Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-in... more Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-increasing specialization, and for narrowing its scope to exclude the literary. For Meschonnic, a linguistics that does not take account of the poetic – particularly of rhythm – is closing its ears to the very heartbeat of language. Rhythm is at the core of a language-body continuity which structuralists ignored because they considered it unconnected to meaning. That, for Meschonnic, was their primordial error, and he argued tirelessly for ‘the continuous’ in language and linguistics. The programme he devised has certain problems. He never makes clear where the structuralism which he rejects starts and ends; indeed, he himself can be seen as a structuralist along the lines described by Cassirer. Both Saussure and Benveniste occupy a curious position in Meschonnic's structuralism. Meschonnic's tendency to idealize the Hebrew language and Biblical texts, contrasting them with Greek l...
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the founding figure of modern linguistics, made his mark on th... more Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the founding figure of modern linguistics, made his mark on the field with a book he published a month after his 21st birthday, in which he proposed a radical rethinking of the original system of vowels in Proto-Indo-European. A year later, he submitted his doctoral thesis on a morpho-syntactic topic, the genitive absolute in Sanskrit, to the University of Leipzig. He went to Paris intending to do a second, French doctorate, but instead he was given responsibility for courses on Gothic and Old High Gerrman at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and for managing the publications of the Société de Linguistique de Paris. He abandoned more than one large publication project of his own during the decade he spent in Paris. In 1891 he returned to his native Geneva, where the University created a chair in Sanskrit and the history and comparison of languages for him. He produced some significant work on Lithuanian during this period, connected to his earl...
Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmat... more Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmatic text, putting forward a reductivist conception of the languagesystem. Yet there are grounds for reading it very differently, as Roman Jakobson(1969) did when writing of Saussure’s “dynamic repugnance toward the‘vanity’ of any ‘definitive thought’”. Henri Meschonnic blamed “structuralists” (alabel which, of course, gets applied to Jakobson himself) for turning Saussure’slinguistics of the continuous into a dogmatic “scientism of the discontinuous”.Meschonnic’s list of structuralist distortions of Saussure is the framework for theargument presented here in favour of a non-dogmatic reading of the Cours.
Summary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of ... more Summary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of iconicity in language through his principle of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Yet two of his articles, one from the beginning (1877) and the other from the end (1912) of his career, propose analyses of the development of certain Latin verbs and adjectives in which iconicity plays a key role. Saussure did not dismiss iconicity, but limited its sphere of application to the relationship between signs and their referents, which falls outside linguistics as he defined it. Hence iconicity does not contradict arbitrariness, which applies to the relationship between signifier and signified within the linguistic sign.
SummaryRead outside its immediate historical context,Languages in Contact(1953) by Uriel Weinreic... more SummaryRead outside its immediate historical context,Languages in Contact(1953) by Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967), most particularly its Preface by André Martinet (1908–1999), contains statements that can seem contradictory and mystifying. Describing his student Weinreich’s book, Martinet characterises bilingualism as “divided linguistic allegiance”, and uses the metaphor of a battlefield to describe the feelings of language variation experienced by bilinguals – but also by monolinguals, suggesting that the mainstream doctrine of languages as self-contained and unified is nothing more than a useful abstraction. Martinet’s own allegiances were divided between loyalty to his student and to his profession, since his own best-known work tended in the direction of the abstraction. All this was taking place in a febrile atmosphere at Columbia University, as “loyalty investigations” were being implemented by the Dean of Students to root out suspected communists – people thought to have allegi...
The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguis... more The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguistics and semiotics, is characterized by a series of dichotomies. Some of them, e.g. langue and parole, signified and signifier, arbitrary and motivated, are very well known, others less so. This paper looks at Saussure’s semiotics in terms of these dichotomies, and considers how later critiques, such as Voloshinov’s (1929), and reformulations, particularly Hjelmslev’s (1935, 1942) and the concept of enunciation which emerged conjointly in the work of Jakobson, Lacan, Dubois, Benveniste and others, were shaped as responses to the Saussurean dichotomies. Also examined in terms of its contrast with Saussure is Bally’s stylistics. The aim is a fuller understanding of the shapes taken by structuralist semiotics, in view of the heritage on which they were based and the broader intellectual climate, including phenomenology and Marxism, in which they developed.
The inclination to resolve the internal antinomies of this complex notion is the motivating force... more The inclination to resolve the internal antinomies of this complex notion is the motivating force of Saussure's Course. In this respect, he master from Geneva had an illustrious predecessor among French linguists. Victor Henry, professor of comparative grammar at the Facult6 des Lettres in Paris, addressed precisely this question in his book Antinomies linguistiques, published in 1896... This book, in which the questions, moreover, hold greater interest han the answers, undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on Saussure's Course (Jakobson, 1942 [1990, pp. 89-90]). At the time of its publication, Antinomies linguistiques (Linguistic Paradoxes) by Victor Henry (1850-1907) garnered a small number of reviews and was hardly ever cited. The first record of a linguist paying serious attention to it is a quarter-century later, when Charles Bally (1865-1947) devoted an article to the distinction drawn in the book's third chapter between 'transmitted ' and 'lea...
American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series
... And if one is translating actual laws, rather than legal commentary, the legal application of... more ... And if one is translating actual laws, rather than legal commentary, the legal application of Tytler's Third Law demands that there be no overt commentary or other intervention into the text. ... It was also, some twenty years later, the project of Hans Kelsen's" pure theory of law ...
Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-in... more Henri Meschonnic criticized structuralist linguistics for assuming that progress lay with ever-increasing specialization, and for narrowing its scope to exclude the literary. For Meschonnic, a linguistics that does not take account of the poetic – particularly of rhythm – is closing its ears to the very heartbeat of language. Rhythm is at the core of a language-body continuity which structuralists ignored because they considered it unconnected to meaning. That, for Meschonnic, was their primordial error, and he argued tirelessly for ‘the continuous’ in language and linguistics. The programme he devised has certain problems. He never makes clear where the structuralism which he rejects starts and ends; indeed, he himself can be seen as a structuralist along the lines described by Cassirer. Both Saussure and Benveniste occupy a curious position in Meschonnic's structuralism. Meschonnic's tendency to idealize the Hebrew language and Biblical texts, contrasting them with Greek l...
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the founding figure of modern linguistics, made his mark on th... more Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the founding figure of modern linguistics, made his mark on the field with a book he published a month after his 21st birthday, in which he proposed a radical rethinking of the original system of vowels in Proto-Indo-European. A year later, he submitted his doctoral thesis on a morpho-syntactic topic, the genitive absolute in Sanskrit, to the University of Leipzig. He went to Paris intending to do a second, French doctorate, but instead he was given responsibility for courses on Gothic and Old High Gerrman at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and for managing the publications of the Société de Linguistique de Paris. He abandoned more than one large publication project of his own during the decade he spent in Paris. In 1891 he returned to his native Geneva, where the University created a chair in Sanskrit and the history and comparison of languages for him. He produced some significant work on Lithuanian during this period, connected to his earl...
Cahiers du Centre de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmat... more Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widelyreceived as a dogmatic text, putting forward a reductivist conception of the languagesystem. Yet there are grounds for reading it very differently, as Roman Jakobson(1969) did when writing of Saussure’s “dynamic repugnance toward the‘vanity’ of any ‘definitive thought’”. Henri Meschonnic blamed “structuralists” (alabel which, of course, gets applied to Jakobson himself) for turning Saussure’slinguistics of the continuous into a dogmatic “scientism of the discontinuous”.Meschonnic’s list of structuralist distortions of Saussure is the framework for theargument presented here in favour of a non-dogmatic reading of the Cours.
Summary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of ... more Summary Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is routinely criticized for denying the possibility of iconicity in language through his principle of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Yet two of his articles, one from the beginning (1877) and the other from the end (1912) of his career, propose analyses of the development of certain Latin verbs and adjectives in which iconicity plays a key role. Saussure did not dismiss iconicity, but limited its sphere of application to the relationship between signs and their referents, which falls outside linguistics as he defined it. Hence iconicity does not contradict arbitrariness, which applies to the relationship between signifier and signified within the linguistic sign.
SummaryRead outside its immediate historical context,Languages in Contact(1953) by Uriel Weinreic... more SummaryRead outside its immediate historical context,Languages in Contact(1953) by Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967), most particularly its Preface by André Martinet (1908–1999), contains statements that can seem contradictory and mystifying. Describing his student Weinreich’s book, Martinet characterises bilingualism as “divided linguistic allegiance”, and uses the metaphor of a battlefield to describe the feelings of language variation experienced by bilinguals – but also by monolinguals, suggesting that the mainstream doctrine of languages as self-contained and unified is nothing more than a useful abstraction. Martinet’s own allegiances were divided between loyalty to his student and to his profession, since his own best-known work tended in the direction of the abstraction. All this was taking place in a febrile atmosphere at Columbia University, as “loyalty investigations” were being implemented by the Dean of Students to root out suspected communists – people thought to have allegi...
The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguis... more The Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which became the master text for structuralist linguistics and semiotics, is characterized by a series of dichotomies. Some of them, e.g. langue and parole, signified and signifier, arbitrary and motivated, are very well known, others less so. This paper looks at Saussure’s semiotics in terms of these dichotomies, and considers how later critiques, such as Voloshinov’s (1929), and reformulations, particularly Hjelmslev’s (1935, 1942) and the concept of enunciation which emerged conjointly in the work of Jakobson, Lacan, Dubois, Benveniste and others, were shaped as responses to the Saussurean dichotomies. Also examined in terms of its contrast with Saussure is Bally’s stylistics. The aim is a fuller understanding of the shapes taken by structuralist semiotics, in view of the heritage on which they were based and the broader intellectual climate, including phenomenology and Marxism, in which they developed.
The inclination to resolve the internal antinomies of this complex notion is the motivating force... more The inclination to resolve the internal antinomies of this complex notion is the motivating force of Saussure's Course. In this respect, he master from Geneva had an illustrious predecessor among French linguists. Victor Henry, professor of comparative grammar at the Facult6 des Lettres in Paris, addressed precisely this question in his book Antinomies linguistiques, published in 1896... This book, in which the questions, moreover, hold greater interest han the answers, undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on Saussure's Course (Jakobson, 1942 [1990, pp. 89-90]). At the time of its publication, Antinomies linguistiques (Linguistic Paradoxes) by Victor Henry (1850-1907) garnered a small number of reviews and was hardly ever cited. The first record of a linguist paying serious attention to it is a quarter-century later, when Charles Bally (1865-1947) devoted an article to the distinction drawn in the book's third chapter between 'transmitted ' and 'lea...
American Translators Association Scholarly Monograph Series
... And if one is translating actual laws, rather than legal commentary, the legal application of... more ... And if one is translating actual laws, rather than legal commentary, the legal application of Tytler's Third Law demands that there be no overt commentary or other intervention into the text. ... It was also, some twenty years later, the project of Hans Kelsen's" pure theory of law ...
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