The Synchronic Fallacy (review)

Most linguists work under the assumption (following the Saussurean paradigm) that synchronic linguistics is diametrically opposed to diachronic linguistics, and most of us who teach linguistics continue to insist on keeping the two approaches apart. Using the author’s own words, this book is ‘a rehabilitation of Hermann Paul’s (Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, originally published 1880, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1968) well-known views on linguistics and a rehabilitation of structuralism to the effect that language is a historical phenomenon and structure and history are compatible’ (12). What Hansen tries to do in this work—made obvious by his title that synchronic approaches to linguistics are fallacies (read: distortions)—is to have diachronic linguistics serve as ‘a necessary corrective to synchronic linguistics’ (13–14). To put it in slightly different terms, he questions how one can justify the dependence of historical linguistics on synchronic theories and/or analyses. The ‘synchronic fallacy’ has allegedly been embraced by some historical linguists, such as Raimo Anttila, who is quoted by H as saying (15, fn. 3): ‘theoretical linguistics is genetic linguistics’ (Introduction to historical linguistics, 2nd rev. edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989: 411), yet that does not necessarily rule out that theoretical linguistics is nongenetic. The crux of the argument is best stated once again in H’s own words: ‘an “essential” component in our human mind is man’s historical sense, a faculty that enables us to handle change’ (18), and further: ‘The Neogrammarian formula, A > B, represents too simple a view of the structural process of variation and change’ (25). On the back cover of the volume our historical sense is also referred to as our ‘temporally structured mind’.

Let us now examine some concrete data H uses to bolster his point of view that synchrony cannot and should not be, strictly speaking, separated from diachrony. Referring explicitly to any stage of a language, it is given that certain morphemes will be more conservative or more innovative than others. Thus, he asserts that these concepts can only be understood ‘by our sense of history’ (54). As illustrative, he compares telephone with its clipped form phone, maintaining that the shortened form presupposes the speaker’s ‘mental faculty of comprehending temporal directionality’ (54). He further mentions the elongated vowel pronunciation of big, viz. [bI::g], the length connoting emphasis. The [I::] has been lengthened, or so it appears, but he rightly asks how the synchronic linguist can decide that [bIg] is not the shortened variant (54). There does seem to be a presupposition of historical knowledge on the part of the speaker in this example, as H claims.

The major strength of this tome is its thorough discussion of the contributions of numerous linguists whose work has in some way touched upon the interfacing of synchronic and diachronic linguistics. The lengthy bibliography (451–72) contains just about every major theoretician on this main front: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Eugenio Coseriu, Umberto Eco, Zellig S. Harris, Louis Hjelmslev, Hans Henrich Hock, Charles F. Hockett, Esa Itkonen, Roman Jakobson, Otto Jespersen, William Labov, Roger Lass, Winfred P. Lehmann, André Martinet (misspelled as Martinét, 464), Antoine Meillet, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, and William Dwight Whitney. Albeit the author’s style does not make for easy reading, there is nonetheless plenty of food for thought, especially for the philosophically and hermeneutically sensitive palate.