THE STATUS OF LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 439.

Exercise 3.

Exercise 2.

Exercise 1.

WHILE READING THE TEXT

Exercise 2.

Exercise 1.

BEFORE READING THE TEXT

I. READING

Before reading the text think what you know about the problem presented in the title and write down your ideas.

Discuss the ideas of Exercise 1 with your partner.

Skim the text very quickly reading only:

- the title: this often summarizes the main ideas of the text;

- the first two or three paragraphs: these introduce the subject of the text;

- the first, second and last sentences of each paragraph: one of these is likely to be the topic sentence;

- the concluding paragraph: this gives a summary of the main ideas or a conclusion.

Discuss the results of skimming the text with your partner.

Read the text.

Edward Sapir [10]

1 Linguistics may be said to have begun its scientific career with the comparative study and reconstruction of the Indo-European languages. Historical and comparative linguis­tics has been built up chiefly on the basis of the hypothesis that sound changes are regu­lar and that most morphological readjust­ments in language follow as by-products in the wake of these regular phonetic develop­ments. There are many who would be dis­posed to deny the psychological necessity of the regularity of sound change, but it remains true, as a matter of actual linguistic expe­rience, that faith in such regularity has been the most successful approach to the historic problems of language. A psychological and a sociological interpretation of the kind of regularity in linguistic change are indeed desirable and even necessary. But neither psychology nor sociology is in a position to tell linguistics what kinds of his­torical formulations the linguist is to make. At best these disciplines can but urge the linguist to concern himself in a more vital manner than heretofore with the problem of seeing linguistic history in the larger frame­work of human behavior in the individual and in society.

2The methods developed by the Indo-Europeanists have been applied with marked success to other groups of lan­guages. It is abundantly clear that they apply just as rigorously to the unwritten primitive languages of Africa and America as to the better known forms of speech of the more so­phisticated peoples. The more we devote ourselves to the comparative study of the languages of a primitive linguistic stock, the more clearly we realize that phonetic law and analogical leveling are the only satisfactory key to the unraveling of the development of dialects and languages from a common base. Pro­fessor Leonard Bloomfield's experiences with Central Algonkian and Athabaskan leave nothing to be desired in this respect and are a complete answer to those who find it difficult to accept the large scale regularity of the operation of all those unconscious linguistic forces which in their totality give us regular phonetic change and morphological readjustment on the basis of such change. There can be no doubt that the methods first developed in the field of Indo-European lin­guistics are destined to play a consistently important role in the study of all other groups of languages, and that it is through them and through their gradual extension that we can hope to arrive at significant historical infer­ences as to the remoter relations between groups of languages that show few super­ficial signs of a common origin.

3 It is the main purpose of this paper, how­ever, not to insist on what linguistics has al­ready accomplished, but rather to point out some of the connections between linguistics and other scientific disciplines, and above all to raise the question in what sense linguistics can be called a 'science.'

4The value of linguistics for anthropology and culture history has long been recog­nized. It is difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject matter. Unless he is somewhat unimaginative, he cannot but share in some or all of the mutual interests which tie up linguistics with anthropology and culture history, with sociology, with psychology, with philosophy, and, more remotely, with physics and physiology.

5 Language is becoming increasingly valu­able as a guide to the scientific study of a giv­en culture. In a sense, the network of cultural patterns of a civilization is indexed in the lan­guage which expresses that civilization. It is an illusion to think that we can understand the significant outlines of a culture through sheer observation and without the guide of the linguistic symbolism which makes these outlines significant and intelligible to society.

6Language is a guide to 'social reality'. It is quite an illu­sion to imagine that one adjusts to reality es­sentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently sim­ilar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

7 The understanding of a simple poem, for instance, involves not merely an under­standing of the single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their over­tones. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

8 For the more fundamental problems of the student of human culture, therefore, a knowledge of linguistic mechanisms and his­torical developments is certain to become more and more important as our analysis of social behavior becomes more refined. From this standpoint we may think of language as the symbolic guide to culture. In another sense too linguistics is of great assistance in the study of cultural phenomena. Many cul­tural objects and ideas have been diffused in connection with their terminology, so that a study of the distribution of culturally sig­nificant terms often throws unexpected light on the history of inventions and ideas. This type of research, already fruitful in European and Asiatic culture history, is destined to be of great assistance in the reconstruction of primitive cultures.

9 The value of linguistics for sociology in the narrower sense of the word is just as real as for the anthropological theorist. Sociolo­gists are necessarily interested in the tech­nique of communication between human beings. From this standpoint language facili­tation and language barriers are of the utmost importance and must be studied in their interplay with a host of other factors that make for ease or difficulty of transmission of ideas and patterns of behavior. Furthermore, the sociologist is necessarily interested in the symbolic significance, in a social sense, of the linguistic differences which appear in any large community. Correctness of speech or what might be called 'social style' in speech is of far more than aesthetic or gram­matical interest. Peculiar modes of pro­nunciation, characteristic turns of phrase, slangy forms of speech, occupational termi­nologiesof all sorts – these are so many symbols of the manifold ways in which soci­ety arranges itself and are of crucial impor­tance for the understanding of the develop­ment of individual and social attitudes. Yet it will not be possible for a social student to evaluate such phenomena unless he has very clear notions of the linguistic back­ground against which social symbolisms of a linguistic sort are to be estimated.

10 It is very encouraging that the psycholo­gist has been concerning himself more and more with linguistic data. So far it is doubtful if he has been able to contribute very much to the understanding of language behavior beyond what the linguist has himself been able to formulate on the basis of his data. The psychologists have perhaps too narrowly concerned themselves with the simple psycho-physical bases of speech and have not penetrated very deeply into the study of its symbolic nature. This is probably due to the fact that psychologists in general are as yet too little aware of the fun­damental importance of symbolism in be­havior

11 A vast number of acts are language acts in a crude sense. That is, they are not of im­portance to us because of the work they immediately do, but because they serve as mediating signs of other more important acts. A primitive sign has some objective re­semblance to what it takes the place of or points to. Thus, knocking at the door has a definite relation to intended activity upon the door itself. Some signs become abbreviated forms of functional activities which can be used for reference. Thus, shaking one's fist at a person is an abbreviated and relatively harmless way of actually punching him. If such a gesture becomes sufficiently expres­sive to society to constitute in some sort the equivalent of an abuse or a threat, it may be looked on as a symbol in the proper sense of the world.

12 Symbols of this sort are primary in that the resemblance of the symbol to what it stands for is still fairly evident. As time goes on, symbols become so completely changed in form as to lose all outward connection with what they stand for. Thus, there is no re­semblance between a piece of bunting colored red, white, and blue, and the United States of America, – itself a complex and not easily definable notion. The flag may there­fore be looked upon as a secondary or refer­ential symbol.The way to understand lan­guage psychologically, it seems, is to see it as the most complicated example of such a secondary or referential set of symbols that society has evolved. 13 Linguistics is at once one of the most dif­ficult and one of the most fundamental fields of inquiry. It is probable that a really fruitful integration of linguistic and psychological studies lies still in the future. We may sus­pect that linguistics is destined to have a very special value for configurative psychology ('Gestalt psychology'), for, of all forms of cul­ture, it seems that language is that one which develops its fundamental patterns with rela­tively the most complete detachment from other types of cultural patterning. Linguistics may thus hope to become something of a guide to the understanding of the 'psycho­logical geography' of culture in the large. In ordinary life the basic symbolisms of behav­ior are densely overlaid by cross-functional patterns of a bewildering variety. It is be­cause every isolated act in human behavior is the meeting point of many distinct configu­rations that it is so difficult for most of us to arrive at the notion of contextual and non-contextual form in behavior.

14 It is very notable that philosophy in re­cent years has concerned itself with prob­lems of language as never before. The time is long past when grammatical forms and processes can be naively translated by phi­losophers into metaphysical entities. The philosopher needs to understand language if only to protect himself against his own lan­guage habits, and so it is not surprising that philosophy, in attempting to free logic from the trammels of grammar and to understand knowledge and the meaning of symbolism, is compelled to make a preliminary critique of the linguistic process itself.

15 A word as to the relation between linguis­tics and the natural sciences. Students of lin­guistics have been greatly indebted for their technical equipment to the natural sciences, particularly physics and physiology. Phonet­ics, a necessary prerequisite for all exact work in linguistics, is impossible without some grounding in acoustics and the physi­ology of the speech organs. But it is far from unlikely that the accumulated experience of linguistic re­search may provide more than one valuable hint for the setting up of problems of research to acoustics and physiology themselves.

16 All in all, it is clear that the interest in lan­guage has in recent years been transcend­ing the strictly linguistic circles. This is inevi­table, for an understanding of language mechanisms is necessary for the study of both historical problems and problems of human behavior. One can only hope that lin­guists will become increasingly aware of the significance of their subject in the general field of science and will not stand aloof behind a tradition that threatens to become scholastic when not vitalized by interests which lie beyond the formal interest in lan­guage itself.

17Where, finally, does linguistics stand as a science? Does it belong to the natural sciences, with biology, or to the social sci­ences? There seem to be two facts which are responsible for the persistent tendency to view linguistic data from a biological point of view. In the first place, there is the obvious fact that the actual technique of language behavior involves very specific adjustments of a physiological sort. In the second place, the regularity and typicality of linguistic processes leads to a quasi-romantic feeling of contrast with the apparently free and undetermined behavior of human beings studied from the standpoint of culture. Lan­guage is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such. Its regular­ity and formal development rest on consider­ations of a biological and psychological nature, to be sure. But this regularity and our underlying unconsciousness of its typical forms do not make of linguistics a mere ad­junct to either biology or psychology. Better than any other social science, linguistics shows by its data and methods, necessarily more easily defined than the data and methods of any other type of discipline deal­ing with socialized behavior, the possibility of a truly scientific study of society which does not ape the methods nor attempt to adopt un-revised concepts of the natural sciences. It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of fail­ure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the inter­pretation of human conduct in general. Whether they like it or not, they must become increasingly concerned with the many an­thropological, sociological, and psychologi­cal problems which invade the field of language.