Being
a pioneer is both a privilege and a liability.
It is the privilege (for example) of announcing from the housetops something
that has since come to be accepted as a commonplace. Those that come later need to place the pioneer
in a proper perspective in order to grasp the proper significance of his thought.
But then it can also incur the liability (for example) of stating his thoughts
in an extreme form without appropriate qualifications or reservations.
Even when the pioneer is a major thinker those that come later owe it to
themselves not only to pay their homage but also to follow the advice of Kant
(Critique of Pure Reason B 370). Our job, according to Kant, is to understand
Plato better than Plato understood himself!
I
What was Saussure’s privilege as the founder of modern linguistics and,
with C.S. Peirce, the co-founder of modern semiotics?
In order to understand this one needs to go a few centuries back in the
history of European thought, philosophy included.
Renaissance Europe was anxious to distance itself from what was seen as
religious dogmatism and irrationalism and to search for alternative foundations
to the understanding of the natural world and the human world, which were being
explored anew. The European thinkers adopted
either of two strategies. There was the
empiricist strategy of grounding one’s terms and/or one’s statements ultimately
in experience, especially sense experience, seen as yielding self-evident descriptions;
the descriptions are deemed to be self-evident or so far as comparing notes with
one another confirms that the exper is a shared. Again, there was the aprioristic strategy of
claiming that man is so endowed that some of the critical terms and/or critical
statements that occur to him need no grounding in experience to yield self-evident
applications; this endowment permits man to step outside the I, the here, and
the now that otherwise delimit his experience. (Since the ancient Greeks called
this endowment logos opposing it to muthos and doxa, that
is, traditionally handed down story and opinion and since logos was customarily
translated by Latin ratio in this sense, the strategy of apriorism is often
does mean no more than the general opposition to dogmatism and irrationalism that
motivated both empiricism and apriorism.) In the late 18th century,
Kant saw the strength and weakness of both these strategies and proposed his critical
method as a third way out. The third way reconciles us to which no more than provisional reasoned
certainty: for example, to being content with the best scientific account available
for the time being that amounts, frankly, stands open to further revision.
All along, the scientific study of the natural world was taking shape,
especially from the time of Newton. The
possibility of giving a similar shape to the scientific and historical study of
the human world came into its own only in the later half of the 18th
century. Adam Smith saw an “invisible
hand” in the price mechanism and the philologists saw it in the sound forms attested
in certain families of languages.
The turn of the 19th century, however, saw a serious questioning
of this reasoned and humane view of the human world celebrated as the Enlightenment
by Roussean and the Romantics. Actually,
this counter-Enlightenment move was anticipated even in early 18th
century by the work ‘la Nuova Scienza’ (1725) (the New Science) by Glambaltista
Vico who proposed a new way of understanding the human world which combined the
scientific and the historical perspectives. Later
in the 18th century, Darwin, Marx, the ‘Golden Bough’ anthropologists,
and Freud hammered away at the edifice fashioned in the course of the Enlightenment.
The tidy, civilized practices of man were seen to be better explained in
terms of underlying compulsions respectively of the biology of the species, of
the forces and relations of economic production, of the understanding and motivation
in the primitive human psyche, and the biology of the growth of a child in the
family. That was the unvarnished truth about man.
Around the turn of the 20th century there was a fresh movement
in European thought. In the human sciences
one turned away from reductive disenhancement after the followers of Darwin and
the others to a close look at the object being explained, from large generalization
to meticulous analysis of detail from the sweep of history to successive states
of human affairs, from explaining everything from some single factor like evolution,
economic necessity, primitive mentality, or libido to constructing tight little
systems of limited scope, and from a search for objects and processes, in substantive
reality to a search for networks of attributes and relations.
“Only connect”, said E.M. Forster around this time in a somewhat different
context. This could well be the watchword of modern
linguistics, modern economics, modern psychology, and so forth.
That is where Saussure stands, giving a positive direction to the negative
shift away from an exclusive concern with linguistic history, from Hermann Paul’s
characterization of linguistics as an essentially historical discipline. Having won his spurs on a signal triumph of
historical linguistics as a youth, Saussure took the logical step from the systematic
nature of language change to the systematic nature of language itself.
He came on the scene when the interest had definitely shifted from the
prestigious but dead classical languages to the modern languages and even their
folk dialects. The interest had also broadened beyond the
familiar Indo-European and Semitic languages to the bewilderingly different systems
of ‘exotic’ languages like Chinese or the native unwritten languages of the Americans,
Africa, and northern Asia. The Böhtlingk
who made the exciting discovery of the Paninian approach, at once rigorous and
flexible, was also the Böhtlingk who applied it with success to a Siberian language.
The phoneticians with their pronunciation drills, quaint alphabets, and
strange contraptions were already on the scene.
Henry Sweet, the grammarian of spoken English, was already inspiring Daniel
Jones, Otto Jespersen, and others. The
German geographer Franz Boas had migrated to America and busied himself with the
ethnography of peoples and their languages, bringing to the new disciplines the
objectivity and the refusal to speculate and wander from the goal imbibed as a
trained natural scientist.
The positive direction that Saussure imparted to the new turn in linguistics
consists in certain principles:
(a) The
principle of immanence: All the regularities that a speaker needs to speak in
order to be understood and a listener needs to understand what is spoken must
be sought entirely within the closed system of the given idiom. After all, ordinary speakers and listeners
are not philologists.
(b) The
principle of recurring relations: The system consists of relations between signifying
speech forms and signified thought forms and signified thought forms and between
one coupling of this kind and another coupling of the same kind.
(c) The
principle of social sustenance: The self-contained
system is ultimately sustained through actual social use and social acceptance.
Quite apart from the imperfections in our acquaintance with Saussure’s
thought that have arisen through the peculiar circumstances of its transmission
through posthumously edited students’ lecture notes, one must look for certain
others of the sort that a pioneer is an heir to.
We shall briefly examine some of these imperfections in the light of our
hindsight. These have to do with certain
sets of Saussurean terms:
(a) language,
langue, parole
(b) point
de vue – synchronique, diachronique, panchronique
(c) significant,
signifié, signe
(d) rapport
– syntagmatique, associatif
We shall take up these sets one by one.
(a) Language, langue, parole :
Language is the totality of linguistic facts.
Out of these the central facts are the facts of langue and the peripheral
facts are the facts of parole. Langue
is the assembly of linguistic habits that enables a listener to understand and
a speaker to make himself understood; it is the social product that enables a
person to exercise his faculty of language. Parole is the totality of what speakers say
and listeners understand; it is the individual’s speech activity consisting of
sentence-long portions of speech; it is the site of individual innovations and
their selective individual acceptance.
What is not too clear in this account by Saussure is the following: (1)
What parole is to langue is what langue is to the faculty of language. In each pair one moves from the specific and
the actual to the more general and the potential. (2) Language is actually a conflation of two steps in this series.
Parole is the specific actual implementation of a person’s version of langue. A person’s version of langue is the specific actual implementation
of the langue accepted by a community of persons. A community’s langue is the specific actual
implementation of the faculty of language.
This language, thus, consists in a four – step progression from the less
accessible to the more accessible (from abstrait to concrete in Saussure’s terminology).
(i)
faculty of language
(ii)
community langue
(iii)
person langue
Steps (i, ii, iii, iv) correspond respectively to Chomsky’s language faculty,
knowledge of language competence, and language performance. They further correspond to the ancient Indian
grammarians’ šabda-bhāvanā, šabda-šakti, šabda-šakti-graha, and šabda-prayoga
(the Sanskrit terms respectively mean speech-potentiality, speech-power, speech-powergain,
speech-performance).
(b) Point de vue – synchronique, diachronique, panchronique :
The facts of langue are open to being considered from the synchronic point
of view, the diachronic point of view, and, may be, the panchronic point of view. From the synchronic point of view one comes
up with a state of langue that persists over so short a time segment that one
considers the (community) langue to be practically changeless. From the diachronic point of view one comes
up with changes that intervene between successive states of langue. There may also be the panchronic point of view
from which to come up with universals of states of community langue and with universals
of changes intervening between them.
What is not too clear in this account by Saussure is the following: (1)
There is a close relation between seamless states of langue in time and homogeneous
varieties of langue in space and, more importantly, between langue changes through
time and langue variations over space. Indeed, the three points of view are best
seen as analytic (capturing single state of single variety), historical (capturing
change through time and variation over space), and correlative (capturing recurrence
across time and space). (2) Saussure appears
to be as much aware of analytic typology, historical-change typology, and, possibly,
historical-variation typology as he is aware of analytic and historical universals. Types and universals are both to be seen as products of the same
non-historical correlative comparison between langues. (3) Since Saussure fails to clearly separate
person langue and community langue, he overemphasizes the separation between the
changeless synchronic and the changeful diachronic. Actually, the changeful person langue is the
requisite link between fluid parole and changeless community langue. It is parole that countenances deviations and
person langue that selectively accepts some of these and rejects others.
The widely accepted deviations become a part of the next state of the community
langue. This is somewhat like mutations, their selective
perpetuation, and the geno-and-pheno-type of each species in evolutionary biology).
Thus, in saying that a change such as analogy is not to be deemed to be
a change engendered within the changeless definition system.
Saussure is referring to the community langue and not to the person langue. (4) Saussure need not have been so unsure about
the panchronique and about the placement of universal and type-generating features
of langue.
(c)
Significant, signifié, signe :
Linguistic facts are a special subclass of semiotic facts. From the synchronic point of view, langue constitutes a closed system
of semiotic facts, specifically, semiotic objects and their relations as distinct
from semiotic processes. Semiotic objects
and relations, no less than semiotic processes, draw their sustenance primarily
from social convention, only secondarily from psychological motivation.
Semiotic objects are of two different orders, the order of signifiants
(Medieval Latin signans) and the order of signifiés (Medieval Latin signatum). A significant possesses valeur in relation
to some signifié, or alternatively in relation to some significant in another
semiotic system such as another langue. Thus,
louer is a single signe in French, but rent and rent out
are distant signes in English. The valeur
of louer is like collapsing the valeurs of rent and rent out.
Again, /sīžlaprã/ corresponds to two distinct signes, namely si
je la prend and si je l’apprend, though the significant is one and
the same. Each signe thus has both unity and identity
(that is, - lacking of components and lacking of variants) and in consequences
is more accessible (concret is Saussure’s term) than either significant by itself,
which is no more than a verbal image, or signifié by itself, which is no more
than a verbal concept. The latter two
may lack either unity or identity or both.
As signe may be a simple unit or a complex syntagme inclusive of other
signes. Sentences, word groups, words,
word elements are all signes, simple or complex as the case may be (A complex
X is an X consisting wholly of other Xs, where X stands for sentence, word group,
word, or word element as the case may be).
Since linguistic significants are verbal images and verbal images are either
spoken sequences (chanîe parlée) or their segments, linguistic signes, especially
complex ones, are linear in nature. Since
linguistic signes are no more than couplings of a significant with and a signifié, they
are formal and conventional in nature. The
coupling is primarily arbitrary; any motivation is secondary, unless the signe
is complex.
What is not too clear in Saussure’s account is the following: (a) The term
signe has also been used for the combination of a significant and the corresponding
signifié or for the link (Medieval Latin signatio) between the two. This is awkward, if not confusing. (2) Saussure accepts the linearity of complex
linguistic signes, but emphatically rejects the possibility of partial resemblance
between simple linguistic signes in respect of their significants or their signifiés.
There is a certain ambivalence here towards the accessible but non-substantial
and formal character of signes.
The ancient Indian grammarians speak of šabda (speech segment),
šabdārtha (speech-value), and šabda-šabdārtha-sambandha
(the link between speech segment and speech value). This link sustains the activation
of in the speaker and the listener is šabda-šakti speech power, which it
will be recalled corresponds to community segment. The three terms correspond to Saussure’s linguistic significant,
linguistic signifié, and linguistic valeur. Ancient
Indian grammarians and other students of language debate as to whether the link
between the two is nitya (causally independent) or naimittika / kārya
(causally dependent) or whether the link is siddha (ready-given) or sādhya
(to be worked out). This debate roughly corresponds to the European
debate as to whether the link is arbitrary or motivated or the discussion raised
later by Benveniste as to how one reconciles the arbitrary character of the link
with the necessary character of the link. Linguistic necessity corresponds to the logician’s
law of identity as applied to terms rather than propositions (A is A rather than
P implies P).
If one finds it awkward to use the French words significant, signifié,
signe, and valeur in English discourse, one can use signant,
signate, sign, and valence (not value) respectively in their
place. For the link between significant
and signifié one can use signation both in French and in English.
(d)
Rapport – syntagmatique, associatif :
Semiotic relations
(rapports) are either between objects of different orders (that is, valeur between
significant and signifié) or between objects of the same order (as when the objects
related are both significants, both signifiés, or both signes).
A semiotic system, such as a langue, is a system of semiotic relations
of various kinds rather than an assembly of semiotic relations of various kinds
rather than an assembly of semiotic objects of various kinds.
Complex linguistic signes are syntagmes of different kinds. Syntagmes can be either ready-made (arbitrary rather than fully
motivated) such as difficulté, mourrai, avoir mal à (la tete etc.),
à quoi bon? or regularly and
freely worked out or constructed (motivated rather than fully arbitrary) such
as facilité dormirai, indecorable, la terre tourne, que nous dit-il?
Grammar consists of lexicology (listing simple linguistic signes and ready-made
complex linguistic signes), morphology (accounting for complex words, especially
constructed ones), and syntax (accounting for complex word groups and sentences,
especially constructed ones). Grammar
accounts for only such linguistic relations as are sustained by native speakers’
use in a society.
(One may note in passing how ancient Indian students of language spoke
of complex linguistics signs as either rūḍha
(ready made and wholly arbitrary), yoga-rūḍha
(constructed but with some arbitrariness), and yaugika (constructed and
wholly motivated).
A rapport between two or more signes is either syntagmatique or associatif. Rapports syntagmatiques are in praesentia,
that is, the related signes are both effectively present in the ongoing discourse.
Rapports associatifs are in absentia, that is, the related signes are drawn
from memory in the background. Thus, facil and ité are in facilité
are in rapport syntagmatique. But difficulté
and facilité are in rapport associatif, so are facil and facilité,
té and difficulté, redouter and craindre (dread, fear
respectively), justement and element (sharing the rhyme ment). When signes in rapport associatif constitute
an array, there is a special paradigmatic variety of such rapports associatifs.
The valeur of any term included in any syntagme or in any associative set
depends on such inclusion. Thus, plural
as opposed to singular is not quite the same as plural as opposed to singular
and dual.
What is not too clear in Saussure’s account is the following: (a) If the
rapport syntagmatique between facil and ité is in praesentia, the
rapport associatif between facil and facilité is also in a praesentia.
(2) If the array grand, grands, grande, grandes is in rapport associatif
and constitutes a paradigm, so also the array does la terre tourne, la toupie
tourne, la roué tourne, being a paradigm of sorts except that this array is
open-ended and unordered. Indeed, Hjelmslev
later proposed to speak of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations rather than
syntagmatic and associative relations; his paradigmatic extends to open-ended
and unordered arrays as well. (3) Actually, Saussure’s rapport associatif is not
a very useful category. The near-synonyms
redouter, craindre and the rhyming of justement, element are not
relations between signes at all but are relations between two signifies and between
two significants respectively; at best, they are lexicological relations.
The relation between a part and the whole in a syntagme, as with facil
and facilité or with la terre and la terre tourne is fundamentally
different from the elation between a part and another part within a whole. Indeed, William Haas later proposed to speak
of three kinds of grammatical relations: syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and functional
(part and part, part or part, and part within whole). This
account fulfils the promise of Saussure’s rather inchoate proposal.
In praesentia and in absentia is not the best way to make these distinctions;
the distinctions are all formal though quite accessible.
The distinction between in prsentia and in absentia actually corresponds
to the distinction between parole and person langue and has little to do with
distinction between different kinds of relations between objects of (Pg. 15, Last line , Not Visible)
Saussure well illustrates an important feature of the turn of the 20th
century movement in European thought, namely, the shift from the 19th
century reduction to processes in substantive reality to a new preoccupation with
formal connectedness of things. In this
there is a close resemblance between structuralism, functionalism, and phenomenology
as methods in the scientific study of the human world; compare the three-way distinction
in Husserl’s phenomenological proposal for an aprioristic scrutiny of meaningful
appearances between hulē, noēsis, noēma (Greek for stuff,
thinking, thought) with Saussure’s three-way distinction between substance, process,
form. If the 19th century reductionism
leaned towards the empiricist strategy, the 20th century formalism
leaned towards the aprioristic strategy. Of
course there was no going back to the pre-Kant onesidedness of the two strategies.
Naturally, Saussure stressed this aspect of the new approach to the study
of language and other aspects of the human world with a certain emphasis and enthusiasm,
a certain shouting from the housetops. Consider
the following:
“D’autres
sciences opèrent sur des objets donnés d’avance et qu’on peut considérer ensuite
à différents points de vue; dans notre domaine, rien de semblable … Bien loin
que l’objet precede de point de vue, on dirait que c’est le point de vue qui crée
l’objet, et d’ailleurs rien ne nous dit d’avance que l’une de ces manihres de
considérer le fait en question soit antérieure ou supérieure aux autres.” (Cours,
Introduction, ch.3, section 1) (English renderings of this and later citations
in this section are given at the end)
Somewhat
later:
“les valeurs restent entièrement relatives” (Cours, Pt.2, ch.4,
section 1).
Again,
he says:
“Tout ce qui precede revient à dire que dans la langue il n’y a que
des differences … sans termes positifs” (Cours,
Pt.2, ch.4, section 4), em phases original).
And
somewhat later:
“Ansi
dans un état de langue, tout repose sur des rapports … Les rapports et les différences
entre termes linguistiques se déroulent… dans le discours … D’autre part … dans
la mémoire…” (Cours, pt.2, Ch.5, section 1).
Objects, valeurs, differences, relations – the whole lot! They are all formal but accessible entities.
Post-modernist thinkers have been trying to cope with the cultural situation
of the late 20th century as defined by the exhaustion of the possibilities
of European modernity defined by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and by
the flood of momentary artifacts thrown up by the passing show (the media, travel
and tourism, fashion and pop-culture) which imprisons the attention within the
I, the here and the now. The anarchistic
urge in many of these to celebrate the vanity of all cognitive and cultural claims
(the slogan being there are no foundations either for understanding things
or for coping with life) found in Saussure’s pronouncements of this kind, duly
bereft of their methodological context, weapons that came quite handy indeed for
their own destructive purpose. Saussure’s
principle of social sustenance often falls by the wayside. Saussure has become a cult figure. That is quite another sort of liability that
a pioneer may incur! Fortunately, fashions
pass, including intellectual fashions of the Paris Left Bank.
ANNEXE
ENGLISH
RENDERINGS OF THE CITATIONS IN SECTION III:
- Other sciences work on objects given in advance which
one can then consider from differing points of view, but such is not the case
with our field. …Far from the object preceding
the point of view, one would say that it is the point of view that generates the
object and, besides, there is nothing to tell us in advance that some one
of these ways of considering the fact in hand shows precedence or superiority
over other ways.
- The valences (valeurs) remain wholly relative.
- All that has been said far amounts to saying that in
langue there are no more than just differences… without any positive terms.
- So, in a state of langue, everything rests on relations.
…Relations between linguistic terms and differences between them unfold
themselves...in the on-going discourse … and, again, in the memory in the background.
COLOPHON
The English-speaking thinkers have been slow in recognizing the stature
of Saussure: the British philologists waited till linguistics overtook comparative
philology, the American students of literature and culture waited till post-modernism
overtook them, and the American linguists waited till they finally caught up with
Continental linguistics. Indian scholars and thinkers have followed suit: only lately their
thought is getting decolonialized.
It is especially a pleasure, therefore, to offer this homage to Saussure,
from an Indian’s point of view, an Indian enjoying the double heritage of ancient
India and ancient and modern West (‘Ancient’ here include ‘Mediaeval’.)
This was an invited contribution to a British publisher’s project to bring
out a volume of articles on Saussure that did not materialized.
ABSTRACT
Saussure, being a pioneer in modern linguistics and semiotics, enjoys a
privilege and incurs a liability calling for our sympathetic but critical understanding.
I. Saussure represents an important turning point in European
attempts to understand the world, especially man, from the time of the Renaissance
onwards. This underlies the three-way
direction he gave to linguistics in terms of immanence, recurring relations, and
social sustenance.
II. Saussure’s thought on language shows certain imperfections
of the kind expected in a pioneer. These have to do with his ideas about the progression of accessibility
from language faculty to language use, about the synchronic, diachronic, and panchronic
perspectives on language, about the semiotic triad, and about the grammatical
triad.
III. One hopes that the appropriation of his formalistic method by
some of the post-modernist thinkers is no more than a passing liability.
NOTE
ON THE AUTHOR
Ashok R. Kelkar, born 1929, trained in English literature (M.A.) from Pune
and Linguistics (Ph.D. from Cornell), retired as Professor of linguistics from
Deccan College and Pune University. Has
written extensively in English, Hindi, and his native Marathi on the analysis
and philosophy of language, literature, art, and semiosis. Among his books are Studies in Hindi-Urdu
I (1968), Language in a semiotic perspective: The Architecture of a Marathi
sentence (1997), Ancient Indian poetics: An Interpretation (in Marathi
and Hindi), Vaikhari and Madhyama (linguistic studies
written in Marathi in two collections).
