This volume brings together Edward Sapir's writings on topics in general linguistics. Commentaries by Leonard Bloomfield, Zellig Harris, John Lyons, Stanley Newman, and volume editor Pierre Swiggers offer retrospective recontextualizations of Edward Sapir's linguistic theory that are in themselves of historical merit. The volume reaffirms that Edward Sapir's mission for the study of language involved as much science as art, developing as it does Franz Boas' combined, and sometimes conflicted, search for law-like generalization, historical particularity, and experiential totality of the object of study.

The book is divided into six chronologically and thematically organized sections spanning work from 1912 to 1949. Section 1 presents Edward Sapir's master's thesis on Johann Gottfried von Herder's eighteenth-century view that grammar evolves as civilization evolves. Section 2 presents two essays that move from the origins of language to the history of languages and that display an early concern with internal form, sound system, analogy, and change in language, as they forward the evolutionary separation of language and external “environmental” factors including race and culture. Section 3 covers the seminal period of 1923–1929, focusing on problems of pattern and symbolism in sound and grammar as subjectively real and as socially and historically mediate. Section 4 forwards a comparative and universalizing approach to language by way of programmatic essays on the problem of an international auxiliary language. Section 5 extends this concern with three papers on semantics—about quantification, scalar grading, and spatial and directional relations—that are explicitly psychological as they relate formal configuration to experience. Section 6 closes the volume with articles written in the early 1930s that balance the self-containment of language with the intrusions of etymological latencies into linguistic behavior and study.

Several of the most important pieces in this volume were previously published in Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality (ed. by David G. Mandelbaum, University of California Press,1949). In spite of this overlap, much valuable and important material from Sapir's lifelong contribution to linguistics and to the history of the study of language is here made available to a wider audience. This volume displays the aesthetic and affective engagement with pattern and change in language that mark Sapir's genuine legacy to general linguistics. Its contents, like their author, surpass disciplinary limits, espousing holism and the liberation of comparative study, for if the “grammarian is regarded by all plain men as a frigid and dehumanized pedant” (167), then this view comes from a misapprehension of our relationship to linguistic form. The formal completeness of language exerts over us not a “tyranny” but a “gentle embrace.” This collection provides an opportunity to remind ourselves of Edward Sapir's focus on the historically particular, subjective, and thoroughly social nature of language's formal systematicity.