Structuralism Vs Stylistics

By : Yulius Yonatan

Yuliana

B. Liana Dewi

Katerine

Fifin

Tri

06 PBG

1 a. Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored.

Structuralism appeared in academia for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society. The work of Ferdinand de Saussure concerning linguistics is generally considered a starting point of 20th century structuralism. The term "structuralism" itself appeared in the works of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement," which spurred the work of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Almost all members of this so-called movement denied that they were part of it. Structuralism is closely related to semiotics. Post-structuralism attempted to distinguish itself from the use of the structural method. Deconstruction was an attempt to break with structuralistic thought. Some intellectuals like Julia Kristeva, for example, took structuralism (and Russian formalism) for a starting point to later become prominent post-structuralists. Structuralism has had varying degrees of influence in the social sciences: a great deal in the field of sociology, but hardly any in economics.

“ There are some kinds of Structuralism “ :

Structuralism in psychology (19th century)

At the turn of the 19th century the founding father of experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt tried to confirm experimentally his hypothesis that conscious mental life can be broken down into fundamental elements, which then form more complex mental structures. In this part of the 19th century, researchers were making great advances in chemistry and physics by analysing complex compounds (molecules) in terms of their elements (atoms). These successes encouraged psychologists to look for the mental elements of which more complex experiences were composed. If the chemist made headway by analysing water into oxygen and hydrogen, perhaps the psychologist could make headway by considering a perception, e.g., the taste of lemonade, to be a "molecule" of conscious experience which can be analysed into elements of conscious experience: e.g., sweet, sour, cold, warm, bitter, and whatever else could be identified by introspection. A major believer was the psychologist Edward B. Titchener who was trained by Wundt and worked at Cornell University. Since the goal was to specify mental structures, Titchener used the word "structuralism" to describe this branch of psychology (Atkinson, R.L. 1990, Introduction to Psychology. (10th Ed) New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p767). Wundt's structuralism was quickly abandoned because its objects, conscious experiences, are not easily subjected to controlled experimentation in the same way that behavior is.

Structuralism in linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure was the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism, and evidence of this can be found in Course in General Linguistics, written by Saussure's colleagues after his death and based on student notes, where he focused not on the use of language (parole, or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and called his theory semiology. However, the discovery of the underlying system had to be done via examination of the parole. As such, Structural Linguistics are actually an early form of corpus linguistics. This approach focused on examining how the elements of language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than 'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a signified (the concept or meaning of the word). This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between words and things in the world that they designate.

Key notions in Structural Linguistics are the notions of pardigme, syntagme and value, though these notions were not yet fully developed in De Saussure's thought. A structural paradigm is actually a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes or even constructions) which are possible in a certain position in a given linguistic environment (like a given sentence), which is the syntagme. The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigme is called value (valeur in French).

Structuralism in anthropology and sociology

According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve as systems of signification. A structuralist studies activities as diverse as food preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture. For example, an early and prominent practitioner of structuralism, anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship (the Alliance theory and the incest taboo), and food preparation (see also structural anthropology). In addition to these studies, he produced more linguistically-focused writings where he applied Saussure's distinction between langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures of the human mind, arguing that the structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in us unconsciously. Levi-Strauss was inspired by information theory and mathematics.

Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, where Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (such as voiceless vs. voiced). Levi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women. A third influence came from Marcel Mauss, who had written on gift exchange systems. Based on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems are based on the exchange of women between groups (a position known as 'alliance theory') as opposed to the 'descent' based theory described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes.

Some anthropological theorists, however, while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's version of structuralism, did not turn away from a fundamental structural basis for human culture. The Biogenetic Structuralism group for instance argued that some kind of structural foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures.

Structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics

Structuralism in mathematics is the study of what structures (mathematical objects) are, and how the ontology of these structures should be understood. This is a growing philosophy within mathematics that is not without its share of critics.

Paul Benacerraf's "What Numbers Could Not Be" (1965) is a seminal paper on mathematical structuralism in an odd sort of way: it started the movement by the response it generated. Benacerraf addressed a notion in mathematics to treat mathematical statements at face value, in which case we are committed to an abstract, eternal realm of mathematical objects. Benacerraf's dilemma is how we come to know these objects if we do not stand in causal relation to them. Another problem raised by Benacerraf is the multiple set theories that exist by which reduction of elementary number theory to sets is possible. Benacerraf concluded in 1965 that numbers are not objects, a conclusion responded to by Mark Balaguer with the introduction of full blooded Platonism (this is essentially the view that all logically possible mathematical objects do exist). With this full-blooded Platonism, it does not matter which set-theoretic construction of mathematics is used, nor how we came to know of its existence, since any consistent mathematical theory necessarily exists and is a part of the greater platonic realm.

Structuralism in literary theory and literary criticism

In literary theory structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy + Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group - Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their death.

Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the "novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. One branch of literary structuralism, like Freudianism, Marxism, and transformational grammar, posits both a deep and a surface structure. In Freudianism and Marxism the deep structure is a story, in Freud's case the battle, ultimately, between the life and death instincts, and in Marx, the conflicts between classes that are rooted in the economic "base."

Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth. As in Freud and Marx, but in contrast to transformational grammar, these basic elements are meaning-bearing.

There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory and Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and have an affinity with New Criticism.

There are definitions about “Structuralism “of Web:

A school of thought, which built up around a group of French thinkers in the 1950s, and 60s. Figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (in anthropology), Roland Barthes (in literary and cultural studies), Jacques Lacan (in psychoanalysis) and Louis Althusser (in marxist theory) were influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and pursued an interest in how meaning is produced. ...
www.adamranson.freeserve.co.uk/critical%20concepts.htm

 an approach to religious studies in which one examines and analyzes the manner(s) in which religious consciousness and ritual practices are explicit reflections of the implicit values and assumptions by which a society or culture defines itself. The focus is not on what religion does for a group (instrumental), but rather on what religion says about a group (expressive).
staff.jccc.net/thoare/gl%20q%20to%20z.htm

 Theory according to which the study of a category of facts must mainly consider the structures. The structuralism of the psychology of the form (cf Gestalt), of modern linguistics (including generative linguistics), of social sciences. [ Le Petit Robert électronique, version 1.3, 1997 ]
psychobiology.ouvaton.org/glossaire.uk/uk-txt-p06.20-glossaire.htm

 As a linguistic approach, introduced first in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Structuralism understands language as a system, whereby meaning is derived from the opposition of elements within that system. Structuralism holds that it is precisely the differences that exist between the concrete entities of language, rather than some internal or a priori meaning, that provides intelligibility. ...
www.umass.edu/polsci725/Glossary.html

 interpretations which stress that human actions ate guided by concepts and beliefs, and that underlying these are structures of thought which find expression in various forms.
www.anthro.wayne.edu/ant2100/GlossaryCultAnt.htm

 Ý The study of social organization and myths, of language, and of literature as structuresî(Holman 449).Ý Structuralism ìis embodied in the scholarship of those who study humans, language systems, social institutions, and their interactions relying on precepts that explain their structures as naturally occurring rather than socially constructedî (Agnello 10).
english.montclair.edu/isaacs/605LitResearch/litermFA02.htm

 Anthropology has seen the development of a number of forms of "structuralism" in its history. One such form (known often as structural-functionalism) approaches the basic structures of a given society as serving key functions in meeting basic human needs. ...
www.qvctc.commnet.edu/brian/antxtrmc.html

 An approach to critical analysis which emphasises universal structures underlying the surface differences and apparent randomness of cultures, stories, media texts etc.
freespace.virgin.net/brendan.richards/glossary/glossary.htm

 is a psychological approach that emphasized studying the elemental structures of consciousness
academics.tjhsst.edu/psych/oldPsych/ch1/terms.html

 Cinematic theories employing various semiological methods to determine how complexly and artistically cer­tain codes and signs are synthesized in a single film, a genre, or the oeuvre of a filmmaker.
pages.slc.edu/~sersauli/filmcourse/Liste%20e%20informazioni/Glossario%20film.htm

 A theory of international relations stressing the impact of world economic structures on the political, social, cultural and economic life of countries.
www.comune.venezia.it/atlante/documents/glossary/nelson_glossary.htm

 linguistics defined as the analysis of formal structures in a text or discourse

 an anthropological theory that there are unobservable social structures that generate observable social phenomena

 a sociological theory based on the premise that society comes before individuals
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

 Structuralism is an approach that grew to become one of the most widely used methods of analyzing language, culture, philosophy of mathematics, and society in the second half of the 20th century. 'Structuralism', however, does not refer to a clearly defined 'school' of authors, although the work of Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered a starting point. Structuralism is best seen as a general approach with many different variations. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

This is explanation about “Structuralism “by Mark Glazer:

It is probably best to approach the term "structuralism" through an attempt to understand the concept of "structure" within this theoretical point of view. Without an understanding of this fundamental concept, it is difficult to arrive to an understanding of the intellectual movement referred to as structuralism. Traditionally the major problem with the term structure has been its concreteness. The word refers to phenomena, e.g. buildings, which are most physical in their essence. Structures in structuralism are not neither concrete nor physical. Structures refer to mental models built after concrete realty. Furthermore, these models are not obvious but demand an understanding of hidden or deep aspects, of the matter at hand. Following this approach structuralism is an attempt to build models which can help understand or, as structuralists, would put it explicate the materials at hand.
The most difficult aspect of structuralism is that these structures are not based on concrete or physical phenomena as they are in biological or other sciences but based on cultural realities such kinship organization or tales. These cultural realities are mental as are the structures, which explicate them. These structures and their structuralist models exist only in human minds, and not in nature as e.g. a Marxist would claim.
There are many structuralists including Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Lévi-Strauss. It is even possible to claim that some important social and/or psychological theoreticians and certain sciences are structuralist in character because what they do is to build models of psychological or social reality. It is accurate to say that of all the structuralist the best known and most influential is Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Structuralism, however, is not a unified school or methodology; Lévi-Strauss does not have a monopoly on structural studies in anthropology or other disciplines. Furthermore, the work done by structuralists is extensive, diverse, and difficult. However, because of his influence Lévi-Strauss is an excellent example of structuralist approaches. In anthropology, the use of the concept of "structure" is far older than Lévi-Srauss; R. Radcliffe-Brown, George Peter Murdock, and many others have used the term in a different ways. Lévi-Strauss brings into anthropology these and other influences that have shaped his thinking and anthropological thought through his work. The main aspects of Lévi-Strauss' work can be summarized under three headings (1) alliance theory, (2) human mental processes, and (3) structural analysis of myth.
(1) Alliance Theory: Lévi-Strauss' theoretical contributions to social anthropology are numerous and significant. The best known of these is "alliance theory." Alliance theory stresses the importance of marriage in society as opposed to the importance of descent. Its basic supposition is that the exchange of women between groups of related men results in greater social solidarity, and that the result of this cohesion is better chances of survival for all members of the resultant kin group

(2) Human Mental Processes: There is unity in the way the human mind functions. Lévi-Strauss claims that, although the manifestations may be very different, the human mental processes are the same in all cultures. The unity of the mental processes results from the biology of the human brain and the way it works. Because of this unity, e.g. the classification of the universe by "primitive man" has the same basis as when it is done by any group, it is done through models. The fact that resultant models of this classification may be different is irrelevant for him. The analysis of myth in Lévi-Strauss is also based on the premise about the unity of the human mind.

(3) Structural Analysis of Myth: Lévi-Strauss' work on myth parallels his interest in mental processes. His attempts to discover unconscious the regularities of the human mind. The use of the structuralist models of myth allows for the reduction of material studied to manageable levels. The dominant manner to accomplish this goal is based on the use of the following concepts: a) surface and deep structure, b) binary oppositions Culture/Nature, and c) mediation.

a) Surface and Deep Structure: To discover the model/structure of a myth one must explore the deep structure of a myth. The surface structure provides us with the narrative, the deep structure with an explication of the myth. This is accomplished by discovering the major binary opposition(s) in the deep structure.

b) Binary oppositions: These occur in nature and naturally in the human mind. They are such things as night and day, left and right or nature and culture. Nature and culture often functions as a binary opposition in tales. However, depending on the tale or myth the binary opposition changes. For example, the binary opposition life and death is a useful one to explicate "Sleeping Beauty." Here, the deep structure of the story suggests that when the thirteenth fairy declares that Sleeping Beauty is to die at her fifteenth birthday that a life versus death binary opposition is posited. A mediation to solution the problem is now necessary.

c) Mediation: A binary opposition can be mediated by finding a solution to the opposition created by the binary. The mediation to the culture/nature binary opposition is that culture transcends nature. In the case of "Sleeping Beauty" the nature of the mediation is quite different but equally embedded in within the subject matter. Here the life versus death binary opposition is mediated by the twelve fairy's action: death is transformed into one hundred years sleep.

Structuralism is an intellectual movement which bases it analysis on the reduction of materials into models referred to as structures. It is fundamental to structuralism that it be understood that these structures are not concrete manifestations of reality; but cognitive models of reality. Lévi-Strauss stresses that all cultures and not only scholars understand the universe around them through such models, and that humankind comprehends his world on the basis of these mental structures.

b.. “ Stylistics “ is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. It attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as, socialization, the production and reception of meaning, literary criticism, and critical discourse analysis.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylistics_(literature)

Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all belong in a particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’.

Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation, the production aOther features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and people’s dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language registers, etc.

nd reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.

Many linguists do not like the term ‘stylistics’. The word ‘style’, itself, has several connotations that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately. However, in Linguistic Criticism, Roger Fowler makes the point that, in non-theoretical usage, the word stylistics makes sense and is useful in referring to an enormous range of literary contexts, such as John Milton’s ‘grand style’, the ‘prose style’ of Henry James, the ‘epic’ and ‘ballad style’ of classical Greek literature, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 185). In addition, stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the connections between the form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the style of language reveals.

2. - Geneva School of Linguistics:

The most prominent figure of the Geneva School of Linguistics school was Ferdinand de Saussure. Other important colleagues and students of Saussure who comprise this school include Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger, Sergej Karcevski and Charles Bally.

The most significant linguistic book connected with this school is 'Cours de languistique générale', the main work of de Saussure, which was published by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sehechaye. The book was based on lectures with this title that de Saussure gave three times in Geneva from 1906 to 1912. Sehechaye and Bally did not themselves take part in these lecture classes, but they used notes from other students. The most important of these students was Albert Riedlinger, who provided them with the most material. Furthermore Bally and Sehechaye continued to develop de Saussure's theories, mainly focusing on the linguistic research of speech. Sehechaye also concentrated on syntactic problems.

Charles Bally

In his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parent were Jean Gabriel, a teacher and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first with Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915 and Alice Bellicot.

From 1883 to 1885 he studied classic language and literature in Geneva. He continued his studies from 1886 to 1889 in Berlin where he was awarded a PhD. After his studies he worked as a private teacher for the royal family of Greece form 1889 to 1883. Bally returned to Geneva and taught at a business school from 1893 on and moved to the Progymnasium, a grammar school, from 1913 to 1939. At the same time, he worked as PD at the university form 1893 to 1913. Finally from 1913 to 1939 he had a professorship for general linguistic and comparative Indo-German studies which he took over from Ferdinand de Saussure.

Besides his works about subjectivity in the French Language he also wrote about the crisis in French language and language classes. Today Charles Bally is regarded as the founding-father of linguistic theories of style and much hounored for his theories of phraseology.

Geneva School of Literary Criticism :

The expression "Geneva School" (French: groupe de Genève) is also applied to a group of literary critics in the 1950s and 1960s, of which the most important were the Belgian critic Georges Poulet, the French critic Jean-Pierre Richard, and the Swiss critics Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset and Jean Starobinski. The critics Emil Staiger, Gaston Bachelard, and J. Hillis Miller are also sometimes associated with this group.

Growing out of Russian Formalism and Phenomenology (such as in the work of Edmund Husserl), the "Geneva School" used the phenomenological method to attempt to analyse works of literature as representations of deep structures of an author's consciousness and his or her relationship to the real world. Biographical criticism was however avoided, as these critics focused primarily on the work of art itself – treated as an organic whole and considered a subjective interpretation of reality (the German concept of Lebenswelt) – and sought out the recurrent themes and images, especially those concerning time and space and the interactions between the self and others.

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Definition of Jakobson, Roman

(rmän´ yäk´ôbsn) (KEY) , 1896–1982, Russian-American linguist and literary critic, b. Moscow. His early work was grounded in structural linguistics and stressed that the aim of historical linguistics is the study not of isolated changes within a language but of systematic change. As a professor of Russian in Moscow in the 1920s, Jakobson and a few colleagues, most notably N. S. Trubetskoi, developed what came to be known as the Prague school of linguistics. They argued that synchronic phonology, the study of speech sounds in a language at a given time, should be considered in light of diachronic phonology, the study of speech sounds as they have changed over the course of the language’s history. After teaching briefly in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, Jakobson went on to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden before coming to the United States to teach at Columbia Univ. (1943–49) and later Harvard (1949–67); at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1957–67) he worked with Morris Halle on distinctive-feature theory, developing a binary system that defines a speech sound by the presence or absence of specific phonetic qualities, such as stridency and nasality.

- Leningrad school of linguistics in 1920s :

A. Disconnecting language from history

1. Viewed from a general perspective, linguistics appears to have both a peculiar history, i.e., how linguists and their works have been situated with respect to each other in time; and a rather unreflective sense of its own historicity, i.e., how its theories, methods, statements, and so are situated in the history of science and the history of society. Many university courses and conference workshops reverently approach the ‘classic’ works of linguistics with no prominent consideration of the historical distance that separates them from ourselves and of the major shifts in historical contexts that have since occurred. Such is the symptomatic approach to two of the most widely-read books in linguistics courses, published in 1916 (Saussure) and in 1933 (Bloomfield) respectively. Neither work refers to its own historical setting: the international tensions leading into world-wide warfare and the downfall of multilingual empires in the one case, and the world-wide economic depression in the other case — as if the authors were expressly preparing their work for a non-historical reception.

2. Such a state of affairs is rather unique among scientific disciplines. In physics, chemistry, and biology, very little of the theoretical material that was current sixty or eighty years ago is approached today with a comparably unreflective sense of history and historicity. Indeed, many of the central conceptions of these sciences have just emerged fairly recently, ushering in revolutionary transformations. Not even mathematics, geometry, and formal logic are genuinely stable over time, though they are relatively detached from empirical objects and events (cf. Beaugrande 1991b).

3. In the concluding chapter of my survey on the discourse of linguistic theories (Beaugrande 1991a), I noted how many of the ‘classic’ works perform an emphatic break with the immediate past while reaching further back. The mentalist descriptive linguistics of early continental European structuralism spearheaded by Saussure (1966 [1916]:82) charged prior philology with holding a ‘hybrid and hesitating’ ‘conception of language’ and applauded ‘traditional grammar’ for being ‘absolutely above reproach’ in its ‘strictly synchronic’ ‘program’ for ‘describing language-states’ (cf. § 11). The physicalist and behaviourist descriptive linguistics of American structuralism inaugurated by Bloomfield (1933:32, 6) repudiated ‘mentalism’, which ‘still prevailed’ ‘among men of science’, and which he associated with the outlook of ‘grammarians’ in ‘our school tradition’; in exchange, philology was lauded as ‘one of the principal enterprises, and one of the most successful, of European science in the nineteenth century’. In turn, Chomsky (1965:67, 4f) rebuked Bloomfieldian descriptive structuralism and behaviourism as ‘fundamentally inadequate’ and gave a high estimate both of ‘mentalism’ and of ‘traditional grammar’, praising the latter for having given ‘a wealth of information concerning the structural descriptions of sentences’.

4. This pattern, which I have wryly called ‘ancestor-hopping’, suggests that linguistics does not seek to deny its historical roots and branches wholesale, but that each theory tends to define itself in programmatic opposition to the currently prevailing theory and proposes to consign it to the past. This tendency suggests a deep-lying troubled awareness of persistent and fundamental problems and an ambition to escape from them through energetic theoretical innovation.

5. A bit paradoxically, a triumphant theory has typically ushered in a phase of uncritical orthodoxy and dogmatic allegiance, attested by exclusive claims to scientific authority and by voluminous citations in professional discourse (§ 19). We thus find Newmeyer’s (1980:249f) Linguistic Theory in America presenting Chomsky’s as ‘the world’s principal linguistic theory’, for which ‘no viable alternative exists’; ‘the vast majority’ of ‘linguists’ ‘who take theory seriously² acknowledge (explicitly or implicitly) their adoption of Chomsky’s view of language’. At the book’s conclusion came the astonishing boast that ‘on the basis’ of Chomsky’s ‘idealization, more has been learned about the nature of language in the last 25 years than in the previous 2500’. I felt keenly reminded of Firth’s (1957 [1934-51]:139) remark: ‘to dismiss two thousand years of linguistic study in Asia and Europe’ ‘is just plain stupid’. But for the present paper, I would concede that such invitations for linguistics to forget its own history, though rarely couched in such hugely self-congratulatory terms, have a venerable history of their own (cf. § 11).

6. The understandable outcome has been a rather choppy evolution and a lingering uncertainty regarding what might count as long-range progress in answering basic questions (§ 17, 19f, 22, 45, 57), such as just what kind of a ‘system’ a language might be: a ‘system of pure differences’ (Saussure), a ‘system of voluntarily produced symbols’ (Sapir), a repertory of human behaviour (Bloomfield, Pike), a ‘self-subsistent, specific structure’ (Hjelmslev), an ‘infinite set of sentences’ (Chomsky), and so on (cf. Beaugrande 1991a for details). Conditions remain ripe for another theory to proclaim itself as the final solution and to rally a fresh swarm of adherents.

A. History in philology

7. Several factors may have contributed to the peculiar history of linguistics. Philology, the institutional and intellectual precursor of linguistics, was intensely ‘historical’ in its concern for the evolution of language. Yet this evolution was assumed to conform to ‘laws’ that are specific to language and thus relatively independent of the history of the language community. The foundational historical research of Jakob Grimm (1819) even applied the term ‘grammar’ to these evolutionary ‘laws’, such as the famous ‘Grimm’s law’ accounting for the sweeping sound-shifts that led toward the development of Modern German along different lines from Modern English and its near relatives. In this context, explanation takes the format of a global contrast between two stages and the most concise statement of the regular changes from earlier to later (cf. § 23). The shift, say, of the sound represented by the letter ‘t’ to the sound represented by the letter ‘s’ could thus be described wholly apart from the context of the actual historical events that occurred during the same time span. Philologists did not deny in theory the important effects of such events as the migration of a language community and its contact with other communities (cf. § 65), or the peremptory divisions of territory in Merovingian and Carolingian times. But they held it was not necessary in theory, and often not feasible in practice, to directly relate the events to the evolution of particular vowels or consonants, or of configurations of these.

8. The rather abstract and self-contained view of language history was thus less a matter of high-ranking theoretical principles, than a practical reaction to the widespread lack of documented evidence regarding the histories of language communities. Philology was quite happy to consult such evidence for periods with a relative plenitude of extant documents which both report on history and reveal major changes in the language, e.g., between Middle English versus Modern English. But philology had to develop methods for pursuing its work without such evidence. Only in this way could its histories of languages be extended far back into times where little or no documentation has survived, and where we are obliged to work with idealised constructions. ‘Indo-European’ is surely the most famous: because ‘the basic language is not reconstructable as a fact’, ‘the question “how did the ancient Indo-Europeans speak?” was deflected to the level of the language system’ — a ‘formal schema reconstructed’ from the ‘features’ ‘left after a process of abstracting, unifying, and rarefying’ (Hartmann 1963:74ff, m.t. [= my translation]).

9. The high level of historical abstractness was therefore justified by the proven ability of philology to overreach historical documentation. This abstract evolution of language was also quite congenial for Herder’s concept of language being central to the ‘spirit of the nation’,³ Darwin’s concept of evolution, and the organic conception of language propagated by the philosophy and science of German Romanticism: ‘language in its peculiarity as a changing and hence “living”, “organic” manifestation’ (Hartmann 1963:7f, m.t.). The abstractness was best maintained in ‘sound analyses’, which ‘reached far back, while syntax was postulated roughly as it is found in historically documented times’ (Hartmann 1963:79, m.t.) — a foretaste of the resolutely static and non-historical theories of syntax in modern linguistics (§ 42-47). Foregrounding language sounds, even to the point of bringing them under the heading of ‘grammar’ (§ 7), reassuringly focuses on the most compact and orderly aspect or ‘sub-system’ of language and the easiest one to disconnect from the concrete history of speakers or communities (§ 34). Yet the eminent philologist Hermann Paul (1891:6, my translation) warned that ‘making the study of sounds’ into the ‘essence of language science’ might lead into ‘isolation’ and ‘superficiality’.

10. Still, language sounds can connect to the concrete reality of speakers through a different channel: the human vocal tract and the operations of articulating sounds in various combinations. For example, we might readily explain the evolutionary choice of a prefix like ‘im-’ versus ‘in-’ in terms of the ease of pronouncing with the subsequent consonant, e.g., ‘impossible’ and ‘inclination’ rather than ‘inpossible’ and ‘imclination’. The long-range ‘mac.