Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 32, Issue 1-2, 2005

The present study offers a typological and a chronological classification of all the extant definitions of the middle voice from Apollonius Dyscolus (2nd century A. D.) to Constantinus Lascaris (1434–1501), the last significant Byzantine grammarian of the Modern times. As a result of the investigation, it becomes clear that there was no generally acknowledged definition of the middle voice in the Greek grammatical tradition until the Renaissance, when the last Byzantine grammarians attempted an all-embracing and complex systematization of the verbal voices. Before that time, what we find is a range of five different definitions, which were combined in different ways by Greek grammarians according to their needs and the scope of their works. Accordingly, the Greek Canones (morphological tables which listed and commented all variant forms of the corresponding verbal conjugations) generally stressed the morphological differences of the middle forms, whereas the Syntaxes neglected morphology and centred on the semantics and syntactic constructions of the middle verbal paradigms. The combination of both criteria in the more general and theoretical Grammars would thus allow for a variety of interpretations.

This paper examines the linguistic thought of Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824), the founder of modern classical philology, and tries to show that contrary to what is commonly assumed, grammar played an important role in his research program for a ‘science of antiquity’. Specifically, Wolf encouraged the study of philosophical grammar, which was the leading linguistic paradigm in Germany around 1800, and he developed an original theory of tense within this methodological framework. But philosophical grammar would appear obsolete soon after the establishment of historical-comparative linguistics and this, it is argued, is an important reason for the enmities in the first half of the 19th century between Indo-Europeanists and the Classical scholars who stayed within the old linguistic paradigm.

Like the other European countries, Russia of the 19th century experienced much of the same scholarly discourse concerning the Aryan idea. The Russian Aryan myth distinguishes itself from the German and French versions by the absence of racialism and its Orthodox anchoring, this way offering the possibility of a certain ‘decentralization’ in the face of the Western experience of Aryanism. This difference often permits Slavophile intellectual circles at the periphery of the classic university life to develop a genealogical discourse concerning nationhood and the legitimization of the imperial expansion of Russia in Asia and the Far East. As a result, the Aryan reference blossomed in the historical and archaeological arguments for the justification of the supposed national continuity and statehood between the ancient Scythian world and contemporary Russia. The proximity between the Slavic and the Indo-Iranian languages, of the Oriental branch of the Indo-European family, would naturally constitute, for the Slavophiles, a scientific argument in favour of the Aryan assertion of Russia : the competition between the Germanic peoples and the Slaves for the most ancient antiquity is then transposed into the notion of language.

Dutch structuralism developed during the first half of the 20th century as a heterogeneous movement. Interest in the works of Karl Bühler (1879–1963), however, can be observed in the publications of Dutch linguists as different as Albert Willem de Groot (1892–1963) and Anton Reichling (1898–1986), professors of General Linguistics at the universities of, respectively, Utrecht and Amsterdam. Although the ways in which they discuss and make use of Bühler’s insights differ widely, in agreement with their very divergent theoretical orientations, there is one common element: both scholars discovered and criticized, independently of each other, the same ambiguity in the famous organon-model, presented by Bühler in his Sprachtheorie (1934).

Structuralism sought to introduce various kinds of autonomy into the study of language, including the autonomy of that study itself. The basis for this was the insistence on categorial autonomy, whereby categories are identified language-internally (whether in a particular language or in language generally). In relation to phonology, categorial autonomy has generally been tempered by grounding: the categories correlate (at least prototypically) with substance, phonetic properties. This is manifested in the idea of ‘natural classes’ in generative phonology, for instance. Usually, however, and particularly since Bloomfield, no such grounding (in meaning) has been attributed to syntax. This attitude culminates in the principle of the autonomy of syntax which was put forward in transformational-generative grammar. Such an attitude can be contrasted not merely with most pre-structural linguistics but also, in its severity, with other developments in structuralism. In present-day terms, the groundedness of syntax assumes that only the behaviour of semantically typical members of a category determines its basic syntax, and this syntax reflects the semantic properties; groundedness filters out potential syntactic analyses that are incompatible with this.

The article portrays Wolfgang Steinitz (1905–1967) as an broad-minded linguist, whose life was determined by the political events in Europe between 1924 and 1967 and by his personal fate as a Jewish scientist, as a German communist of middle-class intellectual origin, and as a refugee to the USSR, Estonia and Sweden, who became an influential figure in the humanities in post-war East Germany. The paper focuses on detecting features of an inner biographical coherence in Steinitz’ oeuvre — despite the outer changes he had to experience with respect to political systems (Nazi-Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Sweden, Soviet-occupied East-Germany/GDR) and scientific fields he had to deal with (Finno-Ugristics, Ostyakology, folklore, ethnology, German studies, and other subjects). The paper illustrates features of biographical coherence emerging from a productive connection of personal motivation and philological method. The way in which Steinitz (1934) analyzed the grammatical parallelisms in Finno-Karelian folk poetry as ‘variations under conditions of contrast’ provides the over-all pattern for the range of scientific endeavours he addressed in his subsequent scientific undertakings. With reference to the personal friendship of the two émigré scholars Wolfgang Steinitz and Roman Jakobson, the paper suggests the life-saving role a commitment to scientific work can play as a balancing pole in difficult political times.