What is ‘American’ about American linguistics? Is Jakobson, who spent half his life in America, part of it? What became of Whitney’s genuinely American conception of language as a democracy? And how did developments in 20th-century American linguistics relate to broader cultural trends?This book brings together 15 years of research by John E. Joseph, including his discovery of the meeting between Whitney and Saussure, his ground-breaking work on the origins of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ and of American sociolinguistics, and his seminal examination of Bloomfield and Chomsky as readers of Saussure.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) is generally considered one of the main founders of modern linguistics and semiotics. The book that was derived from his teaching, the Course in General Linguistics, had a lasting impact on the intellectual life of the 20th century and remains today an object of debates and controversies.
Ferdinand de Saussure is widely considered to be the founder of both modern linguistics and structuralism. The first to establish the structural study of language, he identified the difference between the system of language (langue) and the speech of individuals (parole), and was first to distinguish between the ‘synchronic’ study of language (language at a given time), and the ‘diachronic’ (language as it changes through time). This companion brings together a team of leading scholars to offer a fresh new account of Saussure’s work.
Saussure and Wittgenstein are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century linguistic thought. By pointing out what their ideas have in common, in spite of intellectual sources, this study breaks new ground.
