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that we shall return shortly. However, it is worth noting for the moment
that the founder of General Linguistics viewed the topics outlined above
as not only significant for linguists but important in a more general sense.
For Saussure this is the case because, he asserts, in practice the study of
language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone . He also
makes the forceful contention:
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater
importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely
the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable
state of affairs.
(ibid.: 7)
Arguing against the prevailing trend in linguistic thought in the twentieth
century, and indeed the trend which his own work at least in part
engendered, Saussure argues that the study of language should not be a
sealed and impenetrable field for specialists alone but a discipline whose
significance is general precisely because its object is of singular importance
in social life. Already in such declarations we can find a clear recognition
that Saussure is aware of the importance of language in history; that is, he
recognises the relevance of thinking about language not only in relation to
political history but also with regard to the importance of the study of
language for its users in the historical present.
The commonplace claim that Saussure regarded history as at best an
irrelevance in the study of language, and that it could only function by
suppressing the past is an important one, and it is necessary to be clear
about the assertion which Saussure makes in this regard since it is central.
What he argues here is the cardinal point that General Linguistics
concerns itself only with the system of language which exists at a
24 For and against Saussure
particular abstract moment (the duration of which is determined not by
time but by the requirement that any changes within the system be judged
minimal and not significant). That is, it attempts to describe the state of a
language from the language-user s point of view, in the form of a system in
the present, the nature of which is, by definition, static. Despite this, it is
clear from the Course that Saussure is not arguing against work on the
relations between language and history per se. Rather, he is arguing against
the confusion of the synchronic and diachronic viewpoints. That which is
constantly affirmed is the need to keep these viewpoints separate and, in
the interests of scientificity, to render a hierarchical ordering in which the
synchronic takes precedence over the diachronic. The question to be
addressed is why Saussure deems this necessary to his project and, more
importantly, why this is taken to be a rejection of history.
Before embarking upon an attempt to answer this question it is
necessary to clarify one point. That is that Saussure did not evince a lack
of interest in diachronic linguistics. Not only was his training and only
self-penned publication in this field, he also devoted by far the longest
section of the Course to the problems of diachronic study.1 However, be
that as it may, it is certainly clear that in the theoretical model, synchrony
is privileged over diachrony. The reason for this hierarchy is quite simply
that diachronic facts are not systematic, and therefore stable, in the same
way as synchronic facts appear to be. Diachronic linguistics , Saussure
claims, can accumulate detail after detail, without ever being forced to
conform to the constraints of a system. Thus the diachronic evolution of
language offers not a closed, logical order of relations but a series of facts
which can be interpreted in a number of different ways. The synchronic
system of facts , on the other hand, admits no order other than its own
(ibid.: 23). Briefly put, the problem with diachronic linguistics is that it
deals with units which replace one another without themselves
constituting a system (ibid.: 98).
The privileging of the synchronic view, then, stems from the
requirement for systematicity in language study, and this in turn derives
from the drive towards scientificity. In contradistinction to the sequences
of diachronic units which need to have an order and regularity imposed
upon them, the relations of synchronic units already exist, and merely
await discovery by the scientist of language. Yet even given this distinction
(and its validity in the context of the more self-reflexive developments in
the modern sciences is open to question), it is still not the case that
Saussure can be said to have rejected history. And this is the point at
which Saussure s use of the term history itself, and indeed its extension
in the phrase historical linguistics , needs to be clarified further. When
Saussure uses history in claiming that for a linguist the intervention of
history can only distort his judgment , what he means is simply the fact
that signs change through time; just as the phrase historical linguistics
For and against Saussure 25
really means the tracing of linguistic change through time. For the
scientific linguist the fact that a sign had a different value in the past is of
no consequence, since the object of study is the language in the present.
For the historical linguist, on the other hand, the fact that languages may
have mingled because of political conquest, or that language may give
some indication of how national identities are formed, is of no
consequence either; since for the historical linguist the aim is to trace the
history of a language, and of language in general, in the sense of recording
the changes which have taken place through time. This is the significance
of Saussure s choice of the term diachronic instead of historical
linguistics or evolutionary linguistics . Evolutionary linguistics , though
preferable to Saussure to historical linguistics , might have had
unfortunate echoes of Schleicher s biological naturalism. And historical
linguistics dismissed by Saussure as too vague might be misleading in
the sense that it appears to suggest that the field is concerned with the
study of the relations between language and history (itself to be given the
new title of external linguistics ). The term diachronic , however, has the
advantage of signalling, ironically by way of its etymology, the tracing of
linguistic change through time (dia chronos). What has been argued then is
the rejection of the privileging of the diachronic over the synchronic, on
the basis that systematicity demands synchronicity. This cannot in any
meaningful sense be described as a rejection of history, since the
diachronic perspective for Saussure means simply the evolution or
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