Langue and Parole in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

Langue and Parole in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective

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Concise History of the Language Sciences KOMATSU & WOLF Saussure's First Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1907) KOMATSU & WOLF

Saussure's Second Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1908-1909) KOMATSU & HARRIS

Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910-1911) Related Elsevier Journals Language & Communication Editors: Roy Harris and Talbot Taylor Language Sciences Editor: Nigel Love Lingua Editors: John Anderson, Johan Rooryck and Neil Smith Sample copies available on request.

Cover drawing, a sketch of Ferdinand de Saussure against the St Andrews skyline, by Oleg Dobrovol'skij

Langue and Parole in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective Selected Proceedings of the XXXIst Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, St Andrews 1998

Edited by Christopher Beedham

1999 PERGAMON An imprint of Elsevier Science Amsterdam - Lausanne - New York - Oxford - Shannon - Singapore - Tokyo

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To the memory of Sandor Hervey (1942-97), Reader in Linguistics at the University of St Andrews, and long-standing member of the SLE

From left to right: Dr Isabel Forbes, Prof. Dieter Kastovsky, Prof. Roland Harweg, Prof. Matti Rissanen, Prof. Konrad Koerner, Prof. R.H.Robins, Dr Christopher Beedham

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Introduction

1

I History of Linguistics 1 Three Saussures - One 'Structuralist' Avant la Lettre E.F.K. Koerner

19

2 Gegen eine herkommliche Interpretation von Saussures Langage, Langue und Parole - ein Merkzettel Ralph A. Hartmann

35

3 Eubulides as a 20th Century Semanticist Pieter A.M. Seuren

47

4 Key Dates in Twentieth Century Linguistics R.H. Robins

63

II Langue versus Parole 5 System Description or Systematic Prescription? Bozena Bednarikova

75

6 Completeness and Symmetricity of Paradigms Mati Hint

81

7 Langue und Parole - eine Neubestimmung unter den Gesichtspunkten von Referenz und Geltung Roland Harweg

89

8 Parole as an Individual Realisation of Langue Tadao Shimomiya

99

III Deixis 9 Aspect, Voice and Deixis in Russian Youri A. Poupynin

105

10 The Integration of the German Modals into the Paradigm of Verbal Moods Gabriele Diewald

119

vii

viii

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

IV Morphology 11 Noun Classifiers and Gender Classes - Another Look K. Connors

133

12 Was ist Stamm? Jozef Darski

149

V Semantics 13 One Size Does Not Fit All: A Semantic Analysis of 'small/large' vs. 'little/big' Yishai Tobin

169

14 Colour Categorization and Naming in French and Hungarian Isabel Forbes and Gabor Kiss

181

15 Associative and Semantic Word Fields in Bilinguals: The Case of Russian-Hebrew Bilingualism Larissa Naiditch

189

VI Phraseology 16 On the Cross-Linguistic Equivalence of Idioms Dmitrij Dobrovol 'skij

203

17 Towards a Description of English and French Phraseology Christopher Gledhill

221

VII Discourse Analysis 18 Register-Motivated Variation of Tense and Mood in German Final Clauses Introduced by damit Sven-Gunnar Andersson

241

19 Modals, Comparatives, and Negation Igor Boguslavsky

253

20 Langue and Parole in Speech Act Theories: Some Considerations and a Proposal Elisabetta Fava

263

21 Dinosaurs, Metaphors and Political Argument Andreas Musolff

283

22 Metatext-Sequenzen in deutsch-polnischen Gesprachen: Eine Fallstudie anhand konsekutiv gedolmetschter Texte Magdalena Jurewicz

295

Contents

ix

VIII Sociolinguistics 23 National Profiles of Language Perception: Instrumental vs Cultural-Value Conceptions Natalia Guermanova

307

24 Wieviel Verliert und Profitiert ein Wort auf seinem Weg von der Gebenden in die Aufnehmende Sprache Senta Setinc

321

IX Historical Linguistics 25 Early Collections of Private Documents: The Missing Link in the Diachronic Corpora? Radmila B. Sevic

337

26 Social Networks and Language Change in Middle English: The Challenge of Diachrony Alexander T. Bergs

349

27 On the History of Non-Finite Clauses in English and Other Languages Isabella Buniyatova

363

28 EinfluB der Aspekte auf die Umgestaltung der Futurparadigmen im Russischen Wladimir D. Klimonow

375

29 Possessivaussagen im Deutschen und die Auxiliarisierung von haben Michail L. Kotin

393

30 Dichotomische Zugriffe im Bereich der Aktionalitat des Westgermanischen (im Vergleich zum Slawischen) Michail L. Kotin

401

31 The Mystery of Consonantal Nominal Stem-Building Markers in Ancient Germanic Olga Ossipova

411

32 "Langue" and "Parole" in Proto-Indo-European Reconstructions Thomas V. Gamkrelidze

419

33 Linguistic Dynamics in a German Autobiography Fernande Krier

423

34 Accentual Reconstruction of the Proto-System of Mainland Japanese Dialects Akiko Matsumori

431

x

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

X Generative Grammar 35 Temporal Reasoning in Iterative and Habitual Contexts Florian Panitz

451

36 Doubling Clitics and Information Structure in Modern Bulgarian Ivanka P. Schick

469

37 The Categorial Status and Case Properties of Quantified Phrases in Slavic Nedzad Leko

489

Addresses of authors

509

Name Index

513

Subject Index

515

PREFACE For five warm and sunny days at the end of August 1998, 110 linguists from 25 countries in East and Western Europe and further afield met in St Andrews, Scotland, to discuss matters of language and linguistics. The occasion was the XXXIst Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, and we offer here a selection of the papers presented. Four were plenary papers, viz. the papers by Koerner, Robins, Tobin, and Harweg, the rest were section papers (except one, which was given in a workshop). Local organisers of the conference were myself and Isabel Forbes. The organisation of any conference is a team effort, and many people contributed to the staging of this one. I would like to thank in particular, for their advice and assistance: Dieter Kastovsky, Wolfgang Dressier, and Christine Klein, at the SLE headquarters in Vienna; Marjory Brechin, at St Andrews' Conference and Group Services; Chris Gledhill, Ralph Hartmann, Natalie Braber, David Gascoigne, and Alison Aiton; Julian Crowe, for computing help; Wendy Anderson, for proof-reading; and Chris Pringle, at Elsevier, who attended the conference. I am grateful also for financial assistance to: The British Academy, The Russell Trust, The British Council, and SAILLS (St Andrews Institute of Language and Linguistic Studies). Enquiries about the Societas Linguistica Europaea may be made to: Prof. Dieter Kastovsky, Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat Wien, Berggasse 11, A-1090 Wien, Austria; e-mail: [email protected]. CB, St Andrews, 17 June 1999

Xi

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INTRODUCTION The pages of this volume contain 37 papers which were presented at the XXXIst Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, on 26-30 August 1998. The general theme of the conference was 'Langue and parole in synchronic and diachronic perspective', though it was open to contributors to offer a paper either under that heading or else on any topic of general linguistics. The theme was intended to be both broad, in order not to exclude potential contributors, and specific, in order to give contributors a peg on which to hang their ideas. The theme is, in fact, ambiguous, and although no attempt was made to unravel the ambiguity at the time of the call for papers, it is perhaps time to do so now. The reference to langue and parole in the theme could be an invitation either to reflect on the theoretical notions of langue and parole, or to take them as given theoretically and to use them in an actual analysis. Some contributors interpreted the theme in one way, others in the other way, and others still gave papers outwith the general theme. The selection of papers offered here reflects that broad range. The langue-parole dichotomy is as difficult and controversial today as it ever was. The distinction was made in Saussure's Cows de linguistique generale in order to say that in structuralism it is langue that constitutes the proper Untersuchungsobjekt of linguistics, not parole. And we are all supposed to be structuralists now. But it is pragmatics, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and the like, which are making the running in linguistics today, and these are all areas of parole! Yishai Tobin certainly hit the mark with the original title for his book which eventually appeared as Semiotics and Linguistics, the original title which the publishers did not want to use, and which was: The Saussurean Revolution that Didn't Take Place, as Prof. Tobin related at the start of his conference paper. There is no point in this Introduction in my attempting to summarise all 37 papers which appear here, not least because each paper begins with a short abstract anyway. What I will do instead is to take those papers which lie closest to my own areas of interest and expertise, and highlight what seem to me to be particularly interesting aspects of them. Konrad Koerner, in his paper Three Saussures - One "Structuralist" Avant la Lettre (19-34), locates the first ever published use of the famous phrase that a language is a 'systeme ou tout se tient'. It was first used in print by Antoine Meillet with reference to phonology, in a paper published in 1893 in a French sociology journal: Les divers elements phonetiques de chaque idiome forment un systeme ou tout se tient. Or 1'enfant, en apprenant a parler, s'assimile non une articulation isolee, mais l'ensemble du systeme. (Meillet 1893:318-19; quoted by Koerner, this volume p.26) Koerner points out that, although the phrase is usually - particularly in textbooks on linguistics - attributed to Saussure in the Cours, it does not in fact occur there at all. However, Koerner states that Meillet almost certainly drew the phrase from Saussure, probably from the courses which Saussure taught in Paris during the mid 1880s and which Meillet attended. Koerner also disputes the commonly held view that there were two Saussures, the historical linguist of the Memoire and the structuralist of the Cours. Rather, Saussure's work forms a coherent whole, in which the Memoire, a study of the phonological system of the Proto-Indo-European vowels, is a synchronic and hence structuralist piece. Koerner concludes his paper with an objection to

1

2

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

the fact that Roy Harris, in his translation of the Cours (Saussure 1983), translates the French term systeme with English 'structure', even though French structure does not occur anywhere in the Cours as a technical term or indeed in any of Saussure's writings; it is ironic, says Koerner, that 'structuralism' is the name by which Saussure's work has come to be known. Ralph Hartmann, in his paper Gegen eine herkommliche Interpretation von Saussures Langage, Langue und Parole - ein Merkzettel (35-45), says that it is widely accepted now by historiographers of linguistics that the famous final sentence of the Cours: la linguistique a pour unique et veritable objet la langue envisagee en elle-meme et pour elle-meme (Saussure 1972:317; quoted in German by Hartmann, this volume pp.35-6), was added by the editors of the Cours, and did not come from Saussure himself (cf. Saussure 1972:476-7). Hartmann goes on to argue that an examination of the published sources for the Cours, Viz. Godel 1957 and Saussure 1989-90, reveals that the notes as taken by his students indicate that Saussure did not distinguish between langue and langage as clearly as is done in the Cours, and that the editors of the Cours have sometimes used the term langage where the sources use langue. Hartmann questions the traditional conception of langue as being social, parole in contrast as being individual. The student notes, he claims, show that Saussure was uncertain on this point, as revealed in the following note by Albert Riedlinger: Dans la langue, il y a done toujours un double cote [sic] qui se correspond: elle est . ,. .. .. . Si on considere donc la sphere ou la langue vit, il y aura toujours la langue individuelle et la langue sociale. (Saussure 1989-90: 28, Riedlinger; quoted by Hartmann, this volume p.37) Against this background it is possible to see langue as encompassing not only a social aspect but also individual use and language as action, i.e. speech acts. This would lead to a great deal more commonality than has hitherto been suspected between Saussure and the later Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein's 'game theory' in the Philosophische Untersuchungen), as well as between Saussure and Searle - cf. Searle's assertion that: It still might seem that my approach is simply, in Saussurian terms, a study of "parole" rather than "langue". I am arguing, however, that an adequate study of speech acts is a study of langue. (Searle 1969:17; quoted in German translation by Hartmann, this volume pp.43-4) Youri Poupynin in his paper Aspect, Voice and Deixis in Russian (105-18) suggests that Russian aspect is a deictic category. He defines a deictic category as a category, at least one grammeme of which can denote the elements of the deictic centre, viz. the 'I - Here Now'. It is well recognised that tense is deictic. But there is a conception of the verbal system in Russian which sees it as having 5 tenses (not 3), inextricably linked to aspect: (i) the imperfective past; (ii) the perfective past; (iii) the imperfective present; (iv) the imperfective future; (v) the perfective future (Bondarko 1971). Since the Russian present tense exists in the imperfective variant only, then aspect, with its imperfective grammeme, participates in denoting the deictic centre, and consequently is deictic (Poupynin, this volume p. 106). Poupynin goes on to demonstrate the relevance of deixis to certain Aktionsarten in Russian. For example, it is well-known that imperfective verbs with the prefix pri- (e.g. prijti 'to come, arrive') cannot express processual meaning, which is one of the central meanings of

Introduction

3

imperfective aspect. The reason is a deictic one, viz. that the point of departure of spatial deixis (the 'Here') is strictly attached to the end of the action, whereas the interpretation of an action as a process requires its perception before it finishes, from other observation posts (Poupynin, this volume p. 109). The admission of an observer or perceiver can also help explain the semantics of ingressive verbs (e.g. zasumet' 'to begin to rustle' or 'to be rustling and to become available for perception by someone'), completive verbs, and the phase verbs nacinat' 'to begin' and koncat' 'to finish'. The reflexive phase verbs of the type nacinat'sja 'to begin', koncatsja 'to finish' can probably only mark real initial or final phases of an action where the subject is expressed by a deverbal noun (or a noun with the semantics of an action). If the subject is expressed by a concrete noun it is the perception by an observer of an initial or final phase that is meant by the phase verbs. To say Les nacinalsja/koncalsja 'the wood began/ended' is to say that the observation of the wood began or ended (Poupynin, this volume pp.111-12). Poupynin then applies the notion of observer/perceiver to the verbs of motion, which he calls 'verbs of displacement in space'. He distinguishes between process meaning and what he calls 'relative' meaning, i.e. the position of a perceiver relative to the action perceived. He believes that the various meanings of the verbs of motion, which are presented in the 4-volume Slovar' russkogo jasyka as separate lexical meanings, are actually a function of the interaction between lexis and grammar, specifically aspect. The sentence in 1 is an example of a verb of motion, podnimat'sja 'to go up, rise', with process meaning, sentence 2 shows the same verb with 'relative' meaning: (1) A Margarita v eto vremja uze podnimalas' stremitel'no vverx po lestnice ... 'and Margarita, meanwhile, was already going upstairs rapidly ... ' (M.Bulgakov) (2) Vdali sverkala 1'dami, podnimalas' iz-za rosci ostrym pikom gornaja versina. 'in the distance a lofty summit rose with its sharp peak behind a grove, and sparkled with ice' (A.N.Tolstoy) In 2 the summit does not literally rise up, instead the tense-aspect of the form podnimalas' pinpoints the position of a perceiver - the omniscient author as 'super-perceiver' together with the reader in his/her imagination - relative to the summit. Thus it can be seen that spatial deixis is crucial to the interpretation of the verbs of motion in Russian (Poupynin, this volume pp.113-15). Gabriele Diewald, in a paper entitled The Integration of the German Modals into the Paradigm of Verbal Moods (119-29), relates the 6 modal verbs of German (rnussen, konnen, etc.) in their epistemic use, e.g. as shown in 3: (3) Sie muB zuhause gewesen sein 'she must have been at home' to the verbal moods indicative, subjunctive I, and subjunctive II. She claims that both the modal verbs in their epistemic use and mood are deictic categories. The indicative 'expresses the deictic value of modal nearness, i.e. factuality' (Buhler's 'demonstratio ad oculos', or deixis proper) (Diewald, this volume, p.121). Subjunctive I indicates that the factuality judgement does not come from the present speaker, but from a reported speaker, 'i.e., from a displaced origo' (Buhler's imagination-oriented deixis) (Diewald, this volume, p. 122). On the face of it subjunctive II indicates nonfactuality, e.g. a speaker who utters 4:

4

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

(4) Sie stunde im Garten 'she would be standing in the garden' does not believe that the 'she' mentioned is standing in the garden. But there is more to subjunctive II than nonfactuality, since 4 is not exactly synonymous with 5: (5) Sie steht nicht im Garten 'she is not standing in the garden' Where the subjunctive II in 4 differs from the sentence negation in 5 is that subjunctive II alludes to an unfulfilled condition expressed somewhere in the surrounding text. Hence subjunctive II is an anaphoric/cataphoric expression, and qualifies as Buhler's third type of deixis, viz. the anaphoric use of deictic words (Diewald, this volume, pp. 122-3). In this respect subjunctive II resembles the pluperfect, which alludes to a reference point usually mentioned in the text, also in an anaphoric/cataphoric manner. The modal verbs of German in their grammaticalised (i.e. not fully lexical), epistemic use also express factuality values, e.g. as shown in 3 above or 6 below: (6) Ich kann mich getauscht haben 'I may have been mistaken' According to Diewald konnen and mussen express deixis proper, sollen and wollen are imagination-oriented deixis, whilst durfte and mag are anaphoric/cataphoric deixis. The recognition of the epistemic modals and mood as deictic items points up a parallel between them and tense (tense being already recognised as deictic): tense is basically inflectional, but with some periphrastic realizations; likewise mood is basically inflectional, but also has some periphrastic realizations, viz. the modal verbs in their epistemic use. Kathleen Connors, in a paper entitled Noun Classifiers and Gender Classes Another Look (133-48), ponders the difference between noun classifiers and noun genders. Noun classifiers are typically free morphemes, of a lexical nature, to be found predominantly in isolating languages. Noun genders, on the other hand, are realized by bound morphemes, of a morphological nature, and are to be found predominantly in agglutinative and inflectional languages. Classifier languages tend to have a large number, perhaps dozens, of classifiers (in keeping with their lexical nature), which display inter-speaker variation reminiscent of parole, whilst gender class languages tend to have only a small number of genders, between two and twenty (in keeping with their morphological nature), reminiscent more of langue. Classifiers are often generic or superordinate nouns, e.g. in Dyabugay the word for turkey, wawun, will typically occur together with the word mina, which means 'animal meat', in a noun phrase mina wawun lit. animal meat turkey 'turkey'. Although in general noun genders are semantically arbitrary, particularly for inanimate nouns, whereas classifiers are semantically motivated, classifiers are also to a certain extent arbitrary and unpredictable, and have to be learned. One encounters this in the classifiers that English has, for instance collective nouns, e.g. a pack of wolves but a pride of lions. Connors suggests that derivational and compositional nominalizing morphemes are classifiers (this volume, p. 135). An example is the English nominalizing suffix -ness, as in goodness, kindness: pre-school children generalise -ness to temperature adjectives to form the nouns *warmness, *hotness. Another example is the familiar diminutive suffix in many languages, e.g. in Canadian French the word jobinne from job, which classifies a job not only as small but also as of little economic worth. The semi-suffixes of German, e.g. -zeug as in Fahrzeug 'vehicle', or -tier as in Saugetier 'mammal', are superordinates in a manner reminiscent of classifiers. Such superordinates tend to be neuter in German, and the neuter

Introduction

5

gender itself can indicate superordinate, as in das Gewdchs 'plant', das Getrank 'beverage'. Often masculine and feminine indicate sub-terms of the superodinate, e.g.: das Steinwild 'ibex': der Steinbock 'male ibex', die SteingeiB 'female ibex' das Kraut 'plant': der Klee 'clover', die Klette 'burdock' (Connors, this volume pp. 136-7). Jozef Darski asks the question Was 1st Stamm? in the title of his paper (149-65) and provides a precise and detailed answer. The stem or root of a word is usually defined vaguely and indeed circularly as that part of a word which remains when the ending is removed. The stem of the verb in German used to be considered the imperative, until Bauer (1830:273) made it the infinitive with the ending removed. The problems that arise are illustrated by the present tense paradigm of the verb lacheln 'to smile', which is given in Engel (1996:418) as follows: (ich) lachl-e (du) lachle-st (sie) lachl-e (wir) lachel-n (ihr) lachl-e-t (sie) lachel-n (quoted by Darski, this volume p. 151) Assuming that the hyphen separates stem from ending, then we have here three different stems, viz. la'chl-, lachle- and Idchel-, which cannot be right. Darski claims that an adequate definition of and understanding of stem can only be reached by distinguishing between singular and plural, between the parts of speech (e.g. noun or verb stem), and for the verb between the tenses and the moods (present tense stem, past tense stem, indicative stem, subjunctive stem). Bein 'leg' has the singular stem Bein but the plural stem Beine. Machen 'to make' has the present indicative stem mach, but the present subjunctive stem mache. Darski suggests representing the stem ofraten 'to advise', which displays ablaut in the present tense (ich rate, du ratsf), as rAt, where A represents the change from a to a. In addition to the orthographic stem a more precise way of delimiting a stem is to do so phonologically. Geben 'to give' has the present indicative singular stem /'gIB/ and the present indicative plural stem /'ge:B/. /'gIB/ is realised as /'gi:p/ or /'ge:b/. /'ge:B/ is realised as /'ge:b/ or /'ge:p/. These stems can be conflated to a more general inflexional stem, which Darski represents as: /'gAB/ (Darski, this volume pp. 161-2). Yishai Tobin, in a paper entitled One Size Does Not Fit AH: A Semantic Analysis of "small/large" vs. "little/big" (169-80), takes the apparent synonyms little/small and big/large and uncovers the semantic difference between them. There are two reasons for suspecting that there is a semantic difference between them. One is common sense - why should English maintain both words if they mean exactly the same thing? The other is the structuralist tenet that there is no difference in form without a difference in meaning, which Tobin expresses by talking about the 'invariant meaning' of forms. So what is the different in meaning between the a sentences and the b sentences in 7 and 8? (7) a. I had a little brandy, b. I had a small brandy. (8) a. He has a big mouth, b. He has a large mouth. Why in 9 below does the writer first describe a car as small and then a few lines later as little?

6

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

(9) The next day Sholto picked up a small red car from somewhere and drove very fast from Rome. ... When he suddenly spun the wheel and sent the little car hurtling up a track, she squealed .... (Walker 1992:371, quoted by Tobin, this volume p.173) Why does the idiom in 10 occur with one member of the pair in question, but is ungrammatical with the other member of the pair? (The answer is not ossification in idioms.) (10) a. Who's afraid of the big bad wolf? b. ?Who's afraid of the large bad wolf? Finally, why is the protagonist of The Little Prince (Saint-Exupery 1943) first introduced as a small person, but then referred to throughout the text and most noticeably in the title as the little prince? The answer to all these questions has to do with what Tobin calls Semantic Integrality, by which he means the difference between perceiving something as discrete entities in discontinuous space on the one hand, or collectively as a set in continuous space, on the other. Little and big are unmarked for Semantic Integrality, i.e. they are neutral, whereas small and large are marked for Semantic Integrality, and express perception as a set in continuous space only (Tobin, this volume p. 170). Small and large express things as generic items, as a class of something, a prototype; whereas little and big may individualise an item as unique, they may focus upon it as a specific item, to be explored in greater detail. The analysis obtains greater generality, i.e. explanatory power, by virtue of the fact that Semantic Integrality has been used to explain other linguistic phenomena in English and Hebrew, including 'irregular' plurals, mass/count nouns, the synthetic vs. analytic systems of comparatives and superlatives, and the conditionals //vs. whether (Tobin, this volume pp. 170-1). Isabel Forbes and G.Kiss in their paper Colour Categorization and Naming in French and Hungarian (181-8) report on three tests which they carried out with native speakers of French and Hungarian on colour terms. Before 1969 most linguists held the Saussurean and Sapir-Whorf view that each language divides up the colour spectrum in its own (arbitrary) way, and furthermore that this formal-linguistic division determines the way in which people perceive colours. Since Berlin and Kay 1969, however, opinion has changed, and most linguists now believe that colour terms are not language specific and arbitrary but are universal, maintain Forbes and Kiss. In the first test just under 100 informants were asked to write down what in their opinion were the 'principal colour terms'. In the second test informants were shown a colour array containing 139 chips graded and numbered according to the Munsell system of colour notation, which was the system used by Berlin and Kay. The French and Hungarian speakers were consistent with each other in their recognition and naming of the colours, and consistent with the languages tested by Berlin and Kay. Thus the universality of the perception and naming of colours was confirmed (Forbes and Kiss, this volume pp. 181, 184). The third test was designed to discover how the French informants used brun and marron (both meaning 'brown'), and how the Hungarian speakers used piros and voros (both meaning 'red'). The informants were asked to list all the things that could be called brun, those that could be called marron, and similarly for the Hungarian terms. The results for French are given below in Figure 1:

Introduction

1

Figure 1 The distribution of brun and marron in informants' lists brun marron Category of object No. of mentions No. of mentions Hair 60 7 Eyes 20 45 Skin and other physical attributes 20 1 Persons (physical type) 12 0 Animals (including horses) 22 4 Trees and parts of trees 23 38 Clothes and material 41 23 Leather 14 22 Paint colour 11 18 Earth and Terra Cotta 9 4 (Wooden) furniture 15 8 Food 3 10 Tobacco 3 0 Miscellaneous 1 4 The table shows that the choice of word to describe a colour depends on the type of object which has the colour. Brun 'brown' is the favoured term, as against marron 'brown', to describe hair, skin colour, and physical type (Forbes and Kiss, this volume pp. 185-6). Similar results were found for the Hungarian terms for 'red' piros and voros. Dmitrij Dobrovol'skij asserts in his paper On the Cross-Linguistic Equivalence of Idioms (203-19) that it is a mistake to imagine that an idiom of L1 must always be translated into L2 using an idiom. It is far better not to use an idiom in L2 at all if the result is a functionally and stylistically better translation. Moreover, bilingual dictionaries of idioms are basically incapable of registering all L2-equivalents of a given LI-idiom for all possible contexts. Hence translators are best served by parallel textual corpora and other text-oriented tools. It is more important for the translator to know all the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of a given L1-idiom than to have a list of possible L2-equivalents, because the choice of equivalent always depends on the context. In this spirit Dobrovol'skij attempts to develop a typology of parameters for the cross-linguistic comparison of idioms, covering syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. To take a semantic instance, many bilingual dictionaries consider the German idiom given in 11 to be equivalent to the Russian idiom given in 12: (11) German den Geist aufgeben "to give up the mind/spirit" 1. (obsolete) 'to die', and 2. (coll.) 'to stop working' (12) Russian ispustit' dux "to give up the mind/spirit" 'to die' A closer examination reveals, however, that whereas the Russian idiom can only mean 'to die', the German idiom is rare in the meaning 'to die', and is almost always used in the meaning 'to stop working', a fact which came out of a study of the textual corpora of the Institut fur deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Therefore the idioms in 11 and 12 are not equivalent after all (Dobrovol'skij, this volume pp.212-13).

8

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

To take a pragmatic instance, on the face of it the German idiom in 13 meaning 'to be mad' could be translated into any idiom of a language which also means 'to be mad': (13) German von alien guten Geistern verlassen sein ,,to be left by all good spirits/genii" 'to be mad';«to have taken leave of one's senses But an investigation of the textual corpora of the Institut fur deutsche Sprache in Mannheim revealed that the idiom in 13 is restricted to hypothetical utterances only, for example 14: (14) Zugleich sprach sich der Finanzminister deutlich gegen Forderungen <...> nach einem Sonderopfer der Bundesburger fur die DDR in Form von Abgabenerhohungen oder als Verzicht auf die Steuerreform aus. "Wir waren von alien guten Geistern verlassen, wenn uber den Umweg der Deutschlandpolitik sozialistische Vorstellungen eingebracht wurden", kommentierte Waigel dazu. (Mannheimer Morgen, 15.11.1989) [At the same time, the Minister of Finance clearly expressed himself against claims <...> for a special sacrifice by the citizens of the Federal Republic for the GDR in the form of increased payments or abandoning the tax reform. ,,We would be left by all good spirits/genii if we indirectly brought in socialist ideas by way of the Germany policy", commented Waigel.] Since no Russian idiom meaning 'to be mad' could be found with the same illocutionary restriction, the inescapable conclusion is that Russian simply does not have an idiom fully equivalent in all respects to 13 (Dobrovol'skij, this volume p.217). Chris Gledhill, in his paper entitled Towards a Description of English and French Phraseology (221-37), puts forward an extended notion of collocation, based on Sinclair 1991. Usually linguists distinguish between free word combinations on the one hand, and collocations/idioms on the other. For Gledhill, however, every word is restricted in the syntactic patterns into which it can fit, and hence collocation extends to the whole lexico-syntax of a language - 'every syntagm is a collocation' (Gledhill, this volume p.226). The enabler of this extended notion of collocation is the computer, in corpus linguistics - the computer has done for linguistics what the telescope did for astronomy (Stubbs 1996, mentioned by Gledhill, this volume p.227). Furthermore, it is necessary to take into account register and genre to obtain a full understanding of collocations. Gledhill also brings in speech acts and rhetorical function, in distinguishing collocations from idioms. Idioms, he says, are marked rhetorically, whilst collocations are unmarked rhetorically. For example, dictums and proverbs often exhort or provide a metacomment, as in more haste less speed, meaning roughly 'take your time'. Moreover, corpus studies have shown that idioms are less widespread than previously thought. Moon 1987 found that out of 2265 idioms (e.g. out of the blue, foot the bill) examined in the 323 million word Bank of English (ex-Cobuild corpus, held at Birmingham University, England), only 135 occurred more than twice per million words, compared with, for example, 240 times per million words for the collocation of course (Gledhill, this volume, p.227). The implication is that collocation is more central to the 'idiom principle' than traditional idioms themselves. Collocations carry with them a 'semantic prosody'. For example, the English expression to set in typically has a negative subject, such as bad weather, gangrene. Consequently, any subject that appears with it becomes imbued with the pejorative semantics, e.g. The Tory Party had set in. It is one step from there to 'collocational frameworks' (Renouf

Introduction

9

and Sinclair 1991), which are short texts with the lexical words taken out, only the grammatical words remaining. Gledhill (this volume, p.228) gives the following example: (15) X the Xs with a X X X. X the X with X and X to X, and X each X in it. X the X, X with a X X or X and X over each X. X the Xs with Xs, X on Xly and X in X X until Xly Xed, and claims that a native or fluent speaker of English should be able to guess the genre, text-type, or rhetorical/communicative function of the text. He goes on to claim that collocational patterns vary according to register, and illustrates this claim with example texts of French and English scientific writing. Sven-Gunnar Andersson, in a paper entitled Register-Motivated Variation of Tense and Mood in German Final Clauses Introduced by damit (241-51), reports on a study which produced surprising results for the choice of tense and mood of the verb in final clauses introduced by damit in the spoken language. The type of sentence discussed in the literature on damit clauses is shown in 18 below: (18) Er schickte den Brief schon anderthalb Wochen fruher ab, damit er wirklich rechtzeitig ankam/ankomme/ankame. With regard to the written language the widely held view, as presented in Flamig 1964, is that the past indicative is neutral, contributing no special modal meaning; the present subjunctive is either used to mark the damit-clause as indirect speech or else has an adhortative function; whilst the past subjunctive is used either also to mark indirect speech or else has a counterfactual meaning. In an examination of damit clauses in written texts of the computerized COSMAS corpus in Mannheim the above analysis was confirmed (Andersson, this volume pp.242-5). But in a series of oral elicitation tests by far the most common choice made by informants was the present indicative. In sentence 18 above this would be the form ankommt (Andersson, this volume pp.245-7). Notice that the form ankommt is not given in 18 at all, i.e. the present indicative is nowhere discussed in the literature on damit clauses. Andersson interprets the preponderance of the present indicative in damit clauses with past context in the spoken language as an indication that such clauses are being recategorized as indirect speech (Andersson, this volume pp.247-8). Andreas Musolff, in his paper Dinosaurs, Metaphors and Political Argument (283-94), takes issue with George Lakoff's view that metaphors are fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature, and that the 'cognitive topology' or 'image-schema structure' of a metaphor are obligatorily present in every use of it in a given text, thus imposing limits on the possibility of free thought and inhibiting the creative use of metaphors (Musolff, this volume p.287). Instead, Musolff states: 'the political bias of metaphorical language use seems to me to be the function of the pragmatic context rather than an inherent feature of conceptual schemas' (this volume, p.289). The example he uses to illustrate his point is the metaphor of the dinosaur. If someone wishes to say about a person or an institution that they are in danger of becoming extinct, he can call them a dinosaur, as in the following example from the Times:

10

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony (16) Conference dinosaurs [headline] Like the tail-thrashings of a dying dinosaur, Labour activists and trade unionists meet in Blackpool this week to protest at a new world for which many of them are feebly adapted. (...) Mr Blair must know that one of the main obstacles to taking tough decisions in a Labour government has been the party itself. By getting his "betrayal" in first, he hopes to win the arguments now rather than then. Labour activists understand that: which is why they see this week as their last chance to influence a possible Labour government. They also understand, however, that the apparent influence is illusionary. No wonder they sense that the current climate is inhospitable to their survival. (The Times 30 September 1997, quoted by Musolff, this volume p.286, italics A.M.)

But consider now the following extract from a Guardian interview with the retired Conservative politician Julian Amery: (17) [Amery:] "My own background was Empire protectionist. I believed in the Empire as the basic system on which we must work and, after the War, in Europe as an extension of that empire. Of course, there's no one else left who thinks like that. We're all dinosaurs." (The Guardian 11 April 1992, quoted by Musolff, this volume p.289) Musolff claims that Amery's use here of the dinosaur metaphor in a self-mocking, nostalgic way deprives the metaphor of its negative import, and is actually a clever conversational move or argumentative gambit. The negative extinction part of the metaphor turns out to be optional (Musolff, this volume pp.289-90). Metaphors are not fixed and unchangeable in langue, but are open to communicative and pragmatic manipulation in parole. Natalia Guermanova, in a paper entitled National Profiles of Language Perception: Instrumental vs Cultural-Value Conceptions (307-19), discusses attitudes towards languages, particularly one's native language, and posits two kinds of attitude. A preoccupation of the Enlightenment with reason and logic led to an attitude which extolled clarity and precision in language. Guermanova calls this attitude the instrumental conception. The French and the English were particularly keen to emphasise these virtues in their own languages (Guermanova, this volume pp.313-14). But the Age of Reason gave way to Romanticism. Now people began to admire the expressive, poetic qualities of language. They also believed to find those qualities particularly in the language of ordinary folk, and grass-roots folk culture and local dialects suddenly acquired respect and even awe. Furthermore, languages became associated with nations and national psyche, for example in the writings of Herder and Humboldt. Guermanova calls this attitude the cultural-value conception. It is a conception held by the Russians towards their language, and by Americans towards American English. Americans consider their language to exhibit a democratic frontier spirit, a bold neglect of prescribed norms, in keeping with the American people, and are sympathetic towards slang (Guermanova, this volume pp.314-16). German, incidentally, occupies the middle ground between the instrumental and the cultural-value perceptions (Guermanova, this volume p.315). Language perception is important for various reasons, not least because it influences language theories and language teaching methodologies. After having summarised the views of several contributors to these Proceedings, it is now incumbent upon me, as the originator of the langue-parole theme of the conference, to

Introduction

11

give my own views on the langue-parole dichotomy.1 My own attitude is a rather traditional one, viz. langue is the system, parole is the substantiation of the system, and it is langue which constitutes the proper Untersuchungsobjekt of linguistics. I would perhaps, however, add one more element to this concoction, and that is the idea of progress in (core, theoretical) linguistics. The possibility of progress in linguistics is based on the idea that a 'descriptive' (i.e. not generative) grammatical analysis (including the analyses of traditional grammar), which is of course part of langue, is a hypothesis only, not a statement of obvious facts, and may be superceded by a better analysis, if one can be found.2 Many peculiarities and irregularities of language usually attributed to parole turn out to be artefacts of a particular langue analysis, they turn out to have been introduced into language artificially by the linguist-scientist in a bad analysis at the langue level. Parole is a fascinating object to study, and must be studied by (langue-oriented) linguists, but only because it contains the anomalies and self-contradictions which can lead us - if we recognise them as such and treat them properly - dialectically to a revision of and improvement in our rules and regularities of langue. Langue is the scientific part of language study, the ordered part, parole is the pre-scientific part, the chaotic part. Hartmann (1997:199) has called this approach 'naive scientism'. It is an interesting and well-chosen phrase from a parole point of view, but if Dr Hartmann will forgive me I will use it to illustrate the langue approach and to demonstrate that the criticism embedded in the phrase is ill-founded. Let us take the passive to exemplify the langue approach adumbrated above. The passive construction, consisting in English of be + V-ed, is traditionally derived from an underlying active, and is called a voice of the verb. This analysis attempts to capture the known regularities of the form be + V-ed, and is part of langue. Unfortunately there are several well-known irregularities and idiosyncrasies associated with this analysis of the passive. One of them is that most actually occurring active sentences in texts, when converted into the passive, produce grotesque curiosities such as Girls are liked by John (Svartvik 1966:2). Another is that, whereas the canonical grammarian's sentence to illustrate the passive is John was hit by Mary, with the dynamic verb to hit (which emphasises the idea that the subject 'receives the action of the verb'), a singular definite subject, and the agentive by-phrase realised, an examination of actual texts shows that the typical passive sentence is more like: This difficulty can be avoided in several ways, with a modal verb and passive infinitive, an abstract durative-type verb, an abstract noun as subject, the agentive by-phrase not realised, and an adverbial phrase present in the sentence (Quirk et al. 1985:167-8). A third problem is that most actually occurring passive sentences in texts - the figure is approx. four fifths - occur without the agentive by-phrase realised (Quirk et al. 1985:164-5), whereby the agent is usually non-recoverable, which contradicts the idea that they all came from an underlying active, where the presence of a subject would be obligatory. There

1

The remarks that follow apply to sentence grammar only, they do not apply to approaches which study chunks of language larger than the sentence, such as text grammar, corpus studies, theme-rheme analysis, speech act theory. 2 The term langue is therefore ambiguous. On the one hand it means the true and genuine system of language, which we pursue but never actually reach. On the other hand it means our attempts to capture that system, in the descriptions which we conceive and which we change and refine constantly in the light of scientific progress.

12

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

are many more anomalies associated with the voice analysis of the passive, but that will do for present purposes. Such anomalies are usually considered to be part of parole. Is it naive to expect linguists to be able to find an explanation within langue to the above-mentioned three anomalies? Is it expecting too much from linguistic science 'scientism' - to expect linguists to be able to find a structural explanation within langue to the anomalies? If one adopts the parole approach the answer will be 'Yes', and one will content oneself with a parole-style explanation, perhaps using theme-rheme organisation or some other device of text grammar. And such explanations will sound reasonably convincing. But the fact is, it is possible to explain the anomalies within langue. It is possible to find another analysis of be + V-ed which explains them, and that analysis is one which sees be + V-ed in its resemblance to the perfect, as an aspect of the type Auxiliary + Participle (Beedham 1982, 1998; see also Poupynin 1980, Schoorlemmer 1995). The actional passive has its own meaning, 'action + state' (i.e. actives and passives are not 'cognitively synonymous'), and like all Auxiliary + Participle aspects, the syntax (combinatorial possibilities) of the passive is determined by the lexical aspect of the verb and the compositional aspect of the sentence in which it occurs, i.e. the syntax of the passive is not determined by transitivity (on compositional aspect see Verkuyl 1972, 1993). The explanation for the above-mentioned three anomalies associated with the passive is therefore as follows. Firstly, the fact that the transformation of so many active sentences into the passive produces grotesque curiosities is simply one piece of evidence amongst many for the view that the grammatical voice analysis under which the grammarian derives the passive from an 'underlying' 'active' is incorrect. Under the aspect analysis in its application to English, be + V-ed is related to have + V-ed (the perfect) and to be + V-ing (the progressive), there is no transforming of actives into passives. Anyone who had resorted to a parole type explanation of odd passives such as theme-rheme analysis would have been barking up the wrong tree. The true explanation lies in a correction of the langue analysis. Secondly, Quirk et al.'s prototypical passive sentence This difficulty can be avoided in several ways looks very much like the kind of sentence found in discussions of compositional aspect. What is important is the type of subject NP (singular or plural, specific or non-specific), the lexical aspect of the verb, the presence of a modal verb and a non-finite form of the verb, the presence of an adverbial phrase. All these factors affect the compositional aspect of the sentence. And if the passive is an aspect of the type Auxiliary + Participle, these factors, because they influence compositional aspect, will inevitably affect passivizability (Beedham 1982:115-18). Once again, a parole-type or textual explanation was tempting, but it would have been wrong to go down that route. It has turned out that the problem, which manifested itself in parole, was an artefact of an incorrect grammatical analysis at the level of langue. The real and deeper explanation to the problem has been found in langue. Finally, the reason why corpus studies have found that four-fifths of passive sentences in texts (i.e. at the level of parole) occur without the agentive by-phrase is that it is wrong to derive passives from actives (at the level of langue) and thus to expect passives to occur with the agentive by-phrase realised. The passive is an aspect of the verb, not a voice of the verb, and has a derivation in English parallel to that of the perfect and the progressive. In that derivation the agentive by-phrase is a prepositional phrase which, like most prepositional phrases, is optional. Once again the solution to a problem which manifested itself in parole has been solved at the level of langue. It was not naive to expect to find a solution in langue, it

Introduction

13

was entirely realistic. To look for a solution to the passive in langue, not parole, is not scientism, it is science. Not that that is to say that all parole studies are inherently wrong. Quite the reverse, linguists must study parole. Text grammar, corpus studies, theme-rheme analysis, speech act theory, for example, are all interesting and fruitful areas of linguistics, and many of the arguments and data in Beedham 1982 come from parole.3 But the point is what you do with your parole findings. To the sentence-grammarian the study of parole is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. That end is the elucidation of langue. (The aspectual analysis of the passive is placed in the context of Saussurean structuralism in Beedham 1995:42-52, 66-86). The artificial and transitory nature of grammatical descriptions is emphasised by Mati Hint in his paper Completeness and Symmetricity of Paradigms (81-7), and also by Bozena Bednafikova in her paper System Description or Systematic Prescription? (75-80). Igor Boguslavsky, in his paper Modals, Comparatives, and Negation (253-62), demonstrates how a well-known ambiguity of comparatives results from the interaction between lexical semantics, communicative function, and conversational maxims. Elisabetta Fava, in her paper Langue and Parole in Speech Act Theories: Some Considerations and a Proposal (263-81), attempts to relate grammatical structure to specific speech acts, referring to English, Russian, Greek, and Italian. Magdalena Jurewicz, in her paper Metatext-Sequenzen in deutsch-polnischen Gesprachen: Eine Fallstudie anhand konsekutiv gedolmetschter Texte (295-304), using the example of German and Polish shows how the interpreter in consecutive interpreting does not simply relay information but contributes to the creation of the conversation as well. Radmila B. Sevic, in her paper Early Collections of Private Documents: The Missing Link in the Diachronic Corpora? (337-47), advocates using private letters and documents in diachronic studies in order to reach the nearest approximation to the spoken language of earlier periods. Alexander T. Bergs, in his paper Social Networks and Language Change in Middle English: The Challenge of Diachrony (349-62), attempts to apply the concept of Social Networks from contemporary sociolinguistics to a diachronic study of Middle English. Pieter Seuren, in his paper Eubulides as a 20th Century Semanticist (47-61), presents the neglected Ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides, bitter rival of Aristotle, as a precursor of 20th century logical semantics. And finally R.H.Robins, in his paper Key Dates in Twentieth Century Linguistics (63-72), looks back on linguistics in the 20th century and gives a personal view of the key dates, events, and landmarks. How can it be that we think we are all structuralists, and yet, as Tobin says, structuralism is the revolution that never happened? Hopefully the papers that follow will go some way towards providing an answer to that question. But the main point of these Proceedings, as was of the conference itself, is to provide a platform for discussion and debate in the dialectical process of the science of linguistics.

Christopher Beedham, Department of German, University of St Andrews, Scotland/UK

3

In terms of day to day methodology, the main difference between langue-oriented and parole-oriented linguists is that the former work with invented sentences and the grammaticaliry judgements of native speakers, whereas the latter work with texts, often large computerized corpora, and statistical frequency.

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

REFERENCES Bauer, Heinrich (1830). Vollstdndige Grammatik der neuhochdeutschen Sprache. Dritter Band. Reimer, Berlin. Beedham, Christopher (1982). The Passive Aspect in English, German and Russian. Narr, Tubingen. Beedham, Christopher (1995). German linguistics: An introduction. ludicium, Munchen. Beedham, Christopher (1998). The perfect passive participle in Russian: A review of Participial passive and aspect in Russian, by Maaike Schoorlemmer. Lingua, 105, 79-94. Berlin, B. and P. Kay (1969). Basic Color Terms: their Universality and Evolution. University of California Press. Reprinted 1991. Bondarko, Alexander V. (1971). Vid i vremja russkogo glagola (Znachenie i upotreblenie). Moskva. Engel, Ulrich (1996). Deutsche Grammatik, 3., korrigierte Auflage. Groos, Heidelberg. Flamig, W. (1964) Untersuchungen zum Finalsatz im Deutschen.(Synchronie und Diachronie). Sitzungsberichte der dt. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Klasse fur Sprachen, Literatur und Kunst. Jahrgang 1964, Nr. 5. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin. Godel, R. (1957). Les sources manuscrites du Cows de linguistique generale de F. de Saussure. Droz, Genf. Hartmann, Ralph (1997). Review of C.Beedham, German linguistics: An introduction (iudicium 1995). Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache 24, 198-200. Meillet, Antoine. (1893). Les lois du langage I: Les lois phonetiques. Revue Internationale de sociologie (Paris) 1.311-21. Moon, R. (1987). The analysis of meaning, In Sinclair, J. McH. (ed.) (1987) Looking up: an Account of the Collins COBUILD Project, 86-103. Collins ELT, London. Poupynin, Youri A. (1980). Funktsionirovanie vidov russkogo glagola v passivnyx konstruktsiyax (K probleme vzaimosvyazey kategorii vida i glagola) [The functioning of the aspects of the Russian verb in passive constructions (On the problem of the reciprocal links between the categories of aspect and the verb)]. Diss. kand. filol. nauk., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leningrad. Quirk, Randolph, S.Greenbaum, G.Leech and J.Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London. Renouf, A. and J. McH. Sinclair (1991). Collocational frameworks in English, In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.) (1991) English Corpus Linguistics, 128-144. Longman, London. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1879). Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916). Cours de linguistique generale. Ed. by Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Payot, Lausanne & Paris. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1972). Cours de linguistique generale. Edition critique preparee par Tullio de Mauro. Payot, Paris. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983). Course in General Linguistics. Transl. by Roy Harris. Duckworth, London.

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Saussure, Ferdinand de (1989-90). Cows de linguistique generale. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler. 2 Bande. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. Schoorlemmer, Maaike (1995). Participial passive and aspect in Russian. OTS, Utrecht. Searle, John (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sinclair, J. McH. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Slovar' russkogojazyka. V 4-x tomax. (1981-84). Moskva. Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Analysis. Routledge, London. Svartvik, Jan (1966). On Voice in the English Verb. Mouton, The Hague. Tobin, Yishai. (1990). Semiotics and Linguistics. Longman, London. Verkuyl, Henk J. (1972). On the compositional nature of the aspects. Reidel, Dordrecht. Verkuyl, Henk J. (1993). A theory of aspectuality: The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980). Philosophische Untersuchungen (PU). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.

CORPUS Saint-Exupery, Antoine de. 1943. The Little Prince (translated from the French by Katherine Woods). Reynal & Hitchcock, New York. Walker, Elizabeth. 1992. Hallmark. Headline Book Publishers, London.

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I HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS

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1 THREE SAUSSURES — ONE 'STRUCTURALIST' AVANT LA LETTRE E. F. K. Koerner, University of Ottawa, Canada

Abstract This paper argues for the intrinsic unity of Saussure's linguistic thinking, from his enfantillage of 1872 to the posthumous Cours of 1916, against proposals made by Albert Sechehaye (1940) and Eric Buyssens (1942), who distinguished between three and six 'linguistiques saussuriennes', respectively, based on the Cours alone. In 1961 Buyssens revised his position following the publication of Godel's Sources manuscrites (1957), but the idea of at least 'two Saussures' (cf. Redard 1978), a Saussure of the Memoire (1878) and a Saussure of the Cours (1916), has largely been maintained in the annals of linguistic science. More recently, Harris (1994) suggested that we are talking of at least three Saussures of the Cours when using Saussure's name in order to refer to his general linguistics, a view that can hardly be maintained by a discerning scholar working with Engler's 'edition critique' (1968, 1974). The present paper focuses specifically on Saussure's concept of 'system', tracing its use throughout his thinking about language from 1872 till 1911. Harris' (1983) decision to translate Saussure's 'systeme' by 'structure' points to a serious misunderstanding of Saussure's legacy.

1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS It was the fate of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) to be known for his work in historicalcomparative Indo-European linguistics during his lifetime but to become known almost exclusively for the posthumous compilation of his Geneva lectures during 1907-1911 on (at least in the manner they were presented by the editors and subsequently received by the next generations of readers) non-historical, general and 'synchronic' linguistics, after his death. During his lifetime Saussure was known, indeed famous, for at least two publications, the Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeenms which he published after only six semesters of formal study at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin in December 1878, at age twenty-one and fifteen months before submitting his doctoral thesis, and his 1894 and 1896 articles on the accentual system of Lithuanian, which appeared, respectively, in the years before and after his promotion from extraordinary to ordinary professor of Indo-European philology at the University of Geneva, and for which he has been credited with a 'Law' (see Collinge [1985:149-152], for details). This paper constitutes an

19

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

attempt to see Saussure's legacy as a lifetime commitment in search of system or systems with a view to demonstrating the essential wholeness of his work.

2. THREE OR MORE SAUSSURES? In 1940, at age 70, Albert Sechehaye (1870-1946), the person largely responsible for the manner in which Saussure's ideas were presented in the posthumous Cours de linguistique generale, first published in 1916 (slightly revised in 1922 and 1931 for the second and third editions and ever since frequently reprinted and translated into more than a dozen languages), proposed to distinguish between 'trois linguistiques saussuriennes', namely one he called 'linguistique de la parole pre-grammaticale', an enterprise which would get us back into pre19th-century language genesis speculations if taken seriously; a 'linguistique de la parole proprement dite', which would investigate spoken language as found in dialect study for instance, and a 'linguistique de la langue', which would approximate what Saussure had in mind as regards the central goal of linguistic research as it alone could properly investigate the system of language (Sechehaye 1940). However, two years later, when Eric Buyssens (b.1901) suggested that he could distinguish altogether 'six linguistiques de F. de Saussure' (Buyssens 1942), he was severely criticized by Sechehaye (1944). Buyssens had taken different passages from this 'vulgata' text to suggest that the three dichotomies advanced by Saussure — langue/parole, synchronie/diachronie, and linguistique externe/linguistique interne — could, misleadingly he admits, be seen as possibly leading to six manners in which to conduct linguistics. Instead, Buyssens proposes, quite in line with Saussure's own thinking (as Sechehaye [1944] concedes), a synchronic linguistics which studies the language system and its functioning in speech, and a diachronic linguistics that explains the history of language in terms of changes in the society which speaks it. In 1961 Buyssens revised his position following the publication of Robert Godel's (19021984) Sources manuscrites (1957), which corrects many of the seeming contradictions in Saussure's argument which had, more often than not, been introduced by the editors, as Engler's 'edition critique' has amply documented (Saussure 1967-1968). Yet the tradition to see Saussure in at least two terms, as a historical linguist (represented by his Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes), on the one hand, and as a 'structuralist' (represented by the Cours), on the other, has continued in the annals of linguistic science (cf. Redard's 1978 account). In the present paper the attempt is made to illustrate that this fable convenue is false, since the Memoire of 1878, while dealing with an early stage of language — the reconstructed phonological system of the Proto-Indo-European vowels — is in fact a 'synchronic' study. Moreover, apart from the papers that led up to the Memoire, it is suggested that already in his enfantillage (Saussure's term in retrospect) of 1872, when he was less than fifteen years old, his 40-page "Essai pour reduire les mots du Grec, du Latin & de 1'Allemand a un petit nombre de racines" can in a way be seen as foreshadowing his later preoccupation with discovering or building on the presence of a system in language, which figures so prominently in the Memoire. It is Saussure's emphasis on 'systeme' (of which Mounin in 1968 reported 138 occurrences in the Cours) that rightly or wrongly made him 'the father of structuralism'. There is another aspect to the alleged 'multiplicity' of Saussure's teachings. In 1994, reviewing a monograph by a philosopher who appears to have discovered Saussure only

Three Saussures ?

21

recently as a subject of theoretical inquiry (Holdcroft 1991), Roy Harris ran through the exercise of asking how many Saussures there may be with regard to the Cours alone, namely (Harris 1994:184-185), as 1) Saussure, who "can be treated for convenience's sake, as the putative author of the Cours de linguistique generale, even though 'the real' Saussure did not write it", a kind of short-cut most of us use when discussing particular points made in the vulgata text; 2) his name could also be invoked as the "lecturer who gave any of the courses at Geneva during the years 1907-1911" but to whom certain views could be attributed only by reference to particular students' notes taken down during his lectures, and finally 3) a "third possibility", which would mean, in Harris's (1994:185) view to treat the name Saussure as referring to 'the real' Saussure, i.e., the theorist whose ideas about language seem to have evolved over a period of time, were probably never expressed fully in any course of lectures that he gave, and were undoubtedly still far from having reached a definitive form at the time of his death. The direct evidence of the views of this theorist (Saussure 3) is altogether more controversial, and certainly not identical with that available for establishing the views attributable to Saussure (1) or Saussure (2). However, this 'triplicity' is not the issue in the present paper. Besides, those who want to give Saussure the fairest reading possible will, before they attribute a particular position to him (= Saussure 3?), consult Engler's edition critique (Saussure 1967-1968, 1974). Saussure's general ideas about language and how to analyze them come out clearly enough in all three kinds of'Saussure' that Harris distinguishes. In the present paper I shall pursue the seemingly tortuous route that the idea central to Saussure's linguistic thinking throughout his life, namely, that of language as a system of mutually interdependent parts, has taken, not in Saussure's mind, as it appears to have been always clear to him, but in his teachings; for it is through both his published and spoken word that we have come to associate the concept with his name.

3. THE SEARCH FOR LANGUAGE AS A SYSTEM 'Ou TOUT SE TIENT' IN SAUSSURE More than a quarter-century ago, William Gamwell Moulton (b.1914), one of the very few direct students of Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) — who himself read Saussure's Cours with great interest (cf. Bloomfield 1923) — made the following statement at the outset of a review of four books devoted to Swiss German dialectology, an area in which he had distinguished himself: It is a tenet of 20th-century linguistics that language is systematic. This has been expressed variously in such statements as that language is 'un systeme ou tout se tient',1 that the grammar of a language is a 'system of rules', and that the use of language is 'rule-governed behavior'. (Moulton 1971:938-939) Hardly anyone would want to quibble with such an affirmation about the broad use of this idea today. In the present context, the footnote which Moulton appended to this characterization makes for more interesting reading, and we will see in what follows the quotation why: Although the famous phrase is customarily attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, in a reasonably careful rereading of the Cours I was unable to find it. The earliest occurrence that I have been able to locate is in Maurice Grammont, Traite de phonetique (Paris, 1933), p.167. Did Meillet also say it? Was Saussure the first to say it? Can anyone help me?

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

To be sure, Moulton was neither the first nor the last to have been frustrated in his search for this turn of phrase in Saussure's Cours. Apart from the common observation one can make, namely that, with rare exceptions, good practitioners of the craft tend to be poor historians (if they take any active interest in the history of their discipline at all), it also seems that at least part of the reason for this frustration is due to the long-standing amnesia of American linguistics with regard to European scholarship, from what Thomas Sebeok once characterized as 'the smug thirties' to at least the 1960s, which included a lack of familiarity with or disdain for the work of Saussure, Meillet, Trubetzkoy, Hjelmslev and other European linguists (cf. Haugen 1951, for an early critique of this attitude). Indeed, following Bloomfield's opus magnum of 1933, we can also notice a considerable lack of interest among his followers in historical-comparative linguistics. (Note that those who were fairly well read in Indo-European linguistics — or Romance philology for that matter — and who kept the subject alive in the United States were more often than not, if not exclusively, refugees from Nazi persecution, not American born.1) Moulton's queries are even more interesting for other reasons, as he seems to have been the first scholar to publicly challenge the traditional ascription of the phrase "ou tout se tient" to Saussure. He also suspects that Meillet used it, and he refers to an author and a book which are both at least in some way relevant to the subject of this paper: like Antoine Meillet (18661936), Maurice Grammont (1866-1946) was a student of Saussure's in Paris during the 1880s, and the subject of his 1933 book, contrary to what the title suggests, was devoted to phonology, not phonetics. As regards the urgency with which Moulton expressed his request for help, one cannot but hope that some reader of his note came to his relief soon after this fourth 1971 issue of Language was published, probably at exactly the same moment that I defended my thesis on Saussure which was published fifteen months later, with only minor changes, a new preface and an index of names (Koerner 1973). In it Moulton might have found at least a partial answer to his questions, for it says — in an explanatory footnote to a passage from Meillet's "Le9on d'ouverture du Cours de Grammaire comparee au College de France" of 1906, in which the characterization of language as "un systeme ou tout se tient" figures quite prominently (Meillet 1921 [1906]: 16; Koerner 1973:231): This phrase defining language as "un systeme [...] ou tout se tient" was frequently employed by Meillet and can also be found in the writings of his pupils, notably in J. Vendryes'. Cf. Meillet's pamphlet, La Linguistique (Paris: Larousse, 1916[1915]), p.7: "Toute langue est un systeme rigoureusement agence ..., tout se tient dans le systeme d'une langue". It is interesting to note that Meillet uses this formulation in connection with Saussure's teaching at Paris (1881-91); Meillet then was apparently not aware of the fact that Saussure's lectures on general linguistics were about to be published. (Koerner 1973[1971]:240n.23) One reason for citing this note is also to defend myself against the accusation (e.g., by Szemerenyi 1980:160) that I had attributed this famous phrase to Saussure, a charge against which Brogyanyi (1983:143-144) defended me, referring in addition to other places in the same book of mine as well as to Koerner (1975 [1972]: 746, 797), a study with which Szemerenyi was also familiar (cf. his review in Phonetica 36.162-165 [1979]), in which similar 1 I am thinking in particular of Henry M. Hoenigswald (born in Breslau in 1915) among IndoEuropeanists, and of Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998), born in Kiev but educated in Berlin, and the Viennaborn Henry Kahane (1902-1992), both of whom were doctoral students of the Romance philologist Ernst Gamillscheg (1887-1971), but also of the Viennese Ernst Pulgram (b.1915), who did his second doctorate at Harvard under British-born Joshua Whatmough (1897-1964) in 1946.

Three Saussures?

23

observations had been made. Indeed, following the publication of Peeters' 1990 paper, which supplies further evidence of my subsequent research into the question (e.g., Koerner 1984, 1987), I think there is no need any more to publicly claim ownership of my original findings. (Perhaps I should add that my 1971 dissertation was devoted to the Cours and its impact on 20th-century linguistic thought, not to his Memoire; this interest of mine is more evident in Koerner 1987.) Still, as the record shows, this often-used tournure has received further historical investigation following Brogyanyi's 1983 paper (Toman 1987, Hewson 1990, Peeters 1990), in part also because the phrase — and the idea — is still widely attributed to Saussure in the critical literature, at times against Saussure and 'structuralism' generally (cf. Brogyanyi 1983:145-146). Even the Indo-Europeanist Oswald Szemerenyi (1913-1996), who was so well familiar with the essential tenets of Saussure's Memoire (Szemerenyi 1973), went so far as to regard the phrase as "absurd" (1980:160). While I do not think that the idea of language as a system of interrelated terms needs to be defended — I would find it hard to believe that there is any serious linguist around who would challenge such a view — it seems that a more detailed analysis of the primary sources concerning its early use is still desirable to set the record straight, and to permit future (careful) users of this famous dictum the benefit of an historical accounting of its evolution and proper application to the facts of language.

4. ATTRIBUTIONS OF 'Oil TOUT SE TlENT' TO SAUSSURE Brogyanyi (1983) made no mention of his one-time mentor's characterization of this phrase as 'absurd', but he showed (145-146), as I just noted, that some linguists used the quote to criticize (Saussurean) structuralism generally as not giving an adequate picture of living languages. Others, who ascribe it to Meillet, not Saussure, like Lepschy (1970: 34), remarked that when Meillet stated in the preface to his Introduction a l 'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes that language was "un ensemble ou tout se tient" (Meillet 1903:x), "he was expressing a commonplace idea rather than an original one". The key term here (and the source of Lepschy's derision), it appears, was Meillet's use of the word ensemble rather than systeme2 in this passage, as the former has a seemingly lengthy tradition in French thought. Bogyanyi (p. 145) quotes the definition which Emile Littre (18031881) had given in his Dictionnaire de la langue francaise under the entry of 'systeme' (1869:2119),3 namely, as an "Ensemble de choses qui se tiennent", and which harks back, according to Mounin (1972:43), to the entry for the same term in the French Encyclopedic of 1765, which in turn is quoted by Walther von Wartburg (1888-1971) in his Franzosisches etymologisches Worterbuch as an "ensemble de choses qui se tiennent d'une maniere ou d'une autre, considerees sous Tangle de leurs relations" (1966:504). However, Lepschy (b.1935) did not go much further in his investigations and, as a result, missed Meillet's much more forceful definitions in his many other, earlier as well as later, writings, including the revealing passage

2 Even though the context shows that Meillet in fact used the term 'systeme linguistique indoeuropeen' just before the passage Lepschy refers to. 3 Erroneously, Toman (1987:404) misquotes Brogyanyi (1983) twice when substituting 'systeme' by 'structure'.

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

in the 1912 edition of Meillet's Introduction, which was retained in its many subsequent editions (see section 5.2 below).

4.1 Early attributions The earliest reference to Saussure as the originator of the phrase appears to have come, interestingly enough, from the pen of his one-time student at the University of Geneva and later co-editor of his lectures on general linguistics, Charles Bally (1865-1947). In the first edition of his influential Linguistique generale et linguistique francaise Bally noted (1932:9 = 1944:17): "Dans un systeme, tout se tient [...]: ce principe, proclame par Saussure, conserve pour nous toute sa valeur". This affirmation seems to have been the source of Nikolaj Sergeevic Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), who in his programmatic, if not propagandistic, article of 1933, "La phonologic actuelle", cites the phrase characterizing language as "un systeme ou tout se tient" altogether four times (Trubetzkoy 1933:241-244 = 1969:159-163), each time identifying Saussure as the originator and suggesting (without offering a particular locus — of course) that the phrase in question could be found in the Cours, from which he quoted elsewhere, for instance when referring to the following famous phrase from the Cours: "Les phonemes sont avant tout des entites oppositives, relatives et negatives" (Saussure 1931 [1916]: 164). It seems that on the authority of Bally and then possibly also on that of Trubetzkoy, it became fairly commonplace to attribute the phrase to Saussure. Whatever the (secondary or tertiary) source of this ascription, it seems that the phrase in question fitted well into the argument of those post-Saussurean linguists who took the Cours as a textbook of structuralism rather than as an original attempt at an overall general linguistics in which both synchrony and diachrony would find their proper place.

4.2 Later ascriptions By the 1960s, when linguistics had become a popular subject of university instruction, the expression of language as a 'systeme ou tout se tient' and its congeners had become widely used in the classroom and in the textbook literature. It was a handy phrase if one was to argue in favour of a structural approach to language. It would probably be useful to check all sorts of modern textbooks to make an accounting of more recent ascriptions of this 'tour de phrase'. These are more likely due to a kind of oral, classroom transmission than the result of original research as, for instance in Fishman's 'brief introduction' to sociolinguistics (1970:9), where he makes a general reference to the Cours, obviously without having read it. Given limitations of space, reference to just two more places may suffice where the phrase is credited to Saussure: in Jan Mulder's Martinet-inspired Foundations of Axiomatic Linguistics (1989:135) and an article by Jacob Mey on 'semiosis', where the author even goes so far as to supply a page reference to the Cours, affirming: Perhaps one of Saussure's most important (and at least most widely quoted) statements has been that in language, everything holds together: "dans le langage, tout se tient" (1966:72). The immediate corollary of this statement is that in language everything is possible, as long as one knows, and sticks to, the rules of the game, [...] (Mey 1992:229)

Three Saussures?

25

It is obvious that the author has no idea where this phrase has come from and in what context it was originally conceived. Still, Mey is largely correct in his belief that comparable ideas can be found in the text compiled by Bally and Sechehaye, but not where his reference leads us to, namely, to a discussion of phonetics ("Classification des sons d'apres leur articulation buccale").4

5. ON THE HEELS OF THE SOURCES OF 'Ou TOUT SE TIENT' It appears to me that most teachers of linguistics did not particularly care where the phrase had come from. Indeed, it did not really matter. It was a useful way to explain the nature of language structure, and this usually sufficed. We know of various other instances where concepts or a 'joli mot' (as Meillet called Baudouin de Courtenay's 1881 creation of 'morpheme' by analogy to 'phoneme') are ascribed to the wrong person.5

5.1 The circuitous history of 'ou tout se tient' As we have already noted, there appears to be a fairly long list of scholars to whom the phrase has been credited. To be sure, the idea of language being a system is not a 20th-century discovery. The organicist view of language which permeated 19th-century historicalcomparative linguistics implied that languages were open to systematic analysis (Koerner 1975). So when the French lexicographer Littre, an ardent follower of Auguste Comte's philosophy of science, by the way, defined 'systeme' as an "[ejnsemble de choses qui se tiennent" in 1869, he may be said to have done little else than formulate a generally-held view. As a result, it was not merely the context in which Littre's definition appeared which was probably much less promising and influential than Antoine Meillet's (1866-1936) Introduction a I'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes, which first appeared in 1903, was translated into German soon thereafter, and had six more editions during the author's lifetime. It is probable that most readers of the book used later editions (notably the fifth dating from 1922), by which time the Cours de linguistique generate had appeared and begun to exert its influence. It would help explain why 20th-century linguists soon began to associate the phrase with Saussure and the Cours, and not Meillet and his Introduction — or Saussure and his Memoire, for that matter. However, as we shall see, Meillet used this now well-known phrase much earlier in his career, a whole decade earlier, at least where the printed record is concerned. This is significant, as we shall see later in the present discussion. In 1893, when the quote below appeared, Saussure had returned to Geneva less than two years earlier, and Meillet, then aged 27, was eager to establish himself as a scholar in his own right. It was no surprise that the 4

In his bibliography (p.238) Mey refers to the 1916 edition, and so one may speculate which edition — or translation? — he might have been referring to. Neither in the first French edition (whose pagination differs from all subsequent editions) nor in any later edition or, rather, uncorrected reprint is there anything said on page 72 about this matter; there is not even a mention of 'systeme' in either. 5 The frequent ascription today of the concept of 'markedness' to Chomsky, and not to Trubetzkoy, is just a case in point, and only historians of linguistics may take exception to such misleading claims. For a well-researched corrective to this 'now swollen notion', see Chvany (1996).

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

article was devoted to an expose of the main pillar of historical-comparative linguistic theory and practice since 1876, the question of the regularity of sound change as emphasized by the young scholars of the Leipzig circle around Georg Curtius (1820-1885), notably Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) and Hermann Osthoff (1847-1909), precisely during the time Saussure was a student there (1876-1878, 1879-1880). In his paper on "Les lois phonetiques", Meillet noted — obviously well aware of the idea, first enunciated by Felix Franke (1860-1886), of Artikulationsbasis or modern-day 'articulatory setting': Les divers elements phonetiques de chaque idiome forment un systeme oil tout se tient. Les personnes qui ont appris a prononcer une langue etrangere ont pu s'en rendre compte: ce n'est pas seulement parce qu'il prononce mal le th ou les consonnes finales que le Fran9ais est inintelligible en parlant Panglais, c'est que ni la position des levres, ni celle de la langue ne sont les memes pour parler les deux langues, et que pas une seule des voyelles n'est rigoureusement identique dans les deux. Or 1'enfant, en apprenant a parler, s'assimile non une articulation isolee, mais {'ensemble du systeme. (Meillet 1893:318-319; Koerner 1989:405; emphasis added: EFKK) Two years later we can read the following in an important and influential 215-page monograph of the phenomenon of 'dissimilation' found in Indo-European languages, by another former student of Saussure's during his tenure as Maitre de conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris (1881-1891), Maurice Grammont, where the author holds up the following principle maintained elsewhere by historical linguists at the time: [...] si la dissimilation elle aussi obeit a des lois, tout se tient dans Pedifice, 1'ensemble est complet et il ne reste qu'a parfaire les details. (Grammont 1895:10) As Meillet's 1893 article appeared in a rather obscure place, and not in a regular linguistics journal, it is not surprising that Toman (1987:404), looking for pre-1903 locations of the phrase, expected to have found reasons to attrribute it to Grammont rather than to Meillet, of whom he only found a later (1899) attestation which, however, was much more detailed and so could have been taken as an elaboration on Meillet's part of his confrere's discovery. The latter, in a paper published in the prestigious Indogermanische Forschungen, on a fairly minute subject of Indo-European morphology, had given the following argument to explain a particular language change: [...] tous les mouvements qui concourent a la formation d'un phoneme etant solidaires, 1'alteration de 1'un d'entre eux a chance d'entrainer, soit immediatement, soit plus tard, 1'alteration d'une ou de plusieurs des autres. Du reste ce phoneme n'est pas isole dans la langue, il fait partie d'un systeme dont toutes les parties se tiennent et reagissent les unes sur les autres; [...]. (Meillet 1899:64; Toman 1987:403) Apart from the fact that Meillet's statement is quite distinct from Grammont's, we may be safe in assuming, also based on Meillet's earlier use of the idea, that both had drawn inspiration from the same source, even if later readers might have seen Meillet as its originator, a possibility Toman (1987:404-405) is willing to consider. Thus, it is interesting to note that Joseph Vendryes (1875-1960), one of Meillet's first students and not much later a close collaborator, should have revisited in a way Meillet's 1893 paper. In a programmatic paper on the 'sound laws', published in a Festschrift dedicated to Meillet (on the occasion of what appears to have been the 10th anniversary of his teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes), he noted that the change of one phoneme presupposes the change of other phonemes in the evolution of a given language system ("evolution du systeme"): "L'alteration d'un phoneme suppose 1'alteration concomittante de plusieurs autres phonemes" (Vendryes 1902:116). Even

Three Saussures?

27

if the 'ou tout se tient' phrase itself does not appear in Vendryes' paper, the underlying concept is clearly in evidence.

5.2 Getting closer to the sources of 'ou tout se tient' Given the now widely accepted ascription of the concept and phrase to Meillet, it becomes of interest to the historian of linguistics to look for clues of their genesis in Meillet's mature work, in particular his influential Introduction a I 'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes, published in a German translation in 1909, a considerable feat given Germany's preeminence in the field of comparative-historical linguistics at the time.6 What we could have noted thus far is that nowhere in his writings did Meillet claim ownership of the phrase in question; there is no hint anywhere that he thought he was expressing a novel idea. Where his Introduction is concerned, we should note right from the start that the book carries, on a separate page, the following dedication: A MON MAITRE

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE A L'OCCASION DES VINGT-CINQUE ANS ECOULES DEPUIS LA PUBLICATION DU MEMOIRE SUR LE SYSTEME PRIMITIF DES VOYELLES DANS LES LANGUES INDO-EUROPEENNES (1878-1903)

As we shall see from what follows, this dedication is much more than a polite gesture of a student to his former teacher; indeed, Meillet was very conscious of Saussure's influence on his linguistic thinking as may be gathered from his obituary of the mattre. Referring to his own contribution to a volume of melanges dedicated to Saussure in 1908, the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the Memoire, in which his former students were given an opportunity to indicate "leur dette vis-a-vis de leur maitre", Meillet spoke of his own indebtedness in the following terms: Pour ma part, il n'est guere de page que j'ai publiee sans avoir un remords de m'en attribuer seul le merite: la pensee de F. de Saussure etait si riche, que j'en suis reste tout penetre. Je n'oserai, dans ce que j'ai ecrit, faire le depart de ce que je lui dois; mais je suis sur que Penseignement de F. de Saussure est pour beaucoup dans ce que les juges bienveillants ont parfois pu trouver a y louer. (Meillet 1936[1913]:179) A possible hyperbole aside, we can be sure that Meillet meant what he said. Characterizing Saussure's teachings at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes, Meillet (p. 178) points out that what the student received was of "une valeur generate, ils preparaient a travailler et formalent 1'esprit; ses formules et ses definitions se fixaient dans la memoire comme des guides et des modeles." This statement should be kept in mind, too. Together with the dedication of his Introduction, which was retained in all subsequent editions, Meillet's acknowledgement of the profound impact that Saussure had on his training as a linguist is, in my view, significant for the resolution of our puzzle concerning the original source of the well-known phrase concerning

6 In fact, Meillet's reputation had grown so much by then that the University of Berlin bestowed on him an honorary doctorate in 1910.

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

the systematic nature of language, of which we find so many expressions in Meillet's writings. The following additional locus may suffice to illustrate this. In his 1906 inaugural speech as successor to Michel Breal (1832-1915) in the Chair of Comparative Grammar at the College de France, Meillet chose to pronounce himself on "L'etat actuel des etudes de linguistique generate [sic]". There, speaking about "la realite d'une langue", he expatiates: Elle est linguistique: car une langue constitue un systeme complexe de moyen d'expression, systeme oil tout se tient et ou une innovation individuelle ne peut que difficilement trouver place si, provenant d'un pur caprice, elle n'est pas exactement adaptee a ce systeme, c'est-adire si elle n'est pas en harmonic avec les regies generates de la langue. (Meillet 1921 [1906]: 16; emphasis added: EFKK). Returning to Meillet's Introduction of 1903, we may read in his Avant-propos the following observation which, I believe, should lead us closer to the source of the idea: Comme toute autre langue, les differents parties du systeme linguistique indo-europeen forment un ensemble ou tout se tient et dont il importe avant tout a comprendre le rigoureux enchainement. (Meillet 1903:x = 81937:ix) Indeed, if a further piece of evidence was needed to demonstrate that Meillet had not merely comparative-historical Indo-European linguistics generally in mind but, specifically, Saussure's Memoire, when he spoke of a language as a system of interdependent terms, we may refer to the article "Aper9u du developpement de la grammaire comparee", which Meillet added to the third edition of his Introduction in 1912, barely a year before Saussure's death. There, after a detailed expose of the discoveries made by Saussure in his Memoire (Meillet 1937[1912]:473474), which established "d'une maniere definitive la theorie du vocalisme indo-europeen" (p.473), Meillet conies to the following judgment: [...] le Memoire apportait, par une innovation, un systeme coherent qui embrassait tous les faits, mettait a leur place les faits connus et en revelait une foule de nouveaux. Des lors il n'etait plus permis d'ignorer, a propos d'aucune question, que chaque langue forme un systeme ou tout se tient, et un plan general d'une pleine rigueur. (1937[1912]:474-475; emphasis added: EFKK) As early as 1915, a year before the first appearance of the essentials from Saussure's Geneva lectures on general linguistics, Meillet, in a presentation of the state of the art of French linguistics for the San Francisco World Exhibition, emphatically reiterates this formulation, and clearly in connection with Saussure's teachings in Paris, when affirming "Toute langue est un systeme rigoureusement articule [...], tout se tient dans le systeme d'une langue" (Meillet 1916[1915]:7; also quoted in Koerner 1973:240n.23).

6. THE PLACE OF 'SYSTEM' IN SAUSSURE'S LINGUISTIC THOUGHT7 In his review of the Cours de linguistique generale, Meillet had noted the following, which should be kept in mind when pursuing our quest for the source or sources of this well-known phrase:

7 Given time restrictions, this section lacks the kind of detail that I believe an article defond requires to settle the issue once for all, though I trust the drift of my argument is clear enough to make the point.

Three Saussures?

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[...] la pensee de F. de Saussure s'etait fixee tres tot, on le sait. Les doctrines qu'il a enseignees explicitement dans ces cours de linguistique generate sont celles dont s'inspirait deja 1'enseignement de grammaire comparee qu'il a donne vingt ans plus tot a 1'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, et que j'ai re9u. Je les retrouve telles qu'il etait souvent possible de les deviner. (Meillet 1916:32; Mounin 1968:163) This observation is of importance to my argument as it suggests that Meillet picked up the idea and probably also the felicitous phrase during Saussure's courses in Paris during the mid1880s. It was during this time that Saussure was very much preoccupied with Indo-European linguistics, which was the subject of his courses, but also with defending the findings of his Memoire, which had not yet become widely accepted and had been, by some in Germany, even attacked. Saussure appears to have used the Memoire as a textbook; indeed, a second edition of the volume appeared in Paris in 1887. From Saussure's papers it is clear that he intended to add an answer to his critics (notably Osthoff), but was dissuaded by his colleagues from doing so (cf. Redard 1978:34). It is also important to note that Saussure referred to the Memoire as 'mon Systeme des Voyelles', the first paragraph of which should be quoted in full to illustrate the clear-headedness of this twenty-one-year old genius: Etudier les formes multiples sous lesquelles se manifeste ce qu'on appelle Va indo-europeen, tel est 1'objet immediat de cet opuscule [of 302 pages!]: le reste des voyelles ne sera pris en consideration qu'autant que les phenomenes relatifs a 1'a en fourniront 1'occasion. Mais si, arrive au bout du champ ainsi circonscrit, le tableau du vocalisme indo-europeen s'est modifie peu a peu sous nos yeux et que nous le voyions se grouper tout entier autour de 1'a, prendre vis-avis de lui une attitude nouvelle, il est clair qu'en fait c'est le systeme des voyelles dans son ensemble qui sera entre dans le rayon de notre observation et dont le nom doit etre inscrit a la premiere page. (Saussure 1879[1878]:1; emphasis added: EFKK) There can be no doubt that Saussure's entire argument is based on the idea of 'system' and the interrelationship between the parts. No surprise when in the final paragraph of his Memoire Saussure speaks of "structure considered en elle-meme" (p.283). Indeed, the idea of language as a system may be regarded as the fil conducteur of Saussure's entire work in matters linguistic. Already in his enfantillage (Saussure's term in retrospect) of 1872, when he was less than fifteen years old, the schoolboy wrote a 40-page "Essai pour reduire les mots du Grec, du Latin & de 1'Allemand a un petit nombre de racines" which can be seen as foreshadowing Saussure's later preoccupation with discovering or building on the assumption of the presence of 'system' in language.8 In the Cours, Mounin (1968:61) reports, the term systeme shows up 138 times, and if we add Saussure's use of 'organisme grammatical' and similar expressions which he employed as synonyms, we'd probably arrive at an occurrence of the concept on every second page.

7. CONCLUDING REMARKS In his 1990 paper, "Un systeme ou tout se tient: Origin and evolution of the idea", John Hewson quoted the following remark by the late Jean Stefanini (1917-1985): "L'idee que la

8 In fact, in his reminiscences of 1903 or thereabouts, Saussure (1960:17) reports: "La marotte linguistique me travaillait evidemment des cette epoque, car je n'eus pas plus tot appris quelques rudiments de grec a 1'ecole, que je me sentis mur pour esquisser un systeme general du langage" (emphasis in the original).

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

langue est un systeme a toujours ete consideree par toute 1'ecole de Paris, de Meillet a Benveniste, comme 1'apport fondamentale de Saussure" (Stefanini 1973:322), elaborating on this observation in the following manner (pp.787-788):

The notion of system is indeed fundamental to all of Saussure's work, both synchronic and diachronic; in fact, as Guillaume points out, it is fundamental to the whole comparativist enterprise (1986:10). The centrality of the notion of system in Saussure's work is to be found, in fact, as early as his 1879 Memoire sur les voyelles: in that work he proposed a system of three laryngeals entirely on regular correspondence in the Indo-European languages. While we may regard this statement as un peu rapide, it summarizes fairly adequately what I tried to expatiate on in this paper, namely, that there is a fairly straight line from Saussure's early comparativist work down to his last lecture on general linguistic theory in the summer of 1911. There are definitely not two Saussures, one of the Memoire, another of the Cours, and not only with regard to the notion of 'systeme' which is so central to his linguistic theory. That he struggled with it well into his series of lectures on general linguistics may be gathered from what he responded to one of his most assiduous students, Albert Riedlinger (1883-1978), who had asked him pointed questions about the nature of a synchronic approach to language on 19 January 1909: La langue est un systeme serre, et la theorie doit etre un systeme aussi serre que la langue. La est le point difficile, car ce n'est rien de poser a la suite 1'une de 1'autre des affirmations, des vues sur la langue; le tout est de les coordonner en un systeme. (Godel 1957:29) Indeed, what Wilhelm Streitberg (1864-1925), the Indo-Europeanist, said about Saussure's Memoire might well be applied to his entire work, maybe not always in its eventual execution but definitely in its intent. After having pointed out that in the linguistics of the later 19th century Saussure's work played a very special role, Streitberg (1966 [1915]: 100) notes that his fame lay not in individual discoveries but that seine wahre, seine einzigartige Bedeutung liegt in der systembildenden Kraft seines Geistes. Seine unvergleichliche Starke ist die Synthese; alle Einzelbeobachtungen sind ihm nur Bausteine zu dem planvoll gefugten Gebaude des Systems; er ruht und rastet nicht, bis sich alle Tatsachen, aus ihrer Vereinzelung erlost, zu einem harmonischen Granzen zusammenschlieBen. (101) [... his true, his unique importance is to be found in the power of his mind to form systems. His incomparable strength lies in synthesis; all individual observations are nothing but bricks for the well-thought-out edifice of the system; he does not rest until all facts, taken out of their isolation, are brought together into a harmonious whole.] In view of what has been said above, it must be seen as a sad irony that Saussure should have become known as 'the father of structuralism', given that the word 'structure' is never used as a technical term in any of Saussure's writings; it rarely occurs either in the Cours or the Memoire, which might be regarded as 'structuralist' in the sense of some modern schools of thought, I am not sure which. The irony is reinforced if one considers the fact that Saussure made every effort in his teachings to leave behind the natural-science legacy of 19th century linguistics and its organicist structuralism (Koerner 1973, 1995), and argued for a view of the field that would make linguistics the centre of socio-semiotic study. One cannot but deplore the fact therefore that Roy Harris, in an effort to replace the previous English translation of the Cours (Saussure 1959) by his own rendering of the vulgata text (Saussure 1983), should have

Three Saussures?

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decided (without alerting the user of this translation to his choice) to replace the term systeme in the original text by 'structure', as if both Hjelmslev and Firth had not taught us in their writings of more than fifty years ago the essential difference between 'structure' and 'system', the first pertaining to syntagmatic ordering, the second to paradigmatic organization!

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Bally, Charles (1932). Linguistique generate et linguistique francaise. E. Leroux, Paris (2nd ed., A. Francke, Berne, 1944.) Bloomfield, Leonard (1923). Review of Saussure (1916; 21922). Modern Language Journal 8.317-319. (Repr. in Cahiers Ferdinandde Saussure 21.133-135 [1964].) Brogyanyi, Bela (1983). A Few Remarks on the Origin of the Phrase 'ou tout se tient'. Historiographia Linguistica 10.143-147. Buyssens, Eric (1942). Les six linguistiques de F. de Saussure. Revue des Langues Vivantes 11.15-23, 46-55. (Separate publication, M. Didier, Brussels, 1942.) (1961). L'origine de la linguistique synchronique de Saussure. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 18.17-33. Chvany, Catherine V. (1996) [1993]. The Evolution of the Concept of Markedness from the Prague Circle to Generative Grammar. Selected Essays by Catherine V. Chvany ed. by Olga T. Yokoyama & Emily Klenin, 234-241. Slavica Publishers, Columbus, Ohio. Collinge, N. E. (1985). The Laws of Indo-European. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia. Fishman, Joshua A. (1970). Sociolinguistics: A brief introduction. Newbury House, Rowley, Mass. Godel, Robert (1957). Les sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique generale de F. de Saussure. Droz, GenevaGrammont, Maurice (1895). La dissimilation consonantique dans les langues indo-europeennes et dans les langues romanes. Imprimerie Darantiere, Dijon. (1933). Traite de phonetique. Delagrave, Paris. Guillaume, Gustave (1986) [1945/46]. Esquisse d'une grammaire de la langue francaise IV. Publiees sous la direction de Roch Valin, Walter Hirtle & Andre Joly. (= Lecons de linguistique, 7.) Presses de 1'Universite Laval, Quebec. Harris, Roy (1994). Criticizing Saussure. Semiotica 98:1/2.181-186. [Review of Holdcroft (1991).] Haugen, Einar (1951). Directions in Modern Linguistics. Language 27.211-222. Hewson, John (1990). Un systeme ou tout se tient: Origin and evolution of the idea. History and Historiography of Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV), Trier, 24-27 August 1987 ed. by Hans-Josef Niederehe & Konrad Koerner, vol.11, 787-794. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia. Holdcroft, David (1991). Saussure: Signs, systems and arbitrariness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Koerner, E. F. K[onrad] (1973) [1971]. Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and development of his linguistic thought in Western studies of language. A contribution to the history and theory of linguistics. Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig.

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(1975) [1972]. European Structuralism — early beginnings. Current Trends in Linguistics ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, vol.XIII: Historiography of Linguistics, 717-827. Mouton, The Hague. (1984). French Influences on Saussure. Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de Linguistique 29.20-41. (Repr. in Koerner 1988.67-88.) (1987). The Place of Saussure's Memoire in the Development of Historical Linguistics. Festschrift for Henry M. Hoenigswald ed. by George Cardona & Norman Zide, 201-217. GunterNarr, Tubingen. - (1988). Saussurean Studies /Etudes saussuriennes. Avant-propos de Rudolf Engler. Editions Slatkine, Geneva. (1989). Practising Linguistic Historiography. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia. - (1995). The Natural Science Model and Linguistic Theory in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Sapostavitelno ezikoznanie / Contrastive Linguistics 19:2.41-59. (Revised version published in Professing Linguistic Historiography by E.F.K. Koerner, 47-76. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, 1995.) Lepschy, Giulio C. (1970). A Survey of Structural Linguistics. Faber & Faber, London. (2nd enl. ed., Andre Deutsch, London, 1982.) Littre, Emile (1869). Dictionnaire de la langue francaise. Vol.11, part 2: Q-Z. Hachette, Paris. Meillet, Antoine. 1893. Les lois du langage I: Les lois phonetiques. Revue Internationale de sociologie (Paris) 1.311-321. (1899). A propos du groupe -ns. Indogermanische Forschungen 10.61-70. (1903). Introduction a I'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes. Hachette, Paris. (5th ed., 1922; 8th ed., with a foreword by Emile Benveniste, 1937. Repr., University of Alabama Press, University, Ala., 1964.) (1905). Comment les mots changent de sens. Annee sociologique 9.1-38. (Repr. in Meillet 1921:230-271.) (1906). L'etat actuel des etudes de linguistique generale: Lecon d'ouverture du Cours de Grammaire comparee au College de France lue le mardi 13 fevrier 1906. Revue des Idees (Paris) 3.296-308. (Repr. in Meillet 1921:1-18.) (1909). Einfuhrung in die vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Authorized transl. by Wilhelm Printz. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig & Berlin. (1912). Apercu du developpement de la grammaire comparee. Appended to the third ed. of Meillet, Introduction a I'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes, 439-473. Hachette, Paris. (= 453-483 in 8th ed. of 1937.) (1913). Ferdinand de Saussure. Annuaire de I'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Section des sciences historiques et philologiques) 1913-1914, 115-125. (Repr. in Meillet 1936.174-183.) (1915). La Linguistique. La Science francaise: Ouvrage publie sous les auspices du Ministere de I'Instruction Publique a I'occasion de I'Exposition Universelle de San Francisco, vol.11, 117-124. Ministere de 1'Instruction Publique et des Beaux Arts, Paris. (Separate publication, with a portrait of Saussure, Larousse, Paris, 1916.) (1916). Review of F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (Payot, Lausanne & Paris, 1916). Bulletin de la Societe de Linguistique de Paris 20.32-36. (Repr. in Mounin 1968.161-168.)

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(1921). Linguistique historique et linguistique generate. [Tome I.] H. Champion, Paris. (1936). Linguistique historique et linguistique generate. Tome II. C. Klincksieck, Paris. Mey, Jacob (1992). The Pragmatics of Semiosis. Current Advances in Semantic Theory ed. by Maxim Stamenov, 219-238. John Benjamins, Amsterdam & Philadelphia. Moulton, William G. (1971). Review of Rudolf Meyer, Zur Morphologie und Sprachgeographie des Schweizerdeutschen (Huber, Frauenfeld, 1967) [and three other monographs devoted to Swiss German dialectology]. Language 47:4.938-943. Mounin, Georges (1968). Saussure ou le structuraliste sans le savoir: Presentation, choix de textes, bibliographie. Editions Seghers, Paris. (2nd corrected ed., 1971.) — (1972). La linguistique du XXe siecle. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris. Mulder, Jan W. F. (1989). Foundations of Axiomatic Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York. Peeters, Bert (1990). Encore une fois 'ou tout se tient'. Historiographia Linguistica 17:3.427-436. Redard, Georges (1978). Deux Saussure?. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 32.27-41. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1879) [1878]. Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig. (Repr., Friedrich Vieweg, Paris, 1887.) (1916). Cours de linguistique generale. Ed. by Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, with the collaboration of Albert Riedlinger. Payot, Lausanne & Paris. (2nd ed., Payot, Paris, 1922; 3rd and last corrected ed., 1931.) (1959). Course in General Linguistics. Transl. by Wade Baskin. Philosophical Library, New York & London. (2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, New York-Toronto-London, 1966.) (1960) [c.1903]. Souvenirs de F. de Saussure de concernant sa jeunesse et ses etudes. Ed. by Robert Godel. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 17.3-14. (1978) [1872]. Essai pour reduire les mots du Grec, du Latin & de 1'Allemand a un petit nombre de racines. Ed. from Ms. by Boyd H. Davis. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 32.77-101. (1967-1968; 1974). Cours de linguistique generale. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler. 4 fasc. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. (1983). Course in General Linguistics. Transl. by Roy Harris. Duckworth, London; Open Court, La Salle, 111., 1986. Sechehaye, Albert (1940). Les trois linguistiques saussuriennes. Vox Romanica 5.1-48. (1944). Review of Buyssens (1942). Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 4.65-69. Stefanini, Jean (1973). Sur la conception guillaumienne de 1'opposition langue/discours. Travaux de Linguistique et de Litterature 11.319-328. Streitberg, Wilhelm (1915) [1914]. Ferdinand de Saussure. Indogermanisches Jahrbuch 2.203213. (Repr. in Portraits of Linguists ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, vol.1, 100-110. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1966.) Szemerenyi, Oswald (1973). La theorie des laryngales de Saussure a Kurytowicz et a Benveniste: Essai de reevaluation. Bulletin de la Societe de linguistique de Paris 68.1-25. (1980). About Unrewriting the History of Linguistics. Wege der Universalienforschung: Sprachwissenschaftliche Beitrdge zum 60. Geburtstag von Hansjakob Seiler ed. by Gunter Brettschneider & Christian Lehmann, 151-162. Gunter Narr, Tubingen.

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Toman, Jindrich (1987). Not from 1903, not from Meillet: A final (?) remark on 'ou tout se tient'. Historiographia Linguistica 14:3.403-406. Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj S. (1933). La phonologie actuelle. Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique 30.227-243. (Repr. in Essais sur le langage presentes par Jean-Claude Pariente, 143-164. Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1969.) Vendryes, Joseph (1902). Reflexions sur les lois phonetiques. Melanges linguistiques offerts a M. Antoine Meillet, 115-131. C. Klincksieck, Paris. (Repr. in J. Vendryes, Choix d'etudes linguistique et celtiques, 3-17. C. Klincksieck, Paris, 1952.) Wartburg, Walter von (1966). Franzosisches etymologisches Worterbuch. Vol.XII: Sk-S. Zbinden, Zurich.

2

GEGEN EINE HERKOMMLICHE INTERPRETATION VON SAUSSURES LANGAGE, LANGUE UND PAROLE - EIN MERKZETTEL Ralph A. Hartmann, Department of German, University of St. Andrews, UK

Abstract: In this paper the still common textbook-interpretation as far as the social dimension of language to be found within Saussure's triad of LANGAGE, LANGUE and PAROLE is challenged. It will be shown that LANGUE must not be interpreted as only social in its character as well as that PAROLE must not be seen as only individualistic in its character. A more careful consideration of the sources to Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale could even lead to an idea which proposes a more "pragmatistic" Saussure who might have had similar thoughts about language as for example Wittgenstein (in his Philosophical Investigations) and Searle (in his theory of speech acts).

Im vorliegenden Beitrag soll nochmals auf eine Schwierigkeit eingegangen werden, die mit der ("getreuen") Exegese des Cours de linguistique generale von Ferdinand de Saussure zu tun hat. Da Albert Sechehaye und Charles Bally als Herausgeber des Cours lediglich auf Vorlesungsmitschriften von einigen Saussure-Studenten zuriickgreifen konnten, ist es verstandlich, daB Aspekte des Buches durch subjektive Interpretationen der beiden "Rekonstrukteure" des Saussureschen Gedankenguts gekennzeichnet sind, daB somit keineswegs sichergestellt ist, ob Saussure den Cours, wie wir ihn heute kennen, fur eine Publikation unter seinem eigenen Namen zugelassen hatte (vgl. z.B. Buyssens 1952: 50). So spricht etwa Godel (1957: 98) davon, daB Bally und Sechehaye teilweise im Cours Fragen beantwortet hatten, die Saussure lediglich (in seinen Vorlesungen bzw. in den anderen Quellen) gestellt hatte. Nicht zuletzt deshalb ist eine "unmittelbare" Lekture des "Saussureschen Cours" nicht ausreichend und konnte unter Umstanden zu Fehleinschatzungen fuhren, wenn es darum geht, die vielfaltigen Facetten der Sprachtheorie des Genfers zu beleuchten. Ohnehin wird dieser Sprachtheorie eine herkommliche Interpretation (etwa in Lehrbuchern wie beispielsweise Bartschat 1996), die die LANGUE Saussures als ausschlieBlich sozialen sowie die PAROLE als uneingeschrankt individuellen Aspekt der Sprache wiedergibt, keinesfalls gerecht. Fur (den) Saussure (des Cours), wie ihn eine solche Tradition sieht, ist sowieso nur die LANGUE alleiniges Untersuchungsobjekt der Sprachwissenschaft:

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony "[...] die Sprache [LANGUE, R.H.] an und fur sich selbst betrachtet ist der einzige wirkliche Gegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft." (Saussure 1967: 279)

Diese "Restriktion" des Untersuchungsgegenstandes der Sprachwissenschaft ausschliefilich auf die LANGUE, wie wir sie im SchluBsatz des Cours vorfmden, ist nun aber genau der Punkt, an dem wir am ehesten AnlaB haben, einen "nicht-authentischen" von einem "originalen / originaren" Saussure zu unterscheiden. Bei obigem Satz handelt es sich, wie in der Forschungsliteratur allgemein anerkannt ist (vgl. Godel 1957, Koerner 1973, Jager 1976), um einen "programmatisch bedeutsamen Eingriff (Scheerer 1980: 72) der Herausgeber des Cours in die tatsachliche Lehre Saussures. Ein derartig gravierender Editionsfehler bringt natiirlich beziiglich der Tradierung Saussureschen Gedankenguts auBerst negative Konsequenzen mit sich, die beispielsweise von De Mauro (1967: 452, Anm. 305) in dessen italienischer Ausgabe des Cours wohl am drastischsten skizziert wurden. Obwohl die Einschatzung De Mauros doch etwas ubertrieben erscheint, veranschaulicht sie dennoch, daB eine quellenkritische Lektiire des Cours von vornherein vermutlich viele MiBverstandnisse bzw. falschverstandene "Weiterfiihrungen", wie sie eben immer noch in aktuellen Lehrbuchern vermittelt werden (s. etwa den kritiklos iibernommenen SchluBsatz des Cours bei Bartschat 1996: 59), vermieden hatte. Im folgenden steht nun der Versuch im Vordergrund, anhand der "Quellen" des Cours1 (s. insbesondere Godel 1957, Saussure 1989-90) zu einer etwas "differenzierteren" Dreiteilung der Sprache zu gelangen, mit Hilfe derer sich einerseits die soziale Dimension der Sprache im Saussureschen Sinne verdeutlichen diirfte, durch die andererseits aber zusatzlich Ankniipfungspunkte zu sprachphilosophischen Sichtweisen ("spater" Wittgenstein, Searle) entstehen. Des weiteren wird damit ebenfalls das Problem des Zusammenhangs von LANGUE und PAROLE in der Saussureschen Sprachtheorie ein wenig erhellt, das bei der vorlaufigen "direkten" Lesart im Unklaren bleiben muB: Die ausschlieBliche Fokussierung auf die LANGUE als Gegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft (im Cours) scheint namlich die Frage eindeutig zu negieren, ob die PAROLE eventuell (beispielsweise als "Datengrundlage") in der LANGUE verankert sein konnte. So wird es sich zeigen, daB Saussure wohl keine so starke Trennlinie zwischen LANGUE und PAROLE gezogen hat, wie sie die "direkte" CoursInterpretation nahelegt. Saussure scheint nun, wie die Quellen es ausweisen, seine Vorlesung iiber die Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft in drei Abschnitte eingeteilt zu haben. Wie die Mitschriften der Studenten belegen, waren dies 1.) die Sprachen (les langues), 2.) die Sprache (la langue), 3.) Sprachfahigkeit und Sprach"ausubung" bei den Individuen (faculte et exercice du langage chez les individus). Allein schon diese generelle Aufteilung deutet gewissermaBen eine Divergenz zwischen dem Cours und Saussures tatsachlicher Auffassung an, zumal dort nicht explizit die Rede von den Einzelbegriffen LANGAGE und PAROLE ist. 1

Diese Quellen und Materialien sind in Rudolf Englers kritischer Edition des Cours (damit ist Saussure 1989-90 gemeint; s. Literaturverzeichnis) in sechs nebeneinander gestellten Spalten aufgeftihrt. Spatere Verweise auf diese Ausgabe beinhalten zusatzlich zu den Seitenzahlen den Namen desjenigen, aus dessen Mitschriften die betreffenden Passagen zitiert sind; fur die personlichen Notizen Saussures steht das Ktirzel "NS". Bsp.: "Saussure 1989-90: 40, Joseph" bezieht sich auf die Mitschrift von Francis Joseph auf S. 40 der kritischen Edition; "Saussure 1989-90: 436, NS" verweist auf die personlichen Notizen Saussures auf S. 436 der kritischen Edition; "Saussure 1989-90: 17, NS (A)" bezieht sich auf S. 17 des zweiten Bandes der kritischen Edition. Dieser zweite Band besteht aus einem Appendix (A) mit weiteren erganzenden personlichen Notizen Saussures.

Langage, Langue und Parole - quellengetreu gesehen

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Zunachst scheint Saussure auch gar nicht zwischen LANGUE und LANGAGE zu trennen, wie Constantins Mitschrift nahelegt: "Sans separer immediatement les mots de langue et de langage, ou trouvons-nous le phenomena concret, complet, integral de la langue ou [Hervorhebung R.H.] du langage? C'est a dire, ou trouvons-nous 1'objet devant lequel nous avons a nous placer?" (Saussure 1989-90: 24, Constantin) Die Suche nach dem Untersuchungsgegenstand der Sprachwissenschaft beginnt also fur Saussure gewissermaBen mit einer Art Ratlosigkeit. Sprache, ob wir sie nun LANGUE oder LANGAGE nennen, 1st ein zu komplexes Phanomen, um ohne weiteres festlegen zu konnen, was bzw. welche dieser vielen Komplexitaten zu untersuchen ist/sind. Die Komplexitat der Sprache (LANGUE bzw. LANGAGE) erlaubt es demnach nicht, von einer "einheitlichen Sache" zu sprechen, die von verschiedenen Standpunkten aus betrachtet werden kann. Vielmehr sind es gemaB Saussure (1989-90: 26, NS) die verschiedenen Standpunkte, die die "Sache" erschaffen. Diese "Unsicherheit", wenn man es so nennen kann, setzt sich bei Saussure auch tatsachlich in der Einteilung der Sprache in verschiedene Bereiche fort. Wie oben schon angedeutet wurde, scheint Saussure zu Beginn nicht zwischen LANGUE und LANGAGE zu trennen. Auch die Herausgeber des Cours verwenden den Ausdruck LANGAGE, wenn in den entsprechenden Stellen der Quellen von LANGUE die Rede ist. So heiBt es beispielsweise im Cours einmal, daB die LANGAGE eine individuelle und eine soziale Seite habe (s. Saussure 1967: 10). Andererseits belegen die entsprechenden Quellen, daft Saussure in seinen Vorlesungen eindeutig die LANGUE primar durch zwei sich "korrespondierende" Seiten charakterisierte: "Dans la langue [Hervorhebung R.H.], il y a done toujours un double cote [sic] qui se correspond: elle est . .. ..—rp Si on considere done la sphere ou la langue vit, il y aura toujours la langue individuelle et la langue sociale." (Saussure 1989-90: 28, Riedlinger) Den Zusammenhang zwischen der sozialen und individuellen Seite der LANGUE erkennt Saussure nun darin, daB die Formen bzw. die Grammatik nur in einer "sozialen Weise existieren" konnen. Das bedeutet, daB sie nicht anders als in einer Sprachgemeinschaft, die sie bzw. ihren Gebrauch sanktioniert hat, existieren konnen. Hier ist also mit LANGUE das abstrakte Zeichensystem gemeint, das seine Geltung lediglich im Gebrauch, den die Sprachgemeinschaft davon macht, erhalten kann. Hingegen geht dazu im Gegensatz gemafi Saussure die Veranderung, also der Sprachwandel, eindeutig vom Individuum aus: Ein Individuum verwendet irgendwann einmal ein im Unterschied zum Zeichengebrauch der restlichen Sprachgemeinschaft "verandertes" sprachliches Zeichen (evtl. sogar ein "verandertes" Syntagma, das aus der Aneinanderreihung mehrerer einzelner sprachlicher Zeichen bestehen kann); im Laufe der Zeit finden sich weitere Individuen, die diesen veranderten Gebrauch eines Zeichens akzeptieren, bis der Wandel schliefilich von der gesamten Sprachgemeinschaft anerkannt bzw. sanktioniert ist. Somit besitzt die LANGUE als abstraktes System von sprachlichen Zeichen "soziale" Geltung in einer Sprachgemeinschaft, kann jedoch nur infolge eines "individuellen" AnstoBes Veranderung erfahren. Das Individuum besitzt aber nach Saussure nicht allein ein Potential, den AnstoB zum Wandel des Zeichensystems zu geben, sondern ebenfalls eine Fahigkeit, die er mit dem

38

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Ausdruck Faculte de langage articule bezeichnet, eine Fahigkeit, die uns durch die Sprechorgane gegeben ist. Fur Saussure kann diese Fahigkeit jedoch nicht ohne das von "auBen" kommende, sanktionierte Zeichensystem der LANGUE ausgeiibt (oder: "aktiviert") werden. Den Zusammenhang zwischen LANGAGE, LANGUE und PAROLE exemplifiziert Saussure (1989-90: 41) anhand eines Schaubildes, welches nahelegt, daB der Phanomenbereich der LANGAGE einfach zu gleichen Teilen aus LANGUE und PAROLE besteht. Erlauternd zu diesem Schaubild spricht Saussure von einem "Instinkt", von einer "naturlichen Funktion" der LANGAGE. Zudem charakterisiert er die LANGUE als etwas Passives, das sich in der "Kollektivitat befmdet", als "sozialen Code", der quasi die LANGAGE "organisiert" und das notwendige "Werkzeug" fur die Ausiibung der Fahigkeit zu LANGAGE darstellt. Wenn dementsprechend die LANGUE eine soziale und individuelle Seite besitzt, so gilt das ebenso fur die LANGAGE, die ja sozusagen sowohl die LANGUE als auch die PAROLE umfafit. Wie sieht nun aber das Verhaltnis zwischen LANGUE und PAROLE aus, und woraus besteht die PAROLE im Unterschied zur LANGUE? Die einfachste Charakterisierung der PAROLE ware, daB sie mit den tatsachlichen Hor- und Sprechakten zu identifizieren ist, wie es die herkommliche Sichtweise vorschreibt. Doch ganz so einfach macht es sich Saussure nicht: Auch die PAROLE zeigt sich ihm als individuelles und gleichzeitig soziales Phanomen. Da die LANGUE ein soziales Produkt der Fahigkeit zu LANGAGE ist sowie die nachfolgende "Representation" der sprachlichen Fakten im Individuum bildet, einen LANGUE-"tresor", wie sich Saussure (1989-90: 383, Riedlinger) ausdriickt, muB man auch daran denken, daB das, was in die LANGUE eintritt, zuvor in der PAROLE, also sozusagen im konkret (Aus-) Gesprochenen, versucht wurde: "La langue n'est que la consecration de ce qui avait ete evoque par la parole." (Saussure 1989-90: 383, Riedlinger) Insofern, wenn man von einem "Datenlieferanten" einer Wissenschaft von der LANGUE sprechen wollte, ware eine solche Datengrundlage die PAROLE (vgl. hierzu auch Buyssens 1942: 17). Und naturlich besitzt die PAROLE ebenfalls eine soziale sowie individuelle Seite. So kommen die konkreten Sprachaufierungen fast ausschlieBlich im sozialen Kontakt zustande. Allerdings gehen sie individuell von der im (individuellen) Gehirn reprasentierten LANGUE aus. Das bedeutet: PAROLE ist die soziale Datengrundlage der LANGUE;2 die LANGUE hingegen liefert individuell wiederum die Grundlage fur neue sprachliche AuBerungen, bildet auf diese Weise eben auch die individuelle Basis der PAROLE, die das Individuum im konkreten SprechanlaB zum Ausdruck bringt. 2

Eine derartige Sichtweise bestatigt Saussure selbst beispielsweise in seiner Erorterung beziiglich der Schwierigkeiten, die bei der Abgrenzung bzw. "Segmentierung" sprachlicher Einheiten untereinander entstehen: "Pour faire cette delimitation [= Abgrenzung bzw. Segmentierung sprachlicher Einheiten; R.H.], nous pouvons accorder que la meilleure methode c'est de prendre la parole. La parole ne figure ici que comme un document de langue. En effet, les casiers existant a 1'interieur de notre cerveau, nous ne pouvons les explorer. Obliges d'employer un moyen exterieur dans la parole [Hervorhebung R.H.]." (Saussure 1989-90: 236, Constantin). Das impliziert, daB Ruckschliisse auf die LANGUE iiberhaupt nicht anders moglich sind als in Folge von Beobachtungen der PAROLE: Die PAROLE dokumentiert durch ihre (externen) Daten den (internen) Zustand der LANGUE, die so erst klassifiziert werden kann.

Langage, Langue und Parole - quellengetreu gesehen

39

Somit erfahrt die (oberflachlich als solche erscheinende) Dreiteilung der Sprache in LANGAGE, LANGUE und PAROLE beim "authentischen" Saussure eine - man mochte sagen: dem Gegenstand adaquate - Differenzierung hinsichtlich der individuellen und sozialen Seite. Das betrifft insbesondere LANGUE und PAROLE, wobei unter Berucksichtigung des o.e. Schaubildes auch LANGAGE als die Einheit von LANGUE und PAROLE logischerweise diese "Doppelseitigkeit" aufweist: "[...] (le langage est social, il est vrai, mais pour nombre de faits, il est plus commode de le rencontrer dans 1'individu)." (Saussure 1989-90: 383, Riedlinger) Infolgedessen konnen wir generell festhalten, daB Saussure in seiner Charakterisierung der Sprache mit ihren in sich selbst dichotomischen Teilbereichen LANGAGE, LANGUE und PAROLE bin- und hergerissen ist, wenn es um die Frage geht, ob die individuelle oder soziale Komponente des immens komplexen Phanomens Sprache hervorgehoben werden soil. Eine direkte bzw. herkommliche Lesart des Cours mag nun den sozialen Aspekt betonen: Die LANGUE als eindeutig soziale Seite der Sprache wird hier zum Mittelpunkt linguistischer Untersuchung erkoren. Eine quellenkritische Lesart deutet hingegen an, daB sich Saussure die Sache nicht ganz so einfach gemacht hat. Man konnte sogar meinen, daB er sich in dieser Hinsicht sehr unsicher war. Auf jeden Fall bezieht sich die soziale Dimension der Sprache gemafi der oben dargestellten differenzierteren Dreiteilung der Sprache bei Saussure sowohl auf einen Systemcharakter als auch auf einen Handlungscharakter: Eine Sprachgemeinschaft macht Gebrauch von einem fur sie geltenden System von Zeichen (i.e. soziale und individuelle LANGUE); sie handelt gemaB den (unbewuBten) Regeln des Gebrauchs dieses geltenden Systems von Zeichen. Das System Sprache erfahrt mit der Zeit viele kleine Anderungen, die sich auf den Gebrauch einzelner sprachlicher Zeichen bzw. auf die (sprachlichen) Handlungen der diese Zeichen gebrauchenden Sprecher bezieht. Eine derartige Interpretation Saussurescher Gedanken weist betrachtliche Parallelen zu den spateren Ansichten des Sprachphilosophen Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) auf, die insbesondere in dessen posthum (1958) veroffentlichtem Werk Philosophische Untersuchungen zu fmden sind. Darin stellt Wittgenstein (1980: z.B. 19) den "Spiel"-Charakter der Sprache in den Vordergrund seiner Reflexionen. Ahnlich wie Saussure war sich auch Wittgenstein der Komplexitat des Phanomens Sprache voll bewuBt. Er faBte nun namlich diese Komplexitat von Sprache bzw. von mit Sprache unmittelbar in Beziehung stehenden Tatigkeiten/Handlungen als sogenannte "Sprachspiele" auf, in denen eben der Gebrauch der Worter - Wittgenstein wurde "Worte" sagen - eine entscheidende Rolle spielt, wie es einer der zentralen Satze in den Philosophischen Untersuchungen ausweist: "Die Bedeutung eines Wortes ist sein Gebrauch in der Sprache." (Wittgenstein 1980 (PU): 41) Wenn man nun Wittgensteins "Sprachspiel" und Saussures LANGUE und PAROLE betrachtet, erkennt man die enge Verwobenheit eines (strukturierten) Sprachsystems mit Formen des Verhaltens bzw. sprachlichen Handelns. Der Spielcharakter der Sprache, den Wittgenstein in seinen Philosophischen Untersuchungen zu verdeutlichen versucht, erhalt seine bekannteste Veranschaulichung in der

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Analogiebildung zum Schachspiel. Das Interessante dabei 1st nun, daB diese Analogic ebenfalls bei Saussure erscheint. Auch John Searle verwendet sie im Rahmen der Erlauterung seiner Theorie der Sprechakte (s. Searle 1971), die mit Saussure und Wittgenstein in Beziehung gesetzt werden kann. Im von Bally und Sechehaye herausgegebenen Cours erscheint die Analogiebildung mit dem Schachspiel bzw. mit einer Partie Schach insgesamt viermal. Die Mitschriften der Studenten belegen nun auch, daB der "authentische" Saussure diese Analogiebildung in derselben Form in seinen Vorlesungen angefuhrt hat (vgl. Saussure 1989-90: 64, 195ff, 241f, 249). An der ersten Stelle, in der Saussure Sprache mit Schach vergleicht (Saussure 1967: 27), schreibt er dem Schachspiel zu, ebenso wie die Sprache eine Grammatik zu besitzen. Schachspiel und Sprache bestehen demnach aus einem System von Regeln bzw. Konventionen. Beziiglich der Analogic Sprache-Schachspiel weist er in einer umfangreicheren Passage (Saussure 1967: 104-106) dann u.a. darauf hin, daB man es sowohl beim Schachspiel als auch bei der Sprache mit einem Werte-System zu tun hat, das eigentlich aufgrund von Konventionen feststeht, das also prinzipiell unveranderlich ist. Entscheidend in bezug auf sprachliche Handlungen scheint der Begriff der Ubereinkunft zu sein, den Saussure verwendet: Die Mitglieder der sprachlichen Gemeinschaft haben sich sozusagen unbewuBt auf ein System von Werten geeinigt, das in einer speziellen Weise gebraucht werden muB, damit sich die einzelnen Mitglieder der Sprachgemeinschaft verstehen. Im Schachspiel entsprechen dem die Spielregeln, die im Gegensatz zur Sprache natiirlich bewuBt aufgestellt wurden. Ein veranderter Gebrauch einzelner Elemente hingegen kann auch das System der Werte wandeln, was Saussure dann nicht mit dem Schachspiel generell, sondern mit einer Partie Schach vergleicht (a.a.O). DemgemaB setzt ein einziger Schachzug nur eine einzige Figur in Bewegung; ebenso beziehen sich nach Saussure in der Sprache Veranderungen nur auf isolierte Elemente. Dieser Vergleich Saussures im Rahmen der Schachanalogie deutet nochmals die pragmatische Dimension des Wandels der Sprache an: Wenn ein Mitglied einer Sprachgemeinschaft ein sprachliches Zeichen irgendwann einmal verandert gebraucht, sei es in einer anderen lautlichen Form oder mit einer anderen Bedeutung, so kann das Auswirkungen auf das gesamte Sprachsystem (langue) mit sich bringen, die einfach nicht abzusehen sind. Ein veranderter Gebrauch bedeutet gleichzeitig eine Veranderung des Wertes eines sprachlichen Zeichens. Das impliziert jedoch, daB der der vorherigen (vor einem Wandel) bzw. der nachherigen (nach einem von der Sprachgemeinschaft sanktionierten Wandel) Ubereinkunft entsprechende Gebrauch eines sprachlichen Zeichens Teil der Regeln des Sprachsystems (langue) sind. Wenn Saussure (a.a.O) dann zusatzlich bemerkt, daB Veranderungen zwischen zwei Zustanden beim Sprechen (parole) keine Geltung ha'tten, dann sind eben nur die Veranderungen zwischen aufeinanderfolgenden Zustanden gemeint und nicht Veranderungen, die zeitlich sehr weit auseinanderliegen: Wenn der "Zustand" einer Partie Schach nach dem sechsten Zug beider Parteien und dann nach dem siebten Zug der zwei Gegner verglichen wird, so sticht lediglich dem Schachkenner sofort die Veranderung ins Auge; vergleicht man aber die Stellung der Figuren nach dem sechsten Zug und nach dem 27. Zug, so fallt die Veranderung auch dem ungeubten Schachspieler auf. Ebenso sieht es mit der Sprache aus, wie man sich leicht vorstellen kann. Der Vorgang der Veranderung in der Sprache verlauft langsam und in kleinen Schritten, fur die Verwender der Sprache eher unmerklich. Erst nach einer langen Zeitspanne wird die Veranderung iiberdeutlich. In gewissem Sinne erhalt die Differenzierung, die Saussure zwischen langue und parole vornimmt, durch eine solche Darstellung nochmals

Langage, Langue und Parole - quellengetreu gesehen

41

Plausibilitat, da man ohne weiteres sagen konnte, daB die einzelne sprachliche Handlung mil ihrem (synchronen) Gebrauch sprachlicher Zeichen (also das Sprechen, die parole) durchaus losgelost ist von den Veranderungen, die im System (langue) im Laufe der Zeit feststellbar sind. Die einzelnen, zeitlich eng aufeinanderfolgenden sprachlichen Handlungen unterscheiden sich kaum voneinander, nur diejenigen, die zeitlich weit auseinanderliegen. Somit wirken die einzelnen sprachlichen Handlungen sich mit Fortlaufen der Zeit auf das gesamte System (langue} aus. Man konnte auch sagen, daB parole die konkrete sprachliche Handlung ausmacht, wahrend in der langue, im Sprachsystem, die Regeln reprasentiert sind, die jeweils eine allgemein akzeptierte sprachliche Handlung defmieren. Langue und parole interagieren somit in der Art und Weise, wie es oben schon erklart wurde; die sprachliche Handlung ist dementsprechend Bestandteil sowohl der parole als auch der langue. Die Analogic von Sprache und Schachspiel deckt gemaB Saussure (1967: 127) auch generelle Problematiken auf, die beiden "Systemen" gemeinsam sind: Wenn wir Schach spielen wollen, so miissen wir die Figuren ("Spieleinheiten") und deren Funktion ganz genau kennen. Doch dies allein genugt noch nicht; wir sollten zusatzlich auch noch iiber die Moglichkeiten des "Zusammenspiels" der separaten Bestandteile (und deren Funktion) wahrend der konkreten Partie Bescheid wissen, urn ordentlich spielen zu konnen. Genau das ist es, was Saussure mit der problematischen Abgrenzung der einzelnen Elemente meint: Im Spiel selbst konnen wir zwar noch die Figuren sowie ihre Funktion (bzw. ihren Wert) gegeneinander abgrenzen; aber im Gesamtzusammenhang des Spiels ist es ein Miteinander der Elemente, das nicht mehr im einzelnen abgegrenzt werden kann. Ebenso bei der Sprache: Jeder an der Sprache Teilhabende muB standig uber die Bestandteile (die sprachlichen Zeichen) und deren (regelhaften) Gebrauch Bescheid wissen - die Einheiten scheinen klar abgrenzbar zu sein. Im tatsachlichen Gebrauch der Sprache spielen jedoch so viele Dinge zusammen, daB eine Abgrenzung nicht mehr moglich ist (gemaB Saussure). Diese Sichtweise Saussures mag erneut seinen "Respekt" gegenuber dem Faktum Sprache bzw. vor dessen Komplexitat - damit ist nicht nur die langage, sondern nun auch explizit die langue gemeint - veranschaulichen. Mit diesem Problem der Abgrenzung der sprachlichen Einheiten untereinander kommt ebenfalls die soziale Dimension der Sprache wieder zum Vorschein: Das Sprachsystem, seine einzelnen Bestandteile werden von einer Sprachgemeinschaft so verwendet, daB sie nicht mehr als Elemente erkennbar sind (d.h. eindeutig voneinander abgrenzbar), sondern lediglich als ein funktionierendes ganzheitliches System, dem die Sprachgemeinschaft Geltung verleiht. Die Stellen, an denen Saussure im Cours das Schachspiel als Vergleich zur Sprache heranzieht, konzentrieren sich auf den Aspekt der Veranderung. Man kann nun nicht gerade behaupten, daB dieser Gesichtspunkt im Mittelpunkt der Uberlegungen des (spaten) Wittgenstein stand (vgl. etwa Harris 1993: 223). Dennoch bestehen auffallige Parallelen zwischen Saussure und Wittgenstein bezuglich ihrer Sprachauffassung, wenn ihre jeweiligen Erlauterungen der Schachspielmetapher herangezogen werden. So finden wir beispielsweise innerhalb der Verwendung der Schachspielanalogie auch bei Wittgenstein (1980: 127) im Hinblick auf die soziale Dimension der Sprache den Begriff einer Institution. Wittgenstein (a.a.O) betont, daB Sprache kein (ausschlieBlich) individuumsbasiertes Phanomen sein kann. Das bringt allein schon die Redeweise von der Regelbefolgung mit sich. Man konnte gar keine Regeln feststellen, wenn gewisse (sprachliche oder "spielerische") Handlungen nur ein einziges Mai aufgetreten waren. Der Regelbegriff verlangt von dem Phanomenbereich, auf den wir ihn anwenden, den Charakter einer Institution, wie es Wittgenstein ausdriickt, oder, urn es ein wenig abzuschwachen: den Charakter einer

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"Gepflogenheit". Vielleicht erlautert der zuletzt genannte Ausdruck den sozialen Aspekt sogar noch besser: Eine Gepflogenheit defmiert sich dadurch, daB sie von vielen Menschen oftmals und in der gleichen Form (d.h. regelhaft, regelmaBig, regelgerecht) ausgefiihrt wird. Eine Gepflogenheit ist per defmitionem "sozial". Fiir Wittgenstein sind nun sowohl das Schachspiel als auch die Sprache soziale Gepflogenheiten, soziale und regelhaft, regelmaBig, regelgerecht ablaufende Handlungen von Individuen, die, indem sie gerade Sprache verstehen, wissen, wie sie die (sozialen) Regeln des sprachlichen Handelns anwenden miissen: Sie beherrschen die Technik der Anwendung der Regeln zum Gebrauch der sprachlichen Elemente. Sprache ist demzufolge fur Wittgenstein auf ahnliche Art und Weise eine soziale Institution wie fur Saussure. Wittgenstein ist das Regelsystem des Gebrauchs sprachlicher Zeichen wichtig; er betrachtet die Sprache aus dem Blickwinkel des Pragmatikers. Wenn er jedoch schreibt, daB Sprache keinesfalls ein "unraumliches und unzeitliches Phanomen" sei (s. Wittgenstein 1980: 78), so stellt er sich eindeutig gegen einen (platonistischen) Realismus im Shine von Katz (1985) so wie gegen seine eigene, noch im Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1982) vertretene Position, die mit derjenigen der Logischen Empiristen (z.B. Russell) zu identifizieren ist, wonach - grob gesagt - Sprache als rein abstraktes Objekt zu behandeln ist, das keinerlei raumliche bzw. zeitliche Dimension aufweist. Somit demonstriert Wittgenstein eine weitgehende Ubereinstimmung mit Saussure: Er erkennt mehrere Dimensionen des Faktums Sprache an, auch wenn er nicht an alien interessiert ist.3 Wittgensteins spate Sprachphilosophie insbesondere der Philosophischen Untersuchungen ubte groBen EinfluB auf die angelsachsische Philosophic der Nachkriegszeit aus. Man konnte die Formierung der Schule der "ordinary language philosophy" in Oxford bedeutende Vertreter waren beispielsweise Geach, Ryle, Strawson und Grice - als sprachphilosophisches Legal Wittgensteins bezeichnen, das vor allem deshalb von Bedeutung ist, weil aus ihm die Theorie der Sprechakte hervorging, die eben maBgeblich durch die Wittgensteinsche Spielanalogie inspiriert wurde. AuBerdem zahlt Wittgenstein in den Philosophischen Untersuchungen schon das auf, was spater als Sprechakte bezeichnet werden sollte (s. Wittgenstein 1980: 28-29). Er nimmt im Rahmen dieser Aufzahlung Bezug auf seine "friihe" Philosophic des Tractatus logico-philosophicus und bekennt sozusagen die Defektivitat dieser im Hinblick auf die dort fehlende Beriicksichtigung dessen, was eigentlich vor sich geht, wenn Menschen (auf "nattirliche", "gewohnliche" Weise) miteinander sprechen. Worauf Wittgenstein anspielt, ist die Tatsache, daB man mit Hilfe der (kalkulisierten, begrifflich prazisen) Kunst-Sprache der Logik in dieser Welt nicht die Moglichkeit hatte, das auszudriicken, was die Sprecher einer naturlichen, gewohnlichen Sprache mit ihrer Handlungsweise vermogen zu tun. Genau dieser Gesichtspunkt stand, wie der Name schon bezeugt, im Mittelpunkt der Betrachtungen der ordinary language philosophy ("Philosophic der Alltagssprache" bzw. "Philosophic der normalen Sprache" - vgl. Savigny 1980) und ganz speziell der Sprechakttheorie, die sich aus dieser Philosophic der normalen Sprache entwickelte und deren bedeutendste Vertreter John L. Austin (1963) als Griinder sowie John Searle (1971) sind. 3

Eine ausfuhrlichere Analyse der Wittgensteinschen Verwendung der Schachanalogie im Zusammenhang mit seiner Sprachauffassung ist bei Hartmann (1998: 46-57) zu finden, wo die Parallelen zwischen Wittgenstein und Saussure durch Heranziehung einschlagiger Zitate noch klarer werden.

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Searle defmiert nun den Oberbegriff des Sprechaktes mit einer Unterteilung in drei Arten von Akten: 1.) Den sozusagen "physikalischen" Teil bezeichnet er als Aufierungsakt, d.h., wenn ich einen Satz ausspreche, auBere ich WQrter (bzw. Morpheme und Satze) - ich vollziehe somit einen AuBerungsakt; 2.) den zweiten Aspekt nennt Searle dann den propositionalen Akt, was soviel bedeutet, daB ein Sprecher auf etwas Bezug nimmt, er referiert auf bestimmte Objekte und pradiziert etwas auf sie - ich vollziehe also einen propositionalen Akt, wenn in meinem geauBerten Satz die Eigenschaften Referenz und Pradikation gegeben sind; 3.) Searle geht dann von einem illokutionaren Akt aus, fur den er die ublichen Beispiele (Behaupten, Fragen, Befehlen, Versprechen, etc.) anfuhrt. Spa'ter erganzte Searle diese Trias mit Austins perlokutionarem Akt, unter dem die Wirkung verstanden wird, den illokutionare Akte (sozusagen als Sprechabsichten) unmittelbar auf die Angesprochenen ausuben. Zu solchen perlokutionaren Akten zahlt Searle beispielsweise uberreden, uberzeugen, erschrecken, alarmieren, dazubringen, etwas zu tun. Diese kurze Erlauterung dessen, was Searle unter dem Oberbegriff Sprechakt versteht, war notwendig, urn die These und deren Erklarung, die er in Searle (1971) auBert, im Zusammenhang mit der sozialen Dimension von Sprache sowie den Bezug dieser Dimension zur Schachanalogie zu verstehen. Searle geht davon aus, "daB illokutionare Akte im allgemeinen im Medium der Sprache und damit auf Grund bestimmter Regeln vollzogen werden und tatsachlich nicht vollzogen werden konnten, wenn die Sprache nicht die Moglichkeit ihres Vollzuges erlaubte." (Searle 1971: 62) Das bedeutet also, daB die Sprache (als System konstitutiver Regeln, also die Saussuresche langue) das Medium bereitstellt, welches illokutionare Akte iiberhaupt erst moglich macht. In verschiedenen Sprachen bestehen dann verschiedene (unbewuBte) Konventionen dariiber, wie diese illokutionaren Akte (in der jeweiligen Einzelsprache) zu realisieren sind. Searle verwendet haufig die Begriffe Konvention, Regel und Akt. Um diese Begriffe tiefgriindiger zu klaren, benutzt er die Schachanalogie (Searle 1971: 62-63). Die Parallele zwischen Sprache und Schach ist gemaB Searle nun folgende: Im Schachspiel ist es eine Konvention, welche a'uBere Form der Konig hat; es muB allerdings die Konigsfigur in irgendeiner Form vorhanden sein, damit die zugrundeliegende Regel "Der Konig darf sich bei einem Zug nur auf ein seinem jetzigen Feld direkt benachbartes Feld begeben" realisiert werden kann. Das gilt auch fur eine Schachpartie, die lediglich in der Phantasie zweier Gegner gespielt wird; beide haben eine Vorstellung von der Figur, die einer Konvention entspricht. Die Konvention tiber die aufiere Form der Konigsfigur ist somit notwendig fur die Realisierung der zugrundeliegenden Regel, damit der "Akt" des speziellen Schachzugs iiberhaupt erst erfolgen kann. Searle sieht es nun so, daB dasselbe auch fur die Sprache gilt. Es gibt ein zugrundeliegendes konstitutives sprachliches Regelsystem, das nicht realisiert werden ko'nnte, wenn es keine Konventionen iiber den Vollzug sprachlicher Verhaltensweisen ga'be. Das hat als Konsequenz fur Searles illokutionare Akte, daB diese selbst, also beispielsweise befehlen, warnen, etc., Bestandteil eines zugrundeliegenden Regelsystems sind, ihre Realisierung jedoch abhangt von Konventionen uber die Art und Weise ihres Vollzugs. In diesem Sinne ist einerseits Searles These zu verstehen, daB Sprache sprechen eine regelgeleitete Form des Verhaltens sei, sowie andererseits seine Bemerkung:

44

Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony "Nun konnte es [...] scheinen, als ob der Gegenstand tneiner Untersuchung - in Saussures Terminologie - »parole« im Gegensatz zu »langue« ware. Ich behaupte jedoch, dafi es sich bei der adaquaten Untersuchung von Sprechakten um eine Untersuchung der langue handelt." (Searle 1971:32)

Die Sprechakte selbst sind gemafi Searle Bestandteil des zugrundeliegenden sprachlichen Regelsystems, also der langue, wie sie der Saussure des Cours versteht. Die Konventionen iiber die Art und Weise ihrer Ausfuhrung gehoren jedoch nicht in dieses System und scheinen darauf auch keinen EinfluB zu haben. Generell birgt diese Einschatzung demnach die Schwierigkeit der Trennung zwischen Konventionen und Regeln, zumal die Frage aufkommen mag, ob die von Searle angesprochenen Konventionen nicht Teil der Regeln sind. Sowohl in der Schachanalogie als auch in der Sprache konnte man doch eher von (kulturellen) Spezifikationen der Regeln sprechen, anstatt eine Trennung von zugrundeliegenden Regeln und Konventionen iiber die Art und Weise ihrer Ausfuhrung vorzunehmen. Uberhaupt wird auch nicht klar, welchen Zweck diese Trennung haben soil, wenn Searle davon ausgeht, dafi eine Sprache sprechen eine regelgeleitete Form des Verhaltens ist. An welcher Stelle greifen hier die Konventionen? Sind somit die Konventionen nicht eigentlich Bestandteile der Regeln, so daB ich sagen kann: Eine Sprache sprechen heifit, sich gemafl Regeln, die spezielle Konventionen beinhalten, zu verhalten? Die Rolle der Sprachgemeinschaft, somit die soziale Dimension der Sprache ware hier deutlicher: Die Sprachgemeinschaft ist fur die Festlegung des Regelsystems sozusagen mitverantwortlich, indem sie sich in einer bestimmten Weise verhalt, diese Verhaltensweise aber mit der Zeit in kleinen Schritten verandert, bis schliefilich das Regelsystem auch Wandlungen unterliegt Insofern stellt das gesamte Regelsystem - um in den Worten Saussures zu sprechen - eine soziale Konvention dar.

Literaturverzeichnis Austin, John L. (1963). How to do things with words. Clarendon, Oxford. Bartschat, Brigitte (1996). Methoden der Sprachwissenschaft. Von Herrmann Paul bis Noam Chomsky. Erich Schmitt Verlag, Berlin. Buyssens, E. (1942). Les six linguistiques de F. de Saussure. Revue des langues vivantes, 8, 1523. Buyssens, E. (1952). Dogme ou libre examen. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 10, 47-50. De Mauro, Tullio (1967). Notizie biografiche e critiche su F. de Saussure; Note. In: Corso di linguistica generate (Saussure, Ferdinand de), 285-452, Laterza, Bari. Godel, R. (1957). Les sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique generate de F. de Saussure. Droz, Genf. Harris, Roy (1988). Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein. How to play games with words. Routledge, London/New York. Harris, Roy (1993). Saussure, Wittgenstein and la regie dujeu. In: Linguistics and Philosophy. The controversial interface (Harre, Rom/Harris, Roy, Hrsg.), 219-231, Pergamon Press, Oxford. Hartmann, Ralph A. (1998). Grundlagenprobleme der Sprachwissenschaft. Kritische Analyse und Abwdgung der allgemeinen Ansichten uber Sprache von Saussure, Chomsky undPiaget. Hartung-Gorre Verlag, Konstanz.

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Holdcroft, David (1991). Saussure: Sign, systems and arbitrariness. Cambridge University Press. Jager, Ludwig (1975). Zu einer historischen Rekonstruktion der authentischen Sprach-Idee Ferdinand de Saussures. Dissertation. Eigenverlag, Dusseldorf. Jager, Ludwig (1976). F. de Saussures historisch-hermeneutische Idee der Sprache. Bin Pladoyer fur die Rekonstruktion des Saussureschen Denkens in seiner authentischen Gestalt. Linguistik undDidaktik, 27, 210-244. Katz, Jerrold J., Hrsg (1985). The Philosophy of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. Koerner, E.F. Konrad (1973). Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and development of his linguistic thought in western studies of language. Vieweg, Braunschweig. Koerner, E.F. Konrad (1975). European Structuralism: early beginnings. In: Current trends in linguistics (Seboek, T.A., Hrsg.), Vol. XIII, 717-827, Mouton de Gruyter, The Hague. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1967). Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, 2. Auflage. De Gruyter, Berlin. Saussure, Ferdinand de (1989-90). Cours de linguistique generate. Edition critique par Rudolf Engler. 2 Bande. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden. Savigny, E.v. (1980). Die Philosophic der normalen Sprache. Eine kritische Einfuhrung in die ^ordinary language philosophy«, 2. Auflage. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Scheerer, T.M. (1980). Ferdinand de Saussure. Rezeption und Kritik. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Searle, John R. (1968). Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. Philosophical Review, 77, 405-424. Searle, John R. (1971). Sprechakte. Ein sprachphilosophischer Essay. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980). Philosophische Untersuchungen (PU). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1982). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Logisch philosophische Abhandlung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1984). Philosophische Grammatik. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.

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3

ElJBULIDES AS A 20TH CENTURY SfiMANTICIST

Pieter A.M. Seuren, Nijmegen University, The Netherlands

Abstract It is the purpose of the present paper to highlight the figure of Eubulides, a relatively unknown Greek philosopher who lived ± 405-330 BC and taught at Megara, not far from Athens. He is mainly known for his four paradoxes (the Liar, the Sorites, the Electra, and the Horns), and for the mutual animosity between him and his younger contemporary Aristotle. The Megarian school of philosophy was one of the main sources of the great Stoic tradition in ancient philosophy. What has never been made explicit in the literature is the importance of the four paradoxes for the study of meaning in natural language: they summarize the whole research programme of 20th century semantics, including the problems of vague predicates (Sorites), intensional contexts (Electra), and presuppositions (Horns). It is a surprising and highly significant fact that a contemporary of Aristotle already spotted the main weaknesses of the Aristotelian paradigm.

0. INTRODUCTION Eubulides was a Greek philosopher in the fourth century BC, and is the almost forgotten author of four so-called 'paradoxes', the Liar, Electra, Sorites and the Horns. Although these paradoxes pose extremely serious problems for Aristotle's theory of truth, and consequently for modern semantics and logic, their significance has been underrated through the ages, probably because no answers were found. They were often depicted as flippant cracks, unworthy of serious attention, but also sometimes as embarrassing riddles. During the 20th century these four problems have come up again. Indeed, one may say that they define, more or less, the whole research programme of 20th century semantics. Yet the lineage to Antiquity has been acknowledged only for the Liar and Sorites. Electra and the Horns have been rediscovered (mainly by Frege), and there appears to be no awareness that they were part of the package of arguments put together by Eubulides. It now seems time, therefore, for a radical reappraisal and a rehabilitation of Eubulides as one of the fathers of 20th century semantics.

1. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF EUBULIDES Who was Eubulides? In actual fact, very little is known about his life and works.1 His exact date of birth is not known, but as an educated guess it may be placed towards the end of the 1

The following reconstruction of Eubulides' biography implies a correction of Seuren (1998:426). 47

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fifth century, perhaps around 405 BC. We know that he was born in the Greek colony Miletus, in Asia Minor which is now known as Turkey. We know that as a young man he migrated to Greece, and that he took over a small school of philosophy in Megara, not far from Athens, in 380. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary (s.v. Eubulides), 'he is said to have taught the Athenian rhetor Demosthenes dialectic [i.e. logic P.S.] and rhetoric', an important detail against the background of his well-known quarrels with Aristotle: Demosthenes was Athens' political leader in the struggle against the Macedonian king Philip II, and thus politically opposed to the Macedonian philosopher Artistotle, who taught in Athens from 335-323 BC, under the protection of Macedonian rule. It is not known exactly when he died, but one may surmise that it will have occurred some time around 330 BC. Eubulides is mainly known for his four 'paradoxes', till recently generally considered pointless or even flippant. Kneale & Kneale (1962:114-5), however, suspect that 'he must surely have been trying to illustrate some theses of Megarian philosophy', and that 'the Megarian study of the paradoxes was a serious affair and not mere perversity.' In the context of modern semantics, we now understand that Eubulides was criticising Aristotle, in particular the basic premisses of Aristotelian truth theory and logic, viz. truth as correspondence and the principles of Contradiction and of Bivalence. It is on account of his paradoxes that we feel a total reappraisal of Eubulides is called for. Let us first lend some colour to the historical setting in which we encounter Eubulides. His city of birth, Miletus, was one of the cities founded by the Greeks for the purpose of maritime trade. Like almost all Greek foundations on the coasts of Asia Minor, and also on the Sicilian and Southern Italian coasts, it had become rich and powerful well before the cities in metropolitan Greece reached their heyday. One does not have to be a Marxist to surmise that the early rise of philosophy in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor, Sicily and Southern Italy was one of the side effects of the economic well-being of these cities. The sixth century philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were from Miletus. Heraclitus, who lived from ± 535 till 480, was from Ephesus, also in Asia Minor. Pythagoras, though born in Samos around 580, taught at Croton in Southern Italy. The city of Elea, also in Southern Italy, had an important school of philosophy during the sixth and fifth centuries. Empedocles (483-423) was from Agrigentum in Sicily and taught philosophy there. It is therefore not surprising to see a young man from Miletus turn to philosophy during the early years of the fourth century. Meanwhile, philosophy was beginning to develop in Greece proper, but in a very different vein. Whereas the earlier philosophers in the colonies had concentrated on questions of time, infinity and numbers, of the unity of physical matter, and the forces in the physical universe, the philosophers who began to appear in metropolitan Greece after about 450 took a wholly different, much more practical, direction. Most of them originated from the colonies, but they practised in Greece proper as teachers on questions of political power, morality and truth, with a strong admixture of rhetoric. Again, one does not have to be a Marxist to see a connection between this change in focus and the rise of the first democracies in Greece proper (but not in the colonies, which all stayed under totalitarian rule). Since the early years of the fifth century, many Greek cities had assumed a form of government where decisions were taken in the people's assembly, consisting of free male adults of a certain economic standing. Clearly, in such a setting, it was important for ambitious youngsters to be able to sway public opinion in the political gatherings of their city state. To satisfy this demand, a number of men began to advertise themselves as teachers of rhetoric, political theory and whatever was available in the way of relevant knowledge in those days. These teachers, who were called 'Sophists' (literally 'experts'), travelled from city state to city state, offering their teaching for good money.

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Not too much is known about the Sophists, as none of their writings have survived. All we know about them is based on secondary sources, i.e. quotations and comments by later authors, who vary in their judgments on the quality and moral standing of these itinerant teachers. The careful piecing together of all the evidence by modern scholars has resulted in a mixed overall picture. Whereas some of the Sophists, apparently, deserved a reputation of being a trifle too opportunistic, others stand out as intellectuals of high academic and moral standing. When the best of them taught their young charges how to convince a public assembly by means of clever rhetoric, they also went into the question of the morality of doing so. One important question, obviously, was: may one tell the assembly falsehoods in order to gain power and influence? The answer was a guarded 'No'. But it was recognised, at the same time, that the question of what constitutes truth and falsity could not be answered satisfactorily. In the absence of any serious truth theory, the best they could do was make a democratic appeal to majority opinion: if the majority believes something to be true, then we may take it to be true (not unlike what is commonly seen in modern science). Similar questions arose as to norms of justice. Given the lack of absolute definitions of 'right' and 'wrong', each proposal to do with restrictions on personal freedom or with inflicting damage or punishment had to be judged on grounds of well-informed public opinion and a well-developed civic sense of justice and injustice. A good politician, therefore, had to be well-informed and share his knowledge with the citizens in the assembly, in order to come to a consensus on the best possible solution, given the circumstances. This was what the best of Sophist teaching amounted to. It is easy to see what Sophist teaching of less high standing would have been like. One man in Athens, however, felt unhappy with this type of reasoning. This was the famous Socrates (469-399), an eccentric who went along the stalls of traders and craftsmen in the market, interrogating them about the philosophical foundations of their trade (and not making himself popular by doing so). Especially towards the end of his life, Socrates gathered a circle of mostly upper class young men around him, inspiring them with his questions and his analyses. One of these was Plato (429-347), whose family belonged to the old Athenian aristocracy. Unlike Socrates, who never wrote, Plato was a gifted and prolific writer. His philosophical dialogues, always figuring Socrates as a protagonist, occasionally reach the highest peaks of literary excellence. The story of Socrates and his circle of admirers, including Plato, is a classic in our history books. It has been told and retold endless times, usually in admiring and often even romanticising tones. What was, however, usually either left out or definitely understressed, until Popper (1945) and Stone (1988), was the political side of things. Socrates, who was himself of what we would now call lower middle class origin, held ideas that were not typical of his class. He liked to associate with the antidemocratic, conservative upper class, which was one of the factors that united him with his circle of upper-class, conservative young followers. Stone, in particular, shows in minute detail the basically totalitarian attitude of Socrates, who favoured benevolent but absolute power on the part of one leader or a small group of leaders. Popper, half a century ago, made the world fully aware of Plato's political ideas: Plato actively propagated ruthless dictatorship, with a secret police, a ban on literature and travelling, a stifling of public debate, and all the other grim features of dictatorial regimes that we have come to know so well during the past century. Although Popper was scorned, and Stone largely ignored, by the community of ancient historians, their important contributions to our way of looking at this episode in history have gradually been accepted and integrated, and it is now no longer anathema to mention these more controversial aspects of early Athenian philosophy.

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It is important to know this, because for a brief period of fourteen months, between 404 and 403 BC, the democratic system of government in Athens was overthrown by a group of dictators, the so-called 'Thirty Tyrants'. The leader of the group was Critias, who belonged to Socrates' circle and was a first cousin of Plato's mother. Critias and his associates were responsible for over a thousand political murders and other atrocities committed during the year their regime lasted. Democracy was restored in the summer of 403, but the wounds remained. It is Stone's merit to have shown that the trial of Socrates, in 399, was part of the process, on the part of the democrats, of coming clean with the past without causing too much social damage. Socrates was convicted nominally on charges of 'corruption of youth', but in fact he was a scapegoat for the antidemocratic movement that had led to the tyranny of the Thirty. Socrates drank the hemlock and Plato fled Athens with a group of friends to live in exile. Not until 387 did Plato return to his native city, where he became highly respected and taught philosophy in his Academy till his death in 347. Among Plato's students in the Academy, in fact the most prominent among them, was a young man called Aristotle. Aristotle was not from Greece but from Macedonia, a kingdom just north of Greece with a rough and uncivilised tradition but now rapidly assimilating Greek culture along with the Greek language. Aristotle was born in Stagira, not far from the capital Pella, in 384 BC. His father had been the personal physician and a close friend of the then king of Macedonia, Amyntas II. An exceptionally gifted boy to begin with, Aristotle joined Plato's Academy at the age of 17, to remain there till Plato's death in 347. Having been passed over as Plato's successor, he left Athens to live, first, in Asia Minor and then in Lesbos. In 343-342 Amyntas' son and successor, Philip II of Macedonia, invited him to come and teach his son Alexander, then 14 years old. This he did for two years, taking Alexander and a group of his friends to a mountain farm and teaching them all there was to know in those days. During the 23 years of his reign, Philip had one great ambition, the conquest of Greece. Yet, despite many campaigns and battles, he never succeeded completely. Strong political opposition, especially on the part of the Athenians, and endless revolts kept frustrating his efforts. His main opponent in Athens was Demosthenes (384-322), who managed to inspire the Athenians, through his rhetorical skills, to keep resisting Macedonian domination. In 336 BC Philip II was murdered and Alexander succeeded him, barely twenty years old. Already an army commander of unusual skill, he first completed the task his father had set himself but had failed to bring to an end, the conquest of Greece, hi less than a year Alexander gained control of the whole of Greece, having set the total destruction of Thebes, ally of Athens, as a terrible example. After that, as one knows, he crossed into Asia and became master of the entire Near East, getting as far as the Indus. In April 323, at the age of 33, he died in Babylon, one of the capitals of the Persian empire which he had conquered. By then he had become a legend if ever there was one. In Asia he was widely worshipped as a god. In Greece one was simply awed and baffled. He entered history as Alexander the Great, the source of a rich mythology through the remainder of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, Aristotle returned to Athens in 335, a year after his former pupil Alexander had established Macedonian rule there. Aristotle founded his own school of philosophy, the Lyceum, called after an ancient grove dedicated to Apollo Lyceios north-east of Athens (the site has recently been discovered and is now being excavated). There he taught till 323, when news of Alexander's death reached Athens. No longer certain of Macedonian protection, he left Athens overnight and sought refuge in Chalcis, just north of Athens, where a Macedonian garrison was stationed. One year later, in 322, he died of an intestinal disease.

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Now back to Eubulides. No doubt attracted by the fame of Socrates and Plato, Eubulides migrated to Athens as a young man, and in or around 380 he took over a small but respectable school of philosophy that had been founded by a philosopher called Euclides (not the mathematician!) in the town of Megara, some thirty miles west of Athens. This Euclides is reported to have provided hospitality to Plato and his friends as they fled from Athens in 399, after Socrates' death. As was said at the beginning, tradition has it that Eubulides taught logic and rhetoric to the Athenian Demosthenes, the great opponent of Philip of Macedonia. The evidence is scanty, but it suggests that the well-known personal animosity between Aristotle and Eubulides was at least partly also rooted in political differences. It is hardly thinkable that anti-Macedonian feelings had suddenly subsided after Alexander's forced entry in Athens. It is known, moreover, that Aristotle could only teach in Athens as long as he was protected by Macedonian power The conclusion seems justified, therefore, that there must have been a strong anti-Macedonian faction in Athens and elsewhere in Greece throughout the period in question. And we may add that Eubulides was no doubt an ardent member of that faction. In any case, no sympathy was lost between him and Aristotle.

2. THE ARISTOTELIAN THEORY OF TRUTH But it is time now to turn to the real issues. One of the recurrent themes in Plato's dialogues, and probably also in Socrates' teachings, is the question of the nature of truth and falsity, broached by the Sophists. One of the things that worried Socrates and his followers was the fact that the Sophists presupposed an absolute notion of truth, even if adequate knowledge of what is true and false is often not attainable. If that is so, they reasoned, we must try and find out what truth, taken in and by itself, amounts to. Thus began the quest for the nature of truth and falsity. The theme recurs in many of Plato's dialogues, but it is treated most systematically in his dialogue The Sophist, written in his later years. Here, however, no clear and final conclusion is reached. Yet Plato makes some important statements, which have become integrated into the philosophical tradition. In Sophist (263 BC), we witness a little exchange between the Eleatic Stranger (ES) and the young Athenian Theaetetus (Th): ES: And the true sentence says the things about you the way they are. Th.: What else? ES: And the false one says things that differ from the way they are. Th.: Yes. ES: That is, it says things that are not, as if they were. Th.: More or less, yes. Here Plato states that truth consists in correspondence between what is said and what is the case, while falsity consists in presenting a state of affairs that differs from what is the case. This notion of correspondence was further elaborated by Aristotle. After all the equivocations and inconclusive debates of the preceding century, Aristotle wants to be done with this question, and get on with things, such as the development of a proper truth calculus or logic. Early on in his Metaphysics, at 1011^26, he curtly defines truth as follows (translation by Warrington (Aristotle 1956:142)): We begin by defining truth and falsehood. Falsehood consists in saying of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is. Truth consists in saying of that which is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not.

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We see that, remarkably, Aristotle does more than repeat Plato's correspondence criterion. He introduces a new element, the definition of not as a simple truth-functional inverter of truth values: a toggle between true and false. This has momentous consequences. We must have a closer look at the issues involved, since this is where Eubulides attacked him, as we shall see presently. In his Posterior Analytics (77a 10-24), Aristotle presents, with great emphasis and insistence, two axioms ('no proof can be provided') for his truth theory, which are also applied in his logic. The first axiom is the Principle of Contradiction or PoC, which says that nothing can be the case and not be the case at the sime time. It follows that no sentence can be true and false at the same time. The second axiom is the Principle ofBivalence or PoB, or the Principle of the Excluded Third or PET. This says that propositions expressed in sentences fall into two (mutually exclusive) classes: the true ones and the false ones. A proposition is the mental act of assigning a property (accidens) to an entity (suppositum). This mental act can be expressed as a well-formed sentence in a language, whose subject term refers to the entity or suppositum in question, and whose predicate expresses the property assigned to the suppositum. Sentences that express a proposition, says Aristotle, have no choice but to be either true or false, with nothing in between and nothing outside these two values. Aristotle places particular emphasis on his thesis that the opposition between truth and falsity is not gradual but absolute. In many other cases of opposite pairs there is a gradual transition from one extreme to the other, as with good and bad, or light and dark. But for him, true and false do not belong to this class of gradual opposites, but to the class of absolute opposites, like dead and alive (for entities that have biological life), or even and odd (for numbers). This is his Principle of the Excluded Middle or PEM. It applies absolutely, but for one reservation. In De Interpretatione 19a30 Aristotle discusses the problem of the sea battle which is going to take place, and he then makes a possible exception for statements about future events, which would be exempted from PET. Otherwise, however, PET applies absolutely. Although PEM and PET are often confused, even in respectable writings, one can easily see that PEM is only a subaxiom of the more general PET. The other subaxiom, which we may call the Binarity Principle or BP, is Aristotle's thesis that there are exactly two truth values, and not three or even more. This yields the following rendering of Aristotle's truth theory, applied in his logic: Axioms: I Principle of Contradiction (PoC) II Principle ofBivalence (PoB) or Principle of the Excluded Third (PET) Subaxioms: a. Principle of the Excluded Middle (PEM) b. Binarity Principle (BP) But there is more. If truth consists in correspondence between what is said and what is actually the case, that is, if truth is found in the linguistic expression of a proposition that mentally assigns to an entity a property which the entity really has, in the actual world, then it should make no difference for the truth or falsity of an uttered sentence what expression is used to refer to the entity in question, or what expression is used to denote the property in question. What matters is only that the referring expression does indeed successfully refer to the entity intended, and that the predicate expression does indeed denote the property which the speaker has in mind. In other words, it is a direct consequence of Aristotle's notion of truth as correspondence that referring terms or predicate expressions may be substituted for each other salva veritate (i.e. without affecting the truth value) provided the terms refer to the same entity and the predicate expressions denote the same property.

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This consequence was known to Aristotle but he did not subject it to closer scrutiny. It was not until Leibniz (1646-1716) that it was actually formulated as a principle. Leibniz gives a variety of wordings, the best known of which is probably (Gerhardt 1890:228): Eadem sunt quorum unum potest substitui alteri salva veritate. or 'If two terms can stand in for each other salva veritate, their reference is identical'. This has since become known as the Principle ofSubstitutivity, fundamental in modern semantics.

3. THE EUBULIDEAN PARADOXES 3.1 The Paradoxes and Aristotle But what has all this to do with Eubulides? The answer is simple. Eubulides is mainly known, in what little there is about him in the literature, for his so-called paradoxes. The Greek author Diogenes Laertius (early 3rd century AD), an invaluable source of information about ancient philosophy, writes (ii,108): Among the successors of Euclides was also Eubulides, who raised many questions of logic: the liar, the unnoticed man, the Electra, the hooded man, the heap, the horned man, and the bald man. In Kneale & Kneale (1962:114) we read: From the explanations given by various writers of later antiquity it appears that some of the seven paradoxes specifically attributed to Eubulides were merely variants of others and that the list can probably be reduced to the four following items: (1) The Liar. 'A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?' (2) The Hooded Man, the Unnoticed Man, or the Electra. 'You say you know your brother. But that man who came in just now with his head covered is your brother, and you did not know him.' (3) The bald man, or the Heap. 'Would you say that a man was bald if he had only one hair? Yes. Would you say that a man was bald if he had only two hairs? Yes. Would you ..., etc. Then where do you draw the line?' (4) The Horned Man. 'What you have not lost you still have. But you have not lost your horns. So you still have horns.' This is explosive stuff for Aristotle's theory of truth. According to Kneale & Kneale (1962: 228), Aristotle himself was aware of the paradoxes (e.g. De Sophisticis Elenchis 180b2-7), and he was certainly sharp enough to have seen the deadly power of the arguments. But he declined to answer. This is remarkable, because he did reply to other criticisms directed at him by the Megarians, for example on modalities, or on the distinction between acting and undergoing. In those cases his comment is invariably that the Megarian point of view is 'silly' (Greek dtopori). But he never replied to the paradoxes put forth by Eubulides. One may well surmise, therefore, that Aristotle simply had no reply.

3.2 The Liar Paradox The Liar paradox is, of course, very well known nowadays. Its simplest form is in the sentence What I am saying now is false. Anyone saying this gets into trouble, for if what is said is true, it is at the same time false, and if it is false, then it is at the same time true. It looks very much as

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if this paradox undermines both Aristotle's Principle of Contradiction and his Principle of Bivalence, since it appears to lead to the conclusion that sentences such as the one just given can be both true and false at the same time, which means that there would, after all, be a third possibility not catered for in Aristotle's theory of truth. Clearly, no-one will seriously propose this as a reasonable alternative to the Aristotelian theory, but if that theory is to be saved, then a satisfactory answer must be given to this paradox. In Antiquity, the Liar paradox was well-known, but nothing much was done about it. Cicero was well aware of the Liar paradox, and of the others as well. In Academicae Quaestiones (ii,96) he formulates the paradox, but attributes it wrongly to Chrysippus, a later Stoic philosopher: If you say that you lie and you speak the truth, you lie. But then you say that you lie and you speak the truth, so you lie. This question was raised by Chrysippus, but not solved by him. In his De Divinatione (ii,l l) Cicero mentions the Liar paradox along with the Sorites ('heap'): Can anything of what is dealt with by logicians or physicists be solved by soothsaying? Whether there is one world or many, what the first beginnings were of the world, from which everything originated: those are questions that come within the physicists' competence. And how to solve the Liar, also called by the Greek name of Pseudomenon, or the Sorites (which one may call the Acervalis ['heap'] in Latin if one finds that necessary, but it isn't necessary because the very word philosophia and many other Greek words, such as Sorites, have gained currency in Latin): those are questions for the logicians, not the soothsayers. And many other references to the Liar and the other paradoxes are found in the literature. A weak but famous reflex is found in Paul's Epistle to Titus (I, 12-13), where Paul, cursing the Cretans, writes, obviously unaware of the problem: One of their own prophets said: 'Cretans always lie, the wicked beasts and lazy bellies', and this witness is true. The 'prophet' referred to is a Cretan poet, Epimenides (6th century BC), which is why the paradox is also often called the Epimenidan Paradox. Strictly speaking, however, this is not paradoxical. It is sufficient to assume that the Cretan 'prophet' Epimenides simply said a falsehood if he said that all Cretans always lie. The problem arises only if one makes him speak the truth, as Paul does. In that case, there is indeed a problem, because then Epimenides allegedly spoke the truth and at the same time, being a Cretan himself, must have lied. Perhaps due to this passage in Paul's letter to Titus, the Liar paradox became very popular in medieval philosophy from the 12th century onward. The term used for the paradoxes, especially the Liar, was insolubilia ('unsolvables'). Kneale and Kneale (1962:228) write: [S]o far little work has been done on the surviving texts, and we cannot even say yet when or how the study of insolubilia began.... It may be ... that the [Liar] paradox was discovered afresh in the twelfth century. In any case medieval logicians were not satisfied with simple versions such as Ego dicofalsum, but invented complicated variants like 'Socrates says "What Plato says is false", and Plato says "What Socrates says is true", and neither says anything else. Is what Socrates says true or false?' It was realized that the trouble arose from the attempt to produce a certain sort of self-reference, and an insolubile was defined as a 'propositio habens super se reflexionem suae falsitatis aut se non esse veram totaliter vel partialiter illativa.' But there was no single agreed doctrine about the bearing of such paradoxes on the theory of meaning and truth. On the contrary, various medieval logicians suggested various ways of dealing with the trouble. Kneale & Kneale then mention an anonymous manuscript (Bibliotheque Nationale, Cod. Lat. 16617) probably dating from the early 14th century, where three possible solutions to the Liar are discussed. One solution is called restrictio and consists in a simple prohibition of

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token reflexivity (self-reference) in the use of language. Another solution proposed is that of cassatio or nullity of meaning. This implies that sentences or texts that suffer from the Liar paradox are uninterpretable due to the impossibility of identifying an entity (suppositum) for the subject term in a Liar sentence like This very sentence is false. The third solution, cryptically called 'secundum quid et simpliciter', is (Kneale & Kneale, ib.), 'an unsatisfactory suggestion extracted from the passage of Aristotle mentioned above' [i.e. De Sophisticis Elenchis 180b2-7]. The solution proposed by Russell and Tarski in our century is a modern form of restrictio, and it is now considered the standard solution to the Liar paradox. Yet, although it seems to work satisfactorily in logical languages, which can be subjected to restrictions like a prohibition to mix object language and metalanguage, in natural language, as Kneale & Kneale rightly observe (1962:228), this would exclude all sorts of harmless forms of self-reference, such as What I am now saying is a sentence of English. In fact, one may add, natural language use is replete with perfectly natural and harmless mixings of object language and metalanguage, which, of course, nobody is going to forbid. A simple example is: (1) Jones has lived in Dnjepropetrovsk for many years, but he can still not pronounce it. where // refers not to the city of Dnjepropetrovsk but to its name. It would seem, therefore, that the Kneales are right in rejecting this restrictio for the theory of natural language meaning. Cassatio has hardly been explored in modern times, largely due to the dominant position of Russellian logic, which claims to have solved the Liar paradox definitely, completely disregarding the consequences of its solution for natural language. Yet we can easily pursue or reconstruct the cassatio argument. In a sentence like This very sentence is false the term this very sentence must refer to a proposition expressed, since the predicate false requires propositions to apply to. We thus need a proposition to serve as the suppositum of the predicate false. But all there is to be found is the very same proposition expressed, which is then again said to be false, and so on ad infmitum. There is thus no proposition to be found of which it can be said that it fails to satisfy the satisfaction conditions of the predicate false.2 The third solution mentioned in the medieval manuscript, secundum quid et simpliciter, does not appear to deserve further scrutiny.

3.3 The Electra Paradox Now to the second paradox, which we shall call the Electra, though it is also known as 'the Unnoticed Man' and 'the Hooded Man'. The mythical story, generally known, of course, in Eubulides' and Aristotle's day, goes as follows. While Agamemnon, king of Mycenes, was away to fight in the Trojan war, his wife Clytaemnestra had set up house with another man. Obviously, when Agamemnon was due back, there would be a problem. So when Agamemnon came home Clytaemnestra let him have a warm bath, during which she chopped his head off with a sword. That would have been the end of the affair, had there not been children, in particular a son, Orestes, who now had the holy duty to avenge his father. However, in order to do that, he would have to kill his mother, which would be a heinous crime. In order to sort out his moral dilemma, Orestes went to stay with an uncle for a while. At the end of that period he has made up his mind and has decided that the right thing to do, after all, is to kill his mother. So This argument is proposed as the correct solution for natural language in Seuren (1987).

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he returns to Mycenes, but, sensibly fearing to receive a treatment similar to his father's, he disguises himself as a beggar so as not to be recognised. He then knocks at the gate and is let in. His sister Electra has him shown to the kitchen and given some soup. At this point in the story, Eubulides steps in and asks: 'Is the sentence Electra knows that her brother Orestes is in the kitchen true or false?' It should be true, since she knows that the beggar is in the kitchen, and the beggar is identical with Orestes. Therefore, given the Principle of Substitutivity mentioned above, Electra should also know that Orestes is in the kitchen. Yet she obviously does not know that, because if she did she might well have raised the alarm. We see here that the Principle of Substitutivity apparently does not always apply, and the question is why not. Aristotle may have seen that this is a very serious threat to his theory of truth, but there is no record of any reply. Nor is there any record through the ages of a proper analysis of the Electra paradox in the context of Aristotelian truth theory, until Frege (1892), who rediscovered the problem but was apparently unaware of its history in the Electra paradox. Frege found, first, that substitution of coreferring terms in identity statements complicates Aristotelian truth theory. In the true identity statement: (2) The morning star is the evening star. the terms the morning star and the evening star both refer to the same entity, the planet Venus. Here, substitution of one term for the other, as in: (3) The morning star is the morning star. will not change the truth value of the sentence, but it adds the peculiarity that the sentence then becomes necessarily true, i.e. true in all possible situations, given the metaphysical axiom that everything is identical to itself. In contrast, (2) is a contingent statement, reporting a discovery that was made some time in the distant past (probably by the Greeks). His solution consisted in an application of the old distinction between intension and extension not just to predicates, for which it was invented in Medieval philosophy, but also to definite terms. Frege now stipulates that the extension (or reference) of a term is the entity referred to, while the intension (or sense) of a term is 'the way in which it is presented' ('die Art des Gegebenseins', p. 26), or, in other words, the procedure by which the listener arrives at the entity referred to, given the term in question.3 Now, Frege says, the terms the morning star and the evening star have the same extension, but different intensions. This explains that (2) is a contingent statement, since when two different paths are followed it may come as a surprise that they lead to the same point, while (3), where the same path is followed twice and thus the same point is reached twice, is a necessary truth. Our interest, however, lies in Frege's second finding. Like Eubulides, he found that Substitutivity actually fails in what he called 'oblique' ('ungerade') contexts. That is, when a sentence or clause is embedded (usually as a that-clause) under a predicate that assigns a property to thoughts as entities, then substitution of coreferring terms may well lead to different truth values. Frege gives precious few examples, but his meaning is clear enough. Consider: (4)a. Jones believes that there is life on the morning star, b. Jones believes that there is life on the evening star. If Jones does not believe that the morning star is identical with the evening star, (4a) may well be true and (4b) false, or vice versa. The parallel with the Electra paradox is obvious:

3

Cp. Dummett (1973:281): 'In Frege's theory, the sense of a name consists of the means we have provided for determining an actual (existent) object as its referent.'

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(5)a. Electra knows that the beggar is in the kitchen. b. Electra knows that her brother Orestes is in the kitchen. Since Electra does not know that the beggar is identical with her brother Orestes, (5a) is true but (5b) is false (in the story). It was clear to Frege, and one may hope also to Eubulides and to Aristotle, that this failure of substitutivity in what we now call intensional contexts poses a serious threat to the Aristotelian theory of truth, which entails substitutivity. An answer is therefore absolutely necessary. Frege's answer consisted in extending the extension-intension distinction to sentences and clauses as well. For him, the extension of a sentence is its truth value, while its intension is the underlying thought expressed in the sentence. For him the following two sentences: (6)a. There is life on the morning star, b. There is life on the evening star. have the same extension (truth value) but different intensions (underlying thoughts). However, when a sentence is embedded under a predicate assigning a property to thoughts, such as believe or know, the embedded clause is an argument term of the predicate and refers to a thought, not to a truth value. Now it follows that the 7/zotf-clauses in (4a) and (4b), or (5a) and (5b), refer to different thoughts, which means that substitution of one that-claase for another does not guarantee the preservation of the truth value of the whole sentence. It follows that substitutivity of terms which in fact corefer must fail in intensional contexts, which involve a subject that may not be aware of the fact that the two terms corefer. Frege's solution appealed to modern logicians. Yet when they began to develop what is known as 'formal semantics', around 1950, the notion 'thought' was considered suspect and unmanageable in a formal context. It was for that reason that Frege's solution to his second problem, the failure of substitutivity in intensional contexts, was reformulated in terms of a model-theoretic calculus involving possible worlds. We shall not go into the details of the theory of formal semantics, but it will be clear that Frege's second problem, which is, in fact, the Electra paradox, has been crucial in its development. And since, rightly or wrongly, formal semantics has dominated semantic studies since the early 1970s, we may say that the Electra paradox is at the very centre of modern semantic theory. Yet there is not a single mention of this fact in the literature. All references are to Frege, and Eubulides has been totally forgotten.

3.4 The Sorites The third paradox, generally known under the name of Sorites (from Greek soros 'heap'), but also known as 'the Bald Man', is a direct attack on the Aristotelian Principle of the Excluded Middle (PEM). It says, in effect, that the opposition between truth and falsity is like that between light and darkness: there are infinitely many intermediate values between the two extremes. This is embarrassing for the Aristotelian truth theory, since if truth consists in correspondence between what is said (or thought) on the one hand and that which is the case on the other, then, clearly, there is correspondence or there is not. There is no way in between. Nowadays, however, many philosophers and linguists feel that a different look at what constitutes truth easily undermines this argument. If truth is seen not as correspondence but rather as the result of the satisfaction of the conditions set by the predicate of the sentence (proposition) in question by the entity or entities referred to by the term(s), then PEM is no longer a necessary consequence of the truth theory. For the satisfaction conditions of predicates may

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themselves leave room for partial fulfilment. The predicate dark, for example, is fully satisfied when there is no light at all, but it is partially satisfied when there is a little light, but not enough to justify the predicate light for the entity referred to by the subject term. Thus, one may say that a sentence like This room is dark is partially true of a room where there is just a little light, or that This man is bald is partially true of a man with just a few hairs on his head. Predicates like dark or light are called 'vague' predicates, and it will be clear that natural languages contain large masses of them. A number of theories have been developed during the 20th century, both in logic and in semantics, to account for this kind of vagueness. Best known are the logical approaches. The Polish logician Lukasiewicz devised a three-valued logic, where the third value is to be considered intermediate between truth and falsity. In "Lukasiewicz (1930) it is shown that the intermediate value ('Vz') can be extended to encapsulate all denumerably infinite intermediate values, so that this logic may be taken, in a certain sense (not intended by-fcukasiewicz himself, who applied his logic to modalities) to account for a denumerable infinity of intermediate values that may arise with vague predicates. The same logic, as far as negation, conjunction and disjunction are concerned (but with a different implication), is used in Kleene (1952). The 'fuzzy' logic presented in Zadeh (1975) is more radical, in that it is based on a 'fuzzy' set theory and implies a non-denumerable infinity of intermediate values (see Haack (1978:165) for further comment). Again, we shall leave the technical details aside, but it is clear that the Sorites has had an important impact on modern semantic and logical studies. In this case, the name 'Sorites' has not been forgotten. In fact, it is a standard reference in the vagueness literature. Yet hardly any author seems to realize that the Sorites was first formulated by Eubulides as a contemporary attack on Aristotle's truth theory, and in the context of other similar attacks.

3.5 The Paradox of the Horns We now come to the last of the four paradoxes. It consists of the following logical riddle: What is wrong with the following argument? Major: What you haven't lost you still have. Minor: You have not lost your horns. Ergo: You still have your horns. Besides the somewhat scurrilous aspect of the example, which would have irritated Aristotle (never known for his sense of humour), there is the logical problem: if the argument is correct, then everyone could be rightly branded as either a cuckold or an ex-cuckold. We now know that this riddle shows up the presupposition problem, which has not found a generally accepted solution in either logic or semantics (or pragmatics). The problem is that presuppositions are normally preserved under negation, but that it is often possible to deny the presuppositions as well. This presupposition-cancelling negation is subject to certain conditions, for example that the negation has to be a separate word (not a bound morpheme), must be used emphatically and (for English) constructed with the finite verb form. There are thus (at least) two different possible uses of the negation, in English as in Greek, with differing truthconditional properties. The sentence You have lost your horns carries the presupposition that the addressee once had horns. This presupposition derives from the satisfaction conditions (meaning) of the predicate have lost, which requires that what has been lost must once have been possessed (just

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like what has been forgotten must once have been known, or whoever is back, must once have been away). If this sentence is made negative in the normal, presupposition-preserving way, we get You haven't lost your horns, which still presupposes that the addressee once had horns. The sentence presented in the Major of the argument, What you haven't lost you still have, expresses the general statement that in all cases, if one hasn't lost Y, one still has Y. This general statement is based on the presupposition that goes with sentences of the type X has lost Y, and on the interpretation of the negation n 't as presupposition-preserving. Again, in the sentence presented in the Minor of the argument, the word not is used ambiguously, since it is not clear whether this is the presupposition-preserving or the presupposition-cancelling (use of the) negation. So the argument is valid (and the addressee is a cuckold) only if both negations, in the Major and the Minor, are interpreted as presupposition-preserving. But if not in the Minor is taken as the presupposition-cancelling not, then the argument is not valid, and the addressee need not worry. This is the answer that Aristotle could have given but didn't, probably because he was, like Strawson (1950), unaware of the possibility of presupposition-cancelling not. Not much is known about the presupposition problem in Medieval philosophy (see Seuren 1998:429). Two authors have so far been traced who deal with presuppositions, which they call propositions praeiacentes ('propositions that lie before'). They are Peter of Spain (13th century), and the Englishman Walter Burleigh (±1275-after 1344). They focus on the presupposition that comes with (the Latin equivalent of) only (the 'exclusivae'), as in (la), and those that are induced by aspectual verbs like stop, as in (7b): (7)a. Only the children laughed, (presupp.: the children laughed) b. Jones has stopped smoking. (presupp.: Jones has once smoked) To what extent the presupposition problem was a topic in Medieval philosophy is not known. But it does seem as if the link with the Horns paradox had already been lost.4 In modern times it is not, again, until Frege (1892) that the problem is rediscovered, and in a different shape and context. Frege does not deal with the presupposition problem specifically, but only mentions it in passing (1892:31-2), in a purely philosophical (metaphysical) context: Idealists and skeptics may already have objected: 'You simply talk [in the sentence 'The moon is smaller than the earth'] about the moon as if it were an object. But how do you know that the definite description 'the moon' has a referent at all? How do you know that anything has a referent?' My answer to this is that it is not our intention to speak of the mental representation of the moon, and that we likewise do not content ourselves with just the sense (meaning) when we speak of the moon. But we presuppose a referent. ... Now we may be wrong in assuming this presupposition, and such errors have indeed occurred in the past. But the question of whether we are always mistaken can remain unanswered here. It is sufficient to point to our intention when we speak or think, to justify our talk about the referent of a sign: there is always the reservation 'in case it really exists', [italics mine, P.S.] We see here that Frege is not concerned with presuppositions like those induced by only or by specific predicates like stop or have lost, but with presuppositions of existence, which he links up with the definite article the. Technically, Frege's problem is that if there is no referent (extension) for the (subject) term in question, there is no truth value (extension) for the sentence,

4

An echo of Walter Burleigh's text on presuppositions (without attribution) is found in Geach (1950), which has, however, provoked no reaction at all in the modern presupposition literature (cp. Seuren 1998:431).

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since then there is no entity available to test if it satisfies the conditions set by the predicate. In this respect, Frege's account harbours the threat of a violation of Aristotelian bivalence. The point was taken up again in Russell (1905), where Russell presents his famous Theory of [definite] Descriptions. In order to save Aristotelian truth theory and logic from this threat, Russell proposes that the logical analysis of sentences should never contain a definite determiner (article), and that all definite descriptions of the form the so-and-so should be dissolved into an existential quantifier and a few prepositional functions. Thus, the sentence: (8) The present king of France is bald, should be assigned the logical form (9a) or, in technical notation, (9b): (9)a. There is an x, such that x is king of France and x is bald, and for all y, if y is king of France, y is identical with x b. 3x [KoF(x) A Bald(x) A Vy [KoF(y) -> y = x]] Now the negation of this sentence: (10) The present king of France is not bald. does not imply that there is a king of France: (1 l)a. Not [there is an x, such that x is king of France and x is bald, and for all y, if y is king of France, y is identical with x] b. -6x [KoF(x) A Bald(x) A Vy [KoF(y) -» y = x]] Unfortunately, however, says Russell, speakers of natural languages, for reasons best known to themselves, normally interpret (10) not as (11), as they should (and also do in exceptional cases), but as (12), with the negation covering only 'x is bald' or 'Bald(x)': (12)a. There is an x, such that x is king of France and not[x is bald], and for all y, if y is king of France, y is identical with x] b. 3x [KoF(x) A -[Bald(x)] A Vy [KoF(y) -> y = x]] In this interpretation, the existence of the king of France is entailed. But it is not the logical negation of (9). Thus, by the brutal destruction of grammatical structure and the invention of a logical analysis that does not fit the grammatical facts at all, Russell tried to save Aristotelian truth theory and the Aristotelian axiom of bivalence (PET). Russell's rough handling of natural language was criticised by the Oxford philosopher Strawson (Strawson 1950 and later publications). Strawson, restricting himself to existential presuppositions, felt that the Aristotelian PET should be given up in favour of a so-called gapped bivalent system with the values 'true', 'false', and 'undefined'. The value 'undefined' results when one or more presuppositions of a sentence are false. For him, the negation is per se presupposition-preserving, which gives the following truth-table for gapped bivalent not (~): A

~A

T F U

F T U

('A' stands for any proposition, 'T' for 'true', 'F' for 'false, and 'U' for 'undefined.)

A great deal has been said and written about presuppositions and presupposition-cancelling since Strawson put forward his proposal. Later authors have extended Strawson's notion of presupposition to one that encompasses other types of presupposition as well, such as those that are induced by lexical satisfaction conditions, or words like only and even, etc. Various schools

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of thought have sprung up, in logic, semantics and pragmatics, all differing in their views of how presuppositions are best accounted for. It cannot be our purpose here to try and adjudicate upon this complex question, but it is clear that we have here a major development in the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. And here, too, we see that Eubulides had already got hold of the issue, and in a way that was critical of Aristotle.

4. CONCLUSION The overall conclusion is that, in Aristotle's own day, Eubulides formulated four heavy arguments against Aristotle's theory of truth and therefore his strictly bivalent logic. These paradoxes or riddles were beyond the powers of philosophers and logicians for many centuries, and were consequently ridiculed by many, including Aristotle himself, although some did see their significance. Yet the historical awareness of their author and of the original context in which they were conceived was generally lost. It was only in the 20th century, in the context of the mathematisation of logic and of a renewed interest in natural language semantics, that the paradoxes of Eubulides were rediscovered and recognised for what they are: heavy broadsides on the Aristotelian paradigm. As was said at the outset, the four paradoxes more or less define the entire research programme of modern semantic studies. It is the purpose of this attempt at historical reconstruction to broaden the perspective of those who take an interest in the history and other backgrounds of the semantics, logic and pragmatics of natural language.

REFERENCES Aristotle (1956) Metaphysics. Edited & translated by John Warrington. Dent & Sons, London. Dummett, M. (1973) Frege. Philosophy of Language. Duckworth, London. Frege, G. (1892) Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift fur Philosophic und philosophische Kritik 100:25-50. Geach, P.T. (1950) Russell's Theory of Descriptions. Analysis 10:84-88. Gerhardt, C.I. (1890) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Vol. VII. Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, Hildesheim. Haack, S. (1978) Philosophy of Logics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Kleene, S.C. (1952) Introduction to Metamathematics. North-Holland, Amsterdam. Kneale, W. and M. Kneale (1962) The Development of Logic. Clarendon Press, Oxford. •fcukasiewicz, J. (1930) Philosophische Bemerkungen zu mehrwertigen Systemen des Aussagenkalkuls. Comptes rendus des seances de la Societe des Sciences et des Lettres de Varsovie, Cl. iii, vol. 23:51-77. (English translation: 'Philosophical remarks on many-valued systems of prepositional logic' inMcCall 1967:40-65.) McCall, S. (ed.) (1967) Polish Logic: 1920-1939. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Popper, Karl R. (1945) The Open Society and its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Russell, B. (1905) On denoting. Mind 14:479-493. Seuren, P.A.M. (1987) Les paradoxes et le langage. Logique et Analyse 30 (No.l20):365-383. Seuren, P.A.M. (1998) Western Linguistics. An Historical Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford. Stone, I.F. (1988) The Trial of Socrates. Jonathan Cape, London. Strawson, P.P. (1950) On referring. Mind 59:320-344. Zadeh, L.A. (1975) Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning. Synthese 30:407-428.

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KEY DATES IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LINGUISTICS R. H. Robins, Professor Emeritus, University of London, England

Abstract Very shortly historians of linguistics in the twentyfirst century will have to examine the structure of the twentieth century's work and thinking in linguistics as a general science. In this examination certain dates are likely to emerge as landmarks or key dates, rather like the four 'breakthroughs' of Hockett (1965). This paper considers the concept of historical key dates, and then, passing through the main persons, schools, and doctrines, suggests some possible dates for consideration in the twentyfirst century.

This paper is bound to be in part a personal one, based on circumstances, experiences, and memories. I am a child of this century. In so far as calendrical labels are useful in historical thought, many would say that in political and social history the twentieth century began in 1918, the previous century with many of its stable institutions having been blown to bits in 1914. I was born in 1921 and I am still alive in the middle of 1998. I was educated in the Classics, and for reasons partly connected with the course of the second world war I became a university teacher of linguistics in 1948. One feature of linguistic studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and a most welcome feature, has been the growth of interest, scholarly research, and teaching in the history of the subject. During and since the decade 1965 - 1975 several textbooks and more advanced publications have appeared, and a specialised periodical Historiographia Linguistica (1974). Compare the state of things today with Hockett's statement in the preface to his 1958 Course in modern linguistics that he had omitted all mention of the history of the subject as not appropriate to an introductory book (1958: vii-viii). If we are going to study any aspect of history, political, social, artistic, literary, or scientific, some referential structure must be imposed in advance, and this inevitably involves temporal sequence, as history is about the past in its relations with the present. We are encouraged today to be empathetic, to put ourselves in the position and mentality of particular groups in particular periods, say agricultural labourers in Chaucer's day in Britain, to cite the first chapter of the famous English social history of G. M. Trevelyan (1942). But to do this some temporal identification of the period in relation to the past and present situation of those involved must be clearly envisaged; clearly it did not start at Chaucer's birth and cease

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64 Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony immediately at his death. How can we best do this sort of periodization in our branch of historical thinking? The simplest and easiest to envisage is the purely annalistic approach. Events and participants are linked together in particular years, irrespective of any other associations: for example in 1848 King Louis Philippe's regime in France was overthrown, General Zachary Taylor was elected President of the United States, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair was first published. Annals are useful as references and indispensable in checking details, but do not themselves throw much light on the course or courses of history. In the history of humankind centuries are no less arbitrary divisions than are single years. Yet contingently they do sometimes coincide roughly with major changes in thought, social relations, centres of power, and economic conditions. In his recent (1996) book Europe: a history Norman Davies entitles the last three chapters covering the last two centuries, 'Dynamo' (1815 - 1914), 'Tenebrae' (1914 - 1945), and 'Divisa et indivisa' (1945 - 1991), matching, not all that roughly, the nineteenth century and the two halves of the twentieth. This century has not long to last, and the expression 'Present day linguistics' or 'contemporary linguistics' with reference to twentieth century work will soon be, if it is not already, inadmissible. Some historians of the subject have already played safe: Holger Pederson made the first title of his English translation (1931) Linguistic science in the nineteenth century, and in 1991 Malmberg entitled his coverage 'From the Sumerians to de Saussure'. Certainly temporal distance lends a coherent, albeit sometimes a falsely coherent view, to our subject, or indeed any subject. This was effectively brought to my attention some years back in setting questions in a paper on Linguistic Theory as an external examiner. I was told that Bloomfield was now considered as belonging to the history of linguistics rather than to current theory. At the outset of my professional life Bloomfield's Language (1933) was one of the then few essential textbooks. Of course we must envisage historical changes and developments in the field of ideas and ways of thinking as essentially gradual processes, but the historian of linguistics in the twenty first century, however he or she may tackle the subject, will want to look for a few key dates, be they lectures, particular publications, or the beginning or the end of distinctive schools, to form some sort of time frame within which to recount and analyse the course of linguistics in general or some aspect of linguistics. In his 1964 Presidential Address to the Linguistic Society of America, Hockett (1965) made a selection of four key dates covering roughly the past two hundred years of linguistics at that time. The Address was not primarily about history; it was entitled 'Sound change'; but the subject is reviewed within his four temporal divisions. These were: 1786, the year of Sir William Jones's Third Address to the Asiatick Society; 1975, the year of Karl Verner's paper 'Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung', 1916, the first edition of de Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique generate, and 1957, the first publication of Chomsky's Syntactic structures. Hockett refers to all these four dates as 'breakthroughs'. This is fair enough: linguistics was never, and could never have been the same since the events referred to. But the term does nevertheless suggest rather a Whig historical approach, whereby each change is for the better. In British history in general the first paragraph of Macaulay's History of England (1871: 1) is a splendid example of Whig history, 'How from the auspicious union of order and freedom sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example'. Bloomfield makes the same sort of assertion, though in a more negative way, at the beginning of his book Language (1935: 2): 'It is only within the last century or so that language has been

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studied in a scientific way'. Perhaps the term 'key dates' in the history of linguistics may be less question-begging and more appropriate. What is meant by a key date, or a turning point? Various interpretations are possible. One such is a retrospective view taken by later writers and generally accepted, but not embodying the intention of the original author. Sir William Jones's famous paragraph taken out of context from the rest of the Third Discourse is a case in point. The date 1786 is a date everyone in linguistics knows; it is like 1066 in British history or 1776 in the history of America. But it was not so intended at the time, to set a guideline for the later comparative and historical linguistics, as is so often assumed, especially by those who have not taken the trouble to read the rest of the Discourse or any of the other Discourses that Jones delivered. Jones's ideas on comparative linguistics were far from the later Junggrammatische Richtung; the battle between structure and etymology as criterial evidence had yet to be fought and decided. Jones's 1786 Discourse, like the others, was intended to encourage his colleagues in official positions in the East India Company to learn Sanskrit and other features of Indian culture in order to improve their competence in the conduct of legal cases in that country. And in fact this is how the lecture was first perceived in Europe. Franz Schlegel and his brother August both spoke of their debt to him in their seeking to foster Sanskrit studies in Germany, and among the first publications directly arising from Jones's lectures were grammars of Sanskrit (Wilkins 1808; Carey 1806). Hockett's choice of 1875, the date of Verner's paper, was actually chosen, half whimsically (1965: 185), as lying exactly half way between 1786 and 1964, the year of his Presidency of the Linguistic Society of America; but there was a cluster of publications around that period: the formulation of the 'Law of palatals' independently by several scholars between 1874 and 1878 (Davies 1998: 243), Leskien's Slavic and Germanic inflections, Osthoff s 'Das Verbum in der Nominalkomposition' (1878), and the joint manifesto of Osthoff and Brugmann (also in 1878) which with others set the seal on the Junggrammatiker Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze for more than a generation. The controversies aroused by the Osthoff-Brugmann manifesto served to refine the doctrine but not to displace it from the centrality of this dominant aspect of linguistic science. Sweet was later to protest at this German imperialism, as he saw it (1885: vii): "swarms of young programme-mongers turned out every year by the German universities". But unlike Jones's paragraph, the Osthoff-Brugmann manifesto of the 1870s was explicitly set out by its authors as a challenge: if comparative-historical linguistics is worth doing, do it our way with us. The beginning of the full Neogrammarian programme was a key date, both effectively and intentionally. The last two of Hockett's 'breakthroughs' belong to this century. The first of them is the first publication of de Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique generale, the assertion of the equal status or even the primacy of synchronic, descriptive linguistics as against diachronic historical linguistics, the darling of the nineteenth century, and the structural theory of synchronic linguistics (strangely, it was left to de Saussure's disciples in the Prague School to apply his structuralism to historical linguistics (cp. Jakobson 1931: 247-267; Trubetzkoy, 'Notes autobiographiques' in Trubetzkoy 1949: xix). One aspect of Prague linguistics deserves especial attention in an historical study of linguistics in the twentieth century, the concept of distinctive features, and this is principally associated with two Prague scholars, Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. In his work and in his life dates (1896 - 1982) Jakobson can be seen to bridge the dividing line between the

66 Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony Bloomfieldian half and the Chomskyan half of the century, located at 1957. Distinctive features arose from the application of de Saussure's theory of linguistic 'formes' to phonemic theory (cp. Vachek 1966: 18-22). As early as 1936 Jakobson was applying it to morphological analysis; and with his crossing of the Atlantic during the war he began a fruitful alliance with contemporary phonetic research at the Haskins telephonic research station. Distinctive features made themselves central in structuralist phonology, and, passing through the doctrinal divide of 1957, distinctive feature theory provided the main organization of phonological rules in the generative grammar of the 1960s and 1970s. Its syntactic analogue was taken into the area of grammatical analysis. Things change, but they also persist. Trubetzkoy's features were articulatory, Jakobson's were acoustic, but Chomsky and Halle in their descriptive and historical account of the Sound pattern of English (1968) reverted to articulatory features, though these were not the same as Trubetzkoy's had been half a century before. Hockett's fourth and last 'breakthrough' was, of course, Chomsky's first publication of his short Syntactic structures (1957). This last 'breakthrough' he called 'exact accountability', referring to just one of its dominant demands (Hockett 1965: 197). The two publications cited by Hockett are somewhat different as landmarks. It was after de Saussure's death that a few of his students were so impressed with the importance of his lectures that they decided to make them public from their own and other people's notes; the Cours was subsequently translated into all major European languages. Chomsky's Syntactic structures embodies his own challenge, repeated in a number of subsequent writings (1957: 6): 'We shall find that a certain very simple communication-theoretic model of language and a more powerful model that incorporates a large part of what is now generally known as "immediate constituent analysis" cannot properly serve the purposes of grammatical description'. Thereafter linguistics has never been the same again. Certain publications though brief but challenging, and later overtaken by subsequent writings, still serve as the initial markers of a new school or a new trend or a new school later to develop as a dominant component of an intellectual culture. In an earlier paper (1985) I ventured to compare the position of Ayer's Language, truth, and logic (1936) as the initial assertion of full-scale logical positivism with that of Chomsky's Syntactic structures at the start of generative grammar. Hockett identifies his fourth 'breakthrough' as 'exact accountability'. This passes over the introduction or reintroduction of formal transformations into syntax to mark Katz and Postal's assertion (1964) that a linguistic description must, at least ideally, set out all that is comprehended in a native speaker's command of his own language. Now more than thirty years since Hockett's Presidential Address, how do his two twentieth century key dates stand up to criticism? Perceptions have changed over the last thirtythree years, and though Hockett's dates and their historical significance cannot be ignored, they need some reinvestigation. It would be impertinent of me here at this time to try to lay down one or more key dates in the present century as the framework for linguistic historians in the century ahead of us. I am in any case at or near the close of my own professional life, and younger and wiser scholars than I will have to work out the development and the texture of linguistic thought in this century. All that I am trying to do here, after a brief survey of the concept of key dates in historiography, is to draw attention to points that may invite historical attention. One must be sensible and context-sensitive. At one extreme, a reductio ad absurdum, of course, every public lecture, every book, article, and review could signify or be made to

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signify a change in contemporary science or the reinforcement of the status quo. This might be likened to the 'butterfly's wing' theory of physics. But historically prominent and productive change points are fewer; their number and their criteria for recognition must vary according to the scale of the historical record and the aspect of the subject favoured for close attention. Both of Hockett's key names, de Saussure and Chomsky, declared themselves to be making a necessary change in theory and practice in the general interests of their subject. De Saussure clearly did this in his lectures; he would not otherwise have been resurrected in the original edition of the Cours de linguistique generate (1916) nor in the many editorial revisions by later scholars. In periodization lives are important, but not readily segmentalizable as such. Books and articles are, if they indicate a marked, even though a gradual, change. In philosophy Ayer's Language, truth and logic (1936) has been claimed as an initial mark of logical positivism, at least among English-speaking philosophers. In his British Academy Memoir on Ayer, Quinton ranks this book as (1997:261) lying somewhere near Descartes's Meditations and Berkeley's Principles in the history of philosophy. He goes on: 'In the sixty years since it was published no philosophical book has combined its style, economy, and capacity to incite.' Similar words could have been applied to the Cours and to Syntactic structures. In his early review of this latter book, Lees says as much (1957: 375-407), stressing the revolutionary aspect of Chomsky's linguistic thinking, despite Chomsky's own insistence at the time on his adherence to traditional European grammar, reacting rather against the immediately preceding American structuralism. Though de Saussure must be recognized as the father of structural linguistics, particular aspects of structuralism, especially in America, were directly derived from Bloomfield's Language (1933), whatever his own views on the founding of schools may have been. In his recent Grammatical theory in America Matthews makes 1933 his major starting point. More recently some people have preferred to contrast structural linguistics and linguistic structuralism (cp. Bloomfield's review of the Cours (1923)). In the 1950s there coalesced a number of accepted principles, the reluctance of linguists to say anything much about meanings, the biuniqueness requirement that phonemic analysis must be wholly prior to and independent of morphology, syntax, and semantics, and the insistence on strictly publicly observable data in any linguistic generalization. For a time and among some even the notion of semantic contrast in determining phonemic distinctiveness was barred, and we remember from the early 1950s the controversy in Language on this between Bloch (1953) and the more pragmatic Kenneth Pike (1947; 1952). These principles were set out in Trager and Smith's little book, Outline of English structure (1951), and this was considered so important that copies were issued free of charge to all members of the Linguistic Society of America at the time. In the same year 1951 the same principles were expounded by Harris, though the book had been largely written in the late 1940s. Interestingly, at the end of the preface thanks are expressed to a certain 'N. Chomsky' for help with the proofs. Also in 1951 I recall a personal conversation with the now veteran and most distinguished Professor Murray Emeneau. He said on Harris's Methods: 'I guess this is where we have come to the end of the line'. He was not, I think, saying that it was about to pass away; he was himself in his descriptive work, as in his wartime study of Vietnamese, a structuralist. What he was saying, and what others at the time were saying, was that further theorizing was not what was needed, but the steady application of established theory to the analysis of more languages. This was the view expressed in several textbooks of the time.

68 Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony We might say, then, that in the eyes of others the year 1951 marked a key date in the completion of structuralist theorizing, apart from the inevitable details. In two other specific fields it is interesting to note that in the early 1820s it was considered that inland water transportation had at last achieved its goal in the operation of locks and canals, just before the railways were to take over, and in the 1860s sailors maintained that the 'Tea clippers' were the perfection of wind-powered ships, on the eve of the supremacy of steam navigation. But what we do know now was that six years later in 1957 and after, American linguistics and worldwide linguistics was to meet a great new theoretical challenge. In view of the contrast of theories facing linguistics at this time it might be said that 1951 and 1957 were both key dates, the one marking the fulfilment of structuralism, particularly in America, the other standing at the initiation of a now continuing volteface in theoretical linguistics. The intervening years were a kind of theoretical calm and a time for reflection. Noticeably several general introductory textbooks were written during these years and published in or soon after them, all based on and expounding post-Bloomfieldian structuralism (Harris 1951; Hill 1958; Hockett 1958; Gleason 1961). We have seen the convenience of locating the date of first publications of a particular book or article as the starting point of a new scientific direction, where this can be historically justified. Hockett's first date 1786 is obvious, though it needs interpretation. He chose 1875 (Verner's Law) as his date for the ascendancy of the Neogrammarians, and 1916 as the start of structural linguistics. His exact choice of these later dates, was, as he admits, chosen partly in play for a bit of 'numerology'; but what matters is the near coincidence of various movements of thought, the so-called 'conspiracy theory' of historical change. During the later 1950s and after there have been a number of attempts at a revision of the dominant structuralist theory, and in a more detailed survey than this can be, their key dates could be identified. I am referring to such movements as tagmemics, functional grammar, stratificational theory, J. R. Firth's contextual semantics and prosodic phonology (cp. further Robins 1989: 149-99, 307-20) and socio-linguistic studies such as those undertaken by Labov (1966), and Bernstein (1971). But the rise and progress of what was first called transformational-generative grammar, later to drop the term transformation, was the most profound. Several major changes were demanded and set out. Hockett chose as his title for the period after 1957 as 'Exact accountability'; the demand, at least ideally, that in a linguistic description and the theory underlying it everything involved in the language must be made explicit; in the words of Katz and Postal: 'A linguistic description of a natural language is an attempt to reveal the nature of a fluent speaker's mastery of that language'. Nothing must just be left to 'commonsense'. But other changes conspired to construct the new theory. 1965, the publication date of Chomsky's Aspects of the theory of syntax, marks two major changes, the reversal of the place of phonetics in the linguistic hierarchy and the refocusing of attention on linguistic meaning. So far from the structuralists' insistence on the prior role of phonetic and phonemic analysis, P(honological) rules now converted prior syntactic rule outputs to transcribed or uttered sentences. And meaning, in the guise of 'semantic interpretation' with much of the traditional apparatus of subject, location, object, qualifier, and the like returned to their accustomed place in linguistics, mostly under the guise of'logical form'. But things were not allowed to rest there. Famously, 'Interpretive semantics' was challenged by 'Generative semantics'. In histories of linguistics primarily focused on the

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second half of this century, this dispute figures prominently in both Newmeyer's Linguistic theory in America (1980) and the much more recent Western linguistics (1998) by Seuren. In fact Seuren ends his survey with an 'Epilogue' based on the conclusion of it. Their judgements are very different; Newmeyer uses the term 'Linguistic wars', and writes of the deserved collapse of generative semantics, but Seuren regrets that linguistics has been left in a depressing state, due largely to Chomsky's 'petty, cynical, and unprofessional' conduct. Time and future historians will settle the dates and the significance of this within the ongoing context of generative grammar. But above all we must recognize one mode of thinking as marking the most significant difference between the Bloomfieldian generation, key-dated to 1933, and the Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan generation, taken as a broad coalition with all its later variations, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar Optimalism, Minimalism, and whatever the future may hold. This is the quite radical change in philosophic or perhaps better, scientific outlook. This twentieth century has been a century of scientific thinking, just as was the seventeenth century before it. And in no subject more than in linguistics has the case for scientific status been pressed. This was begun in the later nineteenth century with Schleicher and the Neogrammarians, but it came to its first head with Bloomfield, and its second with Chomsky. In earlier days literary studies were not far removed from the study of language; the ambiguities between the continental and the British use of philology make this apparent. But literary scholarship finds little place in either the Bloomfieldian linguists or among the now many varieties of generative grammarians. Both schools emphasize the importance of treating linguistics as an exact science, but there the contrast begins. Throughout Bloomfield's writings it is clear that science means strictly empirical science. This is made even more clear in a less well known but vitally important piece of writing, Bloomfield's encyclopaedia article (1939), Linguistic aspects of science. He wrote: 'science shall deal only with events that are accessible in their time and place to any and all observers or only with events that are placed in coordinates of time and space' (1939: 13). This is the key text, and all Bloomfield's linguistics flows from it, his antipsychologism, his extreme physicalism in dealing with internal bodily feelings such as hunger and thirst without potentially further reference to potentially observable phenomena ('some of her muscles were contracting' ... 'her tongue and her throat were dry', 1935: 23), and his reluctance to go further into meanings than strict behaviourism would sanction. His understanding of linguistic structure was different from de Saussure's (cp. his review, 1923); structure now concerned itself with the arrangement of phonemes and morphemes within longer sequences, giving rise to the term distributionalism, (Harris 1951: v, 5). Bloomfield's stance was heroic and challenging, for all the justified criticism of later writers. The contrast between Bloomfield and those influenced by him, and Chomsky and those influenced by him is nowhere clearer than in their opposed attitudes towards universal or general grammar, on the classical philosophical distinction of induction and deduction. In Bloomfield's stated opinion general or universal grammar can only be approached after a great deal more information has been made available than we have today. 'The only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations' (1935: 20). For Chomksy, writing as a self-asserted rationalist in linguistics (1966: 72-73), universals are not the long awaited product of patient induction, but hypotheses, on a single language if necessary, to be tested deductively for possible falsification and consequent revision. With a number of roughly coincident strands of theory and method coming together to form the central constitution of

70 Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony generative grammar, various dates propose themselves for the consideration of future historians. Falsification as the test of scientific significance was the assertion of Popper in his Die Logik der Forschung (1935), and Matthews (1993) asks whether the appearance of the English translation in 1959 may have been a significant date in the early development of generative theory in the English-speaking world. The practical results of these two stances have also been antithetical. The Bloomfieldian generation achieved descriptions of a vast array of languages hitherto scarcely known, especially among the Indian languages of the American continents, greatly increasing our available data base of the languages of the world. The generative grammarians have greatly deepened the analysis of the better known European languages, on which they have mainly concentrated, most of all modern English, with grammatical rules covering generalizations either not made before or assigned to stylistic factors. It is through the work of these two American linguistic scholars, Bloomfield and Chomsky, that in the course of the twentieth century America has become the centre of linguistic science, for so long the property of continental Europe. This paper has been intended primarily to consider the notion of key dates or turning points in relation to twentieth-century linguistics, and it is certainly not for me to prescribe any such years for future historiographers of linguistics. But perhaps we might, in a general coverage of what has been thought and written, confirm 1916, the year of the first publication of de Saussure's Cours, and follow it by the setting up of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926 (Vachek 1966: 26), the culmination of its work in 1939, when Trubetzkoy's Grundzuge der Phonologie first appeared; in America 1933 marks the date of the first American edition of Bloomfield's Language, initiating the rise of what became structuralism at its high point in 1951. Since 1957 many changes have occurred in linguistic theory and practice, but it may stand as the year when linguistics as a whole turned in a new direction taking almost every aspect of the subject with it to the end of the century and of the second millennium.

REFERENCES Ayer, Alfred J. (1936). Language, truth and logic. Gollancz, London. Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, code, and control. Routledge, London. Bloch, Bernard (1953). Contrast. Language 29, 59-61. Bloomfield, Leonard (1923). Review of de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generate. Modern Language Journal 8, 317-9. Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language, first British edition 1935, Allen and Unwin, London. Bloomfield, Leonard (1939). Linguistic aspects of science. International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science 1.4. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Carey, William (1806). Grammar of the Sungskrit language. Mission Press, Serampore. Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton, The Hague. Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Chomsky, Noam (1966). Cartesian linguistics. Harper and Row, New York. Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle (1968). The sound pattern of English. Harper and Row, New York. Davies, Anna Morpurgo (1998). History of linguistics 4. Longman, London. Davies, Norman (1996). Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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De Saussure, Ferdinand (1916). Cours de linguistique generate. Payot, Paris. Gleason, Henry A. (1961). An introduction to descriptive linguistics. Holt, Reinhart and Winston, New York. Harris, Zellig S. (1951). Methods in structural linguistics. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Hill, Archibald (1958). Introduction to linguistic structures. Harcourt Brace, New York. Hockett, Charles F. (1958). A course in modern linguistics. Macmillan, New York. Hockett, Charles F. (1965). Sound change. Language 41, 185-204. Jakobson, Roman (1931). Prinzipien der historischen Phonologic. TCLP 4, 247-267. Jones, Sir William (1786). Works (ed. Anna Maria Jones) 1, Discourses and other papers. Robinson and Evans, London. Katz, Jerrold and Paul Postal (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. Labov, William (1966). The social stratification of English in New York City. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington. Lees, R. B. (1957). Review of Chomsky, Syntactic structures. Language 33, 375-407. Leskien, August (1876). Die Declination im Slavisch-Litauischen und Germanischen. Hirzel, Leipzig. Macaulay, Thomas (1971). History of England 1. Longman, London. Malmberg, Bertil (1991). Histoire de la linguistique de Sumer a Saussure. Presses Universitaire de France, Paris. Matthews, Peter H. (1993). Grammatical theory in the United States of America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Meillet, Antoine (1903). Introduction a I'etude comparative des langues indo-europeennes. Hachette, Paris. Newmeyer, Frederick (1980). Linguistic theory in America. Academic Press, New York. Osthoff, Hermann (1878). Das Verbum in der Nominalkomposition. Costenoble, Jena. Osthoff, Hermann and Karl Brugmann (1878). Morphologische Untersuchungen 1. Hirzel, Leipzig. Pederen, Holger (1931). Linguistic science in the nineteenth century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. Pike, Kenneth L. (1947). Grammatical prerequisites in phonemic analysis. Word3, 155-172. Pike, Kenneth L. (1952). More on grammatical prerequisites. Word 8, 106-121. Popper, Karl (1935). Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959, The Logic of scientific discovery. Hutchinson. London. Quinton, Anthony (1997). Alfred Jules Ayer. Proceedings of the British Academy 94, 255-284. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Robins, Robert H. (1985). Linguistics in 1984: retrospect and prospect. Grevatt and Grevatt, Ne wcastle-upon-Tyne. Robins, Robert H. (1989). General linguistics: an introductory survey (fourth edition). Longman, London. Seuren, Pieter A. (1998). Western linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford. Sweet, Henry (1885). Oldest English texts. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Trager, George and Henry L. Smith (1951). Outline of English structure. Battenburg Press, Norman, Oklahoma. Trevelyan, George M. (1942). English social history. Longman, London. Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj (1939). Grundziige der Phonologic. TCLP 1.

72 Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj (1949). Principes der phonologic (French translation with additional material by J. Cantineau), Klincksieck, Paris. Vachek, Josef (1966). The linguistic school of Prague. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Verner, Karl (1875). Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung. Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung23, 97-130. Wilkins, Sir Charles (1808). A grammar of the Sanskrita language. Black, Parry and Kingsbury, London.

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SYSTEM DESCRIPTION PRESCRIPTION?

OR

SYSTEMATIC

Bozena Bednafikovd, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Abstract The paper does not solve the dilemma of whether there is or is not a dichotomy langue/parole. It simply takes into account the system and the system description, as the major reference grammar of modern Czech does. What is innovative in the second volume of this thesaurus is the shift from the surface to the underlying level in grasping the structure of word forms. The conception of the stem suffix reveals the parallelism and isomorphy between synthetical and analytical verbal forms, it explains some examples of homonymy, etc. On the other hand, the mechanical and systematic application of the newly revealed deep structure rules to the description of the adjectival forms prescribes to the system of modern Czech an unnatural regularity and an incomprehensible uniformity, disturbing in consequence the system itself.

Even though this paper has been classed by the organizers of the conference under the topic Langue versus Parole, even though it actually derives its inspiration from the main topic of the conference, it neither attempts nor would dare to solve the dilemma of whether there is or is not a dichotomy langue/parole. The dichotomy in question, originally the first truth of de Saussure's system of general linguistics and which is, to be precise, a trichotomy, that is langage - langue - parole, has been undergoing a long and complicated development. One of the crucial points seems to be what is actually understood by langue. Is it a code (a possibility prior to individual speech acts)? Or a construct (the product of scientific, here linguistic classification)? In other words, is it ascribed an ontological or gnoseological (noetical) status? Unlike some other papers presented at the conference this paper does not try to answer the question of whether there is or is not a system in a language. The aim of this paper is rather modest. It simply rests upon the gnoseological approach to langue and identifies with the system the structure which is to be more or less approximatively revealed, grasped and described. The resultant structure, a quasi-structure, could/should represent an approximate model of a language.

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It is a procedure which is claimed to have been followed by the major reference grammar of modern Czech, the so called ,,academy grammar" - see Mluvnice cestiny I, II, III (1986a, 1986b, 1988). The so called ,,academy grammar" of Czech is composed as an academy description of the contemporary state of the literary/standard language. It is a major grammar work, in many features pioneering, written on a highly theoretical level regarding both the Czech and worldwide trend of treating so-called communicative grammars. This ,,thesaurus" of Czech grammar has also influenced in principle the universities' concept of teaching grammar and linguistics in general. I have been working on a project called The Reader of the Academy Grammar of Czech, which in the form of a terminological dictionary and educational texts will enable students to read about, to understand and to grasp both the basic principles and the basic roots of the above mentioned language description. What is at the centre of my attention, at least in the first stage of the project, is the formal morphology, especially the construction of the word forms and morphemic analysis of the word forms. (Note - the second volume of the thesaurus of the Czech language is devoted to morphology, both functional and formal.) And so it is in this paper. What is innovative here with the morphological system description is the shift from the surface to the underlying level in understanding and grasping the structure of the word forms. This can be seen perfectly in the verbal inflection description. Let us start with the verbal inflection, as the stem suffix concept seen below has been most consistently and integrally applied here. The structure of the verbal forms is based upon a consistent stem principle. The central concept/term in this kind of morphological description is the stem suffix/STEM FORMANT. What in this concept is emphasized with the stem suffix is its connective function, i. e. it works as a link between the morphological basis of the form and the grammatical morpheme(s). Associated with the aforesaid statements about the stem suffix appear to be the following three explanatory remarks: 1) This sort of understanding of the stem suffix goes back to Trubetzkoy's work - see Trubetzkoy (1934) - and was also adopted for example by the Czech morphologist Komarek - see Komarek (1978). 2) In its connective function the stem suffix has even been given a specific name, i. e. CONNECTEME. 3) The stem suffix/connecteme is not a "fully valuable" morpheme, as it bears neither lexicological nor morphological or even derivational meaning. It is defined functionally (by its connective function) and ranks with the so-called submorphemes. Therefore, in the academy grammar, two stems are identified: present stem and past stem. A thorough description of the verbal inflectional system cannot be presented in this paper. For illustrative purposes the present tense paradigm of the conjugational type NEST follows, serving as data for further evaluative commentary:

System Description or Systematic Prescription?

77

Traditional Grammars Nest Sg.

1st p. nes-u 2nd p. nes-es 3rd p. nes-e

The present stem is identical with the morphological basis, i. e. there is no stem suffix (-u, -es, e are the endings). The description of the verbal inflection in traditional grammars identifies the stem suffix just in the 2nd and 3rd verbal classes (there are five of them as far as the present stem is concerned). Hence the system of the personal morphemes (endings) is inevitably rich, numerous and highly variant and differentiated.

Academy Grammar of Czech Nest Sg.

1st p. nes-0-u 2nd p. nes-e-s 3rd p. nes-e-0

The form of the 3rd person singular (indicative, present tense) is identical with the present stem, i.e. there is the zero morpheme ending (the segment -e- being classified as the stem suffix). It follows that the system of the personal morphemes (endings) is considerably simpler and more consistent and homogeneous: Nest Sg.

1st p. -u/-i,-m 2nd p. -s 3rd p. -0

P1.

-me -te -ou/-i

What was added to this unified repertoire of personal endings are special rules defining the alternations of the stem suffixes in various verbal forms. In turn, this conception of the stem suffix revealed the parallelism and isomorphy between the synthetical and analytical verbal forms in Czech - see Komarek (1987): Present tense (indicative) Sg1st p. nes-0-u 2nd p. nes-e-s 3rd p. nes-e-0

Past tense (indicative) nesljsem nesljsi nesl 0

Conditional nesl by-ch neslby-s nesl by-0

The presupposed zero personal ending in the 3rd person present tense indicative corresponds to the zero personal morpheme in analytical verbal forms as the past tense indicative and conditional.

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Langue and Parole in Synchrony and Diachrony

The crucial point of the conception, the stem suffix, and corresponding interpretation of the 3rd person sg verbal form also helps to explain some examples of surface level homonymy, i.e. a completely isolated sort of homonymy in the verbal system (from the synchronic point of view unexplainable): Compare the conjugational type TRPET: On trpi Sg. 3rd p. trp-i-0

Oni trpi P1. 3rd p. trp-0-i

The interpretation (and explanation) is as follows: There is the zero ending in the 3rd person singular as it is regular with other conjugational types. The stem suffix is fully realized as it is common before either zero or consonantal endings. On the contrary, the 3rd person plural has the vowel ending -i, i.e. the same ending which appears, for example, in the conjugational type DELAT (oni del-aj-i) or in the bookish variant of the 3rd person plural in the type MAZAT (oni maz-0-ou/i). According to the newly adopted stem suffix alternation rules the stem suffix has zero realization if a vowel ending follows. To sum up, the formal morphology description has been shifted to a more abstract level, preferring the deep structure of the verbal forms over the surface structure. On the other hand, the mechanical application of these newly revealed deep structure rules to the description of other parts of speech may be ,,sold at a loss". For it appears the adjectival inflection description in the academy Grammar of Czech.

The Adjectival Inflection The adjectival inflection differs widely from the substantive one but it displays some agreement with the verbal inflection. The differential feature here is that there is/is not the stem suffix. While most of the substantive declinational types do not have any stem suffix (from the synchronic point of view) the construction of the verbal forms is based upon the stem principle. So it is true about adjectival inflection, which, being based upon the stem principle, seems to be closer to the verbal inflection. The so called hard adjectives (of the type MLADY) have two complementary variants of the stem suffix (/-e-/, /-i-/), which are bound with the grammatical opposition sg. vs. pi. - see Komarek(1972): Mlady (masc.) Sg. Norn, mlad-0-i Gen. mlad-e-ho Dat. mlad-e-mu Ace. mlad-e-ho Loc. mlad-e-m Instr. mlad-0-im

PL mlad'-0-i mlad-i-ch mlad-i-m mlad-0-e mlad-i-ch mlad-i-mi

The soft adjectives (of the type JARNI), on the other hand, have only the one variant of the stem suffix - /-i-/:

System Description or Systematic Prescription?

Jarni (masc,) Sg. Nom. jar-n-0-i Gen. jar-n-i-ho Dat. jar-n-i-mu Acc. jar-n-i-ho Loc. jar-n-i-m Instr. jar-n-0-im

79

P1. jar-n-0-i jar-n-i-ch jar-n-i-m jar-n-0-i jar-n-i-ch jar-n-i-mi

For explanation of the stem suffix alternations it is necessary to take into account the phonological characteristics of the adjectival endings. It is obvious that the stem suffix has a positive (that is phonemic) realization before consonantal endings, and a negative (i.e. zero) realization before vocalic endings. This conception of the stem suffix again enables one to grasp some examples of the surface structure homonymy (see loc. and instr. of the type JARNI, note: The extension of the plural -i- to singular in the type MLADY would be abnormal and unmotivated, it would not correspond to the pronominal inflection). Even if the same mechanism of dissimilation has been applied here as in the verbal inflection the academy grammar adopted a different mechanical and non-systemic rule: Whatever may follow the morphological basis of the adjective has the status of the stem suffix. Hence the rule violated the deep structure interpretation of the surface homonymy - see loc. sg. jar-n-i-m, instr. sg. jar-n-i-m. But more seriously, it shifts the Czech morphological system towards the sphere of the ,,introflectional" languages: a) The opposition of grammatical number is expressed inside the word, not with the help of the root alternation, but with the help of the stem suffix: Nom. sg. mlad-a-0

Nom. pi. mlad-e-0

b) The gender differences are expressed again in the stem suffix: Nom. sg. masc. mlad-i-0

Nom. sg. fern. mlad-a-0

Nom. sg. neutr. mlad-e-0

c) Even the case forms are expressed here with zero endings (!), which in a language like Czech, a language with very rich inflection (the richest of all the Slavonic languages), sounds quite absurd: Mlada Sg. Nom. Gen. Dat. Ace. Loc. Instr.

mlad-a-0 mlad-e-0 mlad-e-0 mlad-ou-0 mlad-e-0 mlad-ou-0

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On the face of the survey presented above it is quite absurd and unacceptable. This application not only deprives the system of the grammatical endings, but also establishes a heterogeneous set of stem affixes whose alternations are inexplicable, materially not derivable one from another.

Summary and Conclusion The mechanical, highly systematic yet not systemic application of the stem suffix conception to the description of the adjectival forms prescribes to the system of modern Czech an unnatural regularity and simplicity and an incomprehensible uniformity, disturbing in its consequences the system itself.

REFERENCES Komarek, M. (1972). Stavba tvaru adjektivni a pronominalni flexe v spisovne cestine. Slovo a slovesnost, 33, 139n. Komarek, M. (1978). Prispevky k ceske morfologii. AUPO, Prague. Komarek, M. (1987). Ke dvema koncepcim stavbyjednoduchych slovesnych tvaru v cestine. Studia Bohemica IV, 105n. AUPO, Prague. Mluvnice cestiny I, II, III. (1986a, 1986b, 1988). Academia, Prague. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1934). Das morphologische System der russischen Sprache. Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 5, 14n., Prague.

6

COMPLETENESS PARADIGMS

AND SYMMETRICITY

or

Mati Hint, Tallinn Pedagogical University, Estonia

Abstract The completeness and symmetricity of morphological paradigms may be the result of theorizing in grammars of literary languages. In extreme cases new forms (e.g., noun cases, verb forms) may be added to paradigms as the result of artificial form creation by grammarians. On the other hand, some morphological forms which are extinct or inactive in speech may continue to live in literary language. The formation of paradigms in written grammars depends upon the intuition of grammarians; especially the interpretation of analytic verb forms and collocations with auxiliaries may be fabricated. Obviously these phenomena may be interpreted with the help of a Saussurean understanding of differences between speech and language: the postulated (artificial) forms of literary language may turn into grammatical facts of spontaneous speech during subsequent generations, while some other forms in well-formed paradigms may have but marginal (or zero) importance in speech. Therefore, the concept of language has ambiguous meaning for literary languages.

It is easy to demonstrate how sound changes in the history of language break the order and symmetry in paradigms, which usually (in grammar books) are considered to be regular and symmetrical. Phono tactically impossible or homonymous grammatical forms, obscure stem inflections, and fusional processes in morphology are the usual outcome of sound changes. Sound changes are, of course, connected with speech events. It remains disputable how they are represented on the more abstract level of langue. In the generative framework of the theory of language it is possible to consider relatively recent sound changes as superficial rules of speech production which do not