Efforts toward a Means-Ends Model of Language in Interwar Continental Linguistics*

Roman Jakobson

When a few linguists connected with the Prague Circle came, in 1928, to the Hague International Congress, with the drafts of their replies to the fundamental questions proposed by the Congress committee, all of them felt that their deviations from traditional dogma would remain isolated and perhaps severely opposed. Meantime both in the formal and even more in the private discussions at the First Congress of Linguists, there proved to be partisans of similar views and paths among the younger scholars from different countries. Students, pioneering solitarily and at their own risk, discovered to their great surprise that they were fighters for a common cause.

A young, informal organization of researchers concerned with theoretical problems, the Prague Linguistic Circle, became a nucleus of the new trend. This team presented to the First International Congress of Slavists (Prague, 1929) a detailed program of crucial propositions in linguistic theory and practice and supported it with the first two volumes of the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, a series which continued until 1939 and played a considerable role in international scholarly pursuit. In 1930, the Circle convoked the International Phonological Conference of Prague, where the basic principles of the new approach to language and especially to its sound pattern were vividly and intensely discussed.

Since those years, the label “Prague School” has become current in the linguistic world. No doubt the Prague Circle took an important part in the international efforts toward a thoroughly scientific linguistic methodology, and Czech cultural tradition and growth in the twenties and thirties actually favored such an initiative. When we look at the interwar period sub specie his- toriae, we find, however, that what was often taken for Prague’s specific contribution to the development of modern linguistics appears to a high degree to have been a common denominator of several convergent currents in the scholarly life of various European countries at that time. Typical of the Prague ambiance in the 1920’s and ‘30’s was its receptivity to the diverse cultural impulses from West and East. The Prague Linguistic Circle, founded by the far-sighted Czech scholar, Vilém Mathesius, in 1926, was modeled upon an earlier vanguard organization of young Russian inquirers, the Moscow Linguistic Circle, and upon the newly created Linguistic Society of America. The cooperation between scholars of different nations was the pivotal point of the Circle’s activities. Thus, for instance, in 1928, the year of its consolidation, among the thirteen papers read in the Circle, five were Czech, one French, and seven Russian; three of these last were by visitors from the Soviet Union: TomaSev- skij, Tynjanov, and Vino kur.

When one compares the linguistic creeds of the Czech, German, or Russian collaborators of the Prague Linguistic Circle — for example, the views of Mathesius, F. Slotty, or N. S. Tru- betzkoy, with those which were professed in the same period, e.g., by A. W. de Groot and H. Pos in Holland, E. Benveniste in France, A. Sommerfelt in Norway, J. Kurylowicz in Poland, A. Rosetti in Rumania, Gy. Laziczius in Hungary or E. D. Po- livanov in Russia, it would be easy to find individual features specifying the contribution of each of these outstanding innovators, but we could hardly find a unifying pattern for the Prague group which would distinguish it as a whole from the other scholars mentioned above. At the same time, there is a typical drift which ties the work of all these explorers and strictly distinguishes them both from older tradition and from some different doctrines which found their outspoken expression likewise in the ‘ 30’s.

The title of this paper defines this common drift as aiming toward a means-ends model of language. These efforts proceed from a universally recognized view of language as a tool of communication. Statements about language as a tool, instrument, vehicle, etc., can be found in any textbook, but, strange as it seems, the apparently self-evident inference from this truism was not drawn in the linguistic tradition of the last century. Thus the elemental request to analyze all the instrumentalities of language from the standpoint of the tasks they perform emerged as a daring innovation. The prolonged neglect of any inquiry into the means-ends relationship in language — a neglect which still survives in some academic biases — finds its historical explanation in the inveterate fear of problems connected with goal-directedness. Therefore questions of genesis outweighed those of orientation, search for prerequisites supplanted the examination of aims.

The study of sound production with reference to its acoustic effects and the analysis of speech sounds with consistent regard for the various tasks they perform in language were among the first achievements in the systematic build-up of the means-ends model of language. It would be mistaken, of course, to deny the precursory hints to these problems in the thought of single linguists from earlier periods, and an end-directed attitude to sound analysis can be traced, as it has been shown, to Baudouin de Courtenay, Kruszewski, Winteler, and Sweet; but none of these scholars had actually developed the principles and technique of such an analysis, because all of them were still dominated by the genetic schooling of their century.

It was precisely the reference to the tasks performed by the phonic elements of language which enabled the investigators to replace step by step the grossly material, metrical description of speech sounds by a relational analysis and to dissolve the sound-flow continuum into discrete constituents. The same strictly relational attitude was applied also in morphologic and syntactic inquiry and essentially changed and simplified our design of the grammatical system — revealed its internal logic. Since relativity as known is indissolubly linked with the principle of invariance, a systematic search for phonological and grammatical invariants became the fundamental device of linguistic analysis. The ever higher focussing upon the tasks fulfilled by sound elements revealed an intimate connection between the differentiation of grammatical constituents and categories and the stratification of the sound pattern used to express them.

The emphasis on the duality of any verbal sign, carried over by F. de Saussure from Stoic and Scholastic tradition, necessarily brought new results when the relation between the two aspects of the sign, its signans and signatum, was consistently revised from the means-ends angle, and the two Saussurian “basic principles” — the arbitrariness of the sign and the linearity of the signans — proved to be illusory.

In the study of the two basic linguistic operations — selection and combination, or, in other terms, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of language — it is the paradigmatic aspect that was particularly elucidated in the work on the means-ends model. The selection of units or of their combinations is a purposive operation, in contradistinction to those purely redundant combinations which admit no selection. The problem of a careful discrimination between autonomous and combinatory variants was successfully attacked on both the phonological and grammatical levels. One of the most intricate networks, the strikingly hierarchic make-up of the paradigmatic pattern, was subjected to penetrating scrutiny, particularly in the research of Kury- lowicz. The consistent concern with meaning, a true yield of the entire trend, and the systematic analysis of grammatical meanings with a rigorous distinction between general and contextual meanings demanded a similar exploration of lexical meanings, and the imperative need to treat vocabulary as “a complex system of words mutually coordinated and opposed to each other” was comprehensively advocated by Trubetzkoy at the First Congress of Slavists.

In the “Thèses” inaugurating the first volume of the Travaux and in its later deliberations the Prague Circle, insisting on pur- posiveness in language, outlined an inquiry into languages of diverse functions and paid due attention to their different patterning. In this study of the various linguistic aims, the poetic function obtained the most fruitful treatment. The sense for the multifarious character of language saved the Prague group from an oversimplified, bluntly unitarian view; language was seen as a system of systems and especially Mathesius’ papers on intralingual coexistence of distinct phonemic patterns opened new outlooks.

The regard for the various “functional dialects” or in other words the different styles of language radically altered the view of linguistic changes. The two stages of a change in progress were reinterpreted as two simultaneous styles of language; the change was conceived as a fact of linguistic synchrony, and as any fact of synchrony it demanded a means-ends test with respect to the whole system of language. Thus historical linguistics experienced a complete metamorphosis. If in the previous stage of Indo-European studies, as Benveniste stated in 1935, “l’effort, considerable et méritoire, qui a été employé à la description des formes n’a été suivi d’aucune tentative sérieuse pour les interpréter,” henceforth, he pointed out, it will be necessary to consider the reconstructed language no longer as a repertory of immutable symbols but “comme une langue en devenir,” and, furthermore, to envisage the functions of the elements involved.

The role of comparison in linguistics became vastly expanded and diversified when the traditional preoccupation with the inherited communalities (Sprachfamilien) was supplemented by a vivid concern with the affinities acquired (Sprachbünde, in Trubetzkoy’s coinage), and thus time and space found their intrinsic place in the means-ends model of language. Finally, the third and most far-reaching form of comparison, the typological one, leading to the introduction of universais into the model of language, was sketched in the ‘20’s as the final goal of that international trend in linguistics which was christened by the Prague Circle in 1929 “functional and structural analysis.”

If that label, however, is avoided in our survey, this is only because during the last decades the terms “structure” and “function” became the most equivocal and stereotyped words in the science of language. In particular, the homonyms function, ‘role, task’ — viewed from the means-ends angle — and function as correspondence between two mathematical variables, are often used promiscuously, and as Lalande’s Philosophical Dictionary justly warns, “there is here a source of confusion which makes certain pages of our time scarcely intelligible.”

The Sturm und Drang through which linguistics, as so many other fields of knowledge, passed in the interwar years has given place to the large-scale work of our time on the foundations of a far-ranging and exact science of language. It is a joint and responsible labor in which the former differences between workshops of single countries or even single continents step by step lose their pertinence. Likewise many recent sectarian discussions between separate schools suddenly give the impression of belonging to a remote past. Among the models of language which play an ever greater part in contemporary linguistics, pure or applied, questions of the means-ends model gain a new level and relevance.

*A paper written in 1962 and published in Trends in Euro- -pean- and American Linguistics 1930-1960, 11 ( ~ t r e c h t F l m