Charles Carpenter Fries
I had occasion recently to refer a graduate student to Charles
Carpenter Fries's 1952 book
The
Structure of English. She's working on a cluster of issues
having to do with syntactic categories and subcategories, and I
recalled with pleasure Fries's careful development of a system of parts
of speech via distributional analysis, using as raw data some fifty
hours of (covertly) recorded conversations. Though many linguists
are now looking at syntactic categories and subcategories through the
lens of the constructions words can and cannot occur in, and though a
great many linguists now draw their data from corpora, Fries's work is
scarcely known. He has no Wikipedia page, except for a
place-filler
("Diese Seite existiert noch nicht") on the German Wikipedia site.
Well, I think it's time for people to pay some attention to C. C. Fries.
I never met Fries, or Paul Roberts, whose 1956 textbook
Patterns of English is a
presentation of Fries's system for classroom use. But the two
books are an important part of my intellectual history: one of my high
school English teachers used
Patterns
as a text in English grammar -- quite a remarkable step, then as now --
and so gave me my first taste of linguistics. It was
delicious. A couple of years later, at Princeton, I took intro
linguistics (with the Gleason text) first chance I got, even though I
was a math major. I was hooked. On to the intro to
historical linguistics (with the Hockett text) and reading Sapir,
Bloomfield, Fries's
Structure
book, Harris's
Methods in Structural
Linguistics (1951), and, yes
Syntactic
Structures.
The Fries system has four major syntactic categories, called "parts of
speech", in "classes" numbered 1 through 4 (Roberts maintains Fries's
notation, but is willing to label the four classes Noun, Verb,
Adjective, and Adverb), plus fifteen minor categories of "function
words", in "groups" lettered A through O. Some of the groups have
only one member (Group C,
not;
Group H, expletive
there),
and several gather together words that are largely ignored in
traditional English grammar (Group K, comprising utterance-initial
well,
oh,
now, and exclamatory
why; Group M, comprising the
discourse markers
look,
say, and
listen). There are extended
treatments of sentence patterns, immediate constituents, the syntactic
functions "Subject" and "Object", and much else.
Well worth looking at now.
But what happened? Why did Fries pretty much disappear from sight?
Look at the dates. While Fries was getting his book to press,
Chomsky was writing
The Logical
Structure of Linguistic Theory; he finished the manuscript in
1955, the year before the Roberts book was published, and the next year
after that
Syntactic Structures
appeared. By the time Fries died, in 1967, generative grammar was
flourishing and American structuralism was increasingly
marginalized. Fries's careful procedures and concepts defined
from (real-life) data had no place in the world of Universal
Grammar. Well, they're back, and it's time to say some good words
for Charles Carpenter Fries.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
[Update from Mark Liberman -- Dan Everett writes:
Ken Pike told me many stories about Fries that support Arnold's statements. Ken's first presentation in linguistics was on tone languages, to the plenary session of the LSA in 1936. There were only 12 people in attendance, but on the front row were Bloomfield, Sapir, Trager, Bloch and Fries. In the second row was the new PhD, Charles Hockett. After his presentation, Pike said that Sapir wanted him to do his PhD with him at Yale. Bloomfield offered him a spot at Chicago. And Fries talked to him about coming to Michigan. Pike said that he chose to work with Fries over Bloomfield and Sapir because Fries' work was more concerned with helping people learn to do linguistics and apply it.
]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 6, 2006 04:00 PM