LANGUAGE. — In its proper and common meaning, language is spoken speech, the means of expressing and communicating thought in man. In a derived sense, language is also applied to the expressive means of feelings and passions in animals and, more generally still, to the expressive value that things assume by their very presence, for consciousness and thought. Language is, finally, as the expression of being in consciousness, the verb or logos of the mind: the “word” then coincides with the “concept.”
I. PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
The science whose purpose is to investigate the relationship between words, concepts, and things; to determine whence words derive their semantic value; to discern what is personal and what is universal in language; to ascertain the essence of language; and to explain why language exists or ought to exist.Scattered elements of a philosophy of language are found in Plato (Cratylus, 387 ff.) and also in early Christian thought. Theophilus of Antioch, employing Stoic terminology, speaks (Ad Autolycum, II, 10 and 22) of the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος, the inner word of the divine mind, God’s interior expression to Himself, which becomes λόγος προφορικός, the manifested word, first in creation: “All things were made by him” (Jn 1:3), and then in the Incarnation: “And the Word was made flesh” (ibid., 1:14). Medieval treatises on logic, in their discussions of the value of terms, their meaning, their “suppositio,” their relation to other parts of speech and to concepts and things, sometimes contain opinions and assessments that go beyond mere formal logic and belong to the philosophy of language (cf. William of Ockham, Commentary on the First Book of the Sentences, 2.4, M.; Summa totius logicae, I, 63-77).
Yet a true and proper philosophy of language arose only in modern thought, and not in an autonomous form. In its brief history, it has assumed an idealistic hue at one time and a positivistic one at another, depending on the general mentality in which it developed. In a first period, toward the end of the 18th century, W. Humboldt, who first used the term “Sprachphilosophie,” consistently with his fundamental idealism, made great efforts to derive language from the creative activity of the transcendent Ego. He considered in language more the activity of the subject than the effect of this activity, more the faculty and power of expressing oneself in words than the result, the language already existing in the domain of social coexistence. The philosophy of language aimed to demonstrate dialectically how the transcendent Ego must possess a means of expressing its own inner life. Humboldt affirmed that the creative force of the Spirit is the same as the capacity to produce symbols, to symbolize its own immanent content: without words, reality is chaotic; by creating symbols, reality is created: “Die Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedankens,” op. cit. in bibl., p. 64).
In a second phase, the philosophy of language took on a positivistic character, and language was considered as a given, abstracting from its causes. More than a philosophy of language, it was linguistics: the history of words was constructed, genealogical trees were established to trace, through modifications, the original stocks. Then, by applying the methods of experimental psychology, the mechanism of language was illustrated, the analysis of the linguistic faculty and its functioning was carried out to explain anomalies and associations.
A revival of the idealistic interpretation followed. Cassirer (Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Berlin 1923, pp. 3-51) elaborated extensively the symbolic conception of language already conceived by Humboldt. On the one hand, the ancient pre-Socratic philosophers and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle would have held that sensations and ideas were intellectual symbols of external objects, without troubling themselves to verify whether the symbol corresponded to the thing symbolized; on the other hand, modern physicists, e.g., Heinrich Hertz, would hold that space, time, mass, force, matter, energy, etc., are nothing but symbols fashioned by the human mind to master the world of sensible experience. Arts, sciences, myths, religions would be forms of the spirit, each creating its own symbols, different in mode of derivation but all proceeding from a single origin; and they would indicate the paths followed by the spirit in its objectification. The spirit transforms the passive world of mere impressions into the world of pure spiritual expression by elevating the particulars of experience to a higher unity. The gods of Greece owe their formation to Hesiod and Homer: it was the aesthetic beginning of religious thought. The sign or symbol is not a casual envelope of thought but an essential and necessary organ of II. Language not only communicates the content of thought but also represents that content, makes it distinct. Every thought is defined insofar as it is expressed in a word. The acquisition of the sign or symbol represents, in the development of the spirit, the passage to objectification. Language, science, art, and religion provide the stones for building the world of “reality” and the world of the ego.
In an attempt to fuse together the two idealistic and positivistic trends, Karl Bühler (Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Jena 1934) undertook in 1934 in Vienna a comprehensive study of language, considering its functioning and its relations with the integral life of the spirit. He recognized in it a threefold function: the expressive function, which manifests externally the feelings and affections of the subject and can operate even without distinct articulation of speech, common to men, children, and animals; the appellative function, which provokes a reaction in the subjects to whom language is addressed and arouses in the listener the concepts of the speaker; and a representative function, which manifests externally the complex rational and spiritual life exclusive to man. From these points of view, language would represent the synthesis of the whole person, in his affective life (expressive function), social life (appellative function), and spiritual life (representative function): the philosophy of language could lead to a general philosophy of life and being.
In Italy, Giulio Bertoni, in polemic with the “scientists” of language, maintained that the origin of language is not a
Linguistic, but a philosophical and theological problem. The comparison of languages can only serve to uncover affinities and similarities, and even if it were to prove the unity of all languages currently spoken on earth, the doubt would always remain that beyond this unity there existed linguistic conditions which no investigation could clarify for lack of data. Moreover, human expression is not merely articulated or auditory. There is crying, there is laughter, there is pain and joy. To perceive is to speak, to think is to speak. The search for the origin of language is identical with the search for the origin of man. Language is the soul of speech, it is speech enlivened by feeling, by imagination, by the soul. Language reveals itself in accent, in timbre, in the music of speech. Always, speech is accompanied by a movement of the soul. Whoever speaks reveals himself to himself and to others. Language is thought, experience, history. As much thought as language, as much feeling as language. When the mind is troubled, when one struggles to clarify the indistinct, then language becomes speech, and one is freed from torment. Thought constructs itself by constructing language... Language is a creative activity..., it is an arcane fluid that penetrates and imbues words with its magic and draws the spirit to take shape in them (Lingua e pensiero, Florence 1932, pp. 6, 9, 243).
Cantoni merely develops the rigidly idealistic interpretation of language already given by B. Croce, attributing to language only an aesthetic value and a merely expressive and objective significance. For Croce, the science of art and the science of language are not two distinct sciences but one and the same; the philosophy of art and the philosophy of language are the same thing; language is organized sound for the purpose of expression; linguistics, insofar as it is reducible to philosophy, is nothing but aesthetics (Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, Bari 1928, pp. 153-166).
In contrast, the positivist approach is followed by all those modern interpretations of the nature of language deriving from the movement that took its name from the Vienna Circle and which constitutes the various centers of methodology that have arisen in the Old and New Worlds: Milan, Turin, London, Chicago. These centers, and the scholars who belong to them, aim at a positive analysis of language that would purify it of every dross and render it capable of objectively and impartially describing and transmitting observations and the rigorously logical deductions that may be drawn from them. Words are often false deities that reduce reason itself to slavery; language often exercises a lyrical function, it is often conjugated by a naive anthropomorphism (S. Ceccato, Programma per un corso di metodologia, Milan 1946, pp. 3-8). C. Morris in the United States and A. G. Ayer in England reduce the activity of philosophy to the determination of the significance of absent things, to the exclusion of pseudopropositions, and to the analysis of significant propositions: those propositions are significant which are verifiable by experience, whether actually realizable or at least logically conceivable (v. BIBLICA).
It is clear that in a positivistic or neopositivistic conception of language, consistent with the fundamental antimeta-physical position, there is not even a suspicion of any possible philosophical problematic of language. Therefore, while an analysis of language that purifies it of surreptitious meanings and prevents illogical and uncritical infusions may be granted, and while the effort to create a philosophical and scientific language that adheres to the concrete conditions defining knowledge may be approved, all this remains on the margins of an authentic philosophy of language. This asks what language is, according to the various meanings of the term. If by it we mean the faculty of expressing the spirit, and first of all the faculty of expressing itself to itself, the intimate saying of the spirit to itself; if language is that phase of expression which precedes even the conceptualization of thought, or the very fragmentation of thought into the various modes of expression by which it realizes its act; if it is lyric, poetry, art, even before it is concept, logic, word. Beyond the question of language in general, there is that of human language: what its content may be, of what spirit it is an expression; whether it is merely the aesthetic expression of the fleeting moment of a spirit in becoming, or whether, alongside the aesthetic expression, woven into it, there is a content of universal and necessary value, a reflection of an absolute value. The problem of language then coincides with the fundamental problem of all philosophy: what is man, and what is his relationship to the absolute?
Generally, language is not studied as the starting point of a philosophical system; rather, its interpretation is inserted and framed within a system already constructed and formulated, and different from language are the motives that determine an immanent conception—whether of the knowledge of reality or a transcendental, historicist, or existentialist conception. In every conception, however, the dual aspect of the nature of language may be accepted: the expressive aspect and the communicative aspect. While the latter is more obvious, so much so that Aristotle deduced from the existence of language in men their natural social evolution, it is undeniable, nevertheless, that language would not be communication if it were not first expression, and above all expression of thought to itself, the ineliminable and irreplaceable fruit of the very activity of thinking, what it conceives, generates, creates, even if it were not to communicate with anyone, even if it were only self-consciousness. In this sense, language precedes even the concept; it is the very capacity for conceptualization; then the word, spoken or written, is nothing but the aesthetic counterpart of the conceptualization that has occurred, so that language is specifically one for all men, just as specifically one in them are intelligence and reason, by which the concepts of being, substance, cause, etc., are identical in all men, and manifold in their diversity are the languages. It may be said that language is the fruit of the spontaneity of the spirit and of the spirit’s tendency to objectify itself; and if spontaneity is lyricism, poetry, intuition, in opposition to reflection, logic, reasoning, then language is art and not science.
All this may apply to language in general. Human language, however, as the spirit of which it is an expression, has its own qualifications and characteristics. Faced with the concept of the absolute, human spirit, with its limits, processes, involutions, cannot attribute to itself its characteristics. The only solution to the problem of its essence is therefore of a transcendental nature. The characteristics of human language, even in its expressive aspect, even in its communicative aspect, confirm this metaphysical conception. Human language cannot claim for itself, in the expressive phase, an absolute spontaneity. Just as human intelligence is not the absolute and ultimate norm of truth, goodness, beauty, and the values it can realize are not primary and absolute values, so the expressiveness of the human spirit is of a secondary character, is of a participatory nature, is measured and normed by a measure and a norm superior to II. The communicative aspect of language, the possibility and fact of dialogue, the universality of the object communicated and understood, poses the problem of the relations between the many and the one. And this must be resolved by recourse to a superior unity that cannot be of the same nature as the many. The dual aspect of human language confirms the testimony of the spirit, which is perceived as the expressive reflection of an objectivity that transcends II. The spirit and human language are inserted into a universal reality and a universal value.
Human language is expressive and communicative only in the proposition. Croce had already noted that expression is an indivisible whole; in it, the noun and the verb do not exist, but are abstractions fashioned by man in destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the proposition.
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(Estetica, p. 158). Words are not communicated except within an affirmation or a negation. Affirmation, then, is the expression of being, which the human spirit does not create but apprehends, according to its particular mode of knowing, and in accordance with the fundamental exigencies of rational objectivity, the first principles, the condition of the very possibility of dialogue and of language.
Articulated language, too, as such, has a particular value of its own. If the choice of spoken and written words is arbitrary and conventional (the case of onomatopoeic words is an exception), once certain words have been fixed to indicate particular objects, language assumes a character of stability. The acceptance of words by many constitutes the very possibility of spoken and written language. Stability and acceptance of the meaning of words constitute what is usually called the juridical value of language, from which no one who intends to communicate his ideas to other thinking subjects can dispense. It contains a great significance: words have acquired their value through the sieve of centuries, in the crucible of collective human thought, and only then were they definitively accepted, when their outward meaning corresponded to the concept intended to be expressed.
Words are signs and symbols, but of thought. However diverse the many languages spoken by the human race may be, the unity of language is manifest in them. The common traits existing among them do not always depend, as Schuchardt has shown, on mutual kinship; rather, they are due to that element common to all mankind, which is thought.
Thought is the principle of objectivity and universality. Therefore, the passage from reality to thought and from thought to language ensures the latter an objective value, which becomes juridical through common acceptance. It would not, therefore, seem impossible for philosophy to begin with an examination of language in order to attain truth, retracing the path by which the spirit arrives at words. The analysis of the meaning contained in language is always of no small importance. Philosophy, by investigating this meaning, directs its research into the most intimate and profound workings of thought, which, though spontaneous in character, was no less reflective and penetrating in translating reality into words.
Language, even in its completeness and stabilization, like thought itself, contains margins of uncertainty and indeterminacy, and a progressive evolution of forms. Human thought cannot achieve total knowledge of reality, nor will there ever be an expression perfectly adequate to the entire intelligibility of its object. This does not, however, lend support to a shift toward forms of absolute anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. If human thought cannot claim exhaustive knowledge of the real—and in this lies the proof of the transcendent value of being—it nevertheless expresses, in the fabric of its concepts and forms, the fundamental structure of reality.
A conception of language based on the principles outlined above allows for a process of language itself toward a philosophy of the real. In every language there are words that express the same concept, for example, that of substance, of transformation, of obligation, and thus indicate a universal derivation that can have no foundation except in the objectivity of the concept itself. Moreover, in words the diversity with which thought translates reality into concepts is clearly expressed. The distinction between abstract and concrete words is highly significant. "Humanity" and "man" do not denote the same thing. Humanity is what makes "man" to be who he is, but it is not man. The abstract term represents the fruit of an elaboration of thought; the concrete term refers directly to existing reality. Thus, from an analysis of the expressive content of words—inasmuch as words, thought, and reality are bound together—one may, following the example of Aristotle and, earlier, Socrates, draw the general outlines of a logic and a metaphysics.
Aristotle defined words as "passionum animae signa," signs of the concepts of the soul (Peri
the states proper to the self; but gradually it disengages itself from the purely emotive-volitional aspect to arrive at that of intellectual ascertainment. Language, initially voluntary, quickly becomes automatic, in the sense that thought and word seem intimately bound together, passing effortlessly from one to the other.
Disorders of language development include: a) audimutism, the absence or insufficiency of articulated speech in children with normal intelligence and hearing; the evolution is favorable, either spontaneously or under the influence of re-education. It may depend on auditory agnosia or congenital deafness, though the latter is a very rare form; the essential disturbance consists in the incomprehension of spoken language, even though the organs of phonation and articulation are normal; articulated speech is absent and is replaced by gestures or by a language formed of simple sounds without grammatical rules (idioglossia). Or it may depend on a delay in the development of praxic functions (v. NERVOUS SYSTEM); in this case, while verbal comprehension is perfect, there is an impossibility of combining syllables in articulated speech; there is no individual language, as in auditory agnosia, but the language of the environment is spoken, poorly and in a highly deformed manner. b) Deaf-mutism due to peripheral lesions (v. DEAF-MUTES). c) Abnormal pronunciation in spoken language, in the form of "blesti" (stuttering), due to the persistence of a phonetic behavior belonging to a less evolved period of language integration; or of "babbling," produced by uncoordinated motor activity of the different organs participating in phonation, so that the stutterer seems no longer able to breathe while speaking. The onset of such a defect is generally gradual, around the age of 5, though it can sometimes be sudden (in which case it is attributed, at least by family members, to an emotional shock). Once established, stuttering presents "clonic" phenomena (repetition of syllables or phonemes, initial sounds of words, or parasitic sounds) and "tonic" phenomena (temporary inability to emit the slightest sound). The defect is generally intermittent, and emotions accentuate it; it is exceptional in sung speech. Various etiological factors have been invoked from time to time: hysteria, neuropathic constitution, impairment of the central gray nuclei. Stuttering generally does not heal spontaneously; careful re-education is necessary. Language, once acquired, can be compromised in aphasia (v.), a disorder of the expression or comprehension of verbal symbols, with unquestionable intellectual involvement, apart from any impairment of the instruments (if the latter is the case, it is called dysarthria).
Of particular interest are the psycho-neurological problems linked to the possible relationships between the psychic activity of language and the conditions of certain areas of the cerebral cortex. In 1861, Broca localized the center of articulated language in the foot of the third frontal convolution of the left cerebral hemisphere. Wernicke (1847) described another type of aphasia (sensory aphasia) due to a lesion in the first temporal convolution, manifested by an inability to understand language, while speech, although full of errors, was free and abundant. With Bastian and Wernicke, the era of the "diagram-makers" (Head) began, that is, those who described multiple image-storage centers in relation to a hypothetical superior "ideogenic center"; numerous varieties of aphasia (Kleist) were thus illustrated, all framed within more or less artificial schemes: those proposed by Kussmaul, Lichtheim, Charcot, and Grasset were the best known.
In 1906, a memorable date in the history of aphasia, Pierre Marie, the "iconoclast," demolished the classical theory of verbal and articulatory image centers; the disturbances in language comprehension in Wernicke’s sensory aphasia are simply pure disturbances of general and special intelligence. With Head, who denies the existence of verbal images and considers aphasia as a disorder of "inner language," that is, of the symbolic formulation of thought, the transition from neurology to psychology becomes clear. In recent years, a growing opposition between noetic and anti-noetic theories has emerged; on one hand, it is admitted that a general modification of thought underlies aphasic disorders, while on the other, the primary disorder is considered to be that of language, with only secondary repercussions on thought.
Among the principal noetic theorists, following P. Marie, Gelb and Goldstein should be especially remembered; applying the principles of Gestalt theory to the psychopathology of aphasia, they have supported the most important current noetic theory, according to which the aphasic is not merely "a man whose language is modified," but "a man modified" in his entirety, regressed toward more primitive behavior. In aphasics, words with generic meaning are lacking above all, while proper names remain, that is, those names that serve to designate the singularities of things, not categories; the alteration of this fundamental function, called categorical behavior (Gelb and Goldstein), power of symbolic expression (Head), or function of mediation (Van Worckom), determines an alteration in the representative function of language.
According to Goldstein, in ordinary language three different modalities are fused together: representative language (Jackson’s intellectual language), the first to be altered by cerebral lesions; expressive language (Jackson’s emotional language), the best preserved in cases of cerebral lesion; and verbal knowledge, with its many forms of motor and sensory memory, inner language, etc. Motivated by voluntary intentions, the operations dependent on these modalities then continue almost automatically, as "commanded by the overall psychic situation." This last aspect, verbal knowledge, seems to be related to a precise cerebral localization, the language zone, and represents a means of compensation when categorical aptitude is lost; in this way, speech can be evoked either directly and in an entirely aesthetic manner by the presence of the object, or through a "detour" via memories that are linked to perceptions thanks to verbal knowledge. When speech has lost its value as a sign, external verbal knowledge, in individuals particularly gifted in speech, can partially compensate for the loss of representative language. In motor aphasia, the clarity of the disturbances in verbal knowledge allows us to see in it the result of motor learning.
In recent years, there has been a certain anti-noetic reaction, although it cannot be said that true theories have been developed; the importance of linguistic deficit has been effectively emphasized by Isserlin, von Kuenburg, and Lotmar. Indeed, Lotmar’s recent critique (1937) of Goldstein’s conception shows with great clarity how difficult, if not impossible, it is to consider aphasia as resulting solely from the loss of categorical behavior.
Regarding nosographic classification, for Marie aphasia is a single entity and is Wernicke’s aphasia; disturbances of articulated language fall under "anarthria," a purely articulatory disorder; Broca’s aphasia is nothing more than total aphasia, that is, Wernicke’s aphasia plus anarthria. Dejerine and his school, instead, maintain a predominantly motor aphasia, Broca’s aphasia, and a sensory comprehension aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia; total aphasia represents the association of the two types. Mingazzini attempts to reconcile classical conceptions with those of Marie.
Today, the most important systematization of language disorders is that of Head, whose classification is purely phenomenological. He speaks of: a) verbal aphasia, corresponding to the classical motor aphasia, characterized by the impossibility or difficulty of forming or describing words; word recall is difficult, vocabulary is limited, inner language is impaired; there is a disturbance in the comprehension of the content of silently read sentences; verbal expression is deficient, but it is not a simple anarthria (or pure motor aphasia, subcortical); b) syntactic aphasia, clinically corresponding to Pick’s agrammatism; it is a disorder in the arrangement of words in sentence formation; speech is not impeded; relational words (articles, conjunctions, etc.) are lacking; there is a clear resemblance to infantile speech; silent reading and writing are little affected; comprehension is variable; complex commands may not be understood; c) aphasia nominum or amnestic aphasia, a disorder in the comprehension of the nominal value of spoken and written words; the patient is unable to name familiar objects, though able to describe their use or composition; d) semantic aphasia, a complete defect in the recognition of words and sentences; there is no difficulty in forming or repeating words, but in conversation, sentences are incomplete, as if what was to be said had been forgotten; individual words or sentences are understood, but the meaning of the whole is lost; reading is possible, but the sense of the words read is not fully grasped; writing is often impaired.
Regarding anatomical problems, agreement has now been reached on two points: the importance of the left hemisphere, whose lesions most often determine language disorders; and the existence of two "language zones": an anterior one (Broca’s area), whose lesions cause disorders of the expressive function of language, and a posterior one (Wernicke’s area and the region of the angular gyrus), whose compromise produces prevalent disturbances in comprehension.
The classical authors, following Charcot, divided the anterior zone into two centers: the "Broca center" (center of motor imagery of articulation) and the "Exner center" (center of graphic motor images); in the posterior zone, the "center of auditory images" and the "center of visual images" were distinguished; these centers were thought to be connected by association fibers. While subcortical or pure aphasias were thought to result from lesions of projection fibers, transcortical aphasias were attributed to lesions of association fibers between centers or of those fibers connecting such centers with the hypothetical "ideogenic centers."
Modifications have been made to this classical conception, both in terminology and regarding the anatomical site of the centers; the very notion of a "center" (v. LOCALIZZAZIONI CEREBRALI) has subsequently been rejected because it implies a static preformistic character, and it has been preferred to speak of "zones of aphasia." However, both Head and the "gestaltists" (Goldstein) admit the importance of the anatomical site in determining the characteristics of the morbid process.
As for the causes, aphasias may depend on vascular events, neoplasms, cranial trauma, or abscesses; in organic dementias aphasia may arise, as well as in general paralysis (v. DE MENZA), particularly in the Lissauer form; in presenile dementias (Pick's disease and Alzheimer-Perusini disease) aphasia represents one of the typical and fundamental symptoms, together with agnosic-apractic symptoms (Reich's alogical syndrome).
At a superficial examination, an aphasic, especially if of the sensory type, may be mistaken for a demented person; but it will suffice to observe the subject's behavior, both spontaneous and under stimulation, to avoid the diagnostic error.