Jespersen, Otto;
The philosophy of grammar
G. Allen & Unwin, 1924/1968, 359 pages
topics: | linguistics |
Much debate in today's linguistics - between the rule-driven excesses of Chomskyan models and the confused pragmatics of the cognitive grammarians - hinges on whether grammar is a set of rules or a formula. The Chomskyan admits that grammar in languages as they are actually used often include many mixups between the rule-based parts (syntax) and the formulaic parts (lexicon). However, he further argues that owing to its variabilty the actual language as spoken (e-language) is too amorphous to be studied, and that the only type of grammar worth investigating is of the rule variety (i-language). The proper scope of linguistics should be to study the ideal language that the user knows (competence) but may fail to produce (performance). Of course, this position has been strongly critiqued, even By William Labov: It is now evident to many linguists that the primary purpose of the distinction (competence/ performance) has been to help the linguist exclude data which he finds inconvenient to handle -- that is, to further the restricted definition of linguistics set out by Chomsky in Aspects (1965:3). - The notion of 'System' in creole studies from Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 1971, p.468 On the other hand, the Cognitive (or usage-driven) grammarian says that grammar is a continuum - graded from aspects that are more rule like, and others that are less. Grammar needs to address both these aspects. One of its primary tools that enable it to do this is the involvement of semantics in the grammatical enterprise.
Generations of earlier linguists have written eloquently on this propensity for rules to mix comfortably with fuzzy areas like pragmatics and language change. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the historical turn in linguistics culminated in the magnificient achievement (in the English language) of the Oxford English Dictionary. This philological enterprise gave rise to an explanation for many of the processes of language change that informs Jespersen's narrative.
Type vs Formula: plural formed through the addition of -en to the singuIar : only surviving instance is oxen, which is living as a formula, though its type is extinct.
However, subsequent to the rule-based revolution fostered by computers, and the symbolic movement in AI that followed, Chomsky in his analysis returned to the 17th c. Port-Royal grammarians and their Cartesian roots in order to justify his strong rule-driven position, and invoked the separation of syntax from everything else in cognition.
In the 1960s, the idea of autonomous syntax swept through linguistics, riding on the back of the more general generative grammar proposal for formal analysis of syntax. The glimmerings of a formal theory for a subject that had become increasingly descriptive and amorphous, brought in a sea change and despite strong opposition originating in the second decade, these ideas continued to dominate linguistic research for four decades. In the 1990s, with the growing realization of the importance of the subconscious and the relevance of implicit processes even for language production and understanding, the rule-driven, deliberative stance gradually weakened. Indeed, the autonomous syntax position within the generativist tradition seems rather moribund today, compared to the thriving work going on in cognitive and usage-based models It is a pleasure today to read this work by a towering figure of linguistics, whose insights into this debate are outlined beautifully in the first chapter, and indeed, throughout this eminently readable, but sadly very hard to obtain text. All of Jespersen's writings deserve to be much more widely read. [Reprint publishers take note]. Needless to say, much that Jespersen says goes against the grain of Chomskyan theorizing. Also see his inimitable Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905). [review AM sep 2012 ed. dec 2015]
In PG, Jespersen provides a critical examination of a large number of grammatical concepts, distinguishing clearly among notions that linguists often confuse even today (such as the notions of "subject," "topic," and "agent," which even Leonard Bloomfield couldn't keep straight) and paying attention to a far broader range of examples than scholars of his time or even of ours were accustomed to dealing with (as when he discusses examples such as Catch me going there in his chapter on "Negation"). He notices the implications of details in standard definitions and shows how they often misrepresent the facts, e.g., traditional definition of third person as "person or thing spoken of" is inaccurate, since one still uses first and second person forms when speaking about oneself or one's addressee; here an accurate definition must be negative: "does not include speaker or addressee," and even that definition must be qualified to allow for forms such as your humble servant and madame that are "notionally" first and second person but "formally" third person. The thoroughness of Jespersen's coverage of many classes of syntactic constructions in English is astonishing, as in his treatment of full and reduced sentential complements in chapter 9. There are also gratifyingly thorough treatments of syntactic constructions that linguists have largely ignored, as in his brief but highly comprehensive treatment of "comparative conditional" sentences such as The more he gets, the more he wants, which includes the only successful attempt that I am aware of to assimilate the semantics of sentences such as It grew darker and darker to that of comparative conditionals. The unusual amount of effort that Jespersen put into PG is reflected in the fifteen years that he spent working on it and the three changes of title (for which, see Jespersen's preface) that it underwent during its long gestation. As in his Language, the other large semipopular work that he completed as he was approaching his retirement in 1925 from the faculty of the University of Copenhagen, he cannibalized many of his earlier works in writing it. Each of the chapters deals with a topic on which he could easily have written an entire book, and in one case he already had written one: his 150-page 1917 monograph, Negation in English and Other Languages, of which chapter 24, "Negation," is a distillation.
--from preface This book has taken long in making, and like other pet children, it has borne many names. When I gave the first crude sketch of it as a series of lectures at Columbia University in 1909-10, I called it an Introduction to English Grammar; in the preface of the second volume of my Modern English Grammar (1914) I was rash enough to refer to "a forthcoming book on The Basis of Grammar"; in Lantguage (1922) I spoke of it again as "a future work, to be called, probably, The Logic of Grammar," and now at last I venture to present it under the perhaps too ambitious title of "The Philosophy of Grammar." It is an attempt at a connected presentation of my views of the general principles of grammar [based on my long study] of various languages and preparing an extensive work on English Grammar, of which I have so far been able to bring out only two volumes.
The essence of language is human activity - activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first. [opening lines]
The grammarian must be ever on his guard to avoid the pitfalls into which the ordinary spelling is apt to lead him. Let me give a few very elementary instances. The ending for the plural of substantives and for the third person singular of the present tense of verbs is in writing the same -s in such words as ends, locks, rises, but in reality we have three different endings, as seen when we transcribe them phonetically [endz, loks, raiziz]. Similarly the written ending -ed covers three different spoken endings in sailed, locked, ended, phonetically [seld, lokt, endid]. p.18 In the written language it looks as if the preterites paid and said were formed in the same way, but differently from stayed, but in reality paid and stayed are formed regularly [paid, steid], whereas said is irregular as having its vowel shortened [sed]. Where the written language recognizes only one word there, the spoken language distinguishes two both as to sound and signification (and grammatical import), as seen in the sentence "There were many people there." [pron. second has eps in middle] Even without any special grammatical training we feel that the two sentences John gave Mary the apple, My uncle lent the joiner five shillings, are analogous, that is, they are made after the same pattern. how do such types come into existenoe in the mind of a speaker? [an infant], without any grammatical instruction, from innumerable sentences heard and understood he will abstract some notion of their struoture which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own, though it is difficult or impossible to state what that notion is except by means of technical terms like subject, verb, etc.
FREE EXPRESSIONS : created on the spur of the moment after a certain type
which has come into existence in the speaker's subconsciousness as a
result of his having heard many sentences possessing some trait or
traits in common...
It follows that the distinction between them and FORMULAS ("how do you do?",
"beg your pardon") cannot always be discovered except through a fairly close
analysis.
The distinction between formulas and free expressions pervades all parts of
grammar. In morphology we have the same distinction with regard to fiexional
forms. The plural eyen was going out of use in the sixteenth century...
The only surviving instance of a plural formed through the addition of -en to
the singular is oxen, which is living as a formula, though its type is
extinct.
Meanwhile, skoen, fone, eyen, kine have been supplanted by shoes, foes,
eyes, cows; that is, the plural of these words has been reshaped in
accordance with the living type found in kings, lines, stones, etc. 21
When eyes was first uttered instead of eyen, it was an analogical
formation on the type of the numerous words which already had -s in the
plural.
[as with over-regularization in children's speech e.g. "goed",
see Computational explorations in cognitive neuroscience: understanding the mind by simulating the brain by Randall C. O'Reilly and Yuko Munakata (2000).]
It will be seen that in morphology what was above called a
"type" is the same thing as the principle of what are generally
called regular formations, while irregular forms are "formulas."
[type approximates what Langacker calls "schema"]
An example of a productive suffix is _-ness_, because it is possible to
form new words like weariness, oloseness, perverseness, etc. On the
contrary -lock in wedlock is unproductive, and so is -th in width, breadth,
health, and no [new] word with this ending seems to have come into
existence for several hundred years.
The distinction between a formula and a free combination also affects
word-order. One example may suffice:
so long as SOME+THING is felt as a free combination of two elements,
another adjective may be inserted in the usual way: some good thing.
But as soon as SOMETHING has become a fixed formula, it is
inseparable, and the adjective has to follow: something good.
Compare also the difference between the old "They turned each to
other" and the modern "they turned to each other."
[presumably a fusion of each-other?]
The coalescence of originally separate elements into a formula is not always equally complete: in BREAKFAST it is shown not only by the pronunciation [brekfest] as against [breik, fa·st], but also by forms like he breakfasts, breakfasted (formerly breaks fast, broke fast), but in TAKE PLACE the coalescence is not carried through to the same extent, and yet this must be recognized as a formula in the sense 'come to happen,' as it is impossible to treat it in the same way as take with another object, which in some combinations can be placed first (a book he took) and which can be made the subject in the passive (the book was taken), neither of which is possible in the case of take place. [The] distinction here established between formulas and free combinations has been shown to pervade the whole domain of linguistic activity. A formula may be a whole sentence or a group of words, or it may be one word, or it may be only part of a word,-that is not important, but it must always be something which to the actual speech-instinct is It unit which cannot be further analyzed or decomposed in the way a free combination can.
Grammatical habits may thus lead to what from one point of view may be termed redundancy: e.g. the use of it in many cases. It became an invariable custom to have a subject before the verb, and therefore a sentence which did not contain a subject was felt to be incomplete. In former times no pronoun was felt to be necessary with verbs like Latin pluit, ningit 'it rains, it snows,' etc.; thus Italian still has piove, nevica, but on the analogy of innumerable such expressions as I come, he comes, etc., the pronoun it was added in E. it rains, it snowsd, and correspondingly in French, German, Danish and other languages: il pleut, es regnet, det regner. It has been well remarked that the need for this pronoun was especially felt when it became the custom to express the difference between affirmation and question by means of word-order (er kommt, kommt er )...
Verbs like rain, snow had originally no subject, and as it would be hard
even now to define logically what the subject it stands for and what it
means, many scholars ~look upon it as simply a grammatioal device to make
the sentence conform to the type most generally found. In other cases there
is a real subject. yet we are led for some reason or other to insert the
pronoun it. It is possible to say. for instance. "To find one's way in
London is not easy," but more often we find it convenient not to introduce
the infinitive at once; in which cases, however, we do not begin with the
verb and say "Is not easy to find one's way in London," because we are
accustomed to look upon sentences beginning with a verb as interrogative; so
we say "It is not easy," etc. In the same way it is possible to say "That
Newton was a great genius cannot be denied," but if we do not want to place
the clause with that first we have to say "It cannot be denied that Newton
was a great genius." In these sentences it represents the following
infinitive construction or clause, very much as in "He is a great scoundrel,
that husband of hers" he represents the words that husband of hers. Cf. the
colloquial: "It is perfectly wonderful the way in which he remembers things."
The rules for the use of the auxiliary do in interrogative sentences are
to be explained in a similar way. The universal tendency is towards having
the word-order Subject Verb, but there is a conflicting tendency to express
a question by means of the inverted order Verb Subject, as in the obsolete
"writes he' " (cf. German "Schreibt er?" and French "Ecrit-il?"). Now many
interrogative sentences had the word-order Auxiliary Subject Verb (" Can he
write ~.. "Will he write? " "Has he written," etc.), in which the really
significant verb eame after the subject just as in ordinary affirmative
sentences: through the creation of the compromise form "does he write?" the
two conflicting tendencies were reconciled: from a formal point of view the
verb, though an empty one, preceded the subject to indioate the question,
and from another point of view the subject preceded the real verb. But no
auxiliary is required when the sentence has an interrogative pronoun as
subject ("Who writes?") because the interrogatory pronoun is naturally put
first, and so the sentence without any does conforms already to the
universal pattern.
[this is one of the main difficulties of psycholinguistics - how exactly is the sentence produced? Is it a matter of subconscious habit, or is it more deliberative? Anyone who will listen oarefully to ordinary conversation will come across abundant evidence of the way in which sentenoes are bullt up gradually by the speaker, who will often in the course of the same sentence modify his original plan of presenting his ideas, hesitate, break off, and shunt on to a different track. In written and printed language this phenomenon, anakoluthia, is of course much rarer than in speech, though instanoes are well known to scholars. [cites passage from King Lear earliest quarto edition, dropped in Folio - "like a better way" which scholars have struggled over. Suggests that it should be read as a "her smiles and tears Were like - [a pause here, followed by an improved thought] -a better way: [and then the colourful description of Cordelia..] p.28-29 anakoluthia: after starting a sentence, re-considers the content and continues in a manner inconsistent with the start (not in OED, but in this sense in german wikipedia Anakoluth) My chief object in writing this chapter has been to make the reader rea1ize that language is not just dictionaries and the usual grammars ... but a set of habits, of habitual actions, and that each word and each sentence spoken is a complex action on the part of the speaker. 1n each instance, apart from mere formulas, the speaker has to turn these habits to meet a new situation, to express what has not been expressed previously - therefore he cannot be a mere slave to habits but has to vary them to suit varying needs and this in course of time may lead to new turns and new habits; in other words, to new grammatical forms and usages. Grammar thus becomes a part of linguistic psychology or psychological linguistics...
two ways of treating linguistic phenomena: descriptive and the historical. Corresponds to what in physics are called statics and dynamics and differ in that the one views phenomena as being in equilibrium, and the other views them as being in motion. It is the pride of the linguistic science of the last hundred years or so that it has superseded older methods by historical grammar, in which phenomena are not only described, but explained, and it cannot be denied that the new point of view, by showing the inter-connexion of grammatical phenomena previously isolated, has obtained many new and important results. We can explain many irregularities, but to the speakers of our modern language they are just as irregular as if their origin had not been made clear to us. The distinction between regular and irregular always must be important to the psychological life of language, for regular forms are those which speakers use as the basis of new formations, and irregular forms are those which they will often tend to replace by new forms created on the principle of analogy.
Grammar deals with the general facts of language, and lexicology with special facts (cf. Sweet, CP 31). That cat denotes that particular animal is a special fact which concerns that word alone, but the formation of the plural by adding the sound -s is a general fact because it concerns a great many other words as well: rats, hats, works, books, caps, chiefs, etc. 82 ... such facts as the formation of ordinals by means of the ending -th and of 20, 30, etc., by means of -ty unquestionably belong to the province of grammar. p.32
The prinoiple here advocated. is that we should recognize in the syntax of any language only such categories as have found in that language formal expression, but it will be remembered that "form" is taken in a very wide sense, including form-words and word-position. In thus making form the supreme criterion one should beware, however, of a mistaken notion whioh might appear to be the natural outcome of the same principle. We say one sheep, many sheep: are we then to say that sheep is not a singular in the first phrase, and not a plural in the second, because it has the same form, and that this form. is rather to be caJIed ' common number' or 'no-number' or something equivalent? [Similarly] "I cut my finger every day" : is cut in present tense? "I cut my finger yesterday" : is cut past tense (preterit)? Further, if we compare "our king's love for his subjects" and "our kings love their subjects," we see that the two forms are the same (apart from the purely conventional distinction made in writing, but not in speaking, by means of the apostrophe), and a strict formalist thus would not be entitled to state anything with regard to the case and number of kings. And what about love? There is nothing in the form to show us that it is a substantive in the singular in one phrase and. a verb in the plural in the other, and we should have to invent a separate name for the strange category thus created. The true moral to be drawn from such examples is, however, I think, that it is wrong to treat each separate linguistic item on its own merits; we should rather look at the language as a whole. Sheep in many sheep is a plural, because in many lambs and hundreds of other similar cases the English language recognIzes a plural in its substantives; cut in one sentence is in the present and in the other in the past tense, because a difference at once arises if we substitute he for _I_ (he cuts, he cut), or another verb for cut (I tear, I tore)... [Similarly for kings and love].
In other words, while we should be careful to keep out of the grammar of any language such distinctions or categories as are found in other languages, but are not formally expressed in the language in question, we should be no less averse to deny in a particular case the existence of distinctions elsewhere made in the same Ianguage, because they happen there to have no outward sign. 51 The principle laid down in the last few paragraphs is not unfrequently sinned against in grammatical literature. Many writers will discourse on the faclility with which English can turn substantives into verbs, and vice versa-but English never confounds the two classes of words, even if it uses the same form now as a substantive, and now as a verb: a finger and a find are substantives, and finger and find in you finger this and find that are verbs, in flexion and in function and everything. An annotator on the passage in Hamlet, where the ghost is said to go "slow and stately" says with regard to slow; "Adjectives are often used for adverbs " - no, slow really is an adverb, just as long in "he stayed long" is an adverb, even if the form is the same as in "a long stay," where it is an adjective. [the nature of a surface form word needs to be considered with respect to its companions - what are its nearest neighbours?]