36.1357, Reviews: Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century: Frajzyngier (2025)

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Subject: 36.1357, Reviews: Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century: Frajzyngier (2025)

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Date: 24-Apr-2025
From: Zygmunt FRAJZYNGIER [Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at Colorado.Edu]
Subject: General Linguistics: Frajzyngier (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2760

Title: Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
           http://www.cambridgescholars.com/
Book URL: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-0364-1259-3

Author(s): Geoffrey Sampson

Reviewer: Zygmunt FRAJZYNGIER

SUMMARY
Sampson’s Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century book consists of
29 chapters. All chapters, except for Introduction, Chapter 9
‘Grammatical Symptoms and Social Causes’, Chapter 11 ‘Language in deep
time, and the Epilogue (Chapter 29), have been previously published
between 2001 and 2023 in a variety of venues. Half of the reviews were
published in The Linguist List and are easily accessible to the
readers of this review. All of the chapters have been revised for this
volume and have been provided with introductory paragraphs stating how
the discussed volume contributes to contemporary linguistics. Most
chapters, except for the Introduction and the Epilogue, are reviews or
review articles. The reader will not find in these chapters a
synthesis of linguistics in the first quarter of the 21st century. In
each review readers will find interesting insights into some of the
important issues in linguistics couched in a lively style, whether
they agree or disagree with Sampson’s comments. Since discussing all
reviews will take too much time, I will focus on a few which, in my
opinion, are particularly worthy of the reader’s attention. I will not
address the physical form of the book, as the publisher did not
provide the reviewer with a hard copy. A word about the title of the
book: Sampson does not make it clear why the term ‘Structural
linguistics in the 21st Century’’ has been chosen. The chapter that
deals explicitly with Structuralism (Chapter 25) deals with
structuralism that Sampson himself is not very fond of.
        In Chapter 1, ‘Introduction’, Sampson explains the reason for
writing this book as a follow up to his 1980 book: Schools of
Linguistics (not in his list of references). He also highlights some
of the issues discussed in the present book. One of the recurring
issues is Sampson’s critique of the generative linguistics claim that
language is an aspect of human biology rather than a cultural
institution and that there exists a Universal Grammar, along with the
related notion of innateness of the language and the assumption that
'that all humans speak the same language, with surface variation ’
(citing Economist 2023). Sampson’s recurring criticism of Universal
Grammar is reinforced by reference to the work of Tomasello 2003 and
Evans and Levinson 2009. In various chapters of this volume Sampson
reminds the readers how the books he reviews contribute to the fallacy
of the Universal Grammar concept.
The Introduction also contains a brief comment on Cognitive
Linguistics and states that ‘its current manifestation seems more
notable for hype than for substantive content’ (Sampson 2024: 3). The
concept of Cognitive Linguistics is briefly addressed later in the
book but there is no attempt to present its main claims and no attempt
to refute them. Given the spread of studies that have ‘cognitive
linguistics’ in their titles, such a criticism would have been most
useful even if not welcomed by their proponents.
        Some discussion in the introduction is devoted to the
consequences of institutional changes at the universities in Great
Britain and the rest of Europe. On the one hand these changes resulted
in the emergence of departments of Linguistics, and on the other hand
these changes led to the proliferation of scholarly publications, not
necessarily because the scholars had something new to say but because
publication became a part of the requirement for the continuous career
at the university. But not every publication counts in the career.
Reviews of books do not count and, as a result. the number of reviews
published has decreased.
In the concluding remarks in the Introduction Sampson says ‘The focus
of linguistics shifted over time—in mid-century it was the phoneme, in
the late twentieth century it was syntax—but the discipline remained
coherent in one way or another. In the present century, that coherence
is gone. Inevitably, this makes any faithful picture of the modern
discipline rather less aesthetically satisfying. But that is how
linguistics is, today.’ ‘And I believe it is how linguistics needs to
be.’ (Sampson 224: 12). The need to study as broad range of languages
as possible, and to study them through the analysis of natural
discourse rather than through introspection, are some of Sampson’s
main postulates.
Indeed, coherence of the discipline is not its most important
attribute. Its ability to explain the facts with which discipline
deals is the most important criterion by which a discipline should be
evaluated.
The Introduction to the volume could serve as a useful reading for the
advanced undergraduate and for beginning graduate students because it
deals with several issues they will face as professional linguists.
Chapter 2, ‘Because the Stakes are so Low’, is a review of the second
edition of Harris’s Linguistics Wars. In this Chapter Sampson
elaborates on his criticism of Chomsky’s generative grammar as not
being a scientific discipline, in the sense that it is not
falsifiable. That is perhaps an overgeneralization, as Sampson himself
writes that there is no evidence for the existence of Universal
Grammar but there is plenty of evidence against the existence of
Universal Grammar. In the more recent version of Merger Theory there
are also elements which are falsifiable (Frajzyngier 2024). Sampson
also elaborates on the claims that Cognitive Linguistics is an
empirical science. Sampson praises Harris for treating linguistic wars
objectively. Talking about Harris’s discussion Sampson says ‘He does
not really spell out how little intellectual substance there ever was
to the clashes’ (Sampson 2024:26). This chapter, now of historical
significance, may be a recommended reading for linguistics graduate
students, if for nothing else than to look at linguistic controversies
from a healthy distance.
        Chapter 6, ‘Language and Darwinism’, deals with the important
issue of whether the language is a product of evolution from some
earlier forms or is not, as claimed in Chomsky’s various writings
quoted by Sampson on p. 43. The occasion for this discussion is a
review of the book by P. Lieberman, Human Language and Our Reptilian
Brain: the subcortical bases of speech, syntax, and thought, Harvard
University Press, 2000. Sampson praises the book for putting together
the list of studies dedicated to the biological research and for
encouraging linguists to become familiar with this literature. He also
finds many errors in the book that would have been caught by a good
editor.
        Chapter 7, ‘Getting serious about statistics’, is a review of
R.H. Baayen, Word Frequency Distributions. Kluwer (Dordrecht), 2001.
Sampson repeatedly stresses that some knowledge of statistics is a
useful, if not required, tool for linguists. Baayen’s book, says
Sampson, will become an important source for the application of
statistics for many areas of linguistic research. Baayen’s method for
the study of frequency of words, called LNRE ‘Large Number of Rare
Events’, is said to be more reliable than the type/token ratio used as
a method to establish authorship of a given text. Sampson summarizes
the basics of Baayen’s approach in accessible language, without the
use of math. For this reader, the appeal of statistics as a tool would
require a demonstration of its application to issues other than word
frequencies and authorship.
        Chapter 8, ‘Spelling and the law’, is a review of a book by S.
Johnson, Spelling Trouble? Language, ideology and the reform of German
orthography. Multilingual Matters (Clevedon, Som.), 2005. For this
reader the most interesting aspect of the reform of orthography in
German is the emotional response of educators and population at large
to any reform of orthography. While the proposers of the reforms may
have some rational reasons to propose the reforms, the reaction to the
proposals clearly points to some irrational attitudes towards writing
systems. The resistance to the reforms of writing systems have been
observed in several cultures. Linguists who work on introducing
orthographies into languages that do not have a writing system often
report heated discussions among the speakers with respect to the one
or the other choice of a written representation for words and
morphemes.
        Chapter 11, ‘Language in Deep Time’, is one of the most
interesting and informative chapters in the volume. The focus of the
chapter is the contribution of Johanna Nichols to contemporary
linguistics. Sampson proposes that this contribution is in two major
areas: (1) the study of the stage of languages which precedes the
earliest stages that can be studied through comparative method, and
(2) the discovery of the major typological division among languages
between head-marking and dependent-marking languages. Sampson
summarizes the nature of Nichols’s discoveries in a clear and
convincing way. With respect to the first discovery Nichols has
postulated a fine-grained hypothesis involving the correlation between
the number of languages spoken over a large geographical area measured
in million of acres and the geography of the area. The density of
languages is larger in the mountains. With respect to head marking and
dependent marking, in some languages there is an internal split, in
that marking at the clausal level may be different from marking at the
phrasal level. The typological characteristic of head marking and
dependent marking is relatively stable. Both discoveries by Nichols
require explanations. Sampson rightly states that both discoveries
offer an object for further research for many years to come. This
review is a tribute to one of the most important contemporary
linguists.
As a follow-up to the discussion of Nichols’s contribution, Sampson
addresses an issue that a few years ago was an object of interesting
discussion, viz. whether there is a linguistic difference between
languages of hunter/gatherers, i.e. ‘foragers’, and languages of
‘farmers’. Sampson’s discussion is prompted by the reading of the Tom
Güldemann et al edited volume The Language of Hunter–Gatherers, 2000.
Sampson mentions that Cysouw and Comrie’s 2013 study did find some
differences, while the Bickel and Nichols paper in the Güldemann et
al. volume did not find linguistic differences between two types of
food-acquiring populations. The contradiction between the two
findings, one that there is a difference and the other that there is
no difference, needs to be resolved.
        Chapter 12, ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane. Let’s Snog’ is a review
article of several recent books dedicated to the issue of the origin
of language. The reviewed books are J.T. Andresen, Linguistics and
Evolution: A developmental approach. C.U.P., 2014; R. Burling, The
Talking Ape: How language evolved. O.U.P., 2005; G. Deutscher, The
Unfolding of Language, with William Heinemann, 2005; and J.R. Hurford,
The Origins of Language: A slim guide. O.U.P., 2014. The value of this
chapter rests in Sampson’s critical evaluation of a variety of
hypotheses about how human languages came to be. Sampson does not find
any of the offered hypotheses to be convincing.
        Chapter 13, ‘Psycholinguistics Outside the West’ discusses
three volumes of the Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics. The
volumes represent advances in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
psycholinguistics. The importance of these volumes is that many
studies in the volume represent an original approach that is not
driven by the research agenda established in the Western tradition.
The studies of the three languages demonstrate that these languages
are processed psychologically differently from each other and from the
West European languages. For example, in language acquisition in the
Asian languages studied, verbs are acquired before nouns, contrary to
claims about Western languages (Sampson 2024: 104). This reader was
struck by Sampson reporting on the findings by Haruko Minegishi Cook
‘that one important area of Japanese grammar, essential for competent
conversational participation, depends on whether or not emotional
attitudes are shared by the participants—something for which I can
think of no parallel in European languages.’ (Sampson 2024: 103). In
our own studies of Mina (Central Chadic, Frajzyngier, Johnston, with
Edwards, 2005) we found that in clauses coding the end of an event,
Mina can code the emotional attitude of the speaker toward
participants in the denoted event. The attitudes involved are
indifference and concern, often empathy/sympathy.
        Chapter 14, ‘Not Equally Complex After All’ is a review of
F.J. Newmeyer and L.B. Preston, eds, Measuring Grammatical Complexity.
O.U.P., 2014. The issue of whether all languages are equally complex
is the one with which linguists are often confronted when talking with
laymen about languages and is the one students are apt to ask in
Introduction to Linguistics courses. Sampson himself coedited a volume
on linguistics complexity (Sampson et al. 2009), and there is an
earlier volume by Mieastamo et al. 2008, and a more recent collection
in von Prince and Kilarski (eds.) 2021. The contemporary studies on
language complexity all claim that languages are not equally complex.
The open questions are what is understood under the term ‘complexity’
and whether it is the same category when applied to different aspects
of language, e.g. phonology, syllabic structures, morphology, syntax,
or semantics. The measurement of complexity will then depend on the
domain to which it is applied (see Frajzyngier 2021). Within this
approach, there is no clear way of talking about total language
complexity. And then there is additional question: once we know that a
given domain in one language is more complex than it is in another
language, what are the heuristic advantages of such an information?
        Chapter 15, ‘The Old Order Changeth, Slowly’ is a review of B.
Heine and H. Narrog, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis,
second edition. O.U.P., 2015. The review consists of critical
evaluation of many chapters in the book. I find this handbook to be a
useful and quick window into various approaches, especially since some
chapters are written by the main proponents of various approaches. My
recommendation for the readers of Heine and Narrog’s handbook is to
read Sampson’s critique in order to gain the necessary distance to
various approaches discussed in the Handbook. In reviewing the
Handbook Sampson takes the occasion to argue against the reality of
the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. The
discussion of grammaticality or ungrammaticality was often based on
linguists’ introspections. Such judgments of ungrammaticality are
often contradicted by natural discourse data. There are, nevertheless,
cases where the judgment of unacceptability of certain expressions is
categorical. In my own fieldwork, I would often come across judgments
of a text where the speakers without any linguistic education and
often illiterate in their languages would reject some expressions
without the slightest hesitations. Some rejections were culturally
based but others stemmed from the speakers’ subconscious knowledge of
their languages. The judgment of unacceptability (‘ungrammaticality’)
does indeed demonstrate that speakers without any education in
linguistics, and often without any education at all, know what
expressions are not allowed in their languages. Such judgments can be
useful discovery tools in confirming or refuting linguists’
hypotheses.
Chapter 18, ‘Decolonizing the Language of Law’ is conceptually linked
with Chapter 14 in dealing with language complexity. This Chapter is a
review of R. Powell, Language Choice in Postcolonial Law: lessons from
Malaysia’s bilingual legal system. Springer Nature (Singapore), 2020.
At issue is the adaptation of legal norms as developed in Western
societies to the multiethnic and multilingual Malaisian society. The
main conclusion of this review is that not all languages are perfectly
adopted to satisfy the needs of the society or the needs of some
segments of the society. One may think that the adoption of Latin as a
language of scientific investigation in Europe until the 19th Century,
and the contemporary adaptation of English as a language of scientific
investigation across the world, are partially motivated by the
inconvenience and difficulty of conveying the developments in science
that were formulated in other languages.
        Chapter 21, ‘The Beginning of Narrative’ is a review of D.
Meyer, Documentation and Argument in Early China: the Shàngshū 尚書
(Venerated Documents) and the Shū traditions. De Gruyter Mouton
(Berlin), 2021. The importance of the Shū style of documents has been
codified over a period of five hundred years, as Sampson says between
1040–403 B.C. Sampson cites Meyer as stating that in the third century
BC there was a Burning of the Books, and Shu texts had to be
reconstructed from memory. For somebody who is not familiar with the
history of China and the history of its intellectual tradition, the
two events, the Burning of the Books and the reconstruction from
memory, are fascinating. I wish Sampson would devote more space to
these events. Over the ages and up to present times Shu texts have
been used by various authors, including politicians. Sampson’s
discussion of one term, min ‘people’, in Shu documents and
contemporary use indicates a deep knowledge of Chinese.
Chapter 23, ‘Catching Languages Before Extinction’ is a review of the
The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages, edited by M. Bakró-Nagy, J.
Laakso, and E. Skribnik, O.U.P., 2022. The review includes information
about locations of the languages discussed and information about
functions coded in those languages that are not encountered in
familiar Western European languages. Sampson devotes considerable
space to clause-linking in Uralic languages, many of which do not have
mechanisms found in Western Indo-European languages.
Chapter 24, ‘Languages and Mental Worlds’ is a review of The
Integration of Language and Society: a cross-linguistic typology
edited by A.Y. Aikhenvald, R.M.W. Dixon, and N. Jarkey, O.U.P., 2022.
The volume, and Sampson’s review, deal with the highly controversial
issue of whether there is a connection between linguistic structures
and the speakers’ mental outlook. Dixon and Aikhenvald, together and
separately, are some of the most productive contemporary linguists who
worked on a large variety of hitherto undescribed languages. The theme
of Aikhenvald, Dixon, and Jarkey’s book is linked in an important way
with the issues of linguistic relativity, also known as the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The main value of the book for Sampson is the
demonstration of important differences among languages, a strong
argument against any kind of Universal Grammar. Sampson is quite
critical about several chapters in the volume but considers the book
to be a valuable addition to the literature. Sampson does not address
the question of  how do we describe speakers’ mental outlook?
Possibly, the book does not address this question either. We know how
to describe a language but we do not know very well how to describe
mental state.
Chapter 27 Recovering Ancient Poetry was for me one of the most
satisfying Chapters in the book. It is not a review, but rather a
Sampson’s account of the issues he encountered in producing the book
Voices from Early China: the Odes demystified. Cambridge Scholars
Press (Newcastle upon Tyne), 2020. The odes in question are the oldest
instantiations of Chinese poetry, 1000-600 BC!. The difficulties in
producing the book included finding the old phonetic values of
characters that, over two thousand years, changed their pronunciation,
discovering the rhymes, discovering the meaning of characters,
discovering the principles of versification, and translating all of
these into a readable English form. While describing the issue he
faced in producing the book, Sampson gives a brief history of the
study of the pronunciation of characters, a history of the odes and
bits about the history of Chinese. A reader unfamiliar with the
history of Chinese language and literature will find there a wealth of
summarized information that otherwise would require consulting many
volumes.
        Chapter 28, ‘Against Neatness’, is a review of the Handbook of
Usage-Based Linguistics edited by Manuel Díaz-Campos and Sonia
Balasch, Wiley Blackwell (Hoboken, N.J.), 2023. Among the various
linguistic approaches that Sampson discusses in his reviews, the
Usage-Based approach is the one he appears to put most hope in.
Sampson’s summary of the gist of Usage-Based linguistics is as
follows, ‘“Usage-Based linguistics” in the sense relevant to my
present chapter, and expounded in this Handbook, refers to a far more
specific paradigm of linguistics, which claims that a competent
speaker’s knowledge of his language consists largely of memories of
individual instances of linguistic forms rather than of general
patterns or rules distilled from those instances.’ (Sampson 2024:
218). Sampson rightly says that the Usage-Based approach is ‘newish’
and he approvingly summarizes its main tenants:
Nothing we know about the workings of the human mind requires us to
believe that language acquisition involves abstracting structural
generalizations from the utterances we encounter and then discarding
all of the other detailed properties of the utterances.
(Sampson 2024: 217).
And then, quoting Bybee, who wrote the Introduction to the volume and
who contributed to the studies of phonology and morphology within the
Usage-Based approach, ‘“tokens of linguistic experience are retained
in memory along with their context’”. Bybee adds “and [are] grouped
together with similar experiences to form patterns or
generalizations”. (Sampson 2024: 217). The emphasis on memorization as
opposed to analysis is an important issue that needs to be approached
as critically as any other issue in linguistics.        While Bybee’s
statement that ‘tokens of linguistic experience are retained in memory
along with their context’ is true, it does not explain creative
language production, i.e. everyday speech. Memory of what has been
heard, and the context in which it was heard, are necessary inputs to
perform the subconscious analyses of the function of the forms. They
also help in the proper analysis of the forms.
EVALUATION
The reviewed articles attest to Sampson’s close reading of the books
and a broad interest in linguistics and related fields. The main
object of his curiosity is linguistic theory and the history of
linguistic thought, such as the discovery of facts about a large
variety of languages, English dialectology, and such distinct areas as
literacy, writing systems, poetry, computational linguistics, and the
structure of academia. Sampson’s reviews are also reliable for two
rare characteristics that are most welcome in reviews of works on
linguistics. The first one is his deep knowledge of languages which,
judging from these reviews, includes classical Greek and Latin,
French, German, Biblical Hebrew, and Chinese, where he has made
significant contributions, along with some knowledge of Korean and
Japanese. The second characteristic is that he himself has contributed
to many of the fields of linguistics. The reviews therefore have the
authority of someone who worked on various areas discussed in the book
and knows what effort goes into the scholarly work. The overall
characteristic of these reviews is that Sampson focuses on the
contributions that various studies have made to linguistics even when
he has doubts about theoretical assumptions or methodology and even
when he notices numerous errors.
Reading those comments gave me much pleasure and an occasional smile,
even if I disagreed with Sampson’s evaluations. There are not many
books in linguistics that have such effects. I very much regret that I
am unable to match Sampson’s excellent writing. Sampson touches on an
important question for linguistics as discipline: ‘It is not so easy
to identify what benefits to society at large will accrue if we have
thoroughly adequate descriptions of our languages.’ (Sampson 2024:
218). To provide a convincing answer to this question is an important
task for contemporary linguistics. If we fail to answer this question,
the future of research aiming at describing hitherto undescribed
languages is in jeopardy.
REFERENCES
Evans, N. and S.C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language universals:
Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.429–92.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2021. Functional domains, functions, and the
notion of complexity. In von Prince and Kilarski (eds.). Frontiers in
Communication, section Language Sciences.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.622105/full.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.622105
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2024. Locative Predications in Chadic Languages:
Implications for Semantic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, and Eric Johnston, with Adrian Edwards. 2005. A
Grammar of Mina. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Harris, R.A. 2021. The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the
Battle Over Deep Structure. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Miestamo, M., K. Sinnemäki, and F. Karlsson (eds.). 2008. Language
Complexity: Typology, Contact, Change. John Benjamins (Amsterdam).
von Prince, Kilu, and Marcin Kilarski (eds.). 2021. Motivations for
Research on Linguistic Complexity: Methodology, Theory and Ideology.
Frontiers in Communication.
Sampson, G.R., 1979. Liberty and Language. O.U.P.
Sampson, G.R., D. Gil, and P. Trudgill, eds, 2009. Language Complexity
as an Evolving Variable. O.U.P.
Tomasello, M., 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of
Language Acquisition.
Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Mass.).
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Zygmunt Frajzyngier is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University
of Colorado



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