LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY
The first philosophers who devoted their attention to language were the Sophists (Protagora and Gorgia, two of the most representative ones lived between 484 and 376 B.C). Rather than investigating the origin of the cosmos or of the universe (arché), they focused their interest and their studies on the nature of the political power and on its relationship with language, on the laws that governed the functioning of the polis, and they also criticized religion as a perilous instrument of persuasion. They questioned the value of truth, theorising the relativity of anything: good, evil, faith, justice, falsehood. It was the Sophists the first who introduced the art of speech, better known as rhetoric, the ability to use cogent and captivating arguments in order to convince and to move their audience. But what happens if words are used to support every kind of thesis, just or injust? The result is inevitably ethical disorder and moral chaos. That is why the Sophists were regarded by their successors as dangerous deceivers and as brilliant liars . It was Plato the first who dealt with the problem of language origin and of the meaning of words in his famous dialogues. In the dialogue entitled Cratylus, Plato asks himself if words are "natural sounds" or if they are the fruit of conventions. There are three characters SOCRATES, HERMOGENES and CRATYLUS who discuss the issue. Each of them assumes a different position:
Hermogenes. Suppose that we make Socrates a party to the argument?
Cratylus. If you please.
Her. I should explain to you, Socrates, that our
friend Cratylus has been arguing about names; he says that they
are natural and not conventional; not a portion of the human
voice which men agree to use; but that there is a truth or
correctness in them, which is the same for Hellenes as for
barbarians. Whereupon I ask him, whether his own name of Cratylus
is a true name or not, and he answers "Yes." And Socrates? "Yes." Then every man's name, as I tell him, is that which he is called. To
this he replies- "If all the world were to call you Hermogenes,
that would not be your name." And when I am anxious to have a
further explanation he is ironical and mysterious, and seems to
imply that he has a notion of his own about the matter, if he
would only tell, and could entirely convince me, if he chose to
be intelligible. Tell me, Socrates, what this oracle means; or
rather tell me, if you will be so good, what is your own view of
the truth or correctness of names, which I would far sooner hear.
Socrates. Son of Hipponicus, there is an ancient
saying, that "hard is the knowledge of the good." And the
knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge. If I had not
been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the
great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and
language- these are his own words- and then I should have been at
once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and
therefore, I do not know the truth about such matters; I will,
however, gladly assist you and Cratylus in the investigation of
them. When he declares that your name is not really Hermogenes, I
suspect that he is only making fun of you;- he means to say that
you are no true son of Hermes, because you are always looking
after a fortune and never in luck. But, as I was saying, there is
a good deal of difficulty in this sort of knowledge, and therefore we had better leave the question open until we have heard both sides.
Her. I have often talked over
this matter, both with Cratylus and others, and cannot convince
myself that there is any principle of correctness in names other
than convention and agreement; any name which you give, in my
opinion, is the right one, and if you change that and give another, the new name is as correct as the old- we frequently change the
names of our slaves, and the newly-imposed name is as good as the
old: for there is no name given to anything by nature; all is
convention and habit of the users; such is my view. But if I am
mistaken I shall be happy to hear and learn of Cratylus, or of
any one else.
The ideas expressed by Socrates throughout the dialogue reflect Plato's stance, which represents a sort of compromise between Hermogenes's and Cratilo's views. Through long and complex arguments, he denies the total arbitrariness of linguistic signs; onomatopeic words, for example, reveil an evident link between the word and the object to which it refers to (e.g. the term "thunder" evokes in many languages the loud noise which follows a flash of lightning, Italian: tuono / French: tonnerre). Then, Plato (alias Socrates) also confutes Cratylus's thesis. In his opinion there cannot be a biunivocal correspondence between words and things, because in such a case, knowing the names would be tantamount to knowing the things, but this would contradict Plato's theory, according to which the reality of things is only appearance, a shadow of the world of ideas which embody the authentic and unique knowledge.
Aristotle also dedicates a whole work to the question of language, the famous Perì Herméneias (On Interpretation). The philosopher distinguishes the concept of "sign" from the concept of "name": the sign is "something that refers to something else" (aliquid stat pro aliquo) in a natural or conventional way. He also introduces a third element "the concept" which is fundamental because it allows to explain how men are able to communicate to each other by language, in spite of its arbitrariness:
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
Aristotle also contributed to develop the studies of rhetoric. He identified five moments in the elaboration of a verbal discourse:
INVENTIO (Invenire quod dicas): The orator will choose the arguments that better serve his purposes. He will select themes and subjects so as to achieve two main goals: "to convince" and "to stir his listeners' souls".
DISPOSITIO (Inventa disponete): A good orator will structure his discourse in a coherent and logical way.
ELOCUTIO (Ornare verbis): A good orator will draw on a huge repertoire of tropes and figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, hyperboles, oxymorons, metonimies, etc in order to make his discourse more colourful and vivid.
ACTIO or PRONUNCIATIO (Agere et pronuntiare): A good orator will combine his verbal performance with gestures and facial expressions that aim to win the audience's attention and favour.
MEMORIA (Memoria mandare): A good orator will prepare and organize in his mind the speech he is going to deliver before the audience.
During the Middle Age (the period which goes from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A. D. to the discovery of America in 1492), linguistic studies concentrated chiefly upon "grammar" regarded both as a liberal art and as an indispensable instrument to write and to read Latin correctly. The methods adopted by Priscian and Donatus in the teaching of Latin were imitated and innovated during the reign of Charles Magne. Later, William of Conches and Peter Helias started applying logic to linguistic problems, anticipating the concept of Universal Grammar and giving rise to the Modistae' s school.
During the Renaissance there was a revival of interest in classical literature. Greek and Latin works were analysed and interpreted in order to rediscover their original contents and this led to the development of philology. Non European languages and dialects started attracting the attention of scholars. The university of Paris gave its students the possibility to study Arabic or Hebrew, for example. The beginning of colonisation at the end of the 16th century encouraged a lot of missionaries, merchants and traders to investigate language diversity and to come into contact with exotic cultures. The late 15th and the early 16th century were also marked by the birth of the first grammars of modern languages in Europe and by the introduction of printing first in Germany and then in the neighbouring countries, which favoured and accelerated the process of language standardisation and the spread of literacy.
In the 18th century the question of language origin was again at the centre of philosophers' attention. It was Jean Jacques Rousseau who reopened the debate with its work (published posthumously) Essay on the origin of language. He claimed that the faculty of language did not arise only for a question of social usefulness but it developed as a consequence of men's inner disposition and passion. In other words, according to Rousseau men started talking in order to express their state of soul, their moral needs and their feelings. Another philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder emphasized the "human" character of language. In his opinion languages are neither the gift of God, nor a practical instrument of communication. On the contrary, they are the natural product of the human capacity of thinking. In the early years of the 19th century, Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt formulated the idea that every language expresses the spirit and the culture of the people who speak it, by combining linguistic and anthropological studies.
In the 20th century it was Ferdinand de Saussure who laid the foundations of modern linguistics with its collection of lectures published by his students after his death with the title: Course in General Linguistics. He defined the two faces of the linguistic sign: the signifier and the signified. The former corresponds to the "acoustic image", the vehicle employed to convey the meaning; the latter, instead, represents the concept, the idea, the mental image evoked by the sign. Saussure clarifies this dichotomy by introducing the distinction between langue and parole. Langue is language regarded as an abstract and fixed mental structure. Parole is language regarded as the concrete speech act performed by the speakers, or in other words, as their creative linguistic productions. What emerges at this point from Saussure's theory is that language can be studied from two different perspectives: the cognitive perspective since language structures thoughts in the human mind and the communicative perspective since the purpose of language is to make social interaction possible. Nonetheless, the goal of linguistics for him is not to investigate language in all its aspects but only as langue.
Saussure's ideas influenced the studies realised by two Russian scholars Nicolaj Trubeckoj and Roman Jacobson, the most important representatives of the Prague Circle, founded in 1926. They investigated and described the minimal structures of language, (phonemes), by emphasizing their "differential function", on the basis of what de Saussure had claimed:
Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Saussure's can be therefore considered as the forerunner of Structuralism, a methodological approach centred upon the notion of structure which developed in the 60's and 70's and which was adopted not only in linguistics but also in other disciplines such as anthropology and literary theory.
Another famous school of linguistics which drew inspiration from Saussure's work was the School of Copenhagen, founded in 1931 by Luis Hjelmslev with V. Brondal. They both adopted a synchronic approach to the study of language, analysing it in its smallest meaningful grammatical elements (glosseme).
USEFUL LINKS
For those who are interested in Jakobson's well known theory of communication I advice to read the article written by Prof. Lanigan.
If you need a summary of Saussure's ideas download the following pdf realised by Dan Mateescu, Professor of English phonetics and phonological theory at the University of Bucarest.