Chapter II
SAUSSURE: LANGUAGE AS A SOCIAL FACT
By the end of the nineteenth century, apparently everything look good for the time, and some still remain convincing for the present - the equation of languages with biology has been widely rejected. It creates a difficulty for understanding language as an academic discipline: If the languages are not living species. In what sense are they "things" that can be investigated? A layman happily to French as something that can be learned, which has specific devices and in some same or similar cases for the English but differs from it in others; but if the French is an item which is something strange. It obviously is not a concrete object like a table or even like the stretch of terrain called France. You cannot see or hear the France. You can hear Gaston as the waiter saying “pas si bete …””; you can see a line of print in a newspaper “Le Monde”; but how can we define a form is called French that is behind thousands of a phenomenon concrete which can be observed like in two examples? What sort of a form could it be? The biological paradigm had treated the relationship between speech from France as relationship between a particular carrot and the species carrot: and, until the biological paradigm had to be given up anyway, this treatment seemed satisfying – even though the person just could see or eat carrots, person appreciated that it made sense to talk about the species carrot and to discuss, say, its genetic relationship with the species parsnip. But, in the first place, the biological paradigm had fallen by the wayside; secondly, person thought about it that paradigm never really did offer a complete answer to the problem under discussion anyway. In biology, while species are abstractions, at least individuals of a species are concrete; few things are more tangible than a carrot. But the linguistic analogue of a biological individual is a person’s idiolect; and this is almost, if not fully, as much of an abstraction as is the wider concept of a language. We cannot hear Gaston idiolect as a form; we can only hear examples of that idiolect – the comment which he made when he noticed the tip that we left, and example of that idiolect has no parallel in biology. So, although it was not typically felt to be problematic by linguists of the nineteenth century, the question ‘how does it make sense to postulate entities called languages or dialects underlying the tangible reality of particular utterance?’ in fact remained open during the period. The man who answered it, in a way which satisfied his contemporaries and continues to satisfy many people today, was the Swiss scholar Ferdinand the Saussure.
Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, that was his full name, was born in Geneva 1857, son of Huguenot family which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. Although nowadays people think Saussure as first one and foremost who defined the notion of synchronic linguistics-the study of language as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics (diachronic linguistics, as Saussure called it to clarify the contrast) which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject-in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame. Saussure was trained as a linguist of conventional, and became outstandingly successful as such at very early age: his Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (1878), published a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday while he was a student in Germany. It is one of landmarks in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Saussure lectured at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in paris from 1881 to 1891, before returning to a chair at Geneva; all his publications, and almost all his teaching, throughout his career dealt with historical rather than with synchronic linguistics, and indeed with detailed analysis of various Indo-European languages rather than with the general which he is famous now.
In fact, although Saussure produced his work on general linguistics theory in about 1890 (Koerner, 1973: 29), he seems reluctant to give it to someone else, and the story of how his ideas can go into publishing is a strange story. At the end 1996, he was persuaded to take over responsibility for a course on general linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages from a scholar who had had to give it up after thirty three years; Saussure taught the material in the rest of the college years and in the college years 1908-09 and 1910-11. In the first of these years, Saussure limited himself exclusively to historical matters; but when he gave the course for second time he included a brief introduction about synchronic linguistics, and in the third course, finally, a full semester was devoted to theoretical synchronic linguistics. It is not long afterwards, he died, without having published any of this theoretical material. Several people had asked him to it, but he always replied that to set materials of his lesson was too time-consuming. But two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye set those materials from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind. The book that they produced, the Cours de linguistique generale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure’s thought became known to scholarly world, and it was in virtue of this one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.
By the end of the nineteenth century, apparently everything look good for the time, and some still remain convincing for the present - the equation of languages with biology has been widely rejected. It creates a difficulty for understanding language as an academic discipline: If the languages are not living species. In what sense are they "things" that can be investigated? A layman happily to French as something that can be learned, which has specific devices and in some same or similar cases for the English but differs from it in others; but if the French is an item which is something strange. It obviously is not a concrete object like a table or even like the stretch of terrain called France. You cannot see or hear the France. You can hear Gaston as the waiter saying “pas si bete …””; you can see a line of print in a newspaper “Le Monde”; but how can we define a form is called French that is behind thousands of a phenomenon concrete which can be observed like in two examples? What sort of a form could it be? The biological paradigm had treated the relationship between speech from France as relationship between a particular carrot and the species carrot: and, until the biological paradigm had to be given up anyway, this treatment seemed satisfying – even though the person just could see or eat carrots, person appreciated that it made sense to talk about the species carrot and to discuss, say, its genetic relationship with the species parsnip. But, in the first place, the biological paradigm had fallen by the wayside; secondly, person thought about it that paradigm never really did offer a complete answer to the problem under discussion anyway. In biology, while species are abstractions, at least individuals of a species are concrete; few things are more tangible than a carrot. But the linguistic analogue of a biological individual is a person’s idiolect; and this is almost, if not fully, as much of an abstraction as is the wider concept of a language. We cannot hear Gaston idiolect as a form; we can only hear examples of that idiolect – the comment which he made when he noticed the tip that we left, and example of that idiolect has no parallel in biology. So, although it was not typically felt to be problematic by linguists of the nineteenth century, the question ‘how does it make sense to postulate entities called languages or dialects underlying the tangible reality of particular utterance?’ in fact remained open during the period. The man who answered it, in a way which satisfied his contemporaries and continues to satisfy many people today, was the Swiss scholar Ferdinand the Saussure.
Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, that was his full name, was born in Geneva 1857, son of Huguenot family which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. Although nowadays people think Saussure as first one and foremost who defined the notion of synchronic linguistics-the study of language as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics (diachronic linguistics, as Saussure called it to clarify the contrast) which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject-in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame. Saussure was trained as a linguist of conventional, and became outstandingly successful as such at very early age: his Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (1878), published a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday while he was a student in Germany. It is one of landmarks in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Saussure lectured at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in paris from 1881 to 1891, before returning to a chair at Geneva; all his publications, and almost all his teaching, throughout his career dealt with historical rather than with synchronic linguistics, and indeed with detailed analysis of various Indo-European languages rather than with the general which he is famous now.
In fact, although Saussure produced his work on general linguistics theory in about 1890 (Koerner, 1973: 29), he seems reluctant to give it to someone else, and the story of how his ideas can go into publishing is a strange story. At the end 1996, he was persuaded to take over responsibility for a course on general linguistics and the history and comparison of the Indo-European languages from a scholar who had had to give it up after thirty three years; Saussure taught the material in the rest of the college years and in the college years 1908-09 and 1910-11. In the first of these years, Saussure limited himself exclusively to historical matters; but when he gave the course for second time he included a brief introduction about synchronic linguistics, and in the third course, finally, a full semester was devoted to theoretical synchronic linguistics. It is not long afterwards, he died, without having published any of this theoretical material. Several people had asked him to it, but he always replied that to set materials of his lesson was too time-consuming. But two of his colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye set those materials from notes taken by students together with such lecture-notes as Saussure had left behind. The book that they produced, the Cours de linguistique generale (Saussure 1916), was the vehicle by which Saussure’s thought became known to scholarly world, and it was in virtue of this one document that Saussure is recognized as the father of twentieth-century linguistics.
Comments
Post a Comment