HIS RECEPTION IN EUROPE

During the 1880s, the philological scene began to change in Europe, under the cumulative influence of such works as Whitney’s Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875), Bréal’s Idées latentes (1868), Steinthal’s Abriss (1871), Paul’s Principien (1880) and Wegener’s Untersuchungen (1885). For an attentive observer it was possible to detect a slow change from the study of facts (the atomistic study of words, for example) and the writing of fiction (the study of the origin of language for example) to a realistic analysis of language and change of

The bio-bibliographical background 115

language. Brugmann, one such observer, mentions this change in the Introduction to his short comparative grammar (1904: VI), pointing especially to the works of Paul, Wegener, and Sievers (1893, 4th edition). This situation explains why Wegener’s book from the start was well-received in Germany (cf. Ziemer 1886; for a more critical account, cf. Bruchmann 1887). He was only forgotten with the advent of structuralism in the 1950s. Franz Misteli wrote an appreciative review in 1886, in which he pointed out that the major merit of Wegener’s book

Cf. Leskien (1897), who uses this term in his obituary of Whitney.

lies in the fact that he regards language not only as a product of the passive memory or the association of ideas, but as an ‘expression of the whole psyche’ (Misteli 1886:267). Unlike some of his colleagues, Wegener did not want to study isolated words and sounds or compare languages. What he wanted was to find an answer to the more fundamental question: ‘How do we understand language?’ (cf. the title of Part II of his book, English transl. ‘Understanding speech’, in: Abse, 1971), a question that had also intrigued Bréal (IL; ES: ch. XIV), and one that is in some sense the counterpart of Whitney’s question ‘why do we speak as we do?’ (LSL: 10) Like Whitney and Bréal, he paid more attention to the speaker and hearer and to language use. Going beyond Bréal and Whitney, he studied the speaker’s and hearer’s co-operation in the construction of meaning in situation, that is, he studied language as ‘situated action’ (cf. Suchman 1987). He was followed by Hermann Paul who, in the subsequent editions of the Principien, incorporated not only Bréal’s but also Wegener’s ideas and applied them to semantic change (cf. Paul 18801909, 4th edition: 78, note 2; cf. WS: 2).

Brugmann, an admirer of Whitney, and the leading figure in the neo-grammarian movement, cites Wegener in his short grammar (cf. above), and in his posthumously published book on syntax a note is added by the editor Wilhelm Streitberg that refers to Wegener’s posthumously published article (cf. Wegener WS). But it is not inconceivable that Brugmann had himself known and read Wegener’s article just before his death in 1919 and proposed it for publication in the Indogermanische Forschungen. It is not known if Brugmann read the article, but his definition of the sentence is astonishingly similar to Wegener’s. He wrote that a sentence is not always a logical judgement (Urteil), consisting in subject and predicate (cf. ES: ch. XXIV):

Such sentences, regarded as linguistic units, cannot really be separated from interjectional expressions such as oh! ugh!, or from exclamations consisting in formed words such as fire!, requests such as help! or come in!, expressions of agreement or disagreement such as yes and no, beautiful, splendid, questions such as so? etc. All these are linguistic expressions which, uttered in certain situations [my emphasis], and used as instruments of communication in the commerce between individuals [my emphasis], have the same degree of closure and completeness in view of the purpose of communication as the tree is in bloom or if you want to,

I don’t mind.

(Brugmann 1885:1–2)

Change in language 116

However, he does not mention Wegener, but Sievers as his source—an influence he shared with Wegener (cf. Wegener 1882:302). Sievers’ definition of the sentence reads as follows:

We want to understand here [where he deals with the relation between sentence and word] by a sentence (Satz) every independent utterance (Äuβerung), i.e. every mass of sounds which is complete in itself, and which in a certain context, be it of the discourse or of the situation per se, is intended to express a certain sense (thought or feeling) and is understood in a certain sense by the hearer.

(Sievers 1893, 5th edition: 229)

In his paper Brugmann describes the evolution of the sentence from the interjection to the full-blown sentence, and in chapter 7 he tackles the problem of the form of the sentence according to the basic functions of the soul (a part of the book that is based on an article published in 1918) (cf. ibid.: 187ff.). This chapter deals with what we call nowadays speech acts, just as Wegener does in WS:

Man uses language to express feelings of desire and frustration (Lust, Unlust) [for these term cf. Wegener US], wishes, requests, orders, complaints, he rejects ideas and proposals, warns, threatens, curses, expresses doubts, asks questions and answers questions, makes claims, casts judgements upon events, objects and persons.

(ibid.: 187)

He also points out that such speech acts are interpreted in the situation of the conversation (ibid.: 188f.).

(We shall come back to this topic when we describe Wegener’s treatment of the sentence as speech act.)

Apart from linguists, Wegener was also read by psychologists of language, such as Karl Bühler, whose functional model of language is entirely compatible with Wegener’s perspective. Bühler, who worked on a German version of speech-act theory, associated himself with Wegener in his opposition to Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology in general and his psychology of language in particular. (For Wegener’s critique of Wundt, cf. below p. 187; cf. Bühler 19341965:22 passim.)

Not only was German proto-pragmatics influenced by Wegener’s analysis of speech and action, the same holds true of English proto-pragmatics, represented especially by Malinowski (1923), Gardiner (1932), and Firth (1957). Firth wrote:

Among the linguists mentioned in the Supplement [Malinowski had published his article on ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’ as an appendix to Ogden and Richards 1923], the leading German comparatists are missing, but W. von Humboldt, Sweet and Jespersen are there, and notably Wegener (1885), to whom Malinowski owed his early notions of the Situation. Wegener was one of the first to propound what

he called the Situationstheorie [German in the original].

The bio-bibliographical background 117

(1957:94f; quoted by Juchem, ms.)

Inspired by Wegener, Malinowski had introduced the expression ‘context of situation’ into English linguistics, which was fruitfully exploited by the so-called London School:

But the widened conception of context of situation yields more than that. It makes clear the difference in scope and method between the linguistics of dead and living languages. The material on which almost all our linguistic study has been done so far belongs to dead languages. It is present in the form of written documents, naturally isolated, torn out of any context of situation.

(Malinowski 1923:306 quoted ibid.)

The English linguist who owed most to Wegener was Sir Alan Gardiner who dedicated his book The Theory of Speech and Language to him as ‘a pioneer of linguistics’. (His copy of Wegener’s book is now in use at the Taylor Institution, Oxford.) Just like Bühler,

he develops a functional or instrumentalist theory of language, the main function of it being not the expression of thoughts, but the use as an instrument of communication and action: ‘Imagine an angry traveller hurling words of abuse at an uncomprehending porter, or a judge pronouncing sentence of death upon a murderer. Shall we say that these persons are expressing thought?’ (1932:17). Like Paul and Wegener he incorporates the hearer into his theory of language: ‘the act of understanding is one which demands considerable mental effort’ (1932:64), and he analyses a ‘simple speech act’ (1932:71) such as ‘rain’ as collaboration in situation, the situation having, in accordance with Wegener, three dimensions: ‘of presence, of common knowledge, of imagination’ (ibid.: 51). In this analysis he distinguishes, again following Wegener, between the wordform as ‘a fact of language’ and the word-function in the ‘acts of speech’ (ibid.: 144) (cf. also Bréal FF), and finally, he distinguishes between meaning and ‘thing meant’, or the actual referent. This distinction was highly relevant in Wegener’s theory of language-change where the movement between the intentional directedness of the speech act towards a thing-meant and the conventional use of a word to name it make up the whole motion of language-change.

That Wegener had a really strong influence on English and American thought can be further pointed to by reference to Suzanne K.Langer (19421980): Langer based her treatment of metaphor on Wegener; by referring to Blumenthal’s treatment of Wegener in his Language and Psychology (1970); and finally by mentioning Bhattacharya’s article on ‘The context of language use’ (1978), an article based on the English translation of Wegener’s book published in 1971, by D.W.Abse, as part of a book on ‘Language disorder and mental disease’.

In the introduction to his translation, Abse stresses another aspect of Wegener’s thought. Apart from his pioneering work on the sentence and the speech situation, Wegener also put forward a highly interesting theory of word-meaning and change of meaning, which will be described below, p. 181, Abse says:

It is remarkable how perspicuously Wegener deals with the semantic movement and the development of general meaning through metaphor. He

Change in language 118

emphasizes the initial embedment of metaphor in the context of situation which must be understood in order to grasp the meaning of the spoken word. He accomplished this intellectual feat independently of Michel Bréal (1897), whose ‘Essai de Sémantique, Science des significations’ became so well known and enhanced so considerably the serious study of meaning.

(1971:21f.)

The translation of Wegener’s book in this context might account for some of its mistakes.

One can say that Whitney, Bréal, Paul, and Wegener all laid the basis for the most serious theory of semantic change hitherto proposed.

Wegener’s reception in France was, as far as I know, non-existent. His approach however has strong parallels with some currently debated theories of language; cf. Grunig on ‘La fuite de sens’ (1985), Authier-Revuz on heterogeneity (1982), Ducrot (1984) on polyphony. These theories are generally attached to the ‘théorie de l’enonciation’, a movement initiated by Benveniste, that has parallels with speech-act theory. The strongest congruence between Wegener and French thought can be found in Ducrot, who writes in his book Le Dire et le dit (1984) that a sentence (‘phrase’) ‘means only something as part of an argumentative chain’ and of a situation. Ducrot’s instructional theory of enunciation has also been foreshadowed by Wegener: ‘all that the phrase says [e.g. O is too F], is that you have to determine it if you want to constitute the meaning of the utterance (énoncé), that is if you want to discover the “something” that the speaking subject wants to communicate. In this case again the meaning is not something like the sum of the meaning and of something else, but a construction, achieved by complying to the specific instructions given by the meaning, and taking into account the situation of discourse’ (1984:182).

Change in language 120

HIS RECEPTION IN EUROPE