words are linked and differentiated” (Culler 1977, 61).
From 1860 on, a strong reaction developed against both “the German mystical school” and Bopp’s formalism. Scholars such as the linguist Michel Bréal and the historian-psychologist Hippolyte Taine argued that there was need for a return to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment view of language as a human activity (Aarsleff 1982, 290–91, 293–334). That new linguistics was subsequently formulated by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who heeded Bréal’s call for the study of language as an activity that “has no reality apart from the human mind” (in Aarsleff 1982, 382); but he combined this perspective with insights derived from the German neogrammarians, who strongly emphasized the intrinsic patterning of grammar. In his courses in Paris and Geneva (1881–1891, 1907–1911), as well as in the posthumous Cours de linguistique générale (1916), edited by some of his students, Saussure argued that language was neither the expression of a Volksgeist nor a set of independent forms. In place of a concept of language that supplied words as tags for sensations received from the external world, Saussure defined language as a purely internal mental “faculty governing signs” (1983, 11), free from any involvement with an “informing spirit.” With that faculty, humans could create self-regulating systems of signs in the mind and thus prove able to convey and receive information by arranging and rearranging linguistic signs in purely formal ways. The systems created by this internal faculty he called langue, language. Each such langue could be characterized by rules, which arranged the elements available to it and maintained the formal relationships thus constituted. A language was able to reproduce itself as long as these relationships obtained.
The corollary of this new understanding was that ideas or knowledge structures could no longer be understood as having a stable content and significance in their own right but were merely temporary effects of particular ways of using language and employing signs. The “true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them” (Hawkes 1977, 17). Saussurean linguistics thus abandoned any notion of an immediate encounter with the world through language and began to treat reality as portrayed selectively by humanly imposed codes. This move, however, severed any physical or psychological link between the linguistic indicators (signifiers) and what they indicated (the signified). The indicators were no longer connected with their designata by any intrinsic relationship with reality. What seemed firm and stable now became merely provisional and contingent; the link between signs and what they “stood for” became arbitrary. The forms produced by this arbitrary connection had to be learned anew in each generation, by children from parents, and by linguists and ethnologists from their local tutors.
For Saussure a langue was a system located in the mind that made speech (parole) possible. Because the system of langue was for him closed, homogeneous, and self-regulating, it would also constitute an appropriate object for scientific inquiry, while parole, speech, was not properly part of the language system. It consisted for him merely of the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways in which individuals, differentiated by motivation and temperament, actualized or “executed” that system across a wide range of circumstances. This treatment of language did not have its source in neo-Kantianism as such, although his concept of the linguistic community was influenced by the work of Durkheim, who may be read as the protagonist in an ongoing argument with Kant. Durkheim’s conclusion to The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, first published in 1915, agreed with Kant that human ideation was governed by “permanent moulds for the mental life” that “are not made only to apply to the social realm; they reach out to all reality” (Durkheim 1947, 440). But it disagreed with Kant’s locating the forms taken by these categories in the individual: the idea of all at the root of classifications could not have come from the individual, but only from society (p. 441). Saussure’s linguistic categories, like Durkheim’s “collective representations,” were attributes of a collectivity, through a “faculty of mind” at work in that collectivity. Saussure, like the neo-Kantians, therefore accorded precedence to mental schemata over experience in dealing with the world, contributing to the forcefulness of the mentalistic turn.
Yet if Saussure’s structuralist view of the workings of langue constituted the main strength of his approach, his view of speech as a domain of free variation through individual choice has proved the weak point of Saussurean linguistics. As such, it has invited criticisms, and also theoretical modifications and alternatives. One source of criticism was from linguists who agreed with Saussure that the gift of language resided in the mind but who thought that he had not gone far enough. Thus, Noam Chomsky took him to task for restricting langue to a system of static grammatical properties and for failing to recognize that grammatical rules also governed the creative construction of sentences uttered in the language of everyday life (1964, 59–60). Yet in making this critique, Chomsky himself revived the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, now rebaptized as “competence” and “performance,” with “competence” defined as the proper arena of linguistic concern and “performance” accorded only secondary status.
A quite different kind of critique raised questions about the relationship of langue and parole to variation in external social contexts. Three such critical stances bear particularly on the question of the relationship between ideas and power. One was that of Malinowski, who described himself as an “ethnographic empiricist.” Malinowski elaborated his influential perspective on language and linguistics on the basis of field materials gathered in fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands between 1914 and 1918. He acknowledged that language had structure but at the same time distanced himself from Saussurean structuralism by asserting that language was “a mode of action, rather than a counter-sign of thought” (Firth 1964, 94).
Another critique of Saussure’s langue was put forward by the Russian linguist Valentin N. Vološinov, who in 1929 published Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which combined the perspectives of Marxism and linguistic structuralism. After it appeared in English translation in 1973, a review noted that it practically predated “all contemporary interests ranging from semiotics to speech act theory” (Yengoyan 1977, 701). The book is also notable in that its authorship remains uncertain; it may have been written in whole or in part by Mikhail Bakhtin and published, for political reasons, under Vološinov’s authorship. For Vološinov/Bakhtin it was crucial that language was lived out socially, by different cohorts of people interacting in different social contexts. He criticized the assumption that signs were univalent within any speech community and varied only through individual choice in the course of speech. Instead, he argued, signs were likely to be emitted with “accents” that varied by social categories, such as gender, generation, class, occupation, or status or by different interpretations of tradition. Such “multiac-centuality,” he noted, could turn communication into “an arena of struggle” (1986, 23) rather than a chorus of concord.
A third approach to language that went beyond the Saussurean model derived from the American pragmatist and logician Charles Peirce (1839–1914), whose work became important in semiotics in the 1960s. Peirce had argued that “the study of language ought to be based upon a study of the necessary conditions to which signs must conform in order to fulfill their function as signs” (in Parmentier 1994, 11). If no inherent causative relationship exists between an indicator and what it “stands for” in the world, then their mutual association has to be explained, justified, and certified on other grounds. According to Peirce, every linguistic and cultural sign or set of signs that ties an indicator to its designatum must come accompanied by another sign, which refers to the previous sign and defines and explicates it. This sign he called the “interpretant” (Peirce 1955, 100). Each sign functioning as an interprétant requires still another interpretant and sign to define it in turn, thus making semiosis “an infinite process,” “an endless series” (in Parmentier 1994, 27).
In the wake of such critiques, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s various efforts to modify the picture of langue advanced by Saussure and to question the dominant role of grammar defended by Chomsky. The aim of these endeavors was instead “to develop a theory of language in its social context, rather than a theory of grammar,” to delineate
