From Whitney To Chomsky

FROM WHITNEY TO CHOMSKY
ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS

AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Cologne)
Series III - STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES
Advisory Editorial Board
Cristina Altman (São Paulo); Lia Formigari (Rome)

Gerda Haßler (Potsdam); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh)
Barbara Kaltz (Aix-en-Provence); Douglas A. Kibbee (Urbana, I11.)
Hans-Josef Niederehe (Trier); Emilio Ridruejo (Valladolid)
Kees Versteegh (Nijmegen)
Volume 103
John E. Joseph
From Whitney to Chomsky.

Essays in the History of American Linguistics.
FROM WHITNEY
TO CHOMSKY
ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY
OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
JOHN E. JOSEPH
University of Edinburgh
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
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Joseph, John Earl.
From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the history of American linguistics / John E. Joseph
p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series III,
Studies in the history of the language sciences, ISSN 0304-0720; v. I03)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Linguistics-United States--History. I. Title. II. Series.
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© 2002 - John Benjamins B.V.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Chapter 1
The Multiple Ambiguities of American Linguistic Identity 1
Chapter 2
'The American Whitney' and his European Heritages and Legacies 19
Chapter 3
20th-century Linguistics in America and Europe 47
Chapter 4
The Sources of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' 71
Chapter 5
The Origins of American Sociolinguistics 107
Chapter 6
Bloomfield's and Chomsky's Readings of the Cours de
linguistique générale 133
Chapter 7
How Structuralist Was 'American Structuralism'? 157
Chapter 8
How Behaviourist Was Verbal Behavior? 169
Chapter 9
The Popular (Mis)interpretations of Whorf and Chomsky:
What they had in common, and why they had to happen 181
References 197
Index 223
In memory of my mother
Glenlyn Pauline Creason Joseph
14 May 1924-18 April 1991
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to friends and colleagues in discussion with whom the ideas

and views expressed in this book were developed. In particular I must thank
those with whom I have co-authored articles or books in which some of the
ground covered here was directly visited, namely, Julia S. Falk, Christopher M.
Hutton, Nigel Love and Talbot J. Taylor. While I have not used material which
anyone other than I wrote, my writing of it occurred in each case as part of a
creative collaboration. Projects launched by E. F. K. Koerner provided the im
petus for three of the chapters. The publication of this book was his idea as
well, and he kindly read through the manuscript and suggested numerous cor
rections and improvements
Chapters 1 and 9, the bulk of 2 and much of 7 are published here for the
first time. Chapter 8 is based on my original draft for a chapter of Joseph, Love
& Taylor (2001), which I rewrote at the behest of my co-authors, though I still
prefer this version. Parts of Chapter 2 were originally part of Joseph (1988).
Chapter 3 is based on Joseph (1994a), 4 on Joseph (1996a), 5 on (1992), 6 on
(1990) and 7 on (1999c). All have been thoroughly revised and updated.
Over a quarter of a century ago Ernst Pulgram became my first and closest
guide to the development of both American and European linguistics over the
course of the 20th century, to most of which he was a direct witness. Others
who have provided vital personal perspectives include R. E. Asher, William
Bright, Ian Catford, Noam Chomsky, A. P. R. Howatt, Dell Hymes, Bjorn Jer-
nudd, D. Robert Ladd, Jim Miller, F. C. T. Moore, Martha  Pennington, W.
Keith Percival, Vivian Salmon, Stanley Sapon, Jean Verrier and Rulon Wells;
and among the deceased, Robert Austerlitz, J Milton Cowan, Francis P. Din-
neen, S. J., Msgr. Paul Hanly Furfey, Robert A. Hall, Jr., Charles F. Hockett,
Henry Kahane, James D. McCawley, Edna M. O'Hern and R. H. Robins.
Thanks are also due to my fellow historians of 19th and 20th century linguis
tics whose work and advice has helped shape my understanding of the subject,
including Stephen Alter, Julie Andresen, Gabriel Bergougnioux, Jean-Louis
Chiss, Regna Darnell, Daniel Davis, Hayley Davis, Piet Desmet, W. Terrence
Gordon, Roy Harris, Douglas A. Kibbee, Penny Lee, Peter Matthews, Michael
Mackert, Stephen O. Murray, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Claudine Normand, W.
Keith Percival, Christian Puech, Carol Sanders, Pieter Seuren, Pierre Swiggers,
Linda R. Waugh, and the late Vivien A. Law and George Wolf.
Viii FROM WHITNEY TO CHOMSKY
Mrs Frances Güterbock, Nick Hodson, John Kunz, Philip Sapir and Jean-
Bénédict de Saussure all responded generously to my requests for information
about members of their family who figure in the pages that follow.
I am indebted to John and Clare Benjamins for their enduring faith in my
research, and to Anke de Looper and her colleagues on the Benjamins staff for
the hard work of getting it into print.
My dear family are always at the heart of my work, which may sometimes
take me from them but never competes with them for my affection. I wish in
particular to express my thanks and love to my father, John, and my wife,
Jeannette, and our three joint essays in displaced American identity, Julian,
Crispin and Maud.
J. E. J.
Edinburgh, 28 August 2002
CHAPTER ONE
THE MULTIPLE AMBIGUITIES OF AMERICAN
LINGUISTIC IDENTITY
The origins of American linguistic identity

Five centuries have passed since America and Columbus discovered each
other, and for three and a half of those centuries, 70% of the total period,
America lacked a linguistic identity. American and Canadian English and
French were not acknowledged as distinct languages or dialects in either the
Old or the New World, and American Indians were perceived and portrayed as,
in effect, mute. America was the Silent Continent, despite having a population
in 1492 estimated to be in the tens of millions.1 If that seems staggering, it is
because we have all grown up in the firm grasp of that Romantic view of a
New World that was conveniently empty as well as silent.
Picture now, on the glacier-cut canyons or in the jungle wilderness of the
19th-century Americas, the figure of the explorer — grand explorers like Alex
ander von Humboldt in South America or Josiah Dwight Whitney in North
America, or humbler scientific explorers like Henri de Saussure in Mexico and
the Antilles. By coincidence, the three 19th-century linguists who would most
directly shape the study of language in the 20th century were related to these
explorers: Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and William Dwight Whitney
(1827-1894), brothers of Alexander and Josiah, and Ferdinand de Saussure
1. Such pre-historic population estimates must be taken with much scepticism, especially
when, as here, there can be a political motive for exaggerating them: the higher the pre-
Columbian population, the greater the European culpability for colonizing the Americas and, in
some cases, reducing the indigenous populations to near or total extinction. However, even the
U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, which if anything has a vested interest in keeping the figure
low, estimates the pre-Columbian population of the area corresponding to the present-day
United States alone at between 5 and 15 million (as compared with a Native American popula
tion of about two million today), and this excludes the regions of greatest population concen
tration, which extended from Mexico to South America. At the other extreme one finds
statements like the following: "Current anthropological work indicates that the number of na
tive people in the Western Hemisphere may have approached something like 100 million, may
be about 80 million south of the Rio Grande and 12 million or so north of the river. Within
about a century, that population had been destroyed" (Chomsky 1992: 13). This is in support of
his view that on the American holiday Columbus Day "very few people are aware that they're
celebrating one of the first genocidal monsters of the modern era. That's exactly what Colum
bus was. It's as if they celebrated 'Hitler Day' in Germany" (ibid.).
2 FROM WHITNEYTOCHOMSKY
(1857-1913), son of Henri.2 Whitney actually accompanied his brother on his

most ambitious westward expedition.
Of course these relationships are not entirely coincidental — the six men
shared the advantage of growing up in families which valued exploration of
unfamiliar territory, geographical or linguistic, and instilled in them a sense of
scientific duty. But none of them could have predicted the multiple and com
plex ways in which Humboldt's, Whitney's and Saussure's theories of lan
guage would interact to redefine a future century's understanding, or the role
that American languages would play in redirecting linguistic method, or indeed
how their own transcontinental relations would be reproduced and transfigured
in future versions of where modern linguistics was seen as coming from.
The first ambiguity of 'linguistic identity' is that it can refer to the language
someone speaks, or the type of linguistics they profess. Enough 'national
schools' of linguistics have developed over the years that the two meanings
cannot be neatly separated. This opening chapter looks at the development of
American linguistic identity (which I use henceforth in the sense of the lan
guage one speaks) from 1492 onward, interweaving this with the development
of American linguistic thought, not because I believe there was a direct causal
relation between what American English (or Spanish or French) might become
and what American linguistics might become, but because each can throw light
on the question of whether a distinctive American identity arose because it had
to, or because people wanted it to. Or some combination of the two.
The emergence of American linguistic identities coincides with the Roman
tic Age in European thought, and both are multiply connected to the tumultu
ous political events of the time, most notably the American and French
Revolutions. Yet between the European linguistic thought and American lin
guistic identities which were simultaneously emerging, lay a fundamental con
tradiction that has never been adequately problematized, let alone explained. In
writings about American English and Canadian French by both Old and New
World authors we find characterizations taken over from earlier descriptions of
American Indian languages, descriptions which de-rationalize those languages
and place their speakers in the role of the Other, whether as beast, infant, or
2. What is more, Ferdinand's mother's first cousin once removed, Count Albert Alexandre de
Pourtalès (1812-1861), played a noteworthy role in an expedition through the American West
that took on a certain literary importance. After a chance meeting with the writer Washington
Irving (1783-1859), he accompanied him on his "Tour on the Prairies", the account of which
in Irving's Crayon Miscellany (1835) did much to establish the mythology of the 'empty' con
tinent in the American mind (see further Joseph 1984, 1986). Pourtalès own journal of the ex
pedition was discovered and published in the 1960s (Pourtalès 1968). He later became a
notable figure in Prussian politics and was for a time the rival of Bismarck. I am grateful to
Jean-Bénédict de Saussure, grandson of Ferdinand's brother Léopold (on whom see Joseph
2000a), for clarifying to me that this Count de Pourtalès was the first cousin of Count Alexan
dre Joseph de Pourtalès (1810-1883), Ferdinand's and Léopold's maternal grandfather.
THE MULTIPLE AMBIGUITIES OF AMERICAN LINGUISTIC IDENTITY 3
Noble Savage. Such notions are then transferred from Native American to
Euro-American languages. Curiously enough, this happens just at the time
when Romantic language theory is insisting that contact between languages, no
matter how many words are borrowed from one to the other, does not alter
their 'inner form' as determined by their grammatical structure and historical
origins. This discrepancy between linguistic thought and linguistic identity will
be another focus of the chapter.
Linguistic thought in the 'Age of Discovery': Nebrija

1492 is a pivotal date in the history of European linguistic thought, less on
account of Columbus's voyage than because of the publication of the
Gramática castellana of Antonio de Nebrija (c.1444-1522), the first important
grammar of a modern European language. Of Nebrija and Columbus, it was the
former whose efforts had immediate and direct impact upon European thought.
The prologue to his grammar, addressed to Queen Isabella, famously begins:
[L]anguage has always been the companion of empire, and has followed it in such a
way that they have jointly begun, grown, and flourished, and likewise the fall of both
has been joined. (Nebrija 1946 [1492]:5-6)3
There follows a series of examples of languages that have risen and fallen in
tandem with great empires. Nebrija goes on to state why he is determined to
reduir en artificio 'reduce to artifice' the Castilian language (p.9):
And, since my thought and desire has always been to aggrandize the things of our na
tion and to give men of my language works in which they can better employ their lei
sure, which now they waste reading novels or stories enveloped in a thousand lies and
errors, I have resolved before all else to reduce our Castilian language to artifice, so
that that which is written in it now and in the future can follow a standard, and be ex
tended for all time to come, as we see has been done in the Greek and Latin language,
which, on account of having been subjected to art, remain in uniformity even though
they have passed through many centuries.4
The three purposes Nebrija cites — to aggrandize the nation, better employ
men's minds, and prevent the language from changing — are three of the cen
tral purposes of Renaissance linguistic thought generally. The phrases reduir
3. "[S]iempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio, i de tal manera lo siguio que junta mente
començaron, crecieron i florecieron, i despues junta fue la caida de entrambos." This and all
the following translations are my own unless another translator's name is given.
4. "I, por que mi pensamiento i gana siempre fue engrandecer las cosas de nuestra nacion i dar
alos ombres de mi lengua obras en que mejor puedan emplear su ocio, que agora lo gastan
leiendo novelas o istorias embueltas en mil mentiras i errores, acorde ante todas las otras cosas
reduir en artificio este nuestro lenguaje castellano, para que lo que agora i de aqui adelante en
el se escriviere pueda quedar en un tenor, i estenderse en toda la duracion delos tiempos que
estan por venir, como vemos que se a hecho enla lengua griega i latina, las cuales, por aver
estado debaxo de arte, aunque sobre ellas an passado muchos siglos, toda via quedan en una
uniformidad."
en artificio and debaxo de arte mean the same thing — 'artificial' in this pe
riod still has the sense of 'made in accordance with art'. Nebrija conceived of
writing a grammar of a language as conquering it, bringing it down and under
control; 'reducing' it as one reduces an enemy, and reducing it in size by
eliminating those elements that do not accord with logic and regularity.
Therein lies the 'art' of grammar. Toward the end of the prologue, Nebrija tells
Isabella (p.11):
[S]ince Your Majesty has put under her yoke many barbarian peoples and nations of
exotic languages; and with the conquest they were obliged to receive the laws which
conqueror imposes upon conquered, and with them our language; through my Art they
may come into the knowledge of the latter, just as now we ourselves learn the art of
Latin grammar in order to learn Latin.5
Nebrija's grammar will allow the Queen's newly conquered subjects to learn
Castilian, so that the laws of Spain can be imposed upon them and the Spanish
Empire can exist and function. The Empire will extend only so far as its 'com
panion', the Spanish language extends. There is no sense here that Castilian
'belongs' to Castile or Spain in any natural sense, or that it embodies the Cas
tilian soul. Nebrija's arguments are purely political and functional: Castile has
conquered, and so her laws and language shall be imposed. Because the learn
ing of Castilian by conquered peoples increases Spain's territorial dominion,
the aggrandizement of language and empire go hand in hand.
That the study of grammar will improve the minds of those conquered, just
as with novel-reading Spaniards, goes without saying. It will allow them to
preserve their thoughts across time; and more fundamentally, will allow them
to think — for no thinking being would reject civilization and spiritual salva
tion. That the American Indians were human beings in possession of souls was
not immediately obvious to the Europeans; a papal bull of 1537 determined
that they were. Missionaries thereafter studied indigenous American languages
with the purpose of converting their speakers to Christianity, thereby increas
ing the territorial domain of Christendom and of their particular confession.6
5. "[D]espues que Vuestra Alteza metiesse debaxo de su iugo muchos pueblos barbaros i na
ciones de peregrinas lenguas, i conel vencimiento aquellos ternian necessidad de recebir las
leies quel vencedor pone al vencido i con ellas nuestra lengua, entonces por esta mi Arte po
drían venir enel conocimiento della, como agora nos otros deprendemos el arte dela gramatica
latina para deprender el latin."
6. Modern-day accounts of the role of missionaries in the colonial process tend to assume that
they were either the dupes or the running dogs of the imperial powers under whose protection
they operated. No doubt this was often the case to some extent, sometimes even to a great ex
tent, yet the missionary zeal to convert the heathen was a genuinely central motivating factor
and was linked intricately, not simplistically, to the political desire to colonize. The decline of
religion in our own time must not allow us to forget that in the 16th and 17th centuries every
one was required by law to attend church and to participate in the process of winning divine
favour for one's country over the country's enemies. With everyone in every country so en
gaged, how did any one people hope to get the upper hand? Greater fervency of faith was one
Of course, more than a few missionaries found a deep intellectual interest in

the study of these languages and cultures, and modern literature is full of cases
of them losing their faith in the confrontation with the Other culture, if not go
ing native outright.
Examining how Europeans in this period regarded the internal structure of
their own languages, we find a similar sense of territoriality. It is the period of
creation of the national standard languages we know today. That process in
volved determining, first, which region's dialect would form the basis of the
standard, a matter than in Italy is called the questione delta lingua; and sec
ondly, how much functional territory the emerging standard Italian, French,
etc. could usurp from Latin, starting with popular literature and ending with the
most conservative domains, law and religion; and finally, how much the ex
pressive territory of the language could be expanded by adapting words and
syntactic devices from the classical languages, principally through the medium
of translation.
Linguistic thought in the Romantic Age: Humboldt

This essentially political outlook on language would come to be overshad
owed in the 17th century by what we would today identify as a psychological
approach, a focus upon language as not just a vehicle or receptacle, but a sort
of template of human cognition. A template, moreover, that it is a cultural duty
to maintain in proper order, for if the language was not in order, neither could
the thought expressed in it be. Hence the great concern of the 17th and early
18th centuries with the perfecting of existing languages, the writing of univer
sal grammars, and the creation of artificial, universal systems of written char
acters, dependent upon no spoken language, that would express thought
directly and therefore perfectly.
In this light, the dearth of references to American languages by important
linguistic thinkers of the period is unsurprising. Despite Pope Paul Ill's bull, it
was unclear from the European point of view that indigenous Americans
thought in a way comparable enough to the way Europeans thought to make
analogies relevant. As for colonists, they were still reckoned as Europeans. But
possibility, which produced the Christian mystics such as St Teresa of Avila in this period;
greater asceticism was another, appearing in Puritanism and certain other (mainly protestant)
manifestations; decreased tolerance of Jews, observable at this time through much of the Chris
tian world; but nothing was more likely to persuade God than the deeds of a people in convert
ing as many heathen as possible into the Christian faith. The concern for the sake of the
heathen was a concern for one's own good — the two were never in conflict. If colonial pos
sessions increased national wealth and thus contributed to national security and glory, no one
doubted that divine grace was the necessary and sufficient requirement for having all these
things. Here, as throughout history, some individuals were genuinely concerned about their
fellow human beings, but it is impossible to say that this was accompanied by no selfish mo
tives in a culture in which selfless love for others is reckoned to gain one eternal glory.
late in the 18th century some remarkable changes occur, coinciding with the
onset of what is traditionally called the Romantic age, though some of its
greatest figures thought of themselves as anti-Romantic. In the period's most
important treatise on language, we find the following judgement passed on
Renaissance thought like Nebrija's:
But that in which the above-mentioned view leads us chiefly astray is, that it considers
language far too much as a spatial territory, to be extended, as it were, by captures
from without, and thereby misapprehends its true nature in its most essential individu
ality. (Humboldt 1836:36 [1999:33])7
The phrase 'its true nature in its most essential individuality' captures the core
linguistic concern of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who died the year before his
magnum opus was published in 1836. It means that a language should not be
judged by number of speakers or land mass occupied — these being not essen
tial but contingent factors, accidents of history that throw no light on the lan
guage's true nature. Rather, says Humboldt, we should consider its innere
Sprachform, "inner linguistic form", which inheres not in the infinitely ex
pandable territory of vocabulary, but in the very finite domain of grammatical
structure; not how many concepts a language can express, but how it goes
about expressing them.
Evaluated by Renaissance standards, a language like Sanskrit would count
for little, having neither speakers, expressions for the basic concepts of modern
life nor sacred status in Christianity. Yet for Humboldt, Sanskrit is the queen of
languages, with a nobility, logic and symmetry of structure that no later lan
guage, excepting only Greek, has ever approached. Furthermore, as the oldest
language of the Indo-European or 'Aryan' family then known, it stood at the
head of those tongues that have made by far the greatest contribution to human
civilization. No territorial or political considerations could alter these facts.
Could it be a coincidence that this language of unsurpassed nobility, logic,
and symmetry of structure should stand at the head of the greatest cultural line?
Not for Humboldt. Might it then be that the literary products of Sanskrit culture
are what brought the language to its elevated state? Again the answer is no:
Thus civilization and culture are often credited with what cannot in any way proceed
from them, but is effected by a power to which their own existence is due.
As to languages, it is a very common idea to attribute all their features and every
enlargement of their territory to these factors, as if it were merely a question of the
difference between cultivated and uncultivated tongues. If we call upon history to
7. "Worin jedoch jene eben erwähnte Ansicht hauptsächlich irre führt, ist, dass sie die Sprache
viel zu sehr als ein räumliches, gleichsam durch Eroberungen von aussen her zu erweiterndes
Gebiet betrachtet und dadurch ihre wahre Natur in ihrer wesentlichsten Eigenthümlichkeit
verkennt."
witness, such a power of civilization and culture over language is in no way con
firmed. (Humboldt 1836:33-34 [1999:32])8
That leaves only one alternative: that it is language which determines culture
and civilization. And if this is so, then — given that cultural achievement is the
only available means of measuring the intellectual capacity of a people — it
should follow that language structure determines intellectual capacity. Hum
boldt attempts to prove this by drawing up a typology of the structural types of
the languages of the world: inflectional, like Sanskrit; incorporating, like
American Indian languages; and isolating, like Chinese. These are the three
'pure' types, in addition to which he recognizes the 'impure' type of aggluti
nating languages, which do not even merit the citation of an example by him.
Presumably languages so mixed as to appear to be of this type originally be
longed to one of the other three.
Humboldt's typology is more precisely one of language families — Eng
lish, for example, would be reckoned as inflectional because it descends from
the Indo-European line, even though it has lost nearly all traces of inflection
and behaves much more like an isolating language. Humboldt finds that the
inflecting languages are indeed those whose speakers have made the greatest
contributions to world civilization, and deduces therefore that having an in
flecting language gives a nation superior mental capacity. He offers a further
explanation for this: the process of inflection, in which where a root expressing
a fundamental concept takes endings that express subordinate concepts, repro
duces the natural logic of the mind.
If language structure is connected to intellectual capacity, does this not sup
port the Renaissance belief that imposing a European language upon American
Indians will enable them to think? Humboldt would not have thought so, in
deed he would have rejected the question as outdated and dehumanizing. All
human languages enable their speakers to think, in his view, even if some do
this better than others. Less clear is whether an 'imposed' second language
would affect the way a people think. The examples of pidgin and creole lan
guages show how the native language structure persists even when a foreign
word-stock is taken on, and it is in the structure, not the vocabulary, that Hum
boldt believes the 'inner form' lies, and that is linked to thought. And even
where language mixture appears to have moved languages away from their
original inner structural form, that inner form is still present, though hidden. A
8. "So wird der Civilisation und der Cultur oft zugeschrieben, was aus ihnen durchaus nicht
hervorgehen kann, sondern durch eine Kraft gewirkt wird, welcher sie selbst ihr Dasein ver
danken.
"In Absicht der Sprachen ist es eine ganz gewöhnliche Vorstellung, alle ihre Vorzüge und
jede Erweiterung ihres Gebiets ihnen beizumessen, gleichsam als käme es nur auf den Unter
schied gebildeter und ungebildeter Sprachen an. Zieht man die Geschichte zu Rathe, so
bestätigt sich eine solche Macht der Civilisation und Cultur über die Sprache keines weges."
case in point is English, which, after centuries of linguistic evolution, likely

bound up with multiple conquests and movement of peoples, retains only
traces of its original inflectional structure. Nevertheless it still possesses the
inner form of the primordial inflecting language, in Humboldt's view. For him,
then, widening the territory of a language should be an undesirable thing, since
it can only lead to degeneration of the language's original inner form.
Today's reader may be inclined to worry that the supposed superiority of
inflecting languages reflects early 19th-century prejudices rather than the logi
cal functions of the mind, and certainly anyone who today discoursed on the
'intellectual capacity of nations' would be dismissed as a racist, though it is
anachronistic to call Humboldt one. As a public official in Prussia he risked a
great deal in order to become a hero in the struggle for the civil rights of Jews,
and in his writings he was careful to refer to nations and peoples, and not to
races, as he might easily have done. Moreover, the statements with which some
have attempted to convict him of racism have been lifted out of a context
which in fact establishes the intellectual superiority of the very people he is
supposedly defaming (see further Joseph 1999a).
The 'nation' as Humboldt conceives it is — like the 'inner form' of lan
guage itself — a Platonic Idea. Popper (1945:25-26) characterized the Idea
thus:
The things in flux, the degenerate and decaying things, are ([...]) the offspring, the
children, as it were, of perfect things. And like children, they are copies of their origi
nal primogenitors. The father or original of a thing in flux is what Plato calls its
'Form' or its 'Pattern' or its 'Idea' [...]. It is [...] more real than all the ordinary things
which are in flux, and which, in spite of their apparent solidity, are doomed to decay;
for the Form or Idea is a thing that is perfect, and does not perish.
The resurrection of Platonic idealism is part of the heritage of Rationalism that
came to dominate European thought between the time of Nebrija and that of
Humboldt. In the late 18th-century milieu in which Humboldt was educated,
there coexisted an idealistic and rationalist vein associated primarily with
German thinkers, including Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Gottfried
Herder (1744-1803), and later Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), and an
empiricist one that had arisen in Britain and France in the wake of Francis Ba
con (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Pierre Gassendi (1629-1655)
and John Locke (1632-1704), and which included George Berkeley (1685-
1753), David Hume (1711-1776), Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Étienne Bon
not, abbot of Condillac (1714-1780), John Home Tooke (1736-1812) and the
idéologues. The Scottish common sense school formed a bridge between the
two, as did, in a different way, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). With so
much intellectual give and take, it becomes difficult to define distinct schools
of thought; Humboldt stands in many ways at the conjunction between the two
strands. But his insistence on the ideal nature of inner form is firmly within the
Platonic tradition, where he shares the company of his close contemporary
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). A further manifestation of this
idealism is Humboldt's assertion — using Greek terms, no less — that lan
guage is not ergon, but energeia: not something produced, but the potential for
production, something truly virtual in nature.
We could adapt Popper's description of the Platonic Idea to Humboldt's
thought as follows: Existing languages — always in flux, degenerate and de
caying — are the offspring, the children, as it were, of perfect languages. And
like children, they are copies of their original primogenitors. The father or
original is more real than all the ordinary languages which are in flux, and
which, in spite of their apparent solidity, are doomed to decay; for the original
form of the language is a thing that is perfect, and does not perish. It is pre
served within the language, as its Inner Form.
This means that the truest way to 'know' a language is not to observe or
analyze it in its present state, for that is a degenerate state much changed from
the original form, which is what is real. Observation and analysis are valuable
only as tools for getting past appearances and back to that hidden reality. Tak
ing again the example of English: an analysis of English that (like most modern
grammars) ignored the residual evidence of a case system (preserved only in
pronouns — he, his, him etc.) would be rejected by Nebrija on the grounds that
it did not subject the language to the art of traditional grammar; but would be
rejected by Humboldt on the grounds that it was fooled by superficial appear
ances into ignoring the deep reality of the English language, the inner form
that, though much decayed, continues to reside in the spirit and genius of the
language that provide continuity with its distant past.
American linguistic identity

I mentioned earlier that American linguistic identity was a late develop
ment in European thought, indeed one that is still in progress. The outstanding
study of its history, Julie Andresen's ground-breaking Linguistics in America
(1990a), describes four different strategies used by Europeans in the age of Ra
tionalist thought to 'de-rationalize' American Indian languages, starting with
the Tndian-beast strategy':
In the face of all evidence of the existence of the American Indian languages, of the
descriptions which might have been used accurately, and even of the recognition of
different language families ([...]), the eighteenth-century European concluded that the
American Indian and the American Indian languages did not really exist within the
realm of the human and the rational. (Andresen 1990a:89)
Andresen cites James Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799) who allowed that
"the Pope, by his bull, decided the controversy well, when he gave it in favour
of the humanity of the poor Americans" — but then in an excess of generosity

went on to state: "And, indeed, it appears to me, that [the Orang Outangs] are
not so much inferior to the Americans in civility and cultivation, as some na
tions of America were to us, when we first discovered that country" (Burnet
1970 [1774-1809]:347-348). The second strategy is the 'Indian-infant' strat
egy, "associating the Indian with the ancient Europeans viewed as children"
(Andresen 1990a:90). Andresen cites the title of a 1724 book by Joseph-
François Lafitau (1681-1746), Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées
aux mœurs des premiers temps, and notes that "This attitude, contrasting the
Indian-infant to the European-adult, is very widespread in European anthropo
logical texts and endures until the end of the nineteenth century, and even be
yond" (ibid.). Indeed, there is still a certain current of European thinking that
regards Americans as cultural children, to be treated with paternalistic indul
gence, if not contempt.
In the following text from the Rev. John Eliot's (1604-1690) Indian Dia
logues of 1671, the two strategies appear to be in use simultaneously, as the
Christianized Indian Piumbukhou tries to convert his heathen brothers:
If foolish youths play in the dirt, and eat dung, and stinking fish and flesh, and rotten
corn for company's sake, their sachem makes this law: if you come forth from the
filthy place and company, and feed upon this wholesome and good food I have pro
vided, then you shall be honoured and well used all your life time. But if you so love
your old company, as that you choose rather to feed on trash, and venture to perish
among them, then perish you shall, and thank yourself for your foolish choice. This
was our case at first, and is yours to this day. You walk in darkness, defile yourselves
with a filthy conversation, you feed your souls with trash and poison, and you choose
to do so for your company's sake. Behold, God calls you to come out from among
them, and touch no unclean thing, to converse among the wise, and offereth you par
don, life, and salvation in heaven, in glory, among all the elect, saints and angels.
(Bowden & Ronda eds 1980:86)
This, be it noted, is by the greatest 17th-century champion of American Indians
and their languages, author of one of the first Indian grammars (1666) and the
first man to translate the Bible into an Indian tongue (1663).
In the late 18th century appear two variants of what Andresen calls the
'Noble Savage strategy'. In one of these, exemplified by the Adario of Baron
de Lahontan (1666-1715?) and the Ingénu of Voltaire (1694-1778), the Indi
ans speak, beautifully, in French, and this
is not only proof of their intelligence, it also suggests [...] the denial of a language bar
rier. The essence of this strategy for derationalizing the American Indian languages
[...] is located in the refusal of the least possibility of linguistic relativity. [.. .T]he In
génu and Adario [...] are not struggling to express themselves 'properly' in French
with interference from their native language. It is rather as if these Indians, in speak
ing French, are passing from a world of silence into the world of dialogue. When an
Indian speaks in any of the travel literatures, he is shown dialoguing with a European.
Even when presented in his natural habitat, the 'savage' dialogues only with a 'civi
lized'. The 'savages' are never portrayed speaking with each other. (Andresen 1990a:
90-91)
Finally, the Rousseau variant of the 'Noble Savage strategy' claims that while
"The European is nervous and needs to talk" (ibid., p. 91),
[T]he savages of America almost never talk outside the home; each keeps silent in his
hut, using signs to communicate with his family; and even these signs are infrequent.
(Rousseau 1968 [1781]:91)9
Now the American Indian languages are derationalized because "the Noble
Savage is 'above' civilization and does not need to speak" (Andresen 1990a:
91). Whether they are portrayed as subhuman or superhuman, American Indi
ans are the non-linguistic Other.
Over this same period, the term American, which originally had referred
only to aboriginals and their languages, was coming to be applied to persons
and tongues of European descent. Not until eleven years before the Revolution
do we find Americans used as a noun to refer to persons of European descent,
by the physician and political writer Benjamin Gale (1715-1790), himself born
on Long Island, New York: "Paying quit-rents to monopolizers of large tracts
of land, is not well relished by Americans" (Gale 1765: 198). Yet by the end of
the 18th century, Americans will be generally understood to mean those of
European descent. As for the language, in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux
(1734-1788) writes in Voyages dans ¡Amérique "Vous parlez bien américain",
with reference to American English; but the first appearance in this context in
English would not come until 1789, in the Dissertations on the English Lan
guage by Noah Webster (1758-1843): "Numerous local causes [...] will intro
duce new words into the American tongue". These, Webster claimed, would
"produce, in a course of time, a language in North America, as different from
the future language of England, as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are
from the German, or from one another". Obviously this has not come to pass
even in the 21st century, and modern communications and transportation now
appear to make it less rather than more likely that separate languages will de
velop. In 1789, however, the differentiation was scarcely underway. So hard
did one have to look to find differences between American and British English
that one might even be tempted to create some, as Webster did when he single-
handedly removed the  from the spelling of words like colour. The desire for
a distinct language would not be impeded by something so trivial as a lack of
distinctions.
9. "[L]es sauvages d'Amérique ne parlent presque jamais hors de chez eux; chacun garde le
silence dans sa cabane, il parle par signes à sa famille; et ces signes sont peu fréquens."
One is struck by how the first applications of 'American' to Euro-

Americans cluster around the American Revolution. But even more striking is
the degree to which, along with the term 'American', attitudes about American
Indian languages are transferred to American English, especially by its detrac
tors but even by its proponents. The most famous proponent was, again, Noah
Webster, all of whose contemporaries apparently perceived him as a detestable
crackpot. Among the many attacks on Webster's 1801 proposal for a 'Colum
bian' (i.e., American) dictionary was this anonymous one, signed Aristarcus,
that equates 'Americanisms' with barbarisms (cited by Howard 1930: 302):
Now, in what can a Columbian dictionary differ from an English one, but in these
barbarisms? [...] If the Connecticut lexicographer considers the retaining of the Eng
lish language as a badge of slavery, let him not give us a Babylonish dialect in its
stead, but adopt, at once, the language of the aborigines.
Andresen (1990a:67) comments that "'Aristarcus' could not have found a more
damaging comparison than the one between American English and the lan
guage of the aborigines". In 1817 Edward Everett (1794-1865) would write
the following (cited by Read 1939: 121):
An American, on arriving in England, is not unfrequently requested, by intelligent
persons, to give a specimen of his native tongue, in the supposition that this is either a
distinct dialect of English, or even an Indian language.
On this Andresen remarks, "This statement confirms the stereoscopy of the two
Americans (Euro- and aboriginal) and their languages, at the very least in the
minds of 'intelligent' Europeans" (1990a:80).
The situation of Canadian French ran parallel to this, except that political
independence, which came later, had to be won from Britain, not France, so
that French was never perceived as a 'badge of slavery' — quite the contrary.
On the other hand, English combined with native languages to squeeze Cana
dian French out of the European and Canadian consciousness. As late as 1894
the Dictionnaire canadien-français of Sylva Clapin (1853-1928) lists six types
of 'Canadianisms', including:
5th: English and savage terms, written and pronounced as in the original languages;
6th: English and savage terms, more or less Frenchified. (Clapin 1894:vii-viii)10
And in 1901 traces of the Indian-Infant strategy can still be detected in Jules-
Paul Tardivel's (1851-1905) defence of Canadian French:
10. "5° Les termes anglais et sauvages, écrits et prononcés tels que dans les langues originales;
"6° Les termes anglais et sauvages, plus ou moins francisés."
I repeat, the French spoken in our Canadian countryside is in no sense a patois; but,
were it one, we should have no shame on that account [...T]he patois [...] are fully-
fledged popular languages, unschooled if you wish, but possessed of great beauty,
"the candour and naïveté of primeval nature," in the words of a French writer. (Tardi-
vel 1901:22)11
Despite the transparent rhetorical structure — equivalent to the "I never
smoked marijuana, and furthermore I didn't enjoy it" defence — Tardivel is
doing a variant on Mœurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux mœurs des
premiers temps, in which candour and naiveté, the qualities associated with
children and beasts, have a Romantic value but definitely not a rational one.
Politics, language and myth

I suggested at the outset that there is a discrepancy here: American English
and Canadian French are entirely one with European English and French in
grammatical structure, which Romantic language theory insists is where inner
form resides — vocabulary borrowings like tobacco and papoose make no dif
ference. Furthermore, the whole dynamic of Romantic language theory was
aimed toward great historical unities, and not the creation of new sub-
identities; Humboldt is denying the reality of English itself, subsuming it
within the greater reality of Indo-European unity, at the very moment when the
separate reality of American English is being asserted.
It could be that Humboldt's impact helped to temper the emergence of New
World linguistic identities — after all, 'American' and 'Canadian' tout court
have not emerged as the general names of the languages. Ironically, though the
French do refer to American English as l'américain, the term Franco-canadien
dates only from 1880, and, incredibly, québécois with reference to the lan
guage only from around 1970, according to the Robert dictionary. Yet Hum
boldt notwithstanding, American English and Canadian French identities not
only emerged, but in both professional descriptions and the popular mind took
on characteristics of languages with which they were in merely contingent con
tact and from which they had borrowed only scattered vocabulary items.
What do we conclude from this convergence of contradictions? First, that
the political need to establish a distinct American cultural identity after the
Revolution, and again after the War of 1812,12 overrode any contradiction of
11. "Je le répète, le français qui se parle dans nos campagnes du Canada n'est nullement un
patois; mais, le fût-il, que nous ne devrions pas en avoir honte [... L]es patois [...] sont de véri
tables langues populaires, peu savantes, si l'on veut, mais possédant de grandes beautés, 'la
franchise et la naïveté de la nature antique', selon l'expression d'un écrivain français."
12. The 'War of 1812' is itself an interesting case of how memory and national identity inter
act. As perceived by Americans it is a crucial event in American history, because it definitively
secured the northern borders against the British and French and ended a long history of their
attempting to enlist the Native Americans against the European settlers. But in Britain there is
the dominant philosophy, and any lack of linguistic difference sufficient to

support a separate identity from a scientific point of view. Such differences
could be found, created, or suppressed as needed to justify the politically-
motivated position. Secondly, the dominant philosophy, though overridden, did
not entirely withdraw. If political considerations dictated that New World
European languages had to exist, against the letter of Humboldt's theory that
inner form resides in history and grammatical structure, the newly emerged
linguistic identities would nevertheless abide by the spirit of Humboldt's equa
tion between nation and language, and the idea that each of these has "its true
nature in its most essential individuality" through a unique inner form. By
grafting the perceived characteristics of American Indian languages onto
emerging Euro-American linguistic identities, linguists and laymen endowed
American English and Canadian French with a mythical genius or spirit — in
digenous in character, alternately looked down on and revered, but undeniably
'otherly' from a European standpoint. And they did this even though it flew in
the face of the 'scientific' analysis of language which was coming to be as
serted as the only valid way to understand language in the same period.
To suggest that American linguistic identities are the combined product of
political and Romantic mythmaking is not to belittle them. It is rather to iden
tify the source of their extraordinary power, and to explain how they are able to
embody what appear to the rational mind to be direct contradictions. Remem
ber too that the existence of French nationalism is a myth that arose at a time
when it became politically imperative, and was fitted out with the requisite
ideological accoutrements along the way. The Trench language', too, is a
myth of sorts, having started out as one dialect among many, before being
twisted and warped to fit into a grammatical framework originally created for
Greek, and then being declared the perfect instrument of rational thought. In
deed, given that no two of us share the same language except in highly ideal
ized terms, the very existence of 'a language' as a supra-individual thing ís a
myth — the kind of myth on which the functioning of human society depends.
Philosophy and even science, which claims to be supremely objective, can
in fact be overridden by political necessities and bent to suit their purposes.
Columbus could 'discover' America, even though it had millions of inhabi
tants. Nebrija could 'demonstrate' that language is the companion of empire,
despite no lack of examples to the contrary. Humboldt could 'prove' that the
objective reality of languages lay in their pre-historical form rather than in any
thing we can observe directly. And a century after his death, some of his coun-
no recognition of a 'War of 1812' — the events so called are instead recorded as footnotes to
the Napoleonic Wars. The big event that year from the British perspective was Napoleon's
retreat from Russia, setting him on a course toward Waterloo.
trymen could invoke his name in their 'proofs' of Aryan superiority (see
Hutton 1999). We might even suggest that, because Nebrija wrote at a time
when Europe was poised on the edge of limitless greatness, and Humboldt
when its greatest days were far behind it, it is little wonder that Nebrija's
thoughts are directed toward the future establishment and maintenance of Isa
bella's language and empire, while Humboldt can think only of the distant past,
of lost, irretrievable perfection.
The identity of American linguistics

Another ambiguity resides in the title of the first linguistics journal founded
in the United States, in 1917, the International Journal of American Linguis
tics. I surely was not the only student who, upon first encountering this journal,
thought that its title was oxymoronic, until I opened it and realized that it was
not about American linguistics as I understood the term, but the linguistic
analysis of Native American languages. The International Congress of Ameri
canists, including linguistics sections, was held every two or three years start
ing in 1874, and in Paris, the Société des Américanistes began publishing their
Journal in 1895-96. Among the European contributors to 'American linguis
tics' in this sense was Henri de Saussure (1829-1905), father of Ferdinand,
whose scientific travels in the New World in the early 1850s were mentioned at
the start of this chapter. During his stay in Mexico he copied a number of pre-
Columbian texts, which he published in 1891-92, perhaps not coincidentally
the quatercentenary of Columbus.13 He also edited the proceedings of the 4th
International Congress of Americanists, held in Madrid in September 1881 (H.
de Saussure ed. 1882). But the French Américanistes were already ambiguous
in their subject matter: the second volume of the Journal de la Société des
Américanistes (1897-98) opens with an article by Henri Cordier (1849-1925)
on "Américains et Français à Canton au XVIIIe siècle", in which Native
Americans do not figure at all.
The other possible meanings of American linguistics, referring to American
English or French or to theories and methods of analysis developed in Amer
ica, was not strong enough in 1917 for the founder of the International Journal
of American Linguistics, Franz Boas (whose work is discussed in Chapter 3
below), to have worried about ambiguity. But just seven years later, the found
ing of the Linguistic Society of America signalled the fact that a critical mass
13. One of these may have become a source of embarrassment: Ernest-Théodore Hamy (1842-
1908) pointed out in Hamy (1895-96) that the manuscrit du Cacique which Saussure père pub
lished in 1891 was identical to the Codex Becker 1, purchased by Becker in the same town
where Saussure had copied his manuscript almost forty years earlier, and shown by Becker at
the 8th International Congress of Americanists held in Berlin in October 1888. Hamy says
nothing against Saussure, but one is left to wonder whether he published his text in ignorance
of Becker's ownership or in order tacitly to stake his prior claim to it.
16 FROM WHITNEY TO CHOMSKY
of linguists now saw themselves as sharing a national identity, even though the
distinctiveness of American linguistics was still in the early stages of emerging
on the level of theory. Rather more distinctiveness was manifest where meth
ods of analysis were concerned, thanks to the work of none other than Boas,
but its full recognition would await the arrival of a theoretical matrix (or matri
ces) to conjoin with it.
Nevertheless, just as American linguistic identity was declared well before
there was enough structural difference to justify it from a linguist's point of
view, the ideological desire to declare American independence in linguistics
was strong enough to overcome any lack of theoretical distinctiveness. The end
of World War I (1914-18) had brought a widespread sense of liberation from a
century of German linguistic dominance, not just in America but across
Europe. Linguists outside Germany, while still respectful of the historical
methods that had come to define what scientific study of language could be in
the 19th century, now felt free to use, correct, or abandon them as they saw fit.
From the 1920s onward a national linguistics came to mean a more or less
original theoretical position held by a nation's leading linguists. Clearly, the
postwar generation was ready for change.
The theme that runs through all the chapters of this book and, I hope, uni
fies them, is the transatlantic to-ing and fro-ing of linguistic thought in a cen
tury which began without a clear sense of American linguistics existing and
ended with a strong sense of it having been dominant — though finally splin
tering to the point that there is no longer a well defined centre. Since I began
working in the history of linguistics in the 1980s, in the course of following up
on questions that had arisen during my doctoral research on language stan
dardization, I have been struck by the strong belief many of my fellow Ameri
can historians of linguistics have that American linguistics developed in
isolation from what was going on in Europe. That this was not the case for the
great figures of the formative period — Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield — is clear
from their own testimony. For the later part of the century, Jakobson's influ
ence on Greenberg, Halle, Chomsky and others is evident, despite Chomsky's
increasing tendency to pretend that no one ever influenced him, including all
those whose influence he acknowledged in his own early writings (see Joseph
1999b).
The myth of American linguistic isolationism seems above all to have be
longed to the generation of the students of Bloomfield, whose dominance of
the field took place in a time when a much broader myth of American cultural
uniqueness and superiority was being cultivated. In my own elementary educa
tion in the 1960s, it was made to seem that all modern inventions had come
from America. Sometimes this was done through brazen misinformation, as
when the invention of moving pictures was credited to Thomas Edison, or by
disguising the nationality or even the identity of the inventor, as when televi
sion, a British invention, was presented to us as an anonymous creation.
My sense is that the desire to create an isolationist history for American
linguistics is connected to this wider national project — the isolationist histori
ans have absorbed its premises and operate with them as their working assump
tions, without even thinking about it. The history of linguistics is no more
isolated from the trends of the culture in which its practitioners live than is, as I
will suggest in the closing chapter, linguistics itself.
I have not attempted to write a counter-history that emphasizes transatlantic
connections. Although this might be interesting, it would be equally distorting.
Rather I have written the history of several of the most important moments in
the development of modern American linguistics as they appear to me actually
to have happened, which by all the evidence suggests continuity with rather
than discontinuity from what was happening across the ocean.
Obviously, however much I struggle for objectivity, my perspective is de
termined in part by my own experience. In 1999 I was sent a manuscript for
review that opened with an epigram drawn from Joseph (1987). It went on to
note that language standardization is a topic that has long exercised linguists
(especially applied linguists) in Britain, including Joseph, but not American
linguists. It offered sound insights and drew apt conclusions about the features
of American linguistics that had led to this state of affairs. In my report to the
publisher, positive overall, I was obliged to point out that I knew Joseph to
have been born in Michigan and, except for some language courses, educated
there, right up through his doctoral dissertation on language standardization.
He may now be a 'linguist in Britain', but that is not mutually exclusive with
being an American linguist. Still, I accepted the author's basic insight.
Indeed, he may have been right to identify me as un-American. Although
loyal to my native land, I am, as either Americans or linguists go, about as
close to prototypical as a penguin within the bird family. I should like to think
that this allows me a useful combination of insider insight and semi-
objectivity. Perhaps that is wishful thinking. In any case, the present book is
the result of my ongoing attempt to understand what American linguistics is
and how it came to be that way, and, indirectly, what it means to say that
someone is or is not an American linguist. Starting with me.
CHAPTER TWO
'THE AMERICAN WHITNEY'

AND HIS EUROPEAN HERITAGES AND LEGACIES
L'Américain Whitney que je révère ...

Ferdinand de Saussure
Whitney's and Max Müller's lectures

The writings of William Dwight Whitney have a good claim to being the start
ing point of American linguistics. He was the first writer on language born in and
living in the New World whose works Europeans read and discussed for their ana
lytical and theoretical content rather than for information they contained about
American languages. If it seems ironic that American identity should be conferred
by acceptance into European intellectual debates, it was inevitable in a time when
America was yet a backwater. It would remain so until a critical mass of Europeans
recognized a critical mass of American scientists and philosophers as worth listen
ing to. In Whitney's case there is a further irony in that, as the dichotomy between
American and European linguistics would develop in the 20th century, Whitney's
legacy would be more substantial and more directly acknowledged in Europe than
in his own country. This chapter will trace some of the transatlantic relations that
lead into and out from Whitney, not only for their intrinsic interest but also as a
way of identifying what is really original in Whitney's understanding of language,
and, if anything is found to be original, whether it can be cogently tied to currents
in 19th-century intellectual life that are recognized as distinctively American.
From his chair at Yale, Whitney had exerted a unique authority in his native
land. He and his brother Josiah Dwight Whitney (1819-1896), professor of natural
sciences at Harvard, were among the country's first generation of important men of
letters. Whitney's American fame, due largely to his authorship of school gram
mars of English, French, and German, and later his editorship of the Century Dic
tionary, cast him in a role previously occupied in the popular mind only by the
lexicographer Noah Webster, and probably by no one person since. The hundreds
of letters written to him by his readers in the last quarter of the century indicate that
he had not only succeeded Webster as supreme arbiter of American English usage
and established himself as the foremost expert on Sanskrit and Indo-European lan
guages generally, but that he was considered an authority on the study of any lan
guage and on esoteric exotica of all sorts. Questions were sent to him by persons
from the most diverse walks of life; one writer asks him to name the three Euro
pean universities with the largest enrolments.
Taking the measure of Whitney's originality requires one to read him closely in
comparison with his contemporaries. On the surface, his books Language and the
Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875) have
much in common with other general treatments of language of their period; Whit
ney broaches no topic that is not already under discussion, and takes no position
that is wholly without precedent. Even the structure of the 1867 book is closely de
rivative of the Lectures on the Science of Language by Friedrich Max Müller
(1823-1900), whose polemics with Whitney would make the latter a household
name throughout the world. Yet with the 1875 book and Whitney's selection of
topics, the way he treats them, and in particular the relative weight he accords to
philosophical, historical, cultural, ethnological, social, psychological, philological,
typological and grammatical considerations, the originality of his approach be
comes much clearer. It is this book that would set much of the agenda for the mod
ern 'general linguistics' that would eventually emerge in the 20th century.
Max Müller had delivered his first series of nine lectures to the Royal Institu
tion in 1861 and published them that same year, followed by a second series of
twelve lectures in 1863, published in 1864. (Subsequently the two series of lectures
would be published as a two-volume set.) Whitney's 1867 book began as a series
of six lectures "On the Principles of Linguistic Science" delivered to the Smith
sonian Institution in March 1864, which was then expanded to a twelve-lecture se
ries delivered to the Lowell Institute in Boston in December 1864 and January
1865 (Whitney 1867:v). The preface to Whitney (1867) notes that illustrations
have been "borrowed here and there" from Max Müller's Lectures, "which are es
pecially rich in such material" (ibid., p.vii). Although the borrowings are not ac
knowledged individually, Whitney makes eight further references to Müller's
Lectures, all but one of them to the first series. Here is the plan of that series:
1 The science of language one of the physical sciences
2 The growth of language in contradistinction to the history of language
3 The empirical stage in the science of language
4 The classificatory stage in the science of language
5 The genealogical classification of languages
6 Comparative grammar
7 The constituent elements of language
8 The morphological classification of languages
9 The theoretical stage in the science of language. —Origin of Language.
Whitney's lectures do not have titles, but opening lists of topics. His Lecture 2 top
ics include "Language an institution, of historical growth; its study a moral science.
Analogies of linguistic science with the physical science. Its methods historical".
This is in direct rebuttal to Müller's Lectures 1 and 2, denying both his major
'THE AMERICAN WHITNEY' 21
premises, that linguistics is a physical science and that its change must be under
stood as growth rather than history. For Whitney, the opposition between growth
and history represents a false dichotomy. The remainder of Müller's plan is based
upon a scheme of the 'evolution' of linguistic study through a series of stages be
ginning with the empirical and ending with the theoretical. But Whitney does not
accept this model of unimpeded progress, nor does he offer or imply an alternative
model in his own arrangement. He does however come to the origin of language as
the central topic of his penultimate chapter, and again, refuting Müller is the clear
aim (see further Alter 1993; Sutcliffe 2000, 2002).
The external context of the rival sets of lectures needs to be borne in mind.
Max Müller was keenly aware that the Royal Institution was devoted to the physi
cal sciences, and that its members, the élite of Britain's 'hard' sciences, would in
the main be sceptical if not dismissive of claims that comparative philology should
be counted as a physical enquiry. However, as Alter (1999) has shown, arguments
from comparative philology were centrally integrated into the debates about evolu
tionary theory that were raging at the time, and that alone would ensure that the
fellows of the Royal Institution would be keenly interested in giving Müller a hear
ing. For his part, he did not shrink from the issue or offer compromises, but as
serted his position boldly and robustly. The Smithsonian Institution, by contrast,
had history and ethnology as its core concerns. Each of the scholars was telling his
host institution that the science of language fell within its bailiwick. Just as Müller
needed courage to deliver this message to a sceptical audience of scientists (he re
counts his "fear and trembling" in Müller 1887), for Whitney it took considerable
integrity not to be lured by the prestige that was accruing to linguistics with the as
sertion that it was a 'true' science rather than a historical enquiry. For despite nu
merous attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries to found history on a scientific
basis, the dichotomy between the two remained powerful. As Müller put it,
There are two great divisions of human knowledge, which, according to their subject-
matter, are called physical and historical. Physical science deals with the works of God,
historical science with the works of man. (Müller 1861:22)
Even in an increasingly secular age much more value was put on understanding
what came before man and what was beyond his control than on understanding the
products of wilful human action.
In the short to medium term it was Whitney's effort that bore more fruit. The
Smithsonian Institution became the centre of gravity for the development of
American linguistics as a historical, ethnological and structural but not physical
enquiry, up through the first quarter of the 20th century. Max Müller's efforts pro
duced no such immediate heritage, either with the Royal Institution or in Britain
generally. In the longer term, however, the idea of linguistics as a physical science
would become dominant after its reassertion by Chomsky, and arguably was al
ready afoot in some of the pragmatic and behaviourist models that preceded him.
Müller's opening lecture explains that the question of whether the science of
language is a physical or a historical one is bound up not only with one's view of
the origin of language, as is shown by the citation above, but also with what one
sees as the fundamental purpose of language — as an instrument of thought itself,
or a mere contrivance for communicating thoughts.
We do not want to know languages, we want to know language; what language is, how it
can form a vehicle or an organ of thought [...]. (Müller 1861:23; in later edns "a vehicle"
is replaced by "an instrument")
Having thus explained the manner in which I intend to treat the science of language, I
hope in my next lecture to examine the objections of those philosophers who see in lan
guage nothing but a contrivance devised by human skill for the more expeditious commu
nication of our thoughts, and who would wish to see it treated, not as a production of
nature, but as a work of human art. (Ibid., p.27)
This dualistic view of the purpose of language reaches back at least as far as the
Sophists, whose debate on the matter is depicted in Plato's Cratylus. When Socra
tes and Hermogenes agree that "A word, then, is an instrument for teaching about
something, and for distinguishing among realities" (388bl3; see Joseph 2000b:27-
29), the function of 'distinguishing among realities' equates with being 'an instru
ment or an organ of thought', and 'teaching about something' equates with 'com
munication'. Although Socrates does not suggest any difficulty in carrying out
these two functions simultaneously, the conflict between them is in fact the point
of departure for the whole dialogue. Hermogenes maintains that language exists for
communication, while Cratylus insists that it has the much more profound purpose
(from both his and Socrates' point of view) of representing the world to us in
thought. Socrates does not accept either position, but complexifies the debate by
exploring the implications of each for the origin and operation of language. He
concludes that the study of language cannot yield knowledge about how the world
really is, because we cannot determine what in language depicts reality truly, and
what is simply arbitrary historical accretion, without first determining independ
ently what true reality is. This, he insists, only dialectic is capable of doing.
Already in antiquity the final message of the Cratylus was ignored, and its ety
mological enquiries were treated as a route to knowledge via language. By the 19th
century it was commonplace even to read Socrates as supporting Cratylus's view
that words are connected to their meaning not by mere convention but by nature,
physis in Greek, the source of the word 'physical'. So to say, as Max Müller, did
that the study of language was a physical science was also implicitly to take a posi
tion concerning meaning.
In his own series of lectures, Whitney did not come out fighting. He dances
around the ring for the whole of the first round and half of the second. In fact his
first lecture, which opens with a consideration of claims that the investigation of
language merits "the rank and title of a science" (Whitney 1867:1), seems to be
following closely in Müller' s tracks. Whitney too concludes that, after long ages of
pre-scientific development, the study of language has at last reached a stage at
which it deserves to be called a science. Whitney even refers the reader to Müller's
Lectures 3 and 4 (see the list on p.20 above) for "many interesting details" (ibid.,
p.4n). It is the only reference to a contemporary author in the whole of Whitney's
first lecture. He even invokes the term 'physical', though in an ambiguous way:
after suggesting that the investigation of language is among the "sciences of obser
vation and induction — for example, geology, chemistry, astronomy, physics"
(p. 1), he refers to linguistic study alongside "the kindred branches of physical study
to which we have already referred" (p.3). Listeners and readers were apt to assume
that kindred here meant that linguistic study too was a branch of physical study.
Only those paying very close attention would have noted an alternative interpreta
tion: that linguistics is akin to geology, chemistry etc. in being what Whitney calls
sciences of observation and induction, which means that linguistics might be em
pirical science without necessarily being a physical one. A few pages on he men
tions in passing that "the relation between linguistic and physical science, and their
joint and respective value to ethnology, will be made the subject of discussion at a
point further on in our inquiries" (p.8), again giving no clue how contentious an
issue this will prove to be.
Meanwhile he is subtly laying the ground for his dissent from Müller. The
opening paragraph of the first lecture introduces the theme of 'communication', but
slips it into a sentence about multilingualism (p.l):
Men have always been learning languages, in greater or less measure; adding to their own
mother-tongues the idioms of the races about them, for the practical end of communica
tion with those races, of access to their thought and knowledge.
He proceeds to draw a direct link between multilingualism and the awakening of
interest in linguistics, again seemingly innocently (pp. 1-2):
There has, too, hardly been a time when some have not been led on from the acquisition
of languages to the study of language. The interest of this precious and wonderful posses
sion of man, at once the sign and the means of his superiority to the rest of the animal
creation, has in all ages strongly impressed the reflecting and philosophical, and impelled
them to speculate respecting its nature, its history, and its origins.
It would not necessarily have been clear to contemporary audiences that Whitney is
setting up 'the reflecting and philosophical' as terms of abuse, in contrast to the
vision of an empirically-based linguistic science he has already mentioned. But it
becomes plain at the start of the second paragraph (p.2):
Nothing, however, that deserved the name of a science was the result of these older inves
tigations in the domain of language, any more than in those of chemistry and astronomy.
Hasty generalizations, baseless hypotheses, inconclusive deductions, were as rife in the
former department of study as they were in the two latter while yet passing through the
preliminary stages of alchemy and astrology.
Plain enough — but still far below the surface lurks the implication that contempo
rary approaches to language that take language to be an instrument or organ of
thought rather than a vehicle of communication also count as essentially reflecting
and philosophical. Thus, for all his talk of language as a physical science, Max
Müller is no astronomer, but an astrologer.
The conclusion of Whitney's first lecture again dissents from one of the side-
issues of Müller's position, the 'naturalness' of language. After considering along
series of historical changes in languages, Whitney claims the role of Hermogenes
to Müller's Cratylus — but again with no direct indication that a debate is taking
place, or that the 'physical' nature of linguistic science is implicated, and embed
ding his contention in a paragraph about the transmission of languages across gen
erations (p.32):
[E]ach word ([...]) was learned by every person who employs it from some other person
who had employed it before him. He adopted it as the sign of a certain idea, because it
was already in use by others as such. Inner and essential connection between idea and
word, whereby the mind which conceives the one at once apprehends and produces the
other, there is none, in any language upon earth. Every existing form of human speech is
a body of arbitrary and conventional signs for thought, handed down by tradition from
one generation to another [...].
Early in Lecture 2 the gloves come off. Whitney makes only his second allusion to
a contemporary; it is again Max Müller, but this time he is called "a recent popular
writer" and one of his lectures (no. 2 in the outline given earlier) is cited as repre
sentative of a fundamental error in thinking about language (p.35). In the offending
passage, Müller (1861:36-37) had written:
[A]lthough there is a continuous change in language, it is not in the power of man either
to produce or to prevent it. We might think as well of changing the laws which control the
circulation of our blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of
speech, or inventing new words according to our own pleasure.
The physical analogies are plainly chosen to bolster the argument that linguistic
study is a physical science. Again Müller is waxing Cratylean, and Hermogenes-
Whitney is there to strike a blow for conventionalism and human volition:
Language [...] is made up of separate articulated signs of thought, each of which is at
tached by a mental association to the idea it represents, is uttered by voluntary effort, and
has its value and currency only by the agreement of speakers and hearers. It is in their
power, subject to their will; as it is kept up, so is it modified and altered, so may it be
abandoned, by their joint and consenting action, and in no other way whatsoever. (Whit
ney 1867:35)
Whitney takes particular exception to the fact that Müller illustrates his point with
stories about the Roman Emperor Tiberius and the German (Holy Roman) Em-
peror Sigismund making errors in their Latin, being rebuked for it by grammarians,
then claiming (or having someone else claim for them) that the emperor's grammar
is good by definition — but the error remaining an error nonetheless (Müller 1861 :
37). Whitney's comment on these examples is withering (p.36):
The argument and conclusion we may take to be of this character: If so high and mighty a
personage as an emperor could not do so small a thing as alter the gender and termination
of a single word [...] much less can any one of inferior consideration hope to accomplish
such a change, or any other of the changes, of greater or less account, which make up the
history of speech: therefore, language is incapable of alteration by its speakers.
The utter futility of deriving such a doctrine from such a pair of incidents, or from a
score, a hundred, or a thousand like them, is almost too obvious to be worth the trouble of
pointing out.
If the patronizing dismissiveness of this last sentence leads one to expect Whitney
to maintain the contrary doctrine and profess that an individual, powerful or not,
can change the course of a language, one will be surprised to see him state in the
conclusion to this discussion, "Thus it is indeed true that the individual has no
power to change language" (p.45)! The disagreement is over how this deduction is
made and what further deductions can be made from it. In laying out his position,
Whitney invokes political terms that implicate his identity as an American.
The 'futility' Whitney sees in Max Müller's argument is a political matter: no
ruler can enforce a law that his people are not prepared to accept. Popular custom
and usage constitute a law unto themselves, possessing greater authority than the
opinion of any individual, says Whitney (p.36):
Against what authority more mighty than their own did these two emperors offend? Sim
ply against the immemorial and well-defined usage of all who wrote and had ever written
Latin — nothing more and nothing less. High political station does not confer the right to
make and unmake language; a sovereign's grammatical blunders do not become the law
of speech to his subjects, any more than do those of the private man.
But what is the "well-defined usage of all who wrote and had ever written Latin" if
not the power of man to produce or prevent change, which Müller denies? If the
individual cannot change the language, it is "not for the reason that man has no
power over language, but precisely for the contrary reason, that he has all power
over it — that men's usage makes language" (p.37).
What is more, an individual can initiate a change in language. But only initiate:
it is up to the community as a whole to make the change or not (ibid.):
He, accordingly, who can direct usage can make or alter language. In this way only can
exalted rank confer authority over speech: it can give a more powerful impulse toward
that general acceptance and currency which anything must win in order to be language.
There are instances on record in which the pun of a monarch has changed for all time the
form of a word.
He who can direct usage is able to do so not on account of position alone, but by
virtue of a genius for understanding what innovations in language his fellow
speakers will be prepared to recognize as innovative rather than erroneous. It is
only the people who can determine what such a genius is and who possesses it;
those who change the language are elected by them, not appointed from above.
Whitney makes the point with a political metaphor (p.38):
The speakers of language thus constitute a republic, or rather, a democracy, in which au
thority is conferred only by general suffrage and for due cause, and is exercised under
constant supervision and control. Individuals are abundantly permitted to make additions
to the common speech, if there be reason for it, and if, in their work, they respect the
sense of the community.
The contrast with Müller's two 'emperors' could not be more stark. The implica
tion is that this German who had attached himself to the British Empire does not
understand, perhaps cannot understand the true nature of language, which is like "a
republic, or rather a democracy". The world of 1864 offered few examples of de
mocratic republics: besides the fairly democratic Chile and the marginally democ
ratic Argentina, the clearest cases were Switzerland, the United States of America
and, surprisingly, the Confederate States of America. It is astonishing to recall that
Whitney delivered his lectures in the midst of the American Civil War. Although
there was a lull in the fighting in the early months of 1864, by July of that year —
four months after Whitney's Smithsonian lectures — Confederate General Jubal
Early would lead his forces to within five miles of Washington, D.C.
Of course the definition of a 'democracy' is a vexed one. The American repub
lics allowed only some men and no women to vote, and the Confederacy still had
slaves. By that criterion alone Britain was more of a democracy than the Confeder
acy was, though not necessarily in the eyes of an American from either side of the
Mason-Dixon line. Americans have great difficulty understanding the unwritten
British constitution, or even grasping the concept of an unwritten constitution (the
whole point of which is to remain somewhat ungraspable). Britons, apart from fer
vent Scottish or other nationalists, tend to see Britain as the most democratic coun
try on earth, and the great debate of 1864, a year in which Gladstone and Disraeli
exchanged office twice, was precisely over whether the extension of democracy
and equality at home or the amplification of imperial power overseas was to be top
of the agenda. But to Americans, who had initiated their identity by an act of sepa
ration from the British Crown, the monarchy continued to define Britain, and still
does so today. A monarchy cannot, be definition, be democratic.
As far as Whitney is concerned, languages do not admit of differing political
systems. There is only democracy, regardless of how the country might be ruled in
which the language is spoken. In the Democratic Republic of Language, all deci
sions are made by convention, nothing is deemed right or wrong by nature. It fol
lows that communication among the citizens is the republic's whole reason for
being. And the study of the republic is not a natural or physical study but a histori
cal or moral one.
It is perhaps no more than an accident of intellectual history that the young man
on whom Whitney would exert the most profound and significant influence was a
native of Switzerland. But it is worth reflecting that an American and a Swiss
shared a common cultural experience of republican democracy that set them apart
from everyone else in the northern hemisphere.
Whitney's Life and Growth of Language

The book of Whitney's on general linguistics that would have the biggest im
pact on the development of that field in the 20th century was not the closely-
printed 476-page Language and the Study of Language of 1867, but his 1875 book
The Life and Growth of Language, consisting of 319 pages set in considerably lar
ger type. No doubt more than a few of those buying the book entitled Life and
Growth of Language expected it to adopt the metaphor of treating language as a
living organism, made much of by Max Müller and others because of the apparent
link it drew between linguistics and the prestigious physical sciences. They would
learn, however, that Whitney used 'life' to mean an individual's acquisition of his
or her language, and 'growth' simply for historical change, just as one might speak
of the growth of any institution.
In the introduction to the 1875 book Whitney apologises for "following in the
main the same course" as in its 1867 predecessor, noting that this is inevitable. But
in fact the second book, far from being any sort of condensed version of the earlier
one, in some respects turns it on its head. The most striking change is in how the
second book begins:
Language may be briefly and comprehensively defined as the means of expression of hu
man thought. [...I]t is expression for the sake of communication. (Whitney 1875:1)
It takes a bit of effort for today's reader to appreciate just how radical a formula
tion this is. Language, Whitney is saying, is nothing more nor less than a means
toward an end, or rather two ends, the immediate one of expressing thought, and
the ultimate one of communication. This purely functionalist view cuts Whitney
off from the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions that precede him, in which
'communication' is never taken as an end in itself, and places him at the head of a
Modernist line that will continue into the next century. Whitney (1867) had made
the same point, but not until 85% of the way through a very long book:
Man speaks, then, primarily, not in order to think, but in order to impart his thought. [...]
Language, then, is the spoken means whereby thought is communicated, and it is only
that. (Whitney 1867:404-405)
And the key point established early on in the 1867 book, that language is an insti
tution (first stated explicitly at p.48), is not made until p.280 of Whitney (1875),
88% of the way through. Although Whitney's conception of language had not
changed, what he saw as the key to that conception had shifted. In making com
munication the starting point of his approach to language, he gives it a totally de
mocratic basis. For if language is directly bound up with the formulation of
thought — as in Max Müller's famous dictum, "No thought without language, no
language without thought" — then it belongs most fully to the great thinkers, both
in the Humboldtian sense of the nations that have made the greatest intellectual
contributions and the more usual sense of the great philosophers within those na
tions. But if, as Whitney insists, thought exists prior to and separately from lan
guage, and language exists purely for the purpose of communication, then it
belongs equally to everyone who can communicate, which is to say every member
of the speech community including users of sign language. Or almost equally: any
philosophers and 'metaphysicians' (a favourite Whitneyan term of semi-abuse)
whose thought is so abstruse as to defy ready communicability now fall implicitly
into the category of poor users of language, along with the speech defective and
the aphasic.
Communication is bound up as well with the view that convention is the fun
damental principle of language, rather than anything natural. Again, as shown in
the preceding section, this was Whitney's position contra Max Müller in a debate
that recapitulates the one that opens Plato's Cratylus. Late in that dialogue, Socra
tes points out to Cratylus that if he is right, and words are naturally connected to
their meanings, then they must signify this through mimesis, imitation based upon
resemblance between the sounds that make up the words and the sense they con
vey. Yet he is able to summon up examples of words in which one or more sound
has changed over the course of time without any damage being done to their abil
ity to convey the same meaning as before. Socrates tells Cratylus:
Now, I myself also like for words to resemble things insofar as possible; but beware, for
in truth, as Hermogenes says, this force of attraction by resemblance is a meagre, sticky
thing; and one has to make use as well of this vulgar business of convention in regard to
the correctness of words. Still, insofar as possible, perhaps one would speak best if one
spoke with all resembling words — that is, appropriate ones — or as many as possible,
and worst in the opposite case. (435c2-dl, transi. from Joseph 2000b:75)
Socrates calls homoiotēs, the principle of resemblance, both holkē, "attractive" in a
positive sense, and gliskhra, "attractive" in a gluey and sticky way that connotes
shabbiness. On the other hand, he describes synthēkē "convention" as phortikē
"base, low, vulgar" — which is Plato's view of anything appropriate to the popula
tion at large, as opposed to the wise and intelligent few. Democracy was anathema
to Plato and Socrates, for whom the ideal republic would be ruled by a philoso
pher-king. Nevertheless, the Cratylus admits that convention alone is the basis on
which language does operate, even if it should operate through conventions which
are founded upon imitative resemblance. For that is the only guarantee that the lan
guage is not harbouring and propagating false ideas about the world.
Although Plato is remembered as the philosopher of idealism, a belief in de
mocracy is what requires one to be 'idealistic' in the modern vernacular sense of
the word. The democrat must have faith that the collective judgement of the citi
zenry will somehow contrive to be right, even if their choices are made out of self-
interest and prejudice or, what Plato most feared, through rhetorical persuasion. In
politics as in the analysis of language, Plato is first of all a realist, recognizing how
things are before proposing an alternative of how they should be.1 But 'how things
are' is bound up with his negative view of the Athenian citizenry — who, after all,
put Socrates to death — and of mankind generally. Whitney's view of the Ameri
can citizenry, and of his species, is positive, optimistic, idealistic, leaving him un-
afflicted with worries that they might be trying to persuade one another to accept
things that are not in their interest and are using language as their most powerful
tool to that end. Language for him proceeds 'bottom-up' rather than 'top-down'.
That this is clearer in the 1875 book than in its predecessor can be attributed to
the audiences to which each was addressed. The Smithsonian Lectures were for
presentation to a cultural élite. They were engaged in a war of unprecedented fe
rocity in which the abolition of slavery was a key issue, but their laws permitted
their own sons to escape military service by paying to send a substitute, and the
slaves in their own states that had not joined the Confederacy had not been in
cluded in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Many in the Smithsonian audi
ence would need persuading that the democratic vision of language was a sound
basis on which to construct a science, implying as it did that the creolized English
of slaves was every bit as good qua language as the refined English of their mas
ters. By 1875, the United States was a very different place, thriving economically,
secure politically and internationally recognized as the newest great power. Whit
ney's faith in democracy had been vindicated. In this atmosphere he accepted the
invitation to write a book for the wide and international audience which the Inter
national Scientific Series envisaged. Its programme of publishing books simulta
neously in several European languages was unprecedented, and was marred only
by the cost-saving measure of employing anonymous translators of sometimes du
bious ability. The project seems to have freed Whitney from the perceived need to
dwell at length on the point of view opposed to his own, and instead to put his
own vision of language in a direct and forceful way. At the core of this vision is
the nexus:
1. The word 'realist', like 'idealist', is used here in the modern vernacular sense. For Plato, of
course, the ideal is the real.
language
institution not a natural or organic growth
convention arbitrary, not deterministic
communication not bound up with the formulation of thought
community democratic in origin and opeation
social not physical or psychological in nature
(On Whitney's view of the social nature of language, see Chapter 5 below.) Such
an approach to language is not without historical precedent, but it is not generally
found in philosophical considerations of language. Rather, it forms the traditional
underpinning of the rhetorician's understanding of how language functions. Whit
ney's books, the prototype of the modern introductory linguistics textbook, stand
at the conjunction of a number of mid 19th-century literary traditions, including
surveys of the world's languages from a historical point of view, books on the his
tories of words as popularized by Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-
1886), magazine popularizations of German historical phonology and grammar,
and of course Max Müller's lectures, which they often mirror in reverse.
But their most direct affiliation is to textbooks of rhetoric, and perhaps most
directly to the one that was in most widespread use at the time of Whitney's own
education, the Philosophy of Rhetoric by George Campbell (1719-1796), a figure
of the Scottish common sense school who served as Principal of the Marischal
College of Aberdeen (now part of the University of Aberdeen). Alter (1993) has
pointed to the Scottish common-sense component in Whitney's linguistic writings.
Certainly, the central place which Campbell's Rhetoric occupied in 19th-century
American education is attested to by the large number of editions issued by
American publishers well into mid-century.2 Campbell starts from the premise that
"man is much more an active than a contemplative being" (1811 [1776]: 11). This
immediately places the study of man on the plane of empirical observation of ac
tion rather than philosophical speculation about the operations of the mind. Camp
bell's functionalist orientation is evident from the opening of Book I, Chapter 1,
which sets the focus clearly on the ends of linguistic communication (p.13):
2. A partial list: Baltimore: Lucas, n.d. [18th c.]Boston: Thomas B. Wait & Co., and Newbury-
port, Mass.: Thomas & Whipple, n.d. [1809]; Boston: Thomas B. Wait, n.d. [1811]; Baltimore:
Feilding Lucas, Jr., & P. Nicklin, n.d. [1811]; Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, & White, 1818; Bos
ton,  Ewer, 1823; New York: J. Leavitt, 1834; Boston, J. H. Wilkins & Co., 1835; New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1841, 1844, 1845, 1846, 1849, 1851, 1854, 1855, 1858, 1859, 1860, 1868,
1873, 1875 (and other undated editions by them). Many other 'pirated' editions appeared giving
neither publisher nor date. The work's enduring popularity is shown by the existence of a 1911
condensed version "for the exclusive use of Grenville Kleiser's mail course students" (New York
& London: Funk & Wagnalls). A copy of the Wait [1811] edition is in the Library of Whitney's
alma mater, Williams College, and it is that edition which I cite here.
In speaking there is always some end proposed, or some effect which the speaker intends
to produce in the hearer. [...] All the ends of speaking are reducible to four; every speech
being intended to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the pas
sions, or to influence the will.
Further on, Campbell will equate linguistic form ('expression') with the body and
meaning ('sense') with the soul. He calls the soul "the living principle of percep
tion and action", and the body "that system of material organs" by which percep
tion and action are carried out (p.53). He says further (ibid.):
Analogous to this, there are two things in every discourse which principally claim our at
tention, the sense and the expression; or in other words, the thought, and the symbol by
which it is communicated. These may be said to constitute the soul and the body of an
oration, or indeed, of whatever is signified to another by language.
The assumption here — that thought is separable from language, which is the
means by which it is communicated — will be Whitney's assumption as well. And
Whitney's conventionalism finds strong prior expression in the first chapter of
Book  of Campbell's Rhetoric, entitled "The Nature and Characters of the Use
which gives Law to Language", which states (p.183):
Language is purely a species of fashion (for this holds equally of every tongue) in which,
by the general, but tacit consent of the people of a particular state or country, certain
sounds come to be appropriated to certain things, as their signs, and certain ways of in
flecting and combining those sounds come to be established, as denoting the relations
which subsist among the things signified.
Campbell articulates the programme of modern 'descriptive' linguistics in just the
way Whitney will see it (ibid.):
It is of no consequence here to what causes originally these modes or fashions owe their
existence, to imitation, to reflection, to affectation, or to caprice; they no sooner obtain
and become general, than they are laws of the language, and the grammarian's only busi
ness is to note, collect, and methodise them.
The Scot's linguistic democracy shines through when he rebukes Drs Swift and
Johnson for rejecting elements of common usage as 'barbarous' (pp. 184, 194),
since, in Campbell's view, "[I]t were absurd to accuse the language which is
purely what is conformable to general use in speaking and writing, as offending
against general use" (p. 185). But he does not overtly liken language to a democ
racy as Whitney will do. It is the imperial metaphor that he adopts — but with
'use' as its sole empress, making it a democratic entity after all, despite the worst
efforts of those malignant ministers the prescriptive grammarians (p.197):
Thus I have attempted to explain what that use is, which is the sole mistress of language,
and to ascertain the precise import and extent of these her essential attributes, reputable,
national, and present, and to give the directions proper to be observed in searching for the
laws of this empress. In truth, grammar and criticism are but her ministers; and though,
like other ministers, they would sometimes impose the dictates of their own humour upon
the people, as the commands of their sovereign, they are not so often successful in such
attempts, as to encourage the frequent repetition of them.
In carrying these attitudes over into philosophical reflection on language, in an age
when it had been dominated for decades by German and French concerns to link
language structure to the organization of the mind, Whitney created linguistic
modernism. It was helped along by the budding American pragmatism of C. S.
Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910), itself part of the new spirit
of enquiry that had arisen over the course of the debates concerning Darwinian
evolution (see Alter 1999). Whitney, like Darwin, believed that human vocal lan
guage had not developed as an evolutionary end in itself, as Max Müller con
tended, but as a by-product of the evolution of the buccal and laryngeal organs for
the purposes of breathing and ingesting food and drink. The accidentalist position
appealed to Whitney not just because it ran counter to that of his most famous en
emy, but because it appeared to reinforce his own fundamental position that lan
guage arose and operates as a conventional institution rather than a natural growth.
Comparing Whitney with his contemporaries in linguistics, his modernity lies
in his complete eschewal of philosophical-psychological theorizing in favour of a
focus on language as the vehicle of communication, without regard even for what
is being communicated or why or how; his lack of literary references; his democ
ratic republican conception of usage, along with the inevitability of change and the
absence of concern about its results; his scepticism toward whatever is neither
documented nor directly observable; and, particularly in the 1875 book, his dispas
sionate tone, and a sense that he has no general theory of man to defend, even if
such a theory lurks implicitly in his democratic stance.
Saussure's encounter with Whitney

Ninety years after Ferdinand de Saussure's death, the question of his sources
remains an area of lively debate in linguistic historiography. No one contests that
his conceptions of the institutional nature of language and of the need to develop a
synchronic linguistic inquiry were influenced by Whitney, Saussure's own attesta
tions being sufficiently direct. Indeed, the earliest extensive record of his develop
ing theories of general linguistics occurs in seventy pages of notes for a paper he
intended to write in response to an invitation from the American Philological As
sociation to participate in the Whitney Memorial Meeting at Philadelphia, 28 De
cember 1894 (see Godel 1954, 1957:32, 43-46; De Mauro 1972:356-357). The
paper, which remained unfinished, makes clear Saussure' s esteem for Whitney and
the degree to which the American had influenced his thinking. Saussure wrote:
Certain visionaries said: "Language is something entirely extra-human and self-organized,
like a parasitic vegetation spread across the surface of our species". Others: language is
something human, but like a natural function". Whitney said: "Language is a human insti
tution". This shifted the axis of linguistics. (Cited by Godel 1954:59)
What has however been the subject of considerable debate is the matter of when
Saussure felt the impact of Whitney's work, because it bears upon the truth or fal
sity of the statement by Charles Bally (1865-1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870-
1946), editors of Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (hence
forth CLG) that Saussure had stubbornly sought general linguistic principles all his
life:
We have very often heard Ferdinand de Saussure deplore the insufficiency of the princi
ples and methods that characterized the linguistics of the milieu in which his genius grew,
and all his life he searched obstinately for the underlying laws that could orient his think
ing across this chaos. (CLG,p. 7)
Sechehaye (1917: 9) further states that during Saussure's student days at Leipzig
(1876-78) one book — Whitney (1875) — had oriented his thought in the direc
tion that would culminate with the CLG:
In this period, one book had no doubt already exerted a profound influence on his think
ing and pointed him in the right direction: we mean the work of the American Sanskritist
Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language (1875).
Godel (1957:33n.) disputes Sechehaye's statements, contending that the words "no
doubt" indicate a conjecture by Sechehaye rather than information obtained di
rectly from Saussure. He believes that Saussure's epistemological concerns must
actually belong to a later period:
But Saussure must have been very occupied at this time with the courses he was taking
and with his own work [...] and it is not certain that Whitney's books had made a big
splash in Leipzig: Saussure's acquaintance with them could have come somewhat later.
Perhaps it was when he settled in Paris, after the publication of his thesis and his research
trip to Lithuania, i.e. in the autumn of 1880, that he was led to undertake a radical critique
of conceptual assumptions and to search for the principles of a true science of language.
(Godel 1957:33). 6
3. "Quelques illuminés ont dit: « Le langage est une chose tout à fait extra-humaine, et en soi or
ganisée, comme serait une végétation parasite répandue à la surface de notre espèce. » D'autres: «
Le langage est une chose humaine, mais à la façon d'une fonction naturelle. » Whitney a dit: « Le
langage est une institution humaine. » Cela a changé l'axe de la linguistique."
4. "Nous avons bien souvent entendu Ferdinand de Saussure déplorer l'insuffisance des principes et
des méthodes qui caractérisaient la linguistique au milieu de laquelle son génie a grandi, et toute sa
vie il a recherché opiniâtrement les lois directrices qui pourraient orienter sa pensée à travers ce
chaos."
5. "[À] cette époque, un livre avait déjà sans doute exercé une profonde influence sur sa pensée et
l'avait orientée dans la bonne direction: nous voulons parler de l'ouvrage du sanscritiste américain
Whitney, La vie du langage (publié en 1875)."
6. "Mais Saussure devait être alors très occupé par les cours qu'il suivait et par ses travaux person
nels [...] et il n'est pas sûr que les livres de Whitney aient fait grand bruit à Leipzig: Saussure a pu
ne les connaître qu'un peu plus tard. C'est peut-être quand il se fut fixé à Paris, après la publication
De Mauro (1972) takes the side of Sechehaye against Godel, noting that Whitney's
works were in fact extremely well known and respected in German linguistic cir
cles, and that Saussure is known to have used his 1879 Sanskrit grammar. De
Mauro acknowledges that aside from Sechehaye's testimony there is no sure evi
dence that Saussure was already familiar with Whitney's more theoretically ori
ented works. Still, he argues,
It is practically inconceivable that such widely circulated works on such a subject and
with an author whom Saussure's teachers and Saussure himself knew and admired could
have been unknown to him. To accept this ignorance we must moreover cast aside the ex
plicit testimony of Sechehaye. Of course, even without admitting a link to Whitney the
theoretician, the theoretical interests of the young Saussure appear largely proven: but it is
not incautious to trust Sechehaye and to admit that, during his years in Germany, these in
terests in the general theory of language (in 1894 Saussure will say [in a letter to Antoine
Meillet] that they have been in his mind "for a long time") had found their reference point
in the work of the American orientalist and creator of static linguistics. (De Mauro
1972:334)7
De Mauro's arguments do nothing to contradict Godel's recognition that the de
bate is founded upon few factual data:
All this is merely conjecture. Nothing is known of the development of his ideas before
1891, the date of the oldest of the notes. (Godel 1957:33)8
Whitney's European reputation was based upon his personal contacts which the
leaders of the Neogrammarian movement, as well as upon the great respect ac
corded to his work. In 1850 he had gone to Berlin to study three semesters with
Franz Bopp (1791-1867), Richard Lepsius (1810-1884) and Albrecht Weber
(1825-1901), and to Tübingen to study two semesters with Rudolf von Roth
(1821-1895).9 His fellow students in that period included figures such as August
Leskien (1840-1916), who a quarter-century later would translate Whitney (1875)
into German and would be among Saussure's teachers.
de sa thèse et son séjour d'études en Lituanie, donc à l'automne de 1880, qu'il fut amené à une
critique radicale des conceptions admises et à la recherche des principes d'une véritable science du
langage."
7. "II est presque incroyable que des œuvres d'une telle diffusion, sur un tel sujet et d'un auteur
que les maîtres de Saussure et Saussure lui-même connaissaient et admiraient, aient été igorées par
ce dernier. Pour affirmer cette ignorance, il nous faut en outre refuser le témoignage explicite de
Sechechaye. Certes, même sans admettre un rapport avec Whitney théoricien, les intérêts théori
ques du jeune Saussure paraissent largement prouvés: mais il n'est pas hasardeux de faire confiance
à Sechehaye et d'admettre que, dans les années allemandes, ces intérêts pour la théorie générale de
la langue (en 1894 Saussure dira qu'ils sont présents à son esprit «depuis longtemps») avaient
trouvé leur point de référence chez l'orientaliste américain créateur de la linguistique statique."
8. 'Tout cela n'est que conjecture. On ne sait rien du développement de ses idées avant 1891, date
des notes les plus anciennes."
9. This information comes from the entry on Whitney in the 1936 Dictionary ofAmerican Biogra
phy (New York: Scribner's), vol. xx, p.166.
Saussure left Geneva to study in Leipzig in the autumn of 1876, shortly before
his nineteenth birthday. His Souvenirs of his youth and early studies (published by
Godel 1960) relate the tensions that developed early on between him and the
young German professors at Leipzig, that would culminate in what De Mauro
(1972:326-327) has called a 'conspiracy of silence' surrounding the publication of
his Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europé
ennes (Saussure 1879) in December 1878. It was perhaps on account of the un
comfortable situation at Leipzig that Saussure left for Berlin in July 1878, not
returning to Leipzig until the end of 1879. In Berlin Saussure took courses with
two young Privatdozenten, the Sanskritist Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920) and
the Celtologist and Indianist Heinrich Zimmer (1851-1910). Zimmer's name has
been cited in the debate over Saussure's familiarity with Whitney, since Zimmer
prepared the German translation of Whitney (1879).
Unmentioned in this debate was the fact, first noted in Joseph (1988), that
Whitney was in Europe from 25 July 1878 to 27 September 1879. While Godel
and De Mauro might not be expected to have access to the exact dates (which I
determined from Whitney's diaries, kept faithfully from 1843 to 1893), the preface
to Whitney (1879) is signed "Gotha. July 1879". He had travelled there with his
family in order to finish his Sanskrit grammar, to consult with Berthold Delbrück
(1842-1922) and others, to oversee Zimmer's translation (made even as Whitney
was composing the book, and published simultaneously with the English version
by the same publisher) and the correction of proofs. Despite a hectic schedule and
repeated bouts of ill health, all recorded in the diaries, he accomplished the goal.
After landing in Europe on 25 July 1878 the Whitneys travelled about before
settling down in Berlin on 9 October. There they remained until 4 April 1879,
when they removed to Dresden. As noted above, it was in July 1878 that Saussure
moved from Leipzig to Berlin, where he stayed until the end of 1879.
Joseph (1988) presented proof of a personal meeting between Saussure and
Whitney during the period of their joint residence in Berlin, in the form of a letter
written by Saussure and housed in the collection of Whitney's family papers at
Yale. The letter, which had long escaped notice because Saussure is not among the
"noteworthy correspondents" listed in the Whitney collection catalogue (obviously
drawn up without the input of anyone remotely familiar with linguistics!), is re
published in the appendix to this chapter. It shows that the two met within a few
days prior to Whitney's departure from Berlin, which his diary records as taking
place on 4 April 1879.
The letter is dated 7 April, three days after the Whitneys had left Berlin. There
is no indication as to whether Saussure sent it to Whitney's Dresden address, or to
the Berlin address whence it was forwarded, in which case it might not have
reached Whitney for some time. The letter, like the meeting with Saussure, goes
unmentioned in Whitney's diary, the entries to which are generally short and con
cerned mostly with social events, the weather, and Whitney's progress in his work.
After spending 17-19 April at Leipzig, the Whitneys went to Gotha, staying
there till 21 July, by which time the Sanskrit grammar had been completed. On 29
June Whitney attended a "Jena-Halle-Leipzig" meeting at Kosen at which it is
unlikely Saussure was present. If it had not reached him sooner, Saussure's mis
sive could have been in the "pile of letters" Whitney received upon reaching a
planned stop in Switzerland on 8 August. The Whitneys were in Geneva from 5-9
September, though again the diary gives no indication of further contact with
Saussure.
The next week Whitney was in Paris, "where met M. Regnier & attended
meeting of Academy, seeing Laboulaye, Bréal, Bergaigne, Gaston Paris, Hamy,
Thurot, Mariette, & many others. Bréal brought me home" (diary entry, 12 Sep
tember).10 The Whitneys sailed from Le Havre on 27 September, arriving in Amer
ica on 8 October. I have read Whitney's journal for the entire trip and for some
days beyond the return, but have found no mention of Saussure.
The journal is somewhat helpful in pinning down possible dates and occasions
for the meeting. Whitney was ill during most of March 1879 and did not get out a
great deal until toward the end of the month. On 26 March he "called on sundry
people" before leaving on a short trip to Potsdam. He did not return until the 27th,
and probably saw no one that day. On the 28th he saw Heinrich Zimmer, and on
the 29th he attended a lecture at the Sing-Akademie by Richard Gosche (1824-
1889), author of an 1847 thesis on Armenian and 'Aryan' who later extended his
Aryanist interests to become an expert on Richard Wagner. On the 30th, a Sunday,
he called on Karl Abel (1837-1906) and Lepsius; on the 31st he "made calls for 3
hrs.". On 1 April he visited the Albrecht Webers, on the 2nd Abel, Lepsius, and
Georg Curtius (1820-1885). Subsequent dates are rather too close to 7 April for
Saussure to have written on that date of a meeting "il y a quelques jours."
As noted earlier, Zimmer was at this time not only Whitney's translator, but
Saussure's teacher. Given that Saussure's relations with most of the senior scholars
with whom Whitney was in contact were cool or non-existent, it seems most likely
that the meeting took place on 28 March, when Whitney saw Zimmer. The second
10. The institution was the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, to which Whitney had been
elected a corresponding member. The men named, mostly linguists and philologists, were Adolphe
Regnier (1804-1884), Edouard Laboulaye (1811-1883), Michel Bréal (1832-1915), Abel Ber
gaigne (1838-1888), Gaston Paris (1839-1903), Ernest-Théodore Hamy (1842-1908), Charles
Thurot ( 1823-1882) and Auguste-Edouard Mariette ( 1821-1881). The name of Hamy, mentioned
in note 13 of the previous chapter in connection with Henri de Saussure, is given mistakenly as
"Henry" in Joseph (1988); unable to decipher Whitney's handwritten 'm', I accepted the reason
able suggestion of the editor of the journal in which my article appeared that Victor Henry (1850-
1907) might be the person in question. A later check of the Académie's membership at the time
made clear that it could only have been Hamy.
likeliest occasion would be the three hours of calls to persons unrecorded (who
may have included Zimmer) on the 31st. At any rate, it seems safe to assume that
the meeting took place between 28 March and 2 April 1879.
In case Whitney had forgotten about the young Genevan, his memory would be
refreshed shortly after his return to America, through a letter from A. H. Sayce
(1845-1933), Max Müller's assistant and successor at Oxford, with whom Whit
ney was evidently on good terms. The penultimate paragraph of this letter, dated
"Queen's Coll., Oxford, Nov. 17, 1879," reads:
Have you yet read de Saussure's book? He is a prodigy seemingly, not being more than
twenty years of age. His book seems to me an exceedingly clever one, in spite of the faults
due to haste & youth, & an exceedingly jejune style. The substance of it has been given
with great clearness & neatness by Havet.
From Saussure's letter one may infer that Whitney had indeed read the Mémoire
and made notes concerning it, which he offered to give Saussure at their meeting.
The other two mentions of Saussure I have found in letters to Whitney were to
come from his two most faithful correspondents, his former students Charles R.
Lanman (1850-1941), who held the chair of Sanskrit at Harvard and would be re
sponsible for the sending of invitations to the Whitney Memorial Meeting, and
Maurice Bloomfield (1855-1928), Leonard's uncle, who taught at Johns Hopkins
University and was to be the second president of the Linguistic Society of America
in 1926. The Bloomfield letter, dated "Baltimore, Dec. 28/81," begins as follows;
the Proceedings referred to are those of the American Oriental Society:
I have received the package of 'proceedings'; about ten of them I shall distribute among
personal friends here and abroad; the rest to younger scholars, some of them hardly
known to you. I mention some of them, to whom you might otherwise have sent a copy:
Verner, Collitz, Mahlow, Hoffory, Güterbock, Fröhde, Bechtel, Hartmann, Bury, Saus
sure, Paul, Steinthal etc. To older scholars or to Sanskritists proper I shall send no copies;
as I suppose that they see the 'Proceedings' anyhow.
11. Yale University, W. D. Whitney Family Papers, Box 29, File 819. The reference is to Louis
Havet's (1849-1925) 1879 review of Saussure's Mémoire.
12. Yale University, W. D. Whitney Family Papers, Box 31, File 896. Those named, in addition to
Saussure, are Karl Verner (1846-1896), Hermann Collitz (1855-1935), Georg Heinrich Mahlow
(1855-1930), Julius Hoffory (1855-1897), Bruno G. Güterbock (1858-1940), Friedrich Fröhde
(1834-1895), Friedrich Bechtel (1855-1924), Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), John Bagnell
Bury (1861-1927), HermannPaul (1846-1921) and Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899). Güterbock
and Fröhde are today obscure figures. Together with Rudolf Thurneysen (1857-1940), Güterbock
had that year published an index and glossary to the Irish grammar of Johann Kaspar Zeuss (1806-
1856) (Indices glossarum et vocabolarum hibernicorum quae in Grammaticae celticae editione
altera explanantur, Lipsiae: Impensis S. Hirzelii, 1881), and the phonology section of his Königs
berg doctoral thesis on Latin loanwords in Old Irish appeared in 1882 (Bemerkungen über die
lateinischen Lehnwörter im Irischen, 1. Teil: Zur Lautlehre, Leipzig: Pöschel & Trepte). His son
Hans Gustav Güterbock (1908-2000) became a prominent University of Chicago Hittite specialist
and served as President of the American Oriental Society in 1961-62. Fröhde, an inspector of
schools at Liegnitz in Prussia (now Legnica in Poland), had an article in nearly every volume of the
Bloomfield had spent the 1879-80 academic year studying in Berlin and Leipzig,
and must have become well acquainted with Saussure at that time. A letter from
Bloomfield to Daniel C. Gilman (1831-1908) president of Johns Hopkins Univer
sity, dated "Leipzig, May 1st 1880",13 recounts that Bloomfield, who was born in
Austria, at the town of Bielitz, had gone over with the intention of spending the
year in Vienna, but finding the department there to be "not of the highest order," he
moved to Berlin to work with Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901) and Albrecht Weber,
then went to Leipzig for the second semester: a move that coincides exactly with
the end of Saussure's stay in Berlin and his return to Leipzig at the end of 1879 (De
Mauro 1972:327). Unfortunately no documentation has surfaced to indicate
whether Bloomfield knew Saussure.
The Lanman letter, dated "Cambridge, Aug. 9,1882," mentions Saussure's re
cently published doctoral thesis:
I quite forgot to ask you-if you had F. de Saussure's De l'emploi du genitif absolu en
Sanscrit. I own it, and will gladly send it with the other parcel.
I sifted carefully through the thousands of letters in the Whitney collection from
1878 through his death in 1894, as well as the letters of tribute which followed his
death, and other mail lasting into the 20th century, and found no correspondence
between Saussure and Whitney other than Saussure's letter of 7 April 1879. In
reading or at least scanning the letters written to Whitney by linguists and which
therefore might be expected to contain mention of Saussure, I found only the three
cited above.
Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen edited by Adalbert Bezzenberger (1851—
1922), and also published regularly in other journals including the Zeitschrift für vergleichende
Sprachforschung. Most of his contributions were on matters of Greco-Latin etymology, though he
also wrote on aspects of Sanskrit and Proto-Indo-European grammar. Upon Fröhde's death,
Bezzenberger not only wrote his obituary for the Liegnitzer Tageblatt (11 juli 1895), but paid him
the unusual tribute of writing a second obituary and publishing it, together with a bibliography of
his writings and seven of his previously unpublished articles, in his Beiträge (vol. 21 (1896), 317-
330), which did not normally carry obituaries or other personalia. The inclusion here of Bury, who
later achieved great renown as a historian, is surprising because he was only twenty years old at the
time. He had however made his name in 1881, the year before his graduation from Trinity College
Dublin, by co-editing Euripides' Hippolytus with Sir John Pentland Mahaffey (1839-1919), and by
publishing studies in classical and comparative philology that raised the hackles of some of his
elders, notably Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924), the other eminence grise of philological
studies in America along with his friend and close associate Whitney. Gildersleeve, who had served
in the Confederate Army, was appointed Professor of Greek at Johns Hopkins upon the Univer
sity's founding in 1875, and in 1880 founded the American Journal of Philology. Bury and Gilder
sleeve engaged in an extended polemic over the odes of Pindar, the older scholar's speciality in
which the younger had dared to tread (see e.g. Gildersleeve 1890). Bury had studied Sanskrit under
Theodor Benfey (1809-1881) in Göttingen (where Gildersleeve had studied in the early 1850s) and
perhaps crossed paths with Bloomfield in Germany (see top of this page).
13. Daniel C. Gilman Papers, Ms. 1, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore.
14. Yale University, W. D. Whitney Family Papers, Box 32, File 924.
If the young Swiss scholar failed to make much of an impression on Whitney

— whose nature was by all reports benevolent and generous, but who after all was
very pressed to complete his work despite recurring bouts of illness — it is perhaps
more surprising that Saussure nowhere recorded their meeting, for instance in his
notes for the Whitney Memorial Meeting Paper; his Souvenirs end just too early, in
1878. Nevertheless, Saussure's letter to Whitney confirms that De Mauro's, and
not Godel's, conjectures were correct: Whitney's impact upon Saussure dates from
the latter's student days, and was heightened by the occasion of a personal meeting.
While the letter does not prove Sechehaye's statement that it was the theoretically-
oriented Whitney (1875) which principally influenced Saussure in this period, it
strongly supports the statement's factual accuracy regarding the Whitney-Saussure
bond and makes it easier to accept at face value Sechehaye's view that Saussure's
interest in general synchronic linguistics was already taking shape in this earliest
phase of his career.
Saussure pro and contra Whitney

As shown by the quote from Saussure's memorial paper on Whitney (p.32
above), it was the American's insistence on the institutional nature of language that
he saw as cardinal. Its relative lack of prominence in the 1875 book suggests that,
at least by 1894, Saussure was familiar with Whitney (1867) as well. But when we
examine Whitney's writings for links with Saussure's lectures, the most striking
passages are in the 1875 book, particularly the first two chapters with their remarks
on signs and arbitrariness (topics for which there are however closer antecedents,
on which see further Joseph forthcoming), and the end of the eighth chapter, which
returns to consideration of the linguistic sign to establish the force of the commu
nity in maintaining it and the impotence of the individual conscious will to change
it. Before looking at what Saussure seems to have taken away from this discussion,
I want to consider three points on which he clearly dissented from Whitney, one of
them relatively trivial but another representing a major theoretical shift.
The small point concerns the title of the French translation of Life and Growth
of Language, which was La vie du langage. Without mentioning the author by
name, Saussure criticizes this title for propagating the false but powerful and wide
spread view that language is a kind of living organism. The criticism applies
equally to the English title. As noted earlier, Whitney will explain that he takes the
'life' of language to mean its acquisition by native-speaking children. Saussure has
a point: it is mildly deceptive to give a book a title that attracts a wide audience,
only to reveal within the covers that the obvious expectation to which the title
gives rise is being upset.15
15. There is however a venerable tradition of doing precisely this, and I am not entirely sure that
the present book, whose subtitle betrays no suspicion that the identity of 'American linguistics' is
More significant is Saussure's inclination to temper Whitney's views on human

vocal language being an evolutionary accident.
Thus for Whitney, who assimilates languages to social institutions of the same sort as any
other, it is by chance, simply for convenience, that we use the vocal apparatus as the in
strument of languages: men could just as well have chosen gesture and used visual images
instead of acoustic images. No doubt this thesis is too absolute; languages are not social
institutions comparable at all points to others ([...]); more-over, Whitney goes too far
when he says that our choice has fallen by chance upon the vocal organs; it was actually
in some sense imposed on us by nature. (CLG, p.26)16
Part of the problem here is the confusion Saussure sees between what he will dis
tinguish as langue, a particular language system like English or French, and lan
gage, the human language faculty including its production and reception. Whitney,
the apostle of linguistic arbitrariness, is wrong to maintain that langage has fallen
arbitrarily to the vocal organs, in Saussure' s view; but this is of minor importance
compared to his correct insistence on treating langue as a system of arbitrary con
ventions.
But on the essential point, the American linguist seems to us to be right: languages are
conventions, and the nature of the sign for which the convention has been agreed upon is
indifferent. The question of the vocal apparatus is thus secondary in the problem of lan
guage. (ibid.)
The widest and by far the most important gap between Saussure and Whitney is on
the question, closely related to the evolutionary one, of whether thought precedes
language. Not only was this the crux of the Whitney-Max Müller polemics, it was,
besides spelling reform, the most widely debated linguistic issue within English-
language culture in the second half of the 19th century. The two positions on the
question were inseparable from how 'thought' itself was conceived — as 'con
sciousness' , or more generally as mental experience. Since the late 18th century the
German intellectual tradition had been focussed on consciousness, which is essen
tially bound up with (inner) narrative. What one is conscious of is what one can
to be put into question, does not fall within it. One of the boldest examples I know of is the 1892
publication by Max Müller of a book entitled Theosophy, blatantly aimed at the large readership of
the Theosophical Society (on which see further Chapter 4), but letting it be known at the end of the
first chapter that it has nothing directly to do with theosophy as the term was commonly used.
16. "Ainsi pour Whitney, qui assimile la langue à une institution sociale au même titre que toutes
les autres, c'est par hasard, pour de simples raisons de commodité, que nous nous servons de
l'appareil vocal comme instrument de la langue : les hommes auraient pu aussi bien choisir le geste
et employer des images visuelles au lieu d'images acoustiques. Sans doute cette thèse est trop ab
solue ; la langue n'est pas une institution sociale en tous points semblables aux autres ([...]); de
plus, Whitney va trop loin quand il dit que notre choix est tombé par hasard sur les organes vo
caux ; il nous étaient [sic] bien en quelque sorte imposés par la nature."
17. "Mais sur le point essentiel, le linguiste américain nous semble avoir raison : la langue est une
convention, et la nature du signe dont on est convenu est indifférente. La question de l'appareil
vocal est donc secondaire dans le problème du langage."
make explicit in language. Starting from this basis, it is easy to see why thought
and language appear to be not merely inseparable, but identical. If, however, the
starting point is not consciousness but sensory experience — which has been at the
centre of British (and some French) concerns since the 17th century — then ques
tions about 'thought' are located prior to consciousness, in the simple ability to call
up sensory images in the mind. Much of the debate boils down to how 'thought'
should be defined, as starting with sensory memory itself or with the 'awareness'
of such memory, for which symbolic expression is the only manifestation, and ver
bal expression the best evidence.
As Whitney conceives of the institutional nature of language, it must be the
case that thought exists first, and languages follow as arbitrary systems for encod
ing thought. If thought and language come into being simultaneously, as Max
Müller insists, then the link between the two, and thus between words and their
meanings, is not arbitrary but natural. Already in antiquity Socrates in the Cratylus
demonstrated why such naturalness cannot be maintained, and all the subsequent
recorded history of languages has borne out his demonstration. The connection be
tween word and meaning, and between language and thought, must be arbitrary, so
it follows that thought must precede language.
It is at this final logical step that Saussure believes Whitney got it wrong — but
also that he had provided the solution.
To make it evident that languages are pure institutions, Whitney veryrightlyinsisted on
the arbitrariness of signs; and he thereby placed linguistics on its true axis. But he did not
follow it all the way through, and did not see that this arbitrariness separates languages
from all other institutions. (CLG, p. 110)
If we take arbitrariness seriously, and make it the first principle of the linguistic
sign, then the word and its meaning can come into existence simultaneously with
out this implying any deterministic connection between them. Saussure believes,
like Max Müller, that the meanings of words are brought into existence when the
word is created and not before; but the creation of the word is nothing more than
the establishment of an arbitrary institutional link between a sound pattern and a
meaning. The second fact, Whitney's insight, trumps the first without the first be
ing wrong.
But what is the nature of that 'institutional link' ? Saussure seems to have found
the answer to this crucial question in Chapter 8 of Whitney (1875). Whitney here
provides his rationale for the creation of language, basing it on two very modern
18. "Pour bien faire sentir que la langue est une institution pure, Whitney a fort justement insisté
sur le caractère arbitraire des signes; et par là, il a placé la linguistique sur son axe véritable. Mais
il n'est pas allé jusqu'au bout et n'a pas vu que ce caractère arbitraire sépare radicalement la langue
de toutes les autres institutions."
concepts, communication and association, and a modern scientific criterion, sim

plicity of explanation, imbued with particular value in the post-Darwinian context.
Virtually, the object aimed at is to find a sign which may henceforth be linked by associa
tion closely to the conception, and used to represent it in communication and in the proc
esses of mental action. To attempt more than this would be useless indeed, when the tie by
which each individual holds and uses his whole body of expression is only this same one
of association. (Whitney 1875:140)
'Association' had become a term of art on account of its central role in the work of
Alexander Bain (1818-1903), the main figure in English-language psychology of
the mid-to-late 19th century. In Bain's theory, association is the primary means by
which the mind works. The very simplicity of the theory was perhaps its main at
tractions — among other things, it made it possible to comprehend how the human
mind might have evolved from the animal. It had a further appeal for Whitney, in
that a mind that operates by association can readily be conceived of as pre-
linguistic. When Whitney comments that "To attempt more than this would be use
less indeed", it is because explanation by association, as opposed to deeper Max
Müller-style rationalization, is all that the scientific psychology of the day requires
or justifies; but there is perhaps also a sense of reconcilability with Darwin, and
with the economy of effort that makes a particular Darwinian account more con
vincing than the alternatives.
This part of Whitney's Chapter 8 lays the foundation for the most famous sec
tion of the CLG, which is Part 1, Chapter 1, "Nature of the Linguistic Sign". The
rest of Whitney's Chapter 8 provides the basis for the next CLG chapter, "Immuta
bility and Mutability of the Sign". Whitney points out that the processes of lan
guage-making and language change are not carried out in a fully 'conscious' way.
In Joseph (2000c) I have discussed Whitney's use of 'conscious' action, already
slightly old-fashioned in his day, to refer to actions carried out for a specific in
tended purpose, rather than in the more modern sense of being available for intro
spection. Although the creation and use of language are directed towards the
general functional purposes of communicating and getting things done, no word is
created or altered with a more particular aim than that in mind. In this connection,
Whitney states that, indeed, the individual as a 'conscious' subject creates nothing
in language. The work, paradoxically, is carried out by the community, acting
through the individual.
[E]very person is conscious of his inability to effect a change in language by his own au
thority and arbitrarily [...]. [I]n a sense, it is not the individual, but the community, that
makes and changes language. [...] The community's share in the work is dependent on and
conditioned by the simple fact that language is not an individual possession, but a social.
It exists ([...]), not only partly, but primarily, for the purpose of communication; its other
uses come after and in the train of this. To the great mass of its speakers, it exists con
sciously for communication alone; this is the use that exhibits and commends itself to
every mind. That would have no right to be called a language which only one person un
derstood and could use [...]. Acceptance by some community, though but a limited one, is
absolutely necessary in order to convert any one's utterances into speech. Hence arise the
influences which guide and restrain individual action on language. [...] Our recognition of
the community as final tribunal which decides whether anything shall be language or not,
does not, then, in the least contravene what has been claimed above respecting individual
agency. Some one must lead the way for the rest to follow; if they do not follow, he falls
back or stands alone. The community cannot act save by the initiative of its single mem
bers; they can accomplish nothing save by its cooperation. (Whitney 1875:148-151)
Saussure will not contradict this view but will carry its logic a step further, to say
that, in fact, the community does not actively or rationally 'make and change lan
guage' any more than the individual does.
If, with respect to the idea it represents, the signifier appears to be freely chosen, then, on
the contrary, with respect to the linguistic community which uses it, it is not free, it is im
posed. The social mass is not consulted, and the signifier chosen by the language could
not be replaced by another. This fact, which seems to envelope a contradiction, could be
called familiarly "the forced card." One says to the language: "Choose!," but adds: "It'll
be this sign and no other." Not only would an individual be incapable, if he wanted to, of
modifying in any way whatsoever the choice which has been made, but the mass itself
cannot exercise its sovereignty over a single word; it is bound to the language just as it is.
(CLG 104)19
The principal difference from Whitney is the idea of the unconscious mind, under
stood by Saussure as something that can be active and deliberate in its effects, and
socially shared. It is tempting to characterize this as a continental, 'rationalist' con
ception of mind, where Whitney's owes more to the British empiricist tradition.20
From Saussure's perspective, however, what mattered most was that the uncon
scious so conceived provided the systematicity that Whitney lacked, as Saussure
lamented in his draft notes on Sechehaye's 1908 book on the "programme and
methods of theoretical linguistics":
19. "Si par rapport à l'idée qu'il représente, le signifiant apparaît comme librement choisi, en re
vanche, par rapport à la communauté linguistique qui l'emploie, il n'est pas libre, il est imposé. La
masse sociale n'est point consultée, et le signifiant choisi par la langue, ne pourrait pas être rem
placé par un autre. Ce fait, qui semble envelopper une contradiction, pourrait être appelé fa
milièrement « la carte forcée ». On dit à la langue: « Choisissez! » mais on ajoute: « Ce sera ce
signe et non un autre. » Non seulement un individu serait incapable, s'il le voulait, de modifier en
quoi que ce soit le choix qui a été fait, mais la masse elle-même ne peut exercer sa souveraineté sur
un seul mot; elle est liée à la langue telle qu'elle est." The source materials suggest that Saussure's
actual words were even more truculent than this, the Editors' version.
20. Note however that the Scottish common-sense branch of British thought, which dominated
American education in Whitney's formative years and, as championed by Victor Cousin (1792-
1867), simultaneously defined the philosophical mainstream in the French-speaking world, assigns
such centrality to language in the formation of thought that it might accord better with Saussure's
position than with Whitney's on this score.
The American Whitney whom I revere never said a single word on these subjects that
wasn't right but, like all the others, he never imagines that a language demands sys-
tematicity. (Saussure 2002 [ 1908ms.] :259)21
The quest for such systematicity would give rise to the late developments in Saus
sure's thought that were the direct springboard for 20th-century structuralism.
Saussure' s reading of Whitney, I am suggesting, was driven less by a rationalist
than by a modernist imperative. Still, at least one Francophone reader can be
shown to have interpreted Whitney (1875) in a much more 'continental' way than
its author intended. I refer to the anonymous French translator of the book, whose
version, La vie du langage, appeared in the same year as the original. The transla
tion of Chapter 8 is unfaithful to Whitney at two key points. Where he writes
One great reason why men are led to deny the agency of the human will in the changes of
speech is that they see so clearly that it does not work consciously toward that purpose.
(Whitney 1875:146-147)
the translator has altered this to:
One of the great reasons why men are led to deny the action of the human will in the de
velopment of language is that they are not conscious of this action working within them
selves. (Whitney 1877 [1875]:122)22
Even if the translator can be forgiven for failing to comprehend the somewhat un
usual sense in which Whitney uses 'conscious', the sentence he or she has pro
duced makes no real sense within the context. People might very well be conscious
of wilfully initiating a linguistic change within themselves — but that is neither
here nor there. Whitney's point is that the goal of the process is not change per se,
but improved expression and communication. The second departure occurs in the
translation of the passage quoted at length on the preceding page, where Whitney
wrote of a language that
To the great mass of its speakers, it exists consciously for communication alone; this is
the use that exhibits and commends itself to every mind. (Whitney 1875:149)
This the translator has mangled almost beyond recognition:
For the human mass, it indeed exists only for this [communication], and only men who
think are conscious of the role that language plays in the depths of the mind. (Whitney
1877 [1875] :124)23
21. "L'Américain Whitney queje révère n'a jamais dit un seul mot sur les mêmes sujets qui ne fût
juste mais, comme tous les autres, il ne songe pas que la langue ait besoin d'une sytématique." This
passage wasfirstpublished, with the emphasis dropped and punctuation altered, by Godel (1957:
51). On Sechehaye (1908) and Saussure's reaction to it, see further Joseph (2000c:318-321).
22. "Une des grandes raisons pour lesquelles les hommes sont conduits à nier l'action de la volonté
humaine dans le développement du langage, c'est qu'ils n'ont point conscience de cette action
s'exerçant en eux-mêmes."
23. 'Tour la masse humaine, elle n'existe même que pour cela, et les hommes qui pensent ont seuls
conscience du rôle que le langage joue au fond de l'esprit."
It is hard to know what any reader could have made of this, other than to infer that
Whitney divided humankind into a vast 'mass' who do not think and who are un
der the delusion that language exists solely for communication, and a select few
who do think, and are aware of the truth about language, that it lays the foundation
for the mind itself. The translator was obviously unable to comprehend the possi
bility that an author might cite what the 'great mass' thinks in support of an analy
sis, as Whitney has done. The translator takes it for granted that the masses must
always be deluded, and only the enlightened have access to the truth, and misreads
Whitney accordingly. Adding insult to injury, the translator then identifies the
truth about language as, in effect, the view of Max Müller, to which Whitney was
adamantly opposed.
We do not know for certain what version or versions of Whitney's work Saus
sure knew. It might have been the English original, the title of which he sometimes
cited; or the French translation, the title of which is the one he criticized, without
mentioning its significant difference from the original; or the German translation
by his teacher Leskien, which appeared in 1876, the year he began his studies at
Leipzig.24 In so far as Saussure perceived Whitney's thought as sometimes at odds
with itself, the French translation may have been part of the problem. But to Saus
sure's credit, even when he rebuked Whitney for failing to follow his insight
through to its logical conclusion, he acknowledged that Whitney's framing of the
issue was what made it possible for Saussure himself to make the necessary fur
ther progress.
From Whitney Saussure took away what would become the basis of modern
European synchronic linguistics, the language system as a social institution made
up of arbitrary signs, belonging to the community rather than to the individual,
who only partakes of it. The further extensions Saussure brought to this approach
to language will be discussed in the next chapter, where it will also be seen that
Saussure's linguistics, directly or indirectly, had a substantial impact on the devel
opment of American linguistics from the 1920s onward. Given how much of 'the
American Whitney's' intellectual heritage had itself come from east of the Atlan
tic, it should be clear that attempts to assign national identities to versions of mod
ern linguistics must always be tenuous, and the temptation to explain the thought
of a particular linguist in terms of his national culture must be, not resisted, but
indulged with caution, taking care to ground the explanation in solid textual evi
dence.
24. In his third and final course on general linguistics, lecture of 4 November 1910, Saussure is
recorded by one student (Dégallier) as refering to Whitney's books (plural) "Principes de la lin
guistique et Vie du langage", by another (Constantin) to Whitney's book (singular) "Les principes
et la vie du langage". Note that the German title keeps the "and Growth" (und Wachsthum) of the
English, which the French title drops.
APPENDIX
Text of letter from Ferdinand de Saussure to William Dwight Whitney
(Yale University, W. D. Whitney Family Papers, Box 28, File 791)
Genève, le 7 Avril
Monsieur,
Vous avez eu l'obligeance de me dire il y a quelques jours, à Berlin, que je recevrais
de vous un de vos écrits ainsi que quelques notes concernant mon mémoire sur les
voyelles. Je n'ai pu à mon grand regret me présenter en personne pour [page break] les
prendre, empêché que j'étais par une indisposition qui m'a forcé ensuite à revenir
brusquement à Genève. J'attache un grand prix à ces documents venant de vous, Mon
sieur, et si j'osais vous prier de me les faire parvenir à mon adresse actuelle, je vous en
serais infiniment reconnaissant.
Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l'hommage de mon respectueux dévouement.
Genève, Cité 24.
(Added in pencil in another hand, after the salutation: "[WDW]". Added in ink in a third hand,
sideways in margin: "F. de Saussure Geneva, Apr. 7/79".)
TRANSLATION
Geneva, 7 April
Sir,
You were so obliging as to tell me a few days ago, in Berlin, that I would receive
from you one of your writings along with some notes concerning my dissertation on the
vowels. To my great regret I was unable to present myself in person to [page break] get
them, prevented as I was by an indisposition which subsequently forced me to return
abruptly to Geneva. I attach great value to these documents coming from you, Sir, and if
I dared ask you to have them sent to me at my present address, I would be infinitely
grateful to you for it.
Please accept, Sir, the expression of my respectful devotion.
Geneva, Cité 24.
CHAPTER THREE
20TH-CENTURY LINGUISTICS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE
'Progress' and 'science' in linguistics

In order to evaluate and understand the 20th century with any sort of objectiv
ity, we need to extend our perspective backward in time. Historical continuities
with the 19th and earlier centuries give a firmer grounding to judgements concern
ing the 20th. For linguistics, such continuities are undeniable: the founders of
20th-century linguistic theory, trained in that of the late 19th, rejected few of its
fundamental principles but sought instead to extend their scope. Looking back
over the whole of the past 200 years, a still grander continuity emerges, one that
sweeps over and above the paradigmatic and methodological breaks and splinters
that occupy our attention most of the time. It is the gradual realignment of the
study of language away from moral science, philosophy, aesthetics, rhetoric and
philology, and in the direction of the natural sciences — first botany, biology,
chemistry and comparative anatomy; then geology; and finally, by the 20th cen
tury, physics, by way of mathematics.
With this has come a steady elimination of human will from the object of
study, the necessary condition for any 'science' in the modern sense. Over these
same two centuries science has become virtually synonymous with academic pres
tige, as measured by institutionalization (creation of departments and positions,
launching of journals, organizing of conferences), financial support from govern
mental and other grant-giving agencies, and public recognition. Not surprisingly,
then, linguists came to equate progress with scientificization.
When in the first part of the 20th century the great achievements of the 19th-
century forebears were summarized, it was in terms of the new methodological
rigour they introduced into the analysis of language, and of their success in aban
doning formerly connected fields, such as philology and mythology—rather than,
say, how many more languages and linguistic phenomena were described and ac
counted for than previously, or how far language teaching had advanced. In other
words, progress was defined as the acquisition of autonomous status for linguistic
science. As for the mid-20th-century rapprochement with mathematics and phys
ics, it was carried out overtly, with 'mathematical' (later called computational)
linguistics emerging as a significant subdiscipline.
Linguistic 'mainstreams'
These developments did not affect all work on language equally. Rather, the
'mainstream' was progressively redefined in the direction of autonomous enquiry.
By mainstream is meant the group having the greatest institutional prestige, with
no implication that other approaches were 'backwater' in any sense other than the
hold they possessed on the major journals, support agencies, academic depart
ments, and public attention. Areas the mainstream deserted continued to interest
other linguists, sometimes even to inspire new disciplines like general semantics,
philosophy of language and critical theory, to name just three. But in effect, 'lin
guistics' has come to designate a more or less autonomous approach to language,
and this brief overview will not depart significantly from the traditional main
stream focus.
Defining linguistics was in fact the main goal of the book generally credited
with shaping the 20th-century linguistic agenda: the Cours de linguistique gé
nérale (CLG) of Ferdinand de Saussure. As discussed in the preceding chapter,
Saussure established the framework for the 'synchronic' (non-historical) study of
the language system, or langue, conceived as the socially-shared system of signs
deposited in the mind of each speaker. Nevertheless, during at least the first quar
ter of the 20th century the study of language continued to be dominated by the his
torical enquiry which had earned such prestige in the 19th century. Only gradually
did synchronic linguistics gain practitioners and institutional acceptance, until
eventually historical linguistics was itself partially marginalized and fundamen
tally refashioned in the light of synchronic findings.
From the 1930s through the 1950s the mainstream of linguistics was defined
by various American and European 'schools' (understood as groups of linguists
sharing some basic common assumptions about problems and methodology, while
often disagreeing on particular matters) which are today grouped together as
'structuralist'. All of them had some greater or lesser intellectual debt to Saussure
and to the groundwork laid by historical-comparative study. From the 1960s to the
present, the mainstream has been defined by the 'generativist' approaches which
originated in the work of Noam Chomsky (b.1928). But as the 21st century begins,
the Chomsky-centred linguistic universe of the 1960s-1990s has dissolved. Lin
guistics has splintered into a panoply of well-entrenched approaches that are
roughly equal in prestige, and the boundaries of the field have become nebulous.
Language theory before World War I

By 1900 the firm hold which historical grammar had held upon mainstream
status in linguistic science was being challenged by several adjacent fields of
study. Even within the historical sphere linguists did not agree which if any of the
20TH-CENTURY LINGUISTICS IN AMERICA AND EUROPE 49
leads provided by various versions of psychology should be followed. This section

surveys what part of the general linguistics territory each field claimed as its own.
Historical linguistics. By 1890 the mainstream of the field was occupied by
the approach which had been established around 1876 by the Junggrammatiker
(Neogrammarians) of the University of Leipzig, whose work followed up on that
of August Schleicher (1821-1868). It excluded virtually all manifestations of lan
guage except historical phonology, morphology, and syntax (in descending order
of attention), and was primarily concerned with the Indo-European family and par
ticular subgroupings within it. Phonology and morphology covered that part of
language that could be catalogued as positive facts; syntax, on the other hand, had
to be stated in relational terms, and for most known languages it involved a con
siderable volitional factor. Schleicher had excluded syntax from linguistic 'sci
ence' on the grounds that it was subject to free will. Although syntax continued to
be of marginal importance relative to phonology, some important work in this area
was carried out, notably by Berthold Delbrück.
By focussing their enquiry in this way the Neogrammarians succeeded bril
liantly in meeting the criteria for progress of their time. It seemed to many that
they had done all that was possible for a true science of language, as defined ac
cording to the dominant ideology of positivism. This is the impression one takes
away from the first major historiographical study of linguistics in the modern pe
riod, Holger Pedersen's (1867-1953) Linguistic Science in the 19th Century
(1931). But this progress was gained at the price of ignoring 'general' linguistic
theory and leaving most aspects of language to the enquiry of adjacent fields. In
particular, psychology annexed most aspects of language production and compre
hension early on, a move hastened by the enormous influence of Wilhelm von
Humboldt's posthumously published treatise on language structure and mental
development (1836). Even at the height of the Neogrammarian ascendance, dis
senting voices could be heard within the historical domain — most notably that of
Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), who launched a major attack against the Leipzig
mainstream in 1885.
Psychology. 'Classical' psychology of the mid-19th century was the very an
tithesis of positivism, formulating theories of mind and thought in a mode that we
would today classify as philosophical. Psychological linguists in the Humboldtian
tradition like Heymann Steinthal saw their investigations of language as a means
to the understanding of national culture and thought. In particular, their work on
the typology of languages continued to explore the parallels between mental struc
tures and morphosyntactic structures. This mode did not disappear even when, a
generation later, 'experimental' psychologists incorporated enough positivist
methodology into their practice to maintain its scientific status and prestige. One
of the most prominent figures of this period, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), devel-
oped a Völkerpsychologie, a cultural-historical "psychology of peoples" with a

specifically linguistic component. For the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield,
Wundt (1900) was the great modern work on general linguistics (Bloomfield 1970
[1927]: 173) and his own first book follows it closely (Bloomfield 1914). But other
linguists continued to object to the fact that the psychological approach worked
backward from a priori notions about the nature and structure of the mind to form
theories of language that could never be empirical or objective in anything but a
superficial sense.
Phonetics and dialectology. Experimental phonetics, the detailed measure
ment of speech sounds, offered the first truly positivistic approach to language,
and had steadily grown in prestige through the influence of Alexander Melville
Bell (1819-1905), Ernst Brücke (1819-1892) and Henry Sweet (1845-1912) (see
further Kemp 1995). Objective and quantitative as it was, no one could dispute its
claims to scientificness. But while its descriptive power was unparalleled, and its
pedagogical usefulness high, its explanatory power proved disappointing, espe
cially to those who believed phonetic principles would provide the explanations
for historical change. Phonetics could only deal with individual speech acts, not
the abstract linguistic systems that underlay them, and its data tended to form an
end in themselves. Whereas 'classical' psychology had suffered from being too
cerebral and not empirical enough, phonetics was so single-mindedly empirical as
to defy rational interpretation.
Still, in the age of positivism phonetics opened the possibility of accumulating
masses of previously untapped data about living dialects. Detailed research on
German dialects by Georg Wenker (1852-1911) in the 1870s began a trend that
would reach maturity with the 10-volume Atlas linguistique de la France (1902-
10) by the Swiss linguist Jules Gilliéron (1854-1926) and his assistant Edmond
Edmont (1849-1926). Led by Gilliéron, the linguistic geographers developed their
own critique of Neogrammarian theory: against the dictum of absolute sound laws
modulated only by analogy, Gilliéron stressed the impact of factors like homo-
phonic clashes and popular etymology. This led to the resuscitation of a doctrine
originally articulated by Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), which became the rallying
cry of the anti-Neogrammarian resistance: "every word has its history and lives its
own life" ("jedes Wort hat seine Geschichte und lebt sein eigenes Ixben", Grimm
1819:xiv).
Anthropology. Late in the 19th century, as anthropology moved from a physi
cal toward a cultural orientation, an impressive fieldwork methodology was de
veloped based on positivistic principles. Since language was taken to be an
integral element of culture, but with linguists so single-mindedly focussed on trac
ing the history of Indo-European tongues, anthropologists had little choice but to
undertake the description of unknown languages on their own. Franz Boas, a
German émigré to America, became the organizational leader of anthropological

linguistics and began a tradition of description of living languages within their
own cultural framework, free of pre-formed ideas, including those of the psy
chologists. This is not to say that Boas rejected psychological concepts in general,
just that he did not consider the collection and analysis of language data to be the
place for them. Neither did he reject the historical approach; indeed much of his
activity was aimed at establishing the historical affiliations of American Indian
tribes through their linguistic relations. Some have even seen a trace of Humbold-
tian linguistic thinking in the emphasis Boas placed on diversity over and above
universality. In any case, Boas's school was the closest thing to a meeting ground
for the various approaches to language at the start of the century, and it would lay
the foundation for 'American structuralism' with the work of Boas's student and
associate Edward Sapir.
Sociology. The young science of sociology too embodied the spirit of positiv
ism; indeed the founding of both positivisme and sociologie was credited to the
same man, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). As the new century opened, sociology
had begun to seize a considerable portion of the intellectual territory once claimed
by classical psychology, which by now appeared hopelessly old-fashioned and
metaphysical. Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), who had gone to Germany for post
graduate study under Wundt but found his approach less than satisfactory, as
sumed the first chair in social science at Bordeaux in 1896 and obtained a pro
fessorship in Paris in 1902. Also in 1896 he founded the periodical L'Année
sociologique, whose principal linguistic contributor would be Saussure's student
and close associate Antoine Meillet (1866-1936). However, until the Cours, any
thing like a sociological formulation of linguistics would remain a vague desidera
tum. Wundt's national psychology still claimed this aspect of language for its
own.
Toward an autonomous general linguistics. The roughly coeval rise to
prominence of Boas's anthropology in the United States, Gilliéron's dialect geog
raphy and Durkheim's sociology in France, Sweet's articulatory phonetics in Brit
ain and Wundt's national psychology in Germany conspired to give a new impetus
to the study of living languages that mainstream linguistics had long since aban
doned. Not that all historical linguists had ever been content with the division of
labour outlined above: some thought that historical-comparative linguistics alone
could be scientific, others felt that other aspects could be studied scientifically but
that this should fall to adjacent disciplines. Still others thought that historical-
comparative linguistics should be expanded or reformulated to take the other areas
under its wing.
Linguists with a basically historical orientation who published notable books
on general linguistics in the late 19th and early 20th century include several of the
figures who appeared in the last chapter — Whitney, Bréal, Sayce, Henry and
Saussure — as well as Abel Hovelacque (1843-1896) and Hanns Oertel (1868—
1952). The works of Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893) and especially
Hermann Paul deserve particular mention because, although cast in the historical
mould, they anticipate the vision of the linguistic system that would characterize
the structuralist period. But it was Whitney, first and foremost, who showed the
way toward a modern general linguistics that would not be a smorgasbord where
psychology, phonetics, and other subspecialties were served in equal portions, but
a comprehensive study of language guided by historical principles and examining
language for its own sake — a truly 'autonomous' approach.
One other prominent contributor to general linguistics needs to be discussed
here: Otto Jespersen (1860-1943). Jespersen, who gained his early renown in
phonetics and the history of English, undertook in the 1920s an attempt to deline
ate the 'logic' of grammar divorced from psychological underpinnings — work
that anticipates future directions in its attention to syntax and child language ac
quisition. Yet Jespersen would expressly reject some of the key tenets of Saus
sure's CLG and structuralism, making him the last great general linguist in the
pre-structuralist vein.
Saussure and the CLG

The decisive step in redirecting the linguistic mainstream to the study of living
languages was taken by Saussure in the three courses on general linguistics he
gave at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1911, of which the CLG is a
posthumous synthesis. Inspired in part by Whitney's views on the special fitness
of linguists to direct the study of languages, living or dead, Saussure problema-
tized these issues in a clearer and more methodical fashion than anyone before
him. He maintained that language as a self-contained system (langue) was the
proper object of study of linguistics. and that 'synchronic' analysis of language as
a static system should precede and form the basis of historical study. Since the lat
ter, thus reformulated, would no longer be 'historical' in the usual sense, Saussure
created the term 'diachronic' to apply to it.
Saussure delineated a programme that would be neither historical nor ahistori-
cal, neither psychological nor anti-psychological, yet more systematic than the
general linguistics of Whitney or Paul, so as to compare favourably in intellectual
and methodological rigour with the approaches outlined in the preceding section.
Saussure tended increasingly toward sociological rather than psychological formu
lations of langue in the years in which he lectured on general linguistics (see Jo
seph 2000c). He never denied that language has a psychological aspect, but some
of his comments suggest that he thought certain psychologists went too far in
claiming a unique primacy for themselves in the understanding of language.
Saussure's programme surpassed all rival approaches in two crucial aspect of

scientificization. The marginalization of actual speech production (parole) pro
vided a quantum leap toward the elimination of volitional factors; the unconscious
language system, langue, is beyond the direct reach of the individual will. Saus
sure's conception of langue as a system of 'arbitrary' relations between spoken
'signifiers' (i.e., sound patterns) and mental 'signifieds' (i.e., concepts) — rela
tions that are of pure form, where elements may in effect have any substance so
long as they differ from one another — moved linguistics away from its 19th-
century connections with biology (a science largely passé in academic glamour)
and in the direction of mechanical physics, the mathematically-directed study of
the physical universe, which was once again ascending to the forefront of scien
tific prestige after years of relative neglect.
Like its predecessors, Saussure's programme brought progress as much
through what it excluded as what it added. Although he spoke of a linguistics of
parole that would cover the phonetic side of language and the products of individ
ual will, he made it clear that investigating langue is the essential, real linguistics.
Similarly, his programme for diachronic linguistics was meant to reform, not mar
ginalize, the historical study of language, yet such was the impact of his syn
chronic vision that it dealt historical linguistics a blow from which it has never
fully recovered. In both instances the GLG became the touchstone for develop
ments that were probably inevitable, given the overall pressures for the rise of an
autonomous science of living languages and the general evolution of academic
prestige toward mathematical and physical approaches.
The emergence of structuralist schools

The end of World War I (1914-18) brought a widespread sense of liberation
from a century of German linguistic dominance. Linguists outside Germany, while
still respectful of the Neogrammarians' methods, now felt free to use, correct, or
abandon them as they saw fit. In the first decade of the 20th century the formula
tion of a national linguistics had meant the application of Neogrammarian tech
niques to the study of German dialects, and even opposition views had to be
defined relative to the Leipzig mainstream. But from the 1920s onward a national
linguistics came to mean a more or less original theoretical position held by a na-
tion's leading linguists. Clearly, the postwar generation was ready for change.
In any survey of early structuralism the Geneva School deserves pride of place
for the role of Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in publishing the CLG and of
Serge Karcevskij (1884-1955) in transmitting Saussure's doctrines to Moscow
and Prague. The original work produced by the Genevans was also significant, but
as structuralism became a world-wide phenomenon, its centre of gravity shifted
away from Geneva.
Features of structuralism. The term 'structuralism' (which did not come into
use in linguistics until the late 1920s)1 indicates a number of approaches to the
study of language which began to characterize work by the prominent younger
people in the field in the decade and a half following the end of World War I,
characterized by the following features:
A. The study of 'systematic' phenomena more or less along the lines of Saus
sure's characterization of langue, with an emphasis on the synchronic dimen
sion. (It has been noted that even Bally, in attempting to realize a linguistics of
parole in his 'stylistics,' ended up by incorporating stylistic phenomena into
the sphere of langue.)
B. In conjunction with (A), an implicit belief that the virtual system of langue
which makes the use and understanding of language possible is ultimately
what is worth studying, being more fundamental, more 'real' than the actual
utterances it produces in parole. This despite the fact that the system of langue
is not directly observable, and must be reconstructed through analysis of pa
role?
1. Possible antecedents of structuralism have been cited extending back to antiquity, but among
predecessors who actually made apposite use of the term structural — which in the 19th century
probably still felt metaphorical when extended to living creatures and their activities — the earliest
in English would appear to be Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who fromme 1850s divided his soci
ology into 'structural' and 'functional' domains (cf. Leach 1987:55). Whitney (1880:327-329)
classified the differences among varieties of human speech "under three heads: phonetic, structural,
and significant", adding that 'The structural differences [...] of different languages are mainly of
the kind we are accustomed to call grammatical. [...] But structural value is to be seen also even in
the vocabulary of a language [...]". The further extension to structuralist and structuralism would
come more than forty years later in the context of an attempt to introduce American psychologists
to an approach being developed in Germany, notably by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). An 1898
article by the Wundt-trained Anglo-American psychologist E. B. Titchener (1867-1927) entitled
"The Postulates of a Structural Psychology" sets out the case for the structural approach as a neces
sary corrective to the then-dominant functionalism which Titchener associates with Franz Brentano
(1838-1917), John Dewey (1859-1952) and William James. This initial 'structuralism', as James
R. Angelí (1869-1949) wouldfirstcall it in a 1907 article which also contains thefirstattestation
in English of 'structuralist', aimed at the discovery of the elemental units which make up the mind.
It would become embroiled in a controversy over the use of introspective data, and would finally
be definitively rejected as the Gestalt movement of the 1920s turned the tide against elementalism
and toward analyzing the mind and its functions in a holistic way. Beyond the terminological over
laps, it is Gestalt psychology, rather than the 'structuralism' it finished off, that has affiliations with
the much better-known structuralism which would emerge from linguistics some three decades af
ter Titchener's 1898 article. The latter nevertheless has a claim to historical priority, and it may be
that this first structuralism pre-empted further use of the term until enough time had elapsed for it
to sink into oblivion. On the first uses in linguistics, see under "The Prague School" below.
2. By the mid-20th century it would be normal to characterize this as a preference for the abstract
over the concrete; but note that for Saussure whatever is psychologically real for the ordinary
speaker is 'concrete', as against the 'abstract' analytical inventions of linguists, for instance the
hypothetical forms posited by historical morphologists. Thus for Saussure langue is concrete by
definition; observability does not enter into the question. See further Joseph (forthcoming).
C. A general priority of linguistic 'form' over meaning—though see the remarks

below on Firth. This is a continuing heritage from the Neogrammarians,
whose single-minded concentration on form had inspired Bréal to bring forth
'semantics' in reaction.
D. Marginalization of written language, usually characterized as not being lan
guage at all but only a secondary representation — though see the section be
low on the Prague School. This feature seems however to be on a distinct level
from the other four: contingent rather than necessary to the structuralist out
look, and certainly not restricted to it.
E. A readiness to connect the structure of langue to things beyond language, of a
social, behavioural or psycho-cognitive nature.3 Which of these it was seen as
connecting to defined the major divisions separating structuralist approaches.
As will emerge from the following survey, structuralist linguistics arose across
Europe and America not in a unified fashion, but in the form of national schools.
This was due less to lack of contact (despite a long-standing myth to the contrary)
than to a desire for intellectual independence (especially after the decades of Ger
man domination) and for theories that would reflect the different interests and ide
ologies of linguists in the various countries. Yet the postwar generation all sought
approaches that appeared modern and scientific, and they landed on largely the
same things. The CLG was a major influence on all the structuralist schools,
though by no means the only one; it provided a theoretical programme, but scant
indication of the actual work to be carried out. All in all, the structuralist period is
surprising both in its unity and its diversity.
'American structuralism'. The two most prominent American linguists of
the first half of the 20th century, Sapir and Bloomfield, followed parallel and con
vergent career paths. Both were active, together with Boas and others, in institu
tionalizing American linguistics and developing and refining an analytical method
known as 'distributional' because it classifies elements according to the environ
ments in which they appear. Yet where S apir's ideas are embedded in a broad cul
tural-anthropological perspective, Bloomfield had traded in his adherence to
Wundt's Völkerpsychologie and become a behaviourist, conceiving of languages
as systems of stimuli and responses. Meaning, being unavoidably mentalistic, was
suspect to Bloomfield, unless it was determined objectively on the basis of distri
bution. Some of Bloomfield's students and followers would develop a still more
3. Here again, as with 'abstract' and 'concrete' in note 2, what the term 'social' designates for lin
guists shifted over the course of the 20th century. For Saussure the social represents the force that
binds a language together across the individual members of a speech community. By the second
half of the century, however, the social would most frequently be invoked to account for the differ
ences that separate the members of a speech community from one another.
radical position, virtually exiling meaning from the purview of linguistics alto
gether, though it is a mistake to associate this position with Bloomfield himself.
Despite their general convergence, then, Bloomfield's view was more nar
rowly linguistic than S apir's and profited from its attachment to the empirical and
'modern' British-American science of behaviourism. Such was the success of
Bloomfield's 1933 book Language that it effectively set the agenda of American
linguistics for a generation to come. Sapir and his students contributed at least as
much as Bloomfield and the (neo-)Bloomfieldians to the refinement of the distri
butional method and phonemic theory, but never forsook their broader anthropo
logical interests. Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) pursued a line
of enquiry into the notion that the structure of thought might be dependent upon
the structure of the linguistic system. This idea, the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis',
will be the subject of the following chapter. It was in some ways a throwback to
Humboldt, in other ways the ultimate expression of faith in the power of the lin
guistic system; but in any case it was anathema to the anti-mentalist Bloomfieldi-
ans, and even today it continues to arouse controversy.
The Prague School. Despite important contributions by its founder Vilém
Mathesius (1882-1945) and other Czech members, the Prague Linguistic Circle
(founded 1926) is best remembered for the work of three prominent Russians,
Karcevskij, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Prince Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy
(1890-1938). Jakobson had been a prominent member of the Moscow Linguistic
Circle, a centre of the Russian formalist movement, in which certain of the fea
tures of structuralism listed above had arisen independently from Saussure, an in
dication that they were inherent in the Zeitgeist. Karcevskij had been at Geneva
from 1906 to 1916, years that span Saussure's courses in general linguistics, and
when he returned to Moscow after the Revolution of October 1917 he brought
back a first-hand familiarity with Saussurean thought. Jakobson and Trubetzkoy
recognized the points of convergence with formalism and earlier work by Russian
linguists, but also appreciated the originality of Saussure's systematization.
A series of programmatic manifestos written or co-written by Jakobson and
published in the years 1928-1929 mark a key moment in the bringing of structur
alism to attention beyond his immediate circle. In October 1927 Jakobson wrote a
reply to a one of a series of questions sent to participants by the organizing com
mittee of the First International Congress of Linguists, to be held at The Hague in
April 1928. This reply, constituting a combined résumé and manifesto for a
method of synchronic analysis starting from Saussure and basing itself on bino
mial oppositions, was countersigned by Karcevskij and Trubetzkoy and published
in the proceedings of the congress (Jakobson 1962 [1928]). Also in 1928 Jakobson
and Jurij Tynianov (1894-1943) published a brief set of eight theses on 'problems
in the study of language and literature' which sketched out a programme for the
extension of structural principles beyond linguistics, focusing on Saussure's di

chotomies of synchrony-diachrony and langue-parole, and articulating the need
for the study of literature to be put on a scientific footing.
The 'Theses Presented to the First Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague,
1929', again of multiple authorship led by Jakobson, already evince the distinctive
characteristics of Prague structuralism, namely breadth — they include pro
grammes for the study of poetic language and applications to language teaching —
and 'functionalism'. The document begins: "Language like any other human activ
ity is goal-oriented" (Steiner ed. 1982:5). Besides any immediate material goal to
be accomplished, Prague enquiry would assume a constant, implicit goal of maxi
mally efficient communication, whether in the case of a casual utterance or some
manifestation of poeticity. The Prague School also devoted considerable attention
to analyzing the special nature of 'standard languages,' a topic in which they had a
very practical interest given the need to establish and maintain a national language
acceptable to both Czechs and Slovaks that had existed since the creation of
Czechoslovakia in 1918.
In the 1930s Jakobson and Trubetzkoy took structuralism in the radically new
direction of what is now called 'markedness' theory, which holds that certain ele
ments in the linguistic system have an interrelationship that is neither arbitrary nor
purely formal, but defined by the fact that one element is distinguished from the
other through the addition of an extra feature, a 'mark.' When the distinction is
neutralized it is always the simple, 'unmarked' member of the opposition that ap
pears. This concept, which undoes the strict separation of substance and form, first
arose in Trubetzkoy's phonological analyses. Jakobson then extended it to mor
phology and other structural levels, ultimately developing it into a theory of lin
guistic 'naturalness' in which unmarked elements are predicted to be those which
occur most widely across languages, are acquired first in childhood, and are lost
last in aphasia.
Following his emigration to America in 1941, Jakobson exercised a fundamen
tal impact on the development of structuralism, both through his conceptual inno
vations and his success in exporting his brand of structuralism to other human and
natural sciences. Through the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908) it became the
dominant intellectual paradigm in France in the second half of the 1960s, and it
had an enormous impact on American linguistics through Jakobson's influence
(both direct and indirect) on Chomsky, discussed below. A more 'pure' continua
tion of Prague structuralist linguistics was played out in New York, then Paris, in
the work of André Martinet (1908-1999) and his followers, whose linguistique
fonctionnelle continues to this day to develop key aspects of the Prague pro
gramme. But it is particularly with Jakobson and those he inspired, including
Meillet's student Émile Benveniste (1902-1976), that the structuralist concept of
the system is elaborated to near-metaphysical proportions, while opening a vein of

insights that linguists of many schools continue to mine.
Other structuralist currents. Two other traditions have been particularly
influential, though neither so much as those of America or Prague. The first is the
'Copenhagen School' headed by Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965), whose 'glosse-
matics' went farther than any of his contemporaries toward working out the 'rela
tional' nature of linguistic systems as implied in the CLG. In principle the concern
with form over substance was a common structuralist heritage, but as carried to its
logical extreme by Hjelmslev it resulted in a higher degree of abstraction than
Prague functionalism or American distributionalism could tolerate. Hjelmslev an
ticipated the 'algebraic' quality of post-World War  linguistics, and it is indeed
in this later period that his primary influence is felt.
The other important 'structuralist' tradition, the 'London School' of J. R. Firth
(1890-1960), deviates from the others in its treatment of feature (C), the priority
of form over meaning, differentiating it most sharply from the Bloomfieldians. In
fact, Firth approached the whole systematic nature of language in an unparalleled
way. Whereas other schools — including the influential phonetics of Firth's own
colleague Daniel Jones (1881-1967) — conceived of language systems as consist
ing of a small set of largely independent subsystems (phonology, morphology,
syntax, suprasegmentals), for Firth language was 'polysystemic', incorporating an
infinite number of interdependent micro-systems which overlap the traditional
levels of analysis. The London School's refusal to separate phonology and su
prasegmentals, for example, made interaction with American structuralists almost
impossible. Yet it anticipated work in generative phonology by nearly half a cen
tury. The 'neo-Firthian' systemic-functional linguistics of M. A. K. Halliday (b.
1925) and his followers represents the most robust ongoing continuation of an es
sentially structuralist tradition, rivalled only by tagmemics (see p.61).
Finally, special mention is due to Meillet's protégé Gustave Guillaume (1883—
1960), a relatively isolated figure on the Parisian scene who cut his own structural
ist path distinct from those of the Prague-oriented Martinet and Benveniste. Like
Hjelmslev, Guillaume was largely concerned with elaborating the systematic and
abstract programme of the CLG, but less algebraically and with more concern for
linguistic data and psychological mechanisms. Guillaume's work was centred on
French syntax, with a special predilection for analysis of the definite and indefinite
article, which (in French at least) stands on the border between syntax and seman
tics. Here he was clearly ahead of his time — his work gained his widest audience
in the 1970s and 1980s.
Development in historical linguistics

Many linguists interpreted Saussure's arguments for synchronic study as im
plying that it alone was true linguistics — despite the fact that half of the CLG is
devoted to diachronic matters. Jakobson took the lead in insisting that each of the
two approaches actually implies the other. Certainly, of the features of structural
ism listed on pp.54-55, none is blocked a priori from application to the diachronic
dimension; and none of those linguists at the forefront of structuralism ever shied
from tackling historical problems. Indeed, Jerzy Kurylowicz's (1895-1978) dem
onstration in 1927 that the distribution of the letter H in the recently identified and
transcribed ancient language Hittite corresponded precisely to that of the abstract
and hypothetical 'sonant coefficients' posited for Proto-Indo-European by Saus
sure in 1878, did much to convince historical linguists of the value of structural
enquiry, and helped remind structuralists of the valuable corroboration that his
torical data could provide for their theories.
Yet during the same period historical linguistics became the locus of a reaction
against not just structuralism but the whole scientificization that had been under
way for over a century. The point of departure for this reaction was Benedetto
Croce's (1866-1952) call in 1900 for the return of language study to the realm of
moral science and the human will.4 It is surprising neither that most mainstream
linguists ignored Croce nor that certain individuals, particularly in Italy, took up
his call with fervour. Karl Vossler's (1872-1949) attempt at a linguistic applica
tion of Croce's theories attracted a wide following, especially in German-speaking
lands and among Romance linguists. Perhaps the linguist most deeply affected
was Matteo Bartoli (1873-1946), the founder of 'neolinguistics' (later called
'areal linguistics'), an approach to historical study combining Crocean ideas with
the findings of dialect geography to create a counterpoint to Neogrammarianism.
After the deaths of Bartoli and Vossler the movement faded out, though not before
the tenets of areal linguistics became well established in the historical and geo
graphical approaches.5
Another unique development arose in the former Soviet Union with the work
of Nikolai Jakovlevich Marr (1865-1934), who argued for the existence of a grand
4. Croce (1900) first outlined the new 'aesthetics' that would be developed fully in Croce (1902).
These were quickly made known to the English-speaking world by unsigned summaries in The Na
tion (vol. 71,15 Nov. 1900, p.386; vol. 75,25 Sep.1902, pp.252-253), which in fact were written
by Croce'sfirstAmerican champion, Joel Elias Springarn (l875-1939), Professor of Comparative
Literature at Columbia University from 1899 to 1911 (see Van Deusen 1971). He is best remem
bered as one of the co-founders in 1916 of the National Association for the Advancement of Col
ored People, which still awards annually as its highest honour the Springarn Medal, named for Joel
and his brother Arthur.
5. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is reputed to have derived his hugely influ
ential conception of hegemony from his studies in spatial linguistics under Bartoli (see Lo Piparo
1979).
historical macro-family of languages he called 'Noëtic', the principal branches of

which were Semitic and 'Japhetic'. The latter family, another of his inventions,
included originally his native Georgian and the plausibly related Basque, but grew
over the decades to subsume many extinct languages of the Mediterranean region
(e.g., Iberian, Etruscan, Elamite) and was ultimately extended far into Asia, Af
rica, northern Europe (including eventually the Celtic and Germanic languages),
and even America. Marr believed that this original Japhetic cultural unity—class
less, communistic, and not tied to race — fell victim to 'Aryan' conquerors whose
descendants would spawn European capitalism and imperialism. He insisted that
suppressing this history was the goal of 'bourgeois linguistics,' i.e., the Western
European historical-comparative tradition.
Marr's 'New Theory of Language' asserted that language was a superstructural
element in Marxist terms (i.e., a direct consequence of the economic and social
system), and strongly contested the Western European view of linguistic history as
proceeding from unity to diversity, arguing that because of continuous language
mixture we actually move in the opposite direction. Marr's 'paleontological analy
sis' reduced all the words of all languages to four basic elements — sal, ber, yon,
and rosh, occurring singly or in combination — and analyzed their subsequent his
tory according to his theory of 'stadialism', which held that economic revolution
must produce linguistic evolution.
Outside the USSR, Marr's theories were dismissed as methodologically un
sound and ideologically driven; his fantastic etymologies and genealogies and his
claims to penetrate the thoughts and mental development of prehistoric peoples
were beyond the pale of scholarly objectivity. The strongest repudiation of his
views came in 1950 when his own countrymen, led by Stalin himself, denied that
language was superstructural, dismissed Japhetic theory and paleontological
analysis and embraced as scientifically sound the historical-comparative method,
formerly denounced as 'bourgeois'.
Post-World War II 'algebraic' structuralism

From about 1945 younger linguists showed an increasing bent toward the al
gebraic and mathematical aspects of structuralism, in the use of tables, formulas,
and other mathematical schemata, statistics, calculations, and the generally rigor
ous working out of the notions of system and systematicity. Such a bent had al
ready figured prominently in the work of Hjelmslev and Guillaume. In the early
1950s military and commercial interest in furthering the wartime progress on
computers and machine translation improved the fortunes of many linguists, par
ticularly in America, and gave even more impetus to the development of computa
tionally-based models.
In America, the 'neo-Bloomfieldians' assumed the mainstream mantle they

had previously shared with the disciples of Sapir, and anthropological linguistics
retreated to the status of a subdiscipline. Bloomfield's mathematically inclined
heir apparent Charles F. Hockett (1916-2000) rose to prominence, as did Zellig S.
Harris (1909-1992), whose Methods of Structural Linguistics (completed 1947,
published 1951) marked the high point in the systematization of Bloomfieldian
analysis. Harris, Jakobson and to some extent Hockett also began extending their
enquiry to syntax, a largely neglected area (despite a number of high-quality con
tributions over the years, especially in the historical domain). Although syntactic
studies would not come fully into their own until the ascendence of Chomsky,
who declared a sharp break with the structuralist (especially Bloomfieldian) tradi
tion, nevertheless in his wake further structuralist accounts of syntax were put
forward, of which the most notable are the 'stratificational grammar' of Sydney
M. Lamb (b.1929), which follows largely in the tradition of Hjelmslev, and the
'tagmemics' of Kenneth L. Pike (1912-2000).
Pike, who had taken courses with Sapir and Bloomfield in 1937 and 1938, has
had enormous influence not only for his definitive work on phonemic theory but
also for his decades-long association with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and
the Wycliffe Bible Translators, dedicated to translating the gospel into every one
of the world's languages. Through their auspices hundreds if not thousands of de
scriptive linguists have been trained in tagmemic analysis, and as a result, our
knowledge of the structure of many languages exists only in this form. The reli
gious side of Pike's activity has caused it to be neglected in accounts of modern
linguistics, but it is largely the reason why the structuralist tradition continues at
present to have a significant existence throughout the world.
In Europe too syntactic studies were under way, following on the pioneering
work of Lucien Tesnière (1893-1954). But the focus of structuralist investigation
remained on phonology, with dialect geography and historical linguistics continu
ing to be more actively pursued than in America. Meanwhile the younger genera
tion of European scholars looked increasingly to America for innovative ideas and
technological advances. Hence the major development in structuralism during this
period was its exportation to other fields — until a revolt against structuralism be
came part of the student uprisings of 1968 (see Joseph 2001). From the mid-1960s
to the mid-1970s, European linguistics turned increasingly toward American gen-
erativism, while the other human sciences played out a 'post-structuralist' phase.
Transformational-generative grammar, including generative phonology

The mainstream of linguistics in the last four decades of the 20th century has
been shaped by the work of Chomsky, who had ties to Bloomfield through his
teacher Zellig Harris, and to Jakobson through personal acquaintance and through
his close association with Jakobson's student Morris Halle (b.1923). It is widely
believed that in its concern with 'universal' aspects of language Chomsky's pro
gramme is a continuation of Jakobson's; in any case, it had no precedent in neo-
Bloomfieldian structuralism. Such was Chomsky's success in overturning main
stream structuralist tenets that it is no exaggeration to say he revolutionized the
field — though in broader perspective even this 'revolution' only helped advanced
linguistics further along the path it had been following for over 150 years. Chom
sky's avowed aim was to bring linguistics to the level of rigor of physics, at once
the most mathematical and the most exact of the physical sciences. (In his early
years he worked directly on mathematical models of language, but finally aban
doned this line of enquiry to devote himself to his 'context-free phrase structure'
models of syntax and, through the 1960s, phonology).
Chomsky's 'Standard Theory' (1955-65). Much as the search for 'science'
led 19th-century linguists to eliminate living languages and structuralists to elimi
nate parole from their sphere of enquiry, Chomsky too eliminated from considera
tion everything but the linguistic competence of an idealized native speaker-
hearer. He utterly rejected the behaviourism that was part of Bloomfield's legacy,
arguing that language is not a behavioural phenomenon but a mental attribute
(later he would refer to it as an 'organ') that is 'universal' and 'innate.' (Actually,
the version of linguistic behaviourism Chomsky most memorably attacked was not
Bloomfield's, but that of B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), a prominent 'behavioural
psychologist' not directly affiliated with any linguistic school or tradition.)
The claim of innateness not just of general language faculties but of specific
grammatical features is what most abruptly severs Chomsky's thought from its
predecessors, for in certain other ways it represents a continuity and furthering of
the structuralist approach (see further Chapter 8 below). Regarding methodology.
Chomsky rejected distributionalism as naively empiricist, capable only of reveal
ing the trivial phenomena of 'surface' structure rather than the 'deep' structure
which constitutes a language's innate, universal core. Data garnered through intro
spection by the linguist — formerly taboo — were deemed superior to those ac
quired 'objectively' because of the new status granted to the mind.
Where his work was in conflict with the structuralist mainstream Chomsky
sought alignment with still earlier traditions, in particular with 'Cartesian' linguis
tics which other historians of linguistics have not followed him in recognizing.
More subtly, his representation of phrase structure as tree diagrams tied him to a
didactic tradition that embodied much of what the structuralist enterprise had la
boured against. In the early 1960s, when the race for American superiority in
space brought unprecedented funding especially to 'scientific' enterprises, Chom
sky attracted talented disciples from various fields and was enormously successful
in getting both publicity and government funding. Despite the begrudging stance
of many senior structuralists against its leading ideas, transformational-generative

grammar became mainstream linguistics in America around the mid-1960s and
was on its way to having this status world-wide, the first unified paradigm since
Neogrammarianism to do so.
From Generative Semantics to the Revised Extended Standard Theory
(1966-78). Within a short time, however, dissent erupted within the generative
ranks, led by some of Chomsky's most talented followers. The central issue was
Chomsky's insistence upon the radical autonomy of syntax. In Chomsky's view,
syntactic rules represent the initial stage of language generation, while phonologi
cal and semantic rules are subsequent and 'interpretative'. This radical version of
the structuralist priority of form over meaning conflicted with the common intui
tion that meaning perhaps need not, but can, determine syntax to a degree suffi
cient to render the 'autonomy' of syntax virtually non-existent. The colleagues
who broke with Chomsky at this time did so in the name of 'generative' (as op
posed to interpretative) semantics, and though this was no organized movement
with a coherent research framework, it has had a lasting impact on the field. Be
sides reviving interest in semantics as a major sub-discipline of linguistics
(whence it was all but banished during the neo-Bloomfieldian ascendancy), it fed
into the now thriving area of discourse pragmatics (discussed below), which stud
ies how topic and focus phenomena determine word order even in supposedly
'syntactic' languages, and into George Lakoff's influential work on metaphor in
language and thought. Many of the leading ideas of generative semantics were ab
sorbed into later breakaway generative paradigms, and soon thereafter into Chom
sky's own programme (examples include predicate-raising, logical form, lexical
decomposition and globality).
Chomsky's response to this challenge included significant revisions to the the
ory, although he continued to assert more strongly than ever the autonomy of syn
tax and the interpretative nature of semantics. The principal changes made in this
period were a shift of emphasis away from phrase structure rules and toward
word-specific features specified in the lexicon, and severe restrictions placed on
transformations, which were no longer permitted to add or delete but only to move
elements already present in deep structure. This led to a complexification of struc
tural levels and the introduction of 'empty categories', 'traces' and 'filters' to do
the work transformations formerly did. Chomsky still insisted that grammatical
roles like subject and object must be derived from word order, despite the success
of Charles Fillmore's 'case grammar' in explaining these phenomena without the
sometimes elaborate mechanisms to which Chomsky had to resort. The result was
that by the mid-1970s the 'extended standard theory' (EST) and then the 'revised
extended standard theory' (REST) had reached a state of such complexity that its
claims to account for the speed and efficiency of child language acquisition were
growing ever poorer, and alternative models were proliferating annually.
From Government and Binding Theory to the Minimalist Program; Al
ternative Generative Theories. Saussurean and Jakobsonian structuralism con
tinued to be the dominant mode of linguistic analysis in Europe until the student
revolts of 1968. Meanwhile, scores of new universities and linguistics positions
were being created throughout Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. The combined re
sult was that a large post-World War  generation of linguists starting their ca
reers found that the tradition in which they had been trained was intellectually
passé. Some turned to the fashionable post-structuralist approaches suggested by
the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), and others.
But another group of young European linguists became Chomsky's new core con
stituency, and it was to them, in Pisa in 1979, that he presented his new, pared-
down, 'neo-classical' version of generative linguistics, called 'Principles and Pa
rameters' or government and binding theory (GB), the objective of which is to
formulate the 'parameters' of 'core' universal grammar in the most general possi
ble way (Chomsky 1981). Part of the new simplicity was gained through finally
admitting a system of grammatical relations as primary (though without acknowl
edging that this represented any sort of concession to rival theories), and in the
final abandonment of phrase-structure rules, with ever greater emphasis on lexical
specification. But in general, GB shifted the focus of linguistic enquiry away from
accounting for specific problems in specific languages, and toward relating prob
lems within and among languages. By tracing not obviously related problems to
single sources, it seemed for several years to point toward a greater economy of
explanation, and hence toward real progress in the understanding of human lan
guage structure.
In the late 1980s, however, new categories and mechanisms have begun to
proliferate in the light of more detailed data, and Chomsky instantiated a 'Mini
malist Program' aimed at bringing Universal Grammar back to the kind of bare-
bones level required for its innateness to be credible (see Chomsky 1995). In this
version of the theory, the work once done by phrase structure rules is accom
plished instead using information specified for individual words in the mental
lexicon. This information consists of abstract 'features' that need to be checked
against the features of other words within the same constituent. Failure to check
results in ungrammaticality. This word-based model is in part the culmination of
the 'lexicalist' direction Chomsky had been moving in for several decades, of
which another characteristic is the abandonment of any notion of deep structure
(see further Chapter 6).
Of the numerous other generative and post-generative approaches to grammar
that developed in reaction to Chomsky's model in the 1970s and '80s (for a survey
of which see Droste & Joseph 1991), a handful continue to be practised, with the
two healthiest probably being HPSG (head-driven phrase structure grammar),
which restores phrase structure rules to the prominence they had in earlier trans
formational-generative theory, and LFG (lexical-functional grammar), which has a
wide appeal because of its readiness to eschew strictly formal criteria in favour of
functional ones.
Generative phonology. Generative phonology has developed in parallel with
(and sometimes in the shadow of) syntactic theory. Chomsky and Halle's Sound
Pattern of English (1968) established the basis of a phonological theory that
would recapitulate the syntactic model in so far as possible (an unacknowledged
bond with London School structuralism and Praguean phonology). Because pho
nology, unlike syntax, consists of a fixed number of elements, a degree of system
atic completeness was achieved that syntactic studies could never match. Early
generative phonology incorporated Jakobson's distinctive feature theory, as well
as an extremely formalized version of markedness theory (which subsequently
found a prominent place in GB as well). A less formalized version of markedness
soon gave rise to various versions of 'natural phonology' in which phonetic com
plexity interfaces with systemic considerations to determine marked and unmarked
structures.
However, from the mid-1970s on the mainstream of phonological work shifted
to more formal analytical considerations, starting with the proper representation of
'suprasegmentalst most notably stress and the tones of tone languages (another
unacknowledged bond with the London School). John A. Goldsmith's (b.1951)
model of 'autosegmental phonology' gave rise to numerous attempts at accounting
for phonology through the use of 'tier' and 'template' models, and of 'underspeci-
fication' of phonological units as a way of accounting for the behaviour of maxi
mally unmarked elements. From this arose in the late 1980s the approach known
as Optimality Theory (or ), the thrust of which is that innate Universal Gram
mar consists of a set of constraints, each of which can be violated, and which are
ranked differently in different languages. Even within a language, the constraints
can be ranked differently for different speakers, and this is the basis of the  ac
count of language variation.
Natural phonology led in due course to natural morphology and syntax, which
in turn gave impetus to studies of 'iconicity ' between sound and meaning (another
topic anticipated by Jakobson). Optimality Theory has also been extended to other
levels of linguistic structure. Even if phonology no longer occupies the central po
sition it did during the structuralist period, it continues to spawn much original
work that exports as many ideas as it imports to other linguistic realms.
Sociolinguistics
We have seen that each movement toward greater autonomy in linguistics
brings an opposite (if unequal) reaction toward re-placing language in a more
broadly human context. Thus Humboldtian psychologism came on the heels of
early historical-comparative linguistics, Neogrammarianism coincided with the
academic institutionalization of modern literature studies, and structuralism arose
contemporaneously with Crocean aestheticism. So too, generative semantics may
be seen as a corrective reaction against the excesses of transformationalism, as in
fact may the contemporary rise of a large number of alternative approaches to lan
guage, three of which are surveyed in the following sections. The most significant
of these is sociolinguistics.
As was noted early in this chapter, the swift rise to prominence of linguistic
geography in the early part of the 20th century created a momentum for synchronic
linguistics. Although the arrival of structuralism kept linguistic geography from
ever having mainstream status, it continued to be an active and vibrant research
area in Europe and, starting in the 1930s, in America, under the leadership of Aus
trian-born Hans Kurath (1891-1992). The shallower time depth of English in
America meant that geographic isoglosses were often less clearly defined and
more susceptible to socially-based considerations. Raven I. McDavid (1911-1989)
took up these social factors starting in the mid-1940s, around the same time that a
group of scholars centred at Columbia University, led by Martinet and his student
Uriel Weinreich (1926-1967), began to emphasize the importance of class dia
lects. At least one prominent sociologist, Paul Hanly Furfey (1896-1992), was
training students in linguistic research as well, and by the early 1950s a number of
individuals were actively engaged in collecting language data along social-class
lines (see Chapter 5). The movement did not attract wide attention however until
the early 1960s and the early studies of William Labov (b.1927), which coincided
with increased US government interest in funding social research and the study of
'Black English' at the height of the civil rights movement.
Labov's studies established themselves at once at the forefront of sociolinguis
tics, to the point that earlier work was largely forgotten. The reasons are by now
familiar: increased 'scientificness', in particular a mathematical aura, produced
through a heavy reliance on statistical information and calculation. The use of
'variable rules' effectively brought into the domain of langue much that otherwise
would have been relegated to parole, providing a further systematization and re
claiming of territory from voluntary language production. Moreover, Labov's
demonstrations of how social variation can be the synchronic reflex of diachronic
change has led to a significant merger between sociolinguistics and historical lin
guistics in America and Britain.
Sociolinguistics never achieved mainstream status in the US, and while very
much alive there, it has fared better still in the UK, a country that is generally
more class-conscious and has a long tradition of dialect studies. The London
School and 'systemic' linguistics have always emphasized the dual nature of lan
guage as social semiotic — and unlike most other structural approaches, they have
done more than focus on one aspect while paying lip service to the other.
Universal-typological linguistics
Beginning in the late 1950s, Joseph H. Greenberg (1915-2001), a linguist in
the anthropological tradition, began rethinking long-neglected questions of lan
guage uni versals and typology, the latter in connection with his important work on
classifying African languages. That his interest in universals arose simultaneously
with Chomsky's in universal grammar is, despite their considerable differences,
evidence of the power of Jakobsonian structuralism on younger American lin
guists of the period (Greenberg admitted this influence more readily than Chom
sky does).
While Chomsky claimed that study of any one language in its deep structure
would by definition be a study of universals, Greenberg set about looking for uni
versals in an empirical way, by examining the grammars of a sample of languages
from numerous language families. He found that while absolute universals, such
as having the vowel /a/, were trivial to the deeper understanding and functioning
of language systems, a large number of 'implicational' universals could be dis
cerned that related the functioning of seemingly disparate linguistic elements to
one another in previously unsuspected ways. For example, he found that while
languages are almost equally divided between those which place objects before
and after verbs, and between those which place objects before and after adposi-
tions (a cover term for prepositions and postpositions), the two features correlate
such that postpositional languages tend overwhelmingly to have the order object-
verb and prepositional languages to have verb-object. That is, objects tend to come
either before or after both verbs and adpositions in a given language, suggesting
that there exists a unified process of government that supersedes that of either of
these categories.
Although Greenberg's work was directly in line with Chomsky's both in the
overall programme of a search for the universal and in the more specific result of
collapsing traditional distinctions into mega-categories like government, Chomsky
and other generative linguists have from the beginning refused to admit a mean
ingful connection between the two programmes, arguing that Greenberg dealt with
mere surface structure phenomena and drew meaningless conclusions from statis
tical tendencies. For the neo-Bloomfieldians — whose main concern had been to
avoid creating pseudo-universals by imposing the categories and structures of their
native language on the very different languages they were investigating — and for
European structuralists generally, the empirical nature of Greenberg's work and
that of others in the same vein, including Bernard Connie (b.1947), made it much
more palatable than Chomsky's, which appeared to admit of no disproof. Signifi
cant strides toward reconciling the Greenbergian and Chomskyan visions of lan
guage universals have finally been made in the last fifteen years.
Discourse analysis
The final trend to be considered here is remarkable for tying together several
disparate traditions in the goal of expanding language analysis beyond the level of
the individual utterance. Traditionally this was the goal of rhetoric, and later of
'stylistics' as practised for example by Saussure's associate Charles Bally. For lin
guistics proper, however, the amount of (seemingly wilful) variation possible be
yond the level of the clause seemed to establish this as a firm upper limit to the
extent of langue.
This may be why the impulse to go further came from sociology, particularly
from the 'conversation analysis' initiated by Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) in the
1960s, within the more general paradigm of ethnomethodology founded by Harold
Garfinkel (b. 1917). This work did not find common ground with Labovian socio-
linguistics, but did establish bonds with the 'ethnology of speaking' approach
founded by Dell Hymes (b.1927), who had been trained in the anthropological tra
dition. What is more, both conversational analysis and the ethnography of com
munication found common ground with Halliday and the London School, as well
as with Prague School analysis of sentence perspective. John J. Gumperz (b.1922)
is generally credited with having drawn these various trends together in the later
1960s into the field known as 'discourse analysis'.
Discourse analysis soon received valuable input from an unlikely source: gen
erative semantics. In making their case against the hegemony of syntax, the gen
erative semanticists gave particular attention to 'pragmatics', the study of topic
and focus phenomena, a Praguean heritage. Pragmatics was readily incorporated
into the more general scope of discourse analysis, which henceforth could claim
probably the richest pedigree — sociological-anthropological-Genevan-Ameri-
can-Praguean-London-structuralist-generativist — of any current approach. In
the late 20th century Deborah Tannen's (b.l945) analyses of men's and women's
conversational patterns achieved unprecedented popular success in America —
and perhaps not coincidentally, discourse analysis appears to be emerging as a
contender for mainstream status. It is drawing increasing interest from cognitive
scientists as well as from adjacent humanistic fields, including literary criticism.
In this convergence of research traditions we have in a sense the final culmina
tion of the scientificization of language study. Over the past 200 years the dividing
line between the systematic and the wilful has shifted progressively from phonol
ogy to morphology to part of syntax to all of syntax and now finally to all of dis
course. The result of this seems to be, in other words, that no aspect of language
need be considered unsystematic; no aspect cannot ultimately be accounted for in
a scientific, even algebraic way. Through all the vagaries of Neogrammarianism,
structuralism, and generativism, behaviourism and universalism, rationalism and
empiricism, this path of development has continued unbroken.
Conclusion
For language theory the 20th century was a time of great intellectual ferment,
only part of which is reflected in a chronicle of mainstreams. But the definition of
the field is changing. 'Semiotics' has come into existence as the kind of general
science of signs envisioned by figures like Saussure and Peirce. Closer to the
mainstream, the rise of 'cognitive science' as an umbrella category covering much
work in linguistics as well as in psychology, philosophy, computer science and
artificial intelligence, has taken place for the most part under a Chomskyan man
tle. Cognitive scientists see the autonomous structure of language as providing the
key to the structure of the mind; in general, they believe that creating the most ef
ficient model of artificial intelligence is the best way of discovering how the mind
operates. This notion has however come into conflict with another view of the
mind and its operation, called 'connectionism', which is sceptical about the claims
of cognitive science and prefers to construct explanations through a combination
of evidence acquired through direct study of cerebral imaging and modelling of
neural networks and processes of perception and mental organization, as well as of
language structure. The challenge for linguistics as the 21st century begins is to
reassert the autonomous status of language and account for its interaction with
other, equally autonomous mental faculties.
It has become a commonplace to associate the rise of formalism and structural
ism in late 19th and 20th-century thought with the rise of Marxism in both the in
tellectual and the political spheres. If the connection is indeed real, then we should
not be surprised if the fall of Marxism in Eastern Europe, and its metamorphosis
into de facto capitalism in China, portend radical change in Western thought, in
cluding linguistics. We should not even be surprised if the 200-year course of sci-
entificization described at the beginning of this chapter were, finally, reversed. A
revival of interest in problematizing the 'autonomy' of linguistics, nascent at the
time of this writing, may prove to be the first tentative step in this direction.
We have become so used to classifying linguists and their approaches to lan
guage as either 'American' or 'European' that we neglect to consider how weak
and misleading these geographic-cwm-cultural labels are as classificatory princi
ples. For example, in this dyad, British linguistics is obviously to be grouped un-
der 'European', yet it is not at all clear that for linguistics, as indeed for many
other areas, the English Channel is not wider than the Atlantic Ocean. Daniel
Jones may have maintained links with continental phonetics, but his conception of
the phoneme was idiosyncratic. When the work of his colleague Firth eventually
found echoes outside Britain, they were in American phonology. Among philoso
phers of language, the continuity from Austin to the American pragmatician John
R. Searle (b.1932) and other pragmato-semanticists is such that it makes more
sense to speak of an Anglophone tradition than anything based on geography.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), an Austrian and an Englishman who ought to
been an obvious point of reference for Derrida, was virtually ignored by him for
decades because of the academic equivalent of a Cold War mentality that led the
majority of British and Continental philosophers to refuse to countenance each
other's work.
And what does one do with Jakobson? He is always classified as a European
linguist, but settled permanently in America at the age of 44 and lived and worked
there for another 41 years, almost two-thirds of his adult life. What is more, his
influence was such that American linguistics of the second half of the 20th century
was largely reshaped in his image. Other émigrés too had an impact, including
Martinet, who spent a relatively few years in America yet managed to be a prime
instigator in the establishment of sociolinguistics (see Chapters 5 and 7).
The role that national identity (and, in the case of 'European', trans-national)
has played in the development of linguistics and other academic fields in modern
times is an important topic that deserves study in its own right. Identity is part of
national culture, and one of the guiding principles of this book is that linguists
have never been insulated from the cultures in which they live and work. In point
ing out the looseness and limited classificatory usefulness of 'American linguis
tics' I do not mean to suggest that it is a mythical construct that we would be
better off without. Rather, it is a significant cultural construct that needs to be
comprehended as such. It influenced what linguists thought and did — and per
haps most directly, what they read and did not read — and for that reason alone it
merits serious consideration. The mistake would be to let our own understanding
of the development of linguistics be limited by the national labels as they have
been applied thoughtlessly, for the sake of convenience.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SOURCES OF THE 'SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS'
Sermo generator abintellectuet générât intellectom.

Abelard
Sapir and Humboldt

Over the last three decades a received genealogy of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hy
pothesis' has developed, linking it either directly to the work of Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767-1835; see, e.g., Brown 1967, Miller 1968, Câmara 1970, Drech-
sel 1988, Lucy 1992, Koerner 1977,1990,1992,1995), to a slightly wider range
of German thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries centred on Humboldt
and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803; see, e.g., Penn 1972, Malkiel 1974/75),
or to a whole spectrum of 17th and 18th-century thinkers, inevitably with Hum
boldt as the knot at which the various threads are drawn together (see e.g. Christ
mann 1967, Heintz 1973, Haßler 1976, Adair-Toteff 1985, Justice 1987). By this
view — of which a full exposition together with a fairly complete bibliography
can be found in Koerner (1995:217-239) — the Humboldtian idea of a linguistic
Weltansicht or Weltanschauung (worldview) was passed down by Humboldt's
self-proclaimed but not always faithful disciple Steinthal to Boas, the teacher of
Edward Sapir.
The present chapter aims not so much to reject as to complexify this geneal
ogy, to take account of two crucial elements it has ignored. The first is a defining
tension in the work of Boas, Sapir, and Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf be
tween, on the one hand, tendencies that might in part be described as Humbold
tian, and on the other, the seemingly incompatible historical and methodological
requirements of scientific work in the early 20th century. The second is a separate,
previously unsuspected set of influences that led directly to the formulation of
Sapir's ideas, and through them Whorf's, about how language shapes thought,
perception, and culture. An appreciation of these influences can help lead us to a
better understanding of this 'hypothesis' that neither Sapir nor Whorf ever actually
formulated as one.
Because they did not formulate it as such, some have abandoned the term
'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', coined by Whorf's protégé John . Carroll (b.1916),
in favour of others such as Whorf's own 'linguistic relativity principle' (e.g., P.
Lee 1994,1996). However, no term can adequately designate what is in fact a very
heterogeneous set of ideas and interpretations. 'Linguistic relativity principle'

would seem to fail on three counts, since what we are talking about is hardly a
'principle' any more than it is a 'hypothesis', the 'relativity' involved is question
able (see p.88 below), and the term's exclusive association with Whorf seems er
roneously to marginalize the role of S apir. Given the lack of a convincingly better
term, I prefer to stick with the faulty one which at least has the force of tradition
and the virtue of universal recognition on its side.
In the absence of an authoritative definition, the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' has
given rise to a range of interpretations that led the philosopher Max Black (1969:
30) to jest that "an enterprising Ph.D. candidate would have no trouble in produc
ing at least 108 versions of Whorfianism". Even the rather generalized definitions
supplied by the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) do not fully concur
with one another, since "categorization of experience" and "perception of the
world" are not necessarily identical processes:
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [...] A hypothesis,firstadvanced by Sapir in 1929 and subse
quently developed by Whorf, that the structure of a language partly determines a native
speaker's categorization of experience.
Whorfian [...] Designating the views and theories of the American linguist Benjamin Lee
Whorf (1897-1941); esp. in Whorfianhypothesis,the theory that one's perception of the
world is determined by the structure of one's native language.
The first definition refers to Sapir's paper "The Status of Linguistics as a Sci
ence", actually delivered in December 1928 and published the following year. It
includes the following statement, cited in virtually every discussion of the 'hy
pothesis' as being its primary point of departure:
Language is a guide to 'social reality'. Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of
essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking
about social problems and processes. Human beings do not live in the objective world
alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much
at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for
their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without
the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific
problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is
to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two lan
guages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social real
ity. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same
world with different labels attached.
[...] We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the lan
guage habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
[...] From this standpoint we may think of language as the symbolic guide to culture
(Sapir 1929a:209-210 [1949:162])
If we compare this with one of Whorf's most direct statements on the subject, we
find apparent unanimity:
THE SOURCES OF THE 'SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS' 73
[W]hat I have called the 'linguistic relativity principle' [...] means, in informal terms, that
users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different
types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation,
and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of
the world. (Whorf 1956 [1940b] :221)
Neither Sapir nor Whorf is concerned with the basic problem addressed by Hum
boldt, namely how the typology of language structure, together with the consis
tency of a language within its original structural type, determines the mental
development and capacity for intellectual achievement of the people who speak it.
Sapir and Whorf wrote within a vastly changed intellectual context, and Sapir in
particular took such pains to distance himself from certain aspects of the Hum-
boldtian view that it is misleading simply to assimilate him to it.1 His 1905 Co
lumbia University M.A. thesis on Herder's 1772 essay (published as Sapir 1907)
contains no discussion of the linguistic shaping of thought or related issues, and
far from professing any intellectual bond with Herder, maintains a distance that at
times borders on condescension. Likewise, Sapir's 1912 paper on "Language and
Environment" is aimed, in the spirit of many of Boas's writings, at demolishing
Romantic notions of an affinity between language structure and level of cultural
advancement, thus following in the spirit of many of Boas's writings.
It has often been remarked that Sapir's 1921 book Language contains few if
any hints that language shapes thought or culture (see, e.g., Frankena 1958:122;
Sampson 1980:82). Indeed, whole sections of Sapir (1921), (1933a) and other of
his mature writings are aimed at denying the tenets of Humboldt (1836) concern
ing how the intellectual power of cultures is causally correlated with the typology
of language structure. "Rightly understood", writes Sapir (1921:219), "such corre-
1. Koerner (1992:177-178) already tempers the received genealogy by pointing out that 'Humbold-
tianism' cannot be taken to define a unified set of ideas or methods across the 19th and 20th centu
ries, but consists of many strands, some but not all of which can be cogently attributed to Sapir and
Whorf. Certainly, all the linguists in the historical line identified by Koerner, including Sapir and
Whorf, share the belief that a significant connection exists between language and thought, culture,
or both, and that the individual is in some way bound to the culture by means of language. But
whether this is sufficient grounds for identifying a "Humboldtian ethnolinguistics in North Amer
ica" (Koerner 1992:175) and declaring that "Humboldtian ideas have had a long-standing impact
on American ethnolinguistics" (ibid., p. 173), "Humboldt's ideas have had a long-standing influ
ence on American linguistics" (p. 183), "A general Humboldtian approach to language and culture
[...] is still present in the work of Dell Hymes and several of his students" (p. 184), may be worth
re-examining. Extending the Humboldtian tradition to cover any interest in "the study of non-Indo-
European, especially 'exotic', languages, and the investigation of grammatical categories in many
languages throughout the world" (p. 177) would appear to strengthen claims about the extent of
Humboldt's influence, but at the price of watering them down. Whether such interest should be tied
to the name of Humboldt, who after all never carried out any such investigation himself, but relied
on the work of others who did, is a moot point. Ultimately it may well make sense to speak of a
'Humboldtian trend' in 20th-century American linguistics, but unless the phrase reflects some con
tinuity with Humboldt's leading ideas on language origin, typology, and mental development as
synthesized in his one widely available work, Humboldt (1836), it runs the risk of being vacuous.
lations are rubbish". Thus when Sapir uses the Steinthalian metaphor of language
as "a prepared road or groove" for thought (ibid., p. 15), it is as a relatively insig
nificant part of a bigger argument, one directed in the first instance against the
view that thought takes place independently of language, which is "but a garment"
(ibid.), where his point is specifically that thought and language influence one an
other reciprocally rather than in one direction only. The metaphor reappears when
Sapir (pp.217-218) writes that "Language and our thought-grooves are inextrica
bly interrelated, are, in a sense, one and the same", this time as part of an argu
ment against the idea that either language or thought is connected to race or that
"culture and language are in any true sense causally related" (p.218) other than on
the "superficial" level of vocabulary (p.219).
Instead, for Sapir (p.220), "Language is the most massive and inclusive art we
know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations". And
again: "Language is the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands and
thousands of individual intuitions" (p.231). The source of this notion of language
as art and as the cumulative work of generations is identified by Sapir as Croce
(see p.59 above), who is in fact the sole source acknowledged by name in the
Preface to Sapir's Language (1921:v; also pp. 222, 224). It differs in subtle but
significant ways from Humboldt's conception of language as possessing an 'inner
form' that is present most perfectly in its origin, like a seed from which both lan
guage and culture grow. When Humboldt (1988 [1836]:89) compares language
with art, it is with art as creative potential (an energeia) and pointedly not as an
accumulation of works (an ergon), which is how Sapir seems to be describing it.
Humboldt's theories of language are rooted in a view of history in which hu
man events unfold relentlessly from an origin in which all later transformations
are already determined. It is a conception of history characteristic of German Ro
manticism, as well as of French idéologues such as Joseph-Marie Dégerando
( 1772-1842), whom Aarsleff believes was most directly responsible for transmit
ting it to Humboldt (see Aarsleff's preface to Humboldt 1988 [1836]: xlvi-xlvii).
By the time Humboldt's linguistic magnum opus was published this conception
was coming to be associated more and more closely with Georg Wilhelm Frie
drich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegelianism became a powerful force in American aca
demics in the first half of the 19th century, but from the 1860s onward it faced a
growing challenge from the very different view of history in which the Darwin-
ian-Wallacian conception of evolution was grounded. Here human events are nei
ther predetermined nor a matter of random or wilful choice, but are decided at
each step of the way in a perpetual contest. The determining criterion in this con
test is neither divine nor human will, nor some sort of original and transcendental
essence, but superiority for the purpose of survival and reproduction.
Already by the 1870s adherence to a 'Darwinian' rather than a 'Hegelian' view
of history was the hallmark of intellectual modernism, and this would be increas-
ingly the case in the decades to follow. In this regard Sapir and Whorf (at least
when he had come under S apir's influence) were nothing if not modernists. The
evolutionary model of history which underlay their thinking about language sug
gested that languages have if anything evolved toward perfect functionality and
expressiveness, not away from it, and left any notion to the contrary — including
the Humboldtian idea that language mixture can contaminate inner linguistic form
and dilute the original structural purity on which intellectual power depends —
seeming hopelessly Romantic and pre-scientific.2
Sapir in 1921 may be a 'closet' semi-Humboldtian to the extent that he be
lieves in a significant attachment between language and culture; and we find indi
cations (discussed below) that he felt a kinship with persons of Romantic and even
pre-Romantic inclination, however far their views fell from his rigorous methodo
logical standards. In the case of Whorf, Sapir succeeded in pulling someone of
inherently mystical bent into the mainstream scientific fold, suppressing but not
suffocating his theosophical interests in language (discussed below), which re-
emerged in a new form after Sapir's death. One might even imagine that where
Sapir distances himself from Humboldtian ideas it is through a need to mask these
unscientific affinities. Such a possibility would help us understand some of the
contradictions apparent in work like Sapir (1929a), again to be discussed below.
Yet the bottom line is that Sapir (1921) does not describe language as the kind of
shaping force on culture it will become in some of his later writings, most fa
mously in the 1928 (1929a) address.
'Metaphysicalgarbage' and 'magic key'

As to precisely when between 1921 and 1928 Sapir "changed his mind"
(Sampson 1980:82) or at least his rhetoric, we can pinpoint it to the summer of
1923, when, laid up with a broken leg, he read and reviewed a newly published
book entitled The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored by . . Ogden (1889-1957)
and I. A. Richards (1893-1979), and subtitled A study of the influence of language
upon thought and of the science of symbolism. It was this book, discussed further
in the following section, that gave Sapir an entrée into a conception of language
2. The neo-Hegelianism of Croce does not hark back to a pre-Darwinian worldview, but attempts
to discern what is 'alive' and 'dead' in Hegel's idea system within the radically new context of
20th-century thought. Koerner (1989a:74) considers Croce a Humboldtian, and again there are
points of contact, but as shown above, what Sapir takes away from Croce are clear divergences
from the Humboldtian conception of language. On Sapir and Croce, see further Darnell (1990:162-
163). Whorf, at one stage of his thinking at least, was directly opposed to Darwinian evolution; his
archives include an unpublished paper entitled "Why I Have Rejected Darwin". As will be dis
cussed further on, this is pure theosophical dogma, taken straight from Madame Blavatsky's The
Secret Doctrine. Despite this, the basic conception of history that informs Whorf's linguistic writ
ings of the 1930s and '40s is what I am calling the Darwinian one.
and thought which had developed in analytic philosophy with no counterpart in

linguistics or anthropology.
Most linguists down to S apir's time, whether Hegelian or Darwinian in orien
tation or believers in divine endowment, would have accepted the premise that
languages in general serve human beings well as instruments of thought. They dis
agreed over whether some did so better than others, with the most 'progressive'
linguists following liberal anthropologists in adopting a doctrine that all races and
languages represent an equal endpoint to the evolutionary process, hence that
every language is perfectly adapted to the needs of the culture that uses it. But the
tradition of analytic philosophy that arose in the 19th century with George Boole
(1815-1864), C. S. Peirce, Ernst Schröder (1841-1902), Gottlob Frege (1848-
1925), and Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932) began from a very different premise: that
ordinary languages are grounded in metaphysical presumptions which present an
obstacle to rational understanding. We thus need to get through existing lan
guages in order to understand the universal logic that only a 'pure' artificial lan
guage like that of mathematics can adequately capture. This idea has a long
historical pedigree (discussed below), but in the wake especially of Frege it took
off in the later 19th century with a force that would propel it to the forefront of
philosophy with the work of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947), Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921,
translated into English and published by Ogden, with a foreword by Russell), and
the logical positivists of the Wiener Kreis (Vienna Circle). The last group included
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), one of whose most frequently anthologized works,
entitled "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache"
(Overcoming metaphysics through logical analysis of language, 1931), appeared
shortly before he left Prague for the University of Chicago, at about the same time
Sapir left Chicago for Yale.3
We might call this the metaphysical garbage view of how language influences
thought, for it sees all such influence as a problem to be overcome, garbage to be
taken out. Russell lays it out at length in a 1924 article, though already by then it
had been informing his philosophical work for at least two decades:
The influence of language on philosophy has, I believe, been profound and almost unrec
ognized. If we are not to be misled by this influence, it is necessary to become conscious
3. On Peano's involvement in the international language movement, see Falk (1995). The idea that
language can limit thought also found its way into the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy
and psychology, undoubtedly via Peirce (see also . Lee 1985). A prominent member of that tradi
tion, Morris R. Cohen (1880-1947), a student of William James, would write in one of his most
famous essays that 'The sources of illusion are many: inherited forms of expression, fashions in
respectable or approved opinions, the idols of our tribe or clique, of the marketplace, of our pro
fessional conventions, and the like" (Cohen 1931:129). In her biography of Sapir, Darnell (1990:
405) notes that in the late 1930s Cohen served as president and Sapir as vice-president of the Con
ference on Jewish Relations.
of it, and to ask ourselves deliberately how far it is legitimate. The subject-predicate
logic, with the substance-attribute metaphysic, are a case in point. It is doubtful whether
either would have been invented by people speaking a non-Aryan language; certainly they
do not seem to have arisen in China, except in connection with Buddhism, which brought
Indian philosophy with it [...] In these respects language misleads us both by its vocabu
lary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead
to a false metaphysic.
Syntax and vocabulary have had different kinds of effects on philosophy. Vocabulary
has most influence on common sense. It might be urged, conversely, that common sense
produces our vocabulary. This is only partially true. A word is applied atfirstto things
which are more or less similar, without any reflection as to whether they have any point of
identity. But when once usage has fixed the objects to which the word is to be applied,
common sense is influenced by the existence of the word, and tends to suppose that one
word must stand for one object, which will be a universal in the case of an adjective or an
abstract word. Thus the influence of vocabulary is towards a kind of platonic pluralism of
things and ideas.
The influence of syntax, in the case of the Indo-European languages, is quite different.
Almost any proposition can be put into a form in which it has a subject and a predicate,
united by a copula. It is natural to infer that every fact has a corresponding form, and con
sists in the possession of a quality by a substance. This leads, of course, to monism, since
the fact that there were several substances (if it were a fact) would not have the requisite
form. Philosophers, as a rule, believe themselves free from this sort of influence of lin
guistic forms, but most of them seem to me to be mistaken in this belief. In thinking about
abstract matters, the fact that the words for abstractions are no more abstract than ordi
nary words always makes it easier to think about the words than about what they stand
for, and it is almost impossible to resist consistently the temptation to think about the
words. (Russell 1924:367-369)
'Metaphysical garbage' is distinct from the Herder-Humboldt line in linguistics,
which characterizes language not as a source of obstacles to universal logic, but as
the embodiment of a national world-view, a kind of spiritual essence without
which a culture cannot be adequately understood. Language is thus what we might
call a magic key: for the claim or implication is that studying the language of a
people is the way to comprehend their minds or souls. Humboldt declares that
[T]here resides in every language a characteristic world-view. As the individual sound
stands between man and the object, so the entire language steps in between him and the
nature that operates, both inwardly and outwardly, upon him. He surrounds himself with a
world of sounds so as to take up and process within himself the world of objects. (Hum
boldt 1999:60 [1836:74])4
— but he proceeds immediately to deny any implication that this state of affairs
mitigates the connection of thought to the 'simple truth', which is the principal
4. "[S]o liegt in jeder Sprache eine eigenthümliche Weltansicht. Wie der einzelne Laut zwischen
den Gegenstand und den Menschen, so tritt die ganze Sprache zwischen ihn und die innerlich und
äusserlich auf ihn einwirkende Natur. Er umgiebt sich mit einer Welt von Lauten, um die Welt von
Gegenständen in sich aufzunehmen und zu bearbeiten."
claim of the metaphysical garbage view:

These expressions in no way outstrip the measure of the simple truth. Man lives primarily
with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actu
ally does so exclusively, as language presents them to him. (Humboldt 1999:60 [1836:
74-75])5
The world-view embodied in a language is seen instead as a positive force, pro
ducing national unity in its linguistic but also its cultural and social dimensions.
Its only negative aspect is the comparatively small one that no individual can ever
fully escape the world-view of his or her native tongue.
What I am calling the 'metaphysical garbage' and 'magic key' views are not
inherently contradictory, since it is logically quite possible that the structures of all
languages diverge from universal logic and do so in ways that reflect the particular
world-view and intellectual power of the cultures in which they originated. More
over, the two views concur in recognizing a direct bond between language and
thought. Where they differ is in envisioning language as an essentially positive or
negative force within culture, a way toward truth or a source of falsehood and ob-
fuscation. In addition, where 'metaphysical garbage' takes the ultimate truth to He
in universal logic, and so assigns the most meaningful work on language to phi
losophers, 'magic key' takes it to lie in historical reconstruction, and contends that
neither philosophers nor anyone else can understand another culture, or even what
they are doing within their own culture, until linguists teach them.
A full history of these two views of language and its relationship to thought
would far exceed the bounds of this book. Each has roots extending back to antiq
uity. Something like the metaphysical garbage view is already implicit in the de
velopment of Socratic dialectic, which attempts to pass beyond the apparent
meaning of words to (re)discover their 'real' signification. Something like the
"Diese Ausdrücke überschreiten auf keine Weise das Maass der einfachen Wahrheit. Der Mensch
lebt mit den Gegenständen hauptsächlich, ja, da Empfinden und Handeln in ihm von seinen Vor
stellungen abhängen, sogar ausschliesslich so, wie die Sprache sie ihm zuführt."
6. "Durch denselben Act, vermöge dessen er die Sprache aus sich herausspinnt, spinnt er sich in
dieselbe ein, und jede zieht um des Volk, welchem sie angehört, einen Kreis, aus dem es nur in
sofern hinauszugehen möglich ist, als man zugleich in den Kreis einer andren hinübertritt. Die Er
lernung einer fremden Sprache sollte daher die Gewinnung eines neuen Standpunktes in der
bisherigen Weltansicht sein, und ist es in der That bis auf einen gewissen Grad, da jede Sprache
das ganze Gewebe der Begriffe und die Vorstellungsweise eines Theils der Menschheit enthält.
Nur weil man in eine fremde Sprache immer, mehr oder weniger, seine eigne Welt-, ja seine eigne
Sprachansicht hinüberträgt, so wird dieser Erfolg nicht rein und vollständig empfunden" ("By the
same act whereby he spins language out of himself, he spins himself into it, and every language
draws about the people that possess it a circle whence it is possible to exit only by stepping over at
once into the circle of another one. To learnaforeign language should therefore be to acquire a
new standpoint in the world-view hitherto possessed, and in fact to a certain extent is so, since
every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of man
kind. But because we always carry over, more or less, our own world-view, and even our own lan
guage-view, this outcome is not purely and completely experienced" (Humboldt 1836: 75 [1999:
60]).
magic key view is already implicit in the rival development of etymology as an

attempt to locate truth in the original form of words by eliminating the false accre
tions of usage.7 In modern times, 'metaphysical garbage' was articulated as a
problem most influentially by Locke in Book  of the Essay Concerning Humane
Understanding (1689). 'Magic key' can be seen as developing out of, on the one
hand, the linguistic views of Port Royal, put into forceful contrast with Locke's by
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in his Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement
humain (written 1703, published 1765), and on the other, the reinterpretation of
Locke's views by Condillac. Yet only with the dawn of Romanticism, for instance
with the Essai sur l' origine des langues (written 1761, published 1781) of Rous
seau, and Herder's 1772 essay, does it emerge fully-blown.
Both strains are present in 19th-century American linguistics. The following
quote from Whitney, a pure example of magic key rhetoric, shows how strong the
influence of Humboldt could be before the arrival of Boas:
Every single language has thus its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its
shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as
his 'mother-tongue', is cast the content and product of the mind, his store of impressions,
however acquired, his experience and knowledge of the world. This is what is sometimes
called the 'inner form' of language — the shape and cast of thought, as fitted to a certain
body of expression. (Whitney 1875:21-22).
A few years later William Dexter Wilson (1816-1900), sole member of the Cor
nell philosophy department from the university's founding in 1868 until his re
tirement in 1886, would write an essay that begins from the magic key position but
soon brings in metaphysical garbage rhetoric:8
Language is both a product and a producer of thought. I presume that no one of us is
aware of the extent to which the forms of expression and the idioms of the language
which we have used from our infancy have influenced the opinions and beliefs we hold
[...] But in Mental Science and in Ontology, there is at least reason to inquire if we have
not, in many cases, been [...] completely misled by the mere form of expression [...] (Wil
son 1879:1).
7. It may perhaps also be present in the development of poetics as the search for the true meaning
of texts, again through the analysis of their linguistic form, and of rhetoric as the art of manipulat
ing the bond between language and thought for the purpose of persuasion.
8. In this context Wilson cites not Whitney but Max Müller, who seems in many regards the perfect
embodiment of the magic key view, yet was famous for his metaphysical-garbage declaration that
"Mythology [...] is in truth a disease of language" (Müller 1861:11). Wilson goes on to declare
that the removal of metaphysical garbage is in fact the primary scientific project of the day: "I be
lieve that the great work of this age is to realize and make felt the difference between things entia
realia denoted by concrete terms, and the mere fancies — entia rationis denoted by abstract terms
which exist only in the mind of the thinker; and as a state or mode of his mind. The former alone
are real causes, the latter are means of delusion and of false philosophy. Make the distinction and
give it its due influence on our thoughts, and in our opinions, and all questions of materialism and
idealism, of positiveness and of atheism will be at an end" (Wilson 1879:13).
Note that the first sentence of this quote is a translation — almost certainly an un
witting one — of the epigraph from Pierre Abelard (1079-1142) at the head of this
chapter.
Despite the lack of any exclusivity between the two modes, the basic division
of labour was established: philosophers worked on the assumption of metaphysi
cal garbage, linguists on that of magic key. But as the Darwinian view of history
came increasingly to define the modern and the scientific in American academics,
there developed, if not a crisis, at least a severe tension within the study of lan
guage, since the rhetoric of 'magic key' (if not its essential impulse) was that of
the older Hegelianism. Yet without 'magic key' it was difficult to justify the work
that linguists did as having any psychological or educational relevance, hence any
importance beyond the tracing of minute sound changes. This tension is very pal
pable in Sapir (1921), and it explains why Sapir reacted with such otherwise sur
prising enthusiasm to the apparent resolution suggested to him by Ogden and
Richards (1923) — namely, that the relevance of language and linguistics might
be grounded in the metaphysical garbage position underlying analytic philosophy.
The metaphysical garbage line from Ogden & Richards to Sapir

Ogden and Richards do not fit squarely into the analytic philosophical tradi
tion. Indeed they reject the Whitehead and Russell (1910-13) approach to mean
ing, yet they are sympathetic to Russell's later views on psychology, and their
book is filled with passages adhering to the 'garbage' line as laid out in the long
quotation from Russell (1924) on pp. 76-77 above. At the same time, Ogden and
Richards bring a new twist to 'garbage' by tracing "the root of the trouble" to "the
superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things cor
responding to them" (Ogden & Richards 1923:19). This superstition they consider
characteristic of 'primitive' languages, hence their invitation to Bronislaw Mali-
nowski (1884-1942) to contribute a supplement on "The Problem of Meaning in
Primitive Languages" to The Meaning of Meaning (Malinowski 1923).
Also like Russell, Ogden and Richards have little time for linguists. They
make short work of Sapir, brushing off statements from his Language on four oc
casions. For them, 'grammarians', i.e., linguists, have not merely failed to come to
grips with the central problem of language, namely meaning, they have given up
the struggle. Worse, they portray this forfeiture as scientific progress. Ogden and
Richards' critique of linguists on this point blends in bits of magic key rhetoric in
way that must have made a power impact on someone of S apir's inclinations:
What is wrong with Grammar [i.e., linguistics] is not its defective terminology but the
lack of interest displayed by Grammarians in the less arid and familiar portions of the
field which it professes to cover. [...]
The understanding of the functions of language, of the many ways in which words
serve us and mislead us, must be an essential aim of all true education. Through language
all our intellectual and much of our social heritage comes to us. Our whole outlook on
life, our behaviour, our character, are profoundly influenced by the use we are able to
make of this, our chief means of contact with reality. A loose and insincere use of lan
guage leads not only to intellectual confusion but to the shirking of vital issues or the ac
ceptance of spurious formulae. [...]
How many grammarians still regard their science as holding the keys of knowledge? It
has become for them too often merely a technical exercise of strictly limited scope, in
stead of the inspiring study of the means by which truth is acquired and preserved. No
doubt the founders of the science sufficiently misconceived the actual powers of lan
guage, but they realised its importance. We have examined in the course of our study the
means by which we may be put on our guard against the pitfalls and illusions due to
words. It should be the task of Grammar to prepare every user of symbols for the detec
tion of these. (Ogden & Richards 1923:409-410)
Failure to realize the importance of language is hardly a fair charge to lay against
Sapir, but he would have felt quite keenly its accuracy toward many if not most of
his fellow linguists. Not surprisingly, however, few linguists would read Ogden &
Richards (1923), despite Sapir's review — which after all appeared in a popular
magazine rather than a scholarly journal (Sapir 1923). The book overlapped many
fields of enquiry at once, a fact that gave it a certain formidability but also left it
seeming tangential to each of the fields it attempted to embrace.9 Linguists tended
to classify it as philosophy, philosophers as psychology, and psychologists as lin
guistics, when it was not relegated to the hinterland of semantics. Still it cast a
long shadow, with Frankena (1958:122) even claiming that it "dominated" the
first phase of the breakaway from the "traditional" view of language as being
merely what Sapir calls a "garment" draped upon thought.
What begins to turn up in Sapir's writing after his reading of Ogden & Rich
ards (1923) are echoes of the garbage line. In his glowing review of The Meaning
of Meaning he writes:
Of all insidious machines, words are the most insidious. Like the humblest of kitchen
help they work themselves into our good-natured, patronizing confidence and have us at
their mercy before we realize that their almost dispensable usefulness has grooved our
minds into an infinite tracery of habit. [...]
Every intelligent person knows that words delude as much as they help [...] And yet
few accept with due cheer and conviction the notorious failure of a given universe of
speech-symbols, a language, to correspond to the universe of phenomena, physical and
mental. [...]
Messrs. Ogden and Richards [...] make it clear, as no philologist has ever quite made it
clear, why an understanding of the nature of speech is a philosophic essential, why every
9. In the early 1930s Ogden would come to identify his own intellectual heritage with the legacy of
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and his second great project after Basic English would become the
resuscitation of Bentham's work and reputation. Where language is concerned, Bentham is
squarely in the Lockean tradition — more evidence that whatever magic key rhetoric may appear in
Ogden & Richards (1923), the work as a whole belongs mainly to the metaphysical garbage tradi
tion. For a thorough analysis of Ogden & Richards (1923), see Hotopf (1965:10-32).
epistemology and every system of logic that does not subject speech, its necessary expres
sive medium, to a searching critique is built upon the sands, is sooner or later snared in
the irrelevances of the medium. Philosophers and psychologists, most of them, have had
little patience with the ways of speech. They have either dismissed it as a by-product of
human behaviour, as an adventitious code that only grammarians need be seriously inter
ested in, or they have seen in it but a conveniently externalizing expression, an adequate
symbolic complement, of a mental life that is open to direct observation. They have been
either blindly disdainful or blindful [sic] trustful. (Sapir 1923:572)
And in a 1924 article for a general audience which in many regards parallels the
1929a address, Sapir has this to say about Ogden and Richards, ignoring their
sharp dismissal of his own work:
To a far greater extent than the philosopher has realized, he is likely to become the dupe
of his speech-forms, which is equivalent to saying that the mould of his thought, which is
typically a linguistic mould, is apt to be projected into his conception of the world. Thus
innocent linguistic categories may take on the formidable appearance of cosmic absolutes.
[...] In their recently published work on 'The Meaning of Meaning" Messrs. Ogden and
Richards have done philosophy a signal service in indicating how readily the most hard-
headed thinkers have allowed themselves to be cajoled by the formal slant of their habit
ual mode of expression. Perhaps the best way to get behind our thought processes and to
eliminate from them all the accidents or irrelevances due to their linguistic garb is to
plunge into the study of exotic modes of expression. At any rate, I know of no better way
to kill spurious 'entities'. (Sapir 1924:154 [1949:157])
Again, Sapir's Language of 1921 gave no hint that the interrelation of language
and 'thought-grooves' might be pernicious, yet the idea will be central to his sub
sequent writings on the matter, and nowhere more so than in the 1928 (1929a) ad
dress. The extract from it given above (p.72) speaks of how language "powerfully
conditions" thinking, how speakers are "very much at the mercy" of their lan
guage, and so on. It goes on to state that
The philosopher needs to understand language if only to protect himself against his own
language habits, and so it is not surprising that philosophy, in attempting to free logic
from the trammels of grammar and to understand knowledge and the meaning of symbol
ism, is compelled to make a preliminary critique of the linguistic process itself. [...] Of all
students of human behavior, the linguist should by the very nature of his subject matter be
the most relativist in feeling, the least taken in by the forms of his own speech. (Sapir
1929a:212 [1949:165])
The reference to the meaning of symbolism' is evidently meant to evoke Ogden
and Richards, though they are not named in the paper, as a result of which their
role in the formulation of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' has been forgotten.
I referred early in this chapter to an inconsistency in Sapir (1929a) that may
reveal inherent tensions at work. It is clear from the passages of this paper already
quoted that Sapir is portraying culture as being shaped by language — "the 'real
world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the
group" — but another passage, discussing the relevance of linguistics to Gestalt

psychology, suggests that language is fundamentally detached from culture:
Linguistics would seem to have a very peculiar value for configurative studies because the
patterning of language is to a very appreciable extent self-contained and not significantly
at the mercy of intercrossing patterns of a non-linguistic type. (Sapir 1929a:212 [1949:
164-165])
One might argue that the statements are not really contradictory, that Sapir is
merely specifying the direction of the connections: the language habits of the
community condition thinking and perception, but other cultural patterns do not
condition language. When Sapir calls linguistic structure 'detached' and 'self-
contained' he would mean that it is oblivious to being shaped by thought and per
ception, not to shaping them; it is autonomous, not insular. Influence is in one di
rection only, from linguistic patterns to cultural patterns, and not vice-versa. Thus
linguistic patterns represent the unconscious in its purest form. Well and good,
until towards the end of the paper we encounter the kind of statement most famil
iar from Sapir (1921): "Language is primarily a cultural or social product and
must be understood as such" (Sapir 1929a:214 [1949:166]; my italics). Perhaps it
is still technically possible to rescue Sapir from a charge of self-contradiction. But
he does seem to want to have it three ways: language shapes culture, language is
detached from culture, and language is the product of culture. Sapir's anti-magic
key reflexes appear not to have shut down despite the metaphysical garbage rheto
ric. Unlike Wilson in 1879 (see p.79), Ogden and Richards in the citation above,
or Whorf in his late work, he does not find a way to blend the two lines to mutu
ally supportive effect.
This is somewhat less true of a paper Sapir gave to the National Academy of
Sciences three years later, though here too metaphysical garbage rhetoric pre
dominates:
The relation between language and experience is often misunderstood. Language is not
merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem
relevant to the individual, as is so often naively assumed, but is also a self-contained,
creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired
without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal complete
ness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field
of experience. [...] Such categories as number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, 'aspect'
and a host of others, many of which are not recognized systematically in our Indo-
European languages, are, of course, derivative of experience at last analysis, but, once ab
stracted from experience, they are systematically elaborated in language and are not so
much discovered by experience as imposed upon it because of the tyrannical hold that
linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world. [...] The point of view urged in this
paper becomes entirely clear only when one compares languages of extremely different
structures, as in the case of our Indo-European languages, native American Indian lan
guages and native languages of Africa. (Sapir 1931a:578)
The same rhetoric reappears in a long encyclopaedia article that recapitulates the
main lines of Sapir (1921), including its insistence on the lack of any causal con
nection between language and culture, but with some notable differences such as
this characterization of how language patterns present an obstacle to thinking:
This means of course that as our scientific experience grows we must learn tofightthe
implications of language [... N]  matter how sophisticated our modes of interpretation be
come, we never really get beyond the projection and continuous transfer of relations sug
gested by the forms of our speech [...]. (Sapir 1933a:157 [1949:10-11])10
If the extent to which Sapir picks up on metaphysical garbage rather than magic
key rhetoric is surprising, remember that only 'garbage' had exclusively modernist
credentials, even if the occasional interweaving with 'key' helped draw him to the
approach taken in Ogden & Richards (1923). According to Darnell (1990:275),
"Sapir was impressed by Ogden and Richards. [...] The two philosophers focused
on the symbolic and emotive functions of language, grounded linguistic theory in
psychology, and derived meaning from a process of interpretation. The emphasis
on intentionality fit with Sapir's interest in the individual as the locus of culture".
As the above quotations from Sapir (1923) and (1924) show, he read The Meaning
of Meaning more as a critique of philosophers than of linguists.11 Sapir is soon
using Ogden and Richards to promote the importance of linguistics, suggesting in
Sapir (1924) that "plunging into the study of exotic modes of expression" is the
way to take out the garbage. Ogden and Richards would rather have seen Sapir
focus on English and face the problems raised by philosophers head on, as Ogden
would do in his project of fashioning Basic English as a universal logical lan
guage.
10. Sapir (1933a) concludes with a list of 25 works 'to consult', evidently drawn up by Sapir him
self, but omitted from the 1949 collection. The order of items is not alphabetical, not chronologi
cal, not tied to the order of points made in the text; it appears to be based upon relative importance.
Ogden and Richards, in the second edition of 1927, comes sixth in the list, after four works by
Sapir himself and Paget (1930). (By comparison, Bloomfield 1914 comes 21st in the list.) The
inclusion of Sir Richard Paget (1869-1955) here is startling, but again indicative of how Sapir was
attracted at a certain level by work of a somewhat mystical bent. Yet whatever he may have appre
ciated in Paget's unusual combination of instrumental phonetics with an approach to symbolism
that harks back beyond Humboldt to Condillac and John Wilkins (1614-1672), Sapir surely did not
follow Paget in tracing the origin of all languages back to mouth-gestures in Polynesian.
11. The remark in Sapir (1923) about philosophers and psychologists having been too disdainful or
too trustful of language is followed by a reference to the "profounder insights" of Fritz Mauthner's
(1849-1923) three-volume work in its 2nd ed. of 1912, which Ogden and Richards themselves cite.
On the other hand, the one criticism of Ogden and Richards which Sapir ventures at the conclusion
of his review takes a swipe at one of his greatest linguistic contemporaries: "It is true thatthefunc
tion of language is not in practice a purely symbolic or referential one, but is it not a highly signifi
cant fact, none the less, that its form is so essentially of symbolic pattern? Most students of
language, aside from somewhat naïve teleologists like Professor Jespersen, are inclined to be more
interested in the form than in the function of speech, but, as Messrs. Ogden and Richards might
reflect, that is perhaps their private weakness. In any event, the psychology of the varying, yet
eventually equivalent, forms of linguistic expression is a fascinating subject. Little of real impor
tance seems yet to have been said about it" (Sapir 1923:573).
Ogden, five years younger than S apir, had already been thinking about these
problems for many years. Even before going to university Ogden had written on
metaphysical-garbage problems (W. Terrence Gordon, e-mail to the author, 1
March 1995). When he went to Cambridge on a classical scholarship in 1908, he
chose as his field of specialization "the influence of the Greek language on Greek
thought" (Gordon 1990a:5). Although the 'influence' in this rubric suggests a
magic-key reading, it is clear from Ogden's earlier and especially his later writings
that it was a logically pernicious rather than a spiritually shaping influence that he
had in his sights. As Gordon (ibid.) writes, "This topic, referred to variously as the
power of words, word-magic, etc. in Ogden's writings, would form one of his key
themes till the end of his career".12 He had come to Cambridge at a crucial mo
ment for analytic philosophy, just two years before the publication of the first vol
ume of Whitehead and Russell's Principia mathematica. In addition he made the
acquaintance of Victoria, Lady Welby (1837-1912), who introduced him to the
work of Peirce, Bréal's semantics, and her own work in 'signifies', all of which
set the course that would lead to the writing of The Meaning of Meaning (see fur
ther Nerlich 1992:241-248).
On 3 July 1923 Sapir initiated a sporadic correspondence with Ogden:
I have just finished reading your and Prof. Richards' extremely brilliant book on 'The
Meaning of Meaning." I am to review it for "The Freeman," a New York weekly, but
should like to express to you and Prof. Richards in a more personal way how much I have
enjoyed the book and how much I have profited from it. I think linguistics has much to
learn from your analyses, though to what extent they are, all of them, directly and fruit
fully applicable to historical and descriptive linguistic problems remains to be seen.
(Sapir to Ogden, 3 My 1923, p.1)
From the first Sapir insists upon their intellectual kinship, though noting some
points of divergence:
It is very pleasing to me to see linguistics embodied in a general theory of signs and I am
heartily in agreement with what you say about language and thought, and the various uses
12. It is tempting to speculate that the young Ogden may have been strategically playing off the
ambiguity of the word 'influence'. The classicists to whom he owed his scholarship would have
assumed and accepted the 'key' reading, though they would not have appreciated the 'garbage'
perspective of the analytic philosophers to whom Ogden would quickly turn his allegiance. The
magic-key line was probably even more powerful in English than in American language study at
the time, Max Müller having dominated linguistic discourse in England for more than forty years
prior to his death and continuing to do so for some years after. Even Russell produced an essay in
hisfirstyear at Cambridge on the assigned topic "The language of a nation is a monument to which
every forcible individual in the course of ages has contributed a stone" (Russell 1889), which con
tains this passage: "Again, we may study the character of a people by the ideas which its language
best expresses. The French, for instance, contains such words as 'spirituel', or 'l'esprit', which in
English can scarcely be expressed at all; whence we naturally draw the inference, which may be
confirmed by actual observation, that the French have more 'esprit', and are more 'spirituel' than
the English" (Russell 1983 [1889] :34). For a survey of the later development of Russell's thought,
see Jager (1972).
of speech. I am rather doubtful if the discussion of aesthetic problems can move quite so
purely on the emotive plane as you have it. [...] I feel that neither you nor Prof. Mali-
no wsky [sic] do full justice to the importance of purely formal trends in language. [...]
However, I did not wish to criticize — which, in any event, I should want to do to only a
very moderate extent —, but to indicate how fine a book "The Meaning of Meaning" is
for me. I have rarely read anything that intrigued me so much from cover to cover.
I do not believe that where you dissent from my positions we are really as far apart as
you feel yourself to be [...]. (Sapir to Ogden, 3 July 1923, pp. 1-2; last sentence published
by Gordon 1990b:822)
Sapir then goes on to apologize for the various portions of his Language that
Ogden and Richards had criticized. In a postscript that is as long as the body of the
letter he proposes to write a volume for Ogden's series "International Library of
Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method", published by Kegan Paul in Brit
ain and Harcourt, Brace & Co. in America. The series includes Ogden & Richards
(1923) as well as books by Malinowski, Russell, Wittgenstein, and leading figures
in psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology, the last of which would have a shaping
impact on Whorf's writings about perception. The book was never written, and
Sapir's correspondence with Ogden drew to a cordial close in 1934.13
13. Sapir described the proposed book in considerable detail, the following being but a short ex
cerpt: "I have in mind a volume on primitive languages that would be so written as to throw light
on general philosophical problems of the type discussed in 'The Meaning of Meaning'. A some
what useful survey of the nature of linguistic categories would be one feature of such a book, also a
discussion of the degree to which a language can be said to parallel or reflect reality. (In my opin
ion it does so very much less than Dr. Malinowsky, for instance, assumes.) The main purpose of
the book would be to lead to afreerconception of the nature of linguistic phenomena and to indi
cate to how very great an extent we are, the best of us, caught in the coils of our habitual linguistic
expression. This, of course, would be largely a reinforcement of points that you have yourself made
in 'The Meaning of Meaning'" (Sapir to Ogden, 3 July 1923; partially published, with two mis-
readings, by Gordon 1990b:823). Sapir's next letter to Ogden (6 Oct. 1923) begins "I have just
received the contract for a book on 'Psychology of Primitive Languages', and I am glad to see my
self thus committed to the book". His third letter (22 Oct. 1923), referring to Ogden's reply of 9
Oct., then states, "By the way, I believe the title you have selected — 'Language as Symbol and as
Expression' — is quite the best", and it was under this title that the book was announced in the
series catalogues, where it would continue to be listed as "in preparation" at least as late as 1929
(p.16; catalogue is appended for example to Paget 1930). It was not connected to the book on The
Psychology of Culture which Sapir contracted to do with Harcourt, Brace in 1928 following a con
versation with Alfred Harcourt on the Twentieth-Century train out of Chicago (see Sapir 1994:1).
There is then a seven-year hiatus in the correspondence, and the next letter is mainly concerned
with his and Ogden's common interest in the development of an international auxiliary language
(see Ogden 1931, Sapir 1931 b), but mentions that "I have of course been thinking from time to
time about linguistic matters and have been working with Collinson on a work to be entitled
'Foundations of Language', and this work will stand me in very good stead for the volume that I
owe you. I find that problems of conceptual analysis have a way of becoming very much more
complex and far-reaching than one imagines them to be at first approach" (Sapir to Ogden, 29 Apr.
1930). The next letter (Sapir to Ogden, 27 Nov. 1932) arranges a meeting and dinner between
Sapir and Ogden on 30 Nov. 1932 without mentioning the book. Ogden's one surviving letter to
Sapir (2 Oct. 1934) notes that "I still retain very pleasant memories of my brief visit to Yale, and
hope that our discussion may be resumed at no distant date", then asks, "Have you been able to do
any more about your book for the International Library?" Sapir's reply, hisfinalletter to Ogden (2
Nov. 1934), confesses: "I am afraid that I am not appreciably nearer to delivering the book I prom-
We know that sometime in the months after his December 1928 address Sapir
was reading Russell, since Sapir (1929b) is a review of Russell (1929), a book
which however contains no material on language and thought. Nowhere does
Sapir laud the work of Russell or other analytic philosophers in the way he repeat
edly does with Ogden & Richards (1923). It appears that the latter book has
unique title to being the most immediate source of Sapir's metaphysical garbage
rhetoric, hence of what would become known as the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'.
From Sapir to Whorf

Whorf was in attendance when Sapir presented his 1928 address. The Whorf
archives at Yale include a letter from Whorf to Roland G. Kent dated 1 January
1929 (B. L. Whorf Papers, microfilm reel 1, frame 109) stating that "After attend
ing the fifth session, held jointly with the American Anthropological Association
on Dec. 28, 1928,I should like to make application for membership in the Lin
guistic Society of America". Also in the archives are his copy of the programme
from the AAA (Whorf Papers, reel 5, frames 1420-1422) and LSA (frames 1436-
1439), the latter with a now barely legible note in Whorf's hand ("'operation of
more or less intuitions of factors that never quite reach the intellectual level'
Sapir"; in margin, with arrow: "in language", frame 1439). He was already famil
iar with Ogden and Richards at the time, judging from a reference to "the philoso
phers of the 'meaning of meaning'" at the end of Whorf (Whorf 1928 ms., frame
610), which he had completed by 28 May 1928 (see letter from Whorf to B. A. M.
Schapiro, 28 May 1928, Whorf Papers, reel 1, frame 58). The spread of analytic
philosophy in the 1920s and '30s made the idea that language shapes thought
something of a commonplace, which may explain why Whorf (1941a) opens with
the statement: "There will probably be general assent to the proposition that an
accepted pattern of using words is often prior to certain lines of thinking and
forms of behavior [...]". The aftermath would show how much truer this was for
other fields than for linguistics.
The article goes on to tell how Whorf's interest in the matter predates his stud
ies with Sapir, and comes from his experience with fire insurance cases in which
"[...] the cue to a certain line of behavior is often given by the analogies of the lin
guistic formula in which the situation is spoken of [...] And we always assume that
the linguistic analysis made by our group reflects reality better than it does"
(Whorf 1956 [1941a] : 137). Whorf writes about the cases in order to dramatize the
danger inherent in this state of affairs, for in each case a misunderstanding
prompted by language resulted in a catastrophe his company had to indemnify. At
ised some years ago for the International Library but it is very definitely in my mind". Ultimately
Sapir never completed this book, The Psychology of Culture, Foundations of Language, or the
projected second edition of Language which he told his son would be twice as long as the original
edition (Philip Sapir, telephone interview with the author, 29 Dec. 1994).
times his position becomes almost identical with Russell's as in the quote on pp.
76-77 above:14
But it must be emphasized that 'all modern Indo-European-speaking observers' is not the
same thing as 'all observers.' That modern Chinese or Turkish scientists describe the
world in the same terms as Western scientists means, of course, only that they have taken
over bodily the entire Western system of rationalizations, not that they have corroborated
that system from their native posts of observation. (Whorf 1956 [1940a] :214)
Of course, Whorf goes further. The last quote leads directly into a comparative
look at Hopi and what Whorf terms "Standard Average European" (or SAE) that
will culminate with the formulation of what he elsewhere calls the "linguistic rela
tivity principle" (Whorf 1956 [1940b]:221): "Concepts of 'time' and 'matter' are
not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon
the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have devel
oped" (Whorf 1956 [1941a]: 158). In formulating the principle this way Whorf
gets beyond the metaphysical garbage view he inherited via Sapir and rejoins,
again in part, the Humboldtian magic key line. Yet he does not abandon garbage
rhetoric consistently, but uses it as needed to persuade laymen of the importance
of linguistics. To hammer his point home he even suggests that Hopi or another
non-Western language is superior to SAE for formulating certain aspects of phys
ics, leading Percival (1966:8) to remark: "It is as if Sapir and Whorf believed that
all languages were equally irrational, but some were more irrational than others,
namely our own much-vaunted Indo-European languages. [...] Their professed
relativism was in reality only skin-deep". Ironically, at these moments when
Whorf comes closest to Humboldtian rhetoric, it is in order to stake out quite un-
Humboldtian positions.
Even at his most spiritual, as in Whorf (1942), he never adopts that view of
history that is so central to Humboldt's theory of language. One might argue that
such a view is implicit in any assertion that language determines cultural and indi
vidual patterns of thought, and that if Whorf had fully thought through the impli
cations and inconsistencies of what he was saying he would have arrived at a point
of having either to specify the view of history underlying his linguistic relativity
principle or else give up the game completely. Instead Whorf retreats into theoso-
phy (see below), yoga and semi-mystical allusions to Jung and Ouspensky — and
then dies, forcing us to give him the benefit of the doubt that, confronted by the
objections raised to his views starting a decade later, he would have set them upon
a more consistent and solid intellectual base. Still, in doing the history of linguis
tics we have to deal with what people wrote and said, not with what they should
14. Ogden & Richards (1923:50n.) quote Mauthner (1912, .4) to the effect that "If Aristotle had
spoken Chinese or Dacotan, he would have had to adopt an entirely different Logic, or at any rate
an entirely different theory of Categories".
have written and said in order to be consistent with themselves. What we find in
Whorf are language-as-obstacle views from the analytic philosophical line as fil
tered through Sapir, mixed with professions of relativism and of the superiority of
non-Western languages. One might attribute a Humboldtian spirit to Whorf on the
grounds that he raises these issues at all, and yet the perspective he brings to bear
upon them are neither Humboldtian nor relativist in content.
Whorf, Korzybski and Ogden

One other noteworthy if oblique link between Whorf and the analytic philoso
phers is 'Count' Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950; the title is spurious), founder of
General Semantics (see Hutton 1995, Joseph 1996b). The bible of this movement,
Korzybski (1933), attempted to found a new branch of psychology, mathematics
and just about every other science on the same premise that is behind analytic phi
losophy and Sapir's views as laid out above, namely, that language shapes thought.
A typical passage:
We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is
not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s. r [semantic reac
tion] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us uncon
sciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us. (Korzybski 1933:90;
italics in the original)
Whorf's relationship with Korzybski is extremely ambiguous. John B. Carroll
does not remember Whorf ever talking about Korzybski (Carroll, e-mail to the au
thor, 18 May 1994). However, a 1940 book by the Korzybski follower Oliver L.
Reiser (1895-1974) received a glowing review from Whorf, beginning "An im
portant and highly significant book!". The review itself, which includes the fol
lowing passages, reads almost like a profession of Korzybskian faith:
The new science leads towards systems of non-Aristotelian logic such as have been advo
cated by Korzybski, C. I. Lewis, Bertrand Russel [sic], E. T. Bell, and others (notably P.
D. Ouspensky [...] ) [...] Reiser shows that the new system of thought must depart from
Aristotelian logic even though at first this might appear to defy certain beliefs of 'com
mon sense'. But, as Korzybski contended in "Science and Sanity", in the long run the new
thinking makes better sense than the old. (Whorf 1941b: 12-13; on Ouspensky, cf. Whorf
1956 [1942]:254)
In a letter of thanks, Reiser says: "I see that you are familiar with Korzybski's
work, and I am not surprised —" (Reiser to Whorf, 2 April 1941, Whorf Papers,
reel l, frame 1266).15
15. On Reiser and Korzybski, see also Trainor (1936:171). Likewise another correspondent, Har
old Delano, raises Korzybski's name in reaction to Whorf 1941a (Delano to Whorf, 7 Apr. 1941,
Whorf Papers, reel 1, frames 1267-1268). And even Carroll was himself sufficiently interested in
Korzybski to attend one of his lectures in the summer of 1940, though afterwards he penned a re-
port-cum-satire entitled "Humbug", which is what he had concluded that the 'count' was. This
would lie forgotten in hisfilesuntil he dug it out, scanned it and e-mailed it to me on 17 May 1994.
It seems clear that neither Whorf nor any other mainstream linguist took
Korzybski seriously (see also Hall 1987:68, n. 10 on Bloomfield's "hostility and
contempt" toward Korzybski and General Semantics —though Bloomfield's help
is acknowledged in Korzybski 1933) and that they were even a bit embarrassed by
the rather obvious parallels others detected between the Sapir-Whorf and
Korzybskian lines.16 Yet it is unlikely that Whorf would have cited Korzybski's
book in Whorf (1941b) without having read it, and there he would have found a
wealth of apposite quotations from Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein,
Ogden and Richards — in other words from the same intellectual strand that fed
into Sapir's characterization of the influence of language on thought and percep
tion, which formed the basis for Whorf's views.
Whorf has been absorbed into General Semantics as one of their own, to the
point that Pula (1992) suggests that we speak of the "Nietzsche-Korzybski-Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis". Others outside the movement have detected the affinity as
well, for example Hertzler (1965:120-121). Still the conjunction is surprising and
controversial — Carroll, for example, is loathe to admit that there might be any
thing to it — so here is a bit more evidence for it, starting with this excerpt from
Whorf (1941a):
For the mechanistic way of thinking is perhaps just a syntax natural to Mr. Everyman's
daily use of the western Indo-European languages, rigidified and intensified by Aristotle
and the latter's medieval and modern followers [...] The Indo-European languages and
many others give great prominence to a type of sentence having two parts, each part built
around a class of word — substantives and verbs — which those languages treat differ
ently in grammar [...] The Greeks, especially Aristotle, built up this contrast and made it a
law of reason. (Whorf 1956 [1941a]:238, 241)
This is substantially the point made by Russell (1924) on pp. 76-77 above, but es
pecially interesting are the references to Aristotle, since the whole focus of
A photograph from the International General Semantics Seminar, Chicago, 1939, used in promo
tional literature for the organization at the time and reprinted in ETC. 48 (1991), and also found in
the Whorf archives, shows Korzybski surrounded by 35 participants, among whom, standing at
Korzybski's right hand, is the philosopher W. V. O. Quine (1908-2000). Present as well in the
diverse group is future U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa (1906-1991), future novelist William S.
Burroughs (1914-1997), and Charlotte Schuchardt, future wife of linguist Allen Walker Read
(b.1906). Read, who pioneered work on the history of American linguistic identity in the 1930s
(some of which has been cited in Chapter 1), writes interestingly of Korzybski's relations with the
Chicago academic establishment in Read (1991:279-280).
16. This culminated in Whorf (1940a) being reprinted as an appendix to Hayakawa (1941), which
as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection thrust General Semantics upon the American con
sciousness in a way mainstream linguistics would never match. The General Semanticist Stuart
Chase (1888-1985; see Chapter 9) would write the introduction to Carroll's 1956 edition of
Whorf s papers, though Whorf had had rather unkind things to say about Chase in private
correspondence: "For the immediate future, probably the loose-thinking 'semanticists' a la Stuart
Chase, will introduce many popular clichés and make term 'semantic' a hissing and by-word, so
that it will cease to be used by serious scientists" (Whorf 1941 ms., frame 546).
Korzybski's General Semantics is its 'non-aristotelian' nature. All the ills of mod
ern thought that Korzybski dedicated himself to curing stem from Aristotle, hence:
[T]he A[ristotelian] doctrines have had [...] a tremendous influence upon the Aryan race.
The reason is [...] deeply rooted and pernicious. In his day, over two thousand years ago,
Aristotle inherited a structurally primitive-made language. He, as well as the enormous
majority of us at present, never realized that what is going on outside of our skins is cer
tainly not words. We never 'think' about this distinction, but we all take over semantically
from our parents and associates their habitual forms of representation involving structure
as the language in which to talk about this world, not knowing, or else forgetting, that a
language to befitto represent this world should at least have the structure of this world.
(Korzybski 1933:88)
The chapter in which that passage appears begins with a series of quotations, in
cluding several from Russell and Whitehead, including these two:
The evil produced by the Aristotelian 'primary substance' is exactly this habit of meta
physical emphasis upon the 'subject-predicate' form of proposition [...]" (Whitehead
1929:45, cited by Korzybski 1933:85)
[T]he subject-predicate habits of thought [...] had been impressed on the European mind
by the overemphasis on Aristotle's logic during the long mediaeval period. In reference to
this twist of mind, probably Aristotle was not an Aristotelian. (Whitehead 1929:80-81,
cited by Korzybski 1933:85)
Whorf' s admiration of Russell, already evident in the citation from Whorf (1941b)
above; is made even clearer in a review of Whorf (1941a) that, rather bizarrely, is
jointly signed by Fritz Kunz (1888-1972) and Whorf himself:
It appears to be possible, as we read him [Whorf], to get into a higher mental-verbal
world which is generalised, as algebra is generalised above arithmetic. In mathematics we
deliberately seek and progress toward such a level of intellectual living. But we are not
taught to aspire to the same freedom in speech. Those original explorers, Whitehead and
Russell, were so far ahead that they have been virtually useless to the body of mankind.
Like some sort of Lief Erricsons [sic], they will be known by an occasional monument no
ticed sometime later. But the present frontiersmen are near enough to the rest of us, and
maybe the world-pressure helps so much, that we can profit immediately from their writ
ings. (Kunz & Whorf 1941:15)
Yet the review of Reiser so favourable to the views of Korzybski appeared just
three months after one of Whorf's correspondents, Robert A. Lesher of Washing
ton, D. C , asked him: "Can you help me evaluate the following: A. Malinowski's
T h e Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages' appearing as Supplement (I) in
Ogden and Richards 'Meaning of Meaning'. . Korzybski's 'Science and Sanity'.
C. And where does Paul Radin stand" (Lesher to Whorf, 21 Jan. 1941, Whorf Pa
pers, reel 1, frame 1247). Whorf replied with a compact and very personal history
of linguistics that includes the following 'period':
Circa 1928 on, the new, and for the most part probably misguided interest in semantics
beginning with 'The Meaning of Meaning" & similar books — attempts by psychologists,
anthropologists, sociologists, etc. unskilfully to exploit the most difficultfieldsof linguis

tics, which they could not understand. In no sense scientific linguists, but trained men of
other disciplines who have encountered the linguistic element in their own fields, yet with
an essentially parochial viewpoint to which 'language' means simply 'English', these men
begin to darken thefield— but this the linguists had brought on themselves by their ear
lier refusal to investigate meaning and their passing the buck to sundry other disciplines.
(Whorf 1941 ms.,frame545)
Ogden is another figure with whom Whorf's relationship is curiously ambiguous.
As shown above, Whorf places Ogden and Richards at the head of the semanticist
line that will "darken the field", and in the next extract we see how little Whorf
thought of Ogden's greatest achievement:
This is the trouble with schemes like Basic English, in which an eviscerated British Eng
lish, with its concealed premises working harder than ever, is to be fobbed off on an un
suspecting world as the substance of pure Reason itself. (Whorf 1956 [1941c]:244).17
Despite these criticisms a marginal note to Whorf (1937 ms.) reads: "Send copy to
Jung Ogden other psycholo." (frame 481). But in the end the article was never
published. Ogden also appears, along with Malinowski, on the list of 70 people to
whom Whorf planned to send copies of his 1936 article (Whorf 1936 ms.).18
17. A Whorf manuscript of a few years earlier gives a more ambivalent evaluation: 'There is for
example a movement for the extended use of Ogden's ingenious artificial language called Basic
English, which has met with much sympathy among businessmen, educators, people interested in
international affairs, and social prophets like H. G. Wells. There is no use sitting aloof and loftily
condemning such linguistic movements as unscientific. Unscientific or not, they are linguistic phe
nomena of today, and why should linguistic science, which alone can handle the vital underlying
principles of such movements, stand by in sequestered unconcern and let them blunder along, exer
cising their crude but vast power to change the thinking of tomorrow? Basic English appeals to
people because it seems simple. But those to whom it seems simple either know or think they know
English — there's the rub! Every language of course seems simple to its own speakers because
they are unconscious of structure. But English is anything but simple — it is a bafflingly complex
organization, abounding in covert classes, cryptotypes, taxemes of selection, taxemes of order [...]
on the whole, it is as complicated as most polysynthetic languages of America, which fact most of
us are blissfully unaware of. The complex structure of English is largely covert, which makes it all
the harder to analyze. [...] As with Basic English, so with other artificial languages — underlying
structures and categories of a few culturally predominant European tongues are taken for granted;
their complex web of presuppositions is made the basis of a false simplicity" (Whorf 1937 ms.
frames 510-512 [1956:82-83]).
18. It is worth noting that Carroll, in his notes to the published version of Whorf (1937 ms.), lists
eight of the people from the list of 70 but omits Ogden and Malinowski (Whorf 1956:65n.). In the
bibliography to the article Carroll puts Ogden (1930) with the note: "Whorf s citation is to Ogden
and Richards, but I believe he meant to refer to this book about Basic English" (Whorf 1956:86).
More likely he meant to refer to both, for this article on "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in
Primitive Communities" appears to be something of a twist on Malinowski's 'The Problem of
Meaning in Primitive Languages" (1923), an appendix to Ogden & Richards (1923) that will be
discussed in the next section. The point is that Carroll here, like Mandelbaum before him when he
omits the list of books to consult following the reprint of Sapir (1933a) in Sapir (1949), contrib
utes, no doubt unwittingly, to writing Ogden and Richards out of the history of the 'Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis'.
Another link in the chain is the relationship between Korzybski and Ogden,
which Gordon (1987) has examined in detail. Gordon (1990a: 114) notes that "O.,
with little enthusiasm, replied to K's letters for over fourteen years. The latter
stressed the affinity between their approaches to problems of language". Like
Ogden, Whorf was less than thrilled to see views overlapping his own get much
more publicity than his better-formulated work, yet was ready to piggy-back onto
that publicity in order to promote his own interests, which in Whorf's case meant
Sapirian linguistics at Yale.19
Other influences on Whorf

There can be little doubt that the single biggest shaping influence on Whorf's
thinking, from his early years up till the weeks before his death, was theosophy,
which is not a religion but a set of moral doctrines supposedly drawn from the an
cient Hindu teachings that embody the basis of all religions. Whorf was in regular
touch with his local Theosophical Society in Hartford, Connecticut, and, through
his friendship and working relationship with Fritz Kunz, with the society's world
headquarters in Adyar, India. Kunz had lived in India, working as a university
teacher and administrator, and had been a figure of note in theosophical circles
since at least the 1920s (see Cleather 1922) Whorf's unpublished writings in par
ticular owe a great deal to the theosophical doctrines propounded by Madame H.
P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875, and to
writers in older mystical traditions (sometimes termed 'theosophical' long before
1875) that the followers of Blavatsky claimed as part of their heritage.
Madame Blavatsky had been a controversial figure from the start. She pro
duced voluminous treatises like Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine which are
19. See also Trainor (1936), a very favourable review article on Korzybski and some of his follow
ers published in Ogden's journal Psyche. It is interesting that Lyons (1977, vol.1, p.98) introduces
the term 'therapeutic semantics' in a parenthesis on General Semantics inserted within a discussion
of Ogden & Richards (1923). Hackett's early (1954) article on Whorf recognizes affinities not with
Ogden or Korzybski, but with Richards and Hayakawa, among numerous others: "Whorf does not
fall into the trap of positing cause-effect relationships — language and cultural patterns grow to
gether, each a cause and effect of the other [...]. Others reflect the same view (in part) — Granet,
Levy-Bruhl, Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Kluckhohn, Bateson, Haring, Carroll, Trager, and Ha
yakawa. Among these wefindthe cultural anthropologist struggling with the problems of language
behavior, the philosopher interested in ultimate meanings, the semanticist, and the social behavior
ist. To them could be added the mathematician (Bridgeman, Einstein), the political economist (T.
Arnold), the teacher of foreign languages (I. A. Richards), the speech pathologist (W. Johnson), the
child development specialist, educationist, psychologist, and the teacher of communication skills"
(Hackett 1954:3). And, one might add, the psychoanalyst: for I think the other significant piece to
be added to the puzzle is Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and company, whose uses of language get
scant attention from Sapir or Whorf—except, as noted above, when Whorf cites Jung as a kind of
talisman to avoid having to elaborate a theory of history, and despite the fact that Sapir (1994) in
cludes a chapter on Freud's and Carl G. Jung's (1875-1961) views on personality. Chapter 9 will
consider how the popularization of psychoanalysis put the idea 'in the air' that our thoughts and
actions are determined, controlled and limited by unconscious associations including linguistic
ones, and how this may have affected the reception of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'.
the core of theosophical teachings to the present day, available in any 'New Age'
bookshop. She claimed to receive her inspirations astrally from two Brahmin
'masters' in the Himalayas. When, as sometimes happened, she was accused of
plagiarism, she responded with a laugh that the Himalayan masters could hardly
be bothered to provide bibliographic references. She was also fond of producing
'phenomena' such as rappings and bells, which accompanied her wherever she
went, as well as mysterious 'letters' from the masters which would appear out of
the blue. Yet she was a tremendously charismatic woman, and the poet W. B.
Yeats, who was for a time her protégé, scarcely exaggerates when he writes in his
Autobiography that in the late 1880s, when he was part of her inner circle, she was
the most famous woman in the world.
In December 1878 Blavatsky received instructions from her masters to move
the Theosophical Society from New York to India, and she obeyed. Some think
that the persistent knocking of creditors may have underscored the masters' mes
sage, but in any case the Society maintains its world headquarters at Adyar, north
of Madras, to the present day, with branches in dozens of cities world-wide.20 In
1879 the journal The Theosophist was founded, the first of many periodicals that
would be launched by Blavatsky or by the various factions into which the Society
began to split after her death.
Since the 1850s the significance of the Vedic Sanskrit texts had become com
mon knowledge through the writings and lectures of Max Müller, in particular
through a pair of articles he published in the London Times of 17 and 20 April
1857, just before the outbreak of the first War of Indian Independence in May of
that year (see further Godwin 1994:262-264). In these early articles Müller is sur
prisingly disparaging of Buddhism. He holds to the Enlightenment view of it as
atheistic, and characterizes its aspiration to a Nirvana of utter annihilation as a
kind of collective madness, though admitting that "individual Buddhists, though
not understanding it properly, had triumphed over the 'madness of its metaphys
ics'" (Godwin 1994: 262,324,376). By the time Blavatsky appeared on the scene
twenty years later, much had changed. The politics of Indian colonialism had tem
porarily stabilized, the popularity of Zanoni and other novels by Edward Bulwer-
Lytton had shown that the English reading public had a thirst for the exotic and
esoteric. Perhaps most importantly, as Washington (1994) points out, the middle-
class reading public had grown in size through the introduction of universal educa
tion, and felt spiritually undernourished by traditional religion. Moreover, this
large public was not academically indoctrinated enough to sort out why the the-
20. The original Indian headquarters was at Bombay, with the move to Adyar occurring in 1882.
The 'universal brotherhood' aspects of the Theosophical Society actually date from that move to
India. Cleather (1922:83-84) quotes co-founder Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) to the
effect that "the T. S. founded at New York in 1875 was only a 'Miracle Club', as Colonel Olcott
says, with no 'brotherhood plank"'.
osophical treatises offended the scholarly sensibilities of the more highly edu
cated.
Blavatsky claimed to have access to thousands more Sanskrit texts than Max
Müller, thanks to her Himalayan masters. As Crewe (1996:26) puts it, "For sheer
chutzpah, there has never been anyone quite like Madame Blavatsky". Müller's
name crops up continually in early theosophical work, because the obvious the
matic connection with his views lent that work a certain scholarly legitimacy, and
because of his very public evolutionary stand. For his part, he distanced himself
from the movement, but only gradually and rather half-heartedly, perhaps because
he did after all benefit from the attention. His most cunning move in this regard
may have been to entitle his 1892 Gifford Lectures, including their published ver
sion, Theosophy; or, Psychological Religion, and then only at the end of the Intro
duction indicate that his book was not part of the movement that by then was
universally associated with the word. Privately, he repeated to anyone who asked
him about theosophy the story of what Colonel Olcott had said when Max Müller
asked him about Madame Blavatsky's transparently phoney 'phenomena'. "All
religions," Olcott was reported by Müller as having responded, "have to be ma
nured". Prothero (1996:7-8) describes Olcott's own religious belief as a 'creole
faith', combining and simplifying Protestant and Buddhist elements.
Other linguists figure more actively in the early numbers of The Theosophist,
including John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) and Garrick Mallery (1831-1894) of
the Smithsonian Institution, whose enthusiastic correspondence with Olcott about
"the parallels between the N. A. Indians and the real Indians, in psychology, phi
losophy & c." (Mallery to Olcott, 18 Nov. 1879) was published in The Theoso
phist in 1880. The same journal ran for a number of years a regular column
entitled "Puzzles for the Philologists", with both European and Indian contribu
tors.21
The summa of Blavatsky's theosophy, The Secret Doctrine (1888), includes a
theory of language development which in some respects is eerily similar to much
academic theorizing of the time. In particular, the idea of a developmental line
from monosyllabic, isolating languages to agglutinating languages to inflecting
languages had been around for at least a century, usually associated with an evolu
tionary view of history. Indeed it can be seen from the following extract that
Blavatsky takes very much an evolutionary view of language history within the
human race; her anti-evolutionism is directed specifically against the notion that
the first humans evolved from apes.
[T]he first Race — the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called 'Self-Born' — was, in
our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of mind on our plane. The Second Race had a
21. See Hutton & Joseph (1998) for information about the involvement of other linguists with
theosophy, among them Ferdinand de Saussure.
'Sound-language,' to wit, chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race
developed in the beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the
various sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals, which,
however, were hardly nascent in the day of the 'Sweat-born' (the early Third Race). In its
second half, when the 'Sweat-born' gave birth to the 'Egg-born,' (the middle Third Race);
and when these, instead of 'hatching out' ([...]) as androgynous beings, began to evolve into
separate males and females; and when the same law of evolution led them to reproduce their
kind sexually, an act which forced the creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate
in mindless men; then only was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a
tentative effort. The whole human race was at that time of 'one language and of one lip.'...
Speech then developed, according to occult teaching, in the following order:—
I. Monosyllabic speech; that of thefirstapproximately fully developed human beings at
the close of the Third Root-race, the 'golden-coloured,' yellow-complexioned men, after
their separation into sexes, and the full awakening of their minds. Before that, they
communicated through what would now be called 'thought-transference'... Language could
not be well developed before the full acquisition and development of their reasoning
faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic
languages mixed with hard consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are
known to the anthropologist.
II. These linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The latter
were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the Fourth Race
preserved their mother-language [...]* [*Language is certainly coeval with reason, and could
never have been developed before men became one with the informing principles in them—
those who fructified and awoke to life the manasic element dormant in primitive man. For,
as Professor Max Müller tells us in his 'Science of Thought,' 'Thought and language are
identical.' Yet to add to this the reflection that thoughts which are too deep for words, do
not really exist at all, is rather risky, as thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in
eternity whether expressed or not. Logos is both reason and speech. But language,
proceeding in cycles, is not always adequate to express spiritual thoughts [...].] While the
'cream' of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and
intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the
inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a
fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of
America.
III. The inflectional speech — the root of the Sanskrit, very erroneously called 'the elder
sister' of the Greek, instead of its mother — was thefirstlanguage (now the mystery tongue
of the Initiates, of the Fifth Race). At any rate, the 'Semitic' languages are the bastard
descendants of the first phonetic corruptions of the eldest children of the early Sanskrit...
The Semites, especially the Arabs, are later Aryans — degenerate in spirituality and
perfected in materiality. To these belong all the Jews and the Arabs. The former are a tribe
descended from the Tchandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who
sought refuge in Chaldea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father
A-bram (No Brahmin) some 8,000 years B.C. The latter, the Arabs, are the descendants of
those Aryans who would not go into India at the time of the dispersion of nations [...].
(Blavatsky 1888, vol.2, pp. 198-200)
In light of statements like these, of which her work contains many, Blavatsky's
declarations about racial equality ring utterly hollow. Further on she again invokes
Max Müller in defence of her anti-evolutionism, referring specifically to Müller's

highly publicized debate with Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919):
Haeckel's theory that 'speech arose gradually from a few simple, crude animal sounds
[...]' as such 'speech still remains amongst a few races of lower rank' (Darwinian theory
in 'Pedigree of Man, ' p.22) is altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Müller,
among others. He contends that no plausible explanation has yet been given as to how the
'roots' of language came into existence. A human brain is necessary for human speech
Haeckel, among other things, often comes into direct conflict with the Science of
languages. In the course of his attack on Evolutionism (1873, 'Mr. Darwin's Philosophy
of Language'), Prof. Max Müller stigmatized the Darwinian theory as 'vulnerable at the
beginning and at the end.' [...]
Languages have their phases of growth, etc., like all else in nature. It is almost certain
that the great linguistic families pass through three stages.
(1) All words are roots and merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical languages).
(2) One root defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element
(Agglutinative).
(3) The determinative element (the determinating meaning of which has longed [sic]
lapsed) unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).
The problem then is: Whence these roots? Max Müller argues that the existence of
these ready-made materials of speech is a proof that man cannot be the crown of a long
organic series. This potentiality offorming roots is the great crux which materialists
almost invariably avoid. (Blavatsky 1888, vol.2, pp. 661-662)
In the citation before last, Blavatsky referred to "the inflectional speech — the root
of the Sanskrit" as being "now the mystery tongue of the Initiates, of the Fifth
Race". This "root of the Sanskrit" is presumably Ur-Aryan, or what we would now
call Proto-Indo-European. Elsewhere she describes Sanskrit as the language "of
the Gods" (ibid., vol.1, p.269). When, in Book I, Part  of The Secret Doctrine,
entitled 'The Evolution of Symbolism in its Approximate Order", she elaborates
on the mystery language, it acquires an Egyptian heritage as well:
Recent discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a
shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest and oldest down to the latest, has
sprung not only from a common source of abstract beliefs, but from one universal
esoteric, or 'Mystery' language. These scholars hold the key to the universal language of
old, and have turned it successfully, though only once, in the hermetically closed door
leading to the Hall of Mysteries. The great archaic system knownfromprehistoric ages as
the sacred Wisdom Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well
as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language — suspected by the
Mason Ragon — the language of the Hierophants, which has seven 'dialects', so to speak,
each referring, and being specially appropriated, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature
The proof of this lies, to this day, in the extreme difficulty which the Orientalists in
general, the Indianists and Egyptologists especially, experience in interpreting the
allegorical writings of the Aryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt. This is because
they will never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language which
was universal and known to all nations alike in days of old, but which is now intelligible
only to the few. Like the Arabicfigureswhich are plain to a man of whatever nation, or
like the English word and, which becomes et for the Frenchman, und for the German, and
so on, yet which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign & — so all
the words of that mystery language signified the same thing to each man of whatever
nationality. There have been several men of note who have tried to re-establish such a
universal and philosophical tongue: Delgarme [i.e., Dalgarno], Wilkins, Leibnitz; but
Demaimieux, in his Pasigraphie, is the only one who has proven its possibility. The
scheme of Valentinius, called the 'Greek Kabala', based on the combination of Greek
letters, might serve as a model, (ibid., p.310)
Such mixing of Indian and Egyptian elements would remain a characteristic fea
ture of 20th-century theosophy. The casual dispensing with the giants George Dal
garno (c.1626-1687), Wilkins and Leibniz in favour of the relatively obscure
Joseph de Maimieux (1753-1820) is managed with typical Blavatskyan panache.
Whorf was involved with theosophy from an early age, through his father,
Harry Church Whorf. In the Whorf archives at Yale is a letter from the father to
the son urging him to carry on with his research into Mayan hieroglyphs, and not
to discount Madame Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine that a 'fourth race' of men
who inhabited the lost continent of Atlantis originally colonized the New World.
Harry Whorf believed that Ben would find a linkage between Mayan and some
recently discovered inscriptions from the Iberian peninsula, and that this would
provide Blavatsky's view with scientific proof. A number of Whorf's manuscripts
in the Yale archives that have puzzled linguists researching him, such as his "Why
I Have Discarded Evolution", are in fact pure Blavatsky, not lifted but taking their
point of departure, outlook, cues, and sometimes even style from The Secret Doc
trine.
Whorf would have encountered both magic key and metaphysical garbage
views in his theosophical pursuits. Looking just at the summa, Blavatsky (1888),
one finds powerful statements in the magic key vein:
As beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of 'The History of Magic'
and of 'L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries,' the word spoken by, as well as the name of,
every individual largely determine his future fate. Why? Because —
— 'When our Soul (mind) creates or evokes a thought, the representative sign of that
thought is self-engraved upon the astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the
mirror of all the manifestations of being.
'The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the (hidden or occult) virtue of the sign.
'To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic
potency of the human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult
World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being (an Entity), but to place it under and
condemn it through the emission of the Word (Verbum), to the influence of one or more
Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it (the Word) makes them
while naming them [...]'. (Blavatsky 1888, vol.1, p.93)
[T]hespoken word has a potency unknown to, unsuspected and disbelieved in, by the
modern 'sages.' (ibid., p.307; italics in the original)
Alongside these are expressions of a negative sort about language which recall
Whorf 's famous statements about the inability of 'Standard Average European' to
express the world-view contained in American Indian languages like Hopi. The
first extract below is a note to this sentence of the main text: "Those Monads
[lunar gods or spirits] [...] are the first to reach the human stage during the three
and a half Rounds, and to become men".
We are forced to use here the misleading word 'Men,' and this is a clear proof of how
little any European language is adapted to express these subtle distinctions.
It stands to reason that these 'Men' did not resemble the men of to-day, either in form
or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them 'Men' at all? Because there is no other
term in any Western language which approximately conveys the idea intended [...]. The
same difficulty of language is met with in describing the 'stages' through which the
Monad passes. Metaphysically speaking, it is of course an absurdity to talk of the
'development' of a Monad, or to say that it becomes 'Man.' But any attempt to preserve
metaphysical accuracy of language in the use of such a tongue as the English would
necessitate at least three extra volumes of this work, and would entail an amount of verbal
repetition which would be wearisome in the extreme [...]. (Blavatsky 1888, vol.1, p.l74n.)
The attempt to render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically
recurring Law [...] is daring, for no human language, save the Sanskrit—which is that of
the Gods — can do so with any degree of accuracy, (ibid., p.269; italics in original)
For Whorf, as for theosophists generally, there was no necessary conflict between
modern science and mysticism. Modern physics had shown that the essentialism
of European languages was incompatible with the nature of reality:
As physics explores into the intra-atomic phenomena, the discrete physical forms and
forces are more and more dissolved into relations of pure patiemment. The PLACE of an
apparent entity, an electron for example, becomes indefinite, interrupted; the entity
appears and disappears from one structural position to another structural position, like a
phoneme or any other patterned linguistic entity, and may be said to be NOWHERE in
between the positions. Its locus, first thought of and analyzed as a continuous variable,
becomes on closer scrutiny a mere alternation; situations "actualize" it, structure beyond
the probe of the measuring rod governs it; three dimensional shape there is none, instead
— "Arupa" [formless, without rupa ('form, shape')]. (Whorf 1956 [1942]:268)
Western scientific thought needed to free itself from the shackles of linguistic
categories, but was not yet ready (ibid.):
Science cannot yet understand the transcendental logic of such a state of affairs, for it has
not yet freed itself from the illusory necessities of common logic which are only at bottom
necessities of grammatical pattern in Western Aryan grammar; necessities for substances
which are only necessities for substantives in certain sentence positions, necessities for
forces, attractions, etc. which are only necessities for verbs in certain other positions, and
so on. Science, if it survives the impending darkness, will next take up the consideration
of linguistic principles and divert itself of those illusory linguistic necessities, too long
held to be the substance of reason itself.
In the Introduction to his collection of Whorf's papers, John B. Carroll plays down
the significance of Whorf's mysticism. Yet the Whorf archives consist mainly of
hundreds of pages of speculative inquiry into the secret meaning of Hebrew letters
that comes straight from Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (1768-1825), an early 19th-
century mystic and Provençal philologist, several of whose works on mythology
and the secret meanings of Hebrew letters enjoyed a vogue in the early 1920s
thanks to English translations by Nayán Louise Redfield that were issued by no
less prominent a publishing house than G. P. Putnam's Sons (see Fabre d'Olivet
1815-16). Whorf called Fabre d'Olivet "mystical almost to the point of a Jacob
Boehme or a William Blake" but claimed that he "steered absolutely clear of the
cabalistic and numerological hocus-pocus with which the old Jewish tradition of
Hebrew was laden" (Whorf 1956 [1937 ms.]:75]). However, an examination of
Fabre d'Olivet (1921 [1815-16]) reveals both of these judgements to be somewhat
misleading. In fact the first volume of the book evinces a broad knowledge of the
history of linguistics. Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725-1784) is Fabre d'Olivet's
principal (though continually criticized) etymological model, while Thomas
Hobbes is singled out for attack as the main proponent of linguistic arbitrariness
(anticipated by Gorgias and other sophists). Hardly more 'mystical' than Whorf's
own unpublished writings on Hebrew (Whorf 1928 ms. is just the tip of the ice
berg), the book can, I think, be fairly classified as cabbalism with a methodologi
cally modern face.
Other early writings Whorf produced on Mayan are similarly spirited. Through
his Mayan work Whorf developed an interest in contemporary anthropology and
linguistics that brought him into contact with Sapir and his students. But he never
let go of his theosophical connections and interests. He presented a paper to the
Hartford Theosophical Society on "Language and Magic" in 1940; and one of his
best-know articles, "Language, Thought, and Reality", was written for The The-
osophist, where it was published posthumously over two issues in 1942. More
over, in his last months Whorf spent a great deal of time helping launch a new
magazine called Main Currents in Modern Thought with Fritz Kunz.
If we are to identify beliefs in a deep link between language and thought in
Whorf that would be spiritually awakened and methodologically suppressed by
Sapir and the philosophers who inspired him, we have abundant evidence for the-
osophy and other brands of mysticism (see further Rollins 1980), hardly any for
the Herder-Humboldt line. A list Whorf made of "Library books read, beginning
Jan. 1925" (Whorf 1925-28 ms.) includes, for 1925-26, books by Max Müller and
Whitney, but this was subsequent to his reading of Fabre d'Olivet's work, which
continued to be his primary model and inspiration until his first encounters with
Sapir in 1928.22 Insofar as Müller and Whitney adhere to the magic key line,
Whorf probably found their views quite easy to reconcile with what he took to be
Fabre d'Olivet's 'mysticism'. Certainly this would be more true of 'magic key'
than of the more stubbornly 'logical' metaphysical-garbage view, which as its
name indicates is devoted to depriving languages of their religious residue. This
may also help explain why Whorf would be able to re-link with magic key rhetoric
in a way that Sapir could not.
There is no indication in the Whorf papers that he was reading any of the neo-
Humboldtians writing in Germany in the 1920s and '30s, some of whom turned
their pens to using linguistics to justify Nazi doctrines of racial hatred from 1933
on (see Hutton 1999). The only mention of any of them I have found is on a post
card to Whorf from Reinhold Saleski, founder of the LSA Linguistic Institutes
(see next chapter, p.112), to whom Whorf had sent a copy of his 1940a article.23
Nor have I found any indication in Whorf's papers that he knew the work of the
Vassar anthropologist Dorothy Demetracopolou Lee (1905-1975), who starting in
1938 published a series of articles containing views remarkably similar to Whorf s,
though she never cited him (see further Koerner 1992:185, n.9).24 Her 1952 re
view of Sapir (1949) — in the journal of Korzybski's followers, no less — con
tains glowing encomia to Sapir's genius but no indication of where her intellectual
affinity to Sapir or Whorf had its origin.
In 1939-40, just before the writing of the popular articles on language,
thought, and culture that made him famous, Whorf attended a series of lectures at
Yale by Malinowski; indeed, his notes from these lectures are interspersed in the
same notebook in which he was developing ideas for the first of those articles
(Whorf 1939-40 ms.). The conjunction is suggestive, not least because it places
the third most important contributor to Ogden & Richards (1923) right in the mid-
22. The books listed are Max Miiller's Chips from a German Workshop (read 1925-1926), Science
of Language, and Sanskrit Grammar (both read 1926), and Whitney's Oriental and Linguistic
Studies (read 1926). Also on the list are Fabre d' Olivet's Hermeneutic Interpretation of the Social
State of Man (read last of Dec. 1924) and Golden Verses of Pythagoras (read 1925).
23. In the postcard (published in full in Falk & Joseph 1996:217) Saleski asked: "Do you know
Leo Weisgerber? He has many good ideas. Also Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, writing more spec,
from an anthropol.-psychol. point of view" (Saleski to Whorf, 21 Nov. 1940, B. L. Whorf Papers,
microfilm reel 1, frames 1196-1197). Whorf s reply has not survived. As noted in Falk & Joseph
(1994), when in 1950 Saleski published his final book review in Language (after a twenty-year
absence from the journal's pages), of Weisgerber (1949-50), it seems to have been the editor, Ber
nard Bloch (1907-1965), who added a bracketed footnote pointing out the resemblance between
Weisgerber's views and those of Sapir and Whorf. On this whole point, see further Falk & Joseph
(1996).
24. The only reference to her I have found is in a list dated 1 June 1933 of American Indian lan
guages and the names of people who work on them, their institutions, and in some cases the title of
one publication. But there is one name listed alone, without a language reference: "Dr/Miss De-
metracopoulou — Univ. Wash. Seattle dept Anth" (Whorf 1933 ms.). Her language of specializa
tion was Wintu, and it seems likely that Whorf would have listed it had he known her work
directly.
die of Whorf's definitive formulation of his 'linguistic relativity principle'. On the

other hand, the lecture notes are very sparse and contain little of relevance.25
Like S apir, Whorf read widely, and except where he tells us directly, it is diffi
cult if not impossible to pinpoint what phrase in what book may have sparked a
particular idea he held. His ideas about the ultimate unity of science and religion
are closely tied to the contents of the theosophical periodicals of the 1920s and
'30s, which are clearly the source of his anti-evolutionary stance, and may also be
the primary source of his opinions concerning physics, relativity, and other scien
tific topics. Furthermore, whereas Sapir's ambitions were limited to a global un
derstanding of human mental and behavioural faculties on both the individual and
cultural levels, Whorf sought even more inclusive explanations that would com
prehend the physical universe as well. This desire stemmed in part from his the
osophical background, but seemed to be finding confirmation toward the end of
his life from the highest reaches of science (as theosophy had predicted it would).
Developments in quantum theory indicated that all matter consists of waves,
which meant that the brain, the mind, and the organs of phonation were ultimately
no different in kind from the sound waves in which their linguistic output is mani
fested. Whorf's articles of 1941-42 cannot be fully understood unless read in this
context — a context which makes the view of language as a 'magic key' to the
understanding of mind and behaviour no longer seem so magical, as the traditional
boundary between, on the one hand, mysticism and magic, and on the other, ra
tionality and science, fades into irrelevance. The more professionally conservative
Sapir might have agreed with Whorf's late views in his heart, but also have tried
to dissuade him from publishing them, which again Whorf did in fully-blown form
only in the two years between Sapir's death and his own.
Conclusion
As the epigraph to this chapter is meant to indicate, the notion that language is
not simply generated by thought but also generates thought is a heritage that dates
back to the Middle Ages and perhaps beyond. It was given an influential new for-
25. Despite their professional rivalry Sapir and Malinowski had an apparently cordial personal
relationship (see Darnell 1990:353). On 29 December 1994 Philip Sapir looked through his fa
ther's copy of Ogden & Richards (1923) at my request, and informed me by telephone that there
are no marginal comments in the text proper, but that Malinowski's supplement is severely criti
cized. Sapir's review of Ogden & Richards (Sapir 1923) omits any reference to Malinowski, and
hisfirstletter to Ogden (3 July 1923), excerpted in n. 13 above, contains only a few mild criticisms
of his supplement followed by apologies for the criticisms. However a few years later he would
write to Ogden: "I am very glad to learn that The Meaning of Meaning' is already going into its
third edition, which is certainly not bad for so difficult a work. I have always considered this a
splendid contribution to the philosophy of language, though I have never made any secret of the
fact that I consider Malinowski's appendix a very bad piece of work in spite of all the praise which
has been bestowed upon it" (Sapir to Ogden, 29 Apr. 1930). On Malinowski's contributions to
semantics, see further Sampson (1980:223-226), Hutton (1995), Wolf (1988).
mulation in the 17th and 18th centuries that found its most powerful expression in
Humboldt (1836). The best known modern form of this view, the 'Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis', has certain indirect connections to this older intellectual line but also
crucial disjunctures from it. Its immediate source was instead the view of the na
ture of language that lay behind analytic philosophy, particularly as synthesized by
Ogden and Richards, and perhaps with later though less significant reinforcement
via Korzybski. To Sapir it represented an assertion of the foundational importance
of language to thought and culture that was intellectually and methodologically
modern, unlike the Herder-Humboldt line he had examined (albeit superficially)
in 1905 and distanced himself from in 1921. Through Sapir it had a similar impact
on Whorf, leading him to put aside earlier mystical interests in language which
began to resurface only after Sapir's death.
Yet it must also be pointed out that the conclusions drawn by Sapir and Whorf
about how to deal with the shaping influence of language upon thought was radi
cally different from that of the philosophers and semanticists, all of whom saw the
solution to the problem in some form of tampering with 'natural' language. For
the philosophers, the answer lay in the construction of a logical language on
mathematical lines; for Ogden, the simplification of English into a 'Basic English'
that would eliminate the metaphysical traps posed by languages in their 'natural'
forms; for Korzybski, the adoption of devices such as subscripts and superscripts
and including 'etc.' at the end of every sentence. Knowing that Sapir was much
involved with the project for creation of an international language funded by Alice
Vanderbilt Morris (1874-1947), we must not imagine that he was utterly opposed
to such tampering (see Sapir 1949 [1933a]:31-32]; Darnell 1990:272-277; Falk
1995,1999), but there is no indication that this activity was connected to his views
on language, thought, and culture, or was in any way directed at creating a lan
guage in which sounder thinking could take place. Rather, for both Sapir and
Whorf, the primary importance of their view lay in its power as a justification for
the doing, and funding, of linguistics. This is already apparent in Sapir (1929a),
which was written for a rather extraordinary audience, a joint meeting of the LSA,
the American Anthropological Association, and Sections H and L of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. For most of this century Sapir has
personified the intersection of linguistics and anthropology, and more broadly the
need for interdisciplinary exchange between the humanities and social sciences.
The title of his paper, "The Status of Linguistics as a Science" (my italics), was
not a neutral choice, but was aimed dead at the delegates of the American Asso
ciation for the Advancement of Science. The paper goes one by one through the
sciences adjacent to linguistics, including anthropology, sociology, psychology
and philosophy, and argues that all of them must take account of the findings of
modern linguistics if they are to have any validity:
It is an illusion to think that we can understand the significant outlines of a culture

through sheer observation and without the guide of the linguistic symbolism which makes
these outlines significant and intelligible to society. Some day the attempt to master a
primitive culture without the help of the language of its society will seem as amateurish as
the labors of a historian who cannot handle the original documents of the civilization
which he is describing. (Sapir 1929a:209 [1949:161-162])
As for Whorf, he believed that the only way out of the 'grooves' of thought which
one's native language sets down is the study of linguistics, which results in a spiri
tually transcendental experience. This comes to the fore in the article he wrote for
The Theosophist, combining his usual themes of linguistic relativity with rumina
tions on levels of consciousness in Yoga:
The stilling of this activity [of the versatile psychic nature] and the coming to rest of this
focus [of the personality upon that activity in Yoga] [...] is by reliable accounts from
widely diverse sources, both Eastern and Western, a tremendous expansion, brightening
and clarifying of consciousness, in which the intellect functions with undreamed-of rapid
ity and sureness. The scientific study of languages and linguistic principles is at least a
partial raising of the intellect toward this level [...]. Such understandings have even a
therapeutic value. (Whorf 1942 [1956:268-269])
It seems clear enough that Sapir and Whorf share with the analytic philosophers
and semanticists a fundamental belief in a transcendent, universal logic which no
natural' language captures perfectly. Whorf also holds at times that some lan
guages capture some aspects of this logic better than others, as when with regard
to tense in Hopi he does not describe it as constructing time in an alternative and
equally valid way to that of 'Standard Average European', but in a way that would
make Hopi a superior vehicle for the formulation of quantum physics. Thus his
'linguistic relativity principle' fails to be relativistic in two senses, since it is
grounded in a belief in 'true' logic, and does not decline to pass judgement on how
well particular languages embody that logic.
As can be seen most pointedly in Sapir's treatment of Ogden and Richards, his
views on language, thought, and culture, and Whorf's modification of them, repre
sent an attempt to assert the importance of linguistics within the human sciences,
and with Whorf the sciences generally, by jumping on the bandwagon of an al
ready widespread critique of attempts to found logic upon natural languages, since
they are filled with metaphysical traps and pitfalls. Sapir and Whorf said, in effect:
that's right, and who better to detect those traps and pitfalls than those engaged in
the scientific study of language structure. After their deaths, others would use the
'hypothesis' to promote the same agenda.26 Significantly, Sapir and Whorf adum-
26. To take just one example: "If Whorf and his followers are right, the study of language takes on
a new importance in the social sciences. Its place in psychology is greatly expanded, and it be
comes of primary significance in all studies of culture. It may even provide the focal point about
which the social sciences can best be integrated" (Henle 1958:2).
brated it almost exclusively in papers directed at audiences outside linguistics, and

with the exception of Whorf (1941a), only hinted at it in their professional work.
A hypothesis it is not; a principle, perhaps; certainly to some extent propaganda
for linguistics (see further Darnell 1990:380-382; Koerner 1992:181). Yet Whorf,
at least, harboured the ambition of deriving a "planetary logic" from the linguistic
description of the languages of the world (Whorf 1941 ms., frame 546), and even
if this is traceable to his theosophical interests, it suggests that he differed from the
analytic philosophers and therapeutic semanticists less in ultimate goals than in
how and by whom they should be reached.
Read in the context of its immediate sources, rather than in the Humboldtian
tradition, the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' takes on a new look that may help lead us
to a better understanding of what Sapir and Whorf meant, and of why the 'hy
pothesis' has defied precise formulation or interpretation for so many decades. It
was, after all, trapped between two very different views of the nature of linguistic
influence on thought, each founded in a different conception of history, and it de
veloped within a specific, complex intellectual context that has been largely left
out of consideration in later discussions. Until these views have been directly con
fronted with one another they cannot be reconciled, and until they are reconciled
the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' can only read like the epistemological muddle it has
appeared to so many of those who, while initially attracted to it, have finally aban
doned it after serious, but decontextualized, consideration.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SOCIOLINGUISTICS
The term 'sociotinguistics' and its pedigree

It is no easier to pinpoint the beginning of sociolinguistics than of linguistics
generally. Each is the result of a long intellectual evolution, and suggested starting
points are usually based on some combination of convenience, ideology and aca
demic politics. Sociolinguistics is widely assumed to be a product of the 1960s, yet
its roots go much further back, including to Whitney, for whom, as we saw on
p.30, the social nature of language was integral to his view of it as a conventional
institution with communication as its purpose.
Speech is not a personal possession, but a social; it belongs, not to the individual, but to the
member of society. (Whitney 1867:404)
[L]anguage [...] enables men to be, as they are intended to be, social, and not merely gre
garious beings. As it is the product, so it is also the means and instrument, of community.
(Ibid., pp. 440-441)
Whitney recognized the existence of what a century later would be called 'socio-
linguistic variation', based, among other things, on class (ibid., p.22):
[W]hile we all speak the English language, the English of no two individuals among us is
precisely the same: it is not the same in form; it is not the same in extent; it is not the same
in meaning.
But what, then, is the English language? We answer: It is the immense aggregate of the
articulated signs for thought accepted by, and current among, a certain vast community
which we call the English-speaking people [...]. It is the sum of the separate languages of
all the members of this community. Or [...] it is their average rather than their sum [...].
Although one language, it includes numerous varieties, of greatly differing kind and de
gree: individual varieties, class varieties, local varieties.
He later stresses the point that these varieties really constitute 'separate languages',
the difference being one of degree rather than kind (p. 157). He notes too that each
individual possesses a repertoire of such varieties for use in various settings and
with various interlocutors (p. 156):
[T]he same person may belong to more than one community, using in each a different id
iom. For instance: I have, as we may suppose, a kind of home dialect, containing a certain
proportion of baby-talk, and a larger of favourite colloquialisms, which would sound a lit
tle queerly, if they were not unintelligible, to any one outside of my family circle; as an ar
tisan, pursuing a special branch of manufacture or trade, or as one engaged in a particular
profession, or study, or department of art, I am a member of another community, speaking

a language to some extent peculiar, and which would be understood neither by my wife and
children nor by the majority of speakers of English.
Here Whitney echoes remarks made nearly 80 years earlier by Thomas Reid
(1710-1796), the major figure of the Scottish common sense school, about "the
peculiarities of voice, gesture, and manner, which we see in some families, the
manners peculiar to different ranks, and different professions" (Reid 1788:112).
The earliest attested use of the term 'socio-linguistics' is in a brief 1939 article
by T. C. Hodson (1871-1953), entitled "Socio-Linguistics in India".1 Hodson re
fers to three works, Malinowski (1923), the 1922 study of the Andaman Islanders
by another British anthropologist, A. R. Brown (later Radcliffe-Brown, 1881—
1955), and first and foremost to a 1923 book entitled Holism and Evolution by J.
C. Smuts (1870-1950), the South African general and prime minister who playeda
key role in organizing the League of Nations and its successor, the UN. Smuts,
who wrote the book to pass the time while out of power, asserts not only that the
self is largely a social construction, but that it is constructed upon language.
[M]y very self, so uniquely individual in appearance, is [...] largely a social construction. I
would never come to know myself and be conscious of my separate individual identity
were it not that I become aware of others like me: consciousness of other selves is neces
sary for consciousness of self or self-consciousness. The individual has therefore a social
origin in experience. Nay, more, it is through the use of the purely social instrument of lan
guage that I rise above the mere immediacy of experience and immersion in the current of
my experience. Language gives names to the items of my experience, and thus through lan
guage they are first isolated and abstracted from the continuous body of my experience.
(Smuts 1927 [1926]: 254)
Man in India, the journal in which Hodson's article appeared, was received by a
good number of American university libraries (to judge from the National Union
Catalogue), but, like Smuts's book before it, attracted no attention in the linguistics
community.
A decade later, in 1949, the term 'sociolinguistic' made several appearances in
the second edition of Morphology by Eugene Nida (b.1914), in the chapter on
meaning (Nida 1949:152; see also p.154):
There is nothing intrinsic about the semantic values; they are dictated simply by the
reactions of language-users to the sociolinguistic environment [...]. The meaning of every
word and phrase had to be learned from its sociolinguistic setting.
1. The reference to Hodson (erroneously cited as 'Hudson') was communicated to Dell Hymes by
Dr. R. R. Mehrotra of Benares Hindi University, Varanasi, India (see Hymes 1979). I am grateful
to Nick Hodson for providing me with valuable information about his grandfather, Professor Colo
nel Thomas Callan Hodson, who was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and a Fel
low of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. I am still investigating Hodson's other writings on the
languages of India, but the major one I have examined so far, Hodson (1937), contains nothing
relating to 'socio-linguistics'.
THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SOCIOLINGUISTICS 109
The term had not appeared in the corresponding chapter of the 1946 edition. Also
in 1949 'socio-linguistics' was used in regional conference papers by Haver C.
Currie (1908-1993) and his wife Eva Garcia C. Currie (1912-1999), with the
former published in a regional journal (Currie 1952; see further Currie & Currie
1976). The correlation made by Nida between sociolinguistics and semantics was
again evident the following year in Einar Haugen's (1906-1994) Presidential
Address to the Linguistic Society of America (Chicago, 29 December 1950):
If semantics should be an undesirable term [for the linguistic study of meaning, since it
already had a different use in the domain of logic], there is always 'ethno-linguistics' or
perhaps 'socio-linguistics'. (Haugen 1951:213).
The term next surfaced in a discussion of the term 'dialect' by André Martinet:
This is only a sampling of all the possible socio-linguistic patterns in connection with
which the word 'dialect' is actually used [...]. Therefore we may expect to come across
socio-linguistic situations which we may hesitate to class in one or another of our four
categories [...]. (Martinet 1952:261).
On the subsequent history of the term, see Koerner (1986:389, 1991:65) and
Ornstein (1977). Before crediting the 'invention' of the term to anyone (cf. H.
Currie 1980), we should remember that a large number of similar compounds had
been current for some time.2
Investigators such as Koerner (1986, 1991) and Shuy (1990) have traced the
systematic aspect back to American dialect geography, and the social aspect of
language generally back to European sources, in particular Meillet, who was a
close associate of both Saussure and Durkheim, the pre-eminent figures of early
20th-century linguistics and sociology, respectively. Meillet's pupil Martinet
would direct the doctoral dissertation of Uriel Weinreich, who in turn would direct
the dissertation of William Labov, in which sociolinguistics in its modern sense
has come indisputably into being.3
2. The 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1988), vol.15, gives the following dates for
thefirstattestations of these terms: socioreligious (1871), sociocentric (1881), sociography (1881),
socio-economic (1883), socio-political (1884), sociocracy (1887), socioscientific (1891), socio-
psychological (1899), socionomic(s) (1902), sociometric (1908), socioindustrial (1909), sociobio-
logical (1921), socio-cultural (1929), sociopathic (1930), sociotechnic (1931), sociosexual (1932),
sociogram(1933), socio-literary (1933), sociodynamic (1934), sociomedical (1934), sociogenous
(1941), sociodrama (1943), sociogeographical (1945), socio-historical (1949). Note the upsurge in
the 1930s, the decade in which 'socio-linguistic' isfirstattested.
3. Shuy (1990) assimilates many of Koerner's findings; but an earlier (1988) version of Shuy's
paper traces sociolinguistics back almost exclusively to the dialect geography tradition. The earlier
version is valuable for what it reveals about the historical framework which Shuy and other
sociolinguists of the 1960s had assumed for themselves. In addition to the lines leading back to
dialectology and Meillet, Koerner posits a third tradition, studies in bilingualism, initiated by Max
Weinreich (1894-1969, father of Uriel) and continued by Einar Haugen and Charles A. Ferguson
(1921-1998). He also posits a later source of direct input from sociology, through the work of
Basil Bernstein (1924-2000). For the most recent updating of his views, see Chapter 10 of Koerner
(2002). Figueroa (1994) offers a good critical account of the later history of sociolinguistics.
11 FROM WHITNEY TO CHOMSKY
But other important traditions have been left out of these accounts: in particu
lar, linguistic studies by American sociologists, some of whom were very well read
in the linguistic literature and produced sophisticated work. One sociologist in par
ticular, The Right Reverend Monsignor Paul Hanly Furfey (born Cambridge,
Mass., 30 June 1896; died Washington, D.C., 8 June 1992), mastered the distribu
tional method to the point that he was able to publish a critique of it in a linguistic
journal, offered the first known course on "The Sociology of Language", and di
rected two of the first doctoral students to undertake dialect research sufficiently
systematic and socially oriented to merit unreservedly the designation 'sociolin-
guistic'.
Furfey's education and career up to WWII

Furfey made important contributions to several fields in a career of scholarship
and writing that extended from 1919 through the late 1970s. However, just two
aspects of his work are generally remembered: his role as an intellectual leader of
Catholic sociology from the 1930s through the 1970s,4 and his part in helping to
legitimate and spread the New Social Catholicism of Dorothy Day (1897-1980)
and Peter Maurin (1877-1949), most notably through his book Fire on the Earth
(1936) and articles and pamphlets published by The Catholic Worker, edited by
Day from 1933 until her death.4
Furfey's Day-inspired doctrine of Catholic radicalism has been documented by
Curran (1972,1982) and Serano (1982). The last includes an extensive bibliogra
phy of Furfey's published writings. Documents found among Furfey's papers in the
Catholic University of America archives show that he made a strong and
uncompromising defence for Day in the late 1930s when the Archdiocese of New
York undertook an investigation of her moral fitness. Furfey assured her accusers
that even though she had formerly been an advocate of communism and free love
and had borne an illegitimate child, ever since her conversion to Catholicism she
had given up all such beliefs and practices and was living a pure life. There is no
doubt that Furfey did much to help keep Day — now the subject of a popular
movement for canonization as a saint — out of the bad graces of the Church
establishment. (For more information on Day, see Day 1952,1963; Miller 1982; on
Maurin, see Ellis 1981). Furfey's protégée Edna M. O'Hern (1919-2000) said of
him that "It is impossible to measure the influence he has had through his research,
writings, and teaching and guidance of graduate students, on such matters as race,
poverty, war and conscientious objection, etc., but we know it has been very great"
(letter to the author, 1992).
4. The plenary address at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion is
called the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture. The Association's journal, Sociological Analysis, was until
1964 entitled The American Catholic Sociological Review, and published two of Furfey's
linguistically oriented articles (see below).
His activities as "the theorist of American Catholic radicalism" (Curran 1972:

676) came in fact largely to overshadow the scientific pursuits which were his sole
interest before meeting Day in 1934, and which continued to occupy most of his
attention for the rest of his active career. In high school and at Boston College,
where he completed his B.A. in 1917, Furfey took numerous courses in Latin,
Greek, French, German and philology, and in addition taught himself "a bit of He
brew" (Furfey ms.a, one of several unpublished attempts at an autobiography found
in his archives). When he entered graduate school at Catholic University in 1917
on a Knights of Columbus Fellowship he was torn between studying the behav
ioural sciences and Semitic languages (Furfey ms.b:11). He opted for the pro
gramme in psychology, studying under Dom Thomas Verner Moore (1877-1969)
and going to work in "an animal psychology lab under an enthusiastic behaviorist,
an immediate disciple of [John .] Watson [1878-1958]" (Furfey 1961:114).
That anonymous behaviourist made little impression on the young Furfey, but
Moore, who introduced him to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, made a deep and
lasting one. At the time Freud's name still provoked fear and loathing in Catholic
intellectual circles, so it is a mark of Furfey's independence of mind that his first
publication, "Conscious and Unconscious Factors in Symbolism" (Furfey 1919), is
a monograph-length synthesis of Freudian and Jungian thought.5 It is astonishing
work for a 23-year-old who had engaged in exactly one academic year of graduate
research, and it was issued together with an article by his mentor (Moore 1919).
Following the year of work in psychology Furfey began theological studies
(1918-1922) at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and then at the Sulpician Semi
nary on the grounds of Catholic University in Washington, where he "was allowed
to register for one course a semester in Semitic languages. Thus I learned some
thing about not only Hebrew, but also Arabic, Accadian, Syriac, Ge'ez, and some
modern Ethiopic dialects. Finally, while still a seminarian, I was asked to teach a
class in Hebrew for my fellow students, the first class I ever taught" (Furfey ms.a).
Through observing the fundamental differences between Semitic and Indo-
European languages, Furfey (ibid.) recounts, "I came to realize that linguistic
communication has far greater possibilities than I realized. Much of what I had
thought to be essential proved to be only accidental. It was a revealing insight".
After being ordained on 25 May 1922, he returned to Catholic University for
three years of postgraduate study. Although his field was officially sociology, the
psychologist Moore would continue to be his main personal influence (Furfey
ms.b:3). In September 1925 Furfey was appointed Instructor of Sociology at
Catholic University, where he would remain for his entire career, rising through the
5. The chapters of Furfey's youthful monograph are entitled "The Dream and Myth as Symbolic of
Wish Fulfillment", "The Nature of the Libido in Phantasy and in Logical Thought", 'The Manifold
Elements of Unconscious Life", 'The Mental Functions at Work in the Myth" and "Conclusions".
ranks to full professor and, from 1934 until his retirement in 1966, chairman. In
1926 he received his doctorate, and his dissertation was published by Macmillan
(Furfey 1926).
Until the early 1930s his work would remain divided between the areas of psy
chology and sociology, including books of both a theoretical (Furfey 1929a) and an
applied (Furfey 1929b) nature. He would make considerable contributions to study
of the psychological development of children (see for instance Furfey 1929c, 1930;
Furfey, Bonham & Sargent 1930) and scientific epistemology (Furfey 1929d, Fur
fey & Daly 1934, and much later Furfey 1961). His interests were increasingly
drawn toward the physical basis of psychological and social behaviour, and he
spent the academic year 1931-32 at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt doing
medical studies. A very detailed journal of that year survives in his archives.
But after 1934 and the encounter with Dorothy Day, his professional work be
came more sociological in focus. He would devote one major book to sociological
theory for each of the next three decades (Furfey 1937, 1942, 1953), and the gap
between his scholarly and spiritual work narrowed, due to a sense of engagement
that reflects Day's impact. By the late 1930s Furfey began distancing himself from
the Catholic Worker group over a number of issues, including their 'specializing'
in the homeless and neglecting the far greater number of non-homeless poor
(Furfey ms.a), and their insistence that the ultimate answer to urban poverty was to
move the poor to the countryside to form collective farms (Furfey ms.c). Furfey
recognized this policy as romantic and unworkable and did not hold back from
saying so publicly.6 However, he joined forces with Day in anti-war activities dur
ing World War  (and would do so again during the Vietnam War), being particu
larly outspoken about the immorality of obliteration bombing and the selection of
civilian targets (ibid.), though he did not share Day's absolute pacifism, believing
instead in the possibility of a just war.
The sociology of language before WWII

It was during World War  that Furfey's attention was drawn to linguistics.
The Survey of Research Projects in the American Catholic Sociological Review for
1942 lists Furfey's project as "The Sociology of Language" (Reuss 1943:48). He
6. Furfey's close associate Mary Elizabeth Walsh (1905-1987), who did a Ph.D. under him at
Catholic University and then joined the faculty there, opened Fides House in Washington, D.C.,
which "dealt with the ordinary poor, the residents of a slum neighborhood" (Furfey ms.c), and
represented a pioneering effort of its kind. Furfey's national prominence helped bring attention to
Fides House, including at least one visit from Eleanor Roosevelt. Furfey's writings of the 1930s
point with great foresight to the dangers posed by both fascism and communism, and are fiercely
critical of the racism in the United States at the time. The fact that at Fides House young white and
black women lived together initially shocked the white community; but as Furfey predicted, as the
shock wore off, so did many of the irrational fears and prejudices which provoked it.
became a member of the Linguistic Society of America the same year. The first
footnote to Furfey (1944a:3) reads:
The whole subject of the sociology of language is an interesting study which deserves
more attention. The present writer began last year to offer a course entitled The Sociology
of Language at the Catholic University, the first attempt, so far as he knows, to treat the
topic in a formal academic course.
This is probably right, if what is meant is an entire course devoted to just this topic.
C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) had recently published a short bibliography on the
topic (Mills 1940), in which "The sociological and functional view of language,
constituting a revolt from the older Wundtian view" is represented by three works
of the 'social behaviourists' John Dewey, George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) and
Grace De Laguna (1878-1978) (Dewey 1925, De Laguna 1927, Mead 1934).
Dewey and his school are now more generally referred to as the 'Chicago
pragmatists' (see Rucker 1969), but 'social behaviourists' is the term used by both
Mead and Mills. Mills also cites Bloomfield (1933) and several works of Sapir, but
recommends as the best overall treatment of the study of language the 1939
monograph óf Mead's protégé Charles W. Morris (1901-1979).
Another figure on the American linguistic scene at this time demands notice for
his failed attempt to introduce sociological study into mainstream linguistics.
Reinhold Saleski was a founding member of the Linguistic Society of America and
its vice-president in 1927. It was he who came up with the idea of the LSA Lin
guistic Institute, first held at Yale in the summer of 1928 and then annually (later
biennially) to the present day (see Falk & Joseph 1994, 1996). In the summer of
1929 the second LI was held, again at Yale, and Saleski, its Assistant Director, of
fered two courses of his own, "An Introduction to the Study of Chinese" and a
seminar entitled "The Sociological Study of Language". For the latter (which is
noted by Hymes & Fought 1975:955) he published the following description:
An attempt (1) to define the place of the study of language in thefieldof Sociology, (2) to
build up a systematic outline of sociological problems in language, (3) to determine a
general method of attacking these problems, (4) to enter on the investigation of a few such
problems, as circumstances may permit. (LSA Bull 3.7).
Unfortunately, unlike many LI faculty members, he did not specify textbooks, so
we have no further evidence of what he would have taught had the seminar actually
taken place. We assume that it was not given, since the following LSA Bulletin
(4.15) indicates that there were no registrants.
This is an extraordinarily early date for a proposed course on the sociological
study of language. That the 'Chicago pragmatists' may have figured in Saleski's
curriculum is suggested by a 1939 article of his which acknowledges the input of
Herbert Blumer (1900-1987), the University of Chicago sociologist who upon
Mead's death had taken over his social psychology course (see Rucker 1969:136).
There is more concrete evidence of Saleski's interest in another source of what

would later be called sociolinguistics: in 1930 he published reviews in Language
of the Grammaire des fautes (Grammar of errors) of the Geneva School linguist
Henri Frei (1899-1982). The review shows Saleski's familiarity with the work and
approach of Saussure and his Genevan disciples, among whom Saleski oddly lists
Ferdinand Brunot (1860-1938). Saussure, with his insistence on langue being a
social fact, is generally recognized (e.g., by Koerner 1992, Shuy 1990) as having
been a key influence on the eventual emergence sociolinguistics.
One can only imagine the effects on the development of 'American structural
ism' if Saleski had given his seminar in 1929, presenting the Geneva School's
works to both the established and the younger scholars of the Linguistic Institute
(Bloomfield's interest in Saussure will be discussed in the next chapter) and seri
ously applying the methods of sociology to the sorts of problems they raised. But
the failure of anyone to sign up for the seminar, though not a rare occurrence at the
early Linguistic Institutes, suggests that although American linguists of this period
were coming to think of their approach as vaguely 'social' in orientation, studying
the methods developed by sociologists was of no interest to them.
This relates to an ambiguity that would frustrate attempts to consolidate the
'sociology of language' through the 1950s. For Saleski, Furfey, McDavid (see
below), and linguists generally, the term suggested a direct attempt to combine the
findings and methods of linguistics and sociology. For Mills, George C. Barker
(1912-1958), Margaret Schlauch (1898-1986), Ralph Pieris, and the social
behaviourists (and, it seems, for Firth), it meant instead any approach to language
that was not based upon psychology and mentalism. For the latter group, then, the
'sociology of language' was a cover term for contemporary linguistics generally
(what we would now term European and American structuralism — though see
Chapter 7 below). Barker's 1947 article and doctoral dissertation (done in the
Anthropology Department at Chicago, and published posthumously in 1972)
analyse the use of Spanish and English in a Mexican-American community. They
contain references to other socially and anthropologically oriented 'acculturation'
studies that link Barker to the bilingualism tradition mentioned above.7 Schlauch, a
native of Philadelphia and an outspoken member of the American Communist
Party who eventually defected to Poland, gives an impressive and fascinating
synthesis of modern 'social' linguistics from a Marxist perspective (Schlauch
1936). Pieris's article is a hodgepodge of information drawn from sources in
anthropology, psychology and literary studies, with some specific information on
Ceylon (where Pieris was living), and references to Mead (1934), Lewis (1947),
7. Barker (1945) is based almost to the letter upon Mills's (1940) bibliography and elucidates the
thinking behind it; his most significant new citation is the 1933 article on Saussure and Durkheim
by Witold Doroszewski (1899-1976), on which see Koerner (1986:392 [1988:166]).
and work by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Max Müller and Sapir. (On the
Chicago School, Barker and Pieris, see Murray 1994,1998; on Lewis, n.19 below.)
Despite his antipathy to behaviourism, Furfey would probably have cited the
social behaviourists had he known either their work or Mills's bibliography. After
all, Bloomfield's behaviourism did not stop Furfey from citing Language and call
ing it "brilliant" (Furfey 1944a: 4n., quoted in full below). Instead, the sources for
Furfey's sociology of language course came from within 'mainstream' linguistics.
Furfey's sociology of language course and related articles

A set of detailed manuscript notes for "The Sociology of Language" course is
found in Furfey's archives (Furfey ms.d). Since the notes are undated it is not cer
tain whether they are from the 1943 course or a slightly later one, but since the
topic receded from Furfey's active research agenda for several more years, it is
probable that the notes accurately reflect the structure and content of the pioneering
1943 course. The syllabus is as follows:
1. Communication and group life
2. Speech types
3. Speech types with a geographical basis
4. The world distribution of languages
5. Phonetics and phonemics
6. Grammar
7. Dialect geography
8. Speech types with a class basis
9. Speech types with an occupational basis
10. Miscellaneous speech types
11. Speech types and in-group superiority attitudes
12. Language and nationalism
13. Internal development of speech types
14. Interaction of speech types
15. Linguistic fossils
16. Limitations of linguistic communication
Class number 8 is the one which connects most directly with the interests of the
sociolinguistics that would emerge in the 1960s, and so I have reproduced the
notes for that class in their entirety in the Appendix to this chapter, together with
outlines for classes 9 and 10.
A portion of the material for class 8 was developed into the article"TheSocio
logical Implications of Substandard English" (Furfey 1944a), which appeared in
The American Catholic Sociological Review. The article is mainly a summary of
Furfey's research into the literature of American linguistic geography (Kurath
1939), American English grammars (Kenyon 1924, Fries 1940), and the history of
English (Wyld 1927, Baugh 1935), with the central theme being the snobbishness
of 'normative grammar' and the need to respect and study 'substandard' dialects in
their own right. These of course were not new ideas in linguistics (see Joseph
1987: 7-13; Joseph 1989a), though perhaps unfamiliar to Furfey's audience of so
ciologists, who encountered them here in a clear, historically aware, convincing
form. Furfey issues a call for sociologists to appropriate the study of language into
their domain of research:
If SsE [Substandard English] cannot be proved inherently inferior to SE [Standard
English] on purely linguistic grounds, then its position of actual inferiority in current
esteem must be explained from other considerations. The sociologist is in a position to
give the true explanation. (Furfey 1944a:7)
The implication is that the linguists are unequipped to give the true explanation.
But as Furfey goes on to specify what this explanation is, we read nothing that is
not familiar from the standard linguistic handbooks of the time (ibid.):
SE is the speech of the privileged classes. It was such in its origin, as we have seen. For
the English which rose to the position of a standard tongue in the fifteenth century was the
language of the court, the nobility, and the commercial classes of London. This
association with the privileged strata of society has persisted ever since.
Furfey also tells sociologists that language may help elucidate their understanding
of social class (ibid., p.8):
The phenomena associated with social class have recently been attracting increased
attention from sociologists. Attempts are being made to distinguish the various classes on
the basis of such criteria as membership in a kinship unit by birth or marriage, personal
qualities, achievements, possessions, authority, and power (Parsons 1940) [...]. Further
investigations in thisfieldmight profitably pay attention to the importance of language as
an index of social class. One specific point of research which would repay the effort
involved would be the determination of the place in our class structure where the dividing
line between SE speakers and SsE speakers occurs. The highest socio-economic classes
certainly use SE; and the lowest, SsE. But where, among the intermediate classes, does
the border between SE and SsE occur? Or do the intermediate classes use a mixed speech
in which SE and SsE forms are found in varying proportions? It is an interesting question
and one whose solution should be thoroughly practical, given an investigator trained both
in sociology and linguistics.
The reference to Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), doyen of American sociology, is
interesting in view of the attention Parsons would give to language in the late
1950s — according to Murray (1983:282), under the 'tutelage' of Dell Hymes.
Finally, the article makes clear that Furfey's interest in the sociological study of
language is not strictly academic, but tied in with his social agenda:
One result in the practical order might be hoped for as a result of the further study of the
relation of speech to social class. A fuller knowledge of the facts might be an antidote for
the peculiar variety of intellectual snobbery which occurs among those SE speakers who
sneer at SsE [...]. This is not only an illogical attitude but it frequently results in
humiliation for the SsE speaker. The speech line has its injustices as well as the color line.
It would be fairer and more truly democratic to cultivate a more broad-minded attitude
toward the different varieties of SsE which, together with SE, make up the vigorous lan
guage of the American people. (Furfey 1944a:9)
The article succeeded neither in attracting much attention among linguists nor in
generating interest in linguistic research within the sociological community —
other than, some years later, among two of Furfey's own students (see Putnam &
O'Hern 1955, discussed below), for Furfey had set out to produce the investigators
"trained both in sociology and linguistics" his article had called for.
Furfey's sense of the bond between language and social injustice recurs in his
article "Men's and Women's Language", which appeared later the same year in the
same journal (Furfey 1944b). He surveys a wide range of languages in which
forms are distributed according to the sex of the speaker. Of the eighteen examples
Furfey cites of languages which distinguish men's and women's forms, three are
taken from the work of Mary Haas (1910-1996), whose classic paper on "Men's
and Women's Speech in Koasati" (Haas 1944) appeared the same year. Two
others are drawn from Jespersen (1923), and the bulk from various volumes of the
Handbook of American Indian Languages edited by Boas.
Furfey's interest is focused upon the accounts of languages like that of the
Chiquito of Bolivia (Furfey's reference is to Adam & Henry 1880:vi-vii, 4-8),
where, in the men's language only,
Nouns designating gods, daemons, and men are masculine, while those designating
women, the lower animals regardless of sex, and all other concepts are feminine. In the
women's language these gender distinctions do not exist. Men, therefore, use masculine
constructions when speaking of masculine nouns and feminine constructions when
speaking of feminine nouns, while women use the feminine constructions in all cases
regardless of gender. (Furfey 1944b:219)
In the structure of such languages Furfey perceives a latent attitude of masculine
superiority. Halfway through the article he subtly interjects a paragraph on the sex
differences that probably
exist, though in less striking form, in the better known languages of Europe. Jespersen has
collected scattered observations to prove this [see Jespersen 1923:237-254] [...I]t is
probably at least true that there are certain expressions, such as "Oh, dear!" and "How
perfectly sweet!" which sound distinctly feminine to our ears, and others, including a
number of salty and unprintable phrases, which sound equally masculine. (ibid., p.221)
From the corpus of examples he draws a conclusion that seems well ahead of its
time (p.223):
On the basis of this evidence it may be tentatively suggested that language sometimes
serves as a tool of sex dominance. In a previous paper [Furfey 1944a] the writer showed
how the contrast between Standard English and Substandard English could serve as an aid
to upper-class control. It is interesting to note that men's and women's languages, in a
parallel fashion, may also be made to serve the purposes of a dominant social group.
In view of the preceding example, it is clear that this critique is not limited to
'primitive' societies. These two 1944 articles by Furfey would be cited twenty
years later in Dell Hymes's widely circulated collection Language in Culture and
Society (Hymes ed. 1964: 233, 425). Furfey (1944b) was also cited in William
Blight's Sociolinguistics (Bright ed. 1966:15), the proceedings of a landmark 1964
conference. Thus, Furfey's work was not entirely forgotten as the drive to institu
tionalize sociolinguistics got under way.
Furfey on Bloomfield
The third linguistic article published by Furfey in 1944 is in some ways the
most remarkable, being a critique of linguistic method with only indirect connec
tions to his sociological interests. Yet it is an important part of this chronicle, since
what is distinctive about Furfey's analysis of language is not simply the sociologi
cal research techniques and committed social purpose, but the attempt to combine
them with the radical distributionalism he advocates in this third article.
During the second semester of 1942-43 Furfey taught a course in phonetics,
and, no doubt in conjunction with this course, made a thorough study of Bloom-
field (1933). He would call it "a brilliant and provocative book which unfortu
nately is by no means easy reading" (Furfey 1944a:4n). Seizing perceptively upon
the gap between theory and practice in Bloomfield's treatment of meaning, Furfey
wrote a critique, "The Semantic and Grammatical Principles in Linguistic Analy
sis" (Furfey 1944c), which George L. Trager (1909-1992) published in his journal
Studies in Linguistics. Its opening paragraph reads:
A salient characteristic of the newer linguistics is the insistence that grammatical analysis
be carried out on a formal basis with the least possible reference to the meanings of the
forms analyzed. However, since the linguist cannot dispense with meanings entirely, they
are apt to intrude themselves unexpectedly and thus introduce some confusion. An
example is the concept of 'class-meaning' as applied to a grammatical form. Thus
Bloomfield, after criticizing the school-grammar definition of a noun as 'the name of a
person, place, or thing', proceeds on the next page to discuss the class-meaning of
'English substantive expressions' [Bloomfield 1933:266-267]. This is not illogical; for
Bloomfield is consistent in defining grammatical forms by grammatical criteria and
discusses class-meaning as a merely secondary characteristic. However, the procedure can
be confusing to a beginner. The purpose of the present article is to suggest the advantage
of a more rigorous separation of the semantic and grammatical principles in linguistic
analysis and to illustrate the application of this procedure particularly in the classification
of nouns and substantive expressions. (Furfey 1944c:56)
Despite the deferential tone, Furfey clearly thought Bloomfield had not gone far
enough in eliminating semantic considerations from distributional analysis. Fur-
fey's specific objection is to the tendency to assign 'class-meanings' to grammati
cal classes. He argues that such classes should be determined on strictly
distributional terms, with no attempt to co-ordinate them with semantic classes.
The bulk of the paper consists of supporting evidence in the form of data from
many language families illustrating how the grammatical classes commonly re
ferred to as 'gender' and 'animacy' are in fact arbitrarily determined to such an ex
tent that the labels are misleading. After citing examples of 'masculine' and
'feminine' French nouns and adjectives which can denote sexless objects or indi
viduals of either sex, Furfey writes (ibid., p.61):
Whoever canfreehimselffromthe habits of thought inculcated by school grammars and
view the matter realistically must recognize that there are no semantic classes correspond
ing to the grammatical class distinctions of French adjectives.
As a catalogue of semantically arbitrary grammatical features from across the
globe, the article is interesting and useful, though Furfey's attempts to further
formalize the distributional method suffer from certain inconsistencies. For
instance, after stating (p.57):
It is pointless to distinguish two word-classes if the words which constitute them are
identical. Thus it is pointless to speak of a 'nominative' and 'accusative' class of English
nouns.
— he goes on to say in the same paragraph (pp. 57-58):
The requirement of phonetic distinguishability should not be applied toorigorously.Thus
in the number set of English nouns it is legitimate to say that sheep (sing.) is distinguished
from sheep (plu.) by a zero alternant. If this convention is not applied too freely, it is
useful and makes for simplicity of statement.
However, Furfey is rather free with zero alternants in his other analyses; and of
course simplicity of statement is also the obvious defence for Bloomfield's 'class-
meanings'.
That the article should have appealed to Trager, leader of the more anti-
meaning wing of the heterogeneous Bloomfieldian school, is not surprising. In the
decades to come, especially in the wake of rejection of Bloomfield by Chomsky
and his followers in the 1960s, Trager's position would come to be conflated with
Bloomfield's own in the minds of many linguists,8 and the elimination of meaning
would be the main grounds on which Bloomfield's method was criticized —
usually by people who had never opened Bloomfield (1933) or else had not
studied it with anything like the care Furfey brought to the task.
What is curious, however, is that a self-proclaimed anti-behaviourist like
Furfey should have urged such radical elimination of meaning in the distributional
method. Here, perhaps, it is a question of dealing with a separation between ontol-
8. The inaccuracy of this conflation has been demonstrated by Matthews (1986), among others. At
the end of the 1940s, coinciding with Bloomfield's death, the position of semantics as a legitimate
field of linguistic enquiry began to be reasserted, and it was in this context that the early
appearances of the term 'sociolinguistic(s)' occurred in the work of Nida and Haugen cited at the
start of the chapter.
ogy and epistemology that a priest-scientist would have to live with as a matter of
course. Even a socially radical priest like Furfey could not accept the behaviourist
premise that human beings act mechanistically, without contradicting Catholic
doctrine about human nature and free will.9 He could, however, hold that all we
can claim to know definitively about the actions of other human beings is what can
be directly observed and verified by ourselves and others.10 In other words, the
limits that God has placed on human knowledge are such that methodologically
the scientist must treat human beings as if they were machines, even though to
claim that they really are machines would be heretical. Of course, Catholics are by
no means the only people capable of living with this ontological-epistemological
divide, and Furfey might well have maintained it even if he had not been a priest.
But as a man wholeheartedly committed to both the priesthood and the science of
his day, it was the obvious position for him to take.
The three articles of 1944 constitute Furfey's entire direct contribution to the
linguistic literature, apart from scattered references in later books (in particular see
Furfey 1972, Chapter 8: "The Ghetto Dialect", and Furfey 1978: 62-66).11 Furfey
(1943) is an essay in philologically-based Biblical exegesis that does not reveal
any influence from his readings in modern linguistics. But while Furfey did not
publish anything more of note in the field, he went on giving courses in linguistics
for at least another ten years, including a graduate "Seminar in Linguistics" in
1947, 1949 and 1952, and a "Seminar on the Varieties of Language" during the
second semester of 1953-54. Furfey's notes from all these courses are preserved in
his archives at Catholic University. They show the courses to have been remarka
bly thorough surveys of the phonological and morphological structures of lan
guages of the most diverse genetic affiliations, always with a concern for the social
dimension.12 The syllabus for the Seminar on the Varieties of Language shows that
the penultimate session was to be devoted to "Dialects associated with status, oc
cupation, or sex. Slang and argots", and the final session to "Pidgin and creolized
9. Indeed, to contradict Roman Catholic doctrine in his teaching might have put his position at
Catholic University at risk during the decades under discussion, though officially only the posts in
theology are directly controlled by Rome. In the late 1980s Furfey's protégé Charles Curran was
removed by the Vatican from his theology chair at Catholic University for professing non-
canonical views on sex and birth control.
10. In later years, Furfey would engage in an extended polemic with the behaviourist George A.
Lundberg (1895-1966) over the epistemological claims of empirical science and 'supra-empirical'
positivism (Furfey 1961).
11. In a letter to Edna O'Hern dated 10 Aug. 1979, Furfey twice calls the 1978 book "my most
important work".
12. Equally remarkable are Furfey (1952a, b), summaries of the latest work in phonetics (including
sound spectrography) and phonemics that he prepared for his students, but that in no way
compromise the subject matter as one might anticipate in digests made for non-specialists. They
also show clearly that Furfey had continued to follow developments in linguistic theory during the
years after 1944.
languages. Artificial languages". Furfey's notes for the 1947 Seminar in Lin
guistics, which covered regional variation as well as the structures of diverse lan
guages, begin: "Language: a characteristic of social groups". In  1992 telephone
interview with the author, O'Hern recalled that the seminar in which she took part,
together with two other postgraduate students and three faculty members, was
rigorous and required them to do a great deal of work, including field-work. Their
research notes, filed together with Furfey's own, confirm this.
Putnam and O'Hern and those they cite

The two most important students trained by Furfey during this period were
O'Hern and Father George N. Putnam (1909-1991), who co-ordinately undertook
their dissertation research on different aspects of the dialect of one of Washington
D.C.'s inhabited alleys.13 These alleys, with their grossly inadequate living condi
tions, had for decades formed communities sufficiently closed unto themselves to
generate linguistic idiosyncrasies.14 A combined version of the dissertations, enti
tled The Status Significance of an Isolated Urban Dialect was published as a Sup
plement to Language (Language Dissertation No. 53, Volume 31, Number 4, Part
2), dated Oct.-Dec. 1955 but actually appearing early in 1956. The Acknowledg
ments begin with special thanks from the authors to Furfey, "first, for introducing
them to the field of the sociology of language; secondly, for sharing with them his
deep scholarship during his generous direction of this study" (Putnam & O'Hern
1955:v). The study consisted of:
A. interviews with 74 of the 88 known adult residents of the alley, with on-the-
spot phonetic transcription;
B. tape-recorded interviews with five informants, consisting of "(1) a list of thirty
sentences to be read; (2) a set of thirty-five object-pictures for simple identifi
cation; (3) a set of thirty-five situation pictures, chosen for emotional content;
13. O'Hern became Professor of Sociology at St Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, retiring as
Professor Emerita in 1989. According to her obituary (Hammond, Ind. Times, 21 Sep. 2000, which
however contains incorrect information about her academic career), in the 1950s she had been a
resident staff member at Fides House (see n.6), which served the inhabited alleys. Fr Putnam, ac
cording to his obituary (New York Times,21July 1991), served from 1958 to1964as Vice Rector
of Maryknoll College, Glen Ellyn, Ill. After that he taught at seminaries in Tanzania and Kenya,
and served as secretary to the bishops of two dioceses in Tanzania beginning in 1967. From 1987
until his death he taught English at the Wuhan Institute of Technology in China. O'Hern and
Putnam submitted separate dissertations with the identical title to the Catholic University
Sociology Department (O'Hern 1954, Putnam 1954). Putnam's is largely taken up with general
issues regarding phonetics and spectrographic analysis, and incorporates much material from
Furfey (1952a).
14. Several of the inhabited alleys remain in existence. Some are still slum dwellings, while others
have been upgraded in quality and accorded historical status. When I interviewed her in 1992,
O'Hern no longer recalled the actual name of the alley she and Putnam studied, which in their work
goes by the fictitious name 'Columbus Court'.
and (4) after hearing it read, an unprompted retelling of one of Aesop's Fables,
The Lion and the Mouse" (Putnam & O'Hern 1955:7);
C. an instrumental/spectrographic analysis of the tapes made in (B), including
length, stress, and intonation, as well as the precise timbre of vocalic and con
sonantal segments;
D. a less formal description of the dialect's non-standard morphological and syn
tactic features, based upon (A) and (B); and
E. the 'Tape Experiment', in which recordings like that described under (B)(4)
were made by twelve speakers, three of them being residents of the alley and
the other nine being African Americans "of varying degrees of higher status"
(ibid., p. 25).
The tapes were then played to 70 persons who were asked to rank the twelve
speakers according to social status. These rankings were then compared with the
actual status of the speakers measured according to an 'objective' scale called the
Index of Status Characteristics (I.S.C.), devised by W. Lloyd Warner (1898-1970)
in Warner, Meeker & Eells (1949). The results:
The product-moment correlation between the I.S.C. scores of the twelve speakers and the
mathematical equivalents of the judges' ratings was +0.80 [...]. [0]f the twelve speakers,
only two were rated by the judges above other speakers whose I.S.C. scores were higher.
Speakers of very high and very low status were readily so classified/[27] by the judges.
These results bear out the hypothesis of this study, that the dialect of the Columbus Court
residents does reflect low socio-economic status. (Putnam & O'Hern 1955:26-27)
The most remarkable result of the study was the discovery that untrained judges could
rate the social status of speakers so accurately after listening to a very short speech
selection in the absence of all irrelevant cues. (ibid., p.29)
In this project we see a number of Furfey's areas of interest and expertise coming
together: phonetics, the distributional method, dialect geography, highly organized
sociological investigation, formal scientific method. Moreover, Furfey's social ac
tivism resonates in the closing paragraph of Putnam and O'Hern's study:
The importance of speech as a mark of social status (at least in the case of this particular
group) is a matter of great social significance [...]. Persons who grow to adulthood as
members of an underprivileged social group may carry a mark of their origin through life
and suffer from the various forms of discrimination which society imposes on members of
the lower socio-economic classes. (ibid.)
Putnam and O'Hern's survey of the pertinent linguistic literature (p.1, n.2) consists
almost entirely of work in American dialect geography, in particular by Raven I.
McDavid, Jr., who, as noted by both Koerner (1986:389,1991:60) and Shuy (1990:
192-193), was the first to introduce social factors into this area (McDavid 1946,
1948). The motivation for McDavid's sociolinguistic interest is not made clear by
Koerner or Shuy: it is that social differences posed a crucial problem for dialect
atlases, whose creators, in both Europe and America, had been operating under the
assumption that social factors could be ignored. McDavid's study of final /r/ in S.
Carolina speech (which he first gave as a paper at the 1947 LSA Summer Meeting,
Ann Arbor) showed him that its regional distribution could be explained only if
speakers' social status was taken into account. Thus, for him, the social element
was primarily a corrective, a means toward the end of accurate dialect geography.
Besides McDavid and Kurath, other socially oriented linguistic geographers
listed by Putnam and O'Hern include E. Bagby Atwood (1906-1963), Allan F.
Hubbell (1914-1976), and Virginia G. McDavid (b.1926), the wife of Raven (see
Hubbell 1950, Atwood 1953, McDavid 1956). Atwood also gave a paper entitled
"Regional and Social Variants in the Pronunciation of Mrs. " at the 1949 LSA
Summer Meeting, Ann Arbor. Apparently Putnam and O'Hern were unaware of
the 1953 doctoral thesis on San Francisco English by David DeCamp (1927-1979),
which included a study of the distribution of phonological variables by the
educational level and socioeconomic standing of the informants.15
As it happened, DeCamp (1959) would later defend the methods of the
Linguistic Atlas against the critique of Stanley M. Sapon (b.1924), whose 1953
article is cited by Putnam and O'Hern. Sapon was working on a larger study of
socio-economic variables in Mexico City phonology that was never published
(Sapon, telephone interview with the author, 1992; cf. Labov 1966:21). Sapon
undertook his study of the social distribution of phonological variables in Mexico
City Spanish between March and September 1952. His paper to the Winter meeting
of the LSA that year, published as Sapon (1953), consists mostly of an explanation
and justification of his data collecting method and of his use of the I.S.C., together
with some illustrative examples from his Mexico City data. This article is
remarkable for its strongly stated attack on the failure of contemporary linguistics
to take account of social factors:
The significance of quantitative and qualitative analysis of socially stratified linguistic
phenomena becomes impressive when we consider how much of historical and descrip
tive linguistic theory is based on the assumption that the speech of a community repre
sents a homogeneous mass of phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns, fixed
and used almost unanimously (Sapon 1953:57).
His own method, Sapon wrote, had as its object "to enable us to examine system
atically the linguistic behavior of a community along the continuum of social
status, and to mark the degree of correlation between them" (ibid., p.58). In the
Section on General Phonetics of the 1956 Modern Language Association meeting,
Washington, D.C., he gave a paper entitled "An Experimental Verification of
15. DeCamp's supervisor was David W. Reed (1921-2000), director of the Linguistic Atlas project
for California and Nevada, and to judgefromthe acknowledgments, he received considerable input
from Yakov Malkiel (1914-1998). Parts of the thesis were published as DeCamp (1958-59).
Some Aspects of Socio-Linguistic Theory", which offered considerably more data

and a chart showing correlations between linguistic variables and speakers' I.S.C.
rankings.16 Both here and in subsequent publications (Sapon 1957,1958) as well as
in a session he organized at the 1954 MLA meeting in New York, Sapon launched
a critique against the methods of data collection used by the researchers on the
American Linguistic Atlas projects, which he believed allowed subjective factors
to colour the interviewer-interviewee relationship. He proposed to eliminate such
influence by completely standardizing the interview process, and it is here that he
most influenced Putnam and O'Hern, who wrote (1955: In.): "Dr. Sapon very
kindly made his [1953] paper available to the authors in February, 1953; it was
especially valuable for its suggestions for eliciting data for the tape-recorded
interview". His paper to the 1952 LSA meeting appears to have been the first given
to that body on empirical research of a specifically sociolinguistic nature.17
Writing Putnam and O'Hern out of the history of sociolinguistics

Thus one could say that Putnam and 'Hern's work, although directed by Fur-
fey, shows the influence of all three of the linguistic traditions which in Koerner's
schematic do not converge until Labov. Putnam and O'Hern's survey of the perti
nent sociological literature (p.1, n.1) includes only two sources relevant to language,
Furfey (1953) and the 1953 bibliographical study by Joyce Hertzler (1895-1975),
which makes much on its opening page about Mills (1940).18 Its appearance to-
16. The Section topic was "Social Differences in Pronunciation", and the chairs were Ruth Hirsch
Weir (1926-1965) and Dwight Bolinger (1907-1992). The other papers in the section were "Social
Levels in New York City Speech", by James Macris (b.1919); "From Informant to IBM", by
Sumner Albert Ives (b.1911); and "Correlation of Language Usage and Social Structure", by J.
Donald Bowen (1922-1989). Macris was a recent Columbia Ph.D. (1955), and Bowen had
completed an M.A. there in 1949.
17. Sapon had done a Ph.D. in Romance linguistics at Columbia University (1949), where his ma
jor professors included Martinet (of Koerner's historical linguistic' tradition) and Tomas Navarro
Tomas (1894-1979), who falls squarely into the European dialectological line. Sapon considers
that he arrived independently at his interest in investigating social stratification in language, but
acknowledges the influence of his training in Romance dialectology and the impetus provided by
Warner's I.S.C. Sapon's dissertation on the history of the Spanish interrogative from the 12th to
the 15th centuries was directed by Navarro Tomas, whose mentor was the legendary Ramón
Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968). Around 1910, Navarro Tomas had studied in Switzerland with
Louis Gauchat (1866-1942; Malkiel 1980:114), author of a 1905 article often cited as an early
example of social inquiry within the dialectological tradition (see for example Koerner 1991: 63).
Besides Navarro Tomas and Martinet, Sapon considers his major professors to have been Mario
Pei (1901-1978) and Fred Householder (1913-1994). Uriel Weinreich was Sapon's classmate.
Sapon went on to design a pictorial manual (1957) which was supposed to stimulate interviewee
response without the interviewer's intervention. In 1958-59 he went to Europe as a Guggenheim
Fellow to help with the integration of his materials and approach into the Linguistic Atlases of
Catalonia and Scotland, the latter in conjunction with David Abercrombie (1909-1992). The
following year his 1957 manual received a negative review in Language from David DeCamp
(1959); but by this time Sapon's interests had already begun to shift toward psycholinguistics.
18. Hertzler's study, while thorough in its coverage, is riddled with inaccuracies. Not only does he
omit the name of Mills, and discuss Mills's bibliography as though it were the work of the volume
gether with the citation of Furfey in a supplementary issue of Language provided

an opportunity for nearly all the various strands of Anglo-American proto-
sociolinguistic work to be tied together.19
This did not happen. Instead, Putnam & O'Hern (1955) was effectively written
out of the history of sociolinguistics by William Labov in his 1964 Columbia Uni
versity doctoral dissertation, published as Labov (1966). Section 3 ("Studies of
subjective evaluation of language") of the opening chapter begins:
There are even fewer citations which can be made under this heading than under the first.
G. N. Putnam and E. M. O'Hern [1955] published a dissertation on The Status Signifi
cance of an Isolated Urban Dialect. The speech of Negro residents of a particular
neighborhood in Washington was studied, and recordings of some were played to a
selected group of judges from outside the area who evaluated the status of the speakers.
This work suffered from a number of limitations: the selection of informants was totally
unsystematic, and from the occasional background information which was collected, it
appears that only a minority of the informants had any connection with the neighborhood
or Washington during their formative years. The speech of the informants was judged as a
whole, and it is not clear what the judges were reacting to, or how representative their
judgements were. (Labov 1966:19)
Labov's dissertation had an enormous impact. Although it represented just one of
several distinct approaches to the study of sociolinguistics that arose around this
time, Labov's work became the model to follow for the group of young scholars
such as Ralph W. Fasold (b.1940), Roger W. Shuy (b.1931), and Walter A.
Wolfram (b.1941), who were drawn by its social relevance, greater than that of
editors, he also incorrectly gives the names of those editors as Barnes, Becker & Becker rather than
Barnes, Becker & Barnes. Over a decade later he would bring out a book-length survey (Hertzler
1965) of many of the traditions connected with the sociology of language (omitting however
Furfey), which, through a combination of its vastness, the fact mat 'sociolinguistics' and 'sociology
of language' were already becoming marked out as distinct disciplinary territories, and a negative
review in 1967 from the principal organizational figure of the sociology of language, Joshua A.
Fishman (b.1926), did not make quite the impact upon sociolinguists of the time that it might have
been expected to do (though cf. Shuy 1990:188-189).
19. Not quite all, since neither Putnam & O'Hern (1955) nor Hertzler (1953) cites Barker (1945,
1947), DeCamp (1953), Firth (1950), Pieris (1951), or the 1947 book Language in Society by M.
Michael Lewis (1898-1971), who taught at University College Nottingham (later the University of
Nottingham) from the 1920s until his retirement in 1963, with a seven-year hiatus as Vice-Principal
of Goldsmith's College London starting in 1940. Lewis specialized in child language acquisition,
with a particular interest in deaf children. 1947 was a banner year for both Lewis and his wife, the
novelist Hilda Lewis (1896-1974), since, besides his book and their return to Nottingham, where
he took up the Directorship of the Institute of Education, she published her widely acclaimed novel
The Day Is Ours, the story of a deaf child, that was filmed in 1953 as Mandy (released in the US as
Crash of Silence). Nor have I ever seen any reference to a paper given to the 1951 Summer LSA
Meeting, Berkeley, by Harry Hoijer (1904-1976), entitled "The Social Nature of Language"; the
acknowledgments to Barker (1947 [1972]) state that 'The writer owes much to Dr. Harry Hoijer
[... ] for reading and commenting upon various sections of the manuscript". On the other important
linguistic tradition within sociology that was underway by this time, Erving Goffman's (1922-
1982) 'ethnography of speaking', see Murray (1983:300-304). Murray (1994, 1998) discusses
some of the minor figures mentioned here.
either dialect geography or generative grammar, and its potential for generating
grant support, particularly from the Office of Education of the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare, at the height of the Civil Rights movement (on
government funding of sociolinguistic research, see further Murray 1983:406-409).
Labov's version of the prehistory of the field was implicitly accepted; one sees it
repeated virtually intact in later accounts, from Wolfram (1969) to Shuy (1988).
Without denying that Labov's work represented a significant conceptual and
methodological advance over Putnam and O'Hern's, it is worth noting that Glenna
Ruth Pickford (b.1921), in an article highly critical of work in the linguistic atlas
tradition both when it has not and when it has attempted to treat class-based
differences, singles out Putnam & O'Hern (1955) as 'remarkable' and 'significant' :
Sociology has not completed its analysis of class, but it is proceeding critically and it
needs the help of linguistics — language certainly looks like one of the clues (Hertzler
1953:113; Sapon 1953; Currie 1952). The recent study of Putnam and O'Hern (1955),
remarkable for its sociological awareness, is a significant attempt to establish the impor
tance of speech as a mark of social status. In England, Alan S. C. Ross has pioneered
inquiry into the speech of different social classes (1954). (Pickford 1956:223)
A page later Pickford (1956:224) dismisses McDavid (1948) out of hand: "As the
analysis is based on an incomplete approach to social class, [...] it has little
scientific value. If linguistics is to assist the social sciences in ascertaining the
distinctions of social classes, it must first avail itself of the experience and data of
previous scientific inquiries therein". The 1954 article by Alan S.  Ross (1907-
1980), Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Birmingham, is better remembered in its
vulgarized version, "U and Non-U" (Ross 1956).
In any case, what is truly interesting is the 'discursive break' Labov's criticisms
effectuated. Students of sociolinguistics for a generation to come would assume
that the field began with him. First of all, by ranging Putnam & O'Hern (1955)
under the heading "studies of subjective evaluation of language", Labov perhaps
not inaccurately but surely incompletely characterized its contents for his readers.
When Susan M. Ervin-Tripp (b.1927) cites it, it is in an article entitled "An
Analysis of the Interaction of Language, Topic, and Listener" (Ervin-Tripp 1964,
quoted below). Thus the very thorough sampling and analytical procedures
employed in the first part of the dissertation are ignored, and all attention reserved
for the 'Tape Experiment', which again is only summarily and incompletely
described. Also telling is the absence of references to Putnam & O'Hern in Labov
(1964) and (1972), which would seem to lend themselves to its citation.
Again in the 1966 book, four pages after his dismissal of their work quoted
earlier, Labov writes (p.23):
In general, it may be said that psychologists and sociologists have lacked the linguistic
training required to isolate particular elements of structure, and have worked primarily
with vocabulary in content analysis. (Quoted for instance by Wolfram 1969:7)
It may well have escaped his attention that O'Hern and Putnam had degrees in
sociology and had received a thorough grounding in both sociology and linguistics
from the polymathic chairman of the Catholic University Sociology Department;
but it mattered little, since he had already dispensed with them on other grounds.20
The agenda of Labov's (1966) opening chapter is to establish the paucity of
predecessors and its own pioneering status. The one predecessor cited without
sharp criticism by Labov is the 1958 article by John L. Fischer (1923-1985), a
Harvard Ph.D. (1955) who cites Putnam & O'Hern (1955) not disfavorably (he
also cites Gauchat 1905, on which see n.17). But in the wake of Labov, references
to Fischer's work will be much more frequent than those to Putnam and O'Hern's.
Fischer's article received input from Labov's teacher Uriel Weinreich, a co-editor
of Word, the journal in which it appeared (Fischer 1958:51, n.5). Furfey's students
were in touch with McDavid, who Edna O'Hern told me in 1992 had been "very
interested in the dissertation". O'Hern also participated in the 1955 LSA Linguistic
Institute at Georgetown University, and gave a paper entitled "Language as an
Index of Social Status" at the 1955 Summer LSA Meeting, Washington, D.C. (also
attended by Furfey). But O'Hern and Putnam were not in direct contact with
Weinreich's group at Columbia, and this may help account for the apparent lack of
appreciative understanding of their work. Incidentally, those thanked in the
Acknowledgments to O'Hern (1971) include (in addition to Furfey, "who initiated
the study"), Ralph Fasold and Walt Wolfram. But even these later contacts did not
undo the already entrenched Labovian version of sociolinguistic prehistory.
This is not intended as a criticism of Labov. He was engaging in typical
dissertation rhetoric; it just happened that his dissertation immediately became the
cornerstone of a major research enterprise attracting a devoted corps of cohorts and
generous government funding. And his message was a very congenial one for his
followers: they didn't have to spend a lot of time in preparatory study, beyond
20. It is noteworthy, however, that of all the early sociolinguistic or proto-sociolinguistic work
discussed in this paper, Putnam & O'Hern (1955) is the only one to have been published by LSA/
Language. Even the papers by such highly respected linguists as McDavid and Hoijer, and the
prominent neophytes DeCamp and Fischer (see next paragraph), never appeared there. Stanley
Sapon has furnished a revealing anecdote: at the 1952 LSA meeting his paper was immediately
attacked by Robert Stockwell (b.1925) as not being 'linguistic' — until the attack was abruptly
halted by the editor of Language, Bernard Bloch, who praised it and said it certainly belonged on
the program of the LSA meeting. (Bloch also seems to have expunged Stockwell's name from the
discussion record in the LSA Bulletin.) However, when Sapon submitted the paper to Bloch for
publication in Language, it was returned: Bloch informed Sapon regretfully that he could not let
his personal reaction to the paper guide his editorial decisions (Sapon, telephone interview with
author, 1992). Thus the fact that Putnam and O'Hern's work was accepted for publication as a
monograph two and a half years later becomes all the more impressive, and testifies amply to how
well it met the standards of linguistic research of its time. Indeed, as Stephen Murray has pointed
out to me, the well-respected work of Wallace Lambert (b.1922) would largely involve the kind of
global ratings of speakers that Labov castigates in Putnam & O'Hern (1955).
mastering Labov's own methods, before going out into the field. They certainly
were not alone in finding such a message appealing.
After Labov (1966), citations of Putnam and O'Hern are increasingly rare and
perfunctory. Ervin-Tripp appears at least to have read the dissertation, and to
recognize its continuity with later sociolinguistics, though only in an implicit and
very backhanded way:
Another kind of participant-form study is illustrated by Putnam and O'Hern's analysis
(1955) of the relation between social status, judged by sociological indices, and linguistic
features of speech in a Negro community in Washington, D.C. This study has many
similarities in method to dialect geography, but adds a procedure of judges' blind ratings
of status from tapes, to make a three-way comparison possible between objective status,
perceived status, and specific features. Labov (1964) gives a sophisticated analysis of a
status-form relation. (Ervin-Tripp 1964: 92 [1968:200]; my italics)
But even this less than positive mention is exceptional. Putnam and O'Hern — and
with them Furfey and the whole sociological tradition — had all but vanished from
the collective memory of the field.
The discursive break in question may well have been inevitable. As demon
strated by Andresen (1990a), it has been a consistent trait of language study in
America since the 18th century that one 'forgets' intellectual predecessors, particu
larly other Americans; we have seen that this trait was only slightly less true of
Furfey and his students, who 'forgot' much of the preceding work in the sociology
of language, than of those who followed them. Furthermore, in as much as Putnam
& O'Hern (1955) is meant as an objective proof of a commonly accepted and intui
tive truth — that language reflects socioeconomic status — its goal was solidity,
and its nature not such as to generate great éclat. Later researchers never even felt
obliged to cite Putnam and O'Hern's study as evidence that language was corre
lated with social status; this continued to be treated as a given.
Ultimately, however, nothing can obscure the groundbreaking contribution that
Paul Hanly Furfey and his students made to sociolinguistics. Putnam & O'Hern
(1955) was the first published systematic study of the correlation of linguistic
variables with social status. The general plan which Furfey conceived, together
with the social activism that motivated it, can still be perceived in the 'core' socio-
linguistic work that has been carried on since the mid-1960s. Furfey's pioneering
courses and articles, together with the dissertations he directed, make up a major
part, but by no means the only part, of linguistic work done by sociologists that
has been written out of the history of both disciplines.
APPENDIX
Furfey's notes for his course "The Sociology Of Language", c.1943
(Excerpted from Furfey ms. d)
VIII. Speech types with a class basis

Concept of social class.
Used in various senses.
Broad sense: ruling class, a priestly class: in terms of the functions of a group.
More restricted sense: any one of a series of groups which stand in a relation of assumed
superiority and inferiority to one another, the groups being characterized in a general
way by the similarity of their members' mode of life, attitudes, education, wealth,
occupation and general social outlook.
The number and nature of the social classes.
No generally recognized enumeration of the classes into which modern society is divided. But
American sociologists agree on at least three (upper, middle, lower). Dollard [1937] (at least 3 in
South). Warner & Lunt [1941] subdivide the 3 into 6.
Language and social class.
No attempt yet made to classify speech types on a basis of class stratification. But in many or
most languages /[2] it is possible to recognize at least two speech types corresponding to the usage
of the more and less privileged classes respectively. In English, two types at least can be distin
guished.
Standard English (SE)
Substandard English (SsE)
Both can be divided into a written and colloquial form, but it has never been proved that any third
major division exists coordinate with SE and SsE. Intermediate grades seem to be only a mixture of
SE and SsE forms.
The linguistic dignity of substandard speech.
Speakers of a standard language are apt to classify all deviations from their standard as
"mistakes". They usually feel that such deviations represent a corruption of the standard language
by uneducated people of limited intelligence and that the standard speech is intrinsically more
beautiful, more expressive, and more logical than substandard speech.
/[3] Modern linguistic study fails to confirm this view. A standard language is nothing more
than a form of the language which happens to carry social prestige. Often it is merely a local dialect
which has become standard because it happened to be the dialect of the country's capital. Various
influences may later modify the standard language. One such influence is the work of normative
grammarians. In XVIII England there was a movement to "purify" the English language and render
it more "logical". This was a total misconception of the function of grammar which is merely to
record usage; but normative grammar did have a perceptible influence on SE.
On the other hand a substandard language is not a "corruption" of standard usage. To a large
extent it represents (1) a survival of local dialects or (2) of older forms which have not survived in
the SL.
/[4] It would be hard to prove that a SsL is in any way intrinsically inferior to the corresponding
SL. Of course the SL is more often used for literary composition and it is almost exclusively used in
philosophy and science. In this way it may accidentally become richer and more expressive. But
these are accidental features. They do not argue for intrinsic superiority.
The social pressure for the use of a SL is very great. It is the form taught in our schools and
colleges. Not only is the use of SsE socially disapproved, but it has economic significance. A SsE
speaker would find it hard to qualify for a white-collar job. Language forms a mark of social class
which is hard to erase. A workingman suddenly become rich finds it hard to change his language.
Betrays his origin by his speech.
/[5] The Nature of Substandard English
It is convenient to consider this topic under three heads:
Phonetics, grammar, vocabulary.
(1) Phonetics:
(a) In some SE words a d has developed after an n. This is a normal phonetic development, as
the voiced stop originates in the same position as the voiced n.
Thus: thunder, sound, astound (formerly thunor, soun, astoun)
But SsE has carried the process further:
ex.: drownd, drownded.
(b) The change [In] > [In] in words ending in -ing was once more widespread than now.
Occurred early as XIV century. The [In] sound is usually restored in SE but not in SsE.
(c) Ss [dif] deaf shows the regular shift [E] → [i] which is standard in (bead, clean, seat etc.)
The form [εt] for the past tense of eat is the prevailing form in Southern British, but Ss in America.
/[6] (2) Grammar
Best study of SsE grammar — made by Charles Carpenter Fries. (Am. Eng. Grammar)
Inflection for number: 2 mile down the road.
Inflection for tense: My son run away.
genitive forms: hisself
dative-accusative forms: him and this man was found.
In general the difference between SE and SsE is that the latter is essentially poverty stricken. It uses
fewer forms and does not take advantage of the wide resources of the English language. (Probably
because SsE speakers have been deprived of education and have not had the experience of using
English to discuss intellectual issues).
(3) Vocabulary
a. more restricted. Smaller vocabulary.
b. dialect. In N.E.
SE: angle worm, earthworm
SsE: fish worm, mud worm, east worm, angledog.
 immigrant speech: words of foreign origin
d. solecisms: outright mistakes made by SsE speakers who try unsuccessfully to mimic SE.
e. slang: probably greater in SsE than in SE.
/[7] The use of substandard English
Certain writers such as Ring Lardner have written what professed to be SsE for humorous
effect. Although using SsE forms these writers have exaggerated by using the more picturesque
forms and using them more frequently than they actually occur in SsE speech. For example — a
translation of the Declaration of Independence into SsE (a couple of paragraphs quoted by Fries 34-
35). In the passage Fries quotes five out of six negative statements use the double negative. Its use
not so common in real SsE. Even in OE, in which the double negative was normal, it occurred less
than 35% of the time. See: Kenyon: p. 148: for use of forms by SE not approved by normative gram
marians. Fries likewise found many "errors" by SE.
[For classes 9 and 10,I shall not transcribe Furfey's complete notes, but simply the section headings
and occasional comments of special interest:]
IX. Speech types with an occupational basis
(1) Technical language
(2) Technical slang
(3) Cant
"The social effect is to draw the group close together and to emphasize their distinctness from
outsiders."
X. Miscellaneous speech types.
A. Speech types characterizing age groups.
B. Sex differences in language.
"As to: the social effect of sex differences in language not much to be said.
Where women are assigned an inferior status: distinctive language one more badge of subjec
tion. Where women are viewed romantically: speech peculiarities one more element of charm" (p.
2).
C. Religion
D. Sports
E. Clubs and Associations
F. Individual speech types and personality
1. Literary style
2. Verb-adjective ratio
3. Speech & psychopathology
4. Voice and personality
CHAPTER SIX
BLOOMFIELD'S AND CHOMSKY'S READINGS OF THE

COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GÉNÉRALE
Misreading and ideology

The history of linguistics is largely a history of misreadings, of failed commu
nication between authors and readers, exacerbated by the illusion that communica
tion has successfully occurred. From readings of Plato's Cratylus as a defence of
linguistic naturalism by scholars in the Renaissance and after, to Chomsky's (1966)
interpretations of some of those same Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers as
prefiguring his own versions of rationalism and nativism, to the peculiar under
standing of Chomsky's competence-performance dichotomy by applied linguists
in the 1960s and 1970s (see Newmeyer 1990), innumerable lines of failed commu
nication have circumscribed the study of our primary medium of communication.
Whether semi-intentional or genuinely accidental, these misreadings are rarely
neutral. Texts are not processed by empty brains, but by minds already stocked
with set ideas, a priori categories, prototypes — and, perhaps most importantly,
agenda. In other words, misreadings are usually ideologically determined.
This is not a slur against the field of linguistics or its history. Misreading as
defined above is an inevitable occurrence, particularly where author and reader are
separated by generation and culture. Most literary critics have accepted the premise
that texts do not have an inherent meaning, but that meaning is created upon each
individual act of reading, by a reader who brings his or her unique mind and life
experience to bear on the text. Certainly there is no reason why this should be less
true in a non-fictional genre like linguistics than in fiction; indeed, given the power
of agenda and the polemicism of the field, it may be more true.
In this sense, misreading is not to be construed as error. It is quite possibly in
tegral to change and progress. And by no means is it restricted to linguistics. Mis
reading is a function of disciplines proportionately as they are theoretical rather
than applied, abstract rather than practical, and founded upon a tradition of dis
course rather than a tradition of action. Hence theology is excessively prone to it,
while stonemasonry remains relatively unaffected. Physics, psychology and lin
guistics fall somewhere in-between.
Misreading does not render a field less scientific. Stonemasonry is not gener
ally held to be more or less 'scientific' than theology; scientificness is not an ap-
propriate criterion by which to contrast the two disciplines. Rather, it is on the ab
stract-practical scale that they differ. Thus, to suggest that significant misreadings
have shaped the history of linguistics, and that these misreadings may have ideo
logical motivation, is in no way to argue about the field's status as a science. Ide
ology in one form or another is omnipresent in linguistics as in most other types of
thought. The crucial distinction to be drawn is between linguists who acknowledge
their ideological stances and those who do not. Just as the failure to recognize mis
reading produces the illusion of successful communication, the failure to acknowl
edge ideology creates the illusion of an objective, 'pure' sphere of enquiry. In both
cases it is neither ideology, nor misreading, but illusion that compromises the in
tegrity of the science, and that it is healthy to dispel.
The ubiquity and inevitability of misreading do not guarantee that it will occur
always and everywhere in equal measure. Some readers are more prone to it than
others, notably those who, like Chomsky (1966), have some urgent agenda. And
some authors evoke misreading more than others, above all those who do not write
the books with which they are most closely identified and, worse, die before others
write them. Such was the case with Socrates, with Jesus and with Saussure. The
latter two, their thought recorded by several hands, pose especially great problems
of exegesis: the lack of a single authoritative text makes for uncommon breadth of
interpretation.
In Saussure's case, this openness may run deeper still, being a characteristic
part of his thought. This was the opinion of Jakobson (1971 [1969]:744): "But per
haps the genuine greatness of this eternal wanderer and pathfinder lies precisely in
his dynamic repugnance towards the 'vanity' of any 'definitive thought'". Jakob-
son intended for 'this eternal wanderer' to describe Saussure in his lifetime, and
while it seems to have been an accurate portrayal (see further Joseph 1989b), it ap
plies even better to Saussure in the decades following his death and the publication
of the CLG. Certainly no linguist in the 20th century underwent as many ideologi
cally-driven readings as Saussure — a combined result of the revolutionary nature
of his thought, the way in which it was preserved, and the fact that he was not on
the scene as an academic-political force to protest the most egregiously ideological
misreadings.
In this chapter I shall focus on how Saussure was read by the two most influen
tial American linguists of the 20th century, Bloomfield and Chomsky. In both
cases, but especially in Chomsky's, we shall see how their readings of Saussure
evolved in tandem with their theoretical stance. The point is not to reveal the 'er
ror' of a particular reading. It is to show in a constructive way the uses to which
Saussure has been put in the development of modern linguistic science, and to con
sider the ideologies motivating those uses.
BLOOMFIELD'S AND CHOMSKY'S READINGS OF THE CLG 135
Bloomfield and Saussure

Two quite contradictory statements on Bloomfield's relation to Saussure ap
peared in print in 1987, Bloomfield's centenary year. One, by Roy Harris, notes
that while in his 1923 review of the CLG Bloomfield "acknowledges Saussure as
the founder of modern general linguistics" (Harris 1987: xii-xiii), in his 1933 book
Language "Saussure is given a single passing mention in an introductory chapter
on the history of linguistics" (ibid., p.xii).
The reason for the disparity between Bloomfield's eulogy of Saussure in 1923 and his vir
tual dismissal of Saussure ten years later is not difficult to explain. The Bloomfield of the
1923 review is Bloomfield in his pre-behaviourist period; and in his pre-behaviourist pe
riod Bloomfield was a follower of the psychologist Wundt. So the 1923 review gives us a
reading of the Cours as viewed by an American Wundtian who was also a Germanic phi
lologist of the traditional stamp (and a student of Amerindian languages as well). But ten
years later Bloomfield had rejected Wundt in favour of Watson. His reading of Saussure
had altered accordingly. Saussure was now read not as the adventurous founder of modem
linguistics, but as a perpetuator of the endemic psychologism of late-nineteenth-century
approaches to language.
That later Bloomfieldian reading was to dictate the relationship between American and
European versions of structuralism for the next quarter of a century. (p.xiii)
It was not Watson but A. P. Weiss (1879-1931) whose version of behaviourism
became Bloomfield's model. Harris does acknowledge further on (pp. xiii-xiv) that
"it would be a mistake to infer from the way in which Bloomfield's Language de
liberately ignores Saussure that Saussurean ideas left no trace in American aca
demic linguistics of the inter-war period. Bloomfield himself admitted to Jakobson
that reading the CLG was one of the events which had most influenced him (De
Mauro 1972:371)".
The other statement published in 1987 is one by Bloomfield himself, in a letter
to J Milton Cowan (1907-1993) dated 15 Jan. 1945, which Cowan included as a
sample of a serious letter from Bloomfield in an article devoted mainly to his hu
morous correspondence (Cowan 1987). After suggesting some corrections in the
wartime Russian grammar Cowan was writing under his supervision, Bloomfield
lamented:
Denunciations are coming thick & fast; I expect to be completely discredited by the end.
There is a statement going round that de Saussure is not mentioned in my Language text
book (which reflects his Cours on every page). Also that it does not deal with meaning —
it seems there is no chapter on this topic. I do not intended [sic] to give any recognition to
falsehood of this kind or to discourses which contain them or are based on them. (Cowan
1987:29)
Although one is naturally inclined to take Bloomfield's own word as definitive, it
should be noted that only Harris's statement is in accord with the standard histories
of 20th-century linguistics;1 that a cursory reading of Bloomfield (1914) and (1933)

seems to substantiate Harris's, and not Bloomfield's, view; and that authors' reac
tions to negative reviews can often be less than rational. Even allowing that
Bloomfield has engaged in some counter-hyperbole (thus Koerner 1989b:441), to
day's reader is at a loss to detect pervasive Saussurean influence in Bloomfield
(1933). Yet Bloomfield's one extant statement about his debt to Saussure can
hardly be dismissed out of hand.
This seeming paradox stems in part from an illusion: we imagine that what
Bloomfield thought of as Saussure's 'reflection' corresponds to our own early
21st-century conception of Saussure. We may even fall into the trap of imagining
that Bloomfield's or our own conception of Saussure corresponds to the historical
Saussure, or that such a construct as the early 21st-century conception of Saussure
is anything more than a vague abstraction. This is familiar territory: we are con
trasting Saussure as langue with Saussure as parole. And just as we cannot deter
mine the nature of langue except through evidence from parole, our best evidence
for understanding conceptions of Saussure will come from actual individual read
ings. I shall therefore conduct a close examination of Bloomfield's most detailed
writings on the CLG, Bloomfield (1923), (1926) and (1927).
Bloomfield (1923): Self-defence

In his 1923 review of the CLG (on which see further Koerner 1989b), Bloom
field makes a number of revelatory statements. The opening paragraphs grant rec
ognition to Saussure's importance, though in a form hardly stronger than the
ordinary academic niceties for a deceased senior colleague.
It is gratifying to see a second edition of de Saussure's posthumous work on language; the
popularity of the book betokens not only an interest in language, but also a willingness of
the scientific public to face linguistic theory [...]
[I]n lecturing on 'general linguistics' he stood very nearly alone, for, strange as it may
seem, the nineteenth century, which studied intensively the history of one family of lan
guages, took little or no interest in the general aspects of human speech. (Bloomfield 1970
[1923]: 106)
From here to the last sentence of the review, when he declares that Saussure "has
given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech" (ibid., p.108), virtu
ally every statement allows for an ambiguous reading. Where, for instance, does
1. For example, De Mauro (1972: 371-372): "Mais la mention isolée du nom de Saussure dans
Language autorise à maintenir que commence là1'éclipsede Saussure, caractéristique de la linguis
tique post-bloomfieldienne [...]. II y a en effet chez les bloomfieldiens la crainte de retomber dans le
mentalisme en quittant le terrain behavioriste et en parlant de langue" ("But the isolated mention of
the name of Saussure in Language permits us to claim that here is the start of the eclipse of
Saussure which characterizes post-Bloomfieldian linguistics [...]. The Bloomfieldians were in effect
afraid of falling back into mentalism if they strayed from behaviourist territory and spoke of
langue").
Bloomfield locate Saussure's importance? Plainly not in any novelty — let alone
revolution — of approach; rather (p.106):
The value of the Cours lies in its clear and rigorous demonstration of fundamental princi
ples. Most of what the. author says has long been 'in the air' and has been here and there
fragmentarily expressed; the systematization is his own.
He then describes some of these already known ideas that the CLG merely sys
tematized: "It is known that the historical change in language goes on in a surpris
ingly mechanical way, independent of any needs, desires, or fears of the speakers"
(ibid.).
Saussure would have agreed with the sentiment, but would have broadened it
further to include independence of potential effects on language structure. He
would have balked at the term 'historical change' and perhaps 'mechanical', which
differs from 'automatic' by an implied metaphor. We know that the value of the
term 'mechanical' in Bloomfield's work is determined by the opposition between
the mechanistic and the mentalistic, and we cannot assume that Bloomfield's posi
tion on this score corresponds to Saussure's. The next idea 'in the air' is that (pp.
106-107):
Outside of thefieldof historical grammar, linguistics has worked only in the way of a des
perate attempt to give a psychologic interpretation to the facts of language, and in the way
of phonetics, an endless and aimless listing of the various sound-articulations of speech.
Even though Bloomfield would often repeat these criticisms over the years, in
point of fact they apply quite well to Bloomfield (1914). Herein may lie a clue to
the ambiguous nature of this review: Bloomfield cannot hail the theoretical ad
vances of the CLG without implicitly acknowledging the shortcomings of his own
major work. The next sentence, containing Bloomfield's most biting remark,
seems to bear out this possibility:
Now, de Saussure seems to have had no psychology beyond the crudest popular notions,
and his phonetics are an abstraction from French and Swiss-German which will not stand
even the test of an application to English. (p.107)
Saussure would not, in other words, have been in a position to criticize Bloomfield
(1914) were Bloomfield not ready to concede its weaknesses. With characteristic
adeptness, Bloomfield then turns a stinging criticism into an apparent compliment
(ibid.):
Thus he exemplifies, in his own person and perhaps unintentionally, what he proves inten
tionally and in all due form: that psychology and phonetics do not matter at all and are, in
principle, irrelevant to the study of language.
So Bloomfield rescues his own work from the two Saussurean principles which
would seem to discount it, by a two-front deflection: he trivializes the CLG's rejec
tion of psychology and phonetics by declaring them to have been fundamental
principles already in the air — thus apparently known by Bloomfield himself —
then makes it clear that Saussure could have passed no worthwhile judgement in
these areas anyway. The implication is that Saussure's rejection of psychology and
phonetics may result from his utter incompetence in these areas. Bloomfield
emerges as superior to Saussure on every conceivable score.2
While the next two paragraphs, which give some details of the CLG, are less
manipulative, one is struck by how many individual words along the way are not
Saussurean, but eminently Bloomfieldian (p.107):
the language of a community is to be viewed as a system of signals. Each signal is made up
of one or more units; these units are the 'sounds' of the language. Not only has each signal
a definite meaning [...] but the combination of these signals proceeds by definite rules and
itself adds definite elements of meaning [...]. All this is a complex and arbitrary system of
social habit imposed upon the individual, and not directly subject to psychologic interpre
tation [...].
'Signals' is evidently a translation of signes "signs", but unlike signe or sign, sig
nal suggests the notion of a stimulus, with its behaviourist implications. As for
constituent 'units', the CLG speaks only in a vague way of 'linearity'. If "these
units are the 'sounds' of the language", then Bloomfield must have in mind only
the signifier (signifiant), and not the signified (signifié). His statement that "each
signal has a definite meaning" undoes, by its wording, the dynamics of the Saus
surean signe, for which it is equally and crucially true that each meaning has a
definite signal. That Bloomfield does not make this reverse claim is significant,
given his bias against semantics; for although this bias may not have been absolute
(see Matthews 1986), Bloomfield would certainly have been hesitant to acknowl
edge an autonomous existence for meanings. In the last sentence of the citation, the
word 'habit' clearly belongs to Bloomfield rather than Saussure.3
This second half of the review would seem to support the hypothesis that
Bloomfield's Saussureanism might differ in key ways from what most of us con
ceive as a Saussurean position today. Whether or not it is there for any other
reader, Bloomfield found in the CLG a linguistic system operating on 'signals',
and a fundamental rejection of psychologism. The first part of the review helps us
2. Bloomfield concludes this paragraph with a seeming metacommentary; my notes appear in

brackets: "Needless to say, a person who goes out to write down an unknown language [as Bloom
field had done, but Saussure had not] or one who undertakes to teach people a foreign language
[likewise a more central concern for Bloomfield than Saussure] must have a knowledge of phonetics
[as Saussure did not], just as he must possess tact [as Bloomfield's tactics admirably demonstrate!],
patience, and many other virtues; in principle [but not in practice!], however, these things are all on
a par, and do not form part of linguistic theory". In the light of Bloomfield's practice over the next
25 years, it is hard to see that he could have intended a sincere endorsement here.
3. Bloomfield goes on to give a fairly accurate account of the langage-langue-parole distinction,
then makes a couple of errors: he equates linguistique diachronique with 'historical linguistics'
when the clear intent of the CLG was to put the two in opposition (see Harris 1987:89); then
describes it in terms of "change in the system of la langue", when the CLG took such pains to
replace the notion of change with that of concurrence and replacement within parole.
to see in a more general way how strong an impact the CLG must have made on
Bloomfield: Saussure' s principal tenets, if correct, could not fail to cut the legs out
from under Bloomfield (1914), his major work to date. Bloomfield's agenda is,
quite naturally, to defend that work. Like many another clever reviewer, he cloaks
his criticism of Saussure in a sophisticated veil of deference. Yet even the closing
compliment — "de Saussure has here first mapped out the world in which histori
cal Indo-European grammar (the great achievement of the past century) is merely a
single province; he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human
speech" (p.108) — becomes back-handed when we remember how little impor
tance Bloomfield actually accords to a 'theoretical basis' divorced from practical
applications (see following section).
Bloomfield (1926) and (1927): Saussure the behaviourist

The first important paper by Bloomfield to incorporate the behaviourist theo
ries of A. P. Weiss is the 1926 proposal for a 'postulational method' which "saves
discussion, because it limits our statements to a defined terminology; in particular,
it cuts us off from psychological dispute" (Bloomfield 1970 [1926]:128-129).
Saussure and Sapir are here acknowledged for having taken "steps toward a delimi
tation of linguistics" (ibid., p.l29n.). "Thus", Bloomfield notes, "the physiologic
and acoustic description of acts of speech belongs to other sciences than ours"
(p. 129). All these sentiments echo their first utterance in the review of the CLG;
they are followed by the first presentation of a behaviourist scenario in the 1933
mould: "to certain stimuli (A) a person reacts by speaking; his speech (B) in turn
stimulates his hearers to certain reactions (C). By a social habit which every person
acquires in infancy from his elders, A-B-C are closely correlated" (ibid.). The
term 'social habit' comes directly from the 1923 review. Already in 1926, then,
ideas which Bloomfield earlier associated with Saussure occur with only fleeting
and indirect acknowledgement.
Pace Harris, no 'dismissal' of Saussure should be inferred from this, for an
other paper of the same period (Bloomfield 1927, destined to meet with as much
neglect as the 1926 paper was to exert influence) deals with Saussurean doctrine in
detail and still in positive terms. Bloomfield (1927) clarifies some key questions
regarding his understanding of the CLG and its impact for American structuralism.
It begins with a declaration that Wundt (1900) is the greatest work in linguistics of
the first quarter-century (Bloomfield 1970 [1927]:173; the footnoted list of seven
teen 'lesser' works includes Bloomfield 1914 and the CLG). Weiss (1925) does not
figure in the list, presumably because it is not exclusively linguistic, but it never
theless dominates the article's first section ('The underlying method").
Bloomfield notes some positive aspects of the work of the linguists in his list,
among which that
they do not in their actual work use the troublesome introspective terminology; they are not
disturbed by the impossibility, today, of reducing human conduct to physiologic (neuro
logic) terms; yet they employ no extra-material forces'. (Bloomfield 1970 [1927]:174)
Note especially the restriction to 'actual work', as opposed to theorizing, where the
'introspective', 'extra-material' psychological terminology did still predominate.
That such theorizing is the target of Bloomfield's critique should be borne in mind
when reading his 'eulogy' of the CLG as providing "the theoretical basis for a sci
ence of human speech" (see above). Although linguistics occupies "a strategic po
sition from which to attack the study of man" (ibid.), the linguists he has listed —
including Wundt, Saussure and himself as of 1914 — "do not make this attack.
They accept the finalism and supernaturalism of individual psychology, with many
variations, only to discard it, of course, as soon as they approach the actual subject
matter of linguistics" (ibid.). That is, the psychology expounded in their introduc
tory chapters does not spill over into the later chapters on linguistic analysis. The
doubling of 'supernaturalism' with the logical positivistic term 'finalism' will re
cur throughout the article.
The linguist cannot accept "individual psychology, with many variations" be
cause "it tries to explain on an individual basis phenomena which he knows to be
historically conditioned by the social group" (ibid.). The statement sounds per
fectly Saussurean, yet Bloomfield means it to apply not only to Saussure but to
Wundt's Völkerpsychologie (apparently counted here as a mere variation of indi
vidual psychology), to Bloomfield (1914), and in fact, we soon learn, to every ap
proach not founded upon behaviourist precepts. Neither individual nor social
psychology pertains to the 'plane of abstraction' on which "social patterns, linguis
tic and other" exist and operate (p. 175):
We do not trace all the vocal utterances of an individual from birth [...]. We do not trace
the usage of a linguistic form in a community, act by act. Once the individual has acquired
the habit of using a certain linguistic form, we assume that under certain constellations of
[physical stimulus, purely personal condition of the individual at the time, and extra-
linguistic group-habits] he will utter it.
The first part of this statement is perfectly Saussurean, and would not have come
from Bloomfield during his earlier, Wundtian phase. It is enlightening to see Saus
surean ideas used as the logical justification for introducing the postulates of be
haviourism. Bloomfield believes that linguists should depend upon no psycho
logical theory in any case, but should make psychologists come to them, as it were.
Again, this statement is comprehensible only if we separate behaviourism from
psychology, since Bloomfield (1933) is built directly upon behaviourist theory.
At the end of section I, Bloomfield makes two statements, one foreshadowing
his 1933 book — "For Weiss, the social group is an organism of a higher order
than the many-celled individual" — and another recapitulating his review of the
CLG: "a psychology is not necessary in linguistics" (Bloomfield 1970 [1927]: 176).
He then offers the strong claim that the Weissian view is "a sketch of what I take to
be the implications of the actual practice [...] of all linguists, whatever be their
views on psychology" (ibid.). Again, the divorce of actual practice from theorizing
is essential.4
Part , "The Problem of Meaning", deals most directly with the CLG, in which
meaning is not reckoned as much of a problem at all, as Bloomfield at first appears
to recognize:
In what way does the word apple 'mean' or 'refer to' an apple, when none is present? Why
is the dictionary definition nevertheless sufficient? This problem is psychologic rather than
linguistic and is for our science best dealt with by some convenient postulate. It is, of
course, solved with magic ease if we are satisfied with the answer that, when the physical
apple is not present, a 'mental image' or 'concept' of an apple takes itsplace.(ibid., p.177)
That 'mental image' or 'concept', introduced into linguistic thought by Aristotle,
restored to prominence by the CLG, and ridiculed by Bloomfield, is — astonish
ingly — ascribed by Bloomfield not to Saussure, but to Ogden & Richards (1923).
The fact that their famous triangular diagram of meaning contains as one of its api
ces "Thought or Reference" (to which Bloomfield adds the gloss "image, concept,
or thought of an apple") is why Bloomfield says they "take us not one step ahead"
(ibid.). The other two apices are Referent (Bloomfield: "the actual physical ap
ple"), and Symbol ("the word apple"). Yet historically the Referent is Ogden and
Richard's addition to the Saussurean system, which consists only of terms equiva
lent to their Thought or Reference (signifié) and Symbol (signifiant). Having un
done the centrality of Saussure's signifié and restored the physical object to the
system, Ogden and Richards ought to have received credit, not blame, in Bloom
field's eyes!
But Bloomfield saw things very differently. For him, Saussure's system con
sisted not of two units, but of four. "De Saussure's system is more complex: (1)
actual object, (2) concept, (3) acoustic image, (4) speech utterance [...]" (Bloom
field 1970 [1927]: 177). He clearly favours Saussure over Ogden and Richards, but
the undesirable 'concept' is still there. Bloomfield then clarifies that (4) is parole,
while 'the segment formed by the two purely mental terms (2) and (3) is langue,
the socially uniform language pattern' (ibid.). 'Mental' is another loaded term for
4. Two further justifications are given for this stance: (1) "In discussing certain fundamental
problems, such as that of meaning, which could be dealt with by [behaviourist] postulates, linguists
are accustomed to appeal directly to psychology"; (2) "every now and then, before some knotty
problem, a linguist will lay down the long-tried tools of his trade, not to sharpen or improve them,
but to resort instead, for the nonce, to incantations about whose value no two even of the
psychologic shamans will agree". This appears to be an attack on the introductory chapters of the
books he is discussing, where general principles are outlined before their application — or rather
non-application, abandonment — to the analysis of data. The 'incantations' correspond to what he
will label and dismiss as 'mentalism' in 1933.
Bloomfield, an indication that he could not possibly accept the system as thus far
presented.5
In Bloomfield's next move we see him rescue Saussure from the charge of
mentalism; it is, I believe, the single most important passage in understanding
Bloomfield's unique reading of Saussure. Again, the problem is that two terms of
Saussure's system, concept (signifié) and acoustic image (signifiant), are 'purely
mental' (ibid.):
De Saussure's careful statement lays clear the point at issue: What he calls 'mental' is ex
actly what he and all other linguists call "social".
That is, signifiant and signifié both belong to langue; langue is a social construct;
therefore signifiant and signifié are social constructs. So far Bloomfield is swim
ming within a Saussurean lacuna: the failure to resolve the ambiguity between
langue as a pre-eminently social fact and as an individual mental attribute. But he
goes further (ibid.):
[T]here is no need for the popularfinalisticterms. We shall do better to drop (2) and (3)
and speak instead of a socially determined correspondence between certain features of (1)
and (4).
Since 'actual objects' and 'speech utterances' obviously have their 'social' side as
well — actual objects, either by their presence or their absence, provoke utter
ances, which constitute social intercourse — we can simply dispense with their
'mental' quality, Bloomfield says. This done, there remains no reason to distin
guish actual object from concept, and speech utterance from acoustic image. We
have not only got rid of the undesirable finalistic terms 'concept' (signifié) and
'acoustic image' (signifiant) but have shown that they never really belonged in
Saussure's system at all, that Saussure, at bottom, was not a mentalist.
Bloomfield continues to argue the case that Saussure did not really mean for
signifiant and signifié to be taken as a fundamental part of his system — again
promoting 'actual practice' to primacy over mere theorizing:
In his actual practice, de Saussure strictly rules out the metaphysical terms. [...] Or again,
Osthoff s explanation of verbal first members of compounds arising in several Indo-
European languages, an explanation typical of the linguist's avoidance of mentalism, is for
de Saussure paradigmatic. (pp. 177-178)
Actually, the second argument is not pertinent, for it applies to a diachronic shift,
something which the CLG maintains does not occur within langue, but in parole.
The upshot of this section is that Saussure's linguistic system, as viewed by
Bloomfield, is precisely the system we are accustomed to identifying as that of
5. Note too that the additional complexity Bloomfield sees in Saussure's system over Ogden and
Richards's resides in the 'acoustic image', which could not fall clearly into either their Thought or
Referent', with which it shares the feature of being purely mental, or their 'Symbol', with which it
shares the quality of being linguistic.
BLOOMFIELD' S AND CHOMSKY'S READINGS OF THE CLG 143
Bloomfield (1933). Bloomfield is not offering an improvement upon Saussure's

system; he is saying that Saussure's system is actually thus, and that the unfortu
nate addition of two redundant and unnecessary metaphysical terms should not
brand Saussure as a mentalist, for fundamentally he is not one. The Saussurean
system reduces to "a socially determined correspondence between certain features
of (1) [actual object] and (4) [speech utterance]" (cited above). Saussure does not
escape blame entirely; for his unnecessary use of the mentalistic terms he is still
taken to task (together with the Bloomfield of 1914) for having accepted "the final-
ism and supernaturalism of individual psychology, with many variations" in his
theoretical excurses, even though abandoning it in actual analysis.
Bloomfield's repeated condemnation of linguists who do not practise what they
preach gives us further cause for believing that not only is his theoretical system of
1933 grounded in his idiosyncratic understanding of the CLG, but, further, that he
will have attempted to integrate this system directly into his analytic practice. If
this was in fact the case, then the history of European-American linguistic rela
tions in the 20th century is in for considerable rewriting.
To return, by way of conclusion, to the statement by Harris cited on p. 135: the
"eulogy of 1923" is more ambiguous and less generous than eulogies are wont to
be; the "dismissal of Saussure ten years later" is illusory, as Cowan (1987) attests.
It is true that "the 1923 review gives us a reading of the Cours as viewed by an
American Wundtian", but it also supplies a partial motive for Bloomfield's dis
missal of Wundt. It appears to be from the CLG that Bloomfield acquires his dic
tum that linguistics does not need psychology. Bloomfield read Saussure as
introducing a radical new social aspect, and then found the formalization of that
aspect in behaviourism. It is not the case that his reading of Saussure altered be
tween 1923 and 1933 because of his reorientation from Wundt to Weiss; rather, his
reorientation from Wundt to Weiss seems to have been propelled by his reading of
Saussure, which, in so far as the written record allows us to determine, underwent
no substantial change. Certainly Bloomfield (1927) makes clear that Saussure is
not a perpetuator of psychologism, but a behaviourist avant la lettre.
On his final point Harris is surely right: the "Bloomfieldian reading was to dic
tate the relationship between American and European versions of structuralism for
the next quarter of a century". The sense is, however, turned on its head. The
'Bloomfieldian reading' in question was not a dismissal, but an idiosyncratic inter
pretation that at its crux — the resolution of signifiant and signifié into 'speech ut
terance' and 'actual object' — veers far from the path of orthodox Saussureanism.
Chomsky and Saussure

Chomsky's Knowledge of Language (1986a), a synthesis of many facets of his
linguistic work, includes his first attempt in several years to situate this work rela
tive to the earlier structuralist tradition. This occurs primarily in Chapter 2, "Con-
cepts of language", devoted largely to establishing the distinction between 'I-

language' and 'E-language', where the former is the grammar internalized in the
mind of an individual speaker, while the latter is the Externalized, 'commonsense'
notion of a language like 'English', which Chomsky terms an "artificial construct"
(1986: 26,27,29,31) and a "mere artifact" (ibid., p.26), having "no corresponding
real-world object" and thus existing "at a higher order of abstraction" than I-
language (p.27). Whereas for Chomsky I-language is the proper focus of linguistic
enquiry, what he calls "modern linguistics" has failed to make the distinction be
tween the two (p. 16):
Modern linguistics commonly avoided these questions by considering an idealized 'speech
community' that is internally consistent in its linguistic practice [...]. No attempt is made to
capture or formulate any concept with the sociopolitical or normative-teleological aspects
of informal usage of the term 'language'. The same is true of approaches that understand
language to be a social product in accordance with the Saussurean concept of 'langue'.
The last sentence is ambiguous: it is not immediately apparent whether "The same
is true" refers just to the preceding sentence ("No attempt is made to capture or
formulate any concept") or to the whole paragraph, including the positing of an
idealized speech community. The second interpretation must be correct, however,
if the passage is to be deemed consistent with a later reference to "the familiar
Saussurean-Bloomfieldian idealization to a homogeneous speech community"
(p.147).6
Because of its failure to distinguish the two modes, structural Unguistics ended
up studying the mere epiphenomena of E-language (p. 19).
Structural and descriptive linguistics, behavioral psychology, and other contemporary ap
proaches tended to view a language as a collection of actions, of utterances, or linguistic
forms (words, sentences) paired with meanings, or as a system of linguistic forms or
events. In Saussurean structuralism, a language (langue) was taken to be a system of
sounds and an associated system of concepts; the notion of sentence was left in a kind of
limbo, perhaps to be accommodated within the study of language use.
Again, the final sentence, with the reference to Saussure, is ambiguous. Is Chom
sky equating a 'system' of sounds and concepts with the 'collection' of actions,
utterances, or forms referred to previously, or making a distinction between spe
cifically Saussurean structuralism and its later offshoots? Is Saussure receiving two
criticisms (for dealing with mere collections of forms, and for not incorporating the
sentence into langue), or one criticism (the latter) and one plaudit (for dealing with
systems rather than mere collections)?
6. In the book's only other reference to Saussure besides those discussed in this section, Chomsky
dismisses as "unintentionally comical" the charge by Harris (1983) that "the standard idealization
(which he ascribes to Saussure-Bloomfield-Chomsky) reflects 'a fascist concept of language if ever
there was one', because it takes the 'ideal' speech community to be 'totally homogeneous'"
(Chomsky 1986:47n.).
The second interpretation is evidently the correct one, again assuming consis
tency with Chomsky's next reference to Saussure:
It should be noted that familiar characterizations of 'language' as a code or a game point
correctly toward I-language, not the artificial construct E-language. A code is not a set of
representations but rather a specific system of rules that assigns coded representations to
message-representations. Two codes may be different, although extensionally identical in
the message-code pairings that they provide. Similarly, a game is not a set of moves but
rather the rule system that underlies them. The Saussurean concept of langue, although far
too narrow in conception, might be interpreted as appropriate in this respect. (p.31)
Here, it is specifically the concern of langue not with a 'set' of elements but with
"the rule system that underlies them" that Chomsky appreciates, while lamenting
the failure to include syntax within this system.
If Saussure functions as a minor precursor for the I-language concept, the major
precursor is
Otto Jespersen, who held that there is some "notion of structure" in the mind of the speaker
"which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own", in particular,
"free expressions" that may be new to the speaker and to others, (pp. 21-22, citing Jesper
sen 1924)
Saussurean langue is "far too narrow" (citation before last) because it does not ex
plicitly provide for the possibility of such creativity, nor indeed for the sentence
(p. 19, cited on the preceding page). "Saussurean structuralism had placed Jesper-
sen's observation about 'free expressions' outside of the scope of the study of lan
guage structure, of Saussure's langue" (ibid., p.32).
In sum, Chomsky appears to accept one feature of Saussurean linguistics —
(1) the characterization of langue as an underlying system rather than as a set
of elements
— but to reject at least two others:
(2) that it takes langue to be a social product, necessitating a fictitious ideal
ized speech community and preventing it from capturing 'the sociopolitical
and normative-teleological aspects' of E-language;
(3) that it does not include sentences or 'free expressions' within the domain
of langue.
In none of these cases is it self-evident that the statement represents correct or in-
correct linguistic theory, or that it accurately characterizes the CLG. In contrast to
feature (1), consider the following opinions:
It seems that Saussure regarded langue as essentially a storehouse of signs (e.g., words,
fixed phrases) and their grammatical properties, including, perhaps, certain 'phrase types'.
Modern linguistics is much under the influence of Saussure's conception of langue as an
inventory of elements (Saussure, 1916,154, and elsewhere,frequently)and his preoccupa-
tion with systems of elements rather than the systems of rules which were the focus of at
tention in traditional grammar and in the general linguistics of Humboldt.
The distinction I am noting here is related to the langue-parole distinction of Saussure; but
it is necessary to reject his concept of langue as merely a systematic inventory of items and
to return rather to the Humboldtian conception of underlying competence as a system of
generative processes.
These citations are, of course, from none other than Noam Chomsky (1963:328;
1964c:23; 1965:4).7 They accuse langue of precisely the characteristic which
Chomsky (1986a:31) credits it with not having.
Similarly, feature (2) above, wherein langue is rejected on account of its being
a 'social product' necessitating an idealized speech community, represents a turn
around for Chomsky. In the period just discussed, when Chomsky rejected langue
as being just an inventory of signs, he nevertheless accepted it for correlating with
his own notion of individual linguistic competence:
In a work that inaugurated the modern era of language study Ferdinand de Saussure (1916)
drew a fundamental distinction between what he called langue and parole. Thefirstis the
grammatical and semantic system represented in the brain of the speaker; the second is the
actual acoustic output from his vocal organs and input to his ears. (Chomsky 1963:327)
The perceptual model A is a device that assigns a full structural description D to a pre
sented utterance U, utilizing in the process its internalized generative grammar G, where G
generates a phonetic representation R of U with the structural description D. In Saussurian
terms, U is a specimen of parole interpreted by the device A as a 'performance' of the item
R which has the structural description D and which belongs to the langue generated by G.
(Chomsky 1964c:26)8
The CLG's characterization of langue as a 'social fact' was never mentioned by
Chomsky in this period.
Feature (3) has remained a relatively steady critique in Chomsky's comments
on Saussure over the years. Yet at one time he deemed it a minor problem which
could be compensated for, so as to produce a perfect conjunction between Saus
sure's concept of language and his own:
Second, our conception of langue differs from Saussure's in one fundamental respect;
namely, langue must be represented as a generative process based on recursive rules [...].
Once we reformulate the notion of langue in these terms, we can hope to incorporate into
its description a full account of syntactic structure. (Chomsky 1963:328)
I have cited these sets of conflicting opinions not to suggest that Chomsky's views
on Saussure are self-contradictory, but rather to show how they have evolved over
a period of more than twenty years. I assume that Chomsky's views of 1986 and
7. The two earlier versions of Chomsky (1964c) show minor stylistic variations in the passage cited
(Chomsky 1964a:922, 1964b:60).
8. The corresponding passage in Chomsky (1964a:923) and (1964b:61-62) omits the word "full" in
the first sentence.
after represent a more highly developed phase of his thinking, a closer approxima
tion to the truth of things, just as his more recent linguistics represents a closer ap
proximation to the structure of universal grammar than did his very different
linguistics of 1965.9 Obviously, to accept Chomsky's 1986 positions is to admit
that his 1965 positions were at least incomplete, and where the two are contradic
tory, that the 1965 positions were less adequate. And indeed, the 1986 statements
turn out to be better supported by actual statements in the CLG, at least in the case
of (1) and (2).
Thus we can infer on the basis of Chomsky's own recent work that certain of
his statements about Saussure from the 1960s are inadequate, that they represent
misreadings relative to his more recent views. We can then proceed to enquire into
their history, including their possible ideological motivations. The development of
Chomsky's views on Saussure between 1963 and 1968 has been briefly sketched,
and certain of their inaccuracies noted, by De Mauro (1972:400-404). However, De
Mauro does not indicate how the misreadings and the evolution of Chomsky's
Saussureanism might be connected. He is content with an inventory of Chomsky's
surface statements, if you will, without seeking their deep underlying explanation.
Chomsky (1963) the Saussurean

Chomsky's interest in the early history of linguistics began around 1960, at
which time he read the recently issued English translation of the CLG and Godel
(1957), along with much else (Chomsky, personal communication to the author,
1989). As a student he knew Saussure only by name, since with a few exceptions
the pre-post-Bloomfieldian tradition (including Bloomfield's own work) was ig
nored in the ahistorical atmosphere of the time. Chomsky recalls hearing occa
sional references to Saussure in lectures by and conversations with Jakobson,
whom he met in the early 1950s, but indicates that such references were less fre
quent than one might suppose. Thus Chomsky's personal discovery of Saussure
postdates by several years the formation of his linguistic worldview, which by his
own account maintains the essence of what it was in the early to mid-1950s (see
Chomsky 1979:113; 1986:5).
The earliest references to the CLG in Chomsky's work occur in his long 1963
article "Formal Properties of Grammars". As noted by De Mauro (1972:400), §1.1
of that article, which contains the three 1963 passages cited above, constitutes "a
veritable profession of Saussurean faith" ("une véritable profession de foi saussuri-
enne"), wherein Chomsky explicitly equates Saussure's system with his own. "Our
discussion departs from a strict Saussurian conception in two ways" (Chomsky
9. Chomsky (1986:5) characterizes such progress as "a healthy phenomenon indicating that the
discipline is alive, although it is sometimes, oddly, regarded as a serious deficiency, a sign that
something is wrong with the basic approach" (see also Chomsky 1979:175-176). Exactly the same
may be said of his opinions regarding Saussure.
1963:328) —just two ways, with neither being an obstacle incapable of resolution.
Chomsky goes on to equate langue directly with "a grammar that generates sen
tences with structural descriptions; that is to say, [...] the speaker's linguistic intui
tion, his knowledge of the language" (ibid., p.329).
This article represents Chomsky's first extensive attempt to align himself with
a pre-Bloomfieldian precursor. In the early 1960s, Chomsky's main opposition was
the linguistic establishment dominated by the former students of Bloomfield, many
of whom tried to portray Chomsky as a Young Turk with no respect for the great
tradition they were upholding. Chomsky defused this weapon by finding a tradition
older than theirs with which to align his own views. What he found was the CLG.
It allowed him to portray the neo-Bloomfildians as the true upstarts, and himself
as the defender of traditional linguistic enquiry.
Thus, the agenda behind Chomsky (1963) is to highlight every possible correla
tion between the CLG and Chomsky's own work. The principal misreading moti
vated by this agenda is the claimed identity of Chomskyan linguistic competence
with Saussurean langue. Chomsky (1963) completely ignores two of the most sali
ent features of langue: that it has both an individual and a social aspect, neither of
which can be conceived of without the other (cf. Chomsky 1986:16); and that it has
both a synchronic and a diachronic aspect (CLG, p.24).10 The CLG's description of
langue as "the social part of language, exterior to the individual" ("la partie sociale
du langage, extérieure à l'individu", CLG, p.31) points up the flaw in Chomsky's
equation of langue and parole with competence and performance. Whereas in the
CLG langue represents the social aspect of language, and parole the individual as
pect, in Chomsky's work competence represents the individual aspect, with all so
cial facts regarding language being relegated to the (always marginalized) domain
of performance. By 1986, when 'competence' and 'performance' have disappeared
from Chomsky's lexicon, it is finally licit to recognize the social side of langue.
But even in 1963 Chomsky does bring up one lacuna in the CLG: the failure to
assign syntax and recursive rules to langue. Syntax being precisely the area of his
greatest impact upon the study of language, Chomsky, by noting this particular dif
ference between his work and the CLG, shows that not only is he the heir to the
pre-Bloomfieldian tradition, but that he has already improved upon this tradition
where it was weakest.
With hindsight, the CLG was a less than ideal choice as an anchor point for
Chomsky, since it was widely considered to be a cardinal text of structuralism, in
cluding the Bloomfieldian variety. Bloomfield himself was not averse to the idea,
judging from his attempt to reconcile Saussure's thought with his own. Chomsky
10. These also happen to be two features of language to whose study Chomsky has never made any
direct contribution, although indirectly his ideas have had an impact on diachronic enquiry and even
on some branches of sociolinguistics.
risked having his linguistics understood as 'true' structuralism, versus the 'false'
structuralism of the neo-Bloomfieldians, when in fact it was from structuralism of
any sort that he wished to escape.
Chomsky (1962-64): Reaching further back

In 1962, after writing the 1963 paper, Chomsky delivered a plenary address to
the Ninth International Congress of Linguists that is generally credited with having
propelled him to world-wide prominence within the field. The paper exists as a
pre-print distributed to those attending the Congress (Chomsky 1962), and in three
published versions, all of which differ from the pre-print and from each other. Of
these, Chomsky (1964a) is closest to the (1962) version; (1964b) contains all of the
(1964a) revisions plus a considerable amount of new material on the history of lin
guistics; and (1964c) reproduces (1964b) with some very minor adjustments.
Chomsky (1962) makes comments on the CLG that are superficially very simi
lar to those of the earlier (1963) paper. He continues to claim that his view of lan
guage "differs from that of de Saussure in two respects" (1962:512), and after
discussing them he presents his models of language perception and acquisition as
"Still remaining within the classical Saussurian framework, as modified above"
(ibid., p.513). Nevertheless, rather than formulate his own system in terms of
langue and parole as in the (1963) article, Chomsky presents them first in his own
words, then translates them into "Saussurian terms" (ibid.).
The slight distance he thereby puts between himself and Saussure coincides
with his first passing references to other 19th-century linguists, namely Wilhelm
von Humboldt and Hermann Paul. He first quotes Paul to the effect that rote mem
ory plays a trivial role in language production (ibid., p.509; cf. Chomsky 1964c:8).
But his next citation of Paul, this time juxtaposed with Humboldt, is a criticism of
the two scholars for failing to take account of 'creativity' in language production
(Chomsky 1962:512; cf. 1964c:22).
However, between the pre-print and the Congress proceedings, Chomsky's atti
tudes toward Saussure and Humboldt seem to have reversed. To his discussion of
creativity he adds several pages summarizing Humboldt's conception of language
(1964a:918-921), and states that "one can distinguish two conflicting views regard
ing the essential nature of language in Nineteenth Century linguistic theory",
namely, Humboldt's view of an underlying Form in language (ibid.), and Whit
ney's view of language as an inventory of elements (ibid., p.921). To Whitney's
view Chomsky annexes Saussure and structural linguistics (pp. 921-922), while to
Humboldt's view he joins his own thought: "It is just this point of view concerning
the essential nature of language that underlies and motivates recent work in genera
tive grammar" (p.920; Koerner 1990 questions the accuracy of Chomsky's identifi
cation of Humboldt's view with his own).
At the same time, Chomsky finally drops the statement that his approach dif
fers from Saussure's in two ways. The result is that, while he still maintains a gen
eral identification of generative grammar with langue and remarks on Saussure's
'lucidity' in distinguishing competence from performance (ibid., p.915), the cri
tique of langue as 'basically a store of signs with their grammatical properties'
grows in significance. What had been a minor obstacle to a reconciliation of the
Saussurean and Chomskyan positions becomes an insurmountable barrier.
The change in attitude is often subtly expressed: Chomsky no longer says that
his model of perception and acquisition remains within "the classical Saussurian
framework", but merely "the classical framework" (1964a:922). Indeed, Chomsky
takes pains to modify his earlier characterization of the CLG as placing syntax
clearly in the domain ofparole. Yet the net outcome is that Chomsky (1964a) no
longer conveys the impression that its author desires to align himself with what he
sees as a Saussurean position.
This development continued in Chomsky (1964b, c), which carried the search
for a historical anchor back from the 19th to the 17th century. It is here that Chom
sky first introduced René Descartes (1596-1650), Gérauld de Cordemoy (1626-
1684) and the Port-Royal Grammar (1660), suggesting a 'Cartesian' linguistic tra
dition that would culminate with Humboldt before being undone by Whitney, the
Neogrammarians et al Although the references to Saussure are left unchanged in
Chomsky (1964b, c), the addition of considerable chunks of new material on the
'Cartesians' (and on later chapters of Humboldt) combine to dwarf Saussure's sig
nificance — a far cry from Chomsky (1963). And when Chomsky expanded this
material into a book, Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Saussure received only a couple
of passing mentions (1966: 12, 55).
Evidently Chomsky's interest in Humboldt was connected to the work of John
Viertel, one of his colleagues on the  Machine Translation Project in the late
1950s (and twenty years later the translator of Chomsky 1979), who had under
taken a large-scale study of Humboldt's linguistic thought (see Chomsky 1979:
135; and the reference to Viertel's work in Chomsky 1964a:920,1964b:59,1964c:
21). It is also likely that Chomsky picked up ideas during the discussion of his pa
per at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, and that the paper on Saussure
and Humboldt given there by John Verhaar, S.J. (1925-2001) helped him to clarify
the differences between their theoretical positions, though Verhaar's concerns are
quite distant from those of Chomsky's additions to his original text.
But to locate sources of Chomsky's interest in Humboldt is not to find motives
for his abandonment of Saussure. I have already mentioned one likely motive, the
fact that the CLG was widely considered to be the cornerstone of structuralism,
from which Chomsky now wished to distance his own position as much as possi
ble. This problem may well have come to a head at the International Congress, its
large European contingent dominated by self-avowed Saussureans. Despite Chom-
sky's (1963) claim of kinship with Saussure, it is hard to imagine that the Euro
pean linguists' knowledge of the CLG would have prepared them to be less startled
than their American structuralist counterparts by Chomsky's ideas.
In any case, what Chomsky needed was not Saussurean allies, but a historical
anchor point, a solidly respected linguistic tradition to which to marry his own
theoretical stance. The Humboldtian tradition still had practitioners, but unlike the
Saussureans they were largely confined to Germany and isolated from the main-
stream of the field. In noting this tactical advantage I do not mean to imply that
Chomsky's interest in Humboldt was insincere; he has continued to profess it ever
since. But the political convenience presented by following Humboldt rather than
Saussure was no less real.
Chomsky (1965-79) the Anti-saussurean

In terms of the foregoing argument, the 'Cartesians', with no living tradition,
represented an even more advantageous historical anchor for Chomsky. The critics
of Cartesian Linguistics were strident, but tardy: for by the late 1960s, Chomsky
had in effect vanquished the former students of Bloomfield for dominance in the
field. Henceforth his most serious rivals were to be his own former students and
associates. The period of Chomsky's most intense interest in the 'Cartesians' coin
cides with his most strident remarks about Saussure. By this time Chomsky's
agenda had become just the opposite of what it had been in his 1963 article: to
lump Saussure and the neo-Bloomfieldians together in one great 'modern linguis
tics' demonology, framed by the Descartes-to-Humboldt tradition and its genera
tive revival. Recalling that feature (1) above (p. 145) suggests that Chomsky's
earlier statements about Saussure viewing langue as a mere inventory of elements
constitute a misreading, we have here an apparent motivation for that misreading.
To a paragraph detailing certain 17th and 18th-century opinions about how word
order directly recapitulates the "natural order of thoughts", and therefore can be
excluded from grammar, Chomsky adds the comment: "It is worth noting that this
naive view of language structure persists to modern times in various forms, for ex
ample, in Saussure's image of a sequence of expressions corresponding to an
amorphous sequence of concepts" (Chomsky 1965:7-8).
This is an extremely strong form of feature (3). Even in Chomsky (1964a, b, c),
remarks about the CLG not placing syntax explicitly in the domain of langue are
considerably qualified: "[Saussure] appears to regard sentence formation as a mat
ter of parole rather than langue, of free and voluntary creation rather than system
atic rule (or perhaps, in some obscure way, as on the border between langue and
parole)" (Chomsky 1964a:921; 1964b:59-60; 1964c:23).
I think most Saussureans would accept this as a fair comment. The CLG is very
unclear on this point, reflecting an ongoing evolution in Saussure's thought over
the period of the lectures on which the book is based. To cite just one statement by
Saussure from the CLG source materials:
It is only in syntax, finally, that one finds a certainfloatingbetween what is given in the
language and what is left to the individual. The delimitation is difficult to make. (Engler
1968-74:2022C).11
Godel (1957: 168-179), whom Chomsky cites more than once, suggests that the
endpoint of this evolution would be a view according to which all syntagms, in
cluding sentences, belong to langue at least potentially (see also De Mauro 1972:
468-469, n.251). Naturally, ambiguity in a text leaves it particularly vulnerable to
ideologically driven readings. Language and Mind, which caps Chomsky's period
of intense interest in the 'Cartesians', presents syntax as part of parole, with no
qualifiers other than the words "occasionally" (first sentence) and "not strictly"
(second sentence):
He [Saussure] occasionally expressed the view that processes of sentence formation do not
belong to the system of language at all — that the system of language is restricted to such
linguistic units as sounds and words and perhaps a few fixed phrases and a small number of
very general patterns; the mechanisms of sentence formation are otherwise free from any
constraint imposed by linguistic structure as such. Thus, in his terms, sentence formation is
not strictly a matter of langue, but is rather assigned to what he called parole, and thus
placed outside the scope of linguistics proper; it is a process of free creation, unconstrained
by linguistic rule except insofar as such rules govern the forms of words and the patterns of
sounds. (Chomsky 1972 [1968]: 19-20)
The last comment is not supported by the CLG (pp. 172-173), which states in no
uncertain terms that at least some prepositional phrases, verb phrases and even sen
tences within langue are constrained by linguistic rule. Chomsky goes on to sug
gest that Saussure has taken a 'position' on the placement of syntax within parole:
In taking this position, Saussure echoed an important critique of Humboldtian linguistic
theory by the distinguished American linguist William Dwight Whitney, who evidently
greatly influenced Saussure. (Chomsky 1972 [1968]: 19-20)
But in fact it is the lack of a clear position on Saussure's part that causes the CLG
to waver. Finally, perhaps Chomsky's strongest published statement about Saus
sure comes in a 1976 interview, when discussing Jespersen's idea of 'free expres
sion' : "Here he went a good deal further than the structuralists, including Saussure,
who had only quite primitive things to say on this subject" (Chomsky 1979:156).
Chomsky (1986) and after: the Neo-Saussurean?

In this instance, Chomsky's (1986:19) moderate comment that "In Saussurean
structuralism [...] the notion of sentence was left in a kind of limbo, perhaps to be
11. "Ce n'est que dans la syntaxe en somme que se présentera un certainflottementici entre ce qui
est donné dans la langue et ce qui est laissé à l'individuel. La délimitation est difficile à faire."
accommodated within the study of language use" can be taken to indicate that the
1965-72 statements were a misreading, and that his hedges of 1963-64 were closer
to the truth. As Chomsky (1986:5) has commented regarding the development of
generative theory, "there have been many changes and differences of opinions, of
ten reversion to ideas that had been abandoned and were later reconstructed in a
different light" (see also Chomsky 1979:176). We have seen misreadings used to
justify exaggerated claims both of Chomsky's kinship with Saussure (1963), and of
the differences between them (1964-76). The remaining question is what 'unmoti
vated' the misreadings of the latter period, making possible the more balanced and
accurate views of Chomsky (1986)?
We are still too close to the changes in question to be certain that we are judg
ing them accurately and impartially. But the following facts are clear. Chomsky's
rejection of Saussure beginning with the 1964 articles rested fundamentally upon
the notion of a well-defined deep and surface structure related by a set of trans
formational rules, a notion which Chomsky felt was compatible with the linguistic
views of the 'Cartesians', but not with those of the structuralists. One of the prin
cipal developments in generative grammar since the 1960s has been the placing of
severe restrictions on transformations (reduced in later versions of his theory to
only one — Move or Affect — with a whole module of GB, called bounding the
ory, devoted to limitations on its application) and consequently a de-emphasis on
the contrast between deep and surface structure, which has in fact been reformu
lated as a three-way distinction of D-structure, S-structure, and surface structure
since Chomsky (1980). The history of these changes and what motivated them is
reviewed in Chomsky (1979:169-179) and Newmeyer (1986:145-169). The point
is that, although followers of GB disdain to admit it, the result has been, not a re
turn to, but at least a turn back in the direction of, the sort of 'flat' structure which
once had made Saussure the possessor of an "impoverished and thoroughly inade
quate conception of language" (Chomsky 1968:20).12
The differences between Chomsky's earlier and later comments regarding Port-
Royal are instructive in this regard. In 1964, Chomsky claims to find an important
component of his theory actually present in the Port-Royal grammar:
In particular, we find the observation that the semantic content of a sentence is represented
only in an unexpressed deep structure, based on elementary underlying strings, in the
Grammaire générale et raisonnée of Port-Royal (1660). (Chomsky 1964c: 15)
12. Throughout the period of restricting the power of the transformational component, and ever
since, Chomsky has insisted that elimination of the component is not a desideratum. Certainty it
contiriues to play a key role in virtually every module of GB theory. The important point for my
argument is simply the indisputable fact that this tomponent has been greatly reduced in power and
in work performed, and in this sense is relatively less significant within the overall model than it
was in the mid-1960s. Beyond this, the considerable success of the transformation-free models of
GPSG and HPSG can be taken as additional evidence of the component's diminishing appeal to the
linguistic community at large.
In 1986, when 'semantic content' (re-dubbed Logical Form) has been reassigned to
S-structure, the level at which transformational rules (i.e., instances of Move) have
already applied, the description of the Port-Royal grammar changes accordingly:
The seventeenth-century Port-Royal grammar and logic, for example, incorporated devices
similar to phrase structure and transformational rules in this sense and used them to explain
the semantic properties of sentences and to develop a theory of inference. (Chomsky 1986:
65)
One detects a change in tone as well: the 'devices' in question are merely similar,
rather than (implicitly) identical. The preceding citation occurs, significantly, in an
account of the long-since abandoned Extended Standard Theory, and is followed
by a review of the restrictions that were to be placed on transformations.
Since the early 1970s it has gone steadily in a 'lexicalist' direction, to the point
that what was 'minimal' in his 1990s Minimalist Program was grammar, syntax.
Nearly all the work that innate Universal Grammar used to do is now accomplished
by morphological features that are already part of words as they are stored in the
lexicon. Of the two leading lights of Minimalism at , David Pesetsky has pub
lished a book called Zero Syntax, and Alec Marantz has proclaimed 'the end of
syntax':
The syntactic engine itself— the autonomous principles of composition and manipulation
Chomsky now labels 'the computational system' — has begun to fade into the background.
Syntax reduces to a simple description of how constituents drawn from the lexicon can be
combined and how movement is possible [...]. A vision of the end of syntax — the end of
the sub-field of linguistics that takes the computational system, between the interfaces, as
its primary object of study — this vision encompasses the completion rather than the dis
appearance of syntax. (Marantz 1995:380-381)
That last rhetorical flourish of 'completion, not disappearance' is an attempt to
quell dissent among Luddite adherents to Government-and-Binding, the version of
Chomsky's theory that immediately preceded the Minimalist Program.
Chomsky, meanwhile, has held on to a 'minimal' syntactic engine, to the frus
tration of disciples not yet born when he constructed the theory of rule-governed
creativity, which he has never bothered to reformulate, only to reassert while deny
ing that anything has changed. Perhaps he clings to that last bit of innate grammar
just because, although he has lost faith in it as an explanation of language, he re
members how much was built on its foundation, even if few others do. For if Ma
rantz is right and "Syntax reduces to a simple description of how constituents
drawn from the lexicon can be combined and how movement is possible", we have
come back to something uncomfortably close to what Chomsky in 1962 described
as the position of Saussure, who "regards langue as basically a store of signs with
their grammatical properties". What Chomsky saw as crucial then, the "recursive
processes underlying sentence formation", is no longer an essential part of the sys
tem forty years on (see further Joseph 2003).
In sum, there is abundant evidence that Chomsky — like Bloomfield, Saussure

and probably every other linguist — has read according to his agenda. So much of
his intellectual development is on the public record that his work provides an ex
ceptional body of evidence for how an individual's readings change in parallel with
shifts in his or her theoretical stance. Chomsky adopted Saussure as a historical
precursor at a propitious moment in the course of his work, citing aspects of Saus-
surean thought that corresponded to that work and ignoring most of those that did
not. Shortly thereafter, having found preferable precursors, he reversed the empha
sis on those aspects and progressively distanced himself from Saussure. Since then,
further changes in generative theory have freed Chomsky to re-read certain virtues
into the Saussurean viewpoint — a viewpoint maintained in its 'pre-Chomskyan'
form in so few quarters that even its proponents, at least the realistic ones, have
long since ceased to imagine that it might one day re-emerge as a threat to the gen
erative position.
Conclusion
Given the extent of Saussure's influence, there are virtually as many important
readings of him as there have been important linguists in this century. While the
processes seen at work in Bloomfield's and Chomsky's readings (as well as in
those of many other readers who might have been chosen; for examples see Harris
2001) are unusually extensive for reasons alluded to in the opening section of this
chapter, they are nevertheless extensions of the basic phenomenon of 'misreading'
throughout disciplines, particularly those which are oriented toward the abstract
rather than the practical.
This being the case, my readings of Bloomfield and Chomsky are not offered
as 'true' in any kind of objective sense. They have been shaped by my agenda of
locating ideologically determined readings. Yet I believe, perhaps too optimisti
cally, that awareness of one's own ideological bent at least removes one major ob
stacle to clarity of thought. At the same time I realize, perhaps too pessimistically,
that publishing this chapter guarantees its misreading: some linguists will insist on
seeing it as a negative criticism of the field and its history no matter how fervently
I protest to the contrary. But let me try one last time: a discipline is scientific to the
extent it is able to dispel its illusions. No discipline has ever or will ever dispel all
illusions. Unless on this ground one is ready to declare that no discipline is a sci
ence, then linguistics is most assuredly a scientific enterprise.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOW STRUCTURALIST WAS 'AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM'?
Euro-American linguistic relations in the 1930s and '40s

As noted in Chapter 3, the term structuralism was first used in psychology,
starting with Angelí (1907), but the general intellectual movement it would
come to designate in the 1950s and after began in linguistics, as did the first
strong challenge to 'structuralist' dominance. Starting in 1957 and with rapidly
accelerating force from about 1960-62 onward, Chomsky's 'transformational-
generative linguistics' set out to undo the underpinnings of American 'struc
turalist' linguistics. Structuralism became the vieux jeu of the older 'establish
ment' generation, swept aside by the transformational generativism of the
young rebels. This version of events is accepted for example by Culler (1975:
7), who writes that "generative grammar plays no role in the development of
structuralism".
However, at least one prominent European intellectual figure saw things
quite differently. In his 1968 book on structuralism, Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
makes 'transformations' one of three defining features of the movement, lead
ing him to place Chomsky at its very centre (Piaget 1970 [1968]:81-92). With
another 35 years' hindsight, Piaget's view is all the more convincing. Ameri
can linguistics before Chomsky shared several features with European struc
turalism that differentiated them both from the earlier historically-dominated
linguistics, but on a number of essential doctrinal points the gulf between them
was as wide as the Atlantic. Many of these doctrinal points were the very ones
Chomsky overturned, and in so doing he narrowed the gulf considerably. From
the European perspective, looking beneath the overt terms of the debate, it was
Chomsky who brought fully-blown structuralism to American linguistics for
the first time by undoing a decades-long resistance to it.
Here again the story is complex, because the development of linguistics in
America and Europe can never be fully separated or integrated. Of the two
most prominent American linguists of the first half of the century, Bloomfield
began his career as a Germanist, studied in Leipzig and Göttingen and became
a follower of Wundt, while the German-born Sapir was trained by the German
émigré Boas, who became one of America's most celebrated anthropologists.
Boas is widely credited with establishing the basis of what would become the
'distributional' method for the analysis of languages that is at the heart of what
is usually identified as 'American structuralism' (notably by Hymes & Fought

1981). Back in Europe, Lévi-Strauss would acknowledge Boas and his students
Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) and Robert H. Lowie (1883-1957) as his central
influences in anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1973 [1955]:59). And in America, we
saw in the last chapter how testily Bloomfield responded to criticisms of his
1933 book for supposedly ignoring Saussure, saying that in fact Saussure's in
fluence is evident "on every page". Yet we saw too how Bloomfield (1927)
read Saussure as a behaviourist manqué, a feat he accomplished by 'dropping'
the concepts of signified and signifier in favour of 'actual object' and 'speech
utterance' respectively, as if in so doing he simply clarified what Saussure was
trying to say. Bloomfield's desire for European-American linguistic integra
tion seems to have outweighed any concern with presenting a faithful and co
gent reading of Saussure.
From the early 1930s there were regular, if sporadic, contacts between
American linguists and their counterparts in Prague and Paris, London and Co
penhagen. The cross-fertilization can be seen most clearly in work on the com
mon core of their interests, the phoneme, understood by both Bloomfield and
Jakobson as a bundle of distinctive features (see Bloomfield 1933:79; Joseph
1989c). But the differences are no less salient. Even within America, Bloom
field and his followers understood the phoneme as a category for the descrip
tion of behaviour, while S apir gave greater weight to its psychological force
(see Sapir 1933b). In Europe, where behaviourism had not exerted such an
impact, there was little problem in accepting the Saussurean view of the
language system as being simultaneously a mental and a social reality. Despite
this rather fundamental difference, a common faith in the existence of the ab
stract category of the phoneme sufficed to make transcontinental dialogue pos
sible, with occasional static.
After Sapir's death in 1939, Bloomfield's approach began to take over in
America, and its position was definitively solidified when it became the basis
for the highly successful preparation of language teaching materials during the
War. With its steadfast rejection of anything 'mentalistic' as being inherently
metaphysical and therefore not amenable to scientific study, American linguis
tics under the Bloomfieldian aegis had considerably less in common with
structuralism of the European variety than in the 1930s when the bridging fig
ure of Sapir was dominant. If we ask what was 'structuralist' about Bloom
fieldian linguistics from a European perspective, looking back to the principal
tenets of Saussurean thought as a grounding, we do find points in common:
synchronicity, arbitrariness, the social nature of language, the idea that in lan
guage tout se tient, distinct syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. But Saussure's
semiology has been reinterpreted as stimulus and response; and perhaps the
greatest difference is that meaning no longer exists within language but in all
HOW STRUCTURALIST WAS 'AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM' ? 159
those stimuli out in the world. For Bloomfield there can be no signified be
cause the mind, even if we accept its existence as a matter of commonsense
experience, is not objectively observable, and therefore out of bounds for sci
entific purposes. Hence there can be no such thing as 'value' in the Saussurean
sense — a concept so central to Saussure's thought that it means even the
seeming convergences named above are only partial. Nor can the existence of
the language system be in any way psychological or, worse, unconscious. Most
Bloomfieldian linguists denied the distinction between langue and parole in
the very significant sense that they defined a language as a set of observable
utterances, not an unobservable system which, given their refusal to have re
course to the mind, they would have been hard pressed to locate physically, as
their methodology demanded. Finally, they were with few exceptions ex
tremely sceptical about any 'universals' of language beyond the basic behav
ioural schema of stimulus and response. In view of these divergences it is
misleading indeed to identify the Bloomfield-dominated linguistics of the
1940s and '50s as 'American structuralism'.
What was structuralism taken to mean in the 1940s?

Of course, 'structuralism' is a multiply ambiguous word, semantically
vague on its own and tending to take its meaning from whatever term it is be
ing contrasted with — historical linguistics, dialectology, Wundtian and other
psychological approaches, philosophical approaches including those of Croce
and Vossler, heavily text-based approaches such as Jespersen's that were too
reminiscent of old-fashioned philology, normative (including pedagogical)
grammar. In contrast to all these, 'structural' enquiry would attempt to look at
the inner workings of a language system with new, modern eyes.
A key moment in setting the definitional course for linguistic structuralism
occurred with the publication of the first issue of Word, the Journal of the Lin
guistic Circle of New York, in 1945. The Circle was founded by Jakobson and
Martinet with the intention of recreating its predecessor in Prague, and the two
of them served as co-editors of the journal (though Martinet later claimed that
he alone did all the work; see Martinet 1993 and Joseph 1994b). The issue con
tained an article by Lévi-Strauss entitled "L'analyse structurale en linguistique
et en anthropologie" (structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology) and
one by the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) entitled "Structuralism in
Modern Linguistics". In May 1941 Cassirer and Jakobson, both fleeing Nazi-
occupied countries, happened to be passengers on the same ship to New York,
and spent the two weeks of the crossing in excited conversation (Jangfeldt
1997). This was no doubt the connection that gave rise to Cassirer's lecture to
the Linguistic Circle of New York on 10 February 1945 —just days before his
death — which became the Word article.
That article is not straightforward in its construction, nor is its point easy to
grasp. Although ostensibly about structuralism, it is essentially a presentation
of Cassirer's own philosophy of language as developed in Cassirer (1923), a
philosophy with its main roots in Kant (and Humboldt, whom Cassirer regards
as an out-and-out Kantian). He is always at pains to make links with relevant
scientific and philosophical developments from the Greeks through the
Renaissance, and when he does bring his considerable knowledge of modern
linguistics to bear on the discussion, the point is to link it to his own views and
the tradition from which they stem.
Cassirer sees 'structuralism' as opposed to just what his own philosophy is
opposed to, namely, the treatment of language or any other human
phenomenon as something merely mechanical or physical that can be studied
by analysing it into its atomistic components and treating them as so many
mathematical abstractions. This he sees as the legacy of Hume and Mach to
19th-century science, gradually being overcome in the 20th by 'holistic',
'organic' developments such as Gestalt psychology, neo-Kantian philosophy
and structuralist linguistics. He quotes Meillet's famous statement:
Every linguistic fact is part of a whole in which everything is connected to everything
else. One detail must not be linked to another detail, but one linguistic system to
another system. (Meillet 1925:12)1
He then compares this with the views of Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who
had brought about a like-minded revolution in the physical sciences a century
earlier:
In the condition of life, organs are not simply linked, but act upon one another, and
strive all together toward a common goal. Hence changes in one of them influence
changes in all the others. (Cuvier 1835:49)2
For Cassirer, the essence of structuralism is its holism, as opposed to the atom
ism he detects in Neogrammarian historical linguistics or the text-based ap
proaches of Jespersen or the philologists.
The tack taken by Lévi-Strauss later in the same issue has points in com
mon with Cassirer, but in the end they are as different as the generations they
represent. Much tighter in its construction, Lévi-Strauss's article homes in
from the start on a comparison between, on the one hand, the phonology de
veloped by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, and on the other, the study of kinship in
anthropology, which is inseparable from the study of linguistic systems of kin-
1. "Chaque fait linguistique fait partie d'un ensemble où tout se tient. Il ne faut pas rapprocher
un fait de détail d'un autre fait de détail, mais un système linguistique d'un autre système."
2. "Dans l'état de vie, les organes ne sont pas simplement rapprochés, mais ils s'agissent les
uns sur les autres, et concourent tous ensemble à un but commun. D'après cela les modifica
tions de l'un d'eux exercent une influence sur celles de tous les autres".
ship terminology. Lévi-Strauss sees the development of phonology, as opposed

to the merely physical, empirical study of phonetics, as "playing for the social
sciences the same renewing role as nuclear physics, for example, has played
for the exact sciences" (1945:35).3 We shall see that the resemblance Lévi-
Strauss detects between nuclear physics and structuralism goes deeper than
their renewing role. With phonology, he locates the revolution precisely in the
four fundamental points of method identified by Trubetzkoy (1933):
[F]irst, phonology passes from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to the
study of their unconscious linguistic infrastructure; it refuses to treat terms as inde
pendent entities, instead taking as the basis of its analysis the relations between terms;
it introduces the notion of system [...]; and finally it aims at discovering general laws
either by induction or by logical deduction,... which gives them an absolute character.
(Lévi-Strauss 1945:35, italics in original)4
The second and third points, concerning relations and system, are ones Cassirer
would have endorsed. But the unconscious is not a concept that Cassirer deals
with. Although he recognizes that consciousness 'grows' in the child, the dyad
suggested by Lévi-Strauss would no doubt have been too simplistic for his lik
ing. As for 'general laws' with an 'absolute character', they would run quite
contrary to Cassirer's vision of a holistic structuralism capable of capturing
more of the vast, intricate complexity of language than, say, the general and
absolute — but atomistic — laws of the Neogrammarians.
Lévi-Strauss's own position on atomism is subtle indeed. He rejects the
analysis of kinship by so important a figure as W. H. R. Rivers (1864-1922) on
the grounds that it merely concerned with charting the details of relationships
in some particular society: "Each terminological detail, each special marriage
rule, is attached to a different custom, like a consequence or a vestige: one de
scends into an orgy of discontinuity" (Lévi-Strauss 1945:37).5 He likens this
approach to the old-style phonology that Trubetzkoy and Jakobson rejected on
account of its individualism and atomism, and he denies that "kinship systems,
considered in their synchronic totality, could be the arbitrary result of the en
counter between several heterogeneous institutions (most of them hypotheti
cal), and yet function with regularity and any kind of efficiency" (ibid.).6
3. "La phonologie ne peut manquer de jouer, vis-à-vis des sciences sociales, le même rôle ré
novateur que la physique nucléaire, par exemple, a joué pour l'ensemble des sciences exactes."
4. "[E]n premier lieu, la phonologie passe de l'étude des phénomènes linguistiques conscients
à celle de leur infrastructure inconsciente; elle refuse de traiter les termes comme des entités
indépendantes, prenant au contraire comme base de son analyse les relations entres les termes;
elle introduit la notion de système [...]; enfin elle vise à la découverte de lois générales soit
trouvées par induction, soit déduites logiquement,... ce qui leur donne un caractère absolu."
5. "Chaque détail de terminologie, chaque règle spéciale du mariage, est rattachée à une cou
tume différente, comme une conséquence ou comme un vestige: on tombe dans une débauche
de discontinuité."
6. "Nul ne se demande comment les systèmes de parenté, considérés dans leur ensemble syn-
Atomism for Lévi-Strauss is the failure to take a universalist point of view,

the failure to assume that, despite superficial differences, kinship systems must
be fundamentally the same from culture to culture, because the human relation
ships they encode are the same. For the avuncular relationship, the one dis
cussed at greatest length in the article, although its value differs greatly from
culture to culture, nevertheless
We see that avuncularity, to be understood, must be treated as a relationship interior to
a system, and that it is the system itself which must be considered in its totality, in or
der to perceive its structure. This structure itself rests upon four terms (brother, sister,
father, son) linked by two pairs of correlative oppositions, and such that, in each of the
two generations in question, there always exists a positive and a negative relationship.
What, then, is this structure and what can the reason for it be? The answer is as fol
lows: this structure is the simplest kinship structure that can be conceived and that can
exist. It is, to be precise, the element of kinship. (pp. 47-48, italics in original)7
But, not satisfied with the term 'element', he goes further still (p.50):
[W]e have interpreted avuncularity as a characteristic feature of the elementary struc
ture. This elementary structure, resulting from relationships defined among four terms,
is in our eyes the true kinship atom. (italics in original) 8
A surprising term from someone who has made a withering critique of the 'at
omism' of his predecessors, as Lévi-Strauss himself comes close to admitting
in the footnote he appends to this sentence (p.50n.):
It is no doubt superfluous to underline that the atomism we have criticized in the work
of Rivers is that of classical philosophy and not the structural conception of the atom as
found in modern physics. 9
chronique, pourraient être le résultat arbitraire de la rencontre entre plusieurs institutions hété
rogènes (la plupart d'ailleurs hypothétiques), et cependant fonctionner avec une régularité et
une efficacité quelconque."
7. "Nous voyons donc que l'avunculat, pour être compris, doit être traité comme une relation
intérieure à un système, et que c'est le système lui-même qui doit être considéré dans son en
semble, pour en apercevoir la structure. Cette structure repose elle-même sur quatre termes
(frère, sœur, père, fils) unis entre eux par deux couples d'oppositions corrélatives, et tels que,
dans chacune des deux générations en cause, il existe toujours une relation positive et une rela
tion négative. Qu'est-ce, maintenant, que cette structure et quelle peut être sa raison? La ré
ponse est la suivante: cette structure est la structure de parenté la plus simple qu'on puisse
concevoir et qui puisse exister. C'est, à proprement parler, l'élément de parenté."
8. "[N]ous avons interprété l'avunculat comme un trait caractéristique de la structure élémen
taire. Cette structure élémentaire, résultant de relations définies entre quatre termes, est à nos
yeux le véritable atome de parenté."
9. "Il est sans doute superflu de souligner que l' atomisme, tel que nous l'avons critiqué chez
Rivers, est celui de la philosophie classique et non la conception structurale de l'atome telle
qu'on la trouve dans la physique moderne."
This equating of his use of 'atom' with "the structural conception of the atom
as found in modern physics" recalls his earlier comment about phonology and
nuclear physics. Harsh as it may seem, it is difficult to see this as anything but
pseudo-scientific gibberish, of the sort that Sokal & Bricmont (1997) would
expose as all too prevalent in French structuralism, bringing what remained of
its credibility to an ignominious crash. It reminds one too that the article
appeared in the year in which atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and it is
from this that Lévi-Strauss is attempting to draw metaphorical power.
Lévi-Strauss's 'modern physics' atomism is certainly not one that Cassirer
would have agreed can be neatly distinguished from the atomism of 'classical
philosophy'. On the contrary, it had the reductive and mathematical natures
which Cassirer believed it was the virtue of structuralism to overcome.
Actually, Lévi-Strauss's article was not originally about 'structuralism'. It
derived from a paper entitled "Application des méthodes de la linguistique mo
derne à l'anthropologie, particulièrement aux systèmes de parenté (application
of the methods of modern linguistics to anthropology, particularly to kinship
systems") which he read to the Linguistic Circle of New York on 13 May
1944. While it contains numerous occurrences of the word structure, there is
only one instance of structurale apart from the title, and structuralisme is
likewise found only once, within a quote from Trubetzkoy. It may be that the
change of title to"L'analyse structurale" was suggested by Cassirer's later
lecture, which lent the term greater philosophical gravitas than it had
previously enjoyed. The very considerable differences between what Cassirer
said and the version of structural analysis Lévi-Strauss was developing were no
doubt overlooked in the excitement of the moment.
Chomsky's transformation of structuralism

These two visions of structuralism, laid out in the first issue of the first im
portant new American linguistics journal — or was it American, with Jakobson
and Martinet as its editors? — laid an ambiguous foundation, which may ex
plain why, almost 60 years on, it is still hard to pin down what 'structuralism'
meant. For Piaget, writing in 1968, the holism stressed by Cassirer is central to
structuralism, along with two other features, 'transformation' and 'self-regula
tion' . Transformation he associates in particular with Chomsky. As for Lévi-
Strauss, Piaget puts him at the head of a category of 'analytical structuralism'
(in contrast with the 'global structuralism' of Durkheim and Mauss), which
seeks to explain [...] empirical systems by postulating 'deep' structures from which the
former are in some manner derivable. [...T]he search for 'deep' structures is a direct
consequence of the interest in the details of transformation laws. (Piaget 1970
[1968]:98)
These are excellent examples of the 'misinterpretation' (from Chomsky's per

spective) of such Chomskyan terms as deep structure and transformation that
will be discussed below and taken up further in Chapter 9.
The key question for identifying 'American structuralism' is this: what did
either Sapir or Bloomfield have in common with the visions of either Cassirer
or Lévi-Strauss? If we try to map the former pair onto the latter, Sapir goes
with Cassirer's 'holistic structuralism' comfortably enough, at least if we re
strict our attention to Sapirian statements of the sort cited in Chapter 4 in the
context of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'. But Bloomfield does not sit com
fortably either with this or with Lévi-Strauss's 'universalist structuralism'. It is
difficult to see what we might regard as 'structuralist' in Bloomfield from ei
ther of these perspectives, especially given his insistence that one cannot scien
tifically countenance the existence of unobservable structures, whether in the
form of word-classes and grammar, which he replaces by demonstrations of
substitutability, or meaning, which he would replace by observation of behav
iour. Ultimately, the justification for labelling Bloomfield, and even Sapir in
the great bulk of his analytical work, as 'structuralist' amounts simply to the
fact that they are interested primarily in synchrony rather than diachrony, in
analyzing American rather than European languages, and doing it in a system
atic way, without trying to relate language structure too directly to anything
cultural or psychological.
This may be a surprising statement in Sapir's case, given that his interest in
Native American cultures was very great, and his interest in psychology not
insignificant. But had he been more willing to link language structures directly
to cultural or psychological phenomena, he would have looked more like being
in the line of Max Müller than of Whitney. This is so despite the fact that Max
Müller is arguably the more 'holistic' of the two — structuralist 'holism' be
ing, even for Cassirer, something quite apart from the search for "the key to all
mythologies" (the title of the illusory magnum opus of Edward Casaubon in
George Eliot's Middlemarch).
Bloomfieldian non-structuralism was the linguistics against which Chom
sky would primarily come to position himself. His revolution lay partly in con
vincing American linguists that the behaviourist rejection of the mind was
misguided, and that common-sense intuitions about the mental were not neces
sarily unscientific. He insisted on a distinction between 'competence' and 'per
formance' which in early work he likened specifically to the langue and parole
of Saussure (although, as was discussed in the preceding chapter, they were not
exactly the same), and maintained that linguistic competence was a discrete,
unconscious component of the mind having a fundamentally universal struc
ture, much as European structuralists had interpreted Saussure's langue. No
less importantly, he introduced a distinction between 'deep' and 'surface'
structure in language which people outside linguistics quickly latched onto and
interpreted in ways far removed from Chomsky's original intention, reshaping
them to fit the deep-seated sense that words do not mean what they purport to
mean (as will be discussed further in the final chapter).
This sense has been at the root of many 'functionalist' developments in
20th-century linguistics, particularly within European structuralism, where, for
better or for worse, the notion of separate conscious and unconscious minds is
taken for granted. Hence European structuralists had comparatively little diffi
culty reconciling Chomsky's basic views with their own, even if the reconcilia
tion was based upon a misinterpretation from Chomsky's point of view. At the
same time, his notion of transformational rules by which one gets from deep to
surface structure, which had no obvious precedent in European structuralism,
was absorbed into it as Chomsky's original contribution, revolutionary because
it released the structuralist system from the static inertia Saussure had saddled
it with. In fact the transformations were continuous with devices that had been
introduced into so-called 'American structuralism', most obviously the 'trans
forms' of Chomsky's mentor Zellig Harris (see Koerner 2002, Chapter 7, for a
detailed examination of Chomsky's methodological continuity with the Bloom-
fieldian tradition).10 But while transformations injected structuralism with a
new dynamism, it soon became apparent that they made the system too 'pow
erful' in the sense that one could explain anything with no effort, simply by
introducing an ad hoc transformation.
Although Chomsky maintains a self-propagation myth according to which
he was never influenced by any of the teachers whose influence he acknowl
edged profusely in his early publications, he does not deny his contacts from
the 1950s onward with Jakobson, to whom Chomsky & Halle (1968) is dedi
cated (for an analysis of Chomsky's quirkiness as a historian, see Joseph
1999b). It was Jakobson who presented him to the largely European audience
of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in 1962 that is generally seen as marking the start of his international promi
nence. Moreover, the principal intellectual debts Chomsky has acknowledged
apart from Saussure and Jakobson have been European rather than American,
including the linguists of 17th-century France (see Chomsky 1966), Humboldt
and Jespersen.
10. It is also worth noting, as Koerner has pointed out to me, that the original 1947 manuscript
of Harris (1951), which the young Chomsky proofread, was entitled Methods in Descriptive
Linguistics. The change from 'Descriptive' to 'Structural' for the 1951 publication is indicative
of the appeal that was accruing to the latter term by the turn of the decade.
In view of the fact that he set American linguistics on a path significantly

less at odds with the Saussurean framework while undoing none of the com
mon points between Bloomfield and Saussure (except perhaps the amount of
lip service paid to the social nature of language, which Chomsky did not deny
but simply excluded from his realm of interest by defining that realm as the
competence of an idealized native speaker-hearer in a homogeneous speech
community), it seems reasonable to argue that Chomsky introduced structural
ism into American linguistics, more fully than any of his predecessors. His
new, transformational structuralism, which in Piaget's (1968) perspective looks
as if it were an inevitable development in structuralist thought, briefly defined
a minor generational gap among French structuralists; and may, through its ex
cessive power, have helped hasten the pace of the reductions to absurdity by
which structuralism would ultimately come to be rejected.
For a long period from the 1960s through the 1980s, Chomsky's concep
tion of the mind was very influential in psychology, and moderately so in the
more conservative discipline of philosophy. Psycholinguistic studies of lan
guage acquisition continue to be heavily influenced by Chomsky's views. His
notion of the 'modular mind' with its genetically determined structural under
pinnings was at the basis of much early work in cognitive science, and came to
form the target in opposition to which new conceptions were aimed. The fact
that Piaget blatantly jumped onto the structuralist bandwagon (Piaget 1968)
shortly before attacking Chomsky's assertion that language operates as an
autonomous module within the mind (rather than, as Piaget believed, interac
tively with other facets of perception and cognition; see Piatelli-Palmarini ed.
1979) only reinforced the widespread notion that the Chomsky's view is the
opposite of the structuralist one.
Re-identifying American structuralism and ending the Cold War

Pondering this subject in 1998 (see Joseph 1999c), I drew the conclusion
that the true beginnings of 'American structuralism' lie with Chomsky rather
than where they are generally taken to lie, namely with S apir and Bloomfield.
Reconsidering the question four years on, I believe that I got it right on the
structuralism end, but not the American one. American structuralism actually
began with Roman Jakobson's lectures at the École Libre des Hautes Etudes in
New York in 1942. To deny that this is so requires us to maintain that for the
forty years that the foremost figure in structualist linguistics spent in America,
his home for half his life, teaching in American universities and serving as a
tireless organizational leader for many of the most interesting activities in
American linguistics, semiotics and literary studies, what he was doing did not
count as American. Having been born and come to maturity in Europe, he must
always remain European, unless he abandoned his own beliefs and methods for
those of people born and trained in America. And yet, why then does Edward
Sapir count as American? Born in Germany, trained in America but by another
German — presumably he earned his Americanness through assimilation and
allegiance in the First World War. Jakobson, on the other hand, came to Amer
ica only as a last resort, after every European country he might reach had be
come unsafe. He was suspected of being a communist sympathizer; documents
in his archives at MIT show that during the McCarthy Era he kept his job at
Columbia University only through a personal intervention on his behalf by the
University's president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. But on such criteria as that,
could Noam Chomsky, so ferociously and proudly disloyal to the American
government for four decades, count as an American?
In my view, Sapir and Jakobson were, and Chomsky is, unquestionably
American. Lévi-Strauss, who stayed only for the duration of the war, is un
questionably not. Martinet, who stayed until 1955 and played an organizational
role that was much less active than Jakobson' s, but still significant, is a harder
case, but I would count him as part of American structuralism for the duration
of his time in America. The point I wish to make is that to use the national la
bel as a way of excluding people who were living and working in the nation is
more pernicious and misleading than it is useful or enlightening. It involves a
sort of discrimination, and when it leads one to classify Chomsky as belonging
to a separate continent from one of the men in his immediate milieu to whom
he owes much of his fundamental outlook on language, it becomes intellectu
ally as well as morally indefensible. It is motivated by a belief that there can be
only one 'American linguistics', and that it should be as distinct from its Euro
pean counterpart as possible. This is a Cold War mentality. Its reductio ad ab
surdum is to be found in human form, with people like Henry Kahane (1902-
1992) or Ernst Pulgram (b.1915), European-born and exquisitely Old World in
manner, and likely to be classed as 'European' linguists even though each
came to America during World War  and spent the rest of his life there, work
ing to integrate modern linguistic methods into historical enterprises with 19th-
century roots. During the war Kahane worked in the Bloomfield-led Army
Language Training programme in New York, while Pulgram served as a G.I. in
the U.S. Army. What does it take to become an American linguist? What does
it take to un-become one?
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOW BEHAVIOURIST WAS VERBAL BEHAVIOR?
Studying the activity rather than its traces

Idioms and expressions which seem to explain verbal behavior in term [sic] of ideas are so
common in our language that it is impossible to avoid them, but they may be little more
than moribund figures of speech [...]. One unfortunate consequence is the belief that speech
has an independent existence apart from the behavior of the speaker [...]. It is true that ver
bal behavior usually produces objective entities. The sound-stream of vocal speech, the
words on a page, the signals transmitted on a telephone or telegraph wire — these are re
cords left by verbal behavior. As objective facts, they may all be studied, as they have been
from time to time in linguistics, communication engineering, literary criticism, and so on.
But although the formal properties of the records of utterances are interesting, we must
preserve the distinction between an activity and its traces. (Skinner 1957:7)
Mainstream American linguistics of the 1940s and '50s was committed to the be
haviourist line established by Bloomfield in his 1933 book Language. But Bloom-
field's students differed among themselves over how seriously to take his anti-
mentalism. If one accepted the position of 'behaviourist psychology' (an odd con
junction of terms, given that its anti-mentalism makes behaviourism really an anti-
psychology) that, because the mind does not allow objective observation, it cannot
be the proper object of a scientific enquiry, then what exactly was the status and
location of the language system itself? No one believed more strongly in its real
existence than Bloomfield did, but where it might exist does not seem to have wor
ried him unduly.
Nor were his students inclined to take it up. Their epistemological worries were
focussed instead on whether their linguistic analyses should be regarded as 'hocus
pocus' or 'God's truth', in the memorable formulation of Householder (1952).
That is, does the linguist invent language structure, or discover it? This is related to
the question of whether there is a mind for language structure to be located in, but
not quite the same, since nothing in principle prevents either a mentalist or a be
haviourist from adopting either the hocus-pocus or God's-truth position.
Over the course of the quarter-century in which these debates were going on, a
failed novelist turned experimental psychologist named Burrhus Frederic Skinner
(1904-1990) was producing endless drafts of a book he eventually published in
1957 with the title Verbal Behavior. The Preface to the book lays out its long his
tory: he completed a major portion of it in 1934, and taught courses from it at Har-
vard and Chicago in 1938-39. A Guggenheim Fellowship to complete it in 1941

was interrupted by the war, during which Skinner first gained notoriety for his
work using behaviourist principles in training pigeons to guide missiles. An
abridged version was presented as the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1947
and circulated in mimeograph, following nationwide publicity for the 'Skinner
box', a unit for controlling the environment of infants, which he tried without suc
cess to market commercially. The book was finally published a decade later, by
which time Skinner, the exponent of 'radical behaviourism', had become the most
famous psychologist of his generation. Then in 1959 Verbal Behavior was demol
ished in one of the most famous academic book reviews of the 20th century.
During this long gestation period, Skinner remained surprisingly out of touch
with American linguists, despite their shared commitment to behaviourism. That
he was familiar with their work is clear from his reasonably accurate summary of
how they treat the phoneme (Skinner 1957:15-16). But he distances his approach
from theirs by suggesting that they are interested in form whereas he is interested
in function; they in the practices of whole verbal communities, he in the behaviour
of an individual speaker; they in the conditions in which past behaviour has oc
curred, he in prediction and control of future behaviour. The main difference, and
the one that goes farthest to explain the distance he and the linguists kept from one
another, is alluded to in the quotation from Verbal Behavior at the head of this
chapter, and stated explicitly in the one which follows (p. 14):
In defining verbal behavior as behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons
we do not, and cannot, specify any one form, mode, or medium. Any movement capable of
affecting another organism may be verbal. We are likely to single out vocal behavior, not
only because it is commonest, but because it has little effect upon the physical environment
and hence is almost necessarily verbal.
For the linguists — even the Bloomfieldians — a great deal rode on "the belief that
speech has an independent existence apart from the behaviour of the speaker". If it
does not have that independent existence, then what exactly is the status of linguis
tics? Linguists would seem to be studying merely the 'traces' of the activity, as
Skinner puts it, rather than the essential activity itself. The implication is that lin
guistics is a sort of masturbation, compared with the real act of studying language
that is the work of the behaviourist psychologist (where the emphasis on "the me
diation of other persons" perhaps reinforces the sexual analogy). It is the founda
tion of this study that Verbal Behavior sets out to lay.
Rather than his contemporaries in American linguistics, who are the people in
the history of linguistic ideas cited by Skinner? The first citation in the book (ibid.,
p.4) is of Ogden & Richards (1923). The Diversions of Purley (1786-1805) by
John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) is cited repeatedly and at length. Russell and
Whitehead get numerous mentions, including an account of Whitehead's personal
role in provoking the book's writing that will be related at the end of this chapter.
HOW BEHAVIOURIST WAS VERBAL BEHAVIOR? 171
The argument made in both the quotations above about speech being inseparable
from action is also reminiscent of Malinowski, Wittgenstein, Firth, Sir Alan H.
Gardiner (1879-1963), J. L. Austin (1911-1960) and more recently Roy Harris
(b.1931).1 The view might be hazarded that Skinner's Verbal Behavior looks like a
one-off in 20th-century American linguistic thought because it is actually part of a
British linguistic tradition that happened to be written by an autodidact from Sus
quehanna, Pa. But it would be more accurate to say that Skinner's is the sort of
case that breaks down the often dubious attribution of nationality to intellectual
traditions.
Skinner's categories
What is needed for present purposes — and what the traditional 'word' occasionally ap
proximates — is a unit of behavior composed of a response of identifiable form function
ally related to one or more independent variables [...]. Any unit of such behavior is
conveniently called 'an operant'. (Skinner 1957:20)
The key term in Skinner's system, operant, recalls the 'operators' of Ogden's Ba
sic English. It is almost the case that 'verbal operant' is simply 'word' relabelled,
except that, as we have seen, Skinner does not confine the verbal to the spoken-
written-signed, so that a verbal operant could just as well be a movement of the
body as a word. Moreover, he allows for the possibility that certain collocations of
words such as when all is said and done or haste makes waste may be shown to
vary as a unit under the control of a variable, in which case they would constitute a
single operant. The whole set of operants which appear in a speaker's behaviour
make up his or her verbal repertoire, which is understood as "a convenient con
struct" defining the speaker's potential behaviour.
The keywords of first-generation behaviourism, 'stimulus' and 'response',
which figure prominently in Bloomfield's Language and even more so in the work
of the Harvard linguist and founder of 'Dynamic Philology', George Kingsley Zipf
(1902-1950), occur less frequently than one might expect in Verbal Behavior. For
Zipf, language and reaction are ultimately one:
All experience is reaction, patterned at its source. All reaction is expression, once we be
come aware of it. And all expression is language, once we can decipher it. What we have
been terming language is only that particular portion of behavior for which the code is
pretty well known. (Zipf 1936:309)
Skinnerian behaviourism shifts the focus from stimulus and response as external
and purely objective facts to their internal effects on the individual — what it is
that happens between receiving the stimulus and performing the response that al
lows the link between them to be explained and, most importantly, predicted.
1. Wittgenstein, Firth, Gardiner, Austin and Harris are each the subject of a chapter in Joseph, Love
& Taylor (2001).
Skinner's term for this process within the individual is operant conditioning. The
innumerable impressions we receive from the world around us do not automati
cally constitute 'stimuli' that will contribute to operant conditioning. They do so
only when the response they call forth is reinforced, rewarded in some way, by the
other party or parties taking part in the verbal behaviour. The 'schedule of rein
forcement' of a particular operant determines its 'strength' within the individual's
verbal repertoire, understood as its probability of emission under specified circum
stances. The strength of an operant is measurable by the energy level, speed and
repetition of its emission, as well as by a tendency for it to emitted inappropriately,
i.e. with 'inadequate' stimulation.
The probability that a verbal response of a given form will occur at a given time is the ba
sic datum to be predicted and controlled. It is the 'dependent variable' in a functional
analysis. (Skinner 1957:28)
Predicting and controlling the occurrence of verbal operants will be achieved by
analysing the independent variables, which include conditioning and reinforce
ment, aversive control (escaping injury), motivation (e.g., satiation and depriva
tion, and including ageing and the effects of drugs and alcohol), emotion (e.g., joy
and frustration, which, not surprisingly, he treats purely as physical reactions).
Skinner does not distinguish rigorously among these categories, so that aversive
control is sometimes treated as part of motivation, and deprivation as part of emo
tion, and he emphasizes that multiple causation is the rule, not the exception.
Subsequent chapters of Verbal Behavior introduce three further neologisms for
the analysis of verbal behaviour: the 'mand', the 'tact' and the 'autoclitic'. The
mand is "the type of verbal operant in which a response of given form is character
istically followed by a given consequense [sic] in a verbal community" (ibid.,
p.35): Wait! followed by someone waiting, Sh-h! followed by silence, Candy! fol
lowed by receipt of candy. He notes that what is singular about the mand from the
behaviourist point of view is that, whereas other types of verbal operants are asso
ciated with behaviour that mainly benefits the listener, the mand tends to work for
the benefit of the speaker. It is not obvious how listeners are conditioned to re
spond to the mand Candy!, when they themselves do not receive reinforcement
from it in the form of a piece of candy. Therefore the 'total speech episode' must
be taken into account, "all the relevant events in the behavior of both speaker and
listener in their proper temporal order" (p.36). The category of mands includes not
only what are traditionally called commands, but also requests, prayers or entreat
ies, questions, advice, warning, permission, offers and calls.
'Extended mands', including monologues, talking to dolls or animals, wishes
and other 'superstitious' or 'magical' mands, are treated in a section highly remi
niscent of Ogden and Richard's long chapter on "Word Magic" in The Meaning of
Meaning — which also gives Skinner an indirect link with Whorf, for reasons ex-
plained in Chapter 4 above. Indeed, the quotation at the start of the present chapter
proposes in Whorfian fashion that "the belief that speech has an independent exis
tence apart from the behavior of the speaker" is the "unfortunate consequence" of
"moribund figures of speech". Hence too the necessity of neologistically remaking
our vocabulary for talking about talking.
The tact is defined by Skinner as "a verbal operant in which a response of a
given form is evoked (or at least strengthened) by a particular object or event or
property of an object or event" (pp. 81-82). It is what is normally referred to as the
use of a word to 'talk about' a thing or event, as when, in the presence of a doll, a
child says doll. Skinner is not interested in the relationship between word and
thing, but in how the relation between response and controlling stimulus is condi
tioned within the individual — again, not so obvious given that there is no imme
diate reward for talking about something one already has in hand.
'Extended tacts' include metaphors, solecisms, naming, guessing, and the sort
of 'generic extension' that occurs when a speaker calls a new kind of chair a
'chair'. Metaphor has figured prominently in many theories of language which fo
cus on the problem of meaning (as Skinner does, despite all his attempts to behav
iour-babble it away), and it is central to Skinner's whole conception of verbal
behaviour (p.98):
Metaphorical extension is most useful when no other response is available. (Unfortunately,
metaphor is also often useful when there is nothing to say. John Home Tooke pointed this
out [...]). In a novel situation to which no generic term can be extended, the only effective
behavior may be metaphorical. The widespread use of metaphor in literature demonstrates
this advantage [...]. A Dostoyevsky, a Jane Austen, a Stendhal, a Melville, a Tolstoy, a
Proust, or a Joyce seem to show a grasp of human behavior which is beyond the methods
of science.
Throughout the book, most of the data cited by Skinner, apart from unsystematic,
anecdotal observations he had noted down over the years, are examples taken from
works of literature. Considerable stretches of the book, particularly the later chap
ters, focus on literature exclusively. Rather than give up his boyhood enthusiasm,
the failed novelist tried to integrate it into his behaviourism, where it did not sit
comfortably, and likely provided a further irritant to the linguists, who had strug
gled long and hard to establish their disciplinary independence from literature-
centred philology.
Skinner says that the extension of tacts, if carried on without limit, would result
in chaos, since every possible stimulus would potentially call forth every possible
response. The verbal community counteracts extension by introducing abstraction,
whereby a particular property of a thing is uniquely authorized to stand for the
whole class of those things. "A proper noun is a tact in which the response is under
the control of a specific person or thing. A common noun is a tact in which the re-
sponse is under the control of a property defining a class of persons or things"

(p. 113). Only the latter, in Skinner's terms, is an abstraction.
This section on "Abstraction" is a point of no return for readers of Verbal Be
havior. Those who may have given Skinner the benefit of the doubt for the first
hundred pages can here scarcely ignore the fact that he has identified the tact as the
most important class of verbal operants, dwelt at length on its metaphorical and
other extensions, declared them a danger — and then sets up in opposition to them
a process of 'abstraction' that is not clearly separable from the extensions them
selves. He defines it with false distinctions such as the one just quoted between
proper and common nouns, which not only describes inaccurately the common us
age it purports to report, but glosses over its reliance on the ontological gaps be
tween 'control' by persons, things and words. Just when he should confront the
problem, Skinner abruptly changes the subject, and introduces several long quota
tions, including one from Richards on 'word magic'.
The last of Skinner's key neologistic analytic categories, the autoclitic, is even
more heterogeneous than the mand or the tact. It includes expressions containing
what are normally called intention, propositional attitudes, assertion and deliberate
composition. Negation is always autoclitic, whereas the autoclitic function is can
celled with quotation marks. Thus I say he's right contains an autoclitic (an asser
tion), I say "He's right" does not, and I don't say "He's right" does (a negation).
But to complicate matters enormously, Skinner includes all of grammar and syntax
under 'autoclitic processes'. The chapter devoted to them climaxes in an extended
account of that "extraordinary book written in the late eighteenth century by John
Home Tooke", The Diversions of Purley, with Skinner adopting Tooke's view that
nouns and verbs are the only real words, and all others are 'abbreviations' of com
plex relations (Skinner 1957:340). Skinner further agrees with Tooke — with
strong echoes of Ogden — that the grammatical distinction between nouns and
verbs is arbitrary and unnecessary. He identifies the following passage as the one
in which Tooke "[p]erhaps [...] came closest to the present position" (ibid., p.343).
The business of the mind, as far as it concerns language, appears to me to be very simple.
It extends no further than to receive Impressions, that is, to have Sensations or Feelings.
What are called its operations, are merely the operations of Language. A consideration of
Ideas, or of the Mind, or of Things (relative to the Parts of Speech), will lead us no farther
than to Nouns: i.e. the signs of those impressions, or names of ideas. The other Part of
Speech, the Verb, must be accounted for from the necessary use of it in communication. It
is in fact the communication itself: and therefore well denominated Pημa, dictum. For the
verb is QUOD loquimur; the Noun, DE QUO. (Tooke 1786:70-71)
"What Tooke lacked", according to Skinner, "was a conception of behavior as
such"; nevertheless, here "Tooke is talking about verbal behavior" (Skinner 1957:
343). It becomes clear that Skinner ultimately believes syntax is unimportant be
cause his basic picture is one of the discrete operant, a single word or set phrase,
being produced in response to a discrete stimulus, and functioning in turn as a dis

crete stimulus for the listener. "An obscene word", he points out, "has its effect
regardless of its location or grammar" (ibid., p.344).
Chomsky's review
If this summary of Verbal Behavior has seemed disjointed and unsystematic,
with no clear sense of how it goes about achieving the goals set at the beginning,
then it has succeeded all too well in conveying the nature of the book itself. It was
a fragile vessel on which to launch a new theory of language, and it was sunk ex
plosively.
He confidently and repeatedly voices his claim to have demonstrated that the contribution
of the speaker is quite trivial and elementary, and that precise prediction of verbal behavior
involves only specification of the few external factors that he has isolated experimentally
with lower organisms [...]. Since Skinner's work is the most extensive attempt to accom
modate human behavior involving higher mental faculties within a strict behaviorist
schema of the type that has attracted many linguists and philosophers, as well as psycholo
gists, a detailed documentation is of independent interest. The magnitude of the failure of
this attempt to account for verbal behavior serves as a kind of measure of the importance of
the factors omitted from consideration, and an indication of how little is really known
about this remarkably complex phenomenon. (Chomsky 1959:27-28)
The first sentence quoted here is inaccurate. The only way readers of Verbal Be
havior could come away with the sense that the contribution of the speaker is triv
ial and elementary is if they believe that to extend the measure of that contribution
beyond words to actions, and beyond isolated speakers to include those with whom
they are interacting, is to deny the strictly vocal speaker their rightful place at the
centre of the linguistic universe. Nor does Skinner claim any extension from his
experiments with lower animals to human verbal behavior. As Andresen (1990b:
149) points out, "Chomsky's review is 31-pages long. On 13 of those pages,
Chomsky refers to rats or Skinner's bar-pressing experiments, often more than
once per page — although nowhere in Verbal Behavior is there mention of rats
[...]". In the wake of Chomsky's review, few linguists would bother to read the
book and find out what it was really about.
This is not however to say that Chomsky's fire was entirely misdirected. When
it came to Skinner's analytical system of mands and tacts and operant conditioning,
Chomsky's criticisms were levelled with deadly accuracy.
Other examples of 'stimulus control' merely add to the general mystification. Thus a
proper noun is held to be a response 'under the control of a specific person or thing' ([...]).
I have often used the words Eisenhower and Moscow; which I presume are proper nouns if
anything is, but have never been 'stimulated' by the corresponding objects [...]. Elsewhere
it is asserted that a stimulus controls a response in the sense that presence of the stimulus
increases the probability of the response. But it is obviously untrue that the probability that
a speaker will produce a full name is increased when its bearer faces the speaker. Further-
more, how can one's own name be a proper noun in this sense? A multitude of similar
questions arise immediately. It appears that the word 'control' here is merely a misleading
paraphrase for the traditional 'denote' or 'refer'. (Chomsky 1959:32-33)
[I]n each case, if we take his terms in their literal meaning, the description covers almost
no aspect of verbal behavior, and if we take them metaphorically, the description offers no
improvement over various traditional formulations. (ibid., p.54)
Everything Skinner had to say, in other words, either was irrelevant or amounted
to old wine in new bottles. Even what Chomsky infers to be Skinner's view of
how children learn their native language — another topic Skinner in fact never
broached — is treated by Chomsky as merely common sense, bringing us no
closer to an understanding of how that learning takes place (p.43):
As far as acquisition of language is concerned, it seems clear that reinforcement, casual ob
servation, and natural inquisitiveness (coupled with a strong tendency to imitate) are im
portant factors, as is the remarkable capacity of the child to generalize, hypothesize, and
'process information' in a variety of very special and apparently highly complex ways
which we cannot yet describe or begin to understand, and which may be largely innate, or
may develop through some sort of learning or through maturation of the nervous system.
Over the next decade Chomsky's position would become more firmly polarized to
Skinner's, as he moved to the view that children's general, non-linguistic cognitive
capacities are actually unconnected to their acquisition of language, and that input
from those around them is not an important factor in acquisition, having only the
rather trivial function of triggering mechanisms which must be innate. Again, Ver
bal Behavior never raises the issue of children's learning of language, nor gives
any sort of privileged status to the child language-learner. The fairest inference to
draw from Skinner's book is that children's language can be studied in its own
terms, to determine the operant conditioning that allows us to predict what a child
will utter at a given stage of its development, and that those predictions will
change at every stage of a person's life, so there is no 'critical age' at which oper
ant conditioning stops or ceases to be of scientific interest to the behaviourist. It is
not necessarily unfair of a reviewer to suggest that the book ought to have articu
lated a specific theory of child language acquisition. But such was the power of
Chomsky's review that many people today believe that Skinner did just that, and
the theory he articulated was untenable.
Surprisingly, the linguistic 'establishment' of Bloomfield's former students did
not take Chomsky's review as an attack on their own behaviourist inclinations. On
the contrary, they generally relished it as the fending off of an encroachment into
their field by a famous and powerful outsider. Chomsky was certainly on their side
when he contested Skinner's views that:
• words and collocations of words, rather than phonology, grammar and syntax,
are the core of linguistic enquiry;
• verbal behaviour extends beyond the vocal, which aligns Skinner with the Brit
ish pragmatic tradition as well as with semiotics;
• linguists study the mere trace of what is real in verbal behaviour.
Regarding the second point, Andresen (1990b: 150) writes that "With this excoriat
ing review, Chomsky might be said to have programmatically exiled pragmatics
from language theory". The third point meant that Chomsky succeeded in turning
around the implication of who was doing the real thing and who was masturbating.
Over the following five years, however, the generation gap separating Chom
sky and his followers from the students of Bloomfield would widen so much that
the latter would come to be seen as the enemy, and would gradually be assimilated
to Skinner in the mythology of Chomsky's generative linguistics. This was an
ironic turn of events, given that, in hindsight at least, Chomsky actually shared
with Skinner, in opposition to the Bloomfieldian linguists, at least two key posi
tions:
• that linguistics should be concerned with explanation and prediction rather
than with description;
• that linguistics should shift from the study of the community to the study of the
individual.
In the latter case, the way both Skinner and Chomsky construct 'the individual' has
proven spurious. Neither is interested in actual individuals. Rather, both are com
mitted to a view of science as generalizable knowledge that requires the 'individ
ual' to be an idealization — in fact, an idealization of a whole community.
Chomsky's insistence that the knowledge of language he is analysing is literally a
physical attribute in a literal individual would effectively end the hocus pocus vs.
God's truth debate in American linguistics, shifting the centre to a more adamantly
God's truth position than any of the Bloomfieldians had ever dreamed of, with lin
guistics re-imagined as the search to discover a physical 'language organ'.
Who won?
Looking back today at the points on which Chomsky saw himself differing
with Skinner, it is not obvious which position has prevailed. Computer pro
grammes using parallel distributed processing have shown that even with a rule-
based model of linguistic knowledge, acquisition can be accounted for as effec
tively without 'innate knowledge' as with, if they are endowed with a general cog
nitive capacity for extrapolating regularities from the data to which they are
exposed and thus 'teaching themselves how to learn'. Even the precise concept of
operant 'strength' has been taken over in these models.
Chomsky's strong version of nativism has been pushed from the mainstream by
the more interactive view of language acquisition maintained for example by
Pinker (1994). Chomskyan generative linguistics has come to the position that
grammar and syntax do not exist, and that virtually all the effects attributed to them
should actually be located in the lexicon. Corpus linguistics has demonstrated that
language is not structured in units of individual words combined in infinitely crea
tive ways, but that language is structured by a far greater use of collocations —the
opposite of linguistic creativity as Chomsky defined it (see Joseph 2003).
The spectacular growth of pragmatics has returned 'verbal behaviour beyond
the vocal' to central importance in linguistic study. Moreover, Verbal Behavior did
in fact spawn a long and continuous analytic tradition of its own, but one con
ducted entirely within psychology, not linguistics. Chomsky's review ended an op
portunity for bringing together strands of enquiry into language across disciplinary
as well as national divides.
Nevertheless, Skinner is worse than the forgotten man of the 20th-century
study of language, he is its archetypal villain and loser. People who have never
seen a copy of Verbal Behavior can tell you in detail about its denial of any possi
bility of human linguistic creativity. In reality, the book is mostly about such crea
tivity, especially in its artistic sense as represented in literature, and is an earnest
attempt at explaining the mechanisms by which it takes place, while adhering to a
scientific stricture that only what can be observed may be reported. It is possible
that in the end Skinner will turn the tables, as he did repeatedly in his lifetime. The
failed novelist of the 1920s finally produced a best-selling novel, Walden Two
(1948), of limited artistic merit but intellectually a worthy successor to Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World. And in the last decade and a half of his long life he
even realized his artistic ambition with a three-volume autobiography (1976,1979,
1983) widely considered to stand among the best of the genre. Thus even Verbal
Behavior can be counted a success, if only as part of the stimulus for this last bril
liant literary response.
On its own, however, it is a book crippled by its determination to take up issues
already at the centre of a great pragmatic-semantic tradition while denying that it
was doing so, and to replace the methods of that tradition with the only methodol
ogy Skinner knew, an experimental psychological one so totally inapplicable to the
matter at hand that Skinner did not even bother to apply it. The questions he
wanted to answer required observation of actual practice, not as prompted by a lab
technician in a white coat, but as inscribed in social context. The sad result has
been that Verbal Behavior has been denied credit even for what time has shown
that it got right; while in fields where behaviourism had a more substantial impact,
including certain branches of philosophy, anthropology and applied linguistics as
well as psychology, it has achieved the status of a founding text for a methodology
it did not practise, among admirers who seem to have read hardly any more of it
than its detractors have done.
HOW BEHAVIOURIST WAS VERBAL BEHAVlOR? 179
The black scorpion

The following anecdote from Skinner's autobiography was also recounted by
him in an epilogue to Verbal Behavior.
Alfred North Whitehead attended the Monday-evening dinners of the [Harvard] Society [of
Fellows] regularly and was always eager to talk with the Junior Fellows. Unfortunately it
was seldom very profitable. He was seventy-two years old when the Society first met and
he tended to fall back on well-tested anecdotes. One evening [in 1934], however, he and I
were sitting together after the port had gone around and everyone else had left the table
[...]. We dropped into a discussion of behaviorism, which was then still very much an
'ism,' and of which I was a zealous devotee [...]. He agreed that science might be success
ful in accounting for human behavior provided one made an exception of verbal behavior.
Here, he insisted, something else must be at work. He brought the discussion to a close
with a friendly challenge: 'Let me see you,' he said, 'account for my behavior as I sit here
saying "No black scorpion is falling upon the table.'"
The next morning I drew up the outline of a book on verbal behavior. (Skinner 1979:
149-150)
In the epilogue to the 1957 book, Skinner tries to rise to Whitehead's challenge.
After a half-hearted attempt at analysing No black scorpion is falling upon the ta
ble in terms of variables and autoclitics, Skinner concludes: "I suggest, then, that
black scorpion was a metaphorical response to the topic under discussion. The
black scorpion was behaviorism" (Skinner 1957:458). With arare flash of irony he
hints that his analysis is one that might be expected from a Freudian. On a more
serious note, he acknowledges that his radical behaviourism does indeed threaten
the status of such things as human freedom. But this he thinks is merely a matter of
making verbal adjustments. "'Personal freedom' and 'responsibility' will make
way for other bywords which, as is the nature of bywords, will probably prove sat
isfying enough" (ibid., p.460). He concludes by offering Verbal Behavior itself as a
sign of respect for human achievement and dignity, and proof "that no black scor
pion has fallen upon this table" (ibid.).
Skinner on freedom, responsibility and dignity is reminiscent of Stuart Chase's
belief, so abhorrent to Orwell, that all such abstract words boil down to blab, blab,
blab (see Chapter 9). Yet time has shown that any fear of behaviourism leading to
direct reductions in human freedom was misplaced. Arguably, despite the demise
of behaviourism such reductions have taken place anyway, and those who believe
this is so find their principal spokesman in no one other than Noam Chomsky. He
attributes this loss of freedom to a conspiracy among governments, media and big
business to 'manufacture consent' — a process that would actually be easier to
comprehend under a behaviourist view of the mind than under one of innate struc
ture and infinite creativity.2
2. Interesting in this context is Chomsky's 1971 review of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
For his part, Skinner, wilfully perhaps, missed the point of Whitehead's re
mark, which was that the outcome of the human language capacity can never be
wholly predicted, and therefore never wholly controlled. It can be described, and
weak predictions made, but that is quite a different matter from the basis on which
Skinner's programme is founded. If anything, the implication of Whitehead's re
mark is that behaviourism, particularly in its radical Skinnerian version, is 'no
black scorpion', i.e. not anything to be taken seriously, let alone worried about. If
Skinner had understood how that single sentence uttered by Whitehead reduced his
programme to absurdity — that the sentence itself was the metaphorical black scor
pion — he might have spared himself 23 years of work, and spared Chomsky from
becoming famous. Most importantly, he might have spared linguistics from a long
period in which empirical observation, the very cornerstone of science, was con
sidered trivial; in which the autonomy of language was asserted in such a strong
form that it was denied even that the mental language faculty was connected to
other cognitive faculties, let alone to means of expression and interpretation other
than the vocal; in which any link between human language capacity and the
capacity for expression and interpretation in other animal species was likewise de
nied, resulting in theories of language blatantly incompatible with Darwinian evo
lution.
Still, anti-behaviourism was no more a black scorpion than behaviourism was.
Nor was behaviourist psychology the real sex to linguistics' masturbation, or vice-
versa. Each approach had hold of some portion of the truth, while getting other
things dreadfully wrong. Can any theory, particularly of something human beings
do, aspire to more than that? There remains much to unravel as to what linguistic
behaviourism was really about; what insights were achieved by it, as well as by the
other approaches to language which, thanks to Skinner, got tangled up with it and
vanquished in its name; and which of the behaviourist positions in the Skinner-
Chomsky debate have come back tacitly to replace the opposite view, without
credit ever going to the 'loser'.
CHAPTER NINE
THE POPULAR (MIS)INTERPRETATIONS
OF WHORF AND CHOMSKY
WHAT THEY HAD IN COMMON, AND WHY THEY HAD TO HAPPEN
On becoming famous f or what one did not mean

Whorf's early death came just two years after Sapir's and almost simulta
neous with the first wave of popular attention to the view of the relationship of
language and thought that they jointly articulated (or failed to articulate). This
left the way clear to anyone to interpret what they meant without worry of di
rect authorial contradiction. Hence the wide variety of 'strong' and 'weak' in
terpretations, with the former predominating and resulting in a general associa
tion of Whorf's name with a version of linguistic determinism of thought and
culture that he almost certainly would not have accepted.
In Chomsky's case, he vigorously challenged the popular interpretations of
'deep' and 'surface' structure and others of his concepts that had such a wide
appeal and made his name well-known in the 1960s to people who never read a
page of his linguistic work. But to no avail: the concepts took on a life of their
own, and Chomsky saw no remedy but to disown them. Yet, at the same time,
his fame spread much farther through the misinterpretations (from his point of
view) than it ever did through his own intended meanings of the concept,
which are known only to the relatively restricted numbers of people who have
actually studied his work in some depth.
Perhaps it is the ideal situation: the theorist claims only the pure, epistemo-
logically respectable version as his own, in order to retain credibility within his
specialized field, even as the 'vulgarized' version — which, though academi
cally dodgy, resonates with something the general public is already predis
posed to hear and believe — carries his name to the most remote corners of the
planet. There are analogues in every scientific field, Einstein and relativity be
ing an obvious example.
Two things are particularly interesting about the cases of Whorf and Chom
sky: first, that despite their seeming doctrinal differences, there are these
similarities in the history of the reception of their views; and secondly, that in
each case the 'misinterpretation' is essentially the same: the public wants to
hear Whorf and Chomsky say that, at some deep, subconscious level, language
is shaping the mind, in ways that are not at all apparent on the surface.
I do not think it is an accident that these particular 'misreadings' should

have occurred at these precise historical moments. They correspond very
closely to much else that we know was going on in the general cultural under
standing of language and mind in the mid-20th century. This chapter explores
those connections; it does so in what is of necessity a speculative way, given
the absence of any existing scholarship to build upon. It is not mere speculation
— everything alluded to is historically documented — but making the connec
tions requires readers to make an imaginative leap across traditional bounda
ries. In thinking about history, imagination is both crucial and dangerous,
crucial because it is necessary if our understanding of the past is not to stag
nate, dangerous because it is so easy to fantasize. Here documentary corrobora
tion is the best safeguard, and I have tried to provide as much as possible
within the scope of a brief chapter.
There is an even more general aim here than the already very broad one
just discussed. Those of us who write about the history of linguistics tend to
proceed as though linguists lived and worked in isolation from the general in
tellectual trends of the culture around them. No doubt some linguists have ex
isted in an ivory tower, but I do not think that most have done so, and
especially not the greatest ones. Future work in this area would do well to try
to understand why their work was received in the way that it was, and to bring
into the picture those things that were happening outside linguistics, but within
the cultural sphere that academics, students and general readers inhabited, that
might have shaped not only what the linguists wrote, but how they were read.
The 20th-century discourse on propaganda

In Chapter 4 it was suggested that three views of the relationship of lan
guage to thought are found in modern linguistics. One is that language is a
mere garment draped upon thought, with no effect upon its content. The other
two, however, do see a shaping influence of language upon thought. One of
them regards such influence in an essentially positive light, and sees language
as a magic key to understanding the thought of an individual or an entire cul
ture. The last view sees the influence of language upon thought as essentially
negative, with language as the source of metaphysical garbage that gets in the
way of clear, logical thinking.
Linguists of the 19th and 20th centuries mainly took the magic key view,
which does after all give a privileged place to the study of language as the key
to broader cultural and intellectual understanding. The tradition of analytic phi
losophy has been the main stronghold of the metaphysical garbage view. But
there have been crossovers among linguists, who tend however not to give up
magic key rhetoric entirely even when entering into metaphysical garbage dis
course.
THE POPULAR (MIS)INTERPRETATIONS OF WHORF AND CHOMSKY 183
The thesis of this chapter is that the 20th century saw a popularization,
within at least the English-speaking world, of the metaphysical garbage view
of language, in the form of a linguistic mind control cultural discourse frame.
Its origin is in the Great War of 1914-18, and it has been the subject of most
vivid discussion in times of intense international conflict. It takes the form of
anxiety about propaganda, especially about that generated by governments,
but also by commercial interests. It has helped to shape the agenda of 20th-
century linguistics in six ways, by:
1. bringing the metaphysical garbage view of language to the fore, and
thereby tempering the predominantly magic key disposition of linguists;
2. presenting linguists with an opportunity to gain a wider audience by engag
ing in the cultural discourse of propaganda anxiety and suggesting the
study of linguistics as a prophylactic;
3. giving linguists an additional motive for involvement in the international
auxiliary language movement, on the grounds that a scientifically con
structed language (including Basic English) would be a prophylactic
against propaganda;
4. promoting semantics as not only a credible area of linguistic research but
the most important one;
5. steadily helping to increase the presupposition of an unconscious mind that
is the most 'real' level at which human behaviour, including language,
functions; and thus weakening the argumentative base for behaviourist
methodological strictures against unobservables;
6. building a general public presupposition that the relationship of language
and thought is of the metaphysical garbage sort, which would shape the
widespread 'misinterpretation' of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' and
Chomsky's 'deep structure'.
Although propaganda has a centuries-old history, a shift in the discourse con
cerning it began in 1914. It centred around Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount
Northcliffe (1865-1922), owner of The Times and The Daily Mail, and what
opponents of British entry into the Great War saw as a government-press con
spiracy. In Anthony Smith's words, Northcliffe and his brother Harold, 1st
Lord Rothermere (1868-1940), owner of The Daily Mirror, Leeds Mercury
and Glasgow Record,
created a four-year fiction of German terrorism and bestiality. They described the Ger
man army's reprisal actions in Belgium as an orgy of torture and debauchery, inventing
atrocities where their reporters were unable to find them. The Northcliffe newspapers
depicted the work of German soldiers in images which are the familiar material of hor-
ror stories: babies being lifted on bayonets, nuns raped on tables. Public sentiment was
whipped into a frenzy of anti-German hatred. (Smith 1973:30)
There was an urgent need to convince men to volunteer for the armed forces, to
create public support for forced conscription, and to persuade the US to enter,
which it did not do until 1917.
Repressed during the war, 'propaganda anxiety' broke out openly after the
Armistice, in Britain and abroad. British propaganda was blamed by a resentful
America for its entry into the slaughter, and Woodrow Wilson's Democratic
party lost the presidential election of 1920 to Republicans campaigning on the
slogan "The War Was a Fraud". 'Propaganda' begins appearing in titles of a
few American books (see Blankenhorn 1919, Tyler 1920, US War Dept.
[1918?]), though not in that of what was probably the most widely read book
on the subject of this period, Public Opinion (1922) by Walter Lippmann
(1889-1974), who had been appointed an assistant to the US Secretary of War
in 1917, and later helped to draft the Covenant of the League of Nations, along
with General Smuts (see Chapter 5). Germans, meanwhile, convinced them
selves that they had been defeated not by British might but by British propa
ganda; and "In Mein Kampf Hitler was to write that he learned all his own
propaganda techniques from British methods during the war" (Smith 1973:42).
Shortly before 1930 there appears on both sides of the Atlantic a spate of
books with titles containing 'propaganda' or 'clear thinking' (see Lasswell
1927, Bernays 1928, Ponsonby 1928, Lambert 1930, Thouless 1930, Wiggam
1930). Some of these precede the 1929 stock market crash and depression, but
at least some of the others are a response to the growth of radical political
movements this provoked (as are the slightly later Biddle 1932 and Lumley
1933). Others are part of the new science of 'public relations', pioneered by
Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), who consciously applied to it the psycho
logical theories of his uncle, Sigmund Freud. In the same years, Harold Laski's
(1893-1950) University of London lectures would make propaganda into a se
rious academic issue (see Laski 1930a, b). In 1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World presented a dystopia of mind control, just a year before Hitler's rise
to power made it a mainstream cultural issue.
As the spectre of a second world war began to loom, there was a revival of
hostility over the propaganda of the first war among non-interventionists and
pacifists. Books and articles about propaganda again begin to proliferate (see
Doob 1935; Garnett 1935; Lasswell, Casey & Smith 1935; Childs 1936; Irwin
[1936]; Rogerson 1938). With Britain's declaration of war against Germany in
1939, the government's propaganda machine got going again in earnest, one of
its principal goals being to convince the US to enter the war. British propagan
dists like Brogan identified as the main obstacle the belief among Americans
that they had been tricked into the first war by British propaganda. Brogan
(1944: 56-57) attacks this belief head-on:
the widespread, almost universal American belief that intervention in the war of 1914-
18 had been a [...] foolish luxury [...]. America, so the American people was soon told,
had been robbed by international crooks who had found the job of swindling her ap
pointed guardians no more difficult than "rolling a lush." America was the lush, and
the booze that had made her so easy a victim of international pickpockets was propa
ganda.
For the student of that art, the history of the American campaign of propaganda
against propaganda must always rank as a masterpiece.
This is propaganda against propaganda against propaganda. By this time,
George Orwell was writing pieces claming a link between the power of propa
ganda and the structure of language (e.g., Orwell 1944). Another, far less well
known writer on propaganda, John Hargrave (1894-1982), linked it with cul
tural background, which he said is maintained by
the most powerful indirect propaganda of all: the great body of accepted beliefs and
ideas embedded in and upheld by the everyday habits and customs of the people [...].
By a conditioning process of indirect propaganda ([...]) it shapes each individual from
infancy, and these herd-conditioned individuals act as the non-conscious indirect
propagandists who maintain their cultural background. (Hargrave 1940: 111-112; ital
ics in original)
With no apparent knowledge of linguistics or anthropology, Hargrave arrived
at a position remarkably close to the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' as it is popu
larly (mis)understood. Nor was he a mere theorist of propaganda: he put his
ideas into effect in the Kibbo Kift, a breakaway anti-war wing of the Boy
Scouts which he founded at the age of 26.1 In its manifesto he wrote: "It must
be an idea clothed with flesh and blood. [...] It must look to the young first and
implant its message in words of one syllable" (cited from Judge Smith 1995;
emphasis added). By World War , Hargrave's position had shifted from out-
and-out pacifism to a belief that, as he put it in the second subtitle of his 1940
book, "words win wars".2
Great War propaganda anxiety and language theory

There were several direct results for language theory of Great War propa
ganda anxiety. One is said to have begun on the very day of the armistice.
"During a discussion with I. A. Richards on 11 November 1918 Ogden out-
1. The organization, membership to which was not limited by sex or age, later evolved into the
Social Credit Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name 'Kibbo Kift' is supposed
to be from an archaic Kentish dialect, and to mean "a proof of great strength".
2. Other manifestations of propaganda anxiety from the WWII period include Carr (1939),
Klein (1939), Mock & Larson (1939), Petersen (1939), Dale (1940), Bedford [1942], Thouless
(1942), US Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce (1942).
lined a work to correlate his earlier linguistic studies with his wartime experi
ence of 'the power of Word-Magic' and the part played by language in con
temporary thought" (from Ogden's entry in the Dictionary of National
Biography 1951-1960, p.778; see further Joseph 1999d). For amid the wreck
age of the war, in the minds of Ogden and many others, were to be found the
ruins of meaning itself. In the Great War the distortion of abstract words like
'freedom', 'democracy' and even 'victory' had been a key weapon. Ogden and
Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, published in 1923, was motivated in part
by a desire to understand how such distortion could be prevented from happen
ing again.
The dangers of 'word magic' are laid out in Chapter 2, "The Power of
Words". Words possess the power to engender 'hypnotic influences' (p. 132)
which make symbols appear directly bound to referents. This is the basis of
almost all human deception and misunderstanding — including that particu
larly dangerous misunderstanding which is the arbitrariness professed by phi
lologists like Saussure, according to whom "it is 'all a matter of words'". This
Ogden and Richards call 'linguistic nihilism' and 'scepticism', and urge (ibid.):
The best means of escape from such scepticism as well as from the hypnotic influences
which we have been considering, lies in a clear realization of the way in which symbols
come to exercise such power, and of the various senses in which they are said to have
Meaning.
The book was to prove highly influential, not least by provoking Edward S apir
to formulate the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis', as discussed in Chapter 4 above.
Another of its potent offshoots, Basic English, was first envisaged in the same
1918 discussion mentioned above, and proceeded directly out of the principles
outlined in the chapter on Definitions in The Meaning of Meaning. Basic was a
set of 500 English words, later expanded to 850, in which Ogden claimed any
idea could be expressed. Its "two chief purposes" were "To serve as an interna
tional auxiliary language" and to "encourag[e] clarity of thought and expres
sion" (Ogden 1944:4). The latter aim, largely forgotten now, ties it directly to
The Meaning of Meaning. Richards wrote in 1943 that
Neither those who learn English nor those who teach it as a foreign language have in
general any feeling that they are submitting to or furthering a process of intellectual
subjugation. On the contrary, they are more likely to feel that they are helping them
selves or others to resist such influences. (Richards 1943:13-14)
English — here meaning Basic — is the language of intellectual freedom, the
immunization against propaganda. Interestingly, Richards had written to his
wife from Cambridge, Massachusetts, three years earlier that
In fact, at last, I do have a clear lead to put in 12 hours a day on direct British Propa
ganda. (I. A. Richards to D. E. Richards, 15 July 1940; Constable 1990:106, boldface
in original)
In Chapter 4 (p.92, n.17) I have given a quote from Whorf connecting Basic
English with a "crude but vast power to change the thinking of tomorrow".
Another figure who appears on p.92, Korzybski, first sketched out his General
Semantics in 1921, in the great wave of post-WWI propaganda anxiety.
One of General Semantics' many adherents, Stuart Chase, produced the
widely read The Tyranny of Words in 1938. It presents Korzybski, Ogden and
Richards as the "Three human beings [who] to my knowledge have observed
and reflected upon the nature of meaning and communication for any consider
able period" [sic] (Chase 1938:10). He goes on to assert (p. 14):
[I]t is doubtful if a people learned in semantics would tolerate any sort of supreme po
litical dictator [...]. A typical speech by an aspiring Hitler would be translated into its
intrinsic meaning, if any. Abstract words and phrases without discoverable referents
would register a semantic blank, noises without meaning. For instance:
The Aryan Fatherland, which has nursed the souls of heroes, calls upon you for
the supreme sacrifice which you, in whom flows heroic blood, will not fail, and
which will echo forever down the corridors of history.
This would be translated:
The blab blab, which has nursed the blabs of blabs, calls upon you for the blab
blab which you, in whom flows blab blood, will not fail, and which will echo
blab down the blabs of blab.
The 'blab' is not an attempt to be funny; it is a semantic blank. Nothing comes through.
Criticizing Chase, Orwell (1946) would point out the danger of a distrust of
abstract terms so extreme that it made it impossible to recognize fascism. But
General Semantics grew into a big business, which is still around, though like
Basic its glory days are behind it. Those days have come in times of war, hot
and cold. For General Semantics one of the supreme moments was in 1941
when Language in Action by S. I. Hayakawa was chosen by the Book-of-the-
Month Club, a decision no doubt strengthened by pre-war propaganda anxiety
in the US and yielding sales in the hundreds of thousands.3 As an appendix it
contained Whorf (1940a), giving the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' its first mass
exposure in the year of Whorf's death.
Radio waves and the subconscious

At least two additional factors were at work stoking the fires of propaganda
anxiety after the Great War. One was widely acknowledged: the beginnings of
3. This might well not have been possible with a work by a Japanese-American author after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December of that year. Hayakawa served as President of San
Francisco State College from 1968 to 1973, attracting nationwide publicity for his hard-line
stand against student protesters. He rode on the crest of this publicity to be elected for one term
as a United States Senator (1977-83). In 1983 he founded US English, an organization devoted
to lobbying for English to be declared the 'official language' of the US.
radio broadcasting. The first commercial broadcast in Britain was in June

1920, a performance by Dame Nellie Melba sponsored by none other than
Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail (Gorham 1952:23), which became the major
player in the early development of British radio. In the US, the first daily radio
broadcasts were begun in August 1920, and some two years later commercial
sponsorship began. In Smith's view,
The experience of the propagandists of the First World War coupled with the ensuing
reaction against the black art they had perfected were among the profoundest influ
ences on the men who came to lay the foundations of broadcasting in the early nine
teen-twenties. (Smith 1973:31)
The result in Britain was the birth of "a new kind of state monopoly" (ibid., p.
56), the BBC, in 1923, the year The Meaning of Meaning was published. Their
aims were obliquely connected, in that both were directed at preventing a sort
of verbal anarchy, as radio was perceived as being in America, where govern
ment interference in broadcasting was limited to the assigning of airwave fre
quencies. Ogden had this to say about the power of radio:
The idea of Basic is made practical by two of the great mechanical developments of
modern times. The first is the phonograph [...]. Secondly, there is Radio, the most
powerful standardizing force the world has yet seen [...]. (Ogden 1944 [1934]:8)
A very similar comment occurs in a book on broadcasting published a year ear
lier:
It must, of course, be admitted that broadcasting is a huge agency of standardization,
the most powerful the world has ever seen. (Matheson 1933:17-18)
Perhaps both Ogden and Hilda Matheson (1888-1940) heard someone say this
on the radio.4 Interestingly, the BBC's Spoken Language committee in the
mid-1930s included I. A. Richards.
The new reality of disembodied voices entering ordinary people's home
from some central broadcasting authority coincided with the diffusion of the
notion of the 'unconscious mind' into middle-brow, then general cultural
awareness. This began in the early 1920s and accelerated over the following
decades, thanks in part to radio itself. What made propaganda so frightening
was less the fear of succumbing to it oneself as of vast numbers of less intelli
gent people falling victim to linguistic mind control. If actions are ruled by an
unconscious mind, the danger was that much greater.
4. Matheson, one of the founders of BBC radio journalism, had been involved in the setting up
of MI5 during World War I. At the start of World War II, she headed the Ministry of Informa
tion's Joint Broadcasting Committee, known informally as the 'anti-lie bureau', guiding its
efforts to counteract the propaganda broadcasts of the pro-German 'Lord Haw-Haw'.
Sex, popular culture and Margaret Mead

Cultural diffusion of the unconscious was slowed by its coming bound up
with ideas about sex which the average member of the middle class found
shocking, especially in Freud's formulations in terms of incest, castration and
the like. It would finally be anthropologists rather than psychologists who
made the big breakthrough for sex in general culture, and no one more so than
Margaret Mead (1901-1978), whose 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa had a
huge impact, with its tables showing which of the post-pubescent girls in the
community she observed had indulged in masturbation and sex both homo- and
heterosexual. What made this still more shocking and exciting was the fact that
the book's message, stated clearly both by Mead and by her teacher Franz Boas
in his introduction, was that in observing the primitive people of Samoa we see
ourselves as we really are, without the false veneer of civilization.
[M]uch of what we ascribe to human nature is no more than a reaction to the restraints
put on us by our civilization. (Boas, in Mead 1943 [1928]:6)
[T]he anthropologist chooses quite simple peoples, primitive peoples, whose society
has never attained the complexity of our own. [...] I have tried to answer the question
which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the na
ture of adolescence itself or to the civilization? (Mead 1943 [1928]: 14-17)
Through a general tendency to equate the primitive with the unconscious, the
27-year-old Mead managed, as no man could have done (especially not a Ger
man-speaking Jew like Freud, or for that matter Boas or Sapir, given the
deeply-ingrained fears in Western culture of the Semite as an excessively sen
sual being), to convince people that underneath it all they were the pawns of
unconscious sex drives, which their conscious minds struggled constantly to
repress. Mead's book had an immediate and widespread popular impact, nota
bly in songs like "Diga Diga Doo" (Mills Music Inc., 1928), words by Dorothy
Fields, music by Jimmy McHugh (the team which the same year produced the
standard "I Can't Give You Anything But Love"):
There's a spot I know, a
Place they call Samoa
By the sea,
Talking there is not the mode,
They palaver in a code;
They command each other,
Understand each other
Perfectly,
Love and Mamas there are free,
You don't give 'em repartee [...].
Fields managed to conflate a vernacular interpretation of Malinowski (1923)
with her free-sex reading of Mead.
By the late 1930s the notion of the Freudian unconscious really began en
tering popular culture, first in the theatre, then through songs from musical
plays which became popular hits, such as "Where or When" (Chappell and
Co., 1937), from Babes in Arms by Rodgers & Hart:
When you're awake
The things you think
Come from the dreams you dream.
Thought has wings,
And lots of things
Are seldom what they seem [...].
Oh, the tricks your mind can play! [...]
— and then in popular fiction and films. By the mid 1940s the psychological
film was a commonplace, Hitchcock's being superior examples. In the Oscar-
winning 1947 film The Snake Pit, the psychiatrist hero has a framed photo
graph of Freud on his office wall, though Freud's name is never mentioned.
Fear of mind control increased accordingly. McCarthy's purge of Hollywood
was possible because so many people now implicitly believed in the power of
subliminal propaganda, and the gradual arrival of television in every home
made that power seem all the more threatening, especially to those who had
read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The (mis)readings of Whorfand Chomsky

This was the cultural climate within which the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'
entered general awareness. Sapir's early enthusiasm for Freud went back at
least to WWI and his two 1917 reviews in The Dial. By the late '40s and early
'50s it was common knowledge to anyone who went to films or listened to the
radio that human actions are at least partly driven by an unconscious mind,
which self-interested political and commercial forces are trying desperately to
control, through the manipulation of language. This is the 'linguistic mind con
trol cultural discourse frame' I referred to at the outset. Theories of language
which partially engage with the discourse of propaganda anxiety are prone to
be widely read as if fitting fully into the frame. This is what I believe has
shaped the widespread 'misreading' of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' as a gen
eral declaration that language shapes the thought of both individual and cul
ture. People had been so well prepared for hearing just that message that
Whorf's attempts to delimit the sphere of his discussion were to no avail.
The reception of Chomsky's early work can be understood in much the
same way. Interestingly, Freud was one of Chomsky's first great intellectual
passions.
[The 13-year-old Chomsky] spent many of his precious New York hours with an uncle
([...]) who ran a newsstand on Seventy-Second Street [...]. He taught Chomsky about
Freud, and indeed, attracted by his grasp of Freud's theories, people came to him for
analysis [...]. Says Chomsky, " [...] it was a rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud,
Marx, the Budapest String Quartet, literature, and so forth. That was, I think, the most
influential intellectual culture during my early teens" {Chomsky Reader [Peck ed.
1987:] 11). (Barsky 1997:23)
Another passion of Chomsky's teenage years was Orwell, especially Homage
to Catalonia, from which Chomsky claims to have derived
the foundations of much of his later work on propaganda, the media, and the ways that
groups such as the Spanish anarchists are discredited in Western society [...]. "Lan
guage in the Service of Propaganda" [is] one of his many later articles that draws upon
George Orwell's writings and the reception of his work [...]. (Barsky 1997:31)
Chomsky (1986), perhaps the most successful and widely read of his attempts
to synthesize his theory of language into a form accessible to a non-linguist
who is prepared to work hard, concludes with a brief chapter entitled "Notes on
Orwell's Problem" (pp. 276-287). Besides discussing Newspeak, Chomsky
here quotes Harold Lasswell (1902-1978), a leading American scholar of
propaganda, to the effect that "we must avoid 'democratic dogmatisms', such
as the belief that people are 'the best judges of their own interests'" (Chomsky
1986: 286). In Chomsky's view, "Propaganda is to democracy as violence is to
totalitarianism" (ibid.).
By the time Chomsky's ideas came onto the scene, nearly everyone under
the age of 40 had imbibed the idea of a Freudian unconscious like mother's
milk — just the way propaganda is supposed to work — and had grown up in
an atmosphere of propaganda anxiety fed by two world wars and a depression
followed by a Cold War. All of this had predisposed them to believe that lan
guage does not necessarily mean what it appears to mean on the surface, but
that there is a deeper, hidden level of meaning. When Chomsky began to write
about a deep structure in language, connecting it with Universal Grammar, and
these ideas were popularized, it was widely interpreted to mean that Chomsky
had uncovered a universal level of real meaning that actual language distorts.
Again, this is what people already implicitly believed, and needed something
that could be interpreted as confirming.
But it was not limited to the popular reception of his ideas. Almost his
whole first wave of students equated deep structure with a real and universal
meaning out of which syntactic structures were generated. Of course, while
Chomsky was getting his Freud in relatively pure form from his uncle, the fu
ture Generative Semanticists, like the public at large, were getting a vulgarized
form of it from Hitchcock and virtually every other dramatic movie or radio or
television programme they saw or heard. Table One gives a synoptic look at
the development of these many inter-related historical and cultural strands,
without implying any sort of cause-and-effect relationship among them.
Politics and pro Arts, psychology, anthropology, phi

paganda anxiety losophy
Great War, UK war propaganda; Primitivism; vitalism. Freud, Pavlov in middle-
1914-18 resistance by Russell, brow journals. Watson: Behaviourism. Russell:
Ogden. 1915: Church Logical atomism. Dewey: Pragmatism.
ill quits government. [Husserl: Phenomenology. Russian formalism.]
1920-23 1920: Propaganda 1920: Commercial radio begins in US & UK.
issue decisive in US 1922: Wittgenstein's Tractatus, transl. by Og
Republican presiden den. 1923: BBC founded. Initial cultural impact
tial victory. . of Freud. [Gestalt psychology. Wiener Kreis.]
1927-29 Aftermath of 1926 1921: talking pictures. 1928: Mead's Coming of
UK General Strike, Age in Samoa has broad cultural impact: civili
with Churchill in sation is an artificial overlay; song "Diga Diga
charge of government Doo" (Fields-McHugh) conflates Mead & Ma-
propaganda. linowski; [Propp's Morphology of the Folktale.]
Great Depression, Communism. Hitler & 1930: Mead's Growing Up in New Guinea.
1930-33 Goebbels. Revival of 1932: Huxley's Brave New World. 1933: HG
propaganda anxiety, Wells's The Shape of Things to Come predicts
with spate of books. Basic will become universal language by 2050.
Build-up to US isolationists recall Freud popularized on stage and in fiction. 1938:
WWII, UK Great War propa Orwell's Homage to Catalonia', Welles's War
ganda. Stalin's purges, of the Worlds broadcast; DD Lee's "Conceptual
1936-39 attacks on socialist Implications of an Indian Lg". 1939: Whorf
allies in Spain. attends Malinowski's Yale lectures; Freud dies.
WWII and its af US fully engaged in Mass popularization of Freud in film and radio.
termath, war propaganda. UK Whorf s brother Richard becomes prominent
anti-anti-propaganda. film/TV director. 1944-6: Orwell's writings on
1940-46 2nd spate of books. propaganda and English, Animal Farm. Freud
1945: Iron Curtain. & Orwell deeply influence teenage Chomsky.
Cold War, US military increases 1949: Orwell's 1984. '50s: Spread of TV. Or
1949-1950S scientific funding. well, Wittgenstein die, Philosophical Investiga
McCarthy. TV quiz tions published; Austin, Ayer, Quine. Skinner.
show scandals. McLuhan. [Lévi-Strauss, French structuralism.]
Table One: Overview of propaganda anxiety and potentially related intellec-

1 Developments in US Ogden & Richards Korzybski

linguistics
1 Boasian methodology refined. 11 Nov. 1918: Meaning of
1917: UAL founded. Meaning and Basic English
[1916: Saussure's CLG]. projects initiated.
1921: Sapir's Language. 1923: 1923: The Meaning of Mean 1921 : The Manhood of Hu
Sapir's review of The Meaning ing (with Malinowski's paper manity. Beginnings of what
of Meaning. as 'supplement'). will be General Semantics.
1928: Sapir's LSA/AAA ad 1927: "Debabelization"; 1929:

dress, which. Whorf attends. 'Tanoptic English", "Basic",
[Jakobson's structuralist mani all introduced in Ogden's
festo at 1st International Con journal Psyche.
gress of Linguists.]
1933: Sapir's "Réalité psycho 1930: Basic English. Rockefel 1933: Science and Sanity, ac
logique des phonèmes"; ler funding for Ogden's knowledgment to Bloomfield.
Bloomfield's Language. Orthological Institute in China. Koryzbski is writing to Ogden.
1939: Sapir dies; Bloomfield's 1934-35: Applied linguists led General Semantics attracts
"Menomini Morphophonem by Michael West (1888-1973) Quine. 1936: Trainor on
ics" and Jakobson's "Signe attack Basic. 1937: Japan in Korzybski in Psyche. 1938:
zéro" in ally Festschrift. vades China, Orthological In Chase's Tyranny of Words.
stitute forced to pull out.
1940-41: Whorf s Technology Churchill, Roosevelt publicly 1941 : Hayakawa' s Language
Review articles. 1941: Whorf support Basic. 1946: Crown in Action (with Whorf as ap
dies. 1942: Whorf s Theoso buys copyright to Basic for pendix) is Book-of-the- Month
phist article; Jakobson to US; £23,000. Club selection.
Boas dies.
1949: Bloomfield dies. 1952: British Council quietly sup 1950: Korzybski dies. '50s:
God's truth vs. hocus pocus. presses Basic. 1957: Ogden popularity of General Seman
1957: Chomsky's Syntactic dies. tics grows. Hayakawa at San
Structures. Francisco State College. |
tual and linguistic developments in US and UK, 1914-59

The ironies are many. It was this general 'misunderstanding' of deep struc
ture, from Chomsky's point of view, that propelled him to worldwide fame, on
the back of which he could then launch a career as a political critic, one of
whose central messages has been that governments and media conspire to
'manufacture consent' (the title of Herman & Chomsky 1988; the phrase itself
is attributed to Lippmann 1922) — pure propaganda anxiety redox — while
waging war against his own former students who pursued the linguistic impli
cations of the view of deep structure he insists he never meant to imply.
Meanwhile, in that great linguistic tradition that extends back to Whitney's
Life and Growth of Language (see above, p.39n.), he uses (or consents to his
editor using) titles like "Language in the Service of Propaganda" and "Terror
ism: The politics of language" to help sell a book (Chomsky 1992) in which he
repeatedly asserts his reluctance to attribute too much importance to the con
nection between language and thought, in response to an interviewer, David
Barsamian, who — oblivious to the implications for Chomsky's long-held po
sitions on the nature of linguistic meaning — wants him to accept that they are
deeply linked. Chomsky is willing to go as far as the following where the rela
tionship between politics and language is concerned:
There is a tenuous relationship, in fact several different kinds. I think myself that
they're exaggerated in importance. There is in the first place the question discussed, for
example, by Orwell and by a number of others of how language is abused, tortured,
distorted, in a way, to enforce ideological goals. A classic example would be the switch
in the name of the Pentagon from the War Department to the Defense Department in
1947. As soon as that happened, any thoughtful person should have understood that the
United States would no longer be engaged in defense. It would only be engaged in ag
gressive war. That was essentially the case, and it was part of the reason for the change
in terminology, to disguise that fact. (Chomsky 1992: 1)
Terms like "the free world" and "the national interest" and so on are mere terms of
propaganda. Ond shouldn't take them seriously for a moment. They are designed, often
very consciously, in order to try to block thought and understanding. (ibid., p.3)
Barsamian understands, even if Chomsky does not, the power that these views
take on by virtue of being articulated by the leading theoretician of language of
the second half of the 20th century, notwithstanding his initial disclaimers,
which get forgotten in the rhetorical torrent that follows — especially since
few people read these books who aren't already convinced that nefarious forces
are conspiring to control their minds.
"They" are everywhere. There's the "They" who decide what we're supposed to
study in college; the "They" who decide where we're supposed to work, what kind of
car we're supposed to drive, or what kind of food we're supposed to eat. And where
we're supposed to live, or who we're supposed to vote for. There's even the 'They"
who decide with whom, how, and how often we're supposed to have sex. (Worth 1997;
boldface in original)
This is from a review of Carey (1997), a book which, none too surprisingly,
was "developed out of a year's worth of research with Noam Chomsky" (ibid.).
The review continues:
With clarity and rock-solid analysis, Carey traces the evolution of the American corpo
rate and political propaganda movement. It all began in 1917, with the United States'
entry into World War I. In desperate need of public support, President Wilson orches
trated a massive and successful anti-German — or rather, anti-"Hun" — propaganda
campaign. America's business establishment was so impressed that it recruited Edward
Bernays, Wilson's propaganda maven and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, into its service.
It was Bernays who years later penned these chilling words, which helped earn him a
major award from the American Psychological Association: "It is impossible to overes
timate the importance of engineering consent. The engineering of consent is the very
essence of the democratic process. It affects almost every aspect of our daily lives."
[...] Along with Bernays, political scientist Harold Lasswell gave these new propa
ganda techniques legitimacy. "More can be won by illusion that by coercion," Lasswell
once declared. "Democracy has proclaimed the dictatorship of [debate], and the tech
nique of dictating is named propaganda."
Journalist Walter Lippman [sic], who served with Bernays in President Wilson's
propaganda headquarters, referred to regular people like you and me as "the bewildered
herd." Lippman once wrote, "The manufacture of consent was supposed to have died
out with the appearance of democracy. But died out it has not.... Under the impact of
propaganda, it is no longer possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."
Carey documents how Bernays, Lasswell, Lippman, and their brethren helped forge
a bona fide propaganda industry.
What is of interest here is the subtle concealment of the great efforts Bernays,
Lasswell and Lippmann made to educate the public about how propaganda
works. The way the account is worded — 'chilling words', giving 'legitimacy'
to propaganda techniques, 'referring' to 'the bewildered herd' — make it hard
to infer anything other than that these boys were simply out to gain surrepti
tious control over the public mind. Yet none of these statements come from
classified documents recently unearthed from some secret government archive.
They were attempts at publicly exposing the rhetorical techniques of propa
ganda — no different in this regard from Chomsky's own writings on the topic,
or those of his 'research' associates. But the people who read Carey's book do
so because, by and large, they are predisposed to believe in a mind-control
conspiracy, and need only subtle nudges to interpret the motives of those
named as one-sidedly evil. It is thus much like the situation which led to the
misreading of Whorf, and of Chomsky's own early work.
Contemporary propaganda anxiety, with Chomsky as its patron saint, is the
culmination of several trends that have played a part in the development of lin
guistics and have figured throughout this book. The idea of 'manufacturing
consent' is the outcome of the loss of faith in the human will, a faith Whitney
was already trying to shore up in his debates with Max Müller. More precisely,
it represents a belief that a small oligarchy is exercising its will over the
masses, who are like automata under the oligarchy's control. Hence the notion
in the quote from Lippmann on the previous page that "it is no longer possible
to believe in the original dogma of democracy". For Whitney, language itself
was a democracy, an institution in the use of which speakers — all speakers —
exercise their individual will. We saw (p.44 above) how this view was already
twisted by the anonymous French translator who rendered Whitney's "To the
great mass of its speakers, [language] exists consciously for communication
alone; this is the use that exhibits and commends itself to every mind" as "For
the human mass, it indeed exists only for [communication], and only men who
think are conscious of the role that language plays in the depths of the mind".
This dyad of 'men who think', the intellectual élite, versus the 'human mass'
persists in propaganda anxiety, which is, essentially, a form of middle-class
loathing of the great unwashed. No one ever expresses anxiety that they them
selves are having their minds controlled from without. Their awareness of the
'manufacture of consent' apparently immunizes them from its effects. But they
are certain that the vast majority of human beings are not so enlightened, and
are therefore the pawns of the oligarchy, the mysterious 'They'.
For linguistics, the human will was broken when Saussure broke with the
American Whitney, whom he revered, on the matter of what kind of 'institu
tion' language represents. He shifted attention from those aspects of language
in which speakers have a choice to those in which they only appear to have
one, but in reality are taking the 'forced card' (p.43 above). Any remaining
trace of the will vanished completely from American linguistics when Bloom-
field discovered behaviourism, which, by doing away with the mind altogether,
studies human beings on the model of the automaton responding mechanically
to external stimuli. There were two chances to reinstate the will, both of which
failed. The first came when Ogden and Richards' redefinition of meaning as
the product of interpretation, a wilful act, was endorsed by S apir, who always
believed in the humanity and agency of individual speakers. But Sapir, and
Whorf after him, could not resist the urge to attract mass attention by playing
to the popular anxieties of the day. The second chance came in 1962, when
Chomsky decreed that the great fact which linguistics must take as its point of
departure is the infinite linguistic creativity of every speaker. This received
wide attention for the political message it seemed to convey about the possibil
ity, indeed the necessity of human freedom. Yet this was always a false im
pression, since the 'creativity' Chomsky proclaimed was limited to linguistic
production, and was banned from the much more important matter of what that
production meant, since semantics for Chomsky cannot be a matter of interpre
tation. That is precisely the model on which propaganda anxiety depends: the
ordinary person processes whatever they are told automatically, without critical
interpretation.
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INDEX
A arbitrariness 3 9 , 4 1 , 4 5 , 53, 57, 138, 158,

Aarsleff, Hans 72 161, 186
Abel, Carl 36 'Aristarcus' 12
Abelard, Peter 71,80 Aristotle of Stagira 88n., 89-91, 141
Abercrombie, David 124n. Arnold, Thurman Wesley 93n.
Abraham 96 artificial intelligence 69
abstract vs. concrete 54n., 55n., 77, 173- artificial languages 5, 76, 103, 121
174,187 association 41-42
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles- Association for the Sociology of Religion
Lettres 36n. 110n.
acculturation studies 114 astronomy 23-24
Adair-Toteff, Stephanie 71 Atlantis 96,98
Adam, Lucien 117 atomic bomb 163
aesthetics 47, 59n., 66 atomism 160-163
Alter, Stephen 21, 30, 32 Atwood, Elmer Bagby 123
American Anthropological Association Austen, Jane 173
87, 103 Austin, John Langshaw 70, 171, 192
American Association for the Advance Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules 192
ment of Science 103
American civil rights movement 66, 125 
American Civil War 26, 29 Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam and Vis-
American Communist Party 114 count St Albans 8
American English 2, 11-14 Bain, Alexander 42
American Indian languages 4-5, 9-12,15, Bally, Charles 33, 53, 68,193
51,83,99,117 Barker, George Carpenter 114-115, 125n.
American linguistic isolationism 16-17, Barsamian, David 194
55,70 Barsky, Robert F. 191
American Psychological Association 195 Bartoli, Matteo Giulio 59
American Revolution 12-13 Basic English 81, 84, 91, 103,183, 186-
American structuralism 51, 55-56, 139, 187
151, 157-167 Basque 60
analogy 50 Bateson, Gregory 93n.
anatomy 47 Baugh, Albert Croll 115
Andresen, Julie Tetel 9-12, 128,175, 177 Bechtel, Friedrich 37
Angelí, James Rowland 54n., 157 Becker of Darmstadt, purchaser of Codices
anthropological linguistics 51,60 Becker 15n.
anthropology 50-51,55-56,68,76,91, Bedford, Hastings William Sackville Rus
93n., 103, 108, 114, 157-158, 160,178, sell, 12th Duke of 185n.
189 behaviourism 55-56, 62, 68, 93n., 111,
aphasia 57 115, 119, 120n., 135-136, 138-140,
141n., 143-144, 158-159, 164, 169-180, British Broadcasting Corporation 188, 192
183,196 Brogan, Sir Denis William 184-185
Bell, Alexander Melville 50 Brown, Alfred Reginald (see under Rad-
Bell, Eric Temple 89 cliffe-Brown)
Benfey, Theodor 38n. Brown, Roger Langham 71
Bentham, Jeremy 81n. Brücke, Ernst Wilhelm, Ritter von 50
Benveniste, Emile 57-58 Brunot, Ferdinand Eugène 114
Bergaigne, Abel 36 Budapest String Quartet 191
Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne 8 Buddhism 77, 94-95
Bernays, Edward L. 184,195 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, 1st Baron
Bernstein, Basil Bernard 109n. Lytton of Knebworth 94
Bezzenberger, Adalbert 37-38n. Burnet, James, Lord Monboddo 9-10
Bible 61, 120 Burroughs, William Seward 90n.
bilingualism, studies in 109n., 114 Bury, John Bagnell 37, 37-38n.
biology 47, 53
Black, Max 72 
Black English 66, 121-122, 125, 128 Cacique 15n.
Blake, William 100 Câmara (see under Mattoso Câmara)
Blankenhorn, Heber 184 Campbell, George 30-31
Blavatsky, Madame Helena Petrovna Canadian French 2, 12-14
75n., 93-99 capitalism 60, 69
Bloch, Bernard 101n., 127n. Carey, Alex 195
Bloomfield, Leonard 16, 50, 55-56, 60-62, Carnap, Rudolf 76
84n., 90, 113-114, 118-119, 133-144, Carr, Edward Hallett 185n.
147-148, 151, 155,157-159, 164, 166- Carroll, John  71, 89-90,92n., 93n., 100
167,169,171, 177, 193, 196 case grammar 63
Bloomfield, Maurice 37-38 Casey, Ralph D. 184
Bloomfieldians (and 'neo-Bloomfield- Cassirer, Ernst 159-161,163-164
ians') 56, 61-63, 67, 147-149, 151, Castilian (see Spanish)
159,176-177 Catholicism 110-111,119-120
Blumer, Herbert 113 Catholic sociology 110
Boas, Franz 15-16, 50-51, 55, 71, 73, 79, Celtic 60
117,157-158, 189,193 cerebral imaging 69
Boehme, Jacob 100 Chase, Stuart 90n., 179, 187, 193
Bolinger, Dwight LeMerton 124n. Chastellux, François-Jean de 11
Bonaparte, Napoleon 14n. chemistry 23,47
Bonham, Martha Anne 112 Chicago pragmatists 113
Book-of-the-Month Club 187 child language acquisition 52, 57, 63,
Boole, George 76 125n., 166, 175, 177
Bopp, Franz 34 Childs, Harwood Lawrence 184
botany 47 Chinese 7, 88n., 113
Bowen, Jean Donald 124n. Chiquito 117
Bréal, Michel Jules Alfred 36, 52, 55, 85 Chomsky, Noam 1n., 16, 22,48, 57, 61-
Brentano, Franz Clemens 54n. 65, 67-69, 119, 133-134,143-155, 157,
Bricmont, Jean 163 163-167, 175-181, 183, 190, 192-196
Bridgeman, Percy Williams 93n. competence and performance 133,146,
Bright, William O. 118 148, 164
INDEX 225
deep and surface structure 153, 163- Cousin, Victor 43n.

165, 181, 183, 191, 194 Cowan, J Milton 135, 143
E-language and I-language 144-145 Cratylus 22,24,28
innateness 62, 133, 177, 179 Crewe, Frederick 95
linguistic creativity 149, 178-180, 196 critical theory 48
nativism (see innateness) Croce, Benedetto 59, 66, 74,75n., 159
Universal Grammar 64-65, 67, 147, Culler, Jonathan D. 157
154,191 Curran, Father Charles E. 110-111,120n.
Christian, Paul (pen name of Christian Currie, Eva Ruissy Garcia y Carillo de 109
Pitois) 98 Currie, Haver Cecil 109, 126
Christmann, Hans Helmut 71 Curtius, Georg 36
Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Cuvier, Baron Georges 160
192-193
Clapin, Sylva 12 D
Clauss, Ludwig Ferdinand 101n. Dacotan 88n.
Cleather, Alice Leighton 93, 94n. Dale, Edgar 185n.
cognition 5, 8, 166 Dalgarno, George 98
cognitive science 68-69, 166 Daly, Joseph F. 112
Cohen, Morris Raphael 76n. Darnell, Regna 75, 76n., 84, 102n., 103,
Cold War mentality 70, 167 105
Collinson, William Edward 86n. Darwin, Charles Robert 32,41-42,74,
Collitz, Hermann 37 75n., 80, 97,180
collocations 178 Day, Dorothy 110-112
colonialism 4-5n., 94 deaf children 125n.
Columbus, Christopher (Cristóbal Colón) DeCamp, David 123, 124n., 125n., 127n.
1,14 Dégerando, Baron Joseph-Marie 74
communication 22-24, 27, 30-32,41-42, De Laguna, Grace Mead Andrus 113
44,107,196 Delano, Harold 89n.
communism 60, 110,114, 166 Delbrück, Berthold Gustav Gottlieb 35, 49
community 25, 30, 39, 42-43, 138,144 De Mauro, Tullio 32, 34-35, 38-39, 135,
computers 60, 69, 177 136n., 147, 152
Comrie, Bernard 68 democracy 26-28, 31-32, 191, 195-196
Comte, (Isidore) Auguste Marie Xavier 51 Derrida, Jacques 64, 70
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de Mably de, Descartes, René 150-151
abbé de 8, 79, 84n. Dewey, John 54n., 113, 192
Confederate States of America 26, 29 dialect geography 50-51,53,59,61,66,
Conference on Jewish Relations 76n. 109,115,122-125,128,159
connectionism 69 Diderot, Denis 8
consciousness 40-42, 108, 161 discourse analysis 68
Constable, John 186 discourse pragmatics 63, 68
conventionalism 28,30-31,40, 107 Disraeli, Sir Benjamin, Earl of Beacons-
conversation analysis 68 field 26
Copenhagen School 58, 158 distributional method 55-56,62, 118-119,
Cordemoy, Gérauld de 150 122, 157
Cordier, Henri 15 Dollard, John 129
corpus linguistics 178 Doob, Leonard W. 184
Court de Gébelin, Antoine 100 Doroszewski, Witold 114n.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 173 Firth, John Rupert 55, 58, 70, 114, 125n.,
Drechsel, Emanuel J. 71 171
Droste, Rip G. 65 Fischer, John L. 127
Durkheim, Émile 51, 109, 114n., 163 Fishman, Joshua A. 125n.
Dynamic Philology (Zipf) 171 Fought, John L. 113, 158
Foucault, Michel 64
E Frankena, William K. 73,81
Early, General Jubal Anderson 26 free expression 152
École Libre des Hautes Études (New freedom 179,196
York) 166 Frege, (Friedrich Ludwig) Gottlob 76, 90
Edison, Thomas Alva 16 Frei, Henri 114
Edmont, Edmond 50 French 14, 58, 85n., 119 (see also Cana
education 80, 93n. dian French)
Eells, Kenneth 122 Freud, Sigmund 93n., 111, 184, 189-192,
Einstein, Albert 93n., 181 195
Eisenhower, Dwight David 167, 175 Fries, Charles Carpenter 115, 130-131
Elamite 59 Fröhde, Friedrich 37, 37-38n.
Eliot, George (pen name of Mary Ann functionalism 57, 165
Evans) 164 Furfey, Monsignor Paul Hanly 66, 110-
Eliot, Rev. John 10 122,124-131
Ellis, Marc H. 110
empiricism 8, 40-41, 43, 50, 68, 180 G
English 9, 13,29,91, 107, 114-117, 129- Gabelentz, (Hans) Georg Conon von der
131 (see also American English) 52
Erikson, Leif 91 Gale, Benjamin 11
Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. 126-128 Gardiner, Sir Alan Henderson 171
ethnography of communication/speaking Garfinkel, Harold 68
68, 125n. Garnett, Maxwell 184
ethnology 23 Gassendi, Pierre 8
ethnology of speaking 68 Gauchat, Louis 124n., 127
ethnomethodology 68 General Semantics 89-93,103,187
Etruscan 59 generalized phrase structure grammar
etymology 79 (GPSG) 153n.
Euripides 38n. Generative Semantics 63, 66, 68, 191
Everett, Edward 12 generativism 48, 61, 69, 149,151, 153,
evolutionary theory 21, 32,40-42,74-76, 155
95-97, 102, 180 Geneva School 53, 68, 114
geology 23, 27
F Georgian 60
Fabred'Olivet, Antoine 100-101 Germanic 60
Falk, Julia S. 76n., 101n., 103, 113 Gestalt psychology 54n., 82-83, 86,160,
Fasold, Ralph W. 125, 127 192
Ferguson, Charles Albert 109n. Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau 38n.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 8 Gilliéron, Jules Louis 50-51
Fields, Dorothy 189,192 Gilman, Daniel Coit 38
Figueroa, Esther 109n. Gladstone, William Ewart 26
Fillmore, Charles J. 63 God 120
INDEX 227
Godel, Robert 32-35, 39,43n., 147, 152 head-driven phrase structure grammar
Godwin, Joscelyn 94 (HPSG) 65,153n.
Goebbels, Josef 192 Hebrew 100,111
Goffman, Erving 125n. Hegel, (Georg Wilhelm) Friedrich 9, 74,
Goldsmith, John A. 65 75n., 80
Gordon, W. Terrence 85-86, 92-93 hegemony 59n.
Gorgias 100 Heintz, Günter 71
Gorham, Maurice 188 Henle,Paul 104n.
Gosche, Richard 36 Henry, (Alexandre André) Victor 36n.,
government and binding (GB) 64, 153- 52,114
154 Herder, Johann Gottfried (von) 8,71,73,
government funding of research 125, 127 77,100, 103
grammar 130-131, 151, 153-154, 159, 178 Herman, Edward S. 194
grammarians 24-25, 31, 80-82 Hermogenes 22,24,28
Gramsci, Antonio 59n. Hertzler, Joyce Oramel 90, 124, 125n.,
Granet, Marcel 93n. 126
Great Depression 184 historical linguistics 49-53, 58-61, 65-66,
Greek 6, 85 138n., 159-160
Greenberg, Joseph Harold 16, 67-68 history, Hegelian vs. Darwinian 74, 76, 80
Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Karl 50 Hitchcock, Sir Alfred 190-191
Güterbock, Bruno G. 37 Hitler, Adolf 1n., 184, 187, 192
Güterbock, Hans Gustav 37n. Hittite 59
Guillaume, Gustave 58, 60 Hjelmslev, Louis Trolle 58, 60-61
Gumperz, John J. 68 Hobbes, Thomas 8, 100
Hockett, Charles Francis 61
H 'hocus pocus' vs. 'God's truth' (House
Haas, Mary Rosamond 117 holder) 169,177
habit 138 Hodson, Thomas Callan 108
Hackett, Herbert 93n. Hoffory, Julius 37
Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August 97 Hoijer, Harry 125n., 127n.
Hall, Robert Anderson, Jr 90 holism 108, 160-164
Halle, Morris 16, 62, 65, 165 Hopi 88, 99, 104
Halliday, Michael A. K. 58 Home Tooke (see under Tooke)
Hamy, Ernest-Théodore 15n., 36 Hotopf, W. H. N. 81n.
Harcourt, Alfred 86n. Householder, Fred Walter 124n., 169
Hargrave, John 185 Hovelacque, Abel 52
Haring, Douglas Gilbert 93n. Howard, Leon 12
Harris, Roy 135-136, 138n., 139, 143, Hubble, Allan F. 123
144n., 155, 171 Humboldt, Baron (Friedrich Heinrich)
Harris, Zellig Sabbetai 61,165 Alexander von 1
Hart, Lorenz 190 Humboldt, Baron (Friedrich) Wilhelm
Hartmann, (Robert Karl) Eduard von 37 Christian Karl Ferdinand von 1-2, 6-9,
Haßler, Gerda 71 13-15, 28, 49, 56, 66, 71, 73-75, 77-79,
Haugen, Einar Ingvald 109, 119n. 84n., 88-89, 100-101, 103, 105, 146,
Havet, (Pierre Antoine) Louis 37 149-151,160, 165
Hayakawa, Samuel Ichiyé 90n., 93n., 187, Hume, David 8, 160
193 Husserl, Edmund Gustav Albrecht 192
Hutton, Christopher M. 15, 89, 95n., 100, Judge Smith, Chris 185
102n. Jung, Carl Gustav 88, 92, 93n., 111
Huxley, Aldous 178, 184,192 Justice, David 71
Hymes, Dell H. 68, 73n., 108n., 113, 116-
118,158 
Kahane, Henry 167
I Kant, Immanuel 8, 160
Iberian 59 Karcevskij, Sergej Iosifovic 53, 56
iconicity 65 Kemp, J. Alan 50
imperialism 60 Kent, Roland Grubb 87
Indo-European 6, 13, 49-50, 59-60,77, Kenyon, John Samuel 115,131
83,88,90,111 KibboKift 185
influence 85n. kinship systems 160-162
International Congress of Linguists Klein, Herbert Arthur 185n.
First (The Hague, 1928) 56 Kleiser, Grenville 30n.
Ninth (Cambridge, Mass., 1962) 149- Kluckhohn, Clyde 93n.
150,165 Koasati 117
International Journal of American Lin Koerner, Ernst Friedrich Konrad 71, 73n.,
guistics 15 75n., 101, 105, 109, 114, 122, 124, 136,
international language movement 76n., 149, 165
103, 183,186 Korzybski, 'Count' Alfred 89-93, 101,
interpretation 84, 196 103, 187, 193
Irving, Washington 2n. Kroeber, Alfred Louis 158
Irwin, Will 184 Kunz, Fritz 91,93,100
Isabella of Castile and Aragon, Queen 3-4 Kurath,Hans 66,115,123
Ives, Sumner Albert 124n. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy Roman 59
J L
Jager, Ronald 85n. Laboulaye, Édouard 36
Jakobson, Roman Osipovic 16, 56-58, 61, Labov, William 66, 109, 123-128
63, 65, 70, 134-135, 147, 158-161,163, Lafitau, Joseph-François, S. J. 10
165-167, 193 Lahontan, Baron Louis-Armand de Lom
James, William 32, 54n., 76n. d'Arce de 10
Jangfeldt, Bengt 159 Lakoff, George 63
Japhetic 60 Lamb, Sydney M 61
Jespersen, (Jens) Otto Harry 52, 84n., 117, Lambert, Wallace E. 127n.
145, 152, 159-160, 165 language
Jesus Christ 134 and gender 11-118
Johnson, Dr Samuel 31 as art 74
Johnson, Wendell A. L. 93n. as cultural or social product 83
Jones, Daniel 58, 70 as democracy 26-28, 31-32, 196
Joseph (Abū Būtrus Hübayqat), John Earl as garment 74, 81, 182
Anthony 2n., 8, 16, 17, 22,28, 35, as groove for thought 74, 82, 104
36n., 39,42,43n., 52, 61, 65, 89, 95n., as institution 20-21, 27-28, 30, 32-33,
101n., 113, 116, 134, 154, 158-159, 39-41,45,107,196
165-166, 178, 186 as living organism 39
Joyce, James 173 as signals 138
INDEX 229
change 25,42-43,50,137 institutionalization of 47-48

origin of 22 Lippmann, Walter 184,195-196
purpose and function of 22 literary criticism 68, 133,169
social nature of 30,45,48,55n., 107- literature studies 66, 114, 166
109,142, 146, 148,158, 166 Locke, John 8,79, 81n.
standard 57,115-117, 129-131 logical positivism 76, 140
teaching 57, 93n., 158 London School 58, 65, 67-68, 158
typology 7-8, 67, 73 Lo Piparo, Franco 59n.
written 55 Love, Nigel L. 171n.
Lanman, Charles Rockwell 37-38 Lowell Institute, Boston 20
Lardner, Ring 130 Lowie, Robert Harry 158
Larson, Cedric 185n. Lucy, John A. 71
Laski, Harold Joseph 184 Lundberg, George Andrew 120n.
Lasswell, Harold Dwight 184,191,195 Lunt, Paul S. 129
Leach, Sir Edmund Ronald 54n. Lyons, Sir John 93n.
League of Nations 108, 184
Lee, Benjamin 76n. M
Lee, Dorothy S. Demetracopolou 101, 192 McCarthy, Senator Joseph Raymond 167,
Lee, Penny 71 190, 192
Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von 79, McDavid, Raven Ioor, Jr 66, 114, 122-
98 123, 126-127
Lepsius, (Karl) Richard 34, 36 McDavid, Virginia Glenn 123
Lesher, Robert A. 91 Mach, Ernst 160
Leskien, (Johann) August Heinrich 34, 45 machine translation 60, 150
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 57, 158-164,167, McHugh, Jimmy 189,192
192 McLuhan, Marshall 192
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 93n. Macris, James 124n.
Lewis, Clarence Irving 89 'magic key' 77-80, 81n., 83-85, 98, 101-
Lewis, Hilda 125n. 103, 182-183
Lewis, Morris Michael 114, 125n. Mahaffey, Sir John Pentland 38n.
lexical-functional grammar (LFG) 65 Mahlow, Georg Heinrich 37
lexicon 63-64, 178 Maimieux, Joseph de 98
Lincoln, Abraham 29 'mainstream' linguistics 48
Linguistic Circle of New York 159, 163 Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar 80, 86, 91-
linguistic relativity 71-72, 89, 101, 104 92, 93n., 101, 102n., 108, 171, 189,
linguistic sign 39, 41-42,48, 138 192-193
Linguistic Society of America 15, 87,109, Malkiel, Yakov 71, 123n., 124n.
113,122-124, 127 Mallery, Garrick 95
LSA Linguistic Institutes 101, 113-114, Mandelbaum, David Goodman 92n.
127 manufacturing consent 179,194-196
linguistics 133, 135,169, 180, 183 Marantz, Alec 154
and literature 56-57 Mariette, Auguste-Édouard 36
applied 178 markedness 57
areal 59 Marr, Nikolaj Jakovlevic 59-60
as physical vs. historical science 20-26, Martinet, André 57-58, 66, 70, 109, 124n.,
32 159, 163, 167
history of 49, 134-135 Marx, Karl Heinrich 191
Marxism 69, 114 morphology 49, 57, 68, 120, 122-123

mass delusion 45 Morris, Alice Vanderbilt 103
mathematics 47, 53, 60, 62, 66, 76, 89, 91, Morris, Charles William 113
93n. Müller, F(riedrich) Max(imilian) 19-28,
Mathesius, Vilém 56 30, 32, 37, 39n., 40-42,45, 79n., 85n.,
Matheson, Hilda 188 94-97, 100,100-101n., 115, 164, 195
Matthews, Peter H. 119n., 138 Murray, Stephen O. 115-116, 125n., 126,
Mattoso Câmara, Joaquim, Jr 71 127n.
Maurin, Peter 110 mythology 47
Mauss, Marcel 163
Mauthner, Fritz 84n., 88n. N
Max Müller (see under Müller) National Association for the Advancement
Mayan 98, 100 of Colored People 59n.
Mead, George Herbert 113-114 national culture and thought 49, 77-78
Mead, Margaret 93n., 189,192 national linguistics 45,48, 53, 55-58, 69-
meaning 54-55, 58, 80, 84, 93n., 108, 70, 171, 178
118-119, 135, 138, 141, 144, 158, 186, naturalism 41, 57, 133
194, 196 Navarro Tomás, Tomás 124n.
mechanicism 137, 160 Nazi linguistics 101
Meeker, Marchia 122 Nebrija, Elio Antonio de (Antonio
Mehrotra, Rajaram R. 108n. Martínez de Cala y Xarana) 3-4, 6, 8-
Meillet, Antoine Paul Jules 34, 51, 57-58, 9, 14-15
109, 160 neo-Bloomfieldian (see Bloomfieldian)
Melba, Dame Nellie 188 Neogrammarians 34, 49-50, 53, 55, 59,
Melville, Herman 173 62,66,69,150,160-161
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 124n. neolinguistics 59
mentalism 55, 114, 137, 141-143, 158, Nerlich, Brigitte 85
169 neural networks 69
metaphor 63, 173-175 Newmeyer, Frederick J. 133, 153
'metaphysical garbage' 76-81, 83-85, 87, Nida, Eugene A. 108-109, 119n.
98, 101, 182-183 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 90
Miller, Robert L. 71 Noetic 60
Miller, William D. 110 Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount
Mills, C(harles) Wright 113,114n., 115, 183,188
124 nuclear physics 161,163
mimesis 28
mind control 183-184, 188, 190, 194-195 
Minimalist Program 64, 154 obscenity 175
missionaries 4-5n. Oertel, Hanns 52
Mock, James R. 185n. Ogden, Charles Kay 75, 80-87, 88n., 90-
Modern Language Association 123-124 93, 101,102n., 103-104, 141, 142n.,
modernism 27, 32,41, 44, 55,74-75, 80, 170-172, 174, 185-188, 192-193, 196
103, 159 O'Hern, Edna M. 110, 117, 120n., 121-
monarchy 26 128
Monboddo (see under Burnet) Olcott, Colonel Henry Steel 94n., 95
Moore, Dom Thomas Verner 111 Oldenberg, Hermann 35
moral science 47, 59 optimality theory 65
INDEX 231
organicism 160 Plato of Athens 8-9, 22,28-29,41,78,

Ornstein(-Galicia), Jacob 109 133
Orwell, George (pen name of Eric Arthur Platonic Idea 8-9,29,77
Blair) 179, 185, 187, 190-192, 194 poetics 57,79n.
Ouspensky, Petr Dem'ianovic 88-89 Polynesian 84n.
Pope (see Paul III)
P Popper, Sir Karl Raimund 8-9
Paget, Sir Richard Arthur Surtees, Baronet popular culture 189-190
84n., 86n. Port Royal grammarians 79, 150, 153-154
Paris, Gaston Bruno Paulin 36 positivism 49-51, 120n.
Parsons, Talcott 116 post-structuralism 61,64
Paul , Pope (Alessandro Farnese) 4-5, 9 Pourtalès, Albert Alexandre, Comte de 2n.
Paul, Hermann 37, 52,149 Pourtalès, Alexandre Joseph, Comte de
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovic 192 2n.
Peano, Giuseppe 76 Powell, John Wesley 95
Peck, James 191 pragmatics 68-69, 177-178
Pedersen, Holger 49 pragmatism 32, 76n.
Pei, Mario Andrew 114n. Prague School 55-58, 65, 68, 158-159
Peirce, Charles Sanders (Santiago) 32, principles and parameters (see government
69, 76, 85 and binding)
Penn, Julia M. 71 propaganda 183-188, 190-191, 194-196
perception 69, 71, 86,90, 166 Propp, Vladimir Jakovlevič 192
Percival, W. Keith 88 Prothero, Stephen 95
Pesetsky, David 154 Proust, Marcel 173
Petersen, H. C. 185n. psychoanalysis 86, 93n., 111, 190
philology 47, 120, 135, 159-160 psychology 42, 48-52, 54n., 69, 76n., 80-
philosophy 47, 49, 69-70, 75, 76n., 77, 82, 84n., 89, 91-93, 103, 111-114,133,
80-82, 84-85, 89, 93n., 103-104, 160, 135, 137-141, 143-144, 159, 164, 166,
166,178,183 178
philosophy of language 48, 69 public relations 184
phonemic theory 56, 61, 70, 120n., 158, Pula, Robert P. 90
170 Pulgram, Ernst 167
phonetics 50, 53, 70, 120n., 122, 130, Putnam, Father George Nelson 117, 121-
137-138, 161 128
phonology 49, 57-58, 63, 65, 68-69, 120,
122, 160-161 Q
physics 23,47, 53, 62, 88, 99, 102, 104, quantum theory 102, 104
133, 161, 163 Quine, Willard Van Orman 90n., 192-193
Piaget, Jean 157, 163, 166
Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo 166 R
Pickford, Glenna Ruth 126 race 76
pidgin and creole languages 7 racism 8
Pieris, (Percy) Ralph 114-115, 125n. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald 108
Pike, Kenneth Lee 61 Radin,Paul 91
Pindar 38n. radiobroadcasting 187-188,191,192
Pinker, Steven 178 rationalism 8,43-44, 50, 68, 133
'planetary logic' (Whorf) 105 rats 175
Read, Allen Walker 12, 90n. Sargent, Mae Kathryn 112

Read, Charlotte (see under Schuchardt) Saussure, Ferdinand (Mongin) de 1-2, 32-
Redfield, Nayán Louise 100 41, 43-46,48, 52-56, 59, 63, 68-69,
Reed, David Wooderson 123n. 95n., 109, 114, 133-155, 158-159,164,
Regnier, (Louis) Adolphe 36 166, 186, 193, 196
Reid, Thomas 108 langue 48, 52-54, 68, 114, 142, 144-
Reiser, Oliver Leslie 89, 91 152, 154, 164
relativity 102, 181 vs. langage 40
religion 4-5n., 94 vs. parole 66, 136, 138n., 141, 146-
Reuss, Marguerite 112 152, 159, 164
rhetoric 30, 68, 79n. letter to Whitney 46
Richards, Dorothy E. 186 meeting with Whitney 35
Richards, Ivor Armstrong 75, 80-87, 88n., parole 53-54, 62 (see also langue)
90-92, 93n., 101, 102n., 103-104, 141, semiology 158
142n., 170, 172, 174, 185-188, 196 signifier and signified 43, 53, 138,141-
Rivers, William Halse Rivers 161-162 143,159
Rodgers, Richard 190 Saussure, Henri de 1,2, 15, 36n.
Rogerson, Sidney 184 Saussure, Léopold de 2n.
Rollins, Peter  100 Sayce, Reverend Archibald Henry 37, 52
Romance linguistics 59, 124n. Schapiro,B. A. M. 87
Roosevelt, Eleanor 112n. Schlauch, Margaret 114
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 193 Schleicher, August 49
Ross, Alan Strode Campbell 126 Schmidt, Johannes 38
Roth, (Walther) Rudolf von 34 Schröder, (Friedrich Wilhelm) Ernst 76
Rothermere, Harold Harmsworth, 1st Lord Schuchardt, Charlotte (later Read) 90n.
183 Schuchardt, Hugo Ernst Mario 49
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 8,11,79 Scottish common-sense school 8, 30-32,
Royal Institute of Great Britain 20-21 43n., 108
Rucker, Darnell 113 Searle, John R. 70
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William, 3rd Earl Sechehaye, (Charles) Albert 33-34, 39,
76-77, 80, 85-91, 170, 192 43n., 53
Russian formalism 56, 192 second-language learning 7, 78n.
Russian Revolution 56 semantics 48, 55, 58, 63, 85, 93n., 103,
108-109,118,183,196
S semiotics 69, 166
Sacks, Harvey 68 Semitic 60,96, 111
Saleski, Reinhold Eugen(e) August 101, sensory experience 40-41
113-114 Serano, Joseph A., O. Praem. 110
Sampson, Geoffrey 73, 75, 102n. sex 189
Sanskrit 6-7n., 94-97, 99 Shuy, Roger W. 109, 114, 122, 125-126
Sapir, Edward 16, 51, 55-56, 61, 71-75, sign language 28
80-90, 92n., 93, 100-105, 113-115, 139, significs 85
157-158, 164, 166-167, 181, 183, 185- Skinner, Burrhus Frederic 62, 169-180,
187, 189-190, 193, 196 192
Sapir, Philip 87n., 102n. Smith, Anthony 183-184, 188
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis 56,71-105 Smith, Bruce Lannes 184
Sapon, Stanley Martin 123-124, 126 Smithsonian Institution 20-21, 26, 29, 95
INDEX 233
Smuts, General Jan Christian 108,184 T

social behaviourists 113-114 tagmemics 58, 61
Social Credit Party 185n. Tannen, Deborah 68
social psychology 113 Tardivel, Jules-Paul 12-13
sociolinguistics 66, 68, 70, 107-110, 114, Taylor, Talbot J. 171n.
118,122-128 television 190-192
sociology 51, 68, 91,103, 109-117, 122, Teresa of Avila, Saint 5n.
124-126,128 Tesnière, Lucien Valérius 61
sociology of language 112-118, 121, 124, Tetel (see under Andresen)
129-131 theology 133
Socrates of Athens 22, 28-29,41, 78, 134 theosophy 75n., 88, 93-102,105
Sokal, Alan 163 therapeutic semantics 93n.
Sophists 100 Thouless, Robert Henry 185n.
sound laws 50 Thurneysen, Rudolf 37n.
Spanish 2-4,114,123,124n. Thurot, (François-)Charles Eugène 36
speech defects 28 Titchener, Edward Bradford 54n.
spelling reform 40 Tolstoy, Count Leo 173
Spencer, Herbert 54n., 115 Tooke, John Horne 8, 170, 173-174
Springarn, Joel Elias 59n. Trager, George Leonard 93n., 118-119
stadialism 60 Trainor, Joseph C. 89n., 93n., 193
Stalin, Josef 60, 192 transformational-generative grammar 61-
'Standard Average European' (Whorf) 88, 62,125,157
99,104 Trench, Archbishop Richard Chenevix 30
Steiner, Peter 57 Trubetzkoy, Prince Nikolaj Sergeevic 56-
Steinthal, Heymann (alias Heinrich) 37, 57, 160-161,163
49,71,74 Tynianov, Jurij N. 56
Stendhal (pen name of Marie Henri Beyle) Tyler, Lyon G. 184
173
stimulus and response 138-139, 158-159, U
171-172, 174-175, 196 unconscious mind 43, 53, 159, 161, 165,
Stockwell, Robert P. 127n. 183,188-191
stonemasonry 133 United Nations 108
stratificational grammar 61 United States of America 29, 184, 194
structuralism 44, 48, 52-58, 66-69, 114, universal language 98
135, 144-145, 149-152, 157-167 universal logic 78, 84,104
history of the term 54n. universale 61, 67, 159
stylistics 68 US English 187n.
Sweet, Henry 50-51
Swift, Jonathan 31 V
symbolism 82, 84n., 103, 111 value 159
synchronic linguistics 32,45, 58, 52, 54, Vatican 120n.
56, 66, 148, 158, 164 Verhaar, John, S J. 150
syntax 49, 52, 58, 61-65, 69,77, 122-123, Verner, Karl Adolf 37
145,148,151-154, 178 Viertel, John 150
systematicity 43-44, 54, 58, 60, 68 Vietnam War 112
systemic-functional linguistics 58, 67 vocabulary 77, 130
Völkerpsychologie (Wundt) 49-51, 55, German translation of 1875 book 45

140 influence on F. de Saussure 32-34, 38-
Voltaire (pen name of François Marie 39, 45, 52, 152
Arouetlejeune) 10 travels in Europe 35-37
Vossler, Karl 59, 159 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 56, 71-73, 75, 86-
93, 98-105,164, 172-173, 181, 183,
W 185-187,190, 192-193, 195-196
Wagner, Richard 36 Whorf, Harry Church 98
Wallace, Alfred Russell 74 Whorf, Richard 192
Walsh, Mary Elizabeth 112n. Wiener Kreis 76
War of 1812 13-14 Wilkins, John, Bishop 84n., 98
War of Indian Independence (1857) 94 will 39,43-44,47,49, 53, 59, 66, 69, 74,
Warner, W(illiam) Lloyd 122, 124n., 129 120,195-196
Washington, Peter 94 Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow 184, 195
Watson, John Broadus 111, 135, 192 Wilson, William Dexter 79, 83
Weber, Albrecht Friedrich 34, 36, 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann 70,
Webster, Noah 11, 12, 19 76,86,90,171,192
Weinreich, Max 109n. Wolf, (Stewart) George 102
Weinreich, Uriel 66, 109, 124n., 127 Wolfram, Walter A. 125-127
Weir, Ruth Hirsch 123-124n. World War I 16, 53, 167, 183-186, 188n.,
Weisgerber, (Johann) Leo 101ln. 195
Weiss, Albert Paul 135, 139-141, 143 World War II 112, 167, 184-185, 187
Welby(-Gregory), Victoria Alexandra Worth, Mark 194-195
Louise, née Stuart-Wortley, Lady 85 Wundt, Wilhelm Maximilian 49-51, 54n.,
Welles, Orson 192 55,113,135,139-140, 143, 157,159
Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) 92n., 192 Wyld, Henry Cecil Kennedy 115
Wenker, Georg 50
West, Michael Philip 193 Y
Whitehead, Alfred North 76, 80, 85, 90- Yeats, William Butler 94
91, 170,179-180 yoga 88, 104
Whitney, Josiah Dwight 1, 19
Whitney, William Dwight 1-2, 19-46, 52, Z
54n., 79, 100, 100-lOln., 107-108, 149- Zeuss, Johann Kaspar 37n.
150, 152, 164, 195-196 Zimmer, Heinrich 35-36
French translation of 1875 book 44-45, Zipf, George Kingsley 171
196

From Whitney To Chomsky - Essays in The History of American Linguistics (PDFDrive)

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ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS

Series III - STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE LANGUAGE SCIENCES

Advisory Editorial Board

Cristina Altman (São Paulo); Lia Formigari (Rome)

From Whitney to Chomsky.

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

I am grateful to friends and colleagues in discussion with whom the ideas

The origins of American linguistic identity

(1857-1913), son of Henri.2 Whitney actually accompanied his brother on his

Linguistic thought in the 'Age of Discovery': Nebrija

Of course, more than a few missionaries found a deep intellectual interest in

Linguistic thought in the Romantic Age: Humboldt

case in point is English, which, after centuries of linguistic evolution, likely

American linguistic identity

of the humanity of the poor Americans" — but then in an excess of generosity

One is struck by how the first applications of 'American' to Euro-

Politics, language and myth

the dominant philosophy, and any lack of linguistic difference sufficient to

The identity of American linguistics

'THE AMERICAN WHITNEY'

L'Américain Whitney que je révère ...

Whitney's and Max Müller's lectures

Whitney's Life and Growth of Language

Saussure's encounter with Whitney

If the young Swiss scholar failed to make much of an impression on Whitney

Saussure pro and contra Whitney

More significant is Saussure's inclination to temper Whitney's views on human

concepts, communication and association, and a modern scientific criterion, sim­

'Progress' and 'science' in linguistics

Language theory before World War I

leads provided by various versions of psychology should be followed. This section

oped a Völkerpsychologie, a cultural-historical "psychology of peoples" with a

German émigré to America, became the organizational leader of anthropological

Saussure and the CLG

Saussure's programme surpassed all rival approaches in two crucial aspect of

The emergence of structuralist schools

C. A general priority of linguistic 'form' over meaning—though see the remarks

extension of structural principles beyond linguistics, focusing on Saussure's di­

the system is elaborated to near-metaphysical proportions, while opening a vein of

Development in historical linguistics

historical macro-family of languages he called 'Noëtic', the principal branches of

Post-World War II 'algebraic' structuralism

In America, the 'neo-Bloomfieldians' assumed the mainstream mantle they

Transformational-generative grammar, including generative phonology

of many senior structuralists against its leading ideas, transformational-generative

Sermo generator abintellectuet générât intellectom.

Sapir and Humboldt

heterogeneous set of ideas and interpretations. 'Linguistic relativity principle'

'Metaphysicalgarbage' and 'magic key'

and thought which had developed in analytic philosophy with no counterpart in

claim of the metaphysical garbage view:

magic key view is already implicit in the rival development of etymology as an

The metaphysical garbage line from Ogden & Richards to Sapir

group" — but another passage, discussing the relevance of linguistics to Gestalt

From Sapir to Whorf

Whorf, Korzybski and Ogden

anthropologists, sociologists, etc. unskilfully to exploit the most difficultfieldsof linguis­

Other influences on Whorf

Max Müller in defence of her anti-evolutionism, referring specifically to Müller's

die of Whorf's definitive formulation of his 'linguistic relativity principle'. On the

concepts, communication and association, and a modern scientific criterion, sim

extension of structural principles beyond linguistics, focusing on Saussure's di

anthropologists, sociologists, etc. unskilfully to exploit the most difficultfieldsof linguis

These are excellent examples of the 'misinterpretation' (from Chomsky's per

being produced in response to a discrete stimulus, and functioning in turn as a dis

Politics and pro Arts, psychology, anthropology, phi

1928: Sapir's LSA/AAA ad 1927: "Debabelization"; 1929:

Doroszewski, Witold. 1933. "Quelques remarques sur les rapports de la socio