Half a Century of Linguistics: Some Reflections and Reminiscences

HALF A CENTURY OF LINGUISTICS: SOME REFLECTIONS AND REMINISCENCES RANKO BUGARSKI University of Belgrade Abstract: In 1957 two ground-breaking books were published in the field of linguistics, Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” and Lado’s “Linguistics across Cultures”, which have strongly influenced the development of theoretical and applied linguistics respectively over the past half-century. This paper briefly compares their widely different approaches, noting also certain points of contact that subsequent research has revealed. It ends with a few personal reminiscences 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 Noam Chomsky 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-generative grammar, affirmed abstract reasoning and rigid formalism, and thus set off a chain of major developments in theoretical linguistics. 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 linguists. 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 linguistics. However, its overall contribution must be recognized despite certain 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 cultural 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 followers. 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 cognitive linguistics 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 sociolinguistics. To take only the latter, sociolinguistics 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 sociolinguistics 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 dialectology 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 linguistics, 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 present-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.

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