In his linguistics Saussure accomplishes this transformation specifically in the redefinition of the linguistic "word," which he describes as the linguistic "sign" and defines in functionalist terms. The sign, he argues, is the union of "a concept and a sound image," which he called "signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]" (66-67; Roy Harris's 1983 translation offers the terms "signification" and "signal" [67]). The nature of their "combination" is "functional" in that neither the signified nor the signifier is the "cause" of the other; rather, "each [derives] its values from the other" (8). In this way, Saussure defines the basic element of language, the sign, relationally and makes the basic assumption of historical linguistics, namely, the identity of the elemental units of language and signification (i.e., "words"), subject to rigorous analysis. The reason we can recognize different occurrences of the word "tree" as the "same" word is not because the word is defined by inherent qualities – it is not a "mechanical agglomeration" of such qualities – but because it is defined as an element in a system, the "structural whole," of language.
Such a relational (or "diacritical") definition of an entity governs the conception of all the elements of language in structural linguistics. This is clearest in the most impressive achievement of Saussurean linguistics, the development of the concepts of the "phonemes" and "distinctive features" of language. Phonemes are the smallest articulated and signifying units of a language. They are not the sounds that occur in language but the "sound images" Saussure mentions, which are apprehended by speakers – phenomenally apprehended – as conveying meaning. (Thus, Elmar Holenstein describes Jakobson's linguistics, which follows Saussure in important ways, as "phenomenological structuralism.") It is for this reason that the leading spokesperson for Prague School Structuralism, Jan Mukarovsky, noted in 1937 that "structure . . . is a phenomenological and not an empirical reality; it is not the work itself, but a set of functional relationships which are located in the consciousness of a collective (generation, milieu, etc.)" (cited in Galan 35). Similarly, Lévi-Strauss, the leading spokesperson for French structuralism, noted in 1960 that "structure has no distinct content; it is content itself, and the logical organization in which it is arrested [or apprehended] is conceived as a property of the real" (167; see also Jakobson, Fundamentals 27-28).
Phonemes, then, the smallest perceptible elements of language, are not positive objects but a "phenomenological reality." In English, for instance, the phoneme /t/ can be pronounced in many different ways, but in all cases an English speaker will recognize it as functioning as a /t/. An aspirated t (i.e., a t pronounced with an h-like breath after it), a high-pitched or low-pitched t sound, an extended t sound, and so on, will all function in the same manner in distinguishing the meaning of "to" and "do" in English. Moreover, the differences between languages are such that phonological variations in one language can constitute distinct phonemes in another; thus, English distinguishes between /l/ and /r/, whereas other languages are so structured that these articulations are considered variations of the same phoneme (like the aspirated and unaspirated t in English). In every natural language, the vast number of possible words is a combination of a small number of phonemes. English, for instance, possesses less than 40 phonemes that combine to form over a million different words.
The phonemes of language are themselves systematically organized structures of features. In the 1920s and 1930s, following Saussure's lead, Jakobson and N. S. Trubetzkoy isolated the "distinctive features" of phonemes. These features are based upon the physiological structure of the speech organs – tongue, teeth, vocal chords, and so on – that Saussure mentions in the Course and that Harris describes as "physiological phonetics" ([1983] 39; Baskin's earlier translation uses the term "phonology" [(1959) 38]) – and they combine in "bundles" of binary oppositions to form phonemes. For instance, in English the difference between /t/ and /d/ is the presence or absence of "voice" (the engagement of the vocal chords), and on the level of voicing these phonemes reciprocally define one another. In this way, phonology is a specific example of a general rule of language described by Saussure: In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system. ([1959] 120)
In this framework, linguistic identities are determined not by inherent qualities but by systemic ("structural") relationships.
I have said that phonology "followed the lead" of Saussure, because even though his analysis of the physiology of language production "would nowadays," as Harris says, "be called 'physical,' as opposed to either 'psychological' or 'functional'" (Reading 49), nevertheless in the Course he articulated the direction and outlines of a functional analysis of language. Similarly, his only extended published work, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (Memoir on the primitive system of vowels in Indo-European languages), which appeared in 1878, was fully situated within the project of nineteenth-century historical linguistics. Nevertheless, within this work, as Jonathan Culler has argued, Saussure demonstrated "the fecundity of thinking of language as a system of purely relational items, even when working at the task of historical reconstruction" (Saussure 66). By analyzing the systematic structural relationships among phonemes to account for patterns of vowel alternation in existing Indo-European languages, Saussure suggested that in addition to several different phonemes /a/, there must have been another phoneme that could be described formally. "What makes Saussure's work so very impressive," Culler concludes, "is the fact that nearly fifty years later, when cuneiform Hittite was discovered and deciphered, it was found to contain a phoneme, written h, which behaved as Saussure had predicted. He had discovered, by a purely formal analysis, what are now known as the laryngeals of Indo-European" (66).
This conception of the relational or diacritical determination of the elements of signification, which is both implicit and explicit in the Course, suggests a third assumption governing structural linguistics, what Saussure calls "the arbitrary nature of the sign." By this he means that the relationship between the signifier and signified in language is never necessary (or "motivated"): one could just as easily find the sound signifier arbre as the signifier tree to unite with the concept 'tree'. But more than this, it means that the signified is arbitrary as well: one could as easily define the concept 'tree' by its woody quality (which would exclude palm trees) as by its size (which excludes the "low woody plants" we call shrubs). This should make clear that the numbering of assumptions I have been presenting does not represent an order of priority: each assumption – the systemic nature of signification (best apprehended by studying language "synchronically"), the relational or "diacritical" nature of the elements of signification, the arbitrary nature of signs – derives its value from the others.
That is, Saussurean linguistics understands the phenomena it studies in overarching relationships of combination and contrast in language. In this conception, language is both the process of articulating meaning (signification) and its product (communication), and these two functions of language are neither identical nor fully congruent (see Schleifer, "Deconstruction"). Here, we can see the alternation between form and content that Greimas and Courtés describe in modernist interpretation: language presents contrasts that formally define its units, and these units combine on succeeding levels to create the signifying content. Since the elements of language are arbitrary, moreover, neither contrast nor combination can be said to be basic. Thus, in language distinctive features combine to form contrasting phonemes on another level of apprehension, phonemes combine to form contrasting morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, and so on. In each instance, the whole phoneme, or word, or sentence, and so on, is greater than the sum of its parts (just as water, H2O, in Saussure's example [(1959) 103] is more than the mechanical agglomeration of hydrogen and oxygen).
The three assumptions of the Course in General Linguistics led Saussure to call for a new science of the twentieth century that would go beyond linguistic science to study "the life of signs within society." Saussure named this science "semiology (from Greek semeîon 'sign')" (16). The "science" of semiotics, as it came to be practiced in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, widened the study of language and linguistic structures to literary artifacts constituted (or articulated) by those structures. Throughout the late part of his career, moreover, even while he was offering the courses in general linguistics, Saussure pursued his own "semiotic" analysis of late Latin poetry in an attempt to discover deliberately concealed anagrams of proper names. The method of study was in many ways the opposite of the functional rationalism of his linguistic analyses: it attempted, as Saussure mentions in one of the 99 notebooks in which he pursued this study, to examine systematically the problem of "chance," which "becomes the inevitable foundation of everything" (cited in Starobinski 101). Such a study, as Saussure himself says, focuses on "the material fact" of chance and meaning (cited 101), so that the "theme-word" whose anagram Saussure is seeking, as Jean Starobinski argues, "is, for the poet, an instrument, and not a vital germ of the poem. The poem is obliged to re-employ the phonic materials of the theme-word" (45). In this analysis, Starobinski says, "Saussure did not lose himself in a search for hidden meanings." Instead, his work seems to demonstrate a desire to evade all the problems arising from consciousness: "Since poetry is not only realized in words but is something born from words, it escapes the arbitrary control of consciousness to depend solely on a kind of linguistic legality" (121).
That is, Saussure's attempt to discover proper names in late Latin poetry – what Tzvetan Todorov calls the reduction of a "word . . . to its signifier" (266) – emphasizes one of the elements that governed his linguistic analysis, the arbitrary nature of the sign. (It also emphasizes the formal nature of Saussurean linguistics – "Language," he asserts, "is a form and not a substance" [Course (1959) 122] – which effectively eliminates semantics as a major object of analysis.) As Todorov concludes, Saussure's work appears remarkably homogeneous today in its refusal to accept symbolic phenomena [phenomena that have intentional meaning]. . . . In his research on anagrams, he pays attention only to the phenomena of repetition, not to those of evocation. . . . In his studies of the Nibelungen, he recognizes symbols only in order to attribute them to mistaken readings: since they are not intentional, symbols do not exist. Finally in his courses on general linguistics, he contemplates the existence of semiology, and thus of signs other than linguistic ones; but this affirmation is at once limited by the fact that semiology is devoted to a single type of sign: those which are arbitrary. (269-70)
If this is true, it is because Saussure could not conceive of "intention" without a subject; he could not quite escape the opposition between form and content his work did so much to call into question. Instead, he resorted to "linguistic legality." Situated between, on the one hand, nineteenth-century conceptions of history, subjectivity, and the mode of causal interpretation governed by these conceptions and, on the other hand, twentieth-century "structuralist" conceptions of what Lévi-Strauss called "Kantianism without a transcendental subject" (cited in Connerton 23) – conceptions that erase the opposition between form and content (or subject and object) and the hierarchy of foreground and background in full-blown structuralism, psychoanalysis, and even quantum mechanics – the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics and semiotics circumscribes a signal moment in the study of meaning and culture.
RonaldSchleifer
Приложение 2
Фердинанд де Соссюр (перевод)
Швейцарский языковед Фердинанд де Соссюр (1857-1913) считается основателем современной лингвистики – благодаря своим попыткам описать структуру языка, а не историю отдельных языков и словоформ. По большому счёту, основы структурных методов в лингвистике и литературоведении и, в значительной мере, семиотики были заложены в его работах в самом начале двадцатого века. Доказано, что методы и концепции так называемого "постструктурализма", развитые в работах Жака Деррида, Мишеля Фуко, Жака Лакана, Юлии Кристевой, Ролана Барта и других, восходят к лингвистическим трудам Соссюра и анаграмматическим прочтениям поздней римской поэзии. Следует заметить, что работы Соссюра по лингвистике и языковой интерпретации помогает связать широкий круг интеллектуальных дисциплин – от физики до литературных новшеств, психоанализа и философии начала двадцатого века. А. Дж. Греймас и Ж. Курте пишут в «Семиотике и языке»: «Аналитический словарь с заголовком «Интерпретация» как новый вид интерпретации появился в начале ХХ века вместе с лингвистикой Соссюра, феноменологией Гуссерля и психоанализом Фрейда. В таком случае, "интерпретация – это не приписывание данного содержания к форме, которая иначе испытала бы недостаток в том; скорее это - пересказ, который формулирует другим способом то же содержание значимого элемента в пределах данной семиотической системы" (159). В таком понимании «интерпретации», форма и содержание неразрывны; напротив, каждая форма наполнена семантическим значением («значимая форма»), поэтому интерпретация предлагает новый, аналогичный пересказ чего-то, значимого в другой знаковой системе.