Acta Structuralica

international journal for structuralist research

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230333

Classical and modern universals research

their philosophical background

Elmar Holenstein

pp. 305-317

Abstract

Universals research of the last twenty-five years has as its precursors the Cercle linguistique de Prague of the interwar period (in particular, Roman Jakobson and Nikolaj Trubetzkoy). Compared with the classical doctrines of universals from Aristotle through the grammarians of the Middle Ages and the rationalists of the 17th and 18th centuries to Husserl at the turn of this century, the renewed interest in universals in present-day linguistics may be characterized by five shifts: (1) In the traditional doctrines only categories of meaning were regarded as universal, but not categories of expression. This Platonist perspective of the tradition is no longer shared. On the contrary, recent universals research started with the exploration of interlingual constraints in the domain of the categories of expression. (2) A more empiricist attitude led in the first centuries of the modern era to the distinction between “nature” and “culture”. The subsequent correlation of “nature” and “universal” and of “culture” and “variable”, too, is no longer maintained in recent universals research. (3) The traditional doctrines look for a logical, a priori foundation of universals. In recent research biological, psychological and functional explanations prevail. (4) In the tradition, manifest in particular in American anthropology of the first half of this century, only the essential and fundamental traits of language were regarded as universals, “the detail”, however, as variable and changing. Recent universals research has uncovered invariant constraints in the detail of human languages as well. (5) The traditional doctrines were concerned almost exclusively with absolute elements and categories. In the renewed universals research relational (mainly implicational) universals prevail.

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1Orginally published in Linda Waugh & Stephen Rudy (eds), New vistas in grammar, Amsterdam, Benjamins (1991): 451-463.

2American linguists usually begin surveys of modern universals research with a short paper by Burt W. and Ethel G. Aginsky in the journal Word (1948; cf. Ferguson 1978). The Aginskys’ paper is a milestone as regards the history of terminology. It seems to be the first text in which the term “language universals” was used. As for the rest, it deals with universals based on cross-cultural diffusion, a kind of universal that plays no part in the linguistic universals research that, starting in the sixties, has won renewed prominence — despite the fact that it is undeniably a matter of topical interest: for the first time since the origins of mankind it is again possible for cultural phenomena to spread to all human societies by means of contact.

3According to information from André Martinet, the editor of Word at the time, the Aginskys’ paper was solicited by Roman Jakobson:

The Aginskys’ paper, which was the first to mention linguistic universals, had been ordered by Jakobson. It took some time for the seed to bear fruit, but, ever since, what has been produced is in the same vein. From the moment that everybody began to speak about universals I saw the shadow of Jakobson. They all yielded: even Hockett contributed to Greenberg’s book (1963). Greenberg himself, who often opposed Jakobson when he and I were co-editors of Word, also swallowed the bait. (Martinet 1974, 227)

4In view of Jakobson’s importance for the revival of linguistic universals research, as attested by a rival of some decades’ standing, the question as to how he used to give a historical introduction to the topic of universals is of interest. For Jakobson, modern universals research, continuing the tradition of the medieval grammatica speculativa and the “idea, conceived by seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalism, of a universal grammar”, begins with the two philosophers Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Anton Marty (1847–1914). The reference to 17th and 18th century rationalism is taken from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1901/1913: A 318/B1 336). The reference to the doctrines of universals of early modern philosophy is common practice. In Marty’s Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie (1908, 69), it can be found together with the contentious specification that these were “disciples of Cartesius [Descartes]” — a claim that Noam Chomsky has since brought to high standing.

5Marty, being well versed in history, adduces particulars that go farther back. Before the time of the “disciples of Cartesius” he mentions the Scholastics and before them the Stoics, and above all Aristotle, whose work Peri hermeneias he cites as “the first and indeed as a very estimable contribution to general grammar”.

6A thesis formulated at the beginning of Aristotle’s work On Inter|pretation subsequently came to be decisive for the direction of the whole tradition up to Husserl. The first to break with it without at the same time giving up the assumption of universals was Marty.

7Aristotle (16a) states:

As writing, so also is speech not the same for all men. But the mental affections themselves, of which those words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations.

8The pattern of thought is Platonic. Plato’s Kratylos (389e–390a) has it that a language maker, “whether he be here or in a foreign land, so long as he gives to each thing the proper form (eidos) of the name, in whatsoever syllables, is no worse lawgiver, whether here or anywhere else”. It is as when a smith makes a tool for a certain purpose: “So long as he reproduces the same idea, though it be in different iron, still the instrument is as it should be, whether it be made here or in foreign lands”.

9Indeed, only the manner of expressing this “ideology” changed in the doctrines of the following centuries. According to Boethius of Dacia, writing in the thirteenth century, the substantia sermonis is universal, but not the articulatio vocis: according to Leibniz (1765, § 3.4.17) in the eighteenth, les idées but not les mots, according to Husserl (1901/1913, § 4.14) at the beginning of this century, the Bedeutungskategorien [categories of meaning] but not their Ausdruck [categories of expression: Ausdrucks|kategorien].

10The pattern of thought is not only Platonic. It can be found in more than just one tradition, and not only in respect to language. A Japanese formula says ikei dôshitsubutsu “thing of the same quality in difference forms”. The watchword una religio in rituum varietate is familiar from Catholic theology. In ethics the assumption can be found that moral principles are the same everywhere, only their “application” changes from society to society.

All are in considerable agreement on the notion of virtue in general, although they diverge in the application. (Leibniz 1965, § 1.2.18, cf. 2.18.10)

11The application can sometimes be as extremely divergent as a case described by Herodotos in a legendary report (3.38): Reverence before dead parents is encountered everywhere. Whereas, to the horror of the Callatians of India, the Greeks express this reverence by burning their fathers, for the Callatians, to the horror of the Greeks, it ostensibly consists in eating their dead fathers. Similarly, it is conceded that emotions may be the same for all people, but that, if anything at all, the expression of such subjective matters as feelings will vary from culture to culture.

12In stark contrast to these traditional conceptions, modern linguistic universals research took the categories of expression as its first field of enquiry: Roman Jakobson on the level of phonology, demonstrating that there is a universal set of sense-discriminative sound features as well as of laws governing their arrangement to form the phonological system of a language; and people. People live to an age between zero and about one hundred years. This continuum is obviously not arbitrarily segmented either. Although the difference between ten and thirty years is as large as that between thirty and fifty, the probability is significantly greater that different words will be used to designate those of ten years and those of thirty years than those of thirty and fifty. Equally, the probability is greater that an additional age group will be linguistically marked between ten and thirty years than between thirty and fifty. If this happens, it immediately affects the meanings of the words used for those of ten and those of thirty years. The evidence is as follows.

13Some years ago the mayor of Zürich went by foot to Bern — to demonstrate sportsmanship and love of nature. He and his son-in-law were accompanied by two journalists (from the Züri-Leu, a local newspaper). One marched with the mayor, the other drove ahead by car to take pictures occasionally. Having reached the Canton Bern, the photographer asked at a farm there if “three men” had recently walked past. The surprising answer was: Naiaber e Maa met zwee Puurschte [No — but a man with two lads — had gone past). Depending on whether one distinguishes only between boys and men, as is frequently the case in contemporary German, or between boys, lads and men [Knaben, Burschen, Männer], as is still usual among older people, a yes or no answer will have a different force and may prove misleading.

14When comparing the linguistic universals currently under discussion with the universals of the traditional doctrines, two differences become apparent. Both concern the absoluteness of the traditional examples. Traditionally, universals were in general given an a priori, logical foundation, based on the sense of respective categories. On the basis of their meaning, certain linguistic expressions can be connected with other expressions to form meaningful sentences, or they can be transformed into other expressions. A noun can be connected to a verb to form a meaningful sentence (“Flowers bloom”). An adjective (“red”) can be transformed into a noun (“redness”), an epithetic construction (“a white rose”) into a subordinate clause (“a rose that is white”). But not every combination and not every transformation yields a meaningful utterence. “King but or similar and” is not a meaningful sentence. In conformity to the logical foundation, absolute universality was claimed for such regularities. For the kind of universals that have been uncovered by modern universals research, on the contrary, psychological and biological explanations seem more appropriate, the nature of the human brain or mind. Like other psychological and biological explanations they are correspondingly not claimed to be valid without exception, but only to have a statistical validity of high probability. They are not “strict”, but only “near-universals”.

15The only explicitly logical foundation of universals that I know of in modern linguistic universals research (aside from linguistic pragmatics) is in the first manifesto of modern empirical universals research, by Trubetzkoy:

Although the phonological laws valid for all languages are found by pure empirical induction, these laws can sometimes be logically deduced: Thus, for example, the connection between the “melodic correlation” and the “quantitative correlation” can be explained by the fact that the distinction between two intonations is possible only if the beginning and the end of a vowel are perceived as two distinct moments, which in turn presupposes the notion of duration. (Trubetzkoy 1933, 343)

16An objection often raised against the empirical explanation of universals is that peripheral organs are involved equally in the field of visual perception, from which the examples so far adduced come, and in the field of the sounds of language, from which modern universals research started. The prestructured functioning of these peripheral organs — eyes, ears, voice-producing mechanisms — is not denied. But for more abstract cognitive operations central brain processes, whose plasticity is proverbial, must be considered.

17In reply to this it can be pointed out that a whole series of universals from the fields of visual perception and phonology are explained with recourse to central processing operations. This applies for example to the privileged position of the first six primary color terms vis-à-vis the following five, but not necessarily to the order of the pure colors themselves, where peripheral factors seem to play a part (cf. Ratliff 1976). But even in the field of “higher” cognitive operations there is no lack of natural constraints that entail universals.

18Numeral categories are a clear example of abstract mental operations. The following implicational chain holds for grammatical number categories: a trial implies a dual, a dual implies a plural and a plural a singular (Greenberg 1963: 94). There is no language with a dual but no plural. The indefinite idea of a multitude is prior to the definite idea of a duality. The plural as a multitude of units seems cognitively to presuppose the concept of unity, and the dual as a definite multitude seems to presuppose the concept of an indefinite multiplicity.

19As in the case of color terms, these implications are an example for the fact that in a second sense many of the newly discovered universals are not absolute universals, whereby “absolute” is here to be understood not in contradistinction to “statistically probable”, but to “relational”. It is not assumed that certain properties are to be encountered in (almost) all languages, but only that they occur dependent on the presence of other properties that have a material connection to them. Implicational laws of the following kind are (near-)universals: “If a language has C, then it also has B; and if it has B, then it also has A; but not necessarily the other way around.” The relational restriction is no surprise either. It results from the dynamic, historical character of language in general, with phases of elaboration and of simplification, and within individual languages from the developmental character of acquisition by their speakers.

20Greenberg was able to make out over fifty generalizations concerning the lexical number categories, the numerals in natural languages. The following regularities are examples of cases in which an explanation by recourse to cognitive simplicity suggests itself almost forcibly:

Of the four fundamental arithmetical operations — addition and its inverse, subtraction, and multiplication and its inverse, division — the existence of either inverse operation implies the existence of both direct operations.
The existence of multiplication implies the existence of addition.
When a number is expressed by subtraction [...], the subtrahend is never larger than the remainder. (Greenberg 1978, 3.249ff.)

21Addition is prior to and more frequent than subtraction as a means of forming numerals. This seems to be the case not only for the words, but also for the figures. In the Roman numeral system up to three primary units are generally added to the fives and tens, and only one is subtracted (XI, XII, XIII, XVI, XVII, XVIII vs. XIV, XIX). A language that forms a composite numeral by multiplication (quatre-vingts) also possesses numerals formed by addition (vingt-et-un), but not necessarily the other way around. It is logically possible that it not be the numeral eighteen that is formed by subtracting two from twenty, as in Latin (duodeviginti), but the other way around, the numeral two by subtracting eighteen from twenty. But again, the rule applies: not everything that is logically possible is cognitively and linguistically natural.

22To the extent that universal regularities are concomitant with degrees of cognitive complexity and abstractness, developmental psychological expla|nations come to mind. If, however, highly complex cognitive phenomena such as in the case of facial recognition and highly abstract distinctions such as those that take effect with certain grammatical categories apparently occur (a) immediately and (b) without the rate of errors usual in learning processes, then recourse to a specific biological predisposition to the corresponding cognitive abilities seems appropriate.

23The distinction between specific and nonspecific articles observed in child and Creole languages, apparently independent of a corresponding model in the substrate languages, is an impressive example. For example, the indefinite article “a” is used specifically in the sentence, “A dog woke me this morning”, but nonspecifically in a sentence such as, “I would like to have a dog”, that is, some dog or other, it is not yet settled which. At a certain stage Creoles and children seem obstinately to use an explicit article in the first case, and in the second case the so-called zero-article, that is, none. The distinction they master is not simply the concrete distinction between two individuals, this one and that one, but the abstract distinction between something that is individuated and something that is not deictically identifiable, by pointing to a certain spatiotemporal position (cf. Bickerton 1981).

24The naive rationalistic assumption that relatively simple cognitions (for example, the smallest whole numbers up to five or six, with practice somewhat more) can be grasped intuitively but complex cognitions only by means of linguistic constructions, is typical of traditional philosophical discussions of the relationship between thought and language. Empiristic strategies of research are now in the foreground. Empirical experience and not some conceptual reflection decides what is to be regarded as intuitively graspable. If a specific ability (e.g. the easy recognition of such complexities as faces) cannot be understood by means of conceptual analysis, the corresponding explanation is then empirical, for the most part biological.

25Traditional philosophical discussions of the relationship between thought and language can in still another respect be rebuked for narrowness. It can be detected in both opposed camps, the rationalist and the empiricist. On the rationalist side, the exclusive domain of research in linguistic universals was taken to be the realm of logical rationality (necessary conditions of the possibility of language as a universal means of communication as well as consistency and sensefulness, that is, the avoidance of falsehood and absurdity). On the empiricist side it was conjectured that there are only contingent universals concerning objects that are accessible and important to all. Locke (1690, § 1.3.9 & 11) lists fire, sun, heat and number. The best examples of this kind from contemporary universals research are those concerning the object closest to all, one’s own body and its parts (cf. Andersen 1978). Apart from that the empiricists thought not so much of cognitive as of conative and emotional predispositions as candidates for anthropological universals, the pursuit of happiness and the aversion to misery, furthermore feelings of pleasure and displeasure accompanying certain things and ideas (cf. Locke 1690: § 1.2.3; 2.7.3 f.).

26The economy and ecology of expediency as a possible source of anthropological universals that should be systematically examined certainly remained outside the field of research, if not the field of vision of the classical rationalists and empiricists. In this respect Anton Marty signified a turning point — in the wake of empiricist philosophy of the end of the nineteenth century, of course; but in applying this empirical perspective to language Marty was a pioneer, although with only limited impact at first and of historical impact only after more than half a century and thanks to Roman Jakobson’s influence. He saw as no other theoretician of universals before him or among his contemporaries the foundation of a large and important realm of linguistic universals in the “universal nature of psychic and physical capacities (psychische und physische Kräfte)" (Marty 1908, 55).

27The assumption had both material and methodological consequences. Marty formulated it principally in his confrontation with Husserl, a Brentano disciple as he himself was. Materially it means that linguistic universals are not only to be sought in the realm of the categories of meaning, founded in the sense of these categories, but also in the realm of the categories of expression, “in respect of the form that the means of expression assume and must assume everywhere”. If all endeavour to communicate is dependent on the psychic and physical capacities that to a certain extent are common to all human beings, then “legitimate expectations can presumably be drawn as to how, wherever people speak to each other, the tasks set by what is to be expressed will be fulfilled”. Methodologically, the assumption mentioned means that much “that is of greatest import for general grammar can, however, only be known empirically, and not a priori" and “also not from mere insight in the categories of meaning” (Marty 1908, 58, 60).

28The far-reaching significance of human nature, “of the psychic and physical capacities” serving human users of language, for universal regularities become clear just by juxtaposing the categories of meaning comprised by modern universals research to the categories of meaning to which the traditional doctrines of universals restricted themselves.

29In the traditional doctrines there was a clear tendency to restrict oneself to categories of thought that play a part in classical logic. The favorite topics were nouns, the copula, adjectives (which turned out not to be a universal word category), functional expressions such as conjunctions and modes of judgement. In the projects for a universal language the attempt was made to reduce even such a fundamental category of natural language as the verb to an adjective-like form, the participle, or even to a noun plus copula. Cicero scribit was thus transformed into Cicero est scribens or Cicero est scriptor without regard to the modification of meaning attendant on the grammatical transformation.

30What is most conspicuous for a modern theoretician of language about the traditional doctrines of universals, no less than about traditional logic, is perhaps the fact that the pragmatic word category of deictica is missing, the demonstratives and personal pronouns, without which our natural languages would be exceedingly difficult to use and hardly possible to learn. The deictica are among the first grammatical universals to which the universals research that was renewed in the sixties applied itself (cf. Greenberg 1963, 21, 91, 96).

31Another tendency of traditional universals research was to look for universals primarily or even exclusively in the realm of abstract categories. This seems to have less to do with the a priori, logical foundation of universals than with the assumption that abstraction and generalization should imply each other: the more abstract something is, the more universal it is; and the more concrete, the more variable. This assumption reached its zenith and its most explicit formulation in the anthropological literature of the first half of this century. If the universals are no longer founded a priori logically, but rather according to laws of nature (particularly of biology), then a correlation of “abstract” and “universal” or “concrete” and “particular” is unlikely. What is (near-universally) common to all mammals is not only an abstract “blueprint”, which is modified almost beyond recognition in the particular subgroups, cohorts, orders, families, genera down to the species and subspecies, but also such concrete details as the fact that the lower jaw is hinged directly to the skull, instead of through a separate bone (the quadrate) as in all other vertebrates, and that a chain of three tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) transmits sound waves across the middle ear.

32The received opinion in anthropology up to the fifties was that various cultures only had “empty frames” or “blanket categories” in common, so to speak “chapter headings” that permit rough classification of the manners of behavior that vary from culture to culture; there was thought to be no common “behavioristic detail” that is specific as to content. Without claiming completeness or attempting a systematic classification, Murdock (1945, 124) lists 73 such empty frames in alphabetical order. For the sake of illustration the first seven are listed: “age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking”. Other, better known ones are: education, gestures, language, medicine, music, tool making. According to Murdock, some of these universal categories can be resolved into components, which are also universal, for example language into conventional sound units (phonemes), meaningful combinations of such units (words) and rules for combining words into sentences (grammar), so that “exceedingly numerous” resemblances can be found between all cultures, which, however, only “rarely, if ever” concern “specific cultural content”.

It is highly doubtful whether any specific element of behavior has ever attained genuinely universal distribution. The true universals of culture [...] are similarities in classification, not in content. [...] What cultures are found to have in common is a uniform system of classification, not a fund of identical elements. (Murdock 1945, 125)

33But linguistics and ethology are now producing evidence for precisely such universals. The collapse of the anthropological dogma that only relatively empty frames are universal can be dated in the literature. It happened in the early fifties and is connected with the names Roman Jakobson and Joseph H. Greenberg. In 1953 (516 f.), Kluckhohn. referring to a “lecture delivered by Dr. Joseph Greenberg in April 1952 to the staff of the laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University”, cites as the first and weightiest evidence for the contrary thesis the assumption that Jakobson had published a year previously, to the effect that the sounds of natural human languages are not a random mixture but rather form a system with twelve underlying binary oppositions. This system turned out to need revision in points of detail, but it was able to maintain its paradigmatic status. If universal regularities can also be ascertained on the level of expression, pertaining to the progressive elaboration of a lexical field as well as to the extension of already existing categories to categories to which cognitive access has newly been gained (cf. Williams 1976), and pertaining to sentence formation with the introduction of “synsemantica that are logically not founded”, as Marty (1908, 537) puts it; and if these universal regularities depend on the “universal nature of psychic and physical capacities” (Marty 1908, 55), the cognitive and biological structure of man; that is, if there are universal regularities also on the level of the so-called “inner form of language” in addition to those on the level of the categories of meaning and of the external (phonological) form of language: then it is not only appropriate, pace Cassirer, to continue to speak of a universal grammar, but even of universal stylistics. Buffon’s wise dictum, Le style est l’homme même [the style is the man himself], receives in this perspective a new connotation, so to speak a species-specific connotation.

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Publication details

Published in:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) Phenomenological philosophy of language: collected papers, ed. Aurora Simone; Cigana Lorenzo. Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press.

Pages: 305-317

Full citation:

Holenstein Elmar (2020) „Classical and modern universals research: their philosophical background“, In: E. Holenstein, Phenomenological philosophy of language, Genève-Lausanne, sdvig press, 305–317.