MY RESUME OF LINGUISTIC THEORY

EDWARD SAPIR

FRANZ BOAS-- The most important influence on Edward Sapir’s linguistic career was contact with his fellow-anthropologist and linguist, Franz Boas.

Boas was born in 1858, the same year as Durkheim. Sapir was twenty-six years his junior when they met in New York in 1904. Boas had worked out his own scheme for the orderly description of language, and the outlined it in the introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages. This work called for three basic divisions in the description: (1) the phonetics of the language; (2) the meaning categories expressed in the language; and (3) the grammatical processes of combination and modification by which these meanings must be expressed.

1.    Phonetics

Boas showed that he was approaching by experience the views of De Saussure concerning the systematic nature of language sounds: the number of sounds which may be produced is unlimited. In your own language, we select only a limited number of all the possible sounds. Unlike De Saussure, Boas intended to focus on la parole. Boas said that in fact, we can often determine the pationality of the analyst “which we will tend to hear in terms of his own language sounds.

2.    Grammatical Categories

held that each language has its own grammatical system. It is important at this point to emphasize the fact that the groups show material differences in different languages. From experiences with Indian Language, Boas conclude that we cannot impose the form of our language upon other languages, but must look to see what kinds of form they use and how they express relations among ideas.

Some of the conclusions Boas drew from these remarks include the idea that “the natural unit of expression is the sentence” and not the word which “as such is only known by analysis”. He believed that this view is supported by the fact that we have difficulty finding a meaningful use for words in isolation, especially “form words”. Boas considered the study of the grammatical categories peculiar to each language to be the most important task of the linguist, since European grammarians had tended to assume that the categories of their own language are universal.

ü  Noun

According to Boas “none of these apparently fundamental aspects of the noun are necessary elements of articulate speech. He pinted out that suppression of gender does not hamper clarity.

ü Pronoun

The IE classification of pronouns is quite arbitrary, Boas showed since it does not exhaust the logical possibilities inherent in the notion of person:

Logically, our three persons of the pronouns are based on the concepts of the self and the not-self,the second of which is subdevided according to the needs of speech into the concepts of person addressed and person spoken of.

VERBS—Boas found the IE verbal categories such as person, number, tense, mood, and voice to be equally arbitrary and “quite unevenly developed in various language.” Boas concluded his Introduction by saying that any description of a language should concentrate first on what “according to the morphology of the language must be expressed” and not just on what the language might say. This is the same point that de Saussure approaches in the distinctions we have labeled “signification, content, and value”. The signification of all the sentences Boas quoted can be the same, namely, man sick: the renderings he gave are explications of the differences in content, that is, the sum of the signification and value. Whatever Boas’s conception f the influence of language on thought, he did not think that language as such makes abstractions impossible.

Boas did not believe that there is a direct relation between language and culture. Boas was convinced that both in language and in the customs of a tribe we find a kind of “subsequent explanation” of what had an unconscious origin, which seeks to rationalize what is simply there.

EDWARD SAPIR—To his contemporaries Sapir was a genius: his interest were not confined to anthropology and linguistics, but ranged over a wide spectrum of scientific and humanistic subjects. Language was the only book he wrote, and it was dictated over a period of two months from a handful of notes.

Sapir’s Language—Sapir said that although he mentioned psychological factors involved in language use, he had not intended to go very deeply into the psychological bases.

LANGUAGE DEFINED—“Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntary produced symbols.” Sapir added qualifications that distinguish his conception of language from preceding ones. First, the meaning of language is discussed and assigned to a “visual image, a class of image, or a feeling of relation.” Second, the association of speech and meaning is a relation that may but need not always be present. Sapir drew the conclusions that (1) language form can and should be studied for its own sake and (2) meaning must be considered, at least as the highest latent potential, at each step in the formal analysis, since the whole purpose of language is to communicate meanings.

THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH—Sapir did not use the term “morpheme”, but his illustrations of radicals and grammatical elements indicate that they have the same function. Sapir used the term “form” in several senses. He also used the expression in the more traditional meaning of a determining element. Sapir’s notion of linguistic form: it consist of the relations between linguistic forms, which can be considered as morphemes, words and sentences, grammatical processes such as affixation or internal modification, and grammatical concepts. Between things materially and formally considered. Materially the object of linguistic study is sound and those sound sequences that have both referential and differential function or merely differential function.

Sapir developed an “algebraic formulation” to show the relations among the members of common expression, employs four kinds of symbols: capital letters (A); lower case letters (a); parenthesis; and plus signs. The symbols are used as follows: A capital letter stands for a radical, which may or not be a free morpheme. If the form is free, it can be represented as A. if the radical is a bound form, it can be represented as (A). since the parentheses used here and in the representation of the –us ­affix of hortus represent the fact that both are bound forms. The form hortus, therefore, is symbolized as (A) + (b).

Another type is possible, A + B, as in compound words but Sapir though than the majority of such forms are generally analyzed as having a single radical and another form that looks like a radical but is considered subordinate, so that he recommend the analysis A + b (language pp 25 – 30)

A similar representation of a very complex English word shows some alternative decisions that can be made and some of the divisions that must be made. The counterparts of single concepts are better found in radicals and grammatical elements, which do not vary from in language to another as widely as the formal units in which they must occur. This being the case, a word can often appear as a sentence, which Sapir defined as “the linguistic expression of a proposition” (Language, p.35).

Three basic elements of linguistic form at this level, then Sapir defined as follows: Radical – grammatical element, the linguistic counterpart of isolated concepts. Word – one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of “isolated” “meaning” into which the sentence resolves itself. Sentence – the linguistic expression of a proposition.

THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE

An elementary example of his interest in the patterning of language sounds is given in “Sound Pattern in Language” referred to earlier. Other differences in the sounds of a language can be automatic and not functional while the same differences might be found to be functional in another language.

The phoneme, is incapable of definition in purely phonetic terms, since it is a “functionally significant unit in the rigidly defined pattern of configuration of sounds peculiar to a language” (Selected Writings, p.46).

Sapir often spoke of the phonemes of a language as belonging to an “ideal system”, which is known “intuitively” by the speakers of the language.

LINGUISTIC FORM

He pointed out that while it is the linguist’s prime interest to study languages as formal structures, this is not to suggest that form can be studied apart from function but that one of the raost striking features of any language (even the most “primitive”) is its formal completeness.

According to Sapir, there are two ideas to be considered in studying linguistic form - the basic concepts communicated by a language and the formal methods by which these basic concepts are related and modified. Grammatical processes are “formal methods for indicating the relation of a secondary concept to the main concept of the radical element” (Language, p.39).

Sapir discussed 6 main types of grammatical processes: (1) word order, (2) composition, (3) affixation, (4) internal modification of the radical grammatical element, (5) reduplication, (6) accentual differences. Part of the importance in studying these “processes” is the realization that there is no natural connection between the processes and the meaning the process may have in particular language. Composition is the process of uniting 2 radical elements in a single word. Affixation includes the employment of prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Reduplication is repeating all or part of stem. One of the most important insights was that such grammatical meanings are often factors of which native speakers are wholly unaware. In order to show this, he submitted a seemingly simple sentence to a ‘destructive analysis” to show that there are many more concepts involved than the ordinary speaker would suspect.

Sapir took it as axiomatic that language is the sentence and that the sentence is the linguistics expression of proposition. There are two concepts that all languages must express and two other types that are commonly expressed. These concepts can be described as concrete concept and pure concept. Sapir recognized that language must distinguish something like noun and something like verb, since there must be something to talk about something must be said about this subject.  Sapir conclude that analogy “they are really the same fundamental sentence…they are express identical relational concept in identical manner”.

Languages compared

Sapir was convinced that a more basic point of view could be found, and that more than a single point of view necessary. We can classify language according to their formal types. When Sapir examined some of the purely external classification he found them superficial. Sapir believed, to distinguish between languages that have and those that do not have form.

Language can be distinguished into 4 types: (1) those that express concept of types I and IV, which can be called simple pure relational languages, (2) those that express concept of types I, II and IV, which can be called complex pure relational concept, (3) those that express concept of types I and III, which can be called simple mixed relational languages and (3) those that express concept of types I and II and III, which can be called complex mixed relational languages.

Using the basic classification three main criteria emerge: (1) the conceptual type, (2) the technique of formal expression, particularly how the radical modified and (3) the degree of confusion between radical and affix. Every speaker can be understood to have a different system from any speaker, if we define “system” as the number of units and their combinations. Like the term “dialect”, then, expression such as “languages”, branch or stock can be considered the term that reflect our knowledge about nature and degrees of language difference and change.

            Sapir pointed out that the direction of change inherent in a language can be called its “slope,” and that one of the ways of detecting the slope that contributes to drift or patterned change, is to examine the hesitations native speakers have about the proper use of forms. Sapir was of the opinion that the separation of the phonetics and grammar is an unfortunate tendency.

 Sapir believed that sound change cannot be studied apart from the functions of sounds in the language, and that the pattern of a language. Which is reflected by sound change, is best considered when we see that “every word, grammatical element, location, sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration.

The relations among language, rate, and culture have always been a concern of anthropologists, and Sapir was one of the scholars. The myths about predictable connection between the racial characteristics of speakers and their linguistic habits, or between the kind of language people speak and the kind of culture the language reveals.

In Language, and many articles, Sapir presented some of the evidence he had gathered in field work and study to show that while there is no necessary connection between language or race, there are often parallels between culture and language. This fact is hardly surprising, since, as he pointed out, language does not exist apart from culture.

Language will not, therefore, mirror the attitude a culture takes toward its environment any more than we can determine, on the basis of whether its language is inflecting or agglutinating, whether a culture is warlike. The most obvious connections between a culture and its language Sapir found, will be seen on the level of vocabulary.

In one aspect of culture, however, Sapir, and one of his most brilliant pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, thought that language plays a central role. If we define “culture” as “what a society does and thinks” (Language, p. 218), then the thought aspects of different cultures are strongly conditioned by their particular languages-not, of course, by the formal side of language, nor even directly by the conceptual type, but rather language determines culture thought the particular contents of the concepts that make up the world of things in which the culture is interested. Sapir suggested that language is like a “prepared road or groove,” which can be analyzed as “a symbolic system of reference,” much like one of alternative mathematical or geometrical system for describing situations.

In the view of both Whorf and Sapir, it is illusory to think that “experience” can occur without the formative guidance of the linguistic habits of the person experiencing, and that the world we live in is first and foremost one “to large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group”.

According to the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language differences introduce a new principle of relativity, according to which men are not led by their experience to the same picture of the universe unless their language background are the same or similar.