Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera

Portencial heurístico de la Historiografía lingüística: el anzuelo de Plantón. Cómo inventan los lingüistas su historia, de Xavier Laborda

Heuristic potential of linguistic historiography: Plato’s hook. How linguists invent their history, by Xavier Laborda. The book has three chapters. In the first chapter, the contributions to the historiography of linguistics made by V. Thomsen, R. H. Robins and U. Eco are explained and assessed. The second chapter is devoted to discussing the role of rhetoric in the history of linguistics, the so-called Plato’s program as stated in his influential Cratylo and the significance of G. B. Shaw’s Pigmalion as a manifestation of the grammatical paradigm in linguistic historiography. In the last section of this chapter and in the first section of the following chapter, the links between the theory of architecture and the history of linguistic thought are the topic of a suggestive discussion. In the third chapter it is shown how the biographies of M. Twain and S. Pepys can be used to illustrate certain aspects of the historiography of linguistics. The fourth section of the chapter contains a brief discussion of Port-Royal grammar and of Cartesian linguistics. The following section contains a stimulating discussion of the connections between the tower of Babel myth, the library of Alexandria and Plato’s Cratylus. The last section is intended as both a summary and a conclusion for the book.

Linguistic Structure and Social Structure

Lenkersdorf’s paper tries to highlight the contention that foreign cultures and languages should be understood in their own terms. In this sense, it is important to underline that it is not fair to directly apply certain concepts such as science , culture or law as defined in Western societies to local communities whose culture has an entirely different background. It shows and illustrates this point by examining in considerable detail different forms and aspects of Tojolabal social and linguistic life. Unfortunately, some of the ways of doing that do not seem appropriate to me, at least from a linguistic point of view. The author starts with an interesting observation: in the Tseltal community in which the author lived, a single word appeared constantly in everyday speech. It is the word teek , meaning ‘we’. This is directly related to the alleged fact that the social organisation of this community is built on WE; for the discussion to follow it is important to note that ‘we’ and WE are distinct elements: the first is a pronoun and the second is not a pronoun but presumably a social entity. In the paper, it is stated that the Tojolabal community bases its education, justice, science and social organisation on the collectivity and not on the individual. I have nothing substantial to say about the correctness of this social description of the Tojolabal community it appears to be fair and exact. Nevertheless, I object to the much-used procedure that consists in seeking direct correlations between language structure and society. It is widely known among linguists that there is not a direct relationship between the grammatical structure of a language and the cultural, political or religious organisation of the corresponding society except for certain superficial traits (located mainly in the lexicon). One can only say safely that if a certain object or concept is particularly important for a society, it is expected that one or several words denoting that object or concept (natural objects and events, kinship relationships, body parts, certain instruments, and so on) could be found in the language or languages spoken in that society. But beyond obvious cases such as these, it is extremely risky to state a direct relationship between grammar and society. I will try to demonstrate in this commentary that such an enterprise is ultimately based on the myth of primitive societies and cultures. Frequency in use is not a reliable factor for determining a direct language/ society correlation. Let me illustrate this point with a couple of examples. It

SÍNTESIS Y ANÁLISIS EN LAS LENGUAS. CRÍTICA DE LA TIPOLOGÍA MORFOLÓGICA CLÁSICA Y DE ALGUNAS DE SUS APLICACIONES SINCRÓNICAS Y DIACRÓNICAS

The classical morphological classification of languages into three types (isolating, agglutinating and inflectional) was interpreted in the nineteenth century as indicative of three stages of language evolution. It was assumed that the inflectional type was the more evolved stage in language development. Although this classification is still in use in the current linguistic literature, no linguist appears to maintain explicitly that interpretation. Nonetheless, there are some recent proposals in which some version of that interpretation is assumed. In this paper two of these proposals are critically analized. The first consists in McWhorters (2001) statement that the grammar of creoles are the simplest grammars. The second is Alineis (1996) contention that the three language types correlate with the prehistoric development of tool-making. It is shown that the points made by both McWhorter and Alinei are ethnocentrically biased and lack a sound linguistic basis.