16.2206, Review: History of Ling: Sanders (2005) revised review

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2206. Mon Jul 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2206, Review: History of Ling: Sanders (2005) revised review

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1)
Date: 18-Jul-2005
From: Ludwig Fesenmeier < ludwig.fesenmeier at uni-koeln.de >
Subject: The Cambridge Companion to Saussure 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 18:04:36
From: Ludwig Fesenmeier < ludwig.fesenmeier at uni-koeln.de >
Subject: The Cambridge Companion to Saussure 
 

EDITOR: Sanders, Carol
TITLE: The Cambridge Companion to Saussure
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1335.html


Ludwig Fesenmeier, Department of Romance Languages, University of Cologne

[This review replaces the version posted at 
http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2056.html  -- Eds.]

PURPOSE AND CONTENTS OF THE BOOK

The purpose of the Companion is to provide "an up-to-date introduction to, 
and assessment of, Saussure's ideas to an English-speaking readership" (p. 3). 
The aim of the various contributions is thus twofold: discussion of 
Saussurean thought in the context of Anglophone approaches (both 
linguistics and intellectual history) and the communication of work done 
in languages and research traditions other than those of the English-
speaking world.

The book contains fifteen articles which are structured into four parts 
and preceded by a "Notes on contributors" section (pp. vii-x) and a 
brief "Introduction: Saussure today" written by the editor (pp. 1-6); at 
the end one finds the (happily short) "Notes" section (pp. 261-266), a two-
part bibliography ("Works by Saussure and further reading", pp. 267-
272; "References", pp. 273-297) and an "Index" of both names and concepts 
(pp. 298-303).

The unifying theme of the first part and the two contributions it contains 
is labelled "Out of the nineteenth century" (pp. 7-44). The four articles 
of the second part (pp. 45-104) are devoted to "The 'Course in General 
Linguistics'" (henceforth CLG, derived from the original title), while the 
following part, containing six papers, considers the time "After 
the 'Cours'" (pp. 105-202). The contributions of the fourth part 
present "New debates and directions" (pp. 203-260).The first part starts 
with Anna Morpurgo Davies' "Saussure and Indo-European linguistics" (pp. 9-
29), where Saussure's work in this field of investigation is discussed, 
especially his "Mémoire sur le système primitive des voyelles en indo-
européen" (1879). The author sketches briefly the intellectual environment 
(historical-comparative method, the school of Lipsia [where Saussure 
arrived in 1876], the neogrammarians), the content, the reception and the 
impact of the "Mémoire", pointing out on the one hand how already as soon 
as 1879 Saussure's argumentation is based (rather implicitly) on such 
methodical concepts as 'structure'/'system'; on the other hand it 
describes a Saussure constantly in "need for definition, for a terminology 
which is actually consistent and explicit" (p. 27).

Carol Sanders presents "The Paris years" of Saussure (he moved there in 
1880), first of all drawing a picture of the linguistic (Michel Bréal, 
Abel Hovelacque, Arsène Darmesteter) and also the wider intellectual 
context (Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine). She shows how many 
of the central concepts which are thought of today as "Saussurean" 
("langue", "parole", "valeur", "synchrony", "diachrony" etc.) can be found 
in a more or less implicit (and embryonic) way in the works of the persons 
just referred to.

At the beginning of the second part there is the contribution by Rudolf 
Engler about "The making of the 'Cours de linguistique générale'" (pp. 47-
58; it is in part an abbreviated version of an earlier article (Engler 
1987), see p. 51). The author stresses the fact that the CLG "does not 
contain Saussure's 'actual words'" (p. 47), but is rather a mixture of 
students' lecture notes and some preparatory remarks of Saussure himself 
(a fact not always seen so clearly after 1916). He also shows how the 
editors of the CLG, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, influenced its 
contents with their own points of view, though not in any consistent way.

The following article by John E. Joseph deals with "The linguistic sign" 
(pp. 59-75). He presents the basic aspects of how this central notion is 
conceived of in the CLG: the distinction "signifier - signified" 
("signifiant - signifié"), the concrete vs. the abstract character of the 
sign vs. its components, the arbitrariness and the motivation in their 
conjunction, the mutability vs. immutability of the sign, the concept 
of "value" ("valeur"), the linearity of the "signifier". Joseph also takes 

in consideration the problems raised by Saussure's account, but he 
concludes nevertheless that "with his conception of the linguistic sign 
[...] he got something drastically right" (p. 75).

Another important concept, or rather conceptual coupling, namely "'Langue' 
and 'parole'" is discussed in the contribution of W. Terrence Gordon 
(pp. 76-87), who calls it even the "foundational complementarity" of the CLG 
for having "privileged status and unique status in itself" (p. 77). A 
brief presentation of these concepts is followed by an overview of the 
more or less recent criticism attracted thereby (Charles K. Ogden/Ivor A. 
Richards, John R. Firth, Rulon Wells, Nicol Ch. W. Spence, John Hewson, 
Paul Thibault etc.).

The last paper of the second part is that of Claudine Normand on "System, 
arbitrariness, value" (pp. 88-104), where "a historical and theoretical 
perspective" on these notions is offered (p. 88). The author discusses in 
some detail the notions mentioned in the title, completing them by the 
notions "synchrony" and "diachrony". Of greater value is that Normand puts 
them together in a comprehensive "system", underlining that "Saussure's 
theory consists of a set of dovetailed concepts which have to be unfolded 
one after the other, though they are interdependent" (p. 91).

"Saussure and American linguistics" by Julia S. Falk (pp. 107-123) opens 
the third part. After a quite brief sketch of the ideas Saussure himself 
found in the works of Willian Dwight Whitney (p. 107f), Falk goes on to 
describe Leonard Bloomfield's reaction to the CLG as documented in various 
publications, but whose acknowledgement of the CLG had no lasting effect. 
A certain change took place with the arrival of Roman Jakobson, whose 
engagement for Saussurean concepts extended "throughout the four decades 
of his life in the United States" (p. 114). Falk concludes that "so-called 
American structuralism was not built directly on a Saussurean foundation" 
(p. 118), for some structuralist key concepts, as Bloomfield put it, 
have "long been 'in the air' and [have] been here and there fragmentarily 
expressed" (quoted in Falk, p. 108).

Christian Puech draws attention to "Saussure and structuralist linguistics 
in Europe" (pp. 124-138), taking a closer look to "the milestones of the 
French reception of the 'Cours' in a European context" (p. 125). He 
therefore proposes a chronological and a method-based differentiation, 
favouring the latter, which goes as follows: "adoption of a conceptual 
framework constructed [...] on the basis of the 'Cours'" (e. g. Prague 
phonology, Danish glossematics) vs. "a 'heritage' consisting of the 
belated recognition of a source, and post-hoc imitation, borrowings and 
recourse to numerous intermediaries" (p. 128). The author further 
considers the attitudes of (partial) acceptance or rejection of the ideas 
put forward in the CLG, assumed by important French linguists (Ferdinand 
Brunot, Jacques Damourette/Edouard Pichon, Gustave Guillaume, Émile 
Benveniste, André Martinet).

Stephen C. Hutchings' article is about "The Russian critique of Saussure" 
(pp. 139-156), considering in particular Valentin Voloshinov/Mikhail 
Bakhtin, Iurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson. His aim is "to establish the 
parallels and trace the divergences" between the "currents in literary 
structuralism" (p. 140) which emerged during the application to "new 
fields", strongly influenced by Roman Jakobson, of ideas present in the CLG.

In his contribution "Saussure, Barthes and structuralism" (pp. 157-173), 
Steven Ungar aims "to trace and comment on the evolving role of 
Saussure's 'Course' in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes 
and Jacques Lacan" (p. 157). He concludes that in particular Barthes' 
reading of the CLG brought about a strong polarization among social 
scientists whose attitudes can be summarized as a serious misreading vs. a 
further elaboration of a programme only sketched in the CLG.

Peter Wunderli's paper offers a sketch of "Saussure's anagrams and the 
analysis of literary texts" (pp. 174-185), a field of activity which only 
many years after the CLG would become known as also entered by Saussure. 
His anagram studies were received enthusiastically in France (Jacques 
Derrida, Philippe Sollers, and Julia Kristéva, among others), although the 
theory developed proved not to be adequate. As Wunderli argues, the 
anagram studies only apparently contradict certain views found in the CLG 
(linearity, conjunction of signifier and signified etc.), because "[t]he 
anagram [...] is not a linguistic, but a poetic phenomenon", "a poetic 
epiphenomenon" (p. 181) with regards to "normal" language use.

The article by Geoffrey Bennington on "Saussure and Derrida" (pp. 186-202) 
focuses on the role of "writing", more precisely on the relations between 
the phonic and the written realization of language as discussed mainly in 
Derrida's "De la grammatologie". According to Derrida, in a "general 
grammatology [...] linguistics-phonology would be merely a dependent and 
circumscribed region" (quoted in Bennington, p. 188).

The fourth part starts with Simon Bouquet's contribution about "Saussure's 
unfinished semantics" (pp. 205-218). He intends to point out "the central 
importance of the interpretative point of view" in Saussure's thoughts (p. 205). 
As emerges from some notes, the decision to omit discussing a 
linguistics of 'parole' turns out to have been made only for didactic 
reasons. In fact, in such notes there are numerous occurrences 
of "discourse" in the sense of "utterances in use" (p. 210) neglected by 
the editors of the CLG. The concept of 'discourse' seems to be used in 
different contexts (see pp. 210-213). Bouquet then concludes that there is 
a "doubly incomplete nature of his [= Saussure's] conception of meaning" 
(p. 217), because, firstly, Saussure fails to give a properly semiotic 
theory of 'in praesentia' relationships; secondly, it remains unclear "to 
which 'semiotics' a linguistics of 'parole' [...] belongs" (p. 218).

In "Saussure, linguistic theory and philosophy of science" (pp. 219-239) 
Christopher Norris deals, on an epistemological level, with "the 
relationship between Saussurean linguistics and debates within twentieth-
century philosophy of science" (p. 219). As one "salient feature" (p. 220) 
of Saussurean linguistics, he identifies the insight that linguistics, in 
order to count as a science, must necessarily be aware of the difference 
between its object and that object's description. In the final analysis, 
this means that linguistics as a science must be able to decide "what 
counts as a relevant 'fact' within its own (properly specified) object-
domain" (p. 224), but serious problems arise due to the very nature of the 
object of linguistics - problems Saussure was surely aware of, but whose 
solution required tools that Saussure did not yet possess. 

The last article, written by Paul Bouissac, intends to review and 
assess "Saussure's legacy in semiotics" (pp. 240-260). Saussure's impact 
in this field can roughly be "traced along three paths" (p. 243): Eastern 
Europe (Prague functionalism, Moscow-Tartu school), Denmark (glossematics) 
and France (French structuralism). Nevertheless, one must not forget that 
there was also an influence "the other way round", i. e., among others, 
the influence of Russian Formalism, Cybernetics or Lacanian Freudism (see 
p. 244), leading to "some kind of hybridising and creolisation" of 
Saussurism (p. 246). As far as the relevance of Saussure to actual 
semiotics is concerned, the author considers "Saussure's contribution to a 
general science of signs" as "a mine of heuristic questions and uneasy 
tentative solutions" (p. 256).

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The explicitly stated aim of the "Cambridge Companion to Saussure" is to 
provide "an up-to-date introduction to, and assessment of, Saussure's 
ideas to an English-speaking readership" (p. 3) and (more 
generally?) "offer a fresh new account of Saussure's work" (p. i). In 
spite of the minor contradiction between these two statements, the first 
goal can surely be considered to have been achieved. The latter is so the 
more important, since the influence of Saussurean thought both on 
linguistics and other social sciences was so crucial that one might indeed 
speak of a profound difference between the scientific communities where 
these thoughts have become part of the scientific foundations right from 
the beginning and those that only lately and indirectly have taken into 
account these ideas.

But even if one is rooted in one of the formerly-mentioned fields or has 
scientifically "grown" inside a "Saussurean" framework and thus is 
familiar with such notions as "langue", "parole", "synchrony", "diachrony",
"value" etc., the book under review is a good reminder of how many aspects of
Saussure and his work have become and continue to be taken for granted all too
easily. As far as the CLG is concerned, among other things one could mention: 
Saussure is not the author of the CLG in any traditional sense; the 
abovementioned concepts form complementaries rather than oppositions; 
their status is better conceived of as methodical concepts rather than as 
something belonging to the object itself. With regards to Saussurean 
thought, its novelty concerns less the single concepts in "isolation", but 
more the fact of having them brought together in a systemic way. Last not 
least, Saussure himself appears to be an extremely scrupulous scholar who 
was well aware of the preliminary character of his insights and the 
problems they could raise. Though it is highly improbable that he would 
ever have consented to the publication of his lectures, it is the 
many "shortcomings" of the CLG which are responsible for its success and 
its role in the history of ideas.

While all the aforementioned aspects are repeatedly highlighted by the 
authors, there seems to be one important point - or rather name - missing 
in the section "After the 'Cours'". At least in the Spanish and German 
(but also other Romance) linguistic traditions the ideas put forward in 
the CLG are closely associated with the work done - from 1952 onwards - by 
Eugenio Coseriu (1921-2002), who "completed" some of the 
central "dichotomies" discussed in the CLG: lengua - NORMA - habla, 
sincronía - diacronía - HISTORIA (these are the original Spanish terms; 
see Coseriu 1958 and 1962). Unfortunately, Coseriu has published very 
little in English, but this is not sufficient for explaining his absence 
from the book under review (there is one (minor) title quoted in the 
bibliography, see p. 269; a list of Coseriu's publications can be obtained 
from http://www.coseriu.de). In a possible second edition, this missing point 
should be completed. One might also include, then, Saussure's interest in 
onomastic questions (see Arsenijevic 2000), maybe putting it together with 
Peter Wunderli's - important - contribution on the anagram studies which 
does not seem to fit quite well in the part "After the 'Cours'" because 
these studies became known only many years after Saussure's death and 
there is no direct link between them and the topics discussed concerning 
the reception of the CLG. A further useful complement would have been a 
short bio-bibliographical sketch of the "person" Ferdinand de Saussure (in 
tabular form) to help the reader get an overview of his (scientific) life 
(see e. g. Bouquet (ed.) 2003, 502-512).

Furthermore, the reader, who has been reminded in many other parts of the 
book of the "Master's" need for consistent terminology, may be irritated 
somewhat by a number of cases in which this ideal is not upheld:

- Isn't there a difference between "general" and "theoretical" linguistics 
(see p. 9 and passim)?
- Were the scholars working using the comparative method really concerned 
with phonology and not rather phonetics (see p. 13 and passim; 
vs. "phonetic" on p. 21)?
- Must "la langue" really be called "a synchronic system" or similar (p. 35 and
passim)?
- Can Saussure be considered a neogrammarian or not? (rather negative 
Morpurgo Davies, p. 25f - affirmative Bouquet, p. 206)?

Among the (happily few) typographical errors, the more annoying 
are "'coefficient_ sonantiques'" (pp. 22, 26), "'antimonie'" (p. 36), "ComPte" 
(pp. 37, 298, but p. 206), "the German 'NiEbelungen'" (p. 42), "that was it was" 
(p. 161).

In conclusion, despite the problems discussed so far, the "Cambridge 
Companion to Saussure" is a book which has been long overdue and will 
serve quite well the goals it is intended for. And when in 
the "Introduction" Carol Sanders talks about possible reasons 
for "Saussure's almost cult-figure status", one perhaps stops wondering 
why there is a Canadian company that sells pins featuring images of and 
inspired by Saussure ...

REFERENCES

Arsenijevic, Milorad (2000): "Ferdinand de Saussure onomasticien: valait-
il la peine de continuer?", in: Englebert, Annick et al. (edd.) (2000): 
Actes du XXIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie 
Romanes, Tübingen, vol. IV, 77-83.

Bouquet, Simon (ed.) (2003): Ferdinand de Saussure, Paris.

Coseriu, Eugenio (1958): Sincronía, diacronía e historia, Montevideo.

Coseriu, Eugenio (1962): Teoría del lenguaje y lingüística general, Madrid.

Engler, Rudolf (1987): "Die Verfasser des C[ours de] L[inguistique] G
[énérale]", in: Schmitter, Peter (ed.) (1987): Geschichte der 
Sprachtheorie 1. Zur Theorie und Methode der Geschichtsschreibung der 
Linguistik, Tübingen, 141-161. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ludwig Fesenmeier teaches Romance linguistics at the Department of Romance 
Languages, University of Cologne, and is currently working on his post-
doctoral thesis on lexical synonymy in the Romance languages.





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