Le linguiste et les langues par Claude Hagège

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le linguiste et les langues par Claude Hagège Peter A. Machonis Hagège, Claude. Le linguiste et les langues. CNRS, 2019. ISBN 978-2-271-12640-5. Pp. 63 From the Grandes voix de la recherche collection, this work concisely traces the author's life as a field linguist and professor—from growing up in multilingual Tunis, which sparked his early love for languages and linguistic diversity, to studying Greek and Latin in Paris, and then, rather than becoming a teacher with his agrégation, pursuing his lifelong passion doing field work on disparate language families, funded by the CNRS. Researching African languages in Cameroun, Amerindian in British Columbia, Austronesian in Palau, Semitic in Chad, and Sino-Tibetan in China, Hagège was always grounded in an empirical-inductive approach to language, seeking patterns from empirical observations. Although he studied at MIT, he opposes Chomsky's hypothetico-deductive model of an innate universal grammar, stating that even though the language faculty may be innate, "les langues, en tant que telles, ne sauraient relever de l'innéisme chomskyen" (18). In a sort of impromptu fashion, Hagège then explains some of the complexities of language, highlighting his own theoretical contributions, such as logophoric pronouns (whose antecedent lies in an external clause), formes sagittales (a single morpheme to express an I-you relationship), la loi du second lourd, (the heavier phonetic element comes second, for example prendre ses cliques et ses claques), along with seemingly simple forms and ideas that intrigued him over his career, such as function words, pronouns, prepositions, postpositions, along with the recent origin of Creole languages. Without referring to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by [End Page 253] name, Hagège also examines to what extent languages can influence one's perception of the world, from Vaugelas's sexist grammatical rule (the masculine dominates) to the possibility of making French more egalitarian today with feminine forms, such as auteure, autrice, facteure, and proviseure, but not provisrice, since morphology would prevent the creation of this term (40). He concludes that the lexicon shapes one's vision of the world, since people give names to things that they consider important, underscoring his point of view that languages themselves are acquired or constructed by humans based on historic and social factors. After fleetingly alluding to the origin of language, Hagège then concentrates on some thought-provoking examples showing how the evolution of language entails a continuous dialectic between the synthetic and the analytic. For example, the analytic elements of tire and bouchon give the synthetic form tire-bouchon. Inversely, the Latin synthetic form cantabo "I will sing" was replaced by the infinitive plus habeo to form the analytic future, cantare habeo, which in turn became today's synthetic (je) chanterai. In the final pages, Hagège briefly describes some of the world's writing systems and explains why linguists do not seem as interested in these, since writing "est un système de représentations tout à fait extérieur aux langues" (56–57). Overall, this short essay gives the reader many personal details about the motivations of an influential modern linguist, along with a sense of the richness of language. It succinctly introduces the science of linguistics to non-specialists, with easy-to-understand examples highlighting the complexities of language. Peter A. Machonis Florida International University Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French