LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY

GENERAL LINGUISTICS
Fourth Edition
LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY
A Short History of Unguistics A History of English Phenology
Third Edition CHARLES JONES
R. H. ROBINS
Generative and Non-linear
Structural Aspects of Language Phonology
Change JACQUES DURAND
JAMES M. ANDERSON
Modality and the English Modals
Text and Context Second Edition
Explorations in the Semantics and F. R. PALMER
Pragmatics of Discourse
Semiotics and Unguistics
TEUN A. VAN DIJK
YISHAI TOBIN
Introduction to Text Unguistics
Multilingualism in the British Isles
ROBERT-ALAIN DE BEAUGRANDE
I: the Older Mother Tongues and
AND WOLFGANG ULRICH
Europe
DRESSLER
EDITED BY SAFDER ALLADINA
Spoken Discourse AND VIV EDWARDS
A Model for Analysis
Multilingualism in the British Isles
WILLIS EDMONDSON
II: Africa, Asia and the Middle East
PsychoJinguistics EDITED BY SAFDER ALLADINA
Language, Mind, and World AND VIV EDWARDS
DANNY D. STEINBERG
Dialects of English
Dialectology Studies in Grammatical Variation
W. N. FRANCIS EDITED BY PETER TRUDGILL
AND J. K. CHAMBERS
Principles of Pragmatics
GEOFFREY N. LEECH Introduction to Bilingualism
CHAR LOnE HOFFMANN
Generative Grammar
GEOFFREY HORROCKS Verb and Noun Number in English:
A Functional Explanation
Nonns of Language WALLIS REID
Theoretical and Practical Aspects
RENATE BARTSCH English in Africa
JOSEF S. SCHMEID
The English Verb
Second Edition Unguistic Theory
F. R. PALMER The Discourse of Fundamental Works
A History of American English ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE
J. L. DILLARD Process and Result in Language
English Historical Syntax A Study of Aspect in the English Verb
Verbal Constructions YISHAI TOBIN
DAVID DENISON The Meaning of Syntax:
Pidgin and Creole Languages Adjectives of English
SUZANNE ROMAINE CONNOR FERRIS

General Linguistics
An Introductory Survey
Fourth Edition
R. H. ROBINS
General Linguistics
An Introductory Survey

R. H. Robins

FOURTH EDITION
 First published 1964 by Longman Group Limited
Second edition 1971
Third edition 1980
Fourth edition 1989
Third impression 1993

Published 2013 by Routledge

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First edition © R. H. Robins 1964

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Notices
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changing. As new research and experience broaden our
understanding , changes in research methods, professional
practices, or medical treatment may become necessary.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their

own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any
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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29144-7 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Robins, R. H. (Robert Henry), 1921-
General linguistics : an introductory survey .
- 4th ed. - (Longman linguistics library).
1. Linguistics
I. Title
410

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Robins, R. H. (Robert Henry)
General linguistics.
(Longman linguistics library)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Linguistics . I. Title . II. Series.
P121.R6 1989 410 88-5619
Contents

Prefaces xi
System of reference xx
Transcriptions and abbreviations xxii

1 General linguistics: the scope of the subject

1 .1General linguistics as the study of language 1
1.1 .1 Languages and languages 1
1.1.2 Descriptive, historical, and comparative
linguistics 4
I. 1.3 The term 'philology' 6
1.2 Linguistics as a science 6
1.2.1 Implications of the term 'science' 6
1.2.2 Practical applications 10
1.3 The range of general linguistics II
1.3 .1 Levels of analysis II
1.3.2 Language and communication 12
1.3 .3 Phonetics, phonology, grammar,
semantics 19
1.4 Semantics 21
1 -4. 1 Philosophical and linguistic interest in
meaning 21
1 -4 .2 Word meaning 22
1.4.3 Sentence meaning 27
1.4.4 Extralinguistic context 28
1.4.5 Translation 31
General bibliography 34
Bibliography for Chapter 1 38
Notes to Chapter 1 40
vi CONTENTS

2 Theoretical and methodological considerations

2.I Abstractions 43
The status of linguistic abstractions
2. I . I 43
2.1.2 Structural linguistics: syntagmatic and
paradigmatic relations 46
2.2 Dialect, idiolect, style 48
2.2 . I Dialects as subdivisions of languages 48
2.2.2 Dialect mapping: isoglosses 51
2.2.3 Class dialects and 'standard languages' 54
2.2.4 Criteria for determining dialect status 56
2.2.5 Linguistic tendencies affecting dialectal
divisions 58
2.3 General and particular 60
2.4 The structural treatment of lexical meaning 64
2.4. I Lexical interrelations 64
2.4.2 Collocation 64
2-4.3 Semantic field theory 67
Bibliography for Chapter 2 71
Notes to Chapter 2 72

3 Phonetics
3· I Articulatory phonetics 77
3. I. I The spoken foundation of language 77
3. 1.2 Primacy of articulatory phonetics 78
3. 1·3 The physiological basis of speaking 80
3.2 The organs of speech 82
3.2. I The glottis 82
3.2.2 The supraglottal organs of speech 83
3. 2.3 Nasalization 84
3.3 Segmentation: vowel and consonant 85
3·3· I Segmentation 85
3.3.2 Vowels and consonants: transcription 85
3.3.3 Vowels 87
3·3·4 Consonants 93
3.4 Acoustic phonetics 98
3.5 Plurisegmental features 101
3.5. I The continuum of articulation 101
3.5.2 Glottal and supraglottal features 102
3·5·3 Stress 103
3.5.4 Pitch 105
3·5.5 Voice quality 107
3.6 Phonetics in linguistics 110
Bibliography for Chapter 3 II I
Notes to Chapter 3 112
CONTENTS VII

4 Phonology
4. I Speech and writing 114
4.2 Narrow and broad transcription: phonetics and
phonology 118
4.3 The phoneme theory 121
4.3 . 1 The phonemic principle, phonemics 121
4.3 . 2 Segmental phonemes 122
4·3·3 Phonemic analysis of length and stress 126
4·3-4 The syllable 129
4·3 ·5 Tone phonemes 134
4.3 .6 Intonation 136
4·3 ·7 Distinctive features 139
4.4 Further developments 144
4.4. 1 Classical phoneme theory 144
4.4. 2 Juncture phonemes 145
4·4·3 Prosodic phonology 149
4·4·4 Generative phonology 159
4·4 ·5 Natural generative phonology 162
4.4.6 Rule ordering 163
4·4 ·7 Autosegmental and metrical
phonology 164
Bibliography for Chapter 4 167
Notes to Chapter 4 170
5 Grammar: grammatical elements
5. I Preliminary questions 177
5. I. I Uses of the term 'grammar' 177
5·1.2 Formal grammar 179
5·1.3 The basic units of grammar 181
5.2 The sentence 182
5.3 The word 184
5.3. 1 Grammatical criteria of word status 184
5.3. 2 Phonological markers of the word
unit 188
5·3·3 Variant word forms 191
5.4 The morpheme 192
5.4. 1 The morpheme as the minimal
grammatical unit 192
5.4. 2 Morpheme variants (allomorphs) 193
5·4 ·3 Bound and free morphemes: root and
affix 196
5.5 The semantic status of morphemes 202
Bibliography for Chapters 5 and 6 203
Notes to Chapter 5 206
viii CONTENTS

6 Grammar: grammatical classes, structures, and

categories
6. I Syntactic relations 208
6.2 Word classes 210
6.3 Immediate constituents 215
6.3.1 General principles : basic syntactic
structures 21 5
6.3 .2 Endocentric and exocentric: subordinate
and coordinate 219
6·3·3 Word order and syntactic structure 224
6·3·4 Cross-cutting of immediate constituents
and word boundaries 226
6.3.5 Comparison with traditional practice 227
6.4 Grammatical categories 227
6.4.1 Number, gender, case 227
6-4. 2 Concord and government 231
6-4·3 Subject and object 235
6·4·4 Morphology in relation to syntax 237
6·4·5 Inflection and derivation 240
6.4.6 Grammatical functions of stress and
pitch features 244
6·4·7 Morpheme and category 246
6.5 Subclasses , irregularities, and economy 247
6.6 Grammatical semantics 253
6.6.1 Semantic correlations 253
6.6.2 Meanings of grammatical categories 255
6.6·3 Class meanings and structural meanings 264
6.6·4 Methodological implications 267
Notes to Chapter 6 268

7 Current linguistic theory

7. I Theory formation 274
7. I. I Linguistic theory and linguistic practice 274
7·1.2 Rival theories 277
7.2 Transformational-generative linguistics (TG) 280
7.2.1 General considerations 280
7. 2.2 Early formulation: Syntactic structures 280
7. 2.3 Later developments: Aspects of the
theory of syntax and after 287
7.2-4 Government and binding 292
7.3 Other current theories 297
7.3. 1 General context 297
7.3. 2 Generalized phrase structure grammar
(GPSG) 298
CONTENTS ix

7.3.3 Relational and functional grammar 300

7.3-4 Dependency grammars 305
7-4 Earlier post-'structuralist' theories 307
7-4. I General context 307
7-4.2 Tagmemics 308
7-4.3 M. A. K. Halliday: systemic grammar 3II
7.4-4 Stratificational linguistics 318
7.5 Postscript 320
Bibliography for Chapter 7 324
Notes to Chapter 7 327

8 Linguistic comparison
8. I Historically orientated comparison of languages
(comparative and historical linguistics) 334
8. I . I The material 334
8.1.2 The Great Vowel Shift in English 342
8.1.3 Semantic changes 343
8. I -4 The Indo -European family 345
8.1.5 Other language families 347
8.1.6 The representation of correspondences 350
8. 1.7 The neogrammarian thesis 352
8.1.8 Loan words 354
8·1.9 Analogy 358
8.1.10 Sound change and generative grammar 360
8. I . I I Historical inferences 361
8.2 Typological comparison 367
8.2. I General principles 367
8.2.2 Phonetic typology 369
8.2.3 Phonological typology 370
8.2.4 Grammatical typology 372
8.2.5 Linguistic typology and linguistic
universals 373
8.2.6 Structural typology 376
8.2.7 Lexical typology 380
8.2.8 Historical change and linguistic typology 382
8.2.9 Summary 385
Bibliography for Chapter 8 386
Notes to Chapter 8 389

9 Wider perspectives
9. I Linguistics, anthropology and sociology 396
9. I . I Linguistics and anthropology 396
9. 1.2 Linguistics and sociology: sociolinguistics 401
9.2 Linguistics and philosophy 404
x CONTENTS

9.3 Linguistics and psychology 408

9.4 Linguistics and language teaching: linguistics
and communications engineering 412
9-4. I Linguistics and language teaching 412
9.4.2 Linguistics and communications
engineering 414
9.5 Linguistics and literature 416
9.6 Outline of the history of linguistic studies in
Western Europe 423
Bibliography for Chapter 9 429
Notes to Chapter 9 432

Index 436
Preface to first edition

An apology is perhaps desirable for the appearance of a book

purporting to survey the whole range of general linguistic studies.
In a period of increasing specialization, experts in several
branches of linguistics are likely to find that, in their opinion ,
their own speciality is treated scantily, superficially , and with
distortion in emphasis and selection. Indeed, it has been said that
it is now no longer proper or practicable for an introduction to
general linguistics to be attempted by one author, as his own
competence in the different branches now recognized must be
very unequal.
If this were true, it would be a great pity. The various
approaches to language accepted as falling within linguistics are
so accepted by virtue of some unifying theme or contribution to
an integrated body of knowledge. Students are surely entitled to
read, and teachers should be able to write, textbooks which take
into account recent developments in the subject, as far as they
may be made available to beginners, and attempt to show these
in relation to its continuing course and progress as part of a set
of studies sharing in common more than a mere title.
My intention in writing this book has been to produce an
introduction to linguistics as an academic subject, that will be
comprehensible and useful to the student entering on the study
of linguistics at a university in work for a first degree or a post-
graduate degree or diploma, and at the same time will serve to
present the subject in outline to the intelligent general reader as
one that is both important and interesting in its own right.
Where controversy still surrounds aspects of the subject
encountered in the early stages of a student's acquaintance with
it, I have not tried to hide this or to suggest that there is one road
xii PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

to salvation alone worthy of serious attention. Nothing is more

pathetic than the dogmatic rejection of all approaches but one
to language (or anything else) by a person who has not troubled
himself even to consider the arguments in favour of others.
The writer of an introductory textbook has a further consider-
ation to bear in mind. No branch of a living and developing
subject stands still. In linguistics, outlooks, theories, and
procedures are constantly being revised, and new methods
appearing. Such changes, in so far as they represent or promise
progress, are to be welcomed, but they inevitably alter in some
degree the state of the subject during the unavoidable lapse of
time between the writing of the book and its publication; and
further changes must be expected in the future. Some experi-
enced readers and teachers may well feel , as a result, that certain
matters are given greater emphasis than they now merit as the
expense of newer and more significant topics and viewpoints.
In a book such as this, there is little or nothing original, except
perhaps the choice of topics and their arrangement; nor should
there be . I shall be well satisfied if, after reading it, people are
both enabled and encouraged to go further into the subject,
undertake further reading, and perhaps to specialize in one
branch of linguistics or another, after achieving an adequate
understanding and picture of the subject as a whole.
In writing an introductory account of linguistics, one is made
very conscious of the debt owed to one's predecessors and
contemporaries. Anyone engaged in linguistics in Great Britain
lies greatly in debt to the late Professors J. R. Firth and Daniel
Jones, who between them did more than any others to establish
the subject in this country and to determine the course of its
development. To Professor Firth, my own teacher during the
eight years between my joining him at the School of Oriental and
African Studies in the University of London and his retirement
from the Chair of General Linguistics in that university, lowe
the main directions of my work in the study of language, both
in teaching and research. Equally, no one engaged in general
linguistics anywhere in the world can forget or treat lightly the
enormous debt owed to American scholarship in this field.
Without such international figures as Sapir and Bloomfield it is
doubtful if linguistics would have made anything like the progress
it has made, or achieved the academic recognition it enjoys the
world over. Any serious student of the subject must become
quickly aware of the great part American scholars in linguistics
have played and are now playing in all its branches. On the
continent of Europe, de Saussure, Trubetzkoy, Meillet, and
PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION xiii

Hjelmslev, to mention only four names, have been responsible

for contributions to linguistic theory and method that are now
indispensable components of present-day linguistic scholarship.
I hope that in the form this book has taken I have discharged in
some measure my debt to my predecessors and contemporaries.
If I have failed, the fault is mine, not theirs.
More specifically, I am indeed grateful to successive classes of
students whom I have taught in the past fifteen years. Much of
what I have written here has arisen in the preparation, delivery,
and revision of lecture notes and tutorial material. Some points
were first brought clearly to my attention by the work of students
themselves. To Professor C. E. Bazell, Professor of General
Linguistics in the University of London, and to my other
colleagues in the university, past and present, lowe the stimulus
of constant discussion, argument, and collaboration. Professor
N. C. Scott, Professor F. R . Palmer, and Dr, now Professor, J.
Lyons were kind enough to read through a draft of this book.
Each made many helpful and important suggestions, not least in
trying to save me from a number of inclarities, inaccuracies, and
downright absurdities. I hope I have made proper use of their
comments; where I have not, and for all errors and imperfections
remaining, I am, of course, wholly responsible. To all those who,
wittingly or unwittingly, have helped and encouraged me in the
production of this book, I offer my sincere thanks.

University of London RHR

1964
Preface to second edition

That a new edition of a textbook should be in demand some six

years after its first publication is, naturally enough, gratifying to
the author. But it is no less apparent that, in a subject developing
as rapidly and vigorously as linguistics is today, more radical
alterations are required than the mere correction of errors and
the clarification of points hitherto left in obscurity, if the book
is to continue in usefulness .
As regards unresolved controversies and competing views on
the theoretical understanding and the analysis of language, on
which readers were warned in the preface to the first edition, the
passing of years has not diminished this characteristic of current
linguistics, although older disputes now arouse less heat as the
newer ones attract more attention.
I have made an attempt in the sections at the end of Chapter
7 to indicate the main lines on which linguistic theory and
linguistic practice seem to be moving in Europe and America
today . No one should regard these sections as substitutes for the
further reading indicated in the relevant notes, if one wants to
gain a real understanding of current developments; but I hope
that what I have written will serve as an entry and a guide to the
main contemporary 'growth points' in the subject.
On the other hand I have left the account of phonemic phon-
ology and descriptive grammar of the 'Bloomfieldian' period
much as it was, because, although these have been under attack
from a number of directions, a good deal of what is taken for
granted in the way of technical terminology and linguistic
concepts was brought into being by linguists working in this
tradition (itself by no means dead), and the rigour that was
displayed by much of the best in this tradition can serve as an
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xv

inspiration and an example to those who may, nonetheless,

prefer alternative approaches. Moreover, all those scholars who
are responsible for valuable progress in contemporary develop-
ments were themselves first masters of 'Bloomfieldian' linguistics
and started from a full understanding of what was aimed at and
achieved in this stage of linguistics. I remain convinced that the
careful study of the linguistics of the 1940S and 1950S is still the
proper foundation for scholarly comprehension of the subject
today .
Several reviewers of earlier printings of this book were good
enough to make detailed and helpful suggestions for improve-
ments, and I have tried to take these into account and make use
of them . Once again it is one of the pleasures of academic life
to record the help unstintingly given by colleagues whom I have
consulted, drawing on their specialist knowledge and on their
experience in using this book, along with others, in tutorial work
with students. In this respect I am particularly grateful to Dr
Theodora Bynon, Professor M. A. K. Halliday, Dr N. V. Smith,
and Mrs Natalie Waterson. The deficiencies that will no doubt
become apparent are fewer and less glaring, thanks to their co-
operation, and the reader as well as the author will be indebted
to them.

University of London RHR

1970
Preface to third edition

In preparing the third edition I have revised the content of this

book to a considerable extent in the endeavour to bring it up to
date as regards current developments in linguistic theory and
practice, so far as these can be made readily available to begin-
ners . In making these revisions I have again benefited from the
helpful advice from my colleagues, and particularly from Dr
D. C. Bennett, Dr Theodora Bynon, Dr R . J. Hayward, Dr
N. V. Smith and Mrs Natalie Waterson, as well as from students
and correspondents, who have drawn my attention to various
omissions and infelicities in previous editions.
Although I have carried out some considerable reordering and
reworking in the presentation of the elements of linguistics as I
understand them, the basic balance of the book remains much
as it was. That is to say, 'classical' phonemic phonology and
'structuralist' grammar of the Bloomfieldian era are still
explained to the reader in some details as the proper groundwork
on which to build an appreciation and understanding of contem-
porary theories and methods. Some readers may consider that
too much space is given to 'structuralist' linguistics and that an
introductory textbook is no longer the place for these topics . For
such readers there are several excellent textbooks available, but
in my opinion one can best evaluate the merits and the objectives
of linguistic work today if one is familiar with the theoretical
background within which many of the linguists who are now most
influential themselves grew up, and if one has a firm grasp on the
basic concepts with which any linguistic description and analysis
must be concerned.
I have also tried to maintain a broad coverage of the different
topics involved in any comprehensive account of general linguis-
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION xvii

tics as an academic subject. For further details in these topics the

reader must consult the specialist literature, to some of which
attention is drawn in the bibliographies and notes that follow
each chapter. But I consider it quite essential for the student of
linguistics to acquire as soon as possible an awareness of just how
extensive the study of human language must be and how many
different paths of enquiry it opens before him, paths that he
should at least recognize, even though he may not follow them
all through, if he is to comprehend properly the richness of this
field of knowledge upon which he is entering.

University of London RHR

1979
Preface to fourth edition

In preparing this edition of my General Linguistics I have endeav-

oured to maintain the structure and the purpose of earlier
editions while taking proper notice of recent and current devel-
opments in linguistics that have come to prominence since the
third edition .
I remain in the conviction that readers of an introduction to
a subject as rich and as rewarding as general linguistics, whether
they be university students or interested memb ers of the lay
public , need and deserve a survey of the subject as a whole in
its various branches and aspects , in so far as these can be made
reasonably accessible in a single textbook. Perhaps this may now
be a vain hope. If this is the case, I am sorry , since linguistics
is, for all its diversity, a basic unity as the quest for an under-
standing of the structure, the history, and the working of human
language.
Teachers are usually research workers in their own speciali-
zations, and naturally they are anxious to lead their students and
their classes to the 'frontiers of knowledge' where they them-
selves are engaged. They are right in such an objective; exciting
research leads to exciting teaching, and the best of our students
should be acquainted early in their courses with the 'growth
points ' of their subject. But there is a danger here ; one can only
tackle with understanding current advances and specialties
against a firm command of basic principles, concepts, and
methods. Linguistics is not a science that 'destroys its past' (even
if any science can be said to do this) , and much of its subject
matter has been well set out in books and articles published
earlier in this century that have now achieved something of the
status of classics in the discipline. While I hope I have drawn
PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION xix

attention in the chapter bibliographies to important current and

contemporary literature for further reading by advanced students
and intending specialists, I have not hesitated to retain references
to earlier writings where these appear to me to present basic
information accurately, adequately, and accessibly.
An attractive television advertisement for a brand of beer
claims that it 'refreshes the parts that other beers cannot reach'.
I would like to express the reverse hope that this book reaches
those parts that are sometimes neglected or passed over too
briefly by some other introductory textbooks. More seriously, I
am wholly in sympathy with the thoughts of a reviewer of a
recent such textbook (Language 58 (1982), 896): 'It is easy for
linguists of different theoretical persuasions to overlook the
extent of their common ground To teach a 'profession-
alist' introductory course without first ensuring that some of the
thickets of misconception are cleared away is like teaching a
course on immunology to a population that does not yet believe
in the germ theory of disease' .
In planning and preparing this edition, as with previous
editions , I am very conscious of the help that my colleagues have
given me, whether in seminars when I was trying out my ideas ,
in casual conversations, or in direct consultations. In particular
I must thank Dr Geoffrey Horrocks for reading drafts of chap-
ters 5, 6, and 7 and making many helpful suggestions, as well as
saving me from errors in areas about which he knows far more
than I do. Dr Katrina Hayward was no less generous in reading
a draft of chapter 8 and giving me the benefit of her expert
knowledge in this field. To Professor Theodora Bynon, my
successor as Head of the Department of Phonetics and Linguis-
tics, lowe much for her constant encouragement to me to
continue my academic work in the Department, and for her
patience in responding to my repeated questions about what
might be acceptable German, often at times when she was at her
busiest as Head of Department. To all these friends and
colleagues I offer my sincere thanks; this book is less imperfect
for their help . Where obduracy, inattention , or incomprehension
may have led me to neglect their proffered advice, sit venia soli
mihi.

School of Oriental and African Studies, R. H . Robins

University of London
1988
System of reference

Bibliographies
The chapters are followed by bibliographical lists of books and
articles relevant to the topics discussed in them. These are
numbered serially, and referred to in the chapter notes by
author's surname and number; numbers following the serial
number refer to pages in the work concerned. Thus '34, II '
means 'page I I of number 34'.
The bibliographies to each chapter are independent of each
other, relevant works being listed in more than one, where
necessary. To avoid excessive overlapping the bibliographies of
Chapters 5 and 6 are combined into one , appearing at the end
of Chapter 5. After Chapter I a general bibliography of elemen-
tary and introductory works on linguistics is given, with some
brief comments.
None of the bibliographies is intended to be anything like
exhaustive; they are designed simply to serve as a guide for
further reading on the various aspects of general linguistics.

Notes
In the notes to each chapter reference is made to books and
art icles which carry further the discussion of points made in the
preceding chapter, set out alternative views, provide additional
information justifying statements already made (particularly on
languages not widely studied), or appear in some other way to
be relevant.
In this edition the notes are numbered serially through each
chapter, and superscript number appear in the text; but the
SYSTEM OF REFERENCE xxi

intention is that the beginner and general reader should be able

to get a picture of the subject as a whole without the need to look
at the notes at all. They are directed more towards the student
who knows something of the subject already and wants to check
any data to which reference has been made or to follow up in
more detail questions arising from what he has read.
Transcriptions and abbreviations

Linguistic material cited in this book in the examples is generally

represented as follows:
English words and sentences are written in the normal orthog-
raphy, followed by a reading tran sciption where necessary .
Words and sentences from most other languages that have a
roman orthography are cited in this, followed, from Chapter 3
(Phonetics) onwards, by a reading transcription.
Languages without a recognized orthography and a few that
have one but are little known , together with languages written
in orthographies other than roman, are cited in reading transcrip-
tions alone. The only exception to this is that Ancient (Classical)
Greek words and sentences are given in the Greek script
followed by the reading transcription.
Reading transcriptions are enclosed in slant lines / . . . j.
The reading transcription for English is the same as the one
used by D. Jones in his Outline of English Phonetics and his
English Pronouncing Dictionary (London, 1948). In other living
languages the transcriptions are broad transciptions, on phonemic
lines. They are not necessarily strictly phonemic transcriptions;
in some of the languages cited, an agreed phonemic analysis
covering all the relevant features has still to be achieved, particu-
larly in such features as stress . Sometimes deviations in the direc-
tion of narrower transcription are made if it is felt that a reader
without a knowledge of the language will be helped to realize
something of the sound of the words more readily thereby (thus
in the German examples the glottal stop [?] occurring initially in
words like arm /?arm/ poor, and medially in some compound
words, though not usually reckoned a separate phoneme, is tran-
TRANSCRIPTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS xxiii

scribed). The terms broad transcription and narrow transcription

are explained in 4.2.
The transcription of Ancient Greek is a transliteration, since
in dealing with a dead language the phonetic information
required as the basis of an adequate transcription is not ordinarily
available ; this transliteration follows the method set out by A.
Martinet, 'A project of transliteration of Classical Greek', Word
9 (1953), 152-61, except that u is transcribed with Iyl not [u],
The transcription of Latin is the same as the traditional spelling
except that all long vowels are marked as long , and this is done
with the length sign: , not the macron". It is to be noted that
Latin Icl = [k] throughout. The transcription of modern German
is based on W. Victor's Deutsches Ausspracheworterbuch,
Leipzig, 1912.
It is hoped that these conventions will assist the reader un-
familiar with any of the languages from which examples are taken,
without inconveniencing or annoying those already enjoying
some acquaintance with them .
Transcriptions narrower than the reading transcriptions are
printed, where necessary, between square brackets [.. .].

Abbrevations
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies
IJAL International Journal of American Linguistics
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
Lang Language
Sociol rev Sociological Review
TCLC Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague
TeLP Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague
TPS Transactions of the Philological Society
This page intentionally lefi blank
Chapter 1

General linguistics:
the scope of the subject

1.1 General linguistics as the study of language

I.I. I Language and languages
General linguistics may be defined as the science of language. As
with other branches of knowledge and scientific study , such a
definition involves the subject in certain relations with other
disciplines and sciences outside itself, and in subdivision into
different branches of the subject comprised within it. At the
outset something must be said under both these headings, but it
should be made clear that in these, as in several other important
topics which must be examined even in an introductory account,
the opinions of scholars differ in considerable respects.
It must be realized that a subject like general linguistics, in
common with most other subjects of systematic study, is not
static . Viewpoints, including some of quite fundamental import-
ance, may change or receive different degrees of emphasis in the
course of years . No book can honestly pretend to deal with the
subject in a way that will both be accepted in all respects by every
recognized scholar in the field and remain unaltered for all time.
In this book, some account is taken of major unresolved contro-
versies, and the reader must be prepared for others to arise.
In the first place it is desirable to consider the difference
between general linguistics as the science or scientific study of
language and the study of individual languages. This latter study
is, indeed, more familiar to the majority of people, and has
played a major part in all stages of education in many parts of
the world for some time; the study of linguistics, on the other
hand, is, at least in its present form, a relative newcomer in the
field of scholarship, though in the present century and particu-
larly in the past three decades it has shown marked growth in the
2 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

numbers of its students and teachers in the universities of Great

Britain, continental Europe, the United States, the USSR, and
several of the newly developing countries of the rest of the world .
General linguistics is concerned with human language as a
universal and recognizable part of human behaviour and of the
human faculties, perhaps one of the most essential to human life
as we know it, and one of the most far-reaching of human capa-
bilities in relation to the whole span of mankind's achievements.
In so far as all languages share some features in common,
whether in pronunciations, grammatical organization, or express-
ive power , one may speak of human language as an abstract set
of characteristics, perhaps reflecting part of the biologically inher-
ited structure of the human mind or brain. This is often referred
to under such headings as universal grammar, linguistic univer-
sals, and universals of language . The extent to which such
universal features are to be recognized or assumed as underlying
all the known languages of the world is in part a matter of debate
(7.2.3-4 PP 289, 292-4). Human language in this sense is
certainly the province of the linguist, but it must be repeated that
the only evidence we have for its recognition and study comes
from the individual actual languages of the world and from their
speakers and writers, past and present. There are at least three
thousand different languages in the world, leaving aside dialect
divisions within languages (2.2), many of them still uncounted
and unstudied. The general linguist, in the sense of the specialist
or the student concerned with general linguistics, is not as such
involved with anyone or more of them to a greater extent than
with any others. 1 As an impracticable ideal he would know some-
thing about every language ; that is, of course, impossible, and
in practice most linguists concentrate on a limited number of
languages including their own native languages, the number of
languages studied, and the depth of knowledge acquired of each,
varying by personal factors from one linguist to another. Thus
it has been pointed out that the linguist as here defined and as
understood in the context of general linguistics must be
distinguished from the sense of the word linguist as often used
by the public, to refer to someone who necessarily has a practical
knowledge and command of a number of foreign languages.? It
is, of course , desirable that the linguist should know quite a lot
about some languages, and the more languages (especially those
representing types different from his own and from each other)
with which he has some acquaintance, the better he is equipped
for his subject.
Language in all its forms and manifestations, that is all the
GENERAL LINGUISTICS AS THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 3
languages of the world and all the different uses to which in the
various circumstances of mankind they are put, constitutes the
field of the linguist. He seeks a scientific understanding of the
place of language in human life, and of the ways in which it is
organized to fulfil the needs it serves and the functions it
performs. Several of the subjects he has within his purview and
several of the questions to which he seeks answers correspond
to long-established divisions of the study of foreign languages and
of the institutionalized study of one's own language. Pronunci-
ation (phonetics) and grammar are familiar enough, and some
study of meaning and of the way in which meanings are dis-
coverable and statable is presupposed in the compilation and use of
any dictionary or vocabulary book. It is, in fact , partly as a result
both of the search for improvements in the techniques of such
indispensable aids to the study of foreign languages, and of ques-
tions arising on the theoretical basis of their production, that
people have been led to the investigation of the properties and
characteristics of language as such. Part of the justification of
general linguistics lies in its undertaking the examination of the
theory lying behind the practice of the language teacher and the
language learner. The practical teaching of languages will, for
obvious reasons , be largely confined to languages possessing a
world-renowned literature or serving considerable numbers of
speakers either as a first (native) language or as an acquired
second language for the purposes of trade, education, etc (such
as English in large areas of the British Commonwealth and else-
where, Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America,
Russian over much of the Asiatic area of the Soviet Union, and
Latin in medieval Europe). But it is an article of faith for the
linguist that any language , no matter what the level of civilization
reached by its speakers, how many speakers make use of it, or
what area of the world they occupy, is a valuable and worthy
object of study, able to teach him something more about
language in general and the theoretical and practical consider-
ations involved in the study of language.
It is well to reflect on the great diversity of the languages of
the world. Some of the ways in which different languages may
be compared are discussed in Chapter 8; here one may notice
that language, and linguistics, the science of language, embrace
equally living languages , that is languages still used today as
means of communication, and dead languages , that is languages
like Ancient Greek or Old English (Anglo-Saxon) now no more
spoken but known from written records (manuscripts, printed
texts , or inscriptions) . Among the living languages the linguist
4 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

finds his material both in the languages of worldwide use and

with long literary traditions as the vehicles of civilization, and
languages devoid of writing, unknown outside their own
community, except to the linguist, and (as is the position of many
North and South American and native Australian tongues)
spoken perhaps by less than a hundred speakers and so in peril
of extinction before the spread of some extensively used
language.

1.1.2 Descriptive, historical, and comparative linguistics

General linguistics includes a number of related subjects involved
in the study of language as understood in the preceding para-
graphs, and each may be considered from the point of view both
of linguistic theory and of its actual operations or procedures.
The most important and immediate subdivisions of the subject
are descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and comparative
linguistics.
Descriptive linguistics, as its title suggests, is concerned with
the description and analysis of the ways in which a language
operates and is used by a given set of speakers at a given time .
This time may be the present, and in the case of languages as yet
unwritten or only recently given written form it will inevitably be
the present, as there is no other way of knowing any earlier
stages of them, though there are methods by which certain facts
about such earlier stages may be inferred (8. I). The time may
equally well be the past, where adequate written records are
available, as in the case of the so-called dead languages like
Hittite and (except in a few special circumstances) Latin, and in
the case of earlier stages of languages now spoken in their current
forms (eg Old French and Old English). What is more important
is that the descriptive study of a language, and of any part of a
language, present or past, is concerned with that language at the
period involved and not, as a descriptive study, with what may
have preceded it or may follow it. However, the many variant
forms of pronunciation, grammar, and lexical content that the
descriptive linguist records and describes in a language at a given
time may mark the sources of subsequent historical changes
ultimately having far-reaching effects (p 339) .
.Descriptive linguistics depends all the time on the minute and
careful observation and recording of the ways in which each
language is constructed and used, in phonetics, grammar, and
the expression of meanings. It has been a weakness of many
earlier and some modern grammars of less known languages
rather unimaginatively to try to portray them in terms taken
GENERAL LINGUISTICS AS THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE 5

directly from existing grammars of familiar and prestigious

languages such as English and Latin.
Descriptive linguistics is often regarded as the major part of
general linguistics. Be that as it may, it is certainly the funda-
mental aspect of the study of language, as it underlies and is
presupposed (or ought to be presupposed) by the other two
subdivisions, historical linguistics and comparative linguistics.
Historical linguistics is the study of the developments in
languages in the course of time, of the ways in which languages
change from period to period, and of the causes and results of
such changes, both outside the languages and within them. This
sort of study, whether undertaken in general terms or concen-
trated on a particular language area (eg English from Old English
to the present day), must properly be based on at least partial
descriptions of two or more stages of the continuous language
series being treated.
The terms synchronic and diachronic are in general use to
distinguish respectively linguistic statements describing a stage of
a language as a self-contained means of communication, at a
given time, during which it is arbitrarily assumed that no changes
are taking place, and statements relating to the changes that take
place in languages during the passage of years.?
Historical linguistics might from one point of view be regarded
as a special case of comparative linguistics, the third subdivision
of general linguistics. In comparative linguistics one is concerned
with comparing from one or more points of view (and the
possibilities of this are very wide) two or more different
languages, and, more generally, with the theory and techniques
applicable to such comparisons. In historical linguistics the
comparison is limited to languages which may be regarded as
successive stages of the speech of a continuing speech community
differing from one period to another as the result of the cumu-
lative effects of gradual changes, for the most part imperceptible
within a single generation.
As will be seen in more detail in Chapter 8, comparative linguis-
tics is principally divided into comparison made with a view to
inferring historical relationships among particular languages, and
comparison based on resemblances of features between different
languages without any historical considerations being involved.
In Europe and America historical linguistics and historically
orientated comparative linguistics played a dominant role in
linguistic studies during the nineteenth century, for reasons of
academic history (8. I. I), rather antedating general linguistics in
recognition as university subjects. These studies are familiar
6 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

under the title of 'comparative philology' in English, and in some

universities what are in fact general linguistic studies were until
recently carried on and administered under this name.

1.1.3 The term 'philology'

In connection with the study of language the term philology is in
frequent use. In some ways this is unfortunate, as the word and
its equivalents in some European languages (French philologie,
German Philologie) are understood and used in rather different
senses."
In British usage philology is generally equivalent to compara-
tive philology, an older and still quite common term for what
linguists technically refer to as comparative and historical linguis-
tics (8.1.1) . In German, however, Philologie refers more to the
scholarly study of literary texts, especially those of the ancient
Greco-Roman world, and more generally to the study of culture
and civilization through literary documents, comparative phil-
ology in the British sense being designated Vergleichende Sprach-
wissenschaft. This meaning of Philologie is matched by similar
uses of comparable words in other European languages, and in
general with the use of philology in American learned circles. It
may be held that in this usage the word is a convenient term to
employ with reference to the links between linguistics considered
as a science and the aesthetic and humanistic study of literature ,
and to the field wherein the historian of different aspects of a
culture draws on the findings of the linguist in the decipherment
of texts and inscriptions and in establishment of reliable versions
of manuscripts and other documents as materials that provide
him with part of his evidence. The relations of linguistics with
philology in this last sense are very close and allow of consider-
able overlapping.

1.2 Linguistics as a science

1.2.1 Implications of the term 'science'
The term science has been used in the definition of general
linguistics. It may be understood in two ways. In the widest terms
it refers to the fact that the study of language in general and of
languages in particular, as described in outline above, is
considered worthy of scholarly attention and that a systematic
body of facts and theory is built up around it. In more specific
and particular terms it indicates the attitude taken by the linguist
today towards his subject, and in this perhaps it marks a definite
characteristic of twentieth-century linguistics.
LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE 7
In saying that linguistics is a science in the stricter sense, one
is saying that it deals with a specific body of material, namely
spoken and written language, and that it proceeds by operations
that can be publicly communicated and described, and justified
by reference to statable principles and to a theory capable of
formulation. Its purpose in this proceeding is the analysis of the
material and the making of general statements that summarize,
and as far as possible relate to rules and regularities, the infinite
variety of phenomena (utterances in speech or writing) that fall
within its scope. In its operations and statements it is guided by
three canons of science :
[i] Exhaustiveness, the adequate treatment of all the relevant
material;
[ii] Consistency, the absence of contradiction between different
parts of the total statement ; and, within the limits imposed
by the two preceding principles,
[iii] Economy , whereby, other things being equal, a shorter
statement or analysis employing fewer terms is to be prefer-
red to one that is longer or more involved. This is some-
times referred to as the 'capturing of generalizations' .
One can make the position of linguistics within the sciences
more precise . It is an empirically based science , in that its
subject-matter is observable with the senses, speech as heard, the
movements of the vocal organs as seen directly or with the aid
of instruments (3. I, 3.2), the sensations of speaking as perceived
by speakers, and writing as seen and read. No linguist would
disown empiricism in linguistics, but there is today lively
discussion on the degree of empiricism that should be embodied
in a linguistic theory (cp 7. I) . Linguistics is also one of the social
sciences , in that the phenomena forming its subject-matter are
part of the behaviour of men and women in society , in interaction
with their fellows. This last statement is not invalidated by the
existence of purely secondary uses of language by persons alone
and out of earshot of others, in monologue ('talking to oneself'),
ejaculations of joy, terror, or annoyance, addressing animals, and
the like; the essence of language and the vast majority of its uses
involve two or more persons in social intercourse.
Linguistic science and the scientific study of language occupy
a very special place among the sciences, in that the linguist is
simultaneously the observer of language and of languages and the
producer and evaluator of at least one language, his own mother
tongue . This means that the linguist is free to adopt either the
position of the 'external' observer of data, supplied by himself
8 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

or by others in speech or writing, or the position of an 'internal'

analyst of what is involved in being a speaker-hearer, in
'knowing a language'.
From the 'externalist' point of view the linguist treats his
material as any other scientist does, observing, classifying,
seeking underlying regularities, constructing hypotheses to be
tested against further data in order to validate descriptions
already made. This has been the basis of the grammars of foreign
languages with which we are familiar, even though in many cases
the writers have not explicitly stated their position. Linguistics
in this sense is on a par with other sciences, such as physics,
botany, or chemistry, where the scientist is necessarily viewing
his material from the outside . All the phenomena with which he
is dealing are potentially accessible to any and every other
observer on the same basis as they are to him.
From the 'internalist' viewpoint the scientist is observing
himself and asking what is involved, not just in what he says and
writes , but in his brain, whereby he can produce and understand
a limitless number of sentences of his own language. It is sensible
to ask what is meant by 'He speaks Japanese, or English , or
Swahili' when the person is not in fact speaking any of these
languages at a particular time. In this interpretation 'A linguistic
description of a natural language [ie somebody's mother tongue]
is an attempt to reveal the nature of a fluent speaker's mastery
of that language. ,5 The linguist as speaker-hearer of the language
he is studying or the language which he knows well has access,
not only to material that he can produce for himself without
waiting until it turns up in other people's utterances, but also to
essentially personal reactions and judgments on such matters as
acceptability, what is well formed or correct (in contradistinction
to mistakes, slips of the tongue, or the efforts of a non-native
speaker), elegance, clarity and ambiguity , equivalence in
meaning, implications and presuppositions (1.4.3) , and so on .
Such data are of course equally available to other speakers of the
language , but in each person's case they are private phenomena
not directly or publicly observable like the linguistic data referred
to in the preceding paragraph.
To a limited extent linguists share their double orientation with
the other sciences of human kind, such as general psychology, but
in linguistics it is probably carried further than in any other
descriptive science.
Linguists have tended to favour one standpoint over the other
at different times, or even at the same time among contempor-
aries. In this century the contrast has been most markedly associ-
LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE 9

ated with the followers of Bloomfield , insisting on a strictly

'external' viewpoint, and the followers of Chomsky, concerned
above all with the nature of linguistic knowledge , 'competence'
in a language such as one's own, and treating linguistics as a
branch of cognitive psychology .6 Both groups claim that they
have the interests of linguistics as a science at heart; and wher-
ever one's personal preferences or specific abilities may lie, it is
in the interest of linguistic studies as a whole that language
should be studied, investigated, and analysed from both view-
points. This subject will be considered further in Chapter 7.
There is one inference that might be made from the assertion
that linguistics is a science, and it must be disclaimed at once.
This is that because linguistics is a science, it is necessarily not
one of the humanities or a humane discipline , and that in conse-
quence linguistics is in some way hostile to the study of literature
and the linguistic study of language inhibits its literary enjoyment
and the pleasures that come of literary appreciation. The relations
of ,linguistic studies and literary studies will be examined more
closely in a subsequent chapter (9.5) ; but is should be made clear
at once that nothing in linguistic science is such as to interfere
with the analysis and appreciation of literary values in what is
read or written. Indeed the reverse may be true, and if a linguist
finds himself insensitive to the music of poetry, the appeal of
oratory , or the flow of an unfolding story , he has only himself,
and not his subject, to blame.
In the present educational situation disquiet has been
expressed about the gulf that has widened between what are
loosely called the arts and sciences, with the implied suggestion
that scholars, and indeed the educated public in general, must
either be 'literate', somewhat despising the sciences as pedestrian
and illiberal , or, as it has been termed , 'numerate ' , considering
the humanities and what are traditionally regarded as the main-
stays of a liberal education to be largely subjective , irrelevant,
and marred by imprecision. In any much needed rapprochement
between scientific studies and what are called humane studies,
linguistics, along with some of the other disciplines devoted to
the ways of mankind, may have an important part to play. Indeed
among all branches of knowledge linguistics is in a special
position. Science, like all other publicly shared knowledge,
demands the use of language to talk about its particular subject,
and is a refinement and elaboration of our general habit of
talking about the world in which we live. Linguistics differs from
other studies in that it both uses language and has language as
its subject-matter. For this reason among others linguistics may
10 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

well come to occupy a key place in the studies embodied in

higher education.

1.2.2 Practical applications

From what has been said about linguistics as a science, it should
be clear that it is self-justifying as an academic subject. Language
and the means whereby the forms of language and the working
of language may be analysed and described are themselves
regarded as proper subjects of academic study, without any
further consequences being involved. Nevertheless, certain
consequential and important by-products do result from linguistic
work . One may consider a few examples. The greater one's
understanding of language in general, the better one may expect
to be able to set about the task of teaching foreign languages,
both in their general aspects and with an eye to the many special-
ized needs for the knowledge of second languages in limited
ranges of activities that the modern world seems increasingly to
require. This covers both the actual techniques of teaching and
the production of textbooks; textbooks differ from pure descrip-
tions of languages in that their aim is to impart particular skills
in speaking and understanding and in reading and writing (or in
both) , in a given language on the part of speakers of some other
language. Such books are normative rather than simply descrip-
tive; they set a standard, by some means or other, of what is
correct and serve to impart a knowledge of it and foster famili-
arity with it.
Linguistic studies are already being applied to the practical
problems of automatic or machine translation and the exploi-
tation of statistical techniques connected with the use of
language. The communications engineer is helped by some
knowledge of the basic composition of the language signals whose
transmission and reception are his responsibility. An under-
standing of the power language can exert among people and of
different ways in which this power may be exploited and directed
has proved to be a potent weapon in the hands of those who with
the aid of what have come to be called 'mass media' are engaged
in moulding opinions, disseminating views, and exercising influ-
ence on their fellows, whether politically, commercially, or
socially; the fact that such activities may often be regarded as
undesirable and even disastrous is, of course, to be recognized ;
by-products are not necessarily always beneficial. In another
sphere of activity linguistic knowledge is a powerful aid in the
remedial treatments known as speech therapy, for patients whose
speech mechanisms, through injury or defect, are damaged or
THE RANGE OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS I I

imperfect. The applications of linguistics to other activities

serving particular purposes in the world are collectiv ely known
as applied linguistics and are considered further in 9.4.
It is important to recognize the by-products that may come
from linguistic studies; but linguists themselves need not engage
in applied linguistics . Their subject is of sufficient interest and
significance in the world to maintain itself in its own right , just
as is botany without reference to horticulture, and as is ento-
mology without reference to the control of insect -borne disease
or crop pests. The linguist is justified in his work in so far as he
is successful in making human beings more aware of one essential
aspect of their humanity , and , in the words of a contemporary ,
in 'presenting the fundamental insights about language to which
every well educated person should be exposed '. 7

1.3 The range of general linguistics

1.3.1 Levels of analysis
Language is immensely complicated . How complic ated one
discovers in the process of learning a foreign language; and the
ability of all normal persons to acquire structural mastery and the
basic vocabulary of their own language in childhood is one of the
many wonders of human kind. " The obviou s compl exity of
langu age makes it unworkable for the linguist to try and describe
it all at once . Language itself, speaking and writing , is a unitary
activity; people speak and write , and understand what is spoken
and writt en in their own language , without necessarily being
awar e of such things as grammar and pronunciation , but merely
reacting unfavourably to the mistakes of a for eigner without
being able to specify in what respects he has tran sgressed on e or
more recognized standards.
Th e linguist , in order the better to mak e scientific state ments
about language and languages, concentrates at anyone time on
different though interrelated aspects of his subject-matter, by
atte nding to different types of features and by applying differ ent
types of criteria (asking himself differ ent sort s of que stion s).
These different and partial approaches have been called levels of
analysis and the statements made about them levels of linguistic
statement. Such relatively familiar terms as phonetics and
gramm ar refer to two such levels. By extension the term level of
language is used to designate those aspects of a language on
which at any time the linguist is focusing his atte ntion.
Ju st as the limits and comprehension of an academic subject
may var y between one scholar or group of scholars and another ,
12 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

SO do the different levels that it is considered profitable to recog-

nize. Even those who agree on the overall range of topics proper
to the linguist's purview may disagree on the number of levels
with which to operate and the criteria to be applied to them. In
an introduction such as this, no more than a general survey can
be given.
One must recognize at the outset and as the basis of any
division of linguistic analysis (or of language) into levels the two
aspects, form and meaning. Speech is purposeful, and form and
meaning are related at least in part as means and end . An
understanding of language in human life requires both an under-
standing of the formal composition of utterances and of their
relations with the rest of the world outside language.

1.3.2 Language and communication

Many definitions of the word language have been attempted and
they are to be found in dictionaries and in some textbooks. One
definition, first set down in 1942 , has enjoyed a wide currency:
'A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of
which a social group cooperates'." This definition covers much
that is important, but in a sense all definitions are, by themselves,
inadequate, since, if they are to be more than trivial and unin-
formative, they must presuppose, as does the one just quoted ,
some general theory of language and of linguistic analysis.
More useful at this point in an elementary book on linguistics
will be some notice of certain salient facts that must be taken into
account in any seriously intended theory of language.
Language is, so far as we know now, species-specific to man .
Every normal human being has acquired one language, his
mother tongue, by late childhood, the basic lexicon, grammar,
and pronunciation within the first ten years of life, apparently
without effort and without the requirement of systematic instruc-
tion, in contrast to the actual teaching or conscious self-teaching
necessarily involved in the attainment of literacy and the mastery
of foreign languages at school. Much that passes among consci-
entious parents as 'teaching a child to speak' really amounts to the
deliberate widening of his vocabulary along with his knowledge of
the world.
The skills involved in speaking, being an acquisition taken for
granted and largely unnoticed in the process, excite no comment
and evoke no admiration; their absence in pathologically defec-
tive persons arouses sympathy. We praise people for particular
and relatively rare abilities that depend on speech, for having a
fine singing voice, for being a stirring preacher, an inspiring
THE RANGE OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS 13

orator, or a good story-teller, and for being able to recite wih

clarity a patter-song of the type written by W. S. Gilbert, an
unnatural exercise that taxes the powers of most otherwise fluent
speakers of a language. But all these accomplishments represent
additional abilities over and above the mastery of one's own first
language.
Conversely, no other members of the animal kingdom have
been shown to possess anything like a human language. Of
course animals communicate, and socially organized animals
cooperate by means of vocal and other forms of communication.
Much study has rightly been devoted to animal communication.
Interestingly , the animal communication system in some respects
nearest to human language (though a very long way off!) is the
so-called language of bees, whereby bees that have been foraging
are able , by certain formalized movements often called 'dancing' ,
to indicate to other bees still in the hive the direction, distance,
and richness of a source of nectar, so that these others can make
straight to it. This system shares with human language the ability
to impart detailed information about matters not directly access-
ible to the senses of those receiving it; but we notice at once that
the medium employed, the 'substance' , as it is sometimes called,
has nothing in common with the spoken medium in which all
human language is primarily expressed .!"
Naturally studies in animal communication have centred on our
nearest kin among the mammals, the primates, and specific
investigations have been made, for example, into the calls of
gibbons in their natural habitat.'! But the area best known and
most exciting to the general public in this type of research has
been the attempts to teach chimpanzees to communicate with
humans by human methods. Of these chimpanzees , Washoe and
Sarah, the subjects of prolonged training and study in America,
are the most famous. Some references to the accessible literature
on them are given in the notes .F Here it must suffice to point
out that attempts to teach chimpanzees actually to speak have
largely failed ; the signs used are in the main visual, involving
gestures and facial movements. With this medium , intercourse
involving information, questions, and requests, together with
responses directly linked to them, and the rudiments of syntactic
structures, has made astonishing progress, far beyond the scope
of the language of bees, for example. But, and this is an
important reservation, bee language developed entirely within
natural communities of bees; chimpanzees have learned their
language only after prolonged association with human beings who
have devoted themselves to teaching them and studying them .
14 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

Such studies tell us much about the latent and inherent poten-
tialities of chimpanzees, but they do not affect the unique
species-specificity of language in mankind.
Human language, unlike every other communication system
known in the animal kingdom, is unrestricted in scope and infi-
nite in extent. Against the severe restrictions placed on the topics
about which bees and even trained chimpanzees can communi-
cate, human beings can , in any language, talk about all the
furniture of earth and heaven known to them and about all
human experience. Languages are adaptable and modifiable
according to the changing needs and conditions of speakers; this
is immediately seen in the easy adaptation of the vocabulary of
English and of other languages to the scientific and industrial
developments, and the concomitant changes in people's lives,
that took place in Europe and North America in the eighteenth,
-nineteenth , and twentieth centuries.
The immense power and range of language have been
perceived in all societies, and the realization of them was, no
doubt, partly responsible for the magical associations felt among
some peoples to belong to certain words relating to things and
events vital to their lives or fearful in their effects. Traces of such
a magical outlook on language are to be seen today in some
familiar attitudes (2.2.1).
For all this flexibility and power, human languages have devel-
oped through the millennia in which mankind has existed on
earth as a separate species through the medium of speech. The
earliest known writing systems do not date back more than about
4,000-5,000 years, a minute distance in the time-scale of human
existence . The elementary physiology of speech will be treated
in Chapter 3; here it need only be pointed out that all human
language and everything in human life that depends on language
rests ultimately on the distinguishable noises that humans are
able to make out of the passage of air through the throat, nose,
and mouth.
Human infants inherit a biologically determined ability to
acquire and use a language, and this inheritance may account for
the universal features found in all known languages and
assumed in the rest; but we do not inherit any particular lan-
guage. A child learns the language of those with whom he is
brought up in infancy and early childhood, whether they be, as
is usually the case, his actual parents or others. There is no
biological preconditioning to acquire English rather than Malay
or Italian rather than Swahili. 13
Human progress is greatly hastened by the use of language in
THE RANGE OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS 15

cultural transmission (one of its functions); the knowledge and

experience acquired by one person can be passed on to another
in language, so that in part he starts where the other leaves off.
Most teaching, after all, depends in great part on the use of
language, written and spoken. In this connection the importance
of the invention of printing can hardly be exaggerated. At the
present time the achievements of anyone in any part of the world
can be made available (by translation if necessary) to anyone else
able to read and capable of understanding what is involved. From
these uses of language, spoken and written, the most developed
animal communication system, though given the courtesy title of
language, is worlds away.
One topic connected with the study of language that has always
exercised a strong fascination over the general public is the ques-
tion of the origin of language. There has been a good deal of
speculation on this, usually taking the form of trying to infer out
of what sort of communicative noise-making fully fledged
languages in all their complexities gradually developed. Imitative
exclamations in response to animal noises, onomatopoeia and
more general sound mimicry of phenomena, exclamations of
strong emotion, and calls for help have all been adduced. Lingu-
ists, however, tend to leave this sort of theorizing alone, not
because of any lack of intrinsic interest, but because it lies far
beyond the reaches of legitimate scientific inference, since we can
have no direct knowledge of any language before the invention
of writing. In relation to the origin of language, every known
language is very recent.
Two frequently used analogies for attempted inference on the
origin of language are the acquisition of speech by children and
the structures and characteristics of so-called 'primitive'
languages. Both are invalid for this purpose. Children acquire
their native language in an environment in which language is
already established and in constant and obvious use all around
them for the satisfaction of needs, some manifestly shared by
themselves. Their situation is entirely different from that of
mankind as a whole in the circumstances assumed to obtain while
language itself was taking shape.
The second argument, based on the alleged nature of 'primi-
tive' languages, rests on a common, though deplorable, miscon-
ception of these languages. Linguistically, there are no primitive
languages. There are languages of peoples whose cultures as
described by anthropologists may be called primitive, ie involving
a low level of competence in the exploitation of natural resources
and the like. Primitive, however, is not a proper qualification of
16 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

language. Investigations of the languages of the world do not

bear out the assumption that structurally the languages of people
at different levels of cultural development are inherently
different. Their vocabularies, of course, at any time reflect fairly
closely the state of the material and more abstract culture of the
speakers ; but languages are capable of infinite adjustment to the
circumstances of cultural development, and their phonetic and
grammatical organization may remain constant during such
changes. It is a palpable fact of informed observation in the
linguistic study of the languages of culturally primitive peoples
that phonetically and grammatically their languages are no less
(and no more) systematic and orderly than the languages of
Western Europe and of the major world civilizations. Nor are the
processes of change, that affect all parts of languages, any less
active or any slower in operation in these languages than in
others; indeed, the converse may be the case, as it has been held
that the establishment of writing systems and standards of
correctness tend, if anything, to retard linguistic changes in
certain situations. Every language has aeons of changes, irretriev-
ably lost to knowledge, lying behind it. To argue from the
language of primitive people to the nature of a primitive stage
in the evolution of language is valueless. .
Attempts at gathering useful and reliable information on the
origin of language from the inspection of existing languages, and
the falsely grounded search for the 'oldest' language among
them, efforts which go back to antiquity, have rather discredited
the whole question among linguists . The foundation rule
excluding papers on the origin of language from meetings of the
Societe Linguistique de Paris is well known. But though the quest
for man's original language (formerly called lingua Adamica) and
for the reconstruction of the ways in which actual lexical and
grammatical forms emerged from hominids' prelinguistic noises
are seen not to be accessible to scientific study, some linguists
and anthropologists have recently looked at the subject from a
rather different point of view. They have been considering not
what the earliest manifestations of language were like, but how
speaking hominids, homo loquens as they have termed the
species, would be immeasurably advantaged in the struggle for
survival by the possession and use of such a faculty.
Apart from its unconstrained range in communication, setting
it apart from all other known types of animal communication,
already referred to, speech requires little expenditure of energy;
it is independent of light and darkness and of mutual visibility,
requiring only that those involved remain within earshot; it does
THE RANGE OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS 17

not interfere with locomotion, food gathering, tool using,

fighting, and other manual activities, as do gesturing and
pointing. It can generally be combined with eating and drinking;
the discouraging of children today from talking with their mouths
full of food is more a matter of aesthetics and good manners than
avoidance of the occasional choking fits that may arise. In the co-
operative warning of sources of danger, their description and the
concerting of means to avoid or counteract them , in collaborative
efforts in finding, gathering, and storing food, locating shelter
and so on, the development of language must be counted as by
far the most important evolutionary development in the human
species. And once man 's survival and preeminence had been
assured through language, it was language that made possible our
living in larger stable and more viable communities, followed
ultimately by the emergence of language-based intellectual,
moral, and legal systems of rational thought, literature, song, and
drama, such as are the glories of civilized life.!"
Languages fall into the class of symbol systems, symbols being
a special class of signs. The science of sign and symbol systems,
sometimes called semiotics, lies outside the range of an outline
introduction to general linguistics, but a brief clarification of the
terms is desirable.P Signs in general are events or things that in
some way direct attention to, or are indicative of, other events
or things . They may be related naturally or causally, as when
shivering is taken as a sign of fever, or as when earthquakes are,
or were, said to be signs of the subterranean writhing of the
imprisoned god Loki; or they may be related conventionally and
so used, and they are then called symbols, as, for example, the
'conventional signs' for churches, railways , etc on maps, road
signs, and the colours of traffic lights.
Among symbol systems language occupies a special place, for
at least two reasons. Firstly, it is almost wholly based on pure
or arbitrary convention; whereas signs on maps and the like tend
to represent in a stylized way the things to which they refer, the
words of a language relate to items of experience or to bits of
the world in this way only in the proportionately very small part
of vocabulary called onomatopoeic. The connection between the
sounds of words like cuckoo, hoopoe, and such imitative words
as dingdong , bowwow, rattattat, etc and the creatures making
such noises or the noises themselves is obvious ; and in a wider
set of forms in languages a more general association of sound and
type of thing or event is discoverable, as in many English words
ending in -ump ; such as thump, clump, stump, dump , which tend
to have associations of heaviness, thickness, and dullness. It has
18 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

been found experimentally that made-up words, like maluma and

oomboolu, and takete and kikeriki, are almost always treated
alike by persons who hear them for the first time and are asked to
assign them to one or the other or a pair of diagrams, one round
in shape and the other spiky; the first pair are felt appropriate
to the former shape, and the second pair to the latter." More
abstractly , there does seem to be an association in parts of the
vocabulary of many languages between close front vowels, as in
wee (jwi:/}.3.3), and nearness and smallness, and of open back
vowels , as in far (jfo:/), with distance. Consider, for example,
the popularity of the recent neologism mini, and such contrasts
as this (here) and that (there), Hungarian ez and az, French ici,
here, and la, there , and the re-creation of teeny after the first
vowel in tiny had lost its close front quality to become the
present-day diphthong (/tainif), as part of the Great Vowel Shift
(8.1.2) .
The onomatopoeic and 'sound-symbolic', or phonaesthetic,
part of language is of great significance, but its extent in any
vocabulary is quite small , and despite attempts by some to see
the origin of language in such imitative cries, it must be realized
that the vastly greater part of the vocabulary of all languages is
purely arbitrary in its associations. Were this not so , vocabularies
would be much more similar the world over than they are, just
as the conventional picture signs of several historically unrelated
pictographic systems show obvious resemblances.
It is this arbitrariness of greater part of language that gives it
its almost limitless flexibility; unlike most other symbol systems
language is double-structured.'? At the level of phonology artic-
ulated speech sounds are organized into distinctive units , such as
phonemes, and these are grouped into syllables (4.3. 1 ; 4.3-4). In
turn, these units and syllables are used as the spoken manifes-
tation of words and of words concatenated in sentences. It is at
this second level of structuring that meaningful items of language
and interpretable sentences come into being. The distinction
between these two levels is discussed further in 5. I . I .
Secondly, what is conveyed by all other symbol systems can
be explained in language, and these other systems can be inter-
preted in language, but the reverse is not the case . The instruc-
tions given by road and railway signals can be expressed in
words, the propositions of logic can be translated into ordinary
language, though with loss of brevity and precision, those of
classical Aristotelian logic fairly directly, those of modern
symbolic logic more indirectly. But in languages we deal with
whole areas of human life and engage in modes of communi-
cation with which logical systems as such have no concern.
THE RANGE OF GENERAL LINGUISTICS 19

These considerations apply in the use of the word language in

reference to such human activities as instrumental music or
dancing. Certainly these are social and communicative activities,
and they can both express and impart variou s emotional attitudes
and in some cases they can mimetically convey the general
impression of a situation, as, for example, the country scenes
embodied in the successive movements of Beethoven's Pastoral
Symphony. But such communication is not language, nor even
surrogate language. These are different sorts of communicative
art , to some extent conveying, like gestures, but often with
intense aesthetic force , emotions and impressions comparable to
those expressed in explicit detail by speech and writing. When ,
therefore, critics write of the 'grammar' (basic principles) of some
non-verbal art or science, or of 'the immense tragedy of the first
movement of Brahms's first symphony' (Sir Donald Tovey), we
must remember that such words are being used metaphorically
and understand them as such, however profound an artistic judg-
ment may lie behind them.

1.3.3 Phonetics, phonology, grammar, semantics

That part of linguistics that deals with the material of speech
itself is called phonetics . Chapter 3 is devoted to this, and here
it need only be said that it is immediately concerned with the
organs of speech and the movements of articulation , and , more
widely, with the physics of sound transmission and the physiology
of hearing, and ultimately with the neurological process involved
in both speaking and hearing. The subsid iary and less extensive
study of written language in its different forms is sometimes
called graphics or graphonomy, or on the model of ph on etics ,
graphetics; but as this material is less complex, and writing is a
secondary manifestation of language comp ared with speaking
(3. I. I) , this has not been accorded such an important place in
linguistic studies. 18
Within the scope of meaning are involved the relations
betwe en utterances, written and spoken , and the world at large.
Meaning is an attribute not only of languag e but of all sign and
symbol systems, and the study of meaning is called semantics ,
which, therefore, embraces a wider range than languag e alone .
However, since language incorporates by far the most extensive
symbol system in man's use as well as the central one , much of
semantics and of semantic theory is concerned with langu age and
langu ages.
In ord er to fulfil their symbolizing and communicative func-
tion s, languages must organize the available noises that can be
produced by the vocal organs into recurrent bits and pieces
20 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

arranged in recurrent patterns. This formal patterning and

arrangement in languages is studied at the levels of phonology
and grammar. These two levels of linguistics are the subjects of
separate chapters (4, 5 and 6); here it need only be said that
phonology is concerned with the patterns and organization of
languages in terms of the phonetic features and categories
involved, and grammar is concerned with the patterns and
arrangements of units established and organized on criteria other
than those referable to phonetic features alone. It is for this
reason that in the case of languages studied only in their written
forms , such as Ancient Greek or Latin , a full grammatical state-
ment and analysis of the written language, based on orthographic
text, is possible, but any phonological analysis of such languages
must necessarily be uncertain and incomplete, since it can be
made only from such phonetic descriptions of the languages as
can be deduced from the orthography itself or gathered from the
contemporary accounts of ancient scholars and commentators.
Further discussion of the relation between these two levels may
be deferred until Chapter 5.
Both phonetics and semantics involve linguists with the find-
ings and the researches of other sciences. In the case of phonetics
the other sciences that are relevant are restricted in number;
physiology is immediately involved as far as it concerns the struc-
ture and movements of the vocal organs, and in any specialized
study of phonetics the physics of sound wave transmission , the
physiology of the hearing process , and the neurology of the
processes of both hearing and speaking are brought into relev-
ance. In semantics, however, since the meanings of utterances
may relate to the whole world of the actual and potential ex-
perience of the speakers, the appeal to sciences and disciplines
outside linguistics , as well as to the whole range of unscientific
acceptance called common sense , is, in theory, unlimited . But in
view of the essentially social nature of language, the sciences
principally concerned with persons in society , such as social
anthropology, are especially involved. In both cases it must be
pointed out that the statements made, the categories established,
and the terms employed are still primarily linguistic in relevance ,
even though they must necessarily rely on the findings of other
sciences. They are linguistic in that they are made specifically
with linguistic ends in view, that is the study and analysis of
language and languages , and they are not necessarily the sort of
statements, categories, or terms , that the specialists in these
other sciences would want to make. For example, an important
distinction is made in phonetics between the front and the back
SEMANTICS 21

of the tongue (3 .2.2); physiologically and with reference to other

activities, such as gustation and swallowing, this distinction may
not be of fundamental importance.l?

1.4 Semantics
1.4. I Philosophical and linguistic interest in meaning
As has already been said, the study of meaning, semantics, brings
in symbol using and symbol systems outside language; but the
central place of language in human symbol systems makes
language very much its primary concern. The problems arising
from the study and analysis of meaning have been recognized and
have received attention during the whole of man 's intellectual
history. Much of the work involved has been undertaken by
philosophers, especially logicians (to whom linguistics in the West
owed much of its original impulse, 9.6) . The study of logic is
closely connected with the study of language, however the
relations between the two may be interpreted by successive
generations of philosophers, since language is the vehicle of
philosophical discourse and even the specially devised systems of
modern symbolic logic are derived from and refer to particular
types of sentence in natural languages. The logician is, however,
primarily concerned with the inferential uses of language, the
formal means by which statements or propositions may be
reached or inferred as valid conclusions from preceding state-
ments or propositions acting as premises. Much of Aristotelian
logic is devoted to the different types of syllogisms, as sets of
premises followed by conclusions are called, that may be used in
valid chains of reasoning.
The concern of the linguist for the uses of language is much
wider. Formalized logical inference and philosophical discourse
in general are an important part of people's use of language in
several civilizations; but they are by no means the only , or indeed
anything like the most frequent , uses . The linguist's concern is
with language in all its uses and manifestations as part of the
processes of daily living and social interaction by members of
groups, as well as in the specialized applications that form the
provinces of philosophers and literary critics , and the approach
to meaning on the part of the linguist must be based on this much
wider range of language use and types of utterance.
Semantics can be recognized as a level of linguistic description
and as a component of linguistics, but it is a much less tidily
circumscribed field of study than are phonetics, phonology, and
grammar, unless its range is so restricted as to exclude a great
22 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

deal of what the plain man and the common reader would wish
to include under the heading of meaning , with which semantics
is concerned.
What one is really trying to do in semantics, or in making state-
ments about meaning, is to explicate, to make explicit, the ways
in which words, and sentences of various grammatical construc-
tions , are used and understood by native or fluent speakers of
a language. Sentences consist of words, but of words in specific
grammatical relations within constructions, and words are used
in speech (and in writing) as components of sentences. This
applies equally to the so-called one-word sentences, in which a
single word comprises a complete sentence (6.3.1). Nonetheless
semantics can be considered from the point of view of word
meaning and from that of sentence, or structural, meaning.

1.4.2 Word meaning

Word meanings are what are sought and what should be provided
in comprehensive dictionaries of a language. For much of the
history of semantic studies, and still to a considerable extent
today, the investigation of word meaning has been based on the
relationships of reference and denotation. Certainly meaning
includes the relations between utterances and parts of utterances
(eg words) and the world outside; and reference and denotation
are among such relations. But for the purposes of linguistics it
is desirable to deal with meaning by a more comprehensive
treatment.
Sentences have meaning, are meaningful; and a child learns the
meaning of many words by hearing them in other people's
uttered sentences and practising such utterances himself subject
to the correction of others and the test of being understood by
those to whom he is talking . The process goes on all our lives,
and we learn new words and extend and increase our knowledge
of the words we already know, as we hear and see them in fresh
utterances and used slightly differently from the ways which we
are accustomed to. The meaning of a word , therefore, may be
considered as the way it is used and understood as a part of
different sentences; what the dictionary does is to try and
summarize for each word the way or ways it is used in the sort
of sentences in which it is found in the language .
The grammatical structure and certain phonological features
such as intonation may themselves give an indication of part of
its meaning (3.5 .3, 3·5-4, 4.3.6, 6.6·3), as we can easily
see when we consider the part played in English and in many
other languages by word form , word order, and intonation in the
SEMANTICS 23
indication of questioning, commanding, and making statements.
Though familiar in literate languages and apparently universal in
all languages, word divisions are not immediately audible in
connected speech, and the formal features that determine words
as separable units, and the recognition of such features, intuitively
by the speaker and objectively by the linguist , must be examined
further within grammatical analysis (5 .3).
The potential sentences of any language that may be uttered
and understood by a speaker of it are infinite in number, but they
are formed from the total stock of words known to the speaker
at any time. A speaker's word stock is always variable, but it may
be regarded as fixed at any given point in time. Words, therefore,
are, in general, convenient units about which to state meanings,
and no harm is done provided it is borne in mind that words have
meanings by virtue of their employment in sentences, most of
which contain more than one word, and that the meaning of a
sentence is not to be thought of as a sort of summation of the
meanings of its component words taken individually. With many
words particular meanings or uses are only found when they are
used in conjunction with other words , and these are often
scarcely deducible from their other uses apart from such combi-
nations (one need only think of such phrases as cold war, black
market, wildcat strike (unofficial strike, particularly in American
English), white noise (in acoustic engineering); this topic is
further discussed under 'Collocation', 2.4.2).
Reference and denotation are clearly a part of the meaning of
many words in all languages. The many problems arising about
the nature of these relations have been the subject of much philo-
sophical discussion. Here it suffices to point out that by the use
in sentences of certain words one is able to pick out from the
environment and from the general knowledge of speaker and
hearer particular items, features , processes, and qualities, draw
attention to them , give or elicit further information about them,
make them the objects of action or speculation, and, most
importantly, recall them from past experience and anticipate
them in the future provided only that the words used have had
such associations in the previous experience of speaker and
hearer. These are the words whose meanings may, in part, be
learned and taught by pointing. But the relationship between the
word and that to which it may be said to refer is not a simple
one. Proper names (John, Mary, etc) refer to individuals as
single individuals, however many there may be so referred to;
boy, girl, etc refer to an indefinitely large class of individuals by
virtue of being grouped together in some respect ; in the same
24 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

way, climb, fly, swim , and walk refer to four different types of
bodily movement in space. In the strict terminology of logic
denotation is sometimes used in a specific and technical sense, but
in general usage the term is more loosely made equivalent to
reference.
It is often said that the meaning of a word is the idea it conveys
or arouses in the mind of speaker or hearer. This is associated
with a general definition of language as 'the communication of
ideas by speech' or the like. Such accounts of the meaning of
words and the working of languages are objectionable. Idea as
a technical term is notoriously hard to pin down with anything
like precision . It is often taken as equivalent to mental picture
or image, for which drawings are sometimes made in books
dealing with linguistic meaning . Mental pictures are no doubt
perfectly genuine components of our private experience, but as
such they seem of little relevance to linguistics. Firstly, it would
appear that they are not aroused by anything like all the words
in a language, even of those for which a referential meaning is
fairly easily statable in isolation ; secondly, even in the most
favourable cases, the idea as a mental picture does not help
explain one's ability to use a word correctly and understand it.
Any picture is necessarily particular; as Berkeley pointed out,
triangle refers to all of the mutually exclusive sorts of triangles
(isosceles, scalene, right-angled, etc), but any picture, mental or
otherwise, of a triangle must be of one triangle only.2o Even if we
did recognize what a word referred to by having a mental picture
in our mind, we should have to be able to justify the classing
together of what is actually observed and the mental picture by
some further piece of knowledge. It is best to regard knowledge
of the meaning or meanings of a word as part of a speaker's
competence, an ability to use the word in ways other people will
understand and to understand it when uttered by other people;
this knowledge includes knowing the range of items, processes,
and the like to which words that do have referents of one sort
of another may be said, often indeterminately, to refer.
The use of words in utterances to focus attention on particular
bits and features of the world involves a segmentation and an
organization of our experienced environment. Verbalization is
not a mere passive labelling of discrete items and objects; the
process of classification implicit in the use of what are often
called common nouns (boy, girl, tree, house, etc) has already
been noticed. Moreover, the very permanence of names and
designations presupposes that we recognize continuing identities
in the stream of successively observed phenomena. Recognizing
SEMANTICS 25
John today as the John of yesterday and this table today as the
same as this table yesterday is more than just perceiving what is
before one's eyes; it is imposing some order on such perceptions.
Other words with more abstract meanings involve a much more
far-reaching organization of the world of immediate experience;
words like motion, gravity, inertia, energy, and equilibrium do
not refer to things in the way words like table and chair do, nor
do even more abstract words like cause and effect (still less do
they call up definite pictures in the mind), but they have distinc-
tive and important meanings, and their use is a mark of the high
degree of order and systematization imposed by us on the world
we live in. In the same way the use of words like right and
wrong, duty, crime (and many others subsumed under them:
property, theft, punishment, reform, etc), and of comparable
words in other types of society, presupposes a social nexus of
expected ways of behaviour enforced by precedent and the sanc-
tions of disapproval and legal penalties.
Quite apart from the examples just above, many words used
quite ordinarily in everyday life, whose meanings are in no sense
part of a specifically scientific or philosophical vocabulary, bear
much more abstract and complex relations to our world of things,
actions , and processes than words like chair, stone, sun , kick , and
run . The difficulties, intricacies, and delicacies of much semantic
analysis are concealed from the beginner when, as is too often
the case, such words are exclusively chosen as examples in
elementary semantics, just because of their rather obvious direct-
ness of reference, at least in many of their uses. One may, in this
context, reflect on what is involved in the semantic analysis of
such ordinary words as succeed (success), prepare (preparation),
loyal(ty) , and persuade (persuasion).
Some of these ways in which human life are experiences are
ordered in our languages appear to be universally recognized in
the use of words in all languages, and must therefore be regarded
as the general property of mankind (for example, the recognition
of objects occupying space and persisting through time). In other
matters languages differ in the way they most readily tend to
organize parts of the speakers' experience. Relatively trivial
instances of such differences are the obvious non-correspond-
ences of the colour words in different languages (2-4.3); more
significant are the difficulties involved in trying to translate words
relating to moral, religious, legal, and political matters between
the languages of communities having different social systems in
these respects. Such difficulties arise from the differences in
peoples' ways of life, and are made prominent by the work of
26 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

anthropologists in examining societies far removed historically

from the Greco-Roman and Hebraic inheritance characterizing
Western Europe and those countries most influenced by it. We
do not all inhabit exactly the same world , and differences in the
significant items of vocabulary in languages bring this out
clearly."
Not only does reference cover a very wide divergence of
relationship between words and the bits and pieces of the world,
but many words in all languages can scarcely be said to refer to
anything by themselves, for which, consequently, pointing is
useless as a means of explaining their use. This does not mean
that such words are meaningless, which is nonsensical, as they
have quite definite uses in languages; words like English if, when,
of, all, none, the are frequent and essential components of
sentences. But as it has been seen that it is the utterance and the
sentences in it that are the primary meaningful stretches, the
meanings of the component words must be taken as the contri-
bution they make to the meaning of the sentences in which they
appear. The fact that the contribution of some words is partly
that of reference does not make reference the same as the whole
of meaning; and it is not to be assumed that the meaning of a
word when it constitutes a one-word sentence is the same as its
meaning when it forms part of a larger sentence . There are also
quite complex systems of reference involved in the uses of pro-
nouns (I, you, he, himself, etc) . Some of these are mentioned again
in 7.2.3-4.
The ease with which a statable meaning can be assigned to a
word in isolation varies very considerably, and in part it depends
on the degree to which the word is likely to occur in normal
discourse as a single (one-word) sentence ; and even in the case
of such a favoured word one has no right in advance of the
analysis to assume that there will always be found a common
'core' of meaning underlying all the various uses the word has
in the sentences in which it may occur. With words scarcely ever
occurring in isolation, like those cited in the preceding para-
graph, it is almost impossible to describe their meaning
adequately in any other way than by saying how they are typically
used as part of longer sentences and how those sentences are
used. The question whether a word may be semantically
described in isolation is more a matter of degree than of a simple
answer yes or no.
Preoccupation with reference and denotation has troubled
semantic theory, by putting an excessive importance on that part
of word meaning which can be stated easily in isolation and
SEMANTICS 27

treated either as a two-term relation between the word and the

referent or thing meant (or between word-image and concept,
significant and signifie), or as a three-term relation between
word, speaker or hearer, and referent. The meanings of
sentences and their parts are better treated in linguistics in terms
of how they function than exclusively in terms of what they refer
to . The different types of reference indicated above are then
included as part of the function performed, the job done, by
certain words in the sentences in which they are used, and the
dictionary entry of a word simply summarizes the function or
functions, referential or other, of the word in the sort of
sentences in which it typically occurs.f
In addition to reference, excessive emphasis on historical
considerations colours popular discussion on language, especially
on word meanings, as when it is urged that the 'real' meaning
of a word is to be found in its etymology or earlier form and use
in the language. Thus it is claimed that the 'true' meaning of
holiday is 'holy -day' or day set apart for religious reasons, and
that awful and awfully are wrongly used like considerable, very
(there was an awful crowd there, awfully nice of you to come),
since its 'real' meaning is 'awe-inspiring'.
If it is accepted that statements of word meanings in descriptive
linguistics are simply summaries of the ways words are used in
sentences by speakers at a particular time, it is clear that histori-
cally antecedent meanings are outside the scope of such state-
ments. Without specialized study speakers are ignorant of the
history of their language; yet they use it to communicate with
each other and they understand each other. Certainly the
meaning of any word is causally the product of continuous
changes in its antecedent meanings or uses, and in many cases
it is the collective product of generations of cultural history.
Dictionaries often deal with this sort of information if it is avail-
able, but in so doing they are passing beyond the bounds of
synchronic statement to the separate linguistic realm of historical
explanation.

1.4.3 Sentence meaning

The semantic component carried by phonological and grammati-
cal structures (sentence meaning or structural meaning) is readily
illustrated, though a great deal of detailed investigation is
required for its full explication in any language. Different inton -
ations may signal excitement, irritation, anger, friendliness , social
distance, and many other feelings and personal relations, as well
as the more formalized differences between statement and ques-
28 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

tion (3.5.4). The grammatical categories of declarative (indica-

tive), interrogative, and imperative have a partial correlation
with the semantic categories of statement, enquiry, and command
(request, prohibition, etc), though with the reservations noticed
in 6.6.3.
While the lexical content is the same, we all know that the
word order of John loves Mary marks a different sentence from
that of Marl loves John, indicated in a language like Latin by
word form./Johannes Mariam amat/and/Maria Johannem amat/,
the word order, though the most frequent in Latin sentences of
this type, being largely a matter of style, topicalization, and
emphasis. In English questions expecting an answer Yes or No
can be distinguished by different word orders: Mary is going to
Church this morning; is Mary going to Church this morning? In
modern Greek, and in some English sentences (3.5.4) intonation
alone marks the difference.
More subtly, much attention is paid today to the semantic
implications or presuppositions of certain constructions. In
English John regretted (or didn't regret) that his son had failed
his examination implies ordinarily that his son had failed. John
was sure that his son had failed carries no such implication.P The
rather famous sentences involving the King of France: the King
of France is, or is not, bald; the King of France opened the
Exhibition yesterday, etc are puzzling just because the use of the
definite article the implies that there is a King of France, so that
the King of France is bald is not straightforwardly false in the way
that the sentence the Queen of England is bald is. 24 It may well be
that the philosophical problems of the alleged certainty of
'knowledge' as against 'mere belief' derive from the presuppo-
sition that the sincere use of know, and of equivalent words in
other languages, unlike such words as believe, expect, think,
suppose, etc, involve the speaker's reliability in regard to what
he sa~s he knows . One can readily say and readily accept I
think/believe/am pretty certain that he is coming today, but he
may not come , but not tI know he is coming today, but he may
not come (see further 9.2; t here and elsewhere marks a sentence
that is in some way deviant and unacceptable).

1.4.4 Extralinguistic context

Clearly the understanding of word and sentence meanings
involves intralinguistic and extralingusitic factors . Certain
semantic functions are learned and understood apart from any
specific extralinguistic context, for example, the implications of
regret mentioned just above, the fact that all crimson roses are
SEMANTICS 29
red flowers and that all red things are coloured, but not vice versa
(hyponymy is the technical term). Words like mare and ewe
designate female animals, words like stallion and ram designate
male animals , and words like horse and sheep animals of either
sex. But fully to know how to use and understand any of these
words one must have seen the animal or a picture of it, or have
read or been told a certain amount about it. To know when a
request, please close the window, a politer request, would you
mind (very much) closing the window, or a brusque order, close
that window!, would be appropriate requires a considerable
knowledge of personal relations, social conventions, etc; in part
these can be taught, but in general they are acquired in daily life,
or in the course of learning a second language. Similar knowledge
is required fully to control such uses of language as are involved
in sarcasm, irony, flippancy, rhetorical questions, etc.
In addition to what has been said so far, it must be remem-
bered that most sentences, especially in spoken discourse , are not
uttered 'out of the blue' . They are normally heard and inter-
preted in relation to an accepted set of background knowledge
and assumptions, presumed to be shared by all or most of those
involved, together with more specific and relevant knowledge
relating directly to the utterance. This latter may and usually
does include earlier utterances in a conversation or a discourse.
As a brief example , in I think it's going to snow tonight, although
we're well into late April; bother this weather, I've just bedded
out the dahlias at least two relevant assumptions are involved:
although we're well into late April assumes that by this time of
year snow is usually unlikely , and the second half of the conver-
sation assumes the shared knowledge that dahlias are injured by
cold conditions.
A humorous writer can achieve his effect by the deliberate
introduction of irrelevant information into the context of a
conversation, defying generally accepted mutually shared knowl-
edge and assumptions. In Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,
famous for this sort of humour, the March Hare, reproved for
having lubricated his watch with butter, replies ' "It was the best
butter"; " Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well", the
Hatter grumbled, " You shouldn't have put it in with the bread
knife" .' The oddness arises from our knowledge that butter is not
a lubricant for clockwork . Replace butter by oil and breadknife
by dirty brush, and the conversation becomes sensible and not
in the least amusing .
Writing intended to be long lasting, historical records, laws,
literature , and so on sets out much of its context within its own
30 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

text. Conversely emergency calls in situations outside normal

contexts are necessarily short and sharp, relying on the hearers'
immediate grasp of what is wrong and what must be done: Fire!,
stop thief!, man overboard!, etc. On the other side, legal and
legally binding documents of all sorts are notorious for their
intended explicit coverage of every detail of the matter involved
so as to leave no loophole for subsequent misinterpretation,
evasion, or successful challenge. Part of Shylock's downfall was
clearly due to his failure to tie down his bargain for a pound of
flesh in sufficient detail.
Linguists differ on which aspects of meaning they are most
concerned with; some would relegate much of extralinguistic
function to pragmatics as distinct from semantics. Those who
regard the extralinguistic factors as very much the province of
semantics try to identify the relevant factors in terms of context
of situation, social setting, personal and group roles , etc. Work
along these lines has been an especial interest of those concerned
with anthropological linguistics, such as Malinowski and Firth ,
and sociolinguistics (9.1).25 It is being actively pursued today
under the heading of 'Relevance theory' .
Language serves a great variety of purposes , and utterances
perform a very wide range of functions . Within anyone language
notable differences of use, in part employing differences of
vocabulary and composition but mainly drawing on a common
grammatical and lexical stock, must be recognized . To mention
only a few uses of language, one can distinguish poetry of all
kinds, rhetoric, narrative and historical records, ritual and
ceremonial utterances, the forms of legal, political, commercial ,
and administrative operations, the professional intercourse of
technical , learned, and academic persons, as well as all the
general functions of talking and writing in the maintenance of all
daily life of every individual in co-operation with his family and
other members of the community, including the sort of idle
chatter ('phatic communion') and modes of greeting and leave-
taking engaged in where silence would be taken for discourtesy. 26
Language thus embraces very much more than the formal
discourse of philosophy and the works of written literature, just
as mastery of a foreign language in anything like completeness
involves the command of its uses in all manner of different
environments and different circumstances. Native speakers, as
the result of experience gained from early childhood in the
process of acculturation, know how to behave in speaking in the
various roles they come to fulfil in their lives. To describe this
the linguist tries to pick out the essential features of the situations
SEMANTICS 31
that are characteristic of these different roles and to state them
in sets of related categories as contexts of situation. In doing this
he is trying to formalize and systematize, to set down, succinctly
and explicitly, the vital information about the working and the
use of languages that native speakers, for the most part uncon-
sciously, discursively, and gradually, acquire throughout their
lives in a community.
Treated in terms of contexts of situation, the meaning of an
utterance includes both those aspects that can be described, as the
reference or denotation of individual words, and those that must
be stated as belonging to the sentence, or even a series of
sentences. Differences of personal status, family and social
relations, degrees of intimacy, relative ages, and other such
factors, irrelevant to the consideration of sentences as the
expression of logical propositions are all handled under the
appropriate headings of a context of situation.
Meaning in language is therefore not a single relation or a
single sort of relation, but involves a set of multiple and various
relations holding between the utterance and its parts and the
relevant features and components of the environment, both
cultural and physical, and forming part of the more extensive
system of interpersonal relations involved in the existence of
human societies .F

1.4.5 Translation
Experience has shown that some sort of translation between two
languages is always possible, but it is usually difficult, and in no
sense is it an automatic conversion process except in specifically
restricted contexts (eg weather reports, air traffic control
messages, etc). This accounts for the very slow progress being
made in mechanical translation.
Questions of translation are very closely connected with
semantic analysis and the contextual theory of meaning. The
details of this part of language study cannot be covered in an
elementary introduction, but the existence of bilingual speakers
and the possibility of learning foreign languages and of forming
utterances in one language serving nearly if not exactly the same
purposes as corresponding utterances in another (ie of trans-
lating) are universally obvious facts that must be taken into
consideration. Indeed, Malinowski was led to the framing of his
theory of context of situation in working on the translation into
English of key words and sentences found in the accounts given
him of their way of life by some of the Trobriand islanders, a
people inhabiting a small group of islands to the east of New
32 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

Guinea, a people whose whole culture, to which he devoted a

great deal of study, was entirely removed from that of the Euro-
pean culture of his readers.
The term culture is widely used in a number of different ways,
and it will be useful to make explicit its use in this book, a use
fairly general in present-day linguistic writing. The term is taken
from the technical vocabulary of anthropology, wherein it
embraces the entire way of life of members of a community in
so far as it is conditioned by that membership. It is manifest that
on such a conception of culture language is a part thereof, and
indeed one of the most important parts, uniquely related to the
whole by its symbolic status .i"
The need for contextual explanations of meaning was made
clear in working on languages whose speakers were culturally
remote from Europe; but context of situation is just as pertinent
to the explanation of linguistic meaning in any language, though
obviously the relevant factors and components of such contexts
will differ according to the cultural differences between peoples.
The need is less noticeable in dealing with familiar languages,
just because the common inherited culture surrounding the use
of one's own language and, though to a lesser extent, the use of
other languages within the same cultural area, is taken for
granted and so not made explicit. Translation , in Malinowski's
words , implies 'the unification of cultural context'. This is
apparent when one considers the sort of words in other languages
that are relatively easy to translate into English and the sort that
are not. Word translation, or the finding of lexical equivalents,
is easiest with the words of languages within the unified culture
area of west Europe or of parts of the world that have come
under European influence, or with words in other languages
which are such as to have a referential meaning more or less
uniform in all cultures, for example the names of many physical
objects and natural parts of the world's surface , widely distrib-
uted objects and natural parts of the world's surface , widely
distributed botanical and zoological species, and the like ,
although any of these words may for one reason or another have
special uses and therefore special meanings peculiar to the
culture of a particular linguistic community (for example, sheep
and lamb among practising Christians).
Wherever a cultural unity is lacking, the translation of words
having reference to particular features or having particular uses
in a limited field is more difficult to achieve by means of single
lexical equivalents, and requires at best circumlocutions and
often more lengthy explanations themselves in part recreating the
SEMANTICS 33

relevant contexts of situation. One may instance the words

peculiar to the ceremonies of particular religious communities,
and in recent years the misunderstandings of such words,
however translated, as freedom, democracy, equality, across the
cultural frontier between communist and capitalist Europe; on
either side such words are used in contexts different in certain
important respects from each other. Translation and mutual
understanding across such frontiers are not impossible; but much
hard work is required in making clear just what factors are
relevant and assumed to be relevant by speakers on each side,
in the use and understanding of key words of this sort. Good
translators are doing such work all the time, with varying degrees
of success. Description by means of contexts of situation is an
attempt to make explicit what is involved. The existence in
several languages of words formally resembling English democ-
racy and ultimately derived from Ancient Greek
OTl/LOKpoctLo/de:mokratia/ is in itself of little assistance .
Further difficulties of translation arise when all the complex
functions of words in extralinguistic reference and in sentence
composition, as well as the sentences themselves in their contexts
of situation, must be considered and sometimes weighed against
one another in the choice of the means of translation. In its
familiar form, the choice may have to be between the literal and
the literary, in cases where the nearest translation equivalents of
individual words taken in isolation are stylistically unattractive or
misrepresent some other aspect of the original when they'are put
together in sentences. This sort of difficulty arises especially in
the translation of works of literature, of some kinds more than
of others, in which features at other linguistic levels, such as the
grammatical form of sentences and the phonetic form of words,
are stylistically exploited as parts of the literary form of the whole
piece. At the opposite end of the scale to the contextually
restricted types of message referred to at the beginning of this
section , in the case of certain types of poetry the production of
a translation that fulfils anything like all the functions of the
original may approach the impossible . The ability to achieve as
excellent a translation as may be, balancing all the components
at all levels against one another in constructing a version as near
in all respects to the original as is possible , requires a delicate
and sensitive appreciation of all aspects of language; though its.
principles can be referred to linguistic science, its achievement
is more in the nature of an art, in which individual and personal
feeling for the artistic possibilities of the two languages is of the
highest importance.
34 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

General bibliography
A considerable number of books have been written in the present
century to give an introduction to general linguistics and the coverage
of the subject as the authors see it. It must constantly be borne in mind
in reading more widely in this field that no two books on linguistics agree
in all respects with each other. Scholars have differed sharply not only
on what range of studies should properly be comprised within linguistics,
but also on points of linguistic theory and methods of analysis and
description, some being of quite basic importance. One's reading should
not be confined to the latest publications, important and exciting as they
are . In the present century a number of the books listed below have
achieved something like the status of classic texts in the subject, and
should be read as such, even though on certain factual and methodo-
logical points they are now somewhat dated. The works by de Saussure,
Sapir, Vendryes, Jespersen, Bloomfield, and Trubetzkoy (see the bibli-
ography for Chapter 4) clearly belong here. Linguistics is a science, and
it has its practical applications (1.2.2), but it is not a purely practical
science that 'destroys its own past'. Those entering on the study of
linguistics as part of a liberal education should read as widely as they
can on it. Some of the books published in the earlier years of this
century are recognized as being of lasting value; of course, enlightening
books on language written in earlier centuries are also to be recom-
mended, but they are not included in this general bibliography (refer-
ence to some of them will be found in the concluding section of this book
(9.6). No attempt is made here to provide a complete bibliograhy of the
subject. A number of the general books mentioned below contain
bibliographies of varying extents; at the times of publication those in
Bloomfield's Language and Vendryes's Le language were very compre-
hensive. Since 1949 an annual bibliography of linguistic publications,
covering the years from 1939 onward, has been published : Bibliographie
linguistique, Utrecht and Brussels.
Scholarship should know no frontiers, and facilities for exchanging
theoretical viewpoints and methodological strategies have never been
greater than in this age . It is, nevertheless, convenient to list some
important general books under three geographical heads .

Continental European
F. DE SAUSSURE, Cours de linguistique generate, fourth edition, Paris,
1949. This is the posthumous compilation of de Saussure 's teaching
course on linguistics, based on his notes and those of his pupils. De
Saussure in many ways marks the beginning of linguistics as an inde-
pendent academic subject in its present form, and many of the distinc-
tions and topics now almost universally recognized as essential to it
were first made explicit by him. The book is not hard to read, though
the circumstances of its publication involve occasional lack of clarity
on certain points . There is an English translation by R. Harris,
London, 1983.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 35

De Saussure's thinking on language has exercised an important

influence on the whole of twentieth-century linguistics. Perhaps the
attempt to carry his teaching to its logical conclusion is to be seen in
the 'glossematic' theory of Hjelmslev and his followers, mostly in
Denmark. This theory is set out in L. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a
theory of language, trans F. J . Whitfield, Baltimore, 1953. This book
is full of interest and is well worth mastering, but partly because of
the many special technical terms involved and its concise presentation
this theory has not made a large impact outside Denmark. It will not
be further treated in this book .
J. VENDRYES, Le langage, Paris, 1921, also translated , P. Radin , London,
1925.
o. JESPERSEN, Language, London, 1922. Though rather old-fashioned in
some respects by now, this book is well worth reading. Jespersen was
a Danish scholar, but this, like a number of his other books , was
written in English and published in England .
w. PORZIG , Das Wunder der Sprache (second edition), Berne, 1957.
A. MARTINET, Elements de linguistique generale, Paris, 1960 (English
translation , Elements of general linguistics, London, 1964).
Martinet introduces some terminology and points of theory of his
own, also seen in his less elementary A functional view of language,
Oxford, 1962, and the chapter on the evolution of languages (histor-
ical linguistics) presents in simplified form the approach set out in his
Economie des changements phonetiques (in Chapter 8, bibliography).
K. -D . BUNTING, Einfiihring in die Linguistik, Frankfurt a.M., 1971.
R. BARTSCH and T. VENNEMANN, Grundziige der Sprachtheorie, Tiibingen,
1983.
A clear and concise presentation of the subject may be found in Italian
in G . C. Lepschy, La linguistica strutturale, Turin, 1966. (English
version , A survey of structural linguistics, London , 1970.)

American
Modern American linguistics can now be seen as divided by the publi-
cation of Chomsky's Syntactic structures in 1957 into two periods; the
earlier period sometimes called structuralist or, after its leading figure,
Bloomfieldian, and the subsequent, transformational-generative period
inaugurated by Chomsky and named after the distinctive orientation of
his linguistic theory . Other developments in this period must also be
recognized , including some theories derived from Chomsky's teaching,
but now recognizably separate; the more important are mentioned in
7.3, 7·4, below. American textbooks fall into two comparable classes,
with some overlap, depending on the date of composition and the stand-
point of the author. As representative of the first period one may notice
the following:
E . SAPIR, Language, New York , 1921.
L. BLOOMFIELD, Language, London, 1935.
These two books of the same title by American scholars are prob-
36 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

ably two of the most important books in the development of American

linguistics , and their influence has been felt over the whole world of
linguistic scholarship. Of the two, Bloomfield's book is the larger and
perhaps the more important, though the style of Sapir makes his
Language one of the most brilliant and readable books on the subject
ever to be published. Bloomfield's Language, first published in
America in 1933, defined and circumscribed the subject and at once
established itself as a textbook that has not yet been superseded. For
a generation most United States linguists considered themselves in
some sense Bloomfield's disciples, whether they actually studied under
him or not, and a great deal of American work has taken the form
of working out questions raised and methods suggested in Bloom-
field's Language. The two writers are very different in outlook and
complement one another. Sapir's interests were wide-ranging, and
though his linguistic scholarship was unchallenged he was always
probing the boundaries of linguistic studies and the contribution they
could give to and receive from other fields, such as anthropology,
psychology, and literary criticism, subjects in which he himself was
qualified . Bloomfield deliberately concentrated on the theory and
techniques of linguistics as a circumscribed and defined science . Many
of the generally used technical terms in linguistics today were intro-
duced into the subject by Bloomfield in this book Language.
Sapir and Bloomfield have been contrasted more than once, as
centrifugal and centripetal by S. Newman (IJAL 17 (1951), 180-6) ,
and as genius and classic by M. Joos (Readings in linguistics, Wash-
ington, 1957, 31). American linguistic scholarship is indeed fortunate
to have had two such men during its formative years.
Sapir's work can be seen in greater detail in his Selected writings
(ed D . G . Mandelbaum, Berkeley, 1949), and more recently in W.
Cowan, M. K. Foster, and K. Koerner (eds), New perspectives in
culture and personality, Amsterdam, 1986. Bloomfield's attitude to
language studies is further illustrated in 'A set of postulates for the
science of language', Lang 2 (1926), 153-64 and 'Linguistic aspects of
science', International encycloptedia of unified science, 1 (Chicago,
1939), part 4. Many of Bloomfield's most important articles and
reviews have been collected and republished by C. F. Hockett in A
Leonard Bloomfield anthology, Bloomington , 1970.
c. F. HOCKETI, A course in modern linguistics, New York , 1958.
R. A. HALL, Linguistics and your language, New York, 1960.
H. A. GLEASON, An introduction to descriptive linguistics, second edition,
New York, 1961.
A . A. Hill 's Introduction to linguistic structures, New York , 1958, is,
in fact, largely a linguistic analysis , on Hill's lines, of English, concen-
trating on phonology and grammar; it also contains brief appendices on
Latin and Eskimo.
A rather different type of book is seen in Z. S. Harris's Methods in
structural linguistics, Chicago, 1951, which concentrates on phonology
and grammar, working out procedures and methods in great detail and
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 37

with great rigour of theory, exemplified from a number of languages .

It is scarcely an elementary book, and it presupposes a knowledge of
Bloomfieldian linguistics, developing certain aspects of it to their logical
conclusion .
The course of development of the first period of American linguistics
from the twenties of this century is partly set out in a collection of
important articles and monographs arranged in chronological order,
Readings in linguistics, ed M. 100s, New York , 1958.
Among introductions to linguistics cast in a basically transformational-
generative mould one may recommend:
R. w. LANGACKER, Language and its structure, New York , 1968.
v. A. FROMKIN and R. RODMAN, An introduction to language, New York,
1974·
A. AKAMAJIAN , R. A. DEMERS, and R. M. HARNISH, An introduction to
language and communication, Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Many other introductory books on transformational-generative
grammar, some of which are listed in the bibliography to Chapter 7, are
just that. The books listed above are introductions to the subject of
linguistics as a whole, though oriented towards transformational-
generative theory .
The following books cover both periods of American linguistics:
F. P. DINNEEN, An introduction to general linguistics, New York, 1967.
D. BOLINGER, Aspects of language, New York, 1968.
G . YULE , The study of language: an introduction, Cambridge, 1985, brief
(220 pages in all) but very comprehensive.

British
J . R. FIRTH, Speech , London, 1930, brief and provocative .
1. R. FIRTH, The tongues of men, London, 1937, a popular book, with
relatively little detail.
L. R. PALMER, Descriptive and comparative linguistics: a critical intro-
duction, London , 1972.
1. F. WALLWORK, Language and linguistics, London, 1969.
J. LYONS, Introduction to theoretical linguistics, Cambridge, 1968, was
a very significant contribution to linguistic publication in this country .
It incorporated a fuller and deeper treatment of semantics than is
found in most linguistic textbooks, and it was one of the first to treat
grammar predominantly from a transformational-generative point of
view. It is, perhaps, except for the most able and energetic students,
a second-year rather than a first-year book .
Three good first introductions to the study of language, very clearly
written, elementary, and easy to read are D . Crystal, What is linguistics?
London, 1985, 1. Aitchison , General linguistics, London, 1972, and
R. A . Hudson, Invitation to linguistics, Oxford, 1984.
A rather more advanced encyclopaedic work in four volumes,
containing many essays on different aspects of linguistics today , is to be
38 GENERAL LINGUISTICS : THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

found in F. J . Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: the Cambridge survey,

Cambridge, 1988.
A glance through the linguistics periodicals shelves of a college or
university library will give an idea of the now very expensive scope of
this branch of academic literature. For a comprehensive cumulative list
see the annual Bibliographie linguistique, referred to on P 34 above .

Bibliography for Chapter 1

I 1. AITCHISON, The articulate mammal: an introduction to psycholin-
guistics, London, 1976.
2 w. P. ALSTON , Philosophy of language, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
3 R. BARTHES, Elements de semiologie, Paris, 1964.
4 B. BLOCH and G. L. TRAGER, Outline of linguistic analysis, Baltimore,
1942 .
5 L. BLOOMFIELD , Language, London, 1935·
6 G. M. BOLLING , 'Linguistics and philology', Lang 5 (1929), 27-32.
7 R. CARNAP, Introduction to semantics, Cambridge, Mass, 1948.
8 c. R. CARPENTER, A field study in Siam of the behaviour and social
relations of the gibbon, Comparative psychology monographs 16
(1940), Part 5.
9 J. B. CARROLL, The study of language, Cambridge, Mass, 1953.
10 J. C. CATFORD, A linguistic theory of translation, London , 1965.
II N. CHOMSKY, Language and mind, New York, 1972.
12 C. 1. FILLMORE and D . T. LANDENDOEN (eds), Studies in linguistic
semantics, New York, 1971.
13 J . R. FIRTH, Speech, London , 1930.
I4 'Personality and language in society', Sociol rev 42 (1950 ) , 37-52 .
15 'Synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-55', Studies in linguistic analysis,
special publication of the Philological Society, Oxford , 1957, 1-32.
16 'Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski's
views', Man and culture, edited by R. W. Firth, London, 1957,
93- 118 .
17 K. VON FRISCH, Bees, their vision, chemical senses and language,
Ithaca, 1950.
18 A. L. GARDINER, Theory of speech and language, Oxford , 1932.
19 H. P. GRICE, ' Logicand conversation' , Syntax and semantics 3 (1975),
4 1-5 8 .
20 s. R. HARNAD (ed), Origin and evolution of language and speech, New
York, 1975.
21 s. I. HAYAKAWA,Language in thought and action, London, 1952.
22 C. A manual of phonology, Indiana University publica-
F. HOCKETT,
tions in anthropology and linguistics II, 1955.
23 A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
24 D. HYMES, 'Models of the interaction of language and social life', 1. 1.
GUMPERZ and D. HYMES (eds) , Directions in sociolinguistics, New
York , 1972, 35-71.
25 On communicative competence, Philadelphia, 1971.
BIBLI OGRAPHY FOR CH APTER I 39

26 O. JES PERSEN, Language, London, 1922.

27 F. KAIN Z , Die 'Sprache' der Tiere, Stuttgart , 1961.
28 R. M. KEMPSON , Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics,
Cambridge, 1975.
29 Semantic theory, Cambridge , 1977.
30 P. KIPARSKY and c. KIPARSKY , 'Fact', M. BIERW ISCH and K. HEIDOLPH
(eds), Progress in linguistics, The Hague, 1970, 143-73.
31 W. KOHL ER, Gestalt psychology , New York , 1947.
32 A. L KROEBER , 'Sign and symbol in bee communications', Proc
National A cademy of Sciences 38 (1952), 753-7.
33 R. W . LANGACKER, Language and its structure, New York , 1968.
34 G. N . LEEC H , Principles of pragmatics, Lond on , 1983.
35 E. H. LENNE BERG, Biologicalfoundations of language, New York , 1967.
36 P. LIEBERMAN , On the origins of language, New York , 1975.
37 J . LYON S , Semantics, Cambridge , 1977.
38 B. MALIN OWSKI , Coral gardens and their magic, London, 1935.
39 A. MEILLET and M. COHEN, Les langues du mond e, Paris, 1952.
40 T. F. MITCHE LL, 'The languag e of buying and selling in Cyre naica',
Hesperis 1957, 31-71 , reprinted in T . F. Mitchell, Principles of
Firthian Linguistics, London, 1975, 167-200.
41 C. MORRIS , Signs, language, and behaviour , New York , 1946.
42 P. NEWM ARK, Approaches to translation , Oxford , 1981.
43 E. A. NIDA , Toward a science of translating , Leiden , 1964.
44 c. K. OGDEN and I. A. RICHARD S , The meaning of meaning, eighth
edition, Lond on , 1946.
45 F. R. PALMER , Semantics, Camb ridge , 1976.
46 J. P. POSTGATE, Translation and translations , London , 1922.
47 E. PU LGRAM, 'Phoneme and graph eme : a parallel' , Word 7 (1951),
15-70.
48 R. H. ROBIN S , 'A problem in the state ment of meanings' , Lingua 3
(1952), 121-37 ·
49 'Jo hn Rup ert Firth ', Lang 37 (1961), 191-200.
50 E. SAP IR, 'The status of linguistics as a science', Lang 5 ( 1929),
207- 14.
51 F DE SAUSSURE, Cours de linguistique generale, fourth edition, Paris,
1949·
52 T. H . SAVORY, The art of translation , London , 1957.
53 W. SCH MIDT, Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde,
Heidelberg , 1926.
54 N. C. SCOTT, 'Obituary, John Rupert Firth' , BSOAS 24 ( 1961),
4 13- 18 .
55 T. A. SE BEOK, Perspectives in zoosemiotics, The Hague, 1972.
56 'Semiotics: a survey of the state of the art', T. A. SEB EOK (ed), Current
trends in linguistics, Volume 12, 1974, 211-64.
57 N. V. SMITH (ed) Mutual knowledge, London, 1982.
58 D. SP ERBER and D. WILSON , Relevance: communication and cognition,
Oxford , 1986.
59 G. L. TRAGER, 'Th e field of linguistics' , Studies in linguistics , occasional
paper I (1950).
 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT
4°
60 S .ULLMANN , The principles of semantics, second edition, Glasgow and
Oxford, 1957.
61 Semantics, Oxford , 1962
62 R. A. WALDRON , Sense and sense development, London, 1967·
631. F. WALLWORK , Language and linguistics: an introduction to the study
of language, London, 1969.
64 L. WITIGENSTEIN, Philosophical investigations, trans G . E . M.
Anscombe , Oxford, 1953.

Notes to Chapter 1
I On the languages of the world, Meillet and Cohen, 39, give brief
accounts of all languages so far as information is available. See also
Schmidt, 53, and E . Kieckers, Die Sprachstiimme der Erde, Heidel-
berg, 1931; M. Ruhlen, A guide to the world's languages, London,
1987.
2 On the linguist as opposed to the polyglot, Bloch and Trager, 4, 8.
3 Synchronic and diachronic, like a number of other basic terminol-
ogical distinctions in linguistics , are Saussurean in origin (51, 114-43) .
De Saussure gave us the term hat de langue to refer to a stage of
a language at a particular period; thus Chaucerian, Johnsonian, and
contemporary English are each different etats de la langue anglaise.
4 On the different uses of the world philology, Carroll, 9, 3, 65-6;
Bolling, 6.
5 J. J. Katz and P. M. Postal, An integrated theory of linguistic descrip-
tions, Cambridge, Mass , 1964, I.
6 Chomsky II, I.
7 Langacker 33, v.
8 Further discussed in 9.3, with references.
9 Bloch and Trager, 4, 5.
10 On bee dancing, von Frisch, 17; Kroeber, 32; Aitchison, 1,39.
II On gibbons, Carpenter, 8. In general, Kainz, 27; Sebeok, 55.
12 Excellent summary in non-technical language in Aitchison, I,
Chapter 2; cp also R. A. and B. T. Gardner, 'Teaching sign language
to a chimpanzee', Science 165 (1969),664-72; D. Premack, 'A func-
tional analysis of language', Journal of experimental analysis of
behavior 14 (1970), 107-25 ; G. Mounin, 'Language, communication,
chimpanzees, Current anthropology 17 (1976), 1-8 .
13 Biological inheritance, Lenneberg, 35.
14 On the question of the origin of language, Hockett, 23, Chapter 64,
and in The scientific American , September, 1960; Hamad , 20;
Lieberman , 36.
15 On semiotics, Barthes, 3; Sebeok, 56. There is a journal, Semiotica,
specifically devoted to semiotics.
16 On sound symbolism and onomatopoeia, Jespersen, 26, Chapter 20;
Firth, 13, Chapter 6; Kohler, 31, 224-5 .
17 Cp A. Martinet, 'La double articulation linguistique', TCLC 5 (1949),
127- 52.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 41
18 On graphonomy, Hockett, 23, Chapter 62. On the analogy of
phonemics (4.3.1) a branch of linguistics called graphemics has been
suggested (Pulgram, 47).
19 On a narrow interpretation of linguistics, Trager, 59; Hockett , 22, 14.
20 George Berkeley, A treatise concerning the principles of human
knowledge, 1710, Introduction , §13. On the technical distinction
between reference and denotation, Lyons, 37, 176.
21 On different cultural worlds, Sapir, 50.
22 On 'thing meant', Gardiner, 18, 15; significant and signifie, de Saus-
sure, 51, 99; triadic relationship of meaning, Odgen and Richards,
44, Chapter I. On meaning as function , Bazell, Word 10 (1954), 132;
cp Wittgenstein, 64, 126 etc. Bloomfield developed a rigorous theory
of meaning in behaviourist or mechanist terms (5, Chapters 2 and 9).
These topics are discussed from a number of viewpoints by Ullmann ,
60; cp 61. More recent treatments may be found in Kempson, 29,
Chapter 2, Lyons, 37, Chapter 7, and Palmer, 45, 19-3 0.
23 On presupposition generally, Kempson, 28; see also Fillmore, 'Verbs
of judging : an exercise in semantic description', Fillmore and Langen-
doen, 12, 273-89; Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 30.
24 Logicians and specialists in semantics are in dispute about the tech-
nicalities involved in interpreting sentences like the King of France
is bald said with reference to the present day. Broadly two views are
taken: either, in the case that there is no King of France, ie that there
is a King of France is false, then the King of France is bald is simply
false (that is, the King of France is bald entails the truth of there is
a King of France) ; or, alternatively, if there is no King of France,
then the truth (or the falsity) of both the King of France is bald and
of the King of France is not bald does not arise, both sentences being
neither true or false but uninterpretable in a normal context (the
utterance of any statement about the King of France presupposes the
existence, at the time referred to, of such a person.)
Faced with such an apparently odd sentence the ordinary listener,
as opposed to the logician in his professional capacity, would try to
interpret it in a normal manner, perhaps by assuming that the King
of France was a currently well-known nickname of a prominent
politician, popular entertainer, sportsman, or even a notorious and
successful criminal gang leader.
For a full discussion and further references, see Kempson 29,
Chapter 9; also Lyons, 37, 182-3, 600-2.
25 Hyponymy, Lyons, 37, 291-5; semantics and pragmatics, Morris, 41;
Kempson, 28, Chapters 7-9; more generally, Alston, 2. On context
of situation, Malinowski, Supplement I in Ogden and Richards, 44,
and 38, Volume 2, Chapter I ; Firth, 14 and 15,7-11.
Firth's general theory of language and linguistic analysis is set out
in Firth, 15 and 16. A complete bibliography of his publications is
to be found at the end of his obituaries, by Scott, 54, and by Robins,
49·
Those who take a restrictive view of semantics and draw a line,
42 GENERAL LINGUISTICS: THE SCOPE OF THE SUBJECT

however difficult in practice to make precise, between linguistic

meaning and language use, between semantics and pragmatics, would
assign most of the material studied in Firth 's and Malinowski's
context of situation theories to pragmatics, and much else . Kempson ,
for example, writes (29, 192): 'Within the domain of pragmatics,
according to the position adopted in this book, fall topics such as
metaphor, stylistics, rhetorical devices in general, and all the
phenomena relating to what we might call thematic structure - the
way in which a speaker presents his utterance.'
On this view studies of language use, such as are undertaken in
'speech act theory' and in the investigation of the conventions of
conversation (see 9.2, and Grice , 19), would fall within pragmatics
(Kempson, 29, Chapters 4 and 5). This is no way affects the relative
importance assigned to such studies, any more than does the Firthian
virtual inclusion of all pragmatic topics within his contextual seman-
tics. It is a question of the manner in which the highly complex
subject of human language is divided and assigned to the different
branches of linguistics.
For the most recent investigations into this rich and fascinating
aspect of our use and understanding of language the reader should
study Smith, 57, and Sperber and Wilson, 58.
Those who remember reading, or having read to them, Alice in
Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass in childhood should
reread them and notice how much of their particular brand of humour
arises from the deliberate neglect or perversion of normal 'maxims
of conversation' (cp Grice, 19, 45).
26 Phatic communion was used by Malinowski, in Ogden and Richards,
44, 3 15, as a technical term to denote this type of socially necessary
'idle chatter'; cp Hayakawa, 21,72: 'The prevention of silence is itself
an important function of speech.' The successful handling of the
various types of language appropriate to different situations has been
called 'communicative competence' (Hymes, 25). See also Hymes, 24;
Lyons, 37, 573-91; R. Bauman and J . Sherzer (eds), Explorations in
the ethnography of speaking, London, 1974.
27 On semantics generally, two elementary books are especially to be
recommended , Waldron, 62, and Palmer, 45. In the more technical
range , Kempson, 29, is an excellent textbook on semantics, with
particular reference to logic; semantics is here treated, in the author's
words, 'as a bridge discipline between linguistics and philosophy (29,
ix). Lyons, 37, is a most comprehensive exposition of all aspects of
semantics in a wide-ranging application of the term.
Leech, 34, provides an excellent introduction to pragmatics, with
some discussion (5-7) of the different conceptions of the relations
between pragmatics and semantics in the study of linguistic meaning.
See also S. C. Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge, 1983.
28 On translation, Malinowski, 38, volume 2, 14; Postgate, 46; Savory,
52; IJAL 20 (1954), part 4, translation issue; Catford, 10; Nida, 43,
which contains a very full bibliography; Newmark, 42.
General linguistics: the scope of the subject
J. Aitchison , The articulate mammal: an introduction to psycholinguistics, London, 1976.
W. P. Alston , Philosophy of language, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
R. Barthes , Elements de sémiologie, Paris, 1964.
B. Bloch and G. L.. Trager , Outline of linguistic analysis, Baltimore, 1942.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935.
G. M. Bolling , ‘Linguistics and philology‘, Lang 5 (1929), 27–32.
R. Carnap , Introduction to semantics, Cambridge, Mass, 1948.
C. R. Carpenter , A field study in Siam of the behaviour and social relations of the gibbon,
Comparative psychology monographs 16 (1940), Part 5.
J. B. Carroll , The study of language, Cambridge, Mass, 1953.
J. C. Catford , A linguistic theory of translation, London, 1965.
N. Chomsky , Language and mind, New York, 1972.
C. J. Fillmore and D. T. Landendoen (eds), Studies in linguistic semantics, New York,
1971.
J. R. Firth , Speech, London, 1930.
‘Personality and language in society’, Sociol rev 42 (1950), 37–52.
‘Synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-55’, Studies in linguistic analysis, special publication of
the Philological Society, Oxford, 1957, 1–32.
‘Ethnographic analysis and language with reference to Malinowski's views’, Man and
culture, edited by R. W. Firth , London, 1957, 93–118.
K. Von Frisch , Bees, their vision, chemical senses and language, Ithaca, 1950.
A. L. Gardiner , Theory of speech and language, Oxford, 1932.
H. P. Grice , ‘Logic and conversation’, Syntax and semantics 3 (1975), 41–58.
S. R. Harnad (ed), Origin and evolution of language and speech, New York, 1975.
S. I. Hayakawa , Language in thought and action, London, 1952.
C. F. Hockett , A manual of phonology, Indiana University publications in anthropology
and linguistics 11, 1955.
A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
D. Hymes , ‘Models of the interaction of language and social life’, J. J. Gumperz and D.
Hymes (eds), Directions in sociolinguistics, New York, 1972, 35–71.
On communicative competence, Philadelphia, 1971.
O. Jespersen , Language, London, 1922.
F. Kainz , Die ‘Sprache’ der Tiere, Stuttgart, 1961.
R. M. Kempson , Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics, Cambridge, 1975.
Semantic theory, Cambridge, 1977.
P. Kiparsky and C. Kiparsky , ‘Fact’, M. Bierwisch and K. Heidolph (eds), Progress in
linguistics, The Hague, 1970, 143–173.
W. Kohler , Gestalt psychology, New York, 1947.
A. L. Kroeber , ‘Sign and symbol in bee communications’, Proc National Academy of
Sciences 38 (1952), 753–754.
R. W. Langacker , Language and its structure, New York, 1968.
G. N. Leech , Principles of pragmatics, London, 1983.
E. H. Lenneberg , Biological foundations of language, New York, 1967.
P. Lieberman , On the origins of language, New York, 1975.
J. Lyons , Semantics, Cambridge, 1977.
B. Malinowski , Coral gardens and their magic, London, 1935.
A. Meillet and M. Cohen , Les langues du monde, Paris, 1952.
T. F. Mitchell , ‘The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica’, Hespéris 1957, 31–71,
reprinted in T. F. Mitchell , Principles of Firthian Linguistics, London, 1975, 167–200.
C. Morris , Signs, language, and behaviour, New York, 1946.
P. Newmark , Approaches to translation, Oxford, 1981.
E. A. Nida , Toward a science of translating, Leiden, 1964.
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards , The meaning of meaning, eighth edition, London, 1946.
F. R. Palmer , Semantics, Cambridge, 1976.
J. P. Postgate , Translation and translations, London, 1922.
E. Pulgram , ‘Phoneme and grapheme: a parallel’, Word 7 (1951), 15–70.
R. H. Robins , ‘A problem in the statement of meanings’, Lingua 3 (1952), 121–371.
‘John Rupert Firth’, Lang 37 (1961), 191–200.
E. Sapir , ‘The status of linguistics as a science’, Lang 5 (1929), 207–214.
F. De Saussure , Cours de Unguistique générale, fourth edition, Paris, 1949.
T. H. Savory , The art of translation, London, 1957.
W. Schmidt , Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde, Heidelberg, 1926.
N. C. Scott , ‘Obituary, John Rupert Firth’, Bsoas 24 (1961), 413–418.
T. A. Sebeok , Perspectives in zoosemiotics, The Hague, 1972.
‘Semiotics: a survey of the state of the art’, T. A. Sebeok (ed), Current trends in linguistics,
Volume 12, 1974, 211–264.
N. V. Smith (ed) Mutual knowledge, London, 1982.
D. Sperber and D. Wilson , Relevance: communication and cognition, Oxford, 1986.
G. L. Trager , ‘The field of linguistics’, Studies in linguistics, occasional paper 1 (1950).
S. Ullmann , The principles of semantics, second edition, Glasgow and Oxford, 1957.
Semantics, Oxford, 1962
R. A. Waldron , Sense and sense development, London, 1967.
J. F. Wallwork , Language and linguistics: an introduction to the study of language,
London, 1969.
L. Wittgenstein , Philosophical investigations, trans G. E. M. Anscombe , Oxford, 1953.

Theoretical and methodological considerations

R. Bartsch , Norms of language, London, 1987.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935.
R. P. Botha , The place of the dictionary in transformational generative theory, The Hague,
1968.
G. L. Brook , English dialects, London, 1963.
C. D. Buck , Introduction to the study of the Greek dialects, Boston, 1928.
N. Chomsky , Syntactic structures, The Hague, 1957.
‘Some methodological remarks on generative grammar’, Word 17 (1961), 219–239.
Aspects of the theory of syntax, Cambridge, Mass, 1965.
E. Dauzat , La géographie linguistique, Paris, 1922.
J. R. Firth , Speech, London, 1930.
‘Personality and language in society’, Sociol rev 42 (1950), 37–52.
‘Modes of meaning’, Essays and studies, 1951, 118–149.
‘Synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–55’, Studies in linguistic analysis, special publication of
the Philological Society, Oxford, 1957, 1–32.
W. N. Francis , Dialectology, London, 1983.
Z.S. Harris Methods in structural linguistics, Chicago, 1951.
S.I. Hayakawa Language in thought and action, London, 1952.
H. Hickerson , and others, ‘Testing procedures’, Ual, 18 (1952), 1–8.
J. Hjelmslev , Prolegomena to a theory of language, trans F. J. Whitfield , Baltimore, 1953.
C. F. Hockett , A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
H. M. Hoenigswald , Language change and linguistic reconstruction, Chicago, 1960.
F. W. Householder and S. Saporta (eds), ‘Problems in lexicography’, Ual 28 (1962), No 2,
Part 4.
I. Iordan , Introduction to Romance linguistics, trans J. Orr , London, 1937 (revised by R.
Posner, Oxford, 1970).
K. Jaberg , Sprachgeographie, Aarau, 1908.
M. Joos (ed), Readings in linguistics, Washington, 1957.
R. E. Keller , The German dialects, Manchester, 1961.
W. Labov , ‘The social motivation for a sound change’, Word 9 (1963), 273–309.
The social stratification of English in New York City, Washington, 1966.
A. Lehrer , Semantic fields and lexical structure, Amsterdam, 1974.
J. Lyons , Semantics, Cambridge, 1977.
R. I. Mcdavid , ‘The dialects of American English’, Chapter 9 of W. N. Francis (ed), The
structure of American English, New York, 1958.
A. Mcintosh , An introduction to a survey of the Scottish dialects, Edinburgh, 1952.
A. Meillet , Aperç d'une histoire de la langue grecque, third edition, Paris, 1930.
La méthode comparative en linguistique historique, Oslo, 1925.
B. Newton , The generative interpretation of dialect: a study of modern Greek phonology,
Cambridge, 1972.
E. A. Nida , ‘The analysis of meaning and dictionary-making’, Ijal 24 (1958), 279–292.
S. Ohman , ‘Theories of the “linguistic field”’, Word 9 (1953), 123–134.
H. Orton . S. Sanderson , J. Widdowson , The linguistic atlas of England, London, 1978.
L. R. Palmer , Descriptive and comparative linguistics: a critical introduction, London,
1972.
P. Passy , Petite phonétique comparée, third edition, Paris, 1922.
M. Platnauer , ‘Greek colour-perception’, Classical quarterly 15 (1921), 153–162.
E. Sapir , ‘The status of linguistics as a science’, Lang 5 (1929), 207–214.
F. De Saussure , Cours de linguistique générale, fourth edition, Paris, 1949.
E. Siverts En, Cockney phonology, Oslo, 1960.
N. C. W. Spence , ‘Linguistic fields, conceptual systems, and the Welt- bild', Tps 1961,
87–106.
D. Sperber and D. Wilson , Relevance: communication and cognition, Oxford, 1986.
H. Sweet , Collected papers, Oxford, 1913.
P. Trudgill , The social differentiation of English in Norwich, Cambridge, 1974.
W. F. Twaddell , On defining the phoneme, Language Monograph 16, 1935.
S. Ullmann , The principles of semantics, second edition, Glasgow and Oxford, 1957.
C. F. Voegelin and Z. S. Harris , ‘Methods of determining intelligibility among dialects of
natural languages’, Proc of the American Philosophical Society 95 (1951), 322–329.
I. C. Ward , The phonetics of English, Cambridge, 1948.
J. C. Wells , Accents of English, Cambridge, 1982.
J. Wright , A grammar of the dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire, English
Dialect Society, London, 1892.
The English dialect grammar, Oxford, 1905.
Phonetics
D. Abercrombie , Elements of general phonetics, Edinburgh, 1967.
J. M. Aitchison , The articulate mammal, London, 1976.
L. E. Armstrong , The phonetics of French, London, 1932.
J. Bithell , German pronunciation and phonology, London, 1952.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935.
D. Bolinger (ed), Intonation: selected readings, Harmondsworth, 1972.
G. J. Borden and K. S. Harris , Speech science primer: physiology, acoustics, and
perception of speech, Baltimore, 1980.
S. C. Boyanus , Russian pronunciation, London, 1965.
D. Crystal , Prosodie systems and intonation in English, Cambridge, 1969.
The English tone of voice, London, 1975.
D. Crystal and R. Quirk , Systems of prosodie and paralinguistic features of English, The
Hague, 1964.
R. Daniloff , G. Schuckers , and L. Feth , The physiology of speech and hearing: an
introduction, Englewood Cliffs, 1980.
F. B. Denes and E. N. Pinson , The speech chain, New York, 1973.
J. L. Flanagan , Speech analysis, synthesis and perception, Berlin, 1965.
D. B. Fry , Homo loquens: man as a talking animal, Cambridge, 1977.
A. C. Gimson , An introduction to the pronunciation of English, London, 1970.
M. Grammont , Traité de phonétique, Paris, 1950.
W. J. Hardcastle , Physiology of speech production, London, 1976.
R. S. Harrell , The phonology of colloquial Egyptian Arabic, New York, 1957.
R. S. Heffner , General phonetics, Madison, 1952.
C. F. Hockett , A manual of phonology, Bloomington, 1955.
D. Jones , Outline of English phonetics, Cambridge, 1947.
The phoneme, Cambridge, 1950.
M. Joos , Acoustic phonetics, Baltimore, 1948.
J. S. Kenyon , American pronunciation, Ann Arbor, 1935.
R. Kingdon , The groundwork of English intonation, London, 1958.
P. Ladefoged , Elements of acoustic phonetics, London, 1962.
Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics, Chicago, 1973.
E. H. Lenneberg , Biological foundations of language, New York, 1967.
P. Lieberman , Speech physiology and acoustic phonetics, New York, 1977.
H. Mol , Fundamentals of phonetics I: the organ of hearing, The Hague, 1963.
V. E. Negus , The mechanism of the larynx, London, 1929.
J. D. O'Connor , Phonetics, Harmondsworth, 1973.
J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold , Intonation of colloquial English, London, 1978.
C. Painter , An introduction to instrumental phonetics, Baltimore, 1979.
M. Pickett , The sounds of speech communication, Baltimore, 1980.
K. L. Pike , Phonetics, Ann Arbor, 1943.
The intonation of American English, Ann Arbor, 1946.
Tone languages, Ann Arbor, 1948.
R. G. Popperwell , The pronunciation of Norwegian, Cambridge, 1963.
E. Sapir , Language, New York, 1921.
M. Schubiger , English intonation: its form and function, Tübingen, 1958.
S. Singh and K. S. Singh , Phonetics: principles and practices, Baltimore, 1982.
E. Sivertsen , Cockney phonology, Oslo, 1960.
R. H. Stetson , The bases of phonology, Oberlin, 1945.
Motor phonetics, Amsterdam, 1951.
I. C. Ward , The phonetics of English, Cambridge, 1948.
C. M. Wise , Introduction to phonetics, Englewood Cliffs, 1957.

Phonology
S. R. Anderson , The organization of phonology, New York, 1974.
S. R. Anderson , Phonology in the twentieth century: theories of rules and theories of
representations, Chicago, 1985.
C. E. Bazell , J. C. Catford , M. A. K. Halliday , and R. H. Robins (eds), In memory of J. R.
Firth, London, 1966.
J. T. Bendor-Samuel , ‘Some problems of segmentation in the phonological analysis of
Tereno’, Word 16 (1960), 348–355.
M. Bierwisch , ‘Regeln für die Intonation deutscher Sätze’, Studia Grammatica 7 (1966),
99–201.
B. Bloch , ‘A set of postulates for phonemic analysis’, Lang 24 (1948), 3–46.
B. Bloch and G. L. Trager , Outline of linguistic analysis, Baltimore, 1942.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935
D. W. Bolinger , (ed), Intonation: selected readings, Harmondsworth, 1972.
A. Brakel , Phonological markedness and distinctive features, Bloomington, 1983.
J. Carnochan , ‘Vowel harmony in Igbo’, African language studies 1 (1960), 155–163.
J. Chadwick , The decipherment of Linear B, Cambridge, 1958.
Y. R. Chao , A grammar of spoken Chinese, Berkeley, 1968.
N. Chomsky , Current issues in linguistic theory, Cambridge, Mass, 1964.
N. Chomsky and M. Halle , The sound pattern of English, New York, 1968.
A. Cohen , The phonemes of English, The Hague, 1952.
H. N. Coustenoble and L. E. Armstrong , Studies in French intonation, Cambridge, 1934.
F. Dell , Generative phonology, trans C. Cullen, Cambridge, 1980.
D. Diringer , The alphabet, New York, 1968.
M. B. Emeneau , Studies in Vietnamese grammar, Berkeley, 1951.
J. R. Firth , ‘Sounds and prosodies’, Tps 1948, 127–152.
E. Fischer-Jorgensen , Trends in phonological theory, Copenhagen, 1975.
I. J. Gelb , A study of writing, Chicago, 1969
H. J. Giegerich , Metrical phonology and phonological structure, Cambridge, 1985.
A. C. Gimson , An introduction to the pronunciation of English, London, 1970.
H. A. Gleason , An introduction to descriptive linguistics, New York, 1961.
J. A. Goldsmith , Autosegmental and metrical phonology, Oxford, 1988.
J. A. Goldsmith , ‘An overview of autosegmental phonology’, Linguistic analysis 2 (1976),
23–68.
D. L. Goyvaerts , Aspects of post-SPE phonology, Ghent, 1978.
M. Halle , The sound pattern of Russian, The Hague, 1959.
M. Halle , ‘Phonology in a generative grammar’, Word 18 (1962), 64–72.
M. A. K. Halliday , Intonation and grammar in British English, The Hague, 1967.
Z. S. Harris , Methods in structural linguistics, Chicago, 1951.
P. Hawkins , Introducing phonology, London, 1984.
E. J. A. Henderson , ‘Prosodies in Siamese’, Asia Major, New series 1 (1949), 189–215.
E. J. A. Henderson , Tiddim Chin, London, 1965.
E. J. A. Henderson (ed), The indispensable foundation: a selection from the writings of
Henry Sweet, London, 1971.
A. A. Hill , Introduction to linguistic structures, New York, 1958.
C. F. Hockett , A manual of phonology, Bloomington, 1955.
C. F. Hockett , A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
J. B. Hooper , An introduction to natural generative phonology, New York, 1976.
H. Van Der Hulst and N. Smith (eds), The structure of phonological representations,
Dordrecht, 1982.
R. Jakobson , Selected writings I: phonological studies, The Hague, 1962.
R. Jakobson , G. Fant , M. Halle , Preliminaries to speech analysis, Cambridge, Mass,
1952.
R. Jakobson and M. Halle , Fundamentals of language, The Hague, 1956.
W. Jassem , Intonation in conversational English, Wroclaw, 1952.
D. Jones , Outline of English phonetics, Cambridge, 1947.
D. Jones , The phoneme, Cambridge, 1950.
M. Joos , Acoustic phonetics, Baltimore, 1948.
M. Kenstowicz and C. Kisseberth , Topics in phonological theory, New York, 1977.
D. T. Langendoen , The London school of linguistics, Cambridge, Mass, 1968.
W. R. Lee , An English intonation reader, London, 1960.
I. Lehiste , Suprasegmentals, Cambridge, Mass, 1970.
N. Love , Generative phonology, Amsterdam, 1981
A. Martinet , ‘Un ou deux phonèmes’, Acta linguistica 1 (1939), 94–103.
A. Martinet , Phonology as functional phonetics, publication of the Philological Society 15,
Oxford, 1949.
C. Mohrmann , F. Norman , A. Sommerfelt , Trends in modern linguistics, Utrecht, 1963.
J. D. O'Connor and G. F. Arnold , Intonation of colloquial English, London, 1973.
F. R. Palmer (ed), Prosodie analysis, London, 1970.
K. L. Pike , Phonetics, Ann Arbor, 1943.
K. L. Pike , The intonation of American English, Ann Arbor, 1946.
K. L. Pike , Phonemics, Ann Arbor, 1947.
K. L. Pike , ‘On the phonemic status of English diphthongs’, Lang 23 (1947), 151–159.
K. L. Pike , ‘Grammatical prerequisites to phonemic analysis’, Word 3 (1947), 155–172.
K. L. Pike , Tone languages, Ann Arbor, 1948.
K. L. Pike , ‘More on grammatical prerequisites’, Word 8 (1952), 106–121.
P. Van Reenen , Phonetic feature definitions, Dordrecht, 1982.
R. H. Robins , ‘Aspects of prosodie analysis’, Proc University of Durham Philosophical
Society, series B (Arts) 1 (1957), 1–12.
R. H. Robins , ‘Distinctive feature theory’, D. Armstrong and C. H. Van Schooneveld (eds),
Roman Jakobson: echoes of his scholarship, Lisse, 1977, 391–402.
G. Sampson , Writing systems, London, 1985.
F. De Saussure , Cours de linguistique générale, Paris, 1949.
S. A. Schane , Generative phonology, Englewood Cliffs, 1973.
A. H. Sommerstein , Modern phonology, London, 1977.
R. H. Stetson , Motor phonetics, Amsterdam, 1951.
R. H. Stetson , Studies in linguistic analysis, special publication of the Philological Society,
Oxford, 1957.
H. Sweet , Handbook of phonetics, Oxford, 1877.
G. L. Trager and B. Bloch , ‘The syllabic phonemes of English’, Lang 17 (1941), 223–246.
G. L. Trager and H. L. Smith , Outline of English structure, Norman, Oklahoma, 1951.
N. S. Trubetzkoy , Principles of phonology, trans C. A. M. Baltaxe , Berkeley, 1969
(originally published in German, ‘Grundzüge der Phonologie’, TCLP 7, 1939).
W. F. Twaddell , On defining the phoneme, Baltimore, 1935.
J. Vachek , The linguistic school of Prague, Bloomington, 1966.
N. Waterson , Prosodie phonology: the theory and its application to language acquisition
and speech processing, Newcastle, 1987.
R. S. Wells , ‘The pitch phonemes of English’, Lang, 21 (1945), 27–39.

Grammar: grammatical elements

D. J. Allerton , Essentials of grammatical theory, London, 1979.
E. O. Ashton , Swahili grammar, London, 1944.
C. E. Bazell , Linguistic form, Istanbul, 1953.
‘Meaning and the morpheme’, Word 18 (1962), 132–142.
C. E. Bazell , J. C. Catford M. A. K. Halliday , and R. H. Robins (eds), In memory of J. R.
Firth, London, 1966.
J. T. Bendor-Samuel , ‘The verbal piece in Jebero’, Word 17 (1961), supplement.
B. Bloch , ‘English verb inflection’, Lang 23 (1947), 399–418.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935.
Eastern Ojibwa, Ann Arbor, 1958.
E. Bourciez , Eléments de linguistique romane, fourth edition, Paris, 1946.
M. Braun , Grundzüge der slavischen Sprachen, Göttingen, 1947.
R. G. A. De Bray , A guide to the Slavonic languages, London, 1951.
E. K. Brown and J. E. Miller , Syntax, London, 1980.
J. L. Bybee , Morphology, Amsterdam, 1985.
Y. R. Chao , A grammar of spoken Chinese, Berkeley, 1968.
B. Comrie , ‘The ergative: variations on a theme’, Lingua 32 (1973), 239–253.
W. D. Elcock , The Romance languages, London, 1960.
M. B. Emeneau , Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) grammar, Berkeley, 1951.
W. J. Entwistle and W. A. Morison , Russian and the Slavonic languages, London, 1949.
C. C. Fries , The structure of English, New York, 1952.
H. A. Gleason , Introduction to descriptive linguistics, second edition, New York, 1961.
W. Haas , ‘Zero in linguistic analysis’, Studies in linguistic analysis, special publication of
the Philological Society, Oxford, 1957, 33–53.
M. A. K. Halliday , ‘Notes on transitivity and theme in English’, Journal of linguistics 3
(1967), 37–81, 199–244, 4 (1968), 179–216.
A. A. Hill , ‘Morphophonemes of the Keltic mutations’, Lang 27 (1951), 230–247.
A. A. Hill , Introduction to linguistic structures, New York, 1958.
L. Hjelmslev , Les principes de grammaire generale, Copenhagen, 1928.
La categorie des cas, Aarhus, 1935.
‘La structure morphologique’, Actes du 5me congrès international de linguistes (1939),
66–93.
C. F. Hockett , ‘Problems of morphemic analysis’, Lang 23 (1947), 321–343.
‘Two models of grammatical description’, Word 10 (1954), 210–234.
A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
H. Hoijer , ‘The cultural implications of some Navaho linguistic categories’, Lang 27
(1951), 111–120.
‘The relation of language to culture’, A. L. Kroeber (ed), Anthropology today, Chicago,
1953, 554–573.
(ed), Language in culture, Chicago, 1955.
G. C. Horrocks , Generative grammar, London, 1987.
H. P. Houghton , An introduction to the Basque language, Leyden, 1961.
J. M. Jacob , Introduction to Cambodian, London, 1968.
R. Jakobson , ‘Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre’ Tclp 6 (1936), 240–288.
O. Jespersen , The philosophy of grammar, London, 1924.
M. Joos , The English verb: form and meanings, Madison, 1964.
E. L. Keenan and B. Comrie , ‘Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar’,
Linguistic inquiry 8 (1977), 63–99.
J. Lyons (ed), New horizons in linguistics, Harmondsworth, 1970.
A. A. Macdonell , A Sanskrit grammar for beginners, London, 1911.
P. H. Matthews , Morphology: an introduction to the theory of word structure, Cambridge,
1974.
45 A. Meillet Linguistique historique et Unguistique générale (I), Paris, 1948.
T. F. Mitchell , Introduction to colloquial Egyptian Arabic, London, 1956.
J. Morris-Jones , Elementary Welsh grammar, Oxford, 1922.
E. A. Nida , Morphology, second edition, Ann Arbor, 1948.
Syntax, Glendale, 1946.
Synopsis of English syntax, The Hague, 1966.
F. R. Palmer , A linguistic study o f the English verb, London, 1965.
Mood and modality, Cambridge, 1986.
Grammar, Harmondsworth, 1984.
The English verb, London, 1987.
F. Plank (ed.) Ergativity, London, 1979.
R. H. Robins , The Yurok language, Berkeley, 1958.
‘Some considerations on the status of grammar in linguistics’, Archivum linguisticum 11
(1959), 91–114.
‘In defence of WP’, Tps 1959, 116–144.
‘Nominal and verbal derivation in Sundanese’, Lingua 8 (1959), 337–369.
A short history of linguistics, second edition, London, 1979.
E. Sapir , Language, New York, 1921.
E. Sapir and M. Swadesh , Nootka texts, Philadelphia, 1939.
L. C. Thompson , A Vietnamese grammar, Seattle, 1965.
G. L. Trager and H. L. Smith , Outline of English Structure, Studies in linguistics,
occasional paper 3, Norman, Oklahoma, 1951.
H. Vogt , Esquisse d'une grammaire du georgien moderne, Oslo, 1936.
I. C. Ward , ‘Tone in West African languages’, Proceedings of the third international
congress of phonetic sciences, 1938, 383–438.
R. S. Wells , ‘Immediate constituents”, Lang 23 (1947), 81–117.
B. L. Whorf , Four articles on metalinguistics, Washington, 1950.
Language, thought, and reality: selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, (ed) J. B. Carroll
, New York, 1956.
R. O. Winstedt , Malay grammar, Oxford, 1927.
J. Wright , A grammar of the dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire, English
Dialect Society, London, 1892.Grammatical analysis and description, the subject of
Chapters 5 and 6, is covered in a number of general books. All the books referred to in the
general bibliography appearing after Chapter 1 have chapters devoted to grammatical
topics. Additionally attention may be drawn to the following: Hjelmslev, 26; Allerton, 1;
Palmer, 53. In the older European tradition, Jerpersen, 39, is an important contribution by
an important writer. It must be remembered that not all the questions raised in these
books, and in other writings refered to in the notes, are answered in the same way.
Somewhat different theories and different interpretations of theory apply in grammar as in
the other levels of analysis. This does not mean that any one of the writers is ‘right’ and
the others ‘wrong’ in some particular matter.
Current linguistic theory
A. Akmajian and F. Heny , An introduction to the principles of transformational syntax,
Cambridge, Mass, 1975.
D. J. Allerton , Valency and the English verb, London, 1982.
J. M. Anderson , On case grammar: prolegomena to a theory of grammatical relations,
Cambridge, 1977.
M. Aronoff , Word formation in generative grammar, Cambridge, Mass, 1981.
G. M. Awbery , The syntax of Welsh: a transformational study of the passive, Cambridge,
1976.
E. W. Bach , Syntactic theory, New York, 1974.
D. C. Bennett , Spatial and temporal uses of English prepositions: an essay in
stratificational semantics, London, 1975.
M. Berry , An introduction to systemic grammar, London, 1975.
M. Bierwisch , Grammatik des deutschen Verbs, Berlin, 1963
R. M. Brend A tagmemic analysis of Mexican Spanish clauses, The Hague, 1968.
(ed) Advances in tagmemics, Amsterdam, 1974.
R. M. Brend . and K. L. Pike (eds) Trends in tagmemics I and II, The Hague, 1976.
J. Bresnan (ed), The mental representation of grammatical relations, Cambridge, Mass,
1982.
E. K. Brown and J. E. Miller , Syntax: generative grammar, London, 1982.
M. K. Burt , From deep to surface structure, New York, 1971.
L. Burzio , Italian syntax: a government-binding approach, Dordrecht, 1986.
N. Chomsky , Syntactic structures, The Hague, 1957.
Current issues in linguistic theory, The Hague, 1964.
Aspects of the theory of syntax, Cambridge, Mass, 1965.
Topics in the theory of generative grammar, The Hague, 1966.
Language and mind, New York, 1972.
Reflections on language, London, 1976.
Essays on form and interpretation, Amsterdam, 1977.
Language and responsibility, Hassocks, 1979.
‘On binding’, Linguistic inquiry 11 (1980), 1–46.
Rules and representations, Oxford, 1980.
Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding, Cambridge,
Mass, 1982.
Lectures on government and binding, Dordrecht, 1984.
N. Chomsky and M. Halle , The sound pattern of English, New York, 1968.
V. J. Cook , Chomsky's universal grammar, Oxford, 1987.
W. A. Cook , On tagmemes and transforms, Washington, 1964.
Introduction to tagmemic analysis, Washington, 1969.
P. W. Culicover , Syntax, New York, 1982.
S. Dik , Functional grammar, Amsterdam, 1978.
W. O. Dingwall , ‘Transformational grammar: form and theory’, Lingua 12 (1963),
233–275.
‘Recent developments in transformational grammar’, Lingua 16 (1966), 292–316.
B. Elson and V. Pickett , An introduction to morphology and syntax, Santa Ana, 1962.
W. A. Foley and R. D. Van Valin , Functional syntax and universal grammar, Cambridge,
1984.
R. Fowler , An introduction to transformational syntax, London, 1971.
G. Gazdar , E. Klein , G. Pullum , and I. Sag , Generalized phrase structure grammar,
Oxford, 1985.
J. T. Grinder and S. H. Elgin , A guide to transformational grammar: history, theory,
practice, New York, 1973.
T. Gunji , Japanese phrase structure grammar, Dordrecht, 1987.
M. A. K. Halliday , ‘Categories of the theory of grammar’, Word 17 (1961), 241–292.
‘Class in relation to the axes of chain and choice in language’, Linguistics 2 (1963), 5–15.
‘Notes on transitivity and theme in English’, Journal of linguistcs 3 (1967), 37–81,
199–244; 4 (1968), 179–216.
Intonation and grammar in British English, The Hague, 1967.
An introduction to functional grammar, London, 1985.
M. A. K. Halliday , A. Mcintosh , and P. D. Strevens , The linguistic sciences and language
teaching, London, 1964.
A. C. Harris , Georgian syntax: a study in relational grammar, Cambridge, 1981.
G. C. Horrocks , Generative grammar, London, 1987.
R. D. Huddleston , ‘Rank and depth’, Lang 41 (1965), 574–586.
R. A. Hudson , Word grammar, Oxford, 1984.
R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum , Grammar I and II, Boston, 1967.
Y. Kachru , Introduction to Hindi syntax, Urbana, 1966.
J. J. Katz and P. M. Postal , An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions, Cambridge,
Mass, 1964.
A. Koutsoudas , Writing transformational grammars, New York, 1967.
S. M. Lamb , ‘The sememic approach to structural semantics’, American anthropologist
66.3, part 2 (1964), 57–78.
‘On alternation, transformation, realization, and stratification#x2019;, Monograph series on
languages and linguistics 17, Washington, 1964, 105–122.
Outline of stratiftcational grammar, Washington, 1966.
R. W. Langacker , Fundamentals of linguistic analysis, New York, 1972.
R. B. Lees , The grammar of English nominalizations, Bloomington, 1960.
D. G. Lockwood , Introduction to stratiftcational linguistics, New York, 1972.
R. E. Longacre , ‘String constituent analysis’, Lang 36 (1960), 63–88.
Grammar discovery procedures: a field manual, The Hague, 1964.
‘Some fundamental insights of tagmemics’, Lang 41 (1965), 65–76.
J. Lyons , Introduction to theoretical linguistics, Cambridge, 1968.
Chomsky, London, 1977.
A. Makkai and D. G. Lockwood (eds), Readings in stratiftcational linguistics, Alabama,
1973.
E. Matteson (ed), Bolivian Indian grammar I and II, Norman, 1967.
G. H. Matthews , Hidatsa syntax, The Hague, 1965.
G. D. Morley , An introduction to systemic grammar, London, 1985.
D. M. Perlmutter (ed), Studies in relational grammar, Chicago, 1983.
V. Pickett , ‘The grammatical hierarchy of Isthmus Zapotek’, Lang 36.1, part 2 (1960).
K. L. Pike , Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behaviour,
Glendale, 1954–60.
Linguistic concepts: an introduction to tagmemics, Lincoln, 1982.
K. L. Pike and E. G. Pike , Grammatical analysis, Dallas, 1982.
Text and tagmeme, London, 1983.
P. M. Postal , ‘Constituent structure’, Ijal 30.1, part 3 (1964).
A. Radford , Transformational syntax, Cambridge, 1981.
D. A. Reibel and S. A. Schane (ed), Modern studies in English: readings in
transformational grammar, Englewood Cliffs, 1969.
H. Van Riemsdijk and E. Williams , Introduction to the theory of grammar, Cambridge,
Mass, 1986.
J. J. Robinson , ‘Dependency structures and transformational rules’, Lang 46 (1970),
259–285.
N. Ruwet Introduction à la grammaire générative, Paris, 1967, trans N. S. H. Smith, An
introduction to generative grammar, Amsterdam, 1973.
Théorie syntaxique et syntaxe du français, Paris, 1972, trans S. M. Robins , Problems in
French syntax: transformational-generative studies, London, 1976.
P. Sells , Lectures on contemporary syntactic theories, Chicago, 1985.
D. D. Steinbeck and L. A. Jakobovits (eds), Semantics: an interdisciplinary reader in
philosophy, London, 1971.
R. P. Stockwell , P. Schachter , and B. H. Partee , The major syntactic structures of
English, New York, 1973.
L. Tesniere , Eléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris, 1959.
v. Waterhouse , ‘The grammatical structure of Oaxaca Chontal’, Ijal 28.2, part 2 (1962).
The history and development of tagmemics, The Hague, 1974.
H. Wise , A transformational grammar of spoken Egyptian Arabic, Oxford, 1975.
D. S. Worth , ‘Transform analysis of Russian instrumental constructions’, Word 14 (1958),
247–290.

Linguistic comparison
J. M. Aitchison , Language change: progress or decay?, London, 1981.
W. S. Allen , Phonetics in Ancient India, London, 1953.
Vox Latina, Cambridge, 1965.
Vox Graeca, Cambridge, 1968.
Accent and rhythm: prosodie features of Latin and Greek, Cambridge, 1973.
J. M. Anderson , Structural aspects of language change, London, 1973.
R. Anttila , An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics, New York, 1972.
W. W. Arndt , ‘The performance of glottochronology in Germanic’, Lang 35 (1959),
180–192.
C. E. Bazell , ‘Syntactic relations and linguistic typology’, Cahiers F. de Saussure 8
(1949), 5–20.
Linguistic typology, London, 1958.
L. Bloomfield , Language, London, 1935.
E. Bourciez , Eléments de linguistique romane, fourth edition, Paris, 1946.
R. G. A. De Bray , A guide to the Slavonic languages, London, 1951.
M. Breal , Essai sur la sémantique, fourth edition, Paris, 1908 (also available in an English
translation by H. Cust, London, 1900).
C. D. Buck , Comparative grammar of Greek and Latin, Chicago, 1933.
‘Some questions of practice in the notation of reconstructed I-E forms’, Lang 2 (1926),
99–107.
T. Burrow , The Sanskrit language, London, 1955.
T. Bynon , Historical linguistics, Cambridge, 1985.
A. Campbell , Old English grammar, Oxford, 1959.
N. Chomsky and M. Halle , The sound pattern of English, New York, 1968.
N. E. Collinge , The laws of Indo-European, Amsterdam, 1985.
B. Comrie , Language universals and linguistic typology, Oxford, 1981.
(ed), The world's major languages, London, 1987.
A. Darmesteter , La vie des mots, twelfth edition, Paris, 1918.
W. D. Elcock , The Romance languages, London, 1960.
M. B. Emeneau , ‘India as a linguistic area’, Lang 32 (1956), 3–16.
W. J. Entwistle and W. A. Morison , Russian and the Slavonic languages, London, 1949.
L. Foulet , Petite syntax de l'ancien français, Paris, 1930.
H. A. Gleason , Introduction to descriptive linguistics, second edition, New York, 1961.
J. H. Greenberg , ‘A quantitative approach to the morphological typology of language’, R.
F. Spencer (ed), Method and perspective in anthropology, Minneapolis, 1954, 192–220.
Universals of language, Cambridge, Mass, 1983.
The languages of Africa, The Hague, 1966.
M. R. Haas , The prehistory of languages, The Hague, 1969.
M. Harris , The evolution of French syntax: a comparative approach, London, 1978.
A. G. Haudricourt and A. G. Juilland , Essai pour une histoire structurale du phonétisme
français, Paris, 1949.
E. Haugen , ‘The analysis of linguistic borrowing’, Lang 26 (1950), 210–231.
H. H. Hock , Principles of historical linguistics, Berlin, 1986.
C. F. Hockett , A manual of phonology, Indiana University publications in anthropology
and linguistics, 11, 1955.
A course in modern linguistics, New York, 1958.
H. M. Hoenigswald , Language change and linguistic reconstruction, Chicago, 1960.
H. P. Houghton , An introduction to the Basque language, Leyden, 1961.
W. Von Humboldt , Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, Berlin,
1836 (reprinted Darmstadt, 1949).
I. Iordan , Introduction to Romance linguistics, trans J. Orr , Oxford, 1970.
K. R. Jankowski , The neogrammarians: a reevaluation of their place in the development
of linguistic science, The Hague, 1972.
B. Karlgren , ‘Le proto-chinois, langue flexionelle’, Journal asiatique 15 (1920), 205–232.
R. D. King , Historical linguistics and generative grammar, Englewood Cliffs, 1969.
W. Labov , ‘The social motivation of a sound change’, Word 19 (1963), 273–309.
‘The social setting of linguistic change’, in T. A. Sebeok (ed), Current trends in linguistics
11, (1973), 195–251.
W. P. Lehmann , Historical linguistics, New York, 1962.
W. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds), Directions for historical linguistics, Austin, 1968.
H. Lewis and H. Pedersen , A concise comparative Celtic grammar, Göttingen, 1937.
A. Martinet , ‘La double articulation linguistique’, Tclc 5 (1949), 30–37.
‘Structure, function, and sound change’, Word 8 (1952), 1–32.
Economie des changements phonétiques, Berne, 1955.
A. Meillet , La méthode comparative en linguistique historique, Oslo, 1925 (also in English,
The comparative method in historical linguistics, Paris, 1967).
Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, eighth edition, Paris,
1937.
Les caractères généraux des langues germaniques, seventh edition, Paris, 1949.
C. Meinhof , Grundzüge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen, Berlin,
1906.
S. Ohman , ‘Theories of the “linguistic field”’, Word 9 (1953), 123–134.
C. Osgood (ed), Linguistic structures of native America, New York, 1946.
L. R. Palmer , Descriptive and comparative linguistics: a critical introduction, London,
1972.
H. Pedersen , Linguistic science in the nineteenth century, J. W. Spargo , Cambridge,
Mass, 1931 (republished as The discovery of language, Bloomington, 1962).
R. Priebsch and W. E. Collinson , The German language, London, 1934.
E. Pulgram , ‘Proto-Indo-European, reality and reconstruction’, Lang 35 (1959), 421–426.
R. H. Robins , A short history of linguistics, London, 1979.
M. Ruhlen , A guide to the world's languages 1: classification, London, 1987.
E. Sapir , Language, New York, 1921.
F. De Saussure , Cours de linguistique générale, fourth edition, Paris, 1949.
T. A. Sebeok (ed), Current trends in linguistics 11: Diachronic, areal, and typological
linguistics, The Hague, 1973.
H.-J. Seiler (ed), Language universals, Tübingen, 1978.
L. Tesnière , Eléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris, 1959.
P. Thieme , Die Heimat der indogermanischen Gemeinsprache, Wiesbaden, 1954.
N. S. Trubetzkoy , Principles of phonology, trans C. A. M. Baitaxe , Berkeley, 1969.
(Originally published in German, Grundzüge der Phonologie, TCLP 7, 1939).
S. Ullmann , ‘Descriptive semantics and linguistic typology’, Word 9 (1953), 225–240.
The principles of semantics, second edition, Glasgow and Oxford, 1951.
J. Vendryes , Le language, Paris, 1921.
C. F. Voegelin , ‘Models for cross-genetic comparisons’, Papers from the symposium on
American-Indian languages, Berkeley, 1954, 27–45.
A. Walde and J. Pokorny , Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der indogermanischen Sprachen,
Berlin and Leipzig, 1927–32.
U. Weinreich , Languages in contact, Publications of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1,
1953.
J. Wright and E. M. Wright , An elementary grammar of Middle English, Oxford, 1928.

Wider perspectives
J. Aitchison , The articulate mammal: an introduction to psycholin-guistics, London, 1976.
W. S. Allen , Phonetics in ancient India, London, 1953.
J. Allwood , L.-G. Andersson , and O. Dahl , Logic in linguistics, Cambridge, 1977.
W. P. Alston , Philosophy of language, Englewood Cliffs, 1964.
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