In this interview, we talk to Adam Schembri about the nature of sign languages, how they have been studied in the past, and how they are studied today.

Image: HamNoSys base hand shapes, from “HamNoSys – Representing Sign Language Data in Language
Resources and Language Processing Contexts” by Thomas Hanke

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References for Episode 61

Baker, A., van den Bogarde, B., Pfau, R., & Schermer, T. (2016). The Linguistisc of Sign Languages: An introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hill, J.C., Lillo-Martin, D.C. & Wood, S.K. (2025). Sign Languages: Structures and Contexts. London: Routledge.

Johnston, T. & Schembri, A. (2007) Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An introduction to sign language linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kendon, A. (1988) Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cultural, Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Klima, E.S., Bellugi, U. (1979) The signs of language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Schembri, A., Fenlon, J., Cormier, K, Johnston, T. (2026) Sign Language Linguistics: Exploring BSL and ASL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stokoe, W. C. (1960) Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication System of the American Deaf. Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers, Vol. 8, Buffalo, NY: University of Buffalo.

Wilkinson, E. & Morford, J.P (2024). Understanding Signed Languages. London: Routledge.

Adam Schembri’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/adamcschembri/home

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:09] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:12] Today we’re in Birmingham, England, talking to Adam Schembri, who’s Professor of Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. [00:19] Adam is, among other things, an expert on sign language linguistics. [00:24] He’s co-author, along with Trevor Johnston, of the 2007 book Australian Sign Language: An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics, which can claim to be the standard work on Auslan, and co-author of Sign Language Linguistics, which is coming out in June 2026 with Cambridge University Press. [00:45]

AS: They’ve just told us it’s coming out in July. [00:47]

JMc: Oh, it’s coming out in July, OK. [00:49] So in this interview, Adam’s going to tell us about how sign languages fit into the broader theoretical landscape of linguistics. [00:57] So to get us started, can you tell us what sign languages are, what are their defining characteristics, and why do we consider them a kind of language? [01:06] I mean, etymologically, our word ‘language’ is derived from a word meaning ‘tongue’, which suggests to me that we think of speech, sounds that we make with our mouths and that we hear with our ears, as being the essential characteristic of language. But obviously modality is not the key thing if sign languages are also languages, so what’s going on there? [01:27]

AS: Yeah, I mean, I think for a long time, if you look at the history of linguistics, sign languages were certainly dismissed. [01:33] So, you know, some of the big names in early 20th century linguistics, Bloomfield and other people, they didn’t consider sign languages to be languages. [01:42] Actually, though, if we go back a bit further in time in the 19th century, there are psychologists and others who did recognize sign languages as languages. [01:51] In particular, there are a couple of books written by scholars who worked on topics related to educating Deaf children who recognized sign languages as languages. [02:00] I mean, I think what I find really interesting is, I think sign languages are, you know, used by a tiny minority of the world’s population, and yet the implications for linguistics are enormous because they have really, I think, very subtly reshaped the whole focus of the field. [02:21] So I think there’s a lot more interest today in spoken language as multimodal systems, as speech and gesture packaging, and I think that’s probably come about because of the influence of sign languages. [02:34] But modern sign language linguistics, we generally consider an American researcher, William Stokoe, to be the key figure in the history of modern sign language linguistics. [02:48] There was earlier work by a Dutch researcher called Tervoort, which anticipated the work of Stokoe’s, but it was really Stokoe that was most influential because he took kind of a standard structuralist linguistic perspective and applied it to American Sign Language. [03:04] It must be said, he was working at Gallaudet College, which is a tertiary institution in the United States, rather unique in being a university or college that was established for Deaf people specifically. [03:18] So he was working there, and ironically, he was working there with Deaf and hearing academics, all of whom dismissed his interest in American Sign Language. [03:26] They thought this was just a kind of slang, broken English kind of way of speaking, so very similar to the attitudes that existed to African American Vernacular English at the time. [03:36] They kind of just thought of it as a broken form of English, but he learned to sign using what we would call signed English, so sign-supported English, so he would speak in English and he would support his spoken English with key signs. Right? [03:50] That was what he was told to do as a method of instruction, but often the Deaf students wouldn’t understand him, and he would see them translating for each other in class, and he’d go, “What’s going on there?” Like, “They’re communicating more effectively with each other than I am with them.” Right? [04:04] “I want to understand what they’re doing.” [04:06] And so he published a work which basically applied the minimal pair analysis to American Sign Language and showed that American Sign Language, the signs of American Sign Language were composed of smaller parts, right? [04:20] Sublexical elements. [04:22] He called them by fancy Latin names that we don’t want to use today, but generally in the field, they were known, they’re now known as handshape, location and movement, and he saw that the signs that the Deaf students were using at Gallaudet College were all combinations and recombinations of a set of handshapes, movements and locations. [04:44] And so by applying that analysis, he was able to demonstrate that signs weren’t, American Sign Language signs weren’t just holistic, imagistic symbols, but were created from sublexical components in the same way that spoken language words are. [05:02]

JMc: So is the key thing duality of patterning. [05:04]

AS: So it was the duality of patterning, yes. [05:06] I mean, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because we’ve realized actually the duality of patterning thing is a bit problematic for sign languages. [05:13] Many of these sublexical elements actually are meaningful as well, but that came later, and Stokoe actually revised his thinking on this much later. [05:23] But initially he was able to demonstrate in a 1960 publication, which didn’t have a huge impact at the time… [05:30] I think, kind of what really happened a bit later was two other researchers, Edward Klima, who was a linguist in San Diego and his partner, Ursula Bellugi, who was a psycholinguist, neuroscientist, they got really interested in this topic from about the late ’60s because they were interested in, if children have some kind of innate tendency to learn languages, what happens in the case of sign languages? [06:00] So they were really interested in this, and they set up a lab and some of the first sign language researchers, both Deaf and hearing, were trained in that lab and learned their craft there, and they published a book called The Signs of Language in 1979. [06:15] So like nearly 20 years after Stokoe, but this, it was the ’70s where sign language linguistics really took off in the United States, and then it began to spread to other parts of the world, including to Europe, and like the first international sign language research conference was, was in, I think in Stockholm in 1979, and so then it gradually spread from there. [06:34] And meanwhile, you know, there were these researchers like Adam Kendon and others, David McNeill, doing studies on co-speech gesture, and I think the two areas started to come together in the 1990s when people started to think about, “Okay, so how much are gestures like signs and how much are, how much signing can be equated with gestures?” [06:55] And I think both of the fields have fed off each other, but in linguistics, there’s still a lot of focus… [07:00] Like if you look at typology, for example, there’s still a huge focus only on spoken languages, right? [07:06] That’s partly our fault as sign language researchers. [07:09] We’re not very good at communicating with spoken language researchers or indeed at publishing things that are accessible to spoken language researchers. [07:16] It’s a two-way thing, right? [07:17] So sign, spoken language linguists, some part, you often don’t pay enough attention to the work that we’re doing or see implications in our work for their understanding of spoken languages either. [07:29] It’s clear it’s a language because it has both the structure of language and the use and the function of language, so it’s used in all the same ways. [07:39] Sign languages are used in all the same ways that spoken languages are. [07:42] You have sign language poetry, you have sign language… you can pun in a sign language. [07:47] You know, I mean, there’s so many ways that they are the same, right? [07:52] But the key difference is the visual modality, and there’s a lot of iconicity in spoken languages, but there’s a lot more, obviously, I will stand by this — even though there are people in my very department who have explored this issue, like Marcus Perlman and Bodo Winter, who are in my department here at Birmingham and have explored the iconicity of spoken languages and revealed that there’s a lot more iconicity in spoken languages than people realise — but I would still maintain iconicity is a much stronger driving factor in sign languages. [08:23]

JMc: So just on the structural level, so you mentioned that typologists, linguistic typologists are generally only interested in spoken languages. [08:31]

AS: Yeah, that’s often because the data is more easily accessible to them, to be honest. [08:35]

JMc: But are there direct equivalents between the sort of formal properties of spoken languages and the formal properties of sign languages? [08:42]

AS: Yeah, I mean, you can talk about sublexical structure, you can talk about a phonology of sign languages. [08:48] We’ve pretty much accepted that term, even though, as you point out, ‘language’ is based on the word for tongue, ‘phonology’ based on the word for sound. [08:55] We’ve been talking about the phonology of sign languages for the last 40 years, right? 40 or 50 years. [09:01]

JMc: What does that mean? [09:02]

AS: It means research into how the sublexical components of signs work: the hand shapes, the locations, the movements. [09:11] We now think of signs as being composed of five sublexical features: hand shape, hand orientation, location and movement. [09:20] So signs can contrast in all of those features, and there’s an additional fifth factor, which is called non-manual features, which involve things like facial expressions, or mouth gestures, or mouthing of English words, for example, which often co-occurs with signing. [09:35] All of these things can have meaningful, have a contrastive role to play in sign languages as well. [09:39]

JMc: Yeah, and you can parametrize them in the same way that you can parametrize like places of articulation. [09:44]

AS: That’s right. Right. [09:45] So it’s very similar. [09:46] It really is actually a lot more similar than you think, because if you think about it, speech is based on gestures of the oral tract, right? [09:53] So you have a place of articulation that’s equivalent to a location for a sign. [09:57] You have a manner of articulation that’s equivalent to the movement of the hand. [10:01] You have articulators. Are they the lips? Are they the tongue? And that’s equivalent to the handshapes, right? [10:06] So it’s a lot more similar when you think about speech as based on physical gestures. [10:12] Of course, we listen to the result of those gestures, but we also look at each other’s articulators and we use mouthing, you know, to assist our comprehension in face-to-face communication. [10:26]

JMc: Well, I guess it can also override auditory signals, like the McGurk effect, is it called? [10:30]

AS: Exactly. So we know that both things are really, really important. [10:33] There is actually studies showing that hearing signers like myself use more co-speech gesture, and in fact, our signing interferes with our co-speech gesture. [10:44] So we’ll often do a co-speech sign when we’re speaking. [10:48] Even to non-signing hearing people, that still happens. [10:52] Really interesting stuff about, we know now that bilinguals are actively suppressing one of their languages while using the other, because we know that with bimodal bilinguals like me, people who have a spoken language and a sign language, we don’t have to suppress the sign language as much, so it tends to come out. [11:11] Of course, you can’t do that if you’re a spoken language bilingual. [11:14] You can’t really simultaneously articulate words of two languages, but we know from bimodal bilinguals that actually you’re busy suppressing your other language while you’re speaking the one that you’re using at the time. [11:27] Anyway, so there’s also a morphology, so we can talk about, you know, derivational and inflectional processes in sign languages. [11:35] Obviously there’s a syntax, because you’ve got a vocabulary and there are ways to combine those elements to create a clause. [11:41]

JMc: So can we just talk about the morphology? How does that work? [11:45]

AS: Well, okay. So you get examples in sign languages of what many linguists would consider inflection, involve, for example, modifying verb signs to indicate subject and object arguments. [11:58] So there’s a subset of verb signs, which are called, they’re known by various names: agreement verbs, indicating verbs, directional verbs. [12:06] It depends on your theoretical framework, which what you call them. [12:09] I call them indicating verbs because they literally point to locations associated with the subject and the object argument. [12:16] Now, you’re sitting in front of me, James. So I can take the sign for ‘ask’, for example, and I can start the sign close to you and move it towards my chest, and that would mean in BSL, ‘You ask me’, and I do the reverse, you know, from me towards you, and that means ‘I ask you’, right? [12:36] And if there are two third-person arguments, neither you nor me, you know, I might set them up on the right and the left, and I would associate. [12:43] So I might say, you know, Mary on the right and John on the left, and so I’d fingerspell that name, point to the right, fingerspell John, point to the left, and then I can move the sign ASK from Mary to John, and that would mean ‘Mary asked John,’ right? [12:59] So this is considered… That’s why they’re sometimes called agreement verbs. [13:02] It’s considered a kind of person agreement marking. [13:05] It’s certainly… I don’t know whether you want to call it agreement. [13:08] Not all of us agree on whether it should be called agreement, but certainly it is flagging arguments, because it’s telling you who the subject and object arguments of the verb are. [13:18]

JMc: But is there a formal distinction in how the signs are produced between what you’re calling morphology and what you might call syntax, or is it those signs correspond to what is called verbal agreement in a spoken language, and so that’s why you consider it morphology? [13:33]

AS: Yes. Well, it becomes more syntactic if you have the arguments actually realized and to create the clause. [13:39] So obviously when you’ve got a clause with just a verb, you know, not much syntax going on because there’s just a single element, right? [13:46] But you can specify the arguments, or you can put in noun phrases that refer to the arguments and then get, you know, a fuller kind of clause with, with argument structure. [13:56] There’s a lot of research showing that, well, British Sign Language and Auslan are strongly pro-drop languages. [14:03] So there’s a lot, you know, in a narrative, for example, we’ve done studies of narratives, and you’ll find a majority of clauses are verb-only, but if you do have a transitive verb and you have two arguments, it tends to be SVO, right? [14:18] We suspect this is the influence of the surrounding spoken language, but you do find in sign languages that, like spoken languages, the word orders tend to be predominantly SOV or SVO, but you can get more flexibility in the argument structure. [14:33] So you can get, you know, other types of combinations, but sometimes they might be signalled in some way. [14:39] So for example, if you want to topicalize the object and move it to the front and have something like OSV, you might mark the object, because it’s not in an expected word order, with a brow raise, for example, or there might be a slight pause after the object. [14:53] So there are ways of signalling that you have topicalized that element. [14:57] So these are examples of the syntax of sign languages. OK. [15:01]

JMc: OK, and I guess that’s sort of equivalent to intonation in spoken language. [15:04]

AS: Yes. OK. Yeah. Very similar to the intonation patterns of spoken language. Yeah. [15:07]

JMc: OK. And when you talk about things like word order, you’re talking about the temporal order in which the arguments are realized. [15:12]

AS: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

JMc: OK, because the spatial dimension is also important. [15:15]

AS: The spatial dimension is also, but it’s also segmental, right? [15:18] It’s also sequential in the sense that I start in one location, I move to another. [15:22] So even within the internal, like the sign-internal structure, there’s some sequentiality, but then you get co-occurring facial expressions and that’s a bit like intonation, and so that’s where you get more kind of simultaneity of structure. [15:36] So I could, you know, I could produce, “you ask me”, so I direct the sign, “you ask”, you know, ASK from your location towards mine, and if I do it with a brow raise, that might be a yes-no question, like, “Did you ask me something?” [15:52] Or if I did it with a brow furrow, it might be saying, “You asked me… what, exactly?” [15:57] You know, so there are ways of signalling those kinds of things. [16:01] Or I could shake my head, right? And that would be a negation. [16:04] So I could simultaneously shake the head while I produce that single verb sign, and that would negate it saying, “You didn’t ask me,” or “You don’t ask me something.” [16:13] So head shake being used for negation is a very common feature of sign languages, but there are also manual negators, so signs that are negators as well, and it’s much more common to use a combination of the manual negator and the non-manual, the head shake. [16:29] We found, we’ve just published a paper actually on negation in British Sign Language based on spontaneous data. [16:36]

JMc: So in terms of the sociolinguistic dimension of sign languages then, I mean, you mentioned that there’s poetry and that you can pun and you can do all of the things in sign languages, you can do all of the things that you can do in spoken languages, but in a large-scale spoken language, like English, for example, or German or Chinese, there are lots of different registers that are in different domains and no single person will command all of those registers. [17:02] And even, but a single person might use different ones in different circumstances, like if they’re giving a formal speech or just talking to friends. [17:11] And all of this is exhibited in sign languages as well? [17:12]

AS: That’s exactly the same. So like, you know, if I give a talk on linguistics in BSL, I will use linguistics terminology, so there’s signs for syntax, morphology, phonology. [17:22] These are not generally known to most signers, although a lot of signers do know. [17:27] This is the amazing thing is, because books like our book on Auslan have had a big impact on, you know, because they’re the only book, unfortunately, that’s the only book on the linguistics of the language, and lots of Auslan students in Australia read that book, right? [17:41] So they get a grounding in linguistics. [17:44] So linguistics has actually had a huge impact on teaching sign languages because a lot of the work that we’ve done as linguists feeds directly into sign language curricula, right? [17:54] And so a lot of the terms, so a lot of Auslan students in Australia will know, you know, words like ‘morphology’ and ‘syntax’ and ‘phonology’ and things like that, [18:04] and they’ll know the signs as well, but generally, of course, most members of the Deaf community don’t know those signs. [18:10] So yes, you do get register differentiation in sign languages as well, but obviously it depends on the size of the community and how much opportunity there has been for Deaf people to move into different domains. [18:23] So for example, in Australia, prior to the Disability Discrimination Act in the 1990s, signing Deaf people had a lot of difficulty accessing university education. [18:33] So there weren’t many, there wasn’t a very big professional class of Deaf people in Australia, but after the Disability Discrimination Act was passed, there was a huge backlog of Deaf people accessing universities in Australia in the 1990s. and now suddenly you’ve got a much more, you’ve got a larger professional class of middle-class people who’ve studied law, who’ve studied science, who’ve studied all kinds of things at university. [18:58] And so the vocab in Auslan for these things has expanded quite a lot. [19:03] But the other way that register differences are shown in Auslan is the use of fingerspelling. [19:08] So besides the sign language vocabulary, there is a system of fingerspelling where you have 26 combinations of your two hands to represent the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, and fluent fingerspellers can very rapidly fingerspell quite long English words. [19:24] And so there’s a lot of incorporation of English technical vocabulary where there are lexical gaps in the language. [19:30] So in the past, there was a lot of reliance on the fingerspelling element, but because more Deaf people have gone to university and become, you know, professionals in law and science and other areas, sign language vocabulary has grown to meet that kind of demand. [19:44] But there’s still language planning involved. [19:46] So here in the UK, for example, there’s been a whole series of workshops by Deaf scientists and Deaf linguists to create vocabulary for the STEM subjects. [19:57] So a few years ago, where there was a group of people who got together and agreed on signs for the different planets, for example. [20:03] There hadn’t previously been standardized signs for the planets in BSL. [20:09] There’s an extensive online STEM vocabulary where standardized signs for a range of STEM concepts have been proposed. [20:17]

JMc: And those are sort of pure signs that draw on those? [20:19]

AS: Yeah, they draw on the visual elements, so things like, you know, the rings of Saturn are represented in the sign for Saturn and the great storm on Jupiter’s surface represented in the sign for Jupiter and things like that, so visual elements of the planets incorporated into the signs. [20:34] So yeah, they’re very visual, but they’re kind of standard ways. [20:38] So people now, for example, in Deaf schools, if they’re teaching that subject, they’ll go and consult the glossary so that they use the same signs that have been recommended as signs, but there’s still a lot of diversity in the community, right? [20:51] So people are going to come up with their own signs for things often as well, and often if you have an interpreter and a Deaf student studying a new area at the university, they will agree on a set of signs to use in that specific domain, and they may not be used by the wider community. [21:08] So you do get this register differentiation, but it’s a bit different from in English because English, of course, has a long history of being used in all of these domains by large numbers of people, right? [21:19] When you get a much smaller community with less access to all of these areas of life and study, then there’s been some catching up to do, but there’s nothing in the language that limits what can be talked about. [21:34] But it may be that there aren’t standard ways of talking about some very specific concepts that we have in English. [21:40]

JMc: And is there literature in the sense of, like, is there a Shakespeare of Auslan or of BSL? [21:45]

AS: No, there isn’t really an equivalent, but there are… because, of course, sign languages aren’t written languages, so you’re getting more of a kind of video literature now, like people, for example… [21:58] So, you know, sign language poetry began to be documented like in the ’80s and the ’90s with VHS recordings, but now, you know, there’s a lot more of that material online, so there are several sign language poets quite active in creating sign language poetry. [22:14] There are sign-language-specific visual forms. [22:17] So there’s something called Visual Vernacular, which is a Deaf theatre form in which people use signs and gestures that are as visual as possible in order to produce theatrical events that can be accessible to both Deaf and hearing audiences. [22:35] So that’s why it’s called the Visual Vernacular. [22:37] It’s supposed to reach out to people who don’t sign. [22:39] But that’s something that’s been created by theatres of Deaf people borrowing elements from mime and other things. [22:45] So there’s not really a Shakespeare equivalent, but there are certainly like poet laureates in the British Deaf community. [22:52] In fact, there is actually an award every year by the British Deaf Association to a poet laureate. [22:57]

JMc: Literature doesn’t necessarily depend on writing because like there’s also, you know, oral traditions. [23:02]

AS: Yes, yes. [23:03]

JMc: Sometimes with putative authors, you know, like Homeric epics. [23:06]

AS: Yes. No, we don’t really… there’s not really… [23:08] But there is a tradition of like Deaf jokes and Deaf stories that are passed down. [23:12] There are lots of really amazing Deaf jokes, some of them quite shocking for hearing people. [laughs] [23:20]

JMc: Because they… [23:21]

AS: because they involve mocking hearing people. [laughs] [23:25] There’s quite a famous joke about, you know, there’s an American and a Russian and a Deaf man on a train. [23:30] Right? And the American buys this big bottle of Coke and starts drinking it, but he only drinks a little bit of it, and then he throws out the Coke out the window. Right? [23:40] And the other people say, “What are you doing? You’re throwing the Coke away.” And he says, “Oh, there’s plenty of Coke in my country.” [23:44] And then the Russian starts drinking vodka, same thing, sips a bottle of vodka, throws the bottle away. “What are you doing?” [23:50] “Oh, there’s plenty of vodka in my country.” [23:52] So the Deaf man looks at the Russian and looks at the hearing, grabs them, throws them out the window, says, “Plenty of hearing people in my country.” [23:58] [laughs] [24:00] So those kinds of jokes, you know, so there’s lots of that kind of humour, and also Deaf storytelling. [24:07] You know, Deaf people love to tell stories about, specifically about their growing up experiences. [24:14] So many Deaf people grow up with hearing parents, and in the past, hearing parents who were encouraged not to sign by medical professionals who incorrectly believed it would interfere with the spoken language and literacy development of their Deaf children. [24:29] Right? We now know that actually Deaf children who acquire sign language from birth go on to develop really the best spoken language and literacy skills in the spoken language of the surrounding community, whereas often Deaf adults whose parents were hearing, who were encouraged not to sign, unfortunately, many Deaf adults in the adult Deaf community have varying degrees of what’s called language deprivation because they didn’t get exposed to an accessible language during the, you know, the sensitive critical period in the early stages of their life, and this can sometimes, you know, create challenges for their education because they don’t acquire their first language within that window, and it really is difficult then to acquire a second language. [25:15] English is a second language, and English literacy, and so it puts them at a real educational disadvantage for their entire life, and so it’s a very, very serious thing, and you only get this phenomenon of language deprivation in Deaf people because hearing children inevitably get exposed… [25:32] You know, I mean, there’s a few famous cases in linguistics like Genie, etc., but they’re extraordinarily rare. [25:38] You know, most hearing children can’t avoid acquiring one or more spoken languages from birth, but only with Deaf children do you get this phenomenon. [25:48] And mostly it reflects bad… It reflects misinformation, right, during most of the 20th century where medical professionals, speech pathologists, audiologists, educators of Deaf children really wrongly believed that sign languages were not bona fide languages and couldn’t provide a linguistic foundation for Deaf children to acquire the spoken language of their surrounding community. [26:12] And we now know that, tragically, that that was just a hugely incorrect view. [26:17]

JMc: Do you know why attitudes change like that? [26:20] Or do you have any speculations about it? [26:23] Because you mentioned that in the 19th century, there was work on sign languages, but it seems to have, there seems to have been a dip. [26:29]

AS: Yes.

AS: So in 18… It’s quite famous. [26:32] This is another famous part of Deaf folklore. [26:35] Everyone talks about the 1880 Milan Congress. [26:40] So there was the Congress of Educators of the Deaf, right? [26:44] So there was an international association for education of Deaf children and it would have a congress, and in 1880, there was a congress in Milan in which primarily the hearing majority of educators at this congress declared that spoken language should be the language of instruction in schools for Deaf children and that the focus should be on spoken language, right? [27:08] We suspect this was actually because many of the Deaf children that were entered Deaf schools in the 19th century tended to be children who had acquired deafness at some point in their childhood, right? [27:21] So they already had a foundation in spoken language before they became deaf, right? [27:25] And the children who were born deaf were a minority in that population. [27:30] So they weren’t really as well understood as perhaps the larger number of Deaf people, Deaf children who had acquired deafness during their childhood and therefore had some speech, right? [27:40] So we think it was probably this kind of alongside a kind of very Darwinian notion that sign languages were somehow lesser than and that spoken languages represented, you know, some kind of peak human achievement. [27:55] So yeah, so sign languages were banned from the education of the Deaf. [28:01] Now, this affected different countries differently. [28:04] So, here in the UK, it affected a lot of schools pretty much from the 19th century and into the 20th century. [28:09] In Australia, the effect was less dramatic, and in some other parts of the world, it was less dramatic. [28:16] So sign language continued to be used in schools for Deaf children intothe 20th century, but we still had a period in Australia of what’s called oralism, where there was an exclusive focus on spoken language as a language of instruction and a focus on using hearing aids and whatever available technology there was to assist Deaf kids’ listening skills and lip reading skills, but this didn’t work for many, many Deaf kids. [28:41] And even today with cochlear implants, which have proven so successful for many Deaf children and given them near-normal experiences of spoken language acquisition, even many of these children, you can’t always predict when you implant a child whether the cochlear implant will work for that child or not. [28:59] Even with today’s technology, lots of those kids actually who use cochlear implants, some of them will come to the signing Deaf community later in life because they find that they’re actually more comfortable with using sign languages. [29:10] So the recommendation from linguists and from many people in the Deaf community today is even with successful cochlear implantation or hearing aid use, give the child access to sign language alongside access to a spoken language from as early an age as possible because the sign language is the only fully accessible language for that Deaf child and can form a really rock-solid foundation for their acquisition of other languages in the future. [29:40]

JMc: We can accept that sign languages are full-featured languages on a par with any spoken language, but why is it that hearing people by default will learn a spoken language and use it and not a sign language? [29:54]

AS: That’s a very interesting question. [29:56] We do know that in fact lots of Indigenous communities, including Australia, have alternate sign languages which they use in certain circumstances. [30:05] So the most well-known cases are, of course… [30:08] I mean, apart from the Cistercian monks in Europe, OK, so, of course, there were monks in Europe that had vows of silence that used sign languages in those situations. [30:16] Similarly in Australia, you know, there are periods of spoken language taboo. [30:20] So in certain groups of Indigenous Australians, you know, there are long periods in which particularly women, the female relatives of a deceased person, experience a period of speech taboo in which they’re not allowed to speak, and they use sign language in those circumstances. [30:37] But similarly, a lot of those sign languages are also used in other contexts like during hunting in order to not disturb the prey. [30:45] Also, there’s been a lot of studies showing multimodal narrative practices in which Indigenous people will speak while retelling a story but throw in a few signs as well, as well as doing sand drawing, you know, while they’re, you know, seated on the ground and telling a story. [31:03] So quite multimodal experiences using speech, sign, sometimes music, sometimes drawing. [31:09] And in the North American case is Plains Indian Sign Language, where different tribes of Native Americans would get together and use sign language, use Plains Indian Sign Language as a lingua franca, so to communicate across the different spoken languages. [31:23] So we do know that there are actually a lot of communities that are bimodal in this sense, bimodal bilingual, they use a sign language as well as a spoken language. [31:32] But yeah, it’s really interesting question why hearing communities tend to be predominantly spoken language ones. [31:39] I mean, there are possible reasons. [31:42] The use of spoken language when there is no light, OK, or maybe also using a spoken language enables you to use your hands for something else at the same time as you’re using, as you’re speaking, you know, when you’re giving instructions on a manual task in a sign language, you have to alternate between signing the instructions and then doing the task, right? [32:02] So it might be something as trivial as that, that mean that hearing people prefer spoken languages. [32:09] But I think the key thing to remember is yes, speech is the primary means of communicating, but that doesn’t mean that they, you know, hearing people in face-to-face communication, don’t also use their bodies and their hands. [32:21] They do that a lot, right? [32:23] But it just turns out that in terms of the message, the spoken language gesture package, most of the information is in the speech, right? [32:32] But there’s still a lot of information that’s represented gesturally that isn’t always encoded in the speech, right? [32:40] So it is important to remember that spoken languages, even though they are the primary means of communication for the majority of hearing communities, they are multimodal as well, so I think we forget that at our peril. [32:53]

JMc: And how did you get into sign languages? [32:55]

AS: My first partner had Deaf parents. [32:57] So my first partner, when I was at university, he’s what’s called in the Deaf community a CODA, Child of Deaf Adults, right? [33:06] And so a CODA is usually a hearing child who grows up with Deaf parents. [33:11] And so a CODA will often acquire their sign language as their first language, their heritage language of the home, and they will acquire a spoken language some other way, right? [33:22] So yeah, my first partner had Deaf parents, and so his first language was Auslan. [33:27] He was a very fluent signer, and I was with him for a long time before I got the courage to go to sign language class, because he’d always say, “Go to class,” right? “Go to class, and then you can talk to my Deaf friends,” right? You know. [33:38] And so eventually I got up the courage to go to sign language class, and then once I started to reach a certain level of fluency, he started to sign back to me, and then it just grew from there, because he had a… we had a whole community that were just waiting to talk to me, like all of his friends, some of his family. [33:55] Yeah, I was very lucky, because I got so much support from the Deaf community, because I was already kind of on the outskirts of the Deaf community already through my relationship with my partner. [34:07] And then we broke up, but we stayed friends, and then I decided to study to become a sign language interpreter, and then I met my next partner in that sign language class, and we were partners for 20 years. [34:21] And he and I became sign language interpreters in Australia, and so we, again, the relationship with the Deaf community then just continued, because I had a partner who could sign as well. [34:30] And so we would often socialize with Deaf people, and actually, when you do have a sign language as a hearing person, you find so many opportunities to use it. [34:39] It’s incredibly useful. [34:42] You want to be in a nightclub, you’re the only people having a conversation right across the dance floor and getting your partner to get the next round of drinks, exactly what you want, because you can sign it to them. Right? [34:53] And everyone else is shouting over the music, but you’re having a great conversation with all of your friends. [35:02] But yeah, it’s incredibly useful. [35:04] So I can see why, for example, in Indigenous communities in Australia, where storytelling becomes multimodal, you can see why that happens, right? [35:13] Because it opens up a whole new potential for communication in another channel that can co-occur with the spoken channel, so once you have it, why wouldn’t you do it? [35:23]

JMc: And what is it like being a non-native signer, so effectively being an outsider to the community, but being an expert on the linguistics of it, on the science of it? [35:33]

AS: Yes. I’ve seen a real change during my career. [35:38] So I started my Ph.D in 1995. [35:41] I went to the first international sign linguistics conference, which was in Montreal in 1996. [35:46] I went to that conference, and the field then was predominantly hearing people. [35:51] It was really dominated by hearing people who were very interested in, for example, applying linguistic theories to sign languages. [35:59] So it seemed like sign languages were the ultimate test case for the use of universal grammar and things like that, so there was a lot of theoretical linguistics and a lot of hearing people, and a lot of hearing people who didn’t sign very well, right? [36:13] And who would often work with Deaf research assistants, and their communication might not be very effective with that person, and then, you know, the Deaf research assistant or the Deaf consultant would do a lot of the work recruiting participants for their experiments or their studies or what have you. [36:30] But obviously, that was a profoundly kind of colonial setup, and of course, as more and more Deaf people have gotten Ph.Ds in linguistics and moved into roles in academia, there’s been a lot of challenging of this, and I’ve seen how the field of sign language linguistics has shifted and become more inclusive. [36:49] So in 1996, there was no expectation… [36:53] I had a poster. I didn’t have an onstage presentation, but most of the hearing people, and pretty much all of the hearing people who did an onstage presentation at that conference spoke in English, right? [37:04] It was actually in Montreal, so… but everyone presented in English. [37:08] I don’t remember anyone presenting in French, but people all presented in a spoken language, right? [37:12] Basically in English. [37:14] These days, if you go to an international sign linguistics conference, there’s much more of an expectation that a hearing person like me will present in a sign language, right? [37:24] And usually a sign language conference, so for example, the most recent one, the major conference, the major international conference in our field is called TISLR, Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, right? [37:35] So the last TISLR was in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. [37:39] The official conference languages were Ethiopian Sign Language, American Sign Language, which is a sign language of wider communication, and something called International Sign, which is a kind of contact sign language that’s developed spontaneously through mixing of Deaf people. [37:55] And so these were the official sign languages. [37:57] You could present in one of those sign languages or in English. [38:01] I simultaneously presented with a hearing colleague. [38:04] She spoke in English, and I signed the talk, right? [38:07] So that’s just become the norm, that there’s an expectation that hearing people like me, not only that we should learn to sign fluently so we can communicate directly with people in the Deaf community and with our Deaf colleagues, but also that we present at these conferences in a sign language so there’s no need for, to go via an interpreter, right? [38:27] There’s also an expectation that senior hearing scholars like myself provide opportunities for Deaf people. [38:34] In the U.K., we recently had Nick Palfreyman, who is now Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Lancashire. [38:42] He just gave his inaugural professorial lecture actually last week. [38:46] He also gave his talk in International Sign so that it could be recorded and be accessible to people from all over the world. [38:51] So he’s the second signing Deaf professor in sociolinguistics. [38:56] The first was Annelies Kusters, who’s at Heriot-Watt University. [39:00] There’s still a long way to go. I mean, we still need many more Deaf people in the field. [39:03] We still need more Deaf researchers, you know, we still need that, but the field has changed a lot in the last, you know, if I’m thinking about compared to 30 years ago in 1996. [39:13] We have come a long way, but we still have challenges to make sure that we include more Deaf people in sign language linguistics, and also the kinds of research that they can do is amazing. [39:24] I mean, the research that both Nick and Annalies have done is groundbreaking stuff. [39:29] I mean, you know, because being from within the community and having a Deaf perspective and having Deaf lived experience, it leads to all sorts of very different questions. [39:39] I think there’s still a role for people like myself, people from outside the community, because we’re interested in different things in some cases, but sometimes we’re interested in the same things. [39:47] And I think, yeah, I think there’s still a role for both, but I think there is an expectation, and it’s a very fair expectation, that people like me should provide opportunities and support Deaf scholars. [39:59]

JMc: Perhaps just one last question, which was, so there’s writing, which has a sort of symbiotic relationship with spoken language. [40:07] Writing is in a sense of representation of spoken language, although it’s also its own thing. [40:12] Like it has its own affordances and its own modality. [40:16] Is there some sort of equivalent for sign languages? [40:19] I mean, you mentioned before that you can video sign language performances to sort of create a permanent record of them, but you can also record speech, right? [40:29] That’s not what writing is. Is there some sort of equivalent? [40:33]

AS: I mean, in some places there is something called sign writing, which was developed as… it was actually adapted from Labanotation, which is a notation system for notating dance. [40:46]

JMc: OK. [40:48]

AS: So it was adapted by someone called Valerie Sutton to sign languages, [40:53] and she created the Sutton SignWriting system. [40:56] This is used in some schools in some parts of the world as a way to create literacy in a sign language. [41:05] So there are different symbols for the handshapes, locations, movements, etc., facial expressions used in the system, but it hasn’t really caught on very widely in schools for Deaf children around the world because most Deaf kids, most Deaf communities are really, really focused on accessing the written form of the spoken language of their community, the majority spoken language of the community. [41:33] So most of them, you know, most educational approaches focus on developing literacy in the spoken, the national spoken language of their country, so like, schools in the UK generally don’t do any kind of SignWriting, so, you know, they go straight to acquiring literacy in English. [41:53] There are notation systems for representing sign languages. [41:58] So one system that I was trained in was called the Hamburg Notation System, which was created by the University of Hamburg. [42:06] So it’s called HamNoSys, and this is a very iconic system that there are sets of symbols for handshakes, locations, movements, and I was trained to use this in the early ’90s when I started doing sign language research for my Ph.D, and in fact, I’ve got it in my Ph.D dissertation. [42:22] But the interesting thing is that the technology kind of overtook us, so once we got digital video and it became cheaper and easier to store on computers, we then moved straight to ELAN, right? [42:33] So ELAN being, you know, the video annotation system that was originally devised for co-speech gesture and sign languages, and that’s become the standard way now to record and to document sign languages. [42:50] So, yeah, there are sign language writing systems, but they’ve never really taken off. [42:55] There aren’t, for example, any, to my knowledge, any Deaf communities where a majority of people have literacy in a sign writing system. [43:03] They’ll have literacy within, you know, the national language of their particular country, right? [43:08] But also interesting in terms of the symbiosis between spoken languages and sign languages. [43:13] So there’s, even though sign languages are distinct in terms of their vocabulary and grammar, they exist in constant contact with the surrounding written spoken language, right? [43:24] So in the case of Auslan and British Sign Language, what you get is the incorporation of English words via fingerspelling, but also mouthing, which is the silent articulation of a word while producing a sign. [43:38] So you get a lot of the use of mouthing and the fingerspelling, and it’s interesting because it’s a bit like, it’s not the spoken language that’s being represented in the sign language fingerspelling system — it’s a signed representation of the written word. [43:51]

JMc: Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [43:55]

AS: No, no problem. Thank you for coming to Birmingham.

In this interview, we talk to Penny Lee about her research into Whorf and linguistic relativity.

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Photo by Mike Clarke.

Note: On reviewing the recording, Penny Lee noticed a slip of the tongue in her reference to a new Afterword in the 2012 edition of Whorf’s Language, Thought and Reality. This edition, in fact, features a new Foreword by Stephen C. Levinson. 

References for Episode 60

Alford, Danny K. (Moonhawk). 1981. ‘Is Whorf’s relativity Einstein’s relativity?’. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 7.13-26.

Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 

Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Bungay, Suffolk: Fontana/Collins.

Carroll, John B. 1953. The Study of Language: A Survey of Linguistics and Related Disciplines in America. Cambridge. Harvard University Press.

Carroll, John B. and Casagrande, Joseph B. 1958. ”The function of language classifications in behavior”. In E. E. Macoby et al. (eds), Readings in Social Psychology. New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston, 18-31.

Chase, Stuart. 1938. The Tyranny of Words. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us. Wiley-Blackwell.

Harrison, K. David. 2007. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Hoijer, Harry. (Ed.) 1954. Language in Culture: Conference on the interrelations of lan­guage and other aspects of culture. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, Penny. 1996. The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lee, Penny. When is ‘Linguistic Relativity’ Whorf’s Linguistic Relativity? In Pütz, Martin & Marjolijn Verspoor (eds) Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, Series IV Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vol. 199. John Benjamins: Amsterdam & Philadelphia. (45-68). 

Lucy, John A. 1992a. Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lucy, John A. 1992b. Language Diversity and Thought: A reformulation of the lin­guistic relativity hypothesis. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language 12). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Lucy, John A and Gaskins Suzanne. 2001. Grammatical Categories and the Development of Classification Preferences: A Comparative Approach. In: Bowerman, Melissa and Levinson Stephen. (Eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Language Culture and Cognition. Cambridge University Press (257-283).

Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt Brace and World: New York.

Sapir, Edward. 1949 Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. (Ed.) by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California.

Slobin, Dan. 1996. ‘From “Thought and Language” to “Thinking for Speaking”. In Gumperz, John and Levinson, Stephen C. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (70-96).

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1936. ’The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi’. Reprinted in Language, Thought and Reality. (65-71).

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1979. Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale Univ. Library. 

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 2012 [2nd Edition]. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Ed. by John B. Carroll, Stephen C. Levinson and Penny Lee. Cambridge Ma.: MIT Press. [LTR]

In this interview, we talk to Anna Wierzbicka about her life and research into semantics.

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References for Episode 59

Apresjan, Juri. 2000. Systematic Lexicography, trans. by Kevin Windle. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bromhead, Helen. 2009. Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16th and 17th Century English. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Bromhead, Helen. 2018. Landscape and Culture – Cross-linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Goddard, Cliff (Ed.) 2018a. Minimal English for a Global World: Improved Communication Using Fewer Words. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goddard, Cliff, and Anna Wierzbicka. 2025. ‘Anchoring Anthropological Categories in Simple, Translatable Words: The Case of “Art” and “Religion”’. Current Anthropology 66(6). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/739001

Levisen, Carsten. 2024. Postcolonial Semantics: Meaning and Metalanguage in a Multipolar World. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111337432

Mel’cuk, Igor. 2012. Semantics: From Meaning to Text. Amsterdam: Benjamins

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2001. What did Jesus mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2014. Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2020. ‘Seven essential messages for the time of the coronavirus’. Russian Journal of Linguistics 24(2): 253–258.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2020. ‘Essential messages for our time’. Language on the Move. https://languageonthemove.com/essential-messages-for-our-time/

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2025. The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan

In this interview, we talk to Ryan Nefdt about the light latest work in “artificial intelligence” can cast on questions of linguistic relativity.

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Image: Cover of Linguistic Relativity by Pelletier and Nefdt (Oxford University Press)

References for Episode 58

Bickerton, D. (2014). More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution. Harvard University Press.

Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 61–79). MIT Press.

Chemla, E., & Nefdt, R. M. (2024). No such thing as a general learner: Language models and their dual optimization. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008355

Dennett, D. C. (1996). Kinds of minds: Towards an understanding of consciousness. Basic Books.

Haspelmath, M. (2010). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663–687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021

Huh, M., Cheung, B., Wang, T., & Isola, P. (2024). The platonic representation hypothesis. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.07987

Kallini, J., Papadimitriou, I., Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Potts, C. (2024). Mission: Impossible language models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 14691–14714). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.787

Mitchell, J., & Bowers, J. (2020). Priorless recurrent networks learn curiously. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 5147–5158). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

Moro, A., Greco, M., & Cappa, S. F. (2023). Large languages, impossible languages and human brains. Cortex, 167, 82–85.

Nefdt, R. (2023). Language, science, and structure: A journey into philosophy of linguistics. Oxford University Press.

Nefdt, R. (2024). The philosophy of theoretical linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Pelletier, F. J., & Nefdt, R. (2025). Linguistic relativity: An essential guide to past debates and future prospects. Oxford University Press.

Pullum, G. K. (1989). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 6, 579–588. (Reprinted in The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language, 1991, University of Chicago Press.)

Reines, M., & Prinz, J. (2009). Reviving Whorf: The return of linguistic relativity. Philosophy Compass, 4, 1022–1032.

In this interview, we talk to Brigitte Nerlich about her career in the history of linguistics and the public understanding of science

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Image from Brigitte Nerlich

References for Episode 57

Bréal, M. (1897). Essai de Sémantique: Science des significations. Paris: Hachette.

Gardiner, A. H. (1932). The Theory of Speech and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harris, R. (1980). The Language-Makers. London: Duckworth.

Harris, R. (1981). The Language Myth. London: Duckworth.

Harris, R. (1990). Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein: How to play games with words. London: Psychology Press.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Nerlich, B. (1983). Le même et l’autre. Le problème de l’identité en linguistique chez Saussure et Wittgenstein. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 37, 13-34.

Nerlich, B. (1986). La linguistique de Philipp Wegener. Une théorie du dialogue. DRLAV. Revue de Linguistique 34-35, 301-315.

Nerlich, B. (1986). La pragmatique: Tradition ou révolution dans l’histoire de la linguistique française?. Frankfurt/Bern/New York: Verlag Peter Lang.

Nerlich, B. (1990). Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal and Wegener. London: Routledge.

Nerlich, B. (1992). Semantic Theories in Europe, 1830-1930. From etymology to contextuality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nerlich, B. (1998). La métaphore et le métonymie: Aux sources rhétoriques des théories sémantiques modernes. Sémiotiques 14, 143-170.

Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (1996). Language, Action, and Context: The early history of pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780-1930. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nerlich, B., & Clarke, D. D. (2001). Mind, meaning and metaphor: The philosophy and psychology of metaphor in 19th-century Germany. History of the Human Sciences, 14(2), 39-61.

Nerlich, B. and Clarke, D. D. (2007). Cognitive linguistics and the history of linguistics. In: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by D. Geeraerts and H. Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wegener, P. (1885). Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens. Halle: Niemeyer.

Wunderli, P. (1981). Saussure-Studien: Exegetische und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Werk von F. de Saussure. Tübingen: Günter Narr.

In this interview, we talk to Nick Enfield about his research into the connections between linguistic signs and concepts.

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Image from Nick Enfield’s website

References for Episode 56

Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). “Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective”, Review of General Psychology, 8(2): 100-110. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1037/1089-2680.8.2.100

Enfield, Nick J. (2022), “Linguistic concepts are self-generating choice architectures”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 378: 20210352. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0352

Enfield, N. J. (2026). “The enchronic envelope”, Psychological Review, 133(2): 296–314.  https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000553

Kockelman, Paul. (2005). “The semiotic stance”, Semiotica, vol. 2005(157): 233-304. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2005.2005.157.1-4.233

Langacker, Ronald W. (1987), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Makkreel, Rudolf (2021), “Wilhelm Dilthey”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/dilthey/

Ogden, Charles Kay, and Ivor Armstrong Richards (1956 [1923]), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Kegan Paul.

Tomasello, Michael. 2008. Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7551.001.0001

In this interview, we talk to Janette Friedrich about her research and career.

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References for Episode 55

Bühler, Karl ([1934] 2009). Théorie du langage. La fonction représentationnelle du langage, préface de Jacques Bouveresse, présentation de Janette Friedrich, traduction par Didier Samain. Marseille: Agone.

Friedrich, Janette (1993). Der Gehalt der Sprachform. Paradigmen von Bachtin bis Vygotskij. Berlin : Akademie-Verlag,

Friedrich, Janette (2010). Lev Vygotski : médiation, apprentissage et développement. Une lecture philosophique et épistémologique, 2e édition. Carnets des sciences de l’éducation, FPSE, Université de Genève. (brasilianische Übersetzung : Lev Vigotski : Mediação, aprendizagem e desenvolvimento. Uma leitura filosófica e epistemológica. Campinas SP Brasil : Mercado Letras, 2012)

Friedrich, J. (Hrsg.) (2018). Karl Bühlers Krise der Psychologie. Positionen, Bezüge und Kontroversen im Wien der 1920er/30er Jahre. Wien [u.a.]: Springer

Friedrich, J. (Hrsg.) (2022). Karl Bühler und das Wiener Psychologische Institut. Dokumente und Fundstücke, Bühleriana, Bd. 1. Lausanne: sdvig. https://karlbuehler.org/pub-216558

Friedrich, Janette & Cesalli, Laurent (éds.) (2014). Anton Marty & Karl Bühler – Between Mind and Language – Zwischen Denken und Sprache – Entre pensée et langage. Basel: Schwabe Verlag

Vygotskij, Lev S. ([1934] 2002). Denken und Sprechen. Psychologische Untersuchungen. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz.

Transcript

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:29] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:33] Today we’re talking to Janette Friedrich, who has a fascinating international career in philosophy and the history of the human sciences, above all psychology and linguistics, [00:43] and as with a few of our recent interviews, we’re going to do this discussion in German. [00:48] Janette, willkommen im Podcast. [00:50] Kannst du uns erzählen, womit es alles angefangen hat? [00:53] Du bist also in der Nähe von Potsdam aufgewachsen und du hast dann in Russland Philosophie studiert. [01:01]

JF: Ja. Ja, danke James für die Einladung zu diesem Podcast. [01:06] Ja, ja, eigentlich ist es eine lange Geschichte. [01:09] Ich bin in Potsdam geboren und habe, bin dann aber in Ostberlin aufgewachsen und habe Philosophie studiert. [01:16] Damit hat es eigentlich angefangen. [01:18] Ich habe Philosophie studiert von 1979 bis 1984 in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion in Rostow am Don. [01:29] Warum Philosophie? [01:30] Ich wusste nicht so genau, was ich eigentlich studieren wollte. [01:34] Ich habe mich immer interessiert für Literatur, Theater. [01:38] Wir haben an der Schule auch Theater gespielt. [01:40] Dann hatte ich meine Jahresarbeit geschrieben zu Bertolt Brecht. [01:43] Der hatte damals Lehrstücke geschrieben. [01:46] Ja, und da merkte ich, dass ich Spaß habe am Argumentieren und am Denken. [01:52] Man könnte fast sagen am reinen Denken. [01:54] Ja, und da hatte ich dazu noch Freunde, die Philosophie studiert hatten, auch in der Sowjetunion. [02:01] Und da habe ich mir gesagt, warum nicht Philosophie? [02:05]

JMc: Aber wie hast du deinen Studienplatz in Russland ergattert oder in der Sowjetunion? [02:08]

JF: Ja, das ist eine interessante Geschichte, weil ich wollte nicht nur Philosophie studieren… [02:15] Ich wollte, dass… der zweite Wunsch bei mir. [02:17] Ich wollte nicht in der DDR studieren, sondern ich wollte raus. [02:20] Ich wollte woanders hin. [02:21] Die DDR war klein, die kannte man. [02:24] Und ja, da habe ich gesagt, das ist ein Abenteuer. [02:26] Warum nicht in die Sowjetunion? [02:29] Und in der DDR war ja alles sehr zentralisiert gewesen. [02:33] Das heißt, jede Erweiterte Oberschule, EOS, das, was man Gymnasium nennt hier, hatte sowas wie eine Studienplatzliste. [02:44] Und auf dieser Studienplatzliste standen bestimmte Fachrichtungen, die man sich auswählen konnte und wofür man sich bewerben konnte. [02:52] Ja, aber in meiner Schule gab es leider nur Medizin, Zahnmedizin und Erdöl. [02:58] Aber da mein Kriterium ja war, ich möchte unbedingt raus, habe ich mir gesagt, OK, dann bewirbst du dich für Erdöl. [03:04] Also habe ich mich für Erdöl beworben und bin dann eingeladen worden in Halle an der Saale zum Aufnahmegespräch und da saß dann eine etwas verdutzte Aufnahmekommission und sagte zu mir, na ja, Erdöl, das ist Aserbaidschan, das ist Baku, [03:20] da schicken wir nicht so gerne junge Frauen hin. [03:22] Außerdem müssen sie schweißen lernen, wollen sie nicht was anderes studieren. [03:27] Na ja, und so bin ich dann Philosophin geworden. [03:30] Ich habe gesagt, ja, dann nehme ich gerne die Fachrichtung Philosophie. [03:34]

JMc: OK. [03:35]

JF: Ja, und dann ging es fünf Jahre zum Studium in die Sowjetunion [03:40] und wir dachten natürlich, es geht nach Moskau oder nach Petersburg, [03:45] damals hieß es noch Leningrad. [03:48] Aber da war auch alles zentralisiert organisiert [03:52] und wir wurden also alle zentral verteilt nach Rostow am Don. [03:56] Ich musste dann erst mal auf der Landkarte nachschauen, wo sich diese Stadt eigentlich befindet. [04:01] Das ist eine Ein-Millionen-Stadt, vielleicht jetzt sogar schon mehr. [04:05] Also damals war es eine Ein-Millionen-Stadt. [04:07] Sie befindet sich südlich von Moskau, 1000 Kilometer und heißt eigentlich [04:12] das Tor zum Kaukasus, weil es immer über Rostow geht, [04:15] wenn man entweder ans Schwarze Meer, nach Sotschi oder in den Kaukasus will. [04:19] Ja, und das war eine sehr bunte Stadt, [04:23] weil viele unserer Studienkollegen kamen aus dem Kaukasus [04:26] und Rostow hatte einen großen armenischen Stadtteil gehabt, [04:32] also viel mit verschiedenen Kulturen und Völkern zu tun gehabt. [04:38] Ja, und dann habe ich dort Philosophie studiert [04:41] und das erwies sich dann im Nachhinein als interessanter, [04:45] als wenn ich nach Moskau gekommen wäre oder nach Leningrad. [04:49] Warum? Aber das haben wir auch später gemerkt, [04:52] weil ein Teil, ein kleiner Teil unserer Lehrer dort [04:57] eigentlich nach Rostow geschickt wurde, um dort zu arbeiten, [05:01] weil sie nicht so ganz auf der offiziellen Marxismus-Leninismus-Linie lag [05:05] und eigentlich so etwas wie einen kritischen Marxismus, [05:09] einen kritischen Materialismus vertreten haben. [05:12] Deshalb wurde es dort dann interessant für uns. [05:15] Man fragt sich immer, was wurde dort eigentlich gelehrt [05:20] in der Sowjetunion, wenn man Philosophie studiert. [05:23] Wir haben beziehungsweise die Geschichte der Philosophie gehabt, [05:26] gute Spezialisten in der Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie. [05:30] Dann hatten wir Wissenschaftsphilosophie, Geschichtsphilosophie. [05:34] Natürlich hat die Geschichte der Philosophie in den 20er Jahren aufgehört, [05:38] weil das alles, was danach kam, als bürgerliche Philosophie zählte [05:42] und das wurde nicht gelehrt. [05:44] Was aber interessant war, war dieser schon genannte kritische Marxismus oder kritische Materialismus. [05:53] Ein Teil unserer Lehrer waren Schüler von Ewald Wassiljewitsch Iljenkow. [06:00] Den Namen hat man vielleicht manchmal schon gehört. [06:03] Das war, wie gesagt, ein sowjetrussischer Philosoph, [06:07] der sozusagen versucht hat, einen intelligenten Marxismus zu entwickeln [06:13] aufbauend auf einer Spinoza- und Hegel-Lektüre. [06:16] Das war, was er dann so eine kritische Marx-Lektüre nannte. [06:21] Ja, es gibt sogar Übersetzungen von Iljenkow ins Deutsche. [06:29] Schon 1979 hat man seine Dialektik des Abstrakten und Konkreten im Kapital von Karl Marx übersetzt. [06:36] Ja, und 1994 ist ein kleiner Sammelband, Dialektik des Ideellen, herausgekommen von Iljenkow. [06:43] Und diese Dialektik des Ideellen, das ist interessant, [06:47] weil dort beginnt dann eigentlich mein Interesse, [06:50] was mich eigentlich mein ganzes Leben lang nicht mehr losgelassen hat. [06:54] Der Iljenkow hatte so eine ähnliche Idee, wie man sie auch bei Popper findet, [06:59] von der dritten Welt, die Existenz einer dritten Welt. [07:03] Also eine Welt der objektiven geistigen Inhalte, [07:07] die sozusagen losgelöst vom Individuum sind. [07:10] Also soweit das Individuum etwas schafft, [07:13] wird es zu Ideen, die dann sozusagen unabhängig von ihm existieren [07:18] und dann auch unterschiedlich interpretiert, [07:20] unterschiedliche Lebensformen annehmen. [07:23] Ja, das war sozusagen hinter der Idee des Ideellen von Iljenkow. [07:26] Und das Interessante war, er hatte diese damals in Zagorsk [auch Sagorsk geschrieben, russische Grussstadt 70 km nordöstlich von Moskau, seit 1991 trägt sie den Namen Sergijew Possad] [07:32] auch experimentell versucht nachzuweisen. [07:35] Er hat also mit Psychologen zusammengearbeitet, [07:38] mit Alexander Meschtscherjakow, [07:43] der damals ein Experiment mit taubstummen Kindern durchgeführt hat [07:47] und sie sozusagen in die Kultur angeeignet hat [07:52] und sozusagen dazu die Idee des Ideellen von Iljenkow benutzt hat. [07:57] Dieses Thema fand ich furchtbar interessant. [08:01] Da merkt man schon diesen Schnittpunkt zwischen einem Philosophen [08:04] und einem Psychologen, also zwischen verschiedenen Disziplinen. [08:08] Und damals in Rostow haben wir neben Iljenkow [08:12] noch andere Autoren gelesen, [08:14] die man eigentlich im Westeuropa kaum kannte, [08:17] die ich aber sehr spannend fand. [08:19] Und diese Autoren kamen dann nicht wie Iljenkow, [08:22] also aus dem 60er, 70er Jahren, [08:25] sondern die kamen aus dem 20er, 30er Jahren. [08:27] Zum Beispiel, das war eine meiner Entdeckungen, [08:34] die wir damals dort gelesen haben, [08:36] einen georgischen Philosophen, [08:37] der Konstantin Romanowitsch Megrelidze hieß. [08:40] Und der hatte so etwas gesucht [08:42] wie eine phänomenologische Soziologie der Ideen. [08:46] Wieder auch diese Idee, [08:48] es gibt bestimmte ideelle Gebilde, [08:50] die kann man soziologisch analysieren. [08:52] Ja, und Konstantin Romanowitsch Megrelidze [08:54] hatte zum Beispiel bei Husserl ein Jahr studiert, [08:55] war in Berlin bei den Gestaltpsychologen, [08:59] also war beeinflusst von der westeuropäischen Tradition, [09:03] hat aber dann, wie so oft, auch in dieser sowjetrussischen Tradition etwas Eigenes entwickelt. [09:08] Also das fand ich immer ganz spannend. [09:10] Ja, und ich bin damals auch bekannt geworden in Rostow mit Wygotski, [09:16] der war auch einer der Hauptautoren, [09:18] die wir gelesen haben. [09:19] Ja, ich erzähle das ausführlich, [09:22] weil in Rostow mit diesen Autoren wurde dann endlich auch mein Dissertationsthema geboren. [09:28] Und das, was mich immer interessiert hat, [09:32] ist dieser Zusammenhang zwischen Philosophie, Psychologie und auch Sprachwissenschaften. [09:38] Weil Megrelidze war zwar auch ausgebildeter Philosoph, [09:42] aber er hatte bei der Gestaltpsychologie [09:44] etwas studiert [09:46] und hatte dann zwei Jahre [09:48] bei Nikolai Marr in Leningrad gearbeitet und natürlich auch zur Sprachtheorie gearbeitet. [09:55] Also genau wieder dieses Zusammenkommen von philosophischen Ideen und einzelwissenschaftlichen Theorien und Experimenten. [10:05]

JMc: Ja, OK. [10:07] Ja, aber deine Dissertation hast du dann in Berlin geschrieben, oder? [10:10] Du hast also 1991 in Berlin promoviert. [10:13]

JF: Genau, ich bin da zurück und ich hatte dann, [10:16] 1986 oder 1987, [10:19] hatte ich dann eine Aspirantur bekommen. [10:23] Aspirantur, das hieß in der DDR ein Stipendium, ein Doktorandenstipendium, würde man heute sagen, also [10:31] sozusagen ein Stipendium, um in drei Jahren meine Doktorarbeit zu schreiben. [10:34] Ich hatte wirklich nichts anderes zu tun als die Doktorarbeit zu schreiben und dazu bin ich sozusagen nach Leipzig geschickt worden, von Berlin, [10:43] weil in der Zwischenzeit hatte ich an der Hochschule für Ökonomie in Berlin angefangen zu arbeiten. [10:49] Die hatten mich nach Leipzig geschickt und haben gesagt, komm mit einem Doktortitel wieder, [10:55] was natürlich gut war, weil das heißt, es war kein Thema vorgegeben. [11:00] Ich habe mein Thema selber ausgesucht [11:02] und ich hatte das Glück, dass Leipzig das auch akzeptiert hatte. [11:06] Ich wurde betreut von einem Philosophen, [11:08] der spezialisiert war in der Philosophie der Industrie. [11:11] Das heißt, er hatte keine Ahnung von meinem Thema, was mich nicht sehr beunruhigt hat, [11:17] weil ich wusste ja, wozu ich arbeiten will. [11:20] Und ich habe dann meine Doktorarbeit geschrieben, dort in Leipzig. [11:26] Wie gesagt zu… [11:31] Die Doktorarbeit hatte vier Kapitel, kann man sagen. [11:34] Ein Kapitel zu Megrelidze, eins zu Wygotski. [11:37] Und nach der Doktorarbeit habe ich dann das nächste Kapitel noch dazu geschrieben zum Bachtin-Kreis, [11:43] weil ich fand es ganz wichtig war, dass man die Ideen von Bachtin und seine Sprach- und Zeichenauffassung auch mit reinnimmt. [11:50] Das waren also sozusagen die drei Kapitel meiner Doktorarbeit. [11:56] Aber es gab ein erstes Kapitel und das war mir ganz wichtig, weil dieses erste Kapitel hatte ich der Theorie von Iljenkow und Alexander Leontjew gewidmet, [12:07] der ja auch ein Psychologe war und ein Tätigkeitstheoretiker. [12:12] Und warum habe ich dieses Kapitel geschrieben? [12:15] Das war ein wichtiges Objektiv meiner Doktorarbeit. [12:20] Ich konnte nämlich damals in der DDR die Schriften der Kritischen Psychologie lesen. [12:24] Die gab es in den Bibliotheken in Berlin. [12:28] Und die Kritische Psychologie um Klaus Holzkamp [12:32] hatte sich ganz stark mit der Tätigkeitstheorie Leontjews beschäftigt und diesen Tätigkeitsansatz als Hauptquelle reingebracht, auch mit in ihre Psychologie. [12:44] Und ich fand, dass bei Leontjew ein ganz wichtiger Aspekt immer fehlte, [12:48] nämlich der Zeichen- und Sprachbegriff, und sozusagen die Bedeutung der Sprache [12:56] in der Denkentwicklung und in der Bewusstseinsentwicklung. [12:59] Und genau diese Ideen konnte ich mit den Denkern aus den 20er, 30er Jahren hineinbringen. [13:07] Das heißt, das erste Kapitel war so etwas wie ein Abgrenzungskapitel sozusagen. [13:12] Ja, das kann man so sehen, aber man kann es auch noch anders sehen und dadurch natürlich auch das Interesse an den Sprachtheorien, weil ich das damit hereingebracht hatte. [13:23]

JMc: Ja, OK. [13:24]

JF: Ja. Ja, die Doktorarbeit, [13:27] das ist vielleicht noch interessant, die erschien 1993, ich habe sie 1991 verteidigt an der Humboldt-Universität. [13:36] Ich habe sie verteidigt vor einer Kommission, [13:41] die dann von Hans-Peter Krüger geleitet wurde. [13:44] Hans-Peter Krüger war ein Philosoph, der an der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR gearbeitet hatte. [13:50] Hans-Peter Krüger war Habermas-Spezialist. [13:54] Wenn man die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns von Habermas liest, dann findet man auch Verweise auf Wygotski, [14:01] kurz in den Fußnoten, wie zum Beispiel auch auf Bühler, also auch ein Interesse an dieser Art von Theorie. [14:09] Ja, die hatte ich sozusagen vor einer gemischten Kommission verteidigt. [14:16] Herr [Peter] Keiler von der Kritischen Psychologie war auch an der Kommission gewesen. [14:19] Es gab also eine sehr interessante Diskussion dazu. [14:24] Die Dissertation ist erschienen 1993 im Akademie-Verlag unter dem Titel [14:31] Der Gehalt der Sprachform. Paradigmen von Bachtin bis Vygotskij. [14:37] Vielleicht zu diesem Buch vielleicht noch ein Wort. [14:44] In bestimmten Sinne ist das Buch ins Leere gelaufen. [14:49] Kann man vielleicht so sagen. [14:51] Ich hatte ja einen Adressaten unter vielen, die kritische Psychologie. [14:56] Die war aber nach dem Mauerfall mit etwas anderen Dingen beschäftigt. [14:59] Mit sich selbst und ihrem eigenen Platz, glaube ich, wahrscheinlich in der Psychologielandschaft [15:07] Und ich selber war auch nicht mehr da. [15:09] Ich hatte nämlich 1991 Deutschland verlassen und bin nach Frankreich gegangen. [15:14]

JMc: OK, ich hätte ein paar Fragen dazu, und zwar… also apropos Mauerfall. [15:19]

JF: Ja. [15:20]

JMc: Wie war das denn damals als frisch Promovierte oder als Doktorandin zur Wendezeit? [15:28]

JF: Ja, als Doktorandin war es eigentlich nicht so schwierig gewesen für mich, [15:38] aber das hat etwas zu tun gehabt mit dem Thema, einfach ne. [15:42] Das heißt, das war ein Thema gewesen, [15:43] das ich mir selbst gewählt hatte. [15:46] Es ging um die Geschichte, [15:47] um die Geschichte der sowjetrussischen Psychologie und Sprachtheorie an irgendeiner Stelle und zu etwas, [15:54] wozu noch nicht geschrieben worden war. [15:56] Das heißt, es war also auch nicht ideologisch motiviert in dem Sinne, [16:01] sodass ich gesagt hätte, oh, ich schreibe zu etwas. [16:03] Das ist jetzt total passé. Das braucht man nicht. [16:08] Ich wusste einfach, deshalb auch der Dialog mit der Kritischen Psychologie, dass ich etwas geschrieben habe für eine Diskussion. [16:15] Nicht nur für eine Diskussion, die in der DDR oder in den osteuropäischen Ländern lief, [16:19] sondern für eine Diskussion, die auch in Westeuropa lief, weil die Franzosen hatten ja zum Beispiel auch begonnen, Wygotski zu übersetzen. [16:28] Es gab natürlich eine englischsprachige Rezeption von Wygotski. [16:32] Der Bachtin-Kreis wurde auch stark rezipiert von [Renate] Lachmann damals in Westdeutschland. [16:38] Natürlich habe ich die Doktorarbeit nicht geschrieben mit dem Glaube, dass wir in diese Diskussion mit einsteigen können, weil wir saßen ja hinter der Mauer. [16:49] Aber verunsichert in Bezug auf das Thema war ich eigentlich nicht. [16:53] Ich habe die Doktorarbeit dann einfach in Ruhe weitergeschrieben. [16:58] Sie war dann fertig im Herbst 1990. Genau? [17:05] Genau, im Herbst 1990 habe ich sie im Januar 1991 verteidigt. [17:10] Und ich hatte dann irgendwie das Glück, dass sie dann fertig war und dann auch vor einer gemischten Jury verteidigt wurde. [17:17] In dem Sinne auf dem Arbeitsgebiet war es eigentlich nicht sehr beunruhigend oder auch nicht zweifelhaft. [17:28] Die Arbeit ist dann sozusagen, ja, in die breitere Diskussion eingestiegen. [17:34]

JMc: Ja. [17:35]

JF: Wie man das privat erlebt hat oder sozial, [17:37] das sind natürlich andere Fragen. [17:39] Aber, ja, zu der Doktorarbeit selber, eigentlich hat sich damit das Tor aufgemacht [17:45] und ich hatte damit sehr viel mehr Gesprächspartner als davor, [17:49] weil ich hatte die Doktorarbeit ja doch ganz allein in meinem Kämmerchen geschrieben, [17:53] ohne Doktorvater und auch kaum mehr mit Kontakten in die Sowjetunion, [17:58] weil das ja doch 3.000 Kilometer waren und sobald man aus der Sowjetunion weg war, wurden die Kontakte auch immer weniger. [18:09]

JMc: OK. Ja. Und wie bist du denn nach Frankreich gekommen? [18:13] Das hast du auch kurz erwähnt. [18:16]

JF: Ja, ich weiß es nicht mehr genau. Ich wurde – ich glaube, es war genau zum Jahreswechsel 1991 – an der Hochschule für Ökonomie entlassen und habe dann angefangen, Forschungsstipendienanträge zu schreiben. [18:33] Ich war ein bisschen enttäuscht von der Entlassung und habe mir dann auch gesagt, der Erste, der mir Geld gibt, zu dem gehe ich. [18:41] Ja, und das waren die Franzosen, die mir ein Jahresstipendium gegeben haben, ein Forschungsstipendium von der französischen Regierung. [18:50] Das war noch so ein Programm, das beim Auslaufen war. [18:54] Das war ein Forschungsstipendium für Stipendiaten aus den osteuropäischen Ländern. [18:58] Und ich fiel noch irgendwie da drunter, weil das ja gerade erst passiert war, [19:03] der Mauerfall. [19:06] Und ich hatte Glück, weil nämlich Hans-Peter Krüger, der damals die Kommission leitete, Pierre Bourdieu kannte. [19:17] Und Pierre Bourdieu hat dann einen kurzen Brief geschrieben und erklärte sich bereit, mich für dieses eine Jahr, wenn ich das Stipendium bekomme, in seine Forschungsgruppe aufzunehmen. [19:27] Und ich habe das Stipendium bekommen und bin dann für ein Jahr an die École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in die Forschungsgruppe von Pierre Bourdieu gekommen, [19:36] wurde dort von einem Kollegen von ihm, von [Louis] Pinto betreut und habe dann ein Jahr dort an der École des Hautes Études Französisch gelernt, weil ich konnte kaum Französisch, [19:51] als ich nach Paris gegangen bin. [19:54] Ja, und hatte gleichzeitig mich nicht nur bei der französischen Regierung für dieses Stipendium beworben, [20:01] sondern auch bei der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung für ein Feodor Lynen-Stipendium. [20:06] Das war eigentlich der gleiche Weg. [20:09] Ich wollte auch raus. Ich wollte raus. [20:11] Ich wollte woanders hin. Und die Feodor Lynen-Stipendien, das ist ein Stipendienprogramm, was genau dieses Ziel hat, [20:19] zu einem ehemaligen Humboldtianer zu gehen, [20:24] also zu einem ausländischen Forscher, der nach Deutschland eingeladen war und der sozusagen mit dieser Einladung auch die Verpflichtung auf sich genommen hat, wenn er wieder zurückgeht, [20:33] dann auch junge Nachwuchswissenschaftler bei sich aufzunehmen, wenn sie ein Feodor Lynen-Stipendium bekommen. [20:39] Und dieser Humboldtianer, das war Jean-Marc Ferry, ein Philosoph, er war bei Habermas gewesen, [20:50] in Frankfurt am Main mit einem Humboldt-Stipendium, hat die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns von Habermas ins Französische übersetzt und war und ist immer noch der Habermas-Spezialist in Frankreich. [21:01] Und Jean-Marc Ferry war natürlich an meinen Fragestellungen nur am Rande interessiert, aber ein wunderbarer Gesprächspartner, und einfach interessiert auch jemand, [21:15] mit dem er auf Deutsch diskutieren kann, [21:17] über Philosophie bei sich aufzunehmen. [21:19] Und er hat sich bereit erklärt, mich aufzunehmen. [21:21] Also dieser Stipendiumantrag lief gleichzeitig und ich habe es auch bekommen. [21:26] Und das heißt, ich habe dann ein Jahr erst bei Bourdieu in der Forschungsgruppe zugehört. [21:34] Gearbeitet, würde ich in Anführungsstrichen lassen, [21:37] ich habe mich eingelebt, ich habe an den Vorlesungen teilgenommen. [21:41] Ich hatte das damalige Glück, dass natürlich Derrida, Lyotard, all diese Leute in Paris gelehrt haben, Vorlesungen gehalten haben. [21:51] Ich bin in Seminare gegangen, ich bin in Vorlesungen gegangen und habe mich einfach in dieses kulturelle Klima hineingewöhnt. [21:59] Und die Humboldt-S, mit Hilfe der Humboldt-Stiftung konnte ich dann diesen Forschungsaufenthalt auf zweieinhalb Jahre verlängern und habe es dann genutzt, um Französisch zu lernen, richtig zu lernen [22:14] und durch erste wirkliche Kontakte mit Spezialisten in meinem Fachgebiet… [22:19]

JMc: Ja.

JF: …sozusagen herzustellen. [22:21]

JMc: Ja. Ich bin total beeindruckt, es fallen so viele große Namen, die ich nur als historische Figuren kenne und du hast die persönlich gekannt. [lacht] [22:31]

JF: Ja, persönlich, das heißt ich habe natürlich drinnen gesessen und gesehen und gehört. [22:36] Ja. [22:37]

JMc: Irgendwie live.

JF: Ja, natürlich. [22:41] Das habe ich auch gesagt, eine Zeit, die wunderbar war. [22:44]

JMc: Ja, OK. Also dann nach deiner Pariser Zeit warst du dann so 30 Jahre in gutbürgerlichem Genf, oder? [lacht] [22:55] Wie hast du das verkraftet? Von der DDR in die Schweiz. [23:00]

JF: Ja, das ist auch wieder eine eigene Geschichte und hat auch viel mit Zufällen zu tun. [23:05] Wie man merkt, in meiner Karriere spielen auch Zufälle eine Rolle. [23:09] Als ich in Paris war, wollte ich unbedingt nach Genf. [23:15] Mal für vier Wochen und habe das auch bei der Humboldt-Stiftung beantragt. [23:19] Sie haben mir dann nochmal für vier Wochen ein kleines Stipendium für Genf gegeben. [23:23] Ich wollte nämlich ans Jean Piaget Archiv nach Genf, weil es gibt ja eine Geschichte zwischen Wygotski und Piaget und die geht um das Verständnis von Sprache und Denken. [23:37] Wygotski hat ja in seinem letzten Buch, das er 1934 kurz vor dem Tode beendet hat und das dann Posthum erschienen ist, [23:45] Sprache und Denken, hat er ja Piaget sozusagen benutzt, [23:51] besonders seine Idee der egozentrischen Sprache beim Kind [23:54] und hat die aber uminterpretiert und eine etwas andere Lesart dieses Phänomens vorgeschlagen und damit auch Piaget kritisiert [24:03] und Piaget hat ja darauf später reagiert und einen Kommentar dazu geschrieben und sich mit Wygotskis Lesart auseinandergesetzt. [24:11] Ja und ich wollte schauen, ob es einfach in den Piaget Archiven noch irgendwelche Dokumente gibt und da merkt man, [24:17] dass auch in meiner Karriere haben Archive und Nachlässe immer eine Rolle gespielt. [24:22] Ich hatte das bisher noch nicht erwähnt gehabt, aber ich war damals auch für zwei Wochen in Tbilissi gewesen und hab dann im Nachlass von Megrelidze gearbeitet. [24:31] Das heißt, mir hat es immer sehr, sehr viel Spaß gemacht. [24:34] Ich finde es immer ganz, ganz wichtig, auch sozusagen die Manuskripte, diese Objekte in der Hand zu haben, Denkwege nachzuvollziehen, zu rekonstruieren. [24:44] Das habe ich bei Megrelidze gemacht, weil es damals ja nur sein eines Buch gab, aber Manuskripte trotzdem noch da waren. [24:53] Das habe ich bei Wygotski versucht. [24:55] Das hatte damals leider nicht geklappt, weil ich damals keine Dollars hatte, weil damals wurde danach gefragt, um in die Archive zu kommen. [25:05] Aber das hat dann eben bei Jean Piaget natürlich geklappt, weil ja das Archiv öffentlich war und da hatte ich dann noch das Glück, dass ich Bärbel Inhelder kennengelernt habe. [25:15] Bärbel Inhelder war seine wichtigste Mitarbeiterin von Jean Piaget und sie lebte damals noch, als ich nach Genf gegangen bin, für diese vier Wochen. [25:26] Das Jean-Piaget-Archiv war ein wichtiger Ort der kulturellen und sozialen Zusammenkunft. [25:31] Er hatte noch Mitarbeiter, es gab wortwöchentliche Diskussionen. [25:35] Also ich habe dort auch wieder etwas erlebt, was man jetzt eigentlich nicht mehr erlebt, weil jetzt ist es nur noch ein Archiv, wo man reingeht und liest, während damals ein ganzes wissenschaftliches Leben noch stattfand. [25:46] Ja, da war ich vier Wochen und da hatte ich mich angemeldet bei einem Professor Jean-Paul Bronckart. [25:53] Man sagte mir, der kann für dich interessant sein. [25:56] Schau mal, Jean-Paul Bronckart war Psycholinguist, hat in Belgien studiert, dann bei Piaget gearbeitet und sich dann sozusagen für Wygotski interessiert und ist von Piagets Theorie zu Wygotski gegangen. [26:12] Er hatte damals ganz stark Wygotski rezipiert und diskutiert. [26:16] Natürlich nur das, was übersetzt war, entweder ins Englische oder ins Französische. [26:20] Die französischen Übersetzungen begannen gerade. [26:23] Ja, und da bin ich hin und wir haben eine Stunde diskutiert und dann bin ich wieder zurück nach Paris [26:27] und dann hat er mich sechs Monate später kurz vor meinem Stipendiumabschluss angerufen und mir eine Stelle als Assistentin bei ihm in Genf angeboten. [26:37] Naja, und da habe ich mir gesagt, na gut, bevor du nach Deutschland zurückgehst, [26:42] dann nimmst du den Weg über Genf und gehst erstmal nach Genf, bevor du dann wieder in Richtung Norden zurückfährst. [26:49] Habe ich dann nie gemacht. [26:51] Ich bin in Genf geblieben und habe mir dort, ja warum? [26:57] Habe mir dort mein eigenes Forschungsumfeld aufgebaut. [27:01] Das ist ja interessant, weil du fragtest, wie bleibt man im bürgerlichen Genf hängen? [27:09] Das habe ich mich auch immer gefragt, aber wahrscheinlich aus zwei Gründen. [27:15] Der erste Grund war ein ganz pragmatischer. [27:19] Man sieht ja an meinem Karriereweg, dass ich überhaupt kein Netzwerk in Deutschland hatte. [27:24] Das heißt, auch kaum Kontakte, weil ich bin ja gleich weggegangen nach der Wende. [27:30] Das heißt, ich wusste gar nicht wohin, zurück nach Deutschland. [27:33] Ich hätte mich bewerben können. [27:34] Ja, und der zweite Grund war, dass ich natürlich dann, das waren ja schon drei Jahre, vier Jahre, die ich dann im französischsprachigen Raum war, angefangen habe, dort Kontakte zu schmieden. [27:46] Einer der wichtigsten Kontakte, den habe ich damals dann schon in Paris begonnen. [27:54] Das war über die Person von Claudine Normand. [27:59] Das war eine Sprachwissenschaftlerin, Historikerin der Sprachwissenschaften, Spezialistin von Benveniste und Saussure, Mitarbeiterin an einem der wunderbarsten Laboratoires, finde ich, die existieren, am CNRS [28:14] gibt es ein Laboratoire zur Geschichte der Sprachtheorien. [28:19] Ich sage, ein wunderbares Laboratoire, weil dort nur Geschichte gemacht wird. [28:25] Und zwar nicht nur von ein oder zwei Leuten, sondern von zehn, zwanzig mit Doktoranden, dreißig Leuten. [28:33] Geschichte zu den Sprachtheorien nicht nur Europas und auch nicht nur zur Sprachentwicklung in Europa, sondern weltweit. [28:41] Ja, und Geschichte hat mich immer interessiert und über Claudine Normand bin ich dann reingekommen, erst mal in ihre Forschungsgruppe. [28:50] Sie hat mich dann eingeladen zu ihren Freitagssitzungen zu ihr nach Hause nach Nanterre. [28:56] Dort habe ich dann Jean-Louis Chiss und Christian Puech kennengelernt, die Clique, die zu Saussure, zum Strukturalismus gearbeitet hat. [29:04] Und damit habe ich natürlich, sind Türen aufgegangen zur Zusammenarbeit. [29:11] Und nach Genf zu gehen, bedeutete natürlich auch, diese Türen weiterhin offen zu halten und diese Zusammenarbeit weitermachen zu können. [29:21] Und das war eigentlich auch der Grund, warum ich in Genf geblieben bin. [29:24] Dazu kommt natürlich auch dieses gute Zentralisierte in Frankreich, es gibt TGVs, zweieinhalb Stunden bist du in Paris von Genf. [29:32] Und damit konnte ich einfach weiter zusammenarbeiten mit meinen Kollegen aus der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften. [29:39] Ich sage, ein wunderbares Laboratoire, weil auch junge Leute, die heute Psychologie, Sprachwissenschaften oder Erziehungswissenschaften studieren, werden es wissen, es wird ja kaum noch Geschichte gelehrt [29:53] in unseren Disziplinen, in unseren Fachgebieten, die wenigen Lehrstühle, die es früher gab, wurden dann umgewandelt und Geschichte ist oft nur noch fakultativ. [30:04] Für mich ist aber Geschichte dieser Disziplinen furchtbar wichtig. [30:08] Warum? [30:10]

JMc: Das war eigentlich meine nächste Frage. [30:14] Du hast die Frage selbst gestellt. [30:16]

JF: Ja, weil für mich ist Geschichte eigentlich immer Problemgeschichte. [30:22] Das heißt, es gibt bestimmte Probleme, mit denen wir uns, theoretische Probleme, die natürlich auch empirische sind, mit denen wir uns beschäftigen und die einfach nicht gelöst sind. [30:35] Und die sozusagen in jedem Jahrhundert auch anders begrifflich formuliert wurden, anders gestellt wurden, eine andere Form hatten und die sich durchziehen. [30:45] Das heißt, für mich ist Wissenschaft in dem Sinne nichts Kumulatives. [30:50] Das heißt, ich kann dir jetzt nicht die letzten Sprachtheorien geben, die aktuellen und sagen, damit haben sich alle unsere Fragen erledigt. [30:59] Nein, schauen wir uns zum Beispiel die Frage an, was ist der Unterschied zwischen Menschen und Tieren? [31:05] Da kommt oft die Antwort, ja, die Menschen haben die Sprache, die Tiere haben nicht die Sprache. [31:10] Oder die Menschen haben so etwas wie geteilte Aufmerksamkeit oder geteilte Intention, sowas findet man nicht bei den Tieren. [31:18] OK, sind diese Antworten richtig, haben wir damit die letzte Antwort gefunden? [31:24] Nein, das ist eine mögliche Antwort. [31:27] Dass es nicht die letzte sein wird, das zeigt sich, weil wir immer wieder neue Theorien entwickeln. [31:31] Und diese neuen Theorien sind ja auch nicht so neu. [31:35] Man kann ja nicht alles wieder neu denken. [31:37] Sie beziehen sich ja auch auf ältere Theorien. [31:40] Das heißt, diese Fragen bleiben einfach stehen. [31:42] Nur werden diese Theorien, also diese Antworten auf bestimmte Fragen, [31:48] die wir uns in unseren Disziplinen stellen, begrifflich auch immer anders formuliert. [31:53] Und in dieser anderen Begrifflichkeit ist die Antwort dann auch anders. [31:59] Aber dass es nur eine andere Antwort ist, in einer bestimmten Begrifflichkeit, das muss man sehen lernen. [32:06] Und um das sehen zu lernen, muss man Geschichte machen. [32:09] Weil sonst versteht man das nicht. [32:11] Sonst ist man nur in unserer Begrifflichkeit drinne, mit der man bestimmte Sachen erfasst, aber andere nicht. [32:17] Und man versteht gar nicht die Begrifflichkeit anderer Autoren. [32:21] Also dieses immer andere Denken in einer anderen Begrifflichkeit, um gleiche Probleme, das lernt man in der Geschichte. [32:28] Und damit lernt man auch relativieren. [32:31] Und man merkt, dass man das, was man jetzt als theoretischen Vorschlag macht oder als Interpretation eines empirischen Experiments nur etwas Relatives eigentlich ist, [32:42] dass man sozusagen immer explizieren muss als das, was in etwas Begrifflichem verankert ist. [32:52] Das heißt, Geschichte zu machen, lernt auch zu argumentieren und zu explizieren. [32:59] Und dieses nicht explizieren, was oft in der Wissenschaft drin ist, das kann man nicht machen, wenn man Geschichte macht. [33:07]

JMc: Ja. [33:08] Das freut mich total, dass du die Frage so beantwortet hast, weil das ist genau meine Antwort auf diese Frage. [33:13] Aber die meisten, also meine anderen Gesprächspartner im Podcast sind meistens, sind überwiegend Linguisten, [33:21] die die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft machen und die sagen immer, wenn wir die Geschichte machen, [33:25] können wir den Fortschritt des Faches sehen oder den Fortschritt der Wissenschaft nachzeichnen. [33:31] Ja. [33:32]

JF: Eine Sache könnte ich noch sagen, die mich noch interessiert, weil man merkt ja, ja nicht zwei Sachen, die noch interessant sind, [33:41] man merkt ja auch bis heute, bis heute beschäftige ich mich immer mit Autoren, die zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts gearbeitet haben, also ein Jahrhundert vorher, vor unserer heutigen Zeit. [33:55] Und ich bin dabeigeblieben und man fragt mich ja oft, [33:59] warum interessieren mich so die 1920er, 1930er Jahre, [34:04] also eigentlich die Zwischenkriegszeit. [34:06] Das war schon so für die sowjetrussischen Autoren, das ist auch für die anderen Autoren. [34:10] Ich habe mich ja seit Beginn des 2000er Jahre sehr stark für Karl Bühler interessiert. [34:16] Das ist glaube ich noch ein wichtiger Aspekt der Karriere. [34:18] Ich bin eigentlich von Wygotski dann zu Karl Bühler gegangen, und zwar deshalb, weil ich bestimmte Fragen und Probleme [34:25] mit Wygotski nicht mehr formulieren konnte [34:27] und ich fand, man kann das gut mit Karl Bühler machen. [34:30] Und Karl Bühler ist einfach ein Prototyp dieser Autoren des Beginns des 20. Jahrhunderts. [34:35] Er ist auch, er ist jemand, der Philosoph ist, Psychologe, [34:42] aber gleichzeitig eine Sprachtheorie geschrieben hat und auch an einem pädagogischen Institut mitgearbeitet hat. [34:49] Das heißt, er ist ein Psychologe, [34:51] der als Philosoph auch ausgebildet war, auch Philosophie gelehrt hat. [34:55] Also er war immer, heute würde man dazu sagen, interdisziplinär, aber ich finde das Wort nicht so toll, weil die Interdisziplinarität, die wir heute machen, ist eigentlich nicht die, [35:06] die am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts war, weil wo die Psychologen eben auch noch die philosophischen Theorien kannten, wo alle eigentlich eine gleiche Sprache gesprochen haben und noch miteinander kommuniziert haben. [35:21] Also diese Mischung verschiedener Disziplinen, [35:25] also ich mache dann die Sprachtheorie aber als Psychologe, [35:29] interessiere mich für die Sprachwissenschaften, [35:31] aber als Psychologe, bin aber gleichzeitig philosophisch ausgebildet. [35:35] Das hat mich immer interessiert, sozusagen, diese Art zwischen Disziplinen zu sein. [35:41] Ich habe natürlich auch gemerkt, dass das zwischen Disziplinen zu sein, [35:47] heißt auch zwischen den Stühlen zu sitzen. [35:49] Besonders dann ab den 80er, 90er Jahren, weil wir ja eigentlich so etwas gar nicht mehr fördern, [35:57] weil wir uns bloß unsere Lehrstühle angucken, die sind bei uns sehr stark spezialisiert. [36:02] Und das heißt, das habe ich natürlich mein Leben lang auch gemerkt, [36:05] ich habe immer zwischen den Stühlen gesessen [36:07] und man konnte mich nie wirklich zuordnen, [36:10] weil ich habe als Philosoph zu Psychologen gearbeitet und war aber kein Psychologe und war auch kein Philosoph für die Philosophen. [36:19] Das ist also vielleicht eine Besonderheit. [36:21]

JMc: Vielen Dank.

JF: Bitte schön. [36:23]

In this interview, Neil Cohn tells us about his theory that visual art and spoken language draw on the same underlying cognitive abilities.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

References for Episode 54

Cohn, Neil, and Joost Schilperoord. 2025. A Multimodal Language Faculty: A cognitive framework for communication. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Cohn, Neil. 2026. Speaking in Pictures: A vision of language. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/speaking-in-pictures-9781350402164/

Lerdahl, Fred, and Ray S. Jackendoff. 1985. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Publishing.

In this interview, Paul Kiparsky introduces us to the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini and the philosophical significance of his grammatical description of Sanskrit.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Feature image: Pāṇini stamp, India (2004). Wikimedia Commons

References for Episode 53

Bloomfield, Leonard. Tagalog Texts with Grammatical Analysis, 1917. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50797

Bloomfield, Leonard. The Menominee Language, Yale University Press, 1962.

Kiparsky, Paul. Panini as a Variationist, MIT Press, 1979.

Kiparsky, Paul. “On the architecture of Pāṇini’s grammar.” International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2007.

Kiparsky, Paul.  Panini. In Elan Dresher and Harry v.d. Hulst (eds.), Handbook of the History of Phonology. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Ostler, Nicholas. Case-linking : a theory of case and verb diathesis applied to classical Sanskrit. MIT Dissertation. 1979.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Paul Kiparsky, who’s a professor at Stanford University in California, and Paul’s going to talk to us about the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar. [00:35] Maybe you could tell us who Panini was and what his grammar was. [00:39]

PK: We actually don’t know very much about Panini at all. [00:44] We think he worked somewhere between 500 and 350 B.C. in the Northwest, what is now Pakistan, and we know his mother’s name, and that’s just about all we know about him. [01:00] [chuckles] [01:02] So we know a lot about the grammar, of course. [01:06] It’s a system of 4,000 rules, very condensed so that you can print it on 30 pages, and it’s a generative grammar of Sanskrit. [01:19] It’s about the high standard of his day that is comparable to something like Classical Arabic in the modern world, the formal level, but it was an actual spoken language, because the grammar includes lots of information about how to, for example, address a shudra, a member of the lowest caste, with what intonation and so forth, so showing that it was a language that was spoken. [01:56] It also deals selectively, not completely, with the Vedic, earlier form of the language and treats it as a kind of aberrant system. [02:08] You know, it’s not based on Vedic, it’s based on the norm of classical Sanskrit. [02:16]

JMc: So we don’t know very much about who Panini was. [02:19] Do we know that he was an actual person, or is he more a sort of legendary figure, like a character who’s invented to be the author of the grammar? [02:29]

PK: Well, there must have been someone. We know that there were many other grammarians, because Panini quotes a number of them. [02:42] I think seven or eight of them are at least mentioned, and credited with this or that observation. [02:48] They all seem to have had the same basic approach. [02:52] There’s no difference that we can detect in theory or method, but sometimes they disagree about the data, naturally, the dialectal differences and so on. [03:05] And we, I think, can suppose that it’s kind of like Homer. [03:11] He was the last one in a series of scholars, in this case, who contributed to this enormous work. [03:19] It’s nothing that one person could do in their lifetime, and so I think he was the last in the line and the greatest. [03:29]

JMc: OK. So apropos of Homer, you said that the whole grammar can be printed on about 30 pages, so was it originally meant to be written, or is it something that was memorized and only later committed to writing? [03:44]

PK: No one exactly knows, and actually there’s disputes about the extent to which writing, if at all, was used. [03:53] I personally, for whatever it’s worth, think that both were used. [03:59] That’s certainly the practice in modern Panini scholarship among the traditional pandits. [04:06] They will do all of their computation — that is, all the derivations — essentially in their head, so they can give them a word and they will recite the derivation, 20-30 rules, in order, without using any books or anything. [04:26] And they will own a few books. [04:28] For example, they will have an edition of the Mahabhashya, which is the big commentary, and maybe the Kashika and some other works of interpretation, which nobody memorizes as far as I know, but there’s also pandits who memorize the whole thing, but the ones who simply can recite it from beginning to end in a go are not the people who actually work with the text as a derivational mechanism. [05:03] The people who do work with it that way just know all the rules; they can’t necessarily recite them all in order. [05:10] And so I suspect that that’s how it’s been all the way from the start. [05:15] It’s hard to imagine fixing the order of 4,000 rules just orally. [05:23] It had to take some kind of notation to fix it, it seems to me. [05:28]

JMc: So the grammar is still used today by pandits? [05:32]

PK: Well, it’s used in attenuated form. [05:36] It’s become the basis for a lot of practical Sanskrit grammar, school grammar, and people still study it from that perspective, but as a formal grammar, it’s nothing that you could use practically. [05:54] It’s far too complex to use as a vehicle for learning Sanskrit, for example, so essentially, you already have to know the language to a certain extent, at least to be able to understand what’s going on there. [06:14]

JMc: So what is its purpose? Is it meant to be sort of normative, or is it just meant to be a thing of beauty? [06:20]

PK: Both. It’s certainly normative. [06:26] That is, I think, it was originally, and certainly continues to be, normative in that it defines the correct form of classical Sanskrit, but it was also intended to be a record of the actual speech, which was, at that point, perhaps felt as being threatened by the vernaculars. [06:52] The Prakrits had already emerged when the Aṣṭādhyāyī was composed, so the Buddha, who is roughly, very roughly, a contemporary, before Panini, was writing in a much more vernacular form of Sanskrit. [07:13] I mean, that was part of the political content of Buddhism, right? [07:18] It was more popular, but at that time, the classical Sanskrit described by Panini was clearly still in use among very educated people. [07:30]

JMc: So it was essentially, I mean, it was a conservative project, both in the sense of conserving or preserving an ancient high variety, but also in that contemporary political context of preserving ancient learning in the face of a popular religion, namely Buddhism. [07:49] Is that… Have I understood that correctly? [07:51]

PK: Yeah, I don’t know about ancient learning, about perhaps preserving the, maybe sociolinguistically preserving the Brahmin identity in some way, but much more important it is that it’s a scientific venture, that is, it goes very deeply into the structure of the language in a way that linguists can still… have always learned from, at least since the early 19th century, and still continue to learn from. [08:23]

JMc: Yeah. So the 19th century, which is the period in which modern academic linguistics in the Western world really got started. [08:32] So would you say that Panini’s grammar influenced the development of Western linguistics? [08:39]

PK: I’d say in very fundamental ways. [08:43] So if you go back to the early 19th century, the linguists like Bopp, who founded comparative Indo-European grammar, learned from him about morphology. [08:58] So, until then, people thought in terms of whole words, so in Latin grammar, you have, for example, servus ‘servant’, is cited in the nominative singular, and then you do something called inflection to it. [09:20] You change the endings, so servi, servo, servorum, etc., and these things are understood as processes that you apply to the base form, which is an actual case form, the nominative singular. [09:39] Panini introduced the idea that there was a stem, and there were some endings, and that you form the different case forms by adding to the same stem different case endings, and then maybe doing some phonology on the result of that composition, and output is then the actual word. [10:01] And the reason this was important is that it enabled Bopp to get started with comparative grammar, because it’s those things, the stems and the endings, that are reconstructible. [10:16] Actual words, you can reconstruct post hoc, but those are not the entities on which you do your comparative work. [10:25] You work with roots, you work with affixes, stems, etc., etc., and until that insight came along, there was just some kind of global idea, like you find in William Jones and so on, that “Well, this word looks like that word, and they must be related.” [10:45] And also, the other thing that was a big contribution was the idea of phonological structure, so classes of sounds, for example. [11:00] In fact, the classification of sounds was actually much better than for most of the linguistics that was to follow. [11:15] So, for example, vowels and consonants were classified together by the same feature system, so you had palatal vowels, and palatal consonants, and velar vowels, and velar consonants. [11:32] That’s the system that was abandoned by the British phoneticians. [11:37] They decided to classify vowels in one way and consonants in another way, which introduced all kinds of problems, and it was not until Jakobson that linguists reverted to a unified feature system. [11:54] And interestingly, Uralic linguistics never abandoned this idea. [12:01] I mean, they still have, in works on Uralic languages, they talk about palatal vowels, and velar vowels, and all of that, and it’s actually a very good way of dealing with vowel harmony and all of those things that are prominent in those languages. [12:16] But apart from that basic feature, even the idea of having a classification of sounds was something that basically came into linguistics at that time through Indian science. [12:34]

JMc: So, the topic that you wanted to talk about was the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar, so what would you say the philosophical significance of Panini’s grammar is? [12:46]

PK: So, let me preface it by saying that — and this is partly a continuation of my answer to your previous question — there are many other insights that came out of Panini that anticipate the, or were instrumental in introducing these ideas into Western linguistics. [13:12] So, the idea of a modular organization of language. [13:17] So, you go to Bloomfield and his work, not only on the Native American languages like Menominee, but also his Tagalog grammar, which nobody reads, have this very interesting organization. [13:33] There’s a kind of level order system. [13:37] There’s primary endings and secondary endings, and they each have their characteristic phonology associated with them, and they work differently. [13:49] The primary endings go on roots, the secondary endings go on stems, and that’s all a very sophisticated system. [13:57] That’s straight from Panini, and Bloomfield was very well acquainted with Panini. [14:02] He actually wrote an interesting technical article on that. [14:07] There’s thematic roles and the idea of, if you like, a level of representation or a set of categories that come between semantics and the expression in the morphosyntax of grammatical relations, so case and agreement, and stuff like that, in a many-many relationship to both. [14:30] So, a thematic role can correspond to different semantic categories, and it can also correspond to different cases, for example. [14:41] So, that was introduced into modern linguistics in the ’60s. No, ’70s, I would say. [14:50] So, my student Nick Ostler at MIT wrote a dissertation that was very influential, where he had this, and that was inspired by Panini. [15:03] OK, so why am I telling you this? Because the remarkable thing is that Panini had no theory at all, and that’s the theoretically interesting thing. [15:15] All of these very sophisticated categories, conventions, devices, and so forth, which we admire, emerge from only two fundamental things. [15:28] One is, we’re going to have a complete description, and the second is, the total description has to be as simple as possible. [15:38] If you put those things together, they force you to introduce these devices to abbreviate the description. [15:48] So, these are not just handy conventions or anything like that. [15:55] They have a very serious purpose here. [15:58] If you removed any of them, the grammar would become longer. [16:01] It couldn’t fit into 30 pages anymore. [16:05] In fact, for parts of the grammar, you can actually prove this mathematically. [16:11] For example, the Shiva Sutras, which have the phonological classes, and define the phonological classes, they are, in a very particular sense, perfect. [16:23] So, that, I think, is really philosophically interesting, because it provides an answer to an issue that’s being discussed a lot, which is actually at the basis of, for example, the generative grammar project, which is, how is it possible to learn a language, and what do all languages have in common, and why? [16:46] And the answer is very different than what you get in generative grammar. [16:51] It also involves simplicity, but in a totally different way. [16:55] So, what I learned as a graduate student is that you have a rich, innate grammatical formalism, the theory of grammar, and then you have a simplicity principle, and you apply the formal system to the data and always choose the simplest description. [17:19] Well, what Panini has is, he says you don’t have anything except completeness and simplicity, and the structure emerges, right? [17:32] I mean, it seems to me that’s a very exciting answer. [17:35]

JMc: But is it stated explicitly that- [17:39]

PK: Oh, nothing is stated. [17:41] Nothing is stated. [17:42] We just have the rules. [17:43] There’s no theory. [17:45] And that’s a problem. [17:48] We don’t even have all of the principles by which those rules and their interaction is interpreted. [17:58] We don’t have those because, evidently, there must have been a break in the tradition at some point. [18:07] So, you find that even the earliest commentators, which are Katyayana, who writes a bunch of comments, and then Patanjali, who has a more discursive discussion, pro and con of different interpretations, they don’t even know, in many cases, exactly how the grammar works. [18:31] And figuring that out has been a project of modern Panini studies, and that’s been one of the things I’ve been interested in. [18:44] I actually wrote a book that’s called Pāṇini as a Variationist. [18:51] It turns out he uses three words to indicate that the rule is optional, and there’s a ton of optional rules, maybe 30% or so of the rules are actually optional. [19:03] So, you can add this suffix to express a certain meaning, or that other suffix also. [19:11] And he uses three words — vā, vibhāṣā, and anyatarasyām — and what I discovered is that vā actually means ‘preferably’, vibhāṣā means ‘marginally’, and anyatarasyām means ‘either way’, and I proved this by collating not only his own usage, but the usage of the texts and the usage of the Vedas with respect to the Vedic rules that he formulates to show that that fits exactly with what the text shows. [19:54] And so, that was, I think, the first clear proof that there was content in the grammar that the tradition didn’t know about, because there must have been this break. [20:10] So, that’s why it’s important that the grammar was written down, because it’s the only way in which it could be recovered, and the study of it taken up again after this disruption, and that led me in work that was done together with S.D. Joshi, who was a Panini scholar from Pune, where I spent some years, to question the principles by which rules interact, and so we formulated, I think, a much simpler and better understanding of how that works, and that’s been quite controversial, because there are many traditional people who don’t like that. [21:06] On the other hand, I think we have convinced a lot of people, so the discussion continues. [21:13] But anyway, that’s why this is a continuing quest, and we don’t have a finished system that we can just apply and talk about. [21:22] We have to understand first what that system is like. [21:26]

JMc: Do the traditionalists have an alternative interpretation? [21:30]

PK: Well, there is a traditional interpretation, which is… Well, within it, there are many different opinions, also minor disagreements, but there is broadly a traditional consensus, and what we offer is a new one. [21:53] And there’s actually a recent work that’s just coming out, I think it’s Oxford University Press, by Rishi Rajpopat, who has a still different view, so it’s been very controversial, and I think it’s quite interesting, but ultimately not correct. [22:15]

JMc: Empirically not correct, or? [22:17]

PK: It’s just not, it doesn’t handle the… It doesn’t give you the right results, that’s a term. [22:23] I mean, if you like that, that’s a way of saying it’s not empirically correct. [22:28] These are principles about how to decide, for example, if two rules are applicable, which one do you choose? [22:36] And because only a very small part of the grammar shows you the order in which rules are to be applied, most of them just have the rules swimming around there, and you throw in a form, a derivation, and the rules all have a whack at it, and you have to decide which one is prioritized at any point in the derivation, and we have a very simple answer to that. [23:02]

JMc: At a couple of points, you’ve described Panini’s grammar as a generative grammar, and you’ve also mentioned how Panini’s grammar has inspired many developments in generative theory since the ’60s and ’70s, but do you think it’s anachronistic at all to project our modern notion of generative grammar back onto Panini? [23:27]

PK: Well, I’m just using generative grammar in a broad sense, that it’s not restricted to a corpus, but it goes beyond the data, and that it essentially provides you an analysis that relates meaning to sound. [23:45] There’s four levels. [23:48] Again, these emerge from the basic idea. [23:54] You have the simplest description. [23:57] You are forced to modularize the system, and so you have essentially input. [24:03] You can think of it as an input. [24:06] You can think of it as just all being simultaneous if you like. [24:10] It doesn’t matter. [24:11] But there’s on one end the semantics, and there’s a very regimented way in which you talk about tense and mood and all of those categories and about the meaning that the cases express. [24:28] For example, you know, separation: if there is a fixed point, then the removal from that is defined as a separation. [24:40] Then you use that to characterize, for example, a certain theta role, which is, let’s say, source. [24:51] And then you use that theta role, the source, to characterize, among other things, the ablative case, but each of those things has many functions. [25:04] That’s just the most straightforward mapping between them. [25:08] So you have semantics, you have thematic roles, and you have sort of abstract tense, if you like, abstract tense, and then you have case agreement, and you have the actual morphological tenses, and then you have morphophonology, and that is then mapped into phonology. [25:31] And following on that and not dealt with in the grammar is phonetics. [25:37] So there were other works which take the output of the grammar, or if you like, let’s not talk input and output. [25:48] Let’s just say it’s correspondence between semantics and phonology. [25:52] They take the phonology and map it into phonetics. [25:58] So this is interesting. [25:59] Again, the entire edifice of phonemes emerges just from these basic principles. [26:11] There’s no idea of complementary distribution, or minimal pairs, or distinctiveness, or whatnot. [26:21] I mean, all of this theory that goes into phonology and phonemics in Western linguistics isn’t even there. [26:30] But still, you get phonemes, which are exactly… It’s the smallest number of categories that you need in order to characterize the lexicon and the rules, [26:46] and you don’t need for that, for example, the visarga, which is the, you know, the H with a dot under it (it’s a form of S that you get at the ends of words), the anusvara, which is the nasal off-glide that you get in certain combinations, because those are all derivable by phonetic rules. [27:14] So they’re not part of the Shiva Sutras. [27:17] It’s an example of emergent structure, right? [27:23] It comes out from nothing. [27:25] I think it’s an amazing fact. [27:28]

JMc: So do you think it’s a fact about the structure of human language, or do you think it’s just a contingent result of a particular approach to analysis? [27:38]

PK: Well, you know, this is way beyond anything that I could substantiate, but one might think of the human learner as trying to construct the simplest account of the ambient language. [28:01] There’s a modern theoretical foundation for that. [28:04] It’s minimum description length. [28:07] Originated as a theory of randomness, a Russian mathematician, Kolmogorov, and it’s become pretty respectable philosophical theory, because it’s got a solid mathematics behind. [28:27] So John Goldsmith has written about it. [28:32] Yeah. [28:33] So this is kind of a very interesting basic anticipation of a modern idea that I think holds a lot of promise. [28:44]

JMc: Well, that’s excellent. [28:46] Thanks very much for answering those questions. [28:49]

PK: OK. [28:51]

In this interview, Gereon Müller discusses his new book Lanes to Language, which unites the worlds of history of linguistics and cycling.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Intro and outro: Bach, Cello Suite no. 1 in G major, Prelude. Recording from Wikipedia.

References for Episode 52

Helbig, Gerhard, and Joachim Buscha. 19721. Deutsche Grammatik. Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie.

Müller, Gereon. 2025. Lanes to Language: Linguistic bike rides in and around Leipzig. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. http://home.uni-leipzig.de/muellerg/rad/lingride.pdf

Wundt, Wilhelm. 1900–1920. Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythos und Sitte, 10 vols. Leipzig: Engelmann.

In this interview, Martin Haspelmath talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current state of the field.

Photo: Swen Reichhold/Uni Leipzig

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

References for Episode 51

Dryer, M. S., et al. 2013. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. München: Max Planck Digital Library. http://wals.info/

Haspelmath, M. 1993. A Grammar of Lezgian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Haspelmath, M. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663-687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021

Michaelis, S. M., Maurer, P., Haspelmath, M., & Huber, M., eds. 2013. The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: MPI für evolutionäre Anthropologie. http://apics-online.info

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, [00:14] and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:22] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discussed. [00:26] Today we’re in Leipzig with Martin Haspelmath at the Max Planck Institute, [00:32] and we’re going to continue our series of oral history interviews [00:36] by asking Martin about his career in linguistics [00:40] and his contributions to typology, [00:43] and how he sees the past, present, and future of the field. [00:47] So my first question to you is, can you tell us how you got into linguistics? [00:52]

MH: Yes, so thank you for having me here. [00:58] I got interested in languages rather early on, so I was already a linguist later in high school. [01:06] I was interested in Latin and Greek, [01:10] and even in Egyptian hieroglyphs, because there was a museum of Egyptian in our town, [01:17] and I also had some interest in Polish, [01:22] because my mother spent her childhood in Poland as an ethnic German, and so I started studying Polish a little bit, rather early on. [01:32] So yeah, I was interested in languages very early, [01:36] and I was very happy that I had the chance to continue to do linguistics. [01:41]

JMc: So did you speak any Polish at home? [01:43]

MH: No, my mother didn’t speak Polish later on. [01:46] It was only in her childhood, and then the ethnic Germans had to leave Poland, [01:52] but it was an important heritage language for me, because my mother told us a lot about her Polish fatherland, as she said. [02:03] So she came to Germany in 1945 and felt a little bit as an outsider, [02:09] and, yeah, they had lived in Poland for many generations. [02:14] My grandparents even knew Russian, because they had gone to a good Russian school before 1914. [02:20] So Slavic languages are in that sense a family heritage, not that these languages were spoken. [02:27]

JMc: So how did you then transition from this general interest in languages to the actual academic study of linguistics? [02:36]

MH: I studied at the universities of Vienna and Cologne, and first I was very interested in historical linguistics, [02:44] so I was fascinated by the unification that was offered by the study of ancient Indo-European languages in historical-comparative perspective, [02:55] reconstructing sounds and morphological patterns to Proto-Indo-European. [03:03] I had gotten into that even in my later high school years, and I first thought I was going to be an Indo-Europeanist, [03:12] but then things changed. [03:15] My first two years at the University of Vienna, I was doing Indo-European linguistics, [03:21] and it was interesting, but there were very few students, and the professors were very conservative and not so cool somehow. [03:32] And there were two visiting professors from abroad [03:36] who were teaching strange things such as Russian-style syntax — it was Igor Mel’čuk — and Greenbergian universals, typology. [03:50] So I took a course from Edith Moravcsik from the University of Wisconsin, who had worked with Joseph Greenberg in the Stanford Universals Project, [03:59] and so I had known about formal syntax and Indo-European linguistics earlier, [04:06] but I really learned about typology and universals only at the university through Edith Moravcsik, and I was fascinated. [04:15]

JMc: And you made a career out of it. [04:17]

MH: Well, it took a while. [04:20] I went to the University of Cologne, because that was a place where typology was supposedly strong, [04:28] but I was a bit unsure for a while, but then I got a chance to spend two semesters as an exchange student at the University of Buffalo in the United States with Joan Bybee, [04:39] and Joan Bybee had a kind of real typology project, and she involved me in it, [04:45] and so I realized that, yeah, not only I loved it, but there were also some people who thought I could do it well. [04:53] And so Joan Bybee was a very important person who supported me later on, [04:59] and then I had a chance in 1990 to work on a European typology project with Ekkehard König, [05:08] funded by the European Science Foundation, studying European languages in typological perspective. [05:15]

JMc: So what is typology, then? [05:18]

MH: Well, comparing languages that are not necessarily related in ways that potentially lead us to universal generalizations. [05:30] Of course, if we study just European languages, then that’s not universal enough, but I felt that in the 1990s, certainly that led to a lot of new insights that hadn’t been there before. [05:44] So linguistics in earlier decades was mostly focused either on the historical study of particular languages, [05:54] or since the 1960s, in the Chomskyan paradigm, on, yes, speculative ideas about universal grammar and formalization, [06:07] and, yeah, the Chomskyan approach didn’t appeal so much to me. [06:13] And also in the 1970s and ’80s, it was not very comparative yet, [06:18] so I kind of really loved the comparison of European languages that, you know, allowed me to look at patterns in Icelandic, in Albanian, in Maltese, in Estonian, [06:35] and, you know, compare all these little languages and try to see what they have in common, and then maybe later on to broaden that to a global scope. [06:46] But in the 1990s, it was still the European pattern for me. [06:51]

JMc: So what exactly is it that you’re comparing? [06:56]

MH: Well, in the 1990s, we were comparing adverbial clauses, for example, or comparative constructions or indefinite pronouns. [07:06] So we were comparing various morphological and syntactic patterns, regardless of their historical relatedness, [07:16] and often we found that they were similar not because they were inherited, but because they had borrowed patterns from related languages. [07:27] So my dissertation was on indefinite pronouns — you know, things like ‘somebody’, ‘something’, ‘anybody’, ‘anything’. [07:38] You know, English and German are very similar. [07:41] Many words are similar, you know, ‘house’ [Haus] and ‘shoe’ [Schuh], [07:44] and other words are sort of very clearly kind of borrowed, [07:50] like Tisch and table, borrowed from Greek and Latin, and so on. [07:54] All of that was well known, but, you know, why does German have jemand, and etwas, and irgendjemand and irgendetwas? [08:03] So these patterns were not clearly historically related, they were much younger, [08:12] so I was fascinated by this, and often these younger patterns had geographical dimensions, [08:19] so languages spoken in similar areas were often similar in ways that people hadn’t looked at before. [08:28] So we were doing European areal typology, looking at similarities in geographical terms that people hadn’t seen before. [08:37] So that was really a new thing in the 1990s, and I was part of it, and I called it Standard Average European, and it became well known, but it was sort of discovered accidentally. [08:49]

JMc: But, I mean, there was areal typology and the idea of diffusion before the 1990s. [08:55]

MH: Yes, but it was not mainstream. [08:58] There was a little bit of it. [09:00] The diffusion was being studied primarily by dialectologists, so typological areal diffusion was really a new thing. [09:12] Johanna Nichols wrote her book on Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time in 1992, and before Johanna Nichols, Matthew Dryer wrote his famous article on large linguistic areas in 1989, [09:29] and our work on European areal typology in the 1990s was really part of a kind of larger real movement. [09:39] Clearly, there were earlier things. [09:41] There was the idea of an Indian, South Asian linguistic area, there was the idea of Mesoamerican linguistic area, but those were not larger movements. [09:55] They did not immediately spark larger research efforts, whereas in Europe, there were many linguists, [10:02] also related to the funding by the European Science Foundation, [10:07] and, actually, one of the outcomes of our European typology project was that when the funding came to an end in 1995, exactly 30 years ago, [10:18] the Association for Linguistic Typology was founded, coming out of this ESF funding initiative. [10:26]

JMc: So a moment ago, when we were talking about what typology is, about the ultimate aims of the field, you mentioned universals. [10:34] So do you mean sort of universals in grammar, like in language structure? [10:38] Is that the ultimate aim of typology, to discover what the possible range of languages is, [10:44] or is it to look at these mechanisms of diffusion? [10:48]

MH: Well, the universals were certainly a very important goal in Greenberg’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. [10:56] So in 1978, Greenberg had edited four volumes, universals of human language, and that coincided more or less with the Chomskyan interest in universals. [11:08] So in the ’60s and ’70s, certainly there was some universals research, and in the United States, you know, work by Matthew Dryer and Johanna Nichols, and also Joan Bybee, [11:19] and Tom Givon was an important member of that community. [11:24] They were doing sort of empirical universals research, so they had not focused so much on areal typology. [11:34] So I was interested in both of these things, [11:36] but I felt that the areal typology was this new thing that we had discovered in Europe and that we were pushing, [11:43] and this then also led me to ask whether there could be areal typology on a global scale. [11:51] So when I came to Leipzig in 1998, to the Max Planck Institute, I said, “Let’s expand this and have a world atlas of language structures.” [12:02] And I was extremely fortunate that this Max Planck Institute was founded, and there was funding. [12:11] Bernard Comrie was the director, and he thought that was an excellent idea. [12:15] He was part of this Greenbergian American typological movement, and we said, “Let’s study universals from an areal-geographical perspective, and let’s make a world atlas of language structures.” [12:30] And what we discovered with this atlas, I think, was this massive areality worldwide. [12:37] Maybe we didn’t discover new universals. [12:40] Greenberg was actually pretty good at discovering universals in the ’60s. [12:45] And we also, I think, showed that some of the later attempts at finding universals were a bit naive. [12:55] You know, things like the null subject parameter or all kinds of other ideas, [13:00] how word order correlations could be extended, for example, to phonology, you know — many of these did not… actually found confirmation. [13:12] But what we did find was that there was a lot of areality, a lot of geographical structure that needed to be taken into account. [13:21]

JMc: So do you think that areality is like a confounding factor for historical-comparative, for genealogical relationships? [13:29] Would you say that there are two kinds of relationships, sort of historical-comparative on the one side, and then there’s areal, and they’re sort of interfering with each other? Or… [13:39]

MH: Yes, absolutely. [13:40] So there are really three reasons why languages can be similar. [13:45] One, that they’re related in the genealogical sense, that they belong to a language family, [13:52] that they share features because they inherited them from a common ancestor. [13:57] Another one is that they borrowed them, or that they have similar features because other languages in the area have similar features. [14:06] So, you know, like in the Southeast Asian languages, they all have SVO order, subject-verb-object, they’re all kind of isolating, they have tone, and so on. [14:17] So that’s the areal factor. [14:19] And then the third reason for similarities is that they’re just human languages, and human languages just are like that, [14:29] are like that because there’s general universal tendencies. [14:35] And if we want to find the universal tendencies, we first have to take into account the other two potential factors. [14:45] And from the perspective of the universals, yes, we can say they’re confounding factors, [14:50] that we have to somehow, you know, using statistical methods, you know, first eliminate and then find the universal tendencies. [15:02]

JMc: You said there were several massive areas in the world that you’ve discovered through the World Atlas of Language Structures project, [15:09] so how many of them are there? [15:12]

MH: Well, we found that there’s a lot of areality in the sense that many large-scale patterns. [15:21] So earlier, as I had mentioned, people had noted that South Asian languages are rather similar [15:28] regardless of whether they belong to the Indo-European family, or the Dravidian family, or the Munda family. [15:35] They all seem to have a kind of common general pattern. [15:42] People had noticed similarities of Mesoamerican languages. [15:46] People had noticed some similarities in Australian languages and so on. [15:53] So all of these were known, [15:55] but with the World Atlas of Language Structures, published exactly 20 years ago in the summer of 2005, [16:04] we saw that the majority of our world maps showed some areal effects, [16:11] or seemed to show some areal effects — not all of them, but many of them. [16:16] And there were new areal effects, there were some confirmations of earlier patterns, but also a lot of new areal effects. [16:23] And I think we’re still only beginning to understand what these mean, because the problem is that they don’t always form isoglosses. [16:34] Sometimes they do. [16:37] So for the Caucasus, for example, all these languages have ergativity, they have ejectives, they have certain other valency patterns that are striking, [16:54] but then many other things are not shared by the Caucasian languages, [16:58] but they may be shared by languages in the Caucasus and elsewhere, [17:05] or only by some of the languages in the Caucasus and some neighbouring languages. [17:09] So there are many cross-cutting isoglosses, and I think we don’t understand it very well, [17:14] and we have to be careful not to be led to premature generalizations [17:21] by maybe cultural stereotypes. [17:24] Maybe people think, “Oh, South Asia, oh, it’s kind of a cultural area, so we only cherry-pick those features that those languages share.” [17:33] I think that has sometimes happened, [17:35] and maybe even my work on the European linguistic area was, in a way, influenced by European cultural stereotypes, so I’m a bit critical of that now. So… [17:51] I mean, certainly, the idea that Europe is a sort of, you know, common culture, you know, we have the European Union, [18:02] and at the time I thought, “Oh, it’s wonderful, European unification, and now we can show that the European languages also share more than we thought they did,” or so, [18:14] and there was a certain danger of ideological bias in that now, so I’m a bit critical of that now. [18:20]

JMc: Have you noticed sort of subareas within the European languages? [18:24]

MH: Yes, there are subareas, and people have talked about Circum-Baltic similarities, [18:30] people, of course, for a long time had talked about similarities in the Balkan languages, [18:35] but there were also other ideas, for example, similarities, Circum-Mediterranean, right? And similarities in Northern Eurasia in general. [18:50]

JMc: You’ve talked about WALS a lot, about the World Atlas of Language Structures. [18:54] Would you say that that’s your greatest contribution to the field? [18:58]

MH: Well, it’s certainly what I’m best known for, [19:03] but it’s really the Max Planck Institute’s contribution, Bernard Comrie’s contribution, because I had a unique possibility here. [19:12] We had this very generous funding. [19:15] Yeah, I enjoyed bringing all these people together, but the community existed, [19:24] so, you know, basically Greenberg created it in the 1970s with a Stanford project, [19:32] and, yeah, then we collected together all those people that were already doing typology, mostly in Europe. [19:43] Somehow it’s also interesting, historically, that the worldwide cross-linguistic research that was happening in the ’70s and ’80s in the United States [19:54] became more popular in Europe in the 1990s, and so we had people like Leon Stassen, and Anna Siewierska, and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, and Östen Dahl, and so on, [20:07] so typology was already then, in the 1990s, when we started in 1998, [20:12] was a European thing, and I helped bring these people together, [20:16] but also Matthew Dryer and Bernard Comrie. [20:19] David Gil was also very important, and yeah, I had the most time to put it all together also, but it wasn’t really my idea. [20:35] Maybe my biggest intellectual contribution was a more philosophical one. [20:42]

JMc: Yeah, tell us about it. [laughs] [20:44]

MH: Since it’s a podcast not only about history, but also about the philosophy of language sciences, [20:50] I’m happy to talk about that, namely, my interest in comparing languages [20:57] led me to wonder increasingly about how language description and language comparison are in tension with each other, [21:07] and for a long time I hadn’t seen this problem, [21:11] but I saw it around 2010 when we were doing the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, [21:21] because that was a related endeavour, but it was a different one. [21:27] It was, we brought together people who already were typologists, [21:32] and who had already solved the problem of the jump from particular languages to comparing. [21:40] They had looked at grammars and put together comparative studies, [21:46] but when we did the APiCS, [21:48] we brought together 75 teams of scholars [21:53] who were studying pidgin and creole and mixed languages, [21:57] and that was really challenging. [22:00]

JMc: OK, so what exactly is the tension between description and comparison? [22:06]

MH: We drew up a questionnaire, and we asked them, “How is this particular feature behaving in your language?” [22:14] So we asked them, for example, “What is the order of the adjective and noun?” [22:19] “What is the structure of ditransitive constructions?” [22:23] “What is the pattern of numerals, of cardinal and ordinal numerals? [22:28] “What is the pattern of, you know, various morphological systems, tense and aspect?” and so on. [22:39] And then sometimes they asked us hard questions. [22:42] For example, they asked, “What exactly do you mean by an adjective?” [22:46] Right? So, in the earlier typology, these questions also came up, [22:51] but they were resolved by the typologist in reading the grammar. [22:58] With the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures, we were actually discussing with our authors, [23:03] and they weren’t typologists, and they sometimes criticised us. [23:07] They said, “What do you mean adjective? [23:09] This is not an adjective in my language.” [23:12] So we had real debates going on, and that really helped me to understand [23:18] that there was a real deep tension. [23:21]

JMc: OK. And how do you resolve the tension? [23:24]

MH: So I made a proposal in a paper published in 2010; actually, the first version was 2008. [23:30] So we started with the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures in 2007 or so, [23:36] just fairly quickly after the World Atlas of Language Structures came out. [23:40] And my proposal was to resolve it by saying that the descriptive categories that people use for describing and understanding particular languages [23:50] are different from the categories that we use for comparing languages. [23:55] So I said comparative concepts are different from the language-particular descriptive categories, [24:00] and later on, in order to drive this point home, I suggested that we should even have terms like g-linguistics for general linguistics, comparative linguistics, [24:11] and p-linguistics for particular linguistics. [24:14]

JMc: But exactly how does this work, this contrast between comparative and particular categories? [24:21]

MH: People are not always happy about it because they think that, or many people think, that if you compare languages, [24:33] you should make use of the descriptive categories that each linguist set up for describing their language, [24:41] or if people are just, you know, like fieldworkers, for example, and describe a particular language, [24:46] then they want to make use of the concepts that the typologists are using, because often these are very prestigious, [24:54] so they read work by typologists and want to make use of them. [24:59] But what I’m telling them is, “No, don’t do that. [25:04] Make up your own categories. [25:05] Be inspired by what the typologists do, but don’t think that you can take their concepts off the shelf to describe your language. [25:14] Each language should be described in its own terms,” as Boas emphasized in 1911. [25:24]

JMc: But do you think that that means that languages are then incommensurable, [25:27] like that the project of comparing them is just impossible? [25:32]

MH: No, obviously not. Obviously, I’m saying they can be compared. [25:37] I think Boas and some of his successors realized that comparing them is more difficult than people had thought, [25:46] but Boas himself was very interested in comparing languages and cultures. [25:51] He just didn’t think it was so easy. [25:53] He just thought that each language should be first described in its own terms and respected [26:02] and should not be described from the European perspective. [26:08] So Boas himself did not embark on a large comparative perspective. [26:13] He was concerned with different things. [26:16] He was in the 1920s fighting racism in North America [26:20] and did a very good job of that, I think, [26:24] and also some of his students did not engage in large-scale comparison. [26:29] So Sapir and Bloomfield did not do a lot of comparison. [26:35] They were concerned with other questions. [26:37] But I think that the concepts that were developed, especially by Bloomfield, are still very good concepts for comparing languages. [26:48] So, you know, Bloomfield was very careful to use novel concepts for comparing languages. [26:56] So, for example, to say that the morpheme — or the morph, as I would say — is the basis for comparing languages and not necessarily the word, [27:07] because words are something that we get from our spelling, [27:12] but not all languages have writing systems, or they have different writing systems. [27:16] Therefore, using the morpheme, the minimal unit of form and meaning, is a better foundation for comparing languages. [27:25]

JMc: You talk about describing the language in its own terms, but I guess this very process of doing the description, [27:32] like, the grammarian or the linguist brings along their own categories. [27:37] Like the structure doesn’t exist in the language as such, it’s something that the linguist creates through their description, wouldn’t you say? [27:46] Or another way of putting it, would it be true to say [27:49] that there are an infinite number of possible descriptions that could be made of a language? [27:55] An infinite number of valid descriptions, like it could be described in many different ways, and they would all be valid, [28:01] and the differences come from the grammarian who does the description, rather than being inherent to the language? [28:07]

MH: OK, that’s another interesting question that I haven’t written about, because it may be even more frustrating for language describers. [28:19] And as a typologist, somebody who sits at their desk and makes use of the work of the fieldworkers, [28:26] I have enormous respect for the fieldworkers, [28:29] and I know that they often invest a lot into finding the true categories of the language. [28:36] Now, what you’re saying is that perhaps there are multiple correct ways of describing a language, that there is not one true set of categories. [28:47] And I haven’t pushed that. [28:49] I think you’re probably right, [28:51] but more importantly, there are also many wrong ways in which a language can be described. [28:57] So if a fieldworker finds one way of describing a language that’s not wrong, that’s very valuable and very important, [29:08] because the biggest problem is the wrong descriptions of languages, wrong ways that come about from our negligence or even our carrying over our preconceived ideas. [29:21] So I think for the fieldworker, really, the most important task is to find one correct way of describing a language that is not unduly influenced by other considerations, [29:36] such as other well-known languages or preconceived theoretical ideas or whatever. [29:43] So that’s already a tall order for every fieldworker. [29:47]

JMc: But do you think that it would be putting the philosophical question to one side if you say, “We’ll just accept that there could be other descriptions, but we’ll go with this one because that’s the one we have”? [30:00]

MH: I’m agnostic in that regard. [30:03] I’m really a g-linguist. [30:05] I’m not a p-linguist, [30:07] And if somebody says, “But no, my description is really the true description of this language,” then I will not argue with them, [30:18] because what I’m really interested in is in what the speakers of this language do, [30:25] what I have to know in order to learn the language, [30:28] and if their description is one of the many correct ones, that satisfies me, I take that information, I put it into my typological database, [30:41] transforming their language-particular descriptive categories into my comparative concepts and trying to extract cross-linguistic generalizations and ultimately, hopefully, valid universals. [30:55]

JMc: So we’ve talked about the past of typology, your own contributions to the field and of the MPI here. [31:01] How do you see the future of typology? [31:04] Where’s it going? [31:07]

MH: Typological linguistics (comparative linguistics, as I like to call it), will always be of interest to people, to linguists. [31:21] Of course, the future of linguistic diversity does not look very good, because bigger languages are getting bigger and bigger, [31:29] and smaller languages are getting smaller and are less prominent. [31:34] And I think the future, looking to the next 50 or 100 years or so, [31:41] clearly is a dramatic loss of the smaller languages that are influencing us right now. [31:48] We’re still all looking at Australian languages that will be gone in a couple of decades. [31:53] But people will always be interested in diversity, there will always be diversity, there will always be migration, [32:01] there will always be people wondering how Chinese and English compare, [32:05] certainly over the next 100 years, [32:08] and people are already substituting the kind of loss of dialectal diversity, for example, by invented languages, [32:19] Right? So there’s a lot of conlanguages or popular media, there’s Klingon and so on. [32:28] So I have no worry that people will not be interested in linguistic diversity and will not wonder about them, [32:36] and whether they will build on this sort of research that we are doing right now in 50 years’ time, I have no idea. [32:44] Maybe they shouldn’t, because maybe we have gone in the wrong direction, I don’t know. [32:50] Looking at the past, 200 years ago, typology really arose from German Romanticism. [32:58] And German Romanticism had some strange ideas about isolating and agglutinating languages. [33:06] They had the idea that some languages were superior to others, for example. [33:11] You know, some of these were adjacent to racist ideas about some races being superior to others and so on. [33:20] So hopefully we are a little better than people who started the whole enterprise, [33:28] but we are in a way still building on those earlier enterprises. [33:32] So this is for me really a sobering thought, [33:36] and the fact that my ideas about European areal linguistics [33:43] were influenced by my ideology about European unification, again, [33:49] makes me a bit sceptical that all our current ideas are really on the right track. [33:56] So my experience of being in the field for 40 years has taught me to be a bit humble. [34:05]

JMc: I actually really loved you saying that your ideas about the European linguistic area being influenced about your belief in European political unification, because that sort of reflexivity is exactly what this podcast is about. [34:20] That’s what I spent all my time doing, and you’ve done my job for me. [laughs] [34:24] That’s great. [34:25] And the one last thing I wanted to ask you is that, [34:28] quite apart from this purely academic work, [34:31] you’ve also done a lot of work on building up the scholarly infrastructure of the field, [34:36] in particular, being one of the founders of Language Science Press, which is a scholar-run open access publisher. [34:43] So what motivated you to do that, and how do you see that project going? [34:49]

MH: Well, what motivated me is very easy to say. [34:53] My first book, Grammar of Lezgian, was published in 1993, and I was very proud of it, [34:59] and when I saw the price tag of 299 Deutschmarks, which is about 150 euros, I was totally shocked and I realized that nobody would be able to afford it. [35:12] And ever since 1993, I thought something needs to be done about it, [35:19] so when the opportunity came up to do something about it when I was established as a typologist [35:24] and my colleague Stefan Müller in Humboldt University Berlin said, “Let’s do something like this,” I said, “I’ll be part of it.” [35:34] Yeah, I had no teaching obligations here at the Max Planck Institute, plenty of free time. [35:40] I thought, “Let’s do it,” [35:43] and I was very happy that it became a big success, also because Sebastian Nordhoff joined the project and is still doing a very good job of it. [35:56] Again, I don’t know what the future will be. [35:58] I would hope that in the future all scholarly publication will be done by the scholarly organizations themselves [36:07] and we will not give so many profits to these big multinational companies, [36:18] but that’s ultimately a political question. [36:21] Our funding will have to come from public funders, from governments, basically, [36:30] and they will have to decide. [36:33] And until fairly recently, there wasn’t so much interest in a more reasonable scholarly publication structure. [36:46] There was a lot of interest in open access, [36:48] but also open access is not very reasonable [36:50] as long as open access is still controlled by private funders [36:56] who extract a lot of money from the scholarly organizations. [36:59] So I think we really have to push the idea that scholarly publication is part of the scholarly process [37:06] and should not be done by outsiders who extract money from it, [37:13] but I don’t have any resources for that left. [37:21] I leave that to the others and now I concentrate again on my scholarly work. [37:26]

JMc: OK, great. [37:27] Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [37:31]

MH: Good, thank you for having me. [37:33] [music]