16.2056, Review: History of Linguistics: Sanders (2005)

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Subject: 16.2056, Review: History of Linguistics: Sanders (2005)

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1)
Date: 01-Jul-2005
From: Ludwig Fesenmeier < ludwig.fesenmeier at uni-koeln.de >
Subject: The Cambridge Companion to Saussure 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 16:43:50
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

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 
imparting the communication of work done in languages and scientific 
intellectual [research/investigative] traditions other than those of the 
English-speaking world.

The book contains fifteen articles which are distributed structured into 
four parts and preceded by a the "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 shortfew) "Notes" section 
(pp. 261-266), a two-partfold bibliography ("Works by Saussure and 
further reading", pp. 267-272; "References", pp. 273-297) and 
anthe "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 
fromfollowing 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 intellectualscientific 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 there 
appearsit 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 
movedwent there in 1880), first of all drawing a picture of the linguistic 
(Michel Bréal, Abel Hovelacque, Arsène Darmesteter, Bréal) and also 
the wider intellectual context (Auguste Comte, Ernest Renan, 
Hippolyte Taine, Renan). 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 on the background of theirwith their own 
viewpoints 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' '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". What is more, 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-manner-based [style-based] differentiation, favouring the 
latter, which that 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 towards 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, Benveniste, 
Brunot, Damourette/Pichon, Guillaume).

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 and 
Voloshinov/Bakhtin. 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 
follows: 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 should would become known as also 
entered by Saussure. His anagram studies were received 
enthusiastically in France (Jacques Derrida, Philippe Sollers, and Julia 
Kristéva, Philippe Sollers, and Jacques Derrida, among others), 
although the theory developed proved not to not be not 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 up 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 aa linguistics of 'parole' reveals turns out 
to have been taken 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'se 
description of the latter. In the final analysis, this meansis to say 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 here arise serious problems arise due to the very nature of 
the object of linguistics - problems that Saussure was surely aware of, 
but not yet had the means to resolve.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 explicitly stated 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 little minor contradiction 
between these two statements, the first goal can surely be surely 
considered to have been achieved. This isThe latter is so the more as 
more important, as since the influence of Saussurean thought both on 
linguistics and other social sciences was so lasting crucial that one 
might indeed speak of a profound difference between the countries 
and fields of researchscientific 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 thingss one 
could mention: Saussure is not the author of the CLG in any traditional 
sense; the above mentioned 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 oral 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 ). If there is 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 were 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 getting 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:There are some other details which more or less bother the 
reader:

- Isn't there not 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 - rather 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). And why "The 'COURSE in General 
Linguistics'" (title of part II) but "After the 'COURS'" (title of part III)?

In conclusion, despite the problems discussed so far, the "Cambridge 
Companion to Saussure" is a book which is 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 which that sell olds 
pinback buttonspins/badges featuring images of and /being 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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