TEXT 9. Linguistic theory and theoretical linguistics

One of my aims in this chapter, which complements the preceding one, is to motivate a distinction between two terms that are currently employed by most linguists as synonyms and to use this terminological distinction as a peg upon which to hang some comments about the present state of linguistics. The terms in question are linguistic theory' and 'theoretical linguistics'. Another aim is to comment further upon the theoretical term 'language-system' in relation to Saussure's terms 'langue' and 'langage'.

The distinction between 'linguistic theory' and 'theoretical linguistics' is by no means the only terminological distinction that I shall be drawing, here and in other chapters of this book. I do not wish to give the impression, however, that my sole (or primary) concern is at any point purely terminological. I am much more interested in the metatheoretical or methodological issues that the use of one term rather than another, or of one term in addition to another, helps us to identify. As far as the terms 'theoretical linguistics' and 'linguistic theory' are concerned, I wish to suggest that, if they are kept distinct, each of them can be usefully employed to refer to what have now emerged, or are in process of emerging, as two rather different, but equally important, sub-branches of linguistics.

When my Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968a) was published, more than twenty years ago, it was hailed by Bar-Hillel as "the first [book of its kind] ... to carry the long overdue adjective 'theoretical' in its title" (1969:449). It is worth noting in this connexion that, although most of the foreign-language editions did not hesitate to use the equivalent of 'theoretical' in the title, the publishers of both the French and German versions seem to have felt that the use of this adjective was not so much overdue as, in this case at least, premature or inapposite. In preference to (the equivalent of) 'theoretical linguistics' the former chose (the equivalent of) 'general linguistics' and the latter (the equivalent of) 'modern lingu­istics'. The term 'modern linguistics' is of no interest to us in the present context, but 'general linguistics' is; and I will come back to it below. Another review of my book, more critical than Bar-Hillel's and written from a more or less orthodox Chomskyan, or generativist, point of view - more orthodox, incidentally, than I myself have held either then or since - was published in Language (Starosta, 1971). It rightly drew attention to my failure to develop, seriously and consistently, the implications of the programmatic opening sentence, "Linguistics may be defined as the scientific study of language" (Lyons, 1968a: 1), and of obiter dicta ("statements with theoretical import... scattered in odd places throughout the book"; Starosta, 1971: 431) to the effect that one of "the proclaimed aims" of linguistics is "the construction of a scientific theory of human language" (Lyons, 1968a: 45).

This criticism was, I think, well founded. And I would now concede, further, that in the Introduction I not only failed to define 'theoretical linguistics' (tacitly identifying it with 'general linguistics' or even with 'linguistics' tout court), but I adopted far too narrow a view of its subject matter. In effect, I restricted the scope of theoretical linguistics to what I would now characterize as general, theoretical, synchronic microlinguistics (cf. Lyons, 1981a: 34-37). I still think that this constitutes the central and most distinctive part of theoretical linguistics (for reasons that I have explained in the preceding chapter). But I certainly do not believe that diachronic linguistics is intrinsically less theoretical than synchronic; that such branches of macrolinguistics as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, or stylistics are, by virtue of their data and the questions they address, less theoretical than microlinguistics; or even (though I grant that this is more debatable) that descriptive linguistics (i.e. the description of particular language-systems) is necessarily less theoretical than general linguistics (i.e., the study of language in general). I will not labour this point (though it has been much misunderstood by linguists) but shall take it for granted in all that follows.

The view of theoretical linguistics that I put forward in my 1968 textbook was more restricted than I now think it ought to have been in at least one other respect. Having started by defining linguistics, programmatically and perhaps tendentiously, as "the scientific study of language", I confined my attention thereafter to what is arguably but a subclass of languages – a subclass of which English, French, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. are held to be members and exemplars. Such languages may be referred to as N-languages (see Chapter 4). I shall have more to say about the properties of N-languages presently. An initial and provisional indication of the membership of the subclass of languages that I am referring to can be provided.

(Lyons J. Natural Language and Universal Grammar // Essays in Linguistic Theory. vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1991. P. 27–28)

TEXT 10.
Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe's “Tales of Mystery and Imagination”

…Since the 1950s, Edgar Allan Рое has, like so many classic American writers, become an academic industry. A visit to a university library will reveal volumes examining French criticism of Рое; Рое in Russia; the image of Рое in American poetry; Рое and the British magazine tradition; the Scandinavian response to Рое; Рое, Lacan and Derrida; and one 'simply' called Рое Рое Рое Рое Рое Рое Рое (presumably because the author, like his subject, believed in the powers of incantation). Yet for most people it surely remains the case that Рое has two great claims to fame. The first is that, in his three Dupin stories ('The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' and 'The Purloined Letter'), as well as the cipher tale, 'The Gold Bug', and the least-likely-suspect story, 'Thou Art The Man', he laid the foundations for the subsequent development of the detective story. Рое can be credited with the creation or very early refinements of the locked-room convention; the Olympian detective; the less-than-brilliant associate and chronicler; the linguistic and visual puzzle; the easily dismissed police force; the murder as disruption of a small town and the solving of crime as an intellectual exercise.

The second claim to fame is as one of the greatest of all writers of horror stories; not merely because he made more sophisticated the elements he took from the European Gothic tradition, such as subterranean dangers, the femme fatale (literally so in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'), burial alive, ghosts, excessive curiosity, the curse from the past and exotic locales, but because he fashioned those elements into a remarkable investigation of abnormal psychological states and obsessional behaviour (what he chose to call 'the imp of the perverse'). In his Preface to the original edition of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), Рое asserted that'... terror is not of Germany, but of the soul... ', thus immediately distancing himself from what he saw as outdated Gothic paraphernalia. The Gothic novel served as a major model for the early development of fiction in America. In an interesting British collection of American short stories published in 1930, I find that in the first two stories, 'Peter Rugg, The Missing Man' by William Austin (1824) and 'Rip Van Winkle' by Washington Irving (1819), both use the old Gothic notion of the man who defies a higher power and loses his place in the normal flow of time and in each case misses the change from colonies to new nation; an excellent example of the way in which a popular literary formula was used to air the stresses and nostalgias of contemporary life. One of the earliest published American novelists, Charles Brockden Brown, was a fully-fledged Gothic novelist, whose works substitute Indians for the demons of European Gothic; where humble two-storey wooden edifices, far from crumbling ruins, still hold terrors from the European past, and where the chaos of the plot mirrors the chaos of the first decades after the War of Revolution, when there seemed to be little tradition and few recognized moral and political codes to work with. Similarly, one does not have to read far into the tales and novels of a much greater American nineteenth-century writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to see how heavy was the influence of the European Gothic on his writing.

[1] Данный перевод является компиляцией переводов, выполненных студентами.

* Lingua Franca is a pidgin, a trade language used by numerous language communities around the Mediterranean, to communicate with others whose language they did not speak. It is, in fact, the mother of all pidgins, seemingly in use since the Middle Ages and surviving until the nineteenth century, when it disappeared with hardly a trace, probably under the onslaught of the triumphant French language, leaving only a few anecdotal quotations in the writings of travelers or observers… Like other pidgins, it had a limited vocabulary and a sharply circumscribed grammar, and lacked those things, such as verb tenses and case endings, that add specificity to human speech. The language was never written. No poetry, no folktales, no translation of the Bible, just a way to sell the merchandise you had to offer, or haggle for a better price on its purchase. Observers noted that the words constituting this pidgin were mainly of Romance origin, in particular, Italian, Spanish and Occitan, a language occupying an intermediate position between Spanish and French… Lingua Franca seemed to be lost forever, since it died before the advent of the tape recorder or of anthropologists anxious to record a moribund form of human speech, however bizarre, and even laughable, it may have seemed. –