3.1 Like Saussure's Cours, Sapir's Language, first published in 1921, seeks to stake out the overall field of language study. The ‘main purpose is to show what’ Sapir ‘conceives language to be, what is its variability in place and time, and what are its relations to other fundamental human interests -- the problem of thought, the nature of the historical process, race, culture, art’ (SL v).2 He stresses that the ‘content of language is intimately related to culture’, the latter defined as ‘the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives’ (SL 219, 207). ‘The history of culture and the history of language move along parallel lines’ (SL 219).3 Indeed, ‘the superficial connections’ between ‘speech’ and ‘other historical processes are so close that it needs to be shaken free of them if we are to see it in its own right’ (cf. 4.2; 6.6; 12.9; 13.1). ‘Language’ is thus an ‘acquired ‘cultural’ function’ rather than ‘an inherent biological function’ with an ‘instinctive basis’ (SL 3f) (cf. 3.15; 4.2; 8.26, 42, 44, 91; 9.1f, 6ff, 18, 22f, 107; 13.62).4 ‘Eliminate society’, and ‘the individual’ ‘will never learn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society’. ‘Language’ has an even greater ‘universality’ than ‘religion’ or ‘art’: ‘we know of no people that is not possessed of a fully developed language’ (SL 22). Indeed, ‘language’ may have ‘antedated even the lowliest developments of material culture’, which were ‘not strictly possible until language’ ‘had taken shape’ (SL 23) (cf. 4.10; 8.28; 9.7).
3.2 Such theses project a vast scope for the study of language, in pointed contrast to the narrower pursuits of the time (cf. 13.3). Sapir hopes to provide ‘a stimulus for the more fundamental study of a neglected field’ (SL vi). His book could ‘be useful’ ‘both to linguistic students and to the outside public that is half inclined to dismiss linguistic notions as the private pedantries of essentially idle minds’ (SL v; cf. 2.88). ‘Knowledge of the wider relations of their science is essential to professional students of language if they are to be saved from a sterile and purely technical attitude’. We should avoid ‘making too much of terminology’, taking too much ‘account of technical externals’, or parading ‘the technical terms’ and ‘technical symbols of the linguistic academy’ (SL 140, 138, vi). We should also resist such tendencies as the inclination to ‘worship our schemes’ as ‘fetishes’; ‘the strong craving for a simple formula’ ‘with two poles’ that ‘has been the undoing of linguists’; and ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ carried over from 19th-century ‘social sciences’ that has been ‘the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’ (SL 122f) (cf. 3.49; 2.6; 13.14).
3.3 Sapir's characteristic stance is a striking mix of sobriety and exuberance. His portrayals of language, for example, range from staid abstractions of a Saussurian cast over to extravagant panegyrics. At the sober end, Sapir describes ‘language’ as a ‘conventional’, ‘arbitrary system of symbolisms’ (SL 4, 11). Or, less abstractly, it is ‘a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols’ (SL 8). At the exuberant end, ‘language’ is declared ‘the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved’; ‘the most self-contained’ and ‘massively resistant of all social phenomena’; the ‘finished form or expression for all communicable experience’; and ‘the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations’ (SL 220, 206, 231) (cf. 6.2; 13.22). Moreover, ‘language’ ‘is the most fluid of mediums’ and ‘a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions’; ‘the possibilities of individual experience are infinite’ (SL 221, 231) (cf. 3.13, 70; 4.31; 5.25, 28; 8.42). Hence, ‘languages are more to us than systems of thought transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expressions’ (SL 221).
3.4 In Sapir's view, quite unlike Saussure's, ‘language exists only in so far as it is actually used -- spoken and heard, written and read’ (SL 154f) (cf. 13.36). But this claim is addressed mainly to the ‘pedagogue’ who ‘struggles against’ ‘“incorrect”‘ usage and insists on ‘maintaining caste’ and ‘conserving literary tradition’ (SL 156f) (cf. 2.5, 24, 29; 4.40, 87; 8.26).5 The ‘logical or historical argument’ of such pedagogues is often ‘hollow’ or ‘psychologically shaky’, lacks ‘vitality’, or promotes ‘false’ ‘correctness’ (SL 156ff). Instead, we must ‘look to’ ‘the uncontrolled speech of the folk’ and examine ‘the general linguistic movement’ and ‘the actual drift of the English language’ (SL 156, 167). ‘The folk makes no apology’ and feels ‘no twinge of conscience’ about usage, yet ‘has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students’ do (SL 156, 161). So we should explore how a ‘system proceeds from the unconscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from the lips of the folk’ (SL 230).
3.5 However, caution is needed because ‘the man in the street does not stop to analyse his position in the general scheme of humanity’ and may confuse ‘racial, linguistic, and cultural’ ‘classifications’ or see ‘external history’ as ‘inherent necessity’ (SL 208). Even linguists may be ‘so accustomed to our own well-worn grooves of expression that they have come to be felt as inevitable’ (SL 89) (cf. 3.50; 4.4, 72; 5.11; 8.14). Hence, ‘a destructive analysis of the familiar is the only method of approach to an understanding of fundamentally different modes of expression’.
3.6 In Sapir's exuberant outlook, ‘the fundamental groundwork of language’ ‘meets us perfected and systematized in every language known to us’ (SL 22). Yet he is equally impressed by the ‘incredible diversity’ of ‘speech’. Indeed, ‘the total number of possible sounds is greatly in excess of those in use’ (SL 44). From among ‘the indefinitely large number of articulated sounds available’, each ‘language makes use of an explicit, rigidly economical selection’ (SL 46). In ‘grammatical notions’ too, ‘the theoretical possibilities’ ‘are indefinitely numerous’; ‘it depends entirely on the genius of the particular language what function is inherently involved in a given sequence of words’ (SL 63).
3.7 Exuberance and sobriety are again mixed in Sapir's characterization of language as a system. An exuberant conception (just cited) is ‘the genius of language’: the ‘type’ or ‘basic plan’, ‘much more fundamental, much more pervasive, than any single feature’ or any ‘fact’ of ‘grammar’ (SL 120) (cf. 3.32, 46, 51, 63, 68). This ‘genius’ is variously claimed to affect the ‘possibilities of combining phonetic elements’; the interdependence of ‘syllables’; the amount of ‘conceptual material’ ‘taken in’ by the individual ‘word’ (3.32); the ‘outward markings’ of ‘syntactic equivalents’ with ‘functionally equivalent affixes’; the ‘functions’ of ‘sequences of words’; the selection of ‘conventional interjections’; and even the ‘effects’ a ‘literary artist’ can draw from ‘the colour and texture’ of the language's ‘matrix’ (SL 54, 35, 32, 115, 63, 5, 222). Only in regard to ‘race’ does Sapir dismiss the notion of ‘genius’ as a ‘mystic slogan’ or a ‘sentimental creed’ (SL 208f, 212).
3.8 A sober conception, on the other hand, is the ‘economy’ of a language. This conception is applied to the ‘selection’ of ‘articulated sounds’; the ‘alternations between long and short syllables’; the availability of ‘rhyme’; and the relative importance of ‘word order’ versus ‘case suffixes’ (SL 46 229f, 64). The ‘economy’ also ‘irons out’ the ‘less frequently occurring associations’ between ‘radical elements, grammatical elements, words’, or ‘sentences’ on one side, and ‘concepts or groups of concepts’ on the other (SL 37f). This process limits the ‘randomness of association’ and thereby makes ‘grammar’ possible (cf. 2.29). Even the single sentence is said to have a ‘local economy’ of ‘its terms’ (SL 85).
3.9 If we ‘accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's psychic or “spiritual” constitution’, then ‘we cannot define it as an entity in psycho-physical terms alone’ (SL 10f). We should ‘discuss the intention, the form, and the history of speech’ ‘as an institutional or cultural entity’ and ‘take for granted’ ‘the organic and psychological mechanisms back of it’. Sapir is thus ‘not concerned with those aspects of physiology and physiological psychology that underlie speech’ (cf. 2.31). He alludes only in passing to ‘the vast network of associated localizations in the brain and lower nervous tracts’ (cf. 4.10, 14, 18f; 8.21, 23). ‘Language’ ‘cannot be definitely ‘localized’ in the brain’, ‘for it consists of a peculiar symbolic relation -- physiologically an arbitrary one -- between all possible elements of consciousness on the one hand, and certain selected elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and nervous tracts on the other’ (cf. 2.16, 31, 66; 7.31, 93, 743; 816).
3.10 Although Sapir vows he has ‘little to say about the ultimate psychological basis of speech’, he believes that ‘linguistic forms’ ‘have the greatest possible diagnostic value’ for ‘understanding’ ‘problems in the psychology of thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit’ (SL vf) (cf. 5.69; 6.2, 6; 7.10; 8.24; 12.17ff, 22, 62; 13.10).6 ‘Language and our thought grooves are inextricably interrelated, are in a sense, one and the same’ (SL 217f). ‘Linguistic morphology is nothing more or less than a collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrelevancies of individual sentiment’ (SL 218). Moreover, ‘all voluntary communication of ideas, aside from normal speech, is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from the typical symbolism of language as spoken and heard, or, at the least, involves the intermediary of truly linguistic symbolism’ (SL 21). ‘Even those who’ ‘think without the slightest use of sound imagery are at last analysis, dependent upon it’, ‘the auditory-motor associations’ being ‘unconsciously brought into play’ (SL 20). As proof, Sapir cites ‘the frequent experience of fatigue in the speech organs’ after ‘unusually’ ‘intensive thinking’ (SL 19).7 ‘Gesture languages’ too owe their ‘intelligibility’ to ‘their automatic and silent translation into the terms of a fuller flow of speech’ (SL 21).
3.11 Consequently, ‘the feeling entertained by so many that they can think, or even reason, without language is an illusion’ (SL 15). ‘Thought may be no more conceivable, in its genesis and daily practice, without speech than is mathematical reasoning practicable’ without a ‘mathematical symbolism’. An evolutionary connection is propounded: ‘that language is an instrument originally put to uses lower than the conceptual plane and that thought arises as a refined interpretation of its content’ (cf. 4.34; 8.6). ‘The product grows’ ‘with the instrument’, and ‘the growth of speech’ is ‘dependent on the development of thought’ (SL 15, 17). In view of ‘the unconscious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure’, ‘the most rarefied thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an unconscious linguistic symbolism’ (SL vi, 16). The idea that ‘people’ ‘are in the main unconscious’ of the ‘forms’ they ‘handle’, ‘regardless of their material advancement or backwardness of the people’ (SL 124) (cf. 3.61), is favoured by other theorists as well (cf. 13.49). Sapir also surmises that the ‘analysis’ of forms is ‘unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker’, implying that ‘students of language cannot be entirely normal in their attitude toward their own speech’ (SL 161, n) (cf. 13.1, 49).
3.12 However, ‘language and thought are not strictly coterminous’, and ‘the flow of language itself is not always indicative of thought’ (SL 14f). ‘At best language can but be the outward facet of thought on the highest, most generalized, level of symbolic expression’, rather than ‘the final label put upon the finished thought’ (cf. 7.25). Conversely, ‘from the point of view of language, thought may be defined as the highest latent or potential content of speech’, its ‘fullest conceptual value’. Or, ‘language, as a structure, is on its inner face the mould of thought’ (SL 22). Still, ‘the feeling of a free, non-linguistic stream of thought’ may be ‘justified’ in ‘cases’ wherein ‘the symbolic expression of thought’ ‘runs along outside the fringe of the conscious mind’. This view concurs with ‘modern psychology’, whose ‘recent’ literature’ ‘has shown us how powerfully symbolism is at work in the unconscious mind’ (SL 16, 126n). Perhaps ‘a more general psychology than Freud's will eventually prove’ ‘the mechanisms of “repression of impulse” and of its symptomatic symbolization’ ‘to be as applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts’ (SL 157n).8
3.13 A ‘speech sound’ attains ‘linguistic significance’ by being ‘associated with some element or group of elements of experience’; ‘this “element”‘ ‘is the content or meaning of the linguistic unit’ (SL 10). Hence, ‘the elements of language’ are ‘symbols that ticket off experience’ (SL 12). For that purpose, ‘the world of our experiences must be enormously simplified and generalized’ into ‘a symbolic inventory’. ‘The concreteness of experience is infinite, the resources of the richest language are strictly limited’ (SL 84). Besides, ‘the single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable’ (SL 12). So ‘we must arbitrarily throw whole masses of experience together as similar enough to warrant being looked upon -- mistakenly but conveniently -- as identical’, ‘in spite of great and obvious differences’ (SL 13). ‘It is almost as though at some period in the past the unconscious mind of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience’ and ‘saddled the inheritors of its language’ with a ‘premature classification that allowed of no revision’ (SL 100). ‘Linguistic categories make up a system of surviving dogma -- dogma of the unconscious’.
3.14 Sapir thus concludes that ‘the latent content of all languages’ is ‘the intuitive science of experience’ (SL 218) (cf. 3.23; 12.12f; 13.24). ‘The essence of language consists in assigning conventional, voluntarily articulated sounds’ ‘to diverse elements of experience’ (SL 11). The ‘“concept”‘ serves as ‘a convenient capsule of thought that embraces thousands of experiences’ (SL 13). ‘The single impression’ enters one's ‘generalized memory’, which is in turn ‘merged with the notions of all other individuals’. ‘The particular experience’ gets ‘widened so as to embrace all possible impressions or images that sentient beings may form or have formed’.
3.15 Despite his reverence for Freudian ideas and his emphasis on experience, Sapir shows scant concern for ‘volition and emotion’, albeit ‘they are, strictly speaking, never absent from normal speech’ (SL 39). ‘Ideation reigns supreme in language’; ‘volition and emotion come in as distinctly secondary factors’ (SL 38) (cf. 9.15). ‘Their expression is not of a truly linguistic nature’. To support this outlook, Sapir judges the ‘expression’ of ‘impulse and feeling’ to be ‘but modified forms of the instinctive utterance that man shares with the lower animals’ rather than ‘part of the essential cultural conception of language’ (cf. 3.1). Though ‘most words’ ‘have an associated feeling-tone’ derived from ‘pleasure or pain’, this tone is not ‘an inherent value in the word itself’, but ‘a sentimental growth on the word's true body, on its conceptual kernel’ (SL 39f). ‘Speech demands conceptual selection’ and the ‘inhibition of the randomness of instinctive behaviour’ (SL 46n) (cf. 3.9). Besides, ‘the feeling-tone’ ‘varies from individual to individual’ and ‘from time to time’ (SL 40). So ‘desire, purpose, emotion are the personal colour of the objective world’, and constitute ‘non-linguistic facts’ (SL 39, 46n).
3.16 Even in its more rarefied domains, Sapir finds language far from ideal. He notes a ‘powerful tendency for a formal elaboration that does not correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences’ (SL 98) (cf. 2.49).9 Instead, we run up against ‘form for form's sake’, and a ‘curious lack of accord between function and form’ (SL 98, 100, 89) (cf. 3.22, 24, 33; 4.47, 49; 7.63; 8.58; 9.19; 12.25, 27; 13.54). ‘Irrational form’ ‘is as natural to the life of language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning they once had’ (SL 98). ‘Phonetic processes’ favour ‘non-significant differences in form’; and ‘grammatical concepts’ tend to ‘degenerate into purely formal counters’ (SL 100; cf. SL 61).
3.17 Again like Saussure (cf. 2.68ff), Sapir declares that ‘the mere phonetic framework of speech does not constitute the inner fact of language, and that the single sound of articulated speech is not’ ‘a linguistic element at all’ (SL 42; cf. 2.68; 4.29; 6.7). ‘The mere sounds of speech are not the essential fact of language’ (SL 22). ‘Language is not identical with its auditory symbolism’, though it is a ‘primarily auditory system of symbols’ (SL 16f). ‘Communication’ ‘is successful only when the hearer's auditory perceptions are translated into the appropriate and intended flow of imagery or thought’ (SL 18).
3.18 Nevertheless, ‘the cycle of speech’ as ‘a purely external instrument begins and ends in sounds’ (SL 18) (cf. 2.17, 67; 13.27). ‘Speech is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their articulation that we can hardly avoid’ ‘the subject of phonetics’ (SL 42) (cf. 2.70f; 3.14, 21; 4.29; 5.42; 8.70; 13.26). ‘Neither the purely formal aspects of a language nor the course of its history can be fully understood without reference’ to its ‘sounds’. At one point, Sapir asserts that ‘auditory’ and ‘motor imagery’ are ‘the historic fountain-head of all speech and of all thinking’ (SL 21) (cf. 3.10, 37; 8.6).
3.19 In regard to sound systems, ‘the feeling’ of ‘the average speaker’ is not reliable, but ‘largely illusory’, namely that a ‘language’ ‘is built up’ ‘of a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each of which is rather accurately provided for in the current alphabet by one letter’ (SL 42f) (cf. 2.22f; 4.38; 6.50; 7.46, 66; 8.11, 53, 75f; 13.26). ‘Phonetic analysis convinces one that the number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances of sounds that are habitually employed by speakers of a language is far greater than they themselves realize’ (cf. 4.29).
3.20 We should rather assume that ‘every language’ ‘is characterized’ ‘by its ideal system of sounds and by the underlying phonetic pattern’ (SL 56).10 ‘The actual rumble of speech’ must therefore be traced to an ‘ideal flow of phonetic elements’ (cf. 2.68; 4.30; 5.42f; 13.26). ‘Back of the purely objective system of sounds’, each language has ‘a more restricted “inner” or “ideal” system’ that can ‘be brought to consciousness as a finished pattern, a psychological mechanism’ (SL 55).11 ‘The inner sound-system, overlaid though it may be with the mechanical or the irrelevant, is a real and immensely important principle in the life of a language’. ‘Unless their phonetic “values” are determined’, ‘the objective comparison of sounds’ has ‘no psychological or historical significance'
3.21 For ‘the organic classification of speech sounds’, Sapir offers four criteria: ‘the position of the glottal chords’; the passage of ‘breath’ through the ‘mouth’ or ‘nose’; ‘free’ or ‘impeded’ passage; and ‘the precise points of articulation’ (SL 52f). This scheme should be ‘sufficient to account for all, or practically all, the sounds of language’.12 For example, ‘each language selects a limited number of clearly defined positions as characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transitional or extreme positions’. Or, the language picks out its ‘voiced sounds’, which, being ‘the most clearly audible elements of speech’, ‘are carriers of practically all significant differences in stress, pitch, and syllabication’ (SL 49) (cf. 4.34). ‘The voiceless sounds’ serve to ‘break up the stream of voice with fleeting moments of silence’.
3.22 Besides the ‘system of sounds’, ‘a definite grammatical structure’ ‘characterizes’ ‘every language’ (SL 56). ‘“Grammatical” processes’ are ‘the formal methods employed by a language’ (SL 57) (cf. 13.54). ‘Grammar’ indicates that ‘all languages have an inherent economy of expression’, wherein ‘analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms’ (SL 38) (cf. 3.8). ‘Were language ever completely “grammatical”, it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak’ (cf. 13.59). Hence, we should expect to find a ‘relative independence’, or a ‘lack of accord’, ‘between function and form’ (SL 58f, 89; cf. SL 64, 69ff; 3.16).
3.23 For Sapir, ‘our conventional classification of words into “parts of speech is only a vague wavering approximation of a consistently worked-out inventory of experience’, ‘far from corresponding’ to a ‘simple’ ‘analysis of reality’ (SL 117) (cf. 2.30, 65; 3.13; 4.55; 5.72f; 9.27; 13.7, 24). ‘The “parts of speech”‘ ‘grade into each other’ or are ‘actually convertible into each other’ (SL 118) (cf. 13.54). Hence, they ‘reflect not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns’. ‘For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech -- their number, nature, and necessary confines -- is of the slightest interest to the linguist’ (SL 119) (13.7, 17).
3.24 Taken by itself, ‘every language’ does have ‘a definite feeling for patterning on the level of grammatical formation’ (SL 61). ‘All languages evince a curious instinct for the development of one or more grammatical processes at the expense of others, tending always to lose sight of any explicit functional value that the process may have had’ and ‘delighting, it would seem, in the sheer play of its means of expression’ (SL 60) (cf. 3.16). The ‘feeling for form as such, freely expanding along predetermined lines, and greatly inhibited in certain directions by the lack of controlling patterns, should be more clearly understood than it seems to be’ (SL 61). Meanwhile, a strong later trend in American linguistics was foreshadowed by Sapir's recommendation that ‘linguistic form may and should be studied as types of patterning, apart from the associated functions’ (SL 60) (cf. 4.49; 7.63; 13.54). This counsel is ominous if ‘a linguistic phenomenon cannot be looked upon as illustrating a definite “process” unless it has an inherent functional value’ (SL 62).
3.25 ‘The various grammatical processes that linguistic research has established’ ‘may be grouped into six main types: word order, composition, affixation’, ‘internal modification’, ‘reduplication, and accentual differences’ (SL 61).13 Of these, word order is ‘the most economical method of conveying some sort of grammatical notion’ -- ‘juxtaposing two or more words in a definite sequence’ (SL 62). ‘It is psychologically impossible to see or hear two words juxtaposed without straining to give them some measure of coherent significance’. When ‘two simple’ words, or even mere ‘radicals’ (roots), ‘are put before the human mind in immediate sequence it strives to bind them together with connecting values’.
3.26 ‘Composition’ is ‘the uniting into a single word of two or more radical elements’ (SL 64) (compare Saussure's ‘agglutination’, 2.64). ‘Psychologically, this process is closely allied to word order in so far as the relation between the elements is implied, not explicitly stated’. But ‘it differs’ ‘in that the compounded elements are felt as constituting but parts of a single word-organism’. ‘However, then, in its ultimate origins the process of composition may go back to typical sequences of words in the sentence, it is now, for the most part, a specialized method of expressing relations’ (SL 65) (cf. 13.54).
3.27 ‘Affixation is incomparably the most frequently employed’ ‘of all grammatical processes’ (SL 67) (cf. 2.62). A well-developed system of affixes may allow a language to be somewhat ‘indifferent’ about ‘word order’ by compensating with ‘differences’ that are ‘rhetorical or stylistic’ rather than ‘strictly grammatical’ (SL 63) (cf. 7.55). ‘Of the three types of affixing -- the use of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes -- suffixing is much the commonest’ and may indeed ‘do more of the formative work of language than all other methods combined’. In some languages (e.g. Nootka of Vancouver Island), ‘suffixed elements’ ‘may have as concrete a significance as the radical element itself’ (SL 66; cf. SL 71n). In others (e.g. Latin and Russian), ‘the suffixes alone relate the word to the rest of the sentence’ by demarcating ‘the less concrete, more strictly formal, notions of time,14 person, plurality, and passivity’, while ‘the prefixes’ are ‘confined to the expression of such ideas as delimit the concrete significance of the radical element’ (SL 68). Still, ‘in probably the majority of languages that use both types of affixes, each group has both delimiting and formal or relational functions’ (SL 69).
3.28 ‘Internal modification’ entails ‘vocalic or consonantal change’, and is ‘a subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammatical process’ (SL 61, 73). ‘In some languages, as in English’, it ‘indicates fundamental changes of grammatical function’. ‘Consonantal change’ ‘is probably far less common than vocalic’, but ‘not exactly rare’, appearing prominently in ‘Celtic languages’ for instance (SL 74f).
3.29 ‘Reduplication’ is a ‘natural’ operation, namely ‘the repetition of all or part of the radical element’ (SL 76). ‘This process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance’. ‘The most characteristic examples’ ‘repeat only part of radical element’, mainly to signal ‘repetition or continuance’ of an action (SL 77f).
3.30 ‘Variations in accent, whether of stress or of pitch’, are ‘the subtlest of all grammatical processes’ (SL 78f). ‘Accent as a functional process’ is hard to ‘isolate’, being ‘often combined with ‘alternations in vocalic quantity or quality or complicated by the presence of affixed elements’. Even so, ‘pitch accent’ in particular ‘is far less infrequently employed as a grammatical process than our own habits of speech would prepare us to believe’ (SL 81).
3.31 Once more like Saussure, Sapir is cautious about the status of the word (cf. 2.18; 4.54, 60; 5.53; 6.23; 8.54; 12.69, 71, 77; 13.29). He remarks that the word is ‘roughly’ ‘the “element of speech”‘, or ‘the first speech element that we have found which we can say actually “exists”‘ (SL 24, 27). ‘Linguistic experience’ ‘indicates overwhelmingly’ ‘that there is not, as a rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to consciousness as a psychological reality’ (SL 33) (cf. 13.57). ‘The psychological validity of the word’ is strikingly revealed when ‘the naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the written word’, still ‘dictates a text to a linguistic student word by word’ (SL 33f). Yet ‘the psychological existence’ of the word is not based on its outward shape, e.g., on its ‘phonetic characteristics’, such as ‘accent’ or ‘cadence’; these ‘at best strengthen a feeling of unity that is already present on other grounds’ (SL 35). Above all, ‘the word’ ‘cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning’.
3.32 Sapir predictably favours a mentalistic account, though not in terms of one-to-one correspondences between word and meaning (cf. 5.48, 64; 6.27; 9.39; 13.54). It is ‘impossible’ to ‘define the word as the symbolic, linguistic counterpart of a single concept’ (SL 32). ‘Words, significant parts of words, or word groupings’ can all be ‘the outward sign of a specific idea’ (SL 25). Conversely, ‘the single word expresses either a simple concept or a combination of concepts so interrelated as to form a psychological unity’ (SL 82). Hence, ‘the word may be anything from the expression of a single concept -- concrete or abstract or purely relational -- to the expression of a complete thought’ (SL 32). ‘The word is merely a form, a definitely moulded entity that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual material of the whole thought as the genius of the language allows’ (cf. 3.7; 12.63). Therefore, ‘the single word may or may not be the simplest significant element of speech we have to deal with’ (SL 25).15 ‘The mind must rest on something; if it cannot linger on the constituent elements, it hastens all the more eagerly to the acceptance of the word as a whole’ (SL 132; cf. CG 177) (cf. 13.32).
3.33 We might proceed not up from smaller units but down from larger units by stipulating that ‘the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated “meaning” into which the sentence resolves itself’ (SL 34) (cf. 13.26). ‘Radical (or grammatical) elements and sentences’ ‘are the primary functional units of speech, the former as an abstracted minimum, the latter as an esthetically satisfying embodiment of a unified thought’ (SL 32). ‘The words’, in contrast, are ‘the actual formal units of speech’ and ‘may on occasion identify themselves with either of the two functional units; more often they mediate between the two extremes’. ‘The importance’ of ‘methods of binding words into a larger unity’ ‘is apt to vary with the complexity of the individual word’ (SL 109).
3.34 A parallel between word and sentence is drawn to describe ‘complex words’, i.e., ‘firmly solidified groups of elements’ (SL 111). The ‘elements’ ‘are related to each other in a specific way and follow each other in a rigorously determined sequence’ (SL 110). ‘A word which consists of more than a radical element is a crystallization of a sentence or some portion of a sentence’ (SL 111) (cf. 2.55; 3.26; 4.61; 5.41; 8.56; 11.40, 79f; 12.71, 75, 77, 93; 13.54). ‘Speech is thus constantly tightening and loosening its sequences’ (SL 112). ‘Complex words’ illustrate this process: ‘while they are fully alive’ and ‘functional at every point, they can keep themselves at a psychological distance from their neighbours; as they gradually lose much of their life, they fall back into the embrace of the sentence as a whole and the sequence of independent words regains the importance it had in part transferred to the crystallized groups of elements’ (SL 111f).
3.35 ‘Breaking down, then, the wall that separates word and sentence, we may ask’: what ‘are the fundamental methods’ of ‘passing from the isolated notions symbolized by each word’ or ‘element to the unified proposition that corresponds to a thought?’ (SL 110). The answer is a ‘venturesome and yet not altogether unreasonable speculation that sees in word order and stress the primary methods for the expression of all syntactic relations and looks upon the present relational value of specific words and elements as but a secondary condition’ (SL 113). ‘At some point’, ‘order asserts itself in every language as the most fundamental of relating principles’ (SL 116) (cf. 3.25; 7.3, 55; 11.64, 86).
3.36 Along these lines, pursuing the status of the word leads to the status of the sentence. Sapir cheerfully says the ‘definition’ of the ‘sentence’ ‘is not difficult’, since it is ‘the major functional unit of speech’ (SL 35; cf. SL 66). Also, ‘it is the linguistic expression of a proposition
(SL 35) (cf. 3.44f; 8.55; 9.72, 924; 11.39-50). Just as a ‘sentence’ ‘combines a subject of discourse with a statement in regard to this subject’, a ‘proposition’ involves ‘a subject of discourse’ plus ‘something’ ‘said about it’ (SL 35, 119). ‘The sentence does not lose its feeling of unity so long as each and every one’ of its ‘elements’ ‘falls into place as contributory to the definition of either the subject of discourse or the core of the predicate’ (SL 36). Still, ‘the vast majority of languages’ ‘create some formal barrier between these two terms of the proposition’ (SL 119). ‘The most common subject of discourse’ ‘is a noun’ and may be either ‘subject’ or ‘object’ in the traditional ‘technical sense’ (SL 119, 87f, 82f, 94). The thing ‘predicated of a subject is generally an activity’ whose ‘form’ is a ‘verb’ (SL 119). ‘No language wholly fails to distinguish noun and verb’, whereas no ‘other parts of speech’ are ‘imperatively required for the life of language’.16
3.37 Like the word, ‘the sentence’ ‘has a psychological as well as a merely logical or abstracted existence’ (SL 35) (cf. 13.7). Sapir ventures to assert that ‘in all languages’, ‘the sentence is the outgrowth of historical and unreasoning psychological forces rather than of a logical synthesis of elements that have been clearly grasped in their individuality’ (SL 90). ‘The sentence is the logical counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt as made up of the radical and grammatical elements that lurk in the recesses of its words’ (SL 33).17 Such passages invoking the failure of language to be ‘logical’ (also SL 89, 91, 97, 102, 119, 135, 156) call to mind the longstanding dispute among linguists over the use of logic as a model (cf. 13.17)
3.38 Sapir is more in tune with future trends of linguistics when he surmises that ‘underlying the finished sentence is a living sentence type, of fixed formal characteristics’ (SL 37) (cf. 7.95). A type can be recognized when ‘we feel instinctively, without the slightest attempt at conscious analysis, that two sentences fit the same pattern, that they are really the same fundamental sentence’ (SL 85) (cf. 4.68f; 5.40, 58; 7.51, 90f; 12.77). ‘These fixed types or actual sentence-groundworks may be freely overlaid by such additional matter as the speaker or writer cares to put on, but they are themselves as rigidly “given” by tradition as are the radical and grammatical elements abstracted from the finished word’ (SL 37). ‘New sentences are being constantly created’ ‘in the same way’ as ‘new words may be consciously created from these fundamental elements’ (cf. 7.44; 13.54). ‘The enlarged sentence, however, allows as a rule of considerable freedom’ of ‘“unessential” parts’. ‘Such a sentence as “The mayor of New York is going to deliver a speech of welcome in French” is readily felt as a unified statement, incapable of reduction by the transfer of certain of its elements, in their given form, to the preceding or following sentences’ (SL 36). But some ‘contributory ideas’, such as ‘“of New York”‘ or ‘“of welcome”‘, ‘may be eliminated without hurting the idiomatic flow of the sentence’ (cf. 7.51).
3.39 Still, this ‘freedom’ has its limits. ‘Change any of the features of a sentence’ like ‘“The farmer kills the duckling”, and it becomes modified, slightly or seriously, in some purely relational, non-material regard’ (SL 85, 82). If the finite verb precedes both subject and object (“kills the farmer the duckling?”), we get ‘an unusual but not unintelligible mode’; but if articles are omitted (“farmer kills duckling”), ‘the sentence becomes impossible -- it falls into no recognized pattern and the two subjects of discourse seem to hang in the void’ (SL 87, 85). (As this judgment implies, ‘newspaper headlines’ ‘are language only in a derived sense’, SL 36n). Moreover, ‘co-ordinate sentences’ are disqualified on the opposite grounds of including too much: they ‘may only doubtfully be considered as truly unified predications’ (SL 36).
3.40 Alongside phonetic and grammatical structures, ‘conceptual structure’ also ‘shows the instinctive feeling of language for form’ (SL 56) (cf. 3.16). ‘The material of language reflects the world of concepts’, and ‘the essential fact of language’ lies ‘in the classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relating of concepts’ (SL 38, 22). Moreover, ‘the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as a record of the setting’ of ‘concepts into mutual relations’ (SL 13). At least, ‘the unconscious analysis into individual concepts’ ‘is never entirely absent from speech, however it may be complicated and overlaid with irrational factors’ (SL 90). Reciprocally, a ‘concept does not attain to individual and independent life until it has found a distinctive linguistic embodiment’ (SL 17). ‘As soon as the word is at hand’, we feel ‘that the concept is ours for the handling’.
3.41 Sapir proposes to look into ‘the nature of the world of concepts’ as ‘reflected and systematized in linguistic structure’ (SL 82). He raises the prospect of ‘reviewing the purely formal processes used by all known languages to affect fundamental concepts -- those embodied in unanalysable words or in the radical elements of words -- by the modifying or formative influence of subsidiary concepts’. He tells ‘the general reader’ that ‘language struggles toward two poles of linguistic expression -- material content and relation -- and that these poles are connected by a long series of transitional concepts’ (SL 109). ‘Particularly’ ‘in exotic languages’, we are not able ‘to tell infallibly what is “material content” and what is “relation”‘ (SL 102).
3.42 ‘What then are the absolutely essential concepts in speech that must be expressed if language is to be a satisfactory means of communication?’ (SL 93). ‘We must have, first of all, a large stock of basic or radical concepts, the concrete wherewithal of speech’. ‘We must have objects, actions, qualities to talk about’, plus ‘their corresponding symbols in independent words or in radical elements’. Sapir's ‘tabular statement’ of ‘concepts’ is divided on one side into ‘concrete’, which subsumes ‘radical’ and ‘derivational’; and on the other side into ‘relational’, which subsumes ‘reference’, ‘modality’, ‘personal relations’ (i.e. subject and object), ‘number’, and ‘time’ (SL 88f). However, he warns that ‘in the actual work of analysis difficult problems frequently arise’ about ‘how to group a given set of concepts’ (SL 102) (cf. 13.59).
3.43 Besides, ‘it would be impossible for any language to express every concrete idea by an independent word or radical element’ (SL 84). Instead, it must ‘throw countless concepts under the rubric of certain basic ones’, using other ‘ideas as functional mediators’ (cf. 9.62-69). The latter ‘ideas’ ‘may be called’ ‘derivational’ or ‘qualifying’ and may be ‘expressed’ by ‘independent words, affixes, or modifications of the radical elements’ (cf. 3.27f). ‘Radical’ and ‘derivational’ are thus ‘two modes of expression’ as well as ‘two types of concepts and of linguistic elements’.
3.44 ‘In origin’, however, ‘all of the actual content of speech’ is ‘limited to the concrete; relations were originally not expressed in outward form but were merely implied and articulated with the help of order and rhythm’ (SL 114) (cf. 3.35). ‘No known language’ ‘succeeds in saying something without the use of symbols for concrete concepts’ (SL 94). And ‘no proposition, however abstract in its intent, is humanly possible without tying on’ ‘to the concrete world of sense’ (SL 93). Accordingly, ‘such relational concepts must be expressed as moor the concrete concepts to each other and construct a definite, fundamental form of proposition’ allowing ‘no doubt as to the nature of the relations’. ‘Most languages’ ‘throw a bold bridge between’ ‘the concrete and the abstractly relational’ (SL 95).
3.45 Sapir thus ‘revises our first classification’ (summarized in 3.43) and suggests another ‘scheme’ for the ‘classification of concepts as expressed in language’, proceeding through ‘a gradual loss of the concrete’ (SL 100, 103). He enumerates: ‘I. Basic Concrete Concepts’; ‘II. Derivational Concepts’, ‘less concrete’; ‘III. Concrete Relational Concepts, still more abstract’; and ‘IV. Pure Relational Concepts, purely abstract’ (SL 101). Concepts in class I ‘involve no relation’ except what is ‘implied in defining one concept against another’; concepts in II ‘concern only the radical element, not the sentence’; concepts in III ‘transcend the particular word’; and concepts in IV give ‘the proposition’ ‘definite syntactic form’. Class I is ‘normally expressed by independent words or radical elements’, and the other classes by ‘affixing non-radical elements to radical elements’. Sapir conjectures that ‘concepts of class I’ and ‘IV’ ‘are ‘essential to all speech’, whereas ‘II and III are both common, but not essential’ (SL 102).
3.46 Though he considers his classes ‘logically’ ‘distinct’, he concedes that ‘the illogical, metaphorical genius of language’ has ‘set up a continuous gamut of concepts and forms that leads imperceptibly from the crudest of materialities’ ‘to the most subtle of relations’ (SL 102) (cf. 3.37). The gamut runs parallel to ‘a constant fading away of the feeling of sensible reality’ (SL 103). In addition, ‘impulses to definite form operate’ ‘regardless of the need’ for ‘giving consistent external shape to particular groups of concepts’ (SL 61).
3.47 His scheme of concepts animates Sapir to propose an ambitious ‘conceptual classification of languages’ reflecting ‘the translation of concepts into linguistic symbols’ (SL 138). It would be ideal to have ‘a simple, incisive, and absolutely inclusive method of classifying all known languages’ (SL 136). But ‘classifications’, those ‘neat constructions of the speculative mind, are slippery things’ and ‘have to be tested at every possible opportunity’ (SL 144). ‘Various classifications have been suggested’ before, and ‘none proves satisfactory’ (SL 122) (4.62, 72). ‘It is dangerous to generalize from a small number of selected languages’. Nor is the problem cured merely by throwing in ‘a sprinkling of exotic types’ to ‘supplement the few languages nearer home that we are more immediately interested in’.
3.48 Since ‘languages’ ‘are exceedingly complex historical structures’, we should not ‘pigeonhole’ ‘each language’, but ‘evolve a flexible method’ to ‘place it, from two or three independent standpoints, relatively to another language’ (SL 140). ‘We are too ill-informed as yet of the structural spirit of great numbers of languages to have the right to frame a classification that is other than flexible and experimental’. ‘Like any human institution, speech is too variable, too elusive to be quite safely ticketed’ (SL 121).
3.49 However, we must not rush to the other extreme and take the ‘difficulty of classification’ as a ‘proof’ of its ‘uselessness’ (SL 121). ‘It would be too easy to relieve ourselves of the burden of constructive thinking’ by asserting that ‘each language has its unique history, therefore its unique structure’. We should rather proceed with caution, striving to resist the ‘craving for a simple formula’ -- e.g., ‘a triune formula’ with ‘two poles’ and ‘a “transitional type”‘ (SL 122f) (cf. 3.2).
3.50 Above all, linguists must beware of holding the ‘grooves of expression’ of their native language to be ‘inevitable’ (SL 89) (cf. 3.5; 13.42). ‘The classification of language’ remains ‘fruitless’ as long as one assumes that ‘familiar languages’ like ‘Latin and Greek’ ‘represent the “highest development”‘, and that ‘all other types were but steps on the way to this beloved “inflective” type’ (SL 123) (cf. 3.53). Only ‘when one has learned to feel what is fortuitous or illogical or unbalanced in the structure of one's own language’ can one attain ‘a sympathetic grasp of the expression of the various classes of concepts in alien types of speech’ (SL 89). ‘Not everything that is “outlandish” is intrinsically illogical and farfetched. It is often precisely the familiar that a wider perspective reveals as the curiously exceptional’. ‘If, therefore, we wish to understand language in its true inwardness we must disabuse our minds of preferred “values” and accustom ourselves to look upon English and Hottentot with the same cool, yet interested detachment’ (SL 124). ‘Any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific’.18
3.51 Outward appearances may be deceiving. ‘The fact that two languages are similarly classified does not necessarily mean that they present a great similarity on the surface’ (SL 141). ‘We are here concerned with the most fundamental and generalized features of the spirit, the technique, and the elaboration of a given language’. Anyone who has felt ‘the spirit of a foreign language’ may suspect there must be a ‘structural “genius”‘, ‘a basic plan, a certain cut to each language’ (SL 120) (cf. 3.7). The ‘fundamental form intuitions’ of ‘diverse languages’ may ‘some day’ be established well enough to reveal ‘the great underlying ground plans’ (SL 144). For the present, Sapir offers ‘only a few schematic indications’; ‘a separate volume would be needed to breathe life into the scheme’ and disclose a full ‘formal economy of strikingly divergent types’ (SL 146n).
3.52 Sapir's scheme again has four classes of languages, related in diverse ways to his four classes of concepts summarized in 3.45. Two criteria are decisive: (1) whether the language ‘keeps the syntactic relations pure’ or ‘expresses’ them in forms ‘mixed’ with ‘concrete significance’; and (2) whether the language ‘possesses the power to modify the significance of radical elements by means of affixes or internal changes’ (SL 137f). We thus get: A. ‘simple pure-relational languages’ (‘pure’ ‘relations’, no ‘modifying’); B. ‘complex pure-relational languages’ (‘pure’ ‘relations’, ‘modifying’); C. ‘simple mixed-relational languages’ (‘mixed’ ‘relations’, no ‘modifying’); and D. ‘complex mixed-relational languages’ (‘mixed relations’, ‘modifying’).
3.53 Since this classification is still ‘too sweeping and broad’, a further ‘subdivision’ is added (SL 138).19 ‘Agglutinative’ languages apply a ‘juxtaposing technique’; ‘fusional’ languages apply a ‘fusing technique’; ‘symbolic’ languages use ‘internal changes (reduplication; vocalic and consonantal change; changes in quantity, stress and pitch)’; and ‘isolating’ languages use no ‘affixes or modifications of the radical element’ (SL 130, 126, 139) (cf. 4.62f). Though the ‘fusing technique’ is typical of ‘inflective’ languages, many are ‘quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of Latin and Greek’ (SL 130f). Moreover, a threefold subdivision is proposed between ‘analytic’, which ‘does not combine concepts into single words at all’ (e.g. Chinese) ‘or does so economically’ (e.g. English); ‘synthetic’, wherein ‘concepts cluster more thickly’ and ‘words are more richly chambered’ but within ‘a moderate compass’ (e.g. Latin); and ‘polysynthetic’, wherein ‘the elaboration of the word is extreme’ (e.g. Algonkin) (SL 129, 143). Sapir thus proffers a table of types wherein his original four groupings according to the two pairs ‘simple/complex’ and ‘pure/mixed-relational’ are broken down into classes, some rather elaborate: ‘agglutinative-fusional-analytic’ (e.g. Modern Tibetan), ‘symbolic-fusional-synthetic’ (e.g. Semitic), ‘fusional-agglutinative-polysynthetic’ (e.g. Chinook), and so on -- twenty-one varieties in all (SL 142f).
3.54 This scheme is further complicated by the fact that ‘languages are in a constant process of change’, and their ‘technical features’ show ‘little relative permanence’ (SL 144f; cf. SL 171). ‘The feeling’ that ‘our language is practically a fixed system’ is ‘fallacious’ (SL 155). So ‘there is no reason why a language should remain permanently true to its original form’ (SL 144f). In ‘the course of their development we frequently encounter a gradual change of morphological type’ as well as ‘changes’ of ‘grammatical classes’ and word ‘significances’ (SL 144, 141). But ‘languages’ ‘tend to preserve longest what is most fundamental in their structure’ (SL 144). ‘The degree of synthesis’ ‘seems to change most readily’, ‘the technique’ ‘far less readily’, and ‘conceptual type’ ‘persists the longest of all’ (SL 145). ‘Highly synthetic languages (Latin; Sanskrit) have frequently broken down into analytic forms (French; Bengali)’; ‘agglutinative languages (Finnish)’ have ‘taken on inflective features’; and so on.
3.55 The causes of such changes are obscure (cf. 2.41f, 76). Sapir invokes ‘some deep controlling impulse that dominates’ the ‘drift’ of ‘languages’ and ‘linguistic features’ (SL 122, 141, 144; cf. SL 150f, 161f, 167f, 172, 180f, 186, 200ff, 206, 218). ‘A language changes not only gradually, but consistently’, and ‘moves unconsciously from one type toward another’ (SL 121). Without ‘gainsaying the individuality of all historical process’, Sapir ‘affirms that back of the face of the history are powerful drifts that move language, like other social products, to balanced patterns’, ‘to types’ (SL 122). Yet ‘why similar types should be formed, just what is the nature of the forces that make them and dissolve them -- these questions are more easily asked than answered’. At present, we are ‘very far from able to define’ such ‘fundamental form intuitions’, and can only ‘note their symptoms’ (SL 144). ‘Perhaps psychologists of the future will be able to give us the ultimate reasons’ (SL 122) (cf. 3.12; 13.10).
3.56 Meanwhile, we ‘must be careful not to be misled by structural features which are mere survivals of older stages, and which have no productive life and do not enter into the unconscious patterning of the language’ (SL 140fn). We should be alert to ‘the tendency for words that are psychologically disconnected from their etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws’ or of ‘morphological processes that have lost their vitality’ (SL 189). Also, ‘the foreigner, who approaches a new language with a prying inquisitiveness’, is ‘most apt to see life in vestigial features which the native’ ‘feels merely as dead form’ (SL 141n).
3.57 ‘The conception of “drift” in language’ points to the problem of relating ‘historical changes’ to ‘individual variations’ (SL 154). ‘What significant changes take place in language must exist, to begin with, as individual variations’ (SL 155) (cf. 2.45; 3.64; 4.81). A ‘new feature’ ‘may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of the few’ until it ‘becomes part and parcel of the common, accepted speech’. Due to this drift, ‘language has a “slope”‘: ‘the changes of the next few centuries are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present’. ‘Significant changes’ ‘begin’ ‘as individual variations’ that are ‘themselves random phenomena’ until they acquire a ‘special direction’ through an ‘unconscious selection on the part of the speakers’. This ‘direction may be inferred’ ‘from the past history of the language’. For the future, though, ‘our very uncertainty as to the impending details of change makes the eventual consistency of their direction all the more impressive’.
3.58 Language change is accordingly a major concern, since it introduces a leading parameter of diversity into language. Again like Saussure, Sapir likes to draw illustrations from ‘gradual phonetic change’, ranked as ‘probably the most central problem in linguistic history’ (SL 173; cf. CG 147; 2.76; 4.75). This domain supports the view that ‘the drift of language is not properly concerned with changes in content’, but ‘with changes in formal expression’ (SL 218) (cf. 12.66).
3.59 ‘“Phonetic laws” make up a large and fundamental share of the subject-matter of linguistics’ (SL 173) (but cf. 2.13, 38; 3.18; 12.26f). Such ‘laws’ may ‘participate’ in a ‘far-reaching’ ‘drift’: ‘not so much a movement toward a particular set of sounds as toward particular types of articulation’ (SL 181). ‘Phonetic changes’ are nonetheless ‘regular’; ‘exceptions are more apparent than real’, ‘generally due to the disturbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psychological reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic drift’ (SL 180). ‘Phonetic laws’ may be entirely ‘regular’ and ‘sweeping’, or may only ‘operate under certain definable limiting conditions’ (SL 178). These ‘laws do not work with spontaneous automatism’; ‘they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through the gamut’ of ‘analogous forms’.
3.60 We can also consider ‘the general morphological drift of the language’, as ‘symptomized’ by ‘analogical adjustments’ (SL 189). ‘The general drift seizes upon those individual sound variations that help to preserve the morphological balance or to lead to the new balance that the language is striving for’ (SL 186).20 To describe this interactive process, Sapir ‘suggests’ that ‘phonetic change is compacted of three basic strands’: (1) a ‘prevailingly dynamic’ ‘general drift in one direction’; ‘(2) a readjusting tendency to preserve or restore the fundamental phonetic pattern of the language; and (3) a preservative tendency which sets in when a too serious morphological unsettlement is threatened by the main drift’. Here, Sapir differs from the typical ‘linguist’ (including Saussure) who ‘knows that phonetic change is frequently followed by morphological rearrangements’ yet who ‘assumes that morphology exercises little or no influence on the course of phonetic history’ (SL 183; cf. 2.54). ‘A simple phonetic law’ may ‘colour or transform large reaches of the morphology of a language’ (SL 191). ‘If all phonetic changes’ ‘were allowed to stand’, ‘most languages’ might ‘present such irregularities of morphological contour as to lose touch with their formal ground-plan’ (SL 187). However, presumably because ‘phonetic pattern’ and ‘morphological type’ ‘hang together in a way we cannot at present quite understand’, American linguistics did not always concur that the ‘tendency to isolate phonetics and grammar as mutually irrelevant linguistic provinces is unfortunate’ (SL 187, 184) (cf. 5.35; 7.46).
3.61 ‘Analogy’ is a major force for ‘regularizing irregularities that come in the wake of phonetic processes’ (SL 189) (cf. 2.50-54). But it can also ‘introduce disturbances’; indeed, ‘analogical levelling’ accounts for many of the ‘remarkably’ ‘few exceptions’ ‘in linguistic history’ (SL 189, 180; cf. SL 184; 2.51). Still, the effects work ‘generally in favour of greater simplicity or regularity in a long established system of forms’ (SL 189). ‘A morphological feature that appears as the incidental consequence of a phonetic process may spread by analogy no less readily than old features that owe their existence to other than phonetic causes’.
3.62 As befits Sapir's mentalist orientation, he warns ‘linguistic students’ that ‘sound change’ is ‘a strictly psychological phenomenon’ (SL 183).21 He believes ‘the central unconscious regulator of the course and speed of sound changes’ lies in ‘the tendency to “correct” a disturbance by an elaborate chain of supplementary changes’ (SL 182). ‘The most important tendency in the history of speech sounds’ is this ‘shifting about without loss of pattern’, e.g., when ‘the unconscious Anglo-Saxon mind’ deployed ‘certain individual variations, until then automatically cancelled out’, as a means for ‘allowing the general phonetic drift to take its course without unsettling the morphological contours of the language’ (SL 182, 185f). Or, ‘phonetic changes’ may ‘be unconsciously encouraged in order to keep intact the psychological spaces between words and word forms’ (SL 186). Or, an ‘alternation’ produced by ‘an unconscious mechanical adjustment’ might ‘rise in consciousness’ and become ‘neatly distinct’ and ‘symbolic’ (SL 174f).
3.63 Changes due to languages being in contact are explained as an interaction between the ‘unconscious assimilation’ to native ‘habits’ and the ‘unconscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habits’ (SL 197, 200). Here too, ‘as long as the main phonetic concern is the preservation of its sound pattern’, a language may ‘unconsciously assimilate foreign sounds that have succeeded in worming their way into the gamut of individual variations, provided’ they ‘are in the direction of the native drift’ (SL 200). This account is plausible if we assume that each language indeed has ‘innate formal tendencies’ (SL 197), or its own ‘genius’ (3.7).
3.64 Diversity also appears at any single point in time. One parameter obtains among the individual users of a language. ‘Two individuals of the same generation and locality, speaking precisely the same dialect and moving in the same social circles, are never absolutely at one in their speech habits’ (SL 147). ‘A minute investigation of the speech of each individual would reveal countless differences of detail -- in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency’ of ‘particular forms or combinations of words’, and ‘in all those features, such as speed, stress, and tone, that give life to spoken language’. But such ‘individual variations are swamped in or absorbed by certain major agreements -- say of pronunciation and vocabulary -- which stand out very strongly when the language as a whole is contrasted’ with another (SL 147f). Sapir concludes that ‘something like an ideal linguistic entity dominates the speech habits of members of each group, and that the sense of unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a tacitly directing norm’. ‘The individual's variations’ ‘are silently “corrected” or cancelled by the consensus of usage’. ‘All speakers’ are subsumed in ‘a very finely intergrading series clustered about a well-defined centre or norm’.
3.65 A second, and more problematic, parameter of diversity obtains among the dialects of a language. ‘The explanation of primary dialectic differences is still to seek’ (SL 149). ‘Distinct localities’ or ‘social strata’ need not ‘naturally’ produce ‘dialects’ (SL 149f) (cf. CG 193, 210). If, as Sapir just contended, ‘individual variations are being constantly levelled to the dialectic norm, why should we have dialectic variations at all?’ The answer is strikingly like Saussure's: ‘language is not merely spread out in space’, but ‘moves down time in a current of its own making’ (cf. 2.43). While ‘each language’ ‘constantly moves away from any assignable norm, developing new features and transforming itself’, ‘local groups’ ‘drift independently’ (SL 150f). ‘No sooner are the old dialects ironed out’ ‘when a new crop of dialects arises to undo the levelling’. Sometimes, ‘dialects develop into mutually unintelligible languages’, and ‘none but a linguistic student’ ‘would infer’ ‘a remote and common starting point’ (SL 152f).22 This inclination to explain language variety as the product of language change probably reflects Sapir's view that change is more tractable for study, a view Saussure both espoused and denied (2.42f).
3.66 From deliberations like these, Sapir concludes (here too like Saussure, CG 204) that ultimately, ‘the terms dialect, language, branch, stock’ ‘are purely relative terms’ (SL 153; cf. SL 204; cf. 2.43; 4.74, 83; 13.59). ‘A “linguistic stock”‘ may be revealed by ‘our researches’ as ‘but a “dialect” of a larger group’ (SL 153). ‘All languages that are known to be genetically related’ are judged to be ‘divergent forms of a single prototype’. Indeed, Sapir's claim that ‘language developed but once in the history of the language race’ (SL 154) suggests that all languages developed from just one. The degree of development may produce a ‘primitive’ or a ‘sophisticated language’, a ‘lowly’ or a ‘cultivated’ speaker (SL 8, 22). Yet though ‘the more abstract concepts are not nearly so plentifully represented in the language of the savage, nor is there the rich terminology and the finer definition of nuances’, ‘popular statements as to the poverty of expression to which primitive language are doomed are simply myths’ (SL 22). ‘Many “savage” languages’ evince ‘formal richness’ and ‘complexities’ that ‘eclipse anything known to the languages of modern civilization’ (SL 124n, 22). ‘When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam’ (SL 219).
3.67 The features Sapir considers ‘all but universal’ (SL 65, 76) might be signs of this common origin. Elsewhere, however, he suggests that ‘broadly similar morphologies must have been reached by unrelated languages, independently and frequently’ (SL 122, 204). Or, ‘parallels in unrelated languages’ may be caused by ‘borrowing’, although ‘fundamental features of structure’ are more probably ‘vestiges’ of relatedness (SL 198, 205). He decides that the question of ‘the single or multiple origin of speech’ is not pressing, since ‘such a theory constructed on “general principles” is of no real interest’ ‘to linguistic science’ (SL 154) -- just the contrary view to that held by Saussure, Pike, Hjelmslev, Chomsky, and Hartmann (2.8, 10f; 5.44; 6.10f; 7.19; 12.7, 37; 13.48, 62). ‘What lies beyond the demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer’ (cf. 13.16).
3.68 The final parameter of diversity treated by Sapir is a stylistic one. His book closes unconventionally with a disquisition on ‘language and literature’ -- an interest shared by Pike, Firth, Halliday, van Dijk, and Hartmann, but not by Saussure, Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, or Chomsky (cf. 2.24; 4.40f; 5.56; 6.4; 8.83, 89; 9.104, 111; 11.47f, 57f; 12.99). This move befits his fondness for calling ‘language’ itself an ‘art’, e.g., ‘a collective art of expression’ (SL 220, 225, 231) (cf. 3.1, 3, 10).23 ‘Concealed’ in each one are ‘aesthetic factors -- phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological -- which it does not completely share with any other language’ (SL 225; cf. SL 222). If the ‘effects’ due to ‘the formal “genius”‘ of a ‘language’ or to ‘the colour and texture of its matrix’ ‘cannot be carried over without loss or modification’, we might imagine ‘a work of literary art can never be translated’ (SL 222). Yet ‘a truly deep symbolism’ ‘does not depend on the verbal associations of a particular language’, but ‘on an intuitive basis that underlies all linguistic intuition’ (SL 224).
3.69 ‘In so far as style is a technical matter of the building and placing of words’, however, ‘the major characteristics of style’ are ‘inescapably’ ‘given by the language itself’ (SL 226). ‘These necessary fundamentals of style’ ‘point the way to those stylistic developments that most suit the natural bent of the language’ -- its ‘phonetic groundwork’, its ‘morphological peculiarities’, and so on. ‘An artist must utilize the native aesthetic resources of his speech’ (SL 225). For instance, ‘the poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylized application of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of his people’: ‘the daily economy’ or the ‘unconscious dynamic habit of the language’ (SL 161, 228ff). The question is then what the artist, ‘deserving no special credit for felicities that are the language's own’ (SL 225), can contribute.
3.70 Sapir defines ‘literature’ as an ‘expression’ of ‘unusual significance’, but ‘does not exactly know’ how to measure this (SL 221, n). ‘Art is so personal an expression that we do not like to feel that it is bound to predetermined form of any sort’. ‘The possibilities of individual expression are infinite’ (cf. 3.3, 13; 13.43). ‘Yet some limitation there must be to this freedom, some resistance of the medium’. ‘In great art’, despite ‘the illusion of absolute freedom’, ‘the artist has intuitively surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material’ and yet made the ‘fullest utilization’ of it. ‘The material “disappears” precisely because there is nothing in the artist's conception to indicate that any other material exists’ (SL 221f).24 ‘No sooner, however, does the artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a medium to obey’.
3.71 ‘Literature’ has ‘two distinct kinds or levels of art’: ‘a generalized, non-linguistic art’, and ‘a specifically linguistic art’ (SL 222f). ‘The medium’ ‘intertwines’ ‘the latent content of language -- our intuitive record of experience’ -- with ‘the particular conformation of a given language -- the specific “how” of our record of experience’. ‘Artists whose spirit moves largely’ ‘in the generalized linguistic layer’ have ‘difficulty in getting themselves expressed in the rigidly set terms of their accepted idiom’ (SL 224). Their ‘expression is frequently strained’, with more ‘greatness of their spirit than felicity of art’ (e.g. Whitman and Browning), or with a ‘technically “literary” art’ ‘too fragile for endurance’ (e.g. Swinburne) (SL 225) (cf. 8.52, 84, 839, 843). ‘The greatest -- or shall we say the most satisfying -- literary artists’ ‘subconsciously fit or trim the deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech’ (SL 225) (e.g. Shakespeare).25 ‘Their personal “intuition” appears as a completed synthesis of the absolute art of intuition and the innate, specialized art of the linguistic medium’.
3.72 Sapir ‘clarifies’ his ‘distinction’ by ‘comparing literature with science’. ‘A scientific truth is impersonal, untinctured by the particular linguistic medium in which it finds expression’ (cf. 4.22). ‘The proper medium of scientific expression is therefore a generalized language that may be defined as a symbolic algebra of which all known languages are translations’ (SL 223f; cf. 2.82). ‘One can adequately translate scientific’ texts ‘because the original scientific expression is itself a translation’. This quality matches the impression of ‘art’ that seems to be ‘unconsciously striving for a generalized art language, a literary algebra that is related to the sum of all known languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is related to all the reports of mathematical relations that normal speech is capable of conveying’.
3.73 If this comparison holds, Sapir might be expected to propose algebra as the general representation for language in linguistics, as Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Chomsky do (2.82; 6.8, 29, 51, 60; 7.41, 718; 13.15). He does ‘understand why the mathematician and the symbolic logician are driven to discard the word’ in favour of ‘symbols which have, each of them, a rigidly unitary value’ (SL 33) (cf. 3.31). Also, he puts some examples into ‘formulas’ for ‘those who are mathematically inclined’, and draws ‘mathematical’ analogies for relations between ‘thought’ and ‘speech’, or between ‘spoken’ and ‘written language’ (SL 132n, 25-32, 57, 15, 20; cf. 5.40, 51f, 62; 7.48).26 But he goes no further, presumably because he situates language closer to ‘art’ and ‘experience’ than to ‘logical’ ‘symbols’ (SL 33), whence his mistrust of ‘the technical symbols of the linguistic academy’ and of the ‘craving’ for ‘formulas’ (cf. 3.2, 50). Even the ‘sentence’ is described as an ‘aesthetically satisfying’ ‘unit’, and the word as ‘a miniature bit of art’ (SL 32, 35). ‘Abstract form’ is compared to ‘the logical and aesthetic ordering of experience’; and a ‘form pattern which is not filled out’ is deemed ‘unaesthetic’ (SL 157n, 158).
3.74 In our retrospect shaped by decades of academic sobriety in linguistics, Sapir's exuberance is highly conspicuous. The range and diversity of his book has a monumental vitalism wholly unlike the abstraction and specialization we often take for granted. He was willing to turn in any direction that might reveal the ‘fundamental’ (SL vi, 25, 85, 93, 110, 116, 120, 144, 172, 226). He pursued the precept that ‘adequate communication’ depends on its ‘context, that background of mutual understanding that is essential to the complete intelligibility of all speech’ (SL 92). No doubt his palette of topics was too vast for any emerging science. His elaborate mentalism reached far beyond the scope of early 20th century psychology, and was soon to be repressed by ‘physicalism’ and ‘mechanism’ (4.8; 13.11).
3.75 All the same, Sapir's peculiar achievements continue to deserve recognition. He insisted on the equal status and interest of unfamiliar languages, notably Amerindian ones, so that the ‘theoretical possibilities’ would be ‘abundantly illustrated from the descriptive facts of linguistic morphology’ (SL 139). He explored the perilous problematics of form versus content, or thought versus expression, and made them a basis for an original, large-scale typology of languages. And he never tired of saluting the vast potential of language for developments as yet unrealized. He thus bequeathed to us the challenging conviction that any set of ‘examples’ will be ‘far from exhausting the possibilities of linguistic structure’ (SL 141).
NOTES ON SAPIR
1 Sapir's Language is cited as SL to distinguish it from Bloomfield's book of the same name (BL). It was Sapir's ‘only full-length book for a general audience’ (SL ii).
2 In practice, some of these ‘relations’ are not pursued very far. Sapir says ‘it is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated’; and ‘race’ ‘is supremely indifferent to the history of language and culture’ (SL 213, 208; cf. 2.76; 3.7; 4.80; CG 222f). As for ‘art’, however, Sapir includes a chapter on ‘literature’ (cf. 3.3, 68-72).
3 Sapir suggests that ‘the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture whose purposes it serves’; but this is only ‘a superficial parallelism’ ‘of no real interest to the linguist except in so far as the growth or borrowing of new words incidentally throws light on the formal trends of the language’ (SL 219; cf. CG 225). Moreover, we should ‘never make the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary’ (SL 219; but cf. 2.78). Nor is ‘the actual size of a vocabulary’ of ‘real interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their disposal for the creation of new words’ (SL 124) (cf. 2.52; 6.23f).
4 This assertion leads to an opposition between ‘the normal type of communication of ideas’ versus ‘involuntary expression of feeling’ through ‘instinctive cries’ (SL 5). Even ‘conventional interjections’ ‘are only superficially of an instinctive nature’, rather more like ‘art’, and hence cannot have been the ‘psychological foundations’ of ‘language’ (SL 5ff) (cf. 213; 8.6)
5 Sapir's illustration is the fading of ‘“whom”‘ from common speech. But other cases still appear to him as ‘grammatical blunders’, ‘un-English horrors’, or ‘insidious peculiarities’ (SL 156, 166).
6 Benedetto Croce (1902, 1922) is saluted for having promulgated this ‘insight’ (SL v; cf. 3.69). He is also lauded as ‘one of the very few’ ‘contemporary writers of influence on liberal thought’ ‘who have gained an understanding of the fundamental significance of language’ and ‘pointed out its close relation to the problem of art’. Compare 3.68ff.
7 The parallel between ‘silent speech’ and ‘normal thinking’ (SL 18) enjoyed some vogue at the time (e.g. Watson 1920; Thorsen 1925), mainly to divert mentalistic conceptions over toward physicalists ones (cf. Beaugrande 1984a: 52ff). Compare 3.18, 311, 331; 4.9; 5.43; 8.22, 817; 1321.
8 One change in word-forms, for instance, is said to involve ‘unconscious desire’ and ‘unconscious hesitation’ (SL 157, 163, 161).
9 Two causes are cited for this ‘tendency’: the ‘inertia’ of ‘a system of forms from which all colour or life has vanished’; and ‘the tendency to construct schemes of classification into which all the concepts of language must be fitted’, using such absolute opposites as ‘good or bad’, ‘black or white’ (SL 98f). Sapir would mistrust the binary oppositions of later structuralism (cf. 2.70; 5.21, 49; 8.80).
10 Comparing this ‘system’ to a ‘system’ ‘of symbolic atoms’ (SL 56) again suggests a submerged sympathy for physicalism (cf. Note 7). Elsewhere, though, ‘the laws of physics and chemistry’ are declared an absurd foundation for ‘explaining’ ‘languages’ (SL 208f). Compare 13.12.
11 Like Saussure (2.83), Sapir is inconsistent in using ‘mechanical concepts’ (SL 161), especially to explain ‘sound change’ (SL 187, 174), while generally treating this aspect as irrelevant for linguistics (SL 11, 55, 62, 100, 121, 125).
12 The ‘inspiratory sounds’ of ‘“click”‘ languages like Hottentot are exceptions (SL 53n).
13 ‘Quantitative processes like vocalic lengthening or shortening and consonantal doubling’ ‘may be looked upon as particular sub-types’ of ‘internal modification’ (SL 61f).
14 ‘Due to the bias that Latin grammar has given us’, speakers of English ‘generally think of time as a function that is appropriately expressed in a purely formal manner’, even though English does not formally mark ‘present’ and ‘future’ (SL 69n; cf. SL 87).
15 An intriguing comparison is drawn: ‘the radical and grammatical elements of the language, abstracted as they are from the realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world of science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experience’; ‘the word, the existent unit of living speech, responds to the unit of actually apprehended experience, of history, of art’ (SL 32f). For another view of science and art, see 3.72.
16 ‘In Yana [of Northern California] the noun and the verb are well distinct’, though they ‘hold in common’ some ‘features’ that ‘draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible’ (SL 199n). But the language has, ‘strictly speaking, no other parts of speech’. ‘The adjective’, ‘the numeral, the interrogative pronoun’, and ‘certain conjunctions and adverbs’ are all ‘verbs’.
17 In one demonstration, though, Sapir decides that ‘the analysis’ into ‘radical’ and ‘derivational’ ‘elements’ ‘is practically irrelevant to a feeling for the structure of the sentence’ (SL 84).
18 Sapir's distaste for ‘sentimentalism’, in which he himself indulges sometimes, is due to its abuse as a channel for cultural and racial chauvinism (cf. SL 124n, 208f). Undue emphasis on ‘feeling’ is also rebuked (SL 39) (cf. 3.15).
19 Compare these categories with ‘the still popular classification of languages into an “isolating” group, an “agglutinative” group, and an “inflective” group’ (SL 123). Sapir suspects that his ‘contrast of pure-relational and mixed-relational’ is ‘deeper, more far-reaching’ than the older ‘contrast’, ostensibly because ‘conceptual type’ ‘persists the longest of all’ (SL 145f) (cf. 3.54).
20 For example, ‘the English language’ shows hardly ‘one important morphological change that was not determined by the native drift’, despite ‘the suggestive influence of French norms’ (SL 202). ‘English was fast moving toward a more analytic structure long before the French influence set in’ (SL 193n). Still, ‘the language of a people that is looked upon as a centre of culture’ is ‘likely to exert an appreciable influence on other languages spoken in its vicinity’ (SL 193) (cf. 4.40, 83; 8.7). ‘Just five languages’ had an ‘overwhelming’ impact of this kind: ‘classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin’ (SL 194). Sapir finds it ‘disappointing’ that the ‘cultural influence of English has so far been all but negligible’. Today he would say otherwise (cf. 8.11, 13).
21 To ‘think of sound change’ as ‘quasi-physiological’ is a ‘fatal error’ ‘many linguistic students have made’ (SL 183). Compare Note 12.
22 This process of inferring relations was, as Saussure notes, ‘a new and fruitful field’ for linguistics in the 19th century, though it ‘did not succeed in setting up a true science’ (CG 3) (2.5). Sapir again separates the ‘linguistic student’ from the normal speaker (cf. 3.11; 13.49).
23 Compare the ‘innate formal limitations’ and the ‘innate art of the language’ (SL 222, 225). Sapir also uses the term ‘inner form’ (SL 109, 125, 197, 217), one made famous by Wilhelm von Humboldt in Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus (1830-35) and covered in the chapter on Hartmann (12.18). Sapir's typology of language also owes much to Humboldt, though without acknowledgement.
24 I would prefer to suppose, along with many theoreticians of art, that the work's main function is to foreground the otherness of its language (cf. Beaugrande 1986a, 1988a). The material disappears to the degree that the audience's schemas can incorporate it (cf. Gombrich 1960).
25 The stipulation that ‘a truly great style’ cannot ‘seriously oppose itself to basic form patterns of the language’ devalues the ‘semi-Latin’ of Milton and the ‘Teutonic mannerism’ of Carlyle (SL 227). ‘It is strange how long it took the European literatures to learn that style is not an absolute, a something to be imposed on the language from Greek and Latin models, but merely the language itself, running in its natural grooves’. Sapir's tastes are not entirely disinterested, since ‘he published’ ‘some verse in periodicals’ himself (SL ii).
26 ‘The written word’ is judged ‘the most important of all visual speech symbolisms’; ‘written language’ ‘is a point-to-point equivalence, to borrow a mathematic phrase, to its spoken counterpart’ (SL 19f) (but cf. 13.33). ‘The written forms are secondary symbols of the spoken ones -- symbols of symbols -- yet so close is the correspondence that they may’, ‘in certain types of thinking, be entirely substituted for the spoken ones’. People ‘handle’ ‘visual symbols’ like ‘money’, i.e., as a ‘substitute for the goods and services of the fundamental auditory-motor symbols’ (SL 21; cf. CG 115). Compare Note 11.from http://www.beaugrande.com/LINGTHERSapir.htm
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