LINGUISTICS. — Language is a complex activity in which physical, psychic, and spiritual factors concur in so harmonious and demanding a manner as to make it the most universal and most characteristic manifestation of human nature (speech is an exclusively human faculty, and there is no people, however primitive its culture, that lacks it).
By virtue of this nature, language may be viewed from different points of view and may therefore become the object of different disciplines. Physiology studies articulated speech in its mechanism of production and is flanked by 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 in relation to the complex of phonic signs offered for his expression (apprehension, the modalities of the relation mediating between the content of consciousness and linguistic forms, reception by the listener) to the unconscious modifications that take place within the system: the particular investigation of the assumption of meaning by sound, that is, of the constitution of the symbol, falls within the scope of psychology, and consequently so does the problem—if there is a problem—of the origin of language. Sociology is likewise concerned with the study of the linguistic fact, especially as regards the general value of the symbol in the economy of relational life and the importance of linguistic data in the constitution of groups and classes. Philosophy studies language from the standpoint of its cognitive validity; logic in particular is concerned with determining the relation that exists between concept and semantic value, between thought and expression.
The disciplines mentioned above consider language in its general aspects as a human faculty, that is, in its universality. They are disciplines which, having as their object particular aspects of human nature, are necessarily led to consider linguistic activity as the manifestation of that aspect. The sum of their contributions, supplemented by the results furnished by general linguistics (v. below), is sometimes organized into an autonomous philosophical discipline, the philosophy of language, whose object is the origin, modalities, and validity of symbolic forms.
Language is the specifically human faculty of objectifying in phonic symbols the movement of consciousness: closely connected with this objectification, which translates every inner moment into representation, is communication, which appears as the most significant practical aspect of expression. From the psychophysical point of view, language belongs to the order of motor facts; but the motivation that characterizes it most fully is the intentionality of expression, and this places it in the foreground among purposive facts. Representation, which is an indispensable condition for the objectification of the content of consciousness, and of intuition, which occupies a central position within it, takes place through cognitive forms, that is, by means of signs of universal value which, through reciprocal determination, are rendered suitable within the organization of the sentence for the expression of the particular. The complex of signs and the manner of determining them in relation constitute language, the technical complement of the speech act, absolutely indispensable, since without language there is no speech. Its necessity is inherent in the historicity of the speech act, that is, in the concreteness of expressing and understanding.
Like all human activities that transcend pure physicality, speech takes concrete shape in objective forms, which constitute the concrete projection of language as it is determined in time and space. Language is therefore the concrete, historical universal in which the individual, insofar as he participates in a historicity (and he cannot fail to do so, because an isolated individual does not exist, just as there are no communities not composed of individuals), establishes himself in the very act of speaking. There is therefore no actual opposition between the system that constitutes the object—the sociality, as it is commonly and rather improperly called—which represents necessity, the limit proper to form, and the speaker, who represents subjectivity and hence freedom, since the individual as speaker cannot escape that limit, while the system, for its part, has no reality other than in the freedom of the speaker, who translates into action the functionality dormant within II. The need for expression, which is subjectivity, always imprints upon the system attitudes and vibrations that may leave its structure entirely intact, but may sometimes, when the impulse is vigorous in relation to a diminished distinctive qualification of the system itself, be translated into profound and lasting variations capable of integrating it into a substantially new unity. Language, therefore, while on the one hand it is a structure obeying the internal law of its own functionality, on the other is free from all staticity, since as a function it is the form of subjective moments.
Linguistics, or glottology or the science of language, has
as its purpose the study of languages as structure and as change. It is therefore an essentially historical discipline, both because it deals with a fact belonging to the purposive order and because its object takes concrete shape and is delimited not only in space but also in time. It must necessarily refer back to human nature, which is precisely that which is determined in history, and therefore must draw especially upon physiology and psychology; but this in no way detracts from the autonomy it derives from the precise identification of its object, namely, a determinate linguistic system in its functional structure, in its formation and transformation.
The consideration of the linguistic fact reached this task, which constitutes it as a science, only in modern times, after passing through a long history of deviations and errors. Among the Greeks and Indians, language was studied for didactic and normative purposes, not without good results: the alphabetic script itself already entailed a phonemic analysis of astonishing accuracy, and the study of the highly complex morphological apparatus clearly brought the grammatical category to light. Yet among the Greeks, from whom the Western tradition of linguistic analysis derives, on the one hand the study of grammatical forms was included and absorbed within a demand for rationality in which logical and grammatical categories were identified, while on the other the analysis of the lexical sign was rendered ineffectual by the epistemological claim that sought to discover in it a natural truth, that is, an ontological function. There thus arose 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 maintained that grammatical categories, a faithful reflection of logical categories, were always expressed by identical morphological elements. Etymological inquiry, moreover, by arbitrarily fragmenting the word in the discovery of primary elements indicating primordial truths, and thus abstracting completely from the historical datum, closed off the path to attaining the only true reality (ἐνταίον) that can be reached, namely, the creative moment, in any case a moment of «word» (v. below), which always provides language (and language forgets this: the sign in it is arbitrary) with the signifier for a certain knowledge.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rationalism had profound repercussions on the evaluation of linguistic fact. In opposition to the so-called “harmonic” grammar, Leibniz reacted against the doctrine which, proceeding from the assumption that Hebrew was the model and archetype of all languages, introduced the strangest criteria into the analysis of structures, such as those of addition, subtraction, transposition, and inversion of letters (the operations were performed with letters, not sounds). Yet, while acknowledging that the linguistic system is a complex of signs reciprocally bound by functional necessity, it denied the system any autonomy, creating a “general grammar” whose purpose was to combine grammatical patterns, usually derived from Latin, with those of formal logic. Today such a grammatical tendency is being reassessed, both by general linguistics of a structural orientation (and already by De Saussure) and by so-called logistic theory, which proposes, proceeding from language, to find a means of expression more adequate (mathematical symbolism) to the development of logical thought. In reality, rational grammar was entirely unproductive, because of its implicit misconstrual of the nature of language, which, although obeying the general logicality inherent in the system precisely as such, is not the form of pure logical activity, but of the entire movement of consciousness. Thus Giambattista Vico could readily reproach the famous grammarians Giulio Cesare Scaligero and Francesco Sanzio for proceeding “as if the peoples who discovered languages had first had to go to school with Aristotle, whose principles they both used in their reasoning” (Scienza nuova, ed. Nicolini, I, p. 124). On the other hand, Vico, like the neo-idealistic movement that followed him, fell into the opposite error
of considering language the product of aesthetic activity, whereas this, like logic, represents only one part of that integral movement of consciousness of which language is the form.
A genuinely scientific investigation of language, because founded on the historical study of languages and groups of languages, began only in the first decades of the nineteenth century; and it must be related to two circumstances of a different nature: on the one hand, knowledge of Sanskrit, which gave impetus to the investigation of the genetic relationship among an important group of languages; on the other, the intellectual orientation through which the mechanical and rationalistic conception of linguistic structures was replaced by the Romantic conception of “organic form.” The notion of “individual form,” applied by Leibniz to organic life, was transferred by Herder to the sphere of human creations and proved highly 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 the abandonment of the attempt to seek, beyond the accidental features of individual languages, a perfect and rational language, and instead to justify their multiplicity as variations of form in which the essence of language is realized. Once the autonomy of language as an “organic form” had been legitimized, it was easy to introduce and identify in it the notion of development: this was strongly aided by the recognition of the relationship among most of the languages of Europe and between them and Indian and Iranian. Through comparison, the notion of an Aryan-European linguistic community was formed, at the basis of which was posited an ancestral language from which the historical languages were thought to have developed. During this period, the historicity of linguistic fact was not yet dissociated from the notion of organic development; indeed, that historicity took shape precisely in a natural process of development, governed by the same character of necessity by which organic life appeared to be governed. According to Fr. Bopp, who is rightly regarded as the founder of linguistics (his work Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprachen dates from 1816, and his Vergleichende Grammatik began publication in 1833), “languages are to be considered as bodies of organic nature, which are formed according to definite laws, develop while carrying within themselves an inner vital principle, and gradually die.” Later, A. Schleicher, who deserves credit for having, through phonetic comparison, given a more precise outline to the Aryan-European unity (his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen first appeared in 1864), asserted that “languages live like all natural organisms; they do not act as man does and therefore have no history whatsoever, insofar as this word is understood in its strictest and proper meaning.” Accordingly, linguistics is “a part of the natural history of man,” and its task is “to bring to light the laws according to which languages change in the course of their lives, since without knowledge of these laws it is not even possible to understand the forms of present-day languages.” This conception is certainly a reflection of the Hegelian conception of history: according to Hegel, history is conscious will, freedom giving itself the reality proper to it; Schleicher assumes that in the development of language there is no consciousness and no freedom; it therefore cannot be the object of history, but rather of systematics. Darwinian evolutionary doctrine subsequently did not fail to influence Schleicher himself, who speaks of languages, dialects, and local speech varieties as species, subspecies, primary and secondary subspecies, and the like: the various forms are, naturally, explained as the result of progressive development and differentiation, brought about by the necessities of adaptation to the environment.
In this conception of organic development, the becoming of languages is reduced to an inner necessity, but room remains for a certain freedom, analogous to that of a plant which grows according to its laws, yet whose growth cannot be predicted because it is the result of changing relations between its vitality and its environment. In the subsequent conception, dominated by positivism, this margin of freedom was greatly reduced, since organic development was
regarded as the result of causes of a physical order or, at most, of psychic forces operating according to laws of strict mechanical necessity. The culminating manifestation of this conception was the faith in the “infallibility” of phonetic laws, that is, in the perfect regularity of sound change, until extraneous factors of a psychic order intervened 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 achievements that have elevated linguistic studies, in every field 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 brought about, on the one hand, by the revolution in a positivist direction that European culture underwent beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and, on the other, by the numerous discoveries which, leading to a more rigorous and almost complete systematization of Indo-European phonetics, produced the conviction that phonetic processes were mechanical in nature. All research was informed by this principle, formulated as follows in the introduction to the Morphologische Untersuchungen, begun by K. Brugmann and H. Osthoff in Leipzig in 1878, I, p. 13: “Every phonetic change, insofar as it occurs mechanically, proceeds according to inexceptionable laws; that is, the direction of the phonetic shift in all members of a linguistic community... is always the same, and all 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 their research with great results, which transcend its theoretical validity, came to be known as the “Neogrammarians.”
The principle of the phonetic law was already suffering dangerous cracks among its adherents, owing to the very fact that it was impossible not to admit that constant interventions of a psychological nature (assimilations and dissimilations, cross-formations and analogies) gave rise to numerous exceptions; so much so that even among those who applied the positive method in their research, the validity of the principle was called into question (Ascoli, Schuchardt, Paul). The ever greater recognition of the psychological factor, first under the aspect of collective psychology (Wundt), then under that of individual psychology, led the problem of language to be posed in its proper terms, namely, those of the relationship between subject and object, between the individual and the collective; thus two different tendencies arose, the idealistic and the sociological, which respectively emphasize one or the other of the two poles. Meanwhile, the very change in the notion of “law” that had taken place in the natural sciences, and above all the recognition that language belongs to the order of teleological facts, made it increasingly clear what a law actually is in linguistics: a simple cognitive schema of variations. Thus the reconstruction of the common Indo-European language, made by the comparative method and to which an absolute value had been attributed, as though it were a language that had actually existed, appeared in its proper light as a schema of the correspondences observed in the historical languages of the group, taking account of the modifications that had occurred in their individual developments.
Within the framework of the neo-idealist reaction to positivism, the linguistic fact came to assume a position of particular importance. Considered in its subjectivity, it was placed on the same level as art and identified with it, so that general linguistics came to be identified with aesthetics: “Every individual who expresses a spiritual impression creates intuitions and produces forms of language” (K. Vossler). This conception, however, could not disregard the undeniable 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 was compelled to distinguish in linguistics a “stylistics,” concerned with what is unconditioned and original in the forms of language, and a historical grammar, concerned with what is conditioned and common (Vossler). Since innovations originate with individual speakers who, finding themselves in a certain subjective situation and in a certain historical environment, engage in creative activity, 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 and intuition. Yet language is capable of description precisely 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 conditions, certain needs, and certain collective tendencies of the soul of peoples.”
The opposing tendency centers on the objective aspect of language, that is, on the language-system, and proceeds from sociology. For this tendency, the observation that language is an individual fact is true, but irrelevant, like all self-evident propositions (Meillet). In the doctrine of F. De Saussure, the scholar who provided linguistics with a highly original and fruitful, though not systematic, body of principles (the Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously in 1916, was compiled from students’ notes), the individual possesses the need to express himself, but the possibility of doing so through speech is provided by the means furnished by society, namely, the “language-system.” This is a social product, resulting from spontaneous convention, and is constituted by a complex of arbitrary signs, in the sense that there is no necessary connection between the signifying phonic complex and the thing designated: signs are not, that is, the result of natural expressiveness, but owe their existence to collective usage, and their value is related to the system of oppositions and correlations of which they form part. Linguistics proper studies not “speech,” that is, the activity of the individual, from which every innovation nevertheless begins, but rather the “language-system,” that is, the conventional organization of signs which the individual employs. This study is “synchronic” insofar as it studies the system in its present functionality, the sum of conventions of usage in the reciprocal functioning of the mechanism; it is “diachronic” insofar as it considers the modifications to which the system is subject as a result of the disequilibrium that constantly occurs in the relationship between the sign and the idea. Synchronic study is by far the more important, because it seeks to bring to light the system in its functional entity, in the validity with which it presents itself to the entire body of speakers; whereas diachronic consideration, which must leave innovation and its cause aside because they fall within the sphere of “speech” and therefore do not belong to the language-system, must limit itself to recording changes. And this it can do almost exclusively with regard to phonetic changes, the only ones that are acquired gradually; 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 the product of the weight that the system, as a unity and solidarity, carries in the speaker’s consciousness.
De Saussure’s doctrine, expressed more coherently with regard to synchronic consideration, had the great merit of redirecting attention to the functionality internal to the language-system and making it an autonomous system. From it there derives, first of all, insofar as it is founded on a static consideration of the system, the phonological tendency, which aims to clarify the mechanism of oppositions and correlations in which the phoneme assumes its value. Once this consideration was transferred to the field of syntax, on the one hand there emerged the task of clarifying the relationship between the subjective moment and the system through stylistic investigation; on the other, the need arose to reduce the syntactic function of individual systems to cognitive schemas, and this revived the problem already addressed by rational grammar: whether it might be possible to classify this function in schemas of universal validity.
These, then, are the approaches now predominant in the field of linguistics, with a tendency to define themselves as schools (of Prague, Geneva, and Copenhagen). Alongside these approaches, all of which revolve around synchronic consideration (within whose sphere linguistic geography also falls, insofar as it limits itself to observation), the historical approach continues to assert itself as ever vital and productive; it seeks to situate the fact of “language” within the complex reality of the life of the community,
as it is determined in space and time. It is not possible to limit the observation of languages to their functionality as systems, sacrificing the historical interest that is indispensable when faced with a human phenomenon of such vast importance as language. Nevertheless, the theoretical legitimacy of the historical approach to linguistics can no longer be sought today in the notion of organic development or mechanical movement, but only in that of the subject-object, individual-universal relationship, which lies at the foundation 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 dynamism which makes language a fact of history. The Saussurian opposition between synchronic and diachronic consideration cannot certainly suffice, because the variants that determine the incessant and continuous transformation of the system are in truth synchronic: one may instead speak of a static and a dynamic consideration of language and, on this basis, distinguish, on the one hand, grammar or structural linguistics and, on the other, historical linguistics. Stylistics occupies an intermediate position, since it leads from the system as structure to the system as becoming. The subjective moment, so to speak, inserts language into history, freeing it from a strictly technical, grammatical evaluation to which static linguistics would confine II. Indeed, behind the subject, with his creativity on the linguistic plane, lies the entire historicity in which each speaker participates; hence innovation, which theoretically can be identified as an individual fact, is conditioned by an objective situation in which diverse factors operate. Whereas historical grammar limits itself to recording the difference between two linguistic phases considered statically (according to a well-known observation by Schuchardt, repose and movement do not constitute an opposition in the field of languages: only movement is real, only repose is perceptible), historical linguistics has the task of investigating the cause of innovations or, at least, of ascertaining the circumstances in which they occur. Geographical factors, cultural contacts, events and circumstances of a political nature, social organization, relational and practical life, and spiritual activity in all its ethical, artistic, and religious aspects constitute the presupposition of every new expressive need in relation to the system already given; and they condition the collective acceptance 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 that may constitute upheavals in the expression of syntactic relations; and etymological research, which seeks to establish the moment and circumstances in which a sign is adopted to designate a body of knowledge and how that knowledge, which is the semantic content of the sign, is transformed, constitute a highly significant—and certainly the most noble—part 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 together the threads of observations made in various fields, seeks to establish the universal modalities of linguistic development in relation to the causes that determine II. This arduous field bears the name of “general linguistics.”