- Sound structure in language
This is a collection of papers carefully chosen from the extensive list and broad scope of publications by the Danish linguist Jørgen Rischel, who died in May 2007. It commemorates the tradition and innovation in the work of a great scholar, who set out in Nordic philology and European structuralism, and who, in his critical interaction with linguistic schools on both sides of the Atlantic, strove to overcome both the separation of language from usage and culture, and the isolation of linguistics from the cultural sciences and sociology. Throughout his academic life, R's crucial question was 'What is the relationship between language users' speech and the linguist's analysis of it?'. He envisaged a new type of linguistics on a structural basis, but with a firm link to other sciences, such as anthropology, the study of religion, archeology, and genetics. His own in-depth analyses of West Greenlandic and of Minor Mlabri, a hunter-gatherer language of Northern Indochina, bear witness to his success in moving toward this goal.
Being firmly rooted in the old linguistic tradition, R also made language proficiency his guiding principle: 'I would rather not analyze linguistically material which I did not have a first-hand knowledge of. … In general, I prefer only to speak about languages which I speak myself' (x). This is a prerequisite to the amalgamation of formal structural linguistics with cultural studies, [End Page 458] which he advocated so convincingly. In this insistence on speaking languages, he is in line with eminent European linguists, such as Otto Jespersen, Eduard Sievers, Daniel Jones, Paul Passy, Roman Jakobson, Nikolaj Trubetzkoy, and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, as well as American linguists like Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, Bernard Bloch, and Kenneth Pike, whose academic education was shaped before English became the world lingua franca. The above quotation from R reminds us of what William Moulton said: 'Though all linguists must somehow love languages, many of them seem uninterested in speaking languages. I love to' (1980, quoted in his obituary by Mark Louden in Language 84, 2008, p. 168). Nowadays, an anglophone linguist might even say that it is not important to speak the language in order to make linguistic statements about it, and this attitude has, unfortunately, been adopted by European scholars who, in many cases, now also tend to give descriptions in English of languages they do not know. A reversal of this trend is in the interest of the scientific standard of linguistic analyses, and readers of this volume can draw the necessary inspiration for it.
In the introduction (vii-xx), the editors give a very informative and well-written account of the essential stages in R's academic vita and in the development of his thoughts on linguistic theory and methodology. They distinguish three leitmotifs in his work: (i) explicitness of linguistic and phonological theory and its firm grounding in empirical research, (ii) integration of sound systems with morphology and syntax, and (iii) integration of linguistic, cultural, and biological research.
No single one of these leitmotifs is new in the development of linguistic thinking over the past century, though not universally practiced even today. There are still many phonologists who do not apply (i) in their research because they dissociate their desk solutions from laboratory analysis. As to (ii), by contrast, many a laboratory analysis of, for example, prosodic features, is completely separated from meaning in syntax and morphology. Finally, regarding (iii), formal linguists do not pay any attention to it at all. And when it comes to the combination of all three guidelines, we find R's own groundbreaking contribution to the subject. These leitmotifs determined the selection and grouping of the papers for this volume.
Part 1, 'Prerequisites and analysis' (1-81), contains five papers that introduce recurrent topics in R's publications:
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• the relationship between natural speech outside the laboratory and models of description; Ch. 1, 'Formal linguistics and real speech' (3-25)
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• morphophonemic...