Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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JOSEPH HAROLD GREENBERG
JOSEPH HAROLD GREENBERG
Pages 152-181
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From page 153... ...
Greenberg's work was always founded directly on quantitative data from a single language or from a wide range of languages. His chief legacy to contemporary linguistics lies in the areas of language universals and historical linguistics.
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From page 154... ...
in his later work in the genetic classification of the languages of Oceania, Eurasia, and the Americas -- in other words, the languages of the entire world. Greenberg also shifted historical linguistics toward the study of universals of language change, including the study of grammaticalization, one of the most active areas in historical linguistics today.
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From page 155... ...
Also in his senior year he audited a class given by Franz Boas on American Indian languages and, on his own, read all the grammars in Boas's Handbook of American Indian Languages (Boas, 1911, 1922)
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Bloomfield suggested to Greenberg that he read the analytical philosopher Rudolf Carnap and thereby introduced Greenberg to logical positivism. Greenberg studied Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica, even taking it with him when he was drafted into the Army in 1940.
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From page 157... ...
(Greenberg also coedited Word, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, from 1950 to 1954.) Greenberg's intellectual roots included all of the major strands of linguistics, philosophy, and anthropology at the time: American structuralism, Prague-school structuralism, comparative historical linguistics, logical positivism, and cultural anthropology.
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From page 158... ...
His first large project was nothing if not ambitious: the genetic classification of the languages of Africa. After a preliminary publication in American Anthropologist in 1948, a complete classification was published in serialized form in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology in 1949-1950.
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From page 159... ...
Greenberg knew he was overthrowing established academic views, as is clear from the preliminary article in American Anthropologist, in which he fearlessly takes on the authorities in his field. Greenberg did not stop at African language classification.
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In this debate many of the British and German Africanists defended their typological and nonlinguistic classifications of African languages. A crucial number of mostly American Africanists accepted Greenberg's results and the method that he used.
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From page 161... ...
But Greenberg did not publish the evidence for these proposals until many years later, and for this reason I will return to the 1950s to take up the other strands of Greenberg's contributions to linguistics. Much of Greenberg's earlier work is on African linguistics, and he was recognized early on as one of the leading African language scholars.
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From page 162... ...
. In particular, he questioned American structuralism's 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.
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From page 163... ...
(Joe told me that the editor of the volume invited him, expecting to receive an article supporting relativity, and instead received a rather unexpected contribution.) In 1957 Greenberg published his first paper on language universals, the last essay in his volume Essays in Linguistics (1957)
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From page 164... ...
Greenberg himself was working on language universals and planning a conference with Osgood and Jenkins, which was held at Dobbs Ferry in 1961. 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)
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From page 165... ...
Chomsky argued that linguistics should focus its attention on syntax, rather than just phonology and morphology as the American and European structuralists were doing up to that time. Chomsky also argued that linguists should seek language universals, and contrary to the beliefs of many American structuralists, that there are significant language universals to be discovered.
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From page 166... ...
During the 1960s, however, despite the great interest in his word order universals, Greenberg worked largely alone, while Chomsky's generative grammar came to dominate the American linguistic scene. This was partly due to institutional arrangements.
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From page 167... ...
He 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. His first full statement of diachronic typology is found in his lectures from the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at the University of Californa at Los Angeles in 1966, published as "Some Methods of Dynamic Comparison in Linguistics" (1969)
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From page 168... ...
But Greenberg's interest in genetic classification of languages never left him. From the beginning of his research on language universals to the end of his life, Greenberg argued that a prerequisite for typological research, synchronic as well as diachronic, is the establishment of the genetic classification of languages.
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From page 169... ...
Both lexical and grammatical evidence were presented, as with the African classification. Indo-Pacific contains the 14 subgroups originally identified in 1958, which were further divided into sub-subgroups.
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From page 170... ...
Between the 1950s when Greenberg proposed his African classification and the 1980s when he published his classification of the languages of the Americas, historical linguistic research moved away from establishing new genetic families. In fact, historical linguists engaged in deconstructing previously accepted language families, such as Sapir's Hokan and Penutian families in North America, or the Altaic family (Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic)
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From page 171... ...
He argued that a quantitative probabilistic argument is required to "prove" an empirical scientific hypothesis, in response to the historical linguists who argued that reconstruction of the protolanguage was necessary. Greenberg further argued that, in fact, his method necessarily precedes reconstruction, since reconstruction presupposes a classification He noted that he used the same methods for linguistic genetic classification in the Americas as he did in Africa, now generally accepted, and that this method was the same used to identify the now-accepted language families in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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From page 172... ...
He published a number of articles presenting parts of this evidence, and eventually included 72 independent pieces of grammatical evidence in a monograph, Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, vol. 1, Grammar (2000,1)
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From page 173... ...
During his long life Greenberg received many accolades: twice fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, thrice Guggenheim fellow, elected to the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences (in 1965) , president of the Linguistic Society of America, the African Studies Association, the West African Linguistic Association, and the Linguistic Society of America Collitz Professor.
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From page 174... ...
He learned American structuralism from Bloch, Trager, and Whorf, but did not accept their ban on meaning nor their antiuniversalist stance. He continued his typological approach to universals, developed at the same time as generative grammar, while the rest of American linguistics fell under Chomsky's spell.
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From page 175... ...
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." Joe's erudition was awesome, but he wore it lightly.
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From page 176... ...
Both his controversial work on language universals and his even more controversial work on genetic classification were based on the same method: a nearly exhaustive examination of all the linguistic data he could get his hands on. His language universals and genetic classification -- dramatic and far beyond what anyone else had done as they are -- were always presented as provisional and subject to revision.
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From page 177... ...
1911. Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part 1.
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From page 178... ...
Bloomington: Institute for the Study of Nigerian Languages and Cultures, African Studies Program, Indiana University.
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From page 179... ...
Word 6:162-181. 1953 Historical linguistics and unwritten languages.
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From page 180... ...
In Papers from the 4th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed.
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2002 Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, vol. 2, Lexicon.
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