CREATIVE THOUGHT AND LATENT IDEAS

Bréal had stressed in 1866, in ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, that wordforms have functions and that, for this reason, it should be of interest to the historical grammarian (as opposed to the comparative grammarian) to analyse not only the changes in their external forms, but to study the changes in their use. And use is, as we have seen, meaning. The study of the functions of words is therefore the domain of semantics. In his course on ‘Les idées latentes du langage’, given in 1868, Bréal emphasizes this fact again. He even goes so far as to evoke as his ally the Grammaire Générale, so much despised by comparative philologists, and initially by himself. General Grammar, the model of which is the grammar of Port-Royal (1660) had as its goal to show the relationship between the operations of the mind and the linguistic forms. This is precisely Bréal’s topic, only he will arrive at different conclusions.

In ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, Bréal had stressed that the meaning of a word can survive a change in its form, and indeed even profit from it. In ‘Les idées latentes’ Bréal wants to show that the meaning of a word or a sentence, or even a suffix and its form, are not always in exact correspondence. Wordforms give no direct access to meaning, they only give meagre hints, or minimal instructions, on the basis of which our intelligence, our mind, must construct meaning, make sense. That this is so should not be regarded as a shortcoming of language. On the contrary, if words represented exactly what they mean or refer to, as in some scientific nomenclatures, language in the normal sense would die, would no longer be usable, it would lose its function. Linguistic signs have to be vague and flexible for their users, so that they can be adapted to the wide variety of thoughts the users wish to express. This also means that linguistic signs are not created once and for all; they are constantly recreated and changed by those who use them. During this process word forms gradually absorb, so to speak, meaning from their co-texts and contexts by contamination (cf. the example of the word operation). But what is more, they also integrate into their meaning the function they have in a sentence. A form becomes congruent with its function (cf. chapter 11). Thus we arrive at another topic dealt with in the lecture on latent ideas: syntax.

Up to now we have only mentioned the importance of latent ideas for the comprehension of individual words. In this respect Bréal’s theory is compatible and comparable with Whitney’s suggestions concerning the imperfect representation of thought in language. But Bréal’s main argument for the postulation of latent ideas has to

be found in his reflections on syntax and grammar. ‘The whole of syntax’, he writes ‘was at first in our intelligence, and if later on differences in form have somehow separated the parts of speech, this is because language shows at last the traces of the intellectual work it represents. The unity of the proposition and that of the sentence, no less than that of the word, is the product of intelligence’ (IL: 28–9)

To start with let us look at a minimal fact of ‘syntax’: the juxtaposition of two words:

e.g. headache pill, fertility pill, heart pill (cf. Aitchison 1987:154). These examples are

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used by Jean Aitchison, not by Bréal, but they illustrate perfectly what Bréal had in mind in his 1868 article.

Headache pills demolish headaches, fertility pills produce fertility and heart pills aid the heart…. As these examples show, words can be put together in so many superficially illogical ways that one wonders how on earth people manage to understand one another when this is done afresh, as in ‘You can have the owl bowl’, meaning ‘You can have the bowl with the picture of the owl on it’.

(Aitchison 1987:154)

She claims that ‘human word comprehension requires active matching skills, in which preexisting information has to be combined with information extracted from the context’ (ibid.: 155), or in Bréal’s words: ‘It is this mental work of subordination and association which we are obliged to do, and for which language does not offer us any help, that Mr Adolphe Régnier has appropriately called the interior syntax’ (IL: 17; cf. HM: 209) Other primitive examples of syntax are the locutions or articulated groups of words (cf. HM: 200f.), which we have already mentioned in chapter 6, p. 125. (cf. Sampson 1980:147ff. on the emergence of syntax from such primitive groups).

But a language is not only composed of words and groups of words, it needs a mechanism to assemble, arrange, and fix the order of these materials. This mechanism is grammar. And what is important in grammar? The mind: ‘What we are dealing with is the element that is not expressed in language and with the influence that the mind exerts in the long run over the form’ (HM: 205). As in the case of single words or groups of words, we need the mind—or as Bréal says, intelligence—to make sense of whole sentences. Grammar, in the sense of a hierarchical structure of ‘rules’, is the most economical way, the most highly evolved instrument, that allows us to make sense of what we hear. It liberates us from single, item-by-item ad hoc decision-making about meaning.

The grammar of a language determines as much the value of a sign as its relation to the thing or the thought. To understand the sentences ‘Mary loves John’ and ‘John loves Mary’, we have to know more than John and Mary; we have to know the positional value of these names in the sentence, and ‘without us being aware of it our mind has added to the sentence some sort of invisible grammatical mechanism’ (HM: 206).

‘Nouns’, ‘verbs’, etc., that is the categories of grammar or the parts of speech, are, however, not eternal or God-given. They are, like everything in language, the product of

a long evolution, and they change all the time according to new needs. Syntax thus belongs as much to the domain of la sémantique as do words (cf. HM: 206). As much as Bréal agrees with Adolphe Régnier (1855) and his concept of an internal syntax, and with Humboldt and his concept of an inner language-form, he strongly advises us not to take this internal syntax or grammar or form as a gift of God or of nature. He makes it quite clear that grammatical categories are not innate. The internal syntax varies from language to language and it is modified through the ages. It has evolved out of intelligent language- use and it continues to change according to it.

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This is a gradually made acquisition, brought about by the common effort of a whole nation, which consolidates itself through usage and finally imprints itself in our mind in such a way that we normally are not aware of it, and that we can only abstract from it momentarily after a certain struggle. To trace back this intelligent acquisition, as much as the available documents allow us, and with the help of the observation of other language families, is a task which belongs essentially to semantics and which is of particular interest, because in this case meaning dominates and subjugates the matter of language.

(HM: 207; my emphasis)

Syntax is the final victory of mind over matter. It was ten years later, in his Essai, especially Part III ‘Comment s’est formée la syntaxe’, that Bréal fulfilled this programme. He shows the gradual development of adverb, preposition, and conjunction, young categories, the evolution of which is well documented, and of the substantive, adjective and verb, old categories where the evolution is less easy to ‘observe’. All these grammatical tools are created by the intelligent adaptation of old material to new uses.

Mental grammar, Bréal, Port-Royal, and Humboldt

We need to answer the question: In what respect does Bréal’s mental grammar differ from that of the representatives of ‘General Grammar’? Bréal claims that mental grammar has its own laws, which are like the laws of an artist, and not, as the partisans of General Grammar believed, the laws of logic:

As to the logic which links the different parts of a sentence together, it is not always the logic of things. The rules of syntax have undoubtedly their reasons: but these are grammatical reasons, not reasons stemming from the nature of things. These are somehow the beauties of craftsmanship which only those who are initiated notice. When I say to a child in French ‘Ote ton couteau, j’ai peur que tu ne te blesses’ [Move your knife, I am afraid that you might hurt yourself], I use the negation ne which is not logically necessary and which even disconcerts logic. Language is an art which has its own rules and secrets, just as the painter has his procedures for grouping together the persons in a painting or to give the illusion of perspective.

(SL, 1009; cf. ES: ch. XXIV)

Bréal’s conception of mental grammar, of internal syntax and latent ideas, owes less to General Grammar than to Humboldt, whom Bréal mentions frequently in his work. While agreeing with the philosophers of the eighteenth century who argued that language was a social institution and words signs, Bréal would not accept a static, logicistic view of language, defended by some. Evolution and transformation for him remain the keys to unlock the mystery of language, even syntax:

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Our linguists have sometimes thought in the way of the 18th century theoreticians, as if, at a certain moment, nothing had survived from the preceding ages, and as if language had been created in one stroke and according to a unique model. We shall add some words by Wilhelm von Humboldt…: ‘As every language gets its raw material from the preceding generations, the intellectual activity that creates the expression of ideas is always turned towards something which is already there: it does not produce, it transforms’.

([1876a] 1877:385f.; my emphasis)

When one reads Robin’s summary of Humboldt’s thought, one cannot escape seeing direct similarities with Bréal:

Humboldt’s theory of language lays stress on the creative linguistic ability inherent in every speaker’s brain or mind. A language is to be identified with the living capability by which speakers produce and understand utterances, not with the observed products of the acts of speaking and writing…. The capacity for language is an essential part of the human mind;…The articulatory basis of speaking is common to all men, but sound only serves as the passive material for the formal constitution or structure of the language (innere Sprachform). Humboldt’s innere Sprachform is the semantic and grammatical structure of a language, embodying elements, patterns and rules imposed on the raw material of speech. In part it is common to all men, being involved in man’s intellectual equipment; but in part also the separate Sprachform of each language constitutes its formal identity and difference to all other languages…. The latest potentialities of each language’s innere Sprachform are the field of its literary artists, and, more important, the language and thought of a people are inseparable.

(Robins [1967] 1979:174f.)

In fact, the parallels between Humboldt’s and Bréal’s thought had already been noted by Steinthal, who highlighted them in his review of Bréal’s article on latent ideas:

The idea which it presents in detail is not new; one can find it not only in Wilhelm von Humboldt, but also in Pott and G.Curtius. But it is not enough that ideas are occasionally expressed, they must be confronted with facts. This is what Mr. Bréal does. What we are dealing with is simply the following: One should not regard the meaning of a word as the mere sum of what is actually expressed in the root and the affixes; there exists always another kind of determination, which is only added in thought, without any counterpart in the sounds…. In short, every grammatical form contains something which is not expressed in the sound: une idée latente, which only gives it its real linguistic value…. How little says the sound and how much does it give us to understand.

(Steinthal 1869:282–3, 284)

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According to this view, speaking and understanding are not acts of encoding and decoding, but the creative stimulation of thoughts between interlocutors by the means of sound.

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CREATIVE THOUGHT AND LATENT IDEAS