Change in Language: Whitney, Breal and Wegener (History of Linguistic Thought)

CHANGE IN LANGUAGE Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener Brigitte Nerlich was formerly a Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics at Wolfson College Oxford, and is now a Research Fellow in History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of La Pragmatique: Tradition ou révolution dans l’histoire de la linguistique française? (1986), the editor of the Anthologie de la linguistique allemande au XIXe siècle (1988), and she was guest editor of a special issue of Lingua: ‘Linguistic evolution’ (1989).

ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC THOUGHT SERIES Series Editor: Talbot J.Taylor, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure Roy Harris and Talbot J.Taylor Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein Roy Harris Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener Brigitte Nerlich Linguistics in America 1769–1924 Julie Andresen

CHANGE IN LANGUAGE Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener

BRIGITTE NERLICH

ROUTLEDGE LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990 Brigitte Nerlich All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Nerlich, Brigitte, 1956– Change in language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener.— (Routledge history of linguistic thought series) 1. Linguistics. Bréal, Michel Julius Alfred, 1832– 1915. Wegener, Philipp, 1848–1916. Whitney, William Dwight, 1827–1894 I. Title 410′.92′2 ISBN 0-203-19175-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33077-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 00991 X (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data also available

DEDICATION To Anita, my sister Simone, my friend and David, my husband

CONTENTS Abbreviations

vii

Introduction

viii

PART ONE WHITNEY AND BRÉAL 1

THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

2

2

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

8

3

EVOLUTION, TRANSFORMATION, OR ‘THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE’?

37

4

LANGUAGE, ITS NATURE AND ITS ORIGIN

50

5

THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

67

6

LAWS OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

79

7

LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY

93

8

LANGUAGE AND THE SPEAKING SUBJECT

104

PART TWO WEGENER WHITNEY AND BRÉAL, PAUL AND STEINTHAL, AND THEIR RELATION TO WEGENER

111

10

THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

114

11

THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE

120

Conclusion

140

References

141

Index

156

9

ABBREVIATIONS CLG Saussure (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot. CLG/E ibid., critical edition. CLG/H ibid., English edition. CLG/N ibid., edition of notes. DL Whitney (1874) ‘On Darwinism and language’, North American Review 119, 61– 88. ES Bréal (1897) Essai de sémantique (Science des significations), Paris: Hachette. FF Bréal (1866) ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, Revue des cours littéraires de la France et de l’étranger (29 December), 65–71. HM Bréal (1887) ‘L’histoire des mots’, Revue des deux Mondes 82 (1 July), 187–212. IL Bréal (1868) Les idées latentes du langage, Paris: Hachette LGL Whitney (1875) The Life and Growth of Language: an outline of linguistic science, New York: D.Appleton. LI Whitney (1875) ‘Are languages institutions?’, Contemporary Review 25, 713–32. LN Bréal (1891) ‘Le langage et les nationalités’, Revue des deux Mondes 108, (1 December), 615–39. LSL Whitney (1867) Language and the Study of Language: twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science, New York: Charles Scribner. OLS Whitney (1873) Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; the Avesta; the science of language, New York: Scribner, Armstrong. Ph Whitney (1885) ‘Philology, part 1: Science of language in general’, Encylopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. SL Bréal (1879) ‘La science du langage’, Revue scientifique de la France et de l’étranger (26 April), 1005–11. US Wegener (1885) Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, Halle a.d. Saale: Max Niemeyer. WS Wegener (1921) ‘Der Wortsatz’, Indogermanische Forschungen 39, 1–26. * Full bibliographical data can be found in the References.

INTRODUCTION To make language, the intent to signify must be present. (Whitney: 768) Ph*

The history of nineteenth-century linguists is relatively well known, including much of the work of William Dwight Whitney, Michael Bréal and Philipp Wegener. However, what is not so familiar and yet deserves to be, is that these three linguistics tried to solve the mystery of language-change in new ways. This is crucial for a better understanding of linguistics in the nineteenth century and for a better understanding of language and language-change per se. Despite their different intellectual and vocational backgrounds, and the different countries in which they worked (the United States, France, and Germany), Whitney, Bréal and Wegener converge upon a single point in their respective solutions to that problem: it can only be solved if linguists stop regarding language as an autonomous entity, or, in the fashion of that time, an organism that lives and dies independently of the users of the language, and instead start to focus on the actions, as advocated by Whitney, and the mind of the language users, as stressed by Bréal, together with the situation in which they use it, as recommended by Wegener. This book is presented in two parts. Part one points out the similarities and differences between the approaches of Whitney and Bréal, two linguists working in the tradition of comparative * Whitney Ph: 768 (for ‘Philology, part 1: Science of language in general’) and I shall refer to those works which are quoted very often in abbreviated form, e.g. Bréal FF: 12 (for the article ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’). To those works for which translations exist I shall refer in the following mode: e.g. Bréal ES: 112/285, where the first page number refers to the French edition, the second to the English translation. All the other quotations will be given in the standard form, e.g. Müller 1861:14. A list of the abbreviations is provided at p. ix.

philology, but criticizing it from within, especially through their rejection of linguistic ‘naturalism’ (e.g. Schleicher), and linguistic ‘mysticism’ (e.g. Schlegel, Grimm and those who wanted to find the Indo-European ‘Ursprache’) (cf. Bréal 1891, LN: 619; 1873a). These similarities are grounded in their mutual acceptance of the Humboldtian dictum that linguistic origin and change are not based on different principles (also known as uniformitarianism in geology and linguistics; cf. Christy 1983). From this springs their interest in the origin and evolution of language, especially on the semantic level where sense is created all the time. This mutual interest culminates in their defence of the speaker, his/her will and intentions, which they regarded as the true forces of language change. Part two examines the work of Wegener, who is gaining increasing attention from theoreticians and historians of communicational linguistics, constructivism, and psychology of language. Unlike Whitney and Bréal, he gives prime importance to the

dialogue between speaker and hearer and their collaborative construction of meaning, taking into account the situation, and the mental representations that the interlocutors have of it, as well as their reference to mental schemata and other cognitive structures. Wegener thus completes the work, begun by Whitney and Bréal, fulfilling the promises hidden in their oeuvres: to demonstrate that speakers and hearers are the true languagemakers. This demonstration is far more revolutionary and modern than that of Hermann Paul, who could also have been chosen as the third in that group of linguists working towards the establishment of a new science of linguistics. However, Wegener’s importance in this construction-work is clearly shown by the fact that Paul relied heavily on Wegener’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885) when he remodelled his theory of semantic change in the second edition of his Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1880), published in 1886. It would be a rewarding task to give a full description of Paul’s contribution to a theory of language-change. In this book he will often be evoked, but rather as an éminence grise, looking at the performance of the three main actors on the linguistic stage. All in all, I would like to reconstruct the contributions of Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener to general linguistics, a discipline that for them was an historical and psychological science, two points of view that were lost in the linguistic revolution of the twentieth century. Whitney and Bréal both regretted the fact that general linguistics, or the philosophy of language, had been so carelessly neglected by German thinkers. In Wegener they would have found somebody to fill this need. Was Aarsleff correct when he wrote: ‘The radical innovations that occurred during the later decades of the nineteenth century [cf. Whitney and Bréal] did not occur in Germany, where the new development, though important, stayed closer to accepted institutional forms’ (Aarsleff 1979:64)? In their obituaries of Whitney, Brugmann and Leskien (1897), the leaders of the neogrammarian movement, praised Whitney’s ‘Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte’ (Language and the Study of Language, 1867). It is no coincidence that, in translation, the title of Whitney’s book is the same as Paul’s Principien der Sprachgeschichte, a book that Bréal announced as a contribution to ‘la sémantique’ (cf. ES: 307/281) and that others regard as the bible of the neo-grammarians. The overlap between French, German, and American thought is demonstrated by another coincidence. In his obituary of Whitney, Brugmann talks about Whitney’s contribution to the study of Sanskrit and, more importantly, to the elucidation of the ‘Grundfragen des Sprachlebens’ (1897:95)—this is the title of Wegener’s 1885 book which is discussed in Part two of this study. Paul and Wegener were the counterparts of Whitney and Bréal in Germany, all four contributing to the radical innovation of linguistic theory that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century. In her seminal article on language classification in the nineteenth century, Anna Morpurgo Davies writes that the standard history of linguistics ‘sees the period between the later 1830s and the ’70s as a period of increased philological knowledge of the various languages, of greater interest in phonetics, of more solid etymologizing and of slow progress towards the concept of a sound law in the stricter sense’ (1975:631). This standard history overlooks the mounting literature on general linguistic questions and the interest in theoretical questions noticeable during this part of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of such writers as Max Müller, William Dwight Whitney, Archibald

Henry Sayce, Hermann Paul, Heymann Steinthal, Philipp Wegener, Michel Bréal, Abel Hovelacque, and many, many others. One of these, Georg von der Gabelentz, actually complains about the ever-increasing literature in general linguistics and confesses that he did not try to keep up with it when writing his book Die Sprachwissenschaft (cf. 1891:52). I hope that the reader of this history of linguistics will forgive me if I too have overlooked particular representatives of the linguistic scene surrounding Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener.* * On the possibility that both Bréal and Whitney may have used the works of Madvig (1875) as a source of inspiration, see Aarsleff (1979:72ff.).

Part One WHITNEY AND BRÉAL If language is a direct emanation of the mind, or an organic product, a sort of excretion of the bodily organs, so that a word, in any one’s mouth, is an entity having a natural and necessary significance, (…) than one set of opinions on all theoretic points in linguistics will follow; but another and a very different one, if words are only signs for ideas, instruments with which the mind works, and every language therefore an institution, of historic growth. (Whitney 1873:94)

.

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Chapter One THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND William Dwight Whitney was born in the United States in 1827 and died there in 1894, having travelled on a number of occasions to Germany, the homeland of Indo-European and historical-comparative linguistics. His major theoretical works were written in the 1860s and 1870s. Michel Bréal was born of French parents at Landau in Rhenish Bavaria in 1832, but lived and worked most of his life in France, where he died in 1915. Like Whitney, who, in 1850, went to Germany and spent three winter terms there studying with Albrecht Weber, Franz Bopp, and Richard Lepsius in Berlin, and two summers with Rudolph Roth in Tübingen, Bréal went to Berlin in 1857 to study Sanskrit under Bopp and Weber. Both Whitney and Bréal introduced German ideas and the values of a new scientific method to their respective places of research and instruction: Yale and Paris. AN OVERVIEW OF WHITNEY’S LIFE AND WORK William Dwight Whitney* was born into a family that provided a congenial background for scholarly work. Most important was his relationship with his brother Josiah Dwight Jr. William’s attention was first directed towards natural sciences. In the summer of 1849 he was in charge of botany, the barometrical observations, and the accounts of the United States survey of the Lake Superior region of Michigan conducted by his brother, and in the summer of 1873 assisted in the geographical work of the Hayden expedition in * This sketch of Whitney’s life and work is based on Seymour ([1894] 1966:399–426) Smith (1910–11:611–12), Silverstein (1971:xii–xiii), and Hockett (1979).

Colorado. His interest in the study of Sanskrit was first prompted in 1848 by Josiah who had brought back from Europe a Sanskrit grammar. After a brief course at Yale with Professor Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814–1901), then the only trained Orientalist in the United States, Whitney went to Germany where he remained from 1850 to 1853. He collaborated with Rudolf von Roth on the editio princeps of the Atharva Veda Saṃhitā (1855–6), and from this collaboration came his contribution to all the Atharvan material to the seminal Petersburg Lexicon of Sanskrit (1852–75), edited by Roth and Otto von Böhtlingk. In 1861 he received his doctorate from the university of Breslau. In 1864 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit at Yale where he also taught French and German until 1867, as he did at Sheffield scientific school until 1866. When his chair in Sanskrit was funded by his former teacher, Professor Salisbury, to prevent him moving to Harvard, this teaching became voluntary. In 1869 Whitney also became Professor of Comparative Philology. For many years he presented a senior elective course in general linguistic science at Yale, based on his experience as a lecturer on the subject and on his general books Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875). Whitney returned to Germany several times during his tenure at Yale,

The bio-bibliographical background

3

and in 1878 spent several months there completing his Sanskrit Grammar (1879). In September 1879, Whitney was in Paris, where he met, as recorded in his diary, ‘M. Regnier & attended meeting of Academy, seeing Laboulaye, Bréal [emphasis added] Bergaigne, Gaston Paris, Henry, Thurot, Mariette and many others’ (in Joseph 1988:209). At the beginning of the year he had also met Saussure in Berlin. Whitney’s scholarship was internationally acknowledged. He received the Prussian order pour le mérite for science and arts, and in 1870 the Berlin Academy of Sciences awarded him the first Bopp prize for the most important contribution to Sanskrit philology during the preceding three years. In addition to his teaching and writing on Sanskrit, comparative philology, general linguistics, etc., he held various offices in the American Oriental Society, to which he was elected in 1850, and was instrumental in the formative years of the American Philological Association (founded 1869), the Spelling Reform Association (1876), the Modern Language Association of America (1883), and the American Dialect Society (1889). He received popular recog-nition for his editorship of the Century Dictionary of English (1889–91 1st edition, 1897, 2nd edition). After Whitney’s death in 1894, the First American Congress of Philology, held on 28 December 1894, was dedicated to his memory. C.R.Lanman had invited foreign scholars to write short essays on Whitney, and these were read at the Congress. The Festschrift, edited by Lanman, was published in 1897 as a special issue of the Journal of American and Oriental Studies. Among its contributions from Ascoli, Barth, Henry, Jolly (the translator of LSL), all praising Whitney as a famous Indian, Oriental and Sanskrit scholar, were a rather undistinguished piece by Bréal and, more importantly, two letters by Brugmann and Leskien. Saussure had started a draft essay but then abandoned the project (cf. extracts of his notes in CLG/N translated into English, in Jakobson 1971). Whitney’s most famous students and followers included Charles R.Lanman, Hanns Oertel, and Leonard Bloomfield. Lanman, who later became Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, was one of the first linguists to use the word ‘semantics’, introduced by Bréal in 1883. On 27 December 1894, he gave a paper to the American Philological Association entitled ‘Reflected meanings; a point in semantics’ (cf. Read 1948:79). Even more semantically oriented was Hanns Oertel, who tried to construct a psychologicallybased semantics in his Lectures on the Study of Language (1902), which were dedicated to Whitney. In the introduction of his first book, An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), Bloomfield expressed his wish to follow in Whitney’s footsteps. The bibliography of Whitney’s work, published in the Journal of American and Oriental Studies in 1897, has 366 entries. AN OVERVIEW OF BRÉAL’S LIFE AND WORK Bréal* did not begin his career as a naturalist but as a mythologist, and we shall see how this gave rise to different approaches to the life and growth of language. He studied in Weissenburg, Metz, and Paris and entered the Ecole Normale in 1852. In 1859 he gained a post in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Impériale (now the Bibliothèque Nationale). While there he wrote * This sketch of Bréal’s life and work is based on Meillet (1916; [1930], 1966) and the

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biographical note in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1910–11:481).

his two theses, which he defended in 1863: De Persicis nominibus apud scriptores graecos and Hercule et Cacus (1863a and b). His work in the Bibliothèque Impériale must have provided him with excellent opportunities to immerse himself in mythological studies, for which he became renowned. His bibliographer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11:481) writes that among his works, which deal mainly with mythological and philological subjects, may be mentioned L’Etude des origines de la religion Zoroastrienne (1862), for which he was awarded a prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; Hercule et Cacus (1863b), his second thesis; Le Mythe d’Oedipe (1864), and Les Tables Eugubines (1875). Some of these were later reproduced in his Mélanges de mythologie et de linguistique (1877). He also wrote a dictionary of Latin etymology (1885) and a Latin grammar (1890). But the work he is most famous for today is his Essai de Sémantique (Science des significations) (1897), the result of three decades’ research.* Bréal established his reputation as a comparative philologist on the strength of his translation, with introductions, of the second edition of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar (1833–52, 1st edition; 1857–61 2nd edition) (1866–74). His linguistic career proper began in 1864 when he was appointed to teach comparative grammar at the Collège de France, where a chair of Sanskrit had existed since 1814. Meillet writes of this beginning of a new era: There had been chairs of comparative grammar in the arts faculties before; however, their subject areas had not been the science one calls nowadays by that name, but general grammar. For the first time comparative grammar in the modern sense of this term was taught in France. (Meillet [1930] 1966:440) In 1866 he was awarded the title of professor. This was the first occasion that Germanstyle comparative grammar had been taught in France. Previously, Oriental studies and speculations on general grammar had prevailed. In 1875 he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, in 1879 Inspecteur général of public education for higher schools, an office he held until its * 2nd edn 1899, 3rd edn 1904, 4th edn 1908, 5th edn 1911, 6th edn 1913, 7th edn 1924. It has been translated into English by Mrs H.Cust with a preface by Postgate (1900), reprinted in 1964 with a preface by J.Whatmough.

abolition in 1888; and in 1890 he was made Commander of the Legion of Honour. Like Whitney he held various offices outside the university. Most importantly in 1868 he became Secretary of the Société de linguistique de Paris (founded in 1863) an office he held until his retirement in 1905. In this function, and as the founder of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (1868), created by Victor Duruy, he attempted to re-organize French linguistics along the lines of the German university system, without at the same time importing all of German linguistic thinking—which for Bréal had become far too obsessed with naturalistic models of language. Bréal chose to translate Bopp rather than the by then better known and spectacular Compendium written by Schleicher (1861), for reasons that will become clear below. By 1866, both Bréal and Whitney had started to recognize the shortcomings of the comparative paradigm in which they had grown up but

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to which they would always stay attached. When Bréal gave his inaugural lecture on comparative grammar at the Collège de France in 1866 (Bréal FF), he used the occasion to point out the strengths but also the main weaknesses of this kind of linguistics (as he does in his introduction to his translation of Bopp). He regards as strengths the attention to facts, observation of data, etc., and as weaknesses its tendency to ‘naturalism’ on the one hand and to ‘mysticism’ on the other. The main representative of the first movement was Schleicher, who tried to reduce language to a natural organism. The main exponent of the second tendency was Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel, who tried to explain the nature of language by going back to a mythical ‘Ursprache’, rather than to the study of the history and use of language (cf. LN: 616). In Bréal’s opinion, these two approaches to language corrupt the effective and methodologically sound approach to linguistic facts fostered by Bopp. It is important to note that Bréal voices his criticism in the name of the speaker (‘l’homme’), the sole creator and repository of sound and sense, that is of language, a factor in language evolution that most of the comparative philologists sought to exclude from their ‘scientific’ enterprise. Bréal did not only try to re-organize the university system, he also strove to heighten the awareness of secondary school teachers to the importance of language studies, especially modern languages (cf. Bréal 1872; 1873b; [1876b] 1877:347–73; 1882; 1893b). It was for this reason too that he was engaged in the movement to establish phonetics as a linguistic discipline. Indeed, he inaugurated the first phonetic laboratory at the Collège de France in 1897 (cf. Bréal 1897). His most celebrated students were Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1881 to 1891, and Antoine Meillet, who took over the Chair of Comparative Grammar at the Collège de France after Bréal’s retirement in 1905. SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES Whitney, as the ‘creator’ of general linguistics at Yale and Bréal as one of the founders of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris spread German linguistic thought in their respective countries, giving it at the same time a twist in the direction of a general and more semantically-oriented science. But even though Whitney influenced German thought, and while his insights were integrated into what became the second linguistic revolution after Bopp, when Brugmann and Osthoff published their neo-grammarian manifesto in 1878, Bréal did not join this new movement. He elaborated instead his own principles of semantics, qualified by Meillet, one of his students, as ‘so personal’ (cf. 1916:16). In his biographical note Meillet admits that certain aspects of Bréal’s Essai could seem ‘reactionary’. However, the merits of this new type of semantics were quickly recognized and put to use in the Anglo-American world, notably by two of Whitney’s students, Oertel and Lanman. Bréal’s Essai, translated into English in 1900, is still not translated into German. This might be due to the fact that Germany had a strong and rather different semantic tradition of its own: semasiology (cf. Hey’s 1898 review of Bréal’s Essai). But there was one leading linguist in Germany who recognized the value of Bréal’s attempt to establish a theory of semantics: Hermann Paul. In the second edition of his Principien (1886) he acknowledged the similarity of interest between himself and Bréal; both were interested in semantic, and not only phonetic or morphological, change, and both stressed

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the active role of speaker and hearer in language change (cf. Paul 1880, 4th edn 1909:74– 5, note 1). That Bréal failed to exert an influence on German thought was certainly not due to a lack of courtesy or willingness to engage in dialogue on his part. Whitney, by contrast, was much more violent in his attacks on German linguistic science, as one can see from the following statement: In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible. (1873, OLS: vi) Whitney was particularly infuriated by the works of Max Müller, August Schleicher, and Heymann Steinthal, especially their naturalism, organicism, and metaphysical psychologism. He declared: ‘Physical science on the one side, and psychology on the other, are striving to take possession of linguistic science, which in truth belongs to neither’ (LGL: v). Whereas Bréal would have wholeheartedly subscribed to the rejection of physicalism or naturalism (sometimes called by him ‘materialism’; cf. 1873a) in linguistics, he would not have been so harsh in respect of psychology, and here one can detect one of the major differences between Whitney and Bréal. United in their critical view of the state of the liberal arts, they differ in their search for new scientific models. Bréal adopts, to some extent, a psychological approach; Whitney, on the other hand is strongly influenced by Lyell’s geological principles (cf. Lyell 1830–3; 1863; also Christy 1983). Approaching the subject from different directions, Bréal and Whitney converge again when they stress that explanation in linguistic science is based on what Whitney called ‘uniformitarianism’. According to this doctrine, based on Lyell’s principles of causation in geology, the laws of change (intellectual laws for Bréal, laws of human action or behaviour for Whitney) that can be ‘seen’ at work now, are the same as those that worked in the past—they structure language-change in general. Bréal and Whitney also converge in their views of language as a social institution and as an instrument of communication and interaction. The slight differences in orientation—Bréal’s psychologism and Whitney’s geologism—can be traced back to Whitney’s and Bréal’s early influences. Whereas Whitney was a linguist by profession and a naturalist by inclination, Bréal was a mythologist by inclination and a linguist by profession. His two theses, submitted in 1863, were devoted to mythological subjects. But from 1864 onwards Bréal ceased referring to his mythological studies as well as to his affinities with Max Müller in the field of comparative mythology. In his obituary Meillet makes it quite clear why this sudden change came about: At the beginning of his career Bréal was strongly influenced by his teachers in Berlin. His first publications were attached to the ideas of

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Adalbert Kuhn, also endorsed by Max Müller; alongside comparative grammar, founded by Bopp and built on solid principles, making steady progress since its creation, Adalbert Kuhn had wanted to create a comparative mythology. But the common sense of the young author [Bréal] was too strong [my emphasis] to let him dwell on such vain hypotheses. After a short time he abandoned this kind of work and never went back to it; and while Max Müller remained faithful to the mirages of comparative mythology, where he wasted his beautiful talent, M.Bréal began to deal with the solid realities of linguistics and produced a lasting work in linguistics. (Meillet 1916:11) These words could have been written by Whitney who detested Max Müller more than any other linguist. Although Bréal seems to have consciously set aside his interest in mythology for the sake of his linguistic career, some of the basic insights into the origin and nature of language can be traced back to these early essays. He rejected the view that myths and fables are the result of either reasoned or spontaneous creation (cf. Bréal [1863b] 1877:2). In his opinion this interpretation was an ill-conceived attempt to reconstruct the origin of myths, just as the belief in a spontaneous creation is a misdirected attempt to explain the origin of language. The question mythologists should ask is: ‘what was the reason for which each sign was attributed the value it had?’ (1877:3). In Bréal’s view ‘primitive’ men did not symbolize the world in their myths; they described it. Symbols are only an ulterior refinement of language. In the beginning men named things to the best of their abilities and they explained the world likewise. From these primitive acts of what Whitney would call ‘name-making’, the full complexity of language evolved very slowly. Bréal’s favourite examples are the names for the ‘sun’, which was first designated after some salient quality or another (cf. 1877:5–6), and then became a centre of proliferation for names of gods and goddesses. This explanation of myth is important to the understanding of Bréal’s thoughts on language in so far as it is in full accord with the uniformitarian explanation of the origin and change of language. As Whitney wrote: ‘Men are always making language’ (1880:14). Name-making today proceeds in basically the same way as name-making then: ‘It is intentionally that we establish a parallel between the origin of mythology and the origin of language, the question is basically the same’ (Bréal [1863b] 1877:6). In both cases we witness a proliferation of myths or names, based on improvisation, which then undergoes selection. Not only have the origin of language and the origin of myths a similar explanation, linguistic phenomena, such as synonymy and polysemy, can be explained in a way similar to the study of the multiplication of mythical names. Bréal’s aim was the demythologization of mythology as well as of linguistics.

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Chapter Two FRIENDS AND ENEMIES During their full and productive lives, Bréal and Whitney made many friends and in the case of Whitney, many enemies too. The reactions to the work of their scholarly friends and enemies, and my account of their relationship with them, will provide a framework in which Bréal’s and Whitney’s own work can then be situated—and better understood. BRÉAL AND WHITNEY—SCHLEICHER AND BOPP It is well known that by 1860 German linguistics was dominant in Europe (cf. Terracini 1949:74). August Schleicher’s Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1861; English transl. 1874–7), was conceived and received as the apotheosis of comparative grammar, founded by Bopp in 1816. His main followers in the English- and French-speaking countries were Max Müller in Oxford, Abel Hovelacque (cf. Whitney’s review of Hovelacque [1876] 1876), and Honoré Chavée (1867) in Paris (cf. Auroux 1982). Like Schleicher, they regarded linguistics as a natural science, language as an organism, and the life of language as one of growth, decay, and death—albeit with some variations on the theme. Schleicher, Müller, and Hovelacque formed, so to speak, an international cartel of naturalistic linguistics. Schleicher was the unquestioned authority on comparative linguistics until the end of the 1860s, an assessment shared by Bréal and Whitney, at least in their public statements. In his first popular book on general linguistics, Language and the Study of Language (1867), derived from his 1864 Smithsonian Lectures, and repeated as regular courses to the Lowell Institute in Boston (LSL: v), Whitney declared that it was his duty and pleasure to admit his special obligations ‘to those eminent masters in linguistic science, Professors Heinrich [sic] Steinthal of Berlin and August Schleicher in Jena, whose works I have had constantly upon my table, and have freely consulted, deriving from them great instruction and enlightenment, even when I have been obliged to differ most strongly from some of their theoretical views’ (vi–vii).* Soon after Schleicher’s death in 1868 this friendly critique changed to severe opposition. In Whitney’s obituary of Schleicher we find: He is, namely, a vehement champion of the paradox that a language is a ‘natural organism’, growing and developing by internal forces and necessary laws; and his statement and defence of this doctrine are so bold and extreme as to be selfrefuting. He was not unskilled as a naturalist, and his studies in natural history, by some defect in his logical constitution, seem to have harmed his linguistics. Whitney (1869:70)

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Bréal expressed similar views, though less harshly (1866 FF, and 1868a; both essays are reproduced in Bréal 1877). In his Essai he wrote: There are few books which, in small compass, contain so many paradoxes as the little volume in which Schleicher gives his ideas on the origin and development of languages. Though, being a botanist and Darwinian, he usually keeps his mind clear and methodical, he betrays in his work habits of thought appropriate to some disciple of the mystics. For instance, he places the epoch of the perfection of languages in the remote past, before all history. As soon as a people makes its entry into history (he says), and begins to have a literature, decadence, irreparable decadence, appears. Language, in fact, is developed inversely to the progress of mind. (ES: 5/4–5) Naturalism and mysticism, these popular currents of linguistic thought, contradicted Bréal’s profound belief in the progress of language and the human race. Whitney’s fight against these tendencies * He refers to Schleicher (1860) and Steinthal (1860).

was based on a somewhat different ideology: his belief in the power of common sense and inductive reasoning. However, Schleicher’s impact in France was equal to that in the Anglo-American world. The Compendium (2nd edition) won the prestigious Volney Prize in 1867 (cf. Bréal’s preface to Schleicher 1868 [Bréal 1868b], reprinted in Tort 1980:58). Although disagreeing with Schleicher’s naturalism in general, Bréal wrote a preface to the French translation of Schleicher’s two essays: ‘Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft’ (1863) and ‘Ueber die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen’ (1865): La Théorie de Darwin et la science du langage. De l’importance du langage pour l’histoire naturelle de l’homme, translated by M. de Pommayrol, Paris 1868 (cf. the re-issue by Tort 1980, where Bréal’s preface is reprinted, pp. 57–91). However, by 1870 the methodological crisis of linguistics ‘made in Germany’ was widespread and was highlighted by the outbreak of the war between Germany and France in 1870. It was only resolved by the neo-grammarians, who, although introducing the speaker (cf. Osthoff and Brugmann 1878:xii) and stressing the importance of a new kind of general linguistics, or ‘Prinzipienwissenschaft’, made the attachment of linguistics to the paradigm of natural science even more entrenched. ‘Not satisfied with a mere collection or taxonomy of regularities, of the sort that Grimm and his associates had noticed, the neo-grammarians claimed that the laws of phonemic change admit no exceptions. Hermann Paul asserted in 1879, “Every phonemic law operates with absolute necessity: it as little admits of an exception as a chemical or physical law”’ (quoted in Gardner 1985:197). Simultaneously Whitney and Bréal were trying to develop a quite different methodological consciousness for the problems of general linguistics, an awareness that would only be introduced into Germany rather late in the twentieth century, via Saussure. After Humboldt German linguists had relegated the philosophy of language to a dusty corner of pre-scientific speculation and linguistics became more and more data-oriented. Osthoff and Brugmann declared, for example:

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Only that comparative linguist who forsakes the hypothesis-laden atmosphere of the workshop in which Indogermanic rootforms are forged, and comes out into the clear light of tangible present-day actuality in order to obtain from this source information which vague theory cannot ever afford him, can arrive at a correct presentation of the life and the transformations of linguistic forms. (Quoted by Robins [1967] 1979:184–5) Although Whitney would accept the claim for the study of living languages, he would still have criticized the lack of philosophical insight manifested in this passage. This antiphilosophical attitude was, in fact, one of the main grounds on which Whitney had earlier attacked linguists such as Müller and Schleicher. Steinthal was far too metaphysical for Whitney’s taste as will become clear in Whitney’s review of Steinthal’s Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1871) (Whitney 1872b; cf. OLS: 332–75). The only authority that Whitney and Bréal always respected, although not agreeing with him on every point, was Franz Bopp. In an article on Whitney, Rocher points out that ‘Whitney was, over the years, a staunch defender of Boppian orthodoxy in comparative grammar’ (1979:11). ‘He clung to the last to Bopp’s theory that collocation, agglutination, and integration, had been the exclusive means by which Indo-European had created new forms’ (ibid.: 11–12). He also clung to Bopp’s inductive, positivistic method. In short, Rocher concludes: ‘Whitney’s conservatism in comparative philology is in sharp contrast with his innovative contributions to general linguistics’ (ibid.: 11). This is not altogether true: Whitney conceived general linguistics as the basis, the sound foundation of comparative philology. He was not so much against renewal in comparative philology, as against the naturalistic excesses that bore the same name: Comparative philology and linguistic science, we may say, are two sides of the same study: the former deals primarily with the individual facts of a certain body of languages, classifying them, tracing out their relations, and arriving at the conclusions they suggest; the latter makes the laws and general principles of speech its main subject, and uses particular facts rather as illustrations. (LGL: 315) In an article on material and form in language, Whitney praised Bopp for his attention to facts and his feeling for scientific deduction (1873:94f.). And in Bopp’s obituary he writes: ‘to him belongs the peculiar and transcendent honor of having inaugurated and given development to a new science’ (1868:47). Bréal, too, remained a faithful follower of Bopp’s linguistics. One has only to think of his decision to translate Bopp rather than Schleicher—and that in 1866, the high-point of Schleicher’s popularity, a popularity that he must have regarded as somewhat threatening, as Whitney did Max Müller’s. Bréal emphasized the importance of Bopp’s method. In his first lecture at the Collège de France (‘De la méthode comparative appliquée à l’étude des langues’) he writes:

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The theories of general linguistics [in the sense of ‘general grammar’], the general overviews, the big historical surveys, all these noble considerations that we like so much in France, would wear out or would move away from the truth, if we were to look disdainfully at the study of the facts of language, and if we were to give up using for ourselves the instrument of verification and control, which is at the same time the instrument of discovery: I mean observation. (Bréal 1864b:22–3) Unlike Whitney who wanted to give comparative linguistics a sound philosophical basis in general linguistics, Bréal wanted to encourage French general linguists to be more methodical, to pay more attention to facts and observations. When Bréal translated Bopp, his intention was to supplement French general linguistic theories, especially those put forward by the General Grammar movement and by the Idéologues (e.g. Beauzée, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, etc.), with a sound methodological instrument of induction and verification. But Bréal, like Whitney, wanted to make sure that philosophical grounding and accurate observation of linguistics facts should go together. What they did not want was to introduce another medley of highly speculative thoughts about the life and growth of language, especially by those who regarded languages as natural or physical objects and not as products of the activities of men and women. Bréal was in fact the first successfully to introduce Bopp’s comparative linguistics into France and to rouse the French from their dogmatic slumber. But he would not follow the new developments in comparative linguistics initiated by Schleicher, taken up with enthusiasm by Hovelacque and Chavée in France, and promulgated by the Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée, a rival of the Bulletin de la Société linguistique de Paris (cf. Auroux 1982). Gradually, Bréal turned away from comparative philology to establish a new discipline of his own: semantics. The term was coined in 1883 (cf. Bréal 1883:133) and the results of Bréal’s research into semantic issues, started in 1866, were finally published in his Essai. Whitney, though interested in facts of semantic change, never tried to unify his remarks on this subject into one theoretical oeuvre, and never used the term ‘semantics’, as did his students Lanman and Oertel, in imitation of Bréal. To summarize: Whitney and Bréal stood up against two trends in comparative linguistics: the older ‘mysticism’ (romanticism) (cf. Schlegel, but also Steinthal) and the younger ‘naturalism’ (cf. Schleicher, Müller). Both regarded languages as human institutions, brought about, maintained and modified by speakers, their will and their needs. Terracini writes: ‘Whitney, to whom any romantic solution was alien, resorted to one that had been prevailingly adopted in the philosophy of language of the 18th century: language is a human institution’ (1949:91). BRÉAL, WHITNEY AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Terracini’s quote suggests another point of convergence between Whitney and Bréal: they both appear to turn for help to the philosophers of the eighteenth century and their methodological followers in the nineteenth century. Terracini speculates about Whitney’s affinities with Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Bréal writes in his

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Essai that ‘Our forefathers of the school of Condillac, those ideologists who for fifty years served as target to a certain school of criticism, were less far from the truth when they said, in simple and honest fashion, that words are signs’ (ES: 277/249)—they are not organisms and they do not live and die like organisms, a view held by a forerunner of Bréal in the field of semantics, Arsène Darmesteter (1887). In another passage Bréal makes it even more clear where his preferences lie: Our philosophers of the 18th century regarded language as the invention of human intelligence, at first destined for the most simple needs of life, then gradually used for higher purposes: they would have been quite astonished if they could have foreseen the systems and doctrines which were to flourish during the following century. What would Voltaire for example have thought if he had heard that language is a living organism, independent of the human will? …what would have been the surprise of these authors had they been assured that language obeys fatal and necessary laws? (LN: 615) Hans Aarsleff points out the similarities between Bréal’s thought and that of thinkers like Locke and Rousseau in his analysis of Bréal’s 1879 article on the science of language. Comparing words to coins, ‘Bréal repeated’, as Aarsleff writes, ‘Locke’s observation that our thinking and speaking routinely runs on words rather than concepts and things…. This is a way of saying that what matters to the speaker is the current value system; its history or origin is at that point irrelevant, though the study of it may yield another kind of knowledge’ (Aarsleff 1979:85). Aarsleff also reports Bréal’s reference to Rousseau in relation to the subject of mind and language. Rousseau had written in Emile that reason is common to mankind, but that each language has its own particular genius, cause, or effect of the different national characters (cf. Aarsleff 1979:86). This view is fully endorsed by Bréal (cf. LN). Finally, one must mention Bréal’s reference to the eighteenth-century discussions of the origin of language, a problem that German thinkers believed they had given a final solution by establishing a proto-language and quantifying its roots. This idea is fundamentally opposed to Bréal’s belief in the gradual evolution of language and its progress, a belief he inherited from ‘Condillac, de Maupertuis, de Condorcet, de Volney’ (Bréal 1893a:11). BRÉAL, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Following the overview of Bréal’s and Whitney’s affinities and dislikes, we now turn to a closer consideration of their particular enemies and friends. Bréal’s grievances over nineteenth-century linguistic ‘systems’ were expressed most forcefully in his 1866 lecture on comparative grammar, given at the Collège de France (cf. Bréal FF, reprinted in Bréal 1877:243–66). The title of this course (to which he referred in 1868b in his preface to Schleicher’s treatise as a critical review of Schleicher’s work), ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, denotes a departure from the normal comparative grammar framework. It states that words do not only have a form (sound), but also a function

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(meaning). Comparative grammar, even Bopp’s, had focused exclusively on wordforms, disregarding to a large extent their function in the syntagm or articulated group (1887, HM: 200–1), the sentence or the act of speech. Bréal claims that a new historical, not comparative, grammar (cf. FF: 66) should embrace the study of phonetics and morphology—of form—as well as that of meaning—of function. And words have meaning and function only in the use intelligent human beings make of them. Hence they should not be studied in isolation, like fossils of a bygone age: When reading the great works by Mr Bopp and Mr Schleicher, one sometimes has the impression that they describe a fourth realm of nature…one thing follows from the other, everything is explained without any personal agent interfering in any visible way; one could sometimes believe that one is actually reading a treatise on the geology of the grammatical world or that one is observing a series of crystallizations of speech. (FF: 67) In this passage Bréal turns against two major models of comparative grammar: geology and chemistry. As we have seen in the quote from Hermann Paul (p. 14), the notion of exceptionless laws stems from there. Bedazzled by the results and the strength of these and other natural sciences, comparative grammar had totally overlooked the human agent, responsible for that evolution of language, which they so impartially ‘observed’. But as Bréal writes in one of his key statements: ‘The description of human language should not lead us to forget the human being, who is at the same time its beginning and its end, because everything in language derives from him and is addressed to him’ (FF: 67). Gaston Paris This view of language as an instrument of human dialogue was endorsed and perfected by one of Bréal’s friends and colleagues, most famous for his contributions to the field of medieval literature, Gaston Paris. In his review of Arsène Darmesteter’s book La Vie des mots étudiée dans leurs significations (1887:1st English edition 1886) (Paris [1887] 1906), he criticizes the influence of Schleicher on Darmesteter’s thought (cf. his 1868 review of Schleicher [1868]), and warns against the use of such dangerous metaphors as ‘organism’, ‘birth’, ‘death’, etc. He observes that: The cause of the development of language does not reside in itself but in the human being, in the physiological and psychological laws of human nature; hence the development of language differs essentially from the development of species, which is the exclusive result of the interaction between the essential conditions of the species and those of the environment. (Paris [1887] 1906:282)

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Like Bréal, he regards semantic change as governed by laws of the intellect, rather than those of nature. Even more than Bréal, Paris insists on the fact that language is a ‘social function’, based on the dialogical interaction between speaker and hearer in a specific situation, who try to achieve mutual understanding. By stressing the dialogical nature of linguistic interaction Paris goes beyond Bréal and almost echoes Wegener. Whereas Bréal speaks of a dim but persistent will that governs language-change (ES: 7/7), Paris describes the process of language-making and language-change as a series of experiments, carried out by the speakers, that can succeed or fail, but that in the long run govern language evolution: Every dialogue is a series of experiments, of one mind trying to reach another in order to know if the acoustic sensation that one of the interlocutors gives the other produces in him the psychological state that the first wishes to bring about…in really difficult cases, as when the one who speaks uses a new or strange word, or gives a particular, rare or uncertain meaning to a well known word, …he requires an explicit assurance that he has been understood…that’s the most simple scenario; but a language is not only used between two persons: it is a means of intelligent commerce between sometimes quite big groups of human beings; in order for a word with its different meanings to be really part of the language, it must have become understandable to at least a large part of those who speak the language, and this is only possible after an almost endless series of small and partial experiments. The starting point for the emergence of a new meaning of a word is always the individual; but the individual initiative can only be successful, if there exists a logical and easy to grasp relationship between the existing meaning and the meaning one wants to add to it…the new meaning is only born by the merger of two, then several minds. This explains the cautious and slow evolution of word-meaning; less than anywhere else does nature jump here. The leaps to which our quick sensations or perceptions make us prone are checked by the ever present awareness of the necessity to be understood. (1906:287–8) The account of the evolution of meaning, based on the reciprocity of speaker and hearer and their interaction in context, is very similar to that of Wegener and Paul. It seems likely that Paris had read the second edition of Paul’s Principien (1886) shortly before he wrote his review of Darmesteter. And it was in that edition that Paul had incorporated some insights of Wegener’s 1885 Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of the Life of Language, especially those concerning semantic change. Paris refers to the Principien in a footnote (1906:285), but does not give the date of the edition he refers to. Arsène Darmesteter In 1887 Bréal wrote a review of Darmesteter’s book, La Vie des mots, which he later integrated in abbreviated form into the Essai, under the title ‘Histoire des mots’—history of words, not ‘life’ or ‘growth’ or any other vitalistic metaphor. Darmesteter had in fact

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written the first important book on semantics published before the Essai, unfortunately in a naturalistic language. None of the reviewers, neither Bréal, Paris, nor Victor Henry (1887b) fails to point out this weakness. But they do not overlook Darmesteter’s achievements either. His conception of semantics constitutes a progress over Schleicher because he does not want to describe the birth, life, and decay of languages as organisms for the sake of typology or classification. He regards words themselves as organisms struggling for survival. This is much more in tune with Darwin’s theory than Schleicher’s ‘Darwinism’. Unlike Schleicher he does not express views about the perfection or imperfection of languages, the Ur-languages being more perfect than their decaying ‘descendants’. The struggle for life goes on all the time, in all languages, and on all levels of language. His theory of the life of language is directly comparable to that of Whitney, whose LGL (French transl. 1875, especially chapter 5) he refers to at the beginning of his book. As Simone Delesalle has recently devoted an article to Darmesteter (Delesalle 1987), I shall only summarize some essential points. His book originated from lectures given in London in 1886, and I shall use this English version in what follows. He divided his lectures into three parts: 1 how words are born, 2 the society of words (or, as in the French edition, how words live together), and 3 how words die. The first part deals with neologisms and figures of speech, and with the process of semantic radiation or concatenation, accounting, for example, for the fact that a metaphor (e.g. leaf) spreads through the lexicon. The second part describes how word-meanings influence each other syntagmatically or paradigmatically and change through their interaction. Bréal too will deal with phenomena such as contamination (e.g. French ne— pas) on the syntagmatic level, and will give special attention to paradigmatic reactions between words in his treatment of synonyms. The third part of Darmesteter’s book examines the linguistic and non-linguistic causes of word-death, that is to say, it deals with the struggle of words for survival and their ‘natural selection’, as well as with their death brought about by the dying of the referent. Although Darmesteter uses Darwinian metaphors extensively, his conception of language is not biologistic like Schleicher’s. He wants to discover the psychological processes underlying language-change. And the struggle for life among words that he describes is as much a struggle between words as between ideas. In his psychologism, Darmesteter is a direct forerunner of Bréal, who makes it quite clear that Darmesteter, though using the wrong metaphors, is working in the right field—semantics—and applying the right method—psychology. Abel Hovelacque La Linguistique (1876), written by Abel Hovelacque ten years before La Vie des mots must have struck Bréal as much more damaging to linguistic science. Hovelacque defines linguistics as a ‘natural science’ and philology as an ‘historical science’ (1876:1)— definitions that are directly borrowed from Schleicher (cf. Schleicher 1860). In a more extensive definition of linguistics and of the subject matter of linguistics he writes:

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It is possible to give a definition of linguistics; the study of the constitutive elements of articulated language and of the various forms that these elements take on or might take on. In other words, if you like, linguistics is the double study of phonetics and of the structure of the language. (Hovelacque 1876:4) The object of linguistics is ‘language in itself and for itself (ibid.: 7). This is precisely the definition of linguistics that Bréal rejects from 1866 onwards. In his obituary of Bréal, Meillet provides a good summary of this central idea contained in all of Bréal’s writing: In presenting language as the result of human activity and of the efforts made by human beings to express themselves clearly and easily, the author escapes the danger of treating language in itself and for itself, like some sort of object [my emphasis]. (1916:16–17) Hovelacque’s definition of linguistics and its subject matter is deficient in two respects: not only does it overlook that elements—forms—have functions and are used and changed by speakers, it also neglects the fact that elements are integrated into a system. This latter deficiency was ultimately put right by one of Bréal’s students, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, however, like Hovelacque, neglected in part the human as user and constructor of the linguistic systems and structures. It is therefore no accident that the editors of the CLG summarized Saussure’s central insight in the last sentence of the CLG in a way reminiscent of Schleicher and Hovelacque: ‘the only true object of study in linguistics is the language, considered in itself and for its own sake’ (CLG/H: [317] 230). The human being, ‘l’homme’, only re-entered linguistics with Emile Benveniste (1966/English edition 1971: part V). Another error committed by Hovelacque was to describe the life of language as a cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death. Variations in sound and sense for him constitute signs of linguistic decay (cf. Hovelacque and Vinson 1878:10), whereas Darmesteter and Bréal consider them as manifestations of the normal, everyday life of language. Bréal makes this most clear in his critique (1887, as part of the Darmesteter review) of Littré’s Pathologie du langage, an essay that Bréal himself re-published a year later, for its ‘charm’, under the more appropriate title Comment les mots changent de sens (1888). We come to the conclusion that in linguistic matters, there is one rule that dominates all the others. Once a sign is found and adopted for an object, it becomes adequate to the object. You can shorten it, reduce it materially; it will always keep its value. On one condition however, that the usage by which the sign is attached to the signified object remains uninterrupted…. But what the great French scholar [Littré] calls pathology constitutes in fact the normal development of language, it happens every day. (HM: 204)

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Both Whitney and Bréal opposed the view according to which the life of language is one of growth and decay. Where Bréal declared that ‘It is not only at the beginning of mankind that particular languages are created; we create them at every moment, because all the changes that affect them are our own work’ (FF: 71), Whitney claimed: The nature and uses of speech, and the forces which act upon it and produce its changes, cannot but have been essentially the same during all the periods of its history, amid all its changing circumstances, in all its varying phases; and there is no way in which its unknown past can be investigated, except by the careful study of its living present and recorded past, and the extension and application to remote conditions of laws and principles deduced by that study. (LSL: 184) Hovelacque was criticized by not only Bréal and Whitney, but even by a linguistic ‘Darwinist’ such as Darmesteter. In his review of Hovelacque’s La Linguistique (1876), he concedes that linguistics belongs to the natural sciences, but he would have liked to read more about how the elements of a language change and evolve: He should have shown that linguistics is a science which belongs to the psychological sciences, on the one hand, to the physiological sciences on the other; that language is determined by two kinds of laws, physical laws (phonetics) and psychological laws. The latter belong to the domain of morphology, syntax and the transformation of word-meanings. (Darmesteter 1876:369) Without using the term ‘semantics’ which was not introduced by Bréal until 1883, Darmesteter here is advocating a psychological study of semantic facts, at the sub-word level, the word level, and the level of syntax, just like Bréal in 1897 and Paul in 1880. All three—Darmesteter, Paul, and Bréal—were looking for the essential principles that govern semantic change and sought them in the domain of psychology. This was also the route taken by Wegener. Victor Henry Another linguist, mentioned by Bréal in his Essai (ES: 5/4, n.1), and a correspondent of Whitney (cf. Henry 1897:87f; cf. Henry 1896:5), Victor Henry, was deeply concerned with the controversy surrounding the notion of the ‘life’ of language. It is one of the antinomies which mar linguistic science that one can say at one and the same time: language lives and language does not live. Like Bréal and Paris, he protested against the unreflected use and abuse of biological metaphors, a view that he too had expressed earlier in a review of Darmesteter’s book (1887). In his Antinomies linguistiques (1896) he tries to tackle some of the fundamental problems of linguistics by laying bare the antinomic structure of some of its basic assumptions. This essay, written in the tradition of Kant and Humboldt, can be regarded as one of the first books on general linguistics written in this period, thereby fulfilling one of Whitney’s most ardent wishes: the

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promotion of the science of language. It constitutes something like a ‘critique of the faculty of language’ (cf. Chiss and Puech 1987:172), by trying to establish the conditions of the possibility of a general science of language. Three chapters deal with three antinomies concerning: (1) the nature of language, (2) the origin of language, and (3) the relationship between language and thought. Whereas the first two chapters are principally a critique of linguistic ‘Darwinism’, the third chapter is directed against Bréal’s intellectualism. Henry argues that there is no place for consciousness or ‘the will’ in language-change as Bréal argued, but that all procedures of language-change are used and implemented unconsciously. (In 1901 he wrote a book on the linguistic ‘unconscious’, cf. for more details Chiss and Puech 1987.) In the first chapter he poses the questions: What is a language?, What is the life of language, the life of words? As to the first question he writes that a Persian and a Hindu, a Russian peasant and a dairy farmer in the German ‘Unterwald’ speak the same language—historically speaking: this is one side of the antinomic pair of answers to the first question. At the same time, one must concede, that a Frenchman and a Briton, and even Parisians from different quarters or classes in Paris do not speak the same language; that is the other side of the antinomic pair of answers. Even more: no one speaker speaks the same language as any other. Only if one keeps this antinomy in mind, and does not carelessly brush it aside, can one write about languages, language families, dialects, etc. As to the life of language, Henry is even more direct. Languages do not live as organisms, but they live and evolve in every act of speech. We can continue to speak about the life and the evolution of language as long as we know that this façon de parler does not force us to find in language the essential characteristics of life: birth, growth, and death (cf. 1896:10). The growth of language is not governed by irresistible natural laws. New words are ‘born’ through the initiative of the individual speaker who unconsciously applies intellectual procedures (ibid.: 11) that remain constant through the ages (ibid.: 13). The new word ‘bicycle’ does not unfold like a flower; it is created according to certain morphological and semantic procedures that are also at work in the creation of words such as ‘bicentenary’ (and these procedures are even applied ‘retrospectively’ on to a totally arbitrary word-creation, such as ‘bikini’): all this without any conscious or voluntary effort. Keeping this in mind, one is again allowed to write about the ‘life’ of language. Henry even encourages linguists to write about the life of words, because words are ‘really’ born, live, and die in a ‘metaphysical’ sense (cf. Thomas 1897:174f.). But, because of these ambiguous connotations of the word ‘life’, Bréal preferred to speak about the ‘transformation’ of language (cf. ES: 5f). WHITNEY, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Following the publication of Schleicher’s Compendium (1861), Bréal had slowly moved away from comparative philology to create a new branch of linguistics: semantics. For Whitney, too, the publication of this book, together with Max Müller’s lectures on linguistics (1861, etc.), had been a decisive turning-point. His anti-Schleicherian stance was reinforced by the publication of Schleicher’s two treatises on Darwinian linguistics (1863, English transl. 1869; 1865). The 1860s for Whitney were the beginning of an obdurate witch-hunt, a sustained effort to destroy the reputation of these two writers. Why this strong reaction? Apart from

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an unacknowledged struggle to gain popularity in his own right (the structure of his books and the examples used strongly resemble both the form and the content of Müller’s books), Whitney attacked Schleicher and Müller for two reasons: Schleicher was too good a comparative linguist and there was a danger that people reading his books would not only accept and absorb the hard data and formulas, but also the philosophy underlying them, which for Whitney was an unacceptable hybrid of Hegelianism and Darwinism. As for Müller, the reasons for opposing him were the converse: he was too bad a linguist, a dilettante, who bewitched the public with his fluent style, but whose philosophy of language was as wrong as Schleicher’s. Both Schleicher and Müller held that linguistics was a natural science and both ignored the speaker in the linguistic inquiry, that is they denied, destroyed, so to speak, his free will. Another of Whitney’s victims was Steinthal, who did not regard linguistics as a natural science, who did not regard language as an organism, and who stressed the importance of the speaking subject and of society in his psychology of language. He had derived his philosophy of language not from Hegel or Darwin, but from Humboldt. This, in Whitney’s eyes, was his error. Whitney regarded Humboldt as one of the most impractical and unreadable philosophers of language. Whitney’s own philosophy of linguistics, thus opposed to Schleicher’s, Müller’s, and Steinthal’s, was a pragmatic, inductive, and realistic philosophy. This will become clear in his critiques of these three writers. All three were accused of not contributing to the science of language on the one hand, and to the philosophy of language on the other. Having no sound philosophical foundation, the science of language they wanted to establish was built on sand. His experience with the works of Schleicher, Steinthal, and Müller (the German-born professor at Oxford) made him sceptical about the merits of German linguistics in general: In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible. (OLS: vi) But while Germany is the home of comparative philology, the scholars of that country…distinguished themselves much less in that which we have called the Science of language. (LGL: 318) The science of language is an historical one, and not as German scholars seem to believe, a natural one. Regarding philosophy of language, he wrote: ‘Germany is the home of philology and linguistic study; but the Germans are rather exceptionally careless of what we may call the questions of linguistic philosophy, or are loose and inconsistent in their views of such questions’ (LI: 715). He believed that there ‘needs to be, perhaps, a radical stirring up of the subject, a ventilation of a somewhat breezy, even gusty, order, which

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shall make words fly high, and dash noisily against one another, before agreement shall be reached’ (ibid.). This is exactly what Whitney tried to do by introducing some philosophical principles into linguistics, such as the arbitrariness and conventionality of signs, the definition of language as a social institution and an instrument of thought and communication, the stress on the speaker and his/her will to speak and to act so as to satisfy his/her most basic needs. He also insisted that change is a fundamental property of language. Its study should not be reduced to the atomistic listing of changes of isolated linguistic forms, but broadened so that it could embrace the general principles of change. The life and growth of language for him is a dialectical process, governed by two forces: the conservative force, governing the transmission of language from generation to generation, and the alterative force that makes it continually change through use (cf. LGL: ch. 3). These forces give language its particular semiotic character: continuity in alteration. In effect Whitney prefaces what Saussure will call the most fundamental principle of semiotics (cf. CLG/E: 169, 171): So far as language is handed down from generation to generation by the process of teaching and learning, it is stable, and by this means it does remain nearly the same; so far as it is altered by the consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change. (LI: 719) By defining language as intelligent behaviour, Whitney elegantly avoids falling into one of the antinomic traps, noted by Victor Henry. Behaviour that must be learned can also be altered; signs that are by nature conventional are alterable (cf. LGL: 48). However, it was not until Saussure, who did not try to overhaul linguistics radically, but whose followers used his ideas to challenge other linguists, that most of the philosophical principles discussed earlier became established in linguistics. If Saussure had published his obituary of Whitney, written in 1894, this revolution in linguistics arguably would have occurred earlier. Saussure could have joined forces with Whitney, with whom he shared not only a philosophy of language and most of its principal axioms, but also a certain animosity against German linguistics. He wrote: For all time it will be a subject for philosophical reflection that during a period of fifty years linguistic science, born in Germany, developed in Germany, cherished in Germany by innumerable people, has never had the slightest inclination to reach the degree of abstraction which is necessary in order to dominate on the one hand what one is doing, on the other hand why what one is doing has a legitimacy and a raison d’être in the totality of sciences; but a second subject of astonishment is to see that when at last this science seems to triumph over her torpor, she winds up with the ludicrous attempt of Schleicher, which totters under its own preposterousness. Such was the prestige of Schleicher for simply having tried to say something general about linguistics, that he even today seems an unrivaled figure in the history of linguistics. (Quoted by Jakobson, in Silverstein 1971: xxx; CLG/N: 4)

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Grandiose rhetoric! That it remains unpublished is a mixed blessing. Schleicher and the physical theory of language Anna Morpurgo Davies writes in her major contribution to the history of nineteenthcentury linguistics that ‘Schleicher’s work had brought the organic view of language (in the ontological sense) to the point where compromise was no longer possible’ (1975:638)—and Whitney was certainly not a man for compromises. What was so peculiar about Schleicher and so infuriating for men like Whitney, Bréal, and Saussure? Morpurgo Davies provides a masterly summary of Schleicher’s peculiarities and achievements: According to most histories of linguistics a rather curious combination of approaches and results marks Schleicher’s contribution to the study of language. His system seems to embrace a Hegelian belief in a process of prehistoric growth followed by historical decay, a Darwinian theory of evolution, a greater rigour in the application of sound laws, the Stammbaumtheorie, and finally an interest in the reconstruction of Ursprachen. Together with this goes his claim that linguistics, or Glottik, is a natural science and not a form of historical knowledge (a task reserved to philology) and that all languages may be classified into three classes (isolating, agglutinative and inflectional). (Morpurgo Davies 1975:633) We have seen that Whitney started to attack Schleicher’s concept of language and linguistics as soon as Schleicher was dead. But his criticism was set out most clearly in an article written in 1872 and reprinted in the Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1873). Whitney opens his critique by a quote from Schleicher’s book Die Deutsche Sprache: Languages are natural organisms, which without being determinable by the will of man, arose, grew, and developed themselves, in accordance with fixed laws, and then again grow old and die out; to them, too belongs that succession of phenomena which is wont to be termed ‘life’. Glottik, the science of language, is accordingly a natural science; its method is on the whole and in general the same with that of the other natural sciences. (1860:6f.) For Whitney everything is wrong with this definition of language and of linguistics. Language is not a natural organism, but the cultural and historical product of men’s action, an institution (OLS: 316). Like all human action, speech is voluntary, an ongoing process by which language as a product comes into being and is changed. There are no fixed laws that structure language from without, but procedures of change and variation that structure language from within and work ‘in lively phrase’ (OLS: 305). The constant everyday actions of speakers keep language ‘alive’. Language has thus no life of its own; it lives only through its speakers. This is a continuous process that has nothing to do with birth, growth, and decay. Finally, linguistics is not a natural science, but an historical and

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cultural one. To make this point clear, Whitney challenges the reader to ask whether language, like a ‘pyramid is a work of human art or rather a stupendous natural crystal, undeterminable by the will of man, and developed under the government of the eternal laws of regular solids’ (OLS: 302). For Whitney the answer is clearly that language is comparable to a work of art, but not to a crystal, say, and that the laws that govern language are human laws of action, not natural laws. ‘Every law of speech has its foundation and reason in the users of speech—in their mental operations, their capacities, their wants and preferences’ (OLS: 315). According to Whitney, language is an organism only by analogy, as Lyell had said in the Antiquity of Men (1863; cf. OLS: 316). If one wants to understand the nature and life of language, one can turn to geology (Lyell) or biology (Darwin) for methodological inspiration, but one should be careful not to turn their theories upside down, as Schleicher seems to do, reverting to a preDarwinian position. To speak of growth and decay, writes Whitney, ‘looks like Darwinism reversed: the apes not so much represent a condition out of which man has arisen as that into which creatures that might have been men have fallen through simple neglect of learning to talk’ (OLS: 329). But talk of birth, growth, and death conceals an even deeper misunderstanding of Darwin, who did not intend developing a new theory of embryology or of individual evolution, but rather a general theory of the evolution of species, based on the principles of variation and selection. Lyell, the geologist, so much admired by Whitney, outlined a theory of the life of language that was built on these principles. This theory is much sounder than Schleicher’s Darwinian speculations and we shall return to it in chapter 3, pp. 61–5. Lyell was not only a source for Whitney’s better understanding of linguistic evolution according to the uniformitarianist model, his books were also a model of a new type of science—modern inductive science, for which induction alone, or pure positivism, is not enough, especially when dealing with such problematic topics as the origin and life of language: Strict induction from the determinate items of knowledge is no longer applicable; its place is taken by inference from general views and theoretical conditions—these views being themselves, of course, not arbitrarily assumed, but derived by inductive process from facts of language and human history. (OLS: 284–5) This is why Whitney always stressed the importance of general linguistics and the philosophy of language: it is in a sound, logically consistent theory of language that the linguist can find the general principles and theoretical conditions on which to base his inductive knowledge of particular linguistic facts. It is only by a careful balance between induction and deduction that one can avoid the construction of absurd or obscure theories of language: The more thorough we are in our study of the living and recent forms of human language, the more rigorous in applying the deductions thence drawn to the forms current in ante-historic periods, the more cautious about admitting forces and effects in unknown ages whereof the known

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afford us no example or criterion, so much the more sound and trustworthy will be the conclusions at which we shall arrive. It is but a shallow philology, as it is a shallow geology, which explains past changes by catastrophes and cataclysms. (LSL: 287) Steinthal, the next victim of Whitney’s vituperation, violates precisely these principles: he does not establish his theory of the origin of language on induction or on inductivelydirected inferences and theoretical insights. He relies solely, in Whitney’s view, on wild metaphysical and psychological speculations. Steinthal and the psychological theory of language The controversy between Whitney and Steinthal started in 1868 and lasted until 1875 and beyond. It can be regarded as a gradual increase in misunderstanding. In 1868 Steinthal wrote a warm appraisal of Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867), which was published in the fifth volume of his Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. In 1872, Whitney reviewed Steinthal’s Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1871), and this was first published in the North American Review under the title ‘Steinthal on the origin of language’ (Whitney 1872b) and reprinted in the OLS under the title ‘Steinthal and the psychological theory of language’. The review was anything but friendly. Steinthal answered with an ‘anti-critique’ that he called a ‘friendly dialogue’ (1875), but which was in fact a most vehement outcry of fury and hurt pride. We shall concentrate on Whitney’s review of the Abriss because he used it as a convenient vehicle to express his own views most clearly. But what did Steinthal have to say about Whitney in 1868? Steinthal remarks upon the clarity of Whitney’s writing (something that cannot be attributed to Steinthal himself); he admits that he prefers Whitney’s theses to Max Müller’s because they are sound and sober without false pretence (cf. 1868:365). What he cannot accept are the two basic principles of Whitney’s work: his uniformitarianism (though Steinthal does not use this term), that is the view that the same forces of change are at work now that existed in the past, and his belief in the gradual evolution of language. Both views were opposed to his own belief in revolutions or catastrophes. Steinthal clings to a pre-Darwinian, even preLyellian view of language evolution, conceived as a transition from an embryonic state to one of mature growth and death. Accordingly, he holds that the process of change— especially phonetic change—differs during these different stages. Steinthal maintains an essentially pre-Darwinian conception of language-evolution, most probably influenced by Georges Cuvier. Cuvier was a geologist who, in opposition to Lyell, held that the formation of the earth and the evolution of species was structured by successive terrestrial cataclysms or catastrophes (cf. Christy 1983:6 and Cuvier 1818). A brief perusal of this early review offers a foreshadowing of Whitney’s reaction to Steinthal’s subsequent writings. First, Steinthal’s work is not easy to read. It demands, as Whitney says, ‘hard reading, even for the practised linguistic scholar’ (1872b:273). This is due in part to the influence of Humboldt’s thought on Steinthal,

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a man whom it is nowadays the fashion to praise highly, without understanding or even reading him; Steinthal is the man in Germany, perhaps in the world, who penetrates the mysteries, unravels the inconsistencies, and expounds the dark sayings, of that ingenious and profound, but unclear and wholly unpractical, thinker. (ibid.) Impractical. That will be the final judgement on Steinthal’s work. But what is it that makes Steinthal so impractical? First, according to Whitney, he endorses the wrong methodology; and second, he holds the wrong view about the origin of language—both his methodology and his theory of the origin of language are ‘metaphysical’, or better, speculative. Steinthal’s method, unlike Lyell’s, is philosophical, aprioristic, and as such it runs against the ‘current scientific method’, which relies on observations, facts, induction, and sound inferences, thus gradually progressing ‘from the known and familiar to the obscure and unknown’. His other mistake is to rely on psychological rather than strictly historical insights (cf. 1872b:286). According to Whitney, the origin of language cannot be understood by attempting a retrospective investigation of the primitive mind, as Steinthal wishes to do, but only by inferring from current practice to practice then: ‘If such is to be the result of the full admission of psychology into linguistic investigation, then we can only say, may Heaven defend the science of language from psychology!’ (ibid.: 287) Steinthal’s theory of the origin of language is based on the view that language or meaning starts with understanding or interpretation. Language-understanding, based on the interaction between speaker and hearer, is of vital importance to him—a point that will be rediscovered by the symbolic interactionists. Mead, for example, would write in 1934 in not altogether clear terms: There is, then, a great range in our use of language; but what ever phase of this range is used is a part of a social process, and it is always that part by means of which we affect ourselves as we affect others and mediate the social situation through this understanding of what we are saying. That is fundamental for any language; if it is going to be language one has to understand what he is saying, has to affect himself as he affects others. (Mead 1934:75) Steinthal wrote in the Abriss: ‘Seeing oneself understood by the other, one understands oneself: this is the beginning of language’ (1871:386). Unfortunately, this almost modern theory of language as symbolic interaction was marred by being coupled with a theory of the reflex movement, which resembled Heyse’s and Müller’s ‘ding-dong’ theory (cf. Steinthal 1871:363), and Whitney only saw this flaw and not the positive achievements. As Morpurgo Davies writes: ‘Whitney’s criticism was justified, but one-sided’ (1975:668). Against Steinthal’s metaphorical and metaphysical talk of the ‘birth of language’ Whitney argues:

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Every single item of existing speech had its own separate beginning, a time when it first came into men’s use; it had its preparation, in the already subsisting material and usages of speech, and the degree of culture and knowledge in the community, where it arose, and it obtained currency and maintained itself in existence because it answered practical purposes, subserving a felt need for expression. (Whitney 1872b:285) This is Whitney’s ‘practical’ solution to the problem of the origin of language, which he regards as vastly superior to the impractical, metaphysical one proposed by Steinthal. The history of the development of language for Whitney is the sum of the histories of words, and the linguist has to study these in order to understand ‘the gradually advancing condition of mind and state of knowledge of the language-makers and language-users’ (1872b:285). Language for Whitney is an instrument of thought and essentially an instrument of communication. Its use, and the development and change of its use, follow the same laws that ‘govern human action in general in the adaptation of means to ends’ (ibid.: 289). The acts of language-making and language-use are not only mental acts, but acts of the mind and acts of the body (cf. ibid.: 293). As such they operate consciously and unconsciously (cf. ibid.: 292), ‘consciously, as regards the immediate end to be attained; unconsciously, as regards the further consequences of the act’ (ibid.), such as the creation and change of ‘language’. This view of the origin and development of language can be called ‘pragmatic evolutionism’: the laws of language change are nothing other than the laws of human action. Whitney’s practical, pragmatic, or instrumentalist view of language is intimately linked to a sound evolutionary view of the development of language. And although Whitney is sometimes too harsh in his critique of Steinthal, who had (unlike Schleicher) insisted on the importance of the speaker, of society, and of symbolic interaction, one is tempted to agree with Whitney when he writes: In fact, we think our appreciation of the wondrous character of language a vastly higher one than Professor Steinthal; for while he holds that any two or three human beings, putting their heads together, in any age and under any circumstances not only can, but of necessity must, produce it in all its essential features, we think it a possible result only of the accumulated labor of a series of generations, working on step by step, making every acquired item the means of a new acquisition. (ibid.: 304) ‘The constant reproach, that of obscurity, wooliness, and metaphysical inclinations, levelled at him [Steinthal] by some of his contemporaries has stuck’ (Morpurgo Davies 1975:666), and invectives such as this, hurled against Whitney by Steinthal, did not really help to destroy that image: ‘Whitney has nothing at all to do with Common Sense [English in the original], Induction, natural science or history; these are only shields held up to cover his haughty vanity…we are dealing here with a snobbish and pretentious individual of unrestrained pride’ (Steinthal 1875:234). Linguistics will have to wait for

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Wegener to bring together the positive aspects of Whitney and Steinthal, to integrate the insights of both men into a new theory of language and communication (cf. Part two). MAX MÜLLER, WHITNEY’S ARCH-ENEMY AND A FRIEND OF BRÉAL Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), who became Deputy-Professor at the University of Oxford in 1851, and was later appointed Professor of Comparative Philology, was Whitney’s worst foe. Whitney used to attack him with his sharp pen starting in 1865, when he reviewed Müller’s second series of Lectures on the Science of Language (1864), until 1892, two years before his death, when he devoted a whole book to a criticism of Müller’s popular theories (the first and second series of lectures had been reprinted in 1891 in a supposedly revised form; cf. Müller 1891). But Müller was unrepentant. Until his death in 1900 he continued to work within the framework established in his first series of lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in 1861. His lecture ‘On thought and language’, given at the Philosophical Society of Glasgow in 1891 (cf. Müller 1901:85– 109), reiterated what he had first said thirty years earlier. Until the very end Müller held to his idiosyncratic theory of language, its origin, and its relation to thought, and he did not flinch under Whitney’s continuous attacks (on Müller’s life and work, cf. Jankowsky 1979). This raises the question who won the popularity battle; who ultimately convinced the scientific community—the Yale professor or the Oxford professor? In America it was certainly Whitney. B. E. Smith, who wrote Whitney’s biography for the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11) notes that Whitney’s ‘popular works’ ‘were particularly important in that they counteracted the popular and interestingly written works of Max Müller: for instance, Müller, like Renan and Wilhelm von Humboldt, regarded language as an innate faculty and Whitney considered it the product of experience and outward circumstance’ (1910–11:612, note 1). In Germany, Whitney triumphed too, as Brugmann testifies in his very critical review of the German translation of the new edition of Müller’s lectures (1891) by Fick and Wischmann (Müller 1892/3). He writes that the book does not represent the state of the art in modern linguistic science, but that it is rather a caricature of it. He recommends those wanting to be informed about linguistics should read Whitney’s works (cf. Brugmann 1893:890). It is not necessary to enumerate in detail Brugmann’s criticism of Müller, as it repeats what Whitney had written before. Brugmann’s last word on the matter is a quote from Whitney (1892:74): ‘this work is unsound in every part, most of all in its fundamental doctrines’ (Brugmann 1893:891). Was there any value at all in Müller’s work then, or was it simply the idle thoughts of a dilettante, as so many reviewers claimed? By some irony of scientific sort it had at least one merit: without it Whitney would perhaps never have produced anything on the subject of general linguistics. He says himself in one of the closing paragraphs of his book on Müller, it ‘is questionable whether I should myself ever have written a work on the general subject of language if I had not been driven to it by what seemed to me the necessity of counteraction, as far as possible, to the influence of snch (sic) erroneous views’ (1892:77–8). But is that all there is to Müller?*

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French linguists and philosophers of language would certainly not accept Müller’s being reduced to a mere ‘stimulus’. Another factor too has to be borne in mind. Was Whitney so violently opposed to Müller because he was so illogical, irrational, and muddled, or was it that Müller constituted a real threat to Whitney? Did he sometimes come too close to the truth? Let us first see what happened to Müller in France. From The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, edited by his wife (cf. Müller 1902:2 vols), one can make a reasonably accurate reconstruction of Müller’s circle of enemies and friends. Whitney was undoubtedly his main enemy (cf. also Müller, ‘In self-defence’ (1875), reprinted in Chips, IV, 1875:473–549). Müller once tried to make peace with him, but Whitney rejected the offer (cf. Müller 1902: II, 20–1). His friends, or at least acquaintances in a neutral sense, included Noiré in Germany (cf. Noiré 1879), Darmesteter (cf. II, 25), Bréal (cf. II, 24–5), and Renan in France. As Bréal wrote: ‘It is perhaps in France that he had the readers that really understood him and the most sincere friends’ (1900: cxcv). Bréal seems to have been instrumental in getting Müller a place in the French Institute. Müller refers to it in a letter written in 1869, where he also mentions the reception of Bréal’s Idées latentes (1868, ID). Müller also received Bréal’s essay on ‘Les racines indo-européennes’ ([1876a] 1877:375–412), an essay that gives a rather critical account of Müller’s theories. Bréal vehemently rejected the belief that Indo-European roots represent the beginning of speech (cf. 1877:403f.). But Müller replied candidly: ‘I never believed in any Ursprache; it is a deus ex machina, an impossibility’ (II, 25)—a rather hypocritical pronouncement, as we shall soon see. Müller himself liked to produce a deus ex machina from time to time. However, on the whole, Bréal can be regarded as a supporter of Müller. In 1900 he wrote an obituary of Max Müller which was first published in the Journal des débats (7 November 1900), and then re* Cf. Schmidt (1976) for a late rehabilitation. Schmidt claims that Müller was one of the few philosophers of language before Wittgenstein who regarded ‘language as an outstanding philosophical topic’ (1976:659). Based on an analysis of Müller’s The Science of Thought (1887), he comes to the conclusion that for Müller philosophy was mainly language criticism.

published in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 11/49 (1900), although Müller had not been a member of the Society. The fact that Müller never became a member is in itself symbolic of a certain contradiction in Bréal’s life and work. Initially influenced by Müller’s work on comparative mythology, he later abandoned Müller’s theories to establish himself as a hardnosed and thorough comparative linguist who rejected all speculations about the origin of language. And it was as such that he worked in the Société de Linguistique de Paris, especially when he became its Secretary in 1868. It was this Society that included in its rules that no contributions on the origin of language would be accepted (cf. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 1, 1868:111). But he must have continued covertly admiring Müller who had so strongly influenced him in his youth. In the obituary he goes so far as to imagine, or rather to fantasize about, the life Müller might have led in France:* One can well imagine, from 1845 to 1870, a Fr. Max Müller, beautiful, witty, worldly, extrovert, having all sorts of successes, soon member of the Institute and successor of Burnouf [under whom Müller had studied]…. Soon he would have been able to handle our language like his

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compatriot Grimm in former times. He would have poured out over this French public, so open to all that is new and so ill informed about the latest developments, German science, embellishing it by his imagination and seasoning it by his wit. Nothing prevents us from seeing him after 10 or 15 years at the head of the Collège de France, having his chair in the French Academy and attracting here in France, as he has done in England, all the distinctions and favours. However, it is true that the events of 1870 would have profoundly disturbed this beautiful dream. (Bréal 1900: cxcii–cxciii) What Bréal regarded as a beautiful dream would have been a dreadful nightmare for Whitney. If he could have read the obituary, he would have shuddered not only at this evocation of a glorious Max Müller, but at some other passages as well. What Bréal calls * The only quarrel Bréal had with Müller was a political one, related to Müller’s affiliation during and after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/1. Müller openly sided with Germany against France, and he even gave a lecture at the inauguration of the University of Strasbourg in 1872, which had become a ‘Kaiserliche Universität’, after the annexation of the Alsace by Germany.

a ‘grain of paradox’ (1900: cxciv) in Müller’s work, was a profound absurdity to Whitney. And where Bréal expresses his delight at the fact that ‘The artist was so much part of his nature that this tinged a bit his scientific work’ (1900: cxcv), Whitney writes: ‘This book is not science, but literature. Taken as literature, it is of high rank.’ (1892:75). Contrary to Whitney, it was Müller’s literary and aesthetic qualities that attracted Bréal, compared to which Whitney must have appeared to be a hard positivist: One has seen him rejecting a priori certain solutions because they offended his aesthetic sense. He basically continued the tradition of Herder, whom he quoted often. His polemical controversy with the American scholar Whitney, a convinced positivist, brings out well this side of his personality. When his enemies sometimes accused him of voluntarily closing his eyes to the evidence they did not take enough into account this instinct for beauty which dominated his whole nature. (1900: cxcv) Müller’s sense of beauty was certainly not appreciated by Whitney, and Whitney’s rejection of Müller on the grounds that beauty has nothing to do with science was certainly sincere. But on the level of the actual scientific groundwork they both invested in linguistics, that is on the level of content, not form, one can detect some important similarities, and here Whitney’s rejection of Müller was much less sincere, but at the same time far harsher, and in part unjustified. One doctrine they shared was a certain kind of uniformitarianism, to which Whitney stuck throughout his life, and which structured his work on general linguistics. Some of Müller’s claims also have a uniformitarianist ring but unfortunately these are not always systematically integrated into his conceptual framework; they are just one piece in Müller’s medley of theories—theories that mostly contradict each other. Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that he had some important insights into this issue. In his article on uniformitarianism Wells recounts the following anecdote. Lyell, the promoter of

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uniformitarianism in geology, had written in 1863 The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. This included a chapter on language. He starts his chapter 23 with a quotation from Müller, a fact that must have infuriated Whitney, an admirer of Lyell. But one has to admit that in 1863 there was little else available as a handbook of linguistics from which Lyell could have quoted. The following year, when Müller gave his second series of lectures on the science of language, ‘Müller returned the compliment by quoting Lyell’ (Müller 1864: ch. 5, 223–7). Müller might have done so out of mere courtesy or timeliness. But beyond this obvious acknowledgment, in the same work Müller took account of Lyell’s ideas in a much profounder way, for in chapter 2 he all but incorporated uniformitarianism into linguistics by formulating two ‘principles on which the science of language rests, namely, that what is real in modern formations must be admitted as possible in more ancient formations, and that what has been found to be true on a small scale may be true on a large scale’ (Müller 1864:14). The eminent American, W.D.Whitney, in his review of this book (1865:567), commented disdainfully, ‘We should have called these, not fundamental principles, but obvious considerations, which hardly required any illustration.’ But this disparagement was unfair if, as seems to be the case, Müller was the first in linguistics to formulate them. It should be noted, moreover, that Whitney did not question the truth of Müller’s principles. Again, in 1885, Whitney admitted their truth and questioned the importance of stating them (cf. Wells 1973:424– 5). Even more astonishingly, Müller and Whitney also shared a critical view of the Schleicherian doctrine, namely that language is an organism. Both Schleicher and Müller believed that the science of language is one of the natural sciences, but for different reasons. Müller’s naturalism is much more comparable to Darmesteter’s than to Schleicher’s—and much more similar to Whitney’s own version of the life and growth of language than Whitney would like to believe. He rejects Schleicher’s organismic metaphors of the birth, life and death of languages, of languages as mothers and daughters. These ‘evolutionary’ processes, taken from embryology, cannot explain, even metaphorically, the life of language, whereas truly Darwinian processes, such as the struggle for life among words, can (cf. Müller 1861:368). According to Müller the evolution of language can neither be called history nor growth. The course of history is determined by the free acts of men; the evolution of language is not. Natural growth is independent of the acts of men; the evolution of language is not. In short, the best metaphor for the evolution of language is a geological one: sedimentation: The various influences and conditions under which language grows and changes, are like the waves and winds which carry deposits to the bottom of the sea, where they accumulate, and rise, and grow, and at last appear on the surface of the earth as a stratum, perfectly intelligible in all its component parts, not produced by any inward principle of growth, nor regulated by invariable laws of nature; yet, on the other hand, by no means the result of mere accident, or the production of lawless or uncontrolled agencies. We cannot be careful enough in the use of our words. Strictly speaking, neither history nor growth is applicable to the changes of the shifting surface of the earth. History applies to the actions of free agents; growth to the natural unfolding of organic beings.

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(Müller 1861:5, see also Keller 1983:35) One can see that Müller’s conception of the evolution of language was sometimes not as absurd as Whitney would have his readers believe. I agree with Christy (1983:49) that Müller expressed some sound views of language development and change, based on two processes: phonetic decay and dialectical regeneration or growth; that is, the process by which dialect words or grammatical forms enter the standard language (cf. 1861:40). But Müller does not make it easy for the reader to grasp these positive points. In this he is comparable to Steinthal. I have to confess that, when reading Müller, I cannot detect what Bréal calls the poetic beauty of his style. Instead, I get rather impatient, because he never comes to the point, or if he does, contradicts it in the next sentence. I am rather amused by what Keller calls so appropriately Müller’s ‘argumentational contortions’ (Keller 1985:215), but I do not derive any aesthetic pleasure from them. All in all, I can fully understand Whitney’s anger. The main objections Whitney raises against Müller are: (1) his definition of linguistics as a natural science, related to the denial that language has a history and the proposal that it only undergoes growth; (2) his affirmation that thought and language are identical; (3) his special theory of the origin of language; and (4) his rejection of one of Whitney’s main scientific credos: the conventionality of signs. Müller opens his lectures by introducing the following basic theses: ‘There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which according to their subject-matter, may be called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man’ (1861:22). The attribution of language to the realm of God and therefore the realm of nature, attenuated as it may be by some rather contradictory statements, flaws his whole work, and is severely criticized by Brugmann, for example, who writes: ‘Those who let language “grow” can also let religion [etc.] grow, and those who attribute “history” to the latter may also attribute it to the former’ (1893:891). Keller, from whom we borrowed the term ‘argumentational contortions’, shows very convincingly, how these contortions arise from the theses quoted above. First, Müller, contradicts his initial statement and writes that language cannot be counted as one of the works of God after all, being subject to historical change. He admits that the first impulse to a new formation is given by an individual. But nevertheless he assigns language to the realm of physical things, given that language change in general is not influenced by the individual. As in natural growth, the individual is powerless (cf. 1861:35f.; cf. Keller 1985:215). The only way out of this theoretical labyrinth seems to be the one suggested by Keller, that is, to treat language as a phenomenon of the third kind, neither object of our intentions nor product of nature, but only explicable by reference to the invisible hand process, a way out that Müller himself had half-guessed. But this way of explaining language and language-change was not available to Whitney. In order to criticize Müller, he used his new definition of language as an institution, an instrument of communication among others, and his definition of signs as conventional. One of the surprising contradictions in Müller’s thought is that he plainly foresaw these objections, and he spelled them out quite clearly, even before Whitney. In 1861, some years before Whitney started to write about Müller, Müller raised the following

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objections against himself—objections that Whitney in later years had only to elaborate further to turn them into effective weapons. The speculative objections are the following: Language is the work of man; it was invented by man as a means of communicating his thoughts, when mere looks and gestures proved insufficient; and it was gradually, by the combined efforts of succeeding generations, brought to that perfection which we admire. (Müller 1861:28) This is Whitney’s theory of language in a nutshell! However, Müller does not really refute these objections, but goes on to criticize another, perhaps related point concerning the origin of language. He argues against Locke, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart who had said that human beings invented artificial signs when gestures, etc. were no longer sufficient, and that they fixed the meaning of the signs by ‘mutual agreement’. Müller refutes this philosophy of the origin of language: While fully admitting that if this theory were true, the science of language would not come within the pale of the physical sciences, I must content myself for the present with pointing out that no one has yet explained how, without language, a discussion on the merits of each word, such as must necessarily have preceded a mutual agreement, could have been carried on. (ibid.: 31) In short, signs are not ‘conventional’. It was easy for Whitney to reject this refutation and support the claims made by Müller’s original hypothetical critics (cf. 1861:28, quoted above, p. 43), that is, that language is the work of man—and this in a very special sense. Whitney (1892) shows that Müller confounds ‘conventionalism’ with ‘nomenclaturism’ (like Adam in Paradise) and that Müller’s concept of convention is therefore a caricature (cf. 1892:10). ‘Conventional’ in the the right sense of the term signifies neither more nor less than ‘resting on a mutual understanding or a community habit’. As applied to any word constituting a part of language, it means that that word, instead of being bound to its sense by an internal and necessary tie, is so only by an external one, a tie of mutual understanding and common usage, formed by acquired habit on the part of every user (1892:11). Directly related to the fact that signs are conventional is the claim that language is a social institution, an instrument of communication. These claims tie in again with Whitney’s rejection of Müller’s main contribution to linguistic science, namely his description of the growth of language and his attribution of linguistics to the physical sciences. Why did Müller cling so obstinately to these patently absurd postulates? To understand this, one has to go to the heart of Müller’s philosophy of language: his fundamental axiom that there is no thought without language and no language without thought (cf. Müller 1887), and that language is the main barrier between man and beast (cf. Müller 1873). Whitney’s opposition to Müller rested on his wish to destroy these very theorems. But let us first have a closer look at one passage where Müller defends

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these theorems. This microscopic view will demonstrate again how difficult it must have been for Müller to think systematically through an argument. In his chapter on ‘The theoretical stage in the science of language—Origin of language’ (1861: lecture IX), Müller makes some measured statements concerning the origin of language. He writes, for example, that there must have existed a ‘superabundancy of synonyms in ancient dialects’ (1861:368). As an example he gives the various names for the sun—‘the bright, the warm, the golden, the preserver, the destroyer, the wolf’, etc. (ibid.). It seems to be a semantic law (cf. Darmesteter 1887; Bréal ES) that synonyms are either spread over different registers of speech, acquire a different social or aesthetic value, or else, just as Müller says,* there is a struggle for survival carried on among these words, which led to the destruction of the less strong, the less happy, the less fertile word, and ended in the triumph of one, as the recognised and proper name for every object in every language. On a very small scale this process of natural selection, or, as it would better be called elimination, may still be watched even in modern languages so old and full of years as English and French. (1861:368) Whitney and Bréal could not have expressed it better, and their evolutionist views of language coincide here with Lyell’s, Darwin’s, and Müller’s. But Müller did not leave it at that. Unlike Darwin, who refrained from speculating on the origin of variations (which then undergo selection), Müller speculated about the origin of what he calls the ‘roots’ of language. But before he sets out on this rather perilous journey, he ends his description of the struggle for life among words by claiming that ‘Language and thought are * This passage was quoted by Darwin [1871] 1894:91.

inseparable. Words without thought are dead sounds; thoughts without words are nothing’ (ibid.: 369). To this Whitney has only the following to say (he refers to the same chapter in the new edition of the lectures; cf. Müller 1891): ‘this passage…is inane (what German would call albern)’ (1892:8). And he is right. One only has to ask oneself: Did we originally have a superabundance of thoughts, relating, for example, to the sun, and are now left with just one? And more importantly: how do we disentangle this chicken and egg problem—do the thoughts or thought about the sun come first, or do the words come first? If they appear simultaneously, does the struggle for life affect only the words or also the thoughts? If both, then we are back to the first question. The only way out seems to be Whitney’s proposition that we should regard language as an instrument of thought, among others. In any case, after having stated the identity of thought and language, Müller then asks: ‘How can sound express thought?’ (ibid.: 369). Indeed, how can it, if language and thought are identical? He rejects the theories that the ‘400 or 500 roots which remain [i.e. after philological analysis and reconstruction] as the constituent elements in different families of language’ (ibid.), would have been interjections or imitations (but cf. 370 where he rehabilitates them for the expression of sensations). Rather, they are phonetic types. Schmidt writes: ‘Müller establishes the “roots” as “phonic types”, as the final elements of language, whereby further reduction to a more basic element is no longer possible. He further states that the entire vocabulary of the

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indogermanic languages can be reduced to 121 Sanscrit roots’ (1976:665). These calculations seem to be the ingenious result of German ‘Gründlichkeit’! What follows is his later, so-called ‘ding-dong’ theory of the origin of language, as opposed to the interjectional—pooh-pooh—and the onomatopoeic—bow-wow theories, the first attributed to Condillac, the second to Herder (cf. Stam 1976:243). The emergence of phonetic types is based on a creative faculty (371) or rather ‘instinct’ (1861:370) that human beings possessed at the origin of language, and that now that language is created, has fallen into disuse and, one might say, undergone atrophy (but cf. 1861:370, note: ‘its effects continue to exist’). It is a natural instinct, based on the fact that ‘everything which is struck rings’. He give as examples the different ‘rings’ of gold, tin, and stone. This faculty of resonance was especially capable of emitting sounds representing the ‘rational conceptions’ of our mind (ibid.: 370)—onomatopoeia and interjections are just good enough for the expression of sensations! The funny thing is that this bell, when struck by a thought, did not emit one unambiguous sound, but rather a whole ‘Glockenspiel’—and there we are back to the struggle for life and natural selection, because ‘the number of these phonetic types must have been almost infinite in the beginning’ (ibid.: 371)—before being reduced to 121…. Anybody who tries to follow Müller through this argument must admit that Whitney was right in saying that this was ‘humbug’. It is not surprising, then, that Müller distanced himself in later editions of the Lectures from the ‘ding-dong’ theory he had at first espoused. Some people, among them Darwin himself, whom Müller met in 1874 (cf. Müller 1902, I: 468), expressed their criticism more politely. In June 1873, Müller had sent Darwin a copy of his 1873 lectures on Darwin’s philosophy of language, and Darwin had replied in July: As far as language is concerned, I am not worthy to be your adversary, as I know extremely little about it, and that little learnt from very few books…. He who is fully convinced, as I am that man is descended from some lower animal, is almost forced to believe a priori that articulate language has been developed from inarticulate cries; and he is therefore hardly a fair judge of the arguments opposed to this belief. (Müller 1902: I, 452) Whitney had read more than a few books on linguistic matters and thus regarded himself a worthy adversary and a fair judge of Müller’s arguments. In his 1873 lectures Müller had claimed that there are no words without thoughts, just as there are no oranges without peel (cf. the quote in Whitney 1874, DL: 77). In his article on ‘Darwinism and language’ Whitney provides a cogent counter-argument to this hypothesis. Orange-peel, in the first place, is of the self-same substance, and produced by the self-same forces, as the rest of the orange; it is a part of the orange itself; while, on the other hand, a conception, a judgment, a volition, a fancy, is an act of the mind, while a word is an act of the body, just as much as is a gesture, or a grimace…. Again, every orange has its own particular skin, and of one unchanging form and size and thickness and

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color; while the thought and the word are so independent of one another, that either may be altered to any extent without modifying the other; the word may be reduced to the driest vestige of its old self, and the contained idea be as rich and juicy as ever; and the substance of the idea may shrivel away to the emptiness of a mere sign of formal relation, while the word continues to make a fair show. Moreover, as many languages as there are, so many different words for the same thought, words as different as orange-peel and lemon-peel, and apple-skin and potato-skin, and ox-hide and fish-scales. When the Normans came into England, a long time ago, they brought with them a store of skins of a different growth, in which English oranges finally came to be to no small extent enclosed. (DL: 78) It seems to be a much better idea to compare words, or even languages, not to naturally growing oranges, but to cultural products, such as clothing and shelter, both ‘results of men’s needs and men’s capacities’ (LSL: 401). Man was not created, like the inferior races, with a frame able to bear all the vicissitudes of climate to which he should be subjected; nor yet with a natural protective covering of hair or wool, capable of adapting itself to the variety of the seasons: every human being is born into the world naked and cringing, needing protection against exposure and defence from shame. Gifted is man, accordingly, with all the ingenuity which he requires in order to provide for this need, and placed in the midst of objects for his ingenuity to work upon ready to hand. And hence, it is hardly less distinctively characteristic of man to be clad than to speak; nor is any other animal so universally housed as he. Clothing began with the simplest natural productions…. So was it also with language…. His first beginnings were rude and insufficient, but the consenting labour of generations has perfected them, till human thought has been clothed in garments measurably worthy of it, and an edifice of speech has been erected, grander, more beautiful, and more important to our race than any other work whatever of its producing. (LSL: 401–3) In accordance with Bréal, Whitney claims that thought always exceeds language, and sometimes language thought—that thought, so to speak, always grows out of its clothes. On the basis of this doctrine both Whitney and Bréal will be able to assert that the understanding of language cannot solely be based on looking at the apparel, but must always rely on a collaboration of thought between hearer and speaker. The mutual understanding that lies at the origin of language also keeps it alive in every act of speech. Finally, what about Müller’s claim that language is the definite barrier between human beings and the brutes (cf. Müller 1873), and that, according to Humboldt, ‘man could not become man except by language; but in order to possess language, he needed already to be man’ (cf. Humboldt 1903–36, IV:16)? In the Life and Growth of Language Whitney writes that this

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is one of those Orphic sayings which, if taken for what they are meant to be, poetic expressions whose apparently paradoxical character shall compel attention and suggest thought and inquiry, are admirable enough. To make them the foundation or test of scientific views is simply ridiculous; it is as if one were to say: ‘A pig is not a pig without being fattened; but in order to be fattened he must first be a pig.’ The trick of the aphorism in question lies in its play upon the double sense of the word man; properly interpreted, it becomes an acceptable expression of our own view: ‘Man could not rise from what he was by nature to what he was able and intended to become, and ought to become, except by the aid of speech; but he could never have produced speech had he not been at the outset gifted with just those powers of which we still see him in possession, and which make him man’ (LGL: 306–7) —namely, the adaptation of means to ends! Some years before Müller gave his Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language (1873), an admirer of Schleicher, W.H.J.Bleek, had written a treatise On the Origin of Language (1867; English transl. 1869; reprinted in Koerner (ed.) 1983), in which he expressed a similar view to Müller’s about the relationship between thought and language. This treatise was reviewed by Whitney (OLS: 292–7; reprinted in Koerner (ed.) 1983:73–8), and Whitney made it clear that those who hold that there is no thought without language are saying something to the effect that ‘the human hand cannot act without a tool’ (OLS: 297). Just like tools, those ingenious inventions of men that allow them to adapt means to ends, language has been created as an instrument of thought, as an instrument of purposeful action. BRÉAL AND WHITNEY, THEIR PERCEPTION OF EACH OTHER The state of linguistics in the nineteenth century, as seen through the eyes of Bréal and Whitney, makes it quite clear that the late 1860s was a crucial period for both men, and for linguistics in general. Schleicher’s Compendium (1861) gradually lost its popularity under the joint attack of Bréal (FF) and Whitney (LSL). Bopp had died in 1867 and comparative philology slid into a methodological crisis (cf. Bréal 1868a) (although this does not mean that most comparative philologists did not carry on their work just as before). The year 1868 saw a number of events that established a bridge between the old world and the new, between Bréal and Whitney, and which took comparative linguistics in something like a critical grip. In 1868 Whitney wrote an obituary of Bopp in which he announced Bréal’s French translation of Bopp’s comparative grammar (cf. Whitney 1868a:49). In 1868 Whitney also wrote a review of the first volume of the Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de. Paris in which an article by Bréal, ‘Les progrès de la grammaire comparée’, had appeared, (derived from a lecture given at the Collège de France, 9 December 1867; 1868a, reprinted in Bréal 1877:267–94) (Whitney 1868b). In it Whitney described Bréal as ‘one of the soundest and most esteemed of the younger

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philologists of France’ (quoted by Aarsleff 1979:80). In 1868 Schleicher died and his two treatises on Darwinian linguistics appeared in French, prefaced by Bréal. Whitney’s somewhat insensitive obituary of Schleicher appeared a year later in The Nation 8 (1869:70). In 1872 Whitney wrote a first long article on Schleicher (reprinted in OLS) in which he refers to the French translation of Schleicher’s controversial treatises. In a note he signals that ‘M.Bréal’s preface is of but a page or two, and in it he indicates—though, in my opinion in a manner much less distinct and decided than the case demands—his at least partial non-acceptance of Schleicher’s view’ (OLS: 330). Bréal, on the other hand, was more courteous than his American colleague. In his review of the Oriental and Linguistic Studies, which contained reviews of Steinthal and Müller’s works, he even comments in moderate tones on what Aarsleff has called Whitney’s ‘sledgehammer method of criticism’. Bréal writes: ‘The only thing for which one could blame Mr Whitney is that his language, when he points out an error, becomes caustic, as if these errors were always made intentionally’ (1873a:8). So much for the form, but what about the content, Whitney’s theory of language? Bréal had obviously read LSL with pleasure and recommended it for a translation into French (ibid.). However, only LGL was translated into French and appeared in 1875 under the title La Vie du langage. Some believe it was translated by Bréal (cf. Collin 1914); others that Whitney translated it himself (cf. Hombert 1978:112), a fact, that, though unsatisfactory in itself, makes it particularly clear how similar Whitney’s and Bréal’s thoughts on language actually were. Bréal agreed with Whitney in his attempt to discard ‘the clouds of scientific mysticism and to reduce to their real value the hypotheses put forward by a hasty materialism’ (1873a:8).* But knowing Bréal’s opinion of Max Müller, one can imagine that in some respects Bréal objected to Whitney’s inductive and pragmatic approach to language. This is why he called him a ‘convinced positivist’ in his obituary of Max Müller (1900: cxcv). This judgement should not be interpreted too negatively, however. In some respects Bréal was all for ‘positivism’—one has only to think of his admiration of Bopp. Bréal’s real enemies—who were also Whitney’s—were those who shrouded linguistics in a veil of mysticism or materialism, and built theories on imaginary facts, as, for example, the primitive language or the Indo-European ‘roots’. These two tendencies had come about by the ill-judged importation of one biological theory or another in order to give linguistics an air of scientificity. Seduced by the achievements of ‘comparative anatomy’ (cf. Cuvier 1800), Schlegel and others had believed that a reconstruction of the IndoEuropean proto-language was possible. Linnaeus’ classifications of biological species and Darwin’s redefinition of the origin of species had led Schleicher to regard language as an organism and language families as species. * In his Introduction to Vol. IV of his translation of Bopp, Bréal refers to Whitney’s LSL (2nd edn 1868) as ‘a work too unknown in France’ (quoted by Aarsleff 1979; 82, n. 31).

Before presenting Bréal’s and Whitney’s own theories of language and language-change, it is useful to look at the debate surrounding the introduction of biological ideas into linguistic thought during the nineteenth century.

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Chapter Three EVOLUTION, TRANSFORMATION, OR ‘THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE’? Nineteenth-century linguistics was influenced by biological theories via two routes; language classification and language-change. Those who studied language classification could not fail to notice and envy the progress made in the development of scientific classification ‘from Linnaeus through Jussieu to Cuvier (and then to Darwin and Haeckel)’ (cf. Morpurgo Davies 1975:614). Those who were interested in languagechange—and who was not in the nineteenth century?—could not avoid observing the progress—or better the revolution—of thought taking place in biology in the nineteenth century after Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859. Before Darwin, biologists and linguists alike had used the word ‘evolution’ in a loose and imprecise way. After Darwin they had to define their use of ‘evolution’ by reference to Darwin, who had changed its meaning dramatically, as we shall see. Darwin himself was very aware of the ambiguities surrounding the word, especially its ontogenetic connotations, and refrained from using it in the first edition of Origin of Species (cf. Keller 1983:28, n. 2). Those who did not want to enter the debate could continue to use the term evolution in a vague sense or use ‘transformation’ instead, in a less ideologically-oriented way. In Morpurgo Davies’ words: ‘in the sense that all nineteenth-century linguists were interested in language change, all were transformationists’ (1975:674). Transformationism was opposed to creationism and could be reconciled with Darwin’s theory that species develop from other species. Evolutionism, or Darwinism in the stricter sense of the term, was defined by the doctrine of variation and natural selection, that is by specifying the process through which species develop (cf. Greenberg 1971; Morpurgo Davies 1975:673). All Darwinists were transformationists, but not all transformationists were Darwinists. In short, the influx of biological thought into the field of linguistics via classificationism and transformationism created much confusion. This was heightened by the simultaneous changes affecting the concept of geological ‘evolution’ or ‘growth’, regarding the surface of the earth, where followers of Lyell defended uniformitarianism against Cuvier’s theory of catastrophe. To disentangle that confusion we would need a ‘history of linguistics which traces not only the ideal parallelism, but also the effective connections between the study of language and that of the natural sciences’ (Morpurgo Davies 1975:612). Unfortunately, we still do not have such a history. This chapter seeks to remedy this deficit to a very small extent. THE MEANING OF ‘EVOLUTION’: ITS EVOLUTION Before Darwin (and also after) the word ‘evolution’ had a different meaning from the modern one, in biology as well as in its close imitator-science, linguistics. It referred to the unfolding of form in the development of the embryo or plant, and in particular to the

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notion of the pre-formation of the adult organism in the egg or germ. The different meanings of evolution that lead to some confusion in linguistics were all carefully listed in the Century Dictionary, edited by Whitney: 1. The act or process of unfolding, or the state of being unfolded; an opening out or unrolling…. Hence—2. The process of evolving or becoming developed; an unfolding or growth from, or as if from, a germ or latent state, or from a plan; development… Specifically—(a) In biol.: (1) …ordinary growth…; the evolution of the blossom from the bud…. (2) The…emergence… of a chick from the egg-shell which contained it as an embryo…. (3) Descent or derivation, as of offspring from parents; … (4) The fact or the doctrine of the derivation or descent, with modification, of all existing species, genera, orders, classes, etc., of animals and plants, from a few simple forms of life, if not from one; the doctrine of derivation; evolutionism…See natural selection…. (b) In general, the passage from unorganized simplicity to organized complexity… (1897:2044) Similar distinctions can be found in the Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle. Published two decades before the Century Dictionary, in 1866, it could not adopt such a detached and objective stance, but struggled hard to surrender traditional French thought to the Anglo-Saxon influence. Especially dear to French science was preformationism, ‘known as the “encapsulation (emboîtement) theory”,’ defended with powerful arguments by Charles Bonnet in his Considérations sur les corps organisés (1762). This was one of the first works to use the term “evolution” in a biological sense’ (Goudge 1973:178). This sense of ‘evolution’ as ‘ontogenesis’ was hard to forget, it seems. Under the entry ‘évolution’ (vol. 7, 1167, col. 4–1170, col. 3) is the following definition: You have seen in which sense naturalists have used up to now the word evolution; you have seen that they designated by the term evolutionist those who adhere to the formation of living beings from preexistent germs. The words evolution, evolutionist have taken on a new meaning since the publication of the book and doctrine of M.Darwin, and one might say that this meaning contradicts the old and classic [!] acceptation of these words. They have become synonymous with transformism, transformist; that is to say, that they express an idea which is totally opposed to the conclusion usually drawn from the pre-existence of germs. (1866: vol. 7, 1168, col. 4) ‘Darwinism’ (1866: vol. 6, 125, col. 1–131, col. 4) (in some way a synthesis of Lamarckism and uniformitarianism) is defined as follows: Darwinism can be explained simply and clearly in the following way: all animal and plant species, past and present, descend, by way of successive transformations from three or four original types, and most probably from one single primitive archetype. This constitutes the basic message of all of

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Darwin’s work. One can rightly say that the originality of the Darwinian theory does not consist in this conclusion alone, but in the natural laws that M.Darwin has postulated, and which, according to him, explain the origin of species by progressive accumulation and hereditary fixation of at first very slight variations. It is not the transformationist thesis as such that is so new. (ibid.: 125, col. 1) Transformism had indeed been most strongly advocated in France by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck in his Philosophie zoologique (1809) (and before him by Maupertuis, Diderot, K.F.Wolff, and Darwin’s father Erasmus) (cf. Goudge 1973:178). His theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, for example, the famous neck of the giraffe, was linked to progressism. Lamarck believed that alterations are not random but ‘phases of the progressive advance of living things from lower to higher types’ (ibid.). But in the early nineteenth century biological progressism came under attack. The anatomist and palaeontologist Cuvier held that successive catastrophes shaped the earth’s surface as well as the life on earth. Only this catastrophe theory could account, in his view, for the fossil record, where no unilinear sequence of transformations can be found. He therefore rejected Lamarck’s notion of the mutability of species. He was anti-evolutionist and antiprogressionist. (In the end Cuvier effectively destroyed Lamarck, who died in poverty.) French scientists of the mid-nineteenth century found it difficult to abandon preformationism for Darwinism and uniformitarianism (Lyell) for catastrophe theory (Cuvier). Whitney and Bréal were neither pre-formationists nor catastrophists, they were both uniformitarianists, but it is difficult to claim that they were Darwinists. Let us say here that they were transformationists and specify their definition of this term later. The quotes from the two dictionaries show that it was more or less common knowledge from the 1870s onwards that there were different kinds of evolutionism (preformationism, transformism, progressism, Darwinism, etc.) and that Darwinian evolutionism was only one among others. But in the heat of the moment scientists from all orientations and affiliations adopted some formula or other, regardless of the doctrine it belonged to, and tried to integrate it as best they could into their own view of biology, culture, religion, society, and language. In the case of linguistics, one can distinguish between different varieties of evolutionism, all more or less derived from biological theories, and mixed with specific views about history, anthropology, and philosophy. One can identify the following groups: (1) Schleicher Schleicher mixed Linnaean classificationism with a theory of growth and decay, that is the older ontogenetic form of evolutionism as unfolding, with a theory of descent of offspring from parents (cf. family tree), with a Hegelian philosophy of history, and later with Darwinism. He held that a language was a natural organism. Linguistics belongs to the natural sciences. (2) Max Müller Müller also affiliated linguistics with the natural sciences, because in his view linguistic evolution was natural growth, not an historical process directed by the will of men. However, he did not claim that language was a natural organism and rejected

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(5) (6)

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Schleicher’s ontological metaphors. Although he fought Darwinism because it countermanded his belief in the uniqueness of the human race, unique especially for its faculty of language, he adopted some Darwinian metaphors, such as the struggle for survival, to account for changes in the lexicon. Hovelacque, Chavée, Regnaud These three adopted the Schleicherian form of evolutionism (transformationism). Languages are compared to organisms; linguistics is a natural science; language change is regarded a natural growth, governed by natural laws, and independent from the human will or consciousness. Arsène Darmesteter Darmesteter amalgamated Darwinism (in this case especially the theory of variation and natural selection) with psychology. Words are compared to organisms. They, as well as ideas, struggle for survival in the mind and in the language. Languagechange is governed by ‘laws of the mind’ (cf. 1886:18). Steinthal Steinthal stuck to pre-formationism (germ → plant) and catastrophe theory. Whitney Whitney amalgamated uniformitarianism (Lyell) with transformationism; his theory of semantic change arguably hides some real Darwinism (i.e. the theory of natural selection). Languages are not comparable to organisms and linguistics is an historical science. Language change is governed by two different forces—conscious intentional action (individual variation) and ‘unconscious’ consequences (social selection). However, he still talked about the ‘life and growth’ of language, avoiding the term evolution, perhaps for the same reasons as Darwin. Bréal Bréal mixed uniformitarianism (Lyell?) with Larmarckism (?) and progressism (cf. Jespersen 1894; reviewed by Bréal 1896b). Languages are not comparable to organisms, neither are words. Language change is the cumulative consequence of intentional, intelligent, and conscious actions. The language user is the motor of change. Although he rejects Darmesteter’s biological metaphors, his conception of semantics is built on Darmesteter’s work and Darwinian concepts, but directed towards a pronounced psychologism. He wants to discover the ‘intellectual laws’ of language change (cf. 1883; ES) that govern linguistic ‘evolution’ and progress. He rejects the terms ‘life’ and ‘growth’.

Although divided into different groups through their adherence to some specific aspect of Darwin’s theory or its rejection, almost all the proponents of an evolutionary theory of language referred to Lyell as their guardian angel, in short, they were all (with the exception of Steinthal) ‘uniformitarianists’. It is one of the contradictions of Schleicher’s work that even he refers in positive terms to Lyell (cf. Schleicher 1863). In his book on uniformitarianism in linguistics Christy points out that: The faith Schleicher expresses here in the lawful development of language through gradual transformations, along with his rejection of unknown causes in favor of causes known through observation, bears no doubt that

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Schleicher was a practitioner of the uniformitarian, or actualistic, methodology, though in point of theory he propounded first and foremost the organism model. (1983:36) What is uniformitarianism? The term ‘uniformitarianism’ was introduced by William Whewell in 1840 to label a certain scientific theory, contrasted with catastrophism. The issue as discussed by Whewell and his contemporaries primarily presented itself in geology. Charles (later Sir Charles) Lyell (1830) was the most prominent advocate of uniformitarianism. (Wells 1973:423) —and Whitney was one of its most prominent advocates in linguistics (cf. Christy 1983:78–88). The basic axiom of uniformitarianism is well expressed in the title of Lyell’s first book on the topic: Principles of Geology; being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation (1830–3). A ‘uniformitarian’ is therefore ‘One who upholds a system or doctrine of uniformity; specifically, in geol., one who advocates the theory that causes now active in bringing about geological changes have always been similar in character and intensity’ (Cent. Dict. 1897:6616). The uniformitarian doctrine was opposed to ‘catastrophism’, a ‘theoretical view of geological events which has as its essential basis the idea of a succession of catastrophes’ (ibid.: 857). Catastrophism, advocated most strongly by Cuvier, also claimed that one can only account for the phenomena of geology if one supposes the operation of forces different in their nature, or different in power, from those we at present see in action in the universe. Darwin’s contribution to the debate was important in so far as he brought together Lamarck and Lyell, transformationism and uniformitarianism, a synthesis that Bréal and Whitney tried to achieve in linguistics: As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation and by catastrophes; and as the most important of all causes of organic change and one which is almost independent of altered and perhaps suddenly altered physical conditions, namely the mutual relation of organism to organism,—the improvement of one being entailing the improvement or the extermination of others; it follows…. (Darwin 1859:457f.) As in Bréal and to a certain extent Whitney, but contrary to Schleicher, uniformitarianism here is combined with progressism. Another point of convergence, or agreement, between the linguists of that period was the theory of the transformation of species applied to the evolution of languages. Following Lyell, who in 1863 had incorporated a chapter on language in his Antiquity of Man, and Schleicher, who in 1863 had integrated Darwinism into his theory of language

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evolution for the sake of a better typology of languages, most linguists of that period would have subscribed to this statement: ‘Transmutation of species in the kingdom of speech is no hypothesis, but a patent fact, one of the fundamental and determining principles of linguistic study’ (LSL, 175; quoted by Hovelacque 1876:438). Schleicher, the most important proponent of the theory of the linguistic transmutation of species, integrated this theory into the doctrine of a continuous branching tree of languages, a theory at first conceived in a strictly Linnaean framework with the purpose of finding a good classification and typology of languages (cf. Leroy 1950:14; and Maher 1983:xvii–xxx), and to give a graphic illustration of the descent of the Indo-European languages from an ‘Ursprache’ (cf. Schleicher 1860). The twigs, branches, boughs, etc. of the tree of life of languages represented, respectively, species, genera, families, etc. Through Darwin (cf. 1859:160f.) this figure of the tree of life had become a new paradigm in evolutionary theory (cf. Goudge 1973:179), and it was all the more easily adopted by Schleicher as it agreed so well with Boppian organicism and Linnaean classificationism.* What he ignored was that Darwin’s primary goal was not the classification of species, but the explanation of the process of speciation itself. The most important reason why Schleicher’s transformationist version of linguistics was later abandoned was, however, his attempt to accommodate it with Hegelian ideas—and here the agreement among the linguists of the nineteenth century stopped. Whitney and Bréal (followed later in the century by the neogrammarians) would not follow Schleicher down the two branches of his theoretical route: the Stammbaumtheorie and the doctrine of the life-cycle of languages. As Bréal and Whitney had stressed repeatedly, languages are not organisms, but only live through those who speak them. This belief stood in sharp contrast to Schleicher’s ontological conception of languages that propagate themselves through parents and offspring, who live and die. This theory remained attached to the older conception of biological ‘evolution’, and contradicted the Darwinism Schleicherian linguists proclaimed so eagerly. What must have infuriated Whitney was the Hegelianism mixed with Schleicher’s theory of language evolution as growth and decay, which led him to distinguish between ‘evolution’ and ‘history’. According to this view: * A similar table of languages had earlier been presented in Klaproth’s Asia polyglotta (1823, near p. 217) (cf. Morpurgo Davies 1975:636, note 53).

‘evolution’ is the development of more complex beings from simpler, and ‘history’ is the account of the subsequent transformations of such complex beings. Thus, ‘evolution’ and ‘history’ are mutually exclusive by definition. Accordingly, there are two periods, teaches Schleicher in all his works, in the ‘life of language’: language evolution (Sprachbildung), i.e., phylogeny, and language history (Sprachgeschichte). ‘History’ he defines in the Hegelian sense, the necessary condition for which is ‘man’s spiritual consciousness of his freedom’. (Maher 1983:xxviii) During the period of ‘evolution’, language is created (naturally), it progresses from the simple to the perfect. Having reached a state of perfection, it can only decay or degenerate during the period of its ‘history’. Nineteenth-century linguists found it very

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difficult to overcome this myth of the original perfection of the primitive language followed by inevitable decay, which was deeply ingrained in their theories since Schlegel and Bopp (even though not in these Hegelian terms) (cf. Bopp 1816:10–11), and to see that the history of language (governed by free will) could be studied in evolutionary terms. The doctrine of ‘uniformitarianism’ proved to be a very useful tool to exorcise the Hegelian ghost. In his lecture on the form and function of words (cf. Bréal FF), in which he argued against naturalism and mysticism in German linguistics, as well as in his lecture on the progress in comparative grammar (cf. Bréal 1868a), Bréal had already pointed in the right direction. Whitney developed an evolutionary theory of the history of language in his most popular works; but the one who advocated a truly Darwinian linguistics in the most sober and reasonable terms was Charles Lyell. LYELL’S THEORY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION* Thirty years after Lyell had introduced uniformitarian principles into geology (cf. Lyell 1830–3), uniformitarianism started to exert some influence on linguistics, and this especially through Lyell himself who devoted chapter 23 ‘Origin and development of languages and species compared’ of his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863) to language. * One can find a good summary of Lyell’s conception of language in Tort (1980:22–30).

The leading thoughts are that (1) there are various analogies between languages and biological species as regards mutation, splitting of one species (or language) into two, arrested development, competition among different species (or languages), and so forth and (2) sometimes we can see more clearly what happens to species, sometimes to languages. Lyell was looking for light on what happened to species, and he thought that some light might come from what happened to languages. (Wells 1973:425) Given the relative immaturity of human language and its rapid evolution, Lyell thought that philologists had some advantages over naturalists in studying change (cf. 1863:506). But these advantages are compensated by some very specific problems that linguists have to face. First, they have to prove that incessant variation exists (1863:506f.). This seems to be a truism today, but was not accepted wisdom in the early nineteenth century, when linguists had to fight against views of the divine origin of language. Incessant variation once accepted, they have to find documents of intermediate dialects, they have to prove the continuity of variation and transformation, and finally, and most importantly, they have to define the difference between languages and dialects (cf. 1863:507), if they want to show the soundness of the ‘theory of indefinite modifiability’ (ibid.). Lyell proposed a solution to the last problem. Languages can be distinguished from dialects by invoking the principle of mutual comprehension between speakers. Another related problem is that of the limits of the variability of language (cf. 1863:512). Once variability is accepted as existing in language, one is amazed by the incredible creativity witnessed ‘almost daily’ (ibid.). Speakers of all classes, professions, and groups coin new terms, new words are

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constantly created in science and literature, and this creativity seems to be unlimited. But not all new words are accepted and used, only a small proportion. Lyell is therefore forced to ask the questions that every linguist dealing with language-change should ask, and it is here, in the few pages that follow, that we find the soundest conception of Darwinian linguistics proposed to the present day. It is untainted by Hegelianism or organicism. The only thing one can detect is a little Lamarckian progressism, but Darwin himself could not avoid that (cf. 1859:459). It might therefore be appropriate to quote some paragraphs in extenso: It becomes, therefore, a curious subject of enquiry, what are the laws which govern not only the invention, but also the ‘selection’ of some of these words or idioms, giving them currency in preference to others?—for as the powers of human memory are limited, a check must be found to the endless increase and multiplication of terms, and old words must be dropped nearly as fast as new ones are put into circulation. (Lyell 1863:512) Patterson summarized Darwinism in these terms: ‘(i) Geometrical rate of increase + limited resources → Struggle for existence, (ii) Struggle for existence + variation → Natural selection, (iii) Natural selection + time → Biological improvement’ (Patterson 1987:237). If this is Darwinism in a nutshell, Lyell had obviously cracked the nut. Although the speakers may be unconscious that any great fluctuation is going on in their language,—although when we observe the manner in which new words and phrases are thrown out, as if at random or in sport, while others get into vogue, we may think the process of change to be the result of mere chance,—there are, nevertheless fixed laws in action, by which in the general struggle for existence, some terms and dialects gain the victory over others. The slightest advantage attached to some new mode of pronouncing or spelling, from considerations of brevity or euphony, may turn the scale, or more powerful causes of selection may decide which of two or more rivals shall triumph and which succumb, among these are fashion, or the influence of an aristocracy…, popular writers, orators, preachers,—a centralised government organising its schools expressly to promote uniformity of diction, and to get the better of provincialisms and local dialects. Between these dialects, which may be regarded as so many ‘incipient languages’, the competition is always keenest when they are most nearly allied, and the extinction of any one of them destroys some of the links by which a dominant tongue may have been previously connected with some other widely distinct one. It is by the perpetual loss of such intermediate forms of speech that the great dissimilarity of the languages which survive is brought about. Thus, if Dutch should become a dead language, English and German would be separated by a wider gap. (1863:512–13)

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There are two major forces that keep language in a state of continuity in alteration, forces that Whitney calls the conservative and alterative force (cf. Whitney LGL: ch. 3), and that Darmesteter, whose theory of semantic change sounds strangely Lyellian, calls the conservatory and the revolutionary force (cf. 1886:6). Lyell calls them the ‘force of inheritance’, or the tendency of the offspring to adopt without change the inherited vocabulary of the previous generation, and the ‘inventive force’, through which we coin new words, modify old ones, and adapt them to our needs. Given these two forces and the progress of the human mind, the progressive improvement of language is a necessary consequence (cf. 1863:517). Lyell mentions certain procedures used by this inventive force, procedures that Bréal would later call the ‘intellectual laws of semantic change’ (we don’t know if he ever read Lyell): As civilisation advances, a great number of terms are required to express abstract ideas, and words previously used in a vague sense, so long as the state of society was rude and barbarous, gradually acquire more precise and definite meaning, in consequence of which several terms must be employed to express ideas and things which a single word had before signified, though somewhat loosely and imperfectly. (ibid.: 617) This is what Bréal and Whitney would call the restriction of meaning. The farther this subdivision of function is carried, the more complete and perfect the language becomes, just as species of higher grade have special organs, such as eyes, lungs, and stomach, for seeing, breathing, and digesting, which in simpler organisms are all performed by one and the same part of the body. (ibid.) This is similar to Bréal’s explanation of the evolution of ‘parts of speech’. This progressive uniformitarianism is completely in line with Whitney’s and Bréal’s theories of language-change. One has only to read Whitney’s chapters on dialect variation and semantic change in LSL and LGL to become convinced of the profound influence that Lyell must have had on him. These chapters are in a sense nothing more than the fleshing out of the sketch quoted above of Lyell’s theory of language-change. Bréal never appears to mention Lyell, but he must have read him during a period when almost no linguist could escape the references to his work (and he had read Whitney’s OLS, where he refers to Lyell on p. 316, and Schleicher [1863] 1868, who refers to him on p. 11). BRÉAL, A HIDDEN NEO-LAMARCKIST? Lyell never said what the laws of invention and selection were that govern languagechange. It was Bréal’s life-long ambition to discover them. In his search he became more

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and more influenced by psychological ideas. He eventually concluded that the laws of ‘invention’ must be intellectual ones, whereas the laws of selection are of a social character. The intellectual laws indicate the victory of spirit over matter, and they mark the progress of thought. They do not govern change in its purely external form, but change in meaning. Bréal’s intellectual transformationism is definitely not Schleicherian, where history is not conceived in form of progress but decay and where intellectual transformations are replaced by natural growth. The purely empirical observation of linguistic forms would not only be flawed by giving us an incomplete and inexact idea of the developments of languages: it also would lead us to ignore the primary cause of the transformation of languages, which is not provided by the analysis of words, but which we have to seek in ourselves. (FF: 69) The laws that govern language and that manifest themselves in the transformations of speech, are similar to those that can be observed in the evolution of law, usages and beliefs (cf. LN: 618). And: the history of Language, when referred to intellectual laws, is not only more true, but also more interesting: it cannot be a matter of indifference to us to note, above the seeming chance which governs the destiny of words and forms of Language, the appearance of laws corresponding in each case to an advance [progrès] in the mind. (ES: 280/251) But is Bréal’s transformationism of Darwinian origin? Perhaps, but much more probably it was influenced by Lamarck. Bréal’s affiliation to the neo-Lamarckian camp was first proposed by Simone Delesalle (cf. 1987:312). If Bréal was a neo-Lamarckian then it was for two reasons: theoretical and historical. On theoretical grounds he was opposed not only to Schleicher and his conception of the decadence of language, but also, according to Delesalle, to Darmesteter who based his theory of the life of language on the theory of variation and selection, remaining neutral as to the question of progress or decay. Historically, one has to take into account France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war which stirred deep emotions in Bréal, paralleled by the awareness of a certain ‘cultural lag’ in linguistic matters. Bréal was working to repair national pride, first, by campaigning for better schools (cf. on this topic Delesalle and Chevalier 1986); second, by restructuring teaching and research in the field of linguistics and philology at the universities. Bréal was definitely a ‘progressist’—theoretically and ideologically—and one has to agree with Delesalle who puts forward the hypothesis that Bréal was more influenced by Lamarck than by Darwin (Bréal himself kept silent on this subject): Neo-Lamarckism, which had developed in England and France after 1860, has had a great influence in France between the wars of 1870 and 1914, on a theoretical and an ideological level. As notes Jacques Rogers ‘the neo-Lamarckian ideology was used to fight for the republic, against the

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clergy and the monarchists’. This ideology is based on the refusal to accept natural selection alone as the principle underlying the variability of species, and the concern to find the causes of evolution: in the eyes of the neo-Lamarckians, there can be no random variations. The processes of transformation must have a goal, consciousness plays a role, more or less precise or diffuse, and the global movement is one of progress. (1987:312)

WHITNEY, A COVERT DARWINIST? In contrast to Bréal, with whom one has to guess under what influences he elaborated his view of the transformation and evolution of language, one has no difficulty in finding Whitney’s sources of inspiration. He had read Lyell in his youth and quoted him often. He also kept up to date on the Darwinian debate. In a series of articles he set out his thoughts on Darwinism and evolutionism. However, this does not mean that the conclusions he drew from his discussions are always clear. His article on ‘Darwinism and language’ (DL) (in fact a critique of Max Müller’s Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language [1873]) is a masterpiece in this respect. Whitney tries to evaluate very carefully the pros and cons of the ‘doctrine of evolution, of the connected and progressive development of organic life on the earth, of the transmutation of animal and vegetable species’ (DL: 61). He does not want to emulate Schleicher in his wholehearted adoption of this theory, but nor does he want to follow Müller in his ready and harsh rejection of Darwinism. On the one hand, he thought it might harm the science of language to import a theory whose scientific value had not yet been established, and which had given rise to disputes that even the biologists themselves had not yet settled. On the other hand, he found it harmful—or at least not very helpful— to Darwinism itself to recruit blind followers in linguistics, to become embroiled in the internal quarrels of linguistic schools, or be used in theories that are antithetical to Darwinism, such as Schleicher’s view of the growth and decay of languages (cf. OLS: 309). He concludes, therefore, that ‘Darwinism is content to stand and fall by its own merits; it does not ask to be bolstered by linguistic science’ (OLS: 316). ‘So far, linguistic science has not been shown to have any bearing on Darwinism, either in the way of support or of refutation’ (DL: 83–4). He goes as far as to say that linguistic science and Darwinism ‘have no connection with each other’ (ibid.: 84). It seems that what Whitney wants to ensure by this move is the autonomy of linguistic science, even at the risk of making unsubstantiated statements. Having dismissed Müller’s rejection of Darwinism, which was based on the assumption that the power of language is so unique to man that it could never have evolved in gradual transitions from lower forms of life, he writes: There is neither saltus nor gradual transition in the case: no transition, because the two [i.e. the instinctive expressions of animals and the conventional expression of man] are essentially different; no saltus, because human speech is an historical development out of infinitesimal

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beginnings, which may have been of less extent even than the instinctive speech of many a brute. (DL: 87) Stam, in his book on the origin of language, quotes these and other passages to show the helplessness of Whitney when confronted with the mystery of the origin of language. He writes that although ‘Whitney raised these objections [against Müller], he did not commit himself to Darwinism, or, for that matter, to any theory of language origin. He stoutly maintained that linguistic meaning is conventionally established, but how the conventions themselves were established he did not answer.’ Stam goes on to write that Whitney rejected the Darwinian as well as all theological explanations. ‘With all of these alternatives excluded, however, one is forced to wonder not only how but whether language ever originated’ (Stam 1976:249–50). In chapter 4, pp. 83–9, we shall see that Whitney formulated a theory of the origin of language, derived largely from Wedgwood, an admirer of Lyell and an enemy of Müller himself. In another book on Müller Whitney writes that the origin of language is one of the most interesting subjects in linguistic science (cf. 1892:35). But even in ‘Darwinism and language’, from which Stam quotes, one can glean a quite rational view of the origin of language, based on the principle of the primacy of pragmatics, a view according to which the origin of language can be sufficiently well explained by reference to a theory of human action, built on the assumption that human beings possess a global, all-purpose structure of the mind (cf. Herder 1772). This structure, an advance over the very strictly task-limited, localized, and specialized faculties and instincts of animals, enabled human beings to invent not only language, but instruments of all kinds, and use them. Whitney writes that if we could ever find the missing links between animal expressions and human language, we should not find the more and more anthropoid beings possessing a larger and larger stock of definite articulations, to which they by instinct attached definite ideas; there are no such elements in human language, present or traceable past; and as we approach man, the detailed instincts leading to definite acts or products diminish rather than increase; we should find those beings showing more and more plainly the essentially human power of adapting means to ends, both by reflection and unconscious action, in communication and expression as in other departments of activity. (DL: 87) At the end of his article Whitney refers, for support of his theses and his criticisms, to Darwin himself who

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shows a remarkable moderation and soundness of judgment in his treatment of the element of language. Though he refers in a foot-note (Descent of Man, part I, ch. ii) to Schleicher’s pamphlet in his support, he does not deign to make the slightest use of it. Very little exception is to be taken by a linguistic scholar to any of his statements. (DL: 88) Coming from Whitney, this sentence is indeed the highest praise. It shows that he had read the Descent of Man, and it would be rather unlikely that he had not read the more important and innovatory Origin of Species as well.

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Chapter Four LANGUAGE, ITS NATURE AND ITS ORIGIN In the first three chapters of this book the scene has been set for the presentation of Bréal’s and Whitney’s own theories of language. The reader should now be acquainted with opponents and friends, supporters and enemies, contrasting theories and complementary theses. In this process we have already briefly touched upon many important issues in Bréal’s and Whitney’s own theories of language that will now be analysed and presented in more detail: the origin of language, the relationship between language and thought, communication and comprehension, form and function, linguistic creativity and change, and semantic change. Before dealing with these aspects in turn, we must give an account of Bréal’s and Whitney’s concept of language itself, a concept from which they derive many of their theoretical inspirations. LANGUAGE, AN INSTITUTION OF COMMUNICATION In Whitney’s case it is easier to find statements about his concept of language than with Bréal, since Whitney wrote at least two important dictionary entries, one for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on ‘philology’, and one on ‘language’ for the Century Dictionary. In addition to these he wrote several important articles on the topic, for example, on language as an institution (1875, LI) (a part of the dispute with Müller and Steinthal), and on logical consistency in the science of language (1880). Bréal also wrote popular articles on linguistics, but he did not provide a concrete definition of language. We know that both Whitney and Bréal vehemently rejected the view of language as an organism. In accordance with some of the later neo-grammarian writings they believed that language has to be defined in relation to human thought and action. Contrary to most of their contemporaries, but in accordance with most twentieth-century linguists following Saussure’s adaptation of Whitney’s notions, they regard language as a social institution and an instrument of communication. They also anticipated, or better prepared the way for, the definition of a language as a semiotic system of signs. Whitney’s definition of language in the Century Dictionary reads as follows: The whole body of uttered signs employed and understood by a given community as expression of its thoughts; the aggregate of words, and of methods of their combination into sentences, used in a community for communication and record and for carrying on the processes of thought. (1897, 3346; cf. LGL: 1 and LN: 625, 629)

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Whitney often stressed the social character of language, and we shall come back to this definition in relation to Whitney’s attempt to disentangle the roles played by the individual and by society in the evolution of language in chapter 5, pp. 100–4. Language is an institution founded in man’s social nature, wrought out for the satisfaction of his social wants; and hence, while individuals are the sole ultimate agents in the formation and modification of every word and meaning of a word, it is still the community that makes and changes its language. (LSL: 177; cf, also 48, 400, 404, 405; LGL: 280, 309, etc.) Language in this sense is an ergon, to use Humboldt’s term. This interpretation of the word ‘language’ has to be distinguished strictly from ‘language’ in the sense of energeia or, as Whitney himself writes: one has to differentiate carefully between ‘a capacity, and a product of the exercise of that capacity’ (LI: 723). A language is thus ‘a gradual accumulation of the results of its [the capacity’s] exercise’ (ibid.). The faculty of language, which is in fact a general semiotic faculty—a ‘sign-making faculty’ (LSL: 103)—enables us to learn the language of any community into which we happen to be born, to learn any sign system or any language spoken on earth, independently of the race we belong to. Bréal is entirely in agreement with Whitney in this respect when he writes: ‘If it is true that there is a general faculty of language, the inheritance of this or that language in particular is a fiction’ (LN: 629). Both Bréal and Whitney are decidedly antiracist in their theories of language and this anti-racism is based on their evolutionist ideas. Whitney expresses this conviction most forcefully when he writes that no language is a race characteristic; a language is nothing more than the application of the fittest available means to securing the common end of communication (cf. 1885, Ph: 777; and Bréal LN: 633, 636, 639). For Bréal too, language is a social institution, although he does not often use that expression. He talks instead about language as a collective work or a collective product (cf. LN: 627), having, as it were, an ideal existence (LN: 619), just like religions, laws, traditions, and customs. That is, although language is only the product of the accumulated linguistic labour of generations of speakers, these speakers have to comply to its rules as if they were independent of their will. Bréal also stresses the instrumental character of language when he writes in the Essai that language is ‘a product, begun and continued with a practical goal in view, from which, in consequence, the conception of utility cannot be absent for a moment’ (ES: 2/2). The major goal of the use of language is communication (cf. ES 1913, 6th edition: 334), that is comprehension (cf. ES: 14/13). In the practical process of language-using and language-making, as Whitney has said, the end is comprehension, the means is language. All the laws of language-change and language-evolution follow from this basic principle (see further p. 80). As such, language is ‘the most necessary instrument of civilization’ (ES: 2/2; cf. Ph: 776). ‘Languages, then, far from being natural organisms, are the gradual elaborated products of the application by human beings of means to ends, of the devising of signs by which conceptions may be communicated and the operations of thought carried out. They are a constituent part of the hardly won substance of human civilization’ (OLS: 315).

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If language is an institution, it naturally follows that linguistic signs, the elements of that institution, cannot be natural signs, and especially not natural organisms themselves, as Darmesteter had claimed. They have to be considered, indeed, as conventional and arbitrary. These terms do not have exactly the same meaning, as the following quotation shows: Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary and conventional sign: arbitrary, because any one of a thousand other vocables could have been just as easily learned by us, and associated with the same idea; conventional, because the one we acquired had its sole ground and sanction in the consenting usage of the community of which we formed a part. (LSL: 14) Arbitrariness characterizes language as a system of signs; conventionality characterizes it as a social institution. But signs are not only arbitrary and conventional, they are also traditional, based on traditional use and handed down from generation to generation (cf. Ph: 769). Tradition is, in fact, their sole guarantee of stability and continuity, but at the same time, tradition or the transmission of sign systems from generation to generation, involving the learning of signs in new contexts and the application of signs for different needs, is the main factor of change and alteration. Conventional usage, the mutual understanding of speakers and hearers, allots to each vocable its significance, and the same authority which makes is [sic] able to change, and to change as it will, in whatever way, and to whatever extent. The only limit to the power of change is that imposed by the necessity of mutual intelligibility; no word may ever by any one act be so altered as to lose its identity as a sign, becoming unrecognizable by those who have been accustomed to employ it. (LSL: 102) Language as a semiological system keeps its continuity in alteration through uninterrupted tradition (cf. LSL: 23). Bréal too, defines words as signs, a definition that he borrows from the eighteenthcentury philosophers of language, such as Condillac and which he finds superior to the nineteenth-century conception of words. Comparative philologists tended to regard words either as pure phonetic artefacts or else, on the semantic level, as living organisms (Darmesteter), attributing to them a sort of absolute existence. But ‘Words are signs: they have no more existence than the signals of the semaphore, or than the dots and dashes of Morse telegraphy’ (ES: 277/249). Their existence lies in their (conventional) use, and in this sense is an ‘ideal’ one. Bréal also links the inherent conventionality of signs to their inherent mutability. The speakers of a language must be able to change the meaning of signs, to adapt them to new uses, if they want to keep up with the progress of thought and civilization. But this change constitutes no danger to language—no decay—and no danger at all to communication and comprehension either. On the contrary: a sign will

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continue to be useful and comprehensible as long as it is in use—and being used means at the same time being transformed and adapted: Once a sign has been found [by chance or choice] and adopted for some particular object, it becomes adequate to that object. You may mutilate and materially reduce it, it still maintains its value. On one condition that is to say: that the usage which attaches the signs to the object signified, remains uninterrupted. (ES: 331/302). Signs are intrinsically variable because they are used by different speakers in different contexts. But this variability has limits, the outer limit being the need to remain understood by the others: ‘that is to say, it [the limitation] is of the same kind as the other laws which govern our social life’ (ES: 279/250). Given these premisses—language = institution; words = conventional signs—Bréal and Whitney come to the conclusion that linguistics can only be an historical science and never a natural science. SIGNS, SYSTEMS AND VALUES In this chapter, which deals with such apparently modern concepts as signs, systems, and values, we shall inevitably refer frequently for contrast or comparison to the linguist who finally accomplished what Whitney and Bréal had attempted; to establish these concepts as fundamental for any linguistic analysis. This linguist was Ferdinand de Saussure. Whitney’s notion of a language is torn between two poles, a tension that Saussure inherited from him like so many other characteristics of his linguistic theory. These two poles are: the definition of a language as a social institution of communication and as a purely abstract semiological sign system. In chapter 3 we focused on the sociological point of view. The object of the present chapter is Whitney’s treatment of language from a more semiological perspective. But one has to keep in mind that this distinction is more latent than open. Quite often, Whitney mixes these two aspects of language in the same paragraph. What about Bréal, who also influenced Saussure? Did he leave similar traces? Although Saussure never refers to him positively but, only once, quite critically, in his notes on ellipsis (cf. CLG/N: 35), he was certainly influenced by Bréal, especially in his definition of language as collective, social product. But if, according to Saussure, a complete semiology has to explain ‘the role [vie] of signs as part of social life’ (CLG/H: [33] 15) then one has to admit that neither Saussure nor Bréal achieved that goal. They seem to have tacitly agreed on some sort of division of labour—Saussure tackling the abstract nature of signs per se and their ‘life’ in the semiological system of la langue, Bréal concentrating on the life of signs in the social and historical context of their actual use. Whitney is well known for his introduction of some new concepts into the science of language, such as the definition of a language as a sign system and of language as a social institution. Both these innovative definitions gained currency through Saussure’s adaptation and transformation of them. One can even read in an introduction to structural

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linguistics that ‘In D. Whitney’s work… appear the concepts of law, system, structure, which make him the creator of a static, descriptive linguistics, a stage in the Saussurian progress towards a synchronic linguistics’ (Chiss, Filliolet, and Maingueneau 1977:21). Koerner devoted a whole chapter of his book on Saussure to Whitney as a precursor of Saussurian thought (cf. Koerner 1973), and he attributed to him the first uses of such terms as ‘value’ and ‘zero sign’. Similar claims have been made in relation to Bréal, although in this case one has to dig deeper than the surface terminology to find similarities between the former master and his celebrated student. Bréal, like Saussure, turned his back on comparative linguistics after having achieved some fame as a member of this linguistic movement. But although their starting point is identical, Saussure and Bréal used it to explore different fields of the science of language, or better to create new fields of study for this science. Bréal based his theory of semantic change explicitly on the psychology of the speaker, whereas Saussure (without ignoring the consciousness of the speaker), built his synchronic linguistics on the theorem that language is a social fact, a term he used specifically in order to explain its systematic nature. However, Bréal did not overlook the importance of the system either. One of his more eccentric characteristics as a nineteenth-century linguist was his obstinate refusal to refer to etymology as an explanation of the meaning of a sign, or better, its function in the language. He replaced the predominantly diachronic perspective of his century with a synchronic one. The meaning of a sign cannot be explained by looking at it in isolation and discovering its origin. One has rather to look at its insertion into the network of adjoining words in the system of a language and the contexts of its use. The meaning of a word is given by its paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations and more: by its relations with the world of reference—the things. It is here that Bréal differs strongly from Saussure. The meaning of operation, for example, is not exhaustively explained by pointing to the coupling of a signifier with a signified or even by defining its intra-systemic value. One has to observe the transformations it undergoes when being used by a surgeon, general, mathematician, etc., who all do different things with it. The word operation acquires different values in different contexts. The notion of value, as used by Whitney, Bréal, and Saussure, has a very specific meaning in all of these systems of thought. For Bréal and Whitney it is linked to the notion of usage; for Saussure to that of system. The value of a sign, Bréal remarks, will remain the same as long as it is used, that is to say applied and recognized uas the same, by the speakers of a language. It changes if and only if the speakers change the use they put it to. All three, Whitney, Bréal, and Saussure, reject etymology to explain meaning (cf. CLG: 136), but unlike Bréal and Whitney, Saussure tried to exclude the speaker from his new definition of meaning which is an entirely negative one: the meaning of a sign in a system is determined by its difference from all the others, it means what all the others do not mean. Bréal Bréal, aware of the constant influence of social and historical forces on the meaning of words, could not abandon as easily as Saussure did a more positive definition of meaning, even though it was tinged with nomenclaturism. He maintains that signs only have

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meanings at all as a result of their being used meaningfully. The meaning of a sign is attached to the speaker’s use of it on the one hand, and to its referent on the other. These two ties are cut off by Saussure and change, especially semantic change, becomes a mystery to him, whereas in Bréal’s conception it is normal—it is in fact the object of his study. According to an interpretation by Roy Harris (lecture notes), Bréal’s theory makes it clear that we can, in fact, identify changes of meaning much more easily than identify meanings, and that semantic change can therefore be a legitimate object of linguistic study. In a way there is no static semantic object that could be described. According to Roy Harris, Bréal distinguishes between sense and value (a distinction that is sometimes difficult to verify in the texts, as we shall see, but it captures well Bréal’s thought). As signs linguistic forms have or acquire a value—in context. As designations linguistic forms have senses (conditioned to some extent by their etymology). The sense of a linguistic form emerges from its insertion into a system of related morphological forms, its value is established in the context of use. Take for example the word fluvius. Etymologically speaking it offers itself to an application to everything that flows. Its sense conditions the designations. But in the sense of ‘river’ it has a value as a sign actually used. These two perspectives merge in the case of abstract nouns. It is important to notice that designations (senses) tend to become signs (values), they lose their etymological meaning, a loss that actually constitutes a gain in Bréal’s eyes. To use an expression that we shall find in Wegener: the form becomes adequate to its function. In a sense it is the function that determines the value of a form, something Bréal had already pointed out in 1866. These distinctions between sense and value, designation and sign, allow Bréal to explain semantic change. This account of Bréal’s semantics is ingenious, but can it be verified by the texts? This seems to be rather difficult. To give just a few examples, first from the Essai: on p. 3 Bréal distinguishes between the form (forme) and the meaning (sens) of a word. This seems to be uncontroversial. However, in IL he had written: ‘The meaning [signification] of words can survive an alteration of their form and even profit from that alteration’ (1868:9). And in FF: (68) ‘Our language proves to us at any moment that the function of the words survives the mutilation and even suppression of syllables which seem to be the most necessary to its meaning [sens]’ On pp. 119/107 of the Essai he speaks of the ‘general signification’ of a word which can be restricted. Thus many words with a general signification have assumed a special meaning (sens). But the evolution of language can also lead to a ‘unique’ value (122/110). In HM he writes even more confusingly; ‘he who invents the new meaning (sens) instantly forgets all the old meanings (sens), except for one, so that the associations of ideas are always two by two. The people don’t care to go back to the past; they only know the signification (signification) of the day’ (HM: 198). Not only are the concepts of ‘sens’ and ‘signification’ difficult to capture, the same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, of ‘value’. Usually, it means the ‘value of use’: The new meaning (sens) of a word, whatever it may be, does not make an end of the old. They exist alongside of one another. The same term can be employed alternately in the strict or in the metaphorical sense (sens), in the abstract or in the concrete sense. In proportion as a new signification is

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given to a word, it appears to multiply and produce fresh examples, similar in form, but differing in value. (ES: 154/139) This is his definition of polysemy. A little later he writes that one is able to understand a polysemous term because, in the context of discourse, we ‘are not even troubled to suppress the other meanings (significations collatérals)’ that sleep in our mind: ‘It will be asked, how it is that these meanings do not thwart each other; but we must remember that each time the words are placed in surroundings which predetermine their import (valeur)’ (ED: 156/141). But value is also used in the more abstract Saussurian sense of the term, especially when Bréal compares words to pure values in a monetary system (cf. SL: 1009f). This ascendence of words to pure values is regarded as progress. The less the word reminds you of its origin, the better and the more easily you can use it in your mental operations. This impartial, if not positive, view of things vanishes when we come to concrete examples. Here the linguist is replaced by the purist: In our more than civilized societies, advertisements have the most pernicious influence upon words. A term is created by the philosophers, then borrowed by artists, after that industry grasps it. One can read today in the adverts of milliners the words intuition, inspiration, well understood outfit, types of hats. That is to say, words easily lose their value; language has to produce new ones continuously in order to replace them, unless one decides to come back to the mot propre, which is often a better thing to do, and to say simply, for example, instead of a type of dress, a pattern (patron) of dress. (SL: 1010) But what makes a word ‘proper’ if not the purity of its etymological genealogy? Whitney Bréal’s conception of meaning was centred on the speaker. This is hardly surprising given his basic psychologism. Whitney, on the contrary, was suspicious of the value of psychology for linguistics. His theory of language and language-change is therefore far more oriented towards a sociological perspective and his theory of meaning emphasizes the hearer. Wegener will combine these two strands of thought in his dialogical theory of the construction of meaning. Before delving into the interpretation of Whitney’s texts it is worth pointing out that Saussure shared Whitney’s hearer orientation, too. In the CLG he writes: ‘It [the language] is the whole set of linguistic habits which enables the speakers to understand and to make themselves understood’ (CLG/H: [112] 77). In the Engler edition of the Cours we find a statement that echoes Whitney even more closely: This [the social fact] would be a certain average…. What could give rise to this social capitalization, crystallization? This is not [any particular]

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part of [speech] circuit. Firstly not a physical part: when we are in a foreign country, we are not in the social fact of the language. And not [all the] physical part either: in the part of execution 1° the individual is the master, 2° execution will never be made by the mass; remains individual: speech. The receptive and coordinative part, this is what forms a deposit in the different individuals, and which happens to be more or less uniform in all the individuals. (CLG/E: 39–40) To return to Whitney: At the beginning of LSL Whitney asks: What is the English language? He points out that it is the sum, the average, of all the different languages of the members of the speech community. It is a mighty region of speech, of somewhat fluctuating and uncertain boundaries, whereof each speaker occupies a portion, and a certain central tract is included in the portion of all; there they meet on common ground; off it, they are strangers to one another. (LSL: 22) How, then, do we communicate? Almost any two persons who speak it [English] may talk so as to be unintelligible to each other. The one fact which gives it unity is, that all who speak it may, to a considerable extent, and on subjects of the most general and pressing interest, talk so as to understand one another. (ibid.) We are not only able to communicate because we speak one and the same language, but because we want to communicate and because we wish to understand each other. Though somewhat similar, Saussure’s conception of understanding is much more passive than Whitney’s. On another level of analysis the unity of a language is determined by its systematic nature. Whitney uses the term ‘system’ far more often than Bréal or Wegener, giving it a prominent place in his terminology. Like Saussure he uses the term ‘system’ to describe a language as a whole, a sign system (cf. LGL: 24, 43, 106, 115, 157, 182), as well as a language in its spoken and written form, pointing out, for example, the particular features of the phonetic system (cf. LSL: 91, 265; LGL: 62, 67). For Whitney, as for Saussure, language is the semiotic system par excellence, to which other semiotic systems, such as gesture and grimace, pictorial and written signs, become subordinated (cf. LGL: 1f.). But the most fascinating aspect of Whitney’s conception of language is surely his insistence on the link between sign system and language understanding, especially in the context of semantic change, a field of study that Saussure did not touch. Whitney points out that through semantic (‘significant’) changes we create synonyms, thus enriching the resources of expression. He gives the following example: ‘The feeling of shrinking anticipation of imminent danger, in its most general manifestation, is called fear’ (LSL: 110). Specific shades of meaning can be rendered by synonyms such as fright, terror,

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dread, alarm, apprehension, panic, tremor, timidity, fearfulness, etc. ‘Each of these has its own relations and associations’ (ibid.). Specific situations demand the use of either one or the other of these synonyms. However, the semantic field of ‘fear’, thus carved up by synonyms, is not dissected in the same way in every language: ‘The territory of significance is differently parcelled out in different tongues among the designations which occupy it; nor is it ever completely covered by them all’ (ibid.). As Saussure would point out later, using a very similar example (cf. CLG: 160), this parcelling also changes over time, thus altering the specific value of each synonym, which enters into different networks of ‘relations and associations’. Whereas Saussure uses the term ‘value’ here to tie his definition of meaning more closely to the intra-systemic system of signs, Whitney uses the term value, like Bréal, to point out the linkage between word and use: ‘Language would be half spoiled for our use by the necessity of bearing in mind why and how its constituents have the value we give them’ (LSL: 132). Like Bréal too he points out that signs become values as soon as they emancipate themselves from their etymological roots and become purely conventional, i.e. readily and easily usable: ‘An analogous process of elimination of original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional designation merely, is to be seen in every part of language, throughout its whole history’ (Ph: 768, 2nd col.). The notion of value is associated with that of convention and change. It can thus account for the mutability of signs. From the moment when it became an accepted sign for a certain thing, its whole career was cut loose from its primitive root; it became, what it has ever since continued to be, a conventional sign, and hence an alterable sign, for a certain conception, but a variable and developing conception. (LGL: 48) Language is a system of conventional signs, because it is used in communication. But it is more: it is an ever-changing system of conventional and arbitrary signs (LSL: 410) because it is learned and used. The radical arbitrariness of signs and the conventionality of their usage are the conditions of possibility for the continuous and uninterrupted existence of language. If signs were not arbitrary and conventional, language would be neither learnable, understandable, nor changeable. When we are born we learn to associate certain signs with certain ideas, in fact we learn any sign we hear used, any sign whatsoever which is used in the community we are born into (cf. LGL: 14–19). ‘Thus every vocable was to us an arbitrary and conventional sign’ (LGL: 14; cf. also 24, 32, 71). There is no inner connection between idea and word, or as he says later: there is only an extraneous and inessential tie that connects the meaning of a word with its form (cf. LGL: 77). This also means that there is no internal force that could maintain the sign’s identity (cf. LGL: 71). The identity of a sign is established, preserved, and altered solely through its use. If signs were natural and understanding instinctive, they would neither be learned nor altered (cf. LSL: 438). As they are arbitrary and conventional they change all the time in the process of learning and understanding. Conventional usage, the mutual understanding of speakers and hearers [my emphasis], allots to each vocable its significance, and the same

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authority which makes is [sic] able to change, and to change as it will, in whatever way, and to whatever extent. (LGL: 102) The only limit of change is mutual intelligibility. This precondition for the continued existence of language is also, as we shall see, the condition of its coming to exist: its origin. THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE The question of the origin of language was hotly debated in the eighteenth century by philosophers such as Adam Smith and Lord Monboddo in Great Britain, Mandeville, Condillac, and Rousseau in France, Süssmilch in Germany, and many others (cf. Stam 1976). A provisional solution was proposed by Herder in his prize-winning essay (1772). Herder dismissed the theories of the divine origin of language as well as certain philosophical theories put forward by Condillac, Maupertuis, and Rousseau; and he gave the question a new anthropological twist. In his view, man, devoid of natural instincts, had to invent language. But this was only possible because human beings are endowed with a special power or faculty: ‘reflectiveness’ (Besonnenheit). This capacity for reflection compensated for the loss of instinct and won man freedom and language. When Sanskrit was discovered towards the end of the eighteenth century, linguists started to believe that the origin of language had finally been ‘found’ and that they could deal with it historically, that is to say, empirically. The reconstruction of the ‘Ursprache’ was believed to be a scientific enterprise, not a vain philosophical speculation. These hopes were fired by Cuvier’s success in reconstructing prehistoric animals through comparative anatomy (cf. Cuvier 1800), and comparative philology was established. The nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of interest in this question, discussed in thousands of treatises, but neglected by the great philosophers. This trivialization of the question led the linguistic society in Paris to exclude it from its publications, in the hope of stemming the wave of unscientific speculation (cf. OLS: 279). Curiously though, both Bréal and Whitney indulged in speculation on this popular question. Whitney in particular wanted to make it available to a scientific treatment, thus rescuing it from amateur speculations that did more harm than good. Bréal had a similar goal: he wanted to demythologize linguistics as much as he wanted to demythologize mythology. His main target were those German linguists who believed that they really could reconstruct the ‘Ursprache’. His support of the Linguistic Society’s stand is therefore as understandable as his private efforts to give some sense to the question of the origin itself. With the advent of Darwinism the speculations about the origin of language reached a new peak. If Cuvier hadn’t helped, perhaps Darwin could. Accordingly, many writers applied Darwin’s doctrine to the origin and history of language. The most famous were Schleicher ([1863] English trans. 1869), F.W.Farrar (1865), Hensleigh Wedgwood (Darwin’s brother-in-law) (1866), Ernst Haeckel (1875), W.H.J.Bleek ([1867] English trans. 1869 reprinted in Koerner (ed.) 1983). Darwin himself treated the subject in The Descent of Man ([1871] 1894:86ff.), based on some of these illustrious predecessors. He

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especially approved of Whitney’s sound view that ‘communication’ is the driving force of language (cf. [1871] 1894:86, n. 53, he refers to Whitney OLS: 354). Whitney’s conception of the origin of language In his important contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Whitney writes that the ‘Recognition of the impulse to communication as the efficient cause of language-making is an element of primary importance in the history of the origin of language’ (Ph: 766). At the end of this article, he gives the reader some short bibliographical indications. For the historian of linguistics this bibliography provides precious clues to Whitney’s sources of linguistic inspiration. Among Müller, Sayce, Paul, Delbrück, Schleicher, Humboldt, Steinthal, and Hovelacque we find Wedgwood’s Origin of Language, a book written in 1866 (again this pivotal date) in Cambridge. Although written seven years after Darwin’s Origin of Species Wedgwood does not refer to him, but to Lyell, whom he uses especially as a weapon against Max Müller. These two points alone—the adherence to Lyell’s uniformitarianist doctrine (cf. 1866:3), and the sarcasm poured over Müller (especially his ding-dong theory, ibid.: 6–7), must have recommended this booklet immediately to Whitney. But it had a more theoretical appeal, too. The key theses of the book, which contains Whitney’s theory of the origin of language in a nutshell, can be summarized as follows. Language is not instinctive behaviour, like bird song, for example (cf. ibid.: 1); it is learned from ‘intercourse with those around us’ (ibid.: 5), like baking and weaving; it is a tradition handed down from generation to generation (cf. ibid.: 2). However, the first generation of speakers did not have a supernatural endowment for speech, they gradually developed the institution of language on the basis of the faculty of speech, i.e. a specific constitution of the mind and physical frame (ibid.: 5), and because they needed to communicate (cf. ibid.: 9). From ‘significant gestures’ (ibid.: 11), over onomatopoeia (ibid.: 16ff.), interjections (ibid.: 47ff.) and analogical extensions of words created in that way (ibid.: 101ff.), they slowly developed a language as a ‘system of vocal signs’: The essence of language is a system of vocal signs. The mental process underlying the practice of speech is the same as when communication is carried on by means of bodily gestures, such as those in use among the deaf and dumb. (ibid.: 13) This very modern claim was repeated more than a century later by Margaret Deuchar in her article ‘Sign language research’ (1987:311–35), when she tried to answer the age-old questions ‘(i) What is a language? (ii) How are languages learned? (iii) Where do languages come from?’ (1987:335). She writes: We have seen that the similarities between sign languages them-selves as well as between sign languages and creoles can hardly be accounted for in terms of the idea of these languages emerging from a single origin. Instead we have seen that the constraints of the visual medium may have a significant effect on sign language and those of the human mind may

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determine the overall similarities between emerging languages in contrasting media. (ibid.) ‘Only in the one case’, writes Wedgwood, ‘the sign is addressed to the eye, in the other to the ear. The problem of the origin of language thus becomes a particular case of the general inquiry, how it may be possible to convey meaning by the intervention of signs without previous agreement as to the sense in which the signs are to be understood’ (1866:13).* For Wedgwood the basis of all sign languages, be they vocal or gestural, is the resemblance between the sign and the thing signified (cf. 1866:13)—at least at the origin of language. This principle could be called, following Peirce (who by 1866 had just begun his work on semiotics), iconicity. For Wedgwood signs were motivated at the origin of language. He thereby mitigated the principle of the arbitrariness of signs put forward so strongly by Whitney. Signs become arbitrary, they are not arbitrary by nature, because otherwise it would be difficult to see ‘how it may be possible to convey meaning by the intervention of signs without previous agreement as to the sense in which the signs are to be understood’.† This last quote from Wedgwood indicates that the problem of the origin of language is not so much a purely linguistic question, as a question of linguistic philosophy, as Whitney calls it (cf. OLS: 280). Whitney holds that the question of the origin of language is, though not an historical one, a theoretically important, a scientific question, and that it can be solved by inferences based on the observation of language and careful deduction (cf. 281). It is directly linked to the question concerning the relationship between thought and language. Müller had defended the view that language and thought are * This is essentially the question asked and answered by Lewis (1969). † It is not necessary to postulate an iconic beginning of language. At the beginning speech-sounds could just as well have been totally arbitrary, understood contextually. Only later on, when humans had discovered the basic mechanism of language-making, they may have invented iconic signs, for reasons of economy, and to diminish mental effort.

identical and that there is no reason without language and no language without reason (cf. Müller 1887). From this point of view the origin of language must appear to be a deep mystery: how can language originate without reason and reason without language? The enigma can only be solved by postulating a creative capacity that worked at the origin of language and has now died out. Wedgwood calls Müller’s chicken and egg problem the Humboldtian paradox (1866:4), a ‘fallacy’ that arises, if one does not distinguish, as Whitney and Wedgwood do, between the faculty of speech and the actual knowledge of a language (cf. 1866:4). Müller endorsed the Humboldtian paradox when he argued against Darwin’s view of the gradual evolution of language (cf. Müller 1873, third lecture; quoted by Darwin [1871] 1894:89, n. 63) and against Whitney’s view that language is the instrument of thought and reason, an instrument of communication. For Whitney reason is but the conscious adaptation of means to ends (cf. Ph: 769). It follows, then, that language is one instrument of thought among others, although clearly the most important one, thought being the action of the mind (OLS: 285). Originally, the voice competed with other instruments of thought, such as grimace and gesture (cf. Ph: 766). If the voice

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has become the predominant instrument of thought, this ‘is simply a case of the “survival of the fittest”, or analogous to the process by which iron has become the exclusive material of swords, and gold and silver of money: because, namely, experience has shown this to be best adapted to this special use’ (Ph: 767). In opposition to Müller’s anti-Darwinian ding-dong theory of the origin of language, this theory is Darwinian, pragmatic, and semiotic—it could be made the basis of an evolutionary semiotics. The programme of this evolutionary semiotics is laid down in Whitney’s article on ‘Logical consistency in views of language’ (1880): The question of the origin of language, as a scientific one, is simply this: to determine how men such as we actually see them to be, if no language were handed down to them from their predecessors, would proceed in order to possess themselves of such an instrumentality. That they would so possess themselves there is no reason to doubt. Men are always making language; … the beginnings need not have been more difficult than the subsequent changes…. 1. Language was brought into being primarily for purposes of communication, and not of self-development. Only the nearest and most obvious, the most external, inducement to its production was the effective one; every other advantage came as an unforeseen result of its possession. 2. It began with whatever sign could best be turned to account as means of mutual understanding between man and man: grimace, gesture, exclamation, onomatopoeia and other forms of imitation, were drawn upon according to their various availability. What proportion belonged at the outset to each, and what were the steps of the process of natural selection (referred to above) whereby the voice attained its present predominance and almost monopoly, are matters of great interest. (1880:340f.) The first intelligible signs denoted what was most directly denotable: acts and qualities, ‘not concrete existences, for the latter are only signifiable by means of their characteristic acts and qualities’ (1880:15). These signs were what Whitney calls roots. The period of time during which roots were produced is supposed to be a limited one. Once enough roots accumulated, new names could be made ‘by combination and extension and change of application’ (1880:341): ‘Human language began when sign-making by instinct became sign-making by intention; when expression for personal relief was turned into expression of communication’ (LI: 731). In the framework of this ‘evolutionary semiotics’ the origin and evolution of language, as one sign system among others, would be governed by three factors: variation, combination, and adaptation (selection). Vocal signs were best adapted to convey thought and meaning—thus generally selected for the purpose of communication—because they could be readily understood by the others (cf. OLS: 288), over long distances without visual contact. They are also most freely variable, combinable and thus adaptable to all sorts of needs and circumstances. They were thus the best means through which to achieve the basic end of human intercourse: communication and mutual understanding:

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The process of mutual understanding would be a tentative one, every imagined expedient being tried, and adopted if it proved successful; and ere long a foundation would be laid which would admit of rapid and indefinite expansion. (OLS: 288; cf. also Ph: 769) However, the adaptation of means to ends does not stop once vocal signs have been adopted as the best means of communication. Each act of communication being a new tentative, a new experiment to bring about understanding, the inventory of signs is rapidly increased (and the stage of roots overcome (cf. Ph: 769f.)) by variation and combination. These procedures for the extension of the lexicon are exploited in vocal sign systems in a unique way. Other means to extend the sign system are borrowing and analogical transfer. But this increase of signs cannot go on indefinitely—the sign system must be adapted to the capacities of our memory, as Lyell had already noted. By the consenting action of the community only certain signs are selected, others drop out of use. In this evolution of language in a truly Darwinian sense, natural signs are gradually transformed so as to become merely conventional and arbitrary. Strictly context-bound understanding is replaced by the understanding of conventional, context-free signs, needing only a minimal contextual grounding. But it will never be ‘ideal’ in the sense of not needing any context or any effort of interpretation on the part of the hearer: ‘one speech-sign was like another, calling up a conception in its indefinite entirety, and leaving the circumstances of the case to limit its application’ (Ph: 771, col. 1). This was also Bréal’s opinion, even in so far as our modern languages are concerned, where the signs have accumulated significations over the years, have become ‘polysemous’ (cf. p. 123). He writes that: ‘the words in themselves are a poor guide, and they need the whole set of circumstances, which, like the key in music, fix the value of the signs’ (HM: 193). The signs have also tended to lose their original significance. This is what Whitney calls the process of the ‘elimination of original meaning, and reduction to the value of conventional designation’ (Ph: 768, col. 2). What matters to the speaker is not the etymology, but the actual value of a sign in the currently used sign-system. Finally, languages have developed an increasingly complex structure. At the origin of language—Whitney’s root-stage—linguistic signs were used as sentences, or better as all purpose utterances. They functioned as sentences, although lacking their ideal form: In point of fact, between the holophrastic gesture or uttered sign and the sentence which we can now substitute for it—for example, between the sign of beckoning and the equivalent sentence, ‘I want you to come here’—lies the whole history of development of inflective speech. (Ph: 771, col. 1) This history of inflective speech was written by Philipp Wegener in his Untersuchungen, and we shall present it in Part two. It will be surprising to see that Wegener’s objections to Wundt (who regarded only the full-blown sentence as ‘sentence’ and everything else, especially the one-word sentence, as mere sentence-equivalents) had already been spelt out by Whitney:

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But to us, with our elaborated apparatus of speech, the sentence, composed of subject and predicate, with a verb or special predicative word to signify the predication, is established as the norm of expression, and we regard everything else as an abbreviated sentence, or as involving a virtual sentence. (Ph: 771, col. 1) Bréal’s conception of the origin of language Bréal only dealt sporadically with the problem of the origin of language, a topic that smacked so much of mysticism, being linked to the search for a primitive language. However, when he did allude to it, he did so graciously; he even expressed his regret at the fact that linguistics had for too long neglected the question that had so much intrigued the eighteenth-century philosophers (SL: 1010). But not everything produced in the eighteenth century was well. In a chapter added to the 6th edition of the Essai in 1913, on ‘Les commencements du verbe’, he criticized the eighteenth-century philosophers. Some, especially the French philosophers in the tradition of Port-Royal, had supposed that the sole function of language was to formulate judgements (1913:334), that language was an instrument of pure reason—this was the opinion of the advocates of a ‘grammaire générale et raisonnée’—whereas others regarded language as a spontaneous work of the poetic imagination, a view that Bréal attributed to Herder (ibid.), one of the major exponents of German linguistic romanticism. Bréal was in agreement with Whitney when he condemned these two tendencies of thought, the ‘classic’ and the ‘romantic’ accounts of language: Language has been over and above everything else a necessary instrument of communication between human beings. Nobody has expressed this better than the great Roman poet: Utilitas expressit nomina rerum which the French translator of Lucretius has rendered in the following way: The pressing need has created the name of things. (1913:334–5) The basic function of language is communication and the origin of language is not poetic imagination, but the satisfaction of fundamental needs and desires. It was not created suddenly, ex nihilo, but is the product of a slow and gradual evolution and transformation, which proceeds in parallel with our mental powers. Like Whitney, Bréal believed that the science of language can and must attack the problem of the origin of language scientifically, that is by observation (HM: 211). Observation can be used because the creative faculty that has produced language is not extinct (as Müller believed), but is still working, and with the same procedures and the same effectiveness. It can be especially well observed in the domain of semantic change, where our communicative needs have a direct influence on how we use, and thus change, language. As these procedures of change are the same procedures by which language was created, he concludes one reflection on the origin of language with this crucial statement:

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If you want me to give you my opinion on the beginning of language, I would say that I believe that language has had no beginning; it was through a long evolution [my emphasis], where the transitions are almost unnoticeable, that language has emerged from the first stammerings. If we could witness this evolution we would find undoubtedly that it was governed by the same laws which we observe in the transformation of modern languages. These laws are two: differentiation, which attributes different values to signs that are at first synonymous; and analogy [my emphasis], which makes sure that, once a sign has been created to express an idea, we resort to it in all similar circumstances. The same causes which are acting under our very eyes must have made their influence felt from the first days onwards. (SL: 1010) Just as the question ‘When did the first human being appear?’ is nonsensical in a theory of gradual (Darwinian) evolution, so is the question: ‘When did language begin?’ There never was a first human being, but only primates that gradually acquired more and more human characteristics—among which, language. Above and beyond expressing Bréal’s conception of linguistic evolution and the origin of language, this short passage contains Bréal’s essay on semantics in nuce: signs having the ‘same’ meaning are differentiated, fine-tuned to express the most nuanced differences made by the speakers. One sign, once being adopted, is used analogously in every possible circumstance, thus creating systems of signs—in short, language. In the Essai Bréal enumerates more laws of semantic change, but the two laws mentioned here (differentiation of synonyms and analogy) are the most basic. All laws of semantic change for Bréal are ‘intellectual’ laws, they are observable regularities in the speakers’ behaviour, based on certain operations of the mind. This psychologistic interpretation of the origin and evolution of language was a heresy in the eyes of the ‘naturalist’ linguists, Hovelacque and Chavée. One of their followers, Paul Regnaud, who also reviewed Bréal’s Essai, took up the challenge by writing yet another book on the origin of language, Origine et philosophie du langage (1888), from an entirely different point of view from the one adopted by Bréal. Victor Henry, Bréal’s spokesman in the Revue Critique reviewed this book. He applauded Regnaud’s effort to give a summary of the question as treated from antiquity to modern times (this makes up the first part of the book); but there his agreement with Regnaud ends. Henry severely criticized the second part of the book, devoted to the reconstruction of roots and of a proto-language. Both attempts are in vain, and this for reasons clearly exposed by Bréal (Henry only refers to him as ‘notre maître à tous’, 1888:181). Roots are abstractions, and we cannot prove that they correspond to anything real in the proto-language. The existence of the reconstructed proto-language is even more chimerical, given that it is constituted at probably only a very late stage in a very long evolution. Henry notes that there is such a gulf between Regnaud and the new school of linguistics founded by Bréal that mutual understanding seems to be impossible (cf. 185). Henry follows strictly in Bréal’s footsteps: ‘we know nowadays no doubt, not how human beings began to speak, but at least how they speak by increasing and transforming incessantly their linguistic

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stock’ (1885:182). The question of the origin of language has been superseded by that of its continuous transformations and changes.

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Chapter Five THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGECHANGE We saw in chapter 3, that all nineteenth-century linguists were, in one way or another, interested in language-change. This is as true of Whitney and Bréal as everybody else. But unlike their contemporaries they did not merely want to study change in and for itself, and collect and analyse facts of change, they wished to discover the underlying forces, general laws, and principles that bring about and structure linguistic change. In their search for the hidden forces, over and above the observable data of change, they led comparative philology into a new era of linguistic science, a science that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s after the neo-grammarians had entered the debate, and which culminated in Saussure writing that ‘the aims of linguistics will be: (…) to determine the forces operating permanently and universally in all languages, and to formulate general laws which account for all particular linguistic phenomena historically attested’ (CLG/H: [20]). Whitney foresaw this new way of dealing with change: Comparative philology and linguistic science, we may say, are two sides of the same study: the former deals primarily with the individual facts of a certain body of languages, classifying them, tracing out their relations, and arriving at the conclusions they suggest; the latter makes the laws and general principles of speech its main subject, and uses particular facts rather as illustrations. (LGL: 315) It was for this blending of theory and respect for the data that both Brugmann (1897) and Leskien (1897) praised Whitney. FORCES OF CHANGE In his obituary of Whitney, Brugmann noted that, unlike so many of his fellow linguists, Whitney had not been satisfied with the collection, dissection, and inspection of historical facts, but had tried to gain insight into the nature of the forces that produce these facts. Three other linguists who shared this ambition were Bréal and—closer to Brugmann— Hermann Paul and Philipp Wegener. To understand why Brugmann attributed to Whitney a share in the foundation of linguistics as a science of principles, one has to look briefly at Paul’s famous Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1880, 2nd edn 1886, English transl. 1890), sometimes regarded as the bible of the neo-grammarians. Like Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener, Paul contributed to

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the constitution of general linguistics, ‘a science’, he wrote, ‘which occupies itself with the general conditions of existence of the object historically developing, and investigates the nature and operations of the elements which throughout all change remain constant’ (English transl. 1890: xxi; italics in original). He claimed that the ‘historical science of principles has to investigate exactly those points in which the single forces interpenetrate, and to inquire how even the forces most differing in nature, about whose reciprocal relations the exact sciences hardly concern themselves at all, are able to steer to a common goal by means of perpetual reciprocal operation’ (1890: xxiii). Those forces ‘most differing in nature’ are physical and psychological, individual and social. Paul, like Whitney and Bréal, wanted to unmask the mysteries of language-change, and like them he saw that changes are, on the one hand, undoubtedly initiated by the individual speaker and his/her will to make him/herself understood, but that, on the other hand, no speaker has the power to make or change language. As Whitney expressed it: ‘there is no will to alter speech; there is only will to use speech in a way which is new; and the alteration comes of itself as a result’ (LGL: 147). The forces underlying language-change have a Janus-like appearance, and as Paul, like Bréal and Whitney, had not yet found the concept of the ‘invisible hand process’, he tried to circumvent the dilemma by claiming that linguistic variation arises through the individual, but that only certain variations are selected by society, become usage, and change the language. Paul, who like Whitney and Bréal stresses the importance of the individual as the primary agent of change, departs from them in his rejection of any influence of the will, the primary mover in Bréal’s and Whitney’s theory of change. But this is only a shift in emphasis, the underlying conception of language remains the same: The real reason for the variability of usage is to be sought only in regular linguistic activity. From this all voluntary influence is excluded. No other purpose operates in this, save that which is directed to the immediate need of the moment—the intention of rendering one’s wishes and thoughts intelligible to others. For the rest, purpose plays in the development of language no other part than that assigned to it by Darwin in the development of organic matter—the greater or lesser fitness of the forms which arise is decisive for their survival or disappearance. (1890:13) The sum of individual variation brings about a shift in usage (cf. 1890:13): ‘The result of this is that all the doctrine of the principles of the history of language centres round the question, what is the relation between linguistic usage and individual linguistic activity?’ (ibid.). At the time when Paul was writing, it was almost established wisdom that whatever force of change is at work, it is not a natural force, as Max Müller and Schleicher believed. In the neo-grammarian manifesto the speaking subject had been introduced as a force of change. Osthoff and Brugmann had written: ‘that language is not a thing, standing outside and above men and leading its own life, but has its true existence only in the individual, and that therefore all changes in the life of a language can originate only with individual speakers’ (1878: xii). Although the status of the individual speaker in the process of change was far from clear, Paul referred to this factor of change extensively.

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In this new climate of opinion he could thus use Darwinian theorems with much more ease and in a much more inconspicuous way than Whitney, who was writing at the high point of Schleicher’s Darwinistically tinged theory of linguistic evolution. What Paul had in common with Whitney and Bréal, who were still fighting the anti-naturalist fight, was the belief that the forces of change were not natural. But he would not have gone to the extreme of proclaiming that it was the human will and the human mind that determined language-change. In his onslaught against Schleicher Whitney wrote: If the voluntary action of men has anything to do with making and changing language, then language is so far not a natural organism, but a human product. And if that action is the only force that makes and changes language, then language is not a natural organism at all, or its study a natural science. (OLS: 301) Müller received the same treatment with identical arguments. What is at stake for Whitney is the defence of linguistic science itself as an historical or moral science (cf. LSL: 48) against all obscurantism, naturalism and mysticism: And one or two of the most important subjects treated of—for example, the nature of the forces which are active in producing the changes of language, with the resulting place of linguistics among the sciences, and the origin of language—were handled in an exceedingly scanty, superficial, and unsatisfactory manner. (OLS: 240–1) Bréal, too, adopted the will as the principal and primitive force of linguistic change, but more than Whitney he emphasized the importance of the human mind, even conciousness, something which even some of his closest friends, such as Henry, regarded as an over-intellectualization. In a little known text, written in 1887, Bréal stated: Linguistics has certainly studied the modifications that the grammatical mechanism undergoes; however, it has not tried to find with the same care the intellectual causes through which the mechanism modifies and renews itself. It feared no doubt that it would go astray if it tried to discover the principles that are hidden for direct investigation. But without this type of research our science is incomplete. The languages would somehow be deprived of their primary motor. (1887:233) Bréal, like Whitney, rejected Schleicher’s conception of language as an organism that grows according to internal laws, but he also argued against the directly related issue that languages decay, and even more so the postulate that modern languages are no more than pale shadows, the decadent offspring of a perfect ‘Ursprache’. As early as 1867 he told his students in one of his lectures on comparative grammar:

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The principal lesson one can learn from these works [e.g. Curtius] is that our languages are not, as one could think from reading Pott or Benfey, fragments of a once harmonious whole broken into pieces. Each of our languages has emerged from a primitive unity according to organic laws whose influence we can describe and whose principle we can discover. The attention of our first masters was too much distracted by the multitude of objects and prevented them from listening to the hidden forces (my emphasis) which determine the form and decide about the fate of languages. Just as over and above the global laws that govern a whole realm of nature more particular laws determine the development of the classes, giving way themselves to the variety of genera and species, the splitting of the mother-language into so many particular languages and dialects is not the product of a blind shattering, but of a long and regular evolution. (1868a:84–5) Just as natural science has to find the hidden forces that structure biological evolution, linguistics has to find the forces that drive linguistic evolution, ‘with that difference, that the forces we talk about are the faculties of human beings and can be found in ourselves’ (HM:190). If forces structure change, so to speak, what are the laws that govern language-change, a term used by Whitney and Bréal as often as the term force? Although neither Whitney nor Bréal always employ a fine separation of causes, forces, laws, etc., one might say that causes are mostly external, historical influences, but also confused sometimes with forces; forces are the internal drives of human beings, and laws are certain regular patterns, regularities, or tendencies that are observable and classifiable as results of the constant labour of internal forces and external influences (cf. Bréal ES: 11f./11f.; Whitney LSL: 95). Unlike the forces of change, which are broadly speaking operating in the same way in all languages, laws of change are more language-specific (cf. Bréal 1868a:78). In relation to phonetic laws, Whitney wrote: ‘every language has its own peculiar history of phonetic development, its own special laws of mutation’ (LSL:95). LAWS OF THE LANGUAGE—LAWS OF THE SPEAKERS? Attracted by the model of natural sciences, some nineteenth-century linguists had not only projected language as a natural organism, growing and changing autonomously without the interference of the speakers, they had also tried to discover linguistic laws that would be as rigorous as the newly discovered laws of chemistry, biology, etc. In chapter 1 of his Essai, Bréal argued strongly against such a conception of ‘law’ as blind mechanical force. What he calls laws are observable regularities of linguistic behaviour or language use, they are laws of the speakers, not laws of the language, they are the cumulative product of an accumulation of experiments, and as such submitted to the ‘law’ of the survival of the fittest. Not every individual innovation or aberration becomes a law of linguistic change, only those that prove useful in the long run and for a large community of speakers. Bréal’s main goal was the discovery of the intellectual laws that

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govern semantic change, the change of meanings of words, wordforms, phrases, and grammar. One might think that in opposition to semantic laws, phonetic laws (the prime object of historical-comparative linguistics) are entirely physiological and hence ‘natural’ laws (which was, for example, Paul’s opinion, a view that Wegener strongly objected to). Bréal regards this opinion as a great fallacy: The organs of the voice are the servants and not the masters of language. We have to look for the causes of the phonetic changes in that region of consciousness, as yet little explored, where the acts of everyday life are coordinated. To account for the regularity of these facts, we don’t have to evoke a physiological necessity: habit—second nature—is enough. (LN: 622; cf. for similar views see Wegener 1882) In its phonetic and semantic aspects, language is ‘a human act; it has no other existence than in human intelligence’ (LN: 316; cf. Whitney [1878] 1971:249–60). The laws that govern language-change are not external, imposed on language and the speakers of a language from without. They are themselves the product of the speakers’ and hearers’ actions. THE WILL TO SPEAK In Bréal’s and Whitney’s theories of the origin and evolution of language, the speakers’ and hearers’ (cf. Whitney LSL: 474), acts of language-making and languageunderstanding, their active, intentional adaptation of means to ends, their need to communicate and interact via vocal signs, have assumed a place of prime importance: they are the key to unlocking the ‘infinite mysteries involved in every act of languagemaking and language-using’ (LI: 724). Language is essentially a product of collaboration. Those who listen have as great a part in it as those who speak (cf. HM: 199; LSL: 13f.). In their intention to speak and the effort to understand, the speakers and hearers collaborate in the construction of meaning—in context. To call this activity ‘communication’ does not mean reducing it, as is the tendency nowadays, to the simple encoding and decoding of information on the basis of wordforms. In FF (1866) Bréal had stressed that words have different functions, depending on the use they are put to in different circumstances. The intention to speak here and now, to this or that hearer always ‘transforms’ (to use one of Bréal’s favourite terms) the underlying convention or value (what Paul had called ‘usual meaning’; cf. [1880] 1909 4th edition: ch. IV), which in its turn is only the product of accumulated intentional acts of speech (where we give words ‘occasional meaning’; cf. Paul ibid.). Speaking is more than encoding, it is a creative adaptation of means to ends. Understanding is more than decoding, it is a creative interpretation of signs in context. These new polarities, introduced by Bréal and Whitney—speaker and hearer, intention and convention, meaning and value, form and function, speaking and understanding, etc.—are all linked to one central knot in their theories of language: the will. This concept must have deeply upset the linguistic establishment of the day, who believed that languages evolve independently of the will of the speaker, a theory that was

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indeed essential for their attribution of language to the realm of natural objects and of linguistics to the realm of science. To adopt the concept of the will as an explanatory tool was a highly subversive enterprise. Bréal readily acknowledged this when he introduced it in his Essai: ‘To permit will to intervene in the history of Language seems almost a heresy, so carefully has it been banished and excluded for forty years’ (ES: 7/6). Paul Regnaud reviewed the Essai and took the opportunity to express his resentment against Bréal’s ‘heresy’: we have all grounds to believe in a coordinated and spontaneous development, that is to say a natural creation of the forms and a natural attribution of the meanings, which is formally in opposition to the ideas of the author on the intervention of mind or better of consciousness in the development of language…. In this long work [of grammatical evolution] there is nothing, says Mr Bréal, that does not derive from the will. We readily affirm just the contrary: in linguistic evolution nothing or almost nothing is of conscious or voluntary origin; and it is because of this that…, semantics has laws, that it can become the object of a science, and that Mr Bréal’s book, which intends to prove the contrary, cries out for others where these laws will be set out and experimentally demonstrated. (Regnaud 1898:64–5, 67) By adopting this controversial term, Bréal and Whitney wanted to demonstrate once and for all that the nature of the forces and laws underlying linguistic change are categorically different from those discovered in biology and geology, although they may be compared to these laws and analysed analogously. The opposition they encountered was due to the fact that this attempt to redefine the basic assumptions of linguistics endangered the status of linguistics as a science. The will, the individual, and society The forces of change are of individual and social nature, given that language is a means of communication and a social institution. Whitney saw the mutual influences of individual and society on language much more clearly than Bréal. He wrote in ‘Logical consistency in views of language’: A social institution is a body of habits, of customary modes of action, whereby men in a certain community or congeries of communities attain a certain social end, regarded as conducing to their social welfare. The apprehension of the end and the formation of the means to its attainment are an outcome of the insight and experience of the community; the institution, we may say, grows gradually up in the never-ending contest between human nature and human circumstances; it is a historical product of the joint activity of generations, each one of which has contributed to its elaboration. (1880:342f.)

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This view of language as an institution rooted in social action made Whitney immune from those views that attributed to the realm of nature everything that was not directly determined by the individual. Whitney made it clear that nobody can make or change language arbitrarily, and that ‘in a sense, it is not the individual, but the community, that makes and changes language’ (LGL: 149). But the ‘community cannot act save by the initiative of its single members; they can accomplish nothing save by its cooperation’ (LGL: 150f.). Language as an institution changes under the ‘control’ of those who use it. Without use, there is no change. However, this control is only a very indirect one (cf. Bréal ES: 7f./6f.). In fact, the individual alone has no power to change language (cf. LSL: 45), even though s/he continuously changes it in communication (i.e. with others) through the continuous adaptation of a common possession to private ends. Although it is the community of speakers that determines language, the adoption of new words and the abolition of old ones, it can only do so through the action of the individual speakers, and these actions, as all actions, are guided by the will. The only way to reconcile individual and society for Whitney is as follows: he regards language-change as a democratic process (metaphorically speaking): ‘The speakers of language thus constitute a republic, or rather a democracy, in which authority is conferred only by general suffrage and for due cause, and is exercised under constant supervision and control’ (LSL: 38).* Whitney is in agreement with Paris when he writes: ‘each individual is, in a way, constantly trying experiments of modification upon his mother-tongue’ (LSL: 36f.); ‘the immediate agent is the will of men, working under the joint direction of impelling wants, * The ambiguity of this metaphor becomes clear when one reads it in the context of Darmesteter’s book: ‘Universal suffrage has not always existed in politics; it has always existed in the domain of language. There the people are all-powerful, and are infallible because their errors sooner or later make the law. Language, in fact, is a natural creation, and not an edifice regularly planned and “built up”’ (1886:109/1887:117).

governing circumstances, and established habits’ (LSL, 49; cf. 36). But the individual innovations have to be ratified by the community, which ‘checks’ there is no better name available, if it conforms to the general framework of the language, etc. (cf. LSL: 40ff.): The whole process of language-making and language-changing, in all its different departments, is composed of single acts, performed by individuals; yet each act is determined, not alone by the needs of the particular case, but also by the general usages of the community as acting in and represented by the individual; so that, in its initiation as well as its acceptance and ratification, it is virtually the act of the community, as truly conventional as if men held a meeting for its discussion and decision. (LSL: 148) The control exercised by ‘language’ over the individual lies in the exclusion of too apparent anomalies or deviations from general usage, and on the other hand, by providing the individual with models of change. That is to say: the individual will is free, we can choose and innovate, but we are not pre-eminent, we cannot act autocratically over language. Our freedom has certain limits. The constraints on the democratic process of

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word-making are the following: the already existing material and usages of speech and most importantly the already existing analogies, the preferred models of languagemaking (cf. Bréal LN: 627). If certain variations or innovations do not conform to the framework of existing analogies, they cannot survive (cf. LGL: 150). This framework, which sets the limits of individual variation, is also called the ‘inner form’ of language (cf. LGL: 22, passim), a term borrowed by Whitney from Humboldt to designate what one would nowadays call the structure of a language. This structure, which constrains change from within, is not ‘natural’. It is as radically arbitrary and conventional as the tie between sign and idea: Every single language has thus its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his ‘mother-tongue,’ is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions…his experience and knowledge of the world. This is sometimes called the ‘inner form’ of language—the shape and the cast of thought, as fitted to a certain body of expression. (LGL: 21–2) Thus, although the will is important, language is from the outset a social phenomenon. Bréal was aware of the individual–social dilemma too, but tried to solve it somewhat differently. In his view we always follow or obey the laws of the language, but we can always free ourselves from these laws, because in the end they are of our own making: [Language] is made by the consent of many intelligences, by the agreement of many wills, the ones present and acting, the others vanished and disappeared a long time ago. To attribute to it only an ideal existence does not diminish the importance of language: on the contrary, this means that it belongs to those things that are of prime importance and exercise the most influence on the world, because these ideal entities—religions, laws, traditions, customs—are those that give a form to human life. We are normally subject to their action, but we possess always the power to free ourselves from them. They belong to the world of thought and will. (LN: 619–20) Using the same arguments, Saussure might have said that la langue est un fait social, and likewise, though more emphatically, would Meillet, another of Bréal’s former students. In his obituary of Bréal he wrote that his teacher had clearly understood that language was an organ of society and that one could, to a large extent, explain linguistic facts through the life of man in society. But ‘he would not have said easily, like me the day when I became his successor [in 1905], and as did in Geneva, in his course on general linguistics, F. de Saussure, that language is a social fact’ (Meillet [1930] 1966:452). For Bréal, language was first and foremost an intellectual fact. To summarize: Bréal and Whitney would have agreed on the following statement, clearly in accord with Paul’s conception of language change:

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The sum of what all the individual speakers contribute to the common store of thought and knowledge by original work has to be worked into the ‘inner form’ of their language along with and by means of some alterations in its outer form. Here, then, at any rate, are two obvious forces, having their roots in human action, and constantly operating towards the change of language. (LGL: 35) The two forces are that of the individual and of society, the latter being a conservative force, the former an alterative force, the one commanding conformity to the established framework of the language, the other stimulating innovation by provoking speakers to adapt their inherited tools to new uses. The will and the mind Whitney and Bréal were in full accord as far as the role of the will in language evolution was concerned; it is the moving agent of speech and the hidden and indirect cause of language change. But for Bréal, even more so than for Whitney, the will is supported by intelligence, or what one would nowadays call the mind. For him intentionality and cognition are the forces that shape speech and language, the latter even more so than the former. It is only understandable then that his scientific ambition was to discover the intellectual (one would nowadays say cognitive) laws of language-change. Though stressing the importance of the will and of human action more than Bréal, Whitney did not ignore thought and mind as forces of language-change either: But the human mind, seeking and choosing expression for human thought, stands as a middle term between all determining causes and their results in the development of language… In language…the ultimate agencies are intelligent beings, the material is—not articulated sound alone which might, in a certain sense, be regarded as a physical product, but—sound made significant of thought. (LSL: 48, 49) Although thought, intelligence, the mind, and the will (the latter ultimately driving the former) are the motors of change in language, this does not imply that the speakers know what they are doing to language; they only know what they want or will to do with it. Knowing only what they want to do with language, speakers are unaware of what language does for them (providing a framework, an inner form, for their thought) and they cannot predict what effects their linguistic action will have in the long run on this framework. To put it in Darwinian terms; the speaker’s experiments to modify language are voluntary but random, the selection by the community is blind but systematic. The speakers of a language have no overview over the whole synchronic state of a language and they do not care about its diachronic evolution which they produce in every act of speech. This is the reason why Whitney and Bréal always stress the futility of etymology for actual language use.

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Confronted with this paradoxical situation, where language change seems to have its source in intelligent human action without being its direct product, Bréal tries to escape from it by introducing different degrees of consciousness: ‘Between the actions of a consciously deliberate will, and the purely instinctive phenomenon, there is room for many intermediate states’ (ES: 7/6; cf. Whitney LGL: 137). In his review of Darmesteter (HM) Bréal warns linguists not to confound intelligence with reflection or premeditation: ‘Though not premeditated, the facts of language are none the less inspired and guided by an intelligent will’ (1887:210). In his Essai he experiments with another term and speculates about a ‘will, dim but persistent, [that] presides over the changes of Language’ (ES: 7/7). This obscure will should be represented in the form of ‘thousands, of millions, of billions of furtive attempts, for the most part unfortunate, sometimes attended by a partial success, attempts which, thus guided, thus corrected, thus made perfect, attain to definiteness in some specified direction’ (ES: 7f./7). The tendencies that one can observe in the evolution of words are the trace of this experimental process of communication. They are as systematic as the system of language itself, without being the product of systematic voluntary change. Bréal’s obscure will could be compared to Keller’s invisible hand process (1985), an insight into the nature of change that Whitney anticipated even more explicitly: ‘Men will directly to use their means of communication for the various ends of communication; but this voluntary action is exposed to all the modifying influences which gradually alter voluntary action in other departments’ (Whitney 1880:9– 10). The language-makers are quite heedless of its [the change’s] position and value as part of a system, or as a record with historical content, nor do they analyse and set before their consciousness the mental tendencies which it gratifies. A language is, in very truth, a grand system, of a highly complicated and symmetrical structure; it is fitly comparable with an organized body; but this is not because any human mind had planned such structure and skilfully worked it out. Each simple part is conscious and intentional, the whole is instinctive and natural. (LSL: 50) Human beings, the language-makers, must be regarded as ‘blind watchmakers’ (cf. Dawkins 1986; and LSL: 74) They produce the complex structure of language and unconsciously change it, systematically and continuously. The only planning they do is a short-term moment-to-moment application of given means to immediate ends, adapting the traditional tools of speech to ever new situations. Without saying so explicitly, Bréal and Whitney were true Darwinian linguists. They had grasped the essential message of Origin of Species; that although adaptations are not the result of design, they are nevertheless purposive (cf. Goudge 1973:180). Historical linguistic evolution is thus not essentially different from biological evolution—it is an invisible hand process, determined neither by nature nor by intention. This parallel between biology and linguistics is also suggested by Michael Silverstein in his ‘Whitney on language’, which serves as an introduction to the collection of Whitney’s essays, edited by Silverstein under the same title:

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It becomes clear then, that language change is a feedback mechanism where the results of innovation in the system are subject to selection by the community, and the external influence, the social forces exerted by the speakers, are observable variables. Hence in history lies the experimental paradigm for determining the internal structural coherence of language. It is for this reason that ‘explanation’ must be historical, because we cannot experiment with people in the necessary fashion. (Silverstein 1971:x–xxiv) Having used the will as their immediate weapon against naturalism in linguistics, both Bréal and Whitney came to the conclusion that linguistics must be a moral and an historical science: the study of language, whose dependence upon voluntary action is so absolute that not one word ever was or ever will be uttered without the distinct exertion of the human will, cannot but be regarded as a moral science. (LSL: 50) There is no room for another force than the human will. Semantics belongs by its nature to history. (HM: 210)

INTELLECTUAL VERSUS PRAGMATIC EVOLUTIONISM We have noted earlier that Bréal and Whitney, who both championed the influence of the will on language, differ in their stress on the intellect as a force of change. This difference in approach might be explained by different influences on the work of these linguists. However, this is only speculation, given the lack of direct sources. In his article on ‘evolutionism’ for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas Goudge cites two variants of evolutionism: ‘vitalistic evolutionism’ and ‘pragmatic evolutionism’ (cf. 1973:182ff.). The first is ascribed to Schopenhauer and Bergson, famous for the philosophy of the ‘world as will and representation’ on the one hand, and for the theory of the ‘élan vital’ on the other. Reading the description of this form of evolutionism together with a note concerning a book on philosophy in France in the nineteenth century, written in 1867 (!), one cannot escape the impression that Bréal might have been influenced by Schopenhauer’s ‘voluntarization’ and ‘intellectualization’ of the world. Ravaisson, the author of this philosophy manual, argued against the dominant view of nineteenth-century philosophy that nature is governed by blind, mechanical laws, and sought to reintroduce reason, will, and consciousness. He argued: ‘there is absolutely nothing that thought, that the will could not explain…. In short, the reason of everything is reason’. And more specifically on language: ‘It seems that one can say of language what Emerson has said about the universe: “That’s the exteriorization of the soul”, and what Schopenhauer has said about the body: “That’s the will rendered visible, the objectified will”’ (Ravaisson 1867, quoted by Chiss and Puech 1987:169).*

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Others, such as Aarsleff (1982:387), have speculated about a * Bréal seems to have read some German philosophers, as his note on Nietzsche’s etymologies suggests, cf. Bréal 1896a.

different source of influence on Bréal’s glorification of the intellect; the positivistic psychology of H. Taine, the author of De l’Intelligence (1870). Aarsleff sees a connection between Taine’s philosophy and Bréal’s mentalistic conception of grammar, which was especially important for his theory of latent ideas. However, this mentalism had earlier been expressed in 1866 with specific reference to Humboldt, and we shall see that Humboldt can be regarded, as did Steinthal, as one of Bréal’s sources for the concept of latent ideas. But one has to admit that Taine’s influence on Bréal’s thought can be detected in the marked increase in Bréal’s use of the term ‘intelligence’ after 1870, in contexts where Bréal would formerly have used the terms ‘pensée’ or ‘conscience’, for example. (He explicitly refers to Taine in ES: 271/244.) The second version of evolutionism, pragmatic evolutionism, can be traced back to the philosophers and psychologists Peirce, Dewey, Mead, and James. Whitney could only have known Peirce. But even this is unlikely, given that Peirce only published a few, little-noticed philosophical papers during Whitney’s lifetime (cf. Peirce 1878), and that most of his semiotic studies only appeared in the mid-twentieth century (Peirce 1931–5). Nevertheless, the description of pragmatic evolutionism strikes one as astonishingly similar to Whitney’s conception of language: On the pragmatic approach, man is recognized to be engaged, like every other living thing, in a constant process of adapting to his environment. His mental capacities are, therefore, adaptive devices which serve him well or ill in this process. Ideas are instruments for coping with the world, and must be tested by observation and experiment to determine their worth. Thought and action, when functioning properly, are inseparable, for man adapts to an existing situation either by making his behavior conform to it or by actively changing the situation to meet his needs. (Goudge 1973:184) This pragmatic view of the evolution of ideas can be transposed directly onto language and we arrive at Whitney’s pragmatic linguistics: Once more, there is nothing in the whole complicated process of namemaking which calls for the admission of any other efficient force than the reasonable action, the action for a definable purpose, of the speakers of language; their purpose being, as abundantly shown above, the adaptation of their means of expression to their constantly changing needs and shifting preferences. (LGL: 144) In this sense the laws of human action are also the laws of language-change (cf. LGL: 156).

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Chapter Six LAWS OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE Both Bréal and Whitney were fully aware of the difficulties of their enterprise; finding the laws that govern language-change and in particular semantic change. They were also aware of the novelty of their endeavour; ‘no one has ever attempted to classify the processes of significant change, and the movements of the human mind under the variety of circumstances defy cataloguing’ (LGL: 76). In 1887, ten years before the publication of the Essai, Bréal posed the question in his review of Darmesteter’s book (1887) and Paul’s second edition of the Principien (1886)—two attempts to classify the processes of significant change: ‘Is it possible to formulate the laws according to which the meaning of words changes [se transforme]? After reading our two authors, and adding to this the result of our own observations, we are inclined to answer: no. The complexity of the facts is such that is is impossible to establish any certain rule’ (HM: 189). This pessimism induced Bréal to change the concept of law itself in the Essai so that it could be applied to semantic change. According to this new conception there are no hard-and-fast rules but only observable regularities. Whitney, too, overcame his pessimism to write that in spite of the complexity of the topic, ‘we may hope within reasonable space to lay out at least the foundations of the subject, and to trace some of the chief directions of movement’ (LGL: 76–7). WHITNEY: THE LAWS OF THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE Before tracing the chief directions of the movement of language-change classified by Whitney, we have to return briefly to his conception of arbitrariness and conventionality. The condition sine qua non of change is, in Whitney’s view, the fact that there is neither a natural tie linking sign and idea, nor a natural tie linking the language and the world. Both ties are entirely arbitrary. The sign is arbitrary in a first degree, the language as a whole is an arbitrary framework for the conception of the world—this is arbitrariness of a second degree. To give one of Whitney’s examples; a certain colour can be designated by the sign ‘green’, or ‘vert’ or ‘grün’, or by a million other words (cf. LGL: 18ff.). The child learns whatever word is used in the community s/he is born into. But s/he learns not only one colour word but many, and these are not only different from language to language, but each language classifies colours in general in different ways. The classifications and the concepts of each language differ from each other, they have different ‘inner forms’ (cf. LGL: 22). Signs are not only arbitrary, but as one would say in a Saussurean phraseology, radically arbitrary. As there is neither a natural tie between word and idea, nor a relation of representation between language and world, both words and languages as a whole can be formed and shaped according to the changing needs of the speech community. There is also no direct relation between inner and outer aspects of the words, between meaning and phonetic form. Both can evolve independently of each other (cf. LSL: 100f.). In short; languages are open to change.

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Whitney makes a certain difference between change and growth, which make up together the life of a language (cf. LSL: 32f.). Just as one would say today that change is the product of constant variation, Whitney says that growth is the product of constant change. He studies ‘the changes which actually go on in language, and which by their sum and combined effect constitute its growth’ (LGL: 35). He first gives some concrete examples of changes in the English language and then goes on to classify some general kinds of language change: We may distinguish, then:— I. Alterations of the old material of language; change of the words which are still retained as the substance of expression; and this of two kinds of subclasses; 1. change in uttered form; 2. change in content or signification; the two, as we shall see, occurring either independently or in conjunction. II. Losses of the old material of language, disappearance of what has been in use; and this also of two kinds; 1. loss of complete words; 2. loss of grammatical forms and distinctions. III. Production of new material; additions to the old stock of a language, in the way of new words or new forms; external expansion of the resources of expression [borrowing]. (LGL: 44) Whitney’s use of the terms ‘material’ and ‘form’ is sometimes confusing. To disentangle his semantic network it can be graphically represented as follows:

Alterations of the old material of language Form One of the main changes that every item of a language undergoes is abbreviation or contraction given the tendency of speakers to economize their articulatory efforts (the principle of economy) (cf. Whitney [1878] 1971:249–60). This tendency has negative as

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well as positive effects. The negative effects consist in a certain ‘erosion’ of linguistic forms, the positive effects are that these eroded forms, this linguistic waste, can be recycled, so to speak. Whitney’s favourite example is the adverbial suffix -ly, which he derives from the full word like. Like was used in compounds such as godelike, where it was abbreviated to godly (cf. LGL: 52), and a new suffix had been ‘born’. It is subordinated to the ‘root’, and is adapted to this purpose. The influence of the tendency to economy is ‘always cast in favour of subordinating in substance what would otherwise be of loose structure—in short, of disguising the derivation of linguistic signs, making them signs merely, and signs easy to manage’ (LGL: 53). Bréal here would see an intellectual law, by which spirit subordinates matter, subfuses matter with spirit, or mere form with meaning. We shall return to this form of change in the context of the production of new forms via compounding. On formal changes Whitney writes that there are on the one hand, the production of new words and forms by the combination of old materials; on the other hand, the wearing down, wearing out and abandonment of the words and forms thus produced, their fusion and mutilation, their destruction and oblivion—are the means by which are kept up the life and growth of language, so far as concerns its external shape and substance, its sensible body. (LSL: 100) The key terms in Whitney’s conception of external change processes are combination and adaptation, as well as material and form: Material are the grammatically independent lexical items, formal are the subordinate, grammatical affixes, of inflection especially. Certain parts of language are highly structured into formal classes, other parts not, and this can be explained by how long they have been undergoing this constant process of combination and adaptation, which seems to be a unilinear evolutionary tendency. (Silverstein 1971:xvii) This tendency has recently been explored by Helmut Lüdtke, who has taken the processes of combination and adaptation as starting points to discover the quantitative laws of language change, especially on the phonetic and morphological level (cf. Lüdtke 1980, 1985, 1986). Lüdtke’s theory is rooted in what Whitney calls the ‘aggregative theory of Bopp’ (1880:11), or his theory of ‘agglutination’. It explains the change processes going on here and now and allows the linguist to reconstruct the prehistoric period too. Whitney summarized it as follows: 1. Throughout the whole known history of Indo-European speech, there have been made combinations of elements which then by degrees assumed the character of integral words, and sometimes, by subordination of the one element to the other, of forms; and examples of forms, of every class and every age, appear plainly to have been so made. 2. No material of this

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sort is seen to have been made in any other way; wherever exceptions, as forms with internal flection, seem to show themselves, they can be proved to be the inorganic result of processes originally aggregative. 3. There are nowhere found any formal distinction of such a kind that they refuse explanation as made by aggregative processes similar to those by which other forms are actually seen to have been made. Hence, 4. If aggregation is thus demonstrably a real method of Indo-European form making, and the only one possessing that character, and if it is adequate to the explanation of all the facts, then we ought to accept it as sufficient, and to acknowledge that we have no reason to suppose that forms have been made in any other way. (1880:338) Whereas this type of change can be regarded as springing from an unconscious use of linguistic material in the most economic way, there exists another type of change, which Whitney has called ‘mental economy’: analogy. Analogy enables the speaker to repair anomalies (cf. LGL: 74) and avoid exceptions. But in a more general sense the ‘force of analogy is, in fact, one of the most potent in all language-history; as it makes whole classes of forms, so it has power to change their limits’ (LGL: 75). Analogy is a ‘structural’ force that gives each language its specific shape and ‘inner form’. We have already said that the ‘prevailing’ analogies in a language (and they differ from language to language) shape the speakers’ innovations and the communities’ selection. As Silverstein points out: the processes of combination and adaptation remain the same, but they have different effects in different languages, according to the different frameworks of analogical preferences (cf. Silverstein 1971:xviii). Bréal, too, stresses the importance of analogy, the primordial condition of all language (cf. ES: 86/77), the condition of language acquisition as well as of language change. According to him, we use analogy as a linguistic instrument to avoid difficult expressions, to achieve more clarity, to stress an opposition or similarity, or to conform to an old or a new rule (cf. Delesalle 1987:290). For Bréal analogy is more than an instrument that repairs damage done by blind, sound laws (a view held by some of his contemporaries), it has a positive, creative value. Analogy is an essential instrument of thought and language. It works constantly in every act of speech (cf. Bréal LN: 628). In a sense, Bréal’s conception of analogy foreshadows that of Saussure, who like his former teacher observed analogy in our daily linguistic activity, but who also saw in it one of the main forces of linguistic creativity and change. Opposed to the random influences of sound-change and agglutination, analogy was for him, as for Bréal, a form of grammatical, rule-governed change. As Delesalle writes in her article on Bréal and Darmesteter: ‘[analogy] is responsible for the dynamics of the grammaticality of language’ (1987:289). This dynamism, this creativity, is best expressed by Bréal who insists on the fact that analogy is ‘a rule not yet formulated; a rule at which mankind strives to guess, and which we see children trying to discover. By pre-supposing its existence, the people actually create it’ (ES: 80/72). Meaning

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Whitney claims that to some extent ‘the change and development of meaning constitute the real interior life of language, to which the other processes only furnish an outward support’ (LSL: 100). He distinguishes between two major directions of semantic change, or, as he calls it significant change (LSL: 110): 1 restriction of meaning, 2 extension of meaning. Other types of change are only mentioned en passant such as pejoration, amelioration, euphemism, and fashion words (cf. LGL: 97), although Whitney does not use these terms, so common in modern treatises on semantic change. Restriction of meaning works in language from its beginnings. Whitney supposes that the first names were given to things according to one or another striking attribute (e.g. planet—the wanderer). Such ‘epithets of things, representing some one of their various attributes, become the names of things, through every department of nomenclature. Our etymologies are apt to bring us back finally to some so general, comprehensive, colorless idea, that we almost wonder how it can have given birth to such strongly marked progeny’ (LGL: 83–4). As an example, he gives the varied and definite meanings of post which all go back to the sense of ‘put, placed’ (cf. LGL: 84) (cf. Bréal: law of differentiation). The extension of meaning is brought about by metaphorical or figurative use of old forms, e.g. head, foot, tail, etc. It is astonishing that these ‘figurative uses of words do not perplex us; they do not even strike us as anything out of the way; they are part and parcel of the sphere of application of the word’ (LGL: 87), stretching and expanding it increasingly. Again, our willingness to forget the original meaning is the guarantee for the unhindered invention and use of metaphorical expressions. The main metaphorical movement goes from the concrete to the abstract (cf. LGL: 88f.), a tendency that Bréal will also comment upon. He does, however, differentiate between extension of meaning and metaphor, the first being a slow and gradual, almost insensible, process, the second the result of an instantaneous insight into the similarity of two objects, acts, etc. (cf. ES: 135/122). A related type of linguistic change is the one where terms of independent meaning acquire a formal value. This topic is now dealt with under the heading of ‘grammaticalization’ (cf. Traugott 1985). Whitney gives the examples of verbs such as to be, to do, to have; prepositions, such as of and to; articles, conjunctions, relative pronouns, and phrases. The evolution of relative pronouns will also be discussed by Bréal and Wegener, who agree substantially with Whitney, according to whom relative pronouns have emerged from demonstratives and interrogatives, which were put to new use (cf. LGL: 95–6). Some of the topics dealt with by Whitney in this context will be taken up and elaborated by Bréal, when he describes the evolution of syntax (cf. ES: ch. XXII). Loss of words and forms This type of change, which Bréal calls ‘extinction of useless forms’ (ES: ch. VIII), is in some sense trivial because ‘Existence in speech is use; and disuse is destruction’ (LGL: 98). Disuse can either have external causes, such as the disappearance of certain conceptions or objects, or old words are also lost if they cannot survive in the struggle for

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existence against the import of new words or synonyms (cf. LGL: 101). The influence of French on English after the Norman Conquest is an excellent example of this type of change. Another kind of loss, which is constantly occurring, is the loss of old meanings (cf. LGL: 102). As far as wordforms are concerned, one can observe the loss of old distinctions of grammatical form. Whitney gives the example of the old infinitive ending an (from Germ. -en), a loss which has been repaired by the substitution of to as an infinitive marker for the obliterated affix (LGL: 103). This type of loss also affects inflection, gender, etc., most markedly in English (cf. LGL: 105; and Bréal: law of specialization). Production of new words and forms This last mode of change…constitutes in a higher and more essential sense than any of the others the growth of language, and ought to bring most distinctly to light the forces actually concerned in that growth. (LGL: 108–9)

Most of the time we say something new by using and combining old material in new sentences (cf. LGL: 109), but in every new sentence the old words enter new contexts, are used in new situations, and are thereby slightly changed. No act of speech leaves the old material unchanged. This does not do any harm to the meaning of the words used. On the contrary, it is totally congruent with the nature of meaning itself, as it is the ‘customary office of a word to cover, not a point, but a territory, and a territory that is irregular, heterogeneous, and variable’ (LGL: 110). The variation introduced by the speaker is not disturbing, rather it redefines the boundaries of the word’s territory in accordance with the communicative context. This is a sort of subterranean change, relentlessly at work in language: ‘It is, as we have called it before, the mind of the community all the time at work beneath the framework of its old language, improving its instruments of expression by adapting them to new uses’ (LGL: 110). Apart from this slow process of improvement and adaptation, there also exists a more active way of renewing language, based on a certain ‘creative pleasure’. This natural delight in language-making can be observed particularly well in slang (cf. LGL: 113), and its most widely used instrument is metaphor. A more mundane type of lexical renewal is borrowing (cf. LGL: 114ff.), a more exotic type is the actual invention of new words, either arbitrarily (e.g. gas) or via onomatopoeia (LGL: 120f.). However, the commonest type of production of new words is composition (cf. 121ff). Here we come back to a type of change discussed earlier on. It has already been pointed out that Whitney attached a special importance to the fact that affixes of derivation and inflection derive from independent words (cf. LGL: 124). This special case of composition of words is illustrated by some further examples: dutiful, where ful has evolved from Germ, ‘voll’, or doubtless, where less has evolved from Germ. ‘los’. The new suffixes can again be combined in words such as plenti-ful-ly, doubt-less-ly, etc. What Whitney discovered are some general laws of language change that are sufficient for any linguistic explanation. Naturally, every concrete case of change always needs an extra-linguistic, historical explanation as well.

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BRÉAL: THE INTELLECTUAL LAWS OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE Whitney’s main interest lay in the discovery of the laws of formal change processes, whereas his interest in semantic change processes was somewhat limited. Although the term semantics, or ‘sémantique’, was widely used after 1883 (cf. below; and Read 1948), he never used it in his writings. Nor did he include it in his Century Dictionary, where one can only find an entry for semasiology, the term used by Bréal’s German ‘competition’ (cf. Cent. Dict.: 5481). Semasiology and ‘sémantique’ covered the same area in the nineteenth century, as the definition given in the Century Dictionary shows, when compared to Bréal’s definition: ‘The science of the development and connections of the meanings of words; the department of significance in philology’ (1897:5481). Bréal introduced the term ‘sémantique’ in 1883, that is about sixty years after Reisig had invented the term ‘semasiology’ (cf. Reisig [1839] 1881, vol. 1:19). The study to which we invite the reader is of such a new type that it has as yet no name. In fact, most of the linguists have exercised their skill in studying the body and the form of words: the laws that preside over the transformation of meaning, the choice of new expressions, the birth and death of locutions, have been left in the dark or only indicated en passant. As this type of study, just as phonetics and morphology, merits to have its name, we call it semantics…, that is the science of meanings. (1883:133) Bréal’s treatment of semantic change, including morphological and syntactical change, is more complex than the sketch provided by Whitney. To understand his theory of semantic change, one has to define in more detail what he understands by history, intelligence and will. History is not only the internal history of words, studied by historical linguistics (cf. ES: 124/111). For Bréal history itself, external history, the use of words in historical contexts, is important (cf. Delesalle 1887:288).* He repeatedly points out that we can only understand the meaning of words if we know the historical situation in which they have been used, including the ‘things’ the words signified. This historical grounding also includes the state of the language at a given time, the linguistic context so to speak. The actual meaning of a word—or as Bréal terms it, its value—depends on the historical state of the world and the language. Intelligence, as already pointed out, does not mean reflection; it means rather that we do not speak by mere reflex or instinct, but because we think and because we want to communicate. Will again does not mean the will to change language, but the will to speak—we have the intention to speak, and we do it for a certain purpose. On this point Whitney’s conception of language is more exhaustive than Bréal’s, because he points out what the nature of our intention is; the adaptation of means to ends, governed by the laws of human action in general. That is to say: Whitney attaches more importance to languages as human action than Bréal does. But in another sense Bréal goes beyond Whitney when he examines what actions speakers accomplish with language, a topic taken up and treated comprehensively by Wegener (cf. chapter 8 and part two).

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The intellectual laws of semantic change put forward in the Essai operate on two levels: on the level of form and meaning, and on the level of meaning alone. The laws of the first type are treated in the first part of the Essai, the laws of the second type in the second. They are intellectual laws, that is regularities of change that stem * In this chapter I shall draw quite heavily on this article.

from certain tendencies of the mind, from the mind’s striving for more and more perfection and progress, often integrating or profiting from historical progress. The laws of form and meaning, for example, are based on the mind’s tendency to replace synthesis by analysis, the laws of meaning-change exemplify the mind’s tendency to go from the concrete to the abstract, from the individual to the general and from single occurrences to a certain multiplication and proliferation. Types of change of the first kind are: the law of specialization, the law of irradiation, the law of the survival of inflections, and the law of differentiation (of synonyms). The first part of the Essai is also devoted to analogy, to new acquisitions in language, and to the extinction of useless forms, that is selection and thus restriction of the superabundance of word-creation. In the second part * We propose to examine by what causes words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, are induced to restrict, to extend, to transfer this meaning from one order of ideas to another, to raise or to lower its dignity, in short change it. It is this second part which, properly speaking constitutes Semantics or the Science of Significations. (ES: 109/99) The main laws of semantic change are restriction and extension of meaning, metaphor, polysemy and certain laws that regulate the change of words in syntagms and locutions; the transitive force, contagion, and articulated groups. This overruns into part III of the Essai, where Bréal deals with the evolution of syntax. The law of specialization This law is fundamental in Bréal’s view because it accounts for the substitution of variable, subordinated elements by invariable and independent ones, related to the mind’s search for simplification. Examples are the replacement of cases by prepositions, the evolution of the comparative from Latin to French where plus is special* Here, Bréal anthropomorphizing the ‘action’ of words, instead of saying, as he has so often pointed out, that the meaning of words is restricted, extended, etc. by the use of the speakers. This is all the more surprising as he argues at the beginning of the chapter against the mistake of attributing certain ‘tendencies’ of change to words, such as prejorization (cf. ES: 109f./99).

ized as a comparative marker and replaces the Latin suffixes (cf. ES: 15/14), the evolution of auxiliary verbs in French, etc. This shows that the development from Latin to French cannot be described as decay, that is as a process where the perfect grammar of Latin disintegrates and French does some piecemeal repairwork on these ruins. For Bréal the evolution of grammar is a real progress, a progress that achieves increased clarity of expression, by replacing synthetic by analytic forms.

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The law of irradiation and the survival of inflections This law points in the same direction as the first, the law of irradiation marking the interdependence of morphology and meaning in the word, the law of the survival of inflections the importance of syntactic constraints as traces of lost forms. An example of the first law is the attribution of meaning to a suffix which initially did not have this meaning, such as the Latin verbs ending in -sco. This suffix has become the marker of a gradually achieved action, the inchoative. That is, the meaning of some verbs having this ending has contaminated the suffix, given it a specific meaning that it now carries into all the words where it is used. The second law marks the fact that in French, for example, where cases no longer exist, ‘case’ has nevertheless survived in syntactical constraints attached to certain nouns (cf. also Bréal’s ‘transitive force’). The law of differentiation For Bréal the law of differentiation is of primary importance in semantics. He writes: ‘We know little about the creation of Language; but Differentiation is the true Demiurge thereof’ (ES: 40/36). Differentiation is based on a need of thought to introduce more and more subtle distinctions into the world and the language we use. In his description of the process of differentiation Bréal, who normally likes to speak of the creativity of the people and of the popular logic proper to language, suddenly becomes elitist, a phenomenon that Delesalle has studied in some detail (cf. Delesalle and Chevalier 1986:4th part). Bréal writes: Distinctions are first made by a few minds that are more subtle than others: then they become the common property of all. Intellect, as has been said, consists in seeing differences in similar things. This intellect is communicated up to a certain point by Language, for by recognising the distinctions, which the most gifted alone perceived at first, the mental sight of each individual becomes more piercing. (ES: 41f./38) Bréal gives some highly scholarly examples for this subtle differentiation of meaning, for instance between the pleasure of the senses and ideal pleasure, which are designated by two different words in modern Greek but had once been denoted—horror of horrors—by one single word alone. In some ways this law can be compared to the law of specialization. We differentiate, for example, synonyms by attributing to them special social values (e.g. nighty and négligé; second-hand car and pre-owned car), which means at the same time that we specialize each synonym for a specific kind of use. This differentiation of synonyms can even be achieved by more humble human beings; the people (cf. LN: 31). Differentiation has its limits, however. Too much of it is embarrassing, too little would signify that thought has not progressed and expanded. But the amount of differentiation varies from speech community to speech community.

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Laws of semantic change We now come to the laws of semantic change as such, but shall not dwell on the restriction and extension of meaning, quite well-known phenomena of semantic change. However, it is important to note that for Bréal the restriction of meaning is based on internal laws of the language, whereas the extension of meaning has historical causes (cf. ES: 128/115). One of the basic credos of Bréal was his postulate that words are necessarily disproportionate to things and that this forces the mind to readjust this disproportion constantly (cf. ES: 118/106). The expansion of meaning denotes, as one might expect, the progress of thought. An example that Bréal gives is pecunia which changes from meaning ‘wealth in stock’ to meaning ‘wealth’ in general (cf. ES: 130/117). ‘These facts must not be laid at the door of Metaphor. Metaphor is the instantaneous perception of a resemblance between objects. Here on the contrary we are dealing with a slow displacement of meaning’ (ibid.). Compared with differentiation, metaphor seems to stem from an opposite need of the mind: instead of looking for distinctions, it wants to see resemblances and creates resemblances, for example, between different domains of human activity: sight and hearing, touch and taste, man and inanimate objects, organs of the body and inanimate objects, etc. (ibid.: 143/130). Its main tendency is to create abstract meanings from concrete ones. Inventors of metaphors come from all classes and professions, from famous writers to unknown seamen, for example, aborder une question, échouer dans une entreprise, etc. As we shall see in more detail when dealing with Wegener, metaphors tend to wear out. From being somewhat inadequate but expressive, they gradually become adequate for what they are used to express, but this means that they lose their expressiveness proportionately. The aged metaphor (which has been emancipated to the status of pure sign) can in turn be used to create new meaning metaphorically, and so on. In this sense metaphor is one motor in the evolution of polysemy, a term Bréal introduced for the first time into linguistics. * Different from metaphor, and going in the opposite direction, is another phenomenon called concretization of meaning (épaississement du sens). This is, in fact, a form of metonymy, but Bréal does not use this term. He gives as examples the use of general or abstract terms in specific ‘languages’, for example, ouverture in the language of music, etc. Polysemy We shall see in chapter 7, pp. 135–7 that polysemy in Bréal’s semantics is complementary to ellipsis. Whereas in ellipsis we have to make sense from something which is not there, in polysemy we have to make sense out of an excess of something. Polysemy stems from the fact that the new meanings that words acquire in use— * It is possible that Bréal was influenced by Max Müller in the choice of his term. Müller had written: ‘He [the student of language] ought to show how frequently different ideas are comprehensible under one and the same term, and how frequently the same idea is expressed by different terms. These two tendencies in language, Homonymy and Polyonymy, which favoured, as we saw, the abundant growth of early mythology, are still asserting their power in fostering

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the growth of philosophical systems’ (1864:568).

and this in all the ways explained above—do not automatically eliminate the old ones. The new and the old meanings exist in parallel: They exist alongside of one another. The same term can be employed alternately in the strict or in the metaphorical sense, in the restricted or in the expanded sense, in the abstract or in the concrete sense. In proportion as a new signification is given to a word, it appears to multiply and produce fresh examples, similar in form, but differing in value. We shall call this phenomenon of multiplication Polysemia. (ES: 154f./139f.) The concept of polysemy seems to be the centre of gravity around which Bréal’s whole semantic rotates. Polysemy is central to the evolution of language, in so far as it manifests clearly the application of an old form to designate a new idea, thereby enriching language and thought. It also demonstrates Bréal’s belief in the progress of language, thought, and society. Polysemy is an indicator of progress. It also makes clear that meaning is not subordinated to form, but that meaning is indeed the real force in language evolution. Polysemy shows, like no other process of semantic change, the accumulated victories of mind over matter. But Bréal asks himself how speakers and especially hearers manage not to get totally confused by these overwhelming multiplications of meanings. This is only possible because the words are always used in the context of a certain discourse and a certain situation which fades out all the adjoining meanings, highlighting only the one in question (or better: in speech). Bréal points out also that this evocation of the right meaning is helped by the fact that the association of ideas proceeds according to the things, not the sounds (cf. ES: 156/141). At any given point in time a single word may have multiple meanings or senses. But for a speaker/hearer a word has, at any moment of speech, only one meaning or value. In discourse words have a situated, contextualized meaning, determined by the situation and the topic, by what we are talking about. This situational determination of meaning will be central to Wegener’s conception of language. The evolution of syntax Bréal’s semantic analysis is not restricted to the word level, as is so often asserted. In Part I of the Essai he deals with semantic processes at the sub-word level, the morphological relations and influences within the word. In part II he deals with composition and articulated groups of words, that is the semantics of syntagmatic relations. In part III he deals with the semantics of syntactic relations properly speaking, for example contamination, where the meaning of the whole sentence influences the use of a word, and with the transitive force, that is, for example, the evolution of transitive verbs, verbs that have evolved in such a way that they necessarily need a complement. More generally, words contract certain affinities with other words through their use in the context of a sentence, and these affinities gradually gain an obligatory character, so that in the end, certain words can no longer be used without certain others.

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We shall leave aside Bréal’s chapter on composition and come directly to his treatment of articulated groups, a phenomenon that is particularly well illustrated by the French language. What is true for compositions holds true for articulated groups as well: ‘True composition has its criterion in the mind’ (ES: 175/157)! If one can say that words are the building blocks of a sentence, articulated groups are, so to speak, whole prefabricated parts. Examples are: parce que (because), pourvu que (so long as), etc. These are ready-made formulas where separate words have formed a conglomerate conveying a single meaning. These agglomerations occur naturally, because words do not exist in isolation, they are always used in certain word-complexes (cf. ES: ch. XVII). The process whereby meanings are melded together, accompanied or not by a merger of forms, is constantly at work and affects even the articulated groups themselves. Cependant, for example, did not originally mean ‘however’ or ‘nevertheless’; ce pendant was an adverb meaning ‘during that time’. But being frequently used to enumerate two concomitant facts and to oppose them, it now has become a conjunction meaning ‘however’ (cf. ES: 188/168). This could be regarded as a case of contamination, although Bréal does not use this term here. The standard example of contamination is the evolution of the markers of negation in French (cf. ES: ch. XXI). In old French negation was marked by Latin non → ne. For emphasis, words like pas, point, mie were added (not a step, not a point, not a crumb), of which only pas and point have survived. Being constantly used in relation with the negative marker, they have contracted a negative meaning, and in modern spoken French pas alone is used as the negative marker. This is an example of the evolution of syntactic elements through contamination. The central point in Bréal’s treatment of the evolution of syntax, however, is the emergence of grammatical categories or parts of speech, such as adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions etc. Conjunctions, for example, first had a full and concrete meaning, but lost it through their specific uses in a sentence: The German word weil, ‘because’, is an ancient substantive dragged into the class of conjunctions. The form used to be die wîle, die weile, ‘as long as’. Luther uses it in this way, and Goethe too, who loved the language of the people, often employed it. But the word was transferred from the conception of time to the conception of cause, as happened also with the Latin quoniam. At present weil gives the impression of an abstract word indicating the motive of an action. (ES: 205/186) Whereas prepositions and conjunctions are a quite recent acquisition of language, Bréal believed that the personal pronoun was created at the origin of language (cf. ch. 8), that it constitutes, in fact, the oldest grammatical category: I believe this to be more primitive than the substantive, because it demands less invention, and because it is more instinctive, more easily explained by gesture. We must not therefore allow ourselves to be led astray by the appellation ‘pronoun’ (pro nomine),…In my opinion pronouns are, on the contrary, the most ancient portion of Language. How

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could the me have ever existed without a designation by which to express itself? (ES: 207/187)* * One can detect here the influence of Bopp and especially Grimm who wrote: ‘The lever of all words seems to be the pronouns and verbs. The pronoun is not only, as its name could make us believe, the representative of the noun, it is virtually the beginning and starting point of all nouns. Just as the child whose faculty of thought has been awakened pronounces “I”, I find explicitly acknowledged in the Jadschurveda, that the primitive being says “I am I” and that man when called answered “that’s me”’ ([1851] 1911 2nd edition, 281f).

Bréal also stresses another aspect of pronouns, that will become very important in chapter 8. From another point of view pronouns constitute the most versatile part of Language, since they are never definitely attached to one entity but are perpetually travelling. There are as many I’s as individuals who speak. There are as many thou’s as individuals to be addressed. There are as many he’s and it’s as there are real or imaginary objects in the world. (ES: 187f./207) In chapter XXII, Bréal explains the evolution of relative pronouns, the article and auxiliaries. Relative pronouns have evolved from demonstratives, or just deictical gestures. Being deictical in origin, they have become anaphorical (cf. HM: 228). Just like Whitney and Wegener, Bréal relates the emergence of relative and interrogative pronouns to demonstratives. He gives an example from the Vedas: ‘“Quod sacrificium protegis, id ad deos pervenit”. Jam ja nam paribhūr asi, sa deve u gacchati’ (ES: 230/207f.). And he offers the following comment: We shall be asked the reason why the relative proposition is thus launched before the chief one. I believe that we have here a semantic fact of which examples are to be found in other families of languages. By the action of the mind an interrogation must be established, with the result that the two propositions form the question and answer. This is probably the reason why a large proportion of the Indo-European languages make the one pronoun fulfil both the interrogative and relative functions. (ibid.) Again one has to note Bréal’s insistence on the role of thought and intelligence in the evolution of language, just as Wegener had done in 1885. This belief is even more strongly expressed in his final comment on relative pronouns: The creation of a relative pronoun is therefore one of the capital events of the history of language; without a word of this kind, every idea possessed of any force, of any completeness, was impossible. But this creation was obtained by the slow conversion of one of those numerous pronouns which served to accompany a gesture in space. So we here find the human mind patiently forging the instrument of which it is in need.

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(ibid. 230–1/208) By transforming the demonstrative pronoun, thought also forged itself another syntactical tool: the article. Other grammatical tools, such as the copula être and the auxiliaries, such as avoir, have evolved from words with full meanings, such as to stand or to possess. To close this brief excursion in the domain of syntactic evolution one has to quote Bréal’s following statement: The advance (progrès) is obvious to all eyes. The words which were, so to speak, shut up in themselves, are gradually linked with the other words of the phrase. And the phrase itself… appears now a work of art possessing its centre, its lateral parts, and its dependencies, now an army on the march, with all its subdivisions in connection with and in support of one another. (ES: 220/199) Compared to lexical semantic change, syntactic change is a rather slow and invisible process. But neither process is ‘natural’. Both are the product of the speakers’ and the hearers’ use of language, the only real cause being the intelligence and will of human beings. In the next two chapters the speaker will be the central object of attention: what s/he does with language, which speech act s/he performs, and what s/he does to language, that is how s/he recreates it all the time.

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Chapter Seven LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY In his article on Whitney as a forerunner of semiotic thought, Bailey summarizes Whitney’s conception of linguistic creativity. He observes that Whitney’s central insight, which emerged mainly through his confrontation with Max Müller, was that fixing thought in language is central to the creative principle of human sign systems: ‘Unlike the instinctive signs of animals’, writes Bailey, ‘human semiotic processes involve individual creativity mediated by the social requirements of acceptable communication’ (1978:72). As Whitney himself says: ‘Man is capable of acquiring everything, but he begins in the actual possession of next to nothing.’ And: ‘There is no plausibility in the suggestion that he should have begun social life with a naturally implanted capital of the means of social communication—any more in the form of words than in that of gestures’ (LGL: 289). Human creativity, in language or otherwise, is based on the exploitation of general cognitive faculties. It is something different from what linguists in the twentieth century have come to understand by ‘linguistic creativity’, which had been reduced by Chomsky to the rule-governed production of new sentences. But human beings deploy their creativity in more than the creation of new sentences, they mainly use their creative powers to ‘make sense’, as Sampson pointed out in 1980. It is no accident, then, that he refers to Whitney in his chapter on the creative view of the mind (cf. Sampson 1980:15ff.). Preconditions for the exercise of linguistic creativity are the arbitrariness and conventionality of signs, as well as the inevitable lack of ‘fit’ between words, worlds, and thoughts. We can rely on neither a natural endowment of speech, nor on a natural tie between words and things. Language has to be created. LANGUAGE-MAKING Important factors involved in linguistic creativity are: the individual speaker, the thought or contents s/he wants to communicate, and the means s/he employs to achieve that end. These are either, in the pre-linguistic state, gestures and sounds, or in the linguistic state, the old material of accumulated conventional signs and habits of language-use. In executing the intention to communicate, the speaker enters into the process of ‘namemaking’, of which ‘language-making’ is the unintended result (cf. LGL: 144). There is nothing mysterious about this creative act, no hidden supernatural force has to be postulated. Human action, the adaptation of means to ends, is enough. The ultimate force underlying language-change is no other force than that of the cumulative effects of individual voluntary actions (cf. 145ff.). Individual creativity suffices to create and change language, a structure of such intricate complexity that it was once believed that only an omniscient designer could have created it. There are no ‘organic’ forces at work

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either, chemical, physical, or biological, which were believed by others to underlie that ‘crystallization’ of speech, called language. The mysterious source of the creation and change of language lies solely in the mind and action of the speaking individuals (cf. LGL: 140). The act of name-making is essentially based on ‘choice, involving the free working of the human will’ (LGL: 143). We choose what we want to say, we choose the means (words, sounds, gestures, etc.) by which we want to communicate our thoughts. The only thing we cannot choose is the language we have learned to use in our youth. This description of the process of name-making has important philosophical implications: Whitney denies that there is any natural link between sign and thing signified. The tie is entirely conventional; it is an arbitrary link of pure mental association. Bréal says in similar vein that the process of name-making is one of simple improvization (cf. ES: 194/172). Whatever name we invent for a thing or conception, it will be used as long as it is intelligible to others. Any sign that is grasped, used, and survives in the general usage is a good sign: ‘Virtually, the object aimed at is to find a sign, which may hence forth be linked by association closely to the conception, and used to represent it in communication and in the process of mental action’ (LGL: 140). This is the reason why the child who learns a language is not worried by etymologies: s/he learns any arbitrary sign s/he hears. The same is true for every ordinary practical and purely opportunistic language use: We have had to notice over and over again, above, the readiness on the part of language-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie. This is one of the most fundamental and valuable tendencies in name-making; it constitutes an essential part of the practical availability of language. (LGL: 141) The demotivation of signs (if ever there was a motivated sign), their arbitrariness, is essential for the ready, unreflected use of language and for its unhindered, arbitrary, evolution. For this reason Bréal compares words, or better signs, to pure numbers, or values, or mental money by which we cash in our thoughts; the less we are reminded of their etymological value, their percentage of gold or other natural material, so to speak, the better they suit our mental algebra. The only constraint on language-use and language-development is that the coins must have a mutually understandable, negotiable, value (cf. SL: 1009f.). The associative, arbitrary tie between sign and thing signified must be unbroken and the sign must be integrated into a system or a language, an analogously based linguistic network. If all signs were totally isolated from each other, they could only be learned, remembered, and understood with great difficulty, and it would be almost impossible to create new signs. But language as a system of signs and a system of analogies allows the creation of new signs by the analogical application of old material to new uses according to traditional models. In this way creativity is not entirely free, not an irrational outburst, but a systematic exploitation of the possibilities provided by language. Another important factor, without which linguistic creativity could not exist, is the non-identity between thought and language. Thought and language are independent of each other, there is even, as will be shown in more detail when dealing with Bréal, a perpetual discrepancy between language and thought (cf. Whitney LSL: 408ff.). This

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discrepancy pushes the speaker to ever more linguistic innovations in the search of ‘meaning’, it also accounts for the other creative process, that is the creative way in which a hearer goes about interpreting utterances. All these points—name-making as practical, intellectual creativity, the arbitrariness of signs and the inevitable loss of etymological meaning, and the integration of signs into a system of analogies, patterns, and models—are also treated by Bréal. For Bréal, too, the problem of linguistic creativity is intimately linked with the issue of the relationship between thought and language, and the progress of both. We have already noted his conception of signs as coins for thought. In another article, Bréal uses a different comparison: language is an object of art, or better it is itself an artist (with an invisible hand!) having its own secret working procedures: Language is in its way a work of art, which has its own proper procedures and its professional secrets. It does not represent the world, but the impression that the world makes upon him who speaks. Contrary to painting or sculpture, it is an art where everybody contributes his share of collaboration and tries to improve the instrument. The generations are all united: millions of human beings have to permeate the words with thought and feeling, words that the writer uses without even thinking to ask himself where they come from or from whom he got them. (HM: 211–12; my emphasis) That is: words do not represent things, they are the signs of accumulated victories of thought over matter, and the more artificial the better. Hence for Bréal, language-use, or meaning in a dynamic sense, is a creative act of intelligent adaptation of intelligible means to intelligible ends. For him too the act of name-making (cf. ch. XVIII of the Essai: ‘How names are given to things’) is one of individual and original creation, though based on old material and on traditional procedures of word-formation—but these too are only the accumulated product of individual creations. The life and growth of language is based on invention and repetition. The original work of a language-user does not only consist in creating entirely new words, but in giving new use to old procedures of word-formation, inherited, for example, from Latin. Compared to lexical borrowing, this is something like grammatical borrowing, followed by entire assimilation and integration into the language system (cf. Bréal 1868a). Bréal’s comparison of language with art or algebra (SL: 1010) provides some clues to his conception of the arbitrariness of signs: it is in some ways more a conception of diachronic ‘arbitrarization’ than of static arbitrariness. In Bréal’s eyes, signs become liberated from their etymology and their originally motivated use, thus liberating thought from all quasi-natural ties: the ‘progress consists [precisely] in leaving their starting point’ (ES: 197/176): The more the word is detached from its origin, the more is it at the service of thought: in accordance with the experiments which we make [with our experiences, BN], it is restricted or expanded, specified or generalised. It accompanies the object which it serves as label through all the events of

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history, rising in dignity or descending in the scale of opinion. At times even it passes over to the very opposite of its initial acceptation; and is better adapted to its many parts the more completely it becomes a mere sign…. the actual and present value of a word exercises such a power over the mind that it deprives us of all feeling for the etymological signification. (ES: 196f./175f.) Elasticity Both Whitney and Bréal stress the fact that a language does not represent the world, but is used to communicate our thoughts and to act upon the world and other human beings. As such an instrument of thought and action a fixed, precise, and inflexible language would be of no use. It would not be able to keep up with the progress of thought and the changes in our needs and preferences. It could not express our thought in all its variety, complexity and fluctuation. If language is to keep in step with human thought, one basic precondition has to be fulfilled: its signs must be elastic. ‘In proportion as the experience of the human race increases, Language, thanks to its elasticity, acquires new meaning’ (ES: 273/245). One can say that language-use, or making sense, is the action of filling old bottles with new wine: ordinary language, which has to suffice for the expression of our universal knowledge, dispenses for good reasons with this scientific rigour [it is not a precise nomenclature], and, without aiming at an impossible order, it allows us to put new ideas into the elastic frames inherited from former ages. (IL: 12) This elasticity of verbal significance, this indefinite contractibility and extensibility of the meaning of words, is capable of the most varied illustrations. (LSL: 105) Elasticity on the level of meaning—the precondition of semantic change—is as vital for the constant change of language as the morphological procedures of analogical wordformation, mentioned above, and as the varied ways of combining words, provided by syntax. The basic pattern of the elastic adaptation of old signs to new uses is, as Whitney indicates, contraction and extension of meaning; or as Bréal calls it, restriction and enlargement of meaning. But how is it possible that the hearer understands words that are, so to speak, always out of proportion? Through their insertion in the co-text of the sentence and in the context of the situation, a concept to which we shall return in Part two: One fact which dominates the whole subject is that by a necessity, the reasons for which will appear, our languages are condemned to a

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perpetual lack of proportion between the word and the thing. Expression is sometimes too wide, sometimes too narrow. We do not notice this want of accuracy because, for the speaker, expression adapts itself to the thing through the circumstances, the place, the moment, and the obvious intention of discourse. At the same time the attention of the hearer, who counts for half in all Language, goes straight to the thought behind the word, without dwelling on its literal bearing, and so restricts or extends it according to the intention of the speaker. (ES: 119/106) Each speaker’s intent, were he called upon to explain it fully, would be found to agree with that of the rest; only his uttered words directly signify a part, and leave the rest to be filled in by the mind of the hearer. …we do not and cannot always precisely communicate what we are conscious of having in our minds, and [that], of what we call our expression, a part consists merely in so disposing a framework of words that those who hear us are enabled to infer much more than we really express, and much more definitely than we express it. (LSL: 409, 412) The disproportion between language and thought incites the speaker to be creative and inventive, and it requires of the hearer a creative interpretation of the speaker’s utterance, using linguistic and extra-linguistic resources. This dependency of meaning on discourse and context has already emerged when we presented Bréal’s conception of polysemy, a phenomenon to which we shall now return. Ellipsis and polysemy Whereas the elasticity of words makes possible the easy growth or contraction of the word-meaning, in the limits set by comprehension and by the linguistic value-system as a whole, there are two other correlated phenomena, studied by Bréal, and hinted at by Whitney, that are essential to the evolution of language. The first is polysemy. It can be regarded as the reproduction of a word through the propagation of its offspring, or the adaptation of the meaning of a word to the different environments in which it is used (cf. ES: ch. XIV). The second phenomenon is ellipsis. It is either a secondary phenomenon related to polysemy: for example, when House of Commons becomes through mutilation or ellipsis House, and is still understood in context, the word house as such has become polysemous (cf. ES: ch. XV). Or it is related to the surplus of thought, necessary to understand the meaning of certain morphemes: an example would be the different meanings of the suffix -ship in lordship, hardship, etc. (cf. Bréal 1868, who uses the example of the French suffix -ier meaning different things in pommier, armurier, etc.). One could almost speak of morphological polysemy. It might better be called, as Bréal does in 1868, ‘idée latente’, or the hidden meaning, the latent idea, of words and wordforms. Whereas polysemy spreads meanings over context, ellipsis, in this sense, goes in the opposite direction, it gives words and sentences depthmeaning. Aarsleff has described this phenomenon in the following way:

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In addition to the manifest signs we call words, there are others that are just as important, though being ‘invisible’ they have been ignored by linguists in recent generations. Bréal was of course reintroducing one of the basic concepts of grammaire générale, subaudition or ellipsis, which he chose to call ‘latent ideas’. (1982:387f.) In both instances, the speaker relies on the creative, interpretative effort of the hearer. In the case of polysemy s/he adapts the word to the context, in the case of ellipsis s/he fills in the gaps by inferences drawn from the context. Whitney expresses a similar insight in this way: we have often had our attention directed to the imperfection of language as a full representation of thought. Words and phrases are but the skeleton of expression, hints of meaning, light touches of a skilful sketcher’s pencil, to which the appreciative sense and sympathetic mind must supply the filling up and colouring. (LSL: 407) As Bréal writes: ‘The mind penetrates the matter of language and fills all its gaps and crevices’ (IL: 31). Words do not transport meaning between speaker and hearer, they are catalysts or instructions that make meaning emerge by tapping the already existing knowledge (cf. Moore and Carling 1982; also chapter 11, p. 176). All you can do is to provoke my thought, and this provocation will sometimes be all the more effective when it appears to be less explicit [cf. metaphor]. Just like an allusion is often enough to call up a world of feelings and memories, language does not always need to spell out the relations that it wishes us to understand: the slope of discourse alone allows us to arrive where the intelligence of the other wishes to guide us. (IL: 20) Words are not exact models of ideas; they are merely signs for ideas, at whose significance we arrive as well we can;…Sentences are not images of thought, reflected in a faultless mirror; nor even photographs, needing only to have the colour added: they are but imperfect and fragmentary sketches, giving just outlines enough to enable the sense before which they are set up to seize the view intended, and to fill it out to a complete picture. (LSL: 20) Words do not ‘map’ things, and sentences do not picture states of affairs. Speakers and hearers map words with thoughts according to their function, in a creative and active way: ‘That is to say, language, wherever one examines it, shows a thought that stays intact while the expression shrinks or is abbreviated. In spite of the starts and jolts to

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which these ellipses put the history of words, one has to see in it the normal and legitimate work of intelligence’ (ES: 172/154). CREATIVE THOUGHT AND LATENT IDEAS Bréal had stressed in 1866, in ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, that wordforms have functions and that, for this reason, it should be of interest to the historical grammarian (as opposed to the comparative grammarian) to analyse not only the changes in their external forms, but to study the changes in their use. And use is, as we have seen, meaning. The study of the functions of words is therefore the domain of semantics. In his course on ‘Les idées latentes du langage’, given in 1868, Bréal emphasizes this fact again. He even goes so far as to evoke as his ally the Grammaire Générale, so much despised by comparative philologists, and initially by himself. General Grammar, the model of which is the grammar of Port-Royal (1660) had as its goal to show the relationship between the operations of the mind and the linguistic forms. This is precisely Bréal’s topic, only he will arrive at different conclusions. In ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, Bréal had stressed that the meaning of a word can survive a change in its form, and indeed even profit from it. In ‘Les idées latentes’ Bréal wants to show that the meaning of a word or a sentence, or even a suffix and its form, are not always in exact correspondence. Wordforms give no direct access to meaning, they only give meagre hints, or minimal instructions, on the basis of which our intelligence, our mind, must construct meaning, make sense. That this is so should not be regarded as a shortcoming of language. On the contrary, if words represented exactly what they mean or refer to, as in some scientific nomenclatures, language in the normal sense would die, would no longer be usable, it would lose its function. Linguistic signs have to be vague and flexible for their users, so that they can be adapted to the wide variety of thoughts the users wish to express. This also means that linguistic signs are not created once and for all; they are constantly recreated and changed by those who use them. During this process word forms gradually absorb, so to speak, meaning from their co-texts and contexts by contamination (cf. the example of the word operation). But what is more, they also integrate into their meaning the function they have in a sentence. A form becomes congruent with its function (cf. chapter 11). Thus we arrive at another topic dealt with in the lecture on latent ideas: syntax. Up to now we have only mentioned the importance of latent ideas for the comprehension of individual words. In this respect Bréal’s theory is compatible and comparable with Whitney’s suggestions concerning the imperfect representation of thought in language. But Bréal’s main argument for the postulation of latent ideas has to be found in his reflections on syntax and grammar. ‘The whole of syntax’, he writes ‘was at first in our intelligence, and if later on differences in form have somehow separated the parts of speech, this is because language shows at last the traces of the intellectual work it represents. The unity of the proposition and that of the sentence, no less than that of the word, is the product of intelligence’ (IL: 28–9) To start with let us look at a minimal fact of ‘syntax’: the juxtaposition of two words: e.g. headache pill, fertility pill, heart pill (cf. Aitchison 1987:154). These examples are

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used by Jean Aitchison, not by Bréal, but they illustrate perfectly what Bréal had in mind in his 1868 article. Headache pills demolish headaches, fertility pills produce fertility and heart pills aid the heart…. As these examples show, words can be put together in so many superficially illogical ways that one wonders how on earth people manage to understand one another when this is done afresh, as in ‘You can have the owl bowl’, meaning ‘You can have the bowl with the picture of the owl on it’. (Aitchison 1987:154) She claims that ‘human word comprehension requires active matching skills, in which preexisting information has to be combined with information extracted from the context’ (ibid.: 155), or in Bréal’s words: ‘It is this mental work of subordination and association which we are obliged to do, and for which language does not offer us any help, that Mr Adolphe Régnier has appropriately called the interior syntax’ (IL: 17; cf. HM: 209) Other primitive examples of syntax are the locutions or articulated groups of words (cf. HM: 200f.), which we have already mentioned in chapter 6, p. 125. (cf. Sampson 1980:147ff. on the emergence of syntax from such primitive groups). But a language is not only composed of words and groups of words, it needs a mechanism to assemble, arrange, and fix the order of these materials. This mechanism is grammar. And what is important in grammar? The mind: ‘What we are dealing with is the element that is not expressed in language and with the influence that the mind exerts in the long run over the form’ (HM: 205). As in the case of single words or groups of words, we need the mind—or as Bréal says, intelligence—to make sense of whole sentences. Grammar, in the sense of a hierarchical structure of ‘rules’, is the most economical way, the most highly evolved instrument, that allows us to make sense of what we hear. It liberates us from single, item-by-item ad hoc decision-making about meaning. The grammar of a language determines as much the value of a sign as its relation to the thing or the thought. To understand the sentences ‘Mary loves John’ and ‘John loves Mary’, we have to know more than John and Mary; we have to know the positional value of these names in the sentence, and ‘without us being aware of it our mind has added to the sentence some sort of invisible grammatical mechanism’ (HM: 206). ‘Nouns’, ‘verbs’, etc., that is the categories of grammar or the parts of speech, are, however, not eternal or God-given. They are, like everything in language, the product of a long evolution, and they change all the time according to new needs. Syntax thus belongs as much to the domain of la sémantique as do words (cf. HM: 206). As much as Bréal agrees with Adolphe Régnier (1855) and his concept of an internal syntax, and with Humboldt and his concept of an inner language-form, he strongly advises us not to take this internal syntax or grammar or form as a gift of God or of nature. He makes it quite clear that grammatical categories are not innate. The internal syntax varies from language to language and it is modified through the ages. It has evolved out of intelligent languageuse and it continues to change according to it.

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This is a gradually made acquisition, brought about by the common effort of a whole nation, which consolidates itself through usage and finally imprints itself in our mind in such a way that we normally are not aware of it, and that we can only abstract from it momentarily after a certain struggle. To trace back this intelligent acquisition, as much as the available documents allow us, and with the help of the observation of other language families, is a task which belongs essentially to semantics and which is of particular interest, because in this case meaning dominates and subjugates the matter of language. (HM: 207; my emphasis) Syntax is the final victory of mind over matter. It was ten years later, in his Essai, especially Part III ‘Comment s’est formée la syntaxe’, that Bréal fulfilled this programme. He shows the gradual development of adverb, preposition, and conjunction, young categories, the evolution of which is well documented, and of the substantive, adjective and verb, old categories where the evolution is less easy to ‘observe’. All these grammatical tools are created by the intelligent adaptation of old material to new uses. Mental grammar, Bréal, Port-Royal, and Humboldt We need to answer the question: In what respect does Bréal’s mental grammar differ from that of the representatives of ‘General Grammar’? Bréal claims that mental grammar has its own laws, which are like the laws of an artist, and not, as the partisans of General Grammar believed, the laws of logic: As to the logic which links the different parts of a sentence together, it is not always the logic of things. The rules of syntax have undoubtedly their reasons: but these are grammatical reasons, not reasons stemming from the nature of things. These are somehow the beauties of craftsmanship which only those who are initiated notice. When I say to a child in French ‘Ote ton couteau, j’ai peur que tu ne te blesses’ [Move your knife, I am afraid that you might hurt yourself], I use the negation ne which is not logically necessary and which even disconcerts logic. Language is an art which has its own rules and secrets, just as the painter has his procedures for grouping together the persons in a painting or to give the illusion of perspective. (SL, 1009; cf. ES: ch. XXIV) Bréal’s conception of mental grammar, of internal syntax and latent ideas, owes less to General Grammar than to Humboldt, whom Bréal mentions frequently in his work. While agreeing with the philosophers of the eighteenth century who argued that language was a social institution and words signs, Bréal would not accept a static, logicistic view of language, defended by some. Evolution and transformation for him remain the keys to unlock the mystery of language, even syntax:

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Our linguists have sometimes thought in the way of the 18th century theoreticians, as if, at a certain moment, nothing had survived from the preceding ages, and as if language had been created in one stroke and according to a unique model. We shall add some words by Wilhelm von Humboldt…: ‘As every language gets its raw material from the preceding generations, the intellectual activity that creates the expression of ideas is always turned towards something which is already there: it does not produce, it transforms’. ([1876a] 1877:385f.; my emphasis) When one reads Robin’s summary of Humboldt’s thought, one cannot escape seeing direct similarities with Bréal: Humboldt’s theory of language lays stress on the creative linguistic ability inherent in every speaker’s brain or mind. A language is to be identified with the living capability by which speakers produce and understand utterances, not with the observed products of the acts of speaking and writing…. The capacity for language is an essential part of the human mind;…The articulatory basis of speaking is common to all men, but sound only serves as the passive material for the formal constitution or structure of the language (innere Sprachform). Humboldt’s innere Sprachform is the semantic and grammatical structure of a language, embodying elements, patterns and rules imposed on the raw material of speech. In part it is common to all men, being involved in man’s intellectual equipment; but in part also the separate Sprachform of each language constitutes its formal identity and difference to all other languages…. The latest potentialities of each language’s innere Sprachform are the field of its literary artists, and, more important, the language and thought of a people are inseparable. (Robins [1967] 1979:174f.) In fact, the parallels between Humboldt’s and Bréal’s thought had already been noted by Steinthal, who highlighted them in his review of Bréal’s article on latent ideas: The idea which it presents in detail is not new; one can find it not only in Wilhelm von Humboldt, but also in Pott and G.Curtius. But it is not enough that ideas are occasionally expressed, they must be confronted with facts. This is what Mr. Bréal does. What we are dealing with is simply the following: One should not regard the meaning of a word as the mere sum of what is actually expressed in the root and the affixes; there exists always another kind of determination, which is only added in thought, without any counterpart in the sounds…. In short, every grammatical form contains something which is not expressed in the sound: une idée latente, which only gives it its real linguistic value…. How little says the sound and how much does it give us to understand. (Steinthal 1869:282–3, 284)

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According to this view, speaking and understanding are not acts of encoding and decoding, but the creative stimulation of thoughts between interlocutors by the means of sound.

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Chapter Eight LANGUAGE AND THE SPEAKING SUBJECT In 1896, shortly before Bréal published his Essai, Victor Henry had written a pamplet entitled Antinomies linguistiques, where he tried to unravel the mysteries of languagechange. This treatise, like Bréal’s Essai (cf. Bréal’s reference to Henry, ES: 5, n. 1), was directed against organismic interpretations of language-change, such as those proposed by Schleicher. But it was also written against Bréal’s conception of language-change, its assumptions, rather than its conclusions. Henry realized that Bréal had swung too much to the opposite extreme when he proclaimed that language-change has to be explained by reference to conscious, voluntary action. But although Henry wants to introduce the unconscious into linguistics, he is totally on Bréal’s side in so far as his concern with the speaking subject is concerned. Ten years before the publication of the Antinomies, Henry had reviewed the second edition of Hermann Paul’s Principien (1886), in which he expressed his enthusiasm for this book, a book that finally put an end to organismic speculations and, like Bréal in France, gave pride of place to the speaking subject. Paul destroys the belief in the real existence of the language, the word, the syllable, the phoneme, and finally the oversight of the fundamental principle which dominates the whole science: there is only one objective reality in language, the speaking subject at the moment he speaks, and a discontinuous series of variable phenomena, the sounds that escape his mouth, at the precise moment when they escape it. (Henry 1887a:8) In this respect Henry, Bréal, and Paul are in agreement: the speaking subject is the motor of language change. But what role does s/he play precisely? Here, in the answer to this question, the most obstinate antinomies in linguistic science emerge. Henry claims that all facts of language-change—phonetic, morphological, as well as semantic and syntactic—are brought about unconsciously, but by an unconscious that has depth, so to speak (see especially Henry’s essay on ‘martian language’ or a case of glossolalia (1901)). He proclaims that ‘language is the spontaneous work of a subject that is absolutely unconscious as to the procedures which he uses for that effect’ (Henry 1901:5). Bréal, on the contrary, holds that consciousness plays a role in language, especially semantic change. Whitney and Paul, finally, think that both—or better, neither—play a role. Whitney thinks that the driving force of change is the need to communicate and that this force ‘works both consciously and unconsciously: consciously, as regards the immediate end to be attained; unconsciously, as regards the

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further consequences of the act’ (OLS: 355). Paul expresses similar thoughts (cf. [1880] 1909 4th edition: 32; cf. Keller 1983:38). Both use the Darwinian theory of gradual evolution through variation and selection as an analogy to describe the process whereby individual variations spread through a community of speakers and a language, but they do not fall into the traps Schleicher had fallen into. Language-change is the long-term (and as such ‘unconscious’) result of short-term linguistic actions, actions that are conscious in so far as they are directed towards the goal of making ourselves understood, but unconscious in so far as the procedures are concerned, by which we adapt the inherited tool to our private ends. These procedures (metaphor, metonymy, etc.) can be made conscious and used consciously in literary discourse, advertising, and so on. The longterm consequences of our individual and isolated actions are necessarily unknown, they are structured by the ‘invisible hand mechanism’ (cf. Keller 1985). In the context of language-change, the status of the speaking subject is a controversial one. Not so in language use. And it is on this level that Bréal observes and describes some processes that have escaped the attention of Henry, Whitney, and Paul, but which will form the focal point of Wegener’s investigations into the life of language. Bréal’s concern with the speaker had begun even before he started his linguistic career. In his studies of Greek and Latin myths he had shown a particular interest in the myth-making and changing powers of the language-user (notably in Hercule et Cacus ([1863b] 1877:1–162). When he devoted himself entirely to linguistic matters, he did not abandon his belief in the human being as language-maker. His lecture on the form and function of words (1866) was conceived as a rejection of naturalistic and mechanistic conceptions of language and as a promotion of an entirely humanistic description of language-use, where the speakers give forms functions and breathe spirit into matter. His functionalist view of language is closely comparable to Wegener’s, and beyond Wegener to that of the neo-Firthian tradition of linguistics in England. One has only to read Monaghan to see the link: ‘The language token is not a thing with a form and a function. It is a form which functions in context. It has no meaning, but is used to mean’ (1979:186). In his article on latent ideas, Bréal developed these insights even further. The analysis of Bréal’s article on latent ideas has shown that for him the relationship between thought and language is not one of simple representation. Language neither represents the world nor the speaker’s thoughts as such. In the act of speech the world is transformed so as to become ‘speakable’ and the speaker’s thoughts are transformed so as to become expressible. Language is not a mirror, but a—sometimes—very clumsy tool. This obvious disadvantage is heavily outweighed by the advantages of language. Its imperfect capacity of faithful representation is superseded by its perfect adaptability to any communicative need and to any situation of communication. Instead of being a precision instrument, good for one purpose only, that breaks down if you want to apply it to anything else, language is an all-purpose tool. The speaker can use it freely for any purpose, be it the most personal or subjective one—s/he can express him/herself through language. But s/he can also use it to act upon the world and upon the consciousness of his/her fellow human beings. These two ways of using language will now be treated under the headings ‘the subjective element in language’ and ‘speech acts’.

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THE SUBJECTIVE ELEMENT IN LANGUAGE Since Emile Benveniste’s article (cf. Benveniste [1958] 1966:258–66/English transl. 1971:233–30), subjectivity in language has been a persistent theme in French linguistics, especially the strand of thought called ‘theory of enunciation’. However, one can scarcely find reference to Bréal’s early, if not first, contribution to this prosperous field (but cf. Delesalle 1984; Nerlich 1986a). As Sebeok writes in his Foreword to a volume of Semiotica dedicated to Benveniste, Benveniste has opened up ‘the closed circuit of language versus speech act to account for actual language practice as opposed to abstracted language practice, and the subject of enunciation as the locus of its production’ (Sebeok 1981:2). Benveniste was also one of the first linguists to see a relationship between linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, a relationship richly exploited in post-Saussurean and post-structuralist linguistics in France. He also made a (quite peculiar) distinction between semiotics and semantics (cf. [1969] 1974:43–66), the study of language as a system (whose basic unit is the sign), and the study of language in action (whose basic unit is the sentence). He also differentiated between significance (the potential meaning of a sign in a system) and sense (or discourse-meaning), a distinction that resembles the one made by Bréal between sense and value. One feature of the linguistic system that needs these distinctions for its explanation are the pronouns, those small words that shift the conception of language as a static object towards language as an activity (cf. Benveniste [1956] 1966:251–7/1971, 217–22; cf. Jakobson on shifters, [1957], 1963: ch. IX). Benveniste writes that the ‘installation of the subject’ in language creates ‘the category of the person’ (1971:227). Thus we have ‘I’, a reality of discourse alone, and, on another more existential level, the constitution of the subject itself: ‘it is in and by language that man becomes subject: because language alone lays the basis in reality, in its reality which is that of being, of the concept of ego’ (1971:223). From language emerges the permanence of consciousness. ‘We hold that this “subjectivity”, be it phenomenological or psychological, is but the emergence in being of a fundamental property of language. Who says ‘“ego” is “ego”’ (1971:224). In this sense language does not represent thought, it creates the thinking subject itself. This linguistically founded ‘ego’ is itself part of a fundamental polarity: you and me, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’. Its foundation lies in dialogue. I can say ‘I’ and you can say ‘I’, I can say ‘you’ and you can say ‘you’. In the act of enunciation we appropriate language, the linguistic system, for ourselves, and bring it to life in our use of pronouns and other indexical signs. We anchor language in reality, the space constituted by the here and now, the me and the you. This aspect of the life of language had first been studied by Bréal in his chapter on the subjective element in language (ES: ch. XXV). He analyses the markers of subjectivity in language such as pronouns, the use of certain adverbs, like fortunately or perhaps, and the use of modes and tenses, as well as the emergence of particular grammatical features, such as the dual. His theory of the pronoun shows a slight influence of Jacob Grimm (cf. the quotation at p. 126, note) and his theory of the origin of language. Like Grimm, Bréal believes that pronouns, those subjective elements of language par excellence, are the oldest elements of language. They lie at the beginning of language in general and at the

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beginning of language-acquisition. Both assumptions are obviously false. In languageacquisition the use of pronouns occurs at quite a late stage, and this should also be the case in so far as the evolution of language itself is concerned (the only indicator of subjectivity would probably have been the tone of voice; cf. Wegener US). This had been seen quite clearly by Whitney who wrote that the child can only ‘grasp and wield the grosser elements of speech’ (LGL: 13), he is learning words in relation to things, and apprehends singular and plural, persons, tenses and moods only later. So with the pronouns. He is slow to catch the trick of those shifting names, applied to persons according as they are speaking, spoken to, or spoken of; he does not see why each should not have an own name, given alike in all situations; and he speaks of himself and others by such a name and such only, or blunders sorely in trying to do otherwise—till time and practice set him right. (LGL: 13–14) But the falsity of his basic assumptions about pronouns does not diminish Bréal’s merit in pointing out the peculiar status of pronouns in the lexicon, their existential value for the speaker and their paradigmatic value for a theory of language interested in the conversion of language into speech. Pronouns are paradigmatic cases for a dynamic theory of meaning. All words ‘change their meaning’, take on a particular value, when used in discourse—pronouns are only the most extreme examples of this phenomenon. Bréal describes this phenomenon in language-acquisition: ‘The pronouns me and you, my and your, which, in changing mouths, transfer themselves from one to the other, contain its [the child’s] first lesson in psychology’ (ES: 267/240). Language is permeated by the speaking subject’s activity on all its levels. Bréal points out that this is particularly evident in the use of some adverbs, such as no doubt, perhaps, etc. (ES: 256/230). When I say that the cat is, hopefully, on the mat, or that the cat ‘perhaps’ is on the mat, I do not only make a statement, describe a state of affairs, but I give a personal opinion concerning the things described. The same is the case for the use of some modes, such as the optative in Greek (cf. ES: 259f./233) (cf. in modern French the use of the subjunctive). However, the subjective element has its most powerful influence on the expression of the imperative. What characterises the imperative, is that to the idea of action it unites the idea of the will of the speaker. It is true that in most forms of the imperative it would be vain to seek for syllables which specially indicate this will. It is the tone of voice, the expression of countenance, the attitude of body which are charged to convey it. (ES: 261/235) The analyses of the imperative, or better of the speech act type ‘order/command’ will be made the subject of an article by Philipp Wegener, published posthumously in 1921 (see chapter 11, pp. 185–90). Over and above its intellectual function of representing thoughts or the world, language has thus an expressive or affective function. These terms (intellectual/affective)

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are not used by Bréal himself but by Charles Bally, another forerunner of the modern theory of enunciation (cf. Bally 1932). He called ‘stylistics’ what one would nowadays call theory of enunciation or in English-speaking countries, speech act theory. SPEECH ACTS At the end of the chapter on the subjective element in language Bréal writes: We begin to see from what point of view man ordered his langu-age. Speech was not made for purposes of description, of narration, of disinterested considerations. To express a desire, to intimate an order, to denote a taking possession of persons or of things—these were the first uses of Language. (ES: 264f./238) These uses of language are what one would call (after Austin 1962) speech acts with particular illocutionary forces. In his review of Darmesteter’s book (1887), written ten years earlier, Bréal had expressed a similar view: ‘language does not only speak to reason: it wants to move, to persuade, it wants to please’ (HM: 194). These are all, again from the Austinean point of view, perlocutionary acts, describing the effects speech acts have on the hearers. And even ten years before that article, in 1876 (cf. 1877:347–74), Bréal’s conception of language had embraced these pragmatic aspects of language use: Logic and grammar must certainly always live in harmony; but these two sciences are not identical. Grammar contains a number of ideas that logic doesn’t. In logic thought presents itself always in form of a judgement; Peter is a man, Peter is mortal. This is how logic speaks. But language, other than judgements, contains promises, doubts, orders, questions, exclamations. It would be a sterile enterprise to try to reduce all these sentences to the simple form of the judgement. ([1876b] 1877:361f.) This interest in pragmatic aspects of language use, Benveniste shared with Bréal too. He first came upon these uses when dealing with ‘subjectivity in language’. ‘By saying I believe (that…) I convert into a subjective utterance the fact asserted impersonally, namely, the weather is going to change, which is the true proposition’ ([1958] 1966, 264/1971). I believe here has a function similar to the use of adverbs such as hopefully, or perhaps. But the subjectivity in language manifests itself even more forcefully in the use of certain verbs, such as I swear, I promise, I guarantee, I certify (cf. [1958] 1966:265/1971:229), verbs that when used in the first person, singular, indicative, present tense transform utterances into performatives. We do things with these words: Now I swear is a form of peculiar value in that it places the reality of the oath upon the one who says I. This utterance is a performance; ‘to swear’ consists exactly of the utterance I swear, by which Ego is bound. The

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utterance I swear is the very act which pledges me, not the description of the act that I am performing. In saying I promise, I guarantee, I am actually making a promise or a guarantee. (Benveniste [1958] 1966, 265/1971, 229) What Benveniste calls subjective enunciation is comparable to what Austin calls performatives, and what Benveniste calls non-subjective enunciation to Austin’s constatives. It was only in 1963 that Benveniste became acquainted with Austin’s work, when he wrote an article devoted to a colloquium that had been held in Royaumont in 1958, devoted to ‘analytical philosophy’, and where Austin had participated (cf. Benveniste [1963] 1966:267–76/1971:231–8). Bréal never went beyond his rather programmatic remarks about language as action, he never developed a theory of speech acts as such. There was however a linguist, with much in common with Bréal and Whitney: Philipp Wegener. Wegener consequently thought through the implications of such statements as: language is made as much for statements as for the expression of desires, threats or questions. For Wegener language is an instrument of communication and action, used by human beings in complex situations. What Bréal and Whitney left unfinished, he accomplished: he established a theory of linguistic interaction in the full sense of the word.

Part Two WEGENER Speech is human intercourse, and only those linguistic processes which we as listeners have understood can serve us in our speaking. Therefore, the problem of the understanding of speech must be in the foreground of a philological investigation. (Wegener US: 182/272)

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Chapter Nine WHITNEY AND BRÉAL, PAUL AND STEINTHAL, AND THEIR RELATION TO WEGENER In many respects Wegener’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885, US), the main body of writing to be studied in this part of the book, forms the third panel in the triptych of Whitney’s, Bréal’s, and Wegener’s theories of language and communication. Wegener’s work constitutes to some extent the continuation and completion of Whitney’s LSL (1867) and LGL (1875), as well as Bréal’s articles on the form and function of words (1866) and on latent ideas (1868). All three linguists had a functionalist view of language and an instrumentalist view of words; Whitney and Wegener even showed signs of a behaviourist approach to language. All three worked in a framework of ‘pragmatic and semantic evolutionism’, that is to say they gave pragmatics primacy over semantics, and semantics primacy over syntax and phonetics. The nature of language is action and interactive communication, and this nature provides the reasons and rationales of language-change. More specifically, Wegener and Whitney regarded language as a purposeful and goal-directed activity, and language-change as a function of communication. There are also some overlaps in more detailed aspects of their theories, such as the analysis of the evolution of the relative clause, for example. As for Bréal, Wegener shared with him a conception of the evolution of syntax in general. They also held similar views on the importance of language comprehension for the study of language in general, and they both used the form/function distinction to explain some forms of language-change. Bréal’s analysis of the subjective element in language has some features in common with Wegener’s study of the description of actions from the point of view of the speaking subject, especially the explanation of linguistic connectives. They also agree upon a critical view regarding the Lautgesetzfrage, and deny the value of a sharp distinction between physiological and psychological factors in the explanation of language-change (cf. Osthoff 1879), the former explaining sound change, the latter changes in meaning. Bréal and Wegener believed that phonetic as well as semantic changes have to be explained psychologically (cf. Wegener’s review of Paul [1880], 1882). Bréal writes: ‘It’s in intelligence, in the brain, that we must look for the primary cause of phonetic changes. The word is some sort of vocal image imprinted in memory, the reproduction of which is entrusted to our organs, which have their own tendencies’ (1897:7). Whitney did not share Wegener’s and Bréal’s enthusiasm for psychological explanations. What Bréal, Whitney, Wegener, and Hermann Paul had in common,

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however, was their quest for the basic principles that govern the ‘life and growth’ of language. DIRECT INFLUENCES AND UNINTENTIONAL SIMILARITIES Some of the parallels and overlaps in Whitney’s, Bréal’s, and Wegener’s thought can be explained by direct influence; some are, or at least seem to be, of a more accidental nature. Wegener, who was often criticized for scarcely referring to already existing literature, mentions Whitney twice, once in his review of Paul (1880), once in his Untersuchungen. In the first case he reports that Whitney had often accused German linguistics of its obsession with detail at the expense of a more general study of language, the nature of language-change and the principles that govern the history of language (cf. Wegener 1882:301). All this has been achieved, or at least touched upon, by Hermann Paul in his Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). In the Untersuchungen Wegener mentions Whitney alongside Paul, Steinthal, and Lazarus, as one who has had some sound and sober insights into the nature of language (US: 6). Whitney’s influence on Wegener can therefore hardly be disputed. What about Bréal? Wegener denied that he ever read his 1868 article on latent ideas, despite the fact that Paul mentioned it in his book, which Wegener reviewed. But more importantly (for anyone can overlook a footnote), Bréal’s article on latent ideas was reviewed by Wegener’s admired teacher and colleague, Heymann Steinthal (cf. chapter 7, p. 142.). Wegener’s denial can be found in a reply to a review of his own book by Ziemer (1886), who had suggested this parallel (cols 181, 184) (cf. Wegener 1886). However, the similarities between Wegener and Bréal remain striking.

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REAL INFLUENCES We have mentioned that Wegener and Bréal shared an interest in the psychology of language and its application to sound change, a stronghold of the naturalistic and mechanistic explanation of language-change. This is exactly the point on which Wegener and Paul, otherwise so alike in their conception of language, disagree. This disagreement first came to light in Wegener’s review of Paul (1880), where he writes: ‘that phonetic change is influenced much more by psychological factors than Paul and Osthoff believe’ (1882:313). In his review of Wegener (US), Paul in turn wrote that he could not agree with Wegener’s account of sound change (1885: col. 1230). The points on which they agreed strongly were the importance of the speaker and the hearer and their relationship of reciprocity and interaction in the construction of meaning and as driving forces of meaning change. The role of psychology, underestimated in some aspects by Paul, was stressed forcefully by Steinthal. As we shall return to Paul’s and Steinthal’s relationship to Wegener in chapter 10, it is sufficient to mention here the following points. Wegener and Steinthal attributed great importance to the factor of language comprehension, explaining not only the emergence of language itself, its transmission from generation to generation, but accounting for the speaker’s awareness of him/herself, language, and the world (cf. US: 63; Steinthal 1871:75f.). They both agree upon the fact that the effect of speaking (or at the earliest stage, sound production) becomes the purpose of the use of language. When one reads Bumann’s summary of Steinthal’s thoughts on this subject, one cannot help thinking of Wegener’s theory of language understanding in situation: Language is thus based from the outset not only upon the association of the reflex-sound with the perception, but, through the view of the whole series (perception, the desire attached to it, the sound that emerges from it and its effect on the hearer, and on the other hand; the sound heard, attention to the caller, hypothesis about the desire derived from the momentary situation and affirmation of this hypothesis through the success of the action) the merely mechanical association of the sound with the perception is understood. But now the one has recognized the other, he has interpreted not only something objective, but something subjective. With the interpretation of the sound starts the interpretation of the subject, the own and the other. (Bumann 1965:77)

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Chapter Ten THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND Whitney and Bréal were two of the most distinguished figures in the field of linguistics in the nineteenth century. Whitney will be especially remembered for his aggressive criticism of his fellow-linguists and his battle to establish a general science of language, Bréal will be remembered for his more peaceful but forceful restructuring of French linguistics on the German model and his later attempts to break the German supremacy in the linguistic field. Compared to these scholars, Philipp Wegener was neither aggressive nor ambitious. He was satisfied with his work as a simple secondary school teacher throughout his life. In short he was unremarkable. Until recently he has been regarded as a somewhat eccentric linguist, quoted by some, but without ever being in the forefront of linguistic research. However, since the early 1980s, that is to say about a century after his major publication (1885), he has become the idol of some historians of linguistics, especially those who are interested in pragmatics (Rehbein 1977; Bhattacharya 1978; Nerlich 1986a), psychology of language (Knobloch 1984; Thümmel 1984) and the study of communication (Juchem 1984, 1986; Hülzer 1987). In this chapter I shall briefly outline his life and work and then discuss his early reception in Germany, England, and France. Those who want to know more about Wegener, especially his role in the psychology of language at the turn of the century, would do well to read the excellent Introduction to a new edition of Wegener’s Untersuchungen by Clemens Knobloch. I have based my description of Wegener’s life on the obituary by Albert Leitzmann (1916), but have incorporated some of Knobloch’s findings. WEGENER’S LIFE AND WORK Philipp Wegener was born in Neuhaldensleben near Magdeburg on 2 July 1848, and died there on 15 March 1916, in the same year that Bally and Sechehaye published Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Bréal had died the previous year. Thus with Wegener we reach the end of an era. He studied German philology, philosophy, and comparative linguistics at Marburg and Berlin from 1867 to 1871. Among his teachers were the historian Johann Gustav Droysen, the classicist Ernst Curtius, the philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, the general linguist and psychologist of language Heyman Steinthal, and the German scholar Moritz Haupt. He was especially interested in problems of syntax, a topic only sporadically treated in the nineteenth century.* He wrote a thesis on Latin syntax De casuum nonnullorum graecorum latinorumque historia (1871), but he was also a keen

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observer of the living languages and dialects (cf. Wegener 1880). As a specialist in this field, he contributed to the Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, edited by Hermann Paul (cf. Wegener 1891). In his article on German dialectology, written in 1880, he proposed a better distinction between sign (Lautzeichen) and sound (Laut) (1880:453). He also suggested that dialect grammars should be written, consisting of the following sections: phonetics and physiology (Lautlehre), morphology, a logical and psychological study of accents, the influence of written language on spoken language, and a study of the lexicon from a psychological and stylistic point of view. In this last part he wished that dialectologists paid special attention to the different choices of words in different settings, in formal, ordinary, emotional, comic, etc. discourse (1880:472). This article points in the direction of Wegener’s future studies and interests: a psychological and situational analysis of language. His studies under Steinthal, as well as the reading of Steinthal’s and Paul’s major contributions to linguistics (Steinthal 1871; Paul 1880; cf. Wegener’s review 1882) pushed Wegener even more * But cf. Brugmann’s book on the syntax of the simple Indo-European sentence, published posthumously in 1925, which shows striking similarities to Wegener’s conception of the sentence, especially in his posthumously published article on the one-word sentence (1921, WS), which had appeared in the issue of the Indogermanische Forschungen that announced Brugmann’s death in 1919.

towards a psychological study of language. In 1885, he finally published his Untersuckungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of the Life of Language) (title of the English transl. Speech and Reason, 1971), a book that hides great treasures. It was based on two lectures given in 1883 and 1884. He intended to publish a sequel to the Investigations, but his duties as a teacher prevented the realization of the ambition (but cf. Wegener 1911, mentioned by Knobloch). His last contribution to the field of general linguistics appeared posthumously in 1921, under the title ‘Der Wortsatz’ (The one-word sentence). Wegener proposes here a solution to the hotly debated problem of the ‘sentence’. This article too has a particular appeal to the modern linguist, as it contains a detailed analysis of some speech acts (in the Austinean-Searlean sense of this term) in situation, what Wegener himself calls a ‘willkürlicher dialogischer Sprachakt’ (WS: 15)—a voluntary dialogical speech act. In his insistence on dialogue, he shows a more advanced understanding of communication than some modern speech-act theorists. HIS RECEPTION IN EUROPE During the 1880s, the philological scene began to change in Europe, under the cumulative influence of such works as Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875), Bréal’s Idées latentes (1868), Steinthal’s Abriss (1871), Paul’s Principien (1880) and Wegener’s Untersuchungen (1885). For an attentive observer it was possible to detect a slow change from the study of facts (the atomistic study of words, for example) and the writing of fiction (the study of the origin of language for example) to a realistic analysis of language and change of

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language. * Brugmann, one such observer, mentions this change in the Introduction to his short comparative grammar (1904: VI), pointing especially to the works of Paul, Wegener, and Sievers (1893, 4th edition). This situation explains why Wegener’s book from the start was well-received in Germany (cf. Ziemer 1886; for a more critical account, cf. Bruchmann 1887). He was only forgotten with the advent of structuralism in the 1950s. Franz Misteli wrote an appreciative review in 1886, in which he pointed out that the major merit of Wegener’s book * Cf. Leskien (1897), who uses this term in his obituary of Whitney.

lies in the fact that he regards language not only as a product of the passive memory or the association of ideas, but as an ‘expression of the whole psyche’ (Misteli 1886:267). Unlike some of his colleagues, Wegener did not want to study isolated words and sounds or compare languages. What he wanted was to find an answer to the more fundamental question: ‘How do we understand language?’ (cf. the title of Part II of his book, English transl. ‘Understanding speech’, in: Abse, 1971), a question that had also intrigued Bréal (IL; ES: ch. XIV), and one that is in some sense the counterpart of Whitney’s question ‘why do we speak as we do?’ (LSL: 10) Like Whitney and Bréal, he paid more attention to the speaker and hearer and to language use. Going beyond Bréal and Whitney, he studied the speaker’s and hearer’s co-operation in the construction of meaning in situation, that is, he studied language as ‘situated action’ (cf. Suchman 1987). He was followed by Hermann Paul who, in the subsequent editions of the Principien, incorporated not only Bréal’s but also Wegener’s ideas and applied them to semantic change (cf. Paul 1880/1909, 4th edition: 78, note 2; cf. WS: 2). Brugmann, an admirer of Whitney, and the leading figure in the neo-grammarian movement, cites Wegener in his short grammar (cf. above), and in his posthumously published book on syntax a note is added by the editor Wilhelm Streitberg that refers to Wegener’s posthumously published article (cf. Wegener WS). But it is not inconceivable that Brugmann had himself known and read Wegener’s article just before his death in 1919 and proposed it for publication in the Indogermanische Forschungen. It is not known if Brugmann read the article, but his definition of the sentence is astonishingly similar to Wegener’s. He wrote that a sentence is not always a logical judgement (Urteil), consisting in subject and predicate (cf. ES: ch. XXIV): Such sentences, regarded as linguistic units, cannot really be separated from interjectional expressions such as oh! ugh!, or from exclamations consisting in formed words such as fire!, requests such as help! or come in!, expressions of agreement or disagreement such as yes and no, beautiful, splendid, questions such as so? etc. All these are linguistic expressions which, uttered in certain situations [my emphasis], and used as instruments of communication in the commerce between individuals [my emphasis], have the same degree of closure and completeness in view of the purpose of communication as the tree is in bloom or if you want to, I don’t mind. (Brugmann 1885:1–2)

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However, he does not mention Wegener, but Sievers as his source—an influence he shared with Wegener (cf. Wegener 1882:302). Sievers’ definition of the sentence reads as follows: We want to understand here [where he deals with the relation between sentence and word] by a sentence (Satz) every independent utterance (Äuβerung), i.e. every mass of sounds which is complete in itself, and which in a certain context, be it of the discourse or of the situation per se, is intended to express a certain sense (thought or feeling) and is understood in a certain sense by the hearer. (Sievers 1893, 5th edition: 229) In his paper Brugmann describes the evolution of the sentence from the interjection to the full-blown sentence, and in chapter 7 he tackles the problem of the form of the sentence according to the basic functions of the soul (a part of the book that is based on an article published in 1918) (cf. ibid.: 187ff.). This chapter deals with what we call nowadays speech acts, just as Wegener does in WS: Man uses language to express feelings of desire and frustration (Lust, Unlust) [for these term cf. Wegener US], wishes, requests, orders, complaints, he rejects ideas and proposals, warns, threatens, curses, expresses doubts, asks questions and answers questions, makes claims, casts judgements upon events, objects and persons. (ibid.: 187) He also points out that such speech acts are interpreted in the situation of the conversation (ibid.: 188f.). (We shall come back to this topic when we describe Wegener’s treatment of the sentence as speech act.) Apart from linguists, Wegener was also read by psychologists of language, such as Karl Bühler, whose functional model of language is entirely compatible with Wegener’s perspective. Bühler, who worked on a German version of speech-act theory, associated himself with Wegener in his opposition to Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology in general and his psychology of language in particular. (For Wegener’s critique of Wundt, cf. below p. 187; cf. Bühler 1934/1965:22 passim.) Not only was German proto-pragmatics influenced by Wegener’s analysis of speech and action, the same holds true of English proto-pragmatics, represented especially by Malinowski (1923), Gardiner (1932), and Firth (1957). Firth wrote: Among the linguists mentioned in the Supplement [Malinowski had published his article on ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’ as an appendix to Ogden and Richards 1923], the leading German comparatists are missing, but W. von Humboldt, Sweet and Jespersen are there, and notably Wegener (1885), to whom Malinowski owed his early notions of the Situation. Wegener was one of the first to propound what he called the Situationstheorie [German in the original].

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(1957:94f; quoted by Juchem, ms.) Inspired by Wegener, Malinowski had introduced the expression ‘context of situation’ into English linguistics, which was fruitfully exploited by the so-called London School: But the widened conception of context of situation yields more than that. It makes clear the difference in scope and method between the linguistics of dead and living languages. The material on which almost all our linguistic study has been done so far belongs to dead languages. It is present in the form of written documents, naturally isolated, torn out of any context of situation. (Malinowski 1923:306 quoted ibid.) The English linguist who owed most to Wegener was Sir Alan Gardiner who dedicated his book The Theory of Speech and Language to him as ‘a pioneer of linguistics’. (His copy of Wegener’s book is now in use at the Taylor Institution, Oxford.) Just like Bühler, he develops a functional or instrumentalist theory of language, the main function of it being not the expression of thoughts, but the use as an instrument of communication and action: ‘Imagine an angry traveller hurling words of abuse at an uncomprehending porter, or a judge pronouncing sentence of death upon a murderer. Shall we say that these persons are expressing thought?’ (1932:17). Like Paul and Wegener he incorporates the hearer into his theory of language: ‘the act of understanding is one which demands considerable mental effort’ (1932:64), and he analyses a ‘simple speech act’ (1932:71) such as ‘rain’ as collaboration in situation, the situation having, in accordance with Wegener, three dimensions: ‘of presence, of common knowledge, of imagination’ (ibid.: 51). In this analysis he distinguishes, again following Wegener, between the wordform as ‘a fact of language’ and the word-function in the ‘acts of speech’ (ibid.: 144) (cf. also Bréal FF), and finally, he distinguishes between meaning and ‘thing meant’, or the actual referent. This distinction was highly relevant in Wegener’s theory of language-change where the movement between the intentional directedness of the speech act towards a thing-meant and the conventional use of a word to name it make up the whole motion of language-change. That Wegener had a really strong influence on English and American thought can be further pointed to by reference to Suzanne K.Langer (1942/1980): Langer based her treatment of metaphor on Wegener; by referring to Blumenthal’s treatment of Wegener in his Language and Psychology (1970); and finally by mentioning Bhattacharya’s article on ‘The context of language use’ (1978), an article based on the English translation of Wegener’s book published in 1971, by D.W.Abse, as part of a book on ‘Language disorder and mental disease’.* In the introduction to his translation, Abse stresses another aspect of Wegener’s thought. Apart from his pioneering work on the sentence and the speech situation, Wegener also put forward a highly interesting theory of word-meaning and change of meaning, which will be described below, p. 181, Abse says: It is remarkable how perspicuously Wegener deals with the semantic movement and the development of general meaning through metaphor. He

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emphasizes the initial embedment of metaphor in the context of situation which must be understood in order to grasp the meaning of the spoken word. He accomplished this intellectual feat independently of Michel Bréal (1897), whose ‘Essai de Sémantique, Science des significations’ became so well known and enhanced so considerably the serious study of meaning. (1971:21f.) * The translation of Wegener’s book in this context might account for some of its mistakes.

One can say that Whitney, Bréal, Paul, and Wegener all laid the basis for the most serious theory of semantic change hitherto proposed.* * Wegener’s reception in France was, as far as I know, non-existent. His approach however has strong parallels with some currently debated theories of language; cf. Grunig on ‘La fuite de sens’ (1985), Authier-Revuz on heterogeneity (1982), Ducrot (1984) on polyphony. These theories are generally attached to the ‘théorie de l’enonciation’, a movement initiated by Benveniste, that has parallels with speech-act theory. The strongest congruence between Wegener and French thought can be found in Ducrot, who writes in his book Le Dire et le dit (1984) that a sentence (‘phrase’) ‘means only something as part of an argumentative chain’ and of a situation. Ducrot’s instructional theory of enunciation has also been foreshadowed by Wegener: ‘all that the phrase says [e.g. O is too F], is that you have to determine it if you want to constitute the meaning of the utterance (énoncé), that is if you want to discover the “something” that the speaking subject wants to communicate. In this case again the meaning is not something like the sum of the meaning and of something else, but a construction, achieved by complying to the specific instructions given by the meaning, and taking into account the situation of discourse’ (1984:182).

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Chapter Eleven THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE DEFINITION OF LANGUAGE AND SPEECH Wegener, like Whitney, uses the terms ‘life’ (cf. the title of Part I of his book: ‘On the life of language’; English transl. ‘On the life of speech’) and ‘growth’ (US: 3/121) of language. However, in Wegener’s work these terms have lost their controversial character that so annoyed Whitney, they have also shed all ties with any speculations about the origin of language. After having introduced the term of Sprachleben, Wegener immediately goes on to qualify it and free it from all metaphorical ambiguities. He advises linguists to use this term carefully, and to keep constantly in mind that ‘language’ is only a collective name, an abstraction, standing for certain muscular movements with which a large number of people belonging to a social group associate a certain meaning or representation. In his 1921 article he differentiates more clearly between language and speech: When we talk about the activity of speaking [my emphasis], we mean by it first and foremost the articulated sound production of a single individual and we consider the speaker as opposed to the hearer or as an isolated individual. But if we talk about the language [my emphasis] we mean by it the articulated sound-production which is produced in a similar way, or at least with essentially the same acoustic effect, by all individuals capable of speech and members of a bigger community, and which is understood by all speaking members as the meaningful expression of psychical processes. (WS: 1) This definition anticipates almost exactly Saussure’s definition of langue as collective and passive, and parole as individual and active. The only difference is that Wegener regards language as active (better, dynamic) as well. He never uses the metaphor of language as a ‘storehouse’ for example. ‘Language’ is, as we have already said, clearly perceived as an abstraction, embracing the social interactions of speaker and hearer. Just like Saussure, he had some difficulty with the definition of the sentence, which was for him, as for Saussure, an element of speech, not language. It is a functional, not a structural unit. According to this conception the one-word sentence is a sentence, its function is that of a sentence. It is not a mere quasi-sentence. (We shall come back to this problem.) Language in general, or speech in particular, is an action and as such part and parcel of the psychological and physiological life of man, entertaining a close connection with

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all the rest of the human organism (cf. US: 3/121). This definition of language as a phenomenon of the mind and the body, incorporated into the global structure and actions of the human organism is something Whitney always defended, especially against Müller and Steinthal. As Leskien wrote in his obituary of Whitney: ‘Among all others Whitney has taught most energetically that language is not an independent, autonomous organism, but that it can only be understood as an integral, undetachable part of the life-expressions of human beings’ (Leskien 1897:94; cf. Wegener US: 3/121). However, to say that language is a psycho-physiological phenomenon is not enough. The proper definition of language is, again in accordance with Whitney, that of an instrument of communicative interaction, its goal being mutual influence, its nature intentionality and purposefulness, its setting dialogue (cf. WS: 1–3). To say that the nature of language is interaction also solves the problem of the origin of language, to which Wegener alludes very briefly; language originated in human interaction (cf. WS: 1). Although Wegener only touches on the phylogenesis of language, his treatment of the ontogenesis of language is all the more complete. The chapter on language-acquisition as that of the gradual learning of language in context and in interaction would have pleased Whitney. LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION Wegener’s theory of language-acquisition is a remarkable one, not only because of its originality, but also because it contains in nuce all the elements for his theory of language-use, language-understanding, and language-change, giving thus a theoretical unity to Wegener’s global theory of the life of language, a life that has three dimensions; ‘language-birth’ in the child, ‘language-life’ in the adult’s use of language, and ‘language-growth’ in its transformation in time. In none of these dimensions are the speaker and hearer as active agents absent. In the final instance, the life of language as a whole is a continuous process of active problemsolving (cf. Bhattacharya 1978:723), based on the speaker’s and hearer’s inferences and their mental schemata and use of analogies. This problem-solving interaction demands some efforts on the part of the child and the mother but is done more and more automatically and mechanically by adults. After the initial training, language has become a technique or practice, as Wittgenstein would say (cf. US: 73ff./179ff.; cf. Wittgenstein 1954:§199 passim). The language-learning of the infant is an unconscious process, achieved in the context of certain situations where sensations of desire and pain, pleasure and annoyance, comfort and discomfort are dominant features, for example, hunger or thirst. In situations such as these the child gradually learns to use, for example, the word milk, that is, to associate specific sound movements or imitations of certain phonetic images with sets or groups of thought (cf. US: 9/126). But the child always hears words as parts of sentences (ibid.: 11/127), and in the first attempts to speak s/he uses words as sentences (ibid.: 14/129). These two phenomena are most important. Regarding the word as part of a sentence, or sentences, Wegener writes that certain words are stressed, stand out, and thus gain in importance, especially in the situation of pleasure and pain. As Abse notes:

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Philipp Wegener was already aware in 1885 that communication is much more than words of speech. Besides conventional forms of movement, he was concerned with all those which convey individual strivings and feelings. Moreover, long before the present development of techniques of phonemic analysis of living speech, his theory comprised and demanded a closer study of accentual phenomena—stress, pitch, loudness, and other aspects of tone of voice. Indeed, Wegener, in showing how language is rooted in the traffic of men with one another, concerns himself with the coordinating value and mutual influences of the entire extralinguistic series of behaviors with the words of speech. (Abse 1971:3) The paradigmatic instance of this co-ordination of action and mutual influence is the mother–child dyad. What is learned there about the importance of tone and context will be exploited in adult life in every act of speech. Regarding the use of words as sentences, Wegener emphasizes that the child tends to use those words of importance heard in the sentences and to which the mother had given relief by tone and stress. S/he uses these words to alleviate the feeling of hunger or distress, and here again the tone (US: 16/131) is important. The whining tone of the infant, first alone, than used in combination with the word milk, for example, indicates the goal of the utterance which the mother has to infer. With the right tone milk could thus have the ‘illocutionary’ force of ‘I want milk’, ‘I see milk’, etc. But how did the child learn the importance of tone in the first place? Before using words the child cried and this crying was interpreted by the mother in certain ways—associated with some present state of affairs, some past event or some future wish, and she reacted in specific ways.* Having grasped this relationship between crying in a certain way and the effect this has on the mother’s subsequent action by operant conditioning, as one would say nowadays, the child can now use a word purposefully, even in the most imperfect way, with a crying tone and this will be an imperative for the mother, urging her to help the child. Progressively, the child will learn to imitate the sound-image for milk more and more perfectly, and later replace the imperative tone by the use of an imperative sentence. Exposition and predicate The most important part of Wegener’s treatment of language-acquisition is the one concerning his theory of exposition and predicate. * In this way, the child also learns the importance of tenses (cf. ibid.: 13–15/128–30).

When a child says milk, one has not only to infer the function from the form (via attention to tone, situation, gesture, etc.), but one has also to infer the subject of the sentence, which, in this case, is not expressed. Only at later stages of language-learning do children learn to say ‘I’ (US: 16/131). In the early stages the mother infers by mere empathy or sympathy that the child wants somebody to fulfill her/his needs. We shall come back to Wegener’s ethical theory of language later on. For the moment the following quote from Abse will be sufficient to throw some light on the ethical aspects of communication:

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Wegener states that the listener comprehends by means of conclusions drawn from the situation, from the speaker’s indications, and from the various expressions of the speaker’s emotion. In a basic (originally maternal) form of communication the listener infers the speaker’s state of suffering (or discomfort) and feels motivated by the ethical force of sympathetic feelings to help the suffering one in the inferred manner. (Abse 1971:53) In our case the subject is indicated by the tone and inferred by the mother according to the assumption that the child only knows and cares about her/his own pains and pleasures (US: 16/131). Now, these inferences are as important in full-grown adult language as they are in child language. Wegener distinguishes between what he, at first, calls the ‘logical subject’ and the ‘logical predicate’ of a sentence (US: 20/132), that is, between the known and the unknown, the given and the new. As the term ‘logical subject’ already has a specific meaning in linguistic theory (that of the ‘agent’ in a sentence, e.g. ‘the tree was seen by the boy’—here the boy is the logical subject), Wegener prefers to call the logical subject exposition. An exposition in Wegener’s sense of the term is everything which prepares the ground for the appearance and the understanding of the predicate. Whereas the exposition normally prepares the verbal ground or the co-text, the situation of communication provides the non-verbal ground or the context. So as to construct meaning from an utterance, the hearer has to draw conclusions from the nature of the predicate itself and the context of the situation. This context of situation has three dimensions. It consists in the situation of perception (including actions, gestures, etc.), the situation of remembrance or consciousness (including prevailing interests and ideas) and the cultural situation (cf. US: 22–7/135–9). The exposition or situation should provide—verbally or non-verbally—what one needs to know in order to understand the predicate or utterance. However, the relationship between situation and exposition is a complicated one: the more ‘situation’ there is, the less verbal exposition we need (US: 27/140), the more complex or opaque the situation, the more difficult it becomes to provide an adequate exposition (cf. novels, old texts, texts from different cultures, etc.) (ibid.: 28f./140f.). The predicate, on the other hand, which is what the speaker wants to say or communicate to the hearer, is the new, interesting, important, valuable, precious (ibid.: 32/143f.). It is normally stressed: One of Wegener’s major findings is that the logical predicate (that segment of the sentence which carries more emotional tone, the accentuated part, often but not necessarily coinciding with the grammatical predicate) is the key element of the sentence. All that remains is the exposition, a concession to the listener to secure his understanding. (Abse 1971:6) Keeping the right balance between exposition (help for the hearer) and predicate (the speaker’s ‘news’ s/he wants to communicate) would thus be a most valuable communicative skill, one that structures all our communicative interaction. If rightly adjusted, this balanced interaction can be regarded as co-operation. If the balance is

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destroyed, the result is misunderstanding or communicational conflict. This adjustment of the speaker’s intention to the hearer’s capacities goes on all the time, in every communication, but it also accounts, diachronically, for the evolution of grammatical structure or syntax: Wegener…expounds the growth of explicit statement from a matrix of key words, eked out by pointing, in the setting of an obvious situation. Wegener shows us a natural process unfolded by the necessity of being adequately understood, and by the need to avoid misunderstanding. All discourse, he sees, involves two aspects, namely the context and the novel statement in this context that the speaker wants to communicate. Where the physical and social context does not give sufficient direction, the novel assertion would remain ambiguous. The speaker is soon impressed by the need to expound this context verbally in order to clarify the meaning of the novel predication. The lone noun or verb is supplemented with demonstratives, then inflections arise…the ‘word-sentence’ being insufficient, is thus supplemented by more and more words. Appositives, then relative clauses, and so on, are added as corrections of deficient presentations. Grammatical structure evolves by emendation of an ambiguous expression. (Abse 1971, 19–20; cf. also Knobloch 1984, 53–4) The evolution of syntax is thus conditioned by the fact that the speaker has to correct his utterance proactively or retroactively in view of the hearer’s knowledge of the situation, his expectations, and beliefs. The relative clause, for example, emerges from the demonstrative and the relative pronoun from an answer to an anticipated question (cf. US: 34, 37). Whitney had already described this process as follows: Alongside the conjunctions, the relative pronouns are by far the most important of the connectives by which we bind together separate assertions, making a period out of what would otherwise be a loose aggregation of phrases. They are pronouns with conjunctive force…. We only put into expression the necessarily implied mental act when we say ‘my friend, who had had a fever from which he was not quite recovered, was looking ill’;…the relatives, which though not indispensable, are an agency we could hardly afford to miss, are only a comparatively recent acquisition. They are demonstratives and interrogatives put to a new use; employed first with pregnant allusion to an antecedent, then gaining such allusion as an essential element. The construction was in a forming and doubtful state in our earliest English, and who and which won their relative force only considerably later. (LGL: 95–6)

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HOW DO WE UNDERSTAND LANGUAGE? The topic of language-understanding was of prime importance for Wegener, as the following quote from Part II of the Investigations shows: All known human language is articulated. It is not a sum or aggregate of natural tones and sounds. All sounds truly related in a language are formed by a great number of individuals guided by a general norm. From living with other individuals, the accomplished speaker has learned the way in which to form these sounds and how to connect groups of them to form a definite meaning. However, we learn a language by becoming accustomed to associating a certain sound image with a certain meaning, and by comprehending the association of these sound images together to form a definite sense. But who has told us what meaning should be associated with those groups of sounds? No one; because no one can tell us unless he first understands the language himself [i.e. because nobody can be told who does not already speak the language himself]. It is quite clear that linguistic understanding is not dependent solely on the knowledge of the words and their meanings, nor on the knowledge of syntactical forms and their meanings. Otherwise, we would never understand language nor learn how to use it independently. It is thus important for the understanding of the existence and development of language to state clearly which factors and processes make it possible for us to understand language at all, and to investigate in what way these factors gain significance for the formation of language. (US: 63/171) We have seen that the learning of language is based on strategies of problem-solving, that is conclusions drawn from what is said, how it is said, where it is said, and by whom it is said; we have also seen that the evolution of language—even its grammar—is driven by the same strategies arising from the communicative needs and the pressures of the linguistic interaction. It would be astonishing to find that language understanding, or more generally language use, was achieved on radically different grounds. Language understanding thrives on, by now well known, resources: the three types of situation, attention to the speaker-hearer’s expectations, gesture, intonation, the proportional relation between exposition and predicate, and the relationship between form and function, their congruence or incongruence. These sources of inference are most heavily used in dialogue (US: 64/172), in purposeful speech where we do things with words, especially influencing the will of the other (e.g. promise, threat, etc.) (cf. US: 66f./174f.). Words are not mere ‘containers of sound’ (US: 72/178), they are instruments used in purposeful action. In adult dialogue we master the technique almost perfectly, we use the language, the tool, we learned as children, automatically and mechanically (US: 65/173), to achieve specific ends. To achieve these ends most efficiently we tend to use forms that are congruent to their functions (cf. US: 74/180), for example, we use the

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imperative to give an order and do not simply shout a word in an imperative tone. But the use of more and more complex syntactical structures requires in turn a more and more complex inference-help system, so to speak. Tone and stress are no longer enough. This is especially true of narratives or descriptions of action. How do we understand them? How do we understand reported discourse where the immediate situational grounding as a source of inferences is absent? Before we approach this problem, we have to see how language comprehension is achieved in general. Instructions We noted earlier that Wegener proposed a theory of language that relies on the fact that utterances are instructions to the hearer to construct meaning. In Wegener’s view words do not express a substance, they are rather summonses that demand the hearer’s attention and challenge his/her observational powers. They do not so much carry meaning as make the hearer retrieve some facts associated with the sound in his/her memory. These facts are normally memories of the situation in which a word had been spoken before. Only the attentive correlation of the aural sound and the visual input and the associated memories gives rise to an Anschauungsbild, a mental image, which is the ‘substance’ of the word: * As a means of summoning the appropriate situation to consciousness, these words are the linguistic predicates of the situation. We can say that all predicates are ways of indicating or remembering a situation. At first they must be sensed as a demand to * This theory bears a striking similarity to a conception of meaning put forward by Moore and Carling: ‘an understander does not receive information from an utterance, but rather uses the utterance to gain access to information which in some form and to some degree he already possesses. Meaning is thus not, as the container view would have us believe, in language, but rather language serves to tap the existing knowledge and experience of language users in such a way that understanding—to some degree— is possible’ (1982:12).

imagine the appropriate situation or to bring it to view; they must be sensed as an imperative of remembrance. Thus the means of speech for the substance (demonstrative pronoun) is the imperative, or the demand to see or hear something present; the means of speech for the predicate is the demand to remember a situation. (Wegener US: 99/200–1) Once a word is habitually associated with such a mental representation it can be used as a reminder of the situation in which the utterance took place. Once this habit is established, the hearer directly infers the speaker’s intention from the speaker’s utterance. Series of such reminders (words) are sentences, where each ‘reminder’ assumes a specific role, a specific value related to the overall purpose of the utterance. That is, the mechanization of imperatives summoning up remembrances and the integration of words into sentences makes it possible for a sentence as a whole to become something like an instruction for the construction of meaning, executed more or less automatically. Conversely, series of

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words (i.e. sentences) can be reduced mechanically to words. To summarize from Wegener: From this can be discerned that originally there was no phonetic means of speech to indicate a substance. Rather, all means of speech were predicates, that is, means of remembrance by which the familiar situations could be indicated. These situations were of a complicated type in which inanimate bodies, spatial relationships, people, and sensual qualities were all contained. Because of the function of these predicates for a definite purpose, they became indications of certain parts, attributes, or relations of this situation picture. The simplest linguistic utterance begins as an imperative, the command to the listener to remember a situation, with each new word an imperative. Through habituation, fluency, and mechanization of the course of comprehension, these imperative sentences are sensed no longer as sentences, but only in their results as groups of thoughts. Through the conclusion of the listener about the purpose of the speaker, the words attached in a row are formed into a sentence in which the parts have their specific value for the whole. Such rows or sentences can be mechanized again into simple linguistic words. (US: 100/201–2) But instructions would not help if, on the hearer’s side, we did not find some ‘devices’ that help him/her carry out these instructions. Only instructions and the knowledge of patterns, models, or schemata together allow the construction of meaning. Schemata Take, for example, the sentence ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered; cf. US: 105/205). Although the syntactic form does not offer specific clues, we read this sentence as ‘First I came, next I saw, and then I conquered’, that is, we understand it as a chronological series of actions. In the sentence ‘I remained at home and I read’ (ibid.) [better: I stayed at home…], however, we regard both actions as occurring simultaneously. To achieve these various interpretations, the listener or reader relies on the following hints: (1) The meaning of the verbs themselves, a meaning with which the reader has to be somewhat familiar, that is to say that s/he has to have experienced him/herself the actions described (US: 105/205–6). (2) The temporal succession of the linguistic signs themselves (US: 106–206). (3) But most importantly s/he relies again on the distinction between exposition and predicate. In the cases where a sequence of actions is described, the speaker again proceeds by ‘emendation’, correction, attention to the hearer’s expectations, etc., adapting his point of view of the action series to the expectations and experiences of the hearer.

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We frequently indicate an earlier action parenthetically first as a supplementation because it serves as exposition of the action of the predicate; for example [when] (sic) he took off the overcoat, he wore a beautiful jacket [er zog das Kleid aus, er trug einen schönen, dunklen Rock]. We proceed in this manner in all those cases where, by means of supplementary correction, temporal, causal, and concessive subordinate clauses have arisen. These sentence connections can only become subordinate clauses (1) because the listener arranges known actions according to their relationships, (2) because he differentiates between action which is actually valuable for the message, i.e., the predicate of the message, and that which is only a preparatory expositional action. The exposition is not the purpose of the message, but only a serving aid for the predicate, thus subordinate to it. (US: 106/206) Tenses have naturally evolved to make the construction of meaning easier, as well as words indicating temporal relations, such as thereupon, then, now, again, meanwhile, etc. (cf. US: 113/212). If these words help the hearer to construct the action-sequence correctly by filling in gaps of knowledge, there are other words that the speaker has to use when an action unexpectedly changes course, such as but, however, etc. (cf. p. 178 below). Apart from seeing the temporal relationship between actions, the listener also has to construct the specific relationship between subject and verb, verb and object. Wegener gives an example that would have delighted Aitchison (1987) and Moore and Carling (1982): to have a house, a book, a headache, a sharp wit, etc. (114/212); to make mistakes, a table, leaps, etc. (114/213). As to the first examples, Jean Aitchison writes: ‘human word comprehension requires active matching skills, in which pre-existing information has to be combined with information extracted from the context’ (155; cf. chapter 7, p. 138). As to the second series of examples (Moore and Carling use the examples: to put on the television, to put on the gas, to put on some music, etc.; 1982, 184ff.), Moore and Carling write, after having noted that linguists tend to study words in isolation, overlooking their basic variability or adaptability: In assuming that words and expressions have a set of meanings, fully specifiable independently of their occurrence in combination with other units in particular contexts, the container view overlooks one of language’s most fundamental characteristics: the capacity of language users, with a relatively limited vocabulary, to reflect a potentially limitless variety of human experience. The ways in which they do this constitute the true innovative and creative use of language. (Moore and Carling 1982:186) Wegener himself writes that such combinations can only be understood by linking the linguistic meaning to our personal experience of the world. The same holds true for the

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understanding of simple actions ‘executed’ by the subject, such as A eats, writes, lives, hits, etc. (cf. US: 114/213). Language in itself and for itself only gives very meagre hints as to what these combinations or actions mean. The interpretation must be based on conclusions drawn from the context. At the beginning these conclusions might be hard work, ‘are drawn slowly, until habituation mechanizes them; and then the listener and the speaker believe that the supplementations gained by inference are expressed in the words of speech themselves, because the mechanized series of conclusions no longer cross the threshold of consciousness’ (ibid.: 114–15/213). This is not only a theory of the ‘social construction of reality’, but of the social construction of language itself! Construction is the life language. Language does not live and grow according to internal and fixed laws, but because every utterance has to be understood by the listener, because the listener has to construct meaning, a construction for which the speaker provides only the bricks and mortar. The main tools used in this construction are the hearer’s (1) expectations—especially of the (2) purpose of the action and the (3) goal of the action, and last but not least (4) a certain plan or script—Wegener calls it ‘schema’, and the speaker’s attention to these expectations of the hearer (cf. for a modern version of this theory: Schank and Abelson 1977). If somebody says ‘He is digging’ we only understand the description of the action if we understand the purpose of the activities involved in the action, e.g. stabbing into the earth, lifting the shovel, etc. The purpose gives a unity to these activities, turns them into an action. We first recognize and understand actions through the purpose of the activity, so that the activity becomes the purpose of the action. The purpose is thereby the bond by which we condense a series of movements to an entirety. (US: 120/218; emphasis in original) Some activities are just instrumental in relation to the overall purpose. These activities are normally ‘mechanized actions’ (ibid.: 121/219). Another advantage of thinking about the purpose, when observing or hearing about an action, is that it gives the activity a direction towards its completion, a goal (ibid.: 124f./221f.) Take the following example: Thus one relates war was declared, the first battle was bloody…It is not said whether belligerence actually followed the declaration of war; this sequel is assumed as self-evident because the goal of a declaration of war is simply the waging of war. Unless mention is made to the contrary, from the purpose involved one infers that hostilities have been realized. One could almost say with grammatical terminology that the present has been advanced to the perfect…. This expectation originates from the frequent experience that an activity usually continues in a certain fashion. (ibid.: 127/224–5, 120/225)

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However, consider the following case: In the example given above war was declared…, we can continue but it never came to war…, or it came nevertheless…. That is, we say that the listener’s expectation of the actual outbreak of war does not necessarily follow in this case. The speaker should therefore have considerations for the listener’s expectation of a connection between his sentences. (ibid.: 129/225) In the cases described we understand sequences of actions because we know by experience that certain actions ‘causally’ have this or that consequence, and causality seems indeed to be the schema by which we connect most actions (cf. 139f./226f.). Our primary effort in understanding a narrative of actions or events is to construct a satisfying order of events. To do this we must locate or provide two features—temporality and causality. When we recognize something as a story, we regard it as having a temporal sequence based on cause and effect. However weak this schema is (ibid.: 131/227), broken more often than not, we have to know it so as to make sense of actions and the description of actions. ‘Thus that expectation pattern [schema] is only conjectural, and it does not have the character of strict adherence to solid law’ (ibid.: 131/227). Without schemata we would not understand utterances, because language only provides us with some points of reference by which we can proceed to begin the construction of meaning, a little like in a drawing: we first put down some points of reference (cf. ibid.: 138/234), then make a schematic drawing, then fill in the details. Wegener uses the example-sentence: ‘He ploughs the field’. To understand this sentence, we proceed in the following way, and Wegener uses a geometrical comparison, in the manner of Kant:* To give a simile, it is the same as with a geometrical problem: we are not given a complete triangle, but rather three points on a plane [we are given the words he, plough and field] and the demand to construct a triangle [and the instruction to make sense]. Therefore, we ourselves must then find the connecting lines according to our knowledge of a triangle. (US: 138f./234) This knowledge has the form of a ‘schema’ which we superimpose on the points so as to get the triangle (meaning). Wegener describes more complex schemata, sometimes called models in his chapter on how we describe actions. The problem here is at what level to describe actions. We can say ‘he strode out’ but also ‘he raised his right foot, stretched it forward, placed it on the ground, etc.’ (cf. US: 156/250). In certain contexts (a physiology lesson, training after an accident, etc.) a detailed description might be necessary, but there seem to be certain upper and lower limits that should be respected. From reading Wegener one can postulate that there are basically three levels: movements, activities, and actions. Wegener postulates that:

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All mechanized movements, which we assume are also automatic for the listener, will no longer be analysed in their component parts, except for the purpose of making conscious what we do unconsciously and automatically…. Thus, only those actions or activities experienced consciously can be understood by the listener. (US: 158/251, 159/252; emphasis in original) As in the understanding of actions-sequences, we describe actions according to certain patterns, models or schemata (cf. Bewegungsmuster, US: 164). We have, one could say with Johnson-Laird * Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason: ‘In truth, it is not images of objects, but schemata, which lie at the foundation of our pure sensuous conceptions. No image could ever be adequate to our conception of triangles in general. For the generalness of the conception it never could attain to, as this includes under itself all triangles, whether right-angled, acute angled, etc., whilst the image would always be limited to a single part of this sphere. The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere else than in thought, and it indicates a rule of the synthesis of the imagination in regard to pure figures in space’ (quoted by Johnson-Laird 1983:189–190).

(1983), certain ‘mental models’, for example of relations in space, of certain houses, rooms, etc., derived from automatic models of movement, e.g. based on the use of the left and right hand (Raummuster, US: 165/258) (cf. Johnson-Laird 1983, 250ff.). We also have mental models of the normal ‘intensities’ of actions, quantitatively and qualitatively, e.g. a strong cough does not bow trees as does a strong storm, etc. (cf. for similar examples, US: 165/258). These mental models or images of movements, activities and relations form the relative stable molecules for the description and understanding of actions. Thus, as I have called them above, the molecules of activity are the components of action which are always unchangeable, and are always formed according to the same pattern. On the other hand, the larger complexes of these molecules are varied in their composition, but in such a way that the sequence and the transfers from one molecule to another are again constructed to definite patterns. (US: 166f./259; emphasis in original) The patterns for combining molecules of action are again those described above, governed by the presupposition that every action has a goal, a purpose, a cause, and an effect. Such molecules, as the schema for eating or drinking, allow us to understand the description of a Homeric feast, for example, an event which differs markedly from a modern dinner party. The construction of these pictures is a ‘free act of the listener’ (US: 175/255). But what happens if the listener lacks a model or schema for the construction of understanding? S/he resorts to related patterns and in analogy to known patterns, in comparison with known ones, builds new ones. To describe a certain shape we say ‘oval’, a simile with an egg; to describe a distance, we say a ‘rifle-shot away’, which is a

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metaphor for a short time (cf. US: 178/269); to describe the colour of a building we say its ‘grass-green, brick-red’, etc. (ibid.). When writing this chapter, I opened the Observer (28 February 1988) and read the following title of an article on (apparently bad) videos for gardeners: ‘Veni, video, but no vici’. In this case, the example we mentioned already is regarded as a stock-phrase, or as Bréal would say locution, that every gardener understands, whether s/he speaks Latin or not, and the title was modelled on it. The construction of meaning was left to the reader who had to rely on the context and the illustration. This construction of new models according to old ones is, as Wegener says, of prime importance for the study of the development of word-meaning or as it was then called in Germany: semasiology (US: 179/270). In his semantics Bréal has explored exactly these processes: metaphor and analogy, facts that Wegener could only hint at in his book. But he has devoted one very important chapter to the analysis of metaphor, and shown ‘how a figurative designation gradually becomes congruent with its actual function’ (ibid: 178– 90/270f.). SEMANTIC CHANGE Language-acquisition is based on problem-solving in context; so is language understanding or communication. Words in this conception are not static entities, invariants (how could they be, given that they do not express a ‘substance’?) they are not just there to encode and decode thought. They are dynamic entities, flexible instruments that the speaker uses in the framework of a speech situation, embedded itself in a cultural situation. Words constantly interact, or better are made to interact, with each other and with other domains of knowledge in the speaker’s and the hearer’s mind. Words do not carry meaning in themselves, they are invested with meaning according to the totality of the context. They only have meaning in so far as they are interpreted as meaningful, in so far as the hearer attributes meaning to them in context (cf. Juchem 1986:155). According to this view of language, change of meaning is not unexpected. As there are no invariants, variation is the norm, meaning changes all the time (cf. US: 48f./157f.): We must therewith reject the assumption of the uniformity of word meaning…. Therefore, if we use a word within the complex of a sentence, its connection with the other words allows only one part of the group of thoughts which are connected with the word to become conscious. (US: 50/159; cf. Bréal on polysemy; ES: ch. XIV) Given the need for interpretation of any word as part of an utterance in situation, the interpretation of a metaphor has to be considered as only slightly different from the interpretation of any other utterance. We understand the force of a metaphorical utterance on the same principles that we understand the (illocutionary) force of any speech act, that is by drawing conclusions from the speech situation and the situation of consciousness, including certain presuppositions or beliefs common to speaker and hearer. One of the most important beliefs shared by all speakers is that we speak to do something, to influence others, to change their state of consciousness. That is to say, we all believe that

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an utterance has a purpose, that wordforms have a function. In this sense utterances are, as we have seen, orders or imperatives, or instructions to the hearer to make sense. And how to make him/her make sense more constructively than by using a metaphor. Metaphor is one of the primary instruments by which we make new sense of the world, our experience and the language we use to talk about it—hence to change it. How, then, do we attribute meaning to a metaphor, an apparent linguistic nonsense, such as ‘You are a pig’? The person addressed in this way is certainly not a pig! Wegener uses another example (US: 51/151): ‘the war takes fire’ (der Krieg entbrennt) (i.e. the war flares up, in the sense of ‘begins’). What actually happens when we hear this metaphorical utterance is: we understand it immediately as ‘the war breaks out’, which is, of course, another metaphor, a wonderful example for the evolution of language, that Wegener describes in the following. We understand a metaphor through inferences drawn from the exposition and situation, the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. This reliance on the exposition and situation slowly fades away, until the metaphor decays and becomes an established linguistic tool, is understood automatically. Wegener describes this evolution in three steps: 1) War blazes up like a fire…—one thus adds an expositive comment to the figurative idea. 2) War blazes up…—one senses that the predicate is taken from the fire. However, one no longer contemplates the similarity of the two groups, because the comparison has already been made familiar; the comparison is shortened or compromised. 3) War breaks out…—we are now only aware of the ideas contained in the group war, no longer those in the original simile. (US: 52/161) In Darmesteter (1887) we can find a similar description of metaphor. Instead of speaking about the process by which form and function become ‘congruent’, he speaks about them becoming ‘adequate’: the process of metaphor comprises two stages: one where the metaphor is still noticeable and where the name, used to designate the second object, still evokes the image of the first: the other, where, by forgetting the first image, the name does only designate the second object and becomes adequate to it. (1886 [1887]: 63; quoted by Delesalle 1987:276–7) Delesalle comments on this passage in the following, most enlightening way: What interests Darmesteter first and foremost in the figures of speech are the processes which make them appear and disappear; admitting that language has the right ‘to produce the most glaring contradictions’, given that ‘forgetting the primary etymological meaning is itself the law that governs all semantic changes’, he comes close to a conception a ‘logic of

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language’ [term used by Bréal], which allows you to say ‘pavé de bois’ [wooden paving stone], inspite of the primary sense of the word pavé. The emancipation of meaning from form is marked by that ability to forget the original meaning, or to make a primary element out of a secondary one— which in turn risks becoming a secondary one, or disappearing—this is what the author calls ‘one of the living forms of language’. (Delesalle 1987:277) In Wegener’s terms: the metaphorical predicate becomes congruent to its function and can now be used as an instrument of exposition. The metaphor has evolved into a congruent expression. The evolution of language can thus be summarized by the following cycles:

In the evolution of language pragmatics has the primacy over semantics, meaning is always derived from situated and purposeful action. This is a ‘universal’ law of language evolution: words that can be used as logical subjects, i.e. expositionally, only became usable in this way after having gone through a phase where they were predicates needing active interpretation in context. That is to say: all the words we use, and which seem to have such fixed and stable meanings, went through a phase where they did not have this fixed meaning, but were only understood because the hearer attributed meaning to them in context. After having thus been used as predicates and having been more and more frequently interpreted in a similar way, because they were inserted in similar situations and actions, they slowly lose their strong contextually-dependent meaning, and gain something like a conventional meaning, in short they can be used as expositional tools that are interpreted automatically (cf. US: 54/163). The form which only functions through active interpretation now becomes congruent to its function, i.e. the form functions automatically. This also means that special forms have special functions, there is something like a specialization of function or a distribution of functions over specific forms (cf. Bréal’s law of specialization, ES: ch. I). This constant change and specialization is the real life and growth of language. One can say that Wegener’s model of language-change has achieved what Whitney and Bréal were striving for: to show that speakers and hearers are the true language-makers! This constant modification and adaptation of language to communicational needs, is only possible because the language that speakers and hearers use is semantically underdetermined (cf. Bhattacharya 1978:732), that is, open to contextual specification

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and remodelling according to new experiences. Our mind has continually to fill in gaps and shape the linguistic forms in order to make sense. This is exactly what Bréal wanted to show in his Les Idées latentes du langage. As Bhattacharya writes: The tropes of similarity, analogy and metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche affect such restructuring and if standardized in specific instances, change the language. The problem here is to model my differing experience in terms of accepted conceptual units by rearranging them. To the degree that the listener succeeds in his attempts to model my differing experience, communication is possible. (1978:732–3) To conclude this section on Wegener’s model of semantic change one might quote Bhattacharya again, who has captured the essential message of Wegener: ‘To use language is to be metaphoric, and to understand the uses of language is to attempt constructing different metaphors than the standard ones, when the standard ones do not influence others appropriately’ (ibid.: 733). The indeterminacy of language and its necessary reliance on co-and context, is the reason why the meanings of words are constantly reshaped, and this especially according to two shaping mechanisms: metaphor and metonymy. In metonymy the word absorbs meaning from the context of situation and reference, in metaphor it adapts itself to the cognitive co-text and context. SPEECH ACTS As I have already said, the interpretation of speech acts (in the Austinean sense) is not essentially different from the interpretation of other utterances. But speech acts, especially ‘indirect’ speech acts, such as ‘Go!’ as opposed to ‘I order you to go!’ are, just like metaphors, paradigm cases for any theory of language-understanding. It is therefore not surprising that Wegener has devoted more care to the analysis of these phenomena than was usually the case among his fellow philologists. One type of speech act that attracted Wegener’s particular attention was the imperative or order, first, because he thinks that the imperative implicitly structures every act of speech (every utterance says, so to speak, ‘listen to me, I have something to say, make sense of me’); and secondly, because it is, besides the promise, the archetype of ‘performatives’, those speech acts where we really do things with words. In speech acts, such as the imperative, two basic ethical drives of human action are at work, drives that give purpose to every act of speech: the selfish drive and the unselfish drive, or, as Wegener says, sympathy with one’s own interests and plans and sympathy with those of the others (US: 68/175). The relationship between selfish and unselfish purposes is complex. For example, an order is selfish in so far as we want somebody else to do something (for us); it can however be subordinated to an unselfish purpose, for example in the context of education. Flattery, on the other hand, is seemingly unselfish, but is subordinate to selfish purposes (cf. US: 68/175).

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Be that as it may, language does not exist without sympathy or empathy. Nobody could understand an utterance, nobody would even try to understand it, or would obey the implicit imperatives contained in an utterance, if there was no sympathy. In this sense language is based on an ethical principle: try to understand the other as you would like to be understood yourself. * We already know that Wegener devoted a separate article to the indirect speech act, an important case of what he calls a one-word sentence. An example for such a one-word sentence is ‘boots’ or ‘my boots’, meaning ‘Give me my boots’, ‘Where are my boots?’…(cf. US: 68/144; WS). Before we go into a detailed analysis of this article it is useful to look briefly at the debate that took place at the turn of the century concerning the status of the word and the sentence. This debate engaged two famous adversaries: Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Wundt. Wegener, naturally, supported Paul, most explicitly in a review of Delbrück’s introduction to Wundt’s psychology of language (cf. Delbrück 1901; also Wegener 1902). The definition of the sentence was the central issue. Paul defined it in the following way: the sentence is the linguistic expression, or symbol, which indicates that several groups of ideas have been joined in the mind of the speaker. It is also the means for reproducing the same linking of ideas in the mind of the listener. (Quoted by Blumenthal 1970:34 from Principien, 2nd edition 1886: ch. VI) Wundt, on the other hand, defined it thus: ‘It [the sentence] is the linguistic representation of the voluntary sequential ordering of a simultaneous mental impression into logically related segments’ (quoted by Blumenthal 1970:22; from Die Sprache, ch. 7; Book 2, vol. I of the Völkerpsychologie series, 1912). In his review, Wegener admires Paul’s defining statement, that language is based on the reciprocity of action between speaker and hearer, i.e. speaking and understanding (1902:402). This was all the more unexpected as Paul was a follower of Herbart’s individual* This is not a paraphrase of Wegener: BN.

istic psychology, like Steinthal. Wundt, on the other hand, the founder of a social psychology he called Völkerpsychologie (all the more confusing because it was a term also adopted by Steinthal and Lazarus!), neglected the speaker-hearer interaction and concentrated on the solitary individual. He defended what Wegener calls a monologic theory of language, as opposed to his dialogic one. This mistake reappeared when Wundt tried to deal with the sentence. His definition of the sentence only applied to the ideally complete sentence as ‘articulated’ (in the dual sense of that term) by the speaker, and he ignored the interpretation by the hearer. From this point of view it is no surprise that Wundt had to dismiss the one-word sentence as being only a sentence-equivalent, and not a real sentence (406). Paul’s definition, on the other hand, takes the speaker and the hearer into account. Another defect in Wundt’s definition and analysis of the sentence is his exclusive attention to the sentence form—the perfect sentence form—or as Wegener writes the ‘dead schema of syntax’. He says nothing about the function of a sentence. (All

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this shows how easy it was to discover in Wundt a precursor of Chomsky, the analyst of the ideal but ‘dead’ sentence: cf. Blumenthal 1970:9 passim.) Another of Wundt’s claims, which Wegener rejected, is that the sentence precedes the word (406). According to Wegener, if the sentence is the primitive form of speech, this does not imply that the articulated sentence, the sentence consisting in several elements, came first. The oneword sentence interpreted in situation is a much more likely candidate to claim this prerogative (406). One-word sentences had and have the function of sentences, if not their ‘ideal form’—the latter only develops slowly. But Wegener’s definition of the sentence was far from clear. Perhaps Wegener should have emphasized that he understood by ‘sentence’ the functional unit of communication, the utterance, and not the ‘ideal’ unit of grammar. As Knobloch writes: Hardly anyone will object to the substance of Wegener’s position, I think. It is a well established fact of language acquisition that for a certain period of time one-word utterances have to serve sentence functions. But linguists have at all times insisted, with good reason I believe, that ‘compositeness’ must be among the defining features of the notion of ‘sentence’. What Wegener actually defines as a ‘sentence’ is the minimum unit of communication and not a unit of grammar. It may only have been an unfortunate choice of terminology that he treats these problems under the heading of ‘sentence’. But this choice had far-reaching consequences in linguistic discourse. Anyone will accept one-word utterances as a prototype format of communicative acts, but no linguist will accept them as a prototype of sentences. Note that for instance Hermann Paul (1920:121ff) retains the notion of compositeness in his sentence definition, however not on the outer plane of expression, but on the inner plane of psychological content expressed. (Knobloch 1989) In ‘Der Wortsatz’ Wegener stressed even more emphatically than in his review, that the nature of language is communication, that is constituted by the reciprocal action of speaker and hearer—language is essentially dialogic, not monologic, language is essentially intentional and purposeful (and here he acknowledges that Wundt coined an appropriate term: ‘vocal gesture’) (cf. 1921:2–3), but in some respects it is also automatic and unconscious. Without ‘knowing’ which muscles to use or according to which syntactic rule to put words into order (1921:3), we nevertheless always speak, that is execute ‘sound-movements’, with the intention of saying something and influencing the other. In this sense speech is conscious and intentional. We speak with the intention of giving orders, asking questions, answering questions, expressing feelings, judging persons, things and actions, etc. (ibid.). In an order or demand we want to incite the person to whom we talk to act in a certain way, to execute a certain action, or to participate in it (ibid.). This is done in the interest of the speaker (ibid.), that is, the ordered action constitutes the object of the speaker’s volition (Wollen (ibid.: 4))—in short, an order is normally selfish; whereas answering a question, for example, is an altruistic speech act; finally, when we express our feelings we stimulate the other’s sympathetic feelings—a very important social activity because it creates a bond between

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speaker and hearer. Wegener comes to the conclusion that all actions, including linguistic ones, go on in the framework set by these basic drives: egoism, altruism, and sympathy (ibid.). Let us now have a closer look at the order or command. Its normal grammatical form is the imperative, but in fact the linguistic expression of an order is not restricted to that form. There are many ways to express the function of an order, the imperative being only its most congruent form. Instead of using an explicit performative, or a sentence of action with the precise forms of the verb (US: 150/245), such as ‘Give me my boots’, we can say ‘boots’ for example, and we are understood. How is this possible? First, one has to take into account that intonation can express function. Wegener points especially to a stronger affective (musical) tone and a greater expiratory force used in such utterances (WS: 5). But this tone is not always necessary. In a pub we can whisper almost inaudibly the word ‘beer’ and we are immediately understood—and served (WS: 6). In this case it is not the tone that gives the ‘illocutionary force’ away, but the isolation of the spoken word, which indicates to the hearer that s/he has to get his/her interpretational clues from somewhere else—the situation. In our example the situation is so perfectly structured that we can rely entirely on it when we want to be understood. The roles are distributed: customer–barman, the expectations are clear: one wants a drink, the other is there to pour it. In this case the barman infers directly from the merest sound: (1) that somebody orders an action, (2) what action it is, and (3) who has to execute the action, and this although the word in itself only evokes the representation of an object (cf. WS: 9). In other situations this might be more complicated. We are back to the right balance between exposition and predicate, and between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. So far we have discovered three factors that determine the interpretation of an indirect speech-act: affective tone, isolation of the word, and situation. The situation itself can be divided into objective situation—the pub for example—and subjective situation—the knowledge, beliefs, and expectations etc. of the communicators. The objective situation can be regarded as being the same for speaker and hearer, the subjective situation is merely similar, that is speaker and hearer share some representations. When trying to understand a speech act the hearer relies on both sources of inference to complete the one-word sentence—to construct meaning (WS: 7). Some clues in the objective situation can be highlighted by gaze, deictical gestures, etc. which facilitate that task. Another problem is posed by speech acts that appear in the mode of a wish or a question, but are in reality imperatives. E.g. ‘I would like some ink, please’ or ‘Do you have any ink, please?’ spoken in a stationer’s shop. The shopkeeper interprets these utterances as orders, orders that are even legally enforceable (WS: 7f.). As the meaning or function, Wegener also calls it ‘functional meaning’ (WS: 5) (we would nowadays say the ‘illocutionary force’), is not given in the form, a form that is in fact very misleading, the function of these sentences can only be derived from the situation. Thus we have the form and the ‘literal’ meaning on the one side, the function in situation on the other, in short: form and function are sometimes incongruent (WS: 7). When the above quoted sentences were first used the form did not automatically evoke a certain functional meaning (WS: 8). There was, as Paul (1880) would say, a difference between usual and occasional meaning. But form and function tend to become congruent. To use a modern

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example: ‘Could you pass me the salt, please?’ is not interpreted as a question concerning the hearer’s ability to pass the salt, but is automatically understood as a demand. Here again we detect the universal law of language evolution at work that we have observed in chapter 6: linguistic evolution is driven by the dialectic movement that gives items that are at first only understood pragmatically, semantic content. There is a constant dialectical movement between form and function. REPORTED SPEECH The speech act ‘a beer’ is understandable by its grounding in the situation, a situation that provides the hearer with the necessary ground for his problem-solving inferences. What about that speech act as reported by a third to a fourth. ‘Yesterday, in the restaurant, A said to B that he wanted a beer.’ All the situational hints (time, place) and the conclusion the hearer derives from them as to the ‘illocutionary force’ of the utterance (‘want’) have to be expressed verbally, that is, have to be made explicit. Reported speech is decontextualized, the context has to be supplied by language itself—it here deploys its full expositional possibilities. As language loses its ties with concrete situations it has to make itself representational, or rather the speaker has to use it thus. In the construction of meaning, in making sense of an action in particular, we need two points of reference: the subject of the action and the object. Both can be easily inferred, as we have seen. That is, we normally do not need the verb as grammatical tool. This situation changes in reported speech. Wegener writes: ‘Therefore the sentence of action with the precise forms of the verb actually become necessary only at the level of the report, and the forms of the report must be understood simply as indirect speech’ (US: 150/245; emphasis in original). Hence, only in reported speech the whole grammatical, syntactical, and morphological apparatus of language is necessary. In other uses of language it is more or less optional, depending on the speaker’s attention to the situation and the needs of the hearer. On this level Wegener’s so-called ‘ethical’ considerations are reintroduced. As a conclusion one may quote one of the closing paragraphs of the Untersuchungen: Speech is based upon human intercourse, upon egoistical and sympathetic feelings. Its life is engrained in the conditions of society and of the individual. Speech is human intercourse, and only those linguistic processes which we as listeners have understood can serve us in our speaking. Therefore, the problem of the understanding of speech must be in the foreground of a philological investigation. (US: 182/272)

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CONCLUSION Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener have been our three protagonists in this tale of the construction of a new science of language-change. Their individual achievements were vast, but each alone could not have accomplished what he set out to do: to restore to the speakers and hearers of a language what historical–comparative linguistics had denied them: the power to make and change language. Whitney’s contribution to this new science of language-change was one of groundclearing. He effectively destroyed the myth of language as an organism and of linguistics as a natural science. On the newly-cleared ground he could then lay the foundations for a new, pragmatic, and evolutionary semiotics, where the speakers and hearers are the real motors of the life and growth of language. Bréal’s contribution was the elaboration of semantics, which would be the central part of the new science of language-change, because the main aim of the speakers’ and hearers’ action is to make sense, to create new meaning and change old meanings, in short to give meaning to the language they use and the world they use it in. Wegener’s contribution was the creation of a truly dynamic, interactional, and dialogic theory of language-change, which incorporated Whitney’s pragmatic and evolutionary semiotics and paralleled Bréal’s psychological account of the evolution of syntax and semantics. Finally, he put forward a sound conception of language acquisition and language use that was in full accord with the new theory of language-change.

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psychological theory of language’, 332–75; and reprinted in Silverstein 1971, 133– 69.) Whitney, William Dwight (1873) Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; the Avesta; the science of language, New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co. = OLS . Whitney, William Dwight (1873) ‘On material and form in language’. Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1872, 77–96. Whitney, William Dwight (1874) ‘On Darwinism and language’, North American Review 119, 61–88 = DL. Whitney, William Dwight (1874) Die Sprachwissenschaft; W.D.Whitney’s Vorlesungen über die Principien der vergleichenden Sprachforschung für das deutsche Publikum, bearbeitet und erweitert von Dr. Julius Jolly, München: Th. Ackermann (‘Vorrede des Bearbeiters’, iii-xvii). Whitney, William Dwight (1875) ‘Phusei or Thesei—natural or conventional’. Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1874, 95–116 (reprinted in Silverstein 1971, 111–32). Whitney, William Dwight (1875) ‘Are languages institutions?’, Contemporary Review (London) 25, 713–32. (Also published under the title ‘Streitfragen der heutigen Sprachphilosophie’, Deutsche Rundschau (Berlin), 1875, 4 (August), 259–79) = LI. Whitney, William Dwight (1875) The Life and Growth of Language: an Outline of Linguistic Science, New York: D.Appleton; London: H.S.King =, LGL. (In the following years a number of re-issues of this volume appeared both in America and England, the latest edn being in 1901; cf. Koerner 1973, 93 N7 used here; 2nd edn London: C.Kegan & Co 1880) (reprint Hildesheim: Olms 1970; Reprint New York: Dover, 1979; German transl. by Leskien; cf. Whitney 1876a; French transl. 1875 .) This book should not be confused with the English adaptation of Whitney’s first book on this topic entitled Language and its Study, prepared by Richard Morris, London; Trübner 1876, which reproduces only the first seven lectures of the original; cf. Koerner 1973, 93 N7. Whitney, William Dwight (1875) La Vie du langage, Paris: Baillière (3rd edn 1880). Whitney, William Dwight (1876a) Leben und Wachstum der Sprache, transl. by August Leskien, Leipzig: F.A.Brockhaus. Whitney, William Dwight (1876b) Review of Hovelacque 1876, The Nation 22, 98. Whitney, William Dwight (1878) ‘The principle of economy as a phonetic force’, Transactions of the American Philological Association for 1877, 123–34 (reprinted in Silverstein 1971, 249–60). Whitney, William Dwight (1879) A Sanskrit Grammar, including both the classical language and the older dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel. Whitney, William Dwight (1880) ‘Logical consistency in views of language’. American Journal of Philology 1/3, 327–43. Whitney, William Dwight (1885) ‘Philology, part I; Science of language in general’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn vol. XVIII, Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 765–80 = Ph. Whitney, William Dwight (1885) The Roots, Verb-forms, and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language. A supplement to his Sanskrit Grammar, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, (German transl. by Heinrich Ziemer, Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel 1885.)

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SECONDARY TEXTS Aarsleff, Hans (1979) ‘Bréal vs. Schleicher: reorientation in linguistics during the latter half of the nineteenth century’, in Hoenigswald (ed.) 1979, 63–106. reprinted in Aarsleff 1982, 293–334. Aarsleff, Hans (1982) ‘Bréal, “la sémantique”, and Saussure’ in Aarsleff 1982, 382–98. Aarsleff, Hans (1982) From Locke to Saussure, London: Athlone Press. Abse, D.Wilfred (1971) Speech and Reason: Language Disorder in Mental Disease. A Translation of ‘The Life of Speech’ by Philipp Wegener, Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press. Aitchison, Jean (1987) Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Andresen, Julie (forthcoming) Linguistics in America 1769–1924: A Critical History, London: Routledge. Authier-Revuz, Jacqueline (1982) ‘Hétérogénéité montrée et hétérogénéité constitutive— éléments pour une approche de l’autre dans le discours’. DRLAV. Revue de linguistique 26, 91–151. Auroux, Sylvain (1982) Linguistique et anthropologie en France (1600–1900), Paris: Collection THTL, no. 1, série VIII, Université de Paris 7. Equipe d’histoire des Théories Linguistiques. Département de Recherches Linguistiques. Bailey, Richard W. (1978) ‘William Dwight Whitney and the origins of semiotics’, The Sign: Semiotics around the world, ed. by R.W.Bailey, L. Matejka and P.Steiner, Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 68–80. Benveniste, Emile (1966) Problèmes de linguistique générale 1, Paris: Gallimard. (quotes from ‘La Nature des pronoms’ [1956], 251–7; ‘De la subjectivité dans le langage’

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INDEX Aarsleff, H. 18, 51, 107, 135 Abse, D.W. 160, 163, 168ff. act of speech 145; see also speech act action(s) 177, 179, 180; description of 178ff.; human 31, 35, 68, 109, 119, 185; language as 166; linguistic 144, 188; purposeful 173; situated 160; situated and purposeful 184; social 101; voluntary 96, 105f., 143; see also activity activity(ies) 177, 179, 180; see also movement adaptability 145 adaptation 101; combination and adaptation 113ff; of means to ends 35, 49, 68, 85, 88, 99, 109, 115, 119, 130 agglutination 15, 113 Aitchison, J. 138, 176 analogy(ies) 90, 114, 115, 120, 167, 181, 184; framework of 102; system of 131f.; see also language, system arbitrary 72, 82, 131 arbitrariness 28, 73, 111, 129, 132 Ascoli, G.I. 5 Authier-Revuz, J. 164n Austin, J.L. 149f. Bailey, R. 129 Bally, C. 148; and Sechehaye, A. 158 Barth, A. 5 Beauzée, N. 16 Benfey, T. 97 Benveniste, E. 23, 145f., 149f., 164n Bergaigne, A. 4 Bergson, H. 107

Index

157

Bhattacharya, N. 157, 163 biology 31; biological 51, 62 Bleek, W.H.J. 49, 83 Blumenthal, A.L. 163, 186f. Bloomfield, L. 5 Böhtlingk, O. von 4 Bopp, F. 3, 6f., 7, 8, 12, 15f., 19, 50f., 61, 113, 126n borrowing 117 botany 3; botanist 13 Bruchmann, K. 159 Brugmann, K. 5, 8, 14, 37, 43, 93f., 95, 158n, 160f. Bühler, K. 161 Bumann, W. 155f. catastrophe(s) 32f., 54, 57 catastrophism 58f Chavée, H. 12, 16, 57, 91 chemistry 19 Chevalier, J.-C. 66, 121 Chiss, J.-L. and Filliolet and Maingueneau 75; and Puech, C. 25f. and 107 Chomsky, N. 129, 187 Christy, C. 33, 42, 58 Collin, C.S.R. 51 communication 35, 81, 83, 86, 90, 99, 105, 153, 167, 187f.; study of 157 comparative anatomy 51, 83 concretization of meaning 123 Condillac, E.B., Abbé de 16, 17f., 46, 82 Condorcet 18 congruence 172; congruent 138, 173, 181, 183f., 189f. consciousness 25, 47, 66, 96, 98, 107; see also will contagion, contamination 120, 125 context 21; of situation 134, 162f., 169 conventional 29, 43f., 72, 81, 88, 102, 111, 130 conventionality 28, 42, 73, 129 creative use of language 176 creativity 129ff. Curtius, E. 158 Curtius, G. 97, 142 Cust, H. 6n Cuvier, G. 33, 51, 54, 56, 59, 83 Darmesteter, A. 17, 19, 21f., 23ff., 38, 41, 45, 57f., 64, 66, 72f., 101n, 105, 110, 115, 149, 182 Darwin, C. 27, 31, 45n, 47, 51, 53, 55, 59f, 62, 69, 84, 95;

Index

158

Darwinian 13, 21; Darwinism 25, 55f., 60, 66ff., 83; Darwinist (Whitney), 66ff. Darwin, E. 56 Dawkins, R. 106 Delbrück, B. 84, 186 Delesalle, S. 22, 66, 114, 115, 119, 121, 146, 183 Destutt de Tracy, A.L. 16 Deuchar, M. 84f. Dewey, J. 108 dialects 158 dialogue 19f., 146, 159, 172; dialogic 188, 192 Diderot, D. 56 Droysen, J.G. 158 Ducrot, O. 164n Duruy, V. 7 elasticity 133ff. ellipsis 123, 135ff. Emerson 107 enunciation 146, 148, 164n ethical 169, 185f., 191 etymology 6, 76, 105, 115, 130 etymological 79, 133 evolutionism: pragmatic 35, 107ff., and semantic 153; intellectual 107ff. exposition: and predicate 168ff., 182f. extension of meaning 115, 120, 122, 134 (enlargement) Farrar, F.W. 83 Firth, J.R. 162 force(s) 93; alterative 28, 64; of change 94ff.; conservative 28, 64; transitive, 120f. function(s) 18f., 23, 61, 70, 75, 99, 137f., 145, 166, 169, 172, 181, 183; affective, expressive, intellectual 148; of a sentence 187 functional meaning 190 functionalist 153, 162 Gardiner, A.H. 162 Gardner, H. 14 general grammar (grammaire générale, Port Royal) 89, 136f., 140f. geographical 3 geology 19, 31, 40, 58, 61

Index

159

geological 9, 41, 54 geologist 33 Goudge, T.A. 55f., 60, 106ff. grammaticalization 116 Greenberg, J.H. 53 Grimm, J. 14, 39, 126n, 147 Grunig, B.-N. and R. 164n Haeckel, E. 83 Harris, R. 77 Haupt, M. 158 Hegel, G.W.F. 27 Hegelian 60f. Hegelianism 62 Henry, V. 4, 5, 21, 25f., 91, 96, 143f. Herbart 186 Herder, J.G. von 40, 46, 68, 82, 89 Hey, O. 8 Heyse, K.W.L. 35 Hockett, C.F. 3n holophrastic 88 Hombert, I. 51 Hovelacque, A. 12, 16, 22ff., 57, 60, 84, 91 Hülzer, H. 157 Humboldt, W. von 14, 25, 27, 33, 37, 49, 71, 84, 102, 108, 139, 141f., 162 imperative 148, 174; see also order inner form 102, 111, 114 inner language-form 139, 141 (innere Sprachform) instructions 136f., 164n, 173ff. instrumental 72 instrumentalist 35, 153, 162 invisible hand 94, 105f., 144 Jakobson, R. 5, 29, 146 James, W. 108 Jankowsky, K. 37 Jesperson, O. 58, 162 Johnson-Laird, P.N. 179n, 180 Jolly, J. 5 Joseph, J.E. 4 Juchem, J.G. 157, 181 Kant, I. 25, 179 Keller, R. 42f., 53, 105, 144 Klaproth 60n Knobloch, C. 157, 159, 171, 187f. Koerner, K. 49, 75, 83 Kuhn, A. 10

Index

160

Laboulaye 4 Lamarck, J.B.C. de 56, 59, 66 Lamarckism 55, 58; neo 65f. Langer, S.K. 163 language 70ff; acquisition 148, 167ff., 192; classification 53; faculty of 71, 84f. (faculty of speech); (human) institution of 17, 43, 70ff., 84; as instrument of communication 9, 28, 35, 43f, 70ff., 150, 162; as main barrier between man and brute 45, 49; origin of 11, 18, 25, 32ff., 39, 42, 44f., 46, 49, 62, 82ff., 147, 165f., (ding-dong theory) 86; (pooh-pooh, bow-wow) 35, 46f: social function 20; social institution 9, 28, 44, 72f, 75, 101; system 18, 105f., 71 (semiotic), 73, 87, 131 (of signs), 74ff., 84 of vocal signs; understanding passim 171ff., see also organism Lanman, C.R. 5, 8, 17 latent idea(s) 108, 135f., 137ff., 140, 142 (idée latente) 145, 154 law(s) 75, 93, 97, 98ff.; of action, 31; chemical or physical 14; of human action 9, 35, 109, 119; of the intellect 20; intellectual 9, 58, 65, 91, 98, 104, 118ff., of differentiation 90f., 116, 120f., of specialization 117, 120f., of irradiation and the survival of inflections 120; of invention and selection 63; of language-change 110ff.; organic 97; phonetic 95f.; physiologial and psychological 20; physical and psychological 24; semantic 45; of semantic change 91, 121f.; sound 30, 114 Leitzmann, A. 157 Leskien, A. 5, 93, 159n, 166 Lepsius, R. 3 Leroy, M. 60 Lewis, D. 85 Linnaeus 51

Index

161

Linnaean 56 Littré, E. 23f. Locke, J. 18, 44 Lüdtke, H. 113 Lyell, C. 9, 31, 33f., 40f., 45, 54, 56f., 59, 61ff., 67, 84 Maher, P.J. 60f. Malinowski, B. 162 Mandeville, B. de 82 material (and form) 112ff. Maupertuis, P.L.M. de 18, 56, 82 Mead, G.H. 34, 108 meaning (usual, occasional) 99, 190 Meillet, A. 5n, 6, 8, 10, 23, 103 metaphor 22, 116f., 120, 122f., 144, 163, 180f., 182f., 184f. metaphorical 116 metonymy 123, 144, 184f. Mill, J.S. 17 Misteli, F. 159 Monaghan, J.M. 145 Monboddo, J.B. Lord 82 Moore, T. and Carling, C. 136, 173n, 176 Morpurgo Davies, A. 30, 35f., 53f., 60 movement 179, 180 Müller, F.M. 9, 10, 12, 15ff., 27f., 33, 35, 36ff., 51, 57, 67, 70, 84f., 95, 123n, 129, 166 mutability 73, 81 mysticism 7, 13, 17, 51, 61, 89, 96 mystics 13 myth(s) 11, 144 mythologist 9 mythology 5, 10, 123n; comparative 10, 39 naturalism 7, 9, 13f., 17, 61, 96 naturalistic 15 Nerlich, B. 146, 157 neo-grammarians 14, 95 Nietzsche, F. 107n Noiré, L. 38 nomenclaturism 44, 76 Oertel, H. 5, 8, 17 Ogden, C.K. and Richards, I.A. 162 one-word-sentence 159, 166, 171 (word-sentence), 186ff. order 185ff. organicism 9, 62 organism: natural 7, 12f., 17, 21, 30, 41, 51, 57, 70, 72, 96, 192 Osthoff, H. 8, 14, 95, 154

Index

162

Paris, G. 4, 19ff. Patterson, C. 63 Paul, H. 8, 14, 21, 84, 94, 99, 103, 110, 143f., 153 and passim 186f. Peirce, C.S. 85, 108 phonetic(s) 8, 19, 23, 118; change 154; system 80; type 46f. polyonymy 123 polysemy 11, 78, 120, 123, 135ff., 181 polysemous 88 Pommayrol 14 positivist 40, 51 Postgate 6n Pott, A.S. 97, 142 pragmatic 51, 149; see also evolutionism pragmatics 157; primacy of 68, 184 pre-formation(ism) 54ff. progress 13, 66, 78, 120ff., 133 progressism 56, 58, 62 pronoun(s) 126, 146f. psychology 9, 22, 25, 34, 57, 75, 107, 155; of language 157 psychological 32, 65, 94, 154, 159 psychologism 58, 79 Puech see Chiss Ravaisson, J.G.F.L. 107 Read, A.W. 5, 118 Regnaud, P. 57, 91, 100 Régnier, J.A.A. 4, 138, 139 Rehbein, J. 157 Reisig, C.K. 118 Renan, E. 37f. reported speech 190f. restriction of meaning 64, 120, 122, 134 Robins, R.H. 15, 141 Rocher, R. 15 root(s) 38, 45f., 51, 87, 91, 113 Roth, R. von 3, 4 Rousseau, J.-J. 18, 82 Salisbury, E.E. 4 Sampson, G. 129, 139 Sanskrit 3, 4, 46 (Sanscrit) 83 Saussure, F. de 4, 5, 8, 14, 23, 29f., 71, 74ff., 81, 93, 103, 115, 158, 166 Sayce, A.H. 84 Schank, R. and Abelson, R. 177

Index

163

schemata 167, 175ff. Schlegel, F. 7, 17, 51, 61 Schleicher, A. 7, 9, 12, 13, 14 and passim 30ff., 56 and passim 84 Schmidt, S.J. 38n, 46 Schopenhauer, A. 107 Sebeok, T.A. 146 semantic(s) 5, 8, 17, 21, 25, 27, 58, 77, 91, 118f., 120, 137, 140, 146, 181, 192; change 17, 21, 25, 57, 64, 70, 75ff., 80, 90, 98, 110, 115f., 118ff., 160, 164, 181ff.; field 81; procedures 26; see also laws semantically 8 sémantique 118, 139 semasiology 8, 118, 181 semiological 73, 74 semiology 75 semiotic(s) 29, 85, 108, 129, 146; pragmatic and evolutionary 192; system 80; see also language sense: and value 77f., 146 sentence definitions by Paul and Wundt 186 Seymour, T.O. 3n Sievers, E. 159f. sign(s) 10, 24, 43f., 70, 72f., 74ff., 81, 88, 111, 133, 136; and designation 77f. sign languages 85 signification 77f. Silverstein, M. 3n, 29, 106, 113f. situation 163, 172; of consciousness, of perception, of remembrance 169f.; situation of discourse 164n; subjective, objective, 189 Smith, A. 17, 44, 82 Smith, B.E. 3n, 37 social 71, 94, 100ff.; see also institution; language speech act(s) 148ff., 159, 161, 162f, 185ff. Spencer, H. 17 Stam, J.H. 46, 68, 82 Steinthal, H. 9, 13, 15, 17, 27, 32ff., 51, 57f., 70, 84, 108, 142, 153 and passim, 186 (and Lazarus) Stewart, D. 44 Streitberg, W. 160 structure 75 subjective element 145ff., 153 Suchman, L. 160 Süssmilch, F. 82

Index

164

Sweet, H. 162 synonym(s) 45, 80f., 122 synonymous 90 synonymy 11, 22 syntax 138, 158, 170; evolution of 124ff., 171; interior 138; internal 139f. Taine, H. 108 Terracini, B. 12, 17 Thomas, A. 26 Thümmel, W. 157 Thurot, F. 4 Tort, P. 14, 61 transformation(s) 15, 25f., 53ff., 59, 62, 65f., 76, 90, 92, 141 transformationism 59, 65 (intellectual) Traugott, E.C. 116 Trendelenburg, F.A. 158 unconscious 143 uniformitarian 11 uniformitarianism 9, 31, 33, 40f., 54f., 56ff., 58f., 64, 84 value 10, 18, 24, 74ff., 81, 88, 99, 119, 124, 133, 139, 174; -system 135; see also sense and value variability 74 Vinson, J. 23 Völkerpsychologie 187 Volney 14, 18 Voltaire 17 Weber, A. 3 Wedgwood, H. 68, 83ff. Wells, R. 40f., 62 Whatmough, J. 6 Whewell, W. 58 Whitney, J. 3, 4 will 18, 20, 25, 30f., 57, 72, 94ff., 99ff., 119, 128, 130, 148; free 27, 61; intelligent, obscure 105; see also consciousness Wittgenstein, L. 38n., 167 Wolff, K.F. 56 Wundt, W. 89, 162, 186f. Ziemer, H. 154f., 159