Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.34

EDITOR: Linda R. Waugh
EDITOR: Monique Monville-Burston
EDITOR: John E. Joseph
TITLE: The Cambridge History of Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

This book aims to fill a notable gap in the literature of linguistics, by supplying a comprehensive account of its history from the earliest records to the present day. Until now, the standard suggestion to anyone seeking a history of the subject has been Robins (1967), which is an excellent book but is short (as its title announces), and is limited to the European tradition beginning with Greece and Rome. Among other single-volume histories, setting aside the four-volume ‘History of Linguistics’ edited by Giulio Lepschy (1994–98), Allan (2007) is longer than Robins but similarly restricted in purview. McElvenny (2024) is even newer than the book under review and I have not yet seen it, but its coverage begins only in the early nineteenth century. The present book is more than a thousand pages long, and its front cover flap offers coverage of Mesopotamia, East Asia, India, and more; on p. 1 of their general Introduction to the volume, the editors announce that they “have taken into account the importance, originality, and pertinence of language-related concerns within various cultures and intellectual traditions from ancient times up to the year 2000”.

After that general Introduction, the book is divided into three Parts:
Part I: “Ancient, classical, and medieval periods” (Introduction to the Part plus six chapters)
Part II: “Renaissance to late nineteenth century” (Introduction plus six chapters)
Part III: “Late nineteenth- through twentieth-century linguistics”, which is divided into an Introduction plus:
Part IIIA: “Late nineteenth century through the 1950s: synchrony, autonomy, and structuralism” (five chapters)
Part IIIB: “1960–2000: formalism, cognitivism, language use and function, interdisciplinarity” (thirteen chapters)
The Parts are divided into chapters partly by date but mainly by topic, so for instance the chapters of Part IIIA are:
13: “Move to synchrony: late nineteenth to early twentieth century”
14: “Structuralism in Europe”
15: “British linguistics”
16: “American linguistics to 1960: science, data, method”

A few chapters are further subdivided into sections by different authors; for instance the “British linguistics” chapter has one section by Michael MacMahon on “Late nineteenth century to 1970”, and another by Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie on “Neo-Firthian corpus linguistics to 2000”. In all the book has 55 contributors.
The references are helpfully amalgamated into a single list (of 130 pages), eliminating the need to flick back and forth searching for lists at the end of individual chapters. As readers will have guessed from the use of “through” in the Part titles, the text is couched in American English throughout, although many contributors are from Britain or the Commonwealth (and Cambridge is an English university).

The book has evidently, and inevitably, been a long time in gestation. We are not told when work on it began, but for instance Chapter 24, “Historical and universal-typological linguistics”, is by Anna Siewierska, who died in 2011. She is not the only contributor who died between submitting a draft and eventual publication, and there are other cases where authors were apparently not in a position to approve the published version of their contribution; for instance Jürgen Trabant, I believe, is happily still with us, but his chapter on “The celebration of linguistic diversity: Humboldt’s anthropological linguistics”, has an editorial footnote saying “in 2020, with the help of one of [Trabant’s] colleagues, we were able to contact his wife and received permission [to make minor changes to the MS and publish it]”.

Furthermore the editorial team itself changed after the project was launched. Linda Waugh of the University of Arizona saw the book through from start to finish, but John Joseph of Edinburgh University dropped out at an early stage; Monique Monville-Burston, from a Cypriot university, was brought in to share the workload.

Some issues covered in Part IIIB are quite contentious among theoreticians today. The editors say about this that “While the authors have been asked to be broadly non-partisan in their exposition, they have also been encouraged, where appropriate, to address controversial issues (and to show their preferences while respecting other views)”, and this sensible policy has been followed. Frederick Newmeyer is known as an energetic defender of the Chomskyan approach to linguistics, but his chapter, “Chomsky and the turn to syntax, including alternative approaches to syntax”, is very fair in both describing the ways in which Chomsky’s ideas had roots in the linguistics of his predecessors (rather than treating Chomsky, as some acolytes do, as someone who created his field out of nothing), and also describing many of the subsequent developments, such as George Lakoff’s Cognitive Linguistics, which ran contrary to Chomsky’s own theories.

The volume structure, comprising a top-level division into historical periods and, within each period, a lower-level division by topic, feels natural but it does create a problem if one example of a topic falls outside the period which includes the rest of the examples. Part II covers the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, so its first chapter, by Jaap Maat and David Cram on “Universal language schemes”, is able to include both the philosophical languages proposed in the seventeenth century such as John Wilkins’s “Real Character”, and the naturalistic languages constructed in the nineteenth century such as Volapük and Esperanto. But the late-twentieth century constructed language Lojban (Cowan 1997, <mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban>), which to my mind is a more interesting philosophical-language experiment than those of the seventeenth century, falls outside the Part II timeframe and is unconnected with the main linguistic currents of the Part III period, so it is not mentioned.

EVALUATION

One issue I have with the book is its coverage. Part I has extensive surveys of linguistic thought in various non-European societies from their beginnings up to the (European) Middle Ages. Alexander Vovin’s section of Chapter 2, on “Early linguistic traditions in Korea and Japan”, takes those stories up to the year 1448 where it ends abruptly, in line with the Part I timeframe, so I searched through the book to find where the stories continued. I was puzzled to find no continuation, until I realized that the general volume Introduction, on a later page than the passage quoted in my opening paragraph, says:
“We do not return to the East Asian, Indian, and Near/Middle Eastern traditions in Parts II and III, because, in general, their subsequent history is typified by faithful cultural transmission of the earlier ideas …”

The editors surely cannot really believe that non-Europeans thought for themselves about language until 500 years ago, but then all went to sleep for a few centuries until Westerners arrived to wake them up? It certainly is not true of Korea for one, where Ju Sigyeong (who lived from 1876 to 1914) argued for a concept of underlying versus surface structures in both syntax and phonology, long before such ideas became common currency among Western linguists; Ju’s thinking, unlike that of English-speaking linguists, heavily influenced the standard orthography of his national language. I sketched the small amount I was able to learn about Ju’s linguistics in my book ‘Writing Systems’ (Sampson 2015: 159–62), and I would have welcomed a fuller and better-informed discussion by someone who can read Korean; but it was not to be. And I know that new thinking happened elsewhere in the world too, which I should have been glad to learn about. But, from the beginning of Part II onwards (three-quarters of the book), the non-European world becomes invisible. The book almost makes a boast of this, by dating Part II from the “Renaissance”, an exclusively European historical phenomenon.

(One Part I chapter, Kees Versteegh on “The Arabic Linguistic Tradition”, takes the intended limitation of Part I to the pre-modern period less seriously than other contributors, discussing at least one nineteenth-century linguist.)

It may of course be that the unplanned changes in teams of editors and contributors forced the coverage of the book to change in unplanned ways. But I wondered how widely the editors cast their net when recruiting contributors. East Asia does not lack academics who could have written competently, in a European language, about the history of linguistics in their countries, but it is noticeable that not one of the 55 contributors here is based outside Europe or the European-settled world; only one has a non-European-sounding name (Madhav Deshpande of the University of Michigan, who has written chapter 3 on “Linguistic Analysis in the Sanskrit Tradition in Premodern India”).
It is not even necessary to leave Europe to find one large unrepresented territory: the editors are explicit that post-Revolutionary Russia and its “near-abroad” are an “important lacuna” in their book, which they explain in terms of “the isolation of the ‘Soviet bloc’ for several decades”. It is true that Russian work has been less accessible to Westerners than work from many other areas, but that would only make it the more desirable for a reference work like this to cover it: the Russians have been developing linguistics along original lines quite independent of Western research. People willing to make the effort have managed to learn about some of it: Harald Baayen (2001) discusses Soviet statistical work, Johanna Nichols (e.g. 1992: 8–12) writes knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the typological theories of G.A. Klimov. But we learn nothing about these matters here.

Another disappointment is that some Part I chapters contain passages consisting of little more than long lists of names of grammarians and titles of their books, with hardly any indication of what their books say. And when doctrines are mentioned, this is not always done in an informative way. José Martínez Delgado, on “The Hebrew Linguistic Tradition”, discusses a Hebraist (died ca A.D. 1000) known by the Arabic name Ḥayyūj, “the prince of medieval Hebrew grammar”, who “drafted a monographic work … which would change the history of the Hebrew language … The behavior of the three consonants, ‘ ’alef’, ‘waw’, and ‘yod’ [i.e. /Ɂ w j/], was his great discovery.” What is this behaviour? I have a reasonable knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, by Gentile standards at least, but it is not clear to me what Martínez is referring to.

Most Part I chapters are at least devoid of errors, so far as I am competent to judge. Regrettably, that is not true of the 26-page introduction to the Part, by Mark Amsler, which seems to rely heavily on secondary or tertiary sources which have not always been understood. This introduction is subtitled “The emergence of linguistic thinking within premodern cultural practices” and begins with remarks like “Language study … is a form of symbolic power”, but as the introduction develops it does not pursue this politicized viewpoint far. It focuses more on the topics covered in the following Part I chapters, but it throws out remarks which often seem misleading. Amsler says that “Phoenician and later Hebrew and Arabic writing … rel[ied] on diacritical marks to indicate vowels and phonetic features (e.g. aspiration)”: did any of these languages use aspiration distinctively? Amsler may be thinking of the Hebrew dagesh dot, which distinguishes e.g. the sounds commonly romanized as p versus ph, but ph was not an aspirated stop, like the phi of Ancient Greek; it was a fricative [f], and is romanized as ph because [p] and [f] were allophones of one phoneme. Discussing Chinese, Amsler confuses two separate phenomena. The ‘xingsheng’ system was a way that graphs were formed when the script was emerging some three millennia ago: a target word was written with a compound graph in which one element stood for a near-homophone of the target, in the pronunciation of the period, and the other element represented a word having a semantic connexion to the target. ‘Fanqie’ on the other hand is a system in standard use until quite recently, in the absence of a phonetic script, to show the pronunciation of a dictionary entry: two graphs are given, of which the first shares its initial consonant with the target and the second shares the rest of the syllable. (In chapter 2, Alain Peyraube and Hilary Chappell describe fanqie correctly.)

Amsler tells us that “Anglo-Saxon scribes introduced characters from Ogham and runic writing to represent Old English sounds that didn’t occur in Latin”. Runes, yes, but what elements of ogham were used? None that I know of. Amsler defines the Latin ablative absolute construction as “a reduced past participle clause”. I don’t know what he means by “reduced” (reduced from what?), but ablative absolutes don’t necessarily use past participles. Sometimes they contain no verb form at all: ‘consulibus Manlio Iulioque’, “while the consuls were/are Manlius and Julius”. And very often ablative absolutes are based on present participles, like the phrase often abbreviated ‘nem. con.’ in present-day committee minutes: ‘nemine contradicente’, “with no-one dissenting”.

With these and other errors, Amsler’s Introduction creates an unpromising impression for readers embarking on Part I of this book.
(There are also strange anomalies in Vovin’s section already mentioned, but these are of a different order. They all relate to Chinese script. For instance, after introducing the graph 月 for yuè ‘moon’ Vovin adds “(Archaic 疑)”. The latter graph represents yí ‘doubt’; it is not archaic, and not related in any way to yuè ‘moon’. I imagine these errors arose in transmitting electronically-coded text between Vovin’s and C.U.P.’s equipment, though I cannot guess how they ought to read – and was there no proof-checking?)
In terms of the balance of detail on the various historical periods, the book as a whole is very heavily weighted towards more recent times. To an extent this is justified by the fact that there have been many more professional academics producing more publications since the middle of the twentieth century than there were anywhere before. But the editors also give the impression of not being particularly historically-minded. They provide brief summarizing introductions to the volume as a whole and to the three-section Chapter 6, “Near Eastern linguistic traditions”, but they delegate the more substantial introductions to Parts I and II to others (Part I, 26 pp. by Mark Amsler; Part II, 18 pp. by Lia Formigari); the editors’ main contribution of original writing is their introduction to Part III, 78 pp., and two-thirds of that (52 pp.) is about just the last forty years of the more than two millennia surveyed in the volume.

At one point in that introduction, the editors discuss the British sociolinguist Basil Bernstein, describing him as drawing a distinction between “the ‘restricted’ code (of poorer, minority speakers) and the ‘elaborated’ code (of more affluent, white speakers)”. This surprised me, so I checked with Bernstein (1971), and found no reference to race. The empirical research on which Bernstein based his theory of two codes was carried out at the end of the 1950s, only a decade after the June 1948 voyage of the ‘Empire Windrush’ which is usually taken as the beginning of the eventual large influx of non-white immigrants into Britain. Numbers then were still small; as a teenager I walked daily through the centre of the large port city of Bristol to take the bus home after school, and my memory is that a non-white face was a quite unusual sight. There is no reason to doubt that both groups of youngsters whose language behaviour was compared by Bernstein were white English boys. The editors are unhistorically imposing 21st-century obsessions on the very different society of the 1950s.

It is clearly not possible, within the bounds of a review, to give a comprehensive evaluation of the many individual contributions. There is worthwhile stuff scattered throughout. A particularly interesting chapter, to me, was John Coleman’s contribution on instrumental phonetics, a subject I had lost contact with since the 1960s. It has evidently made great strides in the subsequent decades. To mention just one topic in a very rich chapter, it now seems that Daniel Jones’s cardinal vowel quadrilateral is misleading in its implication that vowel quality is determined directly by the position of the highest point of the tongue: the relevant variables have more to do with the root of the tongue than with its surface. And chapters such as Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Michael Kaschak’s on relationships between linguistics and psychology since 1950 provide workmanlike accounts of their topics.

A number of contributors do a useful service by drawing attention to unjustly neglected scholars or books of the past; both Daniele Gambarara and co-authors Emanuele Fadda and Lorenzo Cigana, in their section of Cchapter 14 on “Structuralism in Europe”, and Michael McMahon in his section of Cchapter 15, “British linguistics”, mention Sir Alan Gardiner’s 1932 book ‘Theory of Speech and Language’ as worthy of more attention than it has had. And some contributors helpfully avoid excessive deference to “great names”. I particularly enjoyed McMahon’s footnote to a quotation from J.R. Firth, saying that Firth “loved to bring in scientific analogies, allegedly to clarify his argument, but in fact only to make it even more opaque”.

Unexpected aperçus abound. Patrick Sériot in his section on the Prague Linguistic Circle identifies the birth of the ‘Sprachbund’ concept (the idea that similarities between languages do not necessarily stem from common ancestry, as the Neogrammarians believed, but sometimes result from unrelated languages in contact growing together) with a talk about puzzling similarities between Czech and Hungarian by a German, Henrik Becker, in Vilém Mathesius’s office in 1926. Kees de Bot and Margaret Thomas’s chapter on “Applied linguistics”, discussing the fact that much university teaching in Continental European countries, including the Netherlands, is nowadays done in English, notes that one problem is “that students felt they learned less when they were taught in a foreign language” – but it is not clear that this perception is correct.

On the other hand, there are also chapters, particularly relating to “humanities” rather than technical areas of linguistics, which simply state the areas worked on by various scholars who succeeded in making names for themselves, without much attempt to identify strengths and weaknesses in their ideas. And some contributors seem more interested in who was a student of whose and which individuals or schools influenced which others, than in the contents of their doctrines. Some chapters are unrelievedly abstract, lacking concrete examples to illustrate the isms; there are many pages which feel as though the authors might have lost touch with the fact that linguistics is ultimately about speech-sounds, words, grammatical constructions, and so forth.

Considering how much of the book is devoted to the 1960–2000 period, it is remarkable how many strands of linguistics which came to the fore then are overlooked. Alain Polguère’s chapter on “Lexicology and lexicography”, and Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie’s brief two-page section mentioned above, discuss electronic corpora in connexion with dictionary-making, but nothing in this book describes the many other applications of corpora (pioneered not least by the last-named co-authors): say, McEnery’s study of the important sociolinguistic phenomenon of “bad language”, which could scarcely have been done adequately other than through corpus data (see McEnery 1999 – and, since the timeframe of the book under review, McEnery 2005); or Douglas Biber’s marshalling of corpus data with the statistical technique of factor analysis to produce new discoveries about the evolution of style (e.g. Biber 1991). (Oddly, the reference list includes several Biber items, but I never spotted his name in the body of the book although I was looking out for it. Biber’s name is not in the index – but many page-references are missing for names that are included.) There is no mention of important computer techniques not involving corpora, such as the work of Don Ringe’s team on automatic phylogenetic analysis of language-families (e.g. Warnow, Ringe, and Taylor 1995) – which has since become so influential that Thomas Olander (2022: 2–3) felt driven to argue that traditional historical-linguistic methods should not be abandoned.

Furthermore the book does no more than briefly mention by name some of the areas, such as machine translation or automatic speech recognition, where natural language processing was already being harnessed to economically-significant tasks. (Admittedly, by now it seems that the more successful machine translation becomes, the less its techniques owe to linguistics in a traditional sense – but that finding is itself a significant linguistic discovery.)

I did not notice many factual mistakes in Parts II and III ­– though it was surprising to read Daniele Gambarara and co-authors describing Tesnière (1959) as containing “one of the first uses of tree diagrams for the representation of syntactic structures”: schoolchildren have routinely been taught to use tree-diagrams to represent sentence-structure, in the English-speaking world at least, since the nineteenth century. (See for instance Meiklejohn 1893: 100ff., a book which went through dozens of editions under changing titles on both sides of the Atlantic.) Has French pedagogy not used similar methods? On pp. 346–7 of Kurt Jankowsky’s chapter on the Neogrammarians there are oddities which may reflect problems with computer coding of special characters. The letter q seems to be used for the interdental fricative /θ/, and a list said to exemplify the origin of Germanic voiced fricatives contains no voiced-fricative symbols. Among trivial errors, it is amusing to notice that one of Chomsky’s best-known books is repeatedly cited as ‘Aspects of a Theory of Syntax’. Chomsky actually called his book ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ – not a wholly trivial difference.

I was surprised to see positive references in at least three chapters to Paul Grice’s “Co-operative Principle”, which seems empirically false, and obviously so, as an account of how human communication works (Sampson 1982).

This book ought to have been called ‘A History of Western Linguistics’. But even as such, it could have been much better.

REFERENCES
Allan, K., 2007. The Western Classical Tradition in Linguistics. Equinox (Sheffield).
Baayen, R.H., 2001. Word Frequency Distributions. Kluwer.
Bernstein, B., 1971. Class, Codes and Control, vol. 1: theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Biber, D., 1991. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge University Press.
Cowan, J.W., 1997. The Complete Lojban Language. The Logical Language Group (Fairfax, Va.).
Gardiner, A.H., 1932. The Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford University Press.
Lepschy, G.C., ed., 1994–98. History of Linguistics (4 vols). Routledge.
McElvenny, J., 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: from the beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh University Press.
McEnery, A., 1999. “Swearing and abuse in modern British English”. In Practical Applications in Language Corpora: papers from the international conference at the University of Łódź, 15–18 April 1999 (PALC ’99).
McEnery, A., 2005. Swearing in English: bad language, purity and power from 1586 to the present. Routledge.
Meiklejohn, J.M.D., 1893. A New Grammar of the English Tongue, 10th edn. Alfred Holden.
Nichols, J., 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. University of Chicago Press.
Olander, T., ed., 2022. The Indo-European Language Family: a phylogenetic perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Robins, R.H., 1967. A Short History of Linguistics. Longmans.
Sampson, G.R., 1982. “The economics of conversation”. In N.V. Smith, ed., Mutual Knowledge. Academic Press.
Sampson, G.R., 2015. Writing Systems (2nd edn). Equinox (Sheffield).
Tesnière, L., 1959. Eléments de syntaxe structurale. Librairie Klincksieck (Paris).
Warnow, T., D. Ringe, and A. Taylor, 1995. “Reconstructing the evolutionary history of natural languages”. In Proceedings of the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in 1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster, Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent several years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on other subjects. His next book, a sequel to “Schools of Linguistics” (1980), will be “Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century”, to appear in late 2024.