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In 1916, three years after the death of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cours de linguistique générale (CLG) was published in Geneva. This foundational work marked the beginning of a discipline that has profoundly influenced the development of the humanities ever since.
What sources influenced the CLG? Do the main concepts of this seminal work have the same validity today as they did in 1916? How has the recent development of language sciences influenced its reception? How does this text account for meaning and communication within the context of speech (parole)?
In order to explore these questions, one hundred years after the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal work on General Linguistics, Polis--The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an interdisciplinary conference that gathered 14 international specialists from various disciplines: general linguistics, pragmatics, philology, dialectology, translation studies, terminology, and philosophy.
The first section of this work reassesses the sources and further influence of the CLG on modern linguistics. The book's second part discusses some of the main concepts and dichotomies of the CLG (constitution of the linguistic method, arbitrariness of sign, main dichotomies), under the light of both the original manuscripts and recent linguistic developments (influence of dialectology or translation studies). The third and last part handles the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of language, suggesting new avenues of reflection that could not yet have been fully taken into account within the CLG itself.
Uniting 14 scholarly articles, together with an introduction, an index locorum and a collective bibliography, this volume hopes to encourage readers with its reappraisal and reinterpretation of Saussure's ground-breaking work and thus contribute to the future development of linguistics and humanities.
A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. In this paper, we examine two of these insights, his analytic and synthetic systems of grammar and his foundational work on typology. We show how they were intimately connected within his conception of linguistic research, and how this was in turn embedded in the tradition established by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially as it was further developed by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). This paper goes beyond several previous works with a similar focus by drawing on a wider range of Gabelentz’ writings, including manuscript sources that have only recently been published, and by examining specific textual connections between Gabelentz and his predecessors.
Tragédie et psychologie
(2017)
His dislike for psychological analysis accompanied Albert Camus throughout his life and had a profound impact on his idea of theatre. Especially in his early years, he sees psychology as the antagonist of the kind of theater that he envisages, the "modern tragedy". In the last decade of his life, Camus worked on the novel "Requiem for a Nun" by William Faulkner, whom he greatly respected, in order to stage it. The confrontation with this work and its highly psychologically driven plot makes Camus virtually give up on his anti-psychological attitude.
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in Romance languages and Russian
(2017)
The present study investigates the use of equivalents of the English adverbials seemingly and apparently with a specific morphological structure in Romance languages and Russian, i.e. Spanish al parecer, Portuguese ao parecer and ao que parece, French avoir l’air de, Italian all’apparenza and in apparenza as well as Russian по-видимому. The underlying hypothesis is that the function and syntactic behaviour of these adverbial locutions are motivated by their morphological composition. It is to investigate whether the adverbials may be used sentence-initially, parenthetically, as an adverbial with broad or narrow scope or as a component of a modalised predication. The adverbial locutions are treated as means of expression where evidentiality and epistemic modality represent overlapping functional-semantic categories.
Welterleben/Weiterleben
(2017)
Welterleben and Weiterleben are what determine the second globalization (of four previously explored) whose constantly accelerating dynamic, vectorization, this essay explores. On the basis of selected writings of Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso, the author highlights the increasing speed with which knowledge, especially in the experiential sciences, is produced and disseminated following the routes of ever-widening trade speeded along by globalization. The notion of ‘vectopia’ stands for the connection of utopia and uchronia in space and time in such a way that the experience of the world, expanded worldwide, contains within it a Weiter-Leben, a ‘living-further’ that is to be understood first in a spatial, and not yet temporal, sense, of what Forster called Erfahrungswissen, or ‘experiential knowledge.’ Vectopia, as elaborated here, has a material dimension that relates to the physical person, the body, the experience of the world that cannot occur without the constant changing of place, without a journeying that is again and again recommenced. Vectopia develops the projection of a life not from space or from time alone, but by their combination. Vectopia is more than a concept, it is a thought-figure: it is vitally connected to life, and thus a life-figure. It opens itself to a type of knowledge that stands almost at the threshold of a further life, indeed, of a Weiterleben that, opening itself to a ‘living-onward,’ resides beyond space, time, and movement.
Innerhalb der USA gilt New Orleans seit jeher als die „unamerikanischste“ Stadt, als exotisch und anders, gar als „sozio-geographischer Unfall“. Hier überkreuzen sich nicht nur die Einflüsse verschiedener Kolonialkulturen, sondern auch die Routen des atlantischen Sklavenhandels und der asiatischen Arbeitsmigration und nicht zuletzt die ideellen wie materiellen Transferbewegungen zwischen den beiden Amerikas.
Der vorliegende Band macht es sich zur Aufgabe, diese vielfältigen transarealen Zirkulationsprozesse zu analysieren und das Potential New Orleans' zur paradigmatischen Metropole des Globalen Südens auszuloten. Im Fokus stehen verschiedene Formen der kulturellen Kreolisierung, wie sie sich in der Sprache, der Literatur, der Musik, aber auch in Alltagsphänomen wie dem Karneval oder Computerspielen manifestieren.
Within the USA, New Orleans has long been considered the ‘un-American’ city, seen as exotic and different, even as a ‘socio-geographical accident’. It is a crossroads not only for the influences of different colonial cultures but also for the routes of the Atlantic slave trade and immigration of Asian workers, and not least for material and non-material transfer between the two Americas. This volume seeks to analyse these manifold transareal circulation processes and to explore New Orleans’s potential as a paradigmatic metropolis of the Global South. The focus is on different forms of creolisation as manifested in language, literature and music, but also in everyday phenomena such as Carnival or computer games.
In his “Essay on the Fluctuations in the Supplies of Gold” (1838) Humboldt presents a global history of the flow of precious metals from antiquity to the 19th century. This paper traces Humboldt’s economic thinking within his natural and historical research, starting with an outline of his educational background which incorporated late mercantilist and early liberal influences. It then discusses a world map and four charts drawn by Humboldt, which combine historical and contemporary statistical data into a cartographical vision of a global economic circuit. In a next step, the article explores Humboldt’s application of natural and historical research methods in the field of political economy, using the example of his 1838 essay. Finally, the article addresses Humboldt’s discussion of platinum, a precious metal whose limited natural distribution contradicted the idea of free global exchange.
As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.
Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?
Writing-between-worlds
(2016)
Degérando’s three prize essays and the shift in linguistic thought at the turn of the 19th century
(2016)
Degérando started out from the views of the French ideologists on the relationship of language and thought, but increasingly distanced himself from them. This is already evident based on the choice of reference authors and also on the increasing emphasis on empirical research. His prize essays reflect the fundamental changes in linguistic thought during the late 18th century. He was successful in the competition of the Institut National (1797/1799) and with another essay at the Berlin Academy (1802). His main argument against Condillac and the ideologists is that empirical knowledge does not depend on signs. Therefore, the development of better languages will not improve this kind of human knowledge.
The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal's (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) challenged Steinthal's conception and placed a renewed emphasis on aesthetics. In this endeavour, Gabelentz drew on the work of such figures as August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (1807–1874) and William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894). In this paper, we examine Gabelentz' Formungstrieb and place it in its historical context.
Ever since our first research into Alexander von Humboldt's stay in Spain, the absence of an ensuing relationship between the wise Prussian and the Spanish Crown and Authorities had always surprised us. On starting new research, we found that indeed he sent his first work to Carlos IV from Rome accompanied by a letter of gratitude for the protection he had received during his American trip and submission to the Spanish Crown, which we now present. This first literary fruit of his voyage, which Alexander von Humboldt alluded to in the letter is the first instalment of his work Plantes Équinoxiales, Recueillies au Mexique, dans l’ile de Cuba, dans les provinces de Caracas, de Cumana etc., published in Paris in 1805.
The present study approaches the Spanish postposed constructions creo Ø and creo yo ‘[p], [I] think’ from a cognitive-constructionist perspective. It is argued that both constructions are to be distinguished from one another because creo Ø has a subjective function, while in creo yo, it is the intersubjective dimension that is particularly prominent. The present investigation takes both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. With regard to the latter, the problem of quantitative representativity is addressed. The discussion posed the question of how empirical research can feed back into theory, more precisely, into the framework of Cognitive Construction Grammar. The data to be analyzed here are retrieved from the corpora Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual and Corpus del Español.
The paper aims at considering characteristics from one field of contemporary visual studies that has for a long time been neglected in academic research: Pictorial signs on Social Network Sites (SNS) are an outstanding class of semiotic resources that is greatly shaped by processes of technological and collective sign production and distribution. A brief examination of the scholarly research on the pragmatics and semiotics of pictorial signs on SNS shows that the heterogeneity of visual signs is often neglected and that it mostly concentrates on one aspect of these pictorial signs: their technological production or their purpose for individual self-disclosure. The paper therefore considers the semiosis of pictorial signs on SNS in a holistic perspective as one the one hand produced by individual and collective meaning making as well as on the other hand a product of technological framing. It therefore develops a techno-semiotic pragmatic account that takes into consideration both processes. Starting from a prominent class of pictorial signs on SNS during Tunisian Revolution, the Tunisian Flag graphics, the paper than shows that communicative and social interaction functions on the graphic interface of SNS (‘like’-function, sharing and commenting option) are not only directly inscribed into the pictorial frame, but also greatly influence the reading of a pictorial sign. The location of images on the SNS’ interface has an impact on its meaning and on the social functions of a pictorial sign, as profile pictures are directly linked to the online identity of the user. Through technological sign processing, the polysemy of the image is reduced. We therefore consider the images on the one hand as individual self-narratives and on the other as instances of SNS’ visual culture that brings out dominant visual codes but also allows social and political movements to spread.
The Franciscans in Cathay
(2015)
The study analyzes the process that leads to the elaboration of the thesis of a continuity between the Medieval Asia mission and the New World mission. This effort, undertaken by the Catholic historiography of the mission during the XIX century, is the result of the impulse provided by Alexander von Humboldt’s studies about the discovery of America (Examen critique). The data about the geography of Asia collected by the missionaries-travelers working in the territory between Karakorum and Khanbalik during the XIII e XIV century reaches Christopher Colombus with the mediation of Roger Bacon, whom Humboldt himself esteems as a true cultural mediator. The conclusion of the article tries to identify reasons and modalities of the secularization of the missionary concept, i.e. the shift from the ideal of the propagation of the Christian message to a prevailing interest for cartography and topography, transformations arranged by a late medieval historiography that introduces into martyrolagia the loca toponomastica.
In this paper we discuss how Alexander von Humboldt conceived a past to New Spain in his Political Essay on New Spain (1811) and how this text was, in turn, appropriated by the Mexican historiography during the 19th century.
In order to do so, we analyze how the Prussian drew from American sources, particularly from the text of the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, written shortly before. We also study Humboldt’s conceptions of text and of history, highlighting the place of the indigenous in the composition of his reasoning. Finally, we give examples of how the Mexican nationalist historiography read and reinterpreted the Political Essay.