Linguistics

LINGUISTICS. - Language is a complex activity, in which physical, psychic and spiritual factors concur in so harmonious and demanding a way as to make it the most universal and most typical manifestation of human nature (speech is a faculty exclusive to man, and there exists no people, even of the most primitive culture, that is deprived of it).

By virtue of this character of its own, language can be viewed from different points of view and can therefore be the object of different disciplines. Physiology studies the articulated voice in its mechanism of production, and alongside it stands experimental phonetics, which investigates more particularly acoustic values in relation to phonation. Psychology studies the linguistic fact in its psychic moments, extending its examination from the position of the individual before the complex of phonic signs that present themselves to his expressing (the apprehension, the modalities of the relation that mediates between the content of consciousness and linguistic forms, the reception in the hearer) to the unconscious modifications that take place in the system: the particular investigation of the assumption of sound as meaning, that is, of the constitution of the symbol, falls within the sphere of psychology, and therefore so does the problem, if problem there be, of the origin of language. Sociology is likewise interested in the study of the linguistic fact, above all as regards the general value of the symbol in the economy of relational life and the importance of the linguistic datum in the constitution of groups and social classes. Philosophy studies language from the point of view of its cognitive validity; logic in particular is engaged in determining the relation that exists between concept and semantic value, between thought and expression.

The aforesaid disciplines consider language in its general aspects as a human faculty, that is, in its universality. They are disciplines which, having as their object single aspects of human nature, are necessarily led to consider in linguistic activity the manifestation of that aspect. The complex of their contributions, integrated by the results furnished by general linguistics (v. below), is sometimes organized into an autonomous philosophical discipline, the philosophy of language, which proposes as its object the origin, the modalities, the validity of symbolic forms.

Language is man's own faculty of objectifying in phonic symbols the movement of consciousness: with this objectification, which translates every interior moment into representation, there is closely bound the communicating, which appears as the most relevant practical aspect of expressing. From the psychophysical point of view language belongs to the order of motor facts; but the motivation that most qualifies it is the intentionality of expressing, and this places it in the foreground in the framework of finalistic facts. The representation, which is an indispensable condition for the objectification of the content of consciousness, and of the intuition that holds a central position in it, takes place through cognitive forms, that is, by means of signs of universal value, which, thanks to reciprocal determination, are rendered suitable in the organization of the sentence for the expression of the particular. The complex of signs and the manner of determining them in their relation form the tongue, the technical complement of the linguistic act, absolutely indispensable since without a tongue there is no language. The necessity of it is inherent in the historicity of the linguistic act, that is, in the concreteness of expressing and of understanding.

Like all human activities that transcend pure physicality, speaking concretizes itself in objective forms, which constitute the concrete projection of language as it is determined in time and space. The tongue is, then, the concrete, historical universal in which the individual, insofar as he participates in a historicity (and he cannot fail to, because an isolated individual does not exist, just as there exist no communities that are not composed of individuals), places himself in the very act in which he speaks. There is, therefore, between the system that constitutes the object, sociality as it is commonly and rather improperly called, and which represents necessity, the limit proper to form, and the speaker, who represents subjectivity and therefore freedom, no effective opposition, since the individual as speaker cannot withdraw from that limit, and the system in turn has no other reality than in the freedom of the speaker, who translates into act the functionality that lies dormant in it. The exigency of expressing, which is subjectivity, always impresses upon the system attitudes and vibrations, which may leave its structure entirely intact, but may sometimes be translated, where the impulse is vigorous in relation to a diminished distinctive qualification of the system itself, into profound and lasting variations, capable of integrating it into a substantially new unity. The tongue, therefore, while on the one hand it is a structure that obeys the internal law of its own functionality, on the other hand is outside of all staticity, since as function it is a form of subjective moments.

Linguistics, or glottology or science of language, has as its aim the study of tongues as structure and as change. It is, therefore, an essentially historical discipline, both because it deals with a fact of a finalistic order and because its object concretizes and delimits itself, beyond space, in time. It must necessarily refer back to human nature, which is precisely what determines itself in history, and therefore it must refer above all to physiology and psychology; but this takes nothing away from the autonomy that comes to it from the precise individuation of its object, that is, a determinate linguistic system in its functional structure, in its forming and in its transforming.

To this task, which constitutes it as a science, the consideration of the linguistic fact has arrived only in our times, after having passed through a long vicissitude of deviations and errors. Among the Greeks and the Indians the tongue was studied for didactic and normative purposes, not without good results: already alphabetic writing itself entailed a phonematic analysis of surprising accuracy, and the study of the highly complex morphological mechanism brought the grammatical category into clear evidence. And yet among the Greeks, from whom the Western tradition of linguistic analysis descends, on the one hand the study of grammatical forms is included and absorbed into an exigency of rationality, in which logical category and grammatical category identify with each other, while on the other hand the analysis of the lexical sign is rendered vain by the gnoseological claim that seeks to discover in it a natural truth, that is, an ontological function. There resulted, therefore, a systematics of signs in syntactic function, inspired by an exclusively logical criterion, which still survives and forms an integral part of our grammatical mentality; but the formal datum was neglected, to the point that the analogists claimed that the grammatical categories, a faithful reflection of the logical categories, were always expressed by identical morphological elements. Etymological research, on the other hand, by arbitrarily shattering the word in search of primary elements indicating primordial truths, and thus abstracting completely from the historical datum, foreclosed the way to the attainment of the only true (ἐνταίον) attainable one, that is, the creative moment, in any case a moment of «word» (v. below), which always furnishes to the tongue (and the latter forgets it: the sign in it is arbitrary) the signifier for a certain knowledge.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, rationalism had profound repercussions on the evaluation of the linguistic fact. It reacted, with Leibniz, against so-called "harmonic" grammar, which, starting from the premise that Hebrew was the model and archetype of all languages, brought the strangest criteria into the analysis of structures, such as those of addition, subtraction, transposition and inversion of letters (it operated with letters and not with sounds). But at the same time as it recognized that the linguistic system is a complex of signs bound reciprocally by functional necessity, it denied it any autonomy, creating a "general grammar," whose purpose was to compose into unity the grammatical schemata, usually derived from the Latin language, with those of formal logic. Today such a grammatical tendency is re-evaluated, both on the part of general linguistics of a structural orientation (and already by de Saussure), and on the part of so-called logistics, which proposes, starting from language, to find a means of expression more adequate (mathematical symbolism) to the proceeding of logical thought. In reality, rational grammar was entirely unproductive, because of the misapprehension implicit in it of the nature of language, which, while obeying the general logicality inherent in the system because it is such, is a form not of pure logical activity, but of the whole movement of consciousness. Thus Giambattista Vico could easily reproach the famous grammarians Julius Caesar Scaliger and Franciscus Sanctius for proceeding "as if the peoples who found languages had first had to go to school to Aristotle, with whose principles both have reasoned about them" (Scienza nuova, ed. Nicolini, I, p. 124). On the other hand, Vico, as after him the neo-idealist current, fell into the opposite error of considering language as a product of aesthetic activity, whereas this, like logic, represents only a part of that integral movement of consciousness of which language is the form.

A truly scientific investigation of language, because founded on the historical study of languages and groups of languages, begins only in the first decades of the 19th century; and it is to be connected with two circumstances of a different nature: on the one hand, the knowledge of Sanskrit, which gave impetus to research into the genetic kinship of an important group of languages; on the other, the orientation of thought by which the mechanical and rationalistic conception of linguistic structures was replaced by the Romantic one of "organic form." The notion of "individual form" applied by Leibniz to organic life was carried over by Herder into the field of human creations and was very productive there, because it allowed a new mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, between the particular and the universal: in the field of language it led to renouncing the claim to seek, beyond the accident of individual languages, a perfect and rational language, and instead to justifying their multiplicity as variations of form, in which the essence of language is realized. Once the autonomy of language as "organic form" was legitimized, it was easy to introduce and highlight in it the notion of development: the recognition of the kinship of most of the languages of Europe with one another and with Indian and Iranian contributed strongly to this. Through comparison, the notion was constituted of an Aryan-European linguistic community, at whose base was placed a parent language, from which the historical languages would have developed. In this period the historicity of the linguistic fact is not yet dissociated from the notion of organic development; indeed, this historicity takes shape precisely in a natural process of development, dominated by the same character of necessity by which organic life appears to be dominated. According to Fr. Bopp, who is rightly considered the founder of linguistics (his work Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprachen is from 1816, and his Vergleichende Grammatik began to be published in 1833), "languages are to be considered as bodies of organic nature, which are formed according to determinate laws, develop carrying within themselves an internal vital principle, and die, little by little." Later A. Schleicher, to whom credit must be given for having, through phonetic comparison, given a more precise physiognomy to the Aryan-European unity (his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen appeared in its first edition in 1864), affirms that "languages live like all natural organisms; they do not act like man and therefore have no history whatever, insofar as this word is understood in its strictest and most proper meaning." Consequently, linguistics is "a part of the natural history of man," and its task is "to bring to light the laws according to which languages in the course of their life are modified, since without knowledge of them it is not possible to understand even the forms of present languages." Such a conception is certainly a reflection of the Hegelian conception of history: this, according to Hegel, is conscious will, freedom that gives itself the reality proper to it; Schleicher assumes that in the development of language there is no consciousness, no freedom; it therefore cannot be the object of history, but rather of systematics. The Darwinian doctrine of evolution did not fail subsequently to influence Schleicher himself, who speaks of languages, dialects, local speech as of species, subspecies, primary and secondary subspecies and the like: the various varieties are, as is obvious, explained by progressive development and differentiation, due to the necessities of adaptation to the environment.

In this conception of organic development, the becoming of languages is traced back to an internal necessity, but there is room for a certain freedom, analogous to that of a plant that grows according to its laws, but whose growth is not foreseeable, because it is the result of the mutable relations between its vitality and the environment. In the subsequent conception, dominated by positivism, this margin of freedom is greatly reduced, since organic development is considered as the result of causes of a physical order or, at most, of psychic forces operating according to laws of strict mechanicity. The culminating manifestation of this conception was the faith in the "exceptionlessness" of phonetic laws, that is, in the perfect regularity of the change of sounds, until extraneous factors of a psychic order intervene to disturb its free development.

The history of the phonetic law is the history of linguistics in the last quarter of a century, marked by numerous remarkable conquests, which have raised linguistic studies, in all sectors, and especially in the Indo-European and Romance fields, to the dignity of a science. The conception of phonetic change as subject to a law of regularity analogous to that observed in natural phenomena was led to on the one hand by the positivist upheaval that European culture underwent starting from the second half of the 19th century, and on the other by the numerous discoveries which, leading to a more rigorous and almost complete systematization of Indo-European phonetics, determined the conviction that phonetic processes were of a mechanical order. All research was informed by this principle, which is formulated as follows in the introduction to the Morphologische Untersuchungen, initiated by K. Brugmann and H. Osthoff in Leipzig in 1878, I, p. 13: "Every phonetic change, insofar as it is accomplished mechanically, proceeds according to exceptionless laws, that is, the direction of the phonetic shift in all the members of a linguistic community... is always the same, and all the words in which, under equal circumstances, that sound subject to change appears, are affected without exception by the change." The group of linguists who adopted this axiom and applied it in research with great results, which transcend its theoretical soundness, took the name of "Neogrammarians."

The principle of the phonetic law already suffered dangerous cracks among its followers, by the very fact that one could not avoid admitting that constant interventions of a psychological order (assimilations and dissimilations, crossings and analogies) gave rise to numerous exceptions; so that even among those who applied the positivist method in research, the validity of the principle was called into question (Ascoli, Schuchardt, Paul). The ever greater recognition of the psychological datum, first under the aspect of collective psychology (Wundt), then under that of individual psychology, set the problem of language on its proper terms, namely those of the relationship between subject and object, between the individual and the collective; thus two different orientations arose, the idealistic and the sociological, which respectively place the accent on one or the other of the two poles. Meanwhile, the very change in the notion of "law" that had occurred in the field of the natural sciences, and above all the recognition that language belongs to the order of finalistic facts, made more clearly understood what the law in linguistics actually is, namely a simple cognitive schema of variations. Thus also the reconstruction of common Indo-European, carried out by the comparative method and to which an absolute value was attributed, as of a language that really existed, appeared in its true light as a schema of the concordances observed in the historical languages of the group, account being taken of the modifications that occurred in the individual developments.

Within the framework of the neo-idealist reaction to positivism, the linguistic fact came to assume a position of particular prominence. Considered in its subjectivity, it came to stand on the same plane as art and to be identified with it, whence general linguistics came to be identified with aesthetics: "Every individual who expresses a spiritual impression creates intuitions, produces forms of language" (K. Vossler). Such a conception, however, could not ignore the incontestable fact that language exists as a collective datum and is an instrument of communication, that is, it is a collective creation conditioned by practical needs; and therefore it too is forced to distinguish within linguistics a "stylistics," which looks at what is unconditioned and original in the forms of language, and a historical grammar, which looks at what is conditioned and common (Vossler). Since innovations originate from individual speakers, who finding themselves in a certain subjective situation and in a certain historical environment perform an act of creation, it is necessary to proceed from stylistics, which is the science of individual expression, and then pass to syntax, morphology and phonetics; but the true science of language is stylistics, given that the essence of language is inner activity, intuition. And yet, language is susceptible of description only insofar as it too is development, since it exists as an instrument of social relations in constant change. Historical grammar shows how linguistic creation is limited "by certain states, by certain needs, by certain collective tendencies of the soul of peoples."

The opposite orientation gravitates toward the objective aspect of language, that is, toward the language system, and starts from sociology. For it, the observation that language is an individual fact is true, but it is irrelevant like all self-evident propositions (Meillet). In the doctrine of F. De Saussure, the scholar who gave linguistics a body of principles that is very original and fruitful even if not systematic (the Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916, is compiled from students' notes), what is proper to the individual is the need to express himself, but the possibility of doing so with speech is given by the means furnished to him by society, that is, by the "langue." This is a social product, the result of spontaneous convention, and is constituted by a complex of arbitrary signs, in the sense that there is no bond of necessity between the signifying phonic complex and the thing designated: the signs are not, that is, the result of natural expressiveness, but owe their existence to collective usage, and their value is in relation to the system of oppositions and correlations of which they form part. Linguistics proper studies not "parole," that is, the activity of the individual, from which every innovation also begins, but rather "langue," that is, the conventional organization of signs of which he makes use. Such study is "synchronic" insofar as it studies the system in its present functionality, the sum of the conventions of usage in the reciprocity of the mechanism, "diachronic" insofar as it considers the modifications to which it is subject, following the disequilibrium that always occurs in the relationship between the sign and the idea. By far more important is synchronic study, because it aims to bring to light the system in its functional entity, in the validity with which it imposes itself on the whole mass of speakers; while diachronic consideration, which must leave out innovation and its cause because they fall within the sphere of "parole" and therefore do not belong to the language system, must limit itself to registering the changes; and this it can do almost only with regard to phonetic changes, the only ones that are slowly acquired; both phonetic changes and facts of analogy are founded on the present state of the system, the former as a synchronic variant, the latter as a product of the weight that the system as a unity, as a solidarity, has in the consciousness of the speaker.

De Saussure's doctrine, more coherently expressed with regard to synchronic consideration, has had the great merit of drawing attention back to the functionality that is internal to the language system and makes it an autonomous system. From it derives first of all, insofar as it is founded on a static consideration of the system, the phonological orientation, which aims to clarify the mechanism of oppositions and correlations in which the phoneme assumes its value. Once such consideration is transported into the field of syntax, on the one hand the task has been imposed of clarifying the relationship between the subjective moment and the system, through stylistic investigation; on the other, the necessity has arisen of reducing to cognitive schemas the syntactic function of individual systems, and this has brought back to new life the problem already faced by rational grammar, whether it is possible to classify such function in schemas of universal validity.

Such are the trends prevailing today in the field of linguistics, with a tendency to define themselves into schools (of Prague, of Geneva, of Copenhagen). Alongside these trends, which all gravitate around synchronic consideration (within whose scope linguistic geography also falls, insofar as it limits itself to observation), the historical approach continues to assert itself as ever vital and productive, an approach that demands that the fact of "language" be framed within the complex reality of the life of the community, as it is individuated in space and time. It is not possible to limit the observation of languages to their functionality as a system, sacrificing historical interest, which is imperative in the face of a human fact of such vast scope as language. Nevertheless, the theoretical legitimation of the historical approach to linguistics can no longer today be sought in the notion of organic development or mechanical motion, but only in that of the subject-object, individual-universal relationship, which is at the basis of every human reality.

The intervention of the subject, implicitly assumed in stylistic inquiry even when the system is considered statically, constitutes the presupposition of that dynamic which makes of language a fact of history. The Saussurean opposition between synchronic and diachronic consideration certainly cannot satisfy, because the variants, which determine the incessant and continuous change of the system, are in truth synchronic: one can rather have a static and a dynamic consideration of language and on that basis distinguish, on the one hand, grammar or structural linguistics and, on the other, historical linguistics. Stylistics comes to occupy a median position, given that it leads from the system as structure to the system as becoming. The subjective moment inserts, so to speak, language into history, withdrawing it from a strictly technical, grammatical evaluation, to which static linguistics would wish to reserve it. In fact, behind the subject with his creativity on the linguistic plane, there is all the historicity in which each speaker participates; whence the innovation, which theoretically can be pinpointed as an individual fact, is conditioned by an objective situation, in which various factors operate. While historical grammar limits itself to registering the diversity between two linguistic phases statically considered (according to a well-known observation of Schuchardt, rest and movement do not constitute an opposition in the field of languages: only movement is real, only rest is perceptible), historical linguistics has the task of investigating the cause of innovations or at least of ascertaining the circumstances in which they come about. Geographical factors, cultural contacts, events and circumstances of a political order, social organization, relational and practical life, spiritual activity in all its aspects—ethical, artistic, religious—constitute the presupposition of every new expressive need, in relation to the system already given; and they condition the collective adherence by which the fact of "speech" becomes a fact of "language," that is, a new element of the system. Investigations into the modalities and causes of phonetic changes, into innovations, which may be upheavals, in the expression of the syntactic relationship, etymological research, which seeks to establish the moment and the circumstances in which a sign comes to designate a piece of knowledge and how the knowledge, which is the semantic content of the sign, is transformed, constitute a highly significant part, and certainly the noblest, of linguistics as a science.

Alongside investigations into individual languages or groups of languages there is also room for a discipline of a general character, which, gathering the threads of observations made in the various fields, seeks to establish the universal modalities of linguistic development, in relation to the causes that determine it. To this arduous sector belongs the name of "general linguistics."

Antonino Pagliaro