LINGUIST List 13.277

Sun Feb 3 2002

Review: Graffi, 200 Years of Syntax

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  • Sheila Dooley Collberg, review of Graffi (2001) 200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey

    Message 1: review of Graffi (2001) 200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey

     Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 13:04:41 -0700
    From: Sheila Dooley Collberg <sadcemail.arizona.edu>
    Subject: review of Graffi (2001) 200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey


    Graffi, Giorgio (2001) 200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey. John Benjamins Publishing Company, xiv+551pp, hardback ISBN 1-58811-052-4, $114.00, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98.

    Sheila Dooley Collberg, University of Arizona.

    SYNOPSIS As the title indicates, this book traces the history of syntactic research from the 18th and 19th Centuries to the contemporary work of the Minimalist Program. This is achieved through meticulous examination of the original works of dozens of syntacticians and through systematic comparison of their views on central syntactic problems. The result is a monumental historical narrative that might contain a number of surprises for modern linguists.

    The common thread running through this long and intricate narrative is the role of psychology in the syntactician's view of language and grammar. Graffi argues that this role has been a changing but in fact cyclical one, beginning with what he terms a "psychologistic" syntax in the 18th and 19th Centuries, followed by a rejection of psychologism during the age of Structuralism in the early 20th Century, and concluding with a return to psychologistic syntax in the form of generative grammar. The book is therefore divided diachronically into three Parts which deal with these three periods.

    Within each Part, however, a different organizational principle is followed by the text. Roughly, after giving an introductory chapter presenting the active linguists of each period chronologically, Graffi structures the remaining narrative around the central research questions of each time. For example, in Parts I and II, we find sections titled "The debate on impersonals", "Do subjectless sentences exist?", "Main clauses and dependent clauses", "The internal structure of word groups", and "Looking for syntactic units". Graffi gives a totally impartial and factual account of the views of the leading syntacticians of each period on these and other central problems. While he compares and contrasts the differing analyses which were being produced, and comments upon the possible influences which one syntactician may have had upon the work of another, he does not spend time documenting the debates or polemics which took place between particular researchers or schools. Neither does he sit in judgment over any analysis. The emphasis is always on the syntactic analysis itself and the contribution of each individual linguist to the overall achievements of syntactic research within each historical period.

    Part III departs somewhat from this model in that the discussion tends to revolve more around different schools of syntactic analysis rather than around particular syntactic problems per se. In the chapter "Different views of syntax", Graffi examines the role of Montague Grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, LFG, GPSG, and several functional approaches in the development of the modern psychologistic syntax. The concluding chapter titled "The Chomskian Program" is entirely devoted to tracing the essentially reductionist evolution of transformational generative syntax in the works of Chomsky and his colleagues. The book ends abruptly with a section on Kayne's antisymmetric analysis (Kayne 1994). The Minimalist Program itself is not dealt with in detail, but merely mentioned as the latest incarnation of the Chomskian Program.

    DISCUSSION The sheer volume of information contained in this book is impressive. It is highly educational for modern syntacticians, who may not be aware of the wealth and the scope of syntactic research which dates back to the 19th Century and before. Graffi gives a glimpse into the works of literally dozens of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Some are more familiar names, such as Jespersen, Sapir, Bloomfield, Saussure, Schleicher, and Grimm. Others might be unknown to some readers: Steinthal, Gabelentz, Marty, and Behagel. It is clear throughout the book, however, that Graffi himself is intimately acquainted with the works of all of these scholars, and can draw comparisons among them with ease. This is no small achievement, given that so many of their ideas involve concepts that are defined and interpreted in only subtly different ways. For example, the concept of the "sentence" was disputed and defined variously by different syntacticians. Graffi charts where each syntactician stood on this issue in chapters 3 and 4 in Part I. Such wavering terminology alone can make reading early syntactic publications a daunting task for the uninitiated linguist of 2002. Graffi's book can therefore go a long way toward making these early syntactic treatises more accessible to modern researchers who might wish to read them. In fact, the book acknowledges that the problem of terminology is one which is still with us. Part III includes a discussion of the differing uses of the terms "topic", "focus", and "theme" in modern syntactic frameworks.

    The organizational principle used in the volume has both advantages and disadvantages. Structuring the narrative around research issues and problems entails that Graffi must discuss the work of particular linguists in an essentially fragmented manner, with comments on Jespersen or Humboldt appearing scattered throughout many different sections of the book. It also leads to a certain amount of repetition in order to draw comparisons among different researchers and their views. This consequently makes the book a bit more difficult to use as a reference work, which is probably how many syntacticians will eventually use it. If one is using the volume as a reference work to learn more about Tesni�re, for example, the index of names shows that Tesni�re is referred to at more or less regular intervals throughout the latter 300 pages of the book (every 5 pages, on the average, over one stretch of 200 pages ). The same is true for Graffi's treatment of other syntacticians. In other words, one must read many separate passages to gain the full picture of each linguist's contributions. If the book had been organized differently, for example into separate autonomous sections on each individual syntactician, it would arguably have made a more functional reference work. However, it would also have been a mere encyclopedia then, and Graffi's aim is definitely not to create an encyclopedia. The reference value of the book is secondary to its value as a critical historical narrative. Thus, although the fragmentation and repetition can at times become tedious, they are necessary to keeping the focus of the book upon syntactic research itself rather than upon individual syntacticians.

    The real value of this book lies in its treatment of the larger issues in the history of syntactic theory and how they relate to our modern concerns. It allows us to experience syntactic research in a form which existed long before Chomsky and our other contemporaries. The experience can at times be comical, perhaps shocking, and at its best profoundly thought-provoking. For example, when Graffi quotes Humboldt on unity and diversity in language, we may not know whether to laugh outright or feel embarrassed by the views of our predecessors: (When I read this quote aloud to the students in my graduate typology class, they did laugh outright.)

    "Grammatical formation arises from the laws of thinking in language, and rests on the congruence of sound-forms with the latter. Such a congruence must in some way be present in every language; the difference lies only in degree, and the blame for defective development may attach to an insufficiently plain emergence of these laws in the soul, or to an inadequate malleability of the sound-system. But deficiency on the one point always reacts back at once upon the other." (Humboldt 1988[1836]:140, in Graffi 2001:21)

    After a few moments we probably just go on with our reading and feel grateful that we have progressed beyond such a view of syntax and language variation. Such passages in the narrative help to persuade us that we really have made a great deal of progress in syntactic research in the last 200 years.

    On the other hand, we may experience an uncanny familiarity with passages like the following:

    "An infant is not taught the grammatical rule that the subject is to be placed first, or that the indirect object regularly precedes the direct object; and yet, without any grammatical instruction, from innumerable sentences heard and understood he will abstract some notion of their structure which is definite enough to guide him in framing sentences of his own." (Jespersen 1924:19 in Graffi 2001:71)

    Was this really written by Jespersen in 1924? It could be a passage we might encounter today in an introductory syntax textbook explicating the generativist view of language acquisition. Such passages can make us feel intellectually much closer to our predecessors ? perhaps closer than some of us might care to admit. Discoveries like these in Parts I and II compel us to re-examine the progress we think we may have made in the last 200 years. Graffi implies with his narrative that many of the central syntactic questions of the past remain with us still today. He never states this explicitly, but allows the facts to speak for themselves. That gives us plenty of food for thought. Even the central thesis of the book ? the cyclic rise and fall of the psychologistic view in syntax ? gives us much to ponder.

    It is a pity that the book does not contain a concluding chapter. As noted earlier in the synopsis portion of this review, the chapter on the Chomskian program ends somewhat abruptly with remarks on Richard Kayne's antisymmetric analysis. Graffi does not offer any concluding remarks, summarization, or synthesis of the vast amount of material in the preceding nearly 500 pages. The reader is left without closure, and with many questions: Where will we go from here? Have we finally really decided what the definition of a sentence should be? Does Graffi think that the "cycle" of psychologism will repeat itself again? Does he perhaps even see signs of a nascent reaction against the modern psychologistic syntax which could herald a kind of rebirth of the non- psychologistic syntax which we once called Structuralism? And what about all that has happened since the work of Kayne? Of course it is difficult for a historian to capture everything up until the moment of publication. Nevertheless, Graffi would have done well to include at least some comments on current directions of research and where they might lead. But instead, he chooses to leave the question open and allow each reader speculate on their own.

    So, fellow syntacticians, we are left to write the concluding chapter ourselves. Where do we go from here? What will the next 200 years of syntax reveal?

    REFERENCES Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1836) Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: F. Dummler (Reprint 1968) [ English translation by Peter Heath (1988) On Language. Cambridge University Press.]

    Jespersen, Otto (1924) The Philosophy of Grammar. George Allen & Unwin.

    Kayne, Richard S. (1994) The Antisymmetry of Syntax. MIT Press.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER Sheila Dooley Collberg is a Lecturer in the Dept. of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. She is primarily a syntactician and typologist, and has been a member of the project Parametric Typology: Variation in Syntax, based at Lund University. She is fascinated by the proliferation of syntactic theories in modern linguistics and taught a graduate course last semester at the University of Arizona on this topic.