Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

34 Sections
(In fact the very “gavagai” by itself means nothing. Contrary, the inner act of a native saying
that, represents the meaning of the word. That becomes clear not from the grammar, but from
the complex communicative situation).
The change of viewpoint “from relative words to universal acts” makes it possible to reinterpret
the former linguistic material in a new way (a short sample of the Jewish Greekspeaking
texts, i.e. NT Corpus, could be not out of interest).
References:
Quine W.V.O. Word and Object (Chapter 2), 1960; Ontological Relativism (1977);
Horsley G.H.R. The Fiction of “ Jewish Greek ”, in: New Documents… v. 5, 1989, etc.
Relativism and Universalism in Traditional Grammar
Walmsley, John
University of Bielefeld
john.walmsley@uni-bielefeld.de
The swing from relativism to universalism and back in the history of Linguistics is like the
swing of a pendulum, moving through time from one extreme to the other. The periodical preeminence
of one view or the other, however, must always be seen against a background of
ongoing change: change in motivation, change in definition, change in the ideological
context. Against this background, Structuralism - emphasising the unique individuality of
each language, can be seen as a specific form of relativism.
The structuralist ~ universalist dilemma (“Which facts exactly are we looking at?”) and the
responses to it can be illustrated by the development of modern English grammatical
terminology in 15 th. century England. It is commonly assumed that Bullokar was the
grammarian first responsible for the transfer of Latin grammatical categories to English. In
fact, Bullokar came towards the end of a two-hundred-year period over which a rich and
diverse grammatical terminology was developed. This terminology forms the basis of socalled
“Traditional Grammar” (TG) - no longer practised but still exercising considerable
influence, as we shall see. When Structuralist influence was at its peak around the middle of
last century, TG was criticized for failing to deal with the language under discussion - the
object language - on its own terms (Crystal 1971, Dinneen 1972). This criticism raises the
question: if older grammarians made this foolish mistake, did they do it on purpose, out of
ignorance or incompetence, lack of proper training? Chomsky (1964) took a different view,
seeing the traditional enterprise as an attempt to postulate a set of universal grammatical
categories in terms of which all languages could be described.
The answer must be sought in the context in which the texts were produced. In England, until
the mid-14 th . century Latin (the object-language) was taught through the medium of French
(meta-language). From around 1350 to about 1600 grammars were increasingly written in
English. Over the same period, however, the texts undergo a striking metamorphosis. From
the initial situation, in which the metalanguage was English and the object-language Latin, the
roles are steadily reversed, so that we finish with English as the object-language and Latin the
metalanguage.
This case study shows how - and why - the grammatical categories of Latin came to be
transferred to English. It also underscores the central role played by terminology. In the
context of the relativism ~ universalism debate, the study brings into sharp focus the question
of how “the very same facts” are to be interpreted.