'This eternal wanderer': A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure

John Joseph

'This eternal wanderer': A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure

School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

Abstract

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) has been widely received as a dogmatic text, putting forward a reductivist conception of the language system. 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 (1932-2009) blamed ‘structuralists’ (a label which, of course, gets applied to Jakobson himself) for turning Saussure’s linguistics of the continuous into a dogmatic “scientism of the discontinuous”. Meschonnic’s list of structuralist distortions of Saussure is the framework for the argument presented here in favour of a non-dogmatic reading of the Cours.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Le Cours de linguistique generale
Subtitle of host publication	Reception, diffusion, traduction
Editors	John Joseph, Ekaterina Velmezova
Place of Publication	Lausanne
Publisher	University of Lausanne, Cahiers de l'ILSL
Pages	197-208
Number of pages	12
Volume	57
ISBN (Print)	9782940607020
Publication status	Published - Dec 2018

Publication series

Name	Cahiers de l'ILSL
ISSN (Print)	1019-9446

Keywords

Ferdinand de Saussure
structural linguistics
Roman Jakobson
Henri Meschonnic
langue and parole
syntagmatic and associative axes
synchrony and diachrony
iconicity

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JosephCI2018ThisEternalWandererAccepted author manuscript, 128 KB

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volume = "57",

series = "Cahiers de l'ILSL",

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'This eternal wanderer' : A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure. / Joseph, John.

Le Cours de linguistique generale: Reception, diffusion, traduction. ed. / John Joseph; Ekaterina Velmezova. Vol. 57 Lausanne : University of Lausanne, Cahiers de l'ILSL, 2018. p. 197-208 (Cahiers de l'ILSL).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

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'This eternal wanderer': A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure

Abstract

Publication series

Keywords

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Le Cours de linguistique générale: Réception, diffusion, traduction

Cite this