Saussure and Sechehaye: Myth and Genius

Pieter Seuren, PhD (1969), professor emeritus Nijmegen University, now researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, has published widely on the theory of language, grammar, semantics, presuppositions, natural logic, Creole languages and the history of linguistics.

• PrefaceList of Figures1Introduction2Who was Ferdinand de Saussure?2.1 Family History and Life2.2 TheCours de linguistique générale and Its Mythical Status2.3 Saussure’s Problem with His Intellectual Environment2.4 Saussure’s Limited Intellectual Outlook and His Implicit Rationalism2.5 The Saussurean Myth2.5.1 The Coming about of the Saussurean Myth2.5.2 Saussure the ‘father’ of European Structuralism?2.5.3 Saussure in literature, art and philosophy3TheCours: A Critical Look3.1 Language as a Social Phenomenon3.1.1 The Social Dimension of Language3.1.2 Early French Sociology3.1.3 ‘Völkerpsychology’3.2 Linguistics as the Science of Language, Not of Speech3.2.1 The Tasks of Linguistics3.2.2 The Distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’3.2.3 ‘Frequency linguistics’ Untenable3.2.4 Who Introduced the Distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’?3.2.5 The Speech Circuit3.3 The Notion of Syntax and the Notion of Sentence3.3.1 The Notion of Syntax3.3.2 The Notion of Sentence3.4 The Notion of Sign and Its History3.4.1 Saussure’s Notion of Sign3.4.2 The Type-token Distinction3.4.3 Some History of the Notion of Sign3.4.4 The Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign3.4.5 The Linearity of the Signifier3.5 Differences, Oppositions and ‘valeurs’3.5.1 Comparison with Chess3.5.2 Only Differences in the Language System?3.6 Synchrony versus Diachrony3.7 Conclusion4Charles-Albert Sechehaye4.1 Private Life4.2 Scholarly Life: Preliminaries4.2.1 Production and Reception4.2.2 Weaknesses and Prejudices4.2.3 Sechehaye and Saussure: A Paradoxical Relation4.2.4 Sechehaye and Bally: At Cross Purposes4.2.5 Why was Sechehaye Forgotten, or, Rather, Ignored?4.3 Programme et méthodes of 19084.3.1 Overall Survey ofpmlt4.3.2 Comments on Successive Chapters4.4 TheEssai sur la structure logique de la phrase of 19264.4.1 Overall Survey ofslp4.4.2 Comments on Successive Chapters5Sechehaye and the Great Subject-predicate Debate5.1 The Subject-predicate Debate: How it Arose and Ended up in a Quagmire5.2 How Did Sechehaye Deal with the Subject-predicate Debate?5.3 Why Discourse-driven and Fact-driven Propositions?5.4 Intermezzo on the Structure of Propositions5.5 An Analytical Synthesis of the Whole Question5.5.1 Definition of the Notion ‘proposition’5.5.2 Anchoring and Keying5.5.3 The Question-answer Game: Underlying Cleft Constructions5.5.4 Formal Aspects oftcm: The Need for ‘parameter theory’ in Grammar5.5.5 The Collapse of Quine’s Argument of the Opacity of Modal Contexts6Structuralism, Rationalism and Romanticism in Psychology and Linguistics6.1 What is Structuralism?6.2 Rationalism versus Romanticism: Clarifying the Terms6.3 Human versus Natural Sciences6.4 Reductionism6.5 The Coming about of the Human Sciences6.6 Early Structuralism in Psychology: The Theory of ‘gestalts’6.7 Early Structuralism in Linguistics6.7.1 The Young Grammarians6.7.2 Who Were, and are, the Real Structuralists in Linguistics?6.7.3 Romanticist or Nonstructuralist Grammar?6.8 Summary7ConclusionsBibliographyIndex