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The ‘floating’ linguistic sign

  • T. Craig Christy
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History of Linguistics 2008
Ein Kapitel aus dem Buch History of Linguistics 2008

Abstract

The image of floating , fluctua­tion, waves, and displacement recurs with surpris­ing con­sistency in key descrip­tions of the linguistic sign. Its promi­nence in the theoretical pronouncements of linguists (Michel Bréal, Ferdi­nand de Saussure, Antoine Meillet, Ken­neth Pike ) and sociologists (Émile Durkheim, Mar­cel Mauss), Claude Lévi-Strauss) sug­gests a conceptualization of the linguis­tic sign as impor­tant as the much discussed two-sided sheet of paper, or the game of chess, in Saus­sure’s lectures. The fluid, wave-like linkage of sound and thought, the arbi­trary and differential nature of the linguistic sign, and the elusive, vacillating ‘values’ of terms all reflect Saussure’s view of the linguistic sign as ever-fluctuat­ing. This meta­phor also figures in Meillet’s theory of grammaticaliza­tion , in Bréal’s understand­ing of both Humboldt’s inner language form , and the relation of lan­guage to thought in early mytho­logy, in Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the float­ing signifie r as well as in Pike’s view of language as a ‘field’ consisting of waves and swells.

Abstract

The image of floating , fluctua­tion, waves, and displacement recurs with surpris­ing con­sistency in key descrip­tions of the linguistic sign. Its promi­nence in the theoretical pronouncements of linguists (Michel Bréal, Ferdi­nand de Saussure, Antoine Meillet, Ken­neth Pike ) and sociologists (Émile Durkheim, Mar­cel Mauss), Claude Lévi-Strauss) sug­gests a conceptualization of the linguis­tic sign as impor­tant as the much discussed two-sided sheet of paper, or the game of chess, in Saus­sure’s lectures. The fluid, wave-like linkage of sound and thought, the arbi­trary and differential nature of the linguistic sign, and the elusive, vacillating ‘values’ of terms all reflect Saussure’s view of the linguistic sign as ever-fluctuat­ing. This meta­phor also figures in Meillet’s theory of grammaticaliza­tion , in Bréal’s understand­ing of both Humboldt’s inner language form , and the relation of lan­guage to thought in early mytho­logy, in Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the float­ing signifie r as well as in Pike’s view of language as a ‘field’ consisting of waves and swells.

Kapitel in diesem Buch

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.115.05chr

Kapitel in diesem Buch

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. Part I. Methodological considerations, linguistics and philology
  6. Du Corpus représentatif des grammaires et des traditions linguistiques au Corpus de textes linguistiques fondamentaux 13
  7. The ‘floating’ linguistic sign 25
  8. ‘A term of opprobrium’ 35
  9. Methode als Grenze? 49
  10. Part II. Antiquity
  11. Grammatical doxography in Antiquity 69
  12. Über die Bezeichnung des Indikativs bei den römischen Grammatikern des 1. und 2. Jh. 93
  13. Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity 109
  14. Part II. Renaissance linguistics
  15. Elements of a philosophy of language in Claudio Tolomei’s Il Cesano de la lingua Toscana 129
  16. La conception de l’ordre des mots dans la Grammatica Latina de Caspar Finck et Christoph Helwig 135
  17. The earliest stages of Persian-German language comparison 147
  18. Part IV. Seventeenth and eighteenth century
  19. European conceptions of writing from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century 169
  20. Lessons from literary theory 187
  21. Nachahmung und Schöpfung in der Barockgrammatik 201
  22. Leibniz as lexicographer? 217
  23. Du verbe actif au verbe transitif 225
  24. Metaphors in metalinguistic texts 239
  25. Les Méthodes au XVIIe siècle 251
  26. A propos des règles dans les grammaires françaises de l’âge classique 265
  27. La phrase expliquée aux sourds-muets 277
  28. The place of spatial case forms in early Estonian, Latvian and Finnish grammars 289
  29. Part V. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
  30. Aproximaciones a la enseñanza del análisis 303
  31. A difficult case 317
  32. Relecture jakobsonienne de la distinction saussurienne langue/parole 327
  33. Ernst Cassirer’s and Benedetto Croce’s theories of language in comparison 341
  34. Tradition versus grammatical traditions 359
  35. An early sociolinguistic approach towards standardization and dialect variation 369
  36. Gender and the language scholarship of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the context of mid twentieth-century American linguistics 389
  37. When categories go back to parts of speech 399
  38. ‘Cultural morphology’ 409
  39. Interjections: An insurmountable problem of structural linguistics? 425
  40. L’espace linguistique en voie de (dé)multiplication 435
  41. Z. S. Harris and the semantic turn of mathematical information theory 449
  42. Name index 459
  43. Subject index 465
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Heruntergeladen am 24.12.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/sihols.115.05chr/html
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