W. D. WHITNEY'S VIEWS ON THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE STUDY

This study examines the principal linguistic views of William Dwight Whitney, with attention to the linguistic climate in which his views were developed and their impact on succeeding generations of linguists. His principal works appeared some fifty years after the initial breakthrough in comparative linguistics. While the period witnessed the accumulation of a vast amount of data and the development of an impressive body of knowledge respecting language relationships, there had emerged no general theory of the nature of language or of linguistic method based upon this body of data and knowledge. Whitney's writings in the 1860's and 70's contributed substantially to the development of general linguistic theory for the period.;Whitney viewed language as a social institution regulated by the interaction of the individual speaker with the speech community. Since language forms are arbitrary and conventional, whatever becomes introduced or modified in language results from initiation by the individual speakers and acceptance by the speech community. Further, since language serves a communicative function in society, changes in language must be gradual and orderly so as not to disrupt the communicative process. Sound change and analogy are the two most significant principles working through the internal system of language and governing its development through time. Whatever becomes part of language does so though only through general acceptance by the speech community. Every item in language exists as a conventionally sanctioned and historically transmitted product and it is ultimately the historical record that furnishes explanation of how individual language items arise and spread. For Whitney, language is pre-eminently an historical and social fact.;Whitney's views influenced succeeding generations of linguists. The neogrammarians were indebted to Whitney for refuting the notion that language is an independent organism and for providing linguistic explanation its historical emphasis. Saussure's linguistic thought was inspired in part by Whitney's observations on the social nature of language and on the arbitrariness of language signs; for Saussure, Whitney put linguistics on its true course by insisting upon the arbitrary nature of language signs.;Whitney opposed the view advanced by August Schleicher that languages are natural organisms existing independently of the human will and that language study therefore belongs to the natural sciences. Whitney found equally unacceptable Heymann Steinthal's view that language is essentially a mental phenomenon and that linguistic science ought to be grounded in psychology. Whitney argued that linguistic science belonged to neither area exclusively, that language is one of the principal constituents of human culture and as such belongs among those disciplines which study the nature and development of human institutions. Although he opposed classifying language study as a natural science, Whitney favored a vigorous empirical-inductive approach to language study and urged that generalizations about language phenomena be based firmly on language data. Whitney objected to a psychologically-oriented linguistics because he felt it would fail to give attention to the historical and social forces pertinent to language development. Whitney insisted that languages are gradually elaborated, historically evolved products which are maintained and changed as a result of man's communicative efforts in social interaction. Language study, he held, is in the domain of the social sciences.