r·
l
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor ~
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa) AN INTRODUCTION
TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
Series II - CLASSICS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
p _: New edition
Advisory Editorial Board with an introduction by
I l?
Ursula Bellugi (San Diego);John B. Carroll Chapel Hill, N.C.) r\../ I JOSEPHF. KESS
Robert Grieve (Perth, W.Australia);Hans Hormann (Bochum) University of Victoria
John C. Marshall (Oxford);Tatiana Slama-Cazacu (Bucharest) fS----..· Victoria, British Columbia
Dan I. Slobin (Berkeley) (-J.
l '-./
Volume 3 JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Leonard Bloomfield AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
An Introduction to the Study of Language
1983
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
FOR CHARLES F. HOCKETI For permission to reprint Leonard Bloomfield's book, An Introduction
to the Study ofLanguage (New York, 1914) I would like to thank the publisher
(' Holt, Rinehart & Winston, and Ms Mary McGowan, Manager, Rights and
Permissions Department.*
Thanks are also due to my colleague and friend Joseph F. Kess for having con-
tributed an introductory article to the present reprinting of Bloomfield's first
book, and to Charles F. Hockett of Cornell University, for commenting on an
earlier draft of my Foreword, suggesting substantial revisions of content and
form. It is in recognition of his important contribution to a re-evaluation of
Bloomfield's oeuvre that the present volume is dedicated to him.
Ottawa, Easter 1981 Konrad Koerner
© Copyright 1983 - John Benjamins B.V. * Contrary to my earlier observation (see footnote 10 of the Foreword), I was lucky enough, during
ISSN 0165 716X my sojourn at the Newberry Library in Fall 1982, to locate a photograph of Leonard Bloomfield as a
man in his thirties at the University of Chicago. I would like to express my thanks to Mr. Daniel
ISBN 90 272 1892 7 (Pp.)/ ISBN 90 27218919(Hb.) Meyer - of the Library Archives for having provided me with a copy on which the present picture is
based. - Prof. C.F. Hockett kindly furnished the photocopy for the reproduction of Bloomfield's
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, signature.
microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
CONTENTS
Foreword by the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction by Joseph F. Kess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Leonard Bloomfield: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF
LANGUAGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v, 1
*****
-L~~~ C
FOREWORD
In the foreword to the first volume of "Classics in Psycholinguistics" writ-
ten four years ago, 1 I remarked that research in the history of psycholinguis-
tics demands not only dual expertise in psychology and linguistics but also
mastery of German, since the bulk of the classic material that should be made
available again is in that language, which in matters of science held a position
until the First World War comparable to English today. Currently, specialists
with that particular combination of skills seem fairly rare, something which
may explain the slow growth of the present series in comparison to all the four
others combined under the umbrella title of "Amsterdam Studies in the
Theory and History of Linguistic Science".
Because of this situation, it was a stroke of good fortune that I was able to
persuade Professor Joseph F. Kess to supply the historical background to the
volume here reprinted, and to indicate the importance of certain intellectual
traditions to present-day research. In addition to the skills already men-
tioned, Professor Kess approaches the subject free from bias-he has no ax to
grind, but is concerned solely with keeping the record accurate; and this he
has done, in my opinion, not just competently but with a certain charm. We all
owe him a debt of gratitude.
It is entirely compatible with that gratitude for me to hold certain views
differing from Professor Kess's on a few points of detail.
Thus, it seems to me quite well established that Albert Paul Weiss (1879-
1931) had a profound influence on Leonard Bloomfield during the 1920s,
when both were at the Ohio State University (1921-27). We have Bloomfield's
own extensive testimoqy for this, and we can trace the influence in the sort of
psychology Bloomfield admitted into his later linguistic thinking. In sharp
contrast, although the works of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and Emile
Durkheim (1858-1917) show certain superficial similarities, there is not a
1) See Albert Thumb & Karl Marbe, Experimentelle Untersuchungen uber die psychologischen
Grundlagen der sprachlichen Analogiebildung, new ed., with an introduction by David J. Murray
(Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1978), v-viii. (Please note that on page v of that book, end of the sec-
ond paragraph, "2 vols." is a misprint for "20 vols.").
r
X FOREWORD FOREWORD xi
single reference to Durkheim in Saussure's known writings (published or un- the 20th century. In addition, they provide background material for the un-
published), and thus no evidence that Durkheim was in any way the instigator derstanding of the Zeitgeist. However, neither of the volumes contains much
of Saussure's theory of language.2 Instead, when mentioning the social nature specifically on Wundt's psychology of language.
of language, Saussure often explicitly cites William Dwight Whitney (1827-
1894). But that there should be so little on Wundt's indeed important contribu-
tion to psycholinguistic and linguistic theory in general is symptomatic. Apart
One might also have reservations about Professor Kess's characteriza- from a few passages in Blumenthal's book of 1970 (pp.20-31) from Wundt's
tion of Hermann Paul's (1846-1921) Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Halle: discussion of syntax and selections from volume one of his voluminous Vol-
Niemeyer, 1880; 5th rev. ed., 1920) as codifying 'historical linguistics', even kerpsychologie entitled "Die Sprache" (Leipzig, 1900; 3rd rev. ed., 2 vols.,
though that was Paul's avowed intention. Already a century ago, in reviewing 1911-12) pertaining to the language of gestures (The Hague: Mouton, 1973),6
the first edition of Paul's book, Franz Misteli (1841-1903),3 a follower and we have nothing on Wundt's (psycho-) linguistic writings in English transla-
long-time collaborator of Heymann Steinthal (1823-99), whose Vol- tion.7 That is very regrettable: Wundt's two-volume Die Sprache contains
kerpsychologie Paul had attacked, proposed that its title should speak of numerous insights into language, only a few of which have been taken up in re-
'Sprachwissenschaft', "linguistic science", rather than of 'Sprachgeschichte', cent years. One of the neglected subjects is Wundt's discussion of word order,
"language history". Furthermore, said Misteli, Paul frequently contradicts seemingly known to no contemporary specialist on that topic.s In short, a
himself when dealing with the relation between what Paul called 'Sprachge- selection of his writings on child language, language change, word formation,
schichte' and 'descriptive Grammatik'.4 and many other topics of linguistic interest remains a desideratum. 9
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) founded, in Leipzig, the first insti- Despite the importance of Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) in the de-
tute for experimental psychology ever established in the field. The centennial velopment of structural linguistics in North America, much less information
of that important event has given rise to a number of individual studies of
Wundt's work (Danziger 1979, Leary 1979, Mueller 1979); they are already 6) "Die Satzfiigung" (selections from chap.7 of Book 2) and "Die Gebardensprache" from chap.2
mentioned in Professor Kess's introductory article. In addition to these pa- of Book 1 of Die Sprache, 3rd rev. ed. (1911), respectively.
pers we should now list two symposium volumes,5 from which may be gleaned
valuable information on the 'master psychologist (Blumenthal) himself and 7) By contrast, many other works by Wundt were translated into English, e.g., his Grundriss der
on the impact of his work in the last quarter of the 19th and the first decades of Psychologieof 1896 (transl. by his former student C.H. Judd in the following year); Grundzugeder
physiologischen Psychologie of 1874, reviewed by no lesser scholar than William James (1842-
2) This fable convenue of Durkheim's influence on Durkheim was, interestingly enough, al- 1910) in North American Review No.121, 195-201 (1875), repr. in both volumes on Wundt men-
ready contradicted in 1931, when Witold Doroszeski (1899-1976) had first proposed it, and this by tioned in footnote 5 (pp.114-20 and 199-206, respectively), and transl. by another American pupil
no lesser scholar than Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), who had himself collaborated with Durkheim of Wundt's, E. B. Titchener in 1904. Others include Rudolf Pintner's (1884-1942) transl. (1912) of
and corresponded with Saussure regularly. Cf. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure (Braunschweig: F. Wundt's Einfuhrung in die Psychologie, and Edward Leroy Schaub's translation (1916) ofWundt's
Vieweg, 1973), 226-27, for details. Elemente der Volkerpsychologie of 1912, which was reviewed by Herman K(arl) Haeberlin (1890-
c.1955) in Psychological Review 23.279-302 (1916). This review has been reprinted in the Wundt
3) Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 13.376-409 (1882), especially volume ed. by Rieber (cf. footnote 5 above), pp.229-49.
pp.380ff.
8) Cf. Winfred P. Lehmann, ed., Syntactic Typology (Austin & London: Univ. of Texas Press,
4) Cf. E. F. K. Koerner, "Hermann Paul and Synchronic Linguistics", Lingua 29.274-307 1978), or Bernard Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (Oxford: B. Blackwell,
(1972), repr. in Koerner, Toward a Historiography of Linguistics (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1981), which contain not a single reference to Wundt's theories on the subject. The only such refer-
1978), 73-106. ence seems to be in Aldo Scaglione's work, The Classical Theory of Composition (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: U~iv. of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp.345-46, note 11. Cf. also the excerpts in Blumenthal
5) Wolfgang G. Bringmann & Ryan D. Tweney, eds., Wundt Studies: A centennial collection (1970:27-29).
(Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, 1980), x, 445 pp., a very informative volume indeed; and Robert W.
Rieber (in collaboration with Arthur L. Blumenthal, Kurt Danziger, and Solomon Diamond), ed., 9) Among the various other classic texts that still await translation into English, we may mention
Wilheim WunJt and the Making of Scientific Psychology (New York: Plenum Press, 1980). Karl Biihler's (1879-1963) Sprachtheorie (Jena: G. Fischer, 1934). (I know of altogether three un-
successful attempts made during the past 15 years.)
r
xii FOREWORD FOREWORD Xlll
about his life is available than one should expect, given the number of students Students and Their Theses, 1875-1920", which includes at least 14 Americans,
he had or of young scholars who associated themselves with his teachings from among them Agnell, Catell, Judd, Pace, Scripture, Stratton, Tawney, Titch-
the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, 10 and the role he played in the professionali- ener, and others, all of whom had taken their degrees between 1886 and
zation of the field in general. What is known, however, has been carefully as- 1898.)12 Furthermore, we may note that Bloomfield himself, prior to his de-
sembled by Charles Hockett in his voluminous A Leonard Bloomfield Anthol- parture for Europe, had written a review of the Elemente der Vol-
ogy in 1970 (referred to as LBA in the following). kerpsychologie (Leipzig, 1912), which appeared in 1913 in American Journal
ofPsychology (repr. in LBA 39-43). This review makes interesting reading for
In the present context, one would have liked to know more about the cir- anyone who wants to know how well Bloomfield was familiar with Wundt's
cumstances surrounding the writing of his first book here reprinted, An Intro- psychological work. It also shows that Bloomfield was particularly interested
duction to the Study of Language, published in 1914, i.e., two years before the in what Wundt had to say about language, not only in his Elemente, but also in
appearance of Ferdinand de Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique Tomus I of Wundt's magnum opus, Die Sprache. Although Bloomfield is cap-
generate (Lausanne & Paris: Payot, 1916). The accounts of Bloomfield's able of seeing the shortcomings in Wundt's linguistic theories, especially as far
academic career of the years 1910-21 indicate that he was first an instructor as language development is concerned (LBA 40-42), he considers his work to
and, from 1913, an "Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and Ger- be an important contribution for the linguist to contemplate.
man in the University of Illinois", as we read on the title page of his first book.
Hockett (LBA 44) affirms that the Introduction was "surely written largely at We know - and Professor Kess gives a fine account of this change in
The University of Illinois, and before Bloomfield's departure for Europe; Bloomfield's metatheory-that Bloomfield abandoned, from the early 1920s
thus mainly in 1913". Thus would rule out the conjecture that Bloomfield onwards, more and more his 'mentalistic' position in linguistic matters. It was
wrote the book after his sojourn in Germany in 1913-14, where he studied at about that time that Bloomfield had moved to Ohio State University as "Pro-
the universities of Gottingen and Leipzig, where he not only attended classes fessor of German and Linguistics" (1921-27), and that he reviewed Sapir's
by the (then no longer young) Junggrammatiker August Leskien (1840- Language (1921) and the second edition (1922) of Saussure's Cours (repr. in
1916),11 but most certainly lectures given by Wundt. The reason for Bloom- LBA 91-94 and 106-108, respectively). Both linguists (as had become custom-
field's trip to Germany was, as he related himself to his pupil William G. ary since Paul's Prinzipien of 1880) were making frequent reference to some
Moulton (cf. LBA 515), that it was practically obligatory for any member in kind of psychology; Wundt would have called it Vulgiirpsychologie since nei-
an American German department hoping for academic advancement to have ther really developed a theoretical framework for a psychological analysis of
studied in Germany for some time. linguistic phenomena (cf. Die Sprache, vol.I, 3rd rev. ed., pp.27-28). As a
matter of fact, from about 1910 onwards, Saussure had tried to divest himself
However, Bloomfield did not need to travel to Germany to familiarize of a psychological argument, replacing terms such as 'image acoustique' and
himself with Wundt's psychology of language; by the early 1900s many of 'concept' by more abstract terms such as 'signifiant' and 'signifie', respec-
Wundt's works had been translated into English, and there were more than a tively, proposing an overall, socially motivated science of signs - semiologie
dozen distinguished scholars in psychology and philosophy at North Ameri- - in which linguistics was to play a central role.13
can universities who had received their training with Wundt in Leipzig. (Com-
pare Miles Albert Tinker's [1893-1977] report of 1932, "Wundt's Doctorate Before the First World War, however, German science, not only in lin-
guistics and in psychology, was so overwhelming that it would have been dif-
10) Thus I have been unsuccesful in tracing a photograph of Bloomfield other than the one that
Charles Hockett refaced to his 1970 Anthology, a picture signed by Bloomfield on 6 April 1944, 12) This paper has been reprinted in the volume ed. by Bringmann & Tweney (mentioned in
though depicting him as a man in his late forties rather than mid- or late fifties. [Cf. correction note footnote 5 above), pp.269-79.
to the Acknowledgement on p. v.]
13) Cf. E. F. K. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg, 1973), pp.311-41,
11) Hockett (LBA 542) reports that still in about 1940 Bloomfield held Leskien in high esteem for details.
arguing that he did not think that linguistics had significantly progressed beyond what Leskien had
known 30 years earlier.
xiv FOREWORD FOREWORD xv
ficult for any scholar to escape its influence. And Bloomfield was no excep- about the psychology [of Wundt, I suppose] and would really have preferred
tion. For instance, in 1901 the neogrammarian Berthold Delbruck (1842- to leave it out", as Hockett (LBA 45) suggests, it is true that, "despite long
1922) devoted a book-length study to the question of the place of psychology 'psychologizing' passages" in his 1914 Introduction to the Study of Language,
in linguistics, with particular reference to Wundt's proposals, in which hear- the book could only distantly be regarded as a truly psycholinguistic text (as
gued that the linguist could well live with W1t1ndt's model as with any other, the series in which it appears might suggest). However, it is clear from many
notably the one provided by Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), whom passages in the book - not only from the Preface, in which he states: "I de-
Hermann Paul favoured. 14 The Genevan scholar Albert Sechehaye (1870- pend for my psychology, general and linguistic, entirely on Wundt; I can only
1946) who, together with Charles Bally (1865-1947), was later to edit Saus- hope that I have not misrepresented his doctrine" (p.vi)-that Bloomfield in-
sure's lectures on general linguistics on the basis of students' notes (not their deed used mentalistic underpinnings for his linguistic argument; compare
own!), not only did his doctorate in Gottingen in 1902 (rather than with Saus- especially chap.III, "The mental basis of language" (56-72).17 Little influence
sure, who had been professor in Geneva since 1891), but also published a of Wundt may appear to be present in his section on the sentence, except for
theoretical outline of linguistic science largely based on Wundtian psychol- passing references to psychological matters (pp. 110, 112, 119);18 it is however
ogy.15 In short, working out linguistic problems, diachronic as well as syn- more evident in the section on word-order (186-88), for instance. And speak-
chronic, with reference to psychological doctrine was the normal thing to do at ing of semantic change (322-31), Bloomfield emphasizes the importance of a
the time. 16 psychological foundation, referring to Wundt rather than to Michel Breal's
(1832-1915) influential Essai de semantique: Science des significations (Paris:
As already mentioned above (p.ix), soon after his arrival at Ohio State Hachette, 1897; 6th ed., 1913).19
Bloomfield fell under the spell of the psychologist A. P. Weiss, who was ex-
pounding a 'mechanist' brand of psychology, in fact an approach which be- In the light of the revival of interest in a 'mentalist' conception of lan-
came the underpinning of Bloomfield's Language (1933), replacing as it were guage in North America since the mid-1960s and concomitantly a reappraisal
the 'mentalist' psychology underlying much of his 1914 book (cf.Bloomfield's of the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his followers, 20 which the early
Preface to his 1933, partly reprinted in LBA 44). Thus, in a 1927 paper (LBA
176) Bloomfield opts for Weiss' behaviorist model of psychology, a viewpoint 17) For a comparison between Bloomfield's book of 1914 and his Language of 1933, cf. Esper in
which he appears to have never abandoned afterwards. his above-mentioned book (cf.note 14), pp.186-208.
Although it is not quite clear whether indeed Bloomfield "was uncertain 18) However, a careful analysis of Bloomfield's tenets may reveal a fairly deep influence of
Wundt's proposals in syntax; cf. W. Keith Percival's paper, "On the Historical Source of Im-
14) B. Delbriick, Grundfragen der Sprachforschung mit Riicksicht auf W. Wundts mediate Constituent Analysis", Notes from the Linguistic Underground ed. by James D. McCaw-
Sprachpsychologie erortert (Strassburg: K. J. Triibner, 1901). Curiously enough, in his second ley (New York & London: Academic Press, 1976), 229-42, esp. pp.234-39.
(1886) and subsequent editions of his Prinzipien Paul removed the reference to Herbart found in
the first (p.15). - For a thorough account of the debate, see Erwin A. Esper, Mentalism and Objec- 19) Unlike Bloomfield's treatment of 'synchronic' semantics, a comparison between Bloom-
tivism ofLanguage (New York: American Elsevier, 196~), 15-81. (Note that Wundt replied to Del- field's views on meaning change in 1914 (p.244) and in 1933 (p.428) reveals a very similar view-
briick in the same year.) point. More importantly, the actual cause for change is seen in the arbitrary relationship between
sound and sense (Bloomfield 1914:16; 1933:144-45). Cf. W. Terrence Gordon, A History of Se-
15) Ch[arles] Albert Sechehaye, Programme et methodes de la linguistique theorique: mantics (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982), sect. 9.3 for details.
Psychologie du langage (Paris: H. Champion; Leipzig: 0. Harrassowitz; Geneva: A. Eggimann,
1908). -As we may gather from Robert Godel's book, Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de lin- 20) In his Introduction (1914) we find only two direct references to Humboldt's work and its im-
guistique generale de F. de Saussure (Geneva: Droz, 1957), pp.51-52, Saussure did not subscribe to portance in the development of 19th-century general linguistics (pp. 311,312). But since most gen-
Sechehaye's psychology of !anguage. eral linguists of the period - not only Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899), Franz Nikolaus Finck
(1867-1910), Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893), and others, but also Hermann Paul and Wum:!+
16) Cf., as a further example of this trend, Jacques van Ginneken's (1877-1945) 552-page Prin- - all of whom are mentioned quite frequently in Bloomfield's writings, were influenced by Hum-
cipes de linguistique psychologique (Paris: M. Riviere; Leipzig: 0. Harrassowitz; Amsterdam: E. boldt's linguistic thought, we may safely say that Humboldtian ideas can be reckoned with in many
van der Vecht, 1907). places in Bloomfield's writings without direct acknowledgment.
XVI FOREWORD
Bloomfield referred to frequently in his earlier writings,21 a republication of INTRODUCTION
the book by the 27-year-old Bloomfield appears quite justified. Indeed, it is
my claim that Chomsky, who never tired in the 1960s and 1970s of attacking JOSEPH F. KESS
Bloomfield's later behaviorist and 'mechanist' stance, would have hailed the University of Victoria
earlier Bloomfield - if only for polemical purposes - as expounding the
tradition to follow, if he had cared to read Bloomfield's Introduction to the Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) was responsible for two classic
Study of Language of 1914.22 For the scholar interested in evaluating the mo- textbooks in the field of linguistics. The second of these, Language (1933), is
tives that led Bloomfield to change his epistemological outlook on linguistic familiar to most, but the first, An Introduction to the Study of Language
science during the 1920s, the volume reprinted here is essential reading. (1914), is not. We are, however, all familiar with the debate between men-
talism and mechanism, a choice of philosophical views which strikes at the
Les Jardins du Chateau, Quebec K.K. very heart of language investigation. Bloomfield's role was a crucial one in
October 1981 shaping the direction that the debate took for some time, yet it is on the basis
of his later work that this mechanistic orientation finds its origins. His earlier
21) For direct references to Humboldtian ideas in his earlier writings, cf. LBA 37 [1912], 61 1914 book, An Introduction to the Study ofLanguage, shows some striking dif-
[1914], 76 [1916], 129 [1926], 173 [1927], etc.; cf. also Bloomfield's Language (1933), pp.18-19. ferences to his later views, reflecting much of the then-current thinking on lan-
guage matters. As such, it represents not only an interesting commentary on
22) I find this claim supported, albeit only indirectly, by Arthur Blumenthal's Language and the theoretical development of an extremely influential linguist, but more im-
Psychology: Historical aspects of psycholinguistics (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1970), which portantly, it is a telling document in the evolving history of the discipline and a
acknowledgedly was written in the M.I.T. Department of Linguistics, with Morris Halle and Noam rich source for the linguist or psycholinguist interested in how and why we got
Chomsky providing support and office space (cf. Preface, p.x). More importantly perhaps, the from where we were to where we are. It not only suggests a background for
book was written with Chomsky's theory of language and his interest in establishing 'respectable how the discipline shifted during Bloomfield's time, but it also provides a bet-
ancestors' in mind (cf. pp.8, 31-32, 47, and elsewhere). ter perspective for how it shifts again with theoretical developments in the
1960s. It is thus primarily this earlier book that is of interest here, and this
short essay will attempt to bring into focus some of the Zeitgeist factors, par-
ticularly the psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, which influenced the substance
and direction of the early 1914 book. This introduction will have little to say
about the more recent history of linguistics since 1933, except insofar as it con-
trasts with the 1914 stage of Bloomfield's development. This has been done
elsewhere (Haas 1978; Hall 1969) and is not taken up here.
Bloomfield's early book fits into the gap left unfilled in the linguistic liter-
ature in the English language since Whitney's Language and the Study ofLan-
guage (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875). George Melville
~r
xviii JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xix
Bolling (1871-1963), editor of Language for the first fifteen years of its exis- altogether. Psychology has also gone through its discussion of whether the
tence, in reviewing it, compared it to Hermann Paul's Prinzipien der field of psychology has undergone Kuhnian stages in its evolutionary develop-
Sprachgeschichte (1880; 5th and last revised edition in 1920), noting that ment during the past century and a half (see Weimer & Palermo 1973, and'
"there is no work in the English language with which it should be compared" Weimer 1974a, b). Regardless of the degree to which Kuhnian notions can be
(Bolling 1917; reprinted in Hockett, 1970:50). Possibly the most respected applied to the history of linguistics or psycholinguistics, it remains the case
and influential codification of linguistics, that is, historical linguistics, up to that there are interesting differences in the early B-1914 and the later B-1933,
Bloomfield's time had been Paul's Prinzipien. While historical-comparative particularly with respect to Bloomfield's psychology of language.
linguistics was the initial arena for a highly structured orientation towards lan-
guage, the notion of the study of language as a natural science was also present Psychology has tried itself in a number of different directions, and has
(see Koerner's discussion of August Schleicher in Koerner 1972, 1976), de- failed to come up with a dominant systematic paradigm for more than several
veloping into what would become 'descriptive' or 'structural' linguistics. It decades at a time. Some find this discouraging (see Hockett's introduction to
was not as if linguistics had no place in the human sciences; in fact, compara- Esper 1973), while others (Mueller 1979) simply take this as a matter of
tive linguistics had blossomed earlier and more rapidly than did psychology. course. The systematic overview of psychology to which B-1914 owed intel-
lectual allegiance was the one fashioned by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). In
As a textbook, Bloomfield's 1914 book (henceforth B-1914) had some in- the meantime' we also see during the early part of this century a period during
fluence, though not as much as his 1933 text. One cannot underestimate the which the goals and methods of psychology are open to question, and charac-
value of an integrated model presented by a popular textbook. As Hall terized by the pursuit of a unified view of the discipline of psychology. It was
(1969: 192) noted of his later book, the influence that Bloomfield had "was during the latter part of this period that the later views that Bloomfield held in
due primarily to the thorough organization of Bloomfield's book and the gui- the twenties and thirties regarding the lack of consensus in psychology must
dance in scientific method that many younger linguists found in his work and have been forming. This disciplinary upheaval, coupled with his positive as-
no-one else's." Though Hall had Bloomfield's 1933 book (henceforth B-1933) sociations with the behaviorist Albert Paul Weiss (1879-1931) likely contri-
in mind, one can voice the same sentiment about thoroughness in the 1914 buted to his appreciation of the emerging paradigm in psychology, but it also
version as well. Even so, not all were happy about B-1914 in all respects. For led to his concluding that linguistics could ultimately do without allegiance to
example, Bloomfield's use of innovative terminology was a feature neither a given system of psychology in its formation as an independent science.
familiar to nor welcome by all. Diekhoff's (1915) review criticizes him for it, as
does Aron (1918). His work on Tagalog, published in 1917, also shows the While one may not agree with Kuhn's attempts to relativize the practice
same characteristics, and he was accused by the Philippinist Blake (1919) of of science, one certainly can appreciate in Kuhn's arguments the notion that a
having changed the face of Philippine structure by having used such innova- given stage may be largely the product of the ideas of given period. So one may
tive terminology there as well (see Kess 1979:215-218). This was a pattern say that Bloomfield was a product of the intellectual tenor of his times as well
which was not to change between 1914 and 1933. In retrospect, a later struc- as his particular academic training. His early work very much reflects, as did
turalist generation of course found this entirely laudatory; for example, much of American academe in philology and psychology, the prominence of
Bloch's (1949:9) obituary not unexpectedly observes that "to some readers, German intellectual institutions. Many of the early linguists and philologists
unaware of the danger that lies in the common sense view of the world, were trained in part or in whole at German universities or received their train-
Bloomfield's avoidance of everyday expressions may have sounded like ing under American scholars who had themselves undergone such training.
pedantry, his rigorous definitions like jargon." Bloomfield himself took further studies at Leipzig and Gottingen with schol-
ars like August Leskien (1840-1916), Karl Brugmann (1849-1919), and Her-
The notion of Kuhnian paradigms (Kuhn 1970) in linguistics has attracted mann Oldenberg (1854-1920) in 1913 and 1914, several years after his Chicago
a good deal of attention. Some, like Koerner (1972, 1976) have attempted to doctorate (1909). Bloomfield's roots, even more so than his contemporaries
outline paradigmatic stages in the development of linguistics while others, Boas and Sapir, thus were also in the neogrammarian tradition, having been
like Percival (1976), suggest that we simply abandon the search for paradigms trained in comparative linguistics. His work not only reflects this training in
r
xx JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xxi
the rigors ofJunggrammatiker traditions in historical-comparative linguistics, experience of the observer. In being an advocate of experimental control of
but his 1914 book also shows the specific influence of Leipzig's Wilhelm
Wundt on the psychology of the period. Wundt's psychology of language was any condition in a scientific sense, dealing with introspection or otherwise,
easily available to a Germanic scholar like Bloomfield before his Leipzig visit, Wundt changed the orientation of the field, and in fact, allowed the field of
and he must also have listened to Wundt's lectures more than once while psychology to become what it has become. In admitting both the notions of
there. Bloomfield was only twenty-six at this time and twenty-seven when his experiment and mathematical evaluation to psychology, Wundt was follow-
1914 book was published, a formative stage in his intellectual career no doubt. ing interests that European scholars had in extending notions of the highly
Wundt's influential Die Sprache was already in its third edition by this time, successful natural sciences like biology and organic chemistry to the study of
having first appeared more than a dozen years earlier. human behavior. It was no wonder that his methods were so appealing and his
school at Leipzig attracted younger scholars of the time. It was more than just
Psychology, in the period between 1870 and the First World War was the intellectual climate that allowed Wundt's stature; he had a great deal to
largely mentalistic, due largely to the influence ofWundt, and the intellectual say and it was worth paying heed to.
tradition in German thought. Its method is typically recorded as being that of
introspection. Wundt is seen by many modern psychologists as the 'father of His laboratory and lectures were frequented by both students and schol-
experimental psychology', though their uses of the term 'experimental' are by ars from abroad. Many of the early prominent American psychologists were
no means identical. Testimony to his candidacy for this position in the history one-time students under Wundt, though some later were unhappy about
of psychology is seen reflected in the centennial of the original 1879 opening of Wundt's influence on American psychology (see Rieber 1980); the list of his
Wundt's Leipzig laboratory recently celebrated by the World Congress of students included Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924) and James McKeen
Psychology's decision to convene in the same site in 1980. Psychologists prior Cattell (1860-1944), and the transplanted Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-
to his time, however, found themselves logically within departments of 1927) and Hugo Miinsterberg (1863-1916) as ~ell as Edward Wheeler Scrip-
philosophy, just as Wundt himself had; in fact, Wundt first shared the chair of ture (1864-1945), Edward Aloysius Pace (1861-1938), George Malcolm
philosophy with a philologist. It was, after all, only in 1888 that the first profes- Stratton (1865-1957), Lightner Witmer (1867-1956), and Charles Hubbard
sorship of psychology in the world was filled by James McKeen Cattell (1860- Judd (1873-1946). Although the American version of Wundtian psychology
1944), also a student ofWundt's at Leipzig between 1883-86, attheUniversity somewhat modified his views (see Blumenthal 1980), it is obvious that he was
of Pennsylvania. influential in the early development of American psychological practices
(particularly in the area of laboratory instrumentation) through his returning
Wundt has been seen by many of late as a kind of early cognitive students. One recalls, moreover, that from about 1850 to 1914 much of
psycholinguist, very much akin to the modern sense. Some of his ideas have American academe, Eastern schools as well as tile heavily German-settled
found a renewed respect among many generativist - oriented psycholin- Middle West, looked to Central Europe for its model. Leipzig in fact re-
guists. Indeed, Blumenthal (1970) even characterizes him as the 'master mained a flourishing center of activity until the war and its aftermath dis-
psycholinguist'. Wundt was interested in the investigation of the regularities rupted much of European academic life, eventually breaking its overwhelm-
of certain mental behaviors in an 'experimental' setting. It is interesting to ing influence in many American circles. Hall (1969:211) provides some
note that although Wundt is in this sense typically associated with the experi- further, more personal reasons for the continuing later decline of European
mental control of introspection, only four of the one hundred and eighty arti- influence in the post-war depression years, when resentment against Euro-
cles (between 1881 and 1902) in Wundt's journal, Philosophische Studien, pean scholars in American was also linked to more mundane pragmatic forces
contain introspections; he once even argues against the introspective ap- like job placement, as well as the intellectual ones we might have expected.
proach, and is highly critical of both Titchenerian and Wiirzburg introspec-
tionism at the turn of the century (A.L. Blumenthal, personal communica- Language had an important place in Wundt's psychology. His major
tion). His functional mentalism did allow experimental approaches to the psycholinguistic work, the Die Sprache of 1900 (revised in 1904 and in 1911-
conditions of a stimulus situation and observation of reported changes in the 12), introduced his ten-volume Volkerpsychologie (1900-1920) as the first
book of the series. The original 644-page volume was even revised upwards to
xxii JOSEPH F. KESS r INTRODUCTION xxiii
1
1,378 pages in the 1912 edition (Blumenthal 1979). Wundt had not only a pro-
found impact on the psychology of the time, but he also exerted a certain de- Bloomfield seems to have acquiesced completely to Wundt's establish-
gree of influence in linguistics at the turn of the century. Wundt was true to his ment of psychology as the propaedeutic science. He observes (1914:322-23)
philosophical origins, and everything in its turn was linked, deriving from a set
of primary principles; but it was from psychological principles that all others that
were to be derived, including linguistic principles. Clearly, Wundt was very
much aware of what was transpiring in the adjacent field of philology. Wundt the relation of linguistics to psychology is, on the one hand, implied in the
had maintained a running dispute with Paul and in 1901 (Wundt 1901) had basic position of the latter among the mental sciences. These sciences, study-
answered Delbriick's (1901) critique of his (1900) Die Sprache with a com- ing the various activities of man, demand in differing degrees but nonetheless
plete statement of what was for him the relationship between psychology and universaliy, a constant psychologic interpretation .... As language is in its
historical and descriptive linguistics. As Baker and Mos (1979:3) note, "an forms the least deliberate of human activities, the one in which rationalizing
analysis of the exchanges which took place between Wundt and the linguist, explanations are most grossly out of place, linguistics is, of all the mental sci-
Delbriick, reveals Wundt's extensive command of and respect for the linguis- ences, most in need of guidance at every step by the best psychologic insight
tics literature, and his acceptance of the philologist's premise that he could
achieve an understanding 'of each social group through the analysis of its lan- available.
guage, believing that the very vocabulary and grammar of a people reveal its
psychic constitution' ... The writings over the last thirty years of Wundt's life Wundt's influence is also clearly seen in several early chapters in the
(1890-1920) clearly reflect his pursuit of this area, an area he had labelled Vol- book. By far the most interesting chapters in this regard are Chapter I, 'The
kerpsychologie." Nature and Origin of Language', and Chapter III, 'The Mental Basis of Lan-
guage' (neatly contrasting with Chapter II, 'The Physical Basis of Language').
B100111field was very much aware of not only Wundt, but also the B-1914 was also sympathetic to psychological interpretations of language as
specifics of his work. For example, his (1913) review ofWundt's Elemente der an outgrowth of folk or ethnic mental life, and certainly Bloomfield's discus-
Volkerpsychologie, appearing in the American Journal ofPsychology, has no- sion of gesture language and the origins oflanguage mirror Wundt's teachings
thing but the highest praise for the scope and content of the work. Bloomfield fairly closely. In the early years of the century, whether or not one agreed with
writes that Wundt, one would certainly have had to cope with his ideas on the psychology
of language in setting out a detailed explication of what it was that linguistic
the monumental volumes of Wundt's Volkerpsychologie find not only a sum- science was dealing with. One could not ignore him, and in dealing with the
mary but also a crowning supplement in the Elemente der Volkerpsychologie. topic of language, the options would have been either to agree with him or
Here the entire mental history of man is outlined in a continuous narrative ... present compelling arguments why not. There was nothing that would have
it is safe to say that no other man could have told the story as Wundt has; his replaced Wundtian psychology on the same grand scale, had one the temerity
vast learning, powerful psychologic insight, vivid sense of history, and, not to reject it wholesale. And indeed, there was so much of Wundt, considering
least, his stylistic ability to present states of flow and change have produced a the voluminous output which characterized his professional life (Boring
work of trememdous and awing effect. (Bloomfield 1913; repr. in Hockett [1950] has estimated that Wundt must have produced at a rate averaging 2.2
1970:39) pages every day between 1853 and 1920 to turn out an astounding 53,735
pages), so that one could find argument and counter-argument for most fresh
In the preface to his 1914 book (p. vi), Bloomfield also outlines his intel- approaches if one took the time to look.
lectual allegiance to Wundt, saying "it will be apparent, especially, that I de-
pend for my psychology, general and linguistic, entirely on Wundt; I can only As Lane (1945) observes, Wundt's influence was a force to be reckoned
hope that I have not misrepresented his doctrine. The day is past when stu- with, and even Hermann Paul (1846-1921), in the fourth (1909) edition of his
dents of mental sciences could draw on their own fancy or on 'popular Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, continued their dispute by putting its work in
psychology' for their views of mental occurrence." perspective with respect to Wundt's notions. But by the fifth (1920) edition,
"his quarrel is not with any 'system' of psychology, but. .. with Wundt's opera-
tion with a Volkerpsychologie instead of an individual psychology-the same
objection he had earlier made to Steinthal and Lazarus' work" (Lane,
xxiv JOSEPHF. KESS r INTRODUCTION XXV
:
1945:472). It is unlikely that the early Bloomfield would have been in a posi- ing different names, ideas, and events that contributed to the development of
tion to have challenged or ignored the powerful Wundtian system in his 1914 psychology around the turn of the century. In this respect, the Wundt of 1879
work. But by 1933 he could and did, to the degree that Wundtian notions were is best seen as a symbol of those converging ideas and events; Wundt is conve-
still prominent enough to even be criticized. By the time of B-1933 Anglo- nient to focus upon, with the highly systematized psychology that he offered.
American empiricism and pragmatism had already challenged and largely re- It was perhaps not that Wundt was really the great innovator as much as he
placed Wundtian psychology. The later Bloomfield, of course, was by then was a great synthesizer. His presentation of psychology as a science, and sys-
highly formalistic, concentrating on a mechanistic view of language and laying tematic organization of the field must have been attractive to younger scholars
the foundations for a highly operationalized methodology. like Bloomfield, who in his turn provided the same kind of systematic synth-
esis for the study of language, both in 1914 and in 1933. Simply stated, it is not
But it should also be pointed out that the early Bloomfield saw the value always easy to demonstrate where 'paradigms' leave off and begin, for schol-
of language data for psychology as well. Thus, note the following quote where ars who are depicted as revolutionizing a field in the Kuhnian sense are usually
Bloomfield observes that found to have historical antecedents whose thoughts they carry on (see Perci-
val 1976, for an example of this in linguistics). Moreover, one must also give
psychology makes a wide use of the results of linguistics... such mental pro- some credence to the intellectual climate of the times, such that figures must
cesses, then, as those involved in the utterance of speech cannot find their be seen in the light of their times and their discipline. Whether our picture of
explanation in the individual, -he receives his speech habits from others, - Wundt is an accurate one or not has been questioned by some (Blumenthal
but must be traced for explanation from individual to individual ad infinitum. 1979, characterizes him as the "founding father we never knew"). But
They are products of the mental action not of a single person, but of a com- whether or not Wundt was quietly reinterpreted, by Titchener, and by the his-
munity of individuals. These products, - not only language but also myth, torian Edwin Garrigue Boring (1886-1968) after him, as Blumenthal (1979,
art, and custom, - are the data which make possible the second phase of 1980) suggests, is a difficulty one faces with most earlier scholars. They are
psychology, social psychology (German Volkerpsychologie). As language, often interpreted through one's own particular training and set of theoretical
moreover, is less subject than these other activities to individual deliberate and methodological positions. For example, Wundt's experimental journal,
actions which interfere with the communal nexus, it is the most important do- Philosophische Studien, is a good indication of Wundt and his contem-
main in the study of social psychology. (1914:323-24) poraries' feelings that philosophy and psychology were one. Indeed, Wundt
himself authored four texts in philosophy between 1880 and the tum of the
In looking for the beginnings of psychology and linguistics as sciences, century. His experimental journal was equally devoted to philosophy and
there are a limited number of originators. In linguistics, one has Bloomfield, psychology, containing both reports of experimental studies from his laborat-
and in psychology, one has Wundt; both were specifically intent on defining ory and philosophical discussions, and later even changed its name to
the boundaries of the scientific enterprise which came in each of their respec- Psychologische Studien (Leipzig, 1906-17, 10 vols.), Wundt did believe that
tive fields to so bear their imprint. In looking for beginnings of psychology as a philosophy should be more psychological, and in this, he was innovative.
science, some (see Mueller 1979) find Wundt a more convincing candidate for
'founding father' than other contemporaries like Gustav Theodor Fechner The latter-day student of historical antecedents is often left with a discip-
(1801-1887), Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94), and Wil- linary history which is written from the bias of the reviewer. Witness, for
liam James (1842-1910) for several reasons. There is his initiation of the example, Weimer's (1974a) contrasting of Blumenthal vs. Boring's presenta-
world's first psychological journal Philosophische Studien (Leipzig, 1883- tion of Wundt to us or Marshall's (1970) review of Blumenthal vs. Esper's ac-
1903, 20 volumes) as well as his founding the world's first experimental count of the substance and relevance of Wundt to current psycholinguistics.
laboratory at Leipzig in 1879. But there is also the matter of perceived intent. History is not only written by the victors; it happens to be rewritten by every
Wundt claimed that he was setting out to establish experimental psychology as scholar who looks back, and in so doing to some degree squares history with
a new science, and this he did in the first edition (1874) of Grundzuge der his/her own theoretical and methodological bias, setting it either at odds or in
physiologischen Psychologie [Principles of Physiological Psychology] -
'physiological' having come to mean 'experimental' by this time. One should
still admit, as Mueller (1979) has done, that there were many paths, represent-
xxvi JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xxvii
concert with it. in this respect, leapfrogs back as a parallel to Wundtian psychology in both
There is also some question as to just how 'experimental' Wundt was in ideas and achievements. (Not everyone, of course, agrees with the thesis that
Wundt should be honored as Chomsky's ancestor nor that there is even any
his experimental psychology. According to Blumenthal (1979:550), "for honor in such a claim; see Esper 1971.) Chomsky claims that linguistics and
Wundt, 'experiment' meant the study of processes by means of publicly ob- psychology both had failed to reach their full and proper potential by concen-
servable and measurable events. Introspective reports, in anything like Titch- trating instead on 'taxonomy' and empirical studies. They are from the
ener's style, are indeed very rare in the experiments that came out of the early Chomskyan point of view trivial insofar as they do not inform us of anything
Leipzig laboratory." According to Erwin Allen Esper's (1895-1972) account, vital about the essential nature of language. Chomsky's traditions instead are
this interpretation is incorrect, and Esper (1971) neither sees Wundt as the im- to be traced, like the early 1914 Bloomfield, from a line of thought more akin
portant psycholinguistic figure that Blumenthal does nor the experimental to one in which Wundt's interests would have been compatible. For Chomsky,
value of introspection as a psychological method. Even Blumenthal (1979) the Cartesian philosophy of language, the Port-Royal grammarians, and fi-
notes that the massive Volkerpsychologie involves no experimentation, de- nally Humboldt himself, are more fitting prototype figures in terms of their in-
spite the attention paid to psycholinguistic matters. As an exceptionally lucid terests in language.
piece of deductive speculation, it is quite compatible, though, with the mod-
Linguists of the last century were more like philologists in our terms.
ern generativist frame of reference. Given the Humboldtian view of language and thought which so permeated
To some like Blumenthal (1970, 1973, 1975, 1977), Wundt's theories much of the contemporary work on language, one of their chief preoccupa-
tions was to determine how ethnic character and culture were reflected in lan-
seem especially modern. Wundt's goal as a psychologist was "to give an guage, how concepts might be differently expressed in different languages.
explicit characterization of the principles that govern the functioning of cogni- But true to the philosophical proclivities of philologists of the period, there
tion in humans, and it was his belief that the study of human language would was more speculation about the nature of such considerations in language
provide one of the best means of knowledge about the human mind" (Blu- than there was actual research into the formal mechanics of given languages.
menthal 1973:11). Chomsky's (1968, 1972) injunction about linguistics being The practical details were often left to missionaries, teachers, and others who
a subbranch of cognitive psychology sounds neither innovative nor startling in had a need for such things, while the underlying human essence of language
this epistemological frame of reference. Moreover, Wundt had similar no- was considered more properly approached by deductive means. The influ-
tions about generating an infinite array of sentences from finite means, a pre- ence of ideas about language is seen in Wundt's Volkerpsychologie treatment
cursory notion of deep and surface structure ('inner and outer forms'), and the of national psychology and the psychology of language. According to Blu-
idea of the sentence as the basic unit. It is no wonder that generativists have re- menthal (1973:15), "this is again the Humboldtian influence... the spirit of a
society may largely be influenced by the structure and the nature of the lan-
discovered him wi.th such delight. guage that binds it together." This tradition, though not necessarily through
Thus, for Blumenthal (1970:242) and others, if we now ask Wundt, is also found in the work of Boas, Sapir, and their followers in North
America, but does not figure as prominently in the work of Bloomfield's fol-
what is the historical relevance of the new American psycholinguistics as a lowers.
discipline today, assuming it to be heavily under the influence of the develop-
ments in generative grammar. It is, in fact, in an analogous position to that of The psychological interpretation of language was not unique to Wundt.
Wundt and his followers who in the 1880s opposed the Junggrammatiker (or One also sees it in the writings of his predecessor Heymann Steinthal (1823-
narrow empiricist) tradition in linguistics because of its strict limitation of lin- 1899), as well as m the American philologist William Dwight Whitney (1827-
guistic study to descriptions of utterances. The Junggrammatikers had 1894). Bloomfield himself pays homage to this tradition in noting (1914:312)
studied only the physical shape of inventories. Wundt then revived the Hum- that
boldtian notions about language, essentially the same notions that were re-
cently revitalized in overcoming the limitations of American behavioral lin-
guistics.
Chomsky is pictured as the one who succeeded the preceding paradigm, and
xxviii JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xxix
both of these men have been followed by numerous investigators who have prominence. With psychology considered a natural science, enhanced by the
contributed to our understanding of the mental processes of speech and of its physiological interests which had become so much a part of the discipline,
change and development in time; the great advance of psychology in recent Wundt's concerns were seen as strictly metaphysical and at odds with psychol-
decades and the rise of social and ethnologic studies have been, of course, of ogy as a natural science. Eventually this positivist view won out almost com-
the highest benefit to this phase of the science of language. pletely and Wundt was largely eclipsed in the discipline's development (see
Danziger 1979, and Blumenthal 1975, for a fuller account of the positivist re-
Diekhoff's (1915) review of B-1914 in fact criticizes Bloomfield for just placement of Wundt).
such notions stemming from his following earlier philologists and Wundt a lit-
tle too closely in their Humboldtian notions of the relationship between lan- Whether Wundt himself presaged the move to radical behaviorism by his
guage and ethnic character. Diekhoff (1915; repr. in Hockett 1970:47) ob- pushing psychology out of philosophy into the natural sciences is question-
serves that able, but it is interesting to note that this desire for a new and independent sci-
ence using experimental methods in the analysis of mental events does give
it is quite true, as our author means to illustrate, "that the categoric and other rise to the next logical step. Here American positivism led to radical be-
distinctions of one's own language are not universal forms of expression or of haviorism with its concentration on experimental methods and observable
experience"; yet the conclusion ought not to be pressed too hard that the and replicable features (see Baker & Mos 1979). Wundt perhaps provided the
idiomatic differences between various languages indicate a corresponding catalyst by which this turn of events essentially materialized.
difference in the mental make-up of the peoples concerned ... I cannot con-
vince myself that in this outward remedy of a growing indistinctness any cor- The intellectual climate changed in the aftermath of the First World War,
responding psychological change should have been involved ... Modes ofut- and Wundtian mentalistic psychology gave way to behaviorism, at least in
terance, or idiomatic turns are very often the result of the most curious histor- North America. By the time B-1933 appears, the decline was largely com-
ical development, and they no more adequately express psychological opera- plete, and German intellectual hegemony too was considerably weakened.
tions, than the sound of the individual word can be said to cover a single Others like George Herbert Mead had also changed their appreciative impres-
psychological concept. Both become conventional ... sions of Wundtian notions, and Bloomfield was not alone in having come full
circle in abandoning Wundt's notions on the psychology of language (see Blu-
Diekhoff further criticizes him for his treatment of the nature and origin menthal 1973:16-17). Behaviorism in psychology had largely captured the
of language, particularly the notion that gesture language was the result of American academic imagination, and by the 1920s this type of psychology was
earlier purposeful movements, and that these accompanied by vocal utter- fashionable not only amongst professional academics, but also in the popular
ances, ultimately form the original basis of language. Diekhoff characterizes sense. John B. Watson's Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist
this as a matter of faith more than a demonstrable fact, and the faith is obvi- (1919) and A.P. Weiss' A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior (1824, 1929)
ously one placed in Wundt's notions about gesture language. Bloomfield were very much in evidence and were to largely replace what vestiges of Cen-
(1913) himself had noted of Wundt that his discussion of "the origin of lan- tral European functional mentalism remained on this continent. One can see
guage is splendidly treated... toward this we find in the Elemente only a sketch B-1914's adherence to Wundtian psychology as being quite out of place, had
of the origin of vocal language in the light of gesture (Wundt's greatest single he continued with such loyalties in B-1933. In Mueller's (1979:28) words,
linguistic contribution lies here) .... " (Bloomfield 1913; repr. in Hockett
1970:40). It is obvious that B-1914 notions about gesture language and lan- Wundt's way of thinking about psychology, and the thinking of those that fol-
guage origins must have been directly distilled from Wundt. lowed in his tradition, did not contain the essential ingredients that could
have generated twentieth century psychology... one is struck by the fact that
Wundt's work fits between the two positivist cycles in European thought, all [but Wundt] are characterized by experimental or observational proce-
the first during the mid-19th century, the second around World War I. The dures that are still acceptable as bona fide scientific procedure. The one line
second period sees positivism coupled with behaviorism as a popular of inquiry that specified, and was based on, an "experimental" procedure
philosophy of science. The academic scene witnesses the rise of Anglo- that is not judged acceptable as a method of scientific investigation at the pre-
American empiricism and pragmatism, and the strong turn toward a positivist
philosophy of science makes for a final undermining of Wundt's place of
XXX JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xxxi
sent time is the line established by Wundt. The paradox is that psychology has ence are still firm, but what this entails is somewhat modified from his 1914
selected as the founder of its science a man whose line of inquiry brought with position. No longer does one find explanations ofthe 'why' of human linguis-
it no acceptable experimental method. tic behavior; description thereof is sufficient. Bloomfield observes,
Wundtian psychology was simply not compatible with the turn of events in linguists do not pretend to explain conditions or changes by saying that the
psychology, nor the kind of behavioristic positivism that Bloomfield and speakers strove toward such an end, such as euphony or clearness, and when
others in the 1930s subscribed to. While such Wundtian belief systems were linguists speak of a soul or a mind, the term is otiose .... It is true that in the
perfectly acceptable in their 1914 context, by 1930 they would have been both last years some students of language have tried to galvanize the finalistic and
outmoded and incompatible with the developments that were taking place in animistic factors into some effect upon linguistic: forms, but these scholars
the behavioral sciences in America. In contrasting the two intellectual cli- have in this way produced nothing but less useful restatements of results that
mates and noting the pendulum swings between objectivism and mentalism were gained by the ordinary methods of linguistic study. (Bloomfield 1930;
in psychology and other social sciences over the last two centuries, Esper repr. in Hockett 1970:229).
(1968) even suggests that we would have been better off staying where the
Bloomfieldian swing took us rather than having continued on into another These Weissian notions are also evident in Bloomfield's criticism (1933:17) of
mentalism, namely, that of Chomsky. This, however, may be far from a Paul's psychological interpretations of language characteristics, noting that
majority opinion in the discipline. Paul was given to "statements about language with a paraphrase in terms of
mental processes which the speakers are supposed to have undergone. The
Just as the sociology of Durkheim is said to have had an influence on only evidence for these mental processes is the linguistic process; they add no-
Saussure, so also did the behaviorist psychology of Albert Paul Weiss (1879- thing to the discussion, but only obscure it."
1931) on the later Bloomfield during the 1920s, when both were at Ohio State ··
University. How highly Bloomfield thought of Weiss is captured in Bloom- Whether Bloomfield recognized that in the Kuhnian sense psychology is
field's obituary of Weiss: "Weiss was not a student of language, but he proba- also given to cycles of thought and paradigms of activity is difficult to discern;
bly was the first man to·see its significance" (Bloomfield 1931; repr. in Hoc- however, like his predecessor Delbriick, he came to eschew such choices be-
kett 1970:237). Bloomfield moved from a Wundtian view that language could tween theories in what had become a separate and distinct field. Delbriick's
be accounted for only in terms of human psychology to a Weissian view that advice (1901), of course, was to simply ignore developments in psychology
rather human psychology can only be accounted for in human language terms. and proceed with the linguistic business at hand. In Delbriick's time, the
According to Hockett (see Esper 1973:xiv), "Weiss helped Bloomfield to choice was between the rigorous mathematical psychology of Johann Fried-
realize that the traditional psychological 'explanations' of this or that feature rich Herbart (1776-1841) and Wundt; in Bloomfield's time the choices were
of language were nothing more than paraphrases, in mentalistic terms, of different, but the principle of disciplinary independence remained for Bloom-
what could be (and often enough already had been) perfectly well described in field to enforce. Wundt had attempted to replace Herbart's mechanistic and
purely Jinguistic terms." Although this particular form of behaviorism did not associationistic psychology with a new experimental psychology, seeing
hold center-stage in either psychology or linguistics, it did have sufficient im- psychology as the propaedeutic core science, not one as subordinate to or
pact on linguistics to endow the discipline with the particular complexion it even partner with other sciences of human behavior. Language is the result of
had from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. Bloomfield had already swung over to psychological processes, and one extrapolates from this that the study of
the position that it makes little difference which psychology the linguist ac- philology and psychology must be linked. And of course looking at his mas-
cepts by the time his programmatic article"A Set of Postulates for a Science of sive Volkerpsychologie volumes one can easily see how for Wundt the entire
Language" (1926) appeared, and the period of psychology-independent complex of human organizational phenomena is ultimately psychological.
structuralism probably finds its origins here as well as anywhere else. Delbriick's conclusion (1901) that it makes little or no difference which system
of psychology, Wundtian or Herbartian, is chosen was for Wundt a rejection of
Weiss' influence is particularly obvious in Bloomfield's (1930) presenta- psychology altogether, since Wundt was himself so convinced of the superior-
tion of "Linguistics as a Science". His beliefs regarding linguistics being a sci- ity of his own system (see Kantor 1936:51-53). Delbriick simply saw no par-
xxxii JOSEPHF. KESS INTRODUCTION xxxiii
ticular advantage in understanding or explaining language by choosing one throughout rather than psychological interpretations"; Bolling (1935; repr. in
psychological system over the other, and in so doing, simply rejects them both Hockett 1970:278), "the second drive has for its objective the elimination of
as interesting, but not germane. In so doing, Delbriick sets the stage for 'psychological explanations' from our work. Again I am in hearty agreement
Bloomfield's similar rejection of psychology. Where Delbriick would proba- with the author... [that] such theories add nothing to our understanding of our
bly have seen some superiority in Wundtian psychology, Bloomfield would own problems... ".
have seen for his own intellectual position the same compatibility in be-
haviorist psychology; however, a choice was not required, and linguistic sci- The fact of Bloomfield's being subject to Kuhnian considerations does
ence could, in his view, independently proceed without being wedded to not in any way diminish Bloomfield's stature at either point in his career. As
either of these or any other system of psychology. Koerner (1976:708) has suggested, the fact that scholars are reflections "of
their time and not creatores ex nihilo does not by any means diminish their at-
Thinking probably of Delbriick, Bloomfield (1933:vii) writes, "in 1914 I tainments; their creativity and originality lie in the very fact that they were
based this phase of the exposition on the psychologic system of Wilhelm capable of making use of the things that were in the air and put forward a
Wundt, which was then widely accepted", but "since that time there has been synthesis, a general theory of language, in a rigorous manner not proposed by
much upheaval in psychology; we have learned, at any rate, what one of our any of their contemporaries." In Bloomfield's case, this is all the more en-
masters suspected thirty years ago, namely, that we can pursue the study of lightening for us, for we can observe both the intellectual tenor which went
language without reference to any one psychological doctrine, and that to do into the molding of the discipline as a separate entity and the subsequent shift
so safeguards our results and makes them more significant to workers in re- to positivism. For those who fail to see the archeological merit in this stratig-
lated fields." That the relationship could even be reversed, with linguistics raphic layering of the evolution of ideas within our own discipline, it will at least
having a good deal to offer psychology, is obvious in Bloomfield's (1933:32) allow them to glimpse their own mentalistic position through the eyes of an
suggestion that "the findings of the linguist, who studies the speech signal, will earlier mentalism.
be all the more valuable for the psychologist if they are not distorted by any
prepossessions about psychology. We have seen that many of the older lin- We are at a critical turn in the development of our own understanding of
guists ignored this [perhaps having Hermann Paul in mind]; they vitiated or the discipline. Lest we allow the pendulum swings between mentalism and ob-
skimped their reports by trying to state everything in terms of some jectivism to presage yet another, we must make the most of what we have
psychological theory." Although B-1933 carefully makes explicit its intention learned from the past. As Blumenthal (1974:1131) has noted,
to set aside psychological considerations in delineating linguistics as a science,
one should admit that the mechanistic principles of behaviorism were not only the real successes of both the comparative linguistics in the nineteenth cen-
more compatible with the new linguistics, but also likely to be preferred. tury and of the behaviorist linguistics in the twentieth century were con-
cerned with methodology, procedures, and techniques. Those times in both
Thus one comes full circle from B-1914 to B-1933. Though Bloomfield centuries were perhaps paralleled by similar movements within psychology
called his 1933 book a "revised version of the author's Introduction to the in general. The Wundtians, no less than some recent psychologists, then dis-
Study of Language", his reviewers immediately comment on the fact of its covered that positivistic psychology was in need of explanatory theory, of a
being a totally new book. For example, Edgerton (1933; repr. in Hockett more sophisticated cognitive psychology...
1970:258), "this is really a wholly new book"; Meillet (1933; repr. in Hockett
1970:264), "au lieu de faire de son ancien ouvrage une edition corrigee, il a What we perhaps need now is a new and informed experimental mentalism,
ecrit un livre nouveau fonde sur des theories purement linguistiques"; Stur- one which allows us to understand mental events, but by inductive means to
tevant (1934; repr. in Hockett 1970: 265), "in reality, however, it is a new balance out our deductive speculations about language and cognition. Unless
book." One also detects a certain relief on the part of some that the early we do so, we risk another swing, perhaps even another exciting new
Wundtian allegiance has disappeared. For example, Kroesch (1933; repr. in paradigm, but one which ultimately is not as informative as the experimental
Hockett 1970:261), "the author wisely emphasizes the facts of language mentalism alternative.
Finally, it might be said that we are in many ways what we were and many
of our questions have been also asked in different times and different places.
xxxiv JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION XXXV
As Percival (1976) has suggested, the history of our discipline, as all others, is -----. 1931. "Obituary of Albert Paul Weiss". Language 7.219-221. (Repr. in
a history of the progression of ideas, and Bloomfield's Introduction to the Hockett 1970, pp. 237-239.)
Study of Language of 1914 is a reflection of ideas that come together f~om a
variety of intellectual sources to focus at one point in the history of the discip- -----. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt.
line that has become the one we are. One welcomes the re-issuing of a classic Blumenthal, Arthur L. 1970. Language and Psychology: Historical Aspects of
in the field of linguistics, and given both the intellectual origins of Bloom-
field's earlier psychology of language and the paradigmatic impact of his later Psycholinguistics. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
views on linguistic thought in this century, a classic in psycholinguistics as -----. 1973. "Introduction". Wilhelm Wundt, The Language of Gestures. ( =
well.
Approaches to Semiotics; Paperback series), 11-19. The Hague: Mouton.
REFERENCES
-----. 1974. "An Historical View of Psycholinguistics". Current Trends in Lin-
Aron, Albert W. 1918. Review of Bloomfield 1914. American Journal of guistics, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, vol. 12, pp. 1105-1134.
Philology 39.86-92. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 54-60.)
-----. 1975. "A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt". American Psychologist
Baker, William J., and Mos, Leendert P. _1979. "Mentalism and Language in 30.1081-1088.
(and Out of) Psychology." Paper presented at the American Psychological
Association Convention, New York, N. Y., September. -----. 1977. The Process of Cognition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
-----. 1979. "The Founding Father We Never Knew". Contemporary Psychol-
Blake, Frank R. 1919. Review of Bloomfield 1917. American Journal of
Philology 4.86-93. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 82-89.) ogy 24:7.547-550.
-----. 1980. "Wilhelm Wundt and Early American Psychology: A Clash of Cul-
Bloch, Bernard. 1949. "Obituary Notice for Leonard Bloomfield." Language
25.87-94. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 524-532.) tures". Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychology, ed. by
Robert W. Rieber, pp. 117-135. New York: Plenum Press.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1913. Review of Wilhelm Wundt's Elemente der Vol- Bolling, George Melville. 1917. Review of Bloomfield 1914. The Classical
kerpsychologie. American Journal of Psychology 24.449-453. (Repr. in Weekly 10.166-168. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 50-54.
Hockett 1970, pp. 39-43.) -----. 1935. Review of Bloomfield 1933. Language 11.251-252. (Repr. in Hoc-
kett 1970, pp. 277-78.) [Occasioned by the British edition, London: G.
-----.1914.AnintroductiontotheStudyofLanguage. New York: Henry Holt. Allen & Unwin, 1935.]
(Repr. in this volume.) Boring, Edwin Garrigue. 1950. A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd
Ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
-----. 1915. "Sentence and Word". Transactions of the American Philological Carroll, John B. 1953. The Study of Language: A Survey of Linguistics and
Association 45.65-75. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 61-69.) Related Disciplines in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1968. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
-----. 1917. "Subject and Predicate". Transactions ofthe American Philologi- World. (2nd enlarged ed., 1972.)
cal Association 47.13-22. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 70-77.) Danziger, Kurt. 1979. "The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt". Journal ofthe
History ofthe Behavioral Sciences 15.205-230.
-----. 1917. Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis. ( = University ofIllinois Delbriick, Berthold. 1901. Grundfagen der Sprachforschung mit Rucksicht
auf W. Wundt's Sprachpsychologie erortert. Strassburg: Karl J. Triibner.
Studies in Language and Literature, 3, Nos. 2-4.) Diekhoff, Tobias. 1915. Review of Bloomfield 1914. Journal of English and
-----. 1926. "A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language". Language Germanic Philology 14.593-597. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 45-50.)
Edgerton, Franklin. 1933. Review of Bloomfield 1933. Journal ofthe Ameri-
2.253-164. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 128-138.) can Oriental Society 53.295-297. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 258-260.)
-----. 1930. "Linguistics as a Science". Studies in Philology 27.533-557. (Repr. Esper, Erwin Allen. 1968. Mentalism and Objectivism in Linguistics: The
Sources of Leonard Bloomfield's Psychology of Language. New York:
in Hockett 1970, pp. 227-230.) American Elsevier.
xxxvi JOSEPH F. KESS INTRODUCTION xxxvii
-----. 1971. Review of Blumenthal 1970. Language 47 .979-984. Paul, Hermann. 1880. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle/S: M.
-----. 1973. Analogy and Association in Linguistics and Psychology. Athens: Niemeyer. (5th revised edition, 1920.)
University of Georgia Press. Percival, W. Keith. 1976. "The Applicability of Kuhn's Paradigm to the His-
Haas, William. 1978. "Linguistics 1930-1980". Journal of Linguistics 14.293- tory of Linguistics". Language 52.285-293.
308. Pulgram, Ernst. 1969. "Sciences, Humanities, and the Place of Linguistics".
Haeberlin, Herman K. 1916. "The Theoretical Foundations of.Wundt's Folk- Linguistics 53.70-92.
Psychology". The Psychological Review 23.279-302. Rieber, Robert W. 1980. "Wundt and the Americans: From Flirtation to
Hall, RobertA.,Jr.1959. "ObituaryforLeonardBloomfield". Lingua2.ll7- Abandonment". Wilhelm Wundt and the Making of a Scientific Psychol-
ogy, ed. by Robert W. Rieber, 137-51. New York: Plenum Press.
l23. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp.547-553.)
----. 1969. "Some Recent Developments in American Linguistics". Rieber, Robert W., and Vetter, Harold J. 1979. "Theoretical and Historical
Roots of Psycholinguistic Research". Psycholinguistic Research: Implica-
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70.192-227. tions and Applications, ed. by Robert W. Rieber and Doris Aaronson, pp.
Hass, Wilbur A. 1974. Review of Blumenthal 1970. Historiographia Linguis- 21-61. Hilldale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
tica 1:1.111-116. Robins, Robert H. 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. London: Longmans.
Hockett, Charles F., Ed. 1970. A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. (2nd revised edition, 1979.)
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sebeok, Thomas A., Ed. 1966. Portraits of Linguists: A Biographical Source
Kantor, Jacob Robert. 1936. An Objective Psychology of Grammar. Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746-1963. Vol. II.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bloomington: The Principia Press. (Repr. , 1952.)
Kess, Joseph F. 1979. "Focus, Topic, and Case in the Philippine Verbal Stent, Gunther S. 1972. "Prematurity and Uniqueness in Scientific Discov-
ery". Scientific American 227:6.84-93.
Paradigm". Southeast Asian Linguistic Studies, vol. 3, Nguyen Dang Liem,
ed. Pacific Linguistics, Series C-No. 45, pp. 213-239. Sturtevant, Edgar Howard. 1934. Review of Bloomfield 1933. The Classical
Koerner, E.F.K. 1972. "Towards a Historiography of Linguistics". An- Weekly 27.129-160. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 265-266.)
thropological Linguistics 14.255-280.
-----. 1976. "Towards a Historiography of Linguistics". History of Linguistic Thomson, Robert. 1968. The Pelican History of Psychology. London: Pen-
Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, ed. by Herman Parret, pp. 685- guin Books.
718. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Kroesch, Samuel. 1933. Review of Bloomfield 1933. Journal of English and Watson, John B. 1919. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Bahaviorist.
Germanic Philology 32.594-597. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 260-264.) Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd Ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weimer, Walter B. 1974a. "The History of Psychology and its Retrieval from
Lane, George S. 1945. "Changes of Emphasis in Linguistics with Particular Historiography: I. The Problematic Nature of History". Science Studies
Reference to Paul and Bloomfield". Studies in Philology 42.465-483. 4.235-258.
Leary, David E. 1979. "Wundt and After: Psychology's Shifting Relations
with the Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Philosophy". Journal ofthe -----. 1974b. "The History of Psychology and its Retrieval from Historiogra-
History of the Behavioral Sciences 15.231-241. phy: II. Some Lessons for the Methodology of Scientific Research". Sci-
Marshall, John C. 1970. Review of Esper 1968. Semiotica 2.277-293. ence Studies 4.367-396.
Meillet, Antoine. 1933. Review of Bloomfield 1933. Bulletin de la Societe de
Linguistique de Paris 34:3.1-2. (Repr. in Hockett 1970, pp. 264-265.) Weimer, Walter B., and Palermo, David S. 1973. "Paradigms and Normal
Mueller, Conrad G. 1979. "Some Origins of Psychology as Science". Annual Science in Psychology". Science Studies ~. 211-244.
Review of Psychology 30.9-29.
Weiss, Albert Paul. 1924. A Theoretical Basis of Human Behavior. Colum-
bus, Ohio: Adams. (2nd revised edition, 1929.)
Whitney, William Dwight. 1867. Language and the Study of Language. New
York: Scribners.
xxxviii JOSEPH F. KESS
-----. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. New York: Appleton. AN INTRODUCTION
Wundt, Wilhelm. 1874. Grundzuge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leip- TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE
zig: Wilhelm Engelmann. BY
-----. 1883. "Ueber psychologische Methoden". Philosophische Studien 1.1- LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
40.
Pk. D., .A88iltant PrqfeaBOr of <Jomparati'l16 PktloJ,0gy and German
-----. 1897. Outlines ofPsychology. Trans. by Charles Hubbard Judd. Leipzig: in the Univerritv of Illinois
Wilhelm Engelmann.
I
-----. 1900. Die Sprache. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. (Rev. ed. 1904; 3rd
ed. 1911-12.)
-----. ·1901. Sprachgeschichte und Sprachpsychologie, mit Rucksicht auf B.
Delbrucks Grundfragen der Sprachforschung. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engel-
mann.
-----. 1900-1920. Volkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungs-
gezetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte. 10 vols. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engel-
mann.
-----. 1973. The Language of Gestures. (= Approaches to Semiotics; Paper-
back Series, 6.) The Hague: Mouton.
LONDON
G. BELL AND SONS, LTD
! N11:w YoRK: HENRY HoLT AND CoMP.A.NY
PREFACE.
This little book is intended, as the title implies, for
the general reader and for the student -who is entering
upon linguistic work. Its purpose is the same, according-
Jy, as that of Whitney's Language and the Study of Lan-
guage and The Life and Growth of Language, books which
fifty years ago represented the attainments of linguistic
science and, owing to their author's clearness of view
and conscientious discrimination between ascertained fact
and mere surmise, contain little to which we cannot to-
day subscribe. The great progress of our science in the
last half-century is, I believe, nevertheless sufficient ex-
cuse for my attempt to give a summary of what is now
known about language.
That the general reader needs such information as is
here given was recognized by Whitney, who wrote, in
the preface of his first-named book: flt can hardly admit
of question that at least so much knowledge of the na-
ture, history, an4 classifications of language as is here
presented ought to be included in every scheme of higher
education.' While questions of a linguistic nature are
everywhere a frequent subject of discussion, it is surpris-
ing how little even educated people are in touch with
the scientific study of language.. I hope that my book
will furnish a simple aid for those who choose to make
up this deficiency in our scheme of general education
Students whose vocation demands linguistic knowledge
are subjected in our universities to a detached course or
1•·'
VI PREFACE
two on details of the phonologic and morphologic history
of such languages as Old English, Gothic, or Old French,
- details which are meaningless and soon forgotten, if
no instruction as to their concrete significance has pre-
ceded. To this method of presentation is due, I think,
the dislike which so many workers in related fields bear
toward linguistic study. I hope that this essay may help ..,.
to introduce students of philosophy, psychology, ethnol- CONTENTS.
ogy, philology, and other related subjects to a juster CHAPTER I
acquaintance with matters of language.
In accordance with this twofold aim, I have limited THE NA.TUBE AND. ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.
myself to ·a presentation of the accepted doctrine, not 1. Expressive movements • 1
even avoiding well-used standard examples. In a few 2. Gesture-language . • • • • • • • • • '• • • • • • '1
8
places I have spoken of views that cannot claim more 8. Writing . .. • . • ••••••
• 10
than probability, of hypotheses, and of problems yet to 4.. Audible expressive movements
. rn
be solved, but I have done this explicitly and only be- 6. Development of language in the child.
16
cause I think it fitting to indicate the direction in which 8. The origin of language . . .
• 17
7. Language constantly changing • • • • •
our study is at present tending. Consequently the matter 8. Social character of language • • • •
here presented is by no means my own, but rather the
property of all students of language. It will be found in CHAPTER II.
fuller form and with bibliographic support in the books
mentioned in Chapter Ten, and these books I may there- THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE.
fore name as my more immediate sources.1) It will be 1. Unconsciousness of speech-movements • 18
apparent, especially, that I depend for my psychology, 2. Writing an imperfect analysis •. Hf
general and linguistic, entirely on Wundt; I can only 8. The vocal chords • • • 21
hope that I have not misrepresented his doctrine. The 4. The velum . . • • • • • • • • 26
6. Oral articulation • • • • • • • • 27
day is past when students of mental sciences could draw 6. Oral noise-articulations • 28
on their own fancy or on 'popular psychology' for their 7. Musical oral articulations • 33
views of mental occurrence. L. B. 8. Infinite variety of possible sounds • • • 38
9. Glides and mixtures of articulation • • • •• 40
.u
1) Of Sweet's Primer of Phonetic, the first, and of Meillet'a 10. Syllables • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Introduction the second edition was used in compilation, but 11. Stress • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •• 43
the later editions do not, I believe, differ materially u to any- 12. Pitch. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 51
thing here diacuSBed. 18. Duration • . • • • • • • • • • • • . • • • • • 5~
14:. Limitation of articulations in each dialect . • • • • • 53
16. Automatic variation, • • • • • • . 64
VD.I CONTENTS CONTENTS IX
CHAPTER III. Page Page
THE MENTA.L BA.SIS OF LANGUAGE.
8. Derivation and inflection . . . • • • • • • • • • • 140
9. The semantic nature of inflection: the commonest cate-
gories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . • 14.1
1. The place of language in our mental life • • • • • • 66 10. The semantic nature of derivation . . . . . . . • • 160
56
2. Total experiences. . • . . . . . • • • • • • • • • • 59 11. The phonetfo cl}.aracter of the inorphologic processes • 161
63
S. The analysis of total experiences • • • • • • • • • • 65 12. Word-composition: semantic value . . . • • • • • • • 169
66
4. The naming of objects . . . . . . • • • • • • • • • 67 13. Word-composition not a phonetic process. • • • • 162
69
5. The development of abstract words • • • • • • • • • 70 14.. Simple word: compound: phrase • • • • • • • • • • • 165
71
6. Psychologic composition of the word. ••••••
7. Grammatical categories . ·. . . . . . ••••• CHAPTER VL
SYNTAX.
8. Psychologic character of the linguistic forms . • • •
9. Psychologic motives of utterance . . . . . . • • • • •
10. Interpretation of the linguistic phenomena • • • • • 1. The field of syntax . • • • • 167
CHAPTER IV. 2. The discursive relations . • . •. • 168
THE FORMS OF LANGUAGE. 8. The, emPtional relations . • 170
4. Material relations. . . • • . 171
6. Syntactic categories. . . • . 174
1. The inarticulate outcry • • • • • • '18 6. The expression of syntactic relations: modulation in the
2. Primary interjections . 7S sentence . . . . . . . . . . • . • • • • • lll6
3. Secondary interjections . . . . . . . • • • 76 '1.· Cross-referring constructions. • • • • • • • • • • • • 178
4. The arbitrary value of non-interjectional utterances • 77 8. Congruence • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 180
6. The classifying nature of linguistic expression 82 9. Government . • • • • • • • • • . • • • • • • • • 182
6. Expression of the three types of utterance •• 90 10. Word-order . . • • . • . • • • • • 186
7. The parts of utterances . . . . 92 11. Set phrases: the transition from syntax to style . • • • 188
8. The word: phonetic character • • 97 12. The complex sentence • • • • • • • • • 190
9. The word: semantic character . • • • • • • • • 108
10. Word-classes • • • 108 CHAPTER VII.
INTERNAL CHA"NGE IN LANGUAGE.
11. The sentence •• 110
CHAPTER V t. Language constantly changing. . • • • • • • • 195
MORPHOLOGY.
2. Causes of the instability of language. • • • • • • • • 195
3. Change in articulation . • . •. • • • • • • • 202
1 The significance of morphologic phenomena . • • • 120 4.. Ana.logic change • • • • • • • • • • 221
2. Morphologic classification by syntactic use (Parts of 6. Semantic change . • ••• 237
speech) . . . . . . . . . • • • • • • • 120 6. The ultimate conditions of change in language • • • • 251
8. Classification by congruence . • • • • • • • • • • • 127
4.. Phonetic-semantic classes· . . • • • • • • • 131 CHAPTER VIlI.
EXTERNAL CHANGE OF LA.NGU.\GES.
6. Classes on a partially phonetic basis • • • • 186
1. Language never umform .
6. Difference between morphologic clat1sification and non- 2. Increase of uniformity
.linguistic association . • • • • • • . . • • • • • 139 159
162
'I. Classes by composition . • • • • • • .• • • • • • • • 14:0
X CONTENTS
Page
8. Decrease of uniformity does not offset the increase. • • 263
4. Inferences from historic conditions . . . . . . . • • • 266
6. The process of differentiation. . . . . . . . ••• 273
6. Deduction of internal history from related forms . • • • 274
7. Interaction of dialects and languages . • • • • • 280
8. Standard languages . . • • • • • • • • • • • • • 288
CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER I.
THE TEA.CHING OF LANGUAGES.
THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE.
1. The purpose of foreign language instruction • • • •. 292
1. Expressive movements. In the animal world every
2. Character of the instruction •.• • • • • 293 mental process is accompanied by a corresponding phys-
ical process. Some of these physical processes are express-
3. Age of the pupil . . . . • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 296 ive movements. Investigation has shown that the express-
ive movements are most directly co-ordinated with the
4. Equipment of the teacher . • • • • • • • 297 emotional element that is present in every mental process.
6. Drill in pronunciation . • 299 In man as well as in the lower animals it is primarily
the intensity of the emotional element which appears in
6. Method of presenting semantic material . • 300 the expressive movements. Everyday observation recog-
nizes the intensity of emotion of monkeys, dogs, or birds
7. Grammatical information • • 302 and even of such distant forms as the ant or the fly. In
man and in the animals nearer to man a mild emotion
8. Texts.· . • • • • • • • • • • • •••••• 304 is accompanied on the physical side by a hurrying of
pulse-beat and respiration. If the emotion is more violent,
9. References • 806 the expressive movements extend, successively, to the
facial muscles, then to the hands and arms, and finally
CHAPTER X. to the legs and feet, embracing a set of actions well
THE STUDY OF LA.NfAOAGE. known to common observation. As the violence of the
emotion increases, these movements also grow more ener-
1. The origin of linguistic science. . . . . • • • • • 307 getic. When a certain extreme, however, is reached, the
mental turmoil suddenly ceases and, in exact correspond-
2. How to study linguistics . . • • • • • • 313
aence with this, there is stopping of all the physical
3. Relation of linguistics to other scieilces . • • • • • 319
manifestations: the muscles grow slack, the legs often
INDICES. refusing support, and heart-beat and respiration may tem-
. . . .1 Authors, etc. porarily or even permanently stop.
. . . . .2. Languages .
. . . . .' . .. .. . . . . 826 Bloomfield, Study of La.upa.ge
..............a. Subjecta • • • • • 327
• 381
2 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE E~PRESSIVE MOVEMENTS s
While the expressive movements are thus chiefly de- Beside these expressions we find tension, - pleasant
pendent on the intensity of emotion, some of them, espe- or unpleasant anticipation, - expressed by the inner-
cially in the monkey and in man, have come secondarily vation of the cheek-muscles, and relaxation, _;. satiation
to indicate also the quality of the emotion. T~e quality or disappointment, - by their loosening. Perhaps these
of the emotion shows itself in the play ·of the facial reflexes originated in the use of these muscles in eating.
muscles. The various facial expressions are probably
mechanized forms of what were once instinctive efforts Another specialized type of expressive movements are
at dealing with experiences of taste. The familiar 'sweet1 those which indicate the perceptual content of an ex-
or pleasurable expression brings any substance that may perience. In every experience there is present, beside the
be in the mouth as much as possible into contact with emotional elements (with whieh the expressive movements,
the tip of the tongue, which is most sensitive to sweet we must suppose, are most directly connected), a series
tastes. Similarly, the 'bitter' or abhorrent expression of perceptual impressions, whether of outer sensation or
withdraws the back of the tongue, which is most sensi- of imagery. In fact, it is only by an abstraction that we
tive to a bitter taste. Sour tastes are most felt by the can separate the emotional and the perceptual contents
sides of the tongue: a pleasantly sour taste can be best of our mental life. Just as certain expressive movements
perceived in the position which we know as a 'smile' and originally connected. with experiences of taste have come
an over-sour one best avoided by the 'weeping' grimace. to indicate the emotional quality of an experience, so
These responses have, in the history of the race, become certain other movements, especially of the hands and
purely reflex and hereditary, appearing even in new-born arms, have come to indicate its perceptual content.
children.
Such a movement is that of pointing at things. When
Owing, moreover, to association between these move- a child grasps at things which it cannot reach, its mis-
ments and the emotional qualities in these taste-experiences, judgment of distance results, in each case, in a mere
the movements have come to be constant attendants of movement of the hand in the direction of the object
all experiences, even other than of taste, which involve desired. As the child grows in intelligence it performs
such qualities of emotion. That is, the 'sweet', cbitter', this movement even when it knows it cannot reach things,
'smiling', and cweeping' expressions are now the phys- and finally also uses the movement to indicate things which
ical concomitants of any and all experiences whose emo- it does not want, - things which merely excite its cu-
tional quality resembles that, respectively, of a sweet, riosity or interest, the subjects of its discourse. This de-
bitter, sour, or over-sour taste. Thus any pleasure is ac- velopment of the deictic expressive movement, which
companied by the first of these expressions and any occurs in every child, is peculiarly human; the monkey
abhorrence by the second; the uses of the smile and of does not get beyond the first stage of sometimes grasping
the weeping grimace are too well known to need descrip- at things which it cannot reach.
tion. It is not known to what extent this associational
extension of these movements is hereditary. Another type of expressive movement that indicates
perceptual content is the imitative movement. Imitation
is a term that can be applied to many phenomena of ex-
4 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE GESTURE-LANGUAGE 6
pressive movement throughout the animal kingdom. When southern Italy since Roman times (and no one knows
we find numbers of ants or bees, for instance, congruently how much' earlier), or like that used by the lower classes
performing some one task, we must suppose that an in- in Japan, or by the Cistercian monks under their vow of
stinctive action of some individuals called forth the same silence; and all these forms closely resemble that which
action in all the others. The explanation seems to be that a company of untaught deaf-mutes will, in the course
the bodily movements have become so closely associated of a few years, produce for themselves.
vrith the mental processes which they accompany, that
the sight of a fellow-individual going through the former Gesture-language is so uniform because it consists
at once awakens the same mental state in the beholder. everywhere chiefly of th" universally human expressive
Thus a child, seeing another child weep, enters at once movements voluntarily used for communication. The origin
upon the state of anguish associated with this expression, of the communicative use is psychologically intelligible.
and consequently weeps in sympathy, as we say, with An individual sympathetically taking up another's emo-
the other child. In a grown civilized man these imitative tion might yet reproduce an entirely different perceptual
actions are, however, usually suppressed and even the content. In so far as his expressive movements indicated
sympathetic emotion is reduced to a minimum. This sub- the latter they would differ from those of the first indi-
jection of the imitative movements to the will allows vidual. This already would be rudimentary communica-
them to become expressive of perceptual contents. For tion. It would develope into more and more deliberate
we may now accompany any chosen perceptual element and explicit forms as the race attained to voluntary use
of our mental state by imitative gestures, - provided of expressive movements for any chosen part of one's
only that this element is sufficiently charged emotionally, ideas, and as individuals, after repeated occurrence of the
for, after all, these movements are at bottom indicative divergence of gesture, should foresee this divergence and
of intensity of emotion. Especially in speaking of actions make gestures in order to call forth divergent gestures
we accompany ow· picturing with imitative gestures. Also, from their fellow, - in other words, as the exchange of
anyone asked to define the qualities fcompact' or fspiral' messages became a motive. We must suppose that all
will resort to imitative movements. The prevalence of this took place in connection with vocal language, but
these varies greatly as a matter of communal habit or even where gestures are used without vocal language
good form among different nations. they remain close to their character of expressive move-
ments.
2. Gesture-language. Gestures are frequently used as
the ~eans of communication where vocal speech is im- The deictic movement is of very limited use in gesture-
possib~e or undesirable. The systems of gesture-language language. Objects which, under circumstances, may be
thus used by different peoples are strikingly uniform. absent cease to be designated by pointing gestures even
The gesture-language of certain of the American Indians, when they are present. The deictic gesture thus comes
used where tribes of different language wished to com- to be used only of certain constant relations: for express-
municate, i1 closely like that which has been current in ing the fl', the 'you', the 'here' or 'this', and the 'there'
or 'that'.
6 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE WRITING 'I
The imitative movements, on the other hand, receive ie closely associated with a type of experience, and a
a wide development in the depiding gestures. These have new experience with the same dominant features calls
been divided into three classes. The simplest kind are forth the same gesture, without any consciousness of a
the representative, which depart but little from primitive transference on the part of the speaker. We shall meet
imitative movements, - as, for instance, when 'joy' is similar inevitable transferences or rather ext~nsions of
expressed by a glad grimace or 'sleep' by closing the meaning when we speak of vocal language. In gesture-
eyes and inclining the head to one side. Like all depicting language ·they are limited, however, by the immediate
gestures, representative gestures are either graphic as and apparent connection or identity of most gestures
when one draws the outline of a 'house' in the air (gable• with the natural expressive reaction to the experience.
roof and side walls), or plastic, as in the above gestures Because most gestures are so immediately intelligible a
for 'joy' and 'sleep' or when one joins first finger and gesture not immediately intelligible is but slowly adopted,
thumb in the shape of a circle to indicate 'coin' or 'mon· and. the number of such never becomes very great. The
ey'. Suggestive gestures depict not the thing intended main stock of .every system of gesture is made up of
but some part or accompaniment of it that brings it up such original forms as the deictic and the graphic re-
by association. Graphic examples are the outlining of a presentative gestures, which are practically identical with
beard under one's chin to express 'goat' or of a hat over natural expressive movements.
one's head to express, among the Indians, 'white man'.
The plastic type appears in the gesture for 'silence' in 3. Writing. The expressive movements so far discuss-
which the lips are compressed and .a finger raised or in ed have given rise not only to gesture-language but
that for 'hunger' in. which the cheeks are hollowed and also to writing. Picture-writing is originally the tracing
two fingers, as if grasping a morsel, are held before the of an expressive movement on a permanent material.
open mouth. Symbolic gestures, finally, arise when still Its close kinship with gesture results in the transference
further associational processes have removed the gesture of symbols from one to the other. We find not only
from all 1·esemblance to the thing intended or any part delineations of objects (such as a house) made with
of it. Thus the deictic gestures for space may be used exactly the same strokes as are used in representative
for time: one points backward for the past and forward gesture, but even symbolic gestures are indicated in the
for the future, or, as a plastic example, the suggestive picture. Among the Indians a hand-movement upward
gesture for 'hunger' may be used for 'wish' or cdesire', from the head means 'big man' or 'chief': in picture·
or the suggestive ge~ture for a 'bad smell', raising of writing the same meaning is expressed by a line drawn
the nostrils, may be used to express anything arousing upward from the head of the figure. Similarly, we find
disgust. transference of pictorial symbols to gesture. The picto-
rial symbol for 'exchange' among the Indians consists of
The. transition from the immediately significant gestu- two crossed lines, - significant either of the act of ex-
res, the deictic ·and the representative, to the suggestive change itself or of the crossing of paths at.which barter
and the symbolic is a process of association. The gesture between primitive communities usually takes place. In
r
I
8 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE AUDIBLE EXPRESSIVE MOVEMENTS 9
gesture-language this symbol is used in the form of two reached a. high development. The more familiar type,
crossed fingers. in which air expelled from the lungs meets with obsta-
cles in the breath-passage, appears in amphibians, such as
The further development of writing takes place, as the frog, and especially, of course, in birds and mammals.
we shall see, entirely under the influence of vocal lan- The original form seems to be the cry of pain or rage.
guage. Under a violent unpleasurable emotion the breathing
apparatus and trachea are suddenly contracted. The
4:. Audible expressive movements. We have seen breath, hereby forcibly expelled, sets into vibration cer-
tain elastic protuberances within the breath-passage, the
how the expressive movements have developed in man vocal chords, and is further forced through the mouth
into a voluntarily used set of symbols by which even and nose. The result is a penetrating noise.
abstract meanings may be communicated. The principal
development of expressive movements in this direction Such animals as the mouse and the rabbit utter sound
did not, however, take place in connection with the noise- only under extreme emotion. The development from this
less movements which we have so far considered. ThesP primitive outcry seems to occur in two directions. Among
gregarious animals the primitive outcry becomes an in-
are in several· respects under a disadva~tage. It is per- stinctively used call for help or for the presence of a
fellow-individual. On the other hand, the cry of anger
haps rash to say that they are not capable of sufficient of the fighting males at mating-time develops into a
variation to be fully adequate to our needs; perhaps, general vocal expression of the emotions of this period.
if vocal speech had been denied us, they would have By a further transition this vocal expres Jion accompanies
shown themselves modifiable enough to serve for com- any lively pleasant emotion, as in the male song-bird.
munication in all respects. There is no question, how- The development in this direction brings it about that
ever, but that they are laborious and slow, demand- the vocal utterance is used not only under extreme stress,
ing a. great amount of muscular action on a large scale but also for lesser and for pleasurable emotions. Thus
for even the briefest utterance. They appeal, moreover, there comes about a differentiation between the utterance
to the sense of sight, which is not so pow&rful an arouser of highly unpleasant emotion on the one hand and that
of the attention as hearing and must, indeed, be turned, of lesser pleasant or unpleasant feelings on the other.
often by movement of the entire body, to receive an im- The latter, less violent expressions tend to include some
pression from a new direction. Opposed to all this, the repeated movement of the mouth or some periodic change
sau,nd-producing expressive movements are performed by in the production of the voice-sound itself. No better
a delicate machinery requiring but little muscular effort example of this differ1.:ntiation could be found than the
and appeal to the attention by a channel that is nearly squeak of a bird in extreme fright or pain and, under
always open and requires no adjustment of the receiving less emotional stress, its regular song. The less violent
apparatus. kind of utterance may be Il'.odulated predominantly as to
Expressive movements producing sound occur widely
in the animal kingdom. Such insects as crickets make
noise by rubbing together parts of their bony covering;
this type of audible expressive movement. has nowhere
10 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE IN THE CHILD 11
pitch or as to the noise-quality of the sound. Pitch-mod- which makes articulation of tongue-tooth sounds possible.
ulation is, of course, characteristic of the song of birds, Up to about the end of the first year the child performs
noise-modulation of the dog's bark or of human speech. In an increasing variety of articulatory movements, especial-
our song we combine the two; it has been thought that ly during pleasurable emotion. There can be no question
our unmelodious speech is a degeneration from an earlier that the tendency to this form of expressive movement,
singing habit of expression, but extended research has and especially to the great variety of these movements, is
shown that this is not the case, human song having prob- inherited from the past generations of speaking ancestry.
ably originated in the chant of rhythmic labor. The me-
lodious quality of the bird's song is due to the position The element of mimicry - that is, of imitation of
of its vocal chords at the very bottom of the trachea, the speech of the surrounding adults - becomes more
which leaves a long sounding-tube for the pitch-modifi- and more prominent toward the end of the first year,
cation of the sound; our speech, on the other hand, re- until the child :finally succeeds in repeating, - with no
ceives its great scope of variation as to noise-character consciousness of their meaning, to be sure, - syllables
from the extreme mobility of our tongue and other oral and words that are spoken to it.
muscles. The various movements of these were, no doubt,
in their origin, expressive movements like those of the At about the same time the child begins to understand
'sweet', 'bitter', and 'sour' or 'tense' and 'relaxed' types. gestures; that is, to associate people's gestures with emo-
The effect of the sound upon the producing individual tional and even perceptual experiences. It begins by
and his fellows was, however, so forceful, as opposed to connecting facial expression with states of emotion, rec-
that, of the mere movement and grimace, that the acoustic ognizing, as we say, an angry or a cheerful countenance.
impression of the sound and not the movement itself be- Then comes the association of deictic gestures with ob-
came the basis for further associational development. jects, the child's eyes following the direction in which
one points. At last words begin to be understood: aided,
5. Development of language in the child. The at first, by pointing gestures, the child begins to associate
different stages of vocal utterance appear very clearly such sound-sequences as the nursery words for 'mother',
during the growth of a child. The new-born child shrieks 'father', 'good', 'bad', 'bed', or 'sleep' with the corre-
with wide-open mouth when in pain. By the end of the sponding experiences.
first month it yells also under other sensations of dis-
comfort and soon afterwards it croons when it is con- As yet, however, the child does not utter these sound-
tented. As these less violent emotions are accompanied sequences to express the experiences. When it utters them
by less violent muscular effort, there is already some at all, it does so purely in mimicry. Even in a normal
differentiation in the sound produced. Gradually modi- child the end of 'the second year may arrive before the
fications of these less violent oral movements set in and cross..association between the sounds which it imitatively
are furthered not only by the growing practice of the utters and the significant sounds which it understands
mouth-muscles, but also by the appearance of the teeth, when others speak them, becomes lively enough to en-
able the child to repeat words with consciousness of their
significant value. When this cross-association has been
12 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE THE ORictIN OF LANGUAGE 18
formed speech may be said to have begun. To be sure, While we thus see in the child the development of
the child's reproduction of what it hears is for a long sound-producing expressive movements from the unmodi-
time imperfect. It is no simple task to associate correctly fied yell of pain to the most manifold varieties of articu-
a sound heard with the articulatory movements that will lation, differentiated in general character to correspond
produce it, even though, in the case of some, such as the to different emotional states, the spontaneous rise of the
lip-closure sounds p, b, m, the eye aids the ear. The child use of certain fixed sounds for certain fixed types of ex-
is very much in the position of the adult who hears a perience does not occur in the child. The significant use
foreign language; its perception is often wrong. Such of sounds is, so to speak, prematurely forced upon the
mistakes as the confusion oft and k, off and th are due individual, who has no opportunity of arriving by his
to the unsureness of the perceptive habit: the child actu- own powers at the goal of actual language. How the
ally hears the wrong sound, so far as consciousness is con- human species arrived at this significant use of sound-
cerned. Only after long practice do hearing and articula- utterance is therefore not explained by the development
tion become accurate and closely associated with each other. of the individual under normal circumstances. There are
some accounts, most famous among them that of Hero-
The child's associating the sounds it hears with certain dotus (Hi~tories, II, 2), of children who, for the purpose
experiences is due, of course, to the fact that grown-ups of ascertaining the original development of language,
are constantly producing the sounds in connection, and were left to grow up without hearing anyone speak.
in as plain connection as possible, with the proper ob- The experiment is really impossible, for, to be signifi-
jects and actions. The association, for instance, between cant, it would have to be made with a large group of
mama and the child's mother is presented entirely by the people left to themselves for generations and even cen-
child's elders. In many cases the child will be led to turies, since the development of language in the race can
form a wrong association, which is gradually corrected, not have been other than gradual and communal.
as when it at first calls every man papa. In no case docs
the child itself invent a word, in the sense of spontaneous- 6. The origin of language. The question remains,
ly giving meaning to a sound-sequence. Mother or nurse, then: How did man come to associate fixed sound-se-
to be sure, will often connect some one of the child's quences with fixed .types of experience? The older an-
meaningless sound-productions with some person, object, swer to this question was based on the individual's learn-
or other experience and then teach the child so to connect ing of language. According to earlier theories the place
it: it is in this way that our nursery-words have arisen. of the child's elders was filled, with regard to the race,
They are sound- groups which are uttered by most chil- by divine care: a divinity directly gave men the use of
dren and have come to be traditionally connected by the speech. A more materialistic but essentially identical
adult speech-community with certain meanings; the child, notion was that man himself invented the trick of attach-
however, learns to give them these meanings just ·as it ing significance to sounds; some genius of primitive times,
learns the value of any other words. rrhe connection be- for instance, may have eonceived this brilliant idea.
tween sound and sense is in no case originated by the child. More tenable was the view that the speech-sounds we1·e
14 THE NATURE AND ORIGfN OF LANGUAGE THE ORIGJN OF LANGUAGE 15
originally imitations of what they denoted (Stoics, Herder), experiences: only the movements which produced the
or the view that they were originally the natural and sounds were the expressive ·correspondents and, therefore,
inevitable emotional responses to the corresponding ex- the indications of the experiences. After the sound, how-
periences (Epicureans, Rousseau). ever, had entered into association with the gesture (and,
thus, with the experience), it gradually usurped the more
The evolutionary point of view has shown the falsity important place, owing to the advantages already set
of the first two explanations and growing psychologic forth, and finally came into independent use, without the
insight has deprived the last two also of probability. gesture. This use of the sound alone opened the road
Gesture-language is in this connection especially instruct- for unlimited transferences of meaning of th~ same kind
ive. Gesture-language, as we have seen, is nothing but as those which produce symbolic gestures. In the case
a higher development of the expressive movements com- of the latter the predominant direct connection between
mon, in their basis, to many animals. Vocal languago an experience and a gesture, - a connection obvious to
all and constantly refreshed, - forbade too divergent a
is not essentially different. It consists, at bottom, of ex- development. In vocal speech, however, where direct
pressive movements. In the case of gesture-language the connection between experiences and sounds was neve1·
felt, the further development by means of associational
expressive movements themselves remained the means of shifts of meaning has been unlimited. The connection be-
communication; consequently the connection between a tween sound and meaning, thus, which cannot even ·in its
gesture and the original expressive movement is nearly origin have been a direct one, is further destroyed. by the
always apparent, as when the deictic gesture is plainly freedom of transference due to the lack of any immediately
a weakened grasping movement and the depicting gestu- felt connection between experience and utterance, such as
res scarcely differ from natural imitative movements. In prevents too free a development of symbolic gestures.
the case of vocal speech, on the other hand, it was not
the movement itself that attracted attention and became It is clear, therefore, that even if one could survey
the starting-point for further development, but the sound the whole evolution of sound-producing expressive mo-
which the movement produced. This sound is an effect vements from the single cry of pain to which some ani-
which bears only in respect to emotional intensity any mals are limited, up to the present speech of man, there
distinct and recognizable relation to the experience would be no point at which one could say: Here lan-
calling it forth. The 'sweet' face-gesture, for instance, guage begins. Expressive movements are the physical phase
accompanied by production of the voice-sound gives a of mental processes: whatever the mental processes, the
sound in no way directly related to the experience of expressive movements correspond to them. Man's mind
something sweet or otherwise pleasant. Now, so long as and his ex:pressive activity have developed in indissol-
the face-gesture remained in use, the importance of the uble connection. In the animal world, as we know it,
sound could al ways be secondary, the gesture actually the evolution of one phase without the other is inconceiv-
conveying· the message. The sounds themselves were
neither directly significant of the experience, nor could able. This, indeed, is why it is impossible to set up a
they, in any conceivable way, have been imitative of most
16 THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF LANGUAGE 17
strictly logical definition of language as opposed to ex• ably upon the mental processes. Thus the freedom in
pressive movement in general. Language is the form of which vocal language differs from that of gesture has
expressive movement adequate to the mentality of man. made possible a much higher development.
This mentality is defined no less than man's language
in the aphorism that (Man is a speaking animal'. 8. Social character of language. We have seen that
the greatest stimulus toward the development of express-
7. Language constantly changing. The absence of ive actions is their emergence into voluntary communi-
immediate connection between sound and experience cative use. Language has been developed in the inter-
appears in the fact that, unlike gesture-Janguage, vocal change of messages, and every individual who has learned
language differs vastly in different times and places, - to use language has learned it through such interchange
a fact too familiar to need exposition. The individual's language, consequently, is not his cre-
ation, but consists of habits adopted in his expressive
The change of language in time is of interest in· the intercourse with other members of the community. The
present connection because its phases again illustrate the result of this is the individual's inability to use language
absence of any conservative relation between sound· and e·xcept in the form m which the community as a whole
sense. The sounds habitually uttered under a given type uses 1t: he must speak as the others do, or he will not
of experience are in an unceasing process of change: be understood. As a matter of fact he does not, in nor-
those which we utter today are not like those which mal cases, try to speak otherwise, but unquestioningly
speakers of English uttered a thousand or even a hundred follows his and his fellow-speak~rs' habits. The change
years ago. On the other hand, the transference of mean- which occurs in ~anguage is thus never a conscious alter-
ing also is unlimited; the history of languages shows us ation by individuals, but an unconscious, gradual change
innumerable associational changes of meaning, which in in the habits of the entire community. The motives
gesture, where some connection between expression and which cause it are not individ\1-al reflective considerations
experience is upheld, would be impossible. It would be of the result, but new associative tendencies or new con-
difficult to find an English word which, if it existed at ditions of innervation due to some ~hange in the cir-
all a thousand years ago, has not since then in some cumstances of life affecting the communit.Y. As we
way changed its meaning. All this is due to the fact that examme more closely the different aspects of language,
there never was a stage in which a hearer could recognize we shall again and again find the same characteristic: t.s
any but an arbitrary connection between sound and sense. the individual speaker receives his habits from the c0m-
munity, individual motives do not come into play, but only
The change of language is not a mere endless shifting causes affecting the community as a whole. And as, more-
of sounds !lnd meanings: we find speech rising .in the over, the individual, from childhood, practises his speech
course of time to the power of more delicate and abstract until the details of it are mechanized and unconscious, he
expression and to greater brevity. This development is is rarely aware of the specific characteristics, such as the
due to the. assimilating effect, which we shall· study in phonetic or the grammatical, which are involved in it.
detail,· of experience upon expression; in return the grow-
ing power of expression,. as we shall see, reacts favor· Bloomfield, Study pf Language
WRITING AN IMPERFECT ANALYSIS 19
CHAPTER 11. use different sounds. When the normal speaker hears a
foreign dialect or language, he encounters a twofold
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE. difficulty. His perceptive habits lead hiIIJ to hear _sounds
that merely resernble those of his own speech as if
1. Unconsciousness of speech-movements. The in- they were identical with the latter; and where two or
more of the strange sounds resemble one of his own, he
dividual's unconsciousness of the details of his speech- may fail to distinguish between them. Thus a German
activity appears strikingly when we inquire into the who is picking up English will confuse our v, w, and wh
movements by which speech-sounds are produced. While sounds, our d and th (as in then), our t and th (as in
we know that we speak with the mouth, tongue, and
larynx, the separate movements of these organs rarely ownthink),. and our sh and /4 (as in azure), for in his
or never enter our consciousness. If we are asked to
describe them, we answer in vague, metaphoric expres- language he has but one sound resembling each of these
sions or say things that are altogether wrong. In fact, groups. The second difficulty lies in producing the for-
as to some of these movements not only the normal eign sounds even when their distinctive character is
speaker but even the scientific observer is at a loss. For, heard: thus our German may in time come to appreciate
in spite of the fact that all these muscles are ultimately the distinctions we have mentioned, but will still be un-
at the command of the will, the innervations which con- able to produce the English sounds.
trol them have become mechanized; we consciously give
the impulse for whole words and phrases, but the details These difficulties usually prove fatal to the efforts of
of their utterance always proceed unconsciously. The those who try to describe languages without adequate
impulse, moreover, is given in terms of sound, for, in kn~wledge of phonetics. From nearly all the published
the association of articufatory movements with sounds, material about American Indian languages, for instance,
which is formed very early in life (p. 11) and is, of it is impossible to get any adequate conception of how
course, constantly practised, the latter are entirely domi- these languages are pronounced. So great a Chinese
nant, the former almost forgotten. It appears, then, that scholar as Joseph Edkins was ·unable to describe some
even as regards our own speech- movements of every of the commonest Chinese sounds. It is for this reason
day, some scientific examination of the facts is necessary. that even teachers who have spoken a language from
childhood are often unable to impart their information
It happens, moreover, that not only different languages to others. No one can teach a foreigner his language,
but even different local variations of the same language unless. he can tell his pupil exactly what to do with his
vocal organs to get the proper effect: and this, we have
seen, he cannot do without a certain amount of scientific
siudy.
2. Writing an imperfect analysis. There is one
activity in the course of which nearly all civilized peo-
ples have made some analysis of the sounds of their
20 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE WRITING AN IMPERFECT ANALYSIS 21
speech, and that is writing. This analysis has, however, tween sound and writing. There are two factors which
been gradual and incomplete. In its most primitive form lessen even such consistency as might otherwise develop.
writing is simP.lY the drawing, carving, or painting of One of these is the use of foreign alphabets. When the
the visible features of an experience or of symbolic ele- English, for instance, took over the Latin alphabet, the
sounds of English were so different from those of Latin
ments representing it (p. 7). When this method of that consistency was impossible, - a difficulty under
which we labor even today, for our alphabet has not
communication is frequently used, certain elements in enough signs for our vowels, and none for our th-sounds,
the pictures come to be drawn always in a certain way our sh, our e as in azure, our wh, or our ng as in sing,
and to have a fixed meaning. Gradually such elements and, on the other hand, contains the superfluous char-
may come to be used as symbols for corresponding wor<ls acters c, q, and x, The second factor interferes even
of the vocal language and to be arranged in the. ordt,r more seriously with the regularity of alphabetic writing:
that these words have in speech. As the association be- it is the necessary conservatism of orthography. Read-
tween written symbol and spoken word becomes fixed, ing and writing would be very slow processes, if, every
the symbol may come to be drawn without reference to time we read or wrote, we actually stopped to analyze
its original pictorial value, and to deviate from its older each word into its .component sounds; moreover, accord-
form, associating the word rather than, in a more direct ing to emphasis, speed, personal habit, and so on, the
sense, the experience. When this has happene<l, the asso- spelling of each word would then be variable, - a con-
ciation may grow to be simply one of written symbol dition which would further militate against ease. Such
and sound, regardless of the meaning borne by the sound, a state of affairs never continues long, for the spellings
until, after a time, the symbols are used purely in their of whole words are of course remembered and become
phonetic value. The number of symbols may then 'be traditional. Opposed to this necessary conservatism of
lessened to the point where there is a single character writing, there is the fact that all language at all times
for every syllable used in the language. Such fsyllabaries' is in an unceasing process of change, - a process so
are a very common form of writing; examples are the gradual and subtle that no speaker, through all bis life,
alphabets of India (derived from ancient syllabic forms is aware of it, yet so unceasing that the orthography of
of Semitic writing), and the national alphabets of the every language become.a in a few hundred years· thor-
oughly antiquated even in those features which were for-
Japanese. It is a further simplification when these merly consistent.
characters come to be used not for whole syllables but This, of course, is a reason why writing, though in-
for single sounds of the language, as in the Greek, Latin, volving to a certain extent an analysis of the phy~ical
and derived alphabets, including our own. phase of language, does not satisfy scientific requirements
in this direction. Indeed, so far as the linguistically
All this development is, of course, gradual. There is, untrained person is concerned, writing is often mislead-
in most instances, at no time a deliberate and system-
atic examination of the sounds of the language and an
assigning to each of a written symbol. Accordingly, we
hardly ever find perfect consistency in the relation be-
22 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE WRITING AN IMPERFECT ANALYSIB 28
ing, for the individual movements of writing are so much fusion, if such variations appeared in the writing: it
more consciously performed than those of pronunciation, would mean, for instance, that a Chicagoan could only
that the naive speaker will often think that he speaks with difficulty read a book printed in London. Thus we
as he writes, when this is not the case. He will think, for see that much of the value of writing is actually depend-
instance, that passed and past or close (verb) and clothes ent on its not conveying the exact manner of pronuncia-
are pronounced differently, when actually he may never
in his life have heard or made such distinctions. tion.
More than this, there are in the language even of one
There are other reasons, too, why writing cannot and
need not accurately analyze the spoken sounds. Although and the same person many subtle and complex variations,
the human vocal organ can produce an infinite number which do not demand notation for the practical purposes
of different sounds, each language uses· but a limited set. of reading and writing. Thus we pronounce our vowels
Given, therefore, an alphabet of a limited number of
symbols, it could be used by all languages, though no longer before d than before t, - the o in rode longer,
two of them would give ·each symbol the same value. for instance, than that in wrote, - but it would be super-
Now; within limits this is actually the case: thus letters
fluous to indicate this difference, for every English-speak-
like p and t are used by both English and ~1rench, but ing person regularly and unconsciously speaks his vowels
with different values, v and JJ by both English and Ger- longer before d than before t. An orthography which
mans, but again with differing values in the two lan-
guages. This circumstance may be convenient, on oc- actually indicated all the phonetic facts of speech would
casion, to printers; it would be absurd, at any rate, for be a very cumbersome affair, difficult for even an expert
us to request the Germans and the French to give up phonetician to handle, and requiring, above all, close
their use of these letters because it does not agree with attention to every single utterance that one wanted to
ours. Consequently there are differences between the
pronunciations of different languages which do not appear represent in writing.
in writing. The same is true, moreover, of the different - It is obvious, then, that even a regular aud consistent
local variations of the same language. The words of orthography for practical purposes would not contain a
the English language are pronounced very differently, full analysis of the pronunciation of a language, such as
let us say, by·· a Chicagoan and by a Londoner.. These is often needed by the scientific investigator and, in some
dialectal differences of pronunciation may be so great degree, by the teacher of languages. For scientific ~se
that scarcely a word will be pronounced alike over all several such fully analytic alphabets have been devised;
the territory in which a language is spoken. In the case today the standard one is that of the International Pho-
o( Chinese, in fact, distant dialects are mutually unintelli- netic Association, which shall be used in this book (pho-
gible, though the writing is the same. It would obvious- netic characters being printed in square brackets). It is cus-
ly be a great inconvenience and a source of much con- tomary, however, even in scientific discussions, to avoid a
constant complete analysis by describing, at the outset,
the sounds and regular variations of a language and as-
signing a simple character of the phonetic alphabet to
each typical sound. Such a simplified phonetic alphabet
r
24 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE THE VOCAL CHORDS !5
is of course best for teaching the pronunciation of a for- Danish produces in English ears the effect of constant
eign language, and, if it can be made to fit all the local
variations of pronunciation, would be the ideal practical interruption by little hiccoughs.
alphabet. If the vocal chords are a little less firmly closed, the
3. The vocal chords. The human vocal organ is a compression gives way, from instant to instant, to the
wind instrument which produces sounds by interfering pressure of the breath, so that a vibration productive of
with the breathed air that is being driven from the lungs
in expiration. The first interference which· the expired musical sound results. This musical sound we call voice.
breath meets is at the head of the trachea, in the larynx The pitch of the voice is modulated by changing the length
or Adams's apple. Within the larynx, to the right and
16ft, are two muscular protuberances, the vocal chords, of the chords, for this of course controls the rapidity of
between which the breath must pass. In ordinary breath- vibration. The loudness or stresR of the voice depends on
ing the muscles of the vocal chords are relaxed and the the violence of the vibration, and may therefore be regu-
breathed air passes freely through the aperture between lated in two ways. In singing the regulation is (or ought
them, which is called the glottis. When one holds one's to be) chiefly effected by varying the breath-pressure, that
breath with open mouth the vocal chords are stretched is, by expiring more or less rapidly; in ordinary speech
so as to close the glottis firmly. Owing to their delicate the less cumbersome method prevails of .;lightly widening
musculature, and to two movable cartilaginous hinges,
the arytenoids, in which they terminate at the rear of the glottis for a less loud sound and slightly narrowing
the larynx, the vocal chords can be set also in a number it for a louder; for, as the narrowing of the glottis allows
of positions intermediate between that of breathing and less breath to pass through, the accumulated breath under-
that of firm closure. neath exercises pressure, against which the vocal chords
vibrate under tension, producing a loud sound.
Firm closure of the glottis, suddenly opened, occurs
just before coughing or clearing the throat, also under The voice ·is not heard i~ every sound of speech. In
any strain, as in lifting a heavy weight. As a speech- the· glottal stop, for instance, it obviously is absent. Many
,sound it is used in German initially in the pronunciation of the other speech-sounds, also, are unaccompanied by
of words that in writing begin with a vowel. The sound the voice. If one places a finger on the Adam's apple or
so produced is called the glottal stop, and its phonetic stops up one's ears, the voice will be felt as a buzz or
symbol is[']; a German word like arm 'poor' is therefore trembling; if one now speaks, such sounds asp, t, k, f, s
pronounced ['arm]. The glottal stop occurs also in a [p, t, k, f, s] will be found to lack this buzzing accompa-
great many other languages, such as Danish, where hund
'dog' is pronounced [hu'n], but hun 'she' [hun], Lettish, niment, while such as b, d, g, v, z Lb, d, g, v, z] have it: the
Hebrew ('aleph'), Arabic ('hamza'), and some Chinese
dialects. Its frequent occurrence in such languages as former are unvoiced or breathed, the latter voiced sounds,
as are also, for instance, our accented vowels.
If the vocal chords are so far separated that the voice
no longer sounds pure, but is accompanied by a friction
sound produced by the breath as it passes through the
glottis, we get a murmur. Most of our unaccented vowels
in English· are spoken with murmur instead of voice. As
I
26 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE ORAL ARTICULATION 27
an independent speech-sound the murmur is heard in the the uvula. ~lost speech-sounds are thus purely oral. In
'voiced h' of Cech and of Sanskrit, symbol [fi]. If the a few, snch as m [m] or n [n], however, the breath es-
glottis is still farther opened, the voice ceases and only capes entirely through the nose, the velum being lowered:
the friction-sound remains: this is the sound of our h [h]. such sounds are called nasals. There are other sounds in
which the breath escapes through both mouth and nose:
Still another position of the vocal chords is represent- these a:re called nasalized· (symbol -), e. g. the vowel in
ed by the whisper, in which only the cartilage-glottis, the French cent [su] 'a hundred'. Most speakers are, of
that is, the space between the arytenoids, is open, the vo- course; quite unconscious of the movements of their velum;
cal chords themselves being in contact. In what we ordi- yet it is lowered and raised again every time they speak
narily call whispering the whisper is substituted for the an morn.
voice, the unvoiced sounds remaining unaltered.
5. Oral articulation. The mouth performs a double
Both in whisperiug and in ordinary speech the unvoi- function in speech. It serves, in the first place, as a re-
ced sounds are pronounced with the glottis in its widest- sonance-chamher for the musical sound of the voice or
open position, the muscles of the vocal chord!~ being re- for the whisper. By changing the shape of this resonance-
laxed and the breath passing freely through the larynx: chamher we vary the tone-color of the sound: thus by
this, as we have seen, is also the position for regular narrowing and flattening it we get the high tone-color of
the vowel-sound in fee, by hollowing it, the low tone-col-
breathing. or of the vowel in foe.
The remarkable delicacy and rapidity of adjustment of
Secondly, by moving the tongue and the lower lip dur-
the vocal chords in pa51sing from voice to breathing, from ing the passage of the breath, we can produce noises.
either of these to murmur, whisper, or h, and in changing Most of these depend on the resistance of the breath-stream,
the pitch and stress, requires no further comment. It is but noises can also be produced by suction (symbol[*]),
to be remembered, of course, that the details of all these as in the sound with which we urge on a horse by
movements, in spite of complete subjection to the will, 'snapping' the tongue against the palate [c*J. Such suc-
are so mechanized as to be unconscious: anybody can speak tion-noises occur as regular speech-sounds in the langua-
an h, but it takes careful scientific observation to deter- ges of the African Bushmen and the Hottentots. Where
mine exactly how the sound is produced. the noises are produced by means of the breath, voiced
or unvoiced, there are two principal methods: either a
4. The velum. When the breath leaves the larynx it complete closure is made and then explosively burst, as
passes, in normal breathing, through the nose. During
most of the sounds of speech it is, however, precluded in our p, b, t, d, k, g [p, b, t, d, k, g1, ~ stops, or explosives;
from doing so by the raising of the soft palate or velum,
which now cuts off the nasal passage from the throat and or the closure is incomplete and the noise is produced by
mouth. If one stands with open mouth before a mirror, the friction of the breath passing through the aperture,
breathing through both nose and mouth, and then sud- as in our f, v, th as in think, th as in then, s, z, sh, e as in
denly pronounces a pure, long 'ah ...' [a:], the raising of
the velum can be easily seen, especially if one watches aeure [f, v, e, il, s, z, f, 0], - spirauts or fricatives. Both
28 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE ORAL NOISE-ARTICULATIONS 29
stops and spirants may be modified by lowering the ve- lation with the tongue advanced, [.i.] for greater raising
lum; in the case of the former the breath escapes entirely of the tongue, and [T] for greater lowering; but these signs
through the nose and we hear the nasals, such as m, n, can usually be dispensed with by stating beforehand what
ng [m, n, JJ]; in the case of the spirants it escapes through va'rieties are current in a given language. The voiced na-
both mouth and nose, producing nasalized spirants. sal corresponding to these stops is our n [n], which often
occurs unvoiced [IJ.] in such words as niint, snow, where
6. Oral noise-articulations. The noise-articulations it is spoken just before or after unvoiced sounds. Dental
spirants, more specifically interdental or post-dental, are
can be produced in various parts of the mouth. our unvoiced [f)] as in think and voiced [o] as in then.
a) Labials. Stops produced by closure of the two lips, - Dental articulation is used also in the trills or r-sounds
of most languages. 'l'hese sounds are produced by tighten-
bilabial articulation, - are our unvoiced p [p] and voiced ing the tougue-muscles so that they elastically resist
b [b]. The corresponding nasal is our voiced m [ m]. Bila- the pressure of the breath from instant to instant; an
oiar-spirants are not common; a voiced one [r,] occurs in example is the Slavic or Italian (rolled' r [r], which is
Dutch (written w) and in Spanish (written b, v). med also in the stage-pronunciations of French and Ger-
man. The r-sonnd of American English [.i] is pronounced
Our English unvoiced [f] and voiced [v] are labiodental with the tongue relaxed, so that there is no trilling and
spirants, in which the friction is produced between the even very little breath-friction; in consequence the acous-
lower lip and the upper teeth and accentuated by the col- tic value of the sound is as much musical as noise-like.
lision of the escaping stream of breath with the upper lip. An unvoiced [.J] with increased friction often occurs in
b) Dentals. Most of the oral noise-articulations are made such words as try. The friction element of a trilled [r]
with the tongue. The tongue produces noises with either
the tip or the back articulating against the teeth or the reaches a maximum, if the tongue is held close to the roof
palate: articulation with the tip is called coronal, with the of the mouth, especially at the sides, where it touches
back, dorsal. the upper teeth; if the friction-noise is very great, we seem
to hear a trilled [r] and, simultaneously, a spirant resem-
Coronal articulation against the upper teeth or the gums bling the sound vof z in azure: this strongly spirant trilled
just behind them is called dental; it produces, of stops, [r] is heard in Cechish.
the unvoiced [t] and the voiced [d]. These occur in sev-
eral varieties, such as the interdental, against the lower Another dental articulation is that of the l-sounds or
edge of the upper teeth, the post-dental, against the back laterals. In these also friction is so slight that it would
of the upper teeth (thus in Spanish and in many modern be as well to class them with the musical sounds as with
languages of India, and, in a different variety, in French), the noises. Their characteristic rnsonance is due to the
against the border of the upper teeth and gums (so in fact that the breath escapes at the sides of the tongue,
German), or a little farther back still (as in the English the tip of the tongue being pressed tightly against the
upper teeth or gur.1s. The tone-color of such an [l] Cfln
t and a), - the last two variants being specifically called
alveolar. Such variations are indicated, where necessary,
in phonetic writing by diacritical marks such as [ -l] for
articulation with the tongue drawn back, [1-] for articu•
30 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANUUAGE ORAL NOISE-ARTICULATIO:NS Sl
be varied by raising or lowering the back of the tongue, - The distinctness of the sibilant hiss is lessened, if the
that is, altering the shape of the resonance-chamber. Very
high tone-color, due to raising of the tongue, is heard in tongue is moved so as to displace the furrow from its
the rlight' l of the Slavic languages; less high is that of proper relation to the upper teeth, for then the narrow
German or French l, while that of English is especially stream of breath is not accurately directed against the
dull, owing to the lowering of the middle of the tongue. edge of the teeth, but, instead, eddies round, producing
a peculiar mufiled hiss. These abnormal sibilants are usual-
c) Cerebrals. Leaving the dental position, we come to ly produced by drawing the tongue back from the [s]-
another form of coronal articulation, the cerebral. In this position: so in our English unvoiced [fJ, as in shall and
the tip of the tongue is drawn up and back, so as to articu- voiced [3], as in azure, vision. The exact nature of the
late against the highest point of the palate. Many lan- eddying current of the breath in these sounds is not known.
The (kettle' or fgorge' of the eddy can be enlarged by
guages of India possess these cerebrals [t, <J,, :r;,.] by the protruding and rounding the lips [f)], as in the German
sch-sound. The French varieties lower the tip of the ton-
side of the dentals, distinguishing between the two as sharp- gue and slightly raise the back.
ly as they or we should distinguish between, say, t and k.
Some of these languages have cerebral [~] and [l] which The front articulations may be formed in more pronoun-
may also be heard in the English pronunciation of many cedly dorsal variations. Such are our [tfi-] and [d31-] as
in cheap and jump, the rpalatalized' Russian [ti-], [di-],
Americans. and [s1- ], the Russian and Polish [tf1- ], the Polish rpala-
d) Blade-sounds. We come now to the dorsal tongue- talized' s [f1- ], the Norwegian [f1- ], and the German [f1-]
before consonants. These more dorsal varieties of dental
articulations, in which parts of the upper surface of the and blade sounds are often conveniently indicated, both
tongue (as opposed to the tip in coronal articulation) are in practical and in phonetic writing, by placing an accent-
brought into contact with the teeth, gums, or palate. The mark over the letter, e. g. t' [t1, rather than by fully in-
dorsal articulations that are made farthest forward are
produced, naturally, by the front of the upper surface of dicating the tongue-position, e. g. [ti-.L]. It is also some-
the tongue, which is called the blade. In these sounds the
tongue is contracted so as to form a furrow along the times convenient to express them by the signs of the se-
median line: the breath pa~ses along this furrow, which ries of sounds to be next spoken of, provided the condi-
directs it against the edge of the upper front teeth. Here tions of the language do not make such expression mis-
the narrow, strong stream of air produces a sharp, hissing leading or ambiguous.
noise, whence these sounds receive the name of sibilants:
unvoiced [s], voiced [z]. They occur in several varieties: in e) Palatals. Dorsal articulations against the hard pal-
French they are post-dental, the tip of the tongue touch- ate are called palatal. As the hard palate is comparati-
ing the lower teeth, and the blade, except in the center, vely extensive, they occur in several varieties. The stops,
where the furrow is formed, touching the upper teeth.
The English and German sibilants are alveolar; in Swedish unvoiced [c] and voiced [JJ, are heard in French dialects,
there is even a cerebral variety.
in Lithuanian, and in Hungarian, the nasal [p] also in
Spanish (written ii), Italian (written gn), and French (gn),
32 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE MUSICAL ORAL ARTICULATIONS 33
the French variety being pronounced farther back than is that of the rear upper surface of the tongue against
the others. The spirants of this position are unvoiced [<;], the uvula, the little pendent part at the back of the soft
palate. Of these uvular articulations the unvoiced stop [qJ
as in the German ich [?i<;] T and voiced [j], as in many occurs in Arabic and in Greenlandish; the latter language
uses also the voiced nasal [NJ. In the trill [R] it is the
German pronunciations of such words as ja ~yes' and legen uvula and not, as in the dental trill, the tongue, which
'to lay'. Palatal trills cannot occur, for the back of the vibrates. This uvular trill is the regular r-sound in Northum-
tongue has not enough elasticity to vibrate. A palatal lat- brian English (the_ 'burr'), in Danish, and in the city
eral [A] occurs, however, in southern French, Spanish pronunt:iations of French and German. In French and
(written ll), and Italian (written gl). Those who have not Danish it occurs also unvoiced [JI]; in these languages it
in their native language the habit of palatal articulation is often pronounced without the trill-vibration, as a uvu-
best learn it, if they produce the sounds with the tip of
the tongue pressed against the lower teeth, but this is not lar spirant, both unvoiced [n] and voiced [B'J.
necessary to the articulation.
In connection with the oral noise-articulations we may
f) Velars. Dorsal articulations against the soft palate again mention th~ laryngeal, produced by the vocal chords;
again allow of a great deal of variation, owing to the ex- of these the stop [?] and the spirants, unvoiced [h] and
tent of this region. The sounds here produced are called voiced [n] have already been mentioned (p. 24,ff.). Two more
velars. In English the velar stops, k [k] and g [g], are laryngeal spirants can be produced by compression of the
produced farthest forward before the i-vowel heard in kin entire musculature of the larynx: the 'hoarse h' [H] and
and give, farther back in can and gap, and farthest back its voiced form, the 'ayin' [Q] of the Semitic languages.
before back vowels as in coop, goose; the same habit pre-
vails in German. The velar nasal occurs in English, written 7. Musical oral articulations. We may turn now to
ng, as in s1·ng, symbol [IJJ1). rrhe spirants are: unvoiced the musical articulations or (vowels'. It is important to
[x], as in the German Bach [bax] 'brook', and voiced [g], observe that there is no definite boundary between the
which occurs in modern Greek and in many German pro- noise-articulations and the musical articulations. Any spi-
nunciations of such words as sagen ~to say'. A very open rant can be articulated with varying degrees of closure:
[r ], with little friction, is heard in the Slavic languages. as the pressure of the tongue is relaxed the friction-noise
A velar trill is impossible, but a velar lateral [t] is pro- tlecreases and the element of musical resonance becomes
duced in Polish by raising the back of the tongue: while more and more audible. Such spirants as the American
accurate median contact with lateral opening is here im- English [.i], the laterals, and an open [j] are on the bor-
possible, the general effect still resembles that of the ton- der line; if anything, the resonance-element is, in the [.x] and
gue-tip [l], as well as that of an English w. [l] at least, dominant. The traditional division of sounds
into 'consonants' and 'vowels', while often convenient,
g) Uvulars. The hindmost of the dorsal articulations is therefore untenable for purposes of exact terminology.
Instead, the sounds of speech represent an unbroken se1ies
1) In such words as finger, however, the spelling ng repre• of relations betwe~n noise and resonance: the latter ele·
sents two sounds, [IJ9] .
Bloomfield, Study of Language
34 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE MUSICAL ORAL ARTICULATIONS 35
ment is at a minimum in the unvoiced stops; then come, unrounded front vowel [l] is the German short i, as in
in order, the voiced stops, the unvoiced and the voiced spi- bin tam' and, in slightly lower position, the English short i,
rants, the nasals, the laterals, the r-sounds, and, finally,
the most open musical sounds, in the production of which as in bin.
the mouth is merely shaped into a resonance-chamber. If, while pronouncing [i], one strongly rounds the lips,
In this shaping the chief factor is the tongue-position. the result is the high front narrow rounded vowel [y],
It is customary to distinguish nine typical tongue-positions, as in the French lune (moon'. Decidedly lower, but still
three along the horizontal plane, front, mixed, and back, of the same type is the German long ii, as in kiihn rbold'.
and three along the vertical, high, mid, and low. The for-
The rounded wide vowel of this position [y], - i. e. a
mer three indicate the region in which the tongue app1·oach- rounded [l], - appears, in a lowered variety, in the Ger-
es most closely to the roof of the mouth, the latter
three, the degree of approximation. Other factors modi- man short u, as in Hiitte (hut'.
fying the quality of the resonance are the tensity or re-
laxation of the oral muscles, especially those of the ton- If the tongue is lowered to mid-position from these vow-
gue, and the position, normal, drawn back, or rounded, els, the narrow unrounded vowel is [e]. This vowel oc-
curs in German, as in geht (goes', and in French, as in ete
of the lips. It is customary to distinguish two typical (summer'.
states of each of these factors: wide (that is, loose) and
narrow (that is, tense) vowels, and rounded (lips protru~ The corresponding wide vowel [e] does not dia:er from
ded and rounded) and unrounded vowels. [e] so characteristically as does [l] from [i], for, 'Yhat with
the greater width of the resonance-channel, the width add-
a) Front vowels. A high front vowel, narrow and un- ed by the loosening of the tongue-muscles is here not
rounded, is produced, if one pronounces the spirant [j] so apparent. The [e] occurs in standard German and (slight-
ly lower) in American 1) English as the regular short e-
more and more openly, so that the friction-sound disap- VOV\ el, as in the English men, get.
pears. This vowel [i] occurs in a very characteristic form
in French, where the corners of the mouth are drawn back The rounded form of [e] has usually less lip-rounding
to emphasize the shape of the resonance-chamber: this than that of [i], but a form with as great lip-rounding is
is the regular French i, as in fini rdone'. In German the conceivable, since this factor is in no wise bound to that
lips are not so far drawn back; the sound so produced of tongue-position, but can vary freely. The typical mid
is the German Jong i-vowel, spelled ie or ih. In English front narrow rounded vowel [01 is th~/ French vowel in
it is the initial sound of such words as year, yes. such words as peu (little', jeune (young'. A. lowered varie-
ty is the German long o-vowel, as in schon (benutiful'.
The corresponding articulation with muscles relaxed
produces a very different acoustic effect, for the resonance- The wide form of this vowel occurs, again in a lower-
chamber in a high vowel is so narrow that even the slight
increase in width produced by the relaxation of the ton- ed variety, as the short German o-sound, e. g. in Gotter
gue-muscles is a relatively large change. This wide high
tgods'.
1) By 'American English' I mean my own Chicago pronun-
ciation, common generally to the Norlih Central States.
r
36 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE MUSICAL ORAL ARTICULATIONS 37
The low front position, which is reached from that of Norwegian and Swedish, on the other hand, there is an
the preceding vowels by lowering the tongue, scarcely ad- [o)] with the extreme lip-rounding which French, for in-
mits of any distinction between narrow and wide vowels.
The umounded vowel produced in it, [6], is the British stance, gives to [u].
English vowel in men, get; in both British and American
English it is the long vowel before r in such words as The wide form [o] is the German short o, as in Gott
air, care.; it occurs in French in such words as lait [16]
'milk' and pere 'father'. A wide and lowered variety [::e] 'god'.
is the American English vowel of such words as man, can. The same wide vowel, unrounded, [l], is in American
The narrow rounded vowel [re] occurs in French, as in pronunciation the vowel of such words as cut, but.
peur 'fear' and seul 'alone'.
The low back roonded vowel [gJoccurs in English be-
b) Back vou;els. It will be simplest to speak next of
the back vowels. In these the rear of the tongue is near fore r in such words as hoarse, more. Within the sphere
velar articulation and the front concavely lowered, so that of this symbol, though perhaps lower than the preceding
the mouth is in the shape of a long, wide, hollow reso- sound, is the British English vowel in got, co?lar, and the
nance-chamber. This shape is accentuated, in most cases, like. A narrower forward variety is spoken in such French
by protrusion and rounding of the lips. The unrounded words as mort 'death' and one still more forward, - al-
back vowels are very hard to analyze, owing to the in- most a mixed vowel, - in such as comme 'how'. A lower-
accessibility to touch and sight and to the relatively un- ed variety of [~] sometimes expressed by the special
developed muscular consciousness of the back of the mouth. symbol [n] is the English vowel in such words as all, law.
It exists in Swedish and Norwegian with the greater lip-
The high back narrow rounded vowel [u] is typically rounding normally given to [o].
represented by the French sound in tour 'tower', pousse
'grows'. The German long u has a little less characteristic The unrounded vowel corresponding to [g] is the [AT]
lip-rounding; it occurs, for instance, in du 'thou'. in the British pronunciation of cut, but. Much commoner
is the unrounded vowel coresponding to [n], namely [a].
The wide rounded vowel [u.J is the short sound in Eng- We may take the variety which occurs long in English
father, car as the normal type. Then the German long
lish words such as book, foot and is the German short u, vowel in Kahn 'skiff', Staat 'state' and its wider short
as in JJ!utter 'mother'. form in kann 'is able', Stadt 'city' are a little lower and
the French vowel in pas fa step' and pate 'dough' is a
The unrourided vowel in this position is rare; it oc- little lower and a little farther back. Higher than this
curs as a variant of another vowel in Russian and is said normal type is the [a.1.] in the American pronunciation
also to be spoken in Armenian and in Turkish; its sym- of such words as got, collar. A divergent variety of this
bol is [m]. vowel is [a], pronounced much farther forward than [a];
it is the vowel of such French words as patte 'paw', part
The mid back narrow rounded vowel [o] is most typi- 'part', and, slightly fronted and raised, of the British pro-
cally represented by the Fre11ch o as in rose 'a rose'. The nunciation of man, can, and the like.
German long o, as in Rose, has less distinct rounding; in
e) Mixed vou·els. The mixed vowels are less common
38 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE 'I ~ rlINFI.NITE VARIETY OF POSSIHLE SOUNDS 39
I
than the front or the back. The high mixed vowel, nar-
row and unrounded, [i], alternates with [m] in the Russian ~ cs:llS..: cs:lc..§...
vowel of such words as [sYn] 'son'; it is pronounced Q)
somewhat back of the ideal mixed position. ..: ~..... ~..s..::. ~g ~...:.J."'.9.0..
bO -d;
Its rounded correspondent is the [ii] of Norwegian, writ- s:l d
ten u, as in hus 'house'. I>, '"a
The mid mixed unrounded vowel [e], in both narrow j1-t
and wide pronunciation, is found in German unaccented d pI> Cl)
syllables where e is written, as in alle 'all'. ~
0~ j ]i-:i:>-
The low mixed vowel, unrounded, [6] is used in the
British pronunciation of such words as heard [h6.1d], nurse . .Stops, unvoiced.. ? q Ik C t pI
[ns.1s]. Stops, voiced.• _a_l_g_ d~
I shall not attempt to discuss the vowels of the un-
J
accented syllables of English and some other languages,
as they present many and complicated problems and have Nasals, voiced. N :g - -Jl - !l ml
--
been but imperfectly analyzed. It is customary to express ---
Spirants, unvoiced. h,H I 11 X 9 fs8 r I
the commonest unaccented vowel of a language, - such
as in the second syllable of the English started (really . .Spirants, voiced. n,Q I Il' g j .i:~z5 ~
[e.i.]) or the German [e], as in alle, or the French 'e-mute' I-----
, -,-R=1=..Laterals, voiced.. t i. i _Il
(really [reT~]), as inje 'I', - by the symbol [a], which
Trills, voiced.• I _ r_ _
thus has different values for different languages and is a
practical rather than a descriptive symbol. Musical sounds, high. um iii yi - - 1
There remain the nazalized vowels, of which French Musical sounds, mid.. ~ OA e~e I
can give us good examples. In these the velum is well Musical sounds, low.. 0
lowered, so that much of the breath escapes through the I Musical sounds, lowest. ~ <:eE
nose, producing the peculiar nasal resonance. Thus in
French there is a nazalized [o], [5], as in bon [b5] 'good', n a. a re II
an [u], as in bane [bu] 'bench', an [s], as in bain [bs] 'bath',
and an [re], as in brun [brre] 'brown'. We have seen that these sounds, which may be select~
ed as typical, are only single instances from among an
8. Infinite variety of possible sounds. It will be infinite variety. Even the stops, which might seem fairly
inflexible, occur in a number of varieties. We have al-
seen that eve11 the comparatively few of the most typical ready spoken of the many variations as to point of articu-
sounds here dese,Tihed form a large list. By way of sum- l~tion and of the difference of voiced [b, d, g] and unvoi-
mary we may unite the most important of them in the
following table. ced [p, t, kJ. In English, standard German, and French
this difference is accompanied by another, that of energy
of articulation: the unvoiced stops of these languages are
pronounced with greater muscular tensio1'1. at the point
of closure than the voiced stops. Our [p, t, k], therefore,
are fortes, our [b, d, g] lenes. These two differences do
not always go hand in hand: in many German dialects,
for instance; there are unvoiced lenes. Another kind of
variation in stops will appear in § 9. The various possi-
~·
40 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE SYLLABLES 41
ble pronunciations of spirants, trills, vowels, and so forth, While there are a number of other instances, notably
and their variations as to place of articulation are more in connection with stop-articulation, of various glide-possi-
obvious and have in part been mentioned. bilities, the glide is in the majority of cases determined
by the positions of the two successive sounds. In passing
9. Glides and mixtures of articulation. In the ac- from [a] to (u], for instance, there is only one movement
tual current of speech another factor of variation ap- to be performed and only one path for that movement;
pears: the transition or glide from one sound to another1 or
from inactivity of the vocal organs to the production of similarly, in passing from [n] to Td] all one needs to do
some sound (or vice versa). I shall mention only the two
most important instances. In passing from an unvoiced is to raise the velum, and this can be done in only one
stop to a vowel, we have to perform two movements: to
change the mouth-position and to begin voicing. If these way.
two movements are performed simultaneously, the result Beside glides from articulation to articulation there is
is a pure stop, as spoken in the Romance languages (e.
g. French) or in the Slavic (e. g. Russian). If the stop often possibility of mixture of arti()Ulations. An [m], for
is opened before voicing is begun, so that a puff of un- instance, before an [i], may be pronounced either indiffer-
voiced breath first escapes, we hear an aspirated stop [pr,
t\ kt], as in English and German, or, even more pro- ently or with the tongue-position and lip-widening of the
nouncedly, in Danish. Finally, the glottis may be closed [i]. The latter is the habit of the Slavic languages. This
during the stop and opened at the same time with the latter, mixing in of part of the position of a front vowel, called
- this is the pronunciation in some Armenian dialects, - palatalization, is very common. In English it occurs only
or shortly after it, - this type occurs in Georgian, - in the case of [k] and [g], which are pronounced farther
producing choke stops. The other instance I shall m~ntion forward before [i], as in kin, give (p. 32). In the Slavic
is the on-glide of initial vowels. Here the oral vowel-po- languages almost every consonant can be palatalized; in
sition is first taken: if voicing now begins immediately, writing an accent mark may be used to indicate this (cf.
we hear a pure vowel initial, as in American English or
French; if the vocal chords are gradually brought from p. 31), for instance, in Russian [p'i fu·] 'I am writing', -
the breathing-position into that for voicing, they must
pass through that of an [h] (p. 26), producing the aspi- [p'] spoken with the tongue-position of [i] and the cor-
rated initial of our words such as heel, have, hoop, etc. If, ners of the mouth drawn back for the articulation of this
finally, the vocal chords are first closed and then suddenly vowel. In labialization sounds are pronounced with the
opened into the voicing position, we hear a choke initial, lip-rounding of a rounded vowel. An instance is the Amer-
the glottal stop followed by the vowel: this is the way ican pronunciation of wh, as in which, whale: the vocal
German words written with initial vowel are pronounced, chords are pronouncing an [h] while the tongue and lips
such as arm ['arm] 'poor' (p. 24).
are in the [u]-position, [h)] or [hw].
10. Syllables. While much more could be said about
the different articulations and their glides and mixtures,
it must suffice for our purpose to understand how varied
the possibilities are. Great as is this variety, everyone
who has heard a foreign language spoken will realize
that, aside from the strange sounds, the general manner
7
I
!
42 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE STRESS 43
of pronunciation or taccent' of a language is even more to express a non-syllabic [i]. The combination of non-
characteristic. Here, of course, the possibilities are again
unlimited. Pitch, stress, kind of voice (e. g. full voice syllabic with syllabic vowels is called a diphthong. If
and murmur), and duration (speed) are all variable
factors. the syllabic vowel precedes, as in the English he [hu],
Even aside from the factors just mentioned, a sequence do [duu], day [de1], toe [tou], boy [bne], die [dae], how
of articulations never appeals to the ear as a series of
coordinate sounds. Some sounds are, in themselves and [hao], we speak of a falling diphthong; if the semi-vowel
aside from any distinction of stress or pitch we may
give then., more sonorous than others. Voiced sounds precedes, as in yes [fos], year [1i.1], your [fa.1], wag [ureg],
are more au<iible than unvoiced, for the obvious reason
that to the oral noise they add the tone produced in the wall [finl], of a rising diphthong. A triphthong occurs,
larynx. It is equally obvious that the more open a sound,
the greater its volume. In a sequence of articulations, for instance, in use [luuz], [iuus], wait [ue:i'.t], etc. One
accordingly, we hear a constant up and down of sonority.
The less sonorous articulations are heard, to speak met- can also write [hij, duw, dej, tow, jes, ji.1, ju.1, wreg, wnl,
aphorically, as valleys between crests of greater sonority.
The sound-sequence between the least sonorous instants juwz, juws, wejt].
of two such successive valleys we call a syllable. The
most sonorous sounds are the low vowels. Even in a Next to the vowels in sonority are the trills, laterals,
word like away [reuei] or [auei], which is composed en-
tirely of vowels, we hear two syllables, for the [u], less and nasals; all of them may figure as syllabics. Thus
sonorous than the preceding and following lower vowels,
is heard as a valley; similarly the [i] is less sonorous the American pronunciation of words like sir, skirt, heard,
than the preceding mid vowel [e]: we write [re ue1] or
[a i:ie'i]. The lower sonority of the [i] appears in a com- nurse is [Sf, skit, b.1d, n.1s], and words like bottle, butter,I.
bination like away again [a ue1 a gen]. The most sono- III
rous sound of a syllable is called the syllabic, the others button, bottom are pronounced [baq, b.A.tf, b.A.tljl, bat:rµ].
are the non-syllabics. Vowels used as non-syllabics, like
the [u] and [i] above are often called semi-vowels. The In work [w.rk], the [u] or [w] is non-syllabic, the [.1]
semi-vowel [u] is often, especially if the lips are tenser 1
than in the syllabic occurrence of [u] in the same langua-
ge, written [w], and, as [1], if the friction is at all above syllabic.
a minimum, approaches a [j], this character is often used
The boundary between two natural syllables is thus
always the least sonorous sound between the syllabics:
in bottle, butter, etc. it is the [t].
11. Stress. a) Syllable-stress. The- inherent sonority
of the speech-sounds is partly offset by the possibility
of speaking one sound more loudly than another, -
that is, of distributing the stress (p. 25). Thus the se-
quence [ui] can be spoken with the [u] louder, so that
the [i] becomes non-syllabic: [uj], or with the [i] louder
and the u non-syllabic: [wi], - for the most sonorous
sound is always the syllabic. Even an [ae] may thus be
turned into an [a.e] and an [ea] into an [ea] by speaking
the [e] more loudly than the [a]. On the other hand,
stress cannot wholly offset natural lack of sonority: in
an [as], no matter how loud we try to make the [s], the
[a] will aways be the syllabic, for any voiced [a] is ap-
preciably louder than the loud est [s]
1
44 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE STRESS 46
Some languages regulate the stress within the syllable in short, the least sonorous sound belongs as much to
in conformity with the natural sonority, pronouncing the one syllable as to the other, - it is the valley between
syllabic of each natural syllable with greater stress than the two crests of sonority. In these words there is, how-
the non-syllabics. This, for instance, is the case in the ever, as we have just seen, but one stress-syllable and
Romance and the Slavic languages. In all languages therefore no valley or boundary of stress. The boundary
there is some approximation to this distribution. English between two stress-rises may, on the other hand, coincide
and German depart from it as far as any. In these lan- with the natural syllable-boundary. That is, the stress
guages it often happens that a succession of two or even of one stress-syllable may come to its minimum and that
more natural syllables is spoken with but one effort of of the next stress-syllable begin to rise within the least
stress. While in French, for instance, one would say sonorous sound. This is the case in such Italian words
[za ma pe,l so le,:j], 'I am called the sun', with higher as anno [an no] 'year' and atto [at to] 'act'. The effect
stress on each syllabic than on the preceding and follow- on the ear is that of a definite separation between the
ing non-syllabics, an English word like utter [Ab] begins beginning and the end of the articulation concerned.
Hence we write the symbol twice, once for each stress-
I syllable, and call such sounds double or geminate sounds.
with highest stress, which is maintained through the In by far the most instances, however, the minimum
syllabic [A], and then sinks steadily to the end of the word, of stress does not fall within an articulation: English,
without regard to the presence of the second syllabic. German, and French, for instance, have no double sounds.
In a word like pity [piti] the stress rises through the [p], In the Romance and the Slavic languages the stress-
reaches its height at the beginning of the first [i], main- boundary falls; when there is but one non-syllabic, al-
tains it through this syllabic, and then uninterruptedly ways before the latter: the minimum of stress is reached
sinks. The same is true of German words like bitte at the end of the preceding syllabic, and the new stress
[bita] 'please' or hasse [hasa] 'hate'. There are in all begins to rise with the non-syllabic. Hence the division
these words two natural syllables, but they consist of in the preceding French sentence, or in such Russian
only one stress-syllable. Since stress-weakening by means words as [vo· di] 'waters', [ba· ha] 'woman', [pa ta ra p'i·s']
of separation of the vocal chords (p. 25) easily passes 'hurry up'. When there is more than one non-syllabic
over into the slightly wider-open murmur-position (p. 25), these languages recognize certain groups of articulations
the unstressed parts of such words are often spoken with which may begin a stress-syllable: such groups are treat-
murmur instead of voice. ed like a single sound; thus in French [a pie] 'to call'
or in Russian [pra ftf'a·j t'6] 'farewell'. Sequences of
The distribution of stress may thus conflict as to sounds which may not begin a stress-syllable must be
syllable-boundaries with the inherent relations of natural divided: thus in the above French sentence [ls] cannot
sonority. The boundary between natural syllables is, of begin a stress-syllable, hence the division (p6l so]. In
course, within the least sonorous articulation that inter- English and German, on the other hand., the conditions
l'enes between the syllabics. Thus in utter, bottle, butter,
button, bottom, pity it is in the [t], in the German hasse
[ha.sa] in the [s], in the German bitte [bita] in the [t]:
1
46 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE STRESS 47
are not so simple. 1. In passing from a less highly In all the preceding instances the stress is maintained
at its height throughout the syllabic·and sinks only after
stressed syllable to one more highly stressed, we usually the following non-syllabic is reached. This is why the
[d] in lid, for example, is so much more stressed than
pronounce a single non-syllabic with the following stress- that in lead (verb) [lijd], the [n] in bin so much more
than that in bean [bijn]: the former [d] and [n], respec-
syIlable, as in away [a wej], again [a gen], a name [a nejm]; tively, begin with highest stress and descend, but those
in lead and bean begin only after the strei,s has already
hut we do not always do so, certain meanings demand- decreased during the preceding non-syllabic, [j]. This
maintenance of highest stress throughout the syllabic is
ing a different division, as in an aim '[an ejm], in contrast
called close syllable-stress.
with a name. 2. In passing from a stressed syllabic The decrescendo of the stress may, on the other hand,
followed by a single non-syllabic to a less stressed syl- take place within the syllabic. In the Romance and the
Slavic languages this is almost always necessarily the
labic, we ignore the natural syllable-boundary, as in utter, case, for most of the stress-syllables of these languages
end with the syllabic. This is called open syllable-stress.
pity, bottle, etc. above, - speaking but one stress-syllable. In English it is less common, occurring chiefly in our
longer vowels, which often stand at the end of a stress-
3. If two or more non-syllabics intervene, we put the syllable and therefore must needs include the descres-
cendo, as in mama [mama.:] and frequently (cf. above)
stress-boundary between them, as in until [an til], hating in father fa: i:J"t], apple [re pl]. German has open syllable-
[hej tiIJ], wholesome [howl sam]. - German differs from stress in syllables with long syllabic, as in Wien [vi:n]
'Vienna', Kahn [ka:n] 'skiff', and in the first syllable of
English only in that in case 2 it does make a stress- biete [bi:ta] 'offer', Hase [ha.: za] 'hare', and close in syl-
lables with short syllabic, as in bin [bin] 'am', kann [kan]
boundary (taking the non-syllabic with the following 'is able', bitte [bita] 'please', hasse [ha.sa] 'hate'.
stress-syllable), provided the preceding syllabic is long; The stress may, further, rise, reach its highest point,
and fall within the syllabic; this is called compound
thus, in contrast with bitte [bita], hasse [ha.sa], spoken as stress. It is found regularly in certain syllables in An-
cient Greek and in Lithuanian. In English it is heard
but one stress-syllable each, it says biete [bi: ta] 'offer', in a surprised, displeased What!? and in a peeved,
irritable Nol (most clearly if the whispering test is used).
Hase [ha.: za] 'hare' with two each. After the longer
These differences in syllable-stress constitute one of the
English vowels the same distribution is often made; one chief difficulties in acquiring a foreign pronounciation
may say [fa.: i:J".1p re Pl] as well as [fa.: i:J".1, repl].
I
Within each stress-syllable also, different relations or
stress are possible. Two forms are common: the syl-
lable either begins with highest stress, which then decrea-
ses, or it begins with Jess than the highest stress, rises
to the highest, and then falls off. In each case the high-
est stress may for a short time be maintained. In Eng-
lish we use the former type for syllables beginning with
the syllabic, such as all, are, utter, apple, the latter for
those beginning with a non-syllabic, in which we reach the
highest stress only at the beginning of the syllabic, as in
mid, lid, pity, bottle, etc. (It is best to try these and the fol-
lowing examples of stress-relations in a whisper, as pitch-
variations - see next § - may otherwise be confusing.)
48 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE STRESS 49
and are perhaps the most important factor in the pecu- 'ment, verb; in German ubersetzen ["'y: bar 'z&t s:y.] .'to set
liar 'accent' of a language. across' but [''y: b.1 "z&t s:y.] 'to translate'; in Russian
b) Group-stress. . Of the several stress-syllables in an 1
utterance some receive louder stress than others. In this
distribution of varying degrees of stress among the syl- ['mu· ka] 'torment' (noun) but [mu 'ka·] 'flour'. Other
lables, group-stress, the different languages also diverge. languages with frequent high stress give it a uniform
In French the last syllable of an utterance or of such place with regard to the word, - which, as we shall
parts of an utterance as are fairly independent in mean- svee, is a division based entirely on meaning. Thus
ing, alone receives higher stress, the other syllables being Cechish and Icelandic have highest stress on the first
fairly equal. Thus the French sentence above quoted, re- syllable of every word; short words of relational mean-
ceives, in contrast with the English equivalent, I am ing, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, may,
'called the 'sun, but one highest stress: [3a ma psl so'fa:j], however, lack this stress. In Polish the next-to-last syl-
or at most also a weaker secondary stress on [psl], the lable of words is similarly, in almost all instances, accent-
last syllable of the part of the utterance which corre- ed. German departs widely and English very widely
spond~ in meaning to 'I am called': [30 ma 'pd so "lc,:j]. from a fundamental principle of stressing the first syl-
In Japanese there is even less difference between the lable of every word. There remains, however, the princi-
syllables. English and German, on the other hand, divide ple that in these languages every word is a stress-group,
every utterance into small groups of syllables within each containing one syllable with highest stress and, in longer
of which there is one highest stress, - stress-groups. words, one or more with intermediate stress (the degrees
But even these two languages differ from each other; of stress are indicated by the varying number of accent
English, for instance, normally gives highest stress to marks before the syllable), e. g. procrastination ["p.u.
one syllable each of an adjective and a following noun.
as in a 'young 'man or 'rotten po'tato, so that such a com- 'lures ti '"nej fi;i], with four degrees of stress, highest on
bination contains two stress-groups, while German nor-
mally gives higher stress to the noun: ein 'junger "Herr, [nej], least on [ti] and [f:y.] and intermediate degrees on
'faule Kar"toffel, one stress-group each. Russian also, in
spite of its entirely different syllable-stress, has much [pu] and [k.rres]. Short relational words, such as a, the,
the same group-stress as English or German, but differs,
for instance, in often giving higher stress to a preposition iie, her, in, and the like, have, however, as a ·rule, low
than to a following noun, as though we should say 'at
the foot, 'under the head: ['za· na gu, 'po·d gala vu]. English, stress and stand to the preceding or following higher
German, or Russian, with their frequent high stresses, stress in the same relation as do less stressed syllables
can distinguish different meanings by their distribution of the same word. Further, the highest stress of some
of group stress; thus in English 'torment noun, but tor- words is in certain connections weaker than that of others,
so that the stress-groups which represent words fall
under a higher unity of the phrase; examples are the
German combinations of adjective with noun (see above)
or such expressions as a 'great 'big "man, which, how-
ever, in nearly all cases, are really examples of sentenctr
stress, to which we shall now tum.
e) Sentence-stress. Among stress-groups the highest
Blooinfield 1 Stud7 of Language
1
I
50 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE PITCH 51
stress of some is in turn higher than that of others. This consonant of the dominant word. Thus it is almost al-
_highest stress or sentence-stress is in all languages given ways a part of a sentence or even of a word which usual-
to the emotionally most vivid part of the sentence, - ly is unstressed, that now receives highest stress, 'It's
a result of the fundamental character of speech as an the same person' is [salams:mpsr'son] but 'It's the very
expressive movement varying in intensity according to same person' is [sa la ''ms:m psr 'son]; 'It's impossible' is
the intensity of emotion (p. 1). We may illustrate this [sa ts po 'sibl] but 'It's impossible' is [sa ts: "po 'sibl].
by speaking an English sentence with emotional stress
on different words, - as though in answer, for instance, The rhythmic effects ofstress-distribution are heightened
to various contradicting statements. E. g.: ''I 'saw the in English and Russian by the habit of speaking in the
'young 'man, - I "saw the 'young 'man, - I 'saw the less stressed syllables shorter and less extreme vowels
"young 'man, - I 'saw the 'young "man, and even !'saw than in the stressed. Other languages, like German, go
"the 'young 'man. still farther and restrict the least stressed syllables to a
single vowel, - in German [e].
We find, thus, a threefold distribution of stress. First,
there is the up-and-down of stress within the syllable, 12. Pitch. Pitch, like stress, can be infinitely varied.
fixed for each language. Secondly, every language ha- The modulation of pitch may correspond to the syllabl~-
bitually gives certain syllables higher stress than others: division, each syllable being spoken with a unified pitch-
we have our accented and unaccented syllables and our scheme. This is the case in Chinese; thus in Peking
unaccented short words. Finally, the emotionally dom- [rxua1] with even high pitch means 'flower', L_xua.\l with
inant elements of the sentence receive higher stress than low falling pitch, 'speech' or 'picture', [L'iy/] with low
all others. Usually these elements are words, in whic!:l rising pitch means 'rain' and [r'iy/] with high rising pitch
case the emotional stress is given in most languages to means 'fish'. While the Peking speech has only these
the syllable which otherwise also bears higher stress than four pitch-schemes, some dialects have as many as nine.
the others. Thus when we say It 'wa,sn't dis"honesty, it In Norwegian and Swedish stress-groups (words) of one
was "sheer procrasti'"nation, the emotional stress of pro- syllable are spoken with rising pitch and stress-groups
crastination is placed on the same syllable which habitu- of two or more syllables (corresponding in most, but not
ally has highest stress in this word. If, however, the in all cases, to words) are spoken with either rising or
emotionally most charged part of the sentence is not a falling and then rising pitch, according to fixed habits;
word, but only part of a word, the emotional stress may thus in Norwegian [bun/] 'ground', ['bii nan/] 'the ground',
conflict with the group-stress. Thus, while we say for- ["bii\ 'nan/] 'bound'. In Lithuanian, Ancient Greek, and
'give, as in for'give and for'get, we say "for'give in "give the oldest Sanskrit we find compound (rising-falling)
and "for'give. In French, where not a syllable of every pitch belonging habitually to certain syllables.
word, but only tlie last syllable of sentences and phrases
receives habitual group-stress, the emotional sentence- In other languages, such as English, the different syl-
'Stress is given to the first syllable that begins with a lables have no fixed pitch-relations, but pitch is used in
the whole sentence to express emotional relations. We
use falling pitch for statements, as in He came back or
1'
I
52 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE LDITTA·~'ION OF THE ARTICULATIONS IN EACH DIALECT 53
the answer-word Yes, r1smg pitch for questions that exists between the Norwegian otte ["{)\ 't:a/] 'eight' with
long [t] beginning the second syllable and the Italian otto
contain no question-word, such as Did you say that? or ['gt to] reight' with double [t], the stress-boundary com-
for question-words used alone, as What?; the compound ing after the closure and before the opening of the [t}stop.
pitches are similarly used, thus rising-falling in questions
that contain a question-word, such as What was he doing?, The duration of the various parts of a sentence is less
or in an irritated No, and the falling-rising in an angri- fixed. Certain tendencies, however, such as that to speak
ly surpriseg. What? Compound pitch is usually, if con- a parenthetic clause very rapidly (as in This man, - whu
fined to one syllable, accompanied, as in these examples, for that matter, had very little to do wHh the affair, - ...),
by compound stress (cf. p. 47). can here be distinguished. No doubt there are also differ-
ences between the different languages, but they have never
13. Duration. Duration or quantity, - that is, the been ascertained, owing to the difficulty of abstracting
length of the different sounds, syllables, and stress-groups, from factors of mood, personal habit, and the like, which
- is another important factor. here have comparatively free play.
Thus in English some of the vowels are longer than 14. Limitation of the articulations in each dialect.
others, [re] and [n], especially, longer than [l] and [u]. All A language which significantly used any considerable pa.rt
our vowels, moreover, are longer before voiced sounds, of the articulations and variations of stress, pitch, and
as in bid, than before unvoiced sounds, as in bit. In one quantity that are possible, could be understood only by
case only have we, in American pronunciation, approxi- the closest application of the attention, and, if it used too
mately the same vowel in two distinct quantities, namely many, could not be understood at ail, for the intelligi-
[a:] long, as in father, and the f1ame sound (with a slight bility of language depends, of course, on repetition and
difference, p. 37) short [a], as in got, collar, god,· in ac- recognition.
cordance with the preceding rule the [a] before the voiced
sounds in the last two examples {s, however, longer than As a matter of fact every language limits itself to cer-
in got. In standard German the tense vowels are long, tain sounds and to certain ways of combining them. Some,
the loose vowels short; in the case of [a] there is, however, like English and German, employ constant stress-relations
scarcely any difference except that of quantity, e. g. S-tadt for certain syllables, leaving pitch-modulation for the sen-
Utat] ccity', Staat [fta:t] rstate' tence as a whole; others, like French, use both pitch and
stress only in the sentence; still others, like Chinese, as·
In English our non.:syllabics are longer, the shorter the sign a definite pitch-relation to each syllable and use
preceding syllabic; thus the [n] in bin is longer than that stress only to modul:::.te the sentence; Norwegian and Swe-
in men, which is in turn longer than that in man. In dish use pitch and stress both for the syllable and for
other languages the duration of non-syllabics is not auto- the sentence. The same is true of the individual arti~u-
matic {i. e. does not depend on the surrounding sounds) lations. Thus English and standard German use unvoiced
but is fixed for each word. Such long non-syllabics differ aspirated fortis [p\ t', k'J and voiced plain lenis stop3 [b,
from doubled sounds (p. 45) in that no stress-boundary d, g]; the Romance and the Slavic languages use only
occurs during their articulation. Accordingly a diffe:rence
The words you are searching are inside this book. To get more targeted content, please make full-text search by clicking here.
Bloomfield (1983) An Introduction to the Study of Language
Discover the best professional documents and content resources in AnyFlip Document Base.
Search