X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018
ПЕРЕВОДЧЕСКАЯ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТЬ ДЖОСЕФА ГРИНБЕРГА
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Joe Greenberg was born on May 28th, 1915, in Brooklyn, New York, the second of two children. His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, a German Jew. His father’s family name was originally Zyto, but in one of those turn-of-the-century immigrant stories, he ended up taking the name of his landlord. Joe Greenberg’s early loves were music and languages. As a child he sat fascinated next to his mother while she played the piano, and asked her to teach him. She taught him musical notation and then found him a local teacher. Greenberg ended up studying with a Madame Vangerova, associated with the Curtis Institute of Music. Greenberg even gave a concert at Steinway Hall at the age of 14, and won a city-wide prize for best chamber music ensemble. But after finishing high school, Greenberg chose an academic career instead of a musical one, although he continued to play the piano every evening until near the end of his life.
Greenberg’s first major work was the genetic classification of the languages of Africa, published in serialized form in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropologian 1949-50. At the time, African languages were classified into five families: Semitic, Hamitic, Sudanic, Bantu and Bushman. Greenberg classified them instead into sixteen families, based on two fundamental principles. The first, enunciated in the first article, is the exclusion of typological features from genetic classification. That is, properties purely of form phonological patterns or grammatical patterns or of meaning semantic patterns are too likely to diffuse, too small in number, and too likely to result from independent convergence to act as indicators of genetic descent. Instead, the arbitrary pairings of form and meaning, in both morphology and lexicon, provide the best evidence for genetic classification. This separation of typological and genetic traits of languages provided the key to genetic classification, and almost as a byproduct produced the independent development of typology a few years later in Greenberg’s career.
The second principle is the exclusion of nonlinguistic evidence from the establishment of linguistic genetic families. Both of these principles were violated by the accepted classifications of African languages. Typological traits such as the presence or absence of sex gender and nonlinguistic factors such as race played a role in the accepted classification. Greenberg’s classification cut across the accepted classification but established the basic principles for genetic classification of languages. As a young American scholar, he upset the senior British and German scholars in the field, and a heated debate ensued.
Greenberg did not stop at African language classification. He turned to the study of the languages of the Americas, Australia, and other parts of the world. While North American languages were at the time grouped into a small number of large families, South American languages were not, and so Greenberg began with South America, where he identified seven families. In Australia, he identified one widespread family, which he called General Australian (identical to Pama-Nyungan), and a large number of small families. Some of these observations were published in Greenberg 1953. In response to criticisms of that paper and his other work, Greenberg explicitly formulated the third and final principle of genetic classification, namely the simultaneous comparison of the full range of languages and forms for the area under study. In 1955, Greenberg’s African classification was reprinted, and he had consolidated the sixteen families to twelve. He continued his classification work, proposing fourteen families for the non-Austronesian, non-Australian languages in Oceania in a report to the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 1958.
Greenberg then presented evidence in 1960 that the fourteen families he identified in Oceania belong to a single group. In the same year, a paper originally presented in 1956 was published, proposing that the Native American languages fall into three genetic groupings.
In the course of his research on the Native American languages, he compared them with languages in northern Eurasia and by the early 1960s had identified another large family ranging from Indo-European in the west to Eskimo-Aleut in the east. But Greenberg did not publish the evidence for these proposals until many years later.
Much of Greenberg’s earlier work is on African linguistics, and he was recognized early on as one of the leading African language scholars. In addition to the classification of African languages, he wrote numerous articles on phonology and morphology, particularly in Afro-asiatic, and on language contact in Africa. In the patterning of root morphemes in Semitic, Greenberg displayed his characteristic approach to a linguistic problem. He examined 3775 Arabic triliteral roots and surveyed roots in other Semitic languages in order to formulate a number of constraints on the occurrence of phonemes and phonological features across the root consonants of Semitic. The article also displays his breadth of knowledge of the literature and citation of antecedents and parallel discovery. It is a path breaking work, one that has been repeatedly cited in later research on morpheme structure conditions and phono tactic constraints.
Nevertheless, Greenberg described himself as being in a state of intellectual ferment, or even crisis, in 1952 to 1954. Although not formally trained as a linguist, he had been influenced by American structuralism and its seeming philosophical counterpart, logical positivism. Yet he had recognized some of structuralisms weaknesses, partly through influences such as the Prague School and comparative-historical linguistics (which had much greater prestige then than now). In particular, he questioned American structuralisms lack of interest in meaning and use, the strict separation of synchrony and diachrony, and the methods for uncovering basic linguistic units such as the phoneme.
Greenberg recalled another formative experience that occurred in 1953. He was part of an interdisciplinary seminar on linguistics and psychology organized by the Social Science Research Council. He presented the current state of linguistics, that is, the rigorous methodology of American structuralism, about which he already had misgivings.
It would be four more years, however, before Greenberg published his first paper on language universals. Instead, his next major publication in synchronic theory was in the area of typology. At that time, typology was the study of language differences, not similarities, based on phonological and morphological traits. The morphological typology of the nineteenth century, dividing languages into isolating, agglutinative and inflectional types, was the only major typological classification of languages until Trubetzkoy's work on phonological systems. The morphological typology had been refined and elaborated by Edward Sapir (1921) always Joe's linguistic hero. Greenberg’s essay was a refinement and quantification of Sapir's typology, accompanied by an insightful analysis of the fundamental segmentation of utterances into words and morphemes.
At the Dobbs Ferry conference, Greenberg first presented what became his most famous and far-reaching contribution to linguistics: Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. The same paper was presented in the following year at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists at MIT (where Noam Chomsky also presented his ideas to an international audience for the first time), and then published in 1963 along with the other Dobbs Ferry papers. This paper remains one of the most widely-cited papers in linguistics.
In this paper, Greenberg goes beyond his 1957b essay to represent universals in logical form, namely as implicational universals and biconditional universals. He constructs a genetically diverse sample of thirty languages in order to infer empirically valid universals, arguing that grammatical categories must be compared across languages on an ultimately external, semantic basis. He then applied this method to word order and morphological categories, constructing a total of forty-five universals. In the concluding section, Greenberg offers more general principles to account for the word order universals. In particular, he posits two general word order principles, DOMINANCE (a preference for one order over its opposite, e.g. demonstrative-noun over noun-demonstrative) and HARMONY (an association between one word order and a second word order, e.g. adjective-noun is harmonic with demonstrative-noun), and posits a principle governing their interaction: A dominant order may always occur, but its opposite, the recessive, occurs only when a harmonic construction is likewise present. The latter principle is an early example of a competing motivations explanation of language universals. In other words, Greenberg’s paper established the basic methodology of what is now known as the typological approach to grammar, derives major empirical results, and offers a type of explanation used widely today in typological analyses.
The impact of Greenberg’s paper was dramatic. At the time, the field of linguistics was also being challenged by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was arguing that linguistics should focus its attention on syntax, rather than just phonology and morphology as had the American and European structuralists up to that time. Chomsky also was arguing that linguists should seek language universals, and contrary to the beliefs of many American structuralists, that there are significant language universals to be discovered. Chomsky sought language universals through deductive reasoning in the analysis of individual languages into their Deep structure and transformations of that deep structure into surface structure. But at the same time, Greenberg produced a large number of substantive universals of syntax, derived via inductive empirical generalization over Surface structure across a wide range of languages. Some of Chomsky’s disciples immediately incorporated word order typology (e.g. McCawley 1970). But the fact remains that Chomsky and Greenberg at about the same time proposed opposing theories about universals of grammar (particularly syntax), how they are to be defined and discovered, and how they are to be explained. These later became known as the Chomskyan and Greenbergian approaches to language universals, and later characterized more broadly as the formalist and functionalist approaches to language (though in fact the latter labels encompass a broader range of theories than their historical founders would accept, and embrace theories that precede both of them).
During the 1960s, however, despite the great interest in his word order universals, Greenberg worked largely alone. This was partly due to institutional arrangements. In 1962, Greenberg moved to the department of anthropology at Stanford University. Stanford had only a committee on linguistics at the time, and as a result Greenberg had very few graduate students. Greenberg was instrumental in establishing a department of linguistics at Stanford in 1973. In 1967, Greenberg and his colleague Charles Ferguson received a National Science Foundation Grant for research into language universals that lasted until 1976. As a result, Greenberg and Ferguson were able to fund research by many postdoctoral fellows, including major figures in the next generation of typologists, such as Talmy Giv—n, Leonard Talmy and Edith Moravcsik. The result of this project was a series of twenty Working Papers in Language Universals and the four-volume Universals of human language.
Greenberg himself produced a number of important studies of language universals during this time, on consonant clusters (1964/1978), an oft-cited study of glottalic consonants (1970), word prosodic systems (Greenberg & Kashube 1976), and numeral systems (1974a, 1978a), not to mention numerous general essays on typology and universals, the broadest of which is Greenberg 1974b. The most influential synchronic study after his word order research is his article on universals of markedness and markedness hierarchies (1966a). Markedness was of course an idea developed by the Prague School theorists, whose work Greenberg was exposed to in his early years teaching at Columbia. In Prague School theory, however, markedness is a property of language-specific grammatical categories, and the markedness of a category such as Singular can vary from language to language. Greenberg reinterpreted markedness as a property of crosslinguistic categories, that is, conceptual categories, so that for instance it is a universal that the singular is unmarked compared to the plural. Greenberg constructed a series of universals of formal expression based on markedness relations, and also argued that the morphological (though not phonological) universals are ultimately explainable in terms of text frequency. Again, Greenberg’s work anticipates later developments in functionalist linguistic theory, now usually described as the usage-based model .
Greenberg’s own theoretical interests were taking a new turn in the 1960s. He began to explore diachronic typology, that is, universals of language change as well as universals of synchronic language structure. In fact, Greenberg’s interest in this topic is displayed as early as his first publication on language universals, in which he notes that prefixing languages may develop infixes whereas suffixing languages may develop root-internal changes, both as the result of the psychological preference of anticipation over perseveration. Greenberg was no doubt also inspired by his extensive comparative-historical research in Africa and in other parts of the world.
Greenberg realized that the constraints on patterns of crosslinguistic variation are ultimately constraints on paths of change of language, and so synchronic typology can, and should, be reanalyzed as diachronic typology. He began this reinterpretation of synchronic typology in a short paper on phonological universals. His first full statement of diachronic typology was published in 1969 as some methods of dynamic comparison in linguistics. His other major statement of diachronic typological theory is diachrony, synchrony and language universals (1978b). In these papers, he demonstrates how synchronic typologies can be reinterpreted as diachronic ones, how comparative-historical studies can be used to develop hypotheses of universals of language change, and proposes a model for the representation of diachronic patterns (the state-process model). Greenberg’s diachronic approach to language is presented more generally in his LSA presidential address of 1977, Rethinking linguistics diachronically.
In the 1969 paper, Greenberg also presents case studies of universals of language change. In addition to these examples, he also began publishing major papers on diachronic typology, on numeral constructions (1972/1977, 1975, 1989), gender markers (1978c, 1981), word order (1980) and pronouns (1988, 1993, 2000b). Of these, the study on gender markers helped to stimulate the tremendous explosion of research on grammaticalization, which is the chief area of research in diachronic typology today. Greenberg compares the gender (noun class) markers in the Niger-Kordofanian languages and identifies a grammaticalization process by which a demonstrative such as That evolves to a definite (stage I) article, then to a stage II article covering both definite and specific indefinite functions, and finally to a stage III article found on nouns in virtually all contexts, by which time it is reinterpreted as a noun class/gender marker. In a 1991 paper Greenberg proposes a further process, regrammaticalization, by which a highly grammaticalized marker is employed in other grammatical functions, for example a noun marker is employed as a verbal nominalizer. This process is identical to Lass’s independently proposed mechanism of exaptation.
The first new publication on language classification outside Africa was the Indo-Pacific hypothesis. Between 1960 and 1970, Greenberg gathered all of the material then published on Indo-Pacific languages, and was able to examine some unpublished data as well. He organized the data in 12 notebooks of 60-80 languages each, with up to 350 lexical entries for each language, and also made detailed grammatical comparisons in three further notebooks. To check against the possibility of borrowing from Austronesian, Greenberg prepared vocabularies of similar length for 50 Austronesian languages, particularly those in proximity to Indo-Pacific languages. Both lexical and grammatical evidence were presented, as with the African classification. Indo-Pacific contains the fourteen subgroups originally identified in 1958, which were further divided into subgroups. There were a handful of small groups and isolates which Greenberg identified as Indo-Pacific, but was not able to assign to specific subgroups. The article concluded with proposals for the internal grouping of the fourteen subgroups.
Greenberg continued to publish on diachronic, typological and other topics, but the main focus of his research after retirement was genetic classification. His next area of study was Eurasia. He continued to gather lexical and grammatical evidence for a family he called Eurasiatic, consisting of Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut. He published a number of articles presenting parts of this evidence (Greenberg 1989/1990, 1990b, 1991a, 1995, 1997). In 2000 Greenberg published Indo-European and its closest relatives: the Eurasiatic language family, vol. 1: grammar, containing a historical overview, a discussion of the phonology of Eurasiatic, and 72 independent pieces of grammatical evidence. Although many scholars had compared pairs of families (e.g. Indo-European and Uralic, Uralic and Altaic, Altaic and Japanese), Greenberg argued that that all of the aforementioned groups together constitute a valid genetic unit.
Although Greenberg did not know at the time that he had only two years to live, at the age of eighty-four he proceeded to write the second volume (the lexical evidence) at a frantic pace. He submitted the final etymologies to Merritt Ruhlen for typing on October 27, 2000, and went into the hospital that evening. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and stayed home with his wife from then until his death. But he worked until mid-March 2001 with Ruhlen on finalizing the lexical evidence. He had no intention of stopping short of a complete genetic classification of the world’s languages, which he believed to be possible. He planned to turn next to a southern group consisting most likely of Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Elamo-Dravidian, Indo-Pacific and Australian. He retrieved his old notebooks, but realized that he needed more sources, and did not have the time and energy to proceed further.
During his long life, Greenberg received many accolades: twice fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, thrice Guggenheim fellow, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, president of the Linguistic Society of America, the African Studies Association, and the West African Linguistic Association, and the LSA Institute Collitz Professor. Greenberg gave the first Distinguished Lecture of the American Anthropological Association, and received the Haile Selassie Award for African Research, the New York Academy of Sciences Award in Behavioral Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Talcott Parsons Prize in Social Science.
Yet despite the controversial positions he took from the beginning of his career to the end, and the stature he gained in the field, Joe Greenberg was one of the most mild-mannered and self-effacing scholars imaginable. He was the scholar’s scholar. His office was Green Library at Stanford, where he worked all day, six days a week (down to five in his last decade), always reading and making notes in pencil in his famous notebooks. The library staff one day surprised him by installing a brass plaque on the oak reading table where he worked, inscribed the Joseph H. Greenberg Research Table. His erudition was awesome but he wore it lightly. He could recall obscure facts about languages anywhere in the world.
Joe Greenberg used to say that he learned more from languages than from linguists. To a great extent, this was true. He was a deeply empirical scientist, devoted to creating an empirical science of linguistics, based on a full range of facts from a full range of languages.