SYDNEY M.

LAMB

Sydney Lamb, you wrote a paper under the title "Epilegomena to a Theory of Lan-
guage"-1 Is that an explicit allusion to Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of
Language ? 2
- Yes, it is, definitely. That article was a review article on Hjelmslev's Prolegomena.
At about the same time, I wrote an article called "Prolegomena to a Theory of Phono-
logy", 3 which was another allusion to Hjelmslev's work. I was and I still am a great
admirer of Hjelmslev.

Can you say something about the substantial influence of Hjelmslev on your work ?
- Well, he has been perhaps the greatest single influence on my work. I studied
Hjelmslev with Frank Whitfield, the person who translated Hjelmslev's Prolegomena.
When I was doing my graduate work in linguistics at Berkeley, I took Whitfield's
course there in Russian morphology and it turned out to be largely a course in
Hjelmslev, so I was exposed to him at an early stage of my career. And I was learning,
like other students in American universities at the time, various versions of neo-
Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. But at the same time, unlike most linguists, I was
also exposed to Hjelmslev. Then, several years later, I undertook to write a review
of the Prolegomena and I studied it over in detail a second time and I found that I
was further influenced by him; there were things I hadn't fully appreciated earlier,
and there were other things I had appreciated but had forgotten. This was mainly
in the fall of 1964. At the same time 1 had begun to work out the relational network
notation which is now associated with the stratificational grammar. It was a happy
circumstance that I was doing both of these things at the same time, because I kept
being impressed by Hjelmslev's view that the linguistic system is nothing but a system
of relationships. I had always found that idea very attractive but I hadn't fully grasped
its importance and significance until 1964. Until that time I had been working with

1
S. Lamb, "Epilegomena to a Theory of Language", Romance Philology 19 (1966), 531-573.
2
L. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (translated by J. Whitfield) (Madison,
Wisconsin, 1961).
3
S. Lamb, "Prolegomena to a Theory of Phonology", Language 42 (1966), 536-573.
180 SYDNEY M. LAMB

relationships among linguistic elements, similarly to what Hockett did,4 and I was view-
ing the linguistic system as a system consisting of various kinds of linguistic elements
together with the relationships between them. But as I worked through the details of
this - under the influence of Hjelmslev - 1 discovered that every one of these linguistic
elements was nothing but the intersection of various relationships.

Is it true that Hjelmslev, say, in the early sixties, was unknown in United States ?
- 1 would even say that he is still quite unknown. People have heard of him of course,
I mean everybody knows the name Hjelmslev. But I find that very few people have
known very much about his work. Whitfield of course was very influential in making
it known in this country and there have also been a few articles by others which have
had some minor influence in making him known. I don't know whether my "Epilego-
mena" has helped or not. So, I would say everyone knows Hjelmslev did something
important, but I think relatively few American linguists know much about just what
he did.

In his theory of stratification of language, Hjelmslev distinguishes four strata based

on the opposition expression/content and substance\form. Is that very similar to your
opinion ?
- Well, I would consider it a good starting-point. In my Epilegomena, I argued that
the distinction between expression and content was not enough, that Hjelmslev's
content-form is a conflation of what ought to be recognized as three distinct strata,
which could be called morphemic, lexemic, and sememic. I now think, however, that
the boundary between sememic and lexemic is more important than that between
lexemic and morphemic, so (depending on how one defines the scope of the stratum)
one might say that Hjelmslev's content form needs to be split into just two strata,
the sememic (or content proper, or the conceptual system) and the grammatical
(comprising lexemic and morphemic structure). We still must of course distinguish
between form and substance with respect to both content and expression.

Could I say that you consider glossematics as a stratificational view, in your sense,
of linguistic structure ?
- Yes, or you could say that stratificational linguistics is an extension of glossematics.

Are there in European structuralism, say, in the Saussurean tradition, other sources of
inspiration for your work ?
- Saussure is certainly an inspiration for me. But of course he was also for Hjelmslev
and most of my Saussurean influence has come through Hjelmslev. I have also been influ-
enced by Halliday - as you know he is a contemporary of mine. We have been interac-
ting with each other off and on over the past eight years. He was also influenced both by
Hjelmslev and by Firth. So indirectly I have been influenced by Firth through Halliday.
4
C. Hockett "Linguistic Elements and their Relations", Language 37 (1961), 29-53.
 SYDNEY M. LAMB 181

What is your opinion about the originality of Firth in the history of contemporary
linguistics ?
- I ' m really not qualified to make statements about that, but I know that he was
influenced very much by Malinowski, perhaps more by Malinowski than by Hjelmslev.

His view of language is less immanent than Hjelmslev's. Hjelmslev always stressed the
closedness of the linguistic structure and of the linguistic universe; Firth developed a
more functional theory of language...
- Yes, Firth is more functional and this he gets from Malinowski. i am very much in
agreement with that point of view, which is now championed strongly by Halliday.
But 1 would also hesitate to accept the notion that Hjelmslev's view of language was
closed, because he offers just a breathtakingly broad view at the end of the Prolego-
mena, in which language relates to practically everything. 5

Who were the most important of your teachers within the American tradition ofstructural
linguistics ?
- I was taught American structural linguistics mainly by Murray Emeneau at Berkeley.
He is known as a Sanskritist and Dravidianist, but he was a very good structuralist
too, who was influenced by Bloomfield perhaps more than anyone else. I also had
Mary Haas as one of my teachers, and she in turn was a student of Edward Sapir.
She taught Sapirian linguistics, so 1 learned Sapirian linguistics from Mary Haas and
Bloomfieldian linguistics from Emeneau. And then, although I didn't have him for a
teacher, I was very strongly influenced by Hockett through his writings, especially
"Problems in Morphemic Analysis" 0 and "Two Models of Grammatical Description. 7
He at that time was influential in my thinking concerning the morpheme and its rela-
tion to the phoneme.

What is your most important criticism of Bloomfield and the neo-Bloomfieldians ?

- Well, we can first perhaps recognize a very important distinction, that would
separate two kinds of linguistic theories from each other, namely the single level views
of linguistic structure as opposed to the multi-level or stratified views. Among the
stratified views, we find, besides that which is known as stratificational grammar,
glossematics, the system-structure grammar of Halliday and, to some extent, tagme-
mics and the work of the generative semanticists, but this last is a kind of mixed system.
On the other hand you find the single level systems such as Bloomfield and the original
1957 Chomsky theory. For Bloomfield the morpheme was a combination of phonemes;
he then goes on to show that morphemes can occur in different forms or shapes, but
he never quite reconciles this conception with the other view that a morpheme is a
combination of phonemes - this point is discussed by Hockett in his article "Linguistic
5
L. Hjelmslev, Prolegomena, pp. 101-121.
6
C. Hockett, "Problems of Morphemic Analysis", Language 23 (1947), 321-343.
7
C. Hockett, "Two Models of Grammatical Description", Word 10 (1954), 210-234.
182 SYDNEY M. LAMB

Elements and their Relations".8 Later linguists, followers of Bloomfield, to varying

degrees broke away from that notion, but they never broke away very far, so that you
get the prevailing view that the morpheme is a class of allomorphs and each allo-
morph a combination of phonemes. Thus the distinction recognized between morphe-
mes and phonemes was primarily on the basis of the class/member relationship.
That I do not consider to be a separation of levels in the way we separate different
strata in stratificational grammar, so that we could call it perhaps a quasi-stratification.
It is a step toward a recognition of really distinct levels, but it is not moving far enough.
On the other hand if you take a Hjelmslevian system, you get a really clear separation
of expression-form from content-form and it is this kind of separation that we know
between the strata. So my chief criticism of Bloomfieldian linguistics would be that it is
mono-stratal or unstratified.
I would also criticize neo-Bloomfieldians for their procedural orientation. Linguistic
theory at that time consisted very largely, in this country, of trying to specify rigorous
procedures for linguistic analysis and I think this attempt was just a mistake. It has
been previously criticized by Chomsky and I agree with Chomsky on this point. In
fact, I was preparing to write a paper on this topic when I discovered that Chomsky
had already done it in Syntactic Structures.9

And what about the fact that for Bloomfield semantics is not a branch of linguistics ?
- I would disagree with him at that point too. Bloomfield didn't see that the same
kinds of methods which can be applied in analyzing the lower levels of linguistic
structure can also be applied at the conceptual level. I would also criticize the Bloom-
fieldians and the neo-Bloomfieldians on grounds of their preoccupation with substance
and with classification of linguistic data as opposed to trying to discover what the
abstract linguistic system is which lies behind the data. Hjelmslev is more interested
in finding the form of the linguistic structure which lies behind the data, whereas the
Bloomfieldian tradition was much more concerned with classifying the data.

Can you explain somewhat the interesting analogy you made between Bloomfield and
Chomsky, in connection with your 'typology' of linguistic theories?
- I would say that Chomsky's is fundamentally of the mono-stratal or single level
type, despite his talk about deep structure. In the original version of Syntactic
Structures, we find almost a pure mono-stratal view of linguistic structure, because
one takes essentially a surface structure and then applies a transformation upon it to
form another surface structure. As far as I know, it was only about 1962 that Chomsky
began to recognize deep structure as somehow on a different level from surface
structure.10 The transformations then took on a different aspect. 1 heard him give a
lecture in 1962 in which he was explicitly recognizing a deep structure as somehow
8
Cf. note 4.
9
N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague, 1957).
10
N. Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague, 1964).