valid and meaningful as phonemes and morphemes were taken to be; and, least saliently, a 'foundational' role, signalled in discussion of structural analysis and distinctive features, and of the combination of these that was to be known as 'componential analysis'. Semantics being considered on the side of the rest of culture, rather than of language, and kinship terms being at the core of social anthropology, one had here specific, telling extension of linguistic method beyond language. Almost immediately there were to appear programmatic statements, generalizing, or 'centralizing', linguistic method for the analysis of culture in its entirety. In the next section I shall trace these developments. VI Much of the development to be discussed in this section is part of current controversy. That is perhaps the most important fact about it. Several of the lines of work to be noticed have waned, others are waxing, and part of my task will be to suggest reasons

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for the differences in fate. From the standpoint of the whole, the point is that since the start of the 1950s, it has not been possible to discuss seriously ethnographic method, and the nature of culture, without discussing linguistics and the nature of language. Those who reject a foundational role for linguistics are compelled to argue against it. They cannot ignore it. One sees in the field as a whole the cycle of movement, observed in the work of Boas and Sapir, from a separation to a reintegration of language and culture. In the preceding periods, one could indeed focus on the work of individuals (Boas, Sapir, and to some extent, Whorf). Now it is a question of development along several lines at once. Certain names stand out — e.g., Lévi-Strauss, Goodenough — but there are many names, a considerable literature, and influences that are yet spreading. Phases can be discerned: a burst of programmatic publications, drawing on different streams within structural linguistics; the rise of 'structural anthropology', and 'structuralism', with the work of Lévi-Strauss, this having an initial personal footing in the United States in the period in question; the rise of 'ethnoscience', and 'componential analysis', associated with work of Goodenough, Lounsbury, Conklin, Frake and others ; a falling away of interest on the part of linguists with the rise of transformational generative grammar. By the mid-sixties there is an attempt at a reconstruction of ethnoscience in the name of transformational generative grammar and considerable anthropological criticism of linguistic approaches in ethnography, and at the same time a growing ethnographic critique of some approaches in linguistics itself. I shall leave these last three matters for the conclusion (VII). The work to be discussed not only occupies a period of time (coming to a peak approximately 1949-1965), but constitutes a stage as well. New instances of it can be identified even now (cf. Deetz 1967, Schneider 1968: 32). What gives the stage unity is the question it poses and the answer it seeks. The disparity stated by Voegelin and Harris (1947: 593 — see Y above) — that language and culture differ as to units and methods of study — is taken, not as an observation, but as a challenge. Linguistics is taken as enjoying a kind of structure that anthropology otherwise lacks. One seeks to overcome the disparity by using conceptions of structure drawn from linguistics. Cultural anthropologists might have felt no challenge (many, indeed, did not), or might have reasoned oppositely, and challenged linguistics to learn in method from cultural anthropology (cf. Hymes 1961a: 43-45, Vidich in Radin 1966 [1933]). Cultural anthropology, however, was itself much concerned with pattern and structure (the culture and personality movement [Benedict, Mead and others], the social anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown's adherents at Chicago and elsewhere, the debate in general theory as to the nature of American anthropology's regulative concept, 'culture' [cf Kluckhohn and Kelly 1945, Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952]). And, thanks to the teaching of linguistics in anthropology, many anthropologists verified in their own experience that linguists had ways of dealing with pattern and structure that were more precise, demonstrable, comprehensive, explicit. Linguists might assert

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this out of pride, but many anthropologists had reason to believe them. A good many anthropologists, to be sure, found linguistics a forbidding mixture of a physical skill (phonetics) and a logical apparatus (phonemics) beyond their acquisition (so they thought). Mostly this attitude enhanced the prestige of linguistic method, and a certain number of anthropologists assimilated it, and put it to use. (A few centers predominate — Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley — for reasons I cannot fully explain.) Moreover, the two figures dominant in anthropology in the period, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, shared a tradition of scientific humanism that welcomed linguistics for its distinctive rigor. With Cassirer (1961 [1942] : 120), they saw the methodological problems of the human sciences as being "particularly clear in linguistics", and shared the expectation of Boas that "the scientific understanding of man will in all likelihood grow from our understanding of language" (in a report of 1939, quoted in Hymes 1964a: 9). Their shared interest in linguistics was an important factor in the climate of opinion attending the stage here discussed. Conceptions of structure Formulations of the desired conception of structure varied, as did orientations in linguistics itself. All shared (reduced to barest minimum) a focus on UNITS, and their DISTRIBUTIONS. The methodological key is the notion of CONTRASTIVE RELEVANCE. It recurs in the ethnographic applications, and is the essential diacritic of the stage (cf. Garvin 1952: 217-219; Goodenough 1964 [1951]: 188, 1957; Harris 1951: 297; Lévi-Strauss [Tax et al. 1953: 293], Pike 1954; Conklin 1964 [1955]: 190, Lévi-Strauss 1958: 1974, Frake 1964 [1961]: 195, 1962a: 76, 84, 1964 [1961]: 199; Bock 1964: 220, Conklin 1964: 25-26; Hockett 1964: 129, Sturtevant 1964: 107, Colby 1966: 6-10, Deetz 1967: 85-90). The gist of the notion, as a specifically ethnographic instrument, is well expressed by Frake (1962a: 76): The basic methodological concept advocated here — the determination of the set of contrasting responses appropriate to a given, culturally valid, eliciting context — should ultimately be applicable to the 'semantic' analysis of any culturally meaningful behavior.

Here in effect is the point on which Sapir had concluded his pioneering article on sound patterning (1949 [1925]: 45) — "the necessity of getting behind the sense data of any type of expression in order to grasp the intuitively felt and communicated forms which alone give significance to such expression" — developed by structural phonology into a teachable method, and generalized to all of ethnography and culture. (It was the teaching of structural phonology in anthropology departments that inspired the initial ethnographic movement.)13 The principle is at once symbolic and functional. It is SYMBOLIC, as against attempts to study cultural phenomena in mechanistic or narrowly 'naturalistic' ways, i.e., by 15 The accomplishment of structural phonology was also a brilliant realization of the perspective and program for the cultural sciences of Cassirer (1923 — cf. 47-48, 51-52 of the 1953 introduction by Hempel, and 79, 91-93, 155, 159 of the text).

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sheer observation and measurement. Physical properties by themselves, although seemingly objective, lead into a deceptive subjectivity and a morass of uncertainly relevant discriminations, whether one's senses or instruments are relied upon. True objectivity lies in discovering the intersubjective objectivity of the symbolic forms, the cultural systems, participated in by those one is studying. The principle is equally FUNCTIONAL, in that it is not objects or units in themselves, but their place in a system of relations, that is fundamental, and the system of relations presupposes the function in terms of which it is organized — in the case of structural phonology, the function of diiferentiating lexical and grammatical form. The principle, and the results to which it leads, answered to theoretical needs in cultural anthropology. It justified the intuitive recognition that cultural behavior showed regularities not discoverable by quantitative or statistical methods alone, as against a widespread misidentification of science with just such methods (cf. Sapir 1925, 1929, Lévi-Strauss 1945, Kluckhohn 1959); and it mediated between concrete data and universal significance. The units of structural phonology, and those sought in ethnography, were concrete universale (although no one called them that): universal, as concepts in a general methodology answering to the nature of all language, and concrete, as elements specifically determined for each language. The relativistic thrust of the 1930s was ending, and indeed, being reversed, with 'one world' concepts coming to the fore (cf. discussion of universale in Kroeber et al. 1953, and Tax et al. 1953; on methodological grounds the prospect of universality was important to Lévi-Strauss from the outset [1945, eie.]). The lesson of relativism, however, was not unlearned; Boas' warning against distorting a priori frameworks remained a canon. Moreover, the crucial place of field work in American anthropology made discovery of structure through the handling of new, personally obtained data a requirement for every aspirant to professional recognition. Indeed whereas Lévi-Strauss elaborated the structural inspiration of linguistics along ethnological lines, interpreting and comparing data already reported, most American attention was given to the process of field work itself. Linguists had elaborated named units from the time of Bloomfield's Language (1933), most notably phonemes, morphemes, tagmemes, sememes. From about 1950 anthropologists did the same, proceeding from the general analogy of 'phonemes of culture' (Tax et al. 1953: 283-287; cf. Colby 1966: 26, wherein Wescott attributes the origin of the analogy to Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man [1949]) to individuated concepts such as kinemes (Birdwhistell 1952), behavioremes (Pike 1954), mythemes (LéviStrauss 1955), gustemes (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 99-100). None of these terms became a standard part of a productive method. What became general was the underlying principle, christened EMIC by Pike (1954), as distinct from ETIC. (Maybury-Lewis 1965 : 211-12, 227, shows that it became unnecessary to identify Pike as the source.) The emic term of the distinction has been equated with 'native point of view', purely verbal, and 'good'. All these equations are misleading. As formulated by Pike on the basis of PHONEMIC, the notion does not imply that those whose behavior manifests

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an ernie system are conscious of its nature or can formulate it for the investigator. It is so far from being identical with the verbal that Pike uses the example of a car motor, beside stressing study of nonverbal behavior. Emic analysis is not good, etic analysis bad, but rather, there is an interdependence. Emic analysis is simply analysis of the units and relations of a system, where the functional relevance of the units and relations within the system is validated. It means the difference between discovering the principles that actually underlie the choices of residence of members of a community (Goodenough 1956a, Frake 1962b) and classifying the observed facts of residence according to a preconceived scheme. It is not that a preconceived scheme cannot be adequate, but that its adequacy cannot be taken for granted, and must be demonstrated. Crudely put, the difference is between thinking of description as, or as not, a theoretical task. For some, linguistic and ethnographic description have been tasks of observation, recording, and classification. For those who would adopt the term 'emic', description is the discovery of a theory for a particular case, and in principle predictive of new instances of the language or culture concerned. Etic analysis (following Pike 1954) is of two kinds: (1) the initial framework that gives one a purchase on the system (as in phonetic transcription), and (2) the systematic comparison of the results of emic analyses. Quite obviously, (2) feeds back into (1). (Cf. Sturtevant 1964: 101-104, Hymes 1964b: 15-21.) The notion of contrastive relevance (or functional relevance) is basic to 'emic' analysis in ethnography. It implicates more than units as objects of analysis. Equally essential are dimensions, features, and frames (equivalent to domains [Sturtevant 1964]). Units contrast in terms of underlying dimensions, and dimensions are defined in terms of distinctive features. (For example, 'uncle' : 'aunt' contrast on the dimension of sex, defined in terms of the features 'male' : 'female'.) Distinctive features have been to the forefront in anthropological use of linguistics, because of the initial and continuing influence of Prague School phonological and case-system analysis. That contrastive relevance must be ascertained within a determinate context or frame was clear from the linguistic models of phonological orders and grammatical paradigms. The necessity of determining the validity of the frame itself has been as important as the question of units and features, for those anthropologists concerned with ethnographic method (cf. the quotation from Frake above, and Conklin 1955: 341, 1964: 25, Sturtevant 1964: 103-105, Hymes 1962a: 18-19, 1964d). This concern in fact distinguishes ethnographic method proper from the use of contrast and distinctive features in comparative ethnology and general theory independently of ethnography (see discussion of Lévi-Strauss, and of Kluckhohn 1959: 247, in Hymes 1964b: 15-21, and Sturtevant 1964: 103-105). These interdependent concepts — units, contrasting on dimensions defined by features, within a valid frame — constitute the initial lesson learned by ethnography from linguistics, one ethnography continues to apply fruitfully. Formulations varied, as has been mentioned. The particular techniques of American descriptive linguistics played an important part. Thus, Goodenough (1951) used 'complementary distri-

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bution' as a way of arriving at contrastive invariance in a cultural system. Romney and others adopted the strategy of much American phonology, requiring an etic transcription as the basis for procedures of emic analysis (but cf. Frake 1961, where the necessity is rejected, but distinctive feature analysis is mistakenly identified with use of an etic starting point). Much discussion was in terms of 'segmenting the stream of behavior', on the analogy of phonological segmentation, rather more perhaps than in terms of paradigmatic contrast as the basis of segmentation (cf. Hymes 1964b: 16, and 46, n. 5).14 I have given a generalized, somewhat idealized account, based on the consensus that had emerged by 1964 in the main line of ethnographic work ('ethnoscience'). Strategies and tactics varied too. Sometimes the foundational role of linguistic method was stated in essentially inspirational terms, without specific methodological content. Culture was seen as structured, as was language, but not necessarily homologously structured (thus Goodenough 1951, Lévi-Strauss 1958: 98, Trager 1959: 32). A specifically American interest has been elaboration of etic grids, so as not to miss data and distinctions potentially relevant to a domain (cf. Trager 1962: 114). This concern has been especially notable in the analysis of kinship. The danger of an etic grid is that one may rely upon it, rather than test it, thus unwittingly perpetuating the sort of imposition of inadequate categories against which linguistic method (emic analysis) was supposed to guard.15 To avoid mechanical use of etic grids, Metzger and Williams have been concerned to develop a self-correcting discovery procedure, one which arrives at questions and frames warranted as valid within the culture studied (Williams 1966, Siverts 1966-67). This approach combines the generating and validating functions of linguistic method in an explicit way. Others have simply noted a lack of adequate etic grids for most of cultural behavior, and pursued linguistic analysis as the best route to the cognitive structures of a society (Frake 1962) — an example of the penetrating function (what might be called a 'prelinguistic' approach). It is important to notice that for some anthropologists a foundational use of linguistic method does not entail an empirical use of linguistic data (Lévi-Strauss 1955, Bock 1964), even where the cultural system in question (myth, ritual in the two cases cited) finds verbal expression. This is a major difference between 'structural anthropology' and ethnoscience. At the heart of the ethnographic approach has been the criterion that analyses be that is, capable of correctly anticipating and interpreting novel instances

PRODUCTIVE, 14

Much American linguistic work at the time was expressed in behaviorist terms, discouraging adequate attention to function and meaning, and native speaker responses. Much of it attempted to restrict attention to overt features of a corpus. The inability of such an approach to justify its own practice has generally been conceded. (For some discussion and references to structuralist criticism, cf. Hymes 1964b: 16, and n. 5.) The approach belied the 'mentalistic' perspective that made the initial, as well as later, achievements of structural linguistics possible. (Transformational generative grammar is here taken as an extension of structural linguistics.) 15 On etic grids, and other points discussed here, cf. discussion of Colby 1966 by Kay and Keesing. Schneider's criticism of some componential analysis on the score of etic grid (1965,1968) is discussed in VII below.

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of the behavior with which they are concerned as appropriate or inappropriate. It is in virtue of this criterion that the use of linguistic method in ethnography is intended to be what I have dubbed 'validating' and 'penetrating', corresponding to what Chomsky has called achievement of 'descriptive adequacy' (1965: 27). Goodenough (1957) is commonly taken as the starting point of this 'generative' perspective in ethnography (cf. Frake 1962a: 85, 1962b: 54, 1964: 132, Conklin 1964: 25, Sturtevant 1964: 100, Hymes 1964a: 13, Keesing ms. a [initial paragraph]), although this paper, written in 1954, may be seen as a development of the conception of ethnography argued in his first monograph (1951). The general perspective is stated cogently by Conklin (1964: 25-26), from whom I quote the first sentences: An adequate ethnography is here considered to include the culturally significant arrangement of productive statements about the relevant relationships obtaining among locally defined categories and contexts (of objects and events) within a given social matrix. These nonarbitrarily ordered statements should comprise, essentially, a cultural grammar . . . . No common, or indeed very explicit, way of handling the productive statements and relationships that should constitute a cultural grammar emerged (see Sturtevantl964: 123-124, Keesing ms.). Frake's general statement as to contrastive sets, quoted above, occurs in the context, "The BEGINNING of an ethnographic task ..." (my emphasis), but it was this beginning that was most systematically developed. The interrelations of contrastive sets within taxonomic hierarchies, perfect paradigms, and trees (see Conklin 1962, and Kay's comments on Colby 1966) were explored, and some studies of the place of an analyzed institution within a whole culture provided (see especially Frake 1964a, Conklin 1964). The particular methodology was understood as a means to that more general end (cf. Conklin 1964, where the componential analysis proper is relegated to a footnote). There was no clear model for such larger (or deeper) relationships in the linguistics on which the ethnography drew, and none was independently discovered. Nothing is more revealing of the 'taxonomic' character of the level at which American structural linguistics had so far arrived, indeed, than the projection of this linguistics onto cultural behavior. The one task, beyond establishment of units and features, is conceived consistently as the statement of distribution (Garvin 1952, Pike 1954, Hall 1959, Bock 1964, Hockett 1964, Deetz 1967). A late, flat statement is that of Hockett (1964: 130-1): The ethnographer's report of the inside view should appear as a tabulation of the traits of the community, of the distinctive properties of each, and of their schedulings [ = distributions]. There is nothing to be said of a community's way of life that cannot be said in this fashion, and no format can yield greater accuracy and clarity. Just these three concepts, units, features, and distributions, recur in all the generalized formulations by American linguists, from the first statement (Garvin 1952), through the two major general schemes of Trager, Smith and Joos (see Hall 1959, for 'sets,

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isolates, patterns'; and Pike 1954: 'manifestation, feature, distribution modes'), to, as quoted, Hockett. While distribution was applied within language, and applied also within the rest of culture, it was not, inconsistently enough, applied to the relation of language to culture. Such application was to emerge only later, on a rather different basis, as part of a sociolinguistic critique of the image in 'Herderian linguistics' of one language, one culture units (cf. Hymes 1962a, 1964d, 1966, ms. b). The relation of language to culture, structurally conceived, was treated in one of three ways : in terms of homologies, parallels, analogies, whether in general form or specific structures (Lévi-Strauss 1951, 1953b, 1965; Pike 1960; Bock 1964); in terms of complex relations, allowing for homologies, contradictions, and dialectical relations of transformation (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 98), or simply leaving the relations as problematic (Goodenough 1951); and by integration, for this is the proper term for the ethnographic semantics that developed, most notably with regard to kinship, where a subject matter central to culture was analyzed in linguistic terms. What at the time of 'linguistics without meaning and culture without words' would have fallen between the two disciplines, and have required a special name, such as 'ethnolinguistics', became equally a part of both, as linguistics enlarged its subject matter, and ethnography its means. Having characterized the content of this stage, I must now sketch the several lines along which the actual development took place, assessing their outcomes, and evaluating further the development as a whole. The four phases indicated at the outset of this section — linguistics-based programs, structural anthropology, ethnoscience, and the consequences of transformational generative grammar — are interwoven chronologically. I shall separate them somewhat artificially, mentioning chronological interconnections. The first date pertaining to the present stage is 1945, when Lévi-Strauss published his first article taking linguistics as a methodological inspiration. The second date, 1949, belongs also to him in this regard, through publication of his major monograph on social structure, where the example of linguistics, specifically phonology, is acknowledged (1969 [1949] : 492-493), and presentation of a paper at the International Congress of Americanists in New York City, wherein a search for structural correlations between languages and cultures is developed on the basis of his general perspective on both as manifestations of the activity of the unconscious mind. More will be said of his work below. The same Congress was also the occasion for the first specification of structural linguistic concepts as a potential ethnographic method by Garvin. Linguistics-based

approaches

Garvin. — Like Lévi-Strauss, to whose work (1945) he refers, Garvin was indebted to the Prague School and the work of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, the latter of whom, indeed, had much earlier envisioned common cause between linguistics and cultural

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anthropology (Bogatyrev and Jakobson 1929). Like Lévi-Strauss, Garvin spoke of CORRELATIONS. Whereas Emeneau (1950) proposed simply that there did exist some parallels in structure between language and the non-linguistic (in a presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America in 1949), Garvin spoke of an essential parallelism between verbal and non-verbal behavior. The key concept is structure, "stated in terms of relations between units defined in terms of the function of the structure" (217). It is stressed that the parallelism lies in the relevant relations, not the specific contents ('units' [of structure] being distinguished from 'items' [of content]). Garvin singled out, besides units ('actualizable ranges'), the definition of units in terms of distinctive contrast, and distribution (which he preferred to treat as integration of units in units next larger, or of higher level) — in short, the trio of concepts that was to dominate this stage. Features and distribution were illustrated from Garvin's own analysis of the Kutenai language, but not from any analysis of Kutenai culture — presumably because the ethnological source on which he drew did not permit. In the year of publication of the preceding paper, Garvin published another paper (Garvin and Riesenberg 1952) in which a complementary ethnographic analysis could be provided. He did not follow this with other ethnolinguistic studies. Garvin thus has priority for conceiving an ethnographic method utilizing specific linguistic concepts, but its realization, as integral part of unitary investigation, was to be the work of others. Uldall. — A conception of linguistics as part of a general discipline, subtending all of culture, was of course not an idea first put forward after the Second World War. De Saussure had conceived of semiology, of which linguistics would be a part, in his lectures posthumously published in 1916, and Cassirer had envisioned a unity of culture through the analysis of the symbolic function in its several forms (1923, 1944). Neither seems to have influenced American anthropology directly. A behaviorist formulation of semiotics by Morris (1946) is indeed reflected in the general outlook of Greenberg (1948) and Lounsbury (1956); but it apportioned the field of semiotics only. Morris did not provide specifications as to cultural method. One general formulation, linguistically inspired and implemented, did develop in the years before and during the Second World War. It came from the version of structural linguistics formulated in Copenhagen by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Uldall, glossematics, and was brought to print by Uldall. Uldall argued the case for a common methodology for the humanities (the human, or cultural, sciences), and exemplified a glossematic approach in terms of the analysis of text. The monograph was delayed, not appearing until 1957, as only one of two intended parts {cf. its preface, and Uldall and Shipley 1966: 6-8). Uldall had had contact with American anthropology, through field work out of Berkeley in the 1930s, and illustrated some of his points in the monograph with a California Indian language, Maidu. Glossematics itself was taught at successive

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Linguistic Institutes at Indiana University by Hjelmslev (1952) and Uldall (1953). It had been the subject of a presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America (Haugen 1951), and Hjelmslev's Prolegomena appeared in English translation in 1953, being reviewed at length (Garvin 1954). Both leading textbooks of the decade borrowed from its terminology (Gleason 1955, Hockett 1958) without acknowledgement,16 and Uldall's monograph did stimulate at least one ethnographer who read it (Maner Thorpe, whose Korean ethnographic studies remain unpublished); but both the linguistics and the general program remained marginal in the United States. The American currents were already in motion on the basis of other modes of linguistic statement, and the novel glossematic terminology and methodology seemed at best equivalent. Glossematics remained a purely linguistic school, neither having nor acquiring anthropological practitioners. With the deaths of Uldall and Hjelmslev, it now seems a finished chapter. The great impact in the early fifties came from two sources in American linguistics, George Trager (and his associates), and Kenneth Pike. Behind both is the figure of Sapir. Pike dedicated his book (1954-60) to Sapir, reproducing a photograph taken by himself as frontispiece. In the Sapir Festschrift article he later cited as a starting point for paralinguistics (1958:1), Trager used Sapir's 'epoch-making' "Sound Patterns in Language" (1925) as a precedent for extension of 'configurational' linguistics to prosodie phenomena. In collecting "Four articles on metalinguistics" by Sapir's informal student Whorf, he chose the one from the Sapir Festschrift and others on Sapir's theme of the importance of linguistics as a model for sciences {cf. Whorf 1956a in Hymes 1964a: 136). (The theme of the special importance of linguistics was more widely shared [Boas, quoted above, Hockett 1948b, reflecting Bloomfield, and others].) 1949 appears to be a year in which the initial impetus toward connecting language with culture, in terms of linguistic structure, gathered and broke on every side. Besides Lévi-Strauss's monograph and paper, Garvin's paper, Emeneau's presidential address, and Kluckhohn's reflection of linguistics in his Mirror for Man, there was a paper by Zellig Harris, also at the Americanist Congress (1952), and the publication of Trager's first general program for the field of linguistics. At the time a unity of content (Whorf) rather than of method dominates anthropological attention, as we have seen. But within four or five years, the thrust of the discussion at the major anthropological conferences, discussed in Y, was to be matched by specific programs and a fair amount of implementation. The most extensive empirical implementation was to be associated with Trager, the greater conceptual success with Pike. Trager. — In 1949 Trager defined the field of linguistics (in a pamphlet of that title) as having three parts: 'pre-linguistics' (physical and biological bases) on one side, 'micro-linguistics' — the usual analysis of language — in the center, and 'metalinguistics' beyond, concerned with the 'relations between language and any of the 18 The crosscutting distinctions, expression and content, and form and substance, as the design of language, in Gleason; 'cenematic' and 'plerematic' as general types of unit in Hockett.

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other cultural systems' (1949: 7). In the same year he had Whorf's four papers republished. These anticipations were quickly followed by attention to 'metalinguistic phonology', 'metalinguistic morphology' (Trager and Smith 1951: 81-88), and style; a mimeographed "An outline of metalinguistic analysis" (Smith 1952) extended the analysis of vocal phenomena. Birdwhistell took up gesture and body motion, under the name KINESICS, and a general, language-centered approach to all of culture, under the aegis of communication, was developed by Trager and Hall (Hall and Trager 1953, Trager and Hall 1954), communication itself being placed in a larger setting called 'symbolics'. In Hall's best known book (1959) he included a ten-by-ten typology of the compartments of culture, developed with Trager, and the trio of descriptive concepts mentioned above (set, isolate, pattern), as general to culture. Trager himself later elaborated a scheme of 3 cultural processes (setting, content, functioning), which, successively applied, yield 9 foci, 27 fields, and 81 systems of culture (Trager 1962). Trager's own purpose would seem to have had two main parts, one generally foundational, the other the development of etic grids as 'generating' devices. Fundamental is the assumption of structure: If language can be structurally analyzed, and if the rest of culture has been largely conditioned by language, then all of culture must be structurally analyzable also . . . . The realization of this view is seen as vindication of Whorf, but specific structural parallels are not required : ... [this] does not mean that parts of culture other than language are necessarily to be analyzed homologously or even analogously with language, but they can be analyzed in their own terms ... [and we can] compare them for points of relationship (Trager 1959: 32). As to method, I have for some years been concerned with the analysis of culture, with the goal of finding a guiding methodology that would ensure getting all the data (Trager 1962: 114, citing Hall and Trager 1953). In the mid-fifties the group associated with Trager and Smith (Bloch, Hill, Joos, McQuown and others) was central to linguistics in the United States, and its extensions into other communicative modalities attracted considerable attention. Today it is moribund. The explanation would seem to be that the linguistic base was lost, and the anthropological offshoots failed to take root. The attention to semantics and language varieties was somewhat marginal, Joos (1958) making an interesting finding as to relations among lexical meanings, and proposing (1959, 1962) a suggestive conception of English styles, as the leading contributions of the group to the growing interest in the two subjects. The strength and promise of the approach, for anthropology, and other fields as well, especially psychiatry, was the work on communicative codes interwoven with language in social interaction. After a promising start, the work on paralinguistics, kinesics and the like

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bogged down. It contributed to pioneering work of Alan Lomax in ethnomusicology, and helped give rise to Hall's suggestive work on spatial and other nonvocal relationships in communication ('proxemics') (1959, 1963). A good deal of insight and documentation accumulated (see discussions in Sebeok, Hayes, Bateson 1964 by Birdwhistell, Hall, McQuown, Mead and others, and Hockett 1960). Much of it remained unpublished, however, including the initial study (known in manuscript as "The natural history of an interview"). The one major publication (Pittenger, Hockett, Danehy 1960) showed the intricacy possible to the subject, but not how to establish social interpretations or to develop an ethnographically usable method. To a considerable extent, the work was prisoner of its analog of the phonetic grid and discovery of phonemes by segmentation and classification. It specified and classified etic factors, yet failed to develop a workable transition to emic analysis. It lavished precision on dissection of corpora in the laboratory and left ethnographic interpretation informal. Communicative forms and their functions never quite united in an adequate way. While acknowledging Sapir as its forefather (both Birdwhistell and Hall did so explicitly), the work did not absorb his lesson, the principle LéviStrauss shared with the Prague School, of seizing upon the function, or purpose, that informs and organizes structure and observed detail. Similarly, the general approach to culture remained, in Hall's and Trager's hands, a classification, becoming neither a theory nor a usable method. To say that culture has 100 (Hall 1959) or 81 (Trager 1962) divisions, deductively, is about as useful as insisting that all languages have eight parts of speech, and goes against the concern of ethnographers to validate analysis in terms proper to the culture studied. Some of those attracted to the work in what might be loosely called 'circumlinguistic' analysis drifted away, or were pulled back into questions within linguistics proper by the rise of transformational generative grammar from 1957 onwards, and a continuing cadre of researchers did not arise. This approach most of all felt the impact of Chomsky's work, establishing, as it did, new problems within the heart of linguistics, and withdrawing the attention of the new, expanding generation of linguists from other aspects of communication. The initial expansion outward from linguistics had presumed that the linguistic foundations were secure. The confidence centered in 1951 around Trager and Smith (1951), and Harris (1951), as having provided the necessary tools for language structure proper, such that new domains could be explored — that confidence vanished. Trager and others did not meet the challenge to reconstruct a linguistic basis adequate to the new conception of linguistic structure itself. Their linguistics became isolated, and 'circumlinguistic' work drifted. Pike. — Pike's linguistically-based general program began to appear almost simultaneously with that of Trager and Hall (1954-1960). Pike argued the necessity of a unified methodology, one capable of 'moving without jar' between the verbal and nonverbal aspects of unitary cultural behavior (e.g., conduct in which verbal and nonverbal elements may substitute for each other within the same frame). As has

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been noted, Pike coined the widely adopted terms 'emic' and 'etic' (from 'phonemic' and 'phonetic'), and developed a trimodal conception of structure (manifestation, feature, and distribution). He linked his general approach to a new linguistic concept, appropriating a term used by Bloomfield, tagmeme. (The concept unites a contrastive set with a position in which it occurs, thus integrating the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of grammatical structure.) Where the Trager approach had conceived of parts of culture as something like separate slices of a cake, and its 'circumlinguistic work' rather like tracing the marbling within a single slice, Pike maintained no view of culture as a whole, but for the analysis of specific behavior argued the necessity of multiple perspectives ('particle, wave, field' — see Pike's 1956 article in Hymes 1964a), and developed analyses of integral events and behavioral sequences. He introduced the notion of 'behavioreme' as a possible basic unit of culture, and informally analyzed a breakfast, a church service, and a football game to illustrate his approach. Where the Trager et al. approach became isolated from general linguistic practice and anthropological thought, the linguistic practice introduced by Pike in these volumes ('tagmemics') became the mode of description of many languages, through the work of missionary linguists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, of whose training Pike was in large part in charge. (The initial 'power base' of Trager and Smith, in the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, had ended with the advent of the Eisenhower administration in January 1953.) For those concerned with what was to be called the 'ethnoscience' approach, the first chapters of Part I (1954) of Pike's book were exciting. Not only did he articulate the same attitude and give it a name ('emic analysis'), but also he stood apart from the antipathy to meaning and intuition characteristic of the then dominant behaviorist outlook. Pike insisted on theoretical recognition of what, through his own extensive field work, he knew practice to require — use of meaning, native reaction, recognition of the substantive (identificational) as well as contrastive role of units, interplay of structural levels. He was the first to renew actively the methodological outlook of Sapir, then under a cloud. Notions analogous to those of Pike were used effectively by K. French (1955) and Mayers (1959) in studies of ritual behavior. Bock (1964) adapted Pike to study of roles and social structure, and Hymes (1958) and Dundes (1962) borrowed from him in study of folk tale and myth (though see Sturtevant 1964: 103 on the latter). There has been no major development of Pike's approach, however, only piecemeal utilization. Pike himself has devoted most of his energies subsequently to developing tagmemics as a specifically linguistic approach, and to related analytic devices (such as matrices) and materials (such as texts, approached in terms of rhetorical analysis). The promised concluding chapter of his major work (1960, ch. 17) is a disappointment. The initial promise had been an open-ended exploration of cultural behavior, leading to examples of integrated analysis. Whether because of diversion of energies due to the unanticipated challenge of Chomsky's linguistic theory, or other responsibilities, the work concludes by falling back upon language and society as separate, parallel

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structures, the very approach that the opening chapters had sought to transcend. To sum up this part: the linguists discussed here envisioned a general analysis of culture, but failed to sustain it. They stimulated anthropologists and others, but did not transcend the practice of linguistics proper, neither becoming nor training ethnographers. The anthropological component necessary to analysis of culture was left to anthropologists to supply.

Anthropologically-based approaches 'Structural anthropology'. — Lévi-Strauss, as we have seen, was first of anthropologists after the Second World War to see and use the implications of structural linguistics for the study of culture. As did all others then, he appealed to the example of phonology, then the major accomplishment and theoretical focus. He was indebted particularly to the Prague school, especially Roman Jakobson (1945,1969 [1949] : xxvi). From the beginning, Lévi-Strauss was concerned with more than particular empirical parallels between language and culture, although he regarded each finding as itself an empirical problem ( c f . 1958 [1953]: 90, and his reply to the criticism that he reduced society to language [1958: 93-110]). He explicitly sought an underlying unity. If phonology can attain objective realities, consisting of systems of relations, produced by the unconscious activity of the mind, can an identical method lead to the same results for other types of social phenomena? If so, can we admit that diverse forms of social life are in nature substantially the same — systems of conduct that are projections, on the plane of conscious, socialized thought, of universal laws regulating the unconscious activity of the mind? (1958 [1951]: 67; cf. 1968 [1949b]: 492-3, 1958 [1945]: 62). For this foundational role of linguistics, rooted in the unconscious, Lévi-Strauss had first cited Trubetzkoy as exemplar (1958 [1945]: 40), in linguistics proper; for the anthropological application, he came to cite Boas as originator (1958 [1949a]: 26, 1950: xxx, 1953a: 526-527). To this underlying warrant of structure, Lévi-Strauss adds a second, 'external' and 'functional' foundation: the various structures in society (kinship and marriage, economics, language) can be treated as types of communication, as diverse modes of laws of exchange (1958 [1949b]: 69; 1949c; 1958 [1953]: 326-327). Of all those contributing to the subject, Lévi-Strauss provided the most profound conception of an integration of linguistic method in anthropology, combining a sense of the history of the disciplines, of their relation to other disciplines, of the need as well as the possibility of new methods, of the need as well the possibility of theoretical justification and empirical demonstration. On the most general question, he saw at once that linguistics presents anthropology, not just an opportunity, but an obligation. Anthropological theory must account for language. There cannot be no relation between language and culture, nor can there be a total correlation (if there were, it would have been already recognized). The task is to discover the aspects and levels

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of the actual relationships (1958 [1953b]: 90-91 ; cf. 1958: 98). At the Conference of anthropologists and linguists (Bloomington, 1952), Lévi-Strauss put directly and concretely the answer to the crux stated by Voegelin and Harris, that the methods and units of linguistics and ethnology were in general distinct. He discussed Whorf in terms of an attempt at correlations between language and culture (cf. Whorf 1956a, 1941b), correlations which do not always carry conviction. Is not the reason that Whorf's methodological requirements for culture are less exacting than those for language? The error is to compare results of a methodic, quite abstract analysis of language with ethnographic observations that are merely empirical, or the result of an arbitrary segmentation of social reality (1958 [1953b] : 84,1958:97 ; cf. Olmsted 1950 : 7-8). Lévi-Strauss suggests examples of what is wanted, proposing first that among the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma of the American Southwest, mythology and kinship are parallel in form within each society (and mutually in contrast between societies); linguistic correlations might also be found. As a more complex example of how anthropologists must proceed, in order to meet linguists on common ground, he elaborates part of his Americanist Congress paper (1958 [1951]). There he had compared the languages and kinship systems of several areas of the world as to structure (simple/complex) and elements (few/many). Here he contrasts the IndoEuropean and Sino-Tibetan areas, concluding that in the former the social structure is simple, the elements numerous and complex, while in the latter, the reverse is the case. Once social structure is thus analyzed, can one not engage in dialogue with the linguist? (1958 [1953b]: 87-90). Lévi-Strauss is the world's leading figure in anthropology today, but not because of his attempts to bring together the results of linguistics and social anthropology. The suggestions he put forward were not taken up, except in a critical vein (Olmsted and Moore 1952) or with reservations (Kluckhohn 1961b).17 His most recent direct analogy between linguistic and cultural systems (1958: 99-100, 1965) has met with reservations (Sturtevant 1964: 103) and outright rejection, both as to the empirical implications and the theoretical basis of the analogy (Shankmann 1969). Much of the American response to Lévi-Strauss stems from a difference in fundamental outlook (Schölte 1966), reflecting different intellectual histories in the United States and on the continent, but it is not the criticism alone that requires explanation. It is the success as well. Lévi-Strauss' work in social structure (1949 is the major contribution) has become a central reference point and created something of a school. His analyses of totemism (1962) and of 'primitive' thought (1962) have restored to prominence what were central concerns of anthropology in the first part of the century, and together are THE anthropological interpretation of the human mind for our day. His work on 17 Lévi-Strauss pointed out neglect of the problem posed "by the concrete attitude of a culture toward its language" (1958 [1953b]: 77-8), but the problem came to the fore only with the growth of sociolinguistics (cf. Hymes 1966: 124, 158).

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myth (1955, 1960, and the series of four volumes now appearing, Mythologiques) has revived materials and a subject also long neglected by social anthropologists, and has inspired a host of related studies by others. In all these respects Lévi-Strauss has stimulated interest in linguistics among anthropologists, by his own reference to its example,18 and, in his work on totemism and myth, by combining the logic of binary oppositions with ethnographic detail to shed considerable light on folk taxonomies, a subject central to ethnographic semantics. Other anthropologists have not taken up the specific linguistic analogies drawn by Lévi-Strauss, and criticism of them (e.g., Shankmann 1969) is in fact justified. The example set by Lévi-Strauss in the analysis of social structure, folk taxonomy, and myth, has been taken up, because he has shown how to obtain new understanding of materials that were (in the case of social structure) or could now become (in the case of taxonomies and myth) integral parts of the development of social anthropology itself. He enlarged the scope of structural understanding in the first case, and showed its possibility in the second. Other anthropologists did not need to share Lévi-Strauss' personal history of inspiration by structural phonology, or faith in the unified activity of the human mind, to be challenged by, and profit from, his substantive work. It was possible for them to test his insights in materials of their own. A related case is instructive. Kluckhohn, like Lévi-Strauss, was stimulated by Jakobson's conception of distinctive features. He was indeed stimulated by LéviStrauss as well, returning from the 'Anthropology Today' conference of 1952 with the report that Lévi-Strauss was the one person who had had something new to say (David Schneider, personal communication). In a manner somewhat like that of Lévi-Strauss, Kluckhohn sought to achieve results like those of linguistics in another cultural domain, values, rather than social structure. His three papers (1956b, 1958a, 1958b) and a chapter on Greek values in a posthumously published set of lectures (1961a) were built upon after his death only by a student, Benjamin Colby, and that only temporarily. The reason for the neglect, I think, is that the connection between the formal structure and the content to be illuminated appeared arbitrary and remote. Kinship and marriage, totemic classifications, myths were palpable anthropological subject-matter; Lévi-Strauss explained something already there. Value-emphases were nebulous ; the distinctive features seemed to create, but not to explain, an object (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962: 327-31). Lévi-Strauss did much to shape a climate of opinion receptive to linguistics, but did not much shape the form linguistic method took in ethnography itself. After the initial neglect of his ideas, and lack of sympathy, there came a dramatic turn, so that by 1958, or 1960 certainly, a commonalty of interest between his work and that of ethnoscience was mutually recognized. As has been shown, however, Lévi-Strauss dealt with linguistic concepts at the level of ethnological comparison and general 18 Thus, Davenport (1963: 216) writes: "It was the fusion of the formal method of linguistics with the French Année Sociologique school, founded by Durkheim, that has yielded this new and influential approach to social structure."

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theory, rather than of ethnographic discovery. In interpreting specific cases, he used the general notion of qualitative structure, often in revealing ways. The logic of analysis did not in fact depend upon linguistic formats, nor even upon linguistically analyzed data. (He maintained that myth structure was independent of its verbal form — against this, cf. Hymes 1968a.) The relationships arrived at might in principle have been found without either. Lévi-Strauss thus stimulated ethnographers to seek evidence of structures of the sort he analyzed, but assigned linguistics no clear role in the search. Explicit integration of linguistics in ethnography was primarily a development indigenous to the United States. 'Ethnoscience''. — The term 'ethnoscience' is not entirely happy (cf. Sturtevant 1964, Williams 1966), but has come to be conventionally assigned to the work to be discussed here. In origin it is a generalization of such terms as 'ethnobotany', 'ethnozoology', etc., and indicates the goal of analyzing indigenous systems of classification and knowledge. 'Ethno' indicates the concern with analysis of cultural systems in their own terms ; 'science' refers ambiguously both to the goals of the work itself, and to the assumption that native cultural systems are not imperfect versions of Western science, but products of human rationality and experience in their own right (cf. LéviStrauss 1962 on the universality of the 'savage' mind). The essence of the approach, as it developed in this stage, has been characterized in large part at the outset of this section, and a major survey is available (Sturtevant 1964; cf. also Colby 1966, and comments thereto). Here I shall sketch the history of the approach, before relating it (and structural anthropology) to the emergence of transformational generative grammar. The main contributors to the approach have generally considered Goodenough (1951, 1957) its starting point. Goodenough had in fact come to see linguistics as a model for cultural anthropology while a graduate student at Yale in 1940. Problems raised in his work in social psychology as to the concept of self found an answer in insights gained from the principles of linguistic analysis taught that year at Yale by Trager (personal communication from Goodenough; Trager was not himself, discussing cultural analysis). Lounsbury independently worked along similar lines, regarding kinship (recall the discussions at the Anthropology Today symposium [Tax et al. 1953]), and Conklin (1955) published a pioneer article, based on field work in the Philippines that had begun at the end of the Second World War. The new approach first gained considerable public attention with the publication of articles on kinship semantics by Goodenough and Lounsbury in the issue of Language dedicated to Kroeber (1956). In the same year David French (1956) published a pioneering sketch of a general approach. Kinship remained the exclusive focus of Lounsbury's work (1964a, 1964b, 1965), and the principal concern of many {cf. studies in Romney and D'Andrade 1964, Hammel 1965, and references therein). Frake (1961, 1962a, 1962b, 1964a, 1964b) extended the scope of analysis to other cultural domains, and articulated the goals and principles of the approach. Mean-

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while Metzger and Williams (1963a, 1963b, 1966) developed explicit methods in relation to several cultural domains (see also Black and Metzger 1965). The years 1964-1965 comprise a crest of the initial impetus, reflected in several volumes (Goodenough 1964, Romney and D'Andrade 1964, Gumperz and Hymes 1964, Nader 1965, Hammel 1965). The success of the 'ethnoscience' approach, like that of structural anthropology, is due to three concurrent factors. First, the fate of the work has not been tied to the fate of a particular formulation of linguistic method. More must be said about this point immediately below, but it is generally true that the two successful anthropological approaches have worked with concepts GENERALIZED from linguistics, and have done so in ways responsive to the nature of the particular materials to be analyzed. Particular linguistic formulations have indeed colored particular pieces of work, but the central notion of contrastive relevance has transcended such differences, and proven an enduring basis of analysis. Granted this notion, and the related notions of domain, dimension, feature, unit, and relations among such, changed linguistic formulations can be absorbed. Second, the two successful approaches have addressed themselves to problems important to anthropology, and have become part of sustained developments within anthropology. They have not remained programmatic proposals and classifications. In this respect, it has been generally true that anthropologists have absorbed linguistics, but that linguists have not absorbed anthropology. There are indeed linguists who are good ethnographers, but it is a plain fact that none of the general programs originating in a particular linguistic school have found ethnographic realization. (This need not always be true. One may yet see departments of linguistics hire anthropologists, as departments of anthropology now hire linguists ; but a change in the usual conception of the basis of linguistic description will be required.) Third, the two approaches have in fact been phases of larger movements of thought, of the general growth of structural and formal analysis in this century, and of the return of interest in cognition in psychology and other fields since the early fifties. The leading figures in the two approaches have not at all restricted themselves to linguistics as a source of method and insight. Lévi-Strauss was early interested in communication theory (1951, 1953a; cf. Davenport 1964: 216, who stresses the significance of this). Goodenough has developed applications of Guttman scaling to social structure; Conklin has employed graph theory; Hammel, Metzger, Romney and others have explored the mathematics appropriate to computer simulation and processing; various adaptations of algebra have been employed in semantic analysis itself (cf. Romney and D'Andrade 1964; Hammel 1965, e.g. Lamb 1965; and Buchler and Selby 1968, ch. 9). A long-run view may well find that linguistics has played a transitional role in the development of a full-fledged formal methodology in anthropology. Because it studies material of interest and familiarity, and because it is in close proximity within a shared tradition, linguistics may well be an indispensable efficient cause of formalization within anthropology; but the full story of the trend

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toward explicitness, precision, and mathematical models will not reduce to its role. (The textbook by Buchler and Selby [1968] is an indication of this general prospect; cf. Kay ms.)

VII The story that I have tried to sketch is almost complete — from a signalling of the centrality of language and an unconscious unity of methodological outlook early in this century to the establishment of methods of analysis inspired by linguistics as significant movements in anthropology. Yet there remain strands of the story that require comment — criticisms which, if correct, would belie the apparent success of the development so far sketched, on the one hand, and criticisms which, on the other hand, point to further advances. I shall consider the role of transformational generative grammar first, then take up critiques on anthropological grounds, and other critiques from within the movement toward a linguistic method of ethnography itself. Transformational generative

grammar

Early in the preceding section it was noted that the question of 'cultural grammars' — of statements of the relations among the different structural domains — had not been resolved. The rise of transformational generative grammar posed this question in sharp form. The challenge posed by this approach to conventional structural linguistics was transferred to ethnography. Broadly speaking, the conception of linguistic structure on which the first stage of modern linguistic ethnography was based worked well enough in the discovery of phonemic and morphemic units, and of some semantic properties. Contrast and co-occurrence, segmentation and classification, enabled one to recognize relevant sets of units, together with their positions and privileges of occurrence within sentences. Where it first clearly was seen to fail was in handling systematic relations BETWEEN sentences. It depended on the occurring order of relations among elements. If the goal of structural linguistics is defined as explicating the relation between sound and meaning (as was commonly held by structuralists), then the relations obtained by classification and distributional statements do not exhaust the relations that are relevant. Lyons (1968: 247) gets to the heart of the matter. There are "deeper connections" between sentences which "cut across the surface grammar", and that "have much to do with how we speak and understand", though "still largely unexplored, in any systematic way, by grammarians" (Lyons is quoting Hockett 1958). To deal with these connections, one must recognize, in addition to the surface grammar observable in occurring sentences, one or more levels of deep grammar, and seek to understand

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the complex, but systematic ways in which they are related. (The terms 'deep' and 'surface', which have become general in linguistics, are due to Hockett.) Lyons defines TRANSFORMATIONAL relationships as these 'deeper connections', and generalizes the concept of transformational grammar to comprise "any grammar that claims to assign to each sentence that it generates (i.e., accounts for) both a deep-structure and a surface-structure analysis and systematically to relate the two analyses" (1968: 248). Recognition of transformational relationships has brought radical reformulation of structural linguistics, and change within the initial reformulation itself. For present purposes, some informal examples of what is involved will serve. In (a) Kennedy forced Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles, and (b) Khrushchev was forced by Kennedy to withdraw the missiles, the subjects and objects of the two sentences are exactly opposite, so far as surface structure is concerned; yet, underlying the surface relationships, Kennedy and Khrushchev have the same relationship in both ('logical subject' and 'logical object' in traditional terminology). Here different surface structures manifest a single underlying relationship. Conversely, a single surface structure may manifest different underlying relationships. Thus, (c) Kicking horses can be dangerous may be equivalent either to (d) It can be dangerous to kick horses, or to (e) Horses that kick can be dangerous. That is, horses is the surface subject, but may be either 'object' or 'subject' in underlying relationship. And of course, as with the first example, (f) It can be dangerous to kick horses (g) To kick horses can be dangerous (h) Kicking horses can be dangerous have all the same underlying relationship between horses and kick. Finally, the relationships of a single surface element and position can be quite complex. In (i) What made Eric mad was to be dismissed as naive, Eric is at once object of made mad, object of dismissed, and subject of the predication be naive (cf. Chomsky 1965: 70). The logic here is essentially the same as that used by Sapir (1925) to show that an implicit level of phonology exists behind the observed level of phonetics : differing sets of sounds may have the same underlying pattern, and the same sets of sounds may have differing underlying patterns. Recognition of this logic brought to the fore a new functional relation. CONTRASTIVE RELEVANCE could warrant the status, and disclose something of the organization of elements ; TRANSFORMATIONS (or operations

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of equivalent role) were required to give an adequate account of their organization. It is important to note that the level of deep structure, which is entailed by transformational analysis, is not simply an abstraction from the particularities of surface structure. The deep structure of a system may bear no obvious resemblance to its surface structure, being.much more different in form than the examples given above suggest. It is equally important to note that transformations do not merely handle distributional relationships of individual elements (e.g., assigning kick its proper place in (f-g-h) above). Transformations operate on the underlying structural relationships themselves, and, as the name implies, can change one structure into another. One could say that the first lesson learned from linguistics by ethnography has had to do with units and their distributions, and the second with levels and their relations. This second lesson can indeed be taken to mark a new phase in the development of a linguistic method of ethnography. That it marks a new stage, a new path to success after previous failure, however, as has been claimed (Werner 1966, Durbin 1966; see especially Yidbeck and Pia 1966: 71), is not the case. Within linguistics there could be a sharp sense of antithesis between the goals of transformational generative grammar and the descriptive linguistics that immediately preceded it. Even this antithesis was far from complete, and concerned the particular 'neo-Bloomfieldian' behaviorism that was temporarily dominant after the Second World War. The 'mentalism' of the new approach was not in any way in conflict with the outlooks of Pike, students of Sapir, and Jakobson and those following him. (Anthropologists like Goodenough, indeed, heartily welcomed the Chomskian critique of behaviorism.)19 The goal of accounting for productivity, the ability of users of languages to produce and interpret an indefinitely large number of novel sentences on the basis of a finite system of rules, was made central to linguistics by Chomsky (cf. Hymes 1964b: 30, n. 9). In cultural anthropology Goodenough (1957) had independently stated the goal of ethnography in such a way as to make the generative goal of linguistics a special case (cf. Conklin 1962a: 119, Frake 1962a: 85, Sturtevant 1964: 99, Hymes 1964b: 30-31). The goal of accounting for the underlying connections among specific structures (Durbin 1966) was in view from the outset (cf. Goodenough 1951, Keesing ms., and discussion earlier in this section). The goal 19 In his analysis of Iroquois kinship, presented orally at the Vth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Philadelphia 1956, and in lectures at Harvard and Yale that spring, Lounsbury set as his aim to explain how an Iroquois (here, specifically a Seneca) could apply an implicit knowledge of his kinship terminology in designating any and all possible kin correctly. By extending analysis to all possible kin, rather than limiting it to the most salient cases, as had commonly been the case in anthropological analyses of kinship type, Lounsbury showed earlier interpretations of Iroquois kinship to have been mistaken. The two modes of social classification kinship terminology and clan membership, had been regarded as equivalent. When analysis of terminology beyond immediate kin was carried through, the two classifications were found to be in fact different (cf. the published account, Lounsbury 1964: 1079, n. 4). Lounsbury treated kinship terms as a set of intensively, not extensively, defined categories, capable of productive use in new situations.

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of relating internal knowledge to plans and strategies for its use (Werner 1966: 44, Videbeck and Pia 1966) was already a part of ethnoscience (cf. Goodenough 1956a, Frake 1962b, Wallace 1961a, 1965b), as it was already a part of cognitive psychology (with which the ethnoscience approach grew up in close connection — see Romney and D'Andrade 1964, Parts IV, V). The goal of analyzing a level of underlying (deep) structure, one possibly quite different from occurring structures, was present from the start in the work of Lévi-Strauss (cf. 1958: 364,1962: 328), as both a lesson from linguistics and a goal for anthropology. He expresses it most tellingly perhaps in a famous paragraph in response to criticism (1960b: 52): He [the critic] claims to be a structuralist, he even claims to defend structuralism against my reckless manner of handling it. But he is still a structuralist in Radcliffe-Brown's terms, namely, he believes the structure to lie at the level of empirical reality, and to be a part of it. Therefore, when he is presented a structural model which departs from empirical reality, he feels cheated in some devious way. To him, social structure is like a kind of jig-saw puzzle, and everything is achieved when one has discovered how the pieces fit together. But, if the pieces have been arbitrarily cut, there is no structure at all. On the other hand, if, as is sometimes done, the pieces were automatically modified by a cam-shaft, the structure of the puzzle exists, not at the empirical level (since there are many ways of recognizing the pieces which fit together): its key lies in the mathematical formula expressing the shape of the cams and their speed of rotation; something very remote from the puzzle as it appears to the player, although it 'explains' the puzzle in the one and only intelligible way. The linguistic critique of this view, indeed, would be that the empirical level of structure is seemingly abandoned, whereas a goal of transformational generative grammar is to account for the systematic relations between the two levels. Some linguists and anthropologists indeed did not allow for deep structure in their formulations of cultural analysis (Hockett 1964, Bock 1964), but that is not the case with the main body of ethnoscience work, a point recognized recently by Buchler and Selby (1968): "We ... tried to indicate our agreement with Goodenough (1956b) that we are more interested in strategies and motives, and underlying structures, than in topological descriptions." They there succinctly christen the two points just discussed as ground rules and sets of strategies, the two jointly defining the goal of analysis. The technical handling of relations between deep and surface structure has itself undergone major revision within linguistics (cf. Chomsky 1965), and there are a number of distinct approaches, both within and without the transformational school, taking it in the narrower sense of those whose work derives from Chomsky (cf. Bach and Harms 1968, papers by Lamb in Romney and D'Andrade 1964 and Hammel 1965, among others). Use of generative rules was introduced into analysis of kinship ('componential analysis') early on by Lounsbury (1964b, but presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia in 1961). Lévi-Strauss had dealt with transformations between systems (1956, 1958: 98, 365-6), and in his work in mythology has developed a concept of transformation quite analogous to that of recent grammar. Indeed, the underlying structure is taken as like

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a Boolean algebra, just as in Chomsky's syntax (Chomsky 1965; Lévi-Strauss 1960). Some experiments have been made in representing social interaction by transformational rules of Chomsky's type, but not published. In general, there are a variety of formal models available in linguistics for representing the relations between structures; linguistics itself is exploring new models drawn from logic; and the choice of model for a particular cultural system must be empirically validated Moreover, the adequacy of transformational grammar as a basis for ethnography must itself be critically assessed (cf. Hymes 1964b: 24-33, ms. b). The contributions of Werner and Durbin (1966) do not themselves mark a new advance. Werner reduces the scope of ethnoscience to explicit verbal statements (43), indeed, to a subset of a subset of grammatical sentences (44), conceiving a hierarchy such that not all grammatical sentences are semantically interpretable, and not all semantically interpretable sentences culturally appropriate, these last being the object of study. The difficulty is that not all culturally appropriate statements are in fact grammatical, given the limitations of the usual grammars; the relation of nonequivalence works both ways. And to restrict ethnoscience to verbal propositions is to mistake a route for a destination. Speech is an indispensable and often privileged means of access to native knowledge and cultural systems, but has never been considered the exclusive means or goal (cf. Frake 1962a: 75-6 [ = 1968: 436], Sturtevant 1964: 107, Keesing 1966: 23). Werner, moreover, proposes to assimilate the pragmatic component ('know-how') of cultural competence to entries in a dictionary, accepting a suggestion that most of cultural competence (the knowledge and ability to use it of members of a culture) is simply a list (43)! The complexities of structure already in view (cf. Wallace 1961, Frake 1964c, Conklin 1964, Wallace 1965b) are ignored, for what, from a generative view of grammar, is a very 'taxonomic' view of culture. (Chomsky has used 'taxonomic' to designate linguistic approaches confined to analysis of surface structure.) In short, the goals of generative grammar and ethnoscience are largely shared (a point recognized by Göhring 1967: 808); the new techniques of generative statement have begun to be utilized, and such novel technical suggestions as Werner and Durbin actually make have been absorbed within the general development of structural anthropology and ethnoscience (cf. references to both in Buchler and Selby 1968). The attempt at defining a new stage was inspired by the enthusiasm within linguistics proper and the sense of revolution there, but made in relative ignorance of the anthropological context.20 The example indicates again the difficulty, if not impossibility, of basing an ethnographic approach on the specific form of a linguistic model. 20

Indeed, transformational generative grammar appears a revolutionary change more against the background of American behaviorism, than in the larger context of Sapir, Pike, Jakobson and others. In the long run it may well appear an extension of structuralism, defined by discovery of the functional principle necessary for adequate analysis of syntax, and by the recasting of structural phonology consequent on the working out of the principle.

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If the critics were wrong in thinking to hold the goals of generative grammar up against those of ethnoscience, they were right in saying that progress toward the goals had been but partial. If they were wrong in overlooking how much needed yet to be done in analysis just of 'surface structure' systems, they were right in saying that relations between systems, and to a deeper structure, remained obscure. Much of the reason might fairly have been found in the very small number of anthropologists engaged in such research, and more might have been made of the progress within the particular areas, especially kinship, where attention was concentrated. More serious, however, than these criticisms on linguistic grounds are the critiques on anthropological grounds. Some are misguided, but some are well taken, and together they may significantly affect the participation in the approaches by ethnographers, a factor which we have seen to be crucial. Anthropological

critiques

Harris. — Some critics misunderstand the work in question. Most important of these is Marvin Harris. His standpoint is that of 'cultural materialism' (Harris 1968). It must be added that the standpoint is closer to what may technically be called mechanical materialism than it is to the Marx whom Lévi-Strauss (1958: 110, 366, 369; 1962: 325) and Sartre (1963) acknowledge as a point of departure for anthropology. For Harris, a scientific method must be objective and a scientific theory deterministic. To work through language is to rely on what people say, therefore to be subjective and indeterministic. Taking over the 'emic' : 'etic' distinction, and equating 'emic* with the verbal, Harris argues for the necessity of an 'etic', i.e., nonverbal approach. Only an observational analysis, wholly external to the subject, can be objective. Harris is right as to the need for development of observational description, and devotes commendable energy to it, building on the work of Barker and Wright. The disagreement arises from the inadequacy, IN PRINCIPLE, of an observational method. Lacking any way of determining contrastive relevance, whether by interview, learning the system partially oneself, or testing in other ways, the observational method cannot discover qualitatively discrete units. To establish significant units, to pass from a mass of observed details to some sort of structure, it must fall back on a criterion of quantitative cumulation. In one or another way, frequency becomes decisive for the threshold dividing the significant from the non-significant. Such a criterion cannot distinguish what is rare, or unobserved, from what is systemically impossible. It cannot tell when two observationally identical occurrences are systemically distinct, and two observationally different occurrences systemically the same. (Recall the syntactic examples given earlier, and the development from phonetics to phonology [on which cf. Lamb 1964: 75].) In short, such an approach cannot at all recognize, let alone make explicit and precise, what are elementary properties of cultural behavior. There is a special irony in equating an 'emic' approach with the verbal, subjective, and, because subject to conscious intent, indeterministic. The origin of the term in

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'phonemic' should itself show the equation to be false. Phonology is a celebrated case of unconscious patterning. Users of a language cannot normally articulate their phonological system, and lack terminology with which to do so. Their answers to questions provide indispensable evidence of their system, not the system itself. As defined by Harris, 'emic' analysis is a method that phonemics could not itself employ. (The example shows also the error in equating 'emic' with analysis of terminology.) In short, an ethnography requires observation, but the purely observational approach advocated by Harris (1962) is one that has not absorbed long-standing lessons of structural linguistics, indeed, that rebels against the main tradition of American anthropology (cf. Sapir 1949 [1927]: 546-547). Harris has recently (1968) granted emic analysis a place, when the problem is to crack the code employed by native communicators. That is all that those who advocate it propose. Harris persists, however, in defining 'emic' categories by what he terms their "logico-empirical relationship to cognitive processes", rather than by the use to which they are put. The result is to wholly confuse the relationship of emic to etic analysis, throwing what are moments, or steps, of a single research strategy into opposition on the basis of an ontological dichotomy. Because it deals with semantic phenomena, Kroeber's early (1909) list of dimensions recurrent in kinship terminologies is taken to be 'emic', whereas it has clearly the status of a contribution to an etic grid. Types of kinship relation, like types of speech sound, may have reference to (potential) ideas and logical relationships, as Harris says, but their emic status depends on their being shown to be parts of a given system. Harris is led to consider such etic grids 'emic', when used comparatively, but this could be true only if one were willing to assume them to be parts of a system in a generalized mind of mankind (or of God). There are, to be sure, structural relations among emic systems, as Lévi-Strauss has been at pains to show {e.g., 1958: 98 within societies, 265-6 between societies; on distinctive features in this respect, cf. Hymes 1964b: 15); but these again are the result of analysis, not an input to it. Emic analysis is criticized for lack of attention to predictability, which Harris associates with probability: "An ethnography carried out according to etic principles is thus a corpus of probabilistic predications about the behavior of classes of people. Predictive failures in that corpus require the reformulation of the probabilities of the description as a whole." The criterion of predictability, in the sense of anticipation and interpretation of newly occurring cultural behavior, has been part of the ethnoscience approach from the outset, as we have seen. Analyses are indeed revised in the light of failure in this regard (as is of course a daily occurrence in linguistic analysis). Indeed, continuing feedback, self-correction of this sort is intrinsic to the ethnographic practice of Goodenough, Metzger and Williams, etc. Quantitative relationships have not been common in linguistic and ethnoscientific work, but have been employed by Romney and D'Andrade, Wallace, and others, to test validity. Labov (1966) has employed quantitative relationships to discover social structuring hitherto invisible, relating phonological variation to social mobility, social

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position and situational context. Harris is right to criticize any who would exclude quantitative and probabilistic relationships — the members of a culture have themselves a knowledge of them — but he perhaps misses the point as to their role. To predict what will happen is not the same thing as to explain it. The same level of predictive success may be obtainable for several different analyses. To choose among them, one of course seeks predictions or cases covered by one, not the others; often the generality, consistency, or other theoretical fit of one analysis is the basis for preferring it. Often, indeed, the fact itself of possible alternative analyses is what is of interest (Wallace 1961b). In all these respects, it is not predictiveness alone, but the way in which the analysis explains the structure underlying the predicted behavior, that counts. Harris raises questions about the social reference of an emic analysis, the degree of sharing of structures, situational and personal variation, and the like. Much of what he says should indeed be counted as criticism of some studies, in terms of their own goals; it is part of a necessary ethnographic critique of some conventional linguistic assumptions. Harris misses, however, the attention already given to these matters within ethnoscience, and the fact that the range of possible variation, situational and personal, and indeed, of change, is a function of the available structures {cf. Wallace 1961a, 1965a). Linguistic models themselves incorporate ways of dealing with the selection of alternatives according to situations. It is not the case, as Harris would seem to think, that variation can be expressed only statistically. Such instances as a Trukese father reversing the respect due his daughter-in-law do not invalidate a structural analysis of status relationships. They show the presence of transformational, as well as contrastive, relations. An ethnography must deal with culturally appropriate ways to insult, flatter, etc., as well as to show normal respect. The reported comment, "A good hard jolt was just what she deserved", shows the cultural appropriateness of the transformational result in the Trukese case that Harris singles out. Variation often requires statistics, but they must be integrated with the kinds of structural relations that linguists dub 'context-sensitive rules', 'marked and unmarked categories', and transformational (here, concerned with operations on the relations between behaviors, persons, situations). Harris charges that "In the new ethnography [ = ethnoscience] ... culture is a timeless system of logical categories. Hegel's historicism, his only redeeming feature, has been dropped in favor of a synchronic idealist dialect known as distinctive feature analyis." It is fair to criticize any who separate structural analysis from history and from the motives and needs without which cognitive structures would not exist, or function. The need to study developmental process has been urged within ethnoscience (Brown 1964: 251-222). The general point is the same here as with regard to variation. History and psychodynamics are in important part functions of, changes in and uses of, cultural structures. It is through structural analysis that one can discover what DOES change, and what is organized for personal meaning and expression (for an example with regard to myth structure, cf. Hymes 1968a; Barth

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1966: 33, Wolf 1964: 44-5, 1967: 459 who integrate structure in larger interactional and historical processes). Harris submits "that it is only with respect to statistically insignificant or scientifically trivial performances that behavior stream events can be predicted from a small set of emic rules". He is right to stress the emergent properties of interaction among persons, properties which go beyond what can be said to be part of the cognitive structures of the individuals. It is possible, and necessary, to study personal strategies as well as cultural ground rules. No one would maintain, however, that the number of relevant rules is small, or that discovery of their interrelations is easy (cf. Sapir 1949 [1929]: 165). Again, the path lies through, not around, the analysis of structure. And it might be thought no small thing to explain, on 'emic' terms, so much of the working of man's most essential tool, speech, to lay bare much of what enables men to adapt to and transcend situations. Harris takes it as significant that other sciences had not had to search out subjective worlds of form, which is hardly an argument, if one's subjectmatter, culture, is such a world. As a counter-illustration, he discusses the Bathonga, noting density and spacing of the animal and human populations, under technico-environmental conditions of southern Mozambique. The example brings to the fore some essential factors of a cultural analysis. Of course Harris is right that emic rules must confront etic reality. Some ethnoscience analyses have done so, showing for example cultural rules underlying the spacing of a human population (Frake 1962b). Harris' discussion of the Bathonga leaves the two (emic rules, etic reality) separate. Material conditions and constraints are left unrelated to purposes and patterns of behavior of the Bathonga. A charge of 'idealism' and 'timeless system' often implies irrelevance to human problems and social change. The etic analysis sketched by Harris appears irrelevant, except from the standpoint of a disinterested observer or a totalitarian control precisely designed not to take indigenous ways and desires into account. Harris asserts that the superiority of the etic approach is that it cannot fail to make discoveries about history. If men make history, it cannot succeed (cf. Diamond 1964: 40-1, 45). Harris has provided the most extended, sustained criticism of the ethnoscience approach. He articulates views that are probably widely held (cf. those to be immediately mentioned). He has come to grant the possibility of an emic approach, but sets it against, and subordinate to, its opposite. For ethnoscience, the two approaches are interdependent, and 'emic analysis' is not an option, but an indispensable means. Hammer. — Harris' mistaken equation of 'emic' with overt verbalization is repeated by Hammer (1966: 370). Hammer accepts formal analysis, contrasting it with 'empirical analysis', which deals with "what people say and do, where they live, how many of them there are, what parts of their environment they use and how they use it" (371). Formal analysis, by contrast, deals with systems, such as grammars, and

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semantic domains, in such a way that only an internal, formal criterion of evaluation is possible. Explanation requires both to be joined, but no suggestion is made as to how the joining might be done. Hammer misconceives the two writers she discusses (Chomsky, Wallace), basing a 1966 article on Chomsky's (1957) study, and being apparently ignorant of his discussions of just the problem of the empirical nature of linguistics. She in fact mistakes his disavowal of accounting for the processes of actual speaking and hearing as a disavowal of account for anything actually internal to users of a language, thus ignoring what Chomsky takes to be the purpose of the entire analysis (Chomsky 1965, and many other writings). She also mistakenly equates completeness, as a matter of enumerating the contents of a language, with the technical use of finiteness in transformational generative grammar, and is unaware of the studies of change on a transformational basis (for whose absence she reproaches Chomsky). Hammer does recognize real problems when she stresses the difference between the structuring of reality by a 'native' and of data by an analyst; the need to study change; and the empirical factors which need to be united with formal analyses for full explanation of a system. What she does not recognize are the efforts to test for cognitive validity (Conklin 1955, Frake 1961, Wallace 1961, 1965a, 1965b, Romney and D'Andrade 1964). Her essay leaves an impression of two disjunct approaches. In point of fact, many of those pursuing formal analysis are at the same time seeking to integrate it with 'empirical analysis' as defined by Hammer (cf. Frake 1962b, Goodenough 1956). What is not clear is that there is a corresponding effort by 'empirical analysts'. Burling. — The problem of the 'psychological reality' of structural analyses has been raised by Burling (1964), who stresses the vast number of theoretically possible analyses for a given set. Burling, like Hammer, omits to mention the many ways in which ethnographic and psychological research deal with the problem (cf. Buchler and Selby 205-207). Berreman. — Berreman (1966) has attacked the new approach as a threat to the scope that anthropology must have. Insofar as there is any tendency to make a cult of the approach, such an objection is fair. And it is perhaps legitimate fun to single out methodological studies, such as that of Metzger and Williams on 'firewood' (1966), as if they symbolized a narrowness and irrelevance intrinsic to the approach. It is strange irony, however, when the critique is made in the name of a call for an anthropology that is both rigorous and scientific, insightful and humanistic, verifiable and perceptive (Berreman 1966: 347). That call is a restatement of the reasons for which Boas, Sapir, Kroeber, Kluckhohn and others encouraged linguistic methods within anthropology, and why Goodenough, Conklin, Frake, Lounsbury and others have developed them.

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Vidich. — A similar attack is made by Vidich (1966), as if to seek rigor through language and linguistics was incompatible with humanistic insight, although the men he attacks, Kluckhohn and Lévi-Strauss, have been major spokesmen for an anthropological humanism. Vidich betrays the same sense of necessary opposition when he interprets recent work in sociolinguistics (Gumperz and Hymes 1964) as a 'retreat' from a scientistic linguistics to readdress oneself to communication and understanding (1966: lxxxii, n. 56, cxi, n. 73), whereas 'scientistic' linguistics is an indispensable part of the program in question. These are criticisms of what linguistic method in ethnography tries to do. They mostly misunderstand its nature, and the necessity for it. While they call attention to real difficulties and problems that are not resolved, they perpetuate a division between study of language and study of culture. They do this, indeed, on possibly conflicting grounds, charging a linguistic approach variously with being unscientific and with being 'scientistic'. Some of the criticisms (e.g., Burling, Hammer) in fact attach to ANY cultural analysis, not just to those conducted under the aegis of linguistics and ethnoscience. The relation between an analysis and reality is a GENERAL problem, and it is curious that an approach that explicitly faces it is criticized, as if other approaches did not face the problem at all, as if failure to examine it meant it did not exist. Schneider. — Such critiques are at best cautionary, not serious theoretical ventures, so long as they show no way of incorporating what is already known as true about linguistic and related structures in a more comprehensive framework. A telling criticism is one that shows the approach not to satisfy its own accepted criteria. Schneider (1965, 1968) has made just such a critique of some of the work in componential analysis of kinship. Schneider himself makes some use of linguistic concepts (1968: 32, 111, n. 3). Schneider understands the point of an intensional analysis of kin terms as contrastive sets, defined by a finite set of implicit features. His criticism is that some leading analyses of American kinship have taken for granted, rather than validated, the domain of terms analyzed. From his own ethnographic research, Schneider finds that 'relative' may mean either a person related at all, or a person significantly related, when an informant answers questions containing the term. Moreover, the terminology used in referring to kin is not necessarily either identical with, or privileged with regard to, terminology used in addressing kin or introducing them. In short, Schneider finds that the domain to be analyzed has not been properly validated. Schneider's point has been made on a formal basis by Tyler (1969). Having shown the relation of parentage (P) to be the one genuine primitive relation in the usual kinship typologies, such that "The a priori etic grid utilized in the genealogical method presupposes P", Tyler concludes that it is just on this basis (but not necessarily any other) that Lounsbury is right in interpreting kinship terminologies as extensions from a core set of terms for the immediate family relationships. Tyler suggests the need to transcend the grid so defined, and himself has earlier indicated how to do so (1966).

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The essential thing here is the danger, ever present, of substituting a mechanical for a dialectical use of'etic grids', or analytic frames of reference. (Cf. Lévi-Strauss 1962: 325-326 on analytical and dialectical reason, the latter the exploratory, adapting arm of the former; and Conklin 1955 for an ethnographic example.) One tendency noted above is to criticize a new method in terms that would invalidate old methods too — this is one of the risks a new method, especially a new method claiming novel rigor, must run. A subtler risk is a failure to carry valid criticism through, out of respect or hesitation before an established discipline. In the present case, this danger may be summed up in the phrase, "It may be good linguistics, but it's bad anthropology." Some anthropologists make such statements. But bad anthropology cannot be good linguistics — that at least is a fundamental assumption of this study. In the particular case of ethnographic semantics, if an analysis is false on anthropological grounds, because of error in defining its domain, no linguistic excellence can save it. It is just as much the goal of linguistics as of ethnography to analyze correctly the tacit knowledge of participants in a culture. The impossibility of a separation as to goals in this respect is part of what I have meant by referring to ethnographic semantics as having resolved the relation of linguistics to anthropology, language to culture, by integration. Linguistics has the greater concern to place semantic analysis in the context of grammar, anthropology to place it in the context of culture, but adequacy of analysis is the concern of both. Speaking

In section IV it was said that three considerations determined the outcome of the history recounted here: reconsideration of the nature of the cultural on structural terms, and the extension of linguistic analysis into semantics and into social interaction. The first two have come about, and their development so far has been our focus. The third development has also begun, although less advanced. It is a prime example of the need for a constructive anthropological critique of linguistics, as opposed to passive acceptance or rejection. The absence of semantic description from linguistics and anthropology in the years just after the Second World War could not but be noticed. It had been present before, and, for some approaches, still was. First mediating between linguisitics and ethnography, semantics became integrated into both. The fundamental conception of language, of the object of linguistic description, as linking sound and meaning, prevailed, and at the same time, remained unchanged. What was not much noticed was the absence of description of the use of language. Structural linguistics, indeed, had taken as its charter the separation of language, as structure, from speech, as variation, and this charter had not been successfully amended. Discussions of the relation between language and culture were reduced in practice to discussions of the normal practice of the two disciplines of linguistics and anthropology, and the patterning of speech, the structure of speech acts, was not normally described by either.

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To trace the history of this third consideration would be to start a new story, the development of stylistics and sociolinguistics. Three points can be made here. First, the premise of the work in question is that speech is itself structured. In this respect, the ETHNOGRAPHY OF SPEAKING complements ethnographic semantics, as an extension of the notion of structure radiating out from linguistics (cf. Hymes 1962, 1964b, 1964d). Second, the goal is to discover underlying knowledge, as in contemporary linguistics, but the term employed in linguistics for this, COMPETENCE, is redefined. Whereas it had been restricted to grammatical knowledge (Chomsky 1965), it is extended to the gamut of knowledge, and the abilities as well, that underlie speaking, and more generally, communicative competence in the normal sense of the word (Hymes 1964b, ms. b). Third, the sociolinguistic, or ethnography-of-speaking, approach departs sharply from some of the methodological assumptions of ordinary linguistics. In place of assuming homogeneity of knowledge and use, organized solely around the function of reference, the new approach assumes heterogeneity, and a plurality of functions, including the expressive. It takes as its starting point, not a single language, from which connections to social life may later be sought, but a community's speech economy, of which a particular language is but one component, together with other varieties of language, and modes of communication, within a system of scenes, participants, channels, and acts and genres of speech. When this change of starting point is systematically pursued, it leads to a general critique of long-standing assumptions as to the relation of language to culture. Many of the misgivings and doubts expressed by critics of a linguistic approach are taken into account, by a reconstitution of the linguistic approach itself. In particular, phenomena of variation and use are taken into account. (Cf. Hymes 1964b, Labov 1964, 1966; Gumperz and Hymes 1964, Hymes and Gumperz 1970; and the critiques of particular topics in Hymes 1966, 1967b, 1968a, 1968b.) In brief, one may say that the carrying-out of this third line of development, that of social interaction, leads to complementing a linguistic method of ethnography by an ETHNOGRAPHIC METHOD OF LINGUISTICS (cf. Labov 1966, Hymes 1967c). It provides for an integration of linguistics and ethnography in the study of the structure of speech, including explication of texts as to both verbal form and context of performance, parallel to that in the study of semantic structure. In doing so, the new approach transcends the basis for an integration of language and culture possible previously. In the initial proposals of Lévi-Strauss, and typically in anthropological thinking, the question of a relation between language and culture has been taken as a question of correlations between separate analyses. The guarantee, or promise, of correlation was the unconscious activity of the human mind. Such an approach takes the traditional 'departments' of human life for granted (just as did Cassirer 1923). In the new approach the definition of 'departments' (religion, art, language, etc.) in a culture is taken as itself a problem (cf. Frake 1964a); a unity is sought in the integration of speech in social action; and the ethnographic method itself is required to guarantee the structure and relations, so that conscious and purposeful activity

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need not be set apart (contrast Lévi-Strauss 1950 : xxx). It is thus in principle possible for the new approach to deal with social reality as practical activity, and to conceive and rationally understand the coincidence of changing of circumstances and of human activity as revolutionary practice (Marx 1968: 660-664). From this vantage point, the assumptions of both Marvin Harris and Lévi-Strauss can be seen as complementary products of a certain stage in the human sciences. The two are united in a desire to discover structure in human life, to achieve a determinate, scientific status for the human sciences. In reaction against idealism, one approach saw any reference to factors internal to man as concessions to subjectivity and indeterminism. It saw structure as the product of forces external to man, to individuals, independent of their wills. Men as diverse as Lenin and Leslie White shared this view {cf. Hymes 1964b: 18). In seeking to account for intuitively known structures, a second approach discounted external factors (sometimes, as with Cassirer 1923, ignoring them altogether), seeing structure as the product of the human mind. Yet it too placed structure beyond the intervention of human consciousness or will, either in principle (Boas, the early Sapir, Lévi-Strauss) or by speaking of MAN in abstraction from historical MEN (Cassirer). BOTH approaches make a science of man and conscious control of human history incompatible. Each approach perpetuates the other, because of what it neglects, the first perhaps more so than the second. The structuring of social life is a product of the interaction of men and their circumstances, of the human mind and human ecology, so to speak. (Here is the crux to which Hammer validly calls attention.) There is no longer even tactical motivation for denying that some of the determinants of human action and social structure are within human beings — that thesis was perhaps understandable, as an ideological necessity, in a period when the social sciences had to define their autonomy from biology and psychology, as well as from philosophy and religion. Our present understanding of biology and ethnology, permits a NATURALISTIC understanding of human nature that is neither 'materialistic' nor 'idealistic' in the simple terms in which the two have been felt to be opposed. Likewise, it cannot be satisfactory for long to pursue a science of man that perhaps reintegrates culture with nature, contemplatively (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 320), and satisfies the scientific thirst for uniformity and generality, but that has nothing to say to man's present prospect and social change (Wolf 1968; 1964: 96). The practice of linguistic ethnography can participate in transcending this opposition. It finds structure in the activity of the human mind, conscious as well as unconscious. It does not justify structure by some one source of data (verbal or nonverbal) and a monopolistic epistemological claim. It does not postulate structure as end in itself, but as indispensable means. If it places structure at the center of its work, that is because it believes structure — meaningful structure — to be at the center of human life. If the genesis, maintenance, and change of social and cultural order — their acquisition and meaningfulness in personal life — are to be explained, the nature of the order must be known. Those who honor Marx should grant no less. True, some stop short of dynamics and change, from the side of structural analysis, just as

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some fall short of structure in the study of its conditions. For the tradition singled out as central to this study, from Boas and Sapir through Goodenough, Conklin, Wallace, Frake and others, either is a fault, not a goal. I speak here of promise, as much as, or more than, of accomplishment. If LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHY may serve to designate the dual focus of a 'linguistic method of ethnography', comprised in an 'ethnographic method of linguistics', then the prospect that it holds out for the next stage in the study of the relation of language to culture, in the relation of linguistics to anthropology, may be indicated in two diagrams, which together summarize the discussion just above. The realization of the prospect would be in large part a realization of the final outlook of Sapir. I . RELATION OF LANGUAGE TO CULTURE

(a) Language opposed to culture (Voegelin and Harris, 1947, M. Harris, 1962) (b) Language parallel to culture (Lévi-Strauss, others) (c) Language integral to culture (ethnographic semantics, ethnography of speaking) I I . WARRANT FOR STRUCTURE

(a) external (economic, ecological, behavioral observation, etc.) (b) internal (unconscious activity of human mind) (c) ethnographic practice

EPILOGUE

With so many false starts and unfulfilled beginnings; with specifically linguistic methodology incorporated within logical and mathematical methods generally; with the initial inspiration of linguistics to 'structural anthropology' ending with the analogies between language and culture unproven, and language as necessary integument to myth renounced; with realization that there is needed an ethnographic critique, as well as use, of linguistics in 'ethnoscience' ; much of the subject of this study must seem a local episode, based on the enthusiasm of a linguistics flushed with discovery and success, and the anxiety and parochialism of an anthropology, uncertain of its proper domain, and needing a familiar field, language, to mediate to it the movement of our century toward qualitative, mathematical analysis in all fields. In two respects, however, the questions raised by the development we have traced are part of the permanent agenda of anthropology, and indeed, of the human sciences. This is so because : (1) There are structures and meanings accessible only through language and the methods of linguistics, either as language itself, or as adjacent to, or interwoven with, it. There is much yet to be discovered here, as to kinds of structures and meanings, not just as to determination of known kinds in new milieux.

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(2) The theory of culture (or, of cultural order) must account for language. Some nonverbal forms show linguistic kinds of structure (e.g., Nubian body painting, Buriat Mongol ongon representations), others apparently do not. The common basis of all codes in the human mind conduces to unity of structure. Differences in the means, both within the body (vocal, facial, manual, etc.) and without, and differences in purpose and use, dictate diversity. If the central mode of human experience is communication, the nature of the repertoire of modes of communication, and the meanings of their use, as modes, is central to an understanding of men, generally and in given groups. Work directed to this second problem might be termed the ethnography, and the ethnology, of symbolic forms (honoring in the terms Cassirer as the great expositor of such a vision). The future of these matters depends upon linguistic ethnographers. It is not only that language and linguistics are indispensable to ethnography, for the reasons dubbed 'facilitating', 'generating', 'validating', and 'penetrating'. Study of semantics and of speaking raise questions of analysis, and of mode of statement, that lead to integration of ethnographic and linguistic formats. Such work can extend the scope of linguistic analysis beyond the particular boundaries of a given time, and lead to recasting of linguistic analysis in the light of what is found. 21 It is only by this kind of INTEGRATION, not by ad hoc analogies and comparison of separately arrived at products, that the true relation of language to culture, the true place of language in social life, can be discerned. Such integration points to disciplines of linguistics and ethnography whose adjacent sectors are almost indistinguishable. So far, the training of ethnographers in linguistics has proven indispensable. It may indeed be the best way to introduce formal rigor, joined with empirical insight, in anthropological training. Certainly it is necessary if an adequate theory of symbolic forms, and of culture, is to be attained. There are, to be sure, capable ethnographically oriented linguists, and linguistics as a discipline may come to recognize a need for ethnographic training, if the empirical foundations of its own work are to be secure. There is hardly a cadre of such people now. For the present, as in the past, the key is the teaching of linguistics in anthropology, the training of linguistic ethnographers. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

21

Cf. Lefebvre (1966: 331): "Analysis of language thus will allow one to tighten analysis of praxis. Conversely, analysis of praxis, by clarifying a function of language — the situational function — permits one to tighten analysis of language." The point holds for the gamut of functions of language in speaking. The standpoint of the ethnography of speaking is that the functions of speech in a community have PRIORITY (are constitutive of what is to be analyzed), are PROBLEMATIC (must be discovered and validated in the particular ethnographic situation), and, of course, PLURAL (so that a language is organized in terms of stylistic [including expressive], as well as 'referential* units and relations).

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DISCUSSION

c.

J. M. STUART (Georgetown University) : I am sorry that Professor Chao isn't here today, because you recall from Martin Joos's presentation that he anticipated clarification as we went through the days of the symposium. It seems to me that a very important clarification has emerged in your paper. I have noted with considerable interest the notion of a speaker's competence being discussed. And it seems to me you have now brought it to a point where methodologically there are important issues that we can now begin to separate. One difficulty with Chomsky's handling of the notion of competence is that it is excessively narrow. In this respect, I should say that there is nothing pathological about symbolic treatments, but it's possible to do so to a pathological degree, and that is what I was objecting to before. What we are beginning to see now is a notion of competence that goes a long way back in linguistic history. Boas's concern with what I like to call ethno-epistemic categories begins to emerge now as we begin to look how the human being orients himself in an excessively complex environment. Organisms like Paramecium have this kind of environment: food or nonfood. Orientation with respect to their environment is a relatively simple matter. People like us have very complex environments, and we have to orient ourselves with respect to them. It seems to me that culture and biology come together when we recognize culture as an environment in which we are ambient and language as a major orientational mechanism for making contact with the environment. I.

Now, what interests me methodologically is this: If I am right in assuming that language is an important biological life function, and I mean that literally, in orienting with respect to the environment, then what do we do methodologically to learn from ethnolinguistics in the following case: I guess about one-third of all hospitalized patients in the United States are schizophrenic, not in consequence of being hospitalized, although that's an attractive notion, but they were admitted to hospitals because of a schizophrenic diagnosis. This may not be a familiar thing to many of you in the audience, but I consider that it's a very important thing to be aware of. One-third or our hospitalized patients are schizophrenic. These people are not oriented to the environment, and they have a curious capacity: they pass on their lack of orientation to their offspring. Look at the ultimate behavioral and perhaps genetic consequences of this. I think Dell Hymes is drawing our attention to an area of inquiry where linguistics begins to look over the ridge and unifies that enormous spectrum from culture on the one hand to neurology and evolutionary biology on the other. It's a matter of very serious concern that we handle this thing with methodological appropriateness. HYMES:

I can say very little about schizophrenia. I might refer to Bateson's work, I'm sure you are familiar with it. Whether it's wholly adequate to explain schizophrenia, I

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don't know, but at least it's extremely interesting methodologically here. Some of you may know a paper by Bateson and others called "Toward a Minimal Theory of Schizophrenia". Bateson draws attention to a point made earlier by, among others, Sapir, that if one considers not simply that form of the sentence which a linguist usually studies but its co-occurrence with an intonational pattern or other semiotic system, shall we say, that one genesis of schizophrenia at least is a situation in which a child is in a family group in which he is told one thing by one code, and that meaning is contradicted by another code. For example, his mother says only polite things to him in the words you would get if you wrote them down on a blackboard, but the intonation implies rejection. If then you are in a situation where, so to speak, only the writable-down part is accepted as the message, he cannot talk about the other part of the message — he cannot discuss it. He's put into what Bateson calls a DOUBLE BIND. There's a schizophrenic family, and its product is the child who is schizophrenic. This is, I think, one of the areas in which linguistics enters into in a broader frame of reference. MANER THORPE

(Columbia University): I would like to mention two trends that I see characterizing ethnological, ethnographical work in the latter part of the period that has been discussed by Dell Hymes. I think perhaps that he has touched on these, and they only need a remark for emphasis. The first of these is on the nature of explanation as seen by the ethnographer or the anthropological field worker. There was a gap, I believe, a very great one, between the middle work of Malinowski and this period in perhaps the early 1950's when Goodenough's ethnography began to be published, a gap during that time period in which explanation was seen by the ethnographer, anthropologist, as being one involving causality. And in this period, models of physical science either implicitly or explicitly came strongly to the fore and this point of view in anthropology and ethnography is certainly with us today and very important and not to be neglected. It goes hand in hand with the distinction first clearly made by Goodenough between ethnography and ethnology, in which ethnography returns to the Boasian, the middle Malinowskian and the Goodenough point of view, in which the task is taken first of all to be one of interpretation, and of course, competence falls here. I think it is extremely interesting that Boas was trained in physics. He could thus be assumed to have in mind in much of his work a causal model of explanation; in fact, he never allowed this to intrude in his ethnographic work. My second comment is on the direction of the flow of influences. I think Professor Pitkin has emphasized a reconsideration, at least, of the direction in which the flow of influences is to come. I think there are some ethnographers today, particularly those interested in interpretation, who do not see that they come as beggars to linguistics but rather feel that they come, let us say, as chemists to a conference of crystallographers who are not in the habit of thinking very much about chemistry. We feel that the time will come perhaps when there will be a flow in both directions. This prob-

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ably has something to do with the fact that linguistics has changed rather drastically recently, and seems to have a bit more to offer to the anthropologist. Therefore, the anthropologist finds it more intelligible, and does not feel that he needs to divorce himself from his own material. HYMES:

I might make two observations on that. I think there is a very important sociological fact relevant to this point you made. That is, that every anthropology graduate student has to take some linguistics, so that even if linguistic method goes beyond what, say the generation of the 40s and 50s in anthropology know, their students are learning the up-to-date approaches, and this will continue to be the case. So linguistic method from that point of view is always going to be an inspiration in ethnography, I think. It is institutionalized in this country. On the other hand, it is possible to guess that the situation may change in a rather significant way. It may be that the central role of linguistics in the 50s and 60s is a transitional one in that linguistics presents itself to ethnography as, on the one hand, material of interest — language, and on the other hand as formal. Therefore, it has this sort of pure character which attracts people who want to handle other data formally. But it may be that as this work proceeds (1 think one already sees it happening), one will go beyond linguistics as a source of formal models directly to mathematics. One sees this in the work of Conklin and Goodenough, who are attending to graph theory and scaling theory, and so forth. So that there is a possibility that the situation will change. Perhaps by the end of the century we will look back and see simply what was a general process of increasing formalization of work in cultural anthropology as a whole. (UCLA) : I would like to suggest that an idividual's competence to operate successfully within his culture would affect his linguistic performance, and that thus it would be possible to tie in the study of linguistic performance with ethnographic study. KENNETH TRUITENER

HYMES:

I agree with you. I think the importance of this is not purely academic. It is emerging in the increasing interest and in the money that is being poured into the study of those who are now being called the culturally disadvantaged: those poor people who are different from us. Do I dare say that some work in machine translation did not get full value for its money? GARVÍN:

I have no strong comment on that. Maybe there are some further comments from the floor.

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HYMES:

The point is that if this is really to be attacked, it is not enough to just approach it linguistically, but one has to look at the socio-cultural competence as it affects linguistic performance. This may be a great spur to work of this sort. (University of California, Berkeley): I was interested in one particular passage of your historical introduction, when you spoke about Boas and mentioned the use by Boas of the term 'mental sciences', patterned on Geisteswissenschaften. There is perhaps a little more piquancy in the fact that the very young Leonard Bloomfield, already a very brilliant man in his early and mid-twenties, used expressions which in the light of our knowledge of his major works are bewildering. He used SPIRITUAL SCIENCES which is just what we don't associate with Leonard Bloomfield's behaviorism. At that time of course he was a Wundtian, rather than a Weissian. These early writings are very rarely consulted. I think some people read his first general book on linguistics, but the early writings that I have in mind are very frequently book reviews which appeared in journals such as Modern Philology, published by the University of Chicago Press, or the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, published by the University of Illinois, and since everything philological is repulsive to many modern linguists, they don't read these works by Leonard Bloomfield. To conclude, I am a bit fascinated by the fact that the configuration of the oeuvre of Sapir and Bloomfield is very different, because no serious student of Sapir will claim that everything important written by him is found in his somewhat slim book Language, which I think is a string of brilliant essays rather than a book. As a result everybody who is interested in Sapir reads his selected writings or several other available monographs. On the other hand, with Bloomfield we run into a different situation. For some reason or other, when people say Leonard Bloomfield, they mean exclusively the man of 1933, and this is, I think, erroneous. There exist several Bloomfields, just as there exist many Mexicos. YAKOV MALKIEL

HYMES:

That is certainly an excellent point.

REFERENCES* Aberle, D. F., 1956 Review of Culture and Experience by A. I. Hallowell. American Anthropologist 58.920-23. 1960 "The Influence of Linguistics on Early Culture and Personality Theory", Essays in the Science of Culture in Honor of Leslie A. White, ed. by G. E. Dole and R. L. Carneiro, 1-29. Barth, F., 1965 "Anthropological Models and Social Reality", Proceedings of the Royal Society, B, 20-34. * A date in brackets accompanying date of publication indicates the date of the original publication, e.g., Cassirer 1953 [1923]. A date following the entire entry indicates the date of writing or presentation.

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Berreman, G. D., 1966 "Anemic and Emetic Analyses in Social Anthropology", American Anthropologist 68.346-354. Birdwhistell, R. B., 1952 Introduction to Kinesics. An Annotation System for Analysis of Body Motion and Gesture (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of State, Foreign Service Institute). Bittie, W., 1952 "Language and Culture: A Comment on Voegelin's View", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8.466-471. Black, M. and Metzger, D., 1965 "Ethnographic Description and the Study of Law", American Anthropologist 67, no. 6, part 2,141-165. Boas, F., 1904 "The History of Anthropology", Science 20.513-524. 1908 Anthropology. Lectures on Science, Philosophy, and Art, 1907-08, 5-28 (New York, Columbia University Press) [Boas' lecture, Dec. 18, 1907]. 1911 Introduction. Handbook of American Indian Languages (= Bureau of American Ethnology, Bull. 40, part 1) (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution) [1908]. 1920 "The Methods of Ethnology", American Anthropologist 22.311-321. 1963 [1911] The Mind ofPrimitive Man (New York, Collier Books). Rev.ed. Bock, P. K., 1964 "Social Structure and Language Structure", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 20.393-403. [Reprinted, Fishman 1968.] Bogatyrev, P. and Jakobson, R., 1929 "Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens", Donum Natalicium Schrijnen, 900-913 (Nijmegen-Utrecht). Brown, R. W., 1964 "Discussion of the Conference", Transcultural Studies of Cognition, ed. Α. Κ. Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, 243-253 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). Buchler, I. R. and Selby, H. Α., 1968 Kinship and Social Organization. An Introduction to Theory and Method (New York, Macmillan). Burling, R., 1964 "Cognition and Componential Analysis: God's Truth or Hocus-Pocus?", American Anthropologist 66.20-28 [with comment by Hymes and Frake]. [Reprinted in Theory in Anthropology, ed. by R. Manners and B. Kaplan (Chicago, Aldine)]. Burrow, T., 1966 Evolution and Society (Cambridge, at the University Press). Carrol, J. B. (ed.), 1956 Language, Thought and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press). Cassirer, E., 1953 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. I: Language (New Haven, Yale University Press) [1923]. 1961 The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven, Yale University Press) [1942], Chomsky, N., 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press). Colby, B. N„ 1966 "Ethnographic Semantics: A Preliminary Survey", Current Anthropology 7.3-32. Conklin, H. C., 1955 "Hanunoo Color Terms", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11.339-344. [Reprinted, Hymes 1964a.] 1962a "Lexicographical Treatment of Folk Taxonomies", Problems in Lexicography, ed. by F. W. Householder and Sol Saporta, 119-141 (Bloomington, Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics). [Reprinted, Fishman 1968.] 1962b "Comment" [on Frake 1962], Anthropology and Human Behavior, ed. T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, 86-91 (Washington, D.C., Anthropological Society of Washington).

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1964 "Ethnogenealogical Method", Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, ed. W. H. Goodenough, 25-55 (New York, McGraw-Hill). Davenport, W., 1963 "Social Organization", Biennial Review of Anthropology, ed. by B. Siegel, 178-227 (Stanford, Stanford University Press). Deetz, J., 1967 Invitation to Archaeology (Garden City, New York, Natural History Press). Diamond, S., 1964 "What History Is", Process and Pattern in Culture, ed. by R. Manners, 29-46 (Chicago. Aldine). Dieserud, J., 1908 The Scope and Content of the Science of Anthropology (Chicago, Open Court). Dundes, Α., 1962 "From Etic to Emic Units in the Structural Study of Folktales", Journal of American Folklore 75.95-105. Durbin, M., 1966 "The Goals of Ethnoscience", Anthropological Linguistics 8, no. 8, 22-41. Elkin, A. P., 1941 "Native Languages and the Field Worker in Australia", American Anthropologist 43.89-94. Fishman, J. Α., 1960 "A Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis", Behavioral Science 5.232-239. 1968 (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language (The Hague, Mouton). Frake, C. O., 1961 "The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao", American Anthropologist 63.113-132. [Reprinted, Hymes 1964a.] 1962a "The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems", Anthropology and Human Behavior, ed. by T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, 72-85 (Washington, D.C., Anthropological Society of Washington). [Reprinted, Fishman 1968.] 1962b "Cultural Ecology and Ethnography", American Anthropologist 64.53-59. 1964a "A Structural Description of Subanun 'Religious Behavior'", Explorations in Cultural anthropology, ed. W. Goodenough, 111-129 (New York, McGraw-Hill). 1964b "Notes on Queries in Ethnography", Transcultural Studies on Cognition, ed. by A. K. Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, Jr., 132-145 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). 1964c "How to Ask for a Drink in Subanun", The Ethnography of Communication, ed. J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, 127-132 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). French, D. H., 1956 "An Exploration of Wasco Ethnoscience", Yearbook, American Philosophical Society 224-226 (Philadelphia). French, K. S., 1955 "Culture Segments and Variation in Contemporary Social Ceremonialism on the Warm Springs Reservation", Oregon, Columbia University doctoral dissertation. Garvin, P. L., 1952 "Structure and Variation in Language and Culture", Indian Tribes of Aboriginal America, ed. by Sol Tax, 216-221 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 1954 Review of Hjelmslev, "Prolegomena", Language 30.69-96. Garvin, P. L. and Riesenberg, S., 1952 "Respect Behavior on Ponape: An Ethnolinguistic Study", American Anthropologist 54.201-220. Gleason, Η. Α., Jr., 1955 "An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics" (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Göhring, Η., 1967 "Generative Grammar und Kulturanthropologie", Anthropos 62.802-814.

318

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Goodenough, W. H., 1951 Property, Kin, and Community on Truk (= Yale University Publications in Anthropology, 46) (New Haven). [Reprinted in part, Hymes 1964a.] 1956a "Residence Rules", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 12.22-37. 1956b "Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning", Language 32.195-216. 1957 "Cultural Anthropology and Linguistics", Report of the Seventh Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study, 167-173 (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1954). [Reprinted in Hymes, 1964a.] Greenberg, J. H., 1948 "Linguistics and Ethnology", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 4.140-147. Gumperz, J. J. and Hymes, D. (eds.), 1964 The Ethnography of Communication (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). Haas, M. R., 1953 "Sapir and the Training of Anthropological Linguists", American Anthropologist 55.447-449. Hale, H„ 1892 "Language as a Test of Mental Capacity", Royal Society of Canada, Proceedings and Transactions, 9: 2.77-112. [Cited from Dieserud 1908.] Hall, E. T., 1959 The Silent Language (New York, Doubleday). 1963 "A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior", American Anthropologist 65.1003-26. Hall, E. T. and Trager, G. L., 1953 The Analysis of Culture (Washington, D.C., American Council of Learned Societies). Hammel, Ε. Α. (ed.), 1965 Formal Semantic Analysis (= American Anthropologist 67, no. 5, part 2) (Washington, D.C.). Hammer, M., 1966 "Some Comments on Formal Analysis of Grammatical and Semantic Systems", American Anthropologist 68.523-530. [Reprinted in Theory in Anthropology, ed. by R. Manners and B. Kaplan (Chicago, Aldine)]. Harris, M., 1962 The Nature of Cultural Things (New York, Random House). 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, Crowell). Harris, Z. S., 1951 Review of Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, Language 27.288-333. 1952 "Culture and Style in Extended Discourse", Indian Tribes of Aboriginal America, ed. by Sol Tax, 210-215 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) [1949], Haugen, E., 1951 "Directions in Modern Linguistics", Language 27.211-222. Henry, J., 1940 "A Method for Learning to Talk Primitive Languages", American Anthropologist 42.635-641. Herzog, G. et al., 1934 "Some Orthographie Recommendations", American Anthropologist 36.629-631. Hockett, C. F., 1948a "Implications of Bloomfield's Algonquian Studies", Language 24.117-131. [Reprinted, Hymes 1964a.] 1948b "Biophysics, Linguistics, and the Unity of Science", American Scientist 36.558-572. 1950 "Language 'and' Culture: A Protest", American Anthropologist 52.113. 1954 "Chinese versus English: An Exploration of the Whorfian Theses", Language in Culture, ed. H. Hoijer, 106-123 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 1958 A Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, Macmillan). 1960 "Ethnolinguistic Implications of Studies in Linguistics and Psychiatry", Report of the Ninth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Study, ed. W. A. Austin. 175-193 (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press). 1964 "Scheduling", Cross-cultural Understanding: Epistemology in Anthropology, ed. F. S. C. Northrop and H. H. Livingston, 125-141 (New York, Harper and Row).

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Hodge, F. W. (ed.), 1907 Handbook of American Indians (1907-11). Hoijer, H., 1948 "Linguistic and Cultural Change", Language 24.335-345. 1951 "Cultural Implications of Some Navaho Linguistic Categories", Language 27.111-120. 1954 (ed.). language in Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Hymes, D., 1958 "Linguistic Features Peculiar to Chinookan Myths, International Journal of American Linguistics 24.253-257. 1961a "On Typology of Cognitive Styles in Language (with examples from Chinookan)", Anthropological Linguistics 3, no. 1, 22-54. 1961b "Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach", Anthropology and Education, ed. F. Gruber, 55-83 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press). [Reprinted, BobbsMerrill Reprints in Social Sciences.] 1961c "Linguistic Aspects of Cross-Cultural Personality Study", Studying Personality CrossCulturally, ed. Β. Kaplan, 313-359 (New York, Harper and Row). 1961d "Alfred Louis Kroeber", Language 37.1-28. 1961e Review of The Anthropology of Franz Boas, ed. W. Goldschmidt, Journal of American Folklore 74.87-90. 1962a "The Ethnography of Speaking", Anthropology and Human Behavior, ed. Thomas Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, 13-53 (Washington, D.C., Anthropological Society of Washington). [Reprinted, Fishman 1968.] 1962b Review of Indian Tales of North America, ed. by T. P. Coffin, American Anthropologist 64.676-679. 1963 "Notes Toward a History of Linguistic Anthropology", Anthropological Linguistics 5, no. 1, 59-103. 1964a (ed.). Language in Culture and Society (New York, Harper and Row). 1964b "Directions in (Ethno-)Linguistic Theory", Transcultural Studies of Cognition, ed. by A. K· Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, 6-56 (=American Anthropologist 66, part 2) (Washington, D.C.). 1964c "Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication", The Ethnography of Communication, ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 1-34 ( = American Anthropologist 66, part 6, Washington, D.C.). 1964d "A Perspective for Linguistic Anthropology", Horizons of Anthropology, ed. by Sol Tax, 92-107 (Chicago, Aldine). 1966 "Two Types of Linguistic Relativity", Sociolinguistics, ed. W. Bright, 114-58 (The Hague, Mouton). 1967a "The Anthropology of Communication", Human Communication Theory, ed. F. Dance, 1-39 (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston). 1967b "Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Setting", Journal of Social Issues 33, no. 2, 8-28. 1967c "Why Linguistics Needs the Sociologist", Social Research 34, no. 4, 632-647. 1968a "The 'Wife' who Goes out Like a Man: Reinterpretation of a Clackamas Chinook Myth", Social Science Information 7, no. 3, 173-199. 1968b "Linguistic Problems in Defining the Concept of 'Tribe'", Essays on the Problem of Tribe, ed. by June Helm, 23-48 (Seattle, University of Washington Press). 1968c "Linguistics — the Field", International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (New York and London, Macmillan). 1969 "Linguistic Aspects of Comparative Political Research", Methodology of Comparative Political Research, ed. R. T. Holt and J. E. Turner (New York, The Free Press [Macmillan]). ms. a "Powell and Sapir", read at Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association, Seattle, November 1968. ms. b On Communicative Competence (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press). ms. c "Sociolinguistics and the Ethnography of Speaking", Linguistics and Social Anthropology, ed. by E. Ardener (London, Tavistock Press).

320

DELL HYMES

Hymes, D. and Gumperz, J. J. (eds.), 1970 Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication (New York, Holt, Rinehart, Winston). Jakobson, R., 1944 "Franz Boas' Approach to Language", International Journal of American Linguistics 10.188-197. 1957 Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb (Cambridge, Harvard University, Russian Language Project). 1963 "Efforts Towards a Means-End Model of Language in Inter-War Continental Linguistics", Trends in Modern Linguistics, ed. C. Mohrmann, F. Norman, A. Sommerfelt, 104-108 (Utrecht, Spectrum). Joos, M., 1958 "Semology: A Linguistic Theory of Meaning", Studies in Linguistics 13.53-70. 1959 "The Isolation of Styles", Monograph Series in Language and Linguistics 12.107-113 (Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press). [Reprinted, Fishman 1968.] 1962 The Five Clocks (Bloomington, Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, Linguistics). Kay, P., 1966 "Ethnography and Theory of Culture", Bucknell Review 14.106-114. (ed.). ms. Explorations in Mathematical Anthropology (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press). Keesing. R. M., ms. a "Formalization and the Construction of Ethnographies", Explorations in Mathematical anthropology, ed. P. Kay (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press). ms. b "Two Models for Ethnoscience Research". ms. c "Toward a Model of Role Analysis", A Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. R. Cohen and R. Naroll. Kluckhohn, C. M. K., 1941 "Patterning is Exemplified in Navaho Culture", Language, Culture and Personality, ed. by L. Spier, et. al., 109-130 (Menasha, Wis., Banta). 1949 Mirror for man (New York, McGraw-Hill). 1953 "Universal Categories of Culture", Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber et al., 507-523 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 1956a Review oí Language in Culture, ed. H. Hoijer, American Anthropologist 58.569-574. 1956b "Toward a Comparison of Value-Emphases in Different Cultures", The State of the Social Sciences, ed. by L. White (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 1958a "The Scientific Study of Values and Contemporary Civilization", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 5, 469-477. 1958b "The Scientific Study of Values", University of Toronto Installation Lectures, 25-54 (Toronto). 1959 "Common Humanity and Diverse Cultures", The Human Meaning of the Social Sciences, ed. D. Lerner, 245-84 (New York, Meridian Books). 1961a Anthropology and the Classics, Ch. 3 (Providence, Brown University Press). 1961b^"Notes on Some Anthropological Aspects of Communication", American Anthropologist 63.895-909. Kluckhohn C. and Kelly, W. H., 1945 "The Concept of Culture", The Science of Man in the World Crisis, ed. R. Linton, 78-105 (New York, Columbia University Press). Kroeber, A. L., 1923 Anthropology (New York, Harcourt, Brace). 1952 The Nature of Culture (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Kroeber, A. L. and Kluckhohn, C., 1952 Culture: a Review of Concepts and Definitions (Cambridge, Peabody Museum). Kroeber, A. L. and others, 1953 Anthropology Today (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Labov, W. Α., 1964 "Phonological Correlates of Social Stratification", The Ethnography of Communication,

LINGUISTIC METHOD IN ETHNOGRAPHY

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ed. J. J. Gumperz and D. Hymes, 164-176 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). 1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington, D.C., Center for Applied Linguistics). Lamb, S. M., 1964 "The Sememic Approach to Structural Semantics", Transcultural Study of Cognition, ed. by A. K. Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, 57-78 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). 1965 "Kinship Terminology and Linguistic Structure", Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. Ε. Α. Hammel, 37-64 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). Landar, H. J., 1966 Language and Culture (New York, Oxford). Lee, D. D., 1938 "Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language", Philosophy of Science 5.89-102. 1940 "A Primitive System of Values", Philosophy of Science 7.355-78. 1944 "Linguistic Reflection of Wintu Thought", International Journal of American Linguistics 10.181-187. Lefebvre, H., 1966 Le langage et la société (Paris, Gallimard). Lévi-Strauss, C., 1945 "L'analyse structurale en linguistique et anthropologie", Word 1.1-21. [Reprinted, LéviStrauss 1958; Hymes 1964a.] 1949a "Histoire et ethnologie", Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 54, no. 3-4, 363-391. [Cited from Lévi-Strauss 1958.] 1949b Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, 2nd ed., 1967). [Cited from English translation of the 2nd ed., London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969.] 1950 "Introduction à l'œuvre de Marcel Mauss", Sociologie et anthropologie, by Marcel Mauss (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France). 1951 "Language and the Analysis of Social Laws", American Anthropologist 53.155-163 [1949]. [Cited from Lévi-Strauss 1958.] 1953a "Social Structure", Anthropology Today, by A. L. Kroeber and others, 524-533 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press) [1952], [Reprinted Lévi-Strauss 1958.] 1953b [Chapter one]. Results of the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists, by Lévi-Strauss et al., 1-10 (= Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, 8) (Bloomington). ["Linguistique et anthropologie", in Lévi-Strauss 1958.] 1955 "The Structural Study of Myth", Journal of American Folklore 68.428-444. [Cited from Lévi-Strauss 1958.] 1958 Anthropology structurale (Paris, Plön). 1960a "L'analyse morphologique de contes russes", International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 3.122-49. 1960b "On Manipulated Sociological Models", Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 116.45-54. 1962 La pensée sauvage (Paris, Pion). 1965 "Le triangle culinaire", L'Arc 26.19-29. Lévi-Strauss, C., Jakobson, R., Voegelin, C. F. and Sebeok, T. Α., 1953 Results of the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists ( = Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, 8) (Bloomington). Linton, R. (ed.), 1945a The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York, Columbia University Press). Linton, R., 1945b The Cultural Background ofPersonality (New York, Appleton-Century-Loofts). Lounsbury, F. G., 1953 "Discussion", An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, ed. by Tax, S., Eiseley, L., Rouse, I. and Voegelin, C. F., 278-9, 283-7 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). 1956 "A Semantic Analysis of the Pawnee Kinship Usage", Language 32.158-194.

322

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1964a "The Structural Analysis of Kinship Semantics", Proceedings of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, ed. H. G. Lunt, 1073-1093 (The Hague, Mouton). 1964b "A Formal Account of the Crow and Omaha-Type Kinship Terminologies", Explorations in Cultural Anthropology, ed. W. H. Goodenough, 351-394 (New York, McGraw-Hill). 1965 "Another View of Trobriand Kinship Categories", Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. Ε. Α. Hammell, 142-85 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). Lowie, R. H., 1914 "Ceremonialism in American Indian Cultures", American Anthropologist 16.602-631. 1920 Primitive Society (New York, Boni and Liveright). 1937 History of Ethnological Theory (New York, Farrer and Rinehart). 1940 "Native Languages as Ethnographic Tools", American Anthropologist 42.81-89. Lyons, J., 1968 Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge, at the University Press). Malinowski, B., 1935 Coral Gardens and Their Magic (London, Allen and Unwin). Mandelbaum, D. G. (ed.), 1949 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press). Marx, K., 1968 "Concerning Feuerbach", The German Ideology, by K. Marx and F. Engels, 659-662 (Moscow, Progress Publishers) [1845]. Maybury-Lewis, D., 1965 "Prescriptive Marriage Systems", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21.207-30. Mayers, M., 1959 "Religious Activity among the Pocomchi of Guatemala". Paper Read at Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association, Mexico City. McQuown, Ν. Α., 1954 "Analysis of the Cultural Content of Language Materials", Language in Culture, ed. H. Hoijer, 20-31 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Mead, M., 1939 "Native Languages as Field Work Tools", American Anthropologist 41.181-205. 1959 (ed.). An Anthropologist at Work (London, Seeker and Warburg; Boston, Houghton Mifflin). Metzger, D. and Williams, G., 1963a "Tenejapa Medicine: The Curer", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19.216-234. 1963b "A Formal Ethnographic Analysis of Tenejapa Ladino Weddings", American Anthropologist 67.1076-1101. 1966 "Some Procedures and Results in the Study of Native Categories: Tzeltal 'firewood"', American Anthropologist 38.389-407. Morris, C., 1946 Signs, Language and Behavior (New York, Prentice-Hall). Nadel, S. F., 1951 The Foundations of Social Anthropology (London, Cohen and West). Nader, L. (ed.), 1965 "The Ethnography of Law", American Anthropologist 67, no. 6, part 2 (Washington, D.C.). Newman, S., 1939 "Personal Symbolism in Language Patterns", Psychiatry 2.177-182. 1941 "Behavior Patterns in Linguistic Structure", Language, Culture and Personality, ed. Spier, L., Hallowell, Α. I., Newman, S. S., 94-106 (Menasha, Wisconsin, Banta). Nida, Ε. Α., 1945 "Linguistics and Ethnology in Translation Problems", Word 1.194-208. Olmsted, D. L., 1950 Ethnolinguistics So Far ( = Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 2) (Norman, Oklahoma, Battenburg Press). Opler, Μ. E., 1949 "Words Without Culture or Meaning", Word 5.43-44.

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Osgood, C. E. and Sebeok, T. A. (eds.), 1954 Psycholinguistics, A Survey of Theory and Practice (= Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics, 10) (Bloomington). Paul, H., 1886 Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. [Cited from the 6th unaltered edition, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, I960.] Pike, K. L„ 1954-1955-1960 Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior. Parts I, II, III (Glendale, California, Summer Institute of Linguistics). [In one volume, slightly revised, The Hague, Mouton, 1967.] Pittenger, R. E., Hockett, C. F. and Danehy, R. E., 1960 The First Five Minutes. A Sample of Microscopic Interview Analysis (Ithaca, N.Y., Martineau). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 1957 A Natural Science of Society (Glencoe, Illinois, The Free Press). Radin, P., 1933 The Method and Theory of Ethnology. An Essay in Criticism (New York, McGraw-Hill) [Reprinted, New York, Basic Books, 1966]. Romney, A. K. and D'Andrade, R. G. (eds.), 1964 Transcultural Studies of Cognition (= American Anthropologist 66, no. 3, part 2) (Washington, D.C.). Sapir, E., (All papers reprinted in Mandelbaum, "Selected Writings of Edward Sapir", are cited in the text from that collection, the original date of publication being given in brackets, e.g., 1949 [1912]. Page references in the collection are given here as SWES 89-103, etc.). 1912 "Language and Environment", American Anthropologist 14.226-42 [SWES 89-103]. 1916 Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method (= Canada, Dept. of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 62; Anthropological Series, 5 (Ottawa) [SWES 179-96]. 1917 "Linguistic Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, A General Review", International Journal of American Linguistics 1.76-81. 1921 Language (New York, Harcourt, Brace). 1924 "The Grammarian and his Language", American Mercury 1.149-55 [SWES 150-59]. 1925 "Sound Patterns in Language", Language 1.37-51 [SWES 19-25], 1927 "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society", The Unconscious: a Symposium, ed. E. S. Dummer, 114-142 (New York, Knopf) [SWES 544-59]. 1929 "The Status of Linguistics as a Science", Language 5.207-14 [SWES 160-6], 1931 "Communication", Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 4.78-81 (New York, Macmillan) [SWES 104-9]. 1932 "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27.229-42 [SWES 509-21], 1934 "The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures", Journal of Social Psychology 5.408-15 [SWES 590-97], 1938 "Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist", Psychiatry 1.7-12 [SWES 569-77]. 1939 "Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls in the Business of Getting a Living", Mental Health, Publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 9.237-44 [SWES 578-89], Sarte, J. P., 1963 Search for a Method (New York, Knopf) [1960]. Schneider, D. G., 1965 "American Kin Terms for Kinsmen: A Critique of Goodenough's Componential Analysis of Yankee Kinship Terminology", Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. by. E. A. Hammel (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). 1968 American Kinship: A Cultural Account (New York, Prentice-Hall).

324

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Schölte, Β., 1966 "Epistemic Paradigms: Some Problems in Cross-Cultural Research on Social Anthropological History and Theory", American Anthropologist 68.1192-1201. Sebeok, Τ. Α., Hayes, A. S. and Bateson, M. C. (eds.), 1964 Approaches to Semiotics. Transactions of the Indiana University Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics (The Hague, Mouton). Shankman, P., 1969 "Le rôti et le bouilli: Lévi-Strauss' Theory of Cannibalism", American Anthropologist 71.54-69. Siverts, H., 1966-67 "Report on Ethnographic Procedures", Folk 8-9.325-34 (Copenhagen). Smith, H. L., Jr., 1952 An Outline of Metalinguistic Analysis (Washington, D.C., Department of State, Foreign Service Institute) ; mimeographed. Spier, L., Hallowell, A. I., Newman, S.S.. (eds.), 1941 Language, Culture and Personality: Essays in Memory of Eddward Sapir (Menasha, Wis., Banta). Stocking, G. W., Jr., 1969 Race, Culture and Evolution (New York, Free Press). 1970 "The Boas Plan for American Indian Linguistics: An Historical Re-examination", Studies in the History of Linguistics, ed. D. Hymes (Bloomington, Indiana University Press). Sturtevant, W. C., 1964 "Studies in Ethnoscience", Transcultural Studies in Cognition, ed. A. K. Romney and R. G. D'Andrade, 99-131 ( = American Anthropologist 66, no. 2) (Washington, D.C.). Tax, S., Eiseley, L. C., Rouse, I. and Voegelin, C. F. (eds.), 1953 An Appraisal of Anthropology Today (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). Trager, G. L., 1949 The Field ofLinguistics ( = Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 1 ) (Norman, Oklahoma, Battenburg Press). 1958 "Paralanguage: A First Approximation", Studies in Linguistics 13.1-12. [Reprinted, Hymes 1964a.] 1959 "The Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis", Anthropological Linguistics 1, no. 1, 31-5. 1962 "A Scheme for the Cultural Analysis of Sex", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18.114-8. 1966 "Comment" [on Colby, Ethnographic semantics], Current Anthropology 7, no. 1, 25. Trager, G. L. and Hall, E. T., 1954 "Culture and Communication: A Model and an Analysis", Explorations 3.157-249. Trager, G. L. and Smith, H. L., Jr., 1951 An Outline of English Structure (= Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, 3) (Norman, Oklahoma, Battenburg Press). Tyler, S. Α., 1966 "Context and Variation in Koya Kinship Terminology", American Anthropologist 68.693-707. 1969 "The Myth of P: Epistemology and Formal Analysis", American Anthropologist 79-71-9. Ulldall, H. J., 1957 Outline of Glossematics, Part I ( = Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 2) (Copenhagen) [circa 1942]. Ulldall, H. J. and Shipley, W., 1966 Nisenan Texts and Dictionary (= University of California Publications in Linguistics, 46) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press). Vidbeck, R. and Pia, J., 1966 "Plans for Coping: An Approach to Ethnoscience", Anthropological Linguistics 8(8).71-7. Vidich, Α., 1966 "Introduction", Method and Theory of Ethnology, by Paul Radin (New York, Basic Books). Voegelin, C. F., 1949a "Linguistics Without Meaning and Culture Without Words", Word 5.36-42.

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1949b "Relative Structurability", Word 5.44-45. 1950 "A 'Testing Frame' for Language and Culture", American Anthropologist 52.432-5. 1951 "Culture, Language, and the Human Organism", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7.357-73. Voegelin, C. F. and Harris, Z. S., 1945 "Linguistics in Ethnology", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 1.455-65. 1947 "The Scope of Linguistics", American Anthropologist 49.588-600. 1952 "Training in Anthropological Linguistics", American Anthropologist 54.322-7. Voegelin, C. F. and F. M„ 1963 "On the History of Structuralizing in 20th Century America", Anthropological Linguistics 5, no. 1, 12-37. Wallace, A. F. C., 1961a Culture and Personality (New York, Random House). 1961b "On Being Just Complicated Enough", Proceedings National Academy of Sciences 47 (4).458-64. 1962 "Culture and Cognition", Science 135.351-7. 1965a "Driving to Work", Context and Meaning in Cultural Anthropology, ed. by M. J. Spiro (New York, Free Press). 1965b "The Problem of the Psychological Validity of Componential Analysis", Formal Semantic Analysis, ed. by E. A. Hammel, 229-48 (Washington, D.C., American Anthropological Association). Werner, O., 1966 "Pragmatics and Ethnoscience", Anthropological Linguistics 8(8).42-65. Whiteley, W. H., 1966 "Social Anthropology, Meaning and Linguistics", Man (n.s.) 1.139-57. Whitney, W. D., 1867 Language and the Study of Language (London : Trübner ; New York : Scribners). Whorf, B. L„ 1940a "Science and Linguistics", Technological Review 42.229-231, 247-248. [Whorf 1949: 1-5; Carroll 1956: 207-19.] 1940b "Linguistics as an Exact Science". Technological Review 43.61-3, 80-3. [Whorf 1949: 7-12; Carroll 1956: 220-32.] 1941a "Languages and Logic", Technological Review 43.250-52, 226, 228, 268, 272. [Whorf 1949: 13-8; Carroll 1956: 233-45.] 1941b "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language", Language, Culture and Personality, ed. L. Spier, A. I. Hallowell and S. S. Newman, 75-93 (Menasha, Wisconsin, Banta). [Whorf 1949: 20-38; Carroll 1956: 134-59.] 1949 Four Articles on Metalinguistics (Washington, D.C., Department of State, Foreign Service Institute). 1956a "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in Primitive Communities", Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. by J. B. Carroll, 65-86. [Reprinted, Hymes 1964a] [1936]. 1956b "Language: Plan and Conception of Arrangement", language, Thought, and Reality, ed. by J. B. Carroll, 125-33 [1938]. Williams, G. E., 1966 "Linguistic Reflections of Cultural Systems", Anthropological Linguistics 8, no. 8,13-21. Wolf, E. R., 1964 Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall). 1966 "Understanding Civilizations: A Review Article", Comparative Studies in Society and History 9.446-65. in press "The Anthropologist as Cultural Communicant: Paradox and Predicament", The Nature and Fuction of Anthropological Traditions, ed. by S. Diamond and L. Kräder (New York, Natural History Press).

INDEX OF NAMES

References are to pages,

f = footnote.

Aaronson, Ruth, 129 Abel, Karl, 84 Aberle, D.F., 266 Austin, J.L., 46, 47 Austin, William M., 154 Ayer, Α., 44 Bach, Emmon, 73f., 117, 299 Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua, 47f„ 133f., 141 Barth, F., 303 Bateson, Gregory, 289, 312 Beattie, James, 113 Benedict, Ruth, 260, 266, 277, 279 Benveniste, Emile, 58f. Berreman, G.D., 305 Bierwisch, Manfred, 70f. Birdwhistell, R.L., 281, 288, 289 Bishop, Ruth, 185f. Bittie, W„ 272 Black, M., 295 Bloch, Bernard, 288 Blondel, Maurice, 79 Bloomfield, Leonard, 17,31, 53,57,61 f.,75,209, 270, 281, 287, 290, 315 Boas, F., 39, 40, 250-253,255-258,260, 264,266, 268-270, 272, 275, 279-281, 287, 291, 305, 309, 310,312,313,315 Bock, P.K., 280, 283-285, 290, 299 Bogatyrev, P., 286 Bohannan, P., 253 Bolinger, Dwight L„ 135, 159, 160 Bonney, Margaret K., 17 Braithwaite, R., 19 Brigstocke, Jeremy, 192 Brown, Roger, 159, 303 Buchler, I.R., 295, 296, 299, 300, 305 Bühler, Karl, 65, 75, 162f. Burling, R., 305, 306 Burrow, T., 250f. Buttons, Ella, 185 f.

Buyssens, Emile, 58 f. Cairns, Dorion, 63 f. Carnap, Rudolf, 45, 47f. Carroll, John B„ 19, 134, 275 Cassirer, E., 280, 286, 308, 309, 311 Caws, Peter, 47 Chao, Yuen Ren, 15, 312 Cherry, Colin, 57, 58 f. Chomsky, Noam, 18,19, 34,42-46,49-51, 53,54, 58-60, 66f., 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 87, 95f„ 108, 113-115,119f., 124 f., 126,132f„ 174,194,262, 284, 289, 297-300, 305, 308, 312 Colby, Benjamin, 270, 280, 281, 283f„ 284, 293, 294 Conklin, Harold C„ 170, 249f„ 279, 280, 282, 284, 294, 295, 298, 300, 305, 307, 310, 314 Coseriu, Eugenio, 199, 201 f., 202, 203, 207 Croce, Benedetto, 259, 261, 264 Crystal, David, 141 D'Andrade, R.G., 159, 294, 295, 299, 302, 305 Danehy, R.E., 289 Danes, FrantiSek, 27, 109, 130, 132, 134, 136f., 141-144, 191, 245, 247 Darnell, Regna, 250 Davenport, W„ 293f., 295 Davlin, Joan, 249 f. Day, Arthur C., 186f. Deetz, J., 279, 280, 284 Descartes, René, 75f., 80 Diamond, S., 304 Dieserud, J., 249 Diliberto, S. P., 19, 20 Dilthey, W., 50 Dixon, R.M.W., 18, 250f. Dubois, J„ 110, 141, 210, 212, 221, 245-248 Dundes, Α., 290 Durbin, M., 298, 300 Durkheim, Emile, 209, 293 f.

328

INDEX OF NAMES

Edmundson, Harold, P., 24 Emeneau, Murray, 269, 286, 287 Evans, Donald, 5If. Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 253 Färber, Marvin, 47 Fillmore, Charles H., 51 f., 65, 67 Fink, E., 47 Firbas, Jan, 134f„ 136,140f. Firth, J.R., 39, 41, 57, 253 Fischer, John L„ 204 Fishman, J. Α., 275 Flydal, Leiv, 200, 201 f., 208, 209 Fodor, Jerry Α., 44,51,52f„ 53,57,62,63,69-71, 75, 80, 87 Frake, C.O., 279, 280, 282-284, 294, 298-300, 304, 305, 308, 310 Frei, Henri, 58f. French, David H., 294 French, K.S., 290 Freud, S., 84, 256 Fries, Charles C , 17, 246 Fromkin, Victoria, 21,22,35,38,39,87,128,144 Galton, Sir Francis, 256 Gardiner, Sir Alan, 57, 65, 80 Garvin, Paul L„ 20,34,35,95-97,109-111,140f„ 153, 154, 160, 202, 247, 249f., 280, 284-287, 314 Ghiselin, Brewster, 20 Gleason, H.A.,Jr., 287 Göhring, Η., 300 Gold, Mark, 193 Goodenough, W. H„ 279,280,282-285,294,295, 298, 299, 302, 305, 310, 313, 314 Greenberg, Joseph, 123, 271-273, 286 Greibach, Sheila, 37 Grice, H.P., 47 f. Gumperz, J. J., 295, 306, 308 Hale, Horatio, 249, 253, 255 Hall, E.T., 284, 288, 289 Halle, Morris, 81 Halliday, M.A.K., 18, 142, 174 Hallowell, A. J., 271 Hammel, Ε.Α., 294, 295, 299 Hammer, M., 304-306, 309 Harms, 299 Harris, Marvin, 301-304, 309, 310 Harris, Zellig S., 19, 20, 109, 174, 177f., 267f., 272, 273, 279, 280, 287, 289, 292 Hartmann, Peter, 54, 63f., 80 Hatcher, Anna Granville, 136 Haugen, E„ 287 Hausenblas, K., 137 Hayes, A.S., 289 Hegel, G.W.F., 303

Heidegger, 47 Heisenberg, 50 f. HiU, Archibald Α., 77, 288 Hjelmslev, Louis, 199, 286, 287 Hockett, C.F., 19, 22, 57, 76, 97, 135, 200, 272, 278, 280, 284, 285, 287, 289, 296, 297, 299 Hodge, F.W., 249 Hofstätter, Peter R., 70, 83, 84 Hoijer, H „ 272, 275, 276, 278 Hokshagen, Cyril, 246 Hume, David, 78 Husserl, Edmund, 47, 52-54, 56, 63, 64f., 67, 72, 75, 78, 82 Hutterer, Claus, 200, 205 Hymes, Dell, 39, 83, 84, 203, 204, 208, 210, 249, 250,253,257,264,267,270,275,276,279,280, 285, 287, 290, 292f„ 294, 295, 298, 300, 302, 303, 306, 308, 309, 312-314 Irigaray, L., 212 Ivic, Pavle, 201 Jakobson, Roman, 41, 247, 253, 256, 257, 272, 285, 286, 291, 293, 298, 300f. Jespersen, Otto, 17 Jones, D., 135 Joos, Martin, 20-25, 83,109, 284, 288, 312 Kahn, Charles H., 62f. Kant, Immanuel, 78 Kapp, R.O., 19 Karp, H.R.,20 Katz, Jerrold, J., 44-45f., 51-53, 55f„ 57, 59-63, 67, 69-72, 75, 80, 81, 87, 88, 126 Kay, Paul, 283f., 284, 296 Keesing, R.M., 283f., 284, 298, 300 Kelly, W.H., 274, 279 Kiefer, Ferenc, 95 f. Kleinecke, David, 22, 23 Klima, Edward, 116, 117, 130 Kluckhohn, C. M. K„ 254-256,269,270,274-277, 279-282, 287, 292, 293, 305, 306 Koch, Sigmund, 47f. Kotarbiñski, Tadeusz, 16 Krámsky, Jirí, 132f. Kraus, J., 132 Kroeber, A.L.,40,250f„ 252,253, 257,263,270, 276, 277, 279-281, 294, 305 Kwant, R.C., 53 Labov, W.A., 302, 308 Lamb, S.M., 295, 299, 301 Landar, Herbert, 38 Langendoen, D. Terence, 57 Lauer, Quentin, 47, 52f. Lee, Dorothy, D., 192, 274-276

INDEX OF NAMES Lees, Robert B„ 96f„ 116,117, 130 Lefebvre, Η., 31 If. Lehiste, Ilse, 155 Leibniz, 58, 75f. Lenin, V.l., 309 Lévi-Strauss, C., 253-256,272, 277-283, 285-287, 289, 291-295, 299-302, 306-310 Lideker, Ron, 193 Liem, Nguyen Dang, 177f. Linton, R., 270f„ 271 Lomax, Alan, 289 Longacre, Robert E„ 40, 109, 134f., 142, 173, 174, 177f„ 178, 185-187, 191-194, 204, 245 Lounsbury, F.G., 278,279, 286,294, 298f., 299, 305, 306 Lowie, R.H., 252, 256, 269-271 Ludviková, Marie, 132f. Lyons, J., 296 McCawley, James, 129 McLennan, 250 McQuown, N.A., 278, 288, 289 McLeod, R.B., 47f. Maine, Sir Henry, 250f. Malcolm, Norman, 47f. Malebranche, Ν. de, 59, 75f. Malinowski, Β., 253, 313 Malkiel, Yakov, 203, 209, 315 Markov, A.A., 88 Martins, Gary, 24, 37 Marx, K „ 309 Mates, Benson, 62 f. Mathesius, V., 132f„ 133-136, 139 Mathiot, Madeleine, 27, 140f„ 159-171, 202 Matthews, P.H., 174f. Maybury-Lewis, D., 281 Mayers, M., 290 Mead, M., 260, 269, 279, 289 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 47,52,53,59,60f., 63, 79, 82 Metzger, D „ 283, 295, 302, 305 Morris, Charles, 16, 57, 286 Nadel, S.F., 252, 295 Nagel, Ernest, 95, 96 Newman, S., 268-270 Nickel, Gerhard, 86 Nida, E.A., 272, 273 Novák, P., 136 Oettinger, A.G., 19, 20 Ogden, C.K., 57 Olmsted, David L., 272, 273, 292 Opler, M.E., 272 Osgood, Charles E., 275 Oyelaran, O., 38

329

Pask, G „ 19 Pater, Walter, 16 Paul, H., 250 Pauliny, Eugene, 134 Pei, Mario, 17 Pia, J„ 298, 299 Pichón, E., 58f. Pike, K., 142, 174, 280-282, 284, 285, 287, 289, 290, 298, 300f. Pitkin, Harvey, 27, 35-39, 208, 313 Pittenger, R.E., 289 Plato, 62, 83 Polivanov, E., 136 Pos, H. J., 63 Postal, Paul M., 35, 37-40, 51f., 53, 60-63, 67, 69-72, 80,113, 116,119f„ 122f., 126,128-130, 168, 169, 173 Powell, John Wesley, 249, 250 Putnam, H., 19 Quirk, Randolph, 141 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 254, 271, 279, 299 Radin, P., 250f„ 252, 257, 270, 273 Rapoport, Paul, 96f., 156 Reichling, M.A., 46, 47f„ 52-55, 57, 58, 63-68, 75, 77, 80, 85, 86 Reid, Aileen, 185 Richards, Α., 57 Ricoeur, P., 47 Riesenberg, S. Η., 286 Robinson, Richard, 96 Rogers, Carl R., 47 f. Romney, A.K., 159, 283, 294, 295, 299, 302, 305 Rona, José Pedro, 199, 208-210 Russell, B„ 204 Ryle, Gilbert, 44, 78 Sapir, Edward, 39, 40, 250-253, 256-270, 272, 274-277, 279, 287, 289, 290, 297-281, 300f„ 302, 304, 305, 309, 310, 312, 315 Sartre, J.P., 301 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 53, 57, 65, 74, 75, 87, 143,144,199,201,206,207,209,247,250,260, 286 Schneider, David, 267, 279, 283f., 293, 306 Schölte, Bob, 249f., 292 Scriven, Michael, 47f. Sebeok, Τ. Α., 275, 289 Selby, H.A., 295, 296, 299, 300, 305 Shane, Sanford, 194 Shankmann, P., 292, 293 Shipley, W.F., 286 Siverts, Η., 283 Skalicka, Vladimir, 134,144 Skinner, Β.F., 44, 47f.-49, 54, 74

330

INDEX OF NAMES

Smith, H.L.jJr., 284, 288-290 Sommerfelt, Alf, 209 Spiegelberg, H., 46, 47 Spier, L., 271 Spitzbardt, Harry, 22, 112, 143, 154 Staal, J.F., 44, 47, 51 f., 70 Steinthal, L., 255 Stevens, K.N., 19, 20 Stocking, G.W., Jr., 257, 258 Strevens, Peter, 253 Stuart, C.I.J.M., 25, 33, 39, 110, 168, 247 Sturtevant, W.C., 272, 280, 282, 284, 290, 292, 294, 298, 300 Suppes, Patrick, 19 Swadesh, Morris, 269 Tax, S„ 280, 281, 294 Teeter, Karl, 35, 37 Thorpe, Maner, 84, 85, 142, 170, 171, 191, 192, 287, 313 Trager, G., 269, 270,272,275,283, 284,287-290, 294 Trnka, B„ 132-134f. Trost, Pavel, 134f. Trubetzkoy, N.S., 272, 285, 291 Truitener, Kenneth, 314 Twaddell, Freeman, 18 Tyler, S.A., 306 Uldall, Hans, 286, 287 Vachek, J., 133 van de Hülst, H.C., 47, 48 van Meisen, Α., 50f.

van Peursen, C.A., 47, 75f., 78 Vendler, Zeno, 177f Verhaar, John W.M., 42, 46f„ 49f„ 57, 58f., 62f., 68, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79f„ 83-87, 169, 170 Vidbeck, R„ 298, 299 Vidich, Α., 306 Vidos, B.E., 54 Voegelin, Carl F., 19, 20,249, 269,272,273, 275, 276, 292, 310 Voegelin, F.M., 19, 20 von Humboldt, W„ 72, 77, 275 Wallace, A.F.C., 267, 299, 300, 302, 303, 305, 310 Wann, T.W.,47f.,48 Watkin, Calvert, 156 Weinreich, Uriel, 199-201 Weisgerber, L., 54 Werner, O., 298-300 White, Leslie, 309 Whiteley, W.H., 253 Whitney, W.D., 250, 258 Whorf, B.L., 251, 253, 256, 262, 269, 271, 274276, 279, 287, 288, 292 Williams, G.E., 283, 294, 295, 302, 305 Wilson, Robert, 85 Winter, Werner, 128, 147, 153, 154 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 47f., 51, 60f., 78, 82 Wolf, R.E., 304 Wundt, W., 256 Yngve, V.H., 19, 65 Ziff, Paul, 58f., 63, 69

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

abstraction, mid-level, 85 acceptability, 81, 212, 219, 245 adequacy, descriptive, 30, 49, 284 explanatory, 45 retrodictive, 32 agreement, 116, 147, 148 algorithm, 192 allophone, 156, 202, 203 ambiguity, 212-214, 217-220, 222, 231, 237-239, 241-243, 245 American: anthropology, 254,274,279,281,286, 302; linguistics, 282, 284, 287 analysis, methods of, 28, 108, 109, 296 analytic techniques, 28, 96, 97, 101, 103, 107 anaphora, 115f„ 117, 119f., 123, 124, 129 anomaly, semantic, 221, 234, 237, 239, 241, 243 syntactic, 243, 244 anthropology, cultural, 253, 256, 266, 267, 269, 270, 273, 276, 279, 281, 294, 298, 314; social, 253, 273, 278, 279, 292, 293; structural, 279, 283, 285, 291, 294, 295, 300, 310 aphasies, 245-247 apparatus, conceptual, 166, 167; logical, 280; methodological, 159, 160; theoretical, 159-161 assumptions, initial, 161-166, 171 attitude, language, 206-208 autonomy, 75, 261, 264, 268, 309 superorganic, 261 axis, 179, 180, 188, 189; diachronic, 200, 201 ; diastratic, 200, 201, 203-205; diatopic, 200, 201 ; paradigmatic, 247, 290; syntagmatic, 247, 290 behavior, cultural, 263, 267, 289, 290, 301, 302

behavioral test, 95-101, 104,107-109 behavioreme, 281, 290 behaviorism, 10, 48, 49, 54, 56, 58, 61, 262, 298, 315 Bella Coola, 255 British anthropology, 254, 271 case-system analysis, 282 categorematica, 64 cenematic, 287 f. Chomsky's theory, 72, 79, 81, 290 circum-linguistic analysis, 289 cognitive system, 163, 167 colon level, 186, 187 comparative analysis, 154, 254, 256 compatibility, 45f„ 215-218, 221, 226, 229-231, 233, 234, 236, 238-240 competence, 10, 30, 31, 34-36, 44, 59, 61, 79-81, 87, 88, 300, 308, 312, 313 competence models, 212, 222 complementary: classes, 215, 221; distribution, 150, 282 complementation, 101-103, 105, 109 completeness, 29, 32, 38 componential analysis, 192, 229, 239, 278, 279, 283f., 284, 299, 306 comsigns, 57 configuration, 270f., 277, 315 consistency, 29, 32, 38, 46, 50, 66, 79 constraints, semantic, 214, 217, 230 constructional homonymity, 62, 72 context, 28, 30, 31, 57, 65, 72,134,142,178, 203, 216, 280, 284, 300, 303 co-occurrence patterns, 212, 216, 219, 238, 245, 246 corpus, 33, 35, 38, 41, 55, 283 f. correlations, lexemic, 217, 218; semantic, 217, 219, 225, 229, 240; syntactic, 214, 218, 220, 225, 227, 285 correspondence, 148-151, 153-156

332

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

counterpart, 44, 45, 48, 52, 61 cultural: analysis, 266, 294, 299, 304, 306; patterns, 267, 269, 274, 275; system, 253, 266, 267, 281, 283, 288, 292, 294, 300; units, 249, 278, 285

exponence, backlooping, 175, 181,184-190; descending, 175, 178, 180, 185-187, 189; level-skipping, 174f„ 178-180,184-190; portmanteau, 184, 185; recursive, 179-181, 185-190 expression units, 147

data, attitude, 206, 207; belief, 207; factual, 207; sense, 16, 280 datum, central, 78-80 deep structure, 51, 79, 115, 123, 124, 127, 298, 299; level of, 298, 299 deeper connections, 296, 297 definitions, operational, 96-98, 101, 103, 106, 107, 111; stipulative, 96, 97, 100-102, 106 deictic word, 65 description, aims of, 95, 96; semantic, 276, 278, 307 descriptivism, 109 dialectology, 199-201, 215, 208, 209 diasystem, 199-205 dichotomy, 31, 53f„ 133, 201f. dimension, grammatical, 165f., 166f.; lexical, 164f., 165f„ 166f„ 170; referential, 53f., 66 discourse, 133, 134, 137, 173, 185, 190-192 discovery procedure, 45, 72, 74, 173, 283, 294 distinctive feature, 18, 77, 153, 282, 293; analysis, 283, 303; cognitive, 167; semantic, 167, 170 distribution, 280, 284, 286, 290; syntactic, 220-222, 224, 225, 232 domain, 282, 283, 295; cognitive, 167; cultural, 294, 295; semantic, 167; structural, 296 dualism, 49, 58, 59, 62, 63, 75f„ 88

feedback, 55, 57, 173 Firthian School, 57, 142 follow-up study, 161-167 formal analysis, 295, 304, 305 formalization, 33, 38, 51, 53, 63, 69, 77, 81, 82 formulation, 80, 81, 84, 256, 295 foundational research, 51 f., 69, 71, 72, 79, 81, 82 frame of reference, 11, 19, 28, 30, 32, 34, 42-44, 46-51, 56, 58, 60, 62-66, 70f., 72-79, 162, 164, 246; behavioristic, 82; logical, 44-46, 49, 52f., 53f., 56, 59, 83; phenomenological, 43-47, 49, 64, 78, 79; theoretical, lOOf., 101, 161, 162, 164, 165; transformational 247 framework, 42, 77, 247, 281, 282; behavioristic, 58 ; Cartesian, 75 ; conceptual, 185; logical, 51 f.; semiological, 74, 75; theoretical, 33 French, 206, 212, 217, 233, 141 functional: analysis, 132,141; equivalence, 97, 100,103; flow diagram, 57 ; sentence perspective (FP), 134-140 functionalism, 142

emic analysis, 282, 283, 289, 290, 302, 304 empiricism, 59f., 159 epistemology, 5If., 82, 111 ethnography, linguistic, 296, 309, 310 ethnoscience, 279, 283, 285, 293, 294, 299-301, 303, 306, 310 ethnoscience approach, 290, 295, 299, 302, 304 etic analysis, 282, 302, 304 evaluation procedure, 19, 50 existentialism, 47, 53 experimental approach, 212, 245, 246 explicitness, 31, 42, 51f., 53, 74, 296

Geisteswissenschaften, 50, 256 genealogical method, 306 generative formula, 176, 177, 191 glossematic school, 53, 61, 75 glossematics, 286, 287 government, 101-103, 105, 109 grammar, cultural, 284, 296; generative, 48f„ 53, 73f„ 76, 81, 82, 113, 114, 150, 194, 212, 247, 266, 300, 301; logical, 51; scale-and-category, 174; transformational, 44, 58f.,64,77,79,115,297, 300; transformational generative, 42,47, 51, 58,61, 64,75, 76,79, 81,174f„ 247,283f., 285,289, 294, 296, 298-300, 305; universal, 36,40,41,47f„ 76,82,113,114,127, 147 grammatical: category, 162, 257-259; function, 57, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222, 225-232

INDEX OF SUBJECTS grammaticality, 54, 58, 76, 80, 81, 237 graph theory, 295, 314 grids, etic, 283, 288, 307 gustemes, 281 heuristic principle, 43, 50, 70 hierarchy, 214, 225, 226, 232; descending, 176, 186, 189; grammatical, 173,174,178,184-187,191,192; structural, 35, 137 hierarchical level, 177, 184, 187 holistic approach, 52, 54 homophony, 86, 214, 222 hypothesis, overall, 161-164 hypothetico-deductive approach, 159, 160 idiolects, 52f., 200, 201, 205, 207 idiosemiological experience, 216, 218 immediate-constituent analysis, 66, 174 incorporation rule, 122, 126 Indo-European languages, 153, 154, 156 information retrieval, 139 interference, analogical, 152; paradigmatic, 150,151; syntagmatic, 151 information, center of (CI), 136 introspectionism, 49 intuition, 30-32,35,37,41,53,54,56,61,63,66f., 74, 96f„ 247 isomorphism, 22, 45, 49, 56, 81 Katz-Fodor-Postal theory, 53, 63, 69, 71, 72, 81 kinesics, 265, 288 kinship: semantics, 294; systems, 292 labels, 150, 151, 153 language neutral, 126 langue, 10, 30, 65, 66f„ 80, 86, 199 left-to-right, 123, 124,127-129 level, morpheme, 100f„ 176, 186; utterance, 134, 136, 137, 140 lexeme, 142, 171, 173, 192, 215, 217-220, 222, 226, 232, 233, 241, 242 lexical classes, 214, 219, 220, 225, 229 lexicon, 71, 81, 83, 164-166, 168, 173, 192, 193 lexis, 142, 168 linguistic: analysis, 95, 108, 219, 252, 270, 294, 307, 311; description, 44, 59, 114,133, 282, 295 Linguistic Society of America, 286, 287 linguistics, anthropological, 27, 30,32,33,40,41, 75; behavioristic, 61 ; comparative, 11, 147, 153, 250; computational, 139;

333

configurational, 287; descriptive, 41, 113, 166, 173, 174, 205, 271, 273,298; diastratic, 205 ; diatopic, 205; ethno-, 30, 210, 285, 312; historical, 11, 250, 275, 276; meta-, 274, 275, 287; micro-, 287; para-, 265, 287, 288; phenomenological, 46, 80-82 linguistics, pre-, 287; psycho-, 30, 31, 75, 209, 210, 212; socio-, 30, 75, 142,199-210, 292f.; structural, 39, 45, 53, 113, 114, 127, 209, 251, 253, 254f., 258, 277, 279, 283f., 286, 291, 296, 297, 302, 307; theoretical, 256; technical, 251-253 logic, 51, 70f., 71, 72, 75, 79, 82, 83, 132 materialism, 276, 301 meaning, real, 238; referential, 165 mentalism, 10, 49, 82, 87, 298 message: produced, 216, 227; received, 216, 227 metalanguage, 33, 200, 204; meta-, 204 metaphor, 68, 69, 71, 79, 85, 86 metasystem, 200 metatheory, 44-46, 56, 72 metametatheory, 45, 56 method, classification-by-inspection, 149; comparative, 11, 147; distributional, 53 ; ethnographic, 274, 278, 282, 285, 286, 310; inductive, 110; linguistic, 249-251, 253, 257, 264, 268, 271, 274, 276-278, 280, 283, 284, 291, 295, 296, 298, 306, 310, 314; logical, 310; mathematical, 310; observational, 301 ; quantitative, 281 ; reductionist, 48; statistical, 281 ; structural, 199, 200 method-oriented approach, 95, 96f., 109 methodology, 18, 31-33, 38, 42, 56, 59, 74, 199, 281, 286-289, 295 metonym, 67-69, 71 model-building, 22, 23 models, formal, 300, 314 morpheme: 97, 99, 140, 142, 166, 174-181,

308,

269, 293,

173,

188,

334

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

191,217, 2 7 7 , 2 7 8 , 2 8 1 ; clusters, 97-100 morphology, 29, 77, 81, 100f„ 191, 201 morpho-syntactic rule, 233, 243, 244 mythemes, 281 natural language, 69, 71, 79, 82, 83, 112 node, 174, 175, 184 nonverbal culture, 162-165 norm, 65f., 202, 203 operation, analytic, 96, 97, 101, 103, 107; testing, 98-100, 105, 107, 108 operationalism, 18, 50, 56 Oxonian analysis, 76, 78f., 82 pansomatism, 16 Papago, 161, 167f„ 169 paradigm, 151, 152, 284; elicitation of, 98f.; semantic, 116, 120, 151, 152 parallelism, 68, 189, 206, 260, 286 parole, 10, 30, 65, 66f„ 133, 144, 199 patterning, 269, 270, 274 performance: 10, 30, 31, 34-37, 61, 79-81, 87, 218; models, 212, 222 perspectives, multiple, 290 phenomenon, 159-162, 164-166 phenomenological: analyses, 63, 86; approach, 59f., 71 phenomenology, 18, 42, 44, 46-54, 58, 61, 71, 75-78, 83, 85 phonematic unit, 39 phoneme: 49, 80, 111, 156, 166, 173, 202, 277, 278, 2 8 1 , 2 8 9 ; of culture, 281 phonemics, 48, 280, 302 phonetics, 48, 280, 297, 301 phonology, 29, 39,77, 8 1 , 1 2 7 , 1 3 2 , 1 7 4 , 1 9 0 , 1 9 3 , 250f., 269, 271, 285, 291, 297, 301, 302; structural, 280, 283, 293, 300f. phrase marker, 124, 174f. physicalism, 58, 60 pilot study, 160-167 point of departure, 65f., 66f., 76 polarity of meaning, 70, 84 polysémie forms, 84, 85 possessors, 118, 121-123 power base, 290 Prague School: 132, 133, 141, 143, 162f„ 200, 201, 209, 247, 282, 285, 289, 291 ; methodology, 132 Prague structuralism, 253 presentation, order of, 218, 219 prepositional structure, 101-106

privilege of occurrence, 296 procedure, analytical, 31, 34, 48; derivative information, 60; intuitive, 34; methodological, 21 ; reconstructional, 151; sentence production, 60; synthetic, 48 procedual steps, 96 process, finite-state Markov, 80 pronominalization, 128-130; anaphoric, 114, 121; reflexive, 119 proprioceptive mechanisms, 55 proxemics, 265, 289 recognition criteria, 96, 97 reconstruction, 61, 156 recurrence, systematic, 148, 149 redundancy, 229 reference, theory of, 53f., 60, 68 referent, 52, 55, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69 reflexivization, 114-117, 119-130 Reichling's theory, 52, 54, 65, 67, 80, 82 relations, system of, 281, 291 relator, 179, 180, 188, 189 relevance, contrastive, 280, 282, 295, 297, 301 restrictions: 213, 214, 218, 227, 242, 245; semantic, 215; syntactic, 216, 217 retrievability, 32, 38 rheme (comment), 134, 135, 138 rhythm groups, 173 rightness, criterion for, 98-100, 103-105, 108 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 54, 162, 163, 275 segmentation, 125f., 289, 296 semantic: analysis, 63, 192, 280, 295, 307; class, 227, 229 semantics, 46, 51, 67, 71, 81, 130, 142, 209, 237, 273, 2 7 6 , 2 7 8 , 288, 307, 311; ethnographic, 285, 293, 307, 308, 310 semasiology, 63 sememes, 281 semiology, 74, 76, 286 semiotics, 57, 286 sentence, antithetical, 175, 176, 178, 184,194; embedded, 117, 125f.; kernal, 213, 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 240, 241, 245; macro-, 117; minimal, 212-214, 216, 240, 242, 243, 245; simple, 116-119, 123, 124, 212, 213; single, 212, 213, 243 sequence, definitional, 101, 104, 105; procedual, 96f., 97, 101, 108, 109

INDEX OF SUBJECTS setting, 51, 53, 57f., 69, 288 sign, language, 147, 202, 203, 205-207 signifiant, 63, 202, 206 signifié, 63, 202, 206 simplicity, 32, 38, 137 situation, 57, 58, 62, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 80, 82, 85, 87, 134, 141, 142, 178; communication, 55, 56, 58f., 60; speech, 55, 56, 57, 60 sound: change, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156; patterning, 280 Spanish, 202, 206, 208, 246 statement, constituent parts of, 212, 213 stratification, 200, 201 stress groups, 173, 192 strings, lexical, 173, 184 structure, conception of, 280; constituent, 186, 194; genitive, 106, 107; governed, 101-105; governing, 102, 103; linguistic, 105, 220, 270, 281, 289; social, 273, 290, 292, 293, 295, 299 structural: analysis, 256, 278, 295, 303, 305, 309; concepts, 269, 285, 286 structuralism, 279, 299, 300f. stylistics, 133, 139, 201, 208, 209 subjectivism, 48 substitutability, 97, 100, 103 substitution technique, 97, 98, 103, 104 Summer Institute of Linguistics, 185f., 190, 290 surface structure, 40, 51, 115, 119, 123-125, 127, 194, 259, 297-299 symbolic forms, 281, 311 symbolics, 288 symptomatic value, 202, 203, 205, 206 synchronic description, 29, 144, 201 synonymity, constructional, 72 synstratic description, 201 syntactic: class, 220, 227, 229, 230, 240; description, 77, 101, 129; structure, 60, 71, 77, 115 syntactics, 271 syntagmatic classes, 215 syntagmeme, 174, 177-180, 184, 186-189 syntax, 29, 46, 51, 71, 77, 80-82, 100, 127, 156, 191, 192, 237, 250f„ 300 syntopic description, 201 system of systems, 28, 199, 200 tagmeme, 174-181, 184-190, 246, 281, 290 tagmemics, 174, 188, 192, 247, 290 taxonomy, 30, 84, 85, 149, 193, 194; folk, 293 test, paraphrase, 109; substitution, 99, 100;

335

transformation, 107, 108 thematic: jump, 138; progression, TP, 137-139 theme(topic), 134, 135, 140; split, 138, 139 theme-rheme, nexus, 137, 139 theme structure: of culture, 163, 164; of language, 163; of the utterance, 135 theory, a, 15, 43, 45; anthropological, 291 ; antimentalistic, 48; a priori, 72; a posteriori, 72; automata, 75; deductive, 95 ; ethnographic, 253; evaluating aspect of, 18; explicit, 76; formalized, 19; generative, 65 ; glossematic, 50f.; grammatical, 248; high-level, 73, 74, 76-78, 81; implicit, 4 4 , 1 1 0 ; inner form, 54; integrated, 82; low-level, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78; mentalistic, 54, 58; method-oriented, 204; mid-level, 80, 81 ; model, 23; nature of, 95 ; nonalgebraic, 23 ; phenomenological, 42, 48, 54, 78, 82; psychologistic, 53 ; remoteness of, 74; representation, 23 ; scaling, 314; semantic, 44, 45, 51-53f„ 56, 57f„ 63, 69, 71, 72, 80-82, 87; set, 22; 'strong', 160f.; syntactic, 77, 81 ; system, 22; tagmemic, 174; the, 15, 42; transformational, 9, 45f.; transformational generative, 51, 79, 80f. theory, unifying, 61 ; universal grammatical, 114; universal phonetic, 39 theory of: meaning, 48, 53f., 60, 63, 64, 69, 84; the method, 204; tri-modal structure, 174, 192; utterance, 134,144

336

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

tool, conceptual, 161,163,165-167; operational, 247 topological description, 299 totality, 48, 49, 65f., 217 totemism, 292, 293 totonac, 184,190,191 transformation, 214,217,221,223-233,237, 243-247, 297-299; battery of, 41,109 transformational: analysis, 212, 298; model, 19, 213; rules, 214, 300; school, 174, 194, 299 tree diagrams, 174-176, 178-185, 190 Trique, 186, 187, 190

typology, 147, 288

I,

ungrammaticality, 123, 212, 219, 221, 227, 228, 241,244 universal rules, 124,125 universale, 10, 36, 38,40,144,156, 281 utterance, original, 98, 100, 104, 105, 107, 108; resultant, 98-100, 105, 107, 108 validity, 252, 256; cognitive, 305 verificationalism, 50, 56 word-order, 136,140