200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey (review)

Starting from the premise that most of modern linguistic research deals with syntactic topics and adopting a perspective of history of linguistic thought, Graffi took up the challenging task of surveying the enormous amount of syntactic research over the last two centuries. Based on thorough investigation of a large number of original sources, he argues against the widespread opinion that very few syntactic studies were carried out before the 1950s and demonstrates that, in fact, syntactic matters were carefully investigated not only in the last 50 years or so, but also throughout both the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century.

As nineteenth century syntax was mainly psychology-based (or psychologistic, as the author calls it throughout the book), G’s history of syntactic theories during the last two centuries focuses on the relationship between syntax and psychology or, more precisely, on the position that syntacticians have taken towards psychology and on the vicissitudes of this relationship (which has been recognized as a central problem by most scholars). G also points to the oscillating attitude of syntax towards psychology in the history of linguistics: an initial ‘psychologistic’ period in the nineteenth century, followed by an antipsychological one in the first decades of the twentieth century, and then again a rediscovery of psychology around the middle of the twentieth century.

The structure of the book clearly reflects this oscillation. Part 1 deals with the age of psychologism in linguistics, whose beginnings are assumed to coincide with the crisis of the general grammar model of historical-comparative linguistics, and the rise (indirectly connected with the success of historical-comparative grammar) and fall (mainly due to Otto Jespersen’s and John Ries’s criticisms) of ‘psychologistic’ syntax. Part 2 focuses on structural linguistics which is characterized by a rejection of psychologism and an exclusive focus on morphology and phonology and on the role of syntax in the structuralist systems. Part 3, different in format from the preceding ones, considers the age of syntactic theories during the second half of the twentieth century and the shaping of syntactic theories, whether psychologically-oriented or not.

Besides a general picture of the views on syntax during the ages of psychologism and structuralism, the reader is also offered a thorough classification of the different contemporary syntactic theories according to their roots and subsequent ramifications. The critical ideas throughout the present volume are grounded in a comprehensive illustration of the different syntactic systems and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools. G’s work will certainly be considered a reference work and an important evaluation of the continuous and broken threads within the syntax of the last two centuries.