HALF A CENTURY OF : SOME REFLECTIONS AND REMINISCENCES

RANKO BUGARSKI

Abstract: In 1957 two ground-breaking books were published in the field of lin- guistics, Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” and Lado’s “Linguistics across Cultures”, which have strongly influenced the development of theoretical and respectively over the past half-century. This paper briefly compares their widely different approaches, noting also certain points of con- tact that subsequent research has revealed. It ends with a few personal remi- niscences concerning Chomsky and Lado.

Keywords: Chomsky, culture, Lado, linguistics, structure, syntax.

1. Introduction

Just over half a century ago now, the year 1957 saw the publication of two important and influential books, Syntactic Structures by and Linguistics across Cultures by Robert Lado, which, over the intervening decades, have come to be recognized as the beginning, each in its own way, of major strands in modern linguistic research. Their titles have there- fore acquired a symbolic significance. This paper sketches out some of the developments initiated by these two slender paper-covered volumes, plac- ing them in a wider context. The undue pretensions suggested by the first part of the title of this paper should be tempered with the far more modest second half. The presentation will thus be fairly general, necessarily super- ficial, but also in part quite personal. As is well known to linguists across the world, Chomsky’s book herald- ed a veritable revolution in linguistic theory, with strong reverberations in the study of language acquisition and of the nature of the human mind. It introduced new ideas associated with the concept of transformational-gen- erative grammar, affirmed abstract reasoning and rigid formalism, and thus set off a chain of major developments in . In fact it had the effect of a time bomb: when it appeared nobody outside a small circle B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 204 of initiated enthusiasts was able to grasp its full potential, but subsequent works by Chomsky himself and his followers actually succeeded in revital- izing the study of language in large sections of the world’s community of lin- guists. With time, the generative enterprise, which had also encountered some serious opposition in different quarters, split up into factions and was supplemented with rival theories, notably those arising within cognitive lin- guistics. However, its overall contribution must be recognized despite cer- tain weaknesses and even occasional blind alleys. In contrast, Lado’s book marked a fresh start in empirical work with languages as expressions of cultures, motivated by the practical concerns of developing foreign language teaching methodology through contrastive and error analysis, language testing and related techniques, in this way laying a new foundation for the vital domain of applied linguistics. The purpose of this work transcended the mere contrasting of linguistic systems, reaching out into a more comprehensive comparison of linguistic, social and cultur- al features and thus eventually advancing intercultural understanding. And so, just as in the case of Syntactic Structures, a slim volume demonstrated the potential to stimulate and guide the research of generations of follow- ers. These were field workers rather than “armchair theorists” in the Chomskian tradition; in both cases, however, the wide and expanding cir- cles of linguists remained crucially indebted to the two respective trailblaz- ers. This much can surely be claimed, quite apart from any wish to engage in a comparative evaluation of the impact of these scholars or of their works, which is not our concern here.

2. Points of contact

While the trends thus set in motion may appear to be worlds apart in subject matter, intent and approach, it would be unwise to state resolutely that the twain shall never meet. They cannot be reasonably expected to merge, but fifty years on, one detects significant points of contact in the ongoing process of cross-fertilization between “theoretical” and “applied” approaches to the investigation of language and languages. Speaking quite generally, abstract thinking tends to be increasingly contextualized in major areas of recent and current research, such as or cross- cultural pragmatics. At the same time, empirical studies are seeking firm 205 INTERACTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS theoretical grounding, for example in discourse analysis or in Labovian soci- olinguistics. To take only the latter, today is far removed from its position a few decades ago, when it could be characterised as a field “a mile wide and an inch deep” (Hymes, 1974: 194). How did this change come about? Briefly, Labov’s meticulous observation of sound change in progress on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, which had long been a popular summer resort for rich mainlanders (Labov, 1963), fol- lowed by his ground-breaking investigation of New York City speech (Labov, 1966), laid the theoretical and methodological foundation for a systematic correlation of linguistic and social variation, the very essence of sociolin- guistics as we know it today. This was made possible by erecting, on top of the horizontal (geographic) axis of traditional dialectology, a vertical (social) dimension of variation. It was no longer sufficient to determine simply what was said in one given location as against another; what became the focus of attention was who precisely in that location said what, when and to whom, speaking informally or more formally, etc. In this way, the new urban or social dialec- tology was able not only to establish linguistic facts, but also to account for them in social terms; in other words, to offer explanations for the linguistic behaviour observed. While Labov’s work inspired similar studies elsewhere (e.g. that on the speech of Norwich in Trudgill, 1974), other researchers developed their own approaches (e.g. the social network theory of Milroy, 1987). Taken together, efforts like these definitely raised the scientific status of sociolinguistics. There is now a compromise if not a merger of “theory” and “applica- tion” in other domains too. One is language universals research, where the stark opposition between the theoretical position associated with Chomsky and the empirical investigations exemplified by the work of Joseph Greenberg no longer seems to hold. Another is contrastive linguistics itself, whose very identity would perhaps be lost, if one still insisted on a sharp distinction between its pedagogical and theoretical branches. All in all, then, it seems to me that our increasingly interrelated world, diverse and “multi-culti” but globalising, holds promise of an essentially more integrat- ed linguistics of the future. (Incidentally, such a vision has been with me for some twenty years now; I reported on it at the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists in Berlin in 1987 — see Bugarski, 1990). B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 206

It is not possible here to flesh out these sketchy but far-reaching sug- gestions. I propose instead to organise most of the rest of this paper around the four content words occurring in the titles of the two books I started out discussing, taken in their base forms, and for my present purpose represent- ing four key concepts, or pillars of a scaffolding, on which some crucial seg- ments of twentieth-century linguistic thought rest. These four are linguis- tics, syntax, culture, and structure; so let me take them up in turn.

3. Four basic notions

3.1. Linguistics This is a good example of a field of study with a shifting definition: for as long as it has existed, different practitioners have imposed on it their own particular interpretations of what the discipline was supposed to deal with centrally, and what perhaps marginally, if at all. To say that linguistics is the scientific study of language is of course universally acceptable, but tautolo- gous; and the moment one attempts to be more precise about the meaning of “language” (exactly which aspects of this notoriously multi-faceted phe- nomenon does it cover?), one necessarily concentrates on a particular choice from among numerous possibilities: language as essentially an instrument of thought and cognition, a system of communication, a kind of human behaviour, a means of social cohesion, a structure seen synchroni- cally or in evolution, etc. Here we may identify two extreme positions. One can be epitomised by recalling Roman Jakobson’s well-known paraphrase of Terence: “Linguista sum; linguistici nihil a me alienum puto” (“I am a linguist; noth- ing linguistic is alien to me” — Jakobson, 1960: 377). Just how wide-ranging such a claim might be is well illustrated by the same author’s famous open- ing lecture at the Tenth International Congress of Linguists in Bucharest in 1967 (see Jakobson, 1969). At the opposite end, one may place the view, notably associated with Chomsky, that linguistics is that particular problem area or approach which is of special interest to an influential individual researcher or the school of thought he represents, whereas all the rest may perhaps be worthwhile to somebody else, but is not “real” linguistics. In this day and age the former option is in an operational sense clearly unmanage- able for a single discipline, and the latter is far too restrictive, so a balance 207 INTERACTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS should be sought — possibly, I would suggest, somewhere along the lines of the integrative effort noted above.

3.2. Syntax Scattered contributions to the syntactic level of linguistic analysis can be found across the ages, some of them rather sophisticated even by pres- ent-day standards (for an extensive historical review of the last two cen- turies see Graffi, 2001), but on the whole, syntax has not fared very well in modern times, having been overshadowed by the rise of Indo-European comparative linguistics in the nineteenth century. The comprehensive grammars of the age typically opened with a very substantial part on the sounds, followed by a shorter one on word-building and then a rather lean chapter about syntax. A century later history repeated itself in American structuralism, with grammars of lesser-known languages exhibiting a com- parable disproportion, in that syntax lagged far behind phonology and mor- phology in the space allotted to it. Why was this so? One reason, I would venture to suggest, might lie in the very nature of syntax as, essentially, what the word itself says: arrangement. While the other linguistic levels operate with identifiable and reasonably “pal- pable” units such as phonemes, morphemes or lexemes, syntax is primarily a system of relations among such units and hence so abstract as to be much more difficult to grasp or pin down: something which happens in the process of combining items that have their real identity elsewhere, somewhat like the mere elusive “air” between “things”. And so it fell to the Chomskian revolution, starting in 1957, to rehabilitate syntax, even to the extent (to be challenged shortly thereafter) of making it the central component of linguistic description. Much more than that, in fact: Chomsky effectively specified the traditional image of man as Homo loquens by rewriting it as Homo syntacticus (animals communicate, but only humans talk, by operating complex syntactic systems). This emphasis was subsequently modified with the reaffirmation of semantics and the rise of pragmatics and discourse analysis, so that syntax, no longer either a stepchild of linguistics or its apex, can today be described as one among equals — and that, it seems to me, is what it should be.

3.3. Culture In itself, the notion of culture scarcely needs highlighting, as everyone these days seems to be talking about culture, multiculturalism, cross-cultur- B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 208 alism, interculturalism, language and culture, and so on. Indeed, “culture” has become a buzz-word in much of linguistics, but also in the social sci- ences more generally. What this overworked but extremely vague term does need, however, is precisely focused elaboration, some sharpened but context-sensitive discussion. By this I do not mean searching for a new gen- eral definition of the term itself, an addition to the already vast number of definitional attempts. We may recall that over fifty years ago two American anthropologists collected and analysed no fewer than 164 definitions of “culture” in anthropological and sociological literature; that number must have increased considerably in the meantime. The first of these, offered in 1871 by the British anthropologist Edward Tyler, seems worth quoting on this occasion:

Culture, or civilization… is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 81).

Apart from the opening, which begs the important question of the dis- tinction between culture and civilization, a topic much debated in various European traditions of cultural studies, this definition is strikingly modern in anticipating the now prevalent all-embracing “way of life” concept of cul- ture. What I have in mind is rather a systematic analysis of the different ways in which members of particular human cultures interpret the notion of culture as a fundamental part of their lives and experiences, how they con- ceptualise and value their own cultural institutions, beliefs and practices — in a word, something like “Culture across cultures”. By way of illustration, just a few days before coming to Timişoara to participate in the 2008 British and American Studies conference, I spent a day in the far north of Sweden, a mere 120 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, as a member of a Council of Europe expert delegation concerned with the protection of minority lan- guages. One of these was Sami, and so we met with several representatives of its speakers, including the Chairman of the Sami Parliament and the leaders of the local youth organisation. As we talked — mostly in English, with only occasional use of the interpretation services — I couldn’t help reflecting on two things. One, how inadequate my own stereotype of Sami culture had been. And two, more to the point, I wondered how this traditional commu- 209 INTERACTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS nity might fit modern Swedish technology and life-style into their native cul- tural patterns: what could be their perceptions of cultural values in a small universe combining reindeer grazing with computers, and their Sami dialects with Swedish — and sometimes English too?

3.4. Structure Lastly, the notion of structure, relatively well-defined in comparison with that of culture, has after a period of concentrated attention faded into the background, to my mind unjustly, and hence needs rehabilitating. It saw its heyday in the early decades of the twentieth century, starting with Ferdinand de Saussure’s seminal Cours de linguistique générale of 1916 (even though, curiously, the word “structure” does not occur in this Bible of linguistic structuralism!). From linguistics, the concept quickly spread into other fields, as documented, for example, by the review in Bastide (1962). Yet in the latter half of the century, it came to be largely discredited by Chomsky’s relentless attack on one particular brand of structuralism, repre- sented by Leonard Bloomfield and his followers. In exposing the limitations of this American school, Chomsky in effect wrote off structuralism tout court. However, it has always seemed to me that this was a gross oversimplification. At a conference of the European Linguistic Society in Copenhagen in 1981 — and subsequently on other occasions — I put forward the view, shared by some but apparently not many at the time, that generativism was an offshoot of structuralism rather than a replacement for it. This position I symbolically encapsulated in the term generative structuralism (see Bugarski, 1982). To me, then, the concept of structure (in the sense of a system of rela- tions holding among the units making it up and defining it both statically and dynamically) remains the key linguistic idea of the twentieth century, pro- ductively echoed in the other social and human sciences. I would argue that today, ninety years after de Saussure’s Cours, it deserves to be reaf- firmed, while, of course, taking into account the considerable interim achievements of linguistic theory and analysis.

4. By way of conclusion: some personal reminiscences

I wish to end with a few recollections regarding Chomsky and Lado. My encounter with Syntactic Structures was, if anything, painful: what little B.A.S. vol. XV, 2009 210 formal training in linguistics I had received previously was of an entirely dif- ferent nature, of course. Like, I suppose, pretty nearly everyone else at the time, I found myself confronted with a text I could hardly understand, an experience amply and repeatedly shared by generations of my students later on! I recall ploughing through the book in a postgraduate seminar at University College London in 1962, conducted by the American structuralist James Sledd, himself a novice in this new variety of linguistic theory. I met Chomsky in person only once, at in New York, in 1966. A year later I tried to contact him during a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he was away. Still, I was received by his colleague and collaborator Morris Halle, who proudly pointed to a thick black book on his office desk, saying simply “There it is, finally!”. This was a pre-publication copy of The Sound Pattern of English by Chomsky and Halle, a treatise with some history of underground circulation which upon official publication was to become the classic text of generative phonology. I felt honoured by the privilege of leafing through it as we talked… In the following years I corresponded with Chomsky on a couple of occasions. (May I remind you that these were the good old days, long before e-mail, when you could actually write letters to people and get letters in return, complete with signature, envelope and stamp!). In 1972 my edition of Chomsky’s selected writings in Serbo-Croatian translation, which consti- tuted the first introduction to his work in , was published in Belgrade. I sent copies to him and, on his suggestion, to “his friend Roman Jakobson”, as he put it. I was amused by this qualification, since I recalled some of Chomsky’s printed references to Jakobson’s works which did not strike me as particularly friendly. But then, I suppose, prevailing notions of academic style differed as between the United States and Europe, perhaps especially in those years of head-on conflicts in linguistics. Anyway, both copies were acknowledged by the recipients, with positive comments, to my great satisfaction. In comparison with Chomsky’s work, Lado’s book made for much eas- ier reading on the whole, though it too contained sections I found rather dif- ficult because of my lack of detailed knowledge of the linguistic (and cross- linguistic) material being treated. Lado too I met only once, at a conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. in 1970. Years later I was invit- ed by Kurt Jankowsky, editor of a Festschrift for Lado, to contribute to that volume. I responded to the honour by sending an article whose title, 211 INTERACTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS

“Translation across cultures”, was obviously inspired by that of Lado’s wide- ly known volume (see Bugarski, 1985). This concludes my highly selective, not to say patchy, account of some of the major developments in language study over the past fifty years, seen in the light of two books and through the lens of four key words in their titles. I must apologize for referring to my own work and experiences more often than academic decency would normally permit — but then I did say at the outset that my story would in part be personal. I just thought it might not be entirely inappropriate for me on this occasion to share with you a few fragments of my memories concerning two distinguished linguists and their works whose common recent anniversary prompted my thoughts on the subject.

References

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