Lepschy, G

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Journal of Linguisticshttp://journals.cambridge.org/LINAdditional services for Journal of Linguistics:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereE. F. K. Koerner, Towards a history of American linguistics (Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics 5). London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Pp. x+316.GIULIO LEPSCHYJournal of Linguistics / Volume 40 / Issue 03 / November 2004, pp 699 ­ 706DOI: 10.1017/S0022226704292805, Published online: 04 November 2004Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226704292805How to cite this article:GIULIO LEPSCHY (2004). Journal of Linguistics, 40, pp 699­706 doi:10.1017/S0022226704292805Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/LIN, IP address: 144.82.107.46 on 15 Oct 2012J. Linguistics 40 (2004). DOI: 10.1017/S0022226704292805f 2004 Cambridge University PressE. F. K. Koerner, Towards a history of American linguistics (RoutledgeStudies in the History of Linguistics 5). London & New York: RoutledgeTaylor & Francis Group, 2002. Pp. x+316.Reviewed by GIULIO LEPSCHY, University of Reading & University CollegeLondonWhen I was asked by the Journal of Linguistics to review this book, whichI had not yet seen, I responded with pleasure, partly because the questionsdiscussed in it fall within one of my longstanding areas of interest, partlybecause I had reviewed, long ago, three volumes devoted by Konrad Koernerin the early 1970s to Ferdinand de Saussure, and I had kept up withhis successive work of the following decades. Koerner, who taught formany years at the University of Ottawa before returning recently toGermany, is a prodigiously energetic and productive scholar, particularlywell known for his activity in the ﬁeld of the history of linguistics – as aresearcher, editor of more than 350 volumes (published since 1973 underthe imprint of John Benjamins, in several series of ‘Amsterdam Studies inthe Theory and History of Linguistic Science’), founding editor of the im-portant periodical Historiographia Linguistica as well as of Diachronica, andREVIEWS699organizer of the triennial International Conferences on the History of theLanguage Sciences, ﬁrst held in 1978.Keeping in mind the vastness of the works mentioned above, I wonderedwhether my unexpected sense of disappointment with the present volumecame from a feeling of anticlimax: parturiunt montes. But I do not think so,and in the following pages I shall try to explain how my reaction was causednot by excessively high expectations but by some intrinsic limitations of thiscollection.The book consists of ten essays, followed by a conclusion coyly titled‘In lieu of a conclusion’. Some of the essays are published here for the ﬁrsttime: the ﬁrst, ‘The historiography of American linguistics’, the sixth,‘On the rise and fall of generative linguistics’, the ninth, ‘On the origin ofmorphophonemics in American linguistics’, and the concluding one, ‘On theimportance of the history of linguistics’.The others have been previously published, and the ‘references to earlylocations where the subjects treated in the present volume … have been dealtwith in some fashion, in all circumstances in much less developed form’(v), are listed in the acknowledgements (v–vi). The chapters, with the dateof the ﬁrst printed version in parentheses (in some cases there are alsolater editions), deal with the following topics: chapter 2, ‘Towards a historyof Americanist linguistics’ (1988); chapter 3, ‘On the sources of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ (1992); chapter 4, ‘Leonard Bloomﬁeld and the Cours delinguistique ge ´ne ´rale’ (1989); chapter 5, ‘American structural linguisticsand the problem of meaning’ (1970); chapter 7, ‘Noam Chomsky’s readingof Saussure after 1961’ (1994); chapter 8, ‘The ‘‘Chomskyan revolution’’ andits historiography’ (1983). In a sort of excusatio non petita, the author statesthat he hasalways taken the attitude that one’s intellectual property cannot be copy-righted by others, unless it was written for an encyclopedia or a collectivework for which one has received payment and thus traded one’s rights toa publisher. Cannibalizing one’s own writings … is fair game. (v)This statement may contribute to explaining (but does not justify) therepetitiveness of many of the comments which reappear again and again inthe course of the volume. Cannibalizing one’s own writings may be all rightfor an author, but is less appetizing for readers who ﬁnd themselves par-taking of the same entre ´es in diﬀerent forms and degrees of preparation.To this, one should also add that the style is wooden and sometimes uni-diomatic, and that, to judge from the number of typos, the sub-editor musthave been less than careful.There are two questions that seem to be the main preoccupationsthroughout this volume, to which the author keeps returning in diﬀerentguises and from diﬀerent perspectives. One, of a general kind, is an attemptJOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS700to characterize the nature of the history of linguistics and to deﬁne the notionof ‘historiography’. The other, more speciﬁc point, concerns the notion of‘revolution’ in science and, more particularly, the question of whetherChomskyan linguistics should be considered a development (however orig-inal and innovative) from structural linguistics, or a radical break (in facta revolution) against it. To the nature of historiography the author devotesthe concluding chapter of his book. For someone like myself, who waseducated in Italy around the middle of the last century, the distinctionbetween history and historiography is obvious. Our culture was based onworks such as those of the great historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce,one of whose books we used to read in secondary school, entitled Teoriae storia della storiograﬁa. The terminological distinction between history(res gestae) and historiography (historia rerum gestarum) is clear enough,and so are the theoretical implications, suggesting that if you want tounderstand a historical problem it is desirable – indeed unavoidable – tostudy the HISTORY of the question, i.e., its historiography. A principled, theor-etically aware consideration of a historical issue includes its historiography.If this is natural for cultural history but presents peculiar diﬃculties forthe history of science, linguistics (which, for some aspects, seems to belongto the sciences, for others, to the humanities) is, from the viewpoint of itshistory, particularly problematic. A theoretically sophisticated considerationof these questions has been current since the end of the nineteenth century.Koerner, however, writes thatsince the late 1970s, the History of Linguistics has become a recognizedsubject of serious scholarly endeavour, notably in Europe but also else-where, and it appears to many in the ﬁeld that discussion of the subject’sraison d’e ˆtre is no longer required. (286)Readers might agree, were they not tempted to put the date back by abouta century and replace 1980 with 1870. The eﬀect of the comment, which theauthor adds in a parenthesis, is therefore rather weakened:Perhaps given my long-standing North American exposure in mattershistorical, I may be permitted to diﬀer, for my intention had never been toconvince people in Germany, Italy, or Spain for instance that a historicalperspective to our work in linguistics or language philosophy would bedesirable. It would have meant carrying coals to Newcastle, since in theseand many other countries there has been a long-standing tradition ofseeing subjects in a historical mode. (286)Well, yes, this may indeed be true. But then one wonders whether it wasworth writing a book about the historiography of linguistics, concentratingon questions which ignore such perspective or treat it as marginal. Besides,Koerner states that he is dealing with a NEW perspective, but unfortunatelyREVIEWS701does not explain in what way the notions he is using diﬀer from the tra-ditional ones, and what exactly he means by ‘linguistic past’ in this context:In my view, what I prefer to call (extending the traditional meaning ofthe term) the Historiography of Linguistics, by which I mean a principledmanner of dealing with our linguistic past, or Linguistic Historiographyfor short, furnishes the practising linguist with the material for acquiringa knowledge of the development of their own ﬁeld. (289f.)The second issue mentioned above concerns the relation between struc-tural linguistics and generative grammar. The author comes back tothis topic again and again, stressing that he sees it in terms of continuityrather than revolution (11f.): ‘Chomskyan ‘‘autonomous linguistics’’ hasmuch more in common with Bloomﬁeld’s linguistic theory and practicethan with Sapir’s’ (63). Koerner stresses that one of Chomsky’s doctoralstudents, Ray C. Dougherty, who wrote about a Bloomﬁeldian counter-revolution,mistakenlyinsistedthatSyntacticstructureshad‘initiatedarevol-ution in linguistics’ (108). About the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ Koernercomments:In may be a ‘psychological fact’ for those who want to believe that therewas one, but from the point of view of philosophy of science, there islittle evidence that a ‘scientiﬁc revolution’ occurred following the publi-cation of Syntactic Structures in 1957. (113)And again:It has become common-place to talk about a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’in the study of language, with the result that few, if any, would pause tothink about what the term ‘revolution’ implies or is taken to imply. It isinteresting to note that it is non-linguists in particular … who referred to‘Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics’. (157)And further:Despite many disclaimers, TGG [transformational generative grammar] isbasically post-Saussurean structuralism … However, it cannot be deniedthat many young men and women in linguistics during the 1960s and1970s believed they were witnessing a revolution in the ﬁeld, and it appearsthat this widespread belief (and the associated enthusiasm that youngpeople tend to generate) has been, I submit, at the bottom of the‘Chomskyan revolution’. (163)One could continue with more and more passages of a similar tenor:there has been much more continuity and cumulative advance in Americanlinguistics than we have been made to believe both by the active partici-pants in the ‘revolution’, the followers, and the court historians (210);JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS702and ‘there was more evolution than revolution occurring in Americanlinguistics during the 1940s and 1950s’ (224); the ‘practitioners’ rhetoricalclaims of revolutionary turns and paradigmatic incommensurabilities’ mustbe reconciled ‘with evidence that, in hindsight, suggests more continuity andcumulative advance (or in some cases even regression)’ (245).Making the same point over and over again inevitably causes a senseof tedium. But this is not just due to the repetitiveness of the individualessays. The diﬃculty is more serious since it seems to me that it ispointless to discuss whether a theory represents a revolution or an evol-ution. The question itself is not capable of a sensible deﬁnition or ameaningful answer. The etymology and cultural history of the term ‘rev-olution’ is of course an interesting topic, and the study of various usesand implications of the term, in diﬀerent areas and periods, may beinstructive and rewarding. Designations such as ‘French revolution’,‘October revolution’, ‘Industrial revolution’, ‘Copernican revolution’, etc.are well established and their use is fairly standardized (although initialsmay be lower case or capitalized), and it is perfectly reasonable to try toclarify the phenomena in question, or to look at them in a new light. Forinstance, as I was writing this review, I went to see at the NationalTheatre in London David Hare’s new play The permanent way. The pro-gramme notes print an interesting piece by Ian Jack in which the historyof railways is traced, and it is stated that ‘the Industrial Revolution,contrary to its name, arrived by increments’. This is a good point tomake, in the relevant context, and it clariﬁes the argument. Of course it islegitimate to point to elements of ‘continuity’ which link the present tothe past, but it would be frivolous to insist that one should thereforenot talk of an industrial ‘revolution’. In any case, the nearer in time acultural change is to us, the more diﬃcult it may be to decide whether itsdesignation has in fact become established or whether it is a question ofa controversial usage, adopted by some and rejected by others. The fascistregime in Italy, while it was in power, used to talk of the ‘Fascist Rev-olution’, but since it fell from power the designation has become obsolete.The situation is even more problematic in the case of titles such as Kuhn’s‘structure of scientiﬁc revolutions’. Here too, notwithstanding the attemptsto deﬁne the replacement of one paradigm by another, it seems fruitlessand unrewarding to argue whether a hypothesis belongs to this or thattrend, rather than discussing the relevant questions of substance. Tryingto prove that a work ﬁts into one or another paradigm (assuming thatthis notion makes sense), for instance, whether Saussure’s Cours orChomsky’s Syntactic structures belong to structural linguistics, or diﬀerentparadigms altogether, seems to me to have become a pointless exercise,particularly when one is left with the impression that an empty termin-ological game is being played, and few substantive questions are beingclariﬁed.REVIEWS703Concerning the relative positions of Saussure, of diﬀerent structuralisttrends, European and American, and of the various developments ofChomskyan linguistics, the situation was controversial from the start,and was clearly presented in the relevant works written in the sixties(see, for instance, Lepschy 1966: 37–39, 180–183 and the bibliographyquoted there; also Lepschy 1992: 57f.), and in the best of the more modernaccounts (such as Matthews 1993, 2001). My impression is that Koerner’sdiscussions add little of substance and, if anything, leave the situationmore confused than it was, distracting readers from the intellectual issuesinvolved and diverting their attention towards topics which are allegedto be culturally, ideologically and politically important but in fact turnout to concern petty questions of personal rivalry and self-seekingcareerism, attributed mainly to linguists of a generative persuasion. Thiskind of documentary research, masquerading as sociological history, isfrequently based on gossip, mean interpretation of private correspon-dence, malevolent imputing of base motivations. I feel that readers mayreact with irritation, as I did, at the manner in which criticisms arepresented or reported in these essays. As above, I think that, rather thanoﬀering a detailed analysis, the point can best be proved by oﬀering aseries of quotations which illustrate the temper of this book’s attitude.For instance:… one cannot help noticing that he [R. A. Harris] uncritically acceptsat face value Chomsky’s self-serving accounts of what American linguis-tics was like during his formative years. (113)… the picture that [R.A.] Harris draws of his [Chomsky’s] character on avariety of occasions – the manner in which he ﬁghts his adversaries, hisattitude toward the ‘intellectual property’ of others, and his humanshortcomings generally … is anything but complimentary. (114)Consider also the appeal to ‘keen observers of Chomsky’s technique ofcovering up his true sources of theoretical insight by referring to other, infact quite unlikely candidates’ (145, note 17).As for Morris Halle, ‘Chomsky’s longtime supporter and ally’ (166), heappears as the sinister organizer, administrator and academic politicianbehind the Chomskyan ‘revolution’. A visitor at MIT in 1962, before theInternational Congress, watched ‘Morris Halle plot as if he were Lenin inZurich’ (172). Koerner observes thatIf we take the Communist overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia in1917 as an example, we may detect some similarities between this socialand political revolution and what happened in American linguisticsduring the 1960s. I am thinking in particular of the manner in whichrepresentatives of the ancien re ´gime were treated (they may not haveJOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS704lost their lives, but many academic careers of those who did not jointhe new faith were negatively aﬀected, some were ruined) and, what is ofspecial interest in the present context, of the manner in which historywas rewritten, memory of the immediate past was obliterated and replacedby something else. (214)The MIT Linguistics Department ﬂourishedon the strength of the tremendous sums of money that ﬂowed into itscoﬀers during the 1960s and early 1970s. While it would be unfair to saythat money alone has made the success story of TGG possible – to main-tain such a view would mean to deny the existence of human resourceful-ness and creativity (not in the Chomskyan sense, nota bene!) – neverthelessevery researcher knows the importance of funding for any project s/hemight conceive. (168f.)The overall eﬀect of these comments seems to me depressing, particularlywhen one compares their pettiness with the unmistakable sense of intellectualvigour and originality, indeed of sheer genius, which one feels when oneapproaches an essay written by Chomsky – irrespective of the fact that onemay disagree with any individual suggestion, and indeed with many of hishypotheses concerning the history of linguistics.In order to end on a more upbeat note, I shall observe that in chapter 2,devoted to Americanist linguistics, readers will ﬁnd many useful and in-formative comments to which no doubt they will wish to refer in future, ifthey deal with this interesting and insuﬃciently known area. Koerner makesgood use here of modern studies, and makes helpful comments on the historyof so-called ‘missionary linguistics’, and on many ﬁgures who still deserveto be studied in greater detail such as John Pickering, Jonathan Edwards,Albert Gallatin, Pierre E ´tienne Du Ponceau, and many others. He concludesthatIt is this long-standing tradition of work on Amerindian languages whichexplains that American linguists did not need to read Saussure’s Coursin order to focus on the descriptive, ‘synchronic’ side of language struc-ture. (30)In what way exactly this can be linked to the main theme of this volume,however, is a question which would require a more complex discussion.REFERENCESChomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientiﬁc revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Lepschy, G. C. (1966). La linguistica strutturale. Turin: Einaudi.REVIEWS705Lepschy, G. C. (1992). La linguistica del Novecento. Bologna: il Mulino.Matthews, P. H. (1993). Grammatical theory in the United States from Bloomﬁeld to Chomsky.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Matthews, P. H. (2001). A short history of structural linguistics. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique ge ´ne ´rale. Lausanne & Paris: Payot.Author’s address: Department of Italian, University College London,Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, U.K.E-mail: g.lepschy@ucl.ac.uk(Received 27 January 2004)JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS706

A short history of structural linguistics. Cambridge:

Cours de linguistique ge ´ne ´rale. Lausanne &

Grammatical theory in the United States from Bloomﬁeld to Chomsky. Cambridge:

La linguistica strutturale. Turin: Einaudi.

Syntactic structures. The Hague:

E. F. K. Koerner, Towards a history of American linguistics (Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics 5). London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Pp. x+316

E. F. K. Koerner, Towards a history of American linguistics (Routledge Studies in the History of Linguistics 5). London & New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Pp. x+316

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