Linguistics As a Science of Man

UDC 81:929 Bugarski R. https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2018.10.1 BELLS INTERVIEW: RANKO BUGARSKI LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE OF MAN by Katarina Rasulić BELLS: Your academic career as a linguist is truly impressive, not only in terms of its duration and the number of your influential publications, but also in terms of the range of linguistic and interdisciplinary fields in which you have been active. These include English linguistics, general linguistics, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, language in relation to identity, culture, ethnicity and nationalism, written language and literacy, political manipulations of language, terminology and bibliography, history of linguistics – and the list is not exhaustive. In retrospect, what do you see as the main driving force in the development of your scholarly interests in the study of language? BUGARSKI: In the endeavours listed I was basically driven by my early acquired and continuing fascination with language in its many and diverse aspects. As a linguist I am naturally committed to my profession, but I often feel – if I may put it this way – that language is even more wonderful than linguistics. It is this sense that has taken me from one facet of language to another, and correspondingly from one of the linguistic subdisciplines to the next. This constant urge, however, has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, given such a broad range of interests my scholarly contributions, whatever merit they may have, have necessarily remained more restricted in impact than they might have been had I from the start focused on a few selected fields and delved far deeper into them, which 11 Belgrade BELLS is what most properly trained linguists do. But my linguistic training was anything but proper. I studied English language and literature and German language and literature as one of the first generation of students enrolled in the newly opened Faculty of Philosophy in my hometown, Sarajevo, in l951, and graduated with full marks practically without ever hearing of linguistics. There were courses in the phonetics, grammar and history of these languages, to be sure, but no introductory linguistics course of the kind that would now be taken for granted in most universities. However, towards the end of my studies I found a copy of Sapir’s Language of 1921 in the poorly equipped departmental library; I still wonder how it ever got there, but it certainly played a part in my later decision to focus on linguistics (my first publications had been in the field of literary studies). Actually, it was only after I moved to Belgrade as a newly appointed assistant lecturer in the Department of English in 1961, at the not-so- young age of 28, that I properly discovered linguistics, but thereafter I enthusiastically embraced it, greatly aided by a scholarship that soon took me to University College London, with Professor Randolph Quirk and other well-known linguists, and with libraries in which I eagerly went through the main linguistics journals in a ferocious attempt to make up for lost time. This is where I started work on my PhD dissertation – and finally became a linguist in the process. Yet on the other hand, while I might have achieved more had I controlled my interests and narrowed down the scope of my research, I don’t regret having spread myself over the whole range you indicated, as it simply gave me satisfaction to take a keen look “here, there and everywhere”. BELLS: In your book Language and Identity (Bugarski 2010) you describe how you grew up virtually bilingual, acquiring English as “the second family language”. What was that experience like and what role has the English language played in the formation of your identity? BUGARSKI: It’s no exaggeration to say that this experience was a vital one in my formative years. I am convinced that early bilingualism is one of the best things that can happen to anyone, for several very good reasons related to cognitive development, outlook on life, tolerance of differences, range of choices available when considering one’s future profession, etc. It is sometimes said that science begins with comparison: if only a single species of tree existed, or only one kind of crystal, there could be no botany 12 BELLS Interview: Ranko Bugarski or crystallography as we know them, since science implies generalizations made by comparing different items of a relevant class for similarity and difference, and one can’t usefully generalize over a single item. Similarly with language: I believe that monoglot individuals, constrained by their single mother tongue, are hardly equipped to appreciate to any significant degree the wonders and splendours of human language. Correspondingly, the history of linguistics teaches us that, with all the glories of the great individual languages of ancient civilizations and the early landmarks of their separate descriptive and normative studies, no general linguistics was possible before the knowledge of scores of genetically and typologically different languages across the world had accumulated sufficiently in the post-Renaissance period to give rise to nineteenth-century comparative linguistics. And as to my own identity, I have been most grateful for the circumstances which have allowed me to enrich it with an additional language, an added bonus being that this was English, then on its way to becoming the leading world language. But more generally, it is a mainstay of European cultural history, dating back to late eighteenth century Romanticism and the related rise of nationalism, that the mother tongue of a person or nation is an exclusive sanctity which must be preserved by all means in the face of competing alien tongues. Strong echoes of this long outdated view reverberate even today in educational circles, where it is frequently claimed that learning a second language should be put off until the precious mother tongue as the principal safeguard of identity has been “stabilized” enough to be able to resist the allegedly harmful intrusions of the other language. In sharp contrast to this singular mother-tongue myth, I have always considered my linguistic identity to consist precisely of all the languages and scripts that I have some knowledge of: no doubt a minority view, but one which I hold to be the only reasonable one in this day and age. BELLS: Which (three) linguists have influenced your work the most and in what ways? BUGARSKI: This is a difficult question for somebody who is to a signficant degree a self-made linguist and has never been a member of any particular school of thought or convinced follower of a leading luminary. However, I have been influenced in my work by a considerable number of linguists 13 Belgrade BELLS of a variety of shades. My greatest debt I owe to Randolph Quirk, my first mentor, for his guidance in the early stages of work on my dissertation and friendly encouragement later on. As I write I recall how much his support meant to me in connection with my first major article. In 1967, while spending a year at Columbia University in New York, I sent him a draft of a long paper on the interrelatedness of grammar and lexis in the structure of English, asking for his opinion. His anxiously awaited verdict began with these words: “I haven’t had the time to read the whole article, but I’ve seen enough of it to be convinced that it must be printed”. What sweet music to my ears! The paper was indeed published the following year in Lingua , Amsterdam, an international journal of high repute (Bugarski 1968) – and I have preserved this letter from London to this day... And having mentioned Columbia, I think it proper to add at least two names from there. One is Uriel Weinreich, a pioneer of contact linguistics and noted lexicographer and semanticist, whose work and personality I admired, but who unfortunately died at the age of forty, in the middle of a course on semantics which I was attending. The other is William Labov, a founder of sociolinguistics, whose ground-breaking studies of the speech of New York City and of Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, had done much to inspire my interest in the links between language and society. There is also Noam Chomsky, whose revolutionary studies of the syntactic structures of natural languages and of the relationship between language and mind opened up new vistas for me, vitally enriching my English syntax courses here as well, though after a while I found the rigid formalism too demanding for me to follow. I even came to challenge one of Chomsky’s fundamental claims by arguing that his generative grammar was an offshoot of structural linguistics rather than a replacement for it – and did so long before it became fashionable in some theoretical circles to be anti-Chomsky: at the Copenhagen meeting of the European Linguistic Society in 1981 (Bugarski 1982). Nevertheless, I gained a great deal from Chomsky’s powerful ideas even while questioning some of them. I could of course go on in this vein, but I must stop here, having already exceeded my allowance of three names! BELLS: Your recent book on Serbian lexical blends (Bugarski 2013) opens with a prologue in which you reflect on one sentence from your student essay written long ago – “Over the entrance 14 BELLS Interview: Ranko Bugarski to the shop, pink neon spelt BEAUTILITY”. What makes this sentence special in your life as a linguist? BUGARSKI: Ah, yes – that’s a nice little story. The sentence you quote is from an essay I wrote on 8 October 1962 for Professor Quirk’s class, entitled “An afternoon in Oxford Street: Reflections of a linguistically- minded foreign visitor”, where I jotted down various items of what would today be called the linguistic landscape of that street and commented on them.

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