Schedule StuTS 68

In stark contrast to the development of linguistic research during the nineteenth century, the Cours de linguistique générale promotes a primacy of synchronic over diachronic linguistics and introduces the idea of language as an abstract system (langue) next to the observable linguistic usage (parole). These distinctions have shaped linguistic thinking in most parts of the twentieth century to a degree which is not compatible with the findings associated with the focus on the historicity of human language in the linguistic research traditions before 1916.
My main research question is: which discursive and ideological traits enabled the rather drastic turn which the publication of the Cours seems to have triggered? I will argue that the nineteenth century witnesses a competition between two largely incompatible conceptualizations of ‘language’. The dynamic view focuses on the historicity of (a) language. The essentialist view, on the other hand, presupposes that languages are clearly definable entities and entails a conceptual unity both between ‘language’ and ‘writing/literature’ and between ‘language’ and ‘nation’. While the latter perspective has dominated public and political discourse, the former has shaped the academic discourse, although neither side argues completely isolated from the other. I will argue that this ideological conflict eventually culminates in the fateful claim in the Cours that linguistics needs to take two entirely different paths (“deux routes absolument divergentes”).
A claim underlying my talk is that an analytic deconstruction of language ideologies and meta-linguistic discourses will immediately contribute to an enhanced understanding of the character and emergence of linguistic structures and should therefore be taken as an indispensable methodological tool in linguistic studies. Next to the distinction between ‘synchrony’ and ‘diachrony’, there are other prominent examples of widely accepted theoretical assumptions that reproduce ideologies rather than empirical findings; for instance, the distinction between ‘system’ and ‘usage’, the language/dialect distinction, or the belief that some utterances are better than others (cf. “well-formedness” and related notions).

Info

Day: 2020-11-20
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 01:00
Room: Agathe Lasch
Track: Historical Linguistics
Language: en

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