This answer, while logically adequate, is unlikely to satisfy those who feel Hjelmslev's separation of form from substance is too radical. On the one hand, he is undoubtedly correct in insisting that the system of language is centrally governed by properly *linguistic* principles, principles which cannot be reduced to special cases of the laws of physiology, physics, general psychology, logic, etc. But on the other hand, the categories of linguistic form show too close a correspondence to those of substance to allow linguists to treat this relationship as some sort of extra-systemic consideration, or even as a colossal accident. By and large, the regularities of distribution, alternation, and similar properties of linguistic elements operate with reference to *phonetically* natural classes, have *phonetic* explanations (at least in part), etc.

Further, we see that linguistic systems when expressed in other media than the phonetic show a similar dependence on, and determination by, the properties of that medium. Striking demonstration of this has come in the research on manual (or 'sign') languages conducted since roughly the 1960s. When Hjelmslev wrote, the only such systems that were generally considered by linguists were systems of finger spelling, in which manual signs serve in a more or less direct way to represent letters of an established orthography—itself, in turn, representing a spoken language.

With increasing attention to signed languages in their more general form has come the realization that their structure falls within the range of systems known from spoken languages, and that they are grounded in the same cognitive and neural bases as spoken languages, *modulo* physical differences of modality. On the other hand, they typically represent unique, autonomous systems that are quite different in structure from (and not essentially parasitic on) the spoken languages of the communities within which they are used. An introduction to some basic properties of manual languages and their distinctness from spoken languages is provided by Bellugi & Klima (1979); a collection of results from the more recent (massive) literature is provided by Brentari (2010). While falling well within the class of human natural languages, the organizing principles of these systems, the natural classes of elements that function in linguistic regularities and the principles of historical change operating on the elements, etc., can only be understood in terms of the specific characteristics of their manual implementation—suggesting that a similar understanding of phonetic implementation is essential to an account of spoken languages.

Paradoxically, language seems to be subject in its essence to its own proper set of organizing principles, while its concrete details can be largely related to extralinguistic factors. This contradiction is nowhere resolved (or even admitted) by Hjelmslev, but his work has the merit of stressing one side of the question so strongly as at least to raise the issue. Many other investigators have asserted the autonomy of linguistic structure, but few have been willing to follow this proposition in its most absolute form nearly so far. Probably the only view of phonology to pose the problem and a concrete solution to it is that associated with DeCourtenay and Kruszewski (cf. above, chapter 4): here the extra-linguistic factors serve as constraints on the raw material that enters the linguistic system, while the system itself is subject to its own distinct set of principles. As we have already noted, this is more a program for research than a concretely articulated theory, but it does propose an account of what must be considered the most central issue raised by Hjelmslev: the relation between form and substance in linguistic structure.

There are numerous other issues in general linguistics that are addressed by Hjelmslev's work, but considerations of space preclude further discussion here. On the basis of the overall account given above of the conceptual foundation and goals of glossematics, I now move on to the proposals made within that theory concerning sound structure, and their instantiation in particular descriptions.

### **7.4 Hjelmslev's approach to the description of sound structure**

The abstract character of the issues treated thus far in the present chapter and their distance from actual empirical descriptions of particular language data are completely typical of the writings for which Hjelmslev is known. His study of such theoretical topics was not, however, carried out in as near total isolation from concrete factual material as is sometimes believed. His early training in Indo-European studies, for example, involved the study of a range of languages necessary to pursue that kind of research. His work on Baltic (especially Lithuanian) for his doctorate involved direct fieldwork, and forced him to pay attention to a set of descriptive problems in the domain of accent to which he would return numerous times in his later, theoretical writings.

In addition, he developed descriptive analyses of at least two other languages in some detail: French and Danish. The description of French is known primarily from a summary by Eli Fischer-Jørgensen of lectures Hjelmslev gave in 1948-49 (Hjelmslev 1970). The analysis of Danish is presented in an outline by Hjelmslev himself (Hjelmslev 1951b), again representing lecture material rather than a finished

Figure 7.4: Louis Hjelmslev

paper *per se*. Despite its incompleteness and inconsistencies, the analysis presented of Danish is quite interesting and substantial; it has remained little known because it appeared only in Danish in a comparatively obscure publication. An English translation has, however, been published as Hjelmslev 1973: 247–266.

Of special help to present-day readers is the fact that Hjelmslev's analysis of Danish has been presented and extended by Basbøll in a series of two articles (Basbøll 1971, 1972; cf. also Fischer-Jørgensen 1972). Basbøll's aim is to demonstrate the potential descriptive scope of a strictly glossematic analysis of sound structure, and he stays explicitly within that framework in explicating, improving, and further developing Hjelmslev's analysis. According to Fischer-Jørgensen (1972), a number of Basbøll's proposed modifications represent points that Hjelmslev and others had discussed informally and with which Hjelmslev was more or less in agreement. More recently, Basbøll (2017) provides similar treatment of Hjelmslev's account of French, and Basbøll (to appear) updates and compares the two glossematic analyses.

The sketchy analyses of Danish, French, and, to some extent, Lithuanian that we find in Hjelmslev's work perhaps raise more questions about the descriptive methodology that should be attributed to the theory of glossematics than they answer. Nonetheless, it is possible to gain a reasonable idea of what such descriptions would look like in practice from a study of the material referred to above, especially that dealing with Danish. The few other descriptions that have been

produced under the label of glossematics are not, unfortunately, reliable as indicators of Hjelmslev's own views (Fischer-Jørgensen 1975). Within the scope of this chapter, we cannot address all of the points of interest raised in Hjelmslev's work. I attempt here only to give a notion of the dimensions along which his views differed from those of his contemporaries, and especially to present his views as they bear on the central issues of this book.

For Hjelmslev, the analysis of the expression system of a given language starts from the set of elements that commute (or contrast) with each other. These are all at least candidates for the status of elementary constituents of the expression system; as we will see below, however, the inventory may later be reduced if there are reasons to represent some items as combinations or variants of others.

Within each of the two planes of language, the elementary constituents of linguistic form are called *taxemes*. These are the minimal units that can be arrived at in any particular analysis: in the plane of expression they are roughly the 'size' of a segment (or phoneme). The point of introducing this terminology was (at least in principle) to emphasize the independence of glossematic notions of linguistic form, and especially its relation to substance, from their 'phonological' counterparts (primarily the views of the Prague school and those of Daniel Jones — see chapter 9). The essential difference is supposed to lie in the fact that taxemes are elements of pure linguistic form, having no necessary connection with substance. The taxemes could, of course, be manifested phonetically: in that case, the units of phonetic substance that manifest them are called *phonematemes* by Hjelmslev. These are roughly units similar to structuralist phonemes, if we construe these as segments given a 'broad phonetic' characterization from which most or all non-distinctive phonetic detail is omitted.

The taxemes can be further dissolved into combinations of prime factors called *glossemes*. In scope, these units are comparable (in the plane of expression) to distinctive features; but their analysis is purely formal and universal, and depends in no way on the actual phonetic content of the segments manifesting the taxemes.5 The glossemes in the plane of expression are called *cenemes* and those in the plane of content *pleremes*. Hjelmslev sometimes refers more generally to elements as 'cenematic' or 'plerematic' (i.e., as units of expression and content, respectively); and to 'cenematics' and 'plerematics' as the study of expression and the study of content. Since the analysis of taxemes into glossemes has much less systematic significance for the questions of interest to us here, I will ignore these terms below and treat taxemes as the minimal units of linguistic form in each of the two planes.

5At least in principle, although it is striking how much Hjelmslev refers to phonetic substance in the end.

The taxemes of expression form are themselves defined by the network of relations into which they enter. In his 1936a (preglossematic) treatment, Hjelmslev divides the rules characterizing these into three classes: (a) rules of grouping, which specify the distributional, clustering, etc., properties of elements; (b) rules of alternation, which specify the replacement of one element by another under specified grammatical conditions; and (c) rules of implication, which specify replacements that take place under phonematic conditions. This last definition cannot be taken literally, since phonematic realization is only one possible manifestation of linguistic form (others being orthographic, etc., as discussed in previous sections). The distinction being made is nonetheless clear: alternations involve two or more distinct expression-forms that correspond to the same content, where the choice between them is determined by conditions only represented on the plane of content; while implications involve conditions for the occurrence of one or another form that are present in the expression plane itself.

These three classes of rules, incidentally, are asserted by Hjelmslev to be mutually exclusive in governing the relation between particular phonematemes. This would entail, if correct, the claim that two segments which alternate (under either grammatical or phonological conditions) cannot be systematically related in cluster formation. He illustrates this by arguing that in German the voiced and voiceless obstruents which alternate in syllable-final position do not co-occur in clusters. No one has ever actually examined this claim in any detail; if true, it would be a remarkable fact indeed about the sound patterns of natural languages.

The notion that the units of a linguistic analysis are to be defined in terms of their role in a network of rules is maintained in Hjelmslev's later, more strictly glossematic work, though much heavier emphasis there is put on rules governing distribution than on the principles of alternation. The basic idea is clearly related to (and in part derived from) the same proposal by Sapir, discussed below in chapter 11.

Another influence on Hjelmslev in this regard can be traced in his papers on linguistic reconstruction, an enterprise in which he believed that the purely relational character of taxemes is strikingly shown. The reconstruction of earlier, unattested stages of a language (or family) proceeds in a way that is completely independent of any actual claims about the pronunciation of that ancestral language, at least in principle. The result is the establishment of a system of pure relations, whose terms are correspondences among phonological elements in related systems, but are not themselves phonetic realities. In this connection, he invokes the notion of 'phoneme' as used by Saussure in his Mémoire: an element in the system of a reconstructed language, as attested by a unique set of correspondences in the daughter languages. As we have seen above (chapter 3),

Saussure's later use of the term *phonème* in the sense of 'speech sound' was from Hjelmslev's point of view diametrically opposed to this, but in fact Hjelmslev had read the Mémoire and been impressed with it long before he devoted serious attention to Saussure's work in general linguistics.

While the distinctions among expression taxemes are purely formal and relational, they usually correspond to surface phonetic differences as well. This is not always the case, however, since substance (here, phonetics) does not alone indicate what is most important about an element of the linguistic system: its function, or role in the system of relations. For instance, in his description of French, Hjelmslev notes that schwa must be kept phonologically apart from [œ], not because they differ in any phonetic way (they do not, at least in 'standard', conservative French), but rather because schwa can be latent (deleted) or facultative (optionally inserted) under specified conditions, while the presence of [œ] is constant in a given form. It is precisely its behavior with respect to certain rules that establishes schwa as a distinct element of the system of French expression form.

Differences of this sort between formal and substantive categories in language show up most clearly when we consider the role in Hjelmslev's system of (a) neutralization or syncretism; and (b) reductions in the inventory of taxemes due to representing certain elements as combinations or variants of others. I discuss these two aspects of glossematic description below.

Neutralization is defined as the "suspension of a commutation" under some specifiable conditions. The result of the fact that certain (otherwise contrastive) elements fail to contrast under the conditions in question is an *overlapping*; the element that occurs in this position is called a *syncretism*. For example, syllablefinal voiced and voiceless obstruents fail to contrast in German, and so the final element of words like *Bund* 'association' and *bunt* 'colorful' (both phonetically [bʊnt]) is the syncretism 't/d'.

Clearly, a syncretism in this sense is similar to an archiphoneme in the Prague school sense (cf. chapter 5), but there are also several differences between the two concepts. For one thing, syncretisms are not limited (as archiphonemes are) to cases in which the elements which fail to contrast share certain properties to the exclusion of all other phonological elements in the language. Such a condition would make no sense in Hjelmslev's system, since syncretisms involve elements of linguistic form and not substance, and phonetic features are aspects of substance. Also, syncretisms are not limited to the neutralization of binary oppositions, a condition on archiphonemes imposed somewhat arbitrarily by Trubetzkoy, as noted above in chapter 5.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, syncretisms are only posited when there is an actual alternation involved (as in the case of German final devoicing), and not in cases where a particular contrast simply fails to appear in a given environment (as in the case of English stops after [s], where only phonetically voiceless, unaspirated elements occur). The latter are treated simply as instances of defective distribution of certain phonological elements: it is a fact about English stops that, while the voiceless ones appear after [s], the voiced ones do not.

Although Hjelmslev maintained that evidence from alternations was necessary to the positing of a syncretism, he did not in fact always adhere to this in his practice. Thus, he posits an abstract consonant 'h' in French (to account for the well-known class of *h-aspiré* words, which begin phonetically with a vowel but behave in liaison as if they began with a consonant). This segment is uniformly syncretic with ∅ (i.e., it is never realized phonetically), despite the fact that there are no alternations to support the syncretism.

On the other hand, once a syncretism is established between certain elements in a certain position, the same analysis is extended to other forms which do not happen to show any alternation. Thus, German *ab* is said to end in the syncretism 'p/b' (not simply in 'p') even though it does not alternate, since other alternating forms establish the syncretisms of voiced and voiceless obstruents in this position.

This treatment leads to a difference between two conditions under which a syncretism may occur. In the case of alternating forms, related words provide evidence of which element is basic to the syncretism (thus, *Bunde* establishes that 'd' underlies the syncretism 'd/t' of *Bund* 'bund/t'); while no such evidence is available for non-alternating forms (e.g., *ab*). The syncretism in the latter case is said to be *irresoluble*, as opposed to the *resoluble* syncretism in 'bund/t'. Naturally, the question of whether a given syncretism is resoluble or not is a property of individual forms, not of syncretisms themselves, since a syncretism that was irresoluble everywhere would lack the sort of basis in actual alternations necessary to establish it in the first place.

Syncretisms are divided into several sorts, though the difference is primarily terminological. When the opposition between two elements is suspended in favor of one of them (as when both voiced and voiceless obstruents are represented syllable-finally in German by voiceless ones), the syncretism is called an *implication*. When the representative of a syncretism is distinct from either element (e.g., the neutralization of various unstressed vowels in English as schwa), it is called *fusion*; the same term is applied to a syncretism represented by either of the neutralized elements, in free variation. An example of this latter situation is

furnished by Danish, where syllable-final 'p' and 'b' do not normally contrast, but where the syncretism can be pronounced as either aspirated or not. A special case of a syncretism is a *latency*: this is a syncretism between an overt taxeme and ∅. A French form such as the adjective *petit*, for example, ends in a 'latent' 't'. In fact, in Hjelmslev's analysis, all final consonants in French are latent (unless followed by a vowel, such as a schwa—itself latent in final position under most circumstances). That is, there is an implication of a consonant to ∅ in this position.

Syncretisms form a part of the phonological system of a language, and a representation on the plane of expression in which all syncretisms are indicated has a systematic status. When all possible syncretisms are resolved (including the supplying of latent elements, a process called *encatalysis*), we obtain another expression representation which also has systematic status. Such a notation, in which all possible resoluble syncretisms are resolved, is called *ideal*, while the notation with syncretisms indicated is called *actualized*. It is the actualized notation that is directly manifested in substance as a series of phonematemes, but the ideal notation that serves as the basic expression form of a sign. Diagrammatically, the relation among these elements of a description is as in figure 7.5.

Figure 7.5: Components of a glossematic description: German *Bund*

Hjelmslev's ideal notation for expression form is certainly rather abstract. It clearly cannot be recovered uniquely from surface forms, for example, which is a condition of great importance in most other schools of structuralist phonology. His descriptions make clear that, in practice, it is quite similar to representations that in other schools were called morphophonemic, or to the underlying representations of generative phonology. A number of important differences separate Hjelmslev's picture of sound structure from that of generative phonology, however. One of these concerns the actualized notation, which corresponds to nothing in a generative description, but which is assigned systematic significance in glossematics. On the other hand, the multiple (unsystematic) intermediate representations in a classical generative or morphophonemic description have no correspondents in Hjelmslev's picture, since his rules all apply simultaneously rather than in an ordered sequence.

Another difference lies in the fact that no syntactic or other grammatical information is in principle allowed in ideal notations—leading, as Basbøll (1971, 1972) observes, to rather labored analyses in cases where different word classes show systematically different phonological behavior. This constraint follows, of course, from the fact that such information concerns content, while ideal representations are an aspect of linguistic expression, and the two planes are quite distinct in Hjelmslev's view. As a result, grammatically conditioned alternations are represented as the relation of two systematically different expressions that correspond to the same content, while phonologically conditioned variation is represented as a relation between a single ideal expression form and its various actualized correspondents.

### **7.5 The role of simplicity in a glossematic description**

The distance between Hjelmslev's 'cenematic' representations and phonetic ones is further increased by the fact that he makes every possible effort to reduce the taxeme inventory by treating some elements as variants or combinations of others. To this end, he makes extensive use of aspects of representations that others might consider arbitrary.

An important role in this respect is played by the notion of 'syllable' (cf. section 7.6). Since Hjelmslev explicitly denied that any phonetic definition of syllables was relevant to their identification and delimitation, he was largely free to posit them wherever they seemed useful. For example, he noted that, in German, only [z] and not [s] occurs in undoubted syllable-initial position (e.g., when word-initial); while [s] occurs to the exclusion of [z] in undoubted word-final position. Medially, the two contrast in, e.g., *reisen* 'to travel' (with [z]) *vs*. *reißen* 'to tear' (with [s]); but here Hjelmslev proposes to treat the contrast as a matter of the location of syllable boundaries—'rai.sən' vs. 'rais.ən'. In this way the two segments are reduced to positional variants of a single one. Similarly, the small number of superficially contrastive instances of the 'ich-Laut' [ç] in German (in e.g. *Kuhchen* 'little cow', as opposed to *kuchen* 'to cook', with [x]) are treated as differing in syllabic position ('ku.xən' vs. 'kux.ən'), removing the need to posit a rather counterintuitive phonological difference between palatal and velar fricatives (see chapter 13 below for the attempt to represent this difference within American structuralist theory as depending on another sort of inaudible boundary element).

Similarly, a single segment may be represented as the manifestation of a cluster. In Danish (and other languages), [ŋ] can be represented as manifesting 'n'

before 'k' or 'g', where 'g' is itself often latent in this situation. Thus, apparently distinctive [ŋ] can be treated as the only overt manifestation of the cluster 'ng'. In this instance, the single segment does not actually manifest a cluster *per se*; but the difference between [n] and [ŋ] is the difference between simple 'n' and 'n' forming a cluster with a latent 'g'.

Somewhat different formally is Hjelmslev's proposed reduction of aspirated stops [p], [t], and [k] in Danish to clusters of 'b', 'd', and 'g' with 'h'. In fact in initial position, the stops *p*, *t* and *k* in Danish are aspirated, and thus an analysis of 'p' as 'bh', etc., would be phonetically realistic; but there are two objections to this. First, the phonetic fact is entirely a matter of substance, and as such strictly irrelevant to the analysis of form. More importantly, though, Hjelmslev in fact writes 'hb', 'hd', and 'hg' in most cases rather than 'bh', etc., and there is no phonetic justification whatever for this. Ultimately, he resolves this issue by an appeal to distributional regularities, as will be described below.

Apart from the choice of 'hb' over 'bh' for 'p', however, this analysis raises a classic problem which is as real for any other theory as for Hjelmslev's: how far should an analysis go in reducing surface diversity to a small number of basic elements? In its most extreme form, such reduction would allow every language to be reduced to a system of one or two underlying elements, such as the 'dot' and 'dash' of the Morse code. Hjelmslev explicitly renounces any such reduction, saying reductions should only be made when they are not 'arbitrary'; but the problem is precisely to provide a suitable notion of 'arbitrary' to constrain analyses. Intuitively, the reduction of [ŋ] to 'ng' is less arbitrary than that of [p] to 'hb', but (especially in the absence of considerations of substance) it is hard to make this intuition precise. It cannot be said that Hjelmslev provided any explicit criterion for when a proposed reduction is allowed, and when it is disallowed as 'arbitrary'.

One might argue that, in fact, the principle Hjelmslev appeals to in distinguishing syncretisms from defective distribution is of relevance here: that rules have to be founded in alternations (in the most general sense of the term) in order to be justified. This condition would allow the representation of nasal vowels in French as ideal sequences of vowel plus nasal consonant, for example, as argued by Hjelmslev, and perhaps the representation of Danish [ŋ] as 'ng'. It would, however, prohibit the representation of Danish *p*, *t* and *k* as combinations of 'b', 'd' and 'g' preceded by 'h' (though Hjelmslev does attempt to adduce evidence from alternations in loanwords such as *lak* [lagͦ ] 'lacquer (n.)' *vs*. *lakere* [lagͦhe':rə] 'to lacquer (vb.)'). More drastically, it would prevent any sort of analysis in which two segments that are in complementary distribution (but do not alternate) are represented as the same underlying element: for instance, Hjelmslev's treatment

of Danish syllable initial [t] and final [d] as representing the expression taxeme 't', while initial [d] and final [ð] represent 'd'; or his elimination of the vowel [œ] from the Danish vowel system, as a variant of 'ø'.

In fact, while the requirement of an alternation to support a rule makes obvious sense in the case of syncretisms, it is not clear how such a condition could be coherently formulated with reference to rules of manifestation—and most of the problematic cases of possibly spurious reductions fall within this area. Hjelmslev does indeed argue for the plausibility of certain reductions to manifestation rules by invoking productive rules. For example, in discussing quantity in Lithuanian, he notes that there are certain semi-productive alternations between long and short vowels; and then observes that the same alternation, in terms of its grammatical conditioning, relates the vowels *a* and *o*, and *e* and *ė* (with the first of each of these pairs occurring in the categories that show short vowels, and the second in categories that show long vowels). On the basis of this rule, he concludes that *o* and *ė* should be treated as the long correspondents of *a* and *e*, respectively. Since his analysis treats long vowels as clusters of short vowels, this allows him to eliminate *o* and *ė* completely from the inventory of Lithuanian expression taxemes (treating them as 'a͡a' and 'e͡e', respectively). It is by no means clear, however, that similar arguments can be provided for all cases in which some segment is eliminated from the inventory by treating it as a manifestation of another.

For Hjelmslev, the overriding condition motivating the reduction of taxeme inventories is that portion of the 'empirical principle' referred to above that requires a description to be as simple as possible. In fact, the meaning of 'simplicity' here is quite clear and explicit: the simplest description is the one that posits the minimum number of elements. On this basis, subject to the essential but unclarified prohibition of 'arbitrary' analyses, the linguist must obviously make every reduction possible.

Interestingly enough, the notion of minimizing the number of elements posited in an analysis has two quite distinct senses for Hjelmslev, with rather different implications. On the one hand, of course, it refers to minimizing the taxeme inventory: it is in this way that the reduction of Danish [p] to 'hb' is motivated by the principle of simplicity. In addition, however, the principle is used to motivate the positing of syncretisms.

This is because an analysis which assigns two different expression forms to the same content form (i.e., which treats an alternation as grammatically conditioned or suppletive) is taken to posit more 'elements' (here, in the sense of sign expressions) than an analysis which assigns a single, constant expression form to a single content form. Thus, the principle that morphological elements should

be given unitary underlying forms wherever possible (often taken to be a hallmark of generative phonology, and of morphophonemic analysis) is a governing one in glossematic analyses. Of course, not all differences in the expression of a single element of content can be so treated, as Hjelmslev recognizes: English *be*, *am*, *are*, etc., cannot be described by rules of syncretism in the plane of expression. A considerable range of (often, rather idiosyncratic) alternations *are* so treated, however: in his analysis of French, Hjelmslev proposes a specific rule that makes the sequences 'sə', 'fə' latent before 'z' to account for the small number of unusual words like *os* ([ɔs] 'bone', pl. [o] with the ideal notation 'osəz') and *bœuf* [bœf] 'ox', pl. [bø] with the ideal notation 'bœfəz').

It is essential to recognize that the notion of simplicity invoked by Hjelmslev is only applicable to inventories, whether of taxemes or sign expressions, and not at all to the rules or other statements of systematic relations that enter into the analysis. This is at first sight somewhat at variance with his overall theoretical premises: after all, the units (taxemes, etc.) of the analysis only have their existence insofar as they are defined by the network of rules and relations into which they enter; so it would seem reasonable to claim that the primary way in which an analysis is 'simple' is in having simple rules. Nonetheless, it is clear that simplicity of rules plays little systematic role in Hjelmslev's thinking. For example, the elimination of [œ] from the expression taxeme inventory of Danish is a comparatively limited gain in comparison with the complexity of the rules which are necessary to predict it as a variant of 'ø', but this consideration is never raised in relation to the analysis, and it would appear that it was quite irrelevant to the decision to make the reduction in question.

Given that the elements of the analysis are supposed to derive their reality only from the rules that relate them, a condition such as that part of the empirical principle which requires their number to be minimized seems quite unfounded; but we must recognize that Hjelmslev probably approached the issue from a rather different vantage point. After all, previous linguistics (including the earlier forms of structuralism with which he was familiar) had discussed sound structure in terms of a theory of *phonemes*, elements which represented in one way or another the minimal contrastive constituents of sound patterns. Hjelmslev argued that these minimal elements of form should be derived in a purely immanent way from the relations among them, and to that extent emphasized the role of the rules in grounding an analysis; but he does not seem to have escaped in his own thought from the tendency to hypostatize the terms of these relations. Though his is clearly a theory that differs from others in the ontological status assigned to 'phonemes', it is still primarily a theory of units rather than a theory

of relations in its actual content and application. As such, the notion that simplicity of relations (and not simply of inventories) should play a role in the theory does not seem to have occurred to him.

To the claim that simplicity of rules played no part in Hjelmslev's notion of phonological theory, two partial exceptions come to mind—one more significant than the other. On the one hand, he maintained consistently that the following constraint applied to consonant clusters in all (or at least nearly all) languages: if C1C2C3 is a possible cluster, then both C1C2 and C2C3 must be possible as well. In other words, all clusters of more than two elements must be made up of sequences that are well formed in a local, pairwise fashion as well. It is this constraint, in fact, that causes him to represent Danish [p] as 'hb' rather than 'bh' in many cases: if a cluster such as [pl] were represented as 'bhl', this would violate the condition because 'hl' is not otherwise possible in Danish.

The relevance of this constraint to the simplicity issue comes from the fact that it might be seen as a requirement that the rules of consonant clustering be 'simple' in the particular sense that the rules for long clusters be reducible to the rules for shorter ones. The notion that this is a question of simplicity of rules, however, does not seem very plausible. Hjelmslev fairly clearly regarded this generalization about clusters as having the status of an independent principle of linguistic structure, and not at all as a theorem to be derived from the requirement of simplicity applied to the rules of an analysis.

Another fact is perhaps more significant. Recall that, as stated above, a large number of formal analyses are typically provided by the theory of glossematics for any particular language, where the choice among them is to be made on the basis of which analysis is most appropriate to the substance in which the language is realized. This cannot be interpreted otherwise than as the requirement that the rules of manifestation be maximally simple. Of course, since the rules of manifestation are not an aspect of linguistic form at all *per se*, it is clear that the requirement of simplicity in the empirical principle (a principle that governs the range of possible linguistic forms) cannot be responsible for this; but it is nonetheless a consideration which would have a role to play in a more fully elaborated glossematic theory of sound structure.

Simplicity of rules, then, may play a role in the relation between linguistic form and its manifestation, but apparently not in the rules underlying linguistic form itself. From this, and the expulsion of all phonetic (or 'substance') considerations from the analysis of form, it might seem that the theory is hopelessly unable to deal adequately with the nature of linguistic structure. One could maintain, for example, that no analysis of German can be said to describe the sound pattern of the language unless it treats the changes of /b/ to /p/, /d/ to /t/, etc. in syllable final position as aspects of a unitary fact; and it is only the requirement of simplicity of rules, combined with the definition of the segments involved as a substantive natural class, that has this consequence.

To this objection, Hjelmslev would probably have replied that it states the issue backwards. In his terms, that is, it is the fact that /b/, /d/, /g/, etc. undergo syllable-final devoicing that establishes the link among them, not their phonetic similarity. Different languages containing the same segments may assign them quite different phonological properties (a point made most explicitly by Sapir; cf. chapter 11 below), and so phonetic properties cannot be taken as diagnostic in themselves of whether or not a class of segments is phonologically 'natural'. The very fact that the implications affecting all of the voiced obstruents in German have the same form is what constitutes the similarity among the segments involved—not the substance property of voiced implementation.

Of course, to make this notion more explicit it is still necessary to develop a notion of when a set of implications (or other rules) are relevantly 'similar' to one another; but it is clear that such a notion of rule similarity, implicit in glossematic notions, could be formulated in a purely immanent way—that is, based on the form of rules rather than on the substantial content of either rules or segments. In fact, it was just such a principle of formally based rule collapsing that underlay the notion of simplicity characteristic of early work in generative phonology (chapter 15). In this theory it was in effect proposed that the only intrusion of substance into this question was through a universal phonetically based notation system (the set of distinctive features) for linguistic forms. A perceived failure of this theory due directly to its attempt to disregard the substance of rules (as opposed to representations) was responsible for the addition of the notion of 'markedness' in the final chapter of Chomsky & Halle (1968).

These issues take us increasingly away from the theory of glossematics, at least as far as it exists in Hjelmslev's writings and analyses. It is worth noting, however, that that theory raises rather directly a number of questions that are less evident in relation to other forms of structuralism, and that would only be treated systematically in much later work.

### **7.6 Nonsegmental structure in glossematic phonology**

Another aspect of Hjelmslev's theory which distinguishes it from most of its contemporaries, and which has considerable relevance to present-day work is the attention he paid to phonological structure and properties that cannot be localized within the scope of a single segment. Of course, other theories of phonology recognized the existence of a certain range of 'suprasegmental' properties, and in

fact the major contribution of the British school of prosodic analysis (chapter 9) was precisely in this area. Nonetheless, Hjelmslev is unique among structuralists in the importance he accorded to questions of syllable structure and prosodic phenomena within a primarily segmental framework.

Figure 7.6: Louis Hjelmslev

Centrally, Hjelmslev regarded a text as organized in a hierarchical fashion: into paragraphs each of which can be divided into sentences, which can in turn be divided into clauses that are divisible into phrases, etc. Of particular interest for phonological analysis, a phrase (which can represent a complete utterance by itself) is divided into syllables, and each syllable is divided into segments. Syllables thus play an important role in organizing the utterance: they are the building blocks of phrases, and the domains within which the distribution of segments is to be specified.

It might be possible to give a phonetic definition of the syllable, but (as noted above), this would be irrelevant to the analysis of linguistic form even if such a substance-based characterization were

available. What matters to the analysis of linguistic form is a functional definition of the syllable, and Hjelmslev proposes several at various stages in his writings. The one he finally settles on, which appears prominently in his descriptive work, is the following: a syllable is the hierarchical unit of organization that bears one and only one accent.

To understand this, we must of course ask how an 'accent' is to be defined. The answer rests on Hjelmslev's view of the nature of phonologically relevant properties. In the course of an analysis (i.e., a division of a text into successively smaller hierarchical units), one eventually arrives at units that cannot be further subdivided (essentially, at the division of the utterance into segments). These units can be said to constitute the chain that is a text. But in addition to these, other relevant properties appear in the text which are not localized uniquely in a single such unit. Examples of such properties are intonations (which occur over an entire utterance), stress (which occurs over an entire phonetic syllable), pitch accents in languages like Lithuanian, which occur over a sequence of vowel(s) and following sonorants, etc. Another example is the *stød* in Danish: though this is realized in its strongest form (Grønnum & Basbøll 2001, Grønnum et al. 2013) as a quasi-segmental element (a glottal stop, with associated perturbation of laryngeal activity), Hjelmslev analyzes it as a signal for certain types of syllable structure. The stød is a property of certain segmental patterns within a larger hierarchical unit, rather than a segment *per se*.

Such an element that "characterizes the chain without constituting it" is called a *prosodeme*: these are in turn divided into two types: *modulations*, which characterize an entire utterance as their minimal domain (e.g., intonation patterns that characterize questions), and *accents*, which do not (e.g., stress, pitch accent, the stød, etc.). It is in terms of this notion that Hjelmslev defines the syllable as a hierarchical unit bearing one and only one accent.

Interestingly, since (on his analysis) none of these elements are present in French, he concludes that in the absence of accents, French has no syllables (Hjelmslev 1939). Such a conclusion is typical of Hjelmslev's intellectual style: he liked very much to use the consequences of a rigorous set of definitions to derive striking, indeed shocking conclusions.

This theory bears some resemblances to the proposals of Metrical Phonology, at least in outline (chapter 16). Both depend essentially on the notion that utterances are organized into hierarchical units, and both claim that certain properties are associated with units at one level while others are associated with units at another level. The view of stress as a property of syllables, for example, can be opposed to Chomsky & Halle's (1968) view of stress, which treats it as a property of individual vowels (just as, e.g., height, backness, or rounding is a property of a vowel). As opposed to Metrical Phonology, Hjelmslev appears to treat stress not as a relation between syllables but as a property (typically 'strong stress' vs. 'weak stress') which is assigned to a particular syllable. Since 'weak stress' presupposes 'strong stress', though, and this relation might appear at several levels, it may well be that apparent differences between Hjelmslev's view of the nature of stress and that characteristic of Metrical Phonology are merely a matter of notation.

An interesting aspect of Hjelmslev's theory of syllable structure is that he uses it to define the notions of vowel and consonant. A vowel is defined as a segment that can constitute a syllable by itself, or as one that has the same distribution as such a segment. Consonants are segments that do not fall into this category and that can appear in various positions dependent on vowels.6 The definitions offered are not always as precise and adequate as one might wish, but the view of syllabicity that is involved is fairly clear. Syllables, that is, contain an obligatory nucleus and various optional peripheral positions (which depend on the particular language). A segment occupying the position of the nucleus is *ipso facto* a

6 For French, which as noted above his account mandates the absence of syllables, Hjelmslev establishes a category of "pseudo-vowels" on the basis of words consisting of only a single segment (*à, ai, y, eau, ou, eu*) in order to make the relevant distinctions (Hjelmslev 1970: 217).

vowel (regardless, as Hjelmslev points out, of its articulatory properties: liquids, nasals, and even some obstruents can be 'vowels' if they occupy the appropriate position in the syllable), while a segment whose dependence on such a nucleus has to be specified within the syllable (i.e., part of an onset or syllable-final margin) is *ipso facto* a consonant.

The syllable as a hierarchical unit thus has properties (e.g., accents) associated directly with it, rather than with its constituent segments; it also has an internal structure which is essential to defining the traditional notions of vowel and consonant. As a hierarchical unit of linguistic form, it must of course first be identified in terms of some relational properties it exhibits, and the basis of the unit in these terms is its role in the statement of segmental distributions. For Hjelmslev, this was an extremely important fact: the syllable is the domain within which the grouping properties of segments are defined, and (aside from special restrictions that refer to boundaries of the larger unit, the utterance) this is the only such unit.

He explicitly denies, for example, that there are any grouping restrictions that apply precisely to units of the size of a morpheme, insofar as this is not coextensive with a syllable. This impossibility is claimed to follow from the separation of the planes of expression and content: morphemes, as content units, have no autonomous existence on the expression plane. Any limitations on the distribution of expression units must thus be stated in terms of properties of the expression plane, and it is exactly there that syllables have their reality. Actually, since Hjelmslev appears to count sign expressions as units whose inventory should be minimized, it is not clear that this consequence follows; but it is clear that Hjelmslev intended the syllable to have this central role as the locus of distributional restrictions.

One other such strange conclusion results from the definition of a 'consonant' . A segment only qualifies for this status insofar as its distribution within the syllable has to be specified; thus, a hypothetical language with exclusively (C)V syllables, in which the distribution of any consonant is completely determined by the fact of its belonging to a specific syllable, would have no 'consonants'. The consonantal segments, that is, could be treated as a sort of prosodic property of their syllables. In fact, he describes the earliest reconstructable stage of Indo-European as having this property: all syllables were open, and instead of having 'consonants' in the strict sense, the language had a large inventory of 'converted prosodemes'. This is claimed to be an unstable situation, which led to radical restructuring of the Indo-European phonological system.

Though there is considerably more to be said about Hjelmslev's view of nonsegmental structure in phonology, I will close the discussion here. The point

of citing this aspect of glossematic theory is not to argue that Hjelmslev had important insights here that have otherwise been lost, but simply to point out the central role he assigned to such structure. Most other forms of structuralist phonology concentrated their attention on segmental structure alone, and attempted insofar as possible to treat other phenomena (such as stress and accent) as segmental properties. Here as elsewhere, the theory of glossematics occupies a unique position within the structuralist tradition, one which is closer in some ways to that of present-day phonology than to those of his contemporaries.

### **7.7 Eli Fischer-Jørgensen**

There is mild irony in the fact that following Hjelmslev's insistence that the fundamental questions of linguistics concerned matters of form and not substance, the international reputation of Denmark as a center of important work in the field should have been carried on by a research community primarily known as phoneticians. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Eli,7 a phonetician, was Denmark's most prominent general linguist in the years following Hjelmslev's death, and it was her associated students and colleagues who continued the tradition of Danish linguistics. The transition was not a completely abrupt one, however.

Eli was born in Nakskov in Lolland on 11 February, 1911. At the age of 8, her family moved to Fåborg in Funen where she spent her early school days, going to the gymnasium in nearby Svendborg. In 1929, she entered the University of Copenhagen where she began her studies in German and French. She already had some interest in linguistics and in literature, but her first experiences in phonetics were somewhat off-putting: the courses in German and French phonetics she took consisted mainly of learning physiological descriptions and making transcriptions from written texts, rather than actually producing any sounds. Courses in German linguistics with Louis Hammerich and in French with Kristian Sandfeld and Viggo Brøndal were somewhat better, and Brøndal's course in French phonetics was more appealing than her earlier experiences. It was only when she took a course in Danish phonetics with Poul Andersen, however, that she began to engage with that field.

Her primary interests at this time, though were in general linguistics, and she was eager to read the work of Saussure, Meillet, Shuchardt and Jespersen, among others. When the initial volumes of the Prague Travauxappeared, Hammerich

7Throughout her career, Eli Fischer-Jørgensen preferred to be called simply "Eli". In the present section, I follow that usage. For a rich and detailed account of Eli's life and career, see Skytte 2016.

drew her attention to them, and loaned her the books. These introduced her to the work of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson, which greatly appealed to her, although she was critical of the extent to which the early phonologists "passed too lightly over the phonetic substance which at the start was pushed somewhat aside as belonging to natural science" (Fischer-Jørgensen 1981: 62f.), a reaction which would constitute a recurring theme in her relation with other linguists. Already as a student she became a member of the recently established Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, and greatly enjoyed the discussions there involving Brøndal, Hjelmslev and others. She also attended Hjelmslev's lectures on Rasmus Rask and on Grammont's (1933) historical phonetics.

After receiving her MA in 1936 for a thesis on the importance of dialect geography for an understanding of sound change, she received a scholarship to study in Germany. She spent two terms in Marburg, a center for dialect studies, but found the work there of little interest. She was by now greatly interested in phonology, in part because of her appreciation for the Prague School phonologists and in part as a rejection of an earlier interest in syntax (she had written a prize essay in Copenhagen on the definition of the sentence, and "was fed up with … all the pseudo-philosophical twaddle [she] had had to read for this purpose" Fischer-Jørgensen 1981: 63). She wrote to Trubetzkoy and proposed studying with him in Vienna; he replied very positively (according to Jakobson, the last letter in his hand before his death), but shortly afterwards died so that she never actually met him.

Instead, she went to Paris, where she studied phonology with André Martinet (chapter 8 below) and experimental phonetics with Pierre Fouché and Marguérite Durand, as well as attending lectures by Émile Benveniste on Indo-European. Just before going to Paris, in July of 1938, she attended the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Ghent, where she met Jakobson for the first time. Following her time in Paris, she was invited to work on phonetics with Eberhardt Zwirner in Berlin. She was greatly impressed with Zwirner, but his work was interrupted as a result of political difficulties, and he was called up for service in the German army. She left Berlin to return to Denmark just two weeks before war broke out.

Figure 7.7: Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1949)

Hammerich hired Eli as a teaching assistant in German, and she was able to continue her studies in phonetics. In 1943, she was appointed as a Lecturer in Phonetics, a new post under the chair of linguistics occupied by Hjelmslev. Opportunities for experimental work in phonetics were initially quite limited, due to a lack of equipment and facilities, but gradually through her own efforts and with Hjelmslev's support, she developed a laboratory adequate to support her program.

During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II, Eli was engaged in rather dangerous work with the resistance group led by Prof. Carsten Høeg in assembling files on Nazi collaborators for prosecution after the war (Skytte 2016: 67ff. Fischer-Jørgensen & Ege 2005).

Hjelmslev was already the primary figure in Danish linguistics at the time, and his book Hjelmslev 1943, the main basis on which his ideas would be known outside Denmark, was the center of discussion in the Copenhagen circle for many years. Her review of the book (Fischer-Jørgensen 1943) in the same year served as a landmark both in the exposition of Hjelmslev's ideas, introducing these to students and others in somewhat more readable form, and in their critical evaluation.

After the war, Eli received a scholarship for a year's study abroad. On Hjelmslev's advice, she went to London where she could receive serious training in phonetics. While there, she attended lectures by Daniel Jones at University College and also ones by J. R. Firth at the School of Oriental Studies, as well as doing practical phonetics work on English and French with Hélène Coustenoble.

In 1949, she renewed her acquaintance with Roman Jakobson, initiating a correspondence that continued until his death in 1982. These letters, collected as Jensen & D'Ottavi 2020, document an intellectual interaction at times quite sharp but always cordial. Jakobson was quite interested in discussing the relation between Hjelmslev's views and his own theory of distinctive features. They met in person again when Jakobson visited Copenhagen in May, 1950, and in 1952 Eli received a Rockefeller Scholarship to visit the US. She spent five weeks at MIT, where she had a visiting appointment arranged with Jakobson's support. He was very eager for her to spend the rest of the year working on a project with him, but she found it impossible to stay on. The circumstances are not entirely clear, but after her departure from Cambridge, her subsequent letters to him went unanswered until they met again in 1957 at the Eighth International Congress of Linguists in Oslo.

After her stay at MIT, she went to New York to work with the group of phoneticians at Haskins Laboratories. She was particularly taken with the possibilities offered for speech synthesis research by the pattern-playback machine. From there, she went to Oklahoma to study briefly with Kenneth Pike before returning to Copenhagen. Other collaborations included a stay in Stockholm in 1954 to

work with Gunnar Fant. Eli always downplayed her competence in the domain of physical acoustics, but she was particularly delighted to have been the official opponent at Fant's defense of his doctoral thesis (Fant 1960).

Figure 7.8: Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1968)

Over the following years, she devoted herself to a rich program of teaching and research in phonetics. She was appointed to a personal professorship in phonetics in 1966, associated with the establishment of her own department, the Institut for Fonetik. The program thrived, and with it her research and that of her colleagues. In 1968 she was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the first woman to become a domestic member. In 1979, the Ninth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences was held in Copenhagen, largely organized by Eli. In 1981, she reached the mandatory retirement age and withdrew somewhat (but not toally) from academic life. She died in February, 2010, soon after her 99th birthday.

It would be hard to argue that Eli Fischer-Jørgensen was a major innovative figure in the development of phonological theory. As she says, from her first participation in the discussions of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen she "realized the great difference between being able to understand a theory and being able to create a theory" (Fischer-Jørgensen 1981: 63). And she contributed greatly to the field by being able to understand a wide variety of related but quite different theoretical positions, and to bring that understanding to bear in confronting those theories with one another's insights and with the hard facts elicited in the phonetics laboratory. Familiar at first hand with the work and opinions of Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Martinet, Jones, Firth, Pike and others, she was uniquely positioned to provide a balanced view of the comparative merits and deficiencies of a variety of notions of what "phonology" ought to be, as illustrated in her history of the field (Fischer-Jørgensen 1975).

This was particularly true of her position between Hjelmslev and Jakobson, two important figures whose views were quite at odds but who maintained very friendly relations (perhaps dating to the cordial reception Hjelmslev and other Danish linguists offered to Jakobson in his initial escape from the Germans at the beginning of the war). Eli was able to bring the arguments of each to bear on the other, and also to argue against what she saw as the weaknesses in each of their positions. In both cases, her objections follow from her experience as a phonetician.

In the case of Hjelmslev's views, she points out in a series of papers (including Fischer-Jørgensen 1943, 1952 and elsewhere) that the Glossematic attempt to analyze linguistic structure as purely algebraic in character, with no grounding in phonetic reality on the "expression" side, dating back already to Hjelmslev & Uldall's (1936a) London Congress presentation, could not really be carried out. For one thing, the only way the realizations of formal elements in different structural positions could be satisfactorily identified with one another (e.g. initial [t] and post-vocalic [d] in Danish) must involve at least an implicit appeal to their phonetic identity. Other specific problems with important aspects of the

Figure 7.9: Eli Fischer-Jørgensen in the Phonetics Lab (1981)

theory such as the Commutation Test (Fischer-Jørgensen 1956), and the overall relation between the notions of Form and Substance (Fischer-Jørgensen 1966) emerged from her extensive discussions with Hjelmslev, in meetings of the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle and elsewhere. These differences, along with areas of agreement between them, are surveyed in Fischer-Jørgensen 1975: chap. 7.

Eli's relation to Jakobson's views was somewhat more nuanced, but again grounded in her respect for phonetic facts. One point between them concerned Jakobson's insistence that phonological features had to be binary in character, though they agreed to disagree about this.

I remember once meeting him in America — it was in the beginning of our acquaintance — and his first words were "I know you are my enemy!" I was very astonished and asked him how he had got that idea, and he answered': "You do not believe in the binary principle". So I explained that I found the binary principle very important, but speaking a language with four degrees of aperture in the vowels it was somewhat difficult for me to accept the binary principle as an absolute universal. He understood this, and we have been friends ever since. (Fischer-Jørgensen 1997: 23)

Eli's respect for Jakobson's ideas went back to her initial enthusiasm for the publications of the Prague phonologists, though from the beginning she had reservations about the extent to which the phonological perspective was claimed to exclude phonetics, relegating this to the realm of the natural sciences. It was particularly Jakobson's (1941) Kindersprache that fascinated her, and Eli was generally approving of his efforts to ground the distinctive features in phonetic definitions. Nonetheless, she had a number of objections to Jakobson's specific program in this regard, summarized in Fischer-Jørgensen 1975: 162ff. Over the years, as documented in the letters collected by Jensen & D'Ottavi (2020), she showed no reluctance to challenge Jakobson's position from the secure basis of her work as a phonetician.

It seems reasonable to suggest that just as Eli's view of phonology was strongly shaped by her training and research in phonetics, so also the phonetic topics on which she worked extensively (e.g. Danish *stød*, Fischer-Jørgensen 1987; the properties distinguishing "voiced" and "voiceless" stops, Fischer-Jørgensen 1968 and elsewhere, etc.) were informed by insights from phonological analysis. This productive interplay between a variety of approaches to phonology and the hard data obtained in the phonetics lab characterized her research program and that of her institute, and was continued in the way linguistics in Denmark maintained its significance, through Eli's students and colleagues such as Jørgen Rischel, Nina Grønnum, Hans Basbøll and others.

# **8 André Martinet and Functional Phonology**

If we take the views of the Prague School linguists (chapter 5) to represent the core of European Structuralism between the two world wars, it is apparent that Glossematics (chapter 7) constitutes a significant departure. While the work of André Martinet to be considered below is generally seen as a natural continuation of Praguian phonology, his views are also distinct in some ways. Martinet was certainly close to the Prague School, but he was also a friend of Louis Hjelmslev, and their interaction also influenced him. In their relationship, there is an interesting symmetry in that one of the languages whose sound structure Hjelmslev treated was that of Martinet, French, while one of those that formed part of the basis for Martinet's Doctorate was Hjelmslev's Danish. Martinet's relationship with Jakobson was especially complex: they were close for some years, but later fell out, and much of Martinet's intellectual agenda developed as repudiation of Jakobsonian positions.

### **8.1 Martinet's life and career**

André Martinet was born in Saint-Alban-des-Villards, in Savoy (France) on 12 April 1908.1 His parents were schoolteachers, and he spent his childhood in an environment where the local language was a Franco-Provençal patois: he describes his mother's language in Martinet 1956 as an application of his theory of phonological description. The language of education, however, both among the educated and in addressing those not considered "locals" (including Martinet, whose family was originally from a village not among those in which they lived) was the local form of standard French. He was thus sensitized to the nature of bilingual communities, and thereby to matters of language, from an early age.

When he was eleven, his family moved to Paris, where he continued his education through lycée and university. At the Sorbonne from 1925 to 1930 he studied

1Martinet's(1993) Mémoires provide a great deal of information about his life and career which I have made use of in the present section. Where facts from his life are cited without attribution, this is generally the source from which I have derived them.

#### 8 André Martinet and Functional Phonology

English and Germanic, including a course in Old Norse with Paul Verrier (1860– 1938) which he particularly enjoyed. Verrier recommended him for a fellowship to attend a summer course in Danish in Copenhagen in the summer of 1928, and this began Martinet's long connection with Denmark and Danish linguists.

In 1930, he passed the requirements for the 'agrégation' in English, a selective and highly competitive examination which authorizes those accepted to teach at higher levels in lycées and universities. After teaching briefly at the lycée in Poitiers, he spent most of 1932–34 in Berlin, where he began work on the first of two required dissertations for the Doctorate (Martinet 1937a: on Germanic consonant gemination). On one of his numerous visits to Denmark, in the summer of 1933 he met Karen Mikkelsen-Sørensen, whom he would marry the following year, one of the witnesses at their civil ceremony being Otto Jespersen: "In Copenhagen in 1934, Martinet met Otto Jespersen, whom he admired both as an out-

Figure 8.1: André Martinet

standing linguist and anglicist and as an interlinguist and creator of the planned language project Novial" (Klare 2012: 276). He had translated Jespersen's (1922) book Language into French—though while Martinet (1991: 158) says that the translation had "retardé d'un an [son] succès à l'agrégation", there is no evidence that these efforts ever led to this translation being published.

Around this time, he became interested in the work of the Prague School linguists, and read the first several numbers of their Travaux with interest. At the 1935 London Congress he met Trubetzkoy, with whom he subsequently corresponded. In his summary letter to Jakobson after that meeting (Liberman 2001: 246–248), Trubetzkoy is very positive about Martinet, who he says "is quite "ours", despite Hjelmslev's efforts to "convert" him." Martinet's (1936) article "Neutralisation et archiphonème", was published in the volume 6 of the Prague Travaux. His frequent stays in Denmark also resulted in connections with Danish linguists including Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Uldall, and he discussed with them the evolving theory of Glossematics (chapter 7). His 1946 review of Hjelmslev 1943 in the Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris contributed significantly to making Hjelmslev's views known outside of Denmark.

His second, "complementary" thesis (Martinet 1937b) on the phonology of Danish, completed on the basis of work with his wife Karen, is one of the first substantial descriptions of a language on the basis of Praguian views. On the basis

of these two works, he obtained his doctoral degree, and was then appointed in the autumn of 1937 to a teaching post as director of phonological studies at the École pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne.

On the outbreak of the war in 1939, Martinet was recalled to military service, where he was designated as an interpreter of Danish (the only one in the French army). After some delay, his unit was sent to the Somme front in June of 1940, where they were promptly encircled and captured by the Germans, and sent off to prison camp at Weinsberg. Although not holding an appropriate rank, his status as a translator (controlling French, German and English) was ambiguous enough for him to be interned in a camp for officers, allowing him to stay together with a group of officers from a wide variety of regions in France. During his time in the Weinsberg camp, he took advantage of this situation to collect data on phonological variation in spoken French which he published as Martinet 1945.

Martinet spent only a year and three months in the prison camp. His wife had taken a job in a German bookstore in occupied Paris, and petitioned the occupation authorities for his release, which was granted. He returned to Paris in October, 1941, and resumed his teaching at the École pratique des Hautes Études. The circumstances of his release, however, cast a shadow of potential collaboration with the Germans, for which he was denounced when France was liberated; this led to a request that he stop teaching at the Sorbonne, though he continued his classes in private. The charge of collaboration was eventually withdrawn, partly on the basis of support he had provided for a friend in the resistance who was hiding from the Gestapo.

He was not, however, freed of all suspicions, and his position among his colleagues in Paris was somewhat difficult. Although he took up his teaching once more in October of 1945, this history no doubt played a role in his not being appointed, on the retirement of Joseph Vendryès, to the one chair in linguistics that existed in the Sorbonne, with the appointment instead going to a less well known Indo-Europeanist, Michel Lejeune (Joseph 2016). Partially in reaction to this slight, it seems, when he was offered in 1946 a position directing research at the International Auxiliary Language Association in New York, he accepted and left Paris for the US the following year.

 Karen returned to Denmark with her daughter Hanne by her first marriage, and Martinet and their daughter Catherine remained in Paris. There he met Jeanne Allard, a student in his phonetics class and a researcher in her own right. They eventually came to live together, and were married in New York in April, 1947, a month after his divorce from Karen became final.

#### 8 André Martinet and Functional Phonology

The war had seen the effective dissolution of the Prague School. Trubetzkoy had died in 1938; Jakobson had fled to New York, and those linguists who remained in Czechoslovakia were difficult to contact. Martinet's own maintenance of a notion of phonology derived from Praguian ideas thus took on a more distinctive role.

In New York, he was in contact with Jakobson, whom he had first met at the 3rd International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Ghent in 1938. Jakobson, as a part of his efforts to counter the isolationism of American linguistics by promoting European scholars, exerted his influence at Columbia to obtain the then-vacant chair of general and comparative linguistics there for Martinet in 1947, effectively making him head of the (quite small) department as of 1948, once he had finished his obligations to the IALA. At Columbia, he taught not only general synchronic linguistics but also comparative and Indo-European linguistics. His theory of the nature and motivation of linguistic change, to be addressed in section 8.3 below, was developed in Martinet 1952, 1955.

During this period he also became editor of Word, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, one of whose founders in 1943 was Jakobson. Initially responsible for articles submitted in French, together with Morris Swadesh (whose qualities as a linguist he appreciated much more than as an editor) who dealt with those in English, he continued after Swadesh's departure to direct the journal in collaboration with Joseph Greenberg, Uriel Weinreich and finally Louis Heller until 1965, even after he left New York.

By 1954, Martinet's relations with administrators and others at Columbia had become rather tense. In part this resulted from his efforts to secure support for the creation of a chair in Yiddish Studies, to be occupied by his student Uriel Weinreich, and in part from conflicts with John Lotz, a Hungarian scholar and member of the Columbia faculty whom the administration wished to have join Martinet's Department of Linguistics. These matters so disturbed Martinet that he determined to leave New York and return to France.

As Joseph (1994) notes, there is some irony in the fact that part of the problem he had at Columbia resulted from his efforts to promote a chair in Yiddish Studies, a goal of which his Jewish colleagues would presumably have been supportive. As observed by Joseph (and also by Auroux 1993, Goldsmith 1998), a number of passages in Martinet's (1993) Mémoires evidence a casual stereotyping and caricature that imply an anti-semitism which is hard to accept and somewhat at odds with his attitude toward Weinreich (though see Joseph 2016 for some discussion of their relationship). This is particularly manifest in connection with his early strong animus toward Chomsky.

Martinet (1994: 30f.) recounts with glee the fact that in 1957, he over-ruled his co-editor Weinreich to reject a paper of Chomsky's—according to Murray (1999: 347), the only time Chomsky ever had a journal submission rejected. Martinet says that the rejected paper was "a first version of Syntactic Structures", a characterization which is quite implausible given the facts that (a) Chomsky 1957, at 118 pages, is hardly something that would have been submitted for journal publication in the 1950s; and (b) the book had already been published by Mouton early in 1957. Chomsky (1979a: 132) recalls that the paper in question was "a technical article on simplicity and explanation" which Jakobson had suggested he send to Word; Apparently the paper "[was] "Simplicity and the Form of Grammars", written in the mid-1950s, which spelled out the logic Noam discussed at length in Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew [Chomsky 1951]. Alas, "Simplicity and the Form of Grammars" has been lost to history." (p.c., Jeffrey Watamull to Bert Vaux, 25 July, 2021)

Martinet's imperfect memory when it came to scholars with whom he was unsympathetic was also displayed with regard to Morris Halle. In a discussion about how well he might actually have known Chomsky, he observes that "[i]l ne me pardonnait pas la réjection de l'article qu'il avait envoyé à Word. Celui que je connaissais bien, en revanche, c'était son collaborateur Morris Halle; le seul de mes étudiants américains que j'aie jamais collé" (Martinet 1993: 69).2 There is no evidence that Chomsky was particularly upset about the rejection of his article, but on the other point, Martinet was apparently fond of recounting how he had failed Halle at Columbia. And Halle was apparently fond in his turn of retelling this, and confronting it with the transcript of his actual academic record for that term at Columbia, where he received a grade of "A" from Martinet.3

During the same period, Martinet's relations with Jakobson had become notably less warm. His own thinking about linguistic matters, and phonology in particular, led him to reject Jakobson's program of universal structures and binary oppositions in favor of a much more particularist approach to individual languages. Owing his position at Columbia and his role at Word to Jakobson, however, he was not interested in provoking open conflict. Nonetheless, over the ensuing years matters came to such a point that neither was willing to participate in events where they were likely to share attention with the other, and their direct contacts became limited to accidental encounters. Chomsky's specu-

2 "he [Chomsky] did not pardon me for the rejection of the article he had sent to Word. The one I knew well, however, was his collaborator Morris Halle, the only one of my American students that I ever failed."

3 I am indebted to Bert Vaux for this anecdote.

lation (p.c., 26 May, 2021) that the rejection of his article mentioned above "had to do with a feud between [Martinet] and Jakobson" is probably correct.

In 1955 Martinet returned to France, though he was not able to resume his original position at the École pratique des Hautes Études. A new position as director of studies in structural linguistics was, however, created for him there and he was able to re-establish himself in Paris. Michel Lejeune designated him as his successor to the chair in General Linguistics at the Sorbonne, but although Lejeune retired from the chair in 1955, Martinet's actual accession to the professorship was held back until 1960.4

His classes for undergraduates at the Sorbonne resulted in the publication of Martinet 1960, a work whose title was intended to evoke that of Saussure's Cours. This introduction to Martinet's development of his Saussurean and Praguian views was immediately quite popular, and it has since been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 1965, he founded the journal La Linguistique, devoted to functionalist work; he continued to edit the journal up through his final illnesses in the late 1990s.

In the aftermath of the events in France of May, 1968 and the re-organization of the University of Paris into 13 separate universities, Martinet and his immediate colleagues in linguistics were associated with the new Paris V, René Descartes University (merged in 2019 with Paris VII to form the current University of Paris). Martinet retired as Emeritus Professor in 1977, though he continued to lecture at the École pratique des Hautes Études until 1995. He died on 16 July 1999 in Châtenay-Malabry, France.

Over a long career, Martinet trained a large number of scholars, first at Columbia and then through his seminars at the École pratique des Hautes Études and his classes at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. He was widely recognized as the foremost representative of structuralist linguistics in France, and received a number of honorary degrees and other honors. His views on synchronic matters and the theoretical basis of phonology are central to functionalist theories, and continue to have their adherents (see Akamatsu 1992, 2009 for example) within a somewhat limited circle. His work on the theory of diachronic change, on the other hand, and especially Martinet 1952, 1955 which will be discussed below in section 8.3, has been more widely influential.

4The chronology here is difficult to establish in detail. Although the CV in Martinet 1993: 365f. characterizes him as "Professeur de linguistique générale à la Sorbonne 1955–1977", Martinet (1993: 79) refers to his advancement being blocked until 1960. This is supported by the fact that the title page of Martinet 1956 identifies the author simply as "Directeur d'études à l'École pratique des Hautes Études", but that of Martinet 1960 identifies him as "Professeur à la Sorbonne".

### **8.2 Phonology as functional phonetics**

Martinet (1993: 93) speaks of "le principe de base de la linguistique structurale post-saussurienne, selon lequel un élément n'existe que de ce qui le distinque des autres éléments du même système"5 , and much the same principle can be invoked with respect to linguistic theories: their existence takes on importance in relation to their distinctness from other theories of the same domain. Hjelmslev's Glossematics differed from the Prague School program of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in rejecting a phonetic basis for phonological oppositions. Jakobson, in turn, took issue with Hjelmslev's extreme degree of abstraction in characterizing phonological systems. For his part, Martinet objected both to Hjelmslev's abstractness and to Jakobson's universalism and his embrace of the principle of binary oppositions. Martinet also notes his rejection as editor of Word, as noted above, of an early submission by Chomsky, and stresses that he never had any sympathy whatever for Chomsky's views. Martinet's own stance, then, is perhaps a particularly clear example of a theory whose significance is based on what separates it from others.

Martinet's views on phonology derive from his general picture of the nature of human language, as presented for example in his Elements of General Linguistics: 6

A language is an instrument of communication in virtue of which human experience is analysed differently in each given community into units, the monemes, each endowed with a semantic content and a phonic expression. The phonic expression is articulated in its turn into distinctive and successive units. These are the phonemes, of limited number in each language, their nature and mutual relations varying from one language to another.

This implies (1) that we must reserve the term language to describe an instrument of communication with this twofold articulation and vocal manifestation; (2) that outside this common basis there is nothing linguistic in the proper sense which may not differ from one language to another. (Martinet 1964: 29)

A number of general principles follow from this definition. For one thing, here and elsewhere, Martinet recognizes only spoken languages as worthy of

5 "the basic principle of post-Saussurean structural linguistics, according to which an element only exists by virtue of what distinguishes it from the other elements of the same system" (my translation — SRA)

6Citations of this work are given from the readily available English translation rather than from the French original.

the name. His intention in this is to contrast spoken language with its visual representation in a writing system, but in the process he excludes the possibility that genuinely linguistic structure could be manifested in any other modality. Remarkably, he maintained this position throughout his life, despite the fact that by the 1960s (Stokoe 1960), and certainly the 1970s (Klima & Bellugi 1979), it had become clear that signed languages displayed genuinely linguistic structure in their manual/visual expression.

From the presumed vocal character of language, Martinet also derives the conclusion that linguistic structure, both in the arrangement of content units (monemes) and the components of their phonic expression (phonemes), is exclusively successive and linear. Even disregarding the fact that in signed languages components of both sorts are frequently simultaneous rather than sequential, this disregards the fact that spoken languages often display explicitly non-concatenative morphology, or non-successive combination of meaningful elements. In English pairs such as *sit*/*sat*, *fight*/*fought*, etc. for example, the expressions of the meanings of the past tense and of the lexical verb are simultaneous rather than sequential.

Figure 8.2: André Martinet

The characterization of 'language' cited above also makes explicit Martinet's rejection of the notion that there are interesting and important universals across languages. This shows up most directly in his repeated rejection of Jakobson's proposals and search for universals as the basis of regularities in the structure and development of individual languages.

The two points with which Martinet is most closely associated, however, are (1) the conception of language as an instrument of communication, such that the structure of any particular language is to be derived from the individual and local ways in which its components function to serve this purpose within a particular community of speakers; and (2) the notion that human languages display a double articulation: on the one hand, meaningful elements of content (monemes) combine to provide expressions for an unbounded range of complex meanings, and on the other, separately meaningless phonemes combine to provide the phonic forms that signal the identity of particular monemes. The consequences of the functional commitment will be addressed below; I first take up the notion of the double articulation of language.

Martinet (1949a) was probably the first to cite this as a criterial feature of human language, although it came to wider attention in the form of one of Hockett's "design features" of human language (Hockett 1958, 1960, Hockett & Ascher 1964) as opposed to animal communication systems. A concise statement of Hockett's understanding of the principle is the following:

The utterances of a language consist wholly of arrangements of elementary signaling units called *phonemes* (or *phonological components* to be exact), which in themselves have no meanings but simply serve to keep meaningful utterances apart. Thus, an utterance has both a structure in terms of these meaningless but differentiating elements, and also a structure in terms of the minimum meaningful elements. This design feature is *duality of patterning*.

(Hockett & Ascher 1964: 139)

The basic distinction between two sorts of structure, one composed of meaningful elements and the other of meaningless elements that serve to signal these, probably goes back in both cases to Hjelmslev's distinction between the content and expression planes, composed of *pleremes* and *cenemes* respectively. Although neither Martinet nor Hockett is explicit about this source, Martinet was certainly quite familiar with Hjelmslev's theories, and Hockett actually refers in some places (e.g. Hockett 1958: 574) to the meaningless elements of phonemic structure as *cenemes*.

Neither Martinet nor Hockett explicitly refers to the other's formulation, but in later work Martinet does provide an almost willful misinterpretation of what is fairly clearly intended to be Hockett's view:

Some linguists have been using the phrase "duality of patterning" for what we call double articulation. The point of view is not the same and the implications probably differ. Duality of patterning just points to the existence of two different procedures, one for isolating phonemes and another one for isolating significant segments in the utterance. (Martinet 1984: 34)

Regardless of these matters of intellectual priority, it is important to see the principle involved as what in substance makes "phonology" an essential component of the architecture of human language. It is tempting to see the presence of phonology as simply an ornament, an inessential elaboration of the way basic meaningful units are formed. This would be a mistake, however: it is phonology,

as the expression of one side of language's double articulation, that makes it possible for speakers of a language to expand its vocabulary at will and without effective limit. If every new word had to be constructed in such a way as to make it holistically distinct from all others, our capacity to remember, deploy and recognize an inventory of such signs would be severely limited, to something like a few hundred. As it is, however, a new word is constructed as simply a new combination of the inventory of familiar basic sound types, built up according to the regularities of the language's phonology. This is what enables us to extend the language's lexicon as new concepts and conditions require.

The notion of one articulation of linguistic structure as based on recurrent meaningless elements does not by itself, as Ladd (2014a) makes clear, ensure this productivity. Some animal communication systems involve expressions composed of recurrent, meaningless components: zebra finch songs (Lawson et al. 2018) are built up from a repertoire of individual syllables, for instance, though the combinations are limited and different combinations always correspond to the same message. But the existence of a layer of structure composed of such meaningless elements allows for the possibility, realized in human languages although not elsewhere, that the combinatorics of these elements provides for an open range of possible, distinct expressions, and this is the role of phonology in linguistic structure.

The task of phonology, then, is to uncover and explore the system of the "second articulation" in individual languages, that is, the inventory and combinatory possibilities of the language's set of phonemes. A relatively standard approach to this within structuralist theories would be to collect a corpus of utterances in a phonetic representation, and then explore the inventory of phonetic segments found there to see which ones contrast with one another (and thus belong to distinct phonemes) and which do not (and are thus candidates for allophones of the same phoneme). Martinet, however, rejects such an approach, on the grounds that the segmentation present in the presumed phonetic representations is not objectively systematic, but rather strongly dependent on the background, experience and native language of the transcriber. This objection is interestingly similar to one raised by Bloomfield, which will be discussed below in section 12.4.

Martinet proposes to identify phonemes through the process he refers to as *commutation*, echoing Hjelmslev's terminology. In analyzing the phonology of a language, the linguist begins with a collection of convenient sized utterances — typically single words — and compares them to focus on indivisible, minimal sized portions whose difference results in a change of meaning. This does not require an analysis of meanings, but only recourse to a notion of *difference* in meaning. This analysis is carried out with respect to a range of contexts, with a set of elements identified for each that function to differentiate meaning, and thereby to contribute to the functioning of a language as a tool to convey meaning among its speakers.7

For example (Martinet 1965: 63ff.), comparing French *banc, pan, van, faon, dent, temps, zan, sang, gens, champ, gant, camp, lent, rang, ment* we can identify 15 distinctive units in initial position before [ã], units which we could designate with the letters *b, p, v, f* etc. Comparing *bout, pou, vous, fou, doux, toux, zou, sou, joue, chou, goût, cou, loup, roue, mou* we can again identify 15 units, this time before [u], which we are tempted to designate with the same letters *b, p, v, f* etc.

But what justifies the identification of, e.g., the initial element of *banc* with that of *bout*? The answer that immediately suggests itself is their phonetic similarity, but this is not what establishes them as the same phoneme for Martinet. What matters for him is that the *b* of *banc* is differentiated from the *p* of *pan*, the *v* of *van*, and the *d* of *dent* by the same relevant properties (voiced as opposed to voiceless, stop as opposed to fricative, labial as opposed to apical) as the *b* of *bout* is to the *p* of *pou*, the *v* of *vous* and the *d* of *dent*. The identity of a phoneme, that is, resides not in its positive phonetic properties, but rather in the set of relevant features that give it its communicative function by differentiating it from others in the same environment.

A phoneme, then, is to be equated with a set of distinctions, and not directly with a phonetic value. This is illustrated, for instance, in the analysis of Danish. In that language, vowels are systematically lower in certain /r/ contexts. As a result (Martinet 1964: 60) "the phoneme /æ/ is manifested as [ɛ] in *net* 'pretty' but as [a] in *ret* 'correct, right'; the sound [a] which is the manifestation of the phoneme /æ/ in *ret* is the manifestation of another phoneme /ɑ/ in *nat* 'night'." The point is that Danish distinguishes four degrees of vowel height in certain /r/ contexts and elsewhere, but the phonetic value of the vowel is lower in these /r/ contexts than elsewhere. As a result, the lowest vowel of the series /i, e, æ, ɑ/ is phonetically the same in other environments as the next-to-lowest vowel in those /r/ contexts. The same phonetic value can thus correspond to more than one phonemic unit, and conversely, a single phoneme can be manifested in more than one way phonetically. What characterizes a given phoneme is therefore not its phonetic identity *per se*, but rather the contrastive value it exhibits with respect to oppositions distinguishing it form others in the same position.

7 It is not clear that Martinet actually arrived at his analyses of Danish (Martinet 1937b), French (lecture 3 in Martinet 1949b and elsewhere), or the Franco-Provençal of Hauteville (Martinet 1956) by anything like the process of commutation he describes. His analyses appear to proceed in the standard way from an inventory of phonetic segments, to explore the dimensions of functional contrast among them.

#### 8 André Martinet and Functional Phonology

The phonematic system of a language consists not simply of an inventory of the phonemes established through an analysis of contrastive function, but more importantly, echoing Martinet's Prague School background, of the set of dimensions on which contrast occurs, the set of oppositions. Martinet's classification of these also echoes e.g. that of Trubetzkoy (1939), discussed above in section 5.3. In some cases, exactly two phonemes contrast on a given dimension at a time, as in the case of voiced *vs.* voiceless phonemes in French (/b/ *vs.* /p/, etc.), a *bilateral* opposition. Other oppositions, however, are *multilateral*, in that they involve more than two values: for instance the dimension of place of articulation, opposing labial, apical, palatal and velar phonemes that are otherwise similar in their relation to others. When the same binary opposition distinguishes corresponding pairs of phonemes in two parallel series, as with /b/ *vs.* /p/, /v/ *vs.* /f/, /d/ *vs.* /t/, etc., each of which exists, in Martinet's terms, by virtue of its contrast with the other, the relation between the two opposing series is called a *correlation*.

Martinet's embrace of irreducible multilateral oppositions aligns him with Trubetzkoy's practice, and sets him in opposition to Jakobson's efforts to reduce all multilateral oppositions to complexes of strictly binary ones. This became a significant point of contention between them, and Martinet wrote many times of his rejection of the "apriorism" of Jakobson's attempt to enforce strict binarity on the structure of phonological systems.

Given the similarity between Martinet's account of phonological structure and that of Trubetzkoy, it comes as no surprise that Martinet also includes provision for a quite similar notion of archiphonemes, units that represent the neutralization of a phonemic contrast in certain positions. The standard example is the neutralization of obstruent voicing distinctions in syllable-final position in German and Russian. While the phonemes /d/ and /t/ are distinct in German in the position before a vowel, in final position there is no contrast, and the words *Rad* 'wheel' and *Rat* 'advice' are pronounced identically as [rat]. In such a case the final segment is neither /d/ nor /t/, since the choice of either would imply a contrast with the other. Rather, it is an archiphoneme which we can write as /T/, consisting of the relevant features {apical, stop} with no value for the feature voiced *vs.* voiceless.

In such a case, we say that the feature voiced is *neutralized* in (syllable-)final position in German, with obstruents represented by an archiphoneme lacking a value for voiced. It will be recalled that Trubetzkoy (section 5.5) maintained that only bilateral oppositions could be neutralized in an archiphoneme, offering an incorrect argument to that effect. Martinet provides a similar argument, but uses it instead to show that not all instances of defective distribution should be represented by archiphonemes. Thus, in English /l/ appears following initial /p, b/ and

also /k, g/ (*plan, bland, clan, gland*) but not after initial /t, d/. To represent, say, the fact that there cannot be a word *\*tlan, \*dland* by writing the initial of *plan, bland* as archiphonemic /Plæn, Blænd/ and defining /P, B/ as the neutralization of /p/ and /t/, /b/ and /d/ respectively would be a mistake, since it would imply that this segment has no value for place of articulation, while it does indeed contrast with the /k, g/ of *clan, gland*.

This argument does not show, as claimed by Trubetzkoy, that multilateral oppositions such as articulatory place cannot be neutralized and represented by an archiphoneme. Rather, it shows that such a neutralization must affect all of the members of the opposition, and not just some of them. Spanish, for instance, has three phonemically distinct nasals at the beginning of a syllable, as shown by the contrast among *cama* 'bed', *cana* 'gray hair', and *caña*'cane'. Before a labial consonant, however, only [m] can appear, as in *campo* 'field'; before an alveolar consonant, only [n], as in *insipido* 'tasteless', and before a palatal, only [ɲ], as in *ancho* 'broad'. Since all of the terms of the place opposition are neutralized before a consonant, we can represent these phonemically as /ˈkaNpo/, /iNˈsipido/ and /ˈaNčo/ respectively.

English also has three phonemic nasals: /m, n, ŋ/ as in *ram, ran, rang*. The contrasts among these are neutralized, as in Spanish, before a final stop consonant, and it obviously suggests itself to represent e.g. *ramp, rant, rank* as /ræNp/, /ræNt/, /ræNk/. Notice, however, that on a purely representational view such as Martinet's, there is nothing to prevent the somewhat counter-intuitive interpretation of the nasals here as maintaining their phonemic value, while treating the final stops as represented by an archiphoneme /T/ 'voiceless stop', with place information depending on the preceding nasal: thus, /ræmT/, /rænT/, /ræŋT/.

This analysis can be excluded in a rule-based account of Spanish, because in e.g. *un beso* 'a kiss' [umbeso], *un tipo* 'a type' [untipo], *un chubasco* 'a heavy shower' [uɲčubasko], *un gato* 'a cat' [uŋgato] a rule assimilating nasal consonants to following obstruents, including velars with no corresponding phonemic nasal, is clearly motivated. In contrast with the English case, the phonemic identity of the second word in the sequence, together with the absence of phonemic /ŋ/, precludes the analysis assimilating its initial to the preceding nasal. Since the rule thus established also accommodates the intra-morphemic cases, there is no reason to treat these differently. It is more difficult to apply this argument in English, however, since nasal assimilation has a somewhat different status in this language.

A universalist theory of phonology might argue from the fact of the regressive, anticipatory assimilation of nasals to following consonants in place of articulation, combined with the general absence of assimilation in the opposite direction

(from the nasal to the following consonant) that the asymmetry is due to something in the architecture of phonological systems. On that basis, the counterintuitive analysis of the English facts suggested above could be excluded. On a radically particularist view such as Martinet's however, nothing about Spanish or any other language could be seen as relevant to the analysis of English.

Martinet recognizes that neutralization in an archiphoneme often provides a description of an alternation. In French, the vowels /e/ and /ɛ/ are in contrast in final position, as in *gré* [gre] 'wish, desire' *vs. grès* [grɛ] 'sandstone'. Medially, however, the opposition is neutralized, with only [e] appearing in an open syllable (e.g. *repéter* [rəpete] 'to repeat' vs. *(il) repète* [rəpɛt] '(he) repeats' with [ɛ] in a closed syllable. In such a case, an alternation (e/ɛ) appears and is represented by an archiphoneme. Martinet is quite explicit, however, that this is only possible for a very restricted set of alternations: instances in which the alternating segments differ only as the terms of a completely neutralized opposition, and where the conditioning of the choice is entirely due to the phonological environment.

He is quite clear that other alternations, such as that of ø/u in *ils peuvent*/*nous pouvons* 'they/we can' or ɛ̃/in in *copain*/*copine* 'friend/girl friend' are not to be treated in parallel fashion. In these cases the choice of one value *vs.* the other is based on morphological, and not phonological factors, and thus has nothing to do with phonology. In several places, indeed, Martinet criticizes Trubetzkoy for having included the notion of 'morpho(pho)nology' in his conception of phonology. The absolute exclusion of anything but the simplest of automatic alternations from the domain of phonology establishes rather clearly that this is a theory of representations and not of rules.

Martinet's writing on phonological topics devotes considerable attention to the description and analysis of prosodic properties — linguistic uses of pitch, accent, etc., properties whose scope is not in general that of a single phonemic segment, but rather a syllable, word, or other stretch of an utterance. A full account of his views would require extensive discussion of these matters, but for present purposes the above description of his central positions on phonematics will suffice.

### **8.3 Functional factors in phonological change**

Although in some sense phonology as a coherent object of study has its origins in Saussure's insistence that a science of language has to focus on achieving an understanding of the character of synchronic systems, that does not at all mean that linguistic diachrony disappeared from view. Recall that Saussure himself (chapter 2) was widely known for his Mémoire, a work that revolutionized historical Indo-European studies, and the few other works directly from his pen mostly concerned historical topics (especially Baltic accentuation). Baudouin de Courtenay (chapter 4) was also known as a historical linguist and as noted there developed a view of historical change in the character of alternations on the basis of his understanding of their synchronic typology. A major obsession of Trubezkoy's (chapter 5) throughout his life was the project of a definitive Prehistory of Slavic, and one of the goals of the Grundzüge was an understanding of universals of sound structure that would underpin an explanatory theory of diachronic change. As was shown in chapter 6, Jakobson continued this attention to the interplay between synchronic principles and historical change.

Among the pioneers of phonological study in America that we will consider in later chapters, Sapir (chapter 11) wrote much on historical topics and insisted that his students working on the indigenous languages of the Americas attend to the implications of their results for comparative studies. Bloomfield (chapter 12) was also focused on historical relationships, especially among the Algonquian languages, and one of his more important results was the demonstration in Bloomfield 1925a that the principles of diachronic change were as applicable to unwritten languages as they were to the familiar languages of Indo-European scholarship.

Figure 8.3: André Martinet

While I have paid little attention to historical work in this book, a proper appreciation of the development of phonology must include consideration of the implications phonologists have seen of their understanding of synchronic regularities for processes of historical change. Martinet (1952, 1955) is particularly notable in this regard for providing a well worked out account of diachronic development as a consequence of the character of individual phonological systems. As in the case of his views on synchronic phonology, however, the emergence of his views on diachrony should be seen in part against the background of Jakobson's work.

Throughout his career, Jakobson was concerned with the interplay of synchronic and diachronic principles, perhaps most extensively developed in Jakobson 1929 (recently translated into English with notes as Jakobson 2018). Jakobson (1949) provides a convenient summary of what he saw as the most important relations between these domains.

#### 8 André Martinet and Functional Phonology

Jakobson saw phonological systems as grounded in a system of universals, with a limited set of universally available binary oppositions defined in a way independent of any particular language, the system of distinctive features, playing a central role. The distinctive features were not taken to be completely independent of one another, and a number of implicational relations among them were assumed to govern individual phonologies. For example, he argued that since contrasts of pitch and palatalization were described in terms of a single opposition of "Tonality", they could not in principle be maintained independently. Another claim was that languages could not sustain an opposition of free vowel quantity and free intensity accent together. However, an opposition of one pitch contour to another (e.g. falling vs. rising tones) requires a language to maintain a contrast between long vs. short vowels.

Linguistic changes then, were at least in many cases to be seen as teleological, taking a language from a state in which one or another implicational relation among oppositions was compromised to one where it was satisfied. Thus, if some set of circumstances resulted in previously automatic stress becoming unpredictable and free, the language would need to lose an accompanying vowel length distinction. On the basis of principles of this sort, he provided an account of a number of superficially unrelated changes in the early history of the Slavic languages.

Martinet rejected all of the underpinnings of Jakobson's view: languages were taken to be the completely idiosyncratic communication systems in use in individual speech communities, with no necessary comparability and certainly no basis in a collection of oppositions defined independently. Nonetheless, he did maintain a number of characteristics of phonological systems toward which languages might be seen to strive. Rather than being grounded in a presumed universal framework, though, these were argued to follow from the basic function of language as a means of communication.

Martinet's discussion of the mechanisms of phonological change and their motivations involves and invokes a number of concepts familiar from the work of others. This includes the notion of "least effort" for example, and the constant tension between the need of speakers to minimize the effort involved in speaking and that of hearers to recover the distinctions keeping meaningful units separate. He also recognizes the importance of the mutual, syntagmatic influence of adjacent elements in the speech chain which tend to accommodate to one another. Principles of this nature were, of course, the basis of phonetic explanations in Neogrammarian theories, and they maintain considerable importance in any account of phonological diachrony.

An individually distinctive aspect of Martinet's theorizing about phonological change, however, was his emphasis on the phonemic elements of a language as forming a dynamic system grounded in communicatively functional contrasts, rather than a simple inventory of distinctive elements. Phonemes differ from one another in terms of their characteristic features, and these features organize the phonemes into a coherent pattern of oppositions, series, correlations, bundles of correlations, etc. Since it is phoneme *systems* and not just their individual members that constitute the phonology of a language, it follows that the properties of such a system play a role in change. This results in a tendency to maximize the symmetry of the system by extending correlations, filling structural gaps, etc.

Importantly also, a phoneme cannot be identified with a single, constant phonetic value, since it must be implemented physically and physical events are never totally identical, and therefore each phoneme is associated with a range of possible implementations. Since the communicative function of a phoneme is to be distinguishable from others, the ranges of similar phonemes must maintain enough separation from one another to support this. As a result, Martinet proposes that the phonemes of a language will tend to have ranges of implementation that are maximally separated, a notion that would appear in much later theorizing about phonological systems as "Dispersion Theory" or the like (Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972 and many other references).

The tendencies to maximize system symmetry and to distribute phonemes evenly in phonetic space must be seen against the background of asymmetries in that space. Thus, if a language has four degrees of height in the front vowel system, we expect a tendency to have four heights also in the back vowels, but in fact the articulators provide less space for height variation in the back of the mouth than in the front, and thus there is pressure for back vowels to be fronted. This is most likely for higher vowels, since again there is more articulatory space for high vowels than for low. We thus find changes such as the fronting of /u/ to [ü] in French, Icelandic, and other languages.

At any given time, the phonetic values for a given phoneme will fall within a particular range, and this range may be subject to some variation. Suppose we have two phonemes /A/ and /B/ with ranges that are close but which do not overlap. Now suppose that the implementations of /A/ shift somewhat over time, so as come closer to or even overlap with the range of /B/. There are two possible outcomes: one is for the contrast between /A/ and /B/ to be lost, and for the two to collapse as one. The other is for the range of /B/ to shift enough to restore the required separation that supports their functional distinctness.

Which of these developments will occur in a given case is driven in large part, according to Martinet, by the "functional yield" (or "functional load") of the opposition between /A/ and /B/, that is, by the importance of this particular distinction in separating distinct monemes of the language. He admits that this is a very difficult concept to make precise: neither the type frequency of monemes distinguished by /A/ vs. /B/ nor the token frequency of these monemes in texts is really satisfactory, and the question of how the opposition between them is integrated into the overall pattern of series, correlations, etc. of the phonemic system also plays a role. Nonetheless, it is intuitively appealing that oppositions are less likely to be neutralized in this way to the extent they are well integrated into the language's phonemic system and important to the functional separation of meaningful elements.

If the functional yield of the contrast between /A/ and /B/ is high enough that it should be maintained, on the other hand, the encroachment of /A/'s range into that of /B/ will naturally result in /B/ shifting its range, too, so as to restore the required degree of separation. And perhaps this will result in /B/ approaching the range of another phoneme /C/, thus motivating a further shift in the implementations of this element, and so on. Such a collection of changes, initiated by a shift in the range of /A/ toward that of /B/ and so on, constitutes a "push chain", an important notion deriving from Martinet's work.

Alternatively, suppose that the range of implementation of /A/ shifts so as to be further from that of /B/. In that case, in order to maintain a maximal dispersion of phonemic elements in phonetic space, /B/ might shift toward /A/, taking up some of the space thus left vacant; and a nearby /C/ might then shift toward /B/ for similar reasons, etc. In this case, where the set of changes is initiated by one phoneme's moving away from another, we have a "pull chain".

Martinet (and others following in his footsteps) analyze a large number of developments of the sort just described, and it is clear that such correlated changes are not at all rare. In individual cases, where the precise time course of the various components of the overall change is hard or impossible to establish, it is typically difficult to distinguish in a specific instance whether we have to do with a push chain (initiated by a change in the first element /A/ of a shift /A/→/B/→/C/ etc.) or a pull chain initiated by the last element /C/, although conceptually the distinction is clear.

Martinet's notions of the factors involved in phonological change were passed on at Columbia via his student Uriel Weinreich to Weinreich's student, William Labov, in whose work they were considerably developed. Labov's (1966) classic study of the dimensions of variation in the English of New York City initiated a broad and very productive research program that has in many instances fleshed out Martinet's ideas about the role of variation in change. Martinet's influence

is very strong in Labov's (1994, 2001, 2010) comprehensive account of the factors shaping diachronic change in phonological systems.

Martinet's continuing influence on thinking about the "second articulation" of linguistic structure is largely confined to historical work of this sort. The importance of Martinet 1955 in this regard is quite generally recognized, and his role in drawing attention to the significance of variation in phonological structure can be credited with shaping contemporary views of the sociolinguistics of phonological form.

# **9 British linguistics and Firthian prosodic analysis**

Preceding chapters have been primarily concerned with the development of phonological theory in continental Europe; those that follow will trace its evolution in North America. The present chapter is devoted to a summary sketch of the approaches to sound structure taken by linguists in Great Britain during the same period; but its location in the exposition should not in the least be taken as a claim that British linguistics somehow forms a bridge or connection between these other two major traditions. If anything, the very independence of the theories to be discussed here from either the continental European or the North American models will serve to emphasize the separateness of these two main components of the present book.

The study of sound structure in Britain (generally referred to there as *phonetics*, whether or not it also includes the material called phonology by others) warrants a book-length study of its own, by virtue both of its long history and of the theoretical novelties it presents. For the modern linguist, the aspect of this history that is most intriguing is the theory of *Prosodic Analysis* associated with J. R. Firth and his students at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London University; but the origins of this view and its relation to the phonetic tradition represented by such great names as Henry Sweet and Daniel Jones would surely be worth exploring as well. Prior to the 1970s, there were few general discussions of prosodic analysis and its background beyond the brief sketches of Robins (1957a, 1963) and the critical summary (from the point of view of early generative phonology) by Langendoen (1968). More general recent accounts of the history of linguistics in Britain up until the 1960s include that of Matthews (1999), the personal histories collected by Brown & Law (2002) and a series of studies of Firthian themes edited by Kelly & Plug (2005).

If there are two features which characterize the study of language in Britain up until the early 1960s, these are its insularity and an emphasis on pragmatism rather than principles. Indeed, while linguists elsewhere would probably resent having either of these attributes associated with their work, British writers have often shown what seems to others a strange pride in the completely homegrown character of their tradition, and its emphasis on the practical and the *ad hoc* at the expense of broad conceptual and theoretical results.

The British certainly were not the first to concern themselves with the nature and relations of the sounds of language, but as pointed out in detail by Firth (1946) and Abercrombie (1948), this study has a particularly long and important past in the work of English grammarians, orthoepists, and other scholars going back to the sixteenth century and beyond. This tradition concerned itself largely with the study of English, and was to a great extent self-contained rather than developing in relation to comparable scholarship elsewhere.

This concentration on the apparently local problem of the description of English, in the general context of British independence in scientific and philosophical inquiry, was coupled in some cases with personal attitudes: Henry Sweet, for example, had a highly unfavorable opinion of the methods and results of German philological scholarship, and set out specifically to provide a viable (and suitably British) alternative to it. Over time, a model for the scientific investigation of language arose which took its problems, its methods, and the criteria for its critical evaluation almost exclusively from British sources—resulting in a growing lack of connection with work being done anywhere else.

As late as 1969, Robins could suggest (in a review of Langendoen 1968) that the fact that neither Firth nor any of his students attempted an "adequate statement of his linguistic theories … must in part be attributed to the lack of an adequate challenge to Firthian linguistics during the Firthian period." True, "American linguists were little interested in British development," and perhaps the general level of international scholarly interchange was lower than what we are accustomed to today—but it is at least equally clear that British linguists showed little or no interest in seeking such interchange. If there was no effective alternative to Firth in British linguistics, and thus no stimulus to him to clarify his position, this was because the possibility of looking for such alternatives outside Britain itself was not the kind of thing to be seriously pursued.

The pragmatic character of British approaches to scientific linguistics was aptly summed up by Householder (1952b) in his review of Daniel Jones's (1950) book The Phoneme: "The European asks: 'Is it true?', the American: 'Is it consistent?', the Englishman: 'Will it help?' " Jones's book, for example, has a subtitle promising to describe, for the phoneme, Its Nature and Use, and it quickly becomes clear that a primary consideration for him in choosing among theoretical views of the phoneme is the question of which approach yields the most immediate benefits in areas such as language teaching. Indeed, a fundamental motivation for phonetic research in Britain, from the early orthoepists through Bell, Sweet, and Jones was the issue of how to teach the pronunciation of foreign languages.

Benefits for our theoretical understanding of the nature of language in general were definitely of subsidiary (even though not inconsiderable) interest in this enterprise.

A similar eschewal of abstract theoretical concerns for practical ones can be identified in the commitment on the part of Firth and his students to 'polysystemic' analyses. As we will discuss below, the content of this is the claim that whatever sort of analysis works best in a given limited area should be adopted for that area—even if this analysis is unrelated to or, worse, inconsistent with the analysis provided for some other area of the same language. There is no reason at all, on this view, to present a unified or coherent picture of an entire language insofar as particular disconnected approaches to it yield better results in limited areas.

As a consequence of this concern with results rather than general principles, most of the concerns of both continental European and North American scholarship about language have seemed foreign to British linguists—even those who felt motivated to explore other approaches—and vice versa. It is thus somewhat forced to present the development of linguistics in Great Britain in the present context, given the extent to which our attention has been dominated by questions of little essential interest to the major figures in linguistics in Britain during the period under consideration.

Trends in the 1960s and 1970s, illustrated by the activities of organizations such as the Linguistic Association of Great Britain and its publications including the Journal of Linguistics have largely reversed this tendency to isolation.1 By the end of the 20th century, linguists in the United Kingdom were as well integrated into the field in international terms as those of any other country.

Nonetheless, there are several areas in which earlier British research provides essential perspective on the work of other schools. First, Daniel Jones's theory of the phoneme provides us with a new conceptual foundation for this element, one not covered by the classification suggested in chapter 3 but which is quite close to the view that would later become the consensus position for many American structuralists. Secondly, British linguistics has consistently been much more thoroughly based on detailed, accurate phonetic observation than work elsewhere, and is important to an understanding of the relation between phonetics and phonology.

1Matthews (1999) also associates the shift in attention on the part of British linguists to more international themes with the rise of the LAGB and its partial replacement of the Philological Society. His account makes clear, however, that the theoretical work of figures such as Saussure, Trubetzkoy, Hjelmslev, Bloomfield and others was by no means disregarded in the years prior to the 1960s.

#### 9 British linguistics and Firthian prosodic analysis

Third, Firth's work was essentially the only major approach to linguistics in the period 1935-57, which questioned the central role of the phoneme in phonological analysis. And in addition, the introduction by Firth and his students of the notion of 'prosodies' anticipates in many ways post-SPE developments in generative phonology including aspects of Autosegmental and Metrical theory (cf. chapter 16, though see Ogden & Local (1994) for some limitations of the parallel. The similarities and differences between these pictures certainly merit more than the minimal discussion which considerations of space allow us below.

### **9.1 Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, and the British phonetic tradition**

Though we could trace the roots of British phonetic research considerably farther back, a convenient starting point for the present discussion is the work of Henry Sweet, one of the first in England to stress the scientific status of an inquiry into the facts and mechanisms of speech. Sweet was born in 1845; after studying various languages, as well as some German philology at the University of Heidelberg, and spending some time working in an office, he entered Oxford at the age of twenty-four. While there, he began the series of studies on the history of English (especially Old English) which would establish his reputation as the

Figure 9.1: Henry Sweet

premier Anglicist of his day. Unfortunately, his student career at Oxford had a disastrous conclusion: he was given a fourth-class degree, a result so bad as hardly ever to be given, and generally reserved for those about whom the examiners cannot decide whether they are fools or geniuses. This effectively foreclosed the possibility of a professorial chair at Oxford, a source of bitterness which became progressively greater to Sweet throughout his career.

A series of specialized studies, grammars, collections of texts, and student handbooks devoted to Old and Middle English which Sweet produced between 1869 and 1885 certainly established his stature as a philologist (though they did not earn him the desired chair in 1876, 1885 or—at his final attempt—in 1901), but it was his work on phonetics which is of greater interest to us here. This interest was probably stimulated originally by Alexander Melville Bell's (1867) book Visible Speech, an attempt to provide a scientific system for recording the facts of speech in terms of a representation of the articulatory gestures involved in its production. Sweet's (1877) Handbook of Phonetics served as the standard reference work on phonetics in English for generations.

Aside from presenting the facts of articulatory phonetics (based primarily on impressionistic observations), Sweet's Handbook is of interest to the modern phonologist in presenting an early version of Saussure's 'phonemic insight'. Sweet distinguishes clearly between two related forms of phonetic transcription: 'Narrow Romic' and 'Broad Romic'. The former, narrow transcription, is intended to present as accurate as possible a representation of all of the facts relevant to the production of a transcribed utterance which the phonetician can describe. The notational system for Narrow Romic transcriptions is explicitly intended to be valid cross-linguistically, and equally apt for the presentation of utterances in any human language. Broad Romic, in contrast, is a language-particular representation: such a transcription should "indicate only those broader distinctions of sounds which actually correspond to distinctions of meaning in language." Though he does not use the word phoneme, Sweet makes it clear that a system of Broad Romic transcription for a given language should provide distinct symbols only for those elements whose interchange could (potentially) serve to distinguish words from one another: the phonemic principle.

Sweet's Broad and Narrow Romic transcriptions serve different ends: the former is practical in intent (since if it is adequately defined, such a representation provides all of the information necessary to describe the pronunciation of any transcribed form within a given language with a minimum of apparatus), while the 'scientific' Narrow Romic was intended to provide "an accurate analysis of sounds generally," and was thus "too minute for many practical purposes." There is clearly a relation between the two other than their disparate goals, however: a Broad Romic representation differs from a Narrow one precisely in omitting mention of those phonetic properties that do not serve to distinguish meanings. In other words, Broad Romic representations can be regarded as identifying incompletely specified basic variants, in terms of the discussion in chapter 3. These can (in principle) be converted into fully specified Narrow Romic forms by the addition of (non-distinctive) phonetic detail.

Sweet thus ranks (along with Jost Winteler, Baudouin de Courtenay, and others) among those who explicitly discussed the fundamental principle of phonemic analysis well before the publication of Saussure's Cours. In fact, it is quite clear when we look into the history of virtually every tradition in the study of language that transcriptions which record only those distinctions that serve to distinguish one word from another within a given language were not only the

basis of the original reduction of languages to writing but were perfectly familiar in the theoretical study of language as well, rather than the innovation many writers on phonemic theory in the 1930s and 1940s claimed.

Nonetheless, it would be quite unreasonable to interpret Sweet as a phonemic theorist in a modern sense, since his concern was exclusively to devise a practical system of transcription. The real innovation in structuralist phonemic theory, beginning with Saussure and (especially) the Prague school, was the notion that the set of phonemes (or elements of a Broad Romic representation) in a given language form a system with an important internal organization. It is not the notion of a phonemic representation *per se* that sets off twentieth-century phonology from its phonetically oriented predecessors but, rather, the conception of this representation as composed of elements requiring study and analysis in their own right. 'Structuralism' in phonology should not be identified with the discovery of phonemic representations.