hypothesis of linguistic

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)

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There are about seven thousand languages heard around the world – they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. As you know, language plays a significant role in our lives.

But one intriguing question is – can it actually affect how we think?

It is widely thought that reality and how one perceives the world is expressed in spoken words and are precisely the same as reality.

That is, perception and expression are understood to be synonymous, and it is assumed that speech is based on thoughts. This idea believes that what one says depends on how the world is encoded and decoded in the mind.

However, many believe the opposite.

In that, what one perceives is dependent on the spoken word. Basically, that thought depends on language, not the other way around.

What Is The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Twentieth-century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are known for this very principle and its popularization. Their joint theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or, more commonly, the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, holds great significance in all scopes of communication theories.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the grammatical and verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. It emphasizes that language either determines or influences one’s thoughts.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that people experience the world based on the structure of their language, and that linguistic categories shape and limit cognitive processes. It proposes that differences in language affect thought, perception, and behavior, so speakers of different languages think and act differently.

For example, different words mean various things in other languages. Not every word in all languages has an exact one-to-one translation in a foreign language.

Because of these small but crucial differences, using the wrong word within a particular language can have significant consequences.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is sometimes called “linguistic relativity” or the “principle of linguistic relativity.” So while they have slightly different names, they refer to the same basic proposal about the relationship between language and thought.

How Language Influences Culture

Culture is defined by the values, norms, and beliefs of a society. Our culture can be considered a lens through which we undergo the world and develop a shared meaning of what occurs around us.

The language that we create and use is in response to the cultural and societal needs that arose. In other words, there is an apparent relationship between how we talk and how we perceive the world.

One crucial question that many intellectuals have asked is how our society’s language influences its culture.

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his then-student Benjamin Whorf were interested in answering this question.

Together, they created the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our thought processes predominantly determine how we look at the world.

Our language restricts our thought processes – our language shapes our reality. Simply, the language that we use shapes the way we think and how we see the world.

Since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that our language use shapes our perspective of the world, people who speak different languages have different views of the world.

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a Yale University graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir, who was considered the father of American linguistic anthropology.

Sapir was responsible for documenting and recording the cultures and languages of many Native American tribes disappearing at an alarming rate. He and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between language and culture.

Anthropologists like Sapir need to learn the language of the culture they are studying to understand the worldview of its speakers truly. Whorf believed that the opposite is also true, that language affects culture by influencing how its speakers think.

His hypothesis proposed that the words and structures of a language influence how its speaker behaves and feels about the world and, ultimately, the culture itself.

Simply put, Whorf believed that you see the world differently from another person who speaks another language due to the specific language you speak.

Human beings do not live in the matter-of-fact world alone, nor solitary in the world of social action as traditionally understood, but are very much at the pardon of the certain language which has become the medium of communication and expression for their society.

To a large extent, the real world is unconsciously built on habits in regard to the language of the group. We hear and see and otherwise experience broadly as we do because the language habits of our community predispose choices of interpretation.

Studies & Examples

The lexicon, or vocabulary, is the inventory of the articles a culture speaks about and has classified to understand the world around them and deal with it effectively.

For example, our modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some vehicle – cars, buses, trucks, SUVs, trains, etc. We, therefore, have thousands of words to talk about and mention, including types of models, vehicles, parts, or brands.

The most influential aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the dictionary of its language. Among the societies living on the islands in the Pacific, fish have significant economic and cultural importance.

Therefore, this is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival.

For example, there are over 1,000 fish species in Palau, and Palauan fishers knew, even long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them – far more than modern biologists know today.

Whorf’s studies at Yale involved working with many Native American languages, including Hopi. He discovered that the Hopi language is quite different from English in many ways, especially regarding time.

Western cultures and languages view times as a flowing river that carries us continuously through the present, away from the past, and to the future.

Our grammar and system of verbs reflect this concept with particular tenses for past, present, and future.

We perceive this concept of time as universal in that all humans see it in the same way.

Although a speaker of Hopi has very different ideas, their language’s structure both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. Seemingly, the Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense; instead, they divide the world into manifested and unmanifest domains.

The manifested domain consists of the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past, and the future; the unmanifest domain consists of the remote past and the future and the world of dreams, thoughts, desires, and life forces.

Also, there are no words for minutes, minutes, or days of the week. Native Hopi speakers often had great difficulty adapting to life in the English-speaking world when it came to being on time for their job or other affairs.

It is due to the simple fact that this was not how they had been conditioned to behave concerning time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

Today, it is widely believed that some aspects of perception are affected by language.

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the idea that if a person’s language has no word for a specific concept, then that person would not understand that concept.

Honestly, the idea that a mother tongue can restrict one’s understanding has been largely unaccepted. For example, in German, there is a term that means to take pleasure in another person’s unhappiness.

While there is no translatable equivalent in English, it just would not be accurate to say that English speakers have never experienced or would not be able to comprehend this emotion.

Just because there is no word for this in the English language does not mean English speakers are less equipped to feel or experience the meaning of the word.

Not to mention a “chicken and egg” problem with the theory.

Of course, languages are human creations, very much tools we invented and honed to suit our needs. Merely showing that speakers of diverse languages think differently does not tell us whether it is the language that shapes belief or the other way around.

Supporting Evidence

On the other hand, there is hard evidence that the language-associated habits we acquire play a role in how we view the world. And indeed, this is especially true for languages that attach genders to inanimate objects.

There was a study done that looked at how German and Spanish speakers view different things based on their given gender association in each respective language.

The results demonstrated that in describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of the language marked them as having more male characteristics like “strong” and “long.” Similarly, these same items, which use feminine phrasings in German, were noted by German speakers as effeminate, like “beautiful” and “elegant.”

The findings imply that speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something being feminine or masculine, not due to the objects” characteristics or appearances but because of how they are categorized in their native language.

It is important to remember that the Theory of Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) also successfully achieves openness. The theory is shown as a window where we view the cognitive process, not as an absolute.

It is set forth to look at a phenomenon differently than one usually would. Furthermore, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is very simple and logically sound. Understandably, one’s atmosphere and culture will affect decoding.

Likewise, in studies done by the authors of the theory, many Native American tribes do not have a word for particular things because they do not exist in their lives. The logical simplism of this idea of relativism provides parsimony.

Truly, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis makes sense. It can be utilized in describing great numerous misunderstandings in everyday life. When a Pennsylvanian says “yuns,” it does not make any sense to a Californian, but when examined, it is just another word for “you all.”

The Linguistic Relativity Theory addresses this and suggests that it is all relative. This concept of relativity passes outside dialect boundaries and delves into the world of language – from different countries and, consequently, from mind to mind.

Is language reality honestly because of thought, or is it thought which occurs because of language? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis very transparently presents a view of reality being expressed in language and thus forming in thought.

The principles rehashed in it show a reasonable and even simple idea of how one perceives the world, but the question is still arguable: thought then language or language then thought?

Modern Relevance

Regardless of its age, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Linguistic Relativity Theory, has continued to force itself into linguistic conversations, even including pop culture.

The idea was just recently revisited in the movie “Arrival,” – a science fiction film that engagingly explores the ways in which an alien language can affect and alter human thinking.

And even if some of the most drastic claims of the theory have been debunked or argued against, the idea has continued its relevance, and that does say something about its importance.

Hypotheses, thoughts, and intellectual musings do not need to be totally accurate to remain in the public eye as long as they make us think and question the world – and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis does precisely that.

The theory does not only make us question linguistic theory and our own language but also our very existence and how our perceptions might shape what exists in this world.

There are generalities that we can expect every person to encounter in their day-to-day life – in relationships, love, work, sadness, and so on. But thinking about the more granular disparities experienced by those in diverse circumstances, linguistic or otherwise, helps us realize that there is more to the story than ours.

And beautifully, at the same time, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis reiterates the fact that we are more alike than we are different, regardless of the language we speak.

Isn’t it just amazing that linguistic diversity just reveals to us how ingenious and flexible the human mind is – human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but, indeed, seven thousand!

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis?. American anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79.

Whorf, B. L. (1952). Language, mind, and reality. ETC: A review of general semantics, 167-188.

Whorf, B. L. (1997). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In Sociolinguistics (pp. 443-463). Palgrave, London.

Whorf, B. L. (2012). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT press.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Linguistic Theory

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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the  linguistic theory that the semantic structure of a language shapes or limits the ways in which a speaker forms conceptions of the world. It came about in 1929. The theory is named after the American anthropological linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and his student Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941). It is also known as the   theory of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativism, linguistic determinism, Whorfian hypothesis , and Whorfianism .

History of the Theory

The idea that a person's native language determines how he or she thinks was popular among behaviorists of the 1930s and on until cognitive psychology theories came about, beginning in the 1950s and increasing in influence in the 1960s. (Behaviorism taught that behavior is a result of external conditioning and doesn't take feelings, emotions, and thoughts into account as affecting behavior. Cognitive psychology studies mental processes such as creative thinking, problem-solving, and attention.)

Author Lera Boroditsky gave some background on ideas about the connections between languages and thought:

"The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that 'to have a second language is to have a second soul.' But the idea went out of favor with scientists when  Noam Chomsky 's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a  universal grammar  for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways...." ("Lost in Translation." "The Wall Street Journal," July 30, 2010)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was taught in courses through the early 1970s and had become widely accepted as truth, but then it fell out of favor. By the 1990s, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was left for dead, author Steven Pinker wrote. "The cognitive revolution in psychology, which made the study of pure thought possible, and a number of studies showing meager effects of language on concepts, appeared to kill the concept in the 1990s... But recently it has been resurrected, and 'neo-Whorfianism' is now an active research topic in  psycholinguistics ." ("The Stuff of Thought. "Viking, 2007)

Neo-Whorfianism is essentially a weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and says that language  influences  a speaker's view of the world but does not inescapably determine it.

The Theory's Flaws

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stems from the idea that if a person's language has no word for a particular concept, then that person would not be able to understand that concept, which is untrue. Language doesn't necessarily control humans' ability to reason or have an emotional response to something or some idea. For example, take the German word  sturmfrei , which essentially is the feeling when you have the whole house to yourself because your parents or roommates are away. Just because English doesn't have a single word for the idea doesn't mean that Americans can't understand the concept.

There's also the "chicken and egg" problem with the theory. "Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs," Boroditsky continued. "Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around."

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

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What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

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Supplement to Philosophy of Linguistics

Whorfianism.

Emergentists tend to follow Edward Sapir in taking an interest in interlinguistic and intralinguistic variation. Linguistic anthropologists have explicitly taken up the task of defending a famous claim associated with Sapir that connects linguistic variation to differences in thinking and cognition more generally. The claim is very often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (though this is a largely infelicitous label, as we shall see).

This topic is closely related to various forms of relativism—epistemological, ontological, conceptual, and moral—and its general outlines are discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia; see the section on language in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism (§3.1). Cultural versions of moral relativism suggest that, given how much cultures differ, what is moral for you might depend on the culture you were brought up in. A somewhat analogous view would suggest that, given how much language structures differ, what is thinkable for you might depend on the language you use. (This is actually a kind of conceptual relativism, but it is generally called linguistic relativism, and we will continue that practice.)

Even a brief skim of the vast literature on the topic is not remotely plausible in this article; and the primary literature is in any case more often polemical than enlightening. It certainly holds no general answer to what science has discovered about the influences of language on thought. Here we offer just a limited discussion of the alleged hypothesis and the rhetoric used in discussing it, the vapid and not so vapid forms it takes, and the prospects for actually devising testable scientific hypotheses about the influence of language on thought.

Whorf himself did not offer a hypothesis. He presented his “new principle of linguistic relativity” (Whorf 1956: 214) as a fact discovered by linguistic analysis:

When linguists became able to examine critically and scientifically a large number of languages of widely different patterns, their base of reference was expanded; they experienced an interruption of phenomena hitherto held universal, and a whole new order of significances came into their ken. It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory ; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1956: 212–214; emphasis in original)

Later, Whorf’s speculations about the “sensuously and operationally different” character of different snow types for “an Eskimo” (Whorf 1956: 216) developed into a familiar journalistic meme about the Inuit having dozens or scores or hundreds of words for snow; but few who repeat that urban legend recall Whorf’s emphasis on its being grammar, rather than lexicon, that cuts up and organizes nature for us.

In an article written in 1937, posthumously published in an academic journal (Whorf 1956: 87–101), Whorf clarifies what is most important about the effects of language on thought and world-view. He distinguishes ‘phenotypes’, which are overt grammatical categories typically indicated by morphemic markers, from what he called ‘cryptotypes’, which are covert grammatical categories, marked only implicitly by distributional patterns in a language that are not immediately apparent. In English, the past tense would be an example of a phenotype (it is marked by the - ed suffix in all regular verbs). Gender in personal names and common nouns would be an example of a cryptotype, not systematically marked by anything. In a cryptotype, “class membership of the word is not apparent until there is a question of using it or referring to it in one of these special types of sentence, and then we find that this word belongs to a class requiring some sort of distinctive treatment, which may even be the negative treatment of excluding that type of sentence” (p. 89).

Whorf’s point is the familiar one that linguistic structure is comprised, in part, of distributional patterns in language use that are not explicitly marked. What follows from this, according to Whorf, is not that the existing lexemes in a language (like its words for snow) comprise covert linguistic structure, but that patterns shared by word classes constitute linguistic structure. In ‘Language, mind, and reality’ (1942; published posthumously in Theosophist , a magazine published in India for the followers of the 19th-century spiritualist Helena Blavatsky) he wrote:

Because of the systematic, configurative nature of higher mind, the “patternment” aspect of language always overrides and controls the “lexation”…or name-giving aspect. Hence the meanings of specific words are less important than we fondly fancy. Sentences, not words, are the essence of speech, just as equations and functions, and not bare numbers, are the real meat of mathematics. We are all mistaken in our common belief that any word has an “exact meaning.” We have seen that the higher mind deals in symbols that have no fixed reference to anything, but are like blank checks, to be filled in as required, that stand for “any value” of a given variable, like …the x , y , z of algebra. (Whorf 1942: 258)

Whorf apparently thought that only personal and proper names have an exact meaning or reference (Whorf 1956: 259).

For Whorf, it was an unquestionable fact that language influences thought to some degree:

Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language—shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. [footnote omitted] And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (Whorf 1956: 252)

He seems to regard it as necessarily true that language affects thought, given

• the fact that language must be used in order to think, and
• the facts about language structure that linguistic analysis discovers.

He also seems to presume that the only structure and logic that thought has is grammatical structure. These views are not the ones that after Whorf’s death came to be known as ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (a sobriquet due to Hoijer 1954). Nor are they what was called the ‘Whorf thesis’ by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) which was concerned with the relation of obligatory lexical distinctions and thought. Brown and Lenneberg (1954) investigated this question by looking at the relation of color terminology in a language and the classificatory abilities of the speakers of that language. The issue of the relation between obligatory lexical distinctions and thought is at the heart of what is now called ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘the Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘Whorfianism’.

1. Banal Whorfianism

No one is going to be impressed with a claim that some aspect of your language may affect how you think in some way or other; that is neither a philosophical thesis nor a psychological hypothesis. So it is appropriate to set aside entirely the kind of so-called hypotheses that Steven Pinker presents in The Stuff of Thought (2007: 126–128) as “five banal versions of the Whorfian hypothesis”:

• “Language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation.”
• “A sentence can frame an event, affecting the way people construe it.”
• “The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about.”
• “[I]f one uses the word language in a loose way to refer to meanings,… then language is thought.”
• “When people think about an entity, among the many attributes they can think about is its name.”

These are just truisms, unrelated to any serious issue about linguistic relativism.

We should also set aside some methodological versions of linguistic relativism discussed in anthropology. It may be excellent advice to a budding anthropologist to be aware of linguistic diversity, and to be on the lookout for ways in which your language may affect your judgment of other cultures; but such advice does not constitute a hypothesis.

2. The so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The term “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” was coined by Harry Hoijer in his contribution (Hoijer 1954) to a conference on the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1953. But anyone looking in Hoijer’s paper for a clear statement of the hypothesis will look in vain. Curiously, despite his stated intent “to review and clarify the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (1954: 93), Hoijer did not even attempt to state it. The closest he came was this:

The central idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers.

The claim that “language functions…as a way of defining experience” appears to be offered as a kind of vague metaphysical insight rather than either a statement of linguistic relativism or a testable hypothesis.

And if Hoijer seriously meant that what qualitative experiences a speaker can have are constituted by that speaker’s language, then surely the claim is false. There is no reason to doubt that non-linguistic sentient creatures like cats can experience (for example) pain or heat or hunger, so having a language is not a necessary condition for having experiences. And it is surely not sufficient either: a robot with a sophisticated natural language processing capacity could be designed without the capacity for conscious experience.

In short, it is a mystery what Hoijer meant by his “central idea”.

Vague remarks of the same loosely metaphysical sort have continued to be a feature of the literature down to the present. The statements made in some recent papers, even in respected refereed journals, contain non-sequiturs echoing some of the remarks of Sapir, Whorf, and Hoijer. And they come from both sides of the debate.

3. Anti-Whorfian rhetoric

Lila Gleitman is an Essentialist on the other side of the contemporary debate: she is against linguistic relativism, and against the broadly Whorfian work of Stephen Levinson’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. In the context of criticizing a particular research design, Li and Gleitman (2002) quote Whorf’s claim that “language is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development”. But in the claim cited, Whorf seems to be talking about the psychological topic that holds universally of human conceptual development, not claiming that linguistic relativism is true.

Li and Gleitman then claim (p. 266) that such (Whorfian) views “have diminished considerably in academic favor” in part because of “the universalist position of Chomskian linguistics, with its potential for explaining the striking similarity of language learning in children all over the world.” But there is no clear conflict or even a conceptual connection between Whorf’s views about language placing limits on developmental plasticity, and Chomsky’s thesis of an innate universal architecture for syntax. In short, there is no reason why Chomsky’s I-languages could not be innately constrained, but (once acquired) cognitively and developmentally constraining.

For example, the supposedly deep linguistic universal of ‘recursion’ (Hauser et al. 2002) is surely quite independent of whether the inventory of colour-name lexemes in your language influences the speed with which you can discriminate between color chips. And conversely, universal tendencies in color naming across languages (Kay and Regier 2006) do not show that color-naming differences among languages are without effect on categorical perception (Thierry et al. 2009).

4. Strong and weak Whorfianism

One of the first linguists to defend a general form of universalism against linguistic relativism, thus presupposing that they conflict, was Julia Penn (1972). She was also an early popularizer of the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ formulations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (and an opponent of the ‘strong’ version).

‘Weak’ versions of Whorfianism state that language influences or defeasibly shapes thought. ‘Strong’ versions state that language determines thought, or fixes it in some way. The weak versions are commonly dismissed as banal (because of course there must be some influence), and the stronger versions as implausible.

The weak versions are considered banal because they are not adequately formulated as testable hypotheses that could conflict with relevant evidence about language and thought.

Why would the strong versions be thought implausible? For a language to make us think in a particular way, it might seem that it must at least temporarily prevent us from thinking in other ways, and thus make some thoughts not only inexpressible but unthinkable. If this were true, then strong Whorfianism would conflict with the Katzian effability claim. There would be thoughts that a person couldn’t think because of the language(s) they speak.

Some are fascinated by the idea that there are inaccessible thoughts; and the notion that learning a new language gives access to entirely new thoughts and concepts seems to be a staple of popular writing about the virtues of learning languages. But many scientists and philosophers intuitively rebel against violations of effability: thinking about concepts that no one has yet named is part of their job description.

The resolution lies in seeing that the language could affect certain aspects of our cognitive functioning without making certain thoughts unthinkable for us .

For example, Greek has separate terms for what we call light blue and dark blue, and no word meaning what ‘blue’ means in English: Greek forces a choice on this distinction. Experiments have shown (Thierry et al. 2009) that native speakers of Greek react faster when categorizing light blue and dark blue color chips—apparently a genuine effect of language on thought. But that does not make English speakers blind to the distinction, or imply that Greek speakers cannot grasp the idea of a hue falling somewhere between green and violet in the spectrum.

There is no general or global ineffability problem. There is, though, a peculiar aspect of strong Whorfian claims, giving them a local analog of ineffability: the content of such a claim cannot be expressed in any language it is true of . This does not make the claims self-undermining (as with the standard objections to relativism); it doesn’t even mean that they are untestable. They are somewhat anomalous, but nothing follows concerning the speakers of the language in question (except that they cannot state the hypothesis using the basic vocabulary and grammar that they ordinarily use).

If there were a true hypothesis about the limits that basic English vocabulary and constructions puts on what English speakers can think, the hypothesis would turn out to be inexpressible in English, using basic vocabulary and the usual repertoire of constructions. That might mean it would be hard for us to discuss it in an article in English unless we used terminological innovations or syntactic workarounds. But that doesn’t imply anything about English speakers’ ability to grasp concepts, or to develop new ways of expressing them by coining new words or elaborated syntax.

5. Constructing and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses

A number of considerations are relevant to formulating, testing, and evaluating Whorfian hypotheses.

Genuine hypotheses about the effects of language on thought will always have a duality: there will be a linguistic part and a non-linguistic one. The linguistic part will involve a claim that some feature is present in one language but absent in another.

Whorf himself saw that it was only obligatory features of languages that established “mental patterns” or “habitual thought” (Whorf 1956: 139), since if it were optional then the speaker could optionally do it one way or do it the other way. And so this would not be a case of “constraining the conceptual structure”. So we will likewise restrict our attention to obligatory features here.

Examples of relevant obligatory features would include lexical distinctions like the light vs. dark blue forced choice in Greek, or the forced choice between “in (fitting tightly)” vs. “in (fitting loosely)” in Korean. They also include grammatical distinctions like the forced choice in Spanish 2nd-person pronouns between informal/intimate and formal/distant (informal tú vs. formal usted in the singular; informal vosotros vs. formal ustedes in the plural), or the forced choice in Tamil 1st-person plural pronouns between inclusive (“we = me and you and perhaps others”) and exclusive (“we = me and others not including you”).

The non-linguistic part of a Whorfian hypothesis will contrast the psychological effects that habitually using the two languages has on their speakers. For example, one might conjecture that the habitual use of Spanish induces its speakers to be sensitive to the formal and informal character of the speaker’s relationship with their interlocutor while habitually using English does not.

So testing Whorfian hypotheses requires testing two independent hypotheses with the appropriate kinds of data. In consequence, evaluating them requires the expertise of both linguistics and psychology, and is a multidisciplinary enterprise. Clearly, the linguistic hypothesis may hold up where the psychological hypothesis does not, or conversely.

In addition, if linguists discovered that some linguistic feature was optional in two different languages, then even if psychological experiments showed differences between the two populations of speakers, this would not show linguistic determination or influence. The cognitive differences might depend on (say) cultural differences.

A further important consideration concerns the strength of the inducement relationship that a Whorfian hypothesis posits between a speaker’s language and their non-linguistic capacities. The claim that your language shapes or influences your cognition is quite different from the claim that your language makes certain kinds of cognition impossible (or obligatory) for you. The strength of any Whorfian hypothesis will vary depending on the kind of relationship being claimed, and the ease of revisability of that relation.

A testable Whorfian hypothesis will have a schematic form something like this:

• Linguistic part : Feature F is obligatory in L 1 but optional in L 2 .
• Psychological part : Speaking a language with obligatory feature F bears relation R to the cognitive effect C .

The relation R might in principle be causation or determination, but it is important to see that it might merely be correlation, or slight favoring; and the non-linguistic cognitive effect C might be readily suppressible or revisable.

Dan Slobin (1996) presents a view that competes with Whorfian hypotheses as standardly understood. He hypothesizes that when the speakers are using their cognitive abilities in the service of a linguistic ability (speaking, writing, translating, etc.), the language they are planning to use to express their thought will have a temporary online effect on how they express their thought. The claim is that as long as language users are thinking in order to frame their speech or writing or translation in some language, the mandatory features of that language will influence the way they think.

On Slobin’s view, these effects quickly attenuate as soon as the activity of thinking for speaking ends. For example, if a speaker is thinking for writing in Spanish, then Slobin’s hypothesis would predict that given the obligatory formal/informal 2nd-person pronoun distinction they would pay greater attention to the formal/informal character of their social relationships with their audience than if they were writing in English. But this effect is not permanent. As soon as they stop thinking for speaking, the effect of Spanish on their thought ends.

Slobin’s non-Whorfian linguistic relativist hypothesis raises the importance of psychological research on bilinguals or people who currently use two or more languages with a native or near-native facility. This is because one clear way to test Slobin-like hypotheses relative to Whorfian hypotheses would be to find out whether language correlated non-linguistic cognitive differences between speakers hold for bilinguals only when are thinking for speaking in one language, but not when they are thinking for speaking in some other language. If the relevant cognitive differences appeared and disappeared depending on which language speakers were planning to express themselves in, it would go some way to vindicate Slobin-like hypotheses over more traditional Whorfian Hypotheses. Of course, one could alternately accept a broadening of Whorfian hypotheses to include Slobin-like evanescent effects. Either way, attention must be paid to the persistence and revisability of the linguistic effects.

Kousta et al. (2008) shows that “for bilinguals there is intraspeaker relativity in semantic representations and, therefore, [grammatical] gender does not have a conceptual, non-linguistic effect” (843). Grammatical gender is obligatory in the languages in which it occurs and has been claimed by Whorfians to have persistent and enduring non-linguistic effects on representations of objects (Boroditsky et al. 2003). However, Kousta et al. supports the claim that bilinguals’ semantic representations vary depending on which language they are using, and thus have transient effects. This suggests that although some semantic representations of objects may vary from language to language, their non-linguistic cognitive effects are transitory.

Some advocates of Whorfianism have held that if Whorfian hypotheses were true, then meaning would be globally and radically indeterminate. Thus, the truth of Whorfian hypotheses is equated with global linguistic relativism—a well known self-undermining form of relativism. But as we have seen, not all Whorfian hypotheses are global hypotheses: they are about what is induced by particular linguistic features. And the associated non-linguistic perceptual and cognitive differences can be quite small, perhaps insignificant. For example, Thierry et al. (2009) provides evidence that an obligatory lexical distinction between light and dark blue affects Greek speakers’ color perception in the left hemisphere only. And the question of the degree to which this affects sensuous experience is not addressed.

The fact that Whorfian hypotheses need not be global linguistic relativist hypotheses means that they do not conflict with the claim that there are language universals. Structuralists of the first half of the 20th century tended to disfavor the idea of universals: Martin Joos’s characterization of structuralist linguistics as claiming that “languages can differ without limit as to either extent or direction” (Joos 1966, 228) has been much quoted in this connection. If the claim that languages can vary without limit were conjoined with the claim that languages have significant and permanent effects on the concepts and worldview of their speakers, a truly profound global linguistic relativism would result. But neither conjunct should be accepted. Joos’s remark is regarded by nearly all linguists today as overstated (and merely a caricature of the structuralists), and Whorfian hypotheses do not have to take a global or deterministic form.

John Lucy, a conscientious and conservative researcher of Whorfian hypotheses, has remarked:

We still know little about the connections between particular language patterns and mental life—let alone how they operate or how significant they are…a mere handful of empirical studies address the linguistic relativity proposal directly and nearly all are conceptually flawed. (Lucy 1996, 37)

Although further empirical studies on Whorfian hypotheses have been completed since Lucy published his 1996 review article, it is hard to find any that have satisfied the criteria of:

• adequately utilizing both the relevant linguistic and psychological research,
• focusing on obligatory rather than optional linguistic features,
• stating hypotheses in a clear testable way, and
• ruling out relevant competing Slobin-like hypotheses.

There is much important work yet to be done on testing the range of Whorfian hypotheses and other forms of linguistic conceptual relativism, and on understanding the significance of any Whorfian hypotheses that turn out to be well supported.

Copyright © 2024 by Barbara C. Scholz Francis Jeffry Pelletier < francisp @ ualberta . ca > Geoffrey K. Pullum < pullum @ gmail . com > Ryan Nefdt < ryan . nefdt @ uct . ac . za >

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Sapir Whorf Hypothesis

The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 3 Volume Set. Karen Tracy (Editor), Cornelia Ilie (Associate Editor), Todd Sandel (Associate Editor)

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis holds that language plays a powerful role in shaping human consciousness, affecting everything from private thought and perception to larger patterns of behavior in society—ultimately allowing members of any given speech community to arrive at a shared sense of social reality. This article starts with a brief consideration of the philosophical insights that inspired the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or the “principle of linguistic relativity,” as it is more often known today. Toward the end of the article current empirical research is reviewed. This explores everything from human universals to the cross-cultural differences in the construction of gender, color, space, and other creative practices associated with language, such as storytelling, poetry, or song.

Related Papers

—The Sapir-Whorf's Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis provokes intellectual discussion about the strong impact language has on our perception of the world around us. This paper intends to enliven the still open questions raised by this hypothesis. This is done by considering some of Sapir's, Whorf's, and other scholar's works.

Language Sciences 25, 393-432

Cliff Goddard

Probably no contemporary linguist has published as profusely on the connections between semantics, culture, and cognition as Anna Wierzbicka. This paper explores the similarities and differences between her ‘‘natural semantic metalanguage’’ (NSM) approach and the linguistic theory of Benjamin Lee Whorf. It shows that while some work by Wierzbicka and colleagues can be seen as ‘‘neo-Whorfian’’, other aspects of the NSM program are ‘‘counter-Whorfian’’. Issues considered include the meaning of linguistic relativity, the nature of conceptual universals and the consequences for semantic methodology, the importance of polysemy, and the scale and locus of semantic variation between languages, particularly in relation to the domain of time. Examples are drawn primarily from English, Russian, and Hopi.

Aneta Pavlenko

Debates about linguistic relativity commonly focus on one question: Does language affect thought? This yes-or-no question does not do justice to the complexity of Whorf’s ideas and skirts several issues of great importance to Whorf. My first aim in this paper is to recover the arguments that got lost in translation of Whorf’s ideas into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I will show that, for Whorf, languages were also one of the ways in which we think, scientists were not immune to language effects, and the key to advancement of Western science was multilingual awareness. My second aim is to draw on these insights to articulate a Whorfian agenda for the field of second language acquisition (SLA) that asks new questions about second language learning and cognition and expands the boundaries of the field and the scope, duration, and locations of SLA research.

Language Sciences

Keith Allan

In: Dov M. Gabbay, Paul Thagard and John Woods, editors, Philosophy of Linguistics. San Diego: North Holland, 2012, pp. 531-551. ISBN: 978-0-444-51747-0

William O Beeman

Anthropology and linguistics share a common intellectual origin in 19th Century scholarship. The impetus that prompted the earliest archaeologists to look for civilizational origins in Greece, early folklorists to look for the origins of culture in folktales and common memory, and the first armchair cultural anthropologist to look for the origins of human customs through comparison of groups of human beings also prompted the earliest linguistic inquiries. This essay traces the relationship between the development of anthropology and linguistics down to modern times including the development of sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, culture and communication, pragmatics, metapragmatics and other mainstay topics in linguistic anthropology

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Saul Schwartz

A growing literature in linguistic anthropology critically examines the rhetoric of endangered language advocacy. A number of themes remain underexplored, however, including the invocation of "culture" to justify language preservation, the interests of communities without fluent heritage language speakers, and anthropology's contribution to potentially problematic advocacy tropes. Discourses like "language is the core of culture" and "when a language dies, a culture dies" are widespread in language activism even though they undermine communities' efforts to maintain distinctive cultural identities in the wake of language shift and put dormant language communities in a double bind. While Boasian anthropology contains anti-essentialist and counter-nationalist perspectives on language, culture, and race, some Herderian advocacy tropes are borrowed from the (also Boasian) tradition of linguistic relativity in its popular Whorfian iteration. Drawing on my research on Chiwere language politics, I identify two forms of agency available to endangered and dormant language communities: one form of agency resists language loss but accepts dominant ideologies of national difference that make heritage languages essential to indigenous cultural identities, while another form of agency accepts language loss but resists Herderian nationalist expectations that authentic indigenous communities speak their traditional languages. [advocacy rhetoric, dormant language communities, language and culture ideologies, agency, Chiwere]

Pauline Turner Strong

Anthony K. Webster

Aynura Faikovna

The Bilingual Mind

to appear in Semiotica

This article takes seriously Edward Sapir’s observation about poetry as an example of linguistic relativity. Taking my cue from Dwight Bolinger’s “word affinities,” this article reports on the ways sounds of poetry evoke and convoke imaginative possibilities through phonological iconicity. In working with Navajos in translating poetry, I have come to appreciate the sound suggestiveness of that poetry and the imaginative possibilities that are bound up in the sounds of Navajo. It seems that just such sound suggestiveness via phonological iconicity and the ways they orient our imaginations are a crucial locus for thinking through linguistic relativities.

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Linguistic Relativity by Peggy Li , David Barner LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0026

Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis, posits that properties of language affect the structure and content of thought and thus the way humans perceive reality. A distinction is often made between strong Whorfian views, according to which the categories of thought are determined by language, and weak views, which argue that language influences thought without entirely determining its structure. Each view presupposes that for language to affect thought, the two must in some way be separable. The modern investigation of linguistic relativity began with the contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir. Until recently, much experimental work has focused on determining whether any reliable Whorfian effects exist and whether effects truly reflect differences in thought caused by linguistic variation. Many such studies compare speakers of different languages or test subjects at different stages of language acquisition. Other studies explore how language affects cognition by testing prelinguistic infants or nonhuman animals and comparing these groups to children or adults. Significant progress has been made in several domains, including studies of color, number, objects, and space. In many areas, the status of findings is hotly debated.

Often, leading researchers in the field summarize their newest findings and views in edited collections. These volumes are good places to begin research into the topic of linguistic relativity. The listed volumes arose from papers presented at conferences, symposia, and workshops devoted to the topic. Gumperz and Levinson 1996 arose from a symposium that revived interest in the linguistic relativity hypothesis, leading to a wave of new research on the topic. Highlights of this work are reported in Bowerman and Levinson 2001 , Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003 , and Malt and Wolff 2010 .

Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2001. Language acquisition and conceptual development . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511620669

This volume brings together research on language acquisition and conceptual development and asks about the relation between them in early childhood.

Gentner, Dedre, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The volume starts with a collection of perspective papers and then showcases papers that bring data to bear to test claims of linguistic relativity. The papers are delineated on the basis of the types of language effects on thought: language as a tool kit, language as a lens, and language as a category maker.

Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity . Papers presented at the Werner-Gren Symposium 112, held in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in May 1991. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

A collection of papers arising from the “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” Wenner-Gren Symposium in 1991 that brought about renewed interest in the topic.

Malt, Barbara C., and Phillip M. Wolff. 2010. Words and the mind: How words capture human experience . Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Researchers across disciplines (linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists) contributed to this collection of papers documenting new advances in language-thought research in various domains (space, emotions, body parts, causation, etc.).

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Article contents

Noam chomsky.

• Howard Lasnik Howard Lasnik University of Maryland
•  and  Terje Lohndal Terje Lohndal Norwegian University of Science and Technology and UiT The Arctic University of Norway
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.356
• Published online: 22 August 2017

Noam Avram Chomsky is one of the central figures of modern linguistics. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. In 1945, Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Zellig Harris (1909–1992), a leading Structuralist, through their shared political interests. His first encounter with Harris’s work was when he proof-read Harris’s book Methods in Structural Linguistics , published in 1951 but completed already in 1947. Chomsky grew dissatisfied with Structuralism and started to develop his own major idea that syntax and phonology are in part matters of abstract representations. This was soon combined with a psychobiological view of language as a unique part of the mind/brain.

Chomsky spent 1951–1955 as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he joined the faculty at MIT under the sponsorship of Morris Halle. He was promoted to full professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in 1961, appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976, retiring in 2002. Chomsky is still remarkably active, publishing, teaching, and lecturing across the world.

In 1967, both the University of Chicago and the University of London awarded him honorary degrees, and since then he has been the recipient of scores of honors and awards. In 1988, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in basic science, created in 1984 in order to recognize work in areas not included among the Nobel Prizes. These honors are all a testimony to Chomsky’s influence and impact in linguistics and cognitive science more generally over the past 60 years. His contributions have of course also been heavily criticized, but nevertheless remain crucial to investigations of language.

Chomsky’s work has always centered around the same basic questions and assumptions, especially that human language is an inherent property of the human mind. The technical part of his research has continuously been revised and updated. In the 1960s phrase structure grammars were developed into what is known as the Standard Theory, which transformed into the Extended Standard Theory and X-bar theory in the 1970s. A major transition occurred at the end of the 1970s, when the Principles and Parameters Theory emerged. This theory provides a new understanding of the human language faculty, focusing on the invariant principles common to all human languages and the points of variation known as parameters. Its recent variant, the Minimalist Program, pushes the approach even further in asking why grammars are structured the way they are.

• philosophy of language
• phrase structure

1. Introduction

This article will present an overview of some of Noam Chomsky’s most important contributions to linguistics. The presentation will mostly focus on a set of themes suitable for organizing Chomsky’s ideas and scholarly impact. We will also provide a bit of history and briefly touch on ways in which his ideas have developed across time.

Chomsky’s intellectual contributions and history are just as much the intellectual history of the field of generative grammar. Obviously, many scholars have contributed to this field, making it a collective enterprise and not a single man’s work. Nevertheless, Chomsky has had a unique impact, as his ideas and work have shaped the development far more than any other single individual. For that reason, and given that the topic of this article is Noam Chomsky, our focus will be on him in what follows, although the reader should bear in mind that many ideas have been initiated, developed, or modified by a large cohort of scholars.

The focus in this essay will be on Chomsky’s contributions to the study of syntax. Early on he also did work on the sound systems of human language, most notably a ground-breaking book coauthored with Morris Halle (Chomsky & Halle, 1968 ). And Chomsky’s MA thesis was on the morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (Chomsky, 1951 ).

One caveat is in order: We will not explore Chomsky’s political views or any connection that there may or may not be between his linguistics and politics. For extensive discussion of this, see Smith and Allott ( 2015 ).

This article is structured as follows. Section 2 provides some biographical information about Chomsky. In Section 3, we focus on Chomsky’s earliest work, namely his work on formal/mathematical models of natural language. Foundational issues regarding Chomsky’s approach to language are presented in Section 4.

2. Biographical Sketch

Noam Avram Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928 . In 1945 , Chomsky enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Zellig Harris ( 1909–1992 ), a leading Structuralist, through their shared political interests. His first encounter with Harris’ work was when he proofread Harris’s book Methods in Structural Linguistics , published in 1951 but completed already in 1947 . Chomsky grew dissatisfied with Structuralism and started to develop his own major idea that syntax and phonology are in part matters of abstract representations. This was soon combined with a psychobiological view of language as a unique part of the mind/brain.

Chomsky spent 1951–1955 as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he joined the faculty at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) sponsored by Morris Halle. Since then, MIT has been his intellectual home. He was promoted to full professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics in 1961 , appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics in 1966 , and Institute Professor in 1976 . Although he has officially retired and become an Institute Professor Emeritus, Chomsky is still remarkably active, publishing, teaching, and lecturing across the world.

In 1967 , both the University of Chicago and the University of London awarded him honorary degrees, and since then he has been the recipient countless honors and awards. In 1988 , he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in basic science, created in 1984 in order to recognize work in areas not included among the Nobel Prizes. These honors are all a testimony to Chomsky’s influence and impact in linguistics, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science more generally over the past 70 years.

See Chomsky’s public lecture on analytic philosophy in Oslo, Norway, in 2011 .

3. The Early Years: Formal Grammars

As mentioned, Chomsky was Zellig Harris’s student and thus he knew the details of structural linguistics. His own first works were also attempts to extend Harris ( 1951 ), e.g., in Chomsky ( 1951 ). Harris introduced the concept of a transformation, but for Harris, transformations were relations between sentences. An active sentence would be transformed into a passive, just to give one example. Chomsky soon discovered that there are data that such a method cannot capture. Chomsky ( 1957 , 1963 ) demonstrates this and presents an alternative: sentences have an abstract hierarchical structure that is generated via phrase structure grammars and transformations are relations between abstract structures. This alternative is the main topic of Chomsky’s two most famous and groundbreaking works: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT) (Chomsky, 1955 ) and Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957 ). LSLT was completed in 1955 , while Chomsky was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. The 1975 version contains a comprehensive introduction that also explains how the manuscript developed. Both LSLT and Syntactic Structures contain very little explicit discussion of what Chomsky later became famous for and which we will discuss below, namely an innate language faculty. Rather, they are concerned with developing a formal framework for describing the syntactic structure of human languages. Chomsky ( 1956 , 1963 ) describes various classes of formal grammars and organizes them into a hierarchy, today known as the Chomsky hierarchy or sometimes the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy (Chomsky & Schützenberger, 1963 ). Research since, including Chomsky ( 1955 , 1957 ), has mostly been devoted to developing the class which is suitable for human languages. In his work, Chomsky demonstrated how context-free phrase-structure (PS) grammars can be applied to language. PS grammars consist of:

A procedure for how a sentence is generated, a derivation, then consists of a series of lines. The first line has to start with a designated initial symbol, followed by lines that can be rewritten according to F. The procedure/derivation stops when there are no more symbols that can be rewritten. An illustration is given in (2).

These rules give us the derivation in (3) among several other “equivalent” derivations.

Constituent structure is captured in PS grammars by introducing nonterminal, i.e., unpronounced symbols, which is a novelty in Chomsky’s work. Later, in Chomsky ( 1965 ), rules such as the last two in (2) were called lexical insertion rules as they inserted lexical material into the resulting phrase marker.

Chomsky presented a range of evidence in favor of a sentence having more than just a superficial structure closely resembling the way in which it is pronounced, but that there also is an abstract representation which can potentially be very different from the superficial one. In addition, there can be intermediate structures between the two. Throughout Chomsky’s work, this aspect concerning levels of representation is fundamental.

4. Foundational Work and Ideas

Whereas Chomsky’s earliest work was concerned with the formal nature of grammars, he soon turned towards more general issues. Chomsky ( 1959 ), a review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner, focuses on issues regarding language use and the creative ability all humans have when it comes to language. The review attracted significant attention, not least because it pointed out fundamental problems with behaviorism. Chomsky argues that language acquisition happens so quickly that there is simply no way a stimulus–response mechanism can account for the knowledge that a young child has. Furthermore, such a mechanism does not do justice to the linguistic creativity that children display, namely that we can use our language ability to create new words and sentences that we have not heard before. Rather, what is needed is a nativist perspective on language, whereby humans have a biological blueprint for developing language. The task for the linguist is then to investigate this ability from a linguistic point of view.

Questions concerning language acquisition and the nature of humans’ linguistic competence quickly became Chomsky’s main interest. 1965 and 1966 saw the appearance of two very important publications in Chomsky’s scholarship. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (henceforth, Aspects ) was published in 1965 , and in 1966 he published Cartesian Linguistics (recently reissued as Chomsky, 2009 ). Whereas Aspects mainly presents an overall framework within which to think about language, Cartesian Linguistics is arguably the best nontechnical presentation of Chomsky’s overall philosophy of language. In this latter book, Chomsky traces aspects of the history of his approach to language, drawing connections to Descartes and the Port-Royal tradition. He puts forward a strong defense of a nativist approach to language, that is, arguing that humans are born with a special ability to acquire language. This accounts for the great speed with which humans come to possess language, it accounts for their linguistic creativity (making “infinite use of finite means,” to use a much-cited phrase from Wilhelm von Humboldt which Chomsky often has emphasized), and it accounts for certain aspects of the structure of human languages that children immediately latch onto. Chomsky also makes the point that whereas we can seek to understand the system underlying human language, we probably will never be able to fully understand why we come to say the things we do, as the latter relates to issues of free will that we still do not understand. Bracken ( 1984 ) and McGilvray’s introduction to Chomsky ( 2009 ) provide discussions of the significance of Cartesian Linguistics , whereas Salmon ( 1969 ) offers an important critical discussion.

Returning to Aspects , chapter 1 in this book introduces a number of important concepts in Chomsky’s approach to language. The general goal of the chapter is to define a distinct, scientific project for linguistics. It is “scientific” because its goal is to explain what underlies the linguistic abilities of an individual, and it is “distinct” because human language appears to have special properties. In developing this project, a number of notions are proposed. Let us review them briefly.

One distinction is the one between competence and performance. Chomsky argues that linguists need to study competence, i.e., the grammatical tacit knowledge that any native speaker has of his/her language(s). Competence can only be studied through its outputs, i.e., performance, which can be any expression, be it spoken, written, signed, or nonnatural experimental data. The latter is used to probe more subtly and precisely for specific aspects of competence while controlling for as many outside factors as possible. One such method is to ask a native speaker to judge sentences via what is now called acceptability judgments. Much later, in Chomsky ( 1986a ), the distinction is refined and now Chomsky distinguishes between E-language and I-language, E for external and I for internal, individual, and intensional. I-language is the object of study in linguistics according to Chomsky, whereas E-language is the sum of totally externally manifested I-language, i.e., all performances of linguistic knowledge regardless of the individual speaker who has produced it. The intensional part of I-language highlights the fact that the goal is to investigate the nature of the computational mental system making it possible for humans to speak, sign, and understand an unlimited number of new sentences.

An important methodological issue was also introduced in Aspects : the distinction between acceptability and grammaticality (and correspondingly unacceptability and ungrammaticality). Acceptability involves a judgment made by a native speaker concerning how natural a given set of sentences seem. Typically, a speaker will be presented with two contrasting sentences and the job is to rate them. For example, a native speaker of English will, when comparing Norbert likes cookies and Norbert cookies likes , say that the former is acceptable whereas the latter is unacceptable. Grammaticality, on the other hand, involves a claim made by the linguist as to whether or not the grammar allows a given structure or not. In the present example, the linguist will conclude that the structure underlying Norbert likes cookies is grammatical in English, whereas the structure underlying Norbert cookies likes is ungrammatical in English. Linguists often speak of “grammaticality judgments”, although strictly speaking, this is wrong per Chomsky ( 1965 ).

Adequacy is a crucial notion in Aspects . Chomsky separates it into descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy . A grammar that is descriptively adequate is one that correctly describes the set of grammatical sentences and correctly rules out the ungrammatical sentences. As such, descriptive adequacy is a basic requirement for any grammatical analysis. Even scholars who do not adopt the generative approach, but who, for instance, seek to analyze linguistic production as witnessed in corpora, need to account for the fact that certain patterns do not occur and that the grammar of English is different from that of Japanese. Chomsky, however, puts the bar higher by emphasizing that the goal of linguistic theory should be to achieve explanatory adequacy. This is defined as follows:

To the extent that a linguistic theory succeeds in selecting a descriptively adequate grammar on the basis of primary linguistic data, we can say that it meets the condition of explanatory adequacy. That is, to this extent, it offers an explanation for the intuition of the native speaker on the basis of an empirical hypothesis concerning the innate predisposition of the child to develop a certain kind of theory to deal with the evidence presented to him. (Chomsky, 1965 , pp. 25–26)

This means that the analysis also should account for how a child could acquire the given grammatical system within the short time span that he or she does.

Aspects also introduces a revised formalism for the description of natural language, to which we turn next.

5. Grammatical Architecture, 1965–1980

In Chomsky ( 1955 , 1957 ), PS grammars only construct monoclausal structures. These structures can be merged into e.g., embedded clauses by way of a mechanism called generalized transformations. The recursive component is thus to be found in transformations. In Chomsky ( 1965 ), this is changed and recursion is incorporated into “the base.” A rule such as (4) was added to analyze sentences such as (5).

With a rule such as (4), the PS component now has a recursive character, and, in this model, generalized transformations are eliminated.

Another related innovation in Chomsky ( 1965 ) is the notion of Deep Structure (later called D-structure). D-structure and recursion in the base serve two purposes in the theory: (i) They make the overall theory simpler, and (ii) in connection with a principle of cyclic application of transformations, they rule out certain derivations that do not appear to occur. The earlier 1955 model had no constraints on the interaction between the generalized transformations that combine separate phrase markers and the singulary transformations that manipulate both simple phrase markers and the complex ones that result from generalized transformations. Thus, there could be operations on embedded sentences after they have been embedded. But no such derivations seem to be needed for the description of human languages. In Chomsky ( 1965 ), such derivations are excluded by the elimination of generalized transformations and the imposition of cyclicity on (singulary) transformational derivations.

Importantly, D-structure also played a role in Chomsky’s approach to how syntax relates to semantics. He develops the following model:

The syntactic component consists of a base that generates deep structures and a transformational part that maps them into surface structures. The deep structure of a sentence is submitted to the semantic component for semantic interpretation, and its surface structure enters the phonological component and undergoes phonetic interpretation. The final effect of a grammar, then, is to relate a semantic interpretation to a phonetic representation—that is, to state how a sentence is interpreted. (Chomsky, 1965 , pp. 135–136)

Chomsky follows Katz and Postal ( 1964 ) in severely restricting the phrase structural information available for interpretation. Their slogan was that “transformations do not change meaning.” The model can be depicted as in (6), where Surface Structure is typically abbreviated as S-structure.

The framework was soon challenged by what became known as Generative Semantics. This approach built on Katz and Postal ( 1964 ) in arguing that meaning is represented by a more abstract representation than Chomsky’s D-structure (Lakoff, 1971 ) and that very powerful transformations worked to derive surface representations.

Even within the Chomskyan approach, there were questions concerning D-structure being the sole locus of semantic interpretation. Already Chomsky ( 1957 ) observed that sentences containing quantifiers are interpreted partly based on the surface position of the quantifiers. Consider the examples in (7).

(7a) may be true at the same time as (7b) is false, for example in a case where one person in the room knows Japanese and Chinese, and another one Norwegian and Spanish. Chomsky ( 1965 ) acknowledges that (7) is problematic in a framework where D-structure is the input to semantic interpretation. He speculates that the difference may be due to discourse effects. However, it was soon shown that the problem is far more general, leading to a revised framework whereby both D-structure and S-structure contribute to semantic interpretation (Jackendoff, 1969 ; Chomsky, 1970b ). This framework is known as the Extended Standard Theory (see also Chomsky, 1970a ). Here D-structure only contributed information about grammatical relations, such as subject and object, whereas more or less all other aspects of meaning (scope, anaphora, focus, presupposition, etc.) are derived from S-structures.

Another innovation in the Extended Standard Theory concerns a new encoding of transformations. For movement transformations leaving a gap, it was now suggested that this gap actually consists of a trace (Wasow, 1972 ; Chomsky, 1973 ). For all intents and purposes, this trace acts like a placeholder for the lexical content. Given traces, the motivation for D-structure as a level of representation is reduced, but it took some more time until it was eventually dissolved (Chomsky, 1995 ). Instead of the labels semantic and phonetic interpretation in (6), the former was labeled LF for “Logical Form” and the latter labeled PF for “Phonetic Form”. Crucially, both are grammatical levels of representation and not the actual semantic logical forms or the phonetic encoding.

This grammatical architecture became the cornerstone of what is known as Government and Binding, to which we turn next.

6. Principles and Parameters Theory, 1980–Today

Chomsky and Lasnik ( 1977 ) were concerned with restricting the grammar so that it would rule out options that should not be available. A major problem with earlier models was that they let in far too many structures and rules that did not occur. Constraining the grammar is important in order to get closer to the goal of Aspects , namely to provide explanations rather than just descriptions. Only that way it is possible to account for language acquisition and how grammatical competence develops and reaches its target state. Following some ideas in Chomsky and Halle ( 1968 ), Chomsky and Lasnik argued that something along the lines of a theory of markedness should also apply to syntax, not just phonology. Concretely, they suggested a theory of core grammar with highly restricted options with a few choice points (parameters). Filters were the mechanism that accounted for constraints, and most of them applied to surface structures. However, some filters will have to be language-specific or even dialect-specific, such as blocking for to constructions in most dialects of English.

(10) illustrates the surface filter in question.

Chomsky ( 1981 ) improves on this framework by replacing language/dialect-specific and construction-specific rules with rules that are highly general and constrained by universal principles. This is the Principles and Parameters model. It represents “a radical break from the rich tradition of thousands of years of linguistic inquiry” (Lasnik & Otero, 2004 , p. 207). This model proposes a solution to the fundamental problem of language acquisition by proposing that the language faculty consists of universal principles, and parameters that encode grammatical variation. The child, then, has to set the parameters for the language in question, which in the early days was argued to be a set of binary options—much like a “switchboard,” to use James Higginbotham’s metaphor. The assumption was that parameters linked several properties together where at least one property had to be easily observable. This way, by observing something easy (say, whether or not a language has null subjects like Spanish or Italian), you can set some other property that is harder to observe (say, whether or not the language obeys the that -trace filter, cf. Perlmutter, 1968 ; Chomsky & Lasnik, 1977 ; Rizzi, 1982 ). The principles were assumed to be universal and much work has gone into investigating the nature and format of these principles.

Principles and Parameters Theory consists of two different models (Freidin, 2007 ; Lasnik & Lohndal, 2010 , 2013 ). The first is Government and Binding (GB; Chomsky, 1981 , 1986b ; Chomsky & Lasnik, 1993 ) and the second is the Minimalist Program (MP; Chomsky, 1995 , 2000a , 2005 , 2007 ). We will briefly describe both of them.

A fundamental aspect of GB, in addition to the incorporation of principles and parameters, is its modular architecture: Modules governing various parts of the grammar were postulated, and phenomena such as the passive were analyzed by recourse to interacting modules that work together to derive the properties of the passive. The modules were binding (largely concerned with anaphora), case, theta (argument structure), control (the construal of the missing embedded subject in, e.g., Mary tried __ to win ), and bounding (locality of movement), with the relation of “government” applying across these modules (see Lasnik & Lohndal, 2010 , for an accessible presentation). Notably, this approach denied the theoretical relevance of constructions; rather, constructions are epiphenomenal, as they follow from more basic and abstract properties of grammar.

The basic architecture of GB is as depicted in (8) at the end of the previous section. During the late 1980s, questions started emerging concerning the levels in this model as D- and S-structure became less and less prominent in the theory. This suggests that just two levels are actually required levels of representation. What is required in order for language to relate sound to meaning is an interface with the articulatory-perceptual system (PF) and the conceptual-intentional system (LF). Conceptually, PF and LF enjoy a more privileged status than D- and S-structure in the theory. As such, there really has to be overwhelming empirical evidence justifying the latter two levels, which research concluded was no longer the case. Chomsky then returned to his original proposal from the 1950’s, with no D-structure and structure-building also being done by generalized transformations. A derivation starts out with a numeration, which is a selection of items from the lexicon. These lexical items are then inserted as the derivation proceeds, starting from the bottom, with argument structure and adding functional layers as need be. This, then, became the approach to grammar in the Minimalist Program, or just Minimalism, outlined in great detail in Chomsky ( 1995 ).

The Minimalist Program pursues the hypothesis that language meets the requirements imposed by the external systems in a “perfect” way. The goal is to provide explanations for why the grammar has the structure and organization that it has, which Chomsky ( 2004 ) later dubbed going “beyond explanatory adequacy.” Essentially it is an extremely challenging why -question, seeking to provide a more fundamental understanding of the computational system for language. In the 2000s, this was contextualized in an important paper by Chomsky (Chomsky, 2005 ) where he says that there are three factors involved in understanding language: (i) the genetic component, (ii) experience from input, and (iii) principles not specific to the language system. The latter has become known as “third-factors,” and much research is going into understanding the properties of these third-factors (see Lohndal & Uriagereka, 2016 ). This research again connects to some of Chomsky’s earliest work, namely Aspects , where he says that many properties of the language faculty may follow from “principles of neural organization that may be even more deeply grounded in physical law” (Chomsky, 1965 , p. 59).

It should be noted that with Minimalism, the concept of parameter has changed quite significantly. Chomsky ( 1995 ) endorsed what Baker ( 2008 ) has labeled the Borer–Chomsky conjecture (due to Borer, 1984 ), whereby parameters are reduced to features on lexical and functional elements. Acquiring variation is thereby a question of acquiring any element of the lexicon. This shift has also been triggered by the empirical inadequacy of the view of parameters developed in GB (see Newmeyer, 2005 , and Biberauer, 2008 , for much discussion). Recently, a different view of parameters has emerged, one in which there are hierarchies of different types of parameters (see Biberauer & Roberts, 2012 , 2016 ).

Chomsky is still contributing to the theoretical development of Minimalism. His recent ideas revolve around the importance of labeling of phrases—as NP, VP, etc.—and its place in the architecture of the language faculty (Chomsky, 2013 , 2015 ). Remarkably, even after more than 70 years, he is still setting the agenda in terms of defining important research questions and problems.

7. Controversies and Debates

It goes without saying that Chomsky’s work has provoked abundant reaction and criticism. Scholars have taken issue with more or less every claim that he has made, sometimes arguing against them completely, at other times suggesting modifications and improvements. Regardless of one’s position, it is striking that one scholar’s ideas have been and continue to be discussed both in terms of their technical details and in terms of the more general philosophy. Here we want to briefly single out some of the main controversies surrounding Chomsky’s work (see also Harris, 1993 ; Huck & Goldsmith, 1995 ; Newmeyer, 1996 ; Seuren, 1998 ). We will focus on (i) innateness, (ii) the status of movement in syntactic theories, and (iii) Chomsky’s view of meaning.

Perhaps the most contested part of Chomsky’s approach to human language is his arguments that parts of the language faculty are innate. Numerous linguists, psychologists, and philosophers have argued against this idea, and Chomsky has participated in famous debates with Foucault, Quine, and Piaget. Many of these scholars agree that there is some innate contribution to the feat of language acquisition, but they disagree that there is any contribution that is specific to the language faculty. Unfortunately, much of the criticism in the literature misses the mark, as it ignores the kind of empirical arguments Chomsky adduces in support of the conclusion that there is innate structure. It is important to note that nativism for Chomsky is not an a priori claim, it is a claim based on empirical evidence and arguments, which we cannot review here but which are amply represented in the work of Chomsky and colleagues. Langacker ( 1987 ), Cowie ( 1999 ), Tomasello ( 2003 ), and Sampson ( 2005 ) are all influential critiques of various aspects of Chomsky’s approach. More balanced, yet still critical, collections are Harman ( 1974 ), Piattelli-Palmarini ( 1980 ), and Otero ( 1994 ).

With Minimalism, there has also been an important yet fairly unrecognized change outside of Chomskyan circles. Chomsky ( 2007 , p. 4) characterizes pre-Minimalism approaches as follows: “Throughout the history of generative grammar, the problem of determining the character of FL [Faculty of Language] has been approached ‘from top down’: How much must be attributed to UG [Universal Grammar] to account for language acquisition?” Minimalism turns this upside-down as it “[. . .] seeks to approach the problem ‘from bottom up’: How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of I-languages attained, relying on third factor principles?” (Chomsky, 2007 , p. 4). Put differently, the goal is to see how little language-specific innateness is required while still being able to account for the structures and representations every healthy child acquires. This creates avenues for collaborative work with scholars who have, for example, studied the input to acquisition very carefully or scholars who argue that most of language acquisition can be derived by properties of general cognition.

Another area of debate concerns the analysis of long-distance dependencies in generative approaches to language. Chomskyan approaches have always argued that some long-distance dependencies are created by movement, that is, a gap is created by moving a filler to its surface position (or the movement can be covert, as has been argued, e.g., for Chinese wh -questions; see Huang, 1982 ). Movement operations in the syntax are quite distinct for Chomsky’s approach, as most of the other approaches argue that other formal devices can ensure better empirical coverage of the facts. For instance, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag, 1987 , 1994 ) assumes that movement phenomena are captured by way of a special feature (SLASH) that enables information to be accessible both lower in the structure and higher. Other approaches, such as Lexical Functional Grammar (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982 ; Sells, 2013 ), implement long-distance dependencies in yet another way. It would take us too far afield to discuss the rich set of arguments involved in distinguishing these alternatives. It seems fair to say that the different formal frameworks operate independently of each other and by and large constitute their own research programs (even though the many differences may be less deep than it appears, cf. Sells, 1985 , for such an argument).

The last issue that we will discuss here concerns the role of meaning in Chomsky’s approach to grammar. Chomsky has published extensively on more philosophical aspects of meaning (Chomsky, 2000b , 2006 ; see Smith & Allott, 2015 ), which is not what we will discuss here. Rather, we will take issue with the oft-made claim that Chomsky has neglected, or even avoided, semantics in his theories of grammar (see, e.g., Montague, 1974 ; Lakoff, 1987 ; Langacker, 1987 ; Tomasello, 2003 ). This assessment is somewhat curious given that Chomsky ( 1957 , p. 87) already wrote: “We can test the adequacy of a given set of abstract linguistic levels by asking whether or not grammars formulated in terms of these levels enable us to provide a satisfactory analysis of the notion of ‘understanding.’” Ever since, semantic facts have played a crucial role in syntactic argumentation. Consider the well-known contrast between (11) and (12) (Chomsky, 1963 , p. 66).

Each of these sentences only has one meaning. (11) has the meaning indicated in (13a) and not the meaning indicated in (13b), whereas the opposite holds for (12), as seen in (14).

Chomsky argued that a descriptively adequate grammar needs to assign different syntactic structures to (11) and (12) in order for their semantic interpretation to be different. This grammar also needs to ensure that (15) is ambiguous, with both types of meanings (Pietroski, 2015 ).

For Chomsky, semantics is interpretive, meaning that it is based on mechanisms that interpret the syntactic structure. A range of additional examples can be provided; see Hinzen ( 2006 ) and Pietroski ( 2015 ).

What Chomsky is skeptical of, is that it is possible to provide explanatory theories of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). This is partly because of his skepticism towards providing scientific theories of language production and communication in general. Both production and communication involve more mental faculties than just language, which is partly why Chomsky has very little to say about language use, as he is interested in understanding the structure underlying language use. Smith and Allott ( 2015 ) provide additional comprehensive discussion of these issues.

See the Chomsky-Foucault debate on human nature .

Further Reading

• Anthony, L. M. , & Hornstein, N. (Eds.). (2003). Chomsky and his critics . Oxford: Blackwell.
• Barsky, R. F. (1997). Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Boeckx, C. (2006). Linguistic minimalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bricmont, J. , & Frank, J. (Eds.). (2010). Chomsky notebook . New York: Columbia University Press.
• Cela-Conde, C. J. , & Marty, G. (1998). Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist Program and the philosophy of mind. Syntax , 1 , 19–36.
• Chomsky, N. (2004a). The generative enterprise revisited: Discussions with Riny Huybregts, Henk van Riemsdijk, Naoki Fukui and Mihoko Zushi . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Chomsky, N. (2004b). Language and politics , 2d ed. Edited by C. P. Otero . Oakland, CA: AK.
• Chomsky, N. (2012). The science of language: Interviews with James McGilvray . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Freidin, R. (2007). Generative grammar: Theory and its history . London: Routledge
• Hinzen, W. (2006). Mind design and minimal syntax . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jenkins, L. (2000). Biolinguistics: Exploring the biology of language . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Lasnik, H. (2000). Syntactic structures revisited . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Lasnik, H. , & Lohndal, T. (2013). Brief overview of the history of generative syntax. In M. den Dikken (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax (pp. 26–60). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Lohndal, T. , & Lasnik, H. (2013). Noam Chomsky . Oxford Bibliographies . doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199772810-0142
• Lyons, J. (1970). Chomsky . London: Fontana-Collins.
• McGilvray, J. (Eds.). (2005). The Cambridge companion to Chomsky . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• McGilvray, J. (2014). Chomsky: Language, mind, and politics . Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
• Otero, C. P. (Ed.). (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments . 4 vols. London: Routledge.
• Smith, N. , & Allott, N. (2015). Chomsky: Ideas and ideals . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Baker, M. C. (2008). The macroparameter in a microparametric world. In M. T. Biberauer , (Ed.), The limits of syntactic variation (pp. 351–374). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Biberauer, M. T. (2008). Introduction. In M. T. Biberauer (Ed.), The limits of syntactic variation (pp. 1–74). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Biberauer, M. T. , & Roberts, I. (2012). Towards a parameter hierarchy for auxiliaries: Diachronic considerations. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics , 6 , 267–294.
• Biberauer, M. T. , & Roberts, I. (2016). Parameter typology from a diachronic perspective. In E. Bidese , F. Cognola , & M. C. Moroni (Eds.), Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variation (pp. 259–291). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Borer, H. (1984). Parametric syntax . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
• Bracken, H. M. (1984). Mind and language: Essays on Descartes and Chomsky . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
• Chomsky, N. (1951). Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew . Master’s thesis. University of Pennsylvania.
• Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language. IRE Transactions on Information Theory , 2 , 113–124.
• Chomsky, N. (1955). The logical structure of linguistic theory . Manuscript, Harvard University. Published in 1975, New York: Plenum.
• Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures . The Hague: Mouton.
• Chomsky, N. (1959). Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Language , 35 , 26–58.
• Chomsky, N. (1963). Formal properties of grammars. In R. Duncan Luce , R. R. Bush , & E. Galanter (Eds.), Handbook of mathematical psychology (pp. 323–418). New York: Wiley.
• Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1970a). Remarks on nominalization. In R. A. Jacobs & P. S. Rosenbaum (Eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar (pp. 184–221). Waltham, MA: Ginn.
• Chomsky, N. (1970b). Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. In R. Jakobson & S. Kawamoto (Eds.), Studies in general and Oriental linguistics presented to Shirô Hattori on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (pp. 52–91). Tokyo: TEX.
• Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. R. Anderson & P. Kiparsky (Eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle (pp. 232–286). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
• Chomsky, N. (1977). On wh -movement. In P. W. Culicover , T. Wasow , & A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal syntax (pp. 71–132). New York: Academic Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
• Chomsky, N. (1986a). Knowledge of language . New York: Praeger.
• Chomsky, N. (1986b). Barriers . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2000a). Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In R. Martin , D. Michaels , & J. Uriagereka (Eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik (pp. 89–155). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2000b). New horizons in the study of language and mind . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2004). Beyond explanatory adequacy. In A. Belletti (Ed.), The cartography of syntactic structures (Vol. 3, pp. 104–131). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry , 36 , 1–22.
• Chomsky, N. (2006). Language and mind , 3d ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2007). Approaching UG from below. In U. Sauerland & H.‑M. Gärtner (Eds.), Interfaces + recursion = language? Chomsky’s minimalism and the view from syntax-semantics (pp. 1–29). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Chomsky, N. (2009). Cartesian Linguistics , 3d ed. Edited by J. McGilvray . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Chomsky, N. (2013). Problems of projection. Lingua , 130 , 33–49.
• Chomsky, N. (2015). Problems of projection: Extensions. In E. Di Domenico , C. Hamann , & S. Matteini (Eds.), Structures, strategies and beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti (pp. 1–16). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Chomsky, N. , & Halle, M. (1968). The sound pattern of English . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, N. , & Lasnik, H. (1977). Filters and control. Linguistic Inquiry , 8 , 425–504.
• Chomsky, N. , & Lasnik, H. (1993). The theory of principles and parameters. In J. Jacobs , A. von Stechow , W. Sternefeld , & T. Venneman (Eds.), Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research (Vol. 1, pp. 506–569). Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 9. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Chomsky, N. , & Schützenberger, M.-P. (1963). The algebraic theory of context-free languages. In P. Braffort & D. Hirschberg (Eds.), Computer programming and formal systems (pp. 118–161). Amsterdam: North Holland.
• Cowie, F. (1999). What’s within? Nativism reconsidered . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Freidin, R. (2007). Generative grammar: Theory and its history . London: Routledge.
• Harman, G. (Eds.). (1974). On Noam Chomsky: Critical essays . Garden City, NY: Anchor.
• Harris, R.A. (1993). The linguistic wars . New York: Oxford University Press.
• Huang, C.-T. J. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar . PhD diss. MIT.
• Huck, G. J. , & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates . London: Routledge.
• Jackendoff, R. (1969). Some rules of semantic interpretation for English . PhD diss. MIT.
• Kaplan, R. M. , & Bresnan, J. (1982). Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In J. Bresnan (Ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 173–281). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Katz, J. , & Postal, P. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Lakoff, G. (1971). On generative semantics. In D. D. Steinberg & L. A. Jakobovits (Eds.), Semantics: An interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics and psychology (pp. 232–296). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical prerequisites . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
• Lasnik, H. , & Lohndal, T. (2010). Government-binding/principles and parameters theory. WIREs Cognitive Science , 1 , 40–50.
• Lasnik, H. , & Otero, C. (2004). Chomsky. In P. Strazny (Ed.), Encyclopedia of linguistics (pp. 205–208). London: Routledge.
• Lohndal, T. , & Uriagereka, J. (2016). Third-factor explanations and Universal Grammar. In I. Roberts (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of universal grammar . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Montague, R. (1974). Formal philosophy . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Newmeyer, F. J. (1996). Generative linguistics: A historical perspective . London: Routledge.
• Newmeyer, F. J. (2005). Possible and probable languages . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Otero, C. P. (Ed.). (1994). Noam Chomsky: Critical assessments . 4 vols. London: Routledge.
• Perlmutter, D. M. (1968). Deep and surface constraints in syntax . PhD diss. MIT.
• Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (Eds.). (1980). Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Pietroski, P. (2015). Vocabulary matters. In Á. Gallego & D. Ott (Eds.), MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 77 (pp. 199–210). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
• Pollard, C. , & Sag, I. A. (1987). Information-based syntax and semantics . Stanford, CA: CSLI.
• Pollard, C. , & Sag, I. A. (1994). Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian syntax . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Foris.
• Salmon, V. (1969). N. Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics . Journal of Linguistics , 5 , 165–187.
• Sampson. G. (2005). The Language Instinct Debate . London: Continuum.
• Sells, P. (1985). Lectures on contemporary syntactic theories . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Sells, P. (2013). Lexical-Functional Grammar. In M. den Dikken (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of generative syntax (pp. 162–201). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
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linguistics , the scientific study of language . The word was first used in the middle of the 19th century to emphasize the difference between a newer approach to the study of language that was then developing and the more traditional approach of philology . The differences were and are largely matters of attitude, emphasis, and purpose. The philologist is concerned primarily with the historical development of languages as it is manifest in written texts and in the context of the associated literature and culture . The linguist, though he may be interested in written texts and in the development of languages through time, tends to give priority to spoken languages and to the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

The field of linguistics may be divided in terms of three dichotomies: synchronic versus diachronic , theoretical versus applied, and microlinguistics versus macrolinguistics. A synchronic description of a language describes the language as it is at a given time; a diachronic description is concerned with the historical development of the language and the structural changes that have taken place in it. The goal of theoretical linguistics is the construction of a general theory of the structure of language or of a general theoretical framework for the description of languages; the aim of applied linguistics is the application of the findings and techniques of the scientific study of language to practical tasks, especially to the elaboration of improved methods of language teaching. The terms microlinguistics and macrolinguistics are not yet well established, and they are, in fact, used here purely for convenience. The former refers to a narrower and the latter to a much broader view of the scope of linguistics. According to the microlinguistic view, languages should be analyzed for their own sake and without reference to their social function, to the manner in which they are acquired by children, to the psychological mechanisms that underlie the production and reception of speech , to the literary and the aesthetic or communicative function of language, and so on. In contrast, macrolinguistics embraces all of these aspects of language. Various areas within macrolinguistics have been given terminological recognition: psycholinguistics , sociolinguistics , anthropological linguistics , dialectology , mathematical and computational linguistics , and stylistics . Macrolinguistics should not be identified with applied linguistics. The application of linguistic methods and concepts to language teaching may well involve other disciplines in a way that microlinguistics does not. But there is, in principle, a theoretical aspect to every part of macrolinguistics, no less than to microlinguistics.

A large portion of this article is devoted to theoretical, synchronic microlinguistics, which is generally acknowledged as the central part of the subject; it will be abbreviated henceforth as theoretical linguistics.

History of linguistics

Earlier history.

Linguistic speculation and investigation, insofar as is known, has gone on in only a small number of societies. To the extent that Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Arabic learning dealt with grammar , their treatments were so enmeshed in the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world until recently that they have had virtually no impact on Western linguistic tradition. Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship stretches back for more than two millennia, but the interest of those scholars was concentrated largely on phonetics , writing , and lexicography; their consideration of grammatical problems was bound up closely with the study of logic.

Certainly the most interesting non-Western grammatical tradition—and the most original and independent—is that of India , which dates back at least two and one-half millennia and which culminates with the grammar of Panini , of the 5th century bce . There are three major ways in which the Sanskrit tradition has had an impact on modern linguistic scholarship. As soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world, the unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar ensued, and the foundations were laid for the whole 19th-century edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge, and this had important consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics in the West. Third, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of modern theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.

Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of grammar in India in the 1st millennium bce had already become an intellectual end in itself.

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Theory of language: a taxonomy

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The study of language has been historically proposed as a model for human sciences. For the structuralists, it is because languages, like society, and cultural habits, are man-made rule-based systems. For the Darwinists, it is because cultures and societies are like living species, and can be studied with biological methodology. Sociology, biology and linguistics are considered analogous in different ways. To support work in theoretical and applied linguistics, this paper discusses the problem of the nature of language, investigating how the question “What is language?” has been approached from different angles. Textbook answers guide us in many different directions: language is a tool for communication—and for thinking. It is a collection of words and instructions how to use them. It is the characteristic which—arguably—separates humans from other animals. It is a social construction, a system of symbols, a system of systems, and so on. To classify perspectives, the intellectual history of schools of linguistic thought is examined, connecting linguistic theory with related disciplines. A taxonomy is proposed based on two axes: humanistic versus biological; and historical versus systemic. Main linguistics frameworks are identified and placed into a fourfold table based on these axes. They include the Bloomfieldian school (Type 1); Saussurean structuralism and its derivatives (Type 2); generative grammar and biolinguistics (Type 3); and cognitive‒evolutionary linguistics (Type 4).

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Introduction

Language as Primary Modeling and Natural Languages: A Biosemiotic Perspective

Biology, linguistics, and the semiotic perspective on language, explore related subjects.

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What is language? Mainstream linguists of a given time tend to approach the question by an appeal to scientific progress. A typical account may start by stating that modern linguistics begins in Ferdinand de Saussure's ([ 1916 ] 1959) Course in Linguistics which considers language— la langue —a set of social rules. This understanding was improved by Noam Chomsky who made the correction that the proper term is linguistic competence , and that rules are based on an innate structure or mechanism (Chomsky 1965 ). However, twenty-first century cognitive linguists realised this was a mistake: there are no 'rules'; language is an organism (MacWhinney and O’Grady 2015 ).

Curiously, historical sources teach us that this most modern understanding of language had been rejected by sociologist Georg Simmel by 1890 (Klautke 2010 ), and seriously questioned and reformed by William Dwight Whitney ( 1875 ) and the neogrammarians on whose work Saussure (ibid., p. 5) built his theory. If we take the linguist's word, then, the evolution of the field seems to have been perfectly cyclic.

That is why this paper considers the language problem to be a philosophical one. By this, it is meant that it involves certain principles which are theoretical in their essence rather than just scientific; and that such principles are of a timeless nature. There might never be a single solution to the philosophical language problem: what has been perceived as progress could be fundamentally a question of indecision between the kinds of aspects which could have been established by the intellectual caveperson. Indeed, many early philosophical treatises of the nature and origin of language are found in surviving folk myths from around the world.

Notwithstanding, the focus of this paper as a taxonomy of linguistic thought looks at the question from a pragmatic side, laying down the ideas that, after some thousands of years of philosophical thought on language, have proved to be as fundamental as they are divisive for the modern schools of linguistic analysis. Therefore they form the often-implicit basis of academic research and training in the many fields of science that are related to linguistics.

Schools of linguistics are enumerated by Sampson ( 1980 ) who concludes that further groupings will be difficult to make, but predicts that future linguistics will be dominated by biology. Subsequent attempts at a tighter generalisations include Scholz et al.’s ( 2020 ) and Nichol’s ( 1984 ) tripartite taxonomies; while Croft ( 1995 , 2015 ) proposes a binary model.

A search in history for the axes of theories of language

A common starting point for the debate about the nature of language is found in Plato's dialogue Cratylus where Socrates raises the question whether word forms are arbitrary or iconic, to use modern terminology. Socrates concludes that they can be either, so the philosopher should rather direct their inquiry to what would become to be known as the Platonic forms (Cooper and Hutchinson 1997 ).

There is not quite enough substance for a nature‒nurture debate because these philosophers seem to have considered it rather obvious that language is man-made. The view arising from Cratylus is that there are some who possess the craft of word-making, but the acceptance of words depends on the language users.

This view was confronted by Christian theology which took the Bible as the foundation of knowledge of the universe in the Middle Ages. It was generally thought that all languages are derived from the one that God used to talk to Adam. Therefore, language is part of the Creation (Jermołowicz 2003 ).

On the fringes of Christian influence, however, Al-Farabi (ca. 870‒ca. 950) elaborates the nature of social and societal construction of language as follows. People first realise that they can communicate their needs better if they agree to label some objects and concepts with simple vocal sounds. These are later compounded to create more words. Eventually lawmakers will regulate language usage for the benefit of the community (Druart 2019 ).

The Age of Enlightenment saw humanistic thinking as applied to philosophy of language, with new interpretations of the Holy Scripture which emphasise Man's active role in the creation of his own cultural habits. George Dalgarno ([ 1661 ] 1974) pointed out that, in the Genesis, Adam names the animals, suggesting that modern languages are man-made. Port-Royal Grammar (Arnauld and Lancelot [ 1660 ] 2015) crystallises the Age of Reason thesis by explaining that God created Man rational and social. Therefore, Man used his intelligence to construct language in order to communicate his thoughts to others.

Theological thinking gradually gave way to the modern humanism of the nineteenth century, but naturalistic thinking about culture makes a remarkable return revolutionised by natural selection theory, and later as consolidated by Mendelian genetics. Social Darwinists looked for ways to adopt linguistics to evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin ( 1871 ) suggested that human languages are derived from animal mating calls. August Schleicher ([ 1863 ] 1869) considered languages as species in a struggle for existence, and argued that linguistics belongs to life sciences. This enterprise continues today (Type 3 and Type 4) giving us our primary axis: humanistic versus biological approaches to theory of language.

A secondary axis comes from the separation of a historical from a systemic view. The concept of historical explanation is of course old, with examples of etymological speculations also found in Cratylus, while the Genesis provides an early treatise of the origin and geographic spread of languages.

Mythological explanation is gradually removed from evolutionary hypotheses. Spurred by the Industrial Revolution and growing interest in archaeology, social organisation comes to be defined in terms of historical progress guided by a collective spirit by Georg W. F. Hegel ( 1807 ) and his contemporaries.

The modern worldview also influenced nineteenth century linguistic research which undertook several big projects: etymologies, genealogical studies, and the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language with a historical‒comparative method. While there may have been naïve hopes of uncovering the lost fountainhead of human language, Saussure and his followers acknowledged the ultimate impossibility of gaining reliable knowledge of unrecorded extinct languages (Aronoff 2017 ).

Saussure's solution was to limit the explanatory role of the diachronic approach (Aronoff 2017 , p. 212) and to investigate systemic cohesion to gain understanding of why the known languages are the way they are. Structural linguistics as it later became called—Saussure called his approach semiology —is the study of the inner workings of language as a bilateral system of meaning and expression (Dosse 1997a ).

Systemic explanation is of course not completely new, either. Early grammars, including Pāṇini's Ancient Sanskrit grammar, treat language as a rule-based system (Kiparsky 2009 ). Thomas of Erfurt's mediaeval Modistae grammar is an early example of an attempt to define word classes and sentence parts in opposition to one another (Seuren 1998 ). The foundation of this method is traced back to the grammar of the Stoics, and, ultimately, to Plato's writings and to Aristotelian syllogism (Itkonen 2013b ).

A systemic view of social organisation can also be of a biological kind. It is a rather obvious realisation that human society in some ways resembles an organism or the nests of social insects, with members of society carrying out different vital functions. One instance of this metaphor is Bernard Mandeville's ( 1705 ) satirical poem The Grumbling Hive . The Stoics, on the other hand, had likened philosophy to a living animal: with logic as the bones, ethics as the flesh, and physics as the soul (Long 1982 ); Thomas Hobbes's ([ 1651 ] 2010) Leviathan depicts society as a body consisting of its citizens; while Herbert Spencer (1820‒1903) likened society to a complex of organs with different functions (Corning 1982 ).

Admittedly, the view of language as an organic system appears to be relatively recent. A language‒organism analogy was used by Franz Bopp ( 1816 ; Lehmann 2016 ) and, following the success of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species ( 1859 ), it was converted to a scientific claim by August Schleicher (ibid.). This was in turn reformed as the idea of language as a population of words by Müller ( 1870 ).

Hereby the two axes: humanistic‒biological, and historical‒systemic, form a fourfold table in our taxonomy (Fig. 1 ).

Theory of language: a fourfold table made up of the vertical axis humanistic versus biological ; and the horizontal axis historical versus systemic . Influential works are cited within each type. Type 1 (see “ Type 1: humanistic‒historical ” section) approach is humanistic‒historical; Type 2 (“ Type 2: humanistic‒systemic ” section) is humanistic‒systemic. Type 3 (“ Type 3: Biological‒historical ” section) represents a biological‒historical theory of language; and, Type 4 (“ Type 4: Biological‒systemic ” section), a biological‒systemic theory

Humanistic linguistics

Humanistic linguistics is used as an umbrella term for approaches which regard language as a human invention, separating the subject matter from the sphere of biological inquiry (Itkonen 2011 ; see also Daneš 1987 , p. 30). In this view, linguistics can primarily be seen as a social, historical and psychological discipline (Type 1); or as semiotics: the study of systems of signs and sign processes (Type 2).

Type 1: humanistic‒historical

The first square in the fourfold table regards languages as the products of sociocultural evolution. When we ask why a certain language is the way it is, the standard answer is that its forms have taken shape with the history of the nation who speaks it. As concerns linguistic universals, it could be the case that similarities between unrelated languages have been exaggerated due to an overly Eurocentric perspective; or that social development and information make people think more logically, and since there is only one logic or reason, languages will share certain structures.

As discussed above, evolutionary thinking about culture had become the dominant paradigm by the nineteenth century; although similar ideas had been discussed by earlier philosophers such as Epicurus (341 BCE‒270 BCE; see Verlinsky 2005 ) and Giambattista Vico (1668‒1744; Danesi 1993 ).

Although in many cases ideas proposed by theorists of sociocultural evolution may appear suspiciously similar to those presented by evolutionary biologists, there are reasons why the humanistic and the sociobiological framework should not be confused. For example, Wilhelm Wundt explains the difference between biology and the cultural perspective of Völkerpsychologie :

[T]o the natural sciences belong all those disciplines in whose exploration facts are studied without regard to the participation of a thinking and purposeful agent, while to the mental sciences belong all those subjects in which facts are studied whose existence depends essentially on such a subject. (Wundt 1889 : 33; cited through Macnamara 2009 : 205)

The most common evolutionary approach is the stadial theory which proposes that human societies progress through stages that are predetermined to some degree. The basic idea is that certain innovations are prerequisite to others, so progress takes place in causal steps (Wolloch 2011 ).

There are different opinions of how languages have evolved. While some argued for linear progress: from primitive to logical; others highlighted the purity of the classical languages, followed by a decay in their modern forms; but the Renaissance had also sparked the appreciation and establishment of national languages as the new expressive means of literature and science (Nichols 2012 ).

One to argue against artificial refinement of the national language by scholarly grammarians was Jacob Grimm (1785‒1863) who regarded language as a natural social phenomenon— Sprachgeist —and language change as occurring along fixed patterns which are governed by mechanical sound laws. Franz Bopp (1791‒1867) considered linguistics as the study of the structures of the Geist , or social organism, developing the historical-comparative method which connects the etymologies of different languages. In Bopp's conception, the essence of language is uncovered through the investigation of its life and growth (Pourciau 2017 ).

At this time, sociology was still to establish itself as a scientific discipline: during the nineteenth century, social matters were considered as belonging to the sphere of psychological inquiry (Hejl 1995 ). Society, then, has its own psyche that requires an examination. It is Volksgeist : the spirit or genius of the nation that stores collective cultural knowledge (Verheggen 1996 ).

Moritz Lazarus (1824‒1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823‒1899) coined the term Völkerpsychologie : the study of the myths, customs and the language of the nation. Of the nation psychologists, Wilhelm Wundt (1832‒1920) became the most influential, and his ideas were imported to America by Franz Boas (1858‒1942) who founded the modern Boasian school of anthropology (Klautke 2010 ); and Leonard Bloomfield (1887‒1949) who founded the Bloomfieldian school of linguistics which was later nicknamed 'American structuralism' (Joseph 2002 ). Here, the word structuralism has a different reference from the movement in humanities generally referred to as structuralism (cf. Type 2).

Wundt's interest in nation psychology lay in its potential to explain the mind structures of the individual. His model of psychological evolution involved four stages, from the irregular patterning of the primitive mind all the way to the highly civilised mind where everything is organised into binary branching structures. Wundt's corresponding linguistic model is identical with the universal grammar of the Modistae (Seuren 1998 ), deriving from the logical grammar of the Stoics (Itkonen 2013b ).

Boas agreed with Wundt's nation psychology, but removed his stages of social and psychological evolution to emphasise that all nations are equally good at catering for the needs of their members (Klautke 2010 ). He advocated particularism which remained the norm in anthropology until the 1960s (Spiro 1986 ).

Bloomfield in his turn was particularly interested in Wundt's account of the logical or philosophical grammar (Seuren 2006 ). Nation psychology eventually became strongly associated with German nationalism (Klautke 2010 ), and after World War I, Bloomfield's ( 1914 ) endorsement of it became unsustainable (Joseph 2002 ). Bloomfield then wrote a new textbook of linguistics which endorsed the behavioural psychology of A. P. Weiss (Bloomfield 1933 ), although, importantly, his linguistic analysis remained loyal to Wundt's structural psychology (Seuren 2006 ). The idea from German romanticism, that language shapes the worldview of the individual, eventually became known as the 'Sapir‒Whorf hypothesis' (Koerner 1992 ).

The post-Bloomfieldian school failed to establish a scientific justification for the binary-branching structure (cf. Wells 1947 ; Seuren 1998 ) which became challenged by the European structuralists who proposed a semantic analysis of syntax (Garvin 1954 ; Osborne and Kahane 2015 ). Noam Chomsky eventually solved the problem by claiming that syntax is innate, leading mainstream American linguistics across the nurture‒nature divide (see Type 3).

Nonetheless, the sociocultural-evolutionary mode of explanation has survived well in the fields of historical linguistics (Evans and Bowern 2015 ) and anthropological linguistics (McElhinny 2015 ), and there have even been some signs of renewed general interest. Critical reception of Dan Everett's Language: The Cultural Tool (Everett 2012 ) echoes nineteenth century reactions to Volksgeist thinking:

[U]sing Everett’s reasoning, we would notice phrases like English West Wing and speculate that we English-speakers conceptualize our buildings as giant flying birds; or we might take the phrase downtown branch in relation to a bank to suggest that in English-speaking culture, we conceptualize institutions as giant trees[.] (Enfield 2013 : 161)

Everett had actually suggested that the fact that the Amazonian Wari language has the same word for wife and vagina raises “an obvious cultural question”. However, gender issues in language are quite seriously discussed by modern feminist thinkers (Ehrlich et al. 2014 ), and the way culture shapes people's thinking is a core problem in the overall post-structuralist movement (Williams 2005 ). Although any explanation can be taken too far, undoubtedly, there remain valid points for future research to be made about the connection between the histories and languages of nations, and how these affect the individual's understanding of the world.

Type 2: humanistic‒systemic

This section looks into the development of a view of language as a system in its own right. A precursor to a systemic view of language is found in Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767‒1835). Although a proponent of Type-1 linguistic relativity (Koerner 1978 ), Humboldt preferred a different type of comparative linguistics—crosslinguistic comparisons, today called typology—to gain insight into universal features of the world's languages. He also laid the foundation for the modern notion of phonology as the study of the sound systems of languages. Humboldt furthermore envisaged a linguistics as guided by a universal matrix of inventories of common elements, rules and structures to help scholars gain access to any language (Humboldt 1836 ; Mueller-Vollmer and Messling 2017 ).

Towards the end of the nineteenth century when great etymological projects were nearing their completion, the limitations of the historical-comparative method became painfully evident to linguists like Saussure owing to the insufficiency of all available written sources (Aronoff 2017 ). Saussure then proposed laying emphasis on synchronic analysis as an alternative route to understanding why, ultimately, languages are the way they are (Saussure [ 1916 ] 1959, pp. 212‒214; Aronoff 2017 , p. 450).

In Saussure's conception, language is a semiotic system which is made of bilateral signs, or expression‒meaning pairings. Following a long line in humanistic thinking—whether rationalist or empiricist—the expressive plane, the conceptual plane and the linkage between the two are all organised according to arbitrary rules of social convention. From this, however, Saussure draws an original conclusion (Nöth 1995 ).

Because the bilateral sign system lacks a non-conventional foundation in both of its aspects, it is neither anchored in reality nor in personal psychology. Instead, linguistic organisation arises purely from the association of expression and meaning: there is no expression without meaning, and no meaning without expression (Saussure, ibid., pp. 7‒17).

Saussure regards language as a ‘social fact’—something which resembles the nation spirit (Klautke 2010 )—but, at the same time, it is a kind of geometrical system where all elements are defined in relation to each other in complex networks. Saussure's realisation that society contains many such systems became a core tenet of the post-war structuralist movement which then developed into various frameworks of post-structuralism (Dosse 1997a , b ). Thus, Saussure would unwittingly become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Saussure also proposes a semantic and functional analysis of grammar. His own work is still heavily focused on etymology, with more pages dedicated to diachronic than synchronic linguistics (Saussure [ 1916 ] 1959). Further methods of structural linguistics would be developed by others. Following a shift from structural to functional explanation in sociology in the 1920s, the Prague linguistic circle lays the foundation of functional linguistics based on Saussure's bilateral sign, but also as investigating how the role of language as a tool for communication affects its forms (Daneš 1987 ).

French functionalist André Martinet elaborates the concept of economy, a compromise between simplicity and clarity, as a force which controls language change (Vicentini 2003 ). His linguistic analyses also influenced Jacques Derrida's ([ 1967 ] 1998) philosophy.

Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev takes a different path from Saussure. Based on the algebraic grammars of mathematicians, he proposes glossematics —the analysis of each linguistic element from smallest to largest on both the expressive and the conceptual plane—to gain insight into the compositional nature of language (Seuren 1998 ). Hjelmslev points out that this method also makes it possible to generate all grammatical productions of a given language, and that the method actuates recursion which allows an infinite number of grammatical productions (Hjelmslev [ 1943 ] 1953 ):

When we compare the inventories yielded at the various stages of the deduction, their size will usually turn out to decrease as the procedure goes on. If the text is unrestricted, i.e., capable of being prolonged through constant addition of further parts […] it will be possible to register an unrestricted number of sentences[.] (Hjelmslev [ 1943 ] 1953 : 26)

Hjelmslev considers such calculus primarily non-biological, non-psychological and non-sociological. Thus, he regards “language itself” as a kind of abstract object. Similarly to Humboldt, Hjelmslev proposes that the method be used to analyse and compare the structures of all languages to learn to understand their ways. Like Saussure, Hjelmslev's model became highly influential in semiotics (Nöth 1995 ), and his theory of linguistic analysis was put into practice by the subsequent programmes of functional grammar which continue today (Butler 2003 ).

Another syntactician who should be mentioned is Lucien Tesnière who took his influences from Humboldt and Otto Jespersen rather than from Saussure's interactive model: Tesnière's analysis assumes the primacy of semantics in language. Opposing philosophical or logical grammar (see “ Type 1: humanistic‒historical ” section), Tesnière created a non-phrasal dependency analysis which has later found its applications in computer linguistics as a more elastic alternative to generative grammar (Osborne and Kahane 2015 ).

Sociobiological or Darwinian evolutionary linguistics

“ Type 3: Biological‒historical ” and “ Type 4: Biological‒systemic ” sections will present biological or sociobiological approaches to linguistic theory. Type 3 represents what is described as sociobiology (the evolutionary study of behaviour) or evolutionary psychology (the evolutionary study of psychological traits; Croft 2006 : 91). Type 4 is also described by Croft ( 2006 , p. 6) as ultimately biological; however, the foundation of linguistic explanation of this type is not considered genetic, but indirectly biological and based on evolutionary theory (cf. Croft 2000 ).

Evolution is somewhat ambiguous as a term and has been used by different schools on both sides of the nature‒nurture divide. To summarise differences (“ A search in history for the axes of theories of language ” and “ Type 1: humanistic‒historical ” sections), the classical approach to sociocultural evolution explains change by means of stadial development or progress. For example, the chronological order of technological advancement from Stone Age to Iron Age through Bronze Age can be regarded as predetermined because stone tools were prerequisites of bronze metallurgy, and bronze tools were prerequisites of iron metallurgy (Johnston 1922 ).

However, due to its success in providing a solution for functional explanation in biology, Darwin's principle of natural selection has later on become near-synonymous with evolutionary theory. It is today not so commonly known that Darwin intended natural selection to be applied to cultural evolution, too (Darwin 1871 ); or that his theory had many now-forgotten rivals, some explicitly anti-Darwinian, until mid-twentieth century (Popov 2008 ).

Fundamental ideological differences lie in the causation. The humanistic viewpoint regards language as an intelligent social creation. According to biologism , in contrast, it emerges involuntarily via evolutionary biological mechanisms (Itkonen 1999 , 2011 , 2013a ).

The natural paradigm with its tendencies, sociobiological or evolutionary-biological, denotes here the kind of schools of evolutionary linguistics which adopt the Darwinian or neo-Darwinist view of evolution. A special case is the Chomskyan concept of language based on evolutionary biological mechanisms, albeit not on adaptation or evolutionary stages. It is included in the Darwinian, natural and sociobiological paradigm (cf. Chomsky and McGilvray 2012 , pp. 104‒107; Fitch 2010 , pp. 20‒21).

“ Type 3: Biological‒historical ” section (Type 3) will give an overview of language as caused by human genes, and “ Type 4: Biological‒systemic ” section (Type 4) will present frameworks which link linguistics with the study of living organisms.

Type 3: Biological‒historical

Square 3 in our taxonomy explains language from a historical and evolutionary biological perspective. Charles Darwin ( 1871 ) hypothesised that human languages have evolved from animal mating calls. One way to build on biology is via the addition of Mendelian genetics to Darwin's model of natural selection. Genetic determinism is the idea that people are born with genes that generate sociocultural behaviour including language (P. Ehrlich and Feldman 2003 ).

Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker ( 1994 ) argues that the human language faculty has evolved through an interplay of genetics and natural selection, thus bringing about a language instinct in humans. This instinct entails an innate “universal grammar”; an idea which comes from Chomsky who however argues that it has been caused by a single mutation. As Chomsky ( 2000 ) illustrates,

To tell a fairy story about it, it is almost as if there was some higher primate wandering around a long time ago and some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain. (Chomsky 2000 : 4)

The language organ is hypothesised to contain universal grammar which has the same binary-branching structure as Wundt's psychological grammar Footnote 1 (Seuren 1998 ; Joseph 2002 ; cf. Berwick and Chomsky 2016 , pp. 10‒11). Therefore it seems simplest to regard Chomsky's generative grammar a sociobiological transformation of the Wundtian model (Type 1). In Chomsky's conception, however, the mind is structured into various autonomous modules such as language, ethics, and mathematics. According to this claim, language (i.e. universal grammar) cannot be learned by deduction, but only acquired from the language organ (Smith 2002 ).

Since the 1960s Chomsky has made many attempts to link his theory to early humanist thinkers, sparking negative reactions from experts of Humboldt, Descartes, Arnauld, and others; it is more lately suggested that Chomsky's theory lacks a pedigree in philosophy (Hamans and Seuren 2010 ).

Although referred to as rationalism, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss why Chomsky's claim of representing “Cartesian linguistics” has been disputed. Chomsky does not consider language as a human rational creation at all, so his interest is purely in Descartes's concept of innate ideas. Chomsky's universal grammar, however, is a dependency structure, so it does not contain any innate ideas. As such, Chomsky's theory does not seem to be directly related to the philosophical mode of explanation called rationalism (Markie 2017 ).

In the context of cognitive science, Chomsky's generative grammar is contrasted with George Lakoff's 'empiricism', which also calls for a brief comment. According to Lakoff, people have inherited from lower animals the ability to make rational judgments based on visual thinking (Lakoff 1990 ). Knowledge is embodied in the sense that it is categorised by sensory modalities. Thus, antithetically to innate grammar, Lakoff's cognitive linguistics investigates how language emerges from sensory metaphors, e.g. a warm smile; a close friend (Lakoff and Johnson 1999 ).

For the explanation mode known as empiricism, senses are a requirement of experience; but it seems this version of cognitive linguistics considers the senses as being of primary interest themselves. Some associate Lakoff's idea with an applied psychological movement called neuro-linguistic programming which teaches people-influencing techniques (Feldman 2007 ; Mathison and Tosey 2009 ).

Biological approaches to language attempt to make scientific rather than metaphysical statements, which is desirable in principle. So far such research programmes have not been completely successful in establishing biological linguistics as a proper natural science. There is to date no evidence for an innate language structure. The claims of Pinker and Chomsky were discredited by the mainstream language acquisition and psycholinguistics research community around 2000 (Fernald and Marchman 2006 ; de Bot 2015 ). For some, the question is today which way biolinguistics should turn next.

Dual inheritance theory or the study of co-evolution of language and culture is proposed as a more sustainable approach (Koster 2009 ; Richerson and Boyd 2010 ). The question remains to what extent it can provide a useful alternative to generative linguistics because the human genome does not evolve hand in hand with linguistic change. While it is uncontroversial that the human body provides many features which are useful for vocal communication, there is no direct indication that human anatomy generates grammar, apparently leaving the core aspects of language to culture (cf. Type 1 and 2).

Another way to go is to argue for a more indirect effect of genes, as exemplified by Lakoff's non-generative concept above. Lakoff and his colleagues have however broken away from Type 3 to develop an overarching Type 4 theory (see next subsection).

Hawkins's ( 2004 ) performance‒grammar hypothesis suggests that certain structures could be the manifestations of processing preferences of the human brain, thus explaining why typological comparisons indicate statistical tendencies rather than absolute universals in the languages of the world. Currently, though, this hypothesis is yet to be verified by psycholinguistic research (Song 2010 , pp. 278‒279).

Type 4: Biological‒systemic

Type 4 regards language as an organism or a population. As regards the systemic aspect of language, it is worthwhile to mention that both Type 2 (humanistic‒systemic) and Type 4 (biological‒systemic) emerged from 19th-century historical linguistics. The biological type came first, introduced by August Schleicher (1821‒1868) who was an Indo-Europeanist—like Saussure—but also an expert on botany and gardening. Inspired by Bopp's historical organicism and, later, Darwin's ( 1859 ) Origin of the Species , Schleicher essentially synthesised his fields of knowledge into a single science. Through his historical-comparative research Schleicher came to view languages as biotic entities which grow, spread beyond their territory, have offspring, and eventually die (Koerner 1978 ; Aronoff 2017 ).

The Type 4 systemic conception of linguistic theory is essentially different from Type 2 'structuralism' which grew out of Saussure's rejection of Schleicher and his associates (Saussure [ 1916 ] 1959, pp. 3‒5 et passim). Unlike Saussure, Type 4 authors do not generally consider language as arising from mechanisms of meaning such as opposition or symmetry (see e.g. Croft 1995 ). Saussure (ibid., pp. 7‒15) for his part objected to Schleicher, arguing that the language organism has no evolution of its own because language and its changes are only products of the speech community Footnote 2 (cf. also Type 1).

This argument has again been rejected by today's Type 4 evolutionary linguists who study the evolution of language as a phenomenon of its own kind. Language is considered as a system which adapts to its ecological environment. As mentioned in “ Type 3: Biological‒historical ” section, Lakoff's Cognitive Linguistics is linked with the non-innate evolutionary framework (Croft 2016 ). This union proposes that the human-animal mind produces sensory metaphors which then take shape as language-specific units of selection that replicate and spread within or beyond the speech community (MacWhinney and O’Grady 2015 ; see also quote below). Thus, language as a complex system adapts to human cognition; and to the human social environment (Frank 2008 : 237).

Historically the view arises from a Darwinian evolutionary conception which applies natural selection directly to language itself (Croft 2008 ). A language‒organism analogy was per se commonplace in nineteenth century linguistics (Koerner 1978 ; Turner 2015 ), but it was August Schleicher who took the decisive step to break up with humanism, redefining cultural evolution as a natural science (Schleicher [ 1863 ] 1869):

Languages are organisms of nature; they have never been directed by the will of man; they rose, and developed themselves according to definite laws; they grew old, and died out. They, too, are subject to that series of phenomena which we embrace under the name of “life.” The science of language is consequently a natural science; its method is generally altogether the same as that of any other natural science. (Schleicher [ 1863 ] 1869: 20–21)

The method Schleicher refers to is the historical and reconstructive study of language groups as phylogenetic or family trees, equating languages with biological species. In his review of Schleicher, Max Müller ( 1870 ) adds a micro-level analogy of words as organisms to the macro-level analogy of languages as species. Darwin ( 1871 ) endorses both ideas asserting that

‘A struggle for' life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the 'shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the' upper hand, and they owe their success to their own 'inherent virtue.’ [...] the survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection. (Darwin 1871 : 60)

As the history then goes, the idea envisioned by the early Darwinists as languages and cultures competing for living space was adopted, after the authors' death, by the Nazi party from the writings of Schleicher's colleague Ernst Haeckel, with well-known consequences (Richards 2002 ). Eventually, social Darwinism was banished from the humanities at the end of World War II (Aronoff 2017 ).

As the dust settled, Type 3 biological determinism made a comeback as sociobiology in the 1970s. This movement included Type 4 ideas, too, most famously Richard Dawkins's ( 1976 ) memetics which, from the point of linguistics, is rather similar to Müller's idea which is described by Darwin in his quote above. In the neo-Darwinian model, words or ideas are considered as cultural replicators , something akin to genes or viruses (Dawkins 1995 ; Ritt 2004 ).

It seems likely that a historical chain from pre-1945 Darwinian linguists was broken, and that the current neo-Darwinian trend in linguistics has evolved independently of it. Following the popularity of Dawkins's ( 1976 ) nonfiction bestseller The Selfish Gene , and the obstacles faced by biolinguistics (Type 3), there has of lately been a true renaissance of the language‒species analogy as materialised in a myriad of frameworks. Their assessment is not a completely simple task as is noted by Pelkey ( 2015 ).

Theorists who explore such analogies usually feel obliged to pin language to some specific sub-domain of biotic growth. William James selects “zoölogical evolution”, William Croft prefers botanical evolution, but most theorists zoom in to more microbiotic levels – some claiming that linguistic phenomena are analogous to the cellular level and others arguing for the genetic level of biotic growth. For others, language is a parasite; for others still, language is a virus [...] What is more, some language theorists mix and match biological analogies at so many different levels that we are left with no clear theory of how these analogies function together. (Pelkey 2015 : 103)

Problems of applying biological principles to linguistics are discussed throughout the literature (but see Walkden 2012 for a brief introduction to the topic Footnote 3 ). One pertinent question is whether languages are actually real and alive, or whether it is all a matter of a metaphor or an analogy. Interestingly enough, Schleicher had in his time countered criticism by explaining that he had not thought of languages as actually existing in reality (Koerner 1978 , p. 32f).

One way for replicators to be real and thus an object of modern scientific study is if they are brain synapses whose behaviour and competition could be studied by electroencephalography (Aunger 2010 ; cf. ‘mind reading’ in a quote from MacWhinney and O’Grady 2015 below); but this is currently probably closer to an idea than an actual research program.

Croft ( 2008 ) rejects biological analogies as useless per se, and argues for a generalised mechanism of selection, echoing Dawkins's ( 1989 , p. 322) concept of Universal Darwinism. Croft ( 2000 ) discusses his approach to language and evolution:

The third connection between language change and biological evolution is found where the theory of biological evolution itself has been adopted, or adapted, in order to construct an evolutionary theory of language change (see e.g. Keller 1994 , pp. 141–152; McMahon 1994 , pp. 314–340; Lass 1990 , 1997 ; Ritt 2004 ). Evolution is recognized as a process that occurs with certain types of entities. The process is probably best understood as it occurs with populations of biological organisms; that is evolutionary biology. The hypothesis that forms the starting point of [Croft 2000 ] is that language change is an example of the same process, or a similar process, occurring with a different type of entity. (Croft 2000 : 10

Which precise model of selection should be chosen is subject to debate. Croft ( 2000 , 2006 , 2008 ) argued specifically for an application of Hull's ( 1988 ) model of replication—rather than Dawkins's. But his proposal appears not to have found sufficiently widespread following despite criticism received by memetics (e.g. Polichak 2002 ). Footnote 4 Both models were eventually placed under a common banner of Complex Adaptive Systems (Beckner et al. 2009 ), something which is explained as constituting a “reformulation of memetics” (Frank 2008 ).

What is common with various Type 4 theories is that they define themselves in opposition to Chomsky's innate universal grammar, although there is ambiguity in the terminology. For instance, Chomsky ( 2015 ) considers his approach as “emergent”, which makes sense because language, in his conception, emerges from a random gene mutation. Nonetheless, it is more common to group various Type 4 approaches under the banner of emergentism; or “functionalism” (MacWhinney and O’Grady 2015 ) although the latter term is traditionally associated with the Prague school (Type 2).

Some of the most influential frameworks linked with this evolutionary, emergentist, functionalist programme include usage-based linguistics (Bybee and Hopper 2001 ) and construction grammar (Goldberg 2006 ). Lakoff's cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory are also associated with it. As MacWhinney and O'Grady (ibid.) explain,

Faced with this embarrassment of theoretical riches, students often ask what is the relation between Emergentism and all these other approaches. The answer is that all of these approaches fall under the general category of Emergentism, because all recognize the importance of the principles of competition, hierarchicality, and timeframes [...] Where these approaches differ is in terms of their emphases . For example, given a metaphor such as choking poverty , Embodied Cognition emphasizes mappings of this metaphor to the source domain of the body, Mind-Reading highlights ways in which this metaphor activates particular areas of the brain, usage-based analysis focuses on the conventionalization of the metaphor through usage, and memetics examines the spread of the metaphor across communities. (MacWhinney and O’Grady 2015 : 9)

Like meme and replicator, construction is another name for the basic unit of selection. A construction is a form‒meaning pair which can be a morpheme, a word or a phrase: a construction can consist of several smaller units (Goldberg ibid.). This idea reiterates Dawkins's ( 1989 , p. 195) concept of meme complexes as “units within units”. There is indeed a dispute between memeticists and those who advocate other models of linguistic evolution. Christiansen and Chater ( 2008 ) argue that usage-based linguistics, construction grammar and complex adaptive systems are different from memetics, but Blackmore ( 2008 ) demonstrates that same ideas have been published in memetics literature.

The Schleicherian study of language as phylogenetic trees has also seen its revival, as computational methods are borrowed from evolutionary biology (Atkinson and Gray 2005 ). Lastly, a new model is provided by the evolutionary study of natural constructions such as the nests of social insects. The “social” construction of language is compared to emergent principles which create termites' nests, for instance (Dahl 2004 ).

An assessment of theories of language

Different theories of language reflect different aspects of language by placing the major source of explanans of the language phenomenon in different loci: Type 1 in social history, Type 2 in the semiotic system, Type 3 in human biology, and Type 4 in the evolutionary workings of the language organism or population.

None of the approaches appears to provide a complete definition of language. For a criticism, starting from Type 2: Hjelmslev ([ 1943 ] 1953) offers a most detailed description of the language system. What is noticeable in his definition of 'language' is that he does not consider it as an essentially social and historical phenomenon. Thus, his conception of language was described as an “abstract object” in “ Type 2: humanistic‒systemic ” section. Hjelmslev implies that there is an algebraic system underlying all languages. It is an interesting position, but the relationship between individual languages, such as English and Japanese, and the algebraic language device is not fully expounded.

As a transformation of Hjelmslev, Type 3 generative grammar also considers 'language' or 'grammar' algebraic. What people commonly perceive as languages are mere epiphenomena caused by universal grammar (Hassler 2018 ). This could be understood as meaning that natural grammars are formal grammars generated by an innate computational mechanism. The full explanation has however undergone many reforms, and in the current version (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002 ) only recursion remains part of grammar. Differences between languages are now explained primarily in terms of lexical parameters rather than grammatical ones (Christiansen and Chater 2008 ). The innate element is suggested to provide a choice of possible structures for natural languages (cf. Newmeyer 2005 ). At this point, though, if lexical parameters are not considered innate, the role of the human language faculty has reduced so dramatically it could be largely disposed of, whereby the generative enterprise might collapse back into pre-Chomskyan Type 1.

This does not necessarily mean a return to behaviourism. Wundt's concept of language represented mentalist psychology (Levelt 1992 ); and Roman Jakobson advocated a (Type 2) view of linguistics as a “cognitive science” (Garvin 1953 ) long before Chomsky.

The Dawkinsian concept of Type 4 sees language as a kind of virus which has mutated into billions of strains which have spread globally and across linguistic borders. So what exactly are what we perceive as languages? The complex adaptive systems position remains critical of Type 1, 2 and 3; but its own definition is so broad it is difficult to scrutinise. The current formulation (Beckner et al. 2009 ) resembles in some ways brainstorming more than the kind of definition of language that is needed for a scientific linguistics.

This could be found more easily in Type 1, which today lacks a polestar; but there is something to be learned from the history of theoretical linguistics. A fundamental problem was recognised by 19th-century Sanskritists like Saussure (Aronoff 2017 ). At a certain point historical explanation tends to be reduced to mere speculations about the origin of language. This is due to incompleteness of available data and reliability limitations of the comparative-reconstructive method. A related philosophical problem is hinted at by Max Müller's taxonomy of classical speculations including the likes of the 'bow wow' theory, the 'pooh-pooh' theory and other conjectures about the origin of words: whether they arise from grunts, chants, mating calls, imitations of natural sounds, etc. (Noiré 1879 ).

If we had a time machine that took us through all the stages of lexical development to the very beginnings of human language, and we learned that the first ever word used for egg , for example, was actually 'bow wow': would that not explain everything and nothing about language at the same time? This problem makes Saussure's proposal of complementing historical linguistics with a systemic explanation tempting.

As regards the topic of the theory of language in general, its influence has been impressive. Linguistics has many times been taken as a guiding light for other sciences. It has provided models of social and cultural construction perhaps due to the systematic nature of grammar. Theorising about language has nonetheless remained on a philosophical level: the presented frameworks have not found unequivocal scientific evidence for their most ambitious hypotheses.

But there is something potentially interesting in the literature. Labov's ( 1994 ) conclusion concerning language change studies is that the mechanism responsible for the preservation of economy of the system is quite different from what the functional structuralists had suggested (cf. presentation of Martinet in “ Type 1: humanistic‒historical ” section):

Such a mechanism is the reverse of the effect envisaged by functional theories in linguistics. Kroch's argument indicates that it is not the desire to be understood, but rather the consequence of misunderstanding that influences language change. This mechanism implies a mismatch between producer and interpreter: the type of built-in instability that we would expect to find behind long-term shifts in language behavior. (Labov 1994 : 586)

Instead of striving for greater clarity, a new generation of speakers performs a reanalysis by removing old forms which, after the introduction of new ones, have begun to cause misunderstanding. But Verleyen ( 2006 ) points out that Labov's definition of functionalism is particularly narrow, effectively referring to the preservation of already established distinctions.

Whether promoting disambiguation where phonetic changes occur, or abandoning items that have become ambiguous as a more distant side effect of the changes, either way would seem to explain why no matter how much functional decay languages undergo throughout the centuries, they do not become more and more difficult to understand for the native speaker. Since the two arguments are logically equivalent, Footnote 5 though, it might be the case that language change research has already found scientific evidence for the semiotic approach. That is, language as a system whose structures emerge from the needs of meaning expression.

End discussion

This paper proposed a fourfold table to explain the main differences between modern schools of linguistic thought by investigating how ideologies behind them are linked with intellectual history. While the humanistic side seems to fall quite naturally into the taxonomy, there is a curious mismatch with biological linguistics that requires some clarification.

In this taxonomy, generative grammar, which entails a focus on synchronic analysis, is placed into the historical Type 3; while construction grammar, for example, which yields itself more readily to a historical analysis (Hurford 2012 , pp. 176‒177), is placed among Type 4 systemic views.

The reason for this is because schools of thought can be classified on different grounds. Since the topic here is theories of language, the question is how each school of thought perceives the nature of language. For generative grammar, linguistic structures are genetically based. Since it is not assumed that our genetic makeup is changing, synchronic analysis is the logical way to examine such static structures.

Conversely, systemic Type 4 considers language as a balanced system—in so far as ecological systems tend to become balanced in the long run—but yields itself to historical analysis. This is not contradictory because Type 4 does not postulate genetic changes for linguistic change. Instead, diachronic changes are considered systemic ones.

Of course, authors do combine ideas from different aspects; but it seems that the major differences between the most influential linguistics frameworks are rather naturally explained by a classification based on the two axes proposed here: humanistic versus biological, and historical versus systemic.

Where ideas blend, the taxonomy can be useful for pointing out what kind of synthesis is being made, and what kind of problems there might arise. To take some examples, M. A. K. Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) derives from Prague structural linguistics and is therefore considered a Type 2 humanistic approach. However, M. A. K. Halliday (1925‒2018) endorsed memetics (cf. Type 4) in his later years (e.g. Halliday and Webster 2009 , p. 174; Halliday and Matthiessen 2014 , p. 33). That position is now controversial: François ( 2018 ) argues that the semiotic-systemic view of SFL is too different from the “external” systemic functionalism of authors that in the present paper fall towards Type 4 biological-systemic (Du Bois 1985 ; Hopper 1987 ; Langacker 2008 ; Lakoff 1987 ; Croft and Cruse 2004 ).

As mentioned above, though, Lakoff's Cognitive Linguistics which offers a natural historical explanation of human language ability (Type 3), is united with Type 4 approaches (see “ Type 4: Biological‒systemic ” section for discussion). It is argued that the motivation behind this alliance is to raise forces against Chomsky's Type 3 approach which has dominated American linguistics (Peeters 2001 ).

Some views are eclectic or fall between major types. Some examples discussed in the literature include Givón ( 1979 ) who is labelled as “controversial” by Nichols ( 1984 ) because Givón combines features that could be identified as representing Type 2 or Type 4.

Croft ( 2008 ) considers Blevins ( 2004 ) as eccentric to evolutionary linguistics because Blevins makes explicit that the Darwinian reference in her work is purely metaphorical. Since the line between humanistic and biological or biotic linguistics is traditionally drawn between the advocates and the opponents of Darwinian linguistics (Sériot 1999 ), it is not easy to find a place for Blevins within the main schools of linguistic thought.

As pointed out in “ Sociobiological or Darwinian evolutionary linguistics ” section, evolution as a concept is ambiguous. Many of the American descriptivists from the Boasian and Bloomfieldian school advocated a version of evolutionary linguistics. In fact, Bloomfield ( 1914 ) himself was in favour of Wundt's gestural theory: a rejection of Darwin (Richards 1980 , p. 58). Boas for his part developed a multilinear theory of evolution (Adams 1955 ). It is likewise important to notice that, although Charles Hockett's design features of language evolution have more recently raised interest in the Darwinian camps, it is not compatible with them due to Hockett's ontology of language as a cultural product (Wacewicz and Żywiczyński 2015 ).

Croft ( 2002 , p. 6) considers Joseph Greenberg (1915‒2001) and typology in general as representative of Croft's view of biological linguistics. However, it is difficult to find evidence that Greenberg advocated an evolutionary model of replication and selection. He (see especially Greenberg 1992 ) was interested in evolutionary anthropology, but concludes:

What is rescuable [of Schleicher's organicism] is that linguistics is an empirical science and that therefore its methodology is essentially that of all sciences, whether social or natural. (Greenberg 1992 : 140)

It seems natural to place Hockett and Greenberg into Type 1 with Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, Whorf and others from the same school of American descriptivism.

Although finding the right place for all authors is not a simple task, the systematics presented in this paper will hopefully help identify and give terms to problematics or anomalies. It could also prove to be useful for further philosophical investigations.

There are, for example, indications that these different types of linguistics have each developed their own general epistemology. Furthermore, functional explanation has been used in different ways; to gain further insight into the problematics, one needs to first identify which theory of language each given argument is building up. It has also been an implicit suggestion of this paper that schools of social sciences are organised along the same lines as linguistics. Whether such an idea is correct, and in what exact way social and linguistic theory are analogous will be the matter of another investigation.

Note that the terms logical grammar, philosophical grammar, psychological grammar; and also the Stoic grammar, and the universal grammar of Thomas of Erfurt or the Modistae, all refer to the idea that the sentence is divided into the subject and the predicate (or verb phrase as it is called in the generative and modern context). This Ancient practice became challenged by twentieth century analyses which are purely based on semantics whereby the subject and the object are considered as equal constituents (Seuren 1998 ; Halliday and Matthiessen 2014 , p. 151f; Osborne and Kahane 2015 ).

It is sometimes claimed that Saussure banned historical-comparative linguistics (e.g. Aronoff 2017 , p. 450). On the contrary, Course in General Linguistics explicitly states that the primary task of linguistics should be "to describe and trace the history of all observable languages, which amounts to tracing the history of families of languages and reconstructing as far as possible the mother language of each family" (Saussure [ 1916 ] 1959, p. 6).

Walkden ( 2012 ) is a slide presentation which currently appears to provide the most comprehensive critical review of the literature.

To briefly summarise the criticism, it is argued that the science of genetics breaks down to a weak metaphor when transferred to social sciences (Vada 2015 ).

per double negation, and as such, either statement may be removed. A system can strive for more clarity by adding heteronymy or by removing non-heteronymy; but the latter is equivalent to the former in the given context where it means avoiding the increase of ambiguous expressions.

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Austin, P. Theory of language: a taxonomy. SN Soc Sci 1 , 78 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00085-x

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Linguistic Diversity and Public Servants’ Turnover Intentions: Theory and Analysis From a Multilingual State

Introduction, official language diversity in canada, literature review and hypotheses, methodology, declaration of conflicting interests, biographies, cite article, share options, information, rights and permissions, metrics and citations, figures and tables, language of work in canada’s bilingual public service, the unequal costs of bilingualism in the canadian public service, turnover intention: why it matters, language of use at work and turnover intention.

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H1: Difficulty to Use One’s Official Language of Choice Has a Positive Relationship With Internal and External Turnover Intention

H2: the relationship between difficulty to use one’s official language of choice and internal and external turnover intention is moderated by linguistic minority status.

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