RSSThe Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis
Nov 21
EDITOR: Bernd Heine
EDITOR: Heiko Narrog
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis
SUBTITLE: Second Edition
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa
SUMMARY
When I was a teacher of linguistics, in the 1970s and 1980s, our students
would hear about transformational–generative grammar from the theoreticians,
about Michael Halliday’s systemic–functional grammar from the
language-teaching experts, and maybe about one or two other approaches.
Sometimes they would ask us to dispel their resulting confusion by providing
some kind of comparative guide to linguistic theories, perhaps a document
which showed how one or a few specimens of English would be treated by the
respective theories. I don’t think we ever did what they asked, and it seems
to me that we probably could not have compared the theories by reference to
common examples, because different theories tend to be interested in different
kinds of example. But, far too late for my own students, the book under
review could be seen as an attempt to satisfy that request. (Though, at more
than a thousand pages before the bibliography is reached, I doubt if the
students would have thanked us if we had been able to refer them to it.)
Linguistic theories have multiplied since the 1980s. After the editorial
introduction, the book contains 39 chapters each presenting a different
approach to language description and analysis. (In a few cases, two or three
chapters are devoted to separate aspects of one theory.)
This is a new edition of a book first published in 2010; it has been expanded
to include seven additional chapters. The new chapters are about topics such
as language acquisition, neurolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, and
semantics, whereas the chapters carried over from the first edition mainly
focus on the central linguistic topic of grammar. (There is no indication
that chapters which appeared in the first edition have been revised for this
edition.) Rather more than half of the contributors are based in North
America, most others in Europe, with a sprinkling from Australia, New Zealand,
and Japan. I shall not take the space to list every chapter, but references
to individual contributions as the review proceeds will give an impression of
the overall range of topics and theories covered.
As one might infer from the topics of the new chapters just mentioned, not all
contributions are concerned with rival theories of the same subject-matter.
Patrice Speeter Beddor’s “Experimental phonetics”, for instance, appears to be
entirely compatible with any particular theory about syntax. (Indeed,
although this chapter is a very informative and interesting one, it is not
obvious how it and some of the other new chapters belong in a book about
“linguistic analysis”. It may be that the editors decided that their new
edition should cover the language sciences more comprehensively than the first
edition but were reluctant to modify the book title to reflect that.) The
bulk of contributions, though, offer competing theories about the same or at
least largely overlapping topics. Some authors make this rivalry quite
explicit, for instance Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer (“Dependency grammar and
valency theory”) discuss the question “Is D[ependency] G[rammar] the best of
the theories presented in this handbook?”
Contributions differ, too, in the extent to which they are partisan. Some are
not; for instance Eric Pederson (“Linguistic relativity”) is admirably
even-handed in discussing both arguments for and arguments against what is
often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (a term which Pederson regards as a
misnomer). A larger number of contributors, though, see their chapters as
opportunities to put their pet theories in the shop window and win converts.
Some are more assertive about this than others. Many 21st-century linguists
may not be surprised to hear that the highest levels of self-confidence are
displayed by the generative grammarians. Cedric Boeckx (“Linguistic
minimalism”) makes no bones about telling us that “There is no question that
the minimalist program is the right strategy to account for properties of FL
[i.e. the language faculty]. Its conceptual/methodological legitimacy can
hardly be questioned …” Readers will no doubt make their own minds up about
that.
Another respect in which contributions vary is in terms of how much prior
knowledge they assume. Probably no-one would consult this kind of book unless
they had at least embarked on undergraduate study of linguistics, but many
contributions could be read by people with no deeper acquaintance with the
subject than that. Several contributions, though, seem to expect readers
already to know a fair amount of linguistic theory of the type relevant to the
respective chapter. Thus, Yan Huang (“Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory”) remarks
that “the constraints on Horn-scales … proposed by Levinson, successfully
rules [sic, for ‘rule’] out [a given symbol-sequence] as forming a genius
Horn-scale”. The term “Horn-scale” is eventually explained on a later page,
for the benefit of those like myself who have never read Levinson, but “genius
Horn-scale” appears nowhere else in the chapter, so far as I have seen, and I
am sure I am not the only linguist who will be baffled. Or again, Guglielmo
Cinque and Luigi Rizzi’s “Cartography of syntactic structures” chapter is
dense with references to journal literature, many of which are far from
self-explanatory. They write that
The very simplified structural representations often assumed in the
minimalist literature, expressed by the C-T-v-V system, are sometimes
taken
literally … but the structure of the arguments rarely implies a literal
interpretation, and often is compatible with an interpretation of C-T-v-V
as
a shorthand … with C, T, and v taken as ‘abbreviations’ standing for
complex
zones of the functional structure.
C, T, etc. seem to be explained nowhere in Cinque and Rizzi’s chapter; to me
their statement is totally opaque.
One “grammar” chapter, Martin Haspelmath’s “Framework-free grammatical
theory”, differs strikingly from others, in that it argues that linguists
should avoid allowing their descriptive metalanguage to embody assumptions
about universal features of human language. If there are such universals,
they should emerge from empirical descriptions of individual languages rather
than being imposed on them. Haspelmath notes that “outside the field of
linguistics, metalanguages do not seem to have the role of excluding
impossible phenomena”. (Balthasar Bickel’s “Distributional typology:
statistical inquiries into the dynamics of linguistic diversity” makes a
related point when Bickel writes “There is no need to formulate one’s
explanatory theory in a metalanguage that is full of notions that are unique
to linguistics … and totally insulated from the rest of the cognitive and
social sciences”.) Many other chapters concerned with grammar do appear to
take for granted that an aim of general linguistic theory should be to devise
a notation for grammatical description which permits only those languages
deemed to be learnable by humans to be defined.
One consequence is that these chapters bristle with diagrams and formalisms of
many different kinds: apart from familiar tree structures, various
contributors also use boxes linked by arrows of diverse sorts, algebraic
symbols, data-structure diagrams of the kind used in software engineering, and
other things. A prize for most complex diagrammatic notation should probably
go to Alice Caffarel-Cayron (“Systemic functional grammar and the study of
meaning”), for a diagram labelled “Register variation and instantiation” which
contains pairs of tangent circles, spreading rays, double-headed arrows in
different orientations, and a curly bracket. (Whether all these elements have
well-defined meanings in this author’s theory, or are intended just to suggest
relationships in a more intuitive, vaguer fashion, is not entirely clear.)
The editors write that they found it impossible to organize the contributions
into any logical thematic sequence, so they simply arranged them in
alphabetical order of the main word in the title. This has produced an odd
jumble of topics, for instance after the editors’ introduction the first two
chapters are Eve Clark’s “Linguistic units in language acquisition” and Talmy
Givón’s “Adaptive approach to grammar”, because “acquisition” and “adaptive”
both begin with A. (In fact this scheme is not carried out entirely
consistently. Francisco Yus’s “Relevance theory” is placed among neither the
Rs nor the Ts, but next to the thematically-related chapter by Yan Huang
mentioned above.)
EVALUATION
For anyone wanting to look into some current linguistic theory which he has
heard of but knows little about, this volume would be a good place to start.
It will show what issues seem important to advocates of the theory in
question, and in most cases will point the reader towards other publications
that allow him to go deeper than is possible in a single chapter.
Nevertheless, the book as a whole left me rather depressed. The overall
picture it presents of the current state of linguistics is probably an
accurate one, but it is not a pretty picture.
Linguistics is supposed to be a scientific discipline – a standard one-line
definition of the subject is “the scientific study of language”. Cedric
Boeckx justifies the linguistic theory he presents here in terms of how
natural sciences such as physics and chemistry work. But the evidence of this
book makes it hard to take the scientific pretensions of linguistics
seriously. It is normal and healthy, of course, for a science at any given
moment to contain plenty of disagreement and rival views. But alongside
differences about some issues, one expects to see progressive convergence
towards agreement in other areas. At least, surely, one expects a substantial
degree of agreement about the nature of the data to be accounted for, and
about what would count as acceptable explanations, if they should be
empirically supported. With this book, I have problems both with the
contributors’ concept of linguistic data, and with their ideas about what
count as good explanations of data. If I give specific examples, readers
should please believe that I have no wish to pillory the particular
contributors I quote; they happen to offer particularly clear examples of
tendencies which pervade the book, and pervade much of present-day linguistics
generally.
As an example of the data problem, Vilmos Ágel and Klaus Fischer claim that
one difference between Hungarian and English is that the English verb ‘lie’
(tell an untruth) cannot take a complement clause expressing the content of
the lie. Can it not? I googled ‘lied that’ and was offered “about 328,000
results”, beginning with ‘Have you ever lied that you had a boyfriend …’ and
‘Kelly Baker lied that a young member of her family had cancer …’ In what
sense should these examples not count as English? They look perfectly normal
to me. (A few of the Google examples were irrelevant because they used the
noun ‘lied’ meaning a type of song, but those cases were a small minority.)
At one time questionable claims about “starred sentences” could be refuted
only by reference to purpose-built electronic corpora to which many linguists
had no access, but nowadays Google supplies anyone with information like the
above in seconds. I realize that some linguists will want to say something
like “the ‘lied that’ construction may be frequent in performance but is not
part of native speakers’ true linguistic competence”. However, I just do not
see what sense to make of such a statement. It is like a statement “No true
Englishman fears death in battle”; it is mystical rather than scientific.
Turning to the issue of satisfactory explanation: Yan Huang remarks that “we
can say ‘They summered in Scotland’ [but] cannot say *‘They falled in Canada’
”, and he explains this via a linguistic principle of “pre-emption”: the fact
that ‘fall’ has the verb sense “drop down” blocks it from being used as a verb
similar to ‘summer’ meaning “spend the relevant season”. It is characteristic
of modern linguistics to posit abstract linguistic principles in order to
explain facts which can readily be explained without reference to linguistic
theory. In England we do not use ‘fall’ as the name of a season, we call that
season ‘autumn’ (a word which has no alternative sense), but we too would be
unlikely to say ‘They autumned in Canada’. (NB “unlikely”, not “cannot say” –
I have just said it, or rather written it.) The reason is that there are (or
at least have been) recognized, established social institutions, among those
whose circumstances allow(ed) it, of spending whole summers, or whole winters,
away from home in places with pleasanter weather; hence ‘to summer’ and ‘to
winter’. In spring and autumn the weather is not extreme, so there has been
no established custom of spending those seasons away. Consequently we do not
usually say ‘to spring’ or ‘to autumn’, and Americans do not usually say ‘to
fall’ (in that sense). But if a new custom should arise (presumably for some
non-climate-related reason) of spending whole autumns away from home, very
likely Englishmen would begin saying things like ‘They autumned in Wigan’, and
Americans would start using ‘falled’ the same way.
Noam Chomsky’s ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ (1965) posited a complex
system of linguistic “selection rules” and “subcategorization rules” in order
to enable his transformational grammars to disallow sentences like:
the boy may frighten sincerity
John amazed the injustice of that decision
the book dispersed
I am sure that the particular formalisms advocated by Chomsky and by other
linguistic theorists nowadays will be diverse, and different from those of
‘Aspects’. But few theorists ever seem to have realized that there was never
any need for such formalisms. The examples quoted are odd not because they
are “poor English”, but because they are good English and say, quite
explicitly and clearly, things that no-one is likely to want to say since they
are obviously untrue. (Sincerity and injustice are abstractions, and
abstractions do not feel emotions. To disperse means for a closely-packed set
of separate units to spread apart, but a book is not a set of separate units
and hence cannot disperse.) I would be surprised to encounter an English
sentence ‘The train climbed from Johannesburg to Pretoria’, but to me it would
be absurd to postulate grammatical machinery to disallow it. It is an odd
sentence because Pretoria is about 1700 feet lower in elevation than
Johannesburg, which is not a fact about the English language or about
Universal Grammar.
To my mind the whole idea of “starred sentences” is a highly questionable one,
though much modern linguistic theorizing takes it for granted. My wife and I
recently addressed the problem of one of our cats stealing the other’s food by
buying a new type of feeding-stations with lids that open and close
automatically under the control of the individual pet’s microchip. The
makers, Sureflap, are an English firm founded recently by a Cambridge
physicist, and the manual provided is well written. So I was initially
surprised to encounter a section headed “Learning your pet into the feeder”
and beginning “When learning your pet into the feeder, make sure all other
pets are kept away”. (It explains how to get the mechanism to respond to a
particular pet.) Surely these word-sequences are not English? – ‘learn’ does
not take an animate object, or an ‘into’ phrase. But the activity described
is novel, and the writer has used English in a novel way to refer to it. I
might have preferred to write “Teaching the feeder to recognize your pet” –
but that wouldn’t be quite right, because the change to the feeding-station is
instantaneous, brought about by a single press of a button, it is the cat
which has to be gradually taught to exploit its resulting behaviour. Perhaps
there would be some other form of words which would have been faithful to that
reality and yet deviated less from established usage; but the manual writer
chose the words I quoted, and he or she is doubtless as much an English native
speaker as I am, so who am I to say the wording is not English? It did not
seem so previously, because no English-speaker had found occasion to use
‘learn’ that way. But now someone has had a reason to use ‘learn’ with that
grammar, and I and other native speakers can certainly understand what is
intended. If Sureflap prospers, in years to come probably no-one will bat an
eyelid at this way of using ‘learn’.
Many theoretical linguists have a concept of “grammaticality” according to
which, at a given time, some fixed (though infinitely numerous) class of
word-sequences are “grammatical” in a given idiolect, though from time to time
the rules of the language or idiolect change so that new word-sequences become
grammatical. They would describe the ‘learn your pet’ usage as one that is
currently ungrammatical (for most speakers) but which may be destined to
become grammatical, under the influence of things such as the Sureflap manual.
To my mind this concept of “grammaticality” is a myth. Putting words
together in novel ways in order to express novel ideas is part of competent
language behaviour. The ‘learn your pet’ example may be a rather extreme case
which, in 2015, would make many English-speakers boggle, but less extreme
cases are normal. To quote John Taylor (2012: 285):
speakers are by no means restricted by the generalizations that they
(may) have made over the data. A robust finding from our investigation
is that speakers are happy to go beyond the generalizations and the
instances that they sanction. Speakers, in other words, are prone to
_innovate_ with respect to previous usage …
Anna Babarczy and I have argued, at length and by reference to concrete
statistical evidence (Sampson and Babarczy 2014), that the distinction between
“grammatical” and “ungrammatical” in natural languages is an unreal one. So
far as we are aware, no linguists before Chomsky’s ‘Syntactic Structures’ of
1957, not even formal linguists, ever used such a concept. But giving up that
conceptual distinction undermines a great deal of what theoretical linguists
believe they are doing. There are far fewer facts standing in need of
explanation by linguistics than linguists commonly suppose.
Another recurring feature of the volume reviewed which seems questionable for
a subject that regards itself as scientific is an undue deference to
intellectual authority, evinced by many (though certainly not all)
contributors. Even some who disagree with Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language
nevertheless quote his writings as somehow licensing their own enquiries,
rather like a mediaeval proto-scientist who felt bound to cite Aristotle
before launching into an investigation which might in fact have owed little to
Aristotle’s ideas. Defending a controversial idea about the cognitive
abilities of human babies and apes, for instance, Ray Jackendoff (“The
parallel architecture and its place in cognitive science”) writes “It is
possible to read certain passages of Chomsky as endorsing such a claim”. I am
not sure that this kind of deference to an influential individual is healthy
for any modern scientific discipline (and I certainly do not believe that
linguistics is exceptional in that respect – cf. Sampson 2015).
Conversely, some contributors ignore prior work which should not be ignored –
not because it is entitled to deference, but because it is so well established
that arguments for contrary points of view are unpersuasive if they do not
give explicit reasons for rejecting the established view. This problem is
particularly noticeable in the chapters on word meaning. Meaning in natural
languages was being discussed intensively by philosophers before linguists had
much to say about it; and if there was one thing that English-speaking
philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s agreed on, it was that words do not have
fixed, definable meanings. (As philosophers commonly put it, there is no
distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.) The idea was argued
at length by writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Morton White, and Willard
Quine, and when I first encountered professional philosophy in the 1960s it
was a leitmotiv of that discipline. Many linguists today, including several
contributors to this book, believe not only that word-meanings can be defined
but that they have promising ideas about how to do it. Yet they rarely even
mention that numerous leading members of a neighbouring discipline have given
reasons to believe that it is impossible. (That could be reasonable, if
linguists had already produced convincing refutations of the philosophers’
view – there is no obligation on a book like this to rehearse past errors of
other disciplines. But the truth is that they never have.)
According to Ray Jackendoff, “nearly universal[ly]” the word ‘ghost’ can be
defined as “a mind (or soul) lacking a physical body”. Jackendoff seems to
know more about ghosts even of an English-speaking variety than I do. (If the
Christian doctrine of the Second Coming is correct, are all the departed
appropriately referred to in the interim as ghosts, as Jackendoff implies?)
As for “nearly universal”, does Jackendoff really have evidence that most
current and past human cultures have had a concept neatly equivalent to
English ‘ghost’? That would surprise me. Cliff Goddard (“The natural
semantic metalanguage approach”) apparently believes that all word-meanings in
all languages can be defined in terms of 65 semantic atoms together with
associated grammatical properties. Thus, his definition of ‘something long’
runs:
when someone sees this thing, this someone can think about it like this:
“two parts of this thing are not like any other parts,
because one of these two parts is very far from the other”
if someone’s hands touch this thing everywhere on all sides,
this someone can think about it in the same way
(‘Hands’ would be further decomposable into atoms of meaning.) Does Goddard
believe that ‘long’ said of a stick or a cucumber is a different word from
‘long’ as in ‘a long way from the Earth to the Moon’ (which cannot be “touched
on all sides”)?
I found some of the “new” chapters in this volume more interesting than the
contributions carried over from the first edition. They discuss concrete
facts that are not well-known and which seem clearly relevant to understanding
how language works, whereas most of the “old” contributions discuss material
which in itself is familiar and trivial, and their only concern is how best to
organize that material into formal models of languages. Even when the
material does require to be accounted for within linguistics, which (as we
have seen) is often not so, it is easy to feel “well, we could describe the
facts this way, or we could use that model”, and hard to see what might hang
on the choice of theory.
If an educated but sceptical non-linguist tried to take the measure of
linguistics by reading this book, it strikes me that when he put the
questionable concept of grammaticality together with the lack of convergence
among different approaches, he could well come to suspect that “theoretical
linguistics” is little more than a self-perpetuating non-subject. He might
ask himself whether practitioners are repressing awareness of the flimsiness
of its foundations, simply because their livelihoods depend on the survival of
the discipline. That suggestion may be entirely mistaken. But I am sorry to
say that, on the evidence of the book reviewed, it is not obvious to me how
the sceptic should be answered.
It may seem that this review amounts to a seriously negative evaluation of the
book, but it is not. It is a negative evaluation of the current state of the
discipline of linguistics. The book reflects this accurately, I believe.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 2015. Rigid strings and flaky snowflakes. To be in
Language and Cognition. Online at < www.grsampson.net/ARsy.pdf >.
Sampson, Geoffrey and Anna Babarczy. 2014. Grammar Without Grammaticality.
Berlin: de Gruyter.
Taylor, John. 2012. The Mental Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson studied Chinese at Cambridge University and linguistics and computer science at Yale. He taught linguistics, and later computer science, at the LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex Universities, with sabbaticals at Swiss and South African universities and British research institutions. He has published on most areas of linguistics. Since becoming professor emeritus at Sussex he has been a research fellow at the University of South Africa.
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