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Polarity in Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Werner Leopold
Werner Leopold*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

[Linguistic development follows not one tendency, but two opposing ones : towards distinctness and towards economy. Either of these poles prevails, but both are present and alternately preponderant. At the basis of this polarity is the fundamental dualism speaker-hearer. The tension produced by this polarity constitutes the principle of life in language. Formal and functional grammar are looking at language from these two poles. A bridge between the violently antagonistic views of Wundt and Marty can be built on the two bases provided by this hypothesis.]

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 6 , Issue 4-Part2: Language Monograph No. 7: Curme Volume of Linguistic Studies , December 1930 , pp. 102 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 1930 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Read at the sixth annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 31, 1929.

2 Compare my article Inner Form, Lang. 5. 254-60.

3 Compare A. Marty, Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie, Halle 1908, 629-30.

4 ‘The whole end of speech is to be understood’. Confucius, quoted by Will Durant, Forum 83. 13, January 1930.

5 By speaking of ‘bequemere Verständlichkeit, Verständigung’ (543, 655), Marty obscures the dualism of tendencies, which he apparently does not see.

6 Compare also O. Funke, Studien zur Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie, Bern 1927, p. 126, 132-3, and Engl Studien 61 (1927). 432.

7 I have been criticized for applying terms of a ‘younger science’ to linguistics. If they serve to elucidate the case, I think that should be permissible. I suspect, anyway, that the line of distinction will be drawn less sharply in the future.

8 The controversy about ‘brevity’ in Am. J. of Philology 49 (1928) brings out this point as well as the fact that a reaction is inevitable as soon as one pole is overstressed—in linguistic research as in the language itself.

9 Compare my study Polarity in German Literature in JEGPh, July 1930.

10 W. Horn: Sprachkörper und Sprachfunktion,2 Palaestra v. 135, Leipzig 1923.

11 ‘Grammatische Kategorien sind Denkgewohnheiten’. Gabelentz 253 (of course not individual ones).

12 Taken from E. Altenberg: How We Inherit, New York (1928), p. 238.

13 Compare my article Function and Meaning, to be published soon.

14 His definition of the function of speech (Sprachphilosophie 115) implies a dualism of self-expression and communication. He states in Engl. Studien 62.39 that Marty recognized the dualism, and does so himself expressly (compare also 47). Yet it cannot be denied that the pole of expression receives very little attention from Funke, and less from Marty.

15 Horn 139.

16 1818. Compare NED, ‘polarity’.

17 C. E. Whitmore speaks, very happily, of ‘the complexity of the matter’ and ‘the unity of the apprehension’, PMLA 45. 578.