GYULA LAZICZIUS (1896-1957)

Gyula Laziczius

Thomas A. Sebeok

In the course of a recent report on some highlights of the Eighth International Congress of Linguists, a distinguished Hungarian specialist in Finno-Ugric languages makes a bitter charge. ‘ It is common knowledge,’ he laments, ‘ that no Hungarian contributions to the theory of structuralism exist.’¹ This sweeping indictment— belied a dozen pages later by the obituary of Gyula Laziczius,² an internationally appreciated contributor to the structuralist move- ment, but a prophet with hardly a follower in his own land—may well stand as an epitaph in memory of this dedicated linguist, whose career was shaped by a series of harsh ironies.

Laziczius was born on the 18th of August, 1896, in Újpest, a district of the capital where he died on the 4th of August, 1957. During his life of three score years, he was able to function barely a decade and a half as a productive scholar, so many and so oppressive were the reverses visited upon him. Having completed his elementary and secondary schooling in Újpest, he enrolled at the University of Budapest, in 1914 ; but his studies were interrupted by World War I, which he spent partly in a Russian military prison. Upon his return, in 1918, he continued his higher education and, after graduating in 1920, earned his living as a teacher, for four years, in a variety of secondary schools. In 1922, however, he was dismissed from his post, for political reasons, and ten years were to pass before he was able to free himself from stultifying clerical jobs and, in 1932, resume teaching. The following year, he completed a thesis for his ‘ habilitation ‘ : ‘ General Phonology, With Particular Reference to Hungarian and the Slavic Languages.’ In 1935, he became a corre- sponding member of the Academy ; next year, an adjunct professor of Hungarian linguistics ; then, in 1938, he was called to occupy, as an extraordinary professor, the newly established chair of General Linguistics and Phonetics (which was, incidentally, the first structural academic position to be established anywhere), and. became an ordinary professor of these subjects in 1940. During World War II, he suffered a series of tragic personal misfortunes, including the loss of his son, under particularly grim circumstances. In 1949, he was forcibly retired from his chair, once again for political reasons. He spent the eight remaining years of his life with hardly any opportunity for conducting scientific work, and in penury, scarcely managing to make a living as a hack translator. His heart condition of old deteriorated steadily after his discharge, but he survived for a few more years thanks to the medicines supplied to him by a famous American colleague.

In the 1920’s, while Laziczius did office work by day, he gave his free time to the area of scholarship which first engaged his attention : Russian literature and philosophy. His doctoral dissertation, pre- sen ted in 1929, dealt with ‘ Belinskij and Hegel ‘ ; and he also published a series of articles on Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and other topics drawn from 19th century Russian thought. His maturation as a linguist coincided with the formative period of structuralism, the mid-twenties, when members of the Prague School as well as some of their American colleagues began to emerge from their chrysalis stage.

His first important article, ‘ On Phonology,’ appeared in 1930, followed shortly by ‘ The Phonology of a Hungarian Consonant Change.’³ These papers showed the direct influence, in the first place, of de Saussure ; of the ‘ Prague ‘ linguists, notably Trubetzkoy and Jakobson ; and, not least, of Sapir, whose ‘ Sound Patterns in Language ‘ made a considerable impression on Laziczius (‘ I believe that Edward Sapir was the first to introduce phonemic considerations in the study of sound changes,’ was the opening sentence of the second of his articles cited). Phonemics, as Laziczius conceived of it at the time, constituted an independent branch of descriptive linguis- tics, devoted to the study of the function of speech sounds—this formulation allied him closely with the Prague point of view, which Mathesius had designated ‘ functional linguistics ‘—and he under- took to state its three principal goals : to identify the sounds which possess either a lexical or a grammatical function in a given language ; to decide how such elements are distributed in this or that language ; and, most importantly, to examine and compare phonemic systems, i.e., to study typology. Unless phonemics leads to the formulation of comprehensive generalizations, it will have failed, he insists, since individual events, no matter how interesting by themselves, have nothing to do with science. It is characteristic of Laziczius’ procedure that he promptly attempted to apply the theory he displayed to a concrete corpus, and he showed how the phonemic point of view contributed to the solution of a well-known problem, that of the disappearance of word-final short vowels in old Hungarian.

Laziczius was deeply aware of his predecessors and contemporaries in the structuralist movement (Bühler and Twaddell were among those from whom he profited in later years). Yet he was by no means content to remain merely a disciple : ‘ bien que j’aie toujours approuvé l’idée fondamentale de la phonologie, je considérais avec un certain scepticisme les enseignements qui se cristallisaient peu à peu autour de ce fonds commun.’⁴ Though he eventually became an innovator in phoneme theory, the first of his major works, Introduc- tion to Phonology,⁵ gives less evidence of this than of his remarkable erudition, his grasp of essentials, the lucidity of his formulation, and his versatility in applying a new technique in a field excessively burdened with tradition. Like his other two books, which came out in 1942 and 1944, this, too, was published only in Hungarian, a fact which, of course, prevented the instant international recognition it would surely have been accorded had it been written in a more accessible language. It is, indeed, one of the classical expositions of the field which, even today, repays careful reading.

The book is divided into three sections, roughly equal in length : (1) general phonemics, (2) Hungarian phonemics, and (3) historical phonemics. Among the most valuable chapters in the first part— which is otherwise vintage ‘ Prague ‘—is a sketch of the history of phonemic theory, from the days of the Kazan school of Baudouin de Courtenay and Kruševskij through the First International Congress of Linguists (1928) ; it is plain that the author had complete and critical mastery of the entire literature of his subject.

The second part contains not only the earliest—and in many respects still the best—description of the phonemes of Hungarian, but it also constitutes an original and brilliant exposition of structural dialectology, far ahead of its time. Laziczius succeeded in reducing to a simple and clear structure the apparently chaotic phonetic diversity which separates Hungary’s eight dialect regions, and in relating this to the system of the literary and spoken standards ; whether or not a structural dialectology is, a priori, possible did not concern him, for he was perhaps the first linguist to resolve the question to his own satisfaction and to that of the few who possessed the equipment to grasp his argument.

It is in the third part of the monograph, however, that Laziczius breaks most decisively with the atomism of the Neogrammarians, and boldly outlines the principles of historical phonemic analysis.⁶ ‘ Sound changes in language always and without exception occur as mutations,’ he declares emphatically, and goes on to elucidate, with the aid of this novel instrument, several key problems of Hungarian linguistics. His final chapter, on the ‘ Interdependence of Sound Changes,’ is a plea for intertwining the threads of isolated diachronie events, for searching out those ‘ developmental tendencies ‘ which characterize the particular state of a language, and for recognizing those internal pressures which condition linguistic changes.

Laziczius’ later departures from phoneme theory as developed by Trubetzkoy centered around three problem areas : the definition of the phoneme in terms of psychological notions ; the nature of phonetics ; and the relationship of phoneme to allophone.

In regard to the first point, he in effect joined with most American linguists in sharply rejecting Trubetzkoy’s use of ‘ undefined psycho- logical terms,’ ⁷ but expressed himself as favoring the sociological approach of certain other Russian linguists, notably Vinokur and Šor. He also repudiated Trubetzkoy’s conception of phonetics as a natural science. This view, he argued, is not borne out by either the history of or current practice in the field : ‘ Sans considérer certains buts pratiques (enseignement des sourds-muets, etc.), on l’a toujours mise au service de la linguistique.’⁸ The gap between the two subjects—־ phonetics and phonemics—is not one of principle ; it is, rather, an artificially induced breach motivated by academic politics, one which must be bridged, he argues, by a return to the tradition of Sweet, namely, the reintroduction into phonetics of the functional techniques of phonemic analysis : ‘ les phonéticiens eux-mêmes se sont rendu compte à plusieurs reprises des différences fonctionelles qu’il y a entre les sons d’une langue donnée. Même s’ils n’avaient pas fait cette découverte, on ne devait pas leur refuser le droit d’en tirer profit. Pourquoi réserver cette distinction à la phonologie? Dans la science,’ he winds up on a characteristic note, ‘ il n’y a pas de monopoles.’⁹

It was Laziczius’ view of the nature of the phoneme, however, and the ensuing amiable controversy between him and Trubetzkoy, for which he became most famous internationally.¹⁰ Biihler’s well- known model, dividing the act of speech into three aspects, furnished the philosophical peg upon which Laziczius hung his linguistic garment. These aspects were, it will be recalled those features of sound which refer to the designation (Darstellung), those which are characteristic of the source (Kundgabe), and those which constitute the appeal to the destination (Appell). Laziczius’ first point was that phonemes function in all three aspects and not just referentially ; his second point was that, among linguistic signs, one encounters, beside phonemes and allophones, also another category, which embraces those elements which he dubbed emphatics—we would call them expressive features—which function only in reference to speaker and hearer but not the content ; and, third, that the allophones function only in reference to the speaker but not either the hearer or the content. All three—phoneme, emphatic, and variant—were, more- over, Laziczius insisted, to be regarded as equally conventionalized. He was the first one, followed by van Wijk and Malmberg, to point out that the claimed proportional relationships, phonology to langue equals phonetics to parole, is incorrect, since the allophones are also socially determined.

While Trubetzkoy admitted the unilateral nature of phonemic investigations, he was of the opinion that data concerning expressive elements were so meager and unreliable that one could but speculate about their role in language, and he ended by relegating them, together with the features functioning in reference to the speaker, to a special discipline, namely, phonologische Stilistik. Laziczius, in his several replies, defended and elaborated upon his position, inciden- tally furnishing many novel data in its support ; and he continued to accuse Trubetzkoy and his followers of a number of ‘ errors,’ chief among them being their confusion of expressive elements and allophones.

Whatever one may think of this exchange, or of the merits of Laziczius’ theory, the fact remains that he was the first to describe in functional terms (however gropingly perhaps) the relationship of what some would now prefer to think of as distinctive, redundant, and expressive features. Realizing their importance only lately, linguists and psychologists alike, in collaboration and individually, have begun attempts to disentangle afresh, and with the aid of the newest tools of our trade, these interwoven threads that make up the total ribbon of communication.¹¹

The appearance of his Introduction to Phonology ushered in Lazic- zius’ most productive period : over the next twelve years, he published many papers dealing with all sorts of problems in Hungarian, Finno-Ugric, and general linguistics. Some appeared in leading periodicals abroad, commanded esteem, and brought him invitations to lend his name to the masthead of a number of journals, notably, Acta Linguistica, Archiv für die gesamte Phonetik, and Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. He also came to play an increasingly authoritative role in international congresses of both phoneticians and linguists. At home, he was elected Secretary of the Linguistic Society of Hungary, and to full membership in the Academy.

Laziczius’ researches were by no means restricted to language in its phonic aspect, for his articles touched as well on many different topics in morphology and lexicology, synchronic and diachronie. Writing ‘ On the Question of the Formation of Finno-Ugric Tenses,’¹² for example, he introduces and discusses the notion of morphological zero (which must be treated exactly as we handle ‘ material data, but naturally only within the system, when a corresponding opposition is available ‘) ; and proceeds to a fascinating and learned psycholin- guistic excursus against the so-called ‘ axiom of parallelism,’ that fuzzy, pseudo-Whorfian concept, which still has a remarkable number of adherents—the one about the color-blind Chinese (can they distinguish blue from green ?). In ‘ The Size of the Hungarian Lexicon,’¹³ he makes the point that a quantitative approach to linguistic materials serves no useful purpose if the units counted were not established according to sound principles. ‘ La Définition du mot,’¹⁴ the last paper he published abroad, was composed during the painful war years ; therein, he evaluates several definitions of the word and adds yet another : words are linguistic signs composed of specific phonic elements capable of functioning in a linguistic context {Zeichenfeld) as well as in a non-linguistic environment {Zeigfeld), and constituting, at a particular moment and in a particular speech community, a system.

We have mentioned Laziczius’ friendly debate with Trubetzkoy ; but we must add that the art of dialectic was the method he favored most for the exposition of his views—and he excelled at it. He participated in many disputes, reasoning always with awesome cogency but often with perhaps needlessly offensive acrimony, earn- ing himself a host of enemies. Typically, his papers open with a reaction to someone else’s thesis, which he proceeds to demolish by argument supported with both data and a prodigious knowledge of the relevant literature ; his antithesis is then stated and applied to some concrete linguistic problem which he elucidates in a higher synthesis. Once, when he was charged by a colleague with malice aforethought, he replied : ‘ In my opinion, in science there is no such thing as an attack ; there are only theories and hypotheses, data and proof, and he whose trump is the higher is right.... Attack is not my meat, but criticism is my right, indeed my duty.’¹⁵ And his attitude is further indicated by an observation he made ‘ On the Margins of an Article ‘ : ‘ Every piece of scientific writing, save when it touches on virgin territory, is more or less contentious in character.’¹⁶ In his passionate search for the truth, he was prepared to tilt with anyone, from distinguished foreign colleagues like Trubetzkoy or Bühler,¹⁷ to Hungarian notables like Zoltán Kodály.¹⁸

The seeming multiplicity of Laziczius’ linguistic activities was at last reduced and incorporated into a single, overarching theory of language, which he presented in the second of his major works : General Linguistics—Questions of Principle and Technique.¹⁹ The twelve chapter headings may impart some of the flavor of the book : (1) The Autonomy of Linguistics ; (2) The Subject Matter of Lin- guistics ; (3) Bühler’s Third Axiom—The Place of Linguistics ; (4) Language as Sign Event ; (5) Language as System ; (6) Subsystems in Language ; (7) The Unity of Language ; (8) The Distinction Between Language and Speech as a Methodological Principle ; (9) Sign Event as a Methodological Principle ; (10) Expression of Meaning and Expression of Emotion ; (11) The Distinction Between Synchrony and Diachrony ; and (12) Other Errors of Method.

Laziczius thought of this monograph as only a prolegomenon to his grand design : by clearing away the underbrush of methodological misconceptions, he wished to prepare the ground for a four-volume work, to be devoted, respectively, to phonetics, phonemics, léxico- logy, and syntax. Unfortunately, he was able to complete only the first of these, Phonetics,²⁰ although a version of the book on the morpheme and fragments of the one on syntax also survive. (He died, in fact, while he was completing a chapter on ‘ The Central Problem of Syntax.’)

Phonetics has already been reviewed in the United States in some detail.²¹ It is a fine, mature, and, in some respects, unique book, one which pays equal attention to the genetic and the acoustic stages of the speech event ; accords special treatment to each of the prosodie phenomena of duration, stress, and tone ; and includes meticulous and critical accounts of the historic controversies around the diph- thong and the syllable. In discussing the chapter on acoustics, the reviewer in Language had noted that, in consequence of wartime isolation, ‘ the author had no access to the latest research in this field, which . . . has progressed enormously during the last few years in the United States especially.’ By the summer of 1948, when Laziczius had met and entertained the author of this necrology, he appeared to have read and thoroughly absorbed all that had been published on ‘ visible speech,’ and he volunteered that this new literature had given him no cause to modify his theories in any fundamental way.

In Laziczius, we see the confluence of the best in Russian and American, Swiss, Czech, and Danish linguistic thought, which he enriched from his own nation’s resources. It is not likely that, in our age, another general linguist of his stature will appear in Hungary. Laziczius wrote his major works in Hungarian, but he was a scientist in the main stream of modern linguistics, a river which, like language itself, overflows the boundaries of nations, and will not stay confined to continents.

Source : Thomas A. Sebeok, ‘ Obituary Gyula Laziczius,’ Word 15.175-182 (1959). By permission of Word.

¹ Gy. Lakó, Nyelvtudományi Közlemények [Linguistic Communications] LX (1958), 197.

² By J. Harmatta, ibid. 210-213 ; a German version appeared in the Hun- garian periodical Acta Linguistica VII (1958), 211-216. I am indebted to Harmatta’s account for the chronology of the principal events in Laziczius’ biography, and to J. Lötz for his helpful comments.

³ In Magyar Nyelv [Hungarian Language] XXVI, 18-30 and 266-276, respectively. For the purposes of this obituary, the terms ‘ phonology ’ and ‘ phonemics ‘ may be taken as roughly equivalent.

⁴ ‘ Phonétique et phonologie,’ Lingua I (1948), 294. It strikes me as a bizarre oversimplification to bracket Laziczius with A. Martinet as ‘ adherents ‘ of Trubetzkoy’s, as W. K. Matthews does in Lingua VII (1958), 264.

⁵ Bevezetés a fonológiába, Budapest, 1932.

⁶ A. G. Juilland’s ‘ A Bibliography of Diachronie Phonemics,’ Word IX (1953), 198-208, needs to be emended in regard to Uralic linguistics in general, and the ‘ important explicative contributions ‘ of Laziczius in particular.

⁷ E.g., Z. S. Harris, in Language XVII (1941), 345-349. But in the publications of his later years, Trubetzkoy minimized, if not actually discarded, the psycho- logical slant of his definitions.

⁸ ‘Phonétique et phonologie,’ 298.

⁹ Ibid., 302.

¹⁰ These ideas were worked out, in several somewhat differing forms, in Hungarian: ‘ Jeltan, elemtan,’ Nyelvtudományi közlemények XLIX (1935), 172-189, and also in Altalános nyelvészet (General Linguistics; 1942); in German : ‘ Probleme der Phonologie, Zeichenlehre—Elementenlehre,’ Un- garische Jahrbücher XV (1935), 193-208 ; in English : ‘ A New Category in Phonology,’ Proceedings of the 2d International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Cambridge, 1936), 57-60 ; in French : ‘ Phonétique et phonologie,’ 298-300. For Trubetzkoy’s counter-statement, see ‘ Phonologie und Lautstilistik,’ Grundzüge der Phonologie, Prague, 1939, 17-29.

¹¹ See, for example, Chapter 4 in C. E. Osgood and T. A. Sebeok, Psycho- linguistics (Bloomington, 1965) ; and especially T. A. Sebeok, A. S. Hayes, and M. C. Bateson, Approaches to Semiotics (The Hague, 1964).

¹² In Hungarian ; Magyar Nyelv XXIX (1933), 18-25.

¹³ In Hungarian ; ibid. XXXVIII (1942), 65-73.

¹⁴ Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure V (1945), 32-37.

¹⁵ Magyar Nyelv XXXI (1935), 48.

¹⁶ Ibid. XXXVI (1940), 81-89. A part of this article is devoted to Twaddell’s ‘ splendid book,’ On Defining the Phoneme ; while generally in agreement with him, Laziczius expresses some reservations in regard to Twaddell’s doubts as to some views of the physical reality of the phoneme, certain ones of which— notably Bloomfield’s—he regarded as soundly based.

¹⁷ Cf. ‘Das sog. dritte Axiom der Sprachwissenschaft,’ Acta Linguistica (Copenhagen) I (1939), 162-167.

¹⁸ ‘On Hungarian Pronunciation ‘ (in Hungarian), Magyar Nyelv XXXIV (1938), 307-316.

¹⁹ Általános nyelvészet, Budapest, 1942.

²⁰ Fonetika, Budapest, 1944, 1963. A few months before he died, Laziczius finished editing a German translation of his book, at the invitation of the Academy Publishing House of Berlin. This translation, done by W. Steinitz, at the Hungarian Institute of the University of Stockholm, in 1944, appeared in 1961 (Berlin).

²¹ Language XXIII (1947), 75 f.