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Linguistics and the Study of French Socialism: A Bibliographic Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Robert  and
Patricia Baker
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Extract

Patrice L.R. Higonnet has recently written that “history… implies both the selection of facts and the integration of concrete events in some theoretical setting.” Such a statement is worthy of quotation only because of its banality; today historians are constantly exhorted to use coherent theory in their selection and sorting of “facts.” Yet even a cursory survey of historical analyses of French socialism reveals that historians have often used the fuzzy logic of uncritical empiricism, which describes but does not adequately explain, or the rigid logic of dogmatic theory, which explains on the basis of inadequate description.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 4 , December 1974 , pp. 19 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1974

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References

NOTES

1. Higonnet, Patrice L. R., Pont-de-Montvert: Social Structure and Politics in a French Village, 1700–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. xii.Google Scholar

2. For example, in Le Goff, Jacques, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History,” Daedalus, 100 (Winter, 1971), 1–19.Google Scholar

3. For bibliographic surveys of the French working-class and socialist movements, see: Brécy, Robert, Le Mouvement syndical en France. 1871–1921 (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar; Kriegel, Annie, “Histoire ouvriēre au XIXe et XXe siècles,” Revue historique, CCXXV, No. 478, 455–90Google Scholar; “Mouvements ouvriers,” in Annales: S.E.C., XXII (1967), 1349–79Google Scholar; Perrot, Michelle and Maitron, Jean, “Sources, institutions et recherches en histoire ouvriēre française,” Le Mouvement social, 65 (10–12, 1968), 121–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. For an example of untheoretical empiricism see Stearns, Peter N., “The European Labor Movement and the Working Classes, 1890–1914,” in Workers and Protest, ed. by Mitchell, Harvey and Stearns, Peter N. (Itasca, Illinois, 1971)Google Scholar, which has been analyzed by Baker, Robert P. in “Labor History, Social Science, and the Concept of ‘The Working Class,’”Google Scholar forthcoming in Labor History. Theoretical dogmatism is to be found not only in the dull Communist history of the Cahiers Maurice Thorez (Paris) but also in the skillful blend of theory and history written by George Lichtheim. See Robinson, Paul's review of Lichtheim's The Origins of Socialism (New York, 1969)Google Scholar in Ramparts, December, 1968, p. 50.

5. Netti, J. P., “The German Social-Democratic Party, 1890–1914 as a Political Model,” Past and Present, XXX (1965), 65–95Google Scholar, and Roth, Guenther, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J., 1963).Google Scholar

6. Most notably in the work of Annie Kriegel on the French Communist party; see “Les Communistes français et le pouvoir,” in Kriegel, Annie and Perrot, Michelle, Le Socialisme français et le pouvoir (Paris, 1966), pp. 105–06.Google Scholar

7. The distinction between “ernie” (internal) and “etic” (external) is borrowed from anthropology; see Pelto, Periti J., Anthropoligical Research; The Structure of Inquiry (New York, 1970), p. 68.Google Scholar

8. Baker, , “Labor History, Social Science, and the Concept of ‘The Working Class.’”Google Scholar

9. See Charles Tilly's extremely unsympathetic review of Robin, Régine's La Société française en 1789 (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar in The American Historical Review, 76 (06, 1971), 787.Google Scholar

10. See the criticisms of Merritt, R. L.'s Symbols of American Community, 1735–1775 (New Haven, 1966)Google Scholar in Holsti, Oli, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities (Reading, Mass. 1969), pp. 88–89Google Scholar. Holsti and others argue for the validity of computerized content analysis, but the substantive articles which have appeared thus far appear to have only marginal usefulness. See, for example, articles in Stone, Philip et al. , The General Inquirer; A Computer Approach to Content Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1966)Google Scholar. A more sophisticated, although non-computerized, attempt to provide a categorical foundation for historical semantics may be found in Fontana, Alessandro, “Sémantique et histoire,” in Furet, François, ed., Livre et société dans la France du XVIII siècle (Paris, 1970), II, 121–49.Google Scholar

11. See, for example, Cotteret, Jean-Marie and Moreau, Réné, Recherches sur le vocabulaire du Général de Gaulle (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar, where one discovers that De Gaulle used two main types of speeches (depending upon pronoun usage), constructed increasingly longer sentences during the years that he held power, and possessed a rich vocabulary.

12. Thus, a number of studies have appeared in recent years which deprecate the linguistic abilities of working class, poor, and Black people. See Bernstein, Basil, “Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences,” American Anthropologist, 66 (1964), 55–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lawton, Denis, Social Class, Language, and Education (London, 1968)Google Scholar; Bereiter, Carl and Engelmann, Siegfried, Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Pre-School (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966)Google Scholar. All of these studies indirectly or directly rely upon the concept of a “culture of poverty”, which is cogently criticized in a series of essays in Leacock, Eleanor B., ed., The Culture of Poverty; A Critique (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

13. Chafe, Wallace L., Meaning and the Structure of Language (Chicago, 1970), p. 8Google Scholar. Italics in original.

14. Searle, John, “Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics,” The New York Review of Books, 06 29, 1972, pp. 16–24Google Scholar, which contains a basic bibliography for those wishing to know about Chomskyan linguistics.

15. For the relationship between surface and deep structures, see Burt, Marina K., From Deep to Surface Structure; An Introduction to Transformational Syntax (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Katz, Jerrold J.. The Underlying Reality of Language and Its Philosophical Import (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Jacobs, Roderick A. and Rosenbaum, Peter S., Transformations, Style, and Meaning (Waltham, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar; Landendoen, D. Terence, The Study of Syntax: The Generative-Transformational Approach to the Structure of American English (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

16. For an earlier pre-Chomskyan attempt to deal with relations between sentences see Harris, Zellig S., “Discourse Analysis,”Google Scholar reprinted in Fodor, Jerry A. and Katz, Jerrold J., The Structure of Language; Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964), pp. 355–83Google Scholar. It appears to be theoretically possible to pursue this analysis in the context of post-Chomskyan linguistics; see Chafe, , Meaning and the Structure of Language, p. 95Google Scholar and Provost-Chauveau, Geneviève, “Problèmes théoriques et méthodologiques en analyse du discours,” Langue française, 02, 1971, pp. 6–21.Google Scholar

17. Chomsky, Noam, “Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation,” in Steinberg, Danny and Jakobovitz, Leon, eds., Semantics; An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics, and Psychology (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 183–216Google Scholar; also see Chomsky, , Language and Mind, (New York, 1968, 1972), pp. 74, 111.Google Scholar

18. A key article, essential for any historian wishing to use linguistics, is Slakta, Denis, “Esquisse d'une théorie lexico-sémantique; pour une analyse d'un texte politique (Cahiers de Doléances)”, Langages, 23 (09 1971), 87–131Google Scholar, especially pp. 109–110. See also Habermas, Jürgen, “On Systematically Distorted Communication,” Inquiry, 13 (1970), No. 3, 205–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry, 13 (1970), No. 4, 360–75Google Scholar; Meisel, Jürgen M., “L'Etude des problēmes pragmatique en linguistique,” Communication to the XlIIe Congrès international de linguistique et philologie romans, Université Laval, Quebec, 1971, mimeographedGoogle Scholar; Guespin, L., “Problématique des travaux sur le discours politique,” Langages, 23 (09, 1971), 4–24.Google Scholar

19. The four linguists mentioned are now all at the University of California, Berkeley, which will no doubt become a center for post-Chomskyan generative semantics. Much of their work is available only in mimeographed form through direct communication but some of it has been published: see Fillmore, Charles J., “Types of Lexical Information,” in Steinberg and Jakobovits, eds., Semantics, pp. 370–92Google Scholar and Lakoff, George, “Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts,” in Papers From the Eighth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society [April 14–16, 1972], (Chicago, 1972), pp. 183–228Google Scholar. See also Labov, William, Weinreich, Uriel, and Herzog, Marvin, “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change,” in Lehmann, W., ed., Proceedings of the Texas Conference on Historical Linguistics (Austin, 1968), pp. 97–195Google Scholar, in which the Chomskyan idea of homogeneity of language is cogently challenged by the opposing idea of socially rule-governed linguistic variables. In a more abstract and philosophical manner, Harrison, Bernard, Meaning and Structure; An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (New York, 1972)Google Scholar argues for the extension of rules to the semantic realm, and criticizes the implicit empiricism of Chomskyan semantic categories. For some problems facing post-Chomskyan semanticists, see Charles Fillmore, J., “Some Problems for Case Grammar,”Google Scholar paper presented to the 1971 Georgetown Roundtable on Linguistics, mimeographed.

20. On sources, see Labov, William, “The Study of Language in Its Social Context,” in Fishman, Joshua, ed., Advances in the Sociology of Language (Paris, 1971), 1, 163–64Google Scholar; Mouillaud, M., “Le Système des journaux: théorie et méthodes pour l'analyse de presse,” Langages, 11 (1968), 61–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ozouf, Jacques, “Etudes de presse et analyse du contenu,” Le Mouvement social, 53 (12, 1965), 39–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. On the historian's attitude toward computers, see the remarks by Hanham, H. J., “Clio's Weapons,” Daedalus (Spring, 1971), pp. 509–11Google Scholar. On the use of computers themselves, see Horowitz, Floyd R., “An Algorithm for Determining Iterative Formations in Natural Language Texts,” Computer Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behavior, I (1968), 70–76Google Scholar; Leed, Jacob, ed., The Computer and Literary Style (Kent, Ohio, 1966)Google Scholar; Pêcheux, M., Analyse automatique du discours (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar; Wisbey, R. A., ed., The Computer in Literary and Linguistic Research (Cambridge, 1971).Google Scholar

22. See the works of Dubois, Jean, Introduction à la lexicographie (Paris, 1971)Google Scholar; “Lexicologie et analyse d'énoncé,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 15 (1969), 115–26Google Scholar; Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 à 1872 (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar. See also Prost, A., “Vocabulaire et typologie des familles politiques,” in Cahiers de lexicologie, 14 & 1969), 115–26Google Scholar; Tournier, M., “Elements pour l'étude quantitative d'une journée de 48,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 14 (1969), 77–114Google Scholar; Tournier, M., “Méthode d'inventaire exhaustif du vocabulaire des textes politiques français,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 10 (19679), 83–101Google Scholar. For discourse analysis and syntax see Lindenfeld, Jacqueline, “The Social Conditioning of Syntactic Variation in French.” American Anthropologist, 71, No. 5 (1969), 890–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the works of Maldidier, Denise, La Guerre d'Algérie, analyses d'énoncés (Paris-Nanterre, 1970)Google Scholar; “Lecture des discours de De Gaulle,” Langue française, 02, 1971, pp. 34–46Google Scholar; “Vocabulaire politique de la guerre d'Algérie,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 15 (1969), 101–113.Google Scholar

23. Robin, Régine, “Histoire et linguistique: premiers jalons,’ Langue française, 02, 1971, pp. 47–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slakta, Denis, “Esquisse,” and “L'Acte de ‘demander’ dans les Cahiers de Doléances,” Langue française, 02, 1971, pp. 58–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Barat, M., “Le Vocabulaire des ennemis de la Commune,” La Pensée, 156 (04, 1971), 52–67Google Scholar; Bestor, Arthur Jr., “The Evolution in the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 9 (1948), 259–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Capdevielle, J. and Mouriaux, R., “Image du militant syndicaliste ă travers le vocabulaire de la presse confédérale,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 15 (1969), 95–100Google Scholar; Courdesses, Lucile, “Blum and Thorez en Mai 1936: Analyses d'énoncés,” Langue française, 02, 1971, pp. 23–33Google Scholar; Gans, J., “‘Socialiste,’ ‘Socialisme,’” Cahiers de lexicologie, 14 (1969), 45–48Google Scholar; Kriegel, Annie, “Vocabulaire ‘unitaire’ et periodisation de la politique communiste: l'exemple du Front Populaire,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 15 (1969), 73–86Google Scholar; Provost-Chauveau, Geneviève, “Approche du discours politique: ‘Socialisme’ et ‘Socialiste’ chez Jaurès,” Langages, 13 (03, 1969), 51–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Viard, J., “Socialisme et volonté et socialisme involontaire en 1899,” Cahiers de lexicologie, 15 (1969), 47–54Google Scholar. There also exists in France a number of pro-Communist linguists who remain skeptical about linguistically oriented historical studies. See Marcellessi, J. B., “Elements pour une analyse contrastive du discours politique,” Langages, 23 (02, 1971), 54–55Google Scholar. There appears to be a close relationship between Marcellessi's skepticism and that of the official Soviet position, which, after the denounciation of the theory of N. Marr by Stalin, holds that language does not reflect societal patterns. See Murra, John V. et al. , The Soviet Linguistic Controversy (New York, 1951).Google Scholar

25. The theory of verb dominance may be found in the work of Fillmore, Charles J., “The Case for Case,” in Bach, Emmon and Harms, Robert T., eds., Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York, 1968), pp. 1–90Google Scholar; “Deictic Categories in the Semantics of ‘Come,’ in Foundations of Language, II (1966), 219–27Google Scholar; “Verbs of Judging: An Exercise in Semantic Description,” in Fillmore, Charles J. and Langendoen, D. Terence, Studies in Linguistic Semantics (New York, 1971), pp. 273–290Google Scholar. For the meaning of modals, see Antinucci, Francesco and Parisi, Domenico, “On English Modal Verbs,” Papers from the Seventh Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1971 (Chicago, 1971), pp. 28–39Google Scholar; Ehrman, Madeline, The Meaning of Modals in Present-Day English (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar; Lakoff, Robin, “The Pragmatics of Modality,” in Papers From the Eighth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 1972 (Chicago, 1972), pp. 229–246.Google Scholar