Although the main target of Harris's critique is clearly contemporary generative-transformational grammar, the general impression created by the book is that the whole of contemporary linguistics is in the same sorry state. The author's specific suggestions for escaping from this impasse and creating what he calls a 'demythologised' linguistics are contained in the extensive final chapter (150-204), where he argues for an approach which takes as its point of departure the individual act of speech in its entire communicational context. The discipline so purged he dubs 'integrational' linguistics. The main difference between integrational and orthodox linguistics is characterized as follows (167):

'The basic principle which an integrational linguistics will be concerned to give adequate expression to is that language is continuously created by the interaction of individuals in specific communication situations. It is this interaction which confers relevance upon the participants' past experiences with words; and not, as orthodox linguistics would have us believe, past experience (that is to say, mastery of "the language") which determines the communicational possibilities of their present interaction.'

This perspective will remind many readers of J. R. Firth's well-known theory of the context of situation and of a number of other contemporary approaches in linguistics and philosophy. From his basic contention that performing individual speech acts is a continuously creative process, Harris derives a number of proposals, such as the proposition that the dichotomy between language and non-language does not exist and therefore that it should be taken no account of by linguists, and furthermore that along with that hallowed dichotomy linguists should also abandon the notion of a determinate grammatical system underlying specific speech acts.

Perhaps these are, in spirit, fairly unoriginal, almost commonplace theses,[2] and provided they are interpreted liberally I doubt that they will cause alarm or wreak havoc in most linguistic circles these days. However, if anyone proposes to take Harris's positive suggestions strictly à la lettre, I have two caveats. First, it is unclear from his discussion of telementation what he would recommend replacing it with. He appears to have no objection to using the notion of communication. But if speech-acts involve communication, one can legitimately ask what it is that is communicated (i.e., the messages) and what the conventions are which make the transmission of messages possible (i.e., the code). But as soon as one talks in terms of messages it is not clear that one has completely avoided the trap of telementation. Harris talks glibly about our 'implementing our interactional objectives' (165). If one disapproves of the notion that thoughts are transferred from one person to another when a speech act takes place, as Harris does, I fail to grasp why he finds it preferable to resort to another equally questionable metaphor.[3]

Second, the contention that the belief in a determinate grammatical structure must first be abandoned if a 'demythologised' linguistics is to be achieved will, I suspect, strike most linguistically informed readers as either empty rhetoric or sheer foolhardiness. Linguists are not likely to jettison their professional baggage for the sake of a goal which it seems reasonable to believe can be achieved without submitting the discipline to such an extreme form of theoretical surgery. A more charitable conclusion might be that the author is feeling his way towards some sort of universal pragmatics or general theory of communicative competence, by means of which we may transcend the narrow limits of concrete, highly specific, individual speech-situations. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas made a number of suggestions on these lines; see, for instance, his extensive 1976 essay. While it may be understandable for an English-speaking writer not to have grappled with Habermas's dense German prose, I find it bizarre that Harris has apparently not attempted to come to terms with, for instance, John Searle's extensive work on speech-act theory.

What undoubtedly underlies Harris's qualms about recognizing abstractions such as language is old-fashioned positivism. At one point, he gives himself away, it seems to me, when he characterizes the notion of direct observation in the following terms (44):

'All that we can observe directly (in the sense in which "direct observation" is conducted in the natural sciences generally) are specific speech events, utterances, inscriptions, and reactions to them by members of a linguistic community.'

From this he infers that the 'abstract object of knowledge, "language," is at double remove from direct observation' (44). We first abstract objects such as the English language from English utterances, and then by a further operation of abstraction we obtain the object we refer to as language in general. But to define direct observation in this narrow fashion is surely to ignore the copious discussion which has taken place among philosophers over the past century aimed precisely at elucidating the treacherous notion of observation. It is disturbing to see anybody nowadays seriously maintaining that natural scientists eschew abstractions or base their theories mechanically on observa tions. If one were to outlaw second-level (or even third-level) abstractions one would have to consign the bulk of higher mathematics, not to speak of physics, to perdition.[4]

Let us concede, therefore, that Harris's positive message hardly renders the book either distinctive or significant. What interest it offers, in my judgment, lies in specific discussions that he offers here and there in support of his general position. Harris believes that the language myth 'in its modern form is a cultural product of post-Renaissance Europe,' which reflects, he says, 'the political psychology of nationalism, and an educational system devoted to standardising the linguistic behaviour of pupils' (9).[5] However, the myth has, he maintains, become even more entrenched in our own age with the development of modern synchronic linguistics, which (unaccountably) he dates from the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (12). In particular, the attempt to convert the study of language into a science and the process of setting up university departments devoted to its pursuit have, according to Harris, enthroned the myth and given it a semblance of academic respectability, a circumstance which makes it all the more difficult for the general intellectual public to perceive it for what it truly is.

Harris's picture of the rise of academic linguistics has this much to be said for it, namely that he realizes the importance of relating that development to contemporary views of the philosophy of science (see p. 44). It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that Harris's overall picture of the past is to a considerable degree distorted by his theoretical prejudices.

Harris's attempt to implicate the whole of the western grammatical tradition in his sweeping indictment of today's linguistics raises some interesting general questions about the relation between the practice of a profession at any point in time and the collective memory carried about by its practitioners. It is tempting for the members of any profession to see its history as a single linear development, a chain of important authors and their seminal writings, a progression of insights into the nature of the object of study, ending with the present. In reconstructing the past, one starts by over-simplifying the present for propaganda purposes, because it provides one with a sharper dialectical tool to attack ideological enemies. It is then but a small step to back-project this over-simplified picture to the whole of the past and to see it as a monolithic tradition, either pernicious or benign (or even both pernicious and benign by turns), depending on one's theoretical persuasion.

Often one also singles out a small number of past scholars as trailblazers or paradigm-creators, and in so doing one accepts at its face value their in-house propaganda statements as faithful reflections of historical reality. Thus, in the case of linguistics, one sees Ferdinand de Saussure depicting his predecessors as never having asked themselves 'what the nature of the object they had to study is.'[6] One accordingly takes it for granted that this was indeed the case, and concludes from this that indeed no linguist before Saussure had ever asked himself this fundamental question!

But a modest amount of cogitation, it seems to me, should lead one to be suspicious of this procedure. One has only to begin with the present to become aware of the distortion. For instance, linguists today are not all cast in the same mold, as a glance at the papers presented at any representative international meeting will demonstrate. One has merely to extend that simple insight to the past.

Linguists are, and have long been, ambivalent about the grammatical tradition. On the one hand, they view their subject as having superseded traditional grammar. In fact, the battle against prescriptivism, on which most linguists have been reared, goes back to the early days of academic linguistics, which, contrary to Harris's view, is now well over a hundred and fifty years old—Ferdinand de Saussure had no hand whatever in founding it.[7]

But another attitude exists, especially prevalent among historians of linguistics, one which sees the traditional grammarian as the unique direct ancestor of the modern linguist. Viewed in this way, traditional grammar performs the necessary role of a precursor, preparing the ground for a genuine scientific approach to the study of natural language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From this perspective, the relation between grammar and linguistics is similar to the relation between alchemy and chemistry, or viewed even more positively, the relation between Newton's and Einstein's physics.

The truth, in the nature of things, lies at neither end of these two extremes. The antagonism between linguistics and traditional grammar is real enough and long-standing. After all, while the linguists of the first half of the nineteenth century were trained as traditional grammarians and inevitably carried over into their work many of the presuppositions they brought with them as experts in the grammatical art, they quickly developed a distinctive approach to the problems they were dealing with, and this inevitably brought them into conflict with their former colleagues. In conflicts of this kind, neither side can score a final victory, since the argument involves the raison d'être of a new discipline.

But we must not forget that linguists themselves soon broke up into rival factions, and increasingly bitter internal conflicts arose. In the early days of the academic linguistics in the first half of the nineteenth century, there was an antagonism between the more philologically oriented linguists headed by August Wilhelm Schlegel, headquartered in Bonn, and the comparative linguists at the University of Berlin headed by Franz Bopp. Later in the century, there arose an even more strident antagonism, between the so-called Junggrammatiker at the University of Leipzig and a coalition consisting of some members of the older generation of linguists (Georg Curtius, for example) and an assorted collection of younger scholars (Hugo Schuchardt, Otto Jespersen, et al.). The theoretical issues which divided these two camps were still hotly debated fifty years later, witness Bloomfield's discussion of sound change in his book Language (1933:355ff). We have, therefore, a classic case of an unresolved conflict.

In the twentieth century, new antagonisms have developed, one of the better-known ones being the conflict between old-time historical-comparative linguists, trained for the most part in Germany, and a new generation of scholars, living outside the Reich, who were interested in the study of modern European languages and the 'exotic' languages of what was more recently called the Third World. This antagonism between the structuralists and the practitioners of comparative philology on the European continent in the early part of the twentieth century is another example of an unresolved and (perhaps) unresolvable conflict.

In the meantime, the adherents of traditional grammar either retired to the lower reaches of the school system or attached themselves to newly created university departments devoted to the study of the modern European vernaculars and their literatures. Moreover, philosophers and some specialists in other fields in the twentieth century took up the intensive study of various problems having to do with natural language, and have for the most part conducted their investigations with scant reference to, or even knowledge of, contemporary linguistics. In fact, my sense is that even today some philosophers are still unaware of the existence of academic linguistics or think that it is entirely devoted to the study of individual languages and hence is of no conceivable relevance to the important intellectual issues that they themselves deal with.

In the ever expanding area of language-study, therefore, the world of learning has been saddled with a vast network of professional hostilities. In some few cases these hostilities are supported by honest attempts at rational argumentation, but for the most part they take the form of unspoken and unreasoned antipathies. In such circumstances, appeals to history form part of the apologia advanced by one or other scholarly group. One thinks of the flurry of interest in the history of linguistics among young linguists in the United States caused by the publication of Noam Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics in 1966, a book that attempted to show that generative grammar had a respectable intellectual pedigree. The use of history to denigrate present-day theoretical positions is the reverse side of the same coin. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Harris's book falls in this latter category.

The only way out of this type of intellectual morass is to try to face the facts as squarely as one can. Perhaps the first question we need to tackle is whether the historical antecedents asserted have been correctly interpreted. For instance, the notion that grammar and lexicon are internalized in the individual speaker's brain was developed a full generation before the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), namely by the linguists born in the 1840s, i.e. the much-maligned Junggrammatiker ('Neogrammarians') and such relatively obscure figures as Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his younger colleague Mikolaj Kruszewski. Few professional linguists, I suspect, know that Hermann Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (first published in 1880) presents a fully-fledged cognitive theory of linguistic structure, nor is the fact that Saussure received his initial professional training from the Neogrammarians widely recognized.

Harris disapproves of the notion that speech acts convey meanings from speaker to hearer, but that is merely, to quote the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, 'a universal feature of ordinary language itself—namely that most of its forms of description have been and are being evolved by the constant transfer of terms from application in one kind of context to application in another, and in particular by the transfer of what were originally physical descriptions [...] into psychological descriptions' (Hampshire 1950:240). Neither professional linguists nor traditional linguists can be held responsible for such a commonplace metaphor. Colleagues more knowledgeable in these matters than I am have assured me that terms of this kind are widely used in human societies which lack a grammatical or linguistic tradition of any kind.

Harris claims (10) that the determinacy fallacy (or fixed-code fallacy) has Aristotelian roots in that it follows from the proposition that all men 'are provided by Nature with the same ideas.' In fact, there is no mention of exchanging or communicating ideas in the famous passage at the beginning of Aristotle's De interpretatione, nor is there any mention of linguistic communities. (If language is a myth, then surely the notion of a linguistic community is equally mythical.) In general, it is possible to speak of linguistic expressions expressing meanings without necessarily implying that these meanings are exchanged, conveyed, or communicated. Note that this is precisely what Frege does in his essay 'Thoughts' (see, in particular, Frege 1977:5). In general, Harris overestimates the influence of a handful of thinkers like Aristotle. In that connection, it would perhaps surprise him to be told that for much of the Middle Ages Aristotle's philosophy was, overall, less influential than the ideas of St. Augustine.

I also note with some amusement that when Harris refers to medieval grammarians he refers to them as 'medieval modistic grammarians,' as if the treatises on the modes of meaning constituted the whole of medieval grammar. While the works of this genre produced in the period immediately before and after 1300 certainly epitomize, in an interesting way, the result of applying the scholastic method to grammar on the part of grammarians of a certain (namely strictly realist) philosophical persuasion, the Modistae in fact were a minority of Latin grammarians, and their opponents, chiefly the followers of William of Ockham, rejected their approach for fundamental philosophical reasons. Moreover, there were extensive areas of western Europe (such as England and Italy) where modistic literature penetrated only to a limited extent.

Why does Harris group the determinacy fallacy and the telementation fallacy together? Why do they belong together, and how do they interact? To what extent are they logically independent? To what extent have they been dependent on one another in fact, i.e. in the development of linguistics?

What Harris is really asserting, surely, is not that telementation is a myth, but that it is an illusion. However, if telementation is an illusion, we have the right to ask what the source of the illusion is, and what the reality behind the illusion is. What is going on when we imagine that we have thoughts, which we express in words and convey to someone else? What are the facts?

Contrary to Harris's statements on p. 94 of his book, there are many non-ancient features of traditional grammar, namely terms for the morphological components of words (affix, prefix, root, stem, suffix, etc.), terms for syntactic relations (agreement, government), and terms for sentence constituents (subject, predicate, object, complement, etc.).

Harris asserts that in traditional grammar there was no need for a definition of the word: 'Traditional grammar assumed that there was no need for a definition of the "word"' (94). In actual fact, however, definitions of 'word' are to be found in many traditional grammars. They usually amount to the assertion that words, unlike syllables, are meaningful and signify single concepts. Thus, in an English grammar published in the late nineteenth century, the author states: 'A Word is a Letter, or a combination of Letters, used as the sign of an idea' (Clarke 1874:10). From his mistaken notion that traditional grammarians did not even attempt to define the word Harris concludes that that unit, which was fundamental to the whole elaborate system of definitions used by traditional grammarians, was indefinable and therefore that the entire structure lacked any foundation and could not be used as the starting point for modern scientific linguistics.

On the related question of Saussure's definition of the word (more precisely the minimal sign or signifié), Harris wrings his hands in despair (95-97), but we can hardly expect Saussure to have provided a final solution to as difficult a problem as that in a series of lectures for undergraduates. The miracle is that he was able to say as much as he did, if one considers the conditions under which he worked. We should also remember that the Cours is a college textbook, and that it was compiled not by the author or by his students, but by two colleagues who had not even audited his courses in general linguistics! That the book is as stimulating as it turned out to be is to some extent a tribute to the intelligence of the compilers as much as to Ferdinand de Saussure's genius.

Regarding what Harris calls the principle of contrastive segmentation (95-98), this was a technique that was not invented by Saussure or by any other linguist. It is already implicit in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée as long ago as the mid-seventeenth century, and may be much older than that. It is in any case not difficult to imagine somebody dreaming up such a procedure, even in the absence of any elaborate linguistic theory, since it is implied in conventional alphabetic writing (and perhaps in other types of writing systems). It need not come as a surprise, therefore, that Leonard Bloomfield also used that procedure in spite of the fact that he had imbibed an extremely restrictive version of empiricism. One does not have to invent a Saussurean paradigm, which certainly did not exist in 1933, and assume that Bloomfield was following it in this particular respect.

As regards invariance, this is surely in part a matter of degree (some linguistic communities are more diverse than others) and in part a function of our constant tendency to disregard variation in the interests of communication. Undoubtedly, a third factor is the existence of literary languages, which are artificially streamlined, again in the interests of more efficient communication (specifically, more efficient administration and control). Grammatical descriptions of modern vernacular languages are in fact descriptions of the official literary and administrative languages in question. Most dialects, and in particular most social dialects, of the best-known languages of Europe and Asia have never been described and probably never will be described. Hence, when linguists talk about the extent of language variation in the languages of the world (i.e., the converse of Chomsky's Universal Grammar), what they are referring to, much of the time, is the degree of variation observable in the relatively well-known standard languages of Eurasia, in other words the languages of civilization.

Descriptions of 'exotic' languages have, of course, provided linguists with valuable insights in recent centuries, but such descriptions have never been as detailed or as intensively studied by professional linguists as those of languages like English, Latin, and Chinese, and this situation is unlikely to change to any appreciable extent in the foreseeable future. In any event, speakers of those exotic languages are switching to various 'national' languages at an increasing rate, and it seems likely that at some point in the third millennium the number of natural languages spoken on the planet will be roughly equal to, or at an rate not much greater than, the number of nation-states. It will be too late then, and it may already be too late, to base the study of language universals on detailed descriptions of spoken languages. One imagines that the character of linguistics will gradually change as it adjusts to these new realities.

REFERENCES

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

Clarke, Stephen W. 1874. The Normal Grammar: Analytic and Synthetic. New York & Chicago: A. S. Barnes & Company.

Coseriu, Eugenio. 1977. Tradición y novedad en la ciencia del lenguaje: Estudios de historia de la lingüística. (Biblioteca románica hispánica, Estudios y ensayos, 265.) Madrid: Gredos.

Frege, Gottlob. 1977. Logical Investigations. Edited with a preface by P. T. Geach, translated by P. T. Geach & R. H. Stoothoff. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.

Godel, Robert. 1957. Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique générale de F. de Saussure. (Publications romanes et françaises, 41.) Geneva: Librairie Droz.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1976. 'Was heißt Universalpragmatik?' In: Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie, edited by Karl-Otto Apel, 174-272. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. English translation by Thomas McCarthy entitled 'What is Universal Pragmatics?' in Communication and the Evolution of Society, by Jürgen Habermas, 1-68. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.

Hampshire, Stuart. 1950. Review of The Concept of Mind, by Gilbert Ryle. Mind 59.237-255.

Harris, Roy. 1973. Synonymy and Linguistic Analysis. Toronto & Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Harris, Roy. 1986. The Origin of Writing. London: Duckworth.

Harris, Roy. 1995. Signs of Writing. London & New York: Routledge.

Harris, Roy. 2000. Rethinking Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Harris, Roy (ed.) 2002. The Language Myth in Western Culture. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

Harris, Roy. 2003. Saussure and His Interpreters. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003, reviewed by Jonathan Culler, Language, 82 (2006), 915-918.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1. Edited by Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari. Berlin & New York: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, de Gruyter.

Percival, W. Keith. 1981. 'The Saussurean Paradigm: Fact or Fantasy?' Semiotica 36.33-49.

Petrus Helias. 1993. Summa super Priscianum, edited by Leo Reilly. Volume 1. (Studies and texts, 113.) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1968. Cours de linguistique générale: Édition critique par Rudolf Engler. Vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1993. Troisième cours de linguistique générale (1910-1911) d'après les cahiers d'Émile Constantin, Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General linguistics (1910-1911), from the notebooks of Émile Constantin. Edited by Eisuke Komatsu, English translation by Roy Harris. Oxford & New York: Pergamon Press.

Steinthal, H. 1881. Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Erster Teil: Die Sprache im Allgemeinen: Einleitung in die Psychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, Harrwitz & Grossmann.

Endnotes