34.3235, Review: The Limits of Structuralism: McElvenny (ed.) (2023)

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Subject: 34.3235, Review: The Limits of Structuralism: McElvenny (ed.) (2023)

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Date: 01-Nov-2023
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Linguistic Theories, Philosophy of Language: McElvenny (ed.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.2136

EDITOR: James McElvenny
TITLE: The Limits of Structuralism
SUBTITLE: Forgotten Texts in the History of Modern Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

This book aims to shed light on the difficult concept of
“structuralism” by reprinting publications by seven scholars active in
the early decades of synchronic linguistics (all but the latest of
these reached print at least ninety years ago), with each introduced
by a present-day academic.  “Reprinted” is not quite the right word,
because most of these contributions were originally in other languages
and are published in English translation here for the first time.
Helpfully, original page numbers are inserted in the translations to
facilitate comparison with the originals.

After Chapter 1, in which the editor James McElvenny introduces the
concept of structuralism and the aims of his book, the seven
“reprinted” authors are:

Ch. 2:  Peter Du Ponceau on the grammatical structure of North
American languages, introduced by Floris Solleveld

Ch. 3:  Franz Boas, “The classification of American languages”,
introduced by Margaret Thomas

Ch. 4:  Georg von der Gabelentz on the idea of language typology,
introduced by McElvenny

Ch. 5:  Antoine Meillet on grammaticalization, introduced by John
Joseph

Ch. 6:  Roman Jakobson on “The Eurasian language union”, introduced by
Patrick Sériot

Ch. 7:  Louis Hjelmslev on what he called “linguistic correlations”,
introduced by Lorenzo Cigana

Ch. 8:  Emile Benveniste on “Structure of language and structure of
society”, introduced by Chloé Laplantine.

In the first chapter, McElvenny spells out what I understand by
“structuralism” in linguistics in terms of two famous quotations,
which describe a language as “un système où tout se tient” and say
“dans la langue il n’y a que des différences _sans termes positifs_”.
That is, a language should not be seen as a heap of disconnected
elements but a structure of relationships where a change at any one
point in the system will carry in its train changes elsewhere in the
system, and what matters about an element is not its individual
properties but how it relates to other elements.  (Compare a currency,
where what matters about a coin of a given pattern is that it is
equivalent to two of another pattern or five of a third pattern, but
the fact that British “silver” coins used to be made of a
copper/nickel alloy and are now nickel-plated steel has no relevance
to the functioning of the currency.)

Before reading this book, I confidently believed that the two French
quotations I have just given both came from Saussure’s _Course in
General Linguistics_, so it was a shock to learn from McElvenny that
the “où tout se tient” wording does not occur there (though the “que
des différences” quotation does).  McElvenny attributes the former
phrase to Antoine Meillet (1903), though E.F.K. Koerner (1996–97), who
has gone into this issue thoroughly, points out that Meillet had
already used “un système où tout se tient” in an 1893 paper.  Meillet
had been a student of Saussure’s in Paris in the late 1880s, and as
McElvenny points out, Meillet felt that he was only giving expression
to an idea which was already inherent in the 1879 _Mémoire_ that made
Saussure’s name.  Georg von der Gabelentz made a very similar remark
in a paragraph inserted in the 1901 edition of his
_Sprachwissenschaft_ (not included in the 1891 edition):  “Jeder [sic]
Sprache ist ein System, dessen sämmtliche Theile organisch
zusammenhängen und zusammenwirken.  Man ahnt, keiner dieser Theile
dürfte fehlen oder anders sein, ohne dass das Ganze verändert würde.”
Evidently this idea was “in the air” among linguists at the turn of
the twentieth century, and Saussure may well have been responsible for
introducing the idea, but it was Meillet who introduced the best-known
expression of it into the published literature of linguistics.

The word “Limits” in McElvenny’s title is explained on his first page
by saying that his book aims “to survey the conceptual boundaries of
structuralism, to see where its borders may lie and how permeable they
may be”; he asks “Who was part of this movement?  Who was not?”  This
explanation is needed, because some of the reprinted authors are much
less clearly members of the structuralist movement than others.  Franz
Boas is an important figure in the history of synchronic linguistics,
but I would not have thought he had much or any connexion with
structuralism in the Meillet/Saussure sense.  However, McElvenny
argues that Boas was a leader of a separate current of thought called
“American structuralism”, distinct from the European, Saussurean
tradition.  McElvenny writes that “the American structuralists had a
natural affinity for seeing languages as patterned formal systems”
(though I wonder what linguists that would not apply to).  On the
other hand, Margaret Thomas in her introduction to the Boas chapter,
while recognizing “American structuralism” as a separate intellectual
current, denies that Boas was a structuralist even of that stripe.

The postulation of a distinct, not very clearly defined, “American”
structuralism is one way in which this book displays a certain
American bias.  Another is that McElvenny sees little doubt that the
central figure in the history of structuralism was Roman Jakobson.
(And Patrick Sériot, introducing the Jakobson chapter, says that it is
a “received opinion” that Jakobson “was an early promoter, if not the
founding father of structuralism”.)  McElvenny has found a passage in
a Czech magazine from 1929 in which he believes Jakobson was the first
person to use the word “structuralism” in the relevant sense.  What
matters, though, is not the first use of the word, but how the current
of thought developed, and I would not see Jakobson as a central figure
there.  Jakobson was significant to Americans as the vehicle through
which Prague School structuralism came to the USA, when he emigrated
to New York in 1941, but I never noticed that Jakobson himself made
large contributions to structuralism as an intellectual movement.

By now, the leading ideas in Saussure’s _Course_ have acquired such
prestige that there is a danger of their being taken as self-evidently
right (in which case structuralism would hardly merit identification
as a distinct intellectual movement).  So, in considering a book like
McElvenny’s, it will be as well to begin by reminding ourselves that
structuralist principles are in fact often questionable.  To my mind
they are not necessarily wrong, but they exaggerate the incidence of
phenomena which do crop up in languages but are not the whole story.

Thus, John Ohala (2005) pointed out that the complex array of hidden
psychologically-real relationships between phonemes postulated by
structuralist phonology – matrices of pluses and minuses, “feature
geometry”, etc. – are largely redundant because the facts they are
used to explain often follow from the physical (articulatory,
aerodynamic, or acoustic) properties of the sounds, which are factors
comparable to the metal content of coinage and hence should be
irrelevant in Saussure’s eyes.  André Martinet (1955) held that
sound-changes are controlled by the “functional yield” (or “functional
load”) of phonemic oppositions, an abstract, relational property, but
when Robert King (1967) tested this hypothesis in detail he found that
“functional load, if it is a factor in sound change at all, is one of
the least important of those we know anything about”.  (See also
Sampson 2017: ch. 12 on a recent attempt to resurrect Martinet’s
idea.)  Those who have extended structuralist principles to syntax
believe that a native speaker’s usage is governed by complex ranges of
algebraic grammar rules of which the speaker is unconscious, but
empirical research casts doubt on whether natural languages have
grammars (Sampson 2017: ch. 3).  And so on.  But mainstream
linguistics continues to maintain a structuralist mindset, paying
little attention to objections like these.

When one considers how little notice is taken of those who express
scepticism about structuralist axioms, it is hard not to conclude that
many academics and others simply _want_ language to be a phenomenon
whose outward surface conceals a wealth of unobservable but
psychologically real principles or rules, open to study only by
initiates.  McElvenny brings out the way in which, after structuralism
was inaugurated near the beginning of the twentieth century, it
“spread throughout the humanities and social sciences, reaching a peak
mid-century” – or later:  as I recall it was in the years about 1965
or 1970 when any new book with “structuralism” in the title was sure
to find an eager audience among young people who were convinced that
linguistics and related subjects were going to reveal to us
previously-unguessed mysteries about the human mind.  People might not
have any expertise of their own in the relevant subjects, but they had
a strong will to believe.  It may not be a stretch to see
structuralism, with its insistence that what matters about language
and other human activities is abstract, unobservable mental patterns
below the surface of physical reality, as one of the innocent-looking
headwaters of what became a broader intellectual current that has
ended with the humanities side of universities giving us a
“post-truth” society, in which those who assert empirical facts such
as the reality of immutable biological sex risk being “cancelled” or
losing their jobs, in a way that had seemed to become unthinkable in
the centuries since Urban VIII cancelled Galileo.

So we need to approach McElvenny’s (or any) account of structuralism
in a sober frame of mind, asking ourselves not just whether the work
of the movement is accurately described but whether that work did in
fact lead to better understanding of the nature of human language, or
of other aspects of mental life to which structuralist methods were
applied.

EVALUATION

In evaluating a book of this type, relevant questions are whether the
contributions are wisely chosen – are the authors adequately
representative, and do the items selected from their output help
readers to understand their contribution to the structuralist
movement; and also, how well the chapter-introducers interpret the
authors they introduce.

One surprising selection from the output of an author who certainly
merits a place in the book is by far the most recent of the
contributions, that by Emile Benveniste.  This transcribes a talk
given by Benveniste at a meeting which the Olivetti company convened
in 1968 to burnish its public image.  (Olivetti was then a successful
typewriter manufacturer, the Apple of its day:  its machines were
works of art.)  At that date farsighted industrialists knew that a
computer revolution was round the corner, and Olivetti was already
trying to carve out a place for itself within the new digital world.
The meeting assembled a line-up of established academic “names” to
give talks under the overall heading of “Languages in society and in
technology”; I wasn’t there, but I imagine elegant surroundings and an
invited audience of influential though not necessarily intellectual
citizens.  Benveniste’s contribution was the kind of thing that was
probably expected:  lots of buzzwords, not much solid content.  I
wonder whether Benveniste himself would have chosen to resurrect it
fifty-odd years later.

(Meanwhile, IBM and Apple eventually rolled over Olivetti as they did
over others.  “Olivetti” today is merely a brand owned by Telecom
Italia.)

A surprising omission, on the other hand, is no chapter by Nikolai
Trubetzkoy.  This is all the odder, when the chapter by Roman
Jakobson, dating from 1931, is about the concept of _Sprachbund_,
which I associate more with Trubetzkoy than with Jakobson.  (This is
the concept that a set of languages may show family resemblances not
because they descend from a common ancestor but because, being spoken
in contiguous territories, they have grown similar to one another.)
The existence of _Sprachbünde_ is uncontroversial today, but it
contradicted Neogrammarian orthodoxy and was a novel idea in the early
twentieth century.

Rather than discussing the _Sprachbund_ concept in general, Jakobson’s
chapter is almost entirely about one alleged example, and not a
particularly plausible case:  a _Sprachbund_ covering the languages of
what had been the Russian Empire and, when Jakobson was writing, was
the Soviet Union.  It emerges that belief in this linguistic
phenomenon was part of a much broader, rather sinister-sounding
ideology (Vladimir Putin would love it) called Eurasianism, which
asserted that the whole of that territory was (quoting Patrick
Sériot’s introduction) “a _natural totality_ … characterized by a
certain number of elements which united it [including] ethnic,
economic, anthropological, human, geographical, cultural, linguistic,
etc. features”, and naturally separate from the rest of Europe;
according to Jakobson “the historical destiny of Eurasia confirms its
indissoluble unity”.  Eurasianism was apparently a formal association
founded in Sofia in 1921 by four Russian émigrés, Trubetzkoy being one
of them.

It is not for me to assess the non-linguistic aspects of Eurasianism
(though I do wonder how far Jakobson continued to teach the historical
destiny of the Soviet Union when he was a citizen of the 1950s’ USA).
But the linguistic aspect is odd enough.  He tells us that Soviet
languages (as I shall call them for short) are united by sharing two
properties:  they are not tone languages, and they show a phonemic
contrast in some or all consonants between what in Russian are called
“hard” and “soft” variants, soft consonants being what modern
phoneticians would call either palatal or palatalized consonants,
depending whether closeness of tongue to hard palate is a primary or
secondary articulation.

Jakobson notes that although these properties come close to coinciding
with the Soviet borders, Eurasianism has been “aggressive” enough to
extend the hard/soft contrast to Polish to the west and Japanese to
the east (he claims that Japanese /rya/ is two phonemes rather than
three, /ry/ being a soft counterpart to hard /r/).  I suppose the case
of Polish could be explained by the fact that much of Poland was once
part of the Russian Empire.  But Czech, he repeatedly says, lacks this
contrast – as it should, since the Czech lands historically belonged
to the Austrian rather than Russian empire.  This is bewildering.  If
Japanese /rya ~ ra/ count as soft v. hard, I cannot imagine why Czech
_řa ~ ra_, or _ti di ni_ v. _ty dy ny_, do not.  I have noticed more
than once before that linguists interested in Russian seem to get into
muddles about the terms “palatal” and “palatalized” – see my review
(Sampson 2023) of Bakró-Nagy et al. (2022), an otherwise excellent
book – and this is surely another example.  Jakobson does mention some
languages of eastern Siberia which lack the hard/soft contrast; Sériot
(footnote to p. 144) seeks to explain this away by saying that
Jakobson was only really interested in the languages of European
Russia.  But if the Eurasianist idea about language boils down to “all
Soviet languages are of type T, except for the ones that aren’t”, this
is not much of a claim.

(Since the hard/soft contrast is so central to Jakobson’s chapter, it
is unfortunate that where he illustrates a long series of minimal
pairs, on p. 182, almost all the soft signs seem to have gone missing
in the romanized transliterations.)

Remarkably, Jakobson explicitly asserts that the various Soviet
languages have mutually assimilated not simply because their speakers
influenced one another, but for “teleological” reasons:  the languages
were striving to express their shared Eurasianity.  Polabian was a
Slavonic language spoken in otherwise German-speaking territory which
went extinct in the eighteenth century; it did have hard and soft
consonant-pairs despite being far from Russia, but according to
Jakobson “A language doomed to disappear often allows itself risky
phonological experiments which are inaccessible to a language that is
destined for wide expansion.”  All this is certainly enlightening
about the quality of Roman Jakobson’s thought, but does it inform us
about the structuralist movement?

The writers who introduce the chapters have interpreted this task
rather variously.  Some of the introductions are useful brief accounts
of how the chapter introduced relates to the wider state of linguistic
thought at the time, and some go further, using the chapter introduced
as a peg on which to hang a wide-ranging survey of the author’s work.
(McElvenny’s introduction to the von der Gabelentz chapter is three
times as long as that chapter.)  Half of Lorenzo Cigana’s twenty-page
introduction to the Hjelmslev chapter is about its publication history
– an early MS was intended as a conference contribution but was
rejected, and we are told exactly which committee members voted
against it, how Hjelmslev arranged to publish a reworked version
elsewhere, and so forth:  material that might have been allowed to
lapse into the oubliette of history without much loss.  More than one
chapter-introduction contain passages which are expressed too
metaphorically for me to gather a clear meaning from them.  I do not
know what to make of a remark like Sériot’s “the emergence of European
structuralism between the two World Wars is similar to a painful
birth.  One can distinguish different lineages, different lines of
force.”  When a woman’s labour is painful, it isn’t because she is
unsure who the father is.

Some chapter-introductions contain factual errors.  For instance, the
first chapter after the editor’s introduction, by Peter Du Ponceau, is
largely about polysynthesis in Amerindian languages.  The introducer
Floris Solleveld tells us that Du Ponceau had favourite examples of
words in European languages which share some of this polysynthetic
character; the first example he quotes is “Italian _nolo_ ‘I do not
know’ ”.  The word _nolo_ is Latin for “I do not want” – as Du Ponceau
says where he uses the example in the piece Solleveld has translated.
(_Nolo_ in Italian means “freight”.)  We might all on occasion slip a
mental cog and produce an error as crass as this, and then be so
hypnotized by our own MS that re-reading fails to show us the mistake.
But it is an important part of an editor’s job in a case like this to
save contributors from themselves.  (When I was a young man, OUP’s
editors could be relied on to query such points if they slipped
through as far as them, but I realize that those days are long past.)

Footnoting a passage in the Meillet chapter about the grammar of a
French Bible quotation, “laissez venir à moi les petits enfants” (the
Authorized Version has “Suffer little children to come unto me”), John
Joseph objects that Meillet’s analysis is misguided because both the
French and the English versions are only loose translations of the
Greek original, which has _ta paidia_ with no word for “little”.  This
is quite beside the point, since Meillet was discussing the grammar of
the French sentence (he did not mention the original); but in any case
Greek _paidia_ is the plural of _paidion_ which is a diminutive of
_pais_, “child”, so “little children” is a perfectly literal
rendering.

At one place in Lorenzo Cigana’s translation from the French of the
Hjelmslev chapter, Hjelmslev exemplifies an issue about uses of the
imperative in a footnote which begins, in Cigana’s version, “Cf. Latin
_ubi data occasionst, rape clepe tene_ (Plaute, _Pseud._ 138)”.
Cigana has not realized that Hjelmslev’s “Plaute” is the French name
for Plautus, and that _occasionst_ is a copying error for Plautus’s
_occasiost_, a colloquial contraction of _occasio est_.  The line from
Plautus’s _Pseudolus_ means “Where an opportunity has been given (i.e.
if you get a chance), rob, filch, grab, …”.  Hjelmslev is making the
straightforward point (much easier to understand than a lot of what he
writes in this article) that although the verbs _rape clepe tene_ are
singular imperative forms, in Plautus’s play they are not functioning
as commands to a hearer but as a description of the behaviour of
bystanders who are not being addressed.  This has evidently passed
Cigana by.  Yet, if he does not take the trouble to follow Hjelmslev’s
concrete examples, how can he hope to lead us through the mazy
abstractions of Hjelmslev’s theorizing?

True, in Hjelmslev’s case some readers may feel that it is scarcely
worthwhile to spend too much time trying to make sense of his
strangely abstruse algebraic analyses of simple language phenomena.  I
am put off when a scholar boasts, using the royal we, that “Our work
has no forerunners”, as Hjelmslev does here, and I sympathize with the
view attributed by Cigana to Trubetzkoy that Hjelmslev’s work is full
of “useless subtleties”.  (But then, I have not offered to interpret
Hjelmslev’s theory of linguistic correlations to the scholarly world.)

I am glad to have been put right about the authorship of the “où tout
se tient” quotation.  But this book did not leave me with a sense that
I had learned much that I did not know before about the structuralist
movement, or even perhaps that there is a great deal more to be
learned.

REFERENCES

Bakró-Nagy, M., et al., eds.  2022.  The Oxford Guide to the Uralic
Languages.  Oxford University Press.
von der Gabelentz, G.  1901.  Die Sprachwissenschaft: ihre Aufgaben,
Methoden, und bisherigen Ergebnisse (2nd edn).  Tauchnitz (Leipzig).
King, R.D.  1967.  “Functional load and sound change”.  Language
43.831–52.
Koerner, E.F.K.  1996–97.  “Notes on the history of the concept of
language as a system ‘où tout se tient’ ”.  Linguistica Atlantica
18.1–20.
Martinet, A.  1955.  Economie des changements phonétiques.  Francke
(Bern).
Meillet, A.  1893.  “Les lois du langage I: Les lois phonétiques”.
Revue internationale de sociologie 1.311–21.
Meillet, A.  1903.  Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues
indo-européennes.  Hachette (Paris).
Ohala, J.J.  2005.  “Phonetic explanations for sound patterns:
implications for grammars of competence”.  In W.J. Hardcastle and J.M.
Beck, eds, A Figure of Speech: a Festschrift for John Laver.  Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Sampson, G.R.  2017.  The Linguistics Delusion.  Equinox (Sheffield).
Sampson, G.R.  2023.  Review of Bakró-Nagy et al. 2022.  Linguist List
34.742, <linguistlist.org/issues/34/34-742/>.
Saussure, F.  1879.  Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans
les langues  indo-européennes.  Teubner (Leipzig).

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University
in 1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate
student at Yale University before teaching at the universities of
Oxford, LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his
Computing chair at Sussex he spent several years as a research fellow
in Linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has
published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of other
subjects. His recent books include "The Linguistics Delusion" (2017),
"Voices from Early China" (2020), and "God Proofs" (2022).



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