Published in “Language Information Text” (言語・情報・テクスト) Vol. 19 (2012).

The Range of Language

Tom Gally

In March 1864, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., several lectures on language andlinguistics were given by William Dwight Whitney. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1827, Whitney had begun studying Sanskrit in 1848, using books that his brother had recently brought back from Europe (Seymour, 1895?, p. 3). His studies proceeded quickly, and he was appointed to the “Professorship of
the Sanskrit and its relations to kindred languages, and Sanskrit Literature” at Yale University in 1854, at
the age of twenty-seven (p. 9). While Whitney’s later work extended well beyond the grammar and literature of Sanskrit—in the 1880s, for example, he would become the editor-in-chief of The Century Dictionary, the greatest American lexicographic work of the nineteenth century—his view of language in his talks
at the Smithsonian was narrowly focused. Those lectures, which were later expanded and published in1867 as Language and the Study of Language: Twelve Lectures on the Principles of Linguistic Science,
dealt mainly with one subject: how languages change over time.
Whitney did speculate about linguistic subjects that are not strictly historical. In his ﬁrst lecture, forexample, he touched on “the nature of language as a human endowment, its relation to thought, its inﬂuence upon the development of intellect and the growth of knowledge” (pp. 6–7). He also considered thequestion of how humans acquire language, telling his American listeners that “we speak English because
we were taught it by those who surrounded us in our infancy and growing age.... [T]here was no development of language out of our own internal resources, by the reﬂection of phenomena in consciousness” (p.
11). While here Whitney might seem to have been taking a position on the controversy that would rage acentury later over the existence of an innate human capacity for language, in fact he was merely using thelearned acquisition of the sounds and vocabulary of a speciﬁc language to set the stage for his account of
linguistic change. Because this acquired language is used by diverse individuals, no two of whom speak inprecisely the same way, “it is undergoing all the time a slow process of modiﬁcation, which is capable ofrendering it at length another language, unintelligible to those who now employ it” (p. 24). His account oflanguage acquisition was thus merely the starting point for his much longer discussion—which continued
throughout his lectures—of the historical process of language change.
Whitney’s focus on historical linguistics can be seen as well in his description of the subjects he considered within the range of linguistic science. At ﬁrst, he seemed to take a generously expansive view:― 131 ―

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Every fact of every language, in the view of the linguistic student, calls for his investigation,
since only in the light of all can any be completely understood. To assemble, arrange, and explain
the whole body of linguistic phenomena, so as thoroughly to comprehend them, in each separate
part and under all aspects, is his endeavour. (p. 6)
But Whitney’s range was in fact much narrower, as shown by what he excluded from linguistic study:[The linguist] deals with simple words and phrases, not with sentences and texts. (p. 6)
In other words, Whitney’s interest was almost exclusively on those elements of language that show mostclearly how languages change over time, speciﬁcally the pronunciations and meanings of individual words.
The many aspects of language that can also be studied—including the grammar of sentences and discourses, the forms and organization of linguistic meaning, the pragmatic uses of speech and writing, and the interactions of language with culture, politics, and other areas of human activity—were explicitly excluded.
While Whitney’s alternately expansive (“[e]very fact of every language”) and restrictive (“simple
words and phrases, not ... sentences and texts”) view of language seems contradictory, it makes sense within his historical setting. As Whitney himself and many others have described,1 the discoveries, in the late
18th and early 19th centuries, that Sanskrit is related to the languages of Europe, that the comparison ofword roots and morphological systems of related languages can yield insights into not only how the languages have evolved but also the histories and cultures of their speakers, and that the same tools of comparative linguistics could be applied to the previously unwritten languages of the Americas and elsewhere,
gave linguists an unprecedented wealth of material to study. It was only natural that scholars like Whitneycame to study language mainly within the context of its historical change.
Whitney would not be the last linguist to restrict severely the range of language being studied. Nearlya century after Whitney’s lectures at the Smithsonian, Noam Chomsky gave a series of talks on linguistic
theory at Indiana University in Bloomington. Later published as Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), those lectures began with an extended exposition of Chomsky’s assumptions about language
and its study at that time. He started by describing the distinction between competence (“what the speakerof a language knows implicitly”) and performance (“what he does”) (pp. 9–10), making clear that he wasinterested in the former:
The competence of the speaker-hearer can, ideally, be expressed as a system of rules that relatesignals to semantic interpretations of these signals. The problem for the grammarian is to
discover this system of rules; the problem for linguistic theory is to discover general properties ofany system of rules that may serve as the basis for a human language.... (p. 10)
1

In addition to Whitney (1867, pp. 3–6), see also Müller (1866, pp. 164–186), Sayce (1880, pp. 38–51), Bloomﬁeld (1914, pp. 309–314), and Jespersen (1922, pp. 32–40).
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While he admits that “[p]erformance provides evidence for investigation of competence,” he explicitly excludes from study many factors affecting the use of language: “in the study of grammar we abstract awayfrom the many other factors (e.g., memory limitations, distractions, changes of intention in the course of
speaking, etc.) that interact with underlying competence to produce actual performance” (p. 12). The list oflargely psychological matters excluded by Chomsky—“memory limitations,” etc.—can be expanded to include many social factors that he also ignored then, including the age, gender, and social status of the
speaker, the relationship between the speaker and hearer(s), the practical purpose of the utterance, and theimmediate situation and the larger cultural context within which the utterance takes place.
For Chomsky at that time, the range of even grammars of competence was narrow. His concern wasneither with Whitney’s “simple words and phrases” nor with longer discourses. Instead, the goal of his theory of generative grammar was to “specify the set of possible syntactic descriptions for sentences of a natural language” (p. 13). It was the sentence that interested him, and he and other generative grammarians developed elaborate formalisms to describe how grammatical sentences can be generated.
Just as Whitney’s focus on words and short phrases grew out of the insight that the interrelations
among ancient and modern languages can be traced through those elements, so, too, did Chomsky’s focus
on sentences emerge from an insight into the nature of language: that sentences are frequently created denovo by language users and that the structures of those novel sentences seem to follow regular rules.2 This
property of sentences offered a more fertile ﬁeld for research on the psychological characteristics of language than did, for example, individual words, which seem to be learned largely through imitation, or longer discourses, which may not be as amenable to rigorous rule-based description. Both Whitney andChomsky, therefore, restricted the range of language to those aspects which seemed most appropriate andfruitful within the context of their times.
Another restrictive view of language that has emerged from its historical context is found in the ﬁeldof language education. In 2001, the Council of Europe, an international organization with 47 member
countries, issued the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR). This guide to organizing second-language curricula and self-study, originally targeted at
Europe but increasingly inﬂuential elsewhere as well, is known among language educators mostly for its
specification of levels of language competence through “Can Do” statements. However, the 264-page,
densely written CEFR also presents a comprehensive theoretical view of language and of language’s rolesin the modern world. It gives a central position, for example, to the concept of plurilingualism, which refers
to an individual’s experience and use of multiple languages such that the languages “interrelate and interact” with each other (p. 4). It also treats language competence as including not only linguistic ability in anarrow sense—that is, the knowledge and use of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar—but also social

2

While Chomsky did not claim to have discovered this property of language—in the preface to Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax (1965, p. v), he noted that Wilhelm von Humboldt had made a similar observation in the early
19th century—he and other generative grammarians developed that insight much further than previous linguists
had.
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and pragmatic skills.
The CEFR’s emphasis on plurilingualism and communicative competence can be traced to the historical context from which the document emerged. In the 19th century, the decline of Latin as a common language of Europe, the emergence of powerful nation-states, and the spread of education led to increasingly
prominent roles for national languages and, as a consequence, greater challenges for international understanding and cooperation. It would be difﬁcult to claim that communication difﬁculties were the primarycause of the tragic wars that engulfed that continent during that century and the next. Nevertheless, improved communication among people from different countries and language backgrounds was seen later asimportant for the peaceful integration of Europe, both in the wake of the Second World War and after theend of the Cold War.
Because the political and economic integration of Europe was pursued based on principles of equality
among the states and peoples of the continent, linguistic integration needed to be egalitarian as well. That
egalitarianism would have been contradicted by the adoption of a single natural language, such as English
or French, as a common tongue, and the failure of earlier efforts to establish an artiﬁcial language, such as
Volapük or Esperanto, as a neutral auxiliary language discouraged the repetition of such efforts. The concept of plurilingualism thus emerged from the need to respect the equality and diversity of the many languages spoken in Europe.
The CEFR’s emphasis on communicative competence had a somewhat different origin. Many of thecountries represented in the Council of Europe are also in the European Union, which allows the freemovement of citizens among its member countries. Combined with advances in transport and telecommunications, this movement has led to many more Europeans needing to use multiple languages in daily life.
As a result, the CEFR reference levels focus on what speakers can actually do with a language—the socalled “action-oriented” approach (p. 9). In a description of the common reference levels intended for selfassessment, for example, the “Can Do” statements for a person’s spoken production ability range from “I
can use simple phrases and sentences to describe where I live and people I know” (A1, the lowest level) to“I can present a clear, smoothly ﬂowing description or argument in a style appropriate to the context andwith an effective logical structure which helps the recipient to notice and remember signiﬁcant points” (C2,the highest level) (pp. 26–27). Note that nowhere is mentioned the traditional criteria used to assess linguistic ability, such as pronunciation, vocabulary size, or grammatical accuracy. The CEFR cares about
language as a tool for social interactions, not as a symbolic system for conveying meaning, as a window
into human history, or as a psychological phenomenon. Despite its breadth and depth, the CEFR, too, has alimited conception of the range of language.
• • •Reaching into nearly every area of human life, language is a complex phenomenon with unclear
boundaries.
Language’s complexity, and our inadequate understanding of it, is especially clear in areas where such
understanding would be most useful. Despite decades of research and development and vast improvements
in computing power, for example, machine translation is still inadequate for any but the most limited tasks.
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And despite centuries of efforts to improve the teaching of foreign languages, most students still fail in
their attempts to learn. Such challenges result not merely from the difﬁculty of imitating the mechanisms of
the human brain but also from the immense diversity of language as a social phenomenon and the wide
variation in how different individuals understand and use language at different times.
Similarly, it is difﬁcult to delineate between language and other aspects of human behavior. For example, are gestures—pointing, waving, nodding—a linguistic phenomenon? Many linguists do regard them assuch, for gestures, like spoken language, can be symbolic, are used for purposeful communication, and areoften acquired in their speciﬁc forms rather than universal. Facial expressions, such as smiles, frowns, andgrimaces, are more problematic, because they seem less symbolic and intentional than gestures are; nevertheless, some people might regard them as a kind of language. What about sweating, blushing, and nervous
tremors? Like words and gestures, they can communicate one person’s psychological state to others, butthey would probably not be regarded as language by many linguists.
Given the complexity and the uncertain extent of language, it is not surprising that many linguists
have felt it necessary to limit its range. The problem with this restriction of language study into narrow approaches is that it is so often accompanied by opposition to other approaches. The German philologist Max
Müller (1823–1900), for example, was one of many linguists who have asserted that language is a coherent
system that transcends the variation in the speech of individuals. In his Lectures on the Science of Language (1866), he wrote “although there is a continuous change in language, it is not in the power of any
man either to produce or prevent it” (p. 40). This claim came under withering criticism from William
Dwight Whitney, who responded that “individuals initiate changes, and the community either accepts anduses them, making them language by its use, or rejects and annuls them by refusing to use them” (1892, p.
19). In other words, while Müller restricted the range of language to those characteristics already shared by
a community of speakers, Whitney admitted the contributions of individual idiosyncrasies. This disputeparalleled that between 20th century linguists who, like Chomsky, emphasized linguistic competence andothers, like corpus linguists, who focused on actual performance.
Other differences within the ﬁeld of language can be reduced to disputes over where language begins
and ends. Linguists with anthropological bents, for example, encouraged by access to unwritten languages,
have given primacy to speech over writing, which was the traditional realm of European philology.3 Formalist approaches, spurred in part by advances in mathematical logic and computer technology, have regarded language primarily as an abstract structural system, while “social turn” approaches have emphasized language’s complex interrelations with human society. Whitney, as we have seen, was interested
mainly in the diachronic aspects of language, while today’s cognitive grammarians are focused on the synchronic.

3

The American anthropologist Edward Sapir, for example, while discussing writing and other nonspeech symbolic systems in Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921), stated that “all voluntary communicationof ideas ... is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from the typical symbolism of language as spoken or heard” (p.
21).
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One area where such controversy is particularly intense is in applied linguistics, especially secondlanguage education, where disputes about what is appropriate to teach in language classes are endemic. Educators who emphasize the abstract, systematic aspects of language call for grammar to be taught explicitlyfrom the ﬁrst stages of language instruction; those with more psychological views prefer teaching methods
intended to yield unconscious acquisition of language abilities; and those who, like the authors of the
CEFR, see the realm of language as extending deeply into social interactions advocate pedagogies withstrong pragmatic, cultural, and political components. While such disputes among supporters of different
educational approaches often originate in diverging perceptions of the needs and abilities of learners, theeducators’ varying views of what does and does not constitute language also affect their positions on whatshould be taught in the language classroom.4
The differences in these approaches would not matter if the advocates of each approach remembered
their limiting assumptions and respected other approaches. Unfortunately, however, as shown by the controversies described above, people studying language too often take excessively stubborn positions on the
difﬁcult, perhaps unanswerable question of what exactly constitutes the range of language.
Works Cited
Bloomﬁeld, L. (1914). An introduction to the study of language. New York: Henry Holt.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1966). Topics in the theory of generative grammar. The Hague: Mouton.
Council of Europe. (n.d. [2001]). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Retrieved from http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf
Gally, T. (2012a). Disputes about language teaching, past and present. In Professor Paul Rossiter Festschrift Editorial Committee (Ed.), West to east, east to west: Studies in the ﬁeld of English education dedicated to Professor
Paul Rossiter on his retirement (pp. 25–49). Tokyo: Seibido.
Gally, T. (2012b). Which languages to teach: The classical-modern debate and the future of English education.
Komaba Journal of English Education, 3, 37–52.
Jespersen, O. (1922). Language: Its nature development and origin. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Müller, M. (1866). Lectures on the science of language delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April,May, & June, 1861 (5th ed.). London: Longmans, Green.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Sayce, A. H. (1880). Introduction to the science of language (Vol. 1). London: C. Kegan Paul.
Seymour, T. D. (1895?). William Dwight Whitney. No city or publisher indicated. Retrieved from http://archive.org/
details/williamdwightwhi00seymrich
Whitney, W. D. (1867). Language and the study of language: Twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science.
New York: Charles Scribner.
Whitney, W. D. (1892). Max Müller and the science of language: A criticism. New York: D. Appleton.

4Discussions of other disputes in second-language education can be found in Gally (2012a) and Gally (2012b).
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