Parutions

John E. Joseph, Saussure, traduit de l’anglais (RU) par Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2021, 808 p., ISBN/EAN 978-2-35935-345-7, € 36
Notice de l’Éditeur

« … dans la langue il n’y a que des différences sans termes positifs. Qu’on prenne le signifié ou le signifiant, la langue ne comporte ni des idées ni des sons qui préexisteraient au système linguistique, mais seulement des différences conceptuelles et des différences phoniques issues de ce système.  » (Cours de linguistique générale, 1916, p.166)

La conception quasi algébrique du langage de Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) est fréquemment réduite par un certain nombre d’admirateurs mais aussi de détracteurs à quelques idées simples que l’on peut facilement mémoriser et qui sont aujourd’hui encore l’objet de controverses. La langue est un système d’oppositions acoustiques (le signifiant, la forme) que la convention sociale met en relation avec un système d’oppositions conceptuelles (le signifié, le contenu) : cet emblème du saussurisme – qui a donné naissance au structuralisme – laisse dans l’ombre l’être humain pétri de contradictions qui l’a imaginé. Dans cette étude de la vie et de l’œuvre de Ferdinand de Saussure, John E. Joseph évoque tous les aspects de la personnalité et de l’histoire du père de la linguistique moderne – et de l’école de Paris – qui a laissé une empreinte indélébile dans les sciences humaines et sociales.
Ouvrage publié grâce au soutien du Fonds général de l’Université de Genève.

John E. Joseph est professeur de linguistique appliquée à l’Université d’Édimbourg, où il a dirigé pendant plusieurs années le département de linguistique et de langue anglaise, et Président du Cercle Ferdinand de Saussure. Il est notamment l’auteur de Language and Politics (2006), Language and Identity (2004) et, avec Nigel Love et Talbot J. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II: The Western Tradition in the Twentieth Century (2001). Il a dirigé le volume Language and Politics: Major Themes in English Studies (2010) et dirige avec Talbot J. Taylor la revue Language & Communication.

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud est professeur au département des Études du monde anglophone de l’Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. Ses principaux domaines d’activité sont la stylistique et la traductologie. Elle a codirigé de nombreux ouvrages et numéros de revue tels que Corps et traduction, corps en traduction (2018), Des histoires de la musique : perspectives intersémiotiques et cognitives (2020) et Distorsions cognitives : formes, récits, imaginaires (2021).

Deux comptes-rendus de la version anglaise (2012) : Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 66 (2013) et Histoire Épistémologie Langage 38/1 (2016)

Histoire Épistémologie Langage 43/1 (2021), Dossier thématique : « La grammaire grecque étendue », sous la direction de Émilie Aussant et Lionel Dumarty, SHESL / OpenEdition Journals, 244 p., ISSN : 0750-8069
Publié en ligne : octobre 2021
DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/hel.277
Numéro entièrement disponible en ligne sur OpenEdition Journals et téléchargeable sous format ePub.

Table des matières

Hommage

– Danielle Candel, Jean-François Sablayrolles (1951-2020)

Dossier thématique : la grammaire grecque étendue, sous la direction de Émilie Aussant et Lionel Dumarty

– Émilie Aussant et Lionel Dumarty, Présentation
– Frédérique Biville, De la grammaire grecque à la grammaire latine et gréco-latine
– Margherita Farina, La tradition grammaticale syriaque comme « extension » de la grammaire grecque. Les parties du discours et le participe
– Jean-Patrick Guillaume, L’« hypothèse grecque » et le débat sur les origines de la tradition grammaticale arabe
– Sylvie Archaimbault, La terminologie grammaticale russe et ses sources grecques

Varia

– Manuel Sartori, Le ʿaṭf nasaq : une « coordination » pléonastique ? Contribution à l’histoire de la grammaire arabe

Dossier : l’écriture dans la théorie du langage de Wilhelm von Humboldt

– Lucie Bourassa, Résumé du dossier
– Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Buchstabenschrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau
– Lucie Bourassa, Glossaire
– Lucie Bourassa, De l’alphabet à l’articulation. L’écriture dans la théorie du langage de Wilhelm von Humboldt
– Lucie Bourassa, Bibliographie

Lectures et critiques

– Anne-Gaëlle Toutain, Bank Jensen, Viggo & D’Ottavi, Giuseppe, éd. 2020. From the Early Years of Phonology. The Roman Jakobson – Eli Fischer-Jørgensen Correspondence 1949-1982,
Copenhague : Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab (Scientia Danica. Series H, Humanistica 8, 20). 402 p.
– Anne-Gaëlle Toutain, Imrényi, András & Mazziotta, Nicolas, dir. 2020. Chapters of Dependency Grammar. A Historical Survey from Antiquity to Tesnière (Studies in Language Companion Series, 212). Amsterdam & Philadelphie : John Benjamins. 281 p.
– Pierre-Yves Testenoire, Saussure, Ferdinand de. 2018. La grammaire du gotique. Deux cours inédits. 1. Cours de grammaire gotique (1890-1891) ; 2. Cours de grammaire gothique (1881-1882) accompagnés d’autres articles de Saussure sur le gotique, éd. avec notes et commentaires par André Rousseau. Paris : Honoré Champion (Bibliothèque de grammaire et de linguistique, 54). 504 p.
– Lionel Dumarty, Sandri, Maria Giovanna. 2020. Trattati greci su barbarismo e solecismo: introduzione ed edizione critica, (UALG, 135). Berlin & Boston : De Gruyter. xi + 320 p.
– Jean-Patrick Guillaume, Sheyhatovitch, Beata & Kasher, Almog, éd. 2020. From Sībawayhi to ʾAḥmad Ḥasan al-Zayyāt. New Angles on the Arabic Linguistic Tradition, Leyde & Boston : Brill. 235 p.
Rhéa Delveroudi, Van Rooy, Raf. 2020. Greece’s labyrinth of language. A study in the early modern discovery of dialect diversity, (History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences, 2). Berlin : Language Science Press. 225 p.
– Jacques François, Bréal, Michel. 2020. Introductions à la Grammaire comparée des langues indo-européennes de Franz Bopp, avec une préface de Gabriel Bergounioux. Limoges : Éd. Lambert-Lucas. 147 p.
– Didier Samain, McElvenny, James, éd. 2019. Gabelentz and the Science of Language,
Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press. 316 p.
– Gerda Haßler, Coseriu, Eugenio. 2020. Geschichte der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft. Vol. 2 : Von Nebrija (1492) bis Celso Cittadini (1601). Die Epoche des Humanismus [Texte intégral], éd. par Wolf Dietrich. Tübingen : Gunter Narr. 293 p.

Ouvrages de collaborateurs d’HEL

Fionn Bennett – « Saussure’s “anagrams”: A case of acousmatic mistaken identity? », in Semiotica 2021/238, pp. 181-198 (November 2020).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2019-0009
Published Online: 2020-11-18.
Published in Print: 2021-01-27.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2019-0009/html

Abstract

In the course of his painstaking study of ancient verse, Ferdinand de Saussure came up with an intriguing theory about the phonetics of the poetry he scrutinised. He postulated that the “jeux phoniques” he detected in the texts he analysed was proof that their authors were attempting to “parasite” the surface level meaning of their verse with a “hypotexte.” This hypotexte consisted of “anagrams” of “mots thèmes” whose phonetic properties were “isosyllabically diffracted” throughout the rest of the host text. Today it is generally accepted that Saussure was wrong about this. Few however maintain that what he discerned in the phonetic depths of the verse he auscultated was no more than the figment of a fertile imagination. But if this be so, what exactly had he detected? This paper maintains that what Saussure stumbled upon was the trace of a contribution made to ancient verse by melodically and metrically organised sounds. This was inevitable. Virtually all the texts he probed were “carmina sacra” that were composed to be sung and accompanied by music. This musical accompaniment had a decisive impact on the phonetics of the “lexemic” words in the Poetry that has survived. This is so because sung verse cannot “euphoniously” accommodate a musical accompaniment unless its phonetics constituents are selected, concatenated and intoned in such a way as to follow the melodic contours and rhythm patterns that modulate their articulation. In addition, the point of making verse consist both of melodically organised arrangements of sound and of organisations of sound in which one can recognise ordinary words was not simply ornamental. The real point was to bi-nature what one was hearing. In other words, the goal was to “over-signify” the usual meanings of the “logocentric” words in the verse with a separate but complementary meaning and narrative encoded in melodised tones and metered rhythms. Why qualify the accompanying music as “acousmatic voices”? Because the music in question was added to song to give a voice to whichever tutelary divinity the song was performed to honour. That’s what makes “acousmatic voices” an especially apt epithet for characterising the melodically and rhythmically structured bodies of sound Saussure so presciently discerned in the phonetic depths of the poésie phonisante he probed. The point of their being in poetry was to give a voice to the agencies to whom the object or occasion of verse is beholden for its Being-in-the-world.

Keywords: Ferdinand de Sausssure; anagrams; musical meaning; acousmatic voices; comparative poetics; hieroglossia

Dustin S Stoltz – « Becoming a dominant misinterpreted source: The case of Ferdinand de Saussure in cultural sociology », Journal of Classical Sociology 21/1 (2021), p. 92–113 (February 2021)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X19896056
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468795X19896056

Cultural analysts in sociology typically cite the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to motivate a narrow theory of meaning. In so doing, sociologists incorrectly attribute to Saussure (1) the postulate that meaning is arbitrary; (2) the idea that signs gain meaning only through relations of opposition to other signs; (3) the view that there is an isomorphic correspondence between linguistic signs and all cultural units of analysis, ergo culture is fundamentally arbitrary; and finally (4) the idea that he offers a Durkheimian theory of culture (i.e. Saussure was a follower of Durkheim). Saussure’s project, rather, was specific to linguistics, and mainly one of theoretical and methodological clarification regarding phonology. Saussure never intended his analytical model of phonology to apply to the real operation of meaning in general, as done by contemporary interpreters and, furthermore, never argued that meaning is arbitrary.

Author’s note

This paper was awarded the 2018 Graduate Student Paper Award from the History of Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Stefania Montes Henriques, O caso mais grosseiro da semiologia. O que Saussure pode nos dizer sobre os nomes próprios? Prafácio Eliane Silveira. Campinas (SP), Editora da Abralin (Altos Estudos em Linguística), 2021, 147 p., ISBN 978-85-68990-09-4
DOI : 10.25189/9788568990094
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Présentation de l’ouvrage, 23.09.2021 (min. 00:37)

Este livro se propõe a investigar como o nome próprio é considerado nas elaborações de Ferdinand de Saussure. Essa categoria linguística é considerada como um dos problemas mais espinhosos nos estudos da linguagem, em virtude de ser heterogênea e não possuir uma regra geral que seja aplicável a todas as línguas naturais e por envolver em sua constituição a arbitrariedade e a fala. Assim, efetuamos um percurso teórico pelos estudos da linguagem do século XIX, enfatizando teorias no âmbito da Filosofia e da Linguística, o que nos proporcionou elementos para questionar a posição de Saussure sobre essa categoria linguística. Considerando que a produção saussuriana não se restringiu ao CLG, detivemo-nos em seus estudos comparatistas, nos manuscritos sobre linguística e sobre as Lendas Germânicas. Mediante a análise desses materiais, percebemos que o nome próprio participa do movimento de fundação da linguística moderna, na medida em que é um ponto nevrálgico nas elaborações saussurianas.

(Re)leituras em Ferdinand de Saussure e Émile Benveniste, organizador Jomson Teixeira da Silva Filho. São Carlos : Pedro & João Editores, 2021, 276 pages, ISBN 978-65-5869-482-3 [Papier] / 978-65-5869-483-0 [Numérique].
Notice de l’Éditeur.
Version numérique disponible en accès libre.

Esta obra, que agora vem a público, busca reunir textos de diferentes pesquisadores brasileiros que têm se debruçado sobre as teorias da linguagem ligadas epistemologicamente aos nomes de dois linguistas cujas reputações dispensariam qualquer tipo de apresentação.

Se aqui o fazemos, é mais pela formalidade editorial e pelo prazer de falar sobre eles e menos pela necessidade de apresentá- los. Afinal, temos total ciência de que, ao menos minimamente, todos aqueles que, de alguma forma, interessam-se por questões da linguagem, seja para deles partir, seja para deles sugerir um afastamento ou até mesmo para ignorá-los, já se depararam com os conhecidos pelos epítetos de “pai da linguística moderna” e de “pai da linguística da enunciação”, a saber, Ferdinand de Saussure e Émile Benveniste, respectivamente.

Dois linguistas que têm em comum muito mais do que atribuições de “paternidades”. Dois linguistas complexos, enigmáticos até! Diante da leitura de seus textos, deparamo-nos com situações que, ao primeiro contato de um leitor desavisado – flutuação terminológica, complexidade conceitual, teorizações atribuídas, textos inacabados e lacunais – seriam suficientes para “justificar” a recusa de suas leituras, como o fazem muitos, aliás, lendo-os apenas de segunda mão, geralmente através de manuais de introdução. Normand (2009, p. 17) chega a afirmar, em relação a Saussure, que “uma leitura do conjunto do Curso, se é que é possível, nunca foi encorajada; contenta-se, o mais frequentemente, com extratos que ilustram uma apresentação comentada”.

Extrait de l’introduction