[This paper was written in the late 1960s shortly before I moved to the University of Kansas in 1969. I presented it at the Twenty-Fourth Annual University of Kentucky Foreign Language Conference held in Lexington, Kentucky, 22–24 April 1971. It was never published, and as far as I know it was never commented on, either by me or by anyone else. The original version included neither notes nor bibliographical references. To my knowledge, Rudolf Blümel's Einführung in die Syntax, dedicated to the Neogrammarians Hermann Paul and Friedrich Kluge, has not been discussed by anybody else. Why it has been so neglected I am not quite sure. Perhaps it is partly due to the general ill repute that has befallen the Neogrammarians since the advent of structuralism in the late 1920s. Another reason may be that twentieth-century syntactic theorists were either unaware of the work of their predecessors or were simply intent on ignoring it. This is a question that needs to be further investigated.]
The historical linguists of the early to mid-nineteenth century were chiefly interested in the origin of inflectional affixes. They operated on the assumption that such affixes originally developed from independent words. Accordingly, they paid no attention to syntax. August Schleicher, for example, on one occasion stated openly that linguists were not at that time able to handle syntax in the same scientific fashion that they handled more palpable, more accessible exterior facets of language, namely, sounds and forms (in other words, phonetics and morphology).
In the last half of the century, however, and particularly in the last three decades, the picture changes completely. Let me review the main landmarks. As far as I am aware, the first linguist to work systematically on the syntax of the Indo-European languages was Berthold Delbrück. His numerous monographs on various aspects of comparative syntax appeared between 1867 and the end of the century. He was chosen to write the syntactic portion of the Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik, and his contribution appeared in three volumes between 1893 and 1900. It was his main achievement to popularize the notion of Grundbegriff 'basic concept' and apply it to the use of the various inflectional categories. The sort of question he asked then was, what is the original meaning, the basic concept, which accounts for the various uses of, say, the subjunctive mood or the ablative case in the various attested Indo-European languages.
Syntactic theory was another topic which received attention in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and gave rise to a great deal of rather aggressive controversy. Most linguists were in agreement on one basic issue, and that was that syntactic theory needed to be based on psychology. But the choice of a psychological doctrine was hotly debated. Hermann Paul and others constructed their syntactic theory on a Herbartian foundation, and Paul expounded this type of theory in his Principien der Sprachgeschichte, in particular from the second (1886) edition of that work on.
Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, made himself the spokesman of a rival theory in a number of publications, starting with his Logik in 1880, and culminating in his monumental volumes on folk psychology which appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Both the Paulian and Wundtian theories were very influential later, but I shall focus attention here on the theory of Hermann Paul, since it was more typical of the approach of the majority of linguists at that time. I might mention in passing that it was Wundt's syntactic theory rather than Paul's which influenced Leonard Bloomfield. Wundt was in fact responsible for some of the concepts basic to immediate-constituent analysis, which has played such an important role in twentieth-century syntactic theorizing.
To give you a general picture of the Paulian approach to syntax I shall paraphrase a section of a handbook on syntax, the Einführung in die Syntax by Rudolf Blümel, published in 1914 by the Carl Winter Verlag, and then comment on the ideas contained in it.
Blümel introduces the problem in the following way: Supposing someone says: You were sleeping, so I didn't want to disturb you (in German "Du schliefest; da wollte ich dich nicht stören.") It may be that the speaker has never in his life before uttered, heard, written, or read the sentence du schliefest 'you were sleeping.' Nevertheless, he has no difficult in making the sentence up. How is this possible? To begin with, says Blümel, he must be familiar with the words and know how to form the past tense of schlafen, but this knowledge has nothing to do with syntax, and other factors are obviously involved.
He has uttered, perceived, written and read a multitude of sentences consisting of a subject and a verbal predicate, and knows a number of things about them, for example the relative position of the two sentence constituents, the intonation pattern, the degree of emphasis on each constituent; he has also produced sentences with du 'you' as subject and a verb agreeing with it. This kind of experiental knowledge is what he utilizes when he forms the sentence du schliefest 'you were sleeping.' Except for formulaic sentences, this sort of thing occurs whenever a sentence is uttered. The process involved is analogical formation, and specifically analogical formation in the sphere of sentence formation.
In producing new sentences the speaker has sentences in mind which he has already experienced, and it is on the basis of these that he forms new sentences. The sentences that he has already experienced are the models (Muster) he uses in forming new sentences on their analogy. Any sentence that he has once uttered, heard, written, or read, even sentences to which he has paid no particular attention, are capable of subsequently functioning as models for the creation of new sentences.
It is true, says Blümel, that whole sentences are sometimes repeated. but it is absurd to suppose that in the course of a week the speaker can remember every sentence he has spoken or heard in that period. Sentences which are used very often, especially those that are repeated one after the other in immediate succession, are reproduced from memory, but they are formulae and belong in the category of idioms and proverbs. It follows then that the creative activity of analogical formation is necessarily present for a genuine syntactic configuration, i.e. a true sentence, to be produced. Analogy is the basic process involved in all speech behavior insofar as human beings speak in sentences. It is not, however, something the speaker is consciously aware of. But without it almost every sentence would be a complete mystery, or else the speaker would have to burden his memory with ready-made sentences.
So much for Blümel's exposition. The Paulian position can be roughly summed up as follows. Sentences are produced directly on the basis of specific previously experienced sentences. It is, however, not possible to say in a concrete instance which previous sentences have been used as models for a given sentence, since human beings do not memorize the sentences that they have experienced. The operation of analogy is therefore an unconscious process, and hence is not directly verifiable. However, the advantage of positing the operation of syntactic analogy is that it involves nothing mystical. All that is claimed to happen is that the speaker unconsciously internalizes every sentence he has experienced, and when he produces a new sentence he makes it conform to the syntactic characteristics of the set of sentences he has actually experienced in the past.
It follows from this that the set of operative analogies in the speech of an individual is never static but is constantly changing in response to the particular sentences he experiences. It is therefore idle to ask whether the new sentence is in some abstract sense correct or incorrect, grammatical or ungrammatical. It has been formed on the basis of analogy, that is all that can be said. In other words, an analogy is intrinsically neither valid nor invalid, it either operates or fails to operate in a concrete instance.
But what now of the phenomenon of syntactic change? How did the theory of syntactic analogy account for it? The answer is, I think, a fairly simple one. The theory as I have so far explained it could describe but not explain syntactic change. At some point in time speakers of German began making the verb vergessen 'forget' govern an accusative object rather than a genitive, as it had done previously. The description of the change in terms of the theory of syntactic analogy went as follows. The first thing that happened was that sentences like ich vergesse ihn 'I forget him' were spontaneously formed on the basis of model sentences such as ich hasse ihn 'I hate him,' ich liebe ihn 'I love him.' Then sentences of the type ich vergesse sein were uttered less and less frequently. Finally they ceased to occur altogether, and at that point the change was complete.
It is clear, however, that all that the theory of syntactic analogy could explain was the fact that sentences of the type ich vergesse ihn could be spontaneously formed. In other words, the theorist could show that the sentence ich vergesse ihn did not involve the creation of an entirely new syntactic construction, but merely the use of vergessen in an already existing construction. But what also needs to be accounted for is the obsolescence of the pattern ich vergesse sein and its replacement by the pattern ich vergesse ihn.
Here Hermann Paul used two explanatory devices. First, he assumed that a given analogy had, as it were, a weighting associated with it, which was a function of the frequency of the locutions involving that particular analogy. Thus, Paul would argue that there were many more verbs of the type hassen and lieben, taking an accusative, than verbs like vergessen, taking the genitive. Hence the change involved essentially the attraction of vergessen into the more powerful analogical sphere of hassen and lieben.
The second principle that Paul invoked was that two alternative constructions cannot both survive if the difference between them has no semantic function. In other words, he posited first the creation of alternative but semantically equivalent constructions as a spontaneous process involving merely the operation of the same syntactic analogies as are responsible for so-called regular or correct constructions. He then claimed that the alternative constructions so created competed with one another in a sort of Darwinian Kampf ums Dasein 'struggle for existence,' and that one construction, sometimes the old one, sometimes a new one, would eventually survive and supplant all contenders.
The Paulian theory then hypothesized a constant interaction between analogies operative in the language at a particular point in time and the actual sentences produced, or in other words usage. To Paul's way of thinking the description and theoretical understanding of syntactic change can only be achieved by gaining access to the underlying analogical processes which are, of course, psychological in nature. A mere description, no matter how minute, of the changes in usage is insufficient. What is needed is an understanding of the psychological processes taking place in the speakers of the language, and for Paul therefore the locus of all linguistic change is the human mind, die Seele, not the specific sentences people utter.
To conclude, let me enumerate the basic assumptions involved here. They were:
1. That ordinary speech behavior is creative, not merely reproductive. In this connection, Hermann Paul was fond of quoting the Humboldtian adage "Das Sprechen ist ein immerwährendes Schaffen" and accusing his immediate predecessors of believing that everything that does not deviate from previous usage is simply reproduced from memory.
2. That the unconscious mind stores every sentence the speaker experiences.
3. That the unconscious mind abstracts general rules or analogies from the sentences so internalized.
4. That new sentences are spontaneously produced by applying the analogies or rules that the unconscious mind has abstracted.
5. That analogies vary in psychological intensity, depending on the frequency of their application.
6. That alternative constructions arise spontaneously through the normal operation of syntactic analogies.
7. That alternative constructions compete and the construction that has the greatest psychological intensity wins out over its competitors.
Assumptions 6 and 7 serve to account for the phenomenon commonly called syntactic change.
If we now compare these assumptions with views on syntactic change commonly held in more recent times, we may note the following.
The assumption that ordinary behavior is creative, not reproductive has become a basic tenet of the generative approach to language. Generative grammarians also subscribe to the view that syntactic rules are abstracted from the set of sentences that the speaker experiences and internalizes. Moreover, Paul's overall theory was essentially mentalistic in type, as is current generative theory. However, the notion of a constant interaction between the rules abstracted and the sentences actually produced is, as far as I am aware, a view not shared by generative grammarians. The balance betwen the reproductive and creative aspects of speech behavior has also changed. Hermann Paul emphasized that although speech behavior is not completely reproductive it is not completely creative either, i.e., some aspects of it involve the reproduction of memorized forms and formulae. In fact, the role of memory, which in present-day theories is virtually ignored, was considered a very important one by Paul and his contemporaries.
Notes
1. In his Compendium, August Schleicher's statement about syntax reads as follows: "Die function und den satzbau des indogermanischen sind wir zur zeit noch außer stande in der art wißenschaftlich zu behandeln, wie wir es bei den mer äußerlichen und leichter erfaßbaren seiten der sprache, bei den lauten und formen, vermögen" (Schleicher 1876: 2). Rough English translation: "At the present time we are still unable to deal scientifically with function and sentence structure in the same way that we are able to deal with the more exterior and more tractable facets of language."
2. Blümel 1914: 70ff. The Einführung in die Syntax is also of some general interest in that in it the author develops an ingenious system of sentence diagrams, i.e., a graphic representation for syntactic analysis; see Blümel 1914: 17ff and 271.
3. Paul enunciates the following general principle: "Die sprache ist allem luxus abhold" (1886: 208). Translation: "Language cannot tolerate luxury of any kind."
4. Paul expresses this as follows: "Die geschilderten psychischen organismen sind die eigentlichen träger der historischen entwickelung. Das wirklich gesprochene hat gar keine entwickelung" (1886: 25). Translation: "The psychic organisms as described are what actually drive the historical development. What is actually uttered does not develop."
5. It is curious that Hermann Paul castigates his contemporaries for not always taking the Humboldtian principle seriously enough: "Zwar hat schon W. v. Humboldt nachdrücklich betont, dass das sprechen ein immerwährendes schaffen ist. Aber noch heute stösst man auf lebhaften und oft recht unverständigen widerspruch, wenn man die consequenzen dieser anschauungsweise zu ziehen versucht" (1886: 88). Rough translation: "It is true that Wilhelm von Humboldt long ago explicitly emphasized that speech is perpetually creative. However, even today lively and often stubborn resistance is encountered when one tries to put these ideas into practice." It is not entirely clear what specific passage in Humboldt's writings Paul had in mind here. For a relevant passage in the famous introduction to the Kawi language, see the standard edition of Humboldt's works published by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Humboldt/Leitzmann 1903: §14, pp. 53ff. Note that other editions of Humboldt's magnum opus are differently paginated and the sections differently numbered. When using one of these editions, see the long section entitled Natur und Beschaffenheit der Sprache überhaupt, beginning "Ich nehme hier das Verfahren der Sprache in seiner weitesten Ausdehnung." Paul's explicit appeal to Humboldtian principles obviously runs counter to the usual notion that the Neogrammarians were all too empirically minded to take Humboldt's theories seriously. It is clearly high time that these myths should be finally exposed.
List of references
Blümel, Rudolf. 1914. Einführung in die Syntax, Indogermanische Bibliothek, Sprachwissenschafliche Gymnasialbibliothek, 6. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Humboldt/Leitzmann. 1903. Wilhelm von Humboldts gesammelte Schriften, volume 7, pt. 1, herausgegeben von Albert Leitzmann. Hrsg. von der Königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: B. Behr.
Paul, Hermann. 1886. Principien der sprachgeschichte. 2nd edition. Halle: Max Niemeyer. Note that the pagination of different editions of this work varies considerably.
Schleicher, August. 1876. Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau.