35.1598, Review: The Cambridge History of Linguistics: Waugh, Monville-Burston, Joseph (eds.) (2023)

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Subject: 35.1598, Review: The Cambridge History of Linguistics: Waugh, Monville-Burston, Joseph (eds.) (2023)

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Date: 30-May-2024
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: History of Linguistics: Waugh, Monville-Burston, Joseph (eds.) (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.34

EDITOR: Linda R. Waugh
EDITOR: Monique Monville-Burston
EDITOR: John E. Joseph
TITLE: The Cambridge History of Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

This book aims to fill a notable gap in the literature of linguistics,
by supplying a comprehensive account of its history from the earliest
records to the present day. Until now, the standard suggestion to
anyone seeking a history of the subject has been Robins (1967), which
is an excellent book but is short (as its title announces), and is
limited to the European tradition beginning with Greece and Rome.
Among other single-volume histories, setting aside the four-volume
‘History of Linguistics’ edited by Giulio Lepschy (1994–98), Allan
(2007) is longer than Robins but similarly restricted in purview.
McElvenny (2024) is even newer than the book under review and I have
not yet seen it, but its coverage begins only in the early nineteenth
century. The present book is more than a thousand pages long, and its
front cover flap offers coverage of Mesopotamia, East Asia, India, and
more; on p. 1 of their general Introduction to the volume, the editors
announce that they “have taken into account the importance,
originality, and pertinence of language-related concerns within
various cultures and intellectual traditions from ancient times up to
the year 2000”.

After that general Introduction, the book is divided into three Parts:
Part I: “Ancient, classical, and medieval periods” (Introduction to
the Part plus six chapters)
Part II: “Renaissance to late nineteenth century” (Introduction plus
six chapters)
Part III: “Late nineteenth- through twentieth-century linguistics”,
which is divided into an Introduction plus:
Part IIIA: “Late nineteenth century through the 1950s: synchrony,
autonomy, and structuralism” (five chapters)
Part IIIB: “1960–2000: formalism, cognitivism, language use and
function, interdisciplinarity” (thirteen chapters)
The Parts are divided into chapters partly by date but mainly by
topic, so for instance the chapters of Part IIIA are:
13: “Move to synchrony: late nineteenth to early twentieth century”
14: “Structuralism in Europe”
15: “British linguistics”
16: “American linguistics to 1960: science, data, method”

A few chapters are further subdivided into sections by different
authors; for instance the “British linguistics” chapter has one
section by Michael MacMahon on “Late nineteenth century to 1970”, and
another by Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie on “Neo-Firthian corpus
linguistics to 2000”. In all the book has 55 contributors.
The references are helpfully amalgamated into a single list (of 130
pages), eliminating the need to flick back and forth searching for
lists at the end of individual chapters. As readers will have guessed
from the use of “through” in the Part titles, the text is couched in
American English throughout, although many contributors are from
Britain or the Commonwealth (and Cambridge is an English university).

The book has evidently, and inevitably, been a long time in gestation.
We are not told when work on it began, but for instance Chapter 24,
“Historical and universal-typological linguistics”, is by Anna
Siewierska, who died in 2011. She is not the only contributor who died
between submitting a draft and eventual publication, and there are
other cases where authors were apparently not in a position to approve
the published version of their contribution; for instance Jürgen
Trabant, I believe, is happily still with us, but his chapter on “The
celebration of linguistic diversity: Humboldt’s anthropological
linguistics”, has an editorial footnote saying “in 2020, with the help
of one of [Trabant’s] colleagues, we were able to contact his wife and
received permission [to make minor changes to the MS and publish it]”.

Furthermore the editorial team itself changed after the project was
launched. Linda Waugh of the University of Arizona saw the book
through from start to finish, but John Joseph of Edinburgh University
dropped out at an early stage; Monique Monville-Burston, from a
Cypriot university, was brought in to share the workload.

Some issues covered in Part IIIB are quite contentious among
theoreticians today. The editors say about this that “While the
authors have been asked to be broadly non-partisan in their
exposition, they have also been encouraged, where appropriate, to
address controversial issues (and to show their preferences while
respecting other views)”, and this sensible policy has been followed.
Frederick Newmeyer is known as an energetic defender of the Chomskyan
approach to linguistics, but his chapter, “Chomsky and the turn to
syntax, including alternative approaches to syntax”, is very fair in
both describing the ways in which Chomsky’s ideas had roots in the
linguistics of his predecessors (rather than treating Chomsky, as some
acolytes do, as someone who created his field out of nothing), and
also describing many of the subsequent developments, such as George
Lakoff’s Cognitive Linguistics, which ran contrary to Chomsky’s own
theories.

The volume structure, comprising a top-level division into historical
periods and, within each period, a lower-level division by topic,
feels natural but it does create a problem if one example of a topic
falls outside the period which includes the rest of the examples. Part
II covers the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, so its first chapter,
by Jaap Maat and David Cram on “Universal language schemes”, is able
to include both the philosophical languages proposed in the
seventeenth century such as John Wilkins’s “Real Character”, and the
naturalistic languages constructed in the nineteenth century such as
Volapük and Esperanto. But the late-twentieth century constructed
language Lojban (Cowan 1997, <mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban>), which to
my mind is a more interesting philosophical-language experiment than
those of the seventeenth century, falls outside the Part II timeframe
and is unconnected with the main linguistic currents of the Part III
period, so it is not mentioned.

EVALUATION

One issue I have with the book is its coverage. Part I has extensive
surveys of linguistic thought in various non-European societies from
their beginnings up to the (European) Middle Ages. Alexander Vovin’s
section of Chapter 2, on “Early linguistic traditions in Korea and
Japan”, takes those stories up to the year 1448 where it ends
abruptly, in line with the Part I timeframe, so I searched through the
book to find where the stories continued. I was puzzled to find no
continuation, until I realized that the general volume Introduction,
on a later page than the passage quoted in my opening paragraph, says:
“We do not return to the East Asian, Indian, and Near/Middle Eastern
traditions in Parts II and III, because, in general, their subsequent
history is typified by faithful cultural transmission of the earlier
ideas …”

The editors surely cannot really believe that non-Europeans thought
for themselves about language until 500 years ago, but then all went
to sleep for a few centuries until Westerners arrived to wake them up?
It certainly is not true of Korea for one, where Ju Sigyeong (who
lived from 1876 to 1914) argued for a concept of underlying versus
surface structures in both syntax and phonology, long before such
ideas became common currency among Western linguists; Ju’s thinking,
unlike that of English-speaking linguists, heavily influenced the
standard orthography of his national language. I sketched the small
amount I was able to learn about Ju’s linguistics in my book ‘Writing
Systems’ (Sampson 2015: 159–62), and I would have welcomed a fuller
and better-informed discussion by someone who can read Korean; but it
was not to be. And I know that new thinking happened elsewhere in the
world too, which I should have been glad to learn about. But, from the
beginning of Part II onwards (three-quarters of the book), the
non-European world becomes invisible. The book almost makes a boast of
this, by dating Part II from the “Renaissance”, an exclusively
European historical phenomenon.

(One Part I chapter, Kees Versteegh on “The Arabic Linguistic
Tradition”, takes the intended limitation of Part I to the pre-modern
period less seriously than other contributors, discussing at least one
nineteenth-century linguist.)

It may of course be that the unplanned changes in teams of editors and
contributors forced the coverage of the book to change in unplanned
ways. But I wondered how widely the editors cast their net when
recruiting contributors. East Asia does not lack academics who could
have written competently, in a European language, about the history of
linguistics in their countries, but it is noticeable that not one of
the 55 contributors here is based outside Europe or the
European-settled world; only one has a non-European-sounding name
(Madhav Deshpande of the University of Michigan, who has written
chapter 3 on “Linguistic Analysis in the Sanskrit Tradition in
Premodern India”).
It is not even necessary to leave Europe to find one large
unrepresented territory: the editors are explicit that
post-Revolutionary Russia and its “near-abroad” are an “important
lacuna” in their book, which they explain in terms of “the isolation
of the ‘Soviet bloc’ for several decades”. It is true that Russian
work has been less accessible to Westerners than work from many other
areas, but that would only make it the more desirable for a reference
work like this to cover it: the Russians have been developing
linguistics along original lines quite independent of Western
research. People willing to make the effort have managed to learn
about some of it: Harald Baayen (2001) discusses Soviet statistical
work, Johanna Nichols (e.g. 1992: 8–12) writes knowledgeably and
enthusiastically about the typological theories of G.A. Klimov. But we
learn nothing about these matters here.

Another disappointment is that some Part I chapters contain passages
consisting of little more than long lists of names of grammarians and
titles of their books, with hardly any indication of what their books
say. And when doctrines are mentioned, this is not always done in an
informative way. José Martínez Delgado, on “The Hebrew Linguistic
Tradition”, discusses a Hebraist (died ca A.D. 1000) known by the
Arabic name Ḥayyūj, “the prince of medieval Hebrew grammar”, who
“drafted a monographic work … which would change the history of the
Hebrew language … The behavior of the three consonants, ‘ ’alef’,
‘waw’, and ‘yod’ [i.e. /Ɂ w j/], was his great discovery.” What is
this behaviour? I have a reasonable knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, by
Gentile standards at least, but it is not clear to me what Martínez is
referring to.

Most Part I chapters are at least devoid of errors, so far as I am
competent to judge. Regrettably, that is not true of the 26-page
introduction to the Part, by Mark Amsler, which seems to rely heavily
on secondary or tertiary sources which have not always been
understood. This introduction is subtitled “The emergence of
linguistic thinking within premodern cultural practices” and begins
with remarks like “Language study … is a form of symbolic power”, but
as the introduction develops it does not pursue this politicized
viewpoint far. It focuses more on the topics covered in the following
Part I chapters, but it throws out remarks which often seem
misleading. Amsler says that “Phoenician and later Hebrew and Arabic
writing … rel[ied] on diacritical marks to indicate vowels and
phonetic features (e.g. aspiration)”: did any of these languages use
aspiration distinctively? Amsler may be thinking of the Hebrew dagesh
dot, which distinguishes e.g. the sounds commonly romanized as p
versus ph, but ph was not an aspirated stop, like the phi of Ancient
Greek; it was a fricative [f], and is romanized as ph because [p] and
[f] were allophones of one phoneme. Discussing Chinese, Amsler
confuses two separate phenomena. The ‘xingsheng’ system was a way that
graphs were formed when the script was emerging some three millennia
ago: a target word was written with a compound graph in which one
element stood for a near-homophone of the target, in the pronunciation
of the period, and the other element represented a word having a
semantic connexion to the target. ‘Fanqie’ on the other hand is a
system in standard use until quite recently, in the absence of a
phonetic script, to show the pronunciation of a dictionary entry: two
graphs are given, of which the first shares its initial consonant with
the target and the second shares the rest of the syllable. (In chapter
2, Alain Peyraube and Hilary Chappell describe fanqie correctly.)

Amsler tells us that “Anglo-Saxon scribes introduced characters from
Ogham and runic writing to represent Old English sounds that didn’t
occur in Latin”. Runes, yes, but what elements of ogham were used?
None that I know of. Amsler defines the Latin ablative absolute
construction as “a reduced past participle clause”. I don’t know what
he means by “reduced” (reduced from what?), but ablative absolutes
don’t necessarily use past participles. Sometimes they contain no verb
form at all: ‘consulibus Manlio Iulioque’, “while the consuls were/are
Manlius and Julius”. And very often ablative absolutes are based on
present participles, like the phrase often abbreviated ‘nem. con.’ in
present-day committee minutes: ‘nemine contradicente’, “with no-one
dissenting”.

With these and other errors, Amsler’s Introduction creates an
unpromising impression for readers embarking on Part I of this book.
(There are also strange anomalies in Vovin’s section already
mentioned, but these are of a different order. They all relate to
Chinese script. For instance, after introducing the graph 月 for yuè
‘moon’ Vovin adds “(Archaic 疑)”. The latter graph represents yí
‘doubt’; it is not archaic, and not related in any way to yuè ‘moon’.
I imagine these errors arose in transmitting electronically-coded text
between Vovin’s and C.U.P.’s equipment, though I cannot guess how they
ought to read – and was there no proof-checking?)
In terms of the balance of detail on the various historical periods,
the book as a whole is very heavily weighted towards more recent
times. To an extent this is justified by the fact that there have been
many more professional academics producing more publications since the
middle of the twentieth century than there were anywhere before. But
the editors also give the impression of not being particularly
historically-minded. They provide brief summarizing introductions to
the volume as a whole and to the three-section Chapter 6, “Near
Eastern linguistic traditions”, but they delegate the more substantial
introductions to Parts I and II to others (Part I, 26 pp. by Mark
Amsler; Part II, 18 pp. by Lia Formigari); the editors’ main
contribution of original writing is their introduction to Part III, 78
pp., and two-thirds of that (52 pp.) is about just the last forty
years of the more than two millennia surveyed in the volume.

At one point in that introduction, the editors discuss the British
sociolinguist Basil Bernstein, describing him as drawing a distinction
between “the ‘restricted’ code (of poorer, minority speakers) and the
‘elaborated’ code (of more affluent, white speakers)”. This surprised
me, so I checked with Bernstein (1971), and found no reference to
race. The empirical research on which Bernstein based his theory of
two codes was carried out at the end of the 1950s, only a decade after
the June 1948 voyage of the ‘Empire Windrush’ which is usually taken
as the beginning of the eventual large influx of non-white immigrants
into Britain. Numbers then were still small; as a teenager I walked
daily through the centre of the large port city of Bristol to take the
bus home after school, and my memory is that a non-white face was a
quite unusual sight. There is no reason to doubt that both groups of
youngsters whose language behaviour was compared by Bernstein were
white English boys. The editors are unhistorically imposing
21st-century obsessions on the very different society of the 1950s.

It is clearly not possible, within the bounds of a review, to give a
comprehensive evaluation of the many individual contributions. There
is worthwhile stuff scattered throughout. A particularly interesting
chapter, to me, was John Coleman’s contribution on instrumental
phonetics, a subject I had lost contact with since the 1960s. It has
evidently made great strides in the subsequent decades. To mention
just one topic in a very rich chapter, it now seems that Daniel
Jones’s cardinal vowel quadrilateral is misleading in its implication
that vowel quality is determined directly by the position of the
highest point of the tongue: the relevant variables have more to do
with the root of the tongue than with its surface. And chapters such
as Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Michael Kaschak’s on relationships
between linguistics and psychology since 1950 provide workmanlike
accounts of their topics.

A number of contributors do a useful service by drawing attention to
unjustly neglected scholars or books of the past; both Daniele
Gambarara and co-authors Emanuele Fadda and Lorenzo Cigana, in their
section of Cchapter 14 on “Structuralism in Europe”, and Michael
McMahon in his section of Cchapter 15, “British linguistics”, mention
Sir Alan Gardiner’s 1932 book ‘Theory of Speech and Language’ as
worthy of more attention than it has had. And some contributors
helpfully avoid excessive deference to “great names”. I particularly
enjoyed McMahon’s footnote to a quotation from J.R. Firth, saying that
Firth “loved to bring in scientific analogies, allegedly to clarify
his argument, but in fact only to make it even more opaque”.

Unexpected aperçus abound. Patrick Sériot in his section on the Prague
Linguistic Circle identifies the birth of the ‘Sprachbund’ concept
(the idea that similarities between languages do not necessarily stem
from common ancestry, as the Neogrammarians believed, but sometimes
result from unrelated languages in contact growing together) with a
talk about puzzling similarities between Czech and Hungarian by a
German, Henrik Becker, in Vilém Mathesius’s office in 1926. Kees de
Bot and Margaret Thomas’s chapter on “Applied linguistics”, discussing
the fact that much university teaching in Continental European
countries, including the Netherlands, is nowadays done in English,
notes that one problem is “that students felt they learned less when
they were taught in a foreign language” – but it is not clear that
this perception is correct.

On the other hand, there are also chapters, particularly relating to
“humanities” rather than technical areas of linguistics, which simply
state the areas worked on by various scholars who succeeded in making
names for themselves, without much attempt to identify strengths and
weaknesses in their ideas. And some contributors seem more interested
in who was a student of whose and which individuals or schools
influenced which others, than in the contents of their doctrines. Some
chapters are unrelievedly abstract, lacking concrete examples to
illustrate the isms; there are many pages which feel as though the
authors might have lost touch with the fact that linguistics is
ultimately about speech-sounds, words, grammatical constructions, and
so forth.

Considering how much of the book is devoted to the 1960–2000 period,
it is remarkable how many strands of linguistics which came to the
fore then are overlooked. Alain Polguère’s chapter on “Lexicology and
lexicography”, and Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie’s brief two-page
section mentioned above, discuss electronic corpora in connexion with
dictionary-making, but nothing in this book describes the many other
applications of corpora (pioneered not least by the last-named
co-authors): say, McEnery’s study of the important sociolinguistic
phenomenon of “bad language”, which could scarcely have been done
adequately other than through corpus data (see McEnery 1999 – and,
since the timeframe of the book under review, McEnery 2005); or
Douglas Biber’s marshalling of corpus data with the statistical
technique of factor analysis to produce new discoveries about the
evolution of style (e.g. Biber 1991). (Oddly, the reference list
includes several Biber items, but I never spotted his name in the body
of the book although I was looking out for it. Biber’s name is not in
the index – but many page-references are missing for names that are
included.) There is no mention of important computer techniques not
involving corpora, such as the work of Don Ringe’s team on automatic
phylogenetic analysis of language-families (e.g. Warnow, Ringe, and
Taylor 1995) – which has since become so influential that Thomas
Olander (2022: 2–3) felt driven to argue that traditional
historical-linguistic methods should not be abandoned.

Furthermore the book does no more than briefly mention by name some of
the areas, such as machine translation or automatic speech
recognition, where natural language processing was already being
harnessed to economically-significant tasks. (Admittedly, by now it
seems that the more successful machine translation becomes, the less
its techniques owe to linguistics in a traditional sense – but that
finding is itself a significant linguistic discovery.)

I did not notice many factual mistakes in Parts II and III ­– though
it was surprising to read Daniele Gambarara and co-authors describing
Tesnière (1959) as containing “one of the first uses of tree diagrams
for the representation of syntactic structures”: schoolchildren have
routinely been taught to use tree-diagrams to represent
sentence-structure, in the English-speaking world at least, since the
nineteenth century. (See for instance Meiklejohn 1893: 100ff., a book
which went through dozens of editions under changing titles on both
sides of the Atlantic.) Has French pedagogy not used similar methods?
On pp. 346–7 of Kurt Jankowsky’s chapter on the Neogrammarians there
are oddities which may reflect problems with computer coding of
special characters. The letter q seems to be used for the interdental
fricative /θ/, and a list said to exemplify the origin of Germanic
voiced fricatives contains no voiced-fricative symbols. Among trivial
errors, it is amusing to notice that one of Chomsky’s best-known books
is repeatedly cited as ‘Aspects of a Theory of Syntax’. Chomsky
actually called his book ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ – not a
wholly trivial difference.

I was surprised to see positive references in at least three chapters
to Paul Grice’s “Co-operative Principle”, which seems empirically
false, and obviously so, as an account of how human communication
works (Sampson 1982).

This book ought to have been called ‘A History of Western
Linguistics’. But even as such, it could have been much better.

REFERENCES
Allan, K., 2007. The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics.
Equinox (Sheffield).
Baayen, R.H., 2001. Word Frequency Distributions. Kluwer.
Bernstein, B., 1971. Class, Codes and Control, vol. 1: theoretical
studies towards a sociology of language. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Biber, D., 1991. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge
University Press.
Cowan, J.W., 1997. The Complete Lojban Language. The Logical Language
Group (Fairfax, Va.).
Gardiner, A.H., 1932. The Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford
University Press.
Lepschy, G.C., ed., 1994–98. History of Linguistics (4 vols).
Routledge.
McElvenny, J., 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: from the
beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh University Press.
McEnery, A., 1999. “Swearing and abuse in modern British English”. In
Practical Applications in Language Corpora: papers from the
international conference at the University of Łódź, 15–18 April 1999
(PALC ’99).
McEnery, A., 2005. Swearing in English: bad language, purity and power
from 1586 to the present. Routledge.
Meiklejohn, J.M.D., 1893. A New Grammar of the English Tongue, 10th
edn. Alfred Holden.
Nichols, J., 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. University
of Chicago Press.
Olander, T., ed., 2022. The Indo-European Language Family: a
phylogenetic perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Robins, R.H., 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. Longmans.
Sampson, G.R., 1982. “The economics of conversation”. In N.V. Smith,
ed., Mutual Knowledge. Academic Press.
Sampson, G.R., 2015. Writing Systems (2nd edn). Equinox (Sheffield).
Tesnière, L., 1959. Eléments de syntaxe structurale. Librairie
Klincksieck (Paris).
Warnow, T., D. Ringe, and A. Taylor, 1995. “Reconstructing the
evolutionary history of natural languages”. In Proceedings of the
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms.

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 other subjects. His next
book, a sequel to “Schools of Linguistics” (1980), will be “Structural
Linguistics in the 21st Century”, to appear in late 2024.



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