LINGUISTICS. — Language is a complex activity in which physical, psychic, and spiritual factors converge in such a harmonious and significant way as to make it the most universal and typical manifestation of human nature (speech is an exclusive faculty of man, and there is no people, even the most primitive in culture, that lacks it).
By its very nature, language can be approached from different points of view and thus become the object of various disciplines. Physiology studies articulated speech in its production mechanism, alongside which experimental phonetics investigates the acoustic values in relation to phonation. Psychology studies the linguistic act in its psychic moments, extending its examination from the individual’s position vis-à-vis the complex of phonetic signs offered for expression (impression, the modalities of the relationship that mediates between the content of consciousness and linguistic forms, reception in the listener) to the unconscious modifications that occur within the system. Within the scope of psychology falls the particular investigation of the assumption of sound as meaning, i.e., the constitution of the symbol, and thus also the problem—if there is one—of the origin of language. Sociology is also concerned with the study of the linguistic fact, especially regarding 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 classes. Philosophy studies language from the standpoint of its cognitive validity; logic in particular is engaged in determining the relationship that exists between concept and semantic value, between thought and expression.
The aforementioned disciplines consider language in its general aspects as a human faculty, i.e., in its universality. These are disciplines that, having as their object single aspects of human nature, are necessarily led to consider in linguistic activity the manifestation of that aspect. The sum of their contributions, integrated by the results provided by general linguistics (see below), is sometimes organized into an autonomous philosophical discipline, the philosophy of language, which sets as its object the origin, modalities, and validity of symbolic forms.
Language is man’s faculty of objectifying in phonetic symbols the movement of consciousness: with this objectification, which translates every inner moment into representation, communication is closely linked, appearing as the most significant practical aspect of expression. From a psychophysical standpoint, language belongs to the order of motor phenomena; but the motivation that most qualifies it is the intentionality of expression, which places it at the forefront of finalistic facts. Representation, which is an indispensable condition for objectification, derives from the content of consciousness, and from the intuition that holds a central position within it, through cognitive forms, i.e., by means of signs of universal value, which, through reciprocal determination, in the organization of the sentence are rendered suitable for the expression of the particular. The complex of signs and the manner of determining their relationship form language, the technical complement of the linguistic act, absolutely indispensable since without language there is no speech. The necessity of language is inherent in the historicity of the linguistic act, i.e., in the concurrence of expression and understanding.
Like all human activities that transcend pure physicality, speech takes concrete form in objective structures, which constitute the concrete projection of language as it is determined in time and space. Language, then, the concrete and historical universal in which the individual, as a participant in historicity (and cannot but be so, since an isolated individual does not exist, just as there are no communities not composed of individuals), places himself in the very act of speaking. There is, therefore, no actual opposition between the system that constitutes the objective—sociality, as it is commonly and rather improperly called, which represents the necessity and the limit proper to form—and speech, which represents subjectivity and thus freedom. For the individual as speaker cannot escape that limit, and the system in turn has no other reality than in the freedom of the speaker, who translates its functionality into action. The exigency of expression, which is subjectivity, always impresses upon the system attitudes and vibrations that may leave the structure entirely intact but may sometimes, when the impulse is strong in relation to a diminished distinctive qualification of the system itself, translate into profound and lasting variations capable of integrating it into a substantially new unity. Language, therefore, while on the one hand is a structure that obeys the internal law of its own functionality, on the other is free from all staticity, since as a function it is a form of subjective moments.
Linguistics, or glottology, or the science of language, aims to study languages as structure and as change. It is, therefore, essentially a historical discipline, both because it deals with a finalistic fact and because its object is concretized and delimited, as well as in space, in time. It must necessarily refer back to human nature, which is precisely what is determined in history, and therefore must draw especially on physiology and psychology; but this in no way detracts from the autonomy that derives from the precise individuation of its object, i.e., a given linguistic system in its functional structure, in its formation, and in its transformation.
To this task, which constitutes it as a science, the consideration of the linguistic fact has come only in our times, after having passed 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: even the very alphabetical writing implied a phonematic analysis of surprising accuracy, and the study of the highly complex morphological mechanism clearly highlighted the grammatical category. Yet among the Greeks, from whom the Western tradition of linguistic analysis descends, on the one hand the study of grammatical forms was included and absorbed into a demand for rationality, in which logical category and grammatical category were identified, and on the other the analysis of the lexical sign was rendered vain by the gnoseological pretense, which sought to discover in it a natural truth, i.e., an ontological function. Thus there arose a system 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 grammatical categories, faithful reflections of logical categories, were always expressed by identical morphological elements. Etymological research, on the other hand, by arbitrarily fragmenting vocabulary in search of prime elements indicating primordial truths, and thus completely straying from historical data, closed off the path to the attainment of the only true (ἐτοῦμα) attainable, i.e., the creative moment, however much a moment of “speech” (see below), which always provides language (and it forgets this: the sign in it is arbitrary) with the signifier for a certain knowledge.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, rationalism had a profound impact on the evaluation of linguistic phenomena. It reacted, in league with Leibniz, against the so-called “harmonic” grammar, which, starting from the premise that Hebrew was the model and archetype of all languages, introduced the most bizarre criteria into the analysis of linguistic structures, such as the addition, subtraction, transposition, and inversion of letters (operations performed on letters rather than sounds). At the same time, while recognizing that a 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 unify grammatical schemes—usually derived from Latin—with those of formal logic. Today, such a grammatical tendency is reevaluated, both by general linguistics of a structuralist orientation (and already by de Saussure) and by the so-called logistic approach, which aims, starting from language, to find a more adequate means of expression (mathematical symbolism) for the progress of logical thought. In reality, rational grammar was entirely unproductive, due to its implicit misunderstanding of the nature of language, which, while obeying the general logic inherent in the system, is not the form of pure logical activity but of the entire movement of consciousness. Thus, Giambattista Vico could easily reproach the famous grammarians Julius Caesar Scaliger and Francesco Sanzio for proceeding “as if the peoples who found languages had first had to attend school with Aristotle, whose principles both of them used in their reasoning” (*Scienza nuova*, ed. Nicolini, I, p. 124). On the other hand, Vico, like the neodialectical movement that followed him, 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, grounded in the historical study of languages and language groups, began only in the early decades of the 19th century; it is to be linked to two circumstances of different nature: on the one hand, the discovery of Sanskrit, which spurred research into the genetic relationship of an important group of languages; on the other, the shift in thought whereby the mechanical and rationalistic conception of linguistic structures was replaced by the Romantic notion of the “organic form.” The concept of “individual form,” applied by Leibniz to organic life, was transferred by Herder to the realm of human creations and proved highly fruitful, as it allowed for a new mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, between the particular and the universal. In the field of language, it led to abandoning the pretension to seek, beyond the accidents of individual languages, a perfect and rational language, and instead justified the multiplicity of languages as variations of form in which the essence of language is realized. Once the autonomy of language as an “organic form” was legitimized, it became easy to introduce and recognize in it the notion of development. This was strongly aided by the recognition of the kinship among most European languages and their relationship with Sanskrit. Through comparison, the notion of an Aryo-European linguistic community was established, based on a parent language from which historical languages were thought to have developed. In this period, the historicity of linguistic phenomena was not yet dissociated from the notion of organic development; indeed, such historicity took shape precisely in a natural process of development, governed by the same necessity that seemed to govern organic life. According to Franz Bopp, who is rightly considered the founder of linguistics (his *Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprachen* was published in 1816, and his *Vergleichende Grammatik* began publication in 1833), “languages are to be regarded as bodies of organic nature, which form according to certain laws, develop carrying within themselves an internal vital principle, and die, little by little.” Later, August Schleicher, to whom credit is due for having, through phonetic comparison, given a more precise physiognomy to the Aryo-European unity (his *Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen* first appeared in 1864), affirmed that “languages live like all natural organisms; they do not act as man does and therefore have no history in the strictest sense of the word.” Thus, the strictest historical lesson of natural man is his task “to bring to light the laws according to which languages modify themselves in the course of their life, since without knowledge of these it is impossible to understand even the forms of present-day languages.” This conception is certainly a reflection of the Hegelian view of history: according to Hegel, history is conscious will, freedom that gives itself its own reality; Schleicher assumes that in the development of language there is no consciousness, no freedom; it therefore cannot be the object of history, but only of systematic study. The Darwinian doctrine of evolution was not without influence on Schleicher himself, who spoke of languages, dialects, and local speech varieties as species, subspecies, primary and secondary subspecies, and the like; the different varieties are, of course, explained by progressive development and differentiation due to the necessity 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 own laws, yet whose growth is unpredictable because it results from the changing relationships between its vitality and the environment. In the subsequent conception, dominated by positivism, this margin of freedom is greatly reduced, since organic development is regarded as the result of causes of a physical order or, at most, of psychic forces operating according to the laws of strict mechanism. The culminating manifestation of this view was the belief in the “exceptionlessness” of phonetic laws, i.e., in the perfect regularity of sound change, until such time as extraneous factors of a psychic order intervene to disrupt 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 all fields and especially in the Aryan-European and Romance spheres, to the status of a science. The conception of phonetic change as subject to a law of regularity analogous to that observed in natural phenomena arose from two sources: on the one hand, the positivist turn that European culture underwent from the second half of the 19th century onward, and on the other, the numerous discoveries that, by bringing about a more rigorous and almost complete systematization of Aryan-European phonetics, fostered the conviction that phonetic processes were mechanical in nature. All research was guided by this principle, formulated in the introduction to the *Morphologische Untersuchungen*, initiated by K. Brugmann and H. Osthoff in Leipzig in 1878, I, p. 13, as follows: “Every phonetic change, insofar as it occurs mechanically, unfolds according to impeccable laws, that is, the direction of phonetic shift in all members of a linguistic community... is always the same, and all words in which, under equal circumstances, the sound subject to change appears are invariably affected by the change.” The group of linguists who adopted this axiom and applied it in research with great success—success that transcended the theoretical soundness of the principle itself—came to be known as the “Neogrammarians.”
Among the followers of this principle, the doctrine of phonetic law soon began to show dangerous cracks, for it was impossible to ignore the constant psychological interventions (assimilations and dissimilations, blends, and analogies) that gave rise to numerous exceptions. Even among those who employed the positivist method in their research, the validity of the principle was called into question (Ascoli, Schuchardt, Paul). The growing recognition of the psychological dimension—first in terms of collective psychology (Wundt) and later in terms of individual psychology—led to the linguistic problem being framed in its proper terms, namely, the relationship between subject and object, between the individual and the collective. Thus, two distinct directions emerged: the idealistic and the sociological, which respectively emphasized one or the other of these two poles. Meanwhile, the very shift in the notion of “law” within the natural sciences, and above all the recognition that language belongs to the realm of teleological phenomena, made it clearer what the law in linguistics actually is: a mere cognitive schema of variations. Thus, even the reconstruction of Proto-Aryan-European, achieved through the comparative method and once regarded as having absolute value—as if it were a language that had actually existed—was seen in its proper light as a schema of the correspondences observed in the historical languages of the group, taking into account the modifications that had occurred in their individual developments.
Within the framework of the neorealist reaction against positivism, the linguistic fact assumed a position of particular prominence. Considered in its subjectivity, it came to occupy the same plane as art and was even identified with it, so that general linguistics was equated with aesthetics: “Every individual who expresses a spiritual impression creates intuitions and produces forms of language” (K. Vossler). This conception, however, could not ignore the incontestable fact that language exists as a collective datum and serves as a tool of communication—that is, a collective creation conditioned by practical needs. Hence, it was compelled to distinguish within its own “stylistics,” which examines what is unconditioned and original in linguistic forms, a historical grammar that examines what is conditioned and common (Vossler). Since innovations originate with individual speakers who, situated in a particular subjective state and historical environment, engage in acts of creation, it is necessary to proceed from stylistics—the science of individual expression—and then move on to syntax, morphology, and phonetics. Yet the true science of language is stylistics, since the essence of language is inner activity and intuition. And yet language is susceptible to description only insofar as it, too, is development, for it exists as a tool of social relations in constant flux. Historical grammar shows how linguistic creation is constrained “by certain states, certain needs, and certain collective tendencies of the soul of peoples.”
The opposing direction focuses on the objective aspect of language—that is, language as a system—and proceeds from sociology. In this view, 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 fertile, if not entirely coherent, body of principles (*Cours de linguistique générale*, published posthumously in 1916 and compiled from student notes)—it is the individual who has the need to express himself, but the possibility of doing so through speech is provided by the medium furnished by society, namely, language. Language is a social product, resulting from spontaneous convention, and consists of a system of arbitrary signs, in the sense that there is no necessary connection between the signifier and the signified: the signs are not the result of natural expressiveness but owe their existence to collective usage, and their value is determined by the system of oppositions and correlations of which they are a part. Proper linguistics does not study “speech,” that is, the activity of the individual from which every innovation also arises, but rather “language,” that is, the conventional system of signs that the individual employs. Such study is “synchronic” insofar as it examines the system in its current functionality, the sum of usage conventions in their reciprocal interrelation, and “diachronic” insofar as it considers the modifications to which the system is subject as a result of the imbalance that always arises in the relationship between the sign and the idea. By far the more important study is the synchronic, for it aims to reveal the system in its functional entirety and in the validity with which it is imposed upon the entire body of speakers. Diachronic study, which must exclude innovation and its causes because they belong to the realm of “speech” and thus do not pertain to “language,” is limited to recording changes—doing so almost exclusively with regard to phonetic changes, the only ones slowly assimilated by the system. Both phonetic changes and analogical phenomena are grounded in the actuality of the system: the former as a synchronic variant, the latter as a product of the system’s unity and solidarity as perceived by the speaker.
De Saussure’s doctrine, more coherently articulated with respect to synchronic analysis, deserves great credit for redirecting attention to the functionality inherent in language and rendering it an autonomous system. From this doctrine there first derived, insofar as it is based on a static consideration of the system, the phonological approach, which seeks to clarify the system of oppositions and correlations in which the phoneme derives its value. When this consideration is extended to syntax, it has on the one hand prompted the effort to clarify the relationship between the subjective moment and the system through stylistic inquiry, and on the other, given rise to the need to reduce the syntactic function of individual systems to cognitive schemas—thus reviving the problem already addressed by rational grammar, namely, whether it is possible to classify such a function into universally valid schemas.
Such are the prevailing trends today in the field of linguistics, tending to define themselves into schools (of Prague, of Geneva, of Copenhagen). Alongside these trends, all of which revolve around synchronic consideration (within which linguistic geography also falls insofar as it limits itself to observation), the historical trend continues to assert itself as ever vital and productive. This trend seeks to frame the phenomenon of "language" within the complex reality of a community's life, as it unfolds in space and time. It is not possible to limit the study of languages to their systemic functionality, sacrificing historical interest—which is indispensable when dealing with a human phenomenon of such vast scope as language. However, the theoretical justification for the historical approach to linguistics cannot be reduced to the notion of organic development or mechanical process, but only to that of the subject-object, individual-universal relationship, which underlies all human reality.
The intervention of the subject, implicitly assumed in stylistic inquiry even when the system is considered statically, constitutes the premise for that dynamism which makes language a historical fact. Saussure’s opposition between synchronic and diachronic consideration cannot be entirely satisfactory, since the variants that determine the incessant and continuous change of the system are in fact synchronic: rather, one may distinguish between a static and a dynamic consideration of language, and on this basis differentiate, on the one hand, structural grammar or linguistics and, on the other, history. Stylistics occupies a middle position, since it guides the system from structure to becoming. The subjective moment, so to speak, inserts language into history, rescuing it from a strictly technical, grammatical evaluation to which history would otherwise relegate II. Indeed, behind the subject with its linguistic creativity lies the entire historicity in which each speaker participates; hence, innovation, which can theoretically be pinpointed as an individual act, is conditioned by an objective situation in which various factors operate. While historical grammar limits itself to recording the differences between two statically considered linguistic phases (according to a well-known observation by Schuchardt, rest and movement do not constitute an opposition in the realm of language: only movement is real, only rest is perceptible), history has the task of investigating the causes of innovations or at least ascertaining the circumstances in which they occur. Geographic factors, cultural contacts, political events and circumstances, social organization, relational and practical life, and spiritual activity in all its aspects—ethical, artistic, religious—constitute the premise for every new expressive need in relation to the given system; and they condition the collective adherence by which the act of "speech" becomes a fact of "language," that is, a new element of the system. Investigations into the modalities and causes of phonetic change, into innovations that may involve revolutions in syntactic expression, and etymological research that seeks to establish the moment and circumstances in which a sign is adopted to designate a concept—and how the concept, as the semantic content of the sign, transforms itself—constitute a highly significant, and certainly the most noble, part of linguistics as a science.
Alongside studies of individual languages or groups of languages, there is also room for a discipline of a general nature, one that, drawing together observations from various fields, seeks to establish the universal modalities of linguistic development in relation to the causes that determine II. This challenging field is known as "general linguistics."