Written Language Revisited

235 Pages·1989·21.737 MB·

by  Josef Vachek, Philip A. Luelsdorff

WRITTEN LANGUAGE REVISITED

WRITTEN LANGUAGE
REVISITED
JOSEF VACHEK
Selected, edited and introduced by
PHILIP A. LUELSDORFF
Universität Regensburg
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vachek, Josef.
Written language revisited / Josef Vachek ; selected, edited, and introduced by Philip A.
Luelsdorff.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Written communication. I. Luelsdorff, Philip. II. Title.
P211.V33 1989
001.54'3-dc l9 88-36907
ISBN 90 272 2064 6 (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1989 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Some remarks on writing and phonetic transcription (1945-49) 1
Written language and printed language (1948) 9
On the linguistic status of written utterances (1965) 17
The primacy of writing? (1974) 25
Segmentation of the flow of speech and written language (1977) 35
Some remarks on the stylistics of written language (1979) 43
Glossematics and written language (1980) 53
ParaUnguistic sounds, written language and language development
(1981) 61
Written language as a heterogeneous system (1982) 73
The 1929 Praguian Theses, internal speech, and written language
(1985) 83
Written language seen from the functionalist angle (1987) 91
On the problem of written language (1939, revised 1987) 103
Notes on the development of the written norm of English
(1959, revised 1987) 117
Some remarks on puristic tendencies in written language (1987) 141
Vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Remarks on redundancy in written language with special regard to
capitalization of graphemes (1987) 151
Spelling as an important linguistic concept (1987) 167
On pluridimensionahty of written utterances and its consequences
(1987) 175
Some remarks on revaluations of redundant graphemes (1987) 187
Thoughts on some fifty years of research in written language (1987) 197
Index of persons 215
Index of subjects 219
Acknowledgments
For their kind permission to reprint articles the author and editor are
grateful to the following journals and publishing houses: Acta linguistica
(Copenhagen); Recueil linguistique de Bratislava; Academia R.S. Romania;
Bucare§ti; Julius Groos Verlag, Heidelberg; Rodopi, Amsterdam; John
Benjamins, Amsterdam; Kwartalnik neofilologiczny; Cambridge University
Press; Folia linguistica historica; Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin; Brno studies
in English, Prague; Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague.

Introduction
Philip A. Luelsdorff
Josef Vachek's career as a functional linguist is roughly coterminous
with the birth and growth of the Prague Linguistic School. Vachek was born
on March 1, 1909, in Prague and studied at the Caroline University there as
a student of V. Mathesius, B. Trnka, M. Weingart, and O. Hujer. After
obtaining his doctorate in 1932 at the age of 23, Vachek taught English,
German, and Czech at the Prague English Grammar School for three years,
then English and Czech at the Prague Commercial College until 1944.
Since Vachek's student years, he attended the classes and conferences
of the Prague Linguistic Circle, where he was student secretary and
amanuensis of V. Mathesius, becoming a member of the Circle in 1932.
After World War II Vachek was appointed Professor of English Lan­
guage at the University of Brno in Moravia, where he worked until 1961. In
that year he was appointed Senior Researcher in the Institute of the Czech
Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1971 he accepted
the post of Professor of English at Comenius and 17th November Univer­
sities in Bratislava, Slovakia. Upon retirement in 1975, Vachek trained
young assistants at the University of Presov until 1979.
Josef Vachek's name, as a synonym of Praguian functionalism, is very
well known, both at home in his native Czechoslovakia, and abroad. He has
held numerous guest lectures in Oxford and Cambridge, in London, Vien­
na, Moscow, Warsaw, Cracow and Budapest and visiting professorships at
Indiana University in Bloomington (1964) and the Rijksuniversiteit of
Leiden (1968-69); since 1966, he has been an Honorary Member of the Lin­
guistic Society of America.
X WRITTEN LANGUAGE REVISITED
Vachek's linguistic interests were initially concentrated on the
phonologies of English and Czech, both synchronic and historical, as well
as on linguistic typology. Connected with his phonological concerns were
his studies in graphemics and orthography. He has been working on prob­
lems of written language since the late 1930s, inspired by the writings of the
Ukrainian A. Artymovic (1879-1935) then working in Prague. Later
Vachek joined forces with other scholars of allied interest, especially D.L.
Bolinger of Cambridge, Massachusetts, W. Haas of Manchester, A. Mcin­
tosh of Edinburgh, and Ph. A. Luelsdorff of Regensburg, editor of the pre­
sent volume.
A leitmotiv of Josef Vachek's work is establishing written language as
a legitimate domain of linguistic inquiry. He argues that the mutual relation
of spoken and written utterances should not be formulated exclusively in
diachronic terms as one of primary and secondary, but mainly in the syn­
chronic terms of their mutual functional differentiation. In this functional
spirit, Vachek (1939) differentiates spoken and written language as two sys­
tems of language means which differ not only materially (phonic vs. graphic
substance) but mainly functionally: the task of spoken language is to pro­
vide means for a quick and immediate reaction to extralinguistic reality,
while the task of written language is to provide means for a reaction to
extralinguistic reality which is preservable and easily surveyable. Twenty
years later, in 1959, Vachek treated the relation between spoken and writ­
ten language as that of two language norms, the written norm marked and
the spoken norm unmarked, stressing, in 1974, that this differentiation is
independent of diachronic circumstances.
How is this relationship between spoken and written norms to be con­
strued?1 Vachek (1939) first points to the fact that all members of a literate
language community are aware of the functional complementarity of the
spoken and written norms. The question then arises of the existence of a
higher, universal norm to which both the spoken and written norms might
be subordinated, as given in the following diagram:
LANGUE
(i.e. a universal norm of language)
SPOKEN NORM WRITTEN NORM
SPOKEN UTTERANCES WRITTEN UTTERANCES