HIMA 13,4_340_f19_392-399 11/8/05 2:17 PM Page 393 Grammar education, it was connected with writing and covered a broad spectrum including the A: qawàaid al-lu©a. – G: Grammatik. – appreciation of literature. The grammateîs of F: grammaire. – R: grammatiks. – the New Testament were the ‘scribes’ (Mat 2, S: gramática. – C: yufa 4). In the Middle Ages, it became syno- Before the ‘linguistic turn’ that marked nymous with knowledge or study of Latin, many fields of study in the twentieth century, and often learning in general, especially the Gramsci understood that grammar as the type of knowledge of the learned classes. underlying structure that makes languages With the rise of the nation-state and the possible is an important political issue, vernacular languages, ‘grammar’ lost its both as a regulative social institution and a particular connection to Latin and became key element in philosophical questions of associated with ‘modern’ languages. thought and knowledge. Indeed, Gramsci One of the basic distinctions in grammar dedicated his last prison notebook (Q 29) to is between descriptive grammar and nor- grammar. There his discussion of the politics mative (or proscriptive) grammar. What is of grammar can also be seen as a grammar of known as the Port-Royal Grammar (published politics, as a metaphorical examination of in Paris in 1660) is an important historical the dynamics of hegemony. foundation of normative grammar. It used Of the many meanings and dimensions the idea of a ‘universal grammar’ shared by of ‘grammar’, the most important for all languages to further its aim of teaching Marxists is whether it is seen as the structure people not necessarily how language is used, or set of rules defining a language that is but how it should be used. The authors, ‘objective’, politically neutral and even tran- Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Claude scends history and culture in such ideas as Lancelot (1628–95), were Jansenists of the a ‘universal grammar’. The other alternative Abbey of Port-Royal des Champs near Paris. is that the very description of a grammar is As with an earlier work by Lancelot (1644) a political act that has social and cultural explaining in French how to speak Latin, consequences. Gramsci develops ‘grammar’ the Port-Royal Grammar was primarily a in the latter sense, showing how it inherently paedagogical tool aimed at making it easier involves operations of power and how it to learn a language by explaining its relates to ideology, authority, regulation and structure. Its philosophical position is closely hegemony. The former understanding of tied to the Port-Royal Logic (Arnaud/Nicole ‘grammar’ as, at least initially, a technical 1662) in presenting language structure as and objective structure or set of rules that the product of rational thought processes. can be described in a value-neutral way has In the tradition of René Descartes’s had much greater purchase in contemporary rationalism, the Port-Royal Grammar defines linguistics as well as in everyday language. grammar as the method by which one turns Noam Chomsky’s theory of ‘generative thoughts into verbal signs, or the art of grammar’ and his corollary search for a speaking. As Michel Foucault notes, it would ‘universal grammar’ that is ‘hard-wired’ in be too narrow to see this simply as a the human brain is the culmination of a long prescription of a legislator on how to speak. history of supposedly apolitical notions of Rather, the correct use of speech for Arnauld grammar. and Lancelot is a way to reduce the discrepancy between one’s thoughts (and 1. Grammar comes from the Greek, gram- one’s mother tongue) and the language being matikê (téchnê) – Latin: (ars) grammatica – learned (Foucault III–XVIII). This set a the word grámma means ‘letter, written, re- precedent whereby grammar had some corded’. In its earliest usage in Greco-Roman important role in turning our inner thoughts Historical Materialism, volume 13:4 (393–399) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 13,4_340_f19_392-399 11/8/05 2:17 PM Page 394 394 • Peter Ives into their outer expression in language, historical changes in languages through which is at the heart of the connection ‘sound laws’. They focussed on how between thinking and language, logic and individual sounds and word forms changed grammar. The Port-Royal ‘normative historically within a language and across grammar’ was also important in viewing languages. The emphasis was phonetic language as a synchronic system where the and lexical rather than either semantic or histories of the words constituting it are syntactic. irrelevant. At the beginning of the twentieth The affinities between comparative century, Ferdinand de Saussure took from grammar and German romanticism waned the Port-Royal Grammar this insistence that at the end of the nineteenth century. With linguistics should not be concerned with the rise of the ‘neogrammarians [Jung- ‘reconstructing’ previous linguistic states, grammiker]’, comparative grammar took a as was the method of the historical or decidedly positivistic turn. Where Humboldt comparative grammarians of the nineteenth believed in a ‘universal grammar’ and century. Instead of diachronic analysis, the early comparativists had comparable linguistics must focus on languages as ideas about an ‘Ursprache’, the neogram- synchronic systems in order to define its marians rejected all such ideas as unscientific. subject in a ‘scientifically manageable’ way. They were also disparaging of the value In the eighteenth century, German roman- judgements that normative conceptions of ticism offered a much more historical and grammar contained. Even if such value- cultural approach to language, inspired by judgements were supposedly based on logic a fascination with the origins of language, and incontestable reason, the neogrammarian the primacy of poetry and expression not method excluded any notion of grammar solely rational but emotional, and the as normative of how people should speak. diversity of languages throughout the world. Rather, grammar, for them, was a descriptive Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von pursuit of how people actually used lan- Humboldt and others, in the context of their guage. They took the earlier comparative Enlightenment critique, provided important grammarians’ idea of ‘sound laws’ to its contributions to the study of language. Both extremes, arguing that all language change the concept of grammar and the emphasis could be attributed to such laws, without on the structure of languages were eclipsed exception. According to this view, linguistic by romanticism’s aesthetic and expressive change has nothing to do with cultural, considerations. Though Humboldt’s object political or social context. Rather, linguistic was the Diversity of Human Language phenomena could be explained scientifically Construction (1836), he subordinated it to the solely by laws internal to language. expressive and ‘active’ power of what he called ‘enérgeia’. 2. In 1911, the neogrammarians still held In the nineteenth century, the term sway when the young student, Antonio ‘grammar’ re-emerged in connection not to Gramsci, began studying linguistics at the normative or synchronic structures of University of Turin. In the same year, the language, but to the historical investigation Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, of language change and the relations among completed his last of four years of lectures Indo-European languages especially rooted in Geneva, lectures that would give birth to in comparisons between Sanskrit, Greek and structuralism. Gramsci’s linguistics professor, Latin. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, August Matteo Bartoli, hoped that Gramsci would Schliermacher and Franz Bopp developed become the linguist to refute successfully this approach labelled ‘comparative gram- the neogrammarians. But it was Saussure mar’, comparative philology or historical whose legacy was, if not to destroy the linguistics. Working from the assumption neogrammarians, at least to render them a that languages evolved like living organisms closed chapter in the history of linguistics. and that all Indo-European languages sprang In his posthumously published lectures from one original language or Ursprache, (1916), which became the famous Course comparative grammarians tried to explain in General Linguistics, he rejected historical HIMA 13,4_340_f19_392-399 11/8/05 2:17 PM Page 395 HKWM – Grammar • 395 approaches to the study of language: expanding the traditional meaning, he then language functions as a ‘system’ wherein subverts the original meaning by em- expression and meaning are constituted phasising its unavoidably political nature: through reference to and differentiation from ‘It is obvious that someone who writes each other. a normative grammar cannot ignore the There is no evidence that Gramsci knew history of the language of which he wishes anything about Saussure’s lectures. How- to propose an “exemplary phase” as the ever, his studies with Bartoli led to a similar “only” one worthy to become, in an “or- rejection of the neogrammarians. Like ganic” and “totalitarian” way, the “common” Saussure, Gramsci returned to Port-Royal’s language of a nation in competition and notion of normative grammar as a syn- conflict with other “phases” and types or chronic structure of language. Also like schemes that already exist’ (Gramsci 1985, Saussure, Gramsci criticised the Port-Royal 180; Q 29, 2). connection between ‘normative grammar’ One of Gramsci’s important points is that and ‘universal grammar’, or a direct relation normative grammar is always comparative, to some ahistorical notion of logic and in that it is based on the exclusion of other reason. Unlike Saussure, Gramsci’s critique grammars that he calls interchangeably was fundamentally based on the notion that ‘immanent’ or ‘spontaneous grammar’. This grammar is ‘history’ or an ‘historical is ‘the grammar “immanent” in language document’: ‘it is the “photograph” of a given itself, by which one speaks “according to phase of a national (collective) language grammar” without knowing it. The that has been formed historically and is number of “immanent or spontaneous continuously developing.