Historical Sources: Credit Where Credit Is Due

Abstract

George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky can be considered the responsible agents behind the history of modern mainstream psycholinguistics which emerged in mid-twentieth century. It is a narrative of the dramatic shift away from behaviorism in the direction of mentalist principles. This cognitivism was based largely on transformational linguistics. A closer view of the historical literature serves to diminish the importance of behaviorism, while manifesting a prevailing “written language bias” (Linell, P. (2005). The written language bias in linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations. London: Routledge, p. 4) in psycholinguistic research and elevating some theoretical and empirical thinking of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries on language and language use to a far more important role than has heretofore been acknowledged by most scholars. In keeping with the theoretical and methodological perspective of the present book, Philipp Wegener’s ((1885–1991). Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (Newly edited). Amsterdam: Benjamins) Investigations regarding the fundamental questions of the life of language (our translation) must be erected into a basic historical reference. His philological investigations began with informal observations of actual speaking in everyday settings rather than with analyses of formal structures in dead languages, as the investigations of his classical philological colleagues were being conducted. Wegener’s psychological insights into verbal communication were outstanding for a philologist of his era and became for this reason important for our own engagement of spoken dialogue. Moreover, he emphasized both the listener’s role and the situation in the process of communication. For Wegener, as well as for Edward A. Esper ((1935). Language. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of social psychology (pp. 417–460). Worchester: Clark University Press), the basic and developmentally primary genre of dialogical discourse was not sustained conversation, but the occasional use of speech in association with nonlinguistic activities. But it was the German psychologist Karl Bühler ((1934–1982). Sprachtheorie: Die darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Stuttgart: Fischer) who introduced the definitive terminology of empractical speech. According to him, empractical speech occurred in a setting with two or more participants in which a nonlinguistic activity was salient, when the occasional need for a brief utterance arose. This chapter concludes with a discussion of periodical historical shifts in the relationship between psychology and other language-related sciences regarding the topic of the psychology of language.

Whatever the future course of relations between psychology and linguistics, it should be a more intelligent one if we pay attention to what has happened in the past (Blumenthal, 1985, p. 820).