1. QUESTIONS AND CLUES

1. The number of existing divergent grammatical positions has grown quite large. Parret (1974) contrasts the approaches of Wallace L. Chafe, Noam Chomsky, Algirdas J. Greimas, M. A. K. Halliday, Peter Hartmann, George Lakoff, Sydney M. Lamb, André Martinet, James McCawley, and Sebastian K. Shaumyan. But besides these there are also N. D. Andreev, Renate Bartsch, Irena Bellert, Manfred Bierwisch, Dwight Bolinger, M. K. Brame, Eugenio Coseriu, R. M. W. Dixon, Charles Fillmore, James Foley, Bruce Fraser, Gerald Gazdar, Bennison Gray, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, Richard Hudson, Esa Itkonen, Lauri Karttunen, Asa Kasher, Edward Keenen, Ronald W. Langaker, Hans-Heinrich Lieb, Igor A. Mel’čuk, Richard Montague, David Perlmutter, Kenneth Pike, Randolph Quirk, Petr Sgall, David Stampe, Teun A. van Dijk, Theo Vennemann, and Jef Verschueren, among others.

2. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

1. Thus when Galileo observed mountains and craters on the moon, and measured their heights and depths from the lengths of the shadows, one of his opponents, holding the ancient assumption that the moon must be a perfect sphere, suggested that the real moon is encased in a perfectly smooth and perfectly spherical crystal through which Galileo saw mountains and craters and was deceived into thinking that the surface was rough. Galileo replied that he would grant his adversary the use of this perfectly transparent crystalline substance provided his adversary with equal courtesy would allow him to construct of it mountains ten times as high and craters ten times as deep as those he had observed (Drake 1976:70).

2. A striking example is the case of Home Tooke (1736–1812), who achieved a great social and intellectual reputation as the discoverer of the truth about language and its relation to thought and the mind. He dominated English philology for two generations with etymological nonsense based on “general reasoning à priori” in support of philosophical preconceptions and maintained by early ecstatic reviews, political acceptance, largely unquestioned personal authority, and the abuse and contempt which he poured on other positions (Aarsleff 1967).

3. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the program and methods of modern science; some knowledge of these matters will be assumed in what follows. Students sometimes ask how to learn more about science. The best way is to study science under scientists. A major advantage of doing this is to undergo the process of socialization as a scientist. This is important because it is difficult to learn these things simply through reading. But lacking an opportunity to study under scientists, the least that one should do is to read science and the history of science (not the philosophy of science). A good place to start would be the essays on Galileo and translations of Galileo’s works by Stillman Drake.

A surprising number of linguists read philosophy and the philosophy of science for instruction in how to do linguistics. This is fine for those who see linguistics as a branch of philosophy. But in the present work we see linguistics instead as a branch of science, and for this it is advisable that one learn science directly from scientists. Philosophy has important contributions to make, but teaching science is not one of them. Because the focus of philosophical works is on philosophical issues, their study is inappropriate preparation for someone trying to learn to be a scientist, and is likely to lead to confusions and misconceptions.

4. Some of the important positions of certain influential linguists will be touched on here. In many cases earlier versions of these positions may be found in the writings of their predecessors.

5. Thus it will be necessary to take just the opposite tack from that taken in Chomsky (1965:25): “Using the term ‘grammar’ with a systematic ambiguity (to refer, first, to the native speaker’s internally represented ‘theory of his language’ and, second, to the linguist’s account of this), we can say that the child has developed and internally represented a generative grammar, in the sense described.” This appears to beg at least two important questions: whether a grammar is equivalent to the structure of people, and whether a theory is equivalent to what it purports to be a theory of.

3. ANALYSIS: THE DOMAIN OF LANGUAGE

1. Unfortunately none of the Stoic writings have been preserved intact. The existing fragmentary sources have been collected by Arnim (1903). Particularly valuable is the second century A.D. account of Diogenes Laertius (VII 39-83, especially 55-59). The Loeb edition (Hicks 1925) provides a convenient parallel English translation which, however, is not consistent in its rendering of the technical terms. A better translation into German is to be found in Egli (1967). See also Pinborg (1975), Robins (1951), Coseriu (1969) and Mates (1953). An annotated bibliography by Egli is to be found in Hülser (1979). The student will find differences between different accounts. If he turns to the sources, he will find them incomplete, sometimes cryptic and even contradictory.

2. Numerous quotations could be exhibited. Here are several from linguists who have been influential: “Die sprache ist ein naturobject, und die Wissenschaft von ihr gleicht der naturgeschichte, welche der philosophischen betrachtung zwei objecte darbietet: 1) das verhältniss zwischen den einzelnen naturgegenständen: das system; 2) den bau der einzelnen körper und was dazu gehört: die physiologie” (Rask 1830 as quoted in Thomsen 1889:323). “Die Sprachwissenschaft hat es unmittelbar mit der Sprache selbst zu thun; das Object der Sprachwissenschaft ist also ein concretes, reelles, nämlich die bestimmten, gegebenen Sprachen” (Schleicher 1860:119). “La langue n’est pas moins que la parole un objet de natur concrète, et c’est un grand avantage pour l’étude. Les signes linguistiques, pour être essentiellement psychiques, ne sont pas des abstractions; les associations ratifiées par le consentement collectif, et dont l’ensemble constitue la langue, sont des réalités qui ont leur siège dans le cerveau” (Saussure 1916:32; 1959:15). We will discuss later the issue of the psychological reality of language as a system of signs assumed here by Saussure.

4. ANALYSIS: THE DOMAIN OF PEOPLE

1. This is in contrast to the Stoic theory of sensation involving pneuma passing from the principle part of the psyche to the senses (Diogenes Laertius VII 52), their theory that the seat of rational speech is in the heart (Diogenes Laertius VII 159), and their theory that the world is a living being, rational, animate, and intelligent, endowed with sensation and a psyche (Diogenes Laertius VII 142–3). All of these have been discarded.

5. IMPLICATIONS

1. The plethora of types of grammar differing in the assumptions they make is not a modern development. Michael (1970) found 259 grammars of English written or printed in England between 1586 and 1800. They represent 56 different systems in terms just of what parts of speech they recognize.

2. The term human linguistics has been used at least since 1971. It is a generic term that denotes any linguistics that would study people, individually and collectively, rather than assumed objects of language, and that would study them directly from the point of view of how they communicate rather than through language and grammar, thus eliminating unsupported assumptions and introducing instead theories that can be tested against reality and that can then be judged on their merit as in the physical and biological sciences. Other uses of the term are to be discouraged.

6. A SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION FOR LINGUISTICS

1. The first attempt at articulating a goal for linguistics along the present lines was reported in Yngve (1969). An early effort to work out properties in a state theory was reported in Yngve (1970), which also opted explicitly for science. By 1973 the goal of linguistics had been restated without language (Yngve 1975b,c,d), and the several types of linguistic properties had been delineated. Some recent reports are Yngve (1983, 1984, 1985, in press). The human linguistics effort began as an attempt to improve the linguistic foundation for the depth hypothesis (Yngve 1960) in a way that would preserve its insights and its ability to explain historical change (Yngve 1975a) without accepting the problems inherent in the grammatical tradition.

7. LAWS OF COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOR

1. Human linguistics is treated at the next level of detail in a work that is in preparation.

2. Characterizations of individuals or linkages to any degree of detail are complex enough that computer testing becomes essential for scientific progress. A computer simulator program has been developed that accepts human linguistics models expressed in the notation of the theory and runs them in order to test and debug them. This also provides a scientifically justified notation that can be used in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

8. THE LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE OF PROPERTIES OF PEOPLE

1. Additional notations and detailed justification are to be found in the larger work being prepared for publication.

10. TESTS OF THEORY AGAINST OBSERVATION

1. Chomsky defended this assumption by adding, “This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered.” In the first place, the force of tradition is not sufficient justification for a special assumption. In the second place, special assumptions do not come for free in science. The burden of providing cogent reasons falls on those who would propose, accept, or retain them, not on those who would doubt them.

2. For a study of coherence in discourse comparing schizophrenic and normal speakers using a human-linguistics approach, see Lanin-Kettering (1983). For a study of the topic of conversation using an early version of human linguistics see Vance (1974).

3. This means, of course, that everything would be moved over that belongs in a linguistics focused on achieving a scientific understanding of how people communicate. Such a linguistics would not presume to claim areas outside of its domain. The precise location of the boundaries between scientific linguistics and other concerns such as ethics, aesthetics, and the theory of knowledge, which do have some communicative content, can probably not be estimated until scientific linguistics has been more fully developed. The issue of whether such other areas can be brought completely within the domain of science is not a question internal to linguistics.